How To Tap Your Inner Superpowers In A World Gone Mad

Week 5 of a 10-Week Plan to Connect with Your Center of Wellbeing: Imagine, Evaluate, Listen, Act

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The drumbeat of bad news persists. I steel myself before looking at the morning news. Did something even more terrible happen while I slept?

We may feel hopeless, exhausted, distraught.

There is a way forward.

When the world around us leaves us unsettled, we can regain our balance by tapping our inner superpowers.

Drawing on our inner powers isn’t a magic trick. Nor will it eliminate COVID19 or climate emergencies or broken politics.

It will give us the inner strength and stability to engage in positive solutions rather than collapse in despair or look away in defeat. It will reconnect us with our center of wellbeing.

In previous columns, I explained the Big Four inner negotiators — The Dreamer, The Thinker, The Lover and The Warrior — and their four fundamental qualities — creativity, clarity, compassion and courage.

Even in this insanity, we can call on these inner superpowers.

The traditional classroom has crumbled in our state of quarantine. We can fret over the lost year, or we can learn from educators who tap into their creativity to innovate ways to reach students.

In a dangerously polarized election season, it’s hard to separate truth from spin. Officials leave out or distort key information for political gain. Yet experts, such as Dr. Anthony Fauci, call on their commitment to clarity in service of scientific evidence.

In a world pained by systemic racism, Americans this week officially recognized Christopher Columbus’ “discovery” of the land while at the same time drawing on compassion to mark it also as Indigenous People’s Day.

As a second wave of COVID19 unfolds into flu season, we can feel powerless. Yet tens of thousands of healthy people call on their courage to participate in vaccine trials.

The Big Four characters of our inner world possess all of these qualities but we often overlook one or two of them in favor of our default habits. Here is a way to draw some of our underused superpowers to the fore.

Try the Superpower Primer

When you find yourself in a challenge or conflict, tap into your Dreamer’s creativity by asking yourself, “If anything were possible, what can I imagine could resolve this?”
When you find yourself highly confident that you’re right, tap into your Thinker’s clarity to delve into an opposing view and evaluate what you’re missing.
When you find yourself wishing someone would just calm down or get over it, tap into your Lover’s compassion to listen more closely to what upsets them.
When you find yourself paralyzed into inaction, draw on your Warrior’s courage to act on a small thing that makes a difference to one person.

This exercise helps us identify our internal resources — the superpowers at our core — and deploy them, even in a world gone mad.

We have a powerful center of wellbeing at the heart of our inner world that can help us push past resignation and paralysis to hope and action.

Next week: The four intelligences that drive the Big Four