Why is my mail all wet?

Is there anything we can change less than the weather? Let’s face it, no. 

I’ve learned this lesson hundreds of times throughout my life. My first lesson in not being able to control the weather happened when I was a summer hire at my local post office. You know the old mailman’s creed, “Neither rain nor snow nor heat…”? Rain is the very first one for a reason. You know what happens when it rains on a mailman? The mail gets wet. You know what you can do about? Nothing.

I once had a guy who worked for me tell me, “Major! It doesn’t rain ON the Army, it rains IN the Army!” It never failed. If you were scheduled to go to the field, rain was inevitably in the forecast. Once that rain crawls down your back, there’s not much you can do but relax your shoulders and carry-on. 

As a fellow coach brought to my attention last week, this is an example of your external environment forcing an internal shift to your thinking or emotional response. But let’s dig a little deeper into the mental fitness aspects of this. 

As I’ve written in previous blogs, mental fitness is our capacity to respond to challenges in a positive mindset rather than a negative one. We have any number of voices in our head telling us that working in the rain is a miserable experience and there is nothing more unpleasant than delivering wet mail to cranky customers. 

We call these voices our Saboteurs and our Judge is our Master Saboteur. The Judge is great at judging us, judging others, and judging our circumstances. Our Judge and its minions operate from a position of survival and reside primarily in our left brain. On the other side, we have our Sage brain - the right side of our brain that houses our better angels such as love, empathy, joy, and acceptance

When we are faced with challenges, our Judge will tell us how terrible we are or how awful the people around us are to have caused such a thing. We lament the fact we have to deliver mail in the rain or lash out at others because we just want dry socks to march in. In both cases, it took many wet mailbags and squishy jungle boots to fully understand there truly was nothing I could do about the rain. 

The Sage perspective offers an alternative. I didn’t know it at the time but by finally accepting the fact I had no control over the weather, I was experiencing life through my Sage brain. It tells us that in challenging times, we can choose to accept our circumstances or convert those circumstances into a gift or an opportunity. I accepted the fact that I couldn't do much about the rain but keep the mail as dry as I could and keep shoving wet envelopes and magazines through mail slots. My summers as a mailman were not glorious but I saw them as a chance to get better at walking long distances under heavy loads - a trait that would pay off huge dividends throughout my career in the Army. 

Living life through the Sage perspective doesn’t come naturally to us because we’ve relied on our survival brain for so long. The only way to counter the Judge and its Saboteurs is through regular exercise - mental fitness exercise. With just a handful of daily reps, we can begin to build new neural pathways to live in a more positive mindset. 

By shifting the balance of power in your mind from Saboteur to Sage, you cultivate mental fitness, leading to greater performance, resilience, and well-being. 

If you’re ready to live a more stress-free and happier life, take the Saboteur Assessment and discover more about the PQ® Program.