Brian Johnson explores encouragement as distinct from compassion: suffering with someone versus inspiring their courage and confidence. He proposes reframing support to move people from pain toward heroism, then offers a practice combining both.
Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another Optimize plus one. Not too long ago we talked about the shiny new Optimize Virtue meditation we're working on as part of our Optimize Coach program. Now, I've been thinking a lot about the virtues in general and the meditation in particular, especially a sub virtue to love that I'd like to talk about today. First, super quick context. As you may recall, the the meditation has 11 virtues. On the inhale, we silently affirm the virtue to ourselves. Then on the exhale we have another declarative statement related to the primary virtue. For example, we start with I am wise on the inhale. Then I know the game I'm playing on the exhale. Then I am virtuous on the inhale and I live with arete on the exhale. Then well, let's just do it. Continuing I am confident. I trust my antifragile self. I am purpose driven. I have strength for two. I am self aware. I know myself. I am teleological. I have clear targets. I am energized. I honor my fundamentals. I am present. I focus on what's important now. I am courageous. I say bring it on. I am loving. I am kind, generous and encouraging. I am connected to my daimon. I shine with radiant enthusiasm one more time. Now today I want to shine a spotlight on the I am loving part with a focused beam on the I am kind, generous and encouraging with an even tighter focus on the encouraging part. Encourage. It's a really beautiful word. And the more I meditate on and reflect on the virtue, the more I think it's a really underappreciated facet of love. It seems to me like all the gurus talk a lot about compassion. Now, of course, the ability to feel another's pain is incredibly important, and it's obviously not either or. But what about helping them get out of that pain? It seems like that is arguably considerably more important, especially in a world with so much suffering. So let's stroll over to our dictionary to juxtapose the meanings of of the words compassion and encouragement. Compassion means sympathetic, pity and concern for the sufferings or misfortunes of others. The victim's example sentence should be treated with compassion. It comes from the Latin word that literally means to suffer with. Again, super important to be attuned to the pain in the world. I'm not so sure about the pity part, but we'll save that for another chat. Now let's look up the word encourage. Encourage means to inspire with hope, courage and confidence. It literally means to give someone courage to inject them with it kind of thing. Now, just for fun, let's revisit the sample sentence for compassion and see what it looks like with encouragement. Perhaps this the victims should be treated with compassion can become this. The victims should be treated with encouragement so they can become the heroes they are capable of and destined to be. Yeah, I like that encouragement. That's today's plus one. Let's practice celebrating people's awesome, compassionately supporting them when facing inevitable challenges while and by inspiring them with hope, courage and confidence.
