Learned Helplessness

I’m learning that sometimes God allows us to become uncomfortable where we are in order to encourage us to move in a different direction. And I’m always so much happier when I finally listen to Him and take that step.

About a month ago I decided to go to a different church - same denomination  just different location. I had felt the uncomfortableness of where I was for quite some time and just had not acted on it. But a month ago it just seemed like the perfect time do take that step.

While I was there God led me to a Sabbath School class that is studying this awesome book called "13 Weeks to Peace" by Jennifer Jill Schwirzer.

 It has turned out to be the best thing for me at this point in my life. Not only has it been great to meet new people, I have learned a lot. In one chapter the author discusses "Learned Helplessness" its a bit more technical that I want to go into here. But this thought of learned helplessness helped me to work through a bit of learned helplessness that I was experiencing. There were some things that I just had not attempted because of fear of failure. After reading this book and having a discussion on the chapter - I decided that I would start doing my best to attempt to do things - I might just get lucky and be successful. And sure enough I have surprised myself in several things I have done so far.

It has helped me step out of my comfort zone and attempt things that otherwise I would not do. One of those things is work on our chicken yard. Because of the drought conditions in our area - our grown has actually shrunk. So the fencing around our chicken yard has some gaps at the bottom between the end of the fence and the ground. This is not a good situation. Especially considering what happened to a majority of our last batch of chickens. Two dogs got into our chicken yard and out of sport killed a majority of our chickens. It was a massacre for sure. So I have gotten some handy tools and first I cut a fence in half so that I have about 2 foot sections. Then I am attaching the sections of fence to our existing fence - by cutting some of the wiring on the fence and wrapping those wires around the existing fence wire. I have surprised myself by being able to do this. I have a ways to go since it has been so hot here in Texas - my only time to work on the fence has been in the early am. Then I also have had our granddaughter so I have not had as much time to get things done as I would like.

Another things I did was to change the cartridge in our printer. And that went pretty smoothly. My small calculator that has the print option ran out of paper this past week. So I got the new roll of paper and I worked and worked and worked and finally got the feeders to pull the new paper through. That was frustrating and at times I was tempted to give up but was so thankful that I did not give up.

 

If we will just step out of our comfort zones and try to do things we might just be surprised at what we are able to do. Speaking of that - be watching for a post about one door closing and another door opening - it will have an explanation of another area of my life that I have attempted something new.

 

Think about if you might have a tendency to have some learned helplessness and maybe there are things that you, too, could do if you just tried.