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Learned helplessness, learned hopelessness
You’re more powerful than you think.
This article is cross-posted from my weekly newsletter, The Sunday Soother, a newsletter about clarity, intention, and useful tips for creating more meaning in your life that goes out every Sunday morning. Subscribe here. I am also a coach who works with sensitive people so they can stop second-guessing, make decisions confidently and live the life they’ve always dreamed of. You can learn more about working with me here.
Happy Sunday, friends. Today I want to talk about my past default operating mode, and how I moved on from it.
I use this word a lot in my work with coaching clients:
Despair mode.
I see folks slip into this place so easily. A mode of freak out. Of self pity. Of negativity. Of spiraling out about worst-case scenarios. Of what’s-the-point-ism. Of fear.
For most of my 40 years, this was my default, too. I was addicted to worst-case scenarios, of my own inability to change anything in my life, to my victim narrative.
What despair mode encouraged me to live in was two states: learned helplessness, and learned hopelessness.
The first, learned helplessness — well, if you read my Princess in a Tower Syndrome post from a few weeks back, you have an…
