Have you ever had a psychological sucker punch?

Have you ever had someone explain to you, coldly and logically, why your dream or vision is impossible, and can never come true?

Well, I have. Most recently last week.

As it happens, I had stopped focusing on my stress management programs during the last year, while I finished my book, The Confident Introvert, and developed programs based on it.

But I went back to that topic and am now developing what I think will be a new, exciting, and very complete program, combining elements of stress and habit management that I don’t think have ever been combined in quite this way before.

Or so I thought, until an old friend dropped by, and I enthusiastically told her about my plans. Here is what she told me, with cool and seemingly impeccable logic:

• Everyone is doing stress programs now.

• It is impossible to distinguish between all the people offering such programs – they’re all pretty much the same, no matter what they say.

• None of them are really any good; there is no proof they work at all.

• She, as an office manager, would be very skeptical and rejecting of a stress program for her employees.

I reeled with self doubt for quite a while, unable to collect my wits and think creatively, until I remembered.

• I remembered her stories of her youth when, as a talented artist who subsequently got a college degree in fine arts, both her parents assured her that no one ever made a living in art, so she must seek other employment (which she did).

• And I remembered her telling me how her father, also a talented painter, almost always won first prize in every art competition he entered, and sold his paintings for a nice sum, yet he continued to work at another job his entire life, as she continues to do, believing that it was impossible to make a living at painting.

I also remembered, once I came to my senses, the following:

- More and more articles and research studies, many in medical jou
als, show the positive effects of stress management on the prevention and treatment of illness.

• The stressed clients I have worked with who, like storm-wracked ships, made their way into the harbor of new, happier, jobs and relationships.

• A dear friend, whose prostate cancer was galloping along and who was planning his funeral and giving away his belongings, used a meditation process to such good effect that his tumors have completely disappeared, he has gained weight, turned out two more books since then, and is looking forward to the future. (I can’t claim his success as the result of anything I did, but I do include this very effective meditation process in my own programs now.)

And although I haven’t done a lot of presentations on stress so far this year, I have gotten raving testimonials! Other people somewhere think what I do is important.

Maybe it’s time I remembered to think so, too.

However, that blow to your confidence such as I had is like a sucker punch; it comes suddenly and unexpectedly, seemingly out of nowhere, often from someone you least expect would use it. It leaves you temporarily disoriented and gasping for breath. Just as a real sucker punch makes you focus only on your present survival, so does a psychological sucker punch. I presented arguments in favor of what I believed; she shot them down.

So I remembered to remember my old maxim: When people tell you what you can’t do, they are really showing you the limitations of their own thinking. Not your limitations, theirs.

Philip Zimbardo, the first researcher on shyness, says that shyness is like a prison in which you are both a prisoner and your own jailer. I think that simile can be extended beyond shyness to include any psychologically limiting state of mind.

In other words, once you recognize the fake prison for what it is, you can rally, step out of the prison door, wave goodbye to the poor souls still in there, and throw away the keys. And pity them for their lack of freedom, which you will have now regained.

Stress may happen to us, but we don’t have to choose to keep it.