7 Teachings Of Rafael Santandreu

If you are one of those types of people who think that in reality, in this world there is nothing terrible, that they enjoy everything they undertake without being attached to it or making it a necessity. Also,  you are not demanding with yourself, with others, or with the world, consider yourself belonging to the club of strong people.

According to Rafael Santandreu, an emotionally strong person is one who tells himself that he needs almost nothing to be happy. Also, consider that nothing that happens or can happen in your life is something terrible or catastrophic.

How can we improve our emotional strength?

1. “Necessitis” and “terribilitis” are the father and mother of psychological problems

As we just mentioned in the introduction, being strong on a psychological level means being aware and convinced that human beings need very little: they only need the food and drink of the day to be happy.

Everything else is just vital anecdotes but they do not determine our happiness at all. The person who has a “need” –to have a partner, a job, children, a flat of his own… – is condemned to unhappiness because it ceases to be a legitimate desire and becomes a need

When this happens, we introduce anxiety into our lives, because being something totally necessary, the person believes that they will not be able to be happy if they do not get it and the day they get it, they will feel enormously anguished about the possibility of losing it. That is, if he lost it, it would be something terrible, catastrophic, insurmountable and he would begin to suffer from “terribilitis”.

2. The line of evaluation of things

People have a kind of imaginary rule in our head, with which we evaluate everything that happens around us. It depends on how we evaluate what happens to us, this is how we will feel, because as we know, emotions are always the product of our thoughts.

There are people who know very well to relativize and do not qualify anything as terrible or unbearable, because they know that there will always be something worse and also it will not help them solve the problem. However, emotionally weak people evaluate everything as terrible and consequently suffer greatly. The ideal is to learn to evaluate in its proper measure and above all to internalize the totally realistic idea that nothing is as terrible or dramatic as we tell ourselves.

3. The enough

For Santandreu, enough is a concept that refers to the fact that the person already has enough to be well and does not need anything else. If you get more things, it will be great and you will be able to enjoy it, but if not, nothing terrible will happen because you do not suffer from that “neediness” that we have already talked about.

Enoughness makes us stronger and allows us to value what we have and not complain about what we lack because we will tell ourselves that “we already have enough.”

4. “I’d rather you didn’t act like that, but if you can’t help it, I’ll always love you the same”

What it means this sentence? As we can see, it is a positive suggestion and not a requirement. In our social relationships, we tend to demand too much from others and that is why relationships fail.

We do not realize that human beings do not like things being demanded of us, because we see our individual freedom compromised and we feel pressured. However, if we suggest the other in a positive way, we will achieve more effect and the other will be more predisposed to change.

5. The visualization of the “homeless”

An exercise to gain mental strength is to imagine yourself with almost nothing: homeless, jobless, and without resources, but still happy. It is about realizing that you can be happy with nothing because there are millions of possibilities to explore that can be a source of gratification. We can help others, make friends, practice art, learn interesting things …

6. The two rules of grandfather Rafael

Santandreu tells in his books that his grandfather Rafael instilled in him two basic rules to put an end to indecisions and achieve success. These are: what I start I finish and what I said I was going to do, I do.

With these standards, we learn to have a commitment to ourselves and to go where we want to go. In addition, they are a source of learning because by testing and experimenting, we will know if the chosen path suits us or not and we will be in time to rectify and modify our destiny.

7. Death is essential to understand life

At present we deny death too much because we do not understand that it is necessary for it to form an inherent part of life and that one cannot exist without the other. Death is necessary because if we did not die, we would not all fit on the planet and this would be, of course, a big problem for everyone and it is also good because it helps us to put all our problems in perspective and to put everything into perspective.

Michelle D. Milliman / Shutterstock.com