Why Inner Peace Is a Form of Strength

Finding a sense of inner peace has been one of the greatest blessings of my life thus far.

For someone who spent many years experiencing a lot of internal conflict, anxiety, suppressed anger and periods where my own mind wasn't a particularly pleasant place to be, this was not a feeling I was used to. In fact, I think some part of me unconsciously feared it.

I misunderstood what inner peace actually meant.

I associated it with hippies, monks, passivity and people who had somehow removed themselves from the realities of modern life. I was ambitious, entrepreneurial, restless and wanted a lot from life. Inner peace sounded suspiciously like becoming content sitting underneath a tree somewhere and no longer wanting anything.

That wasn't particularly appealing to me.

What I've since discovered is almost the opposite.

Inner peace doesn't require you to stop wanting things. It doesn't require you to become less ambitious, less driven or less engaged with the world.

It means you can want things without your internal wellbeing being completely dependent upon getting them.

And that is a very different kind of strength.

Why Men Can Mistake Peace for Passivity

I think this misunderstanding can be particularly common amongst men.

So much of what we associate with masculinity involves intensity: ambition, competition, sex, money, achievement, physical strength, risk, adventure and the ability to push through difficulty.

None of these things are inherently bad. I value many of them myself.

But intensity and strength aren't the same thing.

The man who immediately loses his shit because someone cuts him off in traffic isn't demonstrating strength. Neither is the man who can't tolerate rejection without becoming angry, can't experience sexual desire without needing to act on it, or can't sit with discomfort without immediately finding something to make himself feel better.

I used to waste enormous amounts of energy reacting to things that, looking back, were almost completely meaningless.

Now I'll occasionally sit in traffic and watch two people screaming at each other over something neither of them will remember three days later and think, Fuck, I used to give so much of myself away to things like this.

I still get angry. I still get frustrated. I still encounter people on planes taking speakerphone calls who test the absolute limits of my spiritual development.

The difference is that I don't need every feeling to become an action.

That, to me, is where inner peace starts becoming a form of strength.

Inner Peace Doesn't Kill Ambition

Another belief I had to get rid of was that peace and ambition were somehow incompatible.

They aren't.

You can build companies from a place of inner peace. You can pursue wealth from inner peace. You can compete, train hard, take risks, build a family, travel, create things and pursue enormous ambitions without needing your internal world to exist in a permanent state of war.

In fact, I've found the opposite.

When less of my energy is being consumed by unnecessary internal conflict, there is more of it available for the things that actually matter.

The relationship with ambition changes too.

You can still want more money without believing more money will finally make you okay. You can want success without making your entire sense of worth dependent upon achieving it. You can want a relationship without treating being single as evidence that your life is incomplete.

This distinction has become increasingly important to me.

I still want a lot from life.

The difference is that I no longer want my ability to experience life to be indefinitely postponed until I get it.

Peace and Pleasure Are Not the Same Thing

This is something I understand considerably better now because I spent a large part of my earlier life pursuing stimulation.

Pleasure generally requires something to happen.

You eat something delicious. You have sex. You make money. You receive attention. You go somewhere exciting. You buy something. You achieve something. You experience something that changes your internal state.

Again, none of those things are inherently wrong.

The problem comes when you become dependent upon external experiences to continually regulate how you feel internally.

Peace is different.

Peace doesn't say:

Give me something and I'll feel better.

It says:

Nothing needs to happen right now for me to be okay.

That was a completely foreign experience to me for much of my life.

I had become very good at finding things outside myself that could alter what was happening inside myself. Stimulation, adventure, achievement, substances, women, novelty, distraction. There was almost always something available.

Learning that I could experience genuine contentment without needing to add something to the moment changed my relationship with almost everything.

It didn't remove pleasure from my life.

It made pleasure less responsible for my life.

The Space Between Feeling and Acting

One of the biggest practical effects of developing more internal peace has been becoming less reactive.

Something happens.

You feel something.

And then there is a space before what happens next.

That space can be incredibly small, but it matters.

Someone says something that pisses you off and you don't immediately respond.

You experience sexual desire and don't automatically need to pursue it.

You feel rejected and don't immediately need validation.

You feel bored and don't immediately reach for stimulation.

You become anxious about an outcome and don't immediately try to control every possible variable.

This isn't emotional suppression. The feeling is still there.

You're simply developing the ability to experience it without automatically obeying it.

I've come to believe that a huge amount of personal freedom exists inside that space.

The strongest version of a man isn't someone who never experiences anger, desire, fear, disappointment or ambition. It's a man who can experience all of them without immediately surrendering control of himself to them.

Protecting Your Peace Isn't Avoiding Discomfort

There is another mistake I've made around this idea.

Once you experience genuine inner peace, you naturally want to protect it.

That can mean setting boundaries. It can mean changing environments. It can mean reducing the amount of time you spend around certain people or refusing to continually participate in dynamics that create unnecessary chaos.

But I've also learned that protecting your peace cannot become an excuse for avoiding anything uncomfortable.

Some of the most important conversations I've had were uncomfortable.

Growth is uncomfortable.

Discipline is uncomfortable.

Taking responsibility is uncomfortable.

Being told something about yourself that you don't want to hear is extremely uncomfortable.

Sometimes love itself requires uncomfortable conversations.

So I no longer think the goal is to remove everything that disturbs me.

The better question is whether the discomfort is productive or destructive.

There are situations that disturb your peace because they're inviting you to grow, and there are situations that disturb your peace because they're simply chaotic, unhealthy or repeatedly violating boundaries you've clearly established.

Wisdom is learning the difference.

Control, God and Surrender

This has probably become the most important part of inner peace for me.

A lot of internal conflict comes from trying to control things we don't actually control.

Other people's opinions.

Whether someone loves us.

Exactly when something happens.

Whether a business succeeds.

How another person behaves.

What happens tomorrow.

We can influence many of these things, sometimes significantly. But influence isn't control.

This is where my relationship with God has become increasingly important.

Surrender doesn't mean sitting around waiting for God to run your life for you. I still believe deeply in responsibility, effort, discipline and taking action.

You do what is yours to do.

You make the difficult decision. You have the conversation. You work. You train. You set the boundary. You take the risk. You apologize when you're wrong. You change your behaviour when it doesn't align with the man you want to be.

But eventually you reach the boundary of your own control.

And that's where you have to release your grip on the outcome.

I've found considerably more peace in learning to distinguish between those two territories: what is mine to do and what is not mine to determine.

The first requires responsibility.

The second requires faith.

How I've Cultivated Inner Peace

I don't think inner peace is something you simply decide to have.

For me, it emerged gradually from years of practices and changes that initially seemed relatively disconnected from one another.

Meditation taught me how to observe what was happening inside me without immediately becoming part of it. Prayer helped me surrender things I couldn't control. Gratitude trained me to notice what was already good rather than continually focusing on what was missing.

Physical discipline helped too. So did therapy, coaching, journaling, spending time in nature, becoming more careful about who and what I allowed into my life, and learning to sit with uncomfortable emotions rather than immediately trying to change them.

None of these things individually produced some permanent state of enlightenment.

I still lose my peace.

The difference is that now I know what it feels like, I know when I've moved away from it, and I have a much better understanding of how to find my way back.

That's enough for me.

The Stronger Man

I used to think strength was mostly about how much you could withstand, achieve or control.

I still believe resilience, ambition and discipline matter enormously. But my definition of strength has expanded.

Strength is also being able to remain grounded when someone else is losing control.

It's being able to experience desire without becoming governed by it.

It's being able to pursue something enormously important to you while accepting that you cannot guarantee the outcome.

It's being able to feel anger without needing to inflict it on someone else.

It's being able to sit alone without desperately needing distraction.

It's being able to want more while remaining grateful for what you already have.

And perhaps most importantly, it's developing enough trust in yourself and in God that your internal state doesn't need to rise and fall with every external event.

I don't experience inner peace as withdrawing from life anymore.

I experience it as becoming considerably more capable of participating in life without being thrown around by every part of it.

For an ambitious man, I can't think of many forms of strength more valuable than that.