I often hear clients say, “Well I guess I just have to put up with it.” This could be in reference to a situation at work or at home. The details do not really matter.

Putting up with anything doesn’t sound like fun to me. It’s definitely not on my road to happiness.

I would like to ask that you think about your difficult situations and decide if you want to tolerate them or accept them. Tolerance and acceptance are two distinctly different things. Let’s look at two definitions from the Merriam-Webster online dictionary.

Tolerate
1 : to endure or resist the action of (as a drug or food) without serious side effects or discomfort 

2 a : to allow to be or to be done without prohibition, hindrance, or contradiction b : to put up with

Accept
1 a : to receive willingly b : to be able or designed to take or hold (something applied or added)
2 : to give admittance or approval to
3 a : to endure without protest or reaction b : to regard as proper, normal, or inevitable c : to recognize as true : believe

Acceptance leads us to peace. Tolerance is holding back a fight.

Can you feel the difference in the energy between tolerating and accepting?

In my pursuit of happiness, I would rather seek peace through acceptance. Enduring and resisting sound difficult, and they eventually cave in under their own weight.

We can only tolerate something for so long before we can’t take it any more. We have a limit on our patience and willingness to endure.

When we accept something, we have no limit to our patience. I choose to recognize a situation as reality, and I allow it into my life, warts and all. Acceptance is easier than tolerance.

What are you tolerating in your life that you could consider accepting?

Here are some situations I struggled to tolerate and eventually found peace through acceptance.

1. a passive-aggressive boss
2. my limited ability to understand physics
3. differing expectations of household cleanliness
4. cellulite

Here are 5 steps to find peace through acceptance.

1. Recognize your struggle.

2. In your body, feel “tolerance” and your physical resistance to it.

3. In your body, feel “acceptance” and the freedom in it.

4. Ask yourself if you are ready to release the resistance and find acceptance.

5. Accept reality for what it is. End the struggle.

Sometimes releasing the struggle is more complicated than this. There are some situations where we deeply believe that there is something “not fair” or “wrong” with reality.

Releasing a difficult struggle like this can take time and patience. My preferred method to find acceptance in difficult situations is The Work by Byron Katie. The Work has helped me find so much peace in my life.

There are many other releasing techniques available, such as Self-Coaching 101 by Brooke Castillo, The Sedona Method, and Psych-K.

What are your thoughts on tolerance and acceptance?