So Much Happier Blog
Remember Reading for Fun?
“You can’t get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me.”
I recently read about a study that was done in 2009 at the University of Sussex in the U.K. on some basic stress relief techniques and how effective they could be in short periods of time. It held some happy surprises, and I wanted to pass them along to you this week. While you know that Tapping/EFT is definitely my favorite stress relief technique, I like to make sure you know about lots of others you can weave into the fabric of your daily life. Nothing is the right tool for everyone all the time, and what I like about this study is that it points out the utility and surprising rapidity of results you can get from enjoying everyday things you already know how to do! Fast, easy, effective, and no learning required? Yes, please!
In this study, subjects’ heart rates and muscle tension were monitored while they engaged in various activities. Here are the results they recorded for each:
Playing video games: 21% improvement in stress levels. So maybe that silly game you downloaded onto your phone is not just fun, but more helpful to you than you knew!
Taking a walk: 42% improvement. Sometimes age-old low-tech wisdom is the best!
Enjoying a cup of coffee or tea: 54% improvement. Whoa. Does this surprise you as much as it did me? Next time you feel tense, maybe grab your favorite hot beverage and just savor the flavor for a highly effective relaxation break. Amazing!
Listening to music: 61% improvement. I don’t think it’s too much of a surprise that music we like takes most of us to our safe, happy place, but with this kind of proof, we really have a case for working it into our days more consistently. Turn the volume to your preferred level and enjoy. Extra points if you twirl and jump around while listening, because plenty of other studies have shown that moving around and getting the blood pumping produces endorphins, our “happy” chemicals.
The grand prize winner, reading: 68% improvement in as little as six minutes! What?! (Take note that this is based on reading fiction for fun—NOT news or business articles and the like.) Enjoyable reading distracts us from our own thoughts and problems (and distraction techniques have been shown to be quite helpful for anxiety, for instance), as well as firing up our creativity, which adds another supportive element. I find this to be pretty exciting, because it’s so simple. Plus, I’ve always been a big-time bookworm. As long as you’re not multi-tasking, but allowing yourself to be absorbed in the story, I’m guessing you’d get the same results from listening to an audio book.
Isn’t it nice to hear about a few things that are fun and not at all bad for your health (as long as you don’t sprain your thumb playing video games)? In the week ahead, how about digging out your library card (or getting one) and reading a chapter a day of something fun? Even better, walk to the library to get that book, listen to music and gyrate as you make a cup of tea, then curl up with said tea to read that chapter. It’s all good for you! Simple yet powerful pleasures. Who says stress relief has to be hard work?
How about Some Good News?
This world we’re living in can be so busy and difficult and distracting, and filled with the constant blaring of bad news, that sometimes it’s hard to remember that there are good things happening all over the planet all the time as well. I thought this week I’d just send a few sources for updates of this kind. Feel free to bookmark them and return whenever you need a reminder about all the great work being done. You may even be inspired to join in here or there! Even if not, it can be inspiring and heartening to read about uplifting news. I hope you enjoy and get a lift from these sources. Please feel free to share and help others around you remember the good as well!
And just for fun, here’s a nice compilation of a bunch of good stories from 2019. See you next week!
Feeling Out of Phase?
Well friends, here we are solidly into 2020, a new year and a new decade! Whether you were raring to go or felt blindsided by the trappings of wrapping up the old year, time marches on. Like a lot of people, I spent the transition groggy with a nasty cold, and I feel like I’m only now finally starting to wake up again. Maybe you’ve already hit the ground running with exciting new ideas and plans, and if so, well done!
Whatever your experience has been so far, remember that your personal timing doesn’t have to line up with everyone else’s to be valid. Sometimes we all get a little (or a lot) out of step with where the world seems to be headed. You may experience this in small ways, with a sense of being out of synch in your closest relationships or in your local routines. For much of human history, the local was most of what we had to worry about! However, now, with the advent of the Information Age and the 24-hour news cycle that must be filled, no matter how low-quality the programming, we are bombarded with so much more than we can ever participate in, and much of it is fear-mongering. The split focus and temptation toward constant worry that this constantly induces is confusing at best and utterly overwhelming at worst.
And this is not just experienced on a personal level. Our new normal is affecting the genesis and reaction to mass events the world over. This time in history is in many ways chaotic and shot through with layers of rudderless conflict. We’ve hit multiple tipping points that require us to change on a global scale if we want to have a planet to live on at all in another decade or three, and the majority of the world’s leaders seem convinced that childish, self-obsessed stupidity is the way to go.
I actually think a lot of our issues come down to failures in educational systems. That’s not really surprising, since education used to be only for the wealthy, and only quite recently has there been an effort to scale it up to cover everyone in cultures across the world. This effort has revealed a whole new set of challenges that are not easy or quick to solve with our current level of experience regarding the effective transfer of information and skills in group settings. And just recently, the number of readily available distractions has exploded. It used to be that for those with the luxury of free time, one of the exciting things you could do was learn, and expand your horizons in self-motivated ways. Now so much is handed to us, even foisted upon us, that learning is less a joy and more of a constant drudgery as we try to keep up with everything that a cacophony of questionably valuable tastemakers tells us we must.
I don’t mean to sound like a grumpy old person here (“It used to be that everything was just great, blah blah blah”), because there was never a time when everything was perfect on planet Earth! What I’m hearing from so many people right now, though, is that the fight against constant overwhelm is becoming more and more consuming and exhausting. If you feel like you’re bogged down in a cycle of just getting through each day and recovering from it, you’re in good company! Here are some ideas that may help you as you begin to construct your vision of this new year and begin to set it into motion:
Acknowledge that this world is a challenging place in which to live, and don’t be so hard on yourself about it. You have to balance yourself and your needs, the needs of those closest to you, and your relationship with the wider world, all of which are demanding, and these demands are constantly shifting. Give yourself some love and credit for keeping up with all of this. Some people like to make their lives look effortless on social media. Don’t believe that #*%~.
Reaffirm that only you can be the source of the most high-quality information about you. By all means, consider feedback from others as you chart your path, but if their assumptions are wrong, reject them. Only if you retain the right to be the arbiter of your opinions about yourself, and choose to make self-compassion a guiding principle, will you have access to the constant stream of creativity you need in your daily efforts to make your life the best it can be.
Have a written list of your priorities that you refer to daily. Focus is key. You can imagine far more than you can ever accomplish in the flesh! You must prioritize your highest values and connected projects if you ever want to get anywhere. Do you have this? Almost no one does. If you don’t, make a list now in your phone or somewhere else you can easily refer to it. Have you done this yet? Seriously, do it now!
Unless you are a writer or other passionate content producer by choice, focusing on living your life in the real world is far more crucial than narrating your every move in the twittersphere. Yes, stay in touch with important people in your life in the most convenient ways for you. Just don’t confuse running in endless circles online with accomplishing your goals. Simplify and focus.
Carve out the time you need to take care of yourself physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. If you think you’re too busy, start with small steps. If you fall off the wagon, get up and keep trying. You can’t sustain an optimal life if you always put your basic needs last.
Get clear about the ways in which you want to contribute and give, the ways that feel appropriate and exciting for you. If you’re not sure, get out there and practice donating some of your favorite skills. Be careful to corral your giving into this mission statement so that you don’t start behaving as though you owe all things to all people. We all need to exist within a give and take dynamic with the societies we live in, but doing too much will exhaust you and deny the world the best version of what you have to give. Give joyfully, and when you can’t, plot your rest and rejuvenation, and then get back to your chosen areas of giving.
Keep an eye out for ways to make your life fun. If something isn’t fun at all, you’ll tend to quit, because there are limits to human reserves of willpower. Enjoyment keeps us motivated in healthy ways. It also draws us toward activities we’re good at, which helps nurture our effectiveness and deeply feed our life vitality.
It’s fine to be influenced by the timing of the world and the people around you, but remember that those who have invented some of the best solutions in history have been considered eccentric-to-outright-crazy because they were not following the pack. In case you haven’t noticed (you probably have if you’re reading this), the world is desperately in need of creative solutions to a wide variety of problems. Paradoxically, you may be better able to help by refusing to have your timing and your activities dictated by conventional wisdom, immediate imperatives that you’re not the right person for, and public opinion.
Treasure the people you trust. Friends who have your best interests at heart as well as their own, and who have demonstrated the ability to maintain relationships characterized by a balance between giving and receiving, are one of the best things in life. Appreciate these people at every opportunity!
There are times when we need to meet life with a warrior spirit, and no matter what you’re attempting to do with your life, it seems to me that now, this moment on this planet, is one of those times. I don’t mean that we need to be combative, but rather suffused with a courageous willingness to do what is necessary and appropriate in order to meet the challenges we face, both personal and collective. Find someone from any time in history who inspires you in this direction.
I wish you courage, focus, friendship, ease, and joy as you face whatever may unfold for you in 2020. Be awesome!
Cultivating Your Vision
“Dream and you shall become.”
Assuming that you’ve been following along, last week you thought about what you would categorize as this year’s successes and failures, and what you’ve learned from it all. So now what, you ask? Excellent question! Doing this exercise can leave you with a jumble of thoughts, emotions, and impressions from the past year that can be unsettling and confusing, but that’s obviously not the goal! When you’ve spent the time to reflect on your year, the next step is still not action. Instead, it’s more reflection—this time on what you’d like to be able to experience in the new year.
Following nature’s rhythms, it’s a time of year for harvest (enjoyment and celebration of what you’ve produced this year) and envisioning, at this darkest time of the year, what you will begin to set in motion when the light begins its return on the winter solstice.
What positive capacities would you like to continue to strengthen in this coming year?
What do you need to rethink and attempt again in new ways? What will you do before that—research, education, seeking advice and new ideas?
What might you decide to stop doing? (The answer to this has the potential to move you forward in surprisingly powerful ways!)
More than anything, what would you like your life to feel like? See if you can cultivate that feeling now, in the relative quiet of the long nights of winter, regardless of your circumstances. Practicing this can help you to become aware of what supports and what tears at this feeling when life starts to pick up again in the spring. Noticing helps you to make better choices about what belongs in your life and what doesn’t.
It’s easy to get caught up in the spin and rush of the holiday madness that’s all around us now, but it’s important to be resting and recharging our batteries, so remember to slow down enough to be really present for the time you may spend with friends and family this month. Modern life is relentless, but we can choose to unhook, unplug, and get off the crazy wheel sometimes, because we all need to take breaks. All the busy-ness is no good if we’re never experiencing any quality of life.
Remember to carve out some time this month for quiet, reflection, appreciation of what you have to celebrate, and healing from what was difficult this year. Look for ways to experience the joy of mid-winter celebrations that societies all over the world have made a tradition. Give yourself time to dream of what you may create in the new year as the old one winds down. Treat yourself with kindness as you come in from the cold to rest for a while before striking out anew.
Reclaiming Polyanna
“Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Nothing can be done without hope and confidence.”
Years ago, I heard Maryanne Williamson speak on the topic of the story of Polyanna (there’s an old Disney movie based on a novel if you’ve never heard of it. It’s about a little girl who stubbornly sees the good in everyone, and about how this affects the people she interacts with.) She talked about how it’s become fashionable to bash the title character’s perennial insistence on seeing the positive in all things—after all, isn’t someone like that pretty annoying in day-to-day life? Maybe inspiring in a short movie, but otherwise just too much? Marianne went on to point out, though, this little character’s immense power to transform the world around her, which plays out in the story. I thought it was a fantastic point. Would we rather complain and reserve our right to be cynical, or reach for more optimism and the tremendous power that follows?
In light of this awareness, I want to suggest that it’s a good season for thinking about closing down the year that is winding down, and envisioning the year ahead. As we do this, it behooves us to think about what results we were able to create, both positive and negative-seeming:
Where did we succeed, and what can we learn from these successes? What should we continue doing in order to repeat these successes, and what might we need to stop doing?
What successes might we have blown right by without noticing or celebrating, and what would be a meaningful way to celebrate these now?
Where did we fail, or mess up, and what can we learn from this?
Here’s where Polyanna comes in—if you’re having trouble seeing what you can take away from this that would be beneficial to you in the future, play a game with yourself where you give yourself permission to be as obnoxiously and stubbornly cheerful as you possibly can about everything you think of. Really go overboard and get ridiculous about it, practicing on other people’s life events. Then turn that back on the situation from your life and see what that kind of playful, exaggerated thinking can show you about it
Knowing what you know now, how would you go back and redo this situation if you could?
Is there still anything left undone about it that you’d like to wrap up? Maybe you just left the pieces where they lay, rather than cleaning up so you could move on as smoothly as possible. Now might be a good time to pick up the pieces and make peace with it one way or another
Try actually rehearsing mentally how what you learned can help you next time you’re in a situation where it would apply. Learning something new to the point where it’s immediately useful when you need it usually takes some repetition and practice
What can you give yourself credit for in that original “failure” scenario that perhaps you haven’t yet done? In what ways did you really try your best? Where did what you tried come very close to working? Where was bad luck involved, such that you couldn’t have foreseen or controlled certain factors with the knowledge you had?
Is there anyone you need to apologize to or make some other contact with in order to tie up loose ends?
Regardless of whether others have forgiven you, think about how you might forgive yourself. Sometimes we have to let others have their own feelings and their own timing, but we still have the power to decide that internally, we’ve suffered enough for the time being.
In taking stock of recent life lessons, it’s important to both acknowledge our progress and the things we still need to work on. It’s human nature to learn most things by doing, and without the emotional punch packed by the experience of failure, many things we would be likely not to learn at all—yet continuing to learn is often what makes us worthwhile people. As this year enters its final month, it’s a natural time to take stock so that we can let go of the old and allow the new room to grow in the new year. I hope you’ll be able to find a willingness to go easy on yourself, giving yourself proper credit, while still being willing to look clearly at where you were less awesome, make amends as needed, and learn from that. It is through finding this balance that we maintain a sane perspective on both ourselves and others around us, none of whom is perfect, but all of whom have value..
Transforming to Succeed
“I have always believed, and I still believe, that whatever good or bad fortune may come our way we can always give it meaning and transform it into something of value.”
Last week we talked about being able to look at ourselves and notice what we have the power to change that would improve our prospects in moving toward our goals. This is definitely not the easiest thing to do! We’re likely to struggle with various emotions in the process, because no one likes confronting their own limitations. Also, the idea of change, of tackling what we may have found and working toward new skills, can be challenging and scary. And yet this is exactly what we need to be doing all the time if we want to grow into the kind of people who can succeed in a changing landscape—which is what life will always present, whether you’re a hermit or a big-city dweller.
Once you know what you need to change, I recommend first setting your focus on what you really want and why, and find ways to think about this often. Every day you will need to refresh your motivation, particularly when your endeavors require struggle and persistence—and in the process of change, this may be nearly every day! You might want to make yourself little notes or display pictures that you find inspiring. Maybe you’ll make a playlist of music that buoys you and reminds you what all your work is for. Change takes focus and grit, but you’re allowed to have fun while you’re working at it! Make sure you’re finding ways to keep your purpose alive and remind yourself what it’s all about.
You’ll then need a roadmap that shows you your path to your goal so you can see what you need to do, and in what order. Important: Right from the start, accept that this will be a living document, and you will add to and edit it as circumstances change and as you learn experientially. If you add time-related goals to your map, know that those can and sometimes must change. They’re meant to challenge and draw us forward, not tyrannize us. Too many of us have become demoralized by the idea of setting goals at all because not meeting a deadline can feel like failure, and that’s a very hot button for many of us. Overreactions to our perceptions of failure are common, and yet destructive to our learning and growth in profound ways. The truth is that when things don’t go as planned, there’s almost always something to learn that will help you as you continue toward your destination, and if we lose sight of this, me may quit. If you really want that goal and you keep managing your energy and your outlook, you will return over and over to the plan with a willingness to evolve it and yourself as you go. No one is ever perfect, even those who succeed wildly! We’re all human, and trying to hold yourself to impossible standards that include never making mistakes is not helpful.
The last part of this process I want to mention is attention to your physical and emotional well being. If you don’t eat enough nutrient-rich food, move and stretch your body, and get enough sleep to help your body regenerate, you’ll most likely burn yourself out before you can accomplish anything meaningful, and never be able to sustain the prolonged activity that the pursuit of most goals requires. If you don’t manage your emotions, you will be fighting the chaos of bad moods and demotivating thoughts, which will seriously cut into your productivity. You’ll also be missing out on the priceless information that your emotions are trying to convey about how you may be getting off track from your own values and truest desires, as well as about parts of you that may need attention before your subconscious mind will get on board with your success. And trust me, your subconscious is powerful! If it’s not on board with your plan, it will find ways to sabotage that will be both highly effective and most likely invisible to you so that you have little chance of countering them. Sure, you can vilify and stuff down your emotions because it’s what you know, and learning new skills takes time and effort, but if you take a little time to learn an alternative method of operating, you’ll be able to benefit from much smoother sailing for a lifetime. Doesn’t that sound better? I have found that learning some powerful emotional management tools can revolutionize our experience of day-to-day life for the better.
As you probably know already, I recommend Tapping as one of the most highly effective and useful tools for emotional, mental, spiritual, and physical transformation. It’s incredibly supportive in working through road blocks all along the way, whatever it is you may struggle with. If you’ve forgotten how to use Tapping, you can find a couple of quick videos on the subject here. It doesn’t take long to start getting the benefits, so get going or brush up, and I think you’ll find that it really helps!
Where Am I Stuck?
“How few there are who have courage enough to own their faults, or resolution enough to mend them.”
Last week, we looked at the ways in which we tend to resist noticing where we could grow and improve for faster progress toward our goals. This is a very normal human behavior, but it keeps us from being everything we can. This week, I want to encourage you to think about where in your life you feel stuck, and what part in that you yourself may be playing.
It’s usually pretty easy to notice your pain points—often you probably spend much of your day mulling, even obsessing over them. Unless you’re a master at avoidance of your own emotions (and some people are), it probably isn’t hard for you to rattle off the things that are currently frustrating the heck out of you, and the situations you still don’t seem able to change no matter what you try. This is step one.
Step two can be harder because of the blind spots we’re all prone to. This is where I will ask you to think about the ways in which you may be contributing to the pain you’re experiencing, even if you haven’t been doing so consciously. Your first reaction might be, “I’m not! It’s the world, the industry, my family, etc.!” I’m sure that there are numerous factors playing into your situation, but are you sure you have NO hand in it? You might also wail that it’s all your fault, and that wouldn’t be true either. Life on Earth is a shared experience, and if you don’t live on a desert island, then nothing comes down to only you. The important thing is to get used to becoming open to observing where we have the power to choose differently, grow, and become more able to succeed in the ways we hope. So even when you’ve just had it with the factors that are not within your direct control, remember to think about any little part of the problem that could trace back to you. What would make you able to immediately solve this problem? Resources? Skills? Knowledge?
Once you have a better sense of this, you can start making a plan to work on those things that would be helpful and are within your control. This week, ask yourself what you would need to do to improve your own standing in the context of your most annoying problems. Next week we’ll talk about what to do with this information so that you can start moving forward again.
I Don't Wanna!
“I can’t change the direction of the wind, but I can adjust my sails to always reach my destination.”
In any extended discussion of failure, I think it’s appropriate to consider the possible role of our own resistance to change in our analysis of the results we create. While some choices we make may be values-based and therefore non-negotiable (and appropriately so), sometimes we resist necessary growth and skills building because we don’t want to admit to our own deficiencies, or because we don’t want to commit to the work it would take to correct them. This is very human, and not terribly problematic if you’re willing to notice this tendency, see it for what it is, and confront it in proper timing for you so that you can keep moving forward. If you stay mired in your own resistance, though, you are highly likely to repeat behaviors that will block your success over and over. And you probably won’t even realize it.
Dismantling your resistance can be frightening on the very deepest levels of the subconscious. The fear of change, of the unknown, is the most potent immobilizer you’re ever likely to experience. When we allow it to remain unquestioned and unnamed, we pretty much guarantee that effective and lasting growth will remain out of reach. This fear is what prevents us from searching for the root causes of our chronic resistance, including patterns of self-sabotage, which will not allow us to break new ground and succeed in new and bigger ways.
This fear can be masked by all kinds of misdirection—apparent arrogance, chronic pessimism, overwhelm and over-emotional reactions, listlessness, defensiveness, harsh self-judgment—all of these point to the perceived danger of shining light on where we have work to do. Which of these you exhibit will usually go back to patterns you learned in the cauldron of your family’s dynamics or through other formative experiences. Again, all of this is normal! Life is demanding, and these signs of resistance may be indicating that it’s not time for our next step forward. However, it may also be necessary to admit that deep change will never be comfortable, and the time for it will never be truly “right.” At some point, if you really want to make progress, you’ll need to prioritize getting over a wall that you know is standing in the way of your desired progress.
Admitting that part of the problem is you is the first step in overcoming resistance, and like any skill, it becomes easier with practice. After all, no one is perfect, so every one of us will remain a work in progress until the day we move on to greener pastures. Being willing to see where we’re falling short of the behaviors and abilities needed to create the lives we want is essential unless we want to live lives of quiet desperation. Subsequently addressing any problems you find within yourself also naturally expands your ability to do so more effectively in the future. Only burying your head in the sand guarantees that you will remain stuck. Any action you are willing to take to start a ball rolling opens up possibilities that can snowball in your favor.
Wherever you want to expand, I promise you that others have already begun blazing paths, and many have written books or created videos to help others like you along a similar path. If they’re honest, they’ll admit that this kind of work is hard, and uncomfortable, and not fun, but it’s also incredibly rewarding to break through former blockages and free up your life and your future for dreams that otherwise would have had no chance of becoming real. No one is alone in any of this. Though each person is unique, the human condition is defined by access to all the same emotions, the same palette of experiences, which we all share. When we isolate ourselves, either socially or just in our habits of thought, we make life so much harder for ourselves than it has to be.
If you feel stuck in loops of negative experience that you can’t seem to interrupt, it may be time to call upon your reserves of courage, seek advice from someone more experienced, and take a look at yourself and your own limitations, then imagine a process that can lead to the progress you want. No one really likes dwelling on their own weaknesses, but it’s rare that these are immune to sustained effort. Usually there’s room for at least some improvement, and even a little can be the difference between remaining stuck and breaking down barriers that once seemed hopeless.
After a Fall
“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”
For the last couple of weeks I’ve been thinking about failure, so this week I wanted to talk about what happens afterward. As we’ve discussed, many of us have been taught to see failure as something to avoid at all costs, something that is dangerous, humiliating, and unacceptable; we think that if we fail, that means something about us and whether we’re good enough. Sensing that we have failed in any way may send us into a tailspin of emotions and self-recrimination that puts us off track for weeks, months, or even years. If we can find ways to overwrite some of our destructive programming about “failure,” we can shorten the path to more of what we really want to experience, and keep ourselves from feeling so much pain when it could be much less disruptive.
It’s natural to feel a rush of multiple emotions when life doesn’t go our way. There’s nothing wrong with that, and in fact, each emotion we feel can alert us to a different layer of the experience that it would be helpful for us to consider. Each one carries its own message about how we can keep learning in order to get closer to success. For instance, if anger is a part of your mix, perhaps you’re thinking that external forces are partly to blame, and with some thought, you might be able to learn a few things about how to dance more gracefully with the outside world next time you tangle with it; it also might indicate that you’re blaming yourself for doing something that you now see was a mistake. If you feel sad, it may be because you’re telling yourself that you can’t come back from this, or it was your last chance. Frustration may indicate that you’re starting to need a new strategy or a vacation to rest and renew before you head back out into the world again. No one likes to analyze their own part in a mess, but doing so can be incredibly revealing. Examining what happened and why is essential to future improvements.
Sometimes a balanced, grounded perspective can be hard to come by when you’re confronting feelings around failure, so enlisting the help of others to interpret your experiences can be a huge help. We all have habits of thought as well as blind spots that we’ll never notice if we don’t include outside perspectives. We all have a tendency to overreact in some areas, and only with clarity and practice can we learn to undo our old patterns. Allowing others to help helps us to find clarity, and helps us to build a support system that we can lean on as we work our way toward mastery.
Throughout the whole process of finding your more balanced perspective, Tapping can be such a relief! When you’re in the throes of that first round of emotion that arises when you perceive a failure, it can relatively quickly calm your reactions so that you can give yourself the space to think it all through with less judgment. As each layer of emotion is revealed, it can help you stay calmer as you work out which parts were yours and which were out of your control, and then dial all the emotional intensity down to workable levels. Once you have a better sense of what you think of the whole thing, it can help you to release any regrets you’re holding onto, and any fears about the future that have arisen as a result of your outcome. Once you’ve uncovered beliefs that are impacting your judgments about yourself and others, it can also help you find the origins of those beliefs in your earlier life and address old events that may be a part of your present-day habits and patterns. Depending on how spectacular your crash, finding peace may take a lot of Tapping, but the time you invest in it is worth it. It really can help you become free from the ill effects of painful circumstances that might otherwise keep dragging you down.
In truth, no one is born an expert at anything. While we all have innate talents, we all must build skills in any given area through practice, trial and error. Screwing up is not necessarily failure—most likely it’s just the unglamorous part of the process of gaining skills you need to progress. If you’re still alive, even the worst failures are not final! The more you can learn to calmly assess what has actually happened when you’re unhappy with results, the more quickly you can find clarity about where you went wrong, how to do damage control to salvage what you can from the wreckage, and start to create new and better opportunities for the next time around. And the lessons from experience tend to teach us far more, and stick with us much more effectively, than those we learn second hand, so you might eventually find that you can come to value your mistakes as well as your successes. Wisdom grows as a result of all of our experience, not just the fun ones!
Another Perspective on Failure
As a follow up to last week’s blog about failure, this week I wanted to share this video that I thought you’d enjoy. Whether or not you’re a fan of her novels, author J. K. Rowling does what I think is a bang-up job of delivering a Harvard commencement address in it. She covers themes of failure and imagination in ways that I found both entertaining and beautiful. Enjoy!
Dealing with Failure
“Do the one thing you think you cannot do. Fail at it. Try again. Do better the second time. The only people who never tumble are those who never mount the high wire. This is your moment. Own it.”
One of the things we all spend a lot of time thinking and worrying about is, “Am I good enough?” This is completely normal, but it’s also one of the main producers of angst built into the human condition. The other great worry is, “Do I (and will I) have enough?” Years ago I heard a lecturer mention these two questions as those to which all mental and emotional pain will reduce. In my work and my wanderings, I have found this to be true. Both questions are absolutely pivotal to the experiences we have and want to have in life, and they are perennial. At no point will we be able to escape these two questions, no matter how good life gets. And one of the concepts that gets right to the heart of that first question is the concept of failure. What is it, how do we define it, and most importantly, how can we avoid it? Please God, let us avoid it.
Instead of learning how to deal most constructively with these worries as we grow and mature, we often find that our greatest influencers, our friends and family members, pile onto them with their own baggage—much of which was inherited from others in their lives. A vast amount of information about (not) being enough and having enough collects in our subconscious minds, and becomes the compass for our life decisions without our even realizing the problem. Which is that others have defined our sense of self and our ideas about our potential, sometimes so thoroughly that we will fight for this vision of ourselves and the world as absolute reality.
Unfortunately, because of their own beliefs about themselves and the world, parents often drill into us that it isn’t safe to fail, and that failure can be one of life’s greatest horrors. Now in some situations, this makes complete sense. Consequences are all about context, and if you live in a time and place where there really is intense scarcity to grapple with on a daily basis, and just surviving requires balancing on a razor’s edge, then this actually makes a lot of sense. We learn about what’s acceptable and good in any given culture through both observation and direct teaching from those around us, and survival requires our absorbing the rules of play. And by the way, much of human history really has been marked by the experience of struggles for survival in a harsh world. However, not all of us are actually having this experience today. If we’re not, the wisdom of behaving as though we are becomes truly questionable. But how do we undo the deep programming we’ve absorbed throughout our lives that can keep us locked into endless, circular existential worry about being enough and having enough?
I guess this week I’ve decided to go for the big questions that underlie the entire personal development sphere! And while I can’t solve all problems in a short blog, I can give you the main branches that I think can define a successful path forward, keeping in mind that these are highly reductionist. In other words, just because the broad outlines can be stated quickly doesn’t mean they are simple and can be done quickly!
The first branch is giving yourself permission. There may be many aspects to getting to this willingness in all the areas of your life, but ultimately, you are the only one who can decide that you should be free to live a happy life that expresses who you truly feel yourself to be.
The second is extending yourself the love and respect that all humans deserve, the acknowledgment that we are all potentially good and perfect at some level, whether you call that soul or inspiration or genius. If you see yourself this way, you have what you need to invest in your joy, your learning, your constant betterment in the ways that you yourself define. In this distraction-clogged world, clarity can’t solve everything, but it’s a fantastic start and a powerful compass as we make our daily decisions.
As you contemplate giving yourself permission, here are a few things to contemplate:
Your parents probably did the best they could with what they had, including their natural abilities and their own built-in baggage, even if the best they managed was pretty terrible
Parents, if conscious and sober, constantly bounce back and forth between their hopes and their worries for you. This can make them seem pretty nuts when you’re small! They want you to be enough and have enough, but they worry that if you stand out too much, your life may be much harder
They themselves were probably taught that most of us don’t have the luxury of failing, because if we do, it will be the end. We’ll be finished, we and our families will die, and all will be lost. Even if they wouldn’t phrase it this starkly, I promise you that these beliefs are in there
Everyone is carrying around So. Much. Baggage. From what has been passed down unconsciously for countless generations throughout human history. I wouldn’t have believed how much until I started Tapping and finding it all starting to stand out to me in startling detail
If they had had better teaching, encouragement, and better opportunities, their lives could have been wholly different. Do you think humans deserve these things? Might you?
So few people have had the luxury of time and enough opportunity to do the inner work necessary to consciously differentiate between what is truly them, and what is the muddiness passed down to them by others. But because of recent centuries of technological innovations, you may be better able to carve this out if you choose
Only you can choose to stand for the best of humanity and do the necessary work to wash off the past and everything that isn’t really yours.
If you decide to give yourself permission in this way, know that this is not something you will do only once. It will need to be a daily decision you make as your life continues to evolve and change. This might seem like a burden, but the sooner you come to accept it, the more you can build this pivotal habit.
Here are some thoughts to get you moving in positive directions as you begin to live a life in which you take your knowledge of who you really are and want to be and put it into action:
If you do assume that you are good and worthy of your own investment, what would you need in order to get beyond the limitations you’ve absorbed from people and from life events? While not everything can be planned in a linear fashion, some analysis of what you need is crucial to finding resources
Specifically, what holds you back from the things you secretly desire?
Where can you find information and other help that would move you through and beyond these impediments? What work will you need to do on the inside?
You may need to address the aftermath of difficult experiences in your life that have shaped your concept of self. Are you willing?
How might you rethink your concept of failure for the modern world and your own endeavors? Is there good that can come out of failure? Seek out autobiographical information about people you admire and find out how they failed before or after they succeeded, and how that changed them. How do others handle failures in ways that become constructive?
How do you personally define failure? Is a mistake failure? Or is failure only a word for something whose value we have not yet been able to see?
Be willing to ask yourself again every day what you need and stay flexible as new answers arise.
Failure can remain one of our greatest fears, or it can become a natural feature of life on Earth that may never be pleasant, but can become a powerful force for our learning and progress, as well as that of others with whom we communicate our experiences. Unfortunately, in order to see it this way, we will need to go up against a massive amount of programming and the constant opinions of others. It can be done, though, and it has the potential to yield untold dividends in freeing you from harmful and unnecessary limitations.
Finding Your Way Home
“Passion is one great force that unleashes creativity, because if you’re passionate about something, then you’re more willing to take risks.”
I’ve been thinking this week about the concept of failure for a number of reasons, for example:
We live in a densely populated world, which makes it harder for everyone to feel that who they are and what they do matters
We are taught that our value lies in what we do and accomplish
We are taught that if we are seen to fail, that means something very bad about our inherent value and our future possibilities
A vast number of people end up immobilized by shame, disappointment, and dread about failing again
Therefore, there is an inestimable amount of human capacity, even genius, that goes to waste every day on this planet that is so badly in need of solutions to ongoing problems
I’ll be writing more about failure in the coming weeks, but this week I found a video that I thought would be worth sharing. It focuses on the importance of building your life around what you are most passionate about, because this is a reliable antidote to confusion about whether we are better than or less good than we “should” be. There are several great things about this video, I think, one of which is the acknowledgement that it can be just as frightening to succeed as it is to fail. I hope you’ll find it interesting, and a good starting point for thinking about your concepts of failure and how they serve you.
A Happy Give and Take
“Each day offers us the gift of being a special occasion if we can simply learn that as well as giving, it is blessed to receive with grace and a grateful heart.”
Last week I sent you a video on creating a culture of helpfulness. This week, I wanted to write a few words about how to strike a balance between giving and taking. As with many dualities, most people tend to naturally gravitate to one side of the giving/receiving spectrum more than the other. That’s normal and totally fine—we all have our own personalities and mixes of talents and challenges. Some of us find ourselves wanting to give to others all the time, and others of us tend to be more focused on our own goals and finding the help we need to bring them into being. Finding what is, for you, a good balance between the two is an important component in maintaining your relationships, which are a big part of maintaining your overall happiness.
Human beings are inherently social, and have evolved to be part of complex social systems. Throughout most of human history, people who were not willing to be part of a circle of giving and receiving were placing themselves in the dangerous position of not pulling their weight, and becoming superfluous. Someone who was not fully integrated into a tribe or village ran the risk of having to fend for themselves. In a harsh world that was difficult to survive, that was not an enviable position.
Times may be different, but most of us are more fulfilled when we have a strong social support systems made up of some close friends and family members who we can rely on, and to whose lives we can also contribute in meaningful ways. With this in mind, here are a few things to consider as you strive for your appropriate balance:
Do you tend to be very driven and focused on your projects and goals? If so, you may need to remind yourself to reach out to others, ask what’s going on with them, and remember that giving to others feels great
Do you tend to give, give, give, but never take much time for yourself? You may need to encourage yourself to carve out some time for things that help you to rest, renew, be inspired, and laugh
What skills do you have that others tend to remark on and appreciate? Chances are that these are skills you like to use, so when you’re ready to give, maybe those are the ones to offer. If not, you might want to start reminding those in your social circle about the skills you do most like to share
Are you good at receiving gracefully? Or do you tend to deflect? If you’re not comfortable receiving, you are denying others the satisfaction of contributing to your life as a way of expressing love and appreciation. Remember that you’re part of a circle, and allowing them to give to you is as much an act of love sometimes as giving is
If you’re not good at receiving, you might want to think about why, and then do some Tapping on what you discover
The same goes for giving if you don’t tend to enjoy it much. The reasons why may be worth some attention, as you’re leaving your own joy and satisfaction in giving on the table along with the benefits you could be offering to the world by sharing your talents
Some people are taught that asking for help is weak. This is pretty unfortunate, since it denies you the ability to receive the help that may be all around you, and it denies others the opportunity to help create progress
On the other hand, some are taught that it’s selfish to ask for anything. Also and unfortunate and unnatural idea!
Where do you fall on this spectrum? I hope this has gotten you thinking about the ways in which you could experience more satisfaction by finding the right balance of giving and receiving for where you are in your life right now. As we head toward the holiday season, it’s a good time to rethink how you’re operating in this area and make a few new decisions if you find that you’ve been out of balance.
Hierarchy or Helpfulness?
“Though force can protect in emergency, only justice, fairness, consideration and cooperation can finally lead men to the dawn of eternal peace.”
I bet you’ve noticed that it can be hard to find people in today’s world who seem interested in being helpful. This is, in some ways, remarkable in the context of human history, because until not that long ago, anyone who couldn’t cooperate couldn’t survive. The good of one’s tribe or village had to be a consideration in decision making, because it was extremely difficult to navigate the world alone. In the last several hundred years, advances in technology that were previously unthinkable have changed our living conditions beyond recognition. Those of us in countries with more access to such advances now can have a great deal more ease and independence in our lives, which has given rise to greater expressions of individuality. The prevailing philosophy has shifted to include what has amounted to an obsession with individual achievement.
Now, freeing people to use their creativity and produce the products of their unique visions has produced a lot of brilliant work, and there’s nothing wrong with that. On the other hand, obsession with doing everything individually has, it seems to me, produced a lot of loneliness, anxiety, and limitation for a lot of people too. Not everyone is wired to be a James Bond-style army of one. Humans evolved as social animals, and for most of us, it’s very difficult to feel as much alone as many people now do.
This week I want to share a video about cooperation that I watched this week, because I think it’s interesting and applicable to a lot of situations. It’s targeted to people in the business world, so if your interests don’t run along those lines, just hang in there until about four minutes in, when I think the importance to any group of people kicks in. The thesis is about how a commitment to helpfulness in yourself and those around you can change your ability to get more done, and more quickly. When we stop acting like only the obvious leader of any group has notable value to offer, we become more willing to both be helpful, and leverage the helpfulness of others, which is enormously powerful.
How can you augment the presence of this circle of helpfulness in your life? Think about that this week, and see what you notice about where you could use more of this, and how you might begin to create it. I’ll be writing more on this topic next week!
The Way, Way Back
“We will be more successful in all our endeavors if we can let go of the habit of running all the time, and take little pauses to relax and re-center ourselves. And we’ll also have a lot more joy in living.”
Last week we looked at how much we tend to avoid how we actually feel at any point in time, how this tends to create a life of stress and panic, and what we can start doing to turn that around. It’s true that learning to notice the signals from our bodies and emotions, and building nuanced language skills to describe them specifically, are building blocks in creating a happier, more peaceful experience. And these skills will serve us well for a lifetime in dealing with what’s happening in our internal worlds. This week, I want to add a dimension to the discussion that makes things more complicated, but also increases our chances of success in getting to that happier place.
Being able to tune into how you feel and work with it is tremendously helpful in empowering you to live a better day-to-day experience. On the other hand, Gary Craig, the founder of EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques), used to say, “The problem is never the problem.” In other words, the reason we react the way we do to current events in our lives usually goes back much farther than the event we’re dealing with now, usually to old patterns and traumas, sometimes from the very distant past. Being able to do something about those, then, is like finding the map to where all the treasure is buried!
Lucky for us, Tapping has been shown through both extensive use and scientific studies to be effective in dealing with old traumas as well as beliefs that result from patterns of experience. These are two areas in which it is generally most difficult for people to create lasting change. Before I mention some ideas on how to work at this deeper level, please note that big traumas are not generally something you should tackle on your own. Though Tapping can be used as a self-help tool in many cases, if something feels too big or scary for you to confront on your own, then don’t! Get help, and you’ll get faster, more comfortable results, feel supported, and deepen your skills with Tapping as you go.
If you find that you’re Tapping on something that isn’t reducing past a certain point, or that you seem to be working on very similar things over and over, chances are that you need to look to previous events for the foundation of your current problem. Here are some approaches that may help:
When you’re clear on your current issue, and you’ve gotten specific about the associated emotions you’re experiencing and how your body feels in response to those, ask yourself one of these questions:
What does this remind me of?
Who does this remind me of?
When have I felt this specific mix of emotions and sensations before? (If it’s all very familiar, when was the first time you can remember feeling like this, or the worst time?)
What does this seem like a metaphor for (as in, if your neck hurts, what in your life is a pain in the neck?)
In asking these questions, you may find more layers of your issue becoming clear to you. If you do realize new connections, your next step will be to Tap on the original event/cause and all the little pieces of your memory that bother you. These might be sounds, images, smells, words that were said, decisions you made about life as a result, or beliefs you took away from the event, as well as many other aspects. Try working on each aspect of what comes up for you one at a time until how you feel about it plummets in intensity, and when it doesn’t bother you much anymore, move on to the next. By targeting the root causes of your current issues this way with patience and attention to detail, you have a much better chance of feeling better about where you are in the present.
As you go about this kind of work, remember that we all have many, many distressing memories of varying intensity left over from past experiences, so you’re not going to clean them all up in a day! Even if what you’re working on feels thoroughly manageable, don’t go overboard and push yourself to take on too much all at once. We all have at least hundreds of unpleasant recollections that would probably benefit from Tapping. With the time you have, work with whatever seems most appropriate in the moment, celebrate whatever gains you’ve made in how you feel about the past, including any helpful realizations you’ve had, and come back to the rest at a later date. Any progress you can get to is valuable. If you get a sense that you’ve done enough for the day, or that today is not the right time to work on something specific, honor that intuition and make a note to come back to it later. It’s also helpful to keep notes on what you’ve worked on, since it’s easy to forget, and having a record is a way to be able to look back and appreciate yourself for all the good work you’ve done.
The more you address older patterns and root causes of why you feel and react the way you do, the more you’ll find that you can maintain a sense of calm as you go through your life, which will always include daily ups and downs. It’s hard to communicate just how much of a difference doing this kind of work can make over time, but if you give it a try, you’ll quickly start to see what I mean. Having the courage to get real about how you really feel and do something about it can be a challenge at first, but you will also find that as you practice, it becomes a tremendous relief to know that you have the opportunity to bring improvement to your emotional world, and to feel that happening every time you spend a few minutes Tapping.