So Much Happier Blog
The Amplifying Power of Cooperation
“Competition has been shown to be useful up to a certain point and no further, but cooperation, which is the thing we must strive for today, begins where competition leaves off.”
Photo by Shane Rounce
Interestingly, though so many of us have been raised with the idea that nature is set up to reward “Survival of the Fittest,” and that this means a life of high-octane individualistic competition for all beings, this may not be the most observable truth. I just read an article postulating that even Darwin, credited as the author of this concept, didn’t mean it the way it has been passed down. While I’m not an expert here and have not read Darwin’s works directly, I wouldn’t be surprised if his observations had been oversimplified. The world around us is full of examples of ingenious interconnectedness and cooperation. Until very recently in human history, people lived in highly interdependent, necessarily cooperative groups/tribes because without modern technology, the tasks required for sustainable survival were well beyond the abilities of most single humans.
In modern times, we have been increasingly enabled to exist with less directly obvious interaction with others, so daily human interactions have dwindled. As a result, in the last century, there has been a remarkable increase in the symptoms of loneliness and a decrease in feelings of purpose and daily relevance. Many people feel less able to turn to reliable partners for support in times of difficulty. A lot fewer of us feel like we’re a part of a thriving, socially connected community. And now, we’re confronting a pandemic that requires yet more isolation, exacerbating a growing sense of loneliness for so many.
This is new territory, and we are evolving new ways to stay connected, like the Internet. Being able to connect to anyone with Internet service around the world expands the ways in which we can become interconnected to other people in meaningful ways across distance. However, it does not replace the depth of real-world, multi-dimensional relationships that many of us are lacking. The constant availability of vast amounts of information and opportunity of certain kinds may seem as though it should be enough to fulfill us, but somehow it’s just not. It often only adds to our feelings of stress and overwhelm rather than decreasing them as healthy relationships can do.
Healthy, balanced, cooperative relationships can assist us in creating better solutions to problems by allowing us access to a wider array of talents and ideas. They can broaden our sense of security, because we know that the people on the other end will be there when we’re truly in need, just as we will pitch in when they need something important. Healthy relationships assure us that others know, approve of, and care for us through the ups and downs; they help to give us a sense of daily purpose as we participate in supporting a network of people we like, and who are working toward goals we can approve of. Human beings are evolutionary, meaning that we have a natural drive toward learning, growth, and achievement, but we are also built to be social. If we are not tending to our social needs, we can feel just as empty as when there is no obvious path forward to the creation of better things for ourselves and those around us.
In this time of such great challenge to our social needs, it’s vital that we devote some focus and ingenuity to how we will tend to our social needs and those of the people we want to stay connected to. Part of self-care is caring for our relationships, and making sure that those we love know we’re available to them in whatever ways we can be. Relationships take time and effort to build and deepen, and they take more time and effort to maintain. If we neglect them, over time, their strength may falter and leave us feeling less grounded, less supported, less well. Many of us have been struggling to adjust to a host of new routines, pressures, and problems lately, and it’s hard to keep up with everything at once, but making sure we don’t drop out of our relationships is incredibly important.
If you’ve let this go by the wayside in the face of overwhelm, make sure you’re taking the time this week to reach out to someone whose presence in your life you cherish. It doesn’t have to take a lot of time, but you may find that you get great satisfaction out of even a short visit if you’re putting aside distractions and really showing up fully for it. Think about the ways in which you could cooperate to get more of what you want and need rather than trying to go it alone, and take satisfaction in the cooperation you’re already leveraging. Let yourself celebrate and feel good about what’s good in your life, what is supportive and going right even when so much is challenging. Healthy relationships are one of the best, most valuable things we can create, and they should be appreciated and nurtured.
What Was That Again?
“Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.”
One of the areas of greatest disconnect in relationships is around the concept of listening. Most people think they’re great at listening, and many people overestimate their expertise in this area! Being an effective active listener takes work. It takes dedication, focus, determination to avoid distractions, emotional management, generosity, and willingness to stretch your own boundaries in the cause of better understanding a fellow human being. It’s easy and quite common to go off on mental tangents while others are speaking, including starting to plan your own response before the other person has expressed their thoughts. It can be hard to be patient enough to endure, remaining present, without interrupting, especially when the speaker is not great at organizing their thoughts before speaking, but patience is required if you really want to build understanding.
One of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever heard regarding effective listening is to take notes, which makes it a lot harder to split your focus by indulging in your own flights of fancy at the same time or jump to conclusions. Taking notes helps to slow down a mind that tends toward hyperdrive. When you’ve fully heard the speaker out, that’s a better time to process what has been said and compose your own contribution for best relevance. And the best practice for active listening is to go back over the speaker’s points, repeating what you think you heard, and asking questions to make sure you’ve understood. Doing this ensures better comprehension, which assures your speaker that you are serious about receiving their communication—and it helps them to feel heard, which pretty much everyone loves.
Why bother? Well, the best relationships, whether with family, friends, colleagues, or new acquaintances, require respectful curiosity and the willingness to compromise. You can’t gather information, get to know someone more deeply, walk in someone else’s shoes for empathy, or keep up with others’ evolution over time without being proficient at listening. If your listening skills are sub-par, your relationships will remain shallow and confusing. In short, no listening, no meaningful relationships.
With this in mind, I thought I’d share an infographic on communication that I thought you might find interesting. It is intended for consumption in the business world, but the facts and figures apply broadly. As you read it, take note: Where do think you really fall the various scales that measure these skills? Might there be room for improvement? Which of these might you practice this week to start improving your relationships further?
Acupressure Points that May Help with Anxiousness
“Reality is the leading cause of stress among those in touch with it.”
This week I came across an article on some acupressure points that can be helpful for anxiety, and I wanted to share it with you. As you well know by now, my absolute favorite method for emotional management is Tapping, but anything accessible that can help us all dial down stress right now is crucial. If you want to try what this article suggests, you can apply pressure at a level that feels good to you, or you could tap on these if you prefer, and see if you get extra relief. Sometimes, you’ll find that a particular point feels amazing and really seems to get you extra-great results. At other times, you might want to spend a minute or two on each and see how that goes. Just be sure to heed the warnings about not using some of these if you’re pregnant. I also want to mention that the one on the back of the hand near the thumb has been known to induce nausea in my experience, so you might want to tread lightly with that one as well.
Here’s the link to the article. Note that natural health methodologies tend to be poorly funded because they don’t have huge, powerful industries behind them like drugs do, but Tapping can now claim a growing number of well-constructed studies showing that it works across a range of issues. Acupressure is derived from the same knowledge base, Traditional Chinese Medicine, some of the principles of which are echoed in a number of other traditional health systems established long before the Western version of scientific inquiry was born. When treated with respect and common sense, and pursued with appropriate education or consultation with experts, many of these natural approaches can be gentle and helpful.
As always, I wish you and yours health and peace, and the ability to keep working to make the world a better place even through the most challenging of times.
Navigating Assaults on Your Spirit
“You may write me down in history with your bitter, twisted lines. You may trod me in the very dirt, but still, like dust, I’ll rise.”
Sadly, one of the characteristics of the human condition is suffering. Much as we may work to avoid it and maximize our happiness (and I will never argue against doing this in ethical ways that don’t harm others, as it often yields great rewards to us and the world around us), we can’t escape our share of difficulty in this life. And some people accumulate far more than their share. Thinking, feeling human beings partake not just in their own pain, but in the pain of others, which can be just as difficult. And in this day and age, when so much bad news in in our faces all the time, the visible levels of human suffering can be overwhelming on a daily basis. When there are spikes in sad and senseless world events, which has happened numerous times this year alone, it can be hard to continue functioning at all.
Despair and powerlessness are at the very the bottom curve of human emotions. When we’ve fallen this far, coming back to equanimity is a process. It doesn’t have to take a long time chronologically, but it does take work. What drives us into these states is unique and complex, and the severity of our fall is determined by the timing of many factors and how they interrelate. I think we’ve all had the experience of multiple misfortunes coming in rapid succession at times, and in these cases, it’s far harder to remain emotionally and spiritually buoyant if you’re not an enlightened master, or at least someone who has trained for the most challenging and soul-sucking times. In our darkest hours, our task may be to just hang on as best we can so that we can heal and renew when some light returns.
Let’s get right to it. Some ideas for supporting yourself in your worst of times:
Rest. I personally find sleep to be a huge help when I’m emotionally overwhelmed and drained. It’s never the whole story, but it does offer a certain magic. Sometimes the healthiest thing to do is give your system a reset, and this is a good one if you can leverage it.
Do your best to keep drinking water and eating some nutritious food every day. If you can’t be bothered, this is something you may be able to ask for help on from a family member when you’re at your wit’s end.
Indulge in “distraction techniques.” These can include any number of activities, like watching a movie that completely gets your mind off what’s weighing on you, playing a game, playing with a pet or child, taking a bath and reading a novel, or otherwise directing your attention off of the problem. This can seem frivolous when everything seems wrong, but you’re no good to anyone when you’re having trouble summoning the will to do anything at all.
On the other hand, you might find it more helpful (especially when you’ve regained enough energy to feel angry or frustrated) to express your feelings by joining with others who understand what you’re upset about to vent, or consuming art that describes your experience and your feelings, creating art, journaling, going to cognitive therapy, or Tapping. In some cities there are now “rage rooms” where you can pay a fee to let loose and break and destroy things, which I understand can be pretty satisfying! Finding a support group around a long-term struggle you share with others can also be incredibly helpful.
This can also be a great time to decide where you will invest energy in the future to help others or support a great cause that is aligned with your struggle, or with skills you enjoy sharing. Committing to an effort to make the world a better place and improve someone else’s life can give a lot of meaning to yours.
Remind yourself what your highest values are, the things that make life worth living, even if it all seems questionable at the moment. When you learn to do this often, it can be something that saves you from the deepest plunges even when your greatest challenges emerge.
There’s a lot of great work you can do when things are looking a bit better that will help you deal with the next time you hit a deep trough, but it takes more energy to do these than you probably have when you’re in the depths. Setting up a support system, finding like-minded buddies and groups (virtual and in real life), as well as practitioners who can help if you’re really in need, spiritual gathering places where you feel at home, and cultivating comforting rituals and other supportive practices like meditation, physical exercise, healthy emotional and mental attentiveness and venting, or spending time with friends who uplift you.
There will be times when your life will feel terrible and hopeless. I wish that wasn’t true, but I don’t think it’s possible to escape this reality if you live a human life. Without acting out or taking out your emotions on your friends, it is important to take time to express your emotions and thoughts, and also, at times, to studiously ignore them so you can partake of various kinds of healing. Whatever your year has been like so far, I hope that you can find support from a variety of loving sources when you need it. I hope you can become stronger and more compassionate despite, or even as a result of, challenge. I hope the time you spend in your worst pain is dwarfed by the time you spend experiencing solidarity and meaning. When you are on solid footing, I hope you will take your turn supporting those who are not with whatever you are best at giving. I hope the human race finds ways to become better and more humane so that all people can experience better lives.
Where to Start?
“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.”
In last week’s blog, I wrote about how during these strange times, you may be able to find space for some activities that will support your renewal even during all the uncertainty. You may be the only thing you have the power to change right now, but changing yourself can be very powerful—it can initiate change that ripples out and affects everything and everyone around you. If you’d like to do this, you may be wondering how best to figure out what to work on. Most of us have lots of emotions, thoughts, and beliefs left over from previous life events that could be benefitted by Tapping, so how do you know what you should work on today? As long as you don’t choose anything that seems too big or scary, there’s really no wrong answer, but here are a few ways you can land on something that will feel fulfilling to make some progress on right away:
Ask yourself what has been bothering you lately. If we give ourselves a moment, most of us can pretty easily rattle off the things we’re worried, scared, annoyed, angry, or frustrated about at any given time. This does fluctuate, sometimes based on identifiable triggers, and sometimes in ways that are more unconscious and mysterious. Your answer today may be quite different than it was last week. If it’s one big thing, you can Tap on that. If it’s a lot of things, you might want to try the Tap and Rant technique, in which you just Tap through all the points and just vent all of it and how you feel about it.
If you’re focusing on one thing, you can just notice the emotion that bothers you and how it affects your body as you Tap, being as specific as you can about all the sensations you feel. As you Tap, the intensity should come down. You may need to be patient depending on how intense it is, and do multiple rounds of Tapping to get results.
You can also work through an event using the Tell the Story technique, in which you narrate the story of something unpleasant that happened, starting from a neutral place before anything really bothered you, and as soon as you feel any emotion or physical discomfort whatsoever, you pause telling the story and Tap. If you can reduce those feelings to a low number (two or lower on a zero-to-ten scale), then you can resume telling the story and pause to Tap whenever you start to feel anything again at a later point in the story. Once you can tell the story start to finish without feeling much of anything, you’re done with that event!
You can simply scan your body for any discomfort. If you find anything that stands out, you can try Tapping as you voice the sensations. Often what happens as you do this is that the sensation will move and change. After each Tapping round, you can reassess and notice what you feel now. This is called the “Chasing the Pain” technique, and it’s considered one of the Gentle Techniques in EFT. You don’t have to know why you’re feeling the sensation, you just Tap and describe it and how it transforms until hopefully you no longer feel discomfort. How this can be pretty surprising and defy all logic, but often it really helps.
You can also use the Personal Peace Procedure, in which you make notes on a whole bunch of things that bother you, and just pick one each time you Tap to work on. Over time, you can work through them one by one, and you’ll find that even a few minutes a day helps you erase your emotional reactiveness to them and cross things off your list. Eventually you should notice that you feel better and have more energy. Some people like to brainstorm a long list, but that can be overwhelming. You might prefer to just make a short list, and then brainstorm a new one when you finish with those initial items. Trust me, there will always be more to work on!
Remember that as you go, it’s important to be honest about what you feel and not try to force it to change, particularly when it’s at the high end of the intensity scale. If you try to immediately talk yourself out of your feelings as you Tap so you can avoid them, you won’t get good results. It’s necessary to just admit to what’s true and let the Tapping organically change how you feel. Most of the time, it will start to do that naturally within a few rounds.
You may sometimes get stuck at a plateau with something you’re working on. If the intensity came down at all, feel free to call this a win and give yourself a break. You can always come back to it later for another attempt, and sometimes your system needs time to adjust and reveal all the benefits you created.
You may also find that if you’ve worked on something multiple times and you’re not getting anywhere, it’s time for some help. Some things are just tricky to work on, and getting an outside perspective from a practitioner can help you solve the mystery of what’s going on with the right questions and the use of some more advanced techniques.
I hope this helps you venture into more frequent Tapping that will help you survive and thrive in challenging times. What’s better than something you can do anytime, for free, that feels good and supports your short- and long-term balance? Not much in my book!
Melting that Stress Away
This week I want to share an article about a recent study on the efficacy of EFT on stress relief. This study replicates a previous one that showed a significant decrease in cortisol (one of the main stress hormones) production, with an even better average result. This confirms what anyone who has actually learned and used Tapping knows, that it quickly helps to relieve stress and calm the body and mind. On the right side of the above linked page, you can access other studies about EFT’s efficacy as well. You may not want to wile away your day perusing these articles for fun, but if you need a reminder about why it’s highly practical to spend some time becoming comfortable with Tapping and weaving it into your daily routine, perhaps these articles will provide that for you. It’s my hope that you will use this incredible simple, free, supportive range of tools for your benefit always, but particularly at times of high stress and uncertainty, like the ones we’re living through right now.
Need reminder about how to do it? Head over to this page. It only takes a few minutes per day to start practicing and gaining confidence that you can improve your moods and functioning across the board with these techniques. A lot of people have more time right now, so you may have a perfect opportunity to spend a little time each day using Tapping to decrease your stress and clear your slate for a better day, no matter what you have going on. I would never want to be without the ability Tapping gives me to completely change how I feel about my current challenges in just minutes, and I hope it brings you the same kind of solace.
A Simple Way Toward All the Good Stuff
“If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.”
If you’re reading this, it’s at least partly because you like finding ways to make your life better, happier, and more inspiring through methods that only require a reasonable, doable amount of effort. Am I right? In this spirit, this week, I wanted to pass on a link to an article about something that is simple, yet so powerful in helping you to feel better about your life almost instantly.
There’s a lot more research happening these days on the powers of our behavior, including the internal behaviors of our thoughts and emotions. In this article, we get a short summary on some of the scientific findings about the power of making compassion an intentional part of our lives. Sometimes a simple outlook shift can change everything for the better, and prioritizing compassion is one of the most lauded shifts we can make. Compassion is referred to throughout human history across time, place, and culture as one of the most important components of a life well lived. If you want to increase your satisfaction, your relationships, your overall happiness, not to mention your contribution to making the world a better place, this is a shortcut that you can implement anytime for free just by how you think, and it opens the door to the creation of supportive action and habits.
A few thoughts from me:
Practicing compassion requires us to become aware of and care about another’s experience. This takes us out of ourselves and gives us a break from worrying about our own issues.
Humans are naturally social, and wired to help others. Problems arise when we over-give, so keeping an eye on balance is important, but when we’re in balance, sharing and giving feel great.
When we give in a way that answers what another truly needs, everyone’s happiness is amplified. Keying into what someone else needs may require putting aside our own opinions and preferences. If this is hard for you, Tapping can help you find your calm, centered place. From there, you will be more easily able to hear clearly and let the other person express themselves without jumping in with your own preconceptions. As mentioned above, prioritizing someone else’s needs may be a challenge, but it can also be a relief.
Listening is highly educational. You just might find that when you put a bit more attention on listening, you’ll learn a whole lot about how others think and experience the world, not to mention other random topics they’re concerned about, which may be interesting as well.
True leadership starts with listening, and if you both listen and act on what you hear with compassion (without losing yourself, because you’re an essential part of any interaction), you’ll be able to build a better life for yourself and begin to lead others to better things as well. How can you listen compassionately to someone else this 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..
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.
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.