So Much Happier Blog
Elevating the Quality of Your Leisure Time
“The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.”
Photo by Orlova Maria
To be honest, lately I’ve been focused on several activities that have required discipline, and I’ve been feeling less creative personally, and times like this are not my favorite. As a way to add compensatory interest and inspiration during this time, I’ve found myself thinking about bringing some highly concentrated creative beauty into my life courtesy of some wonderful artists whose works I’ve admired over time, or who have been more recently highly recommended.
I have to say that I have thoroughly enjoyed diving into these works of stunning beauty when the day is done and it’s time to stop thinking and acting. I’ve been reminded how much different it is to have contact with something sublime and masterful rather than just mildly interesting and easily accessible. Some works are merely light and fun (which of course is fine, and these have their place, particularly when we’re exhausted and need some mindless time). But some works are more satisfying to each of us, depending on our tastes. Finding and reveling in these can make a huge difference in how inspired we feel, and how much energy and enthusiasm we have at the ready to pursue our own lives on the other side. Don’t you find that when you take in an especially great book, movie, painting, song, etc., you think about it for weeks, months, sometimes years afterward and still feel the joy of the experience? Doesn’t that add to your life in ways that are hard to quantify?
Making a habit of this corresponds to the “Do Something Awe-Inspiring” section of this article on secrets to happiness that I thought I’d share. I actually found this after I’d been working on locating these compressed missives of joy for myself, and it was a good reminder about why this and other key strategies work to improve our moods. Feeling awe, inspiration, and connection to others is essential to creating great happiness. And we’re all living through times when we’re more challenged in these areas, and it’s hard to know when we’ll catch a collective break. That means we need to work harder right now to wring more satisfaction out of things that can sustain us through challenge.
In the week ahead, take just a few extra moments here and there to consider the kinds of creative works you have found most fulfilling. If you don’t have a library card, it’s usually not hard to get one, and that will open up a world of books and other media to your enjoyment. Maybe you have access to services that offer home entertainment that you can mine for experiences that fall within your favorite genres. Lots of museums are offering online tours and other content right now. There’s a lot of content online, some free of charge right now. What have been some of your most beloved works? Where can you find more of those? Friends with similar tastes can be a great source of ideas, so don’t forget to ask around for items you might not have found on your own. Maybe with just a little extra consideration you’ll find some new personal favorites as I have recently done—books you’ll read again and again because they really are that good. Movies you’ll replay in your mind and giggle about every time you think of that favorite scene. Music that will become part of your most passionate shower karaoke sessions. Visual art you might hang on your walls or just revisit when you can.
I wish you an inspiring week. Feel free to share any of your favorites you’d like to pass along in the Comments section!
Are You Your Mind?
“Negative emotions like loneliness, envy, and guilt have an important role to play in a happy life; they’re big, flashing signs that something needs to change.”
In working with clients, I often find that it’s difficult for them initially to connect with their emotions and their bodies. Our culture clings to the virtues of logic and mental activity, sometimes to the exclusion of all else. When we’re young, one of the primary ways we get attention is through succeeding in school at feats of memorization, math, and reading comprehension (or by failing spectacularly in these areas). As we get older, the pressures toward mental achievement grow, and overall success markers like money often flow to those who can conceal emotion and physical needs, and operate, seemingly, solely in the realm of the mental. This societal conditioning may cause us to conceal and deny body, heart, and spirit until they are so isolated that we ourselves believe them to be irrelevant to our happiness and fulfillment—nice if you have time to be self-indulgent, but kind of a waste of time.
Getting clients to tune back into these aspects of self is a process. Noticing and acknowledging the validity of emotions and what they are telling us; awareness of how these emotions affect our physical bodies in the short and long term; the ability to see the ways in which our thoughts and actions contribute to and can solve emotional and physical discomfort; these are learned skills. They can be learned in a surprisingly short time frame, though, if it becomes clear that this is a highly practical and enjoyable pursuit, worthy of time and effort invested. My clients are often delighted at what happens when they allow some initial awkwardness with the process of getting to know their emotions and follow the unfolding of revelations that ensue. When you start to experience firsthand the fruits of honoring your emotions and desires, there’s a rush of exhilaration, empowerment, and optimism that often arises. When you see that you have the ability to harness the wisdom of your neglected parts, a joyful and holistic confidence sprouts. When you know that you can actually DO something about how you feel about your life and your ability to craft your future, new ideas about your potential, and how to solve your most knotty problems, start to bubble up to the surface.
When you first try to get specific about what’s troubling you in any given area, you may run up against all kinds of resistance. You might feel overwhelmed, like if you start to open that Pandora’s Box you’ll become completely overtaken by the volume of what’s been hiding there. You might be convinced that this whole thing is dumb and definitely won’t help you. You might feel uncomfortable because trying something new is always a bit of a challenge. Or you might just find the slippery, ethereal realm of emotion to be confusing because things refuse to stand still as you observe. I encourage you to be patient and keep trying little bits at a time. At some point you notice that you’re starting to recognize pieces of the landscape, and it doesn’t feel so foreign anymore. As you relax and sink into following a process, whether it’s Tapping or something else, you make progress. You understand yourself and others in new ways. You’re able to clear out old stuff from the past that’s been cluttering up your inner world.
The benefits of welcoming your emotions, heart, and spirit back into the room are hard to overstate. Living as a well-integrated human makes so much more of your innate capacity available to you. It helps relieve stress by broadening your perspective and dialing up your creativity. It helps you to admit when the mysterious, non-linear parts of you know something your mind doesn’t, like whether a particular course of action is right for you. It helps to remind you of what gives your life a sense of purpose, and the ways in which just being alive is enjoyable. When you’re living your life trying to do everything with your mind, it’s like trying to navigate with a compass that only ever points north. So take a look around and notice all the directions. Even if you don’t know what to do with them yet, just starting to take them in opens up a whole new world; once you’ve explored it, it will be less exotic and unreachable, and more productive of joyous dimension in your life experience.
Consumption vs. Creation
“I’m always thinking about creating. My future starts when I wake up every morning... Every day I find something creative to do with my life.”
Here's something I've found helpful in my work in supporting productivity: Understanding the difference between consumption mode and creation mode. If you're reading this, the world you were born into has encouraged you to default to consumption mode through your education (memorize what we give you and repeat), the ubiquity of advertising (trust us, you need to buy this), politics (here's the party line), organized religion (this is what you should believe and do), family (here's who you are), and on and on. There's great reward for accepting and conforming to what is handed to us, and that's not necessarily a bad thing! Humans are social animals, so being part of groups is essential to our health and well being. Societal structures help us to create and maintain the stability needed to foster decent standards of living and opportunities to pursue our own personal flavor of happiness, while still feeling like we're part of something larger than ourselves. But it's all too easy to become entranced by all the expectations we encounter, and caught up in endless contemplation of what's expected. Not to mention anxiety about whether we're measuring up, and what will happen if we don't.
If that's where we're living, we're not going to spend much time in creation mode. Creativity thrives outside the strictures of imposed expectations. It requires that you free your mind from established patterns and allow your own unique internal spark to lead the way to something fresh and new. For children, this is easy. For the first several years of life, they don't understand or care much about what anyone else thinks unless behaving a certain way leads to a catastrophic withdrawal of love by family members, but even then they're likely to try to get around the rules. As they get older, they will often realize that it's a lot safer and easier to conform to expectations, lose the imaginary friend, and at the very least perfect an extremely convincing impression of a compliant member of all applicable groups. The desire to be accepted and belong is very compelling during the teen years in particular; if we're not careful, we can get stuck in the patterns of fear-driven compliance, which tends to keep our lives small and confining.
If you want to have access to your creative engine, or work up to being a creative genius, priming the pump with inspiration is important, but it's also essential to turn off the barrage of information and expectation from outside. You must learn to think of yourself as a creator, prioritize making time and space for creative urges to bubble up, and be ready to take action to bring your creations into reality. How you share them with others is up to you, but you'll never get started if you don't find ways to carve out an oasis of self. You may find that this is hard to do because it's so easy to be pulled every which way by so many other things that seem important, especially when you have no guarantee of what you'll produce during this time. You may feel pressure to come out of it with concrete results, and frustration if you don't. It takes courage to stand for something you want that takes solitary effort, especially when it takes time to find one's stride—and it always does when starting something new. How can you know how music you can write in a given amount of time until you try? Obviously you can't! Especially if you've never written a song before in your life.
Even if the steps toward a goal seem very methodical and concrete, you will find that you need to bring your creativity to bear on how to accomplish each task, since you are a unique human being with many needs and desires to balance throughout your project. Sticking with the program requires focus and discipline, and the decision to put aside distractions to bring about the result you want.
No matter what you're working toward, you'll be more successful if you acknowledge that you are choosing to be in creation mode when it's time to work. Acknowledge yourself for having the strength of spirit to go out on a limb alone over the dark chasm of the unknown. Appreciate your desire and your ability to bring new ideas and constructs into being. Focus on bringing forth rather than bringing in. And make sure you still allow yourself some consumption time in order to relax, renew, and stimulate new thoughts and sensations that will feed into your work. You may have noticed that ideas tend to crop up at unexpected moments when you're relaxing and doing undemanding tasks like taking a walk or a shower. This time is important too, because your mind isn't engaged in anything demanding, but you're also not trying too hard either. The right mix of time spent in various states of mind will be something for you to experiment with as you pursue your most productive and satisfying life.
This distinction between consumption and creative mode has really helped me to remember what's important to me as I forego other interesting activities that might otherwise distract me from producing the stuff of my goals. I hope this concept helps you to find a balance between the two that suits your forward movement in the context of your unique life.
Painting with All Colors
“Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.”
Creativity is one of the most powerful qualities one can foster in the effort to build the life of one’s dreams. You’ve probably heard the sentiment that nothing in life ever goes according to plan, and I find that to be true the vast majority of the time. It makes sense that it would be when you think of the sheer variety of experiences that are possible on Earth, and the constant interplay of billions of individuals with a wide variety of backgounds and values. The ability to communicate in real time with nearly every corner of the globe has only sped up the pace of our lives and broadened the complexity of our interactions, concerns, and possibilities. Yet without the creativity to see opportunities in the new and surprising, it’s easy to become quickly overwhelmed. So how do we nurture healthy, resilient creativity that can keep us moving forward toward our goals?
This is a slippery subject, one on which many books have been written, because the answer will need to be highly personal to you. But just for fun, this week I will rashly sally forth and attempt to write some basic guidelines on how to make space for and encourage your creativity. Do keep in mind that, if you want to turn your creativity into the superpower that it can be, you will likely need to try various approaches over time to find what really works for you, refining and updating them to suit what you need at any given moment in your life. Ok, here goes!
· Cultivate a calm, open, curious, and playful state of mind. This is probably the biggest hurdle to opening up your creativity (and it can be quite a tall order if you’ve never exerted yourself in this way). Doing so requires that you gain the ability to calm your thoughts so that there’s room in your headspace for new ideas to arise. You’re probably familiar with the phenomenon of a useful idea popping into your mind while you’re in the shower or doing dishes or yard work; this can happen because you’re somewhat occupied, but have mental space for your mind to roam, and you’re not trying to make anything happen. Practicing a similar state so that you can bring it forward at will gives you far more opportunity for putting your creative talents to use. Meditation is excellent for helping you to practice slowing down your busy mind, and some kind of meditative practice can help you learn to stay out of the way of your creativity. You may need to look into and experiment with several styles until you find one you like, but doing so is incredibly worthwhile for all of the many benefits meditation confers.
· If you want your creativity to come out and play, you’ll need to make time for this to happen in which you don’t feel pressured. You might want to listen to music, or draw, go to a museum, or dance around the living room in order to prime the pump and mark the occasion with your intent. Some people like darkness and silence for thinking creatively. Some like to brainstorm or share a space with others who are also working on creative pursuits. If there’s something specific you’d like to produce, decide what that is and then set aside time to try different approaches and see what inspires and supports your purpose. It may help to think about things you enjoyed doing when you were a child. Even if nothing seems to be working at first, keep setting aside the time and putting yourself in enjoyable, relaxed situations, and eventually you are very likely to get somewhere. Everyone is creative. If you are awake and alive, your creativity is in there, so don’t give up on it.
· In a world in which the ideal is generally for everyone to be driven and achievement minded, it can take courage to insist on making space for creativity, and valuing this process appropriately. If you’re an artist who is driven to create, this may be easier, but if you don’t identify that way, remember that creativity is not just about painting a beautiful work of art, for example. It’s also about flexing the “muscles” necessary to live life artfully in each moment, building skills around coming up with useful solutions to everyday challenges with grace and enjoyment. Knowing that your creativity is going to be responsive when you need it helps to build your confidence, which then makes you more willing to try new things—and we all need to keep doing that in order to avoid becoming stale and old at any age.
· Choose to think of yourself as a creative person. If you have decided that you aren’t for any reason, your mind and experience will tend to uphold your belief. Decide that, even if you haven’t yet exhibited any remarkable creative talent, you still can. Just as you wouldn’t tell a child who has just used a crayon for the first time that they are clearly talent free and should never attempt to draw again, you should give yourself the benefit of the doubt and allow your talents to emerge over time. Just as with brainstorming, practice being non-judgmental about your attempts. Your creativity will emerge when you make it safe to do so. If you’re constantly criticizing yourself, it may stubbornly hide.
· Creativity proceeds from enjoyment. Look for beauty in the world and the people around you. Enjoy the fruits of others’ creative labors, as well as sound, light, color, flavors, and fragrances that surprise and delight you. There is so much wondrous art and natural gorgeousness out there for you to explore. Do you know anyone who hates pretty much everything about life who has created a glorious masterpiece of any sort? I sincerely doubt it. Be on the lookout for beautiful experiences, and you’ll find more to inspire, which will give you more to work with.
· If you have personal issues that get in the way of any of this, ask for help. There are many ways to deal with trauma and fears that might prevent you from allowing your creativity to blossom. The part of you where your creativity resides is a tender, childlike part that needs and deserves to feel safe and valued in order for it to function well. Doing what you need to do to support it can make everything in your life work better.
Time spent on creativity is sometimes seen as an impractical luxury, but I find that expanding access to one’s creativity leads to more opportunities in all areas of life. Even if you take small steps toward opening yours up, I think you’ll find that you enjoy life more and come up with better solutions to anything life throws at you. Even if you have no idea what you might like to produce, adding in even the exploration of good books, movies, visual art, music, or cuisine can enrich your experience of daily life and help energize the creative part of yourself, with excellent long-term effects.
The Enigmatic Turbo Boost
“You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.”
Last week we considered a systematic, structured approach to planning out strategies for change in your life. Using a template like that one can be extremely helpful to keep you on track. Doing so also helps to remind you that it’s normal for change to be a process that requires a continuing loop of thought, work, and experience—most of us don’t have a functioning magic wand to make change instant and effortless, unfortunately! However, there’s also another side to this coin…a more feminine-energy aspect of the change process as I see it, and that’s intent.
Just deciding that you’re going to do something and holding the intent as you go about the business of the structured approach opens you to unpredictable leaps of insight that might not favor you otherwise. Inventors and artists often say that the idea just appears, or the story tells itself. In order to benefit from this kind of serendipity, it’s important to pose a request to the unconscious parts of yourself (in which you could also include your connection to a higher power if that makes sense to you) to send you answers your conscious mind might not find. I call that request intent. It really does have a power that’s hard to describe because the experiences it creates are not structured or linear, but more like the capricious comings and goings of a bird in the night.
Here’s the process I recommend:
· Once you’ve gained some clarity using the more structured approach, define the problem you wish to solve as specifically as you can. Use positive language, as in, “I intend to come up with an idea/find information that will help me to become well easily and in an enjoyable way” rather than “I don’t want to be in pain.”
· Even if you have absolutely no idea how this could happen or doubt that it could, be open to finding a solution. Invoking an open state allows help to arrive in ways that can be surprising.
· Be willing to be a little stupid while you wait. In other words, refuse to worry about how inspiration might strike, and ignore anyone who tries to tell you that a solution is impossible. I personally know some people who have done “the impossible,” and there are plenty of people you can read about who have too. Sometimes finding what you need just takes some time.
· Know that the subconscious deals in the language of symbol. Some people find it useful to keep a pad of paper by the bed at night in case they have a dream that seems meaningful, or some interesting idea that might be helpful. You might think you’ll remember it in the morning, but often you won’t if you don’t write it down.
· Be on the lookout, in a relaxed way, for anything you come into contact with in daily life that might apply to your problem. Keeping your intent in mind can do wonders to help you notice things you otherwise wouldn’t—an overheard conversation, an advertisement, a passage from a book that sparks an insight you can use to move forward.
· Holding your intent in mind also helps you to focus on what you want to move toward rather than the thing you don’t want. For most people, this feels a lot better and helps in maintaining openness to possibility. That’s more productive than dogged pessimism that can result when you harp mentally on the problem. That tends to drain people’s energy and creativity in a hurry.
· When you think about reaching a solution, enjoy the vision of how that will be, how it will feel, and what it will enable you to do. This helps to make the end result seem more real and keep you excited about the prospect as you wait.
· It’s also a good idea to share your intent with others you can rely on to be supportive. Those others can then keep an eye out with you, and may become the source of new information and ideas you wouldn’t have come across yourself.
· Avoid sharing your intent with anyone who might not be supportive.
· Take moments throughout the day to be grateful for what is good in your life already, and for solutions you’ve already found that were a big help in reaching a goal or a milestone.
While you don’t have to become a single-minded, obsessed weirdo about this, I do recommend that you bring your intent back to mind several times per day. Otherwise it’s easy to become busy and forget all about it for days or weeks at a time, and then you’re losing all the benefits you might have enjoyed with a bit more focus. And don’t worry if all of this seems a little awkward at first. It may take you some time to become comfortable with the idea of focusing on an intent that might seem unlikely; your mind may tell you that there’s no point, but the mind is not in control of all things. Working with your intent is not a substitute for structure and strategic action, but it can be a real boost to a process you’ve begun to move your life forward. Try it out and see what happens. You just might find that interesting experiences are set in motion in ways you couldn’t have predicted. Structure and intent together form a synergistic whole that you might find to be a new adventure in the pursuit of your ideal.
Silence Is Golden
“Peace comes from within. Do not seek it without.”
Even if you’ve never meditated, you’ve probably heard that one of the benefits of many kinds of meditation practice is supposed to be a quieter mind. Since most cultures today place great value on the use of the mind, the benefits of a quiet mind can seem mysterious. Use it or lose it, right? Aren’t we supposed to be exercising our minds in order to stretch their capacities and keep them nimble? Well, just as our bodies need both weight-bearing exercise, cardio, stretching, AND rest in order to function at peak capacity, our minds need various kinds of use and rest in order to provide us with the capacities we want from them.
Modern life is so hectic, demanding, and distracting that we don’t generally get much time for silence and reflection. This leaves is with a mind that is mostly running at high speed all the time. With a mind so busily engaged, it’s harder to notice the patterns that are running on autopilot, keeping us stuck in ruts that we never seem to be able to break out of for reasons that elude us. When we put ourselves into a situation where nothing is required of us, and practice meditation with the aim of quieting the mind, we allow the mind to rest a bit; by the way, this in turn allows the body’s stress response to calm down, which is great for physical health—a bonus side effect! While it definitely takes practice to make progress in disengaging from normal patterns of thought, so that benefits may not be immediately felt, over time, it’s possible to build familiarity with new mind states. This familiarity makes it easier to take them with you, or recreate them when you’re experiencing something difficult, so that you can function more smoothly throughout your life. A hyper mind isn’t necessarily a resourceful mind, just as a chronically tense muscle isn’t always useful—it needs to be able to relax and stretch in order to do everything it’s meant to do.
When you’re meditating for the ability to quiet the mind, there are numerous benefits that I know I immediately experience, and you may as well, such as:
· As I head toward greater quiet, my mind will usually chime in a few times to reveal things I need to do or remember, which is legitimately helpful. I can make note of these and continue the process. Without giving myself a few minutes of quiet, I would not have remembered these, and opportunities would have been lost.
· As my mind slows down, I become more aware of my body, and anything about it that I need to address.
· I start to notice more about what is really going on with me, how I really feel about things that have been going on recently in my life. I begin to feel more like myself and less like someone just running around at the behest of every distracting thing I encounter every day.
· I begin to feel that there’s more time available to me than I would otherwise.
· I begin to feel calmer, more at peace, and more powerfully able to define what’s important and where I will choose to put my energy and focus.
· I feel more in touch with my intuition.
· My body feels more pleasantly calm and peaceful.
· I feel like my to do list falls away and I’m able to recognize the goodness of just being alive, which at this point is much more a feeling than a thought.
Once you’ve practiced an expanded state of mental quiet, there are many other meditation techniques to pursue depending on what you want, but being able to create that quiet space is a foundational skill without which only certain kinds of progress can be made. This state also becomes something you can remind yourself to revert to when you find yourself getting hyper for any reason. It can immediately help you to regain helpful perspective on the ways in which you may have been contributing to your own stress. Bringing a greater sense of calm to challenge allows you to stay more creative, less reactive, and more reasonable. You’re then more likely to be able to solve problems and work well with others, which makes you less likely to spend your time feeling stuck and confused.
In a seemingly unlikely way, spending time creating mental quiet leads to greater focus and energy, which can make it seem like you have more time rather than having lost it in the pursuit. Even if you don’t think you can spend more than a few minutes practicing, you can still benefit from the attempt to create a few minutes of internal quiet throughout your day here and there. I highly recommend making this a little game that you play with yourself. You may have other mental games you already play, like doing crossword puzzles. This is just another category of game that builds capacity your brain needs to function with excellence.
Who's Driving This Thing?
“The only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn and change.”
I’ve noticed in my work with clients that many people are much harder on themselves than they would be on anyone else, especially people they love and care about. Something for which one would easily forgive a friend becomes unforgiveable in oneself for reasons that are hard to fathom. Sometimes the client will even say that it seems irrational for him to feel so guilty about something relatively minor, and yet he does. What gives? And why is this such a common experience?
I think the answer is that we have learned this behavior, usually from people who had no idea what was being passed down, in two different ways. First, the conscious part of the equation: When we’re children, we hear from all the adults around us, as well as from friends and peers, about what constitutes being a “good” person. We may have trouble unifying everything we’re told into a cohesive theory about how to behave, but we do know that we’re supposed to try to be “good.” We doubtless remember times when we were accused of behaving badly and intentionally embarrassed by someone, whether publicly or privately. We may learn that life tends to go more smoothly when we behave in a pleasing way toward others; we then take on the job of policing our own behavior, taking on the voices of people we respected or feared and obeying them even in their absence. This is relatively easy to recognize if you think about it—by which I mean that it may take some work to notice when you’re trying to please someone who’s not there, but if you pay attention to how you make decisions, you’ll probably start to see some of these habits before too long.
And now for the second part that is not conscious. Figuring out how this piece is affecting you can be quite a bit trickier. In The Biology of Belief, Bruce Lipton writes about how recent scientific study has revealed that children under the age of six spend most of their time in different brain wave states than adults. Until the age of two, children exhibit mostly delta brain waves, which in adults are associated with sleep states, and from ages two to six they spend most of their time in theta brain wave activity, which in adults is associated with the kind of “suggestible, programmable” state that hypnotherapists lead people into in order to help them accomplish change. In other words, young children are generally not in a fully conscious state that adults would recognize. They do not have access to conscious decision-making and analytical abilities. Therefore, whatever a small child hears is downloaded into her subconscious directly. Did you get that? Young children have no filter; what they hear is recorded directly into their subconscious minds as truth. When you were young, you learned a great deal that you are not aware of now, and it’s still affecting you today unless you’ve taken concrete steps to update that information.
That explains a lot about why it can be so hard to change old habits and beliefs even if we want to. The reasons why we feel a certain way may well be rooted in events and verbal commands we can’t even remember! We have years’ worth of programming that we’ve never had the opportunity to examine. We may remember plenty from childhood, and still be unaware of some pivotal beliefs that were instilled in us very early. The people who taught them to you have changed or may not be alive anymore, but the messages have not. Part of your mind is being run by ghosts.
We all know that parenting is a tough, demanding, and often exhausting job. Parents do what they can to keep us safe and healthy and stay sane at the same time. One of the methods most use is the application of shame to keep us in line—a sharp tone of voice telling us to stop it and a withering look, questions about what we were thinking when we did something that seemed really dumb or dangerous from an adult perspective, maybe a slap upside the head to let us know just how unacceptable our choice was. (Some of this is non-verbal, or even learned from things we just overheard rather than experiencing them personally.) If they can make us feel bad about certain choices, it’s less likely that we’ll make them again. While this can be effective, its continued use can also leave us with a general feeling of not being good enough/as good as others, or the feeling that we need to talk to ourselves harshly in order to avoid bad decisions and consequences. Once it’s installed, this habit of self-talk can run for decades or a lifetime without your awareness of what it’s really about, or that there are other alternatives. The only thing that really makes this second half of the equation different from the first is that it occurs before we can be fully aware of what’s happening, and we may not be able to recall it later.
Some of this may not seem very empowering. After all, what can we do about things we don’t even remember in the first place? In fact, there are ways to clean up even the mysterious things that may be holding you back. Making positive change happen in your life often requires the use of tools that can open a dialogue between your conscious and your unconscious mind. My favorite of these is EFT/Tapping because it’s highly effective, and it’s a self-help tool that almost anyone can learn and use safely. Once you’ve spent some time getting the hang of it, it’s astonishing what you can learn about yourself and what might be keeping you stuck in a particular area of your life. It takes practice to become confident in this dialogue, but it’s well worth the effort if you’re someone who would like to feel better physically, emotionally, or spiritually, or to work toward more positive mental habits. Despite what we may have been taught, it is possible to learn to treat yourself more kindly, and think and problem-solve more constructively. Quieting habitual negativity can free up a lot of energy for better physical health and greater creativity. And now that you know more about how children function, you might want to spend some time thinking about how you talk to the little ones in your life. What you say to them will shape their habits more directly than you might think. Choose your messages carefully to support their long-term health and happiness just as you learn to be more careful with how you speak to yourself.
Ever a New Summit
“Happiness lies in the joy of achievement and the thrill of creative effort.”
Another among the esteem needs that Maslowe wrote about is a sense of achievement. This is an important factor in our conviction of self-worth, both because human beings are built with a natural drive toward creativity they long to satisfy, and because most cultures revere those who have achieved unique and groundbreaking results. It’s worth periodically looking at how you’re feeling about what you’ve achieved in the course of your life so that you can address your innate desire for a sense of achievement; doing this helps to show the way toward keeping your self-esteem at healthy levels.
So what is achievement? Dictionary.com defines it as, “Something accomplished, especially by superior ability, special effort, great courage, etc.; a great or heroic deed.” So this is no walk in the park—it needs to be an accomplishment that required unusual innate qualities, or strife, or both. And who decides what it should be and when the criteria for accomplishment have been met? In the context of a discussion about self-esteem, only you decide what an achievement is and when you’ve attained it. Others will have opinions about what you’ve done, and that will most likely impact your self-assessment to some degree, which we’ll discuss in later blogs in this category. But no one can ultimately decide for you when to be satisfied with your own performance. That is your responsibility, and the process of deciding shapes both your life and your opinion of yourself. This is where clearly defined goals can be useful. If you have taken some time to think through what you want to the best of your current abilities, it’s far easier to direct yourself along the path to the finish, and to be certain about when you’ve arrived. If you haven’t clarified your goals, you are far more likely to encounter confusion about where to go, what to do, and when you’ve accomplished something about which you can feel satisfied.
Here are a few other factors that will impact how you feel about your accomplishments:
· Was the goal something you really wanted to pursue?
Most likely you’ve had the experience of having put considerable time and effort behind something that didn’t bring you the satisfaction you originally expected when you finally achieved it. This can happen for numerous reasons, such as:
o It was never really expressive of you. Someone else wanted this for you, and you went along, either to make them happy, or because you thought it was a good idea, but you never noticed that your own passion was never truly engaged.
o Somewhere along the way it would have been appropriate to adjust the goal, but you refused to do so for whatever reason. People do and must grow and change. It’s normal to realize once you’re in the middle of an effort that your expectations or process need to adjust in order to keep pace with what’s true for you. A goal is meant to draw you forward, not lock you rigidly in place.
o Your goal was not worthy of all the time and effort you poured into it. If you spent years on a complicated revenge scheme, you might eventually achieve it. However, if you felt satisfaction at the result, there would also be shame mixed in; you would know that your achievement spoke of your own unresolved pain and pettiness. If you had, instead, taken steps to express your pain, forgive over time, and protect others from injustice, you would likely have felt satisfaction that was clean and clear of internal conflict.
· Was the process enjoyable?
o If the process of getting to your goal was not enjoyable, you may have forgotten to build fun into your process. Sometimes we think that only through suffering can we create results that are glorious. While it’s true that the application of discipline required to achieve things that fit the dictionary definition of achievement will probably result in some discomfort, it’s also important to be able to enjoy your life during the times that you’re waiting for the gratification at the end of your road. All of it is your life, not just the occasional end point of an extended effort.
o If you hated every minute of working toward the goal, once you achieve it you are most likely exhausted, depleted, and in the habit of being in a bad mood. You may also have convinced yourself that this is the only way anyone gets anything done, and that life is grim and difficult (if you didn’t already believe these things before).
o Was someone else trying to control you throughout the process? If so, you’ll end up with a strong flavor of resentment about the whole experience, even if you like the end result.
· Does your goal result in a satisfactory change in your life?
o If you thought that your achievement would result in a harvest that didn’t appear, you’re likely to feel frustrated even if you feel great about what you did. Sometimes we follow in others’ footsteps and expect to have the same experiences, which doesn’t always happen. Sometimes we pin our fantasies to our goals, such as fame and unreasonable fortune, and are surprised when the fantasy elements aren’t a part of the achievement.
o If your goal did result in the expected harvest, it’s still possible that you didn’t end up feeling the way you thought you would about it. We have a tendency to expect external achievements alone to change how we feel about life and about ourselves, but this discounts the inner game that we must also play in order to feel good about life. As the saying goes, “Wherever you go, there you are.” You can’t outrun your own negative emotional and thought patterns. No achievement will absolve you of the need to do the inner work that is uniquely yours.
No matter how satisfied you are with an achievement, you will find that, as soon as it’s yours, you want something else! This is a normal part of life as a human being. We are creative, evolution-oriented beings who crave experience. This is why it’s best to avoid seeing any goal as the solution to all things in your life and focus on more on a sense of enjoyment of the process—otherwise you’re missing out on the vast collection of moments that make up the majority of your existence. People who look back at their lives in old age often regret that they were not more engaged in all the small and less significant moments of life, and that they did not take every opportunity to be present to the love and enjoyment that was available in every one of them. It’s all important. But if you feel unhappy about what you’ve achieved in life when you take all of it into consideration, I hope you’ll take the time to consider deeply what it is that you most want, and begin to chart a course toward it. Working toward goals that feel great and significant is a basic human desire; if you want to live a life that feels whole, you must not neglect this. And try to do it with zest for maximum enjoyment!
To Love and Be Loved
“Those who have never known the deep intimacy and the intense companionship of mutual love have missed the best thing that life has to give.”
A discussion of love and belongingness needs would certainly not be complete without a look at romance and intimacy, so that’s what we’ll focus on this week. In case you haven’t noticed, the world we live in is obsessed with romantic love, and the dream of intimate relationships between “soulmates,” pairs of people who seem to have achieved perfect harmony. Practically every song on the radio and every story line ever written include stories of loves won and lost. While many of us do seem to yearn for a deep sense of intimacy and connection with another, others find the idea of this less compelling, or find that what they yearn for is outside the accepted norm of romance; for some, what feels like a truthful expression of self in this realm will lie well outside the much idealized (but less often achieved) happy long-term monogamous relationship between two people. The good news is that, whatever your vision for yourself, there are likely many others in this wide world who want to achieve something similar, and with whom you might find what you’re seeking. Your chances of success are greatly enhanced if you’re willing to be honest with yourself and others about what that is, and courageous enough to stand up for it.
Anyone who has been in love knows that the feelings that result are intoxicating, blissful, both calming and energizing, inspiring. The chemistry of what happens in our bodies when we’re in this state is very real, and it all just feels, well, really good! Often effortlessly so. It’s natural to want to stay in it. However, maintaining this state over time requires some effort, the building of numerous skills that must mature with practice and experience, and the willingness to be challenged repeatedly. In some ways, this kind of love is even more challenging than familial relationships specifically because we are not related (at least let’s hope!) Your family members didn’t choose to be related to you, but they always will be. In romantic partnership, we’re clear that the other person always has a choice in whether to stay or walk away, and knowing this creates constant vulnerability. If one hasn’t done the necessary work to feel like a successful independent person who can comfortably live alone, this vulnerability can feel nearly unbearable. Human beings are social creatures who come pre-set with a terrible fear of being rejected and alone. Allowing love in is, in some ways, a radical act of optimism and one of the greatest leaps of faith it’s possible to make.
Vulnerability in relationships is also a product of allowing someone close enough in to really see us for who we are. In revealing ever more of ourselves, we give the other ever more chances to judge us as not good enough, and to wound us with that judgment. For many people, the fear of not being good, not being enough, is the worst of all. The idea of letting someone else see us clearly, and giving them the opportunity to confirm it if they will, can be terrifying. But one of the greatest benefits of taking a chance on love is the opportunity to be seen with our faults and loved anyway. This doesn’t happen every time—obviously—but when it does, it can go a long way toward helping us to heal from our fears of inadequacy. There’s no substitute for working on bolstering our self-worth from within, but real, accepting, caring love rewards our radical leap of faith by unleashing radical forces of healing. I think part of the reason so many of us pine for it is that we instinctively know the truth of this. While sexuality need not be a part of the equation in order to experience this kind of healing, there’s nothing like feeling that we’ve shared all the aspects of ourselves with another and still been acknowledged as worthy and lovable.
In order to keep love alive over time, here are some of the essential skills:
Courage. Love is not for the faint of heart. Maintaining enough vulnerability to foster intimacy can be taxing. Sometimes you’ll get hurt. You’ll need to have the courage to take another chance on this happening again and again even as you work on ways to hurt each other less. Relationships are not perfected overnight. Some relationships are easier. Others are harder, but offer great rewards that make the difficulty worth it. Each relationship is different.
Flexibility. Being truly close to another can be a wild ride. Each human being is unique, and we are so complex to be, to some extent, unpredictable always. Remaining close to someone over time means being willing to allow them to grow and unfold even when that is inconvenient for you.
Curiosity. If you can’t find others genuinely interesting, your long-term relationship prospects are slim. Intimacy requires taking an active interest in another and being willing to share in their revelations; you must be willing to be thrilled by their life as well as your own.
Generosity. Being close to someone else over time requires that you be willing to give as well as to take. If a partner feels that the balance of generosity is unequal in a relationship, they are likely to withdraw, and rightly so.
Openness. A good long-term relationship must be built on honesty and truth; it must allow both parties to share the best of themselves, and at least some of the worst of themselves. It also needs both parties to be able to openly adore the other much of the time. No relationship is all sunshine and rainbows, but if we’re unable to show love and appreciation openly, the relationship will not feel good. We also need to be able to allow ourselves to be adored and accept the love of the other.
Creativity. Each relationship being unique, there are no standard solutions that will work for everyone in all situations. Problem-solving skills are crucial in your ability to keep love alive. Issues will crop up, but if you come to the table with a determination to find a way through that works for all parties, and put your thought and creativity behind the pursuit, you are far more likely to find an excellent solution.
Patience. Sometimes solutions to the problems that arise will take time to find and implement. Sometimes we must live with discomfort. But being truly present in an intimate relationship can spur tremendous growth and excitement in life.
There are plenty of other fine qualities that aid in the maintenance of intimate relationships, of course, but these are a few to get you thinking. Are there others that you’ve worked hard to hone? Add a comment below to share what you know about making love work.
Despite all of our best efforts to perfect the art of being happily close to others, mystery will always be a part of our relationships. Chemistry is mysterious. How, why, and when people change is mysterious. Our evolving desires are mysterious. As much as we might like to feel an unshakeable sense of stability in our intimate relationships, it’s best to continue to strive to be comfortable with the idea that some things will always be unknown. It takes humility to admit that there will always be things we don’t know, but in this information age, it should be obvious that no one can know it all! Acknowledging this makes it easier to enjoy the surprises without feeling affronted by them, and that allows the journey of love and intimacy to be a lot more fun.