So Much Happier Blog
Where the Rubber Meets the Road
“Endure and persist; this pain will turn to good by and by.”
There are many personal qualities that are important contributors to long-term success, but I’ve been writing about some of the most powerful ones over the last few weeks. Along with focus and creativity, persistence is absolutely necessary if you’re to keep yourself moving ever forward in life toward greater mastery of your chosen subject matter. Life has a way of surprising us with all manner of challenges no matter how well we plan. It’s easy to become discouraged by the constant disruptions and the necessary adjustments those challenges call upon us to make. In order to hang in there long enough to get where you want to go, you’ll need to be able to fire up your persistence day in and day out, almost no matter what may be happening around you. Yes, I know, that’s a tall order! I can hear some of you groaning already—this is starting to sound very un-fun.
And yet, what if you could find ways to maintain a calm sense of balance in the midst of chaos? What if you knew how to feed your confidence throughout challenge so that persistence didn’t seem like such a Herculean effort? These are just skills that can be learned, like any other. While some people will be more naturally gifted than others in any area, almost everyone can become at least functional in most skill sets. If you’re someone whose motivation gets knocked off course often, such that you’re often starting and stopping your efforts on things that really matter to you, here are some things to try on the road to becoming unstoppable.
· Remember the importance of focus? You’ll need to apply it to keep reminding yourself that persistence is a skill, not some magical quality that you weren’t born with, so why bother? Some people were taught the skills that feed persistence early, and some need to learn them later, but you have to acknowledge that it’s possible to learn them before you can effectively build them.
· You’ll also need to focus on what’s important to you consistently. Every day. Find ways to do this that appeal to you. It’s good to make this fun, so indulge yourself! If you like, write reminders to yourself on bright sticky notes and scatter them around where you’ll see them throughout the day, or make a recording of yourself repeating your top priorities and play it back in the car, or take a few minutes before you get out of bed and before you go to sleep at night to go over them in your mind and enjoy how they express the truth of you. There can be great joy in just repeating your most important values to yourself often. You might be surprised how enjoyable and inspiring this becomes.
· Practice reviewing your priorities before making decisions throughout your day. When you get into the habit of making sure that what’s most important to you is at least considered in your smallest decisions, you reinforce your ability to strategize with them always in mind. When the larger, more pivotal decisions come up, it will be easier to do the same, and you’ll become brilliant at making decisions that serve your values and goals.
· Keep a journal on decisions you made and how well they support your goals. This is an excellent way to give yourself credit for and celebrate good decisions, as well as notice decisions that you made in a hurry, forgetting to think through what would really be best for you and everyone else before charging ahead. If you don’t take time to frequently review what’s happening in your life, it’s easy to fall back into old patterns and find that you’re getting nowhere. If you keep an eye on things, you have opportunities to do better every day, and you’ll progress much more quickly.
· Sometimes, you will have a bad day. You will need the love and support of at least a few people who you can count on to care about you no matter what. Practice reaching out to them when things aren’t terrible just to talk through a choice or share a win or a concern. This will make it more natural and easy for you to ask for attention when you really need it. Everyone needs support sometimes, and being reminded that someone else cares about you and believes in you helps restore your courage and keep you in the game.
· Manage your mind and your emotions. This cannot be said enough. Your mind will have a tendency to judge you, and others, and spiral into negativity. If you want to build persistence, you must gain the ability to arrest this cycle and bring your mind back to a neutral state at least, and practice more resourceful thinking. You don’t have to pretend that everything is always rosy, but if you’re always indulging in negativity, there’s no way you’re going to reach your goals—and if you did by some stroke of luck, you wouldn’t be able to enjoy them. Your emotions, in the moment at least, proceed from your thinking. There are also probably a bunch stuck in your system from previous events and thinking. For clearing those, the best technique I’ve ever found is EFT/Tapping, and it’s easy and free to do, so if you haven’t taken the time yet, learn the basics and try it! It’s so much easier to make good decisions when you’re not being overwhelmed with outdated mental and emotional habits left over from the past.
· Be stubborn. Every two-year-old knows how to do this like a champ. If you’ve forgotten how, channel your inner two-year-old and stamp your feet and yell, “No! No, no NO! I want _______!” at the top of your lungs every once in a while. Jump up and down for added effect. In addition to being hilarious and getting your blood pumping, this can reconnect you with your most basic desires and your conviction that you deserve to get them. Small children don’t spend time worrying about whether it’s prudent to want a pet unicorn, they just go ahead and want it. When you really connect with your desires, a lot of energy becomes available to you that you can use to take action. Your zest for life resurfaces. You can’t achieve goals if you’re always exhausted and don’t remember what all the effort is for. You have to let yourself want things in order to feel fully alive. Even if they seem impossible, your desires have important messages for you, and help you to keep finding your direction in the face of adversity.
A few caveats:
· Sometimes persistence is not the right tool for the job. If you’re persisting but continually missing the mark, it may be time for a new strategy and some course correction. Mindless persistence can end up looking a lot like reckless stupidity. You want to stay open to learning new things, and benefiting from outside perspectives.
· There will always be moments in any life when it’s time to take a break, either just for vacation, to rest and recharge, or because you’re going through a major transition of some sort—but when you can decide when to take time rather than always struggling to recover enough to get back on the horse, that’s a better place to be.
· Each of us has things we’re just really, really not suited for, in addition to things we’re great at. If you’ve applied yourself enough to gain some ability, but still loathe and get bogged down by a certain activity, it’s wise to partner with someone who is good at it, or find other ways to work around doing it.
· If you’re someone who is motivated by joining with others in some way, then by all means find a buddy who can help you keep at it on a daily basis, or pay a coach to help you stay focused on your goals and the actions you need to take to keep growing. Most people enjoy effort more if they can share accomplishments with others who cheer them on and appreciate their progress. Relationships make life, and our successes, more meaningful and more fun. Look, we brought it back around to fun! And we should. Why be so serious when we can build fun into all of our days with just the intention to do so? Balance means playing as well as we work, because play helps us to relax, de-stress, and regain creativity.
Maintaining persistence is a lifelong pursuit, like maintaining good health. We’re never done. But if you don’t ever get around to investing time and effort into creating basic habits that will keep you going, you can’t expect to live the kind of life you want. Start small if persistence is hard for you, but start! You can do this.
Method or Madness
“It isn’t the mountains ahead to climb that wear you out; it’s the pebble in your shoe.”
It’s that time of year when people’s fancy turns to self-improvement. Everyone’s doing it! We’ve indulged, we’ve rested, and enthusiasm for a fresh start is rising! There’s nothing at all wrong with this—in fact it can make life fun to take part in seasonal and societal shifts as they happen—and joining with others can help to reinforce your own commitment to positive change. If you want to jump on this bandwagon, here are just a few thoughts to help you add checks and balances to your process (not just for politics, people!) so that your decisions really suit your needs and purposes:
· It seems that, in January, physical fitness goals dominate the day. While improving your physical health and fitness is always a worthy goal, and one that supports pretty much everything else you probably want to do and experience, adding an aggressive exercise regimen is not the best place to start for everyone. You may be tempted to think that you have to go whole hog or nothing, but this kind of thinking gets a lot of people injured before the month is out. That will throw a monkey wrench into your momentum for sure. Try to keep any schemes for physical exercise moderate for your current level of fitness so that you’re not adding unsustainable stress to your body, and so that you don’t get stopped short before you can begin to solidify healthy new habits. This is one of those areas in which you will never be finished. There’s no such thing as “done.“ So don’t freak out and overdo, but do plan activities that will qualify as your next phase of achievement.
· For that matter, try to keep any resolution for change to a moderate scheme. We’re often taught that in order to get anything worthwhile done, we need to decide what to accomplish and how, and then thoroughly ignore thoughts, feelings, and life circumstances that might make adhering to the plan difficult. This is the best thinking of two thousand years of male-energy-dominant thinking, and while it has its merits, it also exposes us to unnecessary likelihoods of stress, burnout, unhappiness that results from an unbalanced approach to life, and shame if we fail in a pursuit that was woefully unrealistic to begin with. I’m not saying that no one should take on big goals, but we need to make sure we’re thinking about fitting new items into the context of a whole life with multiple demands. We need to think about building in flexibility, and appropriate moments for reconsideration when circumstances change, so that we can stay in the game for the long haul as life throws distractions our way.
· Just because someone you know or read about is taking on something that sounds interesting or inspiring, that doesn’t mean you need to take on the same. Focus. Really think about what you feel called to learn and grow into this year. There is such a thing as right timing. Events and repetitive pain points in your life may be pointing to certain areas in which it would really behoove you to acquire new skills. Spend a few minutes noting whether there has been a recurring situation in your life lately that you could handle better if you just noticed and addressed your part in it. This might be a more appropriate focus for your energies than climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro, or what have you.
· No one is in a better position than you to decide what’s the right next step for your goals and your life. Of course, it can be helpful to talk through decisions like this with someone supportive, but make sure you don’t turn to someone who has strong agendas of their own for you who might limit your sense of possibility. It’s fine to give important people in your life input on the choice and timing of your projects, but it helps to start with your own opinions about what would be ideal for you before beginning any negotiations of this kind. A great deal of your own power flows from following your heart about who you want to be and what you want to strive for in this life. Don’t abdicate your opportunity to get clear on your own desires and intuition about you.
I hope this helps you to make good decisions for the year ahead. Whatever you do or don’t decide to pursue in 2017, I wish you a happy, healthy year filled with blessings and challenges worthy of you.
I Gotta Be Me!
“Even if all these needs are satisfied, we may still often (if not always) expect that a new discontent and restlessness will soon develop, unless the individual is doing what he is fitted for. A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately happy. What a man can be, he must be.”
We’ve now reached the final need in Abraham Maslowe’s hierarchy: Self-actualization, and this is where things really get fun. When all one’s other needs are met well enough, he observed, only then is one freed to take on “the desire to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming.” This isn’t about merely remaining functional and motivated to get up in the morning. This is about living out your own passionate quest for being the very best possible version of yourself. He acknowledges that there are some rare individuals who have such a need for achievement in this area that they can and will ignore many of the other basic needs in order to focus on it (think of the artist who will live in squalor because all she or he cares about is creating), but these people are very much in the minority. In fact, it’s far more common for people to feel sufficiently beaten down and exhausted by the constant effort it takes to maintain a stable daily routine that they never really make it to the finish line of the hierarchy—which is probably why the whole structure is so often represented by a pyramid in which the self-actualization sector is the relatively small area at the top. If you’re someone who cares about happiness and the art of creating more of it, then spending more time in this sector is your ultimate goal; you’ll need to think about setting up your life to support you in continually refocusing on getting back into this zone.
Maslowe was also clear about the idea that the pursuits to which each person will be drawn when they’re spending time in this sector will be unique. Only he or she knows where the desire for self-actualization must lead. I’m reminded of how my mother always said that when you have more than one child, you see that they just come out different, right from the start! Everyone I know who has raised children has experienced phases of their development when they just get a wild idea and lobby hard for it, whether it’s eating nothing but grilled cheese for weeks at a time, or an insistence that they wear layers and layers of clothing rather than just one outfit at a time, because that’s just how they want to roll. One could argue that this is early evidence of the self-actualization drive. People like teachers who spend time around lots of children often remark on how they don’t have to try to be unique. They just are. And yet, many of us feel, later in life, that we have nothing unique to offer. We feel deflated, dispassionate, bored, or uninspired. Sometimes this happens because we’ve suffered disappointments and don’t know how to deal with them constructively. But often, it happens because others’ opinions and attempts at control have drowned out the inner adventurer. We learned to tone it down because it wasn’t going over well. Partly, this stems from parenting conventions that we’re only slowly learning to move beyond that involve a focus on maintaining authority at all costs lest we lose control of the little beasts altogether. However, it also stems, I think, from the tendency of parents of young children to be sleep deprived, overwhelmed, and to find it easier to try to shut down a child’s annoyingly endless energy and creativity in favor of a little peace and quiet in many single moments throughout the child’s early life. This is not necessarily bad, as long as that energy and creativity are encouraged at other times. After all, we all need to be taught basic manners in order to get along well in society with others, and learning that our rampant self-expression can be trying to others is valuable feedback. But if a child is not encouraged toward her own uniqueness enough, she will learn to bury it. If that happens, the way toward happiness must involve excavating and bringing it back.
It’s also true that others can feel threatened by the extent of our differentness. They may feel unable to cope with the challenge to their own thinking and habits; they may have trouble seeing the beauty in something they’ve never before valued; they may genuinely worry that we will not be treated well in the world because of our unique characteristics; they may worry that they will not be treated well because of their association with us; they may even be jealous of our creativity or sense of self. For whatever reason, there will always be those who will try to train us out of our uniqueness, which is an essential component of our brilliance.
Even if we’ve been encouraged toward self-expression while in school, many of us find that the transition to life as an adult is a shock to the system. Often we’re terribly unprepared for the rigors of earning an income, setting up a life that works, and generally fending for ourselves. In many cultures, there are no longer meaningful rites of passage to help us make the transition. A sense of true community and mutual support can be hard to come by in this age of individualization. No matter how brilliant we have the capacity to be, at this point we learn, often in very unpleasant ways, that there are some things we’re entirely clueless about. There are things we didn’t even realize our family or community members were handling for us. Life is harder and more painful than we expected, at least in some ways, and this can seriously erode our confidence. If we don’t quickly find ways to adapt effectively, we can easily fall back into the realm of the lower basic needs and get stuck there.
If this has happened to you (and if it has, you’ll know it by the dissatisfaction you feel with your life and your conviction that there’s never time to just do what you want), here are some suggestions:
· If you don’t know anything that really gets you feeling excited to be alive, think back to your childhood and remember things you loved to do when you were small. Let’s say you could happily make mud pies outside for hours. What was it that you enjoyed about this? Was it being out in the sunshine? Was it the texture of the dirt in your hands and working on the recipe? Was it having time to yourself to think? There are clues in these memories, so take the time to revisit them. Don’t worry about what anyone else thought about what you were doing. Just remember the bliss and what made that time fun.
· When you start to have a better idea of the things you enjoyed in a pure, self-expressive way, think about how you could recreate some of that joy in your life now. What can you do, even if only every once in a while, that helps you to bring that enjoyment back? Maybe it’s just something simple, like being more aware of the textures of the objects you come into contact with daily. You don’t have to reorder your entire schedule in order to start moving in the right direction.
· Once you have some ideas of a few things you’d love to have back in your life, you will likely feel some excitement about your ideas. Do not, however, expect others in your life to buy in whole hog and want to do all of those things alongside you. Some may, but some won’t. That’s fine! Go find others who love those things as well and join up with them if your activities are better enjoyed in a group. You may need to ask for support in making the time available to take action on some of your ideas. You can volunteer to help others in your life to do something similar if they'll help you. Everyone in your life deserves to follow his/her own unique passions. Your loved ones will be far happier if you allow and encourage them to do that.
· Look for friends who support your expression of your inner adventurer, whether they’re personally interested in the same things or not. Some people will appreciate hearing your stories because they get to sample things they don’t really want to do by living vicariously. Learn to support others in this way as well.
Some schools of thought teach that in order to experience bliss, we should let go of all attachment to earthly pleasures and to outcomes, and give no time to desires for anything but spiritual focus. There are many fine books and other works that espouse this view, and if you look into it, you’ll see that this path encourages a specific kind of brilliance. While I’m interested in all kinds of adventures and I love to read about what others find meaningful, I’ve never wanted to live a solitary life on a mountaintop. I want to live a meaningful life in the midst of all the craziness of daily life around others, and to see where my innermost desires will lead; I think our most deeply held desires can be key to living out lives that elevate those around us and the wider world in which we move and breathe. Personally, I want to experience that world and experiment with it. And it could be said that those who turn their focus habitually inward are also following a kind of desire of their own. After all, who could keep that up if it didn’t somehow excite them?
It need not be selfish to be who you are, to focus on becoming more and more of yourself. Maslowe defined this as a basic and natural human need. I’m guessing that if you’re reading this, you haven’t chosen a life of solitary meditation on a mountaintop either. I recommend spending some time in thinking about how you can follow your inner adventurer and still participate generously in the lives of others. This is your mission, if you choose to accept it. Where will your adventure lead, and what will you choose to express and give?
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!