So Much Happier Blog
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.
Being Stuck ≠ Failure
“Keep on beginning and failing. Each time you fail, start all over again, and you will grow stronger until you have accomplished a purpose - not the one you began with perhaps, but one you’ll be glad to remember.”
Have you ever found yourself in the midst of a project that started to seem like it would never end? In my experience, this is what stops people from getting to their goals more often than anything else. Once you start telling yourself that you'll never arrive where you want to go, your energy and creativity will dissipate, and you'll probably quit on your project and feel like you failed.
Most likely, what actually happened there is that you encountered a problem you didn't know how to solve. That's it. Nothing irreparable happened, you just couldn't see a way forward, you panicked, and you jumped to a conclusion that may not have been true. The problem isn't that you had the thought that your project was over—we all get discouraged sometimes—the problem is that you didn't have the coping mechanisms in place to weather the emotional storm and come back to the table in a sufficiently calm and creative state to rejig your plan.
This happens to the best of us, but it doesn't have to be a permanent state of affairs. We fall into this pattern and then do what we do for a few main reasons. Once you understand what they are, you can review them when you feel stuck to see which one applies, and most likely find a way around the problem.
- Reflexive self-judgment. This is a bad habit we pick up from others when we're young, and if we don't find a way to arrest it, it remains a corrosive force in our lives. One of the reasons regular meditation can be so helpful is that the mind naturally has a tendency to assess and judge—that's what it's good at, and it's a helpful talent! Unfortunately, humans also have a tendency to believe that the mind is the totality of who we are. It makes sense, after all, given that the mind is a loud, constant voice that is always demanding our attention. Until you learn to calm it down, it's difficult to hear from the body, the heart (emotional self) or the spirit. Becoming aware that the analytical messages from your mind are not absolute truth, and can and should be rejected purposefully if they're not helpful, is a skill that takes some doing. It's also necessary if you're going to get out from under the thumb of the negative self-talk that the mind will blare at you when you're uncertain about what to do next.
- We have evolved to be highly risk averse. This also makes a lot of sense when staying alive is a daily struggle, but for people in developed countries that are not in the midst of war or other constant violence, our first reactions may be unnecessarily limiting; being outside one's comfort zone and trying new things can bring up intense fear that may be irrational, but has the power to stop us nonetheless. One of the reasons I love Tapping so much is that it can assist us in calming this fear/stress response when it's clearly not necessary or appropriate for the reality we're facing.
- The gap between who we currently are and who we'd need to become in order to finish the project seems too large, and we get overwhelmed. In order to progress in any process, we need to be able to toggle back and forth between the big-picture view and the granular view in which only the next task is primary. If we only look at the big picture, it's easy to become overwhelmed with the sum total of all things you still need to do, some of which you probably don't have any idea how to do yet. On the other hand, if you get too bogged down in the details, you'll start to get annoyed, lose inspiration, and want to throw in the towel. You need to remember that other tasks are coming, some of which will be more fun, and refocus on what you're doing it all for. A little fantasizing about reaching the goal can bring back the positivity you need. Knowing which view is most helpful at any given time takes practice, and it's a skill that, like any other, can be learned. We can also choose to get help with parts of a project we don't want to do! There's no rule that we have to struggle in silence, though we may have become convinced by someone else's poor belief system that receiving help is a sign of weakness. Cooperation helps everyone to win bigger and faster. It's smart to leverage it when you have the opportunity. Find someone with knowledge to share, find a buddy to help you stay motivated, find a coach or adviser to review overall strategy and implementation, or find a partner to share the burden and the glory of your project. Frustration and overwhelm can both be improved by teaming up with others.
These may not be the only things you feel stop your progress, but I bet they cover a lot of your most treacherous ground. Giving up on a project completely, or for the foreseeable future, may very rarely be a wise choice, but most of the time it leads to unnecessary heartbreak and disappointment that can be hard to recover from. Before you consider quitting, take some time to breathe, think, rest, and allow your creativity to return. There's probably a solution if you're willing to persist.