So Much Happier Blog
Where to Start?
“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.”
In last week’s blog, I wrote about how during these strange times, you may be able to find space for some activities that will support your renewal even during all the uncertainty. You may be the only thing you have the power to change right now, but changing yourself can be very powerful—it can initiate change that ripples out and affects everything and everyone around you. If you’d like to do this, you may be wondering how best to figure out what to work on. Most of us have lots of emotions, thoughts, and beliefs left over from previous life events that could be benefitted by Tapping, so how do you know what you should work on today? As long as you don’t choose anything that seems too big or scary, there’s really no wrong answer, but here are a few ways you can land on something that will feel fulfilling to make some progress on right away:
Ask yourself what has been bothering you lately. If we give ourselves a moment, most of us can pretty easily rattle off the things we’re worried, scared, annoyed, angry, or frustrated about at any given time. This does fluctuate, sometimes based on identifiable triggers, and sometimes in ways that are more unconscious and mysterious. Your answer today may be quite different than it was last week. If it’s one big thing, you can Tap on that. If it’s a lot of things, you might want to try the Tap and Rant technique, in which you just Tap through all the points and just vent all of it and how you feel about it.
If you’re focusing on one thing, you can just notice the emotion that bothers you and how it affects your body as you Tap, being as specific as you can about all the sensations you feel. As you Tap, the intensity should come down. You may need to be patient depending on how intense it is, and do multiple rounds of Tapping to get results.
You can also work through an event using the Tell the Story technique, in which you narrate the story of something unpleasant that happened, starting from a neutral place before anything really bothered you, and as soon as you feel any emotion or physical discomfort whatsoever, you pause telling the story and Tap. If you can reduce those feelings to a low number (two or lower on a zero-to-ten scale), then you can resume telling the story and pause to Tap whenever you start to feel anything again at a later point in the story. Once you can tell the story start to finish without feeling much of anything, you’re done with that event!
You can simply scan your body for any discomfort. If you find anything that stands out, you can try Tapping as you voice the sensations. Often what happens as you do this is that the sensation will move and change. After each Tapping round, you can reassess and notice what you feel now. This is called the “Chasing the Pain” technique, and it’s considered one of the Gentle Techniques in EFT. You don’t have to know why you’re feeling the sensation, you just Tap and describe it and how it transforms until hopefully you no longer feel discomfort. How this can be pretty surprising and defy all logic, but often it really helps.
You can also use the Personal Peace Procedure, in which you make notes on a whole bunch of things that bother you, and just pick one each time you Tap to work on. Over time, you can work through them one by one, and you’ll find that even a few minutes a day helps you erase your emotional reactiveness to them and cross things off your list. Eventually you should notice that you feel better and have more energy. Some people like to brainstorm a long list, but that can be overwhelming. You might prefer to just make a short list, and then brainstorm a new one when you finish with those initial items. Trust me, there will always be more to work on!
Remember that as you go, it’s important to be honest about what you feel and not try to force it to change, particularly when it’s at the high end of the intensity scale. If you try to immediately talk yourself out of your feelings as you Tap so you can avoid them, you won’t get good results. It’s necessary to just admit to what’s true and let the Tapping organically change how you feel. Most of the time, it will start to do that naturally within a few rounds.
You may sometimes get stuck at a plateau with something you’re working on. If the intensity came down at all, feel free to call this a win and give yourself a break. You can always come back to it later for another attempt, and sometimes your system needs time to adjust and reveal all the benefits you created.
You may also find that if you’ve worked on something multiple times and you’re not getting anywhere, it’s time for some help. Some things are just tricky to work on, and getting an outside perspective from a practitioner can help you solve the mystery of what’s going on with the right questions and the use of some more advanced techniques.
I hope this helps you venture into more frequent Tapping that will help you survive and thrive in challenging times. What’s better than something you can do anytime, for free, that feels good and supports your short- and long-term balance? Not much in my book!
The Nefariousness of Boredom
“When people are bored it is primarily with themselves.”
As you work on projects that are important to you over time, sometimes one of the hardest things to do is to resist overthinking things. Once you've determined your overall path and you've gotten down to applying yourself to your next steps, there are phases of a project in which you're working away, but not yet seeing results. Depending on the scope and complexity of your project, these can last quite a while. Since humans tend to prefer instant gratification, staying focused and energized throughout can be a challenge! The mind will tend to kick into high gear at some point and try to convince us that we must be doing something wrong. It shouldn't be taking this long! We should change something up, because this clearly isn't working!
In today's frenetic world, it does seem as though everything happens quickly, and that's what we should expect from the world and from ourselves. And yet, even those who seem to have attained easy success have tales to tell about preparation they've done in the background, usually over the course of many years. The current technological climate wants to convince us that every shiny new toy just pops into being as soon as a good idea is established. We're shown quick and glamorous paths to glory, but again, these are never the whole story. It's easy to measure ourselves against all these flashy examples and decide that there's something wrong with us when nothing is so easy in our day to day. It's easy to become frantic as we feel the passage of time and to decide that we need to pick up the pace, even when there's a well-considered plan in place and it's unfolding accordingly.
Drawing up a realistic plan takes work. Educating yourself on what steps will be needed in order to accomplish new goals and setting out time lines that are challenging, but still possible, takes boldness and vision. Most of us don't do this enough, nor maintain a rhythm of checking in often to adjust and rework that vision. But even if we do, it still takes discipline not to freak out when the process is boring and throw it all out the window. Sometimes it's easier to deal with adversity than it is to deal with boredom—at least with adversity comes a certain amount of drama, which can bring a sense of zest to life even if it's unpleasant. The periods in which the plan requires constant application but little reward can be the most treacherous, the times when our continuance is most precarious.
Since any big project has these periods, we need to find ways not to work up frustration or ennui so thick that it cancels out our momentum. One of my recommendations here may sound a little silly, but it works, so I'll offer it anyway: Be willing to be a little stupid. Refuse to ruminate at length on your state and just keep going, even when it feels like a slog; when you overthink, you'll just annoy yourself and have a tendency to talk yourself out of both good moods and your commitment to the long haul. Try distracting yourself from the boredom with some planned rewards. These don't have to be anything grand or expensive—just playing some inspiring music every day can help buoy your spirits when it feels like you're going nowhere. Planning some time with friends you always have fun with is key. Taking a little time to move your body every day helps bust stress, and I'm not talking about running marathons (unless that's something you love). You might just want to move and groove to some music when you take breaks from your project, because it feels good and gets some healthy blood flow going. Take a walk around the block or to do an errand here and there. Do some light reading or watch a movie to give your mind a break from your efforts. Whatever it is, just keep in mind that when you're working on the more thankless parts of your project, you'll need some extra support to keep yourself going, and plan for it.
No matter what you're working toward in the long term, there will be times when the slowness of your progress will become demoralizing. It happens to the best of us, and it is completely normal to become somewhat annoyed at these times. If you can't seem to enjoy the work you have to do, then find other things to appreciate and enjoy. Usually these dips will automatically correct themselves before too long if you're giving yourself support to get yourself through the difficulty. Know that you're not alone, and remind yourself what's at the end of all this effort, and why you wanted it in the first place. Above all, keep going. When you stretch yourself and refuse to give up, you do eventually get somewhere worth being, and that's what it's all about.
Refocusing to Win
“It is during our darkest moments that we must focus to see the light.”
Since many people are working on new habits this month, I wanted to take a moment to acknowledge that starting a new habit, or ending and old one, is hard! There are degrees of difficulty, obviously, but usually the things we tackle at the beginning of the year are the bigger challenges that we didn't find the gumption to address throughout the previous year, so I'll assume that you might really be challenging yourself right now. In that case, it will behoove you to accept that you may need some extra support to keep yourself focused on and engaged with the task at hand. In order to help you see that need for yourself, consider:
- When you're stretching yourself beyond your comfort zone toward a new state of being, you are likely to have at least moments in which you feel confused and overwhelmed. You don't really feel like the self you've previously known yourself to be, but you also don't yet feel like the "new and improved" version of yourself for whom the new habit is no longer a challenge. In fact, sometimes the path to getting there looks long and treacherous, and highly uncertain, right about now
- To state the obvious, being outside your comfort zone is uncomfortable! No one likes constant discomfort, and it's tough to endure unless you can see the clear link between it and the rapid approach of something you deeply want. If you're not doing things to keep that focus, it's easy to get knocked off track by the loudness of the discomfort in the moment, and by how much you don't like it. Even if you stay on track, constant challenge without instant gratification can be pretty tiring. You may find that you have less energy, and therefore productive time, for other things until you get over the hump in solidifying your new habit
- Many people are exercising more right now. Even though this eventually creates more energy than it uses if you stick with it, in the beginning, it doesn't feel good at all. Until your muscles strengthen, they hurt and protest. Toxins and hormones stored in fat cells hit your bloodstream and change your chemistry until they're processed out of your body. You need more rest to recover and keep going, and you may feel weaker than before you started exercising. Unless you're careful, methodical, and quite physically self-aware, it's easy to injure yourself when starting a new exercise regimen.
So what can we do about all of this?
- Actually write out (or type up) a statement of your goal and why you want it, in other words, include all the great feelings you'll feel if you achieve it. Yes, you, and yes, on paper or a computer, so that you can review it every day and remind yourself what all the effort and discomfort is for when the going gets tough. This will get you up and going when you really want to go back to bed rather than face the work your goal requires. Reading it will send a wave of positive energy rippling across your day, as long as you don't spend any time worrying about how you haven't achieved your goal yet—those thoughts will do the opposite. If they come up, acknowledge them, but don't indulge them
- Write out your top personal values in as much or as little detail as you like so you can read those daily as well. This will help you to remember who you really are when the outer stuff is getting rearranged and you feel confused. This is powerful. Don't discount it
- Give some thought to a few things you can dial back so you have more energy for making change in the early stage of your project, when it's most challenging
- Tell the important people in your life what you're doing so they can support you where possible
- Consider specifically not telling people you know who will not be supportive (or might even try to derail your progress). You have no obligation to cater your life to people who try to wreck the best efforts of those around them
- Team up with someone else who you can talk to about the ups and downs of what you're doing. Just being able to share what you're experiencing with someone else who is working on their own projects helps you to feel understood and seen as you work
- Make sure you add opportunities for fun into your schedule. Taking on new things shouldn't mean that you have no time left to blow off steam, rest, and rejuvenate. Striking a healthy balance is important for the long-term viability of your projects, because if you become exhausted and demoralized, your projects will be dead in the water.
It's great to meet a new year with enthusiasm, just make sure you're allowing yourself a little time to plan for the support you'll need in seeing your projects through to the successful outcomes you want. A lot of good intentions will fall to the wayside by the end of this month. With some planning and reinforcements, yours need not be among them!
Below the Surface
“Honestly, sometimes I get really fed up of my subconscious—it’s like it’s got a mind of its own.”
Now that you're clear about the beliefs you'd like to change, and have done some mental work (see last week's blog if you don't know what I'm talking about), what's the next step...? Now, I recommend working on the emotional side of things. Modern culture heavily emphasizes the mind in problem solving, so that's what many of us think is the alpha and the omega of making progress in anything, but your belief work won't hold if you don't address your emotional realities. These are deeply seated in your psyche and your body, and they will block your progress past a certain point. The great thing is that with effective tools like hypnosis or EFT, you can reach and work with the subconscious realm of old, ingrained emotions and patterns, which is where these blocks, and the power to create lasting change, reside.
You can do this work alongside the mental work (affirmations, for example). Ideally, all of your efforts will coordinate with and support each other. Assuming that you wrote out all the reasons you have the undesirable belief you're working on, the next step is to address each reason. There are other ways to do this, but since my favorite method is EFT, we'll be using that as the framework here. Using the same example as last week, if you believe you're too old to get in shape, one of your reasons might be that you think you have bad genes. In that case, you can do some Tapping for "I have bad genes"; this is a good start, but it's general, and the best results in EFT come from getting as specific as you can. Ask yourself: Why is this reason true, and what makes you sure? Look for your proof in specific events that have happened to you, like someone in your family having a traumatic experience that illustrates this, or someone important to you telling you this with a lot of conviction and emotion at a key moment for you. When you use EFT on these specific experiences, you are dismantling the support for your limiting belief one reason at a time. If you don't take on this work, all the mental work in the world won't usually get you permanent results, because you have these powerful emotional realities hanging on in the world of the subconscious. You may have to work on multiple supporting events in turn in order to start feeling different about each reason, but you may not have to work on everything similar that's ever happened because of the Generalization Effect, in EFT terms. Translation: To some extent, working on one event in a series tends to bring down the intensity of all of them.
As always, if anything feels too big or too confusing for you to handle alone, get help. There are numerous ways to do this, and so many great resources available to you. If you really want to make progress toward your goals, you will need to break the cycle of avoidance that tempts us all and do at least some of this work. You might as well figure out whether you're more likely to tackle it on your own or with others, and get started. Doing something new will always engender some feelings of awkwardness and discomfort, but in this case, the payoff can make the discomfort you endure worth every second in the long term.
I do want to be realistic and tell you that the process of working through all the reasons that support your belief can take some time. Depending on how much time and energy you devote to this, you will move forward if you use EFT faithfully, but you may not see instant results. Try not to quit before you see any. Sometimes you just need to keep at it. How much work will be needed varies widely from person to person and from subject to subject for each person. I also want to mention that sometimes, we hold onto a limiting belief because we get overwhelmed when we consider moving forward without it, and we use the belief as a shield against change. You may be frustrated by your difficulty with making progress in the past, but keep in mind that this behavior is designed to protect us. Humans evolved to be highly risk averse out of self-preservation, one of the strongest drives there is. Sure, you can try to fight this if you want, but you'll make yourself miserable and waste a lot of energy if you go that route. You can't discipline or shame yourself into confidence—I find that partnering up with the side of you that's afraid and trying to keep you alive (even if that's an overreaction) is the smarter and simpler way to go. Often you'll learn something new about what's been motivating you underneath the surface of things when you allow yourself to be open to it. Try asking yourself, "What's the worst thing that could happen if I no longer had this belief?" Once you have an answer, or several, treat each one as its own separate reason using the process outlined above.
This is the basics of working on the emotional glue that keeps old, outdated beliefs in place. If you don't have a good grasp on how to do the Tapping, review that before you attempt it, and always use common sense, pay attention to the signs your body is giving you, and don't overdo it. Otherwise, give it a try and see how including emotional work can help your beliefs to quickly evolve in the most positive way!
When What You Believe Doesn't Help
“Once you replace negative thoughts with positive ones, you’ll start having positive results.”
If you're someone who reads my blog regularly, chances are you're aware enough to know that you have a belief or two (or 20!) that are holding you back from being the happiest, most successful possible version of yourself. It's completely normal to pick up less-than-optimal habits and patterns from others, particularly when you're a child and don't even notice it's happening, though this can happen at any time of life. Those habits then stick around until you do specific work to change them. It's all well and good to know this, but what do you do about it? How can you permanently change a belief that might be based on years of conditioning, including examples you've observed and powerful formative experiences you've had personally?
I won't pretend that we can just wave a magic wand and presto, a limiting belief is gone! On the other hand, sometimes it seems like changing these deeply ingrained beliefs must take a Herculean effort, and that need not be true either if you're willing to use the best tools for the job. Here are my suggestions for taking an inclusive approach that will get all of the parts of you on board. An action in one area will help you to progress, but when you work in all areas, everything happens faster and is more likely to solidify into permanent change.
First, get clear on what you'd like to change and why. There might be numerous beliefs you'd like to rewrite, but pick one! You can get to them each in turn, but without focus, you won't get much done. Let's say, for instance, that the belief you've chosen is, "I'm too old to get in shape." Now, spend some time with your mind. Write down all the reasons this is true for you. Are all your family members who are older obese? Do you feel like you have too many aches and pains to move your body? You can probably come up with a ton of reasons, so keep writing until you feel like you've gotten them out, however bad they sound. It might seem overly negative to really reach for more reasons past the most obvious ones, but trust me, this stuff is gold when it comes to making change possible for yourself. You need to know what's in your mind on autopilot when you're not looking if you want to have a chance at working with it.
When you've dug deep and you feel like you have a good picture of what you believe and why, it's time to think through these reasons (Part I). When you think about them consciously, do you truly believe each one? It can be helpful to ask, "Whose voice is this, and when did I learn it?" Also, "Would I give a close friend this advice?" Sometimes you'll find that you don't fully believe these tapes that play in your head. The process of changing any part you still do believe will need to include purposely challenging the old messages when you find yourself thinking disempowering thoughts. When you find yourself (using our example) thinking that there's no exercise you can do that won't cause you to injure yourself, you'll need to interrupt that with something like, "Wait a minute. That's the old belief talking. Surely there's something I can do to move my body a little that is gentle enough to start building strength and balance without injury. I can start with some searching online for gentle exercise and see what I find. Other people get into shape all the time, and I can too." But even the items you don't consciously believe may still continue to influence you because they're ingrained and habitual.
One excellent tool for fostering change is the use of affirmations. These are positive statements of the new beliefs you'd like to have that you repeat daily until they become new habits. In order to find these, you can look at the negative beliefs and reasons you wrote down in the first step and write out the most opposite inspiring statement you can for each one. Then you simply say them out loud at least once per day. Affirmations have gotten a bad rap lately, but I find them to be a useful support in the midst of change. It's a sort of self-coaching that reminds you where you're going and helps you to try on the feeling of a new belief until it seems more natural. I'll warn you that if you really need an affirmation, you won't even want to say it out loud--the new statement will sound ridiculous and embarrassing! But give it a few days and you'll stop needing to squirm uncomfortably when you say it and consider actually holding that more positive belief. This step alone will not get the job fully done. The mind is a fantastic tool, but it can't solve all our problems alone because it's not the only part of us. This is why some people have taken to claiming that affirmations don't work, but they can be, in my experience, a powerful element in your strategy. More on how to work with other parts of you in later blogs.
Another great way to support the changes you're looking to make with your mind include feeding it new information, like reading or listening to books that will expand your knowledge about the subject at hand. You could read about how to start slowly and get into shape at a healthy pace while avoiding injuries. There are many guides out there on workouts for almost every person and situation. You also might want to read biographies or articles about other people who have done what you want to do. Most of the time, there are many people with experience who can help you along with inspiration and the fruits of their own labor. Knowing that others have been through the same thing, and learning about how they triumphed, is a supportive way to teach your mind that more is possible for you.
It can also be hugely helpful to find at least one other person who is working on the same kind of challenge with whom you can share the journey, the highs and lows, and make the effort more fun. When you can enjoy your efforts, you'll be much more able to stick with the program than if you're trying to muscle through on willpower alone. Joining with others can also help you harness the positive powers of both cooperation and friendly competition. Just make sure that person is also willing to put in effort on the mental side of things and making an effort to stay positive. Partnering with someone who is not doing the inner work to make change last can be more of a downer than an inspiration. You want to put yourself in proximity to people who will cheer you on and have your back when you're having trouble staying the course.
This week has been about supporting change with the mind because this is what our culture tends to offer first, and sometimes only, as the way to make change happen. Much of this probably sounded familiar and fairly logical. In the coming weeks, we'll look at how to bring the rest of you to bear in supporting change so that you're allowing the process to ripple across all parts of you. If you do the work to isolate a belief and the reasons you hold onto it this week, you'll get more out of the weeks to come, so make you sure you take the time to do that now. I also encourage you to experiment with affirmations, and even if it seems goofy, try to have fun with them as a way to start practicing the new. You're on your way to a new, more empowering belief already!
Escaping Mental Quicksand
“The ultimate value of life depends upon awareness and the power of contemplation rather than upon mere survival.”
Have you ever gotten stuck in a negative loop of thoughts and/or actions? Something happens that takes the wind out of your sails, and suddenly you don't want to do anything. You start thinking that it's futile to try, and that thought builds momentum until you feel like you weigh a thousand pounds. Maybe you act out in sabotaging ways. That just makes you feel worse. Etcetera. If you're being honest with yourself, you're aware that we all take detours like this sometimes, and you're no different! The trick is to minimize this kind of distraction so that you can spend more time feeling inspired, and happily chewing through whatever tasks will get you to your goals—including goals for plentiful social and leisure time in which to enjoy your life.
There are two things I want to mention in connection with getting yourself on track when you find yourself in a negative thought loop. First, awareness. In twelve-step programs, we're taught that the first step is admitting we have a problem, but before that's even possible, we have to become aware of the signs and symptoms suggesting that this is true. Generally as you go about your life, the more observant and aware you can become, the better off you are. First, the faster you notice that your thoughts are spiraling downward, the faster you can arrest them and decide what kinds of thoughts and actions would actually help you. Second, the information you gain access to by actively looking for it can help you massively in formulating plans for moving forward. Developing finely tuned awareness may take some practice, because it's a skill many of us aren't taught. Also because we live in a fast-paced world in which we're often trying to tune out the extraneous and focus on what is necessary or preferred, and becoming more aware can be distracting and confusing. It's fine to start slowly and work up to more awareness in ways that feel balanced.
The second thing is education. If you want to move quickly toward your ideal life, become an education junkie. Learn to love it, crave it, and make it a normal part of your daily routine. See a problem that's holding you back? Consult someone who might know about it, or books, podcasts, or the Internet. If you don't immediately find ideas you like, keep looking, and be open to inspiration about a unique solution that might bubble up from the depths of your own subconscious unexpectedly. Once you start on the path to a solution, your mind will work below the surface, sparking your own creativity. You never know what insights may result. This will also tend to help you feel more hopeful, because you're doing something useful that could change your future. Education primes the pump, making new combinations of thoughts possible. It also saves you precious time and energy as you benefit from the triumphs and mistakes of others who have gone before.
To combine the two, let's imagine, for example, that your car is making a strange noise. You might ask a friend who is mechanically inclined what might be causing it (ask someone for help). You might then bring it to a mechanic for a professional diagnosis (hire someone). Once the shop makes a recommendation for service, and offers a price, you might check an online search engine for information about how much any recommended repairs usually run so you can tell whether the price you were given is fair (surf the Internet). Once the repair is completed, you might get a book from the library about how to maintain your car so you have fewer problems in the future (find helpful media). You'll then know what to look for in the future in order to notice what needs to be done to maintain your car (practicing awareness).
All of this contributes to your life experience in ways that will serve you indefinitely, even if it doesn't seem all that fun at the time. As your experience and knowledge grow, so does your confidence, not just with this subject matter, but with the process of learning and solving problems. The ability to notice issues and calmly follow the steps needed to unwind them, when honed, makes you nearly unstoppable. You also become more of a resource for others who may be in need of helpful information in the future, and that can be satisfying in its own way. As you head into this week, think about issues you have that would be helped by turning on your awareness or doing a little research. It can be pretty enjoyable to make progress on an issue that's been irritating you, and you may find that's it's not as hard to do as you thought.
Weaving Progress
“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.”
For most of us, the human experience is complicated; everyone I know has a love/hate relationship with life on this planet, in that we have things that we absolutely love to do, see, and enjoy…but we also have serious issues with some of the mechanics of how things and people here behave. It takes a lot of effort to just go about one’s daily routine and take care of the items necessary to stay alive, and it can be extremely challenging at times (if not all the time) to find the space and energy to work and play the way we’d like to. We’ve all had the experience of having things humming along in some semblance of balance, only to have several difficult things happen at once to break the rhythm and call us into a whole bunch of activity we weren’t expecting and didn’t want. Devices break down. People close to us have urgent needs, disappoint us, or even pass away. World events change the course of our lives in ways that are frustrating at best or catastrophic at worst. It’s a lot to balance, to say the least.
In order to carve out more of what makes all the effort seem worth it to you, there are things you can be doing along the way to make it easier to weather the next bout of challenge. While your attention is being taken up by handling a crisis, the best you’re probably going to be able to do is to practice what you’ve already begun to establish, so these are things to have an eye on when your life is not at its most demanding. They are worth working at as a long game, and let’s face it, if you’re alive, you’re never finished with these. All of the factors that make up your life continually change, and there will always be a new balance to create, but the more skill you can build in each area, the more grace you’ll be able to draw from when you’re called upon to dig deep. Here are the basic areas in which you might choose to focus in order to make progress when you have capacity:
Internal resources. This is the world of factors that are more within your control, and it encompasses the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual:
· The quality of the food you eat, the sleep you allow yourself, the exercise you get regularly
· How well you express and manage your emotions, including through the use of tools such as Tapping/EFT
· How well you manage the thoughts, relationships, and situations that give rise to those emotions
· Your mental habits and discipline, and practices like meditation or journaling in which you grow in your understanding of and ability to manage your mind
· Your general beliefs about yourself and the world
· Your spiritual beliefs and practices
External resources, and your ability to handle interacting with them while maintaining your own equilibrium. These are the factors that are not within your control:
· Basic physics, the intrinsic properties of the world around us
· The beliefs and actions of singular people
· The opportunities available to you at any given time, your positioning in relationship to others and the whole
· World events that are a product of mass movements—these by definition don’t start or end with one person
The areas in which you choose to grow will define your life in many ways. You might choose to focus on an area in which you feel least functional in order to limit the lows you will experience going forward in that area. You also might, as discussed in last week’s blog, focus on putting more energy into an area where you’re already skilled and passionate while finding ways to cooperate with others so that you don’t need to become expert in the areas that are hardest for you. When you read through the bullets above, which areas seem most appropriate for your next round of efforts? If you’ve read this far, you’re most likely someone who likes to keep improving yourself and your life, so giving this some thought will probably open up ideas about progress that would excite you and strengthen your ability to handle future challenge while maintaining better balance and more of a sense of ease.
Particularly if you’re someone who is sensitive to and aware of the people and events around you, I don’t think life as a human ever becomes easy. One of the things that can be counted on is that your life never turns out exactly the way you expected. And yet, this is part of what makes life thrilling—the element of surprise, the constant interweaving of an array of complex factors that promotes endless possibility. That will not change no matter how much we wish it to, so what can you do to appreciate the overall tapestry and the colors you’re weaving into the whole? What can you do to turn up your ability to savor your everyday experience of the process and the beauty it offers?
Welcome to So Much Happier!
“To expect the unexpected shows a thoroughly modern intellect.”
If you've been alive for more than a few years, you've probably noticed that this world is a messy place in which nothing ever goes quietly and obediently according to plan. If you want to do anything but trudge through life in a groove of endless repetition, you will be contending with the chaos of factors too numerous to count in an intimate, challenging, often frustrating tango. It's unavoidable. But how we dance is what makes us the people we are and determines our potential, who we can be. Do we practice our repertoire of steps with dedicated determination and call our creativity up from the depths to give birth to crafty new steps? Do we throw ourselves into the dance with our whole selves despite adversity and inevitable heartbreak? Do we remain committed to partnering the ephemeral when we've been dropped on the hard floor from a high, fast-spinning lift? Or do we let the pain ground us, turn off the spirit of fire within in order to live a life of greater comfort in which we feel vaguely lost and conflicted?
We retain the choice to attempt to live fully, zestfully, expressively, attempting to be the most ourselves we can in every moment; even if there are serious impediments holding us back, such as illness, limited resources, etc., we can still make this our intent. Or we can abdicate our effort, put our passion on the back burner, batten down the hatches, and let life just spin us as it will and try to endure. A lot of us end up in this survival mode a lot more often than we’d prefer. After all, life on planet Earth is challenging, and we all get overwhelmed at times. Most of us have been ill prepared for life as an adult in important ways, whether in important practical skills such as how to budget, pay bills in an organized fashion, cook, or clean, or in social skills like comfortably meeting new people, making small talk, communicating effectively, negotiating, and resolving disputes. There can be so much in the way of our smooth functioning in these everyday necessities that it feels like we can never be free to live a life that feels like it’s truly ours. But the case is never hopeless unless we decide that it is.
Your time on this planet is limited. Are you really living it? Are you making progress toward things that matter to you on a deep personal level? Even if it’s very slow progress, you still get credit here! If you’re not, are you willing to stay out on the floor and keep trying new steps until you find ways through or around impediments? Are you willing to exert effort to make your life into a better expression of your unique talents and potential?
If so, I’ll be offering you ideas, resources, and thoughts on your process here in this blog. But we’re in this together. I’ve been working for years on projects that have given me insights to share, but no one has all the answers. When we support each other with the best we have to offer, we can make leaps forward that we would never be able to achieve alone. To me, that’s the most exciting thing in the world. I want to help empower you to have more of what you want and be more of your best self so that you can go out and delight and empower others. When we all do that, that’s when life really becomes fun.
In his novel Still Life with Woodpecker, Tom Robbins writes that there are really only two mantras, “Yum” and “Yuck.” Will you affirm the “Yum” in life and in yourself enough to commit to harnessing your passion constructively? Will you live with death-defying courage even in the face of difficulty and confusion, knowing that this is the only way to stay open to the unfolding of a better life? Choose wisely today, and every day. You deserve to live a life of joy and gratitude. I look forward to sharing your journey, and supporting it in whatever way I can so that you can continue to discover more, be more, become more. Let’s do this.