So Much Happier Blog
How Did I Get Here?
“Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been, I have great faith in a seed... Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders.”
Now that winter is out and it’s officially spring, we’re almost a quarter of the way through 2019. It’s a good time to stop and take stock of how things are going for you compared to any goals you may have set for the year. Without periodic analysis, you may not make the necessary course corrections to keep yourself moving forward efficiently; however, the context for your progress and the messages you take away from your analysis are important, not just the accuracy of the analysis itself.
Yes, it’s helpful to be clear and honest with yourself about how far you have (or haven’t) come, but it’s also important to notice the reasons why you may have gotten off track so that you can learn from your experience and do something useful about it. For instance, did you overestimate how much you could add to your daily routine while still keeping up the maintenance on everything you already like about your life? Did you get completely stuck somewhere, which prevented you from making your expected progress? Did you decide to take another opportunity, or go in a slightly different direction, so that you made a different kind of progress? And will you choose to see these happenings as failures, or will you mine them for the value they may have to offer?
If you got overwhelmed, maybe you need to break your goals down into smaller steps and try to accomplish a little less every day so you can avoid burnout. If you got stuck and didn’t know how to break your logjam, what can you do to solve that? If you branched out in an unexpected direction, will you need to go back to what you skipped later, and if so, when will that make sense? Taking the time to notice what happened allows you to calibrate to your current reality so that you can make clear, efficient decisions grounded in facts rather than muddling through each day confusedly hoping that all this effort will somehow be worth it someday. Creative, mindful tinkering may lead to real results, but blind muddling generally will not!
No process ever unfolds without surprises. This truth can be both frustrating and invigorating, and sometimes both at once! It can seem desirable to plan and execute everything to perfection, and after all, planning is absolutely necessary to peak productivity; on the other hand, fighting the need to adjust and remain flexible will only drain your energy, because life on planet Earth requires it. Where billions of people are running around exercising free will, it will often be hard to predict exact timing and results no matter how skilled you are at planning! If you want to reach your goals, you need to build in time for reflection, honest measurement of your progress, and strategic adjustments.
One last observation I’ll lob at you: Many of us try to gear up and start the new calendar year with a bang, but according to Traditional Chinese Medicine and other traditions, winter is a time to replenish yin energy, sleep, rest, and dream your ideas into being—it’s not the best time for massive action, pushing yourself, and trying to force timing. If you’ve had trouble with New Year’s resolutions you made at the turn of the year, it may be because you were using the collective habit and energy of those around you to try to fire up some change when what you really needed was some rest and restoration. You might need to just slow down your process a bit, or you might need to allow yourself a break, some space to clear your mind and let your natural enthusiasm start to bubble up again. Now will be a better time to start new things, but again, realize that effecting change takes time and patience. It’s not all about willpower, or trying to force your ideas into being. It’s about working with and remaining open to body, emotions, and spirit as well as mind. Change lasts when you take the time to get all your parts on board with the plan and help them adjust.
Wherever you find yourself in relationship to your goals, you know what to do. Examine why you’re there and what you need to do next to address your position. And don’t forget to Tap on any emotions, thoughts, or beliefs that come up as you do, which will help you to clear out internal blocks to seeing a clear path forward. Happy spring!
Pushing the Eject Button On Fear
“There is just one thing that makes your dream become impossible: the fear of failure.”
As we finish the first week of 2019, you may be fully invested in New Year’s resolutions; you may be already resisting yours; or perhaps you didn’t make them at all. Whatever you choose to do around this tradition, I believe that the most important thing is always to pursue your goals in a steady flow of self-acceptance, calmly learning and readjusting all along the way. If this sounds “soft” or unlikely to produce, that’s because we’ve all been so indoctrinated with the idea that we’re inherently lazy that we may think we have to ratchet ourselves up into a state of mania in order to make any progress; that we have to constantly channel our inner drill sergeant if we’re going to motivate ourselves; that nothing but constant a$$ kicking will get the job done.
Sadly, for most people, this is a terrible idea, born of an extremely cynical view of human nature and thousands of years of raw fear seeming to be the best life preserver in a harsh world. From a purely evolutionary standpoint, this idea may have served us well, but as modern humans we suddenly find ourselves in the opposite of our traditional state—rather than fighting the elements to survive on a daily basis, we now inhabit an overpopulated planet on which the most valuable skills are intellectual and social—the more able we are to learn quickly as technology changes, and to negotiate and de-escalate violence in favor of fair long-term solutions, the more equipped we are for life in today’s world. It turns out that turning harshness and shame on anyone, including ourselves, tends to foment anger and resentment. Inspiration and genuine excitement about creating a better future are exponentially more powerful as an engine for getting us up and going each day, and for moving us through blocks and setbacks that will arise in the course of any project; they also tend to naturally motivate others around us in positive ways without any additional effort, because enthusiasm is infectious!
One of the reasons people tend to resist working with specific goals is that they don’t feel up to dealing with disappointment—which, by the way, will be a part of any process. Sorry, but that’s life on this chaotic planet! Unfortunately, many of us learn from observing adults around us when we’re young that disappointment=impending failure and doom, and it means that we’re stupid/cursed/incapable, or whatever other counterproductive adjective may have been on the menu. The truth is that disappointment may come and go, but it doesn’t have to mean anything except that you’re still learning about how to succeed. Handling negative emotions as they arise, and moving on when you’ve absorbed the helpful message in the feedback you’ve received (and had a chance to rest and renew), is the name of the game. Anytime you take an underwhelming result as a referendum on who you are or what’s possible for you is when you begin a downward spiral that will cost you a lot of time and pain. Falling back into fear and harshness as a hard-wired self-preservation habit is understandable, since throughout so much of human history we didn’t have a lot of time or mental and emotional space in which to consider and practice the best ways to do things. Now, though, we have a lot more access to the higher mind, and we can choose to come off autopilot by noticing our self-talk, and how we’re feeling as we go about our days. Shining a light on our own patterns and being willing to address the ones that don’t serve us through Tapping or some other method that accelerates change will allow us to grow far more quickly and easily in the directions we choose for ourselves.
Whether you’ve made specific resolutions or not, remember that it’s rare for any project to speed forward to the finish line without impediments. One of the most valuable skill sets you can ever acquire is the discernment to note challenging emotions and the patience to follow a process that will resolve them, help you build experiential knowledge, and get yourself moving again. This skill set renders you basically unstoppable! On the other hand, if you don’t build it, you’ll keep repeating the same patterns over and over without understanding why you can’t ever seem to get out of a confusing loop you can’t even see. It sure can seem like there’s just something wrong with you if this is where you are, but that’s not it. You’re in the groove of some pretty ancient wiring that needs attention and replacement. It may not happen overnight, but you can change the way you operate and break out of the old, constrictive ruts. When you do, you’ll see the tendency to rail at yourself for your imperfections for what it is—an old, outdated habit that you can replace with far more effective and happiness-inducing mental software.
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!
Tempus Fugit
“Lost time is never found again.”
We’re two weeks into 2017, and right about now it starts to become difficult for many people to see how they’ll keep up new habits inspired by the turning of the new year. Some people never got around to taking action this time around at all. Others may be feeling the difficulties of making change and the sacrifices it often requires. Often times we decide to make time for these endeavors, only to find that life has a persistent way of “happening” during those very free times we expected to utilize. Our rhythm may get interrupted, our commitment may start to waver, and those shining visions we had of the future may seem to recede farther into the distance with every step so that they seem like they were only ever a fantasy. Then, the negative thoughts come out to play, suggesting that we’ll never get anywhere, and who are we to have thought we could in the first place?
If some version of this is happening to you, congratulations—you’re human! Really making change happen is difficult, messy, and often time consuming well beyond our expectations and hopes. The world around us feeds us stories of “overnight” successes without acknowledging that most of these successful people actually put in a great deal of effort of some kind before they ever achieved any accolades or grand opportunities. Learning and growing in meaningful ways, building new skills and habits, requires long-term application of focus, creativity, and persistence. All of these take practice to wield consistently, but one of the biggest challenges you will face in the modern world is the scarcity of available time; not that this has been absent at any time in history, because time is one the one commodity that it’s tough to make more of, but the pace of life now is arguably more hectic than in times past. We live longer, but we also work more hours, and for more years, than ever before, while the notion of success has continually expanded to cover more ground.
Time management is therefore a key skill, and unfortunately one that we are not formally taught during our formative years in most schools. It’s something we’re usually left to figure out for ourselves—or not. Unless you’re naturally talented in this area, you may find that you never have a clear sense of how much you can realistically accomplish on any given day, nor how best to organize your tasks to get where you’d like to go. You may find that you always seem to be running, but without actually getting anywhere. If you never take the time to step back and think through new strategies suited for your unique needs, you may find yourself living in frustration, self-recrimination, and despair that things can ever be better. It’s easy to decide that everyone else knows things we don’t, or was born with skills we lack, but the truth is that most people have to work to gain these skills. Below are some suggestions for increasing your time management competence. This is one of the leverage points that almost any satisfying life must incorporate in order to run smoothly. Doing this work may not seem fun, but so much more becomes possible when your time management skills improve that it’s well worth putting effort here consistently until you’re more proficient.
· If you’re someone who tends to lose track of time, and find that something you thought would take an hour often ends up taking you three, you may need to consciously become more of a clock watcher for a while, or maybe always. As you work on a task, try keeping a clock in view and check it often. Make it a game to try and guess how much time has passed since the last time you looked. Keep this casual and light. If you play this game consistently, you may find that you become more attuned to the passage of time.
· You can also try setting alarms for certain periods of time so that you have warnings when you’re a quarter of the way into the amount of time you’ve allotted to a task, then halfway, then three quarters, so that you can continually measure where you are. The point is not to stress yourself out with hard interruptions, but to have a chance to speed up, slow down, or make new decisions about how to work.
· For example, if you’re halfway through the time you have, and nowhere near completing your task, you may need to stop, admit that your goal was unrealistic at this time, and either accept a lesser goal for the day or allot more time to continue your efforts.
· Note that people tend to be more naturally productive at different times of day. If you know that you’re a morning person, plan your most difficult tasks to be done first thing. If you tend to come alive in the evening, plan your productive time to take place then. Start to take note of when your high-energy times of day seem to be. There may be times when you need to work outside of these, but acknowledge that you will be less efficient in that case.
· After you become more adept at knowing how much time it takes for you to complete certain kinds of tasks at various times of day, you can begin to do a better job of planning your life. (The previous steps are necessary before this becomes plausible.) When you can plan realistically, you can steer your life with greater effectiveness and satisfaction.
· Once you are in a position to plan well, it’s time to start thinking about how to consolidate your movements so that you waste less time and effort. What would you like to get done today and how much time will each task take? Is there a way that you could accomplish two or more at once, or nearly so, by doing them in tandem? Is there a way that you can walk across the room only once, doing something on the way and something on the way back, rather than making a separate trip for each task? Planning can make a huge difference in how much time you seem to have and what you can accomplish. Again, challenge yourself to be creative about this, but treat it like a game. If you make it fun, your creativity is more likely to come to your aid with less effort and more consistency.
· Always plan a little “uh-oh” time into a task for things that will come up and surprise you—at least an added 10% of the time you were already planning. For example, if you’re doing errands, you may at some point be slowed down by road construction. If you build in a buffer, normal curveballs like this won’t frustrate you out nearly as much, and you’ll be much more likely to stay on track with your overall schedule.
· When you decide to make an important change to your life, you must talk seriously with those close to you about it. Communicate what you’re doing and why, and ask for their support. Be clear that the time you set aside for this new effort is essential to your making the change happen. If they respect and support your goal, there will be times when you might have faltered, but their support can help you use your time and keep up the effort necessary to keep growing.
· In turn, respect the time that others need in order to pursue their important goals. Support your loved ones in carving out and protecting that time.
· Occasionally emergencies happen. When they do, take care of them, and then get back to your important goals. Moving forward toward our dreams and goals is part of what makes us feel that we’re truly alive, so don’t allow surprises to permanently knock you off course.
· If all of this is particularly hard for you, consider hiring a teacher or coach to help you increase your skills.
You deserve to be living the kind of life that can be yours through efficient planning and time management. Resist hasty conclusions that you’re not capable of having what you want, and notice the ways in which you just need to build your skills in order to waste less time and effort. In later blogs, we’ll look at other ways to keep moving forward, but don’t ignore these fundamental skills.
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.
Year in Review
“Everyone has a plan ‘till they get punched in the mouth.”
Despite the fact that this month is a whirlwind for many people, most of us are still managing to find odd moments to judge ourselves against the hopes and goals we had for ourselves in 2016. We may feel good about our achievements, but we’re also quite likely to be dealing with disappointment about where we may have missed out on things we wanted very much. No matter how good life is, some part of us is aware of the ways in which things could be better, and it prowls the corners of the mind resenting this gap and grumbling about the injustice of it.
Perhaps now is a good time to actually tune into that voice and see what it has to say. Periodically assessing where you are is an important part of continually moving forward, and the voice of discontent can be valuable. Taking a few quiet moments to write down how 2016 went for you personally can help orient you as you naturally begin to think about the approach of 2017. Much of this past year, you were likely doing the best you could. If you weren’t, the constructive thing is not to berate yourself, but to gain understanding about why. Ask yourself: Where do you feel you got stuck this year? What are you disappointed and frustrated about that maybe you’ve been avoiding admitting? Stuffing down these feelings won’t help you resolve anything emotionally, and it also won’t support your learning and growth going forward. What would you do over if you could and why? How would you like to be able to handle a situation like this in the future if it comes up again? And what skills will you need to work on in order to become the kind of person who can easily handle it that way?
Doing this before you get drawn into the annual storm of New Year’s resolutions peer pressure will reveal the desires that are most important to you. If you must resolve to change something, let it be supportive of your movement toward the goals that are authentic to you. If you are having trouble figuring out why something is so hard for you, it might be time to call in an expert or a trusted friend for a perspective check. You might need to get a little creative about working with your subconscious to clear out problems that have been dogging you (Tapping, NLP, and hypnosis are great ways to address this kind of issue, and there are plenty of others.) Even though recurring patterns can be extremely galling, know that you can make progress on these if you are willing to keep working on them and trying things until you find something that works for you. Everyone gets exhausted sometimes. When you do, it’s ok to step back, renew yourself, and then get back to it.
So, give yourself a break already. Nothing in life ever goes exactly according to plan. That’s the nature of the human experience. Enjoy any holidays you celebrate this month with zest, and celebrate what went right for you this year with every fiber of your being. In fact, that would be a helpful resolution for 2017—I will celebrate everything that goes right! I will acknowledge something that brought me joy at the end of every day, and celebrate the happiness of others as well! If you acknowledge where you are discontent, and then keeping moving back toward focus on what’s working, it will be easier to keep yourself feeling happy and enthusiastic throughout the new year. If you can do that, all your hopes and dreams become more possible.