So Much Happier Blog
Fairness and Justice: Moving Targets
“At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst.”
Another logical pairing of Maslowe’s preconditions to the pursuit of our human needs is that of fairness and justice. As with the other preconditions, if these are lacking in your world, it’s hard to focus on being your best self, so we’ll think through them a bit this week. They're similar concepts that I think are often differentiated by the question of degree; many people think of fairness as a nice idea that is rarely realized; you’ve probably heard someone tell a child at some point, “Life isn’t fair, so stop whining and walk it off,” or something similar. This imperative acknowledges the difficulties of achieving fairness, as well as, arguably, an insensitivity on the part of the speaker to the child’s feelings and an unwillingness to explain the matter further!
In the ideal, fairness would be an expression of equality in which two human beings are treated identically no matter what their various qualities and differences might be. In reality, it’s easy to see how it would be nearly impossible to treat every person in exactly the same manner, and not even appropriate to do so. For instance, should we allow a five-year-old to drive a car because older people are allowed to? Well, no—that’s an obviously terrible idea, but then the question becomes, which qualities create equality between human beings such that they should be treated identically, and that’s a complex question. The response to this difficulty is met with a variety of approaches across cultures, as the determination of who can be considered similar to whom will be based on local values. Fairness is a word that we often use around subjects that are not fraught with the kind of danger and importance to which we apply the word justice. The word brings to mind two people attempting to decide on what kind of fence to build between their properties, or the way a middle school teacher grades papers, rather than decisions that affect the course of history. We seem to apply it to situations that are not gross violations, but debatable conundrums. It’s a concept that any given group probably decides and polices in a less structured way because of its lower stakes, and the more a group shares similar values, the easier it will be for its members to negotiate solutions that seem fair across the board in any given instance.
Justice, on the other hand, is a term generally used for the formal rule system communicated through a region’s laws and judicial system. Those rules apply across all people who live within the borders of that region, no matter what their cultural influences. Laws are common agreements that sum up the group’s best thinking about how its members should behave. There will always be rules that individual members disagree with, but they govern anyway so that there can be certainty about expectations. There are many wonderful novels that explore visions of utopian living, and the more interesting ones show us the impossibility of creating conditions that will be perfect for everyone. The most we can expect is that our region’s rules will leave us mostly free to act as we prefer. Justice can also refer to the perceived “rightness” of an action or outcome. A region’s laws will take ideals of rightness into account, but they are, again, subjective. Today’s justice is tomorrow’s injustice. In today’s world, where so much information is easily shared, the best practices of many regions of the world are out there to be utilized and to inform local choices. A wider range of options can be considered for the best fit in a local system. New ideas spur more rapid change and more detailed refinements.
The justice meted out by a region’s judicial system, guided by clear written rules of law, lets us know that the culture will not stand for lack of equity on a grander scale, and makes it worthwhile for all to pay attention. Unlike fairness, this should make justice, at least in theory, harder than fairness to ignore or interpret. Of course, enormous amounts of time and money are still spent each year in the arguing of cases and how the written laws apply to each one! The proliferation of legal dramas on television attests to the spellbinding variety of ways in which many laws can be understood and argued. While a societal group holds sway over the rules of justice in that in can contribute to the process of changing laws over time, there are times when it does not seem that justice (as in the right result from a moral perspective) has been served in the moment because an antiquated law is still on the books, or a situation arises with new factors that haven’t been considered before. Not to mention a loophole having been exploited or a judge or jury proving to have an obvious bias. And yet, despite inevitable ambiguities, developed nations still make strong efforts to define legal rules so that clear lines of consequence can be obvious to citizens. When everyone knows what’s allowable and what isn’t, each can make his own choice about his actions, and understand the likely outcomes. Each can also understand her agreement or disharmony with the larger group, which can help her to understand her place in this region and whether she is willing to stay there. The alternative to having set rules would be chaos, which is not conducive to the health and happiness of most people; if chaos reigns, safety concerns draw us away from anything more rewarding that could be achieved in an environment of general stability.
Having a well-defined and well-communicated set of rules also accomplishes a few other things, including helping to map out ways to address what has happened in a given incident (and its aftermath), and how best to move forward following that incident for the safety of all:
· It helps people to decide whether those rules are effectively creating what they think of as justice from a moral perspective. It’s normal for values to shift over time. As they do, those people governed by a particular set of laws can decide separately or as a group that the rules should change to reflect new values, and band together in order to create the change they see as necessary
· Those who run afoul of the rules are punished in some way, which may deter others from risking taking the same kinds of actions. Without consequences, more individuals might dare to flout the rules and cause havoc in a previously orderly system
· The feelings of outrage of victims or other observers at the lawbreaker’s behavior may be satisfied by recompense of some sort being required. This may restore a sense of fairness being upheld in the group; this is an emotional and moral consideration regarding balancing out the scales regarding a former incident
· The public may be kept safer from those who are imprisoned or lose privileges because of unlawful behavior. This is a functional, purely mechanical consideration about doing the best thing going forward from a problematic incident
As for the interplay between the two concepts, if fairness is not a common concept or value in a particular region, it’s also less likely that this region’s judicial system will treat all citizens equitably. For instance, if racial or religious biases are rampant, there may be an unwritten agreement by the majority that all people deserve equal treatment except those in one of the groups that is out of favor, which implies that fairness is not a strong principle here; if women are considered to be less valuable than men, say, there may be entirely different laws in place covering their actions and rights. Even in the United States right now, which likes to pride itself on being a free and modern nation, we still see vestiges of old ideas about women’s place in society played out in the fact that on average, women still earn about 21% less than men who do the same exact job. There’s currently a lot of work being done in the corporate world on changing this stubborn fact, but old ways of thinking and behaving die hard, and for centuries it was completely in vogue to think of women as separate and unequal to men—a completely different commodity with much different value in dollars and cents. “Fairness” that applied among men didn’t apply to women, and that was considered to be obvious and only right. The idea of fairness that many cultures are striving toward now includes similar rules applying to both men and women, though some may vary based on obvious differences. But, of course, there will always be room for confusion as our understanding of differences changes; for example, women are now allowed to serve in the U.S. military, but their progress in having opportunities for career advancement has been slow, and in the event of a draft, women are not included because they are still considered to be fundamentally less suited to combat, and positions that support it, than men. I imagine that, to some modern men in the military, that might be seen as unfair! So even if fairness is a common value, the complexities of life and the progress of ideas mean that it still may not be applied equitably.
Both fairness and justice are imprecise, complicated concepts that will always be imperfectly expressed, but an attempt at them supports societal agreement, conflict resolution, and safety. They help to create a framework in which we can expect to operate as we go about our pursuit of happiness, hopefully with something of a sense of clarity. They support order in the group, another precondition that we looked at last week, and lay out a code of conduct to which we must adhere if we want to remain at liberty. They also give us recourse if someone else is violating our stated rights, which can also contribute to our feelings of safety and stability. Anyone who has been on the wrong side of unfairness knows that it’s not an enjoyable experience. It’s confusing and frustrating, and it can be hard to understand how to avoid it in the future, which can be a real blow to confidence. Anyone who has experienced injustice knows that it can be heartbreaking and incredibly disruptive to one’s life. Structures and customs that help us to avoid these results help to create an environment in which people can thrive. Feeling that you have choices regarding how you relate to issues of fairness and justice is empowering. Consider, then:
· Do you make an effort to treat others fairly?
· Do you include what you know to be local understandings of fairness or moral justice in your consideration of possible actions, or only your own preferences?
· Do you respond thoughtfully to feedback you receive from others about their perceptions of your fairness?
· Do you explain why you make choices to others who will be affected by those decisions, or better yet, involve them in the decision-making process?
· If there are laws where you live that you don’t agree with, do you comply with them? Do you make an effort to change them?
· How do you regard those in a position of trying to uphold your region’s laws?
· Do you ever advocate for fewer or no rules? If so, have you thought through how it would feel to have no recourse against others in those areas?
Are there issues in how you relate to these concepts that you could benefit from thinking through further? Feel free to comment below about anything you realized as you read this post.
The Safe, Happy Place
“The principle of self defense, even involving weapons and bloodshed, has never been condemned, even by Gandhi.”
Two more of Maslowe’s noted preconditions for the effective satisfaction of all our basic needs, which seem to be the most clearly associated with safety, are “the freedom to defend oneself” and “orderliness in the group.” Both of these particular preconditions are of such immediate importance to our ability to meet our safety needs that they are very difficult to ignore. If they are not in a favorable state in a culture, we will likely find it difficult to attend to anything else but our concerns about safety. And a life lived around safety concerns will not be a satisfying one for the vast majority of people. Hopefully you don’t live in a place where you lack the ability to defend yourself and experience basic societal orderliness, but even so it’s worth understanding the ways in which people will react when these preconditions are not in place.
Many countries have laws that allow the use of force for purposes of self-defense. Since the drive for self-preservation is so basic, we aren’t expected to override it even though violence in other situations is generally not condoned; we often automatically consider that the aggressor was likely at fault, as he most likely had other options for addressing the situation, but chose to attack. If for some reason the use of force in self-defense is not considered allowable by a culture, citizens will tend to live in fear and either disempowerment (which denies both the person himself and the culture access to the best he can be and produce) or rebellion (which turns all the power the individual can muster against the culture itself). Neither is very conducive to the happiness of the individual or of the whole in the long run. As an acknowledgment of the individual’s right to defend themselves, in the United States, for instance, there is a constitutional right to bear arms. The founding fathers of this nation were adamant that citizens must be able to protect themselves from both each other and any other threatening force, including their own government’s forces, and the forces of other nations. In today’s far more populous world, and with advances in technology, we now have problems with violence that they could not have foreseen, but the fact remains that the freedom to defend ourselves is very important to both our physical and psychological well-being.
Because our needs for safety are intense, some of the most impassioned debates in any culture will center on the methodologies that are used, allowed, and disallowed in creating and maintaining safety. Even when it’s not immediately clear how, the loudest arguments usually point back to participants’ fears about safety issues. It can be helpful to remember this when you run across strangers acting out. It can help you in taking others’ actions less personally and remaining centered in the face of others’ drama, which allows you full access to all of your resources to keep yourself safe. Similarly, when you notice someone in your life arguing adamantly or disproportionately about something that seems less important to you, chances are that he is connecting the discussion to an immediate or future loss of safety. If you’re interested in aiding in resolutions, and you care about this person, it can be helpful to focus on finding out what he’s really afraid of and addressing it more directly. This may not be an easy task, which is often part of why we don’t take the time to do it. In today’s world, where many of us are almost constantly dealing with an overactive fight-or-flight response for a variety of reasons, finding the root causes of fears and stress can be a complicated process. This is where professional help may be in order, as well as the use of tools that can help dial down stress, such as Emotional Freedom Techniques. Another reason we may not be willing to invest the time and energy necessary to this kind of process is that it may be uncomfortable to be in the presence of this person’s heightened emotions, and those that may be triggered in us as a result.
Unfortunately, most cultures are profoundly uncomfortable with emotional expression and inquiry. So often, we are given the message from the time we’re children that it’s unacceptable to display or even feel emotions. We learn to ignore and repress our feelings, and as a result, we learn little to no facility with handling our own and others’ emotions. We fear anything that looks like emotions or emotional expression as potentially overwhelming. And we remain stunted and confused about a huge, and totally valid and useful, component of human life. This is not serving us.
Moving on to orderliness in a group: This precondition is created through agreement on the ground rules that members of a society will follow, whether formal or unwritten. These rules may be created all at once, or evolve over time, but they must be upheld through stable structures like judicial systems in order to govern. They also need to be able to be updated in response to cultural changes, which are inevitable. If there is no mechanism for changing them, they are doomed, as humans naturally evolve over time. When a sufficient number of members does not agree and follow those rules, and they cannot be changed effectively, chaos in some degree is in store. And when chaos rules, again, the highest potential of members and of the whole group will go out the window. All will feel unsafe. Some members of the group will most likely react to the lack of order by hiding and others by resorting to violence. Smaller groups will band together and may fight each other. Safety will need to be an individual focus until some semblance of order is re-established. No matter how creative and adaptable someone is, when a no-rules culture is in play, that person will likely long for some societal structure and agreement, particularly if he has experienced it before. Humans are inherently social, and most of us desire some semblance of peaceful, constuctive interaction.
Since all of the preconditions are created or challenged in the culture in which an individual finds herself, she cannot likely single-handedly change them; she must therefore find ways to work with them as they are, become part of a movement to shift the current conditions, or physically move to another place with different conditions. If you find yourself in conditions where these preconditions are not stable, you have a difficult choice to make. Will you do your best to pursue happiness from within these challenges? Will you commit yourself to the difficulties of trying to change them from within the system? Or will you make an effort to transplant yourself into entirely new place? If you’re lucky, and you live in a place where the governing rules are clear, universally applied, and mostly reasonable, you may find that you take this for granted, as well as the right to defend yourself physically from threats. It’s easy to forget just how much such conditions support us in moving up the hierarchy of needs into areas more satisfying than safety needs. You may also forget that even when these preconditions around you are mostly favorable, it’s still possible to run up against a circumstance, whether real or imagined, that will snap you back to fear—and that experience can pack a wallop when you’ve become accustomed to safety.
The next time you do find yourself reacting fearfully, try asking yourself what you’re really afraid of, and do your best to address what you find. After all, the quality of your life depends on your ability to handle your safety needs and move on to more fulfilling subjects. Your emotions often have important messages for you about changes you need to consider making. Keep an eye out for the ways in which you may overreact when you feel (not always consciously or correctly) that your safety is on the line, look for root issues, and look for ways to change your tendency in the direction of calmer responses. Be open to noticing the ways in which those close to you may overreact similarly, and consider how you can help them to feel more safe and attended to, as well as to understand their own fears. Get help with all of this if and when you need it. Of course there are times when you’ll need to take real action on real safety issues, but much of the time you may find that focusing on getting specific about what’s bothering you and working on being a better communicator can help to calm your fears. Becoming more comfortable with admitting that you have emotions, and owning up to what they are, is also well worth the effort, as it can release a lot of internal pressure and conflict.
It’s natural for us all to crave physical safety and feel that there’s order to our world. Becoming aware of what’s lacking in these areas and addressing those things can make a huge difference in our enjoyment of life and our ability to spend time in fulfilling ways.
Money, Honey!
“The lack of money is the root of all evil.”
Continuing to follow along with Maslowe’s concept about the needs we must take care of before we can really thrive as a total human being, in this week’s blog, we’ll take a look at another aspect of security: Your ability to make enough money to support yourself and your family. We’re not talking here about your ability to live the most abundant life possible, as that will be for a later post. This one will be about how to create the feeling that you can always handle your basic financial needs.
Your feelings about making money, saving money, and spending money are shaped most profoundly by what you were taught experientially by your family. If you saw your parents and other family members struggling to make and have enough money, then you most likely learned that making money is hard, and that not having enough is something to be feared. If you watched their fortunes go up and down, you probably came away from that experience feeling that money is fickle, and one can as easily lose it as gain it. If you were often told that your family couldn’t afford the things you wanted, then you may have learned to resent money as a concept altogether. I’m sure you can see that these attitudes that so many of us learn about money are not at all helpful in our quest to feel safe and secure enough to pursue the life goals that most excite us.
With these attitudes in tow, we are far more likely to talk ourselves out of taking even small risks in moving toward our goals. We will tend to move through life with a sense of fear and pessimism about our possible monetary outcomes. We are likely to feel that we’re not equal to the task of providing for ourselves and those we love during changing times. All of this will sap our energy and enthusiasm for life in ways it’s hard to fully comprehend until we’re able to finally find ways to transform these beliefs and attitudes.
As far as monetary skills, some of us are lucky enough to have been taught some of these at home. If you did learn some basics about balancing a checkbook or budgeting, for instance, then you may have built some confidence around your ability to handle money. If you were allowed to participate in discussions about financial decisions, then you probably built more there. Those of us who were very fortunate may have learned about investing, or how to run a business. It’s also possible that you learned some things at school that were relevant to finance. You may have had classes in junior high or high school that touched on the basics of earning and using money. You may have elected to take classes in college about business and finance. All of these create advantages that help us to feel competent in the financial arena of life. Unfortunately, many of us come through our schooling with little to no practical learning about financial matters such that we lack confidence and a sense of literacy in this extremely important area. If you didn’t learn these early, you may still be struggling to learn them now, but there are resources available to help you at every turn if you are willing to look and learn from them. It’s not hopeless, even if you’re not where you want to be!
Once we enter the workforce, we start learning through trial by fire if we’re still relatively clueless at that point. Now we are responsible for earning money and paying our expenses. We’re likely motivated by both needs and desires to make ends meet. We start gaining valuable on-the-job skills, and realizing that some of the things we picked up along the way, like social and communication skills, have very real practical value on the job. If we’re willing to continue learning and stay flexible, we can often parlay our gains in experience into better job opportunities or entrepreneurial ventures. If we stop learning or aren’t assertive in looking for expanding opportunities, for whatever reason, then we’re not building the confidence in our ability to earn that would help us to create the important sense of security we’re after.
Another way to build confidence in your ability to support yourself is through life experiences in areas not related to income. Say you encounter a health challenge and are able to make lifestyle and attitude changes to help you in regaining vibrancy as you follow a recommended course of treatment. Rising to the occasion has taught you that you have power within the circumstances that present themselves in your life; you have the ability to roll with the punches and come out better than before, with new knowledge, skills, and belief in yourself. Or say you have a serious issue in a relationship with someone close to you, and you confront it and take action to improve the relationship. While the skills you learned in doing so may not seem immediately relative to your income, you will often gain faith in your ability to handle whatever comes to you in the future. And you may also find that those skills will eventually help you in your moneymaking ventures down the line. Things that you are particularly good at in life have a way of making themselves useful in surprising ways.
The world we live in has changed so much, and so rapidly, that many of us were never formally prepared for the kind of economy in which we now must function. It wasn’t long ago that the norm was for a worker to spend 30 or more years working at the same company and retiring with a financial package designed to keep him going for the rest of his life. Now the norm for a similar worker is to move to a different job, and often workplace, every few years. She is now responsible for her own retirement income. We are at a distinct disadvantage if we’re not good at negotiating and selling ourselves and our talents, or if we’re afraid to try new things and branch out into different kinds of work. Things move quickly in this economy, and sometimes it’s necessary to regroup and take an opportunity that’s being offered even if it’s not what you were looking for. It’s possible to leverage every step you make into more of what you want, but sometimes patience is required.
If you want to feel a sense of security that will free you, here are the items I recommend considering:
- Take stock of your financial skills. Do you know how to budget, balance a checkbook, organize your yearly information to get your taxes filed? If not, spend some time on basic financial literacy. These skills are essential to feeling secure around money.
- Learn about the basics of investing. What are some of the kinds of investments available? It can be very helpful to ask people you know about what investment ideas they’ve come across and chosen to use. Obviously, it’s better to ask people who seem like they’re doing relatively well financially! You may not put this research to use right away, but the more comfortable you become with investing concepts, the more easily you will be able to make good choices when it’s time.
- Regularly take stock of your marketable skills and update your resume. Often we don’t give ourselves credit for the skills we’re constantly learning in the course of life and work.
- Think about skills you have that you might not normally include on a resume, but that help you to remember that you can be flexible, and that you have learned and grown all throughout your life. If you don’t like trying new things, find ways to stretch outside your comfort zone, and make an effort to enjoy the thrill of the novelty.
- Have the courage to examine the beliefs you were taught about money and your ability to have enough. Find a process you can follow to transform any that are clearly not helpful. Often this process yields tremendous gains in your confidence and ability to excel going forward! My favorite way to address this is through Tapping, which can help you to quickly gain clarity and improve your money-related beliefs, but there are many possible paths to the same result. Find one that appeals to you and do this essential work.
I hope this post has given you a few things to think about as you work toward creating a sense of confidence in your financial safety and security. Until next time, I wish you and your family all monetary happiness!
There's No Place Like Home, Part II
“The ache for home lives in all of us. The safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.”
In the last blog, we examined the importance of your feelings of safety from the outside world while you're at home. This week, we'll talk about maintaining a safe, secure environment inside the home, which is just as vital to your health and happiness for all the same reasons. There are two aspects of safety we’ll touch on, both physical and emotional safety; both need attention if we are to feel that we are truly free to reach confidently for the things we most desire out of life.
When we're spending time in at home, in the space that's supposed to be just for us, we deserve to feel supported, loved, understood, and protected. We live in environments that we ourselves have created in our imperfect image—we are constantly confronted with the choices that have made it what it is; we've made these choices over time, sometimes without even realizing that we're doing it. The countless small decisions of the past add up to an effect that we feel every time we open the door. Let’s take a few moments to consider what you’ve established and whether you feel good about it. For instance, do you feel comfortable with how being at home generally feels to you? With the way you spend your time there? With the others who populate the world of your home? If not, you have the power to modify the conditions inside your home to improve your comfort and safety.
The louder of the two aspects of safety is the physical—if you feel like your safety is in jeopardy because someone close to you is violent and may potentially harm you physically, this will tend to be very obvious to you, very upsetting and hard to ignore. That’s as it should be! Someone who can’t even treat you with the respect required to refrain from hurting you outwardly does not belong anyone near you. Unfortunately, there are many reasons why we sometimes put up with behavior from others that is completely inappropriate. Those may include that this person is a family member, and we can’t just choose not to be related to them anymore (it can seem unthinkable to cut someone out of your life who has been such a long-standing part of your life.) It may be that we love and care for this person, even feel that we understand them, and so we wish to be a loving influence in their lives. It may be that we fear change and are afraid to be alone. Whatever the reason you might give, there is a lot of great information out there in the world on dealing with abusive relationships, and while I certainly hope that you’re not a part of anything that looks like this, if you are, there is help for you. I encourage you to go find it. No one should have to live in fear for their physical safety.
On a slightly different note, it is also possible to feel physically threatened by a pet that lives with you. Sometimes it’s necessary to be honest with yourself and admit that a pet that seemed like a good idea at one time is not conducive to your happiness and safety any longer. This can be very difficult for some of the same reasons as described above regarding threatening people. Our pets are family to many of us, and recognizing that a relationship with one isn’t healthy and taking action to correct the situation can be extremely painful. However, it may be easier to change/”train” a pet than a human, so if this is your issue, you may want to look into getting professional help with the animal’s behavior. You’ll still need to be ready to make a new choice if the relationship feels threatening after your best efforts. Your safety, again, should come first.
In order to create an environment that really feels safe and secure from the inside, we must also consider the emotional quality of our relationships with people, as they are at the core of our home's overall effect on us. If you feel that those who figure importantly in your time at home are likely to attack you, your choices, your character, you are not going to be able to enjoy the sense of harmony from which you can be at your best, see clearly, have good ideas, and live a high-functioning life.
· Most importantly, who gets to live in your personal space with you? As anyone who has ever had a bad, or even just incompatible, roommate knows, this affects so many areas of daily life. If someone in our space is at cross purposes with us, it can seem like the whole world is opposing our every move! On the other hand, if you enjoy the people you live with, you get to experience a sense that life is more fun because you’re not alone; you get to feel that others are looking out for you and the home base you share. Ideally, those you live with love and support you in such a way that you feel seen and accepted for who you are when you're around them. If this in not what you generally feel at home, you are dealing with unnecessary stress and dissonance, and you can improve your happiness dramatically by giving some thought to the situation and taking appropriate corrective action.
· Who visits regularly? Who else you allow into your space with regularity also has a lot of bearing on how you will feel at home. If you’re allowing people into your personal space who don’t seem to be on your side, people who are judgmental, selfish, or overly demanding, you will begin to feel that you cannot relax even at home. It will be hard to rest and enjoy downtime there. Again, you are inviting stress into your experience that could be eliminated through the establishment of some better rules about how you use your home.
· Who calls your home number and expects you to pick up the phone? You train others to expect your time and attention by demonstrating when you’re available to them, as well as, in this case, giving out your digits in the first place. If you’re in the habit of giving away all your time and energy to others over the phone when you’re at home, this is another way in which you may be creating a home environment that doesn’t feel safe, calm, and supportive to you. While I’m not suggesting that you should act like a hermit and refuse to talk to anyone once you’re home, I do think it’s important to make sure you get some time to yourself regularly that’s free of unwelcome demands. You decide what time you will give to your community of friends and family, and must make sure you communicate what time is off limits.
· Who has a key and can let themselves in? This level of trust belongs only with those you know you can trust no matter what, and it pays to be very selective on this count.
If a relationship with a family member or other roommate is not supportive to you, and you want to restore your feelings of safety, you'll need to find a way to communicate your experience and ask for changes. This is an area in which we tend to be woefully uneducated, and the idea of confronting others about what’s not working can be frightening because we’re not confident that we can lead the situation to a helpful resolution. There are many excellent books available on building your communication skills, and I highly recommend that you make it a priority to brush up on them if you ever have trouble talking to people in your life about important subjects—and who doesn’t, really? One of the books I like to recommend is Crucial Conversations, by Patterson, Grenny, McMillan, and Switzler, because it deals specifically with isolating the bad habits we usually fall into when attempting to communicate important content and finding ways to break out of them. I think that communication skills are a critic necessity for living a happy life, and I encourage you to consider yourself a lifelong learner here. Being able to accurately and confidently express yourself makes it possible to achieve so much more in your life. You deserve to be able to handle whatever comes up with other people in the most constructive way possible.
Beyond verbal discussion, there may come a time when you need to set some boundaries and enforce them in order to create a sense of lasting safety for yourself. Again, many of us have not been trained in confidently discerning and putting into place the boundaries we need. If you are in a situation that feels bad to you, particularly at home, and you don’t see a way to resolve it, you’ll need to find an advisor to help you find a way through. A smart, balanced friend or family member or a professional counselor of some kind can help you to see the situation more clearly and find the course of action that is most appropriate for you.
Taking some time to review how safe you feel at home, both physically and emotionally, is extremely important to the overall quality of your life. It’s very difficult to be your best self if you don’t feel that you have a place to be in your downtime that is basically supportive and peaceful for you. Please allow yourself to really consider this and see if anything stands out to you as needing your attention. Confronting these issues can be most uncomfortable, but is well worth it in the long run. Proving to yourself that you can improve this aspect of your life will improve your confidence in yourself and your ability to improve other areas of your life as well.
There's No Place Like Home
“He is happiest, be he king or peasant, who finds peace in his home.”
Sometimes daily life can seem like it's all about just trying to keep ourselves and our families clean and fed. Certain periods of our lives may need to be very much about those things—for instance, when we first move out on our own after our schooling (everything from cleaning to paying bills is new and takes conscious effort), or when there are young children in the house (who need a great deal of time, energy, and care). But there are times, hopefully, when we have more energy and focus available for pursuing projects for the sake of interest, self-improvement, career marketability, or creative expression and enjoyment. In order to have the stability to apply ourselves in satisfying ways to these projects, we need to handle a few other things than just physical needs. After we've satisfied our most basic needs, our old friend Abraham Maslow posits that we need to feel safe in order to keep progressing. There are several important areas to consider as we attempt to care for ourselves at this level, all of which are important in allowing us to move forward in life with enough confidence to achieve more than just staying alive every day.
The first one I want to address is the home. Humans are uniquely evolved animals, but animals nonetheless; we crave a retreat that can keep us warm and dry as well as safe from marauding predators. This may not be something you think about consciously all that often. It’s something you no doubt assess in some way when looking for a new place to live, and you may give it some thought in the first few weeks after moving into a new home, but after that you may find that you drop into a routine and take your safety somewhat for granted. While I’m not suggesting that you encourage yourself to be paranoid, I am going to ask you to think about whether there is anything about your home base that you feel uncomfortable about. Perhaps every now and then you have a thought about how you wish there was more light in a certain area outside, or a better lock on your door, and you experience a low-level sense of fear about something you haven't yet defined. If you find that there is something like this that comes up for you, consider that you may be wasting some energy on these worries that would be far better applied to the things you’d prefer to be spending your time on.
Most of us do not realize how much mental, emotional, and physical energy we waste on worrying about things that are in our power to easily change. The things that touch on our sense of physical security affect us on the level of our animal selves, and this level is instinctive. When it feels threatened, we go into “fight or flight” mode, which means that our bodies rev up an array of chemicals to help us prepare for running away from danger at top speed, or for combating the enemy, real or imagined. The body reacts the same way in either case, as it can’t tell the difference between thought and reality. In his book The Biology of Belief, Bruce Lipton details how when we’re in the fight or flight response, blood rushes away from the organs and toward the extremities to fully enable movement, and the organs slow their processes; that means that the body is using energy, but not creating much of it from the resources at hand. The immune system also is greatly disabled in favor of the emergency chemical response. And the center of conscious mental activity, the forebrain, slows in favor of the instinctive hindbrain, because reflex is faster to respond than reason; by boosting the hindbrain’s activity, the brain joins in to help the body survive while the state of emergency persists. While all of this is happening, the body can’t engage in may of its normal activities, including growth processes that repair damage. This overdrive cycle greatly contributes to physical problems over time if it gets activated too often—and in modern life, with its hectic pace and constant demands, this is often the case.
If you could halt or slow this exhausting cycle by choosing to address a few things at home, such as adding a brighter light bulb or springing for a better lock, or even just hanging thicker curtains in the bedroom so it feels more private, why not make that a priority and give yourself more ease on a daily basis? These things may seem small, but they can add up over time. We’ll be looking at other ways to feel secure in future blogs, but in the meantime, just give a thought to how you could make your home feel more relaxing by addressing anything about it that makes you feel nervous or unnecessarily vulnerable. These small changes need not cost much, and they can yield far more than the value you invest.