So Much Happier Blog
The Upside of Down
“The more you praise and celebrate your life, the more there is in life to celebrate.”
This week I read an article about how middle children are becoming less common because family sizes are smaller than they were a generation ago. These "middles" may tend to become more self-reliant and diplomatic, according to some in this position, because they get less attention and have to gain skills through self-reliance and a bit more adversity than their eldest and youngest siblings. In adulthood, they may cherish these traits, but in childhood it may have been hard to seem less important, less visible. This got me thinking about the ways in which we can all learn to appreciate the skills we have picked up, by necessity, out of the ashes of our own annoying or upsetting circumstances.
Even someone whose life looks easy to others has been through trying times. No one goes through life unscathed. So even without knowing you, I know that you've been challenged, buffeted, and forced to adapt somewhat in your life. If you think about the times in your life that have been hardest, you may still wish things could have been otherwise and experience some pain in the recollection. That's very normal. But if you want to stop being defined by these unfortunate events, sometime when you can find a quiet, calm moment, try allowing yourself to perceive beyond the plot points of your story. What did you learn about yourself as a result of living through this experience? What decisions about the future did you make that have helped you to become more of your truest self? Where did you become stronger and more able to spot and avoid trouble in the future? What skills did you decide to cultivate so that you could meet similar challenges more competently in the future? And how has all this learning served you since then? How will it continue to serve you and others with whom you can share your wisdom?
When painful things happen, it's easy to get stuck in wishing they hadn't, because pain obviously feels bad. We may have experienced real loss, which can be extremely vivid, and it can distract us from the appreciation of what we still have that's good. Note that I'm not arguing here against the process of grieving, but it need not exist in a vacuum—when it does, that's when we can really spiral downward in unhealthy ways. If we never get around to acknowledging the hard-won lessons of growth we've achieved through hardship, our self-confidence will lag behind our level of competence. We won't actually acknowledge or get to enjoy the greatness we already have at our fingertips. We will let opportunities where we could have excelled pass us by. We will feel uninspired and unfulfilled because unused aptitudes weigh on us; we know we could be wielding them in the service of our deepest purpose and feeling a glorious satisfaction in it. Who do you think is more of a blessing, someone who shuffles around demoralized and drained, or someone who has the confidence to own their skills and use their powers for good? Who has more fun?
You don't have to love that bad things have happened to you, but I do recommend that you purposefully celebrate all the growth you've attained, whatever the circumstances that gave rise to to it. This is a far more productive place to focus than on past disappointments. By all means, Tap on the aftermath of those adverse experiences to release old pain, because sometimes the weight of them prevents you from effectively doing much else—you know if you've been reading these blogs for while that I'm the last person who's going to tell you to just "suck it up" and ignore your emotional reality! But also, train your mind to appreciate the best in yourself and the world around you. This is a powerful commitment that will help you boost your self-confidence and skyrocket your motivation to make progress in all the areas where you most want to win.
Teaching Happiness
“Be happy for this moment. This moment is your life.”
Many of us struggle with creating happiness, motivation, and fulfillment, in large part because we weren't given the tools to successfully foster these things on a daily basis as part of our schooling. It's never too late to learn, though, and that's what this blog and my work are all about. It was refreshing, then, to read this week about how various governments are beginning to experiment with adding the development of important happiness-related skills to their school methodologies in order to help kids to be healthier mentally and emotionally, and perform better in school. Predictably (I think) it works really well.
Here's a link to the article I read, and I thought I'd just go ahead and pass it along this week. I hope it serves as a reminder that increasing focus on learning things like giving ourselves credit for what we do well, feeling grateful, and empathizing with those around us has real and measurable positive results. What can you do to model these results this week?
Leading the Charge
“Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality.
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Being the one in charge is demanding, and if you are working toward any personal goals at all, this is you! While you get to do things your own way, you also have to be the one driving every aspect of your projects. Unless you're amazing at finding and convincing others to help you out at every turn, you're going to end up doing a bunch of tasks you're not good at and not comfortable doing. You're likely to find some of this painful; working way out past your comfort zone can challenge you at the deepest levels. Even if you have the ability to hire people to help you, you're still going to be the one responsible for your project's results. You'll still be the one who cares most about the outcome. You might not have to do all the tasks required, but you'll have to oversee the work of others, and that opens up a whole new realm of challenges.
If you're someone who is not used to being in charge (i.e., you're not the boss at work and you don't have kids or a successful history with running your own business), moving your goals forward will require you to learn some new operational skills. These may include time management; self-motivation; project planning and management; discipline and persistance (which require a host of mental and emotional management skills); problem solving; and communication skills, among others. Each of these skill areas has the potential to hold you back if you don't have at least a basic level of competency in it. Many people never move forward with important personal goals because they get hung up on these skill sets and don't do what's necessary to learn them. Sometimes this is because of an issue of identity, and unfortunate belief like, "I'm an artist, not a business person," or "I'm just not good at that." In this case, you'll need to do some work on the limiting belief itself, otherwise things will always be hard for you in this area. Sometimes it's just because not enough time and attention has been applied to the area in question. One doesn't learn new things by osmosis unless they're easy.
It's important to realize that while reaching your goal may be a lot of fun, some of the learning process that will make this possible will not be. Just as working out when you're out of shape feels terrible at first, stumbling through your early efforts in other skill building can as well. You might as well know this at the outset, and have coping strategies in place for when you have to attack tasks that make you feel like a hopelessly clumsy oaf. This is tough on the ego, and can be exhausting. You may need recovery time from such efforts, so it's a good idea to schedule short stints working on them in between easier tasks that are more fun for you. Remember that asking for help when you're really stuck is a key discipline. This does not make you weak, it makes you smart. You do not have to know everything. In this information age, that would be impossible, and everyone gets stymied sometimes. It's best not to waste too much time bumping into walls if advice from someone more experienced is available—and as long as you have access to a public library or the Internet, it is!
When you experience resistance or other discomfort as you learn new things, remember that absolutely everyone who has succeeded at anything has gone through something similar. Find friends you can talk to, look for mentors to advise you, and use EFT (Tapping) while you rant and rave and cry if you need to. Admitting to and expressing emotion as you go makes a huge difference. Carrying all of that around under the surface saps your energy, creativity, and confidence.
I wish I could say that once you change a limiting belief, it's just magically smooth sailing after that. It helps a lot to clear out the mental and emotional clutter, but most often, getting where you want to go requires focused effort over time. You'll need to map out a route and take steps often to keep up your gains and your enthusiasm. You'll have to practice more than you'd like to and sweat sometimes as you break new ground. Learning new skills is taxing, but as you practice, momentum builds, and using your fledgling skills gets easier. None of this work is glamorous, but it's necessary if you want to move forward. Pursuing personal goals will help you to feel more alive every day, so continually feeding that charge of excitement is worth it. When you feel like you're struggling, grant yourself appreciation for being willing to work at this, take good care of yourself, and keep moving! Enjoy the process when you can, and when you can't, just keep your mind on your destination.
It's Not You, It's Me
“Love yourself first and everything else falls into line. You really have to love yourself to get anything done in this world.”
In last week’s blog, we looked at how disappointments large and small, sustained over time, can tempt us to take on limiting and destructive beliefs about ourselves and the world. This week I want to focus on a related tendency I’ve observed, equally as problematic and possibly even more pervasive. This is the tendency that many of us have to feel disappointment or frustration, and then turn it quickly and harshly back against ourselves as anger.
In her excellent book Tapping into Wealth, Margaret Lynch includes some great work on how to notice what you’ve decided certain experiences mean about you, who you are and what is possible for you. Uncovering the beliefs about yourself that came about in response to difficult events can be a real eye-opener, because while the beliefs may seem quite familiar when you think about it, you may have no idea where they came from or why they’re there. They probably just seem true, the way things are. Working with these beliefs and reshaping them is a revolutionary experience that can change the entire tenor of your life. However, it’s just as important to look forward and find ways of not forming brand-new limiting beliefs every passing day, and this can be even more tricky. You have to notice how it happens to stop doing it.
I recently had an experience through which I realized very clearly how vicious my self-talk can become when I’m upset or disappointed about something. It wasn’t even triggered by anything all that important, just something that was causing me some garden-variety stress and annoyance that I was tapping about, and I suddenly had a vivid memory of being a young child that seemed connected to the problem at hand. I was probably under ten years old in the memory, and I was so angry and frustrated at myself because there was a skill I was trying to learn that I just could not do correctly yet. All the feelings of frustration, and a seemingly disproportionate sense of rage, as well as feelings of being trapped, welled up. (I never cease to be amazed that such a volume of emotion can be stored and flare with a vengeance when an old memory is triggered, even one you haven’t thought of in years, and that now seems unimportant from an intellectual standpoint!) In this memory, I was just so angry at myself, and I felt that anger in the present as a physical burning sensation all throughout my torso. I remember telling myself that I couldn’t do anything right, and that I’d never learn the new skill because I was just hopeless.
I’m not sure where I got all this, because my parents really tried to encourage us to be positive, persistent, and to put in the work when we were trying to learn something. Who knows? We all get angry and frustrated, and maybe I was just tired and burned out that day. Whatever the reason for the pattern, I recognized this as something I do from time to time internally to this day, and I barely even notice it happening. I generally don’t stop to think about it, and I’ve never seen it so clearly as I did in this memory. I kept tapping on the anger, frustration, and the feeling of being trapped until it all subsided. I was left with a resolve to watch for this habit of thought in the future and work to arrest negative self-talk when I get frustrated by something. I also felt much less concerned with the thing that was contributing to my original stress and annoyance in the present day.
It’s obvious to me in retrospect that when we’re learning new skills, we always have to endure a period of rank incompetence, which really isn’t any fun, but is completely normal. No one is born with skills at, really, anything. Learning is always a process; just because we can’t do something on the first try, that doesn’t mean we’re not able to learn it at all, or that we’re stupid, or useless, or anything else dire. But in the moment, when emotion overtakes us, we’re not thinking logically. We’re far more likely to overreact and decide that our current difficulties “mean” something about us that they don’t actually mean at all. Boy, did I ever do that in that childhood memory! If we can gain clarity about some of the formative experiences that set a negative pattern for us, that creates a path toward undoing them by targeting those experiences with tapping, or NLP, or hypnosis, or some other technique that involves both the memories and a physical element. Techniques that involve the body have proven to be the most successful in creating positive emotional change that sticks.
Next time you find that you’re ranting at yourself when you’re angry or frustrated, ask yourself what this feeling of self-recrimination reminds you of, and think back to the earliest time you can remember feeling something like this. You might be surprised at the answer you get from the old memory banks, and the outdated anger at yourself you might still be holding onto. If you haven’t learned how to tap, hop to it! It’s easy, and I know I’m grateful for it every day that I use it to ease my stresses, whether old or new. When you diminish the power of old emotions, it can be astonishing how your current emotions will calm as well. And keeping your current emotions from spiraling too far out of control diminishes the likelihood that you will reinforce habits of reflexive anger at yourself that have no earthly use in the creation of a happy life.