Category Archives: Personal happiness

One problem at a time

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How much do you really want to worry about?  How much can you control?  Let’s face it, most of the problems that come up in your life are out of your control.  So what do you do about it?  It’s fine to think one step ahead.  A little bit of planning can help you when things don’t go your way.  But it’s easy to go too far.

Do you believe that everything will work out in the end?  That’s the first step, because you have to believe that things turn out okay.  Sure, things will go wrong along the way, and most things won’t go according to your plans, but they will end up working out.

So you’re stressing about something that’s coming up.  You know that it may not go your way, so you think about what might go wrong.  Then you think about the next thing that might go wrong.  Then the next “what if, what if, what if.”  This could go on forever, but what are you really accomplishing?

Think one step ahead so you’re ready, then just accept that everything else will work itself out, or you will just deal with the new issues as they come up.  Worrying about them doesn’t help anything.

Who are you pleasing?

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Name all the people who you have the ability to make happy.  I’ll give you a hint; look in a mirror.  You are the only person who you can make happy, because happiness is a personal choice.

We spend so much time making our choices based on what other people think, but are those choices really pleasing the other people?  If you think about it, you know that they’re not, so why do we keep doing it?  I’m not talking about being nice or helping others.  Basic human kindness is good for everyone.  I’m talking about when we sacrifice what we want to try to please the other people in our lives.

It can be hard to know where to draw the line.  You don’t want to be selfish.  You want to be kind, and to help people.  So how do you know when it’s too much.  Basically, if it gets to the point where you are sacrificing who you are, or what you believe in, then it’s time to stop.  In order to know this, you have to know who you are, and what you believe, which can be hard to do.

A relationship doesn’t have to be a perfect 50-50 split, but it can’t be so unbalanced that it hurts you.  Do your best to be good to the people around you, but know it’s time to protect yourself, and realize that you can’t actually make anyone else happy.

 

Forgiveness takes forever

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Forgiveness isn’t an action.  It’s a process, and it can take forever.

Emotional hurt is different from physical hurt.  You can’t see it.  There is no physical scar; no bruise; no dent that you can take to the body shop and get fixed.  Emotional pain will sneak up on you for a long time; maybe forever.

People are going to hurt you in your life.  There is no avoiding that.  Every time someone does something that is hurtful to you, you have to make a choice.  You can choose to hold onto the hurt and be angry, or you can make a choice to forgive them.  It’s perfectly fine to be mad at first.  It’s natural to have an angry response to someone hurting you.  But the only way to get over the pain is to choose forgiveness.

The problem comes in later, after you’ve forgiven the person.  You can think that you’ve gotten over it, then something happens that triggers the pain, and all of a sudden you’re having an emotional reaction and you don’t know why.  Then you have to make the same choice again; to be mad or to renew the forgiveness.  It kind of doesn’t seem fair.  Someone does something to hurt you, and you’re the one who has to spend time and energy, maybe for years, continuing to forgive them.

But think about the alternative of staying angry.  If you’re mad at someone, what do they feel?  They don’t feel anything.  They can’t feel your anger.  It has no effect on them at all.  All it does is hurt you.  It doesn’t feel good to be mad.  It’s stressful to yourself, and to the people you care about.

Either way you choose, you have to live with some amount of discomfort.  You either deal with the triggers of the past hurt, and repeatedly choose forgiveness, or you choose to stay angry, and you deal with the stress that that choice will add to your life.

I choose to live my life on my own terms.  I choose to live my life on purpose.  I choose forgiveness.  What will you choose?

If you love me, why do you hurt me?

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How are you supposed to be okay when someone who is supposed to love you does things that are hurtful to you?  We expect certain things from the people in our lives, but sometimes they don’t live up to those expectations.  Sometimes, they fall so short of those expectations that it causes us pain.

Just because someone tells you that they love you doesn’t mean they won’t hurt you.  But just like anyone else doing hurtful things to you, it really isn’t about you.  It’s about them.  Shouldn’t they be able to think about your feelings, since they love you?  You would think so, wouldn’t you?  Yet somehow, they don’t.

When a parent hurts a child, when a partner cheats on someone they love, when anyone does a hurtful thing to someone who they say they love, that person is acting out of their own place of pain.  Does it mean they don’t love you?  No.  Does it mean that even though they love you, they will hurt you again?  Yes.

So what can you do?  How can you protect yourself from the hurt?  The best solution is to put as much distance between yourself and the person who is hurting you as possible.  If it isn’t possible to put physical distance between you, you can work on creating emotional distance.  The less you need someone, the less they can hurt you.

The other thing you can do is to realize that it really doesn’t have anything to do with you.  This is so hard to remember when you’re feeling the pain, because you are the one feeling the pain, so how can it not be about you?  But it really isn’t.  It really doesn’t have anything to do with you.  Their behavior is so self-involved that you don’t even factor into the thought process.  Maybe they’ll feel bad about it later, or maybe they won’t, but either way, it isn’t about you; it’s about them.

You need to know that you cannot change this person.  If they ever do change, which is unlikely, they will do so because they choose to.  This is not a choice that you can make for them.  People do what is in their nature, and if it’s in their nature to hurt you, then that is what they will do.

So many of us have been hurt by people while they tell us that they love us.  That is such a hard pain to get over.  In many ways, it’s worse than being hurt by a stranger.  But it has happened before, and it will happen again, and since you can’t change it, the only thing you can do is learn how to protect yourself emotionally from it.  This is one area where I believe strongly in getting professional help.  This type of hurt can be too hard to deal with on your own.  Work on it yourself, but get outside help if you need it.  It isn’t healthy to carry this pain around with you for the rest of your life.

Make the harder choice

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One of my two main rules for life is that the harder choice is usually the right choice.  You don’t get where you want to be in life by taking the easy path.

Every day we are faced with choices to make.  Many of them are trivial, and really don’t matter very much.  But some of them are important.  Some of them seem trivial at the time, but later you realize that they were actually important.  When it comes to making the right choice, it’s almost always the harder one.

This is the way things should be.  Why should someone making easy choices get rewarded for them?  This is true for all aspects of life.  You don’t get a great body by choosing to eat junk food and playing video games instead of exercising.  You don’t get true life-long friends by neglecting them when they need your help.

Your whole life is made up of choices.  Some are just about you, and some are about your relationships with others.  But no matter what they’re about, the harder choice is almost always the right choice for your life.

Emotions 1, Logic 0

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You can’t use reason to get out of this one.  Whatever “this one” is, your emotions win the battle.  I like to think of us as having two minds; an emotional mind and a rational mind.  We all think of things in two ways; from a purely emotional point of view, as well as a logical, reasoned point of view.  We think of all the good, rational reasons that we should feel a certain way, and then we frequently do the exact opposite.

In the battle of your rational mind versus your emotional mind, emotions win.  Think of it this way.  Think of one thing that you are afraid of; spiders, the dark, heights, asking someone on a date.  When you think about it logically, it doesn’t really make sense to be afraid.  Most spiders are harmless, the only real danger in the dark is that you’ll stub your toe, there isn’t any real danger of looking out the 24th floor window, and the worst that happens when you ask someone out is that they say no.  So now you’re not afraid any more, right?  Of course you are, because fear is an emotional response, and emotions win over logic.

So is there a solution?  Maybe yes, maybe no.  The best way to re-shape emotions is through conditioning; you face your fear, so you’re no longer afraid.  I’ve been afraid of water my whole life.  I took a scuba diving course, I practiced until I could swim a mile, and I’m still somewhat uncomfortable in water.  But, now I can swim across the lake and not be afraid.  I’m not going to promise you that it will always work, but I do believe that facing your fears is nearly always a better option than hiding from them and continuing to be afraid.  At least if you face them, you can tell yourself that you really tried.

Sometimes you’re just going to have to tell your emotional mind that while you value its opinion, you’re going to do something else this time.  You force your rational mind to call the shots for a little while.  This is not an easy thing to do, but as usual, the harder choice is the right choice.

Accept that your emotions have value, but they can also hold you back.  Sometimes you have to rely on some logic and reason to push your way through and get what you want.  Try it the next time you feel your fear holding you back from something.  I think you’ll be surprised at how strong you can be.

What is Power?

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What is power?  My International Relations professor in college told us that it is the ability to get someone else to do what you want.  I think that this is partially complete  It is also your ability to resist someone else who is trying to get you to do what they want.

We all have power.  Some of us are more aware of it than others, and some of us are much better at using it.  Just because you don’t feel your own power doesn’t mean that it isn’t there.  You just need some practice using it.

We are all under pressure from others to do what they want us to do.  From the time we are small children deciding what game to play, to professionals in the workplace dividing up the responsibilities, people use their power to get what they want.  Do you find it hard to say ‘no?’  Do you find it hard to ask someone to do something, or to do more than what they were doing?  It may be time to find your power.

It’s important to be fair, and to be able to work, and play, collaboratively with others.  But what about when the others aren’t being fair or co-operative?  You have to power in you to stand up for what’s right.  You have the power to tell a friend or teammate to pull more weight.  Are you afraid they will be mad at you?  That is a reasonable concern, because they might get mad.  But does that really matter?  Who are you trying to please, and why?  If you know what is right, then you are allowed to stand up for it, even if that means that someone else may get mad at you.

You need to stay true to yourself, and in order to do this, you need to find your power.  When you cave in, you give up your power to another person, and you lose a little of yourself.  When you stand up for what is right, and you exercise your power, you get even stronger.  You can do this in a way that is still kind and considerate.  You don’t need to turn it into a confrontation.  And if the other person insists on making into something bigger than it is, that is their choice.  Is this hard?  Absolutely.  Is it worth it?  Without a doubt.

Find your power.  Picture yourself standing up for what is right.  Exercise that power, and see how good you feel when you do.

No one can make you mad

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Whether you like it or not, you own your emotions.  It’s so easy to say “she made me mad,” but it isn’t accurate.  People do things to us, and then we get to choose how we react to those things.

Most people will blame others for their own emotions, because it’s much easier this way.  If I blame you for how I feel, then I don’t have to take any responsibility to make myself feel better.  But as soon as I accept that my emotions belong to me, and I get to choose how I feel, then all of the responsibility is on me.  And once you know this, it makes it harder to going back to blaming others for your emotions.

I’m not saying that you shouldn’t be mad if someone does something bad or hurtful to you.  It’s okay to get mad.  It’s okay to have an emotional reaction.  We are emotional beings.  But, once you get past the emotional reaction, then it’s time to evaluate your feelings, and decide for yourself how you’re going to handle the situation.  Most importantly, once you get past the emotional reaction, that’s when it’s time to choose your own emotions, and take responsibility for them.

There will always be people in your life doing things, or saying things, that are hurtful to you.  How you feel when these things happen is up to you.

Live life on purpose

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If I had to sum up my entire philosophy on life in a single point, it would be this:  Live life on purpose.  This life is yours, and you can do whatever you want with it, so why should you waste it going through the motions and wasting your time.  Live your life on purpose.

I made a decision early in my life that I was not going to wake up one day at 50 or 60 years old and wonder where my life went, and why it didn’t look the way I used to hope it would.  I decided that the only way to achieve this goal was to live my life on purpose; to make the decisions in my life based on whether or not they fit into what I wanted my life to look like long term.

In my twenties, I was in a job that didn’t allow me to see my baby daughter, so I quit that job and started a business, which I designed in such a way as to give me family time.  I realized that having television in my life did not actually contribute to the quality of my life, so I got rid of tv.  In my thirties, I faced the difficult truth that my marriage was not, had never been, and was never going to be fulfilling.  I went through the long and difficult process of divorce.

Every day we are faced with decisions.  Some of them are small, but some are significant.  Sometimes we can tell the big ones when they happen, but sometimes you can’t tell that a decision you made was life-altering until years later.  For this reason, I believe that every decision you make in life has to be made with the end in mind.  What kind of person do you want to be?  What really matters to you in life?  What do you want your life to look like long-term?  All of these should factor into the choices that you make.

Don’t go through the motions of your life.   Don’t wait for other people to make things happen for you.  Don’t live out the dreams of someone else.  This is your life.  Make it the life that you want it to be.  Live it on purpose.

Are you willing to work for it?

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All of us want things from our lives, but not all of us are willing to work for it.  The good things in life require effort.  If you’re only willing to make the minimum effort, guess what you’re going to get for it?

We admire people with great bodies.  We admire great athletes.  We admire professionals who are at the top of their field.  However, we often discount the successes that these people have had.  “She is just naturally skinny.”  “He has great genes.”  “He got into his dad’s business.”

While some people may have an advantage here and there, generally speaking people do not get to be the best, or look the best, without a lot of effort.  The reason that we admire 6-pack abs is because it takes so much work to build up your abdominal muscles, and lose your abdominal fat, that the vast majority of people will never do it.  Certainly, many athletes are born with a body that is suited to what they do.  But the elite athletes also work diligently to stay in shape, and improve their skills.  The ones who don’t make that effort don’t stay in the game.

The bottom line is, you have to work for the good things in life.  If you want a great body, you need to be eat right, and exercise every day.