Did I mention that I’m writing a book about how we make and break habits? Oh yes, I think I did. It’s called Before and After, and it will be out next spring.

Here’s a habit-related issue that I’ve been pondering lately: the need to pay, or the ability to get something for free. I think that these conditions can affect our habits.

First, paying.

When forming habits, we’re surprisingly affected by how convenient an activity is.
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We can harness this, with the Strategies of Convenience and Inconvenience, to foster good habits.  One person changes into exercise clothes as soon as he comes home from work, to make it easier to exercise; another person puts the TV remote-control on a high shelf, to make it a bit harder to turn on the TV.

When we have to pay for something, it feels less convenient. For instance, for most people, it would be cheaper to pay for the gym on a per-visit basis instead of forking over a monthly fee (70% of people rarely use their long-term gym memberships), but although a monthly system may not make financial sense, it makes psychological sense; paying per visit feels less convenient, and means that each work-out means an additional cost, while paying by the month makes each visit feel free.

Also, for many people, paying for something makes them more likely to do it. If they pay for a work-out with a trainer, they’re more likely to go, rather than spend the money on nothing. For some (though not all) Obligers, having to pay is a form of external accountability. For them, therefore, late fees, penalties, paying for a class, hiring professionals, etc., can be very important for sticking to a good habit.

On the other hand, it seems that for some people, paying for something like a training session makes them feel as though they’ve actually done it, even if they haven’t. Paying for a gym membership makes it seem like they’re “going to the gym,” even if they never actually go. Have you ever experienced this?

Perhaps this is related to the “pay or pray” phenomenon: it turns out that when people donate to religious institutions, they’re less likely to attend religious services. Paying acts as a substitute for showing up.

Second, freebies.

Getting something for free also affects our habits. This comes up a lot with food. Many people can’t turn down a free sample — it’s free! But no surprise,  research shows that getting a food or drink sample makes shoppers feel hungrier and thirstier, and puts them in reward-seeking state.

An important strategy for habit-formation is the Strategy of Loophole-Spotting, and getting something for free can provide loopholes. For example, we can use it to argue that “this doesn’t count,” as in “These cookies are compliments of the chef, they’re free, they don’t count.” But everything counts.

Another complicating factor: we tend to value things more when we pay for them. But we also love scoring free stuff. And we’re more likely to do something, like go to the doctor, if we don’t have to pay. These different frames of mind come into play with habits in many different variations.

Have you noticed how the need to pay, or the ability to get something for free, affects your habits?

Gretchen Rubin is the author of the #1 New York Times Bestseller The Happiness Project—an account of the year she spent test-driving the wisdom of the ages, current scientific studies, and lessons from popular culture about how to be happier—and the recently released Happier at Home. On her popular blog, The Happiness Project, she reports on her daily adventures in the pursuit of happiness. For more doses of happiness and other happenings, follow Gretchen on Facebook and Twitter.

Image courtesy of Historias Visuales.

A few days ago, I read Gretchen Reynolds’s piece in the New York Times, Losing weight may require some serious fun, about a study that makes a point that I think is incredibly important.

In the study, women were sent to walk a one-mile course in the next half hour, with lunch to follow.

–Half were told that their walk was meant to be exercise, and they should think of it that way, and monitor their exertion as they walked.

–Half were told that the walk would be for pleasure; they’d listen to music through headphones and rate the sound quality, but they should mostly enjoy themselves.

Afterward, they were asked to estimate mileage, mood, and calorie expenditure.

The “exercise” group reported feeling more tired and grumpy — and at lunch afterwards, they ate significantly more sweets than the “for fun” group. (The piece discusses other studies that show the same kind of result.)

Reading this study reminded me of one of my important conclusions about habits: If we want to stick to our good habits, we should try very hard never to allow ourselves to feel deprived.

When we feel deprived, we try to make things right for ourselves. We begin to say things like “I’ve earned this,” “I deserve this,” “I’ve been so good, it’s okay for me to do this,” “I’ll just do this now, that’s fair, but tomorrow I’ll be good.”

Feeling deprived means that we’ll feel justified in invoking many of the most pernicious loopholes: the Moral Licensing loophole, the Tomorrow loophole, and the Fake Self-Actualization loophole.

The lure of loopholes is why the Strategy of Loophole-Spotting is so important.

Once I realized how dangerous it was to allow ourselves to feel deprived, I grasped the importance of the Strategy of Treats. It’s a delightful strategy, yes, but it’s not frivolous or selfish.

Treats help us to feel energized, restored, and light-hearted. Without them, we can start to feel resentful, depleted, and irritable.

When we give ourselves plenty of healthy treats, we don’t feel deprived. @gretchenrubin
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And when we don’t feel deprived, we don’t feel entitled to break our good habits.

It’s a Secret of Adulthood for Habits: When we give more to ourselves, we can expect more from ourselves.

And when we can frame a habit as fun, that’s useful too. This year, I started walking once a week with a friend. It started as a way to get more exercise, but now I view it as a way to get more friend time. Now that same habit is a treat.

In my forthcoming book about habit-formation, I talk a lot about how to avoid feelings of deprivation. There’s the Strategy of Abstaining, of course, for my fellow Abstainers; there’s “consumption snobbery,” that works too; there’s delay, within the Strategy of Distraction.

How about you? Do you find that deprivation makes you feel justified in indulging or breaking a good habit?

Gretchen Rubin is the author of the #1 New York Times Bestseller The Happiness Project—an account of the year she spent test-driving the wisdom of the ages, current scientific studies, and lessons from popular culture about how to be happier—and the recently released Happier at Home. On her popular blog, The Happiness Project, she reports on her daily adventures in the pursuit of happiness. For more doses of happiness and other happenings, follow Gretchen on Facebook and Twitter.

Image courtesy of Bunches and Bits.

I’m working on Better Than Before, a book about how we can change our habits. The most fascinating subject ever.

In it, one thorny question that I tackle is: How can we make an exception to a good habit, without disrupting that good habit altogether? After all, sometimes we do want to break a habit—to take advantage of a rare opportunity, say, or to celebrate.

A very effective safeguard for that situation is the planned exception, which protects us against impulsive decisions. We’re adults, we make the rules for ourselves, and we can mindfully choose to make an exception to a usual habit by planning that exception in advance.

When we plan an exception we feel in control of ourselves — we’re not breaking a habit willy-nilly, or invoking one of the 10 categories of loopholes at the last minute, to give ourselves excuses. And we feel happier when we feel in control of ourselves and our actions.

Exceptions work best when they’re limited, or when they have a built-in cutoff point. This morning, a friend told me how he’d used a planned exception mindfully to depart from his usual habit of eating only low-carb foods.

Many people tell themselves, “I’m on vacation, I should treat myself, I deserve it, I can’t resist these pies, you only live once!” And they completely abandon their good eating habits. My friend wanted to indulge, but in a limited way.

“When I was staying in a cabin in Montana, I ate almost all my meals at a restaurant that was famous for its pies,” he told me. “People came for miles to get these pies. Before I left New York City, I decided what my pie policy would be.”

His pie policy? One slice of pie at every meal. He told me his thinking, and I was struck by how many good ideas he combined.

1. “If I’m in Montana, then I will eat this way.” “If-then” planning is very effective; by deciding in advance how to behave, we make it easy when the time comes. Also, an exception that exists only in Montana is self-limiting. My friend loves pie, but he’s not going to make a special trip to Montana just for a piece of pie.

2. “I get one slice with every meal, but only one slice.” Yes, he had pie with breakfast, too (pumpkin-tofu or peach pie), and at every meal, but only one slice. Bright-line rules – that is, clearly defined rules or standards that eliminate any need for interpretation or decision-making — are very helpful.

3. “I didn’t take a pie back to the cabin; I could only eat it at the restaurant.” In previous years, he’d sometimes skip the pie at a meal, and take a pie (or two) home to the cabin, and eat it throughout the day. This kind of eating prevents monitoring — which is part of why it’s appealing — but we do much better when we monitor ourselves. 1 slice/meal = very easy math. The Strategy of Monitoring is one of the most important habit strategies; we do better with just about everything when we monitor.

4. “I broke my low-carb rule to eat pie–but only pie.” After the first few days, my friend said, he started to think, “Boy, a little ice cream would be great, and there’s a great ice cream place near here.” But he knows himself, and he knew that if he went from pie to ice cream, then soon he’d be eating bread and pasta, too. So he had pie and only pie.

5. “I knew I’d enjoy my vacation more if I had the pie.” For good habits, it’s very important not to allow ourselves to feel deprived. When we feel deprived, we start saying things like “I deserve this,” “I need this,” and “I’ve earned this,” and then we treat ourselves — often very unhealthfully. By figuring out how to keep himself from feeling deprived, he didn’t get in that “life isn’t fair” mode, he gave himself a treat, and he really enjoyed something special about his vacation.

Note: my friend is an Abstainer, and this approach worked for him. I’ve found that many Abstainers are mostly Abstainers; yes, they do better when they abstain than when they try to indulge in moderation, but every once in a while, they indulge.

By contrast, I’m a total Abstainer. You wouldn’t believe what I’m abstaining from these days. But to my surprise, I’ve come to realize that I’m a very unusual type, a real extreme personality. Which, by the way, was a surprise to no one but me.

It’s a Secret of Adulthood for Habits:

If we want ourselves to keep going, sometimes we need to allow ourselves to stop.
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Have you found ways to keep your good habits, mostly, and yet take breaks occasionally?

Gretchen Rubin is the author of the #1 New York Times Bestseller The Happiness Project—an account of the year she spent test-driving the wisdom of the ages, current scientific studies, and lessons from popular culture about how to be happier—and the recently released Happier at Home. On her popular blog, The Happiness Project, she reports on her daily adventures in the pursuit of happiness. For more doses of happiness and other happenings, follow Gretchen on Facebook and Twitter.

Image courtesy of Robert S. Donovan.

I think a lot about habits, and lately I’ve been thinking a lot about habits related to holiday eating.

The holidays are supposed to be a festive time, but many people feel anxiety and regret around food and drink—the holiday season is so full of temptation.

I have to say, I enjoy the holidays much more, now that I’ve got a better grip on my habits, than I used to.

Here are some ways to apply the strategies of habit-change to this challenge:

1. Buy food in small containers. Studies show that people give themselves larger portions out of larger boxes, so I don’t buy that economy box of whatever. Buy the little box of gingerbread cookies, not the giant box.

2. Make tempting food inconvenient—put cookies in a hard-to-reach spot, set the freezer to a very cold temperature so it’s hard to spoon out ice cream, store goodies in hard-to-open containers. The Strategy of Inconvenience is simple, but crazily effective.

3. Wear snug-fitting clothes. That’s the Strategy of Monitoring. When we’re aware of what we’re doing, we behave better.

4. Dish food up in the kitchen, and don’t bring serving platters onto the table (except vegetables).

5. Pile your plate with everything you intend to eat, and don’t get seconds once that food is gone.

6. Skip the add-ons: tell the waiter that you don’t want the side of fries. When I do this, I sometimes feel like Sally from When Harry Met Sally as I quibble about how my food should be served, but oh well.

7. After dinner, to signal to yourself that “Eating’s over,” brush your teeth. I’d heard about this habit, so I decided to try it, but I was skeptical. I’ve been amazed by how effective tooth-brushing is. This is the Strategy of First Steps–because that tooth-brushing is the first step toward bedtime.

8. Don’t allow myself to get too hungry or too full. This is the Strategy of Foundation.

9. Realize that, with some things, you might not be able to have just one bite. I sure can’t. In the abstainer/moderator split, I’m a hard-core abstainer. It’s far easier for me to skip cookies and chocolate than it is to have a sensible portion. The Strategy of Abstaining is not a strategy that works for everyone, but for some people, it’s enormously helpful.

10. Never eat hors d’oeuvres. This kind of bright-line rule, which is an application of the Strategy of Clarity, is very helpful.

11. Don’t eat food I don’t like, just because it’s there. No one cares if I have a serving of asparagus or cranberry sauce.

12. Plan an exception. Planned exceptions are a great way to break a good habit in a way that feels limited, controlled, and positive.

13. Watch for loopholes! Some loopholes that are especially popular during the holidays include the “This doesn’t count” loophole, the “Concern for others” loophole, and the “fake self-actualization” loophole. Remember, we’re adults, and we can mindfully make exceptions to our good habits, but everything counts.

Although it may seem festive and carefree to indulge in lots of treats, in the end, we may feel guilty and overstuffed. Which doesn’t make the holiday happier.

It’s a Secret of Adulthood:

By giving myself limits, I give myself freedom. @gretchenrubin (Click to Tweet!)

Gretchen Rubin is the author of the #1 New York Times Bestseller The Happiness Project—an account of the year she spent test-driving the wisdom of the ages, current scientific studies, and lessons from popular culture about how to be happier—and the recently released Happier at Home. On her popular blog, The Happiness Project, she reports on her daily adventures in the pursuit of happiness. For more doses of happiness and other happenings, follow Gretchen on Facebook and Twitter.

Intrigued? Pre-order my book Better Than Before, in which I reveal the secrets about how we can change our habits–really!

Featured image courtesy of Liliana Fuchs.

I love all fables, paradoxes, koans, teaching stories,  and aphorisms. That’s one reason I love to keep my Secrets of Adulthood – my own contribution.

For this reason, when I was last wandering through the library, I couldn’t resist pulling out William March’s book, 99 Fables.

And I was particularly struck by Fable #4, “The Persimmon Tree,” about a loophole-invoking possum.

In the fable, a possum looks longingly at the delicious persimmons hanging from the fox’s tree, and thinks about how badly he wants one. “’No,’ he said. ‘The fox is my friend and benefactor, and he trusts me. Oh, no!’”

Several days later, he stares again at the persimmon tree, where the fruits had reached their finest flavor. His mouth waters, but he turns away and goes home.

There, he sees his wife, who says, “’What a morning this would be for eating persimmons! When I think how sweet they are…I could break down and cry my eyes out.’”

The possum says, “’That settles it. I’ll take those persimmons if it’s the last thing I ever do…Why, what sort of a creature would I be if I deprived my sweet, faithful wife of persimmons—endangering her health and making her cry her dear eyes out.’”

The fable concludes:

“We often do for the sake of others what we would like to do for ourselves.”
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In Better Than Before, my book about habits, my favorite chapter (I admit it, I have a favorite) is the chapter on the Strategy of Loophole-Spotting.

I identify the ten — yes, ten — categories of loopholes. (Here’s a list of all ten.) Now, what’s a loophole? A loophole is a justification that we invoke to excuse us from keeping this particular action or habit in this particular situation. We’re not mindfully making exceptions, we’re invoking a loophole as an excuse.

The possum is invoking the “concern for others” loophole. We tell ourselves that we’re acting out of consideration for others and making generous, unselfish decisions. Or, more strategically, we decide we must do something in order to fit in to a social situation.

• It will hurt my girlfriend’s feelings if I get up early to write.
• I’m not buying this junk food for me, I have to keep it around for others.
• So many people need me, there’s no time to focus on my own health.
• It would be so rude to go to a friend’s birthday party and not eat a piece of birthday cake.
• I don’t want to seem holier-than-thou.
• Changing my schedule would inconvenience other people.
• I can’t ask my partner to stay with the kids while I go to class.
• At a business dinner, if everyone is drinking, it would seem weird if I didn’t drink.(This loophole comes up a lot with drinking. Teenagers aren’t the only ones to feel peer pressure to drink, it seems.)

We all have the few loopholes that we invoke most readily. My own personal favorite is the false choice loophole.

Do you agree with the moral of the fable, that “We often do for the sake of others what we would like to do for ourselves”?

Have you ever done something that you thought you shouldn’t, for the benefit of someone else? This loophole is tricky, because sometimes to do that is a form of virtue, and other times, a form of self-deception.

Gretchen Rubin is the author of the #1 New York Times Bestseller The Happiness Project—an account of the year she spent test-driving the wisdom of the ages, current scientific studies, and lessons from popular culture about how to be happier—and the recently released Happier at Home. On her popular blog, The Happiness Project, she reports on her daily adventures in the pursuit of happiness. For more doses of happiness and other happenings, follow Gretchen on Facebook and Twitter.

I’ve posted my U.S. book tour, and I hope to see many of you along the way. Tour cities include Los Angeles, San Diego, Plano, Denver, San Francisco, Princeton, Wellesley, Madison, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. And of course New York City. Please come! Tell your friends! Soon to come: tour events in Canada, the U.K., and Australia.

Image courtesy of Paul Proshin.

5 reasons why rewards can be very dangerous for habit-formation.

Of the 21 strategies that I identify, that we can use to make or break our habits, the Strategy of Reward was one of the most difficult for me to understand.

In large part, because the lesson is:

Be very wary of using rewards to master habits! @gretchenrubin (Click to Tweet!)

Why? It sounds so sensible to reward yourself for sticking to a good habit. But it turns out that rewards are very, very tricky to use well.

Why?

1. One common form of reward is the attainment of a goal, and that reward marks a finish line — and a finish line marks a stopping point. Once we stop, we must start over, and starting over is harder than starting.

The more dramatic the goal, the more decisive the end — and the more effort required to start over. By providing a specific goal, a temporary motivation, and requiring a new “start” once reached, hitting a finish line may interfere with habit-formation. Running the marathon, quitting sugar for Lent, doing a thirty day yoga challenge — once the goal has been met, and we feel the reward of hitting that finish line, the behavior tends to end.

Also, once we decide that we’ve achieved success, we tend to stop moving forward.

2. A reward requires a decision (“Do I deserve this reward?”) Habits are freeing and energizing because they get us out of the draining, difficult business of using decision-making and self-control. We don’t reward ourselves for brushing our teeth, so we don’t have to ask, “Have I brushed long enough to deserve my reward?” We just do it.

When we have to decide whether we’ve earned a reward, we’re forced to employ our decision-making; we’re not on automatic behavior. And every time we make a decision, we have the opportunity to make the wrong choice. So many loopholes to choose from! One for every occasion.

3. It permits an opt-out ( “If I forgo the reward, I don’t have to do this activity”).

4. It teaches us that we’d do this activity only if a reward is offered. A reward provides extrinsic motivation, which tells us that we don’t feel intrinsic motivation. We’re not practicing guitar because we want to practice guitar, but because we promised ourselves a beer every time we practice. Along those lines…

5. A reward makes us associate a behavior with suffering or imposition. Why else would we need the reward? One person exercises in order to earn points at work to get swag. Another person exercises without that reason. Who, do you suppose, is more likely to be exercising, a year from now?

Furthermore, we often choose perverse rewards. A friend told me, “After I’ve lost this ten pounds, I’m going to reward myself with a big piece of chocolate cake.”

The one kind of reward that does work? A reward that takes you deeper into the habit. Doing lots of yoga? Splurge on a new yoga mat. Bringing lunch to work every day? Buy that expensive set of great knives. One company had a smart policy: any employee who exercised at least seventy-five times in one year in the company gym was rewarded with…the next year’s gym membership free. The reward for exercise was more exercise.

For these reasons, rewarding an activity may make us less likely, not more likely, to form a habit.

How about you? Have you noticed this in yourself?

Gretchen Rubin is the author of the #1 New York Times Bestseller The Happiness Project—an account of the year she spent test-driving the wisdom of the ages, current scientific studies, and lessons from popular culture about how to be happier—and the recently released Happier at Home and Better Than Before. On her popular blog, The Happiness Project, she reports on her daily adventures in the pursuit of happiness. For more doses of happiness and other happenings, follow Gretchen on Facebook and Twitter.

Image courtesy of Gili Benita.

Because of my interest in habits, I read a lot of memoirs of addiction. I don’t tackle addiction in Better Than Before, but still, I find that I get a lot of insights from these accounts.

I recently finished an excellent new memoir, Sarah Hepola’s Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget.

I was particularly interested to see how she used loopholes to justify her drinking.

When we try to form and keep habits, we often search for loopholes, for justifications that will excuse us from keeping this particular habit in this particular situation.

However, if we catch ourselves in the act of loophole-seeking, we can perhaps reject them.
@gretchenrubin (Click to Tweet!)

We’re so good at thinking of loopholes! I’ve identified ten categories, in fact, and Hepola uses several of them as she justifies her drinking to herself.

I don’t want to sound unduly critical of Hepola, by identifying her loopholes. We all use them — we’re very ingenious when it comes to finding loopholes. Hepola’s memoir is thought-provoking and insightful, precisely because she’s so honest about her thoughts and actions.

Here are some examples of the loopholes she invokes:

— “Drinking on a plane is a line-item veto in the ‘never drink alone’ rulebook.” This doesn’t count loophole.

— “Everyone drinks alone on a plane.” Questionable assumption loophole. For instance, I’ve never had a drink on a plane in my life.

— “You’re allowed to drink alone while traveling. Who else could possibly join you? I loved drinking alone in distant bars.” Planning to fail loophole. Part of the fun of traveling, for Hepola, is feeling free to drink alone.

— “It would not be an overstatement to say this felt like the very point of existence. To savor each moment.” Fake self-actualization loophole.

— “It was my last night in Paris. I had to say yes.” This sounds like a combo of fake-self-actualization loophole and the tomorrow loophole.

— “I knew some speed bump of circumstance would come along and force me to change. I would get married, and then I would quit. I would have a baby, and then I would quit.” Tomorrow loophole.

— “It wasn’t fair that my once-alcoholic friend could reboot his life to include the occasional Miller Lite…and I had broken blood vessels around my eyes from vomiting in the morning…It isn’t fair!” Questionable assumption loophole.

— “Writers drink. It’s what we do.” Questionable assumption loophole.

— “Paris was the problem, not me.” Lack of control loophole.

Most of us have a favorite few loopholes. Mine? False choice loophole.

In the end, Hepola is able to reject the loopholes, change her habits, and quit drinking.

How about you? Do you have a favorite loophole, that you find yourself turning to most often?

Gretchen Rubin is the author of the #1 New York Times Bestseller The Happiness Project—an account of the year she spent test-driving the wisdom of the ages, current scientific studies, and lessons from popular culture about how to be happier—and the recently released Happier at Home and Better Than Before. On her popular blog, The Happiness Project, she reports on her daily adventures in the pursuit of happiness. For more doses of happiness and other happenings, follow Gretchen on Facebook and Twitter.

Image courtesy of Rodion Kutsaev.

“Generally speaking, envy, resentment, revenge and self-pity are disastrous modes of thought. Self-pity gets fairly close to paranoia, and paranoia is one of the very hardest things to reverse. You do not want to drift into self-pity. … Self-pity will not improve the situation.” – Charlie Munger

Recently, I found myself repeating an embarrassing behavior I used to do all the time when I was younger. But the difference this time was I recognized it and addressed it rather than pushed it aside.

I found myself obsessively watching every vlog on YouTube that had the Instagram model, Sommer Ray in it. Whenever she or another one of her friends would post something, I’d put it on.

That’s not even the embarrassing part. Plenty people are fans of her. But not as many normal, healthy people are obsessed with supermodels and super attractive women as me. A couple of years ago, a friend of mine pulled me aside on Facebook and said: “we had to talk.”

He told me that he kept seeing my activity on his Facebook feed and it raised his eyebrows. I was liking and commenting on dozens of models’ pages and even some pickup artist pages. He advised me to stay away from the weird pickup artists and that it likely came off weird to anyone else who saw my activity.

I was embarrassed and shocked. I was a naive, young boy and I guess I was swept up in the wave of social media and dating advice online and ended up in a weird place. I was learning from people I shouldn’t be taking dating advice from and getting too obsessed with the social media models out there. It crept up on me so slowly that I didn’t notice it.

For a couple of years, I’ve stopped doing that. I’m happy to say that I’ve been off of the pickup artist nonsense for a while. But recently, I’ve been reeled back into the model-loving world. I’m not alone. Many people have unproductive habits and unhealthy goals.

I’ve discovered wealthy entrepreneurs who were motivated to make money only to validate being accepted from a father that never accepted them. But when they got the money they wanted, it was never enough because it was a moving target. Their fathers were dead and they could never make enough. It was only until they addressed the deeper unhealthy psychological issue that they were psychologically satisfied.

There can other unhealthy motivators that can manifest themselves in different ways. Some people lacked companionship growing up because they were ostracized in school. Because of this, they seek unrealistic, glamorous relationships because they think this will satisfy the hole in them. But it sometimes never does.

Lately, I’ve been learning a lot from mentally healthy, successful people and psychology to help myself. Here are some tips to identifying and fixing your self-sabotaging psychological motivators:

1. Investigate Your Deepest Motivators

This time, I did something most people fail to ever do when they’re in this situation: dive deeper. Rather than sweep it under the rug, I kept asking myself “why” until I found the deepest motivators for my issues.

As mentioned, there are healthy and unhealthy motivations for a goal. For me, it’s embarrassing to admit, but I think my love of Sommer Ray and others like her comes from hoping that I can date a girl as attractive and popular as her one day.

I unconsciously use social media as a form of escapism when my life isn’t going that well, a common behavior for many people. Seeing these girls interact or date seemingly normal guys give me hope.

But the big question I asked was, “Why do you think you need someone so out of reach to satisfy your relationships?”

That was the glaring question that was standing out, which leads me to point two.

2.  Dive Even Deeper

The answer to this glaring question behind my bizarre behavior was hard to uncover. But even harder to answer. After some thinking, I think I found out why.

Scarcity created unrealistic ideas of what my goal would be like.

When I looked at the turning point in my life when I first got obsessed with dating beautiful women, I was someone who didn’t have many friends, was an outcast, and never had any romantic interactions even though I was graduating high school already.

I hit puberty and started romanticizing what I was missing out on. Likely, I built up having a beautiful, popular girlfriend as the ultimate prize and joy. Some part of my unconscious never let go of that.

Other traumatic events likely made it worse. One popular, blonde girl in school seemed to show a little interest in me and I built that up in my head without really seeing if she was into me. In college, a moderately attractive girl showed interest in me but I was too shy to approach. I built up our connection in my head so much until months later, I was devastated when I found out she had physical encounters with other men I knew.

3. Recognize, Accept, and Commit

I’ve encountered a couple good self-help and psychology books to help people like me. One of them recommends an empirically based therapy called ACT (acceptance and commitment therapy).

The core theme of ACT is to accept the negative emotions you are feeling by acknowledging them rather than pushing them away or trying to forget them.

It sucks to admit you’re screwed up in some way. But by taking healthy, scientifically proven action, you are improving yourself in a mentally healthy way. Be proud of that. Many people, especially fellow Asian Americans I’ve seen, never consider this route. Instead, they end up following self-destructive pathways, like learning from pick up artists, that end up worsening or ignoring the core issue by addressing the symptoms rather than the cause.

4.  Remind Yourself of Reality

Usually, outsized behaviors or reactions are an internal way of compensating for something. For someone who likes to show off their clothes and money excessively, like Dan Bilzerian, it can be a reflection of something they lacked as a child (acceptance, love, appreciation, toys, hobbies, or relationships).

I’m not a professional or psychiatrist so I can’t give you specific details. But one thing I’ve read that helps is to align your reality with realistic thoughts.

By reminding yourself out loud of what’s actually true, rather than what you think, it can help in your recovery process. How do you know what’s actually true? Consult with healthy, trustworthy people who can tell you.

For example, let’s say you are constantly beating yourself up and thinking you’re not good enough to talk to a girl or make a friend (something I struggle with). But in reality, you’re a good guy who deserves to talk to average girls, but you’re just not giving yourself enough credit.

Rather than consult your own biased opinions of yourself, consult socially intelligent friends you trust. If they all give the same opinion that you’re worthy, then, you know you’re underselling yourself. From there, you can repeat affirmations to remind yourself that you like yourself and are worthy. You can list specific details, like “I am a physically fit person” or “I am a kind, smart, and funny person. I shouldn’t beat myself up.”

In the case of my Instagram model obsession issue, I can give myself a reality check. What are the qualities I truly want in a relationship with a model? Laughter. Fun. Good times. Little to no fighting. Playful teasing. A relationship where both parties make the other better through motivation, laughs, and productive habits. A stunningly beautiful face and body. Kindness. Exploring cool new places and interests together. Enjoying interests we already share.

Well, why can’t you find these in someone more attainable, like someone who actually lives in your area with a normal job? The answer is I can. I don’t need someone who has millions of followers. That level of status would be cool, but it also has its problems.

When you crystallize reality in this way, you can identify what are “nice to haves” and “need to haves” rather than stay in a vague state.

5. Get Started with Baby Steps

It’s easy to sit in your chair and do nothing. It’s easy to refuse to make any progress at all because the results aren’t as high as you ultimately want. It’s easy to live a life that’s more comfortable even if it keeps you stagnant and far away from your dreams.

But the regret you will face isn’t worth it.

I quoted Charlie Munger at the start because his quotes on the dangers of envy are a theme to my biggest struggles this year. I’m not alone. Countless Millennials out there are also destroying themselves with jealousy of the rich, young kids they see on social media. They’re sabotaging their progress by drifting into self-pity and laziness.

Enjoy the process and the small wins because maybe you’ll like it more than the big end result anyways. It’s a cliche message but enjoying the journey is cliche for a reason: it works and it’s true.

Enjoying the journey is cliche because it works and it’s true. @WillYouLaugh (Click to Tweet!)

After years of screwing around and excuses, I finally have been making substantial progress. I’ve gone out on my first few dates. Are they the most attractive women in the world? No. Was I moderately bumped out that they weren’t super attractive? Honestly, yes. But did I marvel at my progress and have some fun? Yes.

I’ve also been investing in my fitness, fashion, and career to become a better man every day.

Trending in the right direction and moving towards healthy, real practice is a great sign. We live longer than we think, so if you’re moving in the right direction, that’s a great clue that you may just one day reach your goals. Just keep in mind that you have to enjoy the journey. You may end up finding a goal that’s even better than a super hot Instagram model — like a girl who’s smart, nerdy, not as hot, but has the same interests as you.

Conclusion

Give yourself a chance to live a better life of less suffering. If you’re identifying any extreme or bizarre behavior that is a theme throughout your life, you can save yourself years or decades of struggle by facing it rather than ignoring it.

I want to live a normal, healthy, happy life. We all do. But we all have issues and memories that haunt us. Even an Instagram model who seems to have their whole life together, like Sommer Ray, has issues. She recently released a Q&A revealing that she was bullied so bad in high school that she was homeschooled.

Hopefully, with this article, you’ll at least have a chance at moving to a more mentally healthy, wonderful place in life.

Does this help? Is there anything I forgot to address that you need help on? Let me know in the comments below and I’ll try to answer.

Will Chou is a personal development blogger at willyoulaugh.com and has spent thousands of hours studying the world’s most successful people, especially businessman.

Image courtesy of Free-photos.

The post The Fears We Run from Are the Secrets to Getting What We Want appeared first on Positively Positive!!.

As the line gets shorter and shorter to hold the Tarantula I panic.

I think to myself, “What if she bites me?” “What if she jumps on my face?” “What if she shoots her pokey hairs into my eyes?”

I have arachnophobia. Just looking at a picture of a spider gives me anxiety.

I don’t want my kids to inherit my fear-based patterns so I have agreed to explore my fear and hold the Tarantula.

As we wait in line to meet Rosie I observe my mind struggling between conditioned fear and my knowledge of human behavior.

My conditioned fear tells me the tarantula is a threat and I must protect myself. My knowledge of human behavior tells me my fear is clouding my cognitive process.

Then it happens. I extend my hand allowing Rosie to walk her eight legs across me. As I start to fantasize about flinging her off my hand consciousness slams me in the face. I remind myself that I chose to follow my fear. At that moment I say to myself, “Change!” Instantly I feel my mind shift from a place of fear to a place of discovery.

It is here that I observe Rosie from a place of childlike curiosity. Noticing her graceful gait, her silky fur and her delicate features. I watch her like a scientist uncovering new territory. I ask the handler about her predators, her lifespan and her eating habits. I soon become aware of the mindset shift this experience has created.

Human beings are wired for survival and therefore perceive many situations as a threat. For example, look at my fear of spiders. Researchers discovered arachnophobia is not only one of the oldest human fears, it is part of our evolutionary survival tactics. In order to survive venomous spiders in Africa, humans had to develop the ability to spot these eight-legged creatures.

Humans are also socially conditioned, through their environment, to fear the unknown. If we can predict adverse events by observing others then we can maximize rewards and minimize threats. This behavior is learned early in our lives as young children.

How do we overcome our hard-wired evolutionary DNA and conditioned fears?

“Hold the Tarantula!”

By holding the tarantula I not only explored my fear, I discovered a new approach to shifting my mindset from fear to understanding.

Use the following tools to shift your fear-based mindset and create a new reality.

Seek to understand.

When you seek to understand you take the judgment out of your reality and create a space for compassion. When seeking to understand your personal threats, no matter how irrational they may be, you begin to shift your perception and your reality.

When you seek to understand you take the judgment out of your reality. @tracy_martino (Click to Tweet!)

Instead of concluding the tarantula as a threat I sought to understand. Here I created a mindset shift from judgment to compassion. My reality changed as I observed and detached from fear.

Be Curious.

The unknown causes humans beings to feel threatened. As a result, our bodies experience anxiety and fear. Counteract these uncomfortable emotions by shifting into a place of curiosity. When you are in a place of curiosity the reward centers of the brain are engaged and you open yourself up to new possibilities.

When I looked at the tarantula from a place of curiosity my anxiety disappeared. I focused on learning more about the tarantula vs worrying about irrational possibilities.

Rewire Your Brain.

The more we use neural pathways they become embedded and become patterns. Most of the time these patterns are subconscious. Create lasting change starts with awareness. Experiment with a signal or word that will alert the brain to rewire.

When I felt myself going back to the same fear-based patterns I said, “Change!” This alerted my brain to be aware of my pattern and give birth a new pathway.

Changing fear-based patterns is a work in progress. There will always be situations that cause you to go into survival mode. You have the ability to evolve and create an opportunity for growth.

I invite you to “Hold the Tarantula” and follow your fear. It will allow you to uncover your personal beliefs and patterns that are holding you back from experiencing life to the fullest.

Tracy Martino is CEO and Founder of Executive Return and T.Martino Brands, LLC. She is a Neuroleadership consultant focusing on how to create trust, engagement, and communication with the tools of Conversational Intelligence, HeartMath and NeuroScience. She is a Best-Selling author, writer, poet and speaker. You can find Tracy at www.tracymartino.com or follow her on Twitter. 

Image courtesy of Michel_van_der_Vegt.

The post Why Holding a Tarantula Transforms Fear appeared first on Positively Positive!!.

Her hysterical sobbing made it difficult for me to make out what she was saying. Finally she said, ”My mother just informed me that she is wearing a white dress to my wedding. She has already purchased it and when I asked her to at least add a navy sash and jacket, she refused and told me how ashamed she was of me for being such an ungrateful and selfish daughter.”

Above is an actual story of a former client who is the daughter of a narcissistic mother.

Does your mother guilt trip you or emotionally blackmail you? Does she act competitively with you or take credit for your talent or accomplishments?

These are all behavioral patterns of the narcissistic mother.

I promise you, if you have one, you know it, even if you haven’t had the correct language to describe it. It is an incredibly painful experience to be the child of a mother with this personality disorder, and particularly painful for daughters.

In this week’s Real Love Revolution video, I will be tackling the topic of how to survive and thrive from this experience. I’ll be covering:

• Two types of narcissistic mothers
• The behavior these mothers display
• How to heal from having a narcissistic mother
• Steps to take to prioritize your own health and happiness

There are two different types of narcissistic mothers. The engulfing narcissist who sees their daughter as an extension of themselves. This mother takes credit for any achievements or talents the child displays as her own. The second type is the ignoring narcissist. She has little interest in her daughter’s life and takes minimal care of her while growing up. This mother continues to focus most of her energy and attention on herself. This experience can be counterintuitive because in American culture, mothers are idolized as all nurturing, forgiving, self-sacrificing angels. Therefore, speaking ill of your mother is considered almost sacrilegious and carries shame. The insidious emotional abuse in this experience can be devastating and isolating because it leaves no physical evidence but the destruction to a child’s sense of self and safety in the world is undeniable.

If you have experienced the very conditional love of a narcissistic mother, it is time to focus on how you can move from surviving to thriving. The first step is to draw solid boundaries to limit contact, which will help to prevent further damage. Another step toward healing is to find support, whether through a group or in individual therapy, or both. This type of abuse is very specific, and learning more about narcissistic mothers while connecting with other women who have gone through the same experience can accelerate your healing. To learn more about the two types of narcissistic mothers, the behaviors they display, and how to survive it, download the Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers Survival Guide here!

It is possible for you to heal from this experience. You deserve to be seen and loved for who you are.

Terri Cole is a licensed psychotherapist, transformation coach, and an expert at turning fear into freedom. Sign up for Terri’s weekly Newsletter, check out her blog and follow her on Twitter.

Image courtesy of Colin Bowern.

The post How Daughters of Narcissists Survive and Thrive appeared first on Positively Positive!!.

My hunch is you are carrying around something that is very heavy and causes you unnecessary suffering. This thing blocks you from the experiences and connections you desire. It weighs you down, holds you back and robs you of joy.

What is this dreadful thing I am talking about?

It is your story.

You see we all create a story about ourselves and the way life works for us based on experiences we have had. And usually, parts of this story are pretty negative. Common self-defeating and deflating storylines include: “I do not belong, I am not enough, life is hard, people are not trustworthy, everyone else is better, something is wrong with me, I am not deserving, I should be doing more, I need to make others happy, love is painful, etc.”

Super uplifting storylines, huh?

No! But I bet you can relate to a few of them. You are not alone. Part of the old story I carried around for decades had to do with not belonging or being likable. This story stopped me from doing things in my life or made doing certain things miserable.

When I attended my friend Gabby’s wedding and reflected upon how liberating it was not to carry around that old story that would have either prevented me from going to an event alone across the country; or, made the weekend unpleasant if I did go because of the tape from an old story playing in my head. Thank goodness that old story is out of syndication in my mind!

Today I want you to have the same freedom and enjoy your life even more by putting down the heavy load of outdated and limiting beliefs that, by the way, ARE NOT TRUE!! It’s time to drop the happiness-killing negative story that goes off in your head and impacts your experience and your results.

Here’s how:

Put yourself in situations that stretch you outside your comfort zone and practice creating a new desirable story during an experience where the tapes from your old stories would have played. In order to truly drop our story, we must rewire our brain. We can only do that when we are in situations that trigger the old script and consciously write a new one.

For example, if you have an old story about not being enough that makes you feel insecure and avoid social situations, then get yourself out there! If you have an old story about not feeling heard, start speaking up or take a class in public speaking. If you have an old story around rejection, ask someone for something. If and when you feel that old story creeping in, consciously catch it and choose how you want to feel, think and act instead.

Transformation is energetic. If your personal growth work involves only analyzing yourself, processing your past, and pontificating or planning your future, you will not shift on an energetic level.

Stop playing it so safe if you want different results. @ChristinHassler (Click to Tweet!)

Get yourself out there and gift yourself with the opportunity to drop that old heavy load of you-know-what you’ve been carrying around.

I want to hear about the stories you are dropping and the new ones you are writing so  leave a comment below!

Love,

Christine

P.S. I have a new podcast where I coach people LIVE on the air. Head over to Over it and On With It and listen in for inspiration and action steps.

Christine Hassler has broken down the complex and overwhelming experience of recovering from disappointment into a step-by-step treatment plan in her new book Expectation Hangover. This book reveals the formula for how to process disappointment on the emotional, mental, physical, and spiritual levels to immediately ease suffering. Instead of wallowing in regret, self-recrimination, or anger, we can see these experiences as catalysts for profound transformation and doorways that open to possibility. You can find more info on her website, and follow her on Twitter and FB.

Image courtesy of Rawpixel

The post It’s Time to Get Over It! appeared first on Positively Positive!!.

I love hearing how people put the Four Tendencies framework to work — whether by using knowledge of their Tendency to improve their own live or to work more effectively with other people.

Recently, I got an email from Nagina Abdullah, health coach and founder of MasalaBody.com. She listens to the “Happier” podcast, and she told me about how she was able to eat more healthfully, lose weight, and boost her energy by harnessing the strengths of her Rebel Tendency.

This story was particularly interesting to me, because — as Rebels themselves often point out — the strategies that work for other Tendencies often don’t work for Rebels.

So I was fascinated to hear her story, and she wrote an account of it to share — which is below, with my comments in brackets.

Nagina writes:

When I was a kid, I got sent to the principal’s office on a weekly basis. While my teachers would ask the students to be quiet and obedient, I would end up in laughing fits and get sent to the principals’ office to get disciplined.

I struggled with following expectations for my whole life. As a child, I resisted my teachers’ rules. As I got older, I resisted being healthier.

See, I love food. I love sweets, fried food, food trucks, BBQs – everything that isn’t good for my waistline. I ALSO resist following the rules of having to be strict to get healthy.

My tendencies finally made sense when I took Gretchen’s Four Tendencies Quiz. I wanted to see if I was an Upholder, Obliger, Questioner, or Rebel.

I wasn’t surprised when I scored as a “Rebel.” Rebels resist outer and inner expectations.

After decades of being addicted to sugar and feeling unable to control my cravings, I embraced my Rebel tendencies. As result, I lost 40 pounds, skyrocketed my energy and started wearing the clothes I had dreamed of wearing.

The “Healthy Rules” I Did Not Want to Follow

After having two kids and working 60+ hour weeks, I felt exhausted and overweight, more than ever before. I needed to get healthier to feel better and have more energy for my kids.

I didn’t want to deprive myself of food I loved and I didn’t have time to spend hours in the gym.

Here are the rules to getting healthier I would regularly hear:

• “You have to count calories, points, crumbs, licks, and drops”
• “You must exercise 3+ days a week”
• “No eating cupcakes, donuts, and everything else you love”

Even though I wanted to get healthier, I resisted restrictive rules like these.

This led to a lot of internal frustration, yo-yo dieting, announcing “It isn’t worth it!” and “Why is this so hard for ME?” [Rebels often get frustrated when they try to use the same techniques that work for other Tendencies.]

Even if I wanted to be healthier, I couldn’t even follow my OWN rules.  [Rebels resist outer and inner expectations.]

Would I ever change my habits to get healthier when I kept rebelling against the rules?

I finally got my dream body when (only when) I broke the rules.

Here’s how I broke the rules to lose 40 pounds and keep it off for now over six years.

Above All, I Wanted to Be a “Rebel Mom”

Being a mom is the greatest gift, but I feared I would be overweight, exhausted and put myself last in the name of my kids, which is the stereotype of a mom I held.

That’s when I decided to be a REBEL MOM and break through the stereotype.

Here’s my vision of being the mom I wanted to be:

• Feel confident in a bathing suit so I could swim and play in the sand with my kids
• Run 5k’s with my kids and set healthy examples for them
• Feel sexy around my husband
• Go rollerblading, biking, ice skating, roller skating, skiing, snowboarding and more with my family and feel strong and agile as I am doing it

Having a goal of a “Rebel Mom” inspired me to be healthier.  [Rebels want to express their identity; they want to live in accordance with their authentic self; they can do anything they choose to do, in order to be the kind of person they choose to be.]

3 Rules I Broke to Get My Dream Body

I started by eating healthy, because I found that it is the most impactful thing to do. But I needed to make eating healthy enjoyable and realistic for my life and family, and that’s when I realized there were three rules I had to break. [Rebels do well to focus on enjoyment. They also often enjoy breaking rules or achieving aims in unconventional ways.]

Rule 1: “You need to eat healthy every day to lose weight.”

How I break Rule 1:

I have one “Cheat Day” a week where I eat everything I want, so I always get a “break” from the rules and have something to look forward to. A Cheat Day is KEY to losing weight if you hate following those strict diet rules. [As an Upholder and an Abstainer and a very low-carb eater, this would not work for me — but it works for Nagina.]

Rule 2: “You have to eat boring food in tiny portions so you feel like you are starving to lose even 5 pounds.”

How I break Rule 2:

Instead of making my food flavorful with heavy sauces and creams, I use spices and herbs that pack in the flavor and have natural health benefits (like anti-inflammation and reduced water retention). I feel like I’m “cheating” and indulging even though I’m actually eating healthy.

I love to add a pinch of cinnamon (lowers your blood sugar) in my morning coffee because it tastes so delicious. [Again, the focus on pleasure and choice.]

Rule 3: “You are “supposed” to eat healthy.”

How I break Rule 3:

Remember the last time you were at an airport? Temptations at every turn, with most people indulging in them? It’s HARDER to eat healthy than not!

As a result of eating healthy, I feel in control of myself, and feel like I’m rebelling against the “norms” of society. [Rebels often benefit from reminding themselves, “I’m not going to be trapped by a sugar addiction. These big companies can’t control me with their fancy marketing campaigns and crinkly packages. I’m strong, they can’t make me eat their junk.” Rebels also often love a challenge: “Most people can’t resist the goodies in an airport, mall, or store, but for me, it’s not a problem.”]

 What you can do to get healthier:

If you resist outer and/or inner expectations (Rebels resist both, and Questioners and Obligers resist one or the other), and/or you have found it challenging to get healthier, try to BREAK some of the traditional rules by using one of the methods that worked for me:

1. What’s a stereotype you would break by getting healthier? Embrace that and make it your goal.
2. Include one cheat day a week and eat whatever you want on those days, while staying healthy on the other days. [Very effective for some people! Not effective for others! Know yourself.]
3. Add herbs and spices to your foods to make it taste indulgent without the extra calories.
4. Resist the unhealthy temptations around you and feel in control of yourself.

What I love about Nagina’s account is how carefully she examined what works for her, what she wants, and figured out her own way to get there.

By embracing her Rebel Tendency, she was able to get the benefit of its enormous strengths. By contrast, when Rebels think they “should” be able to use techniques like to-do lists, scheduling, monitoring, or accountability, they often get very frustrated with themselves.

There’s no one “right” way, no one “best” way — only what works for you.

Gretchen Rubin is the author of the #1 New York Times Bestseller The Happiness Project—an account of the year she spent test-driving the wisdom of the ages, current scientific studies, and lessons from popular culture about how to be happier—and the recently released Happier at Home and Better Than Before. On her popular blog, The Happiness Project, she reports on her daily adventures in the pursuit of happiness. For more doses of happiness and other happenings, follow Gretchen on Facebook and Twitter.

Image courtesy of it’s me neosiam.

The post How a Health Coach Harnessed Her Rebel Tendency to Lose 40 Pounds and Boost Her Energy. appeared first on Positively Positive!!.

Of all the human qualities, compassion tends to take my breath away the most, in part because of the way in which it can transform the gravest of circumstances. Nowhere has this been more evident to me than with the recent flooding in Houston caused by Hurricane Harvey, and then the devastating destruction of Hurricane Irma in the Caribbean and Florida. And though I wish I didn’t have so many examples here, there was also the 7.1 earthquake in Mexico City and then Hurricane Maria which devastated Puerto Rico and other Caribbean Islands like Turks and Caicos. Suddenly, the world became a kinder place, a place where people from different countries around the world stepped up to support the individuals and governments where the destruction took place. We, the people, came together.

As I watched the news coverage of Mexico City I saw all these people working together to remove debris and help find any person who might have been buried in rubble. This is a sight I remember all too well when the Twin Towers fell on 9/11. Brave individuals thrown into chaos, and yet somehow mustering the strength to lend a hand, helping one another in the most trying of times.

We have a tendency to do that, us humans. We’re kind of kind at heart. We’re givers. We take care of one another when push comes to shove. It seems some part of us recognized our innate connectivity during times of severe trauma, or life and death situations. Even people we might judge as monsters become angels during these severe times.

Nowhere did I see this shift in caring more, this seemingly automatic move to compassion, than here in the U.S. with the flooding in Houston. Here we were, the United States, in a loud and all-consuming conversation on divisiveness, and a complete polarization of people across our country based on conservative and liberal identities, when out of the blue, ocean that is, the worst flooding Houston has seen in years came to shore. This devastation immediately shifted us out of this “right-wrong” paradigm of a conversation into a place of deep compassion for all our brothers and sisters. Bam! Compassion for the win! Oh, wait, compassion isn’t out to win, but simply to express an energy of caring to any person who might be in pain because of their current circumstance. And we all stepped up and gave a care.

I know for myself, I wanted to do something. I was a bit shocked at first, but thanks to Facebook there was a link to give to relief funding for the victims of the flooding in Houston. I gave, as did many of my friends here in Los Angeles. I could tell, as there was an option on Facebook that somehow showed you gave when you shared the charity link on your Facebook page. Again, any liberal-conservative thing flew out the window because we were giving around the country. Those of us in LA weren’t saying, “Oh, it’s Texas, they’re more conservative, let’s not give to them.” We reached down into our pockets, and however deep they may have been, we gave, because we care for one another.

That whole experience almost makes me hopeful that we’ll eventually ensure all our citizens here in the U.S. have some form of health care. Maybe there’s a way to line item it under the 790 billion dollar budget for defense spending? I don’t know why no one’s thought of that yet. I mean without our health we’re literally nothing. Can’t defend a country without good health. But back to compassion, because let’s face it, it’s a much better topic to write about as everybody wins where compassion is concerned.

Compassion as a quality holds tremendous power. Not power like a stick of dynamite, or power as in a semi-automatic weapon, but rather authentic power like Gandhi expressed when through peaceful protest he freed an entire country, or power like Nelson Mandela, who also freed a nation despite the racism and prejudice of his imprisoners through choosing a peaceful and compassionate activism which would eventually free, not only himself, but his country from apartheid. At the core of Gandhi and Mandela’s approach, and countless other examples throughout the world, where individuals who understood the inherent power of compassion.

Compassion, what is it good for? Absolutely everything. Yeah, I know that sounds like a lyric from a song some of you older folk might remember. I like my version better replacing war with compassion – it’s good for everything. Yes, everything.

There isn’t anything compassion doesn’t make better. @barryaldenclark (Click to Tweet!)

Don’t believe me? Test it out. Be compassionate in the most challenging of situations. Practice compassion on yourself – you will feel a hell of a lot better afterward, I promise. And let’s be real here, the only way to get to Carnegie Hall is practice. It’s no different with compassion. You have to put this quality to use, breathe air into it, try it out, even on those individuals you think it impossible to shift your feelings towards – especially on them.

Let’s all go on a compassion adventure together, shall we? Oh, it’s not gonna be easy. No one ever said it would be, but I guarantee you it will be worth it. How you ask? Because compassion is the fastest way to the heart of pretty much any individual you might come in contact with or any tough situation, and you’ll leave a path of loving.

Birds will sing, rainbows will fill the sky, and smiles will be seen across the land. I’m not really exaggerating here. These and other wonderful things will occur when you express compassion. It will fill you and your heart, as well as the person’s heart receiving your loving, compassionate energy, and it can transform pretty much any challenging situation.

Compassion is a gesture that, like a rock in a pond, reverberates out into the world. Negativity sucks the life out of us, and God knows there’s an awful lot of it flying around right now. Compassion fuels our souls. My wish for all of us around this planet is to find the internal flame of compassion within ourselves and to share this with all those around us, regardless of what our mind judges the other person or people to be.

It’s a tall order, and one I know we’re built for as the recent hurricanes and earthquakes have proven to us. Compassion is at the heart of us all, and compassion is the one ingredient we find in the center of every storm which acts as a healing balm. It’s there as our gift of the heart and our seeds for healing. Shower life with your compassion, and watch the healing energy grow, erasing all devastation in its path. Ultimately, I believe compassion is the light of God. May loving compassion bless your life always, and in all ways. Now please excuse me, I’ve got a rainbow to catch.

Barry Alden Clark has coached thousands of individuals in connecting more deeply with their hearts, their life purpose, and helped create a pathway for these folks to move forward in a direction more aligned with who they truly are. He & his creative partner Eliza Swords are currently delivering uplifting content on social media every Wednesday via “Best Day Ever with Barry and Eliza”, a Facebook and You-Tube phenomenon reaching thousands of people around the world. They are also inspiring love and joy through creating heartfelt and entertaining content via their production company Pure Honey Ink. Currently they have projects in development for social media, film, television and publishing. You can reach Barry at www.barryaldenclark.com.

Image courtesy of Gerd Altmann.

The post Compassion in the Eye of the Storm appeared first on Positively Positive!!.

This is a letter I have just written to my adult daughter who is continually treated by the important people in her life as though she doesn’t matter.

I was up half the night thinking about you. There are some things you need to know about me…

When I was fifteen I fell in love with a girl at school. I was walking on the moon! Floating on air. I had never been so happy.

This lasted about two days until she told me that she just wanted to be my friend. Then she went out with my best mate instead so I had to see them together all the time with all the obvious pain that that entailed.

Two years later I fell in love with someone else. She only wanted to be my friend as well.  And she also went off with my best friend.

I was by this time excruciatingly lonely and miserable. I was painfully shy and thought the only way to get close to girls was to become their friend. It was a rubbish technique for pulling girls because by the time I felt safe enough to tell them how much I liked them I was well and truly in the Friend Zone.

After two broken hearts I basically retreated into myself and tried to hide from the word the best I could. Mainly by getting drunk a lot. At this time of my life I was surrounded by people, but felt entirely alone and miserable.

When I was twenty-one I had my all time low, when I fell in love with a girl who was delightfully shy and totally alluring. Unfortunately for me she was a bit of a slut too. She went off with ALL of my friends! Of an entire pub full of ‘friends’, only one turned her down because of how I felt about her.

I was hanging around with all these people who just didn’t care that I was in love with this girl. She would tell me that we were exclusive, only to get off with one of my mates the next time she got drunk. Which was never more than a week or two away.

I would cry a lot and run and hide again. After a couple of weeks she would smile at me from across the room, I would forgive her and the cycle would begin again. The worst of it was that deep down I always knew she would do it again.

It went on like this for one long very painful year.

By this time my self-esteem was so low I didn’t even have the courage to walk away from all of them. I truly thought at that time that I didn’t have a choice. But eventually I finally came to my senses.

By that time I was totally devastated, my soul was destroyed and I was hurt beyond belief.  I built huge psychological walls around myself and I trusted nobody. Those walls became so thick that I am still knocking them down today.

This kind of thing went on for years after this too. Nothing quite as bad as this one, but I could never trust anyone and my self-esteem had taken such a beating that I was always in the Friend Zone. Always lonely.

Finally in my late thirties or thereabouts I was sitting with about the eighth girl I was in love with who was telling me she just wanted to be my friend. This time it was one time too many!

I became unbelievably depressed. This girl, who happened to be the only friend I had at the time, (until I blew it by falling for her of course) dragged me to the doctors where I was prescribed Prozac.

I remember so well coming out of the doctors. I collapsed on the ground, against the wheel of my van in the surgery car park, and sobbed like a baby.

Three days later I felt a rather nice tingling sensation in my arms and I knew the Prozac was beginning to kick in. I didn’t like it though!

That day I realised two things.

1. I didn’t want to rely on anti-depressants. And,
2. I realised that if so many girls only wanted to be my friend, it must be because of something I am doing.

It wasn’t them – it was me! 

A healing journey begins

I drove to the doctors and handed them my box of pills telling them I didn’t need them after all.

I was lucky in the fact that I lived alone on a narrow boat at the time so had plenty of privacy and space to begin exploring my inner most feelings in an attempt to get to the bottom of my issues.

I wish I could tell you that I had an amazing epiphany and all was immediately good again, but I can’t. My healing journey took a decade or more, gradually peeling away the lairs of pain one by one and healing them.

As I went through each healing moment my happiness and self-esteem grew. It was an exceptionally long, and often painful, journey. But life became a direct reflection of how much healing I had done – and continues to do so today.

The more of my issues I clear out, the easier and more fun life becomes. @TheVividCoach (Click to Tweet!)

Eventually, I brought myself to a place where I could sit down to lunch with a beautiful woman and, for the first time in my life, just enjoy her company without feeling a desperate need for her to want me.

That woman was your mum. We enjoyed each other so much we fell in love. She was the first woman in my life, since my mum, who loved me back…it had been a long time coming – I was forty-four!

Patterns

If we have a pattern that keeps repeating in our life, such as falling in love with girls who want to be our friend or the important people in our life treating us as though we don’t matter, it is a lesson for us to learn about ourselves.

The pattern will keep repeating itself until we recognise how WE are creating it!

I promised to give you a question but actually I have several for you to ponder. The art is not to quickly answer, “I don’t know”, but to soul search in the faith that you have the answer within you. Keep pondering until an answer comes.

If you are anything like me, each answer will create ten new questions at first. Spend time alone with a note pad and a bottle of wine and look for the answers. Cry when you need to, get angry if you want to, but find the answers and heal your stuff!

The more you allow yourself to create a life of pain, the more pain there will be to heal. So the quicker you get started the quicker and easier you will find it.

I was in my mid-forties before I could even sit down comfortably with a woman I was attracted to (can you believe that?)  You are only twenty-six. It will be far quicker and easier for you – and you’ve got me to help, support and guide you too (if you want it).

As promised, here are some questions to get you started:

• How am I allowing this to keep happening to me?
• What needs to change in order for it to stop happening?
• Which part of me needs this to happen in this way?
• Which part of me needs to feel like this? Or thinks I deserve to feel like this?
• When was the first time in my life that I felt like this? (this might be the beginning of the cycle)

Healing is the most painful and difficult thing we as humans can do. It is also the most liberating, life-enhancing and beautiful experience. It is hugely satisfying and beneficial.

In the end it just comes down to this though. Healing is merely recognising a subconscious part of yourself that wants something you consciously think you don’t want.

The hidden part is so much more powerful so keeps creating what you consciously think you don’t want – which is the cause of your continued suffering!!! 

Inner conflict – two parts of you pulling you in different directions. Healing is essentially uncovering that hidden need and accepting that part of you with love, compassion and gentleness. All you have to do is notice. There is nothing else. The rest takes care of itself. 

Why should you do it?

Because without it, your life will simply keep repeating the same old painful patterns over and over.

Because you are an amazing, beautiful, wonderful person and you deserve to feel love, hope, joy, happiness, fulfilment, peace, confidence and all the other wonderful feelings that life has to offer -all the time!

Because you deserve, as much as anyone, to have people in your life who treat you as well as your mum and I do. With respect, consideration, love, thoughtfulness, compassion, support and encouragement. Everyone should treat you like that, baby.  Not just us!

Because you DO matter!

Because you are about to get pregnant and have a child. Everything you feel will be felt by your unborn child. All of your fear, all of your insecurities and all of your issues will be transmitted and programmed into your child in an amazing and powerful way.

Choose now that you will lead by example and become a POSITIVE influence in your child’s life. Start looking for the truth and happiness that lies buried inside of you.

I hope, from the bottom of my heart, that my letter hasn’t upset you and you can take it for what it is. A guiding light from a loving dad who hopes you can learn from his journey. I wasted three quarters of my life in loneliness, heartbreak, misery and pain before I woke up to the fact that it was all my own doing.

As easily as we all allow continuing pain and struggle in our lives, we can just as easily allow continuing love, abundance and fun. But we have to consciously choose it to be that way, or the default setting is shitsville!

It just takes a little effort and a lot of determination is all. But the effort is well worth it.

Love you

John x

John Freeman is the author of Vivid Visualisation, Success without Stress. He creates unique, personalised guided visualisation recordings that bring all the benefits of visualisation without the effort. Find out more at www.vividvisualisation.com.

Image courtesy of Negative Space.

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When we think of the word “love,” most of us think of images, symbols, and mythologies about romantic love from pop culture: fireworks bursting, flower petals falling—she loves me, she loves me not; lightning bolts striking the ground; birds chirping and the sun shining. All of these images carry with them a sense of the unattainable, the magical. Love becomes something we chase after, an object we wait for, a person onto whom we fixate our attention, an experience wholly out of our control.

I think we’ve all been vulnerable to disappointment when it comes to love. Maybe we have a rough patch in a relationship with a friend or significant other and find ourselves shocked by how much work needs to go into love. Maybe we see these challenges as “problems,” and interpret them as our fault, or perhaps even their fault. We may even find ourselves thinking love itself is a deceptive, dangerous illusion.

The Universal, Healing Power

Regardless of where we’ve ended up with these narratives, there is one bottom line: no matter where we come from, we can experience love more directly, more freely—without all the weight of cultural baggage.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean we can immediately rid ourselves of the stories, fears, assumptions, and judgments about love we’ve picked up throughout our lives. But if we are able to accept that there is only one kind of love—what I call real love—and that we all can access it, no matter what we’ve been through or what we will go through, we open ourselves up to a capacity for connection that is healing, restorative, generative.

When we give and receive love from a place of presence, we can identify our histories, stories, traumas and deep-rooted beliefs with more clarity. We don’t fault ourselves, but can see these challenges for what they are. From there, we learn that no belief, thought, feeling or experience can actually block us from love. We take a stand for ourselves on our right to feel, give, receive, and be the embodiments of love.

What is Real Love, Really?

But what does all this actually feel like? When I first sought to write a book about love, I reached out to some of my students to talk about their experiences of love. What I found was that many of them understood the concept of real love, but weren’t sure how, practically, to experience it. As we talked, we worked together on naming some of the clichés about love that hold us back. As we identified them, we found that an empowering first step to real love was for each of us to become authors of new stories about love.

Real love doesn’t have to be earned. 

One of the most common clichés about love we identified was the idea that love is something to be earned—like winning an award for a groundbreaking film, or making a six figure salary for a 10-hour workday. Yet the truth is, we all deserve love simply by virtue of being in this world. We may be conditioned to think otherwise during our childhoods or later on, but we can come back to this simple truth. It may not feel easy, but it moves us beyond the cliché into real love.

We all deserve love simply by virtue of being in this world. @SharonSalzberg (Click to Tweet!)

Real love is available to anyone.

Some students voiced concern over their notions of original sin—that some people are just born broken, and are incapable of love. In fact, I think most of us can relate to the idea of feeling that we are never good enough. We can, however, invite ourselves to see our lives as both deeply connected to—but incomparable to—the lives of others. When we recognize our own abilities, talents, and heartfelt desires, we can move beyond the realm of comparison and competition. And from there, we start to question what “enough” really means. That is another gateway toward real love.

Real love for ourselves is not a prerequisite.

I personally struggled with how to take on this overarching topic of self-love, tripped up by the myth “you have to love yourself first in order to love another.” Despite the popularity of this idea, I know so many people are able to love others even while remaining highly critical of themselves. That doesn’t mean their love for others isn’t authentic, but perhaps that it comes from a place of greater emptiness than it would if self-love were part of the picture. But this myth makes us see self-love as a means to an end, an easy box to check before we can move onto bigger and better types of love. And that’s simply not the case.

Loving ourselves, others, and even our experiences, is never as simple as a box to check. All forms of love are ongoing processes, journeys we embark upon—without a fixed end point. To me, real love comes down to how well we are willing to pay attention—how closely we can notice and participate in the opportunities we get each day to act lovingly, to accept ourselves and our lives as they are.

Sharon Salzberg is a central figure in the field of meditation, a world-renowned teacher and NY Times bestselling author. She has played a crucial role in bringing meditation and mindfulness practices to the West and into mainstream culture since 1974, when she first began teaching. She is the co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, MA and the author of ten books including NY Times bestseller, Real Happiness, her seminal work, Lovingkindness and her forthcoming release by Flatiron Books, Real Love. Renowned for her down-to-earth teaching style, Sharon offers a secular, modern approach to Buddhist teachings, making them instantly accessible. She is a regular columnist for On Being, a contributor to Huffington Post, and the host of her own podcast: The Metta Hour. For more information, visit www.SharonSalzberg.com.

Image courtesy of aliceabc0.

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The mind. It’s a beautiful and a cruel place to be, depending on the moment. (A.K.A.“brutiful.”)

The mind is part of what makes humans so amazing (Innovating! Creative! Unique!); it allows us to learn from our experiences, solve problems, plan for the future. We can use it to be self-reflective, self-evaluating, and bring awareness to how our “selves” affect other people.

But what about when it starts to suffocate us? What about when reflecting on our past becomes rumination (“I shouldn’t have done that…”) or planning for our future becomes worry? What happens when the same prefrontal cortex that allows us to analyze and act becomes the inhibitor of action…you know, analysis to paralysis?

These moments are symptomatic of an egoic mindset. Self-awareness and reflection can also mean self-focus, and too much focus on ourselves can eventually become harmful. An egoic state (which is a default mindset for most of us humans) can lead us to feeling separate, “less-than” others, and (when intensified) pretty darn insignificant and sad.

So how do we stop it? How do people who rely so fully on their minds get out of…their mind?

Well, here’s one way:

Just like there’s an egoic mindset, there are also hypo-egoic mindsets. (This is the opposite state: being disinterested in the self, less concerned with other’s opinions, present in the moment, feeling “apart” of the whole. You know, the good stuff.) These states are awesome because within them we can let go of our over-analyzing behavior, enjoy the people and the moments in our lives more freely, and just generally…be happier. (Which I think is the general goal, right?)

There’s one way that researchers in a lab have been able to produce hypo-egoic states by eliciting feelings of awe from participants.

Awe

You’ve probably heard the word awe before, and generally know what it means, but just to be specific: awe is a feeling that makes you step back and gasp at the beauty of it all. Awe is knowing that it’s a big world and you’re a part of it; it’s a hard-to-define-moment at which we’re captured by the complexity and power all around us. A starry night, towering redwoods, your child’s eyes…the experiences (different for all of us) that produce a feeling of being struck.

Being struck by what? A hypo-egoic mindset, apparently. In moments of awe, we lose track of ourselves.

It’s hard to be self-centered when we’re enamored with the world around us; we’re less likely to worry about the future or regret the past if we’re captured by the beauty of the Grand Canyon or holding our first born.

So yes, awe is great, but…let’s be honest. We can’t always be at the Grand Canyon. We can’t constantly be staring into the night sky contemplating the universe or walking along the beach.

What can we do to elicit a hypo-egoic mindset from ourselves?

We can put ourselves in the way of awe. We can reflect on times when we personally felt it, remember what it looked like and smelled like, what we noticed and how we felt. We can sit down and write about those moments, re-live them, make them real to us again.

Remember, this isn’t just nostalgia (which is great, but can lead to feelings of longing or sadness.) This is asking yourself what moments have made you do an inner curtsy to the universe, and diving into them. Setting aside five minutes to paint as clear a picture of that moment as possible.

The action of reflecting and writing about a time when we were overwhelmed with the vastness of a moment can itself bring about parts of that moment…as well as the feelings that went along with it. We don’t have to physically be on the beach or at that canyon; we just need to remember (in detail) what it felt like.

This awe-eliciting trick is one to put in your back pocket for a rainy day: or a sunny day, or a foggy day, or a Saturday, or…you get the picture.

Escaping an egoic mindset isn’t always necessary (if we didn’t focus on ourselves at all, how would be achieve our goals?) but it’s helpful to be aware of the ways in which our minds work for and against us.

A practice like this one is like a lasso for the runaway thoughts in our minds.

So, go ahead. Be in awe. Remember it, write about it, tell me about it in the comments. Reflecting on the powerful moments in life might just remind us of the beauty in the here and now.

Melissa Pennel is a coffee drinker, overthinker, and empowerment coach in Northern California. You can find more of her writing on her website, and follow her on Instagram or Facebook. 

Image courtesy of freestockpro.com.

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Over the past ten years, I’ve thought a lot about building a legacy. In particular, I’ve thought about it as it relates to a body of work that you produce and share over the years. This model has kept me going for a long time.

To me, one of the most attractive qualities of writing the blog, starting in 2008 and continuing until now (albeit in several distinct forms), was the idea that I was building a portfolio of sorts. I could write something today, and it would still be around tomorrow, next week, next year, and so on. It would, as I’ve said more than once, “go on to live a life of its own.”

But is that really true?

As I wrote waaaaay back in 2009 (WTF), nothing lasts forever. In my therapy sessions of late, and in my own reflection while traveling, I’ve been thinking more about the not-so-shocking revelation that everything eventually comes to an end.

And as I learn through experience and observation, I’m forced to concede that there are some holes to this model that I love so dearly.

One of the holes is that much of the work seems destined to be lost, sometimes immediately upon dissemination. It disappears into the void of content overwhelm. Some people do go back and discover earlier work, but there’s a real 80/20 rule (probably more like 98/2) to this. Very few people go back, and very little of the work lives to see the sunlight again… if it ever did at all.

Another hole is that some work becomes perennially popular—which is great, of course—but you can’t necessarily predict which work that will be. My second book, The $100 Startup, has sold 10 times the number of copies that my first book, The Art of Non-Conformity, has. I’m glad that people enjoyed it, but I don’t think it’s 10x better than the first one. I didn’t work 10x as hard on it, and I don’t believe in that book’s message 10x more.

I’m pretty sure there’s an element of luck to some of these things. And if it’s not luck, the point is that it’s outside one’s ability to influence, which means it might as well be luck.

Don’t get me wrong, I still believe in the model of legacy work. I’m not quitting or going anywhere. I’m just as motivated as when I started, if not more. Perhaps I’m just less confident in my ability to predict and control it. So maybe it’s time to consider a new model.

Let’s call this new model the Etch-a-Sketch practice of making art. Remember those? You could sketch whatever you imagined in a sea of horizontal and vertical lines, but with a quick shake-shake-shake, it was gone. Aside from never using that Etch-a-Sketch again, which would of course render it useless, there’s no way to preserve the work.

So in this Etch-a-Sketch model, you still have to do your best every day. You put out the show, the post, the essay, the video… or whatever your form or medium. You still get the chance to reach people with it that day.

But then it disappears, never to be seen or experienced again, and you have to start over the next day. The only value is what you make of it today. When tomorrow comes, you have to deliver once more.

In this scenario, there are no archives. There is no body of work. There is only, well, today. This leads to an obvious question: what will you make with your one day of opportunity?

And if you don’t put it to good use, not to worry. Perhaps you’ll have another chance tomorrow, after today disappears into the void.

Chris Guillebeau is the New York Times bestselling author of The Happiness of Pursuit, The $100 Startup, and other books. During a lifetime of self-employment, he visited every country in the world (193 in total) before his 35th birthday. Every summer in Portland, Oregon he hosts the World Domination Summit, a gathering of creative, remarkable people. His new book, Born for This, will help you find the work you were meant to do. Connect with Chris on Twitter, on his blog, or at your choice of worldwide airline lounge.

Image courtesy of Spencer Selover.

The post What If All Your Work Disappeared at the End of the Day? appeared first on Positively Positive!!.

I’ve done a lot of “shadow work”. Shadow work meaning looking into the feelings, thoughts, and associations I made in the past that are giving me grief in my present. In other words, I took lots of time to look into why I felt so shitty for so long and how my past was related to that.

I went from being a victim and blaming other people, to feeling a victim and feeling inadequate, to feeling inadequate and being enormously mad at myself, to feeling a victim and feeling helpless. I can go on for a while but in the end, I let go of the victimhood, started to take responsibility for my own actions, forgave myself, looked at myself with love and started believing and trusting myself again.

I remember very vividly when being in the victimhood and looking into my past, how contracted, small and angry I felt. It felt like I didn’t have any choice at that time and it was so damn hard to choose for a point of view less angry and more empowering and forgiving. It felt like too big of a hurdle for me to take.

During those years I did transform my victim mentality but I did take the long route.

Now I believe it’s not necessary to dive into the past and relive experiences that caused you pain. I did and I kept reaffirming my victim mentality as well as other negative emotions. Instead of learning to look at those experiences with an empowering point of view, I kept affirming my negative one.

By doing this I kept myself away from the light – meaning being my True Self – longer than necessary.

So why does Shadow work keep you from the light?

(Nothing really does keep you from the light except choosing to do so. Shadow work in itself, therefore, doesn’t keep you from the light. But it can keep you away from the light longer than necessary)

• Every experience doesn’t have any meaning in itself but the meaning you give it. This means it’s more beneficial to learn to change your point of view on these experiences.
• How you view your experiences influences how you feel. So if you want to change how you feel NOW, change how you view your past NOW. If you do that, you change how you feel NOW. For that, you don’t need to go back and work through every negative experience in your life.
• Shadow work can have the effect of keeping you identified with your limiting beliefs. In the end, it’s those limiting beliefs that make you feel shitty now and not your experiences in the past.
• Bad things happened in the past and they don’t happen to you in the NOW. With Shadow work you keep reliving those past experiences and for your emotions and vibrations, it seems as if it’s happening NOW.

Why we keep doing Shadow work

• For me it had a lot do with fear. I felt so small, inadequate, and lonely that I felt too scared to step into my own power. I didn’t think I had it in me. It felt less scary to stay in the past and try to “explain” and “rationalize” everyone’s actions in my experiences than to just shift my point of view.
• I also held on too much to my limiting beliefs. I believed in lack of love, money, and possibilities so much I couldn’t believe something else was possible. My world was too small and too contracted to see that what I chose to believe is the exact opposite of what Life and I am about.
• Being attached to my limiting beliefs at that time did have some kind of benefit. It if didn’t I would’ve chosen a different viewpoint. The benefit was that that option felt less scary and overwhelming. By choosing those options I chose the road with less intense fear emotions in the short run and for negativity, doubt, and fear as well on the long run.

When you dive within yourself and you dive into your so-called shadow parts, that hardly ever goes hand in hand with positive feelings. The theory is that because something doesn’t make you feel good, it gets buried in your unconscious parts of your mind. And from there it influences how you act and behave now.

Although it is true that beliefs, thoughts, and ideas that you’re not conscious of can influence how you behave now, it isn’t necessary to dive into negative stuff in your past.

By diving into that negativity you step into that negativity. By doing so, you’re lowering your vibration and with a lower vibration you don’t have access to higher vibration overviews and insights.

What I mean is, that when you unnecessarily look and step into “long lost shadow parts” of yourself and deliberately stepping into negative feelings, you’re depriving yourself of a higher perspective. When you feel grateful, forgiving and loving you have access to more insightful, more in-depth and more loving perspectives than when you feel mad, angry or frustrated.

So if you want to feel better now, and become conscious of unconscious beliefs and thoughts, you don’t have to look at your past.

Your present tells you everything. Because your present is a reflection of you before your present moment became your present moment. So looking at your present, you’re looking at your past. Your present is nothing but a reflection of your inner vibration. So your present reflects your past.

So instead of diving within and looking for your shadow parts in your past, look at your present and work with that. That’ll show you enough to uncover what’s unconscious.

Carmen Smallegange is a coach specialized in uncovering and transforming limiting beliefs. Using her own life lessons she shines a new and fresh light on negative experiences to empower others to do the same and to acknowledge and step into their own amazing potential. You can get her free workbook on how to transform your fears or follow her on Facebook.

Image courtesy of Maranatha Pizarras.

The post Why Shadow Work Keeps You Away from the Light appeared first on Positively Positive!!.

Alex Berenson had the dream job. But he was unhappy. And perhaps it even scarred him in some ways.

He switched it up. To his true dreams. To the dreams he had for himself since he was a child.

I want to do this.

First off, Alex has written 11 bestselling thriller novels. Alex knows how to get the reader to turn the page and ask, “What happens next?!”

This is an unbelievably hard skill.

But it’s not the most important skill when you are moving into your dream job.

I will tell you the most important skill. And Alex explains more clearly how he did it when we are in the podcast.

The most important skill is to have this weird sort of “active arrogance”.

Here’s the gap: The best in your profession have skills, experience, and they know how to sit down and DO something every day.

The beginners: they WANT to do something. They PLAN to do something. They SAY they will eventually do it. They THINK they have the skills they need.

But they never do it.

The ones who succeed. They have the arrogance to think they can just simply sit down and do it. Despite not having the skills. Despite being total amateurs. They simply sit down and DO IT.

By doing it, you LEARN the skills, you DO the job [a first novel in Alex’s case], and you get better.

DOING is the only way to succeed. Most people stop before this point. @jaltucher (Click to Tweet!)

Alex didn’t.

And thank god. Because his 11 bestsellers have been lifesavers for me. A way for me to dream. A way for me to escape.

Here’s how Alex did it:

Create your own universe

“In 2003 and 2004, I went to Iraq for the paper,” he said (he worked at The New York Times). “The war had ended, supposedly… we deposed Saddam. Most reporters go during the ‘active phase,’ so The Times said any cub reporter could put their hand up and go. So I put my hand up.”

Then he came back and realized he had stories. And John Wells was born. Alex has written 11 bestsellers. All page-turners. I wanted to know what made him start writing thrillers. I’ve always thought of writing fiction. I still wonder if that’s what’s next.

Here’s what he told me, “In my universe, nobody lies to me. They can lie to each other, they can even lie to themselves, they cannot lie to me.”

Some luck goes unnoticed

“Coming back to the states was a shock,” he said. “The wastefulness of this country really smacks you when you’ve been away for a while, certainly in a place like that.”

“What do you mean? What’s an example?”

“I think the example that struck me is the electrical grid.”

We take it for granted that the lights go on. And then use them like crazy. I live in NY. The lights are always on. It doesn’t matter what time. And I never think about it. “American is a place of abundance,” Alex said. “I guess that’s a good thing. It’s better to be rich than poor but realize that 80% of the world is never going to live in conditions anything like this. It really does just smack you in the face to realize how lucky we are and how little we realize that.”

Choose yourself

I asked Alex if he thinks we’re becoming complacent as a society. “Thats a real fear,” Alex said. There are two sides. One side is if you give people everything will they stop wanting to work? Will they say they have enough. And give up.

But then the other side is you work so hard and go nowhere. “The flip side of that is if you make the system so unfair that nobody believes hard work can get you ahead, they’re not going to work either.”

And I think that’s why work should be more than a paycheck. There has to be a vision. And following that vision is how you choose yourself.

Have a little arrogance

Alex said a lot of reporters want to write novels. He was one of them. But there’s something that separates those who write from those who don’t…

“I did something arrogant,” he said. “I wrote a novel.”

So I wondered if that’s part of the formula? Do all novelists have some arrogance to write something totally made up and think other people will want to read it?

“Of course,” Alex said. “Are you kidding? It’s the craziest endeavor. ‘I’m going to create this world with these fake people and I want you to believe they’re real. And I want to make them come alive for you.’”

Finding aspects of you

I’m curious about the characters. Like dreams, where do they come from? Is it a manifestation of yourself? Of people you know? And who leads the story? Is it the writer? Some writers say the characters are so strong psychologically that they lead the story.

Alex got his answer from his wife. She’s a psychiatrist. She says John Wells is a projection of Alex’s most idealized version of himself. “He’s strong, he’s very capable, he’s so tough. Women love him, men fear him, sheep want to be with him, ya know he’s tortured because he’s committed all this violence over the years, but he’s essentially a good guy.”

I wonder what it would be like to create my own universe and then ask a doctor to read into me. But I only know what I create if I start creating.

How do you survive?

His books are 400 pages each. And that’s before everything gets cut down and reformatted. He used to write before work. Now it’s his full time job.

“So how do you survive? How do you sit through it?”

“Writing the books is mentally painful,” he said. “I make the characters suffer. Because I’m suffering.”

Who’s your hero?

I wanted to know more about Alex’s hero. He could’ve made the everyman. But instead he chose a spy, someone who in danger. Maybe it’s a reflection of who we want to be. Someone with real freedom.

Alex said. “When you have nothing to lose, when you don’t care if you live or die, you have incredible freedom.”

Alex doesn’t have that freedom. He told me how he was almost kidnapped in Iraq. “People thought I was spy,” he said. ““I had a very close call. I mean everyone has a close call, but I had a very close call”

“What was your close call?”

“Ya know, I don’t like to talk about it.”

I couldn’t let this go. When someone comes on my podcast, I have one chance to ask them everything I want to know.

“Could we please talk about it?”

“I found a notebook that a Shia fighter kept… It was just a tiny green notebook. It was in the rubble of a building. And I took it.”

“They saw you pick it up?”

“No… I was dressed like a local. I had a goatee. I had my haircut shorter, but no one was going to be fooled into thinking I was Iraqi. No one who REALLY looked at me. And I didn’t speak arabic”

People got suspicious of him.

“The question was, ‘What are you doing? Why do you look like this? Why are you trying to pass… you’re not one of us. And once that happened, it just spiraled.”

“So you reached a point where you got scared,” I said.

“Oh, no no no no. It was much worse than that…”

Get stories

I wanted to know how Alex got back home. He was detained. And almost martyred.

These experiences lead to his novels. Now, he had stories to begin fueling the John Wells series.

Write everyday

People ask Alex how he gets his inspiration.

“I have a mortgage to pay and I have a contract. I can’t wait for inspiration.” He says he makes progress every day.

How do you get people to turn the page?

Alex turned the tables. He asked if I wrote a page-turner.

The answer’s no. I tried. I’ve tried for 20 years. He said one key is to let people read your work. I’ve never let anyone read my fiction. I want to know the beats.

We broke them down.

“I’m kind of the wrong person to ask about structure,” he said. “My books violate the normal structure of genre fiction.”

But I find this is true with all peak performers. They can’t explain how they do so well. It comes natural to them. So getting into the finer nuances takes effort.

I dug. And here’s what I found…

Finding structure

1. In the beginning, the main character is involved in something bad
2. Then he solves it
3. And he’s given a grace period of relief
4. Then he goes through something worse… Alex said, “You have to have a mission and within that mission there has to be sub-missions.”
5. It could get worse. “It depends,” Alex said. Sometime the main character gets help from somewhere else or a clue is revealed. Anything can happen.

The key to a great ending…

Eventually it ends… But here’s the key. You need a cool solve.

So I asked, “What’s a cool solve?” This is another great example of an expert knowing his craft better than the inner workings of that craft…

We went through a ton of examples. And finally landed on this:

You have to build. “For Wells, there’s always tensions. Your always asking, ‘How far will this go?’ You just got me to explain it better,” Alex said.

James Altucher is the author of the bestselling book Choose Yourself, editor at The Altucher Report and host of the popular podcast, The James Altucher Show, which takes you beyond business and entrepreneurship by exploring what it means to be human and achieve well-being in a world that is increasingly complicated. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter.

The post How to Write a Page-Turner appeared first on Positively Positive!!.

It feels interminable. Like you’ll never get out. Like it’s never…going…to…end. That’s the nature of hell. It’s not the pain that drives you insane, it’s the fear that the pain could go on and on.

The first thing to tell yourself when you’re in hell: This pain WILL end.

I find this works for most varieties of hell. Physical pain. Heart break. Mental torture. Long road trips when you’re forced to listen to sports talk radio.

You probably won’t believe it when you remind yourself that This pain WILL end. And you may have nine reasons why you’ll never “fully” get over it. (And maybe 4.5 of them could be legit.) But your exact coordinates in hell, that specific degree of pain, that particular agony — all that will shift.

Because life keeps moving forward, always toward healing.
The nature of hell (density + illusion) is constriction.
The nature of heaven (light + truth) is expansion — always upward, onward and inward at the same time.
LIFE LIVES EVERYWHERE.

Use this truth to catch your breath: This pain WILL end.

Declare. Breathe. Move. Forward. Toward the truth.

(PS…For real. The pain will end. You’re going to get through it.)

Danielle LaPorte is an invited member of Oprah’s SuperSoul 100, a group who, in Oprah Winfrey’s words, “is uniquely connecting the world together with a spiritual energy that matters.” She is author of White Hot Truth: Clarity for keeping it real on your spiritual path—from one seeker to another. The Fire Starter Sessions, and The Desire Map: A Guide To Creating Goals With Soul—the book that has been translated into 8 languages, evolved into a yearly day planner system, a top 10 iTunes app, and an international workshop program with licensed facilitators in 15 countries.

Named one of the “Top 100 Websites for Women” by Forbes, millions of visitors go to DanielleLaPorte.com every month for her daily #Truthbombs and what’s been called “the best place online for kickass spirituality.” A speaker, a poet, a painter, and a former business strategist and Washington-DC think tank exec, Entrepreneur Magazine calls Danielle, “equal parts poet and entrepreneurial badass…edgy, contrarian…loving and inspired.” Her charities of choice are Eve Ensler’s VDay: a global movement to end violence against women and girls, and charity: water, setting out to bring safe drinking water to everyone in the world. She lives in Vancouver, BC with her favourite philosopher, her son. You can find her @daniellelaporte and just about everywhere on social media.

The post The First Step to Take When You’re in Hell appeared first on Positively Positive!!.