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Self-Reliance, Translated

2012-05-24T11:25:00.002-07:00

I published a new book yesterday. It is Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay, Self-Reliance, translated into modern English. I've been studying Emerson's essay for years. I consider it one of the most significant pieces of writing ever published.

I once typed the original essay word for word and printed it out as a booklet for myself because I couldn't find a version of the book that stood alone — it was always in a collection of essays. I wanted only the Self-Reliance.

While I was at it, I looked up all the words I didn't know, and made footnotes of definitions for each word on each page (and there were a lot of them). After Al Gore invented the internet, I was able to put it online, which you can read here. And of course, all the footnotes of definitions are now hyperlinks.

Then I recorded the essay for myself and listened to it over and over while driving. And I tried to apply it to my life.

Then, to understand it even better, I went over it line by line, trying to write what Emerson wrote in my own words. That rewrite project is what I just published as a (very small) book. I don't think I'm a better writer than Emerson. I love his writing. Some of his sentences were so well-said, I included them in my translation just because I couldn't bear to leave them out. My motivation for translating it came from an experience I had with Cliff Notes.

I had always considered Cliff Notes as a kind of cheating. If you didn't want to read the real book, you could read a condensed version that tells you everything you need to know to pass a test. Then one day I saw the movie Henry V (the one with Kenneth Branagh). I really liked the movie but I only understood about half of what they were saying. They were speaking English, but three things were hindering my understanding:

1. English was spoken differently back then. They commonly used words we are now unfamiliar with.

2. Shakespeare was a poet, so he often inverted sentences and used unusual phrases in order to make things sound poetic.

3. They were speaking with an English accent.

Emerson's essay is difficult for a modern English speaker today for the first two reasons. Emerson used words that, although I could find them in a dictionary, I had never heard anyone say. And he was a poet, so some of his phrases were meant to be savored rather than read only for their direct meaning.

Just by chance, I was browsing in a used bookstore one day, and I came across a Cliff Notes on Henry V. I was curious what it might say, so I read it and found it a revelation. It explained terms and phrases I didn't know. I remember, for example, the phrase, "throwing down a gage." The Cliff Notes explained this. It is an archaic term that means throwing gloves at the feet of someone, which in those days meant you were challenging the person to a duel. I could have watched Henry V fifty times and never figured that out. But after I learned it, I understood better what was going on when I watched the movie again.

That's what I hope happens after people read my translation. I hope they go back and enjoy Emerson's original and eloquent essay, and understand it better, and really appreciate his creative, powerful prose.

Last year, the Domino Project came out with a beautiful hardcover edition of Self-Reliance. You can find it on Amazon here. Amazon's description of their book gives you a sense of why Emerson's essay is so important to read. It says:

With quotes from the likes of Henry Ford and Helen Keller to modern-day thought leaders like Jesse Dylan, Steve Pressfield, and Milton Glaser, we're reminded of the relevance of Emerson’s powerful words today. Emerson’s words are timeless. Persuasive and convincing, he challenges readers to define their own sense of accomplishment and asks them to measure themselves against their own standards, not those of society.

This famous orator has utter faith in individualism and doesn’t invoke beyond what is humanly possible; he just believes deeply that each of us is capable of greatness. He asks us to define that greatness for ourselves and to be true to ourselves.

At times harsh, at times comforting, Emerson’s words guide the reader to challenge their own beliefs and sense of self.

On the back cover of the Domino version, it says, "Every page of this manifesto will cut you to the bone, inspire you and expose the seduction of blind obedience for what it is: a trap." If you don't own a copy of Self-Reliance already, I recommend the Domino version (and my translation as well to help you understand this important essay).

Get the Domino version here: Self-Reliance.
Get my translation here: Self-Reliance, Translated.

I'll leave you with a quote from Jesse Dylan:

I reread Self-Reliance a few times a year. It's always on my bedside table and I've done it for many years. Emerson's clear and true words ring like a bell. It keeps me on track. It's hard to follow your path or even to know what it is. There are constant distractions. This essay is a guide for how to realize your vision for your life.

How to Make a Boring Task Less Boring

2012-05-18T12:01:00.000-07:00

DO YOU SOMETIMES feel tired? Listless? It might be boredom. Some tasks are just plain boring, and when your mind is bored, it starts shutting down or drifting off and going to sleep. To stay awake, you must engage your mind. Here are a couple of ideas to help you:

Move faster. This makes your mind pay closer attention in order to avoid mistakes. This demand for increased attention wakes you up, focuses your mind and makes the task more challenging. You can speed up without feeling unpleasantly stressed: Make it like a game. How much can you get done in the next half hour? Set a target and see if you can reach it. This makes a tedious task less boring and, as a bonus, frees up more time for things you like to do.

Listen to something. Everyone knows it’s more fun to do physical work while listening to good music than it is working in silence. Music engages your mind to some degree. But there is something that engages your mind more completely: talking. There has been a virtual explosion in the publishing industry of audiobooks. Many people who commute to work have converted that boring and otherwise unproductive time into a mind-engaging education. The amount of recorded material available is staggering. In the next few years, using only the time you spend driving and doing household chores, you can learn a foreign language, listen to countless great books read to you by the best readers in America, and transform boring routines into an opportunity to expand your mind.

There’s another kind of value to listening to audiobooks. Often it doesn’t matter what you have learned. Even if you could recite it, some practical knowledge matters only if you have it in mind. Ideas about human relations are like that. I have pretty much memorized the principles in Dale Carnegie’s book How to Win Friends & Influence People, but when I am face-to-face with a real human being, I often forget it all. It isn’t fresh in my mind — it’s stored away somewhere. For this kind of knowledge, it’s better to listen to a little every day. Then the ideas will be in the front of your mind when you need them.

Use these two ideas to make boring tasks more interesting to your mind. Move faster, listen to something, or both. A mind is truly a terrible thing to waste. Brains are made to be constantly interested. Brains aren’t like muscles; muscles get tired when they are used too much. Brains get tired when they aren’t used enough. Brains not only get tired, but over time, they can become smaller and more feeble.

Research is now showing that it is a myth that people lose their mental ability with age. What they have found is that people who don’t continue to use their mental abilities — people who don’t continue to learn and grow — lose their mental ability with age. Learning and growing is for everyone, young and old alike. Even during a boring task, you can find a way to engage your mind.

This is a chapter from the book, Self-Help Stuff That Works

You Think YOU'VE Got Problems!

2012-05-11T16:13:00.000-07:00

Three Years Among the Comanches is an amazing book. I was just reading it tonight. The story is a first-hand account, published in 1859 by Nelson Lee, who was captured by the Comanches on his way from Texas to California.

The part I read tonight was how two of his companions died. Most of the people he was traveling with were killed on the spot, but four were taken prisoner (Lee and three other men). One day, all four of the prisoners were tied to poles, facing each other. Two prisoners were side by side, and Lee and another prisoner were tied up facing the first two, who were then slowly tortured for two hours.

It was too painful to watch their friends suffering like that, so Lee and the other prisoner-witness tried to look away, but the Comanches forced them to watch as one by one, warriors came up to the two tortured prisoners to slash them with an arrowhead or take a small piece of their scalp. They sliced deep enough to bleed but not enough to kill the prisoners. One warrior after another came up and sliced in a different place. The prisoners screamed, moaned, begged, and bled for two hours. Finally they were put out of their misery with a hatchet through the head.

As I was reading this horrible, graphic account by someone who witnessed it first hand, I was struck by the pettiness of my own problems. I said out loud, "I think I have problems!" The comparison made me feel that my unhappiness at my own little problems was pathetic.

And it occurred to me that this perspective is true. It is not only true, but it is valuable. Pessimism is a violation of your own integrity, and the perspective here — that things could almost always be a lot worse — is the honest truth and a powerful insight.

The truth is, your circumstances are only really bad in comparison to something better. And the truth is, you have a choice about what you compare your circumstances to. If you choose to always compare your circumstances to something more ideal, it will prevent you from being as happy as you could be or as satisfied with your life as you could be. Read more about that.

And think about this: Any unhappiness caused that way is directly attributable to your deliberate refusal to see an obvious truth: That things could be worse. For many people, now and in the past, it is a plain fact that things have been much MUCH worse.

If you ever want a reality-check, remember those tortured prisoners. Compared to circumstances like that, your problems are petty. In fact, compared to circumstances like that, your problems probably seem laughable.

It's also true that you would like better circumstance. But if you're going to tell the truth, tell the whole truth, and that includes the facts that puts your problems in perspective.

The Holstee Manifesto

2012-05-04T13:01:00.001-07:00

Click here to see a much larger image of the famous Holstee Manifesto. And click here to watch a YouTube video version of the Holstee Manifesto (2 minutes and 37 seconds long).

Read more about the Holstee Manifesto in a Washington Post article: How the Holstee manifesto became the new ‘Just Do It’

2012-04-27T19:29:00.001-07:00

The following is an excerpt from an article by Heather Kelly on DEMO. Thanks to Mike Elgan for sending this in:

PositiveTalk is a new web-app that attempts to accentuate the positive social chatter in your life. It eliminates the negative with a somewhat messy and crowded Facebook-esque interface, peppered with graphs and charts obsessively calculating positivity, inspirational quotes, and a hodgepodge of tools that try to gamify being perky.

It looks at the moods of you and your friends by combing Facebook and Twitter, and makes suggestions for ways you can improve your outlook, going so far as too suggest new, better friends.

“It is very important that we consciously and consistently associate with positive people and choose positive words in our internal and external communication,” co-founder Jim Tousignant told VentureBeat. “Doing so results in attracting positive people into our lives, developing strong positive thoughts and beliefs, and achieving positive energy, positive feelings and emotional fulfillment in our minds and lives.”

A beta version of the app was launched at the DEMO Spring 2012 conference in Santa Clara, Calf. on Thursday. (Click here to watch the demo on YouTube.)

The reason for the app, according the its founders, is to combat the global negativity epidemic. Mobile devices and social media are contributing to the scourge by increasing “the volume of negative online messages, emails, voicemails, text messages, instant messages, posts and tweets daily.”

Symptoms can impact your emotions, health, finances, personal life, and business relationships. You may already be infected and not even know it.

The company has some stats to back its claims up: According to PositiveTalk, studies show that 80 percent of the average person’s thoughts are negative (a quick sampling of things I thought while writing this post support the statistic). It also says the average person talks smack about themselves, in addition to the other people, family, friends, and co-workers with whom they interact.

“We think this is going to be a very provocative application,” Tousignant said on stage. In his mind, the tool will help people differentiate their friends online and ask themselves if they really want to associate with negative people.

Learn more about the PositiveTalk app here. The app is free, and is now available for Facebook and Twitter. It will soon be available for other social media.

Control Your Feelings and Improve Your Life

2012-04-20T17:02:00.000-07:00

I WENT TO a big event at the Key Arena in Seattle awhile back. Tony Robbins was the main speaker and master of ceremonies, but it was an all-day event and many speakers were on the roster. Brian Tracy, the author of some of my favorite audio programs, was one of the speakers. Most of them talked about changing your state of mind.

I enjoyed it tremendously. But after it was over I thought, "Here are the top motivational speakers in the world — corporations pay them thousands of dollars to talk to the company's top executives because what these guys teach is so valuable — and the principles they talk about are the same ones Napoleon Hill wrote in Think and Grow Rich eighty years ago!" The way to change your state of mind hasn't changed a bit.

At first I was disappointed. I thought they should have come up with something new. But then I realized the same few principles that worked on human minds eighty years ago still work on human minds today. Human beings haven't changed. We're still human. What will change your state of mind is the same thing that could change your grandfather's state of mind.

One of the principles Tony talked about was what he called "incantations." That means changing your state of mind by saying positive things to yourself with feeling. Napoleon Hill called it "autosuggestion." This is one of the most basic principles for taking advantage of the awesome power of your mind and fulfilling your potential. There ain't much to it, and it's easy to explain.

I saw the principle illustrated in the movie The Edge with Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin. The two men in the movie were out in the Alaskan wilderness. Their plane had crashed and they were trying to get back to civilization. But a huge bear was stalking them. It had already brutally killed and eaten one of their friends. Now it was after them. Their state of mind was FEAR.

They made a circle of fire and it was keeping the bear at bay, but they had no food or water, so they couldn't stay where they were. The bear was faster than they were so they couldn't outrun it.

In this scene, Bob (Baldwin) has a look of hopeless despair on his face. Charles (Hopkins) is sharpening a long pole, saying he's going to kill the bear. We, the audience, realize this is really the only way out of their predicament. Kill or be killed. But Bob is in anguish. He doesn't think it's possible. He says, "We can't kill the bear, Charles. He's ahead of us all the time. It's like he's reading our minds — he's stalking us for God's sake!" He drops his head. His face has a look of intense anguish. He looks like he's on the verge of crying. You can feel what he's picturing in his mind: The horror of being eaten alive and despair of realizing there's no way he can avoid this unthinkable nightmare. It's a thought too overwhelming to grasp.

Charles says, "You want to die out here, huh? Well, then die. I'll tell you what: I'm not going to die. No sir. I'm not going to die. I'm going to kill the bear."

Charles looks at Bob. "Say it," Charles demands. "Say I'm going to kill the bear. Say it!" Charles asks him again. Bob remains silent. Charles yells at him, "Say it! Say I'm going to kill the bear!"

Bob, not looking at all convinced, says quietly, "I'm going to kill the bear."

"Say it again," says Charles.

Bob says it a little louder, "I'm going to kill the bear."

"And again!"

This time Bob yells out: "I'M GOING TO KILL THE BEAR!"

"Good! What one man can do, another can do." Charles is yelling at Bob now, like a coach on the sidelines.

Bob repeats, "What one man can do, another can do."

Charles makes him repeat this statement a few more times, with increasing feeling, and you see the hopeless despair on Bob's face slowly transform into grim determination.

This is a very useful and powerful transition to make in a circumstance like that.

The thoughts you think in a crisis can save your life or bury you. No kidding. Read the stories of people who have survived seemingly hopeless situations — Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors, the true story of a Rugby team that crashed in the Andes mountains; Adrift: Seventy-six Days Lost at Sea, the true story of a sailor who spent 76 days alone on his life raft after his boat sunk; Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage, the true story of a team of Antarctic explorers led by Earnest Shackleton — they all survived because at least one person was able to say to himself with firm determination, "We're going to make it. We will survive." At least one person did not succumb to the despair that naturally occurs to everyone.

Thousands of people have perished in similar circumstances — people who threw up their hands in hopelessness and declared, "We're dead!" — people who wrung their hands and repeated to themselves how hopeless and horrible it was. Those people didn't take the steps that might have saved them. Remember this in case you are ever in a seriously dangerous predicament.

But you don't have to be in really bad straits to use this. This is a tool. A mental tool. It's simple and it's good for a great many applications. No matter how high-tech we get, some tools will never change and will always be useful. People have used axes to chop wood for thousands of years, and in all that time, the basic design hasn't changed. It's basic. It is simple. And it does the job.

CHANGE YOUR ATTITUDE

You can use this mental tool — making positive statements to yourself with feeling — whenever you want to change your state of mind. You can use it whenever the state of mind you have fallen into is counterproductive.

My wife and I got into an argument one night as she was getting ready for bed. I went into the other room so she could sleep. I knew she wouldn't be able to sleep, but I was feeling too angry and self-righteous to try to help her feel better.

My state of mind wasn't what I wanted it to be. So I changed it. I had an effective tool that could do the job. First I said to myself, "I can get out of this self-righteous state." I said it quietly at first. Then I said it with a little more feeling. Then I said it with even more feeling.

That's always a good way to approach it. Sometimes at first you can't really work up any feeling for it. But if you just say it, even in a monotone, the next time you say it, you can say it with a little more feeling.

I was doing this in my head, by the way. You can say things to yourself with feeling. The voice in your head has a tone of voice and a volume.

Then I said to myself (with no conviction at all), "I'm going to go in there and make her feel good." I wanted her to be able to go to sleep with no hard feelings between us.

I said it again and again, with more feeling every time. And...it changed my state. I was angry to start with. After spending only about six or seven minutes using this mental tool, I changed my state from anger to a firm determination to make her feel good. I went into the bedroom, gave her a big hug and told her I loved her. She hugged me back and thanked me.

You are not a victim to your own feelings. You can control how you feel if you have the right tool. It's like chopping down a tree — if you have the right tool (an ax, for example) you can do it. If you don't have the right tool, it is nearly impossible. Can you change your emotional state when you want? Yes, you can, if you use the right tool.

USE YOUR FACE

The researcher Patricia Ruselli did an experiment that went like this: The subject was brought in and told to watch a slide presentation designed to produce sadness. Half the subjects were told to frown while they watched it. The other half were told not to frown.

For several hours afterwards, the people who frowned felt more depressed than the people who didn't frown.

Fritz Strack, a psychologist at Mannheim University in Germany, conducted an unusual experiment. He took a group of volunteers and told them he was going to test their physical skills. He showed them a series of cartoons and told them to rate the cartoons' funniness. But they had to hold a pen in their mouths while they did it. Half of them were told to hold it between their lips; the other half, between their teeth.

The ones with the pen between their teeth rated the cartoons as funnier.

Apparently, when they held the pen between their lips, they couldn't smile, but when it was between their teeth, the pen forced their faces into a smile, or at least closer to a smile than a pen between their lips, and that physical change in their facial expressions changed how funny something was. Interesting.

Another bit of evidence comes from a pilot study that found when people were injected with Botox to get rid of furrowed brows, it improved their mood, in particular, they had measurable decreases in symptoms of depression. Even when your facial expression is changed with a paralyzing toxin, it can alter your emotional state.

The point of all this is for you to realize that when you change your facial expression, you change your feelings. So use this. Say your statements with feeling — feeling in your voice and feeling on your face.

In Henry V, Shakespeare shows his understanding (as usual) of human nature. During a break between skirmishes while they are attacking a city, King Henry addresses his troops. He gives his men detailed instructions on what to do with their facial expression and their breathing. In Act III, Scene I, King Henry says,

Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favour'd rage;
Then lend the eye a terrible aspect;
Let it pry through the portage of the head
Like the brass cannon; let the brow o'erwhelm it
As fearfully as doth a galled rock
O'erhang and jutty his confounded base,
Swill'd with the wild and wasteful ocean.
Now set the teeth and stretch the nostril wide;
Hold hard the breath, and bend up every spirit
To its full height!

Basically, King Henry is telling his soldiers exactly how to get their body and face in a good fighting mode. He tells them to make themselves tense and hardened, to put a look of rage on their faces, to make their eyebrows low with their eyes glaring intensely, to clamp the teeth, flare their nostrils, to blow out forcefully when they breathe out. If you do this, even while sitting here reading, you'll notice it makes you feel more aggressive, more warlike, more ready for battle.

Say your statements with feeling, and use your face, your body's posture, and your breathing to help you enhance those feelings.

TRAINING

There are two ways you can use this tool. One is to change your state in preparation for a task you are about to do, as illustrated above.

The other way is training. Repeat things to yourself that you would like to be in the habit of thinking. Say them aloud in your car. Your car is a good place to practice because you can say it out loud with as much feeling as you want without scaring other people (assuming you are alone in your car).

Repeat phrases to yourself. Repeat things you would like to get in the habit of thinking. Over time, those phrases feel more natural to you and come to mind when you need them.

It's like learning a new foreign language. Each word of the new language feels clumsy to say and you find it hard to pronounce. But the more you say it, the more you repeat it, the more natural it feels. It become familiar.

The thoughts you naturally think only seem natural because you're used to thinking them. Use this technique and you can become accustomed to thinking new thoughts.

And once again, even this idea isn't new. Napoleon Hill and W. Clement Stone suggested in their book Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude that you use what they called "self-starters." These are statements you say to yourself over and over rapidly. For example, "Do it now! Do it now! Do it now!" They suggest you take a statement like that and say it to yourself fifty times in a row every morning. And what happens? That thought comes into your mind when you need it. You have practiced thinking it. It has become comfortable and familiar and comes into your mind easily.

Whether you use this tool for a task you're about to do, or to train your mind to think differently in the future, the tool is easy to use and works beautifully. As Napoleon Hill wrote:

"Follow the instructions, no matter how abstract or impractical they may, at first, appear to be. The time will soon come, if you do as you have been instructed, in spirit as well as in act, when a whole new universe of power will unfold to you."

You can change your state. You can turn despair into determination, wishy-washiness into resolve, anxiety into courage, anger into compassion. This is not one of many basic tools. This is one of very few basic tools, and this is one you will find extremely useful.

Stop Feeling Angry the Easy Way

2012-04-14T00:23:00.006-07:00

ANGER and annoyance come from the conclusions you've drawn about the meaning of an event. You conclude that you were insulted or disrespected, and then you feel anger in response to the disrespect.

For example, when someone does X, it means they think you're stupid. But what if that's not what it means? Then your anger would just be needless suffering, right?

Try this: Next time you feel angry or annoyed because someone did something, ask yourself what you think the action meant. Then ask yourself, "What else could it mean?"

Your first conclusion might not be the best one, so ask it a few times. What else could it mean? Your anger will diminish as your certainty about the meaning of the event diminishes.

Read more: Everyday Creativity.

Cure Your Fear of Public Speaking

2012-04-07T00:39:00.005-07:00

I WAS AFRAID of public speaking since my first day of kindergarten. My mom walked with me to school that day. It was a beautiful morning. Quiet. So peaceful. Just me and my mom.

I had never been to preschool or anything like school, so I didn't know what to expect, and I hadn't thought much about it. But when we got there, the door was at the front of the class, and everyone was there already. I must have been about five minutes late.

As soon as I saw all those kids turn to look at me, I froze. I didn't want to go in. My mom gave me a little nudge from behind. "It's okay, honey," she said, "go on in and take a seat."

I grabbed the sides of the door and tried to get back out. The teacher came over and tried to pull me in. My mom was outside trying to nudge me in, but I was having none of this. I wanted to get away. I started yelling at them and hanging onto the sides of the door as if my life depended on it. Finally they got me inside. I felt so embarrassed I'd made a scene, and that I was forced to acquiesce. From that moment on, I didn't ever want to be in front of a class again.

Another time I was in my first judo competition. My dad and my brother were there. I must have been in third grade at the time. I went out for my first match, and my opponent threw me on the ground in about a half a second and it was over. I was eliminated from the tournament. That was it. I felt humiliated in front of all those people.

And one more: When I was in the fourth grade, a teacher tried to make me get in front of the class to recite a poem. Again, it was a humiliating experience.

So needless to say, when it came time years later to start speaking to groups to promote my book, I had a kind of ancient dread of doing anything in front of a group. I looked forward to an upcoming speech like someone who would hang at dawn. Dread. Serious dread. And dread is a lousy mood that doesn't improve performance at all.

But I cured the dread. The first stage of the cure occurred in a conversation with Klassy (my wife and business partner). I was telling her how much I was dreading the speech I had scheduled the following week. I was silent for a minute. I went through each phase of the speech in my head: Driving there, getting set up, talking for twenty minutes about something I know a lot about. I realized that, in spite of the feeling of dread, there was nothing actually difficult about this task. Nothing at all. I've done a lot of difficult things, and this was easy. The only thing that was hard about it was the dread itself. And somehow the realization that the whole thing was really easy lifted the dread. I said, "It's going to be easy."

Immediately I felt light.

Whenever the dread came back, I did the same thing, and I recommend it to you: Don't just tell yourself "this is easy." Go through the event, step by step, judging each step by how difficult it really will be. How much of a strain will it be? How much effort will it require? How much skill will it take? And then when you realize really how easy it will be, then say to yourself, "This is going to be easy."

This filters out everything but what you're mentally adding. The dread is something you mentally add to the situation, rather than residing in the situation itself.

Did you know shyness can completely disappear when someone is hypnotized if all the hypnotist does is put a block on the person's memory of his own past? In other words, without mentioning shyness or confidence — without even uttering the words — all the hypnotist needs to do is temporarily erase past memories. Shyness vanishes. With no memory of embarrassing moments, what is there to fear?

It is the anticipation of the pain that is actually the painful part. In a study by British and Canadian researchers, they found what they call "dread zones" in the brain. These zones don't actually process the pain themselves. They are in communication with the parts of the brain that deal with the experience.

In the experiment, the researchers hooked volunteers to a device that could deliver both painful and pleasant sensations. In front of the volunteers were two lights. When the blue light came on, there was a warm, pleasant sensation. Every thirty seconds, the red light would start flashing. After seven seconds of flashing red light, the volunteers experienced about eight seconds of a painfully hot sensation.

Meanwhile, they had the volunteers hooked up to some of the most powerful MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) equipment in the world. As the experience was repeated, the volunteers' "dread zones" became more and more active. The zones were communicating to the parts of the brain that actually experience the pain. And the volunteers experienced more and more pain even though the actual amount of heat they received remained the same. Their anticipation of the pain made the experience more painful.

ENJOYMENT

When I realized speaking would be easy, somehow it freed me up to really think about how I'd like to do the talk. I started thinking about what I wanted to do rather than what I thought they wanted me to do or expected me to do. And that changed everything. I totally redesigned my speech. I talked about what I really wanted to talk about, what I really thought they ought to know, and I told stories and illustrated my points the way I would enjoy, rather than trying to please the audience.

Of course, if it was enjoyable to me, it would likely be enjoyable to them, but I concerned myself with doing it the way I would enjoy. This small change made a big difference. I actually began looking forward to my speeches.

When you dread something, look carefully until you really see how easy it will be. And then wrack your brain trying to figure out how you can do it in the way that would be most enjoyable to you. Easy and fun will get it done.

How to Make a Good Idea Cause a Real Change In Your Life

2012-03-31T01:09:00.000-07:00

IT'S RELATIVELY EASY to find good ideas to change your life. It's not too difficult to gain insights about what you need to do. Where it starts to get hard is translating those ideas and insights into actual changes in your life. You want those ideas and insights to make a real difference to you. Good ideas aren't enough. Insights alone don't cut it. You want real changes.

I'm right there with you.

So let's look at how real changes are be made.

Changes always start with thoughts. Not that thoughts can do much by themselves, but no changes can be made without them. When you think differently, you behave differently and feel differently, and when you behave and feel differently, you get different results in your life.

I know it's possible to behave differently in order to change the way you feel and think, but to behave differently, you first have to think it's a good idea to do so. So no matter how you look at it, to change the results you get in your life, you must first change the way you think.

Fair enough, you say, but how?

Let's ask the experts. Who are the real experts in changing the way people think? Who gets paid the most to change what people are thinking? Where is the biggest payoff for changing people's thought-habits? Who pays psychologists to find out exactly what needs to be done to change thoughts?

Advertisers and politicians, of course. These are people with a huge stake in being able to effectively alter people's thought patterns. In advertising and politics, it is survival-of-the-fittest: Those who are most effective at changing people's thinking habits are the only ones who can compete successfully and stay in business. The question is, how do they do it?

Since early in this century, observers have pointed out that political propaganda campaigns tend to use short, easy-to-remember phrases that encapsulate their message. These brief phrases are then repeated over and over again until their meaning becomes part of the thinking-habits of the population.

Even some presidential campaigns earlier in the last century are still memorable: "I like Ike" was Dwight D. Eisenhower's slogan. Woodrow Wilson used the slogan, "He kept us out of the war" to get reelected in 1916. Then after the strain of World War I, Warren G. Harding's slogan, "Back to normalcy," won him the presidency. A campaign slogan from as far back as 1840 is familiar: "Tippecanoe and Tyler too," a campaign for William Henry Harrison and John Tyler.

World War II can be seen, at least from one limited perspective, as a battle of political slogans. Hitler used several. They were repeated in his speeches and painted on walls and posters and huge signs. "One Reich, one Folk, one Leader!" This is short, pithy, easy to remember, and in this case, it has a certain primal rhythm. Here's another he used: "Today we own Germany, tomorrow the entire world!" These slogans were repeated vehemently for years and had a dramatic effect on the minds of Germans.

Mussolini used radio to a great effect. "Believe, obey, fight!" was one of the most repeated slogans. Another was: "Italy must have its great place in the world." These slogans were repeated in messages broadcast all over Italy.

Many different repeated ideas played an important role in World War II. From before they could talk, Japanese children were told again and again that the Japanese people were direct descendants of Heaven and it was their destiny to rule the world.

Of course, Americans had their slogans too, chief among them (in case you weren't alive at the time) was "Win the war unconditionally." Once America was provoked into the war, there was a national campaign to promote participation and cooperation in the war effort — certain resources needed to be conserved, like gas and steel and rubber, and money needed to be raised to fund the war. People were told that Japan and Germany had to be defeated unconditionally. They had to be not just defeated, but defeated soundly, completely — unconditionally. That was a key slogan. It focused attention. It was short, easy to remember, and packed an emotional punch besides. It was very motivating.

Advertisers use exactly the same tool politicians use. It's the real thing. Just do it. When you care enough to send the very best. Tastes great, less filling. The breakfast of champions. Don't leave home without it. You've come a long way baby. You deserve a break today. Takes a licking and keeps on ticking. Fly the friendly skies. Everything you always wanted in a beer — and less. Sometimes you feel like a nut. It's everywhere you want to be. And so on — short, easy to remember slogans repeated over and over and over again. Sometimes the same slogan is used for decades.

For a very long time, politicians and advertisers have been refining and improving their methods. Any method that didn't succeed disappeared from the scene: The campaigner didn't get elected, the product wasn't purchased. And after all this trial and error, both politicians and advertisers have come to rely on the same simple method. Why?

Because short, pithy phrases, repeated over and over, take advantage of the way the human brain works naturally. They focus the mind, simplify the issue, and stimulate action.

Our minds don't handle complicated formulas or doctrines very well unless we concentrate our attention. It's not that we're stupid — we're the most successful species on this planet — but all brains have their limitations.

Complicated ideas require our full attention, which is fine when we're reading in a quiet room or listening to a lecture. But when it comes down to our daily experience — when we're late for work, the kids are crying, and urgent tasks are taking our attention — we find it difficult to concentrate our minds on any concept that is even slightly complex.

So even if only two days ago the book you were reading really made sense, today in the midst of the hustle and bustle, the ideas seem distant and ineffective. You can read the most beautiful philosophy, you can answer all the Big Questions of Life during the evening, and the very next day you're right back in the soup.

And again, it's not because there's something wrong with you, but simply because most of the time, you need to focus on what you're doing. You don't have much extra attention to devote to philosophizing about it. That's true for everyone: Rich or poor, genius or average, in free countries and in nondemocratic countries. That's just how the human brain is.

It was even true for Benjamin Franklin, a man famed for his ability to improve himself. In his autobiography, he wrote about his frustration at changing himself. "While my Attention was taken up in guarding against one Fault," he wrote, "I was often surpris'd by another. Habit took the Advantage of Inattention."

When an advertising company repeats the same jingle in every ad they've ever created, and shows the same ad 15 times a night, it may be blatantly manipulative, not to mention annoying, but it works, and it works better than anything else.

When a ruthless dictator uses short phrases to focus ideas and make them easier to act on, it may be catastrophic for an entire generation of people, but the way someone uses a tool doesn't make the tool bad. A hammer can kill a puppy, but it can also be used to build a house. It's just a tool.

The repetition of a slogan is also a tool — a very powerful and effective mental tool. And it's a tool you can use to produce a lot of good for yourself. You can take advantage of the way your mind works.

You can make your own propaganda campaign in your head; you can alter your thoughts and change your actions for the better.

you don't get to start with a blank slate

THE REASON it's so difficult to change something in your life is that to change the way you feel or behave, you first have to change the way you think, and your thinking is ingrained and habitual.

You think the way you think because those ways of thinking were repeated in some form or another, either by yourself or others, enough times that the thought-pattern became a habit.

It wasn't only your parents and teachers who repeated the ideas that created your thought-patterns; you did it too. There are some thoughts you have thought many times in your life, and that repetition has created solid mental habits.

When I was in first grade, my family had recently moved to a different town in the middle of the school year, and my first day at class, we had "show and tell." I was fairly upset by the move, and didn't have anything to show, and I felt embarrassed at being the new kid, so I said, "I don't have anything to talk about."

And every week after that, I "forgot" to bring something to show. I felt self-conscious because I hadn't shared yet, and everyone else had, and every week that went by made it even worse, because everyone began to expect me to have nothing to say. Whenever I thought of getting up in front of the class, my thought was, "I can't do it." I repeated that thought to myself many times that year.

In fourth grade, my English teacher wanted us to memorize and recite a poem in front of the class every week. Whenever I thought about it, (and that was often) I thought, "I can't do it." This short phrase went through my head again and again throughout my life until about fifteen years ago, when I finally realized what had happened.

I took the Dale Carnegie course in public speaking. The course was designed to get you up in front of a group gradually. The reason that worked so well is that no matter what we were asked to do, I thought, "I can do that."

The first assignment was to sit on the edge of a long table with four other people and answer the instructor's questions about our names, where we lived, and what we did for a living. Of course, I could do that.

Each speaking assignment gradually moved toward eventually standing up there by myself giving a speech, but it was so gradual, the whole way along I kept thinking, "I can do that."

One fine day I was up there speaking and having a great time. I had formed a new thought-habit. "I can do that" replaced "I can't do it."

As a child, whenever you first think a thought, it sets a precedent. You've created the beginning of a pattern. As time goes on, you experience similar circumstances, and the thought tends to repeat itself. Each time it does, the thought becomes more and more likely the next time, until you are an adult with a bunch of thought-habits, and some don't work because they were invented by a little kid who didn't know much about the world.

Now you're an adult. And sometimes you get an insight about how you can change for the better.

But it's harder than you expected, isn't it? Why?

Because your insight is just one little thought against the accumulated force of your already-existing habit patterns.

Repetition cuts a groove like a trough in the dirt. Thoughts flow down that groove much easier than they do in other directions, just like water flows down a trough much better than on flat ground.

It physically works very much like that. Researchers like William Calvin, PhD, find that when a new stimulus is introduced into the brain, it forms a pattern of connections between certain brain cells. And once a pattern has been made, it becomes a little easier for the same pattern to fire again. The more often the pattern gets fired, the easier it is to set off the pattern again. The connections get stronger and stronger the more they are stimulated that way.

Patterns that have been repeated many times become dominant and out-compete with other (less-repeated) thoughts.

So you've got some dominant patterns already formed. Okay. And some of them produce effects you don't like. You want to cause a change in your life. But a lot of the thought-patterns you have are ones you didn't choose, or you chose when you were too young to make a good choice. Okay. That's where you are right now. You can't do anything about the past, but you can take over the process at this point. You can start creating your own patterns. You can start making thought habits you want.

You can do it with repetition.

You can do it by taking your insights and encapsulating them into short, easy-to-remember phrases and then repeating those phrases again and again until the new thought becomes a part of your thinking.

We're down to the practical nitty-gritty. This is where the rubber meets the road. Pick one thing you want to change. Create a thought you want to get in the habit of thinking. Write the principle on a card and carry the card with you to remind you to repeat it to yourself — literally practicing thinking this new thought.

Try to say it to yourself several times every day. Give advice to your children about it. Say your new thought out loud in conversations. Let it become the theme and motto of your life. Imbue your life with it.

Your new thought will begin to come into your mind on its own and when you need it. Do not stop practicing at this point. That's one of the biggest mistakes people make, and the main reason real change seems so difficult. You've got only a bare toe-hold on the new thought. Keep practicing until your behavior has changed to what you want.

Eventually your new thought will become "just the way you think." You couldn't imagine thinking any other way. At that point, you have accomplished a real change. You have translated a good idea into a real change in your life.

Mistakes Are What You Make Of Them

2012-03-23T14:20:00.000-07:00

A mistake might not be a mistake. You might think you should have done this or shouldn't have done that. But it would be better to ask what advantages your already-done deeds give you and exploit them in the present.

The architect Bonano erected a freestanding bell tower for a cathedral, but he made it on soft subsoil — a bad mistake which made the tower lean over. That mistake created a large tourist industry and put the town on the map. Almost everyone in the world has heard of the leaning tower of Pisa. Galileo conducted his famous gravity experiments from the tower. He was able to use that tower because it was leaning.

The compass and its use in navigation was developed in the Mediterranean because the sailors had several disadvantages: the water was very deep, the winds varied a lot in the winter, and the skies were usually overcast. So you couldn't reliably navigate by sounding, by the wind, or by the stars. Those were the three ways sailors all over the world used to navigate.

In the Indian oceans, they have the monsoon winds which are so regular (they change directions with the seasons) you could tell where you were headed by noticing which way the wind was blowing. And they had clear tropical skies so they could usually navigate by the stars.

In Northern Europe, they are on one of the continental shelves of the Atlantic so the water is shallow enough sailors could drop a lead weight attached to a rope to the sea floor to find their depth, and thus could tell where they were by how deep the water was. This was called "making a sounding," and it was a fairly accurate method of locating one's position in charted waters.

But the sailors of the Mediterranean had to develop some way to navigate without shallow waters, clear skies, or predictable winds. And because they had to develop navigation by compass, Spain, which borders both the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, was the first to find and colonize the New World. Without having the know-how to navigate by compass, nobody in their right mind would have sailed across the Atlantic. There would have been no guarantee they'd be able to find their way back without a compass. They'd have no familiar landmarks, no soundings would work, wind directions would of course be unknown, and whether or not they'd have clear skies was unknown.

The disadvantage of having to sail the waters of the Mediterranean turned out to be quite an advantage for Spain.

But of course, given the mind's natural negative bias, I'm sure most people of Spain assumed their sailing conditions were only a disadvantage.

So what are you going to do with what you think is a disadvantage? What are you doing now? Aren't there things in your life right now that you consider a disadvantage? Aren't there conditions you "know" are bad? That you wish would go away?

Choose one of these bad things and ponder this question about it: Could this be an advantage in disguise? Or could I make an advantage out of it? If you don't want to ponder this for weeks, do a little concentrated pondering. Use the problem solving method. Write the question at the top of a piece of paper, "What is good about this?" And force yourself to come up with 15 answers. Write them all out.

Then take another piece of paper. At the top write, "How could I turn this into an advantage?" Make yourself come up with 15 more answers. At the end of this exercise, which will only take you an hour or two, your perspective on the "problem" will be tremendously altered. The "problem" will have lost most of its power to bring you down. This process can undemoralize you. It can give you strength and effectiveness and even good feelings.

Reframing a Disadvantage and Making the Best of Trouble

2012-03-19T00:48:00.002-07:00

WILLIAM COLEMAN HAD ONLY fifty percent of normal vision in one eye and only twenty-five percent in the other. The year was 1899 and although the electric light bulb had already been invented, not many people had one because electricity wasn't available in many places. Even with electricity, the light bulbs in those days weren't very bright. As a law student, the only way William could study at night was to have his parents read his texts to him.

His poor eyesight was obviously a disadvantage. Or was it?

One night William walked into a store brightly lit by a pressurized gas lamp. It was producing more illumination than he'd ever seen — it was bright enough to read by! He said it was the most important moment of his life.

Without the "disadvantage" of poor eyesight, it wouldn't have meant much to him. But since it did mean so much, he got involved in a gas lamp business — so involved he eventually owned the company.

A hundred years later, the Coleman Company is still in business with sales at about half a billion dollars a year. And even though electric light illuminates most of the world, people still use Coleman Lanterns when they go camping. More than a million of those original pressurized gas lanterns are sold every year.

If there's something you think is a disadvantage, think again. Assume there will be an advantage in it and then find it or make it. This intention is a fundamental key to a good attitude. With it, the inevitable setbacks in life won't bring you down as much and you will handle problems more effectively.

I know some people would scoff at this idea. Too airy-fairy. It might remind them of some annoyingly positive people to whom everything is great, but somehow, behind their forced smile, you can see it's all a facade. But this idea can be used with depth, not merely as a way to show a pleasant face to the world to hide your pain from yourself. It can be done with intelligence and wisdom.

I'd like to make a distinction here. Many people think that cynicism and pessimism show that they are mature. Usually these are young people, ironically enough. Somehow cynicism is cool. But it is actually dangerous and unhealthy. It makes you feel bad unnecessarily. It makes you less successful. And the bad attitude it creates is contagious.

In a study at Washington University in St. Louis, researchers interviewed people who had experienced a either a plane crash, a tornado, or a mass shooting. They interviewed the survivors a few weeks after the traumatic event and then again three years later. In the first interview, some people said they could find something good that came out of the event. Some reported they realized life was too short not to pursue their most important goals, or they realized how important their family was to them. Three years later, those were the people who recovered from the trauma most successfully.

In an interview in Psychology Today, the late Carl Sagan said, "This is my third time having to deal with intimations of mortality. And every time it's a character-building experience. You get a much clearer perspective on what's important and what isn't, the preciousness and beauty of life…I would recommend almost dying to everybody. I think it's a really good experience."

Think now about something you normally consider a disadvantage. Are you in debt? Did you have a rough childhood? Were you poor? Didn't have the advantages wealthier kids had? Do you lack education? Do you have a bad habit? Has something terrible happened to you?

What's good about it? Or how could you capitalize on your "disadvantage?" If you don't get a good answer right away, that only means it's a tough question. Try living in that question for several weeks or months. Ponder it while you drive. Wonder about it while you shower. Ask yourself the question every time you eat breakfast. Live with the question and you will get answers.

Take advantage of what you have, where you are, and when you are. It's the only practical way to deal with "disadvantages."

If you have a tendency to simply feel bad about your disadvantages, even that can become an advantage. Overcoming that tendency might teach you something valuable — something you couldn't have learned without it. And you can teach what you learned to your child, making a huge difference to the whole trajectory of her or his life.

Trying to make the best of something helps create solutions. It makes things better. It is even better for your health. It keeps you from feeling as bad when bad stuff happens, and that's important because negative emotions are not good for your health. As Richard H. Hoffmann, MD, said:

"The human body is a delicately adjusted mechanism. Whenever its even tenor is startled by some intruding emotion like sudden fright, anger or worry, the sympathetic nervous system flashes an emergency signal and the organs and glands spring into action. The adrenal glands shoot into the blood stream a surcharge of adrenaline which raises the blood sugar above normal needs. The pancreas then secretes insulin to burn the excess fuel. But this bonfire burns not only the excess but the normal supply. The result is a blood sugar shortage and an underfeeding of the vital organs. So the adrenals supply another charge, the pancreas burns the fuel again, and the vicious cycle goes on. This battle of the glands brings on exhaustion."

Bad feelings play havoc on your system. The idea that "trouble brings seeds of good fortune" allows you to consider the possibility that the bad event might not be as bad as it seems at the moment, and in a sense, makes it possible to procrastinate feeling bad. Procrastinate long enough, and you might just skip it altogether.

Volunteers at the Common Cold Research Unit in England filled out a questionnaire. The researcher, Sheldon Cohen, discovered that the more positive the volunteers' attitudes were, the less likely they would catch a cold. And even when they did catch a cold, the more positive their attitude was, the more mild their symptoms were.

Reframe your misfortunes. Make the best of them. It is good for your mood, your health, and your future.

Bloom Where You're Planted

2012-03-14T01:57:00.000-07:00

ONE MORNING a sixteen-year-old boy was kidnapped from his house by a band of knife-wielding thugs and taken to another country, there to be sold as a slave. The year was 401 a.d.

He was made a shepherd. Slaves were not allowed to wear clothes, so he was often dangerously cold and frequently on the verge of starvation. He spent months at a time without seeing another human being — a severe psychological torture.

But this greatest of difficulties was transformed into the greatest of blessings because it gave him an opportunity not many get in a lifetime. Long lengths of solitude have been used by people all through history to meditate, to learn to control the mind and to explore the depths of feeling and thought to a degree impossible in the hubbub of normal life.

He wasn’t looking for such an “opportunity,” but he got it anyway. He had never been a religious person, but to hold himself together and take his mind off the pain, he began to pray, so much that “...in one day,” he wrote later, “I would say as many as a hundred prayers and after dark nearly as many again...I would wake and pray before daybreak — through snow, frost, and rain....”

This young man, at the onset of his manhood, got a “raw deal.” But therein lies the lesson. Nobody gets a perfect life. The question is not “What could I have done if I’d gotten a better life?” but rather “What can I do with the life I’ve got?”

How can you take your personality, your circumstances, your upbringing, the time and place you live in, and make something extraordinary out of it? What can you do with what you’ve got?

The young slave prayed. He didn’t have much else available to do, so he did what he could with all his might. And after six years of praying, he heard a voice in his sleep say that his prayers would be answered: He was going home. He sat bolt upright and the voice said, “Look, your ship is ready.”

He was a long way from the ocean, but he started walking. After two hundred miles, he came to the ocean and there was a ship, preparing to leave for Britain, his homeland. Somehow he got aboard the ship and went home to reunite with his family.

But he had changed. The sixteen-year-old boy had become a holy man. He had visions. He heard the voices of the people from the island he had left — Ireland — calling him back. The voices were persistent, and he eventually left his family to become ordained as a priest and a bishop with the intention of returning to Ireland and converting the Irish to Christianity.

At the time, the Irish were fierce, illiterate, Iron-Age people. For over eleven hundred years, the Roman Empire had been spreading its civilizing influence from Africa to Britain, but Rome never conquered Ireland.

The people of Ireland warred constantly. They made human sacrifices of prisoners of war and sacrificed newborns to the gods of the harvest. They hung the skulls of their enemies on their belts as ornaments.

Our slave-boy-turned-bishop decided to make these people literate and peaceful. Braving dangers and obstacles of tremendous magnitude, he actually succeeded! By the end of his life, Ireland was Christian. Slavery had ceased entirely. Wars were much less frequent, and literacy was spreading.

How did he do it? He began by teaching people to read — starting with the Bible. Students eventually became teachers and went to other parts of the island to create new places of learning, and wherever they went, they brought the know-how to turn sheepskin into paper and paper into books.

Copying books became the major religious activity of that country. The Irish had a long-standing love of words, and it expressed itself to the full when they became literate. Monks spent their lives copying books: the Bible, the lives of saints, and the works accumulated by the Roman culture — Latin, Greek, and Hebrew books, grammars, the works of Plato, Aristotle, Virgil, Homer, Greek philosophy, math, geometry, astronomy.

In fact, because so many books were being copied, they were saved, because as Ireland was being civilized, the Roman Empire was falling apart. Libraries disappeared in Europe. Books were no longer copied (except in the city of Rome itself), and children were no longer taught to read. The civilization that had been built up over eleven centuries disintegrated. This was the beginning of the Dark Ages.

Because our slave-boy-turned-bishop transformed his suffering into a mission, civilization itself, in the form of literature and the accumulated knowledge contained in that literature, was saved and not lost during that time of darkness. He was named a saint, the famous Saint Patrick. You can read the full and fascinating story if you like in the excellent book How the Irish Saved Civilization by Thomas Cahill.

“Very interesting,” you might say, “but what does that have to do with me?”

Well...you are also in some circumstances or other, and it’s not all peaches and cream, is it? There’s some stuff you don’t like — maybe something about your circumstances, perhaps, or maybe some events that occurred in your childhood.

But here you are, with that past, with these circumstances, with the things you consider less than ideal. What are you going to do with them? If those circumstances have made you uniquely qualified for some contribution, what would it be?

You may not know the answer to that question right now, but keep in mind that the circumstances you think only spell misery may contain the seeds of something profoundly Good. Assume that’s true, and the assumption will begin to gather evidence until your misery is transformed, as Saint Patrick’s suffering was, from a raw deal to the perfect preparation for something better.

This is a chapter from Self-Help Stuff That Works

Self-Indoctrination: A Tool for Change Par Excellence

2012-03-09T19:02:00.008-08:00

YOU GET INSIGHTS — you see things you hadn't seen before and you know your life could be better. But often (too often) the insight fades until you forget about it, and nothing changed. It's frustrating and demoralizing.

But I have found a simple tool that can change this: A digital recorder. Get a handheld digital recorder (here's the one I use) and when you read something you want to remember, or when you get an insight you'd like to remember, record the insight. It takes only seconds. Coach yourself.

Then when you're doing the dishes or walking to the parking lot after work, or whenever, put headphones on and listen to your insights (or just put the little speaker up to your ear and listen — it looks like you're on a cell phone). When you've listened to one insight enough that you've really got it (or if it's no longer relevant) delete it. Keep adding more as you get new insights.

This is an ever-changing, always-relevant self-coaching system. Use it to turn fleeting, temporary insights into something that will change your life for the better and for the long run.

Read about another tool for change: Postables.

Ikigai is Good For You

2012-03-03T00:55:00.004-08:00

WHEN I TOOK the "signature strengths" questionnaire at authentichappiness.org, I received an update on Martin Seligman's work, as I mentioned awhile ago. Here's another passage from that update, also an excerpt from Seligman's new book, Flourish:

There is one trait similar to optimism that seems to protect against cardiovascular disease: ikigai. This Japanese concept means having something worth living for, and ikigai is intimately related to the meaning element of flourishing (M in PERMA) as well as to optimism.

There are three prospective Japanese studies of ikigai, and all point to high levels of ikigai reducing the risk of death from cardiovascular disease, even when controlling for traditional risk factors and perceived stress. In one study, the mortality rate among men and women without ikigai was 160 percent higher than for increased CVD mortality as compared to men and women with ikigai.

In a second study, men with ikigai had only 86 percent of the risk of mortality from CVD compared to men without ikigai; this was also true of women, but less robustly so.

And in a third study, men with high ikigai had only 28 percent of the risk for death from stroke relative to their low-ikigai counterparts, but there was no association with heart disease.

It is healthy to add more meaning and purpose to your life, and it will improve your mood. To explore this, start here:

Why Goals Are Good

How to Find a Purpose in Life

Immediate Practical Benefits to Having a Purpose

Visualizing Goals

"When you are inspired by some great purpose, some extraordinary projects, all your thoughts break their bonds; your mind trancends limitations; your consciousness expands in every direction; and you find yourself in a great new and wonderful world. Dormant forces, faculties and talents become alive and you discover yourself to be a greater person by far than you ever dreamed yourself to be."

- Patanjali

Exercise and Feelings of Kindness

2012-02-24T23:08:00.006-08:00

A study at Northern Illinois University found that bosses who exercised were kinder to their employees than bosses who didn't exercise. And the kindness effect didn't require a lot of exercise. Once or twice a week did the trick.

This is, of course, true for anyone. You will be kinder to your spouse, your kids, your friends, and your co-workers if you exercise.

Why? Exercise improves your mood. “People who exercise tend to have positive moods and to react less to stressful events, which means that they’re also less likely to abuse their employees,” says study author James Burton.

It doesn't take much to make a noticeable difference in your mood. Don't know where to start? Read what Jack LaLanne recommended.

Increase Your Ability and Confidence

2012-02-18T01:16:00.003-08:00

HAVE YOU EVER noticed how wise you are when you give advice to a person younger than you? You aren’t fooling yourself. You really have gained some wisdom over the years. Have you ever wished you could be that wise when you had troubles? You can. You can talk to yourself like a “Dutch uncle.”

Randall Masciana, M.S., tried to find out what kind of mental strategy would improve a person’s performance when throwing darts. Masciana had the participants try everything from mental imagery to Zen. What worked best for improving the dart thrower’s ability to hit the target was “positive self-talk.”

Simply talking to yourself in a confident, reassuring, positive, friendly way makes a difference. It may be trite. It may be old. But it works, and it works better than anything else.

When things get tough, keep your thoughts prominent. Turn up the volume of your inner voice so you can hear it clearly and coach yourself. If you don’t know what to say, imagine a friend of yours or your little brother in the same situation and say to yourself what you would say to them.

Another way of knowing what to say to yourself is to ask yourself what someone you admire would say to you: Abraham Lincoln, a professor, your grandmother — whomever you admire for her or his wisdom and strength of character. Imagine asking the person for advice and imagine what s/he might say to you.

You know more about your own situation than anyone else, so your advice to yourself is in some ways more useful than anyone else’s. You are wise. If you would only talk to yourself and listen, your life would be better.

This is a chapter from Self-Help Stuff That Works.

What's the Best Predictor of a Second Heart Attack?

2012-02-14T23:23:00.000-08:00

WHEN I recently took the "signature strengths" questionnaire at authentichappiness.org, I received an update on Martin Seligman's work. I was impressed by the following astounding finding. It is an excerpt from Seligman's new book, Flourish:

In the mid-1980s, 120 men from San Francisco had their first heart attacks, and they served as the untreated control group in the massive Multiple Risk Factor Intervention Trial. This study disappointed many psychologists and cardiologists by ultimately finding no effect on cardiovascular disease by training to change these men’s personalities from type A (aggressive, time urgent, and hostile) to type B (easygoing).

The 120 untreated control group, however, was of great interest to Gregory Buchanan, then a graduate student at Penn, and to me because so much was known about their first heart attacks: extent of damage to the heart, blood pressure, cholesterol, body mass, and lifestyle — all the traditional risk factors for cardiovascular disease. In addition, the men were all interviewed about their lives: family, job, and hobbies. We took every single “because” statement from each of their videotaped interviews and coded it for optimism and pessimism (determining their explanatory style).

Within eight and a half years, half the men had died of a second heart attack, and we opened the sealed envelope. Could we predict who would have a second heart attack? None of the usual risk factors predicted death — not blood pressure, not cholesterol, not even how extensive the damage from the first heart attack. Only optimism, eight and a half years earlier, predicted a second heart attack: Of the sixteen most pessimistic men, fifteen died; of the sixteen most optimistic men, only five died.

This finding has been repeatedly confirmed in larger studies of cardiovascular disease, using varied measures of optimism.

There are two important things to know about this study. First, the definitions of "optimism" and "pessimism" are very carefully defined. It has to do with "explanatory style" — that is, how you habitually explain events to yourself. Read more about that here.

And second, optimism can be learned, and it doesn't take very long (here's how). An improved explanatory style not only helps your health, it makes you feel better. It improves your mood.

Find out what your explanatory style is (so you can concentrate your efforts at fixing any specific weakness) by clicking here. Scroll down to the link for "Optimism Test" and take the questionnaire. And then begin using this technique to plug the hole(s) in your bucket. It will benefit you for the rest of your life (which may be a long one).

What If

2012-02-10T16:09:00.000-08:00

WHAT IF what we believe about the violent nature of humans and "man's inhumanity to man" is mostly wrong? What if it is caused by a very small percentage of the population who have a specific disorder (and those they manipulate into helping them) that causes most (or all) of the war and violent madness in the world?

And what if people are manipulated into cooperating and participating only because they don't know this very small percentage exist, or even if they know, they wouldn't know how to identify one?

And what if a simple grassroots educational campaign could end "the bloody history of man" once and for all?

Read more: A Practical Way YOU Can Help Create Peace on Earth.

Talking to Family Members About Controversial Subjects

2012-02-03T21:18:00.001-08:00

Election season is coming, and if that means political arguments with a family member and bitter hard feelings that last for months (or if you have upsetting disagreements over any controversial subject with a family member), this article is for you.

YOU HAVE a point of view or a set of facts you want your family member to accept or agree with — or she (or he) has a position she wants you to accept. If you engage in an argument about it, you risk a riff between you, hard feelings, anger, upset, even a complete severing of your communication and a destruction of your affection for each other. This is not good for your mood.

You may have known this family member for a long time — maybe your whole life. So perhaps you believe you should be able to talk about anything with each other. But you might be mistaken about this.

Here's the problem: The more controversial the topic, the deeper the connection between you must be. The "depth" of your communication is measured in recent hours of talking to each other. In other words, if in the last year, you have averaged about twenty minutes a week talking with a family member — on the phone or face to face — your relationship can handle very little controversy. Most of your communication had better be pleasant or neutral (not controversial).

But if in the last year you have spent, on average, many hours a week talking with your family member, your relationship can handle talking about a much more controversial topic.

Think of it this way: Any given power line can only handle so much electricity at once. If more power tries to surge down the line than the line can handle, the line will melt or circuit breakers will melt. A bigger line could handle the surge. A smaller line will fry. In other words, your communication channel is only as big as your amount of communication has made it.

More non-upsetting communication creates a bigger line, a stronger bond, a more robust relationship. A stronger bond can handle controversy better than a weaker bond.

The researcher, John Gottman, looking at what it takes for a marriage to stay together, discovered a minimum ratio: Five to one. A marriage needs at least five times more enjoyable interactions as unenjoyable interactions to prevent divorce. It is possible a similar ratio is required for any relationship.

It is a good rule of thumb anyway to consider that you need at least five times more hours talking about enjoyable topics as controversial. Just to be on the safe side, try keeping it at ten times more. Having a history with your family member is unfortunately not enough. The "power line" between you shrinks with time and lack of communication. A strong bond requires recent communication.

If you're already engaged in a controversy with a family member and already feel angry or hurt by your conversations about it, realize right now that you have been mistaken about each other. You are not in the wrong and neither is the other person. The problem is: The communication channel between you is too small. The problem is not your family member — it is a puny, atrophied communication channel created by a long period of neglect. That's a better way to think about your disagreements because it leads to clarity about what you can do that will effectively improve your feelings about each other. You're suffering the inevitable consequences of a lack of bandwidth. The more you communicate about non-controversial topics, the bigger your bandwidth grows.

If your family member lives in another town or state and you don't see her or him much (or talk much on the phone), you should probably avoid controversy completely. Maybe some day you'll live closer or spend more time talking on the phone. If that happens and you still want to talk about a controversial topic, your bond will be able to withstand it.

In the meantime, reserve those topics only for people you do talk to regularly.

Install this as your personal policy and you will prevent a lot of bad moods and hard feelings. You will find holidays and election years a lot more enjoyable in the long run. And you will both be happier.

Using Meditation to Improve Your Marriage

2012-01-27T18:17:00.000-08:00

DURING A CONVERSATION with your spouse, when your heartrate rises over 100 beats per minute, you are no longer reasonable. After decades of experiments with couples, this is one of the conclusions of John Gottman, a researcher at the University of Washington.

I'm sure you've already discovered that the more upset you are, the less reasonable you are. That is, you hold onto your position more firmly and more rigidly, and you are less open to information or other points of view. Your position becomes more and more absolute and one-sided the more upset you get.

But 100 beats per minute is not very high. I invite you to check your heart rate during the next argument with your spouse. I have done this and was surprised to discover that when I felt only a little upset my heart rate was 120 beats per minute!

Now of course if you continue trying to "discuss matters" with your spouse while being unreasonable, it is very difficult to resolve anything. An escalation of the anger is a more likely result, leading to hurt feelings, a drop in affection, and so on.

That's where meditation can really make a difference. Experiments have shown that people who meditate regularly don't get as upset during arguments and get over it more quickly. Specifically, their heart rate doesn't rise as high and returns to normal more quickly. That means they don't spend as much time in the "unreasonable zone."

That means during disagreements with their spouses, they would spend less time saying things they'll regret later and there will be less hard feelings between them. And that is good for their marraige and good for their mood.

You don't have to meditate very long to see a change. If you're interested in trying the experiment yourself, here's how to meditate: Gently Returning.

HOW to Relax and Be Yourself

2012-01-22T01:12:00.000-08:00

IN LEWIS ANDREWS' excellent book, To Thine Own Self Be True, he says, "To the extent we compromise our integrity to make an attractive image of ourselves, we lose contact with our natural enthusiasm. We become contrived, artificial… bored."

I thought that was rather interesting and then I went on about my business.

But one day I realized how it works. Trying to make an attractive image is not as unusual or rare as I thought. We do it a lot. People expect you to be something in particular, and you expect yourself to act a certain way also — often. The trouble with that is: It leaves you with no flexibility, no freedom, and thus no enthusiasm for living.

People used to comment on my attitude — I was so cheerful and full of life so often. After my first book was published, people began to expect me to be in a great mood all the time. After all, I wrote a book on how to improve your attitude.

I didn't want to disappoint them. I wanted them to think well of me and my book. I wanted to prove the stuff was good. But every moment I spent trying to live up to an image ruined my attitude. It sapped my enthusiasm. It was stressful and it made me resentful of those people for their unrealistic expectations of me. That's when Andrew's meaning hit home. When you try to live up to an image, he said, it kills your natural enthusiasm for living.

After I realized that, I deliberately started doing what I wanted, and had the determination to make sure I didn't do anything to live up to someone else's expectations. And you know what? I was in a great mood. That very day, for the first time in a long time, someone commented on my great attitude.

Opera singer Rise Stevens had a lot of poise and confidence on stage, but she wasn't comfortable hanging around with others. "My discomfort came from trying to be something I was not," she said, "a star in the drawing room as well as on stage. If a clever person made a joke, I tried to top it — and failed. I pretended to be familiar with subjects I knew nothing of…"

But then she had a personal revelation. She says, "I realized that I simply wasn't a wit or an intellectual and that I could succeed only as myself. I began listening and asking questions at parties instead of trying to impress the guests. When I spoke, I tried to contribute, not to shine. Almost at once I started feeling new warmth in my social contacts. They liked the real me better."

Whenever you feel yourself harden into a fixed persona, break out! Whenever you lack natural enthusiasm for living, find out where you're trying to live up to someone's expectation (including your own) and break out of it. Start creating your life again right from that point, as an artist would take down a painted canvas and put up a new blank one.

The price you'll pay is that you will, in fact, disappoint people more often. And you aways have the choice: Live up to someone's expectations or have a natural enthusiasm for living. Choose one and then the other for awhile, just to get a feel for the difference in results. Eventually you'll settle on freeing yourself from trying to live up to an image and you'll relax and be yourself.

Don't try to live up to an image.

Calm Relationships Are Good For Your Mood

2012-01-15T15:18:00.000-08:00

EMPATHY FOR OTHERS requires a minimum level of calm in yourself. To take an extreme example, if you are hanging off the top ledge of a fifty-story building and someone starts telling you their problems, you don't have much empathy, do you? And in a more mundane situations, when you're scared or upset or simply stressed out, your empathy for others isn't as high as it would be if you were relaxed.

And it is true in the other direction too: When you are calmer than you usually are, your empathy for others is higher than normal.

And empathy is a fundamental element in creating and maintaining great relationships. Empathy is what allows you to really connect with people. Empathy is being able to feel how another person feels, to share the experience with them, to see the world through their eyes. It is the most important state of mind you can cultivate in yourself for the pursuit of closeness.

And having a calm body and mind really helps. Experiments have shown this to be the case, and your everyday experience confirms it.

The surest way to calm your body is with what Herbert Benson called the relaxation response, a physical response you can create in yourself very easily. When you hold one word or phrase in your mind for a period of time, you become calmer — and that greater calm lasts for several hours afterward. Here how to produce the relaxation response:

1. Choose one word or phrase to hold in mind.

2. Decide ahead of time how long you will go. Ten minutes is a good length of time. Twenty minutes is best.

3. Get in a quiet place and sit down. Don't lie down. Close your eyes and think the word or phrase. Just hold it gently in your mind. It doesn't matter if you have other thoughts.

4. Your mind will wander away. After awhile, you'll realize you aren't holding your word or phrase in your mind at all any more. When you notice this, simply return to thinking your word or phrase.

5. When your time is up, open your eyes.

Don't do this with a forcing effort. For a few minutes, let go of your planning, your worries, your ideas, or the conversations you might have had or will be having. The relaxation response is a refuge — an island of peace in an ocean of stressful thoughts.

Your increased calm gives you more empathy for people, which changes the way you interact, which improves your connections with people, which improves your health.

All you need to do is sit quietly and hold a simple word or phrase in your mind with your eyes closed for twenty minutes.

Something really surprising happens when you do this simple exercise. The simplicity of your thoughts somehow calms your mind and body. The physical changes are dramatic. Blood pressure drops. Stress hormone levels drop. Your heart slows down. Muscle tension fades away. And some of these effects last for many hours.

Try it. It is incredibly boring sometimes, but ironically, that might be what is so wonderful about it. Just like excitement and fear are almost the same thing, depending on your acceptance or rejection of what's happening, boredom and peace are almost the same thing, depending on your acceptance or rejection of what's happening.

Think of a feeling of calmness as one end of a sliding scale. Calm is on one end; agitation is on the other. Or to put it more extremely: We're talking about a sliding scale with deep serenity on one end and hysterical freakout at the other.

The main thing to remember is that agitation is the malady. Calm is the remedy.

The more agitated you are, the more difficult it is for other people to have a good relationship with you. When we say someone has a "bad attitude," we are just referring to some form of agitation. Stress is agitation. Upset is agitation. Irritable is agitation. Worry is agitation. Anger is agitation. Impatience and intolerance are agitation. When you see it this way, you can easily see why calmness is so vitally important.

When you want to create better relationships, calmness is the most important attribute you can cultivate in yourself. Calmness is the gateway to love, kindness, and affection. Calmness enhances relationships.

You're a better listener when you're calm. When you can listen calmly, thoughtfully, intently, the person really gets heard.

And you're a better speaker when you're calm. When you feel relaxed and secure, it's easier to let your guard down. It's easier to know what you're feeling and easier to say what you're feeling.

Calmness supports sanity (good listening, thoughtful responses to events, sound decisions, etc.).

Agitation does not support sanity.

One thing is sure: The calmness you can cultivate will enhance your relationships.

So think about this next time you want to feel better or be in a better mood. One of the most important influencing factors on your mood is how good your relationships are. In other words, how close you feel with the important people in your life.

If you want to be in a better mood, get closer to people. And the first place to start is to feel calmer and more relaxed. The relaxation response can get you there quickly and reliably.

Herbert Benson wrote an excellent book about how to become more relaxed: The Relaxation Response. I recommend it.

Meaningful Moodraiser

2012-01-05T16:01:00.000-08:00

When something happens and you have a negative reaction, it is because of what you think the event means.

If someone gives you a dirty look, you might feel sad because you think it means they don’t like you any more. But what you think it means is only one possibility. The meaning of the event occurred to you automatically, and it's not necessarily the best thing you could come up with if you really thought about it.

What else could it mean?

That's the key question. Ask yourself, and keep asking, "What else could it mean?" Think of some alternatives and often it will change the way you feel.

When you are upset and you want to feel less upset, this is a great question to ask yourself. Ellen Langer, the researcher and author of Mindfulness, says a key to mindfulness is to question old mindsets. You have thought in certain ways for a long time and it has produced a kind of mindlessness.

To question those ways of thinking opens you up to new possibilities. The question, “What else could it mean?” can help.

When someone is diagnosed with a malignant tumor, says Langer, some people immediately sink into depression because they have the mindset that cancer is powerful and they are helpless to stop it.

But that mindset is not the only possible way to think about cancer, it is certainly not the best one, and it isn’t the most accurate one, either.

Ask yourself often, especially when something happens you think is bad, “Is that the only way to see it?”

Try to come up with different possible ways you could view the same situation.

Really it’s a dumb question. No matter how you’re looking at the situation, it is never the only possible point of view. Probably a better question would be, “What other way could I look at this?”

Or notice what you think the event means, and ask yourself what else it could mean.

Sit down with paper and pen and spend an hour coming up with different points of view you could take on the same event. That’ll shake you out of your automatic, upsetting opinion.

Now look at your list. What do you think is the most sensible point of view? Which one would help you handle the situation the best? Which one would your best friend think is the best point of view?

You can use this question with smaller events too, and you can do it on the fly. If someone treats you with less respect than usual, and you feel a little bothered by it, ask yourself what you think it means.

For example, "I think it means she is mad at me for some reason."

Now ask yourself what else it could mean. For example, "Maybe she is tired. Maybe she drank too much coffee today. Maybe she is jealous because I look so good today. Maybe she is pregnant and has morning sickness."

It only takes a minute or so to come up with some alternative meanings. And when you do, it will change the way you feel about it. You won't feel as bothered. It is a simple method that takes very little effort, but it has a real impact on your mood.

Read more: Feel Bad Less Often

How To Feel More Lighthearted

2011-12-27T17:42:00.000-08:00

A FRIEND OF MINE just got back from Lesotho, a small country in Africa, where he spent two years in the Peace Corps. He told me the people there thought all Americans were rich. As far as he was concerned, he was a poor college student. He’d never thought of himself as rich. We Americans don’t usually think that way because we’re used to our level of wealth. But compared with the people in Lesotho and with many places on Earth, we are rich.

A king of an empire only a thousand years ago was poor compared to a modern American. You and I have services and possessions completely incomparable to the kings: microwave ovens, TVs, phones, medical technology, paved roads and cars to drive on them, hot showers, running water, flushing toilets, MP3 players, and it goes on and on. We’re rich, but we hardly ever think so because human beings have a natural tendency to feel unsatisfied, discontented, to always want more no matter how much we have. It’s true for the people in Lesotho and it’s true for you and me.

U.S. citizens have become progressively wealthier through the years. The average citizen in 1953 had access to 153 electronic appliances. In twenty years, it increased to about 400. The median size of a new home built in 1949 was 1100 square feet. By 1993 it had grown to 2060 square feet. A person in the U.S. on average, owns twice as many cars now as people did in 1950. We’re wealthy! But not very many of us feel wealthy.

The truth is: No matter how far you come, it is never enough. No matter where you arrive, it soon becomes the status quo and loses the thrill, and pretty soon your sights go out to something better. It’s human nature.

We’re all in the same boat. We’re all naturally greedy. We all continually escalate our desires above what we have. It’s as natural as breathing.

But just because something is natural, doesn’t mean it’s good or that you’re helpless against it. This is an important point. It’s natural to have sexual desires. But that doesn’t mean you can jump on everybody you feel attracted to and just apologize later: “Sorry, I couldn’t help it. Sex drive, you know. Biological.” No. We control our natural sexual desires.

In the same way, we can control our natural greed. And I don’t mean merely controlling greedy behavior, but actually controlling the feeling of dissatisfaction.

Before the end of this article, I’ll tell you what you can do about it, but first I want you to grasp the full scope of the problem. Your greed has an impact on every area of your life. You’re greedy about your relationships. You want your lover to be perfect. You’re greedy about your money. No matter how much you make right now, a little more would be better. You’re greedy about your food, your time, your possessions, your pleasures. You would prefer to feel good all the time. You want everybody to treat you with respect. You always want more than you have, and sometimes you feel unhappy about it.

To make matters worse, you also feel pushed and pressured by your own greed. It feels like you must do this and you should do that, but all you’re doing is trying to satisfy your own desires — you want to get a promotion or earn more money or whatever. Your desires feel like needs, but most of them aren’t. They are what you might call “false needs.”

Let’s say you want to be the next CEO of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream, and you’re excited about your goal. You feel good about it. But a few weeks later, you feel stressed by it. What happened?

Your perfectly innocent desire has turned into a false need. As long as it’s simply a desire, the goal — or any goal you want — can be stimulating and fun and inspiring and motivating and a whole bunch of other pleasant feelings. But when you have to put together a resume, and you think you should get it in the mail as soon as possible, and you need to make it perfect, the goal is a drag: it brings you down, lowers your mood and it’s not good for your health.

When you’re fully aware you don’t need to accomplish your goals but only want to, you have energy, good health, and your enthusiasm influences people who can help you.

Desire brings you up and drives you forward with pleasure. Greed brings you down and stresses you out.

When I was a kid, I had to pull weeds in our lawn. There was some kind of “devil” weed (at least, that’s what my dad called it) that kept growing in the grass, and Dad was determined to prevent this evil from taking over the neighborhood. So, come summertime, my brother and sister and I were sent forth to conquer. Our mission: To seek out and pull up the weed with the red leaves. Summers were hot in Nevada. I hated that chore.

Next door to us lived the O’Rourks. They also had the evil weed growing on their lawn, and my best friend, Tommy, had to pull weeds too. Sometimes we had a scheduling conflict: I was ready to play, but he was pulling weeds. I often helped him so he could finish sooner. I noticed that pulling the weeds from the lawn next door was much more fun than pulling them in my own yard, and I even knew why: because I didn’t have to do it. When it was his lawn, it was an option for me, and I did it because I wanted to. The physical task was identical. But mentally, the task was quite different.

Of course you can’t really do this with your job: “I don’t have to go to work. I want to go to work.” You wouldn’t fool anyone with that one, especially yourself. But there are some elements you can influence that may improve your attitude toward any source of stress. We’ll give you a technique here and then look at how it works using some examples.

Use the following technique only when you have a feeling of dysphoria (dysphoria is anger, anxiety or depression, mild or intense). If you’re feeling great, leave yourself alone and enjoy it. This isn’t “positive thinking.” It’s more like “anti-negative thinking.” Use it only when you feel negative. The technique is a series of questions you ask yourself:

1. “What do I want?”
2. “Do I need it to survive?
3. “What would happen if I didn’t get it?”
4. “Do I want to keep the goal, give up on it, or replace it with a new or modified goal?”

This technique will work with any kind of false need — in your job, your relationships, your body goals, etc.

Let’s see how it works. Imagine you’re in an argument with someone close to you. You’re feeling a negative emotion (anger) and you want to use this technique. So you need to have a dialog with yourself.

Can you have a dialog in your head while carrying on a conversation with someone else? Probably not. Especially not when the discussion is heated. After a lot of practice under easier conditions, maybe you’ll be able to do it, but not now. So take a walk or excuse yourself. Say you need a little time to think, and go into another room. And to make it even easier (which I suggest), get a pad of paper and a pen and write down the questions and your answers. Here’s how it might go:

Q: What do I want?

A: I want to make my point. I have a valid point to make, and I want to make it.

Q: Do I need it to survive?

A: No. I won’t die if I can’t make my point.

Q: What would happen if I didn’t make my point?

A: Probably the argument would lose its fierceness.

Q: Now that I’ve thought this through a little, what do I want? Do I still want to make my point? Do I want to give it up? Or do I want to make a new goal?

A: I don’t want to make my point, at least not in this way, and not now. I want to set a new goal: I want to listen.

These questions take the need out of it if it truly isn’t a need. In our hypothetical situation, you go back to listen to the person you were arguing with, and you keep listening until the other is through talking. You’ll probably understand her or him better, and it may change the point you wanted so much to make. Or perhaps you’ll get into better communication and you’ll be able to make your point without anger.

This is a time-consuming process at first. But after doing it a few times, it starts to go quickly. When you’re good enough, you can probably do it in a few seconds while in the middle of the argument, and your partner will gape in wonder at your self-control!

THIS TECHNIQUE ALSO WORKS when you’re striving for a goal and the goal becomes an unhappy burden. Put yourself through the same questions. When you get to the last one, seriously consider giving up on your goal, because if the goal isn’t giving you any joy, what’s the point? You aren’t here long enough to fritter away your precious years on misery.

You might be thinking, “But my goal is not just to give me joy. I’m trying to send my kid through college,” or “I’ve got to pay the mortgage.” If that’s what you’re thinking, you’re in the trap right now and you don’t know it! You don’t have to send your kid to college, and you don’t need to keep your house. You could let your child earn her own way through college — and she might develop a stronger sense of self-reliance because of it. You could move to an apartment and give up yard-work forever. I’m not saying you should do these things, but you could. And knowing you could, knowing that those are only desires of yours, goals you set, will give you a different feeling toward those goals, just like the difference between pulling weeds in my lawn versus Tommy’s lawn.

You have the option: You can choose to keep your goal, or you can change your mind. It’s up to you. If you decide you want to keep the goal, it will be fresh in your mind that you want it, and you’ll feel differently about it. It’s a mental maneuver, and it’ll change the way you feel.

It doesn’t make any difference to say to yourself, “I don’t need this, I want it,” in order to “make yourself” feel better about it. Saying the words, “I want this,” doesn’t affect you much. Knowing you have the option to give it up and deciding not to do so is what makes the difference. That’s why you ask those questions and answer them sincerely. You don’t need to pump yourself up or believe something you don’t believe.

What gives this process power is taking away the falsity. You take away the goal during the questions. The goal is not real. It doesn’t exist. You made it up. You decided to accomplish it. The pressure to accomplish it is in your head, not in reality. When you remove the goal, it changes the way you feel about it.

Sometimes you’ll ask those questions and you’ll realize you really don’t want to make your point or be the CEO of Ben & Jerry’s. And that’s great. You’ll get a fresh opportunity to create a goal that’ll give you some pleasure instead of misery or stress or boredom.

The same point applies in the reading of this web site. You might feel a desire to practice an idea presented here so you can feel better more often. I’m hoping you will. But you may later feel burdened by it — as if you have an obligation to become happier. You don’t. You don’t have to become more successful. You don’t have to look good or lose weight or get rich or feel good. You don’t have to do much to survive, at least here in America. Your mother may not approve, but you don’t have to make her happy either.

You may want some of these things, however. You can figure that out for yourself. But you’ll feel better more often if you keep in mind that you want to do them; you don’t have to.

It’s perfectly natural to think your life should be better than it is. It’s perfectly natural, and perfectly counterproductive. It causes more dysphoria than is necessary. Realize that your desires are only desires that you chose and you’ll feel much better and work toward your desires more effectively.

And when you realize you have a desire that cannot be attained, you can give it up and replace it with a different desire. You’re in charge of this. You’re not the victim of your own desires. You can choose what goal to reach for. You can choose goals that’ll give you the most enjoyment to pursue, and you can keep yourself aware that it’s your game so you can get maximum enjoyment from it. And by doing so, you can voluntarily fill your life with a bearable lightness of being.

The principle:
Ask yourself: Do you really need it?
Do you really have to?
Or is it only a preference?

Imagine a Single Celebration that Includes Everybody

2011-12-21T00:43:00.000-08:00

IN THE NORTHERN hemisphere, the summer solstice marks the longest day of the year and on that day until the winter solstice, the days get progressively shorter. The winter solstice is the moment when the days begin to get longer again. Just the reverse is true in the southern hemisphere, but the two solstices themselves occur at exactly the same moment for everyone on earth.

The origin of the word "solstice" is the Latin solstitium from "sol" meaning sun and "-stitium" meaning a stoppage. Observing the sun over time, you can see the sun rising further and further to the south until the winter solstice when it slows and stops and then reverses.

The winter solstice in the northern hemisphere is close to the same time as Christmas, and many of our Christmas traditions originated from the days before Christianity, when the solstice was celebrated. Traditions for celebrating the end of shorter days and the beginning of longer days have been practiced around the world for many thousands of years.

At Stonehenge on the British Isles, for example, the huge stones are arranged in such a way that they frame the setting sun on the day of winter solstice. The ancient Brits had a tradition of tying apples to the branches of oak trees in the dead of winter to affirm that summer would come again. The Celts put mistletoe on their altars.

The ancient Romans celebrated the winter solstice by giving gifts. And they feasted for a week. Servants traded places with their masters — the masters serving their servants during the feast. They also had a tradition during winter solstice of bringing evergreens indoors.

In Scandinavian countries, the sun disappears in the dead of winter. In the far north, it disappears for as long as 35 days. The ancient people of the far north had a tradition of feasting when the dark days were over and the sun once again shone on the horizon. They celebrated with what they called a Yuletide festival. They feasted in a long hall while a Yule log burned in the fireplace. They thought of mistletoe as sacred. Kissing under mistletoe was a fertility ritual. Holly berries was considered to be the food of the gods.

The solstice celebrations were officially replaced with Christian ceremonies during Roman times as a way of overtaking the ancient traditions, even though Jesus wasn't really born in December. It was a political act. December 25th used to be the solstice with the old calendar. It usually happens on December 21st with the modern calendar.

But the Christian usurping of the celebration was a long time ago. It's water under the bridge and really at this point, who cares? We could start fresh and celebrate the solstice instead of (or in addition to) our other celebrations. We could celebrate the turning of the season. We could celebrate longer and warmer days ahead.

We could keep our celebrations, but change the date, and that way more people could celebrate together. People of different customs could celebrate their customs but also celebrate the solstice with all people.

The solstice has nothing to do with religion, race, or nationality. Every one of us relies on the sun for our warmth, our sunlight, and our food. We rely on the sun for life. The time and date of the solstice can be accurately determined and it occurs at the same moment everywhere on earth.

The solstice might some day become an international holiday. This could be the beginning of something wonderful — a point of unification, a place of agreement, a universal tradition.

You can begin this year by celebrating the solstice in even a small way. Take any of the traditions normally associated with the holiday season and do some part of it on the solstice. Give a gift. Eat a feast. Be kinder to your fellow human beings. Invite people of all faiths to your home to celebrate the end of the longest night and the beginning of longer days. The celebration of the solstice in your own home could actually and concretely work for peace on earth and goodwill toward all women and men.

I wish you a Merry Solstice.