Are you waiting for the perfect life, too?

I keep waiting for the magnificent moment when my life is perfect. You know, that moment where I’m happy and everything is as it should be. Happiness would be my constant state of mind. Every one of my relationships would be fulfilling, and I’d get along well with everyone. I’d live my life vibrantly, flamboyantly. Money would be easy.

I keep looking for this to happen. And maybe it’s the waiting that makes it so elusive. I’m living for another moment, a moment always in the future. However, when I take an aerial view of my life, I see major shifts. Some of the changes are so big they’re actually seismic. For instance, I used to be plagued with a habit of revisiting painful moments from my past. I would replay them over and over, and they’d feel so real that it was as if they were happening all over again. I did this most of my life, and it was so ingrained that even though I wanted to stop, I didn’t know how. Well, I don’t do that anymore. Through tremendous effort, I broke the habit. At the time I never thought I would be able to, I thought I would be stuck with it forever. Changing that part of me was a seismic shift. When I take a grander view of my life, I see these big changes. I need to keep reminding myself of these achievements.

Part of my dissatisfaction stems from undervaluing my achievements and over inflating my challenges. When I reach a personal goal, I lightly pat myself on the back. While my challenges get all of my attention and energy, making them seem even bigger than they are. We probably all do this sometimes – lose sight of the bigger picture and lament our shortcoming. Perhaps some days are for forward movement and others are for reflection. This reminds me of a Buddhist saying: “You, more than anyone else, deserve your love and affection.”

Perhaps kindness and self-love is what is in order for all of us at this moment.

 

YOU are your own corporation. What are you selling?

I came across the idea that we are all corporations. We each have our own unique talents and gifts that are valuable to the world. Each of us has resources like: creativity, intellect, perseverance, health, determination, willfulness, intuition, and compassion. How we govern our lives affects everyone around us.

So if we’re each a corporation, what are we selling and buying? When I came across this question, I couldn’t think of anything at first. I’ve never compared myself to something as immense as a corporation. And I certainly didn’t see myself as selling or buying anything. Eventually I began to see that I do give away parts of myself in order to get something in return.

In a sense we all start off with 100% of shares in our company, ourselves, and then we sell or give them away as we create our lives. Our shares represent any part of us that we value – our time, self-respect, peace, or intellect. Without realizing it, we often give these away: co-workers who constantly want last minute help on a project, or family expectations that we cave into even when we don’t want to. As we do this, we’re also gaining something in return.

This weekend, I finally faced up to the fact that I’m always looking for approval. This was something profoundly missing from my childhood. It’s possible that the majority of what I do, wear, and say is to receive validation from the world. In doing so, I’m trading my shares away. It’s done in the form of my time, self-respect, and my uniqueness. Do I want to keep doing this? Is this making me happy? If I’m truly honest, I can see that in search of this elusive approval, I’ve given so much of myself away that my individuality is almost lost, along with my voice. There are moments where my voice literally gets stuck in my throat.

It’s a worthwhile exercise to take stock of everything that you are and see how much of it is the real you and how much is created for approval. I’m buying back my shares. The only way to do this is to stop looking outward for approval and find it within.

There’s also the question of what I’m offering to the world. Each corporation has something of value to offer. There’s my creativity, compassion, thirst for learning and bettering myself, and my perseverance. What are you offering? This is a great question to ask yourself because it makes you see that you have more talents than you probably realized. It did for me.

 

Discover Your Happiness Without Lifting a Finger

We all want to be happy. The finish line for most people’s goals is usually in the vicinity of happiness. It’s a natural human desire. And it’s wonderful that we’re all trying to find it because it motivates us to create, explore and be better in general. And yet, it’s incredibly elusive.  

I’ve been reading Timothy Gallwey’s book, The Inner Game of Work. You may have heard of him through his other book, The Inner Game of Tennis. In both books, he recommends an interesting way to improve performance, including states of happiness. How do we make our lives more enjoyable? Don’t try to change anything. Leave everything as is. Instead, simply be aware of what you’re feeling when you’re doing the very things you wish were different. For instance, if work feels like drudgery and you want to add pizzazz to it, then focus on how you feel when you’re at work. Don’t’ try to do anything thing differently, just feel.

This idea is counterintuitive. If something isn’t working, then we change it or ourselves. But something has to change. Based on Gallwey’s years of experience as a tennis coach, he noticed that when students focused too hard on improving their game, they often make the very mistakes they were trying to avoid. Yet, when then simply noticed what was happening with the ball, they naturally improved.

It’s the thinking that gets in the way. When athletes talk about being in the zone, where they do everything just right, they all say that in those moments they weren’t thinking about anything at all. It’s when the conscious mind shuts off, and the intuition takes over, that everything beings to flow properly. You’ve probably had moments where you exceeded your own expectations, where you just knew what to do without having to think about it. That’s the zone. And it probably felt exhilarating.

So back to happiness – how do we get it? Based on Gallwey’s theory, the way to finding it is to stop looking for it. Just feel. This bypasses the conscious mind, whose job is to continually judge, criticize and give orders. Without it, enjoyment begins to flow naturally. This takes practice. It’s like meditation, except you’re not in a quiet, secluded room, you’re fully engaged in your life.

 

Creating Success from Past Mistakes

Whenever something upsetting happened to me, I would spend hours afterward replaying it in my mind. Each time I re-enacted the moment, I would get more angry. I did this all the time. It was like I was torturing myself over and over again. Does this sound familiar to you? A lot of us do this. Someone does something we don’t like, we get angry. Then, we’re angry at ourselves for not dealing with it properly, and the moment becomes a recurring nightmare cycling around in our minds.

Instead of dwelling on what went wrong, visualize the solution. See yourself reacting the way you would have liked had you been prepared. This is much more productive than beating yourself up. There’s no point in feeling bad about something that’s already happened – you can’t change it. And by replaying mistakes over and over, you’re almost ensuring that it happens again because the more you run through a behaviour in your mind, the more it becomes ingrained and habitual. A double whammy. However, you can change how you act in the future.

Something recently happened to me that illuminated this insight for me. Someone I always had difficulty getting along with came back into my life. And instantly, all the angry, frustrated feelings flared up. Afterward, on the way home and well into that night, I was filled with anger. My thoughts were focused on what went wrong, how much I disliked this person and all the reasons why. When the anger subsided, I asked myself what I would do differently if I could go back in time. I reimagined the scene with me remaining calm and not reacting to her behaviour. I felt much better. I ran through the entire interaction with me doing and saying all the right things. I saw myself being poised and mature. This was a way of preparing myself to react positively in our future interactions. It was a way of turning a bad experience into a learning opportunity.

This moment led to the realization that I can do this with all of my interactions. Why not? Instead of feeling frustrated over past mistakes, all I have to do is ask myself how I could have done it better, then rehearse it in my mind. This way, I’m programming myself to react the way I want in the future. It’s okay to not know how to handle any given moment, as long as you learn from it and be better next time.

 

Suffer No More – Or How My Thumbs Gave Me A Life Lesson

I’m hurting myself and I didn’t know it. I’m the one blocking my path with boulders, not anyone else – not my job, other people, or my circumstances. Now that I know this, I can change it.

I’ve had the inkling that I’m the one standing in my way, but something happened recently that illuminated it for me. Every winter my fingers get so dry they crack – especially my thumbs. Deep cracks burrow down the side of them and are extremely painful. No moisturizer can help. The only thing I can do is bandage them and wait for winter to leave. Then it suddenly occurred to me that this didn’t always happen. When I lived at home they never cracked. And I started to think about what was different from living with my parents and now? They never used liquid soap like I do. My parents preferred bar soaps. Could this be it? All this suffering and it was self-inflicted? I ran out and bought a bar of pure glycerin soap. Within a few hours my thumbs hurt less, and by the next day they started to heal. It’s been a few days and my hands look better than ever.

After all the long, agonizing winters, I was the one causing my suffering. But how is it that it never occurred to me to change the soap? It’s so obvious…now. Maybe a part of me wanted to suffer. Where we’re at emotionally will show itself in our physical world. I’m definitely happier than I was a few years ago. Back when this started, I was filled with anger and negativity. I’ve since moved on. I don’t host self-pity parties anymore, nor do I need to be in a constant state of suffering. This is why the solution suddenly popped up.

I’m convinced that the answers to our problems, whatever they may be, are hidden in our unconscious. It comes down to the question: Am I ready to let this suffering go? If we’re still identifying with the problem emotionally, then the answer is no. If we’re truly ready to move on, the answer will elegantly float to our consciousness.

I’m starting to think about where else in my life I could be hindering myself. Have I put up obstacles at work, in my relationships, money? The wonderful part of this realization is that we can remove them. In fact, we’re the only ones who can. And this is power.

 

Why are you astonishingly successful?

Affirmations never worked for me. I agree with them in theory: think positively, live a positive life, and your dreams will come true. I firmly believe that our thoughts create our reality. Thoughts lead to feelings, feelings lead to behaviour, and behaviour lead to actions that drive our reality. The purpose of affirmations is to state your wish as if it’s true and repeat it to yourself until you believe it. Some advocate repeating statements like, “I’m healthy and abundant”, over and over; sometimes hundreds of times a day. Repeating a statement over and over never felt right to me. There was always a wiggling voice inside me that said, “That’s not true”.

Then, I came across an intriguing alternative to affirmations, called afformations. Instead of making a statement as if what you want is already true, you ask yourself why it’s already true. For example, “Why am I healthy and abundant?” Making the statement into a question is less threatening. It entices your unconscious and conscious mind to find supporting evidence. Also, it engages the mind to start looking for ways to make it true.

Try it. Think of something you desire, then ask yourself why you have it. Why am I happy? Why am I surrounded by loving friends? If a wiggling voice starts to raise doubts, then phrase it as if it’s about to happen, like “Why am I getting healthier and more abundant?” See what answers you come up with.

When I pose these questions to myself, positive areas of my life pop to the forefront  in support. “Why am I successful?” Because I’m constantly improving myself. I’m persistent and determined. And my creativity helps come up with novel solutions.

We rarely give ourselves credit for the successes in our lives. This is a good way to highlight them and to build on future successes. After asking myself these questions, I realized that I’m standing right next to my ideal self.

 

Is it okay to be beautiful and rich?

Beautiful, rich, self-assured people are bitchy and arrogant. This is what my unconscious keeps telling me. Since my unconscious is hidden from me most of the time, I never questioned this assumption, until this morning.

Most motivational books tell you to envision yourself as you’d like to be, living the life you want. The premise is that by doing so you’ll live into it. This works well if the visualization feels good. Whenever I see myself as beautiful, wealthy, and confident, a ball of anxiety flares up in my chest. Why? Seeing myself exuding these qualities makes me fear that I’ll be shunned. People would see me as uppity. Somewhere in my life these traits got linked with negative associations. I don’t know where these assumptions came from, and it doesn’t matter. It matters that they’re holding me back.

We won’t allow ourselves to be anything that we have negative feelings toward. No mantras, goal setting tricks, or persistence will overcome these obstacles. One way to change ingrained beliefs is to question them. Are they true? Can I prove that being confident, beautiful and rich makes me bitchy and arrogant? No, I can’t. Bitchiness and arrogance comes in all shapes and sizes. Self-assured people are often kind and generous. And being beautiful and rich won’t make me obnoxious. I’ve never been those things.

The more I can demystify negative assumptions, the more comfortable I’ll be with my ideal self. It’s like cleaning out a house filled with dust – only when the house is clean that you can see it’s true beauty and inhabit it freely.