I would never claim to be a great parent. I think most parents have their lingering little doubts about how good they are at raising their children and if the things they are doing will serve their children in the long run. Though I can not claim to be a great parent, I do believe I am serviceable one. I am like a beat up old car you can use to get from point A to point B but never want to be seen driving around in; I can parent when the need arises, though I think my son would usually prefer that I keep quiet and out of sight in the garage until I am needed in those desperate times that he needs me to open a jar or buy him gum.
And though I may not be great, I understand that parenting a child is never an easy ride. There are bumps and bruises and detours and complete derailments and hair pulling moments of utter exhaustion. It can be a thankless, heart wrenching job and it is sometimes difficult to see the fruits of our labors reflected in our children because we are in the trenches – doing the hard work of saying no or cleaning wounds or managing their little lives – and we can not see all the things that they do that validate our influence as parents.
But if you take the time to step back and watch your children, really watch them when they don’t know that you are, I think there exists some tell-tale signs that you are doing this parenting thing right and recognizing these signs can help you relax into enjoying the moments you have with your children more, because you are confident they are going to grow up to be ok.
So what are some of the signs of a child who has a parent that is doing something right?
They share without being told.
If your child usually shares his toys, his sweets, his stories or his smiles with others, then you are doing something right. Everyone seems to evolve a natural affinity towards serious possessiveness and borderline greed and teaching your children the value of sharing sets them up for a lifetime of empathic and compassionate thinking. Considering the needs of others, the strength of his own having and his ability to make other people feel good by sharing, even just a little of the things he has, are qualities that every child should have. Sharing is caring, after all!
They shake off some of the pain of life.
Whether it be physically or mentally, children are going to go through some pain in life and the ability to shrug some of that off and keep going is going to create a lifetime of powerful resilience that will see them through the eventual darkest days we don’t want to imagine for them. I am not suggesting you shouldn’t be there to pick your child up, brush them off, comfort them and kiss some boo boo’s when they happen. I am saying you should teach your children that not all pain is created equally and some pain should be used as motivation. You embrace it, shake it off and let it make you stronger. Teach them that valuable lesson and your children will thank you profusely when they get beat up later in life and have the strength to power through, despite the frequent pains of living.
They teach you things you didn’t know.
Raising an inquisitive child can be annoying sometimes. Why? Why? Why? But why? It’s hard to support all that curiosity when you are knee-deep in a shitstorm of groceries, bills, work, school, whatever, but if we do it right, we can raise a child who is self-sufficiently curious most of the time and if you do that, those damn kids will blow your mind with fun, sometimes trivial, but often times amazingly useful, facts they discovered on their own. I love it when my son throws some nugget out there and I actually have to turn it all around on him and say, why or make him defend his position or fact. He doesn’t have the luxury of pulling out the, “because I said so” card so his argument has to work in some critical thinking and fact based reasoning and the world always needs more of that in everyone.
They are not afraid to get crazy.
One of the best ways you know if you are kicking ass at parenting is if your child is out there kicking ass at life. Children shouldn’t be afraid to try new things or do fun, random things without fear. And they do this because you, as a parent, have given them confidence, support and a free pass to sometimes get spontaneous and wild with life. They aren’t afraid to face plant off the monkey bars because they know you will be there to help them up. They aren’t afraid to throw down on an impromptu foam sword fight in the pouring rain because they know that there are few things as fun as playing in the rain and getting wet for no reason.They are not afraid to sneak up on you and drop you to your knees with a burst of unexpected tickling that gives you the hiccups because you laugh so hard. If you see spontaneity and a little bit of crazy in your children, you are doing something right with raising them, because those are the fearless dreamers that will change the world.
If you see spontaneity and a little bit of crazy in your children, you are doing something right with raising them, because those are the fearless dreamers that will change the world.
They aren’t afraid to challenge you.
This one might be contentious to some parents, but it’s a trait that I value in my son, if only because I think a little rebellion is healthy and leads to a unique, strong personality. I honestly don’t want my son to just accept everything I, or anyone else, says. I want him to find his own ways of doing things and his own way of thinking about things because, just like there is evolutionary strength in distributing our DNA, there is an intellectual strength that can be gained from distributing your own ideas and thoughts about things. What we should try to do as parents is create children that aren’t happy running with the status quo and would never willingly let some terrible errors in thinking or action go unchallenged, no matter where or who it comes from.
They don’t hurt things for fun.
I am not talking about hunting or fishing or whatever. Those things have a deeper value for most people outside of a simple fun activity. I am talking about squashing bugs, just because you can. Pulling the wings off butterflies. Pegging helpless birds with a bb gun. Letting your children derive pleasure from the act of harming things, especially things smaller than them, is not acceptable. We should teach our children that nearly everything has a wish to not feel pain. It’s not a strictly human thing to not want to be hurt or destroyed. We especially need to protect the things smaller than us. If we do this right, our children will grow up with an empathy towards all living things that will see them caring more than harming, and I dare you to pick up a newspaper or turn on a newscast and not think to yourself that this world would be better if more people just cared more about all living things.
They know what it means to break a sweat.
If your children know what it feels like to be exhausted at the end of the day. If their muscles ache from play and their faces are slick with sweat. If they can run around outside for hours at a time without ever claiming to be bored, then you are kicking some serious parental ass. The lost art of serious play is something that children need to be re-taught, especially in this world of sedentary technological stimulation. Getting out there into teams sports teaches the value of sportsmanship and team play. Running around outside with some friends, inventing games, fosters a deeper imagination and creativity. Just getting those kids off their asses and running around with them is a great way to show the value of physical activity as a bonding experience and well-being creator. No matter what you do or how you do it, raising kids that value physical activity is always going to make them better in nearly every way.
Conclusion
So there you have it. 7 ways you know you are doing the parenting thing right. I am not saying that if your child doesn’t display these traits that you are doing anything wrong and I know not everyone is going to agree with them. I also realize I did not cover all the ways we can know that we are parenting properly. These are just the observations and experiences of a beat up jalopy of a parent so help me out and add your ways to know you are parenting correctly to the comments below!
Happiness is big business. Everyone wants it. No one can seem to get it. Keeping it seems impossible and It always looks like someone has more of it than you do. You would think that with all the convenience, information and opportunity that a lot of us are lucky to have that we would have more success in achieving happiness, but the happiness problem is a result of the search itself. There is nothing out there that you are going to find that will truly make or keep you happy. Everything that is going to make you happy is inside you and all it takes is a happiness habit to bring it out and make it last.
Happiness is not something external that we can find and collect. Happiness is not conditional on some outcome. It has no relationship to any possession and the only person that it relates to is yourself. All the marketing and media about happiness would have you think that it is out there and you are looking in at it but the opposite is true, you already contain nearly all the potential for happiness you are capable of and the only thing you can do is put in the work to bring it out more often.
So what do I mean when I say that your happiness is something inside you? There is a common formula, called the happiness formula, that produces a happiness equation that looks like this:
We can see that only 10 percent of your happiness is due to external circumstances. Money. Career. Possessions. Other people’s attitudes. A bird shitting on your head. Whatever. You get the point. All that shit (no pun intended) you can’t control doesn’t even affect your happiness that much. It feels like it does though, because those external circumstances are always right in the forefront of our perception and our negativity bias emphasizes their power but they are really not substantial contributors to our happiness or sadness at all. Next, you can see that 50 percent is your genetic baseline for happiness. Lastly, 40 percent is our daily actions and thoughts.
Ok. So half of your happiness is never going to change. We got what we got in that regard from our genetic heritage. Tough shit about that. You are not going to be able to change your genetics so get over that and consider it out of your control. That still leaves 40 percent of everything that you can control of your happiness. That is a lot of happiness potential you manage and as soon as you accept your role in directing your thoughts and actions, as it relates to your happiness, you can start getting down to the serious business of developing an effective happiness habit. This will make sure you are always maximizing that 40 percent you control and constantly shifting the scales of happiness in your favor.
So how do we do that? We do that by understanding the facts of happiness and practicing the habits that contribute to consistent happiness.
Happiness is contagious.
So many studies have reinforced the idea that seems so obvious when experienced; being around happy people makes you happier and being around sad people makes you fucking miserable. No shit. Just try to maintain positivity when you are sitting around someone who is constantly dragging a rain cloud around over their head. It’s really hard to keep that sadness infection from spreading. In the same regard, try to keep your mopey, depressed bullshit spewing when you are surrounded by positive people. It’s equally difficult not to contract the mood.
The studied math of the contagion of happiness is shown in the image to the right.
We can see that, the more close social contacts that we have that are happy, the bigger percent of happiness gain we can see personally. Close friends that are happy produce a 15% increase in your happiness. Friends of friends that are happy produce a 10% increase in your happiness and the friends of those friends that are happy produce a 6% increase in our happiness. Happiness spreads, like ripples in a pond after a rock is thrown in, everyone can feel the emotional waves of others around them and they are affected by those things. So a really good habit to get into is surrounding yourself with positive, happy people. They will rub off on you, they will cheer you up, they will inspire and motivate you. That is the point of having friends, to support your quest for becoming a better person; so make sure you have the right ones around.
Practice Gratitude
This single, solitary habit has completely changed my relationship to life and happiness. Focusing on the positive is not easy an easy habit to maintain and we can blame evolution for that. You see, we have an evolutionary negativity bias. Simply put, our brains are wired to constantly detect danger and potential harm and to react more strongly to these negative things than any positive things. This negativity bias served a purpose once. It is much more beneficial to survival to have a mind focused towards problems and negative stimuli when you are living in a treacherous, danger ridden world. I better have a constant, vigilant awareness of the fucking saber tooth tiger that could attack my family than in deriving a quiet joy in the time I get to spend with my little caveman family.
The problem is, that negativity bias doesn’t serve such a dramatic purpose anymore, as a lot of people’s lives have taken a dramatic turn for the safer and less constantly treacherous. So we have to fight this negativity bias by balancing the scales of awareness. And we do this by practicing gratitude. Studies have shown that it takes a 5-1 ratio of positive to negative actions/thoughts to balance the scales of awareness and bring out your inner happiness. So an easy practice I recommend is, every time something negative creeps into your awareness, counter that with 5 thoughts of gratitude. Too much to start with? Fine. Then just get into the habit of starting and ending your day with 5 things you are grateful for. This one habit alone might completely change the way you perceive the overall happiness quotient of your life.
Embrace the Pain
Life is painful. It is such a dysfunctional relationship, the one we have with life. It can beat the living shit out of us one moment and then lift us up and hand us some grand, lucky fortune the next. The best thing you can do is embrace the pain of the bullshit and let it strengthen you while you remain vigilant and open for those memorable moments that make it all worthwhile.
When you learn to lean into your pain points and not let them control you, you learn courage, strength and confidence and those things go a long way in to upping your baseline of happiness. When you start believing that you can suffer a whole lot of life’s common pains and difficulties you start to realize that the power they hold over you in the form of fear and anxiety slips away like water off your back and you are left with an indomitable, resilient spirit that will look forward to life’s discomforts and fears as means to growth. Pain is a great teacher and embracing it is a habit that will make your happiness less subject to the fluctuations of life’s little foibles.
Excuse the Assholes
How long have you let a momentary slight from some stranger stick in your head long after the moment passed? You get cut off in traffic and that contaminates the entire day. You get a pissy cashier at the grocery store and you are instantly soured for hours. This once again relates to our negativity bias and it is a constant problem that we all face everyday. The best way to face it is to just excuse the general assholery of the world.
Everyone is dealing with the monumental struggle of their own shit filled existence and they carry that around with all the time. Sometimes it spills over into their interactions with you. They most likely don’t intend that or want it to, but it does, and the best way for you to not let it affect you is just fucking get over it. You do the same shit sometimes to people and you don’t know what is happening in anyone else’s life. You don’t know if their dog just died, or they are going through a brutal divorce or they just got some seriously bad health news that they don’t know how to deal with. Give people the benefit of the doubt and excuse their shitty attitude as often as possible. It makes life a lot easier and it will make you a lot happier.
Ignore the Static
We look at Facebook and we see all the edited, glossy, bullshit highlights of other people’s lives and, when faced with the messy, dirty, unedited director’s cut of our own, we unfairly reason that our lives, with all it’s ups and downs and constant struggles, is somehow less than everyone else’s. Obviously that is not true.
One of the best ways to make yourself happier is to stop comparing your life to anyone else’s. Social media has made it way too easy for people to march out their greatest hits reels . When we see these we think it’s all they have in their life and we think we must be doing something wrong with ours. Well, whatever you see from your friends on social media is just a blip of their life. They are not positing the bad shit. The everyday struggles of mind and body. The lingering conflicts and difficulties that they have to endure in order to get the snippets of those great highlights they post. Ignore the CGI happiness of social media and remember that we are all in the same boat. We all ride the same waves. Sometimes it is smooth sailing and other times you grab on to something and you weather the storms.
Be Active
It’s no secret that being active is a sure fire way to generate happiness. Doing exercise releases so many feel good chemicals like endorphins and serotonin and reduces levels of the stress based ones like cortisol and adrenaline. Establishing a regular exercise routine is a great habit to create that will get you as close to constant happiness as you will ever get.
An exercise habit offers so many compliments to a happiness habit. You will look better. You will feel better. You will eat better. You will build confidence, strength (mental and physical), discipline and ritual. You don’t have to get crazy. Start with 30 minutes a day of good old-fashioned exercise. Cardio, weights, whatever. Just get off your ass and get moving.
Give Back
A habit that is sure to produce endless supplies of happiness is the habit of giving to others. It is nearly impossible to feel anything but happy when you take the time to acknowledge the hardships of others and give back in a way that alleviates their hardship. If that means volunteering at a soup kitchen, joining a program for troubled youth, carrying groceries to the car for an elderly person, whatever. Big or small, the habit of giving back is one that fills you up with happiness and one that should be revisited as often as possible as part of a happiness habit.
Conclusion
Here is the final truth of happiness you should know before you rush off to chase perpetual cloud 9; you can not be happy all the time. It’s not possible. Anyone who says they are happy all the time is ignoring some of the serious pain and misery of life and that is just as unhealthy as ignoring all the joy in life. Don’t strive for a constant state of happiness. Strive to make your default mood and attitude one of greater happiness and ease. When you reset from a struggle or from a joy your goal should be to have created a happiness habit that always has you returning to a set point of generally happy and ready for the next difficulty or pleasure.
Yes, life is going to beat you down. You are going to feel depressed and sad and worn out sometimes, but don’t always be that person because if you are, it’s your own fault. You have every opportunity in the world to create a happiness habit that supports you in your life and provides a constant baseline of happiness, and that is what we are all really looking for when we are searching for that ethereal concept of happiness. Something that lasts. Something that is not dependent on anything else. And something that is our own. All the materials for that sort of happiness are already inside you, now go build it.
Bonjour. Szia. Guten tag. Hello. So many ways to greet someone and I feel as those I should say greet you all again as it has been sometime since I have gotten a post out. I apologize for my writing absence. I have been travelling, with limited Internet access or time, for the past two weeks. Instead of rushing out half assed posts filled with trifling garbage; I decided to wait until my return to write something more meaningful.
I have had a desire to write this post for some time now, but I wanted to wait until I was done with my trip in order to give it some deeper context and clarity in my mind. So, I sit on the plane ride home, writing with a furious abandon, because I could not contain my excitement. I am basking in the afterglow of a beautiful journey that has left me full of words and, more than that, pregnant with a message I wanted to bring to the audience that consumes my silly meanderings.
The details of my trip are not necessary for me to go into. Suffice to say, I took a two-week, solo trip into the heart of Eastern Europe. It was a journey that, before departing, I did not want to admit had me very fearful. I have traveled to foreign countries alone in the past but never for that long and never so unstructured. I had a place to stay. I had a few things I wanted to do but I had no other plan then to explore a distant, foreign land alone, and that scared the shit out of me.
But I did it. I did it to prove to myself that I could. I did it to prove to others that it is possible. I did it because I know there is so much treasure hidden beneath the couch cushions of life; waiting to be swept up by the greedy, desperate hands of fearless, travelling souls. But mostly, I did it because it scared me so much, that I knew I had to do it.
There were moments where it was hard. I lost tickets home to places and was nearly stranded multiple times. I scurried like a nervous insect trying to understand the languages I came across and what that meant for how to act and what to eat and where to go. I got terribly ill for a stretch and suffered through it alone – bed ridden and cursing my luck and loneliness – with no understanding of what sort of medicine I could take that would help. I wandered through dark, imposing alleys that housed shadows that moved like ghosts and footsteps that were imagined thieves coming up to rob and kill me but nothing ever hit me so hard that it ruined me.
There were also so many amazing moments. The cities I explored – lit by lights like a million dancing candles that still glow when I shut my eyes. The sounds – foreign languages and sounds lilting through the air like new perfumes of flowers I have never chanced to smell before. The people – ancient friends I just now met but will now have for a lifetime – met over a drink or a joke or a shared inconvenience that was made the easier by the sharing. The memories – the personal things that can only be exchanged secondhand through nostalgic stories that try, but never fully reach, the depth of the experience. And those things were so powerful that they changed me.
And that is the thing about facing your fears and moving towards something you really want. The bad is never as strong as the good and the bad never affects you as much as the good does, because facing your fears, and moving into your discomforts, is usually a controlled sort of experience. Like riding a roller coaster or jumping from a plane with a parachute or taking a new job or getting married or having children or starting an exercise routine or moving far away from home towards something you really want or any of the million things we are faced with everyday that scares the shit out of us. It’s all scary but it is usually never so terrifying that it could destroy us.
Is there a chance it could all go wrong and you could be left sad and alone and questioning your decisions? Yes. There is always that chance in life. To be unceremoniously thrown into the path of oncoming reality through circumstances beyond your control, but there is not always the chance to have the thrill, the heart thumping excitement, the utter life changing beauty and the creation of armor like courage that comes from approaching something you fear and conquering it. Because in doing something that seems so overwhelming, so tremendously impossible and so far outside the realm of your comfort zone, you come out completely changed.
Because that is what facing your fear is – it is a changing of your being. When you stare down the barrel of the shit that terrifies you, and you defeat it, you are never the same. Your old thoughts and beliefs and ideas don’t hold the same sort of polished, majestic shine they once did and the things that used to scare you are simply childhood bogeymen that hold no more fright. You realize that your thoughts and beliefs and fears are not carved into stone. They are now malleable pieces of clay that can be forever changed and reshaped and you never again face the real danger of becoming so hard and set that you are at risk of shattering should you have to face your fears and change again.
Although I set this message against my own recent experience, I am obviously not talking only about the fear that can come with travel. The idea touches every aspect of our lives. It is the process of reaching outside your comfort zone towards something that you know you want but are afraid to go after. To that I say this; everything worth having, everything you truly want out of life, and everything that will make you the person you want to become, is on the other side of fear. There is no growth, no success and no victory that does not begin with fear, wind its way into discomfort, and bring you out on the other side of true growth. It is to fear that we should align our compass, because it is the best determinant of the direction we should be headed in our lives if we want to have the most impact on them.
So, do things that scare the shit out of you. Do things that have no instant resolution and no discernible path outside of doing them. Do things that others say you are crazy for doing or that others say they could never do, because those are the things that need doing. Not just for yourself – so you can grow and become the fearless fucking monster of life you want to be – but because other people need to see you doing them so they can see that what they think is impossible is only something that lives on the other side of a chasm of fear and if they force themselves to traverse that rickety, swinging bridge to the other side they will come away with something dangerously close to absolute freedom.
And why do I say it is absolute freedom? Because you will finally be free to believe that anything is possible in you, and that is the strongest freedom there is. You will believe that, despite the odds or the struggles or the millions of significant and not so significant doubts that you juggle in your head and convince you to play it safe, that all that matters is facing those fearful moments of your life head on and conquering them or learning from them. There is no losing. There is only another chance or victory and there is always something to be learned from either.
So as my plane finds it’s way towards it’s homeward destination – with the fasten seatbelt light coming on and the restlessness of weary passengers creating a cacophony of excited chatter and movement – I leave you in much the same way I started; with a few of the many ways to depart. Au revoir. Viszontlátásra. Auf Wiedersehen. Goodbye.
But remember this, when you travel, as when you face your fears and move forward in life, goodbye never means you are leaving. It means you are going somewhere else. It means you are taking with you the experiences you accumulated. It means you are moving towards a different, better future and destination because you faced something that helped you grow and you became stronger, more courageous and much more capable of facing your fears in the future.
And you get to take all those things and scatter them like ashes throughout the rest of your life. And those ashes of experiences are the fertilizer of new dreams, new wants, new desires and a new life. That is what facing your fear brings you; a constant phoenix like resurrection of your life. To be born from those ashes of conquered fear time and time again. It is that constant struggle and excitement of facing your fears that brings the ability to always return to your life more limitless and more beautiful then you ever thought you could be.
In life we see limitless possibility. We are told we can do anything, become anyone and live any way we want. It is a sentiment that has produced countless, inspiring rags to riches stories. Freedom and choice is a mental liberation that allows us to consider our options, follow our dreams and become the men and women we want to become. But there is a hidden problem with all of this freedom and choice. When we lay out all those possibilities and all those options for our life, our actions, our experiences, we are often struck inside with a deep anxiety and fear because – while we may be able to do anything and become anyone and live anyway we want – we have absolutely no fucking idea what that looks for us and the last thing any one of us wants is to live in a mental shitstorm of regret and perpetual indecision. And that is why choice and freedom, while so critical to a fulfilling life, can be a dark cloud of anxiety if we let it be.
The problem with too much choice
I am not going to sit here and argue that having the freedom to choose in life is a bad thing. It is obviously one of the key components of a happy life. We all know the value of it. Autonomy. Expression. Excitement. Freedom to choose helps us develop our individual and unique personalities and styles. It helps us to find our paths in life and to develop our sense of personal satisfaction. But there is such a thing as too much choice. We have seen the variety of things we can choose from grow but we have gained almost nothing from this in a psychological way. In fact, all of this choice has exposed new anxieties that can actually diminish your happiness. Here is how:
Analysis Paralysis
Analysis paralysis is a condition or mental state of over analyzing a situation or action to the point where it is impossible to take any action at all. Let’s look at a very common example of this in action. Let’s say you have finally decided to drop some extra pounds and hit the gym. You want to get healthy. Awesome. But you also want to find the best way to get healthy because you have limited time and you want to be efficient and make the best use of your time. So what do you do? You start researching ways to get healthy. You learn about HIIT, steady state cardio, resistance training, metabolic conditioning. You learn about muscle splits, full body routines, olympic lifts, power lifts, body-weight exercises. You learn about intermittent fasting, carb cycling, slow carbs, cheat days, cheat meals, paleo. You learn about creatine and protein and macro-nutrients and food prep and pre-workout and amino acids and … OK! Enough. You get my point.
You took a simple decision to get healthy and you spent hours and hours on the couch, eating junk food, reading about all the different ways you can get healthy and never once did you take an actual, solid step to getting healthy, because there is just too much advice out there to wade through and too many choices to pick from and you always want to make sure you are choosing the best of anything.
Well, let me let you in on a little secret. There is no best of anything! There is only anecdotal truths of things that have worked for people or that they like or that they were able to stick with and you know why these things worked or why they like these things or why they were able to stick with them? Because they stopped analyzing it all and just fucking did something!! They tried things. Maybe it wasn’t the best thing at first but they found out what they liked and what worked for them by doing, not by analyzing all the choices out there because at some point the cost of evaluating all those choices outweighs the value of the best choice.
The Regret of Choosing
That is not the only problem with too much choice. Let’s say you finally settled on a diet and workout plan. You are going forward with it. Kudos to you! You jumped a major hurdle in progress. Not only that, let’s say you were able to convince your friend to start a diet and workout plan with you. Your friend chooses a different workout and diet plan but you are both committed and hit the gym together. Great!
A few months pass and you are starting to see some results. You are feeling healthier, you are losing weight and you are happy but you notice something, your friend is losing more weight and seems even healthier and happier than you. How the hell can that be!! Then you realize, it must be because he chose a better workout and diet plan than you! Damnit! Why didn’t I choose the right one? Now I just wasted 3 months… How much further along would I be if I had picked a better way to lose weight? Fuck dieting and exercise! I am going to go eat an entire pizza!!
With all the freedom to choose comes the inevitable regret that you might have made a better choice. Even if you made the perfect choice for you, you still have the ability, because there are so many other options in your rear view mirror, to think that you might have made the wrong choice and that there may be something better out there for you. That anxiety and fear contaminates your experience of the things you did choose. It makes it seem like the choices you have made are lesser than what they could have been because your expectation of what your choice will deliver will always be tainted by your imaginations of what it should have been. Our minds always exaggerate the pleasure we will gain from a certain choice and always downplays the faults of choosing another thing, and because of that, we believe every decision might have been a little better had we a chance to do it over again.
So what can we do about it?
Ok. So you can see that too much choice can turn into a bad thing. It can prevent you from choosing anything at all and it can poison the choices you do make with fantasies about how other choices might have been better. But what can you do to limit this anxiety you might feel over all the choices in your life?
Consciously limit your choices.
One good way to relive your choice anxiety is to simply decide to limit your ability to make choices. Most people do this in some way or another on a daily basis anyway. To-do lists are a way of limiting your choices. Everyday you have the choice to do anything but you write down the things you KNOW you want to and should do and, if you are strict and disciplined with yourself, when you are faced with something outside of your to-do list, you make the easier decision to follow through with your list.
People also frequently limit their choice by understanding what they like and don’t like in an informed way. When you go to the grocery store you don’t spend hours staring at the 300 salad dressings every time you go because you already know what you like. You found out through trial and error and you stuck with it because you know it offers you a satisfaction you can live with. Sure, you haven’t tried all the salad dressings in the world, and there may be one out there that is just ever so slightly better but – once again – the cost of evaluating all the choices is more than the value gained from finding the absolute best, so you go with what you like and don’t think much about the other options.
Stop looking back at roads not taken.
In most cases, the fantasy you have about the thing you didn’t choose, is just that; a fantasy. The woman you should have married instead of your wife. She is a fantasy. The car you should have bought that is so much better than yours. Fantasy. That amazing salad dressing that will make your kale not taste like the sweat off a donkey’s balls. Fantasy. You make them out to be so much better than they are because you never had them and didn’t have to see the ugly side of them. Had you chosen them instead you would most certainly be fantasizing about the things you have right now and how amazing they must be.
You stop looking back and thinking what might have been by seeing clearly what you have right now. Be grateful for what you have because there are so many people who have nothing. Nothing you choose will ever be perfect, it will have flaws and holes and tangles and weeds but it is your imperfect thing and you get to make one really simple choice with the things that are yours; your appreciate them or you don’t. So stop looking over your shoulder and drifting through your life considering all the million things you could have, should have, didn’t have. It doesn’t matter. If you still want those things, choose them now. But I can promise you one thing. No matter what you choose, it isn’t going to matter at all unless you learn how to appreciate it for what it is and not compare it to what it isn’t.
Believe it or not, but we are all entrepreneurs in life and we are all putting out a product everyday. We manufacture it, we advertise it, we create publicity for it and we try to sell it. If we invest enough time and energy into creating the best product we can create, it gets noticed and people buy it, talk about it and recommend it. If we throw together a shoddy, broken down, piece of shit product with little care for how it works or what value it adds to the world, that also gets noticed, and people avoid it like the plague and tell everyone else to avoid it. The fact is:
Your life is your product.
What you wear is advertising.
What you say is publicity.
What you do is your value to the marketplace.
And all your personal profits and losses is your bottom line.
That’s right. Like it or not, you are a product and the world judges you by what you have to offer them. You are a product of your experiences, your beliefs, your ideas and your values and you manufacture that everyday and put it out into the world. Everything you put out there is being scrutinized by everyone who might buy into what you are selling. A job interview. A friendship. A relationship. A conversation with a stranger. Everyone you meet is sizing you up and asking themselves if that is something they are willing to invest in; is that something they want to buy?
Now, you don’t have to market your product to everyone. You can focus on a small niche market that will “get” you. You can say, fuck everyone who doesn’t wear open-toed sandals with socks on, and wear open-toed with socks on, fully understanding that only other people who wear open-toed sandals with socks on are going to appreciate that. But even within that small market, you still better be putting out a damn good product of yourself or no one is going to buy it. Whatever market you are trying to appeal to in your personal life, you need to make sure you are putting out the right product to the people who matter to you.
How do we do that?
Dress as advertising
Be it a first impression or a consistent style, how you dress impacts your life. It is your product packaging and your perpetual advertising. People see, in what you choose to wear, the opinion you have of yourself and the initial non-verbal statements you are putting out there. Now, before you throw a shit fit about the nonsense of dressing up everyday, I am not saying everyone should wear dresses or suits everyday. I am saying, dress as appropriate for the audience you are trying to appeal to and understand that other audiences might not give you the time of day depending upon how you are dressed.
When I was growing up, I went through a lot of different looks to advertise myself. I did the punk rock thing, in my way, with a colored mohawk and my rebel clothes, because that is how I felt and that was the message I wanted to send. I looked like an asshole and I got treated like an asshole. I expected that and I wanted that. After a while I changed my look, not because I was pressured to, or because I think it is a bad way to look, but because I didn’t want to be seen as that anymore. It was a conscious decision on my part to appeal to a different audience with the way I advertised myself. I am not saying that anyone has to, or should, change the way they dress, but everyone better damn well be cognizant of what it says about them and be ready to handle that scrutiny and reaction.
Think about it this way; you go into a job interview at a bank with a Hawaiian t-shirt, khaki shorts and flip-flops on, I feel pretty confident they are going to show your happy little ass the door. Wrong audience for that kind of dress. Now if you are wearing the same thing and are out on a beach, you will probably attract the right kind of audience; the kind that will buy you a margarita or ask you to put sunscreen on their hairy back. Different audience, different result.
The moral is; advertise yourself properly for the situation and make your advertising unique to you, so you stand out. You advertisement is going to appeal to certain people and what you wear is the first thing you say about yourself to anyone. Dress however you want, but remember that what you wear is what you are telling the rest of the world you are about.
What you say is publicity
I swear quite a bit. I like swearing and, not to toot my own horn, there is some proof that people who swear are smarter than mother fuckers who don’t. Regardless of that fact, I don’t swear in certain company, or in certain situations, because it’s fucking rude and inappropriate!
The way you talk – the words you use and the cadence and the tone and the delivery – these are all ways that you market yourself everyday and these are the ways that people develop a deeper insight into who you are and what you are about as a product.
If you are constantly gossiping about people behind their back, people know that you probably do the same to them when they are not around. If you are constantly being negative and insulting to everyone you meet, people know that all you are selling is misery and sadness and no one willingly buys that shitty product. If you are uplifting people in positive ways and going our of your way to be polite in your speech, people are going to notice that and be attracted to that.
The way you speak internally also defines what you are externally. If you are always beating yourself up and punishing yourself for your past and generally making sure that you are unsuccessful in life because of how you speak to yourself, well, that is going to show outwardly and, once again, people don’t want to buy that shit so stop trying to sell it and stop using it to create your product!
What you do is your value to the marketplace.
Despite all your advertising and publicity, the real reason people end up sticking with you, as a product, is what you do everyday to reinforce that they made a good investment in you. You can pull people in with some flashy advertising, you can throw around some good publicity, but at the end of the day, if your product doesn’t deliver on what it promised, people are not going to stick around. The true value and success of your product is what services you provide, on a daily basis, to the people who invest in you.
Sometimes, you are going to have to make some adjustments to give the most value to the people who you want to continue to invest in you. Wife. Husband. Friends. Family. You are going to have to make improvements in what you are selling and you are going to have to get to know the audience you really desire to appeal to them in a meaningful way and continue to appeal to them so that they continue to buy you, as a product.
I am not saying be deceptive in who you are, or be who people want you to be, I am telling you to create the most authentic product of yourself so that you attract the right kind of people and can retain the people you already value. Products go through many development life-cycles in order to get better and appeal more to their audience. Never believe that, just because you have put out the same product for a long time, that you can’t completely change it if you want. It’s your product, you can do whatever you want with it!
And all your personal profits and losses is your bottom line.
The friendships you make or break, the loves you lose or gain, the children you raise and that leave and the success you have or don’t; these are all the reds and blacks of your personal balance sheet. Sometimes you come out ahead and sometimes you fall behind, but, as in business, you always make an effort to be more profitable than the year before and to recover from any major losses. This means you have to tweak and improve your product. You look at the things that worked, and the type of people that invested in you, and you make sure that is what you want from life. If it’s not, rebrand yourself. Take your product to another audience, one that is more inline with what you want out of life and reevaluate your profits and losses.
All that really matters is that you are happy and content with the balance sheet of your life and that you are putting out the best possible product you can!
This post is different from what I usually write. I am not sure of any real, relatable lessons that might be hidden in this very personal bit of writing, but my hope is that reaches deep into the hearts and souls of other people who might have gone through something similar. Perhaps the words will coalesce into some great community of support for everyone who has watched someone close to them slowly fade away into nothing, and we will all be able to offer a unified strength to those who are going through it now, or will have to go through it in the future. Perhaps this post will have some hidden gems sparkling under the surface of the words that may be mined and polished. I don’t know.
To be honest, I am not very comfortable in writing this. Revisiting it makes my heart skip in my chest and my eyes burn with held back tears. I do not want to go back to that hospital room with the heavy smell of decay and the dim, gray glow of a clouded sky secreting in behind the shuttered shades. I don’t want to see the strongest, gentlest, most compassionate man I ever knew in my life stuck to cords on machines that blinked and beeped and kept him alive, but stole away all the things he lived for. I don’t want to go back there, but I do sometimes, because going back there keeps me mindful of here and now and the breath in my body and the beating in my heart. It keeps me grateful and determined and ready to achieve.
You see, my uncle died of ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) on May 13th, 2015. It came on quick and hard and beat him down like nothing should ever have been able to do to him. This was no ordinary man who was taken away from this world. This was a giant of a man. Everyone he touched was infected by his joy, his excitement for life, his energy, his humor and his kindness. This was a man who gave so much to everyone that he might not of kept enough for himself when the time came to try to fight.
Not that fighting would have mattered, of course. ALS takes them all. Slowly or quickly, it takes them all. ALS is a particularly inhuman way to die. It steals your body and your voice, but leaves you with your mind; untouched except for the constant waves of unending pain and the uninterrupted thoughts of inevitable death. You are left living in a fleshy prison where no one can hear you scream. I cannot imagine a thing closer to a living hell, especially for someone like my uncle, whose purpose in this world was action.
Though his body was an empty, withered husk of the strong, virile man he once was during those final days – the man who taught me how to swim, that never missed a chance to throw the football with me, that showed up to all of life’s events and that offered me fatherly advice and companionship when I had no other man to do so – I could see the secret strength and pleading behind his clear blue eyes. He was desperate to communicate with me, to tell me things that we never got to share. When last I saw him, I heard his eyes scream I love you. I heard them beg me to be strong, to take care of what needed to be taken care of and to never, ever take any of this living for granted. I heard him say it with his eyes as clearly as if he yelled it in my ear and I never forgot a single silent word.
The choking spasms of tears we shared on that last day and the clammy, leathery feel of a once muscular arm and the desperate pleading of conversation in his eyes are etched into my mind forever, and with that etching comes the resolve to never, ever think that this life is anything but an amazing, fleeting treasure. I will always try to see the burden and pain and beauty that we all share in this world and I will rage against it as a storm of love, compassion, empathy and humor. I know that we are all fighting the same fight, and though we might be in different rounds or fighting different opponents, we are all in that ring together and we all have lessons to teach and learn.
Watching someone you love die has a way of turning you forcefully towards your own life. You take stock. You weigh and measure the strength and force to which you are living. It has a way of stripping away your bullshit excuses and demanding that you evaluate and change the trajectory of your life. That day at the hospital with my uncle – when we laughed and cried and we said goodbye – that day changed me. Like the whipping of a cold, bitter wind that changes the course of an aimlessly floating ship, I would forever move boldly in a different direction, sending up great tidal waves of action that would be a trail for others to follow.
The man who was a father to me was taken away and I realized that the only thing I could do to keep him alive was to truly be everything that he saw in me – to leave a legacy so grand, so forceful, so incredible and so bright that no one would ever be able to deny that his love and his lessons were landmarks on my journey towards my eventual success. And though I can never hope to leave such a deep and lasting mark on this world as my uncle did, I hope that I can leave enough to keep his legacy alive in the hearts and minds of others – a legacy of joy and wit and kindness and strength – because that is what we are left with when someone close to us is lost – a chance to keep their legacy alive with the actions of our life.
So, perhaps I will offer at least one solid and definable message of motivation or inspiration in this personal little meandering. Don’t turn away from death. Stare it in the eyes and see in it your future. The people close to you, the people far from you – the people you love and the people you hate – they are all going to die and so are you. I do not say this to be morbid or sad or cruel. I say it because it is the inevitable, undeniable, equalizer of all things and it is one of the greatest motivators life has to offer. We are all in this together. We are all facing the same conclusion. There may not be tomorrow, but there is today. These are the moments for our greatness and to be reflections of the people we have left behind but have never forgotten.
I hate the word routine. It is so sterile and stiff and speaks to a practiced monotony of life. I think it is counterproductive when people speak of establishing routines in their life to create or reinforce habits. No one wants to think of their life as a series of routines that you simply repeat over and over. We want our lives to have substance, depth, and character. We want our habits, not to be something we do, but a strength we gain, and that is why we should look at out the ways to create them, not as routines, but as rituals.
Routines are void of meaning and gravity. They are simply a mechanical sequence of actions – rote motion after rote motion – that you slough through to get to some future result. Routines are hollow things that you do on your way to doing other things. They do offer some value, as we feel we have finished something when we are done with them, but they do not bring with them an excitement in doing them and a new character identity achieved, which is valuable in sticking with a new habit or change.
Rituals, however, are solemn, spiritual experiences that build character in a person. The value of a ritual is in the doing as much as in the result, and because of that, they are actions that take on a larger meaning. Rituals are approached with reverence and devotion and are looked forward to because they bring something deep to the person who does them. Rituals are what we should make of our routines to change the way we build our habits and to better appreciate the things we do in order to make our lives better.
How do we make routine into ritual?
Your habits should embody a quality of character you want to create inside yourself. Whenever I am working to establish a new habit in my life or to destroy an old one, I ask myself what the creation or destruction of this habit will make for me regarding my character. If I want to create a habit of working out, I would fashion the ritual of working out around the idea that I want to embody a warrior’s strength and stamina. If I want to reinforce the habit of reading and writing, I look at the ritual surrounding these practices as a chance to embody a sage’s wisdom. Seeing the creation of my rituals as an opportunity to embody and capture some larger quality to my life, helps me to stick with the habit and see the ritual of it as more than just actions to be performed, but as opportunities to shape and define my character and to become the embodiment of those things I most want to become.
See your routines as rituals; something solemn and prescribed by a higher divinity than just your tiny desires and wants and give it all the proper pomp and circumstance.
Embody the outcomes of your rituals. Your workouts become supplications to the warrior that lives inside you. You set your intent, you put on your soundtrack and you go into that fucking gym and you do battle with every enemy soldier of self-doubt, pain, tiredness and excuse that comes before you. You do that and you haven’t just gotten through your workout routine. You have created a ritual that appeases your warrior spirit. That is something you don’t get used to or complacent with. That is something you look forward to and that strengthens you in more ways than a routine because it gives you something to take with you for the rest of the day.
Defining your archetypes
I see my life as a pursuit of the archetypes I want to embody. I have taken the time to define the character I want to have and the habits I would need to get that character and that has helped shape my daily rituals. My archetypes are the warrior, mystic, and sage. These are my own inventions based upon the qualities I see in these archetypes from stories, myth, and history. You don’t have to create your own. If you are not sure what sort of archetype you might want to embody, here is a link to get you started.
The warrior in me wants to be strong, courageous, healthy and fit. He wants to be able to physically conquer anything that comes his way and to do this I must have a ritual of working out, pushing myself to the physical limits, strengthening my body and eating properly to be the fittest version of myself I can be. These rituals make the warrior in me happy. The mystic in me wants to appreciate the magic of life, he wants to see and relate to the beauty of life and all people in this world. He wants to approach the divine and surrender to the truths of the world. He is appeased by quiet contemplation and reflection and my ritual of meditation and other spiritual pursuits are the only way to satisfy these desires. Lastly, the sage in me values learning. He demands knowledge and understanding and the constant pursuit of moral and general wisdom. The sage requires the rituals of reading and writing and is appeased when a new thing is learned or practiced and my life is made better because of it.
The point in defining my archetypes, and how I use them to shape the habitual rituals of my life, is to give you a starting point for defining your own archetypes and using those to drive the ritual of your life. Who do you want to be seen as and who do you want to be? Decide those and you can begin to create the rituals to get you there.
Deciding on the rituals
Once you have decided what archetypes you want to embody in your life, then decide what rituals you can bring into your life to make that archetype a realistic part of your being. Look at what you are trying to create for yourself and decide what habits someone like that would have and then do those things. If you want to be a warrior, then workout, eat right, be courageous and strong. But do these things, not as a routine to get to a result, but as a ritualistic extension of the warrior spirit that lives inside you.
For example, I will wake at 4:30 am every morning. I take my pre workout and set my intention to destroy those god damn weights as though they were enemies lined up to cut me down. I put on my music and I lift hard and heavy, channeling the warrior in me. Then, to cap off my workout ritual, I take an ice cold shower! Yes. I will not go into the benefits of cold showers here, but I do that every day and it is brutal and beautiful and it makes me feel like a warrior. I never shirk my duty to that ritual because it brings me more than just a workout routine. It brings me an undefeatable state of mind that I carry throughout my day!
When I am channeling the sage in me, I will light some incense, make some tea, and settle into a quiet area of my house to read and write without distraction and with a mind intent on a depth of understanding and mental clarity. Now, these are the rituals I have established for myself for the archetypes I want to embody and they do not have to be your rituals. These are just examples of how to turn a routine into a ritual to get added benefits.
You have a lot of freedom in defining what things would make for the true embodiment of your archetypes, but, whatever you decide, make sure that you find the depth and meaning behind them that is important for you. Do not follow them blindly because they seem reasonable. Follow them because you know that they truly shape the character you are trying to create. That will make all the difference in being able to stick with the rituals that create new habits and never allowing them to feel like cold, empty routines.
Summary
The true difficulty in making any lasting change is our ability to stick with that change and maintain the momentum of action in our lives after the initial shine wears off. We can avoid the drag of trying to establish and persist routine changes by instead seeing the opportunity for establishing deeper and more meaningful rituals in our life. These rituals are the building blocks of lasting character changes. They can be made stronger by tying them to an archetype that you are trying to create in yourself and reproducing the habits that we see in those archetypes. As with most things in life, it is all about perspective, and looking at new habits as opportunities to create a new person inside yourself in the strongest way to stick with it and the easiest way to see habits this way is to surround them with rituals.
