52 Ways to Improve Your Life

To see ourselves as others see us

Seeing the truth, Sense of self 2 Responses »

Apr 232013

Robert Burns’s poem To A Louse is a cautionary tale, describing the sort of mortifying situation I dread. The poor girl thinks people are admiring her but actually they’re pointing and staring because she’s got a louse on her bonnet.

On the other hand, we have the new advertisement for Dove, a video that’s gone viral round the internet recently, whose message is: you are more beautiful than you think. I have a variety of misgivings about this experiment and its conclusion but, in the end, it’s designed to sell products, not win any award for psychological breakthrough. I don’t think anyone can argue with the overall point that the way we perceive ourselves (both what we look like, as illustrated, and what we are like) can differ – and sometimes differ wildly – from the way other people perceive us.

So, what can we learn from the Scottish poet and the American advertisers? How can we find that middle way, to be aware of our literal and metaphorical lice, while maintaining a healthy level of self-esteem and not being excessively introspective?

On the Louse side, I think the lesson is to stay grounded and not allow ourselves to get carried away in the heat of a moment’s attention by the idea the world must suddenly have discovered how fabulous we are. From the outside, modesty and self-deprecation are attractive traits; from the inside, they are protective. If we always err on the side of humility, we should be safe from Jenny’s fate.

But of course there is an extremely fine line between self-deprecation and self-doubt. The point of staying grounded is to be able to make a calm assessment and see reality as clearly as it’s possible to do, given the absence of objective truth. We’ll never see the absolute truth about ourselves because we’re always looking through the prism of our history – and nobody else can see the absolute truth about us either, because they’re looking at us through their own prisms. It’s important to know ourselves as well as we can, to hold ourselves to account and also to give ourselves credit when it’s due. And it’s important to remember we have control over what we’re like and the impression we make on the world.

On the Dove side, I think it’s useful to be reminded how widely perceptions can diverge and I think the lesson is to use this to encourage ourselves to play up to the top end of the tolerance window in the way we present ourselves. What I mean by this is that, to a great extent, people take us at our own valuation. To a great extent but not completely – although more on the negative side than the positive. Basically, if I demonstrate low self-esteem, the opinion you form of me is virtually guaranteed to be low. Even if you can see I have more to offer than I believe I have, low self-esteem tends to elicit negative responses, as I was saying a couple of weeks ago.

If I demonstrate high self-esteem, you are likely not entirely to take my word for it but to probe a bit, so you can form an opinion based on evidence of my characteristics and abilities as well as the vibes I’m giving you. If you judge my self-esteem to be inflated, I will go down in your estimation, probably past what one might think of as the objectively fair level. This is why it’s important to know ourselves and also to be humble. But to return to the tolerance window thing, it’s good to present ourselves as confidently as we can get away with.

To quote from another literary source, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players”. Everybody is an actor. Let’s make sure the character we’re portraying is the person we want to be.

Do we make our own luck?

Letting go of the past, Staying positive Comments Off

Apr 162013

Is it true that we make our own luck? Up to a point, I think it is – and it’s a skill well worth cultivating. Obviously, factors like being born in a safe area of an affluent country are purely a matter of chance; some people encounter less adversity on their journeys through life than others do – but that’s not what we’re talking about here. Neither is this about blame. Bad things happen to people who don’t deserve it and who have done everything that could be expected to invite good fortune, and this post is absolutely not about suggesting they must have done something wrong and brought it on themselves.

As outlined in this useful article about bad luck, a crucial element is whether we have an external or internal locus of control – in other words, whether we take a fatalist view of life or assume responsibility for shaping our own destiny. When I read this, I realised that bringing my locus of control inside myself has played a major part in my recovery from depression. Of course, I am not responsible for everything that happens to me – random stuff befalls all of us all the time – but I am responsible for how I respond to and deal with it. This is not responsibility in the sense of its being my fault; it’s responsibility in the sense that, contrary to what I believed until recently, I actually have control over my own life.

When my locus of control was external, I used to have all sorts of strange explanations for how and why things panned out as they did. I thought people were purposely doing me down and the world was against me. I came to think I must be cursed and every time I lost, broke, spilt or spoilt something, I imagined the Devil laughing.

Overlying this was the conflicting phenomenon of my magical thinking, through which I believed (and occasionally still do) everything that went wrong was somehow my fault. I’m sure this is the result of my mother having an external locus of control and me being the handiest person to blame.

As soon as it dawned on me that I could take control and steer my life in a different direction, I began to feel happier. For me, and I guess for a lot of people, depression was largely based on lack of control. It was a state of feeling stuck and passive, a deep dark pit in which I was abandoned and unable to climb out. I believed I couldn’t climb out, so I couldn’t. The realisation that I could, in fact, do it by myself was basically all it took for me to do it.

All this goes some way to explaining how we can make our own luck. If we allocate out control for everything that happens by blaming other people, the government, the Devil, we come to see ourselves as victims and consider ourselves unlucky. On the other hand, if we take life’s blows on the chin and remember that all experience is useful, we can learn and grow and start to take advantage of – and appreciate – the good things that come our way. This is how we become ‘lucky’.

Professor Richard Wiseman has written a book about what constitutes luck and concludes that it’s all about attitude. (You can read more here.) While it all sounds slightly simplistic, it also makes intuitive sense that people who are more confident and relaxed have better luck than those who are tense and anxious. In a way, this is all very encouraging: we can all be lucky, if we just loosen up and seize the day. The problem is, if we’re feeling anxious it can be extremely difficult to behave in the laid-back, open way Prof Wiseman prescribes.

Entrenched patterns of thought and behaviour are not going to be changed overnight. It’s taken me several years of hard work to lift myself out of depression and prepare the ground for metamorphosis into someone lucky. I’m making progress in the area of taking opportunities but I’m not pushing myself too hard. For me, there’s a fine line between not allowing myself to hide too long in my comfort zone and spurring myself on to the verge of collapse. While I’m still finding it an effort to interact with the world, I’m not going to be able to rise to every occasion and never miss an opportunity, and I’m convinced it’s better to accept this and build up slowly, rather than trying to run before I can walk. But I’m getting there and I’m enjoying the process.

To sum up, if you feel you’re blighted by misfortune, I encourage you to have a good hard look at what’s behind this and think about how you can take more control and shift your perspective. Change how you handle things and observe how your luck changes in response.

Negativity breeds negativity

Staying positive Comments Off

Apr 092013

I was saying at the end of my last post how useful it is to take time out on a regular basis to count one’s blessings, that being positive brings its own benefits, and this week I’d like to expand on that theme. Positive, hopeful, constructive thoughts move us forward, whereas negativity keeps us prisoner, stifles growth and poisons relationships.

Relentless negativity is wearing and destructive. In its presence, I tend to feel either a deadening sense of inertia and enervation or an urge to run away and escape the negative force: people who endlessly complain are hard to be around. As I’ve mentioned before, during my depression I lost a few friends. At the time, I was full of resentment but now I understand it wasn’t so much that they didn’t think I was worth the effort but that the weight of my negativity was just too much for them to bear.

Negativity breeds negativity; there is no doubt about that. However, it’s an annoying fact that positivity does not always breed positivity – or at least not as directly. What I’m trying to say is that bad things will always happen, whether we’re negative or not. I’ve lost friends during periods of my life when I was blooming as well as when I was depressed. When I’ve been applying for jobs over the decades, if I went into the interview feeling negative, convinced in advance that I was going to be rejected, guess what? They didn’t want me. But the times I’ve known I was perfect for the position and I’d love working there, I was turned away too. A negative attitude will practically always yield negative results, while a positive attitude will only sometimes yield positive results. It’s easier to destroy something than it is to build it.

This doesn’t mean it’s fruitless to be positive – far from it – but it does mean we need to take a broader view when it comes to looking at the outcome. If we don’t get what we want, it may be that we need to put a bit more effort into striving for it. It’s a cliché to talk about success being sweeter after a hard slog, but clichés don’t get to be clichés without having some truth and wisdom to them. Alternatively, it may be that what we think we want is actually not in our best interest. This is definitely the case for me with those jobs; I am so much happier being self-employed!

Between “Try harder/Don’t give up” and “It wasn’t meant to be/Things work out for the best” is another fruit of a positive attitude, which is learning from failure and strokes of bad luck and turning them to our advantage. As I’ve already said, bad things will always happen and no amount of positive thinking is going to change that. But we can change how we react, how we cope, what we choose to take from it.

One way to stay positive is to remember that, to a great extent, people see what they’re expecting to see. If you’re viewing life through a dark, gloomy veil, what you perceive will most likely be negative. On the other hand, once you tear down that veil and let in the light and warmth of the sun, suddenly the world looks more cheerful. I know this sounds trite but it’s based in scientifically proven fact and borne out by my experience. I’m sure you’re familiar with the phenomenon whereby, for example, if somebody close to you is expecting a baby, suddenly every third woman seems to be pregnant. Obviously, the birth rate isn’t shooting up; it’s just that your eyes have been opened to pregnancy, where before you didn’t notice. If you’re looking out for negativity, your senses will always be overloaded with it. Conversely, if you tune into positivity, you’ll experience much more of it than you did before.

Focusing on the positive makes life appear better. Since reality is so subjective, if we feel life is good because we’re looking at in a positive way, surely that means life is good? Certainly this has been my experience. On paper, my life is the same as it was five years ago, yet it feels completely different. Then I was struggling, miserable, stuck. Now I’m thriving, happy, purposeful. Nothing has changed except my perspective but, my goodness, my life is transformed.

A change is as good as a rest

Keeping perspective Comments Off

Apr 022013

We’ve had quite a long run of deep introspection in these posts and I think it’s time to remind ourselves that there’s a big, wide world out there, beyond our issues and concerns. The reason it’s useful to do this is to help us keep our worries in perspective. If you’re anything like me, you spend a vast amount of time thinking, weighing things up, calculating… Just living can be exhausting and it’s vital we give our overheated brain a rest sometimes.

Productivity gurus emphasise the importance of taking regular time off to recharge your batteries and the same principle applies to personal development. Time spent concentrating on something completely different refreshes us, if nothing else, and makes it easier to keep our feet on the ground.

Here are a few suggestions for ways you can shift your focus away from yourself and all the stuff you’re dealing with:

Do some strenuous exercise (obviously, only if you’re physically able to without causing yourself harm). The endorphins generated by even just going for a brisk half-hour walk or swim will lift your mood, but if you really want to rest your mind you may need to push a bit harder than this. For me, running eclipses all other thoughts.

Discuss the news or some other subject of intellectual, rather than emotional, interest to you. If you find the interaction with other people sucks you back into your issues, perhaps write an article instead. You don’t have to show it to anybody – the point is simply to fix your attention on something external to you. If this doesn’t appeal to you, what about a puzzle, or even a computer game? Whatever it is, it’s got to be utterly absorbing, so there is no space for niggles at the back of your mind.

Go shopping. You don’t have to buy anything, just be aware of what’s around you. I find getting out into the mêlée of a shopping centre makes me feel I’m taking part in society (as opposed to hiding), while also allowing me to be anonymous, with nothing expected of me.

I also recommend you take time out on a frequent basis to count your blessings and fully appreciate the good things in your life. Being positive brings its own benefits and in this context it’s all part of breaking the cycles and patterns of introspective thought that can, if we’re not careful, weigh us down.

You are free to choose what you think

Keeping an open mind, Seeing the truth, Sense of self 2 Responses »

Mar 262013

We are all shaped by the cultural environment in which we grow up. Our attitudes, inclinations and prejudices are instilled in us at an early age by our parent-figures, our schools, the media and all the other influences of modern society. There is no getting away from this and in any case I don’t believe it is inherently a bad thing; it’s just the way it is. One of the main interests for me in going abroad is to see how differently people in other countries view the world.

It sounds as if I’ve kicked off by contradicting the title and message of this week’s post and, at one level, I suppose I have. None of us is created and nurtured in a vacuum, and in terms of cultural values, ethics and politics, nothing much exists by way of objective truth. We can each only do our best to think and behave with honesty and integrity and remember that someone who has reached the opposite conclusion on any given issue may well have done so with equal honesty and integrity, but approaching from a different perspective.

I was well into my 30s before I realised how many of my opinions were imported holus bolus from my mother. Of course, I knew we agreed about almost everything, but I genuinely believed I had thought things through for myself and just happened to end up thinking what my mother thought because she was right. As I began to detach from her psychologically and emotionally, it became clear to me I’d been fooling myself, that I had trained myself to agree with her because it was the most self-protective course of action. My mother has a strong sense that those who don’t see the world exactly as she does are weird, inferior, possibly deficient, usually rather unpleasant, to be pitied or despised.

What I’m trying to do today is to encourage you to examine your beliefs and opinions and make sure they are really your own. A good way to do this is to get talking to people who hold beliefs and opinions that are different from yours and keep an open mind as you discuss things with them. If you’d like to do this in a safe environment, I recommend a debating society or some sort of discussion group that is chaired and where people don’t resort to personal insults. I’ve been going to a couple of these groups for about eighteen months now and I can tell you they have done me no end of good. I’m learning so much from listening to other people and it’s also immensely reassuring and empowering to know that, although many members of the group may fundamentally disagree with my stance on any given subject, I always feel welcome there. Holding ‘incorrect’ views has historically been an existentialist issue for me and it’s been an absolute liberation to discover there are people to whom I am acceptable even if I think differently from them.

Prejudice is something we take in with our mother’s milk and we cannot be blamed for that. It’s the same, to a greater or lesser extent, for every single person who has ever been born. However, what we can be blamed for is allowing those prejudices to persist, by avoiding or dismissing information that challenges them. We owe it to ourselves and to the world to learn as much as possible and always to keep an open mind. This doesn’t mean we should go through life never forming a solid opinion – far from it – but it does mean we need to keep listening and re-evaluating.

Challenging and changing your views can be quite a disorientating experience but it can also be an exhilarating ride, as you shed your baggage and find out what you really think. In certain areas, you may unearth a truth that blinds you as soon as you uncover it; in other areas, you may decide you were right all along; in yet others, you may go on fine-tuning your views over decades. To me, this is all part of the interest and the growing. You can never be your own person until the views you hold are your own.

And remember that all this cuts the other way too: if your views are based on your own knowledge, experience and open-minded debate, you are on firm ground. There will always be people who disagree with you but, as I was saying last week, this doesn’t necessarily mean you’re wrong. Actually, there is great strength in being able to admit when you’re wrong or you’ve changed your position and if you can get used to doing that with grace and without fear, you’ll get a reputation as someone measured, reasonable and probably even wise. Then, when you are unshakeable on a particular topic, you’ll have more authority and – who knows? – you may even change the minds of some of your listeners.

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