Category: Personal Choice

What People Will Remember from You

I love that quote: “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel”- Maya Angelou.

angelou-quoteThis is true in all sorts of settings, so let’s review a few areas where it is applicable:

When doing public talks or presentations, the real important experience lies at the emotional level. This requires physical comfort, and creating strong emotions in the audience, either through stunning experiences and images, or by referring to people’s own emotional-laden issues.

When creating art, paintings, writing a book or cutting a movie, the emotions that will be created in the viewer is what will make the creation memorable on the long term.

When working with people in a team, what people will remember is any emotions, good or bad, you’ve created during that time. This also applies to one-off interviews.

The list is long. My points was to emphasize how this quote, which is most often used in the field of romantic relationships, can be applied throughout our lives.

You want to be remembered? Create emotions.

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How Love is About Giving Someone the Power to Destroy Us

The other day I was reading this great definition of Love – “Love is giving someone the power to destroy us and trusting they won’t use it“.

LoveThis is such a true statement that it stopped me in my tracks. Here are a few aspects I find great in this statement:

  • love is about giving first,
  • it is about giving unconditionally, even with the risk of self-destruction,
  • love is about creating vulnerability,
  • love is about giving others power over ourselves.

True love might not even consider whether the other will use it to destroy us. It then becomes secondary.

Vulnerability is at the root of all great relationships, as long as it is given voluntarily. How do you render yourself vulnerable to your loved ones?

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How to Avoid Despair – a Choice that is the Greatest Responsibility of Man

In his book On Becoming a Person, Carl Rogers refers to Kierkegaard. “He points out that the most common despair is to be in despair at not choosing, or willing, to be oneself; but that the deepest form of despair is to choose ‘to be another than himself‘. On the other hand ‘to will to be that self which one truly is, is indeed the opposite of despair‘, and this choice is the deepest responsibility of man“.

be yourselfWho are you really? Who do you want to look like really? Is that you?

As I often observe, this tension is indeed a very critical element of people’s well being. Many dysfunctions of individuals can be explained by this gap between who they are and who they want to be.

And it is a choice for each of us. We can choose to stay the way we’ve been raised when other people were shaping us and maybe transferring their expectations upon ourselves. We can choose to try to fit so completely in society’s expectations. Or we can choose to be ourselves, which has some advantages regarding the congruence of our actions; avoids deep despair; but can be quite stressful in a social context.

Indeed it could be our deepest responsibility to make this fundamental choice: do we choose to be ourselves?

Ponder this choice for a moment. Be honest with yourself.

What did you choose?

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How to Listen to the Language Of Our Physical Reactions

“Physical reactions are often the language through which we express painful feelings, especially when it isn’t safe to say them to the people we’re upset with. We often say with our bodies what we can’t or won’t say with our mouths.” – writes the psychologist Susan Forward in Toxic Parents.

back acheAnd these repressed feelings translate into various conditions of chronic pain, tension, insomnia and other symptoms. Just because we can’t say it with our mouth, it endures in our body.

In the particular case of toxic or even abusive parents, Susan Forward’s approach is to enable to talk to the person. Granted it cannot always be a dialogue but the therapeutic impact of just being able to express one’s feelings on a difficult subject, in a calm manner, makes a lot of physical symptoms disappear (it might take quite a lot of time though to reach the stage when this single expression is possible).

If you suffer from some chronic pain that can’t be directly linked to a physical condition, consider whether you would not have some deep feelings repressed somewhere. Then consider how you could express these feelings, calmly, to the person concerned.

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Why We Should Take More Time to Enjoy Where We Are

“We’re so busy watching out for what’s just ahead of us that we don’t take time to enjoy where we are“. This quote is quite accurate I find (I am not sure about the attribution, it seems to be another internet wisdom pieces). Although I struggle too often to take the time.

enjoy the present momentThe interesting twist in this quote is that I probably don’t take enough time to enjoy the present moment because I am watching our for what is just ahead of me, but because I am looking to far away in the future (self-test shows that I am very future oriented from the time perspective).

So it is not quite what is just ahead of me, but what is on the horizon that makes me move forward too fast.

And you? Do you take enough time to enjoy where you are right now?

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Who is Wiser – Our Mind or our Body?

A lot of modern writings focus on the power of the ‘gut feeling‘, and intuition, and how following body perception and emotions can often be more effective than following our rational mind.

golf-gripIn a similar approach, in the excellent novel around golf, ‘the Legend of Bagger Vance‘, Steven Pressfield writes: “Intelligence, I have told you, does not reside in the brain but in the hands. Let them do the thinking, they’re far wiser than you are“.

Is our body really wiser than we are? Have we outgrown with our mind our body’s self-balance, and its ability to integrate experience to foster our decision-making?

I think we always need to remember that there are instances where we need to respond – where we have to positively exercise the choice to respond to what is happening, instead of reacting. And that requires our mind at work. It might be rare. It might not be in these situations where we have trained and repeated movements thousands, millions of times – situations where we’d better follow what our body wants to do without interfering. But as the body is wise in most instances, so is our mind the wisest overall even if it should interfere much less than it does usually.  Even if it chooses only once in a while to decide against our body.

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How to Manage Your Daily Reserve of Self-Control

“Self-control is a finite resource. You can only ask so much of yourself each day” – says Nick Crocker. He continues: “You’ll snap or warp or splinter if you ask too much. You have a limited capacity to direct yourself a certain way. It’s worth considering where that directive capacity goes every day“.

self-control - don't explodeSeen from that perspective, we need to be careful in our utilization of self control and be wary not to exceed our capacity in a given day.

This probably means that if you realize you have used a fair bit early, you need to make sure you don’t put yourself in situations where significant self-control is required.

However I do believe that certain exercises of self-reflection and physical exercise can increase one’s self-control reserve when that is really needed.

In any case, if you feel you are exhausting your self-control reserves don’t explode yet! Maybe wait until the next day to tackle the new situation?

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How to Avoid Suffering when Changing

“Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional” is quite a common quote. We need pain to change (and some pleasure to leverage the change). We can still avoid suffering.

suffering is optionalSuffering is very much a psychological effect. What makes the difference between pain (external) and suffering (internal) is that we can either react or respond; we can choose not to suffer even in the face of pain. And we have always the choice: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” says Viktor Frankl (ref our post ‘How We Always Have a Choice, Even in the Worst Situation‘).

Change will come with pain. It should not come with suffering or bitterness. You can choose not to let it happen. Choose.

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Why Pleasure Can Accelerates Change (only Together with Pain)

It is quite commonplace to state that pain is required for change, and that change occurs when the pain to change is less than the pain to stay in the same condition.

pain changeTony Robbins says  that we need in addition to access some kind of leverage to accelerate change. That pain is required for change. And thus, “to access leverage, you must help someone associate massive PAIN to not changing NOW, and massive PLEASURE to changing immediately. The motivation is based on both pain AND pleasure. Pain is short-term motivation, but you need the pleasure side for long-term motivation.”

He continues, “The truth is everyone in life has developed different strategies or patterns for getting out of pain and into pleasure. Thus, if we want to create permanent and consistent change, what we must do is develop a new set of patterns of how to get out of pain and into pleasure. In other words, in order to create lasting change, we must use pain to get people’s attention and energize them to want to make the change, but then we must link pleasure to the new pattern to make it last”

To create change, do not just highlight the pain of not changing – entice the change with immediate and future pleasure. A new way to design Change Management plans?

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Why You Need to Accept Yourself First to be Able to Change

“The Curious Paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can Change” – Carl Rogers in the book ‘On Becoming a Person‘. Carl Rogers is a famous psychologist that is one of the founders of the coaching approach to change. His book is highly recommended if you are interested in personal change and growth.

The Curious Paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can ChangeThis is a very deep statement. Because of often we think that we should force ourselves to change, with the result that we create resistance and frustration… with poor results.

Carl Rogers’s opinion, forged after decades of giving therapy and counselling, is that deep-seated change is actually possible only when one accepts himself fully, including his emotions and feelings that often tend to be repressed. This deep preparatory work might take months and years before we might be ready for change.

It is interesting that in some respect the same might hold for change in organizations: self-awareness is a necessary pre-requisite.

It might be a good idea to focus first on a deep acceptance of yourself, of your feelings and other psychological and physiological reactions, before venturing down the path of change. A worthwhile investment indeed that will repay multiple times as after, change will become easy and self-sustaining.

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Would Happiness Be Our Greatest Fear?

In this post, Om Swami makes the point that Happiness could be our greatest fear. Even beyond fear of unknown, of death, loss, of failure and rejection! “When good things do happen, we think it’s luck, or plain fluke, that we couldn’t possibly deserve this goodness. This is the fear of happiness. And, it stops most people from chasing their dreams, it’s the obstacle to realizing their full potential“.

Seneca quote - fear of happinessAccording to him, it is a fear that we would learn progressively from being in situations where we would not be adequate. “With the passage of time, this feeling — I’m not good enough — prepares a perennial battleground of two opposing forces, fear and self-affirmation“.

I feel it is true sometimes that the fear of happiness prevents us from taking fully advantage of the situation we are in. I would maybe not fully agree that it is caused by comparing ourselves with other people, maybe it is also a question around whether we really deserve to be happy. Maybe it is not our greatest fear.

Anyway, this question resonates with me – is that fear that prevents me to feel happy? I might be sometimes, somehow. Luckily, Om Swami also provides the antidote: “To think about it, that’s what it boils down to: ‘Let’s go.’ Action is the most potent antidote to fear”

Let’s go!

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How to Calm Down To Find the Right Response to Your Issue

When you are panicked and stressed there is no way you can find the right way to resolve your problem. If you are calm right now, it might look a straightforward common-sense comment, but how often have you tried to find a way to resolve an issue while remaining panicky excited?

stressed executive
Stressed? Right now, calm down before reacting the wrong way!

That will only result in one phenomenon: you will REACT instead of RESPOND. There is a definite nuance between the two. Reaction is like a knee-jerk; it is unconscious and aims for selfish short-term protection. Response on the other hand is thoughtful, and can also take into into account wider interests as well as a long term view.

So the issue is how to calm down before doing something that you might regret later, in addition to probably be ineffective or even counter-productive. Time-off is the only solution, and then depending on the time available, different techniques can apply. When I have time I like to go walking for a while, or even exercising more actively. Ideally I like to spend a night on a difficult situation. When I don’t have time, I apply mindful breathing which in a few deep breaths do effectively lower my stress and allows me to respond instead of reacting.

These are quite easy; what is difficult is to recognize that you need some time off to cool down when you are in the midst of the difficult and stressful situation, so that you regain clarity of thought. It is worth taking the habit of regularly touching-base with yourself to consciously assess whether you are in that situation.

In any case, stop reacting in panic and stressed mode! Calm down and respond instead!

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