Self Help Book: Part 1

Today’s food for thought is on starting a new year, change, and resolutions. I offer part one of my personal self help book. 🙂

Hi. This is your self help book. What do you want help with? Do you want to be a better person? Do you think you need to be a better person?

Why?

Sure, we all need to tweak things sometimes. We don’t come into life knowing everything. Heck, we probably never know everything. I think it’s safe to say that we will never know everything. There will always be learning, mistakes, tweaking. Without learning, mistakes, and tweaking, we’d be dead, whether literally or just inside (and I suspect being in a living body though dead inside might be worse than actually being dead). When we stop learning, we stop growing and start dying.

Life is more fun when we’re growing.

In addition to times for tweaking stuff, we are already who we need to be. You don’t need to be anyone different — you just need to be you. 100% you.

Does that strike you as a contradiction? How do you like contradictions in general?

Life is full of contradictions. Heck, maybe life is one big contradiction.

What if there is enough space and more for contradictions? They can all work together, because they do all work together, whether we want them to or believe them to or not.

On the thought of what we believe, our thoughts and what we tell ourselves are really important. Let’s get that sucker out of the way now. Thoughts and self-talk: IMPORTANT.

Our beliefs inform our circulating thoughts which impact our actions which end in the results we see.

The most effective (and fastest) way to get a different result? Start at the beginning of the line: take a look at your beliefs and change/tweak the thoughts you’ve got circulating in your head. Actions and results can’t help but follow.

It’s simple and easy and hard and complicated.  (Another contradiction right there! Life is full of them.)

We humans are complex, magnificent creatures. We’re also bumbling bulls in a china shop. We help to create our reality and then, a lot of the time it seems, don’t realize we have. We create and then look around us for something to blame/explain if we don’t like what we see.

The energy we put out into the world, in thoughts, actions, and deeds — it’s returned to us.

If we’re angry, rushing, don’t think we have enough time? Chances are high we’ll find ourselves in more and more situations where we’re feeling angry and rushed for time. We’ll likely also come across others who seem angry and in a hurry. (And the more we stay here in this energy, the more momentum we’ll put behind staying in this rushed and angry energy.)

Don’t want to live in anger and rushing as much or permanently? A first step could be this note to self: “What if I consider (just consider!) that maybe everything isn’t mission critical. I don’t have to rush around. There are other ways to go through my day.”

You don’t have to believe this. You can feel dumb saying it. Try saying it to yourself. It’s free. See what comes of it.

Another potential first step: “Self: Take a deep breath. As a matter of fact, I’m going to sit down right now and take five deep breaths. I’m actually going to sit down. Yes, I have time. What is ‘late’ anyhow? Will the world end if I’m not there at the exact moment? Will I explode? Perhaps. Or perhaps not. I’m going to do an experiment. I’ll see if I explode if I am not there on time.” Then see if you explode.

There are a lot of potential first steps here. Actually an infinite amount.

Try something. Try anything. Make it different. See how you feel. Does it feel better to you? (Key: To you. We’re not worrying about how someone else feels right now. We’ll get to this in part 2 (or maybe part 23) though it’s worth mentioning now: You can’t control how someone else feels. You can only direct how YOU feel.)

Slow down. Take a deep breath. Look around you.

On a tangent, slowing down is something that might actually feel pretty good. It’s easy to get so carried away we don’t even see what’s around us. This year I was rushing a week and a half before Christmas to get to an appointment after rushing back and forth helping at my daughter’s school beforehand. On my way out the door, it struck me how much I’d been rushing and that I was amazed I’d actually been able to drive myself to the appointment safely and didn’t crash. I realized I didn’t recall much of the drive because I was rushing. I’d been on autopilot. I’d have missed a $100 bill laying on the sidewalk right next to me in autopilot.

I don’t want to live in/on autopilot. I miss life. Missing life is a less fun way to spend my day.