of your
HAPPINESS
IS YOU
01. The only problem with your life is the way you think about it.
Objectively, you have everything you could ever want or need, yet your unhappiness simply comes from a lack of appreciation (which is a cultivated trait, if not a practice).
02. The solution to most of your problems is just changing the way you think about them. For example, learning that people’s opinions of you are largely projections of how they see themselves would solve your problem, which is evaluating your life through the idea of how other people could perceive it.
03. You’re mentally lazy. You know you should be more present, but you won’t put in the effort to practice it. You know you should meditate and learn to train your brain to focus so it doesn’t become engulfed by negativity, but you head to the gym instead. You’re lazy in the way it matters most, and that’s your biggest problem.
04. You’ve accomplished things you thought would make you happy and immediately shifted them from “goals” to “notches on the belt.”
Once you achieved something, you immediately started to think of it as “another thing done” rather than “another thing in my life to enjoy.”
05. You haven’t practiced holding the emotion of happiness. We all have a tolerance for how “good” we’ll let ourselves feel, our “upper limit.” To go past it, we have to actually practice letting ourselves
feel—otherwise, we’ll self-sabotage to bring ourselves back to our comfort zones.
06. You care more about comfort than you do about change. You’d rather remain moderately uncomfortable than deal with the uncertainty that is making a real change in your life.
07. You consciously choose to spend time with people who aren’t
“good” for you. Meaning: They don’t really care about you, or they inspire you to behave in a way that is counter to what you’re trying to achieve. In other words, they bring out the worst in you, yet you continue to see them anyway.
08. You won’t let your idea of yourself evolve. You’re stuck in only being comfortable thinking of yourself the way you were 3, 5, 10
years ago, because that’s how other people are comfortable seeing you.
09. You choose what you think should be right rather than what actually is. You’re more loyal to the ideas you have about things than the honest reality you know them to be.
10. You won’t apologize. To yourself nor to others. You’re not open to being wrong, and certainly not to taking the ego-hit that is admitting you didn’t always do your best. Yet doing this is the first step in changing that.
11. You haven’t fully taken responsibility for your life—you’re still waiting for something to come and change how you feel. Often, people choose to suffer loudly because they believe it is a “cry to the universe,” as in, if they are transparent enough about how bad things are, something or someone else will eventually have to fix or change them.
12. You’ve ascribed happiness to a level of accomplishment rather than a state of being. You think that only some people can be happy because their life circumstances are ideal, rather than choosing to seek happiness in the moment and realizing that has nothing to do with it.
13. You think that “happiness” is a sustained state of feeling “good,”
when it is really a higher “baseline” for perception. You are better
able to process every emotion, and because you do so healthfully, you return to your general state of contentment quickly.
14. You accept what you’re taught even if it doesn’t feel right. You’re more trusting of dogma, teaching or religion simply because you knew it first, not because it resonates or helps you in a real way.
15. You have a good life, and you know you have a good life. At the end of the day, you know it’s just about choosing to focus on it more.
25
THE PSYCHOLOGY
of getting
UNSTUCK
and the
3 STAGES OF
MAKING HABITS
AUTONOMOUS
Success is more a product of habit than it is skill. To excel at something, you must be able to do it prolifically. Many people write well. Few people write well and consistently. What separates experts from the rest of us is a blend of profound self-control, disciplined routine, and unwavering dedication.
While natural skill is more or less something you’re born with, self-control is something you develop. Most people believe the opposite is true: that they can perfect their talent, but that the drive to do so will come easily.
Our minds have a limited means for self-control. This is to say, we are only capable of withholding ourselves from our impulses and desires for a period of time each day. With practice, we can extend that period, but it is finite regardless.
People who understand this use their time wisely: They eliminate unnecessary decision-making, reduce distractions, minimize what doesn’t matter, and then they focus. Over time, it becomes second nature. In fact, in the 1960s, psychologists identified three specific stages11 we must go through in order to acquire those new skills:
Cognitive: When we first intellectualize the task, make mistakes, and ultimately devise new strategies to perform better.
Associative: When effort is still required to complete the task, but it’s less mentally strenuous than it was. Some aspects of the task are beginning to come naturally, mistakes are still being made.
Autonomous: We go into “autopilot,” or in some cases, “flow.” We can release ourselves from conscious focus and let our programming take over.