Advanced Adulting

Adulting is a big subject, as you know, and there is no one right way to do or be an adult.  And there is no magick do it/fix it/be it button that any of us can push and bingo, we are there. It is an ongoing process that we live and refine and expand and deepen.

Adulting is not something we get up and go do.  Time to feed the cat. Time for work. Time to get something to eat. Gotta go adulting. No. We must consciously choose to become an adult -mentally, emotionally, spiritually. Our bodies do the work automatically for us physically in aging us but aging physically does not guarantee that we will become an adult. You see lots of grown people in our world behaving like adolescents or children. Further, we won’t somehow become adults once we get that job or house or relationship that we’ve been wanting. It is fine to want and to have those things, they just won’t deliver you to adulthood. Those things may saddle you with more responsibility but they won’t, in and of themselves, deliver that magical quality of being an adult.

Becoming and being an adult is a choice that must be made consciously. It isn’t something that can happen by default or osmoses or just by being successful. We all must find our own way. There will be no one right way and no one wrong way to adult. There is no playbook but there are things that we can do and become that will get us ever closer to the goal. There are lots of choices to be made along the way. “What if I make a wrong choice?” You will. We all do. The point is to forgive yourself and then make a new and, hopefully, better choice.

One of the choices we learn over time to make is to show up and direct our impact. When you find yourself in a situation where either you are needed and have been called upon or just happen to find yourself - show up.  That means bringing all of you, your strengths, talents, your abilities, your intellect, your compassion etc., – to the situation in trying to help ensure a positive and responsible outcome. It is about consciously directing the positive impact you are wanting to have on others or in a situation. That doesn’t mean the outcome will always go the way you are intending as there are always other humans involved in the process. However, you will be able to look at yourself in a mirror and be proud of what you contributed, proud of how you conducted yourself.

Be as present as you can and bring as much of the best of you as you can. Leave trying to be perfect out of the equation.

Secondly, Adults know when to call a time out, if you will. To take a step back. Take a breath. The old truth - think before you speak will save you more problems and heartache than you can imagine. Be sure before you decide to fight, bleed and die on some hill that the principle or idea or perspective you are willing to die for is still something that you either believe or still has real value and is important for you. And that, whatever it is you feel so strongly about is actually applicable to the situation you find yourself encountering. Also, put life on pause every so often to take some time to replenish when you need it. We all need time to replenish and recharge.

Thirdly, adults continually add to their self-esteem. Now I have posted a two-part blog post and a two-part podcast about a process that, if worked with, will not only help you generate a real and tangible self-esteem that you can lean on, but it can also potentially change who you are and change your life. It did mine when I learned it. It is also essential to adulthood. It is an on-going process and practice of self-care whose benefits cannot be overstated. Remember, real self-esteem is not some ego-driven excuse to make everything all about you. This process is indispensable to becoming and being an adult.

Adults put their best foot forward out of respect for themselves. Even when you don’t have but 25% to give whomever or whatever, you give the best 25% you can. For many, settling for being mediocre, just getting by, doing just enough, is all many think is required. In truth, a life of mediocrity is seriously soul crushing. In mediocrity, there is no soaring, there is no experiencing the heights. There is no transcendence. And there is no magic.

Adults trust. They learn to trust themselves – beginning with knowing and trusting their own mental and emotional processes. When you really are conversant with knowing and trusting your process, you will then have a sturdy foundation on which to build the ability to trust yourself and others. Trust is also integral to self-esteem. And there is a blog and podcast devoted to trust available to you as well.

Adults are flexible. Are you flexible enough to change? Are you flexible enough to let love change you? Are you flexible enough to grow and change? Are you flexible enough to do something or many things differently? Change your beliefs? Change the choices you habitually make? This is a very big subject. But just looking at how flexible or inflexible you are is a great way into some very valuable self-reflection. Adults self-reflect.

And, yes, adults do enjoy their lives and have fun – lots of it. Only fun changes and evolves over time, as it should. Everybody may have loved your slow cooker chili in college, and you may have been a great cook back then and you may still love cooking for those you love and care about. However, your repertoire hopefully will have grown and expanded by now. You get the point. But yes, have fun and enjoy the gift of your life. Keep expanding and exploring new ways to have fun and let go of things that aren’t so much fun anymore.

Now, all of the above, if nothing else, will get you a long, long way toward and even into real honest-to-goodness adulting. But wait, there’s more. Adulting is an on-going process. In the process of growth, there is always more.

One last quality of being an adult and for many, this is very hard. Adults are future oriented and always looking to the future we want to create. When many of us think about the future, we simply take our past and throw it into the future with the intent that it will have all of the good things that we have liked about our life, but that the future will be an even better version of that past. Or, for the pessimists, we don’t expect anything to change and resign ourselves to it, hoping it really won’t be all that bad. Now there are all sorts of permutations about what we want and/or expect our future to be like. Humans like continuity, comfort, safety, having a sense of belonging. There is nothing wrong with any of that, to a point. There is nothing wrong wit h having cherished traditions or rituals or favorite activities or whatever that we want our future to contain. Certainly not. But, as mentioned above, adults are flexible. Be willing to be flexible about even the good stuff we take from our past and throw out there in front of us, hoping it will be part of our future.

Now, we aren’t going to get sidetracked here discussing the future as it is a very big subject and is really a topic for another day. But here is the rub. What about the stuff you can’t imagine for your future? No matter how limited or expansive our imaginations are, it still has limits. 20 years ago, no one would have imagined living through the Great Recession, COVID, the spread and ubiquity of social media, the ability to have your McDonald’s and Starbucks delivered to your house, CGI driven movies, a Black President, school shootings, electric cars, or streaming. Yet here we are. All of us, in our lives, lived through things – good and bad, that we couldn’t have foreseen or imagined. In your forward thinking, be willing to hold space for the stuff you can’t yet imagine - good stuff, different stuff, and stuff that will call upon your strengths to deal with.

So how do we get there? How do we even begin to be the forward looking, future building adults we want to be and are capable of being?

It starts with – What qualities do you value in yourself and others? What are the things you strive for? I’ll give you an example. When I wrote the series on Dating, I wrote about qualities I would value in a relationship – Trust, Loyalty, Respect, Responsiveness, Mutual Reliance, Intimacy, Passion. And, in order to have those things with someone else, I have to develop those qualities within myself.  Those qualities are ideals that I strive for in who I am becoming though I will never fully reach them. I will never perfectly be 100% of any of those things, but as I strive toward those ideals, I will be more of them as I move into my future.

What are your ideals? Happiness? Joy? Wisdom? Truth? Love? Kindness? Compassion? Dignity? Hope? Well-being? Freedom? Perseverance? Responsibility? Imagination? Creativity? In pursuing those ideals in your life, what are the things you will and won’t do in that pursuit? For example, suppose happiness is one of the ideals you decide to pursue in the living of your life. What things will you and won’t you do to bring yourself closer to that ideal? Suppose you decide that, “Well, being able to do whatever I want whenever I want makes me happy, regardless of the impact it might have on others.” Is that really OK with you? Would it be OK to lie to someone (or yourself) in order to be happy? Would it be Ok to be hurtful, neglectful, or irresponsible toward someone, manipulating them into doing what I want them to do in order for me to be happy? Yes, I am exaggerating to make the point. That said, the things we will and won’t do in pursuit of our goals and ideals form our principles.

As you look to build your future, what ideals, like becoming a more understanding person, are worth aiming for? What principles will you adhere to in that quest? They will set the tone and tenor of so much of that future. Adults have ideals and they also develop the principles that they employ in the pursuit of those ideals. What lines, what boundaries will you and won’t you cross in seeking to be happy or truthful or persevering or understanding or compassionate? I will be responsible in my striving for happiness but I won’t be capricious or reckless or thoughtless in that same pursuit. The more we hold to those positive principles and the less we cross the boundary into those negative principles, the things we told ourself we wouldn’t do – lie, cheat steal, gossip, being unkind or thoughtless, or whatever – the more character we will develop and the more self-knowledge we will have.

Adults develop ideals that they strive for in their growth and principles of how they choose to live their lives – the things they consistently will and won’t do in the living of their lives. And when you combine ideals and principles, their synergy produces character. Adults develop character.

One last thing about values. Make sure that the values you choose to live by are yours and not those given to you along the way by parents, relatives, friends, co-workers, or whomever. Now, you may decide – consciously – that some of the values you’ve picked up along the way are fine and you want to keep them. And that is fine as long as it is your choice and not something you have chosen to adopt out of some sense of obligation or duty. A couple of examples.

FOMO. I have heard from clients and friends about the pressure they feel to keep up with everything and everyone in order to make sure they aren’t missing out on anything. Now, they often feel that that pressure is coming from others but in truth, they are choosing to put that pressure on themselves and live with it. I know of a young woman who is very accomplished in her career and works very very hard. She then goes home and gets on line where she spends hours trying to keep up with family, friends, trends, the latest going on with everybody, everywhere, about everything. This is obviously impossible. When does she squeeze in time for her live-in partner? When does she take time to decompress, for her own sanity? Whose rule is it that she or any of us must keep up on everything or we might miss out? Miss out on what? Of all she strives to keep up on or that any of us would try to keep up with, it can’t all have equal value for us. We have to learn to pick and choose what has value to us in the living of our lives and learn to let other things go.

I read recently that so many Millennial women and men have reached a point of exhaustion trying to be the perfect parent. They are bombarded with endless blogs, podcasts, videos, full of advice on what they must do in order to be the perfect parent who produces the perfect children who are over achievers and exceptional and are competitive to get into the best prs-schools, and who will excel at everything and if they don’t, they have failed as parents. They overschedule themselves and their kids in activities that keep them on the move constantly with their 100% focus on the exceptional development of their kids, leaving no time to maintain their relationships with anyone, often including their spouses – beside the division of labor of childrearing tasks – except for the time they can steal to document their lives for social media. The question would be, who are you living your life for? Who told you that the endless assault of information of what you must do trumps what you might figure out and enjoy living on your own? Humanity has somehow managed to survive 10,000 years without being enthralled to all of the self-appointed experts who have an opinion about how you should live your life and raise your kids and do it all perfectly.

What are the ideals you want to pursue? What are your principles that you live by? What do you value and are they your values or did you pick them up from someone else? Know why you value what you value.

Finally, a few other things to think about. Who are performing your life for? When I was in graduate school, one of my professors introduced me to the idea of the insentient other. The insentient other is the person or people or deities in the back of our minds who we feel is always watching us with an approving or disapproving eye and we tailor our lives, our behaviors, our goals, everything we do is either for their approval or to be more like them and, in being like them, gaining their approval. That insentient other can be a parent, sibling, some other relative, or teacher or clergy member or some public figure. They can be someone we admire or someone whose censure we fear. For some, it is God’s judgment we run from, rather than becoming the kind of person we’d be unafraid to present to our Maker.

Keeping someone always present in the back of our mind to whom we perform our lives – friends, family, co-workers, society – the folks up in the cheap seats, is a behavior that has been around for a very long time. What has made it ever more complicated is the age of social media in which we now live. We aren’t playing our lives to someone we keep in the back of our minds. We are playing our lives very publicly to anyone who will watch and listen. Everything we do, say, think, everywhere we go, gets documented and presented to what we hope will be an adoring public for their approval. This is crazy making and, at its extreme, can wind up exhausting you and alienating you from yourself because, in truth, the attention and approval you are seeking needs to come from you. The standards on which you evaluate yourself, your goals, hopes, dream desires, you character, etc., needs to come from you. That doesn’t mean you are oblivious to feedback you get along the way. But it does mean that you become the final authority – ever growing, ever changing, ever expanding – who gets the final word on your life and who you are choosing to be and become.

If you find yourself playing your life to either the cheap seats or to some particular other who is always present in the back of your mind, always watching, always judging, begin taking your power back. It will be a process that will take time but, in the end, you will be way more empowered, less exhausted, and healthier physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. “They” may never give you the approval you seek and desire. But as you begin to be the one to evaluate and approve of yourself, it will be like the credit card commercial says – “Priceless.”

As we talked about when we talked about self- esteem, some people get their self-esteem from what they intend to do some day, but they never get around to it. Never finding the time or the means or the method of initiating those plans, projects, goals. But they derive their self-esteem from their intention to someday do or be whatever. Or the goals set are unrealistic or fanciful. “I intend to be the influencer of all influencers forever.” I will become the perfect . . . whatever.” “I will never have a bad day or a down moment or make a mistake.” You get the idea. Certainly, set goals and hopes and dreams and then begin taking realistic steps toward implementing them, realizing that it won’t happen overnight. You will make mistakes along the way that you can learn from. And you will learn about yourself and your abilities and strengths and ability to persevere along the way. One more thing, remember that self- esteem comes from a self-evaluation process that you conduct within, not from something outside of yourself. For further information, we have blog posts and podcasts on self-esteem available to you.

This goes along with who are you playing your life to? When you do something well or right or do something good for someone else, is it enough for you to know or do you need to tell everybody? Adults are content with that knowledge within themselves. When they act with integrity – doing the right thing because it is the right thing to do, even when no one else is looking, holding tenaciously to their principles – it is enough for them to know. It needn’t be broadcast.

Do you have your own definition of success? What does success mean to you? What would be fulfilling? We don’t all need or want the same things and most often, however much we may enjoy the things, the trappings (car, house, job, etc.) that success may bring, those trappings rarely bring the fulfillment we anticipate from being successful. How do you define success?

Regarding self-esteem, developing character, and operating within your principles - Are you one of those people who believes that the ends justify the means or that the ends never justify the means – getting there at any price, by any means. Life is a process and everything we do and seek is part of that process. As we strive for what we want out of life, how we get there is all that matters. The means never justify the ends. Ever. It is how you get there, wherever and whatever there is, and who you become in the process is all that matters. So, are you adding, in a positive sense, to who you are becoming?

As you can see, adulting is not about doing so much as it is about being but that is true for life. All of the above are things to think and feel about and apply as life calls on you be more and more the adult in a world where there are too many people with grown bodies who have never progressed beyond being children or adolescents. In our society, you see society tolerating behaviors from other adults that we would never abide in our kids. Become more and more of an adult. Bring that light to a world that needs it. You will be amazed how it will improve your life. It won’t always be a walk on the beach but in the end, the peace of mind; the self-esteem and self-value; the strengths and abilities; you’ll learn and develop will be worth every ounce of effort expended in that process of becoming a true adult.

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Living Skills offers positive psychology counseling, spiritual counseling, and life coaching services in Atlanta, and online. We are sensitive to the needs of the LGBT community. Sessions available by Skype. Please email us at livingskillsinc@gmail.com or visit www.livingskills.pro. Podcast: “The Problem with Humans” now available on Apple Podcasts, Buzzsprout, Google Podcast, Amazon Music, and Spotify, Overcast, Castro, Castbox, and Podfriend, as well as on my site. Follow us on Twitter - @livingskillsinc; on Instagram – livingskillsatlanta; You Tube - Living Skills@livingskillsinc, Facebook - Living Skills, Inc

Adulting

I love the term “adulting.” It sounds like something we are going to get dressed up for and go do. Nothing like a night on the town adulting. Right? The thing is, adulting is something and someone we become and be, not something that we get up and go do.

Now, clearly, adulting would be a lot easier if someone would tell us what the hell an adult really is and what they are supposed to do and how to do it. Our bodies, like it or not, deliver us physically to adulthood. We suddenly reach age 21 and we can legally vote and drink and can serve in the armed forces and are supposed to be able to fend for ourselves. No manuals. “Just do it,” is what is expected. But how prepared are we to be an adult, especially when we aren’t quite sure what that means? We may have arrived at physical adulthood but that is no guarantee that we are ready for what life is going to throw at us.

By that age I was my sole support in the world financially. So, I had to focus on survival. I knew how to do laundry, make my bed, keep a clean house, grocery shop, pay my bills, treat others the way I’d like to be treated, etc., but that all seemed to fit into the whole “these are things that are part of survival” motif that characterized my 20s. Work and chores were great places to hide from the terror of the question – Now what?

As many of us think that adulting is something we go do, we often fall into the misconception that if we do enough “doing,” that we will somehow, in all of that doing, become an adult by default. “By God, they kept at it long enough and it paid off.” We think – “Once I graduate college; once I get married; once I get that job or that title or that salary; then I’ll be an adult. Once I become a parent; once I buy my own house; once I do or have whatever, then it will just happen somehow. Some secret knowledge about adulting will be imparted to me or I will be changed by having whatever and then I’ll know what being an adult means and how to do it.” Those things are all fine, but they are trappings, things that adults can have. But having them won’t make you something or someone you weren’t previously to that except that you may now be someone with an expensive car to pay off or high mortgage payments or a high stress job.

Others are so terrified by the prospect of “having” to be an adult, that they avoid the trappings and anything that goes with them like the plague. “Don’t want to grow up and be an adult. Don’t need or want house payments, car payments, job pressures, or anything or anyone who keeps me from doing whatever I want whenever I want without any hassles.” And we have all known people like that. I understand that motivation all too well. “Just leave me alone and don’t bother me with all of that bs. Leave me be.” OK. But that is just as much of a choice as single-mindedly pursuing the things we want in life and taking on all of those responsibilities that we think once shouldered, will make us an adult.

Becoming and being an adult is a choice that must be made consciously. It isn’t something that can happen by default or osmoses or just by being successful.

Some of us turn into either our parents or the parent we think the rest of the world needs. We become super-judgmental about what “they” are doing – whether that be on a personal or professional or citizen level. “They” need to grow up and get it right, do it right, pull themselves up by the bootstraps, be responsible, etc. And we have no reservations about letting them know what we think. One dirty secret here is that we also often turn those judgments on ourselves and deny to ourselves that we are doing it. And the more we judge ourselves and others, the more alienated we can begin to feel because we are not like “those” people and that makes us feel more superior. We begin to judge things in terms of things are black or white and there are no gray areas. As example, you see a lot this kind of behavior in our current politics. Judgment of others that leads to feeling alienated from people who think or feel differently from us. In that feeling of alienation from those who don’t agree with us on everything, we become more and more distant from others as we become more and more trapped by the better-thans of our ego, all-the-while telling ourselves that we are just being responsible adults.

Remember early in the Trump administration when an anonymous letter was published, I believed in the New York Times, assuring the rest of us and the world that there were indeed adults in the room, working to keep his worst or most misguided impulses in check? The thing is you aren’t an adult if you could have done something upfront to have prevented your now having to step up, in whatever the situation is, and anoint yourself an adult and the adult who is going to now, after the fact, make things all better. That kind of behavior won’t get you there either even if you did tell them so before things went awry.

Some of us try becoming adults by either being just like Mom and Dad or we decide to be the exact opposite of them. Two sides of the same coin. Some of us had great parents who we admire and respect. We take them as our roles models and try to do it just like they did but we can’t because we are not them. We may develop some of their most admirable traits like compassion, humor, even-temperedness, fairness, curiosity about the world, or expertise in a particular subject, being well-read, never being late. Whatever. And there is nothing wrong with developing for yourself traits that you admire in others. But we have to learn to do it our way. As example, your mother may have been an amazing cook and family dinner was a time of reconnecting with one another and re-establishing those familial bonds on a daily basis. But times have changed. What traditions will you develop and establish with your family that help reconnection and bonding in an age where time is at a premium and there are so many competing interests for your time and attention?

Others decide they won’t be anything like their parents, for whatever their reasons. My friend Fred knows a guy who had a very distant father. Dad worked a lot and was never around and had little interest or involvement in his life except as provider. So, Fred’s friend was very involved in his kids’ lives while they were young. But as they got older, and he and his wife divorced, and he wasn’t around nearly as much. He retreated into work and over time defaulted into being just like his father in more ways than anyone would ever dare mention to him.

The point here is how you do adulting will involve a series of many choices, lots of trial and error, and finding your own way. My parents came from a generation that was told by the “experts” that being affectionate toward your children – hugging, picking them up, kissing them, etc. – was not good for them as that kind of mollycoddling would not prepare them to navigate their own way in a tough world. In today’s world, we’ve gone to the other extreme where people complain about helicopter parents who are so over-involved with their kids that those kids can’t function without checking in with Mom and Dad first. And so it goes in all arenas of life. Who do you trust and listen to on “how to” do the many things that adulthood requires of you in many arenas? We all have to find our own way. No, we don’t and won’t do that in a void. But there will be no one right way and no one wrong way to adult.

Some people believe that adults must be serious all the time. “You’ve got responsibilities now.” You are expected to always have your wits about you and always know what to do in every situation. No spontaneity. No new dreams or new goals. No flying off the handle emotionally. No being silly. Be practical and rational. All of that is nonsense. Spontaneity at times can bring a sense of refreshment to life in a way nothing else will. You just can’t plan being spontaneous. If you look back over your life, you will see that there were many times you spontaneously took an action – whether work or fun – you made a decision and took an action and only in looking back do you realize that it was spontaneously done. Yes, you can have fun and still be an adult. Just please do it responsibly. And no, you won’t know what to do in every situation but what will save you is your process of thinking and feeling things through and arriving at good decisions and choices that you know you can trust.

Can you still be practical and rational as an adult and have happy endings or is that only in fairy tales? I mean you have responsibilities now. Yes, you can have lots of happy ending. And no, adulting does not mean being perfect. That is not possible and for many, trying to be perfect leads them into the trap of needing to be right all the time. That isn’t possible either.

One of the best ways to become an adult is to practice just showing up. Good times, bad times, you show up. It is a form of being responsible. Now I don’t mean being a martyr about it. The whole, “All I’ve done for you, sacrificed for you, etc.,” thing. No. But in any situation where either you are needed or just find yourself, you show up willing to help try to ensure a positive and responsible outcome. It is about consciously directing the positive impact you are wanting to have on others. No whining, even when you don’t want to be involved. No finger pointing and blaming. Taking care of business when it needs taking care of and also be willing to have fun and celebrate when it is called for. It isn’t all about good and purposeful work all the time. Being powerful – willing and able to take an action when needed, even if that action is just being there and listening to someone who needs in that moment to be heard and acknowledged. Show up and direct your impact.

I’ll give you a quick example about directing impact. A young supervisor, who has a ton of potential, used to react at the level of her employees. If they were mad or upset, that is the way she’d react – mad or upset. She would match their level of intensity, over-powering their volume to try to force them into submission, which always resulted in escalating the situation. She learned to control her reactions and she learned to listen, worked to de-escalate the employee or the situation and then she’d decide calmly on a solution. Her staff respected her for it and trusted her more. She became the adult in the room.

Adults also know when to step back and take a break. Pause. Sometimes pause can mean taking a breath before responding to something or someone in haste. Hasty responses are usually not a good idea. Think before you open your mouth. It will lead to more directing of your impact and better outcomes. Often times pause means to take a break when you need to replenish, recharge. Quiet time or walk in nature or music or meditation or whatever works for you. Regularly take some time to think and reflect and let go of whatever you are holding on to that is no longer needed. And, certainly, on occasion, whether alone or with a loved and trusted other, do the whining I told you above you not to do. Whine. Bitch. Yell. Stomp your feet. Rant. Rave. Get it all the fuck out of your system. Seriously. And then let all that crap go. It will save your nerve body.

Show up. Direct your impact. Be conscious. Do it responsibly for all involved. Be willing to take responsible actions as needed. But do remember that you are not responsible for everything or everybody, everywhere, all the time, etc. Know when to take a break. And know how to set appropriate boundaries.

Adults continually add to their self-esteem. Now, I have posted a two-part blog post and a two-part podcast about what real self-esteem is and how to do it in a very practical way. Thing is, even when we have plenty, it is always good to add more. Self-esteem is our evaluation of ourselves. We evaluate ourselves on several criteria. Are we honest with ourselves and with others all of the time? I talked about dealing with ourselves in bad faith. Being brutally honest with ourselves is a tremendous strength and a sign of courage. Brutally honest with ourselves about everything and tactfully and compassionately honest with others. About everything. Honesty is the key and will see you through. Self-esteem comes from having personal integrity – doing the right thing because it is the right thing to do. Keeping our commitments as best we can. Saying what we mean and doing what we say. Self-esteem comes from being responsible. And it comes from being trustworthy and learning to trust yourself. There is more to it, and it is available for you to read or listen to.

Always put your best foot forward. Don’t do things half-assed. Why? Out of respect for yourself. No, none of us is always ready in every moment to do that. There will be times where we’re tired or something has thrown us off our game and putting 100% of our best out there just ain’t gonna happen. Then give it 75% or 50% or even 25% if that’s all you got right then. But even during those 25% times, don’t do it half-baked or half-hearted. This is not a demand of perfection decreed to us by the universe. It is about being present, focused, and paying attention to details. A side benefit of that is that it helps you become more proactive in your own life. You’ll respect yourself more and be proud of the way you conducted yourself. Those are the kinds of things adults do.

Adults always keep tucked in the back of their minds a vision, and a feeling, of where they want their life to go, what they want to create for themselves as far as the experience of and direction of their lives. Who and what do you want to become? And then you take whatever life dishes out to you and make it in service of that larger vision, that larger feeling. Life can seem at times out to get us. As the old saying rightly goes, it isn’t what happens to you in life that matters. It is what you do with what happens to you. Who do you want to be? Where do you want your life to go? What do you want the experience to feel like? Having dreams and visions of where your life is going and who you are becoming very directly informs your responses in the present. Thus,  doing what I am doing because of what is happening to me – good, bad or neutral – is influenced by the future I am trying and wanting to create for myself and my life.

Adults trust. Now, I’ve done a blog and podcast on some of the basics. It is available to you. I want to add a couple more pieces. Adults learn to trust themselves, meaning, they trust their intellect, their thought processes. We talked about this as also being a part of self-esteem. Adults trust their intuitions. That does not mean demanding that your intuitions be 100% accurate. Clearly not. Trusting yourself emotionally, what you are feeling. Trusting your body to tell you what it needs as you learn to listen to its messages. Honor your body in that way. Pay attention to it. As we learn to trust these different parts of ourselves, we become more trusting of the whole, more trusting of ourselves.

Adults are flexible. In our busyness, many of us get really invested in our routines, routines that help manage the chaos by bringing some consistency to it. But there is also the risk that in seeking that consistency, we also become it – responding the same way in every situation, eventually losing our ability to adopt new perspectives while becoming rigid, unyielding, unchanging. Reacting the same way to everything in the name of consistency or habit. The last angry man or the perpetual victim. You lose perspective and the ability to make new and different choices. Not a good look. Leave yourself the flexibility to react in a way that feeds your self-esteem and helps you to learn more about yourself as you grow and change. There is no one right way or only one way to run your life. There are many paths to where you want to go. And there are many you’s – friend, parent, worker, boss, sibling, nerd, spouse, artist, poet, dancer, gamer, singer, baker, writer, son or daughter, etc. Don’t be inflexible in those roles either. Allow them to evolve with you as you grow and change.

Finally, adults seek to have fun and enjoy their lives. Not suggesting it’s party time all the time. Enjoying and loving your life, yes, and in that, consciously creating fun. And as you grow and change, what is fun will change as well. I mean if you are still honoring that promise that you made to yourself when you were 16 that you’d always be a head-banger, at age 40 - maybe not so much. Consciously seek fun and create some joy responsibly.

Those are some of the salient qualities of an adult. The self-esteem posts are a gold mine of things that separately and as a whole will be invaluable in getting you to a place where you will actually welcome and claim and embrace being an adult. There are lots of distractions out there that could keep you away from the many gifts from making and staking this claim. And there’s lots of misinformation about what it’s about and how to do it.

One last piece regarding being an adult, it isn’t so much about what you do but how you do it. What you do is important, yes, but it is how you do the doing. The ends never justify the means. It is all about process – your process. All of the above will help. And one day, when you least expect it, not only will you discover with some surprise that you no longer fear or misunderstand adulting, but you will also discover – Yes, I am an adult.

© 2022   Living Skills, Inc. All rights reserved in all media

Living Skills offers positive psychology counseling, spiritual counseling, and life coaching services in Atlanta, and online. We are sensitive to the needs of the LGBT community. Sessions available by Skype. Please email us at livingskillsinc@gmail.com or visit www.livingskills.pro. Podcast: “The Problem with Humans” now available on Apple Podcasts, Buzzsprout, Google Podcast, Amazon Music, and Spotify, Overcast, Castro, Castbox, and Podfriend, as well as on my site. Follow us on Twitter - @livingskillsinc

Self-Care Is Self-Esteem – Part 2

Last time we talked about the fact that self-esteem is a real, on-going need. It is fundamental that we work toward meeting our real needs. Additionally, when you learn how to earn it from yourself, self-esteem can help you make better decisions and choices in life. You can be inspired to not let your life get stale or routine or become trapped in old emotional or mental patterns that can be limiting, if not destructive.

There are all kinds of ideas out there in popular culture about what self-esteem is and isn’t. The bottom line is that self-esteem is your evaluation of you.

In Part 1, we talked about that in order to have more self-esteem, you need to determine that you are a powerful person meaning - you give yourself the permission to take actions in life, to make decisions, etc. You don’t wait on others to tell you it is OK to do so. You don’t rely on others telling you what to do. And you do already have the authority to give yourself that permission - to be powerful enough to take the actions you need to take. None of us are helpless and we are not victims. Power is the willingness and the ability to act, to take action.

Also, self-esteem comes from working to get better and better at thinking and feeling. Look at and reflect upon your patterns of doing each and see where you can improve and grow. Finally, it is essential to evaluate your character. Do you act with integrity? Always? There is no self-esteem without integrity.

We concluded that discussion with Three Things to Do Daily - Be brutally honest with yourself about everything and tactfully honest with others. Be responsible. All or at least most of the time and always about the big things. You don’t have to be perfect. And integrity - Doing the right thing because it is the right thing to do.

All of the above is very doable and most of you do some or most of this already. If you have not read Part 1 or listened to the podcast, I would encourage you to do so. All of that said, what else is there to Self-Esteem?

A big part of self-care and, thus, self-esteem, is seeking to understand yourself. Why are you the way you are? As a silly example - “Well, I’m a Taurus, so that’s why I’m stubborn.” Seriously? Would you accept that excuse from someone else? Why are you stubborn? You like to be right? You hate change? You think you know it all? You don’t trust other people’s opinions or knowledge? What? You get the point. No, you don’t need to call me and do six months of counseling to figure out why you like strawberry ice cream. You just do. OK. Fine. But when you start to run into things like you realize that your lack of trust in love is messing up your relationships, then maybe it would be a good idea to understand why you don’t trust love rather than do without it in your life. Just saying. Learn to understand yourself.

Why do you immediately get defensive when someone asks you a question? Why do you fear losing yourself in a relationship? Why do you like challenges? Why do you hate challenges? Why do you feel like you have to prove yourself to everybody else? Why do you love the thrill of rollercoasters? Why do you love change? Why do you hate change? Why are you always drawn to the “bad” boys or “bad” girls? It is those kinds of things that can trip us up that we should start with. Once you have recognized and acknowledged the pattern, go deeper. Why do I hold on to these patterns or habits? What can I learn about me here?

Also, it is of paramount importance to seek to understand, at least on a working level, other people. Understanding does not mean that you have to agree or be the same, nor does it mean that you have to convert them to your way of thinking or being, nor be converted to their way of thinking or being. It is part of respect – toward self or others – to acknowledge differences and we all are different. I will give you an example of how this might play out in a relationship.

In Dating – Part 4 – Preparing Yourself for the Rigors of Dating – we talked about the Five Love Languages. The 5 Love Languages is a method of understanding how people prefer to give and receive affection. How, in some sense, we feel loved. Comprehending what has meaning to us in a relationship. I recently worked with someone who is in what she reported to be a really good relationship but there was one hurdle. Her partner expressed affection through lots of touching. She didn’t like being touched all of the time. Didn’t mean she didn’t like sex. She did. She just did not like the feeling of having her boundaries, her physical space, invaded all of the time by constantly being touched. She is like me in that our primary love language is acts of service.

Her partner could not understand that.  His primary love language is physical touch. So, who has to change here? Neither of them, in truth. The place to start is having the understanding of each other’s priorities. Have that conversation or series of conversations rather than, “Well, you don’t love me because you won’t let me touch you whenever I want to,” or “You never help me around the house.” So, instead of packing up my marbles and storming off, as we understand one another (and ourselves here), we can build stronger and longer lasting bridges toward one another by making accommodations over time out of respect and understanding. And in that seeking to honestly understand ourselves and someone else or other people in general, we also will generate more self-esteem from ourselves for ourselves.

Also, in seeking understanding, seek meaning. What do things mean to you? You are the only one who has the authority to make that decision. In the example above, what does it mean that one partner does not want to feel like she is being pawed or petted all of the time? It means, at least to her, that she wants to be related to in a way where she feels seen and heard as something and someone more than a sex partner. She wants to be related to on all levels as someone worthy of attention, affection, respect, compassion, and being understood, rather than constantly dealing with, “If you don’t let me touch your endlessly, you don’t love me,” which would not be true. Now I am exaggerating this a bit to make the point.

What do things mean to you? Another seemingly silly example. “If I can’t get to the grocery store early in the week, it causes me anxiety.” OK. We have established that understanding. Now, what does that mean? Well, it could mean I like to have my chores out of the way, so my weekend is free. It could mean that when I go, it gives me some time alone to decompress and be productive at the same time. It could mean that when I go on the weekend and the shelves are picked over and the store is out of what I need and want, it makes me unhappy. What do things mean to you? And what does something mean to someone else? I know someone with chronic pain issues, and they say, “I feel like shit,” a lot. Yeah, I understand that part, but I have no idea what that means. Does it mean the same thing every time they say it? Is it always about their physical discomfort or does it mean something else?

Bottom line – seek to understand yourself and then seek to understand others, even if you don’t agree with them or have the same belief system as them or have any desire to be like them. And seek to understand what things actually mean to you – The Kroger cashier was short-tempered with you. Does that mean they dislike you or were having a bad day or they were just really busy? And seek to understand what things mean to others. I am not trying to turn you all into therapists but if you will work with understanding and meaning, you will become better humans with more self-esteem.

This next step correlates to the third step in Part 1, in which I recommended that you evaluate your own character. We talked about it in terms of looking at establishing integrity and principles, and thus character. Do I live by my principles like not consciously hurting others? Do I do have integrity? Am I a person who keeps my word, etc.? Do I have the courage of my convictions? In this step, take it to the next level. Look at and evaluate your motivations. What motivates the actions you take? Are my actions taken with the motivation, the intention, of being honest; having integrity; being a caring person; establishing a greater level of closeness; whatever; or am I motivated by expediency? Expediency meaning - “I’ll get to all of the character stuff later when I have time or when it is more convenient but for right now, let’s keep things simple at all costs.” (or) “Let’s just go with whatever feels good at the moment or with what meets my desire for immediate gratification.” “I need leverage here, so I am going to manipulate the situation. I’ll just try to see what I can get away with here.”

Now, in Part 1, we talked at some length about dealing with yourself in bad faith. When you look at your motivations and intentions, you will know what is true for you, though you might hate to think it true. In a relationship, I want this and you want that, and that can be anything from where we go to dinner to establishing the boundaries and rules of our relationship and anything in between. And instead of working through the process of understanding, and that can be a quick process, I choose to manipulate you to get what I want whether that means Chinese for dinner rather than Mexican, or having an open relationship even though that is not what you want. Suppose you are having a disagreement with a family member or friend or loved one and they will say and do anything to be right, to win the argument, or they just want to shut you down. They want this to happen now – thus the sense of expediency. Clearly this kind of behavior is not OK, even if it reflects their lack of self-esteem.

A work example. How many of you have had the experience of working for a supervisor or manager who will say and do anything, out of a sense of expediency, to get you to do what they want right then? What they are saying or what they want may not even make rational or logical sense but nevertheless, they want you to do X and they will manipulate you into doing it. Or a manager who is such a control freak that if you walked in and said, “The sky is blue,” the response would be either, “Yeah but except when . . .,” or, “It is not. It’s . . .,” and they will argue you to the mat until you give up in exhaustion. This is obviously neither leadership nor even good or effective management. But, for them, it is expedient. It is what they need and want right in the moment. These people will not have much of any self-esteem to speak of and, having had exposure to these kinds of managers at some point in your life, you are acquainted with this kind of behavior and its potential impact.

Evaluate your own motivations and intentions. Are they motivated from character and integrity or from a need of expediency? The more of this kind of evaluation you do, and the happier you are with what you find, the more self-esteem you will have. And if you don’t like what you find, you are always in a position of power to do something about it.

Next step, this corresponds to the second step in Part 1 which is about honestly evaluating how good you are at thinking and feeling. How good are you at each? What are your patterns? Where can you improve or deepen these abilities? In this step, look at how well you integrate thought and feeling. As example. If you wake up in the middle of the night and hear someone moving about downstairs and you live alone, you are rightfully going to be afraid. Absolutely. However, if you suddenly wake up afraid in the middle of the night, does that automatically mean that there is an intruder downstairs? If someone says something that hurts your feelings, yes, you are going to feel hurt or at least a bit peevish. Right? But if for some reason you are feeling hurt, does that mean someone else said or did something to make you feel hurt or is it just a feeling passing through? If someone does something deceitful behind your back, you are going to be angry. But if you feel angry, does that necessarily mean someone went behind your back?

That you feel something does not always mean that there is a thought of fact behind it. As we have talked about before, that you have a feeling come up, in and of itself, is not a cause for either alarm or celebration. Is the feeling causing the alarm or desire to celebrate tied to anything? Or is it just a feeling passing through that floated up out of your subconscious mind and you need to let it go? In Self-Care is Knowing Your Default Reaction, we talked about habitual emotional responses. “I’m mad because you are late as always even though you knew we had to be on time for this event.” OK. But if I feel mad that doesn’t mean you were late. Anger, remember, is one of the default settings.

All feelings are legitimate in that you are feeling them. But not all feelings are legitimate if the thinking that generates them is not accurate. “You’ve been sneaking around a lot lately, so you must be up to something. You’ve been very secretive and that must mean you are seeing someone else, and I am jealous and hurt.” “No, actually I have been trying to plan a surprise birthday party for you and you know I have a terrible poker face. I can’t hide anything well.” But when you feel something, acknowledge the feeling and then see if you have any valid or logical reason to feel that way rather than denying your feelings. Just don’t let your feelings run your life. And if the feeling isn’t tied to something in fact, let it go.

“If it feels good, do it.” Remember that old trope? That it feels good doesn’t mean it is a good idea. “I really like feeling mellow at work, so I am going to smoke a blunt before work.” But walking into work reeking of weed and looking buzzed may not be a good idea. Also, we need to become really well acquainted with ourselves and our patterns and to learn to differentiate between real feelings and the urgings of our ego. We may feel, for example, that our boss is a complete toadstool and that they deserve to be informed of that posthaste. However, looking at the logic of that, maybe not so much. More likely what our ego wants here is for us to express to them that we consider ourselves better than or superior to them. Probably wouldn’t be good for job security.

You need thinking and feeling together in order to make decisions on what actions to take in your life and then you need to be able to evaluate how good of an idea it was after the fact. So, the question in this step is – How good are you at integrating your thinking and feeling? Do you do just fine until a feeling comes up and then it all goes off the rails? (see blog and podcast Feelings, Wo-O-O Feelings) Or do you think and think and ruminate and stay all up in your head and won’t go near feelings for love or money? “Doesn’t matter what I felt. I think this or thought that.” When you try to separate rather than integrate thinking and feeling, self-esteem tanks. Not only will the integration of thought and feeling boost your self-esteem, it will give you a much firmer foundation for honestly evaluating yourself. And you will also be amazed at how it will help your sanity levels.

The last step and it goes along with the first step of claiming your power. Here, and this in integral, is the determination of and commitment to the fact that we are not helpless. And yes, there are times when we find ourselves between a rock and hard place and can’t imagine a solution. But the determination to eventually find one will get us through it. Ask for help from loved ones and trusted associates, or from professionals in whatever field. Do research if necessary. Certainly, take a step back and see if you can gain some new perspective on the issue. Remember to breathe. Be patient, meaning look and listen over time for answers that make sense and feel right (see previous step). Keep on keeping on and that determination that you are not helpless, will help you find more personal power and generate more self-esteem.

Each of the steps, on its own, has value and will serve you well. Each of us must determine to be powerful and determine that we are not helpless. We evaluate our ability to think and feeling and then we evaluate our ability to integrate what we think and feel. We evaluate whether we are living by our principles, ideals, character, and we evaluate our motivations in everything we do. And we must seek understanding and meaning. This is a process that you can learn to work.

Finally, in Part 1 I told you three things to do daily that will change your life. They are – Honesty; Responsibility; and Integrity.

To those three, I want to add four more:

Trust. Now, my very first blog post and my very first Podcast are entitled But, But, I Trusted You. Learn to trust yourself and then others. A couple of take-aways from that short post. Say what you mean and do what you say. You will be more trustworthy. (Yes, you earn trust from yourself as well, not just from others.) Then evaluate - Do your actions match your words? You can learn to trust peoples’ behaviors, not necessarily what they say. As example. My brother, for a variety of reasons, is always late. Always. He will tell you he is in the process of getting ready early. He may tell you he is working on getting out the door. What I know I can trust is that he will be late. It’s money in the bank. Trust is a very big subject, but this can be a good starting point. Are you trustworthy? Are they? Do you/they say what they mean and do what they say? Do actions match words? How consistent are actions? It is through evaluating those actions and patterns of actions that you can learn what you can and can’t trust.

Listen to the messages life sends you. Pay attention to your life, not your phone. Life, the universe, whatever you want to call it, has a funny way of sending all of us messages. A song you hear that may strike a chord. A poem you read that resonates emotionally. A conversation you overhear that tells you something you needed to hear. Someone reacts to you in an unexpected (good or bad) way. Whatever it may be, pay attention to information coming into you from a variety of sources, especially those from beyond your phone screen. Yes, this is more esoteric, but it will trigger thought and feeling and, in so doing, kick you into evaluating and then integrating your thinking and feeling.

Let yourself listen to your feelings. Listen to your feelings, understand your feelings about this or that, and use the input to make better decisions, without letting your life be run by your feelings. What does your gut – not your ego – but your gut tell you about something or someone? Are your feelings in concordance or at odds with what you are thinking? Thought plus feeling equals emotions. And honor your hopes, goals, dreams, and desires as they are important to you, revising them as necessary.

Finally, never ever ever consciously hurt other people or yourself. That doesn’t mean you may not inadvertently hurt someone else’s feelings. But there was no intention to do so present. We aren’t perfect and sometimes we say or do the wrong thing, or we miss the opportunity to say or do the right thing. But never intentionally hurt someone else or yourself. “Well, I told you not to make me mad. You got what you deserved.” Nope. “I told you not to go there.” Nope. It isn’t what you say but how you say it and why you say it that will immediately impact your self-esteem.

Now, you don’t have to take my word that what all I’ve described will work to help you generate more real self-esteem and that it will be rock solid enough to lean on. Try it on your own. Give it some time and be open to the process and what can come of it. As you work with the components and the process itself, you and your life can change and don’t be surprised if and when it does. Let us know if you have questions or if we can help.

© 2022   Living Skills, Inc. All rights reserved in all media

Living Skills offers positive psychology counseling, spiritual counseling, and life coaching services in Atlanta, and online. We are sensitive to the needs of the LGBT community. Sessions available by Skype. Please email us at livingskillsinc@gmail.com or visit www.livingskills.pro. Podcast: “The Problem with Humans” now available on Apple Podcasts, Buzzsprout, Google Podcast, Amazon Music, and Spotify, Overcast, Castro, Castbox, and Podfriend, as well as on my site. Follow us on Twitter - @livingskillsinc

Self-Respect

An edited version of Self-Respect was published in the Georgia Voice paper and website on 7/23/2021: thegavoice.com

Photo 213490420 © Kukurund | Dreamstime.com

I don’t usually eavesdrop on conversations. That said, when someone is talking loud enough for me to hear, it’s on them. Right? So I am listening to this guy tell a friend that as he is now in his 50s, he has recently discovered self-respect and having done so, has put his wife and his twenty-something aged kids on notice that if they dare to disrespect him, they are all going to be sorry. He isn’t going to take it anymore. But wait, there’s more.

Not only is his family now on notice, but he isn’t taking it from anybody else either. So he finds himself on a surface street that is being blocked by two cars, one headed in one direction and one headed in another and they are having a conversation. When the one headed in the opposite direction of him moves, he drives around the person that has been blocking him, yelling something out the window at the driver. Then the driver catches up to him and starts yelling at him. This goes on with them now chasing one another so that the last person that got yelled at can yell back and get the last word. It escalates with an open water bottle being thrown back and forth between cars and then eventually an opened canned soda being thrown back and forth between the two cars.

The story teller eventually chases this other car into a cul-de-sac where they are both stopped with the cars facing one another. The yelling continues until the passenger in the other car gets out and pulls a gun on the guy telling the story, who then backs his car out of the cul-de-sac and goes home. But he feels vindicated, even though he almost got himself shot, because he wasn’t going to put up with being disrespected.

Respect is not something you can demand any more than you can demand that someone trust you. Respect, like trust, is earned. First from self and then from others. It is not unlike understanding. If you want people to understand you, you must first seek to be understanding of others. “Oh, no. They better ‘get’ that they need to understand/trust/respect me first.” Good luck with that. People that can’t or won’t treat others with respect, as clichéd as it sounds, usually have no idea what respect means or they don’t respect themselves.

So, where to start? Step one is to honestly and appropriately express all of your emotions. Back in March I wrote a blog post entitled, “Feelings, Wo-O-O Feelings,” about dealing with feelings so I am not going to belabor this now. However, first you have to be able to correctly identify what you are feeling. Are you angry or are you sad? Are you happy or just content? Are you really hurt or just disappointed? Once you have identified what you are feeling, then express it appropriately. If I am angry or confused, let’s say, sometimes just the admission of that can help clear it. If I acknowledge I am angry with myself or someone else, or, if I am confused about something or you are confusing me, then I can do something about it. And I will earn respect from myself for having identified the feeling and moved beyond it. But if I scream and holler at you because I am angry at you or I punish myself because I am angry with me, I am inflicting pain by my inappropriate expression and there is no basis there for earning respect from myself.

Further, too many people, like our friend above, get the idea in their heads that “out of self-respect, I get to tell you what a no good, dirty rotten, low down Communist I really think you are.” That isn’t acting out of self-respect. That is acting out of judgment and ego. Far better to just walk away from behavior you find offensive or inappropriate.

So it goes with positive emotions like love. Famed Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca wrote, “To burn with desire and keep quiet about it is the greatest punishment we can bring on ourselves.” Or suppose you are proud of yourself or someone else and instead of expressing that pride, you give them or yourself some kind of left-handed compliment or say something snarky instead. There will be no foundation on which to build self-respect. When you can appropriately express of your feelings, your estimation of yourself will rise.

Secondly, when you fail at something or fall short of your goal, stop and figure out what went wrong. Why did you not succeed as you had intended? Do not blame anybody or anything else. You can‘t fix what you won’t be responsible for. Whether it is a work project, a hobby, or a relationship, whatever the nature of that relationship, when something goes awry or doesn’t work or falls apart, look for what happened. Could it have been avoided? What decisions, actions, choices, beliefs, etc., led you to where things are now? And own and admit that you contributed to this outcome.

Now, a lot of us grew up with the idea that if we made a mistake, not only do we feel terrible about having done so, but we were supposed to be punished for it. No. I learned many years ago that when you hold up you hand, say, “Yeah, I did it,” and be responsible, people will break their backs to help you correct whatever went wrong. And you and others will respect that.

But what about when things go right, go well? How did you get here? What decisions, actions, choices, commitment, perseverance, got you here across the finish line? Own that. Not out of ego. Succeeding doesn’t make you better than. But it is important to figure out and know how you succeeded. Why? So you can do it again. ‘”It was just luck.” Really? Honor the process you used to succeed so that you can replicate, usually with adjustments for the situation, additional successes and greater successes. That you can and will respect.

And finally, always – always – operate from a place of integrity and character, meaning that the ends never ever justify the means. It is always about how you got there. The process. The steps taken. How you conducted yourself along the way, on a daily basis. Were you honest or did you manipulate others? Did you cut corners or did you make sure that the quality of work or product was not sacrificed in the name of expediency? Did you build bridges to others or did you burn bridges in your quest to be first? Did you seek to be understanding and compassionate of self and others or were you impatient, condescending and rude as you progressed? My personal yardstick has long been if I can look into my own eyes in the bathroom mirror at the end of the day and feel good about me, that is all that matters.

Life is a process in the big picture, and so are all of our days, in the little, immediate picture. No one is saying we have to be perfect. Clearly not. But process is the means to our ends and how, on a daily basis, we get to where we are going, is one of the surest ways we can and will learn to respect ourselves.  And, rather than risking getting ourselves shot in a dark cul-da-sac, we will be able to respect that maybe someone else was just having a bad day.

© 2021   Living Skills, Inc. All rights reserved in all media

Living Skills offers positive psychology counseling, spiritual counseling, and life coaching services in Atlanta, and online. We are sensitive to the needs of the LGBT community. Sessions available by Skype. Please email us at livingskillsinc@gmail.com or visit www.livingskills.pro. Podcast: “The Problem with Humans” now available on Apple Podcasts, Buzzsprout, Google Podcast, Amazon Music, and Spotify, Overcast, Castro, Castbox, and Podfriend, as well as on my site. Follow us on Twitter - @livingskillsinc

Running Anxiety

There is a lot of anxiety run riot in the world right now. It is everywhere and is about pretty much everything. The world has entered uncharted territory and we are uncertain of where our lives or our world are going. Uncertainty often produces anxiety. Problem is, thinking about anxiety makes us anxious.

Many of us are so used to living with it, that we don’t give it a lot of thought. It is kind of there in the background but, hey, it’s only anxiety. We get used to the feelings of unease, apprehension, nervousness. “I’m just feeling a little out of sorts or off center or I’ve got things on my mind but it is no big deal.” Actually, yes, it is.

Anxiety, left unanswered builds, suffocates you mentally, emotionally and spiritually, and eventually can destroy your health. “Come on. It’s not big deal and I’ll get to it later. I’ve got bigger fish to fry right now. What’s a little jitters?” Now, as it is a big subject, we are going to start with how do you even know you are anxious? Right? If what I said is true, that we become so accustomed to it that we don’t realize that we are at sufferance of it, then how do we know?

My fave is food. Eating when I am not hungry. Many people call it stress eating. Standing in front of the open fridge at 3:30 AM grabbing out the fixin’s for a turkey and cheese sandwich. “Well, I was having trouble sleeping and I always sleep better with food on my stomach.” You feed your spouse their favorite meal and they’ve eaten until they nearly fell out but 30 minutes later they are rummaging through the pantry looking for a bag of chips because they are feeling peckish.  How is that even possible?

The presence of addictions – chemical or mechanical – are a sign that we are trying to run off anxiety. Chemical addictions whether food, booze, drugs, coffee, cigs, chocolate, sugar. That chocolate that you just gotta have. That cig before you commit murder. The food consumption that borders on or crosses over into binging. If I ate it fast, it didn’t count. If I didn’t enjoy it, it didn’t count. Needing to fill my mouth. Habituated chemical addictions as way of doing anxiety.

Mechanical addictions. The nail biters who will chew their own fingers down to their first knuckle. The hair twisters who aren’t even conscious of how much they do it. The jaw clenchers and grinders. I had a boss who clenched and unclenched her jaw all day, every day, regardless of what was going on around her. She was oblivious to it. My roommate in college who ground his teeth and jaw so ferociously every night that I could hear it from down the hall. The folks who can’t stop jiggling their leg, bouncing that knee up and down at ever increasing speeds. Running off anxiety.

Some people pick fights, usually about insignificant things. “How many times do I have to tell you to put the cap back on the toothpaste? It is unsanitary and messy. Can’t you ever respect my wishes? How come everything always has to be your way?” And off we go. One guy’s boyfriend came home and launched into a tirade about who knows what. When he was finished, the guy asked him, “So what has any of that got to do with me?” “Why can’t you ever listen to anything I tell you?” Usually they aren’t or you aren’t really even angry. Just looking to pick a fight to run off anxiety. And even though the fight usually starts over minor or inconsequential things, the person being attacked gets suckered in and will fight back and it can escalate and terrible things get said and emotional damage done and trust gets broken all because I was feeling anxious. Potentially throwing away a loving relationship to run off anxiety.

Another way many of us handle our anxiety is to worry about everything. Everything. Constantly. It can almost become obsessive. “Do my tires look worn to you? I am thinking that they are starting to wear out. Maybe I should go check them.” “Well, it’s dark outside right now and you just bought them six months ago so it is unlikely that they are about to give out.” “Did you see the rash in that commercial? Doesn’t that look just like this red spot on my elbow? My God, I better go get checked out for psoriasis.” “Your elbow is red because you’ve been leaning on it.” “Yeah, well, just in case.” What if the lunch meat in the kids’ sandwiches wasn’t stored properly? How many eggs are there in the fridge? I worry and I worry and I worry. Things will rotate on and off the checklist of things I worry about but by trying to be hyper-vigilant and aware, by worrying about everything, maybe I can keep the bad stuff at bay. Running my anxiety through worrying.

Some people turn into martyrs. You go to get your COVID vaccine and you even have an appointment and they not only keep you waiting but they take other people first. And you know that they deliberately did it to you. The server refills everybody else’s water glass except yours and you know it was premediated. The busybody at work who is so busy helping everybody else with their work that they can’t get their own done and then can’t understand why nobody appreciates all that they’ve done to help everybody else. “Nobody understands me. Nobody ever helps me. I guess I’ll just have to do it all myself,” followed with a heave and sigh. Martyring themselves as a way to distract from the anxiety they are feeling.

Some people go into depression. The weight of the depression gets so heavy that they can’t get out from under it. Not feeling “a little down” but really depressed and it can take weeks, months, years to escape the suffocation of the depression brought on by anxiety.

Others go into righteousness and blame. There is a lot of this out in the world right now. But it gets to the point of absurdity. “The world is going to hell in a handbasket because the rotten liberals are a bunch of satanic, cannibalistic pedophiles, blah, blah, blah.” It makes me mad because if I had known I was a cannibal, I could have saved a fortune at Kroger over the years.  In the 10,000 years of recorded human history blame has never solved anything. Accountability yes, blame no. But there is tons of blame in our world. And righteousness whose sole purpose is to make the righteous feel superior to and better than whomever is the object of their scorn. Running anxiety by blaming and being righteous.

And, finally, procrastination. The people who let the mail pile up for weeks or months but they’re gonna get to it. That closet that I’ve been meaning to clean out and sort through forever but I keep throwing stuff in there instead. That two minute phone call that I need to make for work but I can’t make it on Monday because they are just getting back to work and I don’t want to bother them. Then Tuesday comes and I’d call but they are just really getting back in the swing of things so I don’t want to be a nuisance. And on it goes and now it is Friday and the week is over so I’ll call next week. The bill I need to pay. Procrastination is how I do my anxiety.

If any of this sounds familiar, good. Because one of the steps of escaping being smothered by your anxiety is to know you have it and being aware of what you do to run it off. And then you can start looking for alternative, less destructive ways to express it.

© 2021   Living Skills, Inc. All rights reserved in all media

Living Skills offers positive psychology counseling, spiritual counseling, and life coaching services in Atlanta, and online. We are sensitive to the needs of the LGBT community. Sessions available by Skype. Please email us at livingskillsinc@gmail.com or visit www.livingskills.pro. Podcast: “The Problem with Humans” now available on Apple Podcasts, Buzzsprout, Google Podcast, Amazon Music, and Spotify, Overcast, Castro, Castbox, and Podfriend, as well as on my site. Follow us on Twitter - @livingskillsinc

The Geometry of Choice

An abbreviated version of The Geometry of Choice was printed in the May 7, 2021 issue of Georgia Voice

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Do you ever stop and think about the number of choices you make every single day? From the moment you open your eyes, you are choosing to do or not do something. How good are the choices you make? Do you ever stop to evaluate them? Are they good or bad or neutral? Further, when you make a bad or neutral one, does it register differently with you than when you make a good one? Do you take your good choices for granted? How about your bad and neutral ones?

Choices define a singular point in time. What will I have for breakfast? Will I get dressed up today or be casual? Do I need to go to the grocery store? Should I call my brother? Is it time to run the dishwasher? You get the point. It is a singular choice made at a certain point in time. We don’t usually pay a lot of attention to them because many of those that we make are habituated.

Habituated choices are those that have become automatic. I don’t consciously choose to feed the cat while my coffee is brewing. It is something I do every morning without thinking about it. I leave my keys in the same place all the time so I don’t have to think about where to leave my keys. I never let my gas tank go below half full so I just automatically turn into the gas station when the fuel indicator is at about ½ full. No thought involved. But in all of these examples, there is a choice made.

Then there are choices made around the initial choice. If I want to have coffee, how many cups do I think I want this morning? Do I want my usual Folgers or do I want one of Peet’s varieties? If I am going out to lunch, what kind of food do I feel like having? Which restaurant do I want to go to? These kinds of choices define the area around that initial determination of having coffee or going out to lunch. In geometry, the initial choice to go out, for example, would be a single point on the page. The rest of the choices about what kind of food, etc., supporting that initial decision define the area around it – Length X Width = Area.

Then there are the choices that define the space, the volume (length X width X depth) of our life in which all of those things happen. These are the fundamental choices that we make about ourselves, our beliefs, our emotions, other people, our relationships, our work, how we see rest of the world. They shape and mold, and in many cases, twist and distort the choices we make on a daily basis. They not only effect the individual ones that define a singular point in space and time but all the others we make around those individual choices. Here are some examples of the kinds of foundational choices we might make. And keep in mind, sometimes we make a number of fundamental decisions that come to define who we are and how we live our lives.

I am good enough. I am not good enough. I can forgive myself. I am unforgivable. I can trust myself. I can’t trust myself. I seek to be understanding of others. I only try to understand people who try to understand me first. Love heals. Love hurts. I can easily create successes. I have to struggle with everything. I can handle it when challenges arise. I have to control everything so there are no surprises. I can handle my feelings. I avoid my feelings. I am responsible for my life, the good and the bad. I get to blame everybody else for anything bad in my life. I get to decide what matters in my life. I let other people tell me what matters in life. People are basically good. People are selfish and rotten. The world is a friendly place. The world is a scary place.

As you can see, the list could be and is, indeed, endless. But let’s look at one example very quickly. Love hurts. I’ve made the fundamental choice to believe that. Thus I will believe that if I love, I am going to get hurt. I will have an attitude of wariness and mistrust of others, especially anyone I might decide to date.  I will want to control. I will potentially think love is too much work or is a struggle or is not worth it. Or, that I need to keep love at arms’ length so that, if I get hurt, it won’t hurt as badly. I feel scared or mistrustful or suspicious. I may decide to sabotage my relationships before I can really get hurt. All of this and more out of just one fundamental choice that love hurts. And that colors and taints all the others I make about dating or not, intimacy on any level - not just physical, the level of caring I am willing to have and show, how vulnerable I am or am not willing to be. All the many many choices contained within that volume, that cube, that world of mine are defined by that fundamental decision that love hurts.

It is always a good idea to review the choices we make. The simple, point-in-time ones and then those we make around it that make it happen. And also to evaluate and review the environment, the structure of our own direction and design, that we have created for ourselves by the big choices, the foundational choices we make about ourselves and our lives.

Do you make good or bad choices? Do you practice making them? Do you think about their potential impacts and outcomes? Do you look at the really big foundational choices that don’t often come up for review? As you review and revise the big, fundamental choices you make, the single point-in-time choices you make will change. And as those choices change, the choices that you make around those single choices will change. And as all of those choices change, your life will change. Change for the better.

© 2021 Living Skills, Inc. All rights reserved in all media.

Living Skills offers positive psychology counseling, spiritual counseling, and life coaching services in Atlanta, and online. We are sensitive to the needs of the LGBT community. Sessions available by Skype. Please email us at livingskillsinc@gmail.com or visit www.livingskills.pro. Podcast: “The Problem with Humans” now available on Apple Podcasts, Buzzsprout, Google Podcast, Amazon Music, and Spotify, Overcast, Castro, Castbox, and Podfriend, as well as on my site. Follow us on Twitter - @livingskillsinc