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-Care is Self-Esteem – Part 1

So, let’s talk about Self-Esteem – What it is and what it is not. The “lack” of self-esteem has often been used as an excuse to justify or rationalize bad behavior. Somehow, if I or you lie, play games, are unfaithful, are deliberately hurtful, have no compassion, whatever, if we do those things because we are lacking in self-esteem, well then it isn’t as bad as if we had self-esteem and did those things. That is, of course, complete nonsense.

When people are dishonest or controlling or playing games or whatever, the truth is that those behaviors reflect a lack of character, a deficit in their principles and ideals. It is, funny enough, those old-fashioned values of having morals, character, and integrity that contribute greatly to the process of generating real self-esteem. However, it is a great deal more than that but if you read no further than the end of this paragraph, if you lived your life solely by those values and did nothing more, you would have more self-esteem on a daily basis.

Now, yes, esteem from others is important. We all want to be held in high esteem by others. That means we want to be respected and admired for who we are rather than for what we have accomplished. Although we can certainly be respected and admired for what we have accomplished in life, more importantly, we want to be respected for who we are. We want others to recognize our worth. We all want to be held in high regard by family, friends, and associates. However, being esteemed by others is not the same thing as self-esteem and being esteemed by others will not provide self-esteem. We must earn our self-esteem from ourselves.

Esteem is a real and an essential need. Psychologist Abraham Maslow is famous for having developed what he labelled as the Hierarchy of Needs. These needs are endemic to humans. Level One is Physiological Needs – air, food, water, shelter, sleep, clothing, etc. The things we need to survive physically.

Level Two is Safety Needs. Most people think of safety as a physical thing, absolutely. But we all also have mental, emotional, and spiritual needs that, when met, help us to feel safe. What those needs are can vary widely between people. As example, suppose you are one of those people who is driven by logic and reason, and you need the people around you to be logical and reasonable and rational. Then someone walks into your life who works off of their feelings and intuition. They follow their gut, logic be damned. That person might make your logical self feel profoundly unsafe. Level Two, meeting your safety needs and ensuring the security of your survival.

Level Three of the Needs Hierarchy is Love and Belonging. It is a human need to give, receive, and be loved. We all have the need and the desire to be intimate – close, tender, vulnerable, trusting, caring – with selected others. We all also need to feel like we belong – whether to a group, a tribe, a family, a place, an occupation, etc. Where do I belong in life? What kinds of people, what career or field of interest, what geographic location, is where I belong? We’ve all had the experience of being on the outside looking in, longing to belong - to the “cool” group or the jocks or a specific country club or a certain business association, or a specific house of worship or a recreational group. We need and want that sense of connection.

Then comes the need for esteem. Need Level Four – Esteem. From others, yes, but more importantly, from ourselves. “Why isn’t getting esteem from others enough? Seems to me it is better if I get it from someone else.” Are you sure? What happens if, for some reason, they stop holding you in high esteem? That doesn’t necessarily mean that they begin to dislike you but what if they move away or just drift away and you are unable to get your regular fix? Suppose you have hundreds or thousands of social medial followers? Now, having lots of social media followers may feed your ego but it won’t give you real self-esteem. That said, what happens if you fall out of favor, are deemed to have committed a microaggression or some other infraction and get cancelled? Whatcha gonna do? The real gift here is, and this applies to self-love as well as self-esteem, is that while no one can give these things to you, no one can take them away either when you are getting them from yourself.

When I teach and do counseling, I work off of a modified hierarchy and in my hierarchy, there are four additional levels above esteem but that is for another time. The thing to keep in mind about this hierarchy is that you need to be working to meet the needs of all four of the levels we’ve laid out above concurrently. You don’t wait until you’ve met all of your survival needs and then move up a level to working on your safety needs. And then once you’ve met all of your safety needs, then you can move up to love and belonging needs. No. All four levels must be attended to, though their immediate existential priority in relation to one another will change, often daily. Thus, meeting esteem needs is as important as meeting your survival needs. And, meeting the needs of each of these levels is an ongoing process. The nice thing about meeting our core needs is that we become happier people in the process.

Another nice thing about self-esteem is that when you find your life or yourself to have stopped growing and changing, when things have gotten stale, routine, dull, it can motivate you to keep on growing and stretching. To grow and stretch even more in service of, or at least heading in that direction, becoming all that you can be. This is not an ad for the army – “Be all that you can be.” – No. Maslow called it self-actualization, the peak, the culmination, the highest of the needs, our needs.

The choices we make and the beliefs that we hold are partially sourced from our self-esteem. As example, how often have you made a choice that you knew not to make because you knew what the fallout would be? And yet, you made that choice when you had other options and sabotaged a relationship or a job or even your life? And if not you, how many people have you seen self-sabotage or self-punish? And why did they make those choices? Because they believed they needed to or had to or deserved what they got or they just didn’t want to prove an errant belief wrong. “Nothing ever works out for me,” that is until you let something work out and then you get to see that yes it can, and that the world would remain on its axis. In order to generate more and more self-esteem, we can learn to evaluate potential outcomes of our choices before we act and we can practice, over time, making better and better choices as we go along. And we can root out and heal the errant beliefs like the one just mentioned so that they change into something more positive.

One more thing. Without our own sense of self-esteem, we run the risk of potentially taking on and living other people’s beliefs and other people’s choices. As example, if you are a supervisor or manager, you have seen people who live up or down to your expectations of them, unless they operate from their own expectations of themselves. People who take on the beliefs from others about their worth and what their lives can and can’t or will or won’t be. Or fulfilling a role we think are expected or destined to play rather than living a life that reflects our most authentic self.

Sometimes we wind up making the same kinds of choices we see others making, refusing to make choices for ourselves. I watched my mother self-sabotage herself more times than I can tell you. The choices were fear based but they were also self-sabotaging. Why did she do this? I learned early on that my nerve body couldn’t take that feeling of knowing I’d just deliberately fucked myself. Why did I make those choices? I made them to be self-punishing. Esteem will get you out of these kinds of places.

Self-esteem is our own value judgement of ourself. It is your self-evaluation of you. Your estimate of who you are. So let’s look at what are some valid criteria that we all can use to evaluate ourselves in a way that can generate real self-esteem? And then, what specifically are some things we can and must do daily?

As simple as this is going to sound initially, make the determination to be personally powerful. That is not so easy in our current world. There is a lot of self-pity and people feeling like victims. People feeling helpless. People feeling mistrustful of and anxious about pretty much everything. Pick your area – environment, civil rights, health care, education, whatever - I hear a lot of, “What is the point? The deck is stacked against us. Nothing will ever change.” Or, the ubiquitous “They”. “They did it to me. They are responsible, not me. I am powerless against whomever or whatever.”

First thing is to come to peace with the fact that you are not powerless nor are you helpless, and you are not a victim, in the greater scheme of things. That doesn’t mean bad or unwelcome things won’t ever happen in your life, but you are not, ultimately, a victim. You have power, meaning, you do have the ability to take actions in your life. Yes, there may be times so bad that you are paralyzed by fear or there may be times that you are so happy that you feel life is just going your way and you need take no actions in life for fear of rocking the boat. In either case, you eventually will need to take further positive actions in your life. The question is, are you willing to act, to take action, when necessary?

Start with recognizing that you are powerful enough to act, to have a sense of agency, that you are not helpless nor a victim. Then evaluate how willing you are to take action, to be powerful. Whether that means finding a new job; proposing to your significant other; finally going to the dentist even though you hate going; stop procrastinating about getting the oil changed in your car; applying to grad school; voting; appropriately standing up for yourself; going for that promotion – recognize that you are the only one who has the authority to give you the permission you need to take those constructive actions in your life. Knowing that you are neither helpless nor a victim, but rather are willing and able to act, you will, over time, generate more and more self-esteem.

Secondly, honestly evaluating how good you are at thinking and feeling. Yes, I have written and podcasted a lot about thinking and feeling. Self-esteem is one of the main reasons why. How good are you at each? Most people tend toward thinking everything through, being logical, rational, reasonable, trying to avoid feelings at all costs. (See my blog post and podcast on feelings.) Others prefer feelings, intuition, their gut response to life. They find thought too detached and arid and cold-blooded. If you want self-esteem, you will need more than a passing acquaintance with both your process and habits of thinking and feeling.

What kind of thinker are you? Are you a fast thinker, a slow thinker, a focused thinker, a clear thinker, a creative thinker?  Do you look at the quality of your thinking? That you had a thought is great but is it a good thought, a productive thought, a thought that will lead to good things? Do you practice thinking? How well acquainted are you with your thought process and how it works? Your mental habits. Do you ever question your own thoughts or thought processes? Do you ever work on thinking more clearly, more effectively, more powerfully? Do you work at developing your skill of thinking? Do you try to learn and think about new things, or do you tend to stick with what you know, however limited or expansive that may be?

How well do you feel? Do you feel deeply, powerfully, profoundly, consciously, intensely, or shallowly, reactively, superficially? How good are you at identifying your feelings or do they just sit there as a sort of vague unease until you are able to bury or forget them? Are you willing to go into the depth of your emotions or do you skate around the edges?

The second step is to evaluate and be aware and then set out to grow your ability to think and your ability to feel. Thinking for yourself and feeling what you feel, not what you think you should think or feel, not what you think others think you should think or feel. In our current world where too many blindly accept conspiracy theories, where too many are willing to be influenced by the “influencers” on social media for FOMO, where there is an abundance of folks everywhere who are more than willing to tell you what to think and feel, it is critical that you think and feel for yourself and that you deepen and stretch and grow your ability to think and feel. That will bring you more self-esteem.

One last point here. With your capacity to evaluate your ability to think and feel, it enables you to be able to learn from or get something from pretty much anything – a silly person, a forgettable television show, or a dull job. Without that ability, you could read or hear or watch something remarkably profound and life changing, and you’d miss it because you have not developed those deeper skills. Do the work here. The returns will be immeasurable.

Thirdly, evaluate your character. Do you live by your principles? There are several components to character. What ideals do you try to live by? Being an understanding person is an ideal, for example. Being understanding doesn’t mean you have to agree with everything you understand. But it does mean that you seek to understand yourself. You seek to understand other people and where they are coming from, and you try to see things from their perspective. Or you try to understand situations that you find yourself in that may be unexpected or foreign to you. Another ideal is being compassionate. Having empathy for others and the trials they may be facing. Compassion is often born from having experienced something similar and you understand the depth and breadth of what someone else is going through. Creativity is an ideal. Being a loving person is an ideal. Being honest is an ideal. Balance is an ideal. So is always doing the right thing. We may never reach the fullness of those ideals but in our striving to live by those principles, we become more.

Once you have some idea of what your ideals are, then you establish principles. Principles are the actions you will or won’t take in pursuit of those ideals. My ideal may be to be an honest person, but I also stick to my principle of not deliberately hurting anyone in being honest with them. Principles are boundaries in a sense. Character is the frequency with which you live by your principles. If I only do the right thing when other people are looking, then I don’t have much character. If I only behave responsibly when I have to or when someone makes me, I don’t have much character. Thus, a person who has character can identify and define their ideals, can delineate their principles, and adhere to them, live by them, and function within those boundaries. And those people will have a much greater sense of self-esteem.

We all evaluate our own character. Jean-Paul Sartre in his book, Being and Nothingness, talks about ‘Bad Faith.” Sartre makes a clear distinction between lying to oneself and lying in general. He writes, “The essence of the lie implies in fact that the liar actually is in complete possession of the truth which he is hiding. A man does not lie about what he is ignorant of . . .” He goes on, “. . .in bad faith it is from myself that I am hiding the truth.” “It follows first that the one to whom the lie is told and the one who lies are one and the same person, which means that I must know in my capacity as deceiver the truth which is hidden from me in my capacity as the one deceived. Better yet I must know the truth very exactly in order to conceal it more carefully . . .” And, Sartre insists, we will fail completely in deliberately and cynically attempting to lie to ourselves.  And we will fail because implicit in this is the knowledge that, on some level, we know good and well when we are lying to ourselves. No matter how much we try to justify or excuse or explain it away, we know. And it is that knowing that we are acting in bad faith toward ourselves, that we rob ourselves of self-esteem. When we do not live by our principles and ideals, when we fall short, when we do not act from a position of character, and we try to fool ourselves into believing that what we did wasn’t so bad or that it doesn’t matter, the price we pay is self-esteem because we know better on some level.

Abraham Lincoln said, “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.” The part he didn’t tell you is that you can’t ever really fool yourself because you know when you are dealing with yourself in bad faith.

So, to wrap up Part 1, first know that self-esteem is a real need. No fine print. Working to meet your needs is an ongoing , never-ending process that, as you work with it over time, becomes easier and more automatic.

Self-esteem can be what shakes you out of the doldrums when life has gotten routine or stale or habitual. It can and will motivate you to continue to grow and change and become more and, in so doing, become free from so much in life that can shackle you or impede you.

Self-esteem can be one of the reasons we learn to make ever-better choices and decisions in our lives.

Self-esteem is your self-evaluation of you. We all are certainly our own toughest critics. When all of the daily noise and distractions and diversions are gone and it is just you with you, no one else, and no one else will know what you really think of you but you, if you are OK in your own book, not perfect, not fabulous, not flawless, but really OK, then you are in a good place headed to even better places.

On a daily basis, claim your power. You do have the ability to act, to take positive, healthy, productive actions in your life. How willing you are to do so is a question you will have to answer. If you are unwilling to act, then know that is an obstacle that can be overcome. You are not helpless. You are not a victim. Victims don’t have self-esteem. They want someone to come and rescue them, fix their life for them. You have the authority to give yourself the permission to act, to be powerful. In so doing, you will have more self-esteem.

On a daily basis, evaluate how good you are at thinking and feeling. We all need to have more than a passing acquaintance with how we think and feel the way we do, and why we think and feel the way we do. We need to know our mental and emotional patterns and habits so we can improve them. And as we become more intimate with our own processes and keep working to improve the quality of those processes, the more self-esteem we will have. You have no idea how well this step alone will serve you.

On a daily basis, evaluate your character. Did you have the integrity to live up to your principles and ideals in pursuit of developing and enhancing your character today? The more you did, the more you’ll have.

Finally, three things to do that will change your life.

Honesty – Brutal honesty with yourself and tactful honesty with everyone else. Honesty about where you excel in life and where you can improve. Honesty about who and what you are and are becoming – the good, the bad, and the indifferent. Honesty about your goals and hopes and dreams and about your fears, your attempts to control and manipulate, your hidden agendas that no one else knows about, and the times you try to manipulate others. Honesty about your beliefs, attitudes, thoughts, feelings, decisions, choices, and about your intentions. Honesty about your expectations. The list is endless. When you come across things you don’t like about yourself or are not proud of, you have the power to do something about that. And, above all, be honest about the things you do well – your successes, your accomplishments, your ability to love and care and give of yourself, your strengths and your talents.

Responsibility - Responsibility is not, “Well, you made your bed, now lie in it.” Your ability to respond. You know when you are being responsible and when you are not. You know if you’ve met your commitments, your obligations, your duties, if you will, to yourself and others, and you know when you haven’t. You know how and when and where to be responsible and if you’ve done so, and you also know when you’ve procrastinated, put off, ignored your responsibilities like paying the electric bill or going to bed so you can get up and go to work in the morning or getting new brakes on the car for your safety and for the safety of those you love rather than spending that money shopping online and putting off the repair. The more you are responsible, the more self-esteem you will have.

Integrity – Doing the right thing because it is the right thing to do – always, even when no one else is watching, and even when you aren’t going to be praised for it because only you will know. Keeping your word, your commitments and promises to yourself and others. Integrity is saying what you mean and doing what you say. Integrity is being unfailing honest and trustworthy and reliable. Integrity is striving to not let yourself or others down and when you do, doing what you can to make things right again eventually.

This is a lot to digest, I know. And Part 2 is coming, so this is not the complete process. Self-esteem is a process – an ongoing, never-ending process. But it gets easier and becomes a part of who you are, so you won’t even have to think about it. You will just do it. If you need help with any of this, send us an email or give us a call. Start with all of the above. It will change you and it will change your life. I know this because once I learned this process, it changed me and my life forever.

Stay tuned for Part 2. And again, please let us know if we can be of help in any way.

© 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 Knowing Your Default Reaction

Self-care became a “thing” during the COVID pandemic. It isn’t that nobody thought about it or did anything about before then. People have been working on developing “healthy habits” for decades. As mental health came to the forefront in a more infsistent way during the crisis, self-help strategies have been talked about with frequency and openness. A lot of it is very surface, whether talking about physical self-care or emotional self-care. “Take Vitamin D. Zinc is essential. Go to yoga class. Give up sugar. Become a vegetarian. Give up red meat.” And as you wade through the deluge of advice about physical healthy living – please don’t forget to use sunscreen – you find what feels right works for you and what doesn’t. All good.

On the emotional/mental/spiritual front, there is also a lot of advice out there about what constitutes self-care on those levels. It is usually delivered in short nostrums intended to fix the self-care problem quickly, without a lot of fuss.  Now, in fairness, as far as a lot of this advice goes, most of it is fine – as far as it goes. As example, “Rewarding yourself for even small achievements is self-care.” Absolutely. Learning to honor ourselves and our achievements and accomplishments is an important life/spiritual lesson. Why? Because we are recognizing what we accomplished though our diligence or discipline or perseverance. And we are acknowledging that we did it. The reward should be proportional to the success. You clean house all day and take yourself out to dinner. OK. You clean house all day and then go binge buying online, not so much.

Another self-care idea I came across is, “Playing dumb to protect your energy is self-care.”  Um, no. Playing dumb is many things, but it is not self-care. I understand that acting like you don’t know anything about anything seems a way to keep yourself from getting drawn in to gossip or drama and, in fact, there is truth to that. However, there are times in life when it is important to stand up and be counted and put your two cents in. First of all, when you refuse to speak the truth in a situation where someone could be negatively impacted if you don’t say something, the price you will pay is your self-esteem because of the lack of your forthright honesty. Secondly, it’ll piss you off to no end when someone else regards you as a complete numbnuts. The deeper truth here is that you are not so fragile that you must constantly protect your energy. Becoming spiritually tougher will serve you well as you are not a delicate flower and learning to stand in your own truth will help you develop self-confidence.

We could go on, and we will in future columns, about some of the ideas about self-care out there. But I want to take that idea to a deeper level. An important aspect of self-care is about knowing and learning to manage your default reaction setting. We all set a pattern fairly early in life in how we react to the unexpected, both good and bad unexpected. These patterns become default settings. The self-care aspect here is learning which of these settings is yours in order to manage and, hopefully, heal it as these are not things you would want to give into. Most of us fall into one of these seven categories: anger, hurt, fear, loneliness, despair, hopelessness, or shame.

Keep in mind that feeling each of these can lead to one of the others. For example, your default reaction is fear but when you get fearful, you also get angry in response to the fear, or you get aggressive as a way to quickly dispel the fear. Or when you feel lonely you can fall into despair about being lonely. You get the idea. But let’s start with what is your first reaction, your knee-jerk reaction, if you will.

Mine was always fear. Something unexpected happened, didn’t even have to be necessarily very negative, and I would go into fear. What would happen as a result of this occurrence? Had I done something wrong? Was this a sign that my life was about to fall apart? What did this portend for me? Now, I had to learn to put things in context. If Kroger was out of broccoli cole slaw for a couple of weeks, did that mean that I was being deprived and would need to alter my diet? Probably not. If someone misunderstood something I said, did I need to be fearful of being either judged or completely misunderstood and in that, somehow being subject to punishment? You see how silly and extreme It can get.

If your default is fear, how likely is it that what you fear will happen? How significant is this fear? Should this fear be realized, is it something that can easily be corrected or is it something that puts your well-being at risk? How rational is the fear or is your ego having a field day with you as it knows where to push your buttons? If, for example, you make a mistake at work, will you really be fired for it or is it OK to admit the mistake and correct it? If you are inconsiderate with your significant other but didn’t really mean to be, you just had other things on your mind, will they really leave you for someone more understanding – remember love’s greatest fear is loss - or can you apologize and ask them for the chance to make it right now that you are no longer distracted?

How big is the fear really? How likely is it to occur? Is the potential outcome really that devastating? In what context is this happening? How significant is it and how much does it matter? Start with these kinds of questions if your default setting is fear. And there is a lot of fear and uncertainty in the world right now and it can be very easy, when we automatically go into fear, to use that fear as proof positive that everything is going to hell in a handbasket and no good will come of anything, so the fear builds and compounds, instead of being addressed. Finally, in looking at some of your worst-case scenarios, design a Plan B. If whatever I fear does happen, what is my plan? What will I do about it?

Others get angry when the unexpected occurs. For some, getting angry helps them to feel powerful enough to cope. We all know people, often men, who walk around with an underlying anger that is just under the surface. A good friend, who has been an air traffic controller, had worked for years in his spiritual development, to release his habit of being the “last angry man.” At heart he was a kind and loving and generous human, but his default was anger. Most people don’t know how to process and release anger in a constructive way, so they stuff it in their shirt pocket and walk around with it. When he had a stroke, which he survived pretty much intact, he was furious with his body and with God because as a spiritual person, that wasn’t supposed to happen to him. He felt shocked and betrayed and angry as hell. Rather than deal with his anger and living out a nice long life, he turned that anger on himself and did not follow his doctor’s advice and was dead in two years.

Others react aggressively in the face of anger. You just pissed me off or weren’t listening or whatever and I immediately go into anger rather than trying to figure out what just happened and why. And in my aggression spurred on by my anger, I can ruin relationships or jobs, by doing and saying something destructive or hurtful. Anger can be a very healthy emotion, but part of self-care is learning how to deal with it – recognize it, process it, and release it appropriately. And not everything that makes you angry rises to the level of importance that it is worth going to Defcon 3. If I forget to stop and by milk on the way home, is it worth a huge angry blowup? Just knowing you are headed into anger can help you walk yourself back from the immediate reaction edge, calm down, and make an informed decision as to how you would like to respond.

Hurt hurts. Right? When someone or something hurts us, it can tear at our self-esteem as well. And hurt takes time to heal. More than any other emotion, you have to give hurt time to heal. And you have to do the healing work. No one can do it for you. With that in mind, not everything that surprises us or that we don’t like or is unexpected is really hurtful. Yet for some of us, we have become habituated in our thinking and in our expectations that we are going to get hurt. Once those paths of least resistance get laid out in our brain structure, that is where we go. So the first question one would ask oneself is, “Is this really hurtful?” Or is it disappointing or challenging or unwelcome or whatever? If you still feel it is, then you want to look at why. Why is this hurtful? Or are you flirting with feeling like a victim? Meaning, whatever is happening, is it being done to you deliberately with the intent of causing emotional harm or are you feeling like a victim and powerless?

This is not the column to delve into the process of healing hurt but to make you aware, if it is your default setting, make you conscious of this pattern and begin breaking it up and lightening your load. The world is not out to hurt you. Life will still have its challenges. But you can heal and make your life easier. One more thing. If this is your default reaction, then either prepare yourself to take in stride answers you may not like to questions like – “Do these jeans make me look fat? “Did you like the peanut butter and sardine pannini?” – or don’t ask questions you may not want the honest answer to until you are ready for an honest answer. Just sayin’.

Loneliness. A big subject and one I will deal with, in more depth, in a future blog and podcast. That feeling of, “Here I am again, out here on a limb or floating on a life raft in the middle of the ocean, all alone. No one to help me. No one to care about me. No one to help lift the burden once again.” You want to be careful here not to let this slide into self-pity, feeling sorry for yourself. Yet that howl of loneliness, out in the cold and dark, alone, can be crazy making.

Anger, hurt, fear and loneliness, if left unexpressed, can become destructive. As with the first four, loneliness and can dealt with and healed. That doesn’t mean you will never ever feel those emotions again. There will always be things that, potentially, make you angry or that hurt you or something that makes you afraid. But you are not consigned to a life of loneliness. There are a lot of layers to loneliness. Where to start is to begin to source where that loneliness came from. Many of us were motivated, as kids in school, to learn and keep up, or we would be left behind, alone, while everybody else moved on in life. Adolescence, a time when we are beginning to discover who we are separate from our families. Our bodies are rushing us into adulthood, and we want to find out where we belong and fit in. We want to be cool and accepted. But, if we’re not, we will be alone – so goes the emotional blackmail. For example, if you don’t know the entire Marvel Universe movies series, in order and know all the plot lines, you are toast. Right?

Where did the threat of being left all alone begin for you? What happened? Even those of us in development can be threatened. I worked for a while with the Ramtha material when I first started my spiritual path. Then one day Ramtha said in a seminar, that all gay men would be thrown out into the void. Anyone who is a supposed spiritual leader who peddles fear in order to make you conform is no spiritual leader. Period.  But that fear of loneliness – you are gay and you are doomed in the eyes of God – is a very familiar threat to many of us.

A way to begin to break that cycle? First, let yourself feel it. Maybe I am feeling lonely at the moment for no particular reason. Perhaps an event occurred that left me feeling humiliated and alone.  You can learn, as with any emotion, to sit with it for a few minutes – without telling yourself any stories about why you feel it or justifying to yourself why you feel it – and then release it. It is a feeling, not a life sentence. Then look at – did an expectation suddenly change? A trip you were planning suddenly got cancelled for whatever reason. Your date for a party bails on you last second. The future you envisioned for yourself or the job you wanted suddenly changes or is gone. Your significant other relationship suddenly goes sour. Sudden changes in expectation can leave you feeling lonely. It isn’t just what you were expecting changed. It is the suddenness of that shift in your expectation that produces the feeling of loneliness. “I’ve been suddenly, abruptly, abandoned and am left to deal with this all on my own.”

The crazy thing is that even when something wonderful happens – you get that job or relationship or car you have been wanting – you can still feel lonely at first, singled out, set apart because of the sudden shift in what you were expecting. And, no, the answer is not to go through life expecting nothing. That is harmful, limiting, and impossible. And if your knee-jerk or default reaction is loneliness, remember this. You can depend upon yourself, even if that negative ego voice in your head says you can’t. You do deserve. You are worth loving. And, yes, ultimately, you can cope with what life throws at you on a daily basis. Start here with all the times you have been able to depend on yourself and go from there. Also, please reference our blog post and podcast on Authenticity. The more you are authentic, that sense of being in touch with your authentic self can help you build the confidence you need here.

Despair. Despair is the worst form of loneliness. That hopelessness. That feeling of helplessness. “Nothing ever works out for me. What’s the point? It/life/relationships are just hopeless.” Then start doing things for other people. It can be as simple as asking someone how their day was and then being present and actively listening to their response. Or invite someone for a cup of coffee or offer to help someone complete chore they don’t really want to do. Get involved. I did volunteer work for many years. It will help begin to move you back into a more balanced place. But whatever you choose to do, do it from a place of honestly wanting to do it.

As with loneliness, what expectation suddenly shifted? Feel the despair and then begin to do something for someone else. There are people in your life who you do honestly and genuinely care about and love. Love and caring – not self-sacrifice – are tremendously powerful gifts that you have at your disposal. Despair has nothing to do with whether or not you are worth loving. Be careful to not let yourself slip into feeling sorry for yourself. And look at what expectation suddenly shifted and work on releasing it.

Hopelessness.  Hope is tremendously powerful. It is not the emotion of last resort nor is it an emotion of desperation – “Well, when all else fails, at least there is hope.” No. Hope is a gift from the Divine. That said it can wax and wane. Some days you have more and some less, but it is always available to you. That said, if hopelessness is your default reaction, take a moment examine if what is happening is really an issue of hope. As example, something you are trying to learn just isn’t making sense to you. Is it that it is really hopeless for you to learn it or are you trying to make yourself understand and use something that has no interest for you at all?

Another place to examine hope is in your anticipations and expectations. Anticipation is what you expect will happen before it actually happens. The job you want, the relationship you are working toward, even relatively simple things like the movie you are going to see or the dinner out that you are looking forward to, you have anticipations attached to those about what you think they will be like. You anticipate/hope the relationship or dinner or movie or job, etc., will be like this or that. Then the event of whatever nature happens. What did you expect would come of it? Regarding the movie you are highly anticipating, you also expect will lead to a fun evening as a whole. But what happens, where do you go when the movie turns out to be a dud? The job you anticipated getting and finally have, you expected would bring you a greater sense of accomplishment or achievement. What happens when it doesn’t? You get the idea but when life throws you curve balls like a lousy dinner out, maybe you put too much weight on what you anticipated and expected the dinner to do for you and your life. Look at your anticipations and expectations.

Secondly, when something does not turn out the way you expected or happen in the way you anticipated, look around your life at the people, activities and things that inspire you and that you love. That which helps you get in touch with where your passions in life truly are. A lousy dinner or a meh date may suck but it won’t damage your passion for meeting new people or having fun. You get my point.

Thirdly, where can and do you trust yourself? We posted a blog and podcast about trust that you have access to. Where do you trust your own instincts, your own wisdom, your own abilities, and your own processes? If your ego jumps in here and tells you that you can’t trust a thing about yourself, that is usually a good indicator you are headed in the right direction because if you can get back in touch with where and how and why you can trust yourself, your negative ego loses its ability to tell you life is hopeless and that you stink.

Hope is an enormous subject that we can’t possibly cover here but those are few good places to start.

Shame. Shame is when you feel flawed and defective, that there is something wrong with you. Counseling is often required to help you lift it. It gets started in our lives when we are asked to be responsible for things we can’t be responsible for. A silly example. When I was young, I had a piano teacher who gave me a piece of music that was way too hard for me. Instead of helping me learn where my obstacles were in developing the ability to play the piece, he made me feel less than, accused me of not trying, and offered no help. But it was his decision where we started my lessons, rather than building a relationship between us and allowing me to work my way up to increasingly more difficult pieces. I felt defective, that I could and never would learn to play difficult pieces, and that was the end of my musical instruction in this life.

Another example. You have a business whose product line is either every limited or is of mediocre quality or is overpriced. Business is down. You hold your staff responsible for the lack of sales, but the issue is with your product line. How can they be responsible, but you nevertheless hold them responsible? That shames them. When you are asked to be responsible for something – “If you loved me, you’d know what I need.” – that you can’t possibly be responsible for, that produces shame. So, if shame is your default setting, start with the question – “Am I being asked to be responsible for something I can’t possibly be responsible for?” If you can’t be responsible for the issue being presented, then refuse to take on that mantle of something that could not have been your responsibility. Refuse to wrap yourself up in something you had no control over. If it is something you were or could be responsible for, then take your power back by taking action to correct or ameliorate the situation.

Shame is a very tough emotion to handle all on your own. But if and when it rears its ugly head in your life, you need not be at sufferance of it. And, if it is your default, are you, in fact, being asked to take responsibility for something that is beyond what you could have been responsible for?

A long column and podcast about a very big subject. Knowing your knee-jerk reaction and being able to work with it – yes, you are able to work with it – can be an immensely important step toward authenticity and is a critical part of self-care. To be authentic you need to know who you are and to tell yourself the truth about all of who you are. As you can begin to work with and mitigate the damage that inappropriate but habitual reactions can cause, you set yourself on a path of being more powerful, more authentic, having more self-esteem, and discovering more of your self-value. Please let us know if we can be of help in any way.

© 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

Living with Uncertainty

The most common complaint I hear from friends, family, colleagues, is that everybody is exhausted and worn down, to some extent or another, by living for so long in a constant state of uncertainty – about everything. In all aspects of our individual and collective lives, the ground under our feet won’t stop shifting.

What’s next? What’s coming now? What else? I walked into a Trader Joe’s on a recent Sunday night, a time I never usually shop for groceries, and was floored. All of the fresh fruit and veggies, all the bagged salad, bagged veggies, all of it was gone. Not an onion or banana to be had. I asked one of the employees if this is what the store usually looked like at 7P on Sundays. I was assured that it was not. They didn’t get in a truck. All I could think of were the stories I read in high school about the bare shelves in Soviet state stores and I wondered, “Is that where we are headed?”

Last September when we wrote about “The Hydra Head Of COVID,” we talked about the various kinds of impact that COVID has had on people, on their lives, on relationships, on who we knew ourselves to be. We talked about old structures and old ways of doing things, especially on a societal level, are crumbling and there aren’t many new ones being erected yet as states literally burn, the pandemic rages on, people are leaving their jobs in droves (the Great Resignation), and the truck with whatever essential goods didn’t come or isn’t coming.

One of my teachers on my path began talking of a “New Paradigm of Uncertainty,” back in 2018. Now, I usually try to make the concepts and ideas I write about practical and applicable. However, here we are going to have to venture into the slightly abstract for a bit to begin to unpack these ideas and make them more practical.

The New Paradigm of Uncertainty:

·       The Freedom of Uncertainty

·       The Wonder of Possibility

·       The Wisdom of Working Together in Harmony

·       The Courage to Keep Exploring

We are all apprehensive of uncertainty. We all like the certainty of, “This is the way the world works. Period. I like knowing what to expect is coming tomorrow.” Now we are all used to dealing with anxiety on a personal level. Will I make this meeting on time? Is this person “the one?” Will they like me? What will my new job be like? Who will my kids turn out to be? We all know that there are no guarantees and no certain outcomes but we have all developed certain strategies in different parts of life that we have come to rely on to keep the chaos at bay and usually ensure that things turn out pretty much the way we want and expect.

But what can we do when the trepidation of apprehension sets in? We can become anxious and fearful, even dreading what might happen and then we tend to lock down and man the barricades. Instead, keep in mind apprehension is not necessarily a bad thing. What is the immediate apprehension here? I may not immediately have an answer but part of the freedom that uncertainty gives us is that we get to make different choices as to how we respond to our apprehensions and forebodings. Does a decision have to me made right now or is it possible to take a step back and wait and see what other information or new ideas might come our way?

Several things to watch out for here. One is impatience. “I want answers right now.” And, if we don’t get those immediate answers, off we go into frustration and, sometimes, anger. Also, some decide to try to control all of the variables and force the desired outcome. Better to deal with the fear underneath the desire to control than to white-knuckle our way through life. For others, instead of outright impatience they decide, “I want to understand why something is happening before I do anything about it.” That is my fave.

When an outcome or future outcome is uncertain, use the freedom you have to choose and work toward – not control – the end result you want. I have the freedom to stop and look at and pull apart my fears and apprehensions. I have the freedom to make new and different choices. I have the freedom not to go into impatience or control or frustration or anger. I can work with those emotions to release them. And I have the freedom to keep amassing data and information as it emerges before I make decisions about an uncertain future.

And I have the freedom to change or alter my perspective. I have the freedom to try to see things differently. A silly example I’ve used before – A co-worker, with whom you are friendly, one morning is very curt with you. Do you decide that you should have known all along that they were rotten and no good or do you think that since this is someone you know, they may just be having a bad morning? Which perspective is correct? Who gets to choose? Perspective - What am I after? What am I trying to accomplish here? What do I hope for? How do I usually see things? What apprehensions need I deal with that might cloud my vision and my understanding? How might I see this differently? And when you find yourself absolutely sure about something, it never hurts to check – Are you certain?

Finally for those with anxiety, please reference our post and podcast entitled, “Running Anxiety.”

Wonder. Wonder gets a dirty name. “The wide-eyed wonder of children.” As adults, we don’t have time for that childish nonsense. Actually, we wonder all the time, only we do it in the negative sense of worry. What if we wondered about what new opportunities we’d like? Or what new chances would we like to begin again? What new hopes and dreams? Is any of this possible? Why not?

Too many of us, the idea of possibility is like walking into the paint store, hoping to find just the right color, and we get overwhelmed by too many options/too many choices. Some of us have reached a point of cynicism where our response to new possibilities is, “Yeah, the other shoe will fall.” However, we can gather our courage and be curious about positive new ideas, hopes, goals. We can sharpen our discernment of possibility with the wisdom we’ve accumulated from past experience. Thus, some possibilities might, upon further examination prove interesting and worth pursuing, while other possibilities won’t feel right, at least not right now.

In fairness, opening to the possible, the positive possible, in our times can be challenging. Thus, take it as something to practice doing over time, not something to do once and cross off your list.

Possibility leads to hope. And you cannot hope without being open to the possibility that it will happen. Finally, don’t be afraid to challenge your imagination to show and do more. What more could I imagine here? What is beyond what I can imagine? Not fantasy. Imagine.

The wisdom of working together in harmony. People fight the idea, that we are all in this together, kicking and screaming. Seems sort of self-evident that however the chaos of the world came to be, we all had a hand in it somewhere and, thus, we are all going to have to fix the world. COVID has and continues to make reaching out in person potentially problematic. But as it clears, turn from the uncertainty and reach out, in whatever capacity, to others involved in something that matters to you. This way you get to put your two cents in as to what will emerge from the chaos and come into being.

Yes, this is all rather esoteric, in a sense. It makes more sense once experienced. Uncertainty, admitting “I don’t know,” can open doors to knowledge. We also get driven inward to find an anchor and a refuge from the stuff outside that is uncertain. And in that process we can find stability. As external and internal security grows, we become more and more open to going with the flow of our life and letting it evolve rather than trying to control.

And, yes, it will take courage to keep exploring. Courage here does not mean absence of fear. It means knowing the kind of person you want to be and the kind of life you want to live and in that determination to keep exploring yourself and the world as the new normal emerges.

There is not nor will there be a quick fix for living with uncertainty, even as it will eventually subside as a new normal emerges. But take bits and pieces of the above as so suits you to work with. You just might come away less uncertain and more confident about the future.

© 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

Perfect

I clearly remember when I started hearing the response, “Perfect,” to pretty much anything said in a conversational exchange. Could be on the phone with customer service about my computer or the cable company and as they are asking me to try different things to get everything working, I would respond that I’d done whatever they had said to do. “Perfect,” was the response every time. “Well,” I tell a friend, “I’ve got to go to the grocery store tomorrow.” “Perfect.” “Then I thought I’d finally pick up the extension cord I’ve been needing.” “Perfect.” “I want to see if my right big toe will fit in my left nostril.” “Perfect.”

Now “Perfect” used to be reserved and used as a superlative indicating something was exceptional or had surpassed expectations in some way. Now it substitutes for, “OK.” At first, hearing the word more than I was used to was oddly comforting. We all like praise for doing well. But as it became more ubiquitous, it became oddly disconcerting. Things were being referred to as being perfect, but those things didn’t rise to a level where perfection should even have been a consideration.

Now I am reading in the press that the drive for individual perfectionist tendencies has become widespread and problematic since the early 00s. (Perfectionism Is Increasing Over Time: A Meta-Analysis of Birth Cohort Differences From 1989 to 2016 – published in the Psychological Bulletin of the American Psychological Association in 2017) The authors, Thomas Curran, University of Bath, and Andrew P. Hill, York St. John University write, “From the 1980s onward, neoliberal governance in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom has emphasized competitive individualism and people have seemingly responded, in kind, by agitating to perfect themselves and their lifestyles. . . Cross-temporal meta-analysis revealed that levels of self-oriented perfectionism, socially prescribed perfectionism, and other-oriented perfectionism have linearly increased. . . the findings indicate that recent generations of young people perceive that others are more demanding of them, are more demanding of others, and are more demanding of themselves.”

While there are societal pressures eliciting this kind of behavior, let’s take a step back and have a look at how misleading and potentially dangerous this striving ultimately is.

Often, when we feel we have to do something perfectly or everything perfectly, we immediately run into two problems. First, perfect is the enemy of good enough. In truth, good enough is good enough. Why? Because, problem number two, for something to be perfect it must remain unchanging, static. Perfection is a static state. Works of art like a Monet painting are perfect because they hang on a wall and never change. They are perfect just the way they are. Humans are constantly growing, changing, and evolving. We are imperfect. Therefore, it is neither possible nor desirable for us to remain fixed because we learn, we change, we grow.

“I have the perfect solution,” and, therefore, we must do it this way. “I have the perfect idea or perfect concept.” Problem herein is that once something has been deemed perfect, it is given no room to change and evolve. We get so caught up in something being the one true way, that it almost becomes dogma versus a living, breathing process. We block out learning along the way. We can become absolutist rather giving ourselves the space to explore and learn. Why must something be perfect in order to merit taking action? Why isn’t it enough that a solution or idea is practical or workable or even a good interim step?

Are we allowed to make missteps or mistakes? Of course we are. Whose rules are these that we can’t? How else can we learn? Where else would the motivation come from to take risks, try new things? One thing I have learned as truth is that when I make a mistake, I need to be the one to hold my hand up, say, “Yeah, I did it.” And then ask for help or forgiveness or both. People will break their backs to help you. They won’t if you make excuses, try to place blame elsewhere, deny responsibility, or whine about how hard something is. But admit something isn’t working or didn’t work and, “Here, let me help you,” will be the response. And next time and the time after that and the time after that you’ll get better and better and better at problem solving or coming up with better courses of action, personally and professionally.

Very often, when we feel we must do something perfectly, what we are telling ourselves is that we don’t trust ourselves – our judgment, our thought processes, the quality of our work, our ability to honestly communicate in relationships, or our ability to be and do good enough. Think about what has become a stock answer to the interview question, “What is your greatest weakness?” “I tend to be a perfectionist in my work.” Problem here is that not only is it a cop-out answer, it can hide tendencies of being unyielding, intemperate, uncooperative, or unwilling to see other people’s point of view.

Beneath that, what is the fear? If we are not perfect at work, what will happen? Will we be disciplined? Demoted? Ostracized? Fired? In that process we will, in some way, undermine our own judgment and ability to think critically or creatively, and our trust in our own work. And it is us doing it to ourselves. How realistic are those fears? Yeah, the workplace is competitive and, in too many workplaces, the idea is that we are all replaceable in a moment’s notice. “Well, Schmendrick made a mistake or their work was less than perfect so let’s get rid of them.” Is that the kind of place you’d want to work? Are the people you work for really like that? Any great inventor, thinker, writer, etc., will tell you that they failed many times along the way to their greatest successes as it was those mistakes and the places where they fell short that they learned and changed their perspectives, or got new ideas or new inspiration, or found a new direction or solution.

In relationships, how can you or anybody possibly be perfect? What you will most likely do is wind up doing one of two things. One is that you will walk on egg shells around your friends or family or significant other. Heaven forbid you say or do the wrong thing. You could piss them off or make them unhappy and they won’t like/love you anymore. Or they will abandon/betray/humiliate you because you weren’t perfect? Or you accept whatever they throw at you, good and bad, so as to not jeopardize your standing with them and potentially lose the relationship. You wind up diminishing or invalidating your own needs in the relationship so as to not be demanding and, therefore, less than perfect. Or you lose yourself completely in trying to meet all of their needs so that they deem you the perfect friend, partner, relative, parent.

Think about the people who try to be the perfect parent. They often fall into the trap of trying to be their kids’ best friend instead of the person who teaches them how to best make their way through life and what it means to be fully and completely human in the very best sense of what that can mean. Teaching them to love and care and have compassion for themselves and others. Encouraging their dreams. Being there when they fall short. And also teaching them that everything in life comes with consequences – both good and bad - depending on the choices made. Thus, teach them how to make good choices. But nowhere in that is there a demand of doing it perfectly.

Think about the stress we place on ourselves when we hold ourselves to the standard of perfection. “I must succeed in doing the impossible.” Stress eventually wears us down and affects our physical, emotional, and mental health. Anxious, fearful, undermining our strengths and abilities, and what we know as our own sound judgment. We begin to question and doubt ourselves and self-doubt – whether you are doubting yourself or making someone else doubt themselves – is very damaging. Yes, be skeptical so that you can re-examine the way you approach your life and its problems. Yes, learn from that re-examination and that willingness to see things differently. But swan diving into self-doubt because you can’t be perfect is a no win proposition.

The demand of being perfect has been shown to lead to things like eating disorders and PTSD. It has also been linked to such issues as bulimia, anorexia, depression, anxiety, and more. It is not a healthy behavior and yet, I can hear someone thinking – “Well, at least we know what can happen. Perfect.”

Certainly in life, strive to do your best. Putting your best foot forward, in that sense, at work or with friends or family and, most importantly, with yourself, is a good thing. It means that you are open to doing better with everything you do, learning along the way, but also enjoying the journey in a way that demanding perfection never will allow. Some days you will be glorious in your achievements and other days – meh. Welcome to the human experience. Winston Churchill put it best, “"To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often." Change is really the only constant in life, as much as we may tell ourselves we hate change. But when we learn that we can improve almost anything in our lives, just a little bit every day, then we have opened the door to the potential of ongoing happiness and continued success.

© 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

Attention vs Affection

Attention and affection are both very important needs but they are different. Be clear as to which you are seeking and why.

Attention is a big deal. It is in the giving and receiving of attention that we become equal in one another’s eyes. If I pay attention to you or you to me, that means we have decided that this person is worth the time and effort and acknowledgment that attention provides. Nothing drives people up a wall faster than being ignored. It is certainly one of my pet peeves. There is an eyeglass store in Midtown Atlanta that has been in its location for a number of years now. Every time I have been in that store, none of the sales people have ever bothered to acknowledge my existence. Doesn’t matter how I am dressed, the time of day, nor the placement of the stars in the heavens.

We all want attention. We all seek attention. Why? Because it provides a sort of validation from others that in their eyes, we are worth them paying attention to. And as you have seen, in our current world, it seems like everyone is seeking to stand out and garner, and in many cases monetize the attention, recognition and validation they are getting, mostly via social media. Others use social media to hookup. They want the attention that provides, as long as it is “no strings attached” but the minute emotion, affection enters the picture, they move on despite the fact that what they are most likely seeking on a deeper level, is true affection.

Conversely, others of us, mostly us introverts, do not like attention or being in the spotlight. For many years I actively practiced hiding in plain sight and am still quite adept at being invisible, especially in a crowded room, in contrast to the people who strive to be the center of attention. They feed off the energy that the attention provides them, whereas for me, I find it exhausting after a while. I prefer operating quietly, behind the scenes, and am very effective in that role of making things happen without it having to be all about me. We shun the spotlight but that does not mean we shun accomplishment.

But regardless of whether you are a person who actively seeks attention, or welcomes it in limited quantities on occasion, or you do your best to avoid it, it is always – ALWAYS – useful to look at what you pay attention to in your life. The things you feed your attention to tend to grow and the things/people/places/activities we withhold attention from tend to wither and fall away in our lives. Do you only give attention to getting more and more attention or do you give attention, for example, to things like the important relationships in your life? Hard to do when you are constantly giving your attention to your phone. Just sayin’.

Do you give attention to needs like what makes you feel safe and secure in life – physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually? Do you give attention to generating a real sense of self-esteem from within or do you get caught in the insatiable and impossible task of seeking it from others?  Do you pay attention to your need to be really creative – rather than just pumping out content to stay relevant on social media? Do you give attention to creating and producing substantive accomplishments or are you relying on whatever captures your attention at the time? Needless to say, attention to self and one’s deeper needs like self-esteem, like being creative and being productive, is not only important but is paramount. Those deeper needs do not go away even when we get the dopamine hit that momentary attention provides.

We all need love and happiness; and passion and compassion; and hope and trust; and the thrill, the eagerness, excitement, the enthusiasm of just being alive. We also want to feel optimistic about our lives and need and want a sense of well-being. Do we pay attention to the primacy of those needs within ourselves and seek to meet them or do we focus our attention solely on the hit of a response to a text message?

The things we pay attention to are often what we manifest in our lives. So it is useful to inventory and review the things we feed with our attention. The things we feed with our attention often become habituated. Do you feed your hope or your cynicism, for example? Do you feed competitiveness, your jealousies, your grudges, your feelings of being unappreciated? Or do you feed joy and love and friendship and fun?

Attention seeking is also a way to try to staunch the pain, frustration and even despair of loneliness. As connected as we all are, there is a lot of loneliness out there in our world and that loneliness will not be assuaged by surface level connection. The worst loneliness is being lonely in a loving relationship or even when surrounded by friends. I have long referred to it as the howl of loneliness wherein the sense of isolation and alienation and even despair can be so overwhelming that there seems no way out. Many of us have all felt, at one time or another in our lives, that unanswered and unanswerable howl.

I have a column planned on the subject of loneliness as it is a big subject, just as is attention. But one of the surest symptoms of loneliness is becoming consumed with being superficially popular. That driving need to be popular, having lots and lots of superficial friends and acquaintances but none of those relationships having any depth or substance. How many people do you know who make no distinction between acquaintances and real friends? Real friends – the people who will drop everything and be there – good times and bad – when you need and/or want them there. Ask Dickens wrote in Nicholas Nickleby, “Family not only need to consist of merely those whom we share blood, but also for those whom we’d give blood.”

The need for attention and the desire to staunch the howl of loneliness often replaces, for many, the real need of affection. The withdrawal of affection or, even worse, the absence of affection from those we love or care about threatens to leave us lonely and alone. And that loss or absence of affection causes pain, real mental, emotional and spiritual pain. The Dalai Lama said, “We can live without religion and meditation, but we cannot survive without human affection.”

We all need affection and that need for genuine affection is something worth paying attention to. Our friends at Oxford Languages via Google say that affection is “a gentle feeling of fondness or liking.” If you look at the many definitions of affection available online, fondness is one of the most common words used in relation to describing what affection is. Merriam-Webster.com also defines affection as, “a feeling of liking and caring for someone or something.” We all want to be liked and cared for and have people feel fond of us. Yes, love is also included in affection but it need not be what we feel to feel affectionate toward someone. “Affectionate attachment” is another term found commonly.

There are all kinds of ways to express or give affection. Physically things like cuddling, holding hands, hugging, etc. Words of affirmation; acts of service; receiving gifts; quality time; and physical touch are commonly associated with ways affection is shown or given. These five things are often associated with what has come to be called the languages of love but they are ways of expressing and receiving affection.

It is an important need. Yet do we pay any attention to giving affection to ourselves or is it always better if someone else gives it to us? How do we give ourselves any affirmation about who we are and what we do and accomplish and who we are becoming? What acts of service do we provide for ourselves or do we tend to treat ourselves in a very utilitarian manner? What do we give of ourselves, to ourselves, like our humor, compassion, intellect, patience? Can we spend quality time alone with ourselves or would we rather chew glass than be alone with ourselves? When was the last time you made yourself laugh because you thought of something funny that only you would understand?

Too often in our current world people substitute and settle for attention, any kind of attention, any port in a storm, rather than seek and cultivate real affection from themselves and from others. Attention, as discussed above, is valuable and essential in our lives but it will not replace the genuine need for affection. Affection, like trust, is something that grows and is earned over time. There is no easy or quick fix to meeting that need. So, by all means, grab all the attention you think or feel you need and want but be careful about thinking it will meet the deeper and more important need of genuine affection.

© 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

Dramatic vs. Drama

There is drama and there is being dramatic. Being dramatic is an act of expressing what feel like big emotions. Drama is elevating the trivial or less significant things or events to an inappropriate level of meaning and significance.

Now, admittedly, being dramatic can be fun for both the person being dramatic and the people listening in the sense of dramatization. Think of the people who are great story tellers or great writers. They have a way of elevating the mundane into something compelling and interesting. They are often articulate and very observant and have a way of using their observations to embellish and enrich the stories that they are telling. They often are very funny and in touch with the irony of a situation. A woman I have known for many years has a way of making a trip to the store for tomato paste fascinating. The preparation for the excursion; the trip itself; the process of finding the tomato paste, or not, the people she met in the process, all carefully wrought and expressed in a way that leaves you hungering for more.

Or the writers who can fully imagine a world and its inhabitants and bring them to life in such a way as to make it not only real but they also fully immerse you in the world of their creation. My favorite novelist, Richard Russo, has a brilliant way of tackling tough events and situations and sometimes heart-rending emotions in a way that is unmatched. And, he can also be very funny when it serves his purposes of dramatization.  People like this are to be cherished for their dramatic skills.

Sometimes, being dramatic is a way good way of expressing emotions that feel, at the moment, too big or too overwhelming or too unbelievable or too wonderful. I have been known to go on dramatic rants when I am frustrated with something that makes no sense to me. These rants are often very funny to the people listening and allow me to blow off steam, but they are a rare occurrence and not a daily activity nor my usual way of expressing what I am thinking and feeling. And yes, sometimes being dramatic serves us well in expressing the good stuff sometimes.

Dramatization can play an important role in understanding. People have new ideas and inspirations and goals all the time. But how often do they stop to evaluate if the idea or inspiration or goal is a good idea or achievable or desirable? Do they stop and evaluate the potential outcomes of their thoughts or decisions or actions? And, as you have all experienced, there are times a colleague or friend or loved one just doesn’t see it. You are trying to get them to see what could happen or why this is not a good path to take or it could be harmful to them and you might as well talk to the garage door.

Storytelling, in a sense, can help people to see. By dramatizing what outcomes could be, you are painting a picture. You are telling a story and that often can be very helpful rather than declarations or judgments or even threats. Rather than, “That’s the dumbest damned thing I have ever heard,” or, “You must have lost your mind to think of something that stupid,” or, “If you do that, I’ll . . .” Paint them a picture. Now this can also work well when someone needs encouragement because they are not sure they are ready to take the risk, or they really can’t see how wonderful something could turn out or they just aren’t sure – but you can see it. By bringing it to light through dramatization, if you will, you may help kindle the spark they need for that chance or for that next step to happen.

Drama is a whole different story. OMG. EVERYTHING rises to the same level of earth-shattering importance. Whether it was the butcher at the supermarket seemingly ignoring them or their best friend not listening to them completely, it is all a concern or crisis that must be talked about and processed to death and resolved before they can move on.

Our culture revels in drama. I don’t know about y’all, but because of the whole Brad-Angelina-Jen thing, I haven’t had a good night’s sleep in years. Right? So much of what now drives our popular culture is the constant swirl of drama that surrounds the people who produce that culture. What are the latest details about Britney and her fight with her conservators? Name your celebrity or influencer and there is bound to be controversy somewhere. Why? Because it sells and keeps people’s names in the news, regardless of their art or accomplishments.

We are surrounded by drama. Now, again, admittedly, a lot of the cultural drama is done in the service of monetization of that drama. But beside the few who might profit, for the overwhelming majority of us, all the drama does is leave us hanging on by the final thread of our very last nerve.

Now let’s take this down a notch to the more practical. We have all experienced or know someone who has experienced being caught up in some drama of their own making. At my friend Fred’s workplace, people began leaving. At the time the job market was OK but not great but good enough for people to be able to find jobs. Rather than really delving into the reasons people were leaving this particular workplace, Fred chose instead to focus on the drama going on in the management level just above him as he was also a manager. He spent hours trying to decipher what this person meant when they said or did this or that. Months worrying and not sleeping over the current or possible next daily crisis. And this focus on other people’s drama distracted him from the fact that he had seen the writing on the wall that it was time to leave.

Finally his job was eliminated. He had had several years in which to send out applications, network, interview, etc., but instead focused on trying to control the effect that other people’s drama could have on his livelihood.

Why do people get caught up in drama – either their own or that of others’? Because something has to give our lives meaning and significance. That is a basic human need. What do I mean?

Significance. You go to your mechanic for a long overdue oil change. He or she says that they are too backed up with work and asks you to come back tomorrow or the day after. How significant is that? Well, that would depend on what shape you car is in. If you are down to very low oil level and a filthy filter, it is certainly way more significant than if your vehicle hasn’t reached that point. Is something significant to you? Your partner’s birthday or your anniversary? Some people hate celebrating special events. Other people love to celebrate everything they can. The Black Friday sales. Is it significant to you because that is when you traditionally do your XMAS shopping hoping for the best deals or a you’re one of those people who couldn’t be paid to set foot in a mall on Black Friday?

Meaning. What does something mean to you? You mechanic says to come back in a day or two. Does that mean he is swamped or he hates you and hopes your car falls apart so there is more for him to fix? You are the one who has to remind your partner of significant dates or events. Does that mean they don’t care or their mind just doesn’t work that way? What does something mean to you? Big gestures mean very little to me. An expensive gift or sudden declaration of whatever means a lots less to me than how you treat me on a daily basis. For me the little things mean more and I assign them greater significance.

Who gets to decide what is and is not significant in your life and what the event or problem or happy occasion means to you? You do. And there are no right or wrong answers and you can change your mind at any time. But a clue that you are a drama junkie is giving everything the same level of life-changing significance and meaning. That everything means the same thing and has the same significance – that life as you know it will change – is not only not true but impossible. Practice assigning meaning – what does this really mean to me? Practice assigning significance – yeah it happened but is it really significant? Is it really all that important to me? As you do this, you will find that your life gets a lot easier.

© 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 Hydra Head of COVID

According to Greek mythology, the Hydra is a nine-headed gigantic water-snake-like monster.  Like the Hydra, there have been many faces to the impact COVID has had on people. For some it has been as traumatic as losing a loved one. For others, outside of being a major inconvenience, it really hasn’t that bad. During these troubling and challenging times, Hercules has not been available to come and rescue us from this monster. We’ve been thrown back onto our own resources to save ourselves.

For people who are more introverted like me, in many ways, it has been an unexpected gift of time. The exile imposed by COVID allowed me time to read, think, meditate, reflect and enjoy the peace that came with the slowing down of the outside world. That said, I was not immune to the fact that life as we all knew it had come to a screeching halt and that all of our heartfelt desires for life to return to return to normal as soon as possible were not going to be answered. And in the course of the last 20 months, my life has changed, and I have changed profoundly in ways that I could neither have foreseen nor imagined.

For the more extroverted among us who thrive on social interaction and get energized by being around others and engaging in out-of-the-house activities, it has been a tough time. Unable to safely and freely move about and be on the go, separated from the touch of friends and loved ones, missing favorite activities, having to find new ways to have fun and connect, has been more difficult. Some have slipped into depression. Others have felt hopeless or helpless or even a sense of despair. Some have gotten very angry. That anger has shown itself in a variety of ways. Angry at politicians. Angry at those who sought to protect themselves by wearing masks. Angry about getting or not getting the vaccines. Angry about others getting or not getting the vaccines. Angry about businesses shutting down. Angry that life as we had known it has gone away.

Life has changed. Many of us would like to say that it was all the result of COVID but many of the changes in our world have been brewing for a long time. In our world, old structures - whether that be media, healthcare, politics, education, international relations, supply chains, alliances, etc. – have and are breaking down and we don’t yet have the new structures to replace the old. In some cases these changes are coming slowly and in other cases coming more rapidly. Some changes are more subtle than others but the old ways, the old traditions of how we thought our world worked or was supposed to work, are breaking down. Order will eventually emerge from the chaos but right now we don’t know what that world will look like and that is bringing up a lot of fear and anxiety and stress in people. COVID added to all that.

Many people felt that they and/or their world was in crisis. The demands made on them - to help stop the spread, to stay home, to give up many of life’s pleasures - were coming too quickly; changes too fast to process; their normal routine, their daily routine had been disrupted and things just weren’t working the way they were supposed to. But we did what we needed to do – we established new routines; processed the changes one step at a time; and we handled the new demands coming from every facet of life as best we could. And this was easier for some than for others. Humans don’t really like change.

Many of us ran into the fact that just because something had worked in the past – job, relationship, hobby, perspectives, goals – did not mean that it would continue to work. Things that we had taken for granted could no longer be taken for granted. Our health, our safety, our survival, our relationships, the things that brought us joy, even our ability to purchase paper towels could no longer be counted on in quite the same way. Spouses and or families having to spend real time together. For some, the increased contact only strengthened the already existing closeness and bonds. Other found themselves looking at loved ones and wondering, “Who are you?”

Many people discovered a desire to not constantly be tied into work and wanting more of a work/life balance. Wanting more flexibility in work schedules. Tired of missing their kids grow up. Quality of life becoming more important than living by arbitrary rules imposed by the workplace. This Hydra-head occasioned the re-prioritizing of life.

Some people found new or alternative or additional ways to make money and survive. Some moved to new places – whether out of choice or by necessity. Many are currently seeking new jobs. That may be for better working conditions, better money, better living conditions or just something new to do as they have become bored and restless.

Having been locked down in our houses for so long, it has been interesting to see people emerge with the drive to be seen and heard. When I was younger, sequins, flashy, sparkly dress was something that was reserved for a very dressy or formal occasion. Now everything glitters, including bedroom shoes – which have moved from the bedroom to everyday footwear. Bling has become de rigueur. Informality in dress and appearance has also become more commonplace. So, in some senses, COVID has changed the way we present ourselves to others as we re-emerge.

COVID also forced people to deal with themselves and then those close to them in ways that they could have avoided before. In the busyness of life, I can keep myself distracted from dealing with me. When I am stuck at home with not a lot to do, eventually binging my fave TV shows, eating, playing with the dog, etc., only will go so far. And then the things like that vague unease you have been feeling starts knocking at the inside of your head. Some people began to rethink what really matters and what is important to them. Others began running into the aspects of themselves that didn’t work for them anymore. Some began to realize how stale their lives had become.

Some began to look at the relationships in their lives and whether they were still important or past their expiration date. The people we cherished and longed for. The touches, the hugs, the warmth of their presence that we so desperately missed but had previously taken for granted. In other cases, people began to get on our nerves – like our spouse or friends who disrupt our equanimity or relatives who we kept in touch with out of a sense of duty and obligation. Nothing was immune from review. In certain cases, we clearly saw what and who we treasured and why, and in other cases, we saw what we had outgrown – people, habits, ways of living our lives.

Others began to dream new dreams and have different hopes and goals. Some went back to school or learned new things from a variety of available resources. Others took on new projects that they had not had the time for before like finally repainting the kitchen or remodeling a room.

We can’t begin to cover all the changes COVID has wrought in the world. COVID, in many senses, made us all realize that we’ve been going with what we know or knew to be good and true and right for us in life, at least up until the pandemic. Nevertheless, for so many of us, it forced us to come face-to-face with – Is this all there is? What now? What’s next? Do I want something more or new or different? Do I deserve more or new or different? Do I dare ask for that? The answer is always, “Yes.”

© 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

Being Liked as a Manipulation

We all need and want to be liked. In being liked we get positive attention from others and that makes us feel valued and worthwhile. It helps us to feel that we are on equal footing with others. It is nice to know that others hold us in high esteem. Nothing sends us over the edge as quickly as when other people ignore us or deem us unworthy of their attention.

In our current Age of Social Media, many of us have become experts in “getting” people to like us. Lots of people openly express the idea that they love social media because you can present yourself as anyone you want to be or pretend to be. Doesn’t matter if that image is real or not. One Gen Z’er I recently spoke to is planning his own You Tube channel wherein he will play a character that is not himself but in so presenting this character, he hopes to gain a following and he tells me that lots of people do this. You get liked and you get followed and, hopefully, you eventually find a way to monetize your presentation and make money presenting yourself as someone else.

As a form of programming or publishing, I think that this is basically no different than an author presenting new characters in books or likeable characters in movies or television. The problem here is that these people are not real. So, in presenting yourself as someone you are not, you are still not being liked for who you actually are and you have to keep up the artifice or face significant backlash from your online community. But, for a group of our compatriots, this level and fashion of being liked may be fine, at least for a while. But it still is a paper-thin level of being liked and accepted, and what happens if and when your 15 minutes is over?

All of that said, that discussion is for another time. What I want to talk about here is about the people who in “real life,” whether that is in the workplace or with friends or family, manipulate you into liking them so they can get what they want out of the relationship - but nothing of value or mattering comes back from them. These are usually people who are, on the surface, very likeable people. They are most often very talkative and personable and almost constantly in motion, at least when you are watching. But they are also, underneath all of the collegiality and bonhomie, getting away with murder.

Some examples. Let’s start with work. Years ago, I bartended with a nice enough looking young guy who used his looks to get in good with our female manager. She walked it right up to the line in giving him preferred shifts and scheduling but not enough for anyone to accuse her of favoritism. Problem was that he wasn’t that good a bartender and didn’t really want to work that hard. What he was willing to work hard at was getting what he wanted from his manager and maintained a passable level of civility with the rest of his co-workers.

He certainly never went above or beyond for anything or anybody. One day his manager had to call him out about something that needed correction and she did it in front of other staff. It was procedural and the correction could have applied to any of us and was thus more of a reminder to all in hearing distance than it was a personal attack on him. He escalated the argument, attacking her and it went back and forth until he said something nasty to her and she announced, in front of the other staff, that he was a “lousy fuck.” Needless to say, neither his nor her employment lasted much longer at this particular establishment. But he had gotten what he wanted for as long as he could until it was time to move on.

How about the person in the office who is always fun and friendly and willing to briefly help others but never gets their own work done? They talk a great game. They suck up to management, who think them delightful. They get the scheduling they want. They get the time off they want. Senior management is always stopping to talk with them. Sometimes they even get to flout the dress code when no one else does. They often talk and talk and talk constantly and the rest of the staff likes them until they begin to realize that they never complete anything and, in many cases, never start anything they really don’t want to do. But they get away with it because they’re always so busy, busy, busy with everything and everyone else that for a while they can make it look like they are working themself to death. One particular woman was busy having fun with her co-workers and drinking on the job. She was popular, and on occasion did do enough work that she could show some accomplishments. But over time, people began to realize she was hardly ever at her desk. She was here and there and yon but rarely ever actually applying herself to her actual work. But they liked her.

A similar version of this was a young guy who was also a big talker. Talked mostly about himself and what he was doing and his exploits way from work, as did the lady above. But when he was unable to avoid a work task, he would do it but at a plodding snail’s pace. Regardless of the complexity of the task, it was done at a pace that was just above glacial. Usually someone would step in and help or take it over for him as otherwise he would never be finished. He often resented being told what to do and made no bones talking badly about managers who made demands on him, making sure that we knew he thought they are all assholes and not to be trusted. But he was well liked by staff and management and he moved on just as soon as more was expected of him. But until then, he got whatever he wanted and never did anything he didn’t want to do or could get out of because he got people to like him.

The point in these examples is that sooner or later people will see through the artifice. As the old saying goes, you can fool some of the people some of the time but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. Eventually people will see through the constant talking, all the busy activity that accomplishes nothing and will also begin to resent the sucking up to those who they think can do them some good.  So, it goes with the friends or family from whom they take and take and give nothing back. You can’t help liking them until you get tired of being manipulated into giving them what they want, but when you actually need them, they are nowhere to be found. And the best part is that, in whatever circumstance, when you or someone else finally has had enough and says no to them, they feel a self-righteous sense of betrayal and abandonment. But when you finally say no it is because you are so tired of the constant barrage of talk that actually says nothing substantial and activity used to camouflage who they really are and what they really are about, that you feel nothing but relief.

Whether online as a persona in cyber space or in the actual living of life out among the other humans, people will watch you and figure out who you really are through your behavior. Behavior doesn’t lie. Why? Because, in general, people wind up doing the things they really want to do and they don’t do or procrastinate until the end of time the things they don’t really want to do, regardless of what they say. As charming or fun or personable or interesting as someone may present themselves to be, the truth will out as to whether there is any real substance there.

Playwright and poet Ben Jonson was named England's first ever Poet Laureate in 1616. (Wikipedia) He wrote, "True happiness Consists not in the multitude of friends, But in the worth and choice." Who you choose to be and become will reflect and express your true worth to yourself. And others will see whether there is someone of depth and consequence there through your actions and behavior, regardless of what comes out of your mouth and regardless of all the activity you use to distract others from seeing the truth of your being. Make good choices as to who you are as it will raise your value and worth to others and, most especially, to yourself. And it will spare you a lot of tap dancing.

© 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

Dignity

Dignity is valuing yourself and valuing others. If you do a Google search, it will tell you that it means being valued and respected for what you are, what you believe in, and how you live your life. It means treating others the way we'd like to be treated ourselves – which is basically the Golden Rule of “do unto others . . .”

Dignity has several components. Value is primary but dignity also includes character and integrity; your personal framework of memory and myth; your personal dreams and visions; and freedom. In our current world, too many are seeking to strip others of their dignity and that is a contributing factor in the breakdown of civility and communication in our society. We often won’t take the time to talk with, much less understand, those who we have deemed unworthy of being valued and respected for who they are, what they believe in, and how they live their lives.

 In other blog posts we have talked a great deal about valuing ourselves and others. It begins with self-awareness - knowing our needs, wants, desires, hopes, dreams, goals, beliefs, the choices we make and why, and more. And while the hopes, dreams, needs, wants, of others are more than likely are very different than ours, it doesn’t make those things any less valuable. When you deny or dismiss the value those things, you strip away some dignity.

Beyond self-awareness, value also includes self-confidence and self-self-love. Self-confidence is knowing that you can cope with whatever life throws at you – both good and bad. We all have different coping mechanisms and different ways of evaluating whether we feel prepared to cope with life. We are all impacted by different things in our own unique way. What may be devastating to one of us might just roll off the back of others of us. What we cannot do is undermine peoples’ coping mechanisms by insisting that they see things or react or deal with things in the way we think they should or as we would. Doing so would undermine their sense of self-confidence.

Self-love is also part of value. When we learn to love ourselves, we are more likely to recognize our own value and, thus, the value of others and the value of the loving relationships they have in their lives.

We won’t go into self-respect here as there is an entire blog post and podcast devoted to that subject that is available to you.

When we deny or refuse to see and respect the needs, wants, desires, hopes, dreams, goals, beliefs, choices, self-respect, self-love and self-confidence, in others, we are stripping them of dignity. And that is not OK.

Character is an important part of dignity. Character and integrity go together. As we discussed when we talked about authenticity, character is about living by our ideals and principles like honesty, compassion, caring, morals, ethics, being responsible, never deliberately being hurtful to others, etc. The measure of our character is how often and how successfully we live by our principles. Integrity is doing the right thing because it is the right thing to do, even when no one is looking. Integrity is keeping our word and keeping our commitments.

When we disparage or disregard or harshly judge the character and integrity of people we know nothing about, we are blinding ourselves to their dignity. We cannot make any kind of value judgment about the character and integrity of anyone based on their appearance or gossip we have heard about them, much less based on some assumption that we have made about them. When we treat others from a place wherein we are not living by our own character and integrity or when we make negative assumptions about anyone’s character or integrity, we turn our backs on dignity.

Also, we all have our own framework of memory and myths. Even if you and I and a friend of ours all went to the same concert or party, all three of us would remember the event differently. We would certainly all remember some of the same things but there would be no absolutely correct version of our memories. So it goes with all of us. Often we remember things from our childhood differently than our parents. A big shock for many as an adult is when they find out that a memory that they have held onto since childhood that was a defining moment for them, their parents have no recall of it ever happening. My point is we all have a storehouse of memories that shape and mold us – our perceptions, our perspectives, our ways of coming at the world and our ways of being in the world. And, over time, we let go of some memories and replace them with newer and more important memories – both good and bad. But everyone’s storehouse of memory is exclusive only to them. We don’t get to judge their memories. We only get to try to understand them and the impact they have had or continue to have. And refusing to respect that the memories that have shaped someone else, that are more than likely very different from your lived experience, cheats them of respect and dignity.

Further, we all have our own personal framework of myths. Most people think of myths as nice stories like fairy tales. Myths are stories but not fairy tales and certainly not fiction. Myths have been used throughout history to explain where we came from, how we got here, and the origin of our people or tribe, our customs, our beliefs, our rituals as a society or as a people. Myths are also instructional. They explain how to approach life or make it through life in a variety of situations. They are archetypal in that sense. This or that myth explains how we should do this or get through that challenge in life or how to make good decisions or do the right thing. Many are about how to avoid the traps that life can set for us.

We all have a set of stories that we tell ourselves about the ways the world works and about how life works and about how we have to approach life and the people in it. Those myths that we live by are informed by the memories we hold, the experiences we have, as well as the beliefs we have come to trust. This is the way life or relationships work and that is just the way it is for us, at least until we decide to change. This is why, as the old wise saying goes, “You can’t understand someone until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes.” You have no idea of the memories and personal myths that have come to form them as they are because those experiences and memories and strategies of getting through life are so personal and so singular to each and every one of us.

We all also have our own dreams and visions for our life. The things we want to accomplish and experience. Where we see ourselves as our life progresses. The life we want to live. And freedom is about the freedom to be and become whomever we want to be, unencumbered by the judgments or obstacles placed on our path by others.

When you encounter someone who doesn’t think like you, look like you, dress like you, worship like you, eat the same things you do, like the same music or movies that you do, remember it is their personal value made up of self-awareness, self-love, self-confidence, self-respect; their character and integrity, their myths and memories; their dreams and visions for their own lives; and their God-given freedom to be and become whomever they want; that has produced the person you are encountering. You do not get to judge them or their process. As we said above, dignity is about treating others the way we'd like to be treated ourselves and nobody likes being judged unfairly or deemed less than others.

There are a lot of problems in the world right now and to begin to fix them, we are going to need all hands on deck. And in order for us to do that we are going to need to begin respecting and honoring one another’s inherent dignity. No, not everybody is going to be just like you nor should they be. A society of the Borg would be a horrible place to live. But as we once again learn to and practice respecting and honoring one another’s inherent dignity, the good news is you are going to meet some amazing people along the way. And as we learn to work together, so will come quite literally, our salvation.

© 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 Metaphysics of Gender Non-Conformity

A slightly edited version of The Metaphysics of Gender Non-Conformity was published on the Georgia Voice website on 6/24/2021: https://thegavoice.com/outspoken/the-metaphysics-of-gender-non-conformity/

Photo 166580129 © Monkey Business Images | Dreamstime.com

I first became aware of the issue of gender non-conformity a number of years ago when I saw straight boys with their girlfriends walking around Little Five Points with sundresses pulled over their tee shirts and jeans. At this same time I was doing volunteer counseling with homeless LGBTQ young adults and they were giving me an education into the rising awareness of transgendered people and their needs and what they face societally. Awareness of and respect for the transgendered community has been growing, rightly so. It has sparked culture war battles over who can use what bathroom and issues with transgendered athletes. And it has led to people of all stripes specifying the pronouns they wish to be addressed by in the signature of their emails.

What I have found most interesting about all of this is the intense focus on living and expressing physical gender and little to no discussion of the masculine and feminine energies that we all possess. All of us. These energies have NOTHING to do with stereotyped sex roles. Nothing. They are about complimentary energies at work in each of us that need to find a balance that leads to wholeness as a person, as a human.

Jung talked about them, I believe, as inner opposites. They are not. Ancient Chinese philosophy, more correctly, talks about them as part of a dualism - complementary, interconnected forces within each of us. Dualisms – light and dark, summer and winter, expansion and contraction, for example. You can’t have one without the other. More closely aligned with our purposes here are thinking and feeling, heart and mind, doing and being.

The masculine energy of will and the feminine energy of imagination. Imagination is a sense that is common to us all. Think of how dreary and empty life would be without it. What you can imagine for yourself and your life is unlimited. Who you can be and become, places you can go, experiences you would like to have, things you would like to do for yourself and others, and more, is all within the province of your imagination. As example, can you imagine yourself being wildly successful? For some of us, heck yeah I can imagine that. For others of us, no, I can’t imagine not having to work like a dog to get what I want. Can you imagine being a great parent? Can you imagine being loved and cherished? What would that be like?

But how do you bring all of that into manifestation in your life? Those things won’t just walk up the driveway. It takes will to make things happen, otherwise, all of the wonderful things we can imagine remain flights of fancy. But when our will, our determination, our focus, our perseverance are applied, we can move mountains. Maybe not immediately but people know to get out of the way as it is our will to create what we truly want in life that is essential in making it happen.

The feminine energy of being and the masculine energy of doing. I ask this question constantly – Who are you? That is about being. Your goals, hopes, dreams, desires, beliefs, choices, what you imagine for yourself and your life. All of that and more contributes to your being. However, most of us are way more comfortable with doing. It has become a badge of honor, at least until the COVID pandemic, to be constantly busy. “I have to be wired into work 24/7. I must stay on top of growing my personal brand on social media. I have things to do, kids to raise, aging parents to take care of, projects to finish. Who the hell has time to worry about being? Piffle. I’m busy doing. Besides, how ‘do’ you do being?”

I keep reading about the rising number of people who are really questioning whether they want to return to that pre-pandemic rat-race life. There is no right or wrong answer here. The only right answer is what works for you. But as some people got to put down all of that doing, they got in touch with just being. Being closer, in some senses, to what they wanted more of in their lives and busyness wasn’t on that list. “I want to hug and just be with the people I care about again.” “I have been able to be there for my kids in a way that I wasn’t pre-pandemic.” You all have heard or said these kinds of things.

It is the feminine energy that creates the space in which something can happen. The womb of creation, metaphorically, if you will. If there is not the space nor the place for something to occur in your life – “Well, I just don’t have time for a relationship right now,” – it won’t. “It isn’t the right time or place for me to seek a new job, start a new career, go back to school, start painting again, get back to baking.” And it never happens because the space was not created. Feminine energy. The masculine energy fills that space. It brings the activity and fills that created space with the activity of job seeking, career switching, firing up the oven to bake. But without the space being properly prepared, we may start something with the best of intentions but we never see it through. Our goals never fully come to fruition.

And finally, the feminine energies of conception and perception. To conceive of something new – a new idea, a new project, a new way of doing things, a new goal, a new hope, a new dream, a new way of expressing something creatively that has never been done before. And conception’s handmaiden, perception. How we perceive something to be. We perceive through our five familiar senses, yes. We talk about the range of light or sound that our human senses are able to perceive. But we also perceive through unfamiliar senses as well. Perception is about the mental and emotional impressions that we get. An awareness, if you will. For example, what we perceive of our past, our present, and the future we think or hope is coming. How we perceive ourselves through our own experience of ourselves.

These are balanced by the masculine energies of meaning and understanding. Who decides what things mean to you? You do. “What if I get it wrong?” There are no right or wrong answers. However, you can always change your mind about what something means to you. What does it mean that some of your shirts have started coming back from the laundry with cracked or broken buttons? Could mean it is time to switch your dry cleaner/laundry. Could mean they are just being careless and you need to point it out to them. Could mean you’ve had those shirts since the dinosaurs roamed and they have been laundered and pressed a thousand times and it is about time for the whole shirt to give out.  Whatever meaning you assign to anything is A) your choice and B) a masculine energy.

Understanding. There is a real crisis in the world right now of understanding. Nobody wants to try to understand anyone else. They want to be understood first. The act and process of really understanding yourself or someone else is a masculine energy. And it has a number of components to it as understanding is a process. For our purposes here, I want to focus on the three final components of the process as I understand it. What can you infer from the thoughts, feelings, facts being supplied to you? We can gain a deeper level of understanding through something that was not directly said. You may tell me you don’t like shopping malls but what I can infer is you don’t like crowds.

Then comes appreciating the other person’s point of view, lived experience, and meaning they have assigned to things, just was you are able to assign meaning to things in your life. And finally, the understanding process concludes with valuing what you have learned and come to understand. And giving that new level of understanding meaning and significance.

Will and Imagination. Doing and Being. Creating the space for manifestation and taking action to bring into manifestation. Conception/Perception and Meaning and Understanding. All important and things that all of us do. So maybe the next time your physical gender identity is not resolving or answering life’s dilemmas, consider starting here with these eight things. Begin bringing them into balance. The gifts you find along the way can be priceless.

© 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

Beware the Bogeyman

There is a lot of fear out there in the world. And there are a lot of people out there telling you to be afraid. The bogeyman is coming to get you – be very afraid. The deficit is killing the economy • Government spending got us through the pandemic • Vaccines will give you autism • Vaccines are the only thing that will save you • If you interfere with my religious freedom to not bake that cake, you are violating my rights • If your behavior isn’t in line with the actual teachings of Jesus, you are not a Christian • Georgie Soros and the Illuminati are forming one world government • Gerrymandering is killing democracy • The Muslims /the Jews / the Evangelicals are coming to get us • Undocumented workers are taking our jobs • Do you want to come pick the tomatoes and cantaloupes? • The rich are the job creators • Small businesses create jobs and opportunity - Everybody and everything gets its turn at being the bogeyman.

Whether you fear death panels, creationism, being limited to one hamburger a month, cannibalism, being told what you can and can’t do with your body, or believe that cows farting is causing climate change, you all are aware of the fear-based insanity we have been living through. And everybody is doing it – certain members of the clergy, quite a number of politicians, and various media empires catering to whoever will listen to them, are using fear to manipulate the masses into frothing-at-the-mouth levels of fear and anger. This is nothing new, but it has reached levels that are moving us toward the point where we have all taken leave of our senses and trust no one and believe nothing.

Any political leader, media figure, or someone in a corporate/business environment, trying to scare you is someone to run from. Usually they tell you either they are the ones to fix it or it can’t be fixed. So do as you are told. Don’t think for yourself. Facts don’t exist. Um, yes they do. They are not interested in the greater good. What they seek to do is pit you against friends, neighbors, family, in order to serve their own ambitions or their political or business agendas.

There are scary things happening that do need to be addressed with a quickness. But the answer is never to give your power to others and then cower and quake in fear, nor to get so angry, as a response to your fear, that you are incited to harm others or yourself. So let’s take a small step together toward addressing all of the fear that is out there and, hopefully at the same time, take some of our power back, thus robbing the bogeyman of his power over us.

When our fears come up, they tend to cluster in certain groupings. We all have patterns. That is normal, expected and human. So, it is always helpful, when some hobgoblin is trying to push your buttons, to know which button is being pushed and then take their finger off your button.

For some of us, we fear that we will somehow or for some reason be abandoned or rejected or humiliated, or betrayed. Now these all work together in all kinds of combinations. But as example, I fear being abandoned, left all on my own to fend for myself and, in being abandoned, I will also feel rejected. And because I was rejected, it is so humiliating to me that “they” would do this to me, that I feel betrayed by those I loved or trusted or relied on. In whatever combination or in whatever arena of my life the fear presents itself, this is where I go. I was rejected because I was not good enough, says the fear, and that feels humiliating to me. My trust was betrayed and now I feel humiliated for ever having trusted whomever. I fear friends, family, people will abandon me. You see how this can go. For many of us, though we each have our own pattern of it, this is the button that gets pushed when we are afraid.

For others of us, I fear the punishment of a martyr. No matter how hard I have tried or have worked, no matter how much I have loved or given, no matter how much I have personally sacrificed, no one will appreciate it.  No one will understand what I have been through, how I have suffered, fearing they will misunderstand my good intentions. Or, I am being expected to do things that are beyond my responsibility, beyond my paygrade, if you will, beyond my capabilities. I am afraid of getting punished for things that I had nothing to do with. Martyred somehow, for some reason. “Why should I suffer and only get one hamburger a month when it isn’t my fault?” “They did or didn’t do . . . whatever. Why am I being punished?” You see how this can play out from the absurd to real work situations or within relationships. “After all I have done for you . . . The sacrifices I have made, the things I have given up.” The fear of being martyred and punished in the process.

A third grouping of fears for some of us is the fear that if I am not perfect – at work, as a parent, in an intimate relationship, as a friend – that I will get blamed. That I will fall short, for some reason, of my own expectations of myself, much less everybody else’s expectations. Afraid of not getting it right. Afraid of being wrong or incorrect or misguided or having misunderstood. What that really means is I will blame myself or others will blame me for not being perfect. The demand of perfection is often what many of us substitute for lack of self-trust. And when we have not learned to trust ourselves, we are open to being manipulated by those who seek to make us doubt ourselves and be fearful.

Others of us fear exclusion. It is not the same as fear of abandonment. Everybody else will get something but I will be excluded or left out or it won’t work for me. You see a lot of this societally in the anger that so many have about some group or another supposedly getting advantages or tangible benefits that I am being excluded from receiving. And that makes me mad because I am being excluded but they are not. I am being left out. And that fear triggers a lot of people.

Now, these are not the only clusters or groupings of fear. And, again, we all have our own patterns. When you look at yours, you will be amazed at the consistency of that pattern. Look at where you go when your buttons get pushed. You can start taking your power back just by recognizing what is happening and by refusing to give your power away to a habituated response to someone trying to make you feel afraid. You will find, as some darned Democrat once said, that we have nothing to fear but fear itself. And in recognizing that, you will have learned a universal truth that transcends politics, media and religion.

© 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

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

Ya Gotta Get a Gimmick

The 1959 Broadway musical Gypsy was based on the memoir of Gypsy Rose Lee, a burlesque entertainer known for, among other things, her striptease act. The show was turned into a movie and one of the numbers that I loved in the movie was the song, “You Gotta Have A Gimmick.” Three strippers tell Louise that you don’t need talent to be a stripper. What you need is a gimmick. “You gotta get a gimmick if you want to get ahead.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkO4Ae2gPsQ

Human history is ripe with people in pursuit of the magick bullet or quick fix that will solve all of their problems and, if God is really good, make them rich as well, with as little effort as possible. The human desire to get rich quick has evidently been with us since at least biblical times. Proverbs 13:11 as quoted in the New American Standard Bible says, “Wealth obtained from nothing dwindles, But one who gathers by labor increases it.” So this human drive has been with us for quite some time.

I started thinking about gimmicks again while I was watching the recent documentary about WeWork on Hulu. Social media and technology are the latest scheme that is supposed to make us rich quickly and deliver us to the Promised Land. Tech was supposed to help us pull out of the Great Recession. WeWork defined itself as a co-working community that was created for small businesses, entrepreneurs and freelancers with the idea that people in that communal community would almost be forced to help one another and in so doing, not only rebel against the office culture of the 80s and 90s but change the way people work and redefine success. Their words, not mine. Kind of a tall order given the research that shows open offices actually decrease creativity and productivity.

Now don’t get me wrong. I have been in WeWork and like it, the free kombucha kegs on every floor notwithstanding. The short and dirty version of the story is the venture capital people saw it as a way to make a lot of money quick, threw enormous amounts of money at the company, all of which was mismanaged and, like they say, the rest is history. My point is, instead of slow steady grow and planning, they went for the quick and easy, all in the name of changing the world and lots of money. Now, while the argument can be made that a few tech companies have changed the word, Apple, Google, FB, etc., the overwhelming majority of companies have not. And, how many app developers in WeWork spaces do we really need or can the world absorb?

Also, we are told, that Millennials want a calling, not just a job or a career. Here is the thing. You are called to a calling, you don’t go out and find it. It will find you, come to you, and not let you go. I had a friend years ago who used to go to Become a Shaman School. In the course of a few weekends or whatever the training timeframe was, you were taught to be a shaman. I think not. Wikipedia defines Shamanism as “a religious practice that involves a practitioner who is believed to interact with a spirit world through altered states of consciousness, such as trance. The goal of this is usually to direct these spirits or spiritual energies into the physical world, for healing or another purpose.” Shamans are thought to not only be able to see beyond the veils but to walk between the veils that separate different levels of reality. I am not doubting shamanism at all. I am doubting you’ll learn that level of enlightenment over a few weekends. And if you are to be a shaman, you will be called and you will know it. And the preparation will take years and will not be a day at the beach. No path of spiritual development is.

Want instant relationship? Swipe right and find true love. Do the personality test and get matched to your soulmate. Gay guys love what I call the Pre-husband Interview. The checklist that they run somebody through before they even go on a date. Do you like - this movie, this kind of food, this music or recording artist, this sport, this hobby, this video games. Do they have the right answers about friends, family, politics, kids, religion, places they want to travel and can they cook? If it all checks out, now we can go on a date. The fly in that ointment is that first you must do the hard work of developing a relationship with yourself.

Our politics have become a shrine to dogma and talking points. Lots of righteous blame and anger on both sides. But no matter how many times Bernie says, “If you have to steal an election to win it, you are a coward,” true as that is, it won’t fix the voter suppression and gerrymandering that has become commonplace.

Want to be healthy? All you’ve got to do is eat spirulina plankton and radishes. Want to be spiritual? Become vegan, even though veganism is a diet not a spiritual path. Want to avoid disease? Take Vitamin D and your problems will be solved. Groupon tells me true health will be mine when I have my vagina steamed.

The ATSs – the applicant tracking systems – that reject 75% of job applicants, supposedly because they don’t contain the right words. But there is not a National Resume Bureau from which to get the list of the “right” words. And nobody wants to do the hard work of actually having to read a resume.

The endless apps that we must have that are supposed to conduct and manage our lives for us. The apps that keep track of how long each individual egg has been in your smart refrigerator. Coloring book apps for your phone in case you don’t have enough else to do. How about the human to animal translator app? How about one of the apps that measures how high in the air you can throw you phone? Then there is the app that lets you stream your conversations and crowdsource them by bringing a group of your friends or strangers along to listen in and assist you. If you don’t know what to say on a date, a meeting, or any other situation – just let some other people help you.

Love, relationships, the environment, politics, work, spiritual development, personal development – becoming authentic, being a good person - raising children, education, and more are all substantive, complex, complicated subjects. They all need serious attention with intention to move forward with them. Contrary to the most earnest human desire for the magic bullet, the gimmick that will fix it all instantaneously, there is no such thing. The only way out is through. We are here to learn. Life and learning is a process. We must do the long, slow steady work it takes in any area of life to see and produce substantive results. So the next time you have a desire to start flipping houses, remembering the Great Recession. The next time somebody tells you the way become enlightened is sell everything and move to Machu Picchu, remember you don’t speak Spanish. The next time you think, “Yeah, that’s the ticket,” please know that it probably isn’t the ticket to anywhere you actually want to go.

© 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

Sensuousness

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“Knock, knock.” “Who’s there?” “Sensuous.” “Sensuous who?” “Sensuous up, would you bring me another soda out of the fridge?”

Sensuality is about feeling. I started thinking about it listening to a friend complain about how unsatisfying most of his online hookups were.  They were very mechanical but not much more. Certainly no feeling on any level other than physical. Sensation, yes, sensuality, no. Most people think of sensuality as something between two people but the sensuousness of life starts with self and our own experiences.

Life is full of sensuousness, if we will pay attention. Full of luscious, rich, sumptuous, exciting experience of feelings on the physical, mental, emotional and spiritual levels. Once we understand what it is, then we can better share that understanding with others.

Think about the feeling of certain foods in your mouth. The taste of your favorite dish and how that resonates throughout your body and the satiation that can bring. When I was little, my favorite dinner was fried shrimp. I liked the crunch of the breading. Combined with flavor of the shrimp and either the kick of the cocktail sauce or the cool tanginess of the tartar sauce. All of that together gave me a feeling of pleasure and excitement because it was so good. Or, the warming sensation of a hot drink on a cold day. A cup of tea or coffee or hot chocolate soothing you as you drink it. There is also the added bonus of the caffeine helping you to feel more alert to the sensations of your body relaxing into the warmth. 

The feel of a breeze on a beautiful spring day as it gets inside your clothes and inflates them, making your skin tingle and feel refreshed. It can also refresh the mind and spirit if it has been a long winter and you are now free to go back outside and enjoy the freedom. The lightness you feel by not being weighed down by heavy winter clothes plus that rush of anticipation that you are about to take off with the wind.

The feeling of a friend’s hand on your shoulder that tells you you belong and are accepted just as you are and that you are alright. The sound of rain on a tin roof or the rustle of the wind through the trees that reminds you that nature can be soothing and healing.

Intimacy is not about the mechanics of sex. You’ve been watching too much porn. It is about the closeness, the tenderness, the vulnerability, and the trust between two people regardless of the specific nature of the relationship. The tenderness in the way we treat each other. How close we feel to each other. How willing we are to trust one another enough to be vulnerable with each another. All part of the sensuousness of life.

Thoughts and feelings are very sensual. Some people love drama and the way it makes them feel excited and alive. Other people hate drama. Some people like confrontation, others hate it. Some people love surprises. Other people hate surprises. Some people like spontaneity, others don’t. The sensations of life lived through our physical senses as well as our mind and emotions. Though they all seem something that just happens on the surface, all of these feelings, that rush of sensuousness takes us someplace deeper into our psyche, somewhere outside of time and space, giving our momentary experience a richness and texture and meaning that physical sensation alone can’t provide.

But there is also the sensuality of your spirituality. Our lives are constantly sending us messages with feelings that provide context and texture. A song we hear in passing on the radio that has a message we needed to hear at the moment. A passage we read in a book that is timely. A conversation we overhear. A chance meeting. An unexpected good fortune where something just arrives out of the blue. A feeling that won’t leave us alone. A thought that urges us forward or warns us to stop. A coincidence where – “Hey, I was just thinking about you and here you are.” A synchronicity where something worked out perfectly though it wasn’t planned at all. “Yeah, well, it was just luck or fate or chance.” Are you sure?

“Stop and smell the roses,” we are told when we feel too stressed or overwhelmed. We all live in a world that now prides itself on being so busy all the time that we need to be plugged in 24/7. We are constantly distracted from our own life and the cornucopia of sensual pleasures it affords us every minute of every day.

Sensuousness is about connection on an unspoken level. It happens between the words used to describe it and beyond those words. It is experiential through the five common senses, and through the senses you possess like intuition and knowing and warmth that lie beyond the familiar ones. It opens you to the transcendent where in a moment, and maybe only for a moment, you are lifted beyond time/space where you can touch and be touched by something more than what words can describe. A sensual experience – physical, mental, emotional, spiritual - between two people can end the sense of separateness and/or alienation, leading to a sense that approaches oneness whether with partners, family or friends. Your work, your creative projects, your hopes and dreams all are sources of and all benefit from sensuousness.

Put down your phone. Open your senses. What are the smells, touches, tastes, sounds, sights, that your life is providing you with? Where do the accompanying thoughts and feelings take you? Do you find inspiration or hope or beauty or peace? Maybe a sense of well-being or contentment. Gratitude. Pleasure. Excitement.  Life is a very lush experience. But you’ve got to be paying attention or those experiences will slip on by and you’ll be left wondering, just like my friend, why is this all so mechanical and rote? It’s not. But do you dare to find out?

© 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

Branding & Self-Image

An abbreviated version of Branding & Self-Image was printed in the June 6, 2021 issue of Georgia Voice

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For more than 10 years, it has become a “thing” to think about and talk about oneself as a brand. You are encouraged to protect your brand and grow your brand and promote your brand, especially in regard to business relationships. I bring my brand and its services to your business, and I expect us to be on a more or less equal footing.

In addition to this being total bs, I find it deeply offensive and unhealthy. 

Brands refer to things like the brand of toothpaste you use or the mayonnaise you like. And when you are done with it, you throw out the old tube or jar and go buy a new one. Humans are neither disposable nor interchangeable. Humans are not things. We are complex, sentient beings and each of us is unique and multi-faceted. We are not a thing engaged in a series of transactions. The idea that all interactions are transactional, that we are each supposed to “get” something out of the transaction each and every time precludes the higher parts of our nature like altruism, compassion, understanding, caring, intimacy, even love.  

Back in the late 80s and early 90s we heard the idea that, especially in personal relationships, we were to become the right kind of product that “people would want to take off of the shelf.” Become the right product and you will succeed. People will want you. You’ll find the relationship or job you are looking for. 

I like the products I buy at the store. Whether bagged lettuce, nice shirts, comfy shoes, or sliced deli, I like and use certain products regularly. Is that the way I would want myself to be treated? A bought and paid for product that is then used by the purchaser however they see fit? “I got someone to take me off the shelf.” Well, that’s nice. Did you get to have any input into the transaction? Did it work out well? The problem herein is that people begin twisting and distorting who they are, or completely losing who they are, in order to be the “right” product or the right brand. Who sets these rules? When it comes to what the “right” product is, everybody will never all like or want the same thing(s). Right? Nevertheless, I am willing to lose myself to become a desired product.  

The right product/brand wears the right clothes, goes to the right places, knows the right people, watches the right TV shows, likes the right music, and has the right kind of thinking, whatever. No dissent or divergence or diversity of thought is tolerated. The danger here is that these things that we are supposed to do and be begin to warp our self-image. “Well, I’m a yoga pants wearing, paradigm-aware, synergy of best practices augmented and informed by my core competencies.” 

Heinz is a brand of ketchup. Tide is a brand of clothes detergent. Dial is a brand of soap. A brand is nothing more than the name of the maker of a product. The product has a very specific use but no matter how good the ketchup or the all-beef franks or the paper towels are, they are objects, things, and once used or consumed, I move on. Is this how you want the relationships in your life to be?  

My identity – what I do, what I say, what I think and what I feel. If my identity is that of a product or brand, then I am focusing only on what I need to do or be to please other people – professionally or personally. What this leaves out are important questions like - Who are you? What are you about? What really matters to you? What brings you joy? Mentally, emotionally, spiritually, who are you? Who are you becoming? What fulfills you? 

My self-image is about how I see myself. And that starts with the components of self-value. Self-awareness. Knowing who I am. Knowing my beliefs, attitudes, thoughts, feelings, decisions and choices. Giving myself a sense of agency in my own life, rather than being something that others use to fulfill their purposes. My self-worth, acknowledging and honoring my emotions and the complexity of them. My self-esteem, the esteem that I earn from myself. Self-love. When I learn to love myself, no one can take that away from me. Self-confidence, knowing that I can handle what life throws at me on a daily basis. These are some of the important things that influence and inform my image of myself. 

When I relate to other people, whether in a business, personal, or intimate relationship, I need to have a real good idea of who it is that I am asking them to relate to. If I have fallen into trying to be the right product or the right brand, then the potential trap here is I am letting others define who I am. I may be a good brand for making your teeth whiter and stronger but what about my own teeth? Problem with being a tube of toothpaste is that the tube never gets to refuse being squeezed. 

Self-image and self-identity are big and important issues in our lives and should not be trivialized. Yet in the “brand” way of thinking, that is exactly what we wind up doing to ourselves – trivializing ourselves. Why am I making an issue of this? Because next time we are going to talk about another popular buzzword circulating right now – authenticity. Product and brands don’t ever reach the level of authenticity. They may be good or bad quality. I may or may not like them. But they are only good for one purpose. They work or they don’t. We are all so much more than that. You are so much more than that. 

If you have to play the Brand Game at work, OK for now. But don’t let those narrow confines define who you are and are becoming.

© 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

Carrying a Grudge

One of my all-time favorite refrigerator magnets is that of a well- dressed woman in evening clothes saying, “I would say my biggest strength is my ability to hold a grudge until the day I die.” (www.ephemera-inc.com) Makes me think of my maternal grandmother, whom I worshipped. She was famous for carrying grudges forever. Both of my parents were only children so any close family went back to aunts and uncles of my grandparents’ generation. I know very little about any of them because, for whatever reason, especially regarding my mother’s family, we didn’t talk to them – for decades. Why? Because my grandmother had a grudge against them that was carried as a badge of honor.

We all know people who carry grudges. We have all been guilty of it at some point in our lives. Why do we carry them? Because we believe that if we forgive the infraction that has precipitated the grievance, that doing so makes it alright. And we are bound and determined that it is never going to be alright. Ever. So forgiving it is not an option on the table.

But forgiving doesn’t mean that whatever happened is now OK. It’s not. But holding onto a resentment, feeling animosity, because of something that happened in the past keeps us locked in that past. Every time we think of it, we have to remind ourselves of what happened and feel those feelings all over again and again and again. It is almost as if we are punishing ourselves by making ourselves feel that bad once more.

Now, I am not talking about experiences like abuse of some sort, or when someone does something that has serious negative consequences for you, a loved one, your family or your life. I mean the more venal sins rather than the mortal ones. Someone says something untoward that you don’t like or agree with or that hurts you feelings. Someone blames you or a loved one for something that you had nothing to do with. They refuse to take responsibility for something they clearly need to. Someone tries to manipulate you or actually succeeds in manipulating you. Someone betrays a secret confidence or gossips about you behind your back. And you will be damned if you will forgive whatever it was.

Forgiving, as already stated, does not make what happened OK. It may never be OK, especially depending on the severity of the impact of the misdeed. But it does begin to let you off the hook. Think about it this way. The person who spends the most time in jail is the warden. Prisoners come and go over time but the warden is always there. Forgiving lets you out of prison. “Well, what about them? What about what they did? There should be consequences for them.”

You don’t have to forgive the what, but to let yourself out of prison, forgive the why. Why did they do what they did? You may know exactly why they did what they did. They always look for someone else to blame. They always like to feel sorry for themselves and try to manipulate others into feeling sorry for them as well. Or they never take responsibility for anything. Or they have this compulsive need to always be right. Or maybe, if they admit they have made a mistake, in their own mind, they are admitting that they are a mistake, and that is too hurtful for them to process. Or they just can’t resist gossip. They know it is wrong and destructive but they just can’t resist the siren’s call. Or you may never know exactly why they did what they did. Nevertheless, you can forgive the why.

Also, forgive yourself, as well, for it happening in your life, rather than an endless litany of self-recriminations. “I should have known when I looked into their beady little eyes that I should never had trusted them or been their friend or whatever.”

One other thing to keep in mind, are you sure they know why you hold this grudge? Are they really aware of their deeply felt offense? For example, maybe they were drunk when they did or said something that humiliated you and they don’t remember. Doesn’t make it alright. They are still responsible for their behavior and their actions.

Now the what. No. You don’t have to forgive that but you don’t have to keep reminding yourself of it either. Doesn’t mean you are going to kiss and make up. Doesn’t mean now you can go back to being besties. You can still walk away from them. They may not be someone you want in your life. They have been hurtful. They have shattered your trust. They have shown no compassion or remorse. This is not someone that you have to keep in your life. The glory is that by forgiving the why, you get to stop reliving it, walk away from it and be free of it.

Yes, there will still be times when friends or family or a store clerk or whomever pushes your buttons and it sends you into a fit of pique where you are mad as a wet hen. Someone crosses the line of one of your pet peeves and now they are going to be sorry. No one is asking you to become a saint. And yes, forgiveness is a much bigger topic than what is being addressed here but this is a good place to start.

Think about some of the things you have been holding on to that are well past their expiration date. Take some time with this. This is not about the clerk at the deli counter being short with you. When you find something of substance that you are willing to forgive and let go of and have thought about it, then, how do you feel about it? Angry? Hurt? Scared? Self-blame? A sense of loneliness or betrayal? These feelings could impede the forgiveness process if not recognized and acknowledged, processed and released. Listen to the parts of you that don’t want to forgive. There may be a part of you that feels forgiveness is weak. There may be a part of you that tells you that you don’t need to forgive. Pay attention to this process. The goal is to understand what you think and feel here.

Next step is to look at what can I learn from this? Beside the reason of wanting to let yourself out of prison, what can I learn about myself in this process? What lesson(s) can I take from this? And then forgive the why. Once the why is forgiven, you don’t have to have those feelings of anger or hurt or fear or self-blame around this issue any longer. You can now reclaim some of your power and strength and love and that was lost by holding on to not forgiving. But above all, you can be free.

© 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