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I’ve been reflecting lately on all of the things I’ve learned in all my self-help studies over the years.  A psychology professor of mine back in college used to say that some times you could tell who the people who had problems were because they were “should”ers.  They’d “should” all over themselves. They’d tell themselves “I should do this” or “I should be more of that” or “I shouldn’t be this.”  These are the people who make themselves crazy passing judgement on themselves and the world around them, wishing things were somehow different.

There’s another saying a guy I know uses.  He’s one of the happiest, most smiling, most laid back and successful guys I know.  His phrase is, “It is what it is.”

Think about that.  The true cause of suffering is not being able to accept things as they really are.  Instead, we struggle against the current, wishing that things were another way and blaming them for not being the way we want them to.

I read an interesting book on Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy called Three Minute Therapy: Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life.  The one problem I have with this kind of therapy is that they debate with clients, trying to get them to change their emotional thinking through rational debate and repeating to themselves the rational truth of a situation.  It works, but not well and it takes a lot of repetition.  There are some real nuggets in here however.  My favorite bit is that these “should”s take 3 forms:

• Demands on oneself
• Demands on other people
• Demands on the situation (or on the Universe)

Think about it.  How often do we place demands on ourselves that we can’t seem to meet but feel we should?  The predictable result tends to be shame, guilt, and self-loathing.  What about those other people who should recognize or respect or appreciate or love us but don’t?  That’s a great recipe for anger, don’t you think?  And then when dumb luck tends to dump on us circumstances that we shouldn’t have to deal with after all the other crap we already have to deal with… Despair or powerlessness, anyone?

Now, it’s perfectly okay to want something.  It’s not only natural to have desires, but they add spice to life.  The trick, however, is that when you absolutely have to have something or absolutely can’t deal with something, usually based on the idea that you should or shouldn’t be, do, or have something, then you’re emotionally attached to something and it controls you.

If you want to start taking control of your life, reaching goals, or finding more happiness, first you need to take an honest look at the kinds of things you tell yourself should be true about yourself, other people, and the world. If you can let go of the emotional attachment that causes that “should” (that’s my specialty, in case you haven’t noticed ) then you’ll actually be able to find peace of mind.

And that is how you can handle anything.

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I might as well call you crazy.  If that’s true, however, everyone is crazy.  Thanks to the way that our brains work, no one is capable of seeing the world perfectly clearly.  This is a basic flaw that all human beings possess, so you need to be aware of it so you can recognize it when it crops up and work around it.

If you’ve read anything I’ve written on this site, you’ll notice I talk about the importance of emotions in the way we think.  Basically, emotions happen before we think and then drive our perceptions, how we think, and what we think about–not the other way around.  Emotions exist to get us moving quickly in response to a threat, while thinking, reasoning, logic, and planning exist for use to understand our world, learn from it, and create a plan to adapt better to it in the future.  Thinking doesn’t involve movement, however, so emotions take precedence just in case we really need to save our own skin in an emergency.

Emotions, though, really create meaning for us.  They tell us if something is good or bad, if we should seek it out or avoid it.  Emotions aren’t particularly smart.  They just are what they are, and when we have an emotion inappropriately attached to something (such as fear attached to public speaking or doubt attached to asking for what you want) not only do we have an external problem that manifests as a behavior (panic when put on stage or shyness and hesitation when asked to make a decision) but it also manifests in our thinking (thinking about how much people will laugh at you or think you look foolish when up on stage or telling yourself that you don’t know what you want.)

Because our emotions color our thinking, we can never be 100% clear and rational.  That’s okay.  It happens to everybody.

The thing, though, is that people aren’t all the same.  Different people have different beliefs about things that are driven by different emotions.  Where you might have some sort of emotional sticking point on one topic, someone else might not have your issue with that topic.  For instance, someone who’s very outgoing and good with people doesn’t have the fear and doubt that someone who’s more shy has.  Someone who’s good with technology doesn’t have the uncertainty and confusion that someone who’s not so good has.

With this in mind, realize that you have certain strengths that other people could use your perspective on, but more importantly you have certain limits where having feedback from someone else is important.  No one is exempt from having their own blinders on their own issues.  I’m not.  The people I learn 3D Mind with aren’t either.  In fact, I’ve never met anyone who really is perfect (and if you meet someone who tries to convince you otherwise you should be wary.)  I’ve met plenty of people who I’ve wanted to be perfect, but I always find out that the reason I want to believe in someone that much is usually because I don’t believe in myself.

With that being said, it’s easy to get caught up in your own problems, even if you’re as skilled as I am with a personal change tool.  The important thing to remember here is that you’re not perfect and sometimes what you really need is the perspective of someone else who doesn’t have your problem.  It’s easy to fool ourselves into thinking that we know what’s right, but one of the most important skills I’ve found when it comes to being able to change yourself or your beliefs is being willing to admit that you could be wrong and put aside your biases just long enough to actually consider another point of view.

If you can doubt your own sanity just enough to be willing to hear out someone that you trust about what they see going on, you might be surprised at what you can learn about yourself.

Photo credit: Astronaut on the Moon by NASA Langley Research Center

Personal change isn’t just something I bring to my clients, its something I live for myself. I was just reflecting on how I wonder how my life would have been different if I’d never learned the skills I have. I’d probably still be shy, depressed, and alone… Or worse.

The thing, though, is that back then when I’d try to imagine how much better my life could be in the future, it seemed somehow both awe-inspiring and scary at the same time. In fact, even when I think of some of my bigger stretch goals now I still have a sense of both possibility and of trepidation. That’s the thing about change. It seems like such a huge deal at the time.

But that’s not what change is.

I can do things now, like start up a random conversation with a stranger, that I just take for granted but would have scared the crap out of me years ago. It’s just normal for me now, and that’s what the best personal change is: taking the thing that scares the crap out of you and making it… Just normal.

You don’t have to get pumped up and motivated and find your passion to make a big change in your life. You just have to make that change… Not seem so big.

When I was first learning 3D Mind, I tried it out on a few friends. One was a cute girl I’d known for years and I asked her what she’d change about herself. She told me she was always comparing herself to other girls in the gym and she never felt attractive enough. She was plenty attractive.

I ran her through the process in 10 minutes and asked her if she still felt the need to compare herself to others at the gym. She said no. The best part, though, was when I talked to her a month later and I asked her,

“So, do you worry about how you look when you’re at the gym?”

She looked at me like I was an idiot and said, “No. Why would I do that?” as if she had never felt that before.

That’s what real change is.  If you think about it, there are probably plenty of things that have changed for you over the years that you take for granted now. It may have taken a long time to get there, but that’s how you know you’ve changed: it’s just normal for you now.

Of course, keep in mind you don’t need years to get to that point. If you have the right tools you can skip right to making the intimidating change a normal, everyday way of being.

Leave a comment and share your thoughts.

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Kicking yourself when you do something wrong is perhaps the worst possible thing you can do… But we all do it anyway.  Studies by psychologist Paul Bloom (The Moral Life of Babies – NYTimes.com) suggest that from as early as 6 months old, babies have a tendency toward rewarding good behavior and punishing bad behavior.  It may just be perfectly natural for us to want to punish ourselves when we do something we consider to be “bad.”

Of course, it’s perfectly natural to feel bad when we hurt someone else, but there are lots of times when we don’t even hurt other people where we still feel bad and still feel the need to punish ourselves. Maybe you’re not as attractive as you feel you should be, or you’re not the right weight. Maybe you don’t make as much money or have as much status as you think you should. Maybe, if you’re a self help buff like me, you feel like you should have better habits or somehow just be better than you are right now. These are all stupid little things that don’t hurt anyone but you and yet you may still kick yourself for them. That’s because somehow it just feels right.

We tend to think of this as a way of motivating ourselves. After all, we don’t want to feel good about that thing we think is bad, right? If these bad habits felt good then we might never escape from them, right? Because of this line of thinkng, we embrace that feeling of “bad” because we think it motivates us to avoid the things about ourselves that we think are bad.

But of course, as usual, we’re wrong.

It’s hard wired into our brains to move towards the things that make us feel good and actively avoid the things that make us feel bad. If you attach bad feelings to a habit that you do all the time, such as smoking, or to an everyday state of being, such as your weight or your job, you will feel bad all the time.

Because we are hardwired to avoid feeling bad, if it’s something that you cannot escape you instead have to distract yourself by feeling good to counteract it. Bad habits such as smoking or eating junk food that causes you to put on your weight are there because they do make us feel good. Because these things make us feel good, the worse we feel the more we want them so we can feel better.

Because kicking yourself makes you feel worse, that actually makes the problem worse. When the problem just keeps getting worse you end up feeling anxious, discouraged and even depressed, and from there you can pretty much kiss any motivation you have to change goodbye.

So in order to stay on track, part of any goal to change should also include either taking the time to build a stronger acceptance of yourself so that you can be okay with your flaw or use something like 3D Mind to clear out the emotions that cause you to want to kick yourself in the first place.

Hopefully this helps to clear things up if you’re wondering why you can’t seem to keep your motivation going on your New Years resolutions.

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People love stories, so much so that it seems to be hard-wired into us. We’re always looking for ways to make sense out of the random events in life and find a way to relate them to ourselves.

We gotta stop it.

Here’s the thing. We feel before we think, and problems are created by associated emotions that push us into reflexive behaviors. If our bad habits and phobias and problems are reactions that happen without thinking, why do we think so much?

We do it to make sense of our reaction to ourselves after the fact (even if after the fact is only a split second after you start feeling drawn to act out the problem)  and we try to justify and explain what’s happened or what’s happening. This helps us feel more in control of our lives, but the downside is that sometimes we can’t (or don’t want to) come up with an explanation right away and so we create reasons why we can’t understand what happened.

The 2 most common reasons that ensure you’ll never change the behavior are that the problem is unconscious and there’ a deep-rooted core belief, and both of these causes can’t be solved without a lot of work. You need lots of Freudian-style digging or deep hypnosis to root out unconscious stuff. As for core beliefs, you may even have an idea of what the core belief is, but the fact that it’s a core belief means you’ll have to spend a long time trying to dig it out. Both of these reasons make it seem like changing the problem will be a HUGE undertaking.

And then there’s the little voice that sometimes asks, “what if it’s buried deep for a reason?” That alone takes the problem and turns it into something that’s caused by the mental equivalent of a monster under the bed.

Watch out! You might not like what you find in the darkest recesses of your mind, and it may even destroy you!!

Except that’s all a lie.  Try looking at it a different way.

The feelings that cause your problem are just feelings. There’s nothing special about them. They don’t have a deeper meaning. They’re not caused by beliefs.  There’s nothing dangerous or scary. They’re just reactions you have, and if you learned those reactions once, you can un-learn them.

Looking at it that way takes away all the extra stories we tell ourselves and simplifies.

That’s important, because change is simple.

Think about it. Where in your life have you been making your problems more complicated than they really are? What happens if you take that all away? You might find yourself thinking about your problems in a different way.