Book: Awareness – Anthony deMello

I’ve read and reread this book.  

 The writer mentions is that all our upsets involve us adding something to the situation where we are upset.  In this case, upset refers to any degree of negative emotionality, including slight annoyance.

What do we add that causes the upset? 

I am not going to tell you.

If you are upset by this , ask yourself what you are adding to the situation?

If you are not upset, what would you have to add to the situation to be upset?

Have fun.

Not getting your way?

 

The next time you are upset, the question below may help you gain some perspective:

What in my life would improve so greatly  if I got it the way I want it?

A different kind a pack rat

I heard a great quote from someone today:

” I am like a pack rat with my memories and feelings. I hold onto them until I can’t even move anymore and then I go nuts.”

Great insight. I have observed this phenomenon, but never heard it expressed so well.

I don’t see it encouragement to express everything you feel, but rather a warning about the wasted energy and time required to keep feelings and memories going. You have to keep focusing on yourself to hold on like that . 

Take a break from yourself. 

 Go to the window.

Look out.

Open it.

Fresh air.

Go.

Go out there and experience dealing with one feeling at a time.

Leave your pack rat ways behind.

Antidote for performance and social anxiety

I heard an interview of a comedian today, Eugene Mirman, on a local radio station –  http://WHJY.com  .  He is a writer for the HBO series, Flight of the Condor. He just wrote a book called The Will to Whatevs: A Guide to Modern Life.

http://www.amazon.com/Will-Whatevs-Guide-Modern-Life/dp/0061346187

He was asked how to deal with performance/social anxiety. He brought up the old Marsha Brady technique that she used to pass her driver’s test on The Brady Bunch – imagine people in their underwear. If that doesn’t work though, he says imagine people in their underwear crying.

Let your kids suffer

Here is the scenario:

Your kids is suffering or you anticipate  them suffering.

Seeing them suffer makes you suffer, and you can’t take it, so you do something to prevent their suffering.

You feel relieved. Your kid has no idea that they should feel relieved because you won’t ever allow them to suffer.

Your kid becomes even worse than you in that they are less able than you to handle the pain that goes along with being alive.

Your kid is still living with you when they are 30 years old.

You don’t understand how it could have turned out this way because you did everything a parent could do.

Grow up! And I am not talking to your kid.

(DAM) Decisive Action Mindset – Anger’s only Antidote

A lot of anger problems come from our habit of keeping our anger warm. If feelings are not under our voluntary control, and anger is a feeling, then when anger happens, its intensity will be worse and potentially more destructive if we are already slightly angry due to the routine sort of thinking we are doing. But can we control our thinking so that we can reduce our risk of anger quickly ramping up from an already warm base? I think a lot of of our thoughts are linked to our feelings and actually reinforce those feelings,  so we don’t have as much direct control over thoughts as we might ‘think’.  I think we can learn to put the brakes on certain thoughts though by learning to recognize them so when  they pop up later we can ‘give pause’ to the moment and in that pause shift focus to a decision to ‘reject or accept a proposal for action’ that we make to ourselves associated with that thought. Thoughts that already have momentum due to their link to a feeling require decisive measures for you to even have the option to slow or stop that momentum.

Ask yourself, when angry,

Have I lost control of something?

Often , when you ask yourself this question, you realize you never had control over it in the first place. For example, if your spouse or parent says something you preceive as unfair criticism,  and you feel angry, did you lose over what they think or say? You actually never had control over what they think or say. You lost control over what you think when the anger arose involuntarily. Your thoughts were rolling along peacefully enough, you hear a criticism, and you feel angry and you lose that relatively peaceful stream of thought you had. You want it back. You want control of your thoughts. If they kept thinking that critical stuff, and you felt in complete control of your thoughts, you wouldn’t have lost control of anything. 

Do you want control of your thoughts?

Yes.

How?

  Well, as I said, thoughts are largely involuntary, so you can’t control them either, just like you can’t control your critic’s thoughts.

So what can you do?

Try this: Notice how each thought  that arises points to an action on your part, if at all. If it only points to action you’d like the other party to take, go to the next thought. Keep evaluating each thought in terms of the actions it points to you taking.  Multiple action options will arise that you can accept or reject. Let them keep rolling. It will feel pretty natural even though my writing about it makes it sound complicated.   Eventually you will see yourself doing something that makes you feel good and meets your standards for yourself. You will feel more in control because you will be focusing on the only thing you can control  –  what you  do. 

This works because when you are angry your body wants you to take action and use some of that adrenaline. The only way to respond to your own anger is with an action mindset. Anger will fight you doing anything else. As soon as you start focusing on your thinking, or their thinking, or their action, your body will be fighting it and wanting to take it  action of its own.  But if you don’t use that energy to decisively present all the action options to yourself than  you will pick a default action and it will usually be a less than optimal.

Here is a personal example of me doing this. It follows a critical comment I heard from someome I care about:

 I could sit here.  No. That feels like giving in.

 I could say something. No. I don’t know what to say. I’ll say something that will make it worse.

I could say nothing. No, I have to do something though .

I could leave. No, that solves nothing.

 I could get a drink of water. Yes. But then what?

I could walk over to the person.  No, not yet.

I could listen to the person. Yes. I walk over and listen. I show I am not afraid and am not going to just let this go.

I could really work hard to understand the person. I am not agreeing with them. Just really trying to understand. I am not showing fear. I am not agreeing to change anything I do. I am not being intimidated.  

I could look at them while they talk. This shows respect and self-confidence.

I could ask questions so I could learn more about what they think. This shows respect, concern, interest, and I have agreed to nothing.

The original propositions for action in the example are pretty primitive but I gradually gain control over myself by telling myself decisively no until my proposals for action get better in terms of their fit with what is going to be effective and comfortable with me.

What toddlers have to teach us

 We actually have a lot to learn from toddlers. Think of how much a toddler is learning on an hourly basis. They far exceed adults or even older children in their relative learning rate.  They are very decisive, and they know instinctively that no is the safest answer and the best answer for enhancing the learning that they must do to survive and develop.

Adults should also start with no as their default position.   No is the safest decision, unless someone says something like, “ give me all your money or I’ll shoot”. Fortunately, those situations don’t happen that often. Otherwise, if you are thinking about things and feeling some inertia or worry or anger, try making a proposal to yourself and telling yourself yes or no. Any doubt at all and you should tell yourself no. You’ll be amazed at the freedom that it gives you, not to avoid the proposition and problem , but to make a decision , in this case no , which allows your brain to settle and see more clearly the obstacles it faces. It is better to tell yourself no multiple times, face the obstacles, and get to a solid yes, than it is to get to yes to quickly. We get to yes too  quickly all the time . We should try getting to no quickly and often when trying to make progress and enjoy the benefits of the safest decisive thinking style available to human beings.

See my post from a few days ago  for a personal example of todder thinking. It come at the end

 http://diddly.wordpress.com/2009/02/15/how-to-be-decisive-about-being-decisive

How to be decisive about being decisive

My ideas here are all well and good, perhaps satisfying to think about and even ponder doing. But I don’t really think I have really answered the question about how you can get yourself to become the decisive person that will most certainly help you cut through anger and lethargy and all the rest.

I think an author named Michael Loboeuf, Ph.D. answers the question in his book titled: The Greatest Management Principle in the World.  Here it is:

THE THINGS THAT GET REWARDED GET DONE

If we do things there is always some reward involved for us. If we do not see any reward associated with an action, we will not do it. Period. It is a law of human nature. You can try challenging it and I bet I will always be able to show you how this law applies every time.

Some actions have intrinsic rewards, that is, it is the feeling we get from doing it that is at least as rewarding as the result of the action.

Planning, or outlining your decisions for a day or week or year, is not intrinsically rewarding for must of us. I think it is because we don’t reward ourselves for being decisive. If being decisive is defined by our committment to rejecting or accepting a proposal we hear from ourselves or others – it  is going to provoke some emotionality. What if you regret it? What if it is ‘wrong’? It feels so final, even though many decisions are reversible. So we don’t make decisions in order to avoid these negative feelings, but in doing so we stray from the manageable world of action which adds to us becoming more internally focused on our  unmanageable feelings. The consequence is the augmented negative  emotionality that we meant to avoid by not being decisive in the first place. It is a vicious circle.   

How do you break this cycle?   REWARD

Before you make a decision, plan on how you are going to reward yourself just for making the decision. The decision may be to reject a course of action, which should be rewarded as readily as accepting a course of action. Knowing you have some pleasure ahead of you can mitigate the negative emotionality that is inevitably associated with making a decision. Unfortunately, what we do instead is reward ourselves for not making a decision. We live in maybe land.  We have nothing else to do, since we haven’t made any  decisions, so we fall into doing something pleasurable, in other words,  we reward ourselves for being indecisive.

So the next time you are wondering what you should be doing, take a break from that course of thinking, and ask youself how you are going to reward yourself for rejecting or accepting a proposal from yourself for a course of action. It could be a small or a large reward. It doesn’t matter.

For example, before you decide to make a to-do list for yourself for tomorrow, commit to rewarding yourself in some way for accepting or rejecting the proposal to make the list. Do not give yourself this reward until you accept or reject the proposal. What will the reward be? What do you like to do?   There are a wealth of rewards out there, and you can always reverse your decision and reward yourself again for the reversal, so you can’t lose here.   No rush to action, just making decisions. I’ll run through the process myself:

Will I come  with a to-do list for tomorrow? No. I am not sure when I can do it.

Without commiting to doing it, can you decide on a time to do it? Yes – 1:15 PM

Will I come up with a to- do list for tomorrow? No. I don’t know what Reena is planning.

Without commiting to doing it, can you get an idea of what Reena is doing? Yes. I’ll get up and ask her now.

Will I come up with a to-do list for tomorrow? No. I don’t have a notebook chosen to do it.

Without commiting to doing it, can you go find a notebook that will work? Yes

Will I come up with a to-do list for tomorrow?  yes

Reward -  5 minutes rest on the couch with or without TV  for ech decision. I made 7 decisions. I could take 35 minutes. I ended up only needing 10 minutes.  I actually rested for 5 of those minutes after the first ‘no’.

And yes, I did make the to-do list

Your ‘to do nothing’ list

Most of us are familiar with and have used a ‘to do’ list. In the spirit of my last post, you also ought to have a ‘to do nothing’ list. It is meant to work in conjunction with the ‘to do’ list, and is no less important. And it is really fun to make a ‘to do nothing’ list. It might involve committing to doing nothing for 30 seconds after a certain task or ‘behavior’. It just makes all the difference to being able to step into ‘voluntary living’, to quote Semmelroth’s term.

You end up smelling the proverbial roses more often, while enhancing your effectiveness.

Go figure that would be the case.

The bibilical story of David and Goliath is instructive in what I am trying to get across – that’ll be next.

Now I am going to do nothing though.

How to be calm and decisive

 The way to cut through hyper and hypo arousal is by making a habit of being decisive.  Decisions get us to action, and as Semmelroth said,  only action can be managed directly, not emotion. If you can directly control action, you will feel much more in control than if you focus on something you can’t control – emotion. Nontheless,  decisions to take action are preceded by emotion and that emotion is fed by what painful or pleasurable thing we are seeing that could happen as a result of various choices that are in front of us. There is no way to get away from emotions, yet they needn’t be debilitating emotions that render you ineffective.   This can be achieved by  commiting to seeing the pain before  having to go through the pain. The emotion  associated with seeing the pain will be significant but you at least have some distance from it because it is happening NOW.  If you see the future pain, but commit to making some decision to reduce your chances of experiencing pain that pain directly, than seeing the  pain in order to inform your decision becomes a wise and not so unsettling prospect.   Unfortunately many people go too far and create a habit of anticipating pain without following it up with a  a firm decision,  and become chronically anxious or angry.  What they need to do is become decisive around the factors that will contribute to the pain and see just enough pain to  sharpen their focus on implementation of those decisions that will reduce the pain. Even if they are the ‘wrong’ decisions, the focused action and feeling of control will reduce  emotionality and increase calm rationality so that the chance of realizing the ‘wrongness’ of the decision is more likely to happen sooner than if you merely focus on the pain or on some distraction from the pain.  You can then more quickly change the decision and get busy implementating again in a better direction. The decision can even be to delay a particular action, and this can be as useful as taking immediate action, as long as the delay has a time limit.  Often seeing pain is overwhelming, and we need to take a break in order to rejuvenate.  You can even spend that delay eating potato chips and watching TV as long as you using the delay as a means to rejuvenate for a set time before you refocus on the pain and making a decision. However,  if you are just distracting yourself and have no set time to refocus in this way, you are going to be ineffective and risk getting addicted to your distractions.

So here are some steps if you are hypo or hyper aroused, even if ownly slightly:

1)See the pain – dig into it. “What is going to hurt? What else? What else?”

2) Commit to a decision to act to reduce the pain you saw.

3) Include enough decisions to  ’rest and distract ‘  for rejuvenation purposes within  a time limit if you are overwhelmed by looking at the pain.