Tag: Happiness

Embrace the Contrast. Leverage “Suck” and Become an Alchemist.

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Most of us can agree that life knows how to throw punches – hard. We have been lifted up, then beaten down again by life. Many of us try to avoid as much of that pain, that “suck”, those lows, as much as possible.

And we show social media just how successful we are at it.

We look for the highlights of our life to answer the questions, “How’ve you been?” and “What’s been going on?”

We wish, we manifest for more happiness, more success, more love, more beauty, more living in the moment. And yet, there are many moments in our life when we’re challenged, we’re afraid, we’re tired, we’re going through it.

But here’s the thing.

There is nothing wrong with you if you are not happy. The challenges of your life are the beautiful story for the main character, you, to learn, to improve, to transcend, to expand.

And a lot of time it looks like pain, it looks like failure. It looks like suck.

It’s time to embrace the contrast. Leverage the suck.

Let’s dive in.

The real gold in life is learning how to steer in the storm, dance in the fire, and befriend the darkness.

Generally speaking, we spend most of our time trying to be happy and comfortable. Making the temperature just right, eating when we are hungry, enjoying treats, and avoiding pain – physical, mental, and emotional. And yet, are still faced with this emptiness. This desire for more. This longing for the next better thing. That’s human.

And yet,

Pain is Where You Find Your Treasure

Something magical happens when you are able to face pain. Your way of thinking changes, your mind becomes more resilient, and your body becomes more resilient. Remember the post on anti-fragility? It’s basically this concept.

In adversity, you experience what some people call “character development” or “building character”. It makes you a better person. It brings people closer together. It’s where you discover what you’re made of, and you surprise yourself with your growth and strength.

Or you crash and burn and try again later.

Sometimes we call that failure. But then again it’s not really failure. It’s the uncomfortable place where our edges are. Where we generally have or do not have the skills for what we want to undertake or accomplish.

The Blessing of Failure Learning

We are made from our words as people.

Failure is not the right word. It is more apt to say learning.

Either we succeed or we learn. Failure is learning.

So we win, succeed, accomplish – or we learn.

What a blessing it is to learn.

Why?

Because you have the opportunity to see exactly how you can grow as a person. How you can “build character” and drop the illusion that you are “better” than you really are.

Sometimes you have to take a hard look at yourself and say, “Oh wow, I’m not that good” and this experience shows me where I can improve.

The Alchemy of Leveraging “Suck”

So to sum up, no checklist here. There is only 1 thing you need to do when things suck.

See it as your big chance to improve.

Your opportunity to learn.

To be challenged and overcome.

To become golden.

Unphased by the storm and enjoying the challenge of steering in it.

REFRAME your ATTITUDE to face the challenge. And to actually ENJOY the challenge. Or at least to sit in the conscious awareness and non judgementalism of the challenge.

Or feel sorry for yourself along the way.

There are 2 ways this goes,

  1. If you absolutely cannot face the challenge, then get some rest. Treat yourself with grace and love and start again when you’re ready.
  2. Face it.

So let’s say you decide to face it.

You’ve already won in improving your character and strength just by facing the challenge at hand. We’ll call this growth. A.k.a. you know how to do hard things.

You win at the challenge, leading to happiness and satisfaction. You reach your edge and expand.

Or

You fail learn. And this, my friend, is your golden moment where you are in “double suck”. You faced a hard challenge (which is painful) and did not succeed (that’s pain on pain).

Take a good honest look at yourself. Realize that you are missing certain skills, components, knowledge, etc. to succeed. Take note, write it down. Try again.

Take a deep breath of awareness and realize that you are an alchemist. Find joy in the process. Find pleasure in your painful growth. Smile in the storm of adversity.

Turning lead Suck Into Gold

It is in this very low moment, that you find yourself in the middle of this challenge, and you own your power by realizing that you are in control of your response. And you can choose to accept > then enjoy it.

How exactly? Let’s illustrate.

Remember the movie, 300? The Spartans are at war with the Persians.

  • The Persian says, “Our arrows will blot out the sun.” (<<< This is your challenge)
  • And the Spartan responds with “Then we will fight in the shade.” (<<< That’s you, alchemist, not only facing, but enjoying – LEVERAGING – the challenge to your best ability)

The Key

It takes practice. It may take time. It’s key to maintain awareness throughout.

See the Spartan’s face? He’s up for it. Embracing the challenge. Embracing the inner fire.

This is a thing that humans have that is usually tossed into our shadow side, or thrown into the “masochist” label. It’s that we actually enjoy a challenge and a little “suck”. We also call that “badass”.

And we like that – in movies, in superheroes, in fantasy. But when it comes to our own lives, we forget that we can choose to be the hero in our own lives. Or the victim.

Lean into your inner fire. Your inner strength. And see the golden opportunity of your expansion in the challenge.

Use animalistic energy + divine perspective.

Wolf with yellow eyes and intense look.

Congratulations alchemist. This is a way to turn lead into gold. Side effects may include self-satisfaction, happiness, the conscious evolution of your spirit, and the liberty to experience life without shrinking, constraining, or resisting, reduced anxiety, and less feeling sorry for yourself. To realize, or see, your power.

Much love,

Jacqueline

Reflection

The Critical Part of Success You’re Most Likely Too Busy For

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The definition of success is personal.

In this case, we’ll have it be whatever you want to achieve or obtain. The attainment of a goal that is important to you and part of your plan.

“You know when you’re successful when you feel fulfillment. If you feel stuck or empty, you’re doing it wrong.”

-Consciousness Liberty

For those of you who don’t know me, my mission is to help you free your consciousness and help redefine the paradigms that we live and work by.

One of those paradigms is the “work hard” wave we’ve been riding in our working culture. American culture, Chinese culture, and many others we have glorified working long hours, “putting in overtime”, “grinding”, “working hard” and “being on-call”.

I don’t know about you, but for me, doing things hard usually means that your skillset is not well equipped for the task at hand.

When you are properly equipped for a task, it is not hard, it’s fluid, it’s enjoyable, it’s effective and efficient, (and in some cases masterful). It’s not hard.

Hard is not optimal. It’s an indicator of friction and by definition an indicator of expending, energy, effort, force or strength into a task.

It’s force. Not power.

And that’s an important difference.

Due to this “work hard” culture, we overwork to the point of compromising our health, our happiness, our productivity, enjoyment, and ultimately – our success.

We’re Too Busy to Create Our Own Success

Our obsession with pushing and working long hours, actually makes us more inefficient in our work. For example, we expect our coworkers to put in long hours, so we take long lunches, schedule long meetings and run them poorly. Being poorly prepared for a meeting and wasting time.

Plus…

It ignores this critical component of success nobody talks about.

Reflection

Why?

We’re too busy being busy, and sharing with everyone how busy we are. We don’t make the time to come up for a breather and realign on our priorities, activities, and the way we do them.

We are in a whirlwind of work that always fills up the time allotted.

And boy do we give it time.

Most of our time.

It’s important to reflect on our tasks and consider,

  • What’s the impact of this?
  • Is this getting me closer to my ultimate goal?
  • What is my ultimate goal?

If you don’t know the answers to these questions, you’re expending a lot of energy on activities that fill up your day, and ultimately your life, and take you no closer to your success.

“If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always be where you’ve always been.”

– T.D. Jakes

Reflection, the Missing Piece to Your Success

You know how at the beginning of this article we talked about how success is personal?

Well, that’s a big deal because you can be a “high performer” at work and be rewarded for your long hours and extra effort and not be “successful” because you’re not fulfilled. You’re checking off tasks at work, but they aren’t the tasks that really matter to you.

Or you may be struggling to keep up at work, and compromising your health and your most precious relationships.

And may not even realize it when it’s happening because you’re too busy.

“Without reflection, we go blindly on our way, creating more unintended consequences, and failing to achieve anything useful.”

– Margaret J. Wheatley

The Benefits of Reflection

If you’re used to the “go, go, go”, “caffeine and crush”, “sleep when you’re dead” culture, reflection can seem painstaking, or worse, a waste of time.

So, why reflect?

Besides the fact that the most famous Emperor of Rome did.

Anyway, so here’s why.

Reflection allows you to gain perspective, deeper wisdom, more alignment, plan new more effective actions, more effective strategies, and gain insights and ideas that can be used to further maximize your time, processes, impact and potential.

University of Florida researchers found that those who start the day by thinking of the kind of leader they want to be were more effective at work.

A University of Zurich study concluded that reflecting on past personal challenges you’ve overcome helps you process negative experiences.

So, what do you get when you have that alignment?

When you’re doing the things that are most important to you?

Happiness and fulfillment.

And as Socrates once said, a life worth living.

Why Does Reflection Make Such a Big Difference?

We go through life having experiences. When you have significant experiences that are of high emotional intensity or high consequence, your mind will automatically create a reference point to better handle that specific situation (and situations like it). it’s a biological survival program.

This works pretty well for some basic life situations: don’t touch that plant again (it’s poison ivy). Don’t talk to that person(they are mean), eat that thing, (that was delicious). But sometimes situations get more complex and your biological survival system can backfire. Don’t speak your mind in the meeting (that was not well received).

As John C. Maxwell said, reflection turns experience into insight. Reflection fine-tunes what success means to you and what are the strategies and steps to get there.

And in some cases, it defines that.

“I never make the same mistake twice. I make it like five or six times, you know, just to be sure.”

-Unknown

Kind of funny how that quote is by Unknown. Anyway, let’s move on.

Types of Reflection

For the purpose of effectiveness, we’ll make a distinction between reflection and self-reflection. They are pretty much the same thing, but a distiction can be made that will improve your practice.

  • Self-reflection – What Socrates calls “knowing Thyself”. When you reflect on you. On your understanding of what “you” are.
  • Reflection – Distinguished by reflecting on your work, tasks at hand, projects, etc. in a specific situation.

“Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.”

-Aristotle

How to Reflect

There are many exercises and ways to reflect. For our purposes here, let’s keep it simple.

  1. Ask yourself questions. Self-dialogue.
  2. Preferably write things down.

Remember, the quality of your questions will determine the quality of your results.

In a specific situation such as a project or event, there are some fundamental questions that can help you get the ball rolling.

  1. What is my goal?
  2. Is this serving my goal?
  3. What did I do? What happened (cause)
  4. What was the result? (result)
  5. What could I have done better/different to have better results?
  6. What valuable lessons did I realize?
  7. How can I incorporate/ integrate these into my work, life, behavior?
  8. What should I start doing? Stop doing?

That’s pretty much it. I suggest setting aside time every day or every week for reflection (Bonus points for scheduling it into your calendar). It’s a conscious design of the evolution of you. Many people find that various journaling practices are an excellent tool for reflection.

How to Self-Reflect

If you want to do general self-reflection, the same process applies.

Knowing yourself is a critical part of your wellbeing, success and fulfillment.

So, I created a list of questions for you to get right to it. You can find them here.

Reflection & Marcus Aurelius

One of the greatest exemplars of reflection practice was the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. His private writings to himself we published and popularized as the work, Meditations in the category of Stoic philosophy. The Meditations of the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius have been read by many historians, philosophers and leaders as they provide insights into the great mind of this Imperial Ruler.

Reflection & The Law of Duaity

In hermetic philosophy, there is a universal law known as the Law of Duality.

The practice of reflection satisfies this law, which maximizes your effectiveness. In this way, you can avoid burnout, boredom, and imbalance. And live a life that is fun, inspires your work and helps you work better.

If you are to compare work to weight lifting, it’s during the periods of rest that your muscles get stronger. It’s during your reflection time that you integrate and align your learnings.

And YOU get stronger.

The Practice of Reflection

In order for you to be successful in starting your new reflection habit, I invite you to create time and space for the reflection practice. Set yourself up for success by scheduling a recurring time in your calendar for this.

Here are some quotes to give you a gentle butt-kick of inspiration.

“Without deep reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people.”

-Albert Einstein

“People who have had little self-reflection live life in a huge reality blind-spot.”

-Bryant McGill

“The more reflective you are, the more effective you are.”

-Hall And Simeral

Let’s slow down to speed up together.

Refrences:

https://kidadl.com/articles/top-reflection-quotes-to-gain-perspective
https://antimaximalist.com/self-reflection-quotes/
https://fromemuseum.org/challenges-faced-by-socrates/
https://nwyatt227.medium.com/3-lessons-to-live-by-from-marcus-aurelius-9c33759e9e77
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14623940903138266
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5703031/
https://web.media.mit.edu/~mres/clubhouse/handouts/reflection-v6.pdf
Read more at https://www.brainyquote.com/topics/reflection-quotes

Why Success Doesn’t Always Equal Happiness and 10 Steps To Fix That

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If you’re reading this, chances are you’ve tasted success quite a few times in your life and you want more of it.

However, you’re going to spend a lot of your time chasing my forms of success —claiming success, taking a selfie with it — and leaving without actual satisfaction.

It will leave you empty. That is not true success. You’re wasting your time.

Why?

You’re chasing other people’s dreams, goals and achievements. You’re chasing the American dream or your father’s dream, or your hero’s dream, not yours. You’re not clear, and you don’t even know it. 

But you feel it.

I’m going to save you a lot of wasted time by helping you find if it’s really your true success before you have to go through the trouble of getting it.

Here’s the difference:

There are 2 types of satisfaction from “success”.

1. Ego Satisfaction – The kind of satisfaction you get from likes on Facebook or your friends exclaiming,

“That’s so cool, or great or awesome!” “What’s it like?” “How did you do it?”

2. Alignment Satisfaction – This is the kind of satisfaction you are looking for. True fulfillment that leaves you feeling,

“This is it. This is what it’s all about.”

Ego satisfaction is the “candy” of success. Tastes really good, gives you momentary happiness, then leaves you empty. Alignment satisfaction is what you’re looking for. The kind of satisfaction so deep that you don’t care who agrees with you and you don’t feel the need to flash it around. The kind that goes deep into your heart and soul where you say, “This is it.” and it fills you up.

That, my friend, is true success, fulfillment. This is what you want to focus on and scrap all the other forms of “candy success”.

Those many times you’ve thought you knew what you wanted — you were sure of it — only to realize that when you reached the top it left you empty inside. You were lacking something from the beginning.

You were lacking clarity.

You require clarity of self to be able to authentically align the goals in your life with your true self and your true purpose.

Your true self is:

  • What you value most in life
  • Your values, virtues you live by.
  • Your mission in life. Your life’s purpose.

Here are the 10 steps to get clarity on your true success

1. Commit to this process

You won’t get something for nothing so be prepared, this exercise requires two things for it to be effective.

  1. Write down your findings.
  2. Keep going when you are uncomfortable.

Still game? Let’s proceed.

2. Define your values

What values do you live by? Create a list of 10 values you uphold most in your life, values you live by, values you stand for. Circle the top 3. This is your roadmap.

3. Define your moments

What moments do you live for? Create a list of 10 types of moments you value most in your life, such as spending time with family or surfing at sunrise.

Make sure your goals allow for or include these moments.

4. Stop forcing success

Slow down and train yourself to be ok with just existing. You don’t have to be in the process of achieving something all the time. This is more challenging and uncomfortable than it seems because your mind is already in the habit of moving fast towards something, anything, all the time.

You will also feel resistance because you are pushing against the current of what society has defined you should be doing. Just chill or zen out. Relax and just exist.

Observe what happens. What new thoughts come to you? What feelings come to you?

5. Learn the difference between force and flow

The goals worth pursuing are the ones that pull you, not the ones you push for. They come into your mind from momentary bursts of inspiration and create lasting impressions that may last for years or a lifetime. Listen to the call. Make sure you are aware enough to capture these moments of inspiration. WRITE THEM DOWN.

6. Do it for you. Don’t give a fuck

Think of a goal you are not yet clear on and write it down.

  • Who are the others involved who would be affected either positively or negatively by the achievement of your goal?
  • What does the achievement of this goal do for your social status? Your family status?
  • How does this affect your decision?
  • Are you getting the most satisfaction from the achievement of this goal or is someone else?

You may realize this goal isn’t even yours to pursue. You WILL realize pleasing others or caring for what others think is a waste of your time and energy.

7. See your goal in the bigger picture

Close your eyes, focus on your breathing and relax your body. This works best if you are in an alpha brainwave state.

Visualize the achievement of your goal. What do you feel? What’s next? How does your goal fit into the bigger picture of your life’s purpose? Don’t know what your life’s purpose is? Here’s how to find it.

8. Create Contrast. Spend time alone in nature

Being alone in nature does wonders for helping you get clarity because you remove the interference from others and your natural inclination to adapt yourself to others.

Without the influence of ads, internet and other people you are free to introspect and express yourself in complete authenticity.

This contrast of environment, energies and solitude will create new insights. Observe your behaviors, thought patterns, tendencies, inspirations and inclinations.

WRITE THEM DOWN.

Now, that you have an idea (and some notes) of who you think you are and what your preferences are, you want to go back and interact with the world and others again.

“Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth. “ – Alan Watts


9. Experiment and observe

Go back into the world with your new sense of self and try things. New things, old things.

Identify the things that light you up and observe the things that upset you on a deep level. Don’t force it, just do what you want and have fun. New experiences provide you with the fresh perspective of knowing whether you like something or not.

Notice your energy levels. Are they elevated or drained? How about your emotional levels? Are you angry, inspired or deep in enjoyment?

Observe how you communicate with others. Observe how you perceive a situation, your thought patterns, observe your posture and movement. More tips on how to observe yourself here.

WRITE DOWN YOUR FINDINGS. Write it or capture it somewhere, so you don’t forget.

10. Question the basics

Now that you have a pretty good sense of who you are alone and with others, let’s take this a step further.

Question the things you usually accept. This takes a high level of awareness because what you do day-to-day has become a habit. You won’t even realize there are other ways of doing things.

For example, is the way you get dressed in the morning the most optimal way of doing so? Why do we have 8 hour/ 5 day week workdays? Could roads be made out of solar panels? Etc.

When you acquiesce to something you don’t enjoy enough times, it becomes an automatic habit, that you repeat even though you don’t enjoy it. You just accept it.

THIS is what we are looking to snap you out of.

Congratulations!

You now have a roadmap and analysis of who you are, what you stand for and what you love.

Here’s to you and your amazingly fulfilling life.