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Posts in category Personal development

101 year-in-review questions

December 30, 2013 Written by Curt Rosengren

As the past year slides into the rear view mirror, you have a choice. You can either run headlong into the coming year without giving the past year any thought, or you can harvest as much insight from it as you can.

You invested 365 days of your life in the last year. Exploring the year in review and discovering what insights it has to share with you is a great way to maximize your ROI (return on investment).

The following list offers a point of departure for that exploration. Don’t worry about trying to answer all of them (that might take the whole next year!). Just scan through and see which ones jump out at you.

As you go through them, refrain from judging yourself. In any given year, you’re going to have high points and low points. You’re going to shine and you’re going to feel like the light is covered with mud. You’re going to succeed and you’re going to fail That’s just reality.

Instead of judging, approach the questions with curiosity and self-compassion. For both the positive and negative assessments, ask yourself, “What can I learn from this? What insight can I glean from this that will better equip me to live the life I want to live in the coming year?”

And now, the questions!

  1. What energized me?
  2. What drained my energy?
  3. How did I make a positive impact in the world?
  4. How did I make a negative impact in the world?
  5. How have I fed love in my life?
  6. How have I fed fear in my life?
  7. What positive things about myself in the past year am I not fully acknowledging?
  8. What am I judging about myself in the past year that I can let go of?
  9. Who influenced me positively?
  10. Who influenced me negatively?
  11. Who helped me?
  12. What help did I need that I didn’t ask for?
  13. Who did I help?
  14. What opportunities to help did I miss?
  15. Who do I want to thank?
  16. What negative reactions am I holding on to?
  17. What am I grateful for?
  18. What helped me be my highest self?
  19. What hindered me from being my highest self?
  20. How did I spend my time? What does that say about what I actually value?
  21. How did I spend my money? What does that say about what I actually value?
  22. How did I grow?
  23. What habits or choices supported my physical well-being?
  24. What habits or choices worked against my physical well-being?
  25. What habits or choices supported my emotional well-being?
  26. What habits or choices worked against my emotional well-being?
  27. What habits or choices supported my spiritual well-being?
  28. What habits or choices worked against my spiritual well-being?
  29. How did I live in sync with my values?
  30. How did I live out of sync with my values?
  31. How did I live from the heart?
  32. How did I walk my spiritual path?
  33. How did I live my faith?
  34. What helped me feel spiritually connected?
  35. What made me feel spiritually disconnected?
  36. What were my successes?
  37. What were my failures?
  38. What was my high point?
  39. What was my low point?
  40. How am I different today than I was a year ago?
  41. How is life different than it was a year ago?
  42. What challenges did I face?
  43. Who are the main people in my life? How did each one of them impact me positively?
  44. What affirming, supportive stories did I tell myself?
  45. What limiting stories did I tell myself?
  46. If the last year was a movie, what role did my character play? (the hero? the victim? the villain?) Why do I think that?
  47. What do I wish I had had more of in the last year?
  48. What do I wish I had had less of in the last year?
  49. Where did I experience connection with people?
  50. Where did I feel disconnected with people?
  51. How did I reach out to connect with people?
  52. How did I shut myself off from connection with people?
  53. Who were my teachers (could be anyone – not just actual teachers)? What did I learn from them?
  54. Who were my students (again, not necessarily actual students)? What did I teach them?
  55. What was the central theme for what the last year taught me?
  56. What habits helped me live the life I want to live?
  57. What habits hindered me from living the life I want to live?
  58. How was I my authentic self?
  59. How was I inauthentic?
  60. What would I do differently if I could do it over?
  61. If I could pick one thing (one thing I did, one way I responded, one change I made, etc.) that most reflects who I aspire to be, what would it be?
  62. How did I plant seeds for a positive future?
  63. How did I compromise the future I want?
  64. What am I proud of?
  65. What am I ashamed of?
  66. What choices did I make that left me feeling good about myself?
  67. What choices did I make that left me feeling bad about myself?
  68. Who do I wish I had spent more time with?
  69. Who do I wish I had spent less time with?
  70. What do I wish I had spent more time doing?
  71. What do I wish I had spent less time doing?
  72. What community or group of people do I wish I had spent more time with?
  73. What community or group of people do I wish I had spent less time with?
  74. Who was uplifting to be around?
  75. Who was it draining to be around?
  76. Who helped me believe in myself?
  77. Who had a negative effect on my belief in myself?
  78. Who encouraged me?
  79. Who discouraged me?
  80. What felt meaningful?
  81. What really mattered?
  82. What did I think mattered that didn’t really?
  83. What felt empty and flat?
  84. How did I nourish myself?
  85. How did I ignore my own needs?
  86. How did I nourish others?
  87. How did I ignore the needs of others?
  88. What aspects of my life did I embrace fully?
  89. What aspects of my life did I resist?
  90. What change did I embrace fully?
  91. What change did I resist?
  92. What did I learn?
  93. Where did I feel like I had clear direction?
  94. Where did I feel confused?
  95. How did I feed positive, healthy relationships in my life?
  96. How did I get in the way of positive, healthy relationships in my life?
  97. How did I live with integrity?
  98. How did I live out of integrity?
  99. Where did I say no when I wish I would have said yes?
  100. Where did I say yes when I wish I would have said no?
  101. What was the single most important thing I learned?

You have invested 365 days of your life in the last year. And those days are jam-packed with potential insight you can use as you move forward. Approach these questions with a sense of curiosity and self-compassion, and harvest the learning!

 

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Beware the Dream Job Syndrome: How to increase your career passion potential

October 30, 2013 Written by Curt Rosengren

Do you want to exponentially increase your potential for finding passion in your career? Then avoid this one simple mistake – defining passion too narrowly!

For most people, pursuing their passion means following their dream to be an artist, or a writer, or an organic farmer, or whatever. For many, for a variety of reasons both valid and imagined, those things remain out of reach. And so the idea of experiencing a passion-packed career gets relegated to pipe dream status.

After a dozen years of helping people create careers that energize and inspire them in my Passion Catalyst work, it’s clear to me that most people have far too narrow a picture of career passion, and that limits their options. I call it the Dream Job Syndrome.

How to increase your passion potential

How do you expand your picture? Start with my definition of passion:

Passion is the energy that comes from bringing more of you into what you do.

It’s doing the kinds of things, in the kinds of ways, in the kinds of places, with the kinds of people, etc. that naturally energize you.

What I’ve found is that everybody has underlying themes that tend to be there when they feel energized and engaged – underlying reasons why they love what they love (for example, a big one for me is “exploration & discovery”).

Feeling passion in your work is actually about experiencing those underlying themes. I think of them as fuel cells we can hook into. Looking at it that way, that dream job is really just a vehicle for experiencing those energy sources.

And that’s where the passion potential expands, because there are a lot of other jobs that will let you experience those underlying themes as well.

If you define your passion as cooking, your options for a career are limited specifically to things where you can cook. But if you identify the underlying reasons why you love cooking, you can in turn ask, “OK, what kinds of careers would allow me to experience those things.

You might love the aesthetics, or perhaps understanding how the different elements interact and work together to get the result you’re looking for. Or maybe you love creating on the fly with whatever is on hand. All of those things could be experienced in different ways in other jobs.

So don’t limit yourself. Passion is much closer than you might think. And it all starts with understanding why you love what you love.

(Check out my post How to find career passion for more insights on finding a career that lights you up.)

–

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Energize your career, Uncategorized
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Be the best you: Occupy your peak position

October 21, 2013 Written by Curt Rosengren

Are you cheating yourself of your potential? If you are, you’re in good company. Most of us are, to some degree.

One of the most insidious ways we get in our own way is the incessant temptation to try to be somebody else. So many people show up in life based on their perception of who and how they need to be in order to succeed, be accepted, etc., and it has little or nothing to do with their authentic shine.

It’s one of the big reasons people end up coming to my for my Passion Catalyst coaching – their career has become this never-ending saga of getting up in the morning and heading off for another day of being who they’re not. (If that feels a little too familiar, here’s an article with some nuts-and-bolts ideas for what to do about it.)

This tendency came up in a conversation with a friend the other day who was feeling the draw of putting on her “conventional mask” when her real gifts and magic have always flowed from her non-conventional (and incredibly effective) authentic persona.

As we talked, this picture came to mind (look upon my artistic mastery in awe!).

personal peak position

The picture wasn’t just about my friend. It describes the sweet spot we all have, that authentic peak where we are bringing our truest gifts and abilities to the world in a way that both energizes us and optimizes our performance.

Any step away from center, from our authentic peak, takes us to a lower level. We don’t feel as good, we don’t leverage our natural gifts as fully, and we don’t perform as well (or we have to put more energy into achieving that same level of performance, which creates an energy drain).

Our potential is at its highest when we’re occupying the peak. Any attempt to “be someone else,” to wear a mask and play a role that’s not natural for us leads us down the hill.

How we step off our personal peak position

How do people step away from that peak position? Things like:

  • Pursuing a career they don’t love because it looks “successful”
  • Making choices based on others’ expectations
  • Presenting themselves as who they think they “should” be
  • Compromising their values to satisfy someone else
  • Using an externally created definition of success to make their decisions

Putting the picture to work in your life

Real life is more complicated than the simplicity of the picture, of course. There are multiple ways we can step off the peak in different areas of our life. And there are times when we have to compromise, optimizing the situation rather than maximizing.

But the picture gives you a really simple way to think about what’s going on in your life. It gives you a way to ask a bottom line yes or no question. There’s only one spot that occupies that peak position, and that is the one that allows you to be authentically you.

So you can ask, “Am I standing on my peak (in my choice of work, in this relationship, in how I show up with people, etc.), or have I stepped down the mountain?”

If you’re not on your peak, you can follow that question up with, “What would standing on my peak look like here? What has led me downhill from the peak? What steps can I take to move back up?”

It’s unrealistic to expect that you’ll be all peak, all the time. But by keeping that peak position in your awareness, you can both make decisions that will keep you there and avoid steps that will lead you down the mountain.

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Authenticity, Energize your life

Newsflash! Everyone else is clueless too!

June 28, 2013 Written by Curt Rosengren

In my Passion Catalyst coaching work, there’s a frequent conversation I have that goes something like this…

Client: Everybody else seems to know what they want to do in their career, and I’m just lost. I’m stuck. Gawd, I suck. There must be something wrong with me.

Me: Don’t worry. Everyone else is clueless too.

OK, so that’s a really abbreviated version of the conversation, but it’s the basic gist of it.

If there’s one thing I have learned over the last dozen years of helping people energize their careers (and their lives), it’s that the facade of “I’ve got it all together” doesn’t run very deep for most people. Underneath is a litany of uncertainty, doubts, and fears.

Take people’s careers, for example. When you look around, it’s easy to think that most of the people around you feel like they’re on the right path. And yet statistically, studies have shown year after year that over 50% of employees are dissatisfied with their jobs! And another 30+ percent are only “satisfied – as in, “It’s better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.” Only 15 percent or so really love what they do.

Not exactly in line with “everyone else seems to know where they’re going,” is it?

Just because people don’t wear a flashing neon sign advertising their uncertainty and dissatisfaction doesn’t mean it’s not there. So next time you feel compelled to compare yourself to how together other people seem to have it, just remember, “Everyone else is clueless too.”

It might not be in the exact same way you’re clueless. They might not have the same fears you have. They might have clarity where you feel uncertainty. But somewhere in their lives, in some way, I can just about guarantee that they’re experiencing their own version of doubt and insecurity.

If you use other people as a measuring stick for assessing how you’re doing in your life, you will always be able to come up short. Why? There’s a quote I love from pastor and author Steven Furtick that somes it up brilliantly:

“One reason we struggle with insecurity: we’re comparing our behind the scenes to everyone else’s highlight reel.” 

So remember, when you fall short in your comparisons, you’re only seeing the highlight reel. Let go of how other people are doing, and focus on your next step.

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Fear, Overcoming obstacles
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Do a good news experiment

June 27, 2013 Written by Curt Rosengren

A couple days ago I posted fifteen online sources for positive, inspiring news as a starting point for feeding your mind with what’s working in the world and nourishing a positive worldview.

One of the challenges with that whole idea is that good news is seldom as riveting and compelling as the bad news (that, unfortunately, seems to be how we’re wired).

The basic question then, if you want to ratchet up the impact good news has on your mind, is how do you create as much engagement around the positive as you can? How do you create as much opportunity for your mind to hook into those positive stories the way it gets sucked into the negative ones?”

The Good News Experiment

The list of positive news sources in yesterday’s post had its genesis in a conversation with a father I had recently about the barrage of negative, toxic news we’re all subjected to on a regular basis and the effect it had on the wordview his kids were developing.

As we talked about the challenge of finding a positive worldview to focus on in the midst of the 24/7 news cycle of violence, destruction, and scandal, I offered to compile a list of positive news sources for his kids. As I put that list together, I started noodling the question, “How do you make this matter? How do you make the energy of these stories compete with the energy of stories of murder and mayhem?”

The idea that popped into my head was simple: Talk about it.

The Good News Experiment idea as it originally formed focused on opportunities for family discussion, but it can just as easily be applied with friends and colleagues.

Here’s the basic idea.

  1. Identify your partners in goodness. This could be a ready-made group like your family, or you could create a Good News Group that gets together on a regular basis to meet in person, by phone, or on Skype.
  2. Decide how often you will meet. For a family, this might be a daily discussion (a great dinner time tradition!). A Good News Group of friends might meet once a week or once a month (keeping in mind that the more frequently you meet, the more naturally it keeps you focused on the good news).
  3. Decide how long the experiment will run. If you’re making the discussion a daily dinner discussion with your family, try doing it for one month to start with. If you’re meeting less frequently with your Good News Group, you may want to expand that period. In either situation, you can always extend it if you find it enriching.
  4. Spotlight your favorite news. Use the list below as a starting point for finding positive news. Each person can share their favorite positive/inspiring/etc. story they have come across since the last discussion.
  5. Discuss it. Each person can share what resonated with them about the story and why they found it compelling. Use that as a springboard to go deeper. How do the others in the group feel about it? What resonates? Are there similar things any of you may have heard of? Where else is news like that happening? What ideas come to mind that any or all of you can apply in your own lives? How do the stories counter the stream of negative perspective we’re fed in the mainstream news? Brainstorm questions to explore and see where they take you.
  6. Review it. Every once in a while, look back and review what impact your focus on the positive news has had. Has it changed or broadened your perspective? Has it given you ideas? Has it helped you counter the doom and gloom that seems to be so prevalent?

Do this as an experiemnt. Don’t just trust me that it’s a good idea. Do it yourself and see what kind of impact it has on you and your fellow experimenters.

I can’t tell you what will happen, but I have a sneaking hunch what might happen. When you have a space in your life specifically designated for focusing on what’s working in the world, and you know you’re going to be on the hook for discussing it, your brain starts to notice it more. You start to automatically look for good news you might be able to share.

And the more you notice it, the more space it occupies in your awareness, and the more potential it has to shape how you experience the world.

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Energize your life, Fear
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Attitude is contagious (what attitude are you catching?)

June 23, 2013 Written by Curt Rosengren

Who do you surround yourself with, and what impact are they having on how you see the world?

I talk frequently about the importance of the people you spend your time with. Here’s a study that reinforces the reason why it’s so important. It follows randomly paired roommates in college to gauge the effect each had on the other’s psychological disposition.

The upshot is that a gloomy roommate can dim a sunnier disposition, and one with a more positive outlook can make a gloomypuss more positive.

We tend to think of traits like positivity or pessimism as more or less fixed by the time we’re adults. But, the researcher doing the study suggests…

“…those traits may be more like a language than like a physical characteristic such as height. By adolescence, people get very good at speaking a certain psychological language — responding to adversity in a certain, fixed way. But just as people can learn a new tongue if they’re suddenly immersed in a new environment where people around them are speaking a different language, the experience of coming to college might have the same effect on the psychological makeup of young adults, Haeffel says. When gloomy people spend lots of time with someone who has a cheerful outlook, it can change their psychological “language.” When cheerful people spend time around gloomy roommates, it can darken their outlook.”

In a significant way, who you spend your time with is who you become.

Take a look around you. What impact are the people in your life having? What do you need more of? What do you need less of?

Like food for your body, the people around you can be nourishment (or not) for your mind and your outlook. Look at it as an extended mental ecosystem. Make it a regular habit to check in with yourself on that ecosystem.

Awareness isn’t enough, of course. You also need to manage it. Make it a point to reach out to people who support, inspire, and challenge you. Minimize the time you spend with people who suck your energy dry.

Are the people around you the people you want to become? If not, start taking steps to change that.

–

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Energize your life, Overcoming obstacles
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Life tip: Invest in meaning

May 31, 2013 Written by Curt Rosengren

Want a greater sense of meaning in your life? Here’s a tip from a recent post on the Harvard Business Review blog about the perceived need to make a trade-off between money and meaning:

Stop trading money for meaning. Start blowing up the dilemma by investing money — and much more significantly, time, energy, attention, relationships, imagination, and passion — in the stuff of a life meaningfully well lived.

 The whole post is worth reading, but that one snippet particularly caught my attention. I love the idea of investing in what yields a sense of meaning in your life.

Typically, people seem to expect meaning to just happen for them. And when it doesn’t, they just accept it as the way things are, like meaning is something reserved for the select few, and the rest of us schleps have to just muck our way through life as best we can.

But when you think about it, why would meaning just happen? It’s certainly not anything that is cultivated by the materialist culture we live in. It makes sense that we need to plant the seeds of meaning and nurture and cultivate them while they grow.

Here are some ideas for areas to invest in.

Self-awareness

The better you know yourself – what energizes you, what you value, what inspires you, what you care about, etc. – the better equipped you will be to create a life that aligns with that.

Invest your money and time in things that help you expand that self-awareness. That might be books, workshops, or working with a coach to help you find clarity.

While you’re investing in self-awareness, spend some time with the question, “What does meaning mean? What feels meaningful to me?” There is no one-size-fits-all answer to that, so explore what it means specifically for you.

Relationships

Humans are social creatures, and our relationships can be a big source of the meaning we experience in our lives. Not just family and friends, but also work relationships, community (including finding the right communities for you), etc.

Invest the time in building and maintaining those relationships. Invest your money in experiences that

Making a difference

This one is what most people think of when they think about finding meaning. They want it to matter that they exist. Unfortunately, there’s a tendency to think primarily in the big picture (“I want to be remembered for something big and important.”). As a result, many of the every-day opportunities to make a difference go sliding by unnoticed.

Invest your money in making a difference, sure (with things like donating to charity, making micro-credit loans through an organization like Kiva.org, etc.), but don’t neglect the small things like a warm smile, or an authentic compliment. The opportunities to make a difference as you go through your day are legion.

Focus

It’s not just that what you focus on grows, it’s also that what you focus on becomes what you see. If you invest your focus paying attention to the positive and the meaningful, you’re going to see more of it. And that will shape how you experience the world.

Passion

The definition of passion I use in my work helping people create careers that light them up is “passion is the energy that comes from bringing more of YOU into what you do.” When you invest your time, money, and effort into a path that energizes and inspires you, not only does it feel more meaningful, you’re also better at what you do. (Here’s another post I wrote on finding passion in your career.)

Creativity

When I talk about creativity in this context, I don’t mean ability to draw or paint. I mean being open to the flow of possibility. The more you can cultivate that possibility, the more potential there is for the truly meaningful to show up in your life.

Spirituality

Last but not least (in fact, you could make a case that this should be first), invest in connecting with something greater than yourself. Invest your time in activities that help you feel that connection (meditation, prayer, a contemplative walk in nature, etc.). And spend your time with people who reinforce that feeling.

This is far from an exhaustive list, but it’s a good start. Do you have any other ideas? Where would you invest to create a life of meaning?

–

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Authenticity, Making a difference
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4 steps to change self-limiting habits

May 22, 2013 Written by Curt Rosengren

Sometimes the biggest obstacle between us and our vision for what we want to create in the world lies smack dab between our ears. We all have self-limiting habits and perspectives.

For example, for me a big one is lapsing into the habitual harangue of my self-critic, Brutal Bart (and mistaking his spiel for reality). For someone else, it might be perfectionism, or chronic pessimism, or making negative assumptions about other people’s motivations, or a mistaken belief about how they “should” show up.

In my role for the last dozen years as a Passion Catalyst helping people create careers and lives that energize and inspire them, I have had a front row seat on the wide range of habitual ways people get in their own ways. I have also discovered a process that works consistently well in shifting those habits.

Step 1: Identify the habit

This seems like a no-brainer, I know, but it’s important. Get really clear on what you want to shift.

Step 2: Learn to notice the habit

If you don’t notice it playing out, you’re a puppet on a string being yanked around by the habit. For many people, those limiting habits are so ingrained that they notice them as much as a fish notices water. It’s just their natural state of affairs. So this step is about creating awareness.

Sometimes it’s enough to say, “I’m going to notice when I do that / think that.” Often though, it’s such a fluid part of our experience it’s like trying to remember to notice the oxygen in the air.

If that’s you, start by noticing after the fact. For a week, do an end-of-day review. Look back at your day and say, where did that habit come up? Think of it as training your brain to notice. Over time, you’ll start noticing it more naturally in real time.

Step 3: Practice shifting the habit

Ultimately your goal is not just to notice the habit in real time, but also to shift it. Often easier said than done. The solution? Again, it’s about training your brain.

Just like you trained your brain to notice, you can train your brain to shift by doing it after the fact. At the end of each day, look back and pick a time when the habit reared its head. Then start asking questions.

Let’s say your habit is self-criticism. You would identify a time when it popped up and ask things like, “Was the intensity of that criticism valid? If I were looking at someone else in the same situation, would I be as caustic and mean with my criticism? OK, so I flubbed that – what might some other ways to respond have been besides beating myself up? What would the kind response to this have been? What are some more productive ways I could have responded to that?”

The aim here isn’t to give your critic more fodder for criticism (you should have done it this way!). It’s to give your brain a chance to practice different alternatives when it’s not in the heat of the moment. Think of it as taking repeated training runs for more positive and constructive responses, giving your brain a chance to build “muscle memory.”

Step 4: Shift the habit in real time

At some point you’ll not only catch the self-limiting habit in real time, you’ll be able to start choosing different alternatives. Sometimes you’ll see the hole before you fall in. Other times you’ll fall in, but climb out again before you get too lodged in it.

Don’t expect to be perfect with it. It’s less of a light-switch approach to change and more of an evolutionary one.

Remember: It takes time

Keep in mind that this process doesn’t look at the shift as an immediate gratification kind of thing. It’s a way to create that shift over time. I will often take a week by week approach with my clients. “OK, this week, just notice. No need to fix anything. No need to do anything different. Just build that noticing muscle.”

Separating the steps out instead of trying to do it all at once both makes it more manageable and more likely to succeed.

–

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Overcoming obstacles
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Gretchen Rubin: The Ripple Revolution Podcast

May 21, 2013 Written by Curt Rosengren

When best-selling author Gretchen Rubin’s book, Happier at Home hit the New York Times best-seller list earlier this year, it found some familiar company – her first happiness-focused book, The Happiness Project. As of now, The GretchenRubinHappiness Project has been on the bestseller list for over two years!

For each book, Gretchen spent a year focusing one month at a time on exploring and implementing different areas related to happiness, then wrote about what she learned.

Listen to this interview with Gretchen and learn:

  • The power of focusing on “ordinary happiness”
  • How getting a handle on everyday life often allows people to make bigger changes
  • How our home environment can make a difference in our lives
  • Why self-knowledge is a key to happiness
  • The importance of negative emotions in living a happier life
  • The importance of mindfulness and paying attention
  • Why you should enjoy the fun of failure
  • The power of perspective in overcoming fear, uncertainty, and doubt
  • The importance of being discerning about what you allow into your brain
  • Three questions to ask to decide whether the news you’re watching/reading adds anything to your life
  • Tips for starting your own Happiness Project

Download the podcast mp3

Thanks for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast and want to be sure you don’t miss the upcoming podcasts listed below, please subscribe to the podcast feed.

Listen to more great interviews at the Ripple Revolution Podcast Archive!


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Energize your life
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Stop trying to fix yourself

May 21, 2013 Written by Curt Rosengren

Imagine being underwater, face mask and a snorkel at the ready and rarin’ to explore what’s there. But you can’t see a thing – the water is just too muddy! In frustration, you splash with your hands, trying to push the silt down to the bottom so you can see.

Does that make any sense? Of course it doesn’t. All you end up doing is stirring up more mud from the bottom. There’s no chance for anything to settle.

While the folly of trying to clear water by pushing the sediment down seems obvious, most of us do a variation of that in our own lives.

We all want to feel good, and often we spend copious amounts of energy trying to fix what’s wrong, only to have it rear its head even stronger. My brilliant friend Molly Gordon at Shaboom! shone a light on that self-defeating cycle in her blog post, Why I’m not sucking my thumb and other happy thoughts. In it, she says:

What I’ve discovered is that it’s not negative thoughts and the moods they produce that trip us up, it’s believing that we shouldn’t have them and trying to change them when we do.

Trying to change thoughts and moods expands them. When we innocently focus on processing what upsets us, we invest emotional and mental energy in the story, and before long the story is a novel.

Her suggestion? Rather than trying to fix those uncomfortable thoughts and feelings, just be with them. Don’t feed them, but don’t try to make them go away, either. As Molly notes:

…changes in our thoughts and moods are like ripples on the surface of a lake. Nothing essential is altered by those ripples. Even if the ripples become waves, the nature of the water is unchanged.

…Irrespective of how long a painful thought or feeling has been around, there comes a moment when it is gone. Even the longest and most involved dramas unravel in the light of insight, leaving us momentarily alive to our essential wellbeing.

That’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot in my own life. A big focus for me right now is self-compassion work. I can be pretty brutal to myself when my inner critic gets worked up into a lather (something that thankfully happens far less frequently these days). Bringing more self-compassion into my life makes a big difference in how much that critic has to latch onto.

For me, what Molly is talking about is a big part of where the opportunity is. The less I take whatever I’m experiencing as a hard and fast reality, the less charge it has. “Oh, there I am getting spooled up about ____ again. Yup, that’s pretty uncomfortable. Good thing it’s not permanent.”

I’m not saying that sitting and watching the choppy water will make the pain go away – at least not immediately. But it doesn’t add to the disturbance and, with time, it gives the water a chance to actually settle.

Next time you find yourself getting worked up, take a deep breath and just notice. What do you feel? What sensations do you feel? What story is running in the background. Is the source of your distress really what’s happening, or has it triggered some other story you have about yourself, others, or the world in general?

As Molly puts it, “Nothing essential is altered by those ripples. Even if the ripples become waves, the nature of the water is unchanged.” Step back and give the surface disturbances a chance to exist, and then to pass. In time, you’ll find that deep, still water once again.

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