MY FIRST UPDATE THIS YEAR I THINK......  HI  

                                                                    

Life is too short to wake up with regrets

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15 Great Decluttering Tips

As with anything, getting rid of clutter can be made incredibly simple: just go through your stuff, one section, closet, drawer, or shelf at a time, and get rid of everything that isn’t absolutely essential, that you don’t love and use often.

Of course, simplifying a process like that isn’t terribly useful to many people who struggle with clutter. So, with that in mind, I present to you 15 fabulous tip for decluttering. These tips aren’t mine — they’re from you guys, the readers, repackaged into a useful little post.

Recently I asked you guys for your best decluttering tips … and I pulled some of the best of those (there are many more good ones I wasn’t able to use). They’re reworded here slightly, and a couple have been modified indiscriminately by me. :)

But they’re great tips nonetheless. Enjoy!

1. Declutter for 15 minutes every day. It’s amazing how much you can get through if you just do it in small increments like this.
2. Don’t allow things into the house in the first place. Whether you’ve begun decluttering the living space, or you’ve just completed it, stop bringing in new stuff NOW. Even if that’s ALL you do and don’t start decluttering immediately, if you can only establish one habit at a time, establish the no-more-stuff habit first. This way, when you do get to decluttering the existing stuff, you’ve already stopped making it worse. Think of bailing out a boat with a hole in it. You can bail and bail, but it won’t do anything for the leak.
3. Donate stuff you’re decluttering, so you don’t feel bad about wasting it.
4. Create a Joe’s Goals chart with decluttering on it — either daily, or 3 times a week. Check off the days when you declutter, and you’ll feel a great sense of accomplishment.
5. Start at the corner by the door and move your way around the room, doing the superficial stuff first - surfaces, empy the bin etc. Repeat, but do more the 2nd time around - ie. open the cupboards.
6. Whenever you’re boiling the kettle for tea, tidy up the kitchen. If the kitchen is tidy, tidy up the next room - it’s only 3 minutes but it keeps you on top of everything (helps if you have an Englishman’s obsession with Tea as well!)
7. Use the “one in, two out” rule. The rule: whenever you bring in an item, you have to throw away two other items. First you cheat, by throwing out two pieces of paper, but soon you will have to move to big stuff.
8. Make your storage space smaller and more minimal. If you have lots of storage, you’ll fill it with stuff.
9. Clothing rule: If you haven’t worn an item in 6 months, sell or donate it.
10. The One-Year Box. Take all your items that you unsure about getting rid of (e.g. “I might need this someday…”), put them in a box, seal it and date it for 1 year in the future. When the date comes, and you still didn’t need to open it to get anything, donate the box WITHOUT OPENING IT. You probably won’t even remember what there was in the box.
11. Declutter one room (including any closets, desks, cabinets, etc.) before starting on the next one. Spending time in that room will feel *so* good, and it will be so easy to keep clean, that it will motivate you to do more!
12. Keep a list in your planner labeled “Don’t Need It - Don’t Want It.” When you’re out shopping and run across some kind of gadget or other item you crave, note it down on the list. This will slow you down long enough to reconsider. Also, seeing the other things on the list that you nearly bought on impulse really helps.
13. Internalize that your value is not in your “stuff”. It is just “stuff”. And realize that your value grows when you share your “stuff”. Hoarding is a selfish act.
14. Have someone else (who you trust!) help you go through things. They don’t have the (sometime’s irrational) emotional attachment that you might have, but can still recognize if something should be kept.
15. Gift everything. Books you’ve read immediately get recycled among friends, family or local libraries. If you buy a new gaming system, donate your old one – and all the games.

Simple Living Simplified: 10 Things You Can Do Today to Simplify Your Life

Simplifying can sometimes be overwhelming. The amount of stuff you have in your life and the amount of things you have to do can be too big a mountain to tackle.

But you don’t have to simplify it all at once. Do one thing at a time, and take small steps. You’ll get there, and have fun doing it.

In fact, you can do little but important things today to start living the simple life.
I was criticized a few weeks ago when I published the Simple Living Manifesto: 72 Ideas to Simplify Your Life, because many people felt the list was too long. I heard this point, and this post is my response: just the 10 most important things.

And these are not 10 difficult things, but 10 simple things that you can do today. Not tomorrow, not next week, not next month. Today. Choose one and do it today. Tomorrow, choose another.

If you do these 10 things, you’ll have made great strides with little effort.

1. Make a short list. Take out a sheet of paper and fold it into a small square, perhaps 3×5 inches. Or take out an index card. Now make a short list of the 4-5 most important things in your life. What’s most important to you? What do you value most? What 4-5 things do you most want to do in your life? Simplifying starts with these priorities, as you are trying to make room in your life so you have more time for these things.

2. Drop 1 commitment. Think about all the things in your life that you’re committed to doing, and try to find one that you dread doing. Something that takes up time but doesn’t give you much value. Perhaps you’re on a team, or coaching something, or on a board or committee, or whatever. Something that you do each day or week or month that you don’t really want to do. Now take action today to drop that commitment. Call someone, send an email, telling the appropriate person or people that you just don’t have the time. You will feel relief. I’d recommend dropping all commitments that don’t contribute to your short list (from Item #1), but for today, just drop 1 commitment.

3. Purge a drawer. Or a shelf, or a countertop, or a corner of a room. Not an entire room or even an entire closet. Just one small area. You can use that small area as your base of simplicity, and then expand from there. Here’s how to purge: 1) empty everything from the drawer or shelf or corner into a pile. 2) From this pile, pick out only the most important things, the stuff you use and love. 3) Get rid of the rest. Right now. Trash it, or put it in your car to give away or donate. 4) Put the stuff you love and use back, in a neat and orderly manner.

4. Set limits. Read Haiku Productivity for more. Basically, you set limits for things you do regularly: email, RSS posts, tasks, feeds, items in your life, etc. And try to stick with the limits. Today, all you have to do is set limits for a few things in your life. Tomorrow, try to stick with them.

5. Simplify your to-do list. Take a look at your to-do list. If it’s more than 10 items long, you can probably simplify it a bit. Try to find at least a few items that can be eliminated, delegated, automated, outsourced, or ignored. Shorten the list. This is a good habit to do once a week.

6. Free up time. Simplifying your life in general is a way to free up time to do the stuff you want to do. Unfortunately, it can be hard to find time to even think about how to simplify your life. If that’s the case, free up at least 30 minutes a day for thinking about simplifying. Or alternatively, free up a weekend and think about it then. How can you free up 30 minutes a day? Just a few ideas: wake earlier, watch less TV, eat lunch at your desk, take a walk for lunch, disconnect from the Internet, do email only once today, shut off your phones, do 1 less thing each day.

7. Clear your desk. I can personally attest to the amazing feeling that a clean desk can give you. It’s such a simple thing to do, and yet it does so much for you. If your desk is covered with papers and notes and gadgets and office supplies, you might not be able to get this done today. But here are the basic steps: 1) Clear everything off your desk and put it in a pile (either in your inbox or on the floor). 2) Process the pile from top to bottom, one item at a time. Do not defer decisions on any item — deal with them immediately and quickly. 3) For each item, either file it immediately, route it to someone else, trash it, or note it on your to-do list (and put it in an “action” folder). If it’s a gadget or office supply, find a place for it in your desk drawers (or get rid of it). 4) Repeat until your pile is empty and your desk is clear. Be sure to get rid of any knick knacks. Your desk should have your computer, your inbox, perhaps a notepad, and maybe a family photo (but not many). Ahh, a clear desk! 5) From now on, put everything in your inbox, and at least once a day, process it in the same way as above.

8. Clear out your email inbox. This has the same psychological effect as a clear desk. Is your email inbox always full of read and unread messages? That’s because you’re delaying decisions on your emails. If you have 50, let’s say, or fewer emails in your inbox, you can process them all today. If you have hundreds, you should put them in a temporary folder and get to them one chunk at a time (do 20 per day or something). Here’s how you process your inbox to empty — including emails already in your inbox, and all future incoming emails: 1) process them top to bottom, one at a time, deciding and disposing of each one immediately. 2) Your choices are to delete, archive, respond immediately (and archive or delete), forward (and archive or delete), or mark it with a star (or something like that) and note it on your to-do list to respond to later (and archive). 3) Process each email like that until the inbox is empty. 4) Each time you check your email, process to empty. Ahh, an empty inbox!

9. Move slower. We rush through the day, from one task to another, from one appointment to another, until we collapse on the couch, exhausted, at the end of the day. Instead, simplify your life by doing less (see Items 1, 4 and 5) and doing them more slowly. Eat slower, drive slower, walk slower, shower slower, work slower. Be more deliberate. Be present. This isn’t something you’re going to master today, but you can start practicing today.

10. Single-task. Instead of multi-tasking, do one thing at a time. Remove all distractions, resist any urge to check email or do some other habitual task like that while you’re doing the task at hand. Stick to that one task, until you’re done. It’ll make a huge difference in both your stress level and your productivity.

Simple Systems: Clean Your House as You Go (with an added burst)

Who among us has the time or energy for housework?

Sure, we often make the time, if we don’t like living in a pig sty. But too often our homes fall into disorder, just because we are too tired or too busy to do a bunch of cleaning in our spare time.

Instead, make housework simple. Simplify your housework with two easy cleaning systems:

1. Clean as you go. This is merely the habit of putting things where they belong, instead of leaving them somewhere to be cleaned later, as well as cleaning any little messes quickly, instead of letting the messes build up. More on this below.
2. Burst cleaning. In my house, we call this a 30-minute cleanup, and it’s something we do on a Saturday when we don’t have much time for cleaning (which is almost every Saturday). The concept is to do a quick clean, in addition to the little cleaning you’ve done throughout the week, leaving your house (fairly) spic and span.

I’ve talked about the concept of clean-as-you-go before, but I thought I’d expand on it a bit after reader Jeff Lilly asked:

I have a question about your clean-as-you-go article. I sometimes have to let our bathrooms get pretty dirty for a while, because I simply don’t have the 30-40 minutes necessary to get in and clean them. If I could do a five-minute cleanup job every time I use them, it would be awesome. What exactly is your routine?

The toilet, for example: if I use the standard toilet cleaner and scrub brush, it takes at least 15 minutes because I have to let the toilet cleaner sit for 10 minutes in the bowl. Obviously, I can do something else during ten of those minutes, but it breaks up the flow of work, and no one can use the toilet during that time. Alternatively, I could simply clean the toilet bowl with a cloth and cleaning solution (which is actually my preferred method, since it gets it a lot cleaner), but if I use a new cloth two or three times a day, that adds up to a lot more laundry!

Also, the shower spray you use: usually these things are designed to be washed off during the next shower. Do you use it in the kids’ bathtub? Do you worry about the chemicals mixing in their bathwater?

Clean As You Go
Jeff’s excellent question allows me to use the cleaning of the bathroom as an example of clean as you go:

• First, I don’t actually clean the bathroom every single day … but every 2-3 days is about right for me. I clean when I notice a little dirt building up, or if I notice something needs cleaning.
• The toilet bowl, for example, usually stays fairly clean, but sometimes needs a quick swish. If I notice a bit of dirt in the toilet, I’ll spray it with a cleaner (any one will do if it’s not too dirty) and then do a quick swish with the toilet brush and flush it down. That only takes a minute.
• If you let things get pretty dirty, you’ll need to do a more thorough clean — such as the things Jeff mentioned — but after that, it’s just a matter of maintaining the cleanliness. You’ll probably still need to do a deeper clean every now and then (use your eyes and nose to determine that) but for the most part, just try to keep things clean.
• For the shower, again, if you keep it clean, you don’t need to use anything too harsh. Just a regular bathroom cleaner will work, if you’re cleaning it every 2-3 days. Just spray it down, and do a quick scrub either right before you get in the shower or while you’re in there. Only takes a couple of minutes, and then you get clean from the shower.
• I do a quick wipe of the sink when I notice it getting dirty (again, every 2-3 days). The floor of the bathroom, maybe once a week. The walls don’t usually need cleaning as often.
• As for the harsher cleaning sprays, yes, those can be harmful if you leave them in when your kids shower. I would recommend spraying, and then coming back and scrubbing and rinsing real quick, if you use those cleaners. But again, if you clean every few days, you won’t need anything too strong. Just a general cleaner.

This is clean-as-you-go for the bathroom: just a quick clean of the toilet, or sink, or tub, every couple of days. It only takes a few minutes, if things aren’t too dirty. I like to do a quick clean before I get in the shower, so I get clean after I dirty myself from cleaning.

But this concept can be applied to the rest of the house too:

• Wash dishes when you’re done with them. Obvious, I know, but too often we leave dishes to pile in the sink. When you’re done with dinner, everyone should pitch in to put away leftover food, wash dishes, and clean the table, stove and counters. Takes about 10 minutes.
• Keep counters and sink clean. If you cook or prepare food, wipe down the counters real quick when you’re done. When you do anything in the sink, rinse and wipe it down. Takes less than a minute.
• Keep floor clean. I find that most of the house needs sweeping or vacuuming only once a week, but the kitchen needs sweeping every day (I have six kids and a cat). We share this duty (although I often end up doing it), and it only takes a few minutes.
• Put away clothes when you take them off. If clothes are dirty, put them in the hamper. If they’re still clean, put them away.
• Put other items where they belong. Instead of laying something on a counter, table, or floor, take a few seconds to put it where it belongs. This is a simple habit that will save tons of time.
• Pick up before you go to bed. I like to do a quick pick-up before bedtime, of stuff that the kids left around. This leaves the house beautifully clean when I wake up in the morning. Only takes 2-3 minutes.

Burst Cleaning
While clean-as-you-go keeps your house fairly clean throughout the week, you’ll still need to do some general cleaning, preferably once a week. But you don’t have a lot of time.

I recommend that you do 30 minutes of cleaning, once a week. We use Saturdays, but you can do it whenever you have the time. For us, the entire family helps out, but if you don’t have a large family, you can just do what you can in 30 minutes.

Here’s what a family can tackle in 30 minutes:

• Quick clean of the bathroom(s), including a wipe down of sink, toilet and tub, and quick clean of floor. Throw rugs in laundry.
• Quick pick-up around the house.
• Sweep floors, and mop if you have time.
• Dust.
• Clean kitchen a little more thoroughly than you do during the week.

If you don’t get all of this done in 30 minutes, don’t worry about it — you can always get it next weekend. But your house should be fairly clean.

Every 2-3 months, you should do a deeper clean — clean out the refrigerator, the oven, the cabinets, closets.

How to develop the habit
Don’t expect to be perfect at clean-as-you-go right away. It’s a new habit, and you’ll have a hard time with it at first.

Instead, try one thing at a time, for about a week or two at a time. I would recommend you follow the advice of one of my inspirations,  who says to start with the kitchen sink: just try to keep it clean and shiny. From there, work on the kitchen counters. Then the kitchen table. You might move to the bathroom sink next. And so on.

Edit Your Life, Part 2: Your Rooms

I’m a former newspaper editor, and one of the things I learned was to edit brutally (no sarcastic comments about why I don’t do that with my blog posts). Cut out everything that’s not necessary, and you’ve got a more meaningful story.

I highly recommend editing your life.

Today’s edit: The rooms in your house, one at a time.

Are you surrounded by clutter in every room in your home? Clutter is visually distracting and stressful — every item that you see demands your mind’s attention, and no matter how short that attention is, and despite that it is subconscious, these little distractions add up. It’s difficult to have peace and to focus amid this clutter. Add to this the wasted time and energy needed to look for things, to maintain things, and to clean things, and the more clutter you have, the more energy it will take to have it.

So, I recommend that you edit each of the rooms in your house, one per week, until you have de-cluttered your home and made it a peaceful and calming place to be.

Here’s how:

• First, choose a room to do this week. Don’t try to do your whole house at once, as this can be very time consuming (unless you just have a lot of time on your hands — in which case, go for it!). Focus on one room, and try to do 15 minutes a day (unless you get carried away and feel like doing more). Work on one room each week.
• In the beginning, skip the closets and drawers that are out of sight for now. We’ll tackle those in next week’s Edit Your Life. Focus for now on the things you can see.
• Start with the big things. Is there too much furniture in the room? If so, edit them. What is necessary, which furniture do you love, which stuff is just too distracting. Also consider removing other big items, like boxes full of stuff.
• Clear all flat surfaces. Desktops, tabletops, countertops, etc. Remove all papers, piles of stuff, little junk, knick-knacks, anything. Put it on the floor. Now get a trash bag and two boxes. Sort through everything in your pile(s), one item at a time. Each item should be either thrown away in the trash bag, put in one box to give away (to friends, family or charity), or in the other box to put in another room in the house. Put back only a couple select items on the flat surfaces, such as a family photo or something that functionally belongs there. But as much as possible, leave the flat surfaces as bare as humanly possible. “Stuff” doesn’t belong here — you need to find a drawer, shelf, or container for whatever stuff you’ve removed. When you’re done sorting through the pile, put the recycle box in the trunk of your car and drop it off the next time you go out to do errands. Throw away the trash bag. Take the other box and put the stuff where it belongs elsewhere in the house (don’t put it on flat surfaces unless absolutely necessary!).
• Repeat this process for any other “stuff” in the room, including stuff on the floor.
• Now go around the room, clockwise, and edit what’s left. This might be stuff on the walls, posted to surfaces like the refrigerator, stuff under tables or desks, etc. Only leave the stuff that’s absolutely necessary. I mostly have blank walls except for a few choice paintings or drawings (by my dad, an artist). All my flat surfaces are bare. It’s nice.
• Be merciless. Edit brutally. The more you can get rid of, the better!

OK, your room should look pretty good now. If so, you should feel pretty great! Sit down, relax, look around, and enjoy the peaceful goodness. Savor your triumph.

Now, this editing process is not a destination, but an ongoing process. It won’t last long if you don’t have a system and develop habits to keep it de-cluttered.

Here’s the system:

• A place for everything, and everything in its place. An oldie, but valuable nonetheless. Are you about to put something down on a flat surface? Stop yourself. Think about where that item belongs. If it doesn’t have a home, find one and stick with it. Always put it in that spot. For example: I have a tray for my keys, wallet, etc., and when I first get in the house, I put these things in this tray. Every time. So I always know where it is. And when I leave, it’s as simple as grabbing my stuff from the tray.
• Have an inbox for your home for ALL incoming papers. And a filing system for documents you need to keep, from bills to important documents to taxes to kids’ report cards. Put all incoming mail, school papers, receipts, etc. into the inbox, and process it once a day (or every other day, but not much longer than that — otherwise you’re just creating a pile). When you process, don’t leave stuff in a pile to be filed later — file it immediately. Trash other stuff. Pay bills immediately or put them in a bills to be paid folder. Don’t leave papers laying around elsewhere.
• Clean up at night and before you leave the house. If you’ve developed good habits, you may not need this, but no one’s perfect, and if you have kids, you’ll definitely need this, because kids certainly are not perfect at this habit. Just take 5-10 minutes to pick up stuff and make sure your flat surfaces are clear.
• Every six months (or a year), de-clutter. Despite your best efforts, new stuff just accumulates. You need to have a regular binging process every now and then.

I highly recommend editing your life.

Today’s edit: All the commitments in your life.

Take an inventory of the commitments in your life. Here are some common ones:

• Work - we have multiple commitments at our jobs. List them all.
• Side work - some of us free-lance, or do odd jobs to take in money. More commitments.
• Family - we may play a role as husband, wife, father, mother, son, daughter. These roles come with many commitments.
• Kids - my kids have soccer, choir, Academic Challenge Bowl, National Junior Honor Society, basketball, spelling bee, and more. Each of their commitments is mine too.
• Civic - we may volunteer for different organizations, or be a board member or officer on a non-profit organization.
• Religious - many of us are very involved with our churches, or are part of a church organization. Or perhaps we are committed to going to service once a week.
• Hobbies - perhaps you are a runner or a cyclist, or you build models, or are part of a secret underground comic book organization. These come with - surprise! - commitments.
• Home - aside from regular family stuff, there’s the stuff you have to do at home.
• Online - we may be a regular on a forum or mailing list or Google group. These are online communities that come with commitments too.

You might have other categories. List everything.

Now take a close look at each thing on the list, and consider: How does this give my life value? How important is it to me? Is it in line with my life priorities and values? How would it affect my life if I dropped out? Does this further my life goals?

These are tough questions, but I suggest seeing if you can eliminate just one thing — the thing that gives you the least return for your invested time and effort. The thing that’s least in line with your life values and priorities and goals. Cut it out, at least for a couple weeks, and see if you can get along without it. Revisit this list at that time and see if you can cut something else out. Edit mercilessly, keeping only those that really mean something to you.

Each time you cut a commitment, it may give you a feeling of guilt, because others want you to keep that commitment. But it’s also a huge relief, not having to do that commitment each day or week or month. It frees up a lot of your time, and while others may be disappointed, you have to keep what’s important to you in mind, not everyone else. If we committed to what everyone else wanted all the time, we would never have any time left for ourselves.

Take the time to edit your commitments, and your life will be greatly simplified. You will thank yourself for it.

Even the most motivated of us — you, me, Tony Robbins — can feel unmotivated at times. In fact, sometimes we get into such a slump that even thinking about making positive changes seems too difficult.

But it’s not hopeless: with some small steps, baby ones in fact, you can get started down the road to positive change.

Yes, I know, it seems impossible at times. You don’t feel like doing anything. I’ve been there, and in fact I still feel that way from time to time. You’re not alone. But I’ve learned a few ways to break out of a slump, and we’ll take a look at those today.

This post was inspired by reader Roy C. Carlson, who asked:

“I was wondering if you could do a piece on why it can be hard for someone to change direction and start taking control of their life. I have to say I’m in this boat and advice on getting out of my slump would be great.”

Roy is just one of many with a slump like that. Again, I feel that way sometimes myself, and in fact sometimes I struggle to motivate myself to exercise — and I’ll use that as an example of how to break out of the slump.

When I fall out of exercise, due to illness or injury or disruption from things going on in my life, it’s hard to get started again. I don’t even feel like thinking about it, sometimes. But I’ve always found a way to break out of that slump, and here are some things I’ve learned that have helped:

1. One Goal. Whenever I’ve been in a slump, I’ve discovered that it’s often because I have too much going on in my life. I’m trying to do too much. And it saps my energy and motivation. It’s probably the most common mistake that people make: they try to take on too much, try to accomplish too many goals at once. You cannot maintain energy and focus (the two most important things in accomplishing a goal) if you are trying to do two or more goals at once. It’s not possible — I’ve tried it many times. You have to choose one goal, for now, and focus on it completely. I know, that’s hard. Still, I speak from experience. You can always do your other goals when you’ve accomplished your One Goal.
2. Find inspiration. Inspiration, for me, comes from others who have achieved what I want to achieve, or who are currently doing it. I read other blogs, books, magazines. I Google my goal, and read success stories. Zen Habits is just one place for inspiration, not only from me but from many readers who have achieved amazing things.
3. Get excited. This sounds obvious, but most people don’t think about it much: if you want to break out of a slump, get yourself excited about a goal. But how can you do that when you don’t feel motivated? Well, it starts with inspiration from others (see above), but you have to take that excitement and build on it. For me, I’ve learned that by talking to my wife about it, and to others, and reading as much about it as possible, and visualizing what it would be like to be successful (seeing the benefits of the goal in my head), I get excited about a goal. Once I’ve done that, it’s just a matter of carrying that energy forward and keeping it going.
4. Build anticipation. This will sound hard, and many people will skip this tip. But it really works. It helped me quit smoking after many failed attempts. If you find inspiration and want to do a goal, don’t start right away. Many of us will get excited and want to start today. That’s a mistake. Set a date in the future — a week or two, or even a month — and make that your Start Date. Mark it on the calendar. Get excited about that date. Make it the most important date in your life. In the meantime, start writing out a plan. And do some of the steps below. Because by delaying your start, you are building anticipation, and increasing your focus and energy for your goal.
5. Post your goal. Print out your goal in big words. Make your goal just a few words long, like a mantra (”Exercise 15 mins. Daily”), and post it up on your wall or refrigerator. Post it at home and work. Put it on your computer desktop. You want to have big reminders about your goal, to keep your focus and keep your excitement going. A picture of your goal (like a model with sexy abs, for example) also helps.
6. Commit publicly. None of us likes to look bad in front of others. We will go the extra mile to do something we’ve said publicly. For example, when I wanted to run my first marathon, I started writing a column about it in my local daily newspaper. The entire island of Guam (pop. 160K) knew about my goal. I couldn’t back down, and even though my motivation came and went, I stuck with it and completed it. Now, you don’t have to commit to your goal in your daily newspaper, but you can do it with friends and family and co-workers, and you can do it on your blog if you have one. And hold yourself accountable — don’t just commit once, but commit to giving progress updates to everyone every week or so.
7. Think about it daily. If you think about your goal every day, it is much more likely to become true. To this end, posting the goal on your wall or computer desktop (as mentioned above) helps a lot. Sending yourself daily reminders also helps. And if you can commit to doing one small thing to further your goal (even just 5 minutes) every single day, your goal will almost certainly come true.
8. Get support. It’s hard to accomplish something alone. When I decided to run my marathon, I had the help of friends and family, and I had a great running community on Guam who encouraged me at 5K races and did long runs with me. When I decided to quit smoking, I joined an online forum and that helped tremendously. And of course, my wife Eva helped every step of the way. I couldn’t have done these goals without her, or without the others who supported me. Find your support network, either in the real world or online, or both.
9. Realize that there’s an ebb and flow. Motivation is not a constant thing that is always there for you. It comes and goes, and comes and goes again, like the tide. But realize that while it may go away, it doesn’t do so permanently. It will come back. Just stick it out and wait for that motivation to come back. In the meantime, read about your goal (see below), ask for help (see below), and do some of the other things listed here until your motivation comes back.
10. Stick with it. Whatever you do, don’t give up. Even if you aren’t feeling any motivation today, or this week, don’t give up. Again, that motivation will come back. Think of your goal as a long journey, and your slump is just a little bump in the road. You can’t give up with every little bump. Stay with it for the long term, ride out the ebbs and surf on the flows, and you’ll get there.
11. Start small. Really small. If you are having a hard time getting started, it may be because you’re thinking too big. If you want to exercise, for example, you may be thinking that you have to do these intense workouts 5 days a week. No — instead, do small, tiny, baby steps. Just do 2 minutes of exercise. I know, that sounds wimpy. But it works. Commit to 2 minutes of exercise for one week. You may want to do more, but just stick to 2 minutes. It’s so easy, you can’t fail. Do it at the same time, every day. Just some crunches, 2 pushups, and some jogging in place. Once you’ve done 2 minutes a day for a week, increase it to 5, and stick with that for a week. In a month, you’ll be doing 15-20. Want to wake up early? Don’t think about waking at 5 a.m. Instead, think about waking 10 minutes earlier for a week. That’s all. Once you’ve done that, wake 10 minutes earlier than that. Baby steps.
12. Build on small successes. Again, if you start small for a week, you’re going to be successful. You can’t fail if you start with something ridiculously easy. Who can’t exercise for 2 minutes? (If that’s you, I apologize.) And you’ll feel successful, and good about yourself. Take that successful feeling and build on it, with another baby step. Add 2-3 minutes to your exercise routine, for example. With each step (and each step should last about a week), you will feel even more successful. Make each step really, really small, and you won’t fail. After a couple of months, your tiny steps will add up to a lot of progress and a lot of success.
13. Read about it daily. When I lose motivation, I just read a book or blog about my goal. It inspires me and reinvigorates me. For some reason, reading helps motivate and focus you on whatever you’re reading about. So read about your goal every day, if you can, especially when you’re not feeling motivated.
14. Call for help when your motivation ebbs. Having trouble? Ask for help. Email me. Join an online forum. Get a partner to join you. Call your mom. It doesn’t matter who, just tell them your problems, and talking about it will help. Ask them for advice. Ask them to help you overcome your slump. It works.
15. Think about the benefits, not the difficulties. One common problem is that we think about how hard something is. Exercise sounds so hard! Just thinking about it makes you tired. But instead of thinking about how hard something is, think about what you will get out of it. For example, instead of thinking about how tiring exercise can be, focus on how good you’ll feel when you’re done, and how you’ll be healthier and slimmer over the long run. The benefits of something will help energize you.
16. Squash negative thoughts; replace them with positive ones. Along those lines, it’s important to start monitoring your thoughts. Recognize negative self-talk, which is really what’s causing your slump. Just spend a few days becoming aware of every negative thought. Then, after a few days, try squashing those negative thoughts like a bug, and then replacing them with a corresponding positive thought. Squash, “This is too hard!” and replace it with, “I can do this! If that wimp Leo can do it, so can I!” It sounds corny, but it works. Really.

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Success Isn’t a Competition: Boosting Others Helps You in the Long Run

“The only thing that will redeem mankind is cooperation.” - Bertrand Russell

As a blogger who has found some success amongst the seemingly endless sea of blogs, I’ve had to confront some old and rusty ideas I used to have about success and competition.

I examined these long-held beliefs early on in my blogging career, and discovered that they were false.

What I learned that has helped me tremendously, and these ideas can be applied to many fields of work and many areas of life:

1. Striving for success does not requre competition.
2. Boosting others actually helps you, in the long run.
3. Envy of others’ success and trying to tear others down helps NO ONE.

The last one probably sounds obvious, but is also the idea that’s least used in reality by many people. For some reason, many of us get jealous when others are successful, and we try to tear the person down. We belittle them for their success, we criticize unfairly, we bad-mouth people, we become obstacles to their further progress.

It’s utterly illogical, and yet you can find it everywhere in life, in many different cultures and industries. How does someone else’s success become a bad thing for other people? This is a concept I’d like to explore a little today, and I’d also like to take a look at the converse: how boosting people actually helps you.

Success Isn’t a Competition

Blogging, for example, is not a zero-sum game. If I gain readers, it doesn’t mean you’ll lose readers. In fact, if we as bloggers link to each other, we can help each other gain readers at the same time.

Helping other bloggers, in that sense, does nothing to hurt you as a blogger. You aren’t competing for readers, even if you’re both trying to get the same readers, because readers can read multiple blogs.

Sure, you might say that readers can only read so many blogs, so we are competing for their limited attention. But that’s a very limited and limiting view. That’s assuming that there’s a very limited pool of readers with a small amount of attention. That isn’t true: there are lots of blog readers out there, and even more, there are MANY non-blog readers who will soon become blog readers, and that number is increasing all the time.

We aren’t competing for readers — we’re all trying to gain readership, but we can do that together, cooperatively if we like. Or we can compete and tear and claw at each other.

This concept can apply to many other industries. I’ve been a writer in the field of journalism, and while some journalists think it’s a competition — you want to beat others by getting the story first (a scoop!) or you’re competing for limited jobs — I never agreed. We were all striving for the same goal: to tell the truth, and to get useful information to our readers. In that light, journalists can cooperate, and some of them actually do cooperate. Sharing of information is good for everybody.

Think about your field of work: while the mainstream view is probably that everybody’s competing with each other, is there a way to see it as just the opposite? That we can all be successful, and that helping each other is actually a good thing?

I would bet that you can see it that way. Think of it in terms of personal success: do you really need to compete with your peers in order to be a success? Can’t you all be successes, but in different ways? Maybe one person makes a million dollars, another successfully starts a small business, another becomes famous for inventing something new, another becomes one of the most solid and hardest working people in his field. Those are all successes in different ways, and there are many, many more ways to be successful.

There is a lot of use in this kind of view. Competition can be a motivator, and sometimes can be a lot of fun. But it can also be destructive, and become an obstacle to success. And if you see things as not a competition, that can lead to some really great things. Let’s take a look at that now.

Boosting Others Helps You in the Long Run

Let’s say, as a blogger, that I link to others and send them a lot of traffic so that they get new readers. Those other bloggers might, over time, become even bigger than me. Have I just lost a competition? Did I just shoot myself in the foot?

Not at all. If I help others to become successes, that’s a good thing. First, it feels good to make others happy and successful. Trust me — this is one of the greatest feelings. But second, if you want to look at things in more of a selfish way (and you don’t have to, at all), making others successful actually helps you in the long run.

Think of it like this: if I help five blogs become so successful that they each have 5 million readers a month (oh, we can dream!), they will probably be grateful for my help. They might remain close friends with me, even though they are now out of my league. They might even see me as a mentor. And as a result, they will probably send readers my way from time to time, when I have good posts their readers might like.

And wham! I now have five major blogs sending their readers to me, after I helped them grow by sending readers to them! I am rolling in traffic! Yee hoo haw!

Of course, there’s no need to see things in such a quid pro quo way, but you can see how this example illustrates the way that helping others can come back to help you in many different ways.

And this doesn’t just apply to blogging — it can apply to anything. Imagine if you had helped Bill Gates to create his first software company, and he went on to become bigger than you. It would be cool to be the guy who made Gates successful, would it not? He might even help your little company and invite you to party on his yacht sometimes. Sure, you lost a competition by helping a competitor — but you also gained a life-long friend who is now a billionaire and seems to be on good terms with Jerry Seinfeld. Hard to beat that!

By freeing yourself from the bounds of competition, you free yourself to help others, even if they might be competitors. And in doing so, you gain relationships, and those can be amazingly valuable — in terms of having great friends, and maybe gaining something in the long run. Friends, of course, are much, much more than what they might give you (and you shouldn’t make friends because they might give you something), but you can see the point: it certainly doesn’t hurt you to help others.

Don’t Tear Others Down

So if boosting others can help you, what about the converse? What does tearing others down do for you?

Well, tearing others down might make you feel better. I doubt it, but it might. It might also stop a competitor from succeeding, and maybe in the short term that’ll help you. I also doubt that, but it might.

The truth is, no one likes a person who tears others down. If you are bad-mouthing someone, it might make you feel better, but others won’t like it. You will gain a bad reputation, and your bad-mouthing will come back to hurt you. If you are sabotaging others, that’s even worse.

If you become an obstacle to others’ success, they will despise you for it. They will try to get around you, and failing that, will try to go through you. Your energies and time will be spent trying to stop others, and defending yourself against their attacks.

What a waste of precious time and energy! Couldn’t you spend that better on building things yourself? On creating something beautiful and truly useful? On helping others to succeed? Of course you can!

Tearing others down is destructive. It hurts other people, and in the long run, it’ll hurt you. Don’t waste your time and energy on it.

Instead, build others up. Praise their success. Learn to be truly happy for the successes of others, rather than envious. Be a part of their success, rather than an obstacle. Participating in something great, including the successes of others, is a wonderful thing to have accomplished.

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Handbook for Life: 52 Tips for Happiness and Productivity

This is something I’ve been wanting to write for some time — a Handbook for Life. Now, is there any handbook that can be a guide to every single person? Of course not. This is just a list of tips that I think will help many people in life — some of them common-sense tips that we often forget about. Consider this guide a reminder.

It’ll also become apparent from the links in this handbook that I’ve written about this stuff before. In essence, this site is a bigger version of this handbook. But I wanted to put them all in one place, as a handy little guide. I hope you find it useful.

How to use this handbook
This handbook is not meant to be a step-by-step guide, nor should you adopt all the tips below. Certainly not all at once. That would be overwhelming. Here are a couple tips for adopting the tips:

• Pick and choose the tips that will be most useful to you. There are 52 tips here — not every single one will be useful to every person. I hope you’ll find 10 that are useful, or that are reminders of something you’ve been wanting to do.
• Don’t do them all at once. Choose one tip to do first, and then do them one at a time. Focus on one first, and then the next. It’s too hard to try to adopt a bunch of changes at once.
• Experiment. Try out a tip, and if it doesn’t work, try another. Life is an experiment, after all.
• None are guaranteed. But many are very likely to bring happiness.
• Also, these are not in any order. Some of the most important are buried below.

52 Tips for Happiness and Productivity

1. Try rising early. It’s not for everyone, I’ll admit. It may not be for you. But I’ve found it to be an amazing change in my life. It has made the start of my days much more positive, and I now have time for writing, exercise, and silent contemplation. I talked about this recently in my post 10 Benefits of Rising Early, and How to Do It.
2. Do less. This is both a happiness and productivity tip. Doing less will make you happier, because your life won’t be so hectic and filled with stress. You will have time for things that give you pleasure, for the loved ones in your life, for life itself. It’s also a productivity tip: if you focus on the essential tasks, the big ones, the ones that will give you the most return for your time, and eliminate the rest, you will actually be more productive. You’ll get fewer tasks done, but you will be more effective. See How to Pare Your To-do List Down to the Essentials.
3. Slow down. Many new readers to this site have read my productivity articles and think that I’m all about being hyper-productive. I’m not. Long-time readers know that I am about a simpler way of life. Unfortunately, in my free-lance blogging, other websites usually ask me to write about productivity, so the preponderance of my productivity writing has given the impression, I think, that I think people should be churning out work at an amazing rate, to the exclusion of all else. Actually, I feel that life is much more enjoyable if you slow down. By doing less, you can actually get more done, even if you work more slowly. And when you’re not working, you should definitely try switching to slow mode. Drive slower (it is so much more relaxing), walk slower, eat slower. See Slow Down to Enjoy Life for more.
4. Practice patience. I’ve talked about how I’m trying to develop patience in my parenting article, How to Become a Patient Parent, but these tips really apply to everyone. If you easily lose your temper, you can become more patient with these tips. Once you’ve developed this skill (and it’s a skill, like everything else, not an unchangeable inborn trait), your life will become much saner and you will be much happier.
5. Practice compassion. This may be the most important tip of all, in my opinion. If you were to choose any of these, I would choose this one. The first part of compassion is empathy — and this ability to understand how others feel can be developed through practice. Start by imagining the suffering of a loved one. Understand their pain, the emotions they go through, and why they would react the way they would. By doing this exercise a number of times, you are developing a skill that can be applied to others — for every person you see, try to understand what they are going through. Try to learn and understand more about their background, and why they react the way they do. Once you’ve developed this invaluable skill, learn the other half of compassion — acting on your understanding, and helping others, alleviating their suffering, acting with kindness. This one thing can bring true happiness to your life, and the lives of those around you.
6. Find your passion. Another indispensable tip. This might be the second on my list of priorities. Find something you love to do, and your life will become immensely improved. You will love your work, the thing that you spend 40 hours (or more) a week doing. You will become more productive, procrastinate less, be less stressed. You will produce something you are proud of, and happy about. Read this article for some practical tips.
7. Lose weight. This only applies, of course, if you are overweight. But losing your extra fat (and when I say lose weight, I mean lose fat), decreases your health risks (obviously), makes you look better, and in general is very likely to increase your happiness about yourself. I actually recommend that you learn to be comfortable and happy with how you look now, and not feel negative about yourself even if you are overweight. However, I’ve found that losing weight (at least for me) is a great way to feel better about your body. Do not make this an unhealthy obsession, however — lose weight gradually, and enjoy the process. See the next two tips for the best methods for doing this.
8. Exercise. Make this a daily habit. Exercise not only helps you lose weight, but for me, it’s made me feel so much better. I actually enjoy exercise now. It’s a time of contemplation for me, and I feel so much better about myself afterwards. See Top 42 Exercise Hacks and How to Make Exercise a Daily Habit and 7 Ways to Build the Exercise Habit.
9. Eat healthy. I don’t recommend dieting. It’s too restrictive and you usually fall off it at some point. I do recommend changes to your diet, however — ones you make gradually, and that can be sustained for life. It not only helps lose weight, but really, once you start eating healthier, it is actually much more enjoyable. See my Top 15 Diet Hacks for more.
10. Meditate. OK, you might be like me — not into New-Age stuff. But meditation can actually be a very simple method for relaxing, for bringing calm, for returning yourself to sanity, for contemplation. My friend Scott Young wrote a good post about doing that here.
11. Get organized. This one’s not necessary. You could go through life wonderfully messy, searching for stuff, enjoying the search. But I’ve tried disorganized, and I’ve tried organized. The second is much more enjoyable to me. Read How to Never Lose Anything Again for a start on the subject, as well as how I keep my family organized.
12. Think positive. Another one of the most important tips on this list, thinking positive — as cliche as it might sound — is one of the single best changes you can make in your life that will lead to so many more positive tips. As I wrote about here, learning to think positive was the skill that turned my life around. It makes everything else on this list possible. Read more about it here.
13. Simplify your finances. Cut down on the number of accounts you have, cut down on your credit cards, spend less, reduce your bills. Make your finances automagical. Simplifying your finances greatly reduces your stress. Also see 10 Habits to Develop For Financial Stability and Success.
14. Simplify your life. Another of my top tips. I’ve greatly simplified my life, in many ways, and I can say that having less stuff in my life, and less to do, has greatly increased my enjoyment of life. De-clutter, simplify your commitments, simplify your work space, simplify your wardrobe, simplify your rooms.
15. Accept what you have. The problem with many of us is that we always think that we’ll be happy when we reach a certain destination — when we get a certain job, or retire, or get our dream house. Unfortunately, it takes awhile before you get there, and when you get there, you might have a new destination in mind. Instead, try being happy with where you are, with who you are, and what you have. To do that, instead of comparing what you have with other people, or with what you want, compare yourself those who have less, with those who are going through tragedy, with those who are struggling. You will see that you actually are extremely blessed. And this can lead to more happiness with your current situation.
16. Envision your ultimate life. What would your ultimate life be like? Where would you live, what would you do, what would you do with your days? Come up with a clear picture of this, and write it down. Now, one step at a time, make it come true. Some ways of doing that follow.
17. Set long-term goals. Your vision of your ultimate life will help you come up with long-term goals. Of those goals, pick one to accomplish within the next year, and really focus on that. Now, pick one medium-term goal to achieve in the next few months that will get you further toward your longer-term goal. Now decide what you can do this week, and today, to get you to your medium-term goal. Just choose one thing at a time, focus on it, make it happen, and then choose the next thing to focus on. See Think About Your Life Goals.
18. Review goals. Setting goals is important, but the key to making them a reality is actually reviewing them (at least monthly, but weekly is better) and taking action steps to make them come true. Again, focus on one at a time, and really focus on them. Read Review Your Goals Weekly.
19. Life mission. Related to envisioning your ultimate life, but different — it’s important that you think about how you would like to be remembered when you die — so you can start living the life that leads to that now. Live with purpose in life, and wake up every day with that purpose in mind. Read the Key to Dying Happy for more concrete steps.
20. Plan your big tasks for week and day. Give purpose to your day by determining the three most important things you can do with your day, and making those a priority. Do the same thing with your week to increase your productivity: pick out the big tasks you’d like to accomplish this week, and schedule those first. See Purpose Your Day and Plan Your Big Rocks First.
21. Maintain focus. One important key to achieving your goals is to maintain focus on them. To do this, again, it’s important that you select one goal at a time. This will prevent your focus from spreading too thin. It’s also important that you give yourself constant reminders of your goal, so you don’t lose that focus. Put up a poster of your current goal, or print it out and put it out somewhere visible, and send yourself emailed reminders. However you do it, find a way to maintain a laser-sharp focus, and the goal will come true.
22. Enjoy the journey. Goals are important, but not at the expense of happiness now. It’s important to maintain a balance between going where you want to go, and being happy as you go there. It’s easy to forget that, so be sure to remind yourself of this little, but important, tip as you make your journey.
23. Create a morning and evening routine. These are two great ways to add structure to your day, make sure you review your goals and log your progress, and get your day off to a great start. An evening routine, for example, could be a great way not only to wind down from a long day and review how your day went, but to prepare yourself for your next day so the morning isn’t so hectic. Your morning routine is great way to greet the day, to get some exercise or meditation or quiet contemplation, or to get some writing or other work done.
24. Develop intimate relationships. It’s great to have a special someone, of course, but intimate relationships could be found with anyone around you. If you have a significant other, be sure to spend time each day and each week with that person, to work on your relationship and communicate and continue to bond. But if you don’t, there’s no need to despair (if in fact you are) … intimate relationships can be developed with friends, other family members, kids, roommates, classmate, co-workers. Every single person we meet is a fellow human being, with the same desires for happiness, for food and shelter, for an intimate connection. Find that common thread, be open and sincere, find out more about each other, understand each other, and give love. This can be one of the most important things you do.
25. Eliminate debt. Financially, this is a huge way to relieve stress and make you feel much more secure. I suggest that you get rid of your credit cards (if you have a problem with credit card debt or impulse spending) and create a snowball plan for yourself. It may take a couple of years, but you can get out of debt.
26. Enjoy the simple pleasures. You can find these everywhere. Food (I love berries!), sunsets, sand between your toes, fresh-cut grass, playing with your child, a good book and a warm bed, dancing in the rain, your favorite music. You could probably make a list of 20 simple pleasures right now, things you enjoy that you could find every day. Sprinkle those little pleasures throughout your day. It makes the journey much more enjoyable.
27. Empty your inbox and clear your desk. This might take a little while to do at first, but once you’ve emptied your inbox and cleared off your desk, it doesn’t take long to keep them clear from then on. It’s a simple habit that’s vastly rewarding. I get an inordinate amount of pleasure from having a clean desk. I recommend you give it a try.
28. Build an emergency fund. This is standard-issue financial advice, I know … and yet it is extremely important. I cannot stress how important it is to have at least a tiny emergency fund in the bank. You often hear that you should have six months saved up. Don’t be intimidated by that. Start out with just a hundred dollars if you can. Cut back on a few things. Then build it up, every payday. Once you have, let’s say, $1,000, it will make a huge difference in your life. It’s not much, and you should still add to it every paycheck, but at least now you’re not living paycheck-to-paycheck, and if an unexpected emergency comes up you can pay for it, rather than not paying other bills and falling behind. It’s a simple step, but it will mean a lot.
29. Keep a journal. This is not one of the more important tips, but I can attest that it’s rewarding. I, for one, have a bad long-term memory, and by writing things down, I can look back and remember what happened a month ago. I just started this a couple months ago, actually, but ti’s been awesome. I started an online journal, something I call the one-sentence journal, and my goal is to just write one sentence a day. Sometimes I write two or three, but the idea is the same — just get one or two things down that happened that day, so I can always look back on it later.
30. Use the power of others. Achieving your goals can be difficult, but using the power of others makes it much more likely to happen. For example, put positive public pressure on yourself by announcing your goal on your blog. Or join an online forum, or a group in your neighborhood, that you can count on for support. I have a mailing list for the May Challenge here on Zen Habits, for example, and our group has helped me stick to my goal of daily exercise even when I started to falter — and the rest of the group can tell you they’ve experienced similar success because of the positive power of the group.
31. Read, and read to your kids. I read all the time — it’s one of my favorite things to do in the world. I love to curl up with a good novel (or even a trashy one) and I can waste away an afternoon with a book. And I’m passing on my love of reading to my kids, by reading to them every day. I love spending time with them this way, and we all enjoy the stories we share together through books. See Best All-time Children’s Books.
32. Limit your information intake. In our lives today, we get a tremendous amount of information through email, blog feeds, reading websites, paperwork, memos, newspapers, magazines, television, DVDs, radio, mobile phones and Blackberries. Not only can this be overwhelming, but it can be distracting and can fill up your life until you have no time for more important things. Go on a media fast to get control over your information intake, and to simplify your life
33. Create simple systems. Once you’ve simplified your life, the way to keep it simple is by creating systems for everything you do regularly. Create an efficient system for laundry, mail and paperwork, errands, your workflow. Anything, really. See ways to Streamline Your Life and to make your mail and paperwork painless.
34. Take time to decompress after stress. There will inevitably be times in your life when you go through high stress. Perhaps several times a week. To maintain your sanity, you need to find ways to decompress. Here are some great ways to do that.
35. Be present. Time can go by extremely quickly. Before you know it, your life has passed you by. Your kids are grown and your youth is gone. Don’t let your life slip by — enjoy it while it’s here. Instead of dwelling in the past or thinking about the future, practice being in the here and now. Here are some practical tips for being present.
36. Develop equanimity. Keep your sanity through all the challenges that life throws at you. Rude drivers, irritating co-workers, mean commenters on your blog, inconsiderate family members. This takes a bit of practice, but you can let these things slide off you like you’re Teflon. Try these practical tips.
37. Spend time with family and loved ones. One of the things that can lead to the greatest happiness, make this a priority every week, every day. Clear off as much time as possible to spend with those you love, and truly enjoy those times. Be present as you do it — don’t think about work or your blog or what you need to do. Read this for more.
38. Pick yourself up when you’re down. There will always be times in our lives when we get a little down, even depressed. Take action to get yourself out of your slump. Here are some great ways to do that.
39. Don’t compare yourself to others. This is hard to do, but it can be a great way to accept who you are and what you have. Whenever you find yourself comparing yourself to a co-worker, a friend, or someone famous (those models on magazines with amazing abs), stop. And realize that you are different, with different strengths. Take a minute to appreciate all the good things about yourself, and to be grateful for all the blessings in your life.
40. Focus on benefits, not difficulties. If you find yourself struggling to do something, or procrastinating, stop thinking about how hard something is, or why you don’t want to do it. Focus instead on what benefits it will have for you, what opportunities it will create — the good things about it. By changing the way you see things, you can change how you feel about them and make it easier to get things done.
41. Be romantic. If you have that special someone, find little ways to be romantic. It can do wonders to keep your relationship alive and fresh. It doesn’t take tons of money, either. See these ideas to get you started.
42. Lose arguments. I know someone who just celebrated his 50th anniversary, and I asked him for his secret to a long and happy marriage. He told me, that if I ever get into an argument with my wife, to just shut up. What he meant, I think, is that I shouldn’t try to be right in every argument. I think this is a reminder many of us need, not just the married ones. But instead of just giving up the argument, instead of trying to be right, instead seek to understand. Really try to understand the other person’s position, to see it from their point of view. This little tip can lead to much happiness.
43. Get into the flow. This is both a happiness and productivity tip. Flow is the term for the state we enter when we are completely focused on the work or task before us. We are so immersed in our task that we lose track of time. Having work and leisure that gets you in this state of flow will almost undoubtedly lead to happiness. People find greatest enjoyment not when they’re passively mindless, but when they’re absorbed in a mindful challenge. Get into that flow by first doing something you are passionate about, and second by eliminating all distractions and really focusing on the task before you.
44. Single-task. I don’t believe in multi-tasking, at least not on a day-to-day basis. Instead, focus on one task at a time. This leads to greater productivity and less stress. You can’t go wrong with that kind of combination. See these tips for more.
45. Be frugal. This is a habit, rather than a goal. It is a way of living, a different mindset, and the best way to live within your means. It doesn’t mean being cheap or forsaking pleasure, but it does mean finding less expensive ways to do things, learning to live with less (and be happier in the process), and controlling impulse spending. I don’t have a single article to give you as reference, but frugality is a recurring theme on Zen Habits.
46. Start small and slow. Regular Zen Habits readers know that I advocate starting slow with any goal or habit change, and starting with a small goal rather than a big one. Why small? Because it’s something you are sure to achieve — and once you do achieve it, you can use that success to push you to further success. It’s a simple technique, but it really works. Start slow when you start exercise, or other similar activities — there’s no need to rush it in the beginning, to overdo it. You have the rest of your life!
47. Learn to deal with detractors. We all face detractors in our lives. They are the naysayers who, even if they are well-intentioned, will make us feel unworthy, or that you cannot achieve a goal. They will tease or be negative. In order to achieve your goals, you need to learn how to deal with these detractors and overcome this common obstacle. Read these tips for some ideas.
48. Go outdoors. These days, too many of us spend so much of our time indoors, especially if our jobs and our ways of having fun are all online. Our kids are often just as bad or worse, with so many ways to watch TV, surf the internet or play video games. Get them and yourself outdoors, appreciate nature, the beauty of the world around us, and the fun of physical activity. See this article for more ideas (to do with or without kids).
49. Retire early. This isn’t a sure way to become happy — you can retire and be bored out of your mind and unhappy — but it’s surely a cool goal. And if you do something meaningful with your life, such as volunteer and help others, it can be a way to be really happy. It’s not an easy goal, either, but you can retire early by cutting back on your living expenses, increasing your income, and investing the difference. The more you can do of all three, the fast you’ll retire. And that’s a truly liberating idea.
50. Savor the little things. Sure, the big things can bring big pleasure, but there are so many more little things in our lives. Savor them when they come up. It’s a way of practicing being present — stop and notice what you’re doing right now, what’s around you. And take time to enjoy it. Read this article for more.
51. Be lazy. There’s a time to be productive, and there’s a time to be plain ol’ lazy. I like the latter, and do it every chance I get. Does that make me a lazy person? Probably not, but even if it does, I don’t care. It makes me happy, and the kids love being lazy with me.
52. Help others. While finding pleasure in life is one way to be happy, doing something that is more than you, that helps others to be happy or to suffer less, is even more rewarding. I suggest you find a good cause or two and volunteer some of your time. You don’t have to commit to big chunks of your life, but just volunteer for a couple of hours. All of us can find a couple of hours in a week or a month. If you do this, you will find out how tremendously happy this will make you. You might even become addicted.

Buddha...................

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BELIEVE AND YOU SHALL RECEIVE.......

YOU ARE WHAT YOU THINK YOU ARE......

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An addict is one whose using has become harmful — habitual — and compulsive. Addiction is a degree of abuse; the addict simply has a habit he or she can’t break — compulsion has become irresistible.

Basically, there are two kinds of addicts: substance addicts and mental addicts.

Substance addicts include — drug addicts — alcohol addicts — tobacco addicts — coffee addicts — food addicts.

Mental addicts include — lying and cheating addicts — resenting-and-hating addicts — worry-and-anxiety addicts — sex addicts — depression-mopping-and-sulking addicts.

Addiction is here understood to be a harmful habit that you can’t break. It is an injurious practice that you can’t stop. It is not necessarily limited to, or limited by, physical or mental factors but always involves both, although sometimes one or the other primarily. The use of physical withdrawal symptoms as a comprehensive definition of addiction is here regarded as generally insufficient and misleading and in particular cases (e.g. cocaine and amphetamines) as dangerously invalid.

What is a recovery?

A recovery occurs when the addict stops using and stays stopped.

In the case of drug addiction, alcohol addiction, and tobacco addiction, stopping is achieved by a program of total abstinence. In the case of food addiction and sex addiction, stopping is achieved by faithful adherence to a program of limited use.

How do you become a member of All Addicts Anonymous?

You are a member of the All Addicts Anonymous Fellowship when, as, and if you adopt the Four Absolutes, the Twelve Steps, and the Ten Points as a way of life, with the intention of practicing them, one day at a time, in all of your affairs.

What are the chances of recovery?

If the addict will simply practice the Program, in the simplest possible way, by going to two or three meetings a week, and by practicing the Program in all his affairs, the chances of recovery are very good. In the meetings, the addict hears the stories of other addicts who have recovered, and he learns how to practice the Twelve Step Program, and to enjoy it. The Program moves the addict from reliance on self-will — which is never equal to the task of beating addiction — to reliance on a Higher Power. It encourages him to face, and make amends for, past wrongs. It sends him right out joyfully carrying this life-saving message to his brother and sister addicts, and gets him beginning to feel like a real human being again. And it works. It produces freedom from addiction in six to seven out of every ten who really try it.

The odds really are that good.

The following is what we tell new people coming into the Program:

The requirements for success on the Program are completely summed up in the Four Absolutes, the Twelve Steps, and the Ten Points. To succeed in the All Addicts Anonymous way of life, this is what you should do: (a) Go to meetings. (b) Learn the Four Absolutes and the Twelve Steps. (c) Practice these principles in all of your affairs. Do this, in your own way, in your own time — but do it — and your chances of permanent, lifelong recovery are very high — pressing 100%.

It must be voluntary.

The conditions for connecting with the All Addicts Anonymous Program are these: (1) You must be looking for real help and (2) you must be willing to pay the price for it. The price, in every case without exception, is a radical change in lifestyle. Nobody is going to force this new lifestyle upon you. Nobody can. But if you will not voluntarily accept the change, the Program can’t work for you.

The change in lifestyle is not easy, but it is possible for anybody, and if you start applying the principles you will find it happening. If you start with the bare essentials of the Program — if you turn your will and life over to God and adopt a policy of absolute honesty in all of your affairs — you will soon find yourself in very different country, with wonderful possibilities opening up — but at the same time with real difficulties emerging. For example, it always happens that you, yourself, discover a lot of objections to this new life, within yourself — doubts, qualms, fears, uncertainties, longings for the old ways. And, on the outside, a lot of your friends will tell you that you are mistaken or, somewhat less delicately, that you are nuts.

These and other difficulties do arise, but again, experience proves that they are never real obstacles for a man or woman who really means business.

If you do mean business, you can start the Program anywhere, anytime. In order to start, just read the principles and start applying them. Real miracles — that is, not just natural wonders but the gracious action of God in human affairs — come as a result of no more than just reading the principles and applying them.

You can begin now!

You can start where you are — now — today — right in your present circumstances. If you are doing something you know is wrong — drugging, drinking, resenting, overeating, fornicating, masturbating, lying, cheating, stealing, or whatever — stop it. One day at a time you will find that you can stop it. In order to stay stopped, you must continue working the Program, one day at a time. Living according to the Program, you will find that your circumstances will change. Let the changes come. Hang on to the truth, trust God, and allow your life to be changed. Keep in touch with other people who are living this way, and learn from them.

Study the literature of the way to God, and learn from it. One day at a time, do what the Program tells you to do. Hang on to total abstinence. Practice the principles in all of your affairs, as well as you can — without lying to yourself, without cutting corners, without copping out. As time goes on, you will see a very great change, a wonderful and revolutionary change, taking place in your life and in your surroundings.

Beginning Your Recovery

What to hang on to

If you are in real trouble — if you are addicted to alcohol, drugs, tobacco, food, sex, worry, resentment, lying, depression, or anxiety — if you want to recover; and if you are willing to accept and act on suggestions from people who themselves have recovered — the outlook for you is good.

There is a way out

Do not let anybody tell you that recovery from addiction is impossible, or unusual. Hundreds of thousands of addicts have recovered — fully, beautifully, and permanently.

The people who clutter up the addictive scene and make it seem like a big deal are the addicts (all of us at one stage of the game) who do not really want to recover and who are still horsing around with the situation and mainly playing games. When you reach the point of wanting to recover and become willing to do what recovered addicts tell you to do, the battle is more than half won.

How to start a recovery — 24 hours at a time

In the beginning of your recovery you are so weak physically and so bombed out mentally that you are easily confused and easily put off. Therefore you have to make “first things first” a rule and stick to it.

The first thing you do is learn the first principles of recovery from someone who knows them and practices them, and to begin to practice them your self. If you approach them with a little humility, they are not hard to understand, and it is not an impossible task to follow them. These principles (and the company of the people who practice them) are your lifeline.You simply cannot afford to argue about them. You merely have to do them, one day at a time.

The way to recovery begins with a few simple, uncomplicated first principles, which come to you as suggestions. Maybe you will not like some of these recommendations, but the thing to remember is that they work, and none of them should be left out. The whole problem is to hang on while you are coming out of the woods, and these suggestions tell you what (and what not) to hang on to.

Hang on to God

The first source of help to which an addict needs to turn — first in order of time and first in order of importance — is God. This is not a matter of religion or philosophy but simply a matter of fact. It is the power of God which enables addicts to recover. Without that power, there are few recoveries.

Now there are a lot of different opinions about God, but we are not talking about God as an opinion but as a living power. You have to remember that you are an addict, not a professor. Do not waste time theorizing about God. What you do is get in touch with God by the simple and direct means of talking to God, that is, by plain, old, ordinary prayer. Every nitwit knows how to pray; the knack here is to do it. No preliminary ducking or bobbing is necessary. Just do it.

Do not waste energy debating about God. Take God as a possibility

— a working hypothesis. Make the experiment of getting in touch. This comes ahead of everything else, and anybody can do it. You can do it. Hundreds of thousands of alcoholics and drug addicts (many of them atheists) have made this experiment and proved to themselves that there is a Power greater than themselves who responds and gives real, practical, effective help when called on. All real recovery begins here. It makes no difference whether you are a believer or not. If you are not, start by praying to the God you don’t believe in. Just park your objections for a while, and do it as an experiment.

Hang on to the truth

You connect with God by means of the truth. And you connect with the truth by stopping lying. All Addicts are liars. Please do not resent this. It is just a statement of fact. Some of us lie in gross ways, some in subtle ways; but all of us are ferocious liars.

As a starter, stop lying to yourself about your condition. Stop pretending it is better than it is. If you are an addict, you are in the grip of a disease which is a vicious killer, and you cannot do anything about it — not by yourself and not with the best scientific, psychiatric, or medical help in the world. Addiction is usually incurable except through spiritual conversion. If you face that fact, your chances for recovery are good. If you ignore it, your chances are poor.

Next, stop lying to get out of jams or to smooth off the rough edges of life. Don’t lie for the sake of peace; don’t lie when common sense invites you to do so; don’t lie to cover up your past; don’t lie on job applications, expense accounts, or tax returns; don’t lie to your boss; don’t lie to your husband or wife. Just don’t lie. When you fail in this resolve (as you will), admit it promptly. And don’t indulge in failure; that is, don’t lie any oftener than you have to.

This policy of non-lying takes real courage if you have a messy past, as most of us do. It feels like it is going to cause problems for you, rather than solve them. But in actual practice it is a life-saver and a life-transformer. Try it, and you will find that non-lying simplifies life and makes it easier to deal with. And it does something else of greatest importance: when you take truth-telling seriously, you put yourself in direct touch with God. God is truth, and throughout the day every decision you make to be honest opens you up to the healing light of his presence. This is not just a pretty thought; it is something real, like electricity, only alive. Work for the truth, as best you can, and the living Truth — God — will work for you. He will give you the strength which you yourself lack, the strength to take the next step.

Hang on to total abstinence

One day at a time, stay away from alcohol, drugs, smokes, or whatever it is that you are addicted to. Total abstinence is the key. That means none — not even a little bit, not even one or two. (In the case of alcohol addiction, drug addiction, tobacco addiction, and coffee addiction, stopping is achieved by a program of total abstinence. In the case of food addiction and sex addiction, stopping is achieved by faithful adherence to a program of limited use.)

One day at a time, with the help of God and the truth, you can do it. It is the first drink or pill or shot or cigarette to which you must say no. One day at a time, stay away from first drink or drug or whatever, and you will never have to worry about all those disastrous ones that follow. “One day at a time” is not a trick with words; it is a thoroughly practical, well-proven formula for success. No addict can face the prospect of a whole lifetime of total abstinence. It seems to big an order. But any of us, with God’s help, can stay away from the first drink, the first pill, the first shot, the first cigarette, or whatever, for twenty-four hours. Do not underestimate the power of this principle.

Hang on to your recovering brothers and sisters

you cannot recover alone. It is a deadly mistake to think that you can. In our times God has chosen to speak to addicts through brothers and sisters who are ahead of them on the road to freedom. These brothers and sisters are the people who can show you how to recover. Find them. Learn from them. Work with them. Join their group, and go to their meetings. If you cannot locate a group, do what the pioneers in this field did: dig up a couple of people who are also looking for recovery, and start your own group. Go to meetings — practice the Four Absolutes, the Twelve Steps, and the Ten Points in all of your affairs, one day at a time — work with others as you go. It really is that simple.

Working with a group is necessary; you cannot sustain a recovery without it. But the group is not God; it is only a vehicle through which God works. It is the principles that communicate the power. Recovery begins with getting in touch with God. He gives us the courage to get honest; he gives us the strength to stay away from the first drink or pill or shot or cigarette or whatever, one day at a time; and he puts us in touch with the people we need to work with.

At the same time, do not misuse trust in God as an excuse to avoid people, or to try to get around any of the other factors in the basic equation. Hanging on to God, hanging on to honesty, staying away from alcohol or drugs (or whatever your addictive substance is), and working with your recovering brothers and sisters — these constitute the formula for recovery, and they go together. You cannot work successfully with any of them unless you are working with all of them. By doing these few simple things, literally millions of previously desperate and hopeless men and women have had their lives, their sanity, and their strength restored through the All Addicts Anonymous way of life.

This is What You Start With

Remember when you are reading program literature that you are studying for know-how and not just fun. There is a great bunch of stuff to choose from out there — and a lot of this literature is tremendously intriguing and fascinating, but all of it has a desperately serious underlying purpose: to communicate to you the reality of God and give you practical knowledge as to how to live from day to day. From your reading you can learn how to get started in praying, meditating, and exercising. Soon you will be able to learn from, and also to help, other people, and that will really begin to change your life.

In conclusion, let me challenge you: Follow the above program faithfully for only one month. If nothing happens, if you don’t feel that anything at all has taken place in yourself and your life, let me know, and I will eat six pages of any All Addicts Anonymous literature on white or rye bread, whichever you specify.

There are ways of praying throughout the day in the midst of other activities, and there are even ways of praying continuously. But the particular kind of prayer which is practiced in specially reserved time every day occupies a position of central importance in the way to God, and very few can get along without it.

Nearly all men live in a cloud of ignorance of God. "Penetrating the cloud" is a term which describes a certain kind of prayer: broadly speaking, it is prayer done in time specifically set aside for the purpose.

You must learn how to practice penetrating the cloud, but even before that you must find the time for it.

Further, you must continue without interruption to find the time for it. A few days or weeks of this practice will do you no harm, but they probably won’t do you much good, either. The practice of penetrating the cloud must become like eating your meals, sleeping, or going to the bathroom. When the time is at hand every day, you just do it, period. Unless you can put it on that basis (and everybody can who really wants to), you are merely stirring around in the cloud, not practicing the penetration of it.

Time must be set aside at least five days a week and preferably six. (You may want to take a seventh-day rest, even from this blessed kind of work.) Morning is best for most people, although evenings will do, and any time of day is all right in a pinch. It should be done at the same time every day; a few lapses on this point are permissible, but not many.

How much time every day? At least ten minutes to begin with. That is my own estimate of the need; opinions vary widely; one of the most experienced men I know says you cannot do much in less than half an hour. Ten minutes obviously is less than a good working minimum, but it is a possible time for anyone, and it will serve to get things going and keep them going. For a starter, it is not presumptuous and not a strain, and nobody can lie his way out of the daily appointment on the plea that it is too much for him. It seems to me that in many cases these advantages outweigh the admittedly grave disadvantages of so short a time.

An old man who was teaching me started me out at this level. He instructed me in what he called the "wedge system." Said he: "Ten-minute periods faithfully and regularly held every day are far better than half-hour sessions held occasionally or in spurts. When the ten-minute wedge is firmly inserted in your daily routine (and this might take six months or a year), then you can drive it in a little further, maybe expanding the time to fifteen minutes — later to twenty — later to thirty — and so on, up to what your real capacity for daily practice of this kind turns out to be. It is wrong to lag, but it is no good trying to be a saint overnight, either."

When I first began to listen to this man, he questioned me about my habits of prayer. "How long do you go?" he asked. "About two hours at a stretch," I said, trying with a great effort to appear modest. (It was true. I was less than twelve months out of a moral and physical collapse in which I had been floundering for years. But I had been reading books, and I am inclined to excess, and I was practicing, at that time, two hours at a clip.)

My old spiritual father looked at me narrowly.

"You do this every day?" he said.
"Well, no," I said.
"You do it for a few days and then skip a few days?" he said.
"Yes," I said.
"And sometimes you skip a few weeks, perhaps?" he said.
"That’s the way it goes," I said.
"Ten minutes a day for you," he said. "No less and no more."Thank God I found my way into the old man’s hands. In another few months I probably would have blown some fuses or soured myself on prayer forevermore, the way I was going. The point is, to begin with a time period which is not beyond your ability to sustain, however humble and indeed however humiliating that period may be. If you want to be a star performer, fine; but take it easy, at least at first. There are real heroes in this game, and it is a good thing to emulate them, but it is also possible to get something like a spiritual hernia. If the ten-minute beginner’s time really is too easy for you, by all means increase it, but not too much and not too fast. On the other hand, after a while if you are not succeeding in keeping the ten minutes clear at least five days a week without fail, drop back to five minutes. Find out what time you can keep, and keep it. Then you are on the way, not otherwise.

Now a word about the place in which you practice. So far as possible it should be the same place every day. It would not serve our purpose here to go into the reasons why, but it does make a difference. (If you are traveling, you just do the best you can on the road, using whatever places are available, and try to stay to a regular place at home.) A bedroom is fine. A bathroom will do. The room should have a door with a lock or bolt, if possible. Again, this is not the occasion to develop the rationale, but it makes a difference to work in a room secured against accidental intrusion. A certain animal level of the mind remains distractingly alert unless it knows it won’t be watched or butted into from the outside. Why waste time trying to argue with it or reassure it, when you can so easily just lock the door?

How do you use the time? That depends. There are many sources of instruction in the art of penetrating the cloud. Using them as little or as much as makes sense, you’ve got to find your own way, or rather, the application of the one Way in your particular case. Some common knowledge along these lines, arising out of my own experience and the experience of those who have shared their lives with me, may be of interest here. The following discussion, of course, is directed to the problem of the householder, the man or woman in the world. The science of penetrating the cloud is very highly developed in certain religious communities and particularly in enclosed orders. On the other hand, as William Temple has pointed out, God is by no means exclusively or even preferentially interested in the formally religious affairs of the world. The monk in his oratory may or he may not have clearer access to the ear of God than the father of a family locked in his bedroom for a few minutes before rushing off to his day’s work.

The attitude, the mental and emotional set, with which you approach and enter your daily period of prayer is important. You have put aside a time for a meeting with God. Either it is that, or it is nonsense. If the President of the United States agreed to meet with you and to give special consideration to your personal, family, and vocational needs, you would come up to the meeting with your face washed, your attention well focused, and your heartbeat stepped up. In prayer, either you are meeting with the Executive and Sovereign Monarch of the Universe, or you are kidding yourself.

Make up your mind which it is. And try to let the truth sink home, even as you approach prayer. Try to get out of the area of lukewarm half-knowledge and half-belief; it is almost worse than no knowledge and unbelief. Either you are a silly fool muttering to himself, or you are entering into an interview with the omnipotent God. This hasn’t anything to do with your spiritual status or capacity. It is just a cold-turkey question with a cold-turkey answer. Either you are talking to Papa or you aren’t. If you are, go in on your toes.

The All Addicts Anonymous Program

With the coming of AA (Alcoholics Anonymous), millions of alcoholics, otherwise hopeless, have found their way back to sanity. But there is far greater lifesaving power in the principles of AA than has yet been widely recognized, because what is involved is the practice of the ethical and spiritual principles common to all mankind, and applicable to all mankind.

The original Program of Alcoholics Anonymous consisted of the Four Absolutes of the Oxford Group, later formulated by AA as the Twelve Step Program. The Absolutes were the foundation on which the Steps were built. This original Program was a world-shaker. This is the Program by which co-founders Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith got sober — by which the famous first hundred AAs recovered — by which the whole movement was launched, in the United States and Canada, and worldwide.

Over the years, as it turns out, a remarkable discovery has been made. It has been found that these original AA principles are equally effective in producing recoveries not only from addictive drinking but also from many other forms of addictive behavior, including both the substance addictions and the mental addictions. Consequently it is now possible to have one Program which works equally well for all addicts and all addictions, and especially for the many persons who are fighting more than one addiction at the same time.

And so the original Four Absolutes, the original Twelve Steps, and the original commentary on the Steps — as adapted for all addicts and all addictions — are now called the All Addicts Anonymous Program.

The Foaddictions)ur Absolutes (as adapted for all addicts and all

Note well: the Four Absolutes are the time-tested moral and ethical code of the All Addicts Anonymous Program. The Four Absolutes, in one form or another, have actually been the foundation of the moral and spiritual life of mankind in all ages and in all civilizations —

1. Absolute honesty — no lying, no cheating, no stealing. In a word, in all your affairs, simply and absolutely no falsehood.
2. Absolute purity — purity of mind, purity of body, purity of the emotions, purity of heart, sexual purity.
3. Absolute unselfishness — seeking what is right and true in every situation above what I want.
4. Absolute love — loving God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your strength, and your neighbor as yourself.

The Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous (as adapted for all addicts and all addictions)

The Twelve Steps are a lifeline for alcohol addicts, many of whom — lacking opportunity to contact an AA group — have recovered by the mere knowledge and application of these twelve principles. It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, not only for alcoholics, but for all other addicts.

Adapted versions of the Twelve Steps have been used by non-alcoholics for many years — by the Al-Anon Family Groups, Alateen, Neurotics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, Gamblers Anonymous, Overeaters Anonymous, Sexaholics Anonymous, and many others. The original version of the Steps, for use by alcoholics only, may be found in the Big Book, Alcoholics Anonymous (New York, 1976: Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc.).

The Twelve Steps as adapted for use in the All Addicts Anonymous Program can be used by any addict—

1. We admitted we were powerless over our addictions, that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked him to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood him, praying only for knowledge of his will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to other addicts, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

The Ten Points (as adapted for all addicts and all addictions)

Chapter five of the book Alcoholics Anonymous has always been a faithful guide for people who want to practice the Twelve Step Program. The following Ten Points are a summary of the lifesaving directions given in chapter five, and currently used in the All Addicts Anonymous Program —

1. Completely give yourself to this simple Program.
2. Practice rigorous honesty.
3. Be willing to go to any lengths to recover.
4. Be fearless and thorough in your practice of the principles.
5. Realize that there is no easier, softer way.
6. Let go of your old ideas absolutely.
7. Recognize that half measures will not work.
8. Ask God’s protection and care with complete abandon.
9. Be willing to grow along spiritual lines.
10. Accept the following pertinent ideas as proved by All Addicts Anonymous experience:

• that you cannot manage your own life;
• that probably no human power can restore you to sanity;
• that God can and will if sought.
• ----------------------------------

As we saw in Part I of this article, defensive relating leaves us in the dark about ourselves and about those closest to us. Defensive relating can lead us to feelings of anger, bitterness and hatred—toward ourselves and toward the very ones we most want to love. But God calls us to see what is most deeply true about ourselves and about others. We were created by the God of love to give and receive love. That is who we are. Our fears and defenses are not who we are. Our longing for love, and our need and capacity to love and be loved, are who we are.

In 1 John 2:9–11 we read:

Anyone who claims to be in the light but hates his brother is still in the darkness. Whoever loves his brother lives in the light, and there is nothing in him to make him stumble. But whoever hates his brother is in the darkness and walks around in the darkness; he does not know where he is going, because the darkness has blinded him.

When fears have distorted our relationships the healing that we need is a healing of our capacity to see. It is a healing that requires God's light of love to shine in our hearts and minds so that we can see ourselves and others more clearly.

In the light of love we can begin to see ourselves with new understanding and compassion. In the light of love we can allow ourselves to feel again our deep longing to give and receive love. As this healing takes place over time in our capacity to see and understand ourselves, we will also begin to experience healing in our capacity to see others more clearly. We can begin to see that others are defensive because they also are afraid. And we can remember that hiding behind those defensive walls and fears is a deep longing to love and be loved.

Moving past fears and defenses and into the vulnerability of heart-to-heart relating is a difficult process. But it is possible. As we gain clearer understanding and greater compassion for ourselves and for the other person—and as we learn to see through the darkness of our fears and defenses—we can begin to transform destructive relationship cycles into healthier cycles characterized by intimacy, kindness and joy.

As with any significant change during recovery, changes in our relationships often seem to involve a dance that is two steps forward followed by one step back. And sometimes it feels more like one step forward and two steps back. We may try to reach out from our heart to the other person, only to find ourselves tense and anxious. In spite of our best intentions to be open and trusting, we may be cautious and guarded. The changes we need to make are complex and difficult. Making these changes will take commitment, patience, persistence and as much hope as we can hang on to.

Why It Feels Worse Before It Gets Better

Among the confusing first signs that a relationship is becoming healthier may be an increase in the emotional pain we experience in the relationship and an increase in the volatility of the relationship. This is not too surprising when we think about it. As we start to get rid of our defenses, our fears start to surface. The fears we have been trying so hard to avoid will seem more prominent at first. We are abandoning some of our defenses in the hope of increased intimacy, but what we find at first is increased fear.

All kinds of fears may surface during this process. The first and often the most significant contributor to the fear and volatility is the raw pain that comes when we start to take an honest look at ourselves. A significant part of healthy change involves deeper self-awareness. Unless we take a fearless moral inventory of our lives we will not have the clarity to pursue change. We need to look honestly at the ways we have hurt others. And we need to look honestly at the ways we have been hurt. All this work on honesty and self-assessment is distressing.

Another contributor to the volatility is a number of deep fears about the relationship and about the experience of change. We may fear that we will fail in being all we want to be in a significant relationship. We may fear that we will lose the relationship and that we will be without this person who is so significant to us. We know we are entering unfamiliar territory as we change in the relationship, and we may fear that we will get lost along the way. All these fears add to the potential reactivity and volatility we experience as we pursue change.

Volatility may increase also because we may not be very practiced at relating without our usual defenses in place. We are not practiced at exposing our fears and longings to others. Interactions may feel volatile as we practice new ways of relating, and we can expect to make mistakes in the learning process.

There are three common temptations for any of us during a season of intentional healing in a relationship. First, we may be tempted to focus on the other person's part of the problem, in an attempt to change that person. Second, we may be tempted to shame ourselves as we look closely at our defenses and fears. And finally, we may be tempted to despair of ever experiencing lasting intimacy. The key to successful change will be to keep these temptations in mind and to do whatever we need to do to resist giving in to them.

What Doesn't Work: Fixing Others

It is always tempting to focus on other people's problems. It is so much less painful than focusing on our own. But it leads us nowhere. The antidote to focusing on the other person's part of the problem is to remind ourselves over and over again that we cannot change anyone but ourselves. We have probably already tried to change the other person, and it has not worked. It is not our job to fix other people, and trying to do so will only lead to more fear, frustration and anger. What we can do is stay as focused as possible on our part of the problem and entrust the other person to the love and care of God.

Doing these two things does not mean we should close our eyes or pretend about the other person's fears and defenses. It does mean that we need to bring as much empathy and compassion as possible to listening, observing and understanding what the other person is struggling with. Over time, as we develop an understanding of the other person's fears and defenses that is based on respect and empathy, our own fears about ourselves will be triggered less frequently. And we will be able to remind ourselves to see past those fears and defenses into the other person's deepest longings for love.

It is important, however, to remember that developing empathy and understanding about the other person's fears and defenses does not give us license to point out their fears or defenses, or to be their therapist or sponsor, or to correct them, or to instruct them in how to change. None of those responses are respectful. They will only increase the other person's sense of not being safe in the relationship. And they will increase our feelings of anger and despair.

A response that is respectful and ultimately healing is to be as clear as we can about our thoughts and feelings and needs and to "let go and let God." The respectful and healing response is to be honest and open about ourselves and to entrust the other person's change process (or lack of change process) to the love and care of God.

What Doesn't Work: Shaming Ourselves A second temptation that can prevent us from growing healthier relationships is to shame ourselves. As we become more aware of our fears and defenses we may be tempted to shame ourselves for having these fears and defenses. Or we may shame ourselves because we are finding the change process to be difficult. Learning to be compassionate toward ourselves will be a challenge as we begin to see more clearly the wounds that have led to our struggles in relationships. We need to remind ourselves that our fears and defenses are not about an irreparable flaw in who we are. Our fears and defenses do not decrease our value as a person. We need to keep in mind that our fears and defenses developed in response to wounds and threats that we have experienced. They are rooted in deep pain. Only compassion for ourselves will allow us to look at them day after day. Only compassion will ultimately bring healing and release from these wounds.

Compassion toward ourselves is important also because of the tendency that some of us have to hold ourselves globally responsible for anything and everything that goes wrong in our lives. Compassion will help us resist this tendency toward global responsibility and complete self-blame. This tendency to hold ourselves responsible for everything is often learned early in life. Children believe they have magical powers. When something goes wrong—a parent becomes ill or depressed, the parents divorce, a parent is angry or abusive—children believe they are somehow the cause. We can carry into our adult lives and relationships this burden of global responsibility for things that happened when we were children. But to remain consciously aware of this burden can be overwhelming. So we push this burden out of our awareness, and then we find ourselves trying hard, trying harder, trying our hardest to single-handedly make our relationships work, without understanding why this cannot bring a real solution. We need to be able to sort out what we are truly responsible for and what we are not responsible for. What we are responsible for we can focus on and work to change. What we are not responsible for we can let go of and entrust to God's loving care.

Praying the serenity prayer daily or hourly can help us with this focus:

God grant me the serenity

to accept what I cannot change,

the courage to change what I can,

and the wisdom to know the difference.

But how do we learn compassion toward ourselves? How do we learn to practice mercy when it comes to the hurtful things we do in relationships? For me the answer to this question was that I needed to begin by realizing how little mercy and compassion I extended toward myself. And then, as much as possible, I have allowed myself to take in God's compassion and the compassion of others. It is difficult to take a long look at how we protect ourselves by blaming or controlling or withdrawing or deceiving or placating or inappropriately altering our moods. It is painful to recognize that we hurt other people by our defensive behavior. But with God's gifts of humility and grace we can look at ourselves honestly. And doing so can enable us to change.

What Doesn't Work: Despair None of the basic requirements for change in a relationship are easy. Giving up trying to change the other person can be an enormous struggle. It requires a deepening trust in God and a developing willingness to acknowledge that we are powerless to change anyone but ourselves.

Learning compassion and mercy toward ourselves so that we can face the painful truth about our fears and defenses and about our resistance to change can also seem nearly impossible. The courage and strength and humility that are required for this work may seem to elude us.

Because of the major challenges we face in the change process, we may be tempted to despair. We may find ourselves feeling hopeless. Hopeless about our own capacity to change. Hopeless about the other person's willingness or capacity to change. Hopeless about the future of the relationship.

The antidote to all this potential despair is, of course, hope. Where does such hope come from? It can come, in part, from reminding ourselves frequently that the complex change process between two people who have been relating defensively, but who want to establish greater closeness, will always involve one or more seasons of volatile relating. Knowing this can help us have realistic expectations of ourselves and of the relationship. Knowing this can help us to stay hopeful when we are experiencing a difficult time in the relationship.

Another way to nurture our hope is to remember that hope comes from God. God is a God of hope. So receiving hope from God means that we are letting God be God. We can take our despair to God. We can ask God for gifts of hope in the midst of the struggle to change.

Hope is also nurtured when we get the help and support we need from others. This may mean therapy or a support group or the counsel of a minister or sponsor. Isolation increases our despair, but the caring help and counsel of others can increase our hope.

How do we know if it is realistic to hold out hope for a relationship? This question is often of great concern. We do not know whether we can make the changes we need to make, and—an even harder question—whether the other person will make the changes necessary for the relationship to become a place of true safety and trust and love. We do not know the outcome. Nor do we have control over the outcome.

What we do have control over is our own willingness to open ourselves to the changes we need to make. All we can do is to stay with our part. If sometime in the future we have let go of our defensiveness and experienced healing from our fears, and the other person has not done much changing, we will have gained a great deal nonetheless. We will have gained deeper peace within ourselves, and we will have gained a deeper capacity for love and grace toward others. What the outcome will be for the relationship at that point, we cannot know ahead of time. But we can leave the outcome in God's loving care.

What Works Scripture offers us guidance as we face the challenging task of finding our way out of our defenses and fears.

Each of you must put off falsehood and speak truthfully to his neighbor . . . . Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen. . . . Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice. Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you. Be imitators of God, therefore, as dearly loved children and live a life of love, just as Christ loved us . . . . (Ephesians 4:25, 29, 31, 5:2)

I want to suggest ten basic guidelines that are either explicitly stated or implied in this text. These guidelines can help to decrease our own defensiveness, decrease the other person's sense of threat or danger in the relationship, increase our capacity to see ourselves and the other person in the light of love and increase our capacity for heart-to-heart relating.

1. We can observe ourselves with compassion. We can observe our defenses, our fears and our longings for love while being compassionate toward ourselves. As we see our defenses we can begin to "put off" the falsehood that these defenses have created in our relationships. As we observe our fears we are better able to understand why we become defensive. And as we observe our longings to love and be loved we can open our hearts to give and receive love more directly.

2. We can speak truthfully about ourselves. We can acknowledge our own defenses and fears. When we are anxious or defensive we can acknowledge that we are anxious or defensive. We can acknowledge that our anxiety and defensiveness are coming from inside us and are not the other person's responsibility.

3. We can step out of our fears and defenses and work to hear the other person with a compassionate heart and mind. We can struggle to see past their defenses. We can remind ourselves that their defenses are in place because of fears. And we can remind ourselves of their longing for love. With these things in mind we can commit ourselves to listen with compassion and respect, working to hear accurately and fully what the other person is communicating about their feelings and thoughts and desires.

4. We can notice when the things we say or do seem to increase the other person's fears and defensiveness. We can do what we can to use a different approach or to change our behavior, so that we are communicating respectfully in a way that the other person can receive. This does not mean we are in charge of, or responsible for, their reactions to us. It does mean we are working to hear and respond to their perceived needs as much as we honestly can.

5. We can be thoughtful in expressing ourselves. We can take full responsibility for our words and our silences and our nonverbal communications. Before we speak we can do whatever is necessary to calm ourselves and to clarify and simplify what we want to share later with the other person about our thoughts and feelings. For example, we can go for a walk, journal, or pray before we express ourselves to the other person.

6. We can refrain from making judgments about the other person's character. The text reminds us to say what is helpful, with awareness and concern for the other person's needs. The other person needs to feel respected and valued, just as we do. Whatever we share, we can do so with this in mind. Whatever we share can be with the goal of healing, rather than of causing further damage to the relationship. For example, it can be helpful to say what we observe of the other person's behavior that leaves us feeling more anxious or defensive ("When you don't call to tell me you will be late, I feel anxious and I start thinking maybe I don't matter to you"). But it is harmful to make judgments about the other person's character based on our observations ("You don't call when you are going to be late because you are irresponsible and uncaring").

7. We can let go of any rage, bitterness and malice that we feel toward the other person. Another way of saying this is that we can do whatever work we need to do to let go of resentments. We can let go of rehearsing over and over again how the other person hurt us. Resentments feed our addictions and our walls of defensiveness. Resentments are poison to our hearts and minds and to our relationships.

8. We can be kind, compassionate, tenderhearted and forgiving toward ourselves and toward the other person. Relationships are places where we are learning about ourselves and about what it means to love and be loved. Sometimes we will get caught in our fears and defenses. And so will other people. Kindness, compassion and tenderhearted forgiveness are necessary ingredients in developing any safe, nurturing relationship.

9. We can practice, practice and keep practicing speaking from our heart. We live in a culture that overexpresses anger and underexpresses love, care and need for others. If we are angry, it is probably because we long to be close to the other person but for some reason we feel afraid. We can talk about our longing for closeness. We can talk about our desire to build a respectful, loving relationship with the other person.

10. We can pray for ourselves and for the other person and for our relationship. We can pray for the knowledge of God's loving will and the strength to carry it out. We can pray for healing and release from fears and defenses in ourselves and in the other person. We can pray that God will open our eyes to see the other person with eyes of love, and open our hearts to give and receive love.

Intimate Relating: Keeping Our Hearts Open Safe. At ease. Joyful. Playful. Respectful. Empathic. Alive. Able to navigate and learn from conflict. Trusting. Kind. These are the words I would use to describe a relationship where defenses and fears have been minimized and hearts are open to give and receive love.

Is it possible? Yes. Can we do it perfectly? No. The last thing we need is to be perfectionistic about our relationships. The experience of intimacy in a relationship does not mean that the relationship has fully arrived. There will be bumps. Conflicts will surface. Fears and defenses will get triggered. But when our hearts have grown tender toward ourselves and toward each other, it is possible to share our fears and defenses with each other and to work through conflicts in ways that produce greater understanding of ourselves and each other.

It is essential to remember that we are creatures. To be a creature is to be limited. As creatures we can work within our limitations and leave the rest to God. This is a critical point. We are not the only ones who are working on this relationship. God is not a distant and disinterested observer of our struggle. God is actively involved in doing what God does best. God is the one who can free us from our attachments to fear. God is the one who can find a way for grace to thrive in a seemingly hostile environment. God never forgets who we are. God sees our defenses. God sees our fears. But God never loses sight of who we really are—his beloved creatures, created to love and be loved.

Many times when struggling in relationships I have sensed God saying, "Do not forget that both of you are humans, limited in knowledge and understanding. Be compassionate when either of you feels afraid or defensive. Bring your struggles to me. Let my grace transform them into gifts of humility and tenderness. Keep coming to me with each fear and each defense. Let me continue to set you free."

Scripture calls us over and over again to live a life of love—to love God and to love each other. These are the two great commandments, Jesus said. God calls us, in love, to love. This is what life is about. This is who we were created to be. How can we respond to this call to love when we are limited human beings? Imperfectly. And with help. We can ask for help from God and from others. We can continue to pursue whatever healing we need, so that we can open our hearts more fully to receive love from God. So that, more and more, God can live in us. So that, more and more, love can live in us.

We can pray with Paul for ourselves and others:

That you, being rooted and established in love, may have power . . . to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. (Eph. 3:17–19)

This is the goal of our efforts when we bring our recovery into our relationships: to be filled with the fullness of God. To be filled with God. To be filled with love. Not all relationships can become safe, close and loving. Some relationships will fail. Some will never heal. Some may be, at best, one-sided in awareness and compassion. But some relationships can be rescued from the distance and destruction created by fears and defenses. Some relationships can, by God's grace, become places where we are free to be our truest, most loving selves, and where the other person is free in this way as well. But whatever may become of our relationships, we can grow in our capacity to experience the love and grace of God.

May we be filled today with a deep sense of God's love for us. May God open our eyes to see others with eyes of love. May God open our hearts in tenderness and joy to live a life of love, just as Christ loved us.

                       Seeing Ourselves More Clearly

I remember looking in the mirror as a teenager and asking myself, Who am I? Who is that person staring back at me? At the time I didn't realize that I had already been answering that question for many years.

As I look back now on those years it is clear to me that my answer to the question Who am I? was, I am a good person. That was who I was; I was good. I had a variety of ways of demonstrating that goodness. I worked very hard. I didn't ask for anything. I didn't cause anybody any trouble. I did what was expected of me. I did everything I could to take care of the needs of others.

Of course, I was not aware at the time that I was answering the question Who am I? in that way. It was not a conscious part of my life. Nor was I aware that my determination to be good was rooted in fear. I was working hard to be good, because maybe if I was good enough I would be protected from deeply buried fears that I was bad. Just as I was not aware that I was working hard to be a good person, I was also unaware that I lived with a deep fear that I was a bad person. I had no understanding of any of this. I just worked harder and harder to be good.

This deep internal conflict, of believing myself to be bad and trying instead to be good, began to surface as I grew into young adulthood. It surfaced indirectly at first. What came to my attention first was that I had difficulty believing, as a young newlywed, that my husband loved me. I could see the evidence of his love: he said he loved me, and he consistently acted like he loved me. But I could not take in his love. I could not believe it or trust it. That disturbed me. I knew something was wrong with me, but I didn't know what it was.

I also began to realize that I was experiencing a similar problem in my relationship with God. I believed that God was loving, but I did not believe that God loved me. I was somehow the one exception. I could see how this created problems for me—how difficult it was to trust or to hope or to simply relax. My inability to believe that God loved me distressed me as deeply as my inability to believe that my husband loved me. Something was wrong. But as hard as I tried, I could not figure it out or change it.

Eventually my distress became great enough that I sought help. When I did, I slowly became aware, first of all, of my ongoing attempts to define myself as a good person. I began to see the many things I was doing to create that sense of myself. I also became aware of my deep fear that I was bad. And I began to understand how that fear about myself had its roots in the early years of my life.

As I saw these dynamics of my self-concept more clearly, I began to realize that the self that I was presenting to the world was actually a defensive structure, a wall I was hiding behind. The answer that I had given to the question Who am I? was really not an answer at all. It was an elaborate attempt to protect myself from fears that I found intolerable.

I also began to see, although with more difficulty, that my sense of myself as bad was a distortion. The belief that I was a terrible person was a conclusion I had come to as a child when I was trying to make sense out of a series of difficult circumstances. Children take responsibility for things they cannot possibly be responsible for. Sometimes children are blamed for things they are not responsible for. And sometimes children are treated in ways that leave them believing they are bad. With a great deal of struggle I came to see that my fear that I was bad was not a truth but a distortion about myself that had grown out of early wounds. Bad was not who I was after all.

As I discovered that much of the hard work to define myself as a good person was a defense, I became more confused about how to answer the question Who am I? And I became further perplexed as I discovered that my underlying fear that I was a bad person was a distortion and was not my true self either. These realizations left me profoundly disoriented. Who was I really?

What I slowly began to discover was that underneath my attempts to define myself as good and underneath my fears of being bad, there deep within was my true self. Under all the pretense and all the distorted ideas about myself was the self that God had created me to be, the self made in God's image. There, waiting to be seen and embraced by me, was a much loved child of God.

Thomas Merton has described the process I was going through quite clearly:

We must cast off our false, exterior self like the cheap and showy garment that it is. We must find our real self. . .in its very great and very simple dignity: created to be a child of God, and capable of loving with something of God's own sincerity.1

Out of these discoveries a simple model emerged for understanding our common struggle to discover who we are. The purpose of this article is to outline this model. It is my hope that its bare-bones simplicity will help you to see yourself more clearly.

Who We Are

What I discovered to be true about who I am was so simple that I had been stumbling over it all my life. Who I really am—my true self—is a person created in God's image. What we know most fundamentally about God is that God is love. We come from God. God's essence is love. Our true essence is also love. We long to love, and we long to be loved. That is who we are under all the fears and distortions about ourselves, under all our ego and pride and defenses. We are spiritual creatures created in the image of the God of love, created to love and to be loved.

I remember as a teenager, when I read the Bible for the first time from beginning to end, how amazed I was that it read like one long love letter from God. "I love you! I love you! I love you!" God says in a thousand different ways from one text to the next. Over and over God says, "I am Love. That is who I am. I am Love."

That is who God is. And it is who we are as creatures made by God in God's image. When people asked Jesus what was the most important thing in all of life he told them, "Love God with every fiber of your being. And love your neighbor as yourself." These are the two great commandments, the two keys to understanding who we are. Love God and love your neighbor as yourself. That's what our lives are about, that is what we are about, that is who we are. We are people created for love. Our sense of meaning and joy come as we express our true selves in the giving and receiving of love.

Yet this wonderful loving self God made us to be often seems beyond our reach. We find ourselves competing with each other rather than cooperating in love. We feel insecure and are forever trying to prove ourselves, instead of knowing we are loved. We work hard to appear superior to each other rather than giving ourselves in love and joy to each other. What has happened to our awareness of our true selves? How did this pearl of great price get buried in a field and become forgotten?

Fears and Distortions

What happens to our true selves, basically, is that they get lost in fear. From the beginning of life, we experience events that seem to threaten our well-being, events that are frightening to us for one reason or another.

As young children we may be left to cry too long when we are hungry. We may hear angry voices and see angry faces and feel ourselves being handled roughly. We may unsuccessfully seek eye contact with a distracted or depressed caretaker. We may feel the anxiety and tension of the adult who holds us. Alarm bells begin to sound inside. What is wrong? we wonder. What do these things mean? We are likely to assume that such events may mean that something is wrong with us—that maybe something is very wrong with us.

It is as if our adult caretakers are holding up a mirror for us all the time. We look into their faces and believe we are seeing either ourselves or the effects of our presence. If what we see in that mirror is mostly a calm, loving and nurturing picture, we will believe that we are loved and that we are known to be loving. But if we look into that mirror and see primarily anger, depression or anxiety we will believe that something is wrong with us. As children we have no way of knowing that the distress we are seeing and sensing is not a reflection of ourselves. We will see ourselves in the distressed faces of our caretakers and develop fears about ourselves—fears that we are not loved or that we are not loving.

If in addition to these distressing mirrors we experience distressing words and actions, our worst fears will be confirmed. If we are told that it is our fault that our caretaker is distressed, we will believe that that is true. If our physical or emotional needs are neglected we will believe we have little value. If an adult we are supposed to be able to trust abuses us emotionally or physically or sexually, we will believe we are at fault. If a parent dies or leaves, we will believe we were the cause.

The most fundamental fears that develop from our beliefs about ourselves are fears that we are not loving and that we are not loved. We question the core of our true selves. The fears that we are not loved and that we are not capable of loving take on specific nuances for each of us, depending on our experiences. The fears that we are not loved or that we are not capable of loving may translate into fears that we are not good enough. Or that we don't matter. Or that we are dangerous. Or that we are insignificant. Or that we are failures.

The difficulty is that all of these fears about ourselves become beliefs. We begin to experience these fears about ourselves not as distortions but as truth. This process is further complicated by the fact that we look at life events through the grid of these distortions and fears and see events in a way that seems to confirm our negative beliefs. If I believe that I don't matter, and someone close to me is distracted by something in his or her own life and neglects me periodically, I will experience this neglect as a confirmation of my worst fear about myself. If I believe that I am dangerous, and a person I want to be close to is anxious about being close to anyone, I will see this anxiety as evidence of what I believe to be true about myself.

A further complication of this dynamic is that for every distortion we have about ourselves there is a matching distortion about others, including God. If I fear that I am bad and that I deserve to be punished, I will see God and others as judgmental and harsh. If I believe that I don't matter, I will see God and others as neglectful and dismissing. If I see myself as not good enough, I will see God and others as impossible to please. We believe that our worst fears about ourselves are the truth, and without realizing it we project those fears onto others, looking for evidence to support our case against ourselves and against them.

Fortunately, God calls us out of our fears and back to the truth. God reminds us, "You are loved. You are created to love." We read in Scripture, "Be imitators of God. . . as dearly loved children and live a life of love, just as Christ loved us" (Ephesians 5:1). We are addressed as dearly loved children. We are not bad or insignificant, but dearly loved. And we are invited to live a life of love just as Christ loved and to be imitators of God by loving like God loves. God knows who we are. God knows we are capable of loving like Jesus loved, like God loves. It is a radical truth that God calls us to. We are not what our worst fears and distortions say we are. We are dearly loved children of God. We are capable of loving as God loves.

Defenses

Our fears and distortions about ourselves generate painful feelings. Feelings of shame, anxiety and despair. These feelings are too painful to tolerate on an ongoing basis. So during the same days and years that our distortions about ourselves are being born, we also develop a strategy for protecting ourselves from the pain of these distortions. We do this instinctively, with little or no awareness of what we are doing. In the same years that I was coming to believe that I was a bad person, I was developing the strategy to prove to myself and to others that I was a good person. I would protect myself from the fear of being bad by trying to be both good enough to be loved and good enough to be seen as loving.

Over time our protective strategies become more and more set in place, forming what we might call a defensive structure. This defensive structure takes on a life of its own. It becomes the way we define ourselves—the way we present ourselves to others and to ourselves. We begin to think that our defensive structure is our true self. But in reality it is a false self. It is a false self in which we invest a great deal of energy, because we believe that any hope for ever feeling any kind of worth is tied to it.

Our defensive structures consist of a variety of patterned responses and choices we make from day to day. We might try to please everybody. Or we might try to prove that we know a lot. Or we might be passive and withdrawn. We might push ourselves to constantly overachieve. Or we might not ever try to achieve much at all. We might clown and chatter about nothing. We might become addicts, or compulsive caregivers or highly religious people.

We become very attached to these ways of being in the world, even when we realize all the trouble that these defensive structures create in our lives. We are attached to them because they protect us from feeling the shame that comes out of our fears and distortions about ourselves.

We each have a unique life story. So the fears we develop about ourselves and the protective strategies we develop to quiet our fears are unique to each of us. Identifying our specific fears about ourselves and the specific defensive strategies we have developed can be valuable. And it can be helpful to see how our fears and our defenses fit together.

Part of my defensive structure was to focus on other people and to be silent about myself. Underneath that defense were the fears that I don't matter and that I'm bad. The unconscious reasoning was, I don't matter. I am bad. I don't want anyone to discover this about me. So I'll keep the focus on the other person. Doing that allowed me to hide and to not bother anyone.

Others may live with the fear I'm dangerous. They may have lived with a parent who was depressed, and they may have feared that they were the cause of their parent's distress. Their strategy for protecting themselves against the fear of being dangerous or hurtful may be to become a person who is forever working hard to cheer others up.

Those who experienced constant criticism may believe they are stupid and incompetent. They may protect themselves by being passive and by underachieving. Others who have a similar history and fear about themselves might defend themselves in the opposite way, by overachieving.

Those who were abandoned by a parent physically or emotionally may fear that they are not wanted. They may try to defend themselves by working hard to please others while remaining emotionally distant.

It is important to acknowledge how ingenious it was of us as children to come up with ways to cope with life's difficulties and the fears that these difficulties generated. For some of us our defensive strategies may have saved our lives as children. They may have helped us to withdraw from danger into places of safety. They may have protected us from fears that we did not have the skills or resources to manage in any other way. But the defensive structures that helped us to survive in childhood may not work well for us as adults. Our defensive strategies turn out to be costly if we come to believe that our defenses are who we are. Those who drink every evening until they pass out on the couch are coping in a way that creates huge problems—the most significant being that they are unavailable to themselves and to others. Not all protective strategies are as visible as this. But all of them have the same effect. All of them leave us unavailable to ourselves and to others. Our defenses create a fortress around our vulnerable, loving hearts, so that our true selves are walled off, locked away, lost to us and to others.

Fortunately, God never forgets who we are. God lovingly calls us back to ourselves. God calls us back to love and to vulnerability. God said to the prophet Ezekiel, "I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you. I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh" (Ezekiel 36:26). God promises that our hearts of stone, the defensive structures we have constructed to keep ourselves from being vulnerable, will be replaced with new hearts—with tender, undefended hearts of love.

Healing Distorted Images of OurSelves

By the time we are adults, our fears and defenses are so well established that the promise that we will receive hearts of flesh to replace our hearts of stone may seem too much to hope for. How do we let go of our defensive structures and our deeply seated fears about ourselves? How can we become free to be who we really are? How can we recover our true selves?

The answer to these questions often begins with a crisis of unhappiness in our lives. Our relationships may begin to fall apart. Or we may realize that we are anxious and depressed all the time. Or we may find ourselves feeling restless and unfulfilled. Crises such as these are alarms going off, telling us that something is wrong. That is why we often say that crises are opportunities. Crises such as these are wake-up calls that invite us to turn around and find our way back home to our true selves.

As we heed these wake-up calls there are three basic tools, or processes, that will assist us on our journey back home. One of these processes is telling the truth about ourselves with compassion. A second process is grieving with comfort and support from others. And a third is seeking conscious contact with God.

Telling the Truth about Ourselves with Compassion

Jesus taught us that the truth is so powerful it can set us free. The truth can free us from our defensive structures and from our fears and distortions about ourselves. It can free us to be our true selves.

In order to heal we need to tell the truth about our defenses. About our fears. About the wounds that generated those fears. And about our deep longing to love and to be loved.

I needed to tell the truth about all those realities in my life. I needed to tell the truth that I was driven to try harder and harder to be good. I needed to tell the truth that those behaviors were strategies to prove to myself and others that I wasn't bad. I needed to tell the truth about early events in my life that had generated these fears in me. And I needed to tell the truth that my deepest longing was to love and be loved.

Telling the truth about ourselves can be a painful process. Acknowledging that my attempts to take care of others was a defensive strategy and was often not respectful or honest led to deep grief for me. Acknowledging my fear that I was bad meant experiencing that fear directly. Acknowledging the events that had generated my fears and distortions meant revisiting those events and all the distress that was a part of them. Acknowledging my deep longing to love and be loved meant feeling those longings as a great ache in my soul.

The process of telling the truth about our lives is full of danger—danger that we will get lost in shame and despair. It is crucial, if this process is to bring true healing, that we bring as much compassion and understanding to ourselves as possible as we tell the truth about our lives. We read in Scripture that we are to speak the truth in love (Ephesians 4:15). Truth must be spoken in love and compassion, so that humility and grace can replace shame and despair. With each step of telling the truth about ourselves it is important to extend to ourselves as much love as we can find in our hearts. It is also important that we draw on the love of others and the love of God. As we do this our true selves become more and more available to us, because we are opening up that part of ourselves. The more deeply we learn and practice this way of compassion toward ourselves, the more the truth will set us free. And the more we extend compassion and grace toward ourselves, the more we will be free to extend it to others. In other words, the more we will be free to be our true selves.

Grieving with Comfort and Support

As we tell the truth about our lives with compassion, we will grieve. That is, we will grieve if we have loving support. Without loving support, we won't grieve fully or in a way that leads to healing. That is the reason many of us do not grieve early losses and traumas until adulthood; we did not have the support we needed for grieving when we were younger.

We read in Scripture that God is "the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles" (2 Corinthians 1:3-4). In the same text we read that we can comfort each other with the same comfort and compassion that we receive from God. It is the embrace of love from God and from others that allows us to do the difficult work of grieving.

Jesus promised the blessing of comfort for all who grieve. "Blessed are those who mourn," Jesus said, "for they will be comforted" (Matthew 5:4). Comfort is the experience of being held in the arms of someone who loves us. It is when we are held by Love that we come to know deep down that we are loved. That is how grieving, with comfort, heals us and sets us free.

Some of the healing grief that we experience involves a process of letting go. We grieve and let go of our defensive strategies and of our fears and distortions about ourselves. Some of the grieving is a process of experiencing deep sorrow over our losses and traumas, and over the ways our fears and defenses have robbed us and others of our true selves. And finally, some of this grieving is the process of opening our hearts to our deep longings to love and to know that we are loved.

Letting go of our protective strategies is an enormous challenge because our defenses have become like good friends. Our addiction to work, our compulsion to help others, our perfectionism, our emotional numbness, our attempts to look successful in some way—these defenses are a way of life. They have come to define who we are. Letting them go will feel like a terrible loss. As we face the loss of our defenses, we will find ourselves wondering what we will do and who we will be without them.

Perhaps even more difficult than letting go of our defenses is the challenge to let go of our fears and distortions about ourselves. These fears and distortions seem like the truth about us. Letting them go can cause us to feel as if we are telling a lie or letting ourselves off the hook. But slowly we will need to see that our fears are fears, not truths. We will need to acknowledge that we drew the wrong conclusions about ourselves early on in life. We will need to become willing to let the truth that we are God's dearly loved children begin to replace our fears that we are not loved and that we are not capable of loving.

In addition to the ongoing processes of letting go, healing grief includes experiencing deep sorrow. Perhaps the greatest sorrow I experienced was that I had been emotionally unavailable to my children. I had no idea how numb I was or how walled off I was. I wanted more than anything to be emotionally accessible to them. I tried hard to do this, but being present to another does not come from trying hard. It comes from being free of our defensive structures and our fears. It comes from being ourselves, our true selves.

Finally, a crucial part of this grief is a willingness to feel, and stay with, our longing to love and be loved. When we stay open to this deep ache in our souls, we are feeling the birth pangs of our true selves being freed. We may be tempted to run from these longings and the vulnerabilities they represent. But it can be helpful to remember that our tender longings to love and be loved are the essence of our true selves. As we make room for these deep longings, painful though they may be, we are opening our hearts to know the joy of these longings being fulfilled.

Seeking Conscious Contact with God

A third process that helps us recover our true selves is the process of seeking and knowing God. We read, "God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him" (1 John 4:16). God, who is Love, made us for love. As we invite God, God joins the love of all heaven and earth to our true selves, to our hearts of love. In this way we live in God and God lives in us. And in this way our deepest longings to love and be loved are met.

There are many ways we might seek conscious contact with God, but I will suggest three that have been helpful to me.

Inviting God

One way we can seek God and know God is to invite God into our lives every day. God is always with us. And God respectfully awaits our invitation. There are many ways we can invite God into our lives. The psalmist invited God in by asking God to know him. "Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting" (Psalm 139:23-24).

This is an invitation to God to know us intimately. It is also a request of God to help us know ourselves intimately. The psalmist starts at the center; he asks God to know his heart. When we pray this with the psalmist we are asking God to know our true selves and to make our true selves known to us. We are inviting God to know us deeply.

The psalmist then talks to God about his fears. He asks God to reveal his anxious thoughts. When we pray this with the psalmist we are asking God to show us the fears and distortions that we live with so that they can be healed and we can be free to know ourselves and to be ourselves more fully.

The psalmist continues by asking God to show him if there are any offensive ways in him. When we pray this we are asking God to reveal to us the ways we are protecting and defending ourselves. Our defensive ways of living are what rob us of ourselves and hurt other people. We can ask God to continue to reveal what we are doing that is defensive, so that we can make different choices and learn to live more vulnerably.

We can invite God to know us and to help us know ourselves. Daily, in one way or another, we can invite God to live with us and we can seek God's will—the way of love—in our lives. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth—in me—as it is in heaven.

Thanking God

Another way we can open our hearts to God each day is by expressing gratitude. Saying thank you to God is not something we do because it is polite or because God requires it of us. Expressing gratitude is something we do because it opens our eyes and our hearts to see and receive the good gifts that God gives us every day.

Gratitude begins when we pay attention—when we open our eyes to see all that we are being given. As we do this, we become like an artist who takes the time to focus with care on life's details. The slice of toast and cup of tea at breakfast become what they are—a gift. The hug from a friend is seen for what it is—a gift. As we open our eyes and look again we begin to see that God, the Maker of all things, is a passionate Lover who is forever showering us with gifts, calling out, "I love you, I love you, I love you! Can you see it? Can you see it in the beauty of the clouds? Can you hear it in that music? Can you feel it in your friend's phone call? Can you see how much I love you?"

As we move from seeing the gifts we are being given each day, to saying thank you, we open our hearts to receive from God. Expressing our gratitude is a way of saying yes to God's good gifts and to God's never-ending love for us. Expressing gratitude each day, throughout the day, opens our hearts to be nourished by Love.

Listening to God

A third way to know God is to listen to God. Much of my life I thought of prayer as something I was supposed to do. I was supposed to talk to God about all the people who needed help, and remind God to take care of them. Later, prayer became more of a conversation, but still a one-way conversation. I talked to God about anything and everything.

Eventually I began to understand that prayer could be a two-way conversation. I realized that I could actively listen to God. I had had a sense of God speaking to me directly from time to time throughout my life, but I hadn't thought of a two-way conversation with God as something I could seek every day. There is nothing difficult about this. For me, it is a matter of asking God to quiet me enough so that I can listen and asking God to speak to me. And then waiting. I try to find a quiet time and place to do this each day. But I often ask God to talk to me not just in times of quiet but also in the middle of the noise of life.

It has taken me some time to trust God's voice. But the more I listen and hear God's voice of love and wisdom and grace, the more I trust God's voice. Sometimes when I listen to God, I experience surprises. I want to share one of those surprises with you because of the impact it has had on my distorted image of myself.

As I was waiting quietly in prayer one day, listening to anything God might want to say to me or show me, I had an image of myself sitting at the beach as an adult. In that image I was holding myself as a child. The distressing part of the image was that the child sitting in my lap was not recognizable as human. The child was a monster child. The picture of myself as a monster child captured vividly my fears about who I was. Fortunately, in that image, Jesus was standing next to me as I held the child version of myself. Jesus looked at me with a twinkle in his eye as he reached out with one hand to touch me. I thought he was going to touch the monster child in my lap and heal her. But he did not touch the child. Instead, Jesus reached out and touched my adult eyes. He healed my eyes so that I could see myself clearly. Jesus touched my eyes so that I could see that what I thought was a monster child was not a monster at all, but a precious child, a child who was infinitely lovable and tenderly loving.

We do not see ourselves clearly. We see ourselves through the distorted lenses of fear. We see ourselves in the mirrors of our caretakers' distressed or angry or absent faces. We see ourselves in the ways we have been mistreated, as if we had little or no value. We cannot live with the pain of these distortions about ourselves, so we make up false selves and invest our energies in these exterior selves.

God, who is Love, invites us to see and be our true selves. God reaches out to heal our vision, which is blurred by fear. God holds up the mirror of his delight in us for us to look into, to see ourselves as God sees us. God wraps us in love and tells us we are infinitely valuable. God invites us to know who we are—dearly loved children, created to live lives of love.