Awareness

Do you ever hear an angry person giving you advice on how to improve your life? What are they thinking? Nobody wants to be more angry. The last thing I want to do is follow advice that might make me more like them. Here's the self-awareness part: do you ever find yourself angry and giving someone else advice? And getting even angrier or impatient when they don't?

You're late for something important. You're annoyed at yourself. Your mind fills with anxiety. You come up with excuses to explain your lateness to the person you don't want to be late for. Moreover, you can't do anything about it. The subway seems to wait an eternity at each stop. Or maybe traffic is stalled. Your emotions get intense as a result. Here's something you probably never noticed before. You don't get anxious because of the lateness nor out of concern for yourself, at least not directly. You get anxious and your emotions get intense for the other person, so you can credibly show it wasn't your fault or that you did all you could to fix it, as a show of respect to the…

I don't like people behaving passive aggressively. I don't think they realize they're doing it a lot of the time. Trying not to be something or to do something is harder than being or doing something else. Instead of trying not to be passively aggressive you could try being actively considerate or compassionate. Or if the other person is being passively aggressive you could try suggesting they try being considerate or compassionate. I just found it interesting and helpful to write out the opposite of passive aggressive. Being actively considerate or compassionate seems like a strategy I like and illustrates how annoying passive aggression can be, as if we didn't already know.

Sometimes something unexpected blindsides you, catches you off guard, moves you in the opposite direction you wanted, and you realize it's going to take a lot of work to fix things. It discourages from trying. It demoralizes you. Most of my posts about problems are about developing skills and how to handle them, at least I think. I'm not sure how others read it, but I think I write like I think I can handle anything and nothing goes too wrong. There are lots of ways to handle such things but my point now isn't about advice. It's just to acknowledge the feeling of discouragement and demoralization and the inevitability of such things happening some times. Nobody escapes it.

If you can make yourself happy then you will. If you find yourself unhappy, doesn't that then mean you don't know how to make yourself happier? Doesn't it mean you are lacking a skill to improve your life? You can blame outside circumstances but if you could make yourself feel better you would. You don't because you can't. So feeling bad tells you what to work on. Not being aware of that feeling is the biggest problem because then you suffer without being able to do anything about it. If you believe, like I do, that if anyone anywhere at any time in a situation worse than mine with less material resources than mine could make themselves happier, then I can too, since we're both…