1.
What are you really thinking about today?
“As
you think, so shall you become.”
Perhaps the most basic
statement of how we work. Think about what you are thinking today. What do
those thoughts say about you? About your life? And how well do they really
match your plans for your life and your image of yourself?
It’s easy to forget
about this simple statement in everyday life. It’s easy to be quite incongruent
with what you think on an ordinary day compared to how you view yourself and
your goals. A simple external reminder such as a
post-it with this quote can be helpful to keep you and your thoughts on the
right track. An brilliant and beautiful expansion on this thought can be found
in James Allen’s As a man thinketh (that can be downloaded
for free here).
2.
Simplify.
“It’s
not the daily increase but daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential.”
“If
you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you’ll never get it done.”
If you want to improve
your life then it’s tempting to want to add more. One problem with this may be
that you don’t really have the time or energy to do more though. And so your
efforts to improve become short-lived.
Adding more and more
just creates more stress and anxiety. Removing clutter and activities, tasks
and thoughts that are not so important frees up time and energy for you to do
more of what you really want to do. And as the clutter in your outer world
decreases the clutter in your inner world also has a tendency to decrease. This
has the added benefit of making it easier to actually enjoy whatever you are
doing even more while you are doing it.
Adding more thoughts
and thinking things over for the 111:th time may create a sense of security. It’s
also a good way to procrastinate and to avoid taking that leap you know you
should take. And the more you think, the harder it gets to act. Perhaps because
you want to keep that comforting sense of security and avoid the risk of
wrecking that feeling.
Thinking has its
place. It can help you plan a somewhat realistic route to your goal and
help you avoid future pitfalls. Overthinking is however just a habit that
will help you waste a lot of time. It’s more useful to replace that habit with
the habit of just doing it.
3.
Learn about yourself in interactions.
“To
know oneself is to study oneself in action with another person.”
The one person that is
the hardest to get to really know may be yourself. Studying yourself while you
are alone may result in some insights. But it’s also likely to produce a lot of
made up thought loops and doubts in your mind. A good way to really learn more
about yourself is study yourself in interactions with other people. How people
react and act in these interaction can over time teach you a lot. And what you
think and how you react can perhaps teach you even more.
What you see, feel and
hear in other people may be a reflection of you. The things you learn by
thinking this way may not always be pleasant, but they can be enlightening.
They help you to see yourself and also how you may be fooling yourself. And
these powerful insights can be very valuable for your personal growth. So, in
interactions with others, try asking yourself: what is reflected?
4.
Do not divide.
“Take
no thought of who is right or wrong or who is better than. Be not for or
against.”
This is a very useful
and powerful thought. It is also one that obviously is hard to live by. Why? I
believe it’s because the ego loves to divide and find ways to “add more” to
itself. It want’s to feel better than someone else. Or more clever. Or
prettier. Or cooler. Or wiser.
How can you overcome
this way of thinking and feeling?
To me it seems to boil
down to not identifying so much with your thoughts or feelings. That doesn’t
mean that you stop thinking or feeling. It just means that you realize – and
remember in your everyday life – that the thoughts and emotions are just things
flowing through you.
You are not them
though.
You are the
consciousness observing them.
When you realize and remember
this it enables you to control the thoughts and feelings instead of the other
way around. It also enables you to not take your thoughts too seriously and
actually laugh at them or ignore them when you feel that your ego is acting
out. When you are not being so identified these things you become more inclined
to include things, thoughts and people instead of excluding them. This creates
a lot of inner and outer freedom and stillness.
Instead of fear, a need to divide your world and a search for conflicts.
To learn more about
this I would recommend Eckhart Tolle’s books and signing up for the 10 free and excellent webcasts –
available both in video and audio form – that he’s doing with Oprah right now.
5.
Avoid a dependency on validation from others.
“I’m
not in this world to live up to your expectations and you’re not in this world to
live up to mine.”
“Showing
off is the fool’s idea of glory.”
The ego wants to add
because it thinks it’s not enough. One way of doing that is by craving
validation from others. We want to feel smart, pretty, successful and so on.
And the validation makes you feel good for a while. But soon you need a new
fix.
And the problem with
being dependent on validation from other people is that you let other people control how you feel.
This creates a rollercoaster of emotion in your life.
To find more emotional
stability and to take control of how you feel you need to get your validation
from to a more consistent source. Yourself. You can replace the expectations
and validation of others by setting your own expectations and by validating yourself.
And so you validate
yourself by thinking about how awesome you are. You don’t sell yourself short.
You appreciate how far you have come and the positive things you have done. You
appreciate your own value in the world. You set goals and you achieve those
goals. This builds confidence in yourself and in your abilities. These things
will help you to build a habit of inner validation.
Now, showing off. Why
do we do that? To get validation from others. However, this need for validation
often shines through and that is why a thing like bragging seldom works.
Instead of seeing the cool and successful person you are trying to project
people just see the insecure and needy person looking for validation. And your
bragging falls flat.
6.
Be proactive.
“To
hell with circumstances; I create opportunities.”
It’s easy to get
locked into a reactive mindset. You just follow along with whatever is
happening. You do what the people around you do. You react to whatever is going
on.
And so you get lost in
your circumstances. This way of thinking doesn’t feel too good. You tend to
feel powerless and like you are just drifting along.
A more useful and
pleasurable way of living is to be proactive. As Bruce says: to create
opportunities despite the circumstances around you. This feels better and
provides better results. But on the other hand it’s also more difficult. It’s
easier to just drift along in the reactive stream of life. And if you want to
be proactive then you may have to take the lead quite often. And that can be
scary.
Still, living
proactively is so much more rewarding and exciting.
7.
Be you.
“Always
be yourself, express yourself, have faith in yourself, do not go out and look
for a successful personality and duplicate it.”
Just being yourself is
a hard thing to do. You may do it sometimes. And other times you may forget or
fall back into old thought patterns. Or you may imitate someone else.
And that comes through
too. And it may work.
But I believe that being the real you will work better. Because
there the genuine you is shining through. Without incongruency, mixed messages
or perhaps a sort of phoniness. It’s you to 100%. It’s you with not only your
words but you with your voice tonality and body language – which some say is
over 90% of communication – on the same wavelength as your words. It’s you
coming through on all channels of communication.
So I’m not saying:
“yeah man, you should just be yourself because it’s the right thing to do etc.”
I’m saying that I think being your authentic self – the one where you do little
dividing, the one that needs little validation from others, the one where your
ego is not running the show and trying to get something from someone – will
give you better results and more satisfaction in your day to day life because
you are in alignment with yourself. And because people really like genuine and
people really like authenticity.
This was exactly what
Professor Yip meant by being detached — not being without emotion or feeling,
but being one in whom feeling was not sticky or blocked. Therefore in order to
control myself I must first accept myself by going with and not against my nature.
For Bruce all knowledge led to self-knowledge.
"When you're faced with looking at your own life with awakened eyes, you will have increased a bit in the knowledge of yourself and knowledge of anything outside of yourself is only superficial and very shallow. To put it another way, self-knowledge has a liberating quality."
"My majoring in philosophy was closely related to the
pugnacity of my childhood. I often asked myself these questions: What comes
after victory? Why do people value victory so much? What is 'glory'? What kind
of 'victory' is 'glorious'?"
"When I look around, I always learn something, and that is to
always be yourself, express yourself, to have faith in yourself. Do not go out
and look for a successful personality and duplicate him. They always copy
mannerism; they never start from the root of their being: that is, how can I be
me?"
"To me, all types of knowledge ultimately means
self-knowledge."
"Like everyone else, you want to learn the way to win, but
never to accept the way to lose. To accept defeat--to learn to die--is to be
liberated from it. Once you accept, you are free to flow and harmonize.
Fluidity is the way to an empty mind. So when tomorrow comes, you must free
your ambitious mind and learn the art of dying."
I am learning to understand rather than to immediately judge
or to be judged. I cannot blindly follow the crowd and accept their approach. I
will not allow myself to indulge in the usual manipulating game of role
creation. Fortunately for me, my self knowledge has transcended that life is
best to be lived and not to be conceptualized. I am happy because I am growing
daily and i am honestly not knowing
where the limit lies. To be certain, everyday there could be a revelation or a
new discovery. I treasure the memory of past misfortune. It has added more to
the bank of fortitude.
