missing sock

Isn’t a missing sock so sad?

Its perfect match is lost somewhere, cold and scared.

Perhaps even gone forever.

…

So what are you supposed to do with a single sock?

Does it quietly rot away in a drawer forever, waiting until its partner returns someday?

…

That is enough philosophical laundry for today.

“how is that me?”

Excerpt from The Power of Full Engagement, by Tony Schwartz and Jim Loehr:

Difficult and unpleasant as it may be to accept, we often feel most hostile to those who remind us of aspects of ourselves that we prefer not to see. “Ask someone to give a description of the personality type which he finds most despicable, most unbearable and hateful, and most impossible to get along with,” writes Edward Whitmont, “and he will produce a description of his own repressed characteristics…These very qualities are so unacceptable to him precisely because they represent his own repressed side; only that which we cannot accept within ourselves do we find impossible to live with in others.” Think for a moment of someone you actively dislike. What quality in that person do you find most objectionable? Now ask yourself, “How am I that?”

Something to think about on Monday morning as the work week begins. Before you rant to your best friend about how the same person at work has been pissing you off again, consider what is it about the person that bothers you the most. 

Can you see those qualities within yourself?

purging shame + the critic and the creator

I am trying to purge my ability to feel shame.

Feeling shame or embarrassment about ourselves—how we look, what we do, how we act—is the biggest inhibitor of taking action. It goes hand in hand with the fear of failure, the fear of doing something untraditional, the fear of being judged, prejudiced, and stereotyped. It is a powerful feeling and it can—no, it will—keep you from taking action for fear of looking silly, being laughed at, or feeling ashamed.

Stop.

Shame is a weakness keeping you from being yourself. It is a wall between what you want to do and what you want to let other people know. It is so powerful that all it takes is one bad experience to stop you from ever doing something again. 

It’s meant to protect you. Shame is your brain telling you that there’s something about you everyone else thinks is weird or isn’t cool or makes them dislike you. 

Those who judge others thrive on shame, because to make others feel ashamed gives people a fleeting sense of superiority. “I am better than you.” Ignore these people, because you cannot shame your way to greatness. Those people will drown in a pool of false superiority and be forgotten by the world soon enough.

Forget these people who laugh and judge your shame, because they crave the attention and your shame keeps them alive. Being forgotten is the same as being dead. Forgetting someone is like killing them from your world, from your reality.

the critic and the creator

There are people who point fingers and laugh at how stupid everyone else is. And then there are people who look at themselves and figure out how to make themselves better, who only look at how stupid everyone else is if they can figure out how to help instead of how to be entertained by their foolishness. That is the difference between the critic and the creator: the creator only criticizes to look for solutions, to make things better. The critic criticizes for personal amusement, to mask insecurity, to derive pleasure from fake feelings of superiority and “having their shit together.”

There is no feeling of shame as a critic: that is because the critic passes that shame onto others, points at others and says, “Look at his shame! Isn’t that sad? Isn’t that hilarious?” But the critic feels plenty of shame and does his best to keep people from noticing. The critic lashes out violently when being judged—because that is their job being taken away from them. The critic judges others to avoid being judged.

The creator understands she is surrounded by critics. She accepts them, accepts they exist as an attempt to make her feel shame. But she resists. She knows these people are phantoms intended to amplify her own self-doubts and question her resolve. She understands being judged for being different is a part of life, and that these critics are just doing their job. These obstacles let her know that she is on the right path. Because a path without critics is a path nobody cares enough to bother criticizing. 

The path of the creator is difficult because creators experience criticism when they fail AND succeed. When you fail, you are criticized for all your faults and mistakes, the “I told you so” routine, the tiresome finger pointing and shame inducing. When you succeed, you are criticized for being lucky, criticized for “doing something anyone else could have done,” criticized for being talented or having the free time. Criticized for growing up in a privileged environment. Legitimate or not, the critic makes it his responsibility to find some way to discredit your success or to claim credit for your failure.

Which team do you play on: are you the critic or the creator?

PPF: past, present, future

Sometimes we get lost in the day to day activities and lose the inspiration we need to push ourselves towards greatness. Rome wasn’t built in a day, but when day 0 and day 1 feel more or less the same, there’s a tendency to feel like we’re not making any progress at all in our lives.

To break out of feeling like today is just another Monday in just another week, try this exercise I call PPF: past, present, future. It is a mix of reminiscing the past, understanding where you are today, and dreamlining where you will be in the future.

Past: Find out as much as you can about where you were and what you were doing exactly a year ago from today. Search your calendars, journals, chat logs, emails—remind yourself where you were a year ago.

For me, May 14th was the first weekend after handing in my senior project which had been a nightmare to complete. I had already accepted an internship for the summer and I think the 14th was the day I went shopping for my first car. It was a completely uneasy experience at the time: I thought after finals ended I would be more relaxed, but I was far more stressed out. I had to figure out my living situation (the internship was outside of where my family lived) and I was also an inexperienced driver, so being expected to drive to work was kind of a crazy thought. The idea of living alone (without a roommate!) for the first time too made me uneasy, not knowing if I was up to the task of taking care of myself. Overall, May 2011 was a stressful month with many sleepless nights.

Present: Where are you now, at this very moment, reading these words? What is going on around you? Where are you currently on your path towards your career? Toward your relationships? 

Fast forward to today, I am sitting in my cubicle, taking a short break from compiling some data on a spreadsheet for easier comprehension. I am content with my job and have plenty of time after work to tinker around with my hobbies and do plenty of reading. The best thing about working instead of being at school is the free time: at school, the work begins after lecture ends, whereas work ends when I leave my office.

I have since moved to a new apartment and gotten very comfortable with taking care of myself, albeit some minor sloppiness issues (why won’t clothes fold themselves??) but the biggest change in lifestyle has been preparing my own meals and rarely ordering out. I’ve been eating healthier, sleeping better, and exercising more frequently. Although my physical fitness doesn’t meet the goals I set a year ago, I have definitely made progress and am not discouraged from pushing forward.

Future: Imagine where you will be exactly one year from today, narrowing as much detail as you can as possible. This is just one year from today, not goals you plan to accomplish over a lifetime.

May 14th is a Tuesday next year. Assuming the world doesn’t end, I guess I should be in my office still. I have some career based goals in mind, mostly revolving around developing expertise in some areas, but I won’t get into those details here. Outside of that, I expect to have about 10 more piano recordings done by next May, with at least 1 original song of my own creation. I should have some basics of jazz theory down, but don’t really expect to have that mastered yet. I should readily be approaching my fitness goals and should have started on taking classes or focusing on a particular athletic skill, whether it be running, boxing, or weight training.

—-

I find this exercise to be important because if you don’t know where you were a year ago from today, how can you tell if you’re making any progress at all? If you don’t fully understand and accept where you are right now, how can you establish reasonable goals to meet in the near future?

Spend 15 minutes today to try the PPF exercise and see if envisioning how far you’ve come from the past and thinking about where you want to be in the future excites you enough to make today a more productive Monday than usual.