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“There is, in sanest hours, a consciousness, a thought that rises, independent, lifted out from all else, calm, like the stars, shining eternal,” Walt Whitman wrote in contemplating identity and the paradox of the self. Whitman lived in an era before the birth of neuroscience, before psychology as we know it became a robust field of scientific study — before, that is, we began examining more closely whatever it is that we mean by the “self,” only to find that it doesn’t hold up to systematic scrutiny. A century after Whitman, another great poet and great seer of the human experience articulated the terror and the beauty of this elemental fact: “The self is a style of being, continually expanding in a vital process of definition, affirmation, revision, and growth,” Robert Penn Warren wrote in admonishing against the trouble with “finding yourself,” “a process that is the image, we may say, of the life process of a healthy society itself.”

Around the same time, a poet laureate of the life process — the great physician, etymologist, poet, and essayist Lewis Thomas (November 25, 1913–December 3, 1993) — explored the confounding nature of the self with uncommon insight and originality in the title essay of his altogether magnificent 1979 collection The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher (public library).

Thomas writes:

We’ve never been so self-conscious about our selves as we seem to be these days. The popular magazines are filled with advice on things to do with a self: how to find it, identify it, nurture it, protect it, even, for special occasions, weekends, how to lose it transiently. There are instructive books, best sellers on self-realization, self-help, self-development. Groups of self-respecting people pay large fees for three-day sessions together, learning self-awareness. Self-enlightenment can be taught in college electives.

You’d think, to read about it, that we’d only just now discovered selves. Having long suspected that there was something alive in there, running the place, separate from everything else, absolutely individual and independent, we’ve celebrated by giving it a real name. My self.

In a testament to Ursula K. Le Guin’s conviction that “we can’t restructure our society without restructuring the English language,” Thomas traces the etymology of self, folded into which is just about the entire history of the human world:

The original root was se or seu, simply the pronoun of the third person, and most of the descendant words, except “self” itself, were constructed to allude to other, somehow connected people; “sibs” and “gossips,” relatives and close acquaintances, came from seu. Se was also used to indicate something outside or apart, hence words like “separate,” “secret,” and “segregate.” From an extended root swedh it moved into Greek as ethnos, meaning people of one’s own sort, and ethos, meaning the customs of such people. “Ethics” means the behavior of people like one’s self, one’s own ethnics.

Embedded in this evolutionary history of our language is something wholly uncorroborated by the evolutionary history of our biology — the misplaced hubris of exceptionalism. Thomas writes:

We tend to think of our selves as the only wholly unique creations in nature, but it is not so. Uniqueness is so commonplace a property of living things that there is really nothing at all unique about it. A phenomenon can’t be unique and universal at the same time. Even individual, free-swimming bacteria can be viewed as unique entities, distinguishable from each other even when they are the progeny of a single clone.

Thomas points out that creatures large and small exhibit properties that, in their human manifestation, we call individuality — they are, in other words, distinct selves. Single-cell microorganisms swimming in the same water, when examined closely enough, can be distinguished from one another by the way they twirl around their flagellae. Beans carry glycoproteins that serve as self-labels. Coral polyps are endowed with a biological self-consciousness that allows them to recognize other polyps of the same genetic line to fuse with, rejecting polyps of different lines. Fish and mice can tell individuals of their species by their smell. (Decades after Thomas composed this essay, we know that trees also differentiate between and communicate with individual others.) He considers the biological function of the self:

The markers of self, and the sensing mechanisms responsible for detecting such markers, are conventionally regarded as mechanisms for maintaining individuality for its own sake, enabling one kind of creature to defend and protect itself against all the rest. Selfness, seen thus, is for self-preservation.

In real life, though, it doesn’t seem to work this way. The self-marking of invertebrate animals in the sea, who must have perfected the business long before evolution got around to us, was set up in order to permit creatures of one kind to locate others, not for predation but to set up symbiotic households. The anemones who live on the shells of crabs are precisely finicky; so are the crabs. Only a single species of anemone will find its way to only a single species of crab. They sense each other exquisitely, and live together as though made for each other.

Thomas locates the most compelling and sobering illustration of this in two obscure species inhabiting the Bay of Naples, melded into one — a common nudibranch sea slug and the medusa of a tiny jellyfish, permanently affixed to the shell-less snail’s mouth as a vestigial parasite. When marine biologists first discovered the improbable pair and set out to investigate how it formed, they found something astonishing and wholly counter to our basic assumptions about the orientation of a self to an other. Thomas writes:

The attached parasite, although apparently so specialized as to have given up living for itself, can still produce offspring, for they are found in abundance at certain seasons of the year. They drift through the upper waters, grow up nicely and astonishingly, and finally become full-grown, handsome, normal jellyfish. Meanwhile, the snail produces snail larvae, and these too begin to grow normally, but not for long. While still extremely small, they become entrapped in the tentacles of the medusa and then engulfed within the umbrella-shaped body. At first glance, you’d believe the medusae are now the predators, paying back for earlier humiliations, and the snails the prey. But no. Soon the snails, undigested and insatiable, begin to eat, browsing away first at the radial canals, then the borders of the rim, finally the tentacles, until the jellyfish becomes reduced in substance by being eaten while the snail grows correspondingly in size. At the end, the arrangement is back to the first scene, with the full-grown nudibranch basking, and nothing left of the jellyfish except the round, successfully edited parasite, safely affixed to the skin near the mouth.

More than a century after the great naturalist John Muir insisted that “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe,” Thomas finds in this real-world Aesop fable drawn from the evolutionary record an embodiment of the exquisite interdependence of nature — an elemental awareness of which we so easily and habitually lose sight, and yet an awareness which, when fully apprehended, dissolves the very notion of a discrete self:

It is a confusing tale to sort out, and even more confusing to think about. Both creatures are designed for this encounter, marked as selves so that they can find each other in the waters of the Bay of Naples. The collaboration, if you want to call it that, is entirely specific; it is only this species of medusa and only this kind of nudibranch that can come together and live this way. And, more surprising, they cannot live in any other way; they depend for their survival on each other. They are not really selves, they are specific others.

The thought of these creatures gives me an odd feeling. They do not remind me of anything, really. I’ve never heard of such a cycle before. They are bizarre, that’s it, unique. And at the same time, like a vaguely remembered dream, they remind me of the whole earth at once. I cannot get my mind to stay still and think it through.

The essays in The Medusa and the Snail, which include Thomas’s beautiful meditation on altruism and the scientific poetics of friendship, remain among the finest, most insightful writing I have ever savored. Complement this particular portion with the young Borges on the nonexistence of the self, Ian McEwan on how the cult of selfhood imperils society, philosopher Jacob Needleman on how we become who we are, and neuroscientist Sam Harris on the paradox of free will, then revisit Thomas on our human potential and our cosmic responsibility.

“Our normal waking consciousness,” William James wrote in his classic treatise on transcendent states, “is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens.” The screen is sometimes a door that swings open into dreams, into psychedelic experiences, into imagined and imaginary versions of ourselves capable of more joy, more courage, more curiosity and open-mindedness than our ordinary selves.

That is what Korean illustrator JiHyeon Lee explores with great subtlety and tenderness in Door (public library) — a minimalist, wordless journey into to a wonderland as wondrous and wild as Alice’s, but one where the improbable becomes not a source of confusion and fright but of pure mirth.

We see a young boy surrounded by the dour grayness of ordinary life, swarmed by unhappy people bustling about their busy, unpresent lives. With key in hand, he follows a bright-red winged being through a mysterious door and into a world populated by strange creatures speaking a strange language — a world that feels like a page out of Codex Seraphininianus, Luigi Serafini’s elaborate encyclopedia of imaginary things written in a code language.

Startled at first and perhaps a bit frightened, the boy shyly accepts the open-handed invitation of a girl-creature and follows her into her world. Gradually, he surrenders to the joyousness that permeates this fanciful foreign land — a festive picnic turns into an enormous playground, which turns into a wedding ceremony.

All along, the boy is instantly embraced and included in the festivities, enveloped in belonging that comes to him warm and unbidden.

When the time comes for him to leave, even the parting is mirthful rather than mournful — we understand that he is to return to his dour, grey, ordinary world, but we also understand that he will return transformed for having known such pure joy and having learned that he possesses the key to it himself.

What emerges is a subtle reminder that even the most beautiful experiences end, but this is reason for celebration rather than lamentation, for we have been made richer, larger, and more alive for having had them at all.

Complement Door with Lee’s debut, the equally delightful Pool, then revisit the best illustrations from 150 years of Alice in Wonderland.

Illustrations courtesy of Chronicle Books; photographs by Maria Popova

It is a rare gift to meet, much less befriend, one of your heroes — a gift that fell upon the American poet, novelist, and diarist extraordinaire May Sarton (May 3, 1912–July 16, 1995) in her mid-twenties, just as she was starting out as a writer, when she met Virginia Woolf (January 15, 1882–March 28, 1941).

On a visit to England shortly after her literary debut, the young Sarton decided to leave a copy of her first poetry collection at Woolf’s doorstep, along with some flowers. To her surprise, the kindly maid opened the door and invited her in. Unprepared for the fortuitous opportunity to meet her idol, Sarton mumbled a polite declination, handed the maid the book, and walked away.

Knowing how desperately Sarton wanted to meet Woolf, the prominent writer Elizabeth Bowen took it upon herself to stage a more planned introduction. She decided to invite both Woolf and the young poet to dinner at her country house in Ireland — an epicenter of the era’s creative community, where she hosted such titans of literature as Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, Iris Murdoch.

In The Writer’s Chapbook: A Compendium of Fact, Opinion, Wit, and Advice from the 20th Century’s Preeminent Writers (public library) — the wonderful 1989 collection of wisdom from Paris Review interviews, which also gave us great writers on how to handle criticism and James Baldwin’s advice on writing — Sarton recounts the moment Woolf entered, a strange and stunning vision:

She walked in, in a “robe de style,” a lovely, rather eighteenth-century-looking, long dress with a wide collar, and she came into the room like a dazzled deer and walked right across — this was a beautiful house on Rogent’s Park — to the long windows and stood there looking out. My memory is that she was not even introduced at that point, that she just walked across, very shyly, and stood there looking absolutely beautiful. She was much more beautiful than any of the photographs show. And then she discovered that I was the person who had left the poems.

Sarton remembers how brilliantly canny and gracious Woolf later was in her response, aware that the young writer’s fragile confidence might perch too precariously on her approval or disapproval:

She answered my gift of that book with a lovely note, which is now in the Berg collection, just saying: “Thank you so much, and the flowers came just as someone had given me a vase, and were perfect, and I shall look forward to reading the poems.” In other words, never put yourself in a position of having to judge. So he never said a word about the poems. But she was delighted to find out that I was the person who had left them.

At Bowen’s dinner, Sarton found herself in conversation with Woolf while “the gentlemen were having their brandy and cigars in the other room.” She recounts:

We talked about hairdressers. It was like something in The Waves! We all talked like characters in a Virginia Woolf novel. She had a great sense of humor. Very malicious. She liked to tease people, in a charming way, but she was a great tease.

But she put me at ease and I saw her quite often after that. Every time I was in England I would have tea with her, which was a two-hour talk. She would absolutely ply me with questions. That was the novelist. I always felt the novelist at work. Where did I buy my clothes? Whom was I seeing? Whom was I in love with? Everything. So it was enrapturing to a young woman to be that interesting to Virginia Woolf. But I think it was her way of living, in a sense. Vicariously. Through people.

Contemplating the strange allure of this strange genius who so enchanted from afar but so struggled with intimacy, Sarton corrects the media-manipulated image of Woolf’s mental illness:

She was never warm. That’s true. There was no warmth. It was partly physical, I think. She was a physically unwarm person. I can’t imagine kissing her, for instance, I mean on the cheek. But she was delightful, and zany, full of humor and laughter. Never did you feel a person on the brink of madness. That has distorted the image, because she was so in control.

Complement with Sarton’s stunning ode to solitude and Elizabeth Bishop’s memoir of Marianne Moore — the most loving remembrance of a role model and mentor ever composed — then revisit Woolf herself on what it takes to be an artist, the relationship between loneliness and creativity, why the most creative mind is the androgynous mind, and what makes love last.

At the age of nineteen, Simone Weil (February 3, 1909–August 24, 1943) placed first in France’s competitive exam for certification in “General Philosophy and Logic”; Simone de Beauvoir placed second. In her short life, Weil went on to become one of the most penetrating and far-seeing minds of her era. Albert Camus lauded her as “the only great spirit of our times.” The Polish poet and Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz considered her France’s “rare gift to the contemporary world.” She was an idealist who lived out her ideals. Born into a family of Jewish intellectuals, the 24-year-old Weil took a year off teaching to labor incognito in a car factory — despite a rare neuropathy that gave her frequent debilitating headaches — in order to better understand the struggles of the working poor. At twenty-seven, she enlisted as a soldier in the anarchist brigade during the Spanish Civil War. At only thirty-four, she died of starvation in an English sanatorium, where she was being treated for tuberculosis, having refused to receive more food than what her compatriots were rationed in Nazi-occupied France. Along the way, she wrote with uncommon insight and rhetorical rigor about such elemental questions as the essence of attention, the meaning of rights, how to make use of our suffering, and what it means to be a complete human being.

That Weil should languish so underappreciated and obscure today is a tragic function of the dual forces of collective amnesia and the systemic erasure of women’s ideas from the historical record. And yet her ideas, which influenced such luminaries as Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag, Iris Murdoch, Michel Foucault, Flannery O’Connor, and Cornel West, resonate with intense relevance today.

In the final months of her life, as she watched the Nazis devastate humanity and fragment even the rational and the righteous into factions of increasingly divisive opinions, Weil composed a short, searing treatise titled On the Abolition of All Political Parties (public library). It was never published in her lifetime. Nearly a century later, it speaks with astonishing and terrifying precision to the underlying forces ripping our world asunder.

Weil begins by posing the foundational question of whether the apparent evils of political divisiveness can be compensated for by the alleged good of adopting the views of any given party. She writes:

First, we must ascertain what is the criterion of goodness.

It can only be truth and justice; and, then, the public interest.

Democracy, majority rule, are not good in themselves. They are merely means towards goodness, and their effectiveness is uncertain. For instance, if, instead of Hitler, it had been the Weimar Republic that decided, through a most rigorous democratic and legal process, to put the Jews in concentration camps, and cruelly torture them to death, such measures would not have been one atom more legitimate than the present Nazi policies (and such a possibility is by no means far-fetched). Only what is just can be legitimate. In no circumstances can crime and mendacity ever be legitimate.

With these three elemental criteria of truth, justice, and public interest in mind, Weil frames the core characteristics of all political parties:

1. A political party is a machine to generate collective passions.
2. A political party is an organisation designed to exert collective pressure upon the minds of all its individual members.
3. The first objective and also the ultimate goal of any political party is its own growth, without limit.

Nearly a decade before Hannah Arendt composed her masterwork on the origins of totalitarianism, Weil draws the inevitable, devastating conclusion:

Because of these three characteristics, every party is totalitarian — potentially, and by aspiration. If one party is not actually totalitarian, it is simply because those parties that surround it are no less so. These three characteristics are factual truths — evident to anyone who has ever had anything to do with the every-day activities of political parties.

As to the third: it is a particular instance of the phenomenon which always occurs whenever thinking individuals are dominated by a collective structure — a reversal of the relation between ends and means.

Everywhere, without exception, all the things that are generally considered ends are in fact, by nature, by essence, and in a most obvious way, mere means. One could cite countless examples of this from every area of life: money, power, the state, national pride, economic production, universities, etc., etc.

Goodness alone is an end.

More than a century after Emerson admonished that “masses are rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in their demands and influence,” Weil adds:

Collective thinking… is an animal form of thinking. Its dim perception of goodness merely enables it to mistake this or that means for an absolute good.

The same applies to political parties. In principle, a party is an instrument to serve a certain conception of the public interest. This is true even for parties which represent the interests of one particular social group, for there is always a certain conception of the public interest according to which the public interest and these particular interests should coincide. Yet this conception is extremely vague. This is true without exception and quite uniformly.

She examines how the second and third defining features of political parties — the determination to influence people’s minds and the ultimate goal of infinite growth — conspire to effect the total manipulation of truth and the corruption of justice:

Once the growth of the party becomes a criterion of goodness, it follows inevitably that the party will exert a collective pressure upon people’s minds. This pressure is very real; it is openly displayed; it is professed and proclaimed. It should horrify us, but we are already too much accustomed to it.

Political parties are organisations that are publicly and officially designed for the purpose of killing in all souls the sense of truth and of justice. Collective pressure is exerted upon a wide public by the means of propaganda. The avowed purpose of propaganda is not to impart light, but to persuade… All political parties make propaganda.

She frames the grim effect on the individual:

A man who has not taken the decision to remain exclusively faithful to the inner light establishes mendacity at the very centre of his soul. For this, his punishment is inner darkness.

With an eye to the three types of lies by which this manipulation occurs — “lying to the party, lying to the public, lying to oneself” — Weil examines the nature and paradoxes of truth:

Truth is all the thoughts that surge in the mind of a thinking creature whose unique, total, exclusive desire is for the truth.

Mendacity, error (the two words are synonymous), are the thoughts of those who do not desire truth, or those who desire truth plus something else. For instance, they desire truth, but they also desire conformity with such or such received ideas.

Yet how can we desire truth if we have no prior knowledge of it? This is the mystery of all mysteries. Words that express a perfection which no mind can conceive of — God, truth, justice — silently evoked with desire, but without any preconception, have the power to lift up the soul and flood it with light.

It is when we desire truth with an empty soul and without attempting to guess its content that we receive the light. Therein resides the entire mechanism of attention.

Perhaps due to her beautifully phrased belief that “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity,” Weil suggests that protecting our attention from manipulation is our greatest and most generous contribution to public life and public good — something which human nature, so hopelessly governed by hope and fear, makes immensely challenging to achieve and therefore all the more triumphant when achieved:

True attention is a state so difficult for any human creature, so violent, that any emotional disturbance can derail it. Therefore, one must always endeavour strenuously to protect one’s inner faculty of judgment against the turmoil of personal hopes and fears.

She considers the particular and supreme peril of what philosopher Martha Nussbaum would term, nearly a century later, our political emotions — the unthinking, affect-driven impulse toward belief and action, which politicians so deftly manipulate by playing on our hopes and fears. Weil terms this “collective passion” and writes:

When a country is in the grip of a collective passion, it becomes unanimous in crime. If it becomes prey to two, or four, or five, or ten collective passions, it is divided among several criminal gangs. Divergent passions do not neutralise one another… they clash with infernal noise, and amid such din the fragile voices of justice and truth are drowned.

[…]

Collective passion is the only source of energy at the disposal of parties with which to make propaganda and to exert pressure upon the soul of every member.

One recognises that the partisan spirit makes people blind, makes them deaf to justice, pushes even decent men cruelly to persecute innocent targets. One recognises it, and yet nobody suggests getting rid of the organisations that generate such evils.

Intoxicating drugs are prohibited. Some people are nevertheless addicted to them. But there would be many more addicts if the state were to organise the sale of opium and cocaine in all tobacconists, accompanied by advertising posters to encourage consumption.

The most toxic effect of collective passion, Weil argues, is that it narrows the locus of attention to particular points of heightened affect — isolated ideas we feel, or are made to feel, strongly for or against — to the exclusion of all attendant ideas that come bundled in that particular party ideology. People are impelled to join a party or a cause because it speaks to a few things they feel strongly about, but they rarely examine closely all the other ideas the party espouses — including many with which, upon reflection and examination, they might wholly disagree. (We have seen this, for instance, with the tidal shift in support by women who initially voted for Donald Trump, having been drawn to some of his economic campaign promises, either unwitting of or turning a willfully blind eye to his reckless misogyny until its undeniable evils came to eclipse any alleged economic goods promised them.)

Weil admonishes that while this manipulative fragmentation of thought to the detriment of truth, justice, and public interest originates in our politics, it has permeated nearly every domain of human life:

People have progressively developed the habit of thinking, in all domains, only in terms of being “in favour of” or “against” any opinion, and afterwards they seek arguments to support one of these two options… There are broad-minded people willing to acknowledge the value of opinions with which they disagree. They have completely lost the concept of true and false.

Others, having taken a position in favour of a certain opinion, refuse to examine any dissenting view. This is a transposition of the totalitarian spirit.

When Einstein visited France, all the people who more or less belonged to the intellectual circles, including other scientists, divided themselves into two camps: for Einstein or against him. Any new scientific idea finds in the scientific world supporters and enemies — both sides inflamed to a deplorable degree with the partisan spirit. The intellectual world is permanently full of trends and factions, in various stages of crystallisation.

In art and literature, this phenomenon is even more prevalent. Cubism and Surrealism were each a sort of party. Some people were Gidian and some Maurrassian. To achieve celebrity, it is useful to be surrounded by a gang of admirers, all possessed by the partisan spirit.

However feasible Weil’s central insistence on the abolition of all political parties may be in reality, her deeper point — the importance of refusing to adopt divisive black-and-white opinions among and within us — may be the single most significant, most countercultural act of courage and resistance each of us can perform today. She concludes:

Nearly everywhere — often even when dealing with purely technical problems — instead of thinking, one merely takes sides: for or against. Such a choice replaces the activity of the mind. This is an intellectual leprosy; it originated in the political world and then spread through the land, contaminating all forms of thinking. This leprosy is killing us.

Complement On the Abolition of All Political Parties with Hannah Arendt on lying in politics, Bertrand Russell on our only effective self-defense against propaganda, Walt Whitman on optimism as a mighty force of resistance, and Rebecca Solnit on the culture-shifting power of calling things by their true names, then revisit Weil on the purest, most fertile form of thought and the key to discipline.

It’s wild how we outgrow what we once thought we couldn’t live without, and then we fall in love with what we didn’t even know we wanted.  Life keeps leading us down paths we would never travel if it were up to us.

Don’t be afraid.

Have faith.

Trust the journey.

Don’t let your expectations of how life “should be” blind you to the beauty of the life you’re living.

And of course, if you’re struggling with trusting the journey and taming your expectations right now, know that you are not alone.  Many of us are here with you, working hard to let go, find more presence and acceptance, and get our thinking back on track.  Let me share a quick metaphor with you that I often share with our course students and live event attendees…

Imagine you had a ripe, juicy tangerine sitting on the table in front of you.  You pick it up eagerly, take a bite and begin to taste it.

You already know how a ripe, juicy tangerine should taste, and so when this one is a bit tarter than expected, you make a face, feel a sense of disappointment and swallow it, feeling cheated out of the experience you expected.

Or perhaps the tangerine tastes completely normal—nothing special at all.  So, you swallow it without even pausing to appreciate its flavor, as you move on to the next unworthy bite, and the next.

In the first scenario, the tangerine let you down because it didn’t meet your expectations.  In the second, it was too plain because it met your expectations to a T.

Do you see the irony here?

It’s either not good, or not good enough.

This is how many of us live our lives… unhappily.

It’s why so many of us feel let down, disappointed, and unexcited about almost everything.

Because nothing really meets our expectations.

Now, imagine you try this instead: remove your expectations of how the tangerine “should” taste.  You don’t know, and you don’t expect to know, because you haven’t even tried it yet.  Instead, you’re genuinely curious, impartial and open to a variety of possible flavors.

You taste it, and you truly pay attention.  You notice the juiciness, the texture of the pulp, the simultaneously tangy, tart and sweet flavors swirling around on your tongue, and all the other complex sensations that arise in your awareness as you chew.  You didn’t know how this tangerine would taste, but now you realize it’s different than the rest, and it’s remarkable in its own way.  It’s a totally new experience—a worthwhile experience—because you’ve never tasted THIS tangerine before.

Mindfulness experts often refer to this as “beginner’s mind,” but really, it’s just the result of a mindset free of needless, stifling expectations.

The tangerine, of course, can be substituted for almost anything in your life: any event, any situation, any relationship, any person, any thought at all that enters your mind.  If you approach any of these with expectations of “how it should be” or “how it has to be” in order to be good enough for you, they will almost always disappoint you in some way… or be too plain and unexciting to even remember.  And you’ll just move on to the next disappointment or unworthy life experience, and the next, and the next, and so on and so forth…

Until you’ve lived the vast majority of your life stuck in an endless cycle of experiences you barely like or barely even notice.

A Mentally Stronger Way to Think & Live

When you add up over a decade worth of one-on-one coaching sessions with students, open conversations with our readers, and the annual live events we host, Marc and I have lots of experience when it comes to assisting people through the pain points that have been holding them back.  And one of the most prevalent pain points we’ve seen unfold over the years is what I just described above—expectations gone wrong.  In fact, most of what we describe as our “biggest problems” are the direct consequence of how we react to life on an average day.

Yes, sometimes there are major tragedies to cope with, but most of the time the only real tragedy is our weak thinking and resulting behavior in the present moment.

Exercising your mental strength—your inner resilience—is key!  And you don’t have to be born mentally strong either.  You can develop this vital character trait with daily practice.

Is it easy?  Not exactly.

Is it worth it?  Absolutely!

And it all starts with facing the present moment fully, with genuine presence and acceptance.

Even when times are relatively good, one of the hardest challenges we face in life is to simply live in our own skin—to just be right here, right now, regardless of where we are.  Too often we aimlessly distract ourselves with anything and everything: food, booze, shopping, television, gossip news, social networks, video games, smart phones, iPads, etc.—basically anything to keep us from being fully present.

We use compulsive work, compulsive exercise, compulsive love affairs, and the like, to escape from ourselves and the realities of living with full presence.  In fact, many of us will go to great lengths to avoid the feeling of being alone with ourselves in an undistracted environment.  So, we succumb to hanging out with just about anybody to avoid the feeling of solitude.  For being alone means dealing with our true feelings: fears, anxieties, anticipation, uncertainty, frustrations, envy, disappointment, and so on and so forth.  And when harder times hit, things spiral even further out of control.

On the flip side, mentally strong people gradually grow to understand that finding peace and happiness in life does not mean to be in a place where there is no noise, no challenges, and no hard work.  It means to be in the midst of those things while remaining focused in your mind and calm in your heart.  It’s about letting go of the pictures in your head about how things were “supposed to be,” and facing the present moment’s challenges with presence and poise.

So, begin today by just noticing with curiosity, and without judgment, all of the ways in which you avoid being in your own skin, with your own issues, right here, right now, in this present moment we call life.  Then focus, carefully, on what you’re truly feeling.  Don’t numb yourself with any more distractions, but instead bring how you feel further into your awareness.

Turn to it, and welcome it.  Smile, and give what you feel your full, thoughtful attention.

• Notice the feeling in your body.  Where is the feeling situated, and what unique qualities does it have?
• Notice the tension in your body, and also in your mind, that arises from this feeling.

Try relaxing the tense parts of your body.  Then relax the tense parts of your mind.  Do so by focusing on your breath: Close your eyes, breathe in and feel it, breathe out and feel it, again and again, until you feel more relaxed.

In this more relaxed state, find some quiet space within yourself.  And in this space…

• Allow yourself to rediscover the fundamental goodness within you, that’s present in every moment.
• Allow yourself to rediscover the fundamental goodness of this very moment, that’s always available to you whenever you’re willing to focus on it.

Take time to just sit with the inner peace these simple rediscoveries bring.

This is the practice of letting go of stress, and simply accepting this moment as it is, and yourself as you are.

You can do this anytime, wherever you are.  You can practice focusing on the goodness in others as well.  Seeing the goodness in your challenges and relationships and work, even when things don’t go exactly as planned.

You can build a healthy daily ritual of stopping unnecessary stress in your life, and rediscovering the peace and joy and love that are always just a few thoughts away.

(Note: Marc and I build healthy, life-changing daily rituals like this with our students in the “Goals and Growth” module of the Getting Back to Happy Course and in our NYT bestselling book.)

Now, it’s your turn…

Don’t wish away any more time waiting for better times ahead.  Just appreciate where you are.  You’ve come a long way, and you’re still learning and growing.  Be thankful for the lessons.  Take them and make the best of things right now.

And if you’re up to it, we’d love know:

• Despite your challenges, what’s something good you could appreciate right now, if you really wanted to?

Please leave a comment below and share your thoughts.

Also, if you haven’t done so already, be sure to sign-up for our free newsletter to receive new articles like this in your inbox each week.

Angel and I recently interviewed a minimum wage motel housekeeper in Miami for a project we’re working on to support our New York Times bestselling book, Getting Back to Happy: Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Reality, and Turn Your Trials into Triumphs.  “Do you like your job?” we asked her.  To our surprise, she smiled from ear to ear and was breathless for a couple moments.  She finally collected herself and said, “I can’t believe how much I love my job!  I get to make dozens of our guests happy every day and feed my two beautiful children at the same time…”

Then, at that same motel 30 minutes later, we met a family of six in the lobby.  They were just hanging out, sharing stories, laughing and taking turns reading excerpts from a book.  Their joyous presence caught our attention, so we asked them where they were from.  “Oh, we’re from here,” the father said.  “Our house burned down last night, but miraculously all of us got out safely.  And that makes this a pretty darn good day.”

Talk about two back-to-back wake-up calls…

There is always, always, always something to be grateful for!

In Getting Back to Happy, I share this entry from my grandmother’s journal, dated 9-16-1977:  “Today I’m sitting in my hospital bed waiting to have both my breasts removed.  But in a strange way, I feel like the lucky one.  Until now I have had no health problems.  I’m a sixty-nine-year-old woman in the last room at the end of the hall before the pediatric division of the hospital begins.  Over the past few hours I have watched dozens of cancer patients being wheeled by in wheelchairs and rolling beds.  None of these patients could be a day older than seventeen.”

That journal entry has been hanging up in our home office for the past two decades, and it continues to remind Angel and I to practice gratitude through thick and thin.  No matter how good or bad we have it on any particular day, we do our best to wake up grateful for our lives, because other people in other places are desperately fighting for theirs.

Think about your own life in this context of gratitude.

How often do you let go of what you think your life is supposed to look like, and sincerely appreciate it for everything it is?

If you’re anything like the rest of us, it’s probably not often enough.

Because finding sincere gratitude is much easier said than done in the hustle of life, especially when hard times hit.  And although Angel and I have coped and grown through our fair share of truly hard times (which I will touch upon at the end of this post), let’s be honest about something: 98 percent of the time we create tragedy in our lives out of fairly minor incidents.  Something doesn’t go exactly as planned, but rather than learn from the experience, we freak out about it and let stress become us.  Or, we resist the small bits of progress we can make, simply because we can’t achieve exactly what we want all at once.

Our challenge for you today is to start choosing differently—don’t let the things that are beyond your control dominate you!

The biggest difference between peace and stress on an average day is attitude.  It’s all about how you look at a situation and what you decide to do with it.  It’s remembering that there are no certainties in life; we don’t know exactly what the future will bring.  So, your best strategy for living is to make the best and most positive use of the present moment, even when it’s far from perfect…

Especially when it’s far from perfect!

Your life, with all its ups and downs, unexpected twists and turns, has brought you to this moment.  It took each and every intricate, confusing, and painful situation you have encountered to bring you to right here, right now.  And if you have the courage to admit that you’re a little scared, and have the ability to smile even as you cry, the nerve to ask for help when you need it, and the wisdom to take it when it’s offered, then you have everything you need.  You just have to believe it so you can take the next step.

Angel and I have guided hundreds of our course students and Think Better, Live Better conference attendees through this process of perspective change—a process stepping forward with sincere gratitude, no matter what.  And that’s what I want to highlight for you today.  We’re going to take a quick look at some ways to find sincere gratitude when there’s nothing obvious to be grateful for… when everything seems to be going wrong.

We usually think of times like these as something we don’t like—dealing with a difficult person or circumstance, struggling with a difficult life change, losing a loved one, etc.  And it’s true, these are not “good times.”  I’m not suggesting we should rejoice at living though disappointing or painful life experiences.  But there are ways we can find gratitude as we grow through them, nonetheless.  Here are some solid examples of how to do just that:

How to Find Gratitude Around Difficult People

We expect people to behave a certain way.  Specifically, we expect them to always treat us kindly, fairly and respectfully.  But the reality is some people won’t.  They will lose their tempers or act foolishly, regardless of how we treat them.  This must be accepted.

Don’t lower your standards, but do remind yourself that removing your expectations of others—especially those who are being difficult—is the best way to avoid being disappointed by them.  You will end up sadly disappointed if you expect others will always do for you as you do for them.  Not everyone has the same heart as you.  Not everyone’s heart is filled with genuine gratitude.

When you’re forced to deal with a difficult person, you can be grateful for having other people in your life who are far less difficult.  You can be grateful for having a way to practice being better at patience, communication, and tempering your expectations.  You can think of this person as a teacher, who is inadvertently helping you to grow stronger as a person.  And, at the very least, you can be grateful for them because they serve as a great reminder of how not to be.

How to Find Gratitude When You Catch Yourself Complaining

Many of us are have developed a subtle habit of complaining about life.  We might not even notice how often we’re doing it, but every time we experience some tension in our lives (things not going exactly our way), we immediately feel bitterness.  This bitterness is a form of complaining, and it’s a common way we waste our lives.

Gratitude is the antidote.  Each time you notice yourself feeling bitter, or complaining, notice that you have a story in your mind that’s causing you to feel the way you do.  Notice that you’re letting this story about “how life should be” dominate you.  Then, find a small way to be grateful instead:

• What could you be grateful for right now, if you really wanted to be grateful?
• What could you appreciate about this moment?

Seriously, when life gives you every reason to be negative, think of one good reason to be positive.  Remember, there’s ALWAYS something to be grateful for.

How to Find Gratitude When You Are Overwhelmed

The familiar faces, places, situations and obligations we rely on and interact with daily… they overwhelm us sometimes, especially when we’re taking them for granted.

Have you ever noticed how the more familiar you become with an amazing situation or relationship in your life, the more you seem to take it for granted?  And then, as it becomes more “expendable” in your subconscious mind, the more it seems to “overwhelm” you on busy days?  You somehow grow to feel like this amazing thing is getting in your way, even though it isn’t—it’s YOU that’s getting in your way.

The bottom line is that we often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.  So, challenge yourself to flip your perspective in moments of overwhelm, using a simple re-framing tool we often cover with our course students called “… AND I LOVE IT!”

“… AND I LOVE IT!” is a phrase that can be applied to the end of any overwhelming thought.  Here are a couple examples:

• I need to go grocery shopping, and pay the bills, and pick the kids up from school in an hour … AND I LOVE IT!
• My inbox is filled with two dozen client emails that need a response today … AND I LOVE IT!

Let this little re-framing tool give you the perspective you need.  Because, again, the everyday things that overwhelm us are often blessings in disguise.

OK, now for some harder stuff…

How to Find Gratitude After Job Loss

No one wins at chess by only moving forward; sometimes you have to move backward to put yourself in a position to win.  And that’s a good metaphor for your life’s work, too.

As painful as losing your job is, it’s an ending that leads to the beginning of everything that comes next.  Let the heaviness of being successful be replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again.  This new beginning is the start of a different story, the opportunity to refresh your life, to reinvent who you are.  See the beauty in this opportunity—the freedom and liberation from a fixed routine—a solid foundation from which you can rebuild certain aspects of your life the way you always wanted it to be.

Remind yourself, as often as necessary, that you can find gratitude for where you are.  You can find gratitude for these moments of reinvention—for pushing into the discomfort of getting good at interviewing, learning new skills and leveling up.  You can find gratitude for the opportunity to grow stronger, even in the midst of the growing pains that ultimately get you there.

How to Find Gratitude Amidst Health Problems

Everyone is down on the pain inflicted by health problems, and when we experience this kind of pain we usually say we have nothing to be grateful for, because we forget something important about what we’re going through: The pain of a health problem is for the living ONLY—for those of us who still have the chance of a lifetime.

A couple short years ago, on the second to last day of her life, a close friend of mine told me her only regret was that she didn’t appreciate every year with the same passion and purpose that she had in the last two years of her life, after she was diagnosed with terminal cancer.  ‘I’ve accomplished so much recently, and truly appreciated every step,” she said.  “If I had only known, I would have started sooner.’”

Her words made me cry and smile at the same time.  What was truly miraculous was seeing the genuine gratitude in her eyes at that moment.  She was sincerely grateful for actually being able to accomplish everything she had accomplished in her final two years.  And her sentiment has always remained with me.  So, while I agree that health problems are never fun, and can often be very painful and debilitating, the pain can still be mediated by a sense of gratitude of being alive.  Of still having a chance to move forward.  Of still having a life worth living, from moment to precious moment.

How to Find Gratitude When Someone You Love Dies

One of the absolute hardest realities to cope with is death.  A person who gave meaning to our life is now no longer in our life (at least not in the flesh), and we are not the same person without them.  We have to change who we are—we are now a best friend who sits alone, a widow instead of a wife, a dad without a daughter, or a next-door neighbor to someone new.  We want life to be the way it was, before death, and yet it never will be.

But, can we still be grateful we had the gift of this person in our lives?  Yes…

Angel and I have dealt with the loss of siblings and best friends to illness and suicide, so we know from experience that when you lose someone you can’t imagine living without, your heart breaks wide open.  And the bad news is you never completely get over the loss—you will never forget them.  However, in a backwards way, we gradually learned that this is also the good news.

Ultimately, we grew to appreciate that although death is an ending, it is also a necessary part of living.  And even though endings like these often seem ugly, they are necessary for beauty too—otherwise it’s impossible to appreciate someone or something, because they are unlimited.  Limits illuminate beauty, and death is the ultimate limit—a reminder that we need to be aware of this beautiful person, and appreciate this beautiful thing called life.  Death is also a beginning, because while we have lost someone special, this ending, like the loss of any wonderful life situation, is a moment of reinvention.  Although deeply sad, their passing forces us to gradually reinvent our lives, and in this reinvention is an opportunity to experience beauty in new, unseen ways and places.  And finally, death is an opportunity to celebrate a person’s life, and to be grateful for the beauty they showed us.

Now, it’s your turn…

The bottom line is that life’s disappointments and struggles are not easy to find gratitude for, but they can become incredible paths of growth if we find the lessons in them—if we start to see everything as our teacher.

Truly, the best time to focus on being grateful is when you don’t feel like it.  Because that’s when doing so can make the biggest difference.

As for me, I’m wrapping up this article with a quick note of gratitude to YOU:

Thank you for reading this article and other articles on marcandangel.com.

Thank you for being a part of our community.

Angel and I are truly grateful YOU are here with us.  ?

And before you go, we’d love for you to reflect on this question:

What’s something little you’re truly grateful for, that you often forget to appreciate when life gets hectic?

Do you have any other thoughts on gratitude to share?  We would love to hear from you.

Please leave a reply below.

Also, if you haven’t done so already, be sure to sign-up for our free newsletter to receive new articles like this in your inbox each week.

I sat at the kitchen table staring at her through tear-filled eyes.  “I feel crazy,” I said.  “I don’t know what’s wrong with me!”

“Why do you feel crazy?” she asked.

“Because I’m neurotic and self-conscious and ashamed, and so much more all at once,” I said.  “I feel like I’m just not good enough for anything or anyone anymore…”

“And you don’t think everyone feels like this at times?” she asked.

“Not like this,” I replied under my breath.

“Well you’re wrong,” she said.  “If you think you know someone who never feels a bit broken and crazy, you just don’t know enough about them.  Every one of us contains a measure of ‘crazy’ that moves us in strange, often perplexing ways.  This side of us is necessary; it’s part of our human ability to think, grieve, adapt and grow.  It’s part of being alive and intelligent,” she said.

I sat silently for a moment.  My eyes gazed from her eyes to the ground and back to her eyes again.  “So, you’re saying I should want to feel like this?”

“To an extent,” she said.  “Let me put it this way:  Taking all your feelings seriously all the time, and letting them drive you into misery, is a waste of your amazing spirit.  You have to know that sometimes what you feel simply won’t align with what’s true and right in this world; it’s just your subconscious mind’s way of allowing you to look at things from a different perspective.  These feelings will come and go as long as you let them go… as long as you consciously see them for what they are.”

We shared another moment of silence, then my lips curled up slightly and I cracked a smile.  “Thank you, Grandma,” I said.

Why We Belittle Ourselves

That conversation with my grandmother took place on a warm September evening over two decades ago.  I remember it vividly because I was smart enough to write a five-page journal entry about it immediately afterwards.  And, what I wrote continues to remind me of how easy it is to fall into a self-deprecating state of mind—to subconsciously belittle oneself when times get tough.  For instance, over the years, I can’t even begin to tell you how many times I’ve caught myself thinking, “You’re not good enough!” simply because I wasn’t having a good day.

Can you relate at all?

To an extent, I bet you can.  Because we all do this to ourselves sometimes…

You have a story about yourself (or perhaps a series of them) that you recite to yourself daily.  This is your mental movie, and it’s a feature film that plays on repeat in your mind.  Your movie is about who you are: you have a chubby tummy, your skin is too dark, you aren’t smart, you aren’t lovable… you aren’t good enough.  Start to pay attention when your movie plays—when you feel anxiety about being who you are—because it affects everything you do.  Realize that this movie isn’t real, it isn’t true, and it isn’t you.  It’s just a train of thought that can be stopped—a script that can be rewritten.

Ready to rewrite the script?  Good!

Start by admitting to yourself that you’ve spent a lot of your life subconsciously belittling yourself.  Thinking you’re not enough.  Wishing to be someone else.  Someone who fits in, who’s less sensitive, needy, and flawed.  Someone who is less YOU.  Because you felt broken and didn’t want to scare people away.  You wanted to make a good impression and have people like you.  To be seen as worthy and lovable so you could feel healed and whole.  And for the longest time, behind a facade of fake smiles, you have inadvertently betrayed yourself for the purpose of pleasing everyone else.  And for longest time, your heart has ached in a subtle way.

But now you’re seeing things differently, right?

Belittling yourself just doesn’t make sense anymore.  And more than that, you now realize no matter what you do or how you change, some people will never respect you anyway, and some situations will never nurture your soul.

You now realize you have to start doing things for the right reasons.

Not because it’s what you think everyone else needs, but because you finally know yourself to be worthy of your own love and care.

Not because other people approve of you, but because you are breathing your own air, thinking your own thoughts, and occupying a space no one else ever could.

You may have been beaten down by adversity, or sidetracked by rejection, but you are not broken.  So don’t let your subconscious mind, or anyone or anything else, convince you otherwise.  Heal yourself by refusing to belittle yourself.  Choose to stand out, to do what you know in your heart is right.  Choose to appreciate yourself for who you are, accepting your quirks entirely and sincerely.

Choose to remind yourself of the truth…

1. You are not what happened to you. — You are not your past experiences.  You are not your scars.  You are not what someone else once said about you.  You are what you choose to become in this moment.  Let go, breathe, and begin again today.
2. You are more than that one broken piece of you. — We all have this image in our minds of ourselves—this idea of who we are.  And when this idea gets chipped or broken in some small way, we tend to broadly internalize it.   Realize this.  It’s easy to feel like everything—ALL of you—is broken along with that one small piece of you.  But that’s not true.  Because you are more than one thing—you are many things!  And remembering this can help you stretch your identity so it’s not so fragile—so it doesn’t shatter when a small piece of it gets chipped.
3. Other people’s opinions of you are rarely accurate. — People may have heard your stories, but they can’t feel what you are going through today.  They aren’t living your life!  So, let go of what they say about you.  There is great freedom in leaving others to their opinions.  And there is a huge weight lifted when you take nothing personally.
4. You are as worthy as you believe yourself to be. — You will never find your worth in another human being—you find it in yourself, and then you will attract those who are worthy of your energy.  Meditate on this.  Accept and acknowledge your own worth today.  Stop waiting for others to tell you how important you are.  Tell yourself right now.  And believe it.
5. The best time to be extra kind to yourself is when you don’t feel like it. — Because that’s when doing so can make the biggest difference.  Truly, it’s not what you say to everybody else that determines your life; it’s what you whisper to yourself every day that has the greatest power.
6. It’s not too late.  You aren’t behind. — You are exactly where you need to be.  Every step is necessary.  Don’t judge or berate yourself for how long your journey is taking.  We all need our own time to travel our own distance.
7. You have come a long way. — The trick is to embrace life today.  Don’t wish it away waiting for better days ahead.  Just appreciate where you are.  You’ve come a long way, and you’re still learning and growing.  Be thankful for the lessons.  Give yourself credit for your resilience, and step forward again with grace.
8. It’s OK to not feel OK sometimes. – Sometimes not being OK is all we can register inside our weary minds and aching hearts.  This emotion is human, and accepting it can feel like a small weight lifted.  Truth be told, it’s not OK when someone you care about is no longer breathing and giving their amazing gifts to the world.  It’s not OK when someone you trusted betrays you and breaks your heart.  It’s not OK when you’re emotionally drained.  It’s not OK when you’re engulfed in grief like you’ve never known before.  Whatever the latest painful season of life consists of, sometimes it’s just NOT OK right now.  And that realization is more than OK.  Breathe…
9. You need to distance yourself to see your situation clearly. — Step back.  Give yourself space.  Sometimes the most important thing you do in a whole day is the short rest you take between two deep breaths.  Take those breaths, and that rest, when you need them.  Just let go for a moment and remind yourself that the strongest sign of your growth is knowing you’re slightly less stressed by the hard realities that used to absolutely overwhelm you.
10. You are a work in progress. — It’s wild how we outgrow what we once thought we couldn’t live without, and then we fall in love with what we didn’t even know we wanted.  Life keeps leading us down paths we would never travel if it were up to us.  Don’t be afraid.  Have faith.  Trust the journey.  Be a work in progress today, and celebrate the fact that you are!

Your Real Story Has Strengthened You

Let the truth sink in.  And then remind yourself of it—read the reminders above—again and again, anytime you catch yourself belittling yourself.  Bring awareness to the false, self-deprecating story—that mental movie—you’re so used to reciting.  Then, rewrite the script…

One day at a time.

One reminder at a time.

Change the way you see yourself.

See how every day, every step, every lesson, every deep breath, and every little reminder matters.

And along these lines, I’ll leave you with this short excerpt from our New York Times bestselling book, Getting Back to Happy: Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Reality, and Turn Your Trials into Triumphs:

“In the end, all the small things make a big difference.  Every step is crucial.  Life isn’t about a single moment of great triumph and attainment.  It’s about the trials and errors that slowly get you there—the blood, sweat, tears, and the small, inconsequential things you do on a day-to-day basis.  It all matters in the end—every step, every regret, every decision, every minor setback and minuscule win.

The seemingly useless happenings add up to something.  The minimum-wage job you had in high school.  The evenings you spent socializing with coworkers you never see anymore.  The hours you spent writing thoughts on a personal blog that no one reads.  Contemplations about elaborate future plans that never came to be. All those lonely nights spent reading novels and news columns and comic strips, questioning your own principles on life and sex and religion and whether or not you’re good enough just the way you are.

All of this has strengthened you.  All of this has led you to every success you’ve ever had.  All of this has made you who you are today.  And all of this proves that you have the strength to deal with the challenges in front of you.”

Now, it’s your turn…

Marc and I have spent the past decade working with hundreds of coaching clients, course students, and live event attendees who struggle with everything we’ve just examined together in this article.  And, as I mentioned above, I struggle sometimes too.  So, if you’re struggling in any way right now, please know that you are not alone.  Watch this short video clip I created for you:

And if you’re up to it, I’d love to know:

• Which part of this article (or video) resonates the most with you right now, and why?

Please leave a comment below and share your thoughts.

Also, if you haven’t done so already, be sure to sign-up for our free newsletter to receive new articles like this in your inbox each week.

When I was a high school freshman, a 260-pound freshman girl showed up for track and field tryouts right alongside me.  Her name was Sara, and she was only there because her doctor said her health depended on it.  But once she scanned the crowd of students who were on the field, she turned around and began walking away.  Coach O’Leary saw her, jogged over, and turned her back around.

“I’m not thin enough for this sport!” Sara declared.  “And I’ll never be!  It’s impossible for me to lose enough weight.  I’ve tried.”

Coach O’Leary nodded, and promised Sara that her body type wasn’t suited for her current weight.  “It’s suited for 220 pounds,” he said.

Sara looked confused.  “Most people tell me I need to lose 130 pounds,” she replied.  “But you think I only need to lose 40?”

Coach O’Leary nodded again.

Sara started off as a shot put competitor, but spent every single afternoon running and training with the rest of the track team.  She was very competitive, and by the end of our freshman year she was down to 219 pounds.  She also won 2nd place in the countywide shot put tournament that year.  Three years later, during our senior year, she won 3rd place in the 10K run.  Her competitive weight at the time was 132 pounds.

There was a time when Sara was convinced that it was impossible to lose weight because, in her past experience, it had never worked out the way she had hoped.  She had completely lost faith in herself.  But, with consistency—with a daily ritual of trying again and again—she restored her faith and achieved the “impossible.”  And when Sara showed up to my 37th birthday (pool) party recently, I smiled when I overheard another guest she just met compliment her on her bathing suit and physique.

Of course, Sara still works really hard—she tries again—every single day to maintain what she has achieved.

And, so do I…

I Lose Faith Sometimes Too

Some people get this idea about me, because I’m a New York Times bestselling author who has spent the past decade writing and teaching people how to create more success and happiness in their lives, that I don’t ever fall short and fail miserably in these areas.  But of course, I’m human, so that’s not true at all.  I fall short and fail at things much more than you might imagine, and certainly far more than I’d often like to admit.  And, it feels just as horrible for me as it does for you or anyone else—I absolutely lose faith in myself sometimes.

Deep down, of course, I know these negative reactions aren’t helpful.  So I own up to what happened, learn a lesson or two, and then get back up and try again.  The final part is the most important part—the trying again…

• I fail at eating healthy and exercising sometimes, but I try again.
• I fail at loving myself sometimes, but I don’t give up on myself either, and so I try again.
• I fail at being a great dad sometimes, especially when I get distracted with stressful business endeavors, but I keep trying, and oftentimes I invoke a fresh smile on my son’s face.
• I even failed at writing the article you’re reading now.  I made an initial attempt and scrapped it because it didn’t feel right.  But I started again, and now I’m done.

When I try again and again, I often succeed, and feel much better about myself, in the long run.

If there’s only one thing you take away from this article, let it be that trying again—giving yourself another chance every day—is always worth it.  Because…

What You Do Again & Again Defines You

Many of the most meaningful results you will ever achieve in your life—the milestones, the relationships, the love, the lessons—come from the little things you do repeatedly, every single day.

Regardless of your unique talents, knowledge, and life circumstances, or how you personally define success and happiness, you don’t suddenly become successful and happy.  You become successful and happy over time based on your willingness to try again and again—to create little daily rituals that amass little bits of progress, through thick and thin.

So, what do your little daily rituals look like?

You really have to sort this out, and get consistent with what’s right for you on a daily basis!  Because failure occurs in the same way.  All your little daily failures (those that you don’t learn and grow from) come together and cause you to fail big.  Think in terms of running a business…

• You keep failing to check the books.
• You keep failing to make the calls.
• You keep failing to listen to your customers.
• You keep failing to innovate.
• You keep failing to do the little things that need to be done.

Then one day you wake up and your whole business has failed.  It was all the little things you did or didn’t do on a daily basis—your rituals—not just one inexplicable, catastrophic event.

Now, think about how this relates to your life: your life is your “business!”

Remind yourself that the vast majority of the results in your life—positive and negative alike—are the product of many small decisions made over time.  The little things you do today, and tomorrow, and the next day, matter!

Too often people overestimate the significance of one big defining moment and underestimate the value of making good decisions and small steps of progress on a daily basis.  Don’t be one of them!

Obvious but Not Easy to Sustain

The concept of taking it one day at a time, one step at a time, might seem ridiculously obvious, but at some point we all get caught up in the moment and find ourselves yearning for instant gratification.  We want what we want, and we want it now!  And this yearning often tricks us into taking on too much too soon.  Angel and I have seen this transpire hundreds of times over the years: a coaching client or course student wants to achieve a big goal (or three) all at once, and can’t choose just one or two daily rituals to focus on, so nothing worthwhile ever gets done, and gradually they lose more and more faith in themselves.  Let this common mistake—this quick-fix mentality—be your wake-up call today.

You really can’t lift a thousand pounds all at once, yet you can easily lift one pound a thousand times.  Small, repeated, incremental efforts will get you there.  It doesn’t happen in an instant, but it does happen a lot faster than not getting there at all.

Do your best to consciously shift your focus away from the big goals—the big ideals—you want to achieve in your life and toward the little daily rituals that support them.  Consider the following…

• If you’re a competitive athlete, your goal is to win sports competitions.  Your ritual is the time you dedicate each day to training your body (and mind).
• If you’re a university student, your goal is to learn and earn a degree.  Your ritual is your daily study habits.
• If you’re a parent, your goal is to be a great role model.  Your ritual is the time and energy you commit to setting a good example each day.
• If you’re a human being, your goal is to live a happy, meaningful life.  Your ritual is the small, positive steps forward you take every day.

Now consider this small excerpt from our New York Times bestselling book: “If you stopped focusing on one of your big goals for a while and instead focused exclusively on your corresponding daily ritual, would you still make progress?  For example, if you were trying to lose weight and you stopped thinking about your goal to lose twenty pounds, and instead placed all of your focus on eating healthy and exercising each day, would you still lose weight?  Yes, without a doubt!  Gradually you would get closer to your goal—your target weight—without even thinking about it again.”

And if you mess up occasionally?

You own up to it, you forgive yourself, and you try again.

One day at a time, one step at a time, you get to…

Restore Faith in Yourself

Restoring your faith in yourself is arguably the most significant hidden benefit of consistently practicing a daily ritual—of trying again and again and again.  In fact, what I lacked before I learned to implement these kinds of daily rituals was the faith that I was actually capable of achieving the positive results I desired in my life.  I had tried so many quick fixes in the past that ended in failure, and had grown so discouraged in myself, that I began subconsciously choosing procrastination over future attempts to fulfill the little promises I made to myself—to learn, to grow, and to make progress in various ways.

In essence, I lost faith in both my ability and myself.  It’s kind of like another person constantly lying to you—eventually you stop trusting them.  The same holds true with the little promises you make to yourself that always end in disappointment.  Eventually, you stop trusting yourself.

And the solution in most cases is the same too: you have to restore your faith and trust gradually, with small promises, small steps (your daily rituals), and small victories.  Again, this process takes time, but it happens if you stick to it.  And it’s undoubtedly one of the most important, life-changing things you can do for yourself.

(Note: Angel and I build and customize tiny, life-changing daily rituals with our students in the “Goals & Growth” module of the Getting Back to Happy Course.)

Now, it’s your turn…

Don’t wish away any more time waiting for better times ahead.  Just appreciate where you are and try again.  If you faithfully take small steps day after day, one day you’ll look back with gratitude for how far you’ve come.

And, if you’re up to it right now, I’d love to know:

• In what way will you “try again” today?  What small step forward can you take today, that can be built upon tomorrow?

Please leave a comment below and share your thoughts.

Also, if you haven’t done so already, be sure to sign-up for our free newsletter to receive new articles like this in your inbox each week.

When I was in elementary school my parents told me it didn’t matter what I did when I grew up, so long as it made me happy.  “Happiness is the whole point of life”, my father said.  “But it doesn’t always come easy.  Your mother loves to help people in need, so she became a psychiatric nurse.  I love reading, writing and poetry, so I became an English teacher.  We both find happiness in the hard work we do each day.”

A few years later when I was in junior high, my sixth-grade homeroom teacher put me in detention for “being difficult.”  She went around the classroom and asked each student what they wanted to be when they grew up.  When she got to me, I told her I wanted to be happy.  She told me I was missing the whole point of the question.  I told her she was missing the whole point of life.

Perhaps my pre-adolescent, smart-aleck response deserved the repercussions.  Perhaps my young mind was oversimplifying some necessary complexities.  Lesson learned I suppose.  But, I’ve still never forgotten the significance of my dad’s wisdom—especially his point about finding happiness in hard work.

Fast forward to today, and Angel and I have spent well over a decade working one-on-one with hundreds of coaching clients, course students, and live event attendees who struggle with variations of that very point—finding happiness when life demands we work hard for it.  As human beings, we somehow get used to the fantasy that life should be easier than it is.  Regardless of what we choose to do “when we grow up,” we subconsciously expect our chosen path to have very few detours, interruptions, and inconveniences.  And oftentimes we wait around for those detours, interruptions, and inconveniences to take care of themselves.

A good case in point: I was picking up a few items at a small CVS store this morning when an elderly man with a guide dog came in.  He walked to the aisle with the greetings cards, picked up a card, held it up extremely close to his face, and desperately squinted his eyes to read it.  A couple other shoppers glanced at his squinting expression as they passed but didn’t stop to help him.  Just as I began to walk over, a big burly guy in a Harley Davidson jacket walked up and asked him if he needed assistance reading, and then proceeded to read him about a dozen different greeting cards out loud until the elderly man smiled and said, “That’s perfect! My wife will love that one!”

As the elderly man checked out at the register, I walked up to the big burly guy and said, “I admire your kindness.”

“Thank you, sir,” he replied with a smile. “Lately, I’ve just been letting my soul guide me.  I’m actually in a bit of a hurry right now, so it would have been much easier to let that man struggle, or let someone else help him, but my soul knows the easy things in life aren’t always the right things.”

Boom!  Such sage wisdom.

So, with the collective sentiments of my father and that kind stranger in mind, I want to remind you that…

You need to do hard things to be happy in life.

You need to do the things most people avoid, such as those that make you uncomfortable, that are far easier to run from, that others won’t do for you, that make you second-guess yourself and question how you’re going to find the time and energy to push forward.

Why?

Because the hard things ultimately build you up and change your life.  They make the difference between existing and living, between knowing the path and walking it, between a lifetime of empty promises and one filled with progress, value and fulfillment.

The key?

Consistent passionate action!

Learn to believe in your heart that you’re meant to live each moment full of passion and purpose—that each and every moment is worthy in its own way.  Consider this excerpt from our New York Times bestselling book, Getting Back to Happy: Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Reality, and Turn Your Trials into Triumphs:

Passion is not something you find in life; it’s something you do.  When you want to find the passion and inner strength needed to change your situation, you have to force yourself to step forward.

Many of us are still hopelessly trying to “find our passion”—something we believe will ultimately lead us closer to happiness, success, or the life situation we ultimately want.  And we say “hopelessly” primarily because passion can’t really be found.  When we say we’re trying to find our passion, it implies that our passion is somehow hiding behind a tree or under a rock somewhere.  But that’s far from the truth.  The truth is, our passion comes from doing things right.  If you’re waiting to somehow “find your passion” somewhere outside yourself, so you finally have a reason to put your whole heart and soul into your life and the changes you need to make, you’ll likely be waiting around for an eternity.

On the other hand, if you’re tired of waiting, and you’d rather live more passionately starting today and experience small positive changes, it’s time to proactively inject passion into the very next thing you do.  Think about it:

Like most of us, you’re likely putting a halfhearted effort into most of the things you do on a daily basis.  Because you’re still waiting.  You’re still waiting to “find” something to be passionate about—some magical reason to step into the life you want to create for yourself.  But you need to do the exact opposite!

Put your whole heart and soul into life!

Do the hard and necessary things, right NOW, with your whole heart and soul fully invested!

When I was a kid, my grandmother used to tell me, “Stop waiting for better opportunities.  The one you have in front of you is the best opportunity.”  She also said, “Too often we spend too much time making it perfect in our heads before we ever even do it.  Stop waiting for perfection and just do your best with what you have today, and then improve it tomorrow.”

Believe it or not, recent psychological research indirectly reinforces my grandmother’s sentiments.  For many years, psychologists believed our minds could directly affect our physical state of being, but never the other way around.  Nowadays, however, it is widely documented that our bodies—for example, our momentary facial expressions and body posture—can directly affect our mental state of being too.  So while it’s true that we change from the inside out, we also change from the outside in.  And you can make this reality work for you.  If you want more passion and happiness in your life right now, act accordingly right now.

Put your heart and soul into something!

Not into tomorrow’s opportunities, but into the opportunity right in front of you.

Not into tomorrow’s tasks, but into today’s tasks.

Not into tomorrow’s run, but into today’s run.

Not into tomorrow’s relationships, but into today’s relationships.

Angel and I are certain you have plenty in your life right now that’s worth your time and energy.  You have people and circumstances in your life that need you as much as you need them.  You have a massive reservoir of potential passion within you, just waiting.

Stop waiting!

If you wait for “the right time”—if you wait until you feel 100% ready—you will be waiting the rest of your life.  Seriously, too many people wait too long to live their best lives.  They wait all day for 5pm, all week for Friday, all year for the holidays, all their lives for passion and happiness.  Don’t be one of them!

You don’t need to have it all figured out to take the next step.  But you do need to take the next step to figure it out.  And as you struggle forward, remember, it is far better to be exhausted from lots of passionate effort and learning, than to be tired of waiting around doing absolutely nothing.

Now, it’s your turn…

Just put your heart and soul into what you’ve got right in front of you.  Your long-lost passion will gradually show up to greet you.  And your inner wellness will start to change for the better.  Guaranteed!

And if you’re up to it, we’d love know:

• What’s the next thing worth investing your whole heart and soul into?  What’s on your plate right now that you could be passionate about, if you really wanted to be?

Please leave a comment below and share your thoughts.

Also, if you haven’t done so already, be sure to sign-up for our free newsletter to receive new articles like this in your inbox each week.

Once upon a time, a young man and woman met, gazed into each other’s eyes, kissed, and knew for certain that they were supposed to be together forever.  In the subsequent days, weeks and months everything fell into place just as they had anticipated.  He was perfect in her eyes, and she was perfect in his.

Oh, it’s the majestic harmony of young love!  When two souls who barely know each other believe they know everything that they must know to live happily ever after in their own blissful bubble.  They think this way because it’s what their emotional hearts and minds tell them is true at the moment.

But you know what happens next.  It’s what always happens next in contrived fairy tales like this.  For one reason or another, logic trumps emotion, their bubble bursts, and the two lovers tumble back down to Earth, bruising themselves along the way and realizing that their perfect, easygoing partner isn’t so perfect or easygoing after all.

Maybe he learns that she doesn’t like to dance, and dancing is extremely important to him.  Maybe she learns that he never makes the bed, and making the bed is extremely important to her.  Regardless of the specifics, our lovers are finally beginning to see each other for who they really are—imperfect human beings.  This is the turning point at which “falling in love” ends and the real work and test of true love begins.

Either their mindset adjusts and they accept reality—that true love isn’t so much about ease and perfection as it is about growth and patience—or they give up and move on to the next short-term fairy tale romance in hopes of finding that one easygoing, perfect soul mate who does everything just right.

Why am I telling you this story?

Because the fluctuating feelings that steer our romantic relationships are quite similar to those that steer our motivation to make a meaningful impact in our lives, and thus a meaningful impact in the world.  A little passion is all that’s required to start, but only sustained perseverance makes it worthwhile.

Sure, short powerful bursts of effort and seemingly giant leaps in a single bound appear to be remarkable.  But they fade as fast as they arrive, and all we’re left with in the end is an unfulfilled void, an empty promise.

An enduring dedication—fulfilling promises by marching forward with one foot in front of the other, even when the going gets tough, and even when it would be much easier to give up—is what true love is all about.  And it’s this kind of love, and only this kind of love, that can make the world a better place, and us stronger, healthier, and happier human beings in the long run.

A real-life, heart-wrenching example…

“I’m dying of Leukemia at age 23.  I was sent home from the hospital for my final few weeks 156 days ago.  But now I’m back at the hospital being treated again.  My doctors now believe there is hope.  And I just want to thank you and Angel, because your Getting Back to Happy course has been my single source of guidance and inspiration on the absolute hardest, loneliest nights.”

That’s the opening paragraph of an email Angel and I received recently from a course student named Susan (I’m sharing this with permission).  Susan’s words continue to remind me that harsh circumstances will occasionally break us down to the lowest of lows.  But if we keep our minds focused on the positive, our hearts open to love, and continue to put one foot in front of the other, we can recover the pieces, rebuild, and fight back with more strength and determination than we ever imagined possible.

Susan has literally been fighting against all odds, and gradually overcoming them!  It has been incredible to witness her progress firsthand through our phone and email communication.  Day by day, she has emotionally freed herself from some of the ideals that once meant a lot to her—like not being ill—so she can move beyond them and the pain they bring.  This has ultimately contributed to the progress she’s made and the renewed hope her doctors now have.

Think about how this relates to the “enduring dedication” I mentioned in the first story above.

And, think about how it relates to YOUR life…

Your response is always more powerful than your circumstance.  A tiny part of your life is decided by completely uncontrollable circumstances, while the vast majority of your life is decided by your responses.

The goal isn’t to get rid of all your painful thoughts, feelings, and life circumstances.  That’s impossible.  The goal is to follow in Susan’s footsteps, and change your response to them today!

It’s never too late.  Just decide to make the best of it.  No excuses.  No resistance.  No giving up.  No regrets.

And when the going gets really tough…

…remind yourself:

1. In the space between “I’ll try again” and “I give up” there’s a lifetime.  It’s the difference between the path you walk and the one you leave behind; it’s the gap between who you are capable of being and who you have become; it’s the legroom for the fairy tales you’ll tell yourself in the future about what could have been.
2. There is no success without unrelenting love.  Love is the foundation of human progress.  Don’t give up on it.  Instead, love what you do, until you can do what you love.  Love where you are, until you can be where you love.  Love the people you are with, until you can be with the people you love most.
3. Putting in extra love and effort—doing the hard things—is always worth it.  Because those are the things that ultimately define you.  Those are the things that make the difference between existing and living—between knowing the path and walking the path—between a life of mediocrity and a life filled with progress and fulfillment.
4. The most powerful weapon against immediate stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.  Train your mind to see the silver linings.  Positivity is a choice.  The happiness and effectiveness of your life in the long run depends on the quality of your thoughts today.
5. Being positive doesn’t mean ignoring the negative; it means overcoming the negative.  There’s a big difference between the two, and it all starts with your thinking.
6. Life will take things from you, and give things to you, gradually and continuously.  It’s funny how we outgrow what we once thought we couldn’t live without, and then we fall in love with what we didn’t even know we wanted.  Do your best to embrace life’s uncertainties as they arise.  Some of the best chapters in your life won’t have a title you feel fully comfortable with until later.  Don’t give up too soon.
7. The petty drama of an average day doesn’t need to get the best of you.  Be selective in your battles.  You can’t control how other people receive your energy.  Anything you do or say gets filtered through the lens of whatever they are going through at the moment, which has nothing to do with you.  Just keep doing your thing with as much love and integrity as possible.
8. When your marriage, parenting, faith, etc. gets tough, it’s not an immediate sign that you’re doing it wrong.  These intimate, intricate aspects of life are toughest when you’re doing them right—when you’re dedicating time, having the tough conversations, and making daily sacrifices.
9. Hard situations build strong people.  You may have seen better days, but you have also seen worse.  You might not have all your wants, but you do have what you need right now.  You woke up with a few aches and pains, but you woke up.  Your life may not be perfect, but it is good.  And more good things are coming down the road as long as you keep moving forward.
10. Inner strength, courage and love don’t always sing out loud.  Sometimes these qualities are merely embodied by a deep breath and a soft whisper at the end of the day that says, “I’ll try my best again tomorrow.”

Now, it’s your turn…

Angel and I have spent the past decade working with hundreds of coaching clients, course students, and live event attendees who struggle with everything we’ve just examined together in this article.  And we struggle sometimes too.  So, if you’re struggling in any way right now, please know that you are not alone.  Just keep doing your best to love every step openly and continuously—to do the hard things you need to do—so you can step forward again with grace.  Watch this short video clip we created for you:

And if you’re up to it, we’d love to know:

• Which part of this article (or video) resonates the most with you right now, and why?

Please leave a comment below and share your thoughts.

Also, if you haven’t done so already, be sure to sign-up for our free newsletter to receive new articles like this in your inbox each week.