I didn't know where best to throw this section in the order of things, so I'm putting it towards the front of my series rather than the end because this is how it is listed in every self-help book out there. This section is my harp back to traditional self-help, because I think this tactic works.
Reread:
INTRODUCTION
PART 1 - Create Space
PERSUADE YOURSELF
Back when I first discovered self-help and positive literature, including some NLP (Neurolinguistic Programming), and positive psychology, one of the first steps that these books pointed out was to give yourself a pep talk every day. There is something magical to telling yourself that you are confident, telling yourself that you're going to make that next big sale, or telling yourself that you can accomplish the task before you. Doing these things leads you to the success you're hoping for.
Several very intelligent people recommend looking yourself in the mirror each morning and complimenting yourself. I tried this for about a month and I think I saw some great results from it, but I think that this is only on the surface of some deeper truth. I think that underneath this important step is persuading yourself that you can heal yourself and that you can be happy again.
When I hit my lowest low in life, I was a little over 20 years old. It was the winter time in West Virginia during the storm they called Snowmageddon that hit the east coast, including Pennsylvania, Maine and New York and a little town called Kingwood, WV. I remember taking a picture of me standing next to a pile of snow on my porch that my memory believes was taller than I am (6'0). The snow had fallen just three or four times but it closed down every road and store in town. We weren't going anywhere.
I was on an LDS mission. I was doing what I believed in--or trying to--but I felt more like Rodrigo in Roland Joffe's film, "The Mission" (1986) during the scene in which he carries his armor through the Amazon. I carried a lot of guilt and shame with me through my mission because of the things I did before my mission. Growing up in this religion it was ingrained in me that sex before marriage was one of the worst sins a person could commit, next to murder, and unfortunately the moment arose when my girlfriend at the time told me she was pregnant and I threw my own beliefs out the window and told her to have an abortion. I was Judas in my own mind. Serving a mission was supposed to absolve me of my sins and give me the opportunity to give back to others and look beyond myself, but it didn't allow me that.
I told myself and other people that I was going on a mission to benefit people other than myself; my primary intentions were noble. Absolving my sins and proving to myself that I can accomplish what I set out to, these were my secondary motives. I definitely thought I worked hard to get out on a mission and that I had accomplished a major goal in life and hoped that it would be a refreshing experience to strengthen my core beliefs. My father and I had flipped a house to earn the money for my mission, I had read my scriptures and prayed daily since I was 15 (then 19) only missed a couple days of church in my life, stood up and bore testimony every first sunday of the month for years. The day I left I felt like I was on fire because I had prepared so much for this monumentous experience of my life--expectations were high and I was so positive because everyone supported me and made me think I was doing the right thing. I felt good.
But my mission hit me with the darkest times in my entire life thus far. I was shut down and snubbed out in a political game played by my superiors who, in my mind, were on missions, just as I was, for selfish motives. Fame was the coveted prize of everyone around me. Strict obedience, zero questioning, and sucking up lead to that fame and fame lead to power and respect. I became the bane of my mission president when other missionaries told him that I was stubborn, proud, and created conflict wherever I went because I wasn't sucking up and I have an inquisitive mind. I felt like I was under attack all the time and that my efforts were never good enough and was always suspicious of my colleagues because I suspected they were going to use me as a scapegoat in order to get ahead. I received conflicting information from members of the church on one hand and other missionaries on the other--the members grew to love me and told me I was the best missionary they had ever experienced, yet the missionaries made me think I was the worst, made me feel hated.
I became very crazy, internally--externally I was fine, or made an attempt to be. I tried to be strong, tried not to show emotion, tried to not let things get me down, but a conflict was eating me alive. I was dealing with the guilt of my "sins" from before my mission on a regular basis--they made me think the hardships I faced were related as though God were cursing me. I dealt with the conflicting views of members vs. missionaries and thought that one or both were wrong and that I was on the wrong side of the line. I was physically exhausted all of the time, didn't sleep enough, didn't eat healthy enough, possibly suffered from malnutrition and overall my mind wasn't working correctly because of the damage being caused on my brain physically and psychologically. I was verbally abused by the people I met on the streets who knew nothing of the religion I was trying to share with them or me as a person. Worst of all, I went on my mission to help people and I grew to feel worthless because I wasn't helping anyone and my leaders told me conflicting instructions that preventing me from helping anyone the way I knew how to help people--raking someone's leaves, shoveling their snow, or assisting them with tasks they were too elderly to manage were considered a waste of time to my superiors. When the snowstorm hit, I was locked away in our apartment and suffered from a form of cabin fever. We couldn't go outside and yet I didn't want to stay in. I fought a battle with guilt thinking that I should always be working always using my time wisely because it wasn't my time--it was time I had given to my God and therefore I should maximize my efficiency. I locked myself away, did little to nothing for myself, and it was eating me alive.
My problem wasn't all of the conflict however, my problem was that I didn't know any different--didn't know that I didn't have to be unhappy. Just like Rodrigio who believed he had to carry the huge weight around, I was carrying the weight of my past and the weight of myself, I was internalizing the verbal attacks on me by my superiors and carrying the weight of self-doubt caused by the conflicting world around me. The hardships I faced on my mission were trivial--circumstances brought me down, people were mean to me, people I thought I could trust were nowhere to be found, I was purposefully isolated from family, I felt very little love and was under constant stress--but these things are nothing. We humans aren't made to be crippled by circumstances, we're made to survive. We're made to thrive in hardship. For many people living in the world today, the purpose of life is discovering happiness in the hard times. As bad as my situation became, I believe that if I knew what I know now, none of that would have mattered and I wouldn't have been brought to contemplating suicide again and ultimately, thankfully, settling with coming home from my mission first to decide if life really was so bad or if I was just trapped in a bad situation.
In order to be happy, you have to persuade yourself to believe that you can be happy. You have to persuade yourself to believe that you are worth something to someone (yourself) and that your life matters, that the experiences you have and the circumstances that you are in, they all matter and they all make up who you are. You have to convince yourself that there is hope out there, that you don't have to be so sad, that whatever circumstances are bringing you down, they are only temporary. I would say a majority of the sad times in my life were circumstantial. They happened and then they passed; even though at the time I thought they would never pass they made time seem to slow down.
Hope is an important part of happiness--at its base I think it is somewhat cheesy and I never appreciate it when someone else tells me to have hope because the lack of hope is the inability to appreciate things the way they are. Everyone knows that hope is the firm belief that something better is going to happen, but few people realize that the lack of hope isn't that something worse is going to happen--that's dread. The lack of hope is the inability to see and appreciate the way things are in the present. Having hope makes you appreciate the way things are now and where they are going. Hope means you're comfortable with your life.
When you're depressed you're not comfortable with your life. When you're depressed you see other people and think it would be better to trade your life for theirs. The root of what most self-help books teach is that you are capable of doing it on your own--that you are capable of becoming comfortable with the way things are. Self-help teaches hope.--that's right, teaches--because it's something you have to learn. Hope isn't given at birth, it is learned.
Self confidence is also learned, not inherited. Confidence means being comfortable with yourself in your present situation. People who are confident learn confidence through a pattern of trial, error, and success--they take risks, devote themselves, and then when they see success it adds to their confidence. When a baby first learns to walk, they lack confidence and instead have doubt and fear. Doubt leads them to not want to try because it is the belief that their actions don't bring about the desired results, and so they pick up their feet so that a helpful adult can't set them on their feet. Fear leads them to quit after starting but before they see success and so they only go as far as one step or they force themselves to fall on their butt. Confidence replaces fear and doubt, but the only way to build confidence is to see success--to observe the connection between actions and successful outcomes, to take one step while holding the hand of a trusted adult who will catch them when the are about to fall, or to hold onto a wall or walker.
I think the underlying motive of self-help books is to give you micro examples of success that you can build upon until you have enough hope to try new, bigger things. This develops a kind of confidence muscle just like walking develops strength and balance in a child. Complimenting yourself each morning teaches you that you do in fact like things about yourself and leads to the hope that others will like things about yourself, and that is enough for you to make an attempt and open up to other people. The trick is to persuade yourself by whatever means to believe two things: that your goal of being happy is achievable by anyone who tries regardless of circumstances, and that you have the tools to achieve that goal.
The tools used to convince other people are the same tools you will have to use on yourself, except you can even go as far as manipulating yourself. Some good tools I have found are:
Repetition/Persistence - Constantly tell yourself things as though they are fact until you start to believe it
Apply Logic - Logic is merely "this leads to this... leads to this...," such as if I get out of bed, I will have time to go to the gym, and working out makes me feel good about myself, therefore I will get out of bed now.
Don't beat yourself up - when you fail at things or don't do them the way that you would like, which you will at some point, rather than reflecting on how bad you are, remind yourself that you have to fail a few times before you learn what works. You'll feel sad even moments after you had a great experience and rather than beat yourself up over being so inconsistent, tell yourself that you're in a learning process and that in order for you to learn you have to have moments like this.
Compliment yourself - Periodically throughout the day plan on stopping everything you do to giving yourself a mental compliment and commit to not continue doing anything until you find something you like about yourself. This forces you to pay closer attention to the things you like about yourself rather than focusing on all of the negative.
Bribe yourself - After you recognize your mood change for the worse, promise yourself something as a bribe for the moment that you pull out of it. Make sure that you follow through with your bribe though and don't set too high of a bounty.
Leave notes to yourself - Notes help you remember things and they can bring a level of excitement if you receive them unexpectedly. Try mailing yourself a letter with a positive message about yourself and things you are learning about hope and confidence.
Pretend you are already there - Acting has a way of making the unreal real. Give your best impression of a happy, confident person and you might just learn a few things about how confidence and hope really work.
The second ingredient to my All-Natural Anti-Depressant is persuading yourself to believe, to have hope, and to be confident. Use whatever means necessary, even lie to yourself if you have to because individual hope and self-confidence are worth it.
Next: PART 3
Several very intelligent people recommend looking yourself in the mirror each morning and complimenting yourself. I tried this for about a month and I think I saw some great results from it, but I think that this is only on the surface of some deeper truth. I think that underneath this important step is persuading yourself that you can heal yourself and that you can be happy again.
When I hit my lowest low in life, I was a little over 20 years old. It was the winter time in West Virginia during the storm they called Snowmageddon that hit the east coast, including Pennsylvania, Maine and New York and a little town called Kingwood, WV. I remember taking a picture of me standing next to a pile of snow on my porch that my memory believes was taller than I am (6'0). The snow had fallen just three or four times but it closed down every road and store in town. We weren't going anywhere.
I was on an LDS mission. I was doing what I believed in--or trying to--but I felt more like Rodrigo in Roland Joffe's film, "The Mission" (1986) during the scene in which he carries his armor through the Amazon. I carried a lot of guilt and shame with me through my mission because of the things I did before my mission. Growing up in this religion it was ingrained in me that sex before marriage was one of the worst sins a person could commit, next to murder, and unfortunately the moment arose when my girlfriend at the time told me she was pregnant and I threw my own beliefs out the window and told her to have an abortion. I was Judas in my own mind. Serving a mission was supposed to absolve me of my sins and give me the opportunity to give back to others and look beyond myself, but it didn't allow me that.
I told myself and other people that I was going on a mission to benefit people other than myself; my primary intentions were noble. Absolving my sins and proving to myself that I can accomplish what I set out to, these were my secondary motives. I definitely thought I worked hard to get out on a mission and that I had accomplished a major goal in life and hoped that it would be a refreshing experience to strengthen my core beliefs. My father and I had flipped a house to earn the money for my mission, I had read my scriptures and prayed daily since I was 15 (then 19) only missed a couple days of church in my life, stood up and bore testimony every first sunday of the month for years. The day I left I felt like I was on fire because I had prepared so much for this monumentous experience of my life--expectations were high and I was so positive because everyone supported me and made me think I was doing the right thing. I felt good.
But my mission hit me with the darkest times in my entire life thus far. I was shut down and snubbed out in a political game played by my superiors who, in my mind, were on missions, just as I was, for selfish motives. Fame was the coveted prize of everyone around me. Strict obedience, zero questioning, and sucking up lead to that fame and fame lead to power and respect. I became the bane of my mission president when other missionaries told him that I was stubborn, proud, and created conflict wherever I went because I wasn't sucking up and I have an inquisitive mind. I felt like I was under attack all the time and that my efforts were never good enough and was always suspicious of my colleagues because I suspected they were going to use me as a scapegoat in order to get ahead. I received conflicting information from members of the church on one hand and other missionaries on the other--the members grew to love me and told me I was the best missionary they had ever experienced, yet the missionaries made me think I was the worst, made me feel hated.
I became very crazy, internally--externally I was fine, or made an attempt to be. I tried to be strong, tried not to show emotion, tried to not let things get me down, but a conflict was eating me alive. I was dealing with the guilt of my "sins" from before my mission on a regular basis--they made me think the hardships I faced were related as though God were cursing me. I dealt with the conflicting views of members vs. missionaries and thought that one or both were wrong and that I was on the wrong side of the line. I was physically exhausted all of the time, didn't sleep enough, didn't eat healthy enough, possibly suffered from malnutrition and overall my mind wasn't working correctly because of the damage being caused on my brain physically and psychologically. I was verbally abused by the people I met on the streets who knew nothing of the religion I was trying to share with them or me as a person. Worst of all, I went on my mission to help people and I grew to feel worthless because I wasn't helping anyone and my leaders told me conflicting instructions that preventing me from helping anyone the way I knew how to help people--raking someone's leaves, shoveling their snow, or assisting them with tasks they were too elderly to manage were considered a waste of time to my superiors. When the snowstorm hit, I was locked away in our apartment and suffered from a form of cabin fever. We couldn't go outside and yet I didn't want to stay in. I fought a battle with guilt thinking that I should always be working always using my time wisely because it wasn't my time--it was time I had given to my God and therefore I should maximize my efficiency. I locked myself away, did little to nothing for myself, and it was eating me alive.
My problem wasn't all of the conflict however, my problem was that I didn't know any different--didn't know that I didn't have to be unhappy. Just like Rodrigio who believed he had to carry the huge weight around, I was carrying the weight of my past and the weight of myself, I was internalizing the verbal attacks on me by my superiors and carrying the weight of self-doubt caused by the conflicting world around me. The hardships I faced on my mission were trivial--circumstances brought me down, people were mean to me, people I thought I could trust were nowhere to be found, I was purposefully isolated from family, I felt very little love and was under constant stress--but these things are nothing. We humans aren't made to be crippled by circumstances, we're made to survive. We're made to thrive in hardship. For many people living in the world today, the purpose of life is discovering happiness in the hard times. As bad as my situation became, I believe that if I knew what I know now, none of that would have mattered and I wouldn't have been brought to contemplating suicide again and ultimately, thankfully, settling with coming home from my mission first to decide if life really was so bad or if I was just trapped in a bad situation.
In order to be happy, you have to persuade yourself to believe that you can be happy. You have to persuade yourself to believe that you are worth something to someone (yourself) and that your life matters, that the experiences you have and the circumstances that you are in, they all matter and they all make up who you are. You have to convince yourself that there is hope out there, that you don't have to be so sad, that whatever circumstances are bringing you down, they are only temporary. I would say a majority of the sad times in my life were circumstantial. They happened and then they passed; even though at the time I thought they would never pass they made time seem to slow down.
Hope is an important part of happiness--at its base I think it is somewhat cheesy and I never appreciate it when someone else tells me to have hope because the lack of hope is the inability to appreciate things the way they are. Everyone knows that hope is the firm belief that something better is going to happen, but few people realize that the lack of hope isn't that something worse is going to happen--that's dread. The lack of hope is the inability to see and appreciate the way things are in the present. Having hope makes you appreciate the way things are now and where they are going. Hope means you're comfortable with your life.
When you're depressed you're not comfortable with your life. When you're depressed you see other people and think it would be better to trade your life for theirs. The root of what most self-help books teach is that you are capable of doing it on your own--that you are capable of becoming comfortable with the way things are. Self-help teaches hope.--that's right, teaches--because it's something you have to learn. Hope isn't given at birth, it is learned.
Self confidence is also learned, not inherited. Confidence means being comfortable with yourself in your present situation. People who are confident learn confidence through a pattern of trial, error, and success--they take risks, devote themselves, and then when they see success it adds to their confidence. When a baby first learns to walk, they lack confidence and instead have doubt and fear. Doubt leads them to not want to try because it is the belief that their actions don't bring about the desired results, and so they pick up their feet so that a helpful adult can't set them on their feet. Fear leads them to quit after starting but before they see success and so they only go as far as one step or they force themselves to fall on their butt. Confidence replaces fear and doubt, but the only way to build confidence is to see success--to observe the connection between actions and successful outcomes, to take one step while holding the hand of a trusted adult who will catch them when the are about to fall, or to hold onto a wall or walker.
I think the underlying motive of self-help books is to give you micro examples of success that you can build upon until you have enough hope to try new, bigger things. This develops a kind of confidence muscle just like walking develops strength and balance in a child. Complimenting yourself each morning teaches you that you do in fact like things about yourself and leads to the hope that others will like things about yourself, and that is enough for you to make an attempt and open up to other people. The trick is to persuade yourself by whatever means to believe two things: that your goal of being happy is achievable by anyone who tries regardless of circumstances, and that you have the tools to achieve that goal.
The tools used to convince other people are the same tools you will have to use on yourself, except you can even go as far as manipulating yourself. Some good tools I have found are:
Repetition/Persistence - Constantly tell yourself things as though they are fact until you start to believe it
Apply Logic - Logic is merely "this leads to this... leads to this...," such as if I get out of bed, I will have time to go to the gym, and working out makes me feel good about myself, therefore I will get out of bed now.
Don't beat yourself up - when you fail at things or don't do them the way that you would like, which you will at some point, rather than reflecting on how bad you are, remind yourself that you have to fail a few times before you learn what works. You'll feel sad even moments after you had a great experience and rather than beat yourself up over being so inconsistent, tell yourself that you're in a learning process and that in order for you to learn you have to have moments like this.
Compliment yourself - Periodically throughout the day plan on stopping everything you do to giving yourself a mental compliment and commit to not continue doing anything until you find something you like about yourself. This forces you to pay closer attention to the things you like about yourself rather than focusing on all of the negative.
Bribe yourself - After you recognize your mood change for the worse, promise yourself something as a bribe for the moment that you pull out of it. Make sure that you follow through with your bribe though and don't set too high of a bounty.
Leave notes to yourself - Notes help you remember things and they can bring a level of excitement if you receive them unexpectedly. Try mailing yourself a letter with a positive message about yourself and things you are learning about hope and confidence.
Pretend you are already there - Acting has a way of making the unreal real. Give your best impression of a happy, confident person and you might just learn a few things about how confidence and hope really work.
The second ingredient to my All-Natural Anti-Depressant is persuading yourself to believe, to have hope, and to be confident. Use whatever means necessary, even lie to yourself if you have to because individual hope and self-confidence are worth it.
Next: PART 3
