Wiki Lurks

A-ha! I’ve found the article I alluded to in my last post. It was: 10 Virtually Instant Ways to Improve Your Life. What a fantastic title – the concept that with a few minor, virtually unnoticable tweaks, you become rich, beautiful, successful and able to eat chocolate til it oozes out of your ears without putting on an ounce. Of course reality isn’t like that, and in fact this list isn’t the usual, stop smoking, eat healthily, get some exercise, marry a goat blah blah blah of other lists. It is subtly different; it’s not about what you do, but about how you think. Of course one can argue with the premise that one can change one’s thoughts in an instant. Nothing is that simple, apart from instant mash. Anyway, I reproduce it here.

1. Stop jumping to conclusions. There are two common ways this habit increases people’s difficulties. First, they assume that they know what is going to happen, so they stop paying attention and act on their assumption instead. Human beings are lousy fortune-tellers. Most of what they assume is wrong. That makes the action wrong too. The second aspect of this habit is playing the mind-reader and assuming you know why people do what they do or what they’re thinking. Wrong again, big time. More relationships are destroyed by this particular kind of stupidity than by any other.
2. Don’t dramatize. Lots of people inflate small setbacks into life-threatening catastrophes and react accordingly. This habit makes mountains out of molehills and gives people anxieties that either don’t exist or are so insignificant they aren’t worth worrying about anyway. Why do they do it? Who knows? Maybe to make themselves feel and seem more important. Whatever the reason, it’s silly as well as destructive.
3. Don’t invent rules. A huge proportion of those “oughts” and “shoulds” that you carry around are most likely needless. All that they do for you is make you feel nervous or guilty. What’s the point? When you use these imaginary rules on yourself, you clog your mind with petty restrictions and childish orders. And when you try to impose them on others, you make yourself into a bully, a boring nag, or a self-righteous bigot.
4. Avoid stereotyping or labeling people or situations. The words you use can trip you up. Negative and critical language produces the same flavor of thinking. Forcing things into pre-set categories hides their real meaning and limits your thinking to no purpose. See what’s there. Don’t label. You’ll be surprised at what you find.
5. Quit being a perfectionist. Life isn’t all or nothing, black or white. Many times, good enough means exactly what it says. Search for the perfect job and you’ll likely never find it. Meanwhile, all the others will look worse than they are. Try for the perfect relationship and you’ll probably spend your life alone. Perfectionism is a mental sickness that will destroy all your pleasure and send you in search of what can never be attained.
6. Don’t over-generalize. One or two setbacks are not a sign of permanent failure. The odd triumph doesn’t turn you into a genius. A single event—good or bad—or even two or three don’t always point to a lasting trend. Usually things are just what they are, nothing more.
7. Don’t take things so personally. Most people, even your friends and colleagues, aren’t talking about you, thinking about you, or concerned with you at all for 99% of the time. The majority of folk in your organization or neighborhood have probably never heard of you and don’t especially want to. The ups and downs of life, the warmth and coldness of others, aren’t personal at all. Pretending that they are will only make you more miserable than is needed.
8. Don’t assume your emotions are trustworthy. How you feel isn’t always a good indicator of how things are. Just because you feel it, that doesn’t make it true. Sometimes that emotion comes from nothing more profound than being tired, hungry, annoyed, or about to get a head-cold. The future won’t change because you feel bad—nor because you feel great. Feelings may be true, but they aren’t the truth.
9. Don’t let life get you down. Keep practicing being optimistic. If you expect bad things in your life and work, you’ll always find them. A negative mind-set is like looking at the world through distorting, grimy lenses. You spot every blemish and overlook or discount everything else. It’s amazing what isn’t there until you start to look for it. Of course, if you decide to look for signs of positive things, you’ll find those too.
10. Don’t hang on to the past. This is my most important suggestion of all: let go and move on. Most of the anger, frustration, misery, and despair in this world come from people clinging to past hurts and problems. The more you turn them over in your mind, the worse you’ll feel and the bigger they’ll look. Don’t try to fight misery. Let go and move on. Do that and you’ve removed just about all its power to hurt you.

This is a fantastic list! Apart from the last one – I remain unconvinced that when karma is taking its time to even the score, a helping hand might not go amiss, but nevertheless. But there at No. 8 is the one that stuck in my mind: Don’t assume your emotions are trustworthy. It even gives a few benign, non-contraversial examples: hungry, tired, annoyed. To which, I might add, pre-menstrual. What? I’m a woman, I’m allowed to say it. Look down & check your underpants – if they’re lumpy, you are not.

Are mental habits easier to change than physical ones? Phobics would say not, Paul McKenna would disagree. But both physical and mental habits improve with attention and effort. These are worthy ones to attempt.

So – Epiphany. Have I had one?  I started this blog to help edge myself out of a rut, and relieve my unemployed frustrations. I came up with an arbitrary list of 5, for no better reason than it makes a snappy title, and I’ve been concentrating on those. As a review, they were in precis:

1. Don’t make New Year’s resolutions.
2. Stop buying chocolate.
3. Start a blog
4. Get a job.
5. Don’t do things I “should”, instead do things I “want”.

Listed like that, I’ve realised that I ranked them from easy to hard – well aren’t I intrinsically organised! The first is of course very easy – I’m sure I’m not alone in my facility to do nothing.

The second cycles between simple and tricky. I’ve noticed over the years that when I am stressed or unhappy, I buy chocolate. Seriously – I associate buying chocolate with rebellion and comfort, and I’m soothed by having it in the fridge. It can sit there for a week or two, but eventually I’ll eat it, so if I stop buying it… I don’t buy/eat biscuits or cake. Probably alcohol & bread are the main sources of my flab, but I’m not ready to give either of those up. I’ll think about cutting down some point!

The third has been startlingly simple from conception to action. From thinking of the domain name (of which more in a future post) to registering, installing Word Press, choosing a theme and uploading the first post took all of two hours. Geek!

The fourth is an interesting one. I was quite prepared to have 6 months off, but was contacted while I was travelling and had an interview lined within a day of getting back. It all seemed extremely promising until it melted away like an ice-cube in the midday sun, with no real explanation. After that, an extended period of sulking was disguised by a potential opening with a friend’s new business which didn’t come to fruition. The final stimulus was a combination of irritation at signing on and a friend getting a new job at the same time. Of course, starting to job hunt 10 days before Christmas isn’t ideal, but I got one interview in before Christmas and it hasn’t put them off. Another company has also got in touch, but they seem unsure what exactly they want to recruit. But I’m hopeful that something will resolve in the next few weeks.

And finally, the biggie – do the things I want, not the things I should. And within this deceptively simple statement lies the devil of detail. This last six months should have been glorious – lots of free time to do…what? Well, not knowing how long I had to eek out the money, the habit soon arose not to go out so much, in case I spent unnecessary cash, which rapidly degenerated into a swamp of sofa surfing. But if that was what I wanted, what was the problem? Except it wasn’t. And it is around this theme of understanding of and motivation to do that this blog will whine on about.