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June 17 - October 24, 2024
In short, routine is important because habitualness creates mood, and mood creates the “nurture” aspect of your personality, not to mention that letting yourself be jerked around by impulsiveness is a breeding ground for everything you essentially do not want.
Your habits create your mood, and your mood is a filter through which you experience your life.
You must learn to let your conscious decisions dictate your day—not your fears or impulses.
An untamed mind is a minefield.
Learning to craft routine is the equivalent of learning to let your conscious choices about what your day will be about guide you, letting all the other, temporary crap fall to the wayside.
Happiness is not how many things you do, but how well you do them.
Happiness is not experiencing something else; it’s continually experiencing what you already have in new and different ways.
When you regulate your daily actions, you deactivate your “fight or flight” instincts because you’re no longer confronting the unknown.
As children, routine gives us a feeling of safety. As adults, it gives us a feeling of purpose.
You feel content because routine consistently reaffirms a decision you already made.
As your body self-regulates, routine becomes the pathway to “flow2.”
When we don’t settle into routine, we teach ourselves that “fear” is an indicator that we’re doing the wrong thing, rather than just being very invested in the outcome.
A lack of routine is just a breeding ground for perpetual procrastination.
10 Things Emotionally Intelligent People do not Do
They don’t assume that the way they think and feel about a situation is the way it is in reality, nor how it will turn out in the end.
Their emotional base points are not external.
They don’t assume to know what it is that will make them truly happy.
They don’t think that being fearful is a sign they are on the wrong path.
Fear means you’re trying to move toward something you love, but your old beliefs, or unhealed experiences, are getting in the way.
They know that happiness is a choice, but they don’t feel the need to make it all the time.
They don’t allow their thoughts to be chosen for them.
They recognize that infallible composure is not emotional intelligence.
They know that a feeling will not kill them.
all things, even the worst, are transitory.
They don’t just become close friends with anyone.
They don’t confuse a bad feeling for a bad life.
They do not try to inform people of their ignorance. When you accuse someone of being wrong, you close them off to considering another perspective by heightening their defenses. If you first validate their stance (“That’s interesting, I never thought of it that way…”) and then present your own opinion (“Something I recently learned is this…”) and then let them know that they still hold their own power in the conversation by asking their opinion (“What do you think about that?”), you open them up to engaging in a conversation where both of you can learn rather than just defend.
They do not post anything online they would be embarrassed to show to a parent, explain to a child, or have an employer find. Aside from the fact that at some point or another, one if not all of those things will come to pass, posting anything that you are not confident to support means you are not being genuine to yourself (you are behaving on behalf of the part of you that wants other people to validate it).
Their primary relationship is to themselves, and they work on it tirelessly. The main thing socially intelligent people understand is that your relationship to everyone else is an extension of your relationship to yourself.
It usually takes a bit of discomfort to break through to a new understanding, to release a limiting belief, to motivate ourselves to create real change.
So healing is really just letting yourself feel.
It’s letting yourself filter and process what you had to suppress at the time to keep going, maybe even to survive.
The feelings you most suppress are the most important ways you guide yourself. Your apprehension to listen is not your own desire. It’s fear of being something more or less or greater or worse or simply different than those around you have implied they will accept.
20 Signs you’re doing Better than you think You Are You paid the bills this month and maybe even had extra to spend on nonessentials. It doesn’t matter how much you belabored the checks as they went out; the point is that they did, and you figured it out regardless. You question yourself. You doubt your life. You feel miserable some days. This means you’re still open to growth. This means you can be objective and self-aware. The best people go home at the end of the day and think: “or…maybe there’s another way.” You have a job. For however many hours, at whatever rate, you are earning money
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Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton call it the “knowing-doing gap,” or the experience of knowing the best thing to do, but doing something else anyway6
101 Things more worth Thinking about than Whatever’s Consuming You The way it will feel to have the life you want. The place you’ll live, the clothes you will wear, what you will buy at the supermarket, how much money you’ll save, what work you’ll be most proud to have done. What you’ll do with your weekends, what color your sheets will be, what you’ll take photos of. The parts of yourself you need to work on, not because someone else doesn’t love them, but because you don’t. The fact that sometimes, the ultimate expression of self-love is admitting you don’t like yourself and coming up with
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“You cannot selectively numb emotion. When we numb [hard feelings], we numb joy, we numb gratitude, we numb happiness.” Brené Brown argues that you cannot numb yourself to one experience without numbing yourself to everything else10. You cannot disregard sadness without also making yourself immune to happiness. This is to say, it’s healthier to experience everything, the good and the bad.
“The way we talk to our children becomes their inner voice.”
Forgetting what our bodies were meant to do—laugh and play and jump and hug and love—and there is literally zero evolutionary advantage in having chiseled hipbones to help you do any of that.
Finding fulfillment in work is never about pursuing your idea of what your “purpose” is. It is always about infusing purpose into whatever it is you already do.
Aspire to be someone who gives things meaning, not who seeks things to give them meaning. Rather than chasing “success,” chase kindness. Rather than believe wealth is the mark of a life well lived, believe that intelligence is, or kindness is, or open-mindedness is.
So here you go—the 16 most important questions you will ever ask yourself: What, and who, is worth suffering for? What would you stand for if you knew that nobody would judge you? What would you do if you knew that nobody would judge you? Based on your daily routines, where will you be in five years? Ten? Twenty? Whom do you admire most, and why? What do you not want anybody else to know about you? What are a few things you thought you would never get over while you were going through them? Why did they seem so insurmountable? How did you? What are your greatest accomplishments so far? What
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Anna Deavere Smith, self-esteem is what really gives us a feeling of well-being.
“[Self-esteem is knowing] that we can determine our own course and that we can travel that course. It’s not that we travel the course alone, but we need the feeling of agency—that if everything were to fall apart, we could find a way to put things back together again.”
Self-esteem is not how much confidence you have in how well people perceive you, but how much confidence you have in whether or not you can manage your life.
Living consciously.
Self-acceptance.
Self-responsibility.
Self-assertiveness.
Living purposefully.
