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That American can-do attitude. It was the exact opposite of my English/Irish pessimism. It made me feel like anything was possible.
Like eating chocolate cake or watching old episodes of Friends, I read self-help for comfort. These books acknowledged the insecurities and anxieties I felt but was always to ashamed to talk about. They made my personal angst seem like a normal part of being human. Reading them made me feel less alone.
‘OK, but you’ve got to actually do stuff,’ said Sheila when I told her my idea on the phone a few days later. ‘You can’t just read books that make you analyse your feelings for the whole year.’ Her tone implied I’d just use this as a massive opportunity to navel-gaze and become even more self-obsessed than usual.
And that was the problem. I was good at ideas. I was also quite good at talking about ideas. Doing them, though, well, that was different.
Feel the Fear was written by a woman telling other women to just go out and do something – do anything. Not for someone else but for themselves.
Susan’s basic premise is that if we sit around waiting for the day that we feel brave enough to do the things we want to do, we’ll never do anything.
In fact, according to Susan, we should be scared every day because that’s a sign that we’re pushing ourselves and moving forwards. If you are not feeling any fear you are not growing.
Every time we avoid doing something it makes us feel weaker, while facing a fear, even if it’s a small one, makes us feel strong, empowered and in control.
Susan says that we are only fooling ourselves when we put things off. She calls it the ‘when/then’ game – we tell ourselves we’ll approach the guy we like when we’re slimmer or we’ll apply for the promotion when we have more experience. We think that fear will go if we just wait for the right time but when we get to the right time we find more excuses. Doing something new is always going to be scary. The only way for it to stop being scary is to do it.
One explained that in our cave woman days we relied on being part of the group for survival and so doing anything that sets us up for potential rejection feels terrifying because how are you going to fight off a sabre-toothed tiger if you are on your own? It was something I’d never thought about. Another article suggested I imagine that I had to either do a quick speech or face a sabre-toothed tiger. They reckoned that when we compare public speaking to vicious mutilation, the talk seems OK.
And maybe if I didn’t always have my guard up, waiting for people to judge me, I might realize that they are there to support and help … because deep down we’re all as scared as each other.
Surely that brush with death should have left me with a ‘life’s short, seize the day!’ mentality? But it hadn’t. Instead it taught me that things can – and do – go wrong.
Psychologists say that there are two sources to all our fears. The first involves our physical safety – so people are scared of heights, snakes and fire because they can kill us. The second source of fear is of social isolation, which is why we are so scared of looking stupid in front of people or of being rejected.
‘Our relationship to money is a direct reflection of how much we value ourselves.’
Kate suggests looking through your statements to find the sources of what she calls ‘financial energy leaks’ – spending that makes you feel bad rather than good. The aim is to cut down on these leaks.
if you want money in your life you have to learn to
receive as well as to give.
She says that if you refuse things such as compliments, or letting your friend treat you to dinner, you are ‘...
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Kate says we must sell everything we don’t use because it’s a source of cash and also in Feng Shui clutter is bad because it blocks our capacity to get new things.
bestseller. Cue The Secret. The book’s basic formula is this: Ask, Believe and Receive.
‘The idea is we’re all living our lives in fear of rejection. We don’t do half the things we want to do because we’re scared people will say “no”. But with this you learn that it might feel horrible to get rejected but it won’t kill you. And people who have played the game say that it’s much harder to get rejected than you think it is – lots of times you get a “yes” when you think you’ll get a “no”.’
Jason had used a tool of psychotherapy called exposure therapy or flooding. This is when you force yourself to face your fears so that eventually you become desensitized. It’s used to treat phobias of snakes and heights.
Gerald hardly ever left his kitchen and yet, somehow, he had touched hundreds of lives with his kindness and patience. He listened to people. He was there.
‘I get up every day and know exactly what’s going to happen – you wake up every day and anything could happen. Make the most of that.’
I’d hardly ever been rejected in reality because I’d gone out of my way to avoid it – at work, with friends, in love.
JK Rowling: ‘It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously you might not have lived at all. In which case you have failed by default.’
‘If you’re feeling stressed about something, say “Fuck It” and you will feel instantly better.’
‘Any form of desire and striving involves some form of tension. When you let go of the desire, the tension goes. And the relaxation that replaces it tends to attract good things to your life.’
if you’re in the right place, doing the right thing, you have amazing strength. If you’re somewhere you don’t want to be, somewhere that someone else has chosen for you (a job, a relationship, etc.) it will make you sick and tired and weak. This is how most of us spend our lives.
The first need is for Certainty/Comfort – this is our need to feel in control and secure. The second is the opposite: our need for Variety and Uncertainty. The third need is Significance. We all need to feel important and unique. Tony explained that some of us get a feeling of significance from our work, some achieve it by having a flash car or by getting a thousand Twitter followers. Tony said that you can even get significance by committing crimes – sounds strange but if you hold a knife up to someone you are suddenly very important in their eyes. Need four is Love and Connection. Need five
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how to get into a ‘peak state’ by thinking of the best moments of our lives, the moments we felt strongest and most at peace.
In order to make changes we needed to focus on the benefits we’d get from the change and also scare ourselves witless with the thought of what would happen if we didn’t change.
First we were asked to identify our limiting beliefs, the beliefs that shaped our world and stopped us from getting what we wanted.
Get practical instead of emotional. Take action instead of getting lost up my own navel-gazing behind. By the end of the month
‘Self-help books only serve to make neurotic people more neurotic.’
psychologists who argued that in periods of economic gloom people look for comfort – which is why angel books, cards and tattoos, are now so popular, even in our non-religious times. We can’t handle what’s happening on earth so we put our faith in something else.
we cannot seek happiness as a goal in itself; instead happiness only comes from being a good person.
‘Happiness is a by-product of service and a life of integrity, and when people don’t live true to principles and they are not involved in service, you are going to find depression and despair,’
• Habit 1: ‘Be proactive’ We may not be able to control what happens to us but we can control our reaction to it. Stop blaming others, stop being a victim, take responsibility for yourself, your actions, your words and your thoughts.
• Habit 3: ‘Put first things first’ We all get distracted by emails and work dramas, but remember to focus on what is important to us rather than what seems urgent.
• Habit 4: ‘Think win-win’ Real success should not occur at the expense of others. • Habit 5: ‘Seek to understand/then be understood’ Go into conversations prepared to listen – really listen – to the other person.
‘Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances …’
But in that moment Tolle had an epiphany: ‘If I cannot live with myself, there must be two of me: the “I” and the “self” that “I” cannot live with.’ He then concluded that only one of these selves was real and, as soon as he realized this, all his negative thoughts stopped.
Quite often the voice isn’t even focusing on what’s happening now, it’s rehashing some old situation or worrying about an imagined one in the future.
I thought that I was using this tough line to spur myself on, but it had the opposite effect. My bullying voice took the joy out of everything and drained me of energy.
The truth was that I was getting a perverse pleasure out of my ‘poor me’ doom-and-gloom narrative. ‘The mind, conditioned as it is by the past, always seeks to re-create what it knows and is familiar with. Even if it is painful, at least it is familiar,’ says Tolle. ‘Observe the peculiar pleasure you get from being unhappy.’
Tolle says it’s down to our ‘ego’ – which he defines as the false identity we create for ourselves based on our thoughts and the stories we tell ourselves. We all think that someone with a big ego is someone who thinks they are better than other people, but actually it can be the other way around too.
‘Every ego wants to be special,’ Tolle once explained to Oprah. ‘If it can’t be special by being superior to others, it’s also quite happy with being especially miserable. Someone will say, “I have a headache,” and another says, “I’ve had a headache for weeks.” People actually compete to see who is more miserable! The ego doing that is just as big as the one that thinks it’s superior to someone else.’ He adds that many of us build our identities around our problems and so we are loath to give them up because it would feel like losing who we are.
that our biggest addiction is to ...
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Tolle says that at any moment, if we are worrying, we should ask ourselves, ‘Is there a problem right now?’ and ninety-nine per cent of the time there isn’t.
