Other People’s Lives Aren’t What You Think

“Sometimes, late at night, I’m visited by dread and shame. I lie in bed and think of somebody else’s life. I imagine the love that they’re getting and the relief that comes from being really known. The private pleasures they share. The friends they have and the pressures they don’t. Their sense of importance. The satisfactions of their work. I imagine how fulfilled they are, and how rich their life is. In these moments, I feel empty and wanting.”

– The character Amy, in HBO’s “Enlightened”

Recently it’s come to my attention, with various people and in totally coincidental ways, that a lot of people are really struggling right now with the belief that Other People’s Lives are somehow better or more gratifying than their own. Both in my personal as well as my professional life, I’m getting the consistent feedback that some people are seeing the lives of others from a distance – whether on Facebook, Twitter or in the real world – and then filling in the blanks in such a way that they assume that those lives are glamorous, satisfying and problem-free.

The tendency to think this way is far from new, but in the age of social networking, it seems to have really amped itself up. I have friends, for example – wonderful friends with good lives – who are veering away from Facebook more and more because other people’s status updates are filling them with jealousy, as well as with the belief that their own lives are boring by comparison. As a therapist, it seems to me that this kind of thinking is not only mistaken, but that it has the potential to be psychologically damaging.

At the risk of sounding like I’m stating the obvious here: People do not, generally speaking, post pictures of themselves online when they’re crying or in an argument. They don’t post status updates about their grief, their humiliations or their low self-esteem. No, people (especially on Facebook) show us want they want us to see. Sometimes that’s intentional and deliberately crafted, but it also sometimes happens simply because people aren’t naturally inclined to post about the hard parts of their lives. That doesn’t mean that the hard parts don’t exist though! Moreover, while it may be hard to imagine, what we often underestimate when we think this way is that other people sometimes make these assumptions about us.

A couple of months ago, a client of mine came into session wanting to talk about an internal reaction that she had to a woman she’d seen walking up the street near my office. Evidently this woman was beautiful and well-dressed, and this prompted my very lovely client to make all sorts of assumptions about her. This woman had money; she was happy; she “had it all together” and “didn’t have any problems.” The funny thing about this, for me, is that this client is a very attractive and talented young woman, and she possesses many enviable attributes. I also happen to know that while there are things that have happened and are happening in her life that bring her pain, she talks about them with almost no one other than me, so I can all but guarantee that other people sometimes have the same reaction to her that she had to this woman. What’s perhaps even wilder is that this isn’t the only example of this kind of exchange that I’ve had in my clinical work recently. I’ve had several patients over the course of the past couple of months who have expressed this sentiment – that they have problems, but that other people don’t – when I have felt very sure that other people perceive them similarly.

Perhaps it’s the benefit of being a therapist, or the fact that I’ve had the privilege of knowing a number of people with seemingly charmed lives who have trusted me enough to show me the mold in their mental basements, but I just don’t buy into this notion that anybody’s life is perfect. We all have our baggage. We all suffer. Sadly, it’s the very nature of life. We only serve to make ourselves feel bad if we go around thinking that we have problems and that other people don’t.

If you ever find yourself thinking this way in the future, try to keep this one thought in mind: You never know what you don’t know about somebody else’s life. If it helps, think about some of the secrets that you keep closest to the vest (the things you’ve probably assumed that most other people don’t experience), and think about how many people you’ve told those secrets to. How many people DON’T know about some of the hardest aspects of your life? When you feel really down, do you Facebook about it? I’m guessing you don’t. So please, for Pete’s sake, don’t ever assume that other people don’t have problems.

For more information about this author, please visit, visit www.lesliecarr.com.

Photo credit: Carmela Alvarado

Deepen Your Awareness; Become Luminous

In Pali, the language of the original Buddhist texts, the term for the potent and alive energy of awareness is “tejos.” The word has several meanings. It can mean heat, flame, fire, or light, and it conveys a sense of splendor and radiance and glory. Tejos refers to a very bright energy, a strength, and a power that is luminous.

By practicing meditation, we bring forth some of this splendor, this luminosity, and this power into the activities of an ordinary day. We practice meditation to be aware in whatever we are doing. And the deeper our awareness, the greater the luminosity.

Our perceptual world is transformed when we relate fully. It is as though we are experiencing each object – each sound, each sensation, each breath — for the very first time. Even painful or unpleasant feelings become included in our sense of the fullness of life, rather than being fearfully held at bay in a futile effort to keep them away from us.

Living without immediacy in our awareness, we seek fulfillment outside of ourselves, grasping at passing experiences. It becomes easy to fall into addiction to increasing levels of stimulating sensations. These supply us with our sense of wholeness, but it is a wholeness held together with only passing phenomena. Imagine doing something very simple, perhaps something you’ve done many times before, so it doesn’t bring up a great intensity. Something like eating an apple.

If you eat the apple while paying very little attention to the sight of it, the feel of it, the smells and tastes of it, then eating the apple is not likely to be a very fulfilling experience. Feeling a mild discontent with the experience, you may be likely to blame the apple. But is it the apple’s fault? It is rare for any of us to recognize that the quality of our attention might have played a role in our feeling of dissatisfaction.

You may begin to think, “If only I could have a banana, then I would be happy. But if you find a banana and then eat it, again in a distracted or inattentive way, you will again end up feeling unsatisfied. But instead of realizing that you simply were not paying attention to the experience of eating the banana, you start to think, “My life is just too prosaic; it is so ordinary. How could anybody be happy with just apples and bananas? What I need is something exotic. I need to go out and get something unusual like a mango. Then I will be happy.”

Perhaps with some trial and tribulation, you actually do get a mango. The first few bites may be wonderful. You have not had a mango for a long time, and this is a new sensation. Soon, however, you are finishing off the exotic mango in just the same way you ate the prosaic apple and the banana, and once again you are left with a feeling of dissatisfaction. In this way we can see that mindfulness is the key to fulfillment, and in fact to life itself.

We practice meditation to make skills like mindfulness real, to take them from an abstract appreciation to a positive part of every day, to generate the force of tejos. Actually doing a meditation practice, rather than just thinking about it, is of course the hard part.

During the month of February, Sharon Salzberg is hosting a mediation program based on her latest book, “Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation: A 28-Day Program.” Participants are invited to reflect on their experiences—pleasant, difficult, and in between—on Sharon’s website and on their own blogs or websites. Comments are welcome from anyone and everyone is invited to make a commitment to 28 days of meditation practice.

For more information on how to optimize your life, visit sharonsalzberg.com.

Photo credit: Taaj Digital Studio

Happiness is a Skill Worth Developing

Over the last 17 years, I’ve seen dramatic business turnarounds in as little as a week — the only change being an increase in a person’s happiness. The results I’ve witnessed have been dramatic. My clients on Wall Street made better trades, CEOs made more profitable decisions, and sales people made more sales, all with a shift in their mindset, which led to greater well-being.

As a result, in the late 90s I decided to focus my career on the pursuit of happiness and fully investigate its effects on the success process. Over a 10-year period, I found that happiness was a skill that anyone could learn and that happiness was a hidden determinant in success. Bottom line: When entrepreneurs learn the skills to be happy, they have unexplainable increases in their results.

Four happiness skills anyone can learn

1. Give up being right.
Most people are addicted to being right, and they don’t even know it. This leads to endless argument and strife. To be happy, you must let go of this ineffective habit of thought.

Try this: Notice that “the drunk monkey” (my nickname for the chatter in your mind) has an opinion on everything, including things it knows nothing about. Opinions are vanities and are always from your perspective. Your perspective may be right for you but certainly not for everyone and everything. And yet, when you pay attention to the drunk monkey, you see that it actually believes it is right about almost everything.

The desire to be right often puts you into a resistant state, which does not lead to happiness.

To give up being right, put yourself in the other person’s shoes. Look at the world from their perspective, and acknowledge that there are multiple ways to view the situation. In short, have compassion for others.

2. Accept the situation as it is, and then take action.
A client of mine found himself in an unpleasant situation. His company was merging with another company, and he was informed that he would be losing his coveted office with the sun shining into the windows that he was accustomed to. This may sound trivial. For him, this was the end of a 10-year era, and he was very attached to what the office represented in his life. He had been angry for a week when we finally spoke. The merger had not yet happened. Yet his anger was creating dysfunction in his ability to produce sales results today.

I helped him realize that he was moving no matter how angry he got. Ultimately, he accepted this and promised to stop complaining because it was not making him feel good. We shifted his focus to defining what he wanted to create out of the merger. He described his best-case scenario. As he did, new options were illuminated, his mood changed, and his energy went up. Getting happy allowed him to get out of his resentment, see new possibilities and get creative.

In the following weeks, his sales results returned, and he discovered a compromise that would work for his new working environment

3. Quit pretending you are a psychic who can tell the future.
Just the idea of a change to his office environment caused him to hallucinate about a future he didn’t like. The problem is, he’s not psychic, so he doesn’t know what the future will hold. Yet he was suffering, right now, as if the negative future had already occurred. This is a trick the drunk monkey plays on people to strip them of their happiness.

The drunk monkey in your head is not your friend. As a biological survival mechanism, one of its functions is to predict potentially negative situations and then mobilize the body to avoid them. But most of your life is not dangerous.

Today, just remind yourself that you are not psychic and that you cannot predict the future. Work to see the situation with clarity by removing your fear and your opinions. Next, identify what you want to have happen.

4. Stop protecting yourself from people who aren’t attacking you.
A Wall Street executive was managing billions of dollars in assets, and yet he felt like nobody listened to him and that he wasn’t important. This perspective had him feeling repressed and defeated. His positive results didn’t seem to match his unhappy mindset. He felt like other people in the firm didn’t think what he had to say was important, and therefore he was an outsider and not involved in making critical decisions. He realized that taking on more responsibility was important, but he felt powerless to do so.

I asked him how he knew this was true. He told me about incidents that had occurred the year before. I asked him to consider that he had changed, they had changed, times had changed, and the world had changed since the incidents from last year. I asked him if he would be willing to run an experiment to put the drunk monkey into place so he could return to happy, fulfilled and satisfied with work. Here’s what I told him to do.

Instead of trying to keep his ideas safe, instead of wondering how he could move his objectives forward, for the next week, he should find out what other people were committed to. See what the other people in the company were working on, and discover ways to contribute to each of the people in the company. Make it a game. See if you can contribute something to someone every day for the next seven days — an idea, a contact, a resource or even just an encouraging word.

Through this process, he shifted from protecting himself from all the people who weren’t attacking him to being supportive and giving. Within the year, he became one of the most celebrated people in his company. The next year, he was recruited away by a superstar in his industry and made a partner in the firm. The trick was simple: He needed to be the change he wanted to see in the world, just like Gandhi said.

When you are happy, you are creative, approachable, flexible and easy to be with. Add those characteristics to your skill set, and you will see an immediate positive benefit.

Most people believe that happiness is something that occurs when the conditions of life are favorable. But the truth is, happiness is the skill navigating challenging situations without getting reactive. If you wait for happiness to find you, you’ll be waiting a long time. Happiness is an inside job.

Matthew Ferry is a revealer, illuminator and awakener whose point of view creates instant transformation in people’s lives. Since 1993 he has personally coached more then 8,000 people to breakthrough performance barriers and achieve unparalleled happiness and success.

Photo credit: Camdiluv

On Having Gratitude This Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving! If you’re reading this post today, and you’re currently in the U.S., you’re probably engaged in any number of annual rituals – from cooking to watching football, to silently (or not so silently) cursing family members who drive you crazy. Many of you might also be thinking about what you’re grateful for right now. If you are, I’m right there with you.

As my sister, Kris, can confirm, I’ve always been a huge dork about having gratitude on Thanksgiving. For other people this holiday might be about turkey or pilgrims, but for me it’s always been about taking one day to really focus on the things I have in my life that are positive. While I incorporate gratitude exercises into my regular journaling throughout the year, each Thanksgiving I make a bigger effort to list everything that I can think of to be grateful for, including the “little” things. I also try to take the day to just generally reflect and give thanks.

The good news is that in recent years, study after study has shown us that there are real, hardcore benefits to experiencing and celebrating gratitude. Research has demonstrated that people who keep daily gratitude journals (giving thanks for about five things/day) can experience as much as a 25-percent increase in day-to-day happiness in as little as a few months, and that this is even true for people who suffer from painful, life-threatening illnesses. Some studies also show that exercising gratitude can improve your health (namely by moderating stress and improving sleep quality).

The reason why this works is because the neural networks in our brains operate on the basis of habit, and you can think of this in terms of practicing a behavior. Any action that we take, or thought that we think, gets recorded in our brains by becoming imprinted in our neurons. As we repeat those actions or thoughts, grooves (effectively) get created in our brains that make us more likely to engage in that kind of thought or action again in the future. From this standpoint, by looking at things on the bright side — by having gratitude for the things that might otherwise go unnoticed — we are literally training our brains to do more of that in general.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting that your problems aren’t real ones, or that there’s never a time or a place for acknowledging and accepting the things in life that are painful. On the contrary, I think that sadness, grief, and anger are all normal emotions that are part of the human experience, and we have to make room for all of it. It’s just that this post isn’t about that — it’s about taking the time to notice the things in life that we can otherwise take for granted. Think of it as an exercise – an exercise that can benefit you no matter what your personal circumstances are.

This is just anecdotal to my own experience, but I will say that it seems like the more I practice gratitude the more I have to feel grateful for. I think I’m just better able to look on the bright side than I used to be. I also notice that my frustration tolerance has improved, as I’m more able to focus on the positive in moments that would otherwise be difficult, challenging, or even just plain annoying.

Here’s what I do, and I suggest that you try something similar: My list always starts with what seems most basic or fundamental, and I work my way out. I’m grateful today, for example, for the parts of my body that work. I am blessed with the gift of sight and — despite some occasional joint pain — two hands that are capable of typing out these sentences right now. From there I can be grateful for my home and my bed, my family or my friends, my sweet little dog and his four, fuzzy paws.

If you lack one of the things I just listed, or feel emotionally triggered by a loss of some kind as you read this, can you think of something else you can feel grateful for right now? Something that might otherwise go unnoticed? The goal is to stop and give thanks for the little things that might be overlooked on a different day.

If you’re reading this and you’re still having a hard time thinking of what you have to feel grateful for, challenge yourself today by trying a little harder. To paraphrase Danielle LaPorte’s post on similar subject matter, if you’re reading this right now, you have internet access, which means that you also have electricity. That alone is something to be grateful for.

So yes, I’m giving thanks for many things this holiday season. I will also be, per my usual custom, inspiring and annoying my family members by making them talk about what they’re grateful for all day long. Please join us: What are you grateful for today?

For more information about this author, please visit, visit www.lesliecarr.com.

Photo credit: mtsofan

Life is a Game. Are You Playing it?

“What you are is what you have been. What you’ll be is what you do now.” – Buddha

Even though life is sometimes messy and unpredictable, there is one constant — opportunities will come and go. And the reality is that opportunities are abundant when we are open to them. When we are open to new things and eager to branch out of our safe, cozy, comfort zone, we can open up a world of new possibilities. And it all starts with one easy step: Play the game, and get on the court. Landmark Forum’s self-improvement course teaches the power of getting on the court in life vs. sitting in the stands.

Think about a sporting event. Spectators cheer from the stands but never put themselves at risk. They are not the ones taking any risks or making anything happen. Rather, they sit, watch, judge and wait, while the players are full of life. They are the doers, making life happen and work with them. They see an opportunity and go for it. They take risks and play hard. Of the two types of people, which would you rather be?

More often than not, I have been a spectator in my own life. I let life happen to me and fell into deep, moldy holes. The only way to pull me out of each depression episode was to take responsibility for my own life and start making calls – getting my butt up out of “self-pity-ville” and taking action to guide me in a better direction. It started with one single step forward, by getting onto the court of my own life.

If you look at your life as a bestselling book or blockbuster movie, how is yours playing out? What kind of picture are you in? Is it full of depression, mistakes, regrets and secrets? Or are you the hero in your own starring role? Are you in a role that challenges and excites you? Do you seize the day and make the moment matter? The opportunity here is to dream of possibilities and things beyond the traditional confines of cultural and social acceptability. Whenever there are areas of our lives we are unhappy with, often, the human tendency is to ignore them … to simply act as if they are not an issue; out of sight, out of mind.

For example, maybe you are unhappy with your job. I was the queen of bitter job certainty. I lived the “this is how things are” card to its death, meaning I was a victim of the negative perpetrations of my job. I worked with people who didn’t understand me or respect my contributions. They always made me feel like an outsider, and I always had a boss who seemed to have ulterior motives. I could never trust them. No matter where I went, what city, this job was where I was. I’d quit one company and start working at a completely different company, sometimes even different industries and would always find myself crying in the bathroom on lunch break.

I would tell myself it is normal to cry at work and this is just how life is supposed to be. I would come home and complain to whoever would listen about how bad my job was, how lame the people I worked with were and how I wasn’t getting what I deserved. That’s a lot of “me, me, and me” talk if you ask me. I was pretty self-consumed and exhausting the victim role. I kept playing out my same reality over and over until one day I was talking to a friend. I was complaining about my new boss and the work I was doing, when she gently said, “Sounds like your last two jobs.”

I realized then and there that the only thing all these nasty, toxic environments had in common was me. I was the connecting thread to all of these mishaps in the workplace. I took mental stock and realized I am accountable for everything in my life. All of these patterns that kept surfacing were a common thread of my life, not theirs. I asked myself, “What have I been doing to create this reality?” Quite simply, I hadn’t been getting on the court or playing a starring role in my own blockbuster. I had been letting life happen to me vs., co-creating with life and being accountable for my own actions and patterns. These patterns were really an inner cry for help. I kept living the same reality of moving between jobs, states and countries to get away and start fresh. But I wasn’t able to look at the big picture. No matter where I went, these patterns would keep recurring until I learned to recognize each situation as an opportunity to learn something new. Each new job was a lesson. And the lesson would keep coming up until I recognized it and greeted it full-heartedly.

Is there a situation in your life that is causing you frustration? Challenge yourself to look at the situation with fresh eyes and ask yourself, “What is this situation trying to teach me? What can I learn from this?” By opening your mind up to the potential of new possibilities, life can reward us in ways we never expected.

Shannon Kaiser is an inspirational travel writer, author, adventure junkie and art director. Shannon is founder of playwiththeworld.com, an adventure site dedicated to helping others love life fully. Connect with her there.

Photo credit: Evan Jackson