By Shane Rodgers
This is a tough time of year for a lot of people. We put so much stock into the Christmas-New Year wind-down that the prospect of cranking up a new year can be daunting.
It is also a good opportunity to rethink how you live and reset your expectations. Tiny changes that you commit to for long enough to form habits can be literally life changing.
Here are five you might want to consider.
Stop worrying about what others think
A lot of people spend a lot of time worrying what other people think. After a while you realise that if you are true to your values and happy with who you are, it really doesn’t matter what other people think of you. In fact, as Deepak Chopra observed, it is probably none of your business.
One of the greatest freedoms anyone can experience is the freedom to rid themselves of concern about how they are regarded. We are obsessed with ourselves because we are what we’ve got. Other people aren’t nearly as concerned with us as we often think and frankly most of them have not earned the right to make judgments about us. Oscar Wilde reminded us that we have to be ourselves because everybody else is taken. If we are happy with who we are, why do we give so much weight to the opinion of others? It makes little sense.
Fix the things you can fix
There are various versions of this based on ancient Buddhist philosophy. Many people say their lives were transformed when they finally learned to quickly fix the worrying things they could control and stop worrying over the things they could not control. The one thing we can control is how we react to every situation.
If you are worried about something, fix it quickly if you control it, and stop being dragged down by things you can’t change.
Choose optimism
We often default to finding the negative in things. But even Winston Churchill, who battled chronic lows throughout his life, famously said he chose to be an optimist because none of the other options made much sense. He was right. Choosing to be negative really doesn’t make any sense.
Ultimately, we always have a choice to go glass half empty or half full. It seems that the people who are happiest, and who live longest, decide to take the optimistic path. Most clouds have silver linings. Or at least the clouds eventually pass.
Be flexible
There is a great line in the Jewel Kilcher song Innocence Maintained that says: “Nature has a funny way of breaking what does not bend”. How true. In fact, if you think about it, the most difficult issues we tend to face are the ones where everyone is dug in on a point and not prepared to budge. In these circumstances, things do tend to break. If you look at nature, everything is about flexibility and adapting to environments as they change. We are all part of nature, so it makes sense that adaptability should also be part of how we live and work.
In reality we mostly live in a world where everyone is half right on most issues. If we are prepared to be flexible and listen to all views, often we find our position was not the best one anyway.
Be grateful
Lives can transform when we learn to be grateful for what we have and not regretful about things we don’t. Everybody has something to be grateful for. Often, we take things for granted and don’t take time to appreciate what we have or thank those who make our lives better.
American author Melody Beattie describes it in this way: “Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today and creates a vision for tomorrow.”
The more you see tragedy and pain in the world, the more you realise that a life where you have a roof over your head and enough to eat is a special gift. In fact, the mere fact of our existence is something of a miracle. Bill Bryson pointed out in his book A Short History of Nearly Everything that you could replay the entire genetic sequence that created humans and likely come up with a different form of life. And it would have only taken one fatal mishap in any of our long family histories for us not to exist as individuals. If not for accidents of geography our parents might never have met.
Life is not something to be taken for granted. Hey, you woke up today. What an amazing opportunity!
Shane Rodgers is the author of Worknado – reimagining the way we work to live.
