Personal growth: Do we have the power to change our moods? May 13, 2018
Posted by Dennis Mellersh in personal development ideas.Tags: coping with anxiety, inspiration, life, low moods, personal growth, philosophy, positive thinking, psychology, writing
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Psychotherapist Richard Carlson tells us that our moods, particularly the two opposites of low moods and high moods, can have huge effect on our intellectual approach to problem solving, but aside from waiting for a low mood to go away, is there a way to avoid the negative effects of a low mood, or alternatively get into a better mood?
Author Seth Godin, in a blog post titled The Places You Go, writes that we sometimes bring on low or positive moods by choice:
“There’s a metaphorical room I can go to where I’m likely to experience flow—a sense of being in the moment and getting an enormous amount done. Down the hall is the room where there’s a lot of anxiety about something I can’t change. I can visit that room if I choose, but I don’t. And yes, it’s a choice.”
One of the key points here is that Godin is talking about how anxiety can result from constantly revisiting and fretting about “something I can’t change.”
He further suggests that, “Anxiety, flow, joy, fear, exhaustion, connection, contemplation, emotional labor… each one can be visited at will if we choose. Sometimes by entering a real room, but more often in metaphor…”
The post he wrote is more involved and complex than what I have written in this short article, so here is the link if you would like to read it in more detail:
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/08/the-places-you-go.html
— Dennis Mellersh
Conquering fear and building confidence with action mini-steps May 12, 2018
Posted by Dennis Mellersh in personal development ideas.Tags: achieving goals, building confidence, life, Overcoming Fear, overcoming procrastination, personal growth, philosophy, psychology, The Magic of Thinking Big, writing
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In his book, The Magic of Thinking Big, David J. Schwartz makes the point that continually delaying taking action in any situation can gradually erode our self-esteem, whereas taking action can help cure fear and build confidence.
Schwartz comments, “Action feeds and strengthens confidence; inaction in all forms feeds fear. To fight fear, act. To increase fear – wait, put off, postpone.” (1)
Schwartz says, for example, that if we dread making a certain phone call, we should force ourselves to make it and the dread will disappear, but “Put it off and it will get harder and harder to make.”
Most of us tend to procrastinate with some things, but from what I have experienced with some situations we may perceive to be difficult, we may find it easier to act if we break the situation down into a number of smaller actionable steps that we can tackle one at a time. Even if each of these action steps is very small, we at least will be making some progress.
Often, we may put off doing something, particularly something important, because it seems to loom large on our fear and envisaged complexity horizon.
But if we tackle the task with mini-steps, it usually will not take nearly as long to complete as we had anticipated, nor will it be as fear-inducing as we had projected.
(1) I found the edition of The Magic of Thinking Big that I’m quoting from in a used bookstore. It was fairly old, dated 1967 as a reprint, with Prentice-Hall, Inc. holding the copyright; and was published by the Cornerstone Library, New York.
– Dennis Mellersh
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