1.) There is nowhere to “arrive” to. The only thing you’re rushing toward is death. Accomplishing goals is not success. How much you expand in the process is.
2.) The things you love about others are the things you love about yourself. The things you hate about others are the things you cannot see in yourself.
3.) The point is not what the routine consists of, but how steady and safe your subconscious mind is made through the repetitive motions and expected outcomes. 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.
4.) Taken from a chapter titled – 10 Things Emotionally Intelligent People do not do. – They recognize their emotions as responses, not accurate gauges, of what’s going on. They accept that those responses may have to do with their own issues rather than the objective situations at hand.
5.) Taken from a chapter titled – 10 Things Emotionally Intelligent People do not do. – They don’t just become friends with anyone. They recognize true trust and intimacy as something you build, and something you want to be discerning with whom you share. But they are not guarded or closed as they are simply mindful and aware of who they allow into their lives and hearts. They are kind to all, but truly open to few.
6.) Emotionally intelligent people allow themselves their “bad” days. They let themselves be fully human. It’s in this non-resistance that they find the most peace of all.
7.) The main thing socially intelligent people understand is that your relationship to everyone else is an extension of your relationship to yourself.
8.) Real emotional maturity is how thoroughly you let yourself feel anything. Everything. Whatever comes. It is simply the knowing that the worst thing that could ever happen…is just a feeling at the end of the day.
9.) What you have to know is that suffering is just the refusal to accept what is. So healing is really just letting yourself feel. It is unearthing your traumas and embarrassments and losses and allowing yourself the emotions that you could not have in the moment that you were having those experiences. It’s letting yourself filter and process what you had to suppress at the time to keep going, maybe even to survive.
10.) Your anxiety is your resistance to the process, your last grasps at a control you are becoming more and more aware that you do not have. Your tiredness is your resistance to who you really are, the person you actually want to be. Your annoyance is your repressed anger. Your depression, biological factors aside of course, is everything coming to the surface, and you bellowing down to stow it away.
And your arrival at the conclusion that you cannot go on like this, that you are missing out, that you’re off-track and feeling stuck and lost, is realizing that you need not change your feelings. You just have to learn to lean into them and see what they are trying to tell you.
11.) When you choose to value having other people’s acceptance over your own, you accept a fate of battling your instincts to assimilate to the needs of other people’s egos. In the meantime, a world and lifetime of listening, learning, allowing, following, perceiving, feeling, and experiencing…constantly eludes you.
Sadness will not kill you. Depression won’t, either. But fighting it will. Ignoring it will. Trying to escape it rather than confront it will. Denying it will. Suffocating it will. Allowing it no place to go other than your deep subconscious to embed and control you will. Not that you’ll take your life or destroy everything “good” you do receive (though you might).
12.) We are more comforted by ideas of what things are as opposed to what they really are. We like to think of ourselves as bodies because that doesn’t leave us with the open-ended “what else”.
But what if “what else” isn’t the end thought, but the beginning? What if awareness frees us of so many things, quells so many thoughts, balms so many aches? What if healing yourself is not fixing an attitude, not changing an opinion, not altering an aesthetic, but shifting a presence, an awareness, an energy?
13.) We are programmed to seek what we’ve known. So even though we think we’re happiness, we’re actually trying to find whatever we’re most accustomed to, and we project that on whatever actually, exists, over and over again. These are just a few of many psychological impediments that holds us back from the emotional lives we claim to want.
14.) There are many reasons we self-sabotage, and most of them have to do with comfort. Modern society (innovation, culture, wealth, success) is designed to convince us that a good life is one that is most comfortable, or able to provide us with a sense of being pain-free and secure. This is pretty directly related to the fact that human beings are hardwired to seek comfort, which translates to us as survival – we’re physiologically designed that way. It only makes sense that in our more fully actualized intellectual and emotional lives, we’d want the same.
15.) Taken from the Chapter 101 Things more worth thinking about than whatever’s consuming you – The fact that you do not need to be exceptionally beautiful or talented or successful to experience the things that make life profound: love, knowledge, connection, community, and so on.
16.) Taken from the Chapter 101 Things more worth thinking about than whatever’s consuming you – The fact that you do not think the exact way other people think, and that perhaps the issues you have with them are not issues but lapses in your understanding of them (and theirs of you).
17.) Taken from the Chapter 101 Things more worth thinking about than whatever’s consuming you –The fact that it is hard to do everything: It’s hard to be in a relationship, it is hard not to be in one. It’s hard to have to perform at a job that you love and are emotionally invested in, it’s hard not to be living your dreams by a certain age. Everything is hard; it’s just a matter of what you think is worth the effort.
18.) Taken from the Chapter 101 Things more worth thinking about than whatever’s consuming you – How much of your self-perception is built by culture, or expectations, or other people’s opinions. How much of your self-perception is sustained by culture, or expectations, or other people’s opinions. Who you are when nobody’s around.
19.) Extraordinary people are just that – rare. Recognizing this doesn’t mean you’re giving up on your potential, it means your dissolving the illusions you have about what it means to be your whole self and live your best life.
20.) You can control how you treat people, but you cannot actually control what they think. The idea that behaving a certain way will elicit a certain response is a delusion that will keep you puppeteering through your life. It will distance you from the person you want to be and the life you want to live. And for what? People are going to judge, criticize, condemn, love, admire, envy, and lust based on their own subjective perceptions regardless.
21.) Most people assume that when their lives change, their thoughts will change. When they have someone who loves them, they’ll think they’re worthy of love. When they have money, they’ll have a different attitude about it. Unfortunately, the opposite is true – when you adopt a new mindset about money, you’ll start behaving differently, and then you’ll be in a different financial position, for example. Your mind creates; it is not created.
22.) Changing how other people think and treat you is not a matter of how outraged you get, but how willing you are to explain, teach, and share. Defensiveness never precedes growth, it stunts it.
23.) Anxiety is one of the main driving forces that has kept you – as well as entire species – alive. Struggling with a crippling overabundance of it usually means you’re not listening to it, or there’s some major issue in your life you refuse to address or take action on. The power of negative thinking is that it shows us what matters and how we need to respond to our lives.
24.) Emotions outlast the memories that created them. We take past emotions and project them onto situations that are in our current lives. This is to say, unless we heal what has happened in the past, we’re always going to be controlled by it. Furthermore, our irrational fears and most severe day-to-day anxieties can be traced back to a cause, which needs to be addressed to effectively stop the effect.
25.) Stress may just be the most dangerous emotion (especially when it’s consistent) and yet it goes unaddressed more often than other feelings.
Relaxing isn’t something you should do to pamper yourself; it’s absolutely essential. Stress debilitates every part of you, and it’s in one way or another interconnected with the top causes of death around the world: accidents, cancer, heart disease, suicide, etc.
26.) Social media is actually making us more emotionally disconnected. Consistently consuming soundbites of people’s lives leads us to piece together a particular idea of reality – one that is far from the truth. We develop such anxiety surrounding social media (and whether or not we’re really living up to the standards expected of us) that we begin to prioritize screen time over real-life face time. As beings who require human intimacy (romantic and not) to survive, it’s becoming a more and more detrimental force in our culture.
27.) Recognize that anxiety stems from shame. It is the idea that who you are or what you are doing is “not right”, therefore eliciting a rush of energy designed to help you “fix” or change it. You’re suffering because there’s nothing you can fix to make that urgent, panicked feeling go away. It’s mismanaged perception of who and how you are.
28.) Realize that thoughts are illusions, but powerful ones. Take inventory of all the things you’ve thought and worried about that have turned out not to be real. Think of all the time you wasted preparing for outcomes that would never manifest and problems that were only in your head.
29.) Do more. If you have time to be regularly consumed by irrational, spiraling thoughts, you need more to focus on, more to work toward, more to suffer for. Make sure that you’re living more than you’re thinking about living.
30.) Do not always trust yourself. Give yourself space to be wrong. Open yourself up to the idea that you don’t know what you don’t know. If your feelings are informed by irrational thoughts, they can very well be incorrect.