For many years in my short life I felt I had to measure up to the expectations of others.  I have run my life largely in the shadow of what others thought I should be and live in the expectations of other people’s feelings.  Can I say that I think that’s a fairly crappy way to live?  If you spend time thinking and worrying about what others think I can assure you that they don’t care as much as you think they do.  Herein lies the paradox:

You think they care and they don’t because they only care when they are so shallow they have nothing else to do but backstab you!

Even then you get a passing mention in the conversation.  So what am I saying?  Be yourself because the mask you put on will end up owning you.  Be you.  All the time.  I learned recently that it doesn’t matter what other people think if I don’t care what other people think.  So, we need to cultivate thinking patterns that are built on models of personal acceptance.  Self-hatred only means misery… and life is too short to give a damn about stupid things like that.

I did this recently and it’s finally beginning to work

People where paying out on me for something and I was getting mad.  The next day after I had blown up and thrown stuff and broken things… it hit me.  If I can begin to accept myself, with all my limitations and say I am happy with that… then I will no longer care what others think because I know I am good enough.

My new saying is…

I’m adequate!  I am adequate, good enough and filled with flaws.  Why is this such a good way to be?  Well, I  know I have limitations and I need help in this area.  I know where to go when I need help in certain areas and I take it because I know I need it.  Also, embracing your flaws means you recognise weakness and strength in yourself.  You can learn to love those weaknesses as much as your strengths because it’s you.  I think we were made with flaws to remind us we need other people and God in our lives.  This is a good thing for when you are weak then you are strong.

When it comes to you… you need to be happy with yourself.  So you are flawed… who isn’t?  You have problems… who doesn’t?  What does it matter that you have failed… everybody fails at something.  Nobody I have ever met past or present is a model of perfection.  I know many fractured people who I accept have flaws and limitations just like me.   I think when you begin to accept yourself and make a habit of thinking how adequate you are (even if you are not) it begins the road to development.  It allows you to begin ton build better inner images of yourself and not built on the expectations of others who really don’t know you like you know you. 

* This picture comes courtesy of  the you say blog

Imagine you have just reached your dream. What would that feel like? Think for a moment what is it you really dream about? Say it was to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. If that was your burning desire what on earth would stop you from doing it? Money? Time? What about if you had two legs amputated below the knee? Warren Macdonald suffered a horrible fate of losing both legs below the knee after being crushed by a rock on a trek in Hinchinbrook Island, Australia. Yet he managed to reach his goal and climb Mount Kilimanjaro. So what’s your impossible dream?

Dreams are meant to be impossible

The fact is when we were formed dreams were formed in us. I don’t care what your friends told you or what you think… you have some deep down burning desire in you that wants to form itself into an actual reality. As I have said before there are two kinds of reality that we need to be concerned with.  That which is active and that which is passive.  The passive kind are the dreams we have and the things we entertain in our heart.    These things are what I am talking about today.  What is it that you deeply dream about?   What are the things you have in your heart to do?  Write them down.

The main goal of having a dream

The major thing you need to do when you have a dream is to think about it.  Don’t shuffle it under the carpet and pretend like it’s not there.  Your dream is that thing that keeps you up at night, that niggle in the back of your mind.  It’s the thing you would do if you could do anything.  It’s meant to be impossible because it will take miracles, action and much faith to get the thing off the ground.  If it didn’t why would you dream about it?  If it was possible there would be no need to dream about it.  You would just do it.

So what can I do about my dream?

The thing I have maintained having reached a dream or two in my life (getting a post graduate degree and a PhD… almost there) I can say that there are several things you need to know.  The most important for this post is this: hold on to it.  Don’t let it go.   There are many things I want to achieve before I go home but that doesn’t mean I am a failure.  The only failures I have met are people who fail to try.  So what’s your dream?  The first and most important thing you need to do is work that out and hold on to it no matter what.   Never give up.

There is a growing amount of [tag]rhetoric[/tag] in scientific circles about the nature of [tag]belief[/tag] and scientific endeavour. I was exploring digg the other day and I came across this article. In it the author discusses the wisdom of crowds phenomena and evolution. What struck me when I reflected on the article was how a lot of scientific literature and things like this article still fail to grasp the concept of belief. Belief is a powerful concept and one that is largely overlooked.

So what is evidence

Evidence can be described as a empirically verifiable facts in scientific terms. Something that we have come to accept ‘as is’ through a rigorous testing process. Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert gave us the idea that we believe first and then go about constructing doubt. More to the point, we do not analyse first, we believe then we analyse. In an earlier article I spoke about the conjecturing process whereby I felt that we follow what Sherlock Holmes does. We reason through the facts and come to a meaningful conclusion, somehow, magically apart from belief. How can this happen? We look at the facts first? I don’t think we do. I think we work of assumptions, hunches and so on and then go to the tools to prove our point. What if the tools are just ways of confirming what we believe instead of actually verifying things? Has happened plenty of times before hasn’t it?

Facts may or may not be real facts they are tainted by what we believe and value we add to them. I can attribute causality to anything if I want and it will make no difference to you or anyone because to me that’s evidence. I can set up a hypothesis test and so on, it will only prove what I want it to. When you say that ’cause and effect’ is, you will not be persuaded otherwise. Why? Because you believe it.

Are [tag]scientists[/tag] immune from this? I don’t think so. If they were immune from it then what they said would be perfect knowledge. The testing procedures we use to work things out are models. They are not reality. We use them to support (with evidence) our version of events. A belief is therefore built into the thing we are constructing because it’s built on the premise of something we think might be related. When the news caster tells us something that happened, ‘A man was shot in the head,’ that’s a fact he was. But then, ‘police suspect the wife.’ They ’suspect’ the wife? That is simply another way of saying we believe the wife is the killer but we lack enough evidence to prove the case. In such a case the belief spurns on the search for evidence not vice versa. The belief in evolution spurns on the search for it’s existence and validity. If this weren’t the case then why do we even bother?

Beliefs: the driving force

Why do we vote the way we do? Beliefs! Why do we believe? There is something deeper in what Dan Gilbert has found and I think we need to pay more attention to the ways in which we believe. In particular why is the human mind predisposed to belief? Why is it the case that we hear things and believe them? Why do we read a book like the origin of the species or the bible and think yes that’s it. That is a thought that has plagued me for years.

When I was a child my father used to tell me all kinds of stories. Stuff about the easter bunny and the like which I know now to be a load of crap (or do I?). At the time however I believed them and acted as if they were so. Until one day I realised that they weren’t. These beliefs limited me in how I understood things because a window was formed for me to look through. In became a way of seeing. When the tooth fairy shoved a dollar coin underneath my pillow in exchange for my tooth do the ‘evidence’ of the missing tooth confirmed what I believed. The tooth fairy existed.

The tooth fairy however does not exist. Even though I believed it first I went about confirming my doubts as I got older and yes I can say with a certain degree of confidence that I am sure she or he doesn’t exist. I can believe it if I want to and live the rest of my life with my belief as the evidence for the tooth fairy’s existence. Will I be a happier person for believing it? I don’t need evidence to believe, my faith is the evidence. Until I go searching for a new belief to replace the old one I have all the evidence I need. Think about your life…how many things do you believe and it’s enough?

Belief is evidence?

Say I take away belief from evidence and the evidence ’speaks for itself’. If this were the case then what would the evidence say? It wouldn’t say anything because what makes evidence ‘conclusive’ is the fact that we believe it. The two go hand in hand. Any evidence is useless without somebody to understand it and put it into context. The same set of facts shown to different people will yield a different point of view. Yet in some cases the evidence itself will create beliefs that later are changed in light of new evidence. So evidence without belief cannot exist.

Here we come to my final point in this post. Belief comes first in everything we do. We learn to construct our doubts later as we grow older. Yet, what we believe about religion, science, the death penalty, abortion, rape, murder and so on comes from what we think the evidence is saying to us because of our beliefs. There is no test that proves anything outside of someone believing it. We believe in the process of scientific testing so we hold it up as being relevant as leading to the ‘truth’… until a better test comes along. It’s a way of seeing that’s useful for now but it’s built on the foundation of beliefs about things and what we have come to expect from the scientific process. There is more faith involved in such things than those in the middle of it would care to admit.

In closing this post I would like you to picture with me what you think a [tag]pink elephant[/tag] looks like. Can you see it?  If you can then we have shared something.  We both have seen a pink elephant.   What I think people do not understand is that beliefs are like a blank piece of paper.  They are largely impressed on us or written by us.  Either way there is no escaping them.  We all think, feel and act on the things we believe.  Whether it be science or solipsism, they are ‘actual’ and drive us to act. Beliefs are real.  They are causally effective.  What do you believe?

Each one of us whether we realise or not has something special to offer. I often struck with surprise when I look at the general population of my students as I tell them they had better be sure the [tag]career[/tag] they choose is something they know they can do. Consider for a moment that you may not know enough of yourself to understand that you are actually attracted to certain things and just plain hate others. For example, I hate doing day to day routine things like paper work. Yet I recognise it as being extremely necessary to keep myself employed. What I get a thrill out of is doing [tag]creative[/tag] things like writing, brainstorming and so on. That’s because I have an underlying stream of creativity that flows through me. That creativity is somehow infused into my being.

In a previous post on emotions I spoke of the need to look at the underlying nature of emotions and how they come out of us on a day to day basis. In that post I drew the analogy that people will not often come to you and say, ‘I am angry at something that happened in the past so I am going to take it out on you if you don’t mind.’ People get angry for whatever reason and you become the victim of it. The same thing goes for people who act as extroverts in social groups. They have been seen as ‘extroverts’ because that’s a central underlying part of their [tag]being[/tag] flowing out of them.

So what’s different about you?

It has been said that we are all the same and there is nobody who is special. I believe this to be true but for a different reason. Everybody has something different about them that makes them ‘unique’. The connotation of something special means that you have some kind of status that makes you better than the rest. You are no better or worse than anyone… we are all in the same boat. Money, sad to say, does not make you a better person. Quite often it makes you much, much worse. There is however, a side to you that makes you entirely different from those around you. What makes you special is the fact that you have something different than people who are around you. That difference is what makes you an individual and it’s something you need to nurture.

The Mask

What you are really like is often sheltered under a mask that you were to make people think something about you. If you want people to think you are a certain way then you will wear a mask. I really saw a part of the Mask movie in which the main character is asking a psychologist advice about this mystical mask he has found. The psychologist uses the mask as a helpful metaphor to understand the reality of how we pretend in our social interactions. That pretending we do hides the real us from people. What makes us different or special is something that is underneath that. Here is an example in my own life.

When I sit down to write something I often don’t plan it out. I don’t need to worry about it because it writes itself. The fiction project I have on this website for example I wrote one page at a time by sitting down and just letting it flow through my imagination.  That’s me.  That may not be you.  You may be like my sister in law and be completely into administrative things.

The bottom line

The bottom line of course is that you should not do things you should not be doing.  Despite the grammatical errors in that previous sentence it is worth repeating.  If you are involved in something that is contrary to your nature you will eventually find yourself confused, frustrated, annoyed and angry.  Don’t burn yourself out.  There are some things that are stepping stones but if you take a position that is not going to teach you something, or help you reach your goals, then you will wind up miserable, frustrated and annoyed.  Just don’t do it.  You have something in you that makes you special.  It makes you different from those around you.  Find out what it is.  Find out what your underlying [tag]talents[/tag] are and develop them day by day.  Practice them, dream about them, believe them into existence.

I want to repeat myself here because I think there are a lot of unfulfilled people in life.  You will not find peace in your life until you begin doing what you know you should be.  You can change and yes it’s not late or too early.  Don’t do what you think you should, find out what you are really like and go towards that one step at a time.  After all, you are special in some way.

In a previous post I have been dealing with underlying [tag]emotions[/tag]. In this third part I want to talk about 5 ways that you can recognise underlying emotions. These techniques are well known but they are worthy of repeating here. Here goes:

1. What do others (family, friends and so on) think about you?

I know this seems counterintuitive when we are talking about underlying emotions but the reality is what other people think really matters. If you think I am making this up or it’s not important then you have tunnel vision. If you cannot accept or at least understand what others think then you are not seriously considering the impact you have on others. Knowing this is very important because it can highlight an underlying emotion that dominates your [tag]personality[/tag]. Think for a moment about a bad boss you have had. If you cannot think of a bad boss think of a person who annoys the living crap out of you. Now what’s the first thing, besides insults, that spring to mind when you think about that person. I bet it’s: He is so angry all the time, why is she so pushy, I cannot understand why he is always so surly and so on. This is the first step… knowing what others think. If you don’t know… go ask someone who doesn’t like you. Then you can say: am I really like that?

2. Knowing the outputs from the inputs

Another way to find these underlying emotions is to think about how you feel when something [tag]hurts[/tag] you. Say your daughter says to you, “I hate you” or your mother in law calls you a nasty name. What is your reaction to that? How does it make you [tag]feel[/tag]? Angry? Hurt? Why is that the case? I think a large percentage of the world’s problem’s can be solved through the ‘why is that the case?’ question. People are rational (most of the time) they often act according to some kind of bias or something that acts as the input which leads to the output, in their decision making process. When you observe yourself getting angry … ask yourself why is that the case? You will instantly recognise something deep and underlying that is belting away in your mind. Write it down and study it from every conceivable angle.

3. What makes you feel?

Sometimes you might be watching a television show and something sets off within you and you feel something. It could be a past hurt or something else but you are feeling some-thing.  Whenever I hear about a successful entrepreneur something goes off in me.  I love shows about business and especially stories of personal success.  That’s me, I love to hear that kind of thing because I am made that way.  I think there is something in you that makes you feel a certain way.  Like the dog who points at the bird, you just need the right set of conditions to draw it out.

4. What do you spend your day thinking about? 

One of the key ways you can recognise the underlying emotions  is to pay attention to your [tag]thoughts[/tag].   Have you ever seriously listened to your thoughts?  No, I mean really have you?  I am not talking about thinking about your thoughts I mean really paying attention to the conceptualisation of your thoughts.   When your thoughts are forming are you paying attention.  Are you really?  Have you ever noticed what it is that forms within you.   This is a big topic and it’s worthy of a lot more discussion than I have allowed for here.  When your thoughts form, the real you is speaking.  The words or [tag]feelings[/tag] that emerge from this interchange are really the output of what’s formed on the inside.  See if you can learn how to do this… I will be discussing this in a later post in the series.

5. What is it in others that drives you nuts? 

The last one in my list is what is it in others that makes you nutty?  I know myself that when I see a trait in somebody that I absolutely hate… it’s something that I hate about myself.  On the other hand, when I notice something I like in people it’s usually something I like in myself.  I find most of the time that when I see traits and characteristics in others that I either admire or despise it reflects some underlying emotion.

In closing this post I want to ask you the question: why are underlying emotions so important?  The answer to that is far too broad for me to answer here.  What I can tell you is that the more you study the underlying condition of your being the more you will learn about the way you are and what you should be doing with your life.  I believe that every person has a purpose in their life that can be found if enough time is spent finding it out.  I am not talking about running around the streets beating your chest crying out for your mother… no I am talking about not ignoring those inward emotions that underly our actions.  Having children, a love of reading or whatever it is that turns you on is connected to a deep underlying [tag]emotion[/tag] of some sort.  The discovery of these things is the beginning of understanding who you are and what you are here for.

Yesterday I spoke about the first part of how to recognise underlying emotions. The second part to recognising underlying [tag]emotions[/tag] is to understand that what comes out of you starts from a place inside. What do I mean? Think about the following scenario:

It’s 5pm and you are on your way home after a long day of work. As you leave work you slide effortlessly into traffic. The more you drive the slower things go until finally you hit a solid stop two minutes drive into your journey. Up ahead all you see is a long row of cars, banked up for miles, with no real hope of escape. How does that make you feel? To be honest it makes me feel mad. I have waited for a long time to get here and now I am basically stuck because everybody leaves work at the same time. No matter when I leave work I ALWAYS encounter traffic. Now I am getting angry.

Is it really the traffic making me angry or is it something else? I think it’s something else. When we are faced with a situation in which things aren’t going our way we often display outwardly emotions that are reflections of our inner thoughts. What ever we are displaying on the outside is what we have built on the inside. As you recognise patterns in your life, like anger, worry and so on. You will begin to notice that these things are deep down in you and that they build themselves into [tag]perspectives[/tag] in your mind. How do you feel when you have been picked on for something you didn’t do? Has anyone ever forgotten your birthday? How did you react? Those reactions come from the inner needs that are usually expressed as emotions, [tag]thoughts[/tag], [tag]ideas[/tag] or deep down [tag]suggestions[/tag].

The key to recognising underlying emotions

The key lies in watching how you behave. For children we might use a behaviour diary to check on what our kids are doing wrong. I think for some of us we need to reflect on how we act. For instance when you are sitting in traffic, ask yourself why traffic bothers you so much. Try this:

1. Recognise the feeling

Notice the style or quality of the feeling as it arises.   Then:

2. Question why

[tag]Reflection[/tag] begins with asking why?  Why do I feel this way?  What makes me angry when I am stuck in traffic?  Why do I feel this way?  One of the key things I suffer from is setting silly goals for myself.  These ‘benchmarks’ are things like: ‘when I have enough money I will be happy’ or something like, ‘unless I do this or that I am not cutting it’.  The only place that goal exists is in my head.  For me it’s like I need to be something special in order to feel pleased with myself.   These benchmarks are total fantasies that are basically connected to my brain in someway that I can’t really explain.  What I am learning at the moment is to shift these perspectives I have set by creating new things to believe in.  That doesn’t mean that I live with my faults… but it does mean I reduce the expectation I have on myself to over perform.  Why do we strive for so much anyway?  I mean what’s the bloody point?

When I see people speeding in traffic and running red lights I wonder… what’s the rush?  What thing in them tells them that they have to perform.  What set of ideas floating around in their brain says, ‘you have to be there on time so get there now as fast as you can.’  This is madness.  One day all this rushing will come to end … along with your [tag]life[/tag].  So why worry about it?  If you are always rushing ask yourself why?  If you are always late… why are you always late?  There’s a reason.  Maybe you just like people looking at you.  Who knows?

3.  Begin to understand the underlying [tag]tensions[/tag] that create the emotions

As you ask why, you should be able to identify what [tag]emotion[/tag] is coming out of you at that time (I will discuss this is more detail in the next post).   There are things that create in us tensions that force us to act in certain ways.  The western society is filled with pressure to perform.  We have a huge crisis of materialism at the moment that is driving people to work harder, faster and longer without seriously thinking about the consequences.  We all know stress is a killer yet we continue to work more and more and more until we explode.  Why?  What tensions are in us that make us do this?  Why are they there?
In the next post in this series I am going to talk about some techniques I find helpful for recognising underlying emotions.    The key thing to remember from this post is you are human and you will have outburst of emotions.  It’s a part of life and you need to be aware of this as you travel along life’s road.  Remember, you have them whether you acknowledge it or not.

Yesterday I spoke about the deep things that underlying what we do. In that post I spoke about the need to recognise the deep things that reside inside us that lead us to act. What I want to do today is begin the deep things series by talking about how to recognise the underlying emotions in situations that you may be familiar with. Feelings like superiority, happiness and joy are all deep level emotions that we need to recognise.

People don’t come up to you and said, ‘you know what I feel angry because of something that happened to me once and whether you like it or don’t I am going to dump it all on you.’ What really happens is the person explodes, you cop the blast and then all things from there stem forward to a messy conclusion. Why is that? I think personally that this occurs because we don’t really know how to recognise the underlying [tag]emotions[/tag] that dominate us and why we feel the way we do. We all have them. Why is it then that we systemically set about ignoring what the inner person is telling us. The language of that inner person is not words: it’s thoughts, ideas, pictures, symbols and suggestions.

Often when we think about emotions, we think about [tag]preferences[/tag]. Such preferences I think are stored on the level of our mind. A preference towards Lasagne or KFC is a mental decision based on a external sense. The sense of taste and the sensation we enjoy when we eat such things stimulates in us a desire. That desire eventually becomes a preference towards certain predilections in the area of ’sense’. What happens when the area of our emotions is stimulated by something beyond our immediate sense? What of those things that we notice about ourselves but simply do not like. Such as: anger, criticism, hatred and the like? Where do such things come from?

Foundational Perspectives

Say for a moment you have working class [tag]values[/tag]. If you don’t think about what your values are and imagine that you thought about work and it’s value in your life. I am plagued with working class values. I cannot see a way around it. Almost everything I do has to be work. One day I sat back and questioned this after reading an earlier version of [tag]Richard Branson[/tag]’s autobiography. That person worked hard… but he worked smart. He, with the help of thousands of other people, built the Virgin empire which despite it’s critics is very large and very successful. He now spends his time flashing that toothy smile for the cameras and evaluating business plans (reminds me of the e-myth … not not e-commerce). The reality is this simple: the rich don’t make money from hard work… they make money from having a good idea, making it work through collective mobilisation and so on.

I know people who work as long and hard as Bill Gates and they as broke as broke can be. Why is that? I was bought up in a house where both parents worked hard and made very little money. That is not their fault. It’s a deep ‘foundational perspective’ that flows out as a underlying emotion causing actions. We need to recognise these foundational things and be aware of them. These deep things we believe have feelings attached to them. They are so real and powerful that they make us think and act in s ways that we often don’t understand.

The first step: knowing how you feel

These foundational [tag]perspectives[/tag] are the basic set of ideas that we hold to that help us to make sense of the world. From these we can deduce that there are emotions that build from these perspectives that are part of us. We often identify ourselves with certain things like work by attaching our emotions to them. We cannot help it. When I say I am an academic it makes me [tag]feel[/tag] something. Something deep. That deep thing that I feel is a sense or a ‘knowing’ of what I think an academic is. I think of ideas, papers, teaching, marking and so on. Each one of those activities raises within me a certain level of  ‘feeling’ that I really don’t understand. When I think of the amount of administration I have to do in my job… I have feelings of dread! I hate administrative work though it’s necessary. Those underlying feelings are incredibly important because that’s how we can know what we are like not what we think we should be.

The question for me is why do I hate administrative work? I can tolerate it, I can use positive thinking to cope with it but essentially I hate it. Deep down there is some feeling arising out of the real me, the inner me, letting me know that I am not like this. This doesn’t mean I quit doing it… but I probably should not pursue a career in it.  If we think about this from another angle.  Why do I feel the need to avoid the work?   What is it in me that makes me want to not do it.  It could be that I simply hate it.  On the other hand it could be because I am lazy!   If you have inclinations towards certain kinds of things (I am not talking about nasty things) like sport, writing, reading or whatever that’s you coming out.

I really like to write.  There’s something in me that feels the need or desire to do it.  I cannot explain why.   Ever met someone who just sends you batty and you cannot work out why?  That’s something in you that sends you nuts.  I met this guy once who just had to be the centre of attention.  He would make loud jokes and remarks and no matter what he would always have to be the centre of attention.  It got the point where I felt like strangling this guy because I am exactly the opposite.  I don’t like to be loud or to be the centre of attention.  At heart there was a personality conflict.  Neither of us could really help it… it’s just our core personality floating to the surface.

Before we move on to the next post I would like you to think about something.  Think for a moment why you are the way you are.  Why not in the interim take this personality test to get you started.   If you would prefer a funnier test why not take this one that helps you see what kind of Simpson you are!  By the way I am a moderate introvert. Thanks for reading.