Forgive release and be free

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Forgiveness, of others and one’s self, can be a powerful, life-altering process. It can change the trajectory of a relationship or even one’s life. It is not the only response one can make to being hurt or hurting others, but it is an effective way to manage the inevitable moments of conflict, disappointment, and pain in our lives.

Forgiveness embraces both the reality of the offence and the empathy and compassion needed to move on. True forgiveness doesn’t shy away from responsibility, recompense or justice. By definition, it recognises that something painful, even wrong, has been done. Simultaneously, forgiveness helps us to embrace something beyond the immediate gut-reaction of anger and pain and the simmering bitterness that can result. Forgiveness encourages a deeper, more compassionate understanding that we are all flawed in our different ways and that we all need to be forgiven at times.

Nathaniel Wade writing in Aeon

Increase your confidence and determination by self-distancing 

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Adopting an alter ego is an extreme form of ‘self-distancing’, which involves taking a step back from our immediate feelings to allow us to view a situation more dispassionately.

“Self-distancing gives us a little bit of extra space to think rationally about the situation,” says Rachel White, assistant professor of psychology at Hamilton College in New York State. It allows us to rein in undesirable feelings like anxiety, increases our perseverance on challenging tasks, and boosts our self-control.

In one study, participants were asked to think about a challenging event in the future, such as an important exam, in one of two different ways. The group in the “immersed” condition were told to picture it from the inside, as if they were in the middle of the situation, whereas those in the “distanced” condition were asked to picture it from afar – as if they were a fly on the wall. The differences were striking, with those taking the distanced viewpoint feeling much less anxious about the event, compared to the immersed group. The self-distancing also encouraged greater feelings of self-efficacy – the sense that they could pro-actively cope with the situation and achieve their goal. 

Self-distancing seems to enable people to reap these positive effects by leading them to focus on the bigger picture – it’s possible to see events as part of a broader plan rather than getting bogged down in immediate feelings. 

David Robson writing for the BBC

 

Universal Beliefs

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The generic nature of human beings and the ordered nature of the world in which we live tend to evoke very similar beliefs in all of us, which we have called universal beliefs. They include:

1. adherence to a law of noncontratidiction,

2. belief in a an external world of orderly processes,

3. belief in the existence of other persons who share our world and with whom we communicate and live,

4. and belief in also in some ultimate reality with which we must eventually reckon.

Beliefs such as these are a practical necessity if we are to think and function at all.

Arthur Holmes, Contours of a World View

The Best Advice I Ever Got.. Mohomed El-Erian

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I remember asking my father, Why do we need four newspapers? He said to me, “Unless you read different points of view, your mind will eventually close, and you’ll become a prisoner to a certain point of view that you’ll never question.” There’s a tendency to operate in a comfort zone and to want to read what is familiar to them. But if you are just used to following one person or one newspaper, you will miss the big shifts.

Mohomed El-Erian, Pimco, quoted in Fortune Magazine

When things go wrong

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People need to recognize that life can be unfair, that accidents will happen. None of this is to say that people have to acquiesce to the threats of life, to lie down and not attempt to change anything. There is nothing wrong with positive thinking and the hope that today will go well or that people might repent and treat others better. But (you) should not be shocked and angered when something does go wrong… cultivate the attitude that life is something to work at and that problems are normal. Learning to laugh at normal failures and irritations has been shown to be effective in defusing anger.

Mark Cosgrove, Counseling for Anger

Best Advice I Ever Got.. Mort Zuckerman

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The best advice I ever got came from one of my professors at the Harvard Business School. 

He told a story about how George Bernard Shaw was working as a clerk in a dry-goods store in Dublin, and he decides to give himself three years to go and write plays in London. And if it didn’t work out he could always go back and be a clerk in a dry-goods store.  

The way I interpreted his advice was to really do what you love. 

Mort Zuckerman, US News & World Report
Quoted in Fortune Magazine