Many of us have developed ideas about ourselves—what we might call identities—that artificially limit what we can accomplish in life.  For instance, some of us have come to think of ourselves as shy or meek, and thus we avoid conflict and let others take advantage of us.  Some of us identify ourselves as unmotivated, and thus we hold back from pursuing the education or careers we want for fear of failure.  Still others see themselves as unsociable or unattractive, and have decided it’s hopeless to try to meet someone they’re attracted to.

We often forget what prompted us to buy into these identities, and even that we existed before we had these beliefs at all.  When asked how they decided that all of these hurtful notions about themselves are true, many people will simply respond “I just know” or “it’s always been that way.”  But there must have been some moment when we decided, or some period of time in which we gradually concluded, that certain beliefs about ourselves are true.  At the very least, when we were embryos in our mothers’ wombs, it’s unlikely we were suffering from self-esteem problems.

I used to have many painful ideas about myself—most notably, that I was too shy or strange to deal with people, and that people generally just wanted me to leave them alone.  Although I was attached to these harmful identities, on some level I knew I couldn’t have believed in them all my life.  There must have been some point in time when I decided they were true.  What was life like before I started thinking these terrible thoughts? I wondered.  But each time I’d try to remember my experience of the world before these beliefs, my mind would simply draw a blank.

A while back, I happened to read about a Zen koan, or saying, that goes “show me your original face before you were born.”  Not surprisingly, my initial reaction to this was “that makes no sense—I didn’t exist before I was born.”  But I also noticed that, when I seriously pondered what I was like “before I was born,” I experienced a peaceful emptiness in my mind.  Most notably, all the negative thinking I usually did about myself, in that moment, disappeared as if it had never been there.  For a few seconds, I was free of my limiting identities.

I was fascinated by the peace the koan brought me, and for a few months I regularly thought about it, hoping for a deeper understanding of its meaning.  One sleepless morning at about four a.m., I finally came to a realization.  In the words “before you were born,” “you” means your identity—the beliefs you’ve formed about yourself and who you are in the world.  You “gave birth” to your identity when you made decisions about who and what you were.  The purpose (or, at least, one purpose) of the koan is to show us we existed—we had an “original face”—before we adopted any beliefs about ourselves.  We are not our beliefs, in other words—we are their creator and believer.

When we contemplate the koan, we get a firsthand experience of what life was like before we developed all these harmful ideas about ourselves.  As I discovered for myself, that identityless state gifts us with a peace and freedom we rarely experience in our lives.  At first, when we try to remember what we were like before we adopted our identities, we feel like we’re “drawing a blank,” not coming up with anything.  However, we only see it that way because we’re so accustomed to having all these thoughts about ourselves, and in the identityless state those thoughts don’t arise.  In fact, that calm blankness is who we were before we decided we were this or that.

I also recognized that, whenever I wanted, I could return to the peace of my “original face.”  Whenever I started running myself down, replaying memories of difficult interactions with others, or generally thinking negatively, all I had to do was remember how I experienced life before I adopted the harmful beliefs.  This memory gave me more than pleasant nostalgia—it actually put me back into the tranquil emotional state of my very early life.

In that state, life took on a joyful and effortless quality.  Without all my ideas about my limitations as a person, the anxieties about relating with people that used to trouble me simply faded away.  Spiritual teacher Osho’s description of this state in Courage: The Joy of Living Dangerously captures its essence well:  “Just be what you are and don’t care a bit about the world.  Then you will feel a tremendous relaxation and a deep peace within your heart.  This is what Zen people call your ‘original face’—relaxed, without tensions, without pretensions, without hypocrisies, without the so-called disciplines of how you should behave.”

As always, I’ll offer an exercise to help others experience the peace this practice has brought me.  If negative beliefs about yourself have been limiting you, try the following.  When some harmful idea about yourself arises—for instance, “I’m too scared to do this,” “I’m not an interesting person,” “people are going to mock me if I try this,” and so on, pause what you’re doing for a moment.  Ask yourself when you decided that this was true.  Then, see if you can recall how you felt before you developed this hurtful notion.

You may, like many people, experience the feeling that your idea has “always been true”—that you’ve “always” been inadequate, unattractive, not smart enough, or something else.  If this happens, ask yourself how you felt when you were an infant, before you were born, or—if those two questions yield the same answer—before you existed.  As you inquire into how you thought about yourself further and further back in time, you’ll eventually come to a point where your mind becomes blank—where you can’t come up with anything you believed or felt about yourself.

Don’t give up here simply because you don’t think you can remember anything—allow the blank sensation to persist, and hold your attention on it.  As you simply give the emptiness permission to be, you may find a sense of calm and focus pervading you.  This is the experience of your “original face”—your natural state before you learned to label yourself in limiting ways.  You can return to it any time you feel restricted by your thinking.

Many people believe finding career satisfaction is simply about having a clear idea of what you want and the drive to go for it.  I think these are important qualities, but they aren’t enough by themselves.  To find a career you’ll feel joyful about and fulfilled by, you have to believe that what you want actually matters—that you genuinely deserve to pursue your goals and dreams, rather than someone else’s agenda for what you’re supposed to do.  The story I’ll tell you here nicely illustrates this point.

A man came to see me recently because he was dissatisfied with his current job and wanted to explore other possibilities.  However, he said, he hadn’t quite nailed down what he was looking for yet.  To get an idea of what career path would best serve him, I asked him some questions about what he enjoyed and what frustrated him about his current job.  We also discussed what he was passionate about in life.

As we talked, he began fidgeting and playing with his pen, and I sensed that he was getting uncomfortable.  Eventually, I asked him if he was nervous or upset about something.  My instinct turned out to be right—he was getting angry, and he let me know why.  “Why do you keep talking about how I feel?  I’m here about my career, not my feelings.”

“Does it matter whether you feel good about your career?” I asked.

“Of course not,” he insisted incredulously.  “My job is about supporting me and my family—not about making me ‘feel good.’”

Ah, I thought.  Now we’re getting somewhere.  “When did you decide it didn’t matter how you felt?”

His body tensed up, and it seemed for a moment he was going to blow up at me again, but suddenly he slumped in his chair and fell silent.  “A while ago,” he finally answered.

As he went on to reveal, he’d believed that what he felt and wanted didn’t matter since his early childhood.  His father, a military officer, demanded the same obedience from his children that he required from his subordinates.  My client remembered a few times when, as little kids often do, he told his Dad he didn’t want to do some task.  His father had angrily responded “it doesn’t matter what you ‘want.’  Now do what I told you.”  And my client would ashamedly slink off and obey.

Since then, my client said, he’d had trouble telling people about his emotions and desires, as he couldn’t shake the conviction that people didn’t really care about them.  When someone asked him, as I did, what he wanted, his first instinct was that he was being mocked or deceived.  No wonder he got angry, I recognized—since he thought there was no way I could actually care what he wanted, he figured I was patronizing or taking advantage of him.

This belief also explained why he wasn’t satisfied in his present career.  Because he was convinced that his goals and dreams “didn’t matter,” he—like many people—had chosen his career based on what he saw as other people’s expectations.  He’d taken a job that was relatively lucrative and prestigious, because he believed it would satisfy his father, his wife and kids, his friends, and others in his life.  But since he’d given no thought to his own happiness, it’s no surprise he settled into a career he was unhappy with.

It took a little coaxing, but ultimately I was able to convince him I actually cared what he wanted, and I wouldn’t scorn or ridicule him if he told me.  When he began to trust that he had a safe place to reveal his desires, his seeming confusion about what he wanted evaporated, and we quickly arrived at a list of career possibilities that he resolved to look into.  He knew what he desired, and he had the talent to make it happen—he just needed reassurance that it was okay for him to have desires in the first place.

I’m consistently struck by the number of people I meet who get uncomfortable talking or thinking about what they want in life.  For various reasons, they’ve learned that it’s unsafe or shameful for them to consider what they want.  These people come to me thinking they need more direction, or to improve their skills, if they want to find a fulfilling career path.  But they often discover that, when they become able to seriously put some attention on what they want, deciding their next step becomes easier.  In short, their problem isn’t a lack of motivation or experience—it’s a lack of self-respect.

If you’re experiencing career dissatisfaction, the first step to take in addressing this issue is to ask yourself what you want out of your career.  Pay close attention to the reactions that come up when you ask this question.  Is it okay for you to think about this issue?  Or does it feel dangerous, selfish or irresponsible?  If you experienced some anxiety when you thought about your desires, you may have hit upon the reason you’re feeling unfulfilled.  If you didn’t take your own desires into account when you chose what you do for a living, it’s no wonder your current job isn’t meeting your needs.

How do you overcome this feeling that what you want isn’t important?  I’ve found that becoming able to acknowledge and follow your desires is like building a muscle.  One way you can strengthen that muscle is to consistently ask yourself, as you go through your day, what you want in each situation you get into.  When you wake up in the morning, for instance, ask yourself “what do I want to do today?”  When you go to the grocery store, ask yourself “what do I want to buy?”  In your intimate relationships, ask “what do I want out of this relationship?”  And so on.

Keep repeating this process, and you’ll likely begin feeling more comfortable with recognizing and expressing what you want.  As psychologist Vicki Berkus writes in Ten Commitments To Mental Fitness: Accept The Challenge To Change, “[j]ust the exercise of checking in with yourself lets your subconscious mind know that you count, your feelings count, and your thoughts count.”  You may find that, as you develop this “wanting muscle,” the doubts and confusion that used to plague you about your career begin to fade away, and peace and clarity take their place.

The Aztecs of ancient Mesoamerica played a game called ulama.  The object was to get a ball through a stone hoop using only one’s elbows, knees or hips.  The game was played by two teams, and the stakes were extremely high.  The captain of the losing team—and, some scholars say, the rest of the team as well—were sacrificed to the Sun God.  Ulama, and similar games from that era, are ancestors of modern sports like soccer and basketball—the biggest difference being that, today, no one usually gets killed for losing.

The difference between ulama and its modern descendants mirrors the difference between how we experience the “work” and “play” activities in our lives.  When we’re working, we tend to think and behave as if our lives are on the line in everything we do.  This sense that there’s “so much at stake” puts us in a constant state of anxiety.  We worry about whether our colleagues are “backstabbing” us, whether our bosses disliked the colors we used in our presentation, whether we’re using too many pens, and so forth.  Our usual emotional state around our careers probably resembles what an ulama player felt like when his team was losing.

Career anxiety also limits our productivity and creativity.  We spend hours second-guessing the words we use in documents, mentally replaying stressful interactions at work, losing sleep over how our superiors perceive us, and so on.  We feel afraid to make suggestions about how things could be done better in the workplace, ask the boss for a raise, give constructive criticism, and take other actions that might benefit us and our coworkers.  Because we think we have so much to lose if our colleagues disapprove of us, we shy away from “rocking the boat.”

Most importantly, our constant state of career-related fear makes it impossible for us to enjoy what we do for a living.  No matter how well-paying our jobs, how fun-sounding the activities they entail, or how supportive our colleagues, we can’t be passionate about our work if we’re worrying nonstop about our reputation and security in our jobs.  This is one reason many people end up dissatisfied when they change careers—as the old saying goes, they take themselves wherever they go, and their perception of work as a super-high-stakes game keeps them in the same fearful state in their new environment.

By contrast, when we do something we consider “play,” we’re able to relax and enjoy ourselves, because the risks that come with losing don’t seem so overwhelming.  These activities are more like games of basketball with your friends—they might get a little rough, but nobody feels and acts as if his or her life were on the line.

Some people’s reaction to reading this might be “of course I need to behave like my life is at stake in my job.  My job pays my bills, and I need to take it seriously.”  This reflects the conventional wisdom in our society, which is that career anxiety is good for you—that the way to be successful in your career is to treat it as if it were a matter of life and death.  Some even take pride in their anxiety—they feel that worrying as much as they do makes them responsible, hardworking people.

But worrying, in fact, doesn’t pay your bills—it only hurts your creativity and productivity, and takes the fun out of what you’re doing.  As management psychologist Art Horn puts it in Face It: Recognizing And Conquering The Hidden Fear That Drives All Conflict At Work, “[w]orry can be quite self-defeating.  When it strikes, we think something quite unfortunate might happen.  Often dealing with the unfortunate matter requires clarity, and this is exactly what worrying destroys.  As a result, on-the-job worry reduces productivity.”

How do you dissolve the feeling that your life is at stake when you’re working, and regain peace and focus around what you do for a living?  I’ll describe one approach I use myself, and that I’ve used with clients.  When career-related anxiety arises, begin to breathe deeply and rhythmically, and focus on some point in the room.  Keep this up until the tension in your body and the other sensations that signal the anxiety pass away.  Don’t distract yourself by diving back into your work, procrastinating, or numbing yourself with food, drugs or alcohol—just stay where you are, and breathe and focus until the sensations are gone.

When we’re worrying, our minds become preoccupied with past experiences involving dangerous or harmful situations, or frightening possible future events.  For instance, perhaps we think back to our parents punishing us as children, or imagine ourselves losing our jobs and being forced to live in a dumpster.

Our bodies react as if these events were actually happening, and often respond by clenching the muscles and breathing shallowly.  As Dr. Robert E. Thayer describes in The Biopsychology of Mood and Arousal, biologists call this a “freeze response,” and it’s what animals do when they sense danger and seek to avoid detection by a predator.  Thus, when we do this, we are actually reacting as if we’re in a life-or-death situation.  However, since concerns we face at work don’t usually threaten our lives, all getting into this state does for us is create discomfort and distraction.

Holding our attention on our breathing and our surroundings helps keep our minds focused on what’s happening now, rather than what happened in the past or might occur in the future.  By breathing fully, we take ourselves out of the constricted “freeze” state.  Psychologist Stephen Wolinsky describes the benefits of this kind of technique in Trances People Live: Healing Approaches In Quantum Psychology:

In order for a symptom to remain a symptom, there has to be a holding of the breath. This holding allows the person to shift into a self-to-self trance: he or she is no longer present with you but is back watching an old internal movie. . . . When I request that clients continue to experience the symptom while they breathe and look at me, I am offering them the possibility of experiencing their symptoms fully but with me in present time.

As we continue to breathe and focus, our bodies gradually recognize that the past and future traumas we’re imagining aren’t happening and we’re not in physical danger, and they feel free to relax again.  Over time, as we keep doing this simple exercise in response to our anxiety, we become more and more composed in the face of situations that used to rattle us at work.

Gaining this sort of composure creates space for us to actually start enjoying what we do for a living.  Where before we may have dreaded getting out of bed to return to our stressful, frightening work environments, we develop a peace, focus and creativity we may not have experienced on the job before.  We start perceiving work as less like an Aztec bloodsport, and more like a friendly, invigorating pickup basketball game.

In literature on changing careers or starting a business, one theme you’ll often hear is that the key product you’re selling is yourself, and that you need to fully believe in yourself if you want others to be interested in what you have to offer.  If you’re not confident in your ability to run a business or market your services, the usual advice goes, stick with your current 9-to-5 job for now.  Take more courses, read more books, get more on-the-job training, and generally get more experience to build up the confidence to strike out on your own.

On the surface, this seems like sound advice.  However, it overlooks a problem I’ve often seen people confront when they’re starting, or hoping to start, a business or make a career change.  Some people can earn prestigious degrees in subjects related to their business, and spend years getting experience relevant to their field, but still feel like they can’t promote their products or services to others.  They have the nagging sense that, if they “put themselves out there,” they’d be arrogant, they’d bother people, they wouldn’t do it well enough, people would attack or ridicule them, and so on.  For people with a deep-seated fear of promoting themselves, gathering more skills and experience isn’t necessarily going to help.

For instance, I know a number of professionals in “high-powered fields” like law, banking and medicine who, despite how successful society and their colleagues consider them, are still deathly afraid of marketing themselves.  They can do the day-to-day work of their professions superbly well, but the idea of going out and finding clients and customers just doesn’t sit well with them.  In fact, some people have admitted to me that one reason they entered their professions was to have a secure, lucrative job without the anxiety of having to sell their services.

If you experience this type of fear around “selling yourself,” an important first step in removing that stumbling block is to carefully observe the thoughts and sensations that come up when the anxiety gets in your way.  When you fully understand how this anxiety feels and how it limits you, you experience a separation from the anxiety, and a sense of choice in how you respond to the world.  You become able to spot the feeling when it’s coming up, and decide to act in spite of it.  As psychologist Phil Nuernberger says in Strong And Fearless: The Quest For Personal Power, “[a]s we become more skilled in our ability to be an observer, we become more aware of the patterns and movements of the mind and we have a greater opportunity to choose the patterns and behaviors we want.”

I’ll recommend an exercise you can do to develop this sort of awareness.  Start by finding a comfortable place where you can sit alone and undistracted.  Allow any thoughts and feelings that come up to simply occur, without judging them, pushing them away, or turning to some activity to take your mind off them.

Now, ask yourself:  what thoughts arise when you consider doing something to market yourself or your products?  For instance, does asking someone to pay you for your goods or services feel sleazy or deceptive?  Would it feel like you were boasting about, or drawing too much attention to, yourself?  Does self-promotion feel like a mundane activity that it’s beneath someone of your qualifications to do?  Do you need to accomplish or learn more to “deserve” to promote yourself?

Next, notice the sensations that come up when you think about “selling yourself.”  You probably know already that you experience fear or anxiety, but what sensations tell you that you’re having those emotions?  For example, is there tension or pain in some part of your body?  Where is it?  Does your breathing become constricted?  Do you feel warmer or colder anywhere?  Does your mouth become dry?  Do you start to sweat?

Once you’ve fully experienced the thoughts and feelings that come up for you around self-promotion, allow those thoughts and feelings to gently pass away.  Let them subside into the space, the emptiness, from which they came.  Just as each breath of air into your lungs is followed by an exhale, so too do fear and other emotions enter and flow out of you.  Observe that, even though the sensations of the anxiety are gone, you are still there.  Allowing yourself to experience the anxiety didn’t destroy or change what you are.  You are still a whole and complete being.

This exercise helps you experience firsthand that sense of separation from your fears I talked about earlier.  Often, we make all kinds of efforts to avoid experiencing fear, as if just feeling it could actually hurt or destroy us.  We hold ourselves back from taking risks, lose ourselves in unfulfilling “busywork,” or numb ourselves with drugs and alcohol to avoid feeling our fear.  As with the professionals I described who chose their careers to avoid the need for self-promotion, many of us design our lives around making sure we don’t have to experience certain emotions.

However, when we allow our fear to run its course inside us, and notice we remain unharmed after it’s gone, we feel empowered to act in spite of it when it comes up.  As psychologist Barbara Miller Fishman writes in Emotional Healing Through Mindfulness Meditation, “[t]he meditative tool for probing experience allows us to watch how thoughts arise and then fade, how powerful emotions such as anger and fear emerge and then subside.  In this way we learn about the impermanence of experience.”

If you aren’t feeling fully confident in your ability to market your products and services, don’t be too quick to assume you need more education and skills to overcome your anxiety.  Acquiring more knowledge has its place, but transcending your fear isn’t usually something you can do on a purely intellectual level.  You may feel blocked because, until now, you’ve been unwilling to have the full, intense, visceral experience of being afraid.  Take a few moments to simply allow your fear to arise and pass away, and notice how much peace and focus this exercise can give you.

Most of us look to the outside world to “give” us pleasure.  We believe that earning more money, having relationships with more attractive partners, watching more entertaining movies, and other similar activities would make us happy.  By the same token, we tend to assume events in the outside world “hurt us” or make us unhappy.  Significant others we argue with, difficult coworkers, mechanics who don’t fix our cars properly, and so on, we believe, cause us to experience pain.

Because we have this outlook, we’re often angry at the world.  We feel the world hasn’t given us our “fair share” of pleasure, or that it’s saddled us with more than our fair share of pain.  We envy others who are taller, have more money, are members of happier-looking families, and so forth, believing the world shouldn’t have given them more pleasure than it’s bestowed on us.  We become distressed when our loved ones and friends “make us unhappy” by not treating us the way we’d like.

As we so often overlook, the idea that events out in the world “make” us feel certain ways is untrue.  Pleasure, pain and other emotions are sensations we feel in our bodies, created by the release of chemicals called neurotransmitters in our brains.  In other words, other people don’t create our pleasure and pain—our own bodies do.  When we keep this fact in mind, we start to doubt the idea that the universe is unfair or that we’ve received the “short end of the stick” in life.

But at a deeper level, “pleasure,” “pain” and the names of other emotions are just labels we slap on the sensations we experience.  Whether a sensation in our bodies is “positive” or “negative” depends on how we interpret it.  For example, to some people, the idea of jumping off a cliff or from a plane is terrifying, but to bungee jumpers and skydivers it’s the ultimate rush.  As psychologist Chris Johnstone says in Find Your Power: Boost Your Inner Strengths, Break Through Blocks And Achieve Inspired Action, “facing fear is so thrilling that some people do it as a sport.  The attraction behind bungee jumping is that there are two sides to fear:  one is terror, the other is excitement.”

As is often said, it’s best to think of the word “emotion” as short for “energy in motion.”  Our various emotions are simply different ways we experience the movement of biochemical energy in our bodies.  That energy is neither good nor bad—it’s simply an aspect of how our bodies work.  Calling some manifestations of this energy “negative” and others “positive” would be like saying our hearts were “good” but our lungs were “bad.”  Michael Sky expresses this point nicely in The Power Of Emotion: Using Your Emotional Energy To Transform Your Life:

All of our emotions manifest as moving (arising, vibrating, gathering, flowing, expanding, boiling) energy. When we have a feeling—any feeling—we experience a tangible movement of vital energy. The energy moving through us comprises the feeling; such energy-in-motion is emotion.

When we learn to see our feelings as nothing more than forms of energy we experience in our bodies, our perspective on emotions shifts.  The feelings we used to see as “bad” no longer seem so problematic and threatening.  We no longer need to go to great lengths to dodge “negative emotions” by holding back from taking risks, avoiding interactions with “difficult people,” and keeping our minds constantly occupied to distract ourselves from how we’re really feeling.

Of course, it’s hard to experience this shift in perspective just by thinking of emotions as energy patterns—understanding this at an intellectual level isn’t enough.  But I’ve found that, with a simple practice, it’s possible to really experience this fact in your body.  To do this, the next time you feel an emotion you’d usually think of as “bad” and want to avoid, such as anger, fear or sadness, pause for a moment, take a few deep breaths and allow the sensations to be there. 

Next, take your attention off the labels you usually put on the sensations, like “happiness” and “despair,” and focus instead on the location of the sensations in your body.  For instance, do you feel them in your chest?  Your neck?  Your shoulders?  Notice what the sensations feel like—for instance, do you feel a tingling, numbness, warmth, heaviness, or something else?  Keep your attention on your direct experience of what you’re feeling, rather than what you’ve learned to call it and the ways you usually distract yourself from it.

As I and others who have done this exercise have found, shifting your focus in this way creates a sense of calm and acceptance around your emotions.  Every sensation we call an “emotion” is just a natural part of the human experience, there’s nothing wrong with it, and it won’t harm or destroy you.  You don’t have to spend your life stressfully and frantically chasing certain kinds of sensation and running away from others.

We feel more free to pursue our goals when we see our fear as just another form of energy moving through us, instead of a threat to our existence.  We feel less distress when we don’t get something we want, because we can accept the sensations that come with the loss without judging or rejecting them.  Seeing our emotions for what they really are helps us live more peacefully and courageously.

Many of us, in some way, are afraid of displeasing people.  Some of us, for instance, constantly worry that our superiors at work see us in a negative light.  Some of us fret over the possibility that our loved ones—whether they’re our families, intimate partners or friends—will abandon us.  Still others are in people-pleasing mode in every situation, with a permanent smile etched on their faces and a complete inability to say “no” to even the most unreasonable requests.

I have a friend who, for many years, fell into the last category I described.  In his job, he had to painfully force himself to call clients and colleagues about business matters, for fear that he might bother them.  When asking a woman out on a date, he would fight to keep himself from hyperventilating due to fear of rejection.  He couldn’t bring himself to ask his neighbors to turn their loud music down, even when they left it on all night.  The depressing examples went on and on.

One day, when we were talking about the anxiety holding him back, I asked him how he felt in those moments when he was paralyzed by the need to please others.  He said he felt a tightening in his shoulders, as if his body were trying to hunch forward and make itself small.  He’d start trying to please people to avoid having the uncomfortable feeling.  As we discussed this sensation, he began to realize he’d been experiencing it in various situations for most of his life.

As it turned out, my friend’s earliest memory of this sensation came from when he was four years old.  He recalled a few times when he was sitting in his bedroom and his mother was yelling at him about something.  He tried to apologize or explain what happened, but when he started talking she stalked off and slammed the door behind her.  Sitting in his room alone, he remembered feeling helpless and trapped, as if the room were his prison.  He remembered deciding he’d never talk back to his mother and, as he put it, “get thrown in jail” again.

In that moment, my friend realized his people-pleasing behaviors came from a need to avoid experiencing that trapped feeling.  He got into the habit of holding back his needs and wants to avoid “going to jail,” and this habit had become so ingrained that he was still doing it as a grown man.  Unfortunately, while this approach may have protected him when he was little and vulnerable, it wasn’t doing him any favors as an adult.  His passive behavior was hurting him in his job, relationships and all other areas of his life.

A few weeks later, my friend had another breakthrough.  It happened when he took his car to be serviced, and he noticed when he got the car back that the dealership hadn’t fixed his interior light as they had agreed to do.  As usual, he decided not to bother them about it, and maybe to deal with the issue in his next regular visit.  As he drove away, he felt frustrated and thought “I wish I didn’t have to use this dealership—they’ve forgotten to do what I asked a couple of times.”

Then the realization hit him—he didn’t “have” to use the dealership.  Obviously, there were many people out there who’d be willing and able to repair his interior light.  He wasn’t at the dealership’s mercy at all—he could walk away.  Until that moment, he’d been unconsciously treating the dealership as if it were his mother—as if the servicepeople could “throw him in jail” if he “bothered” them about the car light.  But they couldn’t.  If he didn’t like the way he was treated there, he was free to get his car serviced elsewhere.

With a rush of excitement, he realized his power to walk away wasn’t limited to minor car repair issues.  If he wanted, he could walk away from jobs and intimate relationships that weren’t working for him as well.  He was free to make his own decisions in every area of his life, and nobody could imprison him for it.

This realization didn’t massively change his lifestyle—he didn’t walk away from his home and job and become a monk or something.  But the knowledge that he couldn’t be “thrown in jail” for expressing his wants and needs drained much of the fear out of his interactions with people.  He was able to take his car back to the dealership to get the light fixed.  He didn’t have to push himself to “bother” colleagues at work.  He could call women without breaking a sweat.  Overall, his life began to feel more joyful and empowered.

As this story illustrates, sometimes the best way to feel more in control of your life is to remember your ability to walk away.  When we forget we have this ability, we start feeling trapped and resentful about our lives, as if we’re “in jail” or forced to be where we are against our will.  We become fearful of taking risks, as we forget that other alternatives are available if our plans don’t work out.  Keeping in mind that you are where you are by your own choice, and that you can always make a change, gifts you with a sense of power and freedom.

It’s also helpful to remember that, in moments when you feel like you’re helpless and trapped in a bad situation—that you can’t “walk away”—you’re likely reverting to thinking and behavior you adopted when you were much younger.  In reality, as an intelligent, resourceful adult, there are few situations where you actually are completely powerless.  Staying aware of this helps you break free of outmoded behaviors designed to deal with childhood circumstances.  As psychotherapist Nancy Napier writes in Getting Through The Day: Strategies For Adults Hurt As Children:

[T]o some part of you—usually a child part—your adult life doesn’t exist. The only timeframe in which this part lives is back then, when things were dangerous, when you were being hurt. Within this pocket of time, your adult self isn’t real yet. The part of you that has been triggered doesn’t know about adult options: that you can walk away, stand up for yourself without being hurt, or talk it through and work it out.

When we become obsessed with pleasing others, we’ve lost sight of the choice and power we have as adults, and we’re reacting to the world as if we were still frightened and vulnerable children.  Simply keeping in mind, in every situation, that we’re free to walk away infuses everything we do with confidence and focus, and empowers us to assert our needs and desires.

(This article appeared in the Carnival of Improving Life, located at http://www.improvedlife.ca/content/ninth-edition-carnival-improving-life.)

Many of us see the unpredictable and sometimes dramatic changes in our moods as a problem.  I, for one, used to get frustrated when a grumpy or lethargic feeling would overtake me at work and hamper my productivity.  “Why can’t my body understand that I’m trying to work?” I’d wonder.  “Can’t I wait until the evening to start getting emotional?”  I would try to resist the mood I was in—for instance, if I were feeling sad, I’d try to think happy, inspiring thoughts—but this only seemed to create more discomfort.

I certainly wasn’t the only one with an attitude of resistance toward my emotions.  Many of us perceive certain feelings as “negative” and unwanted, and spend much time and effort finding ways to avoid experiencing them.  Maybe this involves staying constantly busy, forcing ourselves to think happy thoughts, “drowning out” our emotions with television and loud music, using drugs and alcohol, or something else.  Whatever strategies we use, many of us spend most of our lives trying—without much success—to fight off “difficult” emotional experiences.

My relationship with my “painful” moods changed when I realized how much my fluctuating emotions could teach me about myself, and how much inner peace those learnings could create for me.  A while back, as an experiment, I decided to spend almost all of one Sunday meditating.  I started at sunrise and finished in the evening, stopping only for brief periods to drink water and stretch.

Like many people, my mood tends to vary based on the time of day.  My pattern is fairly predictable—when I first wake up I feel a sense of peace and clarity; in the mid-afternoon I get into a more driven, self-critical state; by the late afternoon there is a mild to moderate sense of frustration; and by nighttime my sense of peace returns.  Thus, when I spent the whole day meditating, I experienced my full emotional cycle.  The difference was that I wasn’t distracting myself with all my usual activities—through all my mood changes, I just sat there and focused on my breathing.

As I meditated, I had a simple but profound realization:  no matter where I was in my daily emotional cycle, I remained the same person.  No matter whether I felt peaceful, excited, sad, or upset, I was still myself.  My moods didn’t, and couldn’t, change who I was in my deepest essence.  Feeling sad didn’t take anything away from me, nor did feeling happy add anything to me—neither emotion had any effect on me at my core.

In that moment, I also understood the reason I tended to resist so-called “negative” feelings like anger and grief.  It was because I saw those emotions as somehow threatening—as if allowing myself to fully experience them could actually hurt or destroy me.  But my meditation experience showed me this wasn’t true.  Although I simply sat there, breathed, and allowed my usual spectrum of emotions to wash over me, I came out of the experience alive and unharmed, and exactly the same person I was when I started.

If I didn’t have anything to fear from my moods, I recognized, I didn’t need to spend so much time and effort trying to escape and suppress them.  Thus, this realization had me remove much of the clutter and distraction from my life.  I reduced my intake of alcohol and mild stimulants like caffeine to the point where I hardly ever use them.  I once listened to loud music as I worked to drown out my “negative thinking,” but now I felt more centered and productive in silence.  I sold my radio and TV, as I no longer needed them to distract me when I started feeling boredom or malaise.

I’d often read in books on psychology and spirituality that it takes more pain and effort to repress our “negative” emotions than it does to simply allow them.  Now, I had firsthand evidence of this in my own life.  But at a deeper level, I began to recognize that there really is no such thing as a negative emotion.  We simply call feelings like anger and sadness “negative” because we’ve grown so accustomed to resisting them, and the stress we create by resisting—not the emotions themselves—has us see them as painful and difficult.

I’m not, of course, the first to take the view that no emotion is truly “negative” unless we try to fight it—health researchers have come to similar conclusions in exploring the connection between repressed emotions and physical illness.  As psychologist Sandy Jost puts it in Your Body, Your Mind & Their Link To Your Health, “[t]here is no such thing as a ‘negative emotion’ when it comes to the healthy expression of the bodymind.  It is the suppression, denying, pushing away, or avoidance of these emotions that causes a physical response that can lead to health problems.”

As others have recognized, a key benefit of meditation is that it gives us firsthand evidence that our thoughts and emotions can’t hurt us or make us less than what we are.  When we allow our emotions to occur without resisting them, and realize we’re still whole after the experience, we come to recognize at a deep level that all the effort we put into distracting ourselves from our feelings is unnecessary.  As psychologist Stephen Wolinsky says in Trances People Live: Healing Approaches In Quantum Psychology, meditation is an experience where “emotions pass through the person without the ordinary damper of judgments or labels,” and its goal is to help the meditator “lose[] all tendencies to become identified with the contents of the mind.”

If you’re new to experiences like the one I described, and you’re interested in deepening your understanding of your relationship to your emotions, you don’t need to spend days meditating.  Instead, you can try simply keeping your attention on your breathing as you go through your daily activities.  Just remain aware of the constant rise and fall of your chest as your day progresses.

Notice as you do this that, no matter what moods you get into, your breathing continues in much the same way—just as you, the being perceiving your thoughts and emotions, remain essentially the same regardless of how you’re feeling.  And because you continue to be yourself, and be complete, no matter what you think or feel, there’s no need to push aside or resist any sensations that arise.  You can simply let go of anything you used to do to distract yourself from how you feel.  This experience will likely bring you a deep sense of wholeness and relief.

(This article appeared in the Carnival of Healing, located at http://www.debramoorhead.com/blog/index.php/carnival-of-healing-137-education-at-its-best/.)

This might not sound revolutionary to some, but I recently realized I’ve made great strides in my ability to say “no” to others’ requests.  A few days ago, a friend called, saying she was having a surprise party for another friend that night and she wanted me to be there.  I was planning to go to a talk at a local bookstore, and I’d been looking forward to it for a while.  I told my friend I’d already made plans, and stuck to my guns even when she was incredulous that I’d go to a lecture instead of her party.

This was definitely a departure from what I was like three years ago.  Back then, I probably wouldn’t even have mentioned to my friend that I had other plans—I would have agreed to go to her party without hesitation.  I used to feel shame and guilt at the prospect of telling someone I wouldn’t do what they wanted and possibly upsetting them.  It didn’t matter to me whether the other person’s request was reasonable, or whether I wanted to do what they asked—all of my attention was on how they’d be likely to react, and how awful I’d feel, if I inconvenienced or hurt them.

The Key Realization

About a year ago, I had a realization that changed my attitude toward saying “no.”  I came to understand the difference between taking responsibility for how other people feel and simply caring how they feel.  When you take responsibility for someone’s feelings, you consider yourself entirely at fault when they feel hurt or angry.  It’s as if you’re responsible for their childhoods, the state of their intimate relationships, their moods, what they had for breakfast, and all the other factors that influence human beings’ emotional reactions.

As farfetched as this idea may seem, most of us learn and buy into it early in our development.  Psychologist Carl Semmelroth aptly puts this point in The Anger Habit In Relationships:

As ridiculous as it seems, it is commonly assumed that our partners make us angry. Most people justify their anger by pointing at something someone else does. And, unfortunately, many spouses and children see themselves as responsible for the anger of other family members . . . . Children learn this perverse theory about anger from their parents and teachers; they learn that they are responsible for other people’s anger.

However, as I finally learned, you can actually empathize with someone and be concerned for their well-being—you can care about how they feel—without blaming yourself every time they get upset.

For a long time, I didn’t understand this distinction.  I thought I had two choices in relating to others’ emotions—either bear full responsibility for them, or have no concern for them at all.  Because lacking interest in them seemed callous to me, I chose to blame myself whenever someone else suffered.  This approach had me avoid saying “no” in almost every situation, because refusing someone else’s request would likely upset them and I’d blame and punish myself for it.  It was a huge relief when I recognized that caring about people didn’t require me to slavishly agree with or obey them.

Simply understanding this distinction, however, wasn’t always enough to keep me from caving in to others’ requests for fear of hurting them.  I’d been avoiding conflict to spare others’ feelings for so long that it had turned into an unconscious habit, and I had to carefully monitor my behavior to make sure I didn’t lapse into my old pattern.

Monitoring Yourself In Real Time

I found that the best way to do this was to observe myself carefully when I interacted with people and watch for moments when my mind became fully absorbed in how they were feeling.  In those moments, all of my attention is on preventing others from being upset, and none of it is on how I feel or what I want.  I can tell when I’m slipping into this mindset when I ask myself a simple question:  “how am I feeling right now?”

If I can’t answer this question—if I have no awareness of how I feel—it means I’ve lapsed into taking responsibility for others’ emotions.  As long as I make sure to ask myself this question when someone makes a request of me, I don’t find myself giving in with no regard to my own needs and desires.

Another method I’ve developed to avoid blaming myself for others’ upset is to watch out for tactics people use to get me feeling responsible for their emotional states.  For instance, some people will accuse you of not caring about them when you don’t do something they want—when, in fact, you are absolutely concerned for their well-being but you have other plans or priorities in that moment.  Or, they’ll demand to know how you could “hurt them” like this—implying that you, not anyone or anything else in their lives, are solely responsible for any hurt they’re experiencing.

Often, people aren’t consciously trying to manipulate you when they employ these tactics—they’re just using the style of communication they’ve grown accustomed to.  However, consciously or otherwise, these people are trying to induce you to do what they ask by convincing you to feel responsible for their emotions.  “If I’m upset or dissatisfied, you’re to blame,” they’re basically telling you, “so if you don’t want to be at fault and feel ashamed, you must give me what I want.”  If you keep an eye out for techniques like these, and notice how they can shake your composure, you’ll get better at catching yourself when you’re about to give in to someone’s demands.

At first, weaning yourself off the habit of taking responsibility for others’ emotions can be a painful process.  Initially, I felt very uncomfortable saying “no” to someone’s request in the face of their irritation or distress.  I worried that people wouldn’t want to be around me if I didn’t always go along with their wishes.  In fact, however, my newfound ability to stand up for my needs and wants hasn’t ruined any of my relationships.  If anything, telling others what I need and want has helped them learn more about me as a person, and thus had them feel more deeply connected with me.

(This article appeared in the Carnival of Improving Life, located at http://www.improvedlife.ca/content/eighth-edition-carnival-improving-life.)

Many people, including people who come to me for coaching, tell me they “don’t know what they want” in life.  Much of the time, however, this isn’t really true.  They’ve just fallen into the habit of saying they don’t know because they don’t feel safe telling people in their lives what they want.  They worry that others will judge them as irresponsible, selfish or unrealistic if they admit what they actually want to do with their lives, and the prospect of being harshly judged feels scary.

I had a conversation with a friend the other day that illustrated this point nicely.  She joked that she would be a terrible client for me because she’s never been able to figure out what she wants in life.

“What do you want to do?” I asked, as if she hadn’t said that last part about not knowing.

She nervously chuckled a little.  “Like I said, I don’t know.”

“What would you say if you did know?”

She laughed and hesitated a bit more, but eventually came around.  “Well, when I was a kid, I really loved to paint.”

As the conversation went on, I witnessed my friend’s quick, miraculous transformation from a woman who supposedly “never” knew what she wanted into someone who’d harbored an aching desire to be a painter all her life.  She told me about the paintings she did when she was younger, and the regret she’d felt for a long time because her other responsibilities had taken her away from her art.  As she talked about it, her nervous laughter and apologetic attitude faded away, and she became more willing to tell me how exciting painting was for her.

I didn’t do anything complicated or magical to induce this change in my friend.  All I did was express genuine interest in what she truly desired, and refrain from shaming or mocking her when she revealed her wants.  It doesn’t take much beyond compassionate listening, I’ve found, to create an environment where people feel safe expressing their wishes.

As easy as it sounds to listen to someone’s wishes without judging or criticizing, many of us don’t have—or don’t think we have—access to a person who will listen to us like this.  Many of us grew up in situations where telling others what we needed and wanted, for whatever reason, didn’t feel safe.  Many of us fear that our loved ones today would ridicule or scold us if we told them what we really desired.  However it happened, at some point we lost our trust in people’s ability to hear what we want and need without attacking or abandoning us.

If we fear that no one will be receptive to our wants, it may look like the easiest thing to do is keep our wants to ourselves.  If we never tell anyone what we want, we believe, no one will ever insult or get mad at us, and our lives will run smoothly.  Unfortunately, our wants don’t disappear just because we don’t admit they exist.  Part of us resents it when we don’t express our desires, and this resentment accumulates in our bodies and renders us prone to rage and depression.  Duke Robinson aptly describes this problem in Too Nice For Your Own Good: How To Stop Making Nine Self-Sabotaging Mistakes:

In order to keep quiet, we expend a great deal of emotional power we could be using to tell others what we need.  We also burden ourselves with a lot of regret as we wonder “why didn’t I ask?”  In the end, we both resent those from whom we don’t get what we want and are angry at ourselves for not speaking up.  This anger, suppressed and turned inward, puts us in danger of depression and serious illness.

If we have unfulfilled desires, it’s better to at least acknowledge them to someone instead of holding them in.  Even if we don’t end up pursuing some of the things we wish for, simply admitting them, without explanation or apology, helps release the anger and sadness that build up around a neglected want.  As we reveal our wants more and more often like this, we regain our trust that the world will accept and support us in pursuing our goals.

I’ll make a suggestion to anyone reading this who doesn’t think they know what they want in life.  Find someone—whether it’s a loved one, a close friend, or a coach or therapist—whom you trust to listen to you without judgment or criticism.  Have them agree to keep what you tell them in confidence.  Once you’re in a safe environment, I think you’ll surprise yourself with how much you actually know about what you want, and how relieving it is to be in a place where you can finally reveal it.  And who knows—maybe this will even have you feel inspired and trusting enough to go for it.

(This article appeared in the Carnival of Improving Life, located at http://www.improvedlife.ca/content/seventh-edition-carnival-improving-life.)

Over the last year, people have been reacting to me in ways they never did before.  Strangers have been smiling at me in the street.  A woman I’d just met in a coffee shop told me she “got a great vibe” from me.  A man I met recently at an event told me “I feel very peaceful around you.”  This sort of thing doesn’t happen every second of the day, but it’s definitely occurred enough for me to start seeing it as a trend.

The most interesting aspect of these interactions is that the people who seemed pleased to be in my presence knew next to nothing about my status and achievements in the world.  They didn’t know what I do for a living, who my friends are, where I live, or any other information we usually consider important in getting a sense of who someone is.  Thus, it was clear they weren’t simply acting happy to be around me because they were impressed with something I’d done, or because they thought they could get money or business opportunities from me.

What these people did sense about me was that I was at peace.  My body felt loose and relaxed and a gentle warmth was flickering in my chest, and my mind was free of anguish over past events and anxieties about my possible future.  When I feel this way inside, people around me actually experience the feeling within themselves as well.  Humans, moments like this have taught me, are far more empathic than we usually give each other credit for being.  We have an extremely acute sense of each other’s emotional states.

If you’d told me three years ago I could change my way of being so that people who didn’t even know me would be happy to be in my presence, I would have laughed.  My belief at the time was that, if you want people to feel good around you, you need to show them you can offer them something valuable—whether it’s money, social status, useful knowledge or something else.  Otherwise, people will be indifferent or hostile.  That’s human nature, I thought—you might not like it, but you have to live with it.

I certainly wasn’t the only one to hold this view of the world—it also happens to be conventional wisdom in our society.  After all, don’t we slave away in our jobs and the educational system, buy expensive cars and clothes, and join the right social groups because we think that’ll make others appreciate and respect us?  If we didn’t do those things, no one would talk, play, or mate with us, right?  Don’t we have to earn others’ love through our achievements in the world?

Unfortunately, despite this idea’s popularity, it didn’t hold up very well in my actual life.  Three years ago, I was a highly-paid, highly-educated young lawyer, with a luxury car and a spacious Northern California condo.  If the conventional wisdom were true, you’d think I would have been getting plenty of love and appreciation—that I’d be surrounded by a close, supportive circle of friends, that beautiful women would be vying for my attention, and that generally people would be pleased to be around me.

In reality, I was solitary, angry and work-obsessed.  In this state, my friends and loved ones weren’t exactly lining up to hang out with me.  On dates with women, I’d find subtle ways to convey that I had money and prestige.  But did a woman I dated at the time ever say to me “I get a great vibe from you,” like the woman I just met in the coffee shop recently?  If you answered “no,” you get a gold star.  I spent countless hours pursuing academic and career success, expecting people to like me and want to be around me as a result, but the world simply wouldn’t cooperate.

My relationships with others began to transform when I started questioning the idea that I needed to “earn” people’s love and appreciation.  When I put my attention on this belief, I also saw how deeply it was influencing my way of being in the world.  For example, when I’d first meet someone, I’d make an effort to quickly crack a joke or tell an interesting anecdote to prove I was someone worth associating with.  Even the way I moved my body, taking long strides with my posture erect and my eyes focused ahead, was designed to make people see me as powerful and deserving of respect.

I recognized that the behaviors I’d adopted to prove my worth were actually making people uncomfortable and driving them away.  The reason was that, no matter how impressive I tried to make myself look, people could tell how I was feeling on the inside.  More importantly, they actually experienced my emotional state in their own bodies.  And because I was frustrated and anxious most of the time, I was having others feel that way just by being around them.

The only way to improve my impact on others, it seemed, was to improve my own emotional state.  With this in mind, I took up a number of practices designed to bring me inner peace.  I started taking walks in the forest, simply being there and appreciating my surroundings with no plans or expectations.  I sat for long periods by myself, seeking and accomplishing nothing, simply existing.  When I felt like it, I’d dance and jump around my house, purely for my own amusement, with no concern for impressing anyone.

As I cultivated peace in myself, people around me—interestingly enough—started seeming more peaceful as well.  It took me a while to realize that I wasn’t just perceiving the world as a calmer place—I was actually causing it to be more peaceful through my way of being.  When people started explicitly acknowledging that it felt good just to be around me, I could no longer deny the reality that my inner peace was creating peace in the world.  As Gerry Shishin Wick and Ilia Shinko Perez put it in The Great Heart Way: How To Heal Your Life And Find Self-Fulfillment, “our disturbing emotions are the source of unethical conduct, suffering and war. . . . [B]y addressing these emotions, we create inner peace which then creates outer peace.”

If you want more fulfilling relationships with others, you may be able to make significant improvements by simply changing your mindset.  Try giving up, if just for a few days, the notion that you need to earn people’s affection, or prove to them that you’re worthy of their time and attention.  Instead, consider the possibility that your own emotional state—your own peace and composure—creates the quality of your interactions with others.