Every person dreams of finding himself in life and learning about his true destiny, but only a few take real steps on the path to happiness. The reasons for the inaction of the majority are in the lack of motivation and lack of understanding by a person of the importance of filling his life with meaning. How to help yourself start living fully, learn how to communicate, make pleasant acquaintances, and most importantly - to find the joy of living every day for all this?
What is happiness?
A person cannot be happy all the time, just like holding positive emotions at one stable high level, but you don’t need to strive for this. The feeling of happiness in itself is unproductive - it serves a person as a reward for another successful achievement, and therefore trying to renew it artificially is even harmful to the dynamics of personal growth. So how justified is the movement towards happiness and is this direction false?
When a person sets a goal, by default he expects that the successful completion of his efforts will be marked by a spectrum of positive feelings - from a sense of simple satisfaction to an euphoric state (“I am happy!”). Therefore, without moving to the goal, and even earlier - without skillfully setting the task and its successful motivation, a person cannot be happy in principle.
In addition, psychologists recommend to a person who believes that joy and a taste for life is not about him, often make small pauses and focus on those small manifestations of miracles of life that surround him at this moment. A child’s smile, good health, the first spring grass in the garden - all this is an occasion for a separate joy. Failing to notice this in the hope of a single serving of some unthinkable happiness means daily robbing yourself in anticipation of the wealth promised by anyone. Irrational and threatens to fade the emotional fuse.
How to find yourself?
Finding oneself is like floating to the surface after a long dive under water and realizing how bright the sun is shining, how beneficial it is warm and tasty uncompressed air in the balloon. All people are familiar with this feeling, because it comes from a free, deprived of the template thinking of childhood, when every child clearly knows why he came to this world and does not doubt his right to happiness.
How to help yourself to a person who does not love his body, hates going to work, is too lazy to pick up a book? No way. You can’t help him. Until healthy egoism wakes up in him, saying, as in childhood, that everything in the world is bad, that does not make him even a bit happier, nothing will change and remain just as gray and annoying.
This question is how to help themselves, psychologists propose to consider from the perspective of "I and the World", where a person, first of all, compares his personality with his environment - how much is his presence harmonious with this society? And his interests - the tasks of the "common cause" at work? And the level of his well-being - desires and expected prospects? To correctly conduct your own reboot, you can use the simple instruction.
“Learning to understand myself”
To understand oneself means to realize and accept one’s needs, regardless of the public’s attitude towards them. It’s not about accepting your asocial principles, which, if given free rein, can harm others, but it’s definitely not worth orienting your desires and goals towards the percentage of condemnation that they have to get from a neighbor from the third floor.
How to do it? A person should imagine such a situation - all his previous achievements are suddenly reset, merit or shortcomings are forgotten, and future life is a white sheet. What story would begin to be written on it? What would he become if he had the opportunity to start all over again, would he listen to someone’s advice, align himself with someone’s results? An honest answer to these questions and visualization of such a perspective will help the individual to determine what he really wants in this life.
"Learning to love myself"
The German psychologist Eric Frome said that the only worthy result of human efforts is the formation of his own personality. Without an intention to improve something in oneself, to discover new possibilities within oneself, to discover the facets of one's perfection, a person’s life is meaningless. Self-love is the main chance to reveal oneself to the world and give it the opportunity to show your love.
How to help yourself? Do not allow extraneous criticism to influence your own attitude to strangers or your actions, respect your decisions and part with people who inspire a sense of uncertainty.
“Learning to be productive”
The definition of the motion vector is, first of all, the elimination of everything that prevents one from moving forward, and we are talking not only about external factors (poor boss, unloved work), but also about internal ones (laziness, irresponsibility). Then you should decide on your merits and real interests, which can go against everything that until now has been the basis of life.
How to do it? You should forever abandon self-digging and doubts about past events, vague suspicions about the “What would happen if ...” and rushing between priorities. The last point is especially important, since attempts to give equal attention to a lot of activities at once reduce productivity and prevent you from achieving at least any meaningful results in any of the undertaken cases.
Confidence is the way to success
How to become more self-confident and why do you need it? Moving forward to a designated goal implies that a person on his way will face obstacles, which, without being self-confident, are very difficult to overcome. You will have to turn a blind eye to many things (for example, aggression or attempts to intervene from outsiders), but what you definitely should not put up with is hidden disrespect for oneself because of a mess in appearance, poor communicative qualities, poor health. How to help yourself?
Learning to talk with people, to listen, but most importantly - to convey their opinion to them, will become possible only after careful work on your personal qualities. They don’t listen to a timid person, they look at a groomed man with disdain, where can one get confidence? Psychologists advise starting with one’s own appearance, giving it the kind of gloss that distinguishes people who live by their own rules, then moving on to training to develop communication skills and at the same time building the right knowledge base in the chosen field.
How to become interesting?
How to become an outgoing and interesting person? No matter how rich the fantasy may be, it will not be possible to come up with an interesting image, and then convince outsiders of its “reality” - the fraud will quickly open. Therefore, the only way out is to realize in yourself all the desired qualities that will help to gain a foothold in the right status, and withstand the test of time.
What psychologists advise in this case:
- to read books that promote self-development and, necessarily, classical works, not knowing which in a decent society is simply embarrassing;
- work on your speech, excluding from it various sayings, template expressions, parasitic words;
- regularly perform breathing exercises that make speech more modular, measured;
- learn to listen without interruption;
- be useful, but not intrusive;
- develop a sense of humor and healthy sarcasm;
- learn to be consistent in conversation and action.
All people are different and what is easily accessible to an extrovert can be a painful torture for an introvert. Therefore, you should not force yourself to "go out into the people" if the primary communication skills have not yet been mastered and the level of timidity significantly exceeds the desire to show oneself to the world. Timeliness is good in everything.
Eliminate tightness and shyness
Shy people are distinguished by a common fear of seeming ridiculous, insincere in the eyes of others, so they avoid all communication and prefer to lead a very monotonous life. There are many exercises that help clamped people to step over a sense of awkwardness and reach their potential, and the simplest of them is to start a conversation daily with ten strangers from the street.
This is much simpler than it seems, because the person to whom the trainee approaches does not suspect the purpose of the conversation. You can ask him the way to the nearest movie theater or find out the time - the main thing is to initiate a conversation, behave at ease and end the conversation yourself when necessary. If you perform this simple exercise every day - for example, on the way to work - after a week it will not be difficult for a person to calmly participate in a lively conversation with colleagues or to initiate a discussion on an interesting topic.
Practical Guidelines for Sociability
In order to become a full-fledged participant in any discussions and make your opinion valuable to others, it is not enough just to overcome shyness, you still need to be able to hold the attention of your opponents and not be branded as impudent or boring. And here, too, as in all areas of communication with the outside world, there are rules:
- you need to be sincerely interested in the opponent and not be shy to show it, asking questions during the conversation and supporting the conversation emotionally (“what are you doing!”, “and what's next?” “wow!”);
- it is necessary to catch the general tone of the conversation and periodically “discharge” the tension with a light joke (ideally, if turned in its own direction);
- monosyllabic sentences are enemies of dialogue, therefore, in a conversation you always need to use phrases that enable the interlocutor to develop the topic;
- don’t “stick” a smile to your face in order to seem friendly - the most kind and helpful people show it much less often than the “leading” managers in the store.
And the last recommendation - in an effort to become popular and fill the gaps in your social life, we must not forget that the constant holding on of a false mask that hides the true motives requires tremendous effort and is completely unjustified. From communication it is necessary to receive pleasure, from interlocutors - positive energy. Only then can contact with others be called easy and mutually satisfactory.
Books to help you find yourself in life
The following list of books can be safely attributed to the necessary set of works for people who want to get off the ground and do not yet know how to help themselves. These books are written by psychologists, professors and publicists, open new horizons for the reader and show that the real possibilities of man have no limits.
Top works for self-improvement:
- “Stone Dissection” from the Indian doctor of medicine Abraham Vergese is a unique piece of the semi-medical genre that answers the question why people are born and die. Using two separated Siamese twins as an example, each of them defending their individuality by their own methods, the author shows the full breadth of human choice and the relationship between this choice and result.
- “What to dream about. How to understand what you really want and how to achieve it ”- from motivational writer Barbara Cher. The book tells about what needs to be done when a complete emptiness has formed in life and there is no way to fill it, and how you can help yourself if you wait for more help from nowhere.
- “The Artist's Way” by Julia Cameron, author of many best-selling books. This is a practical guide for applicants for their inner excellence, who are invited to complete simple and interesting tasks within 3 months to unleash their inner potential. A huge number of positive reviews about the book, which has been relevant for almost 20 years, speaks about the reality of the author’s psychological approach to this issue.
Motivating books should be read meaningfully, writing out important thoughts or interesting facts from them into a special notebook that you can always carry with you to support the right psychological mood in your head. Having finished one work, you need to pause in 5-7 days. This time will be spent on consolidating the acquired knowledge and filtering the acquired information into relevant and useless ones for further work on oneself.