Giving and helping others are wonderful things. We are appreciated when we give to others through charity, volunteer work, or other acts of kindness; and rightly so. When we can help another person in some way, it creates a spirit of goodwill, and it’s one of the single most important acts we can do for our own happiness.

What’s often overlooked though is how much consciousness, caring, time, money, and energy each one of us already puts into significantly helping other people every day – through the work we do.

Every hour we’ve spent in a classroom, in an internship, and at work is an hour we’ve spent honing and perfecting our skills. Every dollar we’ve spent for tuition, books, seminars, travel – and of course those most expensive of seminars, the cost of failure or loss that have added to our wisdom – is a dollar we’ve spent investing in our ability to do our work well.

And every ounce of energy we’ve spent thinking about, worrying over, creating ideas for, and sweating through hard work and difficult times is an ounce of energy that increases our ability to provide some kind of product or service to another human being.

It’s popular these days to dismiss all this because we’re doing it for the money; as though earning money cheapens our efforts, makes our efforts base, selfish, or materialistic.

But earning a living from what we do makes it possible and reasonable for us to do it. When demagogues lecture young college graduates to forego making money, and instead to do something else that helps people, they are telling them that what we do to make money does not help people.

This, of course, is exactly the opposite of the truth.

Money is the great measure of value. That some people get money through deceit or fraud or through the use of political power or manipulation does not negate the fact that most of us make our livings doing something that is of value to other people – and to enough other people that the aggregate of what they pay allows for us to afford those things we need and want.

The contractor we hired to remodel our house some years ago was not simply willing to hammer some nails to help out in our time of need. He makes his living doing what he does. We paid him a lot of money, and in return we got all the skill, experience, and knowledge, familiarity with the sub-contractors, and accountability that led to the finished product we were happy with. The work he did then continues to add to our quality of life every single day.

He didn’t do this as a sacrifice; it was the most moral and benevolent of human interactions: it was an exchange.

Think of the work you do. How many hundreds or thousands of hours have you invested in learning the skills you use? How many years have you spent practicing those skills to earn the level of competence you bring to your work today?

This is what you give back to the world each and every day, without even thinking about it.

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Man should not try to avoid stress any more than he would shun food, love or exercise.

• Hans Selye

It is common knowledge that too much stress is bad for us; yet stress is also a necessary and vital part of living well. Anything that you do that involves challenging yourself, confronting situations that require your best efforts, or pushing yourself beyond your comfort zone will involve a degree of stress.

Happiness is not the absence of stress; it is living with a degree of stress that we can manage. And there’s new research that turns what we thought we knew about stress on its head – what’s most important for our health and well-being is not the stress itself, but what we believe about stress.

When we’re feeling too much stress in our lives, there are two things that we can do:

• Do less of what causes us stress
• Learn to manage a higher level of stress

Legendary UCLA Basketball coach John Wooden said, “Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.” That one sentence contains great leverage for decreasing stress. A major cause of stress is worrying and spinning our wheels trying to do things that are outside of our control.

When we focus on what we can’t do, we feel both revved up to want to do something, and simultaneously helpless to actually do anything. It’s like having one foot on the accelerator and the other on the brake at the same time. To that end, focusing most of our efforts on what we can do will make us more effective, and less stressed out.

Another thing we can do to decrease external stress is to take stock of our environment, and find what increases our stress. Do you spend a lot of time commuting? Are you in an environment that overloads your senses, or in which you feel threatened? If you can change such things you can lower your stress levels.

Here are three simple but effective things we can do to increase our capacity for stress:

• Deliberately breathing more slowly and deeply (not too deeply that you hyperventilate): Practicing breathing between 4-6 breaths per minute for a few minutes a day can help calm your system overall.
• Practicing relaxing: Meditation, prayer, giving yourself time to look at the stars at night… anything that trains your body and mind to relax will strengthen your ability to relax when you need to.
• Regular physical exercise: There are huge psychological and physical benefits to regular exercise – from strengthening our capacity for stress, to decreasing anxiety, to preventing and relieving depression, to increasing your overall health and resilience.

And beyond these, one of the most effective strategies for managing stress is to make plans.

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Change and growth is, first and foremost, an active, creative process. Charting a new course for ourselves, even if we’re only talking about a specific habit or two, involves envisioning what we would like different, how we would like it to be different, and what steps we need to take to get there.

Then, most importantly, it requires the commitment to take action, which involves creating the structures that will guide us through the steps and keep us on track; the scheduled appointments, the deadlines, the people who will keep us accountable.

Successful people actually use less willpower than less successful people, because they set up effective rituals, appointments, and accountability structures that build into their day what they would otherwise need willpower to achieve.

Twyla Tharp, the great dancer and choreographer, in her book The Creative Habit, talks about “rituals of preparation:” what creative people do that prepares them to work. This is hers:

I begin each day of my life with a ritual: I wake up at 5:30 am, put on my workout clothes, my leg warmers, my sweatshirts, and my hat. I walk outside my Manhattan home, hail a taxi, and tell the driver to take me to the Pumping Iron gym at 91^st Street and First Avenue, where I work out for two hours. The ritual is not the stretching and weight training I put my body through each morning at the gym; the ritual is the cab. The moment I tell the driver where to go I have completed the ritual.

Such rituals let our entire system know that we are ready, that it is time to work; they shepherd all of our psychological, emotional and physical resources and make them available to us, so we can focus and absorb ourselves in our task.

It’s the daily consistency that makes such rituals so powerful. As Tharp says:

All preferred working states, no matter how eccentric, have one thing in common: When you enter into them, they impel you to get started. Whether it’s the act of carrying a hot coffee mug to an outdoor porch, or the rock ‘n’ roll that gets a painter revved up to splash color on a canvas, or the stillness of an herb garden that puts a chef in a culinary trance, moving inside each of these routines gives you no choice but to do something. It’s Pavlovian: follow the routine, get a creative payoff.

What are some of your rituals of preparation? Chances are you already have some, even if you haven’t thought of them that way. What do you do that gets you in the frame of mind to function at your best?

Identifying what already works and doing more of it can boost your success, but sometimes creating new behaviors means starting from scratch. If you think about one of the habits you’d like to begin, stop or change this year, what is the first action you need to take to get that started?

If you can identify the first action and commit to a specific time and place to do it, you will triple your chance of success.

Then, if you really want to make creative changes, the essential, irreplaceable element is to commit 100% to making those changes. Commit to the changes, commit to taking that first step, and commit to the strategy and the rituals that will deliver you to your goals.

Commitment is everything. In over 40 years of working with people to help them make positive changes in their lives, I have never seen a single person make such changes without a firm commitment to do so. There’s a palpable quality that radiates from a person when they commit, as though an energetic path that had once been hidden has opened before them toward their goals.

Rituals express a commitment in action. The wish without the commitment is passive; it puts us in a place of helpless longing. The triumph of creation comes with an active, purposeful vision, with concrete steps and consistent ritualized structures that will hold us to our goals, and total commitment that we re-affirm every day.

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My grandmother started walking five miles a day when she was sixty. She’s ninety-seven now, and we don’t know where the heck she is.

• Ellen DeGeneres

It’s no secret that exercise is good for our physical health. But exercise is vital for our mental health as well; and sitting a lot and not exercising is tremendously harmful for our emotional and psychological life.

There has been an upsurge in depression over the past several decades. One major contributor to this is how little physical activity we get. Exercise is just about the best treatment for depression, yet today 50% of men and 60% of women don’t exercise more than ten minutes per week.

Yes, that’s per week.

The most popular treatment for depression is medication. It’s quick to administer, it’s easy to do, but, statistically, for mild to moderate depression it’s actually no better than placebo. It also has side effects that can be pretty unpleasant over time, and when the medication stops, so do its benefits.

Exercise isn’t as easy as medication; it takes work, self-discipline, and perseverance. It requires us to do what we often don’t feel like doing (I’ve jumped into a swimming pool thousands of times, and to this day I have never liked that moment of entering the water).

But exercise is as much as two and a half times as effective as medication for overcoming depression.

Once we develop the habit of exercise, we can easily overcome the inertia and the discomfort; then the benefits we gain against the depression continue, and the side effects are all positive.

But overcoming the inertia and discomfort – or even the self-concept – that exercise requires can be tricky.

We can develop an idea of ourselves that gets in the way of changing our bad habits to better ones: “I’m not one of those people who exercises…” There is a common feature of anything we do that challenges and grows us: our habitual feelings and behaviors can trick us into thinking that they are somehow more genuine or authentic than other feelings and behaviors that we’d like to have.

But they’re not.

What feels familiar to us is simply and purely what we’ve practiced over and over and over again, to the point that it feels natural. So when we want to change our behavior from sedentary to more physically active, the momentum of a sedentary life can make that lack of physical activity feel more genuine, more in line with our nature.

It can also feel as though our habits hold some kind of magical sway over us: something must have happened to us, or there must be some kind of genetic pre-wiring that makes us helpless to counter those habits.

But it’s not magic, and we’re not helpless… it’s just what over time we’ve told our brains to impel us do automatically. It does take considerable time and energy to establish new habits – which means that it’s not something that any of us will do lightly.

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One of the most harmful ways of thinking of ourselves is as a victim. It can make it nearly impossible to find success, financially or otherwise, and undermines our capacity for relationships.

Yet this mindset is not uncommon, we’ve probably all experienced it to some degree. But for some it can create a more pervasive atmosphere in their lives.

As researchers Rahav Gabay and his colleagues have shown, this mindset has four specific qualities that lead to three specific biases, and one onerous tendency, that can skew our view of the world.

Today we’ll look at how to move away from this kind of mindset, and re-orient toward taking effective, positive action.

Changing a victim mindset is much more complicated than the kind of “get over it” advice that’s so common – and useless. We have reasons for feeling like a victim – sometimes because we have been seriously harmed in some way; sometimes because for some reason at some point it seemed like a good strategy to deal with challenging circumstances, and eventually became a habit.

Whenever looking at our habits or mindsets, it’s essential to start with compassion, to understand that we often build certain habits of action or thought because it’s the best we can do at the time, even if it ends up harming us later.

But if our habits are harming us, it’s well worth looking at them honestly and with courage.

We’ve all been hurt, many of us have had traumatic experiences, and some of us have been the victims of abuse, crime or other kinds of serious mistreatment.

But those experiences are separate from holding an idea of ourselves as a victim. We can experience trauma or abuse and not see ourselves in general as a victim; and on the other hand, we can see ourselves as a victim when we have not been traumatized or abused. There is not a consistent cause and effect to this.

The four qualities that Gabay and his colleagues have found express a tendency for victimhood are:

• We want others to affirm our condition, and our suffering
• We see ourselves as having very high moral standards, and everyone else as immoral
• We are preoccupied with our own victimhood, to the point that we minimize, lack empathy, or are oblivious to the pain of others
• We spend time dwelling on how we’ve been wronged, and talk about what others have done to hurt us, rather than look for actions we could take to improve our situation

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I’m used to hearing from people in crisis. As a psychotherapist and life coach, it’s part of my job. It may be a crisis in a marriage, a crisis at work, a financial crisis… There are many places for crises to wreak havoc in our lives.

Some crises are unavoidable. We control only so much of what happens in our lives, and sometimes life throws hardship, tragedy, or deeply chaotic circumstances our way. I don’t make light of or gloss over the realities of life; but I do make it my business to help people to avoid unnecessary troubles, and there is one thing that we can do to prevent some of the more predictable crises of life:

Make and hold your positive commitments all the way, without reservation.

It’s no mystery that making solid commitments is central to a happy, successful life. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe said, “At the moment of commitment, the universe conspires to assist you.” Pat Riley said, “There are only two options regarding commitment. You’re either in or you’re out. There’s no such thing as life in-between.” And then there are the famous words of Yoda to Luke Skywalker in the movie, “The Empire Strikes Back”: “Do, or do not. There is no try.”

There are so many great quotes and sayings about commitment that it’s easy for the profound truth to get lost in the platitudes. Today we’re going to ground this abstract concept into a tangible strategy for real-life results.

We all know – in theory – how important commitment is, and yet one of the biggest problems I confront with my clients on a regular basis is a lack of commitment. This undermines their work, their relationships, their striving towards the life they want to live.

So for all the beautiful sayings and lessons about commitment, something seems to be missing.

As with many fundamental skills, it may often come down to the need, as Aristotle would say, to practice this virtue until it is a habit.

Commitment requires something of a leap of faith; we are ordering our future without any assurance of what that future will bring. It asks us to remove the safety harness, forgo the escape hatch, burn the ships that could take us back to our familiar life, and believe that we can handle the risks and the rewards of commitment.

Commitment requires trust: trust in ourselves, trust in the people and circumstances we are committing to… and trust in the act of commitment itself. One way to build such trust when we don’t already have it is to practice commitment as we can; and to understand why it matters so very much.

By holding a commitment lightly, we make ourselves the victims of passing feelings, idealistic fantasies, Hollywood and pop-psychology visions of happiness, popular fads and opinion polls, and the vicissitudes of life. We are open to the lure of temptation. A pretty face can draw us from our marriage; a short-term pleasure like surfing the web can disengage us from our work.

Withholding our devotion places us in a passive relationship to life, and to the people and events that fill our lives. External forces can seduce us from our highest values as though we were simple mechanisms of stimulus and response. We “keep our options open,” and by doing so put ourselves at the mercy of whatever options may happen to appear.

We tend to use the passive voice to describe our troubles: An affair “just happened.” The project “just fell apart.” No author, no identifiable cause. The passive voice puts us at the mercy of events; the active voice is the voice of self-ownership and commitment.

A lack of commitment to our highest values can create tremendous anxiety; and turn every conflict, every decision, and every challenge, into a potential crisis. Every small problem can throw the entire commitment into question… And that is a major source of avoidable crisis.

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Happiness is hard work. It takes willpower and practice to develop habits that make a life work well; it takes conscientiousness to build flourishing relationships; it takes self-reflection to know what we value and, therefore, where to spend our precious time and energy.

So instead of wishing you a Happy New Year today, I’d like to show you how you can build yourself a strong, resilient New Year… The happiness is what you’ll earn from the doing.

There are three specific elements I’ll show you today. Let’s start with Learned Optimism.

First let me define what I mean by optimism: It isn’t about ignoring harsh realities and pretending things are great, when they’re not. Optimism is a pro-active, problem solving approach to the obstacles and opportunities we’re faced with.

An optimist is more likely to find solutions, because they’re actively looking for them. A pessimist is more likely to feel helpless and overwhelmed, because they’re actively looking for reasons that any given solution won’t work.

Optimists are more likely to succeed at work, school, and relationships, and may live 8 years longer than pessimists. They tend to do better after experiencing adversity, to bounce back stronger; while pessimists tend to do more poorly after adversity, to take longer to get their feet back underneath them.

So the benefits for living more optimistically are huge. And, fortunately, it’s also an element of our personality that’s easily available to change – with some work, of course. Here’s one way to work on this:

A. When you find yourself looking at an event from a pessimistic perspective, first identify the adversity – whatever the situation is that is causing you trouble: “My wife and I are having an argument,” for example.

B. Then identify the belief that brings you to be feeling badly, “We’re always arguing; she never understands me; I just can’t express myself ever in a way that seems to work.”

C. Then notice what the consequence of that belief is: “I feel awful, I feel hurt and angry, I feel afraid of the conflict; I have a sense of despair over how our relationship is going.”

D. The next step is disputation, challenging this belief that is bringing you to feel badly: “Wait a minute. I love my wife, and she loves me. We are not always arguing, if I added it up, we probably argue a tiny fraction of the time we have been together. She actually understands me quite well most of the time, and soon we will understand each other again. Maybe there’s a way I can help to bring that about.”

Practice this – a lot. It will not always come out perfectly, and there will likely be times when it is extremely hard to bring yourself to do this. But the more you practice this the more an effective, optimistic stance will come naturally for you.

The next element is to de-catastrophize.

When we’re faced with a challenge of some kind, hoping for the best isn’t likely to be our best approach; but neither is assuming the worst. When our tendency is to expect the worst-case scenario when trouble presents itself, it weakens us.

We’re more likely to feel helpless and overwhelmed, less likely to succeed, and more likely to struggle – including suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder after a traumatic situation.

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When we think of what we’ll be like ten years from now, most of us imagine that we’ll be just like we are now. Yet when we look back ten years, we’re usually different than we were then.

We’ve learned from experiences, dealt with some hardship, maybe suffered some loss, triumphed in some things, been delighted by epiphanies, and came to understand some things we had not understood before.

If there is something we won’t do now because we “learned it the hard way,” if we have things that we regret having done that we would never ever do again, we can thank our younger self for learning that lesson for us – so we don’t have to keep re-learning it, and suffering over and over again like some cruel Groundhog Day remake.

Of course we are different today than we were ten years ago – unless we’ve removed ourselves from any experience of living. Life is a continual anti-entropy endeavor. If we don’t expend energy to create order, the natural tendency of things to move toward disorder takes over.

If we don’t mow the lawn, the lawn becomes a growth of weeds; if we don’t use our bodies in some kind of physical activity, our bodies begin to break down; if we don’t use our minds to learn and think about new things, our minds will become less active and effective.

If we don’t grow and learn and change our behavior over time to adapt to what we learn, we will become stuck in a rut, passively holding on to the familiar while the world carries on without us.

We all must succumb to entropy to some degree of course, but we also all experience things, and learn, grow, and change as a result.

We will be different in ten years than we are now. That’s a fact of life. The question is, how will we be different; and will we be different mostly as a result of events, or through conscious choice?

In research by Quoidback, Gilbert and Wilson, The End of History Illusion, they found that while we look back over the past ten years and easily see and expect that we are different now, we don’t expect that we will be different ten years from now. Rather, we tend to think that our current age is where we have finally become who we are – and who we are now, we feel, is who we will be in the future.

So, we will be different ten years from now; that’s a fact, a given, a law of the universe even. Yet we don’t think we will be different. That leaves a vacuum. There will be change, yet we tend not to think there will be, so the question becomes: “How will that change happen, if we’re not in on it?”

The answer is, often the change will happen to us. Other people, events, processes outside of our conscious awareness maybe, or outside of our conscious control, will shape us, influence us, and change us over time.

This doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Good people can change us in good ways; good experiences can lead us in better directions. The point is not to avoid influence from others; that would be a lonely and rigid life, and it is not really possible to achieve. We all influence and are influenced by one another much more profoundly than most of us are aware.

In their book Connected, Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler show that if we gain or lose weight, for example, our friends are more likely to gain or lose weight; if we quit smoking, our friends are more likely to quit smoking; if we become happier, our friends will be more likely to become happier.

But we can take that too far and allow ourselves to be changed and molded passively by outside events most of the time; and that’s not an approach to living that I’d recommend.

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