Duh, right? Of course you have. That’s part of the human experience.

We all hit unhappy terrain as we navigate the landscape of life. And when we do, it can be really tempting to condemn it (“this is wrong!”), push it down, or push it away.

Sometimes that might work, but more often it just gets us more stuck and feeling more constricted.

Both/and balm

In this post, I want to share some thoughts on what I described yesterday as a both/and approach. Think of it as a “both/and balm” to both help ease the pain and make space to move in a positive direction.

Both/and in this case means both acknowledging and accepting your current state and recognizing the possibility of moving in a positive direction.

When you acknowledge and accept the current unhappiness – without fighting it or making it wrong – you open the door to engaging that unhappiness in a helpful way, rather than shoving it down, beating yourself up, or running away from it.

You open the door to giving yourself what you need in the moment.

And when you recognize the possibility of moving in a positive direction, you leave the door open to making positive changes without getting mired down in how you currently feel.

What do you need right now?

In my last post I divided the human experience into four super-broad categories – Happy, Neutral, Flat, and Unhappy.

When we need to navigate “unhappy” (and to a certain extent, “flat” as well), rather than clenching our teeth and trying to get back to happy as fast as we can, it can be helpful to apply a lens of three progressive questions to help determine what is actually needed first.

The idea is to look at each item from the list below and inquire, “Is this what needs my attention?”

Ask yourself if you need to:

• Do no harm: This is like stopping the bleeding first. Examples might include learning to be kinder to yourself, intervening when the inner critic wants to bludgeon you, or dialing down drinking (or binge eating, or any one of a thousand things we do that ultimately make matters worse) as a coping mechanism.
• Provide solace: This can actually be done in tandem with reducing the self-inflicted harm (I put do no harm first because sometimes you really do just need to stop the bleeding, but in reality, this one also supports and reinforces those efforts). This might be practicing self-compassion (if I could wish you one single superpower, that would be it), or reaching out to others for support.

Notice that neither of those first two are about getting anywhere. They are simply about finding a way to feel less unnecessary pain in the moment and even finding a way to love yourself a little more in the process. That’s all part of giving yourself permission to be exactly where you are.

But at some point, it’s time for movement in a positive direction. Which brings us to…

• Create positive movement: That might be taking action on making a positive change. Or it could be developing a positive practice like meditation or gratitude journaling. It might entail consciously adding positive elements to your life (like a weekly hobby night where you give yourself permission to just do something you love). Or it might mean recognizing the need to change the story you tell about your situation to change how you experience it.

Try this: If you are currently navigating some unhappy landscape in your life, look at it through the lens of those three questions (and if life feels pretty good right now, look back and pick a time when that’s where you were and use that as a case study to explore).

Identify which of those three stages needs your attention. Then ask yourself, “What one thing can I do?”

If do no harm is calling for more attention, maybe you can work on reducing the critical self-talk. Or reduce or stop the unhelpful coping habits you’re engaging in.

If it’s provide solace, maybe you can explore how to practice greater self-compassion (this talk by self-compassion researcher Kristin Neff is a good place to start) or reach out to a friend for support.

If it’s create positive movement, ask yourself what one thing you can do to start making positive change and moving in the right direction.

Wherever you are and whatever you decide you need, the key to taking a both/and approach is to recognize that the challenging parts of the landscape are a natural and inevitable part of the human adventure. They’re not unusual, or a sign that you are somehow flawed. They’re just a natural part of life.

And while they may never be not-uncomfortable, you can learn to navigate them with greater ease.

The post Unhappy? Try a both/and balm appeared first on Rain Ripple River.

Look at any self-help book section, and you’ll see title after title on happiness. And on the surface, that all seems positive.

And yet…

When you look a little deeper, all this happy-centricity starts to feel maybe a little toxic.

Why? Because somehow we have turned into a culture that worships happiness as an either/or idea, not both/and. We’re either happy, or something’s wrong. We want life to be all happy, all the time. We want our lives to look like other people’s smiling Instagram feeds.

And that impossible aspiration sets us up to – paradoxically enough – be unhappy.

Like it or not, you’re going to have down days. Maybe it’s just a short melancholy funk. Or perhaps things are going completely sideways in your life and you’re feeling the weight of it. Or maybe you’ve just hit a stretch of the blah doldrums. It’s all part of the messy, imperfect reality of being human.

Whatever it is, the incessant drumbeat towards an ever-happier life only adds fuel to the fire, adding to the feeling that something is wrong, that maybe we’re not measuring up and we need to do something to improve.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for doing what we can to move the needle of our lived experience towards a fuller sense of happiness and contentment. Just not at the expense of making the rest of the spectrum of human experience wrong.

The idea isn’t that happiness isn’t a worthy pursuit.

It’s that the toxic fetishization of happiness and the demonization of anything else leads us in precisely the wrong direction.

Taking a both/and approach to happiness

One way I try to avoid that in my own work is by consciously making room for both acceptance of where people are and movement in a positive direction. It’s a little like this quote from Zen master Suzuki-Roshi to his students:

“You are perfect just as you are. And you could use a little improvement.”

Listen, I get it. Feeling unhappy, or stressed, or depressed is no fun. It’s painful, and we all evolved to instinctively want to move away from pain, whether physical or emotional.

But making the uncomfortable state we’re in “wrong” does nothing but add to the pain. It does nothing to move you in a more desirable direction. It just adds to the constriction you feel and inhibits whatever positive possibilities exist.

Unhappy – Flat –Neutral – Happy

The spectrum from unhappiness to happiness covers a wide range of experiences and emotions. But for a more manageable way to think about it, let’s divide it into four main categories:

• Unhappy: This encompasses not only your garden-variety unhappiness, but a variety of experiences ranging from a light feeling of melancholy to depression to feeling deeply grief-stricken.
• Flat: This is a kind of no-man’s land that has an unpleasant tinge to it. There’s no active unhappiness, but everything feels kind of blah. It’s like watching the world on black and white TV. Life is on autopilot and feels like one long shrug.
• Neutral: While not actively positive, this is also a non-negative state. It’s neither noticeably happy nor unhappy. Realistically, it’s not unusual to be spending time here even if overall we would describe our experience of life as a happy one.
• Happy: A range of experiences from peace and contentment to delight to feeling ecstatic.

Why does it help to divide them like this? Because each of those regions of the inner landscape need to be tended to in different ways. And awareness is the starting point.

Try this: Take a look at your life overall. Which of the four landscapes are you currently navigating?

If it’s unhappy, how are you treating yourself? Are you being kind to yourself, or are you adding to the unhappiness by the way you’re treating yourself? (In my next post I’m going to offer some ideas for how to navigate the “unhappy” region with a both/and approach.)

If it’s flat, try taking a “what one thing” approach. What one thing could you add – a hobby, more time with friends, learning something that fascinates you – that could add more of what energizes you to your life? (This is one way of taking a pointillist approach to shaping your life in a positive direction.)  

If it’s neutral, ponder whether that is simply a space of pause in an overall happy experience, or if it is in danger of sliding into “flat.” If it’s a space of pause, acknowledge it. Remind yourself of what’s good, but don’t pressure yourself to “get back to happy.” If it’s sliding into flat, use the “what one thing” idea to put on the brakes and shift the momentum.

If it’s happy, pause for a moment and celebrate. Let yourself savor the things that are contributing to that. Shining a spotlight on what’s good and letting yourself soak it up consciously can strengthen and amplify what’s already there. (This is an example of using “focus management” as a way to change your experience – in this case, expanding the good that is already there.)  

Wherever you find yourself, remember that life is always in a state of flux. White-knuckling happiness with an either/or approach is actually more likely to take you in the opposite direction.

The key is embracing the reality of both/and.

The post Stop white-knuckling happiness – take a both/and approach instead appeared first on Rain Ripple River.

As I have talked about before, we are each leaving a Ripple Legacy. You can’t NOT have an impact. Just by living your life every day, you’re creating ripples (some positive, some negative).

Being a mobile point of positive impact is about living a life that tilts the balance towards better. It’s about noticing the countless positive ripple opportunities we come across every day and acting on them.

It’s not about carving out more time in an already overloaded schedule to be a do-gooder. It’s about acting on the small opportunities that come your way each and every day.

That might be, for example, from our interactions (like habitually noting what’s positive about people and telling them what you see, sharing sage advice, or even just smiling at someone in passing). Or it might be through the choices we make with our money (like supporting the local economy by buying produce from local farmers, or buying from companies whose values we support).

Everywhere we turn, there are small-scale opportunities to create positive ripples.

A microgeneration approach

One of the ways I think about the big potential of that small-scale approach is “microgeneration.”

Microgeneration is a term used to describe small, decentralized energy generation, like a home getting its power from solar panels or small wind turbines.

In the face of the sum total of energy that is needed out there, each microgeneration source is just a tiny drop in a very, very big bucket. But for the home generating the energy, the impact is positive.

And while the individual impact on the whole energy system is negligible, as more and more homes start generating their own power, the cumulative impact has the potential to be great.

It’s the same thing with the difference we each have the potential to make.

Most of us are never going to change the course of history in a way that will get a write-up in the history books. But we still have the ability for our lives to tilt the scales towards positive on a more granular level. We can each be a microgenerator of positive impact.

And when we do that, we affect others, sometimes directly (like someone we have helped) and sometimes indirectly (like the person who decides to look for more positive ripple opportunities in their own lives after seeing how you show up).

The more people start to live that positive-impact-microgenerator life, the more that direct and indirect impact will affect people’s lives.

The importance of “just one”

But if each of us just say, “I’m one person – what can I  do?”, those small scale ripples don’t happen. And when those small ripples don’t happen, then there’s nothing to merge into something larger.

Your positive comment to someone doesn’t shift their mood. Seeing the positive way you show up doesn’t influence how your colleague decides to start showing up. You don’t decide to share the act of kindness you witnessed on the way work that morning (because it didn’t happen) and nobody feels inspired to maybe be just a little kinder that day.

The conversation – in the media, around the water cooler, at the dinner table – stays mired in what’s not working. There’s no fresh positive content to insert a loop of positive potential.

What we do, what we choose, how we show up – it all matters. And the more we see ourselves as mobile microgenerators of positive ripples, the more we’ll notice opportunities to tip the scale in a positive direction, the more we’ll take action on those opportunities, and the more that will influence how we experience life for the better.

And the more of us who show up that way, the more potential there is for it to affect those around us. All of which adds up to a greater potential to create a kind of “new norm.”

Try this: For the next week, look for opportunities to create positive ripples. Don’t worry about acting on them at this point. Your goal at first is just to start noticing. The more you notice, the more possibilities there are for you to create positive ripples.

Try doing an end-of-day review.

At the end of each day, look back and see what positive ripple-generating opportunities you see. Ask yourself questions to get the noticing juices flowing.

Where were the opportunities to:

• Help someone?
• Make someone feel good?
• Tell someone something positive about them that I notice?
• Make someone’s life easier (even in tiny ways)?
• Share my knowledge?
• “Be the change”?

As you start noticing more ripple-generating opportunities, you can start choosing to act on them. Bit by bit, you can develop a ripple-generating habit.

The post How to be a mobile point of positive impact appeared first on Rain Ripple River.

– William Shatner

Want to know three words that, if you really took them to heart and started living by them each and every day, would change everything?

Of course you do (and if you don’t, stop reading now!)

The words are…

<drumroll please>

Life is malleable.

I know, that may not feel particularly earth-shattering, or even inspiring, but there is massive potential for something better in that simple idea.

And much of that massive potential – most, even – is way closer at hand than the wholesale change we often think of when we decide it’s time to change our lives for the better.

Malleability time-scales

Part of the power of life malleability is that it actually happens on numerous time scales. There is always something we can be doing on one time scale or another to shape and sculpt the life we live.

Short-term

What can you do right now to change your experience (e.g., take ten slow, deep breaths, go for a brisk walk around the block, call a friend)?

Medium-term

What can you do in the next year to shape and sculpt your life? This might include things like picking up a new habit, starting a new hobby, spending more time with people who inspire you, learning a new professional skill, etc.

Long-term

How can you shape and sculpt your life over the next five-plus years? This could be planning a career change, or moving locations, or any other major life-altering decisions you might make.

Life-sculpting

On top of the full range of time scales, a big part of what makes it so powerful is the wide range of ways we can sculpt and shape it. For example:

Circumstances

This is what we’re typically thinking when we’re dissatisfied with something and want to make a change. It could be a new job, more time with this person and less with that person, where you live, etc. Basically anything about how you would describe your life belongs in this category.

Story

The story you tell about anything affects how you experience it. When you change the story you’re telling, you change the experience. (I wrote more about the power of your story to change your experience here.)

Focus

What you focus on paints the picture you experience. When you shift the focus of your awareness and attention (e.g., by starting a gratitude practice), you give your brain different inputs, and the picture those inputs paints shifts. (I wrote more about the power of your focus to change your experience here.)

Neural pathways

Your brain loves the path of least resistance. When something becomes a habit, or second nature, what’s really happening is that you have developed neural pathways in your brain that make that the well-trod, easily-traveled path. And fortunately, your brain evolved to create new neural pathways (and new easily-traveled paths).

Physical state

How you feel physically has an enormous impact on how you experience life. Elements of your physical state, like health, fitness, and energy, are all areas where you can make life-experience-shifting changes.

Habits and practices

Much of what happens in your day-to-day life happens on autopilot. The habits and practices we do automatically, without giving it much thought or even effort, shape our actions, our experiences, and our outcomes.

Try this: Take a look at your life through the lens of malleability. Where are the opportunities you see to shape and sculpt it?

Take each of the examples given above of ways you can shape and sculpt (circumstances, story, etc.) and look at each of them through the lens of the three different time scales.

What can you do in the moment that helps shift your experience in a positive direction?

What changes, habits, etc. can you set in motion over the course of the next year?

What long-term changes can you start working towards today?

The more areas of malleable possibility you are aware of, and the more you factor in multiple time scales, the more ability you have to sculpt and shape the life you want to live.

The post Life-sculpting: Malleability is your life’s positive change superpower appeared first on Rain Ripple River.

I have heard some variation on this theme more times than I can count over the years, especially with people who feel called to make a positive impact in the world.

My take on it is that, far from being selfish, self-care is actually something that enables you to make more of a difference.

The conversation is usually prompted by some kind of feeling of “Any time I spend on me is stealing that time away from the difference I could be making – and there’s so much need!”

And that might actually be true, if they were a mechanical perpetual motion machine.

But they’re not. They’re human.

In the short term, yes, they might be able to get more done ignoring their own needs and focusing on doing, doing, doing, more, more, more.

But at some point, it inevitably catches up with them (which is why the catalyst for the conversation is often some feeling of stress or burnout).

Maximizing your ability to make a difference isn’t just committing to a long hard slog through a to-do list from hell for the rest of your life. It’s about playing the long game and recognizing that sustainability is the key.

When you burn yourself out giving and doing, doing and giving, with no time for self-care, you diminish what you have the ability to offer. You can’t do as much, and you can’t do it as well.

Self-care is a vital piece of the equation. It’s the only way to bring more of the best of what you have to offer to whatever you care about for the long haul.

Time for self-care affects how well you do whatever you do. It affects how you interact with people, both professionally and personally. It affects what you will even try, and how you will be bounce back when things go sideways. It affects the energy you have to put into your efforts.

Bottom line, self-care isn’t selfish. It’s a huge part of what allows you to make the most of your gifts and abilities to have an impact.

Try this: Look at your life and ask yourself, “Am I making self-care enough of a priority? And if I’m not, what is suffering as a result?”

Self-care is a catch-all for numerous ways you can care for and nourish yourself. Some examples include:

• Take unfocused down time for yourself
• Spend time with a practice like meditation or yoga that helps you feel grounded
• Exercise
• Do something that gives you pleasure (like reading, or a hobby you love)
• Spend time with a good friend
• Eat healthily
• Stop for 60 seconds and breathe deeply
• Go to bed earlier / Get more sleep

I’m not suggesting that you suddenly carve out hours a day to focus on self-care, but if self-care is an area where you fall short, I am suggesting you start.

Maybe you start with committing to taking 10 minutes each day to relax and do nothing. Enjoy something beautiful. Lose yourself in thought.

Maybe it’s going to bed a half hour earlier each day.

Maybe it’s committing to a brisk five-minute walk each day.

The size of it isn’t really the point at the beginning. If more feels feasible, great. If not, start small. The point is to find a doable way to dip your toe in the water.

And as you do, remind yourself that every minute you invest in self-care is a minute you invest in the good you can do.

The post How self-care helps you change the world appeared first on Rain Ripple River.

No doubt you can put your finger on numerous major turning points that defined the overall arc of your path. What might not be so obvious, though, are the tiny turning points. The micro pivots stemming from the choices you made and the actions you took moment to moment.

Your life as it looks today isn’t just the result of your big decisions. It is also the cumulative result of countless small moments that together led you in one direction or another, shaped your habits, and influenced your ways of being – ultimately creating your current reality.

Sometimes those micro turns nudged you in a positive direction, other times in a negative one. Sometimes they reinforced a helpful way of being, other times they fed a limiting way of showing up.

It’s easy to get lost in the inertia of your life, seeing everything as “the way things are now.” But in reality, your life is infinitely changeable. And nowhere is that more true than in the choices you make moment to moment.

Every moment a crossroads

A few years ago, feeling stuck in a rut that wasn’t working for me, I started exploring the idea of treating every moment as a crossroads.

As I examined how I got there, what kept creating the same ol’ thing, and how to break free of that rut, I started looking at the micro picture. As I did, it was clear how much of both what kept me stuck and what could lead me in a new direction happened at the moment-to-moment level of choice.

There were moment-to-moment choices about, for example, how to spend my time, what to prioritize, what habits to indulge, and the kinds of things I fed my mind.

I started thinking of each moment as a crossroads, one that presented me with a choice of whether to pursue the old mode that wasn’t taking me where I wanted to go, or a new mode that would lead to something better.

Depending on the choice I made, each crossroads offered me a step toward the life I wanted or a step away from it.

I started visualizing it like this:

Every point along the way had the potential to lead me toward what I wanted (the green) or away from it (the brown). And the visual reinforced the notion that, even if I slip, movement towards where I want to go is only one choice away.

In fact, every crossroad is the potential beginning for an endless series of positive choices.

It’s unrealistic to think that every step and every choice is going to lead you in the right direction. But keeping this crossroads concept in mind can make it easier to consciously take a path that leads to the life you want. When you do, you end up with something a little like this.

The beauty of this approach is that it really focuses your attention on the question of, “What choice am I making right now? Which direction am I choosing right now?” And it’s the cumulative effect of those individual choices that takes you where you want to go.

Try this: For the next week, pay attention to the crossroads moments throughout your day. Some examples:

• Whether to eat that salad or that bag of chips.
• Whether to spend time doing something productive, or scroll through still more cat videos on Facebook. (Ouch! Guilty.)
• Whether to reach out and connect with a friend, or sit alone watching mindless TV.
• Whether to give yourself time to rest and refresh, or chase yet another item on your to-do list.
• Whether to give a heartfelt compliment to a co-worker, or just let it slide by unexpressed.
• Whether to apologize to a loved one for being out of line, or whether to double down and insist you were right, even when you know you probably weren’t.

It’s not realistic to keep meticulous tabs on every little crossroads each moment presents. And if you tried, the effort would likely be short lived.  

But if you start paying attention, you might find that there are types of crossroads decisions that are regularly leading you either in a direction you want to go, or a direction you’ll regret.

Start watching the crossroads. Notice what moment-by-moment choices could lead in the direction of a change you want to see, and start making them.

It’s that simple.

The post Every moment is a crossroads: How to change your life one small choice at a time appeared first on Rain Ripple River.

That’s one of the reasons I love models and frameworks. Done well, they create a fantastic simplified container for moving through life. They can offer a greater sense of certainty around how-to and where-next. And our certainty-craving brains love that!

But no matter how helpful they are, there inevitably comes a time when life starts to spill over the edges of that container. We lose track. We get sucked into the wild.

The problem isn’t us. It’s this one simple fact:

Life is messier than the model.

I’m no stranger to this, much to my chagrin. I’ll be rolling along, merrily using the tools and ways of thinking about things that help me simplify the mess and make sense of what I’m doing and where I’m going. And then, whomp! Something challenging blindsides me. Or my supreme distractibility makes me lose track and I wander off the trail and get a little lost.

Suddenly it’s not all nice and tidy. Suddenly I’m not feeling a solid clarity about what I’m doing or where I’m going. Or maybe I have just fallen off the horse altogether and I’m lying on my back going nowhere.

One simple idea

When life feels messier than the model, there is a single simple idea that helps me let go, refocus, and start moving forward again.

It’s always Day One.

Whatever I’m trying to do, whether it’s trying to achieve something in my business, or navigate personal challenges, or develop skills in my woodshop, it’s always Day One.

Whatever has been happening – however off track I have gotten, however lost, or self-judgmental, or unproductive, or downright inept I have been – starting right now, it’s Day One of the journey to wherever I’m going.

As someone who has a long history with a strong inner critic (I’ll write more about him in a future post – his name is Brutal Bart), it can be easy to get lost in self-recrimination for the time or opportunities I wasted, or my lack of progress, or how distracted and unfocused I have been, or any one of a million other ways my path has been unsatisfactory till now.

When I find myself getting lost in that kind of frustration, I come back to that one idea.

It’s always Day One.

Day One of my vision for the difference I feel called to make.

Day One of building my business.

Day One of learning to be more self-compassionate.

Day One of learning to play the ukulele.

Day One of the rest of my life.

Clear the Etch-a-Sketch

The thing I love most about coming back to Day One is that it functions as a kind of reset. It’s like an Etch-a-Sketch.

Whatever stories, frustrations, or self-judgments we carry with us about how things have happened so far create this messy jumble that gets in the way of making the most of the future that remains.

But coming back to Day One is like shaking that Etch-a-Sketch, clearing the screen so you can start creating without all that noise.

Yes, you might still have to deal with the fallout from some of the decisions/actions/inactions/etc. from the past, but when you clear the screen, that becomes just part of the landscape you navigate through, not an ongoing indictment of how things have gone wrong.

Try this: Look around at your life and see if there is any area where you feel frustration or self-judgment because you should be farther, or better, or some other measure of progress that hasn’t been met. Maybe it’s a goal you’re trying to achieve. Maybe it’s some particularly sticky area of personal growth you have been working on. Maybe it’s progress in your career.

Whatever it is, experiment with doing a Day One reset.

Notice whatever judgment or frustration is coming up about how things should be different. Take a deep breath, let it go, and tell yourself, “Today is Day One.” Give the Etch-a-Sketch a good shake.

The events of the past are frozen in place. There’s nothing you can do to change them. But the future is fluid. It’s where you can shape and influence and move and change.

Today is Day One of that fluid future.

And it always will be.

The post It’s always Day One appeared first on Rain Ripple River.

Why?

Because I think setting that as a goal is unhelpful. Destructive even.

Your best self is a lousy goal

Here’s the thing. Your best self doesn’t exist. There will always, always, always be some way we fall short of the ideal. Your best self is a phantom reality that is impossible to find. So telling you to be that is setting you up for failure.

Oh sure, what I mean might actually be an, “aim for the stars and you’ll hit the moon” kind of message. I might mean, “Be the best you can be at any given moment – and sometimes that’s kinda messy, so be kind to yourself.” But so often, that’s not how it ends up landing.

We live in a culture that is always telling us we need to be “more” in order to be good enough. We need to make more money, drive a fancier car, be more beautiful, even be more happy.

Trying to measure up to that is exhausting in itself, but there’s something even more insidious that happens as a result of that ubiquitous message of more. It creates a lens we look through that affects what we see and hear.

So when we hear, “Be your best self,” we nod in agreement and say, “Check! Best self! On it!”

Sounds innocent, even super-positive and helpful, right? But behind the scenes, a more corrosive story often starts to unfold. The little not-enough gremlin that “message of more” has installed in our minds (the one that says, “I’ll be enough when _____”) says, “Best self! Check! I’ll be enough if I’m my best self.”

And then…

Messy…

Imperfect…

Human…

Happens…

We have a day when we fall far short of that best self. We lose our temper with someone we care about. We try something and screw it up spectacularly. We binge on junk food and feel terrible the rest of the day.

And the not-enough gremlin looks at that, compares it to the goal of being our best self, and concludes, “I’m not my best self, so I’m not good enough.”

The specific way this unfolds is individual from person to person, but that’s the general gist.

Bottom line, aiming to be your best self is a crappy goal, because it’s a state that doesn’t exist. And that sets us up for the not-enoughness gremlin to have a field day when we inevitably fall short of it.

Your best self is a great guidance system

A far better use of “best self” and “best life” is as a navigation tool.

What would your best self look like? What would your best self do? What habits would it have? How would it treat other people? How would it treat you?

Building that picture starts to give you a positive guidance system. A north star of sorts you can use to both guide how you show up day to day and recalibrate and get back on track when you wander off track.

Because you will wander off track. That’s just part of the messy, imperfect human experience. And when you do, you can make yourself wrong, and use it as proof of your not-enoughness, or you can say, “Oh dude! How did I get here? Where’s that best-self star?” and point yourself back in that direction. No muss, no fuss. It’s all just part of the adventure of being human.

Try this: Start laying the foundation for a best self guidance system. Begin with a picture of what “best self” even means to you. What would it look like? How would you show up? What qualities would you have? What would you do? A simple laundry list can be a good starting point – this will be a work in progress.

Once you have an initial picture, ask yourself, “What one thing can I do to point myself in that direction?” That could be a reinforcement (reinforcing something you already do that is moving in the best-self direction) or a redirect (making a different decision, starting a more positive habit, etc.).

Each week, take another compass reading and ask, that same question: “What one thing can I do to move towards that best-self direction?”

Step by step, week by week, that compass reading and that question moves you in the direction of a life you feel good living, messy, imperfect humanness and all.

The post Best self: A lousy goal, but a great guidance system appeared first on Rain Ripple River.

– Maya Angelou

What if there was a way to make a difference in your everyday life? And what if it was an opportunity that presented itself over and over, day in and day out? And best of all, what if it was super easy to do?

Spoiler alert: There is.

Of all the bazillion ways to make a difference that come our way every day, one of the most common and most powerful is this:

Sending the message, “I see you.”

Sending it to a loved one. Sending it to a co-worker. Sending it to the checkout clerk at the grocery store. Sending it to the homeless guy panhandling on the sidewalk.

It’s ubiquitous because every encounter with another person offers an opportunity. It’s powerful because it taps into one of our most fundamental human drives.

We all want to be seen. We all want to feel like we matter. Like what we care about matters. Like our interests and efforts matter. Like our lives matter.

Sadly, the culture we live in seems to be more obsessed with shouting “Look at me!” than in helping others feel seen.

All of which makes this that much more powerful as an opportunity to make an everyday impact.

It’s not just about saying, “I see you” (in fact, you might never actually say it at all). It’s about sending the message that you do.

How do you send that message? Here are some ideas:

Be fully present: This isn’t rocket science (but in our high-distraction culture, it seems more the exception than the rule). When you’re talking with someone, let them be your focus. Put down your phone. Look them in the eye. Be engaged. Resist the urge to be like someone at a networking event looking around to see who else they would rather be talking to. Your attention sends a message.

Be curious / ask questions: So often conversations are a kind of mental tennis match. We’re more interested in what we want to say next than what the other person is saying now. But what if you turned that on its head? What if your focus was, “What questions can I ask? How can I find out more about where they’re coming from? How do I discover what they think is important?”

Celebrate them: I don’t mean throwing a party. I mean providing positive feedback when you see the opportunity, whether that is acknowledging something they did well or validating something that seems important to them (like an interest or subject matter they care about). You don’t have to find it personally interesting to celebrate/validate how it feels to them.

Try this: For the next week, make your life a learning lab for sending the message, “I see you.”

Try some of the things I mentioned above. Notice how it feels. Notice what works. Notice how people respond.

And notice how you get in the way. Notice where you’re inadvertently sending the message, “I don’t see you.” Maybe it’s, “I’m too busy to see you now.” Or, “I hardly know you, so I don’t see you.” Or, “My hands are itching to check my phone, so I don’t see you.”

How you show up and the message you send can have an impact on how people feel. And how people feel influences how they show up and the impact they have in their day-to-day life.

Bit by bit, ripple by ripple, sending people the message, “I see you” can set something positive in motion.

The post “I see you” – How three little words make a big difference appeared first on Rain Ripple River.

I would have been one of the one-marshmallow kids, no doubt about it. I might not have even waited for the end of the instructions before gobbling it down.

Living for the future at the expense of what I want right now has never been my forte. It’s like it’s always a surprise that tomorrow shows up, and it’s still me – only now I have to deal with the decisions I made yesterday.

To counter that tendency, and to help me develop a little more of a future mindset, one of the things I started doing is “giving gifts to Future Curt.”

Those gifts might be just about anything, from investing in developing skills and expertise I can use in pursuit of my vision for changing the world from the inside out, to deciding to forego an impulse purchase because I’m saving for something I really want, to something as small as bringing my reading glasses from my home office over to my reading nook so I have them available when I settle into my reading chair.

I try to recognize myself for the gift to reinforce that future orientation. “Thanks Past Curt!” has become a regular refrain.

I love the idea of creating a kind of relationship with our present (and soon to be past) selves and our future selves as a way of shaping and guiding the decisions and directions we take today.

Try this: Do a daily Future Self gift experiment.

Start by making a list of all the ways you can think of to give Future You a gift. It might be seeds you can plant that Future You will reap the rewards of (like saving money, or exercising). It could be something that makes your future life a little easier (like cleaning or organizing). Or it could be doing something now so you don’t have to do it then (I’m always delighted when I don’t have to get up out of my reading chair and go over to my office to get my reading glasses).

Each day, try to do one thing that is a gift to Future You. More is fine if you’re consumed by a gift-giving frenzy, but at least one.

You might, for example:

• Get the coffee ready to brew the night before, so all you have to do is push a button.
• Add money to a savings jar.
• Eat something healthy, or refrain from high-sugar crap (OK, I’m still working on that last bit).
• Refrain from buying that thing you don’t need and put that money in the bank instead.
• Sign up for a course to develop a skill that will be beneficial to where you want to go and achieve.
• Reach out to connect with a potential mentor.
• Spend five minutes meditating.
• Say no to a request so you have more time for something you care about.

The possibilities are pretty much endless.

One way to start priming the pump for noticing gifts to give Future You is to scan through broad areas like:

• Finances
• Health
• Relationships
• Energizers (e.g., hobbies, learning you love, etc.)
• Career
• Time
• Self-care
• Skills and knowledge
• Everyday activities (like setting up the coffee or getting my reading glasses)

You can also ask questions, like:

• How can I make Future Me’s life easier?
• What can I do today that Future Me will be glad I did?
• What investment can I make today in Future Me’s life?

The more you get into a Future You gifting mindset, the more Future You will benefit from the life you live today.

Not a bad investment.

The post What gifts are you giving Future You? appeared first on Rain Ripple River.