13 Lessons in Personal Growth and Happiness
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This week, I wanted to share some recent lessons I’ve learned about personal growth and happiness.The idea came to me when I saw a trend on TikTok. Essentially, people are posting pictures or videos of themselves, over which they write what different versions of their younger self would think of their life now. Some of them are lighthearted, others are focused on growth, and still others reflect on pain and trauma, but they all give insight into how our sense of self evolves over time.
In conversations with friends recently, I’ve been finding myself sharing some of the lessons I’ve learned from years of working with a professional coach and practicing yoga. At our core, I think most of us have pretty similar needs. We all want to feel loved, we all want to feel like we have agency over our lives, and we want to feel valued.
Here’s my list of life lessons I’ve learned so far, in no particular order:
- The way out is through.
This is a teaching straight out of my yoga practice. When life is challenging, it can often feel like we should be able to go around our problems or wake up one day as an entirely new person. There is likely no miracle headed your way, and you’ll probably wake up as the same person tomorrow, so you’ve got to move through it. Breathe, feel your feelings, be accountable to yourself, be willing to fail, and be vulnerable, but don’t stop moving.
In his book, 40 Days to Personal Revolution: A Breakthrough Program to Radically Change Your Body and Awaken the Sacred Within Your Soul, Baron Baptiste writes, “The Zen masters say that a constant drip wear[s] away a big rock. The greatest benefits come from the small shifts that move us in new directions…True growth is not cheap.” There’s room in this world for magic and beauty and luck, but they cannot take the place of being willing to press on through the challenge, learn to grow, make shifts towards being a more whole and aligned person.
- The antidote to extremism is belonging.
The Daily, a news podcast from the New York Times, recently released an interview with the founder of the parody conspiracy theory Birds Aren’t Real. The conspiracy theory posits that all of the birds in the world were exterminated by the US Government between 1959 and 1971 and replaced with surveillance drones. The movement has garnered hundreds of thousands of followers who have been protesting alongside rightwing protesters in an attempt to “fight lunacy with lunacy” as one organizer describes it.
The Birds Aren’t Real movement provides community to young people, largely Gen Z, who have grown up in the age of the internet and are often searching for belonging. The podcast series Rabbit Hole, also from the New York Times, explores the radicalization of people on the internet, many of whom went to YouTube or other services looking for community.
As people, we have a fundamental need to belong, and the internet has created new ways of helping us find belonging. The more people we can call in, help them be “in on the joke” and provide positive communities, the safer we’ll all be.
Related Post: Change How You See the World in 20 Podcast Episodes (Part One)
- Motivation is a mirage.
Contrary to popular belief, you don’t really need motivation. Motivation is great, when you feel it you’ll probably have a better day than if you didn’t, but it’s not a key ingredient to success. It’s also counterintuitive–most of us believe that we find motivation to do a task, do the task, and then feel accomplished afterwards. This is all backwards. In reality, taking action will lead to motivation, and motivation and accomplishment are co-experiences. In order to find the motivation you’re seeking, you first need to take the actions you thought you needed the motivation to do.
The things we do all day are mostly habits, things that we do automatically because we’ve built up the practice of doing them so often. Habits can be good and bad–I have a habit of drinking my coffee right when I wake up (neutral/good) and I also have the habit of immediately scrolling TikTok as soon as my eyes open (neutral/bad). If you’re interested in this topic, I’d recommend that you read the book Atomic Habits by James Clear.
- Do not wait to travel.
Life is mercilessly short. If there’s a little voice in the back of your head wondering what it would be like to see Paris or Rome or Bali…go! Jot down the names of cities you’d like to visit when you’re feeling stuck. Daydream about beaches and crowded cities and tiny cups of coffee on terraces and hikes through the jungle and fish markets and signs in languages you can’t read.
Make a plan to actually go with your friends or family or on your own. Plan a trip to Tulum in Mexico or to Guatemala or come visit me in Ireland. Go to San Francisco and Memphis and New Orleans. If you’ve never been outside of the country it will feel scary–let it be scary, but do it anyway.
Related Post: Top 10 Travel Mistakes (and How to Avoid Them)
- Don’t play tug of war with people.
My coach once told me that anger is a sign that your boundary has been crossed. Set boundaries. Do it for yourself and for the people around you and for the health of your relationships. However, don’t confuse a boundary with a request–you can only control your behavior and the ways that you respond. This video explains the concept really succinctly, and she elaborates a little further here.
During a recent period of interpersonal conflict, I developed a metaphor for the type of person I want to be in conflict. If you think about a horse who is throwing his head and fighting you, the more that you fight back and yank and tug, the more intensely the horse will respond. If, on the other hand, you think of yourself like a tree, there’s only so long a horse will fight and throw his head when the other end of the rope is attached to a tree trunk. Try to be centered and steady and non-reactive in your own behavior, without any expectation of how the other person will respond.
What does this look like? For me it’s been responses like, “That doesn’t work for me,” and “I’m not available then.” If you get a nasty response, you may need to (calmly) reiterate your stance or decide that you’re not able to have that person in your life at this time.
- Vulnerability is a prerequisite to growth.
One of the hard truths that I have continued to learn is that, in most cases, you’ve got to be vulnerable to grow. Without vulnerability, we’re solidly inside our comfort zones, and from that place it’s really hard to find new opportunities of any sort. Here’s a trick I’ve learned, if there’s ever a thing that I’m considering doing, but it scares me so much that I want to run away, that’s usually a sign that it’s on the edge of my comfort zone, and therefore vulnerable.
Really feel into it, because there’s a slightly different feeling when, say, something feels “off” or extreme or even vindictive. Those aren’t the same feelings. The growth feeling is the sense that what you’re stepping into is so big, so uncomfortable that you want to double check to make sure you’re brave enough to do it. That’s where the growth happens.
- Your attention is one of the most valuable things you have to give.
Social media companies have long known that your attention is one of the most valuable things you have to give. That’s why they spend huge sums of money to hire analysts and psychologists to better understand how to hold your attention, allowing them to profit from it through ad sales. Tech companies’ greed for your attention is partly responsible for the radicalization of American politics and for exposing people to misinformation and extreme content. This episode of Rabbit Hole from the New York Times explores this topic if you’re interested in learning more.
In addition to being profitable, your attention has the power to create change. At one point, the narrator in the Invisibilia podcast episode “The Fifth Vital Sign” tells us that “attention is not a neutral force; it invariably changes the thing that it purports to observe.” She’s referring in this case to the attention we pay to our own pain, but I believe that the concept applies to many parts of our lives.
Related Post: Change How You See the World in 20 Podcast Episodes (Part Two)
Our attention has the power to shift political decisions, hold people accountable, amplify voices, as we saw in the recent events related to Joe Rogan’s podcast, which was accused of spreading COVID information. When several artists took their music off of Spotify, the company and the podcast were forced to respond, not because of the monetary value of the music they had to remove, but because of the public attention. Ultimately, about 70 episodes of Joe Rogan’s podcast were removed from Spotify in the past few weeks.
You can read more about the Invisibilia episode, and see a list of other podcast episodes that I love, here.
- Live your life in the present tense.
You create your life every day. I used to live my life like it would start just over the horizon–I’ll start really living once I graduate from high school. My life will really start once I finish college. Life doesn’t work like that, you’re already living it now. In two years, your life will have consisted of the experiences and thoughts and laughs and triumphs and failures that filled up the minutes of those years.
Don’t feel overwhelmed by this. Instead, use each day as an opportunity to live. If someone matters to you, tell them. If you get a nice candle for your birthday, light it. If you have a dress that you love to wear, don’t let it sit in your closet–wear it! The brutal truth is that the time may never feel right, and the sting of having tried and failed is so much less painful than the sting of having wanted to try but instead clipping your own wings.
- Take care of your body.
You get one body to hold your soul for the duration of this life, so take care of it. Learn to love it in its current state. Be unapologetically imperfect. The patriarchy, fashion industry, skin care industry, diet industry, and so many other forces benefit from people wanting to change their bodies–to be thinner, prettier, more attractive. It’s a radical act to love yourself, and it takes hard work and dedication and healing and compassion and patience to do it, but do it anyway.
While loving yourself, be gentle to your body. Try to always think about what you can add to your health, instead of what you need to take away to be healthy. Choose movements that bring you joy and add them to your life. If those movements stop bringing you joy, choose something different.
Floss your teeth. Eat vegetables and fruits. Drink water. Go for a walk. Notice the places in your life when you grimace and grit your teeth and force yourself to do something, and see if you can relax into those things or remove them from your life. Yoga helped me with this, but what works for you can be entirely different. Approach self care with love and acceptance and joy whenever and however you can.
- You can do hard things.
You may find that you sometimes trick yourself into believing that you’re less capable than you are, like your accomplishments belong to a different person. In the words of a friend, “Remember all of the hard things that you have already overcome.” The voice in your head that exists to keep you small is the one who will tell you that you’re not enough; it’s trying to protect you, but it is misguided. You can–and should, and must–continue to do hard things, but this time around, you get to do them on your terms.
- Disappointment is not the same as having been wronged.
The podcast Invisibilia recently featured an episode titled, “Friends with Benefits” that explored the intersection between friendship and sex. One of the guests states that, “We often conflate disappointment with having been wronged, but they’re not the same thing.” It’s common for us to think that a situation that left us disappointed was unfair or unjust, but that’s not always the case. You weren’t fucked over because your crush in high school didn’t feel the same way about you, you were disappointed.
Disappointment is a less righteous emotion than anger, but that’s where its power lies–you don’t need the other person to do anything in response to your disappointment. That means that you can take your disappointment, sit with it, accept it, and move forward, all without needing to hear anything from the other person. Similarly, learning to differentiate between having wronged someone and having disappointed them can help you more quickly identify the places where you need to take responsibility and/or corrective action, and the places where it’s simply not your burden to bear.
You can read more about this episode, and see a list of other podcast episodes that changed how I see the world, here.
- Feel your feelings.
So much of our pain as adults comes from avoiding our feelings. For a lot of us, it takes work and training (through a therapist, perhaps) to learn to sit with our feelings, feel them, and then address them in a healthy way. Avoidance, blame, victimhood, projection, and all of the other behaviors that result from being unwilling to feel your feelings hurt you and the people around you. It’s your job as an adult to do the hard work of healing, feeling, and taking corrective actions to prevent harm to yourself and the people around you.
If you don’t know how to feel your feelings, working with a licensed therapist may be helpful. Here’s a guide to finding a therapist for the first time.
- Have fun.
Fun is not a trivial part of life. Fun and joy and playfulness and laughter are some of the brightest parts of getting to be a human, so don’t deny yourself. Sing along to your favorite song. Have dance parties alone in your kitchen. Make friends with people who leave you belly laughing and gasping for air. Cannonball at your next pool party. Or, my favorite, go tubing down an icy mountain in Colorado.
The joy of being alive lies in the small moments of fun and levity. Don’t wait for them to come to you, actively seek them out. Cultivate smile lines like public badges of honor.
You can read more from me by visiting my blog here.
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