Four Pillars To A Fulfilling Life P.2

We believe that simplification is the key to living a fulfilling life. Sometimes we’re surrounded with too many distractions and people to think about our own lives.

But when you break it down, it is pretty straightforward. We believe that the key to a fulfilling life lies in four pillars: physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual.

Last week we covered the first two – physical and mental – so naturally this week, we’ll get to the last two – emotional and spiritual.

We’ve found that each of these ‘rules’ needs to be satisfied in order to keep our bodies and minds in complete working order.

We don’t believe that any one is more important than the other. Each pillar should be strived for equally. They are all important when chasing the fulfilling life.

Each pillar is a support beam holding up the building (your body and mind). Strong building blocks create a strong unshakeable fortress. When you are unshakeable, the world does not affect you and can live to your own volition.

Emotional

The emotional pillar solely consists of a single category – your relationships. Broken down into several subcategories – friends, intimate partners, co-workers and strangers – they can impact your mood, actions, and, in turn, your life.

Who you choose to surround yourself with directly affects the building blocks to your unshakeable fortress.

1) Friends

Your friends can make or break you. They can make you laugh uncontrollably or cry endlessly. Choose them wisely. Surround yourself with friends that have your best interests in mind. Friends that will help you in your time of need. Friends that can lift you up, when you’re down.

2) Intimate Partners

Your intimate partner can be the guiding light or the darkness in your life. Choose a partner that will challenge you and force you to grow. Someone that will tell you you’re wrong and pat you on the back when you’re right.

People stay in horrible relationships for a multitude of reasons – dependency, loneliness, and insecurity – but never realize that it’s toxic. Toxic relationships are a barrier to your end goal.

3) Co-Workers

You have direct power over the first two categories, but for co-workers, sometimes we’re stuck with negative, life-draining people. Co-workers that complain endlessly and demand our immediate attention for meaningless tasks and water-cooler gossip. Even so, you have some power.

Say you have work to and walk away or you can listen to them for a brief moment, but never give their negativity weight in your head. Let it enter your ears and immediately let the negativity vanish into the air.

4) Strangers

Strangers are the most insignificant group, but they also possess the most power. We seem to internalize their uninformed opinions of ourselves – body image, life choices or negativity – and allow it to affect our mood and actions.

Acknowledge these people as an insignificant group. Don’t give them the power over you. Take them with a grain of salt and shrug them away. Shrug away their negative opinions and little problems. They are there to pin you to their low level.

You are a compilation of the five closest people to yourself. If you surround yourself with toxic people, you eventually become toxic. Eventually, you’ll stop laughing, growing and appreciating as their negativity seeps into every orifice.

Spiritual

The spiritual pillar is completely open to interpretation. Whether you’re Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist or any other faith, simply have something.

You don’t even need to be religious. You can simply just sit in silence everyday and meditate or believe and appreciate life itself. Whatever your beliefs consist of, just give yourself some time every single day to silently reflect.

When we work out, we’re told to allow our muscles some rest to recover. What about our most precious asset? The organ that completely affects all that we feel, manifest and do.

Sit down and think about absolutely nothing. Spend some time each day and simply practice gratitude. Gratitude for life, love and friendships. For the simple pleasures – water, food, ability to breathe – the things we often take for granted.

Your brain needs the same rest that your body craves after a long workout. The effects are immediate and drastic. Suspend the amazing feeling and continue to strive towards it each day.

We have found that when we simultaneously improve all four of these pillars, everything in our lives seems to fall into place.

We all face difficult times and unexpected problems. When we work everyday to improve our four pillars, no matter how great the struggle, we seem to overcome it easily.

Today and everyday, aim for constant improvement.

Until next time, my beautiful readers,

Be bold, be free and love on.

A Problem Person or A Solution Person?

Everyday we’re confronted by problems and challenges in varying degrees. They are seemingly endless. “My boss hates me! I can’t deal with Sally. I have no friends.”

With each passing day, more seem to arise, till they consume us. The only thing you crave is a breath of fresh air, as you desperately gasp.

Running away isn’t a permanent solution. You have to deal with them head on. You have the option between two different types of people.

Are You a Problem Person?

Unfortunately, the majority is this person. Sometimes, I’m this person. I focus on the problems and wallow in them, letting them consume me, till they affect everything.

Thoughts, feelings, and habits all go down the tubes, as I internally scream, ‘why me!’

This type of person is only concerned with one thing – when is the next problem going to arise? They expect more problems, and it’s almost like, they need the problems.

They need them to self-identify with a helpless self, with a vulnerable and weak self. Recently, I allowed my problems free reign over my thoughts. They ran like a broken record, over and over.

But I came out of it. How? I self-identified with a different kind of person.

Be a Solution Person

I sat down with my good friend, old-fashioned pen and paper. I jotted down my problems with little dashes beside them. I tried to come up with as many solutions as possible.

It took a very, very long time and most of them were unusable, far-fetched even. But there they were, on paper. After two hours and thirty-six ideas, one was decent enough to implement.

Be the person to seek actionable steps to your problems. Figure out a way to get yourself through your struggles. Internal and external problems can all be solved with conscious realization.

Confront your boss and ask what you can do better. If he still hates you, quit, find another job. Trying to satisfy someone who cannot be satisfied isn’t worth your sanity.

Is Sally really worth all the trouble she’s giving you? Maybe she’s a complaining acquaintance. Walk away. Maybe she’s a close friend or family. Walking away isn’t realistic. Limit contact. You don’t need the added negativity.

You don’t need friends to be happy. Find happiness in yourself. When you fix yourself, you can show everyone how amazing you are. Approach strangers, listen openly, ask questions, and be present in their lives. Help them first, and they will help you. Be their friend first, and they will be yours.

It is significantly harder to figure out solutions, than it is to wallow in your problems. But, with the prospect of retrieving control of your feelings and habits, it’s well worth the extra struggle.

Start the habit of creating solutions. It will be hard. It will take a very long time. But the more you do it, the easier it becomes. Eventually, you will be able to solve all your problems without struggling. You’ll be able to solve other peoples’ problems.

I’m not at that level yet. I still have to figure out all my problems. But I know if I practice enough, I can be a true solution person.

Be bold, be free, and love on.

HOW TO MASTER JEDI MIND CONTROL

Over the last couple of years I have become fascinated with the idea that everything in your life is a result of what goes on in your mind.

If there are two twins that are the exact same in every way, except that one is relentlessly positive and the other is endlessly negative, their lives would be completely different.

They could encounter the exact same scenarios and obstacles but they would perceive them in different ways. The positive person would see them as a chance to grow, and the negative person would see them as evidence that you can never succeed.

With this in mind I am convinced that learning to skew your mind towards the positive and the useful is the best way to completely transform your life.

Here are the three steps to learning to control your mind like a Jedi.

1) Observe your thoughts.

In order to start controlling the endless chatter in your mind you first have to get rid of the idea that you are your thoughts.

We tend to think that the chatter in our mind is who we are and that is it, but that is just a part of who you are. You are your whole body from top to bottom and your entire subconscious, not just your conscious thoughts.

Now what you need to do is to step back from your thoughts and observe them. Start keeping track of when you are thinking negatively. The next time you find yourself upset, step back for a second and think “Wow, I have a lot of negative thoughts right now.”

Doing this will help you catch yourself in these useless reflexive thought cycles. Nothing good comes from beating yourself up or feeling sorry for yourself so the more you start to catch yourself, the quicker you can implement my next step.

2) Cancel your negative thoughts.

Now that you are starting to keep an eye on what you are thinking instead of just letting the chatter go on, you can start to pull yourself out of these habitual thought patterns.

Your brain doesn’t like using a lot of energy, so if you are a person who naturally reacts negatively, your mind will jump to that first because it is easy. Doing something outside of the norm requires conscious effort, something your brain would rather avoid.
Yeah, thanks evolution, we really appreciate that…

My favourite way to pull myself out of my bad habitual thought cycles is to use an “interrupt mantra.”

An interrupt mantra is something that you start repeating over and over once you realize that you are in one of these cycles. It will replace your useless thoughts with the exact opposite and more useful thoughts.

If you are someone who has problems with procrastination, once you realize that you are thinking “Man, I hate doing this work, I just want to relax and watch some Netflix” you have to switch to your interrupt mantra. It could be something like “I am energized and ready to take on anything. I’ll conquer this project with ease and energy to spare.”

Repeat that as many times in a row as you have to and after a while of canceling your negative thoughts, your mind will start to reflexively jump to the positive and more useful thoughts.

It only makes sense that your procrastination will naturally shrink when your reflexive thoughts are that of being energized and ready to conquer the obstacles ahead of you.

Interrupt mantras can work for any negative thoughts. If you have negative thoughts about your confidence interrupt them with “I am an amazing and confident person. I am going to start giving myself the credit I deserve.”

If you have problems with willpower interrupt those thoughts by saying “I have tons of willpower to spare. I am a strong person who can beat any temptation with ease.”

Rinse and repeat as many times as needed whether it be ten, twenty, or thirty times in a row.

3) Meditation.

This step isn’t required, but it will make the whole process ten times easier. When I started meditating I didn’t realize just how impactful it would be. I also didn’t realize how many of my favourite celebrities and great thinkers meditated.

Everyone from Arnold Schwarzenegger, to Katy Perry, to Oprah Winfrey and more credit meditation as a key part of their success and ability to stay balanced.

We could discuss meditation for hours, the spiritual aspects, the physical effects it has on the brain over time or even just the calming effect it can create instantly. But for now there is one plus side to meditation that I want to share with you.

It allows you to step back from your thoughts.

With the type of meditation I do the point is to focus on your breath so intensely that your thoughts cease. Now, during meditation you are sure to have thoughts pop into your head. In this case you just allow them to surface without analyzing them, and then get back to focusing on your breathing. If you get an itch on your leg, you feel it, but then immediately bring your attention back to your breath.

This will train you to be able to have a thought or emotion surface without allowing it to pull you into its rabbit hole. This way when something happens in your daily life that aggravates you, instead of stewing over it for hours and ruining your whole day you can step back and say “is this really a useful thing to focus on? Do these thought patterns improve my life in any way shape or form, or do they just serve to steal energy and happiness from me?”

Armed with this ability to step back and question these reflexive thoughts, you can truly start to control your mind and use it for your own self improvement.

A quote that has been repeated by many of the great minds of the world, and is very close to my heart is: “The mind is a wonderful servant, but a terrible master.”

This quote perfectly explains the two different relationships you can have with your mind.

Either you control it, or it controls you. The decision is yours.

With love
Steven Farquharson, 2HelpfulGuys

The 3 Rules For A Good Life

What is a good life? Without getting too philosophical, I think a good life is only based on a few rules.

There are too many rules in life. I’m told to stand up straight, act a certain way; don’t use the salad fork for the steak.

What do you mean?

A FORK IS A FORK!

Amidst all the criticisms how do you live a good life? To be honest, I don’t know. But, here’s where I start:

1) Laughter

Every single day, I insert a reason to laugh. As children we laugh about 300 times a day. As an adult, that number is reduced to a meager 7.

SEVEN.

How did we go from 300 to 7?

Did we cross some bridge of agony and now here we are: Mindless drones that wake up, go to work, participate in office gossip, watch Breaking Bad, and then sleep and die?

Laughter is really hard as an adult. It must be, right? Going from 300 to 7? There must have been some sort of life-changing traumatic event that occurred between childhood and adulthood.

We need to get back to our childhood roots. We need to laugh more. Start here:

Standup – Dave Chappelle, Louis C.K. Gabriel Iglesias

T.V. Shows – Blue Mountain State, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, The Office

Movies– Anchorman, Happy Gilmore

YouTube – Our Own Gentlemen’s Corner (no list would be complete without it)

2) Be Grateful

Start your day with gratefulness. Before I get out of bed, every morning, I say ‘thank you.’ The simple-ness of living often gets taken for granted.

“But I’m drowning in debt. I have no friends. My family hates me.”

Even if it seems like you have nothing to be grateful for, there is always something. You can still breathe. You can still come up with ideas. You can still walk and eat and live.

In a previous post, I mentioned the importance of being grateful. You can check that out for more information.

3) Never go to bed angry

I seldom get angry, but when it happens I make sure to deal with it immediately. Address it with the other and with yourself.

Your ego will not let it escape your thoughts. Cast your ego away. Allow those angry thoughts to float away into the wind.

Ask yourself, ‘how much does this matter?’

More often than not, it doesn’t.

Ending the day with anger sets the tone for your next day. Those thoughts fester in your sleep and you wake up with them, fresh in your head. Those thoughts will weigh you down.

Apologize or let it go completely. It’s not worth wasting your life over any problem.

For me, I know everything will be fine if I follow these consistently. And maybe, I can laugh, be grateful for the advice and shrug it off the next time someone tells me that I’m using the wrong fork.

Be bold, be free, and love on.

The Dark Cave

I wouldn’t consider my job the greatest in the world, but it’s decent. I have lots of free time and I’m able to pretty much govern myself.

I’m a operations coordinator. I oversee peoples’ parties, make sure things go smoothly and clean up. Pretty much, I’m a glorified janitor.

Hmm, doesn’t sound as glamorous as ‘operations coordinator.’

People book party rooms for all sorts of happy events: Birthdays, weddings, baby showers and retirements (are retirements happy?). These are all pinnacle moments in peoples’ lives.

Ideally, the hosts should be ecstatic to be celebrating with their family and friends.

Instead, I see the opposite. I see grumpy, anxious hosts enter, spewing a flurry of curse words like some sort of pirate.

But wait; isn’t this supposed to be a happy occasion?

It seems to me, the hosts forgot what they’re celebrating. They choose to be miserable because something wasn’t set up properly.

These little problems ruin their entire occasion. They are forever flustered about everything.

They’re trapped in this dark cave from which everyone eventually emerges.

I’m reminded of the last time I let little things bother me. It sucked. I was flustered and anxious. It was pitch black in my cave. I didn’t know how to deal with everything.

Little problems are just that…

Little. When you make small things into big things, you forget about the important things. You forget to enjoy the present moment. You stop looking for laughter and enjoyment and focus on that insignificant issue of a table being set up wrong.

They Ruin You

Like an apple left out to oxidize, you slowly start to turn. You steer your attention towards more insignificant problems. This process is gradual. All these little problems compile.

They add up, brown. Before you know it, like the gradual process of the apple, you’re spoiled, core out.

Choose Freedom

When in doubt, shrug it off. Don’t let these little problems affect you. When you let it get to you, your life gets affected.

You won’t be able to think and act properly. You start giving in to your vices. You may chomp on your nails. You may smoke or drink. You may want to punch a wall or hurt yourself, or worse, someone else.

These things will weigh on you, like you’re carrying a hundred-pound sandbag. If you let it affect you, you’ll be forever weighted and hindered.

To Learn or Not to Learn 

I like to think of these problems as miniature hurdles, each trying to teach you a little something as you jump them. These problems are a test for you to overcome, to help you progress, to make you stronger.

If you don’t learn from your problems, you’re bound to repeat it. There will only be darkness.

Here lies the pinnacle choice. Do you squander your time complaining and getting angry or do you utilize this moment and seek a way to make your life better.

Every single situation has a good and a bad. What do you choose to focus on? Who will you be after you come through that dark cave?

Be bold, be free, and love on.