May 26, 2022

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Being happy with yourself is the most important skill

Self-love

Photo Credit: LaLaLaLiza

 

By Leo Babauta (Zen Habits)

If you’re like me, you are constantly learning new skills — gardening, carpentry, pizza-making, languages, sports, and so on. And I think this is a fun and wonderful thing to do.

But what’s the most important skill?

That’s debatable. I think compassion is a huge one, as is mindfulness. I’d go with those two any day of the week.

But if I had to pick just one, it would be this: learning to be happy with yourself.

That seems too simple, to trite! Too mushy and New-Agey! And I’ll grant all of that, but I stand firmly by my pick.

Why? The answer has to do with how this one thing can affect everything else in your life. If you are not happy with yourself, or your body, you become insecure. You think you’re not good enough. You fear being abandoned and alone. You do lots of other things to compensate, and these lead to problems. [Read more…]

Don’t ever turn to stone. Take a leap to learn new things.

Photo Credit: thriol

 

By Kristen Ulmer

People ask me all the time why I started Ski to Live.

I want to tell you a story about my past you may find shocking. It explains why I started these evolutionary mindset ski and snowboard camps, and also illustrates the next top mindset tip.

When I was 22 years old I was competing in local Utah mogul competitions and generally coming in last place. Heck, I hadn’t even owned a pair of ski pants until two years prior — just competing in anything was a big step.

That summer, while my fellow competitors trained on snow at expensive camps at Mount Hood, Whistler or even South America, I decided to take a trip to Asia by myself. For 5 months. To work on my self esteem.

I had two rules on this trip. I made these rules because I realized my self worth was entirely based on the fact I was pretty, and could ski well. I realized I wasn’t going to always be pretty, or always ski well, and I thought I’d better find a way to build a more solid personal foundation. [Read more…]

Man changes name to Tyrannosaurus Rex, citing desire for distinctiveness

T-Rex

Photo Credit: Billings Productions, Inc.

 

How much is having a cool, unusual name worth to an entrepreneur? Enough to change Tyler to T-Rex. The socio-economic value of distinctiveness is highlighted in a story today by NPR:

Tyler Gold of York, Neb., is now officially named Tyrannosaurus Rex Joseph Gold, the local York News Times reports.

But there’s no sign that Tyler … er, Tyrannosaurus Rex … is rethinking his choice because of any breaking news about breaking wind.

According to the News Times:

“In Gold’s official filing with the court, he said he wanted to change his name ‘because the (T-Rex designation) is cooler. Also, as an entrepreneur, name recognition is important and the new name is more recognizable.’ He verbally repeated his reasoning during the court proceedings, while on the witness stand [Monday].”

Commenting on the Good Men Blog, Joanna Schroeder adds:

Folks these days are naming their kids more, shall we say… creatively. Cracked.com has a great list of the top 20 unusual celebrity baby names that includes my favorite: Pilot Inspektor, child of Jason Lee.

Personally, I love it. I like that kids don’t get teased for their names being unusual anymore – because almost all the names are unusual.

Our names are all written together in the Cosmic Scroll, to use an image popular with Marc Gafni and other students of Kabbalah. Meaning, in other words, that the Cosmic Scroll, seen as our True Self, is only manifest in the world when it appears with a Name, with a Unique Self.

Each name is already unique, whether it is John, James, Mary, Patricia, or Tyrannosaurus Rex Joseph. But T-Rex’s decision demonstrates spirit’s next move: as individuals strive to build careers for the 21st century, defining their personal brands in a crowded marketplace of individuals with impressive resumes, they are looking to milk value out of every unique, distinguishing characteristic in their portfolio.

Whether T-Rex is just a gimmick or if it will turn Tyler Gold into a mammoth entrepreneur is hard to say. But if the name captures something essential about his Unique Self that lets him be more fully who he is in the world, then let’s bless him on his journey. And then let’s get out of his way…. quick!!!

 

Consciousness is power: a lesson from pebbles

Runner

Photo Credit: Alain Limoges

By Kristen Ulmer

While a body builder, Schwarzenegger was rumored to say lifting weight 1 rep in a conscious state enhanced results more than lifting the same weight 10 times in an unconscious state.

While we wouldn’t take relationship advice from the guy, perhaps this comment deserves pondering! [Read more…]

Top 10 rules for building a unique Online Presence

Sunglasses

Photo Credit: Brigitte Deisenhammer

Note: Adapted from content originally published in December 2011 on Awake, Alive & Aware.

Scientific research has tentatively suggested that how a person shows up online actually is very much like how they show up in real life. The same mannerisms and tics, values and qualities of character, personality traits, etc. And if you have lots of friends and are very social in the real world, you tend to also make many virtual friends, too. So we must give some credibility to the hypothesis than when we are talking about your “Online Presence” we are actually talking about a part of yourself — that part appearing, as the Integral Theorists say, in the Lower Quadrants. Put simply, your Online Presence is really YOU.

And yet there are few guidelines telling us how to navigate the waters of social media, blogging, website and to really claim our online “self” as truly part of us. There are few guides, in any case, that really grasp deeply the interpenetration of psyche and cyberspace, philosophy and Facebook, temperance and Twitter. So several months ago, I attempted my own guide for myself to follow in helping my Unique Self show up more often than my False Self.

1. I Will Not Distract Myself. I will not use social media as a distraction to keep me from doing more pressing work in the world. I will recognize that moment when it becomes a distraction because I will begin to feel that I am procrastinating on something that is more enlivening and rewarding but which requires delayed gratification.

[Read more…]

Walter Russell Mead: Youth today at risk of not forming a healthy relationship to work

Pizza Boy

By Joe Perez

“Young people often spend a quarter century primarily as critics of a life they know very little about: as consumers they feel powerful and secure, but production frightens and confuses them,” says Walter Russell Mead, editor of The American Interest magazine, is an insightful social commentator who isn’t afraid to make broad assessments of culture and society.

The liberal social model is breaking down in the U.S. and elsewhere, Walter Russell Mead says, but we can’t simply return to the conservative view of society, either. Calling the liberal model “blue” and conservative model “red” as is the norm among U.S. political pundits these days, he says that we need to find a way beyond blue that doesn’t try to re-create red.

[Read more…]

Olivia Fox Cabane: mindfulness is a key to being more charismatic

By Joe Perez

In “How To Reverse Your Hard Wiring For Distraction,” Olivia Fox Cabane says that personal presence is one of the three keys to cultivating charisma. She excerpts from her book, The Charisma Myth:

[Read more…]

What is My Dharma?

by Sally Kempton

In my late 20s, as a recovering existentialist in the midst of a life-crisis, I came across  he Bhagavad Gita, and read for the first time Krishna’s wordson dharma. You probably remember the situation: the warrior-prince Arjuna, paralyzed by confusion at the prospect of having to kill his kinsmen in a war, begs his friend and teacher, Krishna, for help. Though Krishna’s response touches on every essential aspect of the inner life, from how to meditate to what to expect when we die, the lines that struck me were these: “You are a warrior,” Krishna tells his pupil, “your svadharma, your personal duty, is to fight. Therefore, stand up and do battle. Better your own dharma badly performed than the dharma of another done perfectly.”

Is it possible to read that sentence without asking yourself the question “What is my dharma?” I felt that I’d suddenly found words for a question I’d been trying to formulate my whole life. I made my living as a writer—was that my dharma? I’d just begun serious spiritual practice—was that my dharma? I had a life-long aversion to the conventional rules of society—was that a sign that I was out of line with dharma, or simply that I followed a dharma that was uniquely mine? Was there really, as Krishna’s words seemed to imply, a blueprint for right action, perhaps lodged in my DNA, that could provide my own personal path to truth? Was that the clue to the question that had confused me for most of my life, “What am I really supposed to be doing?”

Years of practice have convinced me that there is such a thing as personal dharma, and that unless we’re in touch with it, we’re out of touch with our real source of strength and guidance. When we are inside our dharma, spiritual growth seems to happen naturally. When we aren’t, we feel stuck and stymied not just in our work and relationships, but in our inner life as well.

[Read more…]