There are things you don’t learn at school. Not in secondary school or at university either, and they have a lot to do with how we are going to see life. Failing to acquire these skills can turn you into a miserable wretch even if you have no real reason to be one. We’ll count them among the skills that help you grow as a person, and so they will help you on every level, including your professional life.
1. Don’t take things personally
Just because you experience something that makes you feel a certain way (good or bad), it doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with you. Put another way, the universe isn’t conspiring to screw up your life. You screw up your own life with the way you perceive what’s going on around you.
Have you ever been stuck in a traffic jam for hours? It’s nothing personal. Nobody is trying to screw you over. They didn’t close the road because someone knew you were going to get stuck in it. The jam will end when it ends, so don’t be an idiot: you won’t fix it by shouting or leaning on the horn.
We often think that if we are good people, we deserve good things to happen to us. But that isn’t exactly how it works either, because in life, day to day, good things and bad things will always happen to us that make us happy or affect us negatively. And it’s almost never personal.
When people speak badly of you, criticise you or reject you in some way, it is more likely to have to do with them than with you: their values, their priorities, their situation in life. The problem is often theirs, not yours.
Likewise, when you make a mistake or fail at something, it doesn’t mean you are a failure as a person. It only means that you are someone who, like everyone who takes action, will sometimes fail. And you can always improve.
(See: 10 lessons we learn too late in life)
2. Beliefs, at every level
As Mark Manson puts it, most people cling to their beliefs when they are challenged as if they were the life jacket on a sinking ship. The problem is that, very often, their beliefs are the sinking ship.
The trouble is that our beliefs are not simply ideas: they are part of our identity and they shape our personality, for better or worse. Questioning those beliefs therefore means that we also have to question who we are as people, and that is bloody painful, even though in many cases we know our beliefs have “gaps” and we prefer to deny the evidence that they are unfounded.
We are not going to get into such delicate subjects as politics or religion, because we are talking about beliefs in general.
There are women who are abused by their partners and see it as normal, because their father used to hit their mother, they have friends who also take the odd beating from their partners, and they live in buildings where, to a greater or lesser degree, their neighbours also lash out. Now try explaining to that woman that a man hitting you is not right. Believe it or not, she will find it hard to understand.
Many extremely Christian families tend to treat sex as a taboo subject with their children. Try explaining to those families that they aren’t doing the right thing, because there are studies and data suggesting that families where sex is taboo tend to be the ones with the highest percentage of under-age daughters with unwanted pregnancies. In other words, just because your beliefs stop you from talking about sex with your children, it doesn’t mean your children won’t have sex. Simply forbidding it makes them want it as soon as possible.
Your beliefs affect your everyday life.
For example, there are still men who hold on to the thinking they developed as teenagers and believe that women aren’t interested in decent men, but in bad boys, money or a flashy car you can barely afford. And maybe that is true in some cases, if you know women whose values leave a lot to be desired, but the truth is that those beliefs that worked at 16 no longer work at 30 or 40, and they will lead you to constant heartbreak or to ending up married to a woman worth less than a kilo of peppers on special offer.
The same happens professionally. If you believe in yourself and in what you can do, you are more likely to do well in life. Always try to keep your mind open to questioning your beliefs because, without knowing what they are, I can tell you now that most of them are unfounded.
I’m not attractive, I’m useless, I’ll never be happy because I feel trapped in my life. If these are your beliefs, you are right that this will be the result. If you change your beliefs, you will also change the result.
(See: 3 short stories about the mistakes of perspective that stand in the way of your happiness)
3. Making decisions without knowing the outcome
For most of our lives, we can attach an outcome to almost everything. If you were given an assignment at school, you did it, and that was the outcome. If your parents told you to tidy your room, you did it, and we saw the result.
There is no uncertainty at all: you’re told to do something, and you know what you have to do. But real life doesn’t work quite like that. Nobody tells you which degree is right for you. When you start a relationship, nobody can promise you that, as time goes by, it will be the one, the relationship that will make you happy.
Nobody makes you work for someone else or start your own business. And if you do decide to open your own company, nobody can guarantee that it will go well.
There is no such thing as certainty, and that is why one of the problems many people have is that they try to avoid making decisions and keep putting them off.
Sometimes, not wanting to make decisions creates a false sense of security (if I stay as I am, at least I’m not taking any risks), but in most cases doing nothing is the biggest risk we take.
Nobody knows what decision you should make, or what is best for you, except you. Nobody knows what outcome a decision of yours will have. You don’t either. So it’s silly to try to know the outcome before acting. What we do know in many cases is the outcome you will get if you don’t act right away.
So when someone is stuck in a pit of shit, even if you don’t know what awaits you once you’re out, we already know one thing for certain: you have to get out of there. As the old saying goes: “The first steps don’t take you where you want to go, but they get you out of where you want to leave.”
So start acting despite the uncertainty because, in many cases, even if you can’t see the way forward or don’t have enough resources, as we start to act the path opens up and the resources come along on their own.
Sometimes a person just has to do things for no reason other than that they have to do them. Full stop.
What answer did George Mallory give when he was asked why he wanted to climb Everest? He said: “Because it’s there.”
Add a bit of uncertainty to your life. Uncertainty stimulates change, growth, passion and excitement. If there is one thing successful people have in common, it is that they love uncertainty. In fact, certainty doesn’t exist. Nobody can have it, because that’s not how life works. Everything you think you have for life could disappear tomorrow.
(See: Nobody wants to attend the best teacher’s class: pain)
4. Managing problems and emotions
Life is an emotional rollercoaster. Today you’re fine, and tomorrow you’re not. Today you’re happily married, and tomorrow you’re divorced. Today you have a company that’s going great guns, and tomorrow that business isn’t profitable for any of a hundred possible reasons. But in the end, you decide what frame of mind to adopt in the face of life’s most difficult situations.
I remember once witnessing a serious accident when two vehicles collided. One of them was practically crushed like an accordion. All you could see was blood (the two people in that vehicle died). From the other vehicle we managed to pull out a young man whose face could barely be seen because it was covered in blood. At first sight he had a broken eyebrow, a broken nose and a broken arm (we later learned he also had several broken ribs, a punctured lung and some broken facial bones).
My heart was racing and, with my stomach completely turned by the scene, I tried to keep calm. The young man was very frightened and could barely speak or breathe, but he could hear. None of us there could do anything except wait for an ambulance to arrive.
My knowledge of first aid is zero. Perhaps from some films, all I know is that you should try to keep the person awake and, using common sense, try to keep the injured person calm (which is really difficult, if not impossible).
I said to the young man with a smile: “It doesn’t look serious, mate. Relax, you’ll be out partying tonight.” The truth is I didn’t think he was going to make it, given what I could see and my lack of knowledge on the subject. But I’m a believer in psychological placebos, and so I’m aware that if a person senses calm around them, they will be calmer, and that increases the chance that things won’t get worse.
One of the people there, the most hysterical and nervous one (and the least helpful, by the way), asked me whether I wasn’t ashamed to be joking in a situation like that. I kept quiet out of respect for the injured young man, whom I kept talking to while swallowing my nerves and the urge to vomit as best I could, but inside I was thinking: “You thoughtless son of a bitch, can’t you see your hysteria doesn’t help someone in this state?” The ambulance finally arrived and took him away. He died on the way to hospital.
The conclusion from this: when a problem comes up, it doesn’t go away because you get hysterical. Quite the opposite: it gets worse, and your hysteria can also spread to everyone else, which doesn’t help anybody at all.
But controlling your emotions has to go further than that. As we sometimes say, problems are occasionally blessings in disguise. Sometimes what ruins your day today is what makes you happy tomorrow. Take again the example of your partner leaving you. Today you may cry but tomorrow, precisely because they left you, you may find someone who makes you happier. In fact, years later, looking back, you’ll realise it was the best thing that could have happened to you.
When it comes to dealing with problems, we need to have the steps for tackling them very clearly defined:
- See the problem as it is.
- Don’t assume it has to be that way.
- Find the solutions.
If we go back to one of the earlier examples, the abused woman, she may have been crushed by her abuser and think she is worthless, having given up and accepted that taking a beating now and then is normal. She can’t compare herself with other abused women. She has to see the problem: nobody should hit you. No child should see a father hitting their mother.
Once we see the problem as it is, we can’t give up. We mustn’t assume it will be like that for the rest of our lives. So we make the decision (despite the uncertainty) and get out of there.
And as for controlling our emotions, we’ll finish with a short story:
A man told a joke and everyone laughed.
He told the same joke again, and hardly anyone laughed.
He told it again and again until nobody laughed at all.
Moral: if you don’t laugh at the same joke every time you hear it,
why do you keep getting upset about the same problem over and over again?
Break negative emotional patterns quickly and look at situations from another point of view. You can’t control everything that happens around you, but you can control the attitude with which you face your new circumstances. And attitude is everything.
See also: The 6 areas of your life you need to master to control your destiny
Featured image: Philippe-Minh Nguyen, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
