Tag Archives: self improvement

Coping With Anger

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A recent conversation about parenting:

Husband: I’m not used to being filled with hate and anger

Wife: Any other father would be yelling and hitting by now

Husband: The Dalai Lama wouldn’t be hitting

Wife: Any normal father

Husband: I’m not trying to be normal, I’m trying to be exceptional

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Recently, I’ve been finding myself being “really mad” at one of my kids. Worse, I have been carrying my anger around and wrapping it in self-pity. This is a crappy habit to create!

To turn things around, I tried a 14-day cleanse…

Monica laughed as my cleanse was light weight in a Boulder sense… huge salad for dinner and no booze. I didn’t notice any difference physically but the anger has started lifting.

Here’s what I’ve been doing to cope.

Own It – when I’m angry, I notice the anger. I try to create some space by breathing and noticing “wow, I’m angry.” When I can pull this off, I don’t act on my anger.

Not acting on anger is a win, even when angry.

Identity – I remind myself that I’m not always the role that is making me angry:

  • Employee of difficult boss
  • Parent of difficult kid
  • Customer of difficult company

I discovered my painful identity when I was hiking (alone) feeling sorry for myself. I reframed my self pity into “a guy who can go for a hike.”

This helped until I became “guy who’s calf blew out on a hike!” At least my calf trouble got me swimming again and I noticed that problems in my body don’t make me angry.

Communicate – My anger doesn’t like anyone to know about it. So I have been introducing my anger to my wife, my friends and, now, you. Getting the emotion in the open creates space. Space is good.

Share Goodness – when I’m happy or enjoying myself… I send a little bit of that happiness to the object of my anger.

Breathing in – this is a good moment

Breathing out – I send her some goodness

The Rational Mind – I think of myself as being calm and rational. It’s everyone else that runs on autopilot.

Persistent irrational emotions point out that I’m merely OK in “my world” but have trouble with “the World.”

I want to apply evil intent on my kids but, looking deeply, the only possible intent is love and inclusion. Until I can experience that reality:

  • Keep breathing
  • Keep trying
  • Let go of the emotional warfare

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Today’s my youngest’s birthday. She’s one. It took me five years to become comfortable with babies and now they are gone!

Hopefully, I can up-skill with preschoolers before 2018.

Creating Personal Prosperity

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I’ve been watching my happily self-directed pals.

I’ve noticed common elements that bring them satisfaction.

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Convenience – my self-directed pals create this via simplicity, routine and living in a beautiful location. I need to watch myself because I tend towards complexity, travel for its own sake and constant variation in routine. All of these add stress and increase the probability for hassles to pop up.

Mantra: everything I need is at home

Remember: explore locally, travel less, create space in my schedule

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Control – Related to convenience, in my first career, I tried to outsource as much as possible. This “worked” but if carried it to its logical conclusion then there’s nothing left to do other than “be happy,” “be rich,” or “be fast.” The “being” that we long for is usually a reflection of our values.

I’ve been lucky to realize that achieving my goal of “being” didn’t bring much satisfaction.

It was a mistake for me to believe that happiness lay in getting rid of everything (jobs, responsibilities, obligations) that wasn’t “fun.” I’m more satisfied with the un-fun items in my life.

Remember: satisfaction comes from the opportunity to do my best work while serving others

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Quality – It is interesting to watch families that have no limits on their spending. The families that get it “right” don’t focus on prestige. Instead, they focus on achieving value with a solution that is fit for purpose.

Consider: before spending money I ask, will this make a difference? Before spending time I ask, is this my situation to fix?

Mantra: if in doubt then wait

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Under the radar – I have a craving for recognition that’s subdued in my wise buddies. Perhaps they have learned the danger of being skewed by unearned admiration?

Mantra: work to be worthy of respect

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One final thing that I’ve noticed that correlates to happiness, independent of income: near daily outside activity in beautiful surroundings.

Mantra: live the life I want for my children

Remember: base my family in a location where we don’t need to leave

 

Ten Hour Transformations

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A practical example of why the only way to change everything is to focus on changing one thing.

Thinking through my relationship with my daughter, I came up with the following for a minimum commitment to see results…

Ten hours per week:

  • An hour per day as 30 minutes AM/PM;
  • Twice a week do a trip together for 90-minutes (go swimming, ride bikes, trailer ride or park visit)

This structure has me focus on making the small interactions (first each morning, last each night) quality.

With my kids, where I fall short is working on the quality of the little things. I didn’t notice this until last month when we suspended TV, iPad, electronics. To stick to my guns with the electronics ban, I had to interact with my daughter and she had to learn other ways to fill her time (drawing, stacking blocks and playing house).

I learned a lot from the process. Our daughter’s behavior improved and I was forced to face my laziness with engaging with her.

Just like bedtime routines, maybe acting out was driven by a need to get my attention.

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Another area for applying ten-hour commitment might be improving health. You might apply as:

  • An hour per day as 40 minutes walking/cycling in the AM and 20 minutes eating a mixing bowl of salad in the PM;
  • Twice a week – stock the house with healthy options – an hour each time
  • Twice a week – strength training – 20-30 minutes each time

That’s going to capture nearly all of the health benefit from my current lifestyle. I like to exercise more than an hour per day but that’s for mental wellbeing, rather than physical health.

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The above makes it clear, at least to me, why I can only work on one thing at a time.

  • Wife
  • Three kids
  • Amateur sport
  • Job
  • Reading
  • Writing
  • Yoga
  • Spiritual Development

If I seek to change everything (~100 hours per week) then I’ll become overwhelmed and lose the consistency required to achieve anything!

Choose Wisely.

Changing Everything

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A favorite question:

What one thing, if it happened, would change everything?

It can be uncomfortable to acknowledge that our current life experience is a result of the (mostly mental) habits that we’ve created to date.

When I ask myself the above question, I compare my answer to where I spent my time over the last week. I often find myself lacking focus.

Creation of Habits + Time = Life Situation

With the above equation, I consider my habits of thought, action and speech. Listen quietly to any person and they will tell you what they think of themselves (by the humor they share about others).

Because we are mostly operating on autopilot, Free Will is found at the margin of our lives. So, to change EVERYTHING, we need to figure out our ONE THING and focus our Free Will.

Some things:

  • Getting fit
  • Family income and expense balance
  • Gaining control of my schedule
  • Losing weight
  • Being able to ride outside in good weather
  • Being able to eat and drink as much as I want
  • Finding love
  • Publishing a book
  • Winning a special race
  • Finding a sexual partner

I’ve had many “one things.”

So many that I joke with my wife, “Honey, I think I’ve finally found THE answer.”

I joke but there have been several things that have proved transformative:

  • A kind spouse that motivates self-improvement
  • Capital to support freedom of occupation and location
  • Weight loss and exercise leading to wellness
  • Shedding disharmony – in my own mind and in my choice of peers
  • A willingness to own, and share, my errors
  • Living in a beautiful place where I enjoy an outdoor life

Right now, I have two things:

  • Reducing the fatigue that I experience from parenting
  • Achieving income/expense balance

What’s your thing?

Awareness is the first step towards transformation.

Sustainable action consists of building the habit of one small action, done first each day.

Mid Life Transformation

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In 2003, I shared a conversation:

“Gordo, you know what a REAL mid-life crisis is?”

“Tell me, buddy.”

“It’s when you realize that the woman, the job, the body that you think you just might be able to have (if conditions were juuuust right). Well, you realize that there’s no way that’s going to happen and you are forced to look at the reality of your life. That can be hard. Seeing that your dreams ain’t going to happen.”

A longtime reader asked me to look back and share how I found the journey from my mid-30s to my mid-40s.

I started the process by making a list of all the “bad” things that were done to me. Isn’t this how we tend to see the past? A series of challenges that we have had to overcome.

Our personal history is created by our minds back fitting a heroic (or tragic) journey where we arrive at the present. We take credit for the heroism and assess blame for the tragedies. Sitting in judgement over everyone with whom we’ve shared our journey.

So I have my sh*t list and two thoughts come over me:

  1. “If I could wave a magic wand over my list then where would I be today?”
  2. “What use is sharing this list with ANYONE?”

I’m prone to depression but I’ve never been so depressed that I wanted to swap places with anyone.

I’m also aware that we never see the tragedies that we’ve avoided.

So, I thanked my list for delivering a wonderful spouse, three great kids and a family to serve.

Then I asked myself, what’s useful from the last decade?

Reread my buddy’s quote and you’ll see mention of the three gods of the modern world:

  • External validation through sex
  • External validation through money
  • External validation through vanity

If you look at the motivations of men then these gods feature highly. As a former elite athlete, much of the honor we receive is related to the gods of vanity and victory.

It would be easy to write that I transcended these false gods through meditation and fasting!

Truth is, at times, I took each as far as I could and had a lot of success at what others told me would make me a successful person…

…and I saw it wasn’t very satisfying.

My advice would be to look past the sex, money and vanity. What’s on the other side? Is penetration, wealth or beauty going to transform your life situation? Or might they bring a host of new problems along?

My sh*t list, particularly the worst setbacks, gave me an opportunity to ask what’s important and work on being a better person.

What lies on the other side of goodness?

I arrived at my 40th birthday (2008) and my world was falling apart. However, I was a much better person, and that helped me manage my way through. Five years on, I look at my life and am grateful because I missed setbacks that would have been far, far worse.

I’m the age (today) that my friend was a decade ago when he shared his advice. What can I offer that’s useful?

You’re going to be fine.

Keep working on yourself.

If you choose to have children then you will be faced with a choice. The choice is one of openness or closing yourself off. If you choose to be open then you will have to release many of the self-centered beliefs you’ve created. If you choose to be closed then you are likely to feel regret once the window for a relationship passes.

Either way, you will be fine.

Choose kindness.

When You’ve Made Your Money

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By the time I was 32 years old, I had created a life where I had the option of working parttime. For the most part, I got that opportunity “right” and enjoyed my freedom.

My errors came from from the thought (perhaps the lie) that spending yields happiness. That belief, shared by most my peers, pulled me back into fulltime employment twice over the last decade.

The first time I was pulled back, it was to help a friend start a business. There was huge equity upside and I loved the work. It was a good decision but I ended up over-extended financially. Thankfully, I started selling down in 2005 and, in the Great Recession of 2008, “only” lost 2/3rds of my net worth.

The scale of the losses was equal to what wiped out my grandfather’s generation. In the four generations of my family tree (that end with me), we’ve lost enough money for the entire family to never have to work a day in their lives. The bulk of my current job description (father, teacher, administrator, spouse, brother, uncle, trustee) is trying to reduce the frequency, and consequences, of these bad decisions.

When I took my big financial hit, my cost of living (2008) was 5x higher than what I spent in my first year of “freedom” post-college (2001).

Due to the bankruptcy of the business I’d been advising, I was under a tremendous amount of stress. Reflexively, I chose to cut expenses and replace income. My family’s 2009 expenditure was half of 2008, but remained 2.5x higher than what I spent in 2001. I focused on my back-up career of coaching (always have Plan B!) and managed to cover 50% of what I was spending.

At that point, 2010, I didn’t know what to do. Inside my personal business plan, I have a heuristic “if in doubt then wait.” So I repeated the year, with a couple exceptions, Axel (2011) and Bella (2012).

Gradually, across 2011 and 2012, I realized that preserving the status quo (large house, dad working to pay bills that don’t make him happy) was insane. Despite being complete insanity, I was following a path that had universal support in my peer group. As my kids popped up, I noticed that I was getting less and less fun to be around AND I was actively working to create a life outside my house.

The family readings that I shared, and my family history, show that it’s almost certain that we will wipe ourselves out (perhaps more than once) in the next seventy-five years.

What should you know about your money?

  • Most of any financial legacy will be gone a couple decades after my death, or spent by people I never knew
  • The greatest pressure I experience is preserving wealth that I’m unlikely to spend
  • I know I can live in peace on a fraction of my current spending

What do I truly need? Easy to answer day-to-day: exercise, love, service and health.

For the long-term, I like to have a mission. Why not make the people I live with part of my mission? Then I’m surrounded by meaning, and success. If that’s the case then what does my family truly need?

Empathy – it’s easy to find people to do stuff. It’s a lot tougher to find people to listen and care.

Learn To Teach Ourselves – my writing is about sharing how I teach myself. Tools that I want to pass to my kids: write down insights and blindspots, make errors visible, replace habits that hold us back and share stories of what you’d like to become.

Cope With Loss – More by accident than design, I’ve been on a self-guided education of the major faith traditions, neuroscience and behavioral psychology. This has led me to believe that loss is an opportunity to learn by experience. Until life deals us a major setback, we will not understand impermanence and the nature of existence. Create a daily practice that let lets you process, release and recharge from the challenges we all face. Deal with loss by continuing the good that you’ve learned.

My kids weren’t around for for the first 40 years of my life. Common sense means I won’t be here for the last 40 years of their lives.

What’s your legacy?

Good memories and a skill set that let’s the student surpass the teacher.

Creating A Peaceful Home

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To change a habit with my wife and kids, I need to change that habit with everyone.

For example, to break a habit of snapping at other people, I need to remove that response from every single aspect of my life. That’s quite challenging!

If you’re a “yeller” then you won’t stop yelling at your kids until you manage to stop yelling at everyone. Also, many of us are yelling at people that can’t, or don’t, defend themselves. To break the cycle of yelling, it helps to drill down to the true source of our anger (often the past or ourselves).

Sometimes I can’t find the source of the yelling, and have to live with it. Here’s an example from last month. I don’t yell at anyone but, for much of March, there was a voice yelling in my head, mainly at my spirited daughter. I’ve managed to train myself not to express what’s going on in my head so there were times when a silent scream would be triggered each time I saw my little girl. Some of the things I “said” in my head were not very nice!

Having one of my kids act as a stress trigger is a tough situation, as I can’t use my typical strategy of avoidance! I’ve been trying to relax my mind by focusing on the temporary nature of the noise I experience with her. Knowing that there is an ending to every interaction helped calm me down.

I looked deeply and realized that being upset with my daughter had become a habit that was independent of her behavior – even when she was great, the internal battle raged in my mind. There were situations where I wanted her to misbehave to give me an opening to vent. It’s a very good thing that the habits of non-violence and harmony pre-date fatherhood! In the end, I removed myself for a few days, to travel to India for a wedding, and that emptied my mind of the noise.

Coming back to my original goal to speak kindly to my spouse and kids – we need to cultivate kindness with all our interactions. “Kindness to all” being the requirement to deliver “thoughtful speech” to our wives and kids. As I mentioned above, I can train myself to appear calm when there is a storm raging in my mind! It’s not a requirement to be peaceful inside to have a peaceful home (but I’m sure it helps).

I’ll share an idea from Gordon Livingston. Focus on treating people that can’t defend themselves better, for example service people. From that habit, extend towards treating everyone better. Under stress, nobody is good at remembering to treat one category of people better than another.

These habits are also a great way to lower blood pressure without the use of medication. I can see how internalized rage would be bad for one’s health.

When I find myself falling short, I remember that I can’t correct the person I was, but I can correct the person I am. My short comings become inspiration to keep trying for incremental progress.

Why I Declared Victory In My Relationships

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I have a men’s group that tries to meet once a quarter. Recently, we were discussing ways to strengthen our marriages by improving ourselves.

The discussion centered around:

  • being better men for our wives
  • more effective communication with our kids
  • ditching our most damaging habits (anger, overeating, excessive drinking, smoking)

I shared that, while I’m far from perfect, it was effective for me to declare victory on all fronts. For the guys, I interpreted my family mantras in light of my closest relationships:

  • I’ve already won – so I never need to “win” with my wife
  • I have more than I need therefore I don’t expect my wife (or kids) to serve me – at an emotional level, I am my own source of happiness
  • My ultimate goal is to live in a peaceful house that’s full of love

Combing all of the above, I find that there’s nothing left to fight about. If I get irritated then it’s because I’m (blindly) projecting an inability to change myself onto my spouse.

There may be areas of disagreement but, when the family has a goal of harmony, I find that the resolution to any conflict becomes apparent. Sometimes the resolution is simply – we’ll have to deal with this for a while.

Within my marriage, my goal isn’t perfection. My goal is continuous gradual improvement and being part of the overall solution.

Related to my earlier piece on guilt, if I deeply believe that I’m “part of the solution” then I’m able to bring a calm perspective to bear. I don’t need to fix anything, I simply need to help make myself, and our home, a little bit better each day.