The SUCCESS Best-Seller List: December 2016

The most popular books in business, entrepreneurship and personal development

Take a look at the top-selling personal development books of the past month, and you’ll see not all of them are new—that there are modern classics, like Gary Chapman’s The 5 Love Languages, and all-time classics, like Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. But others, like Tim Ferriss’s Tools of Titans, are brand-new and already making waves in the self-improvement world.
For your journey to your best self, we continue our monthly list of the best-selling personal development books with the top 10 for December 2016:

1. Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers

By Tim Ferriss (December 2016; Houghton Mifflin; $27)
On his popular podcast, The Tim Ferriss Show, Ferriss has interviewed top performers of every type. In this ultimate self-help book, he distills and tests the key insights from elite athletes, adventurers, entrepreneurs, executives, creative thinkers, researchers and more to help readers learn to become healthy, wealthy and wise.

2. The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World

By Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu and Douglas Carlton Abrams (September 2016; Avery Publishing Group; $26)
Two spiritual giants. Five days. One timeless question: How do we find joy in the face of life’s inevitable suffering? This book offers a rare opportunity as Archbishop Desmond Tutu and His Holiness the Dalai Lama spend a week exploring the Nature of True Joy and confront each of the Obstacles of Joy (fear, stress, anger, grief, illness, death). Then they offer the Eight Pillars of Joy, which provide the foundation for lasting happiness. This unique collaboration offers a reflection on real lives filled with pain and turmoil, in the midst of which they have been able to discover a level of peace, courage and joy to which we can all aspire in our own lives.

3. You Are a Badass: How to Stop Doubting Your Greatness and Start Living an Awesome Life

By Jen Sincero (2013; Running Press; $16)
This refreshingly entertaining how-to guide serves up 27 bite-sized chapters full of hilariously inspiring stories, sage advice and easy exercises, helping you to create a life you will love. Identify and change the self-sabotaging beliefs and behaviors that stop you from getting what you want—create a life you love and make some damn money already!

4. The 5 Love Languages: The Secret to Love That Lasts

By Gary Chapman (2015; Northfield Publishing; $15.99)

Falling in love is easy. Staying in love—that’s the challenge! How can you keep your relationship fresh and growing amid the demands, conflicts and just plain boredom of everyday life? Whether your relationship is failing or flourishing, Dr. Gary Chapman’s proven approach to showing and receiving love is as practical as it is insightful. The 5 Love Languages includes a “his and hers” personal profile assessment. Updated to reflect the complexities of relationships today, the new edition reveals intrinsic truths and applies relevant and actionable wisdom.

5. Trump: The Art of the Deal

By Donald J. Trump and Tony Schwartz (2015; Ballantine Books; $16.99)
President-elect Donald J. Trump lays out his professional and personal worldview in this classic work, a firsthand account of the rise of America s foremost deal-maker. See Trump in action, how he runs his organization and life as he meets people, chats with family and friends, clashes with enemies and challenges conventional thinking. He isolates the common elements in his greatest accomplishments. Trump: The Art of the Deal is an unguarded look at an entrepreneur’s mind and a must-read for anyone interested in the man behind the spotlight.

6. The Total Money Makeover: Classic Edition: A Proven Plan for Financial Fitness

By Dave Ramsey (2013; Thomas Nelson; $24.99)
America's trusted voice on money and business provides a surefire way to whip your finances into shape with the simplest, most straightforward game plan for completely making over your money habits.

7. Jump: Take the Leap of Faith to Achieve Your Life of Abundance

By Steve Harvey (December 2016; Amistad Press; $25.99)
On January 13, 2016, at the close of taping an episode of Family Feud, Steve Harvey spontaneously began to speak. Not knowing that the cameras were still rolling, the $100 million host offered his studio audience insights into his own happiness and success. His staff, also moved by Steve’s words, shared the riveting six-minute video on social media. The clip immediately went viral, with more than 58 million views worldwide. His message is simple: You need to jump like your life depends on it, because it does if you truly want a life of peace and abundance.

. StrengthsFinder 2.0

By Tom Rath (2007; Gallup Press; $29.99)
Do you do what you do best every day? Chances are you don’t. All too often, our natural talents go untapped. From the cradle to the cubicle, we devote more time to fixing our shortcomings than to developing our strengths. Although you can read this book in one sitting, you’ll use it as a reference for decades. The redesigned StrengthsFinder 2.0 companion website features a strengths community, a library of downloadable discussion guides and activities, a strengths screensaver and a program for creating display cards of your top five strength themes.

9. The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life

By Mark Manson (September 2016; HarperOne; $24.99)
For decades we’ve been told that positive thinking is the key to a happy, rich life. In his wildly popular blog, Mark Manson doesn’t sugarcoat or equivocate. He tells it like it is in a dose of raw, refreshing, honest truth that is sorely lacking today. Manson makes the argument, backed both by academic research and well-timed poop jokes, that improving our lives hinges not on our ability to turn lemons into lemonade, but on learning to stomach the lemons better. Once we embrace our fears, faults and uncertainties, once we stop running and avoiding and start confronting painful truths, we can begin to find the courage, perseverance, honesty, responsibility, curiosity and forgiveness we seek.

10. How to Win Friends and Influence People

By Dale Carnegie (1998 edition, originally published in 1936; Pocket Books; $16)
Go after the job you want and get it! Take the job you have and improve it! Take any situation you’re in and make it work for you! Since its release in 1936, How to Win Friends and Influence People has sold more than 15 million copies. As relevant as ever, Dale Carnegie’s principles endure and will help you achieve your maximum potential in the complex and competitive modern age. Learn the six ways to make people like you, the 12 ways to win people to your way of thinking and the nine ways to change people without arousing resentment.

SUCCESS analyzes a combination of sales data acquired from Nielsen BookScan—which gathers point-of-sale data from more than 16,000 locations across the U.S.—and from a variety of independently verified sources within the personal development industry. This list represents sales from Dec. 4, 2016, through Jan. 1, 2017.    

5 Reasons You Aren’t Successful

Sometimes we’re our own worst enemy. It’s time to get out of the way.

Joseph Lalonde 

Even the most successful people in the world have failed to achieve success at some point, when failure reared its ugly head and knocked them down. The sting from failure can stick around for quite some time—longer than you might imagine. You’ve probably felt it, too. 

     But what caused them and you to fail? Here are five reasons you’re not achieving success:

1. You don’t know what success looks like.

The most common reason we fail to achieve success is because we haven’t defined what success looks like to us. Maybe you’re chasing the latest fad or you’ve watched one too many movies, and that’s where your idea of success stems from.
When we chase other people’s visions of success, we’re bound to fail. We can’t be successful on others’ terms because then it’s like we’re living someone else’s life—and that will never bring us happiness. Instead, to achieve success, lay out what it looks like to you. Define success on your terms and chase it.

2. You don’t know what you’re passionate about.

You bounce from one great idea to the next, constantly chasing what sounds good in the moment. Oprah Winfrey once said, “Passion is energy. Feel the power that comes from focusing on what excites you.” She realized people won’t go after what they’re not passionate about, at least not for long.
Examine your life. Find what brings you joy, what piques your interest and what you’re passionate about. When you do, success begins to appear. 
 

3. You don’t want to put in the work.

You’ve heard about Malcolm Gladwell and his 10,000-hour rule. He studied and discovered the most successful people are the ones who have put in the hard work. They dive into their craft and study. And they worked and worked some more.
You can’t expect success to come to you just because you want it to. You have to work hard. Only then will you find true success.

4. You don’t surround yourself with the right people.

Jim Rohn has a famous saying: “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.”
We have to surround ourselves with others who are passionate about developing themselves and becoming successful. When you begin to congregate with those who have a success mindset, great things begin to happen. You begin to form new relationships with people who can guide you to the next step. From there, they can introduce you to other successful people. And then you begin to build a network of successful people as your support system.

5. You don’t have a positive mindset.

Everything looks down and out. You don’t see how anyone could be a success. This negative mindset needs to shift to a positive mindset if you want your chances of achieving success to improve.
You can’t find success if you’re stuck in negativity. You won’t see any positives in the world and it will hold you back. As you began to shift your mindset from one of negativity to one of abundance, you begin to see a whole new world.
If you’re struggling to achieve success, look at the five reasons above and begin working on the areas where you’re weakest. 

Source: 5 Reasons You Aren’t Successful

The Easiest Trick to Breaking Out of Wrong Ideas

The Easiest Trick to Breaking Out of Wrong Ideas

Having correct beliefs is vital to having the best life!     

Source: Randall Munroe, used with permission

Right now you have something within your reach with an almost magical ability to break out of wrong ideas. You can use it to process data and identify patterns and trends. What do you think it is? Take a guess before reading onward.
Did you guess your computer or your phone? Then you’re wrong! What I'm talking about is much, much more powerful than that. It's more powerful than the fastest supercomputer on the planet.
I'm talking about your brain.
Humans didn't spread out to rule the entire planet because of bigger muscles or sharper claws. Intelligence, the kind of intelligence that all humans have, is our superpower. It's what separates us from other animals, and it is your greatest resource.
But most people don't really use their brain to its full potential. Do you?
You certainly weren’t taught to use its real potential in school. Children are taught facts that will pass tests, but the skills that are most important in life usually don’t involve stuff that’s on an exam. How do I make plans (link is external)? How should I decide between places to live? What’s the best way to negotiate for higher pay? All of these questions involve thinking about and modeling the future (link is external). Imagine how many fewer poor decisions you will make and how much better off your life will be if you learn how to unlock your brain’s true potential and gain agency (link is external) over your life!
Want to know a secret? It's actually pretty easy to make big improvements to how you think. A few quick tricks can make a world of difference and boost your future-predicting power. I'll share one of them right now.
Have you ever heard of Confirmation Bias (link is external)? It's one of the known problems that scientists have discovered about how we naturally think. Imagine a friend suggests that people who drive red cars are bad drivers. At first you don't think that's true, but after hearing a few stories of bad drivers in red cars from your friend, you think he might be onto something. The next time you're on the road you notice a red car swerving around like a maniac... proof! You're a believer now. You start seeing reckless drivers in red cars all the time.
If you don’t believe me, I challenge you to try it out. Drive for a month looking for reckless drivers in red cars. You'll see them everywhere. Or you can save yourself the time and trouble. This perception would only be in your head!
If you actually use science you'll find this is false (link is external). What happens is that if you look for something you'll find it, but you'll also end up ignoring things that don't fit the pattern. If a blue car does something dangerous you won't think about it. If a red car drives safely then maybe it's just a fluke or maybe you'll interpret it as reckless anyway.
Confirmation Bias affects all sorts of things, from racial prejudices to conspiracy theories to personal relationships. If you expect someone you know to act sad, you'll notice their sadness and ignore their happiness. And importantly, it can hurt your ability to predict the future.
Imagine a gambler (link is external) who loses five games of poker in a row. She thinks “I’ve been getting bad luck for a long time… surely my next hand will have to be good to balance it out!” Have you ever thought something like that? I have. After two more bad hands she finally gets a good hand and thinks to herself “I knew it!” But she was wrong twice before being right! With that sort of sloppy thinking it would’ve been smarter just to walk away.
There are several tricks to avoiding this bias and being a better thinker. The one I'm going to share today is to visualize alternate universes regularly. An alternate universe is just a world exactly like this one but where one or two things are different.
Let's use the example of drivers of red cars being reckless. There are two alternate universes here. One alternate universe is where drivers of red cars are *safer* than normal. The other is where red car-drivers are just as good at driving as anyone else. Take a moment to visualize these alternatives and imagine what they look like. Can you see how that would help? Just like focusing on red cars being dangerous causes you notice examples that fit the story, focusing on the opposite lets you catch examples you might otherwise miss. It’s all about controlling where you put your attention.
Let me give an example from my personal life. I once met someone who I had heard was “obnoxious.” Indeed, when I first met him I could immediately see why: the man had almost no social skills. With the seed of “obnoxious” sown in my mind I began to get annoyed when around him. I noticed every time he said the wrong thing or didn’t seem to understand what the topic of conversation was. But then I remembered what I had learned from my research into psychology and I flipped my thinking: I imagined the alternate universe where this guy was cool and easy to be around.
Did my visualization of the alternate universe mean my friend suddenly became suave and charming? Not at all. But it did make him not obnoxious! Specifically, I realized that having weak social skills did not mean I had to find spending time with him unpleasant, and I began to enjoy my time with him much more. I also noticed that his social skills weren’t as bad as I had initially thought. There were a few times when, not trapped by “small talk” or the pressure of meeting someone new, I noticed him acting much more like his alternate-universe counterpart than I would have otherwise expected.
I don’t invite this friend to parties very often (I doubt he’d even enjoy the experience), but we still talk fairly regularly and he’s someone I know that I can turn to if I have a difficult problem in his field. Without the technique of visualizing alternate universes I would have worse social interactions, fewer friends, and be generally less wise. This simple trick has brought many, many people success in their relationships, their work, and elsewhere!
This is just one step on the path to being a better thinker about the future (link is external), and as we move forward I think you'll see how the technique of visualizing alternate universes can be used for becoming more intelligent, effective, and happy!
What do you think?

• Have you had success in improving your life through visualizations before?
• Do you know anyone in your personal life that seems just convinced about something that isn't true?
• Can you think of any areas of your life where you might have an incorrect perception of the world?
• What are specific steps you can take to apply the techniques in this article to improve your perception of the world?

Bio: Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is an author, speaker, consultant, coach, scholar, and social entrepreneur specializing in science-based strategies for effective decision-making, goal achievement, emotional and social intelligence, meaning and purpose, and altruism - for more information or to hire him, see his website, GlebTsipursky.com. (link is external) He runs a nonprofit that helps people use science-based strategies to make effective decisions and reach their goals, so as to build an altruistic and flourishing world, Intentional Insights (link is external). He also serves as a tenure-track professor (link is external) at Ohio State in the History of Behavioral Science and the Decision Sciences Collaborative, and published over 25 peer-reviewed articles. A best-selling author (link is external), he wrote Find Your Purpose Using Science (link is external) among other books, and regular contributes to prominent venues, such as Time (link is external), The Conversation (link is external), Salon (link is external), The Huffington Post (link is external), and elsewhere. He appears regularly on network TV, such as affiliates of ABC (link is external) and Fox (link is external), radio stations such as NPR (link is external) and Sunny 95 (link is external), as well as internet-only media such as podcasts (link is external) and videocasts (link is external).
Consider signing up to the Intentional Insights newsletter (link is external); volunteering (link is external); donating (link is external); buying merchandise (link is external). Get in touch with him at gleb (at) intentionalinsights (dot) org.

Gleb Tsipursky Ph.D. Intentional Insights

Source: The Easiest Trick to Breaking Out of Wrong Ideas

To Achieve Something Outrageously Extraordinary Requires Extreme Effort

To Achieve Something Outrageously Extraordinary Requires Extreme Effort

It’s your decision to be amazing. It’s an attitude. It’s how you live your life.   

Dan Waldschmidt

December 28, 2016   

    

We aren’t doing enough. Sometimes not even the bare minimum.
But it’s worse than that. This lack of effort is poor, lazy behavior. In every sense of the words.
I’m not even sure how we got to this point, but here is what I do know:

• We talk ourselves out of action before we even get started.
• We spend time, mental energy and emotion trying to look good rather than getting results.
• We debate the plan rather than working on it.
• We make excuses for our mediocrity.

If we want to be successful, it takes doing more. A lot more. To achieve something outrageously extraordinary requires extreme effort.

Effort is the great equalizer.
Seth Godin says ever so brilliantly the following about effort: “People really want to believe effort is a myth…. I think we’ve been tricked by the veneer of lucky people on the top of the heap. We see the folks who manage to skate by, or who get so much more than we think they deserve, and it’s easy to forget that these guys are the exceptions…. For everyone else, effort is directly related to success…. And that’s the key to the paradox of effort: While luck may be more appealing than effort, you don’t get to choose luck. Effort, on the other hand, is totally available, all the time.”
It’s inescapable. Effort makes the difference.
Effort is more than “If you pay me more, I’ll work harder.” It’s about not cheating yourself out of your own potential.
Think about that for a minute. Does anyone else really care if you are only putting in a half-ass effort?
No! You know deep down you are cheating yourself. And you are the only one who is really hurt by your actions.

No one cares about you like you. The least you can do for yourself is to put in the effort to give your dreams the chance to come true.
Think about what you want out of life right now. Perhaps you want:

• More self-assurance about your financial future;
• A better relationship with your spouse and children;
• A happier and/or more fulfilling lifestyle.

Are you willing to put in the effort to make these a reality? Not brains or money or manipulation. EFFORT!
If all that seems too overwhelming, if your dreams and goals seem too far off, let me offer the simplest of insights: Effort is simply you taking the next step. Again and again and again.
When you look closely at how ordinary people achieve amazing things, you begin to see it for what it is: one foot in front of the other. That’s all. A step is infinitely easier than a journey.
It’s your decision to be amazing. It’s a commitment to take the next step. It’s an attitude. It’s how you live your life. Relentlessly moving forward.
The world is full of good people doing good things in good ways. What will change the world is you putting in enough effort to do great things. One step at a time.
Be edgy. Put in extreme effort:

1. Avoid the need to blame others for anything.

Mean, small-minded people know they suck. That’s why they are so cranky and eager to point out others’ mistakes. They hope that by causing others to feel inadequate, everyone will forget about how woefully off the mark their own performance is. Don’t blame anyone, for any reason, ever. It’s a bad habit.

2. Stop working on the things that just don’t matter.

Not everything needs to be done in place of sleep. If you work for a boss, then you owe them solid time. You can’t cut that out. You can, however, cut out TV time, meetings and anything else that gets in the way of achieving your goals. Replace entertainment with activity toward your goal.

3. Refuse to let yourself wallow in self-doubt. You’re alive to succeed.

Stop comparing your current problems to your last 18 failures. They are not the same. You are not the same. Here’s something to remember: Your entire life has been a training ground for you to capture your destiny right now. Why would you doubt that? Stop whining. Go conquer.

4. Ask yourself, What can I do better next time? And then do it next time.

If you spend a decade or two earnestly trying to be better, that’s exactly what will happen. The next best thing to doing something amazing is not doing something stupid. So learn from your mistakes and use the lessons to dominate.

5. Proactively take time to do things that fuel your passion (for example, exercise).

Living in the moment requires you to live at peak performance. A huge part of mental fitness is physical fitness. So go fight someone. Or go running if fighting seems a bit extreme. Physical activity accelerates mental motivation.

6. Apologize to yourself and those around you for having a bad attitude.

Do this once or twice, and you’ll snap out of your funk pretty fast. When you start genuinely apologizing for being a bad influence on those around you, you learn to stop whining and start winning.

Excerpted with permission from EDGY Conversations: How Ordinary People Achieve Outrageous Success by Dan Waldschmidt

Source To Achieve Something Outrageously Extraordinary Requires Extreme Effort

The Poison Tendrils of Negative Emotions

How negative emotions lead to self-regulation failure

For readers looking to jump into the deep end of understanding procrastination, I highly recommend the recent volume edited by James Gross, Handbook of Emotion Regulation (link is external). This collection of chapters provides the most current and thorough review of the research literature in the area. Because I have put such emphasis in my own writing on the role of emotions in understanding procrastination, I thought I would summarize aspects of just one of the many chapters of this excellent book. The reference to the chapter written by Dylan Wagner and Todd Heatherton is below.

I was amused and delighted by the metaphor and image that these authors used to depict the role of negative emotions (also called negative affect) in the self-regulation process. In a very typical, academic-style diagram of a model of self-regulation, they first depict a high-level theoretical perspective.
The essential components conceptually look something like this:

TEMPTATIONS & DESIRES    GOALS & STANDARDS    Success
(food, drugs, media use, etc.)         Monitoring    Capacity         Failure

At the center of the model are our goals and standards. In other words, central to self-regulation is monitoring our progress towards our goals and our capacity to do this.  What they depict as directly influencing our goals and standards are temptations and desires. You know, other more fun stuff.  Finally, the model makes it clear that depending on how well we can ignore the temptations while maintaining our goal pursuit predicts whether we succeed or fail. In sum, it’s a common, simple model of self-regulation that is typical of a scholarly paper.
The amusing bit is how they chose to depict the effects of negative affect (negative emotions). They have the same diagram but with a giant black hole underneath the model out of which evil tendrils emerge. These tendrils, as tendrils will, grab on to every component of the model. This model now emphasizes a failure outcome, and the final piece of the model is how failure now feeds back down to the hole from which the tendrils emerge and feed the negative affect.
[Note: While I am tempted to add a photo of their diagram here, there are copyright laws that prevent usage in this way, so I hope that this description allowed you to imagine this quite vivid depiction of a psychological model.]
As they note in the caption to this figure, “Negative affect spreads poison tendrils into every aspect of self-regulation, amplifying desires, decreasing monitoring, depleting limited capacity, and encouraging misregulation strategies (e.g., mood repair and escape from aversive self-awareness), which can relieve negative affect in the short term but often lead to further negative affect upon failure to meet one’s goals” (emphasis added).
Well done!  That’s certainly the lived experience of the effects of negative emotions on our self-regulation. The tendrils pull us down.
These negative emotions seem to emerge from a dark place within us, grabbing on to every aspect of our self, and undermine our ability to self-regulate. And, of course, as we fail in our attempts to self-regulate, the self-blame begins, as does the downward spiral of self-esteem and self-efficacy.
In the bulk of the chapter, Wagner and Heatherton summarize numerous studies related to the different ways that negative emotions, emotion regulation and self-regulation interact. It’s important to remember that these are interactive effects, or as I like to say, it’s a sort of dance between these processes that undermine our success. As the authors summarize this interaction, we learn the following:

• Negative affect (emotions) leads to a desire to “feel good now,” escaping the negative state by engaging in pleasurable activities and reducing self-awareness (to lower any potential feelings of guilt; a process I have described previously);
• These choices related to mood repair serve to increase the pull or attractiveness of immediately available rewards and temptations grow;
• With a focus on pleasure and lower self-awareness, the ability to self-monitor is diminished; and at the same time,
• Negative affect, which is related to rumination, puts an increased load on working memory that further weakens the ability to self-monitor and further undermines goal pursuit, or any further attempt at self-regulation (i.e., no monitoring, no self-control).

It’s not a pretty picture, is it?  But it’s certainly one that I think every human being knows. It’s that downward spiral we experience when “we don’t feel like it” and negative emotions begin to “weave their tendrils” (as these authors depict) throughout our self-regulatory process.

Interestingly, Wagner and Heatherton paint this despairing picture even a little darker, writing:
“Throw in the fact that prior self-regulatory effort may leave the individual in a depleted state in which both resources for further self-control are lacking and the strength of impulses and temptations are increased, and it is a small miracle that people are not constantly acting out their fantasies, drinking, smoking, or indulging in every gastronomic desire” (emphasis added).
This is indeed a pretty dire picture, and it’s not helped by the fact that there is very little research documenting how positive emotions might reverse this. Although there is some evidence to suggest that positive emotions might buffer against ego-depletion and enhance self-regulation, positive emotions are not simply the antidote.  In fact, positive emotions might feed further off-task behaviors if this becomes the new focus of attention; a sort of carpe diem or even “what the hell” effect where we give in and decide it’s time to eat, drink and be merry.
The authors end with this sentence:
“Negative affect is thus a particularly potent threat to self-regulation, because it not only reduces the capacity for control (increased working memory load, reduced self-awareness and monitoring) but it may also lead to increases in the strength of experienced desires and emotions, rendering them all the more difficult to resist.”
So, you might ask as you join me in this dark place, “what are we to do?”  How do we manage to self-regulate?  Well, this has been the focus of most of my blog writing over the past years, with all sorts of strategies derived from a variety of different studies.
In my last blog post, I re-emphasized the importance of not paying attention to these emotions when they arise. Not a simple thing, I understand, as I noted above that negative emotions (affect) are related to and even seem to cause rumination. This rumination is the antithesis of “not paying attention.” But you get my point, right? The research summarized in this chapter makes it clear that negative emotions really do undermine self-regulation through processes like rumination that puts too much load on working memory (which derails monitoring our goal pursuit), or by provoking a hedonic response to feel good now.

Gross offers some potential points of intervention in his own process model of emotion. And, although it’s simply not possible to go much further in a single blog post, I will note that one effective strategy that is incorporated into many successful procrastination interventions is learning to modify appraisals of our situation to alter its emotional significance (I’ll come back to this at some other time, as this was part of the work we did in our recent book Procrastination, Health and Well-Being (link is external)). In any case, the focus here is on cognitive change, the kind emphasized in cognitive behavioral therapies, for example.
I hope that you can see that despite the “poison tendrils” of negative emotions depicted so vividly by Wagner and Heatherton, there are routes to self-regulatory success.  For some of us, this is certainly made more difficult by personality traits such as low emotional stability, as we are more chronically attuned to negative emotions. However, we can learn to act out of character as we learn new strategies to cope. Strategies that are much more effective than avoidance, self-blame and behavioral disengagement, each of which has been demonstrated to be risks not only to our success, but to our health.

Source: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/dont-delay/201607/the-poison-tendrils-negative-emotions?collection=1096682
References
Pychyl, T.A., & Sirois, F.M. (2016). Procrastination, emotion-regulation and well-being. In F.M. Sirois & T.A. Pychyl, (Eds.), Procrastination, health and well-being (pp. 163-188). New York: Elsevier.
Sirois, F.M. (2015). Is procrastination a vulnerability factor for hypertension and cardiovascular disease? Testing an extension of the procrastination-health model. Journal of Behavioral Medicine, 38, 578-589.
Wagner, D.D. & Heatherton, T.F. (2014). Emotion and self-regulation failure. In J. J. Gross (Ed.), Handbook of emotion regulation (pp. 613-628). New York: The Guilford Press.

Timothy A. Pychyl, Ph.D., is an associate professor of psychology at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, where he specializes in the study of procrastination

What Happened When I Lived by Dale Carnegie's Rules

What Happened When I Lived by Dale Carnegie's Rules

Tony Rehagen      

Let’s just say I know Aubrey.       

Apple Store employees don’t wear name tags, but I remember that name. That moniker and the wiry young man with thick glasses that belong to it were the unwitting foci of my frustration and anger three weeks ago, the last time I was sitting here at the so-called Genius Bar. Aubrey was the so-called genius who told me in some esoteric techie dialect that my old MacBook was out of memory or washer fluid or whatever, that three years of work I had failed to back up was essentially lost, and that I was a moron. (OK, I said that last part, but he didn’t argue.)

Well, now I’m back, snarling for a fight after having been cast into the next-door Macy’s for more than an hour, waiting to be paged. My brand-new MacBook won’t start, and I’m certain that almost a month’s worth of un-backed-up work is gone and my life and career are over. And Aubrey, of all name-tag-less messengers, once again drew the short straw. After a few minutes of poking and prodding the machine, he tells me that it might just be my display on the fritz, that all my data might be safe. But the only way to know, says Aubrey, is to plug the laptop into an external display. And the only one, says Aubrey, in this whole entire computer store, is currently being used by an hour-long Apple Watch tutorial.

I’m ready to blow—when certain words come rushing back to me:

Give honest and sincere appreciation, I think.

I hear the imagined Midwestern accent of Dale Carnegie reciting the second tenet of his “Fundamental Techniques in Handling People,” the first section of his best-selling 1936 field bible for relationships, How to Win Friends and Influence People, a building block for so much of the personal development content that has come since.

“People will rarely work at their maximum potential under criticism, but honest appreciation brings out their best.”

“Appreciation is one of the most powerful tools in the world,” the passage reads. “People will rarely work at their maximum potential under criticism, but honest appreciation brings out their best.”

It reminds me to take a breath and consider Aubrey: While I was waiting, I had observed him floating between customers, effortlessly untangling the power cable of one patron’s computer as he talked someone else through an iPhone issue, somehow paying attention to both. Both had walked away smiling, their problems apparently resolved. When he came to me, he knew my machine intimately, had an instinct for what the simplest explanation for its malady might be and how to check. It occurs to me that while I have been furious with one person for being so calm while my world is crashing, he must be dealing with dozens of frustrated, frantic people like me every day. And yet he is reassuring and doesn’t talk down to me. He is really good at his job.

“Look, I know you deal with idiots like me all day,” I say. “I can’t imagine what it’s like trying to solve a billion little crises, one after another. I honestly don’t know how you do it. My problem isn’t your fault—if anything, it’s my fault for not backing up my work. In fact, maybe you could help me with that once we get the machine working…”

Aubrey and I start up a little conversation. He tells me he enjoys helping people but eventually wants to move up to a more supervisory role. In fact, he says, he has an interview for a higher position later today. I tell him it must be hard to focus on trouble-shooting these little glitches with that event on the horizon. He smiles, shrugs off the notion, and mentions that he might be able to find another monitor in the back that can help us solve my problem.

***

The assignment was simple: Read How to Win Friends and Influence People, then live by its advice for an entire month. My initial reaction was one of incredulity. Of course I knew of the book, which has sold more than 30 million copies worldwide and was one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential non-fiction books of all time. But I’ve never been into the self-improvement genre. It’s not that I’m perfect—I’ve just never thought to read an 80-year-old tome penned by a motivational speaker who died during Eisenhower’s first term.

There were grounds for skepticism: First of all, the material is a bit dated. Even after a second edition was released in the 1980s, leaving out the original sections on letter-writing for “miraculous results” and on marriage advice, the updated book comes off as a bit antiquated in places. For instance, the chapter suggesting that effective leaders use praise to sugarcoat criticism begins with an anecdote of President Calvin Coolidge telling one of his secretaries, “That’s a pretty dress you are wearing this morning, and you are a very attractive young woman,” before admonishing her for poor punctuation. (In 2011, Dale Carnegie & Associates Inc., which carries on the author’s teachings and training courses, put out a complete reboot, How to Win Friends and Influence People in the Digital Age, with a 21st-century spin on advice and anecdotes.)

The second reservation I had was that I knew the book had been critically skewered, through the years, as a guide for manipulating people. But Carnegie evidently anticipated such cynicism. In the second chapter of the book, he explains, “One comes from the heart out; the other from the teeth out. One is unselfish; the other selfish. One is universally admired; the other universally condemned…. No! No! No! I am not suggesting flattery!... I’m talking about a new way of life.”

“Do unto others as you would have done unto you” might sound like common sense until you consider that 1) How to Win Friends was revolutionary in its time, practically inventing the genre of self-improvement books; and 2) When you reflect on your own daily interactions, the idea of taking a moment to sincerely appreciate where your counterpart is coming from isn’t all that common.

At least that was the case with me. And among the corny expressions (“Bear Oil!”) and dusty stories about William Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson, I found real nuggets that I put to use almost immediately.

The difference between appreciation and flattery? That is simple. One is sincere and the other insincere.

“Use encouragement. Make the fault seem easy to correct.” This one is a parenting must. When my 4-year-old failed to put her dirty clothes in the hamper, I didn’t yell this time. I bit my lip and told her she did such a good job putting away her toys that she just had to do the same thing with her shirt and pants. “If a desired outcome seems like a momentous task, people will give up and lose heart,” Carnegie writes. “But if a fault seems easy to correct, they will readily jump at the opportunity to improve.” And I was sure to “praise every improvement” when she finally did it—two weeks later.

Carnegie also came in handy with the missus. “Whenever we argue with someone, no matter if we win or lose the argument, we still lose,” he writes. He was obviously married.

During this assignment, my wife and I happened to be buying a new house, and we had the occasion to meet the sellers at the property after we had come to terms. Haggling over the price had been a little contentious, and the inspection even more so. Still, I made it a point to “smile” and “begin in a friendly way,” as Carnegie instructs. I offered the sellers a firm handshake and a sincere appreciation for how they had kept up the property. I was a “good listener” as they talked about improvements they’d made to the place, picking up a few tips to store away for myself. I “talk[ed] in terms of the other person’s interest”—in this case one of the sellers mentioned the herb garden she had planted—and my wife and I followed her on a tour of the yard as she enthusiastically pointed out the tarragon, rosemary and sage that we’ll now know to harvest.

Carnegie also implores us to “make the other person feel important—and do it sincerely.” Before we left, we asked for the inside scoop on the neighborhood, and the sellers immediately spilled the names of the plumber down the street, two auto mechanics we could trust, and the best off-the-menu Mexican food in the ZIP code.

***

More than any specific tip, however, a quick read (at 276 pages) of this book was a reminder that the key to being a human among humans is to always stop and consider the other person’s feelings and perspectives. The only way to break down any barrier between you and someone else is through mutual understanding—and it often has to start with you.

So back at the Apple Store, when I cork my internal tirade and recognize that Aubrey, my only chance at computer salvation, must be sick of my crap, I genuinely sympathize. I empathize. I try to connect on a human level. And when he returns from the back room with a newly rigged monitor, he quickly plugs it into my MacBook and establishes that it is indeed just a faulty display and that all of my files are fine. He indulges my paranoia and patiently waits while I back up my crucial data to a thumb drive, just in case. He tells me my machine will be ready in three business days. I thank him and wish him luck on his interview this afternoon.

As I leave, I’m happy, not only about my computer and files and the fact that the machine is still under warranty and the repair will be free, but that I might have made Aubrey’s day a little bit easier. I sincerely hope Aubrey’s boss recognizes and appreciates his skills. I sincerely hope he gets that promotion. And after I get my laptop back, I sincerely hope I never see Aubrey again.

http://www.success.com/blog/what-happened-when-i-lived-by-dale-carnegies-rules

Hilarious footage shows schoolgirl shouting words to hymn at nativity

If you're passionate about what you do don't be afraid to shout it out!!!!!!

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5 Ways to Stop Sabotaging Yourself

5 Ways to Stop Sabotaging Yourself

1. Give up dwelling on "If only..."   

Posted May 10, 2016    

Most of us have goals, both big (go back to school and get a master's degree) and small (pare down that pile of junk mail). What keeps us from meeting our goals? Why are some goals successfully achieved, while others remain on our to-do list, nagging us for months or even years at a time? 

I've written before about how to set goals that are more likely to be met. And though a few tweaks to your goal-setting method can have an immense impact on your likelihood of meeting those goals, for many of us the problem lies not so much in the goals we set, but the ways we prevent ourselves from meeting them. You might have the most functional, realistic goals in the world, but if you engage in self-sabotage, then guess what? Your chance to meet a goal is gone before you even begin.
With my clients, I consistently see the same behaviors keeping them from taking action. These methods of self-sabotage can prevent them from getting where they want to be, fixing what they need to fix, and becoming the person they would love to be. You may know what you want and be pretty sure of the path you need to take to get it, but it's not uncommon to be stuck in a rut of self-sabotage.
Do you recognize any of the following behaviors in yourself? 

1. Dwelling on "If only...."

We all have regrets, whether they're about something we did (if only I hadn't dropped out of college), or something we didn't do (if only I'd stood up for myself more in that relationship). Sometimes we play the "if only" game about things that we can't control, but that we wish were different: If we had grown up with different parents, if we were more talented, if our partner could fundamentally change in some way.
These thoughts can follow us around for decades, and the problem with them is that they don't lead to action. Repeatedly revisiting "if only" fantasies when they involve things we can't do anything about keeps us idling in neutral. Given our lack of a time machine and the inability to overhaul people other than ourselves, continuing to indulge in these thoughts brings nothing but further frustration. These thoughts don't spur action, inspiration, or problem-solving. And worst of all, dwelling on them keeps the same patterns going (ruminating on how you wasted your 20s socially may make you less likely to go out and seek good friendships in your 40s; dwelling on imperfect aspects of your partner builds resentment that makes your relationship worse).
Try turning "if only" into a different mindset altogether by accepting what's done, but using this fact to influence your future actions. Such as, "X is this way, but Y can be that way" or "I can't undo my past, but I can influence my future" or "I have learned something from X, which is Y—and here's how I plan to use it to improve things." Each of these is a new, more functional spin on the "if only" mindset.

2. Being afraid of your thoughts.

One of the easiest ways to ensure that a thought will have power over you is to try your hardest to suppress it. Sometimes we do this because our thoughts terrify us: "This is the third argument my fiancee and I have gotten in this week. What if it was the wrong choice to get engaged?" Or because we feel guilty about having them: "My coworker is just not pulling her weight on this project. But she's a sweet person and a good friend so I shouldn't rock the boat."

When you suppress a thought, though, you have no chance to process it—to understand it, feel it, and perhaps eventually decide that it doesn't make sense. Ironically, walking around afraid of what your brain has to say gives your thoughts far too much importance. This is a hallmark of people who struggle with obsessional thinking. These people are locked in a battle of trying desperately to get a sticky thought to go away, mainly because they're so overly distressed by having it in the first place. But getting trapped in this battle doesn't move you forward. Try not to think of a rhinoceros in a bikini, and bam—there she is, and she's wearing quite a hot number!
The more you battle your thoughts, the more you deny yourself the opportunity to work through them, and the more you keep yourself locked in a negative pattern. Try acknowledging your thoughts and facing them, emphasizing that they are just thoughts, and labeling them as such. For example: "I'm having the thought that it was a mistake to get engaged. That's probably because I've been stressed out. I don't have to be afraid of this thought; it is human. I will get a bit more sleep, get over this bad week at work, and see if I feel differently. If I don't, I'll think things through further."

3. Burying your feelings.

A close cousin to avoiding bothersome thoughts is trying to bury or mask feelings deemed unacceptable. Many people think that to fully acknowledge feelings means yelling obscenities in the grocery store, or hysterically wailing at their next staff meeting. But letting yourself feel things is not the same as unleashing emotions onto the world at large. In fact, you'll be less likely to unleash feelings in inappropriate ways if you've actually acknowledged them and worked through them in the first place. Often times we bury feelings out of guilt: "I'm angry at my sister for making that comment about my weight. But she's a sweet person and does so much for me. I have no right to nitpick." Or fear: "If I let myself feel sad about my breakup, I'll get so depressed I won't even be able to function."
But feelings, when hidden, grow bigger and bigger. And they are prone to corroding people from the inside out. Emotions don't tend to go away on their own just because we try to keep them in. It's similar to repeatedly slamming down a lid onto a pot of water that's boiling over. You know that if you let the water get a little bit of air—set the lid so that it doesn't completely cover the pot—you'll soon get a calm, smooth boil instead of a frothy, rattling mess. Acknowledging your feelings doesn't make them spin out of control, but putting the lid on them does.

4. Habitually starting tomorrow.

So, you've eaten a third sleeve of Girl Scout cookies before noon, or you're completely frustrated that it's three o'clock in the afternoon and you've gotten little work done. Many times, the natural reaction is to abandon the rest of the day and visualize the beautiful blank slate of tomorrow. But it's never tomorrow. If you spend so much time saving until tomorrow, the habits you want to pick up and the changes you want to make will always be beyond your reach, because tomorrow is a constantly moving target.

If you are someone who must have a "clean slate" to get motivated, it need not be tomorrow. Why not have that clean slate start in one hour? Or fifteen minutes? This helps stop the surge of all or nothing thinking that can lead you to write off the rest of the day, getting you farther and farther from your goals. Even better, instead of arbitrarily declaring the slate clean because the calendar flipped over, create a true and meaningful clean slate through your behavior. Take a brisk walk. Do a brief meditation. Have a quick chat with a friend. Do some breathing exercises. Allow yourself five minutes of a video that makes you laugh. Each of these things can help reset your mind and your productivity much better than the vague "tomorrow," which, when you think about it, is never actually here and never really puts you in the driver's seat.

5. Letting inertia harm you rather than help you.

Inertia is fantastic when it's on your side. If you pick up a healthy habit and maintain it for several weeks in a row—making coffee rather than buying it, taking the stairs rather than the elevator, sorting your emails as they come in—it becomes much easier to continue it. But too often, inertia applies to habits we don't want to have, and activities that make us feel unproductive and unhealthy. This is the reason why the psychological clean slate discussed above can be so powerful. We desperately crave the ability to be free from the things we already view as tainted: A busted diet, a soured relationship, or a pattern of motivation-killing habits at work. We don't want to salvage any of it. We want to start fresh because it's a much more attractive option.
Here's the thing: Just like in the physical world, we are prone to staying in motion—or in place—by this force of inertia, and no one can change it but ourselves. The calendar flipping to a new year, feelings of being "fed up," new workout gear, or public promises can all (briefly) jumpstart new behaviors. But they don't address the underlying inertia, which is truly needed to change long-term behavior. You must build the right day-to-day structure in order for new habits to take hold. Otherwise the inertia of the old habits never really goes away. Yes, those new workout pants are fabulous, but if your gym is still too far away or too incompatible with your work hours, then you haven't done anything to address the inertia that prevents you from going to the gym. Focus not on the jumpstart, but on the overhauling of the battery to get inertia working for you, rather than against you.

Andrea Bonior, Ph.D. (link is external), is a licensed clinical psychologist and speaker. She is the author of the upcoming Psychology: Essential Thinkers, Classic Theories, and How They Inform Your World, (link is external) and The Friendship Fix (link is external), and serves on the faculty of Georgetown University. Her mental health advice column Baggage Check (link is external) has appeared in the Washington Post Express for more than eleven years. She speaks to audiences large and small about relationships, work-life balance, and motivation, and is a television commentator about mental health issues. Join the conversation on Facebook (link is external) or Twitter (link is external)! 
Photo credit: Victor (Flickr Creative Commons)

Source: 5 Ways to Stop Sabotaging Yourself

How Do High Achievers Really Think?

Beliefs that lead to success.

Posted Oct 19, 2011

Positive affirmations (link is external) are a staple of the self-help industry (link is external), but there is a problem with standing in front of the mirror every morning and saying something like: "I prosper wherever I turn and I know that I deserve prosperity of all kinds." "I am my own unique self—special, creative and wonderful." Or "I will be king of the world in just five days, I just know it." It makes you feel kinda silly (and sometimes worse).

What does research show (link is external) about how high achievers really think? High achievers are often marked, unsurprisingly, by a strong motive to achieve. Less accomplished individuals are often more motivated to avoid failure.
Achievement motivated individuals have a strong desire to accomplish something important, and gain gratification from success in demanding tasks. Consequently they are willing to expend intense effort over long timespans in the pursuit of their goals.
Failure-avoiding individuals are more focused on protecting themselves from the embarrassment and sense of incompetence that can accompany failing at a valued task. Consequently they are less likely to attempt achievement-oriented tasks, and may give up quickly if success is not readily forthcoming. Where total avoidance of tasks is not possible, failure-avoiding individuals may procrastinate, give less than their best effort, or engage in other self-handicapping behaviour that provides a face-saving excuse in the event of failure (e.g. drinking heavily the night before the morning of an important exam).
Of course, achievement motivation versus failure avoidance motivation exist on a continuum, with most of us falling somewhere in the middle. In the research literature, this continuum is described as Relative Motive Strength.
An individual's relative motive strength does not exist in a vacuum, but is associated with an elaborate matrix of beliefs that justify the commitment of intense effort toward goal achievement, or the relative lack thereof. The core beliefs that differentiate achievement motivated individuals are:

1. Success is your personal responsibility
Achievement motivated individuals tend to believe that initiative, effort, and persistence are key determinants of success at demanding tasks. Failure-avoiding individuals are more likely to view success as dependent on available resources and situational constraints (e.g. the task is too hard, or the marker was biased).

2. Demanding tasks are opportunities
Achievement motivated individuals tend to see demanding tasks where success is uncertain as ‘challenges' or ‘opportunities'. Failure avoiding individuals are more likely to see them as ‘threats' that may lead to the embarrassment of failure. An achievement motivated individual might tell a failure avoiding individual, "Anything worthwhile is difficult, so stop acting so surprised".

3. Achievement striving is enjoyable
Achievement motivated individuals associate effort on demanding tasks with dedication, concentration, commitment and involvement. Failure-avoiding individuals categorise such effort as overloading or stressful. They see perseverance in the face of setbacks and obstacles as slightly compulsive.

4. Achievement striving is valuable
Achievement motivated individuals value hard work in and of itself. Failure-avoiding individuals may mock achievement striving as uncool (e.g. the attitude that the L on learner plates stands for Loser). They may associate achievement striving with lack of a social life or even early death by heart attack.

5. Skills can be improved
Achievement-motivated individuals have a strong belief that they can improve their performance on demanding tasks with practice, training, coaching, and dedication to learning. Failure-avoiding individuals tend to see skills as fixed and/or dependent on innate talents.
The research into how skills can most effectively be improved is discussed here.

6. Persistence works
Achievement motivated individuals are inclined to believe that continued effort and commitment will overcome initial obstacles or failures. Failure-avoiding individuals are inclined to see initial failure as a sign of things to come.
So the achievement motivated individual says, "Don't assume that you can't do something until you've tried. And I mean really tried, like tried 3000 times, not that you tried three times, and 'oh I give up.'"
And the failure-avoiding individual responds, "You really need to learn when to quit."

The beliefs held by achievement-motivated individuals are not necessarily more logical or objectively correct than the beliefs held by failure-avoiding individuals, certainly not in all situations. However, they are empirically associated with high levels of achievement.

Once you understand the modes of achievement motivated versus failure-avoiding thinking, you will recognise them in the way that others talk about their goals, dreams, successes, and setbacks. You will also recognise them in your own thinking, and you can choose to cultivate the beliefs that will support you to achieve your goals. This is more effective than just trying to think positive and relying on the law of attraction (link is external) to provide you with what you want.

Carl Beuke, Ph.D., is a psychologist working in management and leadership. He works with the New Zealand Prisons Service and Ministry for the Environment, among others.

Source - How Do High Achievers Really Think?

9 Practices for Achieving Emotional Maturity

9 Practices for Achieving Emotional Maturity

Maturity, the essential characteristic of a leader, does not just come with age. It is a goal we work to achieve.

Image credit: Shutterstock.com

Sherrie Campbell

          Contributor

Psychologist, Author, Speaker

Mental health is synonymous with maturity, and maturity is born of responsibility. You cannot be mentally or emotionally healthy if you are irresponsible. People with maturity understand a great truth; they understand that life is difficult. In being able to cept this fact about life, mature people learn to handle life in all of its difficulties, not expecting it to be different. They have learned to accept that not everything in life is going to be their way, show up in the way they thought it would and nor will the world change on its axis to make them happier. Mature people know for any change to happen it has to come from within themslves, and this is where success or failure develop. The only way to live a more fulfilling, successful and purpose-driven life is when the choice is made to fully develop and live the attitudes and principles of a matured person. To follow is a list of those attitudes and principles.

1. Seekers of self-mastery.

Mature people are passionate about self-development, psychology and understanding the inner workings of themselves and the workings of the world. They are open to learn and apply the principles they gain from their explorations in personal development to all areas of their life. This type of growth-mindset keeps mature people living more conscious and aware lives because they are able to live according to the life principles and wisdom gained both trough their own and the experiences of others.

Mature people typically have a team around them, from therapists to coaches to keep them in check and on the path to living a life they love. Because they are supported, guided and in the action of practicing the right attitudes and life principles, mature people more easily overcome the challenges that life inevitably brings them. Through self-mastery mature people learn the art of turning life’s lemons into lemonade.  

 invented by Teads

2. Emotionally intelligent.

Life is going to be full of problems. The acceptance of this allows mature people to stay calm and think more clearly during life’s more difficult moments. The whole process of meeting and solving problems is what gives life its deeper meaning. Mature people have established the emotional intelligence necessary to understand that life’s difficulties are the cutting edge of what distinguishes one from being a success or a failure.

Problems call forth our courage and wisdom. It is only through being able to walk calmly and bravely through difficulties that the mature develop any sense of trust in God, life or in themselves. It is through this process they grow emotionally and mentally. As Benjamin Franklin says “Those things that hurt, instruct.” The emotionally mature learn not to dread, but to welcome life’s challenges for this very reason.

3. Positive attitude.

A positive attitude comes naturally to the mature person. They have faith in the concept that with enough hard work, patience and persistence things will work out. This type of attitude keeps mature people in a state of harmony with themselves and others because from their vantage point there is a way to make every situation a win-win experience. They have mastered the principles of being in mutually beneficial relationships and staying out of relationships which do not serve them or their highest good.

4. Independent.

Mature people have lived life and sought personal growth which allows them the freedom of their independence. Through commitment and life experience mature people have developed an independent mindset and live life following the principles and purposes they have set for themselves, regardless of what other people say and think. This sense of independence brings fearlessness to their personality, and the resilience to be true to who they are. These are not people who follow the crowd, or the establishment; they follow their hearts, passions and desires.  

5. Delay gratification.

Mature people have found a way to ground themselves in self-control. They know that those things worthy of their time will require their patience, persistence and effort. Mature people are able to delay gratification. They enhance their experiences of pleasure by first dealing with and experiencing their pain and getting it over with. In other words, they place their responsibilities before leisure as the only successful way to live.

The mature are willing to tolerate feelings of discomfort long enough to find solutions to their problems. An immediate solution may represent gratification to many, but mature people know that the best solutions come with delaying the need to get rid of the problem quickly. The most lucrative solutions are found in the process of thinking through the problem.

6. Truthful.

Mature people live with high integrity. They are committed to knowing, hearing and working within the truth no matter how hurtful or stressful that truth may be. Mature people are also willing and committed to telling the truth even when it is humiliating and difficult for oneself or another. They have an open mind to hear counsel and to respond to reproof.

7. Responsible.

Those with maturity live successful lives because they spend zero time blaming others for their problems. They take accountability for their actions as a way to further learn and grow. Life and life’s circumstances, at the end of the day, have to be dealt with from our own will and volition, and admitting wrong is woven deeply into the fabric of mature people because they view humility and admitting wrong as steps up the mountain, not steps going backward.The mature person is able to understand that life is what they make it. That every person’s destiny is within their choice. Those with maturity live life making conscious decisions knowing that whatever the result is, they are the one’s responsible. 

8. Accessible.

The emotionally mature understand the most important thing they can give relationships, projects, goals or business is their time. When a person with maturity loves something and it is of value to them, they spend time with it, working on it, taking care of it and enjoying it. They value themselves and therefore see their time as valuable and they have the deep desire to use their time well. For this reason, they are open to interruption and will make themselves accessible whenever it is important. Because they value themselves and their own time they also value the time they give and spend with others, and make those commitments a priority in their lives.

9. Gracious and giving.

Mature people live with a natural feeling of thankfulness and appreciation for the expansive range of people, events and circumstances in their lives. Because maturity is based in responsibility, mature people live with higher levels of happiness and lower levels of depression and stress. The emotionally mature turn their happiness into sharing and generosity. They offer helpful services to others as a way to spread their own wealth and joy in ways that circle back. When their giving circles back, the emotionally mature experience even deeper levels of pleasure, personal satisfaction and gratitude for what they have been given in life to now gift back.

In short, maturity is a choice for everyone. The more you value who you are and what you have to offer, the more responsible you will be in taking care of yourself, your finances, your time, and your personal life. You can choose to live as a mature person. You can choose to live consciously with established principles and attitudes, or you can choose to live continuously beaten up and defeated by the struggles and miseries of life. Albert Ellis says it best, “The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny.”

Sherrie Campbell

Source

Sherrie Campbell is a psychologist in Yorba Linda, Calif., with two decades of clinical training and experience in providing counseling and psychotherapy services. She is the author of Loving Yourself: The Mastery of Being Your Ow...

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9 Practices for Achieving Emotional Maturity