Are you still “wandering around in all directions”?
Are you still one of those who are “wandering around in all directions, roaming here and there, looking for a path in life, competing in their natural gifts, striving for honors, seeking with all their effort night and day to rise to the top, to win great power”?
Or have you started noticing “nature barking out her one demand, that pain be kept away, divorced from body, so that, free from care, free from fear, she may derive enjoyment in her mind from a sense of pleasure?”
Lucretius: On the Nature of of Things, Translated by Ian Johnston, 2010, Book II, lines 8-19 and 23-27
how to satisfy your needs in ways that are congruent with your values
It’s such a simple principle – in principle:
satisfy your needs in ways that are congruent with your values.
In practice, however, it is not so simple at all.
‘I can grasp why the fact that my values and the way I satisfy my needs reduce the causes of stress and add to my well being’, said one of my coachees. (To protect his identity I will call him Peter.) He went on: ’My problem is that I just don’t know how to harmonize one of my cherished values with my actions. ‘
It turned out that the value he cherished so much was one of humanity’s core values: honesty. And his dilemma was also one of the the most common ones: how to be honest without hurting the feelings of his friend.
How to strike a viable balance between tactfulness and honesty? We are confronted almost daily with this problem in out interactions with our friends, family, coworkers. The need to belong is one of our other basic needs while to be honest is another one.
Peter’s problem was how to tell his friend that he did not feel like playing chess with him every Thursday afternoon any more. His friend was disabled and could not leave his house and the weekly chess parties were a very important element of his social life.
We all tend to use a “white lie” in such cases and we often do, since we do not have the knowledge and/or the skills to do any better. Peter’s first thought was to say that he had to work on a new project and that he was too busy at other times with his family. But at the same time he felt that he respected his friend too much to tell him a lie.
I told Peter openly and honestly that there were no simple answers and no quick fixes but it would be a good start is to ask himself how he could express his respect for his friend and only then tackle the thorny issue.
After only two coaching sessions he had both the knowledge and the skills to navigate safely between the rock of honesty and the hard place of tactfulness and save both his self-respect and his friendship. We also worked out another way to satisfy his own and his friend’s needs for belonging and honesty.
He said that it was well worth to work on himself for something very valuable to him: friendship.
Proselytizing for Epicureanism?
Should we proselytize and if yes, for what kind of “Epicureanism” .
An Eye for Accidental Happiness
I have designed dozens of training courses and workshops and delivered hundreds of them, yet my all time favorite is “Crucial Conversations”, which I have delivered all over the world. One of the authors, Kerry Patterson, publishes his monthly musings under the title “Kerrying on” in VitalSmart’s newsletter and I have been downloading his podcasts regularly for a few years now. (Anyone can sign up for their newsletter on their site http://www.vitalsmarts.com/ ) I have got to like and appreciate his dry humor and warm, practical wisdom and can hardly wait to get a fresh dose of them.
In the last one, entitled “Tombstone Talk” Kerry Patterson talks about those unexpected moments of accidental happiness that I also mention in my book “From Pain to Pleasure: The Proven Pathway to Happiness” called “serendipity.” Kerry realized that “the secret of happiness lies in recognizing joy when it comes.” His advice reminds me of the urgent recommendation Kurt Vonnegut left us behind:
“I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.’”
Kerry Patterson admits a fact I also have been experiencing more and more often: “Now that I’m growing older, I’m getting better at spotting such unlikely and lovely experiences. I no longer look past the little snippets of life in quest of the big, trumpeted events. I look for what I want.”
What he and I imply is that your eyes and minds have to be trained by experience and motivation to pick out those snippets of happiness, recognize them for what they are and cherish them. The most successful training school for our eyes and minds I know of is Epicurus’s happiness-acknowledging mind-training school. It has been staying open day and night 2300 years and it is easy to find if you know what you want.
“Everything you possess will possess you some day”
“Alles, was du hast, hat irgendwann dich” is the page a friend of mine started on Facebook:
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