discovering your own values and developing congruent attitudes
On the road from slavery to freedom you have to discover your own individual values and develop attitudes which are congruent with your values.
Within the framework of a coaching session they guidees are guided to discover their own scales of individual values rather than blindly follow the values they inherited from their parents or copied from their peers or the examples and models presented to them by the more or less directly manipulative media.
The tool to develop congruent attitudes is the same old think-tool we have rediscovered: reflection.
We know that attitudes do not automatically result in congruent actions but they are a necessary and very important element on the way from thinking to acting. Scientific research has shown that people are ready to act in a way which is in contradiction with their attitudes if they believe that the action serves their immediate short term interests. (See in: Aronson: The Social Animal).
So the guidees are encouraged and trained to sharpen their think-tools and analyze their beliefs.
satisfiers that contribute to happiness through stress-freedom
After having understood the link between their needs and their desires the guidees learn to analyze the link between their fundamental needs and the satisfiers of these needs, as proposed by Max-Neef.
The main contribution that Max-Neef makes to the understanding of needs is the distinction made between needs and satisfiers. Human needs are seen as few, finite and classifiable (as distinct from the conventional notion that “wants” are infinite and insatiable). Not only this, they are constant through all human cultures and across historical time periods. What changes over time and between cultures is the way these needs are satisfied. It is important that human needs are understood as a system – i.e. they are interrelated and interactive.
Max-Neef classifies the fundamental human needs as: subsistence, protection, affection, understanding, participation, recreation (in the sense of leisure, time to reflect, or idleness), creation, identity and freedom.
Satisfiers also have different characteristics: they can be violators or destroyers, pseudosatisfiers, inhibiting satisfiers, singular satisfiers, or synergic satisfiers. Max-Neef shows that certain satisfiers, promoted as satisfying a particular need, in fact inhibit or destroy the possibility of satisfying other needs: e.g. the arms race, while ostensibly satisfying the need for protection, in fact then destroys subsistence, participation, affection and freedom; formal democracy, which is supposed to meet the need for participation often disempowers and alienates; commercial television, while used to satisfy the need for recreation, interferes with understanding, creativity and identity – the examples are everywhere.
Synergic satisfiers, on the other hand, not only satisfy one particular need, but also lead to satisfaction in other areas: some examples are breast-feeding; self-managed production; popular education; democratic community organisations; preventative medicine; educational games.
The guidees are guided to develop their own synergic satisfiers: these are satisfiers that are congruent with their own individual value system and with their life-goals.
your vain desires are your worst slaveholders
“Men are disturbed, not by things, but by the principles and notions which they form concerning things.” (Epictetus: Enchiridion)
Some of these principles and notions are in our control and others not.
The Stoics had very clear ideas about these two classes:
“Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions.” (Epictetus: Enchiridion)
-but they forgot about the third category.
My guidees learn to classify their principles and notions so they are clear about which of them are under their control and which not. And then we go one step further and discover the third category: things which are neither fully under our control nor fully outside of or control but which we can influence, a wide field of action for self-improvement, cultivated by Epicureans who did not want to live “in servitude to men’s opinions”.
After a time management training course they realize that the majority of the hours of the days and the nights they are a slave they may discover that their most powerful slaveholder is nobody else but their own desires. This discovery is the foundation of the two largest mental liberation movements the world has known: Buddhism and Epicureanism.
In Epicureanism we have a very clear and pertinent analysis about the relationship between a desire and need. Epicurus classified needs in three categories:
- 1. In the first category he put those needs which he called natural and necessary. If you do not satisfy these needs you will feel mental or physical pain: some of them are necessary for your survival like food and beverage shelter, others are necessary for mental and physical stress freedom.
- 2. In the second category are those needs which are natural but not necessary, like special food or luxurious housing.
- 3. In the third category are those desires which are neither natural nor necessary because there are no real needs behind them and they never can be fully satisfied, like wealth, power and social status.
My guidees learn to classify their desires and align them with their needs usually within the framework of the few coaching sessions.
This is one of the most difficult parts of the mental liberation process on the road from slavery to happiness through stress-freedom.
from slavery to stress-FREEDOM
What is the gist of the roadmap my guidance from slavery to happiness through stress-freedom,
my friend G asked me yesterday on the phone.
I told her to wait for a few weeks until my e-book will be finished.
But she was very impatient and asked me whether I could make short outline of it in my blog.
So here it is:
First of all you have to know where you stand, at what level of slavery.
When you feel stressed out you usually have no idea about where it comes from and you start blaming your social and physical environment, instead of taking a good look at yourself.
“An uninstructed person will lay the fault of his own bad condition upon others. Someone just starting instruction will lay the fault on himself. Some who is perfectly instructed will place blame neither on others nor on himself. ” (Epictetus: Enchiridion)
Now to get to know oneself has always been a risky adventure:
Socrates was put to death 2400 years ago just because he tried to spread the habit of reflection and it has been a risky but promising first step ever since to ask the questions like:
What is my role in this situation?
What is my contribution to the stress I feel?
Where do my ideas come from?
Who influenced my system of values?
Have I ever reflected on whether my value system is congruent with my personality, my goals?
Who has contributed to the design of my life-path?
Whose live am I living?
A good starting point is a time management training course. It is an opportunity to realize how many hours out of 24 hours you are living your own life and how many are the results of plans and designs made by others. This way you can see very fast whose slave you are.
Being a slave does not necessarily mean to be unhappy all the time. There is a feeling of childish irresponsibility which makes slavery attractive for a large number of people, probably the majority. The road from slavery to freedom involves reflection; reflection involves effort, because we are not trained to reflect. Our schools train us to read and write and do some arithmetic but they do not train us to reflect on our fundamental needs or on the sense we can give to our lives. For this reason the road from slavery to liberation and to authentic happiness has always been chosen and trodden only by a minority of courageous and determined women and men.
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