FROM KNOWING BETTER TO DOING BETTER

By
Bill Cottringer

This title is a logical progression from the last article—“Decreasing Uhappiness To Increase Happiness.” Before we can do this, we need to learn how to move from knowing what to do and how to do it, to actually doing it. And, the best starting point to close this gap is to take time out to understand the vicious circle nature of our negative thinking and futile efforts which preclude this from happening.

People say and do things and events happen in life that affect us to a certain level of an immediate positive or negative response. But that is not the problem. The real source of negative reactions—that increase our sense of failure, discontentment, unhappiness and turmoil—is the meta-conversations we privately carry on inside our own heads about these things or events.

This meta-communication takes place in the form of over-personalized private interpretations, wrong emotional over-reactions, false explanations, biased perceptions of reality, faulty and incomplete reasoning and a whole litany of other ways we distort the plain and simple neutral truth of something.

Pain is pain that hurts to a certain degree. But, being able to think about things, and even think about our own thinking and reactions, we can easily start feeling more mental pain about the physical pain, which in turn starts making the original physical pain worse. This ends up as a vicious circle that zaps all our energy from the effort to try and undo it and we become hostages to this vicious circle to the no-where zone and wonder what’s wrong.

Take the vicious circle of depression as a prime example. Somebody says or does something to us or an event happens to make us feel sad, blue or even angry. In this emotional state, we are less able to use our rational wits or positive energy to do anything constructive about the source of our depression and anger. Then it becomes magnified as a problem demanding relief.

In turn, this sense of increased inability to respond appropriately starts worrying us and aggravating the matter, making things all the worse. The more we try to reverse the direction of things, the more we dig ourselves into a hole that can’t help but make us feel anything but more anxious, depressed and angry, eventually leading to zilch energy and total hopelessness and helplessness. We have all been there on occasions, super-glued to paralysis.

This explanation of the vicious circle nature of unrest, negativity and unhappiness is not new and we all know better. The question is, how to go from knowing better to doing better? There really are only two keys to doing this:

• We keep doing anything we do—positive or negative—because of the rewards or pay-offs we get from doing these things, even thinking and feeling about something someone says or some event that happens, and all our meta-chatter about these things. We simply cannot begin to practice positive thinking or acting, before we understand the twisted payoffs we inadvertently enjoy from doing the opposite. Then we can begin to substitute legitimate thinking and acting that get even better payoffs.

• Going from knowing to doing takes: (a) insight (b) adequate motivation, and (c) practice. The insight is already known about the vicious circle. Secondly, we won’t make progress on the first item above, until we become uncomfortable enough to want to notice the connection between our negative vicious circle thinking and feeling and the results we get from engaging in this private mental chatter. Thirdly, and once there, we have to muster more motivation to follow though practicing the change. Unfortunately we can easily get caught up with some other urgent priority, somewhere in between, and nothing gets done.

There are no easy and quick shortcuts to go from knowing better to doing better in decreasing unhappiness to increase it. It just takes a lot of critical thinking, motivation, practice, patience and perseverance. But the more effort you put into it has a guaranteed mother-load payoff.

Author's Bio: 

William Cottringer, Ph.D. is President of Puget Sound Security in Bellevue, WA and also a business and personal success coach, sport psychologist, photographer and writer living in the mountains of North Bend. He is author of several business and self-development books, including, The Prosperity Zone, Getting More By Doing Less, You Can Have Your Cheese & Eat It Too, The Bow-Wow Secrets, Do What Matters Most, “P” Point Management, and Reality Repair Rx coming shortly. He can be contacted with comments or questions at 425 454-5011 or bcottringer@pssp.net