A mind contains many feelings and emotions, both happy and sad, like a box that contains both gems and rocks.When there are rocks in the box, we recognize them and accept their presence. Then we take them out of the box. They still exist, but they are now outside of the box. If they come back inside the box again, we can recognize them, accept them, and take them out of the box again.
We can deal with feelings and emotions on our minds the same way we deal with the rocks in the box.It is okay to feel extremely sad and to feel like the world is falling apart. We have to recognize our pain, accept that our pain exists, and allow our pain to exist.We don’t need to get rid of our pain, but we can put it aside. At the same time, while accepting our feelings and emotions, we don’t need to create a sad story about them, just like we don’t need to create a negative story for the rocks as we recognize them, accept them, and put them aside. Adding the story of the unjust world will only enlarge the size of the rocks and expand the magnitude of our sad feelings.
Sometimes life is so hard on us. The rocks are so big and heavy, and we are in so much pain that we start to doubt whether the pain will ever go away. But we have to have faith and remind ourselves that it will go away. Like anything and everything else in this world, nothing lasts, whether it’s happiness or sorrow. It always comes again and again. And it will eventually go away, again and again. The most important thing is to remember that we always have "an option" to act, to remove the heavy rocks out of the box, "an option" to feel light and happy again, even though the rocks still exist...outside of the box.
This is a letter to my very dear girl friend, whose real name is disguised. I think it is a good reminder for anyone.
My dear Amanda,
The other day you said to me that you think you are not good enough, not pretty enough, and not courageous enough to be a happy person and friend. The first thing that came into my mind was that I think you misunderstood a very important truth.
You should realize that you are already enough and more than enough of a wonderful person and friend without your beautiful face, clothes and make-ups, without giving gifts to all your friends, and without being brave all the time. If I strip everything that is external off you, what I can see and feel is a person with a beautiful soul, a person who is loving, caring, genuine, true, unpretentious, and cheerful, a person that I invited to my home and opened myself to. You could not have been more beautiful, smarter, braver, or give me more gifts to be enough to be my friend because you are already more than enough at the core of who you are. And if anyone demands that you need to be more beautiful, smarter, braver or possess more of anything to be their friend or girlfriend, you should run!
You are not the only one that feels like you are not enough. A lot of people feel this way at some points in their lives, particularly when things are not going as planned, when they run into challenges in life such as getting laid off or going through a divorce, when they don’t have certain things that seem to be the so called “norm” of the society such as a nice car, a big house, a good job, kids, a family, a husband, a wife, a boyfriend or a girlfriend. What people often forget is that those things are external. The only element inside us that demands those external things in order to feel enough is our ego. Ego needs a lot of attentions and a lot of external things to make it feel enough. If you can separate your core self from your ego, you may realized that your core self is enough on its own. It does not need anything to make it looks good. It’s already good. Whether you have or don’t have money, beauty, cars, house, jobs, kids, husband, wife, boyfriend or girlfriend, your core self is still there and unchanged. Those external things don’t define you and don’t define your core self. Having money, beauty, cars, house, jobs, kids, husband, wife, boyfriend or girlfriend do not add to your core self or your soul. And vice versa, not having them does not diminish your core self, your soul or who you are.
If you can separate your enough self from the never-enough ego inside you and recognize when your ego is trying to talk to you to make you feel not enough, you will be able to get rid or at least reduce the size and the influence of the ego. Without ego, there is nothing there to get crushed with external things that do not matter to your core self and soul. Then you will experience the stage that I called “low or no ego, but high self esteem”. You can dress in ugly clothes with no make-ups, drive an old car, work on the most unglamorous job, and go through life without a boyfriend or a husband, while feeling content, at peace, and happy. A lot of people like to think that they will be happy when certain things happen, such as finishing a degree, getting married, moving to a different place, getting a promotion, having kids, earning more money and so on. In fact, the moment of happiness and peace is not when you have or achieve certain things or milestones. The moment of happiness and peace is now. And you can achieve that by separating your core self from your ego and not fighting with the present. When you feel content, happy and at peace, you will be able to focus your energy to do many things that you might not have imagined you could. And I am here to support you.
Businessman: “Dear angel, please tell me how much time I have left in this world?”
Angel: “Why do you want to know?”
Businessman: “If I knew I would die in a short period of time, I would travel the world and see the magic that this world has to offer, I would spend my time doing nothing, anything, and everything with people I love and love me, and I would seek every opportunity to tell them and show them how much I love them.
If I knew I would live forever, I would learn a new language and a musical instrument, get another degree just for the sake of learning and not for career advancement, and start a new career or a new business that I had no experience, but that is my passion.
But since I don’t know how much time I have left, I end up doing none of those.
All I do is working long hours every day for the job that is not my passion and spending time building relationships with people who could not care less about me, as it would be good for the career that I have no passion for.”
Angel: “Why are you so constrained by time? Why do you create for yourself a barrier that prevents you to do things that you want to do? Why don’t you just live as if tomorrow would be your last day and learn and create for the future as if you would live forever?”
Businessman: “That is easier said than done, Angel. My company needs me so I can’t take vacation more than three weeks. I also have so many obligations – a family to support, a large mortgage for my big nice house to pay off, and a glamorous social status to maintain. I don’t have enough time to do all those things.”
Angel: “Those are just more excuses. You can start doing something now, if not everything. You have to recognize that you are creating these imaginary obstacles for yourself; therefore you are the only one who can get rid of them. Just remember, after you die, you will no longer have any opportunity to do things you want to do. And if you don’t do things that you want to do now, you are just living like a dead man. So do not ask me when you will die when you act as if you are already dead. Good luck.”
I recently went to Turkey, Greece, and Italy. Everyone that knows me knows that Europe has always been my dream travel destination. I spent weeks researching and planning for the trip. While on the 3-week trip, I took about three to four thousand pictures. And when I came back, I spent over a hundred hours just to select and edit my pictures. I also spent countless time looking at those pictures over and over, reliving my happy moments again and again and again. Yes, I am obsessive.
I am obsessive with and overly emotionally impacted by what makes me happy. Looking up at the bright blue sky positively changes my moods. Watching the light green leaves waving in the air, contrasting with the sunny blue sky brightens me up. Hearing the sound of waves crashing the shores and gazing into the stillness of water in a pond bring me peace. Listening to Edith Piaf and Cannon in D makes my heart beats stronger and transports me to another world. Looking at white snow and sparkling city lights at night through my apartment window while listening to Christmas songs made me overwhelmingly happy that I needed to release and express my feelings in a poem. And having a cup of rich hot chocolate always makes me excited every single time, as if I were sipping that cup of hot chocolate in a Parisian cafe rather than in my kitchen. My mind tends to respond to small things that make me happy, as if they were the long-awaiting, exciting, Europe trips.
On the other hand, I am rarely impacted by what doesn’t make me happy (notice that I didn’t say what makes me unhappy.) I treat activities and situations that don’t make me happy as doing laundry. When I do laundry, I don’t really feel happy or unhappy about it – just a neutral feeling.
The day before my recent surgery, my friends thoughtfully asked how I felt and whether I was afraid of the surgery. And as I was lying on the surgical bed in the operating room, my anesthesiologists and nurses also asked me those same questions. I said “I’m fine”. My heart beat at a normal pace. I wasn’t at all nervous. I looked around the operating room, observing the medical equipment with curiosity. In fact, I wanted to answer them with a question “Well, what do you feel when you have to brush your teeth in the morning?” That was how I felt toward the surgery. To me, that surgery was just one of many activities that I had to do on that day. It was on my Google Calendar, just like my other activities. It was an activity - that’s all. People normally associate surgeries with fear. In fact, it is the human’s thinking that says “Surgeries are scary, so one should be afraid of them”. The truth is that a surgery by itself is just an activity, just like any other activities.
I didn’t always feel this way about surgeries. I remembered that long time ago, when I was still a teenager, I felt bad about my first surgery. I thought “Why me? Why me? Why me? Why was I so unlucky? Why was I not normal like other people?” I didn’t notice when those negative thinking disappeared. Maybe it evaporated over time because I had so many surgeries that I was very familiar with the process and knew what to expect: the pain when I woke up from the anesthesia, the difficulty of living a normal life from a few weeks to several months after the surgeries, the scars, and eventually the ability to live a normal life again after some time. Just like anything and everything in our lives. Things happen in our lives. Then those same things disappear from our lives. I knew that the pains I felt wouldn’t last forever. The difficulties of living everyday life also wouldn’t last forever. The scars would last. But, so what? All the scars on my body haven’t diminished who I am a bit. On the contrary, I think they have added to who I have become.
Another possible reason that made my negative thoughts disappeared maybe because my logical brain which prefers happiness over unhappiness has chosen to stop thinking negatively about surgeries. Like some people said “You can’t control what happened to you, but you can control how you react to it.” But how can you control your reaction? My answer would be to use “logical thinking” or “common sense”. I hope it is as obvious to you as it is to me that hell is just not as desirable as laundry (at least my clothes will be clean afterward). So why would I perceive what doesn’t make happy as “hell” rather than as “laundry”? Unhappiness is not as sexy as happiness, so why would I not choose the latter? It is a simple logic, isn’t it?
A few weeks ago, taking a break from my job search, Lewis and I went to see a basketball game between Stanford and UW. We were discreetly cheering and clapping our hands for the Cardinal among hundreds of the Husky fans in the stadium. The scores were very close throughout the entire game. My heart beat faster and stronger, as the game was approaching the end.
In the last 10 seconds of the game, Stanford was a few points behind UW. I was very impressed that, although there was almost no time left, those college kids were still playing aggressively and passionately. They were still focused and still gave it their best shots in the last 10 seconds. Eventually, UW won. But I was so proud of those Stanford kids.
I walked out of the stadium telling myself that “From now on, I am going to approach my job search like a college basketball – persistently fighting with strong will to win, even in the last 10 seconds”. I had 6 weeks left before Jan 29 to look for a new job before I would have been deported back to Thailand. It was 6 weeks during the holiday when people were on vacation, at end of the year when companies hadn’t yet planned their headcounts for the next year, and in a very bad economy. But those 6 weeks was wayyyyy longer than 10 seconds! In the last 10 seconds of the game, some audience was getting up and leaving the stadium. Maybe they gave up and thought that 10 seconds won’t make any difference, or maybe they didn’t care. And that too was like my job search. Some people doubted that I would be able to find a new job so quickly in such environment. But like those college basketball players, I couldn’t just walk out of the game, and I couldn’t give up on myself.
I ended up got a job offer on Jan 27, two days before the deadline. I even had plenty of time to gather inputs from friends and negotiated on the offer before I signed the contract.
So here’s the lesson learned for me… “If you have more than 10 seconds to do anything, don’t give up. You’ll be surprised by what your persistent effort and “I will win” attitude in that last 10 seconds can bring.”
When I was younger, I struggled trying to put myself into one of the adjective buckets, hoping to belong to some categories: the extrovert or the introvert, the conservative or the liberal, the adventurous or the simple, the shy or the outgoing. There’s no adjective for someone that is both extrovert and introvert, someone that is both conservative and liberal, someone that is both adventurous and simple, and someone that is both shy and outgoing…someone as strange as me.
Not until I was in my early 30s working for a FORTUNE 500 company that I realized that I wasn’t the only one that could not decide which personality buckets I should be in. At one point, I had two bosses; one said I needed to be more aggressive; the other one said I was too aggressive (imagine when they discussed my career development). Then I started to hear people that were close to me said “You need too much adventure and life stimulation” and “That’s great that you enjoy simple things” and “You are very picky and particular” and “You are very easy going” and “You are reserved” and “ You are outgoing” and “You need a lot of personal space” and “You like to go out and be with people” and “You always stay home” and “You are a party girl”. The list continued. Does this sound like a confusing personality? To others, maybe. To me, no – not any more. I’ve heard people said women in their 30s are more attractive than in their 20s. They understand who they are and are comfortable being themselves – I couldn’t agree more.
Somewhere somehow, our society has trained people to label themselves and other people, from the adjectives like the introvert and extrovert to the letters like ESTJ or ISTJ of the well-known Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. At Kellogg, I recalled that my classmates randomly asked one another “I’m ENTJ. What are you?”. When I thought about it, it seemed a little too much that people need labels so badly that we need a scientific method for it. My third boss realized that my first two bosses labeled me with the opposite personality descriptions and figured that there was a much better way for him to understand his employee. So he asked me for my Myers-Briggs results. Yeah..gotta find a label somehow!
While I am comfortable with who I am these days, other people may not feel the same way. In general, having a label psychologically makes people feel comfortable, feel like they know who they are, feel like they know who another person is, feel like they belong to a certain group, and feel like another person is one of their kinds. And not being able to put someone into a bucket can cause frustration and misunderstanding to those that are used to labels and buckets.
With inveterate habit of labeling and bucketing, we seem to forget that each individual is too complex to be described by only a few adjectives or sets of letters. While bucketing people may, on the surface, seem to be an easy way to describe people, it might not result in accurate understanding of people. Inaccuracy inevitably creates misunderstanding and frustration. Luckily, there is a simple, alternative approach that doesn't distort the reality of human complexity. That is to just experience each individual without labeling and bucketing them. Just experience the true person behind it. It's that simple.
The other day after I had finished working out, I walked into the gym’s locker room as usual. As I was opening my locker, two older ladies were chatting. I didn’t catch the entire conversation, but the last sentence that one of the ladies said was “God gave us everything we need to live happily in this world. Some have money, some have beauty, and some have good health.” Then she turned to me asking for support. “Don’t you agree?” I smiled at her as a response without saying a word, grabbed my gym bag, and left the locker room.
As I was walking out of the gym, I asked myself “What did God give me so that I can live happily in this world?”. It took me about 30 seconds before I gave myself the answer. “God gave me the positive attitudes to take any setbacks with good spirits and the wisdom to see and solve the problems and obstacles I have had in life.” Yes, I think that is God’s greatest gift for me. It is not the good family I was born into, not the brain, not the physical appearance and strength. Well, those are gifts from God too. But they are not the greatest gift. The good things are easy to be happy about. The bad things are harder to make rainbows out of it. So it is the ability to be happy and at peace when bad things happened that I call “the greatest gift”.
Having this greatest gift from God doesn’t mean that I can just sit back, relax, do nothing, and all of the sudden, feel happy when bad things happen. It takes some work. The positive attitudes need regular exercises. And the wisdom to solve problems requires that I need to use it to explore and learn different problem solving methods, and to take actions to solve problems and get rid of the unhappiness in life.
For me the easiest part is to exercise the positive attitudes. I think it’s like what the book “Outliers” said that if you practice something over and over for 10,000 hours, you’ll be excellent at it. I’m not sure whether the 10,000-hour rule only applies to activities, or it also applies to attitudes. But you get the point. Practice makes perfect. There is no specific set of rules of positive attitudes that would work for everyone in every situation. So I’m not going to force my way of thinking onto anyone by giving you “10 things you should do to be positive”. You too will have to do some work. You have to find your own positive triggers and exercise them regularly.
The problem solving method part is pretty straightforward and can be taught to anyone. Since I was 7 years old, I was taught that whenever I felt unhappy, first I needed to understand what I was unhappy about. Second, I needed to identify the causes of my unhappiness. Third, I needed to figure out what I needed to do to get rid of the unhappiness. Fourth, I needed to find out how I can execute on it. If you studied Buddhism, this teaching will probably be very familiar to you. Or if you studied business, this framework might be familiar to you as well: Understand the problems, identify the causes, come up with strategies to solve problems, and execute on the strategies. They are all the same logical problem solving framework whether it is solving business cases or solving life and mind cases.
Although this 4-step method seems pretty simple, it might not be easy for a person to answer each question correctly. Some people don’t know what they are unhappy about. Some people misunderstood the causes of their unhappiness. If that is the case, then they will also misunderstand the “what to do” and the “how to do” parts. Some people understand the causes of their unhappiness, but don’t know what to do and/or how to make their pains disappear.
Therefore, one needs to learn and practice to come up with the right answers to these four basic questions, just like a successful CEO needs to learn (from formal education, books, trainings, work, mentors, advisors, consultants, career coaches, and other kind of coaches) and builds skills, knowledge and experience, to be able to answer the four questions, make good decisions and make the company successful. The same is true when it comes to happy living. Everyone needs to learn and build skills, knowledge, and experience to be able to use the problem solving framework effectively and successfully in life. And if we think solving life and mind problems and feeling happy and at peace are at least as important as solving our business problems, maybe it deserves at least as much efforts as we put into our careers.
For me, the most difficult part is to take actions once I understand what I’m unhappy about, what caused the unhappiness, what I need to do and how I need to do to be happy. There are many hindrances to taking actions. Sometimes, it is the fears: fear of the consequences, fear of making other people unhappy, fear of the unknowns. Sometimes, it is the naivety, hoping that things we don’t have control of will change in a better way. Sometimes, it is the indecisiveness. And sometimes, it is the laziness. This is the part that I need a “reminder” for myself, that if I’m unhappy about something, after I analyze it and know what to do about it and how to execute on it, then I need to take actions to make my happiness happen too. If I don’t take actions, there’s really no one else to blame. After all, God already gave me everything I need to be happy. I already have “the greatest gift from God”.
