13 Minutes To Change Your Life

what sort of life would you have to have so that you could bear your suffering nobly that's a good question to ask yourself now and so we have people just write for 15 minutes if you could have what you wanted needed what might that look like and there's an instruction there too is do it badly because what the hell do you know and and besides your vision's going to change as you progress through your life and so you're not getting get it done perfectly but that's okay get it down get a rough first draft down

right a rough approximation of who you could be if you got your act together not who other people think you should be you know although that might enter into it because you don't want to be completely you can't be who you are properly and ignore the fact that you're embedded in a social Contex text and so you have to take the fact that they're other people into account and and it doesn't mean be who your parents think you should be either even though that's another source of information that you might want to consider it's it's

a see a deeper questions like what would actually motivate you and you might think well I could never have that it's like that's not the question that's being addressed here although I would say there's no sense floating off into some kind of impossible juvenile fantasy and we're making an assumption that you're taking the question seriously and that you're going to remain within the bounds of what you regard as sanely reasonable so that's the first part second part was the opposite of that it's like okay now you now you've specified a goal where the goal is

in some sense both your character and your life and you specified that rather vaguely you only had 15 minutes to write about it and that's a good thing because now you have something to move toward now I could tell you this technically this is an interesting thing to know people say they want to be happy that's not true by the way if you investigate what people mean when they say they want to be happy they say I just want to be happy it's a very funny phrase he what do you mean just like there isn't

anything harder than that so you can't just say just I just that's all you want you just want to be happy all the time that's all it would take it's like good luck with that that's that's not going to happen so you can get rid of the just and then I want to be happy well maybe actually what people really mean when they say that is they don't want to suffer and be miserable so really what they mean is they don't want to experience excess negative emotion and you you can find that out if you

care if you carefully question people and carefully analyze the answers you find out they're actually more concerned about avoiding the catastrophic negative than living in a world of hedonistic Delight now you also find that while avoiding the catastrophic tragedy they wouldn't mind having a little bit of hedonistic delight and so some happiness is interleaved in there then you might ask yourself to the degree that people do want hedonistic Delight when they're being happy what does what does happy mean and you might think well happy Means getting what you want Happy is how you feel after

Christmas dinner it's like no that's a sleep right that's content and asleep now that's a that's a form of contentment but it isn't really what people mean when they say that they want to be happy the happiness that people refer to when they talk about happiness has more to do with enthusiasm and enthusiasm is an interesting word because it it means it's entheos it means to be inspired inspired is in spirit it means to be imbued with the spirit well enthusiastic is to be imbued with the spirit of God interestingly enough and we'll return to

that when do you experience the positive emotion that's associated with happiness the answer is not when you've attained a goal but when you're pursuing one so you're set up your your positive emotion is associated with movement forward you could say that your positive emotion is the psychological equivalent of of forward movement just as your negative emotion is the psychological equivalent of freezing or retreating and so your emotions are very tightly tied to your action Freeze Retreat negative Advance towards a goal positive no goal no positive emotion now if you don't remember anything else from tonight

that's a good thing to remember no goal no positive emotion Accord of that as well is no goal confusion so no goal not only means no positive emotion it also means confusion and confusion means anxiety and Dread and so a life without a goal is confusing and hopeless and that begs a question what should the goal be and that's partly what we're trying to establish you wrote for 15 minutes you try to develop a vision for your life now you have something to move toward that sets up the precondition for potential positive emotion and happiness

what else do you need to motivate you well how about negative emotion so what do you do with that well negative emotion can stop you you might think well I'd like to get a better job but I'm afraid of I'm afraid of putting myself out in the job market I'm afraid of being evaluated I'm afraid that if I tried something more difficult I might fail then you have your negative emotion opposing you right it's anxiety is stopping you and fair enough because there are things to be anxious about but what if you could get your

negative emotion behind you pushing you instead of stopping you sometimes in my clinical practice I would have clients who hated their job they're laboring under the thumb of a tyrant and maybe that was partly because they turned themselves into slaves but it didn't matter they were laboring under the thumb of a tyrant they needed to make a move laterally or up they needed to make a move and they were often afraid to and they had they had their reasons they didn't want to contemplate their resumés they didn't want to open up their CVS they didn't

want to face the inadequacies of their past they were afraid of being evaluated they were afraid of being rejected they didn't know how to negotiate they didn't know how to conduct themselves an interview they're afraid of losing the security they'd already built up they had their fears and they were real and those fears stopped them but they'd come to me and say oh my God you know I'm so miserable and my life is so miserable and we take that apart and one of the reasons was because they were laboring under the thumb of a tyrant

and then we talk that through and they'd say well I'm afraid to make a change and I'd say that's okay that's understandable how afraid are you not of not making a change let's make a little vision of that you're 35 you hate your job what's the consequence you're not motivated you don't want to get out of bed in the morning you're starting to get depressed you're getting bitter you're getting resentful you're getting cynical you're amotivated at work you're not doing a very good job and you're starting to shrink now play that out for 10 years

you don't change it you don't fix it and what happens it's not like it's going to get better of its own accord what's going to happen to you well for sure at minimum what's going to happen to you is you're going to be in the same situation but 10 years older and if you can't get out of that situation now what the hell makes you think you're going to get out of it in 10 years you're 10 years older you're 10 years more bitter you're 10 years more cynical Maybe by that time your marriage is

collapsed because who the hell wants to live with you you you're even more of a slave than you were because you've labored another 10 years under the thumb of the Tyrant and stepped backwards every time you were asked to so you got smaller and smaller as the Tyrant got bigger and bigger it's like think about that and that means imagine it imagine that okay now that's the situation you're stuck where you are but it's 10 years from now and I when I say think of that I mean imagine that it's like really play it out

like you know how miserable you are now you're afraid of making the necessary changes but you know how miserable you are now just imagine how miserable you could be in 10 years and in all likelihood what you'll find is that you're way more afraid of that than you are of whatever's stopping you in the present it's really useful to know what your own particular brand of Hell might be and so one of the things we do in this writing exercise is have people do the reverse like like okay so imagine now 5 years from now

you've let whatever Temptations you're particularly susceptible to have the upper hand and they've augured you into the ground you know one person's an alcoholic another person's a criminal another person's living on the street someone else is like skirting the edges of prostitution somebody else is narcissistic and bitter somebody else is depressed and anxious you know where you would fall off the edge of the Earth if you fell off in whatever Direction you're prone to fall off everyone knows that but we avoid that you know that's that's rule three do not hide things in the fog

is that the rule do not hide unwanted things in the fog yeah well we often won't allow ourselves to imagine the catastrophe that we're pursuing let's say through inaction that's a good thing to fix so now you say well you you you think for 15 minutes that's not very long but who you could be and what you could have if you could have what you wanted if you were who you could be and then you think about what sort of hell you could produce for yourself if you didn't do that and that's not a bad

polarity it's like I'm going to get away from that and I'm going to move towards that and then you have your negative emotion working for you and your positive emotion working for you and that's a good gradient and that's a great gradient to emotionally because as I said you don't experience positive emotion except in relationship to a goal and if you got a nice gradient on your goal Pursuit then that's going to increase the degree to which you feel positive emotion and positive Emotion by the way isn't just about being happy that's the most trivial

part of it in some sense positive emotion allows you to focus it it's it's the sole of concentration it's the it's the essence of enthusiastic motivation when you say I really want to do that that statement is predicated on the existence of positive emotion it's the fact that the goal beckons to you that makes you say I want to do that and you know how much easier it is to do something you want to do than to do something you don't want to do and that ease is actually a consequence of the activation of the

system that governs positive emotion and you might ask yourself well how powerful a system is that and I would say well almost all of the drugs of abuse that people are most prone to abusing are abused because they activate the positive emotion system so cocaine methamphetamine heroin is also a painkiller but it has a POS it has a psychomotor stimulant element that's the technical term for the the pharmacological effect of pharmacological agents on the positive emotion system psycho stimulation psych motor because it's associated with movement forward cocaine is such a powerful drug because it makes

you feel like you're doing something worthwhile that's the system it hyperactivates and so is a primary system of motivation it's as old as forward movement itself it's a cardinal source of meaning and it only manifests itself in relationship to a [Music] goal [Music]