Week 4 Video 6: Obstacles to Taking Personal Responsibility

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Ya, my Greek and other friends.

I actually can't believe that the greeting in Greek is just a simple ya.

I thought it would be a little more complicated, and all Greek to me.

If you know what I mean?

But returning to our topic of the fourth habit of the highly happy.

As I mentioned in the last video, it's taking personal responsibility for

your happiness.

What that means is never blaming other people for your unhappiness.

It means seeking to have the ability to regulate your own emotions and feelings.

If this is the first time that you've encountered this idea of taking personal

responsibility for your happiness, you may wonder whether this is even possible.

What if you break your leg, or

lose your job Is it even possible to remain happy, and

in control of your emotions, if something terrible like that were to happen?

The answer is, at least theoretically,

it's possible to be in full control of your feelings.

How?

By taking control of your thoughts.

As we saw earlier, our feelings are determined by our thoughts.

So, if we change our thought patterns, our feelings are naturally gonna change.

This is how people like Mandela were able to maintain their emotional equanimity,

despite being jailed for a good chunk of their lives.

This is also why the same event, for example,

failure to get a job can evoke such different feelings in different people.

As Milton famously said, "The mind can make heaven out of hell and

hell out of heaven." Research shows the Milton was right for the most part.

We can change our feelings by changing our thoughts.

But just because it's theoretically possible to change your feelings by

changing your thoughts doesn't mean that this is easy to do.

The problem is that changing your thoughts isn't that easy,

as I'm sure you know from personal experience.

You need to be able to develop skills to be able to change your thoughts.

The good news is that this ability, like most other abilities,

can be gained through practice.

The bad news, however, is that for

most of us developing the ability is going to take time.

Perhaps a lot of time and also a lot of patience.

I've also learned from teaching my class on happiness that it is also going to take

overcoming some internal obstacles that prevent us

from being receptive to the idea of taking personal responsibility for our happiness.

There are two main internal obstacles that I seem to have discovered,

that seem to bother my students about this idea of taking personal responsibility for

their happiness.

The first obstacle is a certain kind of pessimism.

When I mention the idea of taking personal responsibility for happiness, many of my

students ask, but how can I possibly be happy if something extreme were to happen?

For example, like I mentioned sometime back, I break my leg or I lose my job.

The fact that I can't be happy if something like that happens

means that I can never really hope to take complete responsibility for my happiness.

My happiness will always, at least to some extent, depend on external circumstances

and therefore, I don't even want to embark on this project.

To the students that raise that kind of a question.

I tell them that asking whether they can be happy

even if something really extreme happens is the wrong question to ask.

The right question to ask is whether you can be happy

given the sort of commonplace and everyday events that routinely spoil your mood.

For example, can you be happy even though you're stuck in traffic?

Or can you be happy even though it's raining outside and

you wanted to take a nice walk?

Can you be happy even though you're boss has just shouted at you?

As the saying goes, Rome wasn't built in one day.

Similarly, you don't double up the ability to regulate your thoughts and feelings,

in just one day, just like any other skill you need to build the ability to regulate

your feelings by taking challenges that are the right level for you.

The type of challenges that could get you into flow.

This is similar to any other skill really, if you wish to get all big and

buffed up you wouldn't pick weights at the gym that are too heavy.

That you cant even life them or too light.

You would pick ways that stretch you just beyond your current strength levels right.

Likewise if you wish to get better at regulating your feelings

you will need to pick the right level of challenges and

see if you can maintain your equanimity even in those situations.

By doing this regularly,

you're are almost certain to become better at controlling your feelings.

In fact some day after you've practiced this for more than 10,000 hours,

you may even reach the lofty levels that Gandhi or Mandela did.

Now there's another thing that internal optical that prevents a lot of my students

from even entertaining the idea of taking personal responsibility for

their happiness.

This obstacle is a misconception.

It is a misconception that if you take personal responsibility for

your happiness, the others around you will stop taking advantage of you.

Here's how one of my students put it.

If I'm always in control of my feelings, she said, and

I can be happy no matter what won't my friends and colleagues start abusing me?

Won't they think that since nothing spoils this guys mood,

let's take advantage of him?

Won't that happen, he asked me.

The answer is no, not really.

Because taking personal responsibility for your happiness,

doesn't mean that you don't hold others accountable for their actions.

Let me give you an example, to show you what I mean.

Imagine that a ticketing agent has made a mistake and

booked you on the wrong flight.

Because of this mistake, you won't be able to get to an important meeting on time.

In this type of situation, most people would get angry at the agent,

now if you had total control over your feelings,

you could change your feelings if you wanted to.

For example, you could change your anger into say compassion for

the agent, if you recognize that he's new to his job.

Or there's something else that's going on in his life that's really bothering him.

He's not able to focus on the job 100%, etc.

The fact that your feelings are under your control

means that you will not hold him, the agent, responsible for how you feel.

But just because you choose not to hold him responsible for

how you feel, doesn't mean that you should also not hold him responsible for

the mistakes that his behaviors have caused.

So for example, even though you may not be angry at him,

you may still make it clear that he needs to fix the problem that he's created for

you, which might involve getting you on an alternative flight, or

reimbursing you for the losses you might have had, et cetera.

In fact, it is by retaining control over your feelings that you're more likely to

get the agent to get your problem fixed for you.

Why?

Because, as several researchers have noted, and as David Rock

summarizes really well in his very, very good book Your Brain at Work,

it is when you have control over your feelings that your prefrontal cortex,

which is the part of the brain that allows you to make desirable decisions,

is more available for you, and you're able to make better decisions.

When you lose control over your feelings,

your limbic system takes over the functioning of your brain.

And you aren't able to think as clearly

which means that the decision making is going to suffer.

Here's how Amy Arsten, a researcher at the Yale School of Medicine,

puts it in an article that appeared in nature.

Even quite mild, acute, uncontrollable stress can cause a rapid and

dramatic loss of prefrontal cognitive abilities.

That is, by not being able to control your feelings,

you would lose your ability to make good decisions.

Which in this context with the agent means that you would likely be able to get that

agent to cooperate with you a lot less when you lose control over your feelings.

In other words, taking personal responsibility for

your happiness and being able to regulate your feelings

will not make you a doormat that everyone else can trample on.

Just like, as we discuss last week, being kind and

generous doesn't mean that you burn yourself out by being too giving.

You can be smart about when, how much and to whom to give and similarly, you

can be smart about when, how much and with whom you choose to control your feelings.

So to summarize, the typical obstacles that people tend to have for

taking personal responsibility for their happiness aren't really valid.

Which means, that, it's really desirable to embark on this journey of trying to

take personal responsibility for you happiness, and trying to regulate

your feelings and treating the keys to your happiness in your own two hands.

There are many research people that attest to the usefulness

of having the ability to control your own thoughts and feelings.

Here's perhaps the most comprehensive paper on this topic.

As the authors note in the abstract itself of the paper, and I quote,

higher scores of self-control, and by self control the authors here referring to

the ability to take control of your thoughts and feelings, among other things.

They go on to say, higher scores of self control correlated with making

better grade point average, better adjustment (fewer reports of

psychopathology, higher self-esteem), less binge eating and

alcohol abuse, better relationships and interpersonal skills,

secure attachment and more optimal emotional responses.

The question of course, is how to take personal responsibility for

your happiness.

That is, how do you gain the ability to regulate your thoughts and feelings?

Great question.

To help you answer the question,

let me first focus on another question in the next video.

How or why does taking personal responsibility for your happiness,

that is, the ability to regulate your feelings, help you get rid of or

at least mitigate the fault of deadly happiness in of being overly controlling?

That is, how is taking personal responsibility for

your feelings an antidote to being overly controlling?

Yashew and see you in the next video.

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