What is Your Passion?

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I was listening to a podcast last night about the importance of finding and pursuing your passion. It was one of those rather unrealistic promotional things where if you just follow your passion you will make a bunch of money and have a great time doing it. Phooey.  In the real world, most of us are never going to be so lucky.  Most people who try to make a living following their passion will just end up going broke, giving up and finding an okey job in the real world, if they are lucky.

But don’t let that little bit of realistic pessimism fool you.  I am still an optimist and I am pursuing my passion, just in a bit more realistic way. And the only reason I am able to do so is because my husband supports me. This means, at the moment, I am incredibly lucky to be able to pursue my passion.

For most of my life, my passions had to be a hobby. And you know what? That wasn’t that bad. As long as you have a passion to pursue as a hobby or as a career, you are doing fine.  The people I feel sorry for are those who have nothing they are passionate about.  That would be sad.

So, the next time you find yourself lamenting that work gets in the way of having a life and that you would like more time to pursue your passions. Remember to be thankful that you have passions to pursue. Not everyone does.

The hardest part

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The hardest part about solving our problems is realizing we need to let go of some of our pain to do it. Most people are not willing to let go of their pain because it is part of what defines them. They want whatever is happening to be about them, even if what is happening is not pleasant.

The problem is that in difficult interpersonal relationships, if you want to solve your problem, you have to consider your adversary compassionately. Again, most people aren’t willing to do that because they want and need to be the victim in their drama. And so, they would rather allow their problems persist than to consider the possibility that they might be contributing to the problem.

Regardless of how hard it is and how scary this is to do, if you want to heal, you need to find compassion for yourself and your adversary, in that order. You have to love yourself enough to allow yourself to heal by thinking beyond your hurt to consider someone else’s point of view.

In my latest book, The Bully Vaccine, I spend a couple of chapters talking about the need to consider bullies through the lens of compassion. I know full well that most people reading my book will refuse to do this. What they really want is for the bullying to stop without them having to do any hard work.We Humanists live in the real world. We know that if we want something to happen, we need to take responsibility to make it happen.

When it comes to dealing with a bully, you have to know what is actually motivating them. Hint - bullies rarely bully just to be mean or evil. Most are just trying to feel less insecure or are doing it to try and fit in.  Once you understand a bully’s true motivation you use that information to essentially “retrain” them to not bully you.  If you are too wrapped up in your pain to try and see the world through another person’s eyes, you are not going to be able to achieve the emotional distance you need to implement my program.

There are two main benefits of feeling compassion for a bully. The first is that it puts you in the state of mind to actually respond to them in an emotionally secure way – which is essential to ending the bullying cycle. The second benefit is that instead of focusing on your pain, you are focusing on the pain of someone else. And this really does help insulate you from the mean things the bully is doing. It’s like having an emotional force field around you.

Another way to think about this is that you and the bully have been going round and round on a carousel. By deciding to feel compassion for the bully, you are deciding to step off the carousel while the bully continues to go round and round. You can see them, see what they are doing, but because you are not on the ride with them anymore, you are unaffected by their activities and it is easier for you to encourage them to get off the ride they are on as well. And if they refuse, well, that’s their problem.

So, yes, feeling compassion for bullies and other obnoxious people is probably the hardest thing you can do. However, it is also the smartest thing you can do.

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Letting Go of the Hurt

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There are a lot of people in the world who have been hurt by bullying, physically and emotionally. As I say in my book, The Bully Vaccine, I seem to have escaped that. Sure, people were mean to me, but I never took it personally because I had been taught by my mom that when people behave badly towards you it is because they are dealing with issues and fears that usually have nothing to do with you.

And, in my experience, my mom was right. I don’t really remember being bullied as a child, though I know there were people who were mean that I didn’t like being around, but I never took it personally and so was never emotionally troubled by what they were doing. I mostly just thought such individuals were pathetic and felt sorry for them.

I bring this up because it is clear that a lot of people are harboring hurt about what happened to them into adulthood and I genuinely want to help them release that pain.  So here goes.

In order to let go of this pain you have been holding on to you have to choose to let go of it. The reason you are finding it so hard to let go of it is because to do so requires you to accept that what happened to you wasn’t really about you. And that’s really hard to do. Most people would rather cling to their pain than let it go because at least, it’s their pain and it’s about them.  

To let go of your pain and no longer require closure or an explanation or an apology from the person who caused you that pain, requires you to accept that what happened, despite how horrid it was for you, wasn’t actually about you.  It was about the other person and the fact that their obnoxious hurtful behavior was all about them trying to take their pain and put it onto someone else. In essence, you bully was desperately trying to offload their pain onto someone else and just got in the way.

The question you need to ask yourself is this. Would you rather feel hurt or would you rather feel compassion for someone else? Because for all these years, you took the hurt someone else placed on you and owned it and made it all about you. Because the idea that you might not have mattered was too scary to even contemplate you held onto that pain longer than you should have.

This really is a rational choice you can make. But to do so, you need to let go of your hurt and that requires you to let go of your ego and realize, what happened to you wasn’t about you. Yes, it impacted you and you were hurt by it. But as soon as you get your ego out of the way and allow yourself to really understand that the person who hurt you must have been in tremendous pain to do what they did, you will find you can let go of the hurt you have been carrying around and you will be much much happier. 

It’s Not About You!

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I’ve recently released a book on bullying (free on KindleMay 14th & 15th 2012 by the way) and as a result, I’m getting a lot of adults talking to me about their own experiences with bullying. It’s clear that pretty much everyone I know was traumatized by bullying as a kid.

Anyway, one person referred me to the essays at Salon on writers confrontingtheir childhood bullies as adults. What struck me about these essays was that in almost all the cases the bully either didn’t really remember specific instances, though they remember teasing or being mean, and/or they talked about how traumatized they were during the period of time and that they themselves were so overwrought with nervousness, stress or bullying themselves.

These essays validate what I’ve been trying to teach people for years and what is at the heart of my book, The Bully Vaccine. The world does not revolve around you. When someone is mean to you it rarely has anything to do with you. The person being mean has their own issues they are dealing with and those issues are rarely about you. This is why these bullies don’t really remember being mean or bullying . Their experience wasn’t about their victims. It was about them and what they themselves were going through at that time.  They, like everyone else, were kids just trying to survive childhood with all the pressures growing up brings with it.

This tidbit of wisdom has so many important ramifications that I devote 2 ½ chapters of my Happiness book to this concept and my entire Bullying book to it. Let me try to summarize. First, by understanding that a bully’s behavior isn’t about you, even though they are being mean to you, you don’t take what they do personally. If you don’t take it personally, you aren’t hurt by what they are doing. You feel sorry for them instead.  

Whenever someone is mean to you, always remember, it’s not about you!