How-to-Do-Life Tips

Source: Gratuit, CC 3.0, freeimageslive

When I have a piece of how-to-do-life advice that doesn’t require a blog-length explanation, I post it on Twitter. Their concision may even make them more useful. Here are recent favorites, some of which are improved from the version that appears on Twitter.

Self-knowledge

• Ask yourself and others: "What do people misunderstand about you?"
• Famed psychotherapist Irvin Yalom's go-to question for getting to know someone: "Would you walk me through a typical day starting with when you wake up, perhaps a day earlier this week?" What does your answer say about you, and about the role of people and tasks.
• Consider emulating what you admire in your parents. We'll more likely succeed at developing our parents' attributes than other people's. That's because you've inherited their genes, received their parenting, plus you love them.
• Write your life's memorable moments, from early childhood to today. See any threads? Any implications for what you should do now?
• To move my coaching sessions from the purely cognitive, I ask clients to get in touch with what they're feeling as I play (on Zoom or phone during the pandemic) on the piano this music I wrote. My clients often find that revealing. Care to try it?
• Write your obituary. Doing that often yields self-knowledge and directions for life. For example, today, my client's having written his obituary is making him think about leaving his partner.

Generating and implementing solutions

• Journaling lets you step back to reflect, and it's empowering because you generate your own solutions, which you're more likely to implement. Plus, it's free.
• Have an experimental mindset. Instead of excessive rumination, take low-risk actions and monitor the results. That applies both at work and in personal life.

• A way to build-in a new habit is to log your progress and lack thereof on a memo pad. That’s useful, for example, in procrastination, weight management, and substance abuse.
• Where possible, allocate your time and money based on potential not deficit. As every battlefield medic knows, it's wise to devote limited resources not necessarily to the sickest but to those with more potential to benefit. That can apply to how much time you spend with various supervisees and friends, and to which charitable causes you donate.
• A side effect of the pandemic is that more people are comfortable with virtual sessions with counselors, doctors, etc. Also, self-help apps such as Sanvello should burgeon. Post-COVID, their use will likely keep growing as maddening car traffic and time-sucking mass transit resume.

Procrastination

• Ever find yourself not finishing a task? At that moment of truth, remind yourself that it's far easier to maintain the momentum than to say "I'll do it later" and then have to start with no momentum.
• Potent anti-procrastination tactic: Ask yourself, "What 's my next one-second step?"
• Procrastinators jump from the unpleasant to the pleasant even when that hurts them long-term. Do you need to get comfortable being uncomfortable?

Self-esteem

• Gurus often imply that low self-esteem is an irrationally negative self-assessment. Often it is rational and thus can be a signal that you might try to improve. Perhaps ask trusted people for candid feedback, get a tutor, or take a course.
• Movies, TV, books, etc., venerate the rebel and the quirky creative. Underappreciated is the straight arrow, who would have more fun being off-center but whose sense of responsibility trumps that.
• A fortune cookie reads, "Overconfidence is equal to being blind." I wouldn't go quite that far, but people who crow loud-and-proud often make blanket pronouncements that insufficiently incorporate other worthy ideas and data.
• "People knock themselves out over difficult (goals) because they think difficulty is a sign of it being the right thing. ...It comes easily or not at all." — Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March.
• It's more efficacious to value yourself more on your efforts, accomplishments, and ethics than on identity: religious, racial, gender, or geography, e.g., "I'm a Californian."

Sadness and anxiety

• For sub-clinical anxiety or sadness, rather than undue processing of it, it may be worth trying to suppress it and distract yourself with a pleasurable activity or by taking a baby step forward on some constructive task.
• Don't necessarily accept as valid the praise from people you pay, for example, paid teachers and coaches. Why? Because they benefit from praising you: It boosts the chance you'll keep paying or that you'll write a better review online.

Relationships

• Saying "thank you” in response to praising you conveys "You're right" without appearing conceited.
• Disagree sparingly. You pay a price each time you disagree, let along criticize. Assess whether it's worth that price. It often is but less often so than many people think.
• Some people who have the gift of looks, charisma, or sex appeal use it to unfair advantage. View a person based on the whole person and overall behavior. That's true not just in choosing a romantic partner, but in who you hire and promote, and whose views you support.
• Couples may spend too much time remediating weaknesses. Should you focus more on the good that comes naturally, whether sex, chatting, sports, watching TV together, whatever?
• It's popular to call disagreement with a partner "gaslighting." But sometimes, one partner is more often correct.
• Books and movies glorify the BadAss. But BadAsses tend to project more confidence than competence and often demotivate others. It may be wiser to work with and be in relationships with gentler, more authentic people.

Parenting and family

• Leniency is sometimes unwise. For example, at home, a tantrum that works is likely to spawn more tantruming. A romantic partner who promised to do the dishes but "forgot" is, if you say nothing about it, more likely to "forget" more often.
• To gain a child’s compliance, get down to the child’s height, perhaps on your knee, and kindly but firmly say, for example, "You have 30 seconds to finish with the iPad." If s/he refuses, say something like, "You know you're better than that" and maybe even take the iPad. You have the right to reasonable compliance.
• Better a plain school with good kids and teachers than a fancy school with lessers.
• People endure the strains of family in the belief that family can be counted on in a pinch and they’ll accept you with love even if you're not a saint. Alas, in too many families, such expectations are over-optimistic.
• Family has long been deemed central, in part because having kids was expected and because women had limited earning power and/or desire to make money. That's changing. With so many people bitter about at least one family member, it may be that family along with marriage will continue to fade in primacy.

Work

• Career contentment comes mainly from work of moderate challenge, and a good boss, coworkers, stability, ethics, and pay. Because of supply/demand, those are more likely found outside of entertainment and "make a difference" careers.
• Just before I give a talk or record my podcast, I sit for a few minutes, letting whatever float into my head. I'll jot down anything of value, for example, "integrity" or some important idea to share that I had forgotten about.
• A rule of thumb for managers who have a supervisee who disagrees: Listen, acknowledge why they'd feel that way, decide, and, even if s/he wants to continue the debate, move on. Also applicable to anyone who disagrees with you.

Career Essential Reads

Why Should You Provide a Good Experience to Job Candidates?

A Surgeon Puts Down the Scalpel

Teaching, training

• Pace the amount of new information you provide, because students get overwhelmed. Intersperse explanations, examples, and humor. That's true also of good fiction writers: Plot progression shouldn't come too fast.
• A teacher is more likely to be effective if building on the simple rather than explaining the complex. For example, if I were teaching adults the art of writing, I might start with page 1 of a wonderful children's book and ask them what they like and don't like about it.

Health

• When preparing for a physical exam, inventory yourself from head to toe and then from your morning to bedtime. That will remind you of what to ask about.
• Most dieters gain it back and often more. Unless you're obese, consider accepting your body. Fine, nibble away at your calorie consumption but accept your basic self—and the occasional cheat.
• As we observe long-time friends go from running to striding to trudging to needing help, we slowly are trained to accept the inevitable.
• In these stressful times, gardening, even if it's just your indoor plants, can provide respite from the maelstrom.

I read this aloud on YouTube.

Here is a previous collection of my tweets.