Ok here is what I believe: Most of us are OK. As long as you are not abusive, violent, or cruel you are fine. You don't need to worry about improving yourself. But we all need to accomplish tasks and activities. We all needed to learn to brush our teeth and tie our shoes. Do I think I became a better person when I learned to tie my shoes or say please and thank you? No. I needed those skills to function successfully in our society but I was a perfectly fine human being before and after I learned those things. Learning and accomplishing new skills and tasks doesn't change your innate fine-ness.
When we talk about self improvement we really mean becoming better at tasks or activities or relationships that are important to us. I don't become a better person if I loose weight. I just become better at counting calories, or eating vegetables, or exercising, or attracting attention from dudes, or making other woman jealous, or looking good in skinny jeans, or lowering my blood pressure, or whatever result matters to me whether it is frivolous or serious.
What I'm trying to do is take those self-improvement goals and take them out of myself and make them more like the simple tasks and goals that I accomplish every day. Tasks that I don't associate with my self worth. For example I put on deodorant every day. I don't think that it makes me a better person or that if I didn't use it I would be bad. I just use it because I don't want people to stay away from me because I smell bad and because I don't want sweat stains in my shirts. On the other hand this is how I usually think about weight loss: OMG I can't believe I need to loose x amount of weight, how did I get this bad? What did I do wrong? I suck! I need to loose weight. OK now I've been trying to diet for two weeks now and I haven't lost much. What's wrong with me? I keep cheating! I have no self control! why can't I say no to pizza? I'm so bad.... and so on and so on.
As you can see putting on deodorant is about about accomplishing things I care about: not being socially offensive and not ruining shirts. Weight loss is about ME ME ME, how I have to weigh less, how I suck, how I am bad, how there are so many things wrong with me. I see my ability/inability to loose weight as a reflection on myself. If I can loose weight and keep it off I am a better person, I am good. If I can't then I must not be good enough.
Showing posts with label self improvement. Show all posts
Showing posts with label self improvement. Show all posts
Saturday, April 23, 2011
Orgin story
I am 29 and I have spent most of my 20's trying to improve myself in some way. I don't know where it all started or why. Why do you suddenly believe that you are not good enough and need improving? As a kid I wanted to be better at certain activities or tasks, stuff like basketball or school or being nicer to my parents. I don't think I ever even contemplated the idea of wanting to improve myself for the sake of becoming a better me. But regardless I eventually did discover the allure and obsession of trying to be the best me I could be and in the process I have spent countless hours obsessing/beating myself up over it and accumulating many self-help books.
What's the result? It's been almost 10 years and I can't say I have become "better" in any real way. The more I think about it, the more I am sure that self help sucks. You can't improve yourself in a vacuum. If anything it leads to a lot of self-obsession and navel gazing. Which I guess is what the self help industry wants. The more problems you find with yourself and the more crappy and inadequate you feel, the more money you will spend trying to fix yourself.
If you really want to improve something in your life you need to look outside of yourself and focus on real things. You need to be that 10 year old who wants to improve her jump shot, not the 27 year old who wants to "get into shape" whatever that means. Don't improve yourself, develop skills so you can improve things outside of yourself. Whether that be a book you are trying to write a closet you are trying to keep organized, a 10k you want to run.
This may may seem like I'm just playing with semantics: don't try to shape yourself, try to shape something else and in the process you will change. Maybe it is just semantics, but I really do think that we would actually "improve" much more and be a lot less crazy in the process if we took the focus off ourselves.
Thats what this blog is about, a lab, Avtar Lab, where I (Avtar) can try out this theory myself. I will break out those self-help books I bought over the years. I was going to throw them away but then I thought that maybe they would be useful if used a little differently. Instead of applying the ideas and techniques to myself (where before they ended up not helping) I am going to apply them to activities and things in my life that I care about. Hopefully these books were not a total waste of money. I will blog about things like how hard or easy it is to keep the focus off myself, the books themselves, whether I am improving the things I want to improve, and finally how I change. I want to know if taking the focus off yourself changes the your perception of reality and the whole concept of improvement.
I know that in a way this whole blog could be seen a a form of navel gazing. But I am going to try to be more objective and scientific than I am normally. Also I don't think reflecting on your experiences is real dangerous navel gazing as long as you stay semi-objective, rational and thoughtful and don't downward spiral into ME ME ME ME thinking.
What's the result? It's been almost 10 years and I can't say I have become "better" in any real way. The more I think about it, the more I am sure that self help sucks. You can't improve yourself in a vacuum. If anything it leads to a lot of self-obsession and navel gazing. Which I guess is what the self help industry wants. The more problems you find with yourself and the more crappy and inadequate you feel, the more money you will spend trying to fix yourself.
If you really want to improve something in your life you need to look outside of yourself and focus on real things. You need to be that 10 year old who wants to improve her jump shot, not the 27 year old who wants to "get into shape" whatever that means. Don't improve yourself, develop skills so you can improve things outside of yourself. Whether that be a book you are trying to write a closet you are trying to keep organized, a 10k you want to run.
This may may seem like I'm just playing with semantics: don't try to shape yourself, try to shape something else and in the process you will change. Maybe it is just semantics, but I really do think that we would actually "improve" much more and be a lot less crazy in the process if we took the focus off ourselves.
Thats what this blog is about, a lab, Avtar Lab, where I (Avtar) can try out this theory myself. I will break out those self-help books I bought over the years. I was going to throw them away but then I thought that maybe they would be useful if used a little differently. Instead of applying the ideas and techniques to myself (where before they ended up not helping) I am going to apply them to activities and things in my life that I care about. Hopefully these books were not a total waste of money. I will blog about things like how hard or easy it is to keep the focus off myself, the books themselves, whether I am improving the things I want to improve, and finally how I change. I want to know if taking the focus off yourself changes the your perception of reality and the whole concept of improvement.
I know that in a way this whole blog could be seen a a form of navel gazing. But I am going to try to be more objective and scientific than I am normally. Also I don't think reflecting on your experiences is real dangerous navel gazing as long as you stay semi-objective, rational and thoughtful and don't downward spiral into ME ME ME ME thinking.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)