The Element of Breaking the Cycle and Its Hope for Making Way for New Opportunities and Possibilities

We do a lot of things by reflex.  We say things by reflex.  We respond in reflexive ways.  One of the ways to stop doing things reflexively is to break the cycle.  When a cycle is broken, we immediately start thinking of new ideas and solutions. 

Here's an example: 

I have been renting a car on a monthly basis for several months in a row, while my daughter uses my car. She has gotten so used to using my car, she calls it her car.

My daughter went to England earlier this month, for my Uncle's Al’s funeral.  Perhaps you remember Uncle Al from the tribute I wrote for him after he died in February of this year. Anyway, since my daughter was going to be away for two weeks, I decided to rent a car only for the first week of June, and use the family car (her car, my car) until she returned.

After Tanita returned, I did not immediately rent a car.  By doing that, I broke the cycle of automatically renewing the rental on the 1st of every month.  This helped me think of other options.

Driving to work one day, an idea came to me.  What if I struck a deal with Tanita?  We could share one car and she could drive me to work on some days. In exchange, I could give her the money I was paying the rental car company.  She would be able to earn back the money she had spent on her trip to England.  I put this idea to her and she liked it. We are now sharing the car, and, on some days, she drives me to work, and I come back from work on the light rail.

This would never have happened, had Tanita not made the trip to England, causing me to stop renting.  By breaking the rental cycle for a month, a new option occurred to me.

Breaking the cycle is key to new habits and choices.

Recently, I was going to work on a Friday.  Instead of reaching out for my jeans, I decided to wear cargo pants to work.

I could feel a little extra tension as I badged into the office that day. I was extra self-conscious, because I had never worn cargo pants to work.  I shouldn't have stressed. Nobody picked up on the fact I was wearing anything unusual. I thought to myself – hmmm…the difference is all in my head.

I broke a cycle.

By breaking a cycle, I gave myself an increased number of choices for what to wear on Fridays.

Whenever we break a cycle, we give ourselves an increased number of choices.

If we don't, the cycle we are trapped in – which is often all in our heads - will keep us focused on the wrong things, and make us feel things and do things which are unnecessary. 

Women experience this all the time with clothes.

We think "Oh no, I have nothing to wear today". We tell ourselves, "This looks too casual, this looks too formal”.  We talk ourselves into making extra shopping trips.

We should test ourselves by breaking all automatic cycles. 

When we do that, we make room for new activities in our lives and fresh ways of thinking.

Currently, California is experiencing a severe drought.

California residents have been requested to stop watering their gardens and to cut back their usage by 20%.

Penalties will be applied to those who don't.

It is hard to do and people are upset.

But as soon as people break the cycle of what they are currently doing, they will find surprising ways to cut down their water usage, and to utilize water more effectively.

It all starts with breaking the cycle.

In 2010, I broke several automatic cycles.  It started with me walking out of a company, where I had been working a Commissions Analyst job, and doing the same thing day in and day out, for 5 years.

By breaking that cycle, I was forced to think creatively.

What would be my next step?

My next step was doing the Xactly Administrators course on my own dime. I told you how the idea came to me in my post Advice from People We Love to Hate.

Then a completely unexpected and unplanned, but delightful opportunity, came my way. It was an opportunity to contract with an Xactly Implementations team. I lost no time in reinventing myself.

I was ready to go with the flow, and to welcome the challenge, with open arms and an open mind.

An open mind is a great asset, and breaking the cycle had left me with that - a completely open mind.

I became open to new ways of spending my free time.

Before mid 2010, I spent a lot of time watching CNBC, and Jim Cramer in particular, on TV. In fact, whenever I worked from home, I worked in front of the TV, so I could check what my favorite stocks were doing, and what the financial pundits had to say.

One day I was at church. Going to church was also new for me in 2010. In one of the sermons, the pastor challenged everyone to give up an activity for 30 days - and to read a proverb from the Bible instead.

I chose to give up CNBC and Jim Cramer.

For 30 days, instead of watching CNBC and Jim Cramer, I read a proverb from the Bible.

I never went back to watching CNBC and Jim Cramer after those 30 days.

A 6 year habit was broken.

As time was released in my schedule, it made way for new activities.

I read a book, in which, the author said if you started something new, and did it for 20 minutes a day for 30 days, you could turn it into a habit.

Something I really wanted to do was to write again.

I started writing 20 minutes a day for 30 days.

Writing did not become a habit immediately.

It was 4 months later the effort paid off.

I started this blog and I have been writing since.

I try to write a post at least once a week if possible.

I am now on post 290.

2010 was a turning point year for me in so many ways.

I started meditating in 2010.

By learning to meditate, I broke so many different cycles.  I became less tense, less anxious, less suspicious, less resentful; I became calmer, more accepting and more forgiving.

Breaking any cycle leads to breakthroughs.

One day, I went to the apartment office to pay my rent.

I was surprised to see one of the apartment residents seated behind one of the office desks.

"Do you work here now?" I asked.

"Yes, me and my husband have split, you know", she said.

"Really," I said, surprised. "I would never have guessed. You were so great together."

She told me her story...

Several years before, her husband's dad's physical and mental condition had deteriorated so much, it had become unsafe for him to keep living in their multi-level Santa Cruz home. The doctors advised he be moved to an assisted living facility, but she and her husband didn't have the heart to do that. So they locked up their home in the Santa Cruz Hills, and moved  - with the dad  -into our apartments, to take care of him. The doctors had told them it would be hard work, but they felt they owed it to him.  He was a great man – a retired Air Force captain, who had made some smart real estate and stock investments, and amassed a fortune.

But she had an agreement with her husband - and it was that, as soon as his dad passed away, they would go their separate ways. He wanted out of the marriage.

Now the dad had passed away, her husband had gone back to their Santa Cruz home, and she, newly divorced, had stayed on at the apartments and got a job in the apartment office.

"So sad," I said, "I thought you were a great couple".

"Me too," she said, "but he wanted out - unfortunately."

Then I said, "Well, you have to look on the bright side. Your life was filled only with probabilities until this happened. Now it will be filled with possibilities."

Indeed, though one cycle was broken, a new cycle had begun.  A new cycle filled with possibilities.

Ella now had a job in our apartments.  An extremely sociable person, she enjoyed interacting with all the residents.  She did so well, she was promoted, and went on to become Apartment Manager at one of the other properties in Concord.

Once you break a cycle, a new chapter of your life will start.

Your life, which would have been filled with probabilities before, will now become filled with possibilities.

Opportunities will arise, miracles will happen.

You will know you have broken a cycle, when there's no danger of slipping back to where you were before.

There is no danger of me getting crazily angry any more.  I broke through the cycle of being hot-tempered, years ago.

Whatever cycle you are trapped in - say the cycle of falling in love again and again with the wrong people - you can break through the cycle.

Many have done it.

Any small step towards breaking through a cycle, whether of fear, or negativity, or anger, or addiction, is better than no step at all.

"Change a little, Change a Lot", says Trevor Blake in his landmark book 3 Simple Steps.

Even a small change - in what you do and how you behave - can result in a big change in your life.

Just look at what happened to me, after I walked out of my job in mid 2010.

Each one of us will have our own strategies for breaking a cycle.

The strategies will be as unique as we are.

Here's Sandra Cisneros, the Latin American author - on how she broke the cycle of daydreaming, which was threatening her ability to succeed at college:

"I was a terrible student. Still, I managed to get into college, but my daydreaming threatened to sabotage me. I used behavior modification to break the cycle. I started by setting an arbitrary time limit on studying: for every 15 minutes of study, I'd allow myself an hour of daydreaming. I set the alarm."

We should think of our lives as a series of cycles.  We may break through several different cycles in our lives.

Here's Ben Okri, Booker prize-winning novelist, on the cycles in his life: “I'm conscious of a series of circles working its way through my life. And at this particular moment I have come round to the beginning of my writing cycle. It begins with poetry. There's hardly a day that goes past on which I don't write poetry."

If we are to get stuck in a cycle, we should make sure it is a virtuous cycle.

Writing this blog is a virtuous cycle.  I don’t mind getting stuck doing it.

Otherwise, if we are stuck in any negative cycle, we should try to break out of it.

If, for years, we have been on the wrong side of history, gender, race, or family, we can become trapped in a cycle of helplessness, reflexiveness and bad habits, leading to an impoverished life.We will need to break through that cycle to achieve a significantly different life.

We may even have to break through multiple cycles.

Women have broken through multiple cycles, to get to where they are today in America.  Women in many parts of the world still have to do this.

Breaking through is sometimes necessary just to get us back to "who we are".

To start blogging, I had to get back in tune with my creative side.  It had been unused and neglected for over 14 years. I had to break through to it.

I am so glad I succeeded.

Hope you are too.

Dear reader…..before I end this post, I would like to wish you the breakthrough you have been longing for. 

I have the utmost confidence you can - and will - do it.

As always, thanks for reading and have a great day and week…..M….a Pearl-Seeker like you.  Thanks to Ajay and David for their comments and compliments on my last post, and thanks to the rest of you for your likes, pins and votes…..much appreciated.

The Element Of Learning How to Handle Things and Its Hope For Being More at Peace With Ourselves

picture courtesy: ehow.com

If you go on the internet, you can find instructions for anything.

A quick scan reveals:

Instructions for how to Build a Personalized Hammer for Father’s Day.

Instructions for how to Create an Edible Mustache.

Instructions for how to Tie a Tie

 

Also instructions for less interesting, but necessary, or useful tasks, such as How to Install a Printer Cartridge.

Or how to Add a Signature to a PDF Document.

Unfortunately instructions are not so easy to find for handling our relationships, or our thoughts, emotions and habits, and our ability to control ourselves.

But we have to learn to do this.

Even if we grow up without the right role models.

If we don’t, we will let someone else’s actions dictate our thoughts and actions - and determine the outcome of our lives, and our futures.

Once upon a time there was a little boy.

When he was 3 years old, his dad was plastering a wall at his house.

Innocently - and not knowing what he was doing, the boy poked a finger into the damp plaster.

His dad saw him do it from across the room and got mad.  In a rage, his dad threw a roof shingle across the room at him.

The roof shingle pierced the boy’s head and lodged in his skull.

He had to be rushed to the hospital for an emergency surgery.

The boy grew up with the memory of this terrible incident, as well as other incidents caused by his father’s rages.

Growing up, he was a constant witness to, and a victim of his father’s abuse of himself and his mother. He observed how his mother handled his father's rages with compassion.

When he became an adult, the boy chose to pursue psychology.

He has interested in anger, and the underlying causes for violent expressions of anger.

His studies and research pointed to low self-esteem being the cause of anger. People who were angry harbored severe feelings of shame and guilt - coupled with a lack of empathy for other people’s feelings.

He understood low self esteem was at the heart of many violent crimes.

He decided to dedicate his life to helping people successfully deal with, and overcome their anger issues.

His successes include some of the most hardened criminals in the justice system.

His name is Steven Stosny, or more formally, Dr. Steven Stosny.

He is a living example of how to handle childhood abuse in an enlightened way.

If someone does something to us, we should never think we have only 2 choices, one of which is to run away and seek refuge in something, the other to strike back. 

Fight or flight are not are only answers.

What Dr. Stosny teaches us (and his clients) is that there is a third way, which is developing compassion for ourselves, and for all those who make us suffer, or have made us suffer.

In 1918, when the US entered World War 1, a man enlisted in the US army as a private.

He was 38 years old and had already amassed a fortune of $75,000.

Concerned that he may not come back from the war, he gave his savings to his best friend for safe-keeping.

The war took many lives, but mercifully, his life was spared, and when he was released from duty, which was 14 months later, he was ready to begin his old life again.

One of the first things he did, on his release, was to visit his friend to get his money.

Bad news was waiting for him at his friend’s house.

His friend had committed suicide, and left his wife a widow.

His friend's widow told him, his friend had put both his own money, and the money they had, in a worthless investment, and lost it all.

The shame and grief over the loss had been too much for his friend, and he took his own life.

What do you think the ex-Army Private did?

He accepted the blame for putting “that much temptation” in his friend’s way, and made monthly contributions to the man’s widow, for the next 30 years.

The man’s name was Grantland Rice.  He was the most famous sportswriter of his time.

Even if you don't know his name, you will definitely know these words which he penned –

“For when the One Great Scorer comes
To mark against your name,
He writes - not that you won or lost -
But HOW you played the Game.”

There’s always another way to handle anything.

Leading up to the last 2 elections, and throughout his 2 terms, President Obama has had to endure a lot.  He has had to endure taunts about being black, taunts about his name, accusations he was not born in America.

Did you ever see him lose his cool over any of it?

If we are to succeed, we have to ignore the attempts of people around us to shame us, or bring us down.

We should never let people get under our skin.

We should never ever let challenges or setbacks become sentences in our life, sentencing us to feeling worthless or hopeless.

Every time we have a setback, we should play the Judge and Jury Game recommended in the post, “How to Feel Good About Yourself When the Chips are Down”.

There is a better way to handle anything, even a devastating setback.

In 1990, a 22 year old student of Kenyon College, Ohio, was riding in a car - when she got an attack of nausea.

The nausea continued over days and weeks and months, and was soon accompanied by severe aches and pains - from head to toe, incapacitating her.

After months of going to doctors, they would eventually diagnose her condition as chronic fatigue syndrome.

She dropped out of college, and from then on, her life became that of a house-bound invalid.

In such a condition, many would throw up their hands, and say, “I am an invalid; that’s all my life is good for”.

But the girl did not do that.

She picked a subject that interested her - and started writing a book.

Unable to leave the house, she did all her research at home – either by going online, or via the phone.

She turned out a best-seller. Her book was on the New York Times Non-Fiction Best-Seller list for 30 weeks, and was made into a hit movie in 2003.

Still home-bound, she started to work on a new book soon after.

Her second book was also a hit,  # 1 on the New York Times Non-Fiction Best-Seller List for 52 weeks.

It was picked up by Angelina Jolie, and made into a film.

The girl’s name is Laura Hillenbrand, and the books are Sea Biscuit and Unbroken, movies of which you may have seen.

Laura Hillenbrand chose not to focus on her predicament, but to put her efforts into doing whatever she could - in her predicament. She found the answer in researching and writing.

Are you in a predicament right now?

How are you going to handle that predicament?

Can you put your weight and effort and energy into something like Laura Hillenbrand did?

What are your choices?

We always have more choices for handling a predicament, than the ones we think we have.

Fight or flight choices are not our only choices.

Look at how Grantland Rice handled the discovery that his friend had lost his entire life’s savings.

Look at how Dr. Steven Stosny handled the memory of his father’s rages.

Look at how Laura Hillenbrand handled the fact that she is housebound, and has limited options for what she can do, and what she can't do.

If you've been in fight or flight mode, this could be the turning point in your life.

This could be the moment, when you tell yourself , let’s say your name is Tom, “Tom you are going to handle things differently from now on.”

Start by creating a 10 Toughest Things to Handle List, and coming up with more enlightened, more compassionate responses to each one of them.

We each will have our own 10 Toughest Things to Handle List, but here are some tough situations, many of us will have to handle in our lives:

Someone flies off the handle at you, and says some totally uncalled for things. What’s worse, you’ve been busting your butt - and the person does this, in spite of that?

Someone does not follow your orders.

Someone goes above you.

Someone is more popular and in demand than you, though you are more talented and capable than them, or deserve to be more highly thought of than them.

Someone keeps making the same mistakes again and again.

Someone does not accept your excuse, or apology.

Someone shames you or humiliates you.

Someone rejects you.

And let’s not forget tests of your willpower. Those should go on your 10 Toughest Things to Handle List too - and you should think hard - and plan in advance - about how to deal with them, especially if they have knocked you off your game many times:

How will you handle temptation?

How will you handle greed?

How will you handle fear, or anxiety?

How will you handle shame?

When you are a young adult, and still trying to make sense of the world, you can, and probably will, experiment.

There may be many choices available to you, and you will experiment with one, or more, of them.

Eventually, you will have to learn to look at - and handle - each one of those choices.

You will have to understand what is for you, what is not for you, and what is positively against you.

You will have to learn what to keep, and what to let go, and how to handle the urges that are holding you back, or stealing your peace.

For what is wisdom, after all, but learning what to keep, and what to let go, and how to handle the thoughts or urges that are stealing our peace?

As always, thanks for reading, and have a great day and week….M….a Pearl-Seeker like you.  Thanks to Ajay, Audrey, Chris, David and Rosie for their compliments on Facebook, and thanks to the rest of you for your likes, pins and votes…..much appreciated.  Happy Father’s Day to all the Dads, both the ones I know, and the ones I don't, and compliments to you on the great job you are doing!