Redefine Yourself

The Simple Guide to Happiness

Michael Moody

• Publisher: Ainsley Press
• Year: 2015
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780986352713
• Topic: Desarrollo personal
• Subtopic: Salud mental y bienestar

Why is it so difficult to implement new sustainable change in your life despite your strong desire or success in other areas? Redefine Yourself: The Simple Guide to Happiness reveals the underlying influences on your behavior and the mental and emotional obstacles to achieving long-lasting goals. It unravels the unconscious “You” and steers you through life with a reflective cycle of awareness, acceptance, and adaptation  –  a key cycle to approach personal and professional goals with new efficiency and effectiveness. You will not only rewire your mental self and redefine your being but also create the life you want by examining your self-talk, fears, insecurities, problem-solving approach, decision-making process, and more. REDEFINE YOURSELF and create the foundation for lasting positive change and happiness in your life. 

1

You Are Not Alone

You are not alone.

I hope that you find comfort in these words. Before you begin your journey to redefine yourself, I want you to hear about my journey and what led to the creation of this book. You may be able to relate.

My story began with a newfound dedication to redefining myself. Little did I know that the year I devoted to self-exploration would instead be stretched over four years—culminating in a two-week adventure in Guatemala after a couple of years of spiraling uncertainty during my divorce. At the end of that period, I finally became aware of myself and what steered me.

READY FOR CHANGE

I once said to myself, “I hate the way I look,” when I looked in the mirror. Who am I kidding? It was every day. It was every time. I said the same message when someone was just looking at me too.

What a phrase to tell yourself all the time! I clearly wasn’t happy with myself. There was a growing anxiety that made me feel uncomfortable. I remember talking to friends—people who I’ve known for years—and thinking, “Are they judging me?” or, “Am I saying something wrong?”

Why? I’m not sure. At least, I wasn’t sure at the time. This internal dialogue affected my personal and professional lives, and you can imagine how many situations I avoided because of it.

Dating is an example. Not only are you supposed to meet one-on-one with people you barely know, but you’re expected to share a piece of you intimately. How would I—someone who doesn’t like me—think that another person would value anything that I told them about myself? It’s an anxiety-producing situation worth avoiding—and I did that quite a bit.

For many years, I avoided ME. I avoided truly looking at myself until I reached this pinnacle of unhappiness—the bottom for me. I was sick of staring blankly at nothing while thinking about my life. I was sick of waking up every morning wondering what would go wrong today. I was sick of feeling alone in relationships. I was sick of being unhappy. On a wintry day in the back of a Starbucks on my 30th birthday, I was ready for change.

I started to piece the VERY complicated, imperfect puzzle of myself together and then embarked on my toughest journey: Looking at me.

I was searching for the next step in my life inside a coffee cup and a book called The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss. His book on how to minimize life’s distraction and maximize efficiency in order to live more and work less wasn’t the complete answer, but certainly a first step.

I wanted to create a strategy for the next tier of unknowns in my life. I wanted to be prepared to handle life efficiently! We’ll call this obsessive, perfectionist ambition an excellent reflection of myself at the time.

Although I didn’t entirely agree with Ferriss’ thoughts about achieving wealth, the book had a significant impact on me. The 4-Hour Workweek encourages the reader to examine their fears and insecurities. I’d never taken this step. I examined myself in a whole new way and began to question my life and who I was:

• Am I truly happy with my job?
  
• Am I really listening to people around me?
  
• Why do I work as hard as I do?
  
• What do I fear?
  

These questions stabbed at my brain for days, leaving me stunned but intrigued. I was determined to give myself an honest critique of my life and plan the year ahead as an exploration into my unknown depths.

It took me awhile to face my inner self, but I began to realize the underpinnings of me—the negative and positive motivators that shaped my personal and professional lives. “Being aware” became a scary experience. At that point, my life was a time of flux and change. I was newly married, uncertain about the future of my personal training business, and trying to fix me, all while jumping into these unknowns. This task was more difficult than I had envisioned.

I began to unravel subconscious influences that had control over me. Part of me was an unrecognized butcher who snuck up behind my consciousness and cut off more than fat. He routinely carved off my self-esteem, my efforts, and who I was. This insecurity-driven persona trounced every “I can” statement and consistently judged what I looked like and how I did everything. He limited my ambition and altered my perspective of the world. He repeatedly reminded me that my life wasn’t good enough—I wasn’t good enough.

I recognized my ongoing internal battle and didn’t know how to handle it. I also wasn’t sure if other people were dealing with this, too. I was my worst enemy.

Eventually, I realized that I built the foundation of my business on the fear of failure. I was a square piece in a round marriage. I felt helpless. Somehow, I managed to make my life more complicated than before.

Then, I finally saw it and it was a significant first step. The secret to true happiness was already in my hands. I was always searching for ways outside of myself to reach this goal: Buying a new car, moving into a new home, and getting married. I never fully recognized the fears and insecurities that guided my behaviors, my perceived control, the lack of belief in myself, what influenced my decisions, and the effect of my environment on me.

I finally woke up. I finally became aware. I realized that the secret to happiness didn’t involve just ADDING things to my life. It involved REMOVING them. Instead of always searching for an answer outside of me, I needed to look inside. The secret to redefining myself and achieving happiness was rewiring my MIND. I needed to remove the self-destructive, reinforced patterns and rewire my mind with new adaptive strategies. I needed to rewire the way I looked at myself.

I began creating a business plan for my life that gave me the confidence to interact with my environment in new ways and pursue what I wanted. My life was no longer about just wanting to fulfill the typical social goals of a successful job and family. It was about creating meaningful relationships, trusting myself, and working in a career congruent with my passions and purpose. It became about rewriting the definition of what happiness entails and how to achieve it.

My life became more efficient and less stressful with this new focus. I was gaining more in life with less effort. The only requirement: Staying aware!

This awareness was a return to the “simple” in my life. It was the breakdown of complicated scenarios, like my approach to marketing my business or how I handled a disagreement in my relationships.

My new mantra was, “keep it simple,” and I did. With every new challenge, I was able to keep it simple and move closer to happiness and less self-doubt.

New pursuits became easier as I looked at them with a clearer vision. My fears and insecurities that plagued me for years no longer told me “don’t do it.” I replaced the message with, “I will find a way to do it.”

You will too. I can give you the step-by-step process to achieve financial gain, weight loss, or anything else you want, but it won’t work unless you remove the real obstacle: YOU.

Redefine Yourself will help you look at you for the first time. You will incorporate new adaptive strategies that will not only change your life, but positively impact those people around you. Truly redefining yourself will help you achieve the happiness you’ve always wanted.

Now is your time to REDEFINE YOU!

2

Practice Mindfulness

I began to wonder how many other things flew under my nose daily. What if I slowed life down? What would I see? I needed to become aware of the functional and dysfunctional world both around me and within me. I wanted to be a new person, but I needed to know what I was up against first. I needed to incorporate mindfulness into my life: a mental state achieved by focusing one’s awareness on the present moment while calmly acknowledging and accepting one’s feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations.

A therapist might say, “let’s start” by focusing on your breath. The monk, Bhante Henepola Gunaratana, once said: “When we truly observe the breath, we are automatically placed in the present.” To achieve this state, you’re not allowed to control your breath, and you must let your breath move in its natural rhythm (like while sleeping).

Lie back, relax, and focus on your breath moving in and out like waves massaging the shore. Any time there’s a distraction—a thought about pressing projects at work, random characters on television shows you’re watching, or anything else—place the idea on a boat and let the river take it away. Listen to every sound around you: A dog barking in the distance; the subtle cracks in the wood; your neighbors yelling at each other; your neighbors yelling at you for meditating on their front lawn; whatever it is, name it and continue to focus on your breath and…

Okay, I probably lost you. You either fell asleep or struggled to relax and focus on your breath. Your breathing might have become ragged because while you’re trying not to control your breath, you feel an incessant need to force it. As you do this, it may cause you to begin breathing irregularly and move you away from a relaxed stress.

Meditation is initially stressful and the reason people avoid it. “It’s so simple though,” people will tell you. It’s not. You’ve trained yourself to multitask and do a million things at once in everyday life. It’s different to remove yourself from this mindset and slow down for a moment.

If you practice meditation, it will open your mind and help you look at your reality. Many people find that their reality is far more chaotic and disorganized than they ever imagined. You might have the same realization.

Unless you’re the musician, Sting, who can meditate for four hours, any moment of mindfulness (awareness of now with total stimulation of your senses) is a success. With practice, you’ll realize it isn’t as hard as it seems—especially if it is only 10 seconds at a time. The goal is just to wake up to life around you—and inside of you—at any given moment. The toughest part is not passing judgment. You are just naming what you see, hear, smell, and think about. You are awakening yourself to a new reality.

In my phone, I found an application (Simple Routine) that allows me to schedule alerts throughout the day. I receive a “take a breath” alert four times and do this no matter where I am at or what I am doing. These reminders help me successfully integrate a form of meditation and mindfulness with minimal effort into my life.

When you practice mindfulness, you are returning to the simplest process of you: breathing. Start with a single breath. Breathe all of the way in; all of the way out. You want to inhale fully and then exhale. If a thought infiltrates this moment, name it and allow it to escape your mind peacefully. You can place your thoughts about work and other stresses onto a boat and push it a down ‘that mental river’. You are slowing down your life for one moment. You are incorporating mindfulness into your life.

A few years ago, I first practiced meditation at the Mystical Yoga Farm on Lake Atitlan in Guatemala, just a few months after my divorce. Lake Atitlan stood in total solitude in the middle of three volcanoes. The sunrise peaked over the top of each volcano every morning and slowly lit the fog crawling over the water. It was the perfect setting for breathing and thinking about breathing.

It was also the setting for four days of alcohol-free socializing and vegetarian cooking. In between yoga and permaculture sessions, I snuck out to a hammock and wrote in my journal before falling asleep.

It was simplicity in its mo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Praise for Redefine Yourself
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 You Are Not Alone
• 2 Practice Mindfulness
• 3 Listen to Your Inner Voice
• 4 Face Your Fears
• 5 Extinguish Your Insecurities
• 6 Practice Emotional Restraint
• 7 Believe That You Can Redefine Yourself
• 8 Regain Control Over Your Life
• 9 Find Control Over Your Happiness at Work
• 10 Change the Way You Decide
• 11 Control the Influence on Your Decisions
• 12 Change Your Environment
• 13 Approach New Problems With Confidence
• 14 Accumulate Wisdom Through Error
• 15 Create New Habits
• 16 Redefine Your Boundaries
• 17 Create Conversations With Others
• 18 Define Your Purpose
• 19 Create Goals to Maintain Your Positive Focus
• 20 The Next Step
• Appendix