How to Develop Inner Strength

Windy Dryden

• Publisher: Sheldon Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781847091338
• eBook ISBN: 9781847092168
• Topic: Crescita personale
• Subtopic: Successo personale

Wouldn't it be lovely if we had enough inner strength to stand up to life's demands and challenges? Developing healthy responses to pressure from within may not always be easy, but the good news is that no matter what your genetic heritage, upbringing or education, you can learn to develop inner strength. If you want a way that respects your values and long-term goals, and you're willing to put in the work, How to Develop Inner Strength is the book for you. Inner strength is very much like a garden, says Dr Windy Dryden. It needs hard work to lay the solid foundations, but regular care and attention will keep it blossoming.

1

The foundations of inner strength

Introduction

This book is about developing inner strength. By this I mean developing healthy responses to pressure from without and from within to take the easy way, but one which compromises your values and long-term goals. I am firmly of the view that no matter what your genetic heritage, upbringing or education, you can learn to develop inner strength. It would nice if doing so were easy, but sadly this is rarely the case. However, if this does not deter you and you are willing to put in the work by applying what you read in this book, then you should benefit from what I have to say.

Reading on its own won’t help you. It’s the same with gardening. If you have a garden and enjoy tending it you will know that reading about how to keep a garden looking nice will help you develop good ideas that you can apply to your garden. But reading a book is not sufficient for you to achieve this goal. You will know that a lot of hard work goes into keeping a garden fertile and looking nice. First, you need to prepare the ground and ensure that all weeds are uprooted. Second, you need to keep a watchful eye open for insects and animals that can potentially wreak havoc in your garden by infecting or eating your lovely plants and flowers. Third, you cannot rest on your laurels for too long because, if you do, your garden will not maintain itself. It will deteriorate through lack of ongoing care.

Inner strength is very much like a garden. It needs hard work to lay the solid foundations and regular care and attention to keep it blossoming. In this chapter, therefore, I will discuss the foundations of inner strength, and in the chapters that follow I will discuss how you can build on these foundations in various areas where inner strength is called for.

The foundations of inner strength are characterized by four attitudes or beliefs that need to be present if you are to deal with life’s adversities in a healthy way. In this chapter, I will discuss these four attitudes or beliefs. However, let me first say a word about the approach on which this book is based.

This book is based on Rational-Emotive Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. You may have heard of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), for it has entered into the public consciousness very much as psychoanalytic therapy did many years ago and you have probably heard CBT described as a therapeutic approach. However, in my view it is not a therapeutic approach but a therapeutic tradition in which there are a number of distinctive approaches, of which Rational Emotive Behavioural Therapy (known as REBT) is one. REBT was founded in 1955 by Dr Albert Ellis (1913–2007) and I will discuss the inner strength Dr Ellis drew on in order to get recognition for this approach. The term ‘Rational-Emotive Cognitive Behavioural Therapy’ (RECBT) – which I will use in this book to remind you of the book’s roots – shows that the approach is placed within the CBT tradition and that its distinctive features are REBT in nature.

Flexible beliefs

In this section, I will discuss beliefs that are flexible in nature. However, I will first outline a number of basic facts about human beings.

• We have desires for certain things to happen We do not proceed in life free from desires, wants or wishes. Indeed, our desires are what make the world go around. Normally, when we consider something to be good or in our best interests we want it to happen.

• We have desires for certain things not to happen When we consider something to be bad or not in our best interests, then we don’t want it to happen.

• We have a broad range of desires Unless we have tunnel vision our desires spread across a wide spectrum of events. Thus, we may want: (1) our local football team to win the league; (2) our children to be safe from harm; and (3) ourselves to be promoted at work.

• Different people have different desires Fortunately, we don’t all want the same things. Indeed, the old adage ‘different strokes for different folks’ is particularly relevant in this area of human endeavour.

• Our desires vary in strength Some of our desires are strong, others are medium and yet others are weak. Thus, I may mildly want to beat you at a game of tiddlywinks, whereas I may very strongly want to be promoted at work.

Our desires can be kept flexible or made rigid

When you have a desire, say for success, then you can either keep this desire flexible or make it rigid. When you keep it flexible, you acknowledge that you want success, but you also realize that you do not have to achieve such success. You recognize that it is possible for you not to succeed and you incorporate this possibility into your belief system. Further, you recognize that there is a logical connection between wanting to succeed and believing that you don’t have to do so. You also acknowledge that when you believe you want to succeed, but do not have to do so, then you will feel concerned but not anxious about the prospect of not succeeding, and will feel disappointed but not depressed if it turns out that you do not succeed. In other words, your negative emotions will be healthy rather than unhealthy, and these healthy negative emotions, as they are known in RECBT, will help you (1) to process and learn from your failure to succeed and (2) to apply this learning to future achievement-related situations.

As I have also mentioned, it is possible for you to take your desires and make them rigid, and you are more likely to do this when your desires are strong than when they are moderate or mild. When you make your desires rigid, you take a desire (again for success) and you transform it into something that you think you must achieve. Thus you believe: ‘I want to achieve success and therefore I have to do so.’

When you make your desire rigid, you are trying to exclude the possibility of not succeeding when that possibility in reality clearly exists. As such you are trying to make reality conform to your rigid belief rather than change your rigid belief to fit reality.

Further, you make an illogical connection between wanting to succeed and believing that you have to succeed. This is illogical: it really does not make sense for you to say that because you want something, therefore you have to have it.

Additionally, when you believe that because you want to succeed you have to do so, you will feel anxious rather than concerned about the prospect of not succeeding and depressed rather than disappointed if it turns out that you do not succeed. In other words, your negative emotions will be unhealthy rather than healthy and these unhealthy negative emotions, as they are known in RECBT, will get in the way of you processing and learning from your failure to succeed.

I hope you can see from this discussion that holding rigid beliefs will pose a significant obstacle to you developing inner strength in response to situations where you are tempted to take the easy way rather than the difficult path of pursuing your long-term goals. In contrast, holding flexible beliefs will help you to deal effectively with such temptations despite the fact that you will feel bad when doing so. It may surprise you that healthy negative feelings such as concern, sadness, remorse, disappointment, sorrow and healthy anger, jealousy and envy constitute a healthy feeling response to not giving in to these temptations. They are a realistic feeling response when your desires are not met and will also help give you the inner strength to stay on the path towards reaching your long-term goals. This will be a recurring theme in this book.

So your basic task here is to acknowledge your desires but to convince yourself that you don’t have to have these desires met, no matter how important they are to you. If you truly believe this, it will help you enormously to develop inner strength in the face of urges to stray from the path towards your long-term goals.

Non-awfulizing beliefs

When you hold a set of flexible beliefs which outline what you want in life¹ but do not demand that you get and you encounter some kind of obstacle to what you want, then you will make some kind of negative evaluation of this situation. You will think that it is bad or unfortunate that you are facing such an obstacle. However, if your evaluation is non-extreme then you will not think that it is terrible, awful or the end of the world that the obstacle has occurred. Having said this, the negativity of your evaluation will depend on the strength of your unmet desire, as shown in the following statements:

I very much wanted to get that promotion, but sadly I did not have to get it. It is very bad that I was not promoted, but it is not the end of the world.

I moderately wanted to be picked for the first team, but it wasn’t necessary that I was. It is bad not to be selected, but not terrible.

I mildly wanted to beat you at tiddlywinks, but it was not essential that I did. It is slightly bad that you beat me, but hardly awful.

Your negative evaluations can be extreme or non-extreme

As I have shown above, when you hold flexible beliefs then your negative evaluations of situations where you don’t get what you want (but do not need) are non-extreme. Even when your desire is very strong, when you hold them flexibly then your evaluations may be very negative, but they are still not extreme. They are not extreme because you are stating that they are not awful, terrible, or the end of the world.

However, you can make these negative evaluations extreme by transforming your flexible beliefs into rigid beliefs. As shown above, you particularly tend to do this when your desires are strong, as shown below:

Since I very much wanted to get that promotion, I absolutely should have got it and it is the end of the world that I didn’t.

Non-extreme negative evaluations are known as non-awfulizing beliefs. They are rational for three reasons:

1 Non-awfulizing beliefs are true Non-awfulizing beliefs are true because you acknowledge that no matter how bad it is to be deprived of what you want, it could be worse and therefore it is not terrible. As Smokey Robinson’s mother used to tell her son: ‘From the day you are born till you ride in the hearse, there’s nothing so bad that it couldn’t be worse.’

2 Non-awfulizing beliefs are sensible You recognize that there is a logical connection between it being bad not to get what you want and it not being awful.

3 Non-awfulizing beliefs are constructive When you believe that it is bad not to succeed, for example, but that it is not awful if this happens, then you will once again feel concerned but not anxious about the prospect of not succeeding, and disappointed but not depressed if it turns out that you do not succeed. In other words, your negative emotions will be healthy rather than unhealthy and these healthy negative emotions, as they are known in RECBT, will help you (1) to process and learn from your failure to succeed and (2) to apply this learning to future success-related situations.

Transforming negative evaluations into awfulizing beliefs

When your non-extreme evaluations are particularly negative it is easy for you to transform them into extreme awfulizing beliefs. Thus you believe: ‘It is very bad if I do not succeed and therefore it would be awful if this were to happen.’

When you make a negative evaluation extreme, your resultant awfulizing belief implies that nothing could be worse than not having your needs met.

Further, you make an illogical connection between it being bad not getting what you want (and think that you need) and it thus being awful. If you think about it, it really does not follow that because it is bad to be deprived of what you want (but do not need), it is therefore awful for this to happen.

Additionally, when you believe it is terrible not to succeed, you will feel anxious rather than concerned about the prospect of not succeeding and depressed rather than disappointed if it turns out that you do not succeed. In other words, your negative emotions will be unhealthy rather than healthy, and these unhealthy negative emotions will get in the way of you processing and learning from your failure to succeed.

Again, I hope you can see from this discussion that holding awfulizing beliefs will pose a significant obstacle to you dealing effectively with threats to you staying on the path towards your long-term goals. By contrast, holding non-awfulizing beliefs will help you to deal effectively with these threats despite the fact that you will feel bad when you go against your short-term goals.

So your basic task here is to acknowledge that it is bad when your desires are not met, but that it is not the end of the world when...

Table of contents

• Cover page
• About the author
• Overcoming common problems series
• Title page
• Imprint
• Table of contents
• 1. The foundations of inner strength
• 2. How to motivate yourself
• 3. How to discipline yourself
• 4. How to become more resilient
• 5. How to stand up for what you believe in
• 6. How to deal effectively with family pressure
• 7. How to assert healthy boundaries
• 8. Dealing with lapses in inner strength and preventing relapse
• Search items