Here are 3 universal principles on how to develop good relationships with everyone in your life:

Be quick to listen and slow to speak – in other words, be willing to listen, and listen well! Listening well to another person speak is the ultimate form of flattery and respect, because you show them they are important enough to pay attention to and spend some time with.

Listening well involves focusing on what the other person has to say, getting inside his or her head, and understanding things from their point of view. Being a good listener is not about thinking of what to say while the person is talking or interrupting in the middle of their sentences. That can come later.

Be a person of integrity – how many times have you been burned by people who say or promise one thing only to do another? Do you find them easy to like, and will you think of ever trusting them again? Probably not.

Say what you mean and mean what you say. Don’t make promises you can’t fulfill. Better yet, don’t promise anything at all.
Saying one thing and doing another has been the root of many a broken friendships, marriages, relationships, and homes.

How do you start becoming a person of integrity right now? Stay true to your marriage vows, get your child that treat or toy if you said so, and when you say you’ll pay what you owe or return what you borrowed, do so. you’ll be a better man or woman in the eyes of those around you.

Praise in public, constructively criticize in private – criticizing, condemning, or complaining solicits more resentment than real change.
Instead of opening your mouth the moment something negative pops up in your head, bite your tongue first, and try to understand them next.
If you have a solution in mind, speak that out instead, in a sarcastic and malicious-free way.

And if you really have to tell on or confront somebody, do so behind closed doors. If, on the other hand, you see something to commend, don’t let the good deed pass you by without singing their praises. Their regard for you (and their egos) will thank you for it.

Because the principles of good relationships are universal, if you can be good to one, you won’t have a hard time forming good relationships with almost all people in your life: be it with strangers, acquaintances, neighbors, friends, relatives, your kids, your spouse, and even your boss.

Visit Mark at effortlessabundance.com, and check out his new book, Thirty Days to Change Your Life or join his FREE 30 day programme.

Most of the habits we have cultivated have happened without much conscious awareness on our part. We have repeated behaviours so often without thinking much about it that they have become completely ingrained in us.

We often think of habits as being very difficult to break (and make), but it can be surprisingly easy to do so, if we go about things in the right way.
It is vital to realize that everything starts first in your mind. The way you think is the key to everything. Over many years – usually decades – we have driven deep grooves of thought into our mind. These pathways have become so well worn – we have become so used to them – that they seem completely natural .
Changing habits is about replacing these mental structures with others. We need to build new habitual ways of thinking. Sometimes this can happen naturally. We might encounter a crisis or other extreme situation which forces us to radically rethink and alter our beliefs. But this is rare and our beliefs can be extremely resistant to change. Even when faced with the most extreme situations, people will often still assimilate them into their current belief systems. It is better to take a systematic approach.

First, it is important to become conscious of our habitual ways of thinking. They are so ingrained and so deeply held that we usually don’t even notice them. This is not a bad thing – we have developed a framework of thought which enables us to navigate through life. The mental structures, the habitual ways of thinking we have developed probably did serve us at some point, but they often go ‘out of date,’ no longer serving any useful purpose, even getting in our way and making our lives worse. The framework usually becomes too fixed – we can become stuck in a holding pattern of redundant and self destructive habits. The first step to changing them is to become more self-aware.

Second, we need to let go of the idea that our ways of thinking correspond to reality. The mental pathways we have walked have become so familiar to us and we have used them to navigate through life and so, naturally enough, we tend to believe they are ‘right.’ But they are no more right than any other way of thinking we – and others – might have developed. It is absolutely crucial to accept the idea that our habitual thought patterns, or beliefs, do not correspond to reality. The map we have created in our mind to navigate through the world is not the territory.

Taking these steps and simply being open to the idea that the habits of thought we have developed are our own creation and can be changed can have miraculous results. Mental structures which might have served us once but no longer have any useful function can start to come down, and this can be immensely liberating.

There are various practical ways of ‘re-scripting’ your thought patterns, and different people will find different methods more or less effecitve. Affirmations and visualizations can be helpful, if executed correctly, as can the use of autohypnosis and the techniques of nerolinguistic programming (NLP).

But without the basic understanding that everything is created first in the mind, any efforts towards changing habitual behavior will be bound to fail.

Visit Mark at effortlessabundance.com, and check out his new book, Thirty Days to Change Your Life. Get his RSS feed here.

Our life is what our thoughts make it. Life is neither good or evil, but only a place for good and evil. ~Marcus Aurelius

A belief is something you consider to be true. You cannot decide to believe one thing this week and another, opposing thing, next week. You might think you can, but it really doesn’t work like that. I read recently that baby circus elephants are tied to a strong metal post with a heavy chain because they will try to escape and expend a lot of energy on pulling at their tether. After some time, they accept that they will not be able to escape and so stop pulling. The adult elephants are tethered to a wooden stake with a light rope: they could easily escape, but they believe they are unable to do so, and so the light tethering works as a kind of symbol of their bondage. It is clear that whether your beliefs are true or not is irrelevant. What matters is what you regard to be true. It seems to me that this is a good definition of ‘belief.’

People believe all sorts of things for all sorts of reasons. Some beliefs are trivial and others are very important, but two things are certain:

1. Our underlying beliefs operate at a deep, subconscious level, and
2. These underlying beliefs affect what we experience in life, including our level of success or failure in any endeavor.

Where do these beliefs come from?

Philip Larkin said ‘They f**k you up, your mum and dad.’ Which might seem a bit cruel, but then he did admit that ‘they do not mean to, but they do.’ What he’s saying, of course, is that we learn our worldview from our parents, and if our parents think that life is a struggle and that money and success don’t come easily, then this will be our ‘defaults mode,’ too. We spend many years being ‘drip fed’ these beliefs and they get embedded deep in our subconscious. It’s fine to say ‘just change your beliefs,’ but it’s not always so easy. We have picked up many limiting beliefs from parents, teachers, friends, religion (dare I say?) and society in general. Some of these beliefs are holding us back, so doesn’t it make sense that we should want to shed them?

Do we really want to get rid of these beliefs?

Actually, it’s not that simple. We can get a tremendous payback from some apparently harmful and limiting beliefs. I’m sure we all know people who seem to identify themselves as a victim, believing that they are helpless and needing someone to look after them or ‘save’ them. These people get a feeling of security (they don’t have to try to be better or take any risks because they know it’s pointless and they will fail), and they get people running around after them, looking after them.

We need to look at our beliefs and examine what kind of payback we are getting from them and so why we might not want to let go of them. Some examples of limiting beliefs might be:

• Everyone is selfish
• People are always trying to rip you off
• There isn’t enough to go around so you have to grab what you can
• You can be struck down by circumstances (illness, accident) at any time
• It’s not my fault that my life is like this

All of these beliefs do something for us; they give us some validation or some comfort. But they are simply beliefs. Deeply engrained, to be sure, but only beliefs and so susceptible to change. Shedding these beliefs may cause some pain, but growth is often accompanied by pain, and I am confident that they pain of growth is a small price for the loss of a lifetime of limitation.

Change your beliefs and change your life

And so that brings us to the good news – you CAN change your beliefs. I suggest three steps for doing this:

1. Identify a limiting belief (eg Things just happen. I’m not in control of my life)
2. Cast the belief in a different way (I am in control and I consciously orchestrate my experience)
3. Look around for evidence of this new belief. You WILL find it! After a while, this will sink in and you will start to think the new belief is ‘true.’

In a sense, I’m suggesting that you brainwash yourself. This may sound negative, but remember that you’ve already been brainwashed into negative thinking, so some reprogramming won’t hurt. Perhaps ‘condition yourself’ is a better phrase than ‘brainwash.’ It takes time, but you can do it if you really want to.

It is a shame that our vision can be so limited. Like the elephant, we can walk away from our tether any time, but we often don’t because we are shackled by our false and limiting beliefs.

I want to end with a wonderful fable from Anthony de Mello, a man who really seemed to understand the human condition.

An eagle lays an egg but somehow the egg finds its way into a chicken coup. A chicken incubates the egg with all her others and when it hatches, she rears the eaglet as if it were one of her own chicks. It learns to peck the dust for food, to flap its wings and to strut around the farmyard. One day, an eagle flies by overhead. The little eagle looks up and sees this, and says to himself, ‘I wish I were an eagle – how majestic, how free, how beautiful to be like that and have such a life.’ The eagle lived like a chicken and died like a chicken, because that’s hat he thought he was.

Visit Mark at effortlessabundance.com, and check out his new book, Thirty Days to Change Your Life. Get his RSS feed here.

Worrying is like a rocking chair, it gives you something to do, but it gets you nowhere. ~Glenn Turner

We live in a culture where everyone seems to worry. Turn on the news – someone got shot, there’s mercury in the fish we eat, the cows have got BSE, a new super-flu is coming, terrorists are regrouping, … On and on it goes. If you take all of this stuff seriously, it’s likely that you’ll never go out, never eat, never travel, never take any kind of risk at all.

I’ve no doubt that people have always worried. Dale Carnegie’s book ‘How to Stop Worrying and Start Living,’ which was published in 1944, is packed with stories from the early part of the twentieth century (and even earlier in some cases) about people who worried about all kinds of things. But in fact, as Carnegie so ably and amusingly points out through his many examples, worry makes no sense at all. Here are some reasons why worry really is a pointless and damaging activity. I suspect we all know this deep down, but a reminder doesn’t hurt.

Things never happen the way you imagine. When you worry, you are predicting the future. You are saying ‘I know that things will turn out badly.’ But this just isn’t the case. You have no idea how the future is going to turn out, except to say that it will not be what you think it will be. So why worry?

Worry means you give away your power. Some people are so entrenched in worry that they cannot see any other way to live. But worry robs you of your power to be proactive. The truth is that you are in control and you can choose how to react to situations, so why choose to give that power away so easily and so unconsciously?

Worrying is completely unproductive. Why waste your energy doing something that gets you nowhere. On a treadmill at least you get some exercise, but worry is a truly pointless activity. Spend your time and energy on something more useful.

Worry distorts reality. We live in an age where people live longer, have better access to health care, have more opportunity for personal and professional growth, more chance to travel, greater access to information and lifelong education, and many other wonderful things. Yes, there are risks and potential dangers, but worry magnifies these disproportionately and blinds us to the wonders of our age.

Worrying is bad for your health. Worry is not a normal state of mind, and it adversely affects your health, even your physical health. When you worry, physical changes are happening in your body which are very damaging. It increases stress which can increase blood pressure, cause higher levels of stomach acid, cause muscle tension and headaches, among many other things.

Worry is not natural. Do little children worry? Do animals worry? Do all adults worry? There is nothing inherent in being human that means you have to worry. Worry is a pathology, a distortion of our natural, healthy state.

Do you know the most frequent instruction given in the Bible? Surprisingly, it is not ‘love one another’ or ‘love God’ or anything like that. It is simply ‘do not be afraid.’ I don’t know how many times it appears, but I’ve seen estimates between 100 and 366 times. You don’t have to be religious to realize that this is good advice.

A wisw man called Mark Twain summed it all up. He wrote, ‘I have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.‘

Visit Mark at effortlessabundance.com, and check out Thirty Days to Change Your Life.

If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend six sharpening my axe (Abraham Lincoln).

Have you watched TV programmes like Downsize Me? I really enjoy watching this! People living unhealthy lives are given a lifestyle makeover and end up losing weight, and generally seeming very happy. Obviously they do make great strides over the two months they are being followed by the cameras, but I often wonder how many of these people go back to their old unhealthy ways once the TV cameras have left. The trouble is that these kind of programmes focus on external things – diet, exercise, giving up smoking – but they don’t address the inner world of the individuals they are seeking to treat. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with eating better, giving up smoking, drinking less and doing more exercise, but there’s something deeper here.

The connection between mind and body is becoming more accepted in mainstream medicine. If you think about it, this connection is pretty obvious. When you get excited or nervous or panicky, that feeling starts in your mind but has an immediate effect on your body. When you fall in love, you can feel it in your body. When you watch a sad movie, you might start to cry. When you find out you’ve won the lottery or got an ‘A’ grade in an exam, your heart will start to beat faster and you’ll feel all sorts of other physical effects.

R. Veenhoven carried out a scientific study of the effects of happiness on health and concluded that happy people are less likely to get sick and also that they live longer. The difference between happy and unhappy people was comparable to the difference between smokers and non-smokers in terms of life span. Veenhoven’s findings can be found in The Journal of Happiness Studies (yes there really is a scholarly journal about happiness!)
Our autopilot

We all run on subconscious programmes. It’s how we manage to survive in the world. If we had to think about everything we did, we wouldn’t be able to function – there would simply be too much to think about! Our subconscious takes control of much of our life so that, in essence, we are running on autopilot. Examples of these habitual patterns are being untidy, being late and being poor. All these things come from the subconscious mind. Being sick is also a subconscious habit. I’m not suggesting that all sickness has its origin in the mind (though it might, and many people believe this), but we all know people who constantly get sick, and if they were ever healthy for more than a few months, their subconscious mind would find a way of getting back on track by bringing along an illness of some kind.

Our subconscious scripts often come from our childhood and they were developed because they gave us an advantage. The benefits of being sick, as a child, are that (for example) people will pay more attention to you, you might get a day off school, you might get some special treats or you’ll get treated better than your siblings. I’m sure we all remember the sheer joy of days off school as a child because of some minor ailment. When we grow up, these scripts stay with us. Sometimes they can still confer an advantage on us – maybe we still get attention from our family or a day off work – but they may also be problematic and destructive to our lives.

The strange thing is that many of us (most of us, in fact) don’t realize this is what’s happening. We are not even aware of the autopilot and think that things are happening to us, and not that we are controlling the way things turn out. But the reality is that we are in control and we do have a choice.
How to re-script your subconscious

Viktor Frankl wrote that ‘between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.’

In that space, we can create ourselves anew. We need the right kind of self-talk. We talk to ourselves all day long, so we need to make sure we are saying the right things. We also see ourselves in certain scenarios in our mind’s eye. We need to make sure these visualizations are of what we want to achieve, how we want to feel and what sort of person we want to be. Ultimately, we are trying to construct a good self image. When we have clear image of the person we intend to be in our mind, then our subconscious will start to run that script and the image will become reality. A change in our mind will work its way out.

We need to take responsibility for our lives. Forcing ourselves to endure exercise and eat salad whilst all the time telling ourselves that we are unhealthy and unable to really change will get us nowhere. We need to do it the other way round – start off with the belief that we are fit and healthy, and this will become part of our reality. Spending a lot of time on our mental preparation makes all the difference to our success or failure. Sharpening the axe will make it a lot easier to cut down the tree

Visit Mark at effortlessabundance.com, and check out Thirty Days to Change Your Life.

There are several steps you can take which will enormously reduce – and often, completely eliminate – your fears.

First, you need to accept that you are in control, and that it is possible for you to overcome the fear. If there is anyone in the world who enjoys what you are afraid of, then it cannot be an inherently frightening thing. It is common, for example, to be very afraid of public speaking. There are, however, many people who love to speak in front of big crowds – they find it energizing and rewarding, and so public speaking cannot be frightening by nature: the fear is in your head. Once you truly believe this, overcoming fear is easier.

Secondly, you need to expose yourself to the things you fear. Don’t try to avoid them. Often, the anticipation of doing something is much worse that the thing itself. Jumping in and doing the things you fear will probably help you to realize that it isn’t so scary after all. The more you do it, the more relaxed you will become. It is quite possible that, after the first time, you will start to enjoy it. When I was a child, I was terrified of jumping into a swimming pool. One day, I was forced to do it and, after (quite literally) taking the plunge, I found it was a great experience, so I immediately lined up for another go!

The real key to overcoming your fears, however, is to deal with the images you have inside your head. People with phobias almost always carry around absurdly exaggerated images of the things for which they have a morbid fear. A spider, for example, will be imagined up close, in great detail and vivid colour, perhaps accompanied by frightening sounds. By deliberately changing the way such a person thinks of spiders – by reducing the size and contrast of the image, turning the spider into a comedy image, playing some amusing music as the image appears, etc. – the fear can be reduced enormously. Similar techniques can be used to overcome fear in just about any shape or form.

Techniques such as neurolinguistic programming (NLP) can be very beneficial in overcoming fear. NLP is fast, simple and has been shown to be highly effective. For years, many people have been hostage to their own thoughts – by taking back control and consciously changing the way we think, overcoming fear can be simple.

Mark Harrison writes for a number of well known self-improvement sites. His home on the web is EffortlessAbundance.com. Check out his latest book, Thirty Days to Change your Life.

Real, deep relaxation is probably something many of us rarely experience. It is a state in which tension is absent from the muscles, and where the mind is at ease, free from worry and negative self-talk. It is, therefore, both a physical and a psychological state.

The physical effects of stress are well documented. One of the main effects of stress in an increase in blood pressure, which can contribute to the development of heart disease and hence increase the risk if associated acute conditions such as stroke.

Being properly relaxed has tangible and clear health benefits – people with so-called ‘type B’ personalities tend to have a lower incidence of heart disease. Being more relaxed will also allow you to concentrate better, give you greater immunity to disease, help you to be more efficient and effective, and reduce pain.

Relaxing is not very difficult – it is a natural and normal state, and all you really need to relax properly is the right state of mind. A quiet place, a comfortable chair and no mental stimulation will help, but it is quite possible to be relaxed in any situation if you are thinking in the right way and, for me, this means keeping things in perspective.

Sometimes, things happen in our lives which suddenly give us a greater level of perspective, but consciously and deliberately using a simple technique of ‘zooming out’ and seeing things from a bird’s eye view might help to reduce your stress levels.

The things we tend to worry or get stressed about are almost always fairly trivial. Try to remember what you were worried about a few months, or even a few years ago. Can you recall? If you can, do those things matter now? Now, see yourself in the future. Do the things you are worrying about now matter to your future self? By not identifying so strongly with the details of your situation, things will become easier. In other words, you need to care less about what is currently happening in your life.

Imagine ‘zooming out’ from your current life situation – you are an outside observer, looking on at the details of your life and, as you get further and further away, the details become less clear. Instead of being lost in the maze, you can see, from your bird’s eye vantage point, the whole maze and how to get out. You can now see the wood instead of just the trees.

Try sitting quietly for a few moments and ‘zooming out.’ With a little practice, you will be able to do this anywhere, even in situations which you normally find very stressful and difficult to deal with. It can make a huge difference to your life.

Mark Harrison writes at effortlessabundance.com. Check out his latest book, Thirty Days to Change Your Life.

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More From Mark Harrison:

1. Personality: The Myth of Permanence
2. Looking on the Bright Side
3. Better Relationships: Seeing Coercion For What It Is
4. Taking Back Control: Being Proactive in Daily Life
5. Laughter Really Might be the Best Medicine
6. The Importance of Gratitude

This belief is underpinned by a wide range of research into and theories about personality and, although there is an ongoing debate about whether it is more a matter of ‘nature’ or ‘nurture,’ there is little disagreement about the limited extent to which adult’s generally change their personality.

In some exceptional cases personality does change suddenly and completely. Phineas Gage, an often quoted case study, was the victim of a freak accident in which a metal bar was driven through his skull, destroying a section of his frontal lobe; after the accident, which he remarkably survived, his friends commented that he became a completely different person. Other instances involving disease or the use of drugs can effect significant personality change, but it is not a generally observed phenomenon under normal circumstances.

This does not mean, however, that personality cannot be changed. Most people make little, if any, conscious effort to change themselves ‘on the inside,’ and the theories we use to inform our thinking about personality – notably those of B. F. Skinner, Sigmund Freund, Carl Jung and Carl Rogers – were developed a long time ago, and may reflect a more stable world view. Things have changed a great deal in the past few decades – the world is rapidly evolving and interconnected in ways never dreamed about a few years ago, and success in this kind of fluid environment requires that people be more rapidly adaptable and flexible.

It is one of the tenets of the relatively young ‘positive psychology’ field that we have control over our own lives, and that our experience of life is, in a sense, a reflection of our inner world. The beliefs that make up our internal landscape are what regulate our behavior and our perception of ourselves and others. It is our beliefs that underpin our personality and beliefs, like many other aspects of the self, are susceptible to change. They can change in response to something that appears to happen by chance, such as an illness or a ‘religious’ or spiritual experience, for example, but they can also be changed consciously. Carol Dweck, a psychologist at Stanford, writes in a paper on the possibility of changing personality that ‘beliefs matter, beliefs can be changed, and when they are, so too is personality’

The first and most important step is becoming more self-aware. Often, we are used to reacting to situations in an unconscious and reactive way, but just observing these habitual tendencies without comment or criticism is half the battle. Until you know yourself, you cannot change, and the most self-aware people are by far the most likely to change. The act of observation – becoming more aware of your behavior, your reactions and, therefore, the beliefs which drive them – will naturally cause change to arise. When you truly see how limiting some of your beliefs are they will start to fall away. New and more empowering beliefs about will rise up to replace them.

It is helpful to think of beliefs as perspectives, and these can change. If you move, so does your view – the reality stays the same, but your perception of it is different. A failure can be another piece of evidence to support the belief that nothing ever goes right, or it can be a learning experience, something to build on and something which leads to a better place in the end. When I was first applying for jobs in my last year of university (a long time ago!) I was rejected many times, but finally found a post which, in the end, led me to a new life, a new home and a great relationship. Without the numerous job rejections, none of this would have happened. The glass was most certainly half full!

Other beliefs about, for example, how outgoing you are, what other people are like, how the world operates, our relationship with money, health and so on, are also essentially matters of perspective. Changing these beliefs by shifting perspective is possible and, in many cases, not very difficult but, as with anything worth doing, it takes time and patience.

On my windowsill I have a little potted plant. Someone gave it to me many years ago and I have kept it with me, for no particular reason, through several changes of apartment. I have watered it each week over all those years and, a couple of months ago, a few buds began to appear on one of the stems which was snaking up from the base of the plant. Within a few more weeks, several dark purple flowers started to appear, and now there are five beautiful, delicate flowers, leaning towards the light. They have been there for a while and show no signs of fading away.

Nature is capable of great change and of astonishing beauty, but this change can take time. Our beliefs are like well worn tracks across a field. We are familiar with them and we have walked these tracks for so long that they seem permanent. In reality, they are temporary and other tracks are possible. It is all a matter of choice. If your personality is not serving you, new tracks can be made and, in time, become just as familiar.

Being proactive and taking control of your inner world is becoming more important as the world gets ever more complex and fluid. Personality is more dynamic, subtle and open to change than we might think – it does not define us, but it should serve us.

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References:

1. Dweck, C. S. (2007). Can Personality be C hanged? Stanford University.

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More From Mark Harrison:

1. Looking on the Bright Side
2. Better Relationships: Seeing Coercion For What It Is
3. Taking Back Control: Being Proactive in Daily Life
4. Laughter Really Might be the Best Medicine
5. The Importance of Gratitude

The Newspaper I was flicking through today carried an article claiming that people in Hong Kong are generally least happy in May and June. This is just the opposite of what I expected since, to me, since summer is associated with holidays and nice, sunny weather. Also, it’s the time I get to go back to the UK to see my family for a few weeks. The cause of these ‘summer blues’ is a bit of mystery. It could be that people get more depressed since there is no long holiday to look forward to – most people here work throughout the summer – and the weather is getting worse – hot, humid and unpleasant with lots of rain and storms.

Martin E.P. Seligman, a pioneer of the movement called Positive Psychology, has tried to find out what makes us happy, and has come up with a list. Rather surprisingly, the list does not include money or health, but it does include being surrounded by family and friends, and judging ourselves by our own standards rather than trying to live up to the expectations of others. He also notes that people are also happy when they are engaged in activities which require a lot of concentration, such as playing a musical instrument or doing puzzles.

Patricia Bowmer, in her book In Pursuit of Joy: Life Lessons From Exhilaration, tells us that it is human nature to dwell on what is going wrong and suggests that taking a few minutes each week to write down three or four things you are grateful for can make a great deal of difference to the state of your mental health. Here are a few questions to ask yourself when you’re feeling a bit down.

• Are you fit and healthy?
• Do you have a family?
• Do you have any friends?
• Do you have enough to eat?
• Do you have a job or an income?
• Have you had an education?
• Can you read and write?

Pondering on these things is certain to make you feel happier. But why is gratitude such a powerful thing?

Life tends to give us what we subconsciously expect. Our experience of life, we could say, is a reflection or an echo of our inner world. So in order to attract and experience good things, we need to feel that we already have them. And this is just another way of saying we need to adopt an ‘attitude of gratitude.’

If it is your belief that you lack things, then that will be your experience of the world. If you think you are missing out on something, then you will not attract – or not notice – opportunities in your life. You will fail to see that you are in the right place at the right time. You will not see the significance in certain events or people coming your way.

If you value something very highly, if you treasure it and are grateful for it, then it is likely that it will grow and become more powerful since you are giving your attention and energy to it. This is true of everything in life – friendships, health, happiness and wealth.

All the great spiritual teachers have shown us that we need to be grateful for what we have. The grace before meals, for example, which I used to recite parrot fashion as a child, goes, ‘for what we are about to receive may the lord make us truly grateful.’ As a kid, I never understood why it was so important.

Of course, there are things currently lacking – life is not as we might wish it to be. But life is what it is at the moment, and to kick against it just causes more pain. The only sensible thing to do is to focus on what is good, to see the positive side, that the glass is half filled and not half empty. It is also useful to remember that life will never be complete – there is no such thing, because life is a creative endeavor and there is always more to do: we never get it done. This is why life is such a wonderful adventure.

Viktor Frankl said that between stimulus and response there is a gap, and within that gap is our whole experience of life. He discovered that happiness does not lie outside in the world; it lies within. Perhaps the level of happiness in cities like Hong Kong would increase if people just looked on the bright side a bit more. So what’s it to be? What will you focus on today?

Mark’s home on the web is EffortlessAbundance.com. You can read more in his latest book, Thirty Days to Change Your Life.

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5. What Can Distortion Of The Truth By The Government And The Media Teach Us About Our Personal Relationships?

William Glasser’s book ‘Choice Theory’ offers a new way of looking at relationships.

His basic insight is that we are free to change ourselves but cannot change anyone else. Even a man with a gun to his head cannot be forced to act against his will.

Because we are free (although perhaps not completely so) to make choices about our own thoughts and actions, it must be true that everyone else has this freedom too, and so we cannot interfere with it.

Because we are free (although perhaps not completely so) to make choices about our own thoughts and actions, it must be true that everyone else has this freedom too, and so we cannot interfere with it.

According to Glasser, despite this fact, most people have been raised on the basis of ‘external control psychology,’ where coercion has been used to condition our behavior. As kids, we were rewarded for behavior our parents, teachers and other authority figures deemed desirable, and punished for what they thought of as undesirable. In other words, we have been conditioned like Pavlov’s dogs, salivating at the sound of a bell. It worked on us to some extent, and so, naturally, we copy this method and often seek to control other people, sometimes in very subtle ways.

However, this kind of external control comes with a cost: it is always damaging to our relationships and, in the end, leads to breakdown and unhappiness. The most pernicious thing of all is that, since we have been raised on coercion, we can be completely unaware that we are using this tactic to try to get what we want.

It is, perhaps, easier to spot coercion when we are on the receiving end. There are many ways in which people might try to control you. There are plenty of physically abusive relationships, of course, where direct threats and violence are the weapons of choice, but other tools people use are subtler and can be harder to spot. Examples are:

1. Being remote – keeping others at an emotional distance, never disclosing too much, setting up a persona of mystery.
2. Being scarce – always seeming to have other friends and acquaintances, other (and, by implication, better) places to go and being to be with.
3. Instilling jealousy – flirting with other people, or subtly threatening to do so.
4. Unpredictability – running around, being hard to pin down, and missing appointments and dates.

There are all kinds of other strategies people use. Many of us are so used to this kind of coercion that when we come across an idea like choice theory which asserts that we are, essentially, free agents, we may find it hard to accept that we need not dance to any one else’s tune. But the reality is that, although we are interconnected and we rely on each other, we need not play these games.

One of the most common way we have of manipulating others is using approval, bestowing and withdrawing it according to the kind of behavior we experience. But approval is always an illusion – it is impossible to win the approval of other people in a permanent way, and trying to achieve it is like running on a treadmill – it wears you out and gets you nowhere.

What can you do to free yourself from these control games?

People who have been the victim of controlling and manipulative behaviour can be disparaging about anyone who is open and shows genuine love. But such people, far from being the ‘losers’ they can be labeled as, make for more supportive and secure relationships. Spending time with people who treat you well and accept you as you are is very helpful and will enable you to see that coercion is not the only way to operate.

There is always a way of explaining away the behavior of a controlling person, especially if this person is a partner or a family member, and there are no end of reasons for accepting this behavior. But while you’re making excuses, the coercion and the exhausting race to keep up goes on.  Stop making excuses. If someone is playing control games with you, maybe it’s time to get out.

We all stay in relationships because we are getting something out of them. These pay offs may be obvious – does he or she look good? Do they impress other people? – or they might be more subtle. Try to make a list and then at least you know what you would be losing if the relationship ended. Is this really worth hanging onto? Is it worth your freedom?

Glasser writes that ‘caring for but never trying to own may be a way to define friendship.’ It may seem hard to accept that some of our relationships – perhaps our closest ones – are coercive and contain the seeds of their own demise, but facing up to this reality could be the only option if we wish to thrive.

Mark’s home on the web is EffortlessAbundance.com. You can read more in his latest book, Thirty Days to Change Your Life.

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