Also, I’ve heard that people experience these things differently. Some people hear a voice. Some see an image. What I write here is how I experience these things. Your mileage may vary.

With that said, let’s get on to the terms.

Heart of Hearts: This is the part of yourself that can’t be fooled. It communicates in feelings. When you ask yourself a question it’s the flash of feeling you get before you can verbalize your answer.

Sometimes you won’t be able to hear your heart of hearts, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it doesn’t have anything to say. If you’re out of practice, for instance, it will probably be very quiet and you need to listen harder in order to hear it. It could also be that you can’t handle the truth.

In general your Heart of Hearts has something to say about everything, even something as mundane as brushing your teeth in the morning. Mine says “Yes, this is the right thing to be doing. Why are you asking me?” Of course, I’m translating from a feeling, I don’t actually have a little voice in my head.

Intuition: You may have wondered, how do you know when your heart of hearts has something to say? The answer is Intuition. Intuition, like your Heart of Hears communicates nonverbally, but to call that communication a feeling would be a bit strong. It’s the “something is not quite right here” “feeling”. It’s the part that tells you something you spelled doesn’t “look right”. Or says that 2 * 254 = 502 doesn’t look right.

When your Heart of Hearts has something to say, but doesn’t feel comfortable talking to you, your intuition will let you know.

Like the bunny in this picture, your Inner Bunny can be quite destructive if left to its own devices.

Inner Bunny: I haven’t actually used this term before, but I probably will in the future so here’s the definition. Your inner bunny is old old programming. It’s the part that tells you food is good, sex is good, sleep is good. It’s the part that really believes in fear. It’s the part that craves security.

Your inner bunny will have an immense amount of power over you if you don’t pay attention to it. And even if you do try to pay attention to it, more often than not it’ll run away because is it just got caught. Being found out about is scary! Like a cute little bunny, when it’s scared it needs to be petted and feel it’s secure. When Bunny feels secure Bunny will help you.

If you’re a fan of Seth Godin, you may recognize this term as “The Lizard Brain“. It’s the same thing, but has a more heartwarming connotation. And even if you want some ruthless visualization, you can always think of the Killer Bunny.

Intuition lets you know if you’re talking to your inner bunny. The big cues that you’re dealing with your inner bunny is irrational fear.

I sometimes confuse Heart of Hearts and Inner Bunny because they can answer your question at the same time. To illustrate, let’s say you’re going to give a presentation and you’re scared. You ask yourself “why am I scared”? Part of you says SCARED! FEAR! THIS IS THE WOST THING EVAR! That’s Inner Bunny. At the same time if you’re listening you’ll hear, “You’re scared because Inner Bunny says you’re scared”, and if you pay attention you’ll hear the implication that there’s no reason to be scared.

The two things aren’t the same thing. Your Heart of Hearts speaks from a place of calm. Your Inner Bunny is usually not very calm. But they do talk at the same time, and often your Heart of Hearts will point out that Inner Bunny is the one causing you trouble. Once you get used to listening to Bunny you won’t need to listen for Heart of Hearts because you’ll know what it has to say.

Subconscious: All of these things are part of your subconscious. Any part of your brain that speaks in feelings, I say is part of the subconscious. The part that controls how your limbs move or your automatic breathing function…. yeah not so much. Those things probably should have their own name, and for the time being “subconscious” isn’t one of them.

Of course, I’ve been using “subconscious” all willy-nilly like on the site, and I will fix that in the future. These parts really are different, and I intend to refer to them by name in the future.

Just changed the domain name of LVC to ThePathLessTraveled.net Reason: No one could pronounce LVC

There’s more to it than that, of course, but that’s the big one. For branding purposes, picking a French title was a bad idea. If people aren’t sure how to pronounce the domain name they won’t talk about it to anyone else. A ginormous drawback.

I decided to make the change now instead of when everything was totally ready (like a new front page, about page, theme, among other things) because I was tired of waiting to start building my blog. The domain name was holding me back. I had to get rid of that barrier. I had to change it now.

Why ThePathLessTraveled.net?

Because TheConsciousLife.net was taken.

Seriously though, I like “The Path Less Traveled” better as a name than “The Conscious Life”. TPLT is aspirational, visual, and has the right connotation. It’s about living a better life by taking the hard, good road. It’s about challenging yourself. It conjures a vision of a path in a forest full of obstacles that leads to something beautiful. “The Conscious Life”, on the other hand, is a bit vague. What does it mean to be live a conscious life? Would you know what a blog with that title was about? What image comes to mind? To the first two questions I have a vague notion of what it means to live consciously and what kind of content a blog with that title would have. As for images, nothing specifically comes to mind.

Oh, yeah, and there’s that Robert Frost poem, “The Road Not Taken”… The blog is practically automatically memorable.

The bottom line is this new title excites me. It makes me want to talk about my blog. It makes me want to promote my blog. I have confidence other people will be more inclined to talk about my blog with its new title.

New Feed Location

If you’re subscribed to the RSS feed, it’s in a new location. The old one will still work, but one day many moons from now I may retire it. Proceed at your own risk.

New Twitter Username Too

I changed my twitter username to niquepath. I went away from the “use my blog’s name” approach since thepathlesstraveled is so long–a definite negative on twitter. I’m also unlikely to want to use my name for anything else. If I feel the need to use twitter for Early Music stuff I can use blowthyhorn, which I already have registered.

If you’re already following me on twitter, you don’t have to change anything. It should have updated it automatically.

Yay changes!

If you want to take up running, but believe that if you do you’ll ruin your knees, you won’t run.

If you want to get out of debt but believe that your life won’t be fun anymore, you won’t get out of debt.

If you want to work on your blog daily, but believe your voice isn’t worth being heard, you won’t write.

Of course there are ways to combat each of these mental blocks. If you’re the runner afraid of bad knees you can run barefoot and take up Chi Running. If you’re afraid of deprivation but want to get out of debt you can work on paring down the stuff you don’t care about. (Is it possible to feel loss over something you don’t care about?) If you’re the insecure blogger you can practice writing in your journal or educated yourself so that you are worthy of being heard. The real problem is not the blocks themselves, it’s that we often don’t know when we are mentally misaligned.

So, how can you know when you’re mentally misaligned?

One way is to align your environment, try to achieve your goal, and see how you do. If you fail after aligning yourself with success, there’s a good chance your subconscious is working against you. Ask yourself why you think you failed. “I’m not disciplined enough” is not a good answer. Look deeper. Ask yourself why you don’t want to succeed. If you really can’t think of any reason why you aren’t able to achieve your goal, work more on aligning your environment. Then try again. If you fail again, and there’s still no physical reason why you’re failing, your subconscious is involved. Some part of you doesn’t want you to succeed.

Some good ways I’ve found to get my subconscious to reveal what it’s saying.

Thinking: Just plain old sitting around and thinking about it. I ask myself, “why am I failing at running” and I hear back “because I don’t feel good when I do it”, “because I’m afraid I’m doing it wrong and will injure myself”, “because if I go through the whole ritual (warm-ups and stretching) it eats my day”, … These are my mental blocks. This can be the fastest way to get answers from your subconscious, but in many situations it doesn’t work. For instance, if you feel embarrassed by a certain belief you need a lot of practice to be able to hear it. Thus, while this tool is very powerful, it won’t always work, especially if you don’t have much practice with it.

Writing: Writing acts as assisted thinking. Sometimes I have a lot of ideas floating in my head and I just need to get them all down somewhere. On paper, on the computer, doesn’t matter, just as long as I’m not thinking in circles. And once in a while I’ll get lucky. I’ll see something I’ve written down and a lightbulb will go off in my head. Maybe that embarrassing belief is now so painfully obvious I can’t miss it… or something.

Talking: As useful as thinking and writing are, they’re both solo activities. They work only as well as you know how to use them. Other people have the advantage of being able to see your subconscious at work. They can tell you you’re yelling when you don’t realize your are. They can tell you when you’re using negative language when you don’t realize it. They can tell you why they think  you’re having trouble completing a task. Sometimes they’ll even be right, but even when they aren’t, you’ll learn something.

Reading: When I’m really stuck, I turn to books. I’ll pick something related to solving my problem, and usually I’ll get some kind of insight while reading it. The book may not directly solve my problem, but, solely by virtue of being on the same topic, I’ll usually get at least one lightbulb moment. Going back to the running example, I know I want to run so I might read a book on running. While reading the chapter on “treating injuries” I might finally hear the little voice in my head complaining about ruining my body. In spite of the book not addressing that particular problem, I still would have had a realization about the problem.

In short, you can’t bust your mental blocks until you know what they are. Taking some time to think, write, talk, and read about the areas where you haven’t been successful can help you figure out what those blocks are. Once you know, the solution to your problem is usually straightforward.

6:30 AM: Alarm goes off.
6:30:01 AM: Kitty starts meowing because he either wants food or attention. It’s hard to tell which.
6:31 AM: Take my temperature. (Aaron and I use Fertility Awareness as birth control, so…)
6:35 AM: Get out of bed. Go downstairs to the kitchen to feed the cat.
6:37 AM: Almost trip down the stairs because of kitty.
6:40 AM: Actually feed cat. Look toward the basement and think about how good it will feel to use the exercise bike.
6:41 AM: Grab a glass of water and a book.
6:45 AM: Go downstairs and use exercise bike.

With this routine I can, with minimum resistance, accomplish two goals: get out of bed at 6:30AM and use the exercise bike daily. The reason this routine works is that my environment is well aligned with my goals.

Kitty acts as a cute, pitiful sounding alarm clock that sits outside the bedroom door and can’t be turned off unless I both get up and feed him. This is a huge incentive to complete the first goal: get out of bed at 6:30AM.

The location of the exercise bike helps me complete the second goal. It’s in the basement, and the stairs to the basement are in the kitchen. The kitchen is where I feed kitty, so the exercise bike is only down one flight of stairs. It’s easier to go there than it is to go back to bed.

Change these two things and the chances that I complete my goals drastically goes down.

If I fed kitty in the evening instead of in the morning he probably wouldn’t bother us at 6:30 AM, meaning I wouldn’t have my incentive to get up early in the morning. On the off chance that he did still bother us, that wouldn’t give me much incentive either. There’d be no specific task for me to do. He’d just be wanting attention. I don’t need to go downstairs to give him attention. Also attention is active. I can’t use the exercise bike while kitty’s wanting to be petted and played with. Feeding kitty in the morning is well aligned with my goals. Feeding him in the evening is not.

If the exercise bike was in one of the spare bedrooms (a legitimate place to put it) it’d be much harder to get me to use it. I’d no longer be choosing between an upward and downward stair-climb. The warm bed would be just as close as the bike. It’d be difficult to choose the bike.

Action for You! If there’s some goal you’d like to achieve, ask yourself if there’s any way you can rearrange your environment to make it easier for you to achieve it.

Chances are the first time you make a change it won’t work for very long. That’s OK. Just try something else until you find an arrangement that works for you. Eventually you will, and doing the things you want to do will be easy.

This isn’t a malicious tendency. I’m aligned with Truth. I want others to be too. It’s just not really all that effective. Ideally I’d be able to help people live up to their potential. Instead it hinders my ability to understand others and is arrogant and self-centered.  Arrogant because I don’t know everything. Self-centered because what makes sense for me won’t necessarily make sense for everyone.

Here’s something that’s gotten me in trouble before. I love cooking, I believe it enriches my life, and I believe it is the best way to ensure that the food you pay for comes from good sources. I feel very strongly about this and think a lot of people would do well to start doing their own cooking. Just because I believe this, though, doesn’t mean that everyone can, will, or should learn to cook for themselves. It’s certainly possible to live a good, happy life without every developing cooking skills. I have to be open to the idea that the person I encounter falls in this category.

For the most part I’ve learned to deal with this tendency. If you think you fall into this trap too, here’s some advice.

First, start noticing when you start judging other people. You can’t stop a habit if you don’t realize when you do it.

Second, when you notice you’re doing it, Bite your tongue before saying something you might regret.

Third, channel your energy into understanding them rather than preaching. People like feeling they’re understood, and you’ll be better able to give advice if you’re asked.

Also, remember that there no one right way to live. If someone is happy with the way their life is going, be happy for them. If they’re happiness doesn’t make sense to you, all the more reason to look for understanding.

When I have had success giving advice it’s because of done the following.

I Assumed I Didn’t Know the Whole Story

When someone comes to you for answers, it’s very easy to fall into the trap of giving them right away. That’s the natural course of the conversation. You’ve already got a pretty good idea of the issue is…

Instead you should make sure you understand the situation. Explain it to your friend in your own words. If you can’t get them to clarify. By doing this you double check your own understanding of the situation AND your friend can trust your understanding.

People are way more willing to heed the advice of someone who they believe understands their situation. I know I’m this way. What about you?

I Asked Them To Be Brutally Honest with Me

If your friend doesn’t like what you have to say, you need to hear it. There’s no way you can defend or amend your view if you don’t know what your friend thinks of it.

This of course means you need to be prepared for criticism. You need to be willing to adjust your advice to fit your friend. You need to take your ego out of the picture. It’s not about you or your ability to give good advice, it’s about your friend’s wellbeing. That’s the important thing, which leads to the next item on the list….

I Kept Their Best Interest at the Forefront

Again, it’s about your friend, not about you. Encourage them to live up to their potential. Give advice that makes sense given the information you now have.

Love them.

I Asked Lots of Questions

Ideally try to get them to solve their own problems. It’s more effective than telling them what to do (even if telling them what to do feels more satisfying).

I Offered to Be There for Them In the Future

Tell them that you’ll be there for them. Figuring out what you need to do to solve your problem can happen in an evening. Actually going out and solving it is often much harder. Your friends may fail, and when they do they’ll need someone to help get them back on the right track. That’s your job.

That’s all there is to it.

There are two parts to the process. The first is to be the kind of person who not only gives good advice, but gives it in such a way that it strengthens the relationship. The second step is to use the right words so they take the message the right way. In this post I’ll focus on cultivating the mindset. Next week’s will be on using the right words.

So let’s get to it! Below are things you can do to help yourself BE a better advice giver.

Ask your friend for advice

Chances are your friend has some area of expertise that they’re dying to give you advice on. Maybe they’re an excellent cook, and you have a complicated dinner party you’d like to prepare. Maybe they’re incredibly well organized, and you’d like to improve that in yourselves. Basically, humble yourself by asking them for advice. The idea here is that if your friend sees you humbling yourself, they’ll feel more comfortable doing the same with you.

One caveat: Don’t do it just to improve your chances at getting your friend to ask you for advice. That is, don’t ask them for advice on something you don’t need advice on. If your friend is a master chef, don’t ask him for advice if you have no actual interest in cooking. If you’re more organized than your friend, don’t ask them for advice on organizing… unless there’s something specific they do do that you’d like to do. Just be genuine when you ask for help.

If you aren’t being genuine, they’ll be able to tell, and you’ll get labeled as condescending, which… honestly… would be accurate. Your friendship can’t be very good if you can’t think of any area in which your friend can actually help you.

Again, the goal here is to be humble enough to ask for advice where you aren’t knowledgeable and to value your friend for what he/she is good at. It feels more comfortable to ask someone for advice if they owe you a favor and we like sharing/being valued for our passions.

Actively Work on That Area Yourself

Let’s say there’s something you specifically want to give your friend advice on, one of your first steps ought to do is to work on that area yourself. “Get the log out of your eye before telling your brother to get the speck out of his” and all that jazz. This has the benefit of establishing yourself as an expert (so you can actually give good advice), showing your friend that it’s alright to work on that area, and improving yourself in that area yourself. (If it’s good enough for your friend, it’s good enough for you, right?)

If you’re lucky you might even get some insight into why your friend is still struggling with it, although in my experience you probably won’t. You want to fix it right now, your friend doesn’t. Your experience will be fundamentally different. Resist the urge to get frustrated with them as that will make it harder to listen to them when they try to explain what’s stopping them.

Be Patient; Care But Not Too Much

Detach yourself from the situation. If the person you want to help sees that you care too much, they may avoid you even if you’re the best person to go to. Why? Because you’d put too much pressure on them to change, and not only to change but to do so at your pace. Think about it, why do many of us seek out self-help books or blogs instead of asking our friends and family for advice? One reason, of course, is that our friends and family don’t give great advice, but another is that they want too much for us to follow their advice. We don’t want to disappoint them if/when we fail the first time. We also don’t want to feel obligated to do it their way. Books don’t care if you disregard their advice.

When I’m trying to figure out who to go to for advice, I look for/expect three things in my advice-giver:

1. They’ll be supportive.
2. They’ll give me good, honest advice that’s in my best interest.
3. If I fall they’ll help me pick myself back up and try again.

If I suspected any of these is false, I probably won’t ask… and I won’t appreciate it if they give me their unsolicited thoughts. (Although I am trying to work on the last part.)

The only way to meet all three conditions is to be detached. I can’t really be supportive if I’m clouded by my own expectations. I can’t give good advice if I’m basing it on what I think the situation is. I can’t help them when they fall if I’m too frustrated when they do.

Nurture Your Love

Common advice for married couples is to put some time and effort into keeping the feeling alive. Focus on the things you enjoy about your partner. Do fun stuff. If you don’t you run the risk of only thinking about the qualities in your partner you don’t like.

This advice can be applied to all of your relationships, especially those where you’re starting to see the other person’s flaws. It’s important to remind yourself why you care. Like your significant other, you run risk of focusing on the negatives with your friends too. In addition you might start seeing them as your project, someone you want to fix to give you an ego boost. This is not good.

By nurturing the love, you remind yourself why you’re friends with this person and that they are your equal. They have as much to teach you, as you have to teach them. You respect them.

If you do all of these things you can be pretty certain that your intentions are aligned with good things. I think if any of my friends embodied these qualities, that is,

• They were humble enough to ask for help
• They were experts in or were working on an area I needed help with
• They were detached from the outcome of my situation
• I knew the loved and respected me

I wouldn’t hesitate to ask them for advice, since by doing this they would meet all of the criteria I mentioned earlier. And not only that, if they told me out of the blue that I was doing something that was self-defeating there’s a good chance I wouldn’t see it as a personal attack.

So, next week, you can look forward to a post on how to use the right words convey your advice and how to give them unsolicited advice.

Here’s the definition I’ll use, and for clarity I’ll use two generic names: Alice and Bob. When Alice is getting Bob to do something he wouldn’t ordinarily do, she is manipulating him.

It’s a pretty wide interpretation of manipulative. If Bob is biting his fingernails, and Alice tells him it’s bad for him, even that falls under this definition of manipulation. Her technique might not be effective, and she may be saying it for his benefit alone, but that’s besides the point. Alice is still trying to manipulate Bob. Alice is still trying to change Bob’s behavior.

The thing to realize here is that manipulation in this broad sense is part a part of life, and it’s not always a bad thing. In fact, it is often wise to allow yourself to be manipulated. If someone shows you that your behavior is not aligned with what you profess to believe, you’d do well to reconcile that. If someone is calling you to be a better person, you shouldn’t fight it just because someone else suggested it.

So the question is, what’s the difference between positive and negative manipulation? The answer is quite simple: positive manipulation is when someone gets you to do something that makes your life better in your eyes. Negative is when it makes your life worse in your eyes.

As far as your life is concerned the form of the manipulation really shouldn’t matter. If someone uses guilt to get you to do something you already know you ought to be doing, you should still do it. The key thing here is you know it’s the right thing to do. The fact that they used low-blow tactics is beside the point.

Similarly if someone appeals to your higher values–a method of manipulation I particularly like–and calls you to put more time into your non-profit group of choice, the time spent there may not be the best for you. If you already spend lots of hours at your day-job and then spend as many at your non-profit group your family and friends may get short shrift, and you may find that the new use of your time hasn’t made your life better. The fact that the person used a good method of manipulation is, again, besides the point.

In other words, when someone is attempting to get you to change your behavior it’s the content, not the form, that matters.

This changes, of course, when you’re the one trying to change someone else’s mind. The content is still very important, but most of us have a hard time taking advice that’s presented in the wrong way. If you want to be listened to you’d do well to get both content and form right. That’s what this Friday’s post will be about.

Pick an Area of Focus

It’s much easier to accept external feedback in an area if you’ve decided to focus on improving that area. The reason is that even if you’re the only person analyzing your work you need to be emotionally distanced enough to see where to improve. Putting your ego aside is a prerequisite. Once you’ve done that, it’s not too hard to accept other people’s advice too.

Another benefit of having picked a single area of focus is that you’ve already decided that this is an area worth working on. You aren’t waffling over whether or not you really want to improve. This is incredibly important. As I said earlier, many books (the Covey books come to mind… as well as Seth Godin’s) recommend you seek out advice from your boss on how to be a better employee. But what happens if you really aren’t sure you want to focus on your career? Are you really in a place to accept the feedback you’d get? Of course not!

I suppose it’s possible to pick an area to work on that you aren’t really comfortable working on. So, a rule of thumb: if thinking about working on an area makes you feel nauseated work on your emotional hangups first.

Pick a Person

The second method for getting used to receiving feedback is to pick a person to focus on deepening your relationship with … or several if you’re taking things really slowly. Obvious people are your significant other (how can I be a better partner?) and your kids (how can I be a better parent?), but you could add anyone: parents, siblings, friends, aunt, uncle, niece, nephew, grandparents, etc. Ask them how you could be a better friend to them. Or if you aren’t quite that bold, ask them for advice in areas where they have some experience or passion. If you’re having trouble keeping your resolution to stay fit, ask someone who is fit to help you out. Chances are they’ve been dying to give you advice for a while now.

The key here is to ask for advice from QUALIFIED people. I know it seems obvious, but it’s incredibly easy to forget this, especially if you have few people to turn to. Everyone has their blind spots. Your parents may be great at giving you advice on how to take care of your house, but maybe not so much on starting an unconventional career. Your best friend who’s many relationships haven’t lasted longer than 6 months many not be the best person to turn to for advice on how to keep the flame burning brightly in your long term relationship, but she’s probably a good person to turn to on how to handle life transitions. Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t seek out their take on things they aren’t really qualified to give advice on, it just means you should take it with a hefty dose of salt… especially if their advice trips your bad advice sensor.

You’ll find that when you express your willingness to change to your person of choice, amazing things will happen to your relationship with them. They’ll be more likely to open up to you about the misgivings they have with you in the hopes that you’ll listen and change your ways. When you do change for the better they’ll be very surprised and happy with you. At the same time they may be more open to receiving your advice too. You’ll feel free to be yourself around them and you’ll be able to confront them directly with your issues without worry that they’ll take your frustration to mean that you think they’re worthless.

In short, picking a single area of focus makes it such that you only have to put your ego aside in that area. It’s much easier to do that than to keep your ego aside everywhere. By picking one person to solicit feedback from, once you get used to asking them for feedback you’ll find it easier to do the same with more people. Basically these are good, not too painful places to start.

These days I’m fundamentally happy with myself, and I’ve found that being happy helps way more people than just me.

A Few Reasons You Should Work on Your Happiness

First off, when you’re happy you are more pleasant to be around. Misery may love company, but no one in a so-so mood really wants to be around someone who’s miserable. By being happy you either lift other people’s moods or frustrate them by showing them what they’re missing out on.

It’s only when you’re happy with life that you’re really, truly in a position to be able to help others. Oh, sure, there are plenty of people out there who bury themselves in their good works–doctors who work overly hard to avoid their family, teachers who focus more on their students than their own kids–but these people aren’t really doing as great work as they think they are. They send the message that you can’t have a good home-life and do great service for others.

If you don’t believe me, just think about your own life. When you’ve been depressed and sad, are you really in the best state of mind to help others? Are you really focused on other people’s best interest or are you actually just trying to distract yourself from your own issues?

When you need help, who would you rather receive advice from? Someone who’s fundamentally happy or someone who’s giving you attention to avoid dealing with their issues?

Is it even possible to be happy all the time?

The short answer is, it’s complicated. No one can feel happy 24/7. Feelings are fleeting. If you’ve got a stomach ache you’re not going to feel as good as when you don’t. If you lose someone close to you, you’ll probably feel sad. Etc.

It’s not really about feeling happy 24/7, though. It’s about your default mood in life being happy and content. It’s about feeling good about who you are and where you’re going. When you have positive feelings about these things, you general state will be positive… how can it not be? And speaking from experience, it is absolutely possible to have this be your default state.

How Does Being Happy Affect Your Motivation to Help Others

The happier you are with your own life the more you will want to help others. You’ll want people to experience the good things you are experiencing. You’ll want to do something about the suffering of others.

There’s more to it than that, though. Happiness is a stabilizer. When you feel happy you feel like you can take on the world. But too much stability is a recipe for boredom. If you’re too happy with your life, that happiness will make you unhappy. (Weird, I know… but life is weird that way.) If you’ve ever thought that the promise of eternal bliss in heaven sounded a bit boring, you’ll know what I mean. If I had to bet, I’d say this is a leading cause for why people who seem to have it all sometimes do incredibly stupid, self-defeating things.

If you’re wise you’ll channel the restless energy caused by too much personal happiness (stability) into finding a mission. As I said earlier, you’ll be frustrated by people you know who are suffering. Not to mention that there are plenty of things wrong with the world.

In short, the pursuit of your happiness increases your motivation and ability to help others. It’s not something you should ever feel guilty about.