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101

ESSAYS

that will

CHANGE

the way

YOU THINK
BRIANNA WIEST

THOUGHT CATALOG BOOKS
Copyright © 2016 by Brianna Wiest
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101 ESSAYS

that will

CHANGE

the way

YOU THINK
Brianna Wiest

INTRODUCTION
In his book Sapiens, Dr. Yuval Noah Harari explains that at one point, there
were more than just Homo sapiens roaming the Earth
1
. In fact, there were
likely as many as six different types of humans in existence: Homo sapiens,
Homo neanderthalensis, Homo soloensis, Homo erectus, etc.
There’s a reason Homo sapiens still exist today and the others didn’t
continue to evolve: a prefrontal cortex, which we can infer from skeletal
structures. Essentially, we had the ability to think more complexly, thus
were able to organize, cultivate, teach, practice, habituate and pass down a
world suited for our survival. Because of our capacity to imagine, we were
able to build Earth as it is today out of virtually nothing.
In a sense, the notion that thoughts create reality is more than just a nice
idea; it’s also a fact of evolution. It was because of language and thought
that we could create a world within our minds, and ultimately, it is because
of language and thought that we have evolved into the society we have
today—for better and for worse.
Almost every great master, artist, teacher, innovator, inventor, and
generally happy person could attribute some similar understanding to their
success. Many of the world’s ‘best’ people understood that to change their
lives, they had to change their minds.
These are the same people who have communicated to us some of the
longest-standing conventional wisdom: that to believe is to become, that the
mind is to be mastered, that the obstacle is the way
2
. Often, our most intense
discomfort is what precedes and necessitates thinking in a way we have
never conceived of before. That new awareness creates possibilities that
would never exist had we not been forced to learn something new. Why did
our ancestors develop agriculture, society, medicine, and the like? To
survive. The elements of our world were once just solutions to fears.
In a more cerebral context, if you consciously learn to regard the
“problems” in your life as openings for you to adopt a greater understanding
and then develop a better way of living, you will step out of the labyrinth of
suffering and learn what it means to thrive.
I believe that the root of the work of being human is learning how to
think. From this, we learn how to love, share, coexist, tolerate, give, create,
and so on. I believe the first and most important duty we have is to actualize
the potential we were born with—both for ourselves and for the world.

The unspoken line of everything I write is: “This idea changed my life.”
Because ideas are what change lives—and that was the first idea that
changed mine.
Brianna Wiest — July 2016
1 Harari, Yuval Noah. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. 1st Edition. 2015. Harper.
2 Holiday, Ryan. The Obstacle Is The Way. 2014. Portfolio.

1
SUBCONSCIOUS

BEHAVIORS

that are

KEEPING YOU

from HAVING

THE LIFE

YOU WANT
Every generation has a “monoculture” of sorts, a governing pattern or
system of beliefs that people unconsciously accept as “truth.”
It’s easy to identify the monoculture of Germany in the 1930s or America
in 1776. It’s clear what people at those times, in those places, accepted to be
“good” and “true” even when in reality, that was certainly not always the
case.
The objectivity required to see the effects of present monoculture is very
difficult to develop. Once you have so deeply accepted an idea as “truth” it
doesn’t register as “cultural” or “subjective” anymore.
So much of our inner turmoil is the result of conducting a life we don’t
inherently desire, only because we have accepted an inner narrative of
“normal” and “ideal” without ever realizing.
The fundamentals of any given monoculture tend to surround what we
should be living for (nation, religion, self, etc.) and there are a number of
ways in which our current system has us shooting ourselves in the feet as
we try to step forward. Here, 8 of the most pervasive.
01. You believe that creating your best life is a matter of deciding what
you want and then going after it, but in reality, you are
psychologically incapable
1
of being able to predict what will make
you happy.
Your brain can only perceive what it’s known, so when you choose
what you want for the future, you’re actually just recreating a

solution or an ideal of the past. When things don’t work out the way
you want them to, you think you’ve failed only because you didn’t
re-create something you perceived as desirable. In reality, you likely
created something better, but foreign, and your brain misinterpreted
it as “bad” because of that. (Moral of the story: Living in the
moment isn’t a lofty ideal reserved for the Zen and enlightened; it’s
the only way to live a life that isn’t infiltrated with illusions. It’s the
only thing your brain can actually comprehend.)
02. You extrapolate the present moment because you believe that
success is somewhere you “arrive,” so you are constantly trying to
take a snapshot of your life and see if you can be happy yet.
You convince yourself that any given moment is representative of
your life as a whole. Because we’re wired to believe that success is
somewhere we get to—when goals are accomplished and things are
completed—we’re constantly measuring our present moments by
how “finished” they are, how good the story sounds, how someone
else would judge the elevator speech. We find ourselves thinking:
“Is this all there is?” because we forget that everything is transitory,
and no one single instance can summarize the whole. There is
nowhere to “arrive” to. The only thing you’re rushing toward is
death. Accomplishing goals is not success. How much you expand
in the process is.
03. You assume that when it comes to following your “gut instincts,”
happiness is “good” and fear and pain are “bad.”
When you consider doing something that you truly love and are
invested in, you are going to feel an influx of fear and pain, mostly
because it will involve being vulnerable. Bad feelings should not
always be interpreted as deterrents. They are also indicators that you
are doing something frightening and worthwhile. Not wanting to do
something would make you feel indifferent about it. Fear = interest.
04. You needlessly create problems and crises in your life because
you’re afraid of actually living it.
The pattern of unnecessarily creating crises in your life is actually
an avoidance technique. It distracts you from actually having to be
vulnerable or held accountable for whatever it is you’re afraid of.
You’re never upset for the reason you think you are: At the core of

your desire to create a problem is simply the fear of being who you
are and living the life you want.
05. You think that to change your beliefs, you have to adopt a new line
of thinking, rather than seek experiences that make that thinking
self-evident.
A belief is what you know to be true because experience has made it
evident to you. If you want to change your life, change your beliefs.
If you want to change your beliefs, go out and have experiences that
make them real to you. Not the opposite way around.
06. You think “problems” are roadblocks to achieving what you want,
when in reality they are pathways.
Marcus Aurelius sums this up well: “The impediment to action
advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.” Simply,
running into a “problem” forces you to take action to resolve it.
That action will inevitably lead you to think differently, behave
differently, and choose differently. The “problem” becomes a
catalyst for you to actualize the life you always wanted. It pushes
you from your comfort zone, that’s all.
07. You think your past defines you, and worse, you think that it is an
unchangeable reality, when really, your perception of it changes as
you do.
Because experience is always multi-dimensional, there are a variety
of memories, experiences, feelings, “gists” you can choose to
recall…and what you choose is indicative of your present state of
mind. So many people get caught up in allowing the past to define
them or haunt them simply because they have not evolved to the
place of seeing how the past did not prevent them from achieving
the life they want, it facilitated it. This doesn’t mean to disregard or
gloss over painful or traumatic events, but simply to be able to
recall them with acceptance and to be able to place them in the
storyline of your personal evolution.
08. You try to change other people, situations, and things (or you just
complain/get upset about them) when anger = self-recognition.
Most negative emotional reactions are you identifying a
disassociated aspect of yourself.

Your “shadow selves” are the parts of you that at some point you were
conditioned to believe were “not okay,” so you suppressed them and have
done everything in your power not to acknowledge them. You don’t actually
dislike these parts of yourself, though. So when you see somebody else
displaying one of these traits, it’s infuriating, not because you inherently
dislike it, but because you have to fight your desire to fully integrate it into
your whole consciousness. The things you love about others are the things
you love about yourself. The things you hate about others are the things you
cannot see in yourself.
1 Gilbert, Daniel. Stumbling on Happiness. 2007. Random House.

2
The PSYCHOLOGY

of DAILY ROUTINE
The most successful people in history—the ones many refer to as
“geniuses” in their fields, masters of their crafts—had one thing in
common, other than talent: Most adhered to rigid (and specific) routines.
Routines seem boring, and the antithesis to what you’re told a “good life”
is made of. Happiness, we infer, comes from the perpetual seeking of
“more,” regardless what it’s “more” of. Yet what we don’t realize is that
having a routine doesn’t mean you sit in the same office every day for the
same number of hours. Your routine could be traveling to a different
country every month. It could be being routinely un-routine. The point is
not what the routine consists of, but how steady and safe your subconscious
mind is made through repetitive motions and expected outcomes.
Whatever you want your day-to-day life to consist of doesn’t matter, the
point is that you decide and then stick to it. In short, routine is important
because habitualness creates mood, and mood creates the “nurture” aspect
of your personality, not to mention that letting yourself be jerked around by
impulsiveness is a breeding ground for everything you essentially do not
want.
Most things that bring genuine happiness are not just temporary,
immediate gratifications, and those things also come with resistance and
require sacrifice. Yet there is a way to nullify the feeling of “sacrifice” when
you integrate a task into the “norm” or push through resistance with
regulation. These, and all the other reasons why routine is so important (and
happy people tend to follow them more).
01. Your habits create your mood, and your mood is a filter through
which you experience your life.
It would make sense to assume that moods are created from
thoughts or stressors, things that crop up during the day and knock
us off-kilter. This isn’t so. Psychologist Robert Thayer argues that
moods are created by our habitualness: how much we sleep, how
frequently we move, what we think, how often we think it, and so

on. The point is that it’s not one thought that throws us into a tizzy:
It’s the pattern of continually experiencing that thought that
compounds its effect and makes it seem valid.
02. You must learn to let your conscious decisions dictate your day—
not your fears or impulses.
An untamed mind is a minefield. With no regulation, focus, base or
self-control, anything can persuade you into thinking you want
something that you don’t actually. “I want to go out for drinks
tonight, not prepare for that presentation tomorrow” seems valid in
the short-term, but in the long-term is disastrous. Going out for
drinks one night probably isn’t worth bombing a super important
meeting. Learning to craft routine is the equivalent of learning to let
your conscious choices about what your day will be about guide
you, letting all the other, temporary crap fall to the wayside.
03. Happiness is not how many things you do, but how well you do
them.
More is not better. Happiness is not experiencing something else;
it’s continually experiencing what you already have in new and
different ways. Unfortunately as we’re taught that passion should
drive our every thought move and decision, we’re basically impaled
with the fear that we’re unhappy because we’re not doing “enough.”
04. When you regulate your daily actions, you deactivate your “fight or
flight” instincts because you’re no longer confronting the unknown.
This is why people have such a difficult time with change, and why
people who are constant in their habits experience so much joy:
simply, their fear instincts are turned off long enough for them to
actually enjoy something.
05. As children, routine gives us a feeling of safety. As adults, it gives
us a feeling of purpose.
Interestingly enough, those two feelings are more similar than you’d
think (at least, their origin is the same). It’s the same thing as the
fear of the unknown: As children, we don’t know which way is left,
let alone why we’re alive or whether or not a particular activity
we’ve never done before is going to be scary or harmful. When
we’re adults engaging with routine-ness, we can comfort ourselves
with the simple idea of “I know how to do this, I’ve done it before.”

06. You feel content because routine consistently reaffirms a decision
you already made.
If said decision is that you want to write a book—and you commit
to doing three pages each night for however long it takes to
complete it—you affirm not only your choice to begin, but your
ability to do it. It’s honestly the healthiest way to feel validated.
07. As your body self-regulates, routine becomes the pathway to
“flow
2
.”
“Flow” (in case you don’t know—you probably do) is essentially
what happens when we become so completely engaged with what
we’re doing, all ideas or worries dissolve, and we’re just completely
present in the task. The more you train your body to respond to
different cues: 7 a.m. is when you wake up, 2 p.m. is when you start
writing, and so on, you naturally fall into flow with a lot more ease,
just out of habit.
08. When we don’t settle into routine, we teach ourselves that “fear” is
an indicator that we’re doing the wrong thing, rather than just being
very invested in the outcome.
A lack of routine is just a breeding ground for perpetual procrastination. It
gives us gaps and spaces in which our subconscious minds can say: “well,
you can take a break now,” when in fact, you have a deadline. But if you’re
used to taking a break at that point in time, you’ll allow it simply because
“you always do.”
2 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. 2008. Harper Perennial
Modern Classics.

3
10 THINGS

EMOTIONALLY

INTELLIGENT

PEOPLE

do not DO
Emotional intelligence is probably the most powerful yet undervalued trait
in our society.
We believe in rooting our everyday functions in logic and reason, yet we
come to the same conclusions after long periods of contemplation as we do
in the blink of an eye
3
. Our leaders sorely overlook the human element of
our sociopolitical issues and I need not cite the divorce rate for you to
believe that we’re not choosing the right partners (nor do we have the
capacity to sustain intimate relationships for long periods of time).
It seems people believe the most intelligent thing to do is not have
emotions at all. To be effective is to be a machine, a product of the age. A
well-oiled, consumerist-serving, digitally attuned, highly unaware but
overtly operational robot. And so we suffer.
Here are the habits of the people who have the capacity to be aware of
what they feel. Who know how to express, process, dismantle, and adjust
their experience as they are their own locus of control. They are the true
leaders, they are living the most whole and genuine lives, and it is from
them we should be taking a cue. These are the things that emotionally
intelligent people do not do.
01. They don’t assume that the way they think and feel about a situation
is the way it is in reality, nor how it will turn out in the end.
They recognize their emotions as responses, not accurate gauges, of
what’s going on. They accept that those responses may have to do
with their own issues, rather than the objective situation at hand.
02. Their emotional base points are not external.

Their emotions aren’t “somebody else’s doing,” and therefore
“somebody else’s problem to resolve.” Understanding that they are
the ultimate cause of what they experience keeps them out of falling
into the trap of indignant passivity: Where one believes that as the
universe has done wrong, the universe will ultimately have to
correct it.
03. They don’t assume to know what it is that will make them truly
happy.
Being that our only frame of reference at any given time is what’s
happened in the past, we actually have no means to determine what
would make us truly happy, as opposed to just feeling “saved” from
whatever we disliked about our past experiences. In understanding
this, they open themselves up to any experience that their life
evolves toward, knowing there are equal parts good and bad in
anything.
04. They don’t think that being fearful is a sign they are on the wrong
path.
The presence of indifference is a sign you’re on the wrong path.
Fear means you’re trying to move toward something you love, but
your old beliefs, or unhealed experiences, are getting in the way.
(Or, rather, are being called up to be healed.)
05. They know that happiness is a choice, but they don’t feel the need
to make it all the time.
They are not stuck in the illusion that “happiness” is a sustained
state of joy. They allow themselves time to process everything they
are experiencing. They allow themselves to exist in their natural
state. In that non-resistance, they find contentment.
06. They don’t allow their thoughts to be chosen for them.
They recognize that through social conditioning and the eternal
human monkey-mind, they can often be swayed by thoughts,
beliefs, and mindsets that were never theirs in the first place. To
combat this, they take inventory of their beliefs, reflect on their
origins, and decide whether or not that frame of reference truly
serves them.

07. They recognize that infallible composure is not emotional
intelligence.
They don’t withhold their feelings or try to temper them so much as
to render them almost gone. They do, however, have the capacity to
withhold their emotional response until they are in an environment
wherein it would be appropriate to express how they are feeling.
They don’t suppress it; they manage it effectively.
08. They know that a feeling will not kill them.
They’ve developed enough stamina and awareness to know that all
things, even the worst, are transitory.
09. They don’t just become close friends with anyone.
They recognize true trust and intimacy as something you build, and
something you want to be discerning with whom you share. But
they’re not guarded or closed as they are simply mindful and aware
of who they allow into their lives and hearts. They are kind to all,
but truly open to few.
10. They don’t confuse a bad feeling for a bad life.
They are aware of, and avoid, extrapolation, which is essentially projecting
the present moment into the foreseeable future—believing that the moment
at hand constitutes what your entire life amounted to, rather than just being
another passing, transitory experience in the whole. Emotionally intelligent
people allow themselves their “bad” days. They let themselves be fully
human. It’s in this non-resistance that they find the most peace of all.
3 Gladwell, Malcolm. Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. 2007. Back Bay Books.

4
HOW the

PEOPLE WE

ONCE LOVED

become

STRANGERS

AGAIN
It’s interesting to think about how we make people who used to be
everything into nothing again. How we learn to forget. How we force
forgetting. What we put in place of them in the interim. The dynamics
afterward always tell you more than what the relationship did—grief is a
faster teacher than joy—but what does it mean when you cycle out to being
strangers again? You never really stop knowing each other in that way.
Maybe there’s no choice but to make them someone different in your mind,
not the person who knew your daily anxieties and what you looked like
naked and what made you cry and how much you loved them.
When our lives revolve around someone, they don’t just stop doing so
even if all that’s left is some semblance of their memory. There are always
those bits that linger. The memories that are impressed on the places you
went and the things you said and the songs you listened to remain.
We all eventually find ourselves standing in the checkout line, hearing one
of those songs come on and realizing that we’re revolving around them
again. And maybe we never stopped.
Do you ever really forget your lovers’ birthdays, or all your first times,
intimate and not? Do your anniversaries ever become normal days of the
year again? Are the things you did and promises you made ever really
neutralized? Do they become void now that you’re broken up or do you
decidedly ignore them because there’s simply no other choice? The mind
tells you to go on and forces your heart to follow suit, I guess.
I want to believe that you either love someone, in some way, forever, or
you never really loved them at all. That once two reactive chemicals cross,
both are changed. That the wounds we leave in people are sometimes too

raw to risk falling back into them. I don’t want to believe that we write each
other off because we simply don’t matter anymore. I know love isn’t
expendable. I wonder, and maybe hope, if we ever just force it to be out of
necessity.
Maybe it’s just that we’re all at the centers of our own little universes, and
sometimes they overlap with other people’s, and that small bit of
intersection leaves some part of it changed. The collision can wreck us,
change us, shift us. Sometimes we merge into one, and other times we
rescind because the comfort of losing what we thought we knew wins out.
Either way, it’s inevitable that you expand. That you’re left knowing that
much more about love and what it can do, and the pain that only a hole in
your heart and space in your bed and emptiness in the next chair over can
bring. Whether or not that hole will ever again include the person who made
it that way…I don’t know. Whether or not anybody else can match the
outline of someone who was so deeply impressed in you…I don’t know
that, either.
We all start as strangers. The choices we make in terms of love are usually
ones that seem inevitable anyway. We find people irrationally compelling.
We find souls made of the same stuff ours are. We find classmates and
partners and neighbors and family friends and cousins and sisters and our
lives intersect in a way that makes them feel like they couldn’t have ever
been separate. And this is lovely. But the ease and access isn’t what we
crave. It isn’t what I’m writing about right now. It isn’t what we revolve
around after it’s gone. We are all just waiting for another universe to collide
with ours, to change what we can’t ourselves. It’s interesting how we realize
the storm returns to calm, but we see the stars differently now, and we don’t
know, and we can’t choose, whose wreckage can do that for us.
We all start as strangers, but we forget that we rarely choose who ends up
a stranger, too.

5
16 SIGNS

of a SOCIALLY

INTELLIGENT

PERSON
While you may not know what makes someone socially intelligent, you
have likely experienced the kind of social tone-deafness that leaves you
feeling frustrated at best, and physically uncomfortable at worst.
Manners are cultural social intelligence. Yet it seems traditional
“politeness” is beginning to lose its appeal—it can conjure images of
washing out your personality in favor of more uniform behavior. While we
want to be able to engage with people in a mutually comfortable way, we
shouldn’t have to sacrifice genuine expression in favor of a polite nod or
gracious smile. The two are not mutually exclusive.
People who are socially intelligent think and behave in a way that spans
beyond what’s culturally acceptable at any given moment in time. They
function in such a way that they are able to communicate with others and
leave them feeling at ease without sacrificing who they are and what they
want to say. This, of course, is the basis of connection, the thing on which
our brains are wired to desire, and on which we personally thrive.
Here, the core traits of someone who is socially intelligent:
01. They do not try to elicit a strong emotional response from anyone
they are holding a conversation with.
They don’t communicate in such a way that aggrandizes their
accomplishments to incite a response of awe or exaggerates their
hardships to incite a response of sympathy. This usually occurs
when the topic in question is not actually deserving of such a strong
response, and therefore makes others uncomfortable because they
feel pressured to fake an emotional reaction.
02. They do not speak in definitives about people, politics, or ideas.

The fastest way to sound unintelligent is to say, “This idea is
wrong.” (That idea may be wrong for you, but it exists because it is
right to someone else.) Intelligent people say, “I don’t personally
understand this idea or agree with it.” To speak definitively about
any one person or idea is to be blind to the multitude of perspectives
that exist on it. It is the definition of closed-minded and short-
sightedness.
03. They don’t immediately deny criticism, or have such a strong
emotional reaction to it that they become unapproachable or
unchangeable.
Some of the most difficult people to be in relationships with are
those who are so threatened by even the slightest suggestion that
their behavior is hurtful that they actually end up getting angry at
the person suggesting it, reinforcing the problem altogether.
Socially intelligent people listen to criticism before they respond to
it—an immediate emotional response without thoughtful
consideration is just defensiveness.
04. They do not confuse their opinion of someone for being a fact about
them.
Socially intelligent people do not say, “He’s a prick” as though it is
fact. Instead, they say: “I had a negative experience with him where
I felt very uncomfortable.”
05. They never overgeneralize other people through their behaviors.
They don’t use “you always” or “you never” to illustrate a point.
Likewise, they root their arguments in statements that begin with “I
feel” as opposed to “you are.” They do this because choosing
language that feels unthreatening to someone is the best way to get
them to open up to your perspective and actually create the dialogue
that will lead to the change you desire.
06. They speak with precision.
They say what they intend to say without skirting around the issue.
They speak calmly, simply, concisely, and mindfully. They focus on
communicating something, not just receiving a response from
others.
07. They know how to practice healthy disassociation.

In other words, they know that the world does not revolve around
them. They are able to listen to someone without worrying that any
given statement they make is actually a slight against them. They
are able to disassociate from their own projections and at least try to
understand another person’s perspective without assuming it has
everything to do with their own.
08. They do not try to inform people of their ignorance.
When you accuse someone of being wrong, you close them off to
considering another perspective by heightening their defenses. If
you first validate their stance (“That’s interesting, I never thought of
it that way…”) and then present your own opinion (“Something I
recently learned is this…”) and then let them know that they still
hold their own power in the conversation by asking their opinion
(“What do you think about that?”), you open them up to engaging in
a conversation where both of you can learn rather than just defend.
09. They validate other people’s feelings.
To validate someone else’s feelings is to accept that they feel the
way they do without trying to use logic to dismiss or deny or
change their minds. (For example: “I am sad today.” “Well, you
shouldn’t be, your life is great!”) The main misunderstanding here
is that validating feelings is not the same thing as validating ideas.
There are many ideas that do not need or deserve to be validated,
but everyone’s feelings deserve to be seen and acknowledged and
respected. Validating someone’s emotions is validating who they
really are, even if you would respond differently. So in other words,
it is validating who someone is, even if they are different than you.
10. They recognize that their “shadow selves” are the traits, behaviors,
and patterns that aggravate them about others.
One’s hatred of a misinformed politician could be a projection of
their fear of being unintelligent or underqualified. One’s intense
dislike for a particularly passive friend could be an identification of
one’s own inclination to give others power in their life. It is not
always an obvious connection, but when there is a strong emotional
response involved, it is always there. If you genuinely disliked
something, you would simply disengage with it.
11. They do not argue with people who only want to win, not learn.

You can identify that this is the case when people start “pulling” for
arguments or resorting to shoddy logic only to seem as though they
have an upper hand. Socially intelligent people know that not
everybody wants to communicate, learn, grow or connect—and so
they do not try to force them.
12. They listen to hear, not respond.
While listening to other people speak, they focus on what is being
said, not how they are going to respond. This is also known as the
meta practice of “holding space.”
13. They do not post anything online they would be embarrassed to
show to a parent, explain to a child, or have an employer find.
Aside from the fact that at some point or another, one if not all of
those things will come to pass, posting anything that you are not
confident to support means you are not being genuine to yourself
(you are behaving on behalf of the part of you that wants other
people to validate it).
14. They do not consider themselves a judge of what’s true.
They don’t say, “you’re wrong”; they say, “I think you are wrong.”
15. They don’t “poison the well” or fall for ad hominem fallacy to
disprove a point.
“Poisoning the well” is when someone attacks the character of a
person so as to shift the attention away from the (possibly very
valid) point being made. For example, if a person who eats three
candy bars a day says: “I don’t think kids it’s healthy for children to
eat too much candy each day,” a socially intelligent person wouldn’t
respond, “Who are you to say?”; they would be able to see the
statement objective from the person who is saying it. Usually, it is
people who are most inflicted with an issue that are able to speak
out on the importance of it (even if it seems hypocritical on the
surface).
16. Their primary relationship is to themselves, and they work on it
tirelessly.
The main thing socially intelligent people understand is that your
relationship to everyone else is an extension of your relationship to

yourself.

6
UNCOMFORTABLE

FEELINGS

that actually

INDICATE

you’re on the

RIGHT PATH
Discomfort is what happens when we are on the precipice of change.
Unfortunately, we often confuse it for unhappiness and cope with the latter
while running from the former. It usually takes a bit of discomfort to break
through to a new understanding, to release a limiting belief, to motivate
ourselves to create real change. Discomfort is a signal, one that is often very
helpful. Here are a few (less than desirable) feelings that may indicate
you’re on the right path after all:
01. Feeling as though you are reliving your childhood struggles.
You find that you’re seeing issues you struggled with as a kid
reappear in your adult life, and while on the surface this may seem
like a matter of not having overcome them, it really means you are
becoming conscious of why you think and feel so you can change it.
02. Feeling “lost” or directionless.
Feeling lost is actually a sign you’re becoming more present in your
life—you’re living less within the narratives and ideas that you
premeditated and more in the moment at hand. Until you’re used to
this, it will feel as though you’re off-track (you aren’t).
03. “Left brain” fogginess.
When you’re utilizing the right hemisphere more often (you’re
becoming more intuitive, you’re dealing with emotions, you’re
creating) sometimes it can seem as though “left brain” functions
leave you feeling fuzzy. Things such as focusing, organizing, and
remembering small details suddenly become difficult.

04. Having random influxes of irrational anger or sadness that intensify
until you can’t ignore them anymore.
When emotions erupt it’s usually because they’re “coming up” to be
recognized, and our job is to learn to stop grappling with them or
resisting them and to simply become fully conscious of them (after
that, we control them, not the opposite way around).
05. Experiencing unpredictable and scattered sleeping patterns.
You’ll need to sleep a lot more or a lot less, you’ll wake up in the
middle of the night because you can’t stop thinking about
something, you find yourself full of energy or completely
exhausted, and with little in between.
06. A life-changing event is taking place or just has.
You suddenly having to move, getting divorced, losing a job, having
a car break down, etc.
07. Having an intense need to be alone.
You’re suddenly disenchanted with the idea of spending every
weekend out socializing, and other people’s problems are draining
you more than they are intriguing you. This means you’re
recalibrating.
08. Intense, vivid dreaming that you almost always remember in detail.
If dreams are how your subconscious mind communicates with you
(or projects an image of your experience), then your mind is
definitely trying to say something. You’re having dreams at an
intensity that you’ve never experienced before.
09. Downsizing your friend group; feeling more and more
uncomfortable around negative people.
The thing about negative people is that they rarely realize they are
negative, and because you feel uncomfortable saying anything (and
you’re even more uncomfortable keeping that in your life), you’re
ghosting a bit on old friends.
10. Feeling like the dreams you had for your life are collapsing.
What you do not realize at this moment is that it is making way for
a reality better than you could have thought of, one that’s more
aligned with who you are, not who you thought you would be.

11. Feeling as though your worst enemies are your thoughts.
You’re beginning to realize that your thoughts create your
experience, and it’s often not until we’re pushed to our wits' end
that we even try to take control of them—and that’s when we realize
that we were in control all along.
12. Feeling unsure of who you really are.
Your past illusions about who you “should” be are dissolving. You
feel unsure because it is uncertain! You’re in the process of
evolving, and we don’t become uncertain when we change for the
worse; we become angry and closed off. In other words: If what
you’re experiencing is insecurity or uncertainty, it’s usually going to
lead to something better.
13. Recognizing how far you still have to go.
When you realize this, it’s because you can also see where you’re
headed; it means you finally know where and who you want to be.
14. “Knowing” things you don’t want to know, such as what someone is
really feeling, or that a relationship isn’t going to last, or that you
won’t be at your job much longer.
A lot of “irrational” anxiety comes from subconsciously sensing
something, yet not taking it seriously because it isn’t logical.
15. Having an intense desire to speak up for yourself.
Becoming angry with how much you’ve let yourself be walked on
or how much you’ve let other people’s voices get into your head is a
sign that you’re finally ready to stop listening and love yourself by
respecting yourself first.
16. Realizing you are the only person responsible for your life and your
happiness.
This kind of emotional autonomy is terrifying, because it means that if you
mess up, it’s all on you. At the same time, realizing it is the only way to be
truly free. The risk is worth the reward on this one, always.

7
WHAT the

FEELINGS

you most

SUPPRESS

are trying to

TELL YOU
Emotional intelligence is not how infrequently you feel anything “bad”
because you’ve developed the discipline and wisdom “not to.” It’s not how
easily you choose what you think, how you let it affect you, or how placidly
you react to any given situation.
Real emotional maturity is how thoroughly you let yourself feel anything.
Everything. Whatever comes. It is simply the knowing that the worst thing
that could ever happen…is just a feeling at the end of the day.
That’s it! A feeling. Imagine the very worst, the only thing bad about it
is…how you would feel about it. What you would make it out to be, what
you’d assume the repercussions mean, and how those would ultimately
affect…how you feel.
A sense of fear, a pinch or throb or sting. A hunger pang or ego kick. The
sense of worthlessness, the idea of not belonging. (Interesting how physical
feelings are always quick and transient, but the ideas we hold of pain
always seem to stick around…)
But we avoid feeling anything because we have more or less been taught
that our feelings have lives of their own. That they’ll carry on forever if we
give them even a moment of our awareness.
Have you ever felt joy for more than a few minutes? What about anger?
No? How about tension, depression, and sadness? Those have lasted longer,
haven’t they? Weeks and months and years at a time, right?
That’s because those aren’t feelings. They are symptoms. But we’ll get to
their causes in a minute.
What you have to know is that suffering is just the refusal to accept what
is. That’s it. Etymologically, it comes from the Latin word to “from below

to bear.” Or, to “resist, endure, put under.”
So healing is really just letting yourself feel.
It is unearthing your traumas and embarrassments and losses and allowing
yourself the emotions that you could not have in the moment that you were
having those experiences. It’s letting yourself filter and process what you
had to suppress at the time to keep going, maybe even to survive.
We all fear that our feelings are too big, especially in the moment we’re
actually having them. We were taught not be too loving, we’d get hurt; too
smart, we’d get bullied; too fearful, we’d be vulnerable. To be compliant
with what other people wanted us to feel. As kids we were punished for
crying out if our emotional experience wasn’t in accordance with our
parents' convenience. (No wonder we still respond the way we do.)
The point is that you aren’t the one who is afraid of feeling too much. It’s
the people who called you crazy and dramatic and wrong. The people who
don’t know how to handle it, who want you to stay where you are. Those
are the people who want you to keep not feeling. Not you. You know how I
know?
Because your numbness isn’t feeling nothing, it’s feeling everything, and
never having learned to process anything at all. Numbness is not nothing,
neutral is nothing. Numbness is everything at once.
Because your sadness is saying, “I am still attached to something being
different.” Your guilt is saying, “I fear I have done bad in someone’s eyes,”
and your shame, “I fear I am bad in someone’s eyes.”
Your anxiety is your resistance to the process, your last grasps at a control
you are becoming more and more aware that you do not have. Your
tiredness is your resistance to who you really are, the person you actually
want to be. Your annoyance is your repressed anger. Your depression,
biological factors aside of course, is everything coming to the surface, and
you bellowing down to stow it away.
And your arrival at the conclusion that you cannot go on like this, that
you’re missing out, that you’re off-track and feeling stuck and lost, is you
realizing that you need not change your feelings. You just have to learn to
lean into them and see what they are trying to tell you.
Trying to change how you feel is like finding a road sign that points in the
opposite direction of where you had intended to go and getting out to try to
turn the sign, rather than your course of action.