Becoming Yourself

Developing a Better You

Tag: personal growth (Page 43 of 62)

How to Have Healthy Relationships (part 1): Intentionality

February 8, 2020 / / 0 Comments

It all started with a recent trip to visit my parents in Michigan. With them being in their late seventies and my mom having various health issues, I want to spend as much time with them as I can. I enjoyed hearing my mom share interesting stories from her past. With my dad, a retired teacher with a PhD in philosophy, I had the kind of intellectual discussions about “the big questions of life” that we both enjoy.

One of the things I talked with my dad about was the importance and difficulty of maintaining meaningful relationships through the changing seasons of life. He’s wrestling with that due to being in retirement and caring for my mother. It’s also a pressing issue for me now that I’ve moved away from longtime friends and changed from a group-based music career to the more solitary life of a writer.

When I returned home, I ran into some friends. I was happy to see them together – they’ve been dating seriously for about a year but had experienced some struggles in their relationship lately. I told them that relationships are hard, and even after twenty-seven years of marriage, my wife Lisa and I still have to work at it. They said they wanted to ask us for our “secret” to a healthy, long-term relationship. I said we certainly don’t have all the answers but would be happy to get together and share some thoughts.

Those conversations with my dad and my friends got me thinking about relationships. While that’s a huge topic, my baseline is this – I believe that relationships with self, others, and God are the heart of a meaningful and fulfilling life. Even if the God part isn’t for you, I think most of us would agree that relationships are important, even critical, to our personal development and enjoyment of life.

So how do we nurture and maintain meaningful relationships? Thousands of books have been written trying to answer that question. For the purpose of this post, I’ll just touch on one idea. For me, a key factor in successful relationships is intentionality.

What is intentionality? It’s effort expended for a specific purpose. Intentionality is action toward a predetermined goal. Simply put, if your desire is for meaningful relationships, you’re going to have to work at it. You won’t drift into them any more than your closet, desk, or garage will drift into neat organization. Life doesn’t work that way.

When my son Kilian moved to Sacramento after college, he didn’t have many friends in the area. He chose to be intentional about developing relationships by going to nearby meetup.com events – rock climbing trips, board game and trivia nights, Game of Thrones watching parties. Through those efforts, he’s made some great friends. It never would have happened without him being intentional.

As I look back on my own life, one of the most helpful intentional actions I’ve taken for relationship building is automation. It’s simply setting up a recurring pattern of interaction with people like I schedule auto payments for important bills. For ten years, I’ve had a standing Thursday noon lunch appointment with my great friend Ty. Having that understanding between us eliminates the well-intentioned but often useless “this was great, we should do it again soon” factor from the equation. Life is busy. The important gets sidelined by the urgent. Because of that, even now that I’ve moved out of state, Ty and I still “meet” every Thursday at noon via FaceTime. There are some weeks when it doesn’t work out, but by intentionally planning a connection for every seven days, we stay consistent.

So what would applying intentionality look like in your relationships? Are you in a season where you need to find new friendships? Have you drifted apart from someone and need to reconnect? Maybe some of your current relationships need some attention. Whether the relationships that come to mind are with yourself, others, or God, the concept is the same. If you want to have meaningful, life-giving relationships, focus your efforts. Come up with a plan. Do the work. Expend the energy. Make the call. Send the text. Automate the connection. Be intentional. If you do, you’ll take another great step toward Becoming Yourself.

This post was originally published February 10, 2019.

Vive la Différence: Supercharge Your Personal Growth by Widening Your Circle of Friends

February 1, 2020 / / 2 Comments

It started with my wife Lisa and I heading out for a walk. In the lobby of our apartment building, we noticed a woman we’d never met before and introduced ourselves. Her name was Helen. We began chatting and found her delightful. She had moved into the building by herself a few months earlier and didn’t know many people. We exchanged contact info, and Lisa encouraged Helen to reach out to us anytime.

Later that evening, I got an email from Helen inviting us to lunch. We happily accepted, and a few days later we enjoyed a meal together in a local restaurant. Over the course of several hours, we had a fascinating, wide-ranging discussion about careers, life experiences, religion, politics, children, food, and travel.

We learned that Helen is an amazing person with a powerful life story. She was born into a Jewish family in Poland the day before Hitler invaded and spent her early years in a Siberian labor camp. She endured incredible hardships in various countries before immigrating to the United States as a teenager. Helen speaks several languages, has a dry sense of humor, converses articulately on a wide range of subjects, and, at age seventy-nine, is probably in better shape than I am.

As I reflected back on our interaction with Helen, I realized it was much more than just an engaging lunch. As a person committed to becoming the best version of myself, spending time with people who have different backgrounds and perspectives than my own is vital. While having friends who are of a similar age and season of life is wonderful and important, I’m sharpened and stretched in different ways when I expand my circle of relationships to include people who are not just like me.

We are put on this planet only once and to limit ourselves to the familiar is a crime against our minds.

Roger Ebert

Helen and I are very different people. We have differences in upbringing, culture, language, gender, generation, spiritual perspective, and life experiences. But through spending time with her, I found that my thinking about life, myself, and the world around me was enriched, broadened, and wonderfully challenged. And along the way, we found common ground in our love of music, Japanese cuisine, politics, long walks, and our search for meaning and purpose in life. I’m a better person for being able to call Helen my friend.

So how about you? Do you have people in your life who see things differently? Do you seek them out? Are you exposing yourself to new ideas and perspectives? If you only surround yourself with people who look, think, and act like you, your growth will be significantly limited.

When you are around people whose stories aren’t similar to yours, do you merely tolerate their varied perspectives or do you genuinely try to understand them? Are you open to seeing what you can learn? Being strong in your views is not a bad thing, but it can unintentionally lead to arrogant, dismissive, or demeaning attitudes and behavior. It’s a trap I’ve fallen into before, one that I regularly have to remind myself to avoid. I don’t think I’m alone in that struggle.

So if you’re committed to personal growth, if you want to become a better version of yourself, I challenge you to seek out people with different perspectives. Invite them for lunch or coffee. Ask open ended questions and then truly listen. See what you can learn. Be open to having your opinions changed. Share your own thoughts with humility and respect. If you do, you’ll take another step toward Becoming Yourself.

This post was originally published Jan 19, 2019.

finding direction through fog

How to Find Direction in Life’s Fog

January 18, 2020 / / 0 Comments

Recently I woke up to this view from my apartment’s balcony:

Two hours later, it looked like this:

What caused the dramatic change? The sun. It rose above a cloud bank and burned away the fog.

It felt like a metaphor for my life. Sometimes I find myself in seasons of struggle, confusion, or disappointment where I feel surrounded by fog, unable to see the way ahead or understand what’s happening to me. No matter how hard I strain or squint, I can’t see my way through. I need an outside source, a “sun”, to burn the fog away, to help me find clarity and direction.

In those seasons, the outside source I’ve found most helpful is God. I know that’s a non-starter for some of you, or that you may have a different name for your higher power. I respect that. I’m just stating that in my experience, God has been a better “fog burning” source than anything else I’ve tried. Better than parents or friends or therapists. Better than teachers or gurus or my own gut instinct. Better than self-help books or podcasts or blog posts. Those are all wonderful things but when taken as ends in themselves, each has their limitations.

Yet when God is the lens through which I see the world, and I turn to those other sources in the context of seeking God first, they are often the very ways in which I receive the direction and guidance I need. Somehow, apart from that perspective, those things aren’t as helpful to me. If that sounds mysterious or counterintuitive, I guess I’d say… it is. But I’ve learned to be okay with embracing the mystery.

What I’m really trying to say is this – putting in the effort to seek a relationship with God and learn to hear Her direction, in whatever form, has been the best solution I’ve found to finding my way through the fog of life.

So how about you? How do you find direction? What cuts through the fog in your life? What outside source acts as your “sun”? What skill or relationship or practice can you invest in now to help you better connect with that source? Make the effort. When the next fog bank rolls in, you’ll be glad you did. And you’ll take another step toward Becoming Yourself.

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