Week 7: Act in Love + Day 1: Journal & Set Intentions

We've been occupied with love the last two weeks, coming at it from different angles. We've looked at the habits of kindness, generosity, and equanimity, and we've looked at nurturing yourself. You've been working towards Maitri, an honest and direct friendship with yourself: You pay attention to yourself the way you would a good friend - with curiosity, compassion, and gentleness. The next step, then, is to try to understand yourself even better, to be honest and clear-sighted about your strengths and limitations. What is it about you that drives and informs your values and your goals? What makes you behave the way you routinely behave?

We each have distinctive styles of how we interact with other people and our environment, and different motives, habits, and needs. This week we will look closer at your temperament and your personality. 

Your temperament is your unique style of responding to external events. The traits of temperament are those you are born with, probably inherited from your parents, and these become the foundation for your personality, which begins to develop in your early years. Personality includes your temperament, and also behaviors and preferences that you learn by experience.

It's helpful to analyze yourself a bit, and get the ducks of your personality in a row! Then you can accept your personal style, and look closer at the specific habits you need to cultivate in order to improve your relationships, and act in love.

A note about choosing

Steven Covey’s first habit for effective people is to “be proactive”. In a nutshell, he means that you can choose how you feel, and how you act and respond. You are not a slave to the way others treat you, needing always to take on the emotional weight of whomever is dumping on you, or reacting in kind to rudeness or aggression. You can be in a climate-controlled bubble of your own making, feeling happy, sad, calm, or excited as you choose, and responding with patience or sharpness, as you choose. 

Victor Frankl, a phycologist and survivor of the Nazi death camps, famously said, “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.”

Whatever techniques you've been using to remember your intentions will also help you to remember to choose how you want to feel, act, and respond. 

Remembering doesn't guarantee that you will always choose the best response, but if you can remember to choose, then you can release the burden of being a victim to society, or your family, or your boss, or your history. You will need to work through and heal your own traumas; you will need to retrain your reactivity: But if you choose to do this work you will be stronger, more resilient, and of more use to those you love. 

Day 1: Journal & Set Intentions

Get out your (old) journal notebook and write "Social skills and Habits" or some other heading. (Remember that you can use any journaling technique that suits you: A written dialogue with yourself, a collection of lists, drawings, or mind-maps.) This exercise has three parts again, so allot 5 -10 minutes for each part:

• Part 1 - collect information. Back on Week 1, Day 1, I asked you to make some lists of goals, dreams, and exciting ideas in broad categories. Today I want you to review and add ideas to this list: Love, social skills, friends and family.

Brainstorm some goals, dreams, and exciting ideas for your future in the areas of your relationships - how you wish you could improve on them, problems to solve, friendships to grow, and skills you want to improve. Just write whatever you think of, without judgement; put down everything you really want to do, and everything you only dream of doing, and include at least a few crazy, improbable ideas.

• Part 2 - reflect. Write about your personality style, and how you habitually interact with people. Write about any problems you are having now with the people in your life, and (setting aside the desire to change others), ask yourself, "What skills would most benefit me in my current relationships and situations?"

• Part 3 - weigh the possibilities. Take a break for a few minutes. Get a fresh cup of tea or go outside to look at the sky, then come back and read what you wrote. List just a few (2-4) specific Social Skills Goals for this next month (30 days), such as becoming a better listener, communicating with your family, or figuring out how to fix a conflict situation.

• Add these few new goals to your Month Map and your priority grid, spreading them out in a reasonable way.

Set intentions for the week:

• Write about your top priorities in the next week, including your small daily disciplines, and any big projects or tasks that lead you in the direction of your dreams. List the strongest, most compelling reasons you want to do them.

• List potential challenges- parts you don’t enjoy, things you don’t know how to do, or feel blocked on.

• Set intentions for this week to follow through with each one of your priorities, being sure to include your deepest reasons. Give special attention to any "low-status" priorities.

Last week you added some self-nurturance habits to your priorities, but you might not have yet written intentions for these or added them to your schedule: 

• Write intentions for your first self-care habit, first learning habit, and first awareness practices. Make each of them challenging but doable, preferably in about 10-15 minutes a day, and begin to gather the resources and supplies you need.

• Schedule the time to do each of these (most) every day. Design rituals to bring you to your new habits, and some way to incorporate them into your already established routine. 

• Remember to use all your Full Effort skills as you nurture your physical, mental, and spiritual self.