Day 7: Review and Plan

Take a few minutes to review your seventh week. Write about your accomplishments and what you need to work on. Did you:

• Brainstorm some goals, dreams, and exciting ideas for your future in the areas of Love, social skills, friends and family?

• Write about your personality style, how you interact with people, and about any problems you are having now with the people in your life, and ask yourself, "What one skill would most benefit me in my current relationships and situations?"

• List just a few (2-4) specific Social Skills Goals for this next month (30 days) and add them to your Month Map and your priority grid?

• Make an informal analysis of your temperament and personality characteristics., and investigate your unique preferences and style of behavior?

• Make a list of your top-ten strengths, and some of your character limitations

• Plan a self-cultivation project by choosing the top few character limitations that cause you the biggest challenges in life, defining what you would like to change about these limitations, and framing each of these as strengths to build?

• Write about times you have used your strengths to excess, and brainstorm the kinds of situations that frequently push you into excess?

• Choose one habit of excess, plot how you could manage it, and add this one new management habit to your self-cultivation plan?

• Brainstorm a list of all the virtue habits you would like to practice sometime, choose one or two virtue habits to work at now, and write a definition for each that speaks to you?

• Make a virtue chart and use it to evaluate your growth in your virtue habits, or use your Love Journal to track your virtue practices?

• Write about people in your life who are difficult partners in the relationship dance, pinpoint factors that seem to push those people into excess, and list a few steps you could take to smooth out the dance? 

Day 6: The Relationship Dance

You have been pondering your personality for several days now, considering how you can cultivate yourself to be more loving and virtuous, and how to grow a better relationship with the world. 

But relationships are a dance with partners, who have their own styles, strengths, and excesses. If we bump up against them in the wrong way, we might send them reeling into excess, which will possibly spark our own spiral into excess, and it can become a crazy dance pretty fast.

The relationship dance is complex, and it helps to take some time to practice the steps. If you are having conflict or discomfort with another person on a regular basis, you might find yourself saying, "I just don't understand where he's coming from." And that is exactly the problem: You don't understand his style, his strengths, or what pushes him into excess. You can use your instincts and a little thought to figure it out.

The most common factors leading to excess are physical factors: Hunger, lack of sleep, illness, hormones, and stress. The list below shows generalized examples of other factors, divided into four personality styles. (Note that its normal for people to fall into more than one style):

1. Easy-going Accommodating Styles might get excessive if they perceive unfriendliness or disapproval; have an intense confrontation; have too little structure; feel stifled by deadlines; or if others reinforce their clowning.

Day 5: Practice Virtue Habits

You've got a preliminary plan now to cultivate and manage your character strengths - how to proceed? We will take it slowly and systematically, like we have from the start. 

Last week when we talked about nurturing the four parts of yourself, I mentioned that one part of renewing your spirit is to practice virtue habits. Virtue is an old-fashioned word that I have embraced, because it makes me feel noble! Virtue is ethical behavior; it encompasses a wide array of nice habits and behaviors that you can try to build, and which will help you to act with love, and will also renew your soul.

A couple of years ago I ran across Ben Franklin's system to develop his character (and get his ducks in a row). In 1726, at the age of 20, Ben devised a small chart that he carried with himself, to record his behavior day-to-day, in 13 areas - his 13 virtues - which included temperance, silence, moderation, and chastity. (If you do a Google search you will see that MANY people are interested in Ben's system! You can buy journals and download charts if you want.)

What I found most interesting about Ben's chart is that he asked his friends for ideas about what virtues he needed to work on, and most of them were habits of moderation- he was apparently a man with large appetites! I used this system for one whole year, and found it very useful. I of course collected my own set of virtues to work on, and added them one habit at a time.

Today, if you think it will be useful, you can make your own virtue chart with your very first virtue habit, or two. Or if a chart isn't your style, I’ve made some other suggestions below. In either case, you can start with any of the specific habits or ideas from your self-cultivation plan, or you can choose something easier. Think of this as plotting the map of your love habits.

Take out your journal and your self-cultivation plan.

• Brainstorm a list of all the virtue habits you would like to practice sometime as part of your self-cultivation plan. For a list of suggestions see my Virtues Page. (Tab is on the top bar.)

Day 4: Manage your Excesses

Let's talk some more about managing your strengths. Every human strength has a point at which it becomes excessive, and then it is no longer useful and can even be hurtful. Because excess is the exaggeration of a strength you have, you will never completely get rid of it, but you can moderate and manage it, and learn to be comfortable with the times you slip into excess.

For example, I am analytical and can see quickly in my mind how any plan will play out. I'm a good judge of the pros and cons, and can often give good advice. But this kind of analysis is simply not appropriate or useful all of the time, and, pared up with my strong need for truth-telling, it can be a big problem. When I use my analysis to shoot down ideas, or silence dreamers, I've gone into excess.

I've become a pretty good manager of this strength, but it took me way too long to even realize that I had a problem. I've learned to bite my tongue (some of the time) and say, "You could be right"; I've learned to take the time to listen to understand, encourage brainstorming, and ask before offering my advice. Because I'm aware now of this particular habit I have, I can and do apologize when I go into excess and think I might have hurt someone's feelings.

Take out your journal and look at the list of strengths you made yesterday.

• Write about times you have used your strengths to excess. Brainstorm the kinds of situations that frequently push you into excess.

Some examples:

Day 3: Start a Self-Cultivation Project

Now that you have a baseline understanding of your personality, you can begin to analyze your strengths and limitations, and set some goals for cultivating yourself. Think of this as a gentle, loving, gardening project: You are trimming a little here, and feeding this and that, so that you will grow a better relationship with the world.

You can't really change your personality, but you can moderate your degrees of reaction, and build on your strengths. And remember that your strengths and limitations, are subjective. Some might seem quite clear from the journaling you did yesterday; for example, I listed that I am persistent and conscientious, and also that I am distractible and reserved - it's easy to say which are strengths and which are weaknesses, right?

But some strengths can become problems if we don't manage the intensity. My conscientiousness can make me inflexible, judgmental, and didactic. I've had to learn to appreciate and love those with a more spontaneous style, and manage the intensity of my expectations of myself and others. (I work to cultivate spontaneity in my personality, and enjoy the paradox of scheduling times to be spontaneous!)

Some of your personality characteristics might seem like weaknesses to you, but in fact be strengths. For example, I used to think that my introversion was a limitation because it's not valued in our culture, but I now celebrate it as a strength. Another of my apparent weaknesses is that I am not a great team player, but that has given me the strength to be self-employed and self-sufficient (and I still work at growing my teamwork skills.)

Take out your journal and make two lists:

• Make a list of your top-ten strengths, such as loyalty, honesty, compassion, respect for others, conscientiousness, thriftiness, love of learning, friendliness, and fairness.

Day 2: Know Yourself

Understanding your unique temperament and personality style will help you to have appropriate expectations for yourself. Knowing yourself well makes your experience of life richer, larger, and more exciting. It allows you to make better decisions, express what you need and want in life, and understand what motivates you to resist bad habits and develop good ones.

Today you will make an informal analysis of your temperament and personality characteristics. You were born with some of these characteristics, and some you developed at a young age. Remember as you examine these that they are not innately good or bad, even though it might seem like it. The language is a problem sometimes - we might all want to be labeled "conscientious" but some of us are just more spontaneous and easy-going, and I'm so glad we are all different!

If some of your particular characteristics are troublesome, it's because you haven't yet figured out how to administer them well, or mesh them with other personalities. Today you will gather the data without judgement. Tomorrow you will use this list to make a plan for building on your strengths and moderating your weakness, so make particular note of any insights you have today.

Get out your (old) Journal Notebook and investigate your unique preferences and style of behavior in any way that seems best - you can write descriptions, rate these on a spectrum of one to ten, or just note which are particularly high or low for you:

• 
  Activity level: Are you a high-energy, on-the-go person, or are you more likely to move slowly and engage in quieter, calmer activities?

• Bio-rhythms: Do you like to stick to a predictable routine, or are your rhythms more  irregular, so that you enjoy a varied schedule?

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.