The Joyful Living Guide —4 Steps to Reframe Your Mind For Abundant Positivity
Live every day joyfully, like you used to
He was inches from hitting your car.
The audacity to cut you off like that — it boils your blood. How dare he?
You got up, dragged yourself to your job, worked a full day, and this guy has the nerve to just pull in front of you and speed past.
You ought to honk your horn, flip him off and get revenge.
What happened to you? What happened to me?
The people who were positive and upbeat. Full of joy. Blissfully unaware of others and so beautifully immersed in life. Picking flowers, running around, and playing with friends.
Now here we are, sitting in a car, angry at a stranger.
Where have we gone wrong that we default to anger, hatred and judgment?
Our faces used to default to a smile, not a frown. We used to laugh, spread joy and make the world a happier place.
Well, it’s not too late to rewrite the script.
Leave the judgment behind, ditch the scrunched brow and feel joy again.
This is a guide to forgiveness and well-wishing. A guide that’ll help you will heal your heart, and allow you to return to your childlike state of pure goodness.
Replace anger and negativity with love and optimism — and return to joy.
The Joyful Living Guide.
Step 1 — understand that nobody else is responsible for your anger
“Any person capable of angering you becomes your master; he can anger you only when you permit yourself to be disturbed by him.”
— Epictetus
When you get mad at that driver cutting you off, you’re submitting.
You’re allowing their actions to enter your bubble. Their actions have influenced your life and they’re manipulating you.
By getting angry, you’ve compromised yourself:
your reaction time is inhibited → you’re more likely to have an accident.
your pride causes you to throw judgment and hate at the driver — you might even take a peak into their window —> and what if while you’re looking at the driver, the car in front of you brakes?
Would that have been worth your life, or the life of someone else in the car?
Only when you allow something into your world, can it affect you.
It’s actually not the driver’s fault you’re angry — it’s yours. You’ve allowed them to anger you. They can’t physically change your emotions, you decide to be angry at them.
And the only person who chooses anger is one who’s insecure.
Would a 7-foot-tall person be offended if they were called short?
It’s only when an action hits an existing paint-point of ours that it makes us angry. When something we’re already self-conscious about, is attacked, it offends us.
If someone cuts you off in traffic, and that makes you angry — you have an existing problem. You aren’t confident in yourself. You believe they’re sending a message by cutting you off and that’s why you, and I, get angry.
Your self-centredness assumes that they’re disrespecting you.
This personal attack needs reprimanding so they don’t think they can step all over me like that!
See how ridiculous it sounds when you look at it like that?
The reality is, there’s an impatient and ignorant person in that car, who wants to get home, and probably needs a change in their mindset. But letting it affect your day by creating a non-existent conflict in your mind is completely avoidable.
Even if it were more direct, they can’t physically anger you.
Only you can.
I used to be teased for my stutter. I would normally argue back and probably end up in tears.
But at one point, my mentality changed, and one day I replied:
Yeah, I know I stutter. I was born with it, and I’m trying really hard to get better.
I wasn’t angry this time. I didn’t let him into my bubble.
And he never bothered me again.
Step 2 — replace hate with love
“Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself,”
— Leviticus 19:18
I learned what love is when I realised I felt the same way about my girlfriend as I do about my little sisters.
I started thinking of her when I saw something she’d like in the store. I started to worry about her if she’d gone for a drive and I hadn’t heard from her. I started to include her in my wishes when I blew out candles.
It’s not like Hollywood’s depiction. It’s simpler.
Love is just compassion.
When you choose love, you’re sending hope, protection and good emotions to the other party.
“The world changes when we change. The world softens when we soften. The world loves us when we choose to love the world.
— Marianne Williamson
Next time you feel rage toward someone, I want you to send them a prayer.
A prayer? What is this, some kind of religious article?
A prayer is nothing more than well-wishing. It’s hoping for the best.
And the energy you wish upon others is usually the energy that surrounds you.
And it’s not “woo-woo”. Nobody feels calm and smiles while wishing for a driver to crash and die. They have a cynical mask on, a frown and a scrunched brow.
Then you arrive at your destination and you’re angry. You’re bothered. You vent to your friends, you speak negative energy onto them and the virus spreads.
When you feel that angry thought creeping on — I challenge you to say this:
“I love them. I’m sending them a prayer (well wishes).”
It sounds weird I know. I still cringe a little when I do it. But there’s something about it that really works.
The person in question transforms from a guilty, mean and evil perpetrator into a disturbed little kid who needs your well-wishes. You see another side of them. You see the humanity. You feel the poor parenting, the shitty life and the bad circumstances that got this kid to bully you, or this driver to honk at you.
When you replace hate with love, your shoulders relax, your jaw relaxes, your neck relaxes and the muscles that are so used to frowning bend toward a smile.
The world softens right before your eyes — like the warmth of putting on orange-lensed glasses.
What good does hate give? Why not be a person that exudes overwhelming positivity and joy?
If you replace hate with love, you’ll go through days happier. And if you go through days happier, you’ll positively influence everyone you come in contact with. And they’ll positively influence everyone they come in contact with.
And that’s how you’ll begin to change your pocket of the world.
Step 3 — leverage the emotional compounding effect
When you invest a small sum of money in a nice, conservative fund — it grows by something like 7–8% per annum.
This emotional fund grows by (a completely made up) 30% per decision.
Every time you choose hate, you invest in the daily hate fund.
Every time you choose love, you invest in the daily love fund.
When the hate compounds, it grows into a huge, destructive snowball that crushes anything its way: your spouse, friends, family and even yourself.
But if your snowball has compounded with love, the same people get a totally different version of you. That’s the real Midas Touch. You improve the mood of everyone you come in contact with.
And that’s beautiful. What a juxtaposition from putting hate into the world.
It’s fun to bring joy to the world. It compounds exponentially because you enjoy it more, and you want to do more good.
The love continues to spread.
Step 4 — embrace the challenge of choosing love on a daily basis
Sometimes it feels like we default to hatred.
Choosing love is a constant challenge and you have to do it every day.
But is there anything worth pursuing that isn’t challenging?
Just like a diet, you need to do this consistently to improve your life. One day of healthy eating won’t change anything. But one day of bad eating also won’t ruin months of progress.
Every day when you wake up, you have a fresh start, a blank canvas. So if you had a bad day today, it’s OK. Tomorrow’s a new day.
And I want to note that nobody’s immune to getting angry (everyone eats chocolate on their diet at some point).
I was explaining the concept of this article to Georgia the other day while driving, and during that drive, I got angry at the person driving next to me…
The key is to choose to snap out of it when you recognise what you’re doing.
“I’m sending her a prayer, I’m sending her a prayer!”— I joked.
And it helped.
So cut yourself some slack. This isn’t about being a Buddhist monk and being completely happy and full of joy all the time. We aren’t perfect.
But if you can at least train yourself to snap out of it, you’ll be doing yourself — and in turn, the world — an enormous favour.
And keep going. Keep choosing positivity — it will change your life for the better.
When you feel that anger come on, don’t be ashamed. Recognise it, and choose to swap the hate for love — think of our steps again:
Step 1 — understand that nobody can make you angry.
You are in control of your emotions and mood
Step 2 — replace hate with love.
Choose the positive emotion, it’ll improve your life and the lives of those around you.
Step 3 — leverage the emotional compounding effect.
Every emotion you have builds on the next like a snowball. Make your snowball spread positivity.
Step 4 — choose love daily.
It’s not easy, but it’s a worthy pursuit. It doesn’t matter if you diet for one day, you must keep going in order to lose weight.
Thank you from the bottom of my heart for reading this if you got here.
I put a lot of time and effort into these newsletters - I hope they help you as much as they help me.
Ideas like this genuinely do make self-improvement more interesting and simple to me, and my aim is just to share that with you.
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Sincerely,
Eren