Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
This forum is in permanent archive mode. Our new active community can be found here.
Improving Yourself
So every few years or so I decide to improve upon something about myself. I did it in the past successfully and now I'm just building up some traits. Have you ever tried to do this? What did you work on and how did you do it?
As silly as it might sound, in this recent improvement kick, I made a list. (I like lists. They're fun! ^^) It's not that long, but to sum it up it's about taking chances, being confident, more social and not being a dick. I smile a lot and walk less slouchy and keep thinking that I'm awesome. People tell me that, but I usually don't believe it since I'm insecure and had issues with that forever. Because of that issue there's things I backed out on, people I didn't hang with, or things I didn't say because of fear. Fear of what others will perceive me to be. (Hell, man, I was a bit scared to make a thread on this topic.) Recently, I've grabbed that issue and punched it in the face. I feel like I found that person I wanted to be and assimilated them! (ASSIMILATE!)
Other things are more minor like being neater and learning new words to rely on cursing less. ( Although I love to say fuck. Say it with me. FUUUUUCK!) Or my style and gaming more than I do now. I did finish the major thing which was attending school again and saying my opinion more.
So answer my questions! Yay yay!
As silly as it might sound, in this recent improvement kick, I made a list. (I like lists. They're fun! ^^) It's not that long, but to sum it up it's about taking chances, being confident, more social and not being a dick. I smile a lot and walk less slouchy and keep thinking that I'm awesome. People tell me that, but I usually don't believe it since I'm insecure and had issues with that forever. Because of that issue there's things I backed out on, people I didn't hang with, or things I didn't say because of fear. Fear of what others will perceive me to be. (Hell, man, I was a bit scared to make a thread on this topic.) Recently, I've grabbed that issue and punched it in the face. I feel like I found that person I wanted to be and assimilated them! (ASSIMILATE!)
Other things are more minor like being neater and learning new words to rely on cursing less. ( Although I love to say fuck. Say it with me. FUUUUUCK!) Or my style and gaming more than I do now. I did finish the major thing which was attending school again and saying my opinion more.
So answer my questions! Yay yay!
Comments
Anyway. In the past, I've had to work on my social skills -- a couple years of home school in middle school pretty much demolished them, and I was just painfully shy. It took years before I felt like I could interact normally with people I didn't know. I was also always overweight as a kid, so I learned as much as I could about health and fitness, and made a lot of changes to my diet and started exercising, and got in pretty good shape for the first time in my life -- then I decided to put my newfound fitness to use in martial arts, and that did a lot for my confidence as well.
More recently, I've started making a real effort to be a more loving, less judgmental, cynical person. I started to see some friends go down a very negative path that seems to be focused on tearing others down instead of building themselves up, and they seemed to sink deeper and deeper into this pit of negativity and anger, with nothing to show for it. That's actually what got me to start taking drawing seriously again, and that's worked out pretty well so far.
Most recently, I've started to investigate meditation. There seems to be a lot of bullshit to sift through, but I suspect that there's some useful stuff at the core of it. The idea of strengthening my mental focus is really appealing to me.
The one thing I still really need to work on is my priorities -- spending more time doing the things I need to be doing, like work, exercise, and reading, and less time dicking around online. Really, I should be drawing right now instead of typing this.
I just realized how pathetic this is sorta making me sound... or how pathetic it's making me from a while ago sound? FUUUUUUCK.
Sorry, that was my clarinet hate leaking out.
Before I teach a Tae Kwan Do class, we meditate and I believe it helps. (I'm pretty sure it's not mystical, I think it gets blood flowing.)
College started to see more cracks in the shell, but still nothing significant. I got to the point where I could at least talk to somebody and not try to avoid conversation, but still never tried to seek it out. None of these were really improvements since I wasn't active doing anything, in my mind I was more just learning to endure at a slow rate. Then, during summer at the halfway point of college, I met a guy through my summer job who pretty much changed my life the most so far. He took a look at that shell and hit with a sledgehammer. Now there was a big gaping hole through which light could filter in. That whole summer was amazing and changed my perspective a lot. When I went back to school, things didn't change dramatically, but I was definitely trying more. Just as an example, I was president of the Japanese Club at my college that year, and our adviser told me later that under me, the club did more that year than the rest of its existence combined. That was pretty awesome. Yet, I still wasn't doing that to improve myself, at least consciously (I actually did it mostly for my resume).
It wasn't until that next summer when I took summer classes that I had the epiphany I needed. And it was something so simple and basic. After my first session classes were done, a bunch of my classmates invited me to a BBQ to celebrate our becoming seniors. It was that event that brought me to a significant conclusion: I was doing this all wrong. For the first time in my life, I felt like I actually had something to contribute to the world around me. And it was in realizing that that I stopped worrying about what I did.
So that was the first real improvement phase I went through. For that whole senior year, I was focused on one thing: to improve my social life. That is rather broad, but that's really all it was. I didn't have any specific goals, the whole thing was an experiment to me. I tried as many different things as I could to see what worked and what didn't work. In that year alone, I probably increased the number of friends I had threefold. Granted most of those people I don't really talk to at this point, but I feel that's more their problem than mine. Still, when I came back after that year, most of my friends who hadn't seen me since the previous summer couldn't believe I was the same person. (There was one other significant contributor to my success, something that my friend led me to, which can be found here. Don't let the theme deceive you, the main goal of that podcast is to improve people, and I can certify that it does.)
So I continue to work on that as time goes on. I don't do it (that is, go out) as much as I wish since I work a lot. My new goals for improvement, which I enacted this year, are to get back into working out regularly, and to use my time better. The working out I started when I got out of college, and I did really well at it, but a few months in I severely injured my arm, so I ended up dropping it for a year until I restarted this month. And I also think I am using my time better, I try to avoid the internet when I'm at home and just focus on doing something productive. I'm also trying to get better about doing necessary things without procrastinating, mainly chores.
I also have all this on a list, which I check regularly and update it as things come along
What you do to meditate:
First you sit down on the floor, legs crossed (you know, like in kindergarten).
Then you put your hands on your knees and close your eyes.
While sitting there with your hands on your knees and your eyes closed, you slowly breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth, trying to clear your mind of all thoughts.
You can do this for as long as you want, at least until your calm.
:]
I'm also hoping that this will be the year when I stop questioning a lot of my past choices given that one of my biggest dreams (getting accepted into RIT's Game Design program) worked out. This means that regardless of any different choices I could've made, it all worked out with the outcome I wanted. Therefore, I can hopefully stop beating myself up over past mistakes. It almost validates my life, in a way. So far, I've been doing better, but I still look back too often.
And of course, like every year, I want to try and find ways to build self-confidence. Last year was not a good year for that, but this year is looking much more likely to be the year where I start to like myself a lot more.
I've been listening to some stuff by Jack Kornfield, and doing some of the "guided" meditation. (I use quotes, because it's not like the visualization stuff that most guided meditation seems to be -- it's mostly silence, with him dropping tips and reminders once in a while.) He said one thing that helped me to get it a bit more than I have before, which is that rather than just trying to clear your mind of all thoughts, you try to focus on experiencing each breath. When you're focusing on experiencing each breath, you can't really think about anything else. Anyway -- it's still incredibly difficult for me to focus on my breath without my brain interrupting for more than 10 seconds or so, but I'm trying.
Our clarinets had about a 25% squeak rate. It was awful. I wanted to kick them all in the head every single time.
To clarify, though, the stuff I'm talking about is the guy giving a lecture to a class about meditation and, I guess, Buddhist philosophy, interspersed with meditation segments here and there.
:] I'm not sure if I've ever heard of this Jack Kornfield fellow, but he seems to be very knowledgeable on the subject and I think I'll check out some of his stuff (definitely want to check out his book After the Ecstasy the Laundry). If he's helping at all it might be a good idea to keep listening to his lectures, but have you tried meditating without any type of aid? But just keep trying and, eventually, you shall achieve, meditation might not be for everyone but if you get it down it can help greatly.
Do what will help and as long as you keep at it you'll get it eventually (but if it gives you bad Karma maybe you could go save a kitten or something xP).
:]