The trouble with a lot of self help and personal development is it teaches us we can always be perfect. There is always a way to feel happy! Well, there isn’t. And when you believe there is, you end up creating a spiral of negative thought patterns for yourself. In this video, we will look at a different approach to tackling “bad days” and making the most of mood swings
Whatever Happened to Just Being Type A?
“It came out in the wake of ‘Eat, Pray, Love,’” said Ms. Fletcher of “The Happiness Project,” “this idea that to find happiness you had to leave your husband and quit your job and eat, pray, love. What Gretchen realized is that most people don’t want to leave their husbands and their jobs, and what she provided was recipes for being happier in place.
.. Most people seem to love sorting themselves into discrete, mutually exclusive categories (e.g., I’m an extrovert, you’re an introvert; I’m a perceiver, you’re a judger). Managers, bosses, and administrators seem to love them too. None of this is terribly surprising. Decades of psychological research show that the human mind craves simplicity and prefers categories to dimensions when it comes to conceptualizing ourselves and others.”
.. “This kind of neat categorization is highly appealing when one’s internal emotions and struggles are so messy,”
.. Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, an associate professor of history at the New School who has been researching wellness and self-help culture since the 1950s. “Isn’t it comforting to put yourself in a box that others occupy as well? Doesn’t that assure us of our normalcy? And unlike, say, trying to understand your problems through a clinical source like the D.S.M.” — the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the Baedeker of pathologies and a bucketing good read — “all of the categories tend to have some generally objectively positive traits. That is, you won’t arrive at the diagnosis that you’re a narcissist or a sociopath in a popular self-help book, in part because no one would buy that book.”
.. She divides self-help authors into Astronomers (scholarly) and Astrologers (intuitive), placing herself firmly in the Astronomer camp.
.. five mind-sets that apparently are impediments to successful careers: Captain Fantastic, Solo Flyer, Version 1.0, One Trick Pony and Whirling Dervish.
Elizabeth Warren Sells Out
Senator Elizabeth Warren once appeared on Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, TBS’s unwatchable Daily Show spinoff. This pairing had potential — for the first time, Bee had a chance to appear funny in comparison with her guest. “I am exhausted. I am personally broken,” said Bee, referring to the political scene. “People come up to me all the time and they’re like, ‘What do I do? What do I do? Help me!’ So my question to you is: What should I tell them?”
Gesturing wildly and with an edge to her voice, Senator Warren had marching orders ready: “You get in the fight, and then you fight as hard as you can,” she responded.
“But what does that mean?” asked Bee.
“Oh, come on! You know what it means! It means when you’re told to be quiet, you don’t sit down and be quiet,” replied Warren. “You stand back up.”
.. Warren may wish for capitalism’s demise, but as long as it’s here, she plans to do as well as she can out of it.
.. Elizabeth Warren is becoming a brand. “She’s the Apple of politics,” said Adam Green
.. Warren “has tried out for many roles:
- writer of silly self-help books (back when she was advertising herself as ‘Dr. Phil’s financial guru’),
- academic, Naderite populist,” and more. It is now her turn to play a more familiar role:
- “First Lady of the Left.”
.. Merge the
- “man of the people” cult of Bernie Sanders with the
- “You go, girl!” cult of Hillary Clinton into one movement,
embodied in the very person of Elizabeth Warren, and you could have something unstoppable in 2020. This is the master plan.
Warren will be
- the anti-Trump champion,
- the feminist champion,
- the working-class champion,
- the young people’s champion,
- the media sensation,
- the pop-culture star,
- and — don’t you dare forget — the (totally authentic)
- racial minorities’ champion all in one.
.. Elizabeth Warren cannot deliver the goods. The senior senator from Massachusetts is awkward and halting, even enervating in her relentless hectoring. Her false enthusiasm — the country, she insisted to Samantha Bee, will come out of the Trump years even better than it was before because “we don’t have any other choice”
.. Elizabeth Warren is the kind of politician that only a true believer could love.