Through Personal Development
Mastering the art of aloneness will not only enhance the quality of your relationship with yourself and improve your life, it will dramatically change your relationships with others. Instead of seeking another person to make you whole, you engage in relationships with a sense of being complete and whole on your own. Learning greater self-sufficiency builds your self-esteem and confidence. It also allows you to participate in relationships with others out of conscious choice, rather than from a place of neediness or of fear that you won’t be able to take care of yourself.
Relationships that are based on neediness and fear tend to be conflict-ridden and stressful. The emotionally needy people in relationships—the “Pursuers”—are continually fighting for closeness and feel a sense of panic when their partners want to do something or go somewhere without them. The partners of these emotionally needy people—“Distancers”—are always fighting for their space. They may feel overwhelmed and trapped by the feeling of being overly responsible for the other person’s happiness and/or sense of security. Such relationships turn into battlefields, breeding jealousy, insecurity, resentment, and contempt.
In contrast, in a healthy, conscious relationship, rather than being stuck in the rigid roles of the Pursuer and Distancer, partners make these roles fluid and interchangeable. One week one person may express the need for more time alone, and the next week he or she may feel a need for a greater sense of connectedness than the other person, and vice versa. At times, their need for togetherness may be virtually the same. A healthy relationship means a healthy acceptance of and respect for each other’s needs and a recognition that those needs are always changing.
Personal development allows you to learn how to respond to the world and the people around you in constructive ways—and break the limiting patterns you’ve carried with you from childhood into adulthood. The process involves deep self-examination and awareness of who you are, how you behave, and the results your actions generate. With greater awareness comes more conscious choice—so you can begin to consciously align how you think, behave, and relate to others with the results you long to have in your life. For example, anger is a normal and very human emotion. But few people have been taught how to effectively express and manage anger. You may have been taught to rationalize your anger away, blame or verbally attack the person who’s made you angry, or withdraw from and avoid the other person—and your feelings—altogether. An emotionally mature and constructive approach to anger involves understanding what’s upsetting you and communicating your feelings effectively.
Development work helps you acquire the practical skills that are essential to building and maintaining a healthy and fulfilling relationship with yourself and others. These include the ability to:
Develop strong interpersonal and communi-cation skills
Identify and set healthy boundaries with others
Feel and effectively express the wide range of human emotions, such as sadness, anger, fear, and joy
Negotiate and manage differences and conflict with others
Take responsibility for and care of yourself emotionally, mentally, physically, and financially
When two people have mastered the art of aloneness, they come to relationship from a place of wholeness and personal responsibility, with the life skills needed to share and sustain a joyful, conscious relationship based on healthy interdependence. They come together out of conscious choice as opposed to desperate need. Instead of providing each other with their life sustenance, each partner enriches and enhances an already fulfilling life.
Having a Healthier Relationship with Yourself
I’ve been talking about mastering the art of aloneness as a prerequisite for a healthy partnership or marriage. But what if the dream of meeting a soul mate remains an elusive ideal that never comes to fruition? What if the dream does indeed become a reality, but the relationship ends or your partner dies? If you make finding a soul mate the main focus of your life—and many people do—then if he or she fails to show up, you may spend many days or months or years waiting for a happy and fulfilling life instead of living it.
The benefit of mastering the art of aloneness is its focus on creating and living a joyful life now rather than waiting around for someone to come along and provide it for you at some immeasurable point in the future. Mastering aloneness allows you to:
Discover and focus on what interests you—your passions and life goals; the kinds of people with whom you can share supportive, uplifting, and fun relationships; and day-today activities and actions that motivate and inspire you
Actively engage in your own life and with others
Take action to create the physical and emotional well-being, career, financial security, experiences, relationships, and life circumstances you want to have in your life
Build a strong and solid inner and outer foundation that you have created, that no one can take away from you, and that will sustain you whether you’re in a relationship or living on your own
Getting You There
Throughout this book, I’ll be giving you the tools you need to work through the process of mastering the art of aloneness. At some points, you may want to enlist professional support—the help of a good therapist or coach to guide you through some of the steps that you might find particularly challenging. I’ll address that subject later in the book. But much of this work will draw on your own inner resources.
The exercises at the end of this chapter are designed to jumpstart this process. You’ll evaluate where you are today, and you’ll begin to change the way you think about aloneness. Simultaneously, you’ll start changing your actions and behavior so you begin to reinforce a more positive attitude about being alone. I talked earlier about breaking the vicious cycle of negative feelings and negative behaviors. This is where it begins. Recognize that the more you engage in new behaviors, the more you will create the new results to which you aspire. Here’s an example: Let’s say you have a free Saturday. You can look at it from two perspectives. You can stay at home feeling sorry for yourself because you’re alone with no plans and nothing to do. You can sit around in your sweatpants and a T-shirt watching television, eating chips, and feeling lousy. Or you can look at it a different way: “I have a free day all to myself, and I can do anything I want. I can go to the gym and work out. I can call a friend and go to the movies. I can work in my garden, make myself a delicious lunch, and read a great novel.” Then do something. Do something gratifying. Do something productive. Or do something that truly engages you. But make a conscious effort to avoid doing something that will make you feel isolated and sad. By being more active and more positive, you’ll reinforce and solidify your new perspective on aloneness and begin to create a new reality.
This same approach can infuse every aspect of your life—not just your plans for an open Saturday, but your plans for your future, where to focus your energies, and how you approach the challenges you routinely face. Instead of being trapped in negative feelings about aloneness and the conditions those feelings invoke, you can begin to see opportunities you may never have seen before.
Assessing Where You Are Today
We’re all different. Each of us faces a unique set of challenges and confronts a unique set of obstacles to mastering our aloneness. The following questionnaire will help you assess where you are today and which areas of your life require further development as you move forward.
Mastering the Art of Aloneness:
A Self-Assessment Exercise
The following areas include the core components of mastering the art of aloneness. Check those areas that are going very well in your life—areas where you are experiencing a high level of satisfaction. Check all boxes that apply.
Physical Health and Well-Being:
• I am in optimal physical health and rarely get sick.
• I’m physically fit and energetic.
• I consistently practice self-care by eating a healthy diet, ex
ercising regularly, and maintaining a healthy and balanced lifestyle.
Relationship with Yourself:
• I feel good about who I am on the inside and about my physical appearance.
• I have a strong sense of self-esteem and self-respect.
• I enjoy emotional and mental balance, health, and well-being.
• I consistently honor myself by expressing my feelings and needs and setting healthy boundaries with others.
Professional Life:
• My work is enjoyable and meaningful to me.
• My work activates my full potential and leverages my skills and strengths.
• My work provides me with the level of success and compensation I want to have.
Personal Development:
• I have a strong sense of who I am and what I want in my life.
• I have a clear understanding of my strengths, weaknesses, passions, and values.
• I’m able to set and follow through on goals and commitments to myself and others.
• I can effectively communicate my thoughts, feelings, and needs to others and manage conflict in an effective and resourceful manner.
Social Relationships:
• I share healthy, supportive, and joyful relationships with others and actively engage in the world around me.
• I feel connected to a community that uplifts and supports me.
Spiritual Life (if it’s important to you):
• I have a connection to a higher power or energy and draw from it in my daily life.
• I’m able to be fully present in each moment and take time to appreciate the blessings I have.
Financial:
• I have the financial resources I need to provide the life quality and experiences that I want to have.
• I am financially self-sufficient and feel in control of my financial security.
Identifying Your Challenges and Opportunities
Now we’ll take a closer look at the areas you didn’t check. Identifying the specific areas of your life that are not satisfying, and the opportunities inherent in improving them, will help you to develop a more positive view of aloneness.
Exercise: Challenges and Opportunities
Step One
Take out your journal and write “The Challenges in Mastering My Aloneness” at the top of a new page. Referring back to the items you did not check on the questionnaire above, make a list of all the challenges and obstacles you face in moving toward your mastery of aloneness—the areas on which you feel you need to focus to move forward. These will serve as benchmarks as you go through this process. For example, if you didn’t check Relationship with Myself, what are the reasons? Your list might include: “I’m out of shape and feel self-conscious about the way I look,” or “I make other people’s needs more important than my own,” or “I feel shy and insecure when I’m around people I don’t know.” Identify anything you feel is holding you back from reaching your fullest potential—such as negative emotions (feelings of sadness, loneliness, hopelessness) and negative behaviors (overeating, smoking, drinking too much).
Step Two
Now write “The Opportunities in Mastering My Aloneness” at the top of a new page. Based on the challenges you’ve identified, list the opportunities inherent in these challenges—those things you can focus on to begin changing your perception of aloneness from a negative situation to one that’s full of opportunities. Based on the challenges I listed as examples in Step One, your list might look something like this:
• Get in great physical shape
• Learn how to set healthy boundaries with people and better meet my own needs
• Develop greater self-confidence and feel more at ease around people
This list can be as general or specific as you like. It might include such opportunities as: “Become more independent.” “Learn how to manage my finances.” “Uncover new interests and passions.” “Engage in social activities that will inspire and fulfill me.” “Find more meaningful work.” “Increase my self-esteem.” Or it might include more specific goals and actions, such as: “Join Weight Watchers and lose 15 pounds.” “Go through a Human Resources certification program so I can increase my income.” “Find a coach or therapist and focus on developing a better relationship with myself and increasing my self-esteem.” What’s most important here is to develop a list that inspires you to begin to turn your own challenges into new opportunities.
CHAPTER 3
UNCOVERING YOUR
CONDITIONED SELF
Think of a new baby or a very small child. That child can express all her feelings. One minute, she’s sad. The next minute, she’s angry. A few minutes later, she’s laughing with joy or excitement. A toddler is just as likely to reach over and lovingly stroke her new baby brother’s head as she is to whack him on the leg in a jealous rage. All are within the range of perfectly normal human emotions.
What happens next depends on the family. In one family, a parent might pick that toddler up and gently encourage her to kiss her brother. Or explain that, if you hit your brother, it will hurt him and he will cry. Or simply separate the children. In another, a parent might fly into a rage and send the toddler off to her room. Or, worse still, hit her. In yet another family, no one is even paying attention.
When we’re born—if we’re born healthy—each of us is a whole, integrated human being, capable of expressing the full range of natural human emotions. We have no inhibitions, so we have the ability to feel and express all of our feelings in a very spontaneous and natural way. Then along comes this thing called family. Your family of origin—that is, the family you grew up in—plays an enormous role in determining whether you’re able to sustain this innate wholeness throughout your childhood and into adulthood. There are all kinds of circumstances that can disrupt that continuum. Tolstoy once said, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Put another way, there are constructive, well-functioning families where children learn to express all their feelings in a healthy way. And then there’s everybody else—families with a variety of dysfunctions, each one unique.
In truth, very few adults escape from childhood unscathed. Most families have some form of dysfunction, running the gamut from mild to extreme. Consider these statistics: 63 percent of Americans are affected by substance-use disorders, and, of these, 72 percent are affected by the disorder of a family member. 1Roughly one in four children in the United States is exposed to alcohol abuse and dependence within the family.2Between 40 and 60 percent of marriages now end in divorce, a number that’s up to 10 percent higher for second and subsequent marriages. The majority of divorces occur in families with children under the age of 18.3 But dysfunction occurs even in homes that aren’t experiencing the consequences of divorce or substance abuse. As psychologist J. Bailey Molineux recently wrote in a column titled “Dysfunctional Families Can Be Loving”:
The way I figure it, 90 percent of families are dysfunctional, if by that I mean that they have suffered some emotional pain. I can interview just about anyone and find some dysfunctions in their family histories—premature death, divorces, business failures, serious accidents or chronic illnesses, secrets, emotional cutoffs, alcoholism, parental abandonment, marital problems. To be alive is to be part of a dysfunctional family. It is built into the fabric of life.4
In this chapter, you’re going to begin to explore the dysfunctions in your own family and start to connect the dots—by making a connection between your family of origin and the core limiting beliefs and behaviors that run your life. This is not easy work. It can be uncomfortable and emotionally demanding, and it requires that you be completely honest with yourself as you examine your weaknesses, your limitations, and the areas of your life that present challenges. That means setting your ego aside, which in itself can be difficult. You also have to look back at pieces of your childhood and revisit events that you may find painful. That’s not easy either. Some people find it
hard to look at the choices their own parents made and to evaluate those choices. As you go through this process, it’s important to keep in mind that this work is not about blaming your parents, or anyone else for that matter. It’s not about being a victim. The purpose of this family-of-origin work is to gain an understanding of how you behave and why, so you can change your limiting behaviors into a new set of behaviors that can propel you forward. This is one of the most important steps in mastering the art of aloneness.
The Family as a System
Every family is a system. Like a colony of ants, a football team, or an exclusive tennis club, every family has its own set of rules and the family members play various roles to keep the system going. General systems theory was first developed by an Austrian biologist named Ludwig von Bertalanffy. When his concepts were applied to the field of psychology by a number of prominent theorists, they became a valuable tool for understanding the dynamics of the family. Popularized in the United States in the 1980s by author John Bradshaw with his book Bradshaw On: The Family,5family systems theory plays an important role in my coaching work and in mastering the art of aloneness. It provides a powerful framework for understanding the roots of the self-defeating patterns of thought and behavior that we take with us into adulthood. In my work, I’ve drawn from the fields of psychology, physiology, sociology, holistic healing, and strategic business practices to develop a unique model for achieving mastery over one’s life. It’s a very practical approach that helps you cut right to the core of what I refer to as the default operating system—the internal operating system rooted in the unconscious that automatically drives your thoughts and behaviors. It’s designed to help you understand how your early life experiences within your family of origin shape your internal operating system in ways that can inhibit your sense of well-being and impede your ability to achieve your innate potential.
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