Achieving Happiness Column for 11-5-04 By Tom Muha, Ph.D. GETTING UNSTUCK Did you end up somewhere you don’t want to be in life? Have you been asking yourself what’s keeping you from getting into a better place? The answer is you. The truth is that everyone has times that they get lost in the forest and aren’t able to see where they’re going because of all the trees. When you get lost, your natural instinct is to become afraid. Fear limits your ability to find a way out of the woods to one of three options: blaming others (fight), looking for an easy way out (flight), or feeling inadequate (freeze). It takes an effort to counter these automatic reactions. However, you can learn to recognize your fear by becoming aware of when you’re being critical, giving into bad habits, or thinking that you’re not as good as others. We all tend to fall into these traps, but people who are happy have trained themselves to be conscious of when they’ve lapsed into one of these negative patterns. That’s when they stop, take a break, and look at their map of the forest. You can learn to recognize how your bad feelings are keeping you stuck in a bad place. More important,  you can get to a better place by developing a different way of thinking about how to get there. People who are able to go onto achieving happiness adhere to three strategies for overcoming fears that are easy to understand, but challenging to apply. IT’S NOT MY FAULT If you’re angry, you fear that other people are keeping you from being happy. You’re expending all of your energy fighting against those you feel are to blame for your being trapped in an unhappy situation. But that’s shifting the responsibility for your being stuck onto someone else. You’re giving away your power because you’re afraid to say, “I’m responsible for whether or not I’m happy.” Because your anger is creating animosities rather than cooperation, you’re a part of the problem instead of the solution. It isn’t other people’s job to give you what you want. It’s your job to negotiate a mutually acceptable agreement in order to get what you need. I CAN’T BREAK MY BAD HABITS If you’re habitually eating, drinking, smoking or spending too much, you fear that you aren’t strong enough to create something genuinely good in your life. You’ve discovered that you can temporarily feel better by taking the easy pathway to pleasure. When you give into your unhealthy impulses, however,  you’re taking a shortcut that only makes you feel weaker when you eventually arrive at an even worse place: fatter, sicker or poorer. It’s harder to make healthy choices at first, but within weeks of starting on an uphill path you’ll be feeling so proud of yourself that you’ll actually be enjoying the journey. I’M NOT SURE WHAT TO DO If you’re afraid that you’re not good enough to create positive outcomes in your life, you’ll have difficulty even imagining what they might be. If  you’re afraid of failing, you’ll do nothing. Then when nothing good happens, your belief that you’re incapable of achieving happiness is reinforced. The only way to stop wallowing in your pity party is to take charge of your own thoughts. Quit making excuses. You are capable of controlling your thinking. Stop dwelling on why you haven’t done better in the past, it’s only making you feel like there’s something wrong with you. Start focusing on seeing your future and figuring out ways to get yourself there.  In order to be successful and satisfied with your life, you need to have a vision of what happiness will look like when you get there. This reorients your mind to the destination that you desire for your life. By focusing on the outcomes that are most important to you, you will begin to choose pathways that lead in that direction. You’ll also give yourself the energy you need to move to that destination. By thinking about the steps you’ve followed when you have experienced some degree of success and satisfaction, you can figure out what strengths and skills you used when you were at your best. If you keep getting lost in the forest of life, you need to stop, look and listen. Stop going down the same path, look at where else you’d like to go, and listen to that voice within you that has some ideas about how to get there.   Tom Muha is a psychologist in Annapolis. He welcomes your comments and questions. To contact him call (443) 454-7274 or email him at tom@achievinghappiness.com.