Recession Survival Tips

Know Thyself by Acacia Parks Sheiner

When I say “know thyself,” I do not mean that you should sit around introspecting about who you are as a person. As a culture, we spent way too much time on that sort of thing. What I am recommending is that you make the effort to study yourself empirically. Instead of guessing what makes you happy, find out.

Start by tracking your mood throughout the day (a simple rating on a scale of 1-10 will do, though if you want to get fancy, you can also rate your concentration, energy level, or anything else of interest). Start by seeing what physical factors (sleep, food, exercise, and time of day, to name a few potential candidates) seem to impact your mood. After you have a good baseline for your mood and are aware of the impact that outside factors have on your mood fluctuations, you can start to look at the impact that your choices and behaviors (time spent on social interactions vs. solitary leisure activities; work vs. procrastination; emails vs. phone calls) by tracking your activities and seeing how more or less of a particular kind of activity affects you.

If you can begin to understand what factors and activities impact the quality of your day, you can begin changing your days so that you are more and more likely to enjoy them. Once you develop some hypotheses, you can start to do a bit of experimentation to confirm your hypotheses – try sleeping more or less, and see how that change plays out in your mood ratings. See what happens if you exercise in the morning vs. the evening. Compare days when you don’t see anyone at all with days when you see people all day long, or interact with others for only a few hours. I guarantee that you will learn something.

One of the things many people (myself included) report has a large, positive impact in their day is doing something they are good at. Perhaps the importance of having this kind of experience is obvious, but what isn’t so obvious is the “how”: how can you make sure that you do something you are good at on a regular basis? Is this really within our control? How do we even know what we are good at in the first place? As a culture, we are fixated on “skills” and “talents.” This works for some people – if you happen to be great at basketball and can land yourself a career playing basketball, then you’ve struck gold. But not everyone’s strengths lie in marketable abilities, and even if a person does posses a marketable talent, she may not be able to find a career that makes use of that talent.
We hear a lot less about personal strengths, or what Peterson and Seligman call “strengths of character.”  Compared to talents, personal strengths seem commonplace; after all, everybody has them. However, it is these kinds of traits – not skills and talents – that are the answer to the question of how we can do what we’re good at every day. Why? Because unlike talents, we can make use of character strengths regardless of our circumstances. Let’s say one of your top strengths is kindness. This means that you are both naturally kind, and that you feel especially authentic and exhilarated when you sense and take advantage of an opportunity to display kindness. Unlike the ability to sing or shoot a slam dunk, kindness is something you can apply anywhere – in work, in your personal life, or with strangers.

The same is true of any of the 24 strengths in Peterson and Seligman’s classification of strengths; curiosity, love of learning, zest, and perspective can all serve you well in work and in love, each in their own unique way, if only you knew to rely on them.

Article source: http://blog.happier.com/