Personal Growth Tips

Happiness & Satisfaction. Imagine that you watch the earth from a distance above. What do you see? People running in circle. They leave home in the morning and get home in the night, or run in circle in their home from bed to desk and back. Why do they this? Surviving, satisfaction, happiness?! I was meditating if a millionaire is happier than the average (I mean financial) man and what I will do if I would be a millionaire over night. After a while, I concluded that the advantage of the rich gay over the financial average man reside only in a greater potential to episodic satisfy his senses, needs and wishes, but not a greater capacity at the attitudinal and mental or inner level.

It is sure that happiness and complete frustration are at war. But this doesn’t mean that a complete satisfaction of our senses, needs and wishes assure you happiness. More, you need a little frustration in order to get into a state of happiness, because we humans feel happy only by difference from a lower state to an upper state. We get ordinary and bored even in the highest state of satisfaction.

Happiness & Senses. Let’s take into attention the senses: sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell. From these all only sight and taste make the difference between the two (rich and average man). The rich man has the financial resources to travel where he wants and sees almost all beautiful places in the world and to eat daily all tasty food from allover the world. These things make a significant difference, but take into account that humans get bored with something which occur almost daily, even if this something is the best, because we feel happy only by difference from a lower state to an upper state. And if something is the best what is the next level if you want to feel a difference?!

Happiness & Needs. I think that there is no difference between the two at this level. The financial average man has the resources to satisfy his basic needs: food; sex; safety and security; socialization: friendship and family. But let’s take into account the needs as a whole, not only bodily needs but developmental needs. At the level of self-esteem we may think that the rich man stay better, but it depends on each individual and your attitude toward yourself and others, which can be worked even if you don’t have lots of money. The level of self-actualization also doesn’t depend on lot of money but mostly on your activity and creativity. In other words on your capacity to make your daily activities creative and interesting, which will take you into a flow state of mind, a state of totally and pleasant implication in your activity.

Happiness & Wishes. Here the rich man may have an advantage, with money you can satisfy your most odd wishes and dreams. Take into account, though, that wishes and dreams are more interesting on the path to fulfilling them and pleasant for a short time after, they are not something for the long run, they are something episodic. But let’s be honest, the rich man have a real advantage here.

Happiness & Inner Activity. At this level of mental activity there is no difference between the two. Each of them can have a rich mental activity if they take time to cultivate their mind and imagination. Inner activity and satisfaction have a great impact on your level of happiness. If your inner activity is poor and your aren’t satisfied with what you have and do, then the satisfaction of your senses, needs and wishes make no big difference, because happiness happens at the inner level and activity.

More important than simple and episodic satisfaction of your senses is the inner or attitudinal element. Your attitude toward everything that happens in your life is an essential ingredient of your happiness, but most important is your attitude toward your life as a whole. Is your attitude toward your life one of gratitude and satisfaction or not? Are you satisfied with what you have, do and think everyday?

In our era of consumption, satisfaction and bodily pleasure are overestimated to be the sure way to happiness and ignore the power of inner activity. When you are an ignorant that is a bad state for you, but when you think you are a wise man that is a bad state for you too. And you know why? Because in each of these states your inner activity is low. Only when you are on the path from the ignorant state of mind to the wise or knowing state, you are in a productive state of mind. This doesn’t mean it isn’t a good thing to be a wise man, but is a bad thing to think you are a wise man, it will shrink your mind activity.

Happiness = Senses, Needs, Wishes Satisfaction + Inner Satisfaction & Activity, for the simple reason that You = Body + Mind.

End of life is the only certainty we have and, in the same time, the subject we are frequently avoiding to discuss. We bravely try to “beat” death doing all kind of activities which give us satisfaction, fulfillment and the feeling of being in control of our own life.

Even the feeling of losing the love ones exists, it is “berried” deep inside us and we say to ourselves that they will not die in time to come or it can’t happen to them. In fact, we are refusing to face the reality acting as this “problem” will not affect me if I’m not thinking about it.

We come back to the cruel reality when a close person is taking away from us. When it really happens, we ask over and over again “why him” no matter how old he/ she was. It doesn’t hurt less if the person is older. That’s the moment when we realize that we aren’t ready to deal with love one’s death as well as the fact that the feeling of self-control is an illusion.

So what it has to be done to be more ready to accept the death of someone close? The most important thing it will be to learn to talk open about it. It is known the effect of a spoken word. More we express our interior thoughts and fears more we will be able to accept the inevitable. Further more, by talking we can get rid of all the tensions inside us.

I think that the phenomenon of death psychology should be approached more seriously. A greater attention to what is going throw a person facing a love one’s death it can be an answer to the main question of this editorial. This means that each one of us must learn to live every moment of life to its full intensity being aware that he can’t control and deny death. We can only enjoy the time spend with love ones.

The effect of someone’s death on us and the ability to accept his death depends a lot on this previous self-preparation. I could say that if we” take care” of our soul before by being honest and realistic, then we can convert the overwhelming pain into priceless memories.

Don’t ask yourself if you are ready to deal with a love one’s death and then hide inside YOU, make it real because it will only help you when the time will come! – Psychologist, Nicoleta Cramaruc

The concept of abnormality is not only relative but it’s often mixed up with being different. Every one of us needs to be accepted in a social group and, many times, we are willing to do major compromises to reach this goal. A frequent one is the tendency of constantly showing a similar behavior to the majority’s one to avoid the risk of being isolated.

The predisposition for compromise appears when there is an enormous discrepancy between appearance and reality. This means that we are thinking/ acting differently from the group but we assume our partners’ thoughts/ actions as there are our own. In time, this self-censorship not only brings us a lot of frustration but it also ”help” us to slip in the extreme of a faked behavior.

Taking into account that we are generally tempted to choose the easy way of getting something immediately, it’s explainable our “strategy” which save us the effort of self-describing. The so-called “guilt” of being different is also hidden deep inside our mind, for a short period I would say. In fact, we trick ourselves thinking that it will be easy to act like this for a long time without having to make special efforts. Let’s not forget that self-censorship always involves a huge psychical pressure.

It’s important to know for those who are “afraid” of being them that wanting to be the same as others doesn’t imply any advantage. Have you ever heard the expression “to make a difference”? For making this happen we must accept and let others to find out about our interior structure. If we decide to hide it we only give others the power to control us.

If you have the courage to be different it means you are a strong and independent personality, in control of who you are or you want to be, open mind to challenges. Further more, you must be conscious that you can’t be close friend of everybody, maybe only superficially. You can’t be liked by all and it’s not even recommended to be. It’s more efficient for your self-esteem to be accepted for who/ what you are than for some qualities you simulate to have.

Life means taking all kind of risks and being enough responsible for any action. I believe that he decision to behave like others could be considered a risk as well- the risk of losing our identity inside the group. So it’s desirable to be remarked for acting differently than being “one” more in a social crowd. – Psychologist, Nicoleta Cramaruc

A minimum desire and tendency to control the actions and the persons around us exists in every one of us. This purpose becomes more difficult when it comes to control our mind. Human mind still remains a partially controlled “area”. I believe that more important than control is to permanently develop those essential cognitive skills for an efficient adjustment in the future.

I’ve recently also found this approach of the mind in the book “Five minds for the future” wrote by the well-known psychologist H. Gardner. Based on the concept of “minds”, his point of view outlines that the key for the human’s evolution is to achieve five types of mind.

1. A disciplinary mind prevents us to become “slaves” of passive information learning. The idea is not to exclude the learning process but to do it understanding every discipline. We should be able to think from at least a couple of disciplines’ perspective (science, mathematics, history and an art discipline) and to educate our teenagers not by the past standards but for the future.

2. A synthesizing mind needs abilities to organize the overwhelming “wave” of information and to integrate ideas from different disciplines. By being a synthetic structure we can easily take correct decisions for every problem.

3. A creating mind could be expressively described by the legendary dictum of Descartes “I think, so I exist” transformed into “I create, so I exist”. A creative person is always looking for the challenges. This kind of individual analyzes a situation from more than one perspective trying to clarify any questions or phenomenon. Generally, every person wants to be creative and to realize something new in life.

4. A respectful mind creates a cause-effect relation between persons: the ones disrespectful don’t deserve the other one’s respect. Thinking respectfully means to live one next to other without wanting to produce any harm and to promote tolerance between people. Respect signifies to appreciate the human diversity. The poet W.H.Auden drastically expressed the reality by saying: “we must love each other or die”.

5. An ethical mind is set to warn us about the non-ethical persons and the ones refusing to assume any responsibility. Once we interiorize the ethical perspective we think about the welfare of all the people not only about ours. A notorious religious chief priest said that when all that’s important can be sold and bought, when going to shopping is seen like a salvation or when the publicity commercials are considered as prayers, values are destroyed.

Achieving this five minds isn’t very easy because of obstacles as conservatory attitudes, resistance to everything is new, hidden risks or the lack of proper methods and ways. Further more, it’s also needed a people’s reorientation from the technology evolution to human values and personalities. We have to be more preoccupied for our cognitive and spiritual wellbeing than the material one.

If we want to make the world a better place in the future, we must start from changing our mind’s concepts and choosing the ones that can help us to grow as unique personalities. – Psychologist, Nicoleta Cramaruc