Strategies for Sustainable Emotional Growth

Welcome to the Happiness Podcast. I'm Dr. Robert Puff . Have you noticed how our world is changing quite rapidly right now? Unless you live out in the woods away from everyone, you probably are aware our world is changing and it's changing fast. So with these rapid changes, we want rapid results. It makes sense. If we feel stressed, we want a pill , a vacation, or a quick distraction to fix it right now. We can distract ourselves so rapidly these days it's almost shocking . And if we have to wait for something , we can go into an emotional tail spin or a temper tantrum. Does any of this sound or feel familiar? Unfortunately, we have now what's called the trap of linear thinking. So when we start a new spiritual or mental health practice, we expect linear results. We think , I'll meditate for ten minutes today so my stress should be exactly ten percent lower tomorrow. When it doesn't work that way, we get frustrated and quit declaring that mindfulness doesn't work for me. And so we pour ourselves an extra glass of wine because that works immediately . At least in the short term . The problem with these short term fixes for long term solutions is you just keep needing them and they don't get better . If you've ever met a really calm, peaceful person , they didn't get there overnight . That took years of practice to get there . Spiritual fitness and deep happiness do not grow on a flat, l inear curve, they grow exponentially. The peace we experience today is the dividend of the habits we planted years ago. But if we give it some thought, isn't this exponential growth really true about anything in life that's truly successful? Think of finances. Someone when they get their paycheck spends it all because they want things. They've been waiting and they worked hard that week and they saved nothing for the future. Another person invests a little bit every week, every month of their paycheck, and then twenty , thirty, forty years go by . And what happens? The one person looking for linear fast fixes is still looking for those linear fast fixes. The person that saved a lot now can slow down and has time to enjoy life without fear . I was recently reading a very long post by one of my friends that I grew up in high school with. He was complaining how hard his life was and he couldn't wait to get to heaven to have God explained to him why life has to be so hard . He's not a close friend, but he does post a lot on social media so I'm aware of the different choices he's made in life . And the things he was struggling with years ago are really just the same things he's struggling with now, just more serious struggles because he's struggling overall in so many different areas of his life right now. I'm not trying to judge him. I actually care for him. But we all know examples of this of people that look for short term gain, quick fixes that in the long run, it has a lot of negative consequences . But if we look at other friends of ours on social media and they seem to be doing extremely well , it's usually because they make different choices along the way and now are reaping the benefits of that . These examples are just to show that when it comes to our soul's growth, the math is the same. Have you ever heard of this classic thought experiment ? Would you rather have a million dollars right now or a single penny that doubles in value every day for thirty days? If you do the math, the double penny turns into over five million dollars , but for the first two weeks, the growth looks microscopic and discouraging . And this is true in our spiritual and psychological lives too . When we start practicing mindfulness, taking deep breaths , or forgiving the people who irritate us, the change in our life seems microscopic , but those moments are quietly multiplying. When I started out on my journey , I had a lot of things I needed to work on and to grow in. I remember once I was at a shopping mall and this guy, who was in the hurry, but didn't have the right away, pulled out right in front of me and had to slam on my brakes in order not to hit him. Well , it was a parking lot and he got stuck very quickly and was sitting there, so I got on my car to talk to him. I wanted to give him a piece of my mind , but I'm sure I probably scared him so he rode up his window and wouldn't even look at me so I took my fist and banged it on the top of his car , and I left the dent. It's definitely not something I'm proud of, but it does show that I had room to grow . A lot of room. So I started doing things . I started meditating an hour a day . I made room for exercise to get rid of the stress I was feeling in my body . I started eating better , and found that yoga was also really good for my body , but doing all this didn't transform me overnight . It took time and slowly I began to see the changes and other people saw the changes in me too . Thankfully, those anger moments in my life were isolated , but they began to dissipate slowly . And I began to see differences in my life . Other people's behavior stopped irritating me so much, so all the things that doing we're aren't just isolated events, they're daily deposits . Over decades those daily choices have compounded to create a high resilience baseline of peace that buffers us again st life's inevitable ups and downs . This is how life works in all areas not just spiritual, not just psychological , even in wealth . Do you know the wisdom of Warren Buffet t, the ultimate investor ? He is considered the greatest investor in history , accumulating immense wealth but the secret to his wealth isn't that he made wild, risky, dramatic trades , over ninety percent of his wealth was actually accumulated after his sixty fifth birthday . His superpower and our superpower isn't intensity , it's consistency and time . He let his investments sit and compound for decades . We have to treat our minds the same way . The goal isn't to meditate intensely for ten hours on a Sunday to achieve sudden enlightenment . The goal is to sit quietly for ten minutes every single day for the rest of our lives , letting the peace compound . Think of your favorite emotional superhero. Maybe it was your grandmother , maybe it's a friend , maybe it's someone you know who's a public figure Study their lives and see they didn't get there overnight . It took them years to develop that peace, that tranquility . That's what I've done in life. I've traveled the world, found people that are doing exceptionally well , and then I asked them, How did you get there? It's always the same answer to work , to discipline , to putting forth time in the short term to get the long term results . It just takes time to develop a soul that has happiness and peace as its core . I remember the first time I met one of these older souls . She was one of the most peaceful persons I've ever met my life . And I was just astonished by her . She was working for the Peace Corps , helping police people around the world that wanted to join the Peace Corps. She worked in Los Angeles and had an incredibly modest life. Her car was very old , and she was actually house sitting a business in order to get free rent. But when she would talk and share things about her life, she would talk about how she'd go out for lunch , sit on the grass , and just see the beauty of the world all around her . I didn't know her from before when she was younger, but by getting to know her , I knew she had done many things in her life to get where she was at, and it had taken a lot of work . When she told me about how she spent her lunch times , I was so busy working on my doctorate , accumulating my residency hours and working on my dissertation . I was making time for meditation, I was making time for exercise , but I wasn't making the best use of my time. After I heard what she did, I started going outside , having my lunches just like her and found it so wonderful . And once we get on this journey, we'll keep finding new things we can add to our life that make it better . It really never stops. It's like with Warren Buffet's money. He just keeps making more . We can do the same with our spiritual and psychological life , we can just keep making it better because there actually is an interest rate to our emotions . There's positive compounding, joy . Every time we choose to respond to a frustrating situation with patience instead of anger, we're increasing our interest rate. We are physically wiring our brain to make patience slightly easier the next time . But we have to be careful of what's called negative compound ing, resentment , it works in the other direction . Holding on to a tiny grudge today might seem harmless , but resentment compounds. Left unchecked, a small annoyance multipl into a deep, bitter personality . My friend from high school that I talked about earlier that I read his post on Facebook , I remember when we were in high school , we went through a brief season of canoeing. We didn't go often, but one day we decided to go on a really long canoe trip. There was a lake in the town that we lived in and we decided to canoe all the way around the lake. It was a joyous , wonderful day and we were both happy teenagers just to enjoy in life . And now when I read his post , I could see how the years had compounded and he had so much anger and resent about the things that were happening in his life right now . That young man that I spent time with as a friend had changed . If we don't invest wisely into our lives . There are always going to be consequences both ways . When we invest wisely , we get good results, happiness, peace , but if we invest poorly through anger and resentment, our lives can turn out very challenging in the end . We all know people that are older now and bitter . They really weren't always that way. It took time to get there, but the same is true that someone is doing well . They weren't always that way, it took time for them to get there too . If you do know someone in your life that is struggling . May I make a gentle suggestion ? Don't critique them, don't judge them , but perhaps pray for them and hope that life will slowly get better for them . I think judging people is not a good path in life . Understanding they're on a different journey than we're on and wishing them through our prayers for a better life a good way of addressing these differences . So if we want to start making changes in our life , how do we do this on a daily basis? The first thing we can do is make microdeposits into our soul . Choose one habit that takes less than two minutes. It could be naming three things that we're grateful for when we're going to bed or taking five deep breaths when we get in our car to go somewhere. Commit to doing this every day . However, the key is not to judge the results after a week. Let it compound . The next thing we can do is don't break the chain. In compounding interest, the worst thing we can do is withdraw the money early. In emotional fitness, consistency is more important than intensity . If we only have two minutes to sit in silence today instead of our usual twenty do the two minutes the key is to keep the compounding chain unbroken . And then thirdly, celebrate the invisible growth . Acknowledge that the most important changes happening inside of us right now are invisible . Trust the process . We may find that we still are grumpy over little things , but then one day, for whatever reason , or because of all the growth we've done, that changes , and the things that used to irritate us just don't anymore. In conclusion , you can actually be the wealthiest person in the world if you possess a peaceful mind , and that wealth is built one tiny , mindful choice at a time . And perhaps as a reminder , at the end of the day we can say I trust the quiet power of consistency . Today I make a beautiful deposit into my soul , knowing that my peace is compounding in my resilience is continuing to grow . Thank you for joining me on the Happiness Podcast. If you'd like to learn more about the podcast, please go to W WW dot happiness podcast dot org that's happinesspodcast dot org until next time accept what is love what is