Balance Blog - The Mindful Stoic

How To Stop Being Too Nice

Jun 4, 2023 | Balance

How do we reconcile wanting to be compassionate and being too nice? By too nice, I mean placing the needs of others above your own to the point that your own are not met. Too nice also means getting taken advantage of. Being too nice opens the door to repeated insult, disrespect, and abuse, which can build up like plaque and proliferate over time.

When we fail to defend our needs repeatedly, we begin to feel resentful and angry with those who mistreat us, but also with ourselves. When we begin to lose respect for ourselves, we become ineffective in our efforts to make the world a better place. So, it’s clear that we need to be skillful at walking this tightrope of compassion, love, and understanding.

I believe that those who practice mindfulness, Buddhist, or Stoic philosophy are susceptible to being too nice to the point of self-harm. These practitioners learn to pause and reflect in the heat of the moment rather than letting raw emotions whip their reactions, which can lead them to taking the higher road rather than defending themselves. They learn to practice compassion, empathy, and understanding, which can lead to placing the needs of others over their own.

But, just as these compassion-based ways of living can tilt us towards being too nice, they also provide guidance for better balance. In this article, I’ll share what I feel are uncommon approaches to striking the crucial balance between compassion and being too nice. This article is intended for people who want to make the world a better place and reduce suffering in others.

How to stop being too nice

This article will not urge you to be less kind. Rather, it will focus on preventing or mitigating the negative side effects of ‘being too nice’. It will focus mostly on how not to be taken advantage of.

This post contains affiliate links, which help us keep the blog afloat. Click here for more information.

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Be the leader

Strong leaders command respect naturally. They don’t explicitly demand or enforce respect from others. They generate respect through consistent demonstration of virtuous actions. If you’re the kind of person others want to emulate, they will not want to take advantage of you. They will want to be included in whatever it is you’re doing. Be the leader in your home. Take the initiative at work. Embody your values. Above all, act with compassion, love, and understanding, and the behavior of those around you will gradually follow suit.

Always know your ‘why’ in any given situation or relationship

Define the ‘why’—the purpose—of major situations and relationships in your life. The ‘why’ of your relationship with your boss is to earn a living. The ‘why’ of your relationship to your significant other may be support, intimacy, or love. Knowing the purpose behind situations and relationships gives you guidance. It lets you choose your battles wisely.

You only need to stand up for yourself and protect your boundaries if the behavior of others prevents you from achieving your purpose. When appropriate, communicate this purpose with those closest to you. They should be aware that this is important to you and that you’re willing to protect it.

Another way to think about this with long-term or close relationships is to ask the question, ‘What am I trying to optimize for in this relationship?’ Are you trying to optimize for love? Are you trying to optimize for respect? Or are you trying to optimize for feeling validated and being ‘right’? Again, knowing the true essence of the relationship helps you choose whether or not you need to defend yourself.

Set boundaries

Most of the work required to set boundaries is introspective, because to set boundaries we must first gain a thorough understanding of ourselves. Without knowing our own needs, values, and purpose, we cannot set effective boundaries with others.

Don’t feel afraid, guilty, or selfish for setting boundaries. As mentioned before, if you can’t love yourself, then you can’t make a positive impact on the world. This is a lose-lose scenario. So, if setting boundaries and enforcing them with peaceful speech means the difference between you being strong enough to help yourself and others and you being totally ineffective, then please, stand up for yourself and set those boundaries.

For further reading, an excellent book on setting boundaries is Set Boundaries, Find Peace: A Guide to Reclaiming Yourself by Nedra Glover Tawwab.

Barbed wire over a pink background to represent an article on how not to be too nice

How not to be too nice, aka how not to be taken advantage of

Set consequences

People must face consequences when they cross your boundaries. But, these consequences should not be wrapped up in hatred, anger, or resent. The skillful application of consequences should promote peace and reconciliation.

Rather than adding fuel to the fire by spitting harsh words or engaging in destructive actions, consider using removals or subtractions as consequences. Withdraw privileges or benefits that you normally provide to the guilty party. You could consider removing yourself from the situation entirely for a period. It’s important to communicate clearly to the other person why they’re facing consequences and for how long. More importantly, don’t let your consequences contradict your values. Don’t stoop to their level, resign yourself to passive-aggressiveness, or speak or act in destructive ways.

Always work from a place of love and understanding

Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh taught that we must remember that in all interpersonal conflict the other person is suffering, too. They may be suffering from attachment, ignorance, or hatred. Work to help them overcome or alleviate the root causes of this suffering. Work to help them heal. Do this gently, without preaching or forcing. If we can alleviate suffering in others, from a place of love and understanding, then they can loosen their grip on hindrances in their own lives. Once they begin to see more clearly, they will be less likely to take advantage of your kindness. This requires a lot of effort, but in some cases, it is a more constructive alternative to engaging in gainless battles or walking away forever.

Lessen your attachment to your ego

Sometimes, what may feel like damaging insult, disrespect, or abuse, is really just criticism, nagging, or careless speech. With tight fists wrapped around the sense of self (or ego), the response to these minor grievances is one of automatic defense. This is the ego asserting itself as part of its endless quest for validation. If it’s not preventing you from achieving your ultimate purpose or breaching one of your boundaries, then, although the ego leads you to believe that you need to defend yourself, it may actually require nothing more than shrugging off and moving forward.

Final thoughts

Compassion for all beings includes yourself. Love yourself. If loving yourself means you need five hours a week to exercise, then stand up and protect those hours. If you cannot take care of yourself, then you cannot take care of others. Know your ultimate purpose in relationships and situations and understand your values and needs intimately.

With this knowledge, set reasonable boundaries and communicate them explicitly to others. Be prepared to enforce these boundaries and apply consequences to repeat offenders, but always do so with the ultimate aim of peace, understanding, and reconciliation.

Finally, remember that other people’s actions are entirely outside of your control. Your responses to their actions, however, are yours to mold and shape as you wish.

“You have power over your mind—not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.”

― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

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Your Core Values: Turning Good Intentions Into Good Results

May 22, 2022 | Balance, Stoicism

There is no inertia or silent study with the Stoic virtue of Wisdom. The Stoics taught that Wisdom is about knowing things so that we can do the right things. What good is virtue at all if we’re stuck at home with it? What good is it to have silent, inactive values and virtues? Most of us have core values. We know what’s chiefly important to us: love, health, honesty, freedom, etc. We can recite them when asked, but do we actively work on them?

About a year ago, I noticed in my own life that the things I valued most were taking a backseat to my career. The fortunate thing about this realization is that because of my career I’ve learned a thing or two about getting things done. For a salary, I spend a lot of time solving complex problems, breaking down enormous projects into manageable parts, and constantly optimizing for efficient results. This juxtaposition—my core values on one side sitting stuck in the mire of good intentions and my work on the other side constantly producing tangible results—led me to a powerful realization that I’d like to share with you today.

Getting smart with our core values

If industry is good for one thing, it’s getting things done. Strong businesses are built on mechanisms and techniques that remove good intentions and turn inputs into outputs. We need this with what we value most. We need to apply some result-producing methods to our love life, to our health, friendship, spirituality. Otherwise, our values remain as romanticized ideals trapped in a cloud, never raining down to water the roots of life.

“Waste no more time arguing what a good person should be. Be one.” — Marcus Aurelius

In this article, I’d like to share what I’ve learned since I had this epiphany. It’s based on some basic productivity and project management techniques I’ve picked up over the years working for a giant company. I’ll share how we can borrow a cup of sugar from big business and incorporate it into our own recipe for consistent results. This is about making the time and then using that time efficiently to uphold our values in daily life.

This post contains affiliate links, which help us keep the blog afloat. Click here for more information.

Neon sign showing the words good intentions stricken out and the word mechanisms highlighted.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions

Should is not an acceptable word in a business meeting. “We should review this again next month” or “I should contact the legal department to check on that.” It’s a red flag that means the thing is probably not going to get done. Maybe it will, maybe it won’t. But that’s not good enough. This applies equally to the things we value most. “We should start having date nights every week” or “I should call my old friends more often” or “I should check out the local health food store”. These are all good intentions, which are simply not good enough for producing actual results. The first step is to change that ‘I should’ to ‘I will’. But that’s just the beginning.

How to structure your pursuit of core values and virtues

To turn these good intentions into projects that produce real results, we need two things: structure and accountability. For the structure, you’ll need two tools: a pen and a journal. Without putting them in writing, your values get stuck in the cloud of good intentions. Writing down your plans also removes the bite of forgetfulness. Life is busy. Things come up. So, being able to go back and remind yourself by looking at what you were thinking last week is crucial. Writing is also essential for the accountability piece. You need to be able to track and measure your progress.

Now that we have our tools, we need a little structure. Most big projects generally flow through these phases:

Planning and risk assessment
Execution
Measurement
Review

I can think of no bigger project than a life lived in accordance with values and virtues.

Planning

This is where you work backwards from your desired result. Want to enrich your relationships? What are the actions that will get you there? How can you create the conditions for these actions to take place? This is also the moment for risk assessment. What are the potential blockers to success? How can you remove or mitigate them? I think health is an apt example to illustrate how risk assessment can be useful in our personal lives. Write down a quick list of health risks in your life. Then, think about how you can get smart about preventing these risks. Eating too much junk food? Maybe you can set up a recurring delivery of a box of assorted vegetables or healthy snacks. This makes an easy, automatic condition for the desired results to take place.

“First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do.” — Epictetus

Execution

Once you’ve worked backwards from the desired result and thought about how to tackle the inevitable obstacles, you should be able to produce an action list. There are two vital elements to add to each item of your list. First, you need a date by which you will complete the action. If you’ve been meaning to call an old friend, remove ‘soon’ from the equation and put a date on the calendar (consider using an actual calendar). Secondly, you need a measure of success. This may sound a bit complex and perhaps incompatible with personal core values like honesty, kindness, or community, but with a little imagination, you’ll find you can attach a metric to anything. More on measurement below.

Now you’re outfitted with action items so it’s time to build a schedule to ensure that the plan doesn’t accumulate dust when life gets busy. Creating a schedule to work on your values is perhaps the most important lesson I can share. You can embrace, discard, or adapt any of the ideas I’m sharing in this article, but if you don’t block out time to at least think about your values, they won’t budge.

Neon sign showing the words good intentions stricken out and the word measures highlighted.

Lifting all boats

Try identifying five to seven values you want to work on. Then, assuming they are equally important to you, block at least 30 minutes a day to work on them. Mondays are for health. Tuesdays are for relationships. Wednesdays are for creativity, for example. Create a separate section in your journal where the action plan for each value will live.

Get specific about the time of day, too. If these values are the most important things in your life—more important than work—then give them your best time. If you’re most productive early in the morning on your second cup of coffee, well, don’t fill this time replying to work emails. Instead, use this time for your values. Thirty minutes a day is not a lot and the boss’ email can wait. You will reply to it later because unlike our values, our jobs come with built-in accountability.

Measurement

Thus far, I’ve been relying on my corporate experience to share ideas on how you can work toward fulfilling your commitment to values. Like business, science is another field that wouldn’t exist without numbers and measurements. Even social sciences create proxy measurements to test hypotheses. Numbers don’t lie. The numbers themselves provide accountability. In relation to our key values and virtues, some measures of success may be obvious while for others we may need to get creative. Here’s a short core values list and an idea for how we could measure them:

Honesty: number of days without telling a lie.

Justice (in the Stoic sense): one altruistic act per month.

Responsibility: minutes spent reading to your kids.

Love: one extraordinary expression of your love for another person per week (e.g. writing a note, buying flowers, not doing that thing you want to do so that they can do the thing they want to do).

Community: invite your neighbors for dinner two times per year

Balance: reduce time working by X% and reinvest it into X activity.

Review

This is the time to check in on your dates and measurements. This is the final and therefore most essential element of accountability. There’s no use in creating timelines and recording data if you don’t review it. Did you miss a ‘deadline’? If so, don’t beat yourself up but figure out why it happened and revise your approach for next time. Did you spend fewer minutes this month exercising? Maybe there was a good reason and therefore no corrective action is required. Life happens. Or maybe it’s a trend. You’ve been spending less time exercising each month for the last three months. Maybe, upon closer inspection, you realize you’re bored with the type of exercise you’ve been doing and you need to change things up.

The review period is the moment for recalibration. Even with the best mechanisms and the right effort, we are always working against the backdrop of change. Our environment changes. The people around us change. We change. Review and reflection are the tools that enable reorientation, so that we can remain on a middle path, characterized by a healthy balance between action and rest and proper alignment with our values.

Correcting imbalance

We should also review the values themselves. When I first started doing this—building a schedule and filling it with mechanisms to work on my values—I had included financial stability as one of my values. It was a time during which I worked on things like learning about investing and looking for ways to reduce expenses. But I realized that I already spend an immense amount of time on money; my career. I also realized that I have natural motivations to work toward the outcome of financial stability. This was an imbalance, so I reviewed it, and corrected it to reinvest that time into my relationships.

“We need to regularly stop and take stock; to sit down and determine within ourselves which things are worth valuing and which things are not; which risks are worth the cost and which are not. Even the most confusing and hurtful aspects of life can be made more tolerable by clear seeing and by choice.” — Epictetus

Core values support life

Stoicism teaches us above all to live in accordance with our virtues and core values. It’s a bit like a field manual for life. Stoicism is an exercise to define what is important so that we can act it out. Often, we know how to turn intentions into actions, but we only do it to earn a salary. When it comes to our relationships, health, integrity, and all that we cherish intellectually, we are ineffective.

We fail to produce results in the areas of life that we value most because we rely on good intentions. We make the mistake of thinking because it’s important to us it will just happen. Rarely do things just happen—at least not consistently. Lack of plans, schedules, measures, and accountability is what leads to at best little bursts of ephemeral motivation and at worst nothing at all. The last tip I’d like to share is to have fun with this. Don’t let the measurements become the goal. The structures and mechanisms described here are meant to support life, not get in the way of it.

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What The Death Of Marcus Aurelius Teaches Us About Life

Zen Meditation: How To Stop And Reflect For Wisdom

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Why The Name ‘The Mindful Stoic’? Finding Balance

Apr 10, 2022 | Balance

I’ve been asked a few times why I named this blog The Mindful Stoic. When I first started the blog, my answer to this question was not well formulated. Back then, I knew that mindfulness was a life-changing practice because practicing it had changed my life. I attribute mindfulness as the sole reason I was able to lift myself up from some fairly debilitating anxiety issues I experienced in my early twenties.

Then, after a few years of making mindfulness a constant practice, I transitioned from my career as a teacher to one in marketing at a Big Tech company. I had no formal business training or experience, yet I entered willfully and quite naively into an incredibly fast-paced and high-pressure corporate environment. Initially, I doubted myself. It took a very long time for me to feel like I belonged there. It was during this struggle that I turned to Stoicism, because I had a preconception of it being about strength and courage (which is not false).

Mindfulness helped me find baseline calm, stillness, and provided me with some sovereignty over my nervous system. It helped me control my anxiety. But it did more than that. It also provided me with the precious capacity to view the present moment as a wonderful gift, thereby renewing my appreciation for life itself.

Stoicism, on the other hand, provided me with the mental fortitude I needed to not only cope, but eventually thrive in a world where there is always some degree of interpersonal struggle and constant judgment.

This post contains affiliate links, which help us keep the blog afloat. Click here for more information.

Finding balance between striving and passivity

Today, my answer to the question ‘why The Mindful Stoic?’ is that I’m fascinated by the agility and balance that mindfulness and Stoicism combined have allowed me to achieve. Why both and not just one or the other? Although the two practices overlap on many moral teachings, I believe that there are unique advantages to each.

Mindfulness and the Buddhist teachings with which it is fundamentally intertwined offer a wealth of technical instruction in meditation. Although Stoicism, too, urges us to find stillness, it is not as rich in practical meditation instruction with which one can train the mind to be present and concentrated. The present moment is the fruit of mindfulness practice, and the present moment is where life truly happens. Being present is useful in both rest and action—being and doing. For me personally, though, I tend to lean on my mindfulness practice more in moments when there is no defined, desired outcome, which is how I broadly describe ‘rest’. This is basically any time I’m not working to achieve something.

Finding balance between rest and action

Stoicism’s advantage is that it more directly acknowledges the chaotic nature of the world, including interpersonal struggle. It has much to teach us about being socially courageous and how to deal with difficult or dangerous people. Its concepts like the dichotomy of control are incredibly useful in outcome-based situations. It teaches us to do everything that is within our control but gracefully acknowledge that the random nature of the universe is indifferent to us and things can and will go wrong.

Stoicism teaches us to embrace the unexpected. It prepares us tactically and mentally for any eventuality. It’s not all about grit and sweat, as it has profound offerings on compassion, greater good, and stillness, but it is certainly a practical philosophy of immense utility when it comes to planning and executing outcome-based efforts.

To the person who espouses only Stoicism and does not take time to practice mindfulness meditation, I ask how you will apply your Wisdom or Justice in the heat of an interpersonal conflict if you cannot first identify your emotions as they bubble up? In the heat of the moment, if you cannot literally pause for a split second and say to yourself ‘this is anger’ rather than feel and react viscerally with ‘I’m angry’, then you will not be able to apply the valuable lessons that Stoicism has taught you.

Finding balance between doing and being

To the person who only meditates and has never studied Stoicism, I ask how will you remain on the middle path when the harshness of the competitive world for which you have not prepared slaps you in the face?

I am no master of either practice. I continue to struggle with life’s complexities and uncertainties like anyone else. I’m a regular guy who lives a normal life. I am ambitious because I’m curious about my own potential. Yet, I don’t want my ambition to lead to the detriment of my health or tarnish time spent just enjoying the simple beauty of life. I don’t want to live monastically, and I don’t want to race blindly up the corporate ladder. I want to attempt to strike a perfect balance between these two ways of living: doing and being—action and rest. To date, I’ve yet to find a better way of finding balance than by practicing mindfulness and Stoicism, hence The Mindful Stoic.

The Three Stoic Disciplines: Desire, Action, and Assent

Introduction To Stoicism And Mindfulness

Improve Your Focus With Mindfulness- And Science-Based Protocols

What Is Modern Stoicism? An Introduction & Essential Practices

Where Buddhism And Modern Psychology Converge On Mental Wellness

How To Speak Like A Stoic

Karma In Buddhism: Sowing The Seeds Of Love

What The Death Of Marcus Aurelius Teaches Us About Life

Zen Meditation: How To Stop And Reflect For Wisdom

Memento Vivere: How To Live With Agency, Gratitude & Engagement

How To Practice The Virtue Of Temperance In Stoicism

Dec 26, 2021 | Balance, Stoicism

They say sitting is the new smoking. But how can this be? Our bodies are highly evolved survival machines. We emerged as the dominant species on this planet not in small part because we can run long distances. We can maneuver through and manipulate our environment in sophisticated ways. Surely our bodies can handle sitting in a chair. Of course, the act of resting our asses on a seat is not harmful. It’s only harmful when we sit for eight, ten, even fourteen hours a day. This is excessive. This is the opposite of the virtue of temperance.

What is temperance in Stoicism?

The ancient Stoics gave us their 4 Stoic Virtues, one of which is temperance. The Stoics describe temperance as moderation and active resistance against anything that is harmful in excess. Essentially, temperance is balance.

I’d like to take a deep dive into the virtue of temperance, because finding balance in life is a central pursuit of this blog. In this article, I’ll attempt to share practical tips and strategies for applying temperance to areas of life that I feel are susceptible to harmful excess: decision making, time management, and work life balance.

What did the Stoics say about temperance?

In a passage of Meditations about dealing with other peoples’ shamelessness, Marcus Aurelius wrote:

“What qualities has nature given us to counter that defect? As an antidote to unkindness it gave us kindness. And other qualities to balance other flaws.”

He’s saying that there are always two sides of every coin. Exercising the virtue of temperance can be as simple as looking to the opposite of what’s excessive. Is there too much inactivity in your life because of your office job? The simple antidote is the opposite: exercise. Do you work too hard? The simple antidote is true, mindful rest.

How to practice the virtue of temperance

Two birds with one stone: practicing temperance with time management

Our mortality is both the source of life’s greatest fears and life’s greatest beauty. Our limited time on earth is a defining human characteristic that we all share. We must not squander our time with cheap and frivolous entertainment, nor can we allow the sharp edge of productivity to shave it all away.

This is an incredibly difficult balance to strike—one that requires temperance.

Capitalism is an effective testing and training ground for one’s self-actualization, but we all know there are more important areas of life that cannot be measured by market value: connection with others, quiet time to reflect, creativity without a desired material outcome, etc.

One strategy that I use in an attempt to marry my desire to be successful with my desire to live a mindful and healthy life is finding activities that support both goals simultaneously. I used to love playing organized sports, even as an adult. I also used to love lifting weights at the gym. As my work responsibilities grew (less free time) and my cost of living increased suddenly (greater expenses) when I moved to a very expensive city, I had to make changes to mitigate these losses. I also noticed that my office job was creating an imbalance in terms of excessive time spent indoors. I used to run occasionally, but just as a sort of necessary chore of maintaining cardiovascular fitness.

Stack habits and behaviors to serve multiple purposes

Here, I found myself with the following requirements at the same time: recreational competition, physical exercise, saving money, and more fresh air. So, I decided to become a trail runner to meet all of these needs simultaneously. I realized that by signing up for some tough long-distance trail races, I was creating a fun challenge for myself in a competitive sport, while saving money and gaining more time outdoors by saying goodbye to the gym.

The Mindful Stoic blog is another example of this ‘killing two birds’ methodology, albeit one that I had not considered when I started the blog.

The company I work for places a very high value on writing skills. When we have new ideas, we always develop and present them in writing. Although the content and style of writing is very different between this blog and my day job, I am most likely practicing the written word a lot more than my colleagues who don’t own and operate a blog as a hobby.

Also, writing about mindfulness and Stoicism helps me keep these practices top of mind. Writing about these practices not only provides me with a creative outlet, but it’s also helped them really take root in my life.

The ‘killing-two-birds method’ tenets

The activity should meet or support multiple needs or objectives at one time.
The activity must be done for the love of the activity itself.
If there is a measurable outcome, you should still ‘win’ even if the outcome is not successful.
The activity should allow you to get better at something you can use in other areas of life.

Designing our leisure activities and hobbies in this way allows us to practice temperance when it comes to managing our finite time and balancing ambition with mindful living.

Sure, with enough discipline and habit building, we could spend all of our waking hours working, studying and striving toward some material end. But, there’s more to being human than producing and getting rewarded for it on the market. So, finding healthy hobbies that we truly love doing for the sake of it, but with a little flavor of useful support in other areas of life, is one way to maximize our time.

How to practice the virtue of temperance with decision making

A simple technique for practicing temperance regarding difficult decisions is to quickly identify at least one alternative. For any decision that involves internal conflict, try to think of at least one better alternative early in the process, leaving you with at least two options.

This technique is especially helpful when it comes to cravings or decisions motivated by fatigue or passivity. Here’s a hypothetical situation to help illustrate: after a long day of work, you discover that food in the fridge is in low supply. The idea of going to the nearest fast food restaurant strikes you, but you also know it is not a healthy option. Now is the moment to quickly identify an alternative. You could also go to the grocery store and pick up something quick and easy to prepare. The grocery store option will be cheaper and healthier.

Quickly identifying an alternative does something significant. Instead of allowing your tired mind to wrestle with the sole option of satisfying fast food, your brain now has another outlet. Urges and temptations are most powerful when there are no other options presented, or when the other options don’t satisfy the underlying need. This approach allows us to practice temperance when it comes to all kinds of conflicting decisions.

There is always a middle path

Here are a few more examples of identifying alternatives to practice temperance with decision making:

I’m incredibly tired today, so exercising is probably not a good idea.

Some stretching or yoga will do the trick.

These t-shirts have a buy-2-get-1-free deal.

One is cheaper than two, and I really only need one.

I wonder if I should cut carbs entirely from my diet, but I’ve found conflicting research.

Cutting down on carbs by 40-50% is a sensible compromise.

I’ve been presented with an interesting investment idea, but I’m worried I’ll lose my money.

Define your risk tolerance, i.e. how much money you can tolerate losing, and invest only that much.

I should eat less sugar.

Make a rule for yourself. Decide that you simply will not eat products with more than 20g of sugar per 100g serving.

The powerful aftereffect that accompanies this technique is that by choosing the more positive alternative, sometimes we gain a second wind and end up snowballing with the good behavior. To take the above exercise example, you may successfully negotiate some stretching rather than sitting on the couch, and you may end up feeling great doing the stretching to the point that you regain the desire to exercise more rigorously.

At the very least, you will feel good about having done something, leaving you in a better mood and therefore in a better mindset for the following day. To take the above investing example, you have a zero percent chance of profiting by doing nothing, but by taking a calculated risk, you can reap the rewards if there is a positive return and only suffer a tolerable loss if the return is negative.

Practicing the virtue of temperance with work-life balance

Work life balance has become somewhat of a cliché topic. But, an idea only becomes a cliché if it’s repeated in the culture. If it’s repeated in the culture, then there’s undoubtedly some truth or value behind it. Finding balance in all areas of life is a central theme of this blog, and work life balance is certainly a major part of that.

We all know someone who suffers in life because they let fear or plain laziness prevent them from working and they struggle to meet their needs.

Conversely, we all know someone who works too hard and then suffers in their relationships or health. We must practice the virtue of temperance by balancing between excessive work and excessive passivity.

Work is not just about monetary gain, either. When done in correct proportions and environments, work can provide a sense of pride, challenges that lead to personal growth, and some mental stimulus that keeps our brains healthy.

Here are some practices I find helpful for striking a balance between work and mindful living:

Work life balance tenets

You must accept the fact that you will never finish. There will always be work left undone at the end of the day. You need to be able to embrace this and shut off at the day’s end. Related article: How To Switch Off After Work.
Be wary of technology and turn it off. My grandfather was an incredibly hard worker. But, he never had to contend with email at any hour in any place.
Don’t compare yourself to others and don’t place value on working long hours. Strive to be more efficient than your competition and don’t worry if it appears as if you’re working less.
Out of sight out of mind. Place work related objects in a drawer, closet or separate room at the end of the day.
Acknowledge that a job that’s 100% enjoyable is practically non-existent. The grass is not always greener on the other side, so always attempt to find the good in what you do, accept and overcome the bad before making major changes.
Bring structure and organization to your life outside of work. You have project trackers, schedules, and monthly reviews for your work. But, do you have such mechanisms for your family life? We often say ‘I should spend more time with family’, but how often do we apply our organizational and time management skills to ensure that quality time actually happens? Related article: Your Core Values: Turning Good Intentions Into Good Results
Be acutely aware of the distinction between rest and work. When you begin working, say to yourself ‘now I am working’. When you finish work, say to yourself ‘now I am resting’. All too often we transition from work to rest mindlessly, allowing our work energy and stress to follow us when it should be left where it belongs. Mindfulness is incredibly simple yet powerful.

Final thoughts

Temperance, moderation, and balance are elusive. You can find philosophy and religion attempting to guide people to a middle path all throughout history. Any time we see consistency across cultures and throughout history when it comes to ideas, it’s a good indication that the idea is worth exploring.

I’ve attempted here to write practically about practicing the Stoic virtue of temperance with time management, decision making, and work life balance. I chose these three areas because I feel they lend themselves to the magnetism, often created by culture, that pulls us away from the middle path. But, these are not the only areas in which the virtue of temperance is needed.

Look for any excess in your life and find ways of applying the virtue of temperance to counterbalance it. Take some time to identify these areas of excess, ideally on paper in a journal, and come up with your own strategies and techniques. The world is a chaotic and evolving place to navigate, but the ability to walk a straight line, never losing sight of the middle path, is certainly an advantage that we should afford to ourselves.

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How To Manage Expectations About Life

Sep 11, 2021 | Balance

Are you where you want to be in life today? Does your bar for success and happiness continue to rise just a bit further out of reach with each passing year? We all love to ‘should on ourselves’. We all wrestle with expectations; whether it’s in comparison with distant daydreams, current projects, or the digital masterpiece of other people’s lives as presented on social media. There are cultural expectations like marital status and raising a family. There are economic ones like the magnetic pull to earn more money or to own a home. Even when we earn a decent living, we want more. Happiness is perhaps the most elusive of pursuits that falls into our scope of expectation. So how do we manage expectations about life? Everything is relative, but if you don’t know where you’ve placed your bar, you don’t know how high you need to jump.

We’ll explore ideas like the notion that happiness is a lousy thing to chase. We’ll examine the effect that social media is having on our sense of self-worth. If you’re like me, you have dozens of little ‘shoulds’ running around your head all the time. Don’t worry; we’ll examine that, too. Believing you can improve your position is a good thing. We just need to learn how to harness the guiding potential of those shoulds. This is something I will attempt to lay out clearly in the form of a practical exercise. Through all of this, we’ll embed everything about how to manage expectations about life in the bedrock of the present moment. Being here, now, mindfully is the most potent way to quell not only comparative anxiety but also to get to where you want to go more effectively.

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Manage expectations specifically

Imagine if your boss came to you and asked you about your future salary expectations and you gave the following one-dimensional answer: ‘more’. It’s not very specific, to say the least, and it would likely result in a short and unproductive conversation. In this context, we see that being unspecific about important things is ridiculous. Yet we do this constantly with the notion of happiness. We know we want it, but we can rarely define it in concrete terms. The best way to get a grasp on what happiness means to you is to work it out on paper. Take your time, adjust it as you evolve as a person, but most importantly, break the concept of happiness down into specific and measurable elements.

Try this brainstorming exercise to help you define happiness more specifically. Grab a pen and paper and do a flowing brain dump of the things that make you feel happy. Here’s what that looked like for me: family, freedom, the right amount of challenge, adventure, cats, friendship, good food.

A practical exercise to help manage expectations

Now that you have a list of broad elements, elaborate on each one with simple “When I can…” statements. These statements should describe the condition upon which you enable the associated feeling of happiness. For example, “when I can fly to see my family three times a year, I feel happy”. Similarly, “when I have enough money to pay for new education to secure a career change, I feel a sense of freedom”. The critical part of this elaboration exercise is that it takes an abstract concept like freedom and specifies it into something measurable. I can measure how much money it costs and how much vacation time I need to visit my family three times a year. I can measure how much it will cost to attend a certain educational program and how much savings I would need to sustain myself during the program.

If you’ve not already paused to try this simple exercise on paper, I encourage you to do it now. If you have, you may be thinking ‘this is overwhelming because I’m so far off from some of my ‘when I can conditions’. I hear you. I’m far from achieving some of my own happiness conditions as well. However, the empowering feature of this exercise is not to realize that we’ve made it and the work is done. The purpose of the exercise is to have a more specific answer than ‘more’ when it comes to managing expectations. There’s nothing worse than chasing an undefined ‘more’. When we sit down and calculate what we need in order to align our current reality with our expectations, we can work towards them more effectively. If we can measure it, we can solve it.

Gratitude and awareness of the present moment are the bedrock

We’ve established that working toward something specific is better than entering the rat race blindfolded. But this still doesn’t solve the sense of relative inferiority or failure, because striving implies that we are not there yet. The means of relaxing this tension between where you are now and where you want to be is by grounding yourself in the present moment and constantly taking stock of everything in your life that inspires gratitude. A major theme of The Mindful Stoic blog is that striving and contentment can coexist. Admittedly, there is an inherent tension between wanting more and being more, but I believe it can be a healthy one.

Planning is such a crucial element when it comes to striking this balance between expectation and reality.

“If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.” – Lao Tzu

Once you’ve established the measurable elements that enable conditions for happiness, the next step is to draft plans that will help you get there. If you are not making enough money, you may need an intelligent and realistic plan for a career change or a side hustle. If you need companionship, you need a plan to expose yourself to more valuable social situations, such as special interest clubs or sports.

Plans change

There are two critical aspects to consider when drafting plans. First, they must be in written format and they must contain time-bound actions. Include in your plans realistic and achievable actions that are likely to move you closer to your goals and set dates by which you must complete them. Secondly, plans change. Set reminders in your calendar, perhaps twice a year, to revisit your plans. You evolve and grow as a person. Your expectations and goals may change depending on life circumstances. Abandoning a plan or goal because it is no longer relevant is much more productive than sticking to it for discipline’s sake. The idea here, again, is to bring structure to how you manage expectations about life.

The final point I would like to make about how to manage expectations more effectively is to stop comparing yourself to others. We see more communication (recently with documentary films such as The Social Dilemma) on the fact that social media has amplified comparative anxiety. There is the organic factor embedded in the fact that we all tend to present only the best versions of ourselves on social media. We only post pictures and stories about our exotic vacations, our expensive nights out, or our disciplined workout routines. We know people do this, yet it has the effect when scrolling through our feeds that leads to the subconscious conclusion that everyone else is amazing all the time.

Then, there is the artificial intelligence factor, which we don’t fully understand. Social media companies invest billions of dollars and use intimate information about us to feed algorithms designed to keep us scrolling.

Be specific in your comparisons

The Stoics and many Eastern philosophers prescribed that we should not compare ourselves to others but that we compare ourselves to ourselves.

“The only one you should compare yourself to is you. Your mission is to become better today than you were yesterday.” – John C. Maxwell

This is more than a simple epithet. When you break it down and think about it, the only logical reference point for improvement is your past performance. If I am training for a marathon, I cannot fixate on the previous times of other competitors in my area. Perhaps they are much taller than I am, have been doing it for much longer, or perhaps even had been taking performance-enhancing drugs.

Moreover, I have no insight into their training regimen and therefore no actual data on the process by which they transformed themselves from a non-marathon runner into a marathon runner. Conversely, I do have all the data on my own progress. I can measure how far I ran yesterday or last week. Again, the idea here is to be specific and measurable. The only way you can assess your performance with the highest quality of data is if that data comes from your life.

Learning how to manage expectations for yourself is a win-win situation. We know that living far below your ideals causes psychological distress. It is equally true that having undefined or needlessly increasing expectations traps us on a hamster wheel. It is therefore well worth our time to sit down and figure out exactly what we need to feel fulfilled. Even if we fall short in this pursuit, we will be better off than if we had not attempted.

Embrace the tension

Try the above-mentioned exercise to break down and analyze the conditions that will promote what you define as happiness. Make sure that these conditions are measurable and then draft a plan to guide you. Stay away from social media or at least be honest with yourself that it can lead to inevitable and unhealthy comparisons to others.

The preeminent point I will make to conclude this post is that you need to enjoy the process. Mindfulness is the most effective way of working toward a future condition while enjoying the present moment. Coupled with a lighthearted enjoyment of the process, we should take stock of everything for which we are grateful at least once a day. Manifesting gratitude is the best way to realize how far we’ve come. If we always have our heads buried in the sand working towards ‘more’, we fail to realize our past and current success. This is crucial because not only do you gain a great sense of contentment and satisfaction from the current state of our lives, but also you receive important feedback to let you know if you’re on the right path.

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Ambitious Habit Energy & Finding Rest Anywhere

Jan 29, 2021 | Balance, Mindfulness

Thich Nhat Hanh, Zen Buddhist monk and renowned peace activist, writes about habit energy, describing it as the habitual chasing after the future in our thoughts—a blockage of our ability to be in the present moment. If you have ambitions, dreams or aspire to change yourself in any way, then you may have recognized that doing, achieving and accomplishing becomes habitual. Our action-based thoughts, constantly painting themselves with broad strokes on a future canvas, can be as habitual as breathing. They are so habitual that even in our down time we feel as though we should be doing something productive.

Yet we know we need to rest. We know the importance of being present, for the opposite of this is a whirlwind in which life passes us by. We know our work will benefit from stillness. But how can we find it? How can we rest and take stock of the present moment with so much left to be done? This post serves to help us recognize our ambitious habit energy for what it is and help us find moments of true rest in what would first appear as unlikely moments.

“Habit energy pushes us to run, to always be doing something, to be lost in thoughts of the past or the future and to blame others for our suffering. And that energy does not allow us to be peaceful and happy in the present moment.

– Thich Nhat Hanh

Ambitious habit energy

Have you ever spent an entire day or more at sea? If so, then you’ll recall that when you returned to dry land and climbed under the sheets to sleep that night, even many hours removed from the ocean, you could still feel the melodic rocking of the boat against the swelling waves. Your whole body felt these subtle rocking sensations even though you were lying in your stable bed. Our ambitious habit energy is like this. Long after our work is done or long before it begins, we feel the tension and struggle of getting things done. We can observe this ever-present tension in our bodies even if we are completely still.

I don’t care if you have David Goggins-like work ethic, you need to rest and you know your work will be more precise for it. Watching TV, reading a novel or sleeping are forms of rest, but not the kind of rest we’re discussing here. In all those activities, we are either ignoring or suppressing the autopilot tension of our ambitious state. To truly rest, we need to sit in silence. We need to sit with the sole intention of resting. Only with this deliberate and directed rest can we say to ourselves, ‘I’m turning off my auto-pilot of getting shit done for the day, and now I’m here to rest’. Then, we can observe the tension in our bodies and begin to let go.

The first step is admitting you have a problem habit

We’ve all heard of, known someone, or perhaps even experienced ourselves a battle with substance abuse. And anyone with the strength and support to have recovered knows that the first step toward recovery is admitting. Addictions have a lot in common with habits. They both modify the neural pathways in the brain. Thomas Oppong writes, in his article The Neuroscience of Change: How to Change Your Brain to Create Better Habits:

Habits are found in an area of your brain called the basal ganglia. The more often you perform an action or behave a certain way, the more it is physically wired into your brain. This amazing adaptive quality of your brain is known as neuroplasticity. Your brain forms neuronal connections based on what you do repeatedly in your life—both good and bad.

Habits drive our behaviour. The bad ones force our bodies into situations that the conscious mind knows is not good for us. Constantly doing, constantly focusing on outcomes is very much a habit. We first need to recognize it as such. You might be thinking, ‘but being ambitious is a good thing’. Is it a good thing when we’re trying to spend time with our family? Is it a good time when we’re trying to sleep?

Mindfulness for rest

Ardent drive can be a good habit for putting money in the bank, but I think we would all agree there is a time and place for it. The problem is that the humming of our engines resounds into our times of rest. We’ve all been at the dinner table with friends or family and let our mind scurry ahead to the following day’s task list. We should strive to be there fully, not just for them, but for ourselves as well. Life is short. Life is full of beauty. We should learn to be there completely to absorb and appreciate it all. Being there for life is just one argument for learning to fold our ‘doing mode’ neatly away; we haven’t even touched upon our physical and mental health.

“Let us train to live each moment of our daily life deeply. That is why I like to define mindfulness as the energy that helps us to be there 100 percent. It is the energy of your true presence.”

– Thich Nhat Hanh

Sitting in meditation each day, even if for only five minutes, is the optimal time and place to rest. This is the moment to notice bodily tension and let go of it. This is the time to allow yourself to stop gripping and grasping. Be like a stone naturally sinking to the bottom of a riverbed, with no particular influence or agenda, and eventually resting at its final destination while the universe flows externally overhead. Meditation is the ideal time to rest, but we don’t walk around all day with our meditation cushion and incense in tow, now do we?

The power of cues

We need to train ourselves to see the multitude of ordinary moments in our daily lives that present opportunities for a moment of rest. Not only should we practice recognizing these precious moments for rest so as not to squander them, but we should also associate cues with them, so that they become more automatic—more habitual, much like our pervasive desire to get shit done.

Charles Duhigg, author of the bestselling book The Power of Habit, based much of his work on a simple and scientifically proven concept: the habit loop. The habit loop describes the behavior pattern of any habit. It starts with a cue, followed by an action or routine, followed by a reward. The first step to changing or acquiring a new habit is identifying the cue. What if we could designate cues to pull us back into the present moment?

Thich Nhat Hanh speaks of washing the dishes as an ordinary task, which if undertaken with the intent to be mindful can be quite relaxing. The thought of turning an unpleasant task into a pleasant one with just some mindful concentration struck me. I began practicing mindful dishwashing, and with time, I began to associate the dishes with slow, restful movement. Gradually, I began to expand this practice to handwashing and showering. One day I suddenly realized that water in general was beginning to serve me as a cue to be mindful. Even drinking a glass of water is now a firmly rooted reminder for me to pause, take a breath, and connect with the present.

Reversing ambitious habit energy

Hanh has also written much on the subject of mindful walking. Again, I heeded his advice and began practicing mindful walking as often as possible (this can be a hard habit to acquire because we have spent so much of our lives walking with our minds full, so be patient with yourself). Gradually, I began to associate walking with slowing down, connecting with my surroundings. It began on walks for the sake of walking, but with more practice I began to walk mindfully even on my way to a meeting or heading to the kitchen for a snack. Water and walking. These became my cues to take a few seconds to check in and to rest my monkey mind.

Now, think about how many instances throughout the day you walk or interact with water. It’s got to be in the high dozens. Now imagine if in each of these routine actions you became habituated with slowing down for a second, breathing deeply, and unclenching. That’s a whole lot more rest than just the eight hours beneath the sheets.

When we build this practice of associating ordinary and unmissable cues with mindfulness, we can enjoy more rest amid even the busiest of days. Take time to examine your own ambitious habit energy. The transition between rest and action happens countless times throughout the day, so take some time to recognize this transition so you can arrive in each moment mindfully. Use meditation or quiet reflection as the moment to notice that your engine is still running. Finally, making mindfulness a habit is a difficult thing to do and one that you’ll never perfect, so be patient with yourself and enjoy the process. There is no wasted effort in mindfulness because present awareness, no matter how ephemeral, is a precious thing.

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Acceptance is not resignation. The Stoic practice called The Art of Acquiescence teaches us to accept things that are beyond our control rather than fighting them. It is not, however, passive acceptance. It is not giving up.
— the mindful stoic (@themindfulstoic) January 30, 2024

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Mindfulness is always now. The reality of your life is always now and to realize this, and experience it, can be liberating.
— the mindful stoic (@themindfulstoic) January 26, 2024