Diplomacy is an art

You could tell everything as a tragedy, or you could tell an equally valid and far kinder story. You could say that you made some serious errors, as every human will, and you paid the price for them. Nevertheless, you tried to be good and loved a few people properly. Despite everything, your heart is in the right place.

The difference between hope and despair depends on the way of telling conflicting stories from the same facts.

... who has been internalized. You're speaking to yourself as someone else once talked to you or made you feel.

You should acknowledge your failures and be happy to make amends. But you also have to stand back from this critic and question what they are doing in your mind. They don't have a right to walk as they wish through the rooms of your mind.

Complicated people are very unsure about the legitimacy of their own desires, making them unable to let the world know what they really want and feel.

They may initially appear to agree with everything you're saying, but later on, their reservations will become known. They will say they want to join you for dinner but will inwardly ache for an early night. They will give the impression of being happy while crying inside. They will say sorry when they want you to apologize.

The root cause of confusing complexity may come from fear of how an audience might respond if our real intentions are known.

The origins may have started in childhood. A child becomes complicated when they are given the impression that there is no room for their honesty. A child may have received irritation or open anger for their honesty.

In psychological terms, our minds have a certain bandwidth within which we can tolerate discomfort, a certain speed range in which we can drive with ease, taking care of the challenges and problems. This is known as the window of tolerance.

If we cross the upward barrier in this speed range, we feel terrified, guilty or shameful. If we are below the bottom threshold of this window, we feel lonely, bored, alienated and numb. Remaining within the Window Of Tolerance is our daily challenge as we zig-zag between various emotions and try to keep ourselves sane by self-regulating the mind to remain in the ‘harmonious’ window, while not being stagnant.

If we continuously feel a lot of distress and draining, we should recover ourselves by moderation in eating and drinking, meditation, reading, exercising, and ample rest.

We need to be aware of the direction and trajectory of our moods, emotions and feelings, and make use of introspection and self-observation to get us out of possible pitfalls, avoiding a ‘crash landing’ at a later stage if we do not pay attention.

Instead of making relationships complicated and overambitious, we can just take care of these three essential but overlooked aspects:

1. Kindness: A person who is humane and kind, gentle and not too serious.
2. Shared Vulnerability: A person who is a good, empathetic listener, and makes us open comfortably about our anxieties, problems and worries.
3. Understanding: Someone who has a deep understanding of our traits, quirks, features, obsessions, and the way we see the world. Someone who is interesting enough for us to want to understand.

Paradoxically, by limiting our expectations about our relationship, we can concentrate on the three critical ingredients of kindness, understanding and vulnerability, and have a simple yet loving connection.

By simplifying and clarifying, we can release ourselves from our complicated conflicts and pursue a deep and profound bond.

When dealing with someone annoying, the way forward is not with silence or rage. We are ideally looking for a way to be polite and honest, or civil and forthright.

To achieve this, we should accept that not everything we desire will please others. We could explore and hold on to what we want nevertheless. At the same time, we should distinguish between what someone does and what they meant to do.

We're seldom very good at perceiving someone's motives when an incident drives us mad. We see intention where there was none and escalate a situation when the agitated response is not warranted.

The less we like ourselves, the more we may appear in our own eyes as plausible targets for mockery and harm. The ideal complaint emerges when we remove the paranoid assumption.

As grown-ups, we have choices. We are not small children where we have to depend on our parents for everything.

We could work as a bus conductor or retrain as a psychotherapist. We could volunteer in an emergency shelter. We can throw ourselves into learning a new language or take a university degree. We can look up old and trusted friends or make new friends.

To increase our chances of fulfillment, we need to feed our imagination and provide them with endless examples of alternative narratives, so they are more able to come up with plan Bs. We should practice to picture better ways to be.

As part of creative classes, adolescents should be asked to produce narratives like: If I lost everything and had to start up again, I will... They should be asked to make a list of 20 things that currently make life meaningful, then have to cross them all off and find ten more.

Work is the effort we make to get what nature did not provide us automatically, or what is not in abundance. We need food, water, shelter, clothes, and basic necessities that make our lives easier. We invent tools to help ourselves where nature didn’t help us.

Example: We couldn’t carry too much water in our cupped hands, so we worked and made a bucket to carry it.

Apart from simple mechanical objects that define what tools are, like a hammer or a bucket, tools can also have broader meanings like:

• A book is a tool to preserve our ideas and memory.
• A painting can be a tool to preserve the beauty of what we see or imagine.
• Religion can be a tool to drill into our minds the ideas of morality and consolation that we otherwise will not want to think about.

We have additional pressure towards the kind of work we do, a psychological drive to be powerful, well-known (to people we do not know ourselves) and impressive to others.

The pressures of society and the constant need to prove oneself restrict our every move, and we cannot be truly free to do what we want to do, as any miscalculation, failure or loss will result in a public embarrassment.

• A child does not yet have the pressures and demands of society jamming inside the head all the time.
• Like a child who just does what he or she loves to do and does not have to prove anything to others, we need to find an ‘Adult Love’ inside us.
• We need to let go of our ego, pride, insecurities and rekindle the experience of love.

Both the pity-bearing and sympathetic person will recognize our troubles; they both may say 'poor you.' But the pity bearing person does something cruel by implying that the mess we're in is only ours. They must remind us of the distinctiveness of our situation and keep us at arm's length.

The consoling friend is mature enough to know that everything we are suffering from could touch them one day too. This emotional background will lend sincerity to their words of consolation.

The pitying person knows how desperate our situation is, but then use their energy to make it clear that our sorrow is ours alone and that any similar horror could not ever touch them.

They need to create a wall between our condition and theirs. Their intentions are sweet, but they will not recognise that they are as open to madness, foolishness, accident, and suffering as we are.