Distinguish Your Various Selves

Our story, which we are narrating to others, is constantly changing with our new experiences and insights, as our lives go by.

These stories become our identity and certain core memories, or life events of immense sorrow or happiness, stick with us forever.

One can change the story of one’s past including what it meant. New lessons can be learned by revisiting the past in an objective manner, without guilt, remorse or any grudge.

Becoming emotionally and mentally tough makes us face our past with courage, and helps us change the meaning of our often traumatic past.

The best decision-makers purposefully avoid almost all of the options available.

To commit to one decision means closing the door on everything else. It takes confidence to say, "This is what I'm serious about. I can't be distracted by everyone else's noise and agendas." If you're serious about achieving goals, you must create an environment that shields you from other noise.

Strategic ignorance is not about being closed-minded. It's knowing what you want.

It's realizing how easy a person can be derailed. You even avoid amazing situations that you know is really a distraction. You create boundaries and live your priorities and values and dreams.

Michelle admitted that it wasn't always easy to keep calm in the face of racism and all the other obstinate behavior they faced. She succeeded because she knew who she was and felt that becoming bitter would not make her victorious.

The lesson is that having grace for people takes practice.

Michelle Obama says people's stories are more important than statistics.

She feels humanity would be more tolerant if we learned more about people's stories and cared less about status indicators.

There are five categories of inner experiences:

• Inner speaking, which comes in many forms
• Inner seeing, which comes from things you've seen in real life or imaginary visuals
• Feeling, such as happiness or anger
• Sensory awareness, like being aware of the feeling of a carpet
• Unsymbolized thinking, which is a thought that doesn't manifest as words or images.

Most of us are aware of the internal dialogue – rather than a monologue - where we talk to someone inside our head. Often, that other voice is another aspect of ourselves.

There are four kinds of inner voices: the faithful friend, the ambivalent parent, the proud rival, and the helpless child. We might adopt these different roles to help ourselves get through situations.

• Think well ahead.
• Make sure your decisions suit your own values and interests.
• Think strategically.
• Proaction requires not just thinking but doing.
• Learn and adapt rapidly through trial and error.
• Grit matters, but you also need to learn along the way and adjust.

If you are only 90 percent committed to your goal (like following a certain diet, for example) you have to ask yourself and test your commitment multiple times a day.

You end up unable to predict your behaviour, and any future outcomes. By having a loose commitment setting in your mind, you are bound to deal with decision fatigue and see yourself repeatedly fail, lowering your confidence.

When the commitment is 100 percent, your future behaviour is already set in stone, with no back-and-forth struggle and revisiting of the decision-making condition.

When your best friend offers you a Coke, you know very well that the decision to not have anything like that is already made, and it is easy to say no.

People who lose their jobs can either dust themselves up and move forward in their next amazing adventure, or can sulk at home and not get hired due to their negative mindset. In both cases, the situation is exactly the same, but the perspective makes all the difference.

We cannot let our mind, which has a limited bandwidth of focus and willpower in a day, get tangled in the unimportant and trivial.

A simple hack of taking your focus away from the bad things in life and being grateful for the good things can work wonders to your mind and your life experience. Always try to find the good even in the bad. Create a happiness journal which documents your good life.

We all like to feel good about ourselves in the moment, even if it interferes with our long-term goals.

But instead of letting our present self make the decision, we need to bring our future self into the decision-making process to help us think about the future consequences.

Emotions can be used in two ways: To understand the way we feel, and to use it proactively to influence our future behaviour.

Regret happens after an event. We can't change the past, but we can harness regret to improve our future by visualising how our future self will feel about the decision we make now. If you think that your future self will feel fine about the decision, then it is a perfectly valid conclusion.

Studies have shown that people that are really good at achieving their goals are not the ones that put more effort into exerting self-control in the face of temptations, but the ones that experience fewer temptations to start with.

• They actually enjoy the activities some of us resist (eating healthy, studying, exercising)
• They have better decision-making habits
• Some people just experience fewer temptations
• It’s easier to have self-control when you’re wealthy - when you’re poor, the future is less certain.