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Every time I’m asked to share things about me no one knows I have to dig deep. I live my life mostly transparently and I share a lot online in terms of how I think and what I believe so there aren’t that many things that people don’t know. Who I am is the product of my journey to date and I have shared generously of my past as I do of my present so that people who follow me get a sense of who I am as a person.
So, when it comes to posts like this I’m a little challenged and also, a little afraid. The fear part is natural of course. If there is something of me I haven’t shared to date there is probably a good reason for it and now may not be the best time to forego that reason. Or, at least that’s my reasoning. Then again, I also live like everyone else which means that some of my actions and choices at least follow the path of least resistance.
If something of me hasn’t quite hit the public eye it’s maybe because it makes me feel uncomfortable. The discomfort-avoidance mechanism is ingrained in us so we only tend to leave our comfort zone when we have little choice and that is, also, when we experience the most personal growth.
Guess what? Intentional: How to Live, Love, Work and Play Meaningfully is all about dealing successfully with discomfort and personal growth so now I am, indeed, left without a choice. So, with that preamble and after quite some thought, here we go:
1. I am socially shy and naturally reserved. I know that everyone who’s met me at conferences where I was the keynote speaker or heard one of my talks on YouTube or has seen me give interviews will think that I am naturally outgoing and an extrovert. I really am not. I understand the value of socializing for brain health and an inner mental balance and, in my personal life, I make a real effort to keep in touch with my friends and go to social gatherings, but my natural inclination is to be withdrawn and reserved. In social situations where I am new or don’t know many people I tend to listen a lot and talk a little. It’s my way of understanding the social dynamics that are always at play. So, everything you see as my natural, easy-going way is a way of behaving which I had to learn and which I intentionally apply.
2. Commitment scares me. I hate the feeling of being trapped in a job or profession from which there is no escape. I chose to study Chemical Engineering because it offered an almost endless list of possibilities in what I could do. I write for the same reason (plus it is my favorite way of expressing myself). The longest I have ever worked for any corporate organization is seven years.
3. I love animals to an almost obsessive degree. There is something about the inability of animals to articulate the emotions they feel that speaks deeply to me. I have always had pets in my life, dogs, cats and parrots, but as a teen I also had a pet rat and, at one point, I was the proud of owner of several blue tongue lizards. They are native to Australia and my backyard in Brisbane, Queensland, was full of them for some reason. I have also, at one time or another, owned pet turtles and a finch which I found having fallen out of a nest and hand-reared, from a fledgling.
4. I speak Greek. Hardly anyone knows that and even friends who live in Greece, initially, talk to me in English. I forced myself to learn Greek as a way of mentally challenging my brain some way back. It is a fiendishly difficult language with deceptively easy ways of speaking. These days I live, most of the year, in the country and I make sure I get as much practice as possible.
5. Social injustice triggers me. Those that see my very public persona feel that I am even-tempered and understanding, which I am. At the same time I feel that social injustice is the result of systemic determinants that are designed to keep those who are on a socially elevated position ‘safe’ from having to compete with anyone else. Our unwillingness to accept systemic social injustice is the root cause of a great many social issues we face today including gender inequality, pay inequality, the imbalance between salaried workers and business owners, and the increased levels of poverty we see in technologically advanced countries; which is inexcusable.
Having dug deep and come clean, so to speak I must now confess that I am truly curious to see if anything changes in the way people perceive me when they meet me either across the web or in real life.
Live your life the way you want to. Manage stress better. Be more resilient and enjoy meaningful relationships and better health. We all want that. Such life leads to better choices, better jobs, loving romantic partners, more rewarding careers and decisions that are fully aligned with our aims.
What stops us from getting all that is the complexity of our brain and the complicated way in which the external world comes together. The misalignment between the internal states we experience and the external circumstances we encounter often leads to confusion, a lack of clarity in our thinking and actions that are not consistent with our professed values.
Intentional is a gameplan. It helps us connect the pieces of our mind to the pieces of our life. It shows us how to map what we feel to what has caused those feelings, understand what affects us and what effects it has on us and determine what we want, why we want it and what we need to do to get it.
When we know what to do, we know how to behave. When we know how to behave we know how to act. When we know how to act, we know how to live. Our actions, each day, become our lives. Drawn from the latest research from the fields of neuroscience, behavioral and social psychology and evolutionary anthropology, Intentional shows you how to add meaning to your actions and lead a meaningful, happier, more fulfilling life on your terms.
Read an Excerpt
From a conceptual perspective history is easy to read. The 19th century was all about industrialization. We harnessed machines to augment manual labor by many degrees of magnitude. The 20th century was about achieving efficiencies of scale so the machines that create our goods could run better and produce more at lower cost. The 21st century is about resilience as the production hubs and supply networks we have created are stress-tested to the limit.
The global pandemic that started in the closing months of 2019 acted as a catalyst that accelerated change everywhere. The additional environmental and psychological pressure it piled up became a scalpel that exposed all our weaknesses. The one attribute that would perhaps have allowed us all to weather the Covid-19 storm better, that would have allowed our systems of governance and systems of trade to weather it better: resilience, appeared to be missing from our arsenal. Interestingly, this is where values come in.
There is a chain of causal attributes we need to work our way through now. For example, we can’t talk about values without tackling personality and we can’t tackle personality without discussing traits.
Traits, in turn, affect goals, motivation and behavior. We need to spell out the difference between personality and character, two qualities that are often used interchangeably, and we also must define the difference between traits and values which are also two qualities that are also misunderstood and are often used interchangeably.
About the Author
Twitter: https://twitter.com/DavidAmerland
Medium: https://davidamerland.medium.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidamerland/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/DavidAmerland/about
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Represented by The Knight Agency
For Goodreads Reviews and where to buy the book follow this link: https://davidamerland.com/seo-blog/1429-where-you-can-buy-a-copy-of-intentional-how-to-live-love-work-and-play-meaningfully.html
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Thanks for hosting!
ReplyDeleteThank you so much for hosting this.
ReplyDeleteDavid, I would never have those things about you, very interesting, I enjoyed the excerpt and your book sounds like a great read! Thanks for sharing it with me and have a wonderful day!
ReplyDeleteLooks like a good read.
ReplyDeleteI think it's pretty cool you speak Greek. Do you ever just start speaking it to your Greek friends, just to see their reaction?
ReplyDeleteCould be very useful.
ReplyDelete