How to Become an Extraordinary Person – Continued:

“Improving Quality of Life”

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Having a ‘complex’ personality is always a Bad thing.

Being Extraordinary (as we have been using the term) is the result of two basic but essential mental processes: Integration and Differentiation.

Differentiation

• Movement toward uniqueness or specialization – and towards separating oneself from others. A self that differentiated (and not integrated) may attain great individual accomplishments – but runs the risks of being mired in egotism.

 

Integration

• Union with others, ideas and entities beyond the self. Without integration, a fully differentiated system would be a confusing mess. However, an entirely integrated person will be connected and secure, but lack autonomous individuality.

 

A complex self is one that succeeds in combining these opposite tendencies.

 

How FLOW increases HAPPINESS:

• The self becomes more differentiated as a result of flow:
  • overcoming challenges inevitably leaves a person feeling more capable and skilled.
• Flow also helps integrate the self:
  • in a state of deep concentration, consciousness is unusually well ordered.

Flow allows us to receive the best from both of these worlds! and thus dramatically improve the quality of our lives.

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Improve your ‘Quality of Life’.

2 Strategies>

1>Try to make your ‘external conditions’ match your goals.

 

2>Change how you experience these ‘external conditions.’

 

#1 is very challenging to do – for altering external conditions does  not always improve existence.

 

#2 since how we feel about ourselves is based on the quality of our experiences – in order to improve one’s ‘quality of life’ – one must inevitably improve the quality of their ‘experiences’

And there are many, MANY ways to go about doing this ….

 

Before We Go Into the Many Ways to Improve ‘Q of L’,

Let us discus the difference between Pleasure and Enjoyment.

Why? I hear you ask…

Because Pleasure and Enjoyment are much different things ***

Enjoyment Ø  Enjoyable events occur when a person has not only met prior expectation or needs – but has gone beyond and achieved something unexpected.   Pleasure Ø  A feeling of contentment achieved when your consciousness believes expectations set by our “biological and social conditioning” have been met.

 

*** and because Pleasure helps to maintain order, but by itself cannot create new order within consciousness – whereas Enjoyment or Flow can.

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The Phenomenology of Enjoyment, or FLOW:

One

• Must we have a chance of being completed (appropriate skill level).

Two

• Must be able to concentrate.

Thee

• Task must have clear goals

Four

• Must provide immediate feedback.

Five

• “One acts with a deep but effortless involvement that removes from awareness the worries and frustrations of everyday life. “

Six

• There is an increased sense of control over one’s life.

Seven

• Concern for the self disappears, yet paradoxically the sense of self emerges stronger.

Eight

• Sense of time is altered.

 

Enjoyment appears at the boundary between boredom and anxiety; when the challenges are balanced with the individuals capacity to perform. This occurs when the difficulty of a ‘game’ is kept constant – a fine balancing of challenges and skills – THIS yields the maximum of enjoyment, and increase in the quality of one’s life

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