Helen Keller’s Guide to Courageously Looking the World Straight in the Eye

“Smell is a potent wizard that transports you across thousands of miles and all the years you have lived.”

“The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched – they must be felt with the heart.”

“What I am looking for is not out there, it is in me.”

Deaf.
Blind.
Helen Keller didn’t start out life back in the 1880’s with the cards stacked in her favour. But with the help of patient people she learned to communicate better with the world and went on to write books, work for women’s right to vote and became on of the most inspiring people of the 20:th Century according to Time Magazine.

Keller obviously summoned and created a great deal of courage and character to be able to do all that she did. Here are a few of her brave, tough, reality expanding tips.

Use your experiences to build character.

“Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experiences of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired and success achieved.”

To get real results you have to try things out, perhaps fail and then learn from those failures and try again. And that may not always be pleasant. Even if you view failures and mistakes like learning experiences they can still sting, especially shortly after they happened.

But you can also know that when it stings you have at least done something and that you can gather lessons from this. Instead of a feeling safe but also vaguely feeling that you’re not living up to your potential as you sit on your hands doing or trying nothing. As Keller says, you cannot develop character and success through quiet and ease. You must do things and go through things to become stronger and wiser.

Don’t cling to your illusion of safety.

“Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. The fearful are caught as often as the bold.”

“Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature…. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.”

As written in the previous point, you cannot sit on your hands and take it easy and hope to get things done. At least not the things you really want to get done (which often may be the things you fear doing).

Why do people sit on their hands and get comfortable in their ease and quiet though? Well, one big reason is because they think they are safe there. But the truth is what Keller says; safety is mostly a superstition. It is created in your mind to make you feel safe. But there is no safety out there really. It is all uncertain and unknown.

You may get layed off.
Someone may break up with you and leave.
Illness will probably strike.
Death will certainly strike in your surroundings and at some point come to visit you too.
Who knows what will happen an hour from now?

This superstition of safety is not just something negative. It’s also created by your mind so you can function in life. No point in going all paranoid about what could happen a minute from now day in and day out. But there is also not that much point in clinging to an illusion of safety. So you need to find balance where you don’t obsessed by the uncertainty but also recognize that it is there and live accordingly.

Ss you stop clinging to your safety life also becomes a whole lot more exciting and interesting. You are no longer as confined by an illusion and realize that you set your limits for what you can do and to a large extent create your own freedom in the world. You are no longer building walls to keep yourself safe as those walls wouldn’t protect you anyway. You can instead start your own daring adventure. Perhaps slowly at first, but still.

Face reality head on.

“People do not like to think. If one thinks, one must reach conclusions. Conclusions are not always pleasant.”

How to view reality is a tricky thing. On one hand, it’s very useful to keep a positive attitude and view your world through that.

But, as I wrote a few days ago in Three Sneaky Traps of Positive Thinking, you also have to avoid using positivity as a way to repress real problems in your life. Repressing won’t help you. It will just keep the problem away as time passes and oftentimes deepens and complicates the problem / conflict.

So you have to face reality for what it is in a way too. And as you probe deeper into your life and your surroundings what you come up with will not always be pleasant. One example would be the previous point in this article about safety.

But to grow I think you have to arrive at these conclusions too. Because as tip # 1 in this article says, you have to go through things to develop character, strength and success. I also think you need to arrive at the unpleasant conclusions to gain a deeper understanding. Understanding here being that you feel like you really understand something, which is not the same as knowledge that you might have found in a book.

And although these conclusion may be unpleasant at first they may also be a gateways and turning points for you. They can over time provide some real leaps of growth for you. If you face them and explore them and start to draw understanding and lessons from them. And then start to rewrite your map of the world.

You choose how you treat yourself. And how you want to be treated.

“Never bend your head. Always hold it high. Look the world straight in the eye.”

“Self-pity is our worst enemy and if we yield to it, we can never do anything wise in this world.”

One of the age old words of wisdoms I have heard repeated over and over basically says that no one can make you feel inferior without your consent. So even though it may sound a bit counter-intuitive, deep inside you decide how the world treats you.

You decide if you let an insult hurt you or if you just reject that gift. You also decide how you want to be treated by the way you behave and how you feel about yourself within. How you feel about yourself and how you feel entitled to/expect to be treated by other people will come through perhaps not in your words but in the more important non-verbal communication. Your body language and voice tonality – over 90 percent of communication – will give people signals and feelings about how you feel about yourself and what you expect and feel entitled to.

So you do to a large extent create other people’s responses to you. And that starts in how you feel about yourself. One awesome way to self-sabotage here is to fall into self-pity and victim thinking. It can paralyse you and get your thoughts spinning in all kinds of unproductive and unhelpful ways. Sometimes for a very long time.

Sure, self pity and victim thinking gets you attention from others and can make you feel special. But if you look at things from a larger perspective you also realize how it paralyses your life. When you’re stuck in self-pity you won’t get much good done, neither for you or anyone else. At least not in the way that you could be doing things and feeling good about life if you gave up those destructive thought patterns.

One last and important thing on this topic: people around you will reinforce how you feel about yourself by treating you as they think is appropriate. That reinforces your self-image. This social feedback can be a powerful force that strengthens your and other people’s image of you. No matter if that image is one filled with victim thinking or if it’s one with high self-confidence and positivity.

Optimism is the key to discover what life really has to offer.

“No pessimist ever discovered the secret of the stars, or sailed to an uncharted land, or opened a new doorway for the human spirit.”

So, a form of positivity that is open to reality is a useful perspective. Without positivity and optimism you may get stuck in a pessimistic perspective. Perhaps you see it as a realistic perspective. But on the other hand, how much of what you feared would happen over the years really came into life? Perhaps pessimism isn’t that realistic either.

How you perceive the world can influence it and you. As mentioned above, one example would be that what you expect you often get in return from other people. So you may as well try optimism.

It creates a lot more fun and excitement within. Something that you can bring out into the world and out of your world too. It is the key, attitude-wise, to discover what the world really has to offer and what you can really do.

Impossible is nothing.

“While they were saying among themselves it cannot be done, it was done.”

Yeah, the sub-heading for this tip might sound a bit like a hyperbole. But Keller and the people around her really pulled something amazing off. Becoming such an inspirational figure from such a bad starting point at that point in history couldn’t have been easy at all. It was probably something no one expected.

And isn’t life and history full of those things? People standing in groups of various kinds saying that things can’t be done. And then someone goes for it and does it anyway.

The opinions of others can be helpful. But to take them as fact could be very limiting. Perhaps all of them don’t say things because they know much of those things but because they are stuck in a pessimistic perspective. Or want to cling to the safety they have created within.

Keep on keeping on.

“We can do anything we want to do if we stick to it long enough.”

Now, doing amazing things will probably not happen over a weekend. One big reason that people don’t get what they want may just be that they give up too soon. Perhaps because of a magic pill mentality where their expectation for success is stuck within a too small time-frame.

To get the results you have stick with it. You have to persist. Not all people do. So the longer you persist the thinner the playing field can become. But how can you persist?

Three suggestions:

• Find what you really want to do. This will give you the sustained inner motivation to keep going. If you feel a dip in motivation try 25 Simple Ways to Motivate Yourself or How to Get Out of a Motivational Slump.

• List the reasons to keep going. It’s easy to forget about all the good things that can come out of keeping on going. So you need to remind yourself. Write down all the reasons why you are doing what you are doing and review that piece of paper regularly.

• Learn to just do it. A habit where you just do what you really want to do despite how you may feel about or what your thought may be saying is crucial. Sometimes you just won’t feel like going to the gym. But you go anyway. If you are always obeying your thoughts and emotions then you will fall off the wagon when you are having a bad day. And you are more likely to give up before you have reached your goal.

Be open and flexible.

“When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.”

This is one of my favourite quotes. How often do we not miss the window of opportunity in a new situation just because we are still angry, sad or frustrated about that other door that just closed?

To me this is another powerful reason to remind myself to stay in the present. To not get stuck and hung up on missed opportunities. When you are living in the present – which is a way to live on the positive and open part of the emotional scale too, as explained in this article – and not stuck in the past I have found that it’s a lot easier to find the hidden opportunities in any situation.

So whenever you see a door of happiness closing, take your eyes off it at least pretty shortly after. And instead of letting your awareness linger on what is in the past, use your time and focus to find the new opportunity to continue your daring adventure.

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