life never enters

[jayrob1984]

you ever feel like life never touches you . im 30 and feel life is going nowhere im single no job and i have friends but they never ask me to do anything . i know life aint like the movies but other people like in the movies go somewhere like a party and meet other single people (women) no matter where i go or wat i do nothing ever happens . its like im in a bubble that stops life getting to me . the only things that ever happen to me are bad things. people say its the way you think or look at stuff but it cant all be about that

[Lee Grant Irons]

jayrob,

I hear you. Please be patient with me as I agree somewhat with what you have been told by your friends, but then try to give you some tools that you can use to change your life results. :)

So much about how we feel about life is based on our perceptions, and not reality. If you can change the way you see things, you can change the your actions and get better results when you interact with people. Getting better results in your interactions with other people will give them the desire to have you around more. And suddenly, rather than in a downward spiral fall, you find yourself on a spiral stairway, on the rise, each new contact and event leading to another positive occurrence. This is the goal everyone has. The question is, how do you change the way you see things

Try this for yourself. This might take you an hour or two. Get a clean, unused notebook. On the top of the first page, write the words "Happiness Is." Then below that title, write a number one and then a paragraph about something that happened to you in your past that made you happy. In the paragraph, explain what happened and why you think it made you happy. Then write a number 2, and another paragraph of another time in your life that you were happy and the reason why. Keep going until you run out of things to write or an hour has passed.

Then skip about ten blank pages of the notebook, and then at the top of another blank page, write the words "Happiness Is Not." Repeat the same exercise you did for "Happiness Is," except this time write about moments in your life when you were not happy and why. Some of the reasons why for some of these situations could be completely the fault of other people, because, after all, people can be evil sometimes. However, the cause of unhappiness in our lives is not always the fault of other people. This part is a little tougher, because you should think about how some of these situation might have made you unhappy because of the way you acted. An example would be that you are not happy when you go to a party but don't meet anyone. Write this down, and then write some specific examples of times when you went to a party and this happened, being detailed about exactly how the situation progressed to its bad final end.

Once you have written these two sections in your notebook, as moments come along through the next week that make you happy or make you unhappy, write them down in these two sections of your notebook. What will happen is that you will learn for yourself more specifically about why you are currently unhappy. But you will also learn why you think you are unhappy

The next step is key. For any given situation that makes you unhappy, you must then try to 1. avoid the situation, or 2. change the situation by the way you respond to it, or 3. change the way you feel about the other person involved (this last one does not seem to apply to what you talked about above, so I will not expand on it.) So, in your example, you need to go to as many parties or activities with friends that you can and try to change the bad results you have gotten in the past. This is where the real work comes in. What you need to try to do is change the way you interact with the situation. If you never say anything, then you need to try to talk more. If you never introduce yourself to anyone new, then you need to try to introduce yourself. If during conversations you find yourself talking about yourself all the time, then you need to stop talking about yourself and instead keep asking other people about themselves so that they do the talking. You might find this surprising, but if you can get other people talking about themselves by asking simple questions, such as "What do you do for a living," those other people will walk away from the conversation thinking you are a great guy and fun to be around. There are more things you can do to improve how you interact with people that you find through online research. Do the research. And most importantly, realize that what you are doing is PRACTICING how to help people like you and like being around you. You may completely blow it and act really awkward when you first start trying to purposefully change the way you interact, but that is okay. Other people will understand because, and this is VITAL for you to know, they often feel the same way about themselves. They just hide it well. Do not compare your worst to other people's best. We are all practicing how to be better people.

Do this for a week. Try to get yourself into situations that make you happy, and try to modify the situations that make you unhappy in a way that would help you be more happy, or at least less unhappy. Come back and post here as you go along and let us know how you are doing. Keep in mind, this is just he start. There are other things you can do, but you have to start somewhere. Once you get these tasks done, you can move forward to the next step.

Are you willing to try this?