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Blog post – 10th March 2023
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A Holistic Approach to Self-Management or Personal Development
By Jim Byrne, Doctor of Counselling,
(And author of more than 25 books, mainly on self-help and counselling topics.)
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I think this quotation is very sad, but probably mainly true:
“People settle for a level of despair they can tolerate and call it happiness”.
Kierkegaard
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Hello,
Introduction
Believe it or not, there are some counsellors who will tell you that there are only four things you need to know in order to live a happy, undisturbed life. Four!
This is one example of the error of fragmenting human knowledge into “professions”. Or compartmentalizing knoweldge into discrete subjects and disciplines, instead of recognizing that the “polymathic approach” is more reliable, and less misleading. We live in a world in which knowledge has been fragmented, and parcelled out to groups of specialists, who build Chinese walls between fields of study.
(The “polymathic approach” is to maximize the number of disciplines, or schools of thought, that we read and study, and to balance the claims of one against the other. Or, to take a “coherentist approach” to knowledge, in which we see how well the claims of one author, school of thought, or discipline “fits” together with the other authors, schools of thought, and disciplines that we have studied!)
The fragmentaiton of knowledge results in body doctors who ignore the mind, and mind doctors who ignore the body; and body-mind doctors who ignore the social environment; and social psychologists who ignore the physical and economic environment. And so on.
Most specialists are bound to mislead us, by ignoring the “other 95%” of reality. So we have to be awake, and we have to learn to think critically. And we have to learn to take responsibility for finding our own little ways through this maze of misleading overspecialization.
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The individual and the whole
Reality is always much more complex than any specialist will ever suspect. For example, compare the middle column of the table below, with the REBT claim that all we need in order to be happy, and to avoid overly upset emoitons is to know four “facts” of life. (Give up demanding; accept that you can stand any adversity; stop catastrophizing about life’s difficulties; and accept yourself and other people Unconditionally!)
Here are some ideas that I discuss in my main book on holistic counselling in practice.
Although each individual is actually a social animal, shaped and conditioned by their family of origin, schools, the mass media, and so on, we nevertheless can decide to take responsibility for managing ourselves and our lives. That is to say, if somebody, or something, wakes us up to the reality of a crossroads junction we are facing in our lives, we can take conscious responsibility for choosing the road we will follow. (If nobody or nothing wakes us up, we will continue to follow our non-conscious patterns and habits).
This process of waking up and taking responsibility means giving up operating ‘on automatic’ – giving up being a wholly non-conscious automaton. It is not perfectly effortless, this process of taking conscious control. Remember how difficult it was to change anything as a result of a New Year’s Resolution. And the changing of habits is not perfectly achievable. Remember how often your New Year’s Resolutions failed!
I have been working on my own self-management for more than thirty-five years, but I have not reached ‘the end of the line’ yet! Neither am I in line for a medal or cup for my achievements so far! I have changed some bad habits; formed some new, good habits; but I have to watch my behaviour daily, “as though I were a bandit lying in wait”, as Epictetus put it. (Epictetus, 1991).
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About self-management
Self-management means that I set goals for myself; I seek wisdom for myself; I try to guide my life by the best knowledge that I can find and/or generate. This is not an easy task, and in fact it is a lifelong journey of discovery, trial and error, progress and slipping back, and so on.
Lifestyle Counselling and Coaching for the Whole Person.***
E-CENT advocates the use of some of the most helpful aspects of some of the most useful philosophies of life available to us: like moderate Stoicism, moderate Zen Buddhism, and some aspects of moral philosophy. These philosophies should ideally be combined with the best aspects of modern psychology; and the best of the self-improvement literature available in bookshops and on Amazon and other online bookstores.
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Identifying self-management aims and goals
Most people have their self-management aims and goals back to front. Many people seem to go after wealth before health; and status before happiness; and career ‘successes’ before the sense of making a contribution, or finding their life’s work.
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For more on this subject, please see my page of information about the Holistic Counselling book that I co-authored with Renata Taylor-Byrne, my lovely wife, here: Holistic Counselling book…***
Or take a look at this book: Lifestyle Counselling and Coaching for the Whole Person.***
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That’s all for now.
Best wishes,
Jim
Dr Jim Byrne, Doctor of Counselling
ABC Counselling and Pschotherapy
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As Covid-19 lockdown draws to an end – scheduled for 19th July 2021 (in the UK) – some individuals will celebrate by getting out and about, taking off for holidays (vacations), and generally adding to the population of the world through “enjoyable social activities”!
Covid-19 is the most dramatic crisis to hit the world since the First and/or Second World War. It threatens all of our futures to varying degrees. It wakes us up to something we had tried to forget for decades: That we are already/always insecure, as human beings, living on Planet Earth.
Most of us have probably worked very hard to suppress that awareness for most of our lives – that life is insecure, fragile, and always ends in death. So it is not surprising that being woken up to this reality by Covid-19 has made most of us very anxious; and some of us very angry and/or depressed. And the anxiety may get worse, for many of us, when the lockdown is phased out.
One of the things that I do to control my mind and to manage my life is to write things down. At the moment, I spend about half an hour each morning writing what Julia Cameron called ‘Morning Pages’; about three pages of stream of consciousness; which provide an opportunity to chew through what went wrong (or right) yesterday; and what I want to (or need to) do today.
When they were getting very close to us, I suddenly looked him in the face, angrily, with the intention of ‘willing him’ to move further over the road, away from us (so he could not infect us with Covid-19, if he was infectious). Then, when he was about two metres before the point at which he would pass me by, and without realizing that I would speak, I said (in a fairly quiet, but angry voice): “Move over, you c**t!” These words just popped out of my mouth, unbidden.
As I write these notes this morning, I realize that this is a major learning experience for me. I realize that I am quite demanding that people should and must follow the government’s guidelines in an intelligent manner, and never get closer than two metres from me. (I also realize that this has been building up over time. This is not the first time I’ve felt angry towards somebody who mindlessly walked too close to me. But I failed to pay sufficient attention to what was happening (inside of me, in response to those ‘invasions’); and I made excuses – I distinctly remember – for my aggressive responses – instead of correcting myself).
Dr Jim Byrne, 
The UK government’s decision to promote social isolation and social distancing will have at least two positive effects:
Back in the early 1960’s, when I was in my early teens, my favourite activity was trawling through the stocks of books and magazines in the second-hand bookshops on Aston Quay and Bachelor’s Walk, near O’Connell’s Bridge, in Dublin. When I was about fifteen years old, I found a copy of a psychology magazine in which there was a study of the effects of increasing the population density of rats in an accommodation tower.
“Strong agreement that overcrowding harmed family relationships stood at 77 per cent. Out of 14 tick boxes about the possible effects of overcrowding, a lack of privacy was the one that received the highest rate of strong agreement with 92 per cent of overcrowded families selecting it. Eighty-one per cent strongly agreed that overcrowding caused fighting and arguing among their children.”
But there is a better way to deal with these problems. Rather than letting the misery build up over time, you can take control of both your own mind, and the way you communicate within your family and society. You can insulate your social relationships from constant or repeated misery and unhappiness; and learn to have a wonderful life with your family and friends.
Don’t let your relationships deteriorate. Get the solution today. 
Because of the very great seriousness of the present situation regarding Covid-19, we all need to stay in our homes as much as possible, to stop the spread of this virus.
Most people don’t realise that they become increasingly physically tense as they try to solve the daily problems of their lives. They use up lots of their physical energy just maintaining that tension. Because of this phenomenon, of accumulation, or building up of tensions in the body’s muscles, day in and day out, people develop anxiety, depression, and various physical illnesses.
What Dr Jacobson developed was a simple technique which, if you practise it daily, will reduce your physical tension. It won’t work if you just do it from time to time. The system is very simple, and involves tensing a particular set of muscles, holding it for a few seconds, and then releasing the tension. Each day, as you are doing the tension and release exercises, you will become more aware of what it feels like when you have tension in different parts of your body. And then you can slowly learn to release that tension. Day by day, your tension level reduces as you become aware of what you are doing to your body, as you go about your daily life.
Jacobson’s theory was that clients experienced tension because they had hyperactive bodies and minds, and that the build-up of tension in the body resulted in the following symptoms: anxiety, high blood pressure, cardiovascular disorders, nervous indigestion, peptic ulcers and spastic colon. People were trying to cope with a very fast and constantly changing society, and the problem was that their efforts to cope were using up lots of energy.
“I was shocked to find that 40% of the top executives of one leading corporation had blood vessels that were beyond cure. They were paying with their lives for their years of energy extravagance.”
But if we don’t give ourselves time to recover in-between these stressful events, we stop the natural recovery process from taking place. Our bodies experience more and more stress without this safety valve, or recovery stage, to dissipate it. Then there is a gradual accumulation of tension in our muscles, and stress hormones build up in our blood and body tissues.
Jacobson’s progressive relaxation technique has been acknowledged by health care professionals throughout the world as being very effective in many different healthcare environments. It’s a very straightforward technique that anyone can learn and use for themselves, and this increases their sense of self-efficacy and control over their bodies, and also increases their energy level. It’s a lot cheaper than drugs, medical or otherwise, and doesn’t have any negative side effects either!
It teaches you to raise your awareness of the muscles in your body; and you learn to notice the tension, and how to let go of it, in each of the main muscles of your body. If this is done regularly (daily is best), you become more and more skilled at spotting the tension in your muscles as it arises. Then you can relax the tension immediately after you have created it, instead of letting the tension accumulate in your body. And the more you practise, the more you can automatically spot and release unnecessary tension.
We are here, and it is now. And it seems this now, where we are, is the same now we were in before the Christmas and New Year fantasies arrived to try to sweep us off our feet.
In this book, I have presented a very powerful ‘technology’ for overcoming emotional distress – regardless of the cause. I have also included special advice for couples about how to communicate so as to avoid conflict – or to manage that conflict better; plus special sections on insights into how to communicate more effectively with loved ones; and how to understand and improve your own ‘conflict style’.
Doctor of Counselling
The ABC Newsletter – September 2018
ABC Counselling and Psychotherapy, Hebden Bridge 