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Areas › Anger › What you are actually defending
That is what it looks like when good things only count once somebody else notices. The work is finished, the result is in, and it means nothing until a particular person says something about it. If you recognise that, the thing to practise is small and slightly awkward: register what you did before anyone has weighed in on it.
Those who are saved from their own meanness will be the prosperous ones (Quran 64:16). Prosperity is put on the far side of a person's own smallness rather than on the far side of what they have gathered.
التغابن
فَٱتَّقُواْ ٱللَّهَ مَا ٱسۡتَطَعۡتُمۡ وَٱسۡمَعُواْ وَأَطِيعُواْ وَأَنفِقُواْ خَيۡرࣰ ا لِّأَنفُسِكُمۡۗ وَمَن يُوقَ شُحَّ نَفۡسِهِۦ فَأُوْلَٰٓئِكَ هُمُ ٱلۡمُفۡلِحُونَ
be mindful of God as much as you can; hear and obey; be charitable- it is for your own good. Those who are saved from their own meanness will be the prosperous ones
Qur’an 64:16read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
After a knock to how they saw their bodies, 153 people were randomly given a brief self-compassion, self-esteem or distraction writing task, and the groups differed afterwards in dissatisfaction and in motivation to improve. So what you do in the minutes after a knock does make some difference. It was a single session in a laboratory, which is a long way from a habit.
Moffitt RL, Neumann DL, Williamson SP. (2018). Comparing the efficacy of a brief self-esteem and self-compassion intervention for state body dissatisfaction and self-improvement motivation.. Body image doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
If the warmth has to come from outside, what you earned sits there unused until it arrives.
Understanding an idea is not the same as being changed by it. The explaining is soil preparation, and the crop comes later.
Feeling good about yourself is not the safe end of this. The high and the low come from the same borrowed source, which means the high can be taken back at any point.
Here is an uncomfortable way to look at it. To value someone is often to find them useful, and paying respect is a bit like looking after your tools: being nice to you is nice for me.