A Simple Way to Free Your Mind and be Happier
As most of us go through life, we compare what we do with what other people do. It may be what they say they do, what they show they do on social media, or what they actually do. This can often lead to a dangerous practice where we begin to keep score.
Keeping Score
What does keeping score mean? It means that we go through life having expectations from people and circumstances. Now naturally keeping score is important when you need that information for a particular purpose or goal. If you want to lose weight, keeping “score” of your body-weight is an easy way to measure your progress. If you have started a business, keeping score of the important data for the business like sales, profit margins and expenses, is vital.
Where it becomes dangerous is when we begin to keep score of things that we or others have done, but that cannot necessarily (or often logically) be counted. We have all done this in one form or another. We invite someone to a party, and they do not reciprocate with an invitation to a party they are having and so we keep score. We score ourselves at 1 and them at 0 because we have done something they have not. Then we are upset at them and the friendship suffers or ends.
Someone helps us move and when they are moving, we are busy and cannot help and so they keep score and are upset at us. The conclusion of keeping score is that we should help them move because they helped us move.
As you can see, neither of these situations, which are very common, lend themselves to keeping score when examined logically. If our friend comes to our party, maybe they bring a small gift like wine, and we all have a good time together. Even if they bring nothing, their presence as a good guest and your friend should be enough to make the party fun. You didn’t invite them to secure a future social invitation which may or may not ever come.
If you help someone move, you do it because you want to help them, not to secure future help for when you move. If you want to keep score, tell your friend no, and then pay movers when you have to move. The “score” will remain 0-0 and the friendship will not be affected by it.
Give for the Sake of Giving
Ideally you want to give for the sake of giving. You help your friend, invite them to a party or give them a gift because you want to. No strings attached and you have no expectations from them. That way you both feel good about it and you are not setting yourself up for disappointment in the future if your actions are not reciprocated.
You DO Need Some Expectations
Certainly, having no expectations only applies where you really do not need the outcome to matter. You must have expectations of many things; you expect your car to start, your furnace to heat your house, you employer to pay you, etc. It is the areas where you have not made explicit arrangements for a result that you can apply the criteria of not keeping score.
When you begin to give with no expectation, you will come to two interesting conclusions. First, you will see that there is no shortage of abundance. Even if you did not get invited to a party by someone you had at your party, that does not take away from the fun times you had in the past. That will always be a good memory for you that no one can remove. Giving for the sake of giving does not take anything away from you.
The second conclusion is just as calming. You will realize that you cannot lose something you never had. If you do not get invited to an event, you didn’t “lose” an invitation you never had if you accept that your friend was not obliged to invite you. If you don’t help someone move, they didn’t “lose” a mover that they never had.
Now, these are logical conclusions for emotional issues, so it will probably take some time and work to begin to have no expectations of situations and stop keeping score, but once you can separate out the emotion and look at a situation with more calm logic, you will find that you are happier with yourself and your friends.