The subtle art of not giving a fuck

As you may know, this blog aims at sharing ideas and practices on living a meaningful life: this both for personal use - as a Coach who helps others emerge - and for You - as a leader or eventually team manager.

Here follows a summary of “The subtle art of not giving a fuck” and how we may lead ourselves through life according to Mark Manson.

What's the book all about?

The author discusses about happiness and the painful process of reaching it. We are wired to become dissatisfied with whatever we have and satisfied by only what we do not have: our pain and misery aren't a bug of human evolution; they are a feature.

“Happiness comes from solving problems, the keyword here is solving. If you are avoiding your problems and feel like you don't have any problems, then you're going to make yourself miserable.”

Happiness is therefore a painful process… you have to trust it.

Life is happening for You rather than to You and you are defined by what you are willing to struggle for.

I see two main take aways for coaches and team leaders:

1. Embrace Challenges and Negative Experiences: team leaders may learn to view challenges and setbacks as opportunities for growth and learning. This perspective helps build resilience and encourages a proactive approach to problem-solving.

2. The Value of Suffering and Struggle: struggle and discomfort are often part of the process towards achieving significant accomplishments. Let’s engage with these difficulties as a means to develop and strengthen leadership skills.

Why should you read it?

Because it is a self-help guide that takes a fresh and candid approach to living a meaningful life. 

The author stretches the importance of self-awareness: this resonates tremendously with my style of coaching which devotes quite some time increasing clients’ self-awareness and helping them to:

1. Recognize emotional blind spots: the first layer of our self-awareness is a simple understanding of one’s own emotions.

2. Understand why we feel certain emotions. Emotions are strong signals in coaching and should be given all due attention.

3. Check and update your personal values, what do you consider success or failure, under which standard are you judging yourself and others etc.

It is an important effort to make, because our values determine the nature of our problems and the nature of our problems determines the quality of our lives, authors shares.

Being able to look and evaluate different values, without necessarily adopting them, is a central skill required in changing one’s own life in a meaningful way.

Evaluating clients inherited personal values to check if they are still actual - and most importantly helpful - is an important part of the coaching process.

Finally, two main takeaways come from the author:

1. Taking Responsibility: the importance of taking responsibility for our actions and reactions. Leaders should see responsibility as their “ability to respond” to life’s situations.

2. The importance of choice: “When we feel that we are choosing our problems, we feel empowered. When we feel that our problems are being forced upon us against our will, we feel victimized and miserable.”

The ELI - the Energy Leadership assessment I use with my clients - addresses these aspects from an energetic standpoint. It provides a quantitative energetic profile of how a person shows up in life and decides to look at it, as a victim for instance or as a powerful chooser.

The ELI teaches people how to see life – and its problems – with a different pair of lenses. And how to choose - each time - which lenses to put on.

Conclusions:

“The human mind is just a jumble of inaccuracy.”

Mark Manson shares how most of our beliefs are wrong, to be more exact all beliefs are wrong. We could be living in a less judgmental and more agnostic way; less sure we got it all right.

More experimentally: "our values are the hypothesis - this behavior is good and important that other behavior is not. Our actions are the experiments, the resulting emotions and thought patterns are our data."

“The narrow and rarer the identity you choose for yourself, the more everything will seem to threaten you.”

This lands right at the core of my style of coaching: I support people every day on getting out of their box, out of their own way. On putting the right lenses on.

How?

• Revisiting preconceived ideas and interpretations that don’t work anymore.

• Moving through life in a more skeptical and less judgmental way

• Fostering awareness and showing up differently in life, thus increasing the array of possible outcomes available to them just by

These are some steps to help clients renegotiate their future, redesigning their lives.