Lessons from Jonah Hill's Psychiatrist

Coming Alive: 4 Tools to Defeat Your Inner?Enemy

Did you know that 25% of U.S. adults suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder each year? The problem is clear. We've got a mental health crisis taking place.

Here's a Johns Hopkins article citing National Institute of Mental Health Disorders statistics regarding the mental health crisis. The news isn’t good.

Workplace stress is another domain demanding vigilant awareness, experience, knowledge, and intellect as we each see the value of being part of the solution. Sure, there are good kinds of stress, like going to the gym, taking a hike, or walking 7,343 steps, but bad stress can easily overwhelm us.?

It’s all about taking a stand and doing our best to manage our inner games. Becoming part of the solution means we learn simple psychology concepts (inner game) to apply at home, work, and in between, even if the work commute is a few strides down the hall. Awareness is the gateway to mental health education and improvement for us all. Education is the steps we take to read, learn, and share. Being okay with talking about it can also be helpful. No shame.

Coming Alive, a Great?Book

One of my favorite books in recent months is Coming Alive: 4 Tools to Defeat Your Inner Enemy, Ignite Creative Expression & Unleash Your Soul's Potential. It's an easy read written by Barry Michels and Phil Stutz, both highly successful psychology professionals, offering four powerful lessons and insights for tackling our head trash.?

I first learned about Phil Stutz in the 2002 movie Stutz. It's about Phil Stutz being Jonah Hill's psychiatrist. It's about their relationship and how they become friends. It's heartwarming and a phenomenal story showing us what it's like to work through our problems together, including access to professional therapy even if we're not world famous.

Most of us agree we can say some nasty stuff to ourselves. That's the "Part X" in all of us, and one nickname I've given it is head trash. Here's how two brilliant mental health professionals guide us to deal with that part of us.

Part X

Meet "Part X." Most know the competing voices within. In a classic sense, it's Jekyll and Hyde, the good versus the bad, the shadow and the light. It's how we see, treat, and talk to ourselves.

Recognizing the source of the problem, the adversary, is the first step toward defeating it. Part X goes by many names. It's our job to see it for what it is and reconcile it by training our minds and awareness.?

The Four?Tools

The core of "Coming Alive" is four powerful tools designed to manage the sometimes offsetting and self-defeating influences of Part X. Here's a high-level summary of each:

1. The Reversal of Desire: Embracing pain and challenges as opportunities for growth rather than avoiding them. Changing our perspective about the inevitable challenges we might face, we do the best we can.
2. Active Love: We can disarm negative emotions by cultivating unconditional love and compassion towards ourselves and others. Learning to accept the things we can't change and change what we can is a daily opportunity.
3. Inner Authority: By building inner confidence and a sense of authority over our lives, we can counteract feelings of blame, shame, guilt, fear, or regret of the past. Presence takes practice. Practice often.
4. Imagine Grateful: Imagining gratitude can shift our focus from negativity to positivity. Gratitude lifts us from self-focus to other focus on the people, places, and things we accept in appreciation.

Applying Ourselves Creatively

Michels and Stutz stress the significance of applying these tools to unleash our creative potential. By overcoming the fear and resistance projected by Part X, we can ignite our creative expression and fulfill our potential.

In a creative flow state, we can be grateful and confident. Ask any artist, and they will describe the art of letting go and letting the inner creative potential unfold in small steps. Letting go takes courage. We’re here to create the life of our dreams.

"Coming Alive" is a manual for living unencumbered by the inner critic. While that voice may never completely disappear, we learn to be with it. We learn to see that negative voice for what it is, the shadow, inner critic, or whatever you want to name it. We see it, observe it, talk back to it, and put the new tools we learn to use. We live with it healthily.

The book provides a philosophy for life and a simple toolkit. The tools Michels and Stutz present are ongoing practices that reinforce resilience, love, authority, and gratitude.?

We can learn to observe, accept, and defeat the inner enemy by processing and letting go of the X within us. I see it as “taking a higher road.”

Ultimately, the authors describe taking a more esoteric approach to life, accepting what we can't change, and changing what we can.?

Acceptance is a beautiful thing. Enjoy the book.

Thanks for reading my article, published originally on Medium, where writers get paid for being creative. When not coaching and advising emerging entrepreneurs, business owners, and investors, I help people improve their "mental wealth" and quality of life by writing, speaking, coaching, and advocating for mental wealth and well-being. Learn more at www.CliffordJones.com, or subscribe to The Clarity Letter on Substack.