Provided I am a narcissist, as you say, how would I break the loop?
Two ideas that work for me personally:
First:
To stop circular, unproductive thinking: Do a “brain dump.†Instead of going over things endlessly in your mind trying to develop new contingencies, just freeze the thought at the current stage, pour it out on paper, and file it away for future reference. As they say, “Put a pin in itâ€: It’s unproductive now, so get it on paper, thumbtack it on a bulletin board or file it away in a file cabinet for now, and then refer to it later when you might need it again.
This works for both ideas that you’re trying to develop and for emotional situations that you’re trying to deal with. Once you’ve processed them to the point that they’re not producing anything new, summarize them on paper and move on. This process can actually result in new progress on old ideas. Freed up to take in new input, your mind may develop new leads on old ideas, which can be resurrected as needed and developed further.
Moral of the story: Productive people discipline their thinking. They don’t just let their ideas and emotions run amok or get stuck in ruts. They notice when paths of emotion or thought have become unproductive and they develop ways to put those emotions and thoughts aside until new information arises or circumstances change.
Second:
Develop a list of 10 (or 20 or 30--whatever you can handle) items of biographical data to be learned about every person you know.
Examples: Name, age, birthday, address, what they do for a living, where they work, work-related goals for the future, what kind of residence they live in (rent, own, house, condo), where they grew up, whether they get back there often, how many family members, where they went to college, exercise/fitness habits, favorite entertainment/foods/hobbies/movies/pets, etc.
Develop a blank template of data items and fill it in for each person as you learn about them. And don’t just grill the person for data. Play detective: try to learn that data in casual conversation, one or two items at a time. Try to extract that data without the target realizing what you’re doing.
Even better yet: Before you start deliberately mining data on a person, fill in the blank template yourself for a given person based on what you already know about them, or based on what you guess about them, etc. It’ll be a good test of your powers of observation; checking your early guesses about a person against the data you eventually learn about them will tell you much about yourself and your assumptions about people.
If you don't have a suitable group of people upon which to try this idea at work or in your social group, then join a social group like Toastmasters or Mensa or a church group or whatever and do it there. It's quite a useful exercise with any group of people.
Why learn biographical data about people? Two reasons: 1) Partly for the exercise; to notice the world around you, you have to exercise your powers of observation. As your powers of observation get sharper with exercise, you’ll get quicker at picking up productive information from your environment. 2) As you obtain banks of data, you’ll find that the information is actually quite useful, i.e., for connecting with people, socializing with them, asking them for updates on some ongoing issue in their life, etc. Salespeople do exactly this exercise to make themselves more effective in their job and connect better with customers; marketing firms pay millions of dollars for exactly this information.
Moral of the story: I know you’re not big on connecting with the people around you. But that’s partly because you haven’t made the effort to mine data on them. With a sizable data bank, I have no doubt you’ll find interesting and fun things to do with it. And in the meantime you’ll sharpen your observation skills, which will increase your input from the world around you and exponentially increase your productivity and creativity within your own life.
(By the way, there’s an advanced version of the exercise above: Notice things about people on the fly. Pay attention to what clothing they wear (jewelry, hair style, shoes, carry-along accessories), what words they first say and in what tone, what words they emphasize with additional volume or emotion, what things stand out about their room or office, what postures and body language they use in different situations, what things they repeat when talking, etc. Read advanced books on sales for more ideas along this line and how to use this info.)
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I'm not saying that these two suggestions are the answer to everything. But I do them myself on an ongoing basis, and they've yielded the most results (in terms of increased productivity and effectiveness) out of everything that I've tried across the years