Carla DiBello On Improving One’s Overall Happiness
Entrepreneur and celebrity style insider Carla DiBello on how sometimes it’s the small changes we make that can have the biggest impact on our happiness
When I first moved to Dubai I did what so many expats do when they move across the world and brought very little with me. Not only was it logistically strategic, but it was also symbolic in the sense that I was starting fresh, completely from scratch, and on my own terms. But just as it goes with any move (even one that’s entirely across the globe believe it or not), there are always remnants of a past life that somehow find a way to follow us into our future.
For me, this ended up being a small accumulation of items that proved far less necessary than I expected them to be once I was living a new lifestyle in a new country. However, regardless of how useless these items now were in my new life, they still held an element of sentimentality that connected me, through waves of nostalgia, to my past. So I designated a drawer as a temporary holding place for the items. They remained in that drawer for the next two years.
Over those two years, the contents of that drawer went from items that I initially felt fondly towards to feeling neutral about them, to feeling as though the items were nothing but a complete burden. Here I was, propelling forward in a brand new country – and yet my past life was still managing to take up significant space. After two years of avoiding dealing with that drawer, I finally bit the bullet and tossed the contents into the rubbish. The entire process took a matter of seconds.
That drawer is a constant reminder that those things that drag us down in life often become invisible to us. Even more so, the most important changes that we can make are also often invisible to us – and often fairly simple. The trick is to recognise them before their impact on our life becomes too great.
“The most important changes that we can make are often fairly simple. The trick is to recognise them before their impact on our life becomes too great.”
Exercising, sleeping, eating well, vitamins, and various therapies are all wonderful for us, but I would argue that they are relatively useless to our overall wellbeing if we don’t maintain and continue to fine tune our mental and emotional health.
We all have small changes that we could make that hold the potential to create enormous impact for us in a positive way. There are little things that we avoid doing daily because they become normalised to us, even as annoyances, or hurdles. How do we identify what the little things are that we do that still hold a heavy burden over our lives as a whole?
One strategy that I’ve come to lean on as far as identifying these small but great hindrances, is to tune into what causes me the most anxiety right when I wake up – and also, what keeps me up at night. Meditating is another great way to put my conscious ordering of priorities aside and tap into what is truly weighing on me the most.
And when I do identify these biggest stressors on my life, there is a productivity trick that I like to apply to them, called ‘eating the frog first.’ From a task-oriented approach, the idea is to tackle the hardest, most challenging task first as from there, the day just gets easier. But I find this strategy works just as well with removing invisible roadblocks to life progress, as well as reducing anxiety, because it allows us to feel what the roadblocks are before trying to cognitively identify them. After all, our cognitive minds can be greatly deceiving.
Comprehending how we individually respond to challenges is another huge key to being able to relieve ourselves of invisible burdens, as we have all had different journeys and we all have different backstories.
All the parts need to run smoothly for a car to continue to work and the same goes for our brains and nervous systems. Learning how the parts work together is key. From learning where we fall on attachment styles (which can greatly affect how we perceive things around us as well as how we act on them) to extracting exterior narratives from our impressions, eliminating that which is unnecessary allows us to see more clearly directly in front of us – not only as far as our cognitive judgment goes, but with our hearts as well. And that, I believe, is how we can truly get to where we are meant to be in life.
Photography: Efraim Evidor
Styling: Seher Khan. Carla wears: Blazer, Dhs7,415; Trouser, Dhs2,080, both Max Mara. Shoes, Carla’s own. Hair and Make-Up: La Loge. With thanks to the Western Dubai Mina Seyahi Beach Resort & Marina
By Carla DiBello for Harper’s Bazaar Arabia’s September 2022 issue.