I’d better confess at this point that I have a longstanding relationship with the self-help industry. And … you know all those strange and varied New Age things you might think of as tangentially connected to the self-help industry? Reiki, homeopathy, acupuncture, Bright Path Ascension meditation, crystal healing, chakra balancing – I’ve tried them all. What did I think of them? Did they work? Honestly, I have no idea. Talking therapy has worked for me very well in the past, and so has reading the wisdom of other people and then trying to put it into practice.
For most of my reading life, I have avidly read personal growth and mind-body-spirit books. I’ve even bought books that promise to solve problems I don’t have – How To Heal A Toxic Relationship With Your Postman; When Your Pet Rabbit Is A Psychological Vampire – on the grounds that they might come in handy one day.
Then in 2009, I read a book that changed the way I thought about everything: The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. Its subtitle is ‘A guide to spiritual enlightenment’, which I found slightly off-putting until I read it. An alternative subtitle for the general reader might have been ‘How to eliminate suffering’.
Although the book contained a lot of what I thought of at the time as ‘strange spiritual stuff’, it was also an eye-opening and, for me, life-changing analysis of the human tendency to tell ourselves unhelpful stories about other people and incidents in our lives, and to believe untrue things that increase our suffering. Thanks to The Power of Now, I was able to opt out of a lot of suffering that I’d have been certain was obligatory and unavoidable in my pre-Eckhart Tolle days.
As well as arguing that suffering is avoidable and unnecessary, Tolle advocates compassion and forgiveness towards others, no matter what they do. One quotation from The Power of Now that lodged instantly in my mind is this: ‘If her past were your past, her pain your pain, her level of consciousness your level of consciousness, you would think and act exactly as she does. With this realisation comes forgiveness, compassion and peace.’
I mainly agree with Tolle about the benefits of forgiveness, compassion and peace – with one significant caveat: people can and will always piss us off and do things we think are bang out of order. In order to forgive the person more effectively and release the anger and hurt more quickly and completely, we need first to be able to define the behaviour as unacceptable. We must be compassionate towards others, yes, but we must honour our own significant negative emotional and psychological experiences by allowing ourselves to hold what I call ‘good grudges’ that harm no one and simply allow us to remember in a purposeful way instead of acting as if the thing never happened.
In early 2018, a friend recommended to me the Life Coach School podcast, hosted by American life coach Brooke Castillo. I listened to a few episodes and loved everything I heard. Until my introduction to Brooke (I can’t call her by her surname – in my head, she and I are good friends, so I’m going to call her Brooke and I know she wouldn’t mind) I had never thought about life coaching, apart from when I watched the brilliant episode of Peep Show in which Jez becomes a life coach and proceeds to give terrible advice to everyone he knows.
Sometimes, on her podcast, Brooke interviews other coaches who have their own podcasts. I learned that there are not only general life coaches out there but also many unexpected sub-genres of the profession. I started to explore, and was delighted by the variety that I found in the podcast world. Suddenly a whole new area of self-help had opened up to me. There were weight-loss coaches, relationship coaches, midlife-crisis coaches, coaches for working mothers, coaches who only coach other coaches. My favourite was the decluttering coach who visits your home and, for a sizeable fee, says things like, ‘Start with one drawer. Empty it out, only put back the things you want to keep, and throw the rest away.’
My dog walks grew longer and longer as I added more life coaches’ and self-help experts’ podcasts to my ‘must listen’ list. As well as Brooke (always and forever my favourite), I started to look forward to new episodes from Kate Swoboda, Robin Sharma, Kara Loewentheil, Tiffany Han, Natalie Lue, Gretchen Rubin and, last but by no means least, Oprah Winfrey and her endless procession of wise and wonderful enlightenment-offering guests. I could and still can spend entire days achieving very little apart from having long-distance help poured into my ears by wise Americans.
This, dear sidekick, is why so many of the books and podcasts I’m choosing to turn to in my attempt to solve the mystery of happiness are by life coaches. This is why, when I was worried that I was too happy and might benefit from feeling a little less happy with my current life circumstances, I turned to an American life coach called Katherine.
Let me come out of the closet and make a bold claim: I presently believe that the best life coaches are closer to solving the mystery of happiness than any other group of professionals on the planet. And that’s why it’s crucial to this case that we take witness statements from some of them and hear what they have to say …
I knew a lot of Brooke’s ideas from listening to her podcast, but it was nevertheless a huge revelation to read this book, that contains a very thorough description and user’s guide to her greatest and proudest invention: the CTFAR Model (which stands for Circumstances, Thoughts, Feelings, Actions, Results). The whole ‘thoughts create our reality and are responsible for everything’ theory that Katherine dazzled me with? That’s Brooke’s bag, too, as I discovered when I put the rest of my life on hold to spend my every waking hour studying her teachings.
Brooke believes that all circumstances are always neutral – neither positive nor negative. Yes, even a massacre, even the death of a loved one. Brooke’s view is that we might deliberately choose and want to feel terrible about both events, and that’s fine – and she is at pains to emphasise that she would never wish to feel happy about everything – but her point is that our feelings, and our perceptions of external events and other people’s behaviour and character, are always caused by our thoughts, and our thoughts are always optional; we can change them if we want to.
Brooke encourages us to examine as thoroughly as possible how we’re feeling, and then trace that feeling back to a thought. That’s step 1.
The next step is to accept that our thought (in response to an always and necessarily neutral circumstance) is what causes our feeling, our feeling then causes our action, and our action brings about our result. Therefore, Brooke argues, the results we see in our lives can always be traced back to our own thoughts. If we accept this premise, we get to take full responsibility for all the results in our lives, and create whatever future results we want using the CTFAR Model.
The only part of the model that we don’t have full control over is what Brooke calls the C-line (circumstance), but we can always choose how we want to think about that circumstance, and our thoughts, and never the circumstances, are what create our results. Brooke’s self-coaching model is the ultimate in self-empowerment, and I absolutely love it. I think she’s the Agatha Christie of her industry: the Queen of Coaching.
She believes that the CTFAR Model can solve any problem, and, at the same time, she encourages us not to expect too much happiness, or only happiness, in our lives. As humans, says Brooke, we are always going to have an emotional balance of feeling great 50 per cent of the time, and ‘feeling like ass’ the other 50 per cent of the time. Being human involves accepting and welcoming the 50/50. This reminds me of one of the items on my Happiness Hunches longlist, The Positive in the Negative. (I must trim that longlist down to a shortlist … When? I have no time!)
Brooke would say that my having no time is a direct result of thoughts I had in the past. I chose, in the past, to be this busy in my present. My excessive busyness is the Result Line of an old CTFAR Model I was unaware of having created for myself. Even so, it is no one’s fault but my own – Brooke would urge me not to beat myself up about this, but rather to choose on purpose what thoughts I want to think to create different results in my future. We must be kind and non-judgemental towards ourselves and others, she says, because only compassion and kindness and good feelings can create lasting positive change.
Okay, so, listen: confession time. One of my weaknesses is that I love falling for people and finding new heroes to worship, especially charismatic Americans. And I love even more the idea that there is One Right Answer. (Of course; I’m an Agatha Christie fan.) Having said that, I genuinely believe that Brooke’s teachings might be the key to solving all problems, and I cannot disagree with her on any level when she tells me that her CTFAR Model accurately describes and explains absolutely everything.
I know. It’s a big claim. But I’m willing to stick my neck out for the CTFAR Model. It’s clear, simple, elegant and very hard to disagree with once you understand it properly. (At first, people I’ve introduced it to tend to say ‘What about murdering cute puppies? That’s not neutral! That’s objectively terrible.’ Brooke would say that she too thinks killing cute puppies is terrible, but she’s aware that she’s choosing to think that and she’s happy to stand by that choice and feel sad and angry accordingly whenever she hears of puppies being murdered.)
Her way of looking at the world strongly resembles that of several wise and eminent statue-ish types. Marcus Aurelius said: ‘All is as thinking makes it so – and you control your thinking. So remove your judgements whenever you wish and then there is calm – as the sailor rounding the cape finds smooth water and the welcome of a waveless bay.’1 Shakespeare seems to agree. In Hamlet, he wrote, ‘ … for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so’.2
The ancient Stoic Epictetus comprehensively endorsed Brooke’s approach to life and self-coaching long before Brooke was born:
What disturbs men’s minds is not events but their judgements on events: for instance, death is nothing dreadful, or else Socrates would have thought it so. No, the only dreadful thing about it is men’s judgement that it is dreadful. And so when we are hindered, or disturbed, or distressed, let us never lay the blame on others, but on ourselves, that is, on our own judgements. To accuse others for one’s own misfortunes is a sign of want of education; to accuse oneself shows that one’s education has begun; to accuse neither oneself nor others shows that one’s education is complete.3
Interestingly, although Brooke’s ideas have so much in common with those of Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus, and though her podcast devotes many episodes to her ‘teachers’ and to discussions of their ideas, she never mentions the Stoics as being among her influences.
Kate Swoboda, in her book and her podcast, talks about how to think about and deal with fear, and the importance of establishing new habits if we want to live a more courageous life. By ‘more courageous’, she means a life that is more in alignment with who we truly are and want to be. She diagnoses a lack of this kind of alignment as one of the major causes of unhappiness, lists some common suboptimal thought patterns and behaviours that trip us up (perfectionism, people pleasing, pessimism and self-sabotage), and suggests practical actions and useful ways to think in tricky situations that can help us to be more in integrity with ourselves.
Like Brooke Castillo, Swoboda is not only a life coach, writer and podcaster, but also the founder of a school that trains life coaches. Unlike Brooke Castillo, Swoboda does not offer a magic-key-to-everything CTFAR Model equivalent. On her podcast, she often says words to the effect that, ‘There are no simple answers, there’s no magic formula.’ Whenever she does, I find myself thinking, simultaneously, ‘That’s so plausible. How could there be a simple answer?’ and ‘There is a simple answer, even if it’s not always easy to practise: Brooke’s CTFAR Model.’
Unlike Brooke, Swoboda does not appear to believe that all circumstances are neutral and that only our own thoughts are responsible for causing our feelings; on the podcast in particular, she regularly talks about the behaviour of others from a perspective that assumes that of course other people sometimes do objectively awful things that make us feel terrible.
She is also much more overtly political than Brooke. She talks about certain politicians and political situations very negatively, and declares a desire to challenge and resist the force for harm in the world that she believes they represent. Brooke believes in being equally compassionate and unconditionally loving to everyone, no matter what their political perspective or behaviour – because when we negatively judge others, we are in fact harming them and ourselves, and creating suffering. Brooke, like Eckhart Tolle, would undoubtedly say that whenever we cause ourselves upset and disturb our feelings of peace and love for all fellow humans with our strong conviction that someone is terribly harmful, it is our thoughts that are causing the harm and negativity, not the person about whom we’re thinking them.
Reading and listening to Kate Swoboda after having immersed myself in Brooke’s teachings, I kept finding myself thinking, ‘But if you thought about that differently, it wouldn’t be the bad thing you’ve decided it is’, though I agree with Swoboda about the importance of focusing on our habits – discarding old ones and creating new ones – if we want to create more happiness, integrity and alignment in our lives. Her approach feels much more a compilation of helpful tips, tools and suggestions around happiness and fulfilment gained through courage rather than a denouement-style, big-reveal ‘Here’s the answer’ or ‘Here is my philosophy about how the world works’. She offers plenty of useful clues, though, which I am happy to file away for safekeeping.
Rubin is not a life coach. On her website she describes herself as ‘a writer who relentlessly explores human nature to understand how we can make our lives better’. Her approach is very much a practical one of experiment followed by result, and it’s a personal experiment only; she’s telling us about what she did, not what she thinks we ought to do, though she does suggest that we might like to devise and implement happiness projects of our own.
For a year, Rubin chose a different theme to focus on each month – ‘Make time for friends’; ‘Boost energy’; ‘Aim higher’ – and then spent the allotted month behaving differently, and consciously, in relation to the month’s particular theme. At the end of the year, she was pleased that she had completed her happiness project and she did indeed feel happier. It’s not hard to see why: for a year she lived a much more deliberate and curated life instead of one by default. I love her suggestion that we should all design and pursue our own happiness projects, but I miss the magic-answer factor, as I did when I read and listened to Kate Swoboda after first discovering Brooke Castillo.
Gretchen Rubin is the author of another bestselling book, The Four Tendencies, which I read immediately after The Happiness Project. I bought and read it even though it wasn’t on my original list because I knew as soon as I googled Rubin and learned of the book’s existence that it would be relevant to the mystery I’m trying to solve. I was right. Ironically, this book proved much more helpful to my happiness investigation than did The Happiness Project. In The Four Tendencies, Rubin makes an extremely bold claim: that all people, without exception, can be divided into four categories, or tendencies: upholder, obliger, questioner and rebel.
(God, I love bold claims! Is this a problem? Does it mean that I’m more likely to join a weird cult one day? My first instinct is always to be suspicious and sarcastic about everything, so hopefully that will protect me.)
Depending on our ‘tendency’, Rubin argues that different things make us happy and unhappy. A rebel is in her element when she refuses to meet both outer and inner expectations, but this can make her fail to meet targets others have set for her, as well as ones that she’s set for herself – in which case, her ‘tendency’ might cause her unhappiness long term as she fails to achieve anything. A questioner is only willing to do things he has first questioned and decided make sense. His relentless questioning might give his boss the impression that he’s an obstreperous troublemaker, and he might get fired – which might not make him very happy. Upholders strive to meet both outer and inner expectations, but can cause themselves misery with endless ‘tightening’ of the standards they believe they need to uphold, and so can suffer from stress and burn out, and obligers, who meet outer expectations easily but struggle to fulfil their commitments to themselves, risk feeling unhappy as a result of sacrificing and neglecting their wellbeing as their own values.
Rubin believes that in order to be the happiest we can be and live our best possible lives, we need to take her quiz, find out which is our ‘tendency’, and then exploit its strengths and take her suggested steps to avoid and address its pitfalls.
Rubin’s books are a useful reminder that happiness, and what we need to do in order to achieve it, might be very different for different people. On the other hand …
Another life coach, folks. I hope you will forgive me. What I love about Loewentheil’s podcast is her obvious intelligence, and she refers to her listeners as ‘my chickens’, which I find endearing 98 per cent of the time. (For the other 2 per cent, I think, irritably, ‘I’m not a chicken’.) She used to be a lawyer, and a law academic, and she sounds like a proper intellectual. She strikes me as the life coach most likely to do an episode one day about Immanuel Kant’s deontological moral theory and how it relates to decluttering our bedside cabinets.
I suspect that Loewentheil would not have much time for Gretchen Rubin’s ‘Four Tendencies’ theory. She believes that it’s limiting and unhelpful to think of yourself as any particular type of person, and restrictive, inaccurate and discouraging to view any aspect of your character or behaviour as fixed. She was trained by Brooke Castillo, and is another advocate of the principle that our thoughts create our entire reality – and I’m sure her answer to Rubin would be that any time we want to, we can change our thoughts, feelings and actions, and therefore, by extension, our tendency.
I absolutely loved this book. It’s hilarious and scathing, and reading it made me very happy. It contains the phrase ‘this llama-shaped tract of human desperation’, and is worth reading for that alone. Whippman is a British writer, journalist and film-maker who moved to America and soon became fascinated by the American anxiety-driven obsession with finding happiness. She is deeply suspicious of corporate America’s approach to its employees’ happiness and of the positive psychology movement, and criticises both from a political perspective, asking if there’s something inherently reactionary about the idea that we should rely only on ourselves and our mindful mindset shifts to create our happiness, instead of, for example, life circumstances such as a decent salary, a stable job, good health care and adequate housing.
Whippman argues that governments and employers are absolving themselves of responsibility and avoiding their social justice duties by creating a culture in which citizens and employees are encouraged to believe that they alone are responsible for creating their own happiness. Amusing and chilling in equal measure are the descriptions of corporations that try to convince employees that they can and should be so happy and fulfilled by their work that there’s no reason for them ever to want to leave the office.
I’m torn. I can see Whippman’s point. ‘You go and make yourself happy’ does kind of suggest that ‘Making you happy is not my job’, with perhaps a side order of ‘and therefore I can continue to insist that you work nineteen hours a day for £2 an hour’. However … do we really want to entrust our emotional well-being to the very people who are not treating us well in the workplace? I definitely don’t. As someone who lived for seven years in one of the scariest and most gun-crime-ridden parts of Manchester, during which time I was regularly mugged, burgled and held up at gunpoint, and was too scared to open my own front door (and yet I was always very happy), I know that sometimes we find ourselves in less than ideal life situations. Yes, it would be lovely if a powerful entity like a government or an employer came and sorted everything out for us, but in reality that very often doesn’t happen. And even the poorest, most-mugged-at-gunpoint people who have so little freedom and power, thanks to the socio-economic disadvantages they face, can exercise power when it comes to their own thoughts.
Surely that should be emphasised and celebrated? For those who suffer most seriously in the world, the power to choose and use their thoughts to make themselves feel better is often the only power they have. I’m therefore inclined to agree more with the people who say, ‘Let’s teach everyone that it’s our own brains that make us happy or sad, not what the rest of the world does’, than the ones who say, ‘No, let’s teach everyone that their unhappiness is someone else’s fault and responsibility to solve.’
Of course, none of this means that we can’t also take steps to see to it that everyone gets fair wages and great health care. I don’t see that positive psychology is at all incompatible with working to make the world a fairer and safer place, though Whippman’s descriptions of key popular psychology figures dodging, fudging and evading, like scammers afraid that their con is about to be rumbled, are eye-opening.
Power is a journalist who was feeling miserable and so decided to work her way through some famous self-help texts, one by one, and practise what they preached in order to test which of the methods was most effective. I was delighted to find that one of her chosen texts was Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now, and my impression (Power doesn’t explicitly say so, but it’s suggested) is that she found this to be the most life-improving of all the books and approaches she tried. Any friend of Eckhart Tolle is a friend of mine.
Barrett is president of the Association for Psychological Science. She’s a scientist and an academic, and her thoughts about the making of emotions are laboratory-tested. Her book was a slightly harder slog for a science nincompoop like me – there wasn’t even a light-relief chapter about how to declutter my wardrobe – but the slog was entirely worth it because Barrett turns out to be unambiguously in the ‘Thoughts Create Feelings’ camp (which I think is my camp. I’m starting to feel ready to commit. Almost).
If I was hoping to find some serious scientific muscle with which to back up Brooke Castillo’s CTFAR Model, that is exactly what I found in this book. Barrett presents much scientific evidence to demonstrate that our emotions are constructed and do not arise spontaneously in response to circumstances. She gave a TED talk entitled ‘You aren’t at the mercy of your emotions – your brain creates them.’ She also talks a lot about how the culture and society in which we grow up shapes our thoughts and beliefs, and therefore plays a part in creating our feelings. In this respect she is more deterministic than Brooke, who doesn’t believe that any of us need to be at the mercy of a set of cultural habits or beliefs unless we choose to be. Brooke emphasises personal and individual responsibility for choosing the thoughts and beliefs we want, no matter what society we grew up in.
Byron Katie is a speaker and writer who created something called The Work, which her website describes as a simple, powerful and effective meditation practice. I’ve also seen it described as a method of enquiry. In this book, Katie argues that human beings cause themselves unnecessary pain by arguing with reality. In her words: ‘When you argue with reality, you lose … but only 100 per cent of the time.’ Other causes of pain she identifies are: failing to stay in our own business (and instead straying into God’s business or other people’s business); and believing things that are not true. Although I agree with all of the above, and think that these are incredibly useful concepts to bring to any pursuit of happiness, for an individual or for the world at large, I had a weird experience while reading this book. Katie’s work is endorsed by both Eckhart Tolle and Brooke Castillo, and yet in response to almost every paragraph of Loving What Is, I found my inner intuitive voice screaming, ‘I’m not really sure about this.’
Now, I freely admit that that is: a) a very weird reaction, with nothing whatsoever to back it up; and b) inconsistent of me, because Katie’s approach is in many ways very similar to Tolle’s and Brooke’s. All I can say is that their words, both written and spoken, inspire me and leave me in no doubt that they are significant forces for good on this planet, and Byron Katie’s … well, I don’t feel the same way about her. I persevered to the end of her book, and concluded that I did not want my solution to the mystery of happiness to involve her personally. When I hear Brooke talking about what Katie believes, it sounds great, and I fully intend to apply some of her sound principles to my life. Yet when I hear Katie herself talk about those principles, I feel much more suspicious of it.
The Work is interesting, however. It has the conceptual clarity and boldness that I am usually drawn to. It involves asking yourself four questions about any thought you have that’s causing you distress or disturbing your inner peace:
2. Can you absolutely know that it’s true?
3. How do you react when you believe that thought?
4. Who would you be without the thought?
Then you’re supposed to do ‘The Turnaround’, where you look at your original thought and see if it’s in fact true of you rather than the person you originally had the thought about, or if somehow the exact opposite might be true.
For example, using the thought I’ve just expressed about Katie’s book:
1. Is it true that Loving What Is is deserving of suspicion?
No! Of course not. It does not have that innate quality. I’m merely thinking that about it, and plenty of people think otherwise.
2. Can you absolutely know that it’s true?
Aren’t you listening to my answers? I’ve just conceded that it is untrue as an objective fact. I, however, have that very subjective feeling about it. And I have it very strongly, with no desire to change my thought or feeling.
3. How do you react when you believe that thought?
I decide to use the parts of Katie’s theory that I find useful and true, and I puzzle over my emotional response to her book.
4. Who would you be without the thought?
Er … me. A version of myself who trusts my instincts less.
And then the last question: what about The Turnaround?
Um … I am deserving of suspicion? Byron Katie’s book is the opposite of suspicion-deserving?
I’ve watched videos in which Katie does The Work with audience members at her events. They start out by saying things like ‘My violent partner is ruining my life’, then very soon, under Katie’s tutelage, they end up saying, ‘No, that’s not true’, and ‘I am ruining my own life.’
For me, the big difference between Brooke’s approach and Byron Katie’s is that Brooke is clear that we will sometimes want to choose negative thoughts and feelings, because recognising that something upsetting is nevertheless true for us is important in some instances. And Brooke’s emphasis is on helping people to empower themselves and improve their lives, always. When I watch Byron Katie, I can’t help thinking, ‘Here is a woman trying to convince people that what is true for them in that moment is not true for them in that moment. It’s almost as if she is doing the very thing she so sensibly advises against: arguing with reality.
Sharma’s focus is not so much on happiness as on overall well-being: how to achieve your full potential, become legendary and live a great life. His podcast is one of my favourites. I admire his ambition, his outrageous boldness and his super-high standards in all things (he’s very alarmed whenever a member of hotel staff neglects to bring his or her ‘A game’ to serving the wine or laying down the room service tray). I love all the concepts he’s invented and the names he has given them – things like ‘The Tight Bubble of Total Focus’, ‘Rare Air’, ‘The Leader with No Title’, and his ‘Four Interior Empires: Mindset, Heartset, Healthset and Soulset’. My favourite of all is his ‘Two-Massage Protocol’. This is his idea that in order to be the best versions of ourselves and attain full visionary-hero-legend status, we all need to have two massages per week. I’m in, Robin!
However … Robin also wants me to get up at 5 a.m. every day, and insists that, above all else, waking up at 5 a.m. is the secret of happiness and success. Robin, I’m afraid I’m out.
You all know by now that I can’t help linking everything back to Brooke – and now is no exception. Robin Sharma talks a lot about toxic people and why they are to be avoided. He also believes, and states quite unambiguously and repeatedly, that there are settings and conditions in which we thrive, and ones in which we cannot possibly do so. This directly contradicts Brooke’s view that we can thrive in any situation or setting if we choose the right thoughts. In Brooke’s philosophy, toxic people do not exist. She advocates feeling unconditional love for everyone and says that we never need remove ourselves from a toxic person’s company or a toxic environment, because those things don’t exist.
We can, she claims, render any setting or person non-toxic by: a) loving them no matter what they say or do; and b) maintaining our own boundaries in a way that puts us in charge, always, of our own emotional well-being.
I wonder what Katherine and Lyssa would think about this issue of the toxicity or otherwise of other people. I’ve started to suspect that this might be the one topic about which I disagree with Brooke – which is a shame because, if it weren’t for this one thing, I would be significantly closer to solving the mystery of happiness by comprehensively embracing Brooke’s way forward.
As it stands, I don’t feel I can do so – and it’s the ‘other people’ issue that’s blocking me: can we really take full responsibility for our own happiness, irrespective of what other people are doing and how they are treating us?
I’m not sure how to solve this conundrum. Perhaps it’s time to attack the mystery from another angle – to revisit my Happiness Hunches Longlist and turn it into a shortlist, with one significant new addition …
1 Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
2 Hamlet, Act 2, scene 2, lines 253–54
3 Handbook of Epictetus (The Enchiridion)