Let me extend my best wishes for the New Year.

I think you’ll have to agree that these are interesting times.  It
doesn’t take a lot of effort to find things to be concerned about
these days.

I’ve been impressed with the amount of distress I see in people.
It is certainly understandable in someone who’s lost their job or
home (or both), but I see it even in people where that isn’t the
case.

Most people’s day to day life isn’t that different now than it was
a year ago, yet their sense of well-being has plummeted.

Maybe their home no longer has the market value it had a year ago
and their retirement savings have shrunk, but they still have their
home, their health, their loved ones, worthwhile work, and so on.
Really, their day-to-day life, what they actually experience
personally, is no different than it was a year ago.

Even so, their quality of life has changed because of a change in
mindset.Now I’m certainly not saying that people don’t have real problems,
issues and difficulties.  But I am saying that some ways of facing
them are better than others.

At a simple level, the serenity prayer offers good advice in this
regard.  I’m sure you know it:  “Lord grant me the strength to
change the things I can, the serenity to accept the things I can’t
change and the wisdom to know the difference.”

On other levels, there is now a science around successful coping
and happiness.  I’ll tell you more about that in a moment, but
first I want to mention something from my life.

One of Jackie and my joys over this holiday season has been having
our son home from college.  It’s been especially poignant for us
because of an incident at school that happened a few weeks before
Jon came home.

One of Jon’s friends at school was climbing on the roof of a dorm
one Saturday morning and fell to his death.

The young man was a rock climbing enthusiast and didn’t respect
the danger.  I suppose like a lot of twenty year olds, he felt
somewhat invincible.

I can’t imagine his parent s angst.  Getting a phone call like
that is every parent’s greatest dread.

Ryan’s death was a reminder of how fragile life is and what’s
really important.  Having our son with us is a blessing.  It made
be especially grateful when I went to pick Jon up at school.

Against this background, the fact that the investment funds we
saved to pay Jon’s tuition are down about a semester’s worth really
isn’t a big problem.

However, one of the things I find myself struggling with now is not
worrying about Jon.  I realize I can’t wrap him up in cotton
batting and protect him from every danger in life.  I really
wouldn’t want to if I could.  I want my son to experience life
fully, to be engaged.  I want him to know adventure.

Jackie and I stayed home last night, but Jon naturally wanted to go
to a party with his friends on New Years Eve.  It was snowing and
with the memory of Ryan’s death still on my mind, I found myself
worrying about road conditions.  Jon doesn’t drink alcohol, but
unfortunately there are people out there who do drink and drive.  I
stared imaging all kinds of bad scenarios.

I could have driven myself crazy with “What if…” thoughts.

Fortunately I know some techniques and ways of focusing my thoughts
that I’m finding very helpful, which brings me to my New Year’s
resolution.

I usually don’t make New Year resolutions.  I like to create a
series on-going goals year ‘round.  But this year I think I will
make a resolution and I’m asking you to help hold me to it.

One of the great developments in the field of wellness has been the
new field of Positive Psychology.  Using what I’ve learned from
studying has helped keep me from getting out of balance worrying
about Jon.

Rather than focusing on dysfunction, neuroses and pathology,
positive psychology looks at people who are resilient, successful
and handling life’s ups and downs well to see how they do it.

Success leaves clues.  Is it possible that we could learn how to
live life well from those that are already doing it?

It turns out that genetics and circumstances determine sixty
percent of our happiness but fully forty percent could be
completely under our control.  Yet most of us live life by
happenstance, and worse look for happiness in the wrong places.

Positive psychology tells us how to take control and where to look.

For quite a while I’ve intended to help get the word out by doing
something – sending a series of emails, writing a book, creating a
home study course - something.  But I haven’t done anything about it.

My New Years resolution is to do it, to produce something to teach
people.   I think in these “interesting” times it could be the best
contribution I could make.

Help hold me to my intention.  If I don’t mention my project, write me write a post to ask me about.   I like to think of
myself as someone who honors his commitments, so hold me to this one.

Again, best wishes for the New Year.  And thanks for your help.

Bookmark to:
         

Even if you don’t believe in visualization, I’ll bet you practice at least one form of it sometimes.

Most people have heard of visualization – clearly imagining a desired outcome.  Many people use it hoping to increase their chance of success.

Other people consider visualization New Age fluff.  They deride those who recommend it.

However, even though they scoff, they’re often dedicated practitioners of a specific form of visualization.

In this form, they dwell on an outcome to the point of obsession. They imagine in such detail that they actually experience emotions and shift their physiology.

In fact, this form of visualization may be the most commonly applied.  The only problem with it is that it focuses on negative outcomes.  It’s usually goes by its common name: worry.

Think about it.  Worry is really just a form of negative visualization.

A person worries by vividly imagining an undesired outcome.

People say they can’t visualize, but they have no difficulty worrying.  With no coaching at all, they’re able to conjure up vivid images of the feared event or outcome.  They have no trouble enhancing the images with gruesome details of any possible negative consequence.

Some people are really quite creative as they do this.

Asking the same person to imagine a positive outcome stymies them.

It’s ironic that master worriers often dismiss positive visualization as New Age fluff.  Then they visualize away, only they specialize in the negative.

I’m not quite sure why they consider negative visualization (worry) a responsible, mature use of their time yet denigrate the positive version of the same activity.

In reality, most awful things people worry about never happen.  As Mark Twain expressed it:  “I’ve experienced many terrible things in my life, most of which have fortunately never occurred.”

Vividly imagine something and you do experience it.  Not only that, you might be charting your future.

Athletes know this.  They use visualization to imagine their success – whether it’s a perfect golf shot or a personal record in a race.

I’ve found it useful to prepare for performing surgery.  When I performed major operations, I mentally rehearsed them the night before.  I imagined making the incision and obtaining exposure.  I’d mentally go through the technical aspects in precise detail.  I imagined difficulties I might face or anatomic variations I might encounter.  Then I imagined how I would handle them.  Naturally, I imagined a very successful outcome.

Maybe it was only superstition, but I always thought the operations went better when I did that.

However, there’s a proven added bonus for spending your time imaging positive outcomes.  It makes you happy. (1)

Worry, on the other hand, accomplishes no good.

Now, I’m not talking about evaluating a grim situation to decide what action is most appropriate. That’s responsible and appropriate.

By worry, I mean repeatedly dwelling on grim outcomes when no action is possible.  Worry itself won’t resolve the situation.  It only makes you miserable.

For example, worrying about your teenager driver won’t get them home safely any sooner.

What worry does do is poison your present moment.   You imagine now, in the present.  If you think disturbing, negative thoughts, you’re making a choice that leads you to suffer in this moment.  You aren’t experiencing where you are and what’s actually happening now.  Instead, you’re experiencing what might (or might not) happen in the future.

Not only that, but worrisome thoughts and emotions drive your body to release hormones associated with stress.  Over time, this has a very detrimental effect on your wellbeing.

Some people become habitual worriers.  For them, it may be difficult to stop.  I’ll give some specific advice on how to deal with habitual worry in the future.  For now, know that it is possible to change.

A good start is to imagine positive outcomes for a change.  You can do it for task specific events, such as my examples before of athletes or my preparing for surgery.

But why not do it just for fun?

As children, we daydreamed naturally.  We easily imagined joyfully.  As we grew, most of us daydreamed less and worried more.

There’s no need to go into why we changed.  It’s enough to know that as mature people taking responsibility for our lives we are in control.  We may have unconsciously drifted into patterns of thought that didn’t serve us.  Now that we recognize what’s going on, we’re back in charge. We can choose how we use our mind and to what end we direct our mental energies.

1)  King;  Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 27: 798-807

Bookmark to:
         

 A Modest Proposal That May Shock You

Here’s a two-week experiment to help you clear your mind of distorted perceptions.  As a bonus, you’ll find yourself happier.

We all like to think that we have an accurate worldview.  Most of the time, we’re wrong – we have a distorted view of the world around us.

A large part of this distortion occurs because we’re careless about what we let affect our internal filters. 

You notice what you’re interested in.  Your perceptions tend to support your pre-existing beliefs.  You can sift through the external world and find evidence to back up just about any belief you want.

For example, can you recall, from your own personal experience, events to support the belief that people are shallow, self-centered, and mean and will stab you in the back if you give them half a chance?  I imagine that you can.

However, I also imagine that you can recall, again from your own experience, events to support the belief that people are kind, generous, and supportive and often go out of their way to help others.

Evidence exists for either belief.  Which you notice and remember depends in part on what you are primed to notice.

A person with a pre-existing belief tends to notice events supporting that belief.  They’re blind to equally valid evidence of the opposite viewpoint.

In a way, it’s the same as noticing all the blue Ford cars on the road the day after you buy one yourself.

We have control over our beliefs and our filters, but only if we actively exert that control.  If we don’t take control, outside influences will do it for us.

The news media constitutes one such outside influence.  It consistently and persistently presents a very selective and distorted worldview.  If we follow the media regularly, we’re at great risk of assuming this distorted perspective as our own.

I remember teachers in high school declaring that good citizens should follow the news media to “stay abreast of the world around us”.  That was lousy advice.

The news media, God bless it, doesn’t exist as a public service.  Their primary mission is not to inform and educate.  It does not give us a balanced view of the good and the bad in the world.  If it did, good news would hugely dominate.

Zzzzip.

“What was that?”

“Oh, that was just the bad news for the year.”

The media doesn’t strive for balance.  The media’s overarching drive is to attract viewers or readers.

To that end, the media picks its stories based on their sensationalism, their likelihood of getting attention.  The saying in the newsroom is “If it bleeds, it leads”.

Most news stories convey little or no information you need to know or that you’ll be able to take action on.

For example, I used to have my clock radio set to go off with the radio rather than an alarm.  As often as not, I’d wake up to the top-of–the-hour news summaries.  Awful. 

One morning, in the horrifying few seconds it took me to rouse enough to push the off button, I heard about a serious school bus accident in Europe, a child in Texas that died because his mother left him in a car on a hot day and a soldier who was killed on his way back to base by someone throwing a cinder block off an overpass.

Consider those stories.  Yes, they’re true, they happened.  But what do they have to do with my life?  Is there some action I can take about any of them?  Is the information useful?  Of course not. 

The wire service this radio station subscribed to scoured the globe looking for the most sensational, headline-grabbing stories they could find.  They weren’t interested in accurately representing the overall state of the world. They just wanted to get people’s attention. These were the most sensational stories they could find and they foisted them onto me
As a result, I began my day with my mind filled with horrible images.  They were remarkably hard to shake.

How do you think hearing those stories might have affected my internal filters and my thoughts about the world we live in?  Rather badly, obviously.

Filters based on those stories would be extremely inaccurate.
 
Yes, there was a school bus accident.  It’s also true that every day, year in and year out, tens of thousands of school buses safely convey millions of students between their homes and school.  Also, maternal love, care and nurturing expressed all over the globe daily far outweighs the rare episodes of maternal neglect that make the headlines.

If you let the news media decide what stories enter your experience, you’ll be seeing the world through a very distorted set of filters.

So here’s my modest proposal.  Drop the media.  Fire them. 

You don’t have to do it forever.  Just as a trial, say for two weeks.

For two weeks, I’d like you to avoid any media news sources.  That means no radio, no CNN, no news blogs, no news magazines – none of it.

The point is to just notice what you notice.

You might experience a change in the way you feel.  Your outlook may shift.  You may find yourself more engaged in the world immediately around you.  If you’re not distracted by news about mud slides in California, you’re more likely to appreciate the beautiful weather that’s your experience.

Some people find this experiment difficult because they’ve established a habit of checking the news.  That means it’s even more important for them to try it.

Others worry that they’ll miss something important.  They don’t need to.  If something truly important happens, someone will tell them.  Here’s how that goes.

We all remember where we were when we heard of the attack on the World Trade Center. I was in middle of an operation on a man’s carotid artery. 

An OR nurse not involved with the case came to the operating room to tell us about the first plane going into the World Trade Center. 

Then she felt the need to come back with updates.

After about the third news flash, I rather sharply told her to stay the hell out of my operating room.  I had the major artery to one side of a man’s brain opened and I needed to have my attention and the attention of everyone in the room completely focused on the job at hand.

Even important stories can have low priority in your personal world.

This news fast is only an experiment. It’s just something to try.  I want you to experience the quality of your life with and without the news media in it.  If you think the media really helps you and you’re better off with it, great – go back to following it.  I think you won’t want to.

But you won’t know for sure unless you try the experiment.

One more story.  Most of the things we think are so important in the present moment turn out to be completely irrelevant in the very near future.  Watching a movie recently brought this point home to me.

“Dave” is a pleasant romantic comedy.  In it, Kevin Klein plays a man who looks amazingly like the president of the United States.  In a plot twist typical of romantic comedies, he winds up standing in for the president (hey – it might happen). 

If you enjoy light comedies, I recommend the movie. I gave it 4 out of 5 stars on Netflix.

I mention it here because it was filmed in 1993.  Because of its political theme, the movie had a cute little twist of major politicians and news reporters doing cameo appearances as themselves.  These folks were the movers and shakers of the time.

What struck me as I watched it was how forgotten most of them are now. 

You may remember “Tip” O’Neal, but even his performance on the national stage has become a footnote.  His contemporaries’ roles have faded even more.

This suggests to me that time spent following the soap opera that was politics of the early 90’s might not have been the best investment of one’s time and attention. 

I think we’ll feel the same someday soon about the big stories of today.

So try this little experiment.  I think you’ll find your world a better place and your view of it much clearer.

 I’d love to hear your results.  Email me at jsphfm-jfm@yahoo.com

Bookmark to:
         

Here’s a concept for you to consider.

Our experience of the world isn’t what’s out there; it’s what we perceive to be out there.  That means our reality can be quite arbitrary because we sense the outside world through filters.  These filters exist beneath our conscious mind.  Most people aren’t even aware they’re there.  Yet they determine just what we perceive and therefore deterimine our reality.

We need these filters – we couldn’t possibly keep track of all the information coming in otherwise.

For example, if I asked you what your right foot feels like right now, you could tell me.  It feels warm or cool or you shoe’s too tight or it’s comfortable or whatever.  The point is you could immediately tell me.  Yet a moment before I asked, you weren’t aware of your foot.

How did that happen?  What changed?  Is there a little switch in your brain that turned on the nerves to your foot when I asked the question so you could answer it?

No, of course not.  The nerves in your foot, and everywhere else, send a constant stream of information to your brain.  That information gets filtered out at a pre-conscious level unless you need it – I ask a question or you step on a nail.

The same thing goes on with all your other senses and perceptions.  There’s  a flood of information coming in.  Only a small bit that the filters pass along reaches conscious awareness.

This works at a higher level of functioning as well.  This filtering is why, for example, you buy a certain make and model of a car and then start to notice all the other cars like it on the road. 

I used to drive a green 1994 Intrepid.  I still notice green Intrepids of that model when I see them. 

The cars like yours were always there – it just didn’t mean anything to you until you had one of them.  Before you bought the car, ones like it were filtered out.  When you bought your car, your filter changed and you began to see them.

As I began, this means your experience of life isn’t as much determined by what’s out there as by what you perceive to be out there.

Here’s something else: your perceptions may well be distorted by your filters. 

A real life example of this is a lunch my brother Chris had with a client in New York.  They had a lousy waiter.  The client was convinced they received such terrible service because he was Jewish.  He saw the waiter as anti-Semitic. 

Chris just thought the waiter was a frustrated aspiring actor not at all into his job as waiter.

Which perception was accurate?  Who knows?  We do know that two men sitting at the same table at the same time with the same external events had different experiences based on their filters.

Also, we can be pretty sure that that lunch wasn’t the first time Chris’s client saw life through the filter of anti-Semitism.  Anti-Semitism exists, but it probably doesn’t exist in as many places as he sees it.  He might be able to improve the quality of his life if he adjusted his filter somewhat.

There’s a very effective form of psychological therapy called cognitive restructuring that does just that.  It’s based on the premise that most emotional distress arises from distorted perceptions and that if you clear up the distortions, the distress goes away.

I’ll teach some cognitive restructuring techniques in future notes.  For now I just want you to realize that these filters exist, that there’s a possibility they might be distorted, and, most importantly, that you can change them.

Dr. Bruce Lipton has a fun exercise at his talks.  He has the audience select a pair of glasses with either green or red lenses.  Then he shows a slide.  Depending on which color glasses the audience member is wearing, they see either a friendly cottage and the word “love” or a scary haunted house and the word “fear”. 

What they see depends on which set of filters they use.  When they change filters, they change their experience.

Most of us develop our filters haphazardly as we go through life.  We pick them up from family, the media, early experiences and any number of other sources.  We never examine them for accuracy or usefulness. 

Now you’re different.  You know they exist.  That’s the first step to taking control of them and using them to give you the life you desire and deserve.

 

Bookmark to:
         

People say that nothing focuses your attention like your impending death. 

It has become a tradition as some universities to invite prominent professors to give their “last lecture”.  That is, to imagine that they had one last lecture in which to attempt to communicate their accumulated wisdom and the most important lessons they had learned.

Randy Pausch is a prominent professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University.  He was invited to give a last lecture, only for him it was no theoretical exercise – he has metastatic pancreatic cancer and will, barring a miracle, be dead in a year.

He’s 45 years old with a loving wife and three young children.  He’s at the peak of his career and has a world wide reputation.  Now he’s facing death and talking to us about what he’s learned and what’s important.

He titled the lecture: “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams”.  I can’t recommend it highly enough.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo 

Dr Pausch exhibits profound grace and wisdom.  You’ll smile and even laugh as he speaks.  Expect your eyes to at least moisten.  Tears of compassion mixed oddly mixed with joy are more likely.  He leaves you with an impression of the nobility of the human experience and the inspiration to live your own life as fully as he is living his.

Please watch this – you’ll thank me.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo

As a footnote, I’ve suggested this lecture to people grieving over the death of a loved one.  They’ve found it soothing.
 

Bookmark to:
         

We all need help sometimes to understand or communicate complex ideas.  There are lots of tools we can use to do that, and metaphors are among the most powerful.  A metaphor indirectly compares one thing to another, implying that they share similar characteristics.  To the extent the comparison is valid, it can help us understand the newly introduced concept.

Metaphors also affect our way of looking at a situation – once we define a comparison, we tend to think in those terms.  This can either serve us or hurt us.

For example, if we say “It’s a dog eat dog world”, how are we going to think about the people we interact with every day?  If “Business is a battle and there are winners and losers”, how will we approach negotiations with a client or a vendor?  It’s not too likely that a business person using a war metaphor to define their world view will think win-win.

The same fact applies to our life.  We often have metaphors we aren’t consciously aware of, and these metaphors affect the quality of our interactions.  Metaphors can serve us or they can sabotage us.

If, like the previously mentioned business man, we think that life’s a war, how do we react to others?  That metaphor doesn’t really serve us.  Sure, we can think of examples where life might seem like a battle, but we can with equal validity think of examples where life is joyous.   Our metaphors help determine which examples we notice.

We have a choice in this.  We can live with the metaphors we picked up unconsciously over our lifetime, or we can actively consider options and choose one that serves us. 

A metaphor I’ve chosen for life is to live it as “A work of art in progress”.  I like it, and for now it serves me well.  One of the things I like about it is that the “…in progress” part gives me permission to change if a better concept comes along.

Living life as a “work of art” automatically implies creativity and fresh thinking.  It allows for, and actually encourages, originality. 

Art can be collaborative and interactive – artists from various disciplines often inspire and help each other – so there’s room for social interaction and joint creation.

Perhaps what I like most is that being an artist is a process and the best artist is often more interested in the process of creating that necessarily the end result.  And the art is refined as judgment and technique and taste are developed.

A potter doesn’t throw a lump of clay on a wheel and walk away in disgust because a beautifully proportioned bowl wasn’t instantly created.  The artist works with the raw materials available.   They apply their skill and unique art, continually refining.  The end result is beauty made real and brought to the world – even though they started with something as unremarkable as a lump of mud.

I like that metaphor – feel free to use it yourself.  Until, of course, you find one that serves you even better.

Bookmark to: