Category Archive

Do not ask life for meaning, ask rather what meaning you give to life?

With apologies to Viktor Frankl who made the acute observation that we have to respond to the challenges that life present to us.

The Harare International Festival of Arts took place in Harare as scheduled - in spite of 165 000% inflation, in spite of delayed election results, in spite of the increasing violence.

Life informs arts.  Photographer Chris Kabwato  blogged his pictures including witty exhibitions in the Zimbabwe Art Gallery.

Image via Wikipedia

I learned a new word today: kiasu.

We are showing ‘kiasu‘ when we load up up our plate with food “just in case” the food gets finished. Over-competitiveness.

It is a Mandarin word, and Singaporean cartoonist, Johnny Lau, has a cartoon character, Mr Kiasu, who in Singlish, “everything also I want”, “everything also sure win”, “everything also I grab”.

Apparently, the closest English expression is ‘dog in the manger’. I cannot eat the hay, but I will not let you have it either!

Apart from the fun of learning a little about Singapore culture and humor, this reminded me of Steve Roesler’s post on over-managing our children. I thought you might appreciate it.

I wonder what the opposite is? Certainly the word ’savor’ comes to mind. It being the weekend, it is nice to think of judging the shopping so finely that we have a few really delectable meals . . . and a bare fridge by next Thursday.

Can and does positive psychology help us with the tragic and terrible events in life?

The focus by positive psychologists on the positive has always raised in my mind two issues: how much use is positive psychology when life if really dreadful, and aren’t we being rather patronizing to people in the midst of tragedy and despair?

I wonder what other positive psychologists would say. I would say that we need to look at tragedy and despair squarely but not necessarily in the eye. To use the analogy of wild animals, some will become more aggressive if we stare them in the eye, but some will definitely attack if we lose eye contact. Worldliness is important and we need to understand the menace that faces us. But there is a season for everything, and to continue the analogy, whatever drew us to the bush in the first place, has brought us to this predicament. We need to understand our predicament, and even appreciate it, within the context of our wider lives.

It is so much more easily said than done. In dark times, we value our poets as much if not more than we do in bright times. They mirror what we are feeling - our despair and fear - against a backdrop of our hopes and dreams.

This poem is from Zimbabwe which you may know is in deep peril as they wait for long delayed election results to be announced. April has been a long month of waiting for them. The poet is Comrade Fatso, a local musician, who has his own website and blog. I don’t have his permission to use his poem here. I hope he doesn’t mind. I hope, too, you visit his blog and leave a kind word. Or go to his website and listen to his music (it is for sale!)

Street fillers

The streets are empty.

The state has retreated.

So has the opposition.

All we are left with

are their torn posters,

pasted over each other

in a confusing collage of symbols and slogans.

We also have their space-fillers.

Riot police

aimlessly

walk the streets,

batons in belts

like forgotten cellphones.

Or sometimes

unconsciously

swung in the air

like a stick-picked-up-on-a-path.

They walk the streets

like the thousands

of unemployed H-town youths.

Space-fillers.

Like the pothole-filling youths

who have taken over the suburban streets.

Stopping traffic,

asking for donations,

filling potholes.

Unhindered.

The state has gone back to the drawing board.

The opposition has stayed away from its stay-away.

Its re-count and re-plan time.

And all we have are their space-fillers.

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Catch 22! Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

Have you ever been caught in a situation where you cannot move forwards and you cannot move backwards? It is like getting caught in a traffic jam. If you barge forward, you won’t be popular, and you won’t succeed. If you do nothing, nothing will change.

Now sometimes, we do have to ‘sit tight’. The police are on their way and they will clear the jam bit by bit. It is best to chill.

But sometimes that isn’t the choice. Sometimes if we sit and do nothing, that is where we will stay.

But what if there are cars to the left of us and cars to the right of us; cars ahead and cars behind. What can we do?

Obviously, we have to start just like the police will: one car at a time. And we have to be strategic.

Did you have one of those games as a kid where you had 8 squares in a 9 square space and you had to move them around? And the first move might not look as if it would produce a solution?

That is what we have to do: move one square at a time. Patiently, and strategically.

This is easier said than done though, particularly when our emotions are involved.

Corporate poet, David Whyte writes about a cyclical pattern in our lives where we come periodically to a place which is ‘a traffic jam’. Our task, then, is to find the smallest possible thing to ease, not just ourselves, but everyone around us, out of the impasse.

I have picked FIVE quotations from David Whyte’s poems to illustrate the process.

1. The beginning. “anything or anyone that does not bring you alive is too small for you” (Sweet Darkness)

2. The call. “You are not a troubled guest on this earth, you are not an accident amidst other accidents, you were invited . . .” (What To Remember When Wakening)

3. Reawakening. “When your eyes are tired, the world is tired also. When your vision is gone, no part of the world can find you” (Sweet Darkness)

4. The departure. “Start close in, don’t take the second step or the third, start with the first thing close in, the step you don’t want to take” (Start Close In)

5. Begin the conversation. “”Your great mistake is to act the dream as it you were alone . . . Everybody is waiting for you.” (Everybody Is Waiting For You)

In more prosaic terms, our first step is always to notice we are in a jam, and rather than bluster and curse, consider the best thing to do about it. It is amazing how often we delay this simple first step.

Our second step is equally as hard. We chose after all to be on the road at that time. We didn’t want this result, but after all, we chose to be here, and when think about it, the jam chose to happen when we were there. The jam is an integral part of us and we are integral part of it. We are part of its story, and it is part of ours.

And it doesn’t get any easier. Are we communicating? Or have we taken it for granted that everyone knows that we want the traffic to flow again? Do they think we are just trying to push in? Are we alert to other people who want the traffic to flow again. And can they recognize us? What is it that we do, or notice, that alerts them to our sense of what is possible?

And are we holding back because it all seems too big? If the traffic were to flow again, what would we all be doing in unison, and what would be our part?

And who is really holding everything up? Is it us? Is everyone waiting for us, to pay attention?

Is everyone waiting for us, to start the conversation?

Here

Hat-tip: Sally.  Thank you.

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Autumn Day

Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by J. Mullen

Lord: it is time. The summer was great.
Lay your shadows onto the sundials
and let loose the winds upon the fields.

Command the last fruits to be full,
give them yet two more southern days,
urge them to perfection, and chase
the last sweetness into the heavy wine.

Who now has no house, builds no more.
Who is now alone, will long remain so,
will stay awake, read, write long letters
and will wander restlessly here and there
in the avenues, when the leaves drift.

So much talk about Gen Y. How to celebrate the autumn of our years? Gen Y will be here one day too. How to celebrate the house that is ours and to make that celebration our contribution?

What is your house? How do you celebrate? How does your celebration contribute? How many of us can answer these questions simply?

David Bolchover who wrote The Living Dead: Switched Off Zone Out - The Shocking Truth About Office Life and guest posted for the Timesonline, wrote on his book blurb that he left corporate life to do something with his life!

I also got an email for an organization that specializes in Career Shifts - you know those awkward career changes when you are going to do something different. They quote Howard Thurman whom I am sure David would like too.

“Don’t ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who are alive.”

British poet David Whyte says similarly:

“There is only one life you can call your own, and a thousand others you can call by any name you want.”

If you can’t bunk out to the nearest bookstore to look for one of his books of prose or poetry, spend part of Easter listing all the times at work and play that you have felt truly alive.

It would be great to hear which of those you could sneak into your work life . . .

Adam Greenfield, author of Everywhere and new Head of Design at Nokia, brought the recent Royal Society meeting on Ubiquitous Computing to a crescendo on Tuesday with a clean, TED style, ran through on the pervasive nature of contemporary computers and five principles of design. These are taken from my notes (apologies Adam). As Adam spoke I was trying to relate them to soft systems as well, say HR systems.

Once I got back home, I tried to phrase them positively.

1. At the end of the day, will my client, or my employee regard themselves as better off? And am I willing to be accountable for my impact on them?

2. Am I willing to discuss fully with my client or my employee or a knowledgeable person they select, what we are going to do and what might be the consequences?

3. Does my suggestion honor my client or my employee and bring them esteem and status in the minds of people important to them?

4. Am I aware of the time constraints and rhythms important to my clients and employees and have I entered the rhythm of their activity in a way that is pleasing to them?

5. Is my client and employee in effective control of the process and do they feel that? Are they able to terminate at any time freely and without collateral damage?

Why do we find this so hard to do? I have been following a discussion that the Chief Happiness Officer started on customer service. Why do customer service people hate their customers so much? Quite likely because they have not benefited from these design principles and feel disrespected themselves. Until we, the people who design HR and management systems convey genuine respect towards them, they are not likely to feel well and happy themselves

So while customer service people protest their innocence on CHO, what is our best defence?  Have you designed systems which violated these principles?  Have you had success stories which surprised even you?

I have never been totally happy, no pun intended, with positive psychology’s approach to objectively bad situations.  I am totally persuaded by our ability to make the best of good situation.  I am persuaded by our contribution to sort-of-bad situations.  I am persuaded that in a terminal situation, we may as well be happy.  I can also  point you towards little experiments that cost you nothing but your time and that you can try on your own.

But there are three situations where I am not persuaded positive psychology can help us much, though in truth, nothing much helps in these situations.

First, when you are in a bad situation alone, and I mean socially alone.  I haven’t looked closely at being physically alone.

Second, when other people will harm you, unless you harm them first.

Third, when you have experienced sustained social abuse and your fight/flight mechanism is on a hair trigger.

I watched a Scottish movie over the weekend, 16 Years of Alcohol, that illustrated a combination of these three situations.  The protagonist grew up with an alcoholic father and joined a gang.  While he was generally terrorizing the neighborhood, he met a girl and was motivated to change his life.  The story is about his intelligent and thoughtful attempts and ultimately his death on the streets.

We can compare this story to Goodbye Mr Chips, which I watched last weekend, and the well known movie about hope, Shawshank Redemption.  In Shawshank, we have a protagonist who out-thinks and outwits people and is able to leave the situation by tunneling out of the jail.  In Goodbye Mr Chips, the protagonist has a mentor who is slightly above the situation and he is able to grow himself and ultimately change the environment around him.   Put this starkly, I think you already see the shape of my point.

In 16 Years of Alcohol, the agent of change, a young woman, was a resource but not sufficient to change the situation for the protagonist.  And  importantly, he did not exit the situation.  I’m afraid he should have left town!

The protagonist asks himself at one point: where is hope in a hopeless place?  There was an excellent line though where the young lady suggests to the protagonist that the past does not come looking for him - that he went looking for the past.  And he talks about stopping the past leaking into your heart.  These are good points - with slightly more resources and slightly less stress, he might have made it.

This is a realistic account of dealing with extreme hardship.  If you are interested in using positive psychology to move on from bad places, you should have a look.  Though a tragedy and not a feel good movie, you are left with an abiding memory of struggle and courage.  It is a respectful account of people brought up in the hardest places in our society.

Sociologists sometimes write of a masculine culture. Hofstede writes of masculine and feminine cultures.

The ‘prep’ scene in Goodbye Mr Chips illustrates this point. A pupil slams down a books while Mr Chips’ back is turned. This pupil has already challenged Mr Chips successfully on two occasions: mimicking his walk behind his back and disrupting his class spectacularly.

At first, Mr Chips does not know who is making the noise. He cunningly uses the glass of a large picture as a mirror and calls on the boy without giving away how he knows who is the culprit. Then luck would have it that the boy’s name is “collie” and he is able to humiliate the boy by suggesting that is the name of a dog. And so it goes on.

This is a masculine culture. It is based on pecking order, domination and humiliation.

We aren’t being rude about guys. Why should you put up with it either? The story line in Goodbye Mr Chips is that guys were challenging this way of life in 1910, one hundred years ago.

The alternative

If you want the alternative, look at the scene where Mrs Chips challenges the headmaster. The challenge is based on reason, persuasion, and persistence. Not domination and subjugation. The headmaster deftly avoids the challenge. He rejects an unfamiliar idea, which would be alright in its own terms. He rejects it, though, to restore his domination. Later, in the dance scene, being a wise man, he concedes the validity of the new idea (and validates it by including it in the hierarchy!)

Does life has to be a series of battles? Can we not trade visions? Can we not have Eureka moments when we learn something unexpected? Can we not do the equivalent of come up to a crest of a hill and be amazed by the vista in from of us?

If the 21st century will be about anything, it will be about a currency of visions rather than the currency of force.

Is this a new poem from David Whyte? The Sun.

I discovered Paulo Coelho this year. I am amazed I spent this long on this earth without finding his books.

His stories have mystical settings. By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept is about a woman and her childhood sweetheart who meet up again in their twenties to make a hard decision: should they get together or should he follow his vocation into a Catholic seminary and a life as charismatic and healer.

All Coelho’s books (I think) have a happy ending, but not a silly ending. After many trials, the protagonists resolve to take the high road: living in solidarity with this world. These may be mystical stories, but they are neither fantasies nor escapist.

And the trials faced by the characters are never gratuitous. Each in itself offers a perspective on relating to the world and, I think, the tension between commitment and uncertainty.

They are a remarkably “open” read too. He has a light style that draws you into the story. And then releases you from time to time to ponder what he or one of his characters has just said.

Wikipedia describes the book as “a week in the life of someone ordinary to whom something extraordinary happens”. Read it at the end of a long week to ponder extraordinary people who live ordinary lives.

“Belonging” is the theme of our age. “The House of Belonging” from David Whyte. “calling you into the family of things” Mary Oliver.

Belonging is a hard concept to grasp. Michael Bauwens has drawn this picture showing different understandings of belonging: me as part of a family, me as in let-me-be!, me as let-me-be(come), and me as going part of the way on the journey with you. Co-creation. I came across Barbara Sliter’s blog, Co-creatorship, in the last week or so too.

In my own evolving grasp of the concept, I am thinking in THREE steps:

ONE, can I begin the day with curiosity? Which birds are singing? Who is already up-and-about? What will the day bring that is totally unexpected and surprising? No”to do” list for me! Just an early morning welcome to the unknown as it is evolving around me.

TWO, can I begin the day with sureness? That my interest in the world will help shape it into a better place, alongside the interest of everyone else. The birds, the cat, the neighbor whose petrol mower is already going and shattering the peace, the motorway 20 miles away, the cup of coffee beckoning, the blogosphere which should be ignored this Saturday . . . That my interest is valued and creates safety for others.

THREE, can I be wholehearted? Can I approach everything I do today with energy, enthusiasm and warmth? Can my wholeheartedness for some or even most of my tasks (it is Saturday!) bring me pleasure and create more energy, enthusiasm, warmth for others, people and tasks?

At the end of the day, can I look back on a day when we have been surprised at what we have accomplished together? Not the race that we have won or the people we have vanquished.

Can I be surprised at what we discovered together, and how we continue to surprise each other? Do we go forward to another day, not dizzy with excitement but astounded, that we have found hidden depths in ourselves with all our failings and limitations? The hidden depths of ourselves and others. And do they feel it too? Not necessarily with bear hugs and noisy applause. Just gentle appreciation of how much their hopes and dreams, their wholeheartedness, brought warmth and enjoyment to the day for me.

Sometimes during the working day, I arrive at a website.  I have no idea how I got there and I have no idea why I have never been there before.  But there I am, at the place I want to be.

A site with essays and poetry about the Hero’s Journey.

For people new to the Hero’s Journey, the HJ is a narrative form, the structure of a story, that seems to be a suitable way of organizing our stories about our own lives.  Who else is the hero of our journey but ourselves.

“ how I want to know
that sun,
and how I want to flower
and how I want to claim
my happiness
and how I want to walk
through life
amazed and inarticulate
with thanks.”

David Whyte in a collection about the Hero’s Journey.

“All the king’s horses and all the king’s men, couldn’t put Humpty together again”.

So goes the nursery rhyme, and for most psychologists, any understanding of a person in his or own terms.

We are trained, for our sins, to be analytical.  I trained other people to be analytical.   And I would still defend our training.  But after we have finished being trained, we have to learn to put Humpty together again.  How does all the information we have collected about someone, amount to a person with a hopes and dreams, with a history and with a future,  and with fears and determination.

There are two key ideas.

The first is the idea of a sense of self, that, through whatever means, begins to take shape quite early.

“Hold to your own truth, at the center of the image, you were born with”.   (David Whyte, p. 349, River Flow).

Well, maybe you weren’t born with it, but you probably started exploring images of who you are, quite early in your life.  And the question is, what images can you remember that you were drawn to?

I will give you an example.  At about 10 years old, I saw an American movie about a basketball team who put some magic bouncy stuff on their shoes.  I had never seen a basketball game in real life, we played netball, but I was fascinated.  Five years later (a long time when you are a kid), our school announced that we were going to drop netball and play basketball.  I immediately, and I mean immediately, within thirty seconds, asked my mother if I could play in the team (with all the expense that implied).  She happily agreed, as I was well known for not being able to catch a ball, and hey presto, I was captain of the Under 15’s within weeks.  How I loved that game and it took me from clutz to school hero.

We all have creative images, though some we aren’t going to blog about, and it is worthwhile thinking about them, because however bizarre they are, they are important to us.

The second key idea, which David Whyte makes again and again, but rather obliquely, is that these images are essentially social.  They talk to our relationship with the world and the relationship we want with the world.

Now I am not much of an exhibitionist, and I was rather shy as a youngster, but I think I was drawn to two things in the basketball movie: the shared excitement of the crowd and the nippiness of the game.  And those are the roles I played.   The fast break specialist and the ‘man-to-man’ marker.  These are results-oriented ‘closing roles’, bringing home the bacon so to speak, and roles which the crowds understand and set them alight. For someone lousy at sport, this was gratifying.  It was something I could do in a sports-mad school that helped me learn about how crowds become excited and why we enjoy it so much.

We weave our story from a young age.  We see movies quite by chance, and are taken by some and not by others.  Opportunities arise, and we respond to some and not to others.  And we move on, giving up pursuits of our childhood and adopting others.   It is always our story though, woven partly from chance encounters and partly through choice.  We learn as we go, working out what’s next, from the story we are telling to the world and ourselves.

Understanding this story, delighting in this story, cherishing this story, is the privilege of the existential coach.  We are happier as workmates and colleagues when our story is heard and when our current circumstances are woven in to what went before and what will come soon after.  There is no right or wrong.  Simply the unself-conscious bringing of who we have been, to whom we are with, and the celebration of the richness of our imagination in the past, with the shy pleasure of the growing imaginative awareness of a gentle birth into the future.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Synergy is not a word I like but do we have a better word for describing productive interaction between people? Alex from alwaysnewmistakes writes on how essential synergy is to doing well. Yeah. What a great post contrasting Venice in the time of Vivaldi with Silicon Valley of today. True, true, true.

And Alex makes the further point that it is not enough to be close to abundance. One must take part. My favorite author David Whyte puts it like this:

“I want to know if you are prepared to live in the world with its harsh need to change you.”

Some months ago, I also picked some criteria for the conditions for synergy from an academic paper by David A Lane (I’ve lost the url, unfortunately.)

a. We must have a reason to interact (e.g., you make cheese and I like to eat cheese)

b. Our roles must be complementary (e.g, you sell and I buy)

c. We must interact often enough for a system to emerge (e.g., I must buy from you to keep you in business and you must have cheese to sell to me)

d. We must have permission to find solutions and opportunities to act.

David A Lane talks in terms of worrying less about the outcome and more about the quality of the interaction.  Indeed, I can go to my local deli and if they don’t have what I want, trust to them to produce something that meets my needs.   I once lived in a country where there was a flour shortage.  When the local bakery opened at 7am, I would go in and ask what is for breakfast? And eat what ever they produced!  Generative:  they were in the bakery business and I was hungry.   We could work out the rest imaginatively!   That is synergistic whereas going into a well stocked supermarket, isn’t really.

Synergy - I think it is an essential idea!

Alex from alwaysnewmistakes asks whether hope is responsible to achieving more than we think we are able.

I think of three gurus.

I think of Sun Tzu, the famous Chinese General (Sun Zi if you are used to modern Mandarin). He counsels us that battles are fought or won before they are started. He advises to pick our battles wisely and to only engage if the probabilities are with us. To fight in the “hope” of winning is to court disappointment.

I think of David Whyte and his story of coming across a frayed rope bridge across a canyon in Tibet and freezing in terror. I am not sure if he ever used the bridge. The point is that often we are not happy with where we are, we are reasonably clear where we want to be (over the other side), and we look at the gap between where we are and where we want to be, and our stomach lurches. In terror not hope. The contribution of positive psychology and positive organizational scholarship is how to move forward when we feel the absence of hope - or puke-making terror. The trick is to “Start close in, not with the second step or the third, but with the first thing”. It is also called recrafting, appreciative inquiry, and building the bridge as you walk on it. That ability to stomach, rather literally, the original fear and to look at what you can do rather than at what you cannot do, is key. Would I call it hope? Building hope I think. In my last post, I suggested ways of structuring to contain the terror of people around you. Sometimes we have to start with ourselves. We can’t think let alone lead when we are paralysed with fear. And if this sounds excessive, it is not. Even when you write a paper at uni, when you give your first lecture after the summer break, you can be frozen in fear. You could also be facing a cashflow crisis, or the loss of your biggest customer through no fault of your own, etc. etc. Things happen, to real people, and real people contain the fear and start “close in”. With immense self-discipline, because they are fortunate to understand the mechanisms of hope, and that hope is grounded in what we can do.

The third guru or set of gurus are the people who work on generative psychologies. Some of this work is very technical stuff on how we can produce more together than when we work alone. Great advances hardly ever come from having the right answers up front. They usually come from having enormous faith in the system. Birds seem to fly in a flock by following each other and taking care not collide - from those simple actions we get a flock. Great leadership is when you pose a question (much as Alex has done for me here) and through engagement with the question and each other, we draw out answers we couldn’t have imagined. It can be done alone but we do so much together. Alex’s point about synergy.

So great leaders have a sense of what is possible (get across the canyon), they contain their own terror and start working to establish the next step usually on the basis of what we have in hand and what we are good at doing, and then they work with the group to work out what to do next. Their belief in the ‘followers’ and customers and employees in business, must be massive. They must believe that the solution will emerge from the interaction. They must believe in the quality of people around them.

So is hope essential? Yes. But it is not ungrounded. it is so grounded that we can build the bridge forward. It is so grounded, it is credible and infectious. It is so grounded, we learn as we go with others with us on our journey.

Thanks, Alex

I have just discovered Jodee Bock’s blog. As I was whizzing down her latest posts, I found her piece on New Year Resolutions - aren’t we fascinated by our capacity for inactivity. She reminded me of David Whyte and I have taken the liberty of quoting what she says with two lines from one of David Whyte’s poems.

“If the WHY is big enough, the HOW will take care of itself. The WHY is the PURPOSE. When we’re clear on the WHY, then we can set the vision, which will break the WHY down, maybe into time chunks, for example. Then goals will take a bite out of the vision, and allow us those measurable milestones.” Jodee Bock

“What you can plan is too small for you to live. What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough . . .” From “What to Remember When Waking” in River Flow (p. 351).

And is doing it easy?  I’ll write on that another day.

One of the hardest concepts to grasp in positive existential psychology, is the idea of open endedness.  It is an anathema to the soul of a psychologist trained in positive thinking and to a manager trained in “gap techniques”.  In the old school, we are supposed to define a goal or an outcome and achieve what we say we are going to achieve.  We are supposed to be competent and confident that what we say will work, will work.  We are supposed to be able to make more things work than our neighbor.

David Whyte talks of frontier conversations where we do not know the outcome and of places where we are not certain of our competence.

If we insist on defining things as competencies, then we need to check whether the people joining our organization can tolerate being in a situation where they do not know if they understand or will ever understand.  Equally, if this is a competence important to the organization, the interviewer needs to be in a likewise situation.  Great!  Two people don’t know what they are doing.  So my definition of a good interview is when I have learned something from the person I am interviewing!

Here is a quotation of his reprinted by Inner Edge.

When we are faced with brutality, cruelity, perversion, etc., it is NOT wise to dismiss it in with superficial optimism. Sometimes the glass is not just half-full, it is half-full of poison. Realism is important.

Unfortunately realistic attitudes are associated with depression. Not only do we have to confront exceptional nastiness on occasion, or for some unlucky people day-after-day, experiencing extreme unpleasantness tends to close use down psychologically.

Positive psychology is about the processes that allow us to recognize what is evil and keep a clear mind, and conversely, to keep a clear mind and yet recognize evil for what it is. It is also about how to recognise opportunity, even if it is minute, when opportunity seems to have deserted us.

Today, I came across this quotation on Inner Edge on how to maintain some mental balance and perpective when life horrifies.

This is also a very attractive blog of poems with beautiful accompanying photos.

I’ve just joined Steve Pavlina’s personal development forum. The posts are a bit reminiscent of “Dear Auntie Jane” though the younger people in the group won’t remember the one-to-many days when people wrote in to a newspaper or magazine. This is truly many-to-many in 2.0 spirit and people who join are knowledgeable about personal development and willing to share their ideas.

I posted a few replies to youngsters who felt disoriented and benefited in 2.0 spirit from reflections on my own life. I moved countries last year having done so five years earlier (so fourth city in five years). I was well aware how much time I was spending networking professionally and attending to functional things.

It’s really important to lead a full life with relationships close and social, casual and professional. Everyone should be pursuing a good range of sport, cultural and social activity. It reminds me of David Whyte quoting Rainer Rilke’s poem about the fire and the night. We don’t want to concentrate on the fire. It ignores the night. We want to look at the night which holds everything including the fire.

Hard as it can be when we are under pressure of immediate things-to-do, we need to cherish our wider night of activities we hold dear. Mindtools has an database system for building goals in all areas of our lives - though you can do it on paper too. It is well worth an annual springclean to check through our appreciation of the fullness of life and let the mundane details and work take their place in the wider scheme of things.

Minutes after  I drafted this post, I discovered MindGym,  a coaching site with a fresh approach.  Oddly, they think it is a good thing to be taking work home with you.  Sure, we all do - but a good thing?  Must take that up with them.  And folks, the MindGym is British! Yeah!  Must definitely get in touch with them.

I’ll believe it when I see it or I will see it when I believe - the difference between positivism and positive psychology.

I’ve been familiar with the Desiderata since I was a child (it was popularised by a pop singer in the sixties, wasn’t it?) and I have just re-read it.  Now I read the poetry of David Whyte, Otto Scharmer’s work on presencing, ideas of emergence behind The Legend of Bagger Vance, I see and hear a lot more in this well-quoted poem.

A good way to test a psychological theory is to ask: does it “do something to you” or does it help you to find “your place in the family of things” (Mary Oliver’s Wild Geese)?

soothing, relaxing, protective, safe, thank you!

Weeks later, I had forgotten about this.  Fantastic.  You could draw.  I just scribble like a frustrated three year old.

“To attract good fortune, spend a new coin on an old friend, share an old pleasure with a new friend, and lift up the heart of a true friend by writing his name on the wings of a dragon. “

Chinese proverb

I’ve always thought that one of the best kept secrets of management theory is that middle management sucks.  Have you every noticed that there are very few movies about middle management and whenever there is a story about middle management it is about a submarine or boat where the “business unit manager” is far enough away from the “strategic leaders” to do some leadership, or we see the middle manager bailing out and rediscovering life as in Jerry Maguire.

Middle management sucks because it is all management.  It is all about “to do” lists.  Being a housewife is similar.  “To do lists” take up too much of our attention.  It is a percentage thing.  While everything on the the list is important, we should never allow our lives to be overtaken by what is urgent and important.  Urgent and important should be allowed, how much do you think?  1%?  And if you have so many urgent and important tasks, then the other 99% will just have to be many too.

But will we allow ourselves the freedom of work that is not urgent and important?  As David Whyte says, we make another “to do list” because we are scared that we are nothing and nobody without one.  Yes, it quite interesting when our “to do” lists vanish.  If we are suddenly ill.  Or when we change jobs and nobody knows who we are.  When we don’t get email and our phone doesn’t ring.  It is quite disconcerting.  We hang on to domination by urgent and important, though thoroughly dreary tasks that are large, because they are, but larger than ourselves and our dreams?

For the last 10 years, as a displaced person/migrant, I’ve oscillated between frenetic completion of to do lists of commercial tasks like residence permits, bank accounts, etc. etc. - things I hate to do at the best of times - and silence.  I think this is why migration is so miserable.  Not dealing with bankers and government officials - they are people too.  Not taking boring jobs.  The jobs are important in their own right.  Migration is miserable because we make the mistake of allowing the “to do list” and the silences that surround them be all that it is.

We have to resolve to reengineer our lives around a dream, around what we love to do and what others love us to do because we do it so well.  We have to allow the “to do” work and silences fit in to that space, not be our only space. We are letting priorities become goals and to constrict our spaces until we cannot breathe anymore - rather literally for some.

We need to sit down with a piece of paper and draw a little circle for our little life as a migrant, or as a housewife, or as a middle manager (those scare me more than being a migrant).  Around that little circle we should draw a giant circle representing our horizons and dreams.  And stare at the empty space between the two.  Pretty scary.  I feel my chest constrict.  I want to walk away.

I mustn’t.   I must start defining the points on the horizon.  The points I love and I am drawn to.  And then start filling in any points between me and there, any point at all, useful or not.   I need to take the first step and to put down the first point.

It is hard when immediate pressures are all around us.  And it doesn’t happen instantly.  We keep looking nervously at that tight centre of tedium.

So crisscross over.  Promise yourself you will be back to watch it like a pot on the stove or a sick child.  But branch out in each direction to see how far you can see.  It is only a piece of paper after all. Just add a point.  See if you can.

See if you dare lie a life when priorities take up 1% of your existence and are priorities, not limits and constraints.

I think much of the value of gratitude and forgiveness is in ability to live in the present: to be clear what is happening now, to listen to the “voices” or essential nature of what is happening, to list our choices for action, to take action.  When we ruminate, we are anywhere but here.

aaron(at)todayisthatday(dot)com describes the ho’oponopono that treats self and other and past, present and future holistically - a central idea in quantum physics and in many indigenous cultures such as Hawaii (what is the adjective) and their relatives the Maori of New Zealand.

Here is the challenge.  Can we can accept responsibility for bad weather? In our hands, that question smacks of superstition.    Of course, we did not make the weather.  Of course,  we cannot change the weather.  Of course, we may have predicted it better.  And of course, it is so silly to complain about the weather.  What we can do is note the weather, understand the weather, review what we want from the day, list our choices, and act.

There are times, though, when hardship is severe.  Acting during a tsunami under the influence of adrenalin is probably easier than coping with loss and devastation afterwards.  Maybe then to grieve, and to grieve fully,  is the correct action.

I always  felt so silly in New Zealand teaching western ideas of management and leadership.  My apologies for the curriculum were always met with knowing nods from Maori and Pacific Island students.  The concept of mana, schizophrenically adopted by New Zealanders of recent arrivals but not included in the management curriculum, includes status and influence as a bundled idea, leadership and followership in one.  You have mana as teacher and you acquire mana from being a good teacher. So if something is going wrong in the classroom, one does not get emotional. One acts in appropriate ways to restore the  dignity of the classroom for all concerned.  That’s all.

I wonder the philosophical origins of our need to separate self from society and the present from the past and the future.

I’ve not read the original before.  Here it is.

I suspect that the most interesting concept in positive psychology, if you are a psychologist, is the relationship between the past, the present, and the future.

Our training is based predominantly on on linear models. We are trained to think that if we are X today, we will be Y tomorrow. Most of our tuition concentrated on teaching us to define and measure X’s and Y’s and it took for granted that today and tomorrow are independent.

Positive psychology is based on recursive models. The past does not predict the future; it is part of the future. Mathematically, we predict the value of X in the future, rather than the value of Y in the future.

David Whyte’s Midlife and the Great Unknown begins by addressing the relationship between future, present and past. To feel well, to feel vital, to feel alive, we need to be active, to be acting our future in the context of the present. In other words, always to be doing now what we want for the future, without the future being a separate place.

I particularly like David Whyte’s idea that we are all unique - well of course we know that, but do we act that way? Do we look at all our relationships with people, with events, with places and even with things and see a unique story that is unfolding and interesting in itself?

Related is the concept of mindfulness - to be fully present in events, not to experience their beauty or their ghastliness (ghastliness is real) but to experience be present.

It is a hard concept for we psychologists!

David Whyte takes about finding the frontiers of your life: the place where you face the unknown in an expansive way. I like the correspondence with Paulo Coehlo’s horizon.

StumbleUpon kindly threw up this freeform poem of Shel Silverstein. I haven’t read him before. I particularly like What If as a poem for the incorrigibly anxious, and God’s Wheel, for the incorrigibly stable!