Posts Tagged ‘gratitude diary’
Let the world look at you. I assure you, the world will like what it sees.
Posted on: April 26, 2010
Gratitude or selfishness?
When I first encountered the idea of a gratitude diary, I was discountenanced by feeling grateful for things like . . . well, my coffee. I suspected greed, not gratitude.
Once I started using a diary, then I realised that I was often thankful for the meals I had had that day. I am grateful for a homemade soup, for example. but am I grateful just because I could have been out all day and been subjected to junk food? Partly. Yet when I feel grateful for soup, I never simultaneously think of the disgusting fare served up as food up-and-down the arterial transport spokes. I am think of much I appreciate a well made home made soup. I experience pleasure not gluttony.
In short, I experience me.
This still seems selfish, doesn’t it? But it is my job to see me. It is my job to appreciate who I am.
The funny thing is that we cannot see who we are, or appreciate who we, are except in the eyes of the world. It is when I reach out to some thing I value and treasure, when I recognize what is good in the world, that I recognize the good in me.
Khalil Gibran talks of adventuring a path and meeting the soul. Not a soul. The soul.
David Whyte talks of the universe taking its ball home too, when we get up and take our ball home. He points out that universe is not punishing us. It is just that without “the faculties of attention, there is nothing to be found.”
We are what we are grateful for
We are what we are grateful for. It’s a simple as that. When we remind ourselves of what we truly appreciate, we remind ourselves of ourselves. We are validated. We belong.
But because we are simple folk and all these word feel like mental contortions, we can listen rather to the words of Mr Chips’ fellow teacher.
“I found that when I stopped judging myself harshly, the world became kinder to me. Remember I told you once, go out, and look around the world. Do that now. Only this time, let the world look at you. And the difference, I assure you, the world will like what it sees.”
Where is the end of the tunnel?
At odd times in our lives, someone wise captures our dilemma in a single sentence. I hope he won’t mind, but almost a decade ago in Zimbabwe, at a time when other people were saying, “It is darkest before the dawn”, the UN Representative said to me, “You feel right now that you are in dark tunnel and you cannot see the light at the end. But you will see it eventually.”
I think many people in western countries feel this way. Yet they won’t vocalize their thoughts. I think keeping nervous thoughts looked away is a mistake. Our stress levels and we come no closer to a solution.
Getting our thoughts in order
Speaking up, though, often feels negative. Worse, in competitive masculine societies, which describes most English-speaking societies, when you describe what is not working for you, you look like a loser. And losers definitely come last. People don’t want to hang out with you in case losing rubs off.
Psychologically, though, it is important to express your fears. If we don’t, they will build up until they govern our lives. Then we start to make very unwise decisions. We will find yourself bandying together with people whose only goal is to complain. Losing does become a way of life.
When we express our fears, we also have an opportunity to list what goes well. Our objective is not to ignore what goes badly It is to take stock of what tools we have in our tool kit so we get some leverage on the problem.
My bad day
Let me give you an example. Yesterday, I got pins and needles working at my desk. To get some circulation going, I went downstairs. Despite moving very carefully, I put my numb foot down carelessly, fortunately on the last stair, and twisted it badly. I put out my other arm spontaneously to steady myself and resprained an already sprained-shoulder. The combined pain made my head spin. I thought I might faint.
Effectively, my day was finished. I got back to my desk and with visions of a black-and-blue ankle, looked up how to treat a sprain: RICE. Rest, ice, compression, elevation. And do it straight away.
Fortunately I had a pack of frozen peas in the freezer. My day then became a day of trying to keep ice on my foot (I never did figure out how to combine ice, pressure and height), canceling appointments, and trying to work on my lap.
To make matters worse, my project for the day was design. If there was ever a task that I find fiddly and annoying, its graphics. It beats tax returns and hoovering by a long margin. There, even writing that makes me feel better.
I persevered, despite my aches and pains, until close to midnight with triumph, I produced something that was not disgusting but that needs redoing because the proportions are long.
See how long this story of woe is? I really ended my Wednesday feeling life was dull and unpleasant. I made myself exercise while I ran a clean up on my computer. Then at midnight, I made myself fill out a gratitude diary. What was good to say? Yup, I had stopped my ankle swelling. It ached and it was slightly swollen but it was not a black-and-blue mess. I had made progress on a task I find very hard. I had stopped at home and had salads for lunch and supper.
I surprised myself reevaluating my relatively ’empty’ day as better than I thought. But I resisted calling it positive. That is the point, isn’t it? I resisted noticing the positive because I was so shocked by the negative. Sometimes we want to sulk.
Learning from countries in trouble
Getting a grip, I used some magic Anti-Flamme, available only in New Zealand, on both my ankle and shoulder, curled up in a ball which I hoped would tax neither foot nor shoulder. Then I put on BBC World Service to listen to The Last Resort, a novel about happenings in my birth country, and surprisingly good, though close to the bone.
The author of The Last Resort, is taking the view that it is darkest before the dawn, and for once, a book about Africa is not whincingly sanctimonious.
Listening to the lives of people who are in a very dark place but who go on anyway, reaching out, and trying to be decent in ways they understand, we should know that sometimes we will not be able to see the light at the end of the tunnel. But we are still better calling out to others who are there with us, and taking an inventory of what we have for our emotional and physical sustenance. We don’t know there is a way out. But if we worry about that instead of coping with the present, we will not get out. Our salvation is what is around us.
As for Westerners who are burying their fears. Don’t. I know a fair bit about national economics. I make it my business to follow the pundits. We are up shit-creek. No doubt about it. But we also have
- The buffer of a lot of fat
- Deep confidence
- High aspirations
The nuclear deal crafted by Obama is important. We are working together to make the world safer. Scientists are making fundamental discoveries almost daily. We have a new generation coming through. The internet works so well that it is unremarkable now to interact with people world wide on a daily basis.
In our unspoken discomfort with a financial crisis of our own making, we fall into three traps
- We leave our own heads in a mess
- We “diss” the people who are taking the brunt of the crisis – the unemployed, the poor and the dispossessed
- We miss the opportunities we should be working on
How to survive the dark tunnel of the financial crisis
If you are surrounded by people talking nonsense about darkness and tunnels, then I say accept the reality. We are in a dark place and we cannot see the end.
And keep a daily gratitude diary to keep your emotional state in balance with reality, to honor who and what bring value to your life, and to remind yourself of what does work.
I can walk on my foot today. Blast, though, another day of graphics.
Offer your problems to God, and they may open opportunities that you never imagined.
I am not religious, and if they haven’t clicked away already, my friends who are ‘evangelical atheists’ will think I’ve taken leave of my senses
Management theory is reconsidering its philosophical rots
[Yes, I did mean roots but the typo is apt.]
I heard the idea of presenting one’s problems to God from a Rabbi on Radio 4 today and it is an idea that has been forgotten by management theorists for a long, long time. It is being actively and vigorously revived though, and if you want to be involved in modern management education, “opening yourself to the imagination of the universe” is an idea that you have to get you head around.
Old school management sucked the life juices out of us
“Old school” management is goal-oriented, and fundamentally arrogant and negative. It goes like this. “I define the goal and until you have completed it, you are not up to scratch.”
We might even say that old school management is evil. It is even evil even when we are setting our goals for ourselves and not others. It’s arrogant to believe that we know what is right, not only for today, but for tomorrow whose shape we barely know. It is very arrogant to believe that we know and the other does not. It is evil to undermine the worth of other people and to daily put ourselves and others in situations where we are not up to scratch.
But how do we open ourselves to the imagination of the universe?
For all my exploration of modern management theory, I am still a psychologist and I want to know “what am I going to DO?
“offering a problem to God”, as I understand it, does not mean letting go. It means beginning where we are, with our sense that the present does not meet our sense of what is right and wrong. We begin by accepting our negative evaluation, our arrogant assertion that on this matter we believe we are right, and our overbearing willingness to judge others. We accept that this is ground we stand on at this moment. This is our reality at the minut.
Then, we put this evaluation on the table, probably privately, it is offensive after all. And at last, we listen to what the universe has to say. What does the universe have to say about this problem?
We’ve raised the flag. We’ve said we will hear. Now we listen!
But are we predisposed to listen?
The difficulty is though, that in this mood, when we feel the world is wrong, and we are right and that we are allowed to tell others they are wrong, in this mood, listening to anyone is far from our minds.
Positive psychology, an overlapping school of positive organizational scholarship, kicks in now and has a lot to say on how to reach a point that we can listen and hear.
We begin by reminding ourselves that it is quite natural, housed in a human body, to feel alarmed when we notice something is wrong. Our biology is programmed that way. It is natural . . . well . . . to exaggerate. When times are rough, and we reel from trauma to trauma, or just from hassle to hassle, it is not long before we begin to shut down and focus solely on what threatens us, or simply annoys us.
Positive psychologists help us stay out of this zone of despair, cynicism and negativity. We look to them to keep us in that positive space where we can notice that something is wrong (or a least not to our taste) and listen to the universe. It is a tough balancing act.
Positive psychologists are not our only resource, though. Most world religions have rituals to manage this emotional housekeeping. Balancing our ‘alarm systems’ and listening to others is such an important skill that all cultures have ways of explaining the challenge. What is saying a brief prayer before a meal but a momentary regaining of balance where we take stock in an appreciative not panicky way?
In our secular world, we explain every thing more wordily but we are not necessarily wrong. Just ploddy. Two other very important factors in maintaining ’emotional tone’ are exercise and friends.
The contribution of positive psychologists
Positive psychologists advocate a simple ritual of a gratitude diary. A few brief notes at the end of each day makes the difference between believing that we have to solve every problem ourselves and “hearing” what the universe has to offer.
Offer your problems to the universe and allow yourself to be delighted by opportunities you never imagined.
And to my evangelical atheist friends, if you are such an objective scientist, try it before you knock it.
Happiness, big media and blocked comment
Today, Hamish McRae wrote an article in the Independent on happiness and what national survey of happiness tell us about the role of government in our live.
I wrote a comment only to find comments partly blocked off. So here it is.
Economist should find the maths of happiness easy
Basically, I suggested that Mr McRae might like to to look up the more sophisticated models of happiness. Economist should find them easier to follow than most and might take the lead in an informed debate on happiness.
Then I followed through trying to explain the implications of using Lorenz equations to understand happiness by likening happiness to clean hands.
Lorenz equations and Losada’s model of happiness
You might like to Google Losada’s work on happiness and review the mathematical model underlying his thinking. Happiness surveys presume that happiness is a linear phenomenon where happiness is more-or-less and can be measured as a fixed point with an error score.
More sophisticated views of happiness see it as a phase state (fractal type) defined by a handful of variables linked recursively to each other. In this model, a fixed point (the measure of happiness above) would indicate severe mental illness. In other words, someone who is resolutely cheerful despite the circumstances is ill.
Managing happinesss (and unhappiness)
As one commentator said, you are possibly writing about unhappiness. We know how to create that. Simply have people reeling from petty difficulties all day long with little respite and they will sink into misery.
Hence the buffering techniques such as gratitude diaries and appropriate ways to deal with distress (funerals, grieving etc.)
Just as hands get dirty and must be washed, our lives have misfortune which must be dealt with. But misfortune isn’t dealt with by ignoring it just as dirty hands aren’t dealt with ignoring it.
A gratitude diary works like the washing of hands putting dirt where it belongs and reminding us of the pleasure of clean hands. We know our hands will get dirty again but that is the cyclical process of much of life.
Getting involved in the national debate on happiness
Anyway, economists should grasp the Lorenz equations easily and might add to a more informed public discussion of happiness.
The rest of us can experience the management of happiness in simple ways: mourning and grieving for what has past, keeping a gratitude diary, focusing on what goes well and not what goes badly. These alone stop us sinking into misery and spreading it around.
Pondering gratitude diaries
Possibly, reading the words of Sufi poet, Rumi., will help us understand a “gratitude diary.” We could interpret “the wonders that exist in me” as something to brag about, or proclaim, in self-congratulation. We could also interpret “wonders that exist in me” as the good things in the universe that are “in me and my life.”
To be or not to be
Is not my dilemma.
To break away from both worlds is not bravery.
To be unaware of the wonders
That exist in me,
That
Is real madness!
Rumi
When we are adolescents, we are obsessed with recognition. Our unsatisfied need to be taken seriously is often translated as a search for ‘self’. For people obsessed with ‘self, ‘ME’ would scream off the page. But adolescents want RECOGNITION. They want to understand their relationship with the universe.
Possibly, that’s how gratitude diaries work. We catalog our relationship with the universe.
If you came here saying “Yes!”, you probably also sat up straighter, jutted out your jaw just a little, and felt more determined.
We need one defensive pessimist on every team
You are probably what psychologists call a ‘defensive pessimist’. You are essential to business and family life. You think ahead and make sure things get done!
But do you really dare not to be happy?
What if I told you that happiness lights up different parts of your brain? And in your steely resolve, you are shutting down processing power that you need, badly?
In short, you are running, well limping, like a computer that needs to be cleaned out sooner rather than later.
An organized person finds time to be happy
If you really are as organized and determined as you say, then you WILL find 5 minutes at night for some quiet time to reflect on the day. You will have time to tick off everything that went well and you will have time to ask yourself a simple question: Why did I do so well?
So often, you’ve done well because you think ahead, because you are reliable and because you are persistent. Carry on doing that!
Be organized. We need you. And be happy too.
Ask “Why did I do so well?” and marvel at how much better you sleep, how much you begin to enjoy hearing the birds sing, how much your appetite levels off (not too big or too small), how much you don’t have to push so hard but you get things done anyway.
You don’t believe me?
I thought you were the thoughtful one! You can’t tell me I am wrong until you have tried.
Wave your hand. And look at it. If you can see it, you can learn. But how can we learn emotion? Well, by watching your own MRI scan.
So why do we need web 2.0 applications when an ordinary pencil and supermarket notebook will serve quite adequately as a diary?
This is my experience.
1. By now anyone in the positive psychology world knows the Lorenz ratio. You need 3 positive thoughts to 1 negative thought to function. 5:1 is good. 11:1 is too much – think intoxicated.
2. If you have one major bad event in a day – something important to you does not work well and you are grieving the sense of lost opportunity – the ripple effect through the rest of the day can be significant. Who is it, is it Seligman, who talks of the three P’s : persistent, personal and pervasive. If a setback blocks off a sense of opportunity and hope, yes, it feels persistent, personal and pervasive. You feel very blue.
3. Now here is where diaries and web2.o come in. If you keep a pencil and paper diary, you are likely to rehearse the bad event and the feeling that everything is going wrong. When you use Inpowr, first it reminds you to log in and record your day which you might not do, wisely, if it means writing down what went wrong; second, it effectively runs you through a checklist of your goals. It is very likely that everything else is going quite well, and certainly that your inputs into the bad situation were quite sound.
4. So what do you gain?
- A prompt to spend some time reviewing your wider life rather than wallowing in the misery of one negative (though important event) and an easy to follow format so it is not laborious
- Acknowledgment of what has gone well so that so that is factored in to your decision making and is not swamped by what went badly
- Less self-blame. You are able to distinguish what you put in from how things turned out. And as you blame yourself less, you blame others less, I suppose because the issue is no longer blame. You are back in action mode and thinking about what to do next.
We were built for action and much of our sense of dignity comes from our sense that we are able to act and act appropriately.
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