Posts Tagged ‘psychology’
3 ages of control
Posted on: April 27, 2010
Leaving adolescence
It’s interesting when we start to take control of our lives. We make a plan. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn’t. And we resign ourselves to being powerless.
Encountering adulthood
Then we get a bit older and we resolve to make things work. And we do. When a plan threatens to come apart, we jump around and keep it altogether. And feel very good for it.
Muddling through middle age
It’s only much later that we realize that we weren’t really keeping things together. We were feeling better. We were exploring other stories about ourselves in the world.
Not confronting the experiences of middle age
I see the converse too. I know people who are brilliant at retelling a story as if the world does it’s bidding. They can’t countenance a notion that sometimes the world really is not on your side.
They’ve never made the transition from that early stage of needing to be in control. They’ve just learned to divert their strong need to be in control to a story that convinces . . . well, them. It doesn’t convince anyone else. They are still aiming to feel better and they are willing to pervert reality to regain that feeling.
Living honestly with our lack of control
I can’t believe that this self-deception is a good thing. Misreading the world is dangerous. The world simply doesn’t do our bidding.
Our best bet is to position ourselves in the river and go with the current, steering lightly but not fighting. It’s tough though. I still don’t like being washed along. I have to reverse attitudes I worked so hard to learn.
But maybe I can achieve more through inaction?
There! I still want to achieve. Maybe by promising myself that prize, I can experiment with inaction and simply enjoy the river in all its tumultus chaos?
Be my dictionary. What is the difference between earnest and sincere, solemn and serious?
Posted on: March 25, 2010
Speaking properly
I once worked with people who hated other people ~ or so they said. I hated broccoli (I like it now) and I hated doing my tax return.
Sometimes I loathed someone. Or I disliked someone.
Speaking accurately
The nuances of emotional words are interesting. We have poor emotional vocabularies as a general rule.
Understanding nuances
The other day, I dipped into Kate Fox’ Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour.
The nuances of Englishness
Kate Fox suggests the English accept serious but not solemn and sincere but not earnest. I looked up the differences in my COBUILD dictionary that was built from a corpus of actual English usage (Collins Birmingham University International Language Database). It wasn’t very enlightening.
Serious not solemn; sincere not earnest
So I am on the trail to distinguish solemn from serious and earnest from sincere.
Any suggestions?
Galba Bright
Many of you will remember Galba Bright. The British Sierra Leonian migrant to Jamaica who built a successful emotional intelligence website in less than a year. He died very suddenly and many of us miss him.
Shortly before he died, Galba set me a challenging questions. Do “in tune” people reflect?
When Galba died, I had two unfinished posts on my computer. They’ve stayed here for quite a while and a Twitter poll urged me to publish them in tribute to a man who many of us found inspiring.
This is the draft that I find the more inspiring.
Walking with Elephants
Galba Bright of TuneUpYourEQ asked me to expand my comment that people who are tuned into the world don’t reflect much. I thought this picture of Paul Van R bicycling in Zimbabwe illustrates the point I wanted to make.
Of course, we laugh at first. Then we may wonder whether Paul was being slightly reckless. We question his good sense and wonder if he knows what he is doing.
If he does know what he is doing, if he understands elephants, if he knows when they are likely to walk on the road, if he knows how they will react when they see him, then he is not necessarily reckless at all.
Moreover, if he meets an elephant and the meeting is cordial, if the the elephant was allowed to be an elephant and do elephantly things in an elephantly way, then that evening Paul is likely to relax with some fond and pleasant memories.
Of course, if he doesn’t know much about elephants and he reacts to any elephants he meets in a ways that elephants don’t much like, he might spend the evening in a whole different form of reflection.
We could flesh out this question quite a lot more. I thought it would be fun though to think about elephants.
I think my point is that when we are “in tune” with the world, we don’t reflect very much. We are connected. We are in touch. We are enjoying the world and ‘dancing’ with its rhythms.
When we are not “in tune” with the world, then it is time to reflect. Then it is time to focus on where we are in touch, where we feel vital and alive, and what to follow and do more of.
And as most days are not blissful rides through Africa on a hot, sultry day, some time spent each evening in reflection and when we awake in the morning, helps keep us in touch with what keeps us in touch. Some reflection calms down our fretful helter-skelter rush into stressful activity that is poor replacement for what we love.
We miss you, Galba.
Mysteries, Yes
Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous
to be understood.
How grass can be nourishing in the
mouths of the lambs.
How rivers and stones are forever
in allegiance with gravity
while we ourselves dream of rising.
How two hands touch and the bonds
will never be broken.
How people come, from delight or the
scars of damage,
to the comfort of a poem.
Let me keep my distance, always, from those
who think they have the answers.
Let me keep company always with those who say
“Look!” and laugh in astonishment,
and bow their heads.
Mary Oliver, Evidence
Dedicated to psychologists everywhere.
Psychologists need poetry
I have one piece of advice for anyone who aspires to be a psychologist. Read poetry. Read good novels.
Your College or Department will jump your through a lot of pseud-scientific hoops. Jump through them but for a different reason to the one they give. Jump through them because they will teach you how to ‘fail informatively’. Yes. Fail informatively.
In the future, you will be able to handle unfamiliar situations by proposing one or more reasonable ways forward. And then you can set up some experiments. You can choose the best way forward. And if you have set up your experiment well, the less favorable ways will also teach you a little more than ‘wrong way’. This is the reason why you should study science.
To understand people, well, meet a lot of people and do things with them. And read.
A good read is Paolo Coelho who also blogs and tweets. Today he posted a 1 minute parable on the meaning of happiness. It is an easy read. The ending sums up the meaning of happiness.
For psychologists out there, this parable talks about two important psychological phenonena.
#1 Management of attention.
To manage one’s own direction and to pay attention to what is going on around us.
We need lots of practice at doing this. Computer games help us do this. TV and reading books does not. Sport helps us learn this. Writing does not. But speaking does. Make sure you get lots of practice at learning to manage your attention so that you tackle frontiers with greater ease!
#2 We live at our frontier.
To define who we are by what we do.
Not what we feel, or believe. But what we do in various contexts defined by who else is there. We are our frontier. We are our edge.
Perhaps we are a young man who cannot carry two drops of oil and look around a new place. Or frontier is the new place, the new idea, and our own confusion. It is here that we are ‘alive’ with our dreams and our hopes, our confusions and our sorrows.
This is a tough challenge for psychologists. We have nothing to measure. The definition may even be circular. That is because psychology is not a thing. It is a goal or a purpose that is supremely personal. Our goal is to live a our frontier. The story of our frontier and our confusion is the story we all want to hear.
When we want to do the maths, then we look at whether we were in a situation that covers the whole gamut of emotions and whether we were able to respond appropriately as events unfolded. Or were we like the young boy, first forgetting the context and then forgetting his task. Can we recover from confusion and distress or do we get stuck? Are we so scared of life that we insist that it be plain sailing all day and every day?
Do we approach our frontier or do we hang back? And under what conditions are we able to approach our frontier and learn to carry the oil and look around despite our initial confusion?
Yes, positive psychologists do know something about this. But so do poets. Begin with them.
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Is happiness = pleasure?
Gaye Prior kindly commented on my post about poetry and positive psychology.
“Pleasure does not give life meaning and purpose and love. These are more important to me than passing enjoyment and survive even in the face of tragedy, horror, awfulness and loss.”
Do positive psychologists equate happiness with pleasure?
I’ve promised to reply in four parts describing the 4 puzzles of positive psychology. This is the first part.
Principles of positive psychology
Let’s make the 1st principle of positive psychology the study of the positive (rather than the study of the negative or gaps or deficits.)
The 2nd principle is that well-being or happiness has three parts. As Gaye says “Pleasure does not give life meaning and purpose and love.”
Martin Seligman points out that well-being is made up of
The pleasurable life
The engaged life
The meaningful life
There is a questionnaire on the Penn Uni site that anyone can do. The items on the questionnaire flesh out the concepts. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and pick “measures 3 routes to happiness” under “life satisfaction questionnaires” (2nd last on the page as I write).
Using the ideas of pleasure, engagement and meaning to enrich your life
Here is the description of the three levels of life provided by the psychologists at Penn Uni.
Higher scores on the Engaging Life (knowing what your signature strengths are, and then recrafting your work, love, friendship, leisure and parenting to use those strengths to have more flow in life) and the Meaningful Life (using your signature strengths in the service of something that you believe is larger than you are) have been shown to lead to greater satisfaction with life. Higher scores on the Pleasant Life (having as many pleasures as possible and having the savoring and mindfulness skills to amplify the pleasures) don’t add to satisfaction. To measure your satisfaction, use the Satisfaction with Life Scale.
Keeping pleasure, engagement and meaning in balance
Few of us have our lives in balance. That is the message for people who live in abundant circumstances. Seek balance (and stop complaining!).
Seeking pleasure, engagement and meaning in difficult circumstances
For those of who do not live in abundant circumstances, we have serious shortfalls in one area or another and these shortfalls are not under our control.
I am always uneasy about casual interpretations of positive psychology that dismiss reality. Life can be awful.
The point though is what can be done about it? If something is not under our control, there is little point in railing about it. It it is not under our control then it is not under our control. Focusing on what is out-of-control just makes us feel helpless. That was Seligman’s original speciality btw ~ learned helplessness. Continually focusing on what cannot be done destroys our ability to do anything.
What we can do is work with what we’ve got, and work with whomever will work with us, to leverage whatever we can. We may not be able to change reality but we can do what we can.
Taking control of what little is under our control increases our chances of surviving difficult circumstances
Doing what we can with people who are important to us also seems to increase our chances of survival. Those chances might be minimal, as they were for later psychiatrist Viktor Frankl who survived an extermination camp. But they improve.
The overriding rule
We must remember that we have to work with what is under our control. That is you, me, the people around us and what works. Those are our tools.
The importance of pleasure
We should also not neglect the pleasurable life. We should respect fine food, the sunset and the rose growing in the garden. Oddly, savoring and mindfulness, though nowhere near the whole story of positive psychology, start a positive spiral.
Gratitude diaries provoke a spiral of well being. On a really bad day, feel the earth under your feet. Look at that unexciting doorway of brick and mortar as the most magnificent invitation.
The unfairness of engagement
The engaged life is easy for professional people. We work and like to. Engagement is much more problematic for young people who generally only find ‘flow’ in sports and hobbies. One of the reasons that computer games are popular is that they provide the autonomy, social interaction, opportunity to learn, and opportunity to belong to something meaningful that is often not possible in our educational system.
People in low level jobs also have trouble finding flow in jobs which are poorly designed, micro-managed, and in which they are treated with rudeness and contempt. It is common for people in low level jobs to “recraft”. Why is it that security guards in Zimbabwe are more knowledgeable than shop assistants? Why are domestic help loyal? There is an element of Stockholm syndrome, but there is also a natural tendency to create a job that is satisfying to do.
The fragility of meaning
The meaningful level is provided by being part of something larger than ourselves.
I imagine more wars are created by violating this level than by anything more complicated. We are sensitive to exclusion and exclusion ‘crashes’ our psychological structures very quickly indeed (5 to 10 minutes does it.)
When we are victims of exclusion, we can create a temporary protective buffer with savoring, mindfulness and gratitude diaries. Some people use the pleasure principle badly, of course, and take to overeating and drink, both of which have their place in celebration but are ill-advised compensation for lack of belonging. A walk or smelling a rose allow us to avoid adding a punished body to a battered soul.
Exclusion is devastating.
I hasten to add, that we shouldn’t be too judgemental about people who ‘get it wrong’ because exclusion is devastating.
There is a saying
“when someone in authority like a teacher describes the world and you are not in it, it is like looking in a mirror and not being able to see your face.”
I imagine this is why migrant who “walk both sides of the street” settle better than those who try to assimilate.
Buffering oneself from the impact of exclusion
The antidotes to institutional exclusion (that go beyond a painful social slight) are to develop empathy with others, to show solidarity, and to work on healthy political structures.
We all know the do-gooder who ‘helps’ others. I mean travel the same road as others. Suffer the same risks and share the same glory.
Solidarity is a long road but it is the best road. Mindfulness matters again but not the mindfulness of concrete pleasures. This time we want mindfulness towards the dynamism of the universe.
Simple techniques like closing one’s eyes and listening for the furthest sound can break the cycle of intense stress. Paolo Coelho’s post of today tells us to look expectantly for the magic moments that arrive unannounced and are gone in a twinkle. When we think there is only one microsecond of possibility a day, we pay attention. Even David Whyte’s line of “everybody is waiting for you” suggests to us that we need to reach out.
In teaching, we often use Mary Oliver’s poem Wild Geese to show that we are part of any situation in which we find ourselves and by showing compassion to ourselves (as opposed to self-pity and indulgence), we help to feel in touch with the movement of the universe. I’ll add the poem at the bottom.
Three levels of a good life
In summary, Gaye identified the three levels of a good life:
- pleasure ~ respect for beauty and comfort
- engagement ~ enjoyment of work
- meaning ~ belonging to something bigger than ourselves
With this layout, pleasure seems as if it is the lower level. It is a level that is easily abused but so to is over-identification with achievement or subordinating ourselves to readily to others.
All three are part of the good life. When life is in a mess, try doing an audit of what is going well in each area. Sometimes the map that follows is surprising.
Wild Geese
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Don’t spend a day without having noticed a miraculous moment when the universe converges and you were there
Posted on: January 7, 2010
Positive psychology in poetry
When it comes to understanding positive psychology, there really is no competition between prose and poetry.
Today, Paulo Coelho quoted a passage from his book By The River Piedra I sat Down and Wept, the first in the triology about a week in the life of someone ordinary to whom something extraordinary happens. You must read it for yourself.
Positive psychology in prose
In prose, which is no substitute, this is what he said.
Every day there is a moment when a miracle is possible. It doesn’t announce itself. It is easily missed. And it is likely to present itself in the most unlikeliest ways. In a humdrum guise, or as to lowly that it is not worth earthly notice.
When we look back on our day or our year or our life, we want to look back on those miraculous moments when we were fully attentive and our understanding changed in a flash and our lives changed too.
Because these moments are easy to miss, it is very easy to spend a whole day attending only to what we know. To make sure we never miss those glancing moments, we have to pay attention, expectantly to everything around us.
So we slow down and live a less cluttered life. To be sure, the more we pack in, the more we are likely not pay attention to anything.
And even when life is slow, when our company is dull, when we yearn to be elsewhere, we can still pay attention to the moment, and look out for a miracle. It may not come in that hour. There are no promises. But it might.
Be mindful
Don’t miss it.
Don’t spend a day without having noticed a miraculous moment when the universe converges and you were there.
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At first, I was suspicious about positive psychology
I came to positive psychology some 10 years ago and like many people, I was deeply suspicious. Life is not about happiness, I thought. Life is about effectiveness. Life is about dealing with reality.
I still think that is what life is all about but I have also changed my “mental model” of happiness
Many people encountering positive psychology and happiness for the first time feel the same suspicious. And they write columns in newspapers and the speak on radio and TV about why focusing on happiness is wrong-headed.
A straight-forward summary of the puzzle of positive psychology
Gaye Prior writing from Zimbabwe, commented the post I wrote yesterday on poiesis and auto-poiesis and has captured the debates very clearly.
I realise that you write often of happiness and I wonder how you define what happiness is? It seems to me that many people might describe happiness as pleasure, which to me is more of an ephemeral thing and not happiness in the least. Pleasure does not give life meaning and purpose and love. These are more important to me than passing enjoyment and survive even in the face of tragedy, horror, awfulness and loss.
All over the web people write about happiness and often it sees to me, living here, to be more about pleasure than purpose. I know your blog is more about work and how positive psychology pertains to that and that you may have already done this and I missed it before I found you blog. Perhaps you could just [give] me the reference?
4 puzzles of positive psychology
I’ll answer her query at four levels
#1 The contribution of pleasure, engagement and meaning to well-being.
#2 Happiness at difficult times and in difficult places.
#3 The ‘maths’ of happiness and why positive psychologists agree that much of enjoyment is “passing”.
#4 How conventional psychology is a ‘straw man’.
I’ll leave this here for today and summarize each of the issues in a separate post.
In politics, motivation doesn’t matter
A political science professor once said to me “In politics, motivation doesn’t matter.” I don’t think I have ever really understood that until I read the current Economist debate on “Who is leading the fight against climate change?”
Pro: Peggy Liu
“For Chinese people who see, smell and touch pollution every day, climate change leadership is closely related to personal health.” Read more
Con: Max Schulz
“China is not pursuing lower energy consumption per unit of GDP because of warming. It is pursuing it because it wants to be rich.” Read more
Does it matter why the Chinese reduce emissions. Surely if emissions are important then it is just important that they do?
How much credence do you give to motivation?
I’m trying to figure this out here. I think that maybe when we feel out-of-control that we look for sound lasting relationships. We like at least one ~ control over evolving events or a sound relationship. We are more likely to manage by outcomes when we have control. And we will want to trust motivation when we have little control.
Am I on the right track?
flowing motion 
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