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May 30
Love1

What Happens When We Try To Change Somebody

By Habits and Strategies, Happiness

One of the most common questions I get in my coaching practice goes something like this:

“My (husband, wife, son, daughter, friend, neighbor, etc.) has this behavior, or belief, or way of doing things… How can I get them to change it?”

Now, if it’s a very specific behavior, and changing it would make a big difference in your relationship, it’s always worth just simply asking, for example, “When you talk with your mouth full it really bothers me, could you please do your best to not talk while you’re chewing?”

But often what we want the other person to change is much bigger and more abstract than that.

Of course, we’ve all felt this at some time or other – “If only this person we care about would just stop being so negative, or change this one belief… then they’d be so much better off.” (It’s always something that seems so obvious and simple… to us.)

The big problem with this is that it’s hard enough to change a big habit or belief within ourselves, when we want to. Trying to get somebody else to change a habit or belief, that maybe they don’t want to change, is really a long-shot.

I’ve been working with people to – in part – help them change their beliefs and habits for over 40 years. It’s something I enjoy very much, and have a lot of success with. But it’s not easy. It takes time and energy – and often a good deal of courage – to face our troubling behaviors, and the fears that sometimes accompany them.

When we nag, lecture, cajole, or manipulate those we love to be more the way we think they should be, in that moment we’re not really in relationship with them. In that moment we’re not seeing them as a human being, with all the complexity and unique internal experience that we each live within. We’re seeing them as a thing to make different. In order for them to live up to our expectations of them.

I don’t mean to say that we don’t generally love or understand them, but when we go into that particular mode of “teaching,” and what we’re teaching is the lesson we think this person needs to learn… in that moment, we’re disconnected from that person.

When was the last time you changed somebody else’s behavior by nagging or lecturing them? Or better yet: When was the last time you changed your behavior from somebody else nagging or lecturing you?

We can frighten or intimidate someone to do certain actions, but that’s not helping them to become a better person; that’s just forcing them to act in certain ways… when we’re looking.

The truth is, we’re powerless to change and control people. We’re helpless to make somebody else be just the way we want them to be. We’re not machines to be programmed or fixed; we’re living, thinking, feeling human beings; each with our own hopes, aspirations, and visions for ourselves. And those hopes, aspirations, and visions are going to conflict – often – with other people’s hopes, aspirations, and visions. None of us are going to just toss all that aside because somebody else wants us to be different.

Each one of us is a world, and understanding and honoring that – and being curious about each other’s worlds – is essential for a successful relationship.

Here’s the good news, though: We do influence one another; and we influence one another in a big way.

But that influence isn’t linear, and it’s not something we can direct in such a way that we guarantee any particular outcome.

We have the most influence on the people with whom we have good relationships. That means less nagging and lecturing, and more listening, kindness, playfulness, and curiosity.

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May 22
Love1

Love and Playfulness

By Habits and Strategies, Happiness

Most couples wait six years or more from the beginning of trouble to when they seek help with a counselor, even though prevention is much easier and more effective than repair.

Working as a marriage and family therapist and coach, it’s heartbreaking when a couple seeks my help after they’ve become enemies, having long ago crossed the point of no return.

Once trouble starts, if a couple ignores it or just “lets things work out on their own,” that bond can degenerate quickly, and two people who were once deeply in love can find themselves in an agonizing cycle of criticism, defensiveness, contempt and stonewalling (silent brooding) – what relationship researcher and therapist John Gottman calls “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.”

The problem isn’t conflict. Successful marriages have plenty of conflict. The problem isn’t even unresolved conflict. Successful marriages also have plenty of unresolved conflict.

Conflict is where our differences meet; in many ways, our conflicts help us to get to know one another. A marriage without conflict is also likely a marriage without much intimacy.

It’s how we treat each other when there’s conflict that is the essential difference between a happy marriage and a miserable – or a finished – one.

A marriage is not a game; it’s not a trophy to win or a position to battle for. A marriage is a connection between two people who love each other, trust each other, respect each other and enjoy being with each other. It’s not about winning something over the other person; it’s about achieving something together, with the other person.

A happy, committed relationship is a collaboration between two people creating a life together, sharing a common direction, common values, common dreams. A marriage is a team of two committed, devoted allies.

The heart of a relationship comes through small, daily encounters that create an atmosphere, through a reputation between two people for what they can expect together and through what Gottman calls “rituals of connection” – the things we do regularly that bring us closer.

In a marriage, this can mean that we regularly take time in the morning to find out what each other’s day will be and in the evening to see what each other’s day has been.

It can mean building regular habits of sexuality and physical intimacy, scheduling weekly date nights and predictable time away together, and nurturing shared interests and activities.

And one of the most overlooked qualities of happy, successful relationships is playfulness.

Play, laughter and humor are extremely powerful. We know that when we sleep, our dreams rejuvenate us, establish neural connections in our brains, and even wash away some of the toxins that build up over the course of a day.

Play is the waking equivalent of dreaming. It rejuvenates us, connects us with each other and helps to clear out some of the negative emotions that can become stuck or stagnant when we take things too seriously.

Play and humor – not sarcasm or biting, hurtful jokes, but benevolent play; playing with each other, as teammates and friends – is a creative process. A successful marriage doesn’t happen automatically by instinct; it takes consciousness, kindness and creativity.

When there’s trouble, we need to find a way back to being allies. That can be a tall order sometimes. It takes a clear decision that regaining the friendship, the trust, and the allegiance with each other, is the most important thing – more important than being right, more important than teaching a lesson, more important than making our partner “better” or fixing them…

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May 15
Love1

Consciously Creating Relationships

By Habits and Strategies, Happiness

An acquaintance the other day asked me what I do, and I told her that I’m a Marriage and Family Counselor, as well as a Life Coach. Then she asked an interesting question: “Is compromise the key to a happy marriage?”

At first I was tempted to say yes. Compromise is certainly one part of two different people sharing a life together. We can’t do everything we want whenever we want it; we have to find ways of adapting to each other’s needs and inclinations.

But thinking about it a little more closely, I instead said an emphatic, “no.” Compromise is not really the key. Compromise is kind of like when one person wants a room painted yellow, the other wants it painted blue, and we compromise and get green – but neither of us may even like green. Compromise is sometimes win/win, sometimes not. There are certainly times when we compromise, but it isn’t the driving force of a great relationship.

What is the driving force of a great relationship? A winning premise; a conception of what our relationship is all about that includes a shared vision of the two of us together.

A relationship is a creative process between two people. The two of you create what the two of you choose to create – whether you do that consciously or based on unexplored habits and beliefs is what can make the big difference between a happy, successful relationship, or a less happy, less successful one.

A great relationship is founded on the premise that you and your partner are allies; that you are a team together.

As an example: Imagine you’re on a great basketball team, you have the ball, and you’re on a fast break down the court. You see your teammate up ahead with a great position, so you pass him the ball so that he can shoot. You could have taken the ball all the way down the court and maybe taken the shot yourself, but you passed it to your teammate instead.

Is that a compromise?

Not at all. As a team, we are working toward the same goal: we want to win the game. To win the game we have to play together as effectively as we possibly can. We have to know our teammates extremely well. We have to pay attention to where they are and what they’re doing. We have to be focused on the goal, and committed to playing together at the highest level possible.

This is not compromise; it is a conscious understanding of goals, priorities and strategy. There is nothing so disappointing in a sports team as a bunch of phenomenal players who each think that they are the star, and whose focus is primarily on their own personal glory.

To win as a team requires that everybody see himself as part of that team, and to think in terms of the team’s success and glory. The level of commitment to achieve this is total. It can’t be 99%. We can’t have part of ourselves thinking, “Gosh, maybe I don’t want to be doing this, maybe there could be another option…”

The difference between a 99% commitment and a 100% commitment is huge.

In a marriage, when we commit to curiosity about our partner’s internal world, to getting to know them extremely well, to wanting to keep learning what matters to them, what their dreams and hopes are, what their vision is for our marriage, we are getting to know our teammate. We will come to understand how they respond to different kinds of communication, how to ask for what we want in ways that they are likely to hear, the different moods and events and timings of activities that work and don’t work.

This is something that we both need to do as allies with the same vision for our marriage.

When the two of us spend time together clarifying and refining our vision for our life together, we’re setting the stage for success toward that vision. We are defining the shared direction toward which we both want to head, and we are consciously creating the kind of relationship we want to live together in.

This will be a different direction than we would be heading if we were single. Alone, we would of course have a different vision. But we also could not create the same kind of life as we can together. It might be a great life, but it would be a different kind of life.

Just imagine one superstar basketball player facing off against a full squad of players. He couldn’t do much, because that game is about the relationship between great players.

A marriage is about the relationship between two great people.

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May 08
Love1

Psychological Challenges are More Interesting than You Think

By Emotions, Moods and Reactions, Habits and Strategies, Happiness

When we approach any problem, how we approach it begins with an idea, a belief, a story about what that problem is, and what needs to be done about it.

To considerable extent, we can choose the fundamental belief or premise from which we approach any problem… and how we frame a problem can be the very key to success or failure.

In the movie Apollo 13, when the spacecraft was in grave peril, and people at Mission Control were freaking out expecting disaster, Gene Krantz (played by Fred Harris) stopped them and said, “What do we got on the spacecraft that works?”

With that one powerful question, he reframed the situation from helpless disaster to solvable problem. Everyone immediately shifted from disaster mode to focusing on the strengths and resources available to bring the astronauts home safely – which they did. The story would probably have ended much differently – and tragically – had they stayed in disaster mode.

How we approach our psychological challenges also begins with an idea, a premise, a story.

Currently, the widely accepted premise is that psychological problems – depression, anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), addictions et al – are abnormal phenomena.

They don’t belong here. They were brought to us by some unfortunate circumstances – an unhappy childhood, a personal weakness, a society that’s sick. They’re polluting the system, like a harmful bacteria or virus, and we want all trace of them eliminated immediately.

But what if that premise is wrong?

I’ve been working with people as a teacher, a marriage and family therapist, and a life coach for well over 40 years now. I started with that premise of problems as aberrations – the “disease model” of psychology. I don’t buy it anymore.

Let’s explore a different premise and see where it takes us.  The exploration starts with asking certain questions:

  • What if the underlying tendencies of these trouble are naturally occurring variations in human experience? What if they are not aberrations or pollutants, but challenges to overcome?  What if their severity can be intensified or minimized depending on our experiences, thoughts and actions?
  • What if depression is largely a natural response to feelings of helplessness, too much passive activity, or an unnatural lack of physical activity?
  • What if a certain percentage of us come into the world with a tendency toward depression, and part of our challenge is to master that tendency – just like any of us has to master other physical and intellectual strengths and weaknesses?

We might find that the most effective interventions for depression involve more exercise, identifying effective actions to take, and discovering, in a very personal way, what sort of thoughts and behavior help us move away from feelings of depression.

This is exactly what researchers have found. In fact, physical exercise is the most effective treatment for depression – 2 ½ times as effective as medication (currently the most popular treatment).

We also know from Martin Seligman’s work that depression is often a symptom of helplessness, and that actively changing how we think and what we do can move us strongly out of depression.

Even something as simple as regularly thinking of three good things at the end of each day can move some people out of the depressed range.

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May 01
Love1

Pressing the Pause Button

By Emotions, Moods and Reactions

Anybody can become angry – that is easy; but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose and in the right way – that is not within everybody’s power and is not easy. – Aristotle

It’s easy to get caught up in emotions, to follow the flow and intensity of our impulses. It’s natural… animal… primal. And without intervening with our consciousness, it can be dangerous. This is how we operated throughout much of human history… which is why most of human history was so terribly, horribly violent.

But it’s not how most of us today usually operate, because we have a choice. Over time, particularly through the Enlightenment, we’ve culturally refined our ability to choose – and that ability is central to what makes us human.

When we feel like reacting with anger, fear or hurt feelings – anything that feels like it’s an automatic, purely emotional response – we can react without thinking, blindly following the tides of our emotions.

Or we can choose to do something different.

Stephen Covey talks about this ability to choose as being a “pause button.” A moment between stimulus and response, that transforms that response from an automatic, rote behavior to a conscious, human one.

When we feel like reacting to a situation, instead of going right into the reaction, we can “press the pause button” and consider what we genuinely – from our consciously chosen values and priorities – want to do.

During the ‘60s, ‘70s and well into the ‘80s, the idea that we should “let our feelings out” was a common message in psychology that found its way into popular culture.

This had a positive side. Our emotions are where we live. Awareness of our feelings deepens our experience, and can help us understand one another and even think more clearly. Love, joy, excitement, elation, satisfaction, peace, warmth… as well as fear, pain, grief, anger, and sadness… These all bring us essential information about how people and events are affecting us.

Our emotions are how we experience the meaning of life. To be more in touch with our emotions is to be more in touch with ourselves. To be able to easily and appropriately express our emotions allows us to live a rich, full life with satisfying connections with others.

“Appropriately” is an important qualifier here, though. There can be a downside to emotional expression, in two ways:

  1. It can be harmful over time to practice “releasing” anger. Because anger – particularly intense anger or rage – is fueled by the fight branch of our sympathetic nervous system, it’s often less of an emotion and more what I call a reaction: a more primitive protective response. Because of this, anger doesn’t actually release, it just intensifies. It becomes a well-worn path; a stronger habit.
  2. Emotions are useful if we integrate them with our conscious awareness. Without conscious awareness, our emotions can guide us all over the place. Maybe some good places, maybe some bad places, but almost never the places we consciously want to go.

When we practice venting our anger, we get very good at venting our anger, with all of the interpersonal and health problems this can bring.

The fight branch of our sympathetic nervous system gives us a burst of power and focus to fuel a last ditch effort to fend off and escape a predator. That’s what it’s for. That’s the level of intensity that flows into our system. These days, a powerful expression of anger is almost like our appendix: a vestigial remnant of a bygone function. There is very little use for a full-blown blast of anger for most people most of the time.

The pure emotion of anger may have served a stronger purpose long ago when the world was a much more violent place (the world or our ancestors was, taken as a whole, far more violent than it is today. See Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of our Nature and Lawrence Keeley’s War Before Civilization).

As an emotion, anger is often a response to a sense that a boundary has been violated in some way. The difference between an emotion and a reaction is that a reaction includes a full burst of energy to escape a threatening situation (or with a freeze reaction, a drop in energy to endure and survive it); whereas an emotion is more about learning how to respond better next time. (I go into much more detail about this, with references and skills to practice, in my Mastering Emotions, Moods and Reactions Workbook).

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Apr 24
Love1

Self-Esteem is More Complicated Than You Think

By Happiness

In a study by Jean Twenge of San Diego State University, she found that college kids today are more likely to call themselves gifted and driven to succeed, while their test scores and hours spent studying are decreasing. Their tendency toward narcissism has also increased over the last 30 years.

Today I want to look at what I consider one of the sources of this trend: the unearned self-esteem movement.

Many years ago, when I was young psychology graduate student studying with Nathaniel Branden, I remember him talking one day about how he had been invited to be part of The California Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem, lead by California State Assemblyman John Vasconcelos.

Nathaniel couldn’t see why he would be involved in that, since he did not see a role for government in the development of self-esteem. Nonetheless, the Task Force carried on, and created guidelines for building “self-esteem” in a way that Branden would never have advocated.

According to a New York Times article about the study group in October of 1986:

Mr. Vasconcellos, a 53-year-old Democrat, is described by an aide as “the most radical humanist in the Legislature.” Mr. Twombly said the study group was an attempt by the Assemblyman to translate into political action his 20 years of “personal emotional work” in various forms of psychological therapy at Esalen Institute near Big Sur and other places.

”I’ve explored a lot of alternative ways of being and relating,” Mr. Vasconcellos said. The bill that created the 25-member study group says its aim is to compile “the world’s most credible and contemporary research regarding whether healthy self-esteem relates to the development of personal responsibility and social problems” such as crime, drug abuse, teen-age pregnancy and welfare dependency.

Whether it was Vasconcelos’s intention or not, the model of self-esteem that the task force has effectively encouraged was the one that my favorite social psychologist Roy Baumeister showed did nothing to improve a person’s happiness, success, or character.

The common definition of self-esteem, and the one used for research purposes, is, “feeling good about yourself.” By that definition, the population with one of the highest levels of self-esteem is criminals (I’m not kidding, they feel great about themselves).

In contrast, Branden’s self-esteem is “the reputation we build with ourselves;” or put another way, it’s earned self-esteem.

Branden’s self-esteem is much more complex and involves many different facets – which also makes it very difficult to study as a distinct quality. In fact, self-esteem as Branden describes it has not been studied directly (though elements of it , such as willpower, self-regulation, self-efficacy, and – as we’ll see in a moment – mindsets, have), which makes the term difficult to use as he used it.

The differences between these two visions could not be more consequential. It is the difference between inflating a student’s grades so that their self-esteem is not injured, versus giving a student clear and honest feedback on their performance so they can take the action they need to improve.

It’s the difference between giving awards for participating in an event, versus giving awards for actual performance.

It’s the difference between praising a child for simply being in a situation and praising them for the effort and focus they bring to a situation.

It’s the difference between encouraging a fixed trait mindset versus a growth mindset.

Carol Dweck’s research on mindsets is relevant here. A fixed trait mindset is one where you think of yourself in terms of set qualities, like intelligence, talent, attractiveness, etc. A growth mindset is where you think of yourself in terms of what you do, the quality of your attention, effort, and willingness to learn.

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Apr 17
Love1

How Trade Has Helped Make Us Human

By Happiness

One day in East Africa, deep in our primitive past, an exceptional innovator carved a palm sized, pear shaped, razor sharp axe head out of stone. This must have revolutionized the ability for he or she and their band of hunter-gatherers to hunt, to butcher food… and to wage war on their neighbors.

This was about seventeen hundred thousand years ago, long before homo sapiens had even appeared on earth. Over time, others learned to copy this stone ax head, and the innovation spread throughout the relatively small population of pre-humans, known as homo erectus, or “upright man.”

The identical design of what archaeologists call Acheulean hand stone axes has been commonly found at many different archaeological sites throughout different eras, and up to about a hundred thousand years ago they were still being made, in exactly the same way, by our homo-sapiens ancestors.

For over a million and a half years, as far as we can tell from the archeological record, this was the extent of human and pre-human innovation. That was it! Nothing new for over 1,600,000 years.

Then, something revolutionary happened; something that changed the nature of humanity and transformed our cultural growth as a species… the world’s first jewelry was invented.

One day, about 90,000 years ago, something new appeared in the heart of Africa. Beads. Beads, made of the shells of a tiny marine snail called Nassarius gibbosulus, painted, and with tiny holes drilled in them.

What was truly transformational, though, wasn’t the beads themselves, it was the mystery they presented. How did beads originally found at the seashore of Mediterranean Algeria make their way hundreds of miles to the south? That would be crossing the Sahara Desert now, but back then it was a lush, green hunter’s paradise.

They were brought there. Not as some one-time haul from a murderous raiding party – which would have been the most likely way up to that point for one tribe to get something from another tribe.

No, these beads were part of something new; something that from any evidence we currently have, had never been seen on the face of the earth before; something we take completely for granted today:

Trade.

This was the first evidence of humans trading with one another. These shells weren’t just jewelry, they were likely used as the first money, as well.

Sure, lots of animals do reciprocal things, like picking the lice out of each other’s hair, or helping each other with a hunt. But to trade different things or actions of different value was brand new. I have some meat, you have some berries, and we figure out a mutually agreeable amount of each to barter so we’re both happy… win/win.

But then to use something as a medium of exchange – the money we use today, or the painted Nassarius shells our distant ancestors used in Africa – accelerated the benefits of trade exponentially.

Eventually, our ancestors developed intricate trade networks, inspiring innovation and cooperation that had never been possible before. In a very real sense, trade is what has made us human. It encourages the better angels of our nature – to borrow the title of a magnificent book by Steven Pinker on why violence has declined.

Trade, among other things, encourages curiosity about other people – and therefore empathy. It encourages us to create what’s called a “theory of mind,” the ability to imagine what another person’s internal world might be like.

When we trade, there’s a benefit to wondering what other people – who are not members of our immediate family or tribe – are interested in, how they communicate, what their habits and customs are, how to approach them in a peaceful and respectful manner, and what we might bring to them to exchange for something they have that we want.

Trade encouraged a whole dimension of curiosity that would never have occurred to our ancestors otherwise.

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Apr 10
Love1

A Happy Life is Not Perfect Happiness

By Happiness

There’s a great misunderstanding about what it means to live a happy life, and it can be summed up in the popular symbol of the smiley face.

Now, I like to smile. I love feeling that kind of glowing, delighted state of emotional bliss. It’s wonderful to be full of joy and love and laughter. But feeling those things doesn’t in and of itself make for a happy life; and just because you don’t happen to feel them in the moment doesn’t mean you are unhappy.

In fact, if simply feeling those emotions all the time was what constituted happiness, then it would be a simple matter to find the right combination of drugs that would perpetually bathe our neurons with joyful chemicals, and we could all be perpetually happy.

But this smiley face view of happiness is not the whole story, at all. And we all know it.

A happy life is an engaged life, an active life, an ethical life, a life that you create; a life you can be happy about, a life you can be proud of.

It is not a perfect life.

If you have a view of happiness that tells you that to feel sad or angry or afraid is a sign of failure, or a moral shortcoming of some kind, you’re actually setting yourself up for a miserable bind. The “negative” emotions of life are just as important as the “positive” emotions, in their own way.

Nobody wants to walk around feeling afraid all the time… or angry, or sad. These feelings, in and of themselves, don’t make you happy either.

But they do provide you with important information about what is going on. Used well, they are responses to actual circumstances.

  • Anger is often a response to trespass – if somebody crosses a line where your territory or integrity or values are being violated or crossed, anger lets you know to check this out, and it gives you the emotional energy to push back and protect what matters to you.
  • Fear is often a response to perceived or imagined danger. The challenge becomes discerning whether a given feeling of fear is in response to something real or imagined.
  • Sadness is often a response to loss. The challenge with sadness can be to let it run its course, and allow other, more positive feelings to come back around.

This list is not exhaustive, of course, but it can give you an idea of the value of some of the emotions that are not as pleasant as the “happier” emotions. (I go into much greater – and very practical – detail in my book, the Mastering Emotions, Moods and Reactions Workbook)

A happy life includes the entire range of feelings, an expansive vision of possibilities, and a grounded and accurate relationship to reality. To navigate your emotional life is to integrate what you feel with a clear assessment of reality, and to choose what you want to do with the information and experience contained within your emotional life.

You don’t want to dwell on and become overwhelmed by fear, or sadness, or anger, but neither do you want to avoid these feelings, or judge them as some kind of moral failing.

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Apr 03
Love1

Positive Subtraction

By Emotions, Moods and Reactions

I met my wife Sue about 34 years ago at a Thanksgiving party with some friends of ours. Normally I would have been with my extended family – Thanksgiving was always a favorite of my parents – but this year they hosted our family dinner on Friday, so other family members could be with their respective in-laws.

Had my parents not changed the routine that year, Sue and I might never have met; we never would have been married, we would never have had our kids, and the life we know would be different in so many ways it’s hard to fathom.

Many other circumstances lined up just right to lead to that night that might not have worked out – my wife might not have come to the dinner (she almost didn’t), one or both of us might have lived in another town, we might not have known these particular friends…

It’s pretty remarkable if you think about it, that two people ever meet. But people do, and we did.  If you’re married, it might be worth considering there’s a chance the two of you might never have met.

Doing this deliberately can also make you happier.

In the classic Frank Capra movie, It’s a Wonderful Life, George Bailey is so despondent from events that he’s on the verge of committing suicide. Clarence, a new angel hoping to earn his wings, shows him what life would be like for those he cares about had George not existed. George comes to appreciate the many ways he has deeply affected people, and how much he had taken his good effect toward all those people he held dear for granted.

Seeing clearly what his absence would have meant – and would mean – for so many people he cares for puts suicide out of the question, and brings him to a state of profound gratitude.

That’s more than a sweet story and a classic movie; there is something very true and strong in it that has consequences for a life well lived.

In a study by Koo, Algoe, Wilson, and Gilbert, It’s a Wonderful Life: Mentally Subtracting Positive Events Improves People’s Affective States, Contrary to Their Affective Forecasts, they showed that when people consider the absence of a positive event – as George’s angel helped him to do – they feel more positive than when they think of the positive event itself.

More specifically, those who wrote about how they might never have met their partner were more satisfied in their relationship than those who wrote about how they did meet.

This falls into the category of very worthwhile things to try. If you’re married, think about what life would be like had you and your partner never met. Or think about the people in your life whom you love and care about. What if you had never met? What if something didn’t work out so that a particular person who’s dear to you had never been in your life?

And we can think of the ways that other very positive events might not have ever come to pass.

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Mar 27
Love1

The Shocking Impact of Personal Influence

By Emotions, Moods and Reactions

It‘s easy to underestimate our effect on others. We go about our business in our own world, and assume that everyone else is going about theirs.

New parents can be stunned sometimes to hear their own words coming out of their kid’s mouths; their own actions being recreated by their children. But our impact on each other runs deep, and extends far beyond our immediate family.

Those we are close to, and even those people who are three degrees of separation away from those we are close to – friends of friends of friends – are our sphere of influence… and we are theirs. What we say and do makes a real impact on those around us, and even on those a moderate distance away.

Appreciating this can be a great motivator for living our best life.

In studies by Christakis and Fowler, drawing from the Framingham Heart Study subjects, they found just how powerful our personal contacts with people can be. Here are some examples:

  • For every happy friend we have, our likelihood of being happy ourselves increases by 9%.
  • Our chances of becoming obese increases by 57% if we have a friend who becomes obese.
  • Among pairs of adult siblings, if one sibling becomes obese the chance that the other will become obese increases by 40%
  • If one spouse becomes obese the likelihood that the other spouse will become obese increases by 37%

That’s for our immediate connections; in other studies, they found that we can have a remarkable effect on others even several steps removed from our direct contact:

  • If our friend’s friend’s friend quit smoking, we are much more likely to quit smoking ourselves.
  • Even happy people we’ve never met, three degrees of separation away, have a positive effect on our own happiness.

Good and bad behaviors pass from friend to friend; we influence each other’s health and happiness just by our social interactions.

But the impact of our behavior in one arena is particularly significant… shocking even.

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