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Habits and Strategies

Jan 10
Love1

The Most Important Moment

By Habits and Strategies, Happiness

 

A marriage, a friendship, a close family relationship… all of our important relationships are built on countless moments, innumerable interactions that either build qualities of trust, joy, and respect – or undermine those qualities.

Today I want to show you what is arguably the most important moment for building a trusting, satisfying, loving relationship.

We can often think that what makes a difference in a romantic relationship, or our relationship with our kids, or other friends and relatives, are the big things; the romantic getaway for the weekend, or the great gift that we buy.

…but there is a moment that packs more leverage, more meaning, and more potential for doing good – or harm – than almost any other: the moment when someone we care about asks for our attention.

Changing how we respond in that moment can enliven the entire atmosphere of our relationships. To understand why, we must first look at what happens to us when we’re ignored.

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Jan 03
Love1

How to Redecorate Your Mind

By Habits and Strategies, Happiness

 

Believe it or not, you have a powerful resource inside your head, one that can provide a reservoir of joy, strength and perseverance.   Once you recognize it – and practice tapping into it – you can use it not just to boost your day but to improve the quality of your entire life.  Best of all, it’s as straightforward as hanging a picture on the wall …

Think about the photographs you have displayed in your home.  Are they pictures of the miserable times, the disappointments, the conflicts, the traumas? Did you set things up so you are constantly reminded of the events and people who hurt you most?

Of course not. We’ve all had those times, of course. It’s part of life. But when we put pictures on the wall of our home, we choose pictures of the people we love, the peak moments. We want to be reminded of how adorable our kids were at that age, or the great trip we took that summer, or a favorite quality of someone we love.

We do this because it affects the entire atmosphere of our home. It’s part of what makes our house feel like a home. We may have boxes of pictures stored away that cover a wider range of experience, but what we want to see every day are the images that warm us, comfort us, inspire us.

In a similar way, we have images we reflect on in our mind’s eye; memories of times past, of people and events. We don’t regularly reflect on that many images; probably about as many as the pictures we have hanging on our wall.

And just as the pictures on our wall create a mood in our home, the pictures we reflect on in our minds create an atmosphere within ourselves. What many of us don’t realize is that we have the same ability to choose those internal images as we do to choose the pictures on the wall.

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Dec 27
Love1

How to Actually Reach Your Goals This Year

By Habits and Strategies

 

Now’s the time when we’re supposed to make New Year’s resolutions. All those bad behaviors we’ve suffered from (or made others suffer from); all those good behaviors that we know would make life better for ourselves and those we care about. The things that we vow to do this year even though we’ve never done them before…

Even though we’ve resolved year after year to do them this year.

And then felt anywhere from a mild regret to deep shame when we don’t make the new thing happen.

Magically, like a spell we cast on New Year’s.

Well this year let’s make that a different story, because I’m going to tell you why it never worked before, and why this time you’ll have a good chance of actually reaching those goals this year.

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Dec 20
Love1

Making it a Fair Fight

By Habits and Strategies, Happiness

We have a wonderful deli/bakery nearby that has great, healthy food, and very yummy, not-so-healthy treats – cookies, éclairs, pastries… very tempting stuff. Every once in awhile I’m seduced by these delicacies, and when I am, I almost always notice something afterwards: I don’t feel as good as I did before.

It’s not a severely bad feeling, and I can easily ignore it if I want to. But if I pay attention to the sensations in my body, there’s a clearly different feeling from my insides; it’s not as pleasant as it was before I had eaten the sugar and fat filled morsel.

This is the key to making our fight against bad habits a fair fight.

About 80 percent of the nerves connected to our viscera are afferent – meaning they send signals to our brain from our organs. These are sensory nerves, designed to give feedback about what’s happening within our bodies.

Until recently medical texts claimed that there was little or no sensory information coming from our organs. We now know that’s not true; there are well understood pathways from a part of our vagus nerve that send these sensory signals. Interestingly, Charles Darwin wrote about this over 100 years ago, but it never became widely appreciated until now.

But it’s also extremely common for us as we grow and deal with our challenges and goals – and peer pressure, and impatience of our fellow humans – to learn to ignore much of what these signals are telling us.

By ignoring the sensations of our bodies, we effectively deprive ourselves of one of our great strengths to overcome short term temptation…

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Dec 13
Love1

Time Well Spent

By Habits and Strategies, Happiness

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
–          TS Eliot, Burnt Norton

Time is a continuous, objectively measurable forward movement. We measure it with the rotation of the earth, the orbit of the earth about the sun, and the tilt of her axis relative to that sun as we make our way about it, seen through the changing seasons.

While the mechanics of time in a basic way are well understood, our experience of time and our relationship to time is complex, and can hold the key to our experience of life itself.

Phil Zimbardo, Professor Emeritus of Stanford and author of “The Time Cure,” (famous also for the Stanford Prison Experiment, a classic study in our susceptibility to the abuse of power), describes 6 different time orientations:

  • Past-positive – you’re happy about the past events of your life, focusing on the positive
  • Past-negative – you regret, dwell on and exaggerate the painful events of your past
  • Present hedonism – you enjoy and seek pleasure in the present
  • Present fatalism – you’re passive about the present, feeling that events are not in your control
  • Goal-oriented future – make plans and seek to actively accomplish things to better your life
  • Transcendental future – you seek to be good in this life seeking to be rewarded after death

Our happiness is dependent to a large degree on our relationship to these 6 different time orientations.

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Dec 06
Love1

Mastering Entropy

By Habits and Strategies

Entropy is a term from physics that describes the tendency for matter to move from order into disorder. Life can be seen as a process that is deliberately working against entropy.

If you ever watched the old Get Smart TV show, or the more recent movie, the good guys were called “Control,” and the bad guys were “Chaos.” For living creatures like us, that pretty well describes the situation. Chaos is where entropy draws everything naturally; control is the conscious ordering, the structure that we have to impose on ourselves and our environment in order to survive and flourish.

For most living creatures, instincts take charge of a lot of the necessary ordering which life requires; finding food, mating, sleep cycles, protective behavior, etc. The Austrian physicist Erwin Schrodinger in his book, “What is Life,” proposed a molecule that directed these processes to counter entropy with “negative entropy,” and his hypothesis became an inspiration for Watson and Crick’s search for and discovery of DNA.

But we humans are different in a fundamental way: our basic survival tool is our mind, and unlike instinctual animals, we can choose to use our basic tool of survival… or not.

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Nov 29
Love1

Turning a Wish into a Triumph

By Habits and Strategies

Have you ever watched the downhill skiers in the Winter Olympics before a race, visualizing the run, moving and swaying their bodies as though they’re on the run itself? They all do this now, because the visualization is a powerfully effective strategy for bringing out their best.

But they aren’t picturing themselves with the gold medal and the national anthem playing. They’re crouched down in a skiing stance, imagining how they’ll negotiate the challenges of the run, practicing the specific skills that will get them to that gold medal.

Much is made these days of having a compelling future vision. Picturing yourself on the winner’s block, or with that book published, or that wonderful relationship; imagining a future that you can step into… The pop psychology literature is chock full of advice for seeing yourself having accomplished your goals.

But the pop psychology literature on this is wrong.

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Nov 15
Love1

How to Have an Accurate Assessment of Yourself

By Habits and Strategies

If you know that who you are, what you do, and how you think about things are all changeable and accessible to your own intervention and effort—What Carol Dweck, author of Mindset calls a “growth” mindset—your assessment of yourself will also tend to be very accurate.

In contrast, if you believe that who you are, what you do, and how you think about things are all fixed and unchangeable—a “fixed-trait” mindset—you will then believe that you are at the mercy of forces outside of yourself, and your assessment of yourself will be predictably and dramatically inaccurate.

In order to make accurate assessments, we have to have accurate data. If we are faced with a poor assessment, and our belief is that we are powerless to change, then the only way to salvage any emotional hope is to skew the data, to trick ourselves into discounting it. In this case, the necessary self-reflection will feel threatening to us, containing blows to our self-concept, rather than feeling like useful information. This can lead to incredible suffering and bad results, and can lead us to avoid challenges or difficult feedback—the very things we need in order to grow.

Here’s the challenge:

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Nov 09
Love1

If You Want to Change Something, Measure It

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

Measurement is the first step that leads to control and eventually to improvement. If you can’t measure something, you can’t understand it. If you can’t understand it, you can’t control it. If you can’t control it, you can’t improve it.
― H. James Harrington

It is the mark of an educated mind to expect that amount of exactness in each kind the nature of the particular subject admits. – Aristotle

Our ability to learn is based on feedback.

If I bump my head on a cabinet, the pain lets me know to duck next time… or to change the layout of my cabinets! If a conversation sparks my interest, that spark lets me know to pay closer attention. If I feel awful whenever I spend time with a particular acquaintance, that awful feeling tells me to reconsider spending more time with him.

There is a whole field of study of psychophysiology and biofeedback that is dedicated to helping people learn to control aspects of their physiology, including certain brainwaves, in order to achieve greater relaxation, lowered blood pressure, and other psychological and health benefits.

But we don’t need that level of sophistication in order to make use of biofeedback. Our own bodies, and many common devices, give us plenty to go on… if we pay attention. This holds the key to taking charge of much more of our psychological and physiological existence than many of us know.

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Nov 01
Love1

Using Hope Effectively

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

When we think of emotions that can be dangerous, particularly for managing money and investing, we usually think of things like greed and fear. But there are other emotions that can get us into big trouble. Including hope.

But there’s a way to manage hope so that we’re able to have our dreams for the future, and then make them happen in the real world – if that’s possible.

Greed is a kind of hunger for things in themselves, disconnected from any genuine well-being, and regardless of the consequences. Fear speaks to the need for security – including that deep primal need for survival we talked about an earlier column.

Hope speaks to wishes for potential future flourishing.

A significant portion of our psyche leans toward the future. Our self-concept holds an evolving image of the person we want to be – always a bit better than we are now. Hope is the emotion that draws us toward that image, and the vision of the life we want to lead.

Hope lies at the heart of our aspirations and ambitions; our dreams and wishes. It fuels us to strive for goals and achievements.

It can also lead us to wish for things we cannot have, aspire to achievements we cannot reach, and fantasize dreams that we cannot fulfill.

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