Determining our lives by external data

Anytime we start complaining about something we can’t control, unhappiness awaits.

But anytime we start weighing our options about the things we can control, empowerment ensues.

Here’s an example that everyone should be able relate to:

Have you ever listened to someone bemoan the price of gas, or the cost of the ticket for their daily commute?

If so, did that ever improve their situation?

Of course not. Because the only thing that could have changed that person’s state, or at least motivated that person to take action towards changing their state, would have been focusing on the things that were within their realm of power.

Perhaps brainstorming creative ways to drive less, making a deal with their employer to work remotely twice a week, renegotiating their contract to now include transpiration reimbursement, or god forbid, asking for a raise or finding new ways to make more money so that the extra thirteen dollars a week became inconsequential.

Do you feel the difference?

This posture is rooted in power and proactivity. Even if not a single solution pans out and the person’s commute cost stays exactly the same, the positive experience of brainstorming rather that complaining stretches the mind open to widen the array of possibilities.

Robinson’s book on workaholism explains why this kind of thinking provokes empowerment rather than unhappiness. Positive thinkers are able to cope better with adversity because they can see solutions to stressful problems. Their positive scope widens their worldview, which allows them to take in more information that can lead to better solutions.

Whereas simply complaining fails to take into account the full picture.

Lesson learned, we often have more coping mechanisms than we realize. The key is interrupting the spiral of negative thinking before it gets out of control. Brainstorming and coming up with possible ways to fix the problem instead of getting stuck in the protest mode.

LET ME ASK YA THIS…
Are you taking realistic, constructive steps to deal with life instead of succumbing to it?

Redefine our concept of what we need

There’s a concept in the conservation world called the waste hierarchy.

It’s the order of priority of actions to be taken to reduce the amount of waste generated, and to improve overall waste management processes and programs.

You’ve probably heard it before. Reduce, reuse, recycle.

This concept first poked its head out of the trash pile and seeped into the cultural consciousness in the early seventies. Vietnam caused citizens to demand greater attention and resources for issues like air pollution, waste and water quality.

And so, congress eventually passed a conservation act to extend government resources to that protection effort.

More recently, though, there has been a new addition to the top of this hierarchy. Ahead of existing options now exists a new priority, refuse.

Like when you buy a soda from the bodega and the cashier tries to give you five napkins, two straws and a double plastic bag. You simply refuse. No fuss, no mess, no sanctimonious looks, you just refuse.

Which is kind of ironic, considering that word is also a synonym for the word waste. God bless alliteration.

But the idea is, by eliminating waste from the very beginning, you can nip the problem in the bud. That’s the genius of this concept. Once you introduce the idea of refusing, you obviate the need for the other three options. Any person downstream no longer has to think about whether they should reduce, reuse or recycle, because there is nothing there in the first place.

This reminds me of my favorite karate mantra, the best way to block a punch is to not be there. Not to mention my favorite business mantra, the easiest way to accomplish a task is to eliminate the need to do it.

You get the point. The best gift we can ourselves is to redefine our concept of what we need. That way, we can learn to say no to the things we don’t.

It would make life dramatically easier if more people found their own version of this concept. In a world where we’re all rushing around trying to get all of the things we think we need, just imagine how much calmer we would feel if we paused for a moment and learned the art of refusing.

Think of it as changing the course of a river. Not by putting a boulder downstream, but by placing a pebble near its source. We simply interrupt the spiral before it gets out of control, take a breath, and move on with our lives. 

LET ME ASK YA THIS…
What is it finally time for you to start refusing?

The story we tell ourselves about our preferences

An allergy is a hypersensitivity to a specific substance.

It’s a condition in where body’s immune system reacts abnormally to a foreign element, resulting in everything from hives to rashes to headaches to difficulty breathing.

As someone who’s been allergic to cats, dogs, ragweed and dust for his whole life, this ain’t no joke. Allergies can be debilitating.

Quick history lesson, the word allergy has been around only since the turn of the twentieth century, when a pediatrician coined the term to describe altered biological reactivity. It gained traction in the twenties, when it took on a broader definition to include reactions to everything from dairy and bee stings to mold and hay fever.

But more recently, skeptics have been debating that certain allergies, specifically food borne, as fabricated cries for attention. Claiming that the word allergy has become so diluted that it’s no longer taken seriously. They even bemoan the effects allergies have on public health policy and the production, manufacture, and consumption of food.

But that misses the point. This is a personal issue.

Is it just a fad? Is it just a story people tell themselves about their own preferences? Is it merely junk science that can’t separate the medical from the myth?

The answer is, it doesn’t matter. If announcing to yourself that you are allergic to something help you avoid it and protect your health, then that’s a good thing.

Consider this. The term allergy derives from two root words. Allos, which means different or strange, and then ergon, which means activity. And so, it means that when you encounter with a certain substance or entity, strange activity happens to you, and it’s best to eliminate that from your life at all possibility.

Thus, being allergic a useful story for setting boundaries. It keeps you safe through the power of abstinence, without the need to justify your behavior.

You’re allergic, so you don’t do it. Period.

Personally, I’m allergic to sugar, soda and watching the news. All three things make me feel like shit, and therefore, are allergies.

That’s the most life giving position we can take on this issue. Treat certain things as allergies rather than preferences. Declare to yourself that when you engage with this particular thing, strange things happen to your mind and body, and it’s simply not worth it to make yourself suffer.

There’s nothing to justify, there’s nothing to feel ashamed of, it’s just how your body reacts to certain things. 

LET ME ASK YA THIS…
What story are you telling yourself about your own hypersensitivity?

Once you know about something, it doesn’t matter what the name is

According to the standard classification of mental disorders used by health professionals, workaholism is not included as a nonsubstance addiction.

This distinction provoked a simmering debate in the therapeutic community. There are scores of mental health professionals and civilians alike who don’t recognize it as a problem. Because to them, workaholism no different than, say, caffeine addiction.

In my opinion, the problem is that people are asking the wrong set of questions. Should workaholism become recognized as a psychiatric disorder? Is it nothing more than pop psychology? Are workaholics just obsessive compulsive perfectionists?

These questions aren’t unimportant, but what might be more valuable to ask is something like this.

Is workaholism a useful construct to help heal your dysfunctional and unhealthy behavior?

For me, it was undeniable. For nearly a decade, workaholism was my coping strategy. It wasn’t the problem, it was the symptom. And finally learning see it as an addiction was deeply healing because it forced me to ask myself what the addiction was covering.

To paraphrase from the inspiring book of awakening, working was merely the drink by which you were able to briefly numb your worthlessness.

It’s true that workaholism, as a construct, lacks conceptual and empirical clarity. But I’m not a doctor, and this isn’t a university or a court room or a rehab center. This is my life. And whether the term is officially classified or not doesn’t matter.

Workaholism is and will always be a useful construct to help me heal. And nobody can take that away from me.

There’s a passage from a popular movie about a meth addict that summarizes it best:

Lesson learned, once you know about something, it doesn’t matter what the name is.

If it’s a stairway that takes you down to more meaningful places, then call it whatever the hell you want. 

LET ME ASK YA THIS…
What construct has helped you heal yourself?

Better to feel fulfilled than merely full

Think about how long most people hold onto the residue of negative or even mediocre experience.

They prosecute themselves for crimes past and preoccupy themselves with next time, thinking about how it’s going to be different. Both of these ruminations cheat them out of the present moment, which is the only place joy and meaning are available.

Take lunch at work. You grab a crappy sandwich and bring it back to the office, so you can eat with your team. And as you shove that hoagie into your face for the next twelve minutes, you start looking around the break room, falling into the trap of post choice pondering.

Man, my boss ordered a salad from that new falafel place. And the intern picked up chicken and rice. Wait, are those pork dumplings my coworker ordered? What restaurant in our neighborhood has that? Dude, it looks way better that my greasy meatball sub. Goddamn it. Why do my lunch choices always suck? This is stupid. Wait until tomorrow. Gonna spend a few extra bucks and crush that sushi lunch special from across the street. I’ll be the envy of the entire office and finally win lunch.

Has this ever happened to you? Or have you ever watched someone prosecute and preoccupy, and end up diminishing the satisfaction they get from the choices they have already made?

We can all do better than this.

It reminds me of something an older family friend told me at our wedding. We were laughing at the fact that we spent thousands and thousands of dollars on all this delicious food, none of which we actually got to eat, since we were too busy dancing and laughing and crying with hundreds of people we loved.

My uncle put his hand on my shoulder and said, look, at a certain point, you start to care less about what’s on the table and more about who’s around it.

He was right. Being fulfilled is more important than simply being full.

We need to stop holding ourselves prisoner by our painful past or fearful future. Whatever is happening right now matters more.

With every minute that we spend pondering about the opportunity cost of our last decision, the more that our ultimate satisfaction from that decision decreases.

Let’s end our pursuit of perpetual improvement, and let’s begin our practice of permanent appreciation. 

LET ME ASK YA THIS…
How long do you hold onto the residue of your experiences?

It’s not a perfect formula, but it’s a pleasant experiment

Hypnotists, magicians and persuasion experts teach us that a confused person is in a trance of their own making.

When someone can’t quite figure something out, their brain’s need for closure and resolution creates an activated expectation. That makes them much more suggestible without resistance, which explains all that dancing around like a chicken on a stage in front of thousands of strangers.

But although the state of momentary confusion can be frustrating, it also creates an opening where there once was a barrier. Confusion can become a meaningful way to transform attention into connection.

This brings me to an aspect of wearing a nametag that, after twenty years, has still not gotten old. The look on people’s faces when the nametag breaks their brains. They just can’t figure out why this guy always has that damned sticker on his chest.

Mcgraw dubbed this moment the benign violation theory, which is when something threatens one’s sense of how the world ought to be. In my case, when people see the same damn sticker, day after day, in various contexts that seem abnormal, their confusion fuels a connection.

They eventually ask a question, we start talking until their brain cramp goes away, and now we are a little closer than we were before.

This scenario happens to me all the time, and it’s very gratifying to experience. Especially in a world where confusion gets demonized. Truth is, without that point of dissonance, that confusing moment that made people scratch their heads and wonder why, the two of us would never have deepened our engagement.

There’s a powerful study from an education media journal showing that students who spent a greater proportion of their lessons in a state of confusion exhibited significantly greater gains in learning. Boredom, by contrast, was associated with lower gains in learning.

Their clinical term for this experience called cognitive disequilibrium. It becomes a marker that an important cognitive process has taken place.

Behold, the genius of confusion. When deployed in a friendly way, people appreciate the inconsistency or deficit in their prior beliefs, and that experience motivates them to reconcile an inconsistency or remedy some deficit through interpersonal connection.

It’s not a perfect formula, but it’s certainly a pleasant experiment.

We’re all guessing about everything anyway.

LET ME ASK YA THIS…
Why not use confusion to bring us closer together?

Staying with our intention despite the chaos

Herding cats is a management term people use to describe the futile attempt to control and organize a class of entities which are inherently uncontrollable.

The earliest available reference of this idiom dates back to an article about a software design company from the eighties. The phrase later popped up in the nineties in reference to dealing with writers, and has since become a catchall for managing anyone with a fiercely independent spirit, from toddlers to actors to physicians.

Essentially, these are people who do whatever they want, whenever they feel like doing it.

Sounds like my first report card from kindergarten. Those poor teachers. My poor parents.

But as frustrating and chaotic as it sounds to herd cats, it’s actually skill that anyone can learn. Even if you’re a dog person.

It has less to with managerial tactics and more to do with mindful intentions.

Beginning with empathy. To galvanize any team, we first accept that each member has their own individual set of thoughts, feelings, values and beliefs. And we constantly ask ourselves questions to further understand their motivations.

What’s this person’s currency? Whom do they need to answer to and look good for? What is guaranteed to make them feel they got a return on their investment? What battle might they be fighting that we know nothing about? What is their unique definition of success?

Once we learn some of these traits about the cats we’re attempting to herd, we can tailor our approach to each. That might mean shot gunning certain tasks for people with varying timetables and commitments, creating multiple versions of the same document to satisfy people’s many learning styles, even hiding details and variables from those who would only become derailed from knowing them.

Certainly, we can’t make everybody happy, but we can find out what makes everybody happy, and with our intention and attention, reverse engineer our interactions accordingly.

This brings me to another element to effective cat herding. Assembling a mass of distinct parts into a coherent whole. Managing a delicate yet dynamic union of disparate elements, be it human or otherwise.

Having managed hundreds of projects over the past twenty years, including publishing more than fifty book and twelve musical albums, my experience tells me this.

Expert cat herds are masters of acceptance. You accept that along the journey of any project, people and things will go astray. And when the inevitably do, you don’t allow that to bother you.

You let it go, respect the process, trust that what needs to come back will, act kindly towards yourself and keep moving the story forward.

Babuta writes about this in his award winning blog on zen habits:

Accept that uncertainty and disorder, and relax into them. Stay with your intention despite the chaos. Keep pushing into the discomfort with it, go forward, and stay compassionate for any missteps or interruptions.

If you find yourself in a position where inherently uncontrollable entities are swirling around your head, don’t void your bowels in your litter box just yet.

Pressure is a choice.

Start where you are, help others start where they are, and have faith that you’ll herd all the cats to where you want them to be. 

LET ME ASK YA THIS..
How do you manage fiercely independent spirits?

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