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On Freedom

Posted on by Senia

Everything can be taken but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.
~ Viktor Frankl

Freedom lies in being bold.
~ Robert Frost

All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man’s life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom.
~ Albert Einstein

Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!
~ Patrick Henry

The only part of the conduct of anyone for which he is amenable to society is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.
~ John Stuart Mill

A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.
~ Thomas Jefferson

(and my favorite)
Freedom is from within.
~ Frank Lloyd Wright

Comfortable, a definition

Posted on by Senia

I was talking with a friend about how with some people you just seem to feel comfortable. Around your good friends, around people with whom you can throw about ideas. What is it, this feeling of comfortable? If you ask, “what does it mean when you’re comfortable around someone?”, you’ll hear things like “It’s like being yourself,” “It’s like not thinking,” “It’s relaxing,” “It’s not stressful.”

Have you ever been in a work situation in which you felt that you were both the person who was in the meeting, answering the questions, giving the presentation – and at the same time that you were also the person observing all this from the side, seeing people’s reactions, sensing the vibe in the room? Do you know that feeling in which you’re both doing something and observing yourself doing it? It’s almost as if there were two of you. It seems to take two different brain processes to be doing something and to be on the lookout for how it’s going. And research shows that having both processes run at once uses a lot of your psychological resources.

Research shows that emotional-cognitive processing expends a lot of resources in a person. What do I mean by that? If the emotional signals that a person is getting are not in line with the cognitive signals, then it takes a lot of the person’s resources to balance the two inputs. It’s uncanny that it takes that many resources to figuratively both tap your logical head and rub your emotional stomach. But at the same time, we shouldn’t be surprised: it’s that emotional-cognitive unbalancing that is often the cause of miniature stressors that can turn into major stressors.

(In fact, if you think about babies and toddlers, in toddlers, you visibly see new tricks all the time – a new word, or a new physical ability whereas with babies of less than a year old, you’ll see fewer physical new tricks. But just think of all the different types of balancing that are going on inside their heads. Think of how a baby (and even a toddler for that matter) needs to balance the emotional and physical and thinking and seeing and other processes especially when it’s not yet clear to babies what is in balance and what is out of balance.)

So, in short, being comfortable is not needing to watch what you do while you’re doing it. Being comfortable is not playing both roles at once – the actor and the observer. (Likely similarly to not writing and editing at the same time – first writing to get the content out, and then perhaps later editing to make it pleasant to read). For example, think of how you feel if you’re practicing delivering a presentation in front of a mirror: you are at that point focusing on the delivery and not the content. Now think of yourself talking within a group of people or talking to one other person. Comfortable is when you can focus more on what you’re saying than on the possible reactions of that group or of that person.

comfortable

Comfortable is always knowing that you’ll have a mulligan with this friend or with this group.

COMFORTABLE, a definition
Take-away: Comfortable is when you can focus more on what you’re saying than on how you’re saying it.

Warm Fuzzies

Posted on by Senia

This is a story from Scripts People Play by Claude Steiner. This is one of my favorite great little stories. Here it is quoted in its entirety from this site.

A WARM FUZZY TALE
By Claude M. Steiner

Once upon a time, a long time ago, there lived two happy people called Tim and Maggie with their two children, John and Lucy. To understand how happy they were you have to understand how things were in those days.

You see in those happy days everyone was given a small, soft Fuzzy Bag when born. Any time a person reached into this bag they were able to pull out a Warm Fuzzy. Warm Fuzzies were very much in demand because whenever someone was given a Warm Fuzzy it made them feel warm and fuzzy all over. In those days it was very easy to get Warm Fuzzies. Anytime that somebody felt like it, he might walk up to you and say, “I’d like to have a Warm Fuzzy.” You would then reach into your bag and pull out a Fuzzy the size of a child’s hand. As soon as the Fuzzy saw the light of day it would smile and blossom into a large, shaggy, Warm Fuzzy. When you laid the Warm Fuzzy on the person’s head, shoulder or lap it would snuggle up and melt right against their skin and make them feel good all over. People were always asking each other for Warm Fuzzies, and since they were always given freely, getting enough of them was never a problem. There were always plenty to go around, and so everyone was happy and felt warm and fuzzy most of the time.

sunflowers Continue reading “Warm Fuzzies”

“Human Beings, not Human Doings”

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This is an expression that my friend Margaret really likes to use, “We are human beings, not human doings.”

RECONCILING BEING AND DOING
But maybe sometimes we are human doings. There’s a wonderful brief blog entry by Jeanie Marshall about how people can act both in ways of achieving and reaching for their goals and in ways of allowing and taking in what’s around them without strain. Jeanie says, “At a very early age, most of us are taught to go after the things that we really want. We are often told that the willingness to fight is the indication that something is worthwhile. To fight, compete, and achieve are lifted up as important values. … If you have had such a cultural conditioning, it can come as a real shock to hear that what you need to do is “allow” or “be in the flow” or “relax.” These can seem like really soft or surreal ideas if you have proven yourself by doing things, by taking charge. … In my view, it is not such a paradox. Perhaps that is because I do not advocate replacing outward action with inward reflection; I am advocating a balance.”

To me, there’s something very soothing in the cadence of her words. Plus, what she says is a nice way to resolve the duality of the human beingness and the human doingness: you can have both. She continues, “Being, allowing, being in the flow, and opening are qualities that help you to remember and provide balance for doing whatever you do. Doers already know how to do; doers need to learn how to be, in order to recognize their wholeness. If every breath is only an out-breath, there is no in-breath to provide more air to sustain the next breaths.”

Martin Seligman, known as the father of Positive Psychology, says in his Authentic Happiness that one of the most powerful ways to increase happiness in the present is to savor more, to more fully enjoy the moments of life. Since so many lives are about action and activity, what are the ways that we can slow down and savor?

FOUR WAYS TO SAVOR
Fred Bryant has done research on savoring and writes that there are four different ways that people savor, that people enjoy the moment. And several of these may appeal to you greatly. (I learned about this theory of savoring from Karen Reivich, who heard Bryant present this four-types model in a talk). Everything in life is personal, including how you like to enjoy your downtime.

You can keep a brief log for the next two days to see when you are enjoying the moment, in which of these four ways are you really enjoying it? Are you …
* Basking: Receiving praise and congratulations
* Thanksgiving: Experiencing and expressing gratitude
* Marveling: Losing self in the wonder of the experience
* Luxuriating: Engaging one’s senses fully

Here’s a visual interpretation:

Bryant's four types of savoring

For example, enjoying the fresh salad during dinner is … luxuriating,
looking at the sunset can be … marveling or luxuriating, or even thanksgiving,
hearing someone compliment your cooking and saying “thank you” is … basking,
seeing a little child smile at you can be … thanksgiving.

Karen Reivich states that when you separate savoring out this way, you have a range of possibilities to choose from. It’s like deciding on a mild sage green for a paint color for the bedroom, as opposed to forest green or swamp green. You’re more in control of how you perceive savoring when you start to break savoring out into its components. And according to Diener and Myers, personal control is one of the four main components to happiness.

It’s like having a peacock’s tail of possibilities to choose from.

Sources:
Bryant, F. (1989). A Four-Factor Model of Perceived Control: Avoiding, Coping, Obtaining, and Savoring, Journal of Personality 57:4, 774-797.
Bryant, F. (2003). Savoring Beliefs Inventory (SBI): A scale for measuring beliefs about savoring, Journal of Mental Health, 12, 2, 175-196.
Myers, D. G., & Diener, E. (1995). Who is happy? Psychological Science, 6, 10-19. “In study after study, four inner traits mark happy people: self-esteem, a sense of personal control, optimism, and extraversion.”

Blog Format

Posted on by Senia

Hi, welcome to Senia.com Postive Psychology Coaching. I am an executive coach, working primaily with small business owners, entrepreneurs, and people changing careers. The style I use is positive psychology coaching – lots of assessments, exercises, techniques – very interactive. Positive Psychology is the study of what makes people happier, more productive, and more successful. It is a branch of psychology, and was launched in 1998, which makes it younger than the Internet!

This site plays with ideas in Happiness, Positive Psychology, Coaching, Success, Marketing, Entrepreneurship, Business, Stories, Intuition, and the Brain. Here’s my bio.

The blog format: (Although there will surely be deviations!)
Monday – Positive Psychology or Psychology (also: the Brain, Intuition)
Tuesday – A Short Story, either Fiction or Non
Wednesday – Random (Business, Local, Web, News, Self-Test, Book Review, etc.)
Thursday – Observation or Quote
Friday – A Question

My Biggest Change in View!

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John: “Hi, how goes?” rhododendrons
Mary: “Good. The weather seems to be nice today.”
John: “Yes, it sure is a good day. Did you see the rhododendrons blooming along Salem Road?”
Mary: “Yes, they looked really nice, really fresh. … I think it might rain tomorrow.”
John: “Really, you think so?”
Mary: “I think I heard that on the radio.”

When I was a teenager, I distinctly remember thinking, “How boring. How boring! How BORING! How could people talk so much about the obvious!? Hello! I mean, yes, ok, the weather is nice, the flowers are blooming, yes, it may rain. Let’s get on with it. Let’s debate something. Let’s agree, let’s disagree, let’s find out why things are happening!” (Yes, I actually probably did think in terms of “Let’s debate something.”)

And now, I have COMPLETELY CHANGED MY MIND. Not even a little bit, not even a tiny bit, but a huge large, definitely, very large, very very large bit.

It has to do with living in the moment. What I once had thought was boring, I now think is so nice. So nice. Some of my favorite times are with friends – after we’ve caught up on this and that and this and that, and we’re just lying on the beach, in all our clothes, on the little washed-up shells, with the sun against our faces (probably commenting about how clear the sky is and how warm the sun feels). Or sitting on the couch in the evening with the music on and just saying how mellow the flutes sound. So simple. So good.

shells

Breaking the Ego and Pain-Body Identification (big words for “Getting Over Yourself”)

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Can you recognize yourself in any of these … ?
* “I’ve never been lucky in (choose one: money, career, love).”
* “Sure, I could have done better if only my parents had….”
* “Well, how am I going to have a healthy outlook after what I’ve been through?”

These things are the blame game. These are examples of blaming as a way of remembering past hurts. And they do hurt. And they are hurts.

And your mind grows addicted to that hurt the more you repeat it and retell that hurt. Your mind starts to look for that hurt in new situations as a way of reinforcing it. It starts to rely on it. And as with anything that becomes uniquely yours, your mind actually redeciphers it to be a good thing. It’s part of a small cognitive dissonance that mind thinks, “Well, I’m a good person, I like myself, so this bad thing has got to just be part of me – what can I do?, it’s just part of me, and I’m a good person.” And then, somehow, without you even being aware, the mind massages the message just a little to be simply, “That pain is part of me.”

The two books mentioned in the previous post overlap on this interesting concept of the person’s ego identifying with the person’s pain.

The Power of Now says that if there is a negative feeling, such as anger, guilt, self-pity, or depression, then that feeling is tied to the body as long as the mind continues to dwell on it and to play out scenarios. In this sense, the author Eckhart Tolle says that the body is connected with the pain in a “pain-body.” Furthermore, Eckhart Tolle describes “ego identification with the pain-body” as that sense that there is something of “my story” or “my life” in that cycle and that there is a pleasure that the body retains from identifying with that pain and that history.

In Get Over Yourself, Tonya Pinkins talks about letting go of the ego, dropping the drama, and getting over the victim and saint self-stories. Both the victim story (“Oh, I can’t do anything right because of all these terrible things that happened to me”, “I have a million perfect reasons to be depressed, and you would be too if you’d been through what I’ve been through”) and the saint story (“I am not going to follow my dream because it might hurt some of my close ones,” “I will switch to my dream job once the kids are in college”) are crutches for not acting now. Both stories tie negative feelings, such as guilt or self-pity to the ego, to the core identity of a person.

Breaking that ego and pain-body identification is, in short, “getting over yourself.”

How You Do Anything …

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HOW YOU DO ANYTHING IS HOW YOU DO EVERYTHING

I read the above quote in this book today. And, having read this phrase, I’m reminded of a line in this book, “Realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have. Make the Now the primary focus of your life. … Always say “yes” to the present moment.”

How you do anything is how you do everything.

What if you decided to start paying deep attention and deep respect to each action you take? What would that feel like? And deep attention and deep respect to each person you interact with – even if it’s the five-second eye contact while crossing the street or a phone call from someone when you’re too busy to relax and give full attention, but what if you did anyway?

Today is today. Today is alive. How you do anything in your life at any point today shows the attitude you have to everything in your life. Respect yourself, your boundaries, your possibilities. How you do anything shows how much you respect yourself.

Take-Away: How you do anything shows your attitude towards doing the other things in your life.