Category: All

Go hear the shofar!

Posted on by Senia

There are a few very fun traditions in Judaism. Passover is one of them – go find a Jewish friend around March and get invited to her or his house for Passover.

ShofarAnother great tradition is the blowing of the shofar, the horn’s ram. This only happens a few times a year! And today – Rosh Hashanah – is one of the times.

Go, go, go! The sound of the shofar is really interesting.
The shofar is the oldest wind instrument.

Here are ten reasons why the shofar is blown, including “the shofar stirs the conscience” and “the shofar reminds Jews of the Day of Final Judgment.”

Here you can read about the four different types of shofar notes, and HERE YOU CAN LISTEN to the sharp and almost primal sound of the shofar.

In non-religious terms, there is a beautiful fairly well-known phrase …

The shofar of freedom shall sound for you and all peoples.

Enjoy.

Posted in All

What’s your most important area for self-regulation?

Posted on by Senia

Why didn’t I post any blog posts last week?
I don’t know. I just didn’t.

It wasn’t that there was more than usual going on last week. It wasn’t that I was holed in a cave allowing myself little access to the outside world. It wasn’t that I was scooped up by aliens.

I don’t know why I didn’t post. And after bragging about being so into the daily postings that I’ll write at 11:58pm, I’ll take the non-postings as well to evaluate them.

So I thought about it, and you’re not even going to believe me. Why – if nothing was especially out of the ordinary – why did I not post even once?

It’s the same thing I’ve been talking positively about in past posts, and now it’s affected me in the downward direction: self-regulation.

I exercised last week half the number of times that I have set for myself to exercise weekly. Half! That’s pretty bad. I exercised two or three times instead of the five times weekly goal. And there hasn’t been another week since Jan 1 when I’ve exercised this little.

So, that’s why. Self-regulation in one area of life seeps into self-regulation in other areas of life. I wasn’t exercising the usual number of times, and other basic plans and schedules went off kilter as well.

Seems pretty boring as an explanation, right? Well, actually not! Not to me.

  • It’s nice that science says that self-regulation in one area seeps into other areas.
  • It’s nice that I see this in my personal experience – when I am self-disciplined in the area of exercise, other things like the food I eat, how carefully I reply to emails, blogging daily, and other organizational matters fall into place. Other people including Penelope with exercise, Mimi with yoga, and E.N. with working out also see this in their personal experience.
  • Furthermore, it’s nice that I see this in my clients’ experience – when they create self-discipline in one part of their life, two weeks later, they’re ready to create self-discipline in another part of life.
  • And finally, it’s also – strange to say – nice that I see the contrary effect in my personal experience as well – when I drop self-discipline in one part of life, self-discipline in other parts drops too. (There’s no study that I know of that looks at the contrary, but it’s kind of illuminating to see this in action).
  • Similarly, it’s nice to see the contrary effect with clients’ experience – well, it’s not nice! but it’s intellectually intriguing that this works in both directions – when self-discipline drops in one part of life, other parts have a tendency to follow.

In fact, if I were working with Roy Baumeister on research about self-regulation and self-discipline, I might be interested to learn whether the contrary similarly occurs – that a drop in self-discipline in one area seeps into a drop in self-discipline in other areas.

My theory would be that a drop in self-discipline in YOUR MOST IMPORTANT AREA would contribute to self-discipline dropping across the board. And my two most important areas are:
* Sleep
* Exercise
Then come good food habits, organization, cleanliness, cleaning the inbox, and other things. Once the first two are in place, a lot of other things work out too.

What is your most important area that if it’s in balance, other things more easily fall into balance?

The one thing to know in a job interview

Posted on by Senia

Make it a conversation.

That’s it. That’s the most important thing. Make your interviewer Joe have a good time; make your interviewer Joe enjoy himself in interviewing you. Make your interviewer Sally have something that she can say back at home to her spouse about how her day went. Make something you say able to be repeated by your interviewer Marcel at a cocktail party.

Make it a conversation.

Well, what do I mean “make it a conversation?” Specifically, I mean:

These may be a lot of bullet points to remember, but you don’t need to remember them. All you need to think about is “How can I make this into an interesting conversation?” I work with clients frequently on interview practice, specifically the interview start.

Two specific tips:

1) How to start the interview in a fun way

  • Ask the first question. Intrerviews follow a path of inertia once they get started. If the first question is to you, you’ve alredy turned the tides into a routine interview. So ask the first question. Ask about the company. Ask about the specific position. Learn something from the answer, and then address what you have learned in some of your follow on questions.
  • Be curious. You don’t know everything. No one expects you to. Ask for clarification when you need it.
  • If boxed into answering first, clarify the question to create a sense of back-and-forth.

2) How to have a conversation within a question

  • Clarify the question. If you’ve been asked something and you don’t want to fall into the routine, “Interviewer asks, interviewee answers,” then clarify the question.

    Interviewer: “Tell me about a time when you’ve shown leadership.”

    YOU: “Would you like that to be in some recent experience or my overall largest example of such a time?”

    Interviewer: “An example from your current job would be great.”

    YOU: “Ok…”
  • “To answer this, could I first ask you a couple of things about [the position, the work environment, the projects]?”
  • Respond to conversational invitiations. Sometimes your interviewer Reggie may take an important call, and then after hanging up, may say, “That was from Operations. We’ve announced that we’re looking to buy a new plant.” Respond to this. Feel free to ask, “Is that good news or bad news?” Be open to these parts of the conversation.

Is Self-Help just “vigor without rigor”?

Posted on by Senia

Why should there be a stigma against self-help books? After all, “self” is a good word. And “help” is a pretty good word.

But you’ve seen it. I’ve seen it. That little turning up of the nose when people speak about the self-help section.

Sure, in some bookstores, the section has a brand new title with “personal development,” but we still know what it is.

I recently heard professor Angela Duckworth of UPenn speak, and she talked about the words “self” and “help” being good words on their own. She also added that there shouldn’t by definition be anything wrong with self-help books. But, she continued, it may be the fact that a lot of the conclusions and results of the books have not at all been tested in any way that tends to put people off. I’d add that it’s like reading opinion books – “I suggest you do this” versus “Well, I suggest you try this other thing.”

But some books just catch on… sometimes there’s a “vigor without rigor” Angela says. And that’s where Positive Psychology comes in. That’s where Positive Psychology can add bang for the buck.

There are studies that you can get excited about because they’ve been shown to be stable again and again. For example:

  • Business teams function best when the ratio of positive comments in the team to negative comments is about 3:1 (for marriages, the optimal ratio is 5:1). Fredrickson/Losada and Gottman.
  • People who have had episodes of depression are much more likely to have follow-on episodes. Seligman and others.
  • When you improve self-control in one area of your life, it will filter through into other areas of your life. Baumeister and others.
  • When a pilot group of Ann Taylor store employees used their strengths for a whole year, their increase in store sales – if projected to cover all of Ann Taylor – would have resulted in a 10% increase in sales. Gallup.
  • People experience more “flow” at work than at home. Csikszentmihalyi and others.

That’s a good reason to like Positive Psychology – because it adds rigor to those things we’ve always wanted to question and study but just may not have yet.

Q: What do you hold onto when you’re sleeping?

Posted on by Senia

Hi, welcome to Friday Questions! Would love to hear your response in the comments, and that’s where you’ll find mine.

Q: What do you hold onto when you’re sleeping?

Have you ever noticed that when you’re waking up, your face may be scrunched up in a thought? Your jaw might be tight or clenched? Your eyebrows may be knotted together? Have you ever noticed some physical reaction in your face as you’re waking up?

Where does this come from – if you have noticed it? What thoughts are bombarding around inside your head like dry rice inside a musical egg shaker? What’s making you tense up your face?

Because that’s what’s happening if you find yourself waking up with your face tensed up – something’s making you think tension-building thoughts.

And then it’s up to you whether those are useful or not useful thoughts. It’s up to you whether those thoughts are productive and more you forward. Sometimes you are in a serious situation in your life in which you may need to focus on situations even during your sleeptime. But often, you’re not in those serious situations.

I’m probably thinking along this wavelength because I just wrote about thoughtless awareness, and am thinking about things that make me aware.

Have a wonderful weekend!

6 ways to do SOMETHING DIFFERENTLY – exactly where you are

Posted on by Senia

Why do you need to travel to Scandinavia to enjoy a hot cup of tea after a meal in a restaurant? This is an idea I spoke with my friend E.C. about years and years ago. I still so simply and truly buy into this. You can be more observant. You can enjoy life more. You can do something different. You can enjoy a hot cup of tea right where you are – both in your kitchen and at a local restaurant.

E.C. told me that he had traveled to China, and had seen so much, and had observed so many details of regular life. And had taken so many photos. And then he wondered why people don’t do the same where they are? Why don’t people look for the details and observe the anomalies of daily living? Why don’t people explore what’s really underfoot?

There’s no expectation to do so, and people are busy, and people are not in a relaxation-enjoy-life mindset, and people feel rushed with daily chores, errands, expectations. But … does it need to be this way?

You don’t need to go to a monastery in India. Or break bread in the mills of Poland. Or dip into the Dead Sea.

Right around where you are. What can you do?

Gretchen wrote about breaking the hedonic treadmill by not having access to sending emails for a few days. Then, when she came back to email, it felt soooo good! Exactly.

My grandmother tells a story of a family with seven children that all lived in one room. The family went to the Rabbi and asked the rabbi, “What can we do? We have no space.” The Rabbi said, “Go get a goat and put her in the center of your one room.” The family said, “What?! That doesn’t make sense.” And the Rabbi said, “That’s my recommendation.” The family came back a week later, and told the Rabbi that didn’t seem to help. The Rabbi said, “Now, take the goat out of the room.”

That’s it! That’s the hedonic treadmill. Change things up. Feel too cramped? Make it more cramped, then relieve the pressure.

And you can create your own new experiences to also break the hedonic treadmill. How can you do something very, very different just exactly where you are?

There’s a folk story about a man for whom everything had gone badly, and he went off to live in a far-off country. He wrote letters to his parents telling them of things going on with him, and eventually, things were not going great in the new place either. So his father write him a letter, “Son, how do you expect things to be very different there? You took down there the same thing that was an issue here – you took yourself. So come back and figure yourself out here. We’d love to see you.”

I read this story as very positive. Like, look inside and make the changes you want to make, and then enjoy yourself and your life more. I can see how it could be read differently, and give the father an overly didactic and moralistic tone, but I don’t think about it that way – I read it as a dad’s concern and suggestion for his son.

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In summary, try any of these 6 ways to do something differently – exactly where you are:

  1. Go to a new restaurant nearby with your spouse or good friend. Dress nicely. Enjoy each bite. Write a review to each other over email afterwards.
  2. Walk in an area of town you know, but take photos as if documenting for National Geographic and email them to friends later.
  3. Do your regular sport but pay attention to each muscle. This is an idea I picked up from David Seah. If you’re not actively doing a sport, do this with walking.
  4. Go enjoy the sun in a new way. Find a day that is sunny. Go outside for ten minutes with the idea of enjoying the sun in a new way. What can you try? With your eyes closed? Sunning just the back of your neck for example? Dancing in the sun?
  5. Buy one flower, and spend ten minutes smelling it differently. Smell it when it’s near you, when it’s far away, when it’s in water, when it’s not, when it’s in the sun, when it’s in the shade. What works best?
  6. Hug something soft – a stuffed animal, a dog, a cat. Really feel how the softness feels. Describe it to a friend.

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You’ll notice a lot of the above ideas are also about sharing the feeling of the something different that you’re doing – sending an email about it, describing it. Go ahead and share. As Karen Salmansohn says, really share. Shaaaaaare.

Thoughtless Awareness

Posted on by Senia

Want to relax more?

To create calmness in your life more generally, start with creating spots of calmness. Find a small oasis of calmness this week. I am actually not at all great at this – at relaxing more, at regular quiet time. I went to a meditation session yesterday, and it was quite wonderful and got me thinking (well, thinking later, actually not-thinking during the session). The opening part was a description of the process. One phrase the organizer said that I really liked – and that is fairly familiar to many meditators – is “thoughtless awareness.”

That you’re aiming to get to thoughtless awareness. That you’re aiming to be extremely, extremely aware of the present moment. And at the same time extremely non-thinking in the moment.

Why might it be useful to try a group meditation session, or just to try sitting in a spirit of calmness? Just like Penelope writes this week about losing ten pounds in two weeks and creating those good habits, to create a habit of calmness, we must practice calmness. I especially like Penelope’s words:

If you become more conscious in one part of your life, you will be able to affect positive, conscious change in many parts of your life with relative ease.

In fact, this is one of the largest internalized teachings that I have from the last two years of positive psychology – what is experiential is absorbed, what is mental is interesting. Do you want life lessons to be absorbed or to be interesting?

In other words, the more you practice something, the more you bring it into your life. How? Two ways:

1) The more you practice something, the more those individual practice sessions accumulate, and expertise is a matter of regular daily actions and accumulations.

2) The more you practice in practice sessions, the more you will call on that practice as an automatic habit when you are in the actual situation! The actual situation may be stress-inducing, but the more you have practiced in a safe, training environment, the more you will be able to call on those skills when the stakes are higher.

For example, people role-play how they will act in media interviews, and that’s the right thing to do! I practice with my clients all the time q-and-a to interview questions, and how best to answer certain questions, and that’s the right thing to do! Why? Because in that interview situation, you are going to fall back on something. You are going to reach for something familiar, and why not have that something be a response that you yourself have trained yourself to have? Why not fall back on the well-practiced and comfortable answering that comes from you anyway, just in a pre-interview low-stress thoughtful setting?

At different meditation I once tried, the instructor encouraged us every time we have a thought to say outloud, “thinking.” And to aim for these times of “thinking” to be fewer as we meditate. The reason this worked so well is that it combined thought and physical by having you actually form the word “thinking” and say it softly outloud. It combined experiential. And the more times you do this, the more aware you can become of what triggers the “thinking,” and how to set it aside for the moment.

What other thoughts do you have on how to get to thoughtless awareness? And on whether this state is helpful to practice or not?

“Burp,” says the wagon.

In summary, sometimes a burp is just a burp. Sometimes what a thing is is just that – what a thing is. Sometimes we don’t need to go deeper.

5 Questions to Make a Decision

Posted on by Senia

Need to make a decision? Not sure where to start?
I just friend-coached someone through this kind of situation.
Let me give you a hypothetical example:

Suppose Jody says, I just got the possibility to take on an additional project! I’m not sure whether to take it or not.

First, I’d ask Jody, “What is the goal you want to get to?”
Jody: “I want to have a balanced life and feel that my career is moving forward.”
“Great, what are you thinking about doing to get to that goal?”
Jody: “I’m thinking of taking on this additional project – or not taking it on.”

“What’s the best thing that could happen if you take on this project?”
Jody: “It would move my career forward. I’d learn some that I don’t know now. I’d work with a new set of people.”

“What’s the worst thing that could happen if you take on this proejct?”
Jody: “I could have less time for friends and for sanity.”

“What’s the worst thing that would happen if you don’t take on the project?”
Jody: “I could not get offered other projects because people will see that I’m busy.”

“What’s the best thing that would happen if you don’t take on the project?”
Jody: “I could have a lot more time.”

“So, how do you feel? Do you want to take on the project?”
Usually, Jody will have a sense at this point.

Five Questions:

1) What is the goal of the action you may take or not take?
2) What’s the BEST thing that can happen if you DO this?
3) What’s the WORST thing that can happen if you DO this?
4) What’s the BEST thing that can happen if you DON’T do this?
5) What’s the WORST thing that can happen if you DON’T do this?

(You can ask 2-5 in any order). Then, consider that to get to your goal, reading back what you’ve said to these answers, what does your gut tell you is the right thing to do?

Finally, the hesitations you had in #3 and #5…. can you find a way to take the decision you want to take and still address those hesitations?

Try it.
Let me know how it goes!

Hey, that mug is mine!

Posted on by Senia

There’s a delightful series of experiments about the power of owning something. One experiment goes like this:
* Students walk into an experiment and they are given a MUG.
* Other students walk into an experiment and they are given a PEN.
* Then a student gets the choice to switch his MUG for a PEN or a PEN for a MUG.
Almost nobody switches! They like the choice that’s been made for them.

Most behavioral economists explain this as the endowment effect – once you own something, just that owning it starts to make it more valuable to you.

I also think there’s a degree of automatic reaction and cognitive dissonance. What do I mean and why am I throwing around buzz words?
* Automatic reaction. Jon Haidt studies automatic reaction – the idea that sometimes you just react and later use your brain to rationalize why you may have reacted in that way. I believe the students just don’t want to give it away (whether because they don’t like change, whether because it’s more valuable to them now, or whether for no reason at all).
* Cognitive dissonance. “Well, I don’t want to give up my mug really. Maybe that means I like the mug more. Maybe that means the mug is more valuable to me.”
* Why buzz words? Because these two buzz word pairs signify EXACTLY the meanings of why people might be saying one thing but acting in another way. These words are like useful shortcuts right now.

So NO to “my MUG for your PEN.”

In another study (and this is from memory), some students were given a mug and then told that they could sell it. The mug cost about $5 at the campus bookstore, and all the students given the mug were willing to sell it – but at an average prce around $7!!! Other students were told they could buy a mug, and these students chose prices at which they would buy the mug – they chose about $3 per mug! So the value of the mug can depends on what eyes you look through.

Seth Godin makes this endowment effect very real and very immediate in his Loss vs. Gain story. In sum – he found “the perfect” domain name. He wanted it. He made a bid on it. The seller wouldn’t take $600 for it. The seller was very happy with his own endoment effect for that domain name. Seth was sad. It’s just this blasted endowmnet effect!

One of the best pieces by The Economist I’ve ever read on any topic is a blog post called Un-Endowing the Endowment Effect. The post states, “Now a new paper scheduled to appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Economic Review argues that this asymmetry might not be as formidable as it seems.” It looks like once you change a few things, the endowment effect may disappear. What would one need to change? Well, something that psychologists rarely like to hear in experimental settings … if the words used when handing the object to a student are different, that makes a difference. Also, if a student can be unobtrusively in signaling an interest to trade, that can make a difference. And if a student can inspect the other good before committing to the exchange, that can make a difference.

Please please please, go read this short Economist post, and especially the most delightful Economist words ever – the last line of this article!