Senia Maymin, Ph.D. – Brave Job Search
Senior Leaders: Get a new job *before* you get laid off
Best ideas of positive psychology: happiness, intuition, optimism, health, flow, decision-making, mind and body, goals, habits, great living!
I was at a talk a few days ago, and the speaker in his last exercise, asked us to speak to a partner about a goal we want to accomplish in the next 30 days.
September is the time we used to return to school as kids. September is when people return from vacations and buckle down again to work. September is a time for new things, including new projects and new habits.
What is your September goal?
On the day of Rosh Hashanah, the New Year, I wish you to plan even bigger than you imagined before, and to meet with a success unparalleled in common hours, and I wish you comfort in your own approval of all these events. In other words, think big, act bigger.
Don’t be so humble, you’re not that great.
~ Golda Meir
If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with success unexpected in common hours.
~ Henry David Thoreau
A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval.
~ Mark Twain
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.
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?
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
2) How to have a conversation within a question
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:
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.
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!
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:
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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.
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.
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!
“There’s a new way of creating in the world. I was just talking to a man who is very driven in his work in the stock market, and he said success is all a matter of will, and I said, no, I think it’s all a matter of belief.
“We talked about the image of sandpipers on the beach: they run up, get all the delicious food in the sand, then run back – and their feet never get wet. They’re always in harmony, and in rhythm with the ebb and flow of the ocean. And what’s happening with women now is they are bringing to the party of life the concept of that ebb and flow with natural law. There’s no willfulness around it. Willfulness is masculine energy, which this society has been built on, but it is not the natural way.
“And that’s what you need to do. You don’t finish the ten thousand things on the list, and then get to you, who is ten thousand and one; what you want to do is make a practice of what centering and what quietude really is. And quietude is actually flowing with the flow – back to the sandpiper again. He’s not frantic, running back and forth; he’s rhythmic with the flow.'”
“[O]ur lives inherently have the power and unlimited capacity of a mighty river. … Then through positive energy rituals to train our physical, emotional, mental and spiritual capacities, we will create a dam to harness the power of the river and continually refresh the lake that is our life.”
Dana Arakawa, paraphrasing Greg Martin