Announcing the Happiness Club NY!
FIRST MEETING ever!
Wednesday, June 20.
Category: BEST POSITIVE PSYCH
Best ideas of positive psychology: happiness, intuition, optimism, health, flow, decision-making, mind and body, goals, habits, great living!
Business Game #004: Putting It in Perspective!
This game is directly from the The Resilience Factor by Karen Reivich and Andrew Shatte.*
Example:
“I’ve given this proposal to my boss a half-hour late. He was expecting it. I knew when the deadline was. I just wasn’t finished. And now he’ll be freaked out – he’ll yell at me – he might even fire me. I might have no money to live on. I’ll have to go ask friends for handouts. I’ll have to give up renting my apartment.” This type of downhill spiral thinking is a prime example of a situation in which this exercise can be used.
When:
* When a situation appears overwhelming.
* When you get into a 3am discussion with yourself ruminating and catastrophizing about things that can go wrong.
* When you may be blowing up a very nasty concrete situation into a prolonged many-year huge-consequences event.
Goal of the Game:
To “take the edge off” (as Karen Reivich says in trainging teachers in resilience techniques). To nip anxiety before it grows into self-created stress. To be able to function in a situation even when it seems overwhelming.
How Long to Play: 20 minutes.
Players: Alone, with one person, or with many.
Materials Needed: Paper and pen. Or a new Word document.
HOW TO PLAY:
Worst Thoughts – Best Thoughts – Most Likely – Preparing for Most Likely.
1) Write down your worst thoughts.
* Write down the triggering situation (e.g. I handed in the proposal a half-hour late), and all the resulting possible worst-case situations.
2) Estimate the probabilities of your worst case scenario.(optional: Karen and Andrew are very big on this step, but I don’t think this step is as important, so I call it optional).
* Getting fired 1%
* Having no money at all .001%
* Etc.
3) Write down your best-case scenarios.
* In the above example, “I handed in the resport late, but the boss’s boss was there, and he saw it at the time it came in, and he thought it was wonderful and offered me a promotion, now I make 26x more than I ever did, and I live in a $5 million home, and I go to the race track on the weekends.”
4) Write down the most likely implications.
Forget the worst, forget the best. Now, write down what are really the most likely implications. Will the boss get angry? Yes, likely. Will he fire you? No, not likely.
5) How can you handle these most likely implications?
Write down some steps so that you can handle the most likley implications. If you expect your boss to be angry, maybe send him an apology by email in advance. If you expect that the proposal may not get out on time to FedEx, offer to drive it to the last-closing FedEx in your state. Think of rational, actual steps you can take.
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After you take the above steps, what often happens is that you … feel better.
What the above game does more than anything else is it can take the edge off a situation. It can make a situation more manageable. And in that time, you can take action, and more your life forward in other ways! Enjoy.
Image: Perspective.
The full version of the “Putting It in Perspective” exercise can be found on pages 168-185 of The Resilience Factor: 7 Keys to Finding Your Inner Strength and Overcoming Life’s Hurdles.
Why Be Funny
“This I conceive to be the chemical function of humor: to change the character of our thought.”
~ Lin Yutang
Delayed Gratification vs. Enjoying the Present
In a comment last month, Michael writes,
So, my question is: if success is often dependent on delayed gratification and happiness is often dependent on enjoying the present, as well as achieving some measure of success, then how do we reconcile all these things?
What’s your answer?
I’ll start with mine, and would love to debate it.
Just like I wrote yesterday about doing exercise at 9:56pm on a Sunday to make sure I get in the right number of workouts for that week, I think you choose your battles. There are some things that you may be willing to delay gratification in – with the expectation of stronger gains in the future. I don’t mind not chilling and relaxing on a Sunday evening … as long as my cardio is stronger and my muscles more defined down the road.
I do mind having no weekends to myself – so that’s something I wouldn’t allow myself to do. In coaching, it’s easy to schedule people in on evenings, mornings, weekends. And I love doing early morning calls and evening calls, but I rarely, rarely do the weekend. That’s a sanity measure… even though to some degree delaying my weekends for a year might make the coaching business more exciting earlier, but – hey, why?
“Enjoying the present” – doesn’t this phrase sound like time passing slowly, like a river running. It’s almost, in answer to Michael – it’s almost that you may not be able to buckle down and do the discipline things unless you have enough psychological capital in you to be able to take those things on. And that psychological capital will come to a large degree from your taking good care of yourself, which may include enjoying the present.
To some degree, I see them feeding each other. What do you guys think?
Thanks!
Why I’m writing this at 11:58pm
It’s the same reason that I exercised yesterday – on Sunday – at 9:56pm (the very tippy top end part of the weekend).
There are some guidelines that I’ve set for myself.
Such as posting a blog post daily M-F.
Such as exercising five times per week (and Sunday was the end of the week).
Such as eating healthily.
It doesn’t even matter what my specific guidelines are. It just matters that I stick to them.
I don’t know what the research is – but I do believe it – that focusing on one thing at a time when creating new habits is the way to go. I learned this lesson in rock climbing. And I use it across the board.
Talk to you tomorrow! S.
Rabbit, Rabbit June
The big thing about a new month is that things seem doable – the possibilities seem endless… how can we hold onto this kind of feeling throughout the month?!
How can we increase our challenges regularly during the month?
* One way is to have a system, a graph, or a method to map your monthly challenges. Jeff talks about that briefly here.
* Another way to increase challenge is to plan your future out before it happens. When I have a client meeting the next day, I already plan what we will discuss, and suggestions for the client for homework – I come in with a Word document outline. And I don’t mind if it changes during the session, but there are things that are the increased trajectory of the client’s path, and I want to respect that in planning for the session rather than just have us both talk about what is top of mind that morning. As Jon Bon Jovi is said to have said, “Write your future, but do it in pencil.” I like that. Map it out – plan it – be bold – be specific. But be open to change.
* Another way is to have a buddy system or a reminder system. My friend D is very big on this, and she makes the other person work harder because of it. It’s empowering and encouraging.
Do you have other ways to increase your challenge during the month?
What’s the best part of today?!?! :)
What’s the best part of today, June 1?
* June 1 is International Children’s Day.
* June 1 was Marilyn Monroe’s birthday.
* And, in news especially close to my heart since it refers to my favorite instrument, June 1 starts National Accordion Awareness Month in the U.S.!
QUESTION:
What’s the best thing that happened to you today? OR
What’s the best thing that you expect to happen today!?
My answer is in the comments. Welcome to question Fridays! Would love to know what the best part of today, June 1st, was for you!
Negotiate with Yourself
Michael Felberbaum writes about the article from last week’s Harvard Business Review (HBR) about how great leaders think. Michael says that the HBR article argues that if you have one ok choice, it’s better to create a second choice for yourself, and then choose between the two choices becuase choosing between two will give you a better result than going with one ok choice when it may be the only option. Michael writes about a hidden benefit that may come out of expanding one choice into two choices:
If we follow this “rule” of finding at least two good options, I think we make better decisions. I have been piloting this for myself in trying to resolve some decisions I’ve lingered on for a while about a book I’m working on. I was trying to find an ideal solution. Instead I’ve found two workable options. Amazingly, I think a third option will emerge from those two and it will be closer to my ideal. I’m finding that the benefit of this “rule” is to fully engage creative decision-making which involves comparison, contrast and cost/benefit trade-offs.
I like two ideas especially in what Michael writes:
1) that he expects that once he engages in two ideas, a third better one will likely come along
2) that he enjoys comparing, trading-off benefits/costs between the options
I think of this comparing and contrasting as “negotiating with yourself.” You need to up the stakes. You need to get to a higher level of challenge, and a potentially higher level of flow (ideal combination of skills and challenge).
If you have one choice, you probably haven’t gone as deeply or as far as you could into many domains. You may likely not have pushed yourself as hard as you could have. At least getting two options allows you to negotiate with yourself – to play the game of, “did I push hard enough?”
Remember the Dunkin Donuts commercial with the angel and the devil? Well, it’s time to push myself harder. It’s time to negotiate with an angel version of myself and a devil version of myself.
Get two ideas, and the world already expands! That’s why I think Michael believes that once you have two, a third will likely come your way… because you’ve already proven to your brain that there’s more than one, and maybe it keeps looking (automatically) while you relax.
More on Telling the Story of Your Life
I recently wrote an article on Positive Psychology News Daily: “How You Tell the Story of Your Life.”
Here’s another example of a story you can tell yourself that then puts your body or your mind into automatic action:
A friend of mine who is a computer scientist and very interested in using the scientific method to prove things wanted to lose weight. But he didn’t want to change his eating habits or start exercising, so all he did is start measuring his weight on the bathroom scale every morning and writing it down. Within thirty days, just from the daily observations and recording, he had dropped ten pounds.
What is the story that the mind tells the body? Isn’t this just like the hotel workers in the PPND article who were told their daily activity is plenty of exercise, and who then went on to lose weight?
UPDATE: An online friend told me that the above wasn’t 100% clear. Did he think that he would lose weight? Did he expect it?
Yes, he thought that just by paying attention to the weight that it would decrease, and it did. The story he told himself is that he doesn’t want to consciously change any habits, but that he wants to weigh less. So, in fact, he was making subtle automatic changes that were comfortable to him. And his reasoning is that he never felt the changes, and he believes that the changes in his habits (enough to make his lose ten pounds in a month) occured because he was focused on this idea, and told himself subconsciously the story that he was going to lose weight. Without knowing how he would do it.
What’s the easiest new health habit that you could take on?
Hello, welcome to Question Fridays… My answer is in the comments section – I invite you to put your answer in the comments section as well!
It’s just about full-fledged summer!
Q: What’s the easiest new health habit that you could take on?
What’s a habit that it wouldn’t take you that much effort to start? That it might just take some focus and concentration but not necessarily a lot of work? What’s a habit that would be an easy addition, would be health-promoting, and you’d be happy to have for this summer?