Living in More Than One World

Last week I wrote a guest post for LexisNexis Government Info Pro, Creating Your Total Life List for 2012. Much has been written at the end of last year and the beginning of this one about new beginnings. But as we get deeper into January, it’s easy for the fresh feeling to wear off. No matter how many systems you use to better your life, having handy reminders for self-improvement are always helpful:
1. Time management and productivity: Jason Womack, whose book Your Best Just Got Better: Work Smarter, Think Bigger, Make More, will be released next month, is interviewed by Meridith Levinson for CIO.com, in Time Management: 6 Ways to Improve Your Productivity. (Meridith  interviewed me in 2009, for Peter Drucker as Life Coach: Book Shares His Wisdom.) What’s valuable about Jason’s advice is that it is work-specific, and we can never get enough good tips in this realm.
2. Happiness: This a topic gets hotter every year. For evidence see the January-February 2012 Harvard Business Review, with a number of happiness-themed articles, including Shawn Achor’s Positive Intelligence. Shawn wrote a terrific book, The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work, in 2010. Also check out The Happiness Advantage: An Interview with Shawn Achor, on the World of Psychology blog.
3.  Mindfulness and Stress Reduction: The British duo of Danny Penman and Mark Williams, authors of Mindfulness: An Eight-Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World, have a guest piece for CNN.com, Destress your life in 10 easy steps. Also have a look at their recent posts for Psychology Today. For a personal account of the benefits of mindfulness meditation, see Newsweek’s Mindfulness Meditation Is Rediscovered, by Amy Gross, the former editor in chief of O, the Oprah Magazine.
4. Lifelong Learning: Opportunities abound, from taking classes (both in person and online) to self-directed learning from books and articles in print and online. For quick, painless tips and idea-starters, check out Newsweek’s 31 Ways to Get Smarter in 2012.
Obviously there are many other categories, strategies and techniques for improving your life this year. But any one of the four above would be a great place to start.

Check out Chip Conley’s wide-ranging May 18 ideas in Huffington Post, What We Measure Matters. Conley is both a practitioner and a writer; as founder and CEO of the San Francisco-based Joie de Vivre Hospitality and the author of such books as PEAK: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo From Maslow. The latter is about applying psychologist Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs theory to the business world, taking a concept developed for the individual and applying it organizationally. In his post, Conley discusses how his company asks questions of its employees to help them consider the highest levels of attaining meaning from one’s work and making a positive difference in the experience of the people they serve. Their answers, in his view, help even hourly workers performing tasks such as cleaning toilets see the larger context of their work. Conley says the small country of Bhutan is doing something similar to the application of Maslow’s theory with its Gross National Happiness index, moving away from the traditional economic measurement of Gross Domestic Product to less tangible, but highly important, measures of personal satisfaction and well-being. He wrote about his visit to Bhutan to learn more about the index and how it played out in the lives of its people in a May 11 post in Huffington Post, The Happiest Place on the Planet? For more on Bhutan and its index, see the May 7 Seth Mydans article in The New York Times, Thimphu Journal: Recalculating Happiness in a Himalayan Kingdom.

The pros and cons of curiosity in life are explored in a great radio interview yesterday with psychology professor Todd Kashdan, of George Mason University, on The Kojo Nnamdi Show, produced by WAMU-FM. (It’s the public broadcasting station of my undergrad alma mater, The American University, in Washington, D.C., and also the producer of The Diane Rehm Show.) Kashdan was promoting his new book Curious? Discover the Missing Ingredient to a Fulfilling Life. For more on Kashdan and the book, see his Q&A with Positive Psychology News Daily, and his blog. He’s also one of the interviewees in Deborah Kotz’s recent usnews.com post, 10 Secrets to Finding Happiness During the Recession.

Can we really predict the things that will make us happy? How does that relate to how much time and effort we allocate to various activities in life? Art Markman, a psychology professor at the University of Texas at Austin, addresses this in “Delusions of grandeur II: Overexcited, overanxious, and ready for action,” for his Psychology Today blog. Markman’s post references two other psychology professors: Harvard’s Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness and Tobias Greitemeyer of the University of Sussex.

Also worth reading is a short piece in the May-June 2009 Foreign Policy, The Next Big Thing: Happiness, by Swarthmore College psychology professor Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less. He reminds us that a lot more goes into the measure of a country’s well-being than purely economic factors. Many of us, he says, knew about the factors (such as community, family and friends) that contribute to our happiness, but downplayed them in the pursuit of wealth and risk until reality hit.

In the ongoing spirit of rethinking and reframing our lives, it’s worth reading Paul B. Farrell’s gentle advice in The Zen Millionaire’s 14 Secrets to Happiness on MarketWatch.com. He references such diverse sources as Warren Buffett, Charles M. Schultz (creator of Peanuts), Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (author of Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience; formerly based at the Drucker School) and the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh.

It echoes and builds on advice he gave in a similar column in August 2007, Crash course for ‘happier millionaires’. Farrell includes a reading list of 10 books to set you on the road to happiness, including Flow, the Dalai Lama’s The Art of Happiness (written with Howard C. Cutler), Jacob Needleman’s Money and the Meaning of Life, Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness and Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind.

Needless to say, these columns are not for millionaires or aspiring millionaires only. They have perspective-setting ideas for anyone trying to navigate today’s crazy economy.