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.

Margaret Heffernan poses a stark question in the title of her recent entry on Huffington Post, Is Daniel Kahneman Really the World’s Greatest Living Psychologist? Kahneman, the Princeton University Nobel laureate who currently has a huge best-seller in Thinking, Fast and Slow, has been getting lots of media attention as his book has climbed the charts. What’s really valuable about Heffernan’s post is bringing together short descriptions of other eminent psychologists who have developed followings beyond their own field.
Before his hit book, Kahneman’s work was often referenced in business books, especially those that are oriented towards the mind and personal/professional development. But other psychologists have gotten that treatment as well, including another in Heffernan’s post, Stanford University’s Carol Dweck. Like Kahneman, she wrote a book for a non-specialist readership, in her case the terrific Mindset:The New Psychology of  Success. Her work was featured prominently in Daniel Pink’s Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, and she’s also been written about by Malcolm Gladwell. Besides Dweck, two other Stanford psychologists are in the post, both of whom have done ground-breaking work: Albert Bandura (including his fascinating theory of self-efficacy) and Philip Zimbardo, whose infamous Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971 was later described in his own book for a general audience, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil.
As Heffernan notes, whether or not Kahneman is our greatest living psychologist is ultimately beside the point.  She writes that it is wonderful that we live in a time when so many of these people “are alive and productive, doing elegant and thoughtful work with immediate and lasting relevance to how we live our lives.” And it’s also true that as a society, the fact that the works of mind-oriented authors like Kahneman (not to mention Gladwell, Pink, Dan Ariely and so many others) reach the best-seller lists is surely a good sign.

The most valuable books for personal transformation are often short, practical and to-the-point. That is an apt description of Laura Goodrich’s just-released Seeing Red Cars: Driving Yourself, Your Team, and Your Organization to a Positive Future. Laura is the co-owner of On Impact Productions; and also a consultant, radio/TV/film host and a fellow Berrett-Koehler author. You can read a free excerpt from her book and see her new promotional video at her page on the B-K website. I met Laura last June at the B-K Authors Cooperative Marketing Workshop. I wasn’t surprised that her book is full of solid, actionable advice, because in one of the exercises during the workshop, we were in the same “co-consulting” group to briefly discuss areas in our professional lives that we wanted to work on. I found her to be genuinely thoughtful and interesting/interested, while helping me to think about new ways to approach problems. That’s a big premise of her book: how we think about what we want in life determines not only how we act – or don’t act – but also what we create and receive, personally and professionally. We get more of what we focus on, and for many of us, we focus on what we don’t want, rather than what we do want. She covers both the personal and organizational levels, with exercises to help you determine your passions, interests, goals and values. What particularly interests me is her material on being well-rounded. Her added focus on family and friends, health/fitness, personal finance, spirituality/faith, volunteerism and other areas provides a strong added dimension beyond the workplace. Dr. Ellen Weber, a brain researcher who is interviewed in the book, also has an interesting post about it in her new Forbes blog, Mind Makeover. One final note: the company you keep has an effect on how you think and view the world. Remember this Goodrich suggestion from Seeing Red Cars this weekend and beyond: “Hang around with people who have very positive thinking.”

Today marks the fourth anniversary of the sudden, untimely death at forty-five of Richard Carlson, the psychologist/author of the best-selling Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff series of self-help books.  I devoted nearly a page and a half of my book, in a section on leaving your legacy, to Carlson’s example. I wrote that I twice interviewed and wrote about him for USA TODAY. In our telephone conversations, he seemed very in line with his image: a genuinely nice guy, who had important things to say, and who was adept at getting his ideas across in reader/listener friendly ways. (I happened to come across his phone number in an old address book the other day; a somewhat eerie experience, considering how close it was to the anniversary of his death.) At this time of year especially, it would benefit many of us to consider two things about his legacy: 1. The importance – despite the difficulty – of heeding his message about not getting too stressed out about little things (even if they don’t seem little at the time). His books conveyed the related message that many of our problems can be dealt with by stopping to consider options before leaping to negative conclusions. 2. He put a lot of care and devotion into his work each day, and part of the result was many books, web materials and articles that will continue to nourish people for years. His life example helps prove that it is what we do daily that contributes to our legacy for the future. Carlson also wrote about the fact that not all problems are small: his 2002 book What About the Big Stuff? Finding Strength and Moving Forward When the Stakes Are High deals with tough topics in ways that are ultimately positive, optimistic and life-affirming. His work has been extended and expanded upon by his widow, Kristine Carlson, who is a prolific author and media presence in her own right.

To further your introspection about careers and the workplace, read the thought-provoking Huffington Post entry by the business psychologist and psychotherapist Douglas LaBier, The 4.0 Career Is Coming…Are You Ready? I took an engaging continuing education class taught by LaBier in 1999 for the Smithsonian Associates, in Washington. He also blogs for Psychology Today. His 4.0 post outlines the different stages of careers. In some ways, the ladders from 1.0 to 4.00 are reminiscent of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. LaBier starts with the most basic to the most evolved (and for many, elusive) 4.0, which reaches beyond the 3.0 search for meaning, purpose and balance in one’s work to assuring that it has a positive impact on others. “In essence,” LaBier writes, “the 4.0 careerist is motivated by a sense of service to and connection with the larger human community through the product or service he or she contributes to.” With high unemployment, work in the 3.0 and 4.0 spheres may seem like an unattainable luxury for many. Yet considering work in LaBier’s framework is a useful exercise to help us think about and determine what we really want from how we spend so much of our time and effort. And even if a career of this type may not be possible now, it doesn’t mean that always will be the case.  LaBier also provides a list of 10 points “to assess yourself and your work environment in relation to the 4.0 careerist.” Some of these can be thought of as best-case scenarios; the type of work environment you’d like to aim for, but that probably does not exist in many places. Then again, if you are in the right position, you can work towards creating these ideal environments, for you and others. One final thought: 4.0, as evolved as it is, probably isn’t the ultimate. What will constitute the 5.0 Career, and beyond?

Today’s post was inspired by a suggestion from my friend and Catholic University colleague Kimberly Hoffman. The new school year has started, and both teachers and students need a framework for managing themselves in navigating the fall and spring semesters. Consider these tips in the days and months ahead: 1. Coursework can be all-consuming. Make sure you are maintaining your health by taking some time for exercise and mind-body activities such as yoga or the Alexander Technique. 2. Determine what constitutes your “total life” during the school year. Make a list of all your activities and commitments (especially work and family obligations) inside and outside of the classroom. You will then be better able to summon the proper effort for schoolwork. 3. Make communication a personal priority, both in speaking and listening. Are you clear about the commitments and expectations for each class? 4. Inside and outside of class, look for activities that encourage the highly-engaged, mentally stimulating feeling of flow, as outlined by the psychologist/author Mihaly Csiskszentmihalyi. 5. Make time for reading of books in subject matters outside of what you are studying or teaching, even if it’s just a few minutes each night before falling asleep, or while riding on the bus or train. 6. Stretch beyond your regular subjects by attending at least one public lecture or presentation by a visiting speaker on campus (or at another local school) in another discipline. 7. Look for the sense of meaning in what you are studying or teaching, and how it relates to your life, now and in the future. You can help maintain a proper attitude and sense of belief in your abilities by applying principles from positive psychology. No matter how many of these seven tips for self-management you employ, I hope you find them useful. Additional suggestions are welcome!

If, like me, you are reluctant to show your sketches to other people, be sure to read Art Markman’s new Psychology Today blog post, Tools for Innovation III: Sketches and your brain. Art is a friend and a cognitive scientist at the University of Texas at Austin. The post is one of three recent ones based on ideas (in this case from a chapter by Barbara Tversky and Masaki Suwa) from an Oxford University Press book he and UT engineering professor Kristin Wood co-edited, Tools for Innovation. When you have ideas for innovation, sometimes the best ways to think about, formulate and communicate them are by making some sort of visual representation, even if it is crude, dashed off and open to interpretation. But Art correctly points out that many of us are concerned about what people will think of our less-than-stellar artistic talents, so we either don’t make the sketch, or don’t show it to others. “But it is these very limitations in our ability to sketch perfect what we are thinking,” he writes, “that leaves room for those drawings to be reinterpreted.” If we can get over this limitation, there is a potential for a real breakthrough, because other people may have interpretations we wouldn’t have considered, and that can sharpen our thinking. Another concept he points out is that since so much of the brain is visually-oriented, limiting your ideas to either spoken words, or words on paper, can act as a damper on your creativity. In a similar vein, see Dan Roam’s bestselling book The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures.

I’m about to begin a teaching semester, and many of us will be either teaching, taking classes, pursuing degrees or involved in self-learning ventures this summer. In that spirit, you should benefit from Tad Waddington’s short and to-the-point May 22 Smarts blog on Psychology Today, Smarts: Four things worth learning about learning. Waddington, author of the book Lasting Contribution: How to Think, Plan, and Act to Accomplish Meaningful Work, demonstrates how with additional focused effort and thinking about what we are trying to learn, we’ll gain greater understanding and recall. This is especially true today when we are bombarded by so much material online, in print and on TV and radio. If you add that to the material you are teaching or learning, it can create serious information overload.  He suggests such strategies as reading and re-reading a passage for understanding, but then writing out or saying aloud its meaning.  Also: doing something backward as well as forward (it seems like this one can be fairly tricky), retesting to see if you really understand what you’re trying to learn or accomplish (see how he references Peter Drucker on this one) and trying to understand the theory or principle behind a fact, not just the fact itself. He intriguingly calls the latter behavior “a self-imposed learning disability.” That concept gives us something to think about as we transition to the summer months: how do we hold ourselves back by the way we think and learn?

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.