We in Greenleaf Integrative Strategies are currently in the process of organizing technical assistance in Mumbai to psychosocial and mental health workers responding to the recent terror attacks. The Government of India’s National Disaster Management Authority has deemed there to be a major shortage in professionally-trained, disaster-prepared practitioners.
Greenleaf's programs include Professional Development and Continuing Education that work best in the late acute or post acute periods of mass disaster. We will play a supportive role to practitioners (therapists, spiritual care providers & health care workers) in order to enhance the sustainability of disaster response.
It is of the utmost importance that practitioners do not prematurely burnout or develop trauma themselves in the process of working in the midst of terrorized people. Supervisors and organizations can learn how to manage practitioners’ stress levels with self-care and other methodologies in order to mitigate vicarious traumatization, secondary traumatic stress and compassion fatigue.
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Monday, December 15, 2008
This is Your Brain on Bliss
by Matthieu Ricard
http://www.yesmagazine.org/article.asp?id=3046
Matthieu Ricard quit his career as a cellular geneticist nearly 40 years ago to study Buddhism. He is the French translator for the Dalai Lama.
What is happiness, and how can we achieve it?
Happiness can't be reduced to a few agreeable sensations. Rather, it is a way of being and of experiencing the world-a profound fulfillment that suffuses every moment and endures despite inevitable setbacks.
The paths we take in search of happiness often lead us to frustration and suffering instead. We try to create outer conditions that we believe will make us happy. But it is the mind itself that translates outer conditions into happiness or suffering. This is why we can be deeply unhappy even though we "have it all"-wealth, power, health, a good family, etc.-and, conversely, we can remain strong and serene in the face of hardship.
Authentic happiness is a way of being and a skill to be cultivated. When we first begin, the mind is vulnerable and untamed, like that of a monkey or a restless child. It takes practice to gain inner peace, inner strength, altruistic love, forbearance, and other qualities that lead to authentic happiness.
His Holiness the Dalai Lama often teaches that, while there are limitations to how much information one can learn and to our physical performance, compassion can be developed boundlessly.
Practicing Happiness
It is not difficult to begin. You just have to sit from time to time, turn your mind within, and let your thoughts calm down. Focus your attention on a chosen object. It can be an object in your room, your breath, or your own mind. Inevitably, your mind will wander as you do this. Each time it does, gently bring it back to the object of concentration, like a butterfly that returns again and again to a flower.
In the freshness of the present moment, past is gone, future is not yet born, and-if one remains in pure mindfulness and freedom-disturbing thoughts arise and go without leaving a trace. That is basic meditation.
Pure consciousness without content is something all those who meditate regularly and seriously have experienced-it is not just some sort of Buddhist theory. And anyone who takes the trouble to stabilize and clarify his or her mind will be able to experience it, too. It is through this unconditioned aspect of consciousness that we can transform the content of mind through training.
But meditation also means to cultivate basic human qualities, such as attention and compassion, and new ways of experiencing the world. What really matters is that a person gradually changes. Over months and years, we become less impatient, less prone to anger, less torn between hopes and fears. It becomes inconceivable to willingly harm another person. We develop a propensity toward altruistic behavior and the cluster of qualities that give us the resources to deal with the ups and downs of life.
The point here is that you can look at your thoughts, including strong emotions, with a pure mindfulness that is not associated with the contents of the thoughts.
Take the example of malevolent anger. We usually identify with anger. Anger can fill our mental landscape and project its distorted reality on people and events. When we are overwhelmed by anger, we cannot dissociate from it. We perpetuate a vicious circle of affliction by rekindling anger each time we see or remember the person who makes us angry. We become addicted to the cause of suffering.
But if we dissociate from anger and look at it with mindfulness, that which is aware of anger is not angry, and we can see that anger is just a bunch of thoughts. Anger doesn't cut like a knife, burn like a fire, or crush like a rock; it is nothing more than a product of our mind. Instead of "being" the anger, we understand that we are not the anger, in the same way that clouds are not the sky.
So, to deal with anger, we avoid letting our mind jump again and again to the trigger for our anger. Then we look at anger itself and keep our attention upon it. If we stop adding wood to a fire and just watch, the fire will die out. Likewise, anger will vanish away, without being forcibly repressed or allowed to explode.
There is no question of not experiencing emotions; it's a question of not being enslaved by them. Let emotions arise, but let them be freed from their afflictive components: distortion of reality, mental confusion, clinging, and suffering for oneself and others.
There is great virtue in resting from time to time in pure awareness of the present moment, and being able to refer to this state when afflictive emotions arise so that we do not identify with them and are not swayed by them.
It is difficult in the beginning, but becomes quite natural as you become increasingly familiar with such an approach. Whenever anger arises, you learn to recognize it right away. If you know someone to be a pickpocket, even if he mingles in a crowd, you will spot him right away and keep a careful eye on him.
Interdependence
Just as you can learn to deal with afflictive thoughts, you can learn to cultivate and enhance wholesome ones. To be filled with love and kindness brings about an optimal way of being. It is a win-win situation: you will enjoy lasting well-being for yourself, you'll act in altruistic ways towards others, and you'll be perceived as a good human being.
If altruistic love is based on an understanding of the interdependence of all beings and of their natural aspiration to happiness, and if this love extends impartially to all beings, then it is a source of genuine happiness. Acts of overflowing love, of pure, disinterested generosity-as when you make a child happy or help someone in need, even if nobody knows what you have done-generate a deep and heartwarming fulfillment.
The Habits of Happiness
TED TALK: Listen to Matthieu Ricard answer the questions: What is Happiness, and How Can We All Get Some?
Human qualities often come in clusters. Altruism, inner peace, strength, freedom, and genuine happiness thrive together like the parts of a nourishing fruit. Likewise, selfishness, animosity, and fear grow together. So, while helping others may not always be "pleasant," it leads the mind to a sense of inner peace, courage, and harmony with the interdependence of all things and beings.
Afflictive mental states, on the other hand, begin with self-centeredness, with an increase in the gap between self and others. These states are related to excessive self-importance and self-cherishing associated with fear or resentment towards others, and grasping for outer things as part of a hopeless pursuit of selfish happiness. A selfish pursuit of happiness is a lose-lose situation: you make yourself miserable and make others miserable as well.
Inner conflicts are often linked with excessive rumination on the past and anticipation of the future. You are not truly paying attention to the present moment, but are engrossed in your thoughts, going on and on in a vicious circle, feeding your ego and self-centeredness.
This is the opposite of bare attention. To turn your attention inside means to look at pure awareness itself and dwell without distraction, yet effortlessly, in the present moment.
If you cultivate these mental skills, after a while you won't need to apply contrived efforts anymore. You can deal with mental perturbations like the eagles I see from the window of my hermitage in the Himalayas deal with crows. The crows often attack them, diving at the eagles from above. But, instead of doing all kinds of acrobatics, the eagle simply retracts one wing at the last moment, lets the diving crow pass, and then extends its wing again. The whole thing requires minimal effort and causes little disturbance.
Being experienced in dealing with the sudden arising of emotions in the mind works in a similar way.
I have been exposed to the world of humanitarian activities for a number of years since I decided to dedicate the entire royalties of my books to 30 projects on education and health in Tibet, Nepal, and India, with a group of dedicated volunteers and generous philanthropists. It is easy to see how corruption, clashes of ego, weak empathy, discouragement can plague the humanitarian world. All this stems from a lack of maturity. So the advantages of spending time to develop human altruism and compassionate courage are obvious.
The Fragrance of Peace
The most important time to meditate or do other types of spiritual practices is early in the morning. You set the tone for the day and the "fragrance" of the meditation will remain and give a particular perfume to the whole day. Another important time is before falling asleep. If you clearly generate a positive state of mind, filled with compassion or altruism, this will give a different quality to the whole night.
When people experience "moments of grace", or "magical moments" in daily life, while walking in the snow under the stars or spending a beautiful moment with dear friends by the seaside, what is really happening? All of a sudden, they have left their burden of inner conflicts behind. They feel in harmony with others, with themselves, with the world. It is wonderful to fully enjoy such magical moments, but it is also revealing to understand why they feel so good: pacification of inner conflicts; a better sense of interdependence with everything rather than fragmenting reality; and a respite from the mental toxins of aggression and obsession. All these qualities can be cultivated through developing wisdom and inner freedom. This will lead not just to a few moments of grace but to a lasting state of well-being that we may call genuine happiness.
In this state, feelings of insecurity gradually give way to a deep confidence that you can deal with life's ups and downs. Your equanimity will spare you from being swayed like mountain grass in the wind by every possible praise and blame, gain and loss, comfort and discomfort. You can always draw on deep inner peace, and the waves at the surface will not appear as threatening.
Matthieu Ricard wrote this article as part of Sustainable Happiness, the Winter 2009 issue of YES! Magazine. Matthieu has authored seven books, including Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life's Most Important Skill. He lives at the Shechen monastery in Nepal, travels the world for Karuna-shechen (www.karuna-shechen.org) and does an annual solitary retreat in the Himalayas.
http://www.yesmagazine.org/article.asp?id=3046
Matthieu Ricard quit his career as a cellular geneticist nearly 40 years ago to study Buddhism. He is the French translator for the Dalai Lama.
What is happiness, and how can we achieve it?
Happiness can't be reduced to a few agreeable sensations. Rather, it is a way of being and of experiencing the world-a profound fulfillment that suffuses every moment and endures despite inevitable setbacks.
The paths we take in search of happiness often lead us to frustration and suffering instead. We try to create outer conditions that we believe will make us happy. But it is the mind itself that translates outer conditions into happiness or suffering. This is why we can be deeply unhappy even though we "have it all"-wealth, power, health, a good family, etc.-and, conversely, we can remain strong and serene in the face of hardship.
Authentic happiness is a way of being and a skill to be cultivated. When we first begin, the mind is vulnerable and untamed, like that of a monkey or a restless child. It takes practice to gain inner peace, inner strength, altruistic love, forbearance, and other qualities that lead to authentic happiness.
His Holiness the Dalai Lama often teaches that, while there are limitations to how much information one can learn and to our physical performance, compassion can be developed boundlessly.
Practicing Happiness
It is not difficult to begin. You just have to sit from time to time, turn your mind within, and let your thoughts calm down. Focus your attention on a chosen object. It can be an object in your room, your breath, or your own mind. Inevitably, your mind will wander as you do this. Each time it does, gently bring it back to the object of concentration, like a butterfly that returns again and again to a flower.
In the freshness of the present moment, past is gone, future is not yet born, and-if one remains in pure mindfulness and freedom-disturbing thoughts arise and go without leaving a trace. That is basic meditation.
Pure consciousness without content is something all those who meditate regularly and seriously have experienced-it is not just some sort of Buddhist theory. And anyone who takes the trouble to stabilize and clarify his or her mind will be able to experience it, too. It is through this unconditioned aspect of consciousness that we can transform the content of mind through training.
But meditation also means to cultivate basic human qualities, such as attention and compassion, and new ways of experiencing the world. What really matters is that a person gradually changes. Over months and years, we become less impatient, less prone to anger, less torn between hopes and fears. It becomes inconceivable to willingly harm another person. We develop a propensity toward altruistic behavior and the cluster of qualities that give us the resources to deal with the ups and downs of life.
The point here is that you can look at your thoughts, including strong emotions, with a pure mindfulness that is not associated with the contents of the thoughts.
Take the example of malevolent anger. We usually identify with anger. Anger can fill our mental landscape and project its distorted reality on people and events. When we are overwhelmed by anger, we cannot dissociate from it. We perpetuate a vicious circle of affliction by rekindling anger each time we see or remember the person who makes us angry. We become addicted to the cause of suffering.
But if we dissociate from anger and look at it with mindfulness, that which is aware of anger is not angry, and we can see that anger is just a bunch of thoughts. Anger doesn't cut like a knife, burn like a fire, or crush like a rock; it is nothing more than a product of our mind. Instead of "being" the anger, we understand that we are not the anger, in the same way that clouds are not the sky.
So, to deal with anger, we avoid letting our mind jump again and again to the trigger for our anger. Then we look at anger itself and keep our attention upon it. If we stop adding wood to a fire and just watch, the fire will die out. Likewise, anger will vanish away, without being forcibly repressed or allowed to explode.
There is no question of not experiencing emotions; it's a question of not being enslaved by them. Let emotions arise, but let them be freed from their afflictive components: distortion of reality, mental confusion, clinging, and suffering for oneself and others.
There is great virtue in resting from time to time in pure awareness of the present moment, and being able to refer to this state when afflictive emotions arise so that we do not identify with them and are not swayed by them.
It is difficult in the beginning, but becomes quite natural as you become increasingly familiar with such an approach. Whenever anger arises, you learn to recognize it right away. If you know someone to be a pickpocket, even if he mingles in a crowd, you will spot him right away and keep a careful eye on him.
Interdependence
Just as you can learn to deal with afflictive thoughts, you can learn to cultivate and enhance wholesome ones. To be filled with love and kindness brings about an optimal way of being. It is a win-win situation: you will enjoy lasting well-being for yourself, you'll act in altruistic ways towards others, and you'll be perceived as a good human being.
If altruistic love is based on an understanding of the interdependence of all beings and of their natural aspiration to happiness, and if this love extends impartially to all beings, then it is a source of genuine happiness. Acts of overflowing love, of pure, disinterested generosity-as when you make a child happy or help someone in need, even if nobody knows what you have done-generate a deep and heartwarming fulfillment.
The Habits of Happiness
TED TALK: Listen to Matthieu Ricard answer the questions: What is Happiness, and How Can We All Get Some?
Human qualities often come in clusters. Altruism, inner peace, strength, freedom, and genuine happiness thrive together like the parts of a nourishing fruit. Likewise, selfishness, animosity, and fear grow together. So, while helping others may not always be "pleasant," it leads the mind to a sense of inner peace, courage, and harmony with the interdependence of all things and beings.
Afflictive mental states, on the other hand, begin with self-centeredness, with an increase in the gap between self and others. These states are related to excessive self-importance and self-cherishing associated with fear or resentment towards others, and grasping for outer things as part of a hopeless pursuit of selfish happiness. A selfish pursuit of happiness is a lose-lose situation: you make yourself miserable and make others miserable as well.
Inner conflicts are often linked with excessive rumination on the past and anticipation of the future. You are not truly paying attention to the present moment, but are engrossed in your thoughts, going on and on in a vicious circle, feeding your ego and self-centeredness.
This is the opposite of bare attention. To turn your attention inside means to look at pure awareness itself and dwell without distraction, yet effortlessly, in the present moment.
If you cultivate these mental skills, after a while you won't need to apply contrived efforts anymore. You can deal with mental perturbations like the eagles I see from the window of my hermitage in the Himalayas deal with crows. The crows often attack them, diving at the eagles from above. But, instead of doing all kinds of acrobatics, the eagle simply retracts one wing at the last moment, lets the diving crow pass, and then extends its wing again. The whole thing requires minimal effort and causes little disturbance.
Being experienced in dealing with the sudden arising of emotions in the mind works in a similar way.
I have been exposed to the world of humanitarian activities for a number of years since I decided to dedicate the entire royalties of my books to 30 projects on education and health in Tibet, Nepal, and India, with a group of dedicated volunteers and generous philanthropists. It is easy to see how corruption, clashes of ego, weak empathy, discouragement can plague the humanitarian world. All this stems from a lack of maturity. So the advantages of spending time to develop human altruism and compassionate courage are obvious.
The Fragrance of Peace
The most important time to meditate or do other types of spiritual practices is early in the morning. You set the tone for the day and the "fragrance" of the meditation will remain and give a particular perfume to the whole day. Another important time is before falling asleep. If you clearly generate a positive state of mind, filled with compassion or altruism, this will give a different quality to the whole night.
When people experience "moments of grace", or "magical moments" in daily life, while walking in the snow under the stars or spending a beautiful moment with dear friends by the seaside, what is really happening? All of a sudden, they have left their burden of inner conflicts behind. They feel in harmony with others, with themselves, with the world. It is wonderful to fully enjoy such magical moments, but it is also revealing to understand why they feel so good: pacification of inner conflicts; a better sense of interdependence with everything rather than fragmenting reality; and a respite from the mental toxins of aggression and obsession. All these qualities can be cultivated through developing wisdom and inner freedom. This will lead not just to a few moments of grace but to a lasting state of well-being that we may call genuine happiness.
In this state, feelings of insecurity gradually give way to a deep confidence that you can deal with life's ups and downs. Your equanimity will spare you from being swayed like mountain grass in the wind by every possible praise and blame, gain and loss, comfort and discomfort. You can always draw on deep inner peace, and the waves at the surface will not appear as threatening.
Matthieu Ricard wrote this article as part of Sustainable Happiness, the Winter 2009 issue of YES! Magazine. Matthieu has authored seven books, including Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life's Most Important Skill. He lives at the Shechen monastery in Nepal, travels the world for Karuna-shechen (www.karuna-shechen.org) and does an annual solitary retreat in the Himalayas.
Sunday, December 7, 2008
From Lynne Gilliland: 10 Things to Do to Increase Your Happiness
1. Friends: Spend time with your friends. Get friends if you are low on them.
2. Good health: Take action to stay as healthy as possible .
3. Socializing: Spend time being with people in a nonwork setting.
4. Experiential activities: Travel, exercise. Doing something new makes us happier (tango? scuba diving? cross country bike ride?)
5. Having a job we really like makes us happier than a big paycheck: Consider what is within your realm of responsibility to make your job one you really like. You can change your job, you can change your attitude, you can change how you work with people at your job.
6. Spend time in nature every day.
7. Express your gratitude and respect for the things you experience: Being thankful makes you happy.
8. Take time out: The ability to pause, mentally as well as physically, is important. Taking breaks is a prerequisite for happiness.
9. Accept that there will be unpleasant things in life: At some point every day, you will face hinderances. You'll be late, make a mistake, say something stupid, be less than perfect. This is part of life. Accept it and move on.
10. Open your eyes and look around you. There are more opportunities for happiness than you think. Embrace the moments. Enjoy them. Remember them.
Happiness is a practice. Get started.
-www.gillilandjud.com
2. Good health: Take action to stay as healthy as possible .
3. Socializing: Spend time being with people in a nonwork setting.
4. Experiential activities: Travel, exercise. Doing something new makes us happier (tango? scuba diving? cross country bike ride?)
5. Having a job we really like makes us happier than a big paycheck: Consider what is within your realm of responsibility to make your job one you really like. You can change your job, you can change your attitude, you can change how you work with people at your job.
6. Spend time in nature every day.
7. Express your gratitude and respect for the things you experience: Being thankful makes you happy.
8. Take time out: The ability to pause, mentally as well as physically, is important. Taking breaks is a prerequisite for happiness.
9. Accept that there will be unpleasant things in life: At some point every day, you will face hinderances. You'll be late, make a mistake, say something stupid, be less than perfect. This is part of life. Accept it and move on.
10. Open your eyes and look around you. There are more opportunities for happiness than you think. Embrace the moments. Enjoy them. Remember them.
Happiness is a practice. Get started.
-www.gillilandjud.com
Monday, December 1, 2008
Mohawk Thanksgiving Prayer
~*~ The People ~*~
Today we have gathered and we see that the cycles of life continue. We have been
given the duty to live in balance and harmony with each other and all living
things. So now, we bring our minds together as one as we give greetings and
thanks to each other as People.
Now our minds are one.
~*~ The Earth Mother ~*~
We are all thankful to our Mother, the Earth, for she gives us all that we need for
life. She supports our feet as we walk about upon her. It gives us joy that she
continues to care for us as she has from the beginning of time. To our Mother, we
send greetings and thanks.
Now our minds are one
***
~*~ The Waters ~*~
We give thanks to all the Waters of the world for quenching our thirst and
providing us with strength. Water is life. We know its power in many forms--
waterfalls and rain, mists and streams, rivers and oceans. With one mind, we send
greetings and thanks to the spirit Water.
Now our minds are one.
*****
~*~ The Fish ~*~
We turn our minds to all the Fish life in the water. They were instructed to
cleanse and purify the water. They also give themselves to us as food. We are
grateful that we can still find pure water. So, we turn now to the fish and send our
greetings and thanks.
Now our minds are one.
~*~ The Plants ~*~
Now we turn towards the vast fields of Plant life. As far as the eye can see, the
Plants grow, working many wonders. They sustain many life forms. With our
minds gathered together, we give thanks and look forward to seeing Plant life for
many generations to come.
Now our minds are one.
*****
~*~ The Food Plants ~*~
With one mind, we turn to honor and thank all the Food Plants we harvest from
the garden. Since the beginning of time, the grains, vegetables, beans and berries
have helped the people survive. Many other living things draw strength from them
too. We gather all the Plant Foods together as one and send them a greeting and
thanks.
Now our minds are one.
*****
~*~ The Medicine Herbs ~*~
Now we turn to all the Medicine Herbs of the world. From the beginning, they
were instructed to take away sickness. They are always waiting and ready to heal
us. We are happy there are still among us those special few who remember how to
use these plants for healing. With one mind, we send greetings and thanks to the
Medicines and to the keepers of the Medicines
Now our minds are one.
~*~ The Animals ~*~
We gather our minds together to send greetings and thanks to all the Animal life
in the world. They have many things to teach us as people. We see them near our
homes and in the deep forests. We are glad they are still here and we hope that it
will always be so.
Now our minds are one
*****
~*~ The Trees ~*~
We now turn our thoughts to the Trees. The Earth has many families of Trees who
have their own instructions and uses. Some provide us with shelter and shade,
other with fruit, beauty and other useful things. Many peoples of the world use a
Tree as a symbol of peace and strength. With one mind, we greet and thank the
tree of life.
Now our minds are one
~*~ The Birds ~*~
We put our minds together as one and thank all the Birds who move and fly
about over our heads. The Creator gave them beautiful songs. Each day they
remind us to enjoy and appreciate life. The Eagle was chosen to be their leader. To
all the Birds-- from the smallest to the largest--we send our joyful greetings and
thanks.
Now our minds are one
*****
~*~ The Four Winds ~*~
We are all thankful to the powers we know as the Four Winds. We hear their
voices in the moving air as they refresh us and purify the air we breathe. They
help to bring the change of seasons. From the four directions they come, bringing
us messengers and giving us strength. With one mind, we send our greetings and
thanks to the Four Winds.
Now our minds are one
*****
~*~ The Thunders ~*~
Now we turn to the west where our Grandfathers, the Thunder Beings, live. With
lightening and thundering voices, they bring with them the water that renews life.
We bring our minds together as one to send greetings and thanks to our
Grandfathers, the Thunders.
Now our minds are one.
*****
~*~ The Sun ~*~
We now send the greetings and thanks to our eldest Brother, the Sun. Each day
without fail he travels the sky from east to west, bringing the light of a new day.
He is the source of all the fires of life. With one mind, we send greetings and
thanks to our Brother, the Sun.
Now our minds are one.
~*~ Grandmother Moon ~*~
We put our minds together and give thanks to our oldest Grandmother, the
Moon, who lights the nighttime sky. She is the leader of women all over the world,
and she governs the movement of the ocean tides. By her changing face we
measure time, and it is the Moon who watches over the arrival of children here on
Earth. With one mind, we send greetings and thanks to our Grandmother, the
Moon.
Now our minds are one.
*****
~*~ The Stars ~*~
We give thanks to the Stars who are spread across the sky like jewelry. We see
them in the night, helping the Moon to light the darkness and bringing dew to the
gardens and growing things. When we travel at night, they guide us home. With
our minds gathered together as one, we send greetings and thanks to all the Stars.
Now our minds are one.
*****
~*~ The Enlightened Teachers ~*~
We gather our minds to greet and thank the enlightened Teachers who have come
to help throughout the ages. When we forget how to live in harmony, they remind
us of the way we were instructed to live as people. With one mind, we send
greetings and thanks to these caring Teachers.
Now our minds are one.
*****
~*~ The Creator ~*~
We turn our thoughts to the Creator, or Great Spirit, and send greetings and
thanks for all the gifts of Creation. Everything we need to live a good life is here
on this Mother Earth. For all the love that is still around us, we gather our minds
together as one and send our choicest words of greetings and thanks to the
Creator.
Now our minds are one.
*****
~*~ Closing Words ~*~
We have now arrived at the place where we end our words. Of all the things we
have named, it was not our intent to leave anything out. If something was
forgotten, we leave it to each individual to send such greetings and thanks in their
own way.
Now our minds are one.
**************
CREDITS
English version: John Stokes and Kanawahienton
(David Benedict, Turtle Clan/Mohawk)
Mohawk Version: Rokwaho
(Dan Thompson, Wolf Clan/Mohawk)
Original Inspiration: Tekaronianekon
(Jake Swamp, Wolf Clan/Mohawk)
Copyright © 1993 Six Nations Indian Museum and The Tracking Project.
Today we have gathered and we see that the cycles of life continue. We have been
given the duty to live in balance and harmony with each other and all living
things. So now, we bring our minds together as one as we give greetings and
thanks to each other as People.
Now our minds are one.
~*~ The Earth Mother ~*~
We are all thankful to our Mother, the Earth, for she gives us all that we need for
life. She supports our feet as we walk about upon her. It gives us joy that she
continues to care for us as she has from the beginning of time. To our Mother, we
send greetings and thanks.
Now our minds are one
***
~*~ The Waters ~*~
We give thanks to all the Waters of the world for quenching our thirst and
providing us with strength. Water is life. We know its power in many forms--
waterfalls and rain, mists and streams, rivers and oceans. With one mind, we send
greetings and thanks to the spirit Water.
Now our minds are one.
*****
~*~ The Fish ~*~
We turn our minds to all the Fish life in the water. They were instructed to
cleanse and purify the water. They also give themselves to us as food. We are
grateful that we can still find pure water. So, we turn now to the fish and send our
greetings and thanks.
Now our minds are one.
~*~ The Plants ~*~
Now we turn towards the vast fields of Plant life. As far as the eye can see, the
Plants grow, working many wonders. They sustain many life forms. With our
minds gathered together, we give thanks and look forward to seeing Plant life for
many generations to come.
Now our minds are one.
*****
~*~ The Food Plants ~*~
With one mind, we turn to honor and thank all the Food Plants we harvest from
the garden. Since the beginning of time, the grains, vegetables, beans and berries
have helped the people survive. Many other living things draw strength from them
too. We gather all the Plant Foods together as one and send them a greeting and
thanks.
Now our minds are one.
*****
~*~ The Medicine Herbs ~*~
Now we turn to all the Medicine Herbs of the world. From the beginning, they
were instructed to take away sickness. They are always waiting and ready to heal
us. We are happy there are still among us those special few who remember how to
use these plants for healing. With one mind, we send greetings and thanks to the
Medicines and to the keepers of the Medicines
Now our minds are one.
~*~ The Animals ~*~
We gather our minds together to send greetings and thanks to all the Animal life
in the world. They have many things to teach us as people. We see them near our
homes and in the deep forests. We are glad they are still here and we hope that it
will always be so.
Now our minds are one
*****
~*~ The Trees ~*~
We now turn our thoughts to the Trees. The Earth has many families of Trees who
have their own instructions and uses. Some provide us with shelter and shade,
other with fruit, beauty and other useful things. Many peoples of the world use a
Tree as a symbol of peace and strength. With one mind, we greet and thank the
tree of life.
Now our minds are one
~*~ The Birds ~*~
We put our minds together as one and thank all the Birds who move and fly
about over our heads. The Creator gave them beautiful songs. Each day they
remind us to enjoy and appreciate life. The Eagle was chosen to be their leader. To
all the Birds-- from the smallest to the largest--we send our joyful greetings and
thanks.
Now our minds are one
*****
~*~ The Four Winds ~*~
We are all thankful to the powers we know as the Four Winds. We hear their
voices in the moving air as they refresh us and purify the air we breathe. They
help to bring the change of seasons. From the four directions they come, bringing
us messengers and giving us strength. With one mind, we send our greetings and
thanks to the Four Winds.
Now our minds are one
*****
~*~ The Thunders ~*~
Now we turn to the west where our Grandfathers, the Thunder Beings, live. With
lightening and thundering voices, they bring with them the water that renews life.
We bring our minds together as one to send greetings and thanks to our
Grandfathers, the Thunders.
Now our minds are one.
*****
~*~ The Sun ~*~
We now send the greetings and thanks to our eldest Brother, the Sun. Each day
without fail he travels the sky from east to west, bringing the light of a new day.
He is the source of all the fires of life. With one mind, we send greetings and
thanks to our Brother, the Sun.
Now our minds are one.
~*~ Grandmother Moon ~*~
We put our minds together and give thanks to our oldest Grandmother, the
Moon, who lights the nighttime sky. She is the leader of women all over the world,
and she governs the movement of the ocean tides. By her changing face we
measure time, and it is the Moon who watches over the arrival of children here on
Earth. With one mind, we send greetings and thanks to our Grandmother, the
Moon.
Now our minds are one.
*****
~*~ The Stars ~*~
We give thanks to the Stars who are spread across the sky like jewelry. We see
them in the night, helping the Moon to light the darkness and bringing dew to the
gardens and growing things. When we travel at night, they guide us home. With
our minds gathered together as one, we send greetings and thanks to all the Stars.
Now our minds are one.
*****
~*~ The Enlightened Teachers ~*~
We gather our minds to greet and thank the enlightened Teachers who have come
to help throughout the ages. When we forget how to live in harmony, they remind
us of the way we were instructed to live as people. With one mind, we send
greetings and thanks to these caring Teachers.
Now our minds are one.
*****
~*~ The Creator ~*~
We turn our thoughts to the Creator, or Great Spirit, and send greetings and
thanks for all the gifts of Creation. Everything we need to live a good life is here
on this Mother Earth. For all the love that is still around us, we gather our minds
together as one and send our choicest words of greetings and thanks to the
Creator.
Now our minds are one.
*****
~*~ Closing Words ~*~
We have now arrived at the place where we end our words. Of all the things we
have named, it was not our intent to leave anything out. If something was
forgotten, we leave it to each individual to send such greetings and thanks in their
own way.
Now our minds are one.
**************
CREDITS
English version: John Stokes and Kanawahienton
(David Benedict, Turtle Clan/Mohawk)
Mohawk Version: Rokwaho
(Dan Thompson, Wolf Clan/Mohawk)
Original Inspiration: Tekaronianekon
(Jake Swamp, Wolf Clan/Mohawk)
Copyright © 1993 Six Nations Indian Museum and The Tracking Project.
Monday, November 10, 2008
Kindness at work and the bottom line
This article talks about the difference between being kind and being "soft," and the benefits of kindness and civility for productivity!
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Alice Walker Advises Obama on Sustaining Resilience...
An Open Letter to Barack Obama - By Alice Walker | TheRoot.com
http://www.theroot.com/id/48726
President-Elect Barack Obama
Nov. 5, 2008
Dear Brother Obama,
You have no idea, really, of how profound this moment is for us. Us being the black people of the Southern United States. You think you know, because you are thoughtful, and you have studied our history. But seeing you deliver the torch so many others before you carried, year after year, decade after decade, century after century, only to be struck down before igniting the flame of justice and of law, is almost more than the heart can bear. And yet, this observation is not intended to burden you, for you are of a different time, and, indeed, because of all the relay runners before you, North America is a different place. It is really only to say: Well done. We knew, through all the generations, that you were with us, in us, the best of the spirit of Africa and of the Americas. Knowing this, that you would actually appear, someday, was part of our strength. Seeing you take your rightful place, based solely on your wisdom, stamina and character, is a balm for the weary warriors of hope, previously only sung about.
I would advise you to remember that you did not create the disaster that the world is experiencing, and you alone are not responsible for bringing the world back to balance. A primary responsibility that you do have, however, is to cultivate happiness in your own life. To make a schedule that permits sufficient time of rest and play with your gorgeous wife and lovely daughters. And so on. One gathers that your family is large. We are used to seeing men in the White House soon become juiceless and as white-haired as the building; we notice their wives and children looking strained and stressed. They soon have smiles so lacking in joy that they remind us of scissors. This is no way to lead. Nor does your family deserve this fate. One way of thinking about all this is: It is so bad now that there is no excuse not to relax. From your happy, relaxed state, you can model real success, which is all that so many people in the world really want. They may buy endless cars and houses and furs and gobble up all the attention and space they can manage, or barely manage, but this is because it is not yet clear to them that success is truly an inside job. That it is within the reach of almost everyone.
I would further advise you not to take on other people's enemies. Most damage that others do to us is out of fear, humiliation and pain. Those feelings occur in all of us, not just in those of us who profess a certain religious or racial devotion. We must learn actually not to have enemies, but only confused adversaries who are ourselves in disguise. It is understood by all that you are commander in chief of the United States and are sworn to protect our beloved country; this we understand, completely. However, as my mother used to say, quoting a Bible with which I often fought, "hate the sin, but love the sinner." There must be no more crushing of whole communities, no more torture, no more dehumanizing as a means of ruling a people's spirit. This has already happened to people of color, poor people, women, children. We see where this leads, where it has led.
A good model of how to "work with the enemy" internally is presented by the Dalai Lama, in his endless caretaking of his soul as he confronts the Chinese government that invaded Tibet. Because, finally, it is the soul that must be preserved, if one is to remain a credible leader. All else might be lost; but when the soul dies, the connection to earth, to peoples, to animals, to rivers, to mountain ranges, purple and majestic, also dies. And your smile, with which we watch you do gracious battle with unjust characterizations, distortions and lies, is that expression of healthy self-worth, spirit and soul, that, kept happy and free and relaxed, can find an answering smile in all of us, lighting our way, and brightening the world.
We are the ones we have been waiting for.
In Peace and Joy,
Alice Walker
http://www.theroot.com/id/48726
President-Elect Barack Obama
Nov. 5, 2008
Dear Brother Obama,
You have no idea, really, of how profound this moment is for us. Us being the black people of the Southern United States. You think you know, because you are thoughtful, and you have studied our history. But seeing you deliver the torch so many others before you carried, year after year, decade after decade, century after century, only to be struck down before igniting the flame of justice and of law, is almost more than the heart can bear. And yet, this observation is not intended to burden you, for you are of a different time, and, indeed, because of all the relay runners before you, North America is a different place. It is really only to say: Well done. We knew, through all the generations, that you were with us, in us, the best of the spirit of Africa and of the Americas. Knowing this, that you would actually appear, someday, was part of our strength. Seeing you take your rightful place, based solely on your wisdom, stamina and character, is a balm for the weary warriors of hope, previously only sung about.
I would advise you to remember that you did not create the disaster that the world is experiencing, and you alone are not responsible for bringing the world back to balance. A primary responsibility that you do have, however, is to cultivate happiness in your own life. To make a schedule that permits sufficient time of rest and play with your gorgeous wife and lovely daughters. And so on. One gathers that your family is large. We are used to seeing men in the White House soon become juiceless and as white-haired as the building; we notice their wives and children looking strained and stressed. They soon have smiles so lacking in joy that they remind us of scissors. This is no way to lead. Nor does your family deserve this fate. One way of thinking about all this is: It is so bad now that there is no excuse not to relax. From your happy, relaxed state, you can model real success, which is all that so many people in the world really want. They may buy endless cars and houses and furs and gobble up all the attention and space they can manage, or barely manage, but this is because it is not yet clear to them that success is truly an inside job. That it is within the reach of almost everyone.
I would further advise you not to take on other people's enemies. Most damage that others do to us is out of fear, humiliation and pain. Those feelings occur in all of us, not just in those of us who profess a certain religious or racial devotion. We must learn actually not to have enemies, but only confused adversaries who are ourselves in disguise. It is understood by all that you are commander in chief of the United States and are sworn to protect our beloved country; this we understand, completely. However, as my mother used to say, quoting a Bible with which I often fought, "hate the sin, but love the sinner." There must be no more crushing of whole communities, no more torture, no more dehumanizing as a means of ruling a people's spirit. This has already happened to people of color, poor people, women, children. We see where this leads, where it has led.
A good model of how to "work with the enemy" internally is presented by the Dalai Lama, in his endless caretaking of his soul as he confronts the Chinese government that invaded Tibet. Because, finally, it is the soul that must be preserved, if one is to remain a credible leader. All else might be lost; but when the soul dies, the connection to earth, to peoples, to animals, to rivers, to mountain ranges, purple and majestic, also dies. And your smile, with which we watch you do gracious battle with unjust characterizations, distortions and lies, is that expression of healthy self-worth, spirit and soul, that, kept happy and free and relaxed, can find an answering smile in all of us, lighting our way, and brightening the world.
We are the ones we have been waiting for.
In Peace and Joy,
Alice Walker
Friday, October 31, 2008
Your Explanatory Style
For a great summary of Martin Seligman's description of how we create our world, see Stephen Sheild's article here.
psychological hardiness
From Stephen Shields' blog. See the full article.
A leader must possess or develop “psychological hardiness.” Psychologists Suzanne C. Kobasa and Salvatore R. Maddi studied individuals in business who although in the midst of highly stressful situations nevertheless experienced low degrees of illness. By studying executives at Illinois Bell during the deregulation of AT&T and the Baby Bells, Kobasa and Maddi were able to identify certain characteristics that healthy individuals shared in distinction from those who were unhealthy in stressful situations. They discovered that individuals with psychological hardiness
1 – believed that they had an influence on their environment and acted consistently with that belief;
2 – consistently considered how to change situations for advantage and never accepted events at face value;
3 – regarded change as part of the normal course of events;
4 – viewed change as a helpful path to positive development; and
5 - were committed to learning and personal transformation.
In contrast, individuals who did not thrive physically in stressful environments held very different attitudes. They
1 – were bored with life;
2 – found life to be meaningless;
3 – considered change to be threatening;
4 – believed themselves to be at the mercy of their circumstances;
5 – prepared for the worst; and
6 – considered the status quo to be normal and viewed change as unusual.
A leader must possess or develop “psychological hardiness.” Psychologists Suzanne C. Kobasa and Salvatore R. Maddi studied individuals in business who although in the midst of highly stressful situations nevertheless experienced low degrees of illness. By studying executives at Illinois Bell during the deregulation of AT&T and the Baby Bells, Kobasa and Maddi were able to identify certain characteristics that healthy individuals shared in distinction from those who were unhealthy in stressful situations. They discovered that individuals with psychological hardiness
1 – believed that they had an influence on their environment and acted consistently with that belief;
2 – consistently considered how to change situations for advantage and never accepted events at face value;
3 – regarded change as part of the normal course of events;
4 – viewed change as a helpful path to positive development; and
5 - were committed to learning and personal transformation.
In contrast, individuals who did not thrive physically in stressful environments held very different attitudes. They
1 – were bored with life;
2 – found life to be meaningless;
3 – considered change to be threatening;
4 – believed themselves to be at the mercy of their circumstances;
5 – prepared for the worst; and
6 – considered the status quo to be normal and viewed change as unusual.
Thursday, September 25, 2008
Your Intangible Vital Capital
From Sandy Davis' "Zillience" Newsletter:
(1) Building up “Vital Capital” for Retirement
In my view, the “retirement equation” has two major components. The first is your tangible wealth (i.e., your financial capital), and the second is your intangible wealth (i.e., what I’m going to define as your “vital capital” or your overall well-being).
What concerns me is how few of us are paying close attention the intangible half of the equation: the importance of building up your “vital capital.” I think of “vital capital” as the sum of the intangible assets you need to live a healthy, productive, and enjoyable life. When these assets are well managed, upon retirement you will be healthy enough and you will have enough stamina to take full advantage of whatever financial capital you have accumulated.
Because these intangible assets fall outside of their expertise, most financial planners tend to take your health and stamina for granted. They can afford to consider this “none of their business.” Unfortunately, even most doctors and health care providers are now required to focus so singularly on illness and disease that they also can end up taking your overall health and stamina largely for granted. They no longer are afforded time to focus on “the long view.” You, however, cannot afford to overlook your health and stamina. Remember that no one else has as big a stake as you do in sustaining your own well-being.
Because of this blind spot, when we’re planning our retirements, most of us have been taught to put financial capital way out ahead of vital capital. This priority, however, amounts to a classic case of putting the cart before the horse. Why? Because without adequate vitality, when you stop working you might end up being unable to enjoy the fruits of your well-earned retirement funds. Indeed, if your health should fail you before your planned retirement, you might find yourself prematurely disabled and facing an early “forced retirement,” way ahead of your reaching the security of attaining all the financial capital you had planned to amass.
Either way, once you chronically lack vitality, you will no longer be able to fully enjoy doing the very things you may have been deferring until retirement. Your “glory days” might end up being behind you, and you could be left with far less to look forward to than you ever imagined. Particularly if you lack good health, even if you were to have all the money in the world, your ability to enjoy your wealth can end up being severely constrained. Indeed, it might also be short-lived.
Financial Capital Is Not Enough
So having plenty of financial capital is, in and of itself, not enough. You also need to have a wealth of “vital capital.” This includes excellent health, great personal stamina, an agile mind capable of cogent thinking, an exuberant outlook on life, and a strong confidence in your ability to continue to make valuable contributions to the world around you, ones that are creative, generative, and fulfilling.
In what follows, I invite you to look carefully at this intangible half of the retirement equation. I encourage you to be sure to do at least as much “portfolio management” around building your future “vital capital” as you do around building your future “financial capital.”
As I mentioned earlier, the critical goal that most of us tend to overlook is our need to amass enough vital capital to ensure that we will be in a position to enjoy whatever financial capital we are amassing for ourselves. In other words, each of us needs to strike a balance between our investments in these two different types of assets: those that are tangible and those that are intangible.
If you were to come up short with one or the other, I suggest that your vital capital is, in the long run, at least as important and as valuable as your financial capital. Maybe even more so. After all, without your health, it’s hard to do just about everything. You can’t leave home for long without it.
“Vital Capital Planning”
By way of analogy, let’s apply a simple financial planning model to the task of “vital capital planning.” Think of your vital capital as something you can build up and save for the future—just as you would save money. Then let’s compartmentalize what you need to save for retirement and make a plan to deposit your intangible assets it into six different bank accounts.
Three of these accounts will be interest-bearing savings accounts in which you continuously make deposits and then let what you have saved grow and compound over time. For the most part, you will rarely make big withdrawals from these accounts. They hold investments you make now with the long term clearly in mind. You have faith that what you save now will be extremely valuable to you in the future—especially if and when you decide to retire.
The other three accounts are more akin to checking accounts. They are more suitable for holding “faster moving” assets. As with your savings accounts, you want to cultivate a habit of making regular deposits into these accounts. Because of the unpredictability of life, you also may need to make occasional—or even frequent—withdrawals. Whenever you need to spend some the vital capital you have invested in these accounts, you can do so quickly and even massively. All you have to do is write a check and cash it.
The more you save and invest in all six of these accounts, the more vital capital you will have at your disposal, and the more degrees of freedom you will have day-to-day. Your accumulated “intangible assets” will provide you with a strong foundation for living your life in a continuous state of abundant zillience. This is true right now, today. It also will be true going forward, not just when you retire, but long thereafter, as well.
Let’s differentiate the six accounts further.
The Three Savings Accounts
You can use your three savings accounts as “holding vessels” for the virtual capital that you create through the three “background generators” of zillience (Footnote 1). The first account is for deposits of the positive energy you generate each and every time you successfully make and keep an agreement. The second account is for deposits of the positive energy you generate when you take care to eat well. This is a matter of choosing to eat only nourishing foods and only in modest amounts. The third account is for deposits of positive energy that you generate by taking care to sleep well. By making it your habit to get enough quality sleep each night, you can not only keep your energy strong and steady, but you can also bank the dividends from being well-rested into this third saving account.
As you make continuous small deposits in these three savings accounts, you will start to “bank” a significant measure of vital capital.
The Three Checking Accounts
The three checking accounts hold the virtual capital that you create through your “foreground generators” of zillience (Footnote 1). These are the three developmental practices in which you make intentional small investments every single day in order to be sure that you are continuously paying yourself first.
The first checking account holds the virtual capital that comes to you by dint of having a daily centering practice. You might think of this as “mind capital.” It includes your having a well-developed ability to re-center your thoughts and emotions quickly, and a related ability to maintain your “centeredness” through thick and thin. Ironically, you develop these abilities by practicing “getting out of your mind” and spending short periods of time in a restorative place of deep inner stillness.
The second checking account holds the vital capital that flows from exercising vigorously every day or every other day. You can think of this as “body capital.” It includes great health, abundant stamina, a high degree of fitness, corresponding physical agility and flexibility, and the ability to move your body through space both powerfully and gracefully.
The third checking account holds the deposits you are able to make when you invest in a daily creative practice. You can think of this as “spiritual capital.” It includes your ability to stay connected with your own true passions, to be fully authentic, to be ceaselessly creative, to be expansive emotionally, and, all the while, to be continually at peace with just what is. It also includes having a great and reliable sense of humor.
Your Portfolio of Virtual Capital
All six of these bank accounts make up your “portfolio” of investments in your own virtual capital. The distinction between what goes into each account is likely to gradually dissolve over time. In the end, every “dollar” invested is a “dollar” you can spend. It’s yours to put to good use when you need it, regardless of when or how you earned it.
So however young or old you are today, and however far away your retirement appears to be, remember that there is more to amassing wealth than just accumulating financial capital. At least as important is having a wealth of vital capital. Amassing this latter type of capital is entirely up to you. No one else can do it for you.
Just remember that the act of developing vital capital requires clear intentions, sharp attention, and a continuous and systematic amount of effort. Alas, there are no shortcuts. On the other hand, the rewards can be immeasurable, life sustaining, and thoroughly enjoyable.
Call to Action
To start the process of building up your “vital capital,” all you have to do is open up one bank account. Which of the six accounts above appeals to you the most? What would it take to start making some daily deposits in that account? To what do you need to pay attention? What specific actions would be valuable for you to take every day? Once you start making deposits, how fast can you grow the intangible wealth in your account(s)? How will this benefit you? When will you have enough to start sharing your intangible wealth with others? What do you want to contribute? To whom? To what cause? For what heartfelt reason?
Once you have answers to these questions and start to take action accordingly, you’ll most likely find yourself moving along your own true path. You’ll be headed “homeward” in the very best sense of the word.
(1) Building up “Vital Capital” for Retirement
In my view, the “retirement equation” has two major components. The first is your tangible wealth (i.e., your financial capital), and the second is your intangible wealth (i.e., what I’m going to define as your “vital capital” or your overall well-being).
What concerns me is how few of us are paying close attention the intangible half of the equation: the importance of building up your “vital capital.” I think of “vital capital” as the sum of the intangible assets you need to live a healthy, productive, and enjoyable life. When these assets are well managed, upon retirement you will be healthy enough and you will have enough stamina to take full advantage of whatever financial capital you have accumulated.
Because these intangible assets fall outside of their expertise, most financial planners tend to take your health and stamina for granted. They can afford to consider this “none of their business.” Unfortunately, even most doctors and health care providers are now required to focus so singularly on illness and disease that they also can end up taking your overall health and stamina largely for granted. They no longer are afforded time to focus on “the long view.” You, however, cannot afford to overlook your health and stamina. Remember that no one else has as big a stake as you do in sustaining your own well-being.
Because of this blind spot, when we’re planning our retirements, most of us have been taught to put financial capital way out ahead of vital capital. This priority, however, amounts to a classic case of putting the cart before the horse. Why? Because without adequate vitality, when you stop working you might end up being unable to enjoy the fruits of your well-earned retirement funds. Indeed, if your health should fail you before your planned retirement, you might find yourself prematurely disabled and facing an early “forced retirement,” way ahead of your reaching the security of attaining all the financial capital you had planned to amass.
Either way, once you chronically lack vitality, you will no longer be able to fully enjoy doing the very things you may have been deferring until retirement. Your “glory days” might end up being behind you, and you could be left with far less to look forward to than you ever imagined. Particularly if you lack good health, even if you were to have all the money in the world, your ability to enjoy your wealth can end up being severely constrained. Indeed, it might also be short-lived.
Financial Capital Is Not Enough
So having plenty of financial capital is, in and of itself, not enough. You also need to have a wealth of “vital capital.” This includes excellent health, great personal stamina, an agile mind capable of cogent thinking, an exuberant outlook on life, and a strong confidence in your ability to continue to make valuable contributions to the world around you, ones that are creative, generative, and fulfilling.
In what follows, I invite you to look carefully at this intangible half of the retirement equation. I encourage you to be sure to do at least as much “portfolio management” around building your future “vital capital” as you do around building your future “financial capital.”
As I mentioned earlier, the critical goal that most of us tend to overlook is our need to amass enough vital capital to ensure that we will be in a position to enjoy whatever financial capital we are amassing for ourselves. In other words, each of us needs to strike a balance between our investments in these two different types of assets: those that are tangible and those that are intangible.
If you were to come up short with one or the other, I suggest that your vital capital is, in the long run, at least as important and as valuable as your financial capital. Maybe even more so. After all, without your health, it’s hard to do just about everything. You can’t leave home for long without it.
“Vital Capital Planning”
By way of analogy, let’s apply a simple financial planning model to the task of “vital capital planning.” Think of your vital capital as something you can build up and save for the future—just as you would save money. Then let’s compartmentalize what you need to save for retirement and make a plan to deposit your intangible assets it into six different bank accounts.
Three of these accounts will be interest-bearing savings accounts in which you continuously make deposits and then let what you have saved grow and compound over time. For the most part, you will rarely make big withdrawals from these accounts. They hold investments you make now with the long term clearly in mind. You have faith that what you save now will be extremely valuable to you in the future—especially if and when you decide to retire.
The other three accounts are more akin to checking accounts. They are more suitable for holding “faster moving” assets. As with your savings accounts, you want to cultivate a habit of making regular deposits into these accounts. Because of the unpredictability of life, you also may need to make occasional—or even frequent—withdrawals. Whenever you need to spend some the vital capital you have invested in these accounts, you can do so quickly and even massively. All you have to do is write a check and cash it.
The more you save and invest in all six of these accounts, the more vital capital you will have at your disposal, and the more degrees of freedom you will have day-to-day. Your accumulated “intangible assets” will provide you with a strong foundation for living your life in a continuous state of abundant zillience. This is true right now, today. It also will be true going forward, not just when you retire, but long thereafter, as well.
Let’s differentiate the six accounts further.
The Three Savings Accounts
You can use your three savings accounts as “holding vessels” for the virtual capital that you create through the three “background generators” of zillience (Footnote 1). The first account is for deposits of the positive energy you generate each and every time you successfully make and keep an agreement. The second account is for deposits of the positive energy you generate when you take care to eat well. This is a matter of choosing to eat only nourishing foods and only in modest amounts. The third account is for deposits of positive energy that you generate by taking care to sleep well. By making it your habit to get enough quality sleep each night, you can not only keep your energy strong and steady, but you can also bank the dividends from being well-rested into this third saving account.
As you make continuous small deposits in these three savings accounts, you will start to “bank” a significant measure of vital capital.
The Three Checking Accounts
The three checking accounts hold the virtual capital that you create through your “foreground generators” of zillience (Footnote 1). These are the three developmental practices in which you make intentional small investments every single day in order to be sure that you are continuously paying yourself first.
The first checking account holds the virtual capital that comes to you by dint of having a daily centering practice. You might think of this as “mind capital.” It includes your having a well-developed ability to re-center your thoughts and emotions quickly, and a related ability to maintain your “centeredness” through thick and thin. Ironically, you develop these abilities by practicing “getting out of your mind” and spending short periods of time in a restorative place of deep inner stillness.
The second checking account holds the vital capital that flows from exercising vigorously every day or every other day. You can think of this as “body capital.” It includes great health, abundant stamina, a high degree of fitness, corresponding physical agility and flexibility, and the ability to move your body through space both powerfully and gracefully.
The third checking account holds the deposits you are able to make when you invest in a daily creative practice. You can think of this as “spiritual capital.” It includes your ability to stay connected with your own true passions, to be fully authentic, to be ceaselessly creative, to be expansive emotionally, and, all the while, to be continually at peace with just what is. It also includes having a great and reliable sense of humor.
Your Portfolio of Virtual Capital
All six of these bank accounts make up your “portfolio” of investments in your own virtual capital. The distinction between what goes into each account is likely to gradually dissolve over time. In the end, every “dollar” invested is a “dollar” you can spend. It’s yours to put to good use when you need it, regardless of when or how you earned it.
So however young or old you are today, and however far away your retirement appears to be, remember that there is more to amassing wealth than just accumulating financial capital. At least as important is having a wealth of vital capital. Amassing this latter type of capital is entirely up to you. No one else can do it for you.
Just remember that the act of developing vital capital requires clear intentions, sharp attention, and a continuous and systematic amount of effort. Alas, there are no shortcuts. On the other hand, the rewards can be immeasurable, life sustaining, and thoroughly enjoyable.
Call to Action
To start the process of building up your “vital capital,” all you have to do is open up one bank account. Which of the six accounts above appeals to you the most? What would it take to start making some daily deposits in that account? To what do you need to pay attention? What specific actions would be valuable for you to take every day? Once you start making deposits, how fast can you grow the intangible wealth in your account(s)? How will this benefit you? When will you have enough to start sharing your intangible wealth with others? What do you want to contribute? To whom? To what cause? For what heartfelt reason?
Once you have answers to these questions and start to take action accordingly, you’ll most likely find yourself moving along your own true path. You’ll be headed “homeward” in the very best sense of the word.
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Resilience for Leaders workshop
What do I mean, "for leaders?"
I assume a unique definition of leadership: A leader is someone who says to themselves "I am going to be the one to take responsibility to make sure things around me go well for everyone." So it could easily mean you, and everyone you work with!
What do I mean by Resilience?
Resilience is the quality that allows us to be our best self, even in situations that are not to our liking. How can leaders and other "stressed-out" professionals prepare themselves to demonstrate grace under fire?
Resilient people have many traits and habits.
...the capacity to access spontaneity and creativity to address problems, positive interpretations in thought and conversation, internal grounding and fullness, the capacity to find and use social support, and so on. The cultivation of these habits and capacities also enhances the quality of individual and organizational life.
Call to set up a workshop in your workplace: 202 550 5462
In this first session, we will begin the journey toward a resilient workplace! We will explore our own stories of resilience, offer support to peers, set or reaffirm personal goals for the ongoing cultivation of resilience, and use action methods to work with a couple of stories.
I assume a unique definition of leadership: A leader is someone who says to themselves "I am going to be the one to take responsibility to make sure things around me go well for everyone." So it could easily mean you, and everyone you work with!
What do I mean by Resilience?
Resilience is the quality that allows us to be our best self, even in situations that are not to our liking. How can leaders and other "stressed-out" professionals prepare themselves to demonstrate grace under fire?
Resilient people have many traits and habits.
...the capacity to access spontaneity and creativity to address problems, positive interpretations in thought and conversation, internal grounding and fullness, the capacity to find and use social support, and so on. The cultivation of these habits and capacities also enhances the quality of individual and organizational life.
Call to set up a workshop in your workplace: 202 550 5462
In this first session, we will begin the journey toward a resilient workplace! We will explore our own stories of resilience, offer support to peers, set or reaffirm personal goals for the ongoing cultivation of resilience, and use action methods to work with a couple of stories.
Monday, August 25, 2008
Three Doors to Resilience
From Sandy Davis' newsletter:
In order to generate lots of “zillience,” I recommend that you have at your disposal three different ways to “come back to your senses.” That way, no matter what challenges you face, you will have not one, but a choice of three different steadying practices on which to lean. You can rely on any one, two, or all three to sustain your personal energy in a state of zesty coherence.
The Front Door
The first zillience-generating practice I recommend to everyone is a daily centering practice. This is the most straightforward way for you to slow down and calm yourself. When you take time do whatever centering practice works best for you, you intentionally let everything around you fall away so that you can create an inner place of centered stillness.
With practice, you teach yourself to turn off the incessant “chatter” in your mind for short periods of time so that you can just “be.” In doing so, you can gain a huge amount of control over your ongoing emotional states. Using techniques as simple (and infinitely portable) as deep breathing, you can open up new choices about how to handle upsetting circumstances effectively and gracefully.
In a sense, your centering practice is the “front door” to re-energizing yourself. It’s the closest and easiest door to walk through, and it arguably provides the most “bang for the buck.” You can do most centering practices anytime and anywhere. Even better, doing them needn’t cost you a penny. After you spend time in the state of intentional inner stillness that you become skilled at creating for yourself, your mind and spirit will normally feel well refreshed and re-energized.
The Side Door
The second zillience-generating daily practice I recommend to everyone is regular aerobic (i.e., vigorous) physical exercise. By exerting yourself physically either every day or every other day, you can strengthen your heart, revitalize every cell in your body, and, over time, you can develop great physical stamina. An abundance of scientific research has established that regular exercise also serves to strengthen your immune system, prevent all sorts of life-threatening diseases (including various forms of cancer), generate new neurons in your brain, contribute to your emotional stability, help you control your body weight, forestall the onset of dementia (including Alzheimer’s Disease) and, when all is said and done, lengthen your life measurably.
You can think of exercising as a “side door” to re-energizing yourself and building up your zillience. It’s a door that may be a bit less obvious than the “front door.” For many, choosing to walk (or run or cycle or swim) through this door it is more of a challenge. Strenuous exercise requires significantly more physical effort than centering practices that focus on stillness.
As a way to “come back to center,” however, physical exercise can be just as effective as doing a “pure” centering practice. When you are moving continuously and are at one with the cadence of your stride, the rhythm of your stroke, and/or the meditative quality of your repetitive movements, you can experience the paradox of being physically in full motion while simultaneously being totally focused and still inside. Athletes refer to this delicious state as “being in the flow.” Attaining this state is a second reliable way to “come back to your senses” and dwell in a restorative place of centered stillness.
Exercise offers an additional benefit for those of us who sometimes feel stuck and/or depressed. Just as it is impossible to keep your eyes open when you sneeze heartily, when you are physically moving through space by dint of your own willful exertion, it’s impossible to feel stuck. For the duration of your exercise session, “stuckness” falls away, and you benefit from experiencing the opposite of being stuck. You have an irrefutable experience of “being in motion.” This experience is “priceless” because positive (physical) experiences trump negative (mental) thoughts.
The Back Door
If centering practices are the front door to developing more zillience, and regular vigorous exercise is the side door, the “back door” can take the form of a daily creative practice.
I define a creative daily practice as an intentional creative activity that normally falls outside of the domain of whatever it is you do for a living. You want your creative practice to be a genuinely refreshing and re-vitalizing counterpoint to everything else that you are obligated to do. You want it to provide you with a surefire way to re-connect you to your deepest passions. You also want it to be focused on developing something new, whether it be a new personal experience, a gratifying new result, or even an enjoyable new identity fragment such as: “I’m an artist.”
When you zero in on an activity that meets these criteria and then give yourself permission to purse some aspect of it every day for an average of at least 15 minutes, you will begin to systematically develop your own creativity in ways that cannot otherwise be done. You will also likely rediscover how inspiring it is to become entranced repeatedly by an enjoyable activity that tantalizes you to grow and be more at one with your own authentic self. This, in turn, can lead to your reconnecting with the joy of expressing your deepest values ever more fully and ever more creatively.
You will also likely experience the encouraging sensation of “not being dead yet.” Your creative practice can supply you with repeated compelling evidence that you are still alive, still capable of self-discovery, and still capable of learning “new tricks.” (You can teach old dogs new tricks; old dogs just have to practice with sharper attention.)
In the process of getting entranced with whatever creative practice you choose for yourself, you can become so singularly focused that you lose track of time and of all your other concerns. Just as when you are doing your centering practice or exercising vigorously, everything else can fall away, thereby paradoxically enabling you to reach a similar place of centered stillness.
By way of distinctions, note that your creative practice usually requires you to do some form of “not doing anything.” In contrast, your creative practice works only when you are actually doing something. Thus, your daily creative practice is somewhat of an inversion of your centering practice, and hence it has an inherent “back door” quality.
In order to generate lots of “zillience,” I recommend that you have at your disposal three different ways to “come back to your senses.” That way, no matter what challenges you face, you will have not one, but a choice of three different steadying practices on which to lean. You can rely on any one, two, or all three to sustain your personal energy in a state of zesty coherence.
The Front Door
The first zillience-generating practice I recommend to everyone is a daily centering practice. This is the most straightforward way for you to slow down and calm yourself. When you take time do whatever centering practice works best for you, you intentionally let everything around you fall away so that you can create an inner place of centered stillness.
With practice, you teach yourself to turn off the incessant “chatter” in your mind for short periods of time so that you can just “be.” In doing so, you can gain a huge amount of control over your ongoing emotional states. Using techniques as simple (and infinitely portable) as deep breathing, you can open up new choices about how to handle upsetting circumstances effectively and gracefully.
In a sense, your centering practice is the “front door” to re-energizing yourself. It’s the closest and easiest door to walk through, and it arguably provides the most “bang for the buck.” You can do most centering practices anytime and anywhere. Even better, doing them needn’t cost you a penny. After you spend time in the state of intentional inner stillness that you become skilled at creating for yourself, your mind and spirit will normally feel well refreshed and re-energized.
The Side Door
The second zillience-generating daily practice I recommend to everyone is regular aerobic (i.e., vigorous) physical exercise. By exerting yourself physically either every day or every other day, you can strengthen your heart, revitalize every cell in your body, and, over time, you can develop great physical stamina. An abundance of scientific research has established that regular exercise also serves to strengthen your immune system, prevent all sorts of life-threatening diseases (including various forms of cancer), generate new neurons in your brain, contribute to your emotional stability, help you control your body weight, forestall the onset of dementia (including Alzheimer’s Disease) and, when all is said and done, lengthen your life measurably.
You can think of exercising as a “side door” to re-energizing yourself and building up your zillience. It’s a door that may be a bit less obvious than the “front door.” For many, choosing to walk (or run or cycle or swim) through this door it is more of a challenge. Strenuous exercise requires significantly more physical effort than centering practices that focus on stillness.
As a way to “come back to center,” however, physical exercise can be just as effective as doing a “pure” centering practice. When you are moving continuously and are at one with the cadence of your stride, the rhythm of your stroke, and/or the meditative quality of your repetitive movements, you can experience the paradox of being physically in full motion while simultaneously being totally focused and still inside. Athletes refer to this delicious state as “being in the flow.” Attaining this state is a second reliable way to “come back to your senses” and dwell in a restorative place of centered stillness.
Exercise offers an additional benefit for those of us who sometimes feel stuck and/or depressed. Just as it is impossible to keep your eyes open when you sneeze heartily, when you are physically moving through space by dint of your own willful exertion, it’s impossible to feel stuck. For the duration of your exercise session, “stuckness” falls away, and you benefit from experiencing the opposite of being stuck. You have an irrefutable experience of “being in motion.” This experience is “priceless” because positive (physical) experiences trump negative (mental) thoughts.
The Back Door
If centering practices are the front door to developing more zillience, and regular vigorous exercise is the side door, the “back door” can take the form of a daily creative practice.
I define a creative daily practice as an intentional creative activity that normally falls outside of the domain of whatever it is you do for a living. You want your creative practice to be a genuinely refreshing and re-vitalizing counterpoint to everything else that you are obligated to do. You want it to provide you with a surefire way to re-connect you to your deepest passions. You also want it to be focused on developing something new, whether it be a new personal experience, a gratifying new result, or even an enjoyable new identity fragment such as: “I’m an artist.”
When you zero in on an activity that meets these criteria and then give yourself permission to purse some aspect of it every day for an average of at least 15 minutes, you will begin to systematically develop your own creativity in ways that cannot otherwise be done. You will also likely rediscover how inspiring it is to become entranced repeatedly by an enjoyable activity that tantalizes you to grow and be more at one with your own authentic self. This, in turn, can lead to your reconnecting with the joy of expressing your deepest values ever more fully and ever more creatively.
You will also likely experience the encouraging sensation of “not being dead yet.” Your creative practice can supply you with repeated compelling evidence that you are still alive, still capable of self-discovery, and still capable of learning “new tricks.” (You can teach old dogs new tricks; old dogs just have to practice with sharper attention.)
In the process of getting entranced with whatever creative practice you choose for yourself, you can become so singularly focused that you lose track of time and of all your other concerns. Just as when you are doing your centering practice or exercising vigorously, everything else can fall away, thereby paradoxically enabling you to reach a similar place of centered stillness.
By way of distinctions, note that your creative practice usually requires you to do some form of “not doing anything.” In contrast, your creative practice works only when you are actually doing something. Thus, your daily creative practice is somewhat of an inversion of your centering practice, and hence it has an inherent “back door” quality.
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
Sunday, August 3, 2008
The difference between stress and burnout
Stress, by and large, involves too much: too many pressures that demand too much of you physically and psychologically. Stressed people can still imagine, though, that if they can just get everything under control, they’ll feel better.
Burnout, on the other hand, is about not enough. Being burned out means feeling empty, devoid of motivation, and beyond caring. People experiencing burnout often don’t see any hope of positive change in their situations. If excessive stress is like drowning in responsibilities, burnout is being all dried up.
Read more about preventing burnout here
Burnout, on the other hand, is about not enough. Being burned out means feeling empty, devoid of motivation, and beyond caring. People experiencing burnout often don’t see any hope of positive change in their situations. If excessive stress is like drowning in responsibilities, burnout is being all dried up.
Read more about preventing burnout here
List of Ways Life Coaching Builds Resilience
* Self-discovery
* Fuller understanding of self
* Harnessing your spirituality
* Finding vision
* Establishing purpose
* Setting meaningful goals
* Designing your career path
* Sustaining joy
* Attracting only good
* Re-creating mindset
* Achieving balance
* Embracing intentions
* Maintaining focus
* Raising expectations to a higher level
* Reaching peak performance
* Identifying potential
* Grabbing hold of possibilities
* Fuller understanding of self
* Harnessing your spirituality
* Finding vision
* Establishing purpose
* Setting meaningful goals
* Designing your career path
* Sustaining joy
* Attracting only good
* Re-creating mindset
* Achieving balance
* Embracing intentions
* Maintaining focus
* Raising expectations to a higher level
* Reaching peak performance
* Identifying potential
* Grabbing hold of possibilities
Resilience: imagining that what is can be better
If you approach circumstances with the mindset that you have the wisdom, fortitude and arsenal of choices on which to draw, there is no end to the variety and magnitude of the solutions you will arrive at. If you doubt this, talk to a colleague or coach who favors this approach. In addition, the stress, pain and anxiety will concomitantly be far less than if your approach were to succumb to self-pity, fear, doubt, anxiety or hopelessness. Before facing any new threatening situation, such as that of losing your job too soon, practice with less disastrous tests in your life. With this creative mindset rehearsed you will surely become a master over time, since all of modern life is made up of transitions.
-Hyacinth E. Gooden-Bailey, M.A., Life Transitions Coach
-Hyacinth E. Gooden-Bailey, M.A., Life Transitions Coach
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Special August rate on life coaching!
This month, Usoni.com is offering a reduced fee on life coaching!
Contact atieno@usoni.com
Contact atieno@usoni.com
Five Tips for August Renewal
From: Pamela McLean
1. Make a list of activities you loved when you were under the age of 25, post your list in a visible place for a few days -- then pick one activity to resurrect and try it on for the month.
2. Take a mini-vacation that requires only a little planning -- make it within driving distance of home and somewhere you haven't been.
3. Take a day long silent retreat in you home -- no email, no phones, no television, just YOU.
4. Scan 2008, looking back and looking at the months ahead -- create two columns on a blank page -- one side for what's working and the other for what needs adjusting -- brainstorm on ways to make small adjustments.
5. Make time for dreaming big dreams without any requirements to act on them --- just allow a bit of space to wander in unknown territory! Who knows where you might lead yourself!
1. Make a list of activities you loved when you were under the age of 25, post your list in a visible place for a few days -- then pick one activity to resurrect and try it on for the month.
2. Take a mini-vacation that requires only a little planning -- make it within driving distance of home and somewhere you haven't been.
3. Take a day long silent retreat in you home -- no email, no phones, no television, just YOU.
4. Scan 2008, looking back and looking at the months ahead -- create two columns on a blank page -- one side for what's working and the other for what needs adjusting -- brainstorm on ways to make small adjustments.
5. Make time for dreaming big dreams without any requirements to act on them --- just allow a bit of space to wander in unknown territory! Who knows where you might lead yourself!
Small successes “radiate out” into all domains of your life...
From Sandy Davis' latest newsletter:
When you become highly successful at keeping your agreements to do whatever daily practices you take on, you are likely to become successful at keeping all your other agreements, as well. Just start by taking great care of yourself and your own personal energy. Faithfully do your simple daily practices as a way to pay yourself first. Then let your successes with your daily practices “ripple out” to all the other domains in your life. They normally do.
What is uplifting is having the feeling that you are constantly “at choice.” When you willingly choose the particular challenges you’d like to face and then face them successfully, you gain a measure of personal sovereignty. You develop a sense that you are in charge of your own life and that you are capable of being as resourceful as you need to be to “make ends meet.”
From: Sandy Davis | sandy@coachmehome.com | 207-563-7263
When you become highly successful at keeping your agreements to do whatever daily practices you take on, you are likely to become successful at keeping all your other agreements, as well. Just start by taking great care of yourself and your own personal energy. Faithfully do your simple daily practices as a way to pay yourself first. Then let your successes with your daily practices “ripple out” to all the other domains in your life. They normally do.
What is uplifting is having the feeling that you are constantly “at choice.” When you willingly choose the particular challenges you’d like to face and then face them successfully, you gain a measure of personal sovereignty. You develop a sense that you are in charge of your own life and that you are capable of being as resourceful as you need to be to “make ends meet.”
From: Sandy Davis | sandy@coachmehome.com | 207-563-7263
Going for your best life
“The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one." -- Mark Twain, 1835-1910, Author and Humorist
“Do not wait; the time will never be 'just right.' Start where you stand, and work with whatever tools you may have at your command, and better tools will be found as you go along.” -- Napoleon Hill, 1883-1970, Author
(Contact atieno@usoni.com for a special August rate on life coaching!)
“Do not wait; the time will never be 'just right.' Start where you stand, and work with whatever tools you may have at your command, and better tools will be found as you go along.” -- Napoleon Hill, 1883-1970, Author
(Contact atieno@usoni.com for a special August rate on life coaching!)
Learning to love reality as it is
“I was asking myself why I was having these obstacles in my life ... then I suddenly became aware that these obstacles were my life, and I began to enjoy them.” -- John Kanary, Author of "Breaking Through Limitations"
“What is required is that we love the difficult and learn to deal with it. In the difficult are friendly forces, the hands that work on us.” -- Rainer Maria Rilke, Poet and Writer
“What is required is that we love the difficult and learn to deal with it. In the difficult are friendly forces, the hands that work on us.” -- Rainer Maria Rilke, Poet and Writer
Thursday, July 3, 2008
Refugee Mental Health
Center For Mental Health Services
An Annotated Bibliography on Refugee Mental Health
You will find islands of vulnerability and resilience in this SAMHSA.gov resource. There are paragraph synopses that follow the citations here, so this is a very enhanced, content-rich bibliography.
Saturday, June 21, 2008
Interview with Joan Wangler - The Power of Groups to Change Business Culture
As you know from previous posts, I have been wondering if anyone has used the power of groups to change organizational culture. Yes they have, with simple protocols that have proven effective!
Joan Wangler has been building resilience into the fabric of society in a little corner near Washington – the Goddard Space Center. For 8 years, she has been leading creative learning groups and coaching young leaders. She since began the Civility Collaborative, which meets regularly at Goddard and has improved the business culture from the inside out.
"We share observations about our own civility, make recommendations about what we are reading on civility, we reach out to the schools and other government agencies. There is a whole movement afoot in Howard County on raising civility – there are even bumper stickers.”
“When we meet, we have speakers – like P.M. Forni, who has a book called Choosing Civility. His message is that civility is a form of gracious goodness and benevolent awareness. When we are civil and exercise restraint and
respect, we have a whole different appreciation of life."
"So what has been happening in the Collaborative is that we are supporting each other in getting more emotionally intelligent. Social intelligence is a more accurate predictor of being successful in life than your intellectual competence. So this is a focus on relational competence, from a different point of view. This is a whole other way of appreciating diversity."
"In the Collaborative, we structure learning conversations around the topic of civility. First, someone tells their story, something they captured from their life in their little notebook, and no one interrupts. At first we were talking more about road rage types of stories, but now we are talking more about our encounters with people at work and how we have chosen to be more civil or requested a way of moving forward that is civil.”
“Then we have a speaker – last week we had someone from Alternative Dispute Resolution who talked about how civility would avoid conflict. Then we also discuss Forni's book. He has a number of rules of civility, and stories to illustrate each. So in the group someone will take responsibility to lead the discussion on that particular chapter, and take it way beyond."
"We run the Collaborative like a "World Café" – a red and white checkered table cloth, food, and people who are willing to talk about what matters. We do a lot of coaching, and we use the ‘feed forward’ process."
"Marshall Goldsmith has a book about feed forward. In feed forward, someone shares a story about an issue they want to accomplish something on. They tell the story. Then we stand up. They say what they want to achieve, and different people popcorn ideas. The person just says ‘thank you’ not ‘that won't work.’ People come back the next time and say here's what I tried. People have had breakthroughs in their relationships as a result of this process."
"I always feel a lot of love and appreciation in that group." There are plenty of bottom-line financial reasons to implement this brand of leadership development, but the other bottom line is just as important. Joan is authentically committed to bringing civility not only to one organization, but beyond, to the world. The social technologies that have worked at Goddard can be applied elsewhere to foster resilient communities. The word is civility, but the secret mission I hear is "love and appreciation." Who wouldn't want to show up to work in that kind of environment?
Joan Wangler has been building resilience into the fabric of society in a little corner near Washington – the Goddard Space Center. For 8 years, she has been leading creative learning groups and coaching young leaders. She since began the Civility Collaborative, which meets regularly at Goddard and has improved the business culture from the inside out.
"We share observations about our own civility, make recommendations about what we are reading on civility, we reach out to the schools and other government agencies. There is a whole movement afoot in Howard County on raising civility – there are even bumper stickers.”
“When we meet, we have speakers – like P.M. Forni, who has a book called Choosing Civility. His message is that civility is a form of gracious goodness and benevolent awareness. When we are civil and exercise restraint and
respect, we have a whole different appreciation of life."
"So what has been happening in the Collaborative is that we are supporting each other in getting more emotionally intelligent. Social intelligence is a more accurate predictor of being successful in life than your intellectual competence. So this is a focus on relational competence, from a different point of view. This is a whole other way of appreciating diversity."
"In the Collaborative, we structure learning conversations around the topic of civility. First, someone tells their story, something they captured from their life in their little notebook, and no one interrupts. At first we were talking more about road rage types of stories, but now we are talking more about our encounters with people at work and how we have chosen to be more civil or requested a way of moving forward that is civil.”
“Then we have a speaker – last week we had someone from Alternative Dispute Resolution who talked about how civility would avoid conflict. Then we also discuss Forni's book. He has a number of rules of civility, and stories to illustrate each. So in the group someone will take responsibility to lead the discussion on that particular chapter, and take it way beyond."
"We run the Collaborative like a "World Café" – a red and white checkered table cloth, food, and people who are willing to talk about what matters. We do a lot of coaching, and we use the ‘feed forward’ process."
"Marshall Goldsmith has a book about feed forward. In feed forward, someone shares a story about an issue they want to accomplish something on. They tell the story. Then we stand up. They say what they want to achieve, and different people popcorn ideas. The person just says ‘thank you’ not ‘that won't work.’ People come back the next time and say here's what I tried. People have had breakthroughs in their relationships as a result of this process."
"I always feel a lot of love and appreciation in that group." There are plenty of bottom-line financial reasons to implement this brand of leadership development, but the other bottom line is just as important. Joan is authentically committed to bringing civility not only to one organization, but beyond, to the world. The social technologies that have worked at Goddard can be applied elsewhere to foster resilient communities. The word is civility, but the secret mission I hear is "love and appreciation." Who wouldn't want to show up to work in that kind of environment?
Monday, June 16, 2008
Tips from athletes and sports psychology
One of the fascinating things that has happened in the area of stress reduction is that doers, rather than thinkers, have come up with the best methods. Excellence in athletics has led to some of the most useful "best practices" for reducing stress.
Read some of these tips here.
Read some of these tips here.
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
Return to your core values for strength.
In the name of self-care, I googled "inspirational stories" and came up with this very cheesy one. Blatantly sappy, but on reflection I think it reminds or invokes a return to a core value - generosity and kindness.
Core values are one of the most important sources of resilence.
Core values are one of the most important sources of resilence.
Monday, June 2, 2008
re-entry... adjusting to the unacceptable
For a beatuiful taste of what it is like to return from a humanitarian context to the safety bubble of the West read the Saturday, May 31, 2008
"re-engaging with the clamor of the west while residing in the gap between misery and enlightenment" entry of Gwen's SalusWorld blog.
An excerpt:
What I have realized is that traveling and working abroad in areas of need of humanitarian action makes one modest - you are forced to see what a tiny place you occupy in the world and what a crap-shoot it actually is that you just happened to be lucky enough to be born to a privileged family in a privileged country devoid of horrifying events in your immediate environment. Seeing the world also reminds you that the horrifying events – the poverty, and war and trauma is the real global REALITY and what we’ve got here is layers upon layers of denial and dissociation. How is it that we can be at war and I (nor any of my closest friends) have been immediately affected? And, how it is that things like genocide, torture, kidnapping, environmental degradation, violent repression of political rights, the release of toxins into pristine environments, discrimination and the conscription of child soldiers all over the globe occurs constantly and we don’t stand up and swallow up such brazenness in one gulp?
"re-engaging with the clamor of the west while residing in the gap between misery and enlightenment" entry of Gwen's SalusWorld blog.
An excerpt:
What I have realized is that traveling and working abroad in areas of need of humanitarian action makes one modest - you are forced to see what a tiny place you occupy in the world and what a crap-shoot it actually is that you just happened to be lucky enough to be born to a privileged family in a privileged country devoid of horrifying events in your immediate environment. Seeing the world also reminds you that the horrifying events – the poverty, and war and trauma is the real global REALITY and what we’ve got here is layers upon layers of denial and dissociation. How is it that we can be at war and I (nor any of my closest friends) have been immediately affected? And, how it is that things like genocide, torture, kidnapping, environmental degradation, violent repression of political rights, the release of toxins into pristine environments, discrimination and the conscription of child soldiers all over the globe occurs constantly and we don’t stand up and swallow up such brazenness in one gulp?
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Book on the effects of war
For a comprehensive catalogue of all the ways war can affect vets and their families, see _Back from the Front: Combat Trauma, Love, and the Family_
by Aphrodite Matsakis
by Aphrodite Matsakis
The case for organizations to use peer networks to foster resilience
Exhibit A
From A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists in the Twentieth Century by Ben Shephard:
"military psychiatry is often done best not by psychiatrists but by doctors, officers, or soldiers who understand the principles of group psychology and use the defenses in culture to help people through traumatic situations."
In other words, the members of a given culture can be the best ones to tap into it to foster resilience, using the values, beliefs, rewards, and reframing concepts that are the norms within it. Culture makes sense of reality, and trauma often ruptures that sense, leaving people feeling exposed in a crisis of meaning. Who better to help repair that rupture than a peer who knows the nature of what has been lost, and perhaps even the way back? Who better to call on the resources that community uses to provide extra support where needed than someone who knows exactly what those resources are?
PEER NETWORKS RULE!
From A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists in the Twentieth Century by Ben Shephard:
"military psychiatry is often done best not by psychiatrists but by doctors, officers, or soldiers who understand the principles of group psychology and use the defenses in culture to help people through traumatic situations."
In other words, the members of a given culture can be the best ones to tap into it to foster resilience, using the values, beliefs, rewards, and reframing concepts that are the norms within it. Culture makes sense of reality, and trauma often ruptures that sense, leaving people feeling exposed in a crisis of meaning. Who better to help repair that rupture than a peer who knows the nature of what has been lost, and perhaps even the way back? Who better to call on the resources that community uses to provide extra support where needed than someone who knows exactly what those resources are?
PEER NETWORKS RULE!
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Debrief, exit interviews, follow-up and peer support networks for humanitarian staff – making the business case to management
When humanitarian aid workers exit an organization to their next assignment, a little extra and relatively inexpensive attention from the organization can make a big difference. The difference for the departing staff member or consultant can be between a debilitating stress reaction or a smooth transition. The difference for the organization can be between a loyal recruiting pool, and reduced legal risk of liability cases on one hand and a faltering reputation on the other.
Management therefore has a stake in making the time, even in a busy and overstretched resource environment, for conducting psychological debriefs for staff returning from the field, giving exit interviews that glean lessons learned, and following up at six weeks and six months to establish that staff have found adequate resources for coping with any adverse reactions to the stress they experienced in the field.
Another simple and cheap way to provide support to exiting staff is the provision of peer networks in the form of listserves or informal virtual introductions among alumni of the organization. Events, newsletters, and other community maintenance services can supplement to good effect, but the basic facilitation of connection can provide ample opportunity for forming supportive ties with others who can provide empathy, due to their own similar experiences, as well as outlets for sharing ideas, mentoring, and stimulating positive social change.
Social support, as provided by management in the form of exit protocols and by peers through social networking, is important for several reasons. Recent studies show that “traditional social networks play a surprisingly powerful and underrecognized role in influencing how people behave.”1 A World Vision study2 showed that “individual resilience factors only accounted for some 7% of the variance between those who develop stress and trauma reactions and those who do not. … the degree and type of social support an individual is experiencing… accounted for up to 30% variance.”
Sharing these facts may convince, but in order to win real commitment by management for actual implementation, decision-makers will understand the need for providing exit services when they have experienced the bite of a stress reaction for themselves. Field visits, stories, and simulations can be useful in communicating, at a visceral level, the impact of stress in absence of a supportive environment.
1. Social Networks' Sway May Be Underestimated By Rob Stein, Washington Post Staff Writer
2. Conference session on Stress and Trauma Effects on National Staff: How Best to Use the Resources (Tuesday, 16th November, 2004; 3.50pm) by Janelle Richards, Human Resources Manager, World Vision, Australia, Janelle.richards@worldvision.com.au, Supplementary analysis was conducted by staff at the Headington Program at Fuller Seminary.
The key findings were:
• The relationship between a manager and their staff is critical for the mental health of all groups whether exposed to trauma or not.
• Those with compromised Social Support are 10 times as likely to be experiencing trauma following an event during service with WV as those with non compromised Social Support.
• Staff exposed to trauma who have compromised social support are 2.6 times as likely to experience moderate to severe anxiety as staff exposed to trauma who have good levels of social support.
• Social support within the organisation is a good a predictor of health with the most potent social support being the team leader.
• There is a threefold higher risk of experiencing anxiety if staff social support is compromised than if it is not.
Management therefore has a stake in making the time, even in a busy and overstretched resource environment, for conducting psychological debriefs for staff returning from the field, giving exit interviews that glean lessons learned, and following up at six weeks and six months to establish that staff have found adequate resources for coping with any adverse reactions to the stress they experienced in the field.
Another simple and cheap way to provide support to exiting staff is the provision of peer networks in the form of listserves or informal virtual introductions among alumni of the organization. Events, newsletters, and other community maintenance services can supplement to good effect, but the basic facilitation of connection can provide ample opportunity for forming supportive ties with others who can provide empathy, due to their own similar experiences, as well as outlets for sharing ideas, mentoring, and stimulating positive social change.
Social support, as provided by management in the form of exit protocols and by peers through social networking, is important for several reasons. Recent studies show that “traditional social networks play a surprisingly powerful and underrecognized role in influencing how people behave.”1 A World Vision study2 showed that “individual resilience factors only accounted for some 7% of the variance between those who develop stress and trauma reactions and those who do not. … the degree and type of social support an individual is experiencing… accounted for up to 30% variance.”
Sharing these facts may convince, but in order to win real commitment by management for actual implementation, decision-makers will understand the need for providing exit services when they have experienced the bite of a stress reaction for themselves. Field visits, stories, and simulations can be useful in communicating, at a visceral level, the impact of stress in absence of a supportive environment.
1. Social Networks' Sway May Be Underestimated By Rob Stein, Washington Post Staff Writer
2. Conference session on Stress and Trauma Effects on National Staff: How Best to Use the Resources (Tuesday, 16th November, 2004; 3.50pm) by Janelle Richards, Human Resources Manager, World Vision, Australia, Janelle.richards@worldvision.com.au, Supplementary analysis was conducted by staff at the Headington Program at Fuller Seminary.
The key findings were:
• The relationship between a manager and their staff is critical for the mental health of all groups whether exposed to trauma or not.
• Those with compromised Social Support are 10 times as likely to be experiencing trauma following an event during service with WV as those with non compromised Social Support.
• Staff exposed to trauma who have compromised social support are 2.6 times as likely to experience moderate to severe anxiety as staff exposed to trauma who have good levels of social support.
• Social support within the organisation is a good a predictor of health with the most potent social support being the team leader.
• There is a threefold higher risk of experiencing anxiety if staff social support is compromised than if it is not.
Monday, May 26, 2008
Vicarious resilience
This piece points up the idea that, instead of suffering vicarious trauma, therapists may gain from the resilience of survivors!
The abstract reads:
This study explores the formulation of a new concept: vicarious resilience. It addresses the question of how psychotherapists who work with survivors of political violence or kidnapping are affected by their clients' stories of resilience. It focuses on the psychotherapists' interpretations of their clients' stories, and how they make sense of the impact that these stories have had on their lives. In semistructured interviews, 12 psychotherapists who work with victims of political violence and kidnapping were interviewed about their perceptions of their clients' overcoming of adversity. A phenomenological analysis of the transcripts was used to describe the themes that speak about the effects of witnessing how clients cope constructively with adversity. These themes are discussed to advance the concept of vicarious resilience and how it can contribute to sustaining and empowering trauma therapists.
The abstract reads:
This study explores the formulation of a new concept: vicarious resilience. It addresses the question of how psychotherapists who work with survivors of political violence or kidnapping are affected by their clients' stories of resilience. It focuses on the psychotherapists' interpretations of their clients' stories, and how they make sense of the impact that these stories have had on their lives. In semistructured interviews, 12 psychotherapists who work with victims of political violence and kidnapping were interviewed about their perceptions of their clients' overcoming of adversity. A phenomenological analysis of the transcripts was used to describe the themes that speak about the effects of witnessing how clients cope constructively with adversity. These themes are discussed to advance the concept of vicarious resilience and how it can contribute to sustaining and empowering trauma therapists.
Dance therapy for torture survivors
Amber Gray uses movement therapy to work with survivors of atrocities. Learn more here. Restorative Resources Training and Consulting, LLC, provides individual, family, group and community-based psychotherapy; training and education; consultation related to clinical practice, organizational structure and management; and program development, implementation and evaluation, nationally and internationally, to people and organizations who serve survivors of extreme interpersonal trauma.
Soldiers against war
Military and their families come together and speak out to end violence: Veterans Against the Iraq War, Veterans for Peace, and Iraq Veterans Against the War
help for veterans suffering war stress
The National Veterans Foundation can be reached at 1-888-777-4443 and offers help and advocacy to veterans and their families.
2004 program on supporting humanitarian workers
This summary of a 2004 event is a useful overview of issues involved in providing adequate support to humanitarian aid workers.
http://www.groups.psychology.org.au/Assets/Files/cross_cultural_conf_pres_summary.pdf
http://www.groups.psychology.org.au/Assets/Files/cross_cultural_conf_pres_summary.pdf
Friday, May 23, 2008
one woman show on haiti (in dc)
If you are passionate about art connected to social
change, Kathleen Gonzales, whose work delves into Haitian
folklore, interviews with Haitians & Haitian-Americans, and also her
own experience growing up in Haiti as she saw violence seize her
country, will be presenting her beautiful and courageous story this coming week -- with 2 pay-what-you-can (free!) sneak preview shows Tuesday & Wednesday.
The Bridge of Bodies
A one-woman show
Written and Performed by Kathleen Gonzales
Directed by Patrick Crowley
May 29th - June 15th
Thursday–Saturday, 8pm, Sundays, 3pm
Pay-What-You-Can Previews Tuesday May 27 & Wednesday May 28
Flashpoint 916 G Street NW
Washington, DC 20007
Tickets: $20, $10 for students with valid student ID.
$10 per person for groups of 8 or more.
For reservations call: 202.315.1340 or email
tickets@bridgeofbodies.com
Marie-Therese immigrated to the United States carrying little
recollection of who she was and why she left. With her silent mother
as the only link to her past, Marie-Therese realizes that she must
return to her native Haiti to understand her true identity. Along her
journey, Marie-Therese encounters walls that eavesdrop on
conversations, strangers who recognize her from long ago and a ritual
cleansing from deep blue pools of water. She meets many characters who
each hold a piece to the puzzle of who she is. Will she be able to fit
the pieces together and remember what happened?
Haitian-born Kathleen Gonzales draws from her own experience and
interviews with Haitians and Haitian-Americans in this intimate
tapestry capturing the sights and sounds of Haiti's troubled past, as
well as the rich cultural landscape of today.
Proceeds from this production will benefit The Eyes of Haiti, a non-
profit organization, teaching peace and sustainability to the youth of
Haiti.
Part of the 2007-2008 Mead Theatre Lab Program at Flashpoint, a
Cultural Development Corporation project. Funded in part bythe D.C.
Commission on the Arts & Humanities, an agency supported in part by
National Endowment for the Arts.
The Mead Theatre Lab Program at Flashpoint, a Cultural Development
Corporation project, is made possible by the generous support of the
Morris & Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation, the DC Commission on the Arts &
Humanities, the Max & Victoria Dreyfus Foundation, the Aaron & Cecile
Goldman Foundation, the Jovid Foundation, Mary & Daniel Loughran
Foundation, the MARPAT Foundation, Jaylee & the late Gilbert Mead, the
Eugene & Agnes E. Meyer Foundation, Prince Charitable Trusts, Jon and
NoraLee Sedmak and many other sponsors. Hotel Helix is Flashpoint's
2007-2008 Hotel Partner. Barefoot Wine is Flashpoint's 2007-2008 Wine
Partner.
change, Kathleen Gonzales, whose work delves into Haitian
folklore, interviews with Haitians & Haitian-Americans, and also her
own experience growing up in Haiti as she saw violence seize her
country, will be presenting her beautiful and courageous story this coming week -- with 2 pay-what-you-can (free!) sneak preview shows Tuesday & Wednesday.
The Bridge of Bodies
A one-woman show
Written and Performed by Kathleen Gonzales
Directed by Patrick Crowley
May 29th - June 15th
Thursday–Saturday, 8pm, Sundays, 3pm
Pay-What-You-Can Previews Tuesday May 27 & Wednesday May 28
Flashpoint 916 G Street NW
Washington, DC 20007
Tickets: $20, $10 for students with valid student ID.
$10 per person for groups of 8 or more.
For reservations call: 202.315.1340 or email
tickets@bridgeofbodies.com
Marie-Therese immigrated to the United States carrying little
recollection of who she was and why she left. With her silent mother
as the only link to her past, Marie-Therese realizes that she must
return to her native Haiti to understand her true identity. Along her
journey, Marie-Therese encounters walls that eavesdrop on
conversations, strangers who recognize her from long ago and a ritual
cleansing from deep blue pools of water. She meets many characters who
each hold a piece to the puzzle of who she is. Will she be able to fit
the pieces together and remember what happened?
Haitian-born Kathleen Gonzales draws from her own experience and
interviews with Haitians and Haitian-Americans in this intimate
tapestry capturing the sights and sounds of Haiti's troubled past, as
well as the rich cultural landscape of today.
Proceeds from this production will benefit The Eyes of Haiti, a non-
profit organization, teaching peace and sustainability to the youth of
Haiti.
Part of the 2007-2008 Mead Theatre Lab Program at Flashpoint, a
Cultural Development Corporation project. Funded in part bythe D.C.
Commission on the Arts & Humanities, an agency supported in part by
National Endowment for the Arts.
The Mead Theatre Lab Program at Flashpoint, a Cultural Development
Corporation project, is made possible by the generous support of the
Morris & Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation, the DC Commission on the Arts &
Humanities, the Max & Victoria Dreyfus Foundation, the Aaron & Cecile
Goldman Foundation, the Jovid Foundation, Mary & Daniel Loughran
Foundation, the MARPAT Foundation, Jaylee & the late Gilbert Mead, the
Eugene & Agnes E. Meyer Foundation, Prince Charitable Trusts, Jon and
NoraLee Sedmak and many other sponsors. Hotel Helix is Flashpoint's
2007-2008 Hotel Partner. Barefoot Wine is Flashpoint's 2007-2008 Wine
Partner.
Monday, May 19, 2008
Invisible Wounds of War
A report released this week by the RAND Corporation, focusing on the rates of PTSD, major depression, and traumatic brain injury in Iraq/Afghanistan war veterans. Researchers also conducted focus groups with military families and spouses about these issues and a model of the economic impact of these conditions.
The authors of the report recommend that effective programs incorporating evidence-based care must be developed to treat veterans experiencing problems such as PTSD and major depression, and suggest that such programs would actually have a negligible or even net positive cost due to their mitigation of the negative economic impact associated with these events.
There is a summary and free download of report results here:
RAND Center for Military Health Policy Research (2008). Invisible Wounds of War: Psychological and Cognitive Injuries, Their Consequences, and Services to Assist Recovery. Santa Monica, CA: The RAND Corporation.
The authors of the report recommend that effective programs incorporating evidence-based care must be developed to treat veterans experiencing problems such as PTSD and major depression, and suggest that such programs would actually have a negligible or even net positive cost due to their mitigation of the negative economic impact associated with these events.
There is a summary and free download of report results here:
RAND Center for Military Health Policy Research (2008). Invisible Wounds of War: Psychological and Cognitive Injuries, Their Consequences, and Services to Assist Recovery. Santa Monica, CA: The RAND Corporation.
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Tips for donating to cyclone relief
A note from Simon Billenness, co-chair of the board of directors of the U.S. Campaign for Burma: http://uscampaignforburma.org/ follows:
I've been working on this almost full-time since the cyclone struck. It's been a crash course for me in humanitarian relief in Burma. Here is what I've learned.
1. It is best to give donation to small NGOs. The big NGOs (Red Cross, World Vision, etc.) have big publicity machines and are likely not hurting for donations. We should give our "smart money" to the most effective small NGOs who devote their money solely for relief and spend little to no money on fundraising overhead.
2. It is best to give to NGOs who were on the ground prior to the cyclone. They are experienced with Burma, already have a network of Burmese partners, and know how to best bypass the regime's stealing and corruption.
3. Donate to political action as well as relief. The problem is not that there is insufficient aid. Aid is already piling up on the borders. The real problems is that the Burmese military regime is taking control of aid deliveries and diverting it to feed the army. (The regime is scared that their own troops are hungry and have weapons. The generals fear mutinies and even a large-scale insurrection.) The regime is also refusing access to the affected regions by aid workers and journalists. It will take political pressure on the regime to force them to let in the aid. That requires funding the organizations that are organizing the most effective political pressure.
Regarding aid, I do recommend Thirst Aid, which was inside Burma pre-cyclone and has already been delivering water purification tablets. (Thirst Aid is a small NGO run by a couple of experienced Burma aid activists in Oregon and has very little overhead.) www.thirst-aid.org
Foundation for the People of Burma was established by Hal Nathan, a San Francisco money manager and, I believe, Buddhist. This group has worked through monasteries inside Burma for several years. http://www.foundationburma.org/
Avaaz.org has raised a lot of money. Big kudos to them. But Avaaz does not have the contacts inside in Burma so they are distributing their money to the smaller groups that have.
Other organizations that I know and personally vouch for:
Burma Lifeline: http://www.burmalifeline.org/
Burma Border Projects: http://www.burmaborderprojects.org
Disclaimer: I am Co-chair of the Board of Directors of the U.S. Campaign for Burma.
The U.S. Campaign for Burma is raising money that people can earmark for relief. These funds are being passed though 100%. I cannot go into detail about the groups inside Burma to which we are directly sending the money. If the regime learned that we were giving money to those organizations, they would very likely steal the money and put the people in prison.
I would also recommend donations for the political work of the U.S. Campaign for Burma, Burma Campaign UK, and Canadian Friends of Burma. These do the most effective work in lobbying the United Nations, U.S. government and Congress as well as the European Union and its member governments.
http://www.uscampaignforburma.org
http://www.cfob.org
http://www.burmacampaign.org.uk/
I've been working on this almost full-time since the cyclone struck. It's been a crash course for me in humanitarian relief in Burma. Here is what I've learned.
1. It is best to give donation to small NGOs. The big NGOs (Red Cross, World Vision, etc.) have big publicity machines and are likely not hurting for donations. We should give our "smart money" to the most effective small NGOs who devote their money solely for relief and spend little to no money on fundraising overhead.
2. It is best to give to NGOs who were on the ground prior to the cyclone. They are experienced with Burma, already have a network of Burmese partners, and know how to best bypass the regime's stealing and corruption.
3. Donate to political action as well as relief. The problem is not that there is insufficient aid. Aid is already piling up on the borders. The real problems is that the Burmese military regime is taking control of aid deliveries and diverting it to feed the army. (The regime is scared that their own troops are hungry and have weapons. The generals fear mutinies and even a large-scale insurrection.) The regime is also refusing access to the affected regions by aid workers and journalists. It will take political pressure on the regime to force them to let in the aid. That requires funding the organizations that are organizing the most effective political pressure.
Regarding aid, I do recommend Thirst Aid, which was inside Burma pre-cyclone and has already been delivering water purification tablets. (Thirst Aid is a small NGO run by a couple of experienced Burma aid activists in Oregon and has very little overhead.) www.thirst-aid.org
Foundation for the People of Burma was established by Hal Nathan, a San Francisco money manager and, I believe, Buddhist. This group has worked through monasteries inside Burma for several years. http://www.foundationburma.org/
Avaaz.org has raised a lot of money. Big kudos to them. But Avaaz does not have the contacts inside in Burma so they are distributing their money to the smaller groups that have.
Other organizations that I know and personally vouch for:
Burma Lifeline: http://www.burmalifeline.org/
Burma Border Projects: http://www.burmaborderprojects.org
Disclaimer: I am Co-chair of the Board of Directors of the U.S. Campaign for Burma.
The U.S. Campaign for Burma is raising money that people can earmark for relief. These funds are being passed though 100%. I cannot go into detail about the groups inside Burma to which we are directly sending the money. If the regime learned that we were giving money to those organizations, they would very likely steal the money and put the people in prison.
I would also recommend donations for the political work of the U.S. Campaign for Burma, Burma Campaign UK, and Canadian Friends of Burma. These do the most effective work in lobbying the United Nations, U.S. government and Congress as well as the European Union and its member governments.
http://www.uscampaignforburma.org
http://www.cfob.org
http://www.burmacampaign.org.uk/
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Manage your energy, not your time
"The science of stamina has advanced to the point where individuals, teams, and whole organizations can, with some straightforward interventions, significantly increase their capacity to get things done."
The following is an excerpt from an article by Tony Schwartz and Catherine McCarthy, featured in the Harvard Business Review, October 2007
Steve Wanner is a highly respected 37-year-old partner at Ernst & Young, married with four young children. When we met him a year ago, he was working 12- to 14-hour days, felt perpetually exhausted, and found it difficult to fully engage with his family in the evenings, which left him feeling guilty and dissatisfied. He slept poorly, made no time to exercise, and seldom ate healthy meals, instead grabbing a bite to eat on the run or while working at his desk.
Wanner’s experience is not uncommon. Most of us respond to rising demands in the workplace by putting in longer hours, which inevitably take a toll on us physically, mentally, and emotionally. That leads to declining levels of engagement, increasing levels of distraction, high turnover rates, and soaring medical costs among employees. We at the Energy Project have worked with thousands of leaders and managers in the course of doing consulting and coaching at large organizations during the past five years. With remarkable consistency, these executives tell us they’re pushing themselves harder than ever to keep up and increasingly feel they are at a breaking point.
The core problem with working longer hours is that time is a finite resource. Energy is a different story. Defined in physics as the capacity to work, energy comes from four main wellsprings in human beings: the body, emotions, mind, and spirit. In each, energy can be systematically expanded and regularly renewed by establishing specific rituals—behaviors that are intentionally practiced and precisely scheduled, with the goal of making them unconscious and automatic as quickly as possible.
To effectively reenergize their workforces, organizations need to shift their emphasis from getting more out of people to investing more in them, so they are motivated—and able—to bring more of themselves to work every day. To recharge themselves, individuals need to recognize the costs of energy-depleting behaviors and then take responsibility for changing them, regardless of the circumstances they’re facing.
The rituals and behaviors Wanner established to better manage his energy transformed his life. He set an earlier bedtime and gave up drinking, which had disrupted his sleep. As a consequence, when he woke up he felt more rested and more motivated to exercise, which he now does almost every morning. In less than two months he lost 15 pounds. After working out he now sits down with his family for breakfast. Wanner still puts in long hours on the job, but he renews himself regularly along the way. He leaves his desk for lunch and usually takes a morning and an afternoon walk outside. When he arrives at home in the evening, he’s more relaxed and better able to connect with his wife and children.
Establishing simple rituals like these can lead to striking results across organizations. At Wachovia Bank, we took a group of employees through a pilot energy management program and then measured their performance against that of a control group. The participants outperformed the controls on a series of financial metrics, such as the value of loans they generated. They also reported substantial improvements in their customer relationships, their engagement with work, and their personal satisfaction.
The following is an excerpt from an article by Tony Schwartz and Catherine McCarthy, featured in the Harvard Business Review, October 2007
Steve Wanner is a highly respected 37-year-old partner at Ernst & Young, married with four young children. When we met him a year ago, he was working 12- to 14-hour days, felt perpetually exhausted, and found it difficult to fully engage with his family in the evenings, which left him feeling guilty and dissatisfied. He slept poorly, made no time to exercise, and seldom ate healthy meals, instead grabbing a bite to eat on the run or while working at his desk.
Wanner’s experience is not uncommon. Most of us respond to rising demands in the workplace by putting in longer hours, which inevitably take a toll on us physically, mentally, and emotionally. That leads to declining levels of engagement, increasing levels of distraction, high turnover rates, and soaring medical costs among employees. We at the Energy Project have worked with thousands of leaders and managers in the course of doing consulting and coaching at large organizations during the past five years. With remarkable consistency, these executives tell us they’re pushing themselves harder than ever to keep up and increasingly feel they are at a breaking point.
The core problem with working longer hours is that time is a finite resource. Energy is a different story. Defined in physics as the capacity to work, energy comes from four main wellsprings in human beings: the body, emotions, mind, and spirit. In each, energy can be systematically expanded and regularly renewed by establishing specific rituals—behaviors that are intentionally practiced and precisely scheduled, with the goal of making them unconscious and automatic as quickly as possible.
To effectively reenergize their workforces, organizations need to shift their emphasis from getting more out of people to investing more in them, so they are motivated—and able—to bring more of themselves to work every day. To recharge themselves, individuals need to recognize the costs of energy-depleting behaviors and then take responsibility for changing them, regardless of the circumstances they’re facing.
The rituals and behaviors Wanner established to better manage his energy transformed his life. He set an earlier bedtime and gave up drinking, which had disrupted his sleep. As a consequence, when he woke up he felt more rested and more motivated to exercise, which he now does almost every morning. In less than two months he lost 15 pounds. After working out he now sits down with his family for breakfast. Wanner still puts in long hours on the job, but he renews himself regularly along the way. He leaves his desk for lunch and usually takes a morning and an afternoon walk outside. When he arrives at home in the evening, he’s more relaxed and better able to connect with his wife and children.
Establishing simple rituals like these can lead to striking results across organizations. At Wachovia Bank, we took a group of employees through a pilot energy management program and then measured their performance against that of a control group. The participants outperformed the controls on a series of financial metrics, such as the value of loans they generated. They also reported substantial improvements in their customer relationships, their engagement with work, and their personal satisfaction.
Monday, May 12, 2008
Interview with Sandy Davis: "My daily resilience practices have actually saved my life a bunch of times."
Interview of Sandy Davis by Atieno Fisher on April 21, 2008
Excerpt: I realized that the daily practices I was doing served to generate a vital inner energy that served to amplify and extend my own ability to be resilient. In other words, I discovered the “proactive” side of resilience. I realized that before you can be optimally resilient, you first have to become “zillient.” Then, when adversity or change challenges you, you will be primed to be “re-zillient” or resilient.
Sandy Davis holds a PCC Certificate (Professional Certified Coach) from the International Coach Federation and has been a full-time professional coach for over 12 years. For decades, he has been experimenting with various ways to develop personal resilience. He has self-published two instructional manuals on this subject, the most recent of which is entitled: “Zillience! How to Succeed in Business without Really Frying.”
In April, I had the opportunity to interview Sandy about his work and his thinking on the subject of personal resilience. I was reminded again that the people we often consider extraordinary and elevate as somehow different (more heroic or saintly) than ourselves are actually people just like the rest of us, who make choices that are just as open to each of us. In the transcript of that interview that follows is a description of Sandy's story and how he came to evolve the three resilience-sustaining practices he now teaches others.
AF: How did you become interested in developing personal resilience?
SD: At the age of six, I stumbled on the need to develop my own resilience experientially, long before I knew the word “resilience” existed. After the sudden and unexpected break-up of my parents’ marriage, I found myself in circumstances that I didn't like. The world around me abruptly transformed from being safe and predictable to unknown and unpredictable. Suddenly life became threatening. This was a big shock, one that traumatized me in subtle and lasting ways. It let me to feel a need to constantly be “en garde.”
I remember wanting to find a way to make the uninvited adversities that had befallen us go away. I had an intuition that there had to be some way to offset them, to play through the adversities, and to come out the other side of them. I wanted to be more in control of my situation. But no one offered me any help or instruction in how to do this. Back then, I found myself trapped in my own private existential distress.
AF: What were some of the lessons you learned way back then?
SD: The set-up for one of the first lessons I learned about how to “play through adversity” began a year later, when I was in the second grade. I had been labeled as “musically talented,” and was in my second year of private piano lessons. I had a great aural memory and could play melodies back upon just hearing them once. It was also easy for me to improvise around those melodies. I would happily spend hours “noodling” away on the family piano.
Unfortunately, however, I was dyslexic (which was not yet diagnosable back then). My brain was wired up in such a way that reading music was next to impossible. Written notes made no sense to me whatsoever. So I taught myself to compensate for this inability by taking the fullest possible advantage of my auditory memory. After each lesson, I would ask my mother to sight-read my newly assigned pieces for me. Then I would reconstruct what she had played by ear and commit the piece to memory. That was how I bluffed my way through the first two years of piano lessons.
My relationship with my piano teacher became increasingly adversarial. I though of her as “Mrs. Witch” and to this day remember her only by that made-up name. She was determined to have all her students to play every note exactly as it was written. She had no interest in my playing in the assigned pieces in an “approximate” way, and she was even less interested in my improvising those melodies in order to decorate and “improve” them.
We finally came to blows. At the end of my second year of lessons, Mrs. Witch declared to my mother (in front of me) that I was “unmusical and uneducable.” She told my mother that she would do better to spend her money on giving me riding lessons. A week later, I was sitting on top of a horse. I felt wounded, double-crossed, and betrayed. It was as though I had been summarily thrown out of the promise land. My most favorite pastime had been ripped out from underneath me.
AF: Was that the end of your pursuit of music?
SD: No, eight years later, when I was 15, I finally discovered a way to forever heal that wound. I stumbled into the world of traditional folk music. I discovered the recordings of Pete Seeger, the Weavers, the Kingston Trio, and other folk musicians. Here was a world where songs and tunes were learned primarily by ear and then passed along by ear from musician to musician and from generation to generation. This was my idea of heaven on earth.
I jumped headlong into this vibrant world. I knew this time around that no one would ever be able to take my music away from me again. It was mine now. I have continued to thrive in this world of music ever since. I still play traditional dance tunes every day, and this act of making music still reliably nourishes my spirit.
Perhaps more than anything else, it was this formative learning experience that marked the beginning of my figuring out how to bounce back from adversity. It was my first memorable success in reclaiming what I wanted, what I needed, and what I loved. In the process, I discovered the value of daily practice (in this case, playing my five-string banjo every day) and it led me to a first taste of what a delight it is to master something. It also gave me a very positive new identity fragment: “I’m a musician. I play the banjo.”
Having this new identity gave my self-confidence a huge boost. More importantly, it encouraged me to believe that no matter what the setback, it is possible to find a way through it. After having my favorite pastime painfully stripped away when I was seven, I later found my own way to reclaim it. Because I refused to give it up, the wounded part of me finally started to feel whole again.
AF: Were there other lessons in resilience that date back to when you were young?
SD: Yes, I think the roots of my long-standing interest in resilience go squarely back to my formative years. For example, another lesson in dealing with adversity came about through some physical challenges I faced as an adolescent.
When I was 14, I was stricken with rheumatic fever and ended up with scarred heart valves and a residual heart murmur. I was told back then that I would never be able to exercise vigorously. Through high school and college, I was not allowed to play competitive sports. I missed out on the rewarding experience of becoming an athlete.
When I was 23, I took it upon myself to disobey the long-standing advice of my doctors. I was fed up with being so out of condition that I was unable to walk up four flights of stairs without becoming winded and red in the face. Without anyone’s permission, I went out and bought myself a pair of sneakers and a sweat suit and just started running.
At first, jogging a distance of one mile just about killed me. But I liked the payoff of feeling better about myself after I had worked up a good sweat. So I continued to run. Over three months, I gradually worked my way up to running three miles every other day. At that point, I had developed enough stamina to run up four flights of stairs without becoming winded. That was a thrill. And I was reminded again that practice always pays off.
AF: What did you take from this lesson?
SD: I was so impressed by this demonstration of the power of daily practice that I have never stopped exercising vigorously for at least half an hour ever other day. For the past 40 years, I have continuously run 5K every other day, year ’round, or rowed a distance of 7.5K.
AF: That’s an impressive demonstration of persistence. After all those miles, how are your knees?
SD: Up until a few months ago, there were in fabulous condition. Then, unfortunately, in February of this year, I was in a near-fatal car accident in which my right knee was permanently injured. I suddenly had to stop my long-standing practice of running, and it appears now that I may never be able to run again. My injured right knee can no longer tolerate the “concussions” of the running stride. I am grateful, however, that I can still ride a bicycle and I can still row my racing shell. My new goal is to continue doing one or the other of those two sports every other day for the next thirty-plus years, year ’round, until I am 100 years old.
I remain fully committed to exercising regularly because that’s what has continuously strengthened my heart and, in spite of my shaky start as an invalid, that daily habit has enabled me to run a total distance of well over 24,900 miles (which is the circumference of the earth at the equator).
AF: You mentioned to me earlier that you’ve had some recent setbacks. What are those?
SD: When I was 61, my history with rheumatic fever caught up with me. After 40 years of running, my heart finally needed some assistance. Over a period of several decades, my resting pulse had become progressively lower. It finally got too low and I developed symptoms of heart block. Fortunately, I was alert to my symptoms and, on the day when my heart finally needed help, I was fortunate to have a pacemaker hastily implanted in my chest.
The good news is that the pacemaker was implanted just in time, and it fully corrected the heart block problem. In short order, I was able to resume my routine of exercising vigorously for at least half an hour every other day. The bad news is that at the same time I received my pacemaker, a staph infection was also accidentally implanted in me.
That infection “colonized,” and eight months later, it unexpectedly “came back to life” and all but killed me. As a consequence, I had to spend three weeks in two different hospitals. In addition to treating the systemic staph infection, I had to have having two more pacemaker surgeries, one to “extract” my first pacemaker install a temporary replacement, and then a second surgery to implant a new pacemaker and remove the temporary one.
On top of that, I had to endure six weeks of continuous intravenous infusions of antibiotics. More than anything else, the toxic antibiotics nearly killed me. What saved my life were the daily resilience practices I have been doing faithfully for the past several decades. Even as I was in the hospital, they gave me the stamina I needed to “play through adversity” once again.
AF: I know you speak of “doing your daily resilience practices as though your life depends on them.” It sounds like that has proven to be true for you. Is that so?
SD: Yes. My daily resilience practices have actually saved my life a bunch of times. I think it’s fair to say that without them, I wouldn’t be here today. They have pulled me through emotional adversities (such as depression, personal losses, etc.), medical challenges (such as various sports injuries and occasional illnesses), and my fair share of major life upsets (such as divorce, getting laid off from work, failing in business, etc.).
AF: How was it that you started to incorporate these daily resilience practices into your work with your coaching clients?
SD: Based on how valuable these daily practices have proven to be for myself, about 10 years ago I started experimenting with teaching these practices to my coaching clients. The practices proved to be extremely effective in helping them meet the challenges they were facing. I then set about inventing ways to reach more people. Four years ago, I started piloting several group programs. Today I offer both live workshops, and several ongoing phone-based group programs. All of these programs focus on teaching you how to take on and sustain these simple daily resilience practices. I’ve also authored two instructional manuals on this topic.
AF: You’ve clearly spent a long time putting the pieces of this puzzle together. You started way back when you were a teenager. Take us from back then to the present moment.
SD: As a teenager, my experiments in becoming resilient were somewhat haphazard. Fortunately, a few of them produced great results. Over the past 50 years, I have gone on to consciously experiment with all sorts of daily developmental practices. I have sought out ones that had the promise of helping me reach the long-desired state of being prepared to handle whatever challenges and adversities were bound to be on my path. I have tested many different practices. In almost all cases, I have experimented with a given practice for at least five continuous years or longer.
About eight years ago, I reached a point where it felt like I had finally “cracked the code.” I had been searching for a combination of daily practices that would ensure a consistent high degree of personal resilience. I wanted to discover the best, most effective, most affordable, and minimum set of simple daily practices.
Along the way, I came to understand that “resilience” is fundamentally a reactive phenomenon. Only in the moment of facing adversity, do you actually put forward responses that are what we call “resilient.” The question I asked myself was, “In between those moments of making resilient responses, what’s going on?”
That was when I realized that the daily practices I was doing served to generate a vital inner energy that served to amplify and extend my own ability to be resilient. In other words, I discovered the “proactive” side of resilience. I realized that before you can be optimally resilient, you first have to become “zillient.” Then, when adversity or change challenges you, you will be primed to be “re-zillient” or resilient.
AF: So what are the daily practices that generate this energy you call “zillience?”
SD: What I have discovered works best is a combination of three simple daily practices. All three require you to “come back to your senses.” One is focused on developing your mind. The second focuses on developing your body. And the third focuses on developing your spirit.
All three of these practices are what I call “non-cognitive” practices. They are not about thinking. In fact, they are all designed to help you regularly “get out of your cerebral cortex.” They all involve learning “experientially” rather than “cognitively.”
Here’s the magic combination of daily practices that I have found will reliably amplify and extend your natural resilience:
1. The first is a pure centering practice for the mind. It entails learning to shut down the “CPU” (Central Processing Unit) of the thinking brain and focus momentarily on just being without thinking. One simple way to do this is to focus your attention singularly on your breathing. Doing this for just 15 minutes a day is enough to produce desirable changes (such as lowing the level of the stress hormone, cortisol, in your blood, and strengthening your immune system). By teaching yourself how to let go of your thoughts and be completely present in the moment, you can gain a remarkable degree of control over your inner emotional world. For example, you can learn to quickly let go of negative emotional states and induce positive emotional states at will.
2. The second daily practice entails exercising vigorously for an average of 15 minutes a day or 30 minutes every other day. When you regularly exercise “aerobically,” you not only strengthen your heart as a muscle. You also keep the inner workings of your whole body “toned up.” Indeed, regular exercise turns out to be particularly beneficial for your brain.
Without regular exercise, our bodies slowly start to degenerate. With regular exercise, it’s possible to “hold even” as we age. Indeed, at any given moment, no matter how old we are, we can develop our bodies to be stronger, healthier, and more agile. In some truly remarkable ways, regular exercise can actually reverse the normal aging process.
3. The third daily practice is what I call a daily creative practice. Each of us can benefit hugely from having a restorative developmental activity that we pursue every day in some small but continuous ways. You want to choose a creative activity that falls outside the domain of your work, one that tantalizes you to keep on developing your creative self. You want to choose an activity with which you feel a deep and passionate connection. You want it to be something so dear to you that when you take time to pursue it, you can become completely entranced by it. You want it to have the power to bring you back to center you by pulling you far away from everything else in your life that is stressing you. By having such a practice and by doing it for at least 15 minutes each day, you can greatly refresh your spirit.
AF: How long have you been doing these three daily practices?
SD: I’ve been doing a daily creative practice off an on for almost 50 years. I’ve been exercising vigorously for half an hour every other day for over 40 years. And I’ve been doing a daily centering practice for the past 15 years. For the past six years, I have also kept an accountability log in which I record every day how many minutes I spend doing each of these practices.
Based on these logs, I know that on April 1st of this year, I completed 2,100 consecutive days during which time I did not miss my daily centering practice a single time, and during which time I missed my every-other-day aerobic exercise only on a few instances when I was injured or sick. Over the span of the past 69 consecutive months, I have averaged over an hour a day doing my daily creative practice (which happens still to be playing traditional music).
AF: You speak of doing these daily practices as though your life depends on them. How is that so?
SD: These practices have saved my life multiple times. For example, as I was being wheeled into the operating room to receive my pacemaker (and months later when I had to have it extricated surgically), my centering practice really helped to be able to remain calm and receptive. Furthermore, the only way I could survive the painful staph infection I had was to continuously do my centering practice.
Because my creative thinking was all tuned up when I was admitted to the hospital, I was able to maintain the thought clarity and self-confidence required to catch a number of potentially fatal medical mistakes that were made. I was able to stay tuned into my body and trusted that I knew at least as much, and in some cases more, than my doctors knew. Without this confidence in my own processing capabilities and the resulting courage to speak out, I would be dead today. These are some examples of how these daily practices have saved my life.
AF: How about an example of how these practices have helped others in similar ways?
SD: I have seen these practices help others tremendously. For example, several years ago I coached a President and CEO of a manufacturing company over a period of about 18 months. When I started working with him, his life was pretty messed up both professionally and personally. He was on the cusp of getting fired. He was also overweight, out of shape, and highly distractible. His father had died in his 40’s of a heart attack, and it appeared that my client was on track to follow in his father’s footsteps.
By teaching my client how and why to take on a individualized version of these three daily resilience practices, he moved quickly from a place of feeling beleaguered and stressed out, to a place of leading with a genuine warmth of spirit and a new-found agility. He became visibly much more “zillient.”
Three years later, over the Christmas holidays, I unexpectedly received a card from him in which he wrote longhand: “Sandy, thank you for saving my life.”
AF: How is it that you, yourself, have consistently chosen to respond to adversities with such a positive attitude?
SD: Most of my own learning about resilience stems from my wanting to find effective ways to move away from discomfort. I have always believed that if I could learn to self-regulate my own emotions, my own beliefs, and my own actions, I would be able to create a kind of “personal sovereignty.” I would be able to remain free, no matter what my circumstances. I would be able to stay “at choice.” For my whole life, I have been a student of how to create this kind of personal sovereignty.
What I have discovered is that these simple daily practices have the power to change your destiny. Where you end up in life depends on what you practice. If you choose to practice negative behaviors, you will get better and better at them, until they finally influence your destiny. By the same token, if you practice positive behaviors, ones that benefit your health and well-being, you will also get better and better at them, and they will influence your destiny in positive ways.
What we tend to forget is that either course takes about the same amount of work and commitment. So when there’s no difference in “price,” why not treat yourself to the positive outcomes?
It is not that the positive choices are easy. More often than not, they are hard. But choosing a positive path and taking committed action accordingly is what moves you from surviving to thriving.
For example, in February when I suddenly couldn't run anymore, I was deeply discouraged by my personal loss. At that point, I had a choice. I could sit there and continue to practice feeling sorry for myself. Or I could re-orient my thinking in some positive manner and practice a different choice. I chose this latter course. I decided to view my knee injury not as the end of my running, but as the beginning of my cycling. I went out and bought myself a bicycle and never looked back.
AF: Please say a bit more about how these practices can change your destiny.
SD: Your destiny derives in large part from what you practice every day ––consciously or otherwise. If you are depressed, it is because you have been practicing hanging out in that emotional state. If you keep on practicing being depressed, it is predictable that you will get even better at it. If you decide that you want to stop being depressed, you have to start practicing something else.
A proven medical intervention that works to decrease depression entails increasing your body’s production of serotonin. This can be done via prescriptive medications. In almost all cases, it can be done equally well by exercising regularly. So if you want to break your habit of being depressed, a great place to start is to take on a daily practice of vigorous exercise. What I have found is that when you are physically in motion, it’s impossible to feel stuck. Once you start to exercise regularly and continuously, a predictable result is that you will start to feel “not depressed.”
What’s critical is that you get to a point where you understand you have the option to change your practices in order to create different results. Then all you have to do is take action––repeatedly and continuously. This requires commitment and work. In the long run, nothing else produces sustainable results.
AF: Before we finish, I’d like to ask you what’s going to be next for you? How is your work evolving now?
SD: What’s calling me next is to find ways to teach these practices to seniors in high schools and to incoming college freshmen. I would love to help kids discover the power of these practices sooner than later. If I had known how to systematically put them to work at that age, my life might have tracked quite differently.
Right now I work mostly with adults in their forties and fifties. Before they come to me, they have had to finally conclude on their own that they don’t “know it all,” that what they have been doing isn’t producing the results they want, and that they are ready to make a commitment to changing some behaviors in order to get different results. They need to be willing to do something to “get out of their head,” to come back to their senses, and to explore the power of simple experiential learning.
What excites me now is to reach out to younger individuals. I’m looking forward to figuring out how to connect with them in order to make a positive difference not just for “fully-grown” adults, but also for as many young adults as possible.
AF: I like your observation that we are all free to choose between fragility and resilience by cultivating greatness of spirit bit by bit.Thank you for sharing your thoughts and experiences, Sandy!
To find out more about Sandy Davis, the services he offers, and the instruction manuals he has published, visit www.homecomingcoaching.com. To order a copy of Sandy’s instruction manual on developing zillience, visit www.zillience.com. To reach Sandy or to subscribe to his free monthly e-newsletter, send an e-mail to sandy@wayofresilience.com. (As a bonus for new subscribers, Sandy will send you a free 22-page introductory excerpt from his instructional manual on developing zillience through simple daily practices.)
Excerpt: I realized that the daily practices I was doing served to generate a vital inner energy that served to amplify and extend my own ability to be resilient. In other words, I discovered the “proactive” side of resilience. I realized that before you can be optimally resilient, you first have to become “zillient.” Then, when adversity or change challenges you, you will be primed to be “re-zillient” or resilient.
Sandy Davis holds a PCC Certificate (Professional Certified Coach) from the International Coach Federation and has been a full-time professional coach for over 12 years. For decades, he has been experimenting with various ways to develop personal resilience. He has self-published two instructional manuals on this subject, the most recent of which is entitled: “Zillience! How to Succeed in Business without Really Frying.”
In April, I had the opportunity to interview Sandy about his work and his thinking on the subject of personal resilience. I was reminded again that the people we often consider extraordinary and elevate as somehow different (more heroic or saintly) than ourselves are actually people just like the rest of us, who make choices that are just as open to each of us. In the transcript of that interview that follows is a description of Sandy's story and how he came to evolve the three resilience-sustaining practices he now teaches others.
AF: How did you become interested in developing personal resilience?
SD: At the age of six, I stumbled on the need to develop my own resilience experientially, long before I knew the word “resilience” existed. After the sudden and unexpected break-up of my parents’ marriage, I found myself in circumstances that I didn't like. The world around me abruptly transformed from being safe and predictable to unknown and unpredictable. Suddenly life became threatening. This was a big shock, one that traumatized me in subtle and lasting ways. It let me to feel a need to constantly be “en garde.”
I remember wanting to find a way to make the uninvited adversities that had befallen us go away. I had an intuition that there had to be some way to offset them, to play through the adversities, and to come out the other side of them. I wanted to be more in control of my situation. But no one offered me any help or instruction in how to do this. Back then, I found myself trapped in my own private existential distress.
AF: What were some of the lessons you learned way back then?
SD: The set-up for one of the first lessons I learned about how to “play through adversity” began a year later, when I was in the second grade. I had been labeled as “musically talented,” and was in my second year of private piano lessons. I had a great aural memory and could play melodies back upon just hearing them once. It was also easy for me to improvise around those melodies. I would happily spend hours “noodling” away on the family piano.
Unfortunately, however, I was dyslexic (which was not yet diagnosable back then). My brain was wired up in such a way that reading music was next to impossible. Written notes made no sense to me whatsoever. So I taught myself to compensate for this inability by taking the fullest possible advantage of my auditory memory. After each lesson, I would ask my mother to sight-read my newly assigned pieces for me. Then I would reconstruct what she had played by ear and commit the piece to memory. That was how I bluffed my way through the first two years of piano lessons.
My relationship with my piano teacher became increasingly adversarial. I though of her as “Mrs. Witch” and to this day remember her only by that made-up name. She was determined to have all her students to play every note exactly as it was written. She had no interest in my playing in the assigned pieces in an “approximate” way, and she was even less interested in my improvising those melodies in order to decorate and “improve” them.
We finally came to blows. At the end of my second year of lessons, Mrs. Witch declared to my mother (in front of me) that I was “unmusical and uneducable.” She told my mother that she would do better to spend her money on giving me riding lessons. A week later, I was sitting on top of a horse. I felt wounded, double-crossed, and betrayed. It was as though I had been summarily thrown out of the promise land. My most favorite pastime had been ripped out from underneath me.
AF: Was that the end of your pursuit of music?
SD: No, eight years later, when I was 15, I finally discovered a way to forever heal that wound. I stumbled into the world of traditional folk music. I discovered the recordings of Pete Seeger, the Weavers, the Kingston Trio, and other folk musicians. Here was a world where songs and tunes were learned primarily by ear and then passed along by ear from musician to musician and from generation to generation. This was my idea of heaven on earth.
I jumped headlong into this vibrant world. I knew this time around that no one would ever be able to take my music away from me again. It was mine now. I have continued to thrive in this world of music ever since. I still play traditional dance tunes every day, and this act of making music still reliably nourishes my spirit.
Perhaps more than anything else, it was this formative learning experience that marked the beginning of my figuring out how to bounce back from adversity. It was my first memorable success in reclaiming what I wanted, what I needed, and what I loved. In the process, I discovered the value of daily practice (in this case, playing my five-string banjo every day) and it led me to a first taste of what a delight it is to master something. It also gave me a very positive new identity fragment: “I’m a musician. I play the banjo.”
Having this new identity gave my self-confidence a huge boost. More importantly, it encouraged me to believe that no matter what the setback, it is possible to find a way through it. After having my favorite pastime painfully stripped away when I was seven, I later found my own way to reclaim it. Because I refused to give it up, the wounded part of me finally started to feel whole again.
AF: Were there other lessons in resilience that date back to when you were young?
SD: Yes, I think the roots of my long-standing interest in resilience go squarely back to my formative years. For example, another lesson in dealing with adversity came about through some physical challenges I faced as an adolescent.
When I was 14, I was stricken with rheumatic fever and ended up with scarred heart valves and a residual heart murmur. I was told back then that I would never be able to exercise vigorously. Through high school and college, I was not allowed to play competitive sports. I missed out on the rewarding experience of becoming an athlete.
When I was 23, I took it upon myself to disobey the long-standing advice of my doctors. I was fed up with being so out of condition that I was unable to walk up four flights of stairs without becoming winded and red in the face. Without anyone’s permission, I went out and bought myself a pair of sneakers and a sweat suit and just started running.
At first, jogging a distance of one mile just about killed me. But I liked the payoff of feeling better about myself after I had worked up a good sweat. So I continued to run. Over three months, I gradually worked my way up to running three miles every other day. At that point, I had developed enough stamina to run up four flights of stairs without becoming winded. That was a thrill. And I was reminded again that practice always pays off.
AF: What did you take from this lesson?
SD: I was so impressed by this demonstration of the power of daily practice that I have never stopped exercising vigorously for at least half an hour ever other day. For the past 40 years, I have continuously run 5K every other day, year ’round, or rowed a distance of 7.5K.
AF: That’s an impressive demonstration of persistence. After all those miles, how are your knees?
SD: Up until a few months ago, there were in fabulous condition. Then, unfortunately, in February of this year, I was in a near-fatal car accident in which my right knee was permanently injured. I suddenly had to stop my long-standing practice of running, and it appears now that I may never be able to run again. My injured right knee can no longer tolerate the “concussions” of the running stride. I am grateful, however, that I can still ride a bicycle and I can still row my racing shell. My new goal is to continue doing one or the other of those two sports every other day for the next thirty-plus years, year ’round, until I am 100 years old.
I remain fully committed to exercising regularly because that’s what has continuously strengthened my heart and, in spite of my shaky start as an invalid, that daily habit has enabled me to run a total distance of well over 24,900 miles (which is the circumference of the earth at the equator).
AF: You mentioned to me earlier that you’ve had some recent setbacks. What are those?
SD: When I was 61, my history with rheumatic fever caught up with me. After 40 years of running, my heart finally needed some assistance. Over a period of several decades, my resting pulse had become progressively lower. It finally got too low and I developed symptoms of heart block. Fortunately, I was alert to my symptoms and, on the day when my heart finally needed help, I was fortunate to have a pacemaker hastily implanted in my chest.
The good news is that the pacemaker was implanted just in time, and it fully corrected the heart block problem. In short order, I was able to resume my routine of exercising vigorously for at least half an hour every other day. The bad news is that at the same time I received my pacemaker, a staph infection was also accidentally implanted in me.
That infection “colonized,” and eight months later, it unexpectedly “came back to life” and all but killed me. As a consequence, I had to spend three weeks in two different hospitals. In addition to treating the systemic staph infection, I had to have having two more pacemaker surgeries, one to “extract” my first pacemaker install a temporary replacement, and then a second surgery to implant a new pacemaker and remove the temporary one.
On top of that, I had to endure six weeks of continuous intravenous infusions of antibiotics. More than anything else, the toxic antibiotics nearly killed me. What saved my life were the daily resilience practices I have been doing faithfully for the past several decades. Even as I was in the hospital, they gave me the stamina I needed to “play through adversity” once again.
AF: I know you speak of “doing your daily resilience practices as though your life depends on them.” It sounds like that has proven to be true for you. Is that so?
SD: Yes. My daily resilience practices have actually saved my life a bunch of times. I think it’s fair to say that without them, I wouldn’t be here today. They have pulled me through emotional adversities (such as depression, personal losses, etc.), medical challenges (such as various sports injuries and occasional illnesses), and my fair share of major life upsets (such as divorce, getting laid off from work, failing in business, etc.).
AF: How was it that you started to incorporate these daily resilience practices into your work with your coaching clients?
SD: Based on how valuable these daily practices have proven to be for myself, about 10 years ago I started experimenting with teaching these practices to my coaching clients. The practices proved to be extremely effective in helping them meet the challenges they were facing. I then set about inventing ways to reach more people. Four years ago, I started piloting several group programs. Today I offer both live workshops, and several ongoing phone-based group programs. All of these programs focus on teaching you how to take on and sustain these simple daily resilience practices. I’ve also authored two instructional manuals on this topic.
AF: You’ve clearly spent a long time putting the pieces of this puzzle together. You started way back when you were a teenager. Take us from back then to the present moment.
SD: As a teenager, my experiments in becoming resilient were somewhat haphazard. Fortunately, a few of them produced great results. Over the past 50 years, I have gone on to consciously experiment with all sorts of daily developmental practices. I have sought out ones that had the promise of helping me reach the long-desired state of being prepared to handle whatever challenges and adversities were bound to be on my path. I have tested many different practices. In almost all cases, I have experimented with a given practice for at least five continuous years or longer.
About eight years ago, I reached a point where it felt like I had finally “cracked the code.” I had been searching for a combination of daily practices that would ensure a consistent high degree of personal resilience. I wanted to discover the best, most effective, most affordable, and minimum set of simple daily practices.
Along the way, I came to understand that “resilience” is fundamentally a reactive phenomenon. Only in the moment of facing adversity, do you actually put forward responses that are what we call “resilient.” The question I asked myself was, “In between those moments of making resilient responses, what’s going on?”
That was when I realized that the daily practices I was doing served to generate a vital inner energy that served to amplify and extend my own ability to be resilient. In other words, I discovered the “proactive” side of resilience. I realized that before you can be optimally resilient, you first have to become “zillient.” Then, when adversity or change challenges you, you will be primed to be “re-zillient” or resilient.
AF: So what are the daily practices that generate this energy you call “zillience?”
SD: What I have discovered works best is a combination of three simple daily practices. All three require you to “come back to your senses.” One is focused on developing your mind. The second focuses on developing your body. And the third focuses on developing your spirit.
All three of these practices are what I call “non-cognitive” practices. They are not about thinking. In fact, they are all designed to help you regularly “get out of your cerebral cortex.” They all involve learning “experientially” rather than “cognitively.”
Here’s the magic combination of daily practices that I have found will reliably amplify and extend your natural resilience:
1. The first is a pure centering practice for the mind. It entails learning to shut down the “CPU” (Central Processing Unit) of the thinking brain and focus momentarily on just being without thinking. One simple way to do this is to focus your attention singularly on your breathing. Doing this for just 15 minutes a day is enough to produce desirable changes (such as lowing the level of the stress hormone, cortisol, in your blood, and strengthening your immune system). By teaching yourself how to let go of your thoughts and be completely present in the moment, you can gain a remarkable degree of control over your inner emotional world. For example, you can learn to quickly let go of negative emotional states and induce positive emotional states at will.
2. The second daily practice entails exercising vigorously for an average of 15 minutes a day or 30 minutes every other day. When you regularly exercise “aerobically,” you not only strengthen your heart as a muscle. You also keep the inner workings of your whole body “toned up.” Indeed, regular exercise turns out to be particularly beneficial for your brain.
Without regular exercise, our bodies slowly start to degenerate. With regular exercise, it’s possible to “hold even” as we age. Indeed, at any given moment, no matter how old we are, we can develop our bodies to be stronger, healthier, and more agile. In some truly remarkable ways, regular exercise can actually reverse the normal aging process.
3. The third daily practice is what I call a daily creative practice. Each of us can benefit hugely from having a restorative developmental activity that we pursue every day in some small but continuous ways. You want to choose a creative activity that falls outside the domain of your work, one that tantalizes you to keep on developing your creative self. You want to choose an activity with which you feel a deep and passionate connection. You want it to be something so dear to you that when you take time to pursue it, you can become completely entranced by it. You want it to have the power to bring you back to center you by pulling you far away from everything else in your life that is stressing you. By having such a practice and by doing it for at least 15 minutes each day, you can greatly refresh your spirit.
AF: How long have you been doing these three daily practices?
SD: I’ve been doing a daily creative practice off an on for almost 50 years. I’ve been exercising vigorously for half an hour every other day for over 40 years. And I’ve been doing a daily centering practice for the past 15 years. For the past six years, I have also kept an accountability log in which I record every day how many minutes I spend doing each of these practices.
Based on these logs, I know that on April 1st of this year, I completed 2,100 consecutive days during which time I did not miss my daily centering practice a single time, and during which time I missed my every-other-day aerobic exercise only on a few instances when I was injured or sick. Over the span of the past 69 consecutive months, I have averaged over an hour a day doing my daily creative practice (which happens still to be playing traditional music).
AF: You speak of doing these daily practices as though your life depends on them. How is that so?
SD: These practices have saved my life multiple times. For example, as I was being wheeled into the operating room to receive my pacemaker (and months later when I had to have it extricated surgically), my centering practice really helped to be able to remain calm and receptive. Furthermore, the only way I could survive the painful staph infection I had was to continuously do my centering practice.
Because my creative thinking was all tuned up when I was admitted to the hospital, I was able to maintain the thought clarity and self-confidence required to catch a number of potentially fatal medical mistakes that were made. I was able to stay tuned into my body and trusted that I knew at least as much, and in some cases more, than my doctors knew. Without this confidence in my own processing capabilities and the resulting courage to speak out, I would be dead today. These are some examples of how these daily practices have saved my life.
AF: How about an example of how these practices have helped others in similar ways?
SD: I have seen these practices help others tremendously. For example, several years ago I coached a President and CEO of a manufacturing company over a period of about 18 months. When I started working with him, his life was pretty messed up both professionally and personally. He was on the cusp of getting fired. He was also overweight, out of shape, and highly distractible. His father had died in his 40’s of a heart attack, and it appeared that my client was on track to follow in his father’s footsteps.
By teaching my client how and why to take on a individualized version of these three daily resilience practices, he moved quickly from a place of feeling beleaguered and stressed out, to a place of leading with a genuine warmth of spirit and a new-found agility. He became visibly much more “zillient.”
Three years later, over the Christmas holidays, I unexpectedly received a card from him in which he wrote longhand: “Sandy, thank you for saving my life.”
AF: How is it that you, yourself, have consistently chosen to respond to adversities with such a positive attitude?
SD: Most of my own learning about resilience stems from my wanting to find effective ways to move away from discomfort. I have always believed that if I could learn to self-regulate my own emotions, my own beliefs, and my own actions, I would be able to create a kind of “personal sovereignty.” I would be able to remain free, no matter what my circumstances. I would be able to stay “at choice.” For my whole life, I have been a student of how to create this kind of personal sovereignty.
What I have discovered is that these simple daily practices have the power to change your destiny. Where you end up in life depends on what you practice. If you choose to practice negative behaviors, you will get better and better at them, until they finally influence your destiny. By the same token, if you practice positive behaviors, ones that benefit your health and well-being, you will also get better and better at them, and they will influence your destiny in positive ways.
What we tend to forget is that either course takes about the same amount of work and commitment. So when there’s no difference in “price,” why not treat yourself to the positive outcomes?
It is not that the positive choices are easy. More often than not, they are hard. But choosing a positive path and taking committed action accordingly is what moves you from surviving to thriving.
For example, in February when I suddenly couldn't run anymore, I was deeply discouraged by my personal loss. At that point, I had a choice. I could sit there and continue to practice feeling sorry for myself. Or I could re-orient my thinking in some positive manner and practice a different choice. I chose this latter course. I decided to view my knee injury not as the end of my running, but as the beginning of my cycling. I went out and bought myself a bicycle and never looked back.
AF: Please say a bit more about how these practices can change your destiny.
SD: Your destiny derives in large part from what you practice every day ––consciously or otherwise. If you are depressed, it is because you have been practicing hanging out in that emotional state. If you keep on practicing being depressed, it is predictable that you will get even better at it. If you decide that you want to stop being depressed, you have to start practicing something else.
A proven medical intervention that works to decrease depression entails increasing your body’s production of serotonin. This can be done via prescriptive medications. In almost all cases, it can be done equally well by exercising regularly. So if you want to break your habit of being depressed, a great place to start is to take on a daily practice of vigorous exercise. What I have found is that when you are physically in motion, it’s impossible to feel stuck. Once you start to exercise regularly and continuously, a predictable result is that you will start to feel “not depressed.”
What’s critical is that you get to a point where you understand you have the option to change your practices in order to create different results. Then all you have to do is take action––repeatedly and continuously. This requires commitment and work. In the long run, nothing else produces sustainable results.
AF: Before we finish, I’d like to ask you what’s going to be next for you? How is your work evolving now?
SD: What’s calling me next is to find ways to teach these practices to seniors in high schools and to incoming college freshmen. I would love to help kids discover the power of these practices sooner than later. If I had known how to systematically put them to work at that age, my life might have tracked quite differently.
Right now I work mostly with adults in their forties and fifties. Before they come to me, they have had to finally conclude on their own that they don’t “know it all,” that what they have been doing isn’t producing the results they want, and that they are ready to make a commitment to changing some behaviors in order to get different results. They need to be willing to do something to “get out of their head,” to come back to their senses, and to explore the power of simple experiential learning.
What excites me now is to reach out to younger individuals. I’m looking forward to figuring out how to connect with them in order to make a positive difference not just for “fully-grown” adults, but also for as many young adults as possible.
AF: I like your observation that we are all free to choose between fragility and resilience by cultivating greatness of spirit bit by bit.Thank you for sharing your thoughts and experiences, Sandy!
To find out more about Sandy Davis, the services he offers, and the instruction manuals he has published, visit www.homecomingcoaching.com. To order a copy of Sandy’s instruction manual on developing zillience, visit www.zillience.com. To reach Sandy or to subscribe to his free monthly e-newsletter, send an e-mail to sandy@wayofresilience.com. (As a bonus for new subscribers, Sandy will send you a free 22-page introductory excerpt from his instructional manual on developing zillience through simple daily practices.)
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