I AM The Movie

In the category of ‘there are no coincidences”, about a week ago I found myself watching one of the final episodes of Oprah. Although I am a devoted fan, student and teacher of her work, I have not seen a segment on the air date in literally years. I specifically tuned in because I had seen a commercial describing the episode and it caught my attention. (So commercials do still work by the way.)

The episode was number 26 in her 30 day countdown and the guest academy award winning filmmaker, Tom Shadyac. His newest movie – actually a documentary – will not win any academy awards, yet it will contribute one of the user-friendly pieces on the concept of evolving consciousness. The movie is entitled I AM.

A life altering illness caused Shadyac to question his established concepts about success. He got to the same place I did when I wrote in my book, “This book is my attempt to dispel a myth that has been perpetrated on the unsuspecting masses for many generation. The myth I refer to is the one that assures if you do your homework, earn good grades, and graduate from the right schools, you will land a job or create a business that will provide you riches, happiness, health, and love; you will achieve your “happily ever after.”

My book and the movie I AM focus on the myth part of that sentence.

Go see the movie. It is worth the ticket price and more.

Dr. Success Challenge: Make a list – as long as you would like – about what is RIGHT with the world.

Enjoy. Peace be with you and thank you Roxanne W. Isbey, Jr. for the wonderful photograph.
Andrea T. Goeglein, PhD
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The Future of Philanthropy

Giving, and the positive impact on the giver, is a very hot topic this week.  There seems to be no end to people and causes that are in need.  A search of TED.com resulted in a an interesting conversation (as always) on the subject of the future of philanthropy.

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/katherine_fulton_you_are_the_future_of_philanthropy.html

Happy Giving.  Thank you.
Andrea Goeglein, PhD
http://www.dontdiebooks.com/
http://www.servingsuccess.com/
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Marshmallows Predict Success in Life

It may be a holiday in the U.S. today, but one of the leading researchers in Positive Psychology combined a bit of holiday in Hawaii with a bit of work by posting the following article.  I remember the first time I read this work.  Being a sugar addict from birth, I had negative thoughts of being the kid who actually ate the marshmallows!  Thank you Dr. Robert Biswas-Diener of Positive Psychology Services, LLC

Marshmallows Predict Success in Life

In the 1960s the psychologist Walter Mischel conducted one of the most whimsical and important studies in the history of the field. He placed marshmallows in front of pre-schoolers and instructed them NOT to eat the treats. He explained that they could have a single marshmallow, or be rewarded with an additional marshmallow if only they could resist temptation until he returned. He then exited the room, leaving the poor children alone with that delicious, soft, white, mouth-watering little goody. This test became the classic "delay of gratification" task and Mischel and other researchers quickly saw that some kids were naturally good at withstanding temptation while others gave in almost immediately. What's even more interesting and-ultimately-more important is that the pre-schoolers' ability to delay gratification predicted their college entry exam scores almost two decades later. This simple childhood test also predicted drug use later in life. In short, a person's ability to exert self-control is a good predictor of success in life.

Mischel went on to a long and productive career, much of it aimed at refining and explaining the insights gleaned from his marshmallow study. Mischel theorizes that humans have two important systems-hot and cool-and the interaction of these is crucial to the art of willpower. Our "hot" system is our emotions, and these are simple, reflexive, and drive us forward. Our "cool" system is cognitive, and it is reflective, complex, and helps us "know" instead of "go." There is something you should know about how these systems work together: first, stress-both acute and chronic-can take the cool system "off-line" and lead to the dominance of the hot, emotional "go" system. Think about it this way: Have you ever been stressed while working at your computer, but seemed unable to pull yourself away? You likely stayed at your work station, angry, muttering comments to colleagues such as "just give me another minute with this" as if more minutes with the stressful work will be just the thing to calm you down. You make this type of backward decisions because your thinking has been partially dismantled in favor of an approach oriented emotional state.

Fortunately, there are several solutions to hot state problems. One of the easiest is a strategy with an almost military title: attentional deployment. What is attentional deployment? Simply put, this means distracting yourself or otherwise removing the hot temptation from your field of vision (or thought). Remember those pre-schoolers and that plate of marshmallows? The kids that did the best at the delay of gratification task sang songs and closed or covered their eyes. Compare this to the far less successful children who stared directly at the marshmallow, willing themselves not to eat it. The avoiders had the intuitive understanding that distraction is a superior strategy than the heavy lifting of trying to muscle the task with sheer willpower. Once you understand that hot engagement is often the very problem than disengagement is the obvious answer. So, next time you are angry at your computer try getting up and leaving it until your cool system takes over! Simply another reminder that we can all learn a lot from pre-schoolers!

Thank you.

Thrive

There is a short list on which I keep the names of people whose work I admire in any given field.  I find keeping such a list stops me from wondering in the 'woods' of an Internet search on any given topic.  When it comes to those I trust in the field of applied positive psychology, Robert Biswas-Diener, is not only on that list, but on the top!  I have never met him, but can tell from his thoughtful and useful newsletters that if I still owned hotels, he would be the consult I would hire.  The following review of the new book, Thrive, was written by Robert Biswas-Diener.  Since I loved The Blue Zones, I can't wait to pick up a copy of Thrive.
People familiar with positive psychology are often unfamiliar with Dan Buettner. This is because Dan is an explorer, journalist, world-record holder, and expert on a topic often overlooked by positive psychologists: health. In his first book-- The Blue Zones-- Dan identified geographic anomalies: places where a disproportionate percentage of the population lived to be 100 or more. He investigated the health and social habits of people in Okinawa and other places. His reasoning is as follows: it makes sense to look at the habits of people who are successful. In his newest effort, Thrive, Dan extends this strategy to happiness.


Thrive is another topocentric book; this time Buettner shifts his attention from the healthiest places on the planet to the happiest. One of the things I love best about Dan's take on happiness is that he gets out into the field. Scientific findings are great-- and Buettner certainly makes the most of his relationship to Gallup and access to Gallup survey data-- but it is often just as fruitful to get out of the laboratory and talk to people on the street who illustrate academic points on a more day to day level. It is because of this journalistic impulse that Thrive doesn't read like "just another happiness book" but appears to offer something new.... newer data, new stories, and new ideas.


On a final note I should also mention that I love Dan's take on the science of happiness. Rather than present his own model of happiness-- as if we need another one of those!-- Dan interviews Ed Diener, Sonja Lyubomirsky, Ruut Veenhoven and other experts, reprinting their quotes in full and letting small points of difference hang in the air between them. Ultimately, I suspect Dan agrees with Sonja on the meaning of happiness when she says "Most of us don't need a definition of happiness because instinctively we know whether we are happy or not." Thrive is like this: supported on a foundation of science but, ultimately, a book about people.

Robert's company publishes various workbooks in the field of positive psychology.  Check him and them out:  Dr. Robert Biswas-Diener, Positive Psychology Services, LLC, www.intentionalhappiness.com

Thriving, Thanksgiving, and The Thanks in giving, Andrea
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Superstition and Happiness

Today I was engaged in an interesting conversation with a client about superstition -- holding them and what that means relative to your belief in God and Einstein's proposition that there are two kinds of people in the world -- those who believe the world is a friendly place and those who believe the world is a hostile place. 

I went looking to my to my favorite source for all content wonderful -- TED.COM -- and typed in the word "superstition".  What came up was the speech by designer Stefan Sagmeister.  His opening story about a job in Hong Kong and his closing piece about his list of things he likes about his job still have me smiling. 

Hope it does the same for you.  Happy thinking...Thank you, Andrea
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The Change Is Good

Many have asked how I can maintain my positive perspective given the erratic state of affairs in all areas of our lives and the world.  My answer can be easiest explained by a real life example.  What follows is an portion of a newsletter from Honeybee Capital written by Honeybee's founder Katherine Collins.  Katherine may not be typical of those creating their livelihood within the financial markets, yet she is an example of who is there waiting to take the spotlight.  Bet you have not been reading about this from Bernanke! 


BERNANKE SPEECH ON HAPPINESS:
Does all this talk about ‘enoughness’ and ‘business vs. profession’ sound like a
bunch of fluff to you? I can hear you now -- fulfillment, schmul-fillment! Well, Ben
Bernanke cares, and you should too! Here is a link to his Commencement speech
at the University of South Carolina – did he talk about monetary policy? No! The
risk of unsustainable US debt levels? No! How much he hates the name
‘Helicopter Ben’? No! He talked about happiness, and more importantly, about
sustained happiness, or satisfaction. Read his thoughts on the value of relative
prosperity, of friends and family, of having work that puts you “in the zone”, of
feeling some sense of control over our own lives. I do not think Ben Bernanke is a
flaky touchy-feely hippie, yet Ben Bernanke wants you to write in a gratitude
journal. Think about it!

http://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/bernanke20100508a.htm

If Bernanke is a big enough man to write in a journal, how about you?

Thank you,
Andrea T. Goeglein, PhD
Dr. Success
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The Hidden Gift of the Gratitude Exercise Part 1

As 2010 comes to a close, I decided to republish a blog about closure, letter writing and most of all gratitude for those we love in our lives.  Enjoy this day, and every day.  Remember to remember:  this moment is the only one you really have, may you use it to be love, see love, and live love.  Peace on Earth and in you always, Andrea

A cornerstone Positive Psychology exercise is the Gratitude Letter and Visit. I have admitted on more than one occasion that I did this exercise and hated it – yet I have never regretted doing it. The suggested process is you write a letter to someone who has helped you during your life, expressing what they did and how it helped you. You then arrange to visit with the person and read the letter to them. That was the part I hated. Yes, hated. Yet since the person I wrote to has since passed away, I appreciate that I have a complete feeling of closure with our relationship while we lived on this earth together. I had not expected that result, but with hindsight I know that the gratitude exercise contributed to that sense of closure. This result was duplicated with a former client and friend’s experience.

During work with a senior executive in his late 50’s I assigned the Gratitude Letter Exercise. Having a father in his last 80’s, this senior executive chose to write a letter to his Mom and Dad. Typical of a client interaction, he chose to write the letter but instead of following the protocol of reading it to the recipient(s), he wrote the letter and placed it in a book in his parent’s vast home library. He knew his parent’s had a habit of returning to certain books several times during the year. His Dad discovered the letter a short time later.

In the solitude of his beloved library, in a chair that fit him like a well worn shoe, he read a letter of love and appreciation from his son. He read examples of how, as a father, he had guided his son’s life every step of the way. He read how he taught his son to love his country because of his distinguished military experience, how his son learned to love his wife watching his Dad love his mother, and how his son learned to never give up on his children – because his parents never gave up on him.

You can only imagine the flood of pride and emotion his Dad felt upon reading his son’s words. My friends Dad told him that a letter had never meant so much, they shared tears of love and joy and spoke about how grateful and fortunate they all were to have had each other in their lives.

Life being life that is not the end of the story. Within two weeks of their tear filled conversation, his Dad received a terminal diagnosis. Within six months his Dad had passed away.

The only challenge I leave you today is a question, “Is there a letter you need to write?”

Thank you,
Andrea T. Goeglein, PhD
Dr. Success
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