To start this New Year, I’m choosing to focus on happiness.
For some time now, I’ve been interested in the question of why some people are happy while others are not. As I’ve studied this question, I’ve found books, articles, videos, and courses that have been created to help people increase their happiness. I thought I’d share some of that information with you.
Before we get started though, there’s a barrier to happiness that is worth looking at. Continue reading
Conflict is a human reality. Whenever two or more people need to interact, there’s an opportunity for conflict.
Actually, I’ll take that back. Conflict doesn’t always require two people; there are times when I don’t even agree with myself!
So I could hardly pass up a book entitled, “The Coward’s Guide to Conflict: Empowering Solutions for Those Who Would Rather Run Than Fight.”
In this book, author Tim Ursiny asserts that healthy conflict has benefits. It can lead to more confidence, more respect, more self-respect, better career prospects, and less anger and depression.
With all those benefits, why would we ever try to avoid conflict? Continue reading
I feel a chill whenever I hear of someone being prosecuted for a crime that’s said to have happened many, many years ago. It’s particularly disquieting when the prosecution is not based on physical evidence but rather, based solely on someone’s memory of an event.
My choice of discomfort about those stories is based on my perception of how memory works. It seems to me that memory is rather “flexible,” that is, what I remember and what someone else remembers of the same event can be surprisingly different!
So I was interested in a recent article by Dr. Joel Wade on memory. He suggests that our memories are not so much like a video of what happened, rather “…like stories we’ve created of our personal experience; an amalgam of emotions, perspective, and interpretations of events. We remember the meaning we made of the events at the time.”
What is the meaning that we make of events? Continue reading
Do you believe there’s good in everyone? That even the most awful person is good at their core?
Values and beliefs form part of what Dr. Wm. Glasser refers to as our “Quality World.” Our beliefs influence our perceptions, decisions and actions.
Chelsea believes in the goodness of all. Thus, she believes that there is a core of goodness in her partner, Mike. Despite past experience, when Mike says, “Chelsea, I love you. I won’t drink [gamble, cheat on you, beat on you, steal from you, etc.] anymore,” Chelsea buys it. She wants to believe that Mike has changed.
Chelsea’s situation reminds me of Aesop’s fable of the farmer and the snake. These fables, although centuries old, effectively express big ideas in few words. There are different versions of the fable, but here’s the gist. Continue reading
When it comes to feelings, do you lead? Follow? Or just try to get out of their way?
You may remember, “If it feels good, do it.” That slogan came with a prevailing “wisdom” that it’s not only OK for feelings to guide your actions, but…that’s the authentic way to live!
Thus, if a choice doesn’t feel good, it isn’t good. A consequence of using this for your life philosophy could be that you take only paths that feel good, abandoning them when good feelings fade. If good feelings are transient, then you go from path to path, ever-seeking, never satisfied.
Instincts and feelings are certainly useful. For example, “This dark alley feels a little creepy; maybe I will choose another route.” Feelings that cause us to consider our actions can be handy for self-preservation! Continue reading
In a talk on mastery, Sal Khan discusses the difficulty inherent in an educational process that pushes people to learn new material before they’ve mastered fundamentals.
Mastery of learning is an appropriate topic for Khan. He’s the founder of khanacademy.org, a website that provides lots and lots of opportunity to practice math and science.
Khan questions how we’d view house construction if we treated it the way we treat achievement in school. Is it OK for an inspector to declare a foundation 75% correct and say, “It passed! Carry on.”?
We know that the foundation needs to be 100% or the whole construction will eventually come tumbling down!
Where else is mastery critical? Continue reading
There exists a near-universal excuse to get out of most any activity. It goes like this: “Oh, I’m sorry. I don’t have enough time to do that.”
Have you ever used this excuse? I have.
So many people feel time-stressed that they believe the “lack-of-time” excuse. They may have even used it themselves and will often accept it as a perfectly reasonable, understandable response from others.
There is a cynical way to perceive this excuse, however. In case this has never occurred to you, here it is: Pleading lack of time enables us to weasel out of an activity that we didn’t want to do anyway, without having to come right out and say, “I don’t want to do that.”
But really, what’s the difference between “I don’t have enough time to do that” and “I don’t want to do that”? Continue reading
At some point in your life, you will probably go through a difficult patch. Perhaps you perceive that you have had more than your share of difficulties already. Maybe you’ve witnessed someone whose life seems to be filled with one difficulty after another.
In some cases, our difficulties are the logical consequences of choices we’ve made. In other cases, however, difficulties result from events completely out of our control. The choices made by others can have a negative impact on our lives. Sometimes, plain, simple bad luck can take us to the wrong place at the wrong time.
The difficulties that come up in our lives may seem unfair, and it can be heart-wrenching to observe difficult things happening to people we care about.
However, no matter the difficulty facing us, we have some choices. While we may not be able to choose our outcome, we can choose our attitudes and perceptions. Continue reading
