Life, as we all know, is conflict, and man, being part of life, is himself an expression of conflict. If he recognizes the fact and accepts it, he is apt, despite the conflict, to know peace and to enjoy it. But to arrive at this end, which is only a beginning (for we haven’t begun to live yet!), a man has got to learn the doctrine of acceptance, that is, of unconditional surrender, which is love.
Henry Miller in The Wisdom of the Heart
Song: “Moment of Surrender” by U2
[A] fear-based survival framework for viewing the situation: We filter the external facts through the internal lens of thoughts, feelings, beliefs and body sensations. In this way, our fear creates our reality, locking us in anger, powerlessness, and blame.
Recontextualizing and Reframing
It’s understandable why we might react from fear when facing challenging situations. Mindfulness, however, is a powerful tool that offers the opportunity to make a radical shift in orientation.
Mindfulness is the practice of bringing our awareness to what we are experiencing in the present, both internally and externally, without judgment (Kornfield, 2009). It is a wakeup call to become conscious of the ways we perceive and respond to life’s situations.
We don’t have to meditate to practice being mindful. There are many ways to incorporate mindfulness into our daily lives. As we become increasingly mindful, we can begin to respond from a place of freedom and choice.
In other words, we can act with resilience.
Mindfulness and Resilience
As we become more mindful, we broaden and build several inner resources that help us strengthen our resilience (Fredrickson, 2001). These include:
• Compassion. […]
• Acceptance. […]
• Openness. […]
• Creativity. […]
Living resiliently is more than just “bouncing back.” It is about shifting our perceptions, changing our responses, and learning something new.
Living resiliently represents a whole new way of being and doing. It isn’t just for the hard times — it’s for all times. Empowering us to live, love, and work adventurously in the face of change, it builds a well from which we can draw for the rest of our lives.
The Marshmallow Test
[…] This simple test of willpower ended up being a powerful indicator of the child’s future success. In a follow up, the children who were able to wait for the second marshmallow were shown to have higher grades and better SAT scores. What’s this mean for us? First, thankfully, dozens of people have reenacted the test on YouTube. More importantly, willpower is vital to our success, but we have a limited supply so use yours on stuff that matters.
The 10,000 Hours Rule
[T]his 1993 study by Florida State Researcher Dr. K. Anders Ericsson suggested that to truly master our craft we need to spend 10,000 hours practicing.
And not just any practice, deliberate practice. Top performers select the difficult aspects of their work and repeat them endlessly until they are ingrained as habit. […]
The Grit Scale Indicator
Angela Duckworth of the University of Pennsylvania and Christopher Peterson of the University of Michigan took the Stanford Marshmallow test to the next level. In 2007, they developed a test that would measure a person’s “grit,” that is, an unassailable desire to see a goal or project through to the end. The test asked participants to read questions like “I have achieved a goal that took years of work” and rate its truthfulness on a five point scale.
Those who were shown to have more “grit” outperformed their less gritty peers. High grit scores correlated to higher GPAs, spelling bee winners, and West Point graduates.
The study touched off an entirely new school of thought in education that believes a high I.Q. isn’t a predictor of success. And the good news is, as adults it’s never too late to increase our grit.
Many thanks to the over 750 people who responded to the survey on loneliness. One of the questions was about what emotionally sensitive people see as the reason for their loneliness. Fear was mentioned by many of you: Fear of rejection, judgments, vulnerability, and of not being perfect. Some were afraid of their reactions to other people. […]
Many of you have found ways to cope with loneliness. You suggested finding a deep spiritual connection or a meaningful purpose. Some of you keep busy with activities and schedule special events to look forward to, such as going to a movie or reading a special book. Reading was a primary way of easing loneliness (71.6%) and television was seen as a companion by 48.9%.
Hobbies, therapy, volunteering, helping others, pets, creative activities, and not discounting relationships that you have are helpful. Online relationships help (45.4%), gardening, finding pleasure in small things and learning to accept yourselves worked for some of you. And finally, many mentioned meditation and mindfulness.
Almost 60% of you said that you believed that if you weren’t lonely you could be content or even happy. You said you didn’t feel lonely when you were with family, having meaningful conversations, with pets, being authentic, and when you were fully engaged with life. Though some said they liked being alone, most of you felt less lonely when you felt you belonged, when you could be yourself with others.
Independence is highly valued in our culture and at the same time the need to connect with others in a genuine way remains an important part of having a contented life. Connecting with others is not simple and requires complex skills. We’ll look more at loneliness in a future post, as well as the skills necessary to form connections.
We like to think we can read people like a book, relying mostly on tell-tale facial expressions that give away the emotions inside: the way the brows lift slightly with alarm, or the crow’s feet that crinkle with a wide smile. But when it comes to the strongest emotions, we read much less from facial expressions than we think we do. In fact, even though we believe it’s the face that tells the story, we’re typically reading something very different: body language and social cues.
Aviezer says his results suggest that the classic textbook distinction between positive emotions and negative emotions may need to be revised to incorporate the possibility that they may share more underlying physiological features than we thought. That could have implications for theories that link emotions to economics, social psychology, and neuroscience.
“I also think the findings may have some clinical applications,” he says. “Consider populations such as individuals with autism or various neuropsychiatric disorders. […] our work suggests that perhaps we should zoom out a bit and teach them how to recognize emotions from the full person in context.”
This ability is called “selective hearing” and is a computational function in your brain that enables you to focus in on your companion’s voice in the midst of the endless sound waves coming from ceiling fans, ambient music, and other people’s voices bouncing off the walls. Your ability to focus in on that single selected voice is impressive.
Although most modern humans are no longer engaged in hunting and gathering activities, our world would look very different were it not for selective hearing. Imagine living in a city – or even a moderately sized suburban town, for that matter – with its ambient atmosphere combining traffic, voices, weather sounds such as wind or rain, and the rest of the cacophony of daily life that we simply don’t think about from moment to moment. Were it not for selective hearing, we would drown in an overwhelming sea of noise, unable to focus on any one sound well enough to effectively evaluate its importance. Considered in that context, the neurological capability that we call selective hearing has played a significant role in defining how we function as a species.
More than 50 year ago, the American psychologist George Miller published a study that measured people’s mental recall of lists of new information.
Dr Miller concluded the brain’s short-term memory capacity could absorb roughly seven pieces of information. The study become one of the most cited psychology articles in the world.
But when Professor Parker examined Miller’s original data he found the results of his experiments showed the brain could handle only four chunks of information, not seven. Professor Parker believes the popularity of Miller’s research came from its evocative title - The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two. Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information.
While there were plenty of examples of groupings of seven in society, there were equally as many references to four: four ancient elements, four seasons, four Gospels, four suits in a card pack and Olympic Games every four years, said Professor Parker, whose findings were published in the journal_Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica._
While there was still uncertainty about the processes behind the brain’s storage capacity limits, the consensus supported the four over seven for the amount of information the brain could absorb, Professor Parker said. “There may be no limit in storage capacity per se but [there is] a limit to the duration in which items can remain active in short-term memory.”
The Honest Truth about Dishonesty: RSA Animate Version.
Another book I read recently, and heartily recommend.
More video and audio from Ariely’s appearance at the RSA:
Susan Cain on the Power of Introverts, Live-Illustrated by Molly Crabapple
In this short animated excerpt from Susan Cain’s RSA talk, based on her fantastic book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking (public library) and illustrated by the darkly delightful Molly Crabapple, Cain explores how modern society evolved to glorify the qualities associated with extraversion. And yet, rather than being a social handicap, introversion isn’t just enormously widespread but also socially advantageous and necessary.
I read this book recently, and highly recommend it.
Elsewhere on the web:
- RSA - Quiet: the power of introverts in a world that can’t stop talking
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[Susan Cain: The power of introverts Video on TED.com](http://www.ted.com/talks/susan_cain_the_power_of_introverts.html) - Little Atoms Podcast (April 6, 2012)