Read this if you are in a hurry

Everyone recalls the invoking of the force in George Lucas’ Star Wars films. There was you regular ordinary force, and then there was the dark side of the force. The latter involved getting caught up in one’s feelings, particularly angry ones. The former resulted from this yoda-like receptiveness to the force’s possible existence and utility even though it seemed impossible initially that such a passive invitation to something so intangible could result in achieving ones desires.

We have a force in our mind that is more commonly referred to as the will. Semmelroth writes that “your will is the center in your mind that can initiate action. See it as a gentle and patient, but also persistent and intelligent, agent for action. Whatever the problem you face, you will be better off when you use your volition to initiate problem solving behavior along with the expectation that the problem will  be solved that way, instead of pushing. “

Using our will to force things is sort of the mental equivalent of stuttering, the will is the first syllable initiating effort and if you keep harping on that first syllable, your going to lack direction and breadth of vision in you effort. When willing is made into an effort to control, it is merely an exercise in anger.  Willing something really a soft smooth activity in and of itself.  In contrast ….  will , will, will, will , will, will, will ….. and you’ll see that your activity, look and feel like hurry.

All hurry is anger.

Don’t think so? Watch people’s expressions when they are in a hurry. Or try interrupting someone in a hurry.

Semmelroth:

An excellent place to begin the task of replacing willpower with intelligent and competent will is in everyday hurrying through tasks. You begin by slowing down when you are hurrying. You may say, “But suppose I need to or want to get something done quickly.” To be quick is different  than to hurry.

>if you wish to speed up and you have a higher gear that you can comfortably shift into, do it.

>if you don’t have a higher gear, don’t hurry. Instead, look for a more efficient technique for doing the task. Then practice it.

>shoot for a pace that gives you a sense of competence.

In the effort to do something about your anger, no other thing will bring you more peace than governing your “motor” to run at a comfortable pace.

Read that last sentence very,  very slowly – take a second at least between each word.

Let your kids suffer

Here is the scenario:

Your kids is suffering or you anticipate  them suffering.

Seeing them suffer makes you suffer, and you can’t take it, so you do something to prevent their suffering.

You feel relieved. Your kid has no idea that they should feel relieved because you won’t ever allow them to suffer.

Your kid becomes even worse than you in that they are less able than you to handle the pain that goes along with being alive.

Your kid is still living with you when they are 30 years old.

You don’t understand how it could have turned out this way because you did everything a parent could do.

Grow up! And I am not talking to your kid.

(DAM) Decisive Action Mindset – Anger’s only Antidote

A lot of anger problems come from our habit of keeping our anger warm. If feelings are not under our voluntary control, and anger is a feeling, then when anger happens, its intensity will be worse and potentially more destructive if we are already slightly angry due to the routine sort of thinking we are doing. But can we control our thinking so that we can reduce our risk of anger quickly ramping up from an already warm base? I think a lot of of our thoughts are linked to our feelings and actually reinforce those feelings,  so we don’t have as much direct control over thoughts as we might ‘think’.  I think we can learn to put the brakes on certain thoughts though by learning to recognize them so when  they pop up later we can ‘give pause’ to the moment and in that pause shift focus to a decision to ‘reject or accept a proposal for action’ that we make to ourselves associated with that thought. Thoughts that already have momentum due to their link to a feeling require decisive measures for you to even have the option to slow or stop that momentum.

Ask yourself, when angry,

Have I lost control of something?

Often , when you ask yourself this question, you realize you never had control over it in the first place. For example, if your spouse or parent says something you preceive as unfair criticism,  and you feel angry, did you lose over what they think or say? You actually never had control over what they think or say. You lost control over what you think when the anger arose involuntarily. Your thoughts were rolling along peacefully enough, you hear a criticism, and you feel angry and you lose that relatively peaceful stream of thought you had. You want it back. You want control of your thoughts. If they kept thinking that critical stuff, and you felt in complete control of your thoughts, you wouldn’t have lost control of anything. 

Do you want control of your thoughts?

Yes.

How?

  Well, as I said, thoughts are largely involuntary, so you can’t control them either, just like you can’t control your critic’s thoughts.

So what can you do?

Try this: Notice how each thought  that arises points to an action on your part, if at all. If it only points to action you’d like the other party to take, go to the next thought. Keep evaluating each thought in terms of the actions it points to you taking.  Multiple action options will arise that you can accept or reject. Let them keep rolling. It will feel pretty natural even though my writing about it makes it sound complicated.   Eventually you will see yourself doing something that makes you feel good and meets your standards for yourself. You will feel more in control because you will be focusing on the only thing you can control  –  what you  do. 

This works because when you are angry your body wants you to take action and use some of that adrenaline. The only way to respond to your own anger is with an action mindset. Anger will fight you doing anything else. As soon as you start focusing on your thinking, or their thinking, or their action, your body will be fighting it and wanting to take it  action of its own.  But if you don’t use that energy to decisively present all the action options to yourself than  you will pick a default action and it will usually be a less than optimal.

Here is a personal example of me doing this. It follows a critical comment I heard from someome I care about:

 I could sit here.  No. That feels like giving in.

 I could say something. No. I don’t know what to say. I’ll say something that will make it worse.

I could say nothing. No, I have to do something though .

I could leave. No, that solves nothing.

 I could get a drink of water. Yes. But then what?

I could walk over to the person.  No, not yet.

I could listen to the person. Yes. I walk over and listen. I show I am not afraid and am not going to just let this go.

I could really work hard to understand the person. I am not agreeing with them. Just really trying to understand. I am not showing fear. I am not agreeing to change anything I do. I am not being intimidated.  

I could look at them while they talk. This shows respect and self-confidence.

I could ask questions so I could learn more about what they think. This shows respect, concern, interest, and I have agreed to nothing.

The original propositions for action in the example are pretty primitive but I gradually gain control over myself by telling myself decisively no until my proposals for action get better in terms of their fit with what is going to be effective and comfortable with me.

What toddlers have to teach us

 We actually have a lot to learn from toddlers. Think of how much a toddler is learning on an hourly basis. They far exceed adults or even older children in their relative learning rate.  They are very decisive, and they know instinctively that no is the safest answer and the best answer for enhancing the learning that they must do to survive and develop.

Adults should also start with no as their default position.   No is the safest decision, unless someone says something like, “ give me all your money or I’ll shoot”. Fortunately, those situations don’t happen that often. Otherwise, if you are thinking about things and feeling some inertia or worry or anger, try making a proposal to yourself and telling yourself yes or no. Any doubt at all and you should tell yourself no. You’ll be amazed at the freedom that it gives you, not to avoid the proposition and problem , but to make a decision , in this case no , which allows your brain to settle and see more clearly the obstacles it faces. It is better to tell yourself no multiple times, face the obstacles, and get to a solid yes, than it is to get to yes to quickly. We get to yes too  quickly all the time . We should try getting to no quickly and often when trying to make progress and enjoy the benefits of the safest decisive thinking style available to human beings.

See my post from a few days ago  for a personal example of todder thinking. It come at the end

 http://diddly.wordpress.com/2009/02/15/how-to-be-decisive-about-being-decisive

How to be decisive about being decisive

My ideas here are all well and good, perhaps satisfying to think about and even ponder doing. But I don’t really think I have really answered the question about how you can get yourself to become the decisive person that will most certainly help you cut through anger and lethargy and all the rest.

I think an author named Michael Loboeuf, Ph.D. answers the question in his book titled: The Greatest Management Principle in the World.  Here it is:

THE THINGS THAT GET REWARDED GET DONE

If we do things there is always some reward involved for us. If we do not see any reward associated with an action, we will not do it. Period. It is a law of human nature. You can try challenging it and I bet I will always be able to show you how this law applies every time.

Some actions have intrinsic rewards, that is, it is the feeling we get from doing it that is at least as rewarding as the result of the action.

Planning, or outlining your decisions for a day or week or year, is not intrinsically rewarding for must of us. I think it is because we don’t reward ourselves for being decisive. If being decisive is defined by our committment to rejecting or accepting a proposal we hear from ourselves or others – it  is going to provoke some emotionality. What if you regret it? What if it is ‘wrong’? It feels so final, even though many decisions are reversible. So we don’t make decisions in order to avoid these negative feelings, but in doing so we stray from the manageable world of action which adds to us becoming more internally focused on our  unmanageable feelings. The consequence is the augmented negative  emotionality that we meant to avoid by not being decisive in the first place. It is a vicious circle.   

How do you break this cycle?   REWARD

Before you make a decision, plan on how you are going to reward yourself just for making the decision. The decision may be to reject a course of action, which should be rewarded as readily as accepting a course of action. Knowing you have some pleasure ahead of you can mitigate the negative emotionality that is inevitably associated with making a decision. Unfortunately, what we do instead is reward ourselves for not making a decision. We live in maybe land.  We have nothing else to do, since we haven’t made any  decisions, so we fall into doing something pleasurable, in other words,  we reward ourselves for being indecisive.

So the next time you are wondering what you should be doing, take a break from that course of thinking, and ask youself how you are going to reward yourself for rejecting or accepting a proposal from yourself for a course of action. It could be a small or a large reward. It doesn’t matter.

For example, before you decide to make a to-do list for yourself for tomorrow, commit to rewarding yourself in some way for accepting or rejecting the proposal to make the list. Do not give yourself this reward until you accept or reject the proposal. What will the reward be? What do you like to do?   There are a wealth of rewards out there, and you can always reverse your decision and reward yourself again for the reversal, so you can’t lose here.   No rush to action, just making decisions. I’ll run through the process myself:

Will I come  with a to-do list for tomorrow? No. I am not sure when I can do it.

Without commiting to doing it, can you decide on a time to do it? Yes – 1:15 PM

Will I come up with a to- do list for tomorrow? No. I don’t know what Reena is planning.

Without commiting to doing it, can you get an idea of what Reena is doing? Yes. I’ll get up and ask her now.

Will I come up with a to-do list for tomorrow? No. I don’t have a notebook chosen to do it.

Without commiting to doing it, can you go find a notebook that will work? Yes

Will I come up with a to-do list for tomorrow?  yes

Reward -  5 minutes rest on the couch with or without TV  for ech decision. I made 7 decisions. I could take 35 minutes. I ended up only needing 10 minutes.  I actually rested for 5 of those minutes after the first ‘no’.

And yes, I did make the to-do list

Your ‘to do nothing’ list

Most of us are familiar with and have used a ‘to do’ list. In the spirit of my last post, you also ought to have a ‘to do nothing’ list. It is meant to work in conjunction with the ‘to do’ list, and is no less important. And it is really fun to make a ‘to do nothing’ list. It might involve committing to doing nothing for 30 seconds after a certain task or ‘behavior’. It just makes all the difference to being able to step into ‘voluntary living’, to quote Semmelroth’s term.

You end up smelling the proverbial roses more often, while enhancing your effectiveness.

Go figure that would be the case.

The bibilical story of David and Goliath is instructive in what I am trying to get across – that’ll be next.

Now I am going to do nothing though.

How to be calm and decisive

 The way to cut through hyper and hypo arousal is by making a habit of being decisive.  Decisions get us to action, and as Semmelroth said,  only action can be managed directly, not emotion. If you can directly control action, you will feel much more in control than if you focus on something you can’t control – emotion. Nontheless,  decisions to take action are preceded by emotion and that emotion is fed by what painful or pleasurable thing we are seeing that could happen as a result of various choices that are in front of us. There is no way to get away from emotions, yet they needn’t be debilitating emotions that render you ineffective.   This can be achieved by  commiting to seeing the pain before  having to go through the pain. The emotion  associated with seeing the pain will be significant but you at least have some distance from it because it is happening NOW.  If you see the future pain, but commit to making some decision to reduce your chances of experiencing pain that pain directly, than seeing the  pain in order to inform your decision becomes a wise and not so unsettling prospect.   Unfortunately many people go too far and create a habit of anticipating pain without following it up with a  a firm decision,  and become chronically anxious or angry.  What they need to do is become decisive around the factors that will contribute to the pain and see just enough pain to  sharpen their focus on implementation of those decisions that will reduce the pain. Even if they are the ‘wrong’ decisions, the focused action and feeling of control will reduce  emotionality and increase calm rationality so that the chance of realizing the ‘wrongness’ of the decision is more likely to happen sooner than if you merely focus on the pain or on some distraction from the pain.  You can then more quickly change the decision and get busy implementating again in a better direction. The decision can even be to delay a particular action, and this can be as useful as taking immediate action, as long as the delay has a time limit.  Often seeing pain is overwhelming, and we need to take a break in order to rejuvenate.  You can even spend that delay eating potato chips and watching TV as long as you using the delay as a means to rejuvenate for a set time before you refocus on the pain and making a decision. However,  if you are just distracting yourself and have no set time to refocus in this way, you are going to be ineffective and risk getting addicted to your distractions.

So here are some steps if you are hypo or hyper aroused, even if ownly slightly:

1)See the pain – dig into it. “What is going to hurt? What else? What else?”

2) Commit to a decision to act to reduce the pain you saw.

3) Include enough decisions to  ’rest and distract ‘  for rejuvenation purposes within  a time limit if you are overwhelmed by looking at the pain.

Voluntary living

I am going to use some direct quotes from Semmelroth’s book that actually are in one of the last chapters, but it makes a point from which we can build a foundation for dealing with hyper and hypo arousal. It talks about anger specifically, but I will try to expand the discussion to to other emotions eventually.

You cannot wade in the river of anger without being sucked in by the undertow of the loss of freedom.  It is an outright logical impossibility to try to force yourself  or someone else to do something and have the resulting behavior occur voluntarily. Participation in the exercise of force and threats of force can have only one of two results: either involuntary compliance or involuntary resistance.

Remember- ‘force’ can be the smallest thing, like a vanishing smile. It is pretty tempting to think you don’t use force that much on yourself or others. Semmelroth clarifies that.

Unfortunately, you cannot always avoid people who threaten you in an attempt to control you. A mugger can only be dealt with by resistance, if possible, or by compliance if necessary. But most attempts to control you can be avoided if you don’t feel you need or want something from the person attempting them. Other people most often employ threats (not always explicit)  that amount to withholding things (including ‘things’ like courtesy and kindness) they think you have some need or claim of.

So how do you develop the ability not to ‘feel you want or need something’ from someone who is making an attempt to control you?

You can’t control what you feel directly. Semmelroth writes, “Emotional responses need not be managed. They do need to be starved of fuel when they interfere with your life.  If you feed your dread ( or whatever emotion) by making your dread the problem to be solved before you act, you have changed the task from getting something done to how you feel about it.  ”

Hmmm. Getting something done. Like what? What do you want? That is not so easy to know as it may seem. Access to the knowledge  of what we want  can easily be drowned out by hyper and hypoarousal. The reason for this is that often we decided what we want at some point in the past.  The feeling of desire that preceded that decision is much more subtle in the present moment – post decision. The more subtle  feeling of desire is not strong enough by itself to push away our anger or fear or sadness.   At our best, we know the  experience of desiring something, having made a decision to get it, and being able to keep our focus on the achievement of that thing despite distractions such as emotions. 

Consider a bball player who has an important shot to make under these circumstances:  the  fans are screaming, the ref just made a questionable call, you’ve missed your last 5 shots, and your ankle hurts. Where does your focus need to be? The shot – the ball, your hands, your feet, your fingers, the basket.  You decided a long time ago that when you take a shot your desire is for it to go in. That decision was made and has never changed. The felt sense that you want to make the shot is ‘obvious’ and  extraneous to succeeding.   You are actually more likely to miss if you get caught up in a desperate desire to make it.  In addition, all the other wants in that moment must be ’starved’ – the desire for the fans to shut up, the ref to be fair and reliable, your past self to have done better, and your ankle not to hurt. Those are problems of thwarted desire that you may choose to address later.

So decisions are important to not feeling that you want or need something from someone who is attempting to control you. You need to find a way to keep those decisions fresh in your mind. You can’t rely on the desire that preceded those decisions and may linger with greatly diminished intensity afterwards to prompt you to remember. So how do we find a way to have easy access to those decisions that reflect our highest standards and deepest desires? How? How? I don’t know off that bat, but I’ll get to it in another post.

 

The impact of temperature on our capacity for kindness

Short interesting read.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/10/23/warm.hands.study.ap/index.html

Keeping our heads off the ground by having them up our ass

We’d never get through the world if we knew it as it is: enormous and chaotic. We’d need a brain so large that we couldn’t keep our heads off the ground. The brain’s simplification of reality means that anything that gets into the mind is immediately overemphasized, whether it is an emotional slight, a change in the weather, or a matter of statecraft. So we give the most recent news that greatest weight in decision making. This  leads to frequent  and dramatic fluctuations in our thoughts and moods, and our fragile minds almost leave us little choice but to delude ourselves most of the time.

NO ONE FACES REALITY.

We all react to a simplified, filtered model of the world, a personal story we tell ourselves with respect to the world and our place in it.

From Healthy Pleasures by Robert Ornstein and David Sobel.

See www.ishkbooks.com