8 Things I Wish I Knew When I Was 22

When I was 22, I wouldn’t have listened to my old curmudgeonly self. I would have said, “You don’t get it”, then put my headphones back on and headed over the Haymarket. I might have written about it on my blog over at TheGlobe.com (remember that site?) under my pen name ‘nehalennia’. 1999 was a great year, and I was going to make a million trillion dollars working teh internets. Instead I got laid off from my dot com job and ran into the warm embrace of reliable employment. So despite the fact that I wouldn’t have taken my own advice, here are 8 Things I Wish I Knew When I Was 22:

1. Pick a career you love; you don’t have to give into the pressure to be practical. Everyone changes careers over their lifetime; why not experiment with one that you are crazy about? Worst case scenario, you go get that crappy corporate job when you’re 28 and let the cool waters of 9-5ing wash away any memories of your failed Falafel-R-Us Gift Basket business.

2. Pay off your credit card debt and don’t buy so much stuff. Does every college do this? Offer credit cards at the student union, and in exchange for filling out an application, they gift you a candy bar? I was hungry! I was broke! Sign me up! Thankfully I was so thoroughly burned the first time, I learned my lesson.

3. Your student loans can be deferred practically indefinitely. After graduation, just call them and ask for a deferment. They will bend over backwards to make deferring easy to do. In six months when your deferment is over, call them up and do another. Repeat as needed.

4. It doesn’t cost as much as you’d think to travel. You don’t need to save $50,000 to spend a year overseas. If you’re young, willing to sleep anywhere (hello, couchsurfing!) and go to countries off the beaten tourist track, then you can survive on much less (I’ve heard as low as $1000/mo).

5. The job you have right now is not that important. If I were an employer I would only hire ambitious twenty something’s. They will knock themselves out working incredibly hard on stuff that barely matters. Try to get a 35 year old to take photocopying that seriously and you’re more likely to get your dog to iron your suit in the morning.

6. You don’t need a safety net. You can figure this out. The idea of being out there, with nothing to catch you if everything goes wrong may make your stomach do little flips, but really, you’ll be just fine.

7. This is the best time in your life to travel carefree. If you wait it’s going to be more complicated financially and emotionally. Now instead of putting on a backpack and heading out the door, I’ve got to cancel leases, forward mail, set up online payment arrangements, sell a ton of stuff, convince my family that I don’t need an MRI “just in case this idea is a sympton of a brain tumor”, and wrangle with complex stuff like dodging the “when are you going to have kids” question.

8. Did you read #7? Go Travel Now!

Great article from www.almostfearless.com.

How to Banish Bad Habits and Control Temptations

Everyday people are trying to stop one bad behavior or another. I thunk most of us have personal experience as to how difficult it can be.

PsyBlog has articulated this challenge in an excellent blog entry, which has been duplicated here. The original article can be found at www.psyblog.com. Enjoy!


Anyone who has ever found themselves trying to turn on the bathroom light seconds after phoning the power company to ask how long the power cut will last, knows how easily habits bypass our conscious thought processes.

Part of the reason habits are so difficult to change is they are triggered unconsciously, often by situations we've encountered time and time again. Before going into the bathroom: turn on the light. After getting new email: waste 10 minutes aimlessly surfing the web.

Temptations, on the other hand, play more on visceral factors like hunger, sex or thirst. We see a muffin and can't resist.

New research published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin by Quinn et al. (2010) suggests a different strategy for changing a bad habit than for resisting a temptation.

"Don't do it!"

First, though, the researchers wanted to find out what habit-control strategies people use in everyday life. Ninety-nine students kept diaries of their battles with bad habits and temptations. Over 7 or 14 days they recorded each time they felt like giving in to a temptation or a bad habit they were trying to get rid of.

Top of the list for unwanted activities were excess sleeping, eating and procrastination (no big surprises there in a sample of students). The top strategies to combat these were:

Vigilant monitoring: watching out for slip-ups and saying "Don't do it!" to yourself.
Distraction: trying to think about something else.
Stimulus control: removing the opportunity to perform the habit, say by leaving the bar, fast-food restaurant or electronics store.

For strong habits it was the vigilant monitoring that emerged from self-reports as the most useful strategy, with distraction in second place. While for strong temptations rather than habits, participants reported that stimulus control was the most effective strategy while monitoring dropped to third place behind distraction.

For both weak habits and weak temptations the strategy used mattered less, although for weak temptations the monitoring strategy emerged as the best.

How to defy a bad habit

As you'll be gathering from reading PsyBlog, though, psychologists are suspicious of what people say. Instead they like experiments to see what people do. So, in a second study they used a lab-based analogue of real life, to see if vigilant monitoring really is an effective strategy for controlling strong habits.

Sixty-five participants learned one response to a word, then in a second study had to change this response in defiance of the habit they'd built up.

Backing up the first study, the experiment found that vigilant monitoring was the most successful short-term strategy for suppressing a strong habit. Once again for weak habits the type of strategy used made little difference.

Habits versus temptations

So, why does vigilant monitoring work for habits but not for temptations? Quinn et al. argue that it doesn't work for temptations because watching out for slip-ups heightens our attention to the temptation which we are, ironically, once again tempted by. Stimulus control, though removes the opportunity: out of sight, out of mind.

Unlike temptations, habits are learnt by repetition and so they can sneak in under the radar. We find ourselves repeating them without thinking. Vigilant monitoring probably works because it helps us notice the habit and remember that we wanted to change it.

The bad news

But, as anyone who has ever tried to change a long-held habit will know, continually monitoring for bad habits is tiring and some days your self-control is weaker than others.

This isn't helped by what are known as 'ironic processes of control' which I cover in my series '10 more brilliant social psychology studies'. This is the idea that monitoring a thought in the hope of getting rid of it only makes that thought come back stronger.

In the long-term it may be necessary to try and replace the old habit with a new one. Unfortunately this new habit is likely to be much more unstable than the old one.

I'd like to leave you with better news but sometimes it's good to know the worst. We are often slaves to our habits and many of these habits are extremely hard to change because they are triggered outside our conscious awareness. Anyone who tells you different is either lying to themselves or trying to sell you a quick-fix that probably won't work.

- On the road with my iPhone

Finding Middle Ground

Every week I receive an email from the Crucial Conversations site that address different conversational challenges. This week the issue is to how to find middle ground where two sides are completely polarized.

Question

When I try to have crucial conversations about issues where there seems to be no middle ground (i.e., abortion, global warming, politics), people often respond with over-the-top, dismissive, and divisive statements. How can I effectively hold crucial conversations about high-stakes topics with those who engage in aggressive ways?

Signed,
Seeking Middle Ground

Dear Seeking,
Several years ago in London, I hailed a taxi for the 45-minute trip from Gatwick airport to my hotel. After I informed the driver of my destination, he turned back and said, "You have an American accent. Are you American?"

"Yes," I responded.

He then made a pretty bold generalization about the culture I came from.

It was late at night. I was a bit tired. I weighed my willingness to engage in an energetic conversation and as I considered ignoring the comment I thought, "I should be able to do this. I should be able to talk to someone with a strong opinion even if I don't fully agree."

As this challenge took shape in my mind, I found myself more interested in a dialogue. I had no intention of trying to change his mind, but I thought, "Here's a guy who wants to be heard. And if there's hope for the world it's only if people like him and me can disagree in a respectful way." With this moral mission in mind, I responded.

"Not too worried about your tip, I take it?" I said and smiled at his eyes in the mirror.

He broke into a broad grin, then continued, saying that he loved Americans, but again reiterated some strong generalizations.

His voice got louder and his face redder the more he spoke. I began to wonder if I should just nod and smile or if I should really engage. But I returned to my conviction that until we can find peaceful ways of disagreeing we have no hope of creating real peace in the world. At one point in what turned into a five-minute monologue I patted the back of his seat to interrupt him.

"Hey, my friend. May I ask you a question?"

He looked into the rear view mirror and paused. "Sure. This is your taxi at the moment."

"You know, I am from the U.S. and don't get as much contact as I'd like with people who have a whole different experience than I do. I am very interested in hearing your views. And I may agree with some of them but disagree with others. Are you interested in mine, too, or should I just hear you out?"

"Oh, no," he practically crooned. "I want a debate!"

"Okay, then how about this. You take the first five minutes and then I get the next five. At the end, I don't care if we both agree on everything or not, but I'm guessing we might both be a little smarter. How is that?"

He laughed heartily, turned to face me full on and said, "You are a strange man. But that is a deal."

I don't know that my taxi-driver friend ended up seeing the world any differently when we were done with that ride, but I did. Not that my opinions were profoundly altered, but they were tested in a way I was grateful for. Most importantly, I was encouraged to discover that dialogue was possible with someone who held strong views and who seemed initially uninterested in anything but a monologue.

This is what I've found to be helpful in such a controversial conversation:

1. Talk about how you'll talk. If you're having a one-sided conversation but would like a dialogue, and it's not going that way, stop the conversation and come to agreement about ground rules. You can do this in a very respectful way by letting the person know you are interested in their views and want to continue the conversation. Then ask for time boundaries, or lower volume, or whatever will help you engage in a healthier way.

2. Check your motives. Be sure your interest in the conversation is sincere. If you just want a chance to demonstrate the perfection of your own opinions, expect the same from the other person. Fair is fair. But if you want dialogue, be sure you are open to new information or perspectives. If you are sincerely interested in getting smarter not just looking smart, you'll behave in ways that will invite the same from the other person.

3. Encourage disagreement. We've learned a startling truth about dialogue. People are okay with you expressing even very strongly held views so long as you are equally genuine in your invitation of their disagreement. Before sharing your opinions, make a statement like, "You know, I've got a really strong opinion on this. I've thought a great deal about it and read pretty widely, and I'd like to tell you my view. But at the end, if you see holes in it, or if you have new information I don't have, I desperately hope you'll challenge me with it. I really want to learn from your view in any way I can." This sincere invitation takes the fighting wind out of others' sails. They realize they don't have to beat you over the head with their opinions because you're asking for them!

4. Never miss a chance to agree. Finally, don't go for efficiency. When we agree on 50 percent of a topic and disagree on 50 percent we tend to move quickly to the disagreements because those are what interest us most. And besides, life is short, so why not start with the fight, right? Wrong! If you want worthwhile dialogue, take the time to listen for points on which you agree. Point them out. Confirm them. Put them in the "Pool of Shared Meaning." Then—and only then—move to the areas of disagreement. When you do this you reaffirm that your goal is not to win, it's to learn.

I hope these modest ideas are useful to you as you engage with others. I truly believe the future of humanity lies in our capacity to develop mutual purpose and mutual respect across the planet—and that happens one crucial conversation at a time.

Thank you for your interest in advancing public discourse about our most crucial issues.

Pump It Up: Eleven Tips for Exercising Regularly

Exercise is one of the keys to happiness. Research shows that people who exercise are healthier, more energetic, think more clearly, sleep better, and have delayed onset of dementia. They get relief from anxiety and mild depression, comparable to medication and therapy. They perform better at work.

Also, although it’s tempting to flop down on the couch when you’re feeling exhausted, exercise is actually a great way to boost energy levels. Feeling tired is a reason to exercise, not a reason to skip exercise.

But even when you admit that you’d feel better if you exercised, it can be very hard to adopt the habit. My idea of fun has always been to lie in bed and read, preferably while also eating a snack, but I’ve managed to keep myself exercising by using all these tricks on myself:

1. Always exercise on Monday. This sets the psychological pattern for the week. Along the same lines …

2. If at all possible, exercise first thing in the morning. As the day wears on, you’ll find more excuses to skip exercising. Get it checked off your list, first thing.

3. Never skip exercising two days in a row. You can skip a day, but the next day, you must exercise, no matter how inconvenient.

4. Give yourself credit for the smallest effort. My father always said that all he had to do was put on his running shoes and close the door behind him. Many times, by promising myself I could quit ten minutes after I’d started, I got myself to start—and then found that I didn’t want to quit, after all.

5. Think about context. I thought I disliked weight training, but in fact, I dislike the guys who hang out in the weight-training area. Are you distressed about the grubby showers in your gym? Do you try to run in the mornings, but recoil from going out in the cold? Examine the factors that might be discouraging you from exercising.

6. Exercise several times a week. If your idea of exercise is to join games of pick-up basketball, you should be playing practically every day. Twice a month isn’t enough.
7. If you don’t have time to both exercise and take a shower, find a way to exercise that doesn’t require you to shower afterward. Twice a week, I have a very challenging weight-training session, but the format I follow doesn’t make me sweat. (Some of you are saying, “It can’t be challenging if you don’t sweat!” Oh yes, believe me, it is.)

8. Look for affordable ways to make exercising more pleasant or satisfying. Could you upgrade to a nicer or more convenient gym? Buy yourself a new iPod? Work with a trainer? Get a pedometer to keep track of your walking distances? Exercise is a high life priority, so this a worthwhile place to spend some money if that helps.

9. Think of exercise as part of your essential preparation for times you want to be in especially fine form—whether in performance (to be sharp for an important presentation) or appearance (to look good for a wedding) or mood (to deal with a stressful situation). Studies show that exercise does help.

10. Remember one of my favorite Secrets of Adulthood, courtesy of Voltaire: Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Don’t decide it’s only worth exercising if you can run five miles or if you can bike for an hour. I have a friend who scorns exercise unless she’s training for a marathon—so she never exercises. Even going for a ten-minute walk is worthwhile. Do what you can.

11. Don’t kid yourself. Belonging to a gym doesn’t mean you go to the gym. Having been in shape in high school or college doesn’t mean you’re in shape now. Saying that you don’t have time to exercise doesn’t make it true.

People often ask me, “So if I want to be happier, what should I be doing?” and I always say, “The first thing to do is to make sure you’re getting plenty of sleep and plenty of exercise.”

I know that answer doesn’t sound properly transcendent and high-minded on the subject of happiness, but research shows that you’d be wise to start there. And I’ve found that if I’m feeling energetic and well rested, it’s much easier to follow all my other happiness-inducing resolutions.

Originally published on The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin

Sticky Teams

Any time you have two or more people who have to cooperate or work in some form or fashion, you are going to have natural drift that will arise in the relationship(s).

Picture for a moment a layer of sheet ice - a thin layer of ice that floats on water. Now, If you take a hammer to the sheet ice it will shatter into a number of pieces. The natural tendency of these individual pieces is to drift away from each other, unless concentrated effort is invested to hold them together in a cluster.

The sheet ice is a simple metaphor to illustrate the relations between people. If concentrated effort is not invested to hold the relationships together, people tend to drift from away from each other. This is true for families, sport teams, rock groups, corporate teams or just about any other type of group you can think of.

Think about your own history. There have been people in your life who were once very close, but have since drifted away. Perhaps you moved (or they) to a new company, a new city or a new country. Life moves on for all parties and everyone gets wrapped up in their own existences.

Then you will have other relationships that you have maintained and strengthened despite what has transpired over time. A concentrated effort has been invested to build and maintain strong bridges between the fragmented sheet ice.

It is not only physical distance (i.e. new company, city or country) that can be the cause of relation drift. The distance can also be mental. People may still be part of the same group, see each other everyday, and on paper are formerly regarded as a group. It's just that mentally they have distanced themselves from each other. In family groups the word 'estranged' is used. In corporate groups it is commonly known as 'silos'.

How does a group overcome this natural drift?

From my experience working with groups (mainly teams within organizations) I have found there are three key-elements required to keep groups intact, functioning and healthy.

1. The ability to build and maintain relationships.
2. Specific dialogue skill-sets.
3. Creating a space/venue/arena for safe and healthy interaction.

If you have all three elements in place and a concentrated effort is invested in maintaining and improving these elements, the result is team cohesiveness. What I like to call Sticky Teams.

The above three elements do not reqiuire a PhD in psychology. It just requires a little education and a whole lot of common sense. Most people have a least one strong working/professional relationship, which is a very good indication that they are applying the three elements of sticky teams/groups. The challenge is to repeat the behavior with those relationships that are important, but seem to be in drift.

In my following blog posts I will go into deeper details about each of these elements.

- On the road with my iPhone

60 Inspirational Quotes

Wisdom and Inspirational Quotes
1. It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.
—Albert Einstein
2. Eighty percent of success is showing up.
—Woody Allen
3. I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education.
—Wilson Mizner
4. The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance; it is the illusion of knowledge.
—Daniel J. Boorstin
5. The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.
—William Arthur Ward
6. If you don’t make mistakes, you’re not working on hard enough problems. And that’s a big mistake.
—Frank Wilczek
7. You can never get enough of what you don’t really need.
—Eric Hoffer
8. Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
—Albert Einstein
9. Do not confuse motion and progress. A rocking horse keeps moving but does not make any progress.
—Alfred A. Montapert
10. I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.
—Bill Cosby
11. Tomorrow is often the busiest day of the week.
—Spanish Proverb
12. Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.
—Oscar Wilde
13. There is a great difference between worry and concern. A worried person sees a problem, and a concerned person solves a problem.
—Harold Stephens
14. It is easier to fight for one’s principles than to live up to them.
—Alfred Adler
15. I hear: I forget / I see: I remember / I do: I understand
—Chinese Proverb
16. Discipline is just choosing between what you want now and what you want most.
—Unknown Author
17. The very best thing you can do for the whole world is to make the most of yourself.
—Wallace Wattles
18. Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.
—Barry LePatner
19. When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad, and that is my religion.
—Abraham Lincoln
20. Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.
—Winston Churchill
Humor Quotes
21. If it weren’t for my lawyer, I’d still be in prison. It went a lot faster with two people digging.
—Joe Martin
22. Acquaintance, n.: A person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to.
—Ambrose Bierce
23. I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me.
—Noel Coward
24. The difference between death and taxes is death doesn’t get worse every time Congress meets.
—Will Rogers
25. You know you’re getting old when you stop to tie your shoelaces and wonder what else you could do while you’re down there.
—George Burns
26. Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.
—Groucho Marx
27. Those are my principles. If you don’t like them I have others.
—Groucho Marx
28. Somewhere on this globe, every ten seconds, there is a woman giving birth to a child. She must be found and stopped.
—Sam Levenson
29. Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur. (Whatever is said in Latin sounds profound.)
—Unknown Author
30. The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for thirty years she served the family nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found.
—Calvin Trillin
31. The tooth fairy teaches children that they can sell body parts for money.
—David Richerby
32. My friends tell me I have an intimacy problem. But they don’t really know me.
—Garry Shandling
33. I don’t deserve this award, but I have arthritis and I don’t deserve that either.
—Jack Benny
34. I always wanted to be somebody, but now I realize I should have been more specific.
—Lily Tomlin
35. If God wanted us to fly, He would have given us tickets.
—Mel Brooks
36. If I only had a little humility, I’d be perfect.
—Ted Turner
37. When I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up reading.
—Henny Youngman
38. The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.
—Groucho Marx
39. Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.
—Douglas Hofstadter
40. Honest criticism is hard to take, particularly from a relative, a friend, an acquaintance, or a stranger.
—Franklin P. Jones
Otherwise Interesting Quotes
41. Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.
—Albert Einstein
42. Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
—Susan Erz
43. Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
—Pablo Picasso
44. A genius! For 37 years I’ve practised fourteen hours a day, and now they call me a genius!
—Pablo Sarasate
45. There is nobody so irritating as somebody with less intelligence and more sense than we have.
—Don Herold
46. The bad news is time flies. The good news is you’re the pilot.
—Michael Althsuler
47. The little I know I owe to my ignorance.
—Orville Mars
48. The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
—George Bernard Shaw
49. In God we trust; all others bring data.
—Dr. W. Edwards Deming
50. The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.
—Mark Twain
51. Never argue with a fool, onlookers may not be able to tell the difference.
—Mark Twain
52. My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.
—Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.
53. Simple, clear purpose and principles give rise to complex and intelligent behavior. Complex rules and regulations give rise to simple and stupid behavior.
—Dee Hock
54. Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.
—Albert Einstein
55. In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.
—Dwight D. Eisenhower
56. The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.
—Niels Bohr
57. Before you go and criticize the younger generation, just remember who raised them.
—Unknown Author
58. Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.
—Arthur Schopenhauer
59. It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.
—Harry Truman
60. A conclusion is the place where you got tired thinking.
—Martin H. Fischer

Cohesion -- Sport Psychology with Karlene Sugarman, M.A.

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