Achilles, Odysseus, Psychology, Science, Sport, Work

Optimism Epiphany

   

I’ve had an epiphany. It all comes down to three Ps; and avoiding learned helplessness…

First discovered in dogs and then in humans, Wikipedia takes up the strain here:

Research has found that human reactions to a lack of control differ both between individuals and between situations. For example, learned helplessness sometimes remains specific to one situation but at other times generalizes across situations.

An influential view is that such variations depend on an individual’s attributional or explanatory style. According to this view, how someone interprets or explains adverse events affects their likelihood of acquiring learned helplessness and subsequent depression. 

For example, people with pessimistic explanatory style tend to see negative events as permanent (“it will never change”), personal (“it’s my fault”), and pervasive (“I can’t do anything correctly”), are likely to suffer from learned helplessness and depression.

If you want to bounce back fast from setbacks and beat the blues, Martin Seligman’s book and the thesis of learned optimism are well worth a read. It’s certainly working for me. 

I’m ruminating less, and actively breaking up permanent, pervasive and personal interpretations of bad situations when I hit them…

I’m regularly reminding myself: 

“It’ll pass”, “it’s just one part of my life”, “it’s not me that’s causing this.”

And directing myself – and others – toward action, not helplessness: 

“Ok but what can we do about it right now”,  “OK if we can’t fix that, what else can we fix” and “if anyone is going to make this better we can, so let’s have a go.” 

I feel a lot better, and people around me do too. It transpires the main benefit of pessimism is you predict the future better. 

Optimism might help change it.

Aristotle, Psychology, Science, Writing

Habit Forming

  
Is the great Greek wrong on this one… 

I stumbled across  an interesting article in Time – (it quoted an academic from my place of work) which suggests he might be:


So what are habits, really? According to Dr. Benjamin Gardner, a psychologist focusing on habit research at King’s College London, “habit works by generating an impulse to do a behaviour with little or no conscious thought.” Habits are simply how the brain learns to do things without deliberation. These impulses can be put to good use, but only certain behaviors can become habits.

Building a habit is relatively simple — just harness the impulse. For new habits to take hold, provide a clear trigger, make the behavior easy to do, and ensure it occurs frequently. For example, by completely removing unhealthy food from my home and eating the same thing every morning, my diet became a healthy habit. I extracted the decision making process out of what I eat at home.

However, if the behavior requires a high degree of intentionality, effort, or deliberation, it is not a habit. Although proponents of habits tout them as miracle cures for doing things we’d rather not do, I’m sorry to say that’s snake oil. All sorts of tasks aren’t habits and never will be. By definition, doing things that are effortful aren’t habits.

Unfortunately, this means behaviors that require hard work and deliberate practice aren’t good candidates for habit-formation. For example, although I make time for it every day, writing is not a habit. Writing is hard work. If I waited for an “impulse” to write, I’d never do it. To get better at writing requires concentration and directed effort to make sense of the words as they go from the research to my head and then to the screen. Similarly, lifting weights isn’t a habit because getting stronger requires working harder.

So if these type of behaviors aren’t habits, what are they? They’re routines. A routine is a series of behaviors regularly practiced. Routines don’t care if you feel an urge or not, they just need to get done. When I finally realized I would never succeed at making going to the gym a habit, I began looking for how to establish a routine instead.

This makes sense, when you think about it. I’ve read elsewhere that as much of 40% of the time we are doing things which have become habitual and have no conscious deliberation – we are on Autopilot.

This suggests three things – all of which I’m trying… Make boring but useful things a habit (taking my vitamin D for example); make things which take some effort but are good for me into a routine (write a blog every Saturday); and more counterintuitively – make sure things which are supposed to be enjoyable, don’t become a habit. 

Why? Because once you stop thinking about them, you’re no longer consciously enjoying them. Not having a drink on Monday or Tuesday has become a habit (good). So sometimes sharing a bottle of prosecco with my other half on a Wednesday, has become a treat (need to be careful it doesn’t become a habit though…)

It’s worth reflecting on what you want to do without thinking, what you can’t do without thinking and what you enjoy doing – and need to think about to consciously enjoy. 

Habits aren’t conscious. They may help to make us excellent; but our best and most enjoyable work and experiences require conscious effort. 

I’m sure Aristotle would buy that.

Life, Music, Psychology, Work

Joy

 

I’m not big on joy – more steady progress, appreciation, a bit of peace… Joy is one of those ‘hot’ emotions, which can feel like it’ll just cause me bother or be too much like hard work.

So imagine my surprise (having been dreading it for weeks) to be utterly joyful last evening, at a work event. 

We had a ceilidh which involved 90 minutes of lung-busting jigging around bumping into each other; swinging folk you hardly know around, ‘stripping the willow’ and prancing like the ‘gay Gordons’. 

I had a spill and hit the deck, as we sought to spin our foursome fast enough, for the two ladies to take off and fly with centrifugal force. I then nearly re-enacted the Large Hadron Collider with a Greek particle physicist in some poorly-coordinated galloping. What a laugh. Everyone finished hot, flushed, sweating and beaming. 

The last time I remember everyone beaming like this at my work, was at an awards night when the staff choir brought the room to life. And this has set me thinking…

I’ve been listening to Bach’s passions this week – and perhaps there’s something to be said for a bit more joy. Singing, dancing, music, performance; they’re as old as the hills. But they still make life feel worth living. Here’s to joy.

Achilles, Life, Work

Non Toxic

  
It’s hard work, but I feel like I’m making progress in my new job. And although I’m working flat out, people I’ve seen recently say I look well on it.

Of course people always say that. It’s pretty rare for someone to come out and say: “You look terrible”. But most of the people I’ve met from my old work, do say I look a lot happier now than I did there.

Which – given the large, in some cases huge and always myriad practical challenges in my new job – seems, on the face of it, quite surprising.

But, I as I said to someone this week; I think this simple chart explains it all:

  

Albeit they happen, my current job is dogged by far fewer ‘toxins’ than my old one. 

It’s not all progress. Not everyone is a catalyst; there are plenty of inhibitors around.  But the big difference is there are far fewer ‘deliberately discouraging or undermining events’. 

What a relief – as another Harvard Business Review article pointed out this week, organisations should worry less about hiring ‘superstars’ and more about avoiding hiring ‘toxic people’. The benefits of stars are more than eclipsed by the cost of toxic folk.

But the problem in my old job was as much structural as personal; it’s hard work being close to government. All organisations have politics, but stating the obvious, government is all about politics – and that means ‘deliberately discouraging or undermining events’ are part and parcel of working in or with it. 

I discovered this week that for all the moans and grumbles, universities have one of the highest job satisfaction scores of all sectors of the UK economy. 88% of people who work in universities say: “this is a good place to work”; only 56% do in government.

Less toxins, more progress – that’s all it takes to keep me happy at work.

Aristotle, Ethics, Life, Work

Office 2016

  

Further proof this week (were it needed) that not thinking about things, actually helps you think about things…

After ten days off for Christmas; scarcely thinking at all about work, I arrived in the office on Monday a little dazed and confused. A colleague asked with a smile if I had any blinding new insights to share? I could only answer slightly sheepishly “Nope”. 

But then, thanks to the miracle of the empty mind, I scribbled with a scratchy pen, on a couple of discarded misprinted sheets of A3 off the printer: the entire scope of my job; and the purpose for me at work for 2016. 

It had all became clear, because I hadn’t been thinking about it…

Later that same day (at bedtime to be precise) the few remaining work-related knots in my head, were smoothed out by a simple but super article in ‘Philosopy Now‘ by Peter Adamson. 

Adamson reminds us that Aristotle gave us the clinching argument against “the proposition that the good life lies acquisition of wealth.” 

He continues: 

Whatever else we say about the happy life, happiness is surely something we deserve for its own sake. You don’t seek to become happy for some further goal. 

Money by contrast, is not something that can sensibly be desired simply for itself. It is valued only for what we can acquire with it, such as security, pleasures and the opportunity to show virtue. 

Therefore a life that seeks to pile up wealth with no other end in view is incoherent.

He continues 

Aristotle has a similarly persuasive case to make against the life devoted to honor: we wish to be honored not just for any old reason, but because we deserve to be honored. 

At most, then, honour comes as a kind of bonus on top of what we really want, which is to be or to have achieved something worthy of the honour.  

Out of the contenders for a happy life, that leaves the life of virtue. And virtue is complemented by pleasure, because the virtuous person takes pleasure in being virtuous; and by honor too, at least if one’s fellow citizens apportion honor rightly.

Of course Aristotle was nothing if not also practical: 

Although Aristotle insisted that the good life is the virtuous life, he cautioned that we need money as well. You can hardly hope to be virtuous without money, if only because generosity is a virtue: you need wealth to give it away.

Common sense also tells you that such things as health, a flourishing family, and friends, belong to the good life, and Aristotle wasn’t against common sense on this score. 

But it’s Adamson’s conclusion which is the clincher:

In these days, when whole countries are faced by economic disaster, ancient advice remains useful: accept money and use it wisely when it comes, but do not sacrifice virtue to get it – and remember that there are things in life compared to which money, in any currency, has zero value.

In sum, don’t seek money or honour for their own sakes; and if they come as a by-product of hard work and a good character, use them wisely.

A timely reminder for 2016 from Adamson that Aristotle’s Ethics are a more than decent guide to working (as well as wider) life.