Category: Personal Choice

How Mindfulness Requires Compassion

Following up from the previous post ‘How We Need to Remember that Mindfulness is Difficult and Messy‘ and the excellent post by Leo Babauta ‘The Honest Guide to Mindfulness‘, the author underlines an essential element: the need for compassion – for oneself and for others.

I like the conclusion of the post: “Mindfulness is only part of the work. The work also requires compassion — for yourself and others. It requires vulnerability and the ability to open your heart. It requires honesty and the willingness to face things. It requires being willing to love things as they are, without needing to control things. It requires letting go of what you think things should be like, letting go of what you think you should have or shouldn’t have. The work requires you to be willing to be curious, to be open, to remain in not knowing.”

Mindfulness is a journey and to be successful, a measure of acceptance of oneself and others is needed. It is actually quite a necessary condition to progress beyond a certain point. Be more compassionate to yourselves and to others!

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How We Need to Remember that Mindfulness is Difficult and Messy

This excellent post by Leo Babauta ‘The Honest Guide to Mindfulness‘ reminds us that mindfulness – a highly trendy concept – is difficult and messy.

“If you’re new to mindfulness, it’s easy to get the wrong idea from all the marketing you’ll find online. Images of people at complete peace with the world and themselves, full of bliss, simply by sitting still and meditating for a few minutes … they are beautiful images, but they don’t tell the whole truth.”

It is hard to be mindful, and it will take substantial practice and exercise to reach a satisfactory mindfulness stage. Leo Babauta also underlines that it is very uncomfortable as it will real things you’d probably prefer to remain hidden.

This also means that probably much less people have reached a satisfactory level of mindfulness than what they advertise. Difficult is always filters out those that are really motivated and ready to put the effort. Much less people are probably truly mindful than what they say.

If you want to embrace mindfulness, be ready for quite a tough journey of introspection and seeing the world differently, which can be quite unsettling. Still it is quite a beneficial experience, just fasten your seat-belt!

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How We Should Not Skimp Little Luxuries

This post ‘Little Luxuries‘ by Steve Pavlina has resonated with me. His point is that we should not skimp on little luxuries because the emotional cost of doing to is much greater than the benefit of not spending for it – and the risk to remain in a scarcity mindset.

Fancy coffee: a luxury?

“If you took all the money you spend on luxury lattes each year and saved it instead, you’d have a little bit more money but a less luxurious life. But you’d also risk getting more entrenched in a scarcity mindset because scaling back your lifestyle just to save a little extra money is mostly a waste of thought.”

He warns us: “Self-discipline is a limited resource. Save it for the big stuff that matters. Don’t squander it on fussing over how you handle minor expenses.”

The point he makes about the fact that this behavior of avoiding little luxuries actually stems from a scarcity mindset is quite enlightening. And the solution is rather to take the opposite view, using those little luxuries of money and time to expand one’s universe: “Instead of worrying about small expenses, think about making interesting contributions to people’s lives. Explore different ways to creatively express yourself. Take some interesting risks.” It is an investment to get out of the scarcity mindset.

So, grant yourself little luxuries as an exercise to get rid of the scarcity mindset – and leverage on it to expand your horizons!

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How We Need to Overcome the Fear of Unfulfillment of our Lives

In this excellent short post ‘Scared of success?’ the Gapingvoid culture design group addressed the link between fear and achievement. We are fearful to start something new. And when we don’t then we wonder why, and it creates even more fear: to have forego our lives doing nothing worthwhile.

The straightforward issue is that “Out of fear may come comfort, but also out of fear often comes a sense of unfulfillment. You spend your whole life being scared, then wonder why you haven’t created anything“

And I find the next reverse issue even more interesting: “more poignantly, you spend whole life not creating anything, and then you wonder why you’re so scared all the time“

The fear of unfulfillment, of not having lived at the expected level, of not having impressed on the world our talents, whatever they are, may be one of the most fundamental human fears. Let’s not just face it passively, let’s go explore new things and be creative!

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How to Overcome the Paradox of Choice

Too much Choice creates paralysis and kills Choice. We can realize that in any restaurant with a too long menu. The excellent TED talk by Barry Schwartz tackles this issue deeper: ‘The paradox of choice‘.

The usual assumption at least in Western societies is that “The more choice people have, the more freedom they have, and the more freedom they have, the more welfare they have.”

Barry Schwartz notes that too much choice leads to choice paralysis, and also to ‘cost of opportunity’ issues (“the attractive features of alternatives that you reject that make you less satisfied with the alternative that you’ve chosen“).

Barry Schwartz goes as far as to attribute the unprecedented increase of clinical depression (and suicide) in our societies to too much choice. Finally, he says, when there was not to much choice, people had lower expectations and that may have been a cause of higher happiness.

I believe that faced with too much choice as we are today, it is still important to maintain low expectations and a mindset of satisfaction with what we have. I understand this is difficult in a world of temptation and where it is easy to depress over the fantastic lives other seem to have on social networks.

The paradox of choice is clearly a major challenge in our societies. The best response seems to be targeted education about how best to behave in such a world – and this seems to be mission in the new generations’ formal life learning.

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How Modern Identification Technology Proves How Unique We Are

Every other week another technology for personal identification crops up. On the latest ones is based on heartbeat, as explained in this MIT Technology review article ‘The Pentagon has a laser that can identify people from a distance—by their heartbeat‘.

While facial recognition is becoming mainstream and is used in airports and increasingly in the public space, and fingerprints are used almost daily, the stream of unique identification methods continues. Let’s just hope the individual uniqueness is effectively proven and that those methods get certified!

However the point I want to make is that they all show how unique we can be: fingerprints, face, eyes and pupila, DNA, heartbeat… So many aspects that create a unique signature and make us different from other billion individuals…

Soon medicine will also start to become individual based, depending on our genetic variants.

Did you realize how unique you are? And that we all should make better use of this uniqueness instead of trying to get standardized and categorized as cogs of the economy?

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How We Need to Set Rules for Biohacking

Biohacking (using drugs and technology to make one’s body/mind function better) is trendy. In this post ‘Biohacking Gone Wild‘, some interesting examples are given – from simple examples we all are actually using, to extreme hacking.

We’ve been doing biohacking in its widest senses for ages, for example when we are wearing glasses.

Some modern examples are quite frightening: “It’s estimated that over 100,000 people already have various types of implants. In Sweden, thousands of Swedes are inserting chips under their skin to speed up their daily routines. They use chips to open locked doors, to store contact information, and to get on to the train“

We do, and we will obviously progressively extend our capabilities using technology of some sort. I do think there are some limits that should only be exceeded with care. For me, anything changing my body chemistry for example, is for me clearly out-of-bounds. Using prosthetics adding capabilities to my body can be discussed as long as it can be shut down, removed, or only put on when needed. Not to mention personal data protection.

Biohacking is just starting, and it will pervade the world of the Collaborative Age. What rules should we put in place to keep it within reasonable bounds?

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How We Need to Know How to Enforce Replenishment Periods

As Leo Babuta reminds us in his post ‘Antidotes to Overwork‘, we need to learnt to “Do Less By Enforcing Replenishment Time“.

“Enforcing time for rest and replenishment doesn’t come naturally to most of us, especially in our society. In our world, it’s always a matter of doing more and more. It’s always connected, always cram in more, always respond. All the time.”

“How often do you take an hour or two just to go for a walk and not read or listen to anything useful? To find silence and time to contemplate? To find space for yourself, to find room to breathe? We don’t value that, but it’s so important. You can’t function at your best without it.”

Leo Babuta continues by suggesting some approaches and techniques to really find the time to replenish. What I find interesting is the recognition for the need to have some balance between very active moments and replenishment moments. Replenishment is not just relaxation it is also being open to new ideas, people, locations and thus taking the time to grow.

When are you taking the time to grow?

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How to Create Rituals to Change

This excellent post by Leo Babauta ‘The Art of Creating a Ritual for What Matters Most‘ reminds us that an effective way to change is to create a ritual.

“In this world where technology and consumerism have become our religion, we’ve largely lost something magical: the ability to elevate something into the realm of the sacred.” “We can lift an everyday act into the realm of the divine by turning it into a sacred ritual. What I’ve been trying to practice is the art of turning what matters most in my life into a ritual.”

Leo Babuta goes on suggesting moment and activities that could be converted into rituals, and how to achieve this transformation.

Without attempting to change everything to a ritual, I note that it can be a very useful way to induce change and ensure that there is repetition of a voluntary action where we are present. We may gain at having a few rituals in our lives, with a spiritual element added on!

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How to Increase Happiness After our Professional Decline

In this follow-up post from ‘How Professional Decline is Coming Sooner than We Think‘ we continue to investigate the excellent and deep material of the paper ‘Your Professional Decline Is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think – Here’s how to make the most of it‘. Once we have recognized that professional decline is inevitable and probably occurs around 50 or 20 years after you started your current career, how can we deal with this to maintain or increase our happiness?

The author quotes ancient Indian wisdom about the different phases of life. It also quotes some modern wisdom about happiness of mature people. In sum, it appears to be essential to pro-actively start a new phase of life around sharing one’s knowledge and experience, connecting, and serving.

People do that in different ways, from consultants to interim managers to serving their community and becoming teachers. Many also develop their spiritual self. The way is to recognize that this phase in life calls for a change, stopping competitive behavior and sharing more.

Be proactive in recognizing that your professional decline starts earlier than you think; and increase your happiness by taking the time for yourself and to help grow others. That’s a quite good recommendation that I will endeavor to follow!

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How Professional Decline is Coming Sooner than We Think

I strongly recommend to read this long article ‘Your Professional Decline Is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think – Here’s how to make the most of it‘ because it contains much profound wisdom about professional career and happiness.

In this first post, let’s concentrate on the fact that our professional decline happens earlier than we believe. “According to research by Dean Keith Simonton, a professor emeritus of psychology at UC Davis and one of the world’s leading experts on the trajectories of creative careers, success and productivity increase for the first 20 years after the inception of a career, on average. So if you start a career in earnest at 30, expect to do your best work around 50 and go into decline soon after that. The specific timing of peak and decline vary somewhat depending on the field.” It seems that creative fields see an earlier decline, while fields relying more on building up experience over time have a somewhat later decline.

In any case, “The biggest mistake professionally successful people make is attempting to sustain peak accomplishment indefinitely, trying to make use of the kind of fluid intelligence that begins fading relatively early in life. This is impossible.”

It is essential that we recognize that we can’t sustain our performance indefinitely, and that there should be space for our younger successors to take over and put a new spin into our works. This is probably the number one happiness issue with high level professionals.

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How to Avoid Burn-Out – a Proven Approach

Burn-out is now recognized as an occupational condition in many countries and is observed to become increasingly prevalent. In this post ‘A simple strategy helps doctors fight burnout. Could it work for the rest of us?‘ a simple method is described that appears effective in hospitals, where it is a major concern.

This method is simply to get a conversation going about difficult workplace situations, with minimum framing and facilitation. “Wherever they are, the structure is the same. Organizers choose a topic: dealing with patients’ families, for example, or a deep dive into a particularly wrenching recent case. A pre-selected panel of volunteers shares their perspective to get the conversation started. Then it opens for discussion. Moderators gently steer away from efforts to diagnosis or solve problems—no small feat in a room of people who diagnosis and solve all day, every day. The normal hospital hierarchies do not apply. The only thing participants are allowed to do during rounds is talk about how they feel. No judging. No fixing. Just talking.“

The emotional connection thus created seems sufficient to recreate a sense of purpose and get rid of the strains that are at the source of burn-out. It has been observed that burn-out is not just physical (lack of sleep for example) but is also psychological such as loss of the sense of purpose. This method addresses directly the psychology and just creating a location for emotional sharing appears effective.

It goes to show that the modern workplace does not allow sufficiently deep emotional sharing and engagement, and that may be something that needs to be addressed more consistently.

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