Observing and noticing

An old coach of mine, Paul Dominguez, once taught me to pay attention to my environment; that my environment actually “calls forth” certain behavior.  You might notice this clearly in a living room that’s organized around the TV.  With the chairs, table and sofa all arranged around the TV you’ll find it perfectly natural to reach for the remote the moment you sit down.   I think this is one of the main reasons that people have difficulty around honoring their commitments.  They make a commitment that calls for a massive change in behavior, like quitting smoking or watching less TV and taking up exercising, yet there surroundings - including their daily routines - call forth the old patterns of behavior.

Your old buddies continue to call you to come down to the club to watch “the game”, or you continue to find the remote in your hand every time you sit down in your living room.  What’s particularly sad about this is that many people beat themselves up about these breakdowns because they are blind to the pull that is coming from their environments.

If you really want to stick to your commitments for 2009 take a look at your environments; not just at home and at work, but in every single room of those environments.  Take a look at your routines and what you are drawn into as you engage in your routines.  If you often get pulled into the local bar on your way to or from the grocery store, then consider changing the time you go for groceries, or exchange that routine with your wife for something else that she does.  Unless of course she gets pulled into the bars.

I’m looking at my environment here in Trinidad for the hidden stimulations that call forth wanted and unwanted behaviors.  I’m also being honest about some of those “unwanted” behaviors.

I wish you a Feng Shui 2009.

Whoever said, “Into every life a little rain must fall,” knew what she was talking about; but this is ridiculous.  It’s rained almost every day since I’ve been here in Trinidad and yesterday it rained all day - much of it torrential.  On the narrow congested road to where my parents live, there were parts of the road under two to three feet of water.  What’s up with that?   So much for sunny Trinidad and getting away from the frigid New York weather. For the first time I can recall I stayed at home in Trinidad because of the weather.  Roads were covered in mud and bridges in mud and debris.  Also my friend who was having a Christmas party had no electricity.

This gives an opportunity to observe how people cope with inconvenience. Especially me.  For let’s face it, this stuff is only inconvenient.   So what if you can’t go sit outside in shorts or go to the beach? There are many places where this is impossible for most of the year, either because of the weather or gunfire. So what if there is no water, we’ve got water to drink and we know it’s temporary.  The water will come back in a day or two.  There are places where people never have running water and must walk for hours to get just enough water to live.  And so what if I don’t go out and hang with friends with great food and drink?  I’m here for awhile and there will be plenty of opportunities to eat and drink in great company.  There are people who are starving in the world.

I’m lucky to be around two individuals who get swept up in the drama of the inconvenience and make an empty water main mean the end of the world.  I’m one of the two, and I’m lucky because the other person serves as a reminder that I tend to go there also.  Go to irritation and make wrong, and I catch it very quickly now, thanks to my lucky amigo who is close by and serve as my canary in the coal mine.  I see where it’s going and I take a deep breath before I over-react.  I’ve gotten so good now that to another observer I would appear the picture of calm.  What’s going on though is I do get triggered, I notice it and then I let it go.

The mark of a master maybe?   Do you think I can leave the temple yet?  There’s still the rice-paper dammit. 

In their Law of Attraction books, Esther and Jerry Hicks talk about segmenting. The idea is you break your day into discrete portions of time or “segments” as a means to focus your attention during that time on something that you want done.

This is a brilliant concept.  Why?  Because my biggest challenge is managing my Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) - see post on 17 April 2008.  I can get distracted at a frightening pace.  In going to write this post, I think of three other ideas and start writing them first. I happen to glance at my left and see an article that catches my eye and I read it, and while reading it I remember to respond to someone regarding some semi-urgent matter, and so I go to my email and read four or five mails before it occurs to me that I was supposed to be doing something else, except I can’t remember what.  Wish I could blame this on age, but I don’t have that excuse plus I do remember always being like this.

If I’m not careful I can be the prima donna in the chaos ballet, plie (ing), pirouette (ing) and fouette (ing) my way across the cluttered stage of my life.  Not graceful and a tad painful, but at least it’s not as bad as I portray …, at least not anymore.

The idea of segmenting is a great and simple practice to incorporate in your life practice.  All you do is stop and ask yourself what will I focus on now. Choose something and do that to the extent that you intend or until its done, and then stop, and ask yourself the question again.  Give yourself a time period - no more than 2 hours - and then stop. It can also be a very useful form of meditation.  You could say for example, that in the next 30 minutes I’m going to wash the dishes.  Giving the dishes your full and undivided attention can be very calming and can be a very powerful form of meditation.

This is a great way to give yourself some direction and focus.  Be careful though.  This is no substitute for planning.  If you don’t cultivate a practice of planning then you’ll find that this practice will have limited value.   A practice of planning will give some purpose to the things that you choose in your segments.  Without an overall context of planning you will find yourself still very stressed even though you’ve been VEEEERY busy.

If productivity is your challenge make sure to read David Allen’s books especially the classic “Getting things done.”

Well I’m no Thomas Friedman and no, I am not a communist. Look at my picture (click on “About”) – does that look like the face of a communist? The reason I’m writing this post is because I wonder if two famous communist rallying cries are actually coming to pass in our world today.

(1) “Workers of the world unite.” (Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels)

In the Communist Manifesto, Marx believed that communism would arise from a revolution of the international (my italics) working class. He believed that each person’s work, and how they worked was entirely personal and individual, and that the capitalist mode of production necessarily alienated the worker class because it forced the worker to essentially give up his inherent creativity to produce in his own fashion. (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx#Philosophy). This for Marx was tantamount to being alienated from one’s own nature – a spiritual loss.

Look around at the daily frustrations and anxiety of modern life. Doesn’t this indeed seem to be the case? People medicate, or distract themselves with TV, drugs or sex to relieve the frustration and anxiety they feel from this alienation Marx was referring to. Marx understood work as a social activity, and that it was the social relationships that people enter into as they acquire and use the means of production, that shape history. The tensions produced by any particular mode of production would lead naturally – depends on whether you think of revolution as natural – to another mode of production. So for Marx, it went from feudalism to capitalism to communism.

Look at our world today. Are we in the midst of an international revolution? A case could be made that we are, and like most revolutions people will and are getting hurt emotionally and financially, and things will be radically different after it’s done. At least in this case there has been no bloodshed.

The means of production are now accessible to everyone.  Everyone can manufacture, market, produce and sell products and services.   And that’s no exaggeration.  All they need is the will to acquire and use knowledge. (And a computer with a high speed internet connection.) Whether you like it or not, workers of the world are uniting, and they’re calling it globalization. Read “the World is Flat” by Thomas Friedman, and “The four-hour Workweek” by Timothy Ferris if you are to have any chance of participating in the revolution rather than have the revolution be done to you.

(2) “From each according to his ability, and to each according to his need.” Karl Marx

Probably no statement chills the heart of the free market capitalist more than this one. Who knows what one’s true ability is, and who decides what any single person needs? A totalitarian system of government was the Soviet answer, and we know how that worked out. No argument there. What intrigues me though is there seems to be a naturally occurring form of this happening all around us; due to the rise of the personal computer and the internet.

There are open source software platforms where extremely talented people from all over the world collaborate and give of their time and knowledge to produce software platforms and applications that are shared for free with anyone that “needs” them.

There are also little applications that you can download for free to your Smartphone or computer. People are writing content and sharing information for free all over the internet. I’m well aware that there are still economic engines driving a lot of this freeness or sharing, but not all of them, and you are seeing more and more that people are producing value to be shared with anyone that “needs” them.

This phenomenon more than anything is what made me think that communism, not the totalitarian, central-controlled, religion-excluding, Soviet-style communism, but a kinder, gentler, sustainable and bourgeois-friendly communism is coming back. Communism 2.0.

Something is happening to the way we collaborate and coordinate our actions in the living and working of our lives and it is occurring naturally – no bloody revolutions - in a distinctly “social” context. From the “sharing” of digital content that can now be produced by anyone without the need of major entertainment studios, to the sharing of renewable energy for the security of the free world and survival of our planet.

I don’t know what is coming next – how all this will play out - but I don’t think we can call it Capitalism. People will no longer be driven to consume for consumption sake because the new system will be driven by genuine social and environmental concerns. Profits will be alive and well for the foreseeable future but they will not be the sole driver of business behavior.

Perhaps Marx was just ahead of his time.

If Communism 2.0 won’t catch on, what would you call it?   Capitalism 2.0?  Fine with me.  Thomas Friedman where are you when I need you? There’s another best seller here.

I have noticed something about many people who have found success in their true calling. Before they found their passion, or became famous they had already either excelled in business success, or they hit the dregs of existence and were homeless addicts on the verge of suicide, (or heading in that direction).  Wayne Dyer the famous author was an orphan and an alcoholic, Rhonda Byrne the producer of the Secret claims to have been bankrupt and suicidal. Eckhart Tolle was suicidal when he had the experience that led him to write the power of now. Louise Hey almost died of cancer. On the other end of the scale we have people like Jack Welch, Bill Gates, Bob Parsons, Jerry Jones and Mark Cuban – people that seemed to have lived lives being outliers even before they became famous or successful. My point is that these people weren’t normal to begin with. In the degree of their prior success or failure they were two or three standard deviations away from the average.

Makes me wonder:  What about the rest of us?  Those of us who haven’t, and will probably never excel at the heights of corporate success, and who have never and likely will never sink to the depths of despair, wandering the streets homeless or suicidal. Who speaks for those secretly suffering within the crowded confines of averageness, trapped in the bounds of normalcy … languishing within the limits of mediocrity?   Who will be our hero?

Those of us living lives of quiet desperation, who will represent us?

Yes, I do include myself amongst the middling masses - at least for this post.    It’s odd to admit to being ordinary.  Many people would prefer to lie, rather than say how they really feel about this. It would truly be extra-ordinary to hear someone boast, “Yes Sir, I put the bell in the bell curve.  If it wasn’t for people like me, people like you couldn’t stand out.”

If we want true evidence that it is possible for anyone to achieve what they want in life, don’t we need some examples, some breakaways from the height of that bell curve?   If our only examples come from the outliers, one, two, even three standard deviations from the norm … then what makes me believe that it’s possible for someone like me to have the life of my dreams, what evidence do I have that I can have what I want?

Downright depressing indeed.  For I don’t believe that at this point in my life that it’s realistic for me to become a captain of industry.   No, there is little chance of me becoming a Jack Welch, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet etc. at this point in my life.

So what options do I have?   If the route to my greatness is not through a life history of the Midas touch, does this mean that at this point of my life, my only course to greatness is an unpleasant detour through homelessness and addiction? To let things get so bad that I attempt suicide?  What if I succeed?   That would be the icing on the cake wouldn’t it?

Here he lays a testament to the irony of his ability. The first thing he really put his mind to he succeeded at. Imagine what he could have achieved if only he put the clarity, focus and determination he put into his suicide into his life - imagine what Peter Anthony could have achieved. As it stands, here he lays: the ultimate non-starter; procrastinator extraordinaire. A martyr to mediocrity.

I think it’s necessary for some new deviants, some real life “Joe the plumbers”, that really invent themselves not through the near death breakdowns of hopelessness and despair, but from an invented breakdown of mediocrity and an epiphany. What I mean by an invented breakdown is that you create a breakdown, or declare a breakdown that may not physically exist before you declare it.  The italicized paragraph above is an example.

I want some heroes to begin his/her story with, “I was average. Not the top of my class; don’t have a slew of successful companies or business successes behind me, nor was I ever psychological road kill. What made the difference for me was I saw the impact of my mediocrity ten, twenty, thirty years down the road. I projected myself into the future I was living into and saw myself unable to retire, broken relationships and not being able to say I had left any positive impact on the world. And that was enough to scare me off the curve.”

Yes, I know that crisis is the necessary medium of change, but does it have to be an actual crisis? Is it possible to act out of the anticipation of the oncoming train wreck that may be twenty or thirty years away? Wouldn’t it be great if we could teach people to think that way? Wouldn’t the country, the world be in a lot better shape if this type of thinking was more the norm than the exception?

Until we are able to teach our young people the skill of assessing the present value of future consequences, the skill to see long-distant consequences of their current choices, today’s flock of the mediocre can only hope to escape via an epiphany of an invented breakdown.

Then again, maybe I should just head down to the local bar.

So I’m writing a book, and after explaining what the book is about to a good friend, he asks me why am I writing it?  I gave the obvious answer of course, “Because I’ve always wanted to write a book.”  And then comes the predictable question, “Why?”

And then my mind produces a deluge of possible answers:

Because I have something to say, that is important?  Because I want to be famous/rich/acknowledged?  Because I want people to get how smart I am?

Note the question marks.  It’s just amazing to me that I had not thought of why I wanted to do this.  I then began really thinking and writing about the purpose of the book.  What would it mean to me, my readers, to people that I would mention in the book, to the world?  What value would it provide?   This it turns out has become quite a revealing and productive exercise.  Because in thinking about the why I wanted to write the book, it is affecting what I want to say in the book and how I’m going to say it.   The thinking about the why, to what purpose should I undertake this effort has created an entirely new space for the “doing” of the book.

I was reminded of this at a business workshop I attended this last weekend where an organization got it’s employees and customers together to share their thinking about the why and what of their enterprise.  What an exercise.  Instead of mindlessly going about the doing of their existing business until a crisis hit, they were asking themselves very tough questions about why they exist, and in answering that question coming up with new possibilities for the business.

And this got me thinking.  Every day people do a whole slew of activities that they don’t think about.  No idea as to the purpose or the history of the activity.  They watch certain TV shows, read certain magazines, go to work, argue with their kids or tuck them into beds, all with no purpose in mind. They just do them.   I wonder how many of the activities you would stop doing or modify if you were to stop and ask why you were doing them?  How many of your current activities would you continue if you became present to the consequence of continuing those activities?

Kind of heavy eh?  Some people may find that asking questions like these will lead to the really big question: What is my life for?

Happy trails. 

I posted before about our ability to create a space between stimulus and response. This is of course not Nobel Prize submission material, yet it’s one of those truisms that is so often taken for granted.

What I want to say here is that a practice of creating that Space will be a difficult one to implement, or maybe even impossible without a context for your life.  By context I mean a story about you, who you are, what your values are, and what you’re creating with your life.  If you’re not clear on what your goals are in life and therefore how your colleagues at work, your family at home, your neighbors and members in your communities all fit into your life, you’ll have difficulty making the proper choices about the many possible reactions you could make to any stimulus from a person or situation.

Consider this example:

Mary is a deeply religious person and has created her main goal in life to save as many souls as possible. This is the context within which she lives her daily life.   In any interaction with people Mary gets to choose responses that further her goal.  So when an angry man pushes her on the bus, Mary suppresses her knee jerk reaction to say something angrily in response, and considers the man.

Space.

Since she is very clear on what her life purpose is, she can immediately place this man in that context and assess that he is a candidate to be saved.  She can make the man’s push mean that it was a signal from God to have her intervene in his life and take action.  Her response is then based on the meaning that she chose to give to what happened, and the meaning she gave it came from her context, her story about what she’s up to in life.

Sam, who has no such clarity around his life’s purpose and has no goals for his life, might have taken the push personally, said something nasty and an argument or fight might have ensued.

No Space.

So this comes full circle back to the examined life.  What are you up to in life?  Who are you?  What are your personal ethics?  What are you creating with your life?  Great questions for the life practitioner.  It might take you years to evolve the answers that work for you, and it is essential to have at least some work-in-progress answers now if you’re going to make good use of the Space.

The other day a friend of mine called me to share that he had a huge breakthrough while sitting on the can.  He thought that last bit of detail essential to the share.

The breakthrough that he had during his biological “functioning” was that he was automatically and unconsciously coming from “Something’s wrong.”   From his personal, family and business life he realized he automatically looked at what was wrong with everything.  He wasn’t doing this all of the time, but enough to affect his mood and close him down to new possibilites.

His real breakthrough came from realizing that he could just as easily look at what was right about all these areas in his life … and presto!  He did, and immediately his mood shifted; he was in a space to act powerfully for his future.

I reminded him about a book that I told him about and that I have on my site store called “Change The Way You See Everything.”   This book does an excellent job of highlighting how we can shift our perspective, and the very profound effect such a perspective-shift practice can have on your outlook on life, your happiness.

The authors call it Asset Based Thinking (ABT) vs. the Deficit Based Thinking (DBT) that most people have as their default settings.   Personally I think that ABT is our “Factory” setting - just look at kids - and somehow through the people we’ve associated with and the media we consume this factory setting got changed to DBT.  Everybody knows this at some level, yet it takes some event - like finding this book for me, or having an epiphany on the can for my friend - for us to remember.

There is another great practice similar to ABT that is called the Thought Exchange which I’ll share about at another time.   In the meantime, I highly recommend “Change The Way You See Everything” for yourself, your kids (before DBT takes hold), and anyone in your life that needs a friendly reminder that there are other more valuable ways to look at everything in life.  Be well.

I can’t believe I did that.  I mean really; what could have I been thinking?  I’m too embarrassed to describe the event, but I will say that it was inappropriate.   And to top it off, it was with a very put together professional who could be of immense value in my professional growth and a great friend in my future.

It reminds me of a similar humility producing event that occurred very early in my professional career where I was at lunch with three of my business colleagues.  I had just started the job, and a colleague - also new - asked me if I wanted to join her and two of our more senior colleagues for lunch; one being very senior to us.  Anyway the topic of oral care came up and the ladies were very anti-dentist and were sharing their favorite horror story dentist visit.  Being the spontaneous extrovert that I am, I jumped in with “I actually haven’t had any bad dentist experiences, in fact - drum roll please - the best head I ever had was in a dentist’s office.”

Dead silence.

To my horror, I recognized what I had said.  I knew enough about American culture to know what the word head communicates here.  I could hear my mother reciting the four things that come not back: the sped arrow, the past life, the lost opportunity and the spoken word.  Less than a week on the job, I had just told three professional women that I had the best head in my life at the dentist’s office.

“Time out!”  I said.   “Let’s talk about cultural differences.”  They, themselves shocked, were looking at me with looks of curious disbelief. “You see where I come from the word head is more commonly used to express what you would call a buzz.”  Then I proceed to explain that I had been given nitrous oxide as part of my oral surgery to remove an impacted wisdom tooth.  It felt so good that I was oblivious to any pain or discomfort.

They looked at each other and then abruptly laughed out loud.   Whew!  They had accepted my gaff for the honest blunder that it was.

The question is how does one come back from something like that?  Make no mistake, there is an impact.  For example, for years after the one colleague that stayed in the company with me would sometimes greet me on a Monday morning and loudly ask “Had any good head lately Pete?”

When you commit such a “crime” there really is a consequence.  In one respect you can’t come back from it. It’s like your own personal invasion of Iraq.   You can’t just withdraw and pretend like it never happened.  Every time you show up at the UN, you know … people talk.  And forget about taking Iraq out for a drink.  Even if she’s polite enough to accept the invitation, you know what she sees when she looks at you: an invasion justifying, selfish creep.  That’s not the truth about you of course, but you have given her valid grounds to see you this way.

In the grand scheme of humility-producing actions that I have done in my life the one that prompted me to write this post is certainly not the worst, but it is the first that I’ve done in a long time, and I thought I would write about it because it brings up a couple things that I think are important to understand and incorporate into the practice of your life.

First, please understand that beating yourself up about something you thought, said, or did is not very helpful.  It is probably the case that human beings are the only creatures on the planet capable of punishing themselves over and over again for a single event.  Indeed, we can keep up the self-flagellation for a lifetime.  Definitely do learn from the incident (see below), but be clear that there was the incident (whatever happened)  and the story you make up about it (thank you Landmark Education), and they are not the same thing.  You get to choose the story you make up about whatever happens, and as a human being you have the capacity to invent an infinite number of stories about anything that happens.  Why pick a story that doesn’t move you forward in life?

Living your life as a practice means that you have in the background your greatness and that life is all about the ups and downs; they can’t exist without each other.  Growth in your life requires downs, failures, breakdowns, heartache and loss.  If you don’t experience at least some of these you cannot grow, in fact you’re not living.  Life isn’t only about happiness!  If you don’t have other emotions you wouldn’t know what happiness was, and life would be a gigantic flatline even if all your circumstances are what you think you would like.

Second, learn from the things that don’t work in your life.  Whether you’re on the giving or receiving end in a situation that doesn’t work, your job is to learn from it without assassinating possibilities or relationships.  What this looks like is giving up judging people and events as bad or wrong.  People will always do things that don’t work, and most times they have no awareness of the event and its effect on others.  Assigning a quality to that person’s character like bad, evil, or shallow closes off possibilities for both you and them.  Usually, it’s also a sign that you do the same to yourself.  Take a look and see.

So, where does that leave me with this person that I committed my latest humility-producing event?  Feeling and being great - as long as I live the practice that I preach.  That person will continue to occur for me as judging me and what I did as long as I continue to be the same of myself; I love myself too much to continue carrying that around.  I’ve moved on, accepting the consequence of a moment of unconsciousness.  At the very least it has reminded me that a teacher dwells within every circumstance of life.

It is quite amazing what music does to me; how it makes me move, sing; how it brings up emotions … no, how my emotions respond like they are in a dance with the music. The music calls and my emotions answer - in an instant. And then the dance begins, often literally. I am compelled to move once the music speaks to me. Sometimes with poignant emotion, sometimes with just an infectious rhythm that I feel compelled to express myself to. I want to answer it’s call. And so if I don’t move my body, I drum … on something - much to the chagrin of some people around me. Too bad for them I think. On the other hand, I often meet people who are amused and intrigued by my spontaneity.

No question, music is our easiest access to transformation. Without music most of the movies you’ve seen would not have had the emotional impact they’ve had. Take a look at the video clips that I posted on July 11th and 17th of this year. Do you think either of them would have been noteworthy without the music?

Music literally transforms how you feel in an instant, and for The Practice of Your Life I would like to bring this to your attention, because how we feel - our mood, our attitude towards things - directly influences what’s possible for us. Music transforms our mood, how we feel in a particular moment. Music can literally transform who you are being while you are listening. Want to feel aggressive, happy, sad, angry, determined, passionate, anxious, fearful, terrified, proud etc., etc. There’s a song out there that will do the job.

The power of music comes from it’s ability to bring up the entire range of possible emotions in us. So why not bring attention to the music that you listen to? Consciously categorize the music you listen to by the mood it brings up for you, and use it to transform negative emotions to positive ones, to transform down moods into up moods.

(Disclaimer: I’m not saying that there is anything bad or wrong about down moods or negative emotions. Human beings are meant to experience the full range of emotions, and you’d never know which way was up if you’ve never been down. I am saying that your mood does influence how you think, what you say and what you do. Up moods tend to open up more possibilities in your thoughts, words and deeds, and down moods tend to shut down possibilities. I am saying that you can consciously choose to change your mood and when you do music can help.)

Happy music for me comes from the Caribbean and South/Latin America e.g. Soca, Zouk, Merengue, Salsa, Samba etc. Most of the songs of these types lift me up and I want to grab a woman in dance.

When I want to feel powerful I listen to Sinatra and sing.

When I want to feel or express sorrow, there’s no one artist for me but there are several songs that bring up a sweet beautiful sorrow like, This Old Man (Kenny Rankin), This Woman’s Work (original by Kate Bush and a really great interpretation by Maxwell), A Day in the Life of a Fool (done by Kenny Rankin and really emotional rendition by Patrick de Santos).

Some songs like And So It Goes (Billy Joel) and Yesterday When I was Young (Charles Aznavour) make me reflect on my life.

Songs like Drown in My Own Tears (Ray Charles) bring up a cheerful, sad, wise optimism about life. Ray Charles by the way covers the whole gamut for me. In fact if I were to have only one Artist’s work with me on a deserted island it would be his.

Lounge music creates a great atmosphere for sensuality, and when I want to work out I look to Rockitwave 8.

So why not take an inventory of your music and start using it for effect. In the same way that you might use music to artfully engineer a seduction, or produce a max calorie burn, you can also use music to set the stage for thinking, reading, reflecting and simply managing how you feel. I highly recommend using music in the practice of your life. And you get to create what that looks like.

Tip: Use whatever feels.