“Speed is about time, but it’s also closely related to endurance and effort. The faster the speed, the thinking goes, the less endurance or effort required. Patience, on the other hand, requires endurance and effort.”- Taken from Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, by Lori Gottlieb
Later, in the same book (about a page later), she quotes the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm: “Modern man thinks he loses something-time- when he does not do things quickly; yet he does not know what to do with the time he gains except kill it.”
Our world is filled with a lot of hurry, hurry, now, now.
We want results/things/growth/success/our haircut/our food/our dose of dopamine (social media, I’m looking at you)/our purchases/our everything as soon as we give even the thoughts our energy.
Patience is not modern human’s virtue.
The conundrum is that the time spent waiting, the time spent in patience, the time spent just BE-ing bears more fruit for the soul than the actual “getting.”
Spend some time in a cam state today. Revel in the patience, it will bring much better dividends than the pressure-filled moments do.
One huge thing I dislike about elections (especially this one) is the way they tend to AMPLIFY our differences and erode our common ground.
I truly believe we should all support who we want to support.
We should back ballot measures that align with our personal philosophies for our lives, our families, our communities and our futures.
What I dislike is the way that people can stand on their “side of the voting line” and cut off the other side completely.
We are entitled to our views and we are allowed to express those views.
It is disheartening that those views can break friendships, end conversations and erode our peace.
No matter where you put your stake into the ground on the issues, realize we all share that ground, even if where I plant my stake is far removed from where you plant yours.
I am hopeful, that regardless of the voting results, we can start focusing on the commonalities we all share and work toward lessening the divide between humanity rather than increasing it.
Regardless,
I hope you have a wonderful day today (as well as the vast majority of days moving forward 🙂
He is an excellent speaker and author and an all around wonderful human being.
I received this in his daily email service today:
“A star wants to see themselves rise to the top. A leader wants to see those around them become stars.”-Simon Sinek
What a simple but powerful message.
If we want to succeed for our benefit we may become stars.
And we may burn bright, for a time, only to burn out just as fast.
But if our motivation is to help lift others up, to inspire, to create positive change within others (which will also do the same for us, it’s kind of a law), then the light we help create will burn sooooo much brighter and for soooo much longer.
I just started reading: Maybe You Should Talk to Someone by Lori Gottlieb (check it out here ) and I like it so far!
This line is great and bears repeating: “It’s not as if we’re going to peer in those darker corners, flip on the light, and find a bunch of cockroaches. Fireflies love the dark too. There’s beauty in those places. But we have to look in there to see it.”
So true!
I truly wish the stigma of mental health could be washed away.
Especially now, with all the craziness of the pandemic, disconnection, solitude, political and social turmoil…we need others to help keep our lives sane.
We need to talk to somebody.
I have gone to counselors and therapists numerous times.
It’s not because I am “crazy.”
It’s because I finally realized that with my drive to improve my life, my family’s life and to improve the world, sometimes I need different people riding shotgun, helping me navigate through my past, present and future.
Sometimes we need professionals to help guide us through the muck and mire.
And I, for one, am so thankful they are there and I have access to these people.
So please, if you are feeling stressed, depressed, low…know there are truly wonderful people out there that will help you see the fireflies in the darkness.
Don’t ever suffer alone.
The world needs you and holding it al in yourself isn’t helping anyone.
And again, sometimes it’s great to talk to someone just about your big dreams and aspirations and they can help you balance them all so ambition doesn’t drive you wild.
In the book: Grit by Angela Duckworth, she quotes Will Smith as saying “Harmony is aerodynamic.”
When we can find our passion, when we can align that passion with our work, and even more so when the vision of our team member’s/families/coworkers, our movement toward that vision becomes so much easier.
That is why it is so important to have discussions about your goals with the people on your various “teams” (work/home/etc).
When you articulate your goals and they articulate theirs, you will find common ground and that makes it all the easier to move toward that future.
Work on collaborating to become a supremely aerodynamic force today 🙂
“The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.”-L.P. Hartley
“But plant your hope with good seeds, don’t cover yourself with thistle and weeds,”-Mumford and Sons, (Thistle and weeds song title)
In the book: Grit by Angela Duckworth, she discusses one of the main differences between people who have a growth mindset vs people with a fixed mindset is that those with a fixed mindset (feeling that achievements have a lower ceiling than others) carry around a feeling of hopelessness for change.
Most of the time this hopelessness comes from a negative past.
As L.P. Hartley eloquently put it, when we travel to the future, we leave the past behind. We cannot let the anchors of our past weigh us down from taking flight toward our future.
By all means, consider your current situation.
But also realize, that with hope, the future will look vastly brighter.
Dream big, plant seeds and sprout forth to a more meaningful and positive future.
The picture above was taken from the book: Grit by Angela Duckworth.
It is a really good book.
In one chapter she discusses the difference between a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. She discusses the that key to cultivating a growth mindset (which has been connected to higher learning, more successful careers, larger more positive impacts, etc) is realizing that there is hope in your situation. When you can attach hope to any time of adversity, you realize you can decide to improve your current life. If you believe that you are hopeless than growth cannot occur.
The great news is that there is always hope.
So today, when faced with adversity, grab on to a hopeful future, realize you have options for a better tomorrow and GROW 🙂
So…it’s (its?) July, 2020 and the world is definitely on the wackadoodle side of normal. I guess a pandemic can do that. The thing that is most concerning to me, isn’t the virus. It is the fear, and how when left unchecked, it becomes a guillotine, sharp and divisive. Left vs right. Black vs white. Mask vs no mask. Vaxxers vs anti-vaxxers. The world has gone bi-polar and the middle ground (which is where I prefer to live on many things) is becoming a deeper and deeper canyon. Fear is a powerful and useful emotion. It is a great tool to spur action, to incite change. Fear should urge us to consider our options and steer our trajectory toward a brighter future. The key is it should help us use our other emotions and logic to make a decision. Fear should never drive the decision alone. Many times fear is irrational, and making decisions based on fear usually results in less-than-ideal situations. Fear is meant to propel us in short, fight vs flight moments. “Should I run from the grizzly bear, or fashion a bow and arrow out of that pine tree sapling and go toe-to-claw with the big fella?” Fear is definitively useful in those types of situations. But when fear gets to drive us on a day-to-day basis, the road we take will not be a straight, calm, collected or enjoyable one. When fear is behind the wheel, we are all over the damn road, erratic, swerving and taking a heck of a lot longer to get from point A to point B, because we aren’t really concerned with getting to point B at all, we just want to get as far away from point A as humanly possible in the shortest amount of time allowed. We aren’t concerned with a brighter future, we just want to run as far away from the here and now as we can.
Fear is regulated by a part of our brain called the amygdala, a primitive portion that when activated, shuts down our parasympathetic (resting) nervous system. Our heart rate increases, blood pressure elevates, energy is pushed away from our reproductive system and digestive system. The amygdala also puts the brakes on our prefrontal cortex a bit. As Marwa Azab, Ph.D. states in PsychologyToday.com (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/neuroscience-in-everyday-life/202003/10-things-the-brain-does-in-response-pandemic) “In situations that may compromise your survival, the brain would rather be overcautious and wrong. Rumors, fake news, and anomalous stories gain credibility.” Our emotional systems override our logic-based ones and we begin actively searching for threats, rather than working toward a more calm and collected state.
In scrolling through the “news feed” of the day, I can’t help but stop at some comments that I know incite even more divisiveness. And when I read the comments, I am saddened by the loss of connection that is propagating. No matter what side people fall on any of the topics, I can’t help but feel disheartened by the anger and estranging comments. There is so much “if you don’t feel this way you are actively trying to hurt others.” Or “If you don’t feel this way, you are a sheep, blindly following those in charge.” As I said before, I wholeheartedly believe neither of these positions ring true one bit. For the past few years I actually have been telling my wife that I was concerned how separated our world was becoming. It seems there are two sides to so many things, and too often only two sides (I know that’s a lot of twos and toos). Recent events are increasing the gap and that worries me.
Human beings thrive on connection. We don’t always need to agree on everything, in fact having some discourse and disagreements can help us learn, grow and understand. But when we are sitting in a place of fear, anxiety or worry, the disagreements can escalate to firm, immovable stances, and “immovable” definitely implies, “not-growing.” It has been said numerous times before, but it bears repeating: we are only going to get through this crazy time together. I don’t mean that in a cliche sense. There have been numerous scientific studies that show the power of connection. In one such study, strong social connection was correlated with a 50% increase in longevity (https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1000316) and other studies have shown that social connection boosts immunity, lowers stress and increases empathy (which is something we all could use right now).
So, during this time, it is O.K. to put your stake in the ground so that others know where you stand. Just also realize that others have a different stake in a different ground and the best thing we can do as Stephen Covey has said is to “Seek first to understand.”
Dissemination of Inspiration 