Pam“We don’t attract what we want, we attract what we are.” - Anonymous
Peter Gouveia
My motto: “Live your life with passion so your epitaph will read ‘No Regrets.’”
elizabeth
Life is not greener on the other side.
“life is greenest where you water it most”
Stacie
There is no good or bad, just done and not done.
This is to motivate me to get started when I’m frozen with the fear whatever I do won’t be good enough. If I do it, it can’t be bad.
Skip Reardon
1. Actions speak louder than words.
2. We are what we repeatedly do.
3. Attitude is everything.
Ming Wong
I have two mottoes actually,one of which is attributed to Confucius: Find work which you enjoy, then you wouldn’t have to work a day in your life!
The other one: Everything’s relative. Truly.
And I’ll end today’s quotes with this delightful one that made me smile just to read it!
Now that we know how to get out of a bad mood, here is the shortcut below.
Bad moods most often start in the head. With a thought. About something bad. A person can decide to either allow that thought to grow or to nip it in the bud. Here is what nipping a bad-mood-creating thought in the bud looks like:
This is something a friend of mine asked me about recently. Suppose the thought is “she hates me” about a person that you know who may be acting less friendly towards you recently. This is what might be running through your head at the time:
“Why is she acting less friendly? What did I do? Why doesn’t she like me? I haven’t changed. But maybe something I said offended her. Maybe she thinks I’m rude. Or mean. What did I do?”
Using the A.P.E. method, here are the three phrases that will be he most effective to quickly nip the bad mood in the bud. First of all, address the Alternatives:
Alternatives: “A more accurate way of seeing this is…”
“A more accurate way of seeing this is … that maybe she is having some personal issues and is more tense, and maybe that’s coming across as not friendly.”
Then the Perspective:
Perspective: “The most likely thing to happen is … and I can …”
“The most likely thing to happen is … that she won’t talk to me for a few days and then her mood will blow over and she’ll be friendly-friendly like before, and I can … just give her space in the meantime and wait for her to get there.”
And finally, Evidence:
Evidence: “That’s not true because …”
“That’s not true that she hates me because … she passes me an extra pen today during class, and she held the door for me after class, and she didn’t NOT speak to me - she was just curt in her words.”
So, there you have it - the three A.P.E. sentences to turn to when in a bad mood … or when a bad run-on, negative dialogue gets stuck in your head like an Alvin-and-the-Chipmunks tune.
Our first question was, should you get out of a bad mood? Suppose that our answer is already, YES. Now, what do we do? (Update: After you read this, you may want to keep handy the three sentences for the A.P.E. Method.)
Karen Reivich, co-author of The Resilience Factor, suggests some concrete steps. In a talk she gave at our Positive Psychology classes, Karen gave the best three suggestions I’ve heard for getting out of a bad mood. These are practical and immediately usable.
The problem with bad moods is that they stop you in your tracks, they hinder you from doing other things that can lead to continued small successes and that can move you forward in life. Additionally, as Dave Seah points out, you can’t always be waiting for the muse. Most often in life, you need to do things whether you’re in a bad mood or a good mood. For example, compare a person who takes actions to move his life forward only when he’s in a good mood (or when the muse strikes him) to a person who takes actions to move his life forward no matter what mood may have set on him temporarily. Who will likely be more productive?
Here are the three principles Karen Reivich teaches to get out of a bad mood. I remember these as A.P.E.
A - Alternatives
P - Perspective
E - Evidence
Karen Reivich suggests that these are best used “When you need to disarm negative thoughts so that you can stay focused on the task at hand.” At the same time, these are not necessarily the best techniques to use “When you need a thorough, thoughtful and comprehensive understanding of a problem.”
So you want to stay focused on the task at hand, on moving your life forward. What do you do?
A – Alternatives
You can generate alternative beliefs. For example, if the bad mood started with thinking, “I haven’t done anything productive at work in the past year. I haven’t contributed anything. I’ll never contribute anything. And not only do I stink at work recently, but everything else is going down the drain too.”… then what are some alternative beliefs that you could seek?
Karen Reivich characterizes the possible alternative beliefs into three categories (that are introduced with great thoroughness by Marty Seligman here):
Me / Always / Everything.
If your beliefs tend to focus on “me” – “I did this, I got myself into a decade worth of trouble,” then try to look outwards a little bit … not too much – do not rationalize away your own potential contribution to the situation. But do look outward if you tend to blame yourself. Do look at the environment, the surroundings, and provide other possible explanations. (Create an alternative).
If your beliefs tend to focus on “always” – “I’m never good at my work, I always mess up at the office, this never goes right for me,” then train your brain to find the one thing that you consistently excel at during work. Feel that pride – no matter how small – in that one thing that you own, that is yours, and that you can reliably think about to know that you are good at that part of work. (The point is to create one alternative, so it is not always).
If your beliefs tend to focus on “everything” – “And not only am I not good at my work, I can’t meet a great girl/guy, I’m terrible at keeping in touch with friends,” then train your brain to find the one part of life in which you have control. Feel that control in that part of your life – no matter how small that part may be – maybe brushing your teeth, maybe emailing a certain friend regularly. (Create an alternative thought-pattern: not everything.)
P – Perspective
A friend of mine Emma who is also a practitioner of Positive Psychology says that she once heard something say something so visual that she will not forget it.
“Imagine the biggest issue you have – the biggest, most terrible problem or set of problems that you can come up with. Now blow them up – imagine them even bigger and more terrible. Imagine close to the worse that can happen. Imagine all those problems spinning around like the tornado in Dorothy’s Kansas at the beginning of the movie. …
Now take that entire storm and all those issues and shrink it down and put the entire storm into a teacup.”
And that’s exactly how I see it – a white porcelain tea cup on a white porcelain delicate plate, and a small steam above the teacup where the remains of the storm can be seen. It is the super-literal description of the phrase “storm in a teacup,” and talk about perspective!
Do that – put some perspective on the issues. What are the probabilities that everything will go wrong? Usually not 100%. Put the perspective of time on it (probably not as intense if you were to look back on this from 50 years in the future). Put the perspective of seriousness on it (these are bad moods, but nobody should be dying from this). Put the perspective of “me” on this (how impenetrable does my problem look compared to starving children). The perspective of comparison is called downward social comparison… but in psychological studies it has proven to be effective in precluding depression.
The goal in finding perspective is to create flexibility in thinking. It is not to create an excuse for things that may actually have gone wrong, but it is to minimize the impact on your life of certain thoughts.
E – Evidence
Find concrete evidence to the contrary. If you are in a bad mood because you are berating yourself, then create evidence to the contrary. If the argument is that you’ve never done anything good in your work for the past decade, get a piece of paper and list two things that you have done well. That’s it – two things. Two concrete examples.
Lesson & Take-Away: If you’re in a bad mood, and want to switch to being productive and focused, use these three techniques to get out of your bad mood:
A - Create Alternatives for why something may be happening to dispute negative, bad mood thoughts,
P - Put the issue in Perspective to get out of a bad mood, and
E - Use concrete Evidence to discount the bad-mood self-talk in your head.
Classisa is 12 years old. She has been dating Geordie for about a week. In this week, dating has meant that they’ve sat next to each other at lunch, and on the weekend, they went to the movies and held hands.
Clarissa got dropped off by her mom at her friend Jamie’s house. After fumbling with the doorknob since she was holding two sweaters and two nail polish containers in her hands and didn’t have a bag with her, she went in and upstairs to Jamie’s hot-pink-color room. Jamie’s mom always left the house door open for the neighbors to come in at any time.
Jamie was on her bed reading some Asimov (a hand-me-down book from her brother) with Modest Mouse blasting on her computer. Clarissa dropped her small armload onto the end of the bed, and said, dramatically, “That’s it. I want it to be over.” Jamie blew a watermelon-smelling bubble, turned over, closed her book, and sat up. “Why?” she asked slowly, wanting to draw out the details from Clarissa patiently and slowly.
“I think he likes Liz,” answered Clarissa, looking towards the hardwood floor. (more…)
It’s a bit contradictory but in the holiday season at the same time that people get into great moods being around friends and family, sometimes people also get into bad moods. And it might have to do with the more somber winter weather. It might have to do with exercising less and eating more. Or it might have nothing to do with anything, and might just be a temporary, brief bad mood - which could happen to any person in any season for any reason.
What do you do? The first question is, should you try to get out of your bad mood, or should you stay in it, and sulk in it, and breathe it in, and bathe in it?
It depends whether the bad mood is from a temporary occurrence or from something significant. If somebody died, or a person breaks up with a girlfriend or boyfriend, or if a close friend moves far away, or if a work project goes terribly, awfully wrong, then that is likely much more than just a bad mood. That is the significant end of something. You may need to be alone. You may need to grieve. Grieving is extremely important in order to go “through” an experience as opposed to denying that something exists. As a wise friend of mine says,
Remember to feel what you feel.
Feelings are there to be felt. Especially in times of grief. A science-expert friend of mine told me that she heard that it is clinically considered that the average period of grief for a person’s death is two months, and that after two months, grief is considered psychiatrically abnormal, and psychiatrists often start to prescribe medications. I think that is absolute baloney. Grief takes as long as it takes. And it takes a different length of time for different people and for different situations.
On the other hand, if the bad mood comes because one person said something mean to you or because of no reason at all, then that may very well be a bad mood you want to ditch. If it’s temporary, if it’s a bad mood for a small reason, then there’s no reason to dwell on it. In the long run, just about everything seems small, so if it’s a small thing, then why not drop it? Why not live forward?
And if the bad mood is for no reason at all? A gardener friend of mine used to say,
Sometimes sadness is just the last drop that overflows the barrel.
And to me that was always very visual because I could see the barrel below the front porch, and I could imagine a light rain overflowing it slowly. Sometimes a bad mood comes on just like that.
This is primarily the case I want to talk about – the bad mood for no reason. Yes, a person could stay in that mood for a long, long time. A person could decide not to go anywhere, do anything, no exercise, no going out to see friends, and just dwell and sulk in the bad mood.
But that bad mood would stay. That’s the problem. If you do nothing to get rid of it, it is very easy for a bad mood to stay around. Why do bad moods , if not countered, stick around?
Because people are inertia-prone. People prefer not to change things. So many products offer money-back guarantees… because people don’t return things once they receive them.
Because the more, the more. The more you go out and enjoy life and, for example, go bowling with other people, the more you’ll enjoy it and want to do this more. And the more you stay in bed and don’t do anything, the more you’ll want to do this.
Because something needs to occupy your mind space, and only actively driving out the bad mood can make it leave your mind space. Unless you push bad moods out of the way, bad moods do not leave on their own. A reason to go away does not “just appear”. One of two things has to happen: you find something that occupies your time more than the bad mood or the bad mood has to be so bad that you start to rebel against it (the bad mood may have influenced you to act in ways that do worse things to yourself). In both cases, you need to actively drop the bad mood (by focusing on something else or by rebelling against the bad mood) in order to move on.
So given that bad moods need to be actively shaken off, how generally do you do it?
A friend of mine is a doctor, and when she was first in medical school, she decided that she’d do an experiment on herself. One week, she got terribly sick with a flu-like cold, and all the symptoms of headache, runny everything, no voice, drowsy… and her roommate got sick the same way. So they decided to see who would get better faster - one person was the control who would do nothing - just stay sick, sulk in it, stay in bed, grumble. And one person would take hot showers three times a day to clear up the breathing, wash off the old sickness, would put on clean clothes, clean sheets. Who do you think got better first? Voila, unsurprisingly, the girl who kept removing signs of the sickness.
So one answer is to know that you will need to take some action to shake the bad mood off (the metaphorical equivalent of lots of hot showers and change of clothings). If you’re trying to get out of your bad mood, what specifically should you do? To be addressed in detail tomorrow.
Hi, it’s question Friday. (On the Friday after Tgiving, Walmart usually makes more than $1 billion in the one day - wild, eh?) Here’s the q… would love to hear your answers! My answers are here.
As we celebrate Thanksgiving with turkey, mashed potatoes, apple pie or pumpkin pie, and gathering family and friends, what do we remember about the origins of this tradition? We’ve heard that this tradition grew the first year when Pilgrims settled into Plymouth, Massachusetts when the Pilgrims brought together all their harvests and celebreated their bountiful foods.
The big secret is that the Pilgrins arrived in the fall of 1620, and the first year of harvest of the Pilgrims in Plymouth, 1621, was absolutely terrible, and resulted in a famine. So did the second year. And then in the third year, 1623, something dramatically changed about how the Pilgrims chose to govern themselves, and it is that that led to the bountiful first harvest, and to the gathering around and sharing the great food.
Here is the first person account by the Governor of the British colony in Plymouth at the time, William Bradford, of the years between 1600 and 1622:
1621, The first harvest was shared communally among all the families and was very small. Furthermore, from the time they had arrived, abundance had decreased significantly.
“They began now to gather in the small harvest they had, and to fit up their houses and dwellings against winter … every family had their portion. All the summer there was no want; and now began to come in store of fowl, as winter approached, of which this place did abound when they came first (but afterward decreased by degrees).”
There had been very little supply up until 1623.
“All this while no supply was heard of, neither knew they when they might expect any. So they began to think how they might raise as much corn as they could, and obtain a better crop than they had done, that they might not still thus languish in misery.”
What was the something that changed before the harvest of 1623, the first abundant harvest? William Branford writes:
This was the DECISION OF THE PILGRIMS in 1623:
To give each family some land to farm on their own as opposed to having communcal farming and communal land. “At length, after much debate of things, the Governor (with the advice of the chiefest amongst them) gave way that they should set corn every man for his own particular, and in that regard trust to themselves; in all other thing to go on in the general way as before. And so assigned to every family a parcel of land, according to the proportion of their number, for that end, only for present use (but made no division for inheritance) and ranged all boys and youth under some family. This had very good success, for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been by any means the Governor or any other could use, and saved him a great deal of trouble, and gave far better content. The women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn; which before would allege weakness and inability; whom to have compelled would have been thought great tyranny and oppression.”
Why did having the private land for each family result in much stronger crops than having a communal shared farming? William Bradford answers this question also with his 1620’s explanation of shirking - he claims that there is no increased happiness in communcal living and that shirking goes away when people farm for themselves as opposed to for others.
No increased happiness from communal living. “The experience that was had in this common course … that the taking away of property and bringing in community into a commonwealth would make them happy and flourishing; as if they were wiser than God. For this community (so far as it was) was found to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort.”
Communal living had hurt everyone - young men, strong men, aged men, and women who were as slaves, says Bradford.
“For the young men, that were most able and fit for labor and service, did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men’s wives and children without any recompense. The strong, or man of parts, had no more in division of victuals and clothes than he that was weak and not able to do a quarter the other could; this was thought injustice. The aged and graver men to be ranked and equalized in labors and victuals, clothes etc., with the meaner and younger sort, thought it some indignity and disrespect unto them. And for men’s wives to be commanded to do service for other men, as dressing their meat, washing their clothes, etc., they deemed it a kind of slavery, neither could many husbands well brook it.”
In fact, and Bradford writes firmly about this point, communal living and treating all people the same actually ‘diminish[es] and take[s] off the mutual respects’ that people would naturally have towards one another.
“Upon the point all being to have alike, and all to do alike … it did at least much diminish and take off the mutual respects that should be preserved amongst them. … I answer, seeing all men have this corruption in them, God in His wisdom saw another course fitter for them. “
In 1623, there was a DECISION that changed everything, and it is because of that decision that we now celebrate Thanksgiving.
Lesson and Take-Away: People take incomparably better care of something that belongs to them personally than they do of communal property.
Sources:
* William Bradford: History of Plymouth Plantation, c. 1650 (exerpts, entire book in google books)
* More information about the secret history of Thanksgiving can be found here, here, here, and an account dating to 1607 with the Virginia settlement before the Plymouth settlement here.
* If you want to google and search for this real history of thanksgiving, search for the words “thanksgiving private property“.
My favorite ten books - that I would take to a deserted island, that I return to every year or few years, that I think about often, that I give copies of to my friends … here they are!
