Dr. Joel Wade Articles

REAL STRENGTH

2007-01-08T17:58:00.000-08:00

When I was a young psychology student I was fortunate to find a mentor in Nathaniel Branden. One day I asked him, "What do you think is the single most important thing that you do with your clients, the one thing that forms the foundation for everything else?"

His answer was simple, but it had a tremendous impact on me. It resonated deeply with core beliefs and values that I held, but didn't have the words for yet:

"I look for the best within people," he said, "and I try to speak directly to that part of them. Even if they do not see it themselves, I look for it, and speak to it, and I don't get thrown off by their negative beliefs about themselves."

To actually do this is one of the most profound acts of taking purposeful command of your perspective on others and yourself that you can engage in.

What you are doing by seeing the best within someone, including seeing the best within yourself, is to focus on the strengths within them, and within yourself. You are looking for the resources that a person has, keeping your eye on those.

Our consciousness allows us to perform a certain degree of executive functioning. We can choose to focus our attention over here rather than over there; we can choose to take certain actions over other actions; we can take actions that go against our feelings when we decide that is good and necessary; we can decide to suspend our awareness of certain things; we can choose to follow an impulse or not.

We can also choose to focus on our strengths, to begin a process of deliberately using those strengths in new ways, and thus growing the breadth and momentum of the repertoire of our strengths over time. We can help other people to do this as well.

This is not a simple, "New Age-y" play with language, claiming that you can simply change your perspective and all will be wonderful; it is an act of taking charge of your perspective and working over time to move that perspective toward your strengths, and to work over time to bring those strengths into the world through your actions.

We are not just a bucket of parts. We are not a static collection of traits and personality that sums up to our lot in life. We are dynamic, living, growing, learning, choosing, acting agents of our living selves. When I see the best in you, I am not looking at a painting with different colors and choosing to look only at a particular color, like green. I am looking at a creative process of life that is doing his or her life.

When I look at myself and focus on my strengths, I am not deceiving myself by not dwelling on all of the shortcomings and weakness. I am not being dishonest by not bringing into my awareness past blunders, difficulties or tragedies. I am looking for the resources I have within me now, so that I can use those resources to make the most of my actual circumstances now.

Each of us can get caught in a static self-image, one that includes past history, mistakes, shortcomings, weaknesses, hurts, fears, and limitations. This stance can be seen, especially from inside that self-image, as "what is real and true about me."

Cynics tend to look for the pain, the faults, the weaknesses of a person, and say "That is what is true, that is what is real." From this perspective, the optimism and hopefulness that comes of looking for strengths is nothing but a Pollyanna-like fantasy.

But your self-image is not real in the sense that a chair or a redwood tree is real; it is a self-image, which is the image and sense that you have of yourself based on your history, your assumptions, the feedback that you have taken in from the world, and your wishes, hopes, fears, desires, ambitions, and feelings.

It is a subjective self-perception that you have created of who you are. This self-perception can be more or less accurate, and it is a perspective that is changeable.

Of course it is also possible to ignore or deny elements of yourself that are genuine limitations. There is no benefit to believing that you are capable of doing something that you are not, nor is there any benefit to pretending that your history is not what it was. Denying gravity does not enable you to fly.

We do have biological limitations, and we do come into this world with particular temperament styles that can make it easier or more difficult to do certain things.

But this is just the raw material that each of us has to work with, to build a life into something about which we can feel good, proud, satisfied, and engaged. The Wright Brothers did not deny gravity; they sought to understand the principles of design that would allow them to use the existing atmosphere to overcome gravity. They found in the air around them a strength that had not yet been mastered, and what they made of that was magnificent.

Just as optimism is actually more realistic and effective than pessimism, living from your strengths is a more realistic and effective stance towards life than focusing on your weaknesses.

I say this not out of belief or wishful thinking; I say this with conviction because we know from research that real people can learn optimism and become more effective and happy and less depressed for real in their lives, and we know that real people can become more effective and happy and less depressed for real through developing the habit of using their strengths in new and different ways each day.

The results are tangible and significant.

There are two perspectives that you can choose to emphasize in your life:

1) You have within yourself stores of raw material that you have not yet identified as useful. You have within yourself strengths that you have only touched briefly. You have within yourself the capacity to use that strength in ways that you have not even considered.

2) You also have shortcomings, troubles in your past, physical and temperamental limitations, and circumstances that limit your possibilities.

By dwelling on one of these perspectives you can overcome the other.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to decide which one you will use to do which.

TEACHING KIDS TO BE HAPPY

2006-11-19T10:08:00.000-08:00

My son Jesse just asked me, "Dad, have you thought about writing a column about being done with something, and feeling good about being done with it?" Jesse had just completed his homework early, and was enjoying the feeling of both the burden lifted, and the joy of accomplishment.

Good idea, Jesse. So here goes.

There is momentary pleasure, and then there is the satisfaction that comes from focusing on a goal, absorbing yourself in the task, and completing it well. Often the difference between a happy life and an unhappy life has to do with whether you spend more of your time and energy engaged in pursuing the former or the latter.

Momentary pleasure can be wonderful. I would never suggest that you should not do things and have experiences that make you feel good. In fact it is well worth making sure that you make room for pleasure, and practice savoring the sensations that go along with it. My one caveat is that you try and do things that are congruent with your values, and that do no harm.
But people who spend a significant amount of time trying to have pleasurable experiences are actually among the least happy of people. Passing pleasures, when invested in too dearly, just don't deliver the long term sense of satisfaction and joy that their wonderful moments might suggest.

That long term satisfaction and joy comes from engaging in activities that absorb you, that challenge you outside of your comfort level but within your competence, and that also have some meaning to you. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced chick-sent-me-high) calls this state of mind "flow".

In contrast to momentary pleasures, the most common emotional state that people experience during flow is... nothing. You are generally not aware of what you are feeling when you are absorbed in what you are doing, because, well, you are absorbed in what you are doing. All of your awareness and energy are focused on the task at hand.

The satisfaction and joy are sort of grown and accumulated as you work on your task. As you work, you are putting your mind to use, drawing from what you know and the skills you have learned, and applying and adapting them as needed to achieve your goal.

As you do this you are becoming more complex, and you add to your psychological resources and resilience. This is true whether it is a project for work, reading a book, playing an instrument, playing a sport, engagement in a relationship, or getting your kids to do their homework well.

Seeking pleasures is like spending money. Absorbing yourself in challenging and meaningful activities is like earning money and depositing into your account.

The more time you spend in flow, the more psychological capital you have to invest in other meaningful experiences and activities. You also have more psychological capital to use toward savoring momentary pleasures, too.

So, for a kid like Jesse, it is important that he has activities that challenge him to use and develop his skills. It is important that there are expectations that he will put his best effort toward these activities. And it is important that he learns to see these activities through to completion even when he doesn't feel like it.

It is important because doing so is a skill that a person must learn and practice. If he learns it now and masters the skill, he will be able to draw on it for the rest of his life. If he doesn't learn it and practice it now, he'll have to do it later.

It's harder to do later.

This is actually something that gets lost these days. In many schools, there is more focus on lowering expectations in the name of building "self-esteem", more focus on lessening challenges in the name of decreasing stress, and more focus on fitting lessons into small and (presumably) entertaining bites so that kids don't lose interest.

For parents, the most difficult part of parenting can be guiding kids toward challenging activities, holding them to high expectations, and keeping them at their task until it is through when their kids (and their parents) want to do something else - anything else. This task becomes all the more difficult when there is little obvious help in the community to support such a stance.

The dominant cultural tone, at least where I live, is pretty dismal. There is a romantic vision of the noble savage at work here, where kids who are left to work things out on their own, with other kids who are left to work things out on their own, are given the power to choose whether to do their work or not, whether to do their work well or not, whether to finish their tasks or just blow them off.

Kids (and adults) walk around with their underwear hanging out, their pants down to their knees, and lots of offensive artwork and "poetry" on their clothing.

This is what we see in movies, TV, and what stands out when we see lax standards at school and elsewhere in the community, where adults are either afraid to set clear guidelines, don't know how to, or just don't understand how important they are.

But when I start to worry too much about this, I remember the 60's and 70's. To judge from Hollywood and those annoying commercials praising the "free spirits" of the sixties, you would think that everybody back then protested the Vietnam War, hated America, and loved to do drugs.

But of course, that was not the case.

While the loudest in the culture hogged the spotlight and the microphones, and turned up their amplifiers and their bad manners way too loud, most of America was busy doing good work, raising families, helping their neighbors, and focusing on their business through completion.
People know what makes them feel that their life is good. It just takes time to sort it out when the messages are confusing.

It's no different today, just more graphic. Okay, a lot more graphic.

What Jesse said to me is important, because it reminds us that kids know that it feels good to do work well. Kids are glad to have guidelines, limitations and expectations - and they will test them often to make sure that they are sound. If you don't hold the structure strongly, they'll be glad to push through and just hang out. That will give them a momentary pleasure, and cost them the satisfaction of flow.

If they do that often enough, they'll get good at it.

I am talking about it here, because I would like you to be confident when you limit the videogame hours, require schoolwork that is challenging and expect it to be done well, limit empty time like hanging out at the mall and encourage productive and creative activities, and expect that underwear is to be worn under what they are wearing. You need to be confident that you are doing precisely the right thing for your kids.

No matter how loud the culture sounds, no matter how over the top it looks, guiding your kids toward flow and keeping the immediate gratifications within reasonable bounds is exactly what they need from you.

And tell them why, clearly. "This will help you to make a happy and successful life for yourself, and you'll feel better about yourself for having stuck with it until you're done."

A MESSAGE TO NEW TEENAGERS

2006-07-06T14:12:00.000-07:00

(This is the text of a commencement speech I gave last week for a graduating 8th grade class. This private school in Santa Cruz, California goes from K-8; this graduating class happened to be all boys.)

First of all, I want to say congratulations. You are the graduating class from what I believe is the best school in Santa Cruz County.

What I love about this school is the combination of high expectations, along with a culture that encourages both a love of learning and good manners. All of these are important, as I will talk about this afternoon, not just because it helps you to become better people, better citizens, and better friends, but it is crucial for your own personal happiness as well.

One of the hard things about being a 13 or 14 year-old teenager these days is something that I'm sure you are all familiar with. It is the desire, and the need, to display a kind of behavior that mocks things like high expectations, love of learning, and good manners. It is usually described as being "cool", but there is a more accurate word for it: Cynicism.

Cynicism is actually an ancient Greek school of philosophy. Its founder was Antisthenes, who was a follower of Socrates. Socrates believed that if a person knew Truth - with a capital "T" - then he or she would naturally choose the Good - with a capital "G". The highest task then became to find Truth at all costs; the rest would take care of itself.

The big idea of Cynicism is that all of the institutions, social conventions, and other structures that people have created, just get in the way of knowing Truth, and knowing Truth is the top priority.

So, in order to come to know Truth, you have to reject these institutions and social conventions. By rejecting these you would get a glimpse into Truth, and, as the belief goes, you would then be happier.

But part of a cynic's behavior is also marked by a kind of sarcastic and condescending view of people who accept and live with the conventions of a society. This means that if you have created a happy life for yourself using the opportunities that human achievement has made possible, then you are, in the cynic's view, deceiving yourself, and deserving of ridicule.

Also deserving of ridicule is the idea that you can be happy with your family or respectful of people who make things happen in the community. If you enjoy your work, enjoy school, love your country, are willing to support institutions that you find useful, then, to a cynic, you are fooling yourself.

As I'll show in a minute, this is a very silly way to pursue a happy life.

But let's look at what might be useful about cynicism. It is important to question established rules and conventions, so that you can learn whether or not they are of value. Do they help us to live happy, successful, and engaged lives? Or do they serve to entrench outdated ideas that actually get in the way of the good?

It is extremely useful for you to re-evaluate the assumptions by which you live, so that you can be open to the feedback from the world that you need in order to improve.

That said, there is no value in the sneering sarcasm and condescension that goes along with cynicism. It is possible to question, to evaluate and re-evaluate the usefulness of rules and conventions, to be dynamic in your own growth and exploration, while also holding an optimistic, grateful, and benevolent spirit.

There are lots and lots of good things in the world, structures and institutions that make life better. There are good elements of human nature. It is in our interest to find what these are, and what it is about them that work. It is in our interest to support those things - and on the other hand, to find what doesn't work, and to change those things as we can.

But cynicism is fundamentally a helpless and passive stance. It is a stance of disengagement from the world as it is. The cynic observes and ridicules, mocking those who live according to established ways.

The bitterness, the sarcasm, the biting comments, they don't come from a position of active engagement in making things better, they don't come from a position of strength; they come from a position of anger and resentment that things are not already the way the cynic would wish them to be.

So tonight, as you celebrate your graduation from this wonderful institution, I would like to steer you away from Antisthenes and the Cynics, and toward someone much smarter and wiser: Aristotle.

Aristotle believed that happiness is not a state of being, it is not a state of knowing some hidden and mysterious Truth - with a capital "T". Happiness is an action.

It isn't something that you possess, or a feeling that you just experience when you're having fun. Happiness for Aristotle comes from practicing your virtues until they are habits.

Happiness is based on taking action in the world as it is, in relation to human nature as it is, and the institutions, conventions, and other structures that are available; not from a passive and wishful thinking that these should all somehow be different already.

There are actions that you can take in life, that research in my field of Positive Psychology is showing can clearly improve your level of happiness. The interesting thing about this research is that it is showing that many of the things you have been taught about virtue and good character, turn out to be the core elements that make for a happy life - for you.

For many people, the case for virtue is kind of a circular argument: You should be virtuous because, well, because you should be virtuous. It is just the right thing to do. A good person should be virtuous. Be good, you know... because! Or the ever popular: "Be good because I say so!"

But the reality of human nature is that it includes a large measure of self-interest. To base a commitment to virtue on a denial or an opposition to this self-interest is not an effective strategy.

If you expect a whole world of people to be good because it will "make the world a better place", or "it will help others", or "it is what is expected of you", or "it is your duty", you might as well build yourself a bunker and crawl in.

It is not that these are not good and desirable things, and it is not that we aren't motivated at all by such good will; it is just that it is not part of human nature to do large, long term things that do not also include somewhere any personal benefit.

Tonight, I want to encourage you as you make your way into the world, to be good people. For your sake. Not for my sake, not for your Principal's sake or your teachers' sake, not for your parents' sake, or anybody else's - though we will all benefit from and be grateful for your goodwill.

You've heard enough about why it's good for others that you live with virtue. That's a given.

I want to encourage you to be good people because by doing that you will build for yourself a happier, more satisfying, and more successful life.

Let me give you some examples of how virtue is in your own interest.

Honor is what you do when you own your own life. Living honorably means that you take your life seriously, and take responsibility for creating a meaningful existence. This includes your relationships with other people. You should seek to live an honorable life not only because the world improves when there are more honorable people in it, but because honor is an expression of self-possession and self-love.

You should strive to become more optimistic, not because people will like being around you, or because you will do better at work - nice and good things, and true - but because optimism is the antidote to depression and helplessness, and you will be happier if you are more optimistic.

You should be forgiving, not just because you have been told that it's good and right. It's good and right, in part, because by forgiving you allow yourself to let go of holding a grudge, and holding a grudge keeps you in a negative relationship with the past.

Forgiveness frees you from whatever and whomever it is with whom you had been holding a grudge, and frees you to live a happier life. That this may be moving and humbling to the one forgiven is a separate possibility.

You should cultivate and express a sense of gratitude not just because it is a nice thing to do for others, but because we know from the research that feeling and expressing gratitude is essential to living a happy life.

And it is one of the easiest things that you can practice as a new behavior to make yourself happier. You can become more grateful very easily; the simplest thing you can do is, every day, just think of three good things that happened that day.

And just as holding a grudge keeps you focused on what was bad in the past, feeling gratitude focuses you on what was good in the past.

Gratitude is like optimism for the past, just as hope is optimism for the future.

You should live with integrity, not just because good people live with integrity, but because life is much better when you are congruent between what you think, what you say, and what you do. Life is much better when you are honest, when people trust you, and when you trust yourself.

You should treat others as you would have them treat you, not just because it is "The Golden Rule", and so you have been told that you are supposed to do this, but because developing a deep capacity for empathy is at the heart of good relationships of any kind; and good relationships are at the heart of living a happy and successful life.

You should develop a sense of self-discipline and focus in whatever you do, not only because it will make you a better worker, or that it will "build character" - which it will - but because the happiest people are those who have developed the capacity to focus and absorb themselves in their work and in their play.

This ability to focus and apply yourself, whether or not you feel like it at the time, is what creates a sense of "flow", which is necessary to living a happy life.

You should develop a strong capacity for self-regulation, not because it will make you a better citizen, and a more reliable person - though it will, and that is all to the good - but because self regulation is the act of taking possession of your life.

It is the difference between owning your life, and being at the mercy of your feelings and impulses.

You should be friendly and playful, not just because other people will like you better, or because you will be more popular - though this is true - but because it is a more joyful way to live this one precious life. It's more fun.

I want to end with a quote from a now old movie, Say Anything, where the main character is wrestling with whether or not to treat a girl with whom he is falling in love with a kind of uncaring, cool attitude, as his cynical friends suggest he should do, or if he should treat her with respect and admiration, which is what he really feels, and how he would like to treat her.

His genuine friend with whom he was talking this over asked him why he wouldn't treat her with respect and admiration. He started saying something like, "Well, the guys say I should ignore her and act cool - pretend I don't care."

His true friend looked him straight in the eye and responded: "Don't be a guy. The world is full of guys. Be a man."

You are all on your way to becoming men. Treat yourself with respect and admiration, and don't be afraid to treat other people with respect and admiration as well.

Look forward to your High School years, they're bound to be a lot of fun, and challenging, and full of complexity. But you've had a great start here.

Let that great start help you to own your own life as you grow into men, and let the guys follow your lead, not you theirs.

CYNICISM VS HAPPINESS

2006-03-24T11:44:00.000-08:00

The Virtue of Happiness
by Dr. Joel Wade

The other day, my wife and I were having lunch, and an acquaintance from our kid’s school came by. The first words out of her mouth were: “How unusual, a husband and wife actually sitting together and talking with each other.” The next day, talking with some parents at a little league tryout, one of the parents said how. “By this age, kids don’t even notice when grown ups say something,” while the other parent nodded in agreement.

These are not uncommon sentiments. You probably make statements like these from time to time without thinking. But as a habit over time they can be poisonous to your happiness. There is a philosophical school that they reflect.

They are the Cynics.

Their founder was Antisthenes (446-366 BC), who was a follower of Socrates. Socrates believed that if a person knew Truth, then he or she would naturally choose the Good. The task became then to find Truth at all costs; the rest would take care of itself.

The big idea of cynicism is that all of the institutions, the social conventions and mores, the structures that human beings have created in order to function well, are impediments to Truth. Therefore, in order to come to know Truth, one has to reject these institutions, social conventions, and mores. By doing so, presumably, one gets a glimpse into Truth, and will therefore be happier.

I find this a patently silly approach to living well.

Part of a cynic’s behavior is marked by a sarcastic and condescending view of those who accept and live within the conventions of a society. This means that if you have created a happy life for yourself using the opportunities that such a framework provides, then you are, in the cynic’s view, deceiving yourself, and deserving of ridicule.

So to a cynic the idea that one can be happily in love and married, or happily enjoying a good relationship with one’s children – particularly if they are teenagers, is a ridiculous and stupid idea. If one enjoys one’s work, loves one’s country, is willing to support institutions that one finds useful, then, to a cynic, one is fooling oneself.

It is hard to see how a person can, without great contradiction, be optimistic, grateful and fully engaged in work and relationships - pillars of a happy life - while also being cynical.

Cynicism is the dominant philosophical undertone of the twentieth century. It allows for such other philosophical ridiculosities as the post-modern deconstructionist philosophies, Marxism, and the hippie and drug culture epitomized by Timothy Leary’s advice to, “Tune in, turn on, drop out”.

In psychology, a common view is that there is a deeper and wiser sense buried in your unconscious, and a therapist can help you to dig it out. This is fine on the face of it. There is more to us than meets the eye, and there are certainly elements of myself – feelings, hopes, dreams, wishes, strengths and shortcomings - that I get to know better as time goes on. I support wholeheartedly your effort to know yourself better.

But the cynical view joins in this search for self and adds the idea that because there are elements of myself that are unknown to me, then if I don’t know them I am not being real; and if I immerse myself in my unconscious flow of a world, then I am somehow more real. In my years as a therapist, however, I have not found that therapists in general are any more or less real than someone who studies any other profession. More in touch with emotions, perhaps, but then often more ruled by them as well; more fussy and self-indulgent.

In politics, Marxism asks people to accept that there is a kind of human nature that is different from what we see, and have seen for millennia. The true human nature that can be realized if only the dictatorship of the proletariat is allowed to take power and make it so; the politically enlightened person will understand this (on faith) and work to make it so. Those who do not understand this are ignorant and deluded by the establishment.

People use drugs primarily to escape into an easy state of euphoria for a time, even when the cost in terms of their overall happiness is dear. This practice has been given an aura of self-exploration by the 60’s drug culture that advertised a deeper communion with Truth through hallucinogenic drugs. Those who did not “turn on” were not in on that Truth, and were often treated with condescension. I know several people whose lives were destroyed by this drug culture. How about you?

Cynicism is the foundation of the attitude of “cool”. The beatniks and the hippies had a way of being that they felt was more real than the establishment and particularly those who like the establishment and the opportunities of civilization that it provides. When people are being cool – copping an attitude of disengaged and smug superiority – the true description for what they are being is cynical.

But let’s look at what might be useful about cynicism: It is important to question established rules and conventions, so that we can learn whether or not, or to what degree they are of value. Do they help us to live happy, successful, and engaged lives? Or do they serve to entrench outdated ideas that actually interfere or undermine the good?

It is extremely useful for us to re-evaluate the assumptions by which we live, so that we can be open to the feedback of the world that we need to improve.

That said, there is no value in the sneering sarcasm and condescension that is one of the hallmarks of cynicism. It is possible to question, to evaluate and re-evaluate the usefulness of conventions, to be dynamic in your own growth and exploration, while also holding an optimistic, grateful, and benevolent spirit.

Happiness is an action. It is based upon taking action in the world as it is, in relation to human nature as it is, and the institutions, conventions, mores, and other structures that are available. There are good things in the world, structures and institutions that make life better. There are good elements of human nature. It is in our interest to identify what these are, and what it is about them that work. It is in our interest to support those things; and on the other hand, to identify what does not work, and seek to improve it or to minimize its impact.

But cynicism is fundamentally a helpless and passive stance. It is a stance of disengagement from the world as it is. The cynic observes and ridicules, mocking those who live according to established ways. The bitterness, the sarcasm, the biting comments, come not from a position of active engagement in making things better, but from a position of anger and resentment that things are not the way one would wish.

I write every week about what you can do to bring yourself more happiness. Being cynical is not among these.

When you see somebody happy in their marriage, with their kids, in their work, with their country, watch yourself for that sarcastic remark, or that mildly cutting barb. When you find yourself listening to such comments from others, notice how you feel when you accept those comments as accurate, versus when you reject them as just a cynical view.

Cynicism is not a path to Truth; it is the enemy of happiness. Enjoy and love your life, your family, your work, and your country. These are what a good life is made of. That is what is real.

NATURE TO BE COMMANDED MUST BE OBEYED

2005-09-02T11:00:00.000-07:00

The Virtue of Happiness
By Dr. Joel Wade

Any move to improve your life, or anything else, must begin with a good understanding of what is true right now. Not how you would like it to be, but how it actually is.

Psychologically, this is called self-acceptance.

If you wish for your life to be different, whether in terms of action in the world, or in terms of internal emotional and psychological experience, you must first accept that you are as you are right now.

This is a step that people often try to skip, since what they want is not what is true right now, but an ideal that they hold for themselves, a vision of what they would like to be true.

Idealism involves envisioning something as you would like it to be, as you think it should be, according to an idea that you have. There is a useful role for idealism: it employs our imagination toward what could be; it gets us to look in a direction toward which we would like to head. This is essential to any sort of growth or progress.

But there is also a danger to idealism: it can get us to ignore reality in pursuit of an imaginary world - an idea. In so doing it disconnects us from the world as it is, with all of its wonders and tragedies, and from which we draw the very real resources we need to improve.

Part of what I am seeking to do in these columns is to offer skills and techniques that can help you to improve your relationships, your effectiveness, and your overall well-being - not in some wishful, grandiose fashion, but in very real ways, moving you toward a better life in fact.

The most important ingredient to any of this is to accept what is true about yourself and the world you live in right now.

I do not mean by this that you should resign yourself to the way things are. I mean by this precisely what Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) meant in his quote that forms the title of today’s column.

To move something in the world, you must first see it as it is. In order to make changes in your life, and in the world around you, you first have to understand and accept yourself as you are, and to see and accept the world as it is now.

It is from that foundation and vantage point that effective and benevolent change can be pursued.

Let’s start with accepting yourself as you are. You might have goals you are striving for; you might want to have a life that is more joyful, less painful, more expansive, less fearful; you might want to improve your relationships or change your work so that it is more satisfying to you. The most important step you can take is to acknowledge and accept the truth of your life as it is now.

If you get scared easily, you get scared easily. That’s the truth.

If you have a temper that troubles you, you have a temper that troubles you. That’s the truth.

If you find it hard not to be sarcastic with your mate or your kids or your friends, then accept that this is so.

If you are sensitive and take things too personally, admit it, look that fact in the eyes, and accept that this is so.

If you have skills and abilities that you are not using, and it’s difficult to acknowledge that you’ve been resting on some laurels for a while, acknowledge it, and accept it.

If you love your mate, your kids, your friends so much that it’s overwhelming sometimes and you zone out to the Internet or get too involved in other things for fear of the intensity, then accept that.

You have to start there. Otherwise there is no chance of making any movement toward the sort of changes you would like to bring about in your life.

Change is like one of those maps you find in malls or campuses that show you all of the possible destinations, but also include a big arrow pointing to a spot that says, “You Are Here.”

Without that arrow, you would not know in which direction to proceed. Could be left, could be right, could be just behind you. In order to orient yourself toward your goals, you have to have some idea of where you are in relation to those goals.

If you try as best as you can, and you just cannot acknowledge and accept the truth of what is so right now, then start by accepting that you are not willing or able to accept the truth right now. That will give you some foothold on what’s true. Sit with that for a little while, and you may be able to take a step closer to more truth.

You can also use the following sentence stem to explore this: “It is difficult for me to admit…”

Write that down at the top of a sheet of paper, and then without thinking much, or editing or repeating, quickly write down ten endings. Don’t mull them over, just write. Do the same thing each day for a week, and I think you’ll find you have more awareness of what you’ve been unwilling to accept about yourself.

But self-acceptance also involves another element: a quality of being friendly toward yourself. Be kind to yourself, be understanding of yourself. Remember that you are human, and do not fall into the dangerous side of idealism that tempts you to see what you want to see, and not what is. To do so will get you nowhere.

It is not effective or useful to berate yourself, to nag yourself, to beat yourself up over how you are. You might be angry with yourself, you might feel disappointed with yourself, you might want very much to be different in some ways, but you will not make changes for the better unless you have a spirit of friendship toward yourself.

Think of that mall or campus map. You will get to the destination you are looking for because you wish to go there, not because you hate where you are. Hating where you are will just get you to run from where you are, but not toward anything in particular. And in your haste, you’re likely to miss the opportunities and resources all around you, like a blur of shops or rooms at that mall or campus.

Hating yourself, or some element of yourself will likewise simply spur you to want to get away from yourself, or some part of yourself you do not like. But you cannot actually get away from yourself, any more than you can step outside of your physical body. You need yourself, with all of your shortcomings and disappointments, to go toward what you would like.

It is the resources within you now, whatever they may be, that will carry you forward.

This is why you need to nurture and develop a sense of kindness and friendship with yourself, a sense of understanding of the difficulties of your life and gratitude for the blessings of your life.

To help this part along, a few more sentence stems - same instructions as above:

“Something that it’s difficult for me to accept about myself is…”
“If I were to be 5% kinder to myself…”
“I am becoming aware…”

Find out what is true about yourself first. Search for the places that you avoid seeing in yourself and look them in the eye, kindly, gently, as a friend who holds you to your deepest strength and goodness.

Obey reality, your personal, subjective reality. It is in conversation with what is true that you can reach for the kind of life you would like. You must first accept your own nature in order to move it.

WHO CARES WHAT THE JONES’S HAVE?

2005-08-19T14:34:00.000-07:00

The Virtue of Happiness
By Dr. Joel Wade

Some of the research on happiness has shown that though more money above a certain level does not correlate much with more happiness, having more money than your neighbor does.

And having less money than your neighbor is correlated with lower happiness.

Most recently there is a study in the news by sociologists Glenn Firebaugh and Laura Tach, called "Relative Income and Happiness: Are Americans on a Hedonic Treadmill?"

They found that physical health was the most important factor in the happiness of their subjects, but their relative income was second most important.

Their research discovered that differences between people in health, education, and other “correlates of happiness” didn’t matter nearly as much as a disparity in income within the same age group or “cohort.” Firebaugh and Tach concluded: “The higher the income of others in one's age group, the lower one’s happiness.”

There are different aspects to these findings. In part it might reflect one’s regret for not fulfilling one’s own potential, disappointment in how one has dealt with opportunities, etc. But the central issue, I believe, is envy.

There is nothing mysterious about this. The role of envy is central to human nature. The 10th Commandment warns against it, primitive - and not so primitive - societies have superstitious charms to protect against “the evil eye.” We all know about the green monster of envy. I doubt that any one of us has not fed this monster or been harmed by it at one time or another.

So now we have research clearly showing that indulging this monster can tangibly decrease your happiness.

Let’s look at some of the effects that indulging in envy can have on you:

Envy turns your human neighbor into a non-human object. When we envy another person, we are not seeing that person for who they are, we are seeing them for what they have. They may have money or possessions or life circumstances that I want and don’t have.

And when I think of the person, it is those things that I will see, it is those things that I will think of as they speak; and throughout whatever interaction I have with that person, some part of my consciousness will be focused on those things.

Envy presumes your own impotence. Envy focuses you on what you don’t think you can have. When was the last time you made something happen that you firmly believed you couldn’t do? It happens, but it’s pretty darned rare.

I love the saying, “Be bold and great forces will come to your aid.” Envy implies disbelief in yourself, and separates you from your boldness, and any great forces.

It encourages an external locus of control. Envy puts the focus for your life outside of yourself. When you envy, you are telling yourself that because this person out there has something, that means I cannot have it. And I cannot be happy if they have it and I do not.

Envy breeds malevolence. When you envy, you are not happy for the success of your neighbor, you are resentful of it. The sentiment, if it were really stated in full, would be something like, “if I can’t have this, I don’t want them to have it.”

Envy weakens your capacity for benevolence. To be truly kind, generous, and loving toward another, you must be able and happy to see them and appreciate them for who they are, and to want the best for them. You cannot possibly do this congruently while indulging in any of the above.

Given that you’re human, and so are likely to feel envy at some point or other in your life, how can you deal with such strong feelings, which have been a part of human nature and wreaking havoc since the beginning of time?

There are several steps:

Don’t indulge the feelings. Contrary to the therapeutic philosophies of the 60s and 70s, your feelings are not wise, they are not guides to be consulted in opposition to your clear thinking. They are potentially useful information, to be noticed, considered, sometimes expressed, but you should always:

Integrate these feelings with thought. As you notice the feelings, think something like the following:

What am I attracted to here? What are the possessions or circumstances that I see this person enjoying that I would like to have for myself? Use this information to clarify your own desires and goals, making the desire personal to you, and not focused on the person who has what you would like.

Consider whether this desire is a good thing, something that would improve your life and make a benevolent impact upon the world, or a bad thing that would do you or others harm if pursued. If it is a good thing, move on to the next step.

If it is a bad thing, identify it clearly, look it squarely and honestly in the eye, and as best you can, banish it from your “to do” list. (It may be a good but impossible thing, like wishing you were forty years younger. In this case, go hunting for what you are grateful for in your life, past and present. This won’t make you younger, but it may take off some of the edge.)

What do I believe about my own abilities that I am feeling the emotion of envy? How could I think about myself differently, so that I might feel something more like inspiration and ambition to create what I desire for myself? What support do I need to enable me to feel that I could actually move toward what I want?

What you can do this week to effectively move yourself toward reaching that goal? This assumes that you have reframed your envy into inspiration and ambition, and then used this to identify a benevolent desire and goal.

It doesn’t matter how far you move toward the goal, it is the direction, and not the mileage, that matters. Because envy is a stance of stagnation and impotence, any move in a positive direction toward what you desire will work to dissipate that envy. You cannot be effective and helpless at the same time.

Repeat this every week from now on until it’s habitual and envy is not.

If you feel envy, find within that envy the seeds of your own ambition. Identify and clarify your goals, and find the support you need to move toward them effectively and benevolently.

Then kindly thank your neighbor for the inspiration.

MASTERING HAPPINESS

2005-05-19T14:46:00.000-07:00

The Virtue of Happiness
By Dr. Joel Wade

If you want to master anything, you have to practice it, think about it, dream about it, talk about it, and do all of this at a pace and a level of involvement that you can maintain over time. This is true if you want to become a competent businessperson, doctor, writer, artist, or scientist. It is true if you want to develop satisfying relationships. It is true if you want to become a good fisherman.

The same holds true if you want to live a happy and gratifying life.

I could tell you lots of ways that you could do short sprints that would be fun in the moment. That may be worth doing, as long as it is in the context of your values and responsibilities. But doing this alone is like eating fruits and vegetables one day, when your overall diet is regularly full of fats and too much meat. Or doing a good deed once in a while, when you normally are guided by a harmful morality.

Today I want to encourage you to set up a program for yourself that will build your happy life consistently, at a pace and a level of involvement that you can maintain over time. I have found that these are some of the most common things I help people with in my coaching practice.

Happiness is not an idea. It is an experience that comes largely from practicing certain skills and restricting certain harmful indulgences.

Some of the skills to incorporate into your daily routine are:

1) Gratitude - count your blessings each day, appreciate the people in your life, past and present, who have helped you, encouraged you, supported you, challenged you, and loved you. Look for the good around you, and actively, purposely, acknowledge it.

2) Optimism - look for the opportunities and the benevolence wherever you are. When you find yourself thinking pessimistically (seeing the negative as permanent, pervasive and personal, and seeing the positive as transient, exceptional, and unrelated to you or your actions), actively dispute that pessimistic stance, while looking for the positive.

3) Forgiveness - whenever and to whatever degree you can, forgive others their trespasses, as you would have them forgive yours.

4) Flow - create situations in your life that are challenging enough that you feel stretched, not so challenging that you cannot hope to manage them successfully, and not too easy that they are boring. Allow yourself to become completely absorbed in the tasks you are engaged in - including the tasks of marriage and parenting.

5) Fun - make sure that you take time to have fun, enjoy the opportunities you have, eat good food, take time to play with friends, engage in the joy that the world has to offer.

6) Collect more experiences than stuff - Actively engage yourself in things that have benevolent meaning to you. Try and do something wonderful that you will remember fondly for the rest of your life at least once a year. You will habituate that great new stereo system a few days or weeks, but you can look back fondly and freshly on your adventures all your life.

7) Live with integrity - know what you believe, what you feel, what you know, and let your words and deeds be congruent with these. Follow through on your commitments. Keep your promises. Be honest.

8) Build and maintain warm, loving relationships - treat the people in your life with compassion and benevolence, and value the time you spend with those you love. Let this be part of your spirit of adventure in life.

Some of the indulgences to restrict are:

1) Catastrophic thinking - when you find yourself expecting the worst of a situation, think of what the worst outcome would be, what the best outcome would be, and what the most likely outcome will be. Find one thing you can do to make it less likely that the worst will happen, and more likely that the best will happen. Prepare yourself reasonably for the most likely thing.

2) Don’t hold a grudge - do what you can to forgive, but what you can’t forgive, try actively to put it down somewhere, so that you are not carrying it around with you. Think of it as a burden that you are carrying because of something that was done that hurt you in the past - either by someone else, or by yourself. See what you can do to put that burden down. It does not serve you to carry it.

3) Pessimism - see #2, “Optimism” above. You wouldn’t let someone come in and mess up your house, don’t let pessimism come in and mess up your life, either.

4) Envy, covetousness, adultery - restrict compelling and seductive thoughts, desires, and the actions that they would encourage, that you know will hurt yourself or others. I don’t mean that you should freak out when you feel something uncomfortable, or think something disturbing. Thoughts and feelings flit in and out of our awareness constantly like wildlife in a rural backyard. Over a lifetime you will certainly have thought or felt just about everything at one moment or another.

But it is not the wild animals that wander through your yard that will hurt you or others, it is the wild animals that you feed. Don’t indulge in fantasies and desires that will hurt people. If you wouldn’t do it, or wouldn’t want it done to you, don’t spend time feeding the thought of it.

5) Passivity - don’t do nothing when you could be doing something productive, engaging, and/or fun. Everyone needs time to rest and relax, but inaction leads to and intensifies depression and passivity. Make sure that you aren’t getting drawn into inactivity. This can be easier said than done, of course. Often we feel stuck when the tasks we need to accomplish are too big. Break them down into smaller, do-able chunks, and begin working on them one by one. Taking small but useful steps is much more effective than you might think.

In addition to the above, I would encourage you to go through my other columns occasionally and revisit some of the suggestions and exercises that speak to you. Sometimes things may occur to you on a second or third reading that didn’t strike you as relevant a year ago.

Here is your homework to begin to master the skills of living a happy and gratifying life: pick two or three items from the menu here, or from my other columns, and take a couple of months incorporating them into your life at a pace and a level of involvement that you can maintain over time. Reflect daily on how you have used what you have chosen to work with. Once these skills have become habits, incorporate a few more, again at a pace and a level of involvement that you can maintain over time.

There is nothing mysterious here. Be patient, be persistent, be benevolent, be devoted, and you will earn for yourself a happier and more gratifying life.

DON’T HOLD A GRUDGE

2005-03-17T14:48:00.000-08:00

The Virtue of Happiness
By Dr. Joel Wade

Anger is a response to trespass. It’s a response to an incident that you feel violates some boundary or value that you hold. When you feel hurt, when you feel wronged, when you’ve been disrespected or humiliated or shamed, it’s easy to hold on to that anger. Sometimes for a long, long time.

I want to suggest that you don’t.

I had some Great Aunts who, well into their 70’s, would occasionally bring up some incident or other involving one of the sisters. They were still angry about whatever the transgression was, still pushed out of shape by it, still holding onto a grudge from something that happened more than 50 years earlier!

I guess they were still holding out hope that they could one day go back in time and make it so that that transgression didn’t happen. Beyond that, all they were doing was keeping a negative feeling alive.

This is not unusual. In fact there is quite a market for holding grudges in my profession. I have seen so many people over the years who are willing to spend a lot of time and money going over in greater and greater detail just how their parents hurt them.

The hope here, as with my Great Aunts, can only be that somehow, by “working through” those painful events, those events will no longer have happened. This is not stated clearly, of course, or else it would seem ridiculous on the face of it - which is why I am stating it clearly here.

It is more often stated in vague terms, implying that by going over this past history, somehow you will no longer be hurt by what happened back then, and you can get on with your life.

But the very process of going over the painful past serves only to turn the path to that past pain into a superhighway.

Remember, you get good at what you practice. If you practice dwelling on what has hurt you in the past, then you will get very good at dwelling on what hurt you in the past.

This does not mean that you should pretend that what was painful did not happen. This does not mean that there is no reason to look at the past in order to learn from it, or to bring greater understanding, compassion, and perspective to it. It does not mean that you pretend that you were not affected by what may have been truly awful events.

The fact is, truly awful events will affect you for the rest of your life. They will never cease to have happened, but they will fade in intensity the farther out in time you get from them - unless you keep those awful events alive in the present by holding a grudge.

If you think of time as a journey away from events, holding a grudge is like refusing to leave bad events until they get better. But since these are by definition past events, there is no changing them, and so they will never get better. The best that you can do - and this is significant - is to see those events from the perspective of a larger context. Close in, the Sun is all burning heat and blinding light; as you move out from say the orbit of Mercury to the orbit of Neptune, that same Sun that consumed your senses with such pain becomes just one of billions of other stars decorating the heavens.

To hold a grudge is to keep yourself in a Mercurial orbit about whatever has hurt you. To accept what has happened, to forgive when and as you genuinely can, and to will yourself to look around at the larger context within which that solar event is but a point of light, is to give yourself the gift of a continuing journey.

Sometimes with severe trauma there are reminders, flashbacks, invasive memories, that keep the events alive against your will. This is much more difficult to deal with, and if this is the case for you, please don’t think that I am being glib with my suggestions here, I fully understand the challenges and the horror of such trauma, and I am not suggesting that you just pretend it away.

What I am suggesting is that you do what you can to forgive what you are able to genuinely forgive, and to accept that what happened did indeed happen, and to do everything you can possibly do to avoid carrying around a grudge.

There may be an action that needs to be taken. You may be holding onto a grudge in part because you have not said what you need to say. Maybe somebody close to you said or did something that hurt you and they don’t know it, or haven’t acknowledged it, and you need to tell them and/or hear that they are sorry. Maybe there is a more severe event that requires some form of justice - if a crime has been committed, the criminal needs to be apprehended and punished.

If there is an appropriate action to be taken to address a trespass, then define that action, determine whether it is reasonable, legal, congruent with your values, and will serve to allow you to get on with your life in a better way (no violent outbursts, no doing harm out of revenge, no taking actions that will simply make someone else hurt and make your life worse), and decide whether it will help to take that action.

For example, you may feel angry with a loved one over a hurtful comment. The appropriate response would not be to become physically violent, or to come up with a comment that would hurt them back just as bad. Rather, you would want to let them know that what they said hurt, and that you don’t want to be spoken to in that manner. Usually in such cases, if the other person offers an apology at that point, the hurt is over and you can let go of any remaining grumpiness.

Sometimes when you can talk about it directly and benevolently with the other person you may even find that what you were dwelling on was only a misunderstanding, and you were holding a grudge for nothing.

There may be something that happened for which there is no action to be taken. Either it just happened so long ago, or to address it would take you into a worse situation, or there simply is nothing to be done. You may have feelings that are difficult to let go of. Here’s something that may help:

This is very simple, but do it slowly; approach it as you would a strange animal. For very severe events, this may be too much and could bring up overwhelming feelings; consider getting help from someone skilled in dealing with trauma if this is the case.

Simply think of the person who hurt you, and begin to wonder what their situation was, what they may have been thinking, what they may have been going through. See the situation through their eyes for a moment, standing in their shoes.

By doing this, you may get a sense of empathy that allows you to understand what happened in a different light. You may even find that it is now easier to accept what happened and forgive the person who hurt you. Perhaps the shift in perspective will bring you to a larger context that may free you to a degree from the negative feelings.

This week, begin to notice when you find yourself carrying a grudge. Do what you can to broaden the context and bring a sense of acceptance, understanding, and, if possible, forgiveness to the event, the other person or people, and to yourself as well.

And the reason to do this is so that you can live a better life yourself, today and into the future, regardless of what other people may have done or failed to do in your past.

Holding a grudge is not about justice, for there is no action involved, just continual orbiting about a painful event.

Forgiveness is not primarily about letting the other person off the hook.

Forgiveness is a gift that you give to yourself, so that you can continue on your life’s journey with greater happiness.

WHY IS HAPPINESS A VIRTUE?

2005-02-02T14:49:00.000-08:00

The Virtue of Happiness
By Dr. Joel Wade

Happiness has often been seen as light, fun, playful, and superficial, and portrayed as sort of whimsical, as though serious people shouldn’t take happiness very seriously. I see it differently. I think our capacity to develop and earn a sense of happiness in life is a primary feedback mechanism for our own individual success in living, and our continued growth and consciousness as a species.

Virtue comes from the Latin Virtus, meaning manliness, excellence, goodness. Happiness is a virtue, first and foremost, because it takes virtuous choices and behavior to create a happy life.

Philosophers, theologians, psychologists, and moralists have long argued that people should behave virtuously, and their reasons often revolve around ideas that such behavior is in the interests of the greater good, that it makes for a better world. The emphasis, from this point of view, is on the external, on the effects upon others. It is often either implied or explicitly stated that were people to act upon their own self-interest, the world would quickly deteriorate into an amoral nightmare.

There is some truth to this. In fact, those arguing for a primarily external locus of virtue probably came to that stance from what they saw through history and in the world around them: that people often have been guided by their feelings and desires, and it is from such a primitive and unconscious context that humankind has been gradually awakening. If everyone acted upon their short-term interests, their impulses and desires, their feelings in the moment, the world would indeed soon deteriorate into chaos.

The truth, however, is much more hopeful and inspiring.

It is the human capacity to delay gratification, to plan and focus, to absorb oneself in tasks and direct oneself toward goals - goals that take time, discipline, and long-term dedication which in important ways defines our humanity. It is a person’s ability, in those moments when an impulse or feeling or desire courses through his or her body, to pause and consider whether or not following that impulse, that feeling, that desire, is what he or she really wants to do, that differentiates us from the other organisms of the world.

This capacity to choose to focus, to bring self-consciousness to our actions, and to guide the behavior of our lives, is also central to what leads to the satisfaction of a life well lived. This is what true happiness is made of.

In fact, much of what is considered vice - violence, brutality, addiction, promiscuity, irresponsibility, vulgarity, and laziness for example - can be defined by actions and choices that are dictated by feelings and desires in the moment, in the absence of self-conscious consideration.

Feelings and desires ebb and flow continually. Impulses are triggered by a multitude of internal and external stimuli. These movements within us, our emotions are a liquid sea of possibilities. There are those who believe that these movements are reliable guides that we should follow. But this view of guidance disconnects the head from the heart, conscious thought from emotions.

In truth, emotions are like perceptions. They can be useful information to consider, and they can just as often be the result of misperceptions or inaccurate assessments of what is going on. The challenge to us as human beings is to distinguish the accuracy and meaning of any given emotions, to master the internal forces in our lives, and to channel these toward the habits and goals we choose.

Of course, there is more to happiness that simply having well-developed impulse control.

Happiness involves gratitude, it involves appropriate forgiveness, it involves optimism, it involves hope, it requires integrity, it requires benevolence, and it requires the ability to foster good relationships. All of these qualities benefit the other people in our lives. Ultimately, good manners and civilized behavior stem from these qualities.

These qualities also assist in our competence. Optimism and happiness make for better performance at work. A friendly and benevolent attitude makes for more effective and satisfying relationships. And an optimistic stance toward life is correlated with greater longevity and better health. The practices that increase happiness also make us emotionally stronger, psychologically more resilient, better able to deal with problems and challenges, and therefore of more use to others when they need to count on us.

There are behaviors that decrease happiness: envy, gossip, holding a grudge, sitting around doing nothing for very long, pessimism, ingratitude, irresponsibility, lack of empathy and self-absorption, contempt, and violence, to name a few. These also obviously have undesirable effects upon other people as well.

I will state here my hypothesis and belief, that when life is approached with benevolence and integrity, the same sorts of behaviors and choices that make my own life good - not always or necessarily fun in the moment, but good, also serves the greater good of mankind.

This is not about perfection. Being human we are complex, and the choices and behaviors that lead toward greater happiness are learned and tested over time according to our particular strengths and situations. Each life is a work in progress, but there is a growing understanding of the direction toward which we can aim that progress, if we want to create a good, engaged, and meaningful life.

We can establish a positive feedback loop, a benevolent cycle, that can grow the good in the world while growing the good in our own life. There is no contradiction between having a good life yourself, and being good in the world - if you live with benevolence, with integrity, with forgiveness, with optimism, with consciousness. Work to grow these capacities that true happiness requires, and you will also be of value to your fellow human beings.

There is no need to change human nature or character. Human nature is as it is, and it is just fine as it is - even though tragic, messy, and complex.

It is what we do with our human nature that matters. We can choose to think, or not. We can also choose to direct our lives toward the behaviors that increase our own happiness and benefit our neighbors as well - or not.

And that is what makes happiness a virtue.

BECOMING AN ADULT

2005-01-11T14:49:00.000-08:00

The Virtue of Happiness
By Dr. Joel Wade

In his book Becoming Adult, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and co-author Barbara Schneider look at the differences between teenagers on their way to becoming grown-ups who are either more happy and successful, or more unhappy, complacent, and disengaged.

The central ingredient is the amount of time that teenagers spend in play or work, or both, or neither.

Play in this regard is defined as engagement in activities that are enjoyable in the moment; work is defined as activities that may or may not be enjoyable in the moment, but that serve to build skills or resources for future gratification.

Teenagers are happiest when what they are engaged in includes both work and play. They are least happy when what they are doing includes neither.

In addition, those teenagers who have learned to focus much of their time toward work and play end up being more happy and successful as adults. Working hard and playing hard makes for a good life.

If you have a teenager, think about how he or she spends his or her time.

Is she spending most of her time studying, doing extracurricular activities such as sports or work or internships? Or does she spend much of her time in front of the TV, hanging out at the Mall, playing video games, or in empty time either alone or with friends?

I know that quite a few of my friends who have kids are not very clear about this. They know that it would be better for their kids to be doing and sticking with more activities that are engaging and productive, but in the face of a status quo that values being conversant with what’s on TV, or being familiar with the latest video game, or hanging out doing nothing, they come to doubt how much to guide their kids toward activities that require long term dedication and focus, because these are seen by peers and shown in the media as being “un-cool”.

They are not sure whether to get their kids that X-box video player, or for how many hours per day they should limit them. They think they ought to have their kids learn a musical instrument, but when they don’t seem to feel like practicing during the first year of lessons, they think they ought to just give it up. They think that the hanging-out-with-friends-time is just as important and valuable as the reading or practicing or engaging in challenging and fun activities-time.

What the research shows, however, is that these choices are actually pretty darned clear.

It is much better for teenagers to spend their time reading, studying, practicing, playing in active structured activities, doing something truly fun and engaging with friends, working, focusing, and building their skills.

I am not advocating nagging and slave-driving your kids. I am not saying that there is no time for rest, or downtime, or goofing around with friends, or watching a movie or a good TV show, or playing a video game. But this should be a small percentage of a teenager’s actively awake hours - rest time between rich and engaging activity.

Unfortunately, for too many teenagers, these non-activities make up a majority of their waking hours. And this is a waste of precious time and life. You get good at what you practice, and if a teenager practices doing nothing, that is what they will master.

It is also important to teach your kids to engage in fun and constructive activities from the time they are very young, so that they come to value these activities, and seek them out on their own as they get older and become more independent.

Keep this in perspective, though. While it is good to teach and show kids from early on the benefits of engagement and perseverance, younger kids need more gentleness and flexibility with this; they need more time simply goofing around. Younger children will fill this time with their own imagination and creativity, which is crucial for their development.

For younger kids, think of it more in terms of your own intention and gentle - yet clear -guidance toward some activities over others, and expressing and modeling your own enthusiasm for knowledge and positive activity, so that they come to experience and accept that this is how a good life is lived.

Your teenager needs your guidance more than you might realize. Show them by your own actions that engagement is the way to live. Help your older kids to find circumstances and activities that are challenging and absorbing, and peers and mentors who support a lifestyle of engagement, and they will be more likely to build their adult lives around work and play that will see them through into a rich, happy and successful adult life.

TEACH YOUR KIDS OPTIMISM

2005-01-05T17:04:00.000-08:00

The Virtue of Happiness
By Dr. Joel Wade

Today I want to put Learned Optimism in a form that you can teach to your kids. For more detail on this, I recommend The Optimistic Child, by Martin Seligman. The information in today’s column is drawn from that excellent book.

Before you do this, take some time to explore your own internal dialogue. You are modeling optimism or pessimism for your kids all the time, and the best way for you to teach them optimism is to embody it yourself a lot of the time (perfection is not necessary). See my past columns on learned optimism - 'What You Say to Yourself Matters', and 'Know Your ABCs' -- and play with the suggestions here as well. Once you are comfortable with the principles, here’s what to do to begin teaching your kids:

The first step is to talk with your kids about their internal dialogue. We all talk to ourselves, but sometimes we’re not very aware that we’re doing this or what we are saying. Help your child explore what they say to themselves in different situations. Play with this, make it fun. And don’t dwell on it. A few minutes are fine. Then come back to it later.

You may spend a few weeks on just this. Once they get the idea and can tell you what they’re thinking to themselves, move on to the next step.

Next, begin to explore with them how what they say to themselves can affect how they feel. Ask them to tell you a difficult situation that could be painful for them, or think up one yourself to get things rolling - a scene with one child ignoring or teasing another, for example; or a teacher or parent scolding them.

Now draw a cartoon strip picture (or have them draw a picture) with 3 frames: Frame 1: a picture of the above event, 2) a picture of a boy or girl involved in #1 with an empty text balloon (to be filled in later), and 3) a picture of the same boy or girl, with an angry expression.

Ask your child to tell you what the boy or girl in the picture might say to themselves in picture #2 that could lead to them feeling angry.

Now draw (or have them draw) the same strip, but in the 3rd frame the boy or girl is sad. Ask your child to tell you what the boy or girl in the picture might say to themselves in picture #2 that could lead to them feeling sad.

Now draw (or have them draw) the same strip, but in the 3rd frame the boy or girl is feeling okay. Ask your child to tell you what the boy or girl in the picture might say to themselves in picture #2 that could lead to them feeling okay.

Now, pick a few other situations, and repeat the above with each one. Include at least one situation that would be likely to lead to feeling good as well. This will help them see how what they say to themselves can lead to them feeling bad even in a situation where they ought logically to feel good.

Doing the above will help them see and give them an experience of how what they say to themselves can lead them to feel different things. Once they see this, begin to play with these ideas over time. You may take many weeks of coming back to this exercise, using different examples from your child’s life. You get good at what you practice, so help them to practice these skills as different situations arise.

There is more that you can do, and I’ll have more to say about this as time goes on, but practicing what I’ve described here today should keep you busy for a while. Don’t rush, don’t nag, and don’t pressure. When your kids give you signals that they’ve had enough, back off for awhile. This is a skill that will serve them well throughout their lives. What’s important is that they learn to master it over time. There’s no rush.

Kids that learn the skills of learned optimism are more resilient, and are much less susceptible to helplessness and depression. These habits can form a benevolent cycle that your child can build on as they grow. Every challenge they overcome becomes a deposit in the bank of their resilience.

Help them to invest well.

POSITIVE RESOLUTIONS

2004-12-30T17:06:00.000-08:00

The Virtue of Happiness
By Dr. Joel Wade

Imagine if all of your problems were gone. Imagine if all of your negative impulses were completely tamed, if all of your bad habits were stopped. Imagine if everything negative in your behavior, your thoughts, your emotions were brought to neutral. Would that bring you happiness?

I don’t think so.

Much as we tend to focus on our shortcomings, other people’s shortcomings, all of the symptoms and vices that make life more difficult than it might be, eliminating the negatives is not what gives life most of its meaning. A neutral life is not a rich life.

(I don’t want to imply that it’s not important to notice negatives and seek to improve on them. It may be necessary for you to remove some negatives or work on areas of weakness as well. And for some, negatives are so pervasive - addiction, violence, impulse driven behavior - that without clearing away a great deal of negative behavior, there can be no positive. See Theodore Dalrymple’s Life at the Bottom for an idea of just how bad this can get. If you have any of this going on, please get into a good rehab program or find some other intensive help that will give you the support you need and will hold you to the changes you need to make. Do it now, don’t wait until tomorrow.)

Focusing on your shortcomings also sets your sights too low. A martial artist or a boxer knows that when you throw a punch, you don’t aim for the opponent, you aim through the opponent. This is what gives a blow its force. If you aim to eliminate the negatives in your life, you may reach that goal, but only just, and no further.

Alternatively when a person strives to build his or her strengths, that person will also often overcome many of their difficulties in that pursuit. As your life becomes more expansive, the symptoms, the shortcomings, the deficits can often remain their same size, which means that they become proportionately smaller to your now larger life.

Find out what your strengths are, build on them, design your life more around them, find ways of using your strengths in situations where you have not used them before, and in ways that you have not considered before. This is a better path to success and happiness than dwelling on the negatives, and focusing on trying with all your might to eliminate them.

When you focus on a weakness and attempt to strengthen it, it tends to be a much more difficult task, and once you have brought some change to bear, it is much more difficult to maintain that change. When you build on a strength, it is usually a much more robust change, an easier change to make due to greater leverage, and it tends to hold over time.

Now is the time of year when many people make resolutions - changes that they would like to pursue over the New Year. These often take the form of “Thou Shalt Not”: I won’t eat Twinkies. I won’t nag my kids so much. I won’t read books while driving.

Take some time and focus on what was good over the past year; things that worked activities that you would like to continue, engaging projects that have inspired you. Having done this, create a list of positive resolutions for 2005 (this idea is from Martin Seligman’s wonderful book, Authentic Happiness).

Instead of thinking about what you want to stop doing in 2005, focus on what you want to make happen in 2005. I might suggest that among these you include searching for three or four ways that you can use the strengths you have to deal with areas of weakness in your life.

For example, you may be not so good at prudence, discretion, and caution, but very strong on creativity and curiosity. Think of how you might apply your creativity and curiosity to either imagine the trouble you might get into if you aren’t a bit more careful in a particular situation, or you might notice how you have had to use these strengths to get yourself out of the pickles you’ve gotten into. (The Marx Brothers made a very good living demonstrating the latter)

Coming up with positive resolutions in this way can be a great thing to do with your family, bringing even very young kids into the fun. Write these down and keep them where they can be easily seen. Check in with each other or with yourself about them from time to time, to see how you’re progressing.

This makes for a much more fun, expansive, and effective exercise. You’re likely to fulfill some or many over the next year, and you may find that some of those negatives you had considered dwelling upon become smaller as well.

I wish you all a wonderful, resilient, and rich year to come, filled with the Virtue of Happiness.

WHAT YOU SAY TO YOURSELF MATTERS

2004-12-16T17:06:00.000-08:00

The Virtue of Happiness
By Dr. Joel Wade

I want to revisit the concept of learned optimism this week, building on what I said in 'Know Your ABCs'.

There are people who have literally made the best out of existence in a concentration camp, while there are others who have lives overflowing with blessings yet can find nothing good to say about their situation. There are people who live in miserable conditions, but who even so would consider themselves happy. There are people who in the midst of an abundance of love, health, and opportunities, feel as miserable as the before-mentioned folks should feel.

Why is this so?

Because how you interpret a situation has everything to do with the effect that situation has upon you. Consider the following scenario:

1. You have been working on a business deal for some time, and have put a great deal of time and effort into this. You present it to your potential client, who listens attentively but then tells you that they aren’t willing to put money into it right now.

2. You tell yourself: “I have no ability for this kind of thing. My presentation was horrible as always, I’m just no good at making a sale, and worse yet at creating something of value that people will want to pay for”.

How do you suppose you will feel? I would guess somewhat depressed and demoralized.

Now let’s look at the same scenario, with a different internal dialogue:

1. Same scenario as above.

2. You tell yourself: I’m so disappointed. I know the economy has been slow in the area, and people aren’t paying for the kind of projects I’m offering. Still, I think my presentation skills could use some work, maybe some coaching or doing a program like ‘Toastmasters’ could help. But all in all, I did my best, and for whatever reason, my potential client wasn’t ready to buy right now. Maybe I need to rethink this, maybe there’s a way that I could redesign it given the feedback I just received.”

How do you suppose you will feel now? Probably disappointed, but maybe ready to tackle some of the problems that you now see.

The first internal dialogue focused on elements of your character - unchangeable things, things that are permanent (“horrible, as always”), pervasive (“worse yet at creating something of value that people will want to pay for”), and personal (“I have no ability for this kind of thing, I’m just no good at making a sale”).

The second was not a list of positive affirmations, nor was it a denial of the objectively negative elements of the situation. It was, however, put in hopeful terms that one could grow and learn from. It was changeable (“the economy has been slow in the area”), specific (“I think my presentation skills could use some work, maybe some coaching or doing a program like ‘Toastmasters’ could help”), and impersonal (“my potential client wasn’t ready to buy right now”).

There is no difference in objective reality between these two scenarios. The only difference is in what you said to yourself afterwards. The first example is a pessimistic interpretation that leaves you hopeless and helpless. The second example is an optimistic interpretation that leaves you with some useful and productive action that you can take that may improve your prospects in the future.

Now, you practice a few. I will provide several scenarios, for each one your job is to write down two explanations to yourself that will leave you feeling helpless and hopeless, and two explanations that will leave you feeling more energized and positive.

1) You come home and your wife or husband is obviously annoyed and barely says a word to you for about fifteen minutes.
2) You get pulled over for speeding.
3) You find out that you have exceeded your goals for a work project.
4) You come home and your wife or husband is delighted to see you.

Remember, for a negative event, a pessimistic interpretation is permanent, pervasive, and personal; an optimistic interpretation is changeable, specific, and impersonal. For a positive event you reverse this: an optimistic interpretation of a positive event is permanent, pervasive, and personal; a pessimistic interpretation is changeable, specific, and impersonal.

Once you’ve done this with the above examples, come up with a few more from your own life to play with. After you get the idea, begin practicing optimistic interpretations regularly every day for different situations in your life. You might even play with this together with your spouse, or a friend.

This may not be easy. It may be very, very hard work for you. But the more difficult it is, the more likely it is that you will benefit from practicing this regularly over time. Stay with it, in time it will become more and more automatic. This can make a very real difference in your life - ultimately, it may mean the difference between happiness and depression, whatever your circumstances may be.

THE MYTH OF THE GOLDEN AGE

2004-10-28T17:07:00.000-07:00

The Virtue of Happiness
By Dr. Joel Wade

Do you long for the good old days, when life was simpler, people were healthier, air was cleaner, people were more prosperous on one income than they are now on two, morality was stronger, the world was more civilized, our country was freer, and there was greater opportunity for the innovative mind?

If you are longing for these things as though they existed in a more idyllic past, you are mistaken. Every one of these qualities of life has not just improved, but has improved dramatically over the past 50 years. I recommend to you Gregg Easterbrook’s book The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse.

Among his observations: Since about 1990, the crime rate in the US has been going down. Except for the level of greenhouse gasses, every environmental trend in the US and Europe has been positive, for decades. Average life expectancy in the US has grown from 41 years in 1900 (when there was a lot of infant mortality and women dying in childbirth), to around 77 year today; it is about 66 years in the entire world. Drug, alcohol, and cigarette use in the US has been declining. Divorce rates and the rate of children born outside of marriage in the US, though way up from the 1950’s, are actually now in a shallow decline. Teen sexual activity and teen pregnancy is down. IQ scores are up 20% from a century ago. The Cold War is won, freedom and democracy is spreading, and wealth is growing.

This is a small sample. I could fill a whole chapter of a book outlining these, as Easterbrook does. Why, then, is it so common to reflect back upon better days, simpler times, and clearer morals?

One simple reason, according to Harvard psychologist Peter Jencks: We were kids then.

Now, some of you may have had horrible childhoods, and so you may have a much different experience. But think of what your responsibilities are as an adult, how much time you spend thinking, worrying, arranging, and working. If you have kids, think of how much you do to care for them, to make sure they are getting good food, a good education, good experiences as they grow. Think of how much you take care of that they simply do not need to worry about.

Your parents, or other adults in your life, did that to some degree for you, too. And those days, however full and challenging and sometimes painful and overwhelming, were also free of many of the burdens that you carry now, as an adult.

That is why many people think back on earlier times as a sort of golden age, when things were so much simpler. They were much simpler since they were kids, but they were not simpler for the grown ups.

You may personally be in a better or worse place in your personal life right now. But with all of the problems and conflicts and worries and troubles that you may be facing today, the world around you is actually closer to a “golden age” today than it has ever been before.

Knowing that the world is getting better - much better - and not worse as the media and many politicians would have us believe, is an important context shift for many people. Easterbrook says he is on a crusade among his media friends to get them to begin reporting this, but he has not had any success so far. There is just too much investment in the idea that “bad news sells” for them to change their tune, even in the face of near miraculous improvement in nearly every element of life.

So if you’re waiting to see this on TV before you let go of a portion of worry and allow yourself to feel a fuller measure of gratitude for the direction the world is going, you’ll be waiting a long time. Turn off your TV, and begin to look at the real improvements multiplying all around you.

Start now. Read Easterbrook’s book. And try completing the following sentences about ten times each (with new endings each time): “If it turns out the world is getting better and not worse…”; “If I were 5% more aware of how things are improving in the world…”.

We are now living in an expanding, improving golden age of which our parents and grandparents would have been in awe. We all need to be in awe of the life we have to enjoy today.

AGING WELL

2004-10-20T17:09:00.000-07:00

The Virtue of Happiness
By Dr. Joel Wade

I want to recommend book to you, Aging Well, by George Vaillant. Vaillant is the director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, a longitudinal study that has followed a group of men in great detail from their time as Harvard undergraduates throughout their lives into old age. In this book he draws upon this study and two other longitudinal studies, one of gifted women, and one of inner city men, and finds that much of what we have heard about growing old well is not exactly true.

There are things that we have all heard should matter in terms of living healthy aging, but upon closer inspection are not really factors at all. The longevity of your ancestors, stress, the characteristics of your parents, childhood temperament such as shyness and anxiety, general ease in social relationships, and cholesterol level, all do certainly make an impact on the quality of your life and health earlier in life, in young adulthood into middle age. But later on these don’t seem to matter much.

As Vaillant said to me when I had an opportunity to speak with him a few weeks ago, “Childhood history is like the light and heat of the sun, the further you travel away from it, the less impact that light and heat has upon you”.

On the other hand, there are clear patterns of behavior that have been practiced by what Vaillant calls the “happy-well” of these studies. If you want to prepare yourself for a happy and healthy old age, do four or more of the following:

1) Don’t abuse alcohol. Alcoholism does the most damage of anything. People die young, live depressed, stay lonely, and stay stuck in harmful behavior patterns due to the chronic abuse of alcohol. Contrary to some thinking about this, it is not depression that causes alcoholism; it is alcoholism that causes depression. If this is you, please seek help now. Not tomorrow, not next week, not next month, not when you get your nerve up. Do it now. There are many fine treatment centers and programs available around the country, find one that suits you. Do it now.

2) Don’t smoke, or at least stop by about age 45. This one should be obvious.

3) Have a stable marriage.

4) Keep at a healthy weight - not a perfect weight, just a healthy weight. Check with your doctor to see what that would be for you.

5) Get some exercise. You don’t have to be Jack LaLane here, just regular walking or other such physical activity. Again, ask your doctor.

6) Develop an adaptive coping style. As Vaillant says it, this, “refers to our capacity to turn lemons into lemonade, and not to turn molehills into mountains.” This involves a quality of emotional maturity, and includes many of the practices that I talk about in my columns. Don’t just follow your impulses, think about them first; develop a sense of humor, particularly regarding yourself; develop more empathy and less self-absorption; practice gratitude and forgiveness, focus on strengths, not weaknesses, in yourself and those around you.

7) Get more education. A college education is correlated with longevity, and the closer you are to this, the better. The benefits of more education may have a lot to do with how you think about and relate to the other six above.

These are the lessons of hundreds of people who have lived well and poorly, loved and lonely, satisfied and disappointed, in good and poor health, most of them well into old age. As Vaillant says, “Old age is like a minefield; if you see footprints leading to the other side, step in them.”

ETHICS AND THE PARADOX OF CHOICE

2004-09-15T17:10:00.000-07:00

The Virtue of Happiness
By Dr. Joel Wade

It can be helpful to think of your ethical principles as non-reversible commitments to yourself.

I have referred in the past to Barry Schwartz’s fantastic book The Paradox of Choice. My point in that column was that it is useful when making a commitment, as much as possible, to make that commitment non-reversible.

This is not always appropriate, of course. There is much to be said for the freedom to change one’s mind. But there is so much anxiety that can be created by continually considering and re-considering the decisions and commitments you have made; wondering whether there might be something better: a better mate, a better house, a better car, a better job, a better stereo system. A person can spend far too much time second-guessing what he or she has committed to.

If you do this too much it can be like renting your life. What will you take better care of, a home that you own, or a home that you rent? When you rent, you keep your options open and can jump toward new opportunities with ease; when you own you have responsibilities that can certainly be annoying and burdensome at times, but you get a kind of satisfaction and sense of constancy that you cannot achieve in any other way.

One can live one’s life in the same way, keeping continually open to possibilities and opportunities, without ever settling into one’s choices with gusto.

What does all of this have to do with ethics?

There is a reason why people with strong and consistent ethical values appear more comfortable in their skin, can make decisions more easily, and do not change their positions with each new nuance of an issue: They have already made their ethical decision long before any particular situation arises. We sense and sometimes say of such people that they are “at home with themselves”.

When a person has done this, they have made a non-reversible commitment to their ethical principles.

If my ethical principles include telling the truth, then I don’t ever have to consider telling a lie, no matter how strongly I am tempted by fortune and glory. I have already committed to that choice long before the temptation arises. I will have caveats of course, such as: 1) Extreme circumstances: I would lie to a terrorist to save my family in a heartbeat; or 2) A sense of consideration for the appropriateness of any disclosure - I don’t say every feeling that passes through me in the name of “honesty”, I don’t disclose things to people that are none of their business, etc.

If my ethical principles include not stealing, then I will not be tempted by the opportunity to take what is not mine, even when “nobody will know.” I will be conscious of the fact that I will know, and that I will know that in stealing anything I will have violated my commitment with myself.

I have heard some people say that this seems like a lot of work - and it can be, at first, if one has never before made such an ethical commitment. But in truth it makes day to day life much simpler, can free up a great deal of energy, and can relieve one of a great deal of anxiety.

As with any other commitment, making a commitment to your ethical principles non-reversible will remove a great burden from your own conscience, and will make your moral decisions much simpler.

WHAT MAKES A GOOD SOCIETY?

2004-08-18T17:11:00.000-07:00

The Virtue of Happiness
By Dr. Joel Wade

There are things that an individual can do to improve his or her well being. There are things that couples and families can do to improve their relationships. Are there things that a country can do to improve the overall well being of its citizens?

There are.

Though there is much work left to be done, research is beginning to sketch a picture of the elements that contribute to a nation’s overall well being. Ed Diener and Martin Seligman in Beyond Money: Toward an Economy of Well Being (Psychological Science in the Public Interest, July, 2004) have reviewed the research that seeks to measure the well being of societies. Looking at their findings can give each of us a direction to aim for in our efforts to improve the country where we live.

Here is what they have found:

Countries with a high degree of well being are democracies, with high economic and political freedom, individualism, human rights, effective and stable governments, strong economies, with low rates of unemployment and inflation, with a per-capita income above about $10,000; they are religious, and they have a high degree of social capital - which means that people trust each other, are mutually helpful, and tend to be members of organizations outside of work.

In the United States, we are fortunate to have most of these elements working for us - not that they are perfect, mind you, so we mustn’t get complacent about it. There is one area though that looks to have decreased, and that is in the degree of social capital. This may be one of the factors that have lead to the rise in depression over the past several decades.

People trust each other less; we are more mobile so it is more difficult to have a sense of neighborhood or community. Our government does more of the caretaking, and those of us who can afford it tend to hire people to do the work of caretaking, so that this quality of caring for your neighbor in times of trouble is much less common than it once was, and this usually takes a big disaster to mobilize.

If you live in a country other than the U.S., you can look to the above list and wonder what might be done to move your country more in the direction suggested by these findings. This may mean working toward establishing a freer society, or arguing in favor of greater individualism.

But there is something more to consider, beyond the well being of a country. What sort of a country tends to foster greatness? From what sort of societies has a Michelangelo, an Isaac Newton, or a Beethoven arisen?

In his fascinating book Human Achievement, Charles Murray has explored the elements that have brought forth such creative genius. What he found might sound simple, but it holds a deep insight into the nurturing of genius.

These cultures all value truth, beauty, and goodness.

Sadly, these are not qualities that are generally affirmed today, in the U.S. or anywhere else in the world. Take a look at our politically biased scientists, the angst and darkness of much of modern art, and the cynicism of much of the political and social commentary.

If we could begin to move these qualities toward the direction of truth, beauty, and goodness, it would be a contribution well worth the effort.

Consider this as your civics homework for this week. Is there anything you could do to move the ball towards greater trust and helpfulness - one person to another? Have you been putting off joining an organization that you think would contribute to furthering your values? And is there anything that you can do in your work or private life that might nudge our society a bit more in the direction of truth, beauty, or goodness?

The really fun thing is, as you consider these questions, and as you begin to take action from them, you will find that this sort of involvement will also improve your personal happiness. And as I have already discussed in earlier columns, as you create a happier life for yourself, you will also have a more benevolent influence on others. That’s what I call a benevolent cycle.

And that’s the Virtue of Happiness.

KNOW YOUR ABC'S

2004-05-19T17:11:00.000-07:00

The Virtue of Happiness
By Dr. Joel Wade

Martin Seligman pioneered the understanding of what is called “learned helplessness. He found that animals and people could get so used to not being able to act to improve their situation that they simply give up. This was a very important contribution to our understanding of depression and passivity.

In his book, Learned Optimism, he demonstrates how to learn, not helplessness, but its antithesis: optimism. The benefits of learning optimism are substantial. The studies have shown that there can be a difference of eight years between the life span of an optimistic person and that of a pessimistic person.

The optimist, of course, lives longer.

When one learns to be more optimistic, one can also expect to be healthier in general, to suffer less from depression, and to be more effective in one’s life. Optimists are happier and more resilient.

When something good happens for an optimist, they tend to see it as personal (I made this happen), pervasive (I make lots of things like this happen), and permanent (I always will make these sorts of things happen).

When something good happens for a pessimist, they tend to see it as impersonal (this happened to me somehow), specific (it is unusual that this happened), and temporary (it’s not likely that this will happen again).

The reverse is true when it comes to bad things. The optimist will see a bad event as impersonal, specific, and temporary; while the pessimist will see a bad event as personal, pervasive, and permanent.

Fortunately for us, of all the strengths that can improve one’s level of happiness, optimism is one that we know can be significantly improved with practice.

How can you improve your optimism? Know your ABC’s, of course. (This exercise can be found in more detail in Seligman’s books Learned Optimism and Authentic Happiness):

A) When you find yourself looking at an event from a pessimistic perspective, first identify the adversity - whatever the situation is that is causing you trouble: “My wife and I are having an argument,” for example.

B) Then identify the belief that brings you to be feeling badly ”We’re always arguing, she never understands me, I just can’t express myself ever in a way that seems to work.”

C) Then notice what the consequence of that belief is: “I feel awful, I feel hurt and angry, I feel afraid of the conflict, I have a sense of despair over how our relationship is going.”

D) The next step is disputation, challenging this belief that is bringing you to feel badly: “Wait a minute. I love my wife, and she loves me. We’re having an argument, which is to be expected in any relationship from time to time. We are not always arguing, if I added it up, we probably argue a fraction of the time we have been together. She actually understands me quite well most of the time, but right now we have a misunderstanding. If it were true that she never understands me, or that I never can express myself effectively, we would never have come to know and love each other. So that’s baloney. Right now we are having a misunderstanding, period. At some point, probably very soon, we will understand each other again. Maybe there’s a way I can help to bring that about.”

E) What you can expect through doing this is energization, feeling a sense of freedom from the pessimism and more energy regarding this issue: “I now feel some hope, and a sense of perspective on the disagreement that we’re in the midst of right now. This is my best friend I’m dealing with. I feel lighter and more secure.”

Practice this. A lot. It will not always come out perfectly, and there will likely be times when it is extremely hard to bring yourself to do this. But the more you practice this when the stakes are lower - with more minor disputes or ruminations - the more it will become second nature for you when you really need it.

It will also help your general orientation towards life to become more optimistic over time. The rewards of this in health, happiness, and resilience are well worth the investment in time and energy.

So the next time you find yourself responding to adversity with pessimism, you needn’t feel helpless, you now know you have a tool: just remember your ABC’s!

COMMIT TO YOUR COMMITMENTS

2004-04-22T17:12:00.000-07:00

The Virtue of Happiness
By Dr. Joel Wade

Remember the old traditional marriage vows? “…For better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part.”

There are good reasons for these words, and other words of commitment like them, and these reasons are not just the ones you might think.

Of course there’s the obvious element of duty, of keeping your commitments to others to establish trust and to maintain an honorable reputation - with yourself as well as with others.

Then there’s the recognition that others are counting on you, and that your success or failure at sticking with your commitment to them will affect their lives, particularly when children are involved.

These are important reasons. A good life involves good dealings with other people. But, as with most if not all of the virtues, there is also a very important component to commitment that relates directly to personal happiness.

When you make a commitment, you are making a choice, you are deciding upon a course of action that will continue into the future to some extent. When you stick with your commitment, you are limiting the number of choices that are open to active consideration. This may seem like a negative - limiting your choices - but it is not.

We all know the upside to increased choice. But there is a downside as well. Every choice takes time and energy. There is a certain degree of anxiety that accompanies every choice. When we have too many choices open, our time and energy becomes monopolized by these open choices. It is far better to decide that some choices are non-reversible (Barry Schwartz talks about this in his recent book, The Paradox of Choice, a book I highly recommend).

Living well is largely a matter of setting priorities, spending your money, time, and energy on what matters to you, and not spending it on what does not matter to you. Spending your money, time, and energy on keeping your options open, when you could be spending them on something of greater value - like making the most of your marriage or your other non-reversible choices - is a poor use of choice.

When someone makes commitments in this fashion, others can trust that his actions will match his words, and his actions will have consistency over time - and so can he. It’s a nice, solid feeling to be around someone whose commitments are commitments. In part this is because it is a nice solid feeling to be someone whose commitments are commitments.

Your homework this week is to consider which decisions you are keeping somewhat open, and which of these you could close by simply deciding that they are not reversible. Spend some time imagining what it would be like to close these options. You may find that you have more time and energy available to put toward other things that matter more to you.

Living With Integrity

2004-03-11T17:13:00.000-08:00

The Virtue of Happiness
By Dr. Joel Wade

“Father, what is honor?”
“Honor, Son, is the gift that a man gives to himself.”
--from the 1995 movie “Rob Roy”

When you think of a person of integrity, what do you think of? Probably someone who is honest, who follows through on his or her commitments, who does what’s right even when it’s difficult, who walks his walk and talks his talk.

A simple way of thinking about integrity is congruence.

Integrity means that the various elements of your self are not disconnected or scattered about. What you believe is congruent with what you say. What you say is congruent with what you do.

What do you believe? What do you value? What is meaningful to you?

When you feel challenged on any of these, do you assert your values? Do you speak what is true for you, or do you tend to keep it to yourself? Do you tend to take the action that those words suggest? It is certainly important to be thoughtful about what you say and do, but in general, do your words and deeds correspond with what you value?

What are your strengths?

Think what your life would be like if you designed your daily life around your strengths. To live in congruence with your strengths is to be congruent with your temperament, with your gifts, and with the best within you. (If you haven’t done so already, go to www.authentichappiness.com and take the VIA Strengths Questionnaire, to get a better sense of your strengths. Then take some time to think about how you could arrange your life to be more in line with those strengths).

Integrity is always a work in progress. Every new awareness, every new piece of information, every new understanding, can be actively integrated into who you are - or not. To live with integrity means to actively strive to integrate what you do and what you experience. This can be difficult work at times, particularly when it is new for you; but this work, and the congruence you earn through it, contributes mightily to a sense of satisfaction and happiness.

As with so much of virtue, people have often seen integrity as a thing you do as some sort of external duty. But I see it as a fundamental act of self-love. It is also central to the ability to earn happiness.

Contrary to what much of 20th century psychology and philosophy taught, character does seem to matter a great deal with respect to a person’s happiness. The idea that character doesn’t matter, that we are happy only to the extent that our environment has made us happy, can now be considered one of those archaic relics from a past century: the last one.

Try writing this sentence beginning on a piece of paper: “If I were to live with 5% more integrity this week…” and finish it with ten different endings, quickly, no editing, no elaboration, no complex details. Do this each day for a week (exercise courtesy of Nathaniel Branden see www.nathanielbranden.net ).

At the end of the week, go back and look over what you have written. Spend some time wondering about it, considering how you might be able to use what you’ve written.

Look for ways that you could increase your integrity just 5%, and I think you’ll have given yourself a gift you can long cherish.

Happy Frugal New Year!

2003-12-31T17:13:00.000-08:00

The Virtue of Happiness
By Dr. Joel Wade

Why frugal?

My sister has a way of putting important things simply and clearly. She defines frugality as “spending your money on what you want, and not spending it on what you don’t want”. I think this applies not just to money, but to time and energy, as well.

How much money have you blown this year on things that you have hardly used, or that were in some other way a waste?

How much time and energy have you blown?

As you think of the year to come, consider how you would like to spend your money, your time, and your energy over the course of the coming year.

There are things we do because we are simply in the habit of doing them, even though they bring us no happiness, and may detract from our joy in life - I think of the average of four hours a day of TV that kids in the U.S. watch, when studies have shown that the usual emotional state experienced while watching a sit-com is mild depression.

There are things we do that give us pleasure. Things we eat, things we buy that feel good but don’t build toward anything beyond the moment. Some of these things serve to build a sense of joy, and bring fun and richness to our life. As such this sort of pleasure is part of a life well lived.

Sometimes these things can actually be self-destructive, as with drug abuse or other thoughtless behavior.

There are things we do that absorb us, during which we experience what author Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow”. This may or may not be fun in the moment, but it leads to the experience of life as pleasurable and gratifying.

There are things we do that have great meaning for us. Things that make the world a better place, things that move us and touch the people in our lives, living with integrity, following through with our commitments, earning an honorable reputation with ourselves. This, too, may be fun or not in the moment. But it leads to tremendous gratification and deep happiness.

Think about this as you decide what you will spend your money, time, and energy on this year. Will this contribute to your pleasure, flow, or meaning? If not, why are you doing it? If it is to fulfill an obligation, chances are it will probably contribute to flow and meaning, even if it is not something you particularly enjoy. If it is purely for short-term pleasure, think about the amount of money, time, and energy you are spending, and consider whether you are investing enough toward a longer-term happiness.

If it is hurtful, ask yourself how you think you can afford to continue doing it.

I think of this when we buy gifts for our kids. Are they fun? Good. Are they fun in a way that helps them learn, focus, explore, and absorb themselves more deeply? That’s much better.

Shall we go on a trip? Is the destination and itinerary fun? Great. Is it fun and an adventure we can enjoy and learn from, savor and treasure? That’s much better.

Shall I watch TV or read a book? Shall I surf the net or go for a hike in the woods? Shall I spend money on a fun, expensive toy with lots of bells and whistles that will lose its novelty in a week or two, or save that money toward an adventure to somewhere I’d love to visit?

Shall I devote myself to my wife, my kids, my dear friends? Or shall I let some or all of them down in pursuit of an affair, or some other momentarily pleasant but otherwise destructive impulse?

Shall I read a story to my kids, or tell them to go to bed while I flip through the TV channels? Shall I talk with my husband or wife about our dreams and goals as friends and mates, or shall I think about what I’m dissatisfied with, and argue about some irritation or shortcoming?

Shall I gripe about what’s wrong with something or other, or look for what I have to be grateful for and focus on that?

Shall I ruminate about what has been bad about my life, my childhood? Or shall I focus on what I can do to make a good life now, all things considered?

Shall I stay at a secure job that I hate, or move toward a more risky but potentially more gratifying and meaningful career?

Shall I make a habit of eating a bunch of candy and ice cream as the core of my diet, or shall I eat good meals with lots of fruit and veggies?

These are all the same fundamental question. Do I spend my money, time, and energy on those things that bring long-term joy, gratification, and meaning? Do I spend it on things that give mostly short-term pleasure? Do I spend it on things that I actually do not want?

In the coming year, shall I spend my resources on what makes my life a happy one? Or shall I spend it on things that don’t?

Find what matters for you this year, and invest in that.

And have a frugal, Happy New Year!