Belief Makers

So often, you hear about people entering a new relationship and in the process losing themselves. Over the years, I've had many friends who 'fell' in love. It all started with attraction: not just to appearance, but to looks, intelligence, money, energy, charm, and so on.

Attraction is powerful. Most of us are not able to clearly articulate what it is in another person that attracts us. At best, we can identify elements of attraction (someone's smile or their laugh or their wit), but we can't come up with an overall blueprint of what would make a person attractive to us. Our not being able to clearly identify what it is in others that makes them attractive makes attraction even more powerful, almost magical.

As though attraction were not already powerful enough, most of us would probably describe 'being attracted' as something that happens to us, not something that we do. Indeed, enchantment might be a better word to use when describing our experience of attraction.

Charmed
Now, there are all sorts of challenges that come with being enchanted.

First, being enchanted causes us to focus on the elements of attraction to the exclusion of the elements of repulsion. We're so attracted to his winning smile and confidence that we ignore the times when he seems controlling and rigid. We're so enamored of her warm voice and soft caress that we ignore times when she's unkind to or impatient with others. We build up an image of the other person that is indeed positive, but unbalanced. Unlike seeing flaws in the full light of day and then not judging them, we blind ourselves to them.

Second, being enchanted causes us to ignore or casually dismiss the trail of discarded passions that we abandon along the road to a deeper (and more time consuming) relationship. We put other relationships on the back burner. We put plans on hold. We spend less and less time on other interests.

I have a friend Jeff who is the most naturally gifted musician I've ever met...

When I we were both fifteen or so and just discovered be-bop, I bought some Charlie Parker records. For a fifteen year old, I had a good ear; I could listen to any pop or rock song and write down what was being played. As I listened to Charlie Parker, I was completely blown away. He played so fast and so differently, that I could just barely keep up listening to what he'd played, let alone write it down.

I played the record for Jeff who seemed to kind of space out as though memorized by the music. When the tune ended, he picked up his trumpet and started playing back Charlie's riffs verbatim. He'd never before heard bebop let alone the specific recording and yet...

In a composition class at Berklee College of Music, we would gather weekly to have our compositions reviewed by our instructor and to have them played by students. One week, I wrote a brass quartet that I was really proud of.

After looking at my scribblings for just a few seconds, my teacher looked up at me telling me, "Look, when writing for other instruments, you really need to get a better understanding of the range and capacity each of the instruments. You can't just write something because it sounds good in your head. This trumpet part has intervals that no trumpet player is ever going to be able to play."

Ahh..., little did he know. Jeff was the trumpet player in the quartet that day.

Anyway, a couple of years later, Jeff was enchanted. I don't think that he even owns a trumpet today.

Third, enchanted is a set up for bitterness and resentment. It's not that we don't see the flaws; we simply ignore them. It's not that we forget all that we've given up; we just look away from it. When the enchantment ends, all that stuff comes crashing down on us.

Nothing Personal
Our experience of enchantment is not limited to personal relationships or even to people. We can be enchanted by pretty much anything: big companies offering bright futures and money... owning a big house or an expensive car or a boat... running off to join the Peace Corps... becoming a rock star. You name it; pretty much anything can be the source of our enchantment.

There's a saying: the two happiest days in a boat owner's life are the day he purchases his boat and the day that he sells his boat. With slight modification, this is probably the case in many relationships; couples are happiest when they first get together and after they break up (assuming that the vindictive bitterness thing doesn't settle in.)

Breaking the Spell
The crazy part about the power of attraction is that, even after being burned by it, we'll immediately embrace it again. It's as though we think that the culprit was the object of attraction, not attraction itself.

I have friends who, after freeing themselves from long, unhappy, unfulfilling relationships that began with attraction, almost immediately purchase a ticket for the next ride. Some even use attraction to someone new to help inspire to them break free from someone old. And the cycle continues...

On the flip side, I have friends who are unhappy in their relationships simply because they're 'suddenly' confronted with all the things that they've ignored and denied all along. They 'suddenly' become aware of the less attractive aspects of the other person or that they've 'given up so much'. It's as though their partner tricked them or somehow did it to them.

In the end, as long as you view attraction as something that cannot be understood or something that happens to you, you're, well... you're screwed. Nothing you can do about it.

If on the other hand, you view attraction as something that you can understand and something that you do, then there's hope.

Think about it; there must something in your life to which you were once not attracted, but are now attracted: sushi... girls... guys... books... football... drama.. adventure... math... music... running?

I've been told by lots of people that I'm rather an acquired taste. Acquiring taste is essentially our shaping and changing that to which we're attracted. We do it all the time. It's just that we tend not to do it deliberately or systematically.

If you don't want to buy into owning your sense of attraction, how about simply better understanding it. Next time you go to a restaurant, make a game out of identifying what you find attractive and unattractive in others that you can see and hear. Take turns with your dinner companion(s) identifying what and why. Write it all down and look for patterns as they emerge. If they don't keep playing until they do.

Finally, if you insist on buying into the whole enchantment thing, at least be aware of the trade-offs that you make along the way. Note them. Talk about them. Don't let them slide by hoping that something will change. It won't.

Happy Wednesday!

Teflon

Labels: all blogs, mark tuomenoksa, philosophy, relationships

Last night, I thought more about the 'getting it right' phenomenon I wrote about yesterday in More than You Know. Apparently I was doing much of my thinking while sleeping, because at about 4AM, I suddenly sat up in bed recalling a story about virtuoso jazz pianist Oscar Peterson and virtuoso classical pianist Vladamir Horowitz. As the story goes (whole tone scales playing in the background)...

Horowitz determined that he would to put to rest forever the question of which school of pianists was truly the greatest, the jazz school or the classical school.

Horowitz purchased a copy of one of Peterson's solo recordings and learned to play one of the songs verbatim. Not only did he learn to play exactly the same notes as Peterson, but he also learned to play them flawlessly, even better than the original recording.

Horowitz arranged for a meeting with Peterson. As the two talked about the merits of the schools of music they each represented, Horowitz said to Peterson, I'd like you to hear something. He sat down at Peterson's piano and played the song he'd learned with all the virtuosity and grace of a classical master. When he was done, he turned to Peterson and said, "So, what do you think?"

Peterson who had improvised the original recording, looked at Horowitz and said, "That was great. Play something else."

Getting It Right
Over the years, I've come to realize that no matter what the discipline (music, snowboarding, medicine, business), there are innovators and there are performers. This morning, I came to the
conclusion that the primary difference between innovators and performers is how they feel about 'getting it right'.

Innovators tend not to be too concerned about getting it right. They make lots of mistakes. They're often sloppy in regard to their technique. Their main motivation is pushing the envelope, doing things that haven't been done before.

Performers on the other hand are concerned specifically with getting it right. In fact, not just getting it right, but getting it perfect. Performers may innovate in incremental ways, honing and refining what has been created by others. But in general, their motivations and skills are focused on manifesting the perfect instantiation of something well defined and understood.

Of course, you occasionally encounter someone who is both an innovator and a performer. Bach didn't just compose all those fugues, he could improvise them on the fly. Sean White seems certainly to be redefining the sport of snowboarding while also being the sport's greatest performer. However, people like Sean White and Johann Sebastian Bach seem to be pretty rare.

What's Wrong with Being Great?
Over the years, I've encountered a lot of people who were great performers, but who wanted to be counted among the innovators. In some cases, their being great performers simply wasn't enough for them; they saw being an innovator as somehow better or more prestigious or more important than being a performer.

To some extent, society seems to be of two minds. In the near term, we seem to gravitate to the great performers. However, over the long term, we tend to remember only the innovators. If you were to ask someone about current musicians that he knows, it's likely that all of them would be performers. However, if you were to ask him about musicians from two-hundred years ago, it's likely that he'd list composers, not performers.

The problem with great performers who don't consider being a great performer good enough is that they tend not to be very good at innovating. Getting it right simply gets in the way. Their work tends to be derivative rather than creative, borrowing liberally from what has been done before. When they do 'create', the creation doesn't have the kind of structural integrity found in the work of great innovators. They lack a sense of systemness. They may not even understand the notion of systemness.

In the end, innovation requires a willingness to completely abandon 'getting it right'. In some cases, the path to innovation requires intentionally getting it 'wrong', to break the mold and see what happens. Now, if you're concerned about acceptance or approval or good grades or whatever other rewards come with getting it 'right', then it's likely that you're not going to innovate.

The Innovator's Dilemma
So, how does an innovator deal with the practical aspects of getting it wrong, e.g, not being able to get or keep a job. Well, outside of the simple answer of becoming independently wealthy, one thing that comes to mind is making your passion your vocation and not your occupation.

I have many friends from music school who simply don't enjoy playing music anymore. At twenty, we were all innovators, trying new things and breaking rules. Now that they make their living from music (as teachers, composers, performers or studio musicians), there's very little innovation involved in their work. They're paid to color within the lines and to do so perfectly.

If you put yourself in the position where your livelihood depends on your craft, you're likely to lean towards getting it right. Alternatively, there's always deciding to live on less. It's amazing how much of what we never even considered owning at eighteen becomes absolutely essential at forty.

In regard to More than You Know, Sree commented on the need to get it right being quite deeply seated in most of us. I have to agree that it sure does appear that way. However, from my perspective, it comes at great cost.

OK, I can go back to sleep now.

Happy Tuesday!
Teflon

Labels: all blogs, empowerment, mark tuomenoksa, philosophy

I spent Thursday and Friday in New Jersey working with my friend Jonathan and then hanging out together at night. In the evenings I got to reconnect with old friends and meet new friends. In particular, I got to spend time with and get to better know Jonathan's mom and sisters. It was really fun.

What's with All the Questions?
One of the things that I tend to do when hanging out with people (or pretty much any time I'm with people) is to ask a lot of questions. Friday night, as we sat talking in the kitchen of Jonathan's sister Nancy, I started asking questions of Nancy's friend Lori. Nancy goodheartedly quipped something like, "Watch out, here he goes!"

Now, I get that a lot. People notice that I ask a lot of questions and make different assertions as to why.

Some see all my questions as a kind of shtick which is Yiddish for either a contrived and often used bit of business that a performer uses to steal attention (as in 'play it straight with no shtick') or a devious trick or a bit of cheating (as in 'how did you ever fall for a shtick like that?'). Others, see the questions as a way of hiding whatever my agenda might be, making themselves nervous and spending a lot of time on "why did you ask that?" And still others think that I simply don't like to answer questions, so I ask them instead.

Indeed, to the extent that doing something frequently qualifies as shtick, then perhaps shtick it is. However, although I'm aware of various questions that I seem to ask more frequently than others, I'm not aware of any specific pattern or series of questions that I use repeatedly. The agenda part is always funny in that I'm typically simply interested and curious about the other person, not driving towards anything in particular, but just seeing where the questions and answers will take us. I'm not sure why people find it hard to believe that you're just curious about them, but a lot of people do (find it hard to believe).

The Gorge of Eternal Peril
As we talked about my questioning, Jonathan, referring to Monty Python and the Holy Grail, asked, "What's your favorite color?"

In the movie, King Arthur and his crew approach the Bridge of Death that spans the Gorge of Eternal Peril. To cross the bridge, one must correctly answer three questions put forth by the bridge keeper. If answered correctly, one may proceed. If not, one is cast into the Gorge of Eternal Peril.

Sir Launcelot
The first to approach the keeper of the bridge is Sir Launcelot.

KEEPER: Stop! Who would cross the Bridge of Death must answer me these questions three, 'ere the other side he see.
LAUNCELOT: Ask me the questions, bridge-keeper. I'm not afraid.
KEEPER: What is your name?
LAUNCELOT: My name is Sir Launcelot of Camelot.
KEEPER: What is your quest?
LAUNCELOT: To seek the Holy Grail.
KEEPER: What is your favorite color?
LAUNCELOT: Blue.
KEEPER: Right. Off you go.
LAUNCELOT: Oh, thank you. Thank you very much.

Seeing that Launcelot has crossed safely and that the questions were easy, Sir Robin goes next.

ROBIN: That's easy!
KEEPER: Stop! Who approaches the Bridge of Death must answer me these questions three, 'ere the other side he see.
ROBIN: Ask me the questions, bridge-keeper. I'm not afraid.
KEEPER: What is your name?
ROBIN: Sir Robin of Camelot.
KEEPER: What is your quest?
ROBIN: To seek the Holy Grail.
KEEPER: What is the capital of Assyria?
ROBIN: I don't know that! Auuuuuuuugh!

Poor Sir Robin is cast into the Gorge of Eternal Peril. Sir Galahad approaches the keeper.

KEEPER: Stop! What is your name?
GALAHAD: Sir Galahad of Camelot.
KEEPER: What is your quest?
GALAHAD: I seek the Holy Grail.
KEEPER: What is your favorite color?
GALAHAD: Blue. No yel-- Auuuuuuuugh!

When it comes to questions, I think that many of us treat the answers as though getting them 'wrong' might result in our being cast into the Gorge of Eternal Peril. We start to wonder what's really motivating the questioner. We start to second guess our answers. We start to wonder if our favorite color is blue, no yel--auuugghhh.

Dumbing Ourselves Down
Whatever the motivation is, being concerned about getting answers 'right' has this amazing effect of making us stupid. Oftentimes, the answer that first comes to mind is simply amazing, and yet, we're not sure about it, so we say, "I don't know."

Many of us will play a game of 'wait and see' to make sure that it's 'safe' to answer or to say what we think. We know that we have something to offer, but we hold back.

Indeed, there are many times when people who ask questions do so with hidden agenda. There are many times when people are simply performing shtick. Nonetheless, why hold back, denying yourself and others all your brilliance inside that's just busting to get out.

One of the biggest limiting beliefs that many of us have adopted is, "I have to get this right!" I have a couple of alternatives to suggest:

1. Very little that we do is set in stone, irreversible or unchangeable.
2. Getting it 'best' works much better than getting it 'right'. By getting it best, we simply make each answer the best we have at that moment. A moment later, we can get it best again (making it even better.)

Happy Monday!

Teflon

Labels: all blogs, empowerment, mark tuomenoksa, philosophy

The other night we sat talking over dinner with our friends Randy and Jenny. Iris spends time in the playroom almost every day with their son Quinn. Iris remarked that just the other day, Quinn had spontaneously shouted, "Aimee, A-I-M-E-E!"

Randy and Jenny were amazed as Quinn doesn't spell nor could they recall how or when he would have learned to spell Aimee.

So what changed?

Jaycees Can't Sing
As we considered what had transpired with Quinn, I recalled having worked with a group of Jaycees in Glen Ellyn, Illinois when I was about 22. As a fundraiser, the Jaycees had decided to produce a musical written by Jaycees and performed by Jaycees. I was hired as the music director.

I sat at the piano one night facing four young business men whose main performance involved a quartet with four-part harmony. Each of them had sheet music in front of them which they had practiced and learned. So, we jumped right into the song.

As we began rehearsing, it was immediately clear that the harmonies weren't all they were intended to be. We started, stopped, started, stopped and then finally I decided it might be best to practice the song first in unison. "Hey guys, let's take it once through with everyone singing the melody."

So, we launched into a rousing chorus of the song singing just the basic melody and... well, what they sang wasn't exactly the melody. In fact, it wasn't exactly any melody.

From all I could discern, every one of these guys was tone-deaf. As I paused the song, pondering how to proceed, out of the corner of my eye at the edge of the Glenbard West, high school stage, I could see the musical's director bent over laughing. Turns out, he knew full well that none of the guys in front of me could 'carry a tune in a bucket' and our current exercise was meant as a bit of a practical joke (on me).

Joke's on Me
I suddenly felt inspired to teach these guys who can't sing, to sing. We tried taking one line at a time over and over. We tried simply humming the song without the lyrics. We tried pretty much anything that I could think of, but still nothing that was sung in any way represented the tune: not for want of trying.

Finally, I pointed to the man directly in front of me and said, "I'm going to play a note on the piano. When I play the note, I'd like you to listen to it and then to hum the same note. Everyone else, I want you to listen to what I play and then listen to what he sings."

I played a G below middle C and waited. The man hummed an Eb just below. I played the G again and waited. The man hummed a Bb just above. I played the G a third time and... E. Then I stopped, scanned the group catching each man's eyes and asked, "OK, I want you to think about this. Is what I played, what he hummed?"

I could almost hear the gears turning as each man pondered the question, eyes glancing back and forth. Finally, one man looked me in the eye, a big 'ahh hah!' spreading across his face, and said, "No!"

One by one, we proceeded with the exercise until each of the guys could here when a hummed note was the same pitch as that being played and when it wasn't. Turned out that none of the guys had ever associated pitch with music. They'd always considered music to be words and rhythm. About an hour later, everyone of them could sing the song, some of them actually singing harmony. They'd simply never connected the dots.

Under-connected Brains
As I learn more about the neurological basis for autism, a common thread is that of brain synchronization. Different parts of our brains are responsible for different activities. When we undertake complex tasks, multiple regions of our brains work together to accomplish them. To do this effectively requires connectivity and timing.

For people with autism, it appears that the timing and coordination of certain parts of the brain doesn't work or doesn't work well. This makes processing of some complex tasks impossible or difficult.

Imagine racing down an entrance ramp onto a highway of fast moving traffic. Let's say that drivers on the ramp pay attention only to other drivers on the ramp, and those on the highway only to others on the highway. Both the ramp and the highway work fine, but when you bring them together, the merging of traffic doesn't work. Not only that, but because the merging doesn't work, both the highway and the ramp stop working as traffic begins to pile up at point of intersection. To work effectively, activity on the ramp and on the highway must be coordinated an synchronized.

Similarly, people with neurological challenges that limit or preclude the synchronization and coordination of various regions of the brain have difficulties with complex tasks. Each processing center works fine. However, crudely speaking, when you bring together multiple centers, the merging of information doesn't work and the resulting pile up causes each independent region to overload.

It appears that the solution to this is simple (albeit perhaps not always easy to implement). The key is to conduct activities that help to improve the coordination of the various parts of the brain. Since the individual parts of the brain are working just fine, once the connections are established, amazing things happen including apparently miraculous strides in learning.

Connecting the Dots
I've often used the illustration:
Oftentimes, when teaching others new skills and capabilities, we use repetition. If someone is slow to 'get it', we repeat and repeat and repeat until they either understand or we determine that they aren't going to understand.

However, if a person simply isn't making the connection between two or more critical elements, you can repeat until we have an efficient and effective public health care plan, and they still won't 'get it'. Repetition without connection doesn't work.

What is likely more useful is to ferret out the places where the connections are not being made, and then to work on connecting the dots.

OK, so that's the simple part. The trickier part is figuring out what connections are missing and how to build the bridges. Depending on the situation, there may be formal evaluations that can help you with that. In other cases, it might be as simple as dialoguing with someone until you find the missing bridge. If you're coaching someone, it may involve simply dropping what's not working and starting to pay close attention to where the connection breaks down. Once you find it, work on bridging the disconnected pieces.

The cool thing is that once the connection is made, all sorts of wonderful things happen and progress can seem miraculous.

If you've struggled all your life with math, it could be that your cognitive abilities are just fine, there are just a few things that don't quite connect yet. If you're a slave to the sheet music never having been able to 'play by ear', it could be that there are just a couple of connections that need to be made and you'll be playing anything you hear. In many cases, there may be a solitary, basic connection or association that's simply missing. Track it down, bridge the connection and voila!

Happy connecting!

Teflon

Labels: all blogs, education, mark tuomenoksa, philosophy

Every Friday until November 7, 2010 you will find entries from a series written by Iris about her training to run the New York marathon in 2010. It is something she never aspired to do; she has never run a distance of more than two kilometers in her life. In this series she describes her adventures and how she works on her beliefs to transform her challenges and successes into one great experience.

Running
It’s the end of week two of the inflammation injury. I've run a total of five minutes (!) over the last week and have been doing strengthening exercises. This seems to me a slow, slow recovery! I am registered for a 10K in three weeks and I wonder how I will be doing by then. Ahh, well... that’s the future. I'd rather come back to the present moment and take it one day at the time. The strengthening exercises, the stretching and cross training will do their work.

This afternoon I heard that my friend Jonathan knows about this diet that in his opinion works really well to eliminate inflammation. This weekend I will hear all about it and change my diet to help my body. By Friday I will give you an update about this all. No beliefs to explore this week. Everything feels peaceful in this area, and I want to leave this subject to go back to the article that I wrote yesterday.

Chew on This!

Labels: beliefs, iris tuomenoksa

(Iris's weekly marathon article will be posted Saturday March 27, 2010)

Labels: iris tuomenoksa, optimism

In January, the children and I were thrown in to a world of horses and royalty and dressage and Austrian culture by the book, White Stallion of Lipizza.  It is a beautiful story of dreaming, persevering and accomplishing.  It introduced me to this idea of the stallion being the teacher.  Borina, the Lipizzaner stallion teaches Hans, the young austrian boy, the ins and outs of dressage.  There were times when the stallion did all the movements perfectly, independent of input from the young Hans, almost as if to show him how the movement should actually be done. Then, Borina would more accurately respond to Hans' less than correct input (throwing Hans off or dragging his hind quarters in an undignified fashion) helping in the potential riding master's learning process.

The story reminds me of Jaedon's teachings.  Now that I'm clear on the fact that he is teaching and I am positioning myself as his student.  Many of his responses mirror my internal thoughts and feelings, and give me the opportunity to explore them more deeply.  As he reflects my discomfort to me, I see it more clearly.

I'm also his manager, helping other willing students have access to his lessons.  This week, I had the pleasure of adding 5 new students to Jaedon's classroom.  Read about my journey here.  Their first goal learning to let go of any need to 'fix' Jay and to really have fun being a loving, peaceful presence in his life.  Initially, Jaedon seems to interact with them strongly, almost showing them how much fun their time could be. At some point, they will each get to see the powerful reflecting image too.  How will they respond?  I really want to help them, guide them in this process.  Yet, I feel myself go tense at the ensuing thoughts: 5 new volunteers!  How will I manage? Can I teach them all?  I'm realizing that these thoughts add to my confusion (some days yes! some days no!) about having a large team of volunteers working with Jay.

Reframing all that in my head is such a relief.  I live with the master teacher! I'm just a facilitator, a midwife in my volunteer's process.  Every volunteer will go as far and connect as deeply as they each want to.  While I hope they do, and I continue to look for ways to inspire them, I can take myself off the hook.  I'm not making them.

I'm hopeful and excited, anticipating the next few weeks for all of us.   I'm getting to practice this new way of being with Jaedon and they are getting to learn from him more directly.... I keep refining this whole volunteer training thing.  Who knows what it will become next?

Labels: autism, beliefs, faith clarke, volunteers

So, when it comes to new relationships, new opportunities, new ideas and new adventures, are you the kind of person who jumps first? Or, are you the one who waits to see what others (or the other) will do?

Maybe you're someone who proposes to jump 'together'? Together may be a way to encourage someone to go with you. Together may be a way to manipulate someone into going before you. Together may indicate a willingness to wait or a lack of willingness to go it alone. Some people can appear to go together when in fact they're so good at watching others that their delay is imperceptible.

Of course, you can never really go together unless each is willing to go alone.

Let's Be Friends, You Go First
Over the past few days, Iris and I have had amazing opportunities to experience all sorts of relationships, potential relationships and former relationships. Last night, as we talked over dinner, Iris commented on what she was seeing as a common theme: who goes first?

Who goes first has lot's of variants. For example, some people play who goes first kind of like you would that Olympic 'sport' curling; they don't really push and they don't really pull, they just keep the other person in play with promises and innuendo like brooms brushing ice around a rock. They're not ready to commit, but they're also not ready to let go.

Others play who goes first by running rapidly towards the edge of the cliff where it's either fly or plummet. They run fast enough to inspire confidence, but not so fast as to lose the person trailing them. They race ahead and then pull up at just the last second, allowing the other to pass them. If the other stops, so do they; if not, they follow on.

Others jump, but they have a hidden parachute strapped to their backs.

Some people adopt the business mantra, 'he who goes first loses'. For example, if you're negotiating a salary or a deal or the purchase of a car, whoever clearly articulates what they're willing to pay or what they're willing to take, loses. For many, this is part of the art of negotiation. They hold their cards close to their chests, revealing no more than what is absolutely required to stay in the game.

Some are more manic, pushing hard sometimes and then suddenly withdrawing.

And then there are other people who don't hesitate whatsoever; they seem not to know that there's a game is being played. Cards face up on the table, they say what they want, they tell you what they'll do, and then they go for it.

How do you approach new relationships and opportunities?

Holding Out for More
I think one of the motivators that drives the who goes first game is a form of playing not to lose that is more like afraid that I could have done better. I can't tell you how many people I know who've held off on committing to a relationship because they felt like, perhaps, just maybe, they could 'do better'. It's amazing how the idea of 'doing better' can get in the way of doing great.

We do this in situations from evaluating our significant relationships to purchasing a house to looking for a new job. I've often called it the fruitless pursuit of perfection; the perfect becomes the enemy of the awesome. In in the end, I imagine it's no different than cocaine addiction or golf, always looking for that high or that round that will surpass (or even be as good as) a previous one.

Delaying Execution
Of course, some people are simply full of crap. They're so concerned about what others are thinking about them that they'll say pretty much anything to keep others in the game. They'll promise, they'll cajole, they'll manipulate, they'll distract and they'll misdirect. They'll say whatever it takes to get another chance. "Just one more day... Just one more time... It will be better, you'll see!"

The toughest part of this is that the best players tend to be the most sincere (in the moment). Although many of us believe you can't lie to yourself (it's kind of definitionaly impossible), there are still cases where people have such strong powers of denial so as to be delusional. They could see through their own lies, but, well, they don't.

Tethered
Then there are the people who actually have no intention of ever fully pursuing their stated desires. They speak of them and flirt with them. They race toward the edge as though to jump only to be yanked back at the last moment by whatever it is that ties them down. It could be a previous commitment, a lifestyle, money, comfort or simply what others would think of them.

I know people who for years have talked on and off about starting their own companies. Yet I'm confident that they'll simply never abandon the comfort of a regular paycheck.

I know others who say they want to do more for the people in the world around them, but their stuff (their possessions, their status, their lifestyles, their relationships) always gets in the way.

I have friends who out of concern about what others might think, stay in relationships with their partners even though both of them want out. They don't have the will to make it work, nor do they have the will to leave it behind.

Depressing?
As I read my post to Iris, her comment was, "Wow, this post is really kind of... depressing!"

I hadn't thought of it that way, but I think I can see her point. If in fact, most people don't simply jump in, but instead, feign jumping while waiting for others to go first... well, you could view it as depressing or as an opportunity to grow and change.

So, are you someone who decides to go for something and then goes for it with complete abandon, or do you hesitate waiting for someone else to lead the way? As you take off on a new adventure, do you strap a parachute to your back or ensure that there's a safety net waiting below? Maybe you talk the talk, but your walk is hampered by the tethers that snap you back to your status quo?

In the movie Gattaca, Vincent explains to his brother Anton how he was able to swim a large expanse of water despite his physical limitations and apparent lack of capacity to do so.

You want to know how I did it? This is how I did it, Anton: I never saved anything for the swim back.

I believe that we often deny ourselves the best we could experience, simply because we hold back, we watch, we wait, we ration, we save our strength for the swim back.

Happy Tuesday!
Teflon

Labels: all blogs, empowerment, mark tuomenoksa, philosophy

Some months ago my good friend Mark K was very engaged in his reading of (i.e., listening to) Martin Seligman who has a long background in positive psychology.

I finally got the CD, Learned Optimism, that included an evaluation of your optimism profile.

The test is very simple and can be found on the Internet at Optimism Test.

The survey basically asks you about how you respond to good and bad events (or stimuli), and then measures the degree of pervasiveness, permanence and personalization of your beliefs. The pervasiveness, permanence and personal nature of beliefs correlates directly to your level of optimism.

Permanence
The permanence of a belief has to do with how long you believe something will last. When you get sick, do you feel as though you'll never get well (permanent) or do you feel as though it will be over quickly (not permanent)? If you get fired, do you believe that you'll never find a job or that you'll get a job quickly? If someone says they love you, do you see that as a forever statement or as something that needs to be reinforced frequently? These are examples used to measure permanence.

Optimistic people tend to ascribe little permanence to negative (unhappiness-fueling) beliefs and situations, and significant permanence to positive (happiness-fueling) situations of beliefs. I tend to see bad events as something that will pass (which gives me a high score on the bad-permanence factor). However, I also see many good events as something that will end some time (which gives me a low score on the good-permanence factor).

So I started to question myself: do I believe that I can change so I keep seeing bad events as temporary, whereas I prolong the expected duration of good events?

Labels: acceptance, all blogs, control, joy vigh strand, optimism

As a child facilitator being present is a very important aspect of my work, and of the every day fun I have!

Being present helps me to focus on my little friend. I can play with one hundred percent of my attention and notice his or her cues, which helps me to help him/her the best way I can. Being present also allows me to fully enjoy our time together.

This hasn't always been this way. I used to be an expert worrier and I used to spend at least 80 percent of my days thinking about different things. For example I would be thinking about my to do list or I would be occupied with beating myself up for things I did in the past. Or I would be feeling sad about everything that was happening to me (my lovely victimhood).

I used to have conversations with people and have my thoughts somewhere else or read a book and then realize after some pages that I had no idea what I read.

Why do we time travel?

Labels: all blogs, barbara balla, present

Every Friday until November 7, 2010 you will find entries from a series written by Iris about her training to run the New York marathon in 2010. It is something she never aspired to do; she has never run a distance of more than two kilometers in her life. In this series she describes her adventures and how she works on her beliefs to transform her challenges and successes into one great experience.

It's Thursday evening and I am typing this blog while watching the sun go down. The sky is orange and beautiful. From my lazy chair I have an incredible view that seems so much more amazing to me tonight. I am totally aware and it seems that this sunset was specially painted for me personally.

Sitting in my chair I am wondering about my life, the world, our experiences and how we interpret them. It's one of those philosophical moments in which many things are thought, and it is a moment in which I feel very grateful for my life. I am grateful for who I am today. In my thirty-seven and a half years I have walked many roads. The last seven years I have mainly walked new unknown roads with my hubby Teflon, creating our amazing future on the spot.

Making Miracles
I must tell you, we are miracle makers. We see, choose and decide without holding on to what we have. We like moving towards what we want at full speed! If this means leaving our house, or changing our jobs, or traveling around the world, or taking loans to support others with what we have, we do it without hesitation.

One thing that makes us miracle makers is that we "love". We love each other deeply; we love other people deeply; we love a challenge; we love helping people; we love doing creative new things; we love change and we love to change; we love life and everything in it. We love what is and what will come and we believe that what will come is going to be beautiful.

Today I spent my day talking to families with autism, working with one of my wonderful little friends in his playroom and doing a couple of dialogues with amazing people. And at the end of the day I was not burned out or tired, but I felt full of gratitude and love for the people I worked with. People are the most amazing mammals in the world, so inspiring, creative and fun.

Running?
Sometimes things do not go our way. My leg injury that I ran into a couple of weekends ago did not disappear. A full-blown inflammation is still keeping me tied to walking and biking instead of running. But the funny thing is that I am not upset.

I start to get ready to go back to running. My mind clearly wants to run. But my body says something else. Teflon and I talked about this inflammation and we came to the conclusion that my cardiovascular system has really strengthened, but that my muscles are running behind in gaining strength. So, this week I am signing up for a gym to have some machines help me focus on this and show this inflammation the door.

When things do not the way we expect, we find alternatives, and we try new things. We follow the path that opens up, but instead of blindly walking it, we influence, we change, we create and we end up where we want.

Making It Big!
I'm reading what I wrote in this article and I realize that I am practicing something that I explained to one of my clients today. I told this person that when you look at addressing a challenge, you go into the details and cut everything in small, specific pieces. It helps you to see what the challenge is about and to see that there are simple steps you can take to overcome it. However, when you are not working on a challenge, but working on making your happiness and positivity bigger, the skill is to create your beliefs in a big way. Forget about specifics, get big and general!
Here an example. I could have said, I love Teflon. But instead I wrote, "We love deeply!"

Saying that we love deeply is a way bigger statement of love in my life. In comparison with the first statement it seems unbreakable, tangible, vibrant. Ahhhh. Love...

So, I would like to know, how often and in which situations you make your happiness fueling beliefs big and general? Do you allow yourself to make your skills, abilities and passions big? Or, do you qualify them and apologize for them? When was the last time that, in describing yourself, you used words like amazing, awesome, wonderful or great?

I'd love to hear from you and your amazing description of you!

Iris

Labels: all blogs, iris tuomenoksa, love

I started this week with a wonderful realization: my son Jaedon was sent to me so that can take what I learn and offer it to others.  Jaedon's name means God has heard and I think I finally got it.  Jaedon is God's gift to me and I get to offer him and all he teaches to others.  This isn't a new thought for me, but I settled into it in new ways this week.

Lessons in Progress...
What is Jaedon teaching?

1. Be Loving and Accepting.  He doesn't need people to be a particular way to accept them.  He just does.  It seems to me that the more we show him loving acceptance, the more of his love we get to see.   Maybe showing loving acceptance is for us then?
2. Be yourself.  Jaedon just does Jaedon.  He doesn't try to be anyone else and he is happiest when we aren't trying to make him into someone else
3. Be Happy.  Jaedon is primarily a happy boy.  He doesn't worry too much about what others think!
4. Be a mirror.  Jaedon allows us to see ourselves, our reactions, our discomforts, our fears, without judging them.  He doesn't protect us from our discomfort.  He let's us choose our feelings and gives us the opportunity to reflect on it as being about us.  It's not about him!

Labels: faith clarke

Turn this thing around
I will not go quietly
I will not lie down
I will not go quietly

Don Henley, I Will Not Go Quietly

I've recently been doing some work that required me to provide history about myself and the things that I'd done. Since I developed a penchant for being in the present, I haven't done a very good job at cataloging what I've done previously. So, I decided to google myself to determine my history.

Through the course of my googling I found that I'd been awarded nine patents that I was completely unaware of. One of them goes back to work I'd done with an amazing group of people back in the late 80's and early 90's at Bell Labs. I found that I'd even filed a couple of patent applications with Arno Penzias who won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1978.

It was fun to research myself as a third party might and my resume now looks way cool. One of the patents I found took me back to an amazing time in the late 80's.

US Patent 5724590 - Technique for executing translated software
In the late 80's, Don Henley wrote a song that became a theme song of sorts for my advanced development group at Bell Labs. This was a point in time where the computer industry was in flux. At that point, IBM was still a computer company that owned the mainframe market and created the PC market. The Apple Macintosh was a relatively new entry in the fray, and a long gone company call Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) owned half of Massachusetts and most of the mini-computer market.

AT&T had recently divested itself of the operating companies that were called the "baby bells". At that time, these companies were named New England Telephone and Illinois Bell and so on. They went on to become companies like Verizon, Cingular and Qwest. The reason AT&T had let go of these subsidiaries was so that it could launch new businesses focused on the burgeoning computer market. Unfortunately, the business minded folks at AT&T had no clue about the computer market. At a point in time where the leaders of AT&T Computer Systems might have purchased either Apple or National Cash Register (NCR) to get into the computer business for about the same price, they purchased… well, they purchased NCR. Sigh…

That Ain't Squat
Anyway, my group of seven engineers had been working on what would have been the next generation computer for AT&T. We had an operating system developed at Bell Labs called UNIX and a new processor developed by a company called MIPS which was later purchased by Silicon Graphics which became the computing engine for many of the high-end special effects companies in Hollywood (movies like True Lies and Apollo XIII). I had a an amazing visionary boss who said, "In order to have a computer that can win as a late entry into the computer market, it's not enough for it to run UNIX applications (of which there were few); it must also run all Windows and Macintosh applications!!"

Now, he was an amazing visionary with a great ability to inspire and somehow manage technology mavericks, but he had no clue as to how he might accomplish this. So, we set out, it never occurring to any of us that it was impossible, just something that we didn't yet know how to do.

As we developed our new computer, we came up with a system that could literally translate the software running on one system and run it on a completely different system in a way where it was impossible for anyone to see any differences. For example, we could run Macintosh applications and Windows applications and Unix applications all on the same computer at the same time.

Now, this isn't like the virtual machines of today that let you run say Windows on a Macintosh. The systems today count on both systems using fairly similar architectures (for example the same processor). In this case, the hardware systems were completely different from one another. (For fellow geeks out there, one was running on Intel x86, another on Motorola 68xxx and yet another on the MIPS R3000.) The other really cool thing was that our translated applications ran much faster after translated than before translated, i.e., our virtual applications ran about 5-times faster than the originals. Even today, the virtual applications are never quite as fast as the originals.

In addition to this, we developed all sorts of advanced media processing capabilities, text readers, voice processing and so on. It was an amazing time and there seemed little we couldn't do. Our little desktop machine could do the work of many computers and was more powerful than a Cray supercomputer.

We called our new computer squat so that no one could say, "That ain't squat."

Everyone Wanted to Help
As word of our little project started to spread, different people began knocking on our door to see if they could help us. It turns our there were whole research departments dedicated to different pieces of what we had done, departments dedicated to speech processing technologies, departments focused on reading text, departments focused on new operating systems, departments focused on compiler technologies (the technology basis for translating applications).

However, in many instances, the offers of help were in fact suggestions that we not use the technology that we had developed, but instead, use the technology developed by the various "helping" organizations. Some of these suggestions were made quite strongly to the point of being perceived as demands. I started to learn about the politics of academia and research.

Essentially, no one believed that a small group of just seven people could have accomplished as much as had and that we should avail ourselves of the work of these much larger organizations. We were open to doing so, but only if what was there actually worked and worked better than what we had. We didn't find much evidence of that and said, "Thank you, no."

Oops... next thing you know, we were the subject of a technology audit by some really high-powered people from the research organization. It was their job to review what we'd done and see whether or not it was real. It was fascinating.

The Inquisition
So one afternoon we were visited by an amazing group of people including Al Aho, Peter Weinberger and Brian Kernighan (the namesake of the Unix program AWK), Larry Rabiner who ran the speech research lab, and Arno Penzias (the head of Bell Labs Research). We walked them through everything that we'd done providing demonstrations, presentations and fielding questions.

To say that these guys really knew their stuff would be a bit of an understatement. They asked specific and insightful questions about various aspects of the project and gave up little in the way of the impressions they were taking away. As we progressed through the afternoon, the folks on our team would check in with one another wondering how things were going.

Finally, as we gathered around a monitor for one of the final demonstrations, Peter Weinberger leaned over to me and softly said, "You know, this is really impressive."

I felt as though I'd been holding my breath for three hours and had finally exhaled. My whole body relaxed in a way that let me know that I'd been carrying a lot of tension.

We were officially audited and approved.

Project Canceled
At the end of 1990 going into 1991, AT&T purchased National Cash Register (NCR) for $7.5 billion. The idea was to quickly enter the computer business by purchasing a cash register company; it ended up decreasing the wealth of AT&T shareholders by between $3.9 billion and $6.5 billion. Anyway, when AT&T made the acquisition, they decided that we didn't need to be developing new computers anymore and to "redeploy" the members of our team.

It was a really amazing group that had a great working chemistry and I had no intention of disbanding it. I made various appeals up the chain of command to no avail. As the deadline approached, I found another organization within the company that had defined some new, funded projects that desperately needed a strong working team with the kinds of skills my team had. Without asking permission, I transferred each of them to that organization.

A few weeks after the transfer was effected, I sat in my office the lone remaining member of my team on the organization chart. My phone rang. When I answered, I heard the voice of the executive assistant to our senior vice president talking into what was clearly a speaker phone surrounded by other people. He said, "Mark, I want you to think very carefully before answering the following question. How is that your team ended up in thus-and-such organization?"

I wasn't particularly good at taking advice, and without hesitation I said, "Because I transferred them there?"

Life After Life
Well, eventually they got over it and I ended up getting a job in the basic research group thanks to the new relationships I'd established through our technology audit. AT&T later ended up selling of NCR and exiting the computer business and then being purchased by one of the operating companies that it had dumped years earlier.

My team ended up doing some amazing work creating a system that was purchased by Apple to move many of their applications from the Motorola 68xxx to the PowerPC and I had a grand time in the research group.

It was nice to think about those times and remind myself of not lying and not going quietly.

Teflon

Labels: all blogs, empowerment, mark tuomenoksa, philosophy

written by Rita Gendelman

Labels: rita gendelman, sensory. singing bowls

I used to have nightmares about losing my children in a department store. I would always find them giggling and playing games under the racks of clothes. After the sense of panic had subsided, I simply sat and watched as a smile slowly filled my face. In their reality, they were never lost. They were simply experiencing a new way to explore new things and having a blast. I was thinking about these nighmares recently after having lunch with a friend who spent most of our time together describing how lost she felt in her life. She described her discomfort about the "uncertainty of her future", and about having "no direction". These thoughts seemed quite paralyzing for her and given my experience with career coaching seem quite common.

How many of you have created discomfort as a result of an "uncertain future"? One of my most profound "aha moments" was shortly after our amazing and beautiful son David was diagnosed with autism. Once a "specialist" declared that his/ our future was uncertain, I became much more comfortable taking things one day at a time. We quickly put together a plan of action, researched available options, and began a journey. As I look back on this now, I chuckle. Did I really need an autism specialist to tell me that the future was uncertain? It sounds so silly now but my actions actually validate that I was living my life as if the future was "certain". As if everything I did today shaped tomorrow in the exact way I thought it should. As you can imagine, I experienced a lot emotions associated with dissapointment. Now that I know for sure that our future is uncertain (thanks specialist), I don't experience dissapointment. Sure there are things that don't work out the way I wanted them to but I am no longer "dissapointed". Instead, I think about the clothes racks and how something so frightening to me was so exciting to two amazing childern who know more about happiness and fun than anyone!

Love to all,
Kathy

Last month Teflon and I were traveling. We went to the beautiful beaches of South Carolina, and we worked from distance. We enjoyed early walks on the beach to get breakfast; we worked from bookstores and little coffee shops. We met some fun, interesting people over dinner. We talked with friends at home and mostly felt in touch with the world we normally live in.

I say mostly, because my two dear play friends at home in their playrooms, were not able to see, talk to or play with me for a complete month.

When we made our travel plans, I realized that my travel ideas would make an enormous impact on the daily routines of my friends. I would just disappear on them for a complete month. How to explain this change to them in a way that they would understand that I hadn't left them? That I would come back? That I would be thinking of them?

Tracking Iris
I made a plan because I wanted to help them understand that I would be gone for a while, but that I would be coming back again. I decided that I would talk with them about my upcoming travels and I wanted to give them something that would remind them of these discussions and give them a way to comprehend what was going on. Both boys are not yet at a stage where you just tell them "hey, I'm going to the beach and I'll be back in four weeks!"

I'm not sure if they yet totally understand what four weeks means, or what it means to go to the beach. I for sure do not believe they know that the closest beach around is a three hour drive, and that the beach I was going to was way, way farther.

With my computer, I created a calendar for the upcoming ten weeks. It had a little photo of me, an explanation of my going on a holiday. It showed the playroom sessions with me before I would leave and after I left in a different color than the other days. A visual representation of the calendar was hung on the wall in their playrooms for others to reference when they talked about me while I was gone. About two to three weeks before I left, I started telling my friends about my travel plans and with the help of family and other playroom friends, one cross was placed on the calendar every day.

I got an email halfway through my holiday where the mom told me that her son would wake up in the morning and say "no Iris today, no... no... no..."

I guess that my plan worked!

My First Day Back in the Playroom
I had no idea how my little friends would respond to me coming back into the playroom. One of the boys has at different times shown real anger and frustration when his dad returned from travels, and so I could see this happening with me. The other boy sometimes withdraws by staying into the bathroom when something is up for him, so I could see that happening too!

None of this happened. Instead, I was greeted with acceptance and love. The first boy looked at me as if he could not believe his eyes for at least a minute and them mostly wanted to hug and kiss me. The first two days back in the playroom he regularly checked the tattoo on my arm, as if that picture proved I was really back. The other boy showed me what an incredible vocabulary jump he had made in the area of animals and how well he could write them and easily embraced me as his play buddy!

Friendships

Labels: all blogs, autism, iris tuomenoksa

A person who has not made his greatest contribution to science before the age of thirty will never do so.

Albert Einstein

Over the past couple of weeks, I've been trying to figure out why people seem to go stupid as they get older. Sure, we become more knowledgeable and adept at dealing with everyday situations. Some of us garner and dole out wisdom and insight.

Yet, it seems that most of become less creative. More and more of what we do is simply what we did the day before. A solution that worked once is applied over and again. Our new work becomes derivative of our previous work and then simply straight forward replaying of what's in the archives. We live lives of greatest hits and reunion tours.

Why is that?

Holding on Too Tight
In the movie Top Gun, an aircraft carrier's best pilot, Cougar, walks into his commanding officer's quarters after nearly killing himself and his navigator when he panicked losing all perspective including the differentiation of up and down.

CO: Cougar you should be in sickbay. What's on your mind?
Cougar: My wife and kids sir.
CO: We've seen this before...
Cougar: No sir, I'm holding on too tight, I've lost the edge.

Perhaps the reason we lose our creativity is because we start hanging on to what we have, we go into preservation mode. Being creative is much more than thought process. In fact, thinking is much more than a function of the brain. What I've been learning lately is that thinking creatively is a byproduct of brains that developed to control and coordinate complex muscle movement and balance. Our brains didn't evolve to support thinking, thinking is just a side effect.

Being creative is not so much a thought process as it is a side-effect of how we live each day. If we live in a way that is open to change, that goes wherever life will take us, that consistently brings new challenges and stimuli into our everyday situations, our brains develop (continually) one way. If we live in a way that is focused on consistency and stability, that resists new challenges and stimuli, and that clings steadfastly to the river bank, our brains develop in another way.

The brain that is open, flowing and constantly encountering new challenges remains (and perhaps becomes more) creative.

Dying to Think
And Jesus said...

I can guarantee this truth: A single grain of wheat doesn't produce anything unless it is planted in the ground and dies. If it dies, it will produce a lot of grain.

John 12:24, God's Word Translation

This statement enforces a great truth. The grain of wheat may remain in the granary for a thousand years and be preserved, but it is useless there. It neither reproduces, nor is food. It is when it falls into the ground and undergoes dissolution, that it brings forth fruit. It is fruitful by giving itself up.

Commentary from the People's New Testament

I've always found John 12:24 to be quite powerful. It's a great reminder of how limited we become when go into preservation mode.

Over the years, I known lots of people who, having made more money than they could ever spend, decided that they wanted to be remembered for more than that. After years of inactivity, they would try to engage the creative parts of their brains. Some CEO's would become interested in the actual content of the businesses they ran, not just the numbers. Some technologists would suddenly become interested in invention and creating something to benefit the world, not just being recognized for their position or work they'd conducted thirty years prior. Others would invest themselves in causes offering pro bono leadership and management skills to organizations that couldn't otherwise afford them.

The thing is that I've never seen this done well. The CEO's who hadn't been hands-on operators for years, had the authority to make changes, but the changes were not insightful or useful. The technologists, lacking that creative spark and ingenuity, would resort to "collaborating" with younger colleagues to whose work they could attach their names. The business leaders didn't know how to function without support staff, people to build their spreadsheets or create their presentations or print out their emails.

Years of hording and preserving had left them with little in the way of creativity and adaptability.

Willing to Lose
As I think about it, creativity is probably an artifact of adaption and proportional to adaptability. Essentially, adapting to new environments, challenges and stimuli build the thought muscle required to be creative. However, if we find ourselves in positions of preserving, maintaining stability, playing not to lose, then we spend little time adapting.

As for me, I think that in some ways I'm a lot like Mark K and my dad. One of my biggest motivators is not being bored. However, our approaches to not being bored are quite different. I think my dad's and Mark's solution to boredom is to be entertained by others. Mine is to move on to the next thing once I've got the current thing down.

At first I was thinking that I'm not afraid to lose everything, but I'm not sure that that's it. It's not the absence of fear, it's just that I'm so attracted to new challenges and learning, the thought of losing doesn't really occur to me.

I guess that for some people, that would make me stupid.

So What?
OK, so what? I'm not really sure. I just started writing this morning and here I am.

I guess what I'm saying is that letting go, embracing new challenges and opportunities, jumping into arenas where you have absolutely no clue, and forgetting about preservation are all key to staying and becoming more creative. I'm also coming to the conclusion that a word full of creative thinking people is one in which I prefer to live.

What do you think?

Happy Saturday, Teflon

Labels: all blogs, mark tuomenoksa, philosophy

Every Friday until November 7, 2010 you will find entries from a series written by Iris about her training to run the New York marathon in 2010. It is something she never aspired to do; she has never run a distance of more than two kilometers in her life. In this series she describes her adventures and how she works on her beliefs to transform her challenges and successes into one great experience.

The other day I received an email that contained the following sentence...

I realize that I forgot to mention your taking up running. I haven't been able to relate to this yet, because running is not my thing, but it has been great to see your handling of all your issues around it. Thanks for sharing that!

This sweet comment has kept me thoughtful ever since I read it. I think it has to do with the words "not my thing". It tickles me, because until January, I would have been the first to agree that "running is not my thing", or more generally, any activity that gets your heart rate over 120 and has nothing to do with dancing, is not my thing!

However, over the last two months I have proven to myself that running is my thing! I can enjoy and be passionate about something I always said I hated. And I can deal with set backs without going back to hating it.

Inflamed and Happy About It
Last week I had a great, great running week. On Sunday running home, I pushed myself to go a little faster than before. Three quarters of the way home, this feeling came up just above my ankle. I had never felt it before. It was not really painful, but something was clearly a little irritating. I told myself, "hmmm... maybe an extra rest day between now and my next run."

The next morning though, it was clearly pain.

The weirdest pain in the weirdest place! No idea why it happened, so I did a little research and determined that it was an inflammation due to the unevenness of the road surface. So I have to deal with it. I didn't do a lot of running this week; I only did some biking on a stationary bike. I also didn't do unhappiness around it. After my first surprised reaction, I learned a lot about inflammation and now I’m just eager to go back on the road when the inflammation is gone.

Running as a Tool for Personal Growth
So why do I tell you all this running stuff in the Belief Makers blog, every week, over and over. Because for me, it is not about the running, but instead, the power that we give to our beliefs and how beliefs can make or break what we do. By exploring our beliefs with something real and tangible, we can build endurance and strength in ways previously unknown to us. I am not only talking about our bodies but also about our minds.

For example, let's say that your biggest dream has always been to create your own company, but you also believe creating a company is just "not your thing". You might believe that you don't have the skills, the knowledge, or the attitude to be a leader. Perhaps you believe that you do not have the support you need from the people around you. Maybe you're just scared generally of not having a job.

If this is the case, then I promise you that you'll never create this business you are dreaming about. You are holding yourself back and you don't need anyone or anything else in your way to make it hard or challenging.

Until you make starting a business "your thing", you'll never start. You might even come to hate the idea of starting a business just as I hated the idea of starting to run.

Roadblocks
Let's say you get past the starting challenge and you do start your company. You believe you have skills and knowledge and, with the help of others, you have been able to open your own little shop. But then things happen. Customers don't show up as quickly as you would have liked... People whom you thought would support you don't... Maybe someone offers you a job in which you would make much more money than you could ever make in this little business of yours.

What do you do? If you are still holding on to unhappiness fueling beliefs, you probably start to struggle with all the choices you have to make. However, if you have trained your beliefs with strength and endurance training, you will glide through these waters easily and safely. You'll know what you know, you'll know what to do, and you'll know that wherever you end up it will be OK.

It will be OK
I am not talking about unrealistic, pie-in-the-sky, artificial projections where you sit as a king on his thrown and everything in the world goes as you want it. I am talking about standing with two feet solidly on the ground, pursuing the fundamentals of your business in the present moment, and being the boss you want to be.

Maybe your goal is to see your product sold all over the world. Maybe your goal is to simply be a business owner who treats all the employees with respect and provides them the compensation they earn. Maybe you want to want to provide accessible and affordable support to people who otherwise would not be able to get it.

People who stay focused on their original intentions when starting their business can create the business they had in mind and grow it while navigating all the unforeseen challenges that come along the way. Your business can stand tall like a blooming flower in a summer garden as long as you decide that it's all OK.

What's Your Motivation?
Remember that it is easy to be distracted along the way. After running your business for a bit, your original intentions may have changed. Over the years, Mark has worked in many situations where he was brought in as a change agent. In some cases, the companies were heading down the road to closing their doors; in others, they simply wanted to make their business better.

Sometimes the business leaders would openly engage in new ways to approach their businesses. At other times, their actual motivations and intentions would get in the way of their stated intentions and motivations; making the business better was not always the highest priority.

Some people would be motivated by saving face and not want to acknowledge that they'd made mistakes. Others would be motivated by being in control and they wouldn't want to give up the control required to make the business more successful. Sometimes, people were simply motivated by cash and would prefer to sell the business rather than fixing the business.

While many business leaders will say that they want to run a successful company, one in which the employees shout from the rooftops, "come work here, this is the best job ever!", not everyone does.

As you operate your business, it's important to stay in touch with your intentions and motivations. Have they shifted over time? If they have, do you want to reinvigorate your original mission, or do you want to change it? Is everything still OK?

Back to Running
To me, running seems to be a little micro business on its own. Things go well. Things are challenging. I make progress quickly. I encounter challenges that slow me down. But as long as I hold on to my main intention to work towards the marathon in November, while being healthy and while working on my strength and endurance skills, no one and nothing can stop me!

Labels: beliefs, iris tuomenoksa, marathon

Today, I had coffee with a mom of a child with autism.  I will be meeting with another mom next week tuesday and another on wednesday.  I invariably meet other moms with children with ASD and I ask them if they would like to talk.  They do.

Let me rewind.  If I gave you $5 million to spend in the next 5 years, what would you do?  If you didn't spend it, you would have to pay me back with interest or go to jail!  How would you spend your days?  Where would you spend your money?  Now that the rent and food is covered, would you go to your current job?  Since you can afford to travel, where would you go?   These are a few questions I asked myself years ago, and I review them constantly.  The more I think about the questions, the clearer the answer becomes.  My last questions are usually something like:Do I need to wait until I have the money to do what I really want to be doing?  What would I need to change today to move closer to doing these things that I really want to be doing?

I can't say that the changes were dramatic, but step by step, thinking about doing one small thing, then doing it, I find myself sharing myself and my  experiences wherever I think it might help and having a blast!

Since my current schedule is a little tight (home business, home schooling, full time relationship based program for Jay), one mom said to me that she couldn't do what I do, almost as if I'm a super mommy.  She was referring to a comment I made about creating additional income to fund my son's special diet, supplements, therapy and the like.  I don't know what to say when people make comments that suggest I'm doing something unusual.  I'm doing what I want to do.  Every piece of my full life came to me like the right lotto number on the little spinning balls.  It just fell right in place.  I don't have to run my  business or talk to parents.  I get to!

This morning, on my way to an appointment, I had a clear mental  picture (a vision?) of a dark skinned woman with no means, no money, no food, maybe no clean water.  Her children were running all around her. One had autism.  I don't know if she knew it was autism.  I just know that she knew she couldn't have the same expectations of him as she has of her other kids, who have to be really good at helping themselves in these desperate times.  I wondered, Can I share with her about intervention?  About stimulating language? About increasing eye contact?  I don't know.  What I knew was that I wanted to come alongside her in her journey, offer an arm, a shoulder, whatever.

This picture isn't strange to me.  I spent the first 20+ years of my life in Jamaica.  There, intervention for autism (intervention for almost anything, actually) is for the minority.  I remember a heart breaking story told to me by one of the 3 speech pathologists on the island at the time.  She worked with an under-serviced population who were put on a list to get discounted speech therapy.  When their turn came, they got 10 weeks of therapy, and were sent on their way.   She told me of a day when she heard a rukus outside her office, and went outside to observe a mother severely punishing her son (I won't give details) and she asked what was happening.  The mom replied that she was calling her son and he was ignoring her and not answering.

Such communities experience fear because of what they don't know and don't understand.  My heart went out to the boy, but more so to the mom.  If she could beat the autism out of him, her life and his would be difficult in the more typical ways.  I have so many pictures of rural communities that could do with support, where kids with challenges are misunderstood and parents feel tortured.

So one step at a time, one person at a time.  A connection here, a connection there.  I get to network with amazing people who are passionate about helping, who encourage me and give me energy to reach out more and more. I get to run a business from my home, that hopefully, will provide enough income, so that I can organize 'help' (not sure what it would look like yet) and fund it, instead of spending my time asking people who don't have my vision to spend their money to help.  I get to do that.  What a life!

Enough about me.  What about you?  I cannot imagine the wealth of passion and desire you have inside you that could be directed somewhere?  If you weren't spending all your time to make money to eat food and sleep inside somewhere warm, what would you be doing with your time? Find out.  Do it.  It's your life.  Live it.

Labels: autism, faith clarke, life, passion

I was in a blissful, meditative state experiencing blue shift as my fingers glided across the keyboard of my MacBook, an action movie playing on my desktop as Guns N' Roses pounded in my headphones. Part of me noticed a disturbance in the air as someone opened and closed the door entering the room. However, I continued typing assuming that if someone wanted my attention, they'd let me know.

Twenty minutes or so later, I turned around to see Iris standing behind me in a trance-like state, her eyes fixated on the cinema display as the action movie played on. I spoke to her, but there was no reply. I stood up and walked over to her, but nothing. Then I walked over to the desktop, clicked the trackball and stopped the movie. Voila! Iris emerged.

Compatible or Not?
Iris and I are amazingly compatible from a practical perspective. Both of us are easy with changing anything and everything simply because we want to. Neither of us requires time to wake up or prepare in the morning; if we decide in the moment to do something, we just pop out of bed and go. I like to cook; Iris likes to eat. We both love to pursue and wrestle with philosophical constructs, but only insofar as we can see a practical application for them.

There is however one area where we are amazingly incompatible. Our sensory systems appear to operate at completely opposite ends of the spectrum. For me, the more the stimuli, the better. For Iris...

I love driving in densely packed, fast moving traffic. Iris prefers roads on which she is the only driver.

I become totally relaxed in crowded environments with lots of sensory stimulation and activity: sights, sounds, smells, textures. Iris tends to be overwhelmed by too much sensory input and prefers to shut herself off from stimuli when she wants to focus.

If I want to fall asleep at night, I start a movie and usually don't make it through the opening credits. Iris can be asleep when I start the movie, but will wake up and end up staying up until the movie ends.

When it's quiet (aurally, visually and otherwise), I pace and find it hard to focus. Iris becomes serene and highly focused.

Blissful Coexistence
Of course, over time we've become aware of the ways in which our sensory systems operate and how to reconcile the incompatibilities. I've learned the joy of really comfortable headphones that don't allow even a hint of sound to escape into the air. Whenever we sit in a restaurant or bar that has a television, we position ourselves so Iris is facing me and I'm facing the TV. Late at night, I start movies with my headphones on and I take my Adderall before driving to Boston or New York. If I'm having difficulty focusing while Iris is talking, I'll wash dishes or sweep or walk as we continue the conversation.

It's been working.

Sensory Systems and Relationships
Today I was talking with a friend who's been working a new job that he's really enjoying. He's found smart people and great camaraderie. He likes the work and feels really good about what's he's accomplishing. Everything is great... well almost everything.

He has one colleague that he really likes and who really like him. They respect each other and get long well. However, there are instances where their conversations seem to simply run off the rails. As he described the situation to me, it occurred to me that he and his colleague are experiencing a sensory gap.

My friend is a great conceptual thinker. He has the ability to look at a lot of seemingly disparate and independent facts, find the common threads, piece them into a cohesive framework and then determine what the most useful next steps would be. He can see the forest and the trees.

As he described various scenarios with his colleague, I realized that the colleague is a trees guy. He understands and remembers many independent details and bits of information, but isn't great at establishing and maintaining context. Instead, each detail floats along side all the others. When my friend begins extrapolating and explaining things that require a forest perspective, his colleague sees what appear to him to be giant leaps in logic and unfounded conclusions. The communications break down.

A Bit Autistic
As I've been learning more about sensory systems, I've come to understand that oftentimes children with autism have a tremendous capacity for specifics and details, but have difficulty with abstraction, extrapolation and context; they can see the trees, but don't know that there is a forest. Apparently, this has nothing to do with cognitive ability, but instead with the communications among various regions of the brain. It's a networking problem, not a computing problem.

One can first see this in terms of sensory processing. Children with autism will often focus exclusively on activities that involve stimuli from just one sensory system (e.g., flapping their hands in front of their eyes or spinning in circles or making sounds). The thought is that this is due to the child's inability to coordinate the activities of the various parts of the brain required to process and integrate multiple, simultaneous sensory stimuli. When they are faced with too many simultaneous stimuli, they can react quite strongly and emotionally. The inability to coordinate the processing of various sensory stimuli or multiple diverse concepts is essentially due to a brain that lacks synchronization.

By understanding this, parents can help their children by creating activities that take into account the child's sensory processing challenge (meet them where they are) and by conducting activities that help improve their child's sensory processing capability (growing their skills).

The lack of synchronization is not an either/or phenomenon, but instead varies dramatically in terms of degree and scope. It's probably the case that each of us experiences it in one form or another. So my theory is that we might better understand and work with people who's brains are synchronized differently than our own by taking into account what their sensory integration challenges might be.

So What?
So, is there someone in your life who seems to get caught up in details losing sight of the big picture? Perhaps they even get rigid and resistant when you try to bring them back to the broader context, insisting that details and specifics are what matter the most. My thought is that you might begin to approach them in a manner similar to the parent of a child with autism equipped with an understanding of sensory integration and brain synchronization.

First, recognize that their basic neurology has a limiting effect on their capacity to process multiple, simultaneous concepts and to maintain context or the big picture. Therefore, when you want to communicate complex ideas, you'll want to present each concept a step a time and then help build and maintain the context for them as you go.

Second, you might want to undertake exercises that are designed to improve brain synchronization. From what I've learned, the brain has an amazing capacity to rewire itself based upon activities that require the rewiring.

Anyway, that's what I was thinking about this morning.

Happy Wednesday!

Teflon

Labels: all blogs, mark tuomenoksa, philosophy, relationships

As I sat in the Media Lab at MIT on Friday, I enjoyed being exposed to so many concepts that were new to me. I felt privileged to learn about the physiological and evolutionary basis for how we think and process external stimuli from people who are experts in the field.

At the end of the day, we took a tour of the center and I got to see everything from models of next generation automobiles to software systems that were teaching themselves to speak. During our tour, I had the opportunity to speak with the students who were actually conducting much of the research and to ask them specific and perhaps pedestrian questions about what they were doing and how they were doing it. I love to look behind the curtain and get down to the nuts and bolts of things.

Agenda Free
There was something in my interaction with the students that I found particularly appealing and refreshing. Unlike the talks we had heard throughout the day which were expertly prepared and presented, the students simply talked about what they were doing in the moment without preparation. They shared both what was working and what wasn't working. In many cases, they made it clear that they weren't sure whether or not what they were doing would ever work. In particular, as I pointed out some alternatives that they might pursue, they were not at all defensive and seemed willing to go with whatever would get them there. They had no agenda but that of solving the problem they were working on.

And yet, because of how they were funded and the agendas of the professors with whom they worked, pursuing paths to solutions outside their charters was not in the cards.

If It Works, It's Not Research
This got me to thinking this morning about why I originally left the world of research and academia. I had what many would have considered to be the greatest job in the world. I was paid really well (more than $120K annually in 1992) to do pretty much anything I could think of. I had more than a million dollars to play with in terms of implementing and developing my ideas and I had access to amazingly talented people.

At the same time, I worked in a culture where the primary motivator was credit and attribution. In the research community, being recognized as the one who invented or created thus-and-such trumps all else, including money, power and relationships. Not having a research background or a PhD, I was a bit of a pariah and made many an academic faux pas. I would be invited to meetings regarding ongoing projects and innocently say something like, "Isn't what your looking for really just..."

And then I wouldn't be invited back.

Over time, I ended up not only solving some difficult problems, but also figuring out ways to commercially implement the solutions. I anticipated this being well received by my colleagues. However, the response was, "If you can solve it, then it's not research!"

I decided that I'm not a research type and left to become an entrepreneurial type.

Agenda Laden
One of the problems with being motivated by attribution and acknowledgment is that it distorts everything else: in my opinion, far more so than money or power. Once we have an agenda of attribution and acknowledgment, three things happen:

1. we close ourselves to alternatives to the point of fabricating or stretching evidence supporting our position;
2. we dismiss others as not being the originators of our concept or idea to the point of never mentioning anyone who might have preceded us; and,
   
3. when it becomes impossible to dismiss others, we highlight immaterial nuances of our concept that differentiate it from its predecessors and alternatives.

The Origins of Option
So this morning, I got a bit curious about the question "where in fact did Option come from?", not because I wanted to determine attribution, but instead, because I felt that various attempts gain attribution may have obscured the bigger picture and potentially useful information.

Here are some of the concepts I discovered in my brief exploration...

It's Just A-B-C
I discovered that what we have come to call Stimulus-Belief-Response was conceived in 1955 by a man named Albert Ellis who is considered by many to be the grandfather of cognitive psychology. In an article on psychology.info I found:

Although ideas associated with cognitive psychology can be traced back to philosophers of fourth century B.C., it is Albert Ellis’s (1913-2007) who is said to be the grandfather of cognitive-behavioral therapy. His Rational-Emotive approach (established in 1955) is often viewed as the basis of the contemporary cognitive model. In his “A-B-C” model, the Activating event is linked through the Belief to the emotional Consequences. Our beliefs are often too extreme, such as the belief “Everyone should treat me with respect.”

The aim of Rational-Emotive psychotherapy is to bring to light these irrational and maladaptive beliefs and their connection to the inappropriate emotional consequences. Replacing these beliefs with more rational attributions of situations (such as “I like for people to treat me with respect, but I realize that some people may not.”) leads to a reduction in negative emotions. Ellis’ approach is more recently referred to as Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy (REBT).

Isn't that cool! I found a paper on REBT and Albert Ellis that you can download here.

Acceptance and Non-Judgmental Attitude
Next, I found the basis for the idea of an accepting and non-judgmental attitude based on the work of Carl Rogers and what he called Unconditional Positive Regard. One article on wikipedia says:

Unconditional positive regard, a term coined by the humanist Carl Rogers, is blanket acceptance and support of a person regardless of what the person says or does. Rogers believes that unconditional positive regard is essential to healthy development. People who have not experienced it may come to see themselves in the negative ways that others have made them feel. By providing unconditional positive regard, humanist therapists seek to help their clients accept and take responsibility for themselves. Humanist psychologists believe that by showing the client unconditional positive regard and acceptance, the therapist is providing the best possible conditions for personal growth to the client.

Further, Rogers credits a man named Stanley Standal with the coinage of the phrase attributing it to an unpublished doctoral thesis from 1954.

Your Own Best Expert
In the same article, Carl Rogers is credited with the concept of each of us being our own best expert, i.e., the person best qualified to help ourselves given support and facilitation.

Unconditional positive regard can be facilitated by keeping in mind Carl Rogers’ belief that all people have the internal resources required for personal growth. Rogers' theory encouraged other psychiatrists to suspend judgment, and to listen to a person with an attitude that the client has within himself the ability to change, without actually changing who he is.

Judgments, Generalizations and Changing Beliefs
Many of us know that within the S-B-R or A-B-C models, the most powerful beliefs are those which are heavily biased or judgmental and those that lack specificity and are general. Also, those of us who use the Dialogue know that by looking at our beliefs and changing them, we can become happier. It turns out that these concepts can also be traced back to the likes of Rogers and Ellis.

In the book, Cognitive and Behavioral Theories in Clinical Practice, (Nikolaos Kazantzis, Mark A. Reinecke, Frank M. Dattilio and Arthur Freeman) we see:

To help over come negative thinking, various cognitive restructuring strategies can be used, including those advocated in more formal cognitive therapy (e.g., Beck, 1995). For example, we often prescribe use of the A-B-C method of constructive thinking. With this technique, patients are taught to view emotional reactions from the A-B-C perspective, where A is the activating event (e.g., a problem), B is beliefs about the event (including what people say to themselves), and C is emotional bad behavioral consequences. In other words, how individuals feel and act is often the product of how they think.

Such cognitions often include highly evaluative words such as should and must, catastrophic words to describe non-life-threatening events, and phrases that tend to be over-generalizations (e.g., Nobody understands me!)

By examining self-talk, the patient can learn to separate realistic statements (e.f., "I wish…") from maladaptive ones (e.f., "I must have…") as they pertain to problems in living. The patient can also be given a list of positive self-statements to substitute for or to help dispute the negative self-talk (assign the reverse advocacy role-play strategy.

So What?
I was thrilled to see in just a few minutes of googling that there is a strong and broad foundation for what so many of us have come to find so useful and that there are so many potential sources of information. I feel even more enthusiastic about the process of codifying Option or whatever we end up calling whatever we end up with. Who knows, as we keep exploring and researching, we might find that someone has already reduced the entire thing to something that fits on a 3x5 note card with no font smaller than 12pt.

Happy exploring!

Teflon

Labels: all blogs, mark tuomenoksa, philosophy

If you wonder if you have read Optimism Test: Part One, then the answer is NO! Or at least you have not yet read a blog written by me called Optimism Test: Part One. If you wonder why this blog is called Optimism Test: Part Two, then you might have the same feeling as I had last Sunday when I was discussing optimism... we never came to the starting point, or rather we never came to what I had expected to be the starting point.

The Starting Point
Every three months I meet with a group of Danish people who have two things in common:

Labels: all blogs, choices, joy vigh strand, optimism

In the movie Shawshank Redemption, two imprisoned men, Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) and Ellis Boyd "Red" Redding (Morgan Freeman) bond over a number of years, finding solace and eventual redemption through acts of common decency.

In one scene, Red describes the effect of the prison to a couple of other prisoners.

Red: These walls are funny. First you hate 'em, then you get used to 'em. Enough time passes, you get so you depend on them. That's institutionalized.

Heywood: Shit. I could never get like that.

Prisoner: Oh yeah? Say that when you been here as long as Brooks has.

Red: Goddamn right. They send you here for life, and that's exactly what they take. The part that counts, anyway.

Brooks (James Whitmore), an older man who has spent decades at Shawshank, is later released from prison. Not knowing what to do with his new found freedom, he commits petty crimes so as to get himself arrested and returned to the prison. However, the prison doesn't take him. Lost and alone without the comfort of the prison, Brooks hangs himself.

Over the past year, I've started to notice more and more people who've been institutionalized or Shawshanked as it were. The institutionalization doesn't occur in ways that you'd normally expect to see it, not in prison or group homes or asylums. It occurs right in the midst of the everyday world.

Shawshanked by the Job
I spent a bunch of years at Bell Laboratories which was then a part of AT&T. When I joined Bell Labs in 1981, AT&T had on the order of one million employees. Bell Labs was the R&D arm of AT&T with something around 30,000 engineers and researchers. By R&D standards, that's one big lab.

Being such a large organization, Bell Labs had well defined ways of doing pretty much anything and we were all trained in them. As a young employee with no previous corporate experience, it was never clear to me what parts were generally accepted business practices and what parts were Bell Labs idiosyncrasies. Everything was lumped together.

Over time, what you were taught simply became the way things were done.

I left AT&T sixteen years later to work at a small public technology company in Boston. Culture shock would be an understatement. Many things that I thought were normal practices, no one had ever heard of. Many things that were normal practices, I had never heard of. My first inclination was to head back for the prison, but I didn't. Instead, I dove in, made a lot of mistakes and learned even more. It took a good year before I'd fully broken the bonds of my Shawshanking.

Later, when I started my own company and was approached by former colleagues from Bell Labs who wanted to break out, I happily welcomed them in joining my new venture. Invariably, as each escapee from a large corporate environment began working within our little start-up, they would have similar experiences of disorientation and confusion. One of my friends described our hiring efforts saying, "We're not so much recruiting as resuscitating!"

Shawshanked by Family
I'm really grateful to have had a mom whose primary child-rearing goal was to raise independent people. I have many friends whose parents want them to be strong an independent on the one hand, but then on the other hand load them down with obligation and dependency so as to 'keep the family together'. Holidays, vacations, Sunday afternoons, you name it, all become "family time" often to the exclusion of anything else. Eventually, a child doesn't know how to define himself outside the context of his family.

This basic type of family Shawshanking is pretty common place and in fact lauded by many as a 'good thing'. I'm not so sure about that.

Of course, there are less common forms of Family Shawshanking that might be more obvious. These take the form of things like trust funds and family businesses. My good friend Mark Kaufman is a great example of someone whose father Shawshanked him with a trust fund, effectively imprisoning Mark with money. Mark and I have often discussed how the best thing that could ever happen to Mark would be for him to lose all his money. And yet, I'm not sure that Mark would know what to do.

Over the years, I've met countless people who've stepped into senior positions in the family business, commanding high salaries and perks. Many of them lack the skills and qualifications to perform their jobs and wouldn't be able to find a similar position outside the family business. They often spend years establishing themselves and building a lifestyle, that were it not for the family business, they couldn't afford. At some point or other, they will think about leaving the family business and setting out on their own, but they can't. Not qualified for the salaries they're paid and with no business perspective outside that of the family, they're stuck.

Of course the parents who Shawshank their children typically do so with the best of intentions. Nonetheless, Shawshanked they are

Shawshanked by Lifestyle
Probably the most common way we Shawshank ourselves is through lifestyle. Most of us start adulthood with very little financially speaking. We don't own homes. We don't own a cars and if we do, they're not the expensive, brand new top of the line types. We may have some new cloths, but not full wardrobes. If we do have the above, it's likely due to family Shawshanking, e.g., money from dad or being twenty-five and still living at home.

Over time though, we start to accumulate. We buy a house. Then we buy a bigger house. Then we buy a bigger house in a "nicer" neighborhood. We trade in the old used car for a new car. Then we upgrade. We lay down roots. We have kids. We start to make our purchases not for ourselves, but "for the kids". We determine that, in order for our kids to do well, they "need" to go to private school. And so on.

Before you know it, we transition from people who are simply happy to be together in a small apartment with an old car to get us around, to people who get upset with a ding in the Mercedes or not being able to get to Paris this year. We Shawshank ourselves with our lifestyles.

Have You Been Shawshanked?
Of course, the examples I've provided above are perhaps a bit more extreme than what you might have experienced. It might not be a new Mercedes; it might be a used minivan. It might not be a trust fund, it might just be a few dollars here and there when you need them. It might not be your job or your family or your lifestyle, you might have Shawshanked yourself in any number of creative ways.

Still, if you find yourself in a situation where you don't know who you'd be or what you'd do if something external to you changed or disappeared, then you my friend have been Shawshanked.

In the end, Shawshanked isn't a good or bad thing. However, it can be a costly thing keeping us from pursuing our wants or limiting our perspectives or causing us to back down in situations where we would otherwise take a stand.

Even if in the end you decide that Shawshanked is the way to go, it's nice to do so in a way that is clear and deliberate.

So, have you been Shawshanked?

Teflon

Yesterday, I spent the day at a small conference at the Media Lab at MIT. The conference of about sixteen people brought together Artificial Intelligence researchers at MIT with practitioners who work with various forms of psychological disorder, the premise being that it's sometimes easier to learn about something when it's not working than when it is working. So, you had the AI guys, the practitioners and, um, me.

We Walk, Therefore We Think
The first speaker was a practitioner focused on child development. He gave an amazing presentation that began with the origins of man and ended with the current epidemic of childhood challenges such as ADHD and Autism. He compressed a few day's worth of presentations into just a bit over an hour speaking at a rate that required no Adderall on my part.


He explained that the reason humans developed the brains that we have is primarily due to evolutionary forces driving improved mobility in open areas (highly mobile mammals survive on the savanna while less mobile mammals don't). Our need for improved mobility led to bipedalism (walking on two feet) which in turn required significant development of our brains to manage the complex and coordinated movement of muscles defying gravity.

He went on to explain that our brains are not different because of their size, but instead, because of their structure and the structure of our broader neurological systems. The brain consumes significant resources; in order for bipedalism to work, it had to be done efficiently. If our brains were consumed providing real-time, always-on motor coordination of all the muscles required to walk or run on two feet, then bipedalism would have quickly gone the way of the duck-billed platypus.

To walk more efficiently, our bodies developed in a way that allows for independent operation of various systems and muscle groups. Rather than communicating all the time with every single muscle required to walk, the brain communicates between 10 and 15 times per second with various muscle groups effectively shutting down in between communications sessions. Efficient! To us it all appears to be continuous and fluid, but in fact it's just a sequence of discrete events (think of frames of a movie playing at about 30 frames per second).

Of course, for all this to work, everything has to be synchronized. It's no good if every time the brain wakes up to issue the next command, the muscle groups are busy doing their thing, or if the muscle groups looking for the next action find a sleeping brain. So, our neurological systems developed a clocking mechanism of sorts that keeps everything in sync, until it doesn't.

Out of Sync
The independent but synchronized operation of various components of our neurological and motor systems extends to other systems such as our sensory systems and even to communication and coordination of various independent regions of the brain. When everything is in sync, it works great; but when we loose synchronization, different challenges occur such as autism, ADHD and schizophrenia. These challenges are not attributable to a damaged brain, just to a brain that lacks synchronization and coordination (think good employees, bad management).

If a child has challenges with various forms of sensory stimuli (e.g. bright lights or loud noises or touching and hugs), it's not a problem with his his sensory receptors (his eyes or ears or skin) and it's not a problem with the regions of his brain that process the information. Instead, the problem lies in the coordination of the various receptors and the various processing centers. With poor synchronization, you get the mental equivalent of trying to walk with uncoordinated muscle groups.

Getting in Sync
So, if many challenges we face are due to poor synchronization of various systems and various regions of our brains, what do we do to improve synchronization? Essentially, we conduct activities that stimulate and challenge the systems that are out of sync (think of working on a set of weaker muscles in order to stimulate and develop them.)

For example, if a person were to experience a stroke leaving his right arm paralyzed or impaired, research has shown that the most effective treatment would involve restraining his left arm so that he can't use it. Similarly, if a child is not able to process non-verbal communications, you would want to focus on communicating (perhaps exclusively) non-verbally.

Of course we needn't take on the challenge head-on in order to stimulate development. We can work via any number of modes to stimulate growth and development. For example, there appears to be a significant relationship between postural and cognitive abilities in ADHD. Rather than working on ADHD, we could work on exercises focused on posture and mobility. It's all connected.

Celebrate
As we talked about these approaches, one of the psychiatrists brought up concerns regarding self-esteem, i.e., if we work exclusively on a child's weaknesses, won't that lead to poor self-esteem? The answer was simple. Approach all activities in a positive, enthusiastic and celebratory manner. Although the target of the activity the challenge or weakness, the manner of the activity is upbeat and happy.

Of course, I'm a neophyte who's just taken a few days of expert presentation compressed into a few hours of discussion and now compressed it into a few lines of blog. One of the books recommended at the conference is Disconnected Kids by Dr. Robert Melillo.

Happy synchronizing!

Teflon

Labels: all blogs, autism, mark tuomenoksa

Every Friday until November 7, 2010 you will find entries from a series written by Iris about her training to run the New York marathon in 2010. It is something she never aspired to do; she has never run a distance of more than two kilometers in her life. In this series she describes her adventures and how she works on her beliefs to transform her challenges and successes into one great experience.

Seven thirty in the morning. It's thirty-two degrees, the fields are while, the roads are clear. My hubby is dropping me off in town, and my goal is to run back home. I am prepared for the colder weather here. I am dressed with a hat, gloves, running clothes and running shoes. I even wear an extra layer of long nylons for warmth. It's my third run in my own neighborhood this week.

I start running and the quietness embraces me immediately. The nature is amazingly fabulous. Frozen water, snow as far as your eyes can see, and only once in a while cars come by to disturb the stillness. The locals wave at me from their cars and geese are singing me a song.

While running I am thinking about the changes I made over the last two months. I am still amazed that I am doing this; that I am a runner now. I am even more amazed that I really want to do this and I am utterly amazed about how good I feel about the whole experience of training for a marathon. I had never thought much about the experience that is attached to running. Or let me correct that, I only thought about all the negative experiences I had with running!

Mark said to me the other day after one of my excited rantings about my running, that I probably soon will experience a "runners high". A rush of endorphins will create a feeling of pure bliss and happiness. I am don't think I would describe my experiences that way (yet)! But I can tell you that I do enjoy peacefulness with the world around me, a connectedness I have not felt since I was a little kid.

I want you to know that every run still starts with a battle. After fifteen to twenty seconds I start to feel this sensation of being out of breath, and my body says stop.... Stop.... STop.... STOp.... STOP.... But by now I know that I can ignore these signals. I know the urge to stop will go away and my body will relax and start enjoying the journey. In the beginning it would take me up to 12 minutes of struggle (if it would go away at all!), but now I think it is only up to four or five minutes. When my breathing finds a comfortable rhythm with the movement of my legs, my body quiets down and I enter the world of quietness....

I talk to myself while running. I tell myself things like: ah, now I am here, that means I ran so far… or I make comments about unknown little rivers creeping through the fields, and count the cars coming by. This morning I was telling myself: it is quite sneaky how this road is slowly climbing. You cannot really see it, but after two miles, you for sure feel it! Then I had to laugh. What a negative attitude towards the road! What an interesting picture I was painting in my head: the road going up slowly with an intention of sneakiness! I changed this image to being grateful for the road, because it helps me to train for sustainability and strengthening of my muscles. Which is needed for the last part of my route!

I live on a hill. And it doesn't really mater what route I take, I have to over that hill and then climb up the hill to get home! So, I decided to make the hill a standard challenge in my route. Mu thought is that by the time I can run over that run without having to walk one step, I am in awesome condition.

So, this hill is now my friend. It's a friend who authentically tells me how I am doing in my training. It is the friend who is always there for me. As a rock he stands and smiles at me when I tickle him with my running footsteps. As a father he cheers me on when I start walking. And he gives me all what is needed to develop myself further and further. And independent of what I do or don't do he is there for me....

I never thought I would create a friendship with a mountain. What will be next on my journey towards the New York marathon? I will keep your posted. In meanwhile, feel free to share with me your journeys and experiences!

Labels: all blogs, iris tuomenoksa, marathon

I have to say it: I love you guys!  Most of you I don't know, but I really  appreciate the space to share, explore and get feedback.  Just one comment or question can stir an entire wave of thought and action.

Last time I wrote about being late and wanting to be curious about that.  I received a great comment about making being on time a priority.  That started me thinking: What do I prioritize when I am preparing to leave my home?  Honestly, I prioritize everything being in good shape so that when I come back home, I don't have a crisis to manage.  So anything that even slightly suggests I will have more work to do when I get back home, flashes like a huge neon light saying 'Do It Now'.  That is funny, because so many other things flash another sign 'Do It Later'.   I must think about that...  Anyway, back to the lateness.  So getting where I am gong early or on time has a lower priority than damage prevention at home.

The concern about damage at home isn't confined to the moments immediately after I get back home, but can be extrapolated into the near or distant future.  I seem to enjoy taking all the things I see in the moment that I don't like and projecting them into the future, and scaring myself into a flurry of activity.  What if Jaedon keeps throwing stuff behind the couch? (so I stop to add encouraging, energetic, enthusiastic words aimed at stopping this activity) What if they don't eat well and develop all the ailments that come from junk food?  What if...?  As the what ifs run through my mind, I race around trying to put them out, multitasking like a maniac!  Before I can even recognize the path I'm on, another demand rushes in, another voice, the phone....  Too many priorities...

So on this matter of priorities, I am realizing 2 things:

• Prioritizing the experimentation with fear and the resulting flurry of activity isn't helping me get where I'm going on time (among other things).  While I continue to look at the value of scaring myself, my gratitude shortcut to happiness helps me regain focus in the moment.  I take a moment, look at the fear and let it go.
• There are some legitimate priorities that I juggle.  I want to prepare food and whatever else for the children to help whoever will be holding the fort in my absence.  If I am traveling with the children, I want to be prepared for the eventualities that I know about because being prepared helps me feel more comfortable during those trips.  I want to prioritize both my preparedness and my getting where I'm going on time!  

The challenge with multiple priorities is one that many face.  You know about the cost, quality, time triangle, right?  It basically says that there is no such thing as a cheap, good quality product that was made quickly.  Say you are prioritizing both cheap travel and getting to France quickly... It will be a rough trip!  Or it may take a long time to become someone like a flight attendant or someone else who qualifies for cheap travel.  With multiple priorities, there will likely be a trade-off.  If I have limited time and multiple priorities, chances are, I will be late.  If I give myself more than adequate time, and focus on only the legitimate priorities, I can be on time!

Labels: faith clarke, late, priotities

One of my favorite tidbits of "Mark's-ist" philosophy is "The path to my future is brightly lit by the bridges I have left burning behind me!" I think there's a powerful forward facing energy in the way Mark has re-tooled an old concept for a growth oriented use.

Labels: all blogs, authenticity, mark kaufman, relationships, stress

Talking with Mark and Katya last night, Mark thanked me for laying out argument and forms of fallacy in such a clear and concise manner, "Now that I see it laid our so clearly, it will be easy for me to effectively construct illogical and fallacy-laden arguments with a near zero rate of anything that makes sense!"

A Better World through Argument
Sigh... I guess that argument is like any other powerful tool; it can be used and it can be misused. But, nonetheless, I was thinking that (despite anything my dad might tell you) I would love to be surrounded by people who's skill at argument far surpassed my own. Why?

1. In order to argue well, you must think clearly and speak from understanding. I've mentioned before that when people say something is so complex that it's difficult to explain, it's not because the subject is complex; it's just that the person speaking doesn't fully understand the subject. If you're not only explaining, but arguing, then understanding is no longer optional.
2. Because argument exposes places where we don't fully understand what we say we understand, it creates new opportunities for growth and learning. People who actively and successfully argue their perspectives and beliefs know their stuff.
   
3. For me, people who really know their stuff and are open to arguing and learning are much more interesting and enjoyable to be around. Alternatively, spending time with people who lack strong argumentative skills feels like playing basket ball on sand or pool on a warped table; they're either unresponsive to new ideas and musings or they take them down nonsensical pathways to irrelevant destinations . It's not that you can't have fun in either activity, it's just not my preference.

So, I selfishly want people to become great arguers because, people who are great arguers aren't boring. Of course, there are other good reasons for having people argue well like ending war, poverty and hunger. But, for now, I'll settle for people becoming more interesting.

Activities
As I've received feedback on For the Sake of Argument and Fallacy, a common thread has been the recognition of places where people routinely experience poorly constructed argument or the use of fallacy.

One friend said, "Wow, I had a boss who would constantly use Appeal to Authority, Appeal to the People, Ad Hominem and Genetic Fallacy. I always knew that there was something wrong with his arguments, but could never put my finger on it."

Another said, "I've never seen argument as a way to build consensus and agreement. I always thought it was about getting what you want and winning!"

And yet another said, "After reading your articles, I've been hearing what people say completely differently. I was listening to a commentator on the news and realized that he was using all sorts of fallacy as the basis for his conclusions."

So, if you'd like to join me in my quest to make my world more interesting to me, here are some steps that you can begin taking today.

Step One: Listen Critically
One of the things that you might want to do is start to listen to what you hear (on the radio, at the coffee shop, at work, in meetings) with a more critical ear regarding the construction of argument and the use of valid propositions. You don't need to respond or argue, just listen and see if you can map various statements to valid or invalid proposition. If the proposition is valid, ask yourself why it is valid. If it's invalid, why?

Step Two: Practice
Step two can be conducted alone using a recorder or better yet, with a partner also interested in honing their skills. The basic idea is to take an opinion that you hold that may be a bit controversial and argue it, presenting what you believe in a logical manner without fallacy.

Start by proposing premises that you and the person who is hearing your argument agree to. From there, draw inferences and slowly build towards your conclusion (your opinion). The role of your partner is to either accept or decline each proposition. If your partner declines, then it's your job to re-frame, change or discard your proposition.

Of course, in all likelihood the process will not move from premises through inferences to conclusion, but instead will bounce back and forth starting with your conclusion and determining what propositions are required to support it, then the propositions required to support those propositions, and then finally moving forward from the base premises.

Step Three: Perform
Step three is my favorite part. At dinner or in a meeting or at a party or anywhere that you find yourself in a discussion where two clearly independent perspectives are being expressed (yours being one of them), invite everyone to join in formal argument between yourself and the proponent of the other perspective. Quickly explain the rules of engagement (building one brick at a time) and the concept of fallacy (you might even have a little sheet that lists various forms of fallacy). You could treat the whole thing like playing pictionary or charades.

Each of you can then present your arguments to the other whose only job is to accept or decline. The other participants serve as the adjudicators validating whether or not you've stuck to the format and whether or not your propositions are valid.

This might be a great exercise for corporate team building or even conflict resolution. Collect a group of interested parties, present them with a sheet that provides the rules on the front and the list of fallacies on the back, and then have at it.

Setting Out
My interests aside, seeing as we all experience argument on a daily basis, we might as well become good at it.

So, spend this week listening with a critical ear and making note of the various forms of fallacy you hear. You might even write down your own version of the rules of engagement and the definition of various fallacies. If you feel inspired, share your observations with others and ask them to join you.

I'd love to hear the insights you garner. I might even begin working on a completely non-trademarked and open to anyone, Argument, the board game.

Carry on,
Teflon

Labels: all blogs, empowerment, mark tuomenoksa, philosophy

My travel adventures continue and I'm loving it...next stop Costa Rica! I will be Son-Rising with another amazing family in beautiful and different surroundings. Experiencing new things and being spontaneous, I feel totally alive, present and fully engaged in life. I wish this feeling for everyone!

Labels: boundaries, harmony, home, jeannene christie, kids, tips