Category: Productivity

  • Ever Feel Like You’re Lazy? It’s the Quantitative Trap.

    Ever Feel Like You’re Lazy? It’s the Quantitative Trap.

    For much of my life, I thought I was lazy, and berated myself for not being less lazy than I seem to be. (I also sometimes berate myself for using double negatives in my writing, so maybe I just like berating myself).

    Anyhow, I don’t think I’m alone.

    When I’ve taken the time to consciously think about it, I realize that the problem is not what my default mode of thinking thinks it is. It’s not that I’m actually lazy. The real problem is that I don’t operate well according to a traditional, linear clock schedule.

    Again, I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one. I see others who struggle with this as well.

    I have times when there are bursts of creativity, insight, and action that produce large amounts of work. There are other times when my energy is low, and I have no clarity whatsoever — nor do I feel like doing much of anything.

    After over five decades of struggling with this self-beration paradigm, always trying to “be better” and failing, I’ve finally decided to give myself some grace.

    Some of that grace came from a writing project I’ve been working on. In one part of that project, I write about the Quantitative Trap that our society is in. This phrase describes a deep, core belief system we all are steeped in from birth about the seeming importance of the *quantitative* over the *qualitative.*

    This belief in the quantitative applies to our experience of time, use of time, and thoughts about our own productivity therein. In my case, I had bought into the idea that time is quantitative and linear, and therefore my productivity should be so.

    Yet this diminished my qualitative experience, causing me adopt the stance that I couldn’t follow the natural rhythms of my body, mind, and creativity.

    It caused me to try to act like a machine, ever working, gears consistently whirring, when my body and mind don’t work that way.

    And for the ultimate cherry on top, it caused me to do that berating I mentioned before, whenever I fell short of my perceived quantitative yardstick of how productive I “should be being” versus how productive I was actually being.

    I’m done with that. For me, this is the year of Qualitative over Quantitative. I’m focusing on the Quality of my own experience, since life is short, and I’m done with all the measurement, comparison, and self-flagellation based on arbitrary quantitative yardsticks, like those of “productivity.”

    If you’re someone who has gotten sucked into the Quantitative Trap, and want to experience something different, please join me in focusing this year on the Qualitative.

    What do you think? Have you succumbed to the Quantitative Trap? Want to do something different?

  • Life As a Mirror

    Life As a Mirror

    Do you feel like your experiences keep repeating themselves? The same problems … over and over … cycling back around to the same stuff?!

    A tourist attraction shows us how life can sometimes be like a frustrating hall of mirrors… but it doesn’t have to be.

  • Embracing the “Inner Asshole”

    Embracing the “Inner Asshole”

    Administrative roadblocks, aggressive colleagues, and depressing news: things like these are rampant. The question is, how should we deal with them? Many of us often choose to take the “safe” route of staying cool-headed and rational. That’s what we’ve been taught to do for most of our academic lives. But who does that “cool-headedness” really benefit? Does it really have the positive effect we’ve been promised when we respond more like the level-headed Spock from Star Trek than the hot-headed Kirk? The answer you pick will have a major impact on your long-term success and happiness, and it’s not the most obvious.

    I wrote this piece for the Research Success Alliance, a group of researchers my team works with on grant writing and career success. I decided to share it with my followers… In it, I examine the often unintended side effects that occur when we try to always “keep a lid on it.”

     

    For anyone who’s gone through a Western education, you’ve likely been taught that one thing is important: Objectivity. Cold, hard, rationality, devoid of emotion.

    We are taught that in order to be a “good” person, a “right” person, and a “smart” person, we must turn off all that messy emotional crap.

    “Facts and data are where it’s at. Facts tell us the truth. Facts don’t lie. Facts produce logic that is infallible! Yay and hallelujah for facts!”

    And, so, the other thing, poor emotion – is left behind to rot. Worthless. Useless. Meaningless. It can’t be quantified. It can’t readily be measured, teased apart, and analyzed. It does not adhere to the oh-so-grand logic of mathematics and computers. It can go in unpredictable directions and do things that don’t make sense.

    So, we are taught, “Get that emotion out of there! Shut it down! Put a lid on it!It is useless, especially if you want to be a great scientist or researcher.”

    The vilification of emotion is similar to what happened with alcohol in the 1920’s leading to its (temporary) prohibition.

     

    Vilifying alcohol doesn’t make it go away, it makes it go underground

    One of the failed experiments in US history was a constitutional amendment that banned the transport and sale of alcohol. At the time this 18th amendment was added to the US constitution, alcohol was roundly vilified in many segments of society.

    The result of that attempt to “put a lid on alcohol” is written in history books for all to behold: Alcohol went underground. Alcohol turned violent. Alcohol started massive gang wars. Alcohol of suspect quality and safety was produced by thousands of illegal distilleries that dotted the landscape.

    It got so bad that pretty quickly we managed to overturn that constitutional amendment and make alcohol legal again. It is the only constitutional amendment in 2.5 centuries of U.S. history to have the distinction of being repealed.

     

    REPRESSION leads to unintended consequences

    I’m not saying that alcohol is “good.” (In many situations, it isn’t). I’m not saying that alcohol is “bad” (a fine glass of red wine with dinner can be wonderful – and I’ll arm wrestle anyone who says otherwise!)

    Alcohol just is. It is good and bad. It is both, yet it is neither. But trying to repress it’s use? The facts of history show that it doesn’t work, at least not in our Western culture. There are always unintended consequences.

     

    The same goes for emotion

    We can try to repress emotion. We can try to bottle it up. We can try to pretend that we are nothing but robots who can become devoid of that messy emotional stuff, only to operate from pure logic and rationality to be the “perfect” person.

    But just like alcohol, the emotion doesn’t go away, it goes underground. It is still there, hiding, waiting, repressed. We have desires, fears, excitements, and sadnesses that well up within us, no matter how “logical” we pretend to be. The exceptions to this are psychopaths. They are people who experience no emotional connection to other beings (though they may learn to act as if they do). They do things like killing people out of “curiosity.”

    If you’re not a psychopath, you likely have (lots of) emotion, no matter how well-buried. The question is then what to do with all that emotion. Since most of us have been trained to be rational, intelligent, and objective, we often don’t deal with this part very effectively.

     

    The pot boileth over…then explodes

    As an example of what happens with all the buried emotion, imagine a kettle with some water that’s heating on the stove. At some point, the water in that kettle will reach a boiling point, letting off copious amounts of steam.

    If we keep the lid on the kettle, pressure will build and build until there will be an explosion.

    On the other hand, if we take the lid off sometimes, to let some steam escape, it will just dissipate into harmless vapor.

    So on the one hand, we have a deadly situation involving shrapnel when we try to close off the steam and keep it bottled up. On the other hand, if we let off the steam, then it is far less dangerous.

     

    Emotion is like that steam kettle

    Repressed desires. Repressed fears. Repressed expression. Pretended Stoicism.

    In my family, which was very scientifically-inclined, emotion was something we were never encouraged to show. Emotion was something to be afraid of. Emotion made us “crazy.”

    This led to cultivating the belief that only rationality could win the day, and lead us on the golden path to the promised land of “truth.”

    Or so I believed.

    Unfortunately, all of my schooling amplified these foolish notions. It got worse the higher in school I went. While as an undergraduate student in college, there were moments where emotion was still allowed and occasionally discussed, by the time I was in graduate school?

    Forget it.

    Emotion was only for the weak and the irrational. Emotion had no place in this “serious business” of decoding the human genome.

     

    And because I adopted that common viewpoint that emotion is “bad,” I became a much more mediocre researcher.

    By striving to shut away all that emotion within me, I also shut away the excitement of doing science. I shut away the curiosity and the intrigue.

    Worse, just like that pressure boiler, I’d have occasional explosions. These happened not only in graduate school, but in my post-doctoral position, and worse, once I was in a faculty job. If someone were to do a forensic analysis of my past emails, they’d find a history of me sounding perfectly reasonable, compliant, and amenable, punctuated by episodes of YELLING.

    On any topic where there was strong emotion(space for my lab, funding, or difficult collaborations, for example), I would start out by repressing it to try to seem perfectly logical and reasonable.

    (And, in the process of being perfectly “reasonable” I’d often get walked all over by whomever I was interacting with on that subject). Eventually, the repressed emotions from me being walked all over would boil up. They would put increasing pressure on the lid I’d put on them, until the explosion would occur.

    A flurry of emails would go out. Angry, finger-pointing emails. LOUD emails.

    People would often be stunned by the switch from “perfectly reasonable Morgan, who can be walked all over” into “asshole Morgan, who fights back with vehemence.”

     

    Being an “Occasional Asshole” didn’t get me what I wanted…

    For example, in my almost 10 years at UNC Chapel Hill, I never had what I would consider a reasonable amount of quality lab space commensurate with the level of funding I brought in. I went through cycles of repressed anger about it, with occasional boil-over or explosions, time and time again.

     

    But the space situation never changed.

    It never changed because the “asshole” Morgan, who was willing to advocate for her and her team’s interests simply because she desired “BETTER” (one of those “irrational” emotions) – was so inconsistent. She would only show up in those occasional explosions, and those were so intermittent that, despite leaving her and others around her often shell-shocked, it wasn’t a formula for actually getting things changed.

     

    The episodes got so bad that in one of them, I sent an email to the department chair that said, “I QUIT.”

    Even though I had a cushy, tenured job with a great salary and a lab chock-full of hard working staff, I threw it all away. That was the mother of all explosions in my life.

    Sadly, I still didn’t learn the lesson.

    I carried this same tendency into my endeavors after leaving UNC, including my business and my interactions while at Boise State University. At Boise State, at one point I sent in a resignation (i.e. the “asshole” Morgan coming out to protect me related to frustrations I had there), and a short while later, I sent in an apology and attempted to un-resign (i.e. the “compliant, rational” Morgan who wanted to appease and please).

     

    However, neither quitting nor un-quitting solved the underlying issues of my dissatisfaction with my career at the time.

    A few months after the Quit/Un-Quit Scenario,I quit again. That was the next explosion, resulting from several months of pent-up frustration. I’m sure I left people baffled by that whole affair, and to this day, I feel much chagrin about it. (But unfortunately, un-doing is only possible on computers).

    Meanwhile I built a fairly thriving business of helping researchers. I have helped many achieve astounding successes in both grants and life, like my client Stefanie who recently received her 4th grant in a row as a second year faculty member, yet who has great work-life balance. (A note: Stefanie’s success was due to her unusually hard work at changing herself. Most people do not get such astounding results because they don’t do the difficult, deep work required).

     

    So what in the heck is the problem?

    Why did I say “fairly thriving business” when it has positive effects like Stefanie’s transformation?

    I know that I can reach more people to help them. I have facilitated other similar transformations for people, but there are SO many people out there still struggling with all the things Stefanie did, and more. And, because of my own repressed fear of being seen as a “pushy marketer” (aka an “asshole”), I don’t reach many of those struggling people who may want help.

    The trouble is the same conflict between the “wanting to be nice and liked” Morgan versus the “let’s make a difference” Morgan. Causing change and making a difference always angers some people. It is inevitable. That means these two versions of me are at odds.

    On the one hand, I have a deep fear of being seen as that  “pushy asshole” – and so I minimize my presence by avoiding sending out emails, posting on the blog, etc.

    On the other hand, that repressed fear eventually builds up pressure in my life and business. The pressures include:

    • The pressure of feeling like I’m not moving forward or expanding.
    • The financial pressure of keeping a team running and salaried
    • The pressure of feeling stagnant, without expanding our reach.
    • The pressure of knowing I can and want to be doing better
    • The pressure of not being able to do the travel with my family that I want to, because we always seem to be “on a tight budget”

     

    So, the pressures build up to explosions.

    I still have the explosions to let off the bottled-up steam, but sometime about five years ago, their nature changed. I used to have a level of consciousness where I was in “victim-hood” and would blame whatever bad sh*t was happening on others. I would blame it on a bureaucrat, a committee, or a collaborator. I would point fingers at stupid politicians for the stuff going on in the world, or at reviewers for not “getting” my work. It was easy to point the blame and make it all “their” fault that I was experiencing whatever crappy situation.

    However, in my path of personal development, I came to realize that blaming others for what I’m  experiencing is dis-empowering. Our choices truly do create our reality for us. So if we want a different reality, we have to make different choices. Pointing fingers at others and playing the victim is incredibly dis-empowering. So I chose to stop doing that.

     

    Instead, I started going inward

    These days when things go bad, I go inward. I take responsibility for it. I realize that whatever I’m experiencing is ultimately a product of my choices.This reaction is different than angrily lashing out at others.

    Instead, it has often amounted to angrily lashing inward.

    In my “explosions” now, I am often profoundly angry at myself, at life, and at the universe for creating a situation where I have to still sometimes struggle with money, or with such a limited reach.

    I’m honestly not sure that this has been more healthy than my previous tendency to lash outward at whomever was the “blame recipient du jour.” It is no more empowering to blame oneself than to blame someone else for the woes being experienced.

    The problem is that there’s a need for blame in the first place.

     

    The need for blame comes from the pent-up emotion that leads to an explosion of some kind

    It’s become abundantly clear that “lashing out inward” in such explosions is no more a healthy alternative to lashing outward than e-cigarettes are to tobacco. Maybe a bit better, maybe not.

    I have tried nearly every personal development strategy I could find. While they have positively transformed my life in so many ways, none of them solved this fundamental issue of these pent-up emotions leading to the seeming bi-polar cycle of being compliant, reasonable, and rational, alternating with moments of angst exploding outward and/or inward.

    The fundamental issue has been this repressed emotion, and the results that repression produces. What the heck is that thing I’ve been repressing?

    I have a desire to reach more people. I have a desire to live an even better life. I have a desire to see progress for my kids, and my team. I have a strong desire to do my small part in creating a better world. These desires are not “rational” goals. If you dig deeply, they can’t be clearly justified as any better than another choice. There is no objective rule of the universe that says one must help other people or make the world a better place. From an objective and rational standpoint, it seems pointless: if the universe will end in an ultimate “heat death,” then why worry about it?

    Worse, the desire to create changealways ends up pissing some people off. No matter what it is, there will always be people who resist anything new, different, or unusual. And in my family, which was very much based on always acting calm, rational, and logical, these messy things like desiring something bigor dealing with the ramifications such as pissing people offweren’t dealt with. All that messy emotional stuff was to be kept well-hidden under a guise of being rational. Pissing people off was definitely frowned upon, as was creating any kind of big disturbance.

    So here we have another emotion coming into play: the fear of pissing people off, and the resulting consequences of that. But here’s the thing – I didn’t want to admit that I had that fear. After all, I have done many things in my life that others consider pretty fearless, so I had this self image that I couldn’t possibly have such a simple fear. Therefore, I repressed it, until it would explode out in some kind of drama.

     

    Changing only when forced to by an explosion: Not a recipe for consistent progress.

    I would walk around with this fear, unintentionally playing small to not piss people off, until things got really bad in my own life and work. There would be some kind of event that would bring things to a head. Once things got to this point, I’d finallymake some changes, as the fear of things falling apart overwhelmed the fear of pissing people off, and so I’d finally do something.

    For example, if there were bills to be paid, and no money to pay them, then “being an asshole” and holding myself or employees more accountable would make sense. In a “do or die” situation, the asshole-ness could be justified “rationally.”I’d make some changes with a kind of willpower and determination that I didn’t normally have access to.

    Then as soon as the difficulty passed, I’d go back to “normal” which means repression: playing the “nice Morgan” and often getting walked over while I watched my dreams slowly die. During these times, I’d even feel deep guilt about the “asshole-ness” I’d acted upon in previous times when I moved things forward.

     

    Of course, none of the self-incrimination fixed the problem. It made it worse.

    All that negative self talk only served one purpose: to make me feel like there was something fundamentally wrong with me that kept creating these situations. And, feeling that there was something wrong with me led to a corresponding feeling that I don’t deserve more success than I’ve had. That led to further repression of my desires to expand my reach and impact, “because obviously I don’t deserve it, I’m too weird and flakey, and sometimes an asshole too!”

    Maybe this cycle is familiar to you. Or maybe you just go for it, and play big without worrying about how others see you.Either way, let me tell you from personal experience, it sucks. It is worth dealing with.

     

    Dealing with it comes at a cost.

    What is that cost? The cost is allowing – and even embracing all that messy emotional stuff lying under the surface. In other words, we must embrace our humanity, rather than continuing to aspire to be androids.  It includes embracing the “bad” with the good.

    You can’t just embrace the happy, loving, joyous parts, while repressing all the scared, angry, and selfish parts.

    It doesn’t work that way. As I’ve attempted to illustrate with these stories, anytime you’re repressing any emotional parts of yourself, you will eventually get a boil-over.

    It may be a health problem.

    It may be a career problem.

    It may be a relationship blow-up.

    But rest assured, if you’re not embracing all of it, an explosion of some kind is on its way. And unlike a controlled release, an explosion can create collateral damage.

     

    How to create the controlled release: Embrace the Inner Asshole/Bitch, and then transcend it.

    Your fears may be different than mine. But at least for many women, and some men, there is a big fear of being seen as an asshole or bitch. There is a fear of being seen as selfish, greedy, or pushy. There is a fear of being seen as not being “nice” and “amenable” at all times.

    Believe me, as someone who has lived as both man and woman, the social pressures that amplify these fears are much greater for women than for men. However, that’s not to trivialize their effect on men: I have had many male clients that also become paralyzed by them.

    In any case, I’m using this “fear of being seen as an asshole or bitch” as an example to illustrate a point that applies to any frequently repressed emotion, especially the fear.

    How can you measure whether this is affecting you? By considering a simple question: is there a part of you that feels like you could be experiencing more out of life than you currently are? Does it seem like something keeps holding you back from doing greater things, but you’re not sure what?If so, it is likely you’ve got some of this repressed emotion that’s behind it.

     

    So, how do we deal with that?

    The first principle is what not to do: we often can’t just talk it down rationally. These emotions we feel like an “inner child.” If you’ve had kids or worked with kids, you know what I mean. If a kid has a fear of getting on a rollercoaster, it is difficult if not impossible to talk that kid into getting on with rationality. It doesn’t matter how many times you say “rollercoasters are safer than the car ride we took to get here.” I’ve had just such a conversation with one of my daughters, and it led me nowhere. Her fear won out and she didn’t go on that ride.

    Trying to talk emotion down through reason alone often just gets it more entrenched than ever, whether dealing with a kid, your own emotional “inner child”, or with someone else’s. Trying to talk condescendingly to that part of yourself can often serve to amplify the very same emotional needs you’re trying to “talk down off the ledge.” It further builds up steam towards the next explosion. With my fear being seen as an asshole/bitch as an example, I haven’t been able to just reason it away. I’ve tried, and that has not worked, and the fear has slowly grown.

    In other words, by trying to invalidate the emotions, we amplify them.

    This is not to say that rational thinking should be abandoned; no. It is just saying that when dealing with deep inner emotions, it’s not a very useful tool.

     

    What’s the alternative?

    I’ve been experimenting with an idea that comes from the philosophy of Ken Wilbur, which is  “Include and Transcend.” The idea is that as we further develop our own consciousness to higher levels, rather than trying to push away and marginalize past tendencies or problems, we embrace and include them so that we can ultimately transcend them.

    An example from the popular culture that embodies this concept is Batman.

     

    Batman Embraced and Transcended

    As a kid, Bruce Wayne who would later become Batman, was terrified of bats. It was a deep and paralyzing fear for him. After letting that and many other fears paralyze him for years, he finally decided to embrace them. He went into a bat cave and exposed himself to thousands of bats. He had a brief mental breakdown while bats flew all around him, clearly causing tremendous fear and turmoil. But ultimately, he realized that he was still okay. He realized that while his fear of bats may never fully go away, he could live with it. He could include it and transcend it.

    And so he became the Batman, to represent his transcendence of the fear bats represented. He transcended it only by embracing and including it, and became one of the most famous superheros of all time.

    Perhaps what makes Batman so alluring is that he is a real human who has real fears and foibles like the rest of us, but has managed to transcend them enough to go out and do good in the (fictional) world.

     

    Embracing the Asshole…

    I recently took an inventory, and discovered that I still have lots of various fears and doubts at this emotional level to embrace and transcend if I want to move forward, but one of the biggest ones is this fear of being seen as an asshole. If I want to overcome it, I have to embrace it.

    What that means is embracing the fears of:

    • being pushy
    • bothering people
    • holding my staff accountable, or even holding myself accountable
    • having great boundaries with family
    • offending my rationally-oriented brother and mom
    • turning off a potential future client
    • turning off an existing client

    and a lot more….

     

    Relief from embracing Asshole-ness?

    Honestly, now that I’m “embracing the asshole” it is quite a relief. See, if I weren’t embracing the asshole, I couldn’t have written this. I know there is someone out there who will be offended by this post.Maybe the use of the word “asshole” will trigger someone, if nothing else. That’s just how the world is. With over 7.6 billion people to offend, someone will always be happy to take the offended position.

    I’ve tried many times to rationally talk myself into this very same point of view. I’ve told myself quotes about how “you can’t do anything important without offending someone” – or “if you’ve offended someone, it means you’re doing something worthwhile.”

    Those kinds of seemingly rational statements have occasionally helped in the short term, but have no brought any kind of lasting change.

    This “embracing the asshole” is different. It feels lasting. It feels like an acknowledgment of who I really am. It acknowledges that I am not perfect nor will ever be. It acknowledges that there will be people upset with some of what I do. It relieves me of all the worry and self judgment that goes with that.

    If I can just let myself “be the asshole,”  and embrace the surrounding fear about that, I can have more positive impact in the world. I can do better for myself, my staff, my clients, and the world at large.

    So, ironically, by embracing the asshole, I’m also embracing making more of a difference. I’m embracing more positive impact.

    That feels GOOD. After all those years of trying to fight off and run from being seen as an asshole, it is a profound relief.

     

    Another example: Embracing Arrogance

    I have a client who I worked with recently on a similar issue. But in her case, the big fear was of being seen as arrogant. The emotional baggage was around the concept of “who do you think you are to go out and do these crazy/big/ambitious things?!?” She grew up in a family and culture that told people to mostly play small, keep their heads down, work hard, and not make a ruckus. Yet this person has very big ambitions, and has already accomplished quite a bit. The more she accomplishes, it seems the more this repressed fear affects her. She’ll have moments of “going for it” interspersed with times of “who the hell do I think I am” where she’ll shrink back and withdraw. It reminds me of my own cycle, just expressed in a different way.

    So in a recent interaction where this fear was clearly holding her back, I said: “What if you embrace your arrogance?” I used the example of Steve Jobs. I asked “do you think Steve Jobs could have accomplished what he did without arrogance?” (The answer is hell no). It absolutely requires at least some arrogance to go out and do something big in the world.

    The opposite of arrogance is timidity. Nobody ever accomplished big things by being timid. While I’m not advocating that my client go out and be arrogant all the time, I am advocating that she embrace the part of her that is already arrogant, i.e. the part of her that has big ambitions, and is willing to act to turn those into reality. Even if some people will surely be offended by it.

     

    It is about embracing that part of us that already exists, not becoming becoming a total asshole or arrogant jerk.

    My goal is not to become a total asshole towards everyone, no. My goal is to embrace that ambitious, smart part of me that wants to change the world. It is embracing that part that sometimes gets impatient with foolish, stupid, and mediocre human behavior. It is embracing that part of me that myself or others may sometimes label as an asshole.

    That’s an important distinction. There’s a big difference between “becoming a total asshole” versus “embracing the asshole part of me that’s already there.” One is trying to become intentionally obnoxious and asinine. The other is just embracing the part that is a side effect of who we already are and the desires we have to move forward in life. It is embracing the part that other people might not like because it’s not acting the way they want it to act(becausethey too are being selfishand wanting everyone else to act in a way they see as right, true, and correct).

    This is the what I encouraged my client to do by embracing the arrogant part of her that already exists. I did not encourage her to just go out and be arrogant to everyone she meets to intentionally cause a stir.

     

    What is the fear or emotion you have most repressed?

    This is where it is often important to get help from someone outside of your head. While I eventually identified my own fear of being seen as an asshole, it has taken me over 10 years of serious self-development work – and also working with many others – to come to this conclusion.

    None of us – no matter how smart nor how introspective we are – are very good at seeing such things inside of ourselves. Nearly all of us have blind spots. Worse, seeking help on such things from family members or friends is often the worst way to get honest introspection. These people we’re close to in our lives like to uphold a certain image of who we are, just like we do to ourselves. Therefore, they often have the blinders just as much as we do about what’s really going on underneath the hood.

    This is something we work with researchers on in the Research Success Alliance*. We often observe that when someone is struggling with a problem like (lack of) grant funding, it is not only due to the inability to write killer proposals. It often goes deeper than that, and ties into issues like certain repressed fears that lead to various kinds of self-sabotoge. We love nothing more than helping to identify these patterns so that people can get un-blocked and move forward powerfully.

    * To find out more about the Research Success Alliance (RSA), stay tuned!

     

     

    Dr. Morgan Giddings is creator of programs and courses like Grant Dynamo, Grant Foundry, and Fearless Creators – all designed to help research doctors and scientists reduce overwhelm and frustration while increasing career satisfaction.

    Her newest program, The Research Success Alliance combines grant training and help with tackling the underlying stresses of every day life in academia.

  • How to Hack Your Creative Workspace

    How to Hack Your Creative Workspace

    This is a guest post by Allie Smith-Hobbs. 

    It’s the middle of summer. How’s your productivity? 

    grant deadlines

    There are nights where I’ve been up in the wee hours ruminating about projects. And although our work endeavors can sometimes be frustrating, they can also be the reason we joyously jump out of bed in the morning and rush to the computer with excitement. Work thoughts often fill our minds, but have you given much thought to where you do your work?

    The where of your work matters. 

    grantwritingworkspace

    Your workspace can dramatically affect your entire work experience including both your creativity and your productivity.

    Whether you’re a small business owner or a tenured professor, your clarity and quality of work will reflect your inner state. It’s very difficult to write clearly or work productively with muddled goals and fuzzy thoughts. While the much bigger topics of core alignment, inner clarity and mental schemas are definitely at play when it comes to our creativity and productivity, there are a few simple steps you take right now to hack your workspace.

    So grab a cup of tea, spend a few minutes answering these questions and make a few tweaks to dramatically improve not only your creativity and productivity, but also your overall quality of life.

    mockupNIHgrant

    Location. Location. Location.
    This is where the magic happens. Your workspace is your personal real estate. 

    Where do you find your groove? Is it in a high energy environment like the corner of a bustling coffee shop? Or perhaps a quiet space in your home office with a cat on your lap and a latte on the desk?

    Your workspace may include the office, a local coffee shop or even a laptop while lounging by the pool.

    If you have the option of working wherever you want, pay attention to which locations give you inspiration and which give you even more distractions. Depending on your vocation, you may or may not have much latitude when it comes to where you plug in your computer. If you’re required to work in your onsite office, you still have choices that can improve your productivity. How about giving yourself the gift of two hours of uninterrupted time behind locked doors with all distractions (including phone and internet notifications) turned off? What could you accomplish without the constant distraction and drain of colleagues popping by every few minutes?

    Aesthetics
    And speaking of distractions…is clutter overwhelming your desk? Is there a stack of paperwork that needs to be filed?

    Our moods contribute to our productivity (or procrastination).

    What type of mood does your workspace invoke? Does it make you feel tanked of energy – even if you’ve only been there a few minutes? Or is it filled with things that inspire you?

    If you experience a particular emotion every time your eye lands on something, it’s in your best interest to make sure it’s a positive emotion. File those papers, pay those bills, clear off the table – you’ll find it easier to get things done.

    Music and Silence
    Music is powerful and silence is golden. Are you a fan of music or do you need silence during your business hours? Does putting on the headphones put you in a focused state? Personally, I love music but during intense writing sessions, I find most music a distraction (particularly if it has lyrics). The Spotify channel “Deep Focus” is an exception, as its tracks are selected to improve a flow mindset.

    I crank the tunes when in an editing phase or when doing creative multi-tasking, which is a different mindset than getting ideas down in a rough draft, documenting in a spreadsheet or anytime I need to get into the nitty gritty details of a project. It’s your preference when it comes to your auditory input, what’s the difference between focus and distraction?

    Routine and Variability
    Do you thrive on the discipline of a routine to get tasks done at the same time and/or day or do you prefer variability to keep you interested and your ideas fresh? You may prefer a different environment when churning out rough drafts, mind maps and brainstorms versus the refining and editing phases.

    Do you prefer being in solitude or do your ideas flow from collaboration and interaction? From scheduling to location, what routines work best for you?

    You define your creative workspace. A customized workspace that fits your personality and work habits will contribute to a peaceful, energetic and organized mind. 

    Let’s hear from you – are you a solo writer, researcher or entrepreneur or do you need to chat and collaborate in the hallways to ignite your creativity? Do you lock yourself in your office for a late night or do you get up early with a cup of coffee and do your best work at the kitchen table before 8 am? What changes can you make – right now – to make your workspace a place you want to be?

  • How to Have the best Holidays ever…

    How to Have the best Holidays ever…

    The Holidays are supposed to be a time of giving thanks and enjoying family – but for many of us they turn into a nightmare.

    In this article, I discuss what makes the holidays difficult, and give you steps you can implement for a much better result.

    A lot of us go through the holiday season feeling like we should be enjoying the cheer and merriment, but we aren’t. Many of us feel just the opposite… sad, disengaged, overwhelmed.  It is a frustrating contradiction that’s increasingly common.

    Apart from lacking daylight and cold temps in the Northern Hemisphere, there are a couple things that happen during the holidays that make them difficult to get through.

    Family Overdose

    The first is that we are exposed to a lot more family than we usually are in our day to day life. For many of us this involves visiting with parents and/or in-laws – and sometimes extended family too.

    In a perfect universe, most of us want to enjoy this time with family, but….  we often end up frustrated and dispirited by patterns of interaction we have established with these people. As much as we want the patterns to go away,  we keep re-living them over and over again. Each time we visit, we’re confronted with the same thing, over and over again… and it can seem like Groundhog Day.

    You might get drawn into political debates with your dad or uncle who is a Rush Limbaugh fan and you’re most definitely not…

    Or it could be that your mom likes to tell you what to do, and you feel like she’s treating you as a child….

    Whatever those patterns are, they disrupt our energy and make the Holidays much harder to handle. They take us away from our “Core” and get us into reactive ego-land, where frustration and angst are par for the course.

    Once we’re in reactive ego-land, it’s often hard to recover back into “sanity” until we get away from these people.

    Worse still, if we start feeling cranky or dispirited, we may do or say something we regret. That can feed into guilt, and guess what that guilt does? It reinforces the whole negative cycle we’re already in. It produces more negativity and guilt.

    We feel like we should be “better” as a child/parent/neice/nephew than we are being, and that makes us feel negative and unworthy.

    Basically, it sucks. We’ll talk about some remedies in a moment, but first let’s look at the next thing that most of us face during the Holidays.

    Overwhelm in the Holidays

    This second thing is a basic sense of overwhelm. For my academic clients, many look to the Holidays as a time to get away from teaching and committee duties, and to both recover energy, but also to make progress on things like grant proposals.

    Yet what often ends up happening is that we start out feeling great to finally have some free time, and soon, we’re overwhelmed. By the end of the Holidays, we’ll look back and often feel guilty that we accomplished so little.

    How does that happen? The Holidays are overwhelming. What may have been a nice, calm time a century ago has turned into a big shopping and visiting fest. If you go to the malls, they are overrun with people. If you go to the airports, they are overrun with people. Traffic is crazy. Expectations are crazier.

    Since most of us feel obliged to spend time with and buy gifts for the people in our lives, we are thrust into that craziness on a regular basis through the travel and the shopping.

    While I’m a girl who loves a good sale from time to time, wading through all the options and ads is often too much. It’s too much information for anyone to deal with – especially if you’ve got a complex career and home life too.

    On top of that there are physiological factors. With the cold weather and diminished sunshine (in Northern Hemisphere) we often have less energy to get out, and are more prone to getting sick. If you have kids, they love to bring home viruses that affect the whole family.

    On top of that, for academics, the Holidays often cap off an intense Semester. This ends in a bout of grading, finishing up un-done work, followed by trying to move things forward before the next semester starts.

    For our human biology – which evolved on the quiet savannas of Africa – this kind of constant push and information overload is not something we are equipped to deal with for more than a short span of time.

    It affects us mentally, and that can spill over into physical effects as well. This is a time of year when fatigue-like symptoms often appear.

    At the time of year when we feel like we’re supposed to be “cheerful” and “energetic,” instead we just end up feeling “tired” and “run down.”

    That sucks, doesn’t it?

    While solving this is not a “quick fix,” here are some pointers to get you started:

    1. Avoid unrealistic expectations. Be aware of unrealistic expectations for yourself and others, and avoid them like the flu. Most of us go into the Holidays thinking that we’ll get work done, get travel done, get shopping done, get cooking done, get time with family spent, and on the list goes. It’s like we have to be a combination of Martha Stewart, Albert Einstein, and Gandhi all wrapped into one little bundle of joyous energy. Talk about unrealistic! We are all human, and no matter whether we’re in great physical shape or not, we all have limits. Many of us ignore those limits when we’re thinking about the future, and this is especially bad when it comes to the Holidays. So it’s important to really scale back our expectations for ourselves during this time.
    2. Sleep more. No matter how you slice it, the Holidays are going to be more stressful for most people than during “normal” times. Dealing with stress requires additional sleep – at least if you want to stay healthy. So, give yourself permission to sleep more. Don’t see it as “wasting time” but rather, see it as “investing time in well being.”
    3. Exercise. It’s way too easy to feel “stuck” inside due to the inclement weather. Yet getting outdoors is an essential mood-lifting tool in your arsenal. Even a 15 minute walk can make a big difference. If you live where it’s cold and icy, bundle up nice and warm and get out! (Some people consider me weird, but I love getting out on my bike this time of year when it’s sub-freezing. There aren’t many other bikers out, so I feel like I have the roads and trails to myself.)
    4. Avoid the big sales at the mall and crowded places like that. Like I said, I love a good sale. But years ago I swore to myself that I’d avoid Black Friday outings, and I am very glad that I did. The question to ask is this: how much does it cost you in terms of stress and frustration to save a few dollars when you go out shopping with the big crowds? For most of us, it’s simply not worth it. This is especially true for those of us who are wired to be “internal” – i.e. who don’t like spending lots of time around lots of people. Going against our own inner nature can really end up being de-energizing, and the effect can last for days.
    5. Avoid guilt. We are a society of wannabe superheros. Many of us have totally unrealistic expectations for ourselves about what we should and can accomplish. Since none of us end up ever meeting our expectations for our own “superhero” status, we then end up feeling guilt over it. And, this kind of guilt can be amplified by interactions with those people in our lives who like to use guilt as a tool to manipulate us. Yet all the guilt just saps our energy and well-being. And worse, sometimes the guilt turns into shame about our own abilities, and that’s even worse.

    Now, one thing we didn’t address here is how you deal with your relationships with other people – especially when it comes to (sometimes pushy or intrusive) family members.

    This is a big subject, so instead of trying to cover it here, I’ve put together a brand new training “Managing your relationships: how to take control of both your personal and working relationships so they don’t drive you crazy.”

    It will help you during the Holidays, but also applies to any other time of year.

    To join me on the training (which will be on Tuesday December 8 at 4 pm MT/6 pm ET), you can use this fancy button:
    Click Here to Save Your Spot

     

  • My other favorite F-word

    This is a guest post by Allie Smith-Hobbs.

    Fun is a four letter word around the American workplace. When I worked in Silicon Valley during the dotcom boom of endless foozball rounds and mini-golf in the all-you-can-eat-cafeteria, “fun” was mandatory ad nauseum. But in the wake of the collapse, playing and even hard-earned vacation time seem to be the casualty of economic downturn and unhealthy cultural norms. People I know roll over their vacation time year after year until they “finally have time to take a vacation.”

    Fun and playing = goofing off.

    Fun and playing = screwing around.

    Fun and playing = NOT working. NOT making money.  And generally not contributing or being productive…or does it?

    Overworked, overstressed and overtired is exactly the time to take a vacation. It’s the reset button on your creative work life.

    I just spent a week playing in a foreign country where I don’t speak the language. I played with my friends. An10405420_10206365606116502_8669581598549735927_nd by played, I mean I didn’t play on my phone. In fact, the utter lack of wifi ensured that I gave my international adventure the full attention that it deserved.

    My Australian traveling companions are spending their holiday by traveling for three weeks. Three weeks?! That’s unheard of in America unless you’re taking a university sabbatical or short-term disability leave. This is a culture where even maternity leave is tacitly frowned upon. So where do we stand on a frivolous vacation bent on play?

    A holiday is a shortcut to deep belly laughing, making new friends and adopting the immersion method of adventure. And yes, I approach it tongue-in-cheek but in all honesty, when was the last time you played? On a micro scale of getting on the floor with children or grandchildren or the macro scale of packing your carry-on, hopping on a plane, and leaving your emotional baggage at the airport?

    This is your friendly reminder to have more fun. I’d wager that your life needs more of this particular F-word. In fact, I’d even swear by it. 🙂

    Allie Smith-Hobbs has a background in administration with a M.S. in Instructional and Performance Technology and a passion for literature and writing. She combines adventure, administrative support and cool technology in supporting Dr. Morgan Giddings and her clients.

  • Fun Killers are Productivity Killers, Part I

    Fun Killers are Productivity Killers, Part I

    Why do you want to be more “productive?” Why are there so many productivity books, products, courses, and gurus?

    If you examine this question, productivity isn’t quite what it seems. Lots of people (moi included) have fallen into the trap of seeking productivity for the sheer sake of “being more productive because that’s what we’re supposed to do.”

    But why?

    If you think about it, this is programming we carry around that is a) bogus and b) fun-killing. If you think about the source of this programming, we can go back to the factories of the Industrial era, with bosses lording over “production” to assure that it didn’t lag.

    Notice the similarity between the word “production” and “productivity?” Yeah.

    You are a tool

    The implication is that you are a tool for cranking out stuff (otherwise known as a “robot”). The more stuff a robot cranks out, the better the robot! The more we reward the robot. Yay! Good Robot!

    Um, no thanks. Not the way I want to live my life. And hopefully not the way you want to live yours. Being someone’s pet robot is not in my life plan.

    I can anticipate the objection now (hey, I’ve done enough grant writing that I am pretty good at figuring out what those objections might be, in advance).

    Your objection may be something like this:

    • If I produce more, I will earn more money and/or other rewards (like promotions or Nobel prizes).
    • If I earn more money and/or other rewards, I will be happier
    • Therefore, producing more means more happiness!

    Yes, I talk to a LOT of people who have this kind of implicit (and almost always unexamined) belief system.

    It’s not helping you…

    Let me count the ways in which this belief system does not serve you.

    1) Producing more does not lead to more money or other rewards. It is NEVER about the quantity, unless you’re on an assembly line or a farm. If you are doing anything even mildly creative in your work, it is about the QUALITY and NEWNESS of what you do, way more than quantity!

    (Imagine if your humble author went on a robot-like “productivity” binge and wrote 3 blog posts per day of blah blah blah blah blah… where would that get her? Um… nowhere! Or, perhaps having a Comp Sci degree, she could use an artificial intelligence program to auto-generate lots of blog posts? um…. blech)

    2) More money and/or other rewards do not equal more happiness. Quite often, the opposite occurs. People often have this ego that thinks these things will make it feel satisfied, but the ego is NEVER satisfied.

    For example, I had a client who recently had few HUGE wins in her life. A few days after the ego-led euphoria of those wins wore off, it was “back to normal” – but worse.

    It was “worse” because the big wins put additional pressure on her to “live up to” the wins and to “not screw it up.” So here she was, less than a week after some things that would create envy among many other people – feeling more doubt and concern than ever. (Fortunately, we worked through that and she’s back on track!)

    Those wins, like money and stuff, never produce lasting joy or satisfaction. So why is it that we often spend much of our lives striving for them?

    Ego programming. The ego is not by itself “bad” (and you’re not going to get rid of it in this life anyway). However, through various experiences with various people in our lives, we pick up ego programming that tells us that seeking fame or fortune or stability or security is for our highest good. And we carry that programming through life, unexamined, it shaping most of our actions and experiences without us even knowing it.

    And so we end up pursuing goals that are shallow, ego-led goals, never finding the long-lasting joy or satisfaction that is our birthright as a human.

    For many of my readers, you may be more in the category of “seeking security” or “seeking stability” rather than “fame and fortune.” You may even have some judgement relative to those people who seek fame and fortune, thinking of them as ego-driven, while thinking of yourself as not so ego-driven.

    I encourage you to think about that for a moment. What generates the need for security or stability for many people? Fear – i.e. not wanting insecurity, fear of the unknown, fear of the future, fear of what will happen, fear of things not going well, etc.

    Where does fear come from? Ego programming! Fear is only and always about ego. It is just a different form of ego programming. Yet it can take over your life in an insidious manner that’s far less than the obvious ego programming that leads to seeking fame and fortune.

    We live in an ego led world, and I am an ego girl…

    Okay, the line from the song by Madonna didn’t fit this expression so well, but I will proceed nonetheless….

    We live in a very ego-led world. It is rare to encounter someone who has seriously undertaken a path of attempting to live at a deeper level, one that strives to constantly go deeper than the ego-programming and to live from the CORE. That means living in the NOW, enjoying each moment, being in the flow, and creating!

    So, we tore apart the notion that “producing more will produce more happiness.” It’s bogus.

    I don’t think that anyone truly wants to “be productive.” (Have you EVER met a small child who says “I want to be PRODUCTIVE today?” I didn’t think so.)

    No, I think that people want to have harmony, adventure, joy, fun, excitement, intrigue, love, connection and similar feelings/experiences. And we need to get rid of the notion that more productivity somehow leads directly to more of those things.

    It often leads to exactly the opposite – especially in our over-jacked, hyped up, always-on society. We often get sucked into “being productive” for the sake of “being productive” and then these other things become ever more elusive. That’s bogus.

    So, in part II of the article, we’re going to do a logical trick that is going to blow your mind (or at least tweak it a tiny bit) – to redefine the relationship of productivity to your fun and to your life.

    Stay tuned……

  • Your Problem Is Not What You Think It Is

    Your Problem Is Not What You Think It Is

    Let’s say that by some weird coincidence in life, you have a problem that you have to actually deal with and can’t just sweep under the rug. (Hey, most of us never have problems, do we?)

    It could be that there’s not enough money flowing. It could be that you’re a researcher who is struggling with grant funding.

    Or maybe it’s a relationship problem. You’re just not getting the respect or attention that you think you should from someone important in your life.

    Or health issues like chronic pain or the Big C?

    Peeling back the layers

    Let’s consider any problem you might face just like we’d contemplate the layers of the Earth, from the outer crust to the inner core.

    We humans often deal with these issues at the surface – or crust – level.

    Let’s say you’re facing chronic pain due to arthritis.

    The surface level way to deal with chronic pain is by taking a pain reliever. It makes the pain diminish, temporarily. But it never lasts. It doesn’t solve the underlying condition. In fact, often the underlying condition keeps getting worse over time, and eventually you need to increase the strength of the pain relievers just to keep up. Not only that, but then you’ll have to deal with the impact of long-term pain reliever use, such as ulcers.

    Sadly, many people never go beyond that “pain relief” level in addressing their problems.

    I see it with entrepreneurs and business owners who cover up the pain by taking just one more job or client they don’t really want to do, but need the “pain relief” of the short-term money fix.

    I see it with researchers who write just one more grant proposal to try to get funding for work that they’re not really interested in doing, except for the money that it brings.

    You can’t win by just addressing a problem at this “crust level.” While you get temporary “pain relief” it never lasts. And quite often, the actual problem worsens over time, so the “pain relief” needs to get bigger and bigger.

    You may move from something like aspirin to ever more potent prescription drugs, and even those potent drugs eventually stop working. It’s a slippery slope and almost never ends well.

    Diving Into the Mantle

    Some small fraction of people take the time and energy to dive into the next level of a problem. I am thinking about people I’ve known who’ve had chronic arthritis. (I hope that in this discussion you see how it applies to other problems, like money, relationships, etc… because at the core, they all are the same issue).

    Very few that I’ve known actually dive down into this level of the problem, where they examine diet and lifestyle factors, and start changing them.

    There’s plenty of scientific evidence that certain foods have autoimmune stimulating properties, which in layman’s terms means that they are more likely to cause arthritis. And I’ve met several people who have reduced their arthritic symptoms by paying attention to their diet.

    Yet most resist this level. Why? I’ve heard two major reasons:

    1) It’s too much effort to change diet. There’s no time. “Why can’t I just take a pill to solve this problem?”

    This excuse is just an expression of something our society encourages via messages all around us: take the easy way out. You don’t have to work on yourself. You don’t have to change. You are just “fine” as you are – it’s the nasty circumstances or people that are to blame. Not you!

    2) “The science has conflicting data about whether arthritis can be addressed with diet.” Yes, one thing that disease research hasn’t grappled with is human individuality. We each respond differently to different things! So let’s say you have a study that links eating food X to arthritis, but there’s conflicting data. Well, that’s probably because in some people food X does stimulate arthritic conditions and in others food X has the opposite effect.

    Confusion and paralysis lead to doing nothing at all

    This kind of analysis often leads to confusion and paralysis – i.e. the doing of nothing.

    These two things combined often prevent people from even addressing a problem at this level. But let’s say that you decide to go ahead and deal with it at this deeper level. Let’s say you decide to spend the time and effort it takes to figure out what foods and lifestyle factors influence YOUR arthritis.

    The rewards can be big. After an initial time of “groping around in the dark” to figure out what works and what doesn’t, you find things that work for you and the condition starts improving. You no longer are dependent on expensive prescription painkillers (with their side effects). You are gaining independence, and no longer identify with the disease condition all the time. It no longer rules your life.

    That’s a big step, and it’s one that only a small fraction of people take – for ANY problem. Yet there’s an even deeper step, one that’s even more difficult, that even fewer people take.

    Getting to the core

    The CORE. What could that be?

    It’s the same for ALL problems that ANYONE experiences in ANY area of life.

    It is your thinking.

    Your thinking defines your actions. If your actions are producing unwanted results, then there’s always some flaw in your thinking that’s producing those actions that are producing the unwanted results!

    Now, I’m a believer in a strong mind-body connection. But let’s set that aside for a minute, and pretend that there is no mind-body connection. Let’s pretend that something like arthritis is caused only by “circumstances”.

    We know for a fact that diet and lifestyle impact conditions do impact arthritis. So, why do people resist changing those things so much?

    It’s all in the thinking. We have all developed egos that “learned how to survive in this world” – and yet the very same ego that knows how to survive often prevents us from dealing with new problems it’s never encountered before.

    The Ego Thinks “I’ve Got This Handled” (it rarely does)

    The ego thinks it’s got this survival thing figured out! It doesn’t want to change! It is afraid of change! Change is scary! And the ego is fueled by fear.

    Yet, if you dive beneath the ego layer of our being, and get to the core, there’s something very different there. There’s that loving, joyous, happy person that nearly all of us are – at least at times – when we are young children, before the adults get hold of us and start programming us to no longer be happy.

    So, if we somehow manage to bypass ego, and tap into that core, that loving, happy, joyous person inside just wants us to feel good. It wants us to make the changes we need in order to do that.

    Sadly, for most of us, the ego is the dominant voice. Like I said, it’s fueled by fear, and there’s plenty of fear mongering in our world to give it a nice steady supply of fuel. It can become very loud, and very dominant. A bit like that obnoxious drunk guy at the party who talks over everyone else to prove how smart he is. Yes, that’s your ego.  For some reason, you’re listening to him.

    It’s rare that I see someone dive down to this CORE level to address an issue, but when they do, the changes are profound.

    It’s like a rediscovery of who you really are. It’s like re-meeting your “better self” after that person has hidden away in the closet for decades.

    Bringing out your better half

    When you bring that better self out of the closet and into your life, she will do what it takes to solve the problem at its core level. In the case of arthritis, she will read lots of books, and start carefully experimenting with different approaches to heal the arthritis.

    And, she’ll begin visualizing as well. There’s plenty of evidence that visualization works.

    This person, operating from the core, will keep trying things, until she finds things that work. So what if visualization is a “waste of time?” At least she gave it a chance to work! That’s far better than sitting around trying to base your life on what you think in advance “won’t work.” (That’s the fear based ego talking, always).

    The worldview of this person operating from the CORE is fundamentally different and far more empowered than the other two levels. At this level, the person realizes that they are totally responsible for shaping their reality and they take charge of it.

    At the other levels, there is a lack of this same total responsibility. Instead, the ego chooses to blame problems on circumstances – people, foods, past events, etc…

    And as long as you’re blaming a problem on stuff that’s outside of you, you can never find the true solution. That’s because the true solution is always inside of you – but you won’t find it until you start looking inside of you and addressing it at that level.

    When you join the rare people who dive into this level, you find a world of so-called “miracle cures” and “amazing turnarounds.” When you take the responsibility for having created your problems, and reclaim the power to solve them, amazing stuff starts happening.

    What Level Are You Using?

    So I ask you, for any problem you’re facing, what level are you addressing it at? Are you willing to take it deeper, to take full responsibility for that problem, and to change your thinking so that you can finally get it out of your life? Are you ready to start creating your reality rather than “reality” creating you?

    Or are you going to keep blaming that problem on things outside of yourself, and giving your power to solve it away to those things?

    It’s your choice! That’s the awesome thing about life. We all have that freedom to choose.

  • Eliminating Overwhelm From Your Life

    Eliminating Overwhelm From Your Life

    This isn’t going to be another one of those “six steps and you’re cured” kind of posts about the problem of overwhelm. That’s because if you don’t solve the fundamental mindset problem underlying overwhelm then you’re unlikely to solve the overwhelm – no matter how many steps you take.

    And here’s the real problem that underlies overwhelm: you’re operating from reactivity.

    In the modern world, we are all constantly accosted by the outside forces. We are accosted by well-meaning people who tell us what we should be doing. We are accosted by information and news. We are accosted by people who want something from us. We are accosted by messages of consumerism. We are accosted by emails and social media. And more….

    The key to overwhelm lies in our reactions – or non reactions – to all of these assaults on our peace and well-being. If you are operating from a place of reactivity, it means that each time you run into one of these assaults, it provokes a reaction in you – often an emotional one. That’s exhausting and draining.

    Example: A Reactive Facebook Feed

    For example, say you’re on Facebook, looking through the newsfeed. Say you run across a post from a friend about an abduction. You see a bunch of grisly detail about how it happened, where it happened, to whom it happened. You see a bunch of comments from other people who are up in arms about how awful it all is, how unsafe the world is, and on and on.

    This is a perfect example of reactivity: you have just been pulled into one of the worst kinds of reactivity, which is fear-based. Fear is a very strong reactive driver of our human behavior.

    Once you get sucked into that, it releases a flood of neurotransmitters and hormones that put you in an anxious state – making you more susceptible to reacting to the next thing that comes along.

    And so it goes, from one reaction to the next – each one of them prompting a feeling of “I should do something about that!!” combined with a knowing that you just don’t have the time or resources to do something about everything.

    It doesn’t have to be Facebook, either. The same thing goes for watching the news, listening to negative colleagues, etc.  Any source of information or feedback into your life that makes you feel like you should be doing something about it, that you should add it to your “to do” list, is causing reactivity.

    Before you get the impression that I’m going to say you should run off and go meditate in a monastery for six years, that’s not the point. Personally, I think that’s boring.

    How to not react in a reactive world

    Let’s assume you aren’t going to go for the monastery route – what do you do?

    The key is to shift into a totally proactive mode of being. Once you do this, almost nothing will stop you or distract you, and you’ll find yourself being less and less reactive to all this outside noise that attempts to intrude.

    A perfect example is in the writing of this post. I sat down in front of the computer in a proactive determination to get this done. While I was doing that, I got several messages from people wanting stuff from me, and I ignored them. I will come back to them later.

    Just don’t get in my way when I’m on a mission. That’s proactivity.

    Once you’re on that path, then overwhelm is impossible. You simply won’t let all that junk penetrate your bubble and slow you down.

    Getting your priorities straight

    Doing this requires that you get your priorities straightened out. It requires that you know what you really want, and you connect to that with passion and determination.

    If you’ve been living for a long time in reactive mode, it may require a big-time “housecleaning” of your life. It may require some time meditating and in quiet contemplation. It may require help from someone outside of your own mind who can identify the limiting beliefs holding you back (this is one of the core things I do for my top clients).

    However you do it, this is essential. Until you get connected to the core of yourself where all your passion and enthusiasm lies, and that connection becomes so strong that nothing else can interfere, then each time you encounter some outside input, you will find yourself back in reactive mode.

    And that brings you back into overwhelm.

    It isn’t an easy journey to permanently rid yourself of reactivity in our overloaded world. Yet it is a journey well worth the taking.

    If you want to eliminate overwhelm for good, then make it your mission to permanently get out of reactive mode. You’ll find that in the process of making that shift, it can eliminate anxiety, depression, and a host of other problems as well.

  • The "I hate money… (give me more of it)" syndrome

    The "I hate money… (give me more of it)" syndrome

    One of the chronic, often devastating conditions I run into nearly everyday is this:

    “There’s not enough money out there, it is scarce and hard to come by, and it requires a struggle to get it!”

    It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about money for the household, money for the business, or grant money for the research lab… there never seems to be enough of it.

    This condition can be every bit as serious and life-destroying as chronic health conditions.  It leads to a sort of money-repellancy that is at odds with the surface-level goals that a lot of people state that they want (such as: “I want more money”).  When we compare a want like this to a deeper belief such as “money is scarce,” the belief always wins out in the end. Beliefs are far more powerful than wants.

    Let’s take a simple example to illustrate. Say that you’re participating in a scavenger hunt. If the organizers tell you there’s a $100 bill to be found, you will likely believe them unless there’s reason not to. Based on that belief, you’re probably going to search quite hard to find that $100, and many of the participants will not give up until someone finds it.

    On the other hand, let’s say you have organizers that like to mess with your mind. They have hidden a $100 bill as part of the hunt, but they didn’t tell anyone about it. How hard is anyone going to work to find that $100? Since nobody believes there’s a $100 bill hidden, the participants aren’t going to search particularly hard for it. It may remain hidden and unfound for a long time, unless the organizers go reclaim it.

    That’s the power of belief. The willingness to search for the $100 is in proportion to people’s belief in the possibility that they might find it. This same principle is true in all of our relationships with money:

    “The willingness to work to make/find/get the money we desire is in proportion to our belief that it is possible for us to do so.”

    I talk to scientists who want more grant funding, all the time. Yet when it comes to doing the things it takes to get it (such as writing a really awesome grant application), there’s all sorts of self sabotage because the belief isn’t there to support the want.

    This is true with the entrepreneurs and consultants I work with also. Many of them want a successful endeavor, but can never seem to find the clients to support it – the belief isn’t there.

    Money madness


    What seems to be missing in these kinds of “money is scarce” worries is the understanding that money is attracted or repelled based on your attitudes about it.

    So, if you’re a scientist asking a funder to give you, say, a $1.25 million grant to support your research, and yet you have a negative belief that the money is nearly impossible to actually get, are your efforts going to be the full-out, best possible? Of course not. You’ll likely suffer lots of doubts and fears as you proceed, and that will come across as a not-so-strong proposal.

    It’s a condition I have plenty of experience with. My father was a product of the great depression, his formative years during the height of joblessness and fear of the time. As a result, he learned to stockpile and save. That led to things such as having 10 cases of expired cans of tuna sitting around in the basement, ultimately needing to be thrown away… or a thousand pounds of grain in the basement that were fodder for mice.

    In his efforts to scrimp and save because of “scarcity,” my father was throwing away money and resources that could have been used for better causes. It’s not that saving up for a rainy day is bad – it’s good. But to expect that bad things are going to happen, that scarcity is normal, is not healthy.

    When I was in the height of my own scarcity mentality, I managed to go deeply into debt while earning a six figure salary (most of that debt came from starting a bike shop based on the notion of a scarcity of oil and other resources). I went into debt because I had a bad relationship with money.

    I hate money… give me more of it

     
    A lot of people I encounter think of money as a “necessary evil.” Imagine if you had a friend or lover that you thought of that way: “I want you around, but I resent you.”

    Not many friends or lovers would stick around if you have that kind of attitude towards them.

    Money is no different. If you resent it, and resent the people who have it, do you think it’s going to stick around in your life? There’s no chance. You repel it.

    Money is neutral. It can be used for good, or for bad. However, if you want more of it in your life or work, you have to focus on the good aspects, and make friends with it. Otherwise, it’s highly unlikely you’ll get more of it.

    The more you focus on “lack of money” the more you’ll experience “lack of money.” If that’s you, why not try a shift, just for a week: look around at all the places money IS, and appreciate how much of it is floating around. Practice shifting your attitude from “it’s really hard to get” to “look how easily it comes to me.”

    If you alter your beliefs about it, you’ll be amazed at what a difference that makes over the long term in your ability to find ways that bring it to you. This applies to both money for your own purposes, and money for things you believe in, such as your research that needs grant funding.

    One last thing: If you’re currently experiencing money challenges, I suggest that you make an “inventory of money attitudes” to see what you really think about money. Take out a piece of paper and writing utensils, and write “money” at the top. Then, spend 10 minutes just writing whatever comes to mind as you look at that word. To go even deeper with this, write down what you think your parents think about money – what you heard and saw them do around this topic. Because chances are, unless you’ve made a conscious effort to think otherwise, you’ve just adopted their viewpoint! (I know I did).

    Once you’re done, review what you wrote, then ask yourself “what do I really believe about money?” and  “are those beliefs about money serving me?” If the answer to the second question is “no” it may be time to start installing some different beliefs in the firmware of your mind.

    Dr. Morgan Giddings