The Chrysler Super Bowl commercial featuring Clint Eastwood has certainly generated considerable discussion. Unfortunately, most of it has been about whether Eastwood and the commercial were a promo for Obama and his administration. Eastwood, who according to his own report has always voted for Republican candidates for president, agreed to do the commercial, I would assume, not because he was concerned that Obama wouldn't be reelected, but because of the polarization in this country and the failure of the American people to work together as a team. As I see it, the commercial was about resilience, the ability to manage adversity, to bounce back, about the American people being able to work together in a cooperative way, as a team, in creating solutions to our economic and social problems.
The commercial was a realistic portrayal of the challenges that we are facing and a comparison of the challenges to the challenges that one city, Detroit, faced a few years ago. The key is attitude. The problems that we are confronting can be solved. They have been solved in the past. They are not permanent and do not have to be pervasive. They do not have to destroy us. Wasting our time pointing the finger of blame at each other is not going to help us move ahead. Working together as a team and focusing on what our strengths are and what we have accomplished in the past will move us forward. We are all in this together. Our fates are intertwined. It is time we started behaving in ways that reflect this reality.
Saturday, February 25, 2012
Thursday, December 22, 2011
Holiday Money and Time
Americans often report money as a significant source of stress in their lives, as well as a lack of personal time. The holiday season can increase both financial stress and time pressure. But there are some steps that you can take to help manage these stressors. Happy holidays involve developing a set of realistic goals for the season that includes time for relaxation and for low-key celebration with good friends and family.
The American Psychological Association suggests a number of simple strategies:
Set realistic expectations. Start by creating a realistic budget and remind your children that the holidays aren't about expensive gifts. No celebration will be perfect. Be flexible.
Take time for yourself. If you take care of yourself, you will be better able to care for others in your life. Try to get exercise during the holidays. Take a long walk. Enjoy the holiday music. Enjoy your favorite foods, but in moderation.
Volunteer. With the recession, many charitable organizations face new challenges. Find a local charity, such as a soup kitchen or a shelter, and organize your family to volunteer together. Helping others can be a source of resilience for you and for them.
Prioritize and remember what is really important. Material things can be a part of the holidays, but commercialism can overshadow the true sentiment of the holiday season. Remind yourself that your relationships with your family and friends are what really matters.
Seek support. Talk about the stress and the disappointments you may be feeling. If you're feeling extremely blue and talking with others isn't helping that much, consider talking with a professional such as a psychologist to help you develop coping strategies and better manage your stress.
For additional information on stress and lifestyle and behavior, visit the American Psychological Association website: www.apahelpcenter.org and read the blog www.yourmindyourbody.org
The American Psychological Association suggests a number of simple strategies:
Set realistic expectations. Start by creating a realistic budget and remind your children that the holidays aren't about expensive gifts. No celebration will be perfect. Be flexible.
Take time for yourself. If you take care of yourself, you will be better able to care for others in your life. Try to get exercise during the holidays. Take a long walk. Enjoy the holiday music. Enjoy your favorite foods, but in moderation.
Volunteer. With the recession, many charitable organizations face new challenges. Find a local charity, such as a soup kitchen or a shelter, and organize your family to volunteer together. Helping others can be a source of resilience for you and for them.
Prioritize and remember what is really important. Material things can be a part of the holidays, but commercialism can overshadow the true sentiment of the holiday season. Remind yourself that your relationships with your family and friends are what really matters.
Seek support. Talk about the stress and the disappointments you may be feeling. If you're feeling extremely blue and talking with others isn't helping that much, consider talking with a professional such as a psychologist to help you develop coping strategies and better manage your stress.
For additional information on stress and lifestyle and behavior, visit the American Psychological Association website: www.apahelpcenter.org and read the blog www.yourmindyourbody.org
Being an Effective Communicator
In the last blog, we began to talk about communication skills. Communication is one of the basic elements in resilience. Effective communication is one of the keys to building resilience and maintaining balance in your life. If we do not communicate clearly and directly with others, we will not understand and we will not be understood. If people are to talk with you and share information, especially if they are to say things that may be difficult to say or for you to hear, they need to know that they are connecting with you. They need encouragement. If you meet their attempts to communicate with silence, or if you assume the attitude of interrogator, you will not put other people at ease and you will not encourage them to tell you what you need to know.
To be effective in understanding another's perspective and helping them through a difficult time, you need to do things which show interest and genuine concern. In the last blog, we discussed four of these: Using neutral expressions, such as "I see," "Go on," "I understand," etc., nodding your head or smiling, echoing back or simply rephrasing what the person has said and asking good questions of people, questions that are open-ended and that encourage people to talk.
Here are two more ways of encouraging people to talk and improving your effectiveness as a communicator:
Get down to details. If, for example, on a medical crisis you are trying to find out what is happening, be specific. One of the major blocks to communicating in a crisis is the inability of people to describe exactly what was said or done by another person. Being able to accurately describe what happened is often essential to being able to understand a very tense and complex situation.
Being specific requires that you focus on observable actions of others without making value judgments or interpretations of what they meant. As a society, we love to talk in generalities. We often accuse people of behaving in a certain way because of a motive or a value that we believe is hidden behind their behavior. It can be important to look at people's motives, but at this point in the process, that is not your goal. Your goal is to try to understand what is happening and what people did and said.
Reflect back to others what they are saying. This is a technique frequently used by counselors. It is a very effective way of helping people hear themselves and understand what they are saying. Very often, people need to say things out loud, and they need to hear other people's reactions.
When you reflect back what a person is saying, you are not simply trying to say the same thing with different words. It is not a slick use of language that you are trying to achieve. You say back to the person what his or her statement meant to you. This gives the person you are talking with an opportunity to hear themselves, to hear your impressions of what they are saying and to correct you if the impression that they are giving is not accurate. It is also another way of letting people know that you care about what they are saying and that they matter to you.
Here is an example. Your friend may make a general statement that you respond to with a specific statement. For example, she may say, "I can't eat anything I like since I was diagnosed with diabetes." And you may respond by saying, "You like certain vegetables? You mean you can't even eat those now?" Sometimes your specific statement may be humorous and may encourage your friend to look more realistically at the situation that she is confronting and to not exaggerate or generalize.
The reverse may also be true. Your friend may list the things that she hates about her new diet, and you may respond by making a general statement, like, "It sounds like there's not much on your diet that you really like."
What your friend is saying may also bring to mind an example that you believe reflects what she is trying to say. For example, your friend is saying that she has been hesitant to go out to restaurants since she was diagnosed with diabetes. You recall that she turned down an invitation from you and your family to try a new restaurant that had just opened. You may want to mention this as an example.
To be effective in understanding another's perspective and helping them through a difficult time, you need to do things which show interest and genuine concern. In the last blog, we discussed four of these: Using neutral expressions, such as "I see," "Go on," "I understand," etc., nodding your head or smiling, echoing back or simply rephrasing what the person has said and asking good questions of people, questions that are open-ended and that encourage people to talk.
Here are two more ways of encouraging people to talk and improving your effectiveness as a communicator:
Get down to details. If, for example, on a medical crisis you are trying to find out what is happening, be specific. One of the major blocks to communicating in a crisis is the inability of people to describe exactly what was said or done by another person. Being able to accurately describe what happened is often essential to being able to understand a very tense and complex situation.
Being specific requires that you focus on observable actions of others without making value judgments or interpretations of what they meant. As a society, we love to talk in generalities. We often accuse people of behaving in a certain way because of a motive or a value that we believe is hidden behind their behavior. It can be important to look at people's motives, but at this point in the process, that is not your goal. Your goal is to try to understand what is happening and what people did and said.
Reflect back to others what they are saying. This is a technique frequently used by counselors. It is a very effective way of helping people hear themselves and understand what they are saying. Very often, people need to say things out loud, and they need to hear other people's reactions.
When you reflect back what a person is saying, you are not simply trying to say the same thing with different words. It is not a slick use of language that you are trying to achieve. You say back to the person what his or her statement meant to you. This gives the person you are talking with an opportunity to hear themselves, to hear your impressions of what they are saying and to correct you if the impression that they are giving is not accurate. It is also another way of letting people know that you care about what they are saying and that they matter to you.
Here is an example. Your friend may make a general statement that you respond to with a specific statement. For example, she may say, "I can't eat anything I like since I was diagnosed with diabetes." And you may respond by saying, "You like certain vegetables? You mean you can't even eat those now?" Sometimes your specific statement may be humorous and may encourage your friend to look more realistically at the situation that she is confronting and to not exaggerate or generalize.
The reverse may also be true. Your friend may list the things that she hates about her new diet, and you may respond by making a general statement, like, "It sounds like there's not much on your diet that you really like."
What your friend is saying may also bring to mind an example that you believe reflects what she is trying to say. For example, your friend is saying that she has been hesitant to go out to restaurants since she was diagnosed with diabetes. You recall that she turned down an invitation from you and your family to try a new restaurant that had just opened. You may want to mention this as an example.
Can We Change Our Thinking?
In my work as a clinical psychologist, I frequently see people who are convinced that they cannot change their thinking. Indeed, such change involves hard work. We have all developed patterns of thinking that have reached the level of habit. It is almost automatic. Unfortunately, many of these ways of thinking are traps.
They are traps in the sense that they often do not lead us to a solution to the problem that we are confronting. Instead, they encourage us to avoid situations, to give up before we need to and to apply simplistic solutions to complicated problems. From a pragmatic point of view, they do not work.
The first step in changing thinking patterns is to recognize the ones that we have, and especially to focus on the ones that we have that don't work. We have discussed in some detail in a previous blog "Catastrophic Thinking," the tendency to assume the worst and spend much of our time thinking and planning about how we are going to deal with the terrible events that we are quite sure are going to befall us before any of them even occur. Catastrophic thinking is defined simply as ruminating about irrational worst-case outcomes. Needless to say, it can increase anxiety and prevent people from taking action in a situation where action is required. This can be especially true in a crisis situation.
Catastrophic thinking, like other thinking traps, needs to be disputed. In order to do this, you must first identify the thinking for what it is.
Here are three other patterns of faulty thinking:
Confirmation bias. This involves accepting only information and data that support your current beliefs and values. This is the classic "don't bother me with the facts." You don't have to look very far to find this type of thinking rampant in our society. Just look at some of the debates that have occurred over the last few years regarding global warming and evolution.
A second faulty pattern of thinking that can be a thinking trap is "all or none" thinking in which events are seen as either black or white. There is no gray. No flexibility. Indeed, these patterns of thinking encourage rigidity and not resilience.
A third pattern is over-generalization. This is a tendency to see a single temporary event as a general permanent state of affairs. Eric Byrne years ago talked about this as one of the classic dirty-fighting tactics that couples use in an argument. They often accuse each other of "never" or "always" when that simply is not an accurate description of what has occurred. We all know that no one can be that consistent. Like other thinking traps, they do not work very well. In an argument with someone, they simply are a way of putting yourself one-up and the other person one-down. What is the outcome? The other person simply gets angry or hurt and tries to rebalance the contest, which is what it has turned into by now, by saying something equally outrageous.
A faulty thinking pattern, like any old habit, does not die easily. A first step in changing it is to recognize it for what it is and to commit ourselves to try very hard not to make use of it. This may be especially difficult when we are feeling angry or upset. It is at these times that our strong feelings may lead us back to these old patterns.
They are traps in the sense that they often do not lead us to a solution to the problem that we are confronting. Instead, they encourage us to avoid situations, to give up before we need to and to apply simplistic solutions to complicated problems. From a pragmatic point of view, they do not work.
The first step in changing thinking patterns is to recognize the ones that we have, and especially to focus on the ones that we have that don't work. We have discussed in some detail in a previous blog "Catastrophic Thinking," the tendency to assume the worst and spend much of our time thinking and planning about how we are going to deal with the terrible events that we are quite sure are going to befall us before any of them even occur. Catastrophic thinking is defined simply as ruminating about irrational worst-case outcomes. Needless to say, it can increase anxiety and prevent people from taking action in a situation where action is required. This can be especially true in a crisis situation.
Catastrophic thinking, like other thinking traps, needs to be disputed. In order to do this, you must first identify the thinking for what it is.
Here are three other patterns of faulty thinking:
Confirmation bias. This involves accepting only information and data that support your current beliefs and values. This is the classic "don't bother me with the facts." You don't have to look very far to find this type of thinking rampant in our society. Just look at some of the debates that have occurred over the last few years regarding global warming and evolution.
A second faulty pattern of thinking that can be a thinking trap is "all or none" thinking in which events are seen as either black or white. There is no gray. No flexibility. Indeed, these patterns of thinking encourage rigidity and not resilience.
A third pattern is over-generalization. This is a tendency to see a single temporary event as a general permanent state of affairs. Eric Byrne years ago talked about this as one of the classic dirty-fighting tactics that couples use in an argument. They often accuse each other of "never" or "always" when that simply is not an accurate description of what has occurred. We all know that no one can be that consistent. Like other thinking traps, they do not work very well. In an argument with someone, they simply are a way of putting yourself one-up and the other person one-down. What is the outcome? The other person simply gets angry or hurt and tries to rebalance the contest, which is what it has turned into by now, by saying something equally outrageous.
A faulty thinking pattern, like any old habit, does not die easily. A first step in changing it is to recognize it for what it is and to commit ourselves to try very hard not to make use of it. This may be especially difficult when we are feeling angry or upset. It is at these times that our strong feelings may lead us back to these old patterns.
Sunday, October 23, 2011
Navigating a Course Adjustment
All aspects of life change as circumstances, interests, demands and needs weigh in to influence "what was" to "what should be or is" and the accompanying indicators, if observed, lead to a course correction.
I am at that point and following the message, I am embarking on a revision of thought and approach to work and life contribution. Taking my long career and the experiences and lessons I have acquired, my new focus is on organizations and people, their mission, goals and focus that leads to positive change.
Possibilities for improvement and systems that work to reflect needs and positive outcomes are needed in this day and age. We banter about, sometimes in disarray, and the goals and long-term expectations diminish in the chaos. It is all about people, and it is that direction I seek to plot a path forward.
What are our needs as a society? A system of justice? Improved quality of life? Perhaps doing the right thing in the face of adversity and challenge. The answer lies in the purpose of being that includes environment, family, friends, work, and social events.
My focus will be on organizations and systems that touch many lives particularly in public safety and first responders.
Richard Lumb
Thursday, July 14, 2011
Act On What We Believe
Resilience requires that we be able to ask and answer the question each morning, Why am I getting up? The answer is hopefully not because we have to or we should, but because we have some sense of purpose and direction for the day.
Being able to adapt well to adversity, to be able to bounce back from difficult times, requires us to have a sense of direction in our lives and a belief that we are acting in a way that is consistent with our values.
In the novel, Reaching Home, Muqtada is a terrorist who is planning a bio-terror attack on the city of Boston. A man in his mid-sixties with thinning hair and a light gray beard, Muqtada feels he has spent most of his life in motion. He is an average man in many ways, height and build, but his life has not been average. He fled Iran with his family in the early 1970s when the Shah's regime collapsed. Although his father reestablished the family in New England, Muqtada always dreamed of returning home. He dropped out of college and tried to create his own future in business, but failed. He lost his left hand and part of his arm in one of these failed efforts. In the story he now wears a glove prosthesis as a means of keeping from being easily recognized by the authorities.
After his father's death, he took his inheritance and traveled in the Arab world. It was there that he found a way back home. He would prove himself, not as a traitor to his country and his faith as his father had been seen, but as a true believer in the cause of his countrymen. When the nuclear accident occurs at Pine Grove Labs, he believes that the government of the United States will be preoccupied. They will not have the time to worry themselves with him. The time is now, he thinks. He and his allies have planned and waited. They are ready.
The values that Muqtada is acting on may be quite different from ours. But his belief in what he sees as right and just helps give him the resilience to continue on. To continue the plan and to act, as a human being, he is similar to us in that his sense of purpose and direction gives him the strength and the resilience to act on his plans, no matter how misguided and evil we may see believe them to be.
Dr. Ron Breazeale, Ph.D
Author of Duct Tape Isn't Enough
Original blog can be found at www.psychologytoday.com/blog/
On Being Flexible
Flexibility is a primary factor in resilience and is reflective of an individual's emotional adjustment and maturity. From the early studies in the fifties of what factors contribute to emotional health, flexibility has consistently been seen as one of the most important. As indicated previously, it requires that an individual be flexible in both his or her thinking and his or her actions.
One of the main characters in Reaching Home is Special Agent Douglas Jennings. In the story, Special Agent Jennings rolls over and looks at his watch. It's 3:00 a.m. Groaning as he pulls himself out of bed, he flips on the television and then begins throwing clothes in a battered, old leather two-suiter that, like him, has seen too many early morning flights. He is being assigned to the investigation at Pine Grove, an accident at a nuclear reactor. Newscasters are speculating as to whether it is an act of terror. He doubts it. Jennings knows that the real act of terror is yet to come. A terrorist cell in the Boston area is planning on carrying out what the Cold War Soviets had only schemed and dreamed of, unleashing a disease that could spread not just death, but panic across the U.S. in a matter of days. Jennings has been working on the investigation, Project Outbreak, for a year.
Jennings is a man who does what he is told. As the story unfolds, Jennings will be tested a number of times. His inflexibility and rigidity, as well as his inability to deal with his own anger, will cost the lives of a number of his agents and almost destroy him.
Persistence in pursuit of a direction and a purpose must also be tempered with flexibility in thinking and action if one is to manage adversity and not be destroyed by it.
Dr. Ron Breazeale, Ph.D
Author of Duct Tape Isn't Enough
Original blog can be found at www.psychologytoday.com/blog/in-the-face-adversity
One of the main characters in Reaching Home is Special Agent Douglas Jennings. In the story, Special Agent Jennings rolls over and looks at his watch. It's 3:00 a.m. Groaning as he pulls himself out of bed, he flips on the television and then begins throwing clothes in a battered, old leather two-suiter that, like him, has seen too many early morning flights. He is being assigned to the investigation at Pine Grove, an accident at a nuclear reactor. Newscasters are speculating as to whether it is an act of terror. He doubts it. Jennings knows that the real act of terror is yet to come. A terrorist cell in the Boston area is planning on carrying out what the Cold War Soviets had only schemed and dreamed of, unleashing a disease that could spread not just death, but panic across the U.S. in a matter of days. Jennings has been working on the investigation, Project Outbreak, for a year.
Jennings is a man who does what he is told. As the story unfolds, Jennings will be tested a number of times. His inflexibility and rigidity, as well as his inability to deal with his own anger, will cost the lives of a number of his agents and almost destroy him.
Persistence in pursuit of a direction and a purpose must also be tempered with flexibility in thinking and action if one is to manage adversity and not be destroyed by it.
Dr. Ron Breazeale, Ph.D
Author of Duct Tape Isn't Enough
Original blog can be found at www.psychologytoday.com/blog/in-the-face-adversity
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