Humainologie creative dialogue next Zoom on January 6

Thanks for your wonderful contributions, that have made our first Humainologie Story Writing Festival so memorable! If Christina and Erica have stories to add, we might find them in our stockings on Christmas morning.

Contrary to what I had said at the Zoom meeting last night, I will suggest that we wait until January 6 for our next creative dialogue. If each of you can think of a topic you would like to facilitate (or ask a guest facilitator to lead) some time in 2021, that will give us a head start in January. When I send out the email to the dialogue network later this week, I will suggest that we have a theme for each month of 2021, and that Happiness be our theme in January. In accord with that theme, my most recent book synopsis is appended below.

It was great to see most of you last night, to hear your stories, and to share the good spirits with you. Each day is a gift, each year is a gift, and together we can use those gifts creatively.

Wishing you a very Creative New Year in 2021!

Think like a bakery and make it fresh!

Arthur Book: (Shawn Achor) The Happiness Advantage: How a Positive Brain Fuels Success in Work and Life (2010) For most of the past one hundred years, we have been influenced by the idea that success is what leads to happiness. The theme of this book is that happiness is what leads to success. Based in the framework of positive psychology, and an expanding body of research in accord with the principles of positive psychology, the book is organized in three Parts: “Positive Psychology at Work,” “Seven Principles,” and “The Ripple Effect.” The Seven Principles are the essence of the book. The first principle is expressed in the book’s title. Otherwise stated, happiness gives your brain a “competitive edge.” The author cites studies showing that people (including children) who are given a puzzle to solve will be more effective at meeting the challenge if they are first asked to think of something that makes them happy. The ability to cope with difficulty is enhanced by happiness. The second principle is The Fulcrum and the Lever: Changing Your Performance by Changing Your Mindset. Your mindset (the fulcrum) can give you “the power (the lever) to be more fulfilled and successful.” The mental construction of our daily activities, more than the activity itself, defines our reality. Archimedes had said that if you gave him a fulcrum in the right position and a lever long enough, he could move the planet Earth. Shawn Achor says, “Our power to maximize our potential is based on…(1) the length of our lever – how much potential power and possibility we believe we have, and (2) the position of our fulcrum – the mindset with which we generate the power to change.” A spirit of enthusiastic confidence will enable you and others to leverage possibilities you otherwise would not have. Principle #3 (named after a popular video game, Tetris) is The Tetris Effect: Training Your Brain to Capitalize on Possibility. It emphasizes the importance of “seeing the opportunity in every difficulty,” or to quote the author himself, “This principle teaches us how to retrain our brains to spot patterns of possibility, so we can see – and seize – opportunity wherever we look.” Tetris is a game in which the player arranges objects in space to achieve a specific goal. After playing Tetris, the player often experiences an after-effect, in which they use their visual imagination to continue the game in other settings, such as the supermarket. They may imagine rearranging objects on the shelves of the supermarket to achieve the goals of Tetris. Exactly that ability to look for possibilities for achieving a desired outcome in any setting can be cultivated to powerful advantage. If we make a habit of looking for positive things that happen and for opportunities for us to create positive outcomes, “we profit from three of the most important tools available to us: happiness, gratitude, and optimism.” The author suggests that if each day you “write down a list of ‘three good things’ that happened that day, your brain will be forced to scan the last 24 hours for potential positives…. In just five minutes a day, this trains the brain to become more skilled at noticing and focusing on possibilities for personal and professional growth….” In one study, “participants who wrote down three good things each day for a week were happier and less depressed at the one-month, three-month, and six-month follow-ups.” Principle # 4. Falling Up: Capitalizing on the Downs to Build Upward Momentum. Here the author emphasizes how to find “the mental path that not only leads us up out of failure or suffering, but [also] teaches us to be happier and more successful because of it.” He explains: “On every mental map after crisis or adversity, there are three mental paths. One that keeps circling around where you currently are (i.e., the negative event creates no change; you end where you start). Another mental path leads you toward further negative consequences (i.e., you are far worse off after the negative event; this path is why we are afraid of conflict and challenge). And one, which I call the Third Path, that leads us from failure or setback to a place where we are even stronger and more capable than before the fall.” Most people who experience setback fail to even imagine the Third Path. “Study after study shows that if we are able to conceive of a failure as an opportunity for growth, we are all the more likely to experience that growth.” Most people have heard of PTSD, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Evidence indicates that Post Traumatic Growth is also very common. Referring to the ancient maxim “What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger,” Achor emphasizes that the Third Path has long been familiar wisdom. Several strategies for how to use a setback to bounce back are provided, including “Change Your Counterfact.” In a hypothetical example, you might have an auto accident and scratch the side of your car, an event which might upset a lot of car owners. However, you can immediately be aware that a car accident could have had a far worse outcome. And that minor accident can lead to enhanced vigilance in your driving and other advantages. You can develop the habit of experiencing any setback with an immediate mental search for the good that can come from it. Principle # 5. The Zorro Circle: How Limiting Your Focus to Small, Manageable Goals Can Expand Your Sphere of Power. Zorro became a legendary hero after his mentor drew a small circle on the ground and taught Zorro how to fight invincibly within that small circle. Your Zorro Circle might be a set of “atomic habits” that make you much more effective each day and enable you to get high priority tasks done proactively. For example, based on your awareness that getting aerobic exercise every day helps you sleep better at night and be more energetic next day, you might include a few minutes of aerobic exercise as one part of your Zorro circle. You might also include in your Zorro Circle a few minutes of thinking about priorities for the week and the month ahead, and then selecting just one small part of that to make a top priority for today, with a nearly exclusive focus on that one priority for a designated part of your day. “The point: Small successes can add up to major achievements. All it takes is drawing that first circle in the sand.” Principle # 6. The 20-Second Rule: How to Turn Bad Habits into Good Ones by Minimizing Barriers to Change. The author’s efforts to learn to play guitar had fizzled until he discovered that when he placed the guitar where he saw it and walked by it in his house every day, it suddenly became easy for him to sit down and practice guitar. Previously he had put it away in his closet after every practice and taken it out of the closet when he was ready to practice again. Putting it in the closet and taking it out required only 20 seconds – and yet, together with the fact that he did not constantly see the guitar, it was enough to stifle his good intentions of practicing every day. “What I had done here, essentially, was put the desired behavior on the path of least resistance, so it actually took less energy and effort to pick up and practice the guitar than to avoid it. I like to refer to this as the 20-Second Rule, because lowering the barrier to change by just 20 seconds was all it took to help me form a new life habit. …Lower the activation energy for habits you want to adopt and raise it for habits you want to avoid.” (Notice how the basics described in James Clear’s book Atomic Habits again are front and centre in Shawn Achor’s Principles 5 and 6.) Principle # 7. Social Investment: Why Social Support Is Your Single Greatest Asset. In a long-term study of Harvard men from the time they entered Harvard in the 1930s until they were elderly men, a key finding was that good interpersonal relations best correlated with “the good life.” George Vaillant (who had directed the study for 40 years) described “the life circumstances and personal characteristics that distinguished the happiest, fullest lives from the least successful ones,” summarizing the findings in one word: “love – full stop.” Are you a workaholic who is too busy with your work to devote time and attention to your family and friends? Then you are setting yourself up for failure. In the work environment, it is those groups and businesses that have a warm and lively social environment that tend to flourish. Group genius, writing partners, and creative dialogue are concepts that emphasize the value of social connection for excellence. In the brief concluding part of the book, Part 3 (“The Ripple Effect”) Shawn Achor emphasizes that if you spread the happiness advantage at home, at work, and beyond, it creates conditions for success all around you. It benefits others in countless ways. Recalling the “butterfly effect,” whereby a butterfly flapping its wings generates enormous change, the author writes: “Each one of us is like that butterfly.”