May 08

How to Keep Going

Posted on 8 May 2012 by Mike Reeves-McMillan

Perseverance – keeping going, not giving up – is one of the great secrets to success. I’m more and more convinced of it the more stories I hear about successful people.

Sometimes, in fact, keeping going, hanging in there during stressful times is the success. Sometimes, getting through tough times is the task in front of you, and success consists of still standing at the end.

I’ve done mostly project work for more than 20 years now, so I’m familiar with the “we just need to get through this” experience. And that’s standing me in good stead at the moment.

I’ve mentioned here before that my wife is currently having health problems. She’s had rheumatoid arthritis since the age of six, and has multiple joint replacements, and one of them got infected late last year and had to be removed. She’s now had it replaced, and is currently on five or six weeks of bed rest (that is, she can’t get out of bed) in hospital, after which they’ll probably keep her in for roughly as long again.

It’s a long, hard journey for both of us – her more than me, obviously, but me too. So I thought, while I’m still in the middle of it, I’d share with you some of what I’m doing to keep myself well and keep my spirits up so that I can continue to support her and do the other things that I’m committed to doing.

1. Eat well

I know that if I go the easy way and eat junk food at odd hours I’ll make myself ill and won’t be able to cope. So I’m going the other easy way.

My programme at the moment is that I go up to the hospital after work, spend a couple of hours with my wife, and then go home. At the weekends I spend most of the afternoons with her. There aren’t any facilities for me to heat food there or anything, so I’m living largely on sandwiches. But they’re good sandwiches.

I’ve noticed that I feel better after eating pesto, or anything with basil in. It’s probably because it’s high in iron. So what I do is, when I go shopping at the weekend, I buy the fixings for pita pockets: hummus, pesto, felafel mix, olives, cheese and of course pita bread (wholemeal). I spend about an hour cooking the felafels and assembling five days’ worth of sandwiches, and I put them in the fridge and pull one out each day.

At the hospital, if I haven’t brought food for whatever reason and I need to eat, there’s a Subway outlet. It’s fast food, but it has vegetables in it.

And with breakfast, I’ve started drinking vegetable juice (it’s not V8, but it’s a direct copy with the exact same ingredients).

Now, fresh vegetable juice is better than bought vegetable juice, and the vegetables themselves, unjuiced, are better still. Any nutritionist will tell you that. But fresh vegetable juice is not an option that’s on the table, in a time-pressed, stressed context. Bought vegetable juice is better than no vegetable juice, and those are my realistic options.

If I do get home at night in time to cook, I’m usually eating steamed frozen vegetables (a mix of broccoli, peas and beans that I buy packaged at the supermarket) and microwaved and then steamed frozen Chinese dumplings (wholemeal). Again, fresh stuff is nutritionally better than frozen, but when I don’t know how often or when I’ll be eating them, and I have limited prep time, fresh stuff is not much of an option. Frozen vegetables are better than no vegetables.

Canned vegetables are also better than no vegetables. I’ve made a very nice meal (or actually about four or five meals) by emptying two cans of lentils, a can of tomatoes with onions and garlic, a can of baby corn and some frozen chopped basil into a pot and simmering it for a quarter of an hour or so.

I feel much better for having some vitamins and minerals in my body, even if they’re less than I’d get from all fresh food that I spent hours preparing. I don’t have those hours, so quick and nutritious beats quick and non-nutritious.

I eat fruit – fresh and dried – too.

Question: What small things could you do to improve your nutrition within the time and money you already have?

2. Exercise

I don’t have a lot of spare time or motivation at the moment, and injury issues have put paid to some of the exercises I used to do. But what I have done is structure my day so that exercise just happens.

The current project I’m on for the day job is located in the city. I park in a secure carpark (since my car was stolen a few months back from an insecure one) that’s a bit under 1km from where I work, and walk downhill through a park. I do this every day, regardless of the weather, because it’s easier to keep parking in the same place.

: moionet / Foter

After work, I walk up to the hospital, which is about 1.7km including a steep hill. And after spending time with my wife, I walk back to where I parked, down the third side of a triangle, just under 1km again. That’s a total of around 3.5km (2.2 miles) every weekday. At the weekends I park in the same place, so it’s a bit under 2km.

At first I was tired, and sometimes I still am, but on the whole I feel really good on it. I just bought a new pair of walking shoes that also look OK at work (Rockports, if you’re wondering), because the old shoes were starting to hurt my feet. Expensive, but worth it. I enjoy the walking (apart from the passive smoking that walking down city streets involves), and it’s doing great things for my energy and ability to keep going through the stress.

Question: How can you structure your day to include moving your body more?

3. Meditate

I’ve been meditating regularly for over a year now. It’s less impressive than it sounds. All I do is, before I get up in the morning I use a little app on my iPhone called Soto Timer to mark out a 10-minute period, during which I focus on my breath. The app makes a Tibetan bell sound at the start and end of the 10 minutes.

You’d think that would do nothing at all. But I definitely notice the difference if I miss a day, and I’ve been noticing the long-term difference from doing the regular practice.

So have other people. At work the other day, someone told me – not privately, but in a meeting – that I’d been assigned to support the more… challenging users of the system we’re implementing “because you don’t get upset easily”. People who knew me years ago would be surprised at that, I think.

Question: Will you trade 10 minutes a day of simple practice for the ability to stay calm?

4. Stay positive

There’s a lot around about positive mental attitude, and some of it is outright snake oil. If I see the word “manifest” being used I generally switch off immediately. But there’s also good research that says that what you think does influence the outcomes you get – and, of course, how much you enjoy the process of getting them.

In the midst of what isn’t a great situation, I don’t want to be Pollyanna, but I do want to look for a positive spin. I’m getting to spend a lot more time with my wife at the moment, under circumstances that strengthen the bond between us, for example. She’s alive, she’s recovering well, she’s (in general) being well looked after, and we don’t have money worries.

One of the most important things is to decide for yourself what are the most important things.

Question: In what way might the way that you think about your situation be making it harder than it needs to be?

5. Sleep well

I’m not always sleeping well at the moment, but I generally get a good sleep. The exercise, of course, helps with that. The good nutrition probably isn’t doing any harm either, or the meditation, or the positive attitude. I have plenty of stress management techniques that I can use if I need to. And I use the techniques in the Sleeper’s Checklist to make sure I get good, restorative rest.

I don’t operate well on poor sleep (I don’t think anyone does, really, but other people are better than me at pretending). I know I can’t get through this stressful time well without that resource.

Question: Can you find one thing on the Sleeper’s Checklist that you could implement to improve your sleep?

How to not give up

“But Mike,” you may be saying, if you’ve read much of my stuff, “these are the same things you always bang on about. Nutrition, exercise, meditation, getting your head on straight, sleeping well, managing your stress. That’s your answer to everything.”

Well, yes. Yes, it is. Because it works.

Look back over the questions I’ve scattered through today’s post, and find one thing you can implement today. It’ll help you keep going through the tough times.

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Apr 12

How Ernest Becker’s Denial of Death Changed my Life

Posted on 12 April 2012 by Mike Reeves-McMillan

Today I have a guest post for you from Nadia Jones. This is only the second guest post on the site, because I have very strict requirements for guest posts (so don’t worry, this isn’t going to turn into one of those blogs where you seldom hear from the owner any more).

Here’s Nadia:

About a year ago, I was experiencing ongoing periods of intense depression and anxiety. While medication certainly helped make daily life possible, the pills weren’t able to make life particularly enjoyable. There was something missing, some idea that I had not yet digested that was keeping me from overcoming this particularly dark period in my life.

Then I read Ernest Becker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Denial of Death, and I realized that there were certain things I hadn’t thought through to get me to where I wanted to be. Although reading the entire book is, in my opinion, essential, here’s exactly what Becker taught me and how it changed the way I approach life:

The fear of death (physical or symbolic) is at the heart of all fear and anger.

Becker notes in his book, “The idea of death, the fear of death, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is the mainspring of human activity—designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny of man.”

Whether we think of death in the physical sense, or we think of the various small symbolic “deaths” that terrify us—the idea of breaking off a close relationship, losing a job, or even losing your sense of self after failure—it is our unique human awareness of things having a final end that drives our anxiety, depression, and worries.

Fully accepting death is perhaps the most important first step in fully embracing life and all it has to offer.

In response to this fear, we attempt immortality through various “hero projects”. Most hero projects are limiting.

Mike has discussed how to be a hero at length here on How to Be Amazing. Becker, too, found that pursuing one or more “hero projects,” as he called them, was central to our well-being.

The society in which we live often dictates our hero projects.

For example, acquiring wealth is a common hero project in a consumerist society like ours. Starting a family and raising children is another common hero project, though not as universal as it once was. Seeking salvation, and thus, immortality, through religion is yet another pervasive hero system.

In the end, however, Becker found that most common hero projects, even if noble in their own right, even if cherished by the culture that surrounds us, will leave us feeling empty, depressed, and angry. This idea explains the rather common phenomenon of materially successful, wealthy people who nonetheless struggle with depression.

Going inside yourself to discover your own, unique hero project is terrifying, but ultimately rewarding.

If most hero projects will ultimately leave us dissatisfied, what, then are the heroics that we should strive for to feel truly alive?

Becker uses the idea of “cosmic heroics” to explain the only viable hero system that opens us to the full possibilities of life. While Becker doesn’t specifically define this system (after all, he emphasizes time and again that any successful hero project must be individually fashioned, rather than pressed upon us by others), cosmic heroics are the striving for an ideal self that transcends the experienced self. The ideal self “…is fully in the world on its terms.”

This process, the shedding of instilled hero systems and forging one’s own hero system, requires an understanding of the awfulness of reality. It requires the courage to let go of every preconceived notion you’ve held and reexamining it.

As Becker notes, “To live fully is to live with an awareness of the rumble of terror that underlies everything.”

Ultimately, for me at least, Becker has shown that really thinking about your personal meaning of life, and acting on it, is the key to fulfillment.

On a practical level, this entails both investing your own creative energies into projects that suit your talents, while also taking seriously that which has little monetary value in our society—our relationships with others and the openness to and enjoyment of visceral, lived experience.

How to create your hero project

So how can we take Becker’s wisdom and put it into action now? Here’s what I did:

Write down your beliefs. Research educated opinions that oppose these beliefs. Open yourself up to new ideas.
Write down what you are good at. Write down what you enjoy. Choose items that overlap and create your very own hero project.
What are you afraid of? Think about how fear of death plays into your specific fear and slowly expose yourself. Personally, I would have panic attacks while driving, so I stopped driving altogether for over six months. After realizing that I was holding onto an unshakeable (and irrational) fear of dying in a car accident, I accepted this fear, and I tackled it head on. Accept your fears. Accept death.
Let’s say that your number one priority currently is your career. Make a list of neglected relationships and place these relationships at the same level as your number one priority of work. You’ll soon find that when you actually make relationships a priority, once you make it a point to put time into them, your relationships with others will be your greatest reward.

Author Bio:

This is a guest post by Nadia Jones who blogs at accredited online colleges about education, college, student, teacher, money saving, and movie related topics. You can reach her at nadia.jones5 @ gmail.com.

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Apr 03

How to Live Out Your Values

Posted on 3 April 2012 by Mike Reeves-McMillan

One of the things that leads to life satisfaction is living in line with our values – doing things that we believe are good and valuable things to do.

So how might we do that more?

I’m still slowly making my way through Peterson’s A Primer in Positive Psychology, and I’m up to the chapter on Values, where he summarizes some of his own research on the circumstances in which our beliefs are most likely to be reflected in our actions. For today’s post, I want to go through some of these and suggest how we can cultivate those circumstances in order to live more authentically and congruently.

1. Acquire your values for yourself

It’s not a huge surprise that Peterson found values we acquire through direct experience are more consistent with our behaviour than ones we got second-hand, as it were – from our parents, the religion we were raised in or our culture in general.

Second-hand values, by the nature of how we got them, can often stay in our heads rather than getting all the way out into our lives. Values we acquired for ourselves, though, inherently came out of our life circumstances rather than an abstract system of philosophy, so they’re already connected to what we do.

I’m going to give a paradoxical-sounding piece of advice here. If you have values that you know are more in your head than in your heart, that came from your upbringing, go out and try to act on them. You’ll learn something that way about what it’s like to live those values, and whether they’re congruent with who you are.

If they are congruent, you’ll have taken a step towards living out your professed beliefs. And if they’re not, you’ll discover more about what your actual values are.

To give you an example, when I was a young man I converted to evangelical Christianity through the encouragement of my two closest friends. A number of years later, one of those friends, who had, in the meantime, left his faith, told me and our other friend that he was gay.

Now, we’d known him for more than half our lives at this point, and cared about him very much. We weren’t going to reject him as a person, no matter what our pastors said about homosexuality. For me, that conversation was a step on a path to quite a different kind of faith more congruent with my experience of real people, whereas for our other friend it was a trigger for him to realise that the faith he’d been raised in and the person that he was were too far apart to stay together any more.

(I didn’t say it was a safe, easy thing to do.)

2. Incorporate your values into your image of yourself

We live out values that help to define our self-image. If it’s very important to you that you’re a kind person, it’s much more likely that you’ll act kindly than if you just think kindness is important for people in general.

One good way to work this is to take a test that clarifies what your most important values are (such as Douglas Wagoner’s values test), and then make some statements, aloud, about the top few results. “Being a _______ person is important to me” is a good format for these statements.

You could write the statements out, too, and put them up where you can see them.

3. Be self-aware about your values and behaviour

: Fenanov / Foter

Reflecting on your values before acting “primes” you to act consistently with those values. If you don’t think about what you’re doing, you’re likely to act, instead, out of expected social scripts.

The exercise above should help with this, too.

4. Place yourself in circumstances where you’re expected to act out the value

Peterson notes that if there’s a strong norm about the particular behaviour you’re contemplating, that norm will exert more influence on your behaviour than your value will. For example, if you have a value of helping people but there’s a strong norm in your culture about not stepping forward or “interfering” in the affairs of a stranger, you may hesitate to come to the aid of someone you don’t know.

To me, this says that you need to find an environment filled with people who share your values, where the norms are to live out those values. As long as you live in an environment where the dominant norms prevent you behaving in ways that reflect your values, you will be incongruent and, therefore, internally conflicted and unhappy. Particularly if you’re self-aware.

5. Be specific about your values

If your values are very abstract, they’re less likely to connect to specific behaviours. This is fairly obvious. Peterson’s example is that having a general value about beauty is less likely to make you recycle than if your value is more specifically about recycling.

If you’ve been through Wagoner’s test, you’ll have whittled down more specific values to a general one that is most important to you. For example, on the first page of his test I had a clump of values about intelligence, wisdom, insightfulness, perceptiveness, clearheadedness, reason and the like, which I later boiled down to one or two words.

If you’ve done that, turn around and reverse the process. What does a value of wisdom mean to you? It’s a lot easier to imagine acting perceptively or acting insightfully than it is to imagine acting wisely, simply because the words are more specific.

How to live out your values

Living in accordance with your values is very freeing, though also courageous. It will mean going against what people around you are doing some of the time, against your own desires some of the time, and certainly against the desires and expectations of other people some of the time.

Being aware of your values, making them your own, making them part of your identity, being specific about them and looking for contexts which encourage you to act on them will help you to live congruently and with integrity.

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