Designing Your Life, part I: Excuses

This week, I am helping teach the annual Designing Your Life class at MIT, taught by the Handel Group. It was through this class, 3 years ago, that I took my first step down the life coaching path that has now become my career. I remember sitting in the class and being blown away by the simplicity and power of Lauren's message... and the same sense of excitement and possibility is evident in the participants this year as well. As the course progresses, my goal is to use this blog to give you guys a taste of what we're playing with.

As a first homework, each participant evaluated the 18 areas of their life: career, body, community, relationship to yourself, bad habits, relationship, sex, romance, characteristics that don't work, family, money, time, home, organization, learning, fun and adventure, and spirtuality, and health. Yes, there are a lot of facets of your life, and in undertaking this exercise most people find that they have been ignoring a few of them. We ask partipants to evaluate where they are in each areas, what their ideal would be, and explain why they are not currently at their ideal.

One of the main reasons that we are not at our ideal is because we are caught up in the world of excuses. Clever inventions, excuses. They are the perfect device to get us off the hook for not doing what we know we should be doing. You know what I'm talking about... you are running late to a meeting, and in the five minutes before you burst through that door, your mind is churning through a dozen different excuses to justify your lateness. The subway took a while to come, I couldn't find the room, who picked this meeting time anyways... any excuse but the real reason you were late: I chose to sleep in an extra 10 minutes. Because really, if you give the real reason, you sound like a slounch. Ok, so this morning you actually were a slounch, but who wants to tell your coworkers that?

The problem with excuses is that over time, we start to believe them. We start to believe that it really was the subway, or the rain or whatever, and that the circumstances were out of our control. We lose sight of the power that we ultimately wield--in this case, the ability to set an alarm, get up, and arrive on time -- and begin to feel like our lives are, like the subway, out of our control.

Here are some of the brilliant excuses that our participants gave us this year... any of them sound familiar? I know I personally have been around the block on many of them. (Note that the participants signed a waver allowing annonymous re-use of their work):

On being overweight: I put on more than 15 pounds in the past year, it happened very gradually, and I saw it happening but I could never intervene (intervene in what? The civil war in Chad?)

On not keeping in touch with his family: I do not like to make phone calls at home because we have a very small apartment and any noise carries throughout the whole space, which makes it hard to talk without bothering each other. (weren't mobile phones invented for just this purpose?)

On being single: Very little flirting is directed my way, even though I seem approachable and available. (as if flirting were something that falls out of the sky... )

On a mediocre sex life: I don't really know how to make this area of my life better, as it involves changing another person's physiology (or psychology, but I don't know how to do that). (so she's the weak link, huh?)

On not having found the ideal career: There are too many options, and too much pressure to be 'successful.' (some would say that options are a good thing in finding the right fit...)

On not being able to refrain from swearing: When I was younger, I never voiced my anger or frustrations. I was quiet and held everything inside me. I always say the anger built up until it ended up spilling over and the swear words were the end result. (so when you said the word s*** a few minutes ago, it actually really originated decades ago, and is finally reaching us today? Like light from a star in a distant galaxy. Wow.)

The people who wrote these excuses are truly warriors... over the next few days, they are taking this stuff down. Controlling the hand that feeds the mouth, picking up the cell phone, sending out the flirt and the tease, listening to the heart, and cutting out the swears. Go guys, go!

The origins of greatness

I thought that President Obama's speech made a nice point about greatness:

"In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned."

Greatness, in addition to many other characteristics such as honesty, compassion, faith, courage, is a moment-to-moment quality. People aren't born great; they don't have the great gene. You don't achieve greatness and then coast on it for the rest of your life-- just look at the stereotypical high school quarterback or prom queen at their 20 year high school reunion.

No, greatness is something you are continually inventing for yourself. In some situations you may be great, in others not. The good news here is that, at any given moment, we always have the option to be great. Just because you weren't great this morning doesn't mean that you can't be great in the afternoon. Just because you weren't great to your husband last week doesn't mean that you can't be great to him right now. The clean-slatedness of greatness is full of hope and opportunity.

I don't know about you guys, but I'm going to be great tonight.

Image courtesy of http://www.obamarama.org

Good? Bad? Who knows...

My wallet was stolen at a cafe a week ago. I was deep in conversation with one of my clients, and someone must have slipped a hand into my purse and taken my wallet.

This experience was about as unpleasant as having to wait for a walk signal to cross the street. Or wiping your shoes before entering a house. MAYBE even having to remember to take out the trash, but not quite as bad as taking out the recycling.

To explain my outlook on the whole thing, I refer you to great story from Dan Millmans's Way of the Peaceful Warrior that really nails it:

"An old man and his son worked a small farm, with only one horse to pull the plow. One day, the horse ran away.
'How terrible,' sympathized the neighbors. 'What bad luck.'
'Who knows whether it is bad luck or good luck,' the farmer replied.
A week later, the horse returned from the mountains, leading five wild mares into the barn.
'What wonderful luck!' said the neighbors.
'Good luck? Bad luck? Who knows?' answered the old man.
The next day, the son, trying to tame one of the horses, fell and broke his leg.
'How terrible. What bad luck!'
'Bad luck? Good luck?'
The army came to all the farms to take the young men for war, but the farmer's son was of no use to them, and so he was spared.
'Good? Bad?'

Image courtesy of http://www.horsesmaine.com/

Creativity thrives in rough times

From Orson Wells in The Third Man:

"In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace—and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

Ok, so it was technically the Germans who produced the cuckoo clock. And the Swiss DO hold most of the money in the world. And now that we're on the subject, they DID lure three friends of mine away from the US with promises of good-paying science jobs, true love, and public transit that runs on schedule.

Nonetheless, Orson's underlying message rings true. Tough situations bring out the best in us, and play an important role in our lives.

After working around the clock in November and December to write a brilliant research manifesto, my partner Anthony learned last week that a research group at Stanford had recently published a similar paper. This is news that researchers typically dread, falling on the spectrum of catastrophes somewhere below the loss of a family member and above having a double root canal without anesthetic.

After a sleepless night and a few handfuls of uprooted hair, Anthony set about writing a new, better paper that showed how his research was useful in a wider range of situations than the Stanford paper. To publish his paper quickly and powerfully, he targeted the paper for submission to a prestigious computational photography conference. There is a high bar for acceptance into this conference, and so his little grey cells worked overtime to write a paper that would communicate the utility, simplicity, and beauty of his work.

As the editor of Anthony's papers, I can honestly say that this second paper surpassed the first paper in almost every way: a veritable Sistine Chapel. Without the help of the Stanford team, Anthony would still be making cuckoo clocks.

Image courtesy of www.allclocks.com

Zooming out

Let me tell you about a great mind-stretching exercise that I have been practicing lately.

My goal was to learn how to think big-picture. I am by nature a detail-oriented thinker, and so am fabulous at defining tasks, breaking them down, and executing. But I struggle with taking a step back and taking in the big picture. Strategy, out-of-the-box five year plans, my mission on this planet... I have a hard time zooming my mind out to think about these things.

Lauren Zander, founder of the Handel Group recommended that I try the following exercise routine, and I am here to say that it works. And it combines mental exercise with physical exercise: what could be better? Three times per week, I go on a 45 minute run. I start with 15 minutes of warm-up. Then for 15 minutes, I run at 70% intensity, where 100% is a sprint and 0% is a slow walk. In this state of focused exertion, I get in a zone. I focus my mind on a big picture question, like "If I were in charge of the Gates Foundation, what would I do" or "If I were elected President, what would be my term goals" or "If I could write an NPR expose about anything, what would I write?" It is a sort of meditation, and by golly my mind wants to wander all over the place, from what I am cooking for dinner to a punchline from the latest episode of The Office. But I keep bringing my mind back and focus on the question at hand. After 15 minutes of this, I feel expanded, creative, and focused. 15 minutes of cool-down, and I am ready to approach the rest of my life from a fresh perspective.

Walking by any gym, you see people working out to TV, music, or a magazine. Why not work out to mind exercises?

Image courtesy of http://thomashawk.com/hello/209/1017/1024/Central%20Park%20Jogger4.1.jpg

A bump on the head

This week's New Yorker has a great commentary by Lauren Collins about how our responses to the current financial climate are entirely within our control, just as a small child's response to a scrape or bump is within her control:

"Every parent knows the moment when a small child hits his forehead on a doorknob, or bumps her chin on the coffee table, and then the long seconds of red-faced anticipation, breath drawn, while everyone waits for the explosion of tears... though the inevitable explosion is, mostly, inevitable, a small part of the parent’s heart hopes that this time the child will somehow compose herself, see that her injury isn’t life-threatening, take a breath, find distraction in a bright, shiny object, and laugh."

So too, argues Collins, goes economics. Investor mood and confidence often trumps other, more "rational" economic factors in driving the market up or down. How we choose to perceive the current economic climate will largely determine if our economy sinks or rebounds, just as a child's perception determines if the bump is a devastation or inconsequential.

Moral of the story: we create our own realities, so why not create a good one?

This goes for all areas of life. Why choose to believe that your marriage is doomed, a career change would never work, and that that extra 10 pounds is "inevitable"? Do you really want to create that reality? Which would you prefer instead? Let's vote for that one.

Choose to "take a deep breath. Look at the ornaments! Don't cry."