Wednesday, July 30, 2014

What’s the most important virtue of all?


Maya Angelou and Samuel Johnson insist that it’s courage. 

 Said Maya Angelou: “Courage is the most important of all the virtues because without courage, you can't practice any other virtue consistently.”

 Said Samuel Johnson: “Courage is reckoned the greatest of all virtues; because, unless a man has that virtue, he has no security for preserving any other.”

Courage may top the list for some, but other candidates abound. Aristotle said that pride is the crown of all virtues while others maintain that it’s humility or patience or cheerfulness (said B.C. Forbes: “Cheerfulness is among the most laudable virtues. It gains you the good will and friendship of others. It blesses those who practice it and those upon whom it is bestowed”). And the scriptures say that charity (love) is the greatest of all virtues. 

But a new player has taken center stage of late, and science is fast confirming the physical, psychological and social benefits of acquiring, and practicing daily, this virtue. 

It’s gratitude.

Comedian Louis C.K. might have said it best. In a TV appearance some years ago that went viral, the comedian said that when he’s at the airport, and people complain about sitting on the runway for an extra 30 minutes, he feels compelled to ask:

“Oh really, what happened next? Did you fly through the air, incredibly, like a bird? Did you partake in the miracle of human flight?”

It’s easy to forget all that we have, and all that we take for granted. 

Cultivating an Attitude of Gratitude

Psychology Professor Robert Emmons, one of the world’s leading experts on the subject, believes that gratitude is the “forgotton factor” in happiness research.  The professor has examined gratitude for decades (his work is captured in his book: Thanks! How The New Science of Gratitude Can Make You Happier) and has found that people who view life as a gift and consciously acquire an “attitude of gratitude” will experience multiple advantages. Explained Emmons: “Without gratitude, life can be lonely, depressing and impoverished. . . . Gratitude enriches human life. It elevates, energizes, inspires and transforms. People are moved, opened and humbled through expressions of gratitude.”

And clinical psychologist Melanie Greenberg, writing for psychologytoday.com, explains that experiencing and expressing gratitude “opens the heart and activates positive emotion centers in the brain.  Regular practice of gratitude can change the way our brain neurons fire into more positive automatic patterns. . . . Gratitude is an emotion of connectedness, which reminds us we are part of a larger universe with all living things.” Added Greeenberg: “Gratitude can lead to feelings of love, appreciation, generosity, and compassion, which further opens our hearts and helps rewire our brains to fire in more positive ways.”

Both Greenberg and Emmons acknowledge that cultivating the virtue of gratitude can be difficult, which is why they both recommend keeping a gratitude journal.  Said Emmons: “Gratitude journals and other gratitude practices often seem so simple and basic; in our studies, we often have people keep gratitude journals for just three weeks. And yet the results have been overwhelming. We’ve studied more than one thousand people, from ages eight to 80, and found that people who practice gratitude consistently report a host of benefits.”

Why might gratitude have these transformative effects on people’s lives? Said Emmons:

“1. Gratitude allows us to celebrate the present. It magnifies positive emotions.”

“2. Gratitude blocks toxic, negative emotions, such as envy, resentment, regret – emotions that can destroy our happiness.”

“3. Grateful people are more stress resistant” and

“4. Grateful people have a higher sense of self-worth.”

"We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures." - Thornton Wilder

“He is a wise man who does not grieve for the things which he has not, but rejoices for those which he has." – Epictetus

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Saturday, July 26, 2014

Attractive people: are they also beautiful inside?



It’s a common notion – when you see an attractive person, you tend to judge them to be kinder, more gentle, more understanding and sympathetic. But is it true?  Do attractive people have more positive traits and values? In short, do beauty and goodness go together? 

Possibly not, according to one recent study conducted by two Israeli professors. They concluded: “. . . our findings suggest that the beautiful strive for conformity rather than independence and for self-promotion rather than tolerance.” The study was conducted by Sonia Roccas of the Open University of Israel and Lilach Sagiv of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. (One notable caveat: the study involved only women, yet the study abstract spoke in terms of “attractive people,” leading to the obvious question: do these results hold for men as well?). 

Psychologists call the phenomenon the “what is beautiful is good” stereotype, and it’s well documented.  People tend to perceive attractive adults as more social, successful and well-adjusted.  To test the stereotype, Roccas and Sagiv sought to answer two related questions: 1. How does perceived attractiveness relate to perceived personality? and 2. How does perceived attractiveness relate to actual personality. To examine this, they asked study participants to self-rate their own traits and values.  Here’s what they found, according to a write-up at sciencedaily.com (study participants, or “judges,” were asked to evaluate women (the “targets”) on video, doing a weather forecast):

“Women who were rated as attractive were perceived as having more socially desirable personality traits, such as extraversion, openness to experience, and conscientiousness, just as the researchers hypothesized. . . . But when the researchers looked at the targets' actual self-reported traits and values, they found the opposite relationships. . . .Women who were rated as attractive were more likely to endorse values focused on conformity and submission to social expectations and self-promotion."

Surprising results?

In a comment forum at the web site unexplained-mysteries.com, one person asked whether the inverse might be true, that is, do people perceive unattractive people to have unattractive traits. 

Another commenter, surprised at the study findings, posed this view: “You would think self-promotion would be less needed if one is attractive, so that was a surprise to me.  The attractive people I know in a professional capacity are more quiet about themselves.  The conformity trait does ring true though. In my experience very attractive people get a lot of positive feedback no matter what they do.  That surely screws them up in the head in many ways.”

Tuesday, July 15, 2014

Life success: Does it matter where you go to college?

Apparently not, according to a first-of-its-kind nationwide survey, conducted by Gallup and Purdue University. After interviewing more than 30,000 U.S. adults nationwide, the authors came to this surprising conclusion: to succeed in life, it doesn’t matter where you go to college – what matters is what you do there, what experiences you have and how engaged you are.

The promise is clear: if we pursue a college education, it will lead to a better life. And the natural extension is that the more prestigious the school, the more successful we’ll be.  But the Gallup-Purdue survey finds that the school itself doesn’t matter.  And they have the numbers to back it up. 

Said the authors:   

“. . . [W]here graduates went to college – public or private, small or large, very selective or not selective – hardly matters at all to their current well-being and their work life in comparison to their experience in college.” 

Gallup-Purdue evaluated a person’s life in two broad categories: workplace engagement and personal well-being.  Some key findings:

·         Living the great life (well-being).  The survey found that only 11% of graduates are thriving in all five areas of well-being (sense of purpose, financial security, personal health, close relationships and community involvement), leading the authors to conclude that “many graduates are still waiting to experience that ‘great life’.”  And, apparently, it doesn’t matter what college you attended. For the top 100 schools listed by U.S. News & World Report, just 12% of their graduates are thriving in all five elements, just a single percent higher than the overall average. 

·         Workplace engagement – While college graduates are enjoying their work more than non-graduates, the survey found that only 39% of college graduates are engaged at work (49% are “not engaged” and 12% are “actively disengaged”). Statistically, graduates who majored in the arts and humanities (41%) and the social sciences (41%) were slightly more engaged at work than either science (38%) or business majors (37%). And “[t]here were no differences in employee engagement by race or ethnicity, or by whether the graduates had been the first in the family to attend college.”

Great Jobs, Great Lives – do universities help us achieve them?

The study authors maintain that, despite universal agreement that college is designed to help adults thrive in the workplace, and in their lives, “. . . there is not a single college or university in the U.S. that has rigorously researched and measured whether their graduates have ‘great jobs’ and ‘great lives’.”

Accordingly, the authors urge us to focus on the college experience, given that these six "experiences" are directly linked to workplace engagement and well-being later in life:

1.       Mentor – having a mentor who encouraged them to pursue their dreams;

2.       Support – knowing that a professor cared about them;

3.       Excitement – having at least one professor who made them feel excited about learning;

4.       Internship – having an internship or job that was connected to their classroom learning;

5.       Long-term project – working on a project that took a semester or more to complete; and

6.       Extracurricular activities – being active in pursuing extracurricular activities.

Said the authors: “Feeling supported and having deep learning experiences means everything when it comes to long-term outcomes for college graduates.”

A final word from Gallup-Purdue:

“A national dialogue on improving the college experience should focus on ways to provide students with more emotional support, and with more opportunities for deep learning experiences and real-life applications of classroom learning.”
 
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Thursday, July 10, 2014

Do you have many (ok, any) 50/50 friends?

“True companions in life walk side by side.” – psychologist Marie Hartwell-Walker

 Some months ago a good friend posed this question to me, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. What exactly did he mean by 50/50?

To my friend’s way of thinking, 50/50 is the essence of a balanced relationship – a relationship where two friends balance their effort, their interest (in each other’s lives) and their talk time.  Two people, two listeners, two questioners – two people who care deeply about each other, yet two individuals who recognize that, at times, one friend needs more nurturing than the other, as life circumstances dictate.

It also means two individuals willing to open up to each other, in a meaningful way – allowing each other to pull the curtain back on their private lives, and private thoughts, in a way that says, in essence: “I trust you to understand, to listen to my triumphs and challenges, and not to judge me in any way.  To simply support me.” 

That, I suppose, is a 50/50 friend.  It’s not about literal talk time (though over time, I suppose, a 50/50 balance sounds desirable). Instead, it’s probably more about a genuine interest in the other person’s life, and daily travails. 

Now, knowing that, I re-pose the question to you: Do you have many 50/50 friends?  And how do you go about cultivating those relationships?

As a lifelong reporter, I was trained to ask questions, and that certainly has carried over to my social life.  A friend once told me that I ask more questions that anyone he knows (I wasn’t sure if he was complimenting me, or criticizing me, so I decided to assume the former).  My professional training aside, my desire in asking questions* is simply to learn – to learn more about what goes on in other people’s lives (as I often share, I already know what I’m doing, so sharing it with others isn’t particularly growth-producing).

For good or for bad, in social settings, my ear is attuned to what I call the “bounce-back,” that is, when a person bounces back a question to you, and listens with interest (side note: as I’m sure you’ve experienced, a bounce-back question doesn’t always connote true interest – sometimes it simply serves as a personal segue – for example, try to recall a time when someone asked you: “Have you seen any good movies lately?” and immediately told you about the movie they just saw, in notable detail).

On the subject of relationships, Dr. John Grohol (founder and CEO of PsychCentral) explained:

“Relationships tend to function best when they are in a state of balance (or homeostasis); however, the task of achieving a healthy balance in our relationships is more easily said than done — especially if we didn’t grow up with healthy role models in these areas.”

Offered psychologist Marie Hartwell-Walker, writing for PsychCentral.com:

“Real friends are obligated to each other in a meaningful way. To be a friend is to accept the gift of another’s trust with the appreciation and trustworthiness such a gift deserves. It requires the willingness to devote time, energy, and thought to the other person’s needs and desires as well as to our own.”

Hartwell-Walker offers 7 tips for maintaining strong friendships:

1.       Keep in contact;

2.       Don’t keep score;

3.       Keep it balanced;

4.       Be loyal;

5.       Remember their birthday (little things count);

6.       Deal with conflict; and

7.       Be a fan.

Added Hartwell-Walker:

“Good friends feel equal in the relationship. When a friendship is healthy, roles shift easily. They share stories. They listen attentively. They treat and are treated. They look to each other for wisdom without feeling inferior for doing so. They share their opinions without feeling superior. Neither person feels taken for granted, put down, or put on a pedestal. True companions in life walk side by side.”

*of late, two of my favorite open-ended questions are: “What’s new in your world?” and “What’s best?” This second question flows from a passage in “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” in which the author explains the illimitable difference between “What’s new?” and “What’s best?”

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