David Teachout's Blog

(43) Interview with Juan Lee: Love Made Simple

Juan Lee is an author and teacher on the powerful principle of love. Raised within the Christian church, Juan has turned to teachings about love over the years to find strength, understanding and hope.

As a child, Juan was the youngest of four children raised by a single father. Juan struggled with an undiagnosed learning disability that made school difficult. He joined the US Air Force out of high school in hopes just to survive.

For video interview: YouTube

Love Made Simple: Humanity and Legacy

“Don’t wait to join humanity. The legacy that you leave upon your death will impact generations to come, regardless of whether you leave family members behind, because as a successful teen, young adult, adult, or senior, you have touched lives. You’ve joined humanity at each stage of your life. You have realized that humanity is only going to be as great as the people who’ve traversed through it.”

Love Made Simple: A Guide to Inner Peace, Contentment, and Success

We can and must remember that our shared humanity is what gives meaning and purpose to our individual actions. We are only in this life for a short time, yet our actions, by virtue of our interconnected nature with one another, will echo for generations, even after our names are forgotten. Every moment is an opportunity to decide what those influences will be, how you will show up as an expression of humanity, and what legacy you will leave behind. A guiding principle in recognizing our role within humanity and looking to legacy is that of love.

“Courage means being unafraid to die, knowing that your life has (or should have had) impact for the greater humanity. It means facing a difficult diagnosis with bravery. It means making the most of every moment—because our tomorrow is not guaranteed. The conclusion of life should hold a loving legacy for others to treasure.”

Love Made Simple: A Guide to Inner Peace, Contentment, and Success

Author Links:

Juan Lee | the Author (juanleetheauthor.com)

Juan Lee, Author | Facebook

Love Made Simple: A Guide to Inner Peace, Contentment, and Success

The post (43) Interview with Juan Lee: Love Made Simple appeared first on Therapy | Mental Health | Psychology | Washington | Life Weavings.

How to Win: Life is Not a Battle Between Good and Evil

Today we will explore the idea of good and evil, that there are “good people and evil people”, the foundation of the last untruth explained by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt in their book “The Coddling of the American Mind.” In response to the three untruths, in (episode 33) Self-care Instead of Self-Harm, I offered three truths as a balm or replacement, noting the consequences of believing the first and the path of resiliency in following the latter. Here we’re going to focus on the third untruth, “Life is a battle between good people and evil people,” and its replacement, “Life is a lived experience through many intersectional identities,” to finish off this series of episodes.

UntruthsWhat doesn’t kill you makes you weaker – leads to self-identifying through victimhoodAlways trust your feelingsLife is a battle between good people and evil peopleTruthsConsequences are inevitable and often outside of our direct control, so learn from themQuestion your feelings, but don’t dismiss themLife is a lived experience through many perspectives

“Tribalism is our evolutionary endowment for banding together to prepare for intergroup conflict. When the “tribe switch” is activated, we bind ourselves more tightly to the group, we embrace and defend the group’s moral matrix, and we stop thinking for ourselves. A basic principle of moral psychology is that “morality binds and blinds,” which is a useful trick for a group gearing up for a battle between “us” and “them.” In tribal mode, we seem to go blind to arguments and information that challenge our team’s narrative.”

The Coddling of the American Mind (p. 58).

Life is a battle between good people and evil people, my tribe and your tribe is the third untruth. It interferes with our ability to communicate and find common ground. In tribal mode, we lose the ability to think for ourselves, we think with the group mind, and it moves us toward ethical abdication. We become closed to new information.

Identity Politics

Jonathan Rauch, a scholar at The Brookings Institution, defines it as “political mobilization organized around group characteristics such as race, gender, and sexuality, as opposed to party, ideology, or pecuniary interest.” He notes that “in America, this sort of mobilization is not new, unusual, unAmerican, illegitimate, nefarious, or particularly leftwing.”

The Coddling of the American Mind

Intersectionality

“The problem with identity politics is not that it fails to transcend difference, as some critics charge, but rather the opposite – that it frequently conflates or ignores intra group differences.”

“Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics and Violence Against Women of Color” -Kimberle Crenshaw

A different way forward…

Lets begin with similarity as people:

We organize our experiences through Self-Stories or Narratives or IdentitiesAll perception through Narrative is context-specificGoal-DirectedEnvironmentally ConstrainedCognitive heuristics (any approach to problem-solving that uses a practical method or various shortcuts in order to produce solutions that may not be optimal but are sufficient given a limited timeframe or deadline) are innate and inevitableAvailability BiasProximity BiasWe go towards ease and away from difficultyThe “Consistency Rule”Within a given Identity-Driven Narrative, we focus on what supports the structure, ignore what doesn’t, and behave in such a way that perpetuates that “As-If” world.

This inclusive, common-humanity approach was also explicit in the words of Pauli Murray, a black and queer Episcopal priest, and civil rights activist who, in 1965, at the age of fifty-five, earned a degree from Yale Law School. Today a residential college at Yale is named after her. In 1945, she wrote: 

“I intend to destroy segregation by positive and embracing methods. . . . When my brothers try to draw a circle to exclude me, I shall draw a larger circle to include them. Where they speak out for the privileges of a puny group, I shall shout for the rights of all mankind.”

The Coddling of the American Mind (p. 61)

Starting from the place of our common humanity, we move away from the ideas of good and evil, us and them, and can engage in open-ended dialogue about the changes we want to make.

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Value-Based Goals: How to Get the Results You Want Now

Value-based goals can be difficult, both in creating them and in following through. Further, the fact that they’re difficult is itself a frustration because goals are what is believed to guide the direction of our lives. Rather like mileposts on a highway counting every iteration of a road well-traveled, goals are seen as the markers for life moving forward. Goals are difficult, however, largely because of this framework. When looked at as life-markers, goals become their own source of measurement, rather than directing our attention to the reason and motivation behind their accomplishment. By shifting your attention to the meaning and purpose provided by your Values, goals become a means of personal fulfillment.

We can keep with the travel metaphor to help us out. How often during a trip does the monotony of the distance start becoming an enemy all on its own? How often do you find yourself focused on the next mile marker, the next landmark as a means of showing progress, only to finally arrive and feel exhausted? That feeling is due to having got so focused on reaching a particular destination that the purpose of getting there was lost, overshadowed by the minutiae of the process. This is similar to the notion of forgetting the forest because you’re so focused on the trees. The more you focus on the iterative process of reaching a destination, the broader picture provided by big ideas, purposes, and meaning gets lost.

Shifting goals to align with meaningful purpose can be done through a three-step process.

Select the Area of Your Life to See Change In and Write Out Your Goal

Life can be seen through a lens of the areas or roles that we take. With that lens in mind, we can look at the roles we take in the areas of Work or School, Family (however that is defined by you), Community: friends, neighbors, social groups, and Self: mind, body, and spirit (from Leading the Life You Want by Stewart Friedman). First, decide what area of your life you’re looking to make a change in. Try to keep it to just one area as much as possible, though of course, any change will have ripple effects within the others.

Once you’ve decided, narrow that area down to a particular goal. For this, we can use the SMART acronym, standing for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-sensitive. Selecting an area of your life first helps with being specific and relevant. Measurable makes it possible to track progress and know when you’ve arrived. Time-sensitive is there to give you a sense of urgency and an end-point to be aware of. Boundaries like these help us by providing structure for our thoughts and behavior, so we aren’t being flippant with our desires or casual with our actions.

Identify the Value the Change is Seeking to Serve

Values are the triggers that inspire us to action, both in outward behavior and inner emotional responses. To effect change in our lives, we want to align behavior to the Value we want to serve. In desiring to keep this simple, think of the area of your life that you’re wanting to see the change in, and reflect on what Values are often triggered. If it’s Work or School, do the Values of Time-Management, Honesty, or Integrity show up? If it’s Family, perhaps Love, Affection, or Trust arises. You can download the Value Pyramid worksheet on the Resources page as a way to connect the change you wish to see with the Value in the area you want to see the change in.

As you can see from the Values Pyramid worksheet, we all serve multiple Values at any given time. Quite often the Behavior we choose to support one may end up undermining or not supporting another Value in an ideal way. What’s important to remember here is that this juggling act is part of everyday living. Selecting a single Value aligned with your goal provides an emotional match to see the goal through to completion. By remembering there are other Values important to you, a broader awareness can be built that allows you to see around behavioral obstacles that get in the way of your value-based goal.

Measure Success through Every Instance of the Value-Directed Behavior

Lastly, when pursuing your value-based goal, recognize that Values are served in many different ways. Rather than keeping your eye only on the end-goal or a particular behavior of completion, each and every step becomes a movement of Value, serving what matters to you. This allows you to remain aware of your surrounding, acknowledge the changes in your life that are happening in pursuit of your goal and constantly reinforce your desire to reach your goal by thinking of yourself from aligned with what matters to you. Value-directed behavior is a way to consistently reinforce your desire for success by providing a way to connect every behavior along the path to your eventual value-based goal.

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Question Your Feelings, But Don’t Dismiss Them

Question your feelings. This is how we start the exploration of the 2nd Untruth, “always trust your feelings.” We will define affect, the wholeness of our emotional experience, labels as a short-hand for communicating a physiological experience to others, and the important difference between homeostasis and allostasis. Pulling from the works of Jonathan Haidt, Greg Lukianoff, and Lisa Feldman-Barrett we uncover the importance and limitations of our emotional experiences and their labels.

Allostasis

“In modern psychological usage, “affect” refers to the mental counterpart of internal bodily representations associated with emotions, actions that involve some degree of motivation, intensity, and force, or even personality dispositions. In the science of emotion, “affect” is a general term that has come to mean anything emotional. A cautious term, it allows reference to something’s effect or someone’s internal state without specifying exactly what kind of an effect or state it is. It allows researchers to talk about emotion in a theory-neutral way.”

“Allostasis: A Model of Predictive Regulation” by Peter Sterling

Question Your Feelings: The 5 Steps

Step 1: Accept emotional responses as natural and inevitable reactions to things that are important to you

Step 2: Accept that the emotional response itself is outside your control (this is different than the behavioral way you then decide to express and support that reaction)

Step 3: Identify the Value that the emotion is pointing you towards that has been either violated or supported

Step 4: Mindfully bring attention to the Value that matters to you, while continuing to accept the emotional response

Step 5: Explore different ways to express/support that Value which are healthy, goal-oriented and in line with the best version of yourself you know to be

Resources:

Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain – Lisa Feldman Barrett

How Emotions are Made – Lisa Feldman Barrett

Affect as a Psychological Primitive (PDF)

The Coddling of the American Mind – Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt

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Consequences are Inevitable, Learn From Them

As noted by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt in their book “The Coddling of the American Mind,” there is an untruth of “what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.” To that, we will instead embrace a deeper appreciation for how our brain/body system works within experience to prepare us for an uncertain future. Ultimately we can learn to accept and even desire to build a capacity for seeing errors and mistakes and consequences as spaces for growth. 

Our brains are biological predictive devices, not truth-tellers.

The premise of the standard regulatory model, “homeostasis”, is flawed: the goal of regulation is not to preserve constancy of the internal milieu. Rather, it is to continually adjust the milieu to promote survival and reproduction. Regulatory mechanisms need to be efficient, but homeostasis (error-correction by feedback) is inherently inefficient. Thus, although feedbacks are certainly ubiquitous, they could not possibly serve as the primary regulatory mechanism.

Peter Sterling, “Allostasis: A model of predictive regulation”

Every Narrative/Story we have hides as much as it reveals.

People who possess the truth are perceptive, insightful, observant, illuminated, enlightened, and visionary; by contrast, the ignorant are in the dark. When we comprehend something, we say I see. And we say, too, that the scales have fallen from our eyes; that once we were blind, but now we see. This link between seeing and knowing is not just metaphorical. For the most part, we accept as true anything that we see with our own eyes, or register with any of our other senses.

Schulz, Kathryn. Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error (p. 54).

Consequences are part of living in a reality that is not beholden to our desires.

Our brains piece together information fragments in ways that make sense to us and which can therefore feel like real memories. This is not a conscious decision by the ‘rememberer’, rather something that happens automatically. Two of the main processes during which this occurs are known as confabulation and source confusion.

Shaw, Julia. The Memory Illusion . Random House.

Consequences are a source for expanding perspective.

Genuine self-knowledge is, no doubt, exceptionally difficult to attain, and the truth about what we are may certainly be distressing. In our efforts to conduct our lives successfully, however, a readiness to face disturbing facts about ourselves may be an even more critical asset than a competent understanding merely of what we are up against in the outside world.

Frankfurt, Harry G.. On Truth (pp. 58-59). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

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Why Hate Feels So Good and What To Do About It

Democracy is a community project and as such, it is only as strong as the virtues of the people who are participating in it. It is only as strong as the social habits we encourage in ourselves and one another. Here we explore the feeling of hate within an understanding of our very human need to shape reality to suit our vision of what we believe it to be or should be, and seeing then how anything that gets in the way of that vision invokes our passions.

Seek out three things:

A broader perspective. You don’t need to agree with a contrary opinion, but if you are committed to making your belief as strong as possible, seek the strongest of alternatives so that like steel, you work to purge the “impurities” or limitations from your own view.Recognize the universality of passion. If you find yourself utterly shocked at how a person can hold a particular belief or why they express their solidarity with it in a particular way, consider that your own passions have in life led you down many a dead-end road and likely will again. The variation in human beings is as much about how many ways we can be wrong and we can stand in awe at the diversity of exploration.Remember that life is filled with many peaks of possibility, not just one. An equality of outcomes will only make all paths look the same. Our passions drive us in many different directions and in a democratic society dedicated to pluralism and the celebration of the individual, those variations can work together to elevate the whole of our shared humanity. 

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Election Thoughts – Voting 2020

Democracy is a Value-based interpersonal construct for guiding human behavior. As such, democracy exists at the intersection of humanity’s greatest potential and all our foibles. We can aspire to be the best versions of ourselves that we know to be, but it requires an active engagement, both on the ground through action and also through mindful reflection. Both of these actions mean accepting that any of us may be wrong in whole or in part, that ideas deemed contrary are worth exploring to expand the vision of what’s possible, and a recognition that our fellow human being is more than any single thought/feeling/action. By such thoughtful interaction will we build the space to let fly the better angels of our nature.

Voting is a Value-Based Decision

“The essence of a pattern is a relational structure. Recall that the origin of the word pattern is pater, literally ‘the father’ of that which has been created. We most often notice patterns by means of their repetitions, however. Individuals have the sense that they have been ‘here’ before.” p. 88

From “Constructive Psychotherapy” by Michael J. Mahoney

Voting is an Extension of Narrative

“The word belong has two meanings. First and foremost, to belong is to be related to and a part of something. It is membership, the experience of being at home in the broadest sense of the phrase. Belonging is best created when we join with other people in producing something that makes a place better. It is the opposite of thinking I must do it on my own.”

From “Community” by Peter Block

Voting is an Attempt to Shape Reality through Behavior

“The creation of groups from personal and intimate mutual knowledge was the unique achievement of humanity. The origin of the human condition is best explained by the natural selection for social interaction—the inherited propensities to communicate, recognize, evaluate, bond, cooperate, compete, and from all these the deep warm pleasure of belonging to your own special group.”

From “The Meaning of Human Existence” by Edward O. Wilson

The post Election Thoughts – Voting 2020 appeared first on Life Weavings.

Election Thoughts 2020

Democracy is a Value-based interpersonal construct for guiding human behavior. As such, democracy exists at the intersection of humanity’s greatest potential and all our foibles. We can aspire to be the best versions of ourselves that we know to be, but it requires an active engagement, both on the ground through action and also through mindful reflection. Both of these actions mean accepting that any of us may be wrong in whole or in part, that ideas deemed contrary are worth exploring to expand the vision of what’s possible, and a recognition that our fellow human being is more than any single thought/feeling/action. By such thoughtful interaction will we build the space to let fly the better angels of our nature.

Voting is a Value-Based Decision

“The essence of a pattern is a relational structure. Recall that the origin of the word pattern is pater, literally ‘the father’ of that which has been created. We most often notice patterns by means of their repetitions, however. Individuals have the sense that they have been ‘here’ before.” p. 88

From “Constructive Psychotherapy” by Michael J. Mahoney

Voting is an Extension of Narrative

“The word belong has two meanings. First and foremost, to belong is to be related to and a part of something. It is membership, the experience of being at home in the broadest sense of the phrase. Belonging is best created when we join with other people in producing something that makes a place better. It is the opposite of thinking I must do it on my own.”

From “Community” by Peter Block

Voting is an Attempt to Shape Reality through Behavior

“The creation of groups from personal and intimate mutual knowledge was the unique achievement of humanity. The origin of the human condition is best explained by the natural selection for social interaction—the inherited propensities to communicate, recognize, evaluate, bond, cooperate, compete, and from all these the deep warm pleasure of belonging to your own special group.”

From “The Meaning of Human Existence” by Edward O. Wilson

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Self-Care Instead of Self-Harm

The stories of our life will frame the potential for self-care or self-harm, resilience or fragility, setting us up for an array of behavior that can support one or the other.

Untruths



What doesn’t kill you makes you weakerAlways trust your feelingsLife is a battle between good people and evil people

Referencing “Coddling of the American Mind” by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt.

Truths



Learn from consequences and yes, even mistakesQuestion your feelings, but don’t dismiss themLife is a lived experience through many intersectional identities

If you have any questions about any part of this episode, please feel free to reach out at David.teachout@lifeweavings.com. I will respond to each message and it’s possible your question may get an entire episode dedicated to it! 

Podcasts can also be listened to on iTunes, Soundcloud, Libsyn, and Google Play.

Your support is deeply appreciated and allows me to keep bringing you the content that you appreciate. Below you’ll find a button to set up a single or recurring donation through PayPal. Any amount is appreciated and ensures you’ll never hear advertisements.

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Accepting and Rebounding from Failure

Looking at failure, it’s inevitability in our lives and how you can accept, learn from and not define the whole of who you are by it. Will tie the nature of failure to last episode’s discussion of behavior and go over six steps to working through the difficulty of failing. 

Steps to Working through Failure

1: Unhook – notice mental commentary 

2: Make Space – expand around pain

3: Be Kind to Yourself

4: Appreciate what Worked and Any Improvements

5: Find Something Useful

6: Take a Stand – what value are you wanting to ground yourself upon? 

If you have any questions about any part of this episode, please feel free to reach out at David.teachout@lifeweavings.com. I will respond to each message and it’s possible your question may get an entire episode dedicated to it! 

Podcasts can also be listened to on iTunes, Soundcloud, Libsyn, and Google Play.

Your support is deeply appreciated and allows me to keep bringing you the content that you appreciate. Below you’ll find a button to set up a single or recurring donation through PayPal. Any amount is appreciated and ensures you’ll never hear advertisements.

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