Life Transformation - Personal Growth

Continuing with the theme of establishing a set of new habits and goals during this new year period, the next topic up is personal growth.

• Seek out people who bring out the best in you, challenge you, and help you grow. Just as children are extremely influenced by the friends they make, so are you.
  
• Do something scary on a daily basis. Among other things, this implies overcoming any shyness and discomfort at talking to people you don’t know.
  
• Simple rules for success from Jane Goodall: “… really work hard, and take advantage of opportunities, and never give up…”
  
• Learn something new every day. Just as you exercise you body, you also need to exercise your brain. This becomes more important the older you get. Studies have shown that the most important brain exercise is to learn something completely new, not just incremental improvements in a topic you are already very familiar with.
  
• The more close relationships you have, the fuller you life and the better your health. Invest in friends, family, and relationships, new and old. Take time to really cherish them.
  

Two Wolves

Your attitude is your choice. Chosing optimism is an empowering political act.
A good friend of mine sent me an email with the following story.


TWO WOLVES

One evening an old Cherokee told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside people. He said, "My son, the battle is between two wolves inside us all.

"One is Evil - It is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.

"The other is Good - It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith."

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather: "Which wolf wins?"

The old Cherokee simply replied, "The one you feed."

Life Transformation – Spiritual Health

Continuing with the theme of establishing a set of new habits and goals during this new year period, the next topic up is spiritual health. Just as we need to avoid toxic junk food for the body, we should avoid toxic junk influences for our spirit.

• Avoid as much as possible exposure to commercial influences, including exposure to commercial TV and radio.
  
• Avoid exposure to things that promote anger, fear, resentment, envy, disrespect, and pessimism.
  
• Avoid exposure to things that promote objectionable values: violence as entertainment, glorification of conspicuous consumption, treating people as sex objects, etc…
  
• Avoid exposure to people promoting such toxic behaviors, and seek out energizing optimistic people.
  
• Become enthusiastically involved in positive causes that are bigger than yourself.
  

Life Transformation - Progress Report

I did manage to get my email inbox down to zero on Jan 1st, and have kept it that way every evening since. I filed some items for future reference, and put those emails that still needed action in a “to do” folder, then archived the rest in a special folder in case I need to reference them in the future. So far, so good.

I also got rid of the vast majority of my pile of magazines. I cut out and saved some articles for future reference, then threw the rest out. It turns out that I had many more magazines squirreled away than I realized at first, and my goal of getting down to just three magazines being saved at any one time will be more difficult than I thought.

One problem that occurred to me comes from the old phase "my habits define my life". While the previous postings on developing better habits for organizing, diet, and staying healthy are good, I don't want them to define my life. Next up to post about is the set of habits that address attitudes, purpose, and spiritual related issues.

Life Transformation - Organizing Habits

Continuing with the theme of establishing a set of new habits and goals during this new year period, the next topic up is organizing habits. One thing I really have trouble with is setting priorities when it comes to consuming information. I suppose many people with a healthy curiosity about a wide variety of topics have this problem. However, when there is essentially an unlimited amount of free information available on the World Wide Web, the tendency to attempt to consume everything of interest has to be resisted. Otherwise, as in my case, your email inbox will continue to grow without bounds with all the things “you plan to get to as soon as you have more time”. Same with the ever growing stack of magazines on the desk.

The overall habit must be to become more selective in what you try to drink from the fire hose of information coming at us each day. We can’t possibly take it all in, or even any reasonable fraction of it, so there needs to be prioritization about what is important to further your top one or two goals, what is really worth the time spent on it, and be willing to ignore the rest.

So my goals in this area for the coming year are (this is where things get more radical):

• On Jan 1st, I will zero out my email inbox (actually archive the roughly 1900 emails currently in there, ugh!) and start out fresh. I will completely clear out my inbox again each night before going to bed.
  
• The first time I open an email, I will remove it from my inbox. If I can deal with in 2 minutes or less I will handle it right then. Otherwise I will put it in a “To Do” folder, file it in a folder where I save useful information on that topic, or delete it. I will not leave it in the inbox with the intention of coming back to it later.
  
• Many web browsers let you open multiple windows, with multiple tabs per window. This is great for opening articles that you intend to read “later when you have more time”, but it also invites a great deal of abuse. On Jan 1st I will close all the windows and tabs on my web browsers, and do so again each night before going to bed.
  
• I will have at most 3 magazines on my pile of “magazines to read as soon as I have time”. If a new magazine comes in the mail, I will get the pile of magazines back down to 3 before going to bed.
  
• Decluttering: Vertical places (desk tops, table tops, floors…) are not meant to be places to store things. To discourage clutter and accumulation of useless stuff, and encourage focusing on those things I prioritize, I will clear off key vertical spaces each night before going to bed.
  
• To encourage more productive days, I will get up at 5am on a regular basis. The exception is when doing so would result in a severe lack of sleep because I had to stay up late the previous night.
  

That sounds just radical enough to be exciting.

Life Transformations - Health

Continuing with the theme of establishing a set of new habits and goals during this new year period, the next topic up is general health. I’ve done well this past year on hitting some of the big themes: regular doctor checkups, not smoking, wearing my seat belt in a car, etc. My diet was covered in another post, so here’s what I have left to work on this coming year:

• Average at least 7 hours of sleep per day
  
• Take a daily vitamin supplement and fish oil capsule
  
• Exercise at least 4 times a week
  
• Jog a total of at least 500 miles during the year
  
• Minimize caffeine intake. Drink no more than one small cup of coffee per day.
  
• Maintain a positive and grateful attitude (to be covered more in another post)
  

I once took a test on improving my life expectancy, and to my surprise the single biggest factor I could improve on is driving less. In principle that should be one of my health goals too, but I just don’t know how to set a specific actionable goal on that given my current uncertainty over future unemployment plans. It's something to keep in mind though.

Life Transformations - Diet

The beginning of a new year is a good time to reflect on your life and to think about establishing new habits or goals. Many experts will tell you that the best success at establishing new habits comes from focusing on one new habit at a time. However, there is a certain thrill that produces a greater sense of motivation for starting a larger life transformation all at once, which implies changing many habits at the same time. I find myself having trouble resisting the temptation to do this, or at least to contemplate it in some detail. So I’m going to write a sequence of appends about initiating a larger set of transforming habits. The idea is to start these on Jan 1st, 2010. We’ll see how successful such an approach really is.

To start the list, I’ll pick a topic that’s rather straight forward though not necessarily easy – eating. The strategy for eating food should be based primarily on maintaining the best possible health. That’s actually a somewhat radical notion for most people. Granted that there are exceptions where sharing food becomes part of special celebrations or social activities, but this should not in any way be a driving force in your diet habits. Food choices can also be an important part of an effort to live in a responsible and sustainable way, which interestingly often results in making the same choices that would be made if health issues drove your selections.

So here are some new choices that will help transform my diet:

- Eat three healthy meals per day – no between meal snacking.
- Fast one evening per week (i.e. No eating after 3pm).

I will eliminate the following from my diet:

- Cookies, donuts, muffins
- Soda (including diet)
- Candy
- Fried Foods, including French fries
- Bread (except as part of meals)
- All junk food (you know it when you see it)
- Eat lower in the food chain, and eliminate beef
- Anything I’ve seen advertised (with exceptions for obviously healthy food, but such food is rarely advertised)

That’s a good start. If I can pull off most of this, it will be a major improvement in the quality of my diet.

Implications of Completely Eliminating Complaining

There is a new movement that urges people to completely eliminate complaining from their lives. The idea is that if you see something that you consider wrong, then either (1) work to fix it, or (2) accept it as the way things are. Sitting around complaining produces a disempowered attitude and is toxic to your spirit. In a group situation, it can produce toxic effects on the attitude of the entire group.

I thought this would be easy for me, until I started to consider the implications. The goal is to change your attitude, not just your outward behavior. So that means ending all internal complaining about how people, or the world in general, has treated you unjustly. That is harder. Then it occurred to me that it also means eliminating impatience, because impatience is really internal complaining that the world is just not moving fast enough to suite you. It also means eliminating anger, since anger is just complaining taken to an emotional extreme. This is really challenging, but it gets even worse.

Did you ever beat up on yourself for missing an important meeting or event? Did you ever feel that if you were just a better and more dedicated person you wouldn’t have missed that appointment? In reality, missing an event should not be viewed as a moral failure; it should be viewed as a failure in your scheduling process – something that you can work to correct. This is just an example of a wider issue. For me, one of the hardest parts about eliminating any complaining from my life is to stop complaining and beating myself up for all those times when I did not live up to my expectations. This is a challenging task for anyone, but one with large potential rewards in terms of enhancing your spirit and attitude towards life.

The Next Stage of Life?

Back in December when I was contemplating ways to make significant transformations in my life, I posted the following note on my office wall:

Make some change - get rid of something to signify putting things behind you and moving forward.

I struggled with this idea for a while, looking for something perhaps only symbolic, or perhaps more substantive, that I could put behind me to signify moving forward into a new stage of life. Mozart changed his middle name when he got married, which may have been his way of signifying a rebirth or new phase of his life. What change should I consider making?

Ironically, that note on my office wall foreshadowed the involuntary event of being laid off 2 months later. I guess I finally have my answer. For me, this may well become a new distinct “4th stage” of my life. The first stage was my childhood in my parents home. The second stage was my life in college. The third stage was raising a family and a 26 year career at IBM. Now I may well be entering a fourth stage with a new career and focus. As a friend recently told me, consider this opportunity to be a great gift to be exploited in the fullest.

With that in mind, I wanted to share an inspirational quote from Mary Oliver's poem When Death Comes that our minister recently shared with us:

When it's over, I don't want to
wonder if I have made of my life
something particular,
and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing
and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don't want to end up simply
having visited this world.

Perhaps making this an end of my "just visiting this world" phases is a good way to look at my new opportunities.

A Big Change In My Life

I have always considered Obama’s election to be a transformative event for the country, if not the world. In past posts I talked about how to make significant transformations in my own life. There is a big new developments in this area that I want to announce.

I have worked for IBM for 26 years. It’s a comfortable job, but sometimes I wondered if focusing so much of my time and energy on esoteric technology issues for a major corporation is how I want to spend so much of my life. I sometimes fantasize that if I had real courage, I would quit and go work for a non-profit organization, or write a book that would change how people think, or start my own organization. I don’t have anywhere near the guts to actually do that though, especially in this economy.

Well, reality just intervened with a massive 2x4 across the forehead. Last month I learned that our department at work was downsizing and I was scheduled to be laid off at the end of February. I was focused on this for the last few weeks and thus posted very little to this blog. I can now let everyone that this phase of the waiting and uncertainty is over, and I have officially joined the ranks of the unemployed as of yesterday. I’m viewing this as a paid sabbatical for a few months (thanks to a nice severance package) while I look at various opportunities and try to decide what to do. But it’s also an unasked for opportunity to do something substantially new.

I talked to some people about what I should do on what could turn out to be effectively a 6 month paid sabbatical. The most interesting advice I received so far is to do something new, something that I wouldn’t have done otherwise. Despite all the unpleasant stress over the last month, it’s entirely possible that I could turn this into an interesting adventure. Now it’s time to take a very serious look at what to do in the second half of my life.

What would a transformed life look like?

Recently I was talking about a life transformation with a good friend who asked me a very helpful question: "What does a transformed life look like to you - what is your vision of an end goal?" I've been giving this a fair amount of thought lately. While I don't have a complete description yet, I think I can list some of the high level aspects of what such a transformation might end up producing. This is a highly personal list and I wouldn't expect it to be the same for any other person contemplating similar changes, but here's what I came up with.

Some aspects of a transformed life

• Permanently put behind me all the anger and frustrations of the past
  
• Inner changes in how I see the world, and how I see myself
  
• Started on an exponential growth in both understanding and making contributions
  
• Develop a much clearer understanding of what to do and what not to do with my life
  
• Simplify other aspects of my life in order to become radically more effective
  
• Change my habits and daily schedule to better promote these goals
  
• Have my discretionary schedule and finances reflect my values and priorities
  
• Have my decisions based on compassion, and never on anger, resentment, fear, greed, or pride.
  

More details to follow.

Virtual Retreat - an Update

On Dec 20th I wrote a post about starting a one month virtual retreat to work on transforming my life. I successfully made it through a trip to visit my extended family during the Christmas holidays and want to comment on how the retreat is going so far:

Getting up early and doing daily journaling about your thoughts and plans: I haven't always made my goal of starting at 5am, but this has been a really helpful practice so far.

Disciplined eating: I managed to stick with eating three healthy meals a day and avoiding all between meal snacks. It was a big change in my habits, but I felt committed and have succeeded so far. The result - I actually lost weight during the holidays :-) I also found that it gets easier after the first few days. I'm considering making this a long term habit now.

Avoid TV - I had planned to allow myself a few exceptions (PBS shows such as Bill Moyers, etc), but I'm finding that following this rule in a more strict sense without exception is working out fine. I've extended it to commercial radio and shopping malls too.

I've also decided to work on eliminating harmful negative emotions to the extent that this is possible, starting with the emotion of anger. I certainly can't claim success at eliminating anger after a week of trying, but I did notice something interesting happening. It became very easy to have the detached part of my mind recognize when anger started. I could then start an internal dialogue about what triggered this emotion, why it is likely to be harmful, and how to look at the situation in a more realistic and helpful way. This would lead to the anger dissipating reasonably quickly, leaving a more honest and unclouded view of the situation. This is more than just anger management, it's actually controlling and eliminating anger. My initial experience strongly suggests that it's habit worth spending some effort cultivating.

Maslow's hierarchy of needs

A common way to look at motivation is through the system of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. From the most basic to the most advanced, they are listed as follows:

1) Physiological - food, water, air, shelter....

2) Safety - sense of security for yourself and family and access to resources...

3) Love/Belonging - Family, friends, community...

4) Esteem - achievement, respect of others...

5) Self - Actualization - creativity, problem solving, contributing, realizing your maximum potential...

I've had fairly good success at satisfying the first four categories of needs. The interest in a life transformation, or doing a "midlife assessment and transition" comes mainly from the 5th need for greater self-actualization. It's comforting to know that this is recognized as a common need for many people. It helps explain many of the thoughts I was having difficulty articulating.

When reading about Maslow's hierarchy of needs, I came across the interesting claim that by the end of his life Maslow added a 6th need, though it actually sounded more like a level of development than a need. He referred to it as "self-transcendence", which is moving beyond a focus on yourself and your ego. Instead, your focus becomes centered on appreciating, understanding, and promoting the well being of the humanity and nature as a whole. This seems like an important part of the end goal of a life transformation.

A midlife crisis, or something else?

It occur ed to me that a desire for a life transformation was similar to having a midlife crisis. I did some reading on this and learned that the most common times for this to happen is around the age of 50 now. Since I'm 51 it seemed that I was on to something here and I wanted to learn more.

I turns out that the classical stereotype middle age crisis (picture a man becoming depressed and anxious about growing older, divorcing his wife, buying a red corvette, and marrying a woman half his age) is actually very rare. The best data suggests that between 5% - 12% of middle aged people suffer a "classic" midlife crisis. Most people, on the contrary, find life very satisfying and content around the age of 50.

I found that there are multiple different types of midlife crises. For example, it's possible to assess one's life and future without becoming clinically depressed. In fact it's quite common and appears to be a healthy thing to do. This is more accurately categorized as a "midlife assessment" possibly leading to to a "midlife transition". This is covered in more detail on Life Two, an excellent blog about midlife improvements. This is a more accurate description of what I'm going through than a midlife crisis.

How you deal with the desire for change makes all the difference. You can take a harmful approach in a vain attempt to show some sort of youthful vigor. This often results in pursuing change for the sake of change and make radical changes without thinking them through. Such impulsive behavior can seriously damage or destroy relationships or a career.

On the other hand, a midlife assessment can come about when you have a feeling of disquiet brought upon by a sense that you are living your life in a way that is out of alignment with what deeply matters to you, or that you are failing to live up to your potential. When handled properly, this can result in some very positive changes in how you live the rest of your life.

One of the tricks about this process is to be realistic. To the extent that you've come to terms with your life and your limitations and accept yourself as you are, you can enjoy the accomplishments and successes that you have achieve. Many of the people who find themselves very unhappy turn out to be out of touch with reality with unrealistic goals and fantasies. They're disappointed at not becoming the president of their company or a world famous best selling author. In a study on midlife crises, Orville Brim advises people to "live a life of just manageable difficulty. Goals set too low often lead to a boring life; those set too high can produce bitter disappointment."

A Virtual Retreat

I've been giving more thought to what would be the end goal of a life transforming change. I have some initial thoughts on this that I'll post later. One of the things I have decided upon is to spend the next month conducting a "virtual retreat" to take some time to focus on this question. I started a few days ago and will continue to Jan 20th. Besides being one month from today, that just also happens to be the end of the transition period for our nation and the beginning of a new era as we change leaders.

During this next month, I will:

• Read as much as possible about life transformation and finding a purpose in life.
  
• Spend the first and last hour of each day journaling, reading, or thinking about life transformation
  
• Put off watching almost all TV or attending non-work events of questionable value.
  
• Get up at 5am to start early when the house is quiet and my family is asleep
  
• As a discipline practice: Eat only 3 simple healthy meals a day. No snacking before or after meals.
  

I started a few days ago and I already like the routine. I haven't made 5am every day, but I've always been up before 6am. Taking an hour or more of undisturbed time in the morning to read and write down your thoughts is wonderful. I've already finished reading two books on the topic, which is amazing progress for me.

Christmas vacation with the relatives will be a challenge for both the TV and eating discipline practices, but I want to try to stick as close to the guidelines as possible. Following a guideline to avoid ALL between meal snacking over the holidays could have some very practical benefits. I'm not sure if my relatives will be impressed, or just consider my behavior to be very odd.

Why pursue a life transformation?

Elisa asked some really great questions in her comment to my last post about what is the end result of a life transformation, what is the goal, and what does it get you? Indeed, I could ask why pursue a life transformation at all? I have a quite comfortable and productive life by most standards. Why not just continue living the contented life I have now? I’ve been giving these questions some thought, and let me try to address that last question first.

I agree with the many people who claim that true fulfillment comes from finding something that you are passionate about and that you can devote your time and energy towards. We all have a built in desire to be engaged in such a task, and to be part of something bigger than yourself. Some would call this a desire for finding meaning in life, and some would call this a spiritual longing. We also all have a built in desire to grow as a person, and to me this period represents a tremendous growth opportunity if I can successfully exploit it. Living an undisturbed contented life is just not fulfilling in the same way.

So I’m not really content just sitting back and doing what I’m doing now without any more growth until I die. Even when I think I’m doing well at making a contribution to the world, I know that I am doing only a small portion of what I’m capable of. I also know that according to the latest estimates, as an average American I’m consuming about 5x my fair share of the world’s resources. That could be justified if I was using this consumption to make some sort of exceptional contribution, but I’m not.

I’m not even sure I could continue living an undisturbed contented life much longer if I wanted to. I believe that the world is on the verge of undergoing a set of tremendous transformations in the coming decades, either for good or for bad. This will affect all of us more than we care to admit. The current economic turmoil is but one early example of what will be happening. The effects of peak oil and climate change are rapidly approaching. There is much work to be done to direct these transformations to a positive direction, and I feel a great desire to be part of that effort.

Besides, there’s a sense of adventure in contemplating big changes :-)

Transforming Your Life - Part 2

Here is a summary of some thoughts on what a life transforming process is like, and how a significant life revolution is different from a more gradual life evolution. Most of this description is base on ideas in the ebook Life Transformations by Michelle L Casto. Once again, the key to a life transformation starts with your inner attitude, not necessarily your outward behavior.

The first thing you need to learn about change, is that in order to change your outer reality, you must transform you inner programming. By changing your thoughts, you change your feelings, and thus change your actions. Your thoughts, feelings, and beliefs about how life works or doesn't work determine what you will create in your outer world.

Evolution is the process of gradual growth and development. Revolution is taking an incredible direction, often abrupt and sharply different form the past. To experience a life revolution, you need to see with new eyes, to experiment, to learn, and to flow with life. To experience a life revolution, you have to first bring to completion old patterns and processes and then create something radically new.

Get a life makeover. If you want to renovate your life, begin with how you feel on the inside. Have a deep conversation with yourself. strive to know yourself better through self-discovery activities, such as regular journaling. Become a student of your own life - questioning and reflecting on what who you are and what you do.

"We cannot become what we want by remaining what we are" - George Bernard Shaw

Transforming Your Life - Part 1

I spent some time browsing on the web recently on the topic of "transforming you life". I even purchased and read my first eBook Life Transformations by Michelle L Casto. It was a nice short 56 page one evening read that introduced several good ideas in need to think about more.

Two important thoughts came through from several sources, perhaps best summarized by an article titled The Science Of Transformation In Everyday Life. Major life transformations are generally not characterized by big changes in outward circumstances and behavior. They are better characterized by two important inner changes.

1. Deep changes in perspective - Major changes in the way you look at the world, altering one's core assumptions about the nature of things and the way the world works. This "shifts the entire landscape and one's trajectory through it."
   
2. A Changing Sense of Self - Changes in your sense of self, who you are, and your relationship to others and the world. These changes are sometimes referred to as a "spiritual experiences involving a diminished sense of personal identity and an enhanced sense of connection to others, an experience that became an enduring part of the transformational process."
   

More insights from the Life Transformations next time.