Social Pillar of Happiness: Being Social

By nature human beings are social animals. We survived for millennia by working together in packs and sharing our labor, resources and knowledge. We are hard wired to survive and in order to survive we recognize the need to be in groups. It makes sense that in order for our natural survival instinct to be satisfied we require daily social activities. In the near past it was impossible to survive day to day without human interaction.

Within the last 15 years with the internet revolution many of those human interactions can be skipped for the sake of time efficiency. While we are becoming more and more time efficient, we are exchanging and fighting against out natural instincts. While we have entered into a new state of consciousness as a species, the challenge of a hermit life may still be too much for most of us to bear.

So my recommendation is simple. Do 1 social thing every day for at least an hour outside of work. It can be lunch with a colleague or a happy hour or working out with a friend as long as you do it you’ll satisfy that instinct and it will be that much easier to be conscious and happy in everyday life.

Until next time, be social!

Side Note: If possible, try to be socially inclusive. Unfortunately humanity also developed the instinct to create “others” or the enemy, those not within our group. Conflict first arose out of physical need and hunger uncontrolled by consciousness. This created the concept of “the others” who tried to take “our” food and resources. This has mutated “others” based on the desires of man and not the need of man, both which are follies. So be inclusive and do not create others. We are all living beings together on this planet.

Incompetence

We’ve all known somebody who we could tell was talking out their ass about a topic. They were not knowledgeable about a topic, yet spoke as though they were. I am certain all of us (myself included) have done this whether or not we knew it. I wanted to explore why this behavior occurs and possibly provide a solution to reduce it.

Why do we talk out of our ass? 2 big reasons out of the many I see are an unnecessary desire to impress and we don’t know we are talking out of our ass. The desire to impress is a defect caused by our ego. Our egos seek validation and the satisfaction of being superior to others. True we can be superior in form and knowledge to others, this is of only relative importance. At the end of the day we all have equal consciousness. Without getting any more confusing, I’ll delay this discussion to a future post.

The 2^nd reason we talk out of our ass is that we don’t know we’re doing it. I refer to the Dunning-Kruger effect. In short “You are a novice on a topic. You think you are an expert in it. This is because you are a novice and have little knowledge on the topic and therefore are unable to gauge where you fall on the expertise scale” This happens regardless of the intention of the ass-talker. This makes me think about the popularly held belief that it takes 10,000 hours of activity to become an expert at it so how many of us are incorrectly calling ourselves experts at something after reading a couple internet articles. I even get the sense that even I am talking out my ass a little bit about talking out the ass. To caveat, I am no expert in incompetence even though I may have reached that 10,000 hour mark long ago.

What’s my solution? We can all sense when we begin to talk out of our ass a bit. If you feel the slightest bit uncomfortable about the info you’re giving then be sure to caveat it. Call out ass-talkers, so those who believe them may be better informed. However, do so gently and understanding regardless of the reason why they are doing it. If it’s clear that everyone can see they are full of it, then wait until they are alone, pull them aside and inform them. The goal is to increase knowledge and awareness which can not be done if people just end up annoyed and shouting at one another…until next time.

Mental Pillar of Happiness, Creative Thinking

How does thinking creatively create an environment allowing one to live a happy life?

The majority of humanity is driven by a sense of inadequacy. I do not have enough, I am not enough, I need to do something in order for life to fulfill me. This results in boredom, feelings of routine and nervousness about doing nothing.

This sense of inadequacy is false and the root cause is something internal to each of us. While creative thinking does not solve the root-cause of the inadequacy, it provides strong relief. This relief will improve quality of life, but like any other object is only temporary.

Creating something you normally do not do breaks the routine of everyday life and disrupts the feelings of inadequacy, nervousness and doing nothing. The act of creation requires a level of focus which does not allow us to have the negative feelings mentioned above. I have often heard of people who are performing different acts of creation entering into a realm of focus that they do not have in everyday life. There are no limits with creation. Even if you can not physically make it, mentally you are only constrained by your imagination. However it is important to take the imagined and make it physical, much like taking a dream and making it reality. Only then will you maximize the experience. This will be a little difficult require some discipline to reach initial success, but once you overcome the initial hurdle you’ll find yourself absorbed by creation.

Until next time, create something!

Why is it so hard for me to ask for help?

I have struggled with asking for help my whole life. Asking for help is not my natural mind set. I believe one cause of this is how I studied for my engineering degree.

As an engineering student I often chose to figure things out for myself first and then work with others and provide them solution. It was faster for me to work alone and think through the solution and then share my answers with others to see if it made sense. It benefitted me and those who I checked my solution with. This mode of working was efficient to handle problems which were set up like college homework, especially as I had a heavy workload. Here’s the exact problem and there is indeed a definite answer. By following this mental pattern I became accustomed to not asking for help unless I was stuck and had been stuck for a long period of time.

However, in the workplace and in life issues are not so cut and dry. Team work and help is needed to not only complete the work, but to even define the problem and then to help communicate and spread the message. As I move forward I will try to define a new mental pattern of asking where can people help speed up or improve the quality of the end result. Please post your experiences.

Pillar of Happiness Physical: Sleeping 6-8 hours a night

So why do I value sleep so highly that it is a pillar to happiness?

I struggled with sleep for a period in college. Senior year I was sleeping Monday-Friday 4 to 5 hours a night due to heavy course load and late night 2-3 hour exercise routines and making up for it be sleeping 10-12 hours on the weekend or just sleeping in class. Toward the end of senior year I was beginning to have random nosebleeds and had high blood pressure even though I felt physically fit. My grades began to suffer and I could tell I was not truly learning the material as I had before. Socializing was difficult as I could not keep a level emotional level and did not have the energy to feel empathy. Spiritually I felt like I was everywhere instead of in the present moment. While there were other causes to these issues, if I had slept more the effect of these issues would have been much diminished.

Sleep is the foundation to living an enriched and fulfilled life. While sleep can not guarantee a happy life, it is a critical component in creating an environment for oneself that allows for good and easy living. Lack of sleep effects physical fitness, mental ability, disrupts spiritual peace and makes socializing harder. While there is something to be said about having a little bit less sleep in order to operate better, I will save that for a future blog post.

While different people in different periods of their life will have different sleep requirements, but I think we all have a good sense when we have not slept enough the night before. So please, take care and get the rest needed. You and everyone around you will be happier for it.

Steps to Change

I was originally going to write about metrics, but hit a writer’s roadblock. I decided to talk about the basic steps for engaging in change activity. In my career almost all roles I have played were and still are as a change agent. The ability to see change happen because of direct activities is immensely satisfying as human beings.I recommend we all participate as change agents both in work and also in life regardless of what we do or the lifestyle we lead. The basic steps for change are…

1. Identify the 5 W’s (who, what, where, why, when) to change. The key focus should be on the why, don’t worry about the how, that will come later.

2. Measure the current situation today and create a baseline to see the change from..

3. Using the 5 W’s Set a Goal of Tomorrow including a definite deadline and a measurable goal.

4. Create a plan to reach the goal of tomorrow or the how.

5. Communicate and execute plan to reach the goal of tomorrow including measuring and taking corrective action needed to reach the goal of tomorrow

6. Reach the goal of tomorrow. Celebrate, review and communicate why the goal was successful. Or because deadline passed review why goal of tomorrow was not reached, but still celebrate and communicate the success that was reached and/or the effort that was put forth.

7. Start over from step one. Do not let inertia stop you. (Reference Eli Goldratt, Theory of Constraint).

Same with the Pillars of Happiness I will take about these Steps to Change in detail in future Blog Posts. Please comment about what you think and let me know which step you think people tend to not put enough focus on.

Pillars to a happy life

Pillars
My past 3 blog posts have been about my daily workouts which keep me happy. I thought I would expand on that. What I have below are the pillars I feel create an environment where humans can be at peace and find the happiness inside all of us. I think I will elaborate on each of these points in future blog posts.

Physical
- Working out 30 minutes a day
- Sleeping 6 to 8 hours a night
- Eating a balanced diet of 2000 or less calories, or eating until slightly hungry

Mental (All of these are outside of your regular work day)
- Training the mind for 15 minutes a day. Meditation or some form of brain training (lumosity.com)
- Creative thinking for 15 minutes a day. Writing a blog, painting a picture, creating a food dish. The key is doing an activity which requires out of the box creativity on your part.

Social
- Do something daily involving people you do not see every day (share a meal, grab a coffee, attend a happy hour or networking event) or try something new with people you do see everyday (new restaurant, new bar, different activity or modified activity) for 15 minutes each day

Spiritual
- Train your spirit and find the inner peace inside you for 15 minutes a day.

Part 3: Spiritual Workout

The past 2 days I have talked about 2 of the 3 workouts (physical and mental) I do daily. The final of the 3 workouts I do daily is a spiritual one. This may seem weird to the majority of you, even folks who may identify themselves as spiritual/religious.

Before I talk about what I do for my spiritual workout, I think it’s good if I define spirituality. Spirituality is a tool I use to find my inner peace, awareness and joy. Like the body is a tool used to perform physical tasks and the mind is a tool used to perform thinking tasks spirituality is a tool used to find my inner spirit/peace. I view religious practices and rituals also as tool to help one find inner spirit/peace and they have their place.

So what do I do for my spiritual workout? Right now I am primarily re-reading the Power of Now and Awaken a New Earth by Eckhart Tolle and using them to find my inner peace. I find that his writings help me find my inner spirit/peace much as reading the Bible or Koran help others. As I finish the books and start another re-reading of them I plan to start writing a document about how best I can re-find my inner peace. I may even put together a power point for me to reference like an exercise training plan or my Lumosity training courses. I spend around 15-30 minutes doing this workout.

Finally out of all of the workouts I do that, I know that the spiritual one is the most important to my well being. It is unfortunate in the US society today the focus is heavily on the physical and mental with less focus on the spiritual. Even then some of us regularly skip the physical and use our everyday work as a reason to not have to do the mental even though we know we could use a mental refresher of trying something different.

I guess my key message is that if in the US we spent 1 to 1.5 hours a day out of our busy schedules to exercise, train our thinking to think differently and focused on our spiritual well being we’d better enjoy those remaining 14.5 to 16 hours and lead happier lives.

That’s it for now. I think my next post will be about my pillars to leading a happy life. Until tomorrow, Ciao.

Part 2: Physical Workout

In yesterday's post I posted about my 3 daily workouts. They are Spiritual, Mental and Physical daily workouts. By doing these 3 daily it makes keeping me peaceful and happy a lot easier. While I can be at peace and happy without doing these, it is much harder.

Yesterday's post focused on the mental aspect, today I will focus on the physical. In general the physical workout is a sub-portion of an overall physical well-being regimen which I will talk about in future posts. The physical workout is a daily 30 minute activity or longer. It can be as easy as a 30 minute walk or more intensive such as weight-lifting and swimming. The key is to do it daily and right after waking up. This helps warm up the engine and makes the rest of the day easier.

So remember, daily exercise for 30 minutes right after waking up.

Alex

Keeping the Brain Active

Bringing this blog back hopefully. I took a Lumosity.com brain grade test and it recommended I start writing daily to help further keep my brain healthy. I am a member of Lumosity. It costs $70 a year and gives me access to all their brain training exercises. I have found it worthwhile for 3 reasons

1) I do feel an improvement in my brainy brain capabilities and general mental alertness
2) The courses make it easy to do a brain workout of at least 15 minutes a day
3) The brain workout is a great part of my start of the day spirit, mind, body workout routine (next blog post)

So sign up for Lumosity.com if you feel your brain could use a tune up. And finally I was not paid my Lumosity.com for this post :)

Alex