Positive Emotions and Your Healthy Heart

Remember when Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a book debunking the current mania with happiness and positive thinking. In case you don't, here are some links to my posts on the topic... here... here ... and here.

Considering how quickly the mental health profession has turned from inducing people to get in touch with their negative emotions to building their positive emotions, and considering that much happiness study sounds a bit pie-in-the-sky, it is reasonable for someone like Ehrenreich to question the enterprise.

Be all of that as it may, it turns out that the connection between happiness and good health is not quite as aleatory as Ehrenreich might have led you to believe. In fact, as recent study demonstrated positive emotion, happiness, and the like contributes mightily to the health of your heart. Link here.

I just wanted to share the good news.

Reporter Fired for Believing in Objective Reality

No, it is not a joke.It did not come from The Onion. A reporter named Jonathan Springston was just fired by the Atlanta Progressive News for believing that new reporting should be based on objective reality.

Editor Matthew Cardinale explained his action this way: "At a very fundamental, core level Springston did not share our vision for a news publication with a progressive perspective. He held on to the notion that there was an objective reality that could be reported objectively, despite the fact that that was not our policy at the Atlanta Progressive News." Link here.

The candor is shocking, but I doubt that the Atlanta Progressive News is the only journalistic enterprise that functions as though objective reality is just a figment of someone's imagination, a ruse perpetrated by the ruling class to maintain its power.

If you believe that there is something strange about Editor Cardinale's viewpoint, then, at the least, you are poorly informed about what is being taught in our institutions of higher education. It is not, as the Huffington Post suggests in the link above, bogus or aggravating. It flows simply and directly from the leftist thought that has saturated far too many humanities departments for lo these many years.

Within the confines of a French department it sounds charming to deconstruct reality; in the hands of the media it turns reporting into propaganda. Pushing an interpretation of reality that furthers your cause trumps any consideration of what really happened. In fact, the more sophisticated thinkers do not believe that anything really happens until someone says it has happened.

Of course, a political movement that does not believe in objective reality cannot be expected to be presenting itself as it really is. The supposedly progressive agenda touted by this Atlanta newspaper looks an awful lot like socialism in disguise.

This "progressive" publication declares that its goal is: "to bring us closer to universal health care, living wages, affordable housing, peace, a healthy environment, and voting systems we can trust."

How could anyone find except to those lofty ideals?

In one sense they are simply peddling a grab-bag of leftist shibboleths. In another they are promoting a massive government intrusion into our economy and our lives.

Worse yet, the gauzy vision of a future where children will frolic in pristine green pastures, where there will be no more war or competition, where everyone will have the best affordable health care... this vision can only be sustained when you take your leave of objective reality.

What happens to the progressive vision when it becomes real? A great American example is California, a bankrupt state that is drowning in progressive principles.

Here is the objective reality, as rendered by Victor Davis Hanson: "Her in California we idle farmland, though we have the water, enterprise, and soil to produce far more food than we do. We put vast swaths of both land and sea off limits to gas and oil production, though we could produce far more petroleum and natural gas than we do. We snub nuclear power, though our population steadily increases and its desire for electronic appurtenances grows, not shrinks. We like 'wilderness areas' (who doesn't?) where we build no roads, harvest no timber, and build no dams. We strangle Silicon Valley with all sorts of labor and business regulations until it fabricates and outsources abroad." Link here.

You might consider that the Atlanta Progressive News does not represent true progressive thought. But then, what of California? It was not governed by a bunch of extremist propagandists.

Apparently, when you take progressive ideals and put them into practice you get a failed state. .

Like Greece,California is both broke and broken. That, dare I say, is an inconvenient objective reality.

Barack Obama: The Triumph of Therapy

In voting for Barack Obama, America sent a narrative to the White House. And why should it not have? Through the agency of our most serious thinkers the therapy culture has been insisting that human life is a narrative, no more, and no less. How better to affirm your adherence to that culture than by voting for the better narrative.

In one sense Obama embodied a story of penance and redemption, a story of salvation through divine intercession. In another sense his policies have worked to enact a Robin Hood narrative, taking from the rich and giving to the poor.

They have not provided presidential leadership, largely because fictions cannot lead. They can pretend; they can don the trappings of leadership; but they can never work effectively as chief executive.

Of course, Obama was a great life story without a track record. There is a very large difference between concocting a pleasing narrative and presenting a record of accomplishment.

Even the most well-crafted fictional persona will eventually crash into reality. Now, as the country suffers an extreme case of buyer's remorse, we are all paying the price.

Amazingly, led by the self-appointed arbiters of truth, no one seemed to care that Obama lacked a record of achievement, either legislative or executive. It doesn't stop there. Obama never released his medical records. We know nothing of his grade point averages. We have never seen his SAT or LSAT scores.

For the therapy culture, your narrative is the meaning of your life. The therapy culture is about teaching us all to construct our life stories. As a reactionary movement it has pointed us to our past, encouraged us to regress, and imagined that we would find meaning once we discovered which myth we were playing out.

This culture has never had a real interest in track records. It has left that to the coaches.

Nor does it have any real interest in character. Building a record of accomplishment involves knowing how to deal with success and failure. A person who can react with humility to real success and can work to correct failure is showing character. He is less likely to become prey to the arrogance that is borne of flattery or to the self-doubt that is the lot of those who do not know how to deal with failure.

Good character involves a track record. Honorable people are those who have acted honorably over and over again. People who are trustworthy have consistently shown themselves worthy of trust.

Honor is not a role you play in a drama. You cannot put it on and take it off like a mask. You cannot achieve it by insisting with the greatest eloquence that you are a good person.

People who rely on narratives can never own their experience. If your life is an enactment of someone's dream or fantasy or drama, then you are a dramatic persona. Your experience is never really yours because you are always following a script.

If the story is the thing, then freedom is not. As a character in a play you do not have the freedom to countermand the script or to make it up as you go along.

Your experience is yours only when you respond to it ethically. Taking responsibility for success or failure makes an experience your own. It shows you as an ethical individual, not as a dramatic persona who can simply remove the mask and become someone else when things go wrong.

If this is not making very much sense, or if you still retain some hope for the Obama administration, think of it this way. If you want to ask for a raise, should you walk into your boss's office with your life story in hand? Or should you present a record of your accomplishments, showing what you have contributed to the bottom line?

Or else, when you are choosing someone to marry, should you choose the person who has the most compelling life story, or should you choose the person with the best character? Which one do you think will make the better long term mate?

Bad Rachel Calls Hillary's Bluff

We all do it. We spin out visions of the future. At times, knowing what might happen is just as important as knowing what is happening. Besides you cannot prepare for something that has already happened. And if you want to know the truth of today's experience, that will more likely be decided by what happens tomorrow than by what happened yesterday.

It seems clearer and clearer by the day that the President Obama is leading his party to a catastrophic mid-term election. The savior is fast becoming an albatross; hope is morphing into anger; nuanced thinking is looking like ineptitude.

The American people are waking up to the error of their ways. Many of them cannot wait to have the opportunity to express themselves at the ballot box. Some, like Evan Bayh, did not want to wait for November.

Evan Bayh's withdrawal from the Indiana senate race should not just be read as a condemnation of an overly partisan Congress. If you call Congress hyper-partisan you also need to ask who is in charge . At the least, Bayh wants to distance himself from the Obama administration and the approaching electoral calamity.

Why would he do so, if not to leave the door open to a primary challenge? Trying to dethrone a sitting president in a primary is not very easy, but it has been done. It looks today as though the left wing of the Democratic party will never accept a moderate like Evan Bayh, but this same wing has been empowered for the past year, and what has it accomplished. Will a humbling defeat cause the Democratic party to trade in some of its zeal for a possible victory?

Now, we hear Lanny Davis, a notable Clintonista, call Obama: "an ineffectual president." To which he added: "... the absence of effectiveness combined with the cynicism of government because of that absence of effectiveness ... is toxic."

When Lanny Davis starts speaking out against Obama, you know that something is afoot.

After all, if Obama fails, and especially if he fails to help Democrats hold on to Congressional power, who would be better placed to replace him in the hearts and minds of Democrats than the I-told-you-so candidate, Hillary Clinton.

We all know that Hillary will present herself as the most qualified and competent candidate, with a wealth of executive and legislative experience... what better antidote could there be for the ineptitude of the current administration.

Among Democrats Hillary Clinton has an aura. For having suffered the slings and arrows of political martyrdom she wears a halo that makes it nearly impossible for people to question her qualifications or abilities.

Everyone thought that Hillary was an inspired choice for Secretary of State. Even conservatives jumped on her bandwagon, because she had presented herself as a foreign policy hawk in the midst of a bunch of weak-kneed liberals.

And yet, did anyone ask whether she was qualified for the job? Did anyone ask how well-versed she was in foreign policy issues? To my recollection, no one even raised the issue.

Foreign policy is an enormously complicated and difficult field. Most effective Secretaries of State-- think of Henry Kissinger-- have spent most of their lives grappling with the complexities of foreign policy. They are specialists; they have an exceptional grasp of the field. We may not all agree with their policies, but they are not babes in the woods when it comes to foreign policy.

We cannot say the same about Hillary Clinton. She has no background in foreign policy and no real experience in the field. While in the Senate Hillary was not on the Foreign Affairs committee.

We are indebted to Rachel Abrams, of the new and excellent blog "Bad Rachel," for having reminded us of this truth. According to Bad Rachel, Secretary Clinton simply does not know what she is doing. Link here.

For example, yesterday in Doha, Qatar Hillary announced that today's Iran is: "a far cry from the Islamic Republic that had elections and different points of view within the leadership." See Abe Greenwald's commentary here.

Greenwald was properly horrified to hear an American Secretary of State "praise the freedom and pluralism of Iran's Khomeinist revolution." This same Islamic Republic held American diplomats hostage for over a year in 1979, has always supported Hamas and Hezbollah, and has been a major state sponsor of terrorism.

The points are so obvious that they are painful. I imagine that by now most of the world probably does not take what Hillary says very seriously. They know she is in over her head, does not know what she is talking about, and is just rambling on.

We, however, must keep this all in mind. The time might soon be on us when the Democratic party will try to rally the nation around the executive leadership of Hillary Clinton, citing among her qualifications her amazing grasp of foreign policy.

Thanks to Bad Rachel, we can hope that the free ride is over.

Coaching Lessons: How to Start Over

By choice or by chance, or even by necessity, many people today find themselves having to start over again. Many have lost their jobs; some have even lost their careers. Some have worked long and hard to earn degrees, only to discover that there are no jobs for people with their qualifications. The Great Recession has played havoc with plans, with prospects, and with the future.

Feeling alone, lost, and adrift, people do not know where or how to start. People talk about reinventing or rebranding themselves, but for many it feels like they are being called on to become someone else.

This is a lot easier said than done.

Alexandra Levit defined the problem this way: "... many people, prospective career changers included, are paralyzed by inertia because of negative circumstances like the bad economy or a chaotic workplace." Link here.

I mention in passing that the need to start over is not limited to the workplace. Someone who has broken up with a lover, who has gotten divorced, or has moved to a new part of the country or the world will immediately find himself faced with the same psychological inertia, the same feeling of anomie that haunts those who are being forced to reinvent or rebrand themselves professionally.

But people usually have fewer problems with professional rebranding than they do with personal rebranding. The difference is between desire and necessity. You may want to have a new relationship, you may even crave a new lover, but you must get a new job.

When it comes to overcoming psychological inertia, necessity is a much better motivator than desire. More so because if you have become fully demoralized you will not want much of anything. Depression kills desire. If you wait for the first stirrings, the green shoots of desire, you will stay in your rut.

No one ever recovered from a depression because he wanted to; people recover from depression because they have to.

Dire necessity will force you to take that first step toward reinvention. You need to be pushed by necessity because the first step will feel like a leap of faith, a step into the void.

You need to take the first step, not knowing whether it will lead somewhere or nowhere. Once you have learned how to step forward into uncertainty, it will be easier to do it the second time.

What are some of the possible first steps. Here's one.

As David Allen explained, if you are trying to reinvent yourself, to start on a new career path, or to start a new business your first step must be to write down your ideas... to get them out of your mind and on to a piece of paper.

Mulling it over, ruminating, reflecting, or introspecting are good ways to feed your inertial impulse. Writing things down will break you out of that inertia, will make the ideas more real, and will afford you the opportunity to start planning how you are going to put them into action.

The first scrawl or scribble will lead to a check-list, a master plan, an organization chart... and so on. But there has to be a first step, a moment when pen touches paper and where ideas start to appear in written form.

You might be thinking that, when all is said and done, the ideas that are free floating in your mind are the same as the ideas that you are going to write down... so, what is the point of adding this superfluous activity.

The answer is simple. As almost any writer will explain, whatever you had in your mind when you started writing, once the words start appearing on paper, new and original thoughts will immediately pop into your mind.

The process of writing things down cures our tendency to ruminate, but it also gives us access to ideas that, in my opinion, would not have been otherwise accessible.

The principle forms the basis for the cognitive treatment of depression. Aaron Beck's cognitive therapy involved writing down lists and doing written homework assignments. Could there have been a better antidote for the depressing psychoanalytic exercise of ruminating, introspecting, and generally pretending that speech is thinking out loud.

Writing cures overthinking. But so can a good conversation.

For some people the first step might be: reaching out to someone else. By this I do not, and Allen certainly does not, mean that you should call up your friends and complain about your fate. You do not want to draw people into your inertia; you want to allow them to get you out of it.

When you use other people as sounding boards, you will overcome the feeling that you are in it alone. You must also pay close attention to the advice you are receiving. Just because it does not feel right and does not feel like it came from the depths of your own mind... that does not mean that it is worthless. If you dismiss it as useless you will be taking a step back.

What does this all mean? In short, that, especially when you are starting over again, you should not even try to go it alone.

Insensitivity Training

In today's Financial Times Lucy Kellaway declares that she has discovered "the single most sensible word that [she'd] seen on the flabby subject of leadership in at least a decade."

That word is: "insensitivity." Link here.

For all these many years businessfolk have suffered under the imperious demand to be more sensitive than thou. They were implored to show more empathy, to feel everyone's pain, to exercise what was called "emotional intelligence."

Thanks to Daniel Goleman, who coined the phrase "emotional intelligence," the therapy culture invaded the executive suite. People were running off to do sensitivity training; they were getting in touch with their feelings; they were becoming more thin-skinned.

Unfortunately, as Kellaway suggests, all of this empathy and sensitivity does not make you a better competitor. How will our legions of emotionally sensitive leaders compete effectively against the emotionally insensitive Chinese? For now, not very well.

All of these finely-tuned emotional states do not even make you any better at cooperation. If you belong to a team and the team is charged with completing a task, then your focus should be on the task at hand, not on how it makes your teammates feel.

In fact, if a teammate attempts to regale you with his emotional sensitivity you will probably resent him for being a distraction.

As Kellaway explains it, a leader who spends his time worrying about how badly people will feel if they are not chosen for a project, if they are not promoted, if they do not receive a raise, even if they are fired will simply not be able to function.

Looking at the way someone's feelings might be hurt by an executive decision will simply paralyze you.

To Kellaway a sensitive executive is simply a ditherer: "If you are sensitive you will dither and prevaricate, or you will do the necessary and then toss and turn [in your bed] fretting about the consequences."

You might, as an exercise here, try thinking of a political leader whose enhanced sensitivity has rendered him incapable of exercising executive leadership, to the point where his name has attracted the epithet: ditherer.

Of course, Kellaway does not propose that we make a fetish of insensitivity. She proposes that every executive suite have one officer who can monitor emotional sensitivity and who will tell the boss when he needs to address such an issue. As well as I can tell, that person is usually a Human Resources executive.

Nor does Kellaway declare that sensitivity is always a bad thing. Sensitivity is wonderful in love relationships and friendships. What works in the boudoir, however, should probably be kept out of the boardroom.

So, Kellaway recommends that executives undergo insensitivity training. Happily enough, that involves learning to do exactly what the therapy culture tells you not to do.

It other words you have to be a contrarian, not just in your investing decisions but in your adherence to cultural values.

For example, the therapy culture has it in for denial. Kellaway recommends that you develop your capacity for denial.

Certainly, she says, you cannot be an effective leader if you are too afraid of of failure: "confidence comes as a result of denying the likelihood of failure."

You should also be denying your doubts about the usefulness of what you are doing. A good leader soldiers on. He does not give in to denial and self-doubt.

Optimally, he should achieve what Kellaway calls mild emotional dyslexia. He should not be totally insensitive but he should have the ability to misread emotional cues, to ignore them, even to read them backwards.

To conclude her column, Kellawy addresses what is surely the thorniest issue: the question of sensitivity and gender.

To prove her point about the burden of sensitivity she notes that women, who are masters of sensitivity, tend not to rise very high on the corporate ladder. To the dismay of many Kellaway suggests that they are not being held back by a patriarchal conspiracy, but by their superior emotional intelligence.

In her words: "the average man, armed with his mild emotional dyslexia, has a most unfair advantage in being well equipped to sail through a day in the office and sleep like a baby in his bed at night."

This recalls a longstanding debate. Or, at least, I seem to recall that it does.

When women enter the workforce, should they be encouraged to be more like men, thus denying their emotional sensitivity, or should they try to make the business world safe for people whose leadership skills do not involve emotional dyslexia.

At the beginning of the most recent wave of feminism, the correct answer would have been that women can and should be more like men, the better to succeed at business. After Goleman, I believe, the pendulum swung in the other direction, and womanly traits were considered to make for better leaders. Men were exhorted to become more like women, to get in touch with their feminine sides, to develop their emotional intelligence and sensitivity.

If the current business climate is any indication, this did not work out very well.

Insensitivity training, anyone?

The Amy Bishop Story: Murder in Huntsville

For now let's put aside the question of Amy Bishop's motives. Admittedly, we are all intrigued by the picture of a mild-mannered, Harvard-educated, mother of four pulling out a gun during a faculty meeting and murdering three of her colleagues. And we are aghast at the fact that this was not the first time she committed cold-blooded murder.

However much we want to know the secrets of Bishop's pathology, I would like to begin from a different angle.

When Bishop opened fire, she was making a statement. She was trying to say something, even to trying to persuade people of something. Whatever her motives, they will perhaps be more easily accessible if we look first at what she was saying.

Bishop was saying that those who denied her tenure deserved to die. Clear and simple.

She was saying that she had the right, even the moral obligation, to strike out for justice. Denying her tenure had been a grave and monstrous injustice. It was up to her to set things right, for her and for the cosmos.

To make that statement Bishop sacrificed her own life. She martyred herself for what she considered to be justice. Not only that. She abandoned her husband and four children. And she marked them all with the stigma of being related to her, of having lived with her, and of not having stopped her.

Regrettably, Bishop's family will pay a very high price for her pursuit of justice.

So fully did she adhere to the narrative of crime and punishment that she acted as though the only solution to her anguish was to live out the narrative and to force others to live within it too.

She did not see herself as having lost a competition; she saw herself as having been denied her just desserts. The first sends you back into training; the second sets you out on the road to the rough justice called vengeance.

Bishop might also have been trying to effect a form of persuasion. Whatever she intended, whatever she meant, she seemed to be saying that she felt that she was denied tenure because the committee had not been sufficiently afraid of her. What other reason could there possibly have been? They must have done it because they thought they could get away with it, because they could do it with impunity.

The powerful wert preying on the weak. They had always done so because no one had ever made them pay for it.

Perhaps, her guilt narrative could only find one reason why a committee would deny tenure to a Harvard-education biologist: they did not fear her reaction.

One wonders what effect her actions will have on future tenure considerations. Will they make committees more likely to look favorably on candidates who make them feel threatened?

Let us hope that this is not the case. Even so, it does not obviate the possibility that Bishop, having given up on her own hopes for academic success, was martyring herself to help future candidates.

Since we do not have a way to look into Bishop's mind, let us simply examine her circumstances. What might have driven her to such an extreme distress?

The husband of one of her victims offered one clue. His wife, a member of the biology department, had told him that Bishop: "was not as good as she thought she was."

This sounds strange. Bishop had received a Ph. D. from Harvard. In principle, she must have been very, very brilliant. Many of her students thought so.

But how does it happen that a Harvard Ph. D. is denied tenure at a less-than-prestigious school like the University of Alabama, at Huntsville, a branch school of the University of Alabama system?

Did Bishop feel that it was beneath her dignity as Harvard Ph.D. to be teaching nursing students in Huntsville, Alabama? The New York Times reported that she had problems with most of her nursing students. Link here. See also the remarks at Ratemyprofessors.com. Link here.

Was she suffering from academic snobbery? Does that explain how some of her students could think she was brilliant and helpful, while others saw her as remote, disinterested, and condescending.

For all we know she thought that the biology department at UAH should have been honored by her presence, that she was doing them a favor by working there and teaching nursing students.

Yet, as one student wrote: "I hear she's from Harvard. I hope she remembers that she is not at Harvard." Another wrote: "She might have graduated from Harvard but she had very little common sense."

Bishop might well have believed that since she was from Harvard, she should have been granted tenure automatically, especially in a place like Huntsville, Alabama. If UAH was several steps down from Cambridge, then not receiving tenure at such a place might have felt like a drop into oblivion.

She might have felt that she had lost everything in terms of academic standing and prestige, and in terms of professional dignity. If that was true, perhaps she felt that she had nothing to lose. She could go out with a statement about the system that had treated her so unjustly.