Ideas that challenge / comfort / inspire
Stephen Goforth
According to Good Habit, Bad Habit author Wendy Wood, forming new long-term behavioral patterns is possible to some extent for most people, and it’s largely a function of learning to do something so automatically that you perform the task without having to consciously decide to do it, like brushing your teeth before you go to bed.
Amanda Mull writing in The Atlantic
I learned the danger of excessive caution long ago, when I consulted for huge Fortune 500 companies. The single biggest problem I encountered—shared by virtually every large company I analyzed—was investing too much of their time and money into defending old ways of doing business, rather than building new ones. We even had a proprietary tool for quantifying this misallocation of resources that spelled out the mistakes in precise dollars and cents. Senior management hated hearing this, and always insisted that defending the old business units was their safest bet. After I encountered this embedded mindset again and again and saw its consequences, I reached the painful conclusion that the safest path is usually the most dangerous. If you pursue a strategy—whether in business or your personal life—that avoids all risk, you might flourish in the short run, but you flounder over the long term.
Ted Gioia writing in The Atlantic
So many people who glowingly report that their lives have been turned around by a seminar, a church, or a counselor sometimes make me think of figures in a wax museum. They look like the real thing, but they don't breathe. You expect them to move like living people, but they never do. These are not the folks you want to be with when you're in real trouble or deep pain. Their words of encouragement are always appropriate and warmly offered, but they fall flat. You never feel more alive after a conversation with them- a bit cheered or instructed, perhaps, but never alive. Developing the spark that is the unmistakable evidence of life is the challenge before us-and also the mystery.
Larry Crabb, Inside Out
Some periods of our growth are so confusing that we don’t even recognize that growth is happening. We may feel hostile or angry or weepy and hysterical, or we may feel depressed. It would never occur to us, unless we stumbled on a book or a person who explained to us, that we were in fact in the process of change, of actually becoming larger than we were before.
Whenever we grow, we tend to feel it, as a young seed must feel the weight and inertia of the earth as it seeks to break out of its shell on its way to becoming a plant. Often the feeling is anything but pleasant.
But what is most unpleasant is the not knowing what is happening. Those long periods when something inside ourselves seems to be waiting, holding its breath, unsure about what the next step should be ... it is in those periods that we realize that we are being prepared for the next phase of our life and that, in all probability, a new level of the personality is about to be revealed.
Alice Walker, Living by the Word
We have to let go of the old thing before we can pick up the new one—not just outwardly, but inwardly, where we keep our connections to people and places that act as definitions of who we are. There we are, living in a new town, but our heads are full of all the old trivia: where the Chinese restaurant was (and when it opened in the evening), what Bob’s phone number was, what shoe store stocked the children’s sizes..
We usually fail to discover our need for an ending until we have made the most of our necessary external changes. There we are, in the new house or the new job or involved in a new relationship, waking up to find that we have not yet let go of our old ties. Or worse yet, not waking up to that fact, even though we are still moving to the inner rhythm of life back in the old situation. We’re like shell fish that continue to open and close their shells on the tide schedule of their home waters after they have been transplanted to a laboratory tank or at the restaurant kitchen.
William Bridges, Transitions
Life fishtails its way across an undulating landscape. If you want to live, you need to give yourself over to the way of transition—to let go when life presents you with a time of ending, to abandon yourself to the neutral zone when that is where you find yourself, to seize the opportunity to make a new beginning when that moment presents itself.
William Bridges, The Way of Transition
Many young people have stopped learning in the religious or spiritual dimensions of their lives long before they graduate from college. Some settle into rigid and unchanging political and economic views by the time they are twenty-five or thirty. By their mid-thirties most will have stopped acquiring new skills or new attitudes in any central aspect of their lives.
As we mature we progressively narrow the scope and variety of our lives. Of all the interests we might pursue, we settle on a few. Of all the people with whom we might associate, we select a small number. We become caught in a web of fixed relationships. We develop set ways of doing things. As the years go by we view our familiar surrounding with less and less freshness of perception. We no longer look with a wakeful, perceiving eye at the faces of people we see every day, nor at any other features of our everyday world.
That is why travel is a vivid experience for most of us. At home we have lost the capacity to see what is before us. Travel shakes us out of our apathy, and we regain an attentiveness that heightens every experience. The exhilaration of travel has many sources, but surely one of them is that we recapture in some measure the unspoiled awareness of children.
It is not unusual to find that the major changes in life - marriage, a move to a new city, a new job, or a national emergency - reveal to us quite suddenly how much we have been imprisoned by the comfortable web we had woven around ourselves. Unlike the jailbird, we don't know that we have been imprisoned until after we have broken out.
John Gardner, Self-Renewal
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was arrested by the Nazi in 1943 for his work with the resistance. He had been warned not to speak publicly. He did so anyway and was hanged April 9, 1945. Ethics is a gathering of his notes for an intended work on the subject, hidden in a garden before they could be seized by the police. Here is one paragraph contrasting the Ethics of Kant to Christ:
Christ did not, like a moralist, love a theory of good, but He loved the real man. He was not, like a philosopher, interested in the 'universally valid,' but rather in that which is of help to the real and concrete human being. What worried him was not, like Kant, whether the 'maxim of an action can become a principle of general legislation', but whether my action is at this moment helping my neighbor become a man before God. -Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics
Stephen Goforth
Learn to expect, not to doubt. In so doing you bring everything into the realm of possibility. This does not mean that by believing you are necessarily going to get everything you want or think you want. Perhaps that would not be good for you. When you put your trust in God, He guides your mind so that you do not want things that are not good for you or that are inharmonious with God’s will. But it does definitely mean that when you learn to believe, then that which has seemingly been impossible moves into the area of the possible. Every great thing at last becomes for you a possibility.
Norman Vincent Peale, The Power of Positive Thinking
Steven Covey offers a moving example in Seven Habits of Highly Effective People as to how context can change our outlook. Covey was riding the subway when a man and his children boarded the car. The kids were loud and rowdy, throwing things and disturbing everyone in the car. The man seemed oblivious.
It was very disturbing and yet the man sitting next to me did nothing. It was difficult not to feel irritated. I could not believe that he could be so insensitive as to let children run wild like that do nothing about it, taking no responsibility at all. So finally, with what I felt was unusual patience and restraint, I turned to him and said, “Sir, your children are really disturbing a lot of people. I wonder if you couldn’t control them a little more?
The man lifted his gaze and said softly, “Oh, you’re right. I guess I should do something about it. We just came from the hospital where their mother died. I don't know what to think and I guess they don’t know how to handle it either."
Can you imagine what I felt at that moment? My paradigm shifted. Suddenly I saw things differently, and because I saw things differently, I thought differently, I felt differently. My irritation vanished. I didn’t have to worry about controlling my attitude or my behavior; my heart was filled with the man’s pain. Feelings of sympathy and compassion flowed freely.
While this change of perspective could be momentary, it doesn't have to be. We are continually faced with decisions about how we will approach life's circumstances.
Remember that piece of music you heard that suddenly lifted your spirit and changed your whole outlook in the middle of the day? Do you remember that pleasant smell that took you back in time to fond memories? Remember when you exited a movie theater seeing an exhilarating film, inspired to change the world? Imagine putting your feet to those sentiments.
If change is possible, that puts the responsibility on our shoulders to make it happen. It's a thought that's downright scary—and motivating.
Stephen Goforth
For men and women who have accepted the reality of change, the need for endless learning and trying is a way of living, a way of thinking, a way of being awake and ready. Life isn’t a train ride where you choose your destination, pay your fare and settle back for a nap. It’s a cycle ride over uncertain terrain, which you in the driver’s seat, constantly correcting your balance and determining the direction of progress. It’s difficult, sometimes profoundly painful. But its better than napping through life.
John Gardner, Self-Renewal
They are called “superforecasters” and they make surprisingly accurate predictions about world events. Tara Law writes about these semi-professional forecasters in TIME magazine:
Superforecasters tend to share certain personality traits, including humility, reflectiveness and comfort with numbers. These characteristics might mean that they’re better at putting their ego aside, and are willing to change their minds when challenged with new data or ideas…they may also be more flexible than traditional scientists, because they’re not bound to a particular discipline or approach. Their predictions incorporate research and hard data, but also news reports and gut feelings. They tend to be actively open-minded and curious. They’re in “perpetual beta” mode—always striving to update their beliefs and improve themselves. A willingness to change your mind when presented with new information, contend with your biases, challenge one another’s ideas, and break down problems into specific questions are all desirable qualities in people who make big, important decisions.
How can you determine whether a job candidate is willing to constantly revise their understanding and reconsider problems they thought they'd already solved?" Ask: “Tell me about a goal you didn't manage to achieve. What happened? What did you do as a result?"
Most candidates will take responsibility for failing. (People who don't are people you definitely don't want to hire.) Good candidates don't place the blame on other people or on outside factors. They recognize that few things go perfectly, and a key ingredient of success is having the ability to adjust.
Smart people take responsibility. And they also learn key lessons from the experience, especially about themselves. They see failure as training. That means they can describe, in detail what perspectives, skills, and expertise they gained from that training. And they can admit where they were wrong -- and how they were willing and even eager to change their minds.
Jeff Haden writing in Inc.
Can the 3.5% rule change the world? A new study finds nonviolent campaigns were twice as likely to succeed as violent campaigns when they had achieved 3.5% participation during a peak event.
More from the BBC.
What you knew, what you understood, and what you trusted about everything is OVER. Because everything’s changed. It’s over. That’s the first truth.
The second truth.. is that it’s just beginning—if you choose to be remarkable. Why not choose to show up in your life and then your profession with a kind of engagement and energy and commitment and passion that says, “I can do it again! And I can’t wait.” Why wouldn’t you choose that?
If you say, “I don’t know,” then look at your beliefs. Because chances are someone told you long ago that you couldn’t do it. You weren’t tall enough. You weren’t smart enough. You weren’t rich enough. You weren’t the right color.
Don’t pay a bit of attention to that. You are in the process every day of becoming. Take your hand off the doorknob and say, “Now.”
Roger Fransecky, The Apogee Group
Anyone who has ever remodeled a house knows a good deal about personal transitions because such an undertaking replicates the three-part transition process. It starts by making an ending and destroying what used to be. Then there is the time when it isn’t the old way any more, but not yet the new way, either. Some dismantling is still going on, but so is some new building. It is very confusing time, and it is a good idea to have made temporary arrangements for dealing with this interim (“neutral zone”) state of affairs--whether it is temporary housing or a time of modified activities and reduced expectations to make the old housing work. And as the contractors always warn you, remodeling always takes more time and money than new construction. Good advice in regard to transition, too.
It is not just the pace of change that leaves us disoriented. Many Americans have lost faith that the transitions they are going through are really getting somewhere. To feel as though everything is “up in the air,” as one so often does during times of personal transition, is endurable if it means something – if it is part of a movement toward a desired end. But if it is not related to some larger and beneficial pattern, it simply becomes distressing.
It is as if we launched out from a riverside dock to cross to a landing on the opposite shore – only to discover in midstream that the landing was no longer there. (And when we looked back at the other shore, we saw that the dock we had left from had broken loose and was heading downstream.) Stuck in transition between situations, relationships, and identities that are also in transition, many Americans are caught in a semipremanent condition of transitionality.
William Bridges, Transitions
One of the most important differences between a change and a transition is that changes are driven to reach a goal, but transitions start with letting go of what no longer fits or is adequate to the life stage you are in. You need to figure out for yourself what exactly that no-longer appropriate thing is. There’s no list in the back of the book. But there is a hint can save you considerable pain and remorse: Whatever it is, it is internal. Although it might be true that you emerge from a time of transition with the clear sense that it is time for you to end a relationship or leave a job, that simply represents the change that your transition has prepared you to make. The transition itself begins with letting go of something that you have believed or assumed, some way you’ve always been or seen yourself, some outlook on the world or attitude toward others.
William Bridges, Transitions
Today’s students need universities and colleges that will help them navigate a world where constant changes are the norm and where learning how to adapt is the central problem of living and of citizenship. The idea that the college years should be primarily about potential is not idealistic or naive; it is prescient.
Caitlin Zaloom, Indebted: How Families Make College Work at Any Cost
Elizabeth Stokoe, professor of social interaction at Loughborough University, and her colleagues, have analysed thousands of hours of recorded conversations, from customer services to mediation hotlines and police crisis negotiation. They discovered that certain words or phrases have the power to change the course of a conversation.
People who had already responded negatively when asked if they would like to attend mediation seemed to change their minds when the mediator used the phrase, “Would you be willing to come for a meeting?” “As soon as the word ‘willing’ was uttered, people would say: ‘Oh, yes, definitely’ – they would actually interrupt the sentence to agree.” Stokoe found it had the same effect in different settings: with business-to-business cold callers; with doctors trying to persuade people to go to a weight-loss class. She also looked at phrases such as “Would you like to” and “Would you be interested in”. “Sometimes they worked, but ‘willing’ was the one that got people to agree more rapidly and with more enthusiasm.”
Rosie Ifouldwriting in The Guardian
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