Knowing What You Want

Words: 1,061 Reading time: 3 minutes 32 seconds

Kelly was like a lot of teenagers; poised on the threshold of her future, she couldn’t decide. With so many opportunities open to her, how was she to know which one was the right one? Some of her teachers advised her to seek out more information. It didn’t help her. It multiplied her options without suggesting what her direction might be. Where was she to go from here?

You might expect me to recommend using a coach at this point, but where Kelly was concerned, I hesitated. When it comes to goal-setting most coaches conduct a mental version of the three-card trick. And their sleight of hand starts with the very first words out of their mouths – decide on your goal.

They have used that “D” word - decide. Kelly could now wait with baited breathe for all to be revealed. Alas, she would wait in vain. Nothing more is ever said about deciding. That particular stumbling block is deftly avoided as they move on to explaining how the decision should be worded to best effect; securing necessary resources; identifying obstacles; systemizing effort and … whoa!

The Starting Point
Let’s go back. Tell us about the start. How do we decide? What is it that tells us when we know what we want? Isn’t this is the key to the whole exercise?

If what we decide is decided very well, then the rest is merely mechanism for the most part. If we can decide powerfully, then the force will be with us…to coin a phrase.

When we are asked to name what we want, given a few minutes, most of us can come up with a list. Some of the items will be banal, some wild, some wonderful, some small and personal, some immense and municipal. If given more time we could even extend the list. But, out of all the things listed, how do we decide?

The Should-y Life
Part of the difficulty we face may be because, if we think about it, we rarely ask for what we want. Instead we live a life based on “should” and the “should” is bequeathed to us by others – I should exercise more, I should get a qualification, I should own a bigger house, I should get a better job, I should work fewer hours.

Getting from our shoulds to our authentic wants can be a problem. Recognizing that to be happy, we must live the life that we truly want to live, and that we are the only one who can truly determine what is right, doesn’t really help. How do we know what that is?

Even with an extensive list we may still not know what we want. Perhaps we don’t know all the options and what implications each might hold. Selecting just one want may exclude the possibility of fulfilling some other want, since they could be mutually exclusive.

Like buses, our wants often come in fleets. A person having just a single want is rare. Such a person may not exist at all. So, if we end up with conflicting wants – as seems likely – the question of how we know which one to pick stays with us.

What About Values?
One hypothesis is that values have great strength in determining human goal direction. Through our values we perceive important truths about life. These ideals are then reinforced by our emotions and feelings, and those sentiments create a vital passion that we hope to realize in our lives.

Some great human values include things like tolerance, openness, respect for the individual, and teamwork, which derive in part from some of the higher spiritual values like love, beauty, and truth. At certain points, the human and spiritual values come together in concepts such as selflessness, self-givingness, and gratitude

S.H.Schwartz carried out some extensive research and extracted six “universal” moral values, trustworthiness; respect; responsibility; fairness; caring; and citizenship.

However, I am not convinced that this helps people like Kelly a great deal.

A number of our wants may serve the same value – so how do we choose between them?

And any one of our wants may serve one or more of our values – so how does that help us know what we really want?

And should our wants cause some universal values to compete, how are we to rank them?

Hedonism
Steve Pavlina, often a source of inspiration, advises, “Treat goal-setting as a way to enhance your present reality, not as a way to control the future. Stay in the present and consider how this goal can improve the quality of your life right now. Not a year from now. Not five years from now. Not even tomorrow. Right now this very minute. Does it give you hope? Does it inspire you? Does it promise solutions to some current problems?”

As seductive as this might sound at first glance, all Steve has done is shift the timeframe. The questions raised earlier about mutually exclusive wants, conflicting wants and competing wants still remain.

Confession Time
Kelly is a person much like the rest of us. Most of us don’t know what we want. We only know what we don’t want, so we spend all our time moving away. And not knowing which path best fits our appetites, abilities, skills and personality doesn’t matter, because away is in any direction from the point of departure.

Once we are in motion, regardless of the drive, our perspectives will change. Whatever we start out wanting, or not wanting, may appear more or less attractive depending on where our journey has taken us.

Not knowing is OK. Pushing yourself to decide more quickly, more rationally, more firmly will result in beating yourself up to no good purpose.

In our task- and success-driven world, much is written about what people need to do and think, but very little about how they ought to be. To be truly fulfilled Kelly first needs to understand herself. Only when she does will she be able to follow Georgia Anne Geyer advice which is, “Follow what you love. Don’t deign to ask what “they” are looking for out there. Ask what you have inside. Follow not your interests, which change, but what you are and what you love…”

And even when you are sure you know what you want, you will still have no idea of what to cook for dinner.

Lessons in Staying Positive – #8

Words: 959. Reading time: 3 minutes 12 seconds.

Our feelings are contagious. For example, if you are feeling down and disappointed then that feeling is likely to be transmitted subconsciously to those who interact with you.

Some individuals may believe that if they speak in a bright, cheery voice and act in an upbeat manner then that will effectively conceal what else is going on. It rarely does.

Even if the person concerned exactly modulates her voice to the precise pitch and timbre she uses normally when she is actually feeling bright and cheerful, her true inner feelings are almost certain to “leak” into some of the other ways we express ourselves.

These will include facial expressions, verbal dexterity and variety, breathing patterns, eye accessing cues, blink rate, gestures and body language. And it is likely to be the motions of the person’s further extremities, such as feet and fingers that give the game away.

The multiple ways we humans use simultaneously to express ourselves makes whole-body, consistent make-believe a daunting task.

And the longer, deeper and more frequent the interaction, the more likely it is that subconscious transmission will take place. Put simply, the longer pretence is maintained, the more effort it takes.

By the same token, if you are truly feeling buoyant and optimistic then the people you are communicating with will pick up on it. If you have a really good state people will think “I like this person” and be drawn to you.

We are more comfortable with people we like and it is easier to like someone who is happy, just as a warm, sunny day in May is more elevating than a cold, wet Wednesday in November.

We are also more comfortable with people who we think are like us, or who we would like to be like. Given a choice, most people would elect to be happy and most would hesitate to describe themselves as sad, miserable or cheerless. That’s not going to win them any friends.

That happiness is catching is confirmed by a study that followed a whole community of people for 20 years. The study, published in the British Medical Journal, followed more than 4,700 people living in Framingham, Massachusetts from 1983 to 2003. Researchers found that the effect of one happy person could ripple through three degrees of separation. The researchers liken the pattern of happiness transmission to the spread of a virus: those with the most number of happy contacts are the mostly likely to catch the happy bug.

“Happiness is like a stampede,” said [co-author] Nicholas Christakis… “Whether you’re happy depends not just on your own actions and behaviours and thoughts, but on those of people you don’t even know”

In this study certain social relationships were more effective at spreading happiness; the good mood of a next-door neighbour was more contagious than that of a live-in spouse. Friends of the same gender were the most likely source of good cheer.

A temporal element was also detected: the effects of a happy encounter could linger for as long as a year before fading.

One important dimension of such “contagion” has been rightly emphasised by Shigehiro Oishi, a University of Virginia psychologist who studies the causes and consequences well-being. He has said:

"Although we are connected with friends and family members who live far away via cell-phone and the Internet, these results indicate that there is nothing like a face-to-face interaction. We are told to get connected by cell-phone companies, but in order to get connected you really have to live close by and interact face to face.”

Technology is evolving a lot faster than the human animal.

But how can something like happiness be contagious? Some researchers think one of the most likely mechanisms is empathetic mimicry. Psychologists have shown that people unconsciously copy the facial expressions, manner of speech, posture, body language and other behaviours of those around them.

Through a kind of neural feedback, they experience the emotions associated with the particular behaviour they are mimicking.

Barbara Wild and colleagues at the University of Tubingen, Germany, found that the stronger the facial expression, the stronger the emotion experienced by the observer. She believes this process is hardwired, since it acts so rapidly and automatically.

Others suggest it works through the action of mirror neurons, a type of brain cell thought to fire both when we perform an action and when we watch someone else doing it, though it is not clear whether the mimicking would cause the neurons to fire or whether their firing would trigger the mimicry.

What is clear is that unconscious imitation allows people to "feel a pale reflection of their companions' actual emotions" and even "feel themselves into the emotional lives of others", says Elaine Hatfield, of the University of Hawaii.

There is plenty of evidence for emotional contagion outside the lab. In 2000, Peter Totterdell at the University of Sheffield found a significant association between the happiness of professional cricketers during a match and the average happiness of their teammates, regardless of other factors such as whether the match was going in the team's favour.

Other studies have found that waiters who offer service with a smile are rewarded with bigger tips.

In NLP this is called being in uptime. Make sure your head, your heart and your happiness are all on the same plain before launching into any key activity, particularly where it involves face-to-face contact. If not, then postponing to a better time - or making a phone call instead - might be the better strategy.

In business giving your clients, the people you are communicating with, the sense of having your “unconditional positive regard”; that you are there for them and with them; that they have your undivided attention, is the foundation on which good rapport is based.

Imparting happiness with the deal is a big bonus worth having.