Month: September 2020

Best Dad Ever: The Power of Language – Use it Wisely

I am wearing a shirt my girls got me that reads, “Best Dad Ever”. By all measures it is correct. I am the best Dad my girls ever had. Of course I am their only Dad. These words however can be misleading and cause misunderstanding. For instance, someone could challenge me that they are a better Dad. Of course they would be correct if they were talking about being a Dad to their children. It can get confusing. No matter how we think about it, language is powerful and we should use it wisely.

This topic is of great importance. For example, the most important conversation is the one you have with yourself. What you tell yourself can only be contradicted by yourself. Nobody can jump in your head and change your mind unless you let them. These means what you say to yourself carries meaning – choose your words wisely. You can let others in your head by reading and watching TV. That happens a lot now during the election campaign. I encourage you to think about how candidates use words to send messages, inaccurate or accurate depending on how it is used. What is important about the language is what it causes people to do and how it impacts their actions.

One way that words trigger actions is when they remind us of values. Schwartz identified 10 Basic Values. I encourage you to review his article about those value at An Overview of Schwartz Theory of Basic Values. As he demonstrates, we all have these values, just at differing levels. He also explains these values can be triggered by words. The power of these values varies by our role in life – parent, teacher, consumer, marketer, owner, worker, etc.

The ten values he identified are grouped by Openness to Change, Self-Transcendence, Conservation, and  Self-Enhancement included:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

These values were used by Edward Bernays to incite a consumer revolution where he showed organizations how they could more easily sell their products if their products were associated with deeply held values such as power or freedom. He outlined how to do this in his 1928 book, “Propaganda”. The book and video also documents how he used false science. He falsely used science by creating an experiment with an expected outcome. He used bad science to falsely support an objectively bad choice, bacon and eggs. I encourage you to watch the video below to learn how he did this. In other words, he was NOT using words to promote #SelfishSelflessSynergy, but you can.

  

I was reminded of the power of words while reading Kate Raworth’s excellent 2017 book, “Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economist”. In the book she uses the example of calling people consumers or citizens and how those words dramatically impact how people think and act. As a consumer it means people can only express your potential by buying things, but as a citizen it would inspire people to take actions to be a good member of society. Words are powerful, we must use them carefully and also carefully think about how they are being used.

Here is another example of powerful words that may impact thoughts and actions as written by Umair Haque:

Don’t you think there’s something wrong with a world where Amazon, Inc is a “person,” but the Amazon isn’t? Without personhood, the worst amongst our species — the profiteers and predators — is free to treat nature and the animals just like they once treated slaves: maim, abuse, and annihilate them, until they’ve been used up. – Umair Haque

As you know, my focus has been attempts to use words that will generate comprehensive improvements by creating pervasive, reciprocal, selfish selfless, synergistic interactions so everyone and everything benefits. I look forward to hearing how you use your words to generate #SelfishSelflessSynergy or comprehensive improvements. Please share your thoughts below. Thank you.

Be Well’r,

Please share your thoughts and questions below.

Ginsburg Widened the Circle of Inclusion & Equality

We all mourn the passing of Ruth Ginsburg. She made a powerful POSITIVE impact on all of us. Although she is known for her work to help women’s rights, her work was about creating a more just and perfect union by expanding inclusion and equality. She was passionate about her causes but human enough to be good to all. I noted this when Justice Scalia passed, someone who had drastically different views than her, yet they still had a friendship (see Honoring Justice Scalia – Dare to Disagree).

Justice Ginsburg’s life is something we can all strive toward, that is to aim to help lift everyone up. The Washington posted this interesting article about her, Ginsburg’s vision led us to a better America. We can do the same. I am impressed that she was able to make such a large difference in her life without trying to legislate from the bench. She believed and demonstrated how she could help build a better system by working with the other parts of government. She read her dissent in the case of Lilly Ledbetter and then said now the ball is in your court congress. After, congress did take the ball and passed legislation to promote equal pay.

If you don’t know much about her, I recommend you watch both of the excellent movies recently released about her life, “On the Basis of Sex” and “RBG”. The NYTimes described those movies here, Ruth Bader Ginsburg: The Films About Her Life. Together these movies provide a good overview of her life, yet she did so much more. It appears you can Stream “RBG” on Hulu or Amazon Video and you can see “On the Basis of Sex”  on Amazon or Showtime (trailers for both below). I hope both will be made more widely available.

Although she was a small woman, she had a GIANT impact on all our lives. Each of us and our the world is better because of her work. She was a prime example of how to Practice Paneugenesis because she generated comprehensive improvements by creating pervasive, reciprocal, selfish, selfless, synergistic interactions so everyone and everything benefits.  #SelfishSelflessSynergy.

Please share how her good work benefitted you and how you will pay it forward.

Be Well’r,

Craig Becker

Be selfish, selfless, & synergistic so everyone and everything benefits!

#SelfishSelflessSynergy

Please share your thoughts and questions below.

Looking for Health in All the Wrong Places

I am confused by our currents attempts to achieve health. If you follow me you know, I am confused because we seem to focus on disease rather than health. It is as if we go after B (disease – prevent and treat), hoping to get A (health and well-being). But these states are independent, though related. Simply making less or more of one state does not necessarily have a  corresponding change in the other state.

I am continually reminded of this current confusing approach, or what seems to be honest attempts at chasing A (disease) to improve B (health), such as in Dan Heath’s new, interesting book, Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen. Once again the focus is on fixing problems…just earlier, or upstream. Upstream reminded me of a passage in John Robbins 1996 book “Reclaiming Our Health”. In the beginning he shared a story about a fictitious society that lives on a mountain. He explained that people kept falling off the mountain and the society made faster and faster ways to rescue and treat people after they fell off the mountain. Of course the faster they got, the better they thought they were doing. Finally someone suggested they build a fence. Obviously a fence is better than people falling off the mountain, but it does not make us better than we would have been if we didn’t fall off the mountain. It just went further Upstream. We should aim to make things MORE GOOD, NOT JUST LESS BAD (see Create More Good, Not Just Less Bad).

I think some solutions of how we can be More Good are being offered in Bradley and Taylors work outlined in their book, “The American Health Care Paradox: Why Spending More is Getting Us Less” and in their NYTimes column, that seems to have an inaccurate title, To Fix Health Care, Help the Poor. Their work documents that America does not actually spend the most on health care if you consider treatment AND social services provided in most other countries. Social services benefit health and well-being of society, thus creating a higher quality of life, and they also lower treatment and disease costs.

Without question, better health will come from improved physical, mental and social well-being. This has been proven over and over again. Higher health means more prevention and less issues, less problems however is the side effect of better health. In addition when something difficult does happen in life, as it most assuredly will, better health provides value because now they will be able to overcome, heal because the difficulty will be less problematic due to their higher health status. Those benefits of overcoming difficult disease problems are the side effect of having a better life. The primary focus on health, needs to be on health and how to improve it. If we do that, not only do we get better health, a higher quality of life, a by-product or secondary benefit is less problems and prevention of other difficulties.

For us to create a better world, we have to ask the right questions. If we don’t ask the right questions, it is impossible to get the right answer. Asking the wrong questions means no matter how hard we work at getting the answers, we still won’t get what we want because we asked the wrong question. I better understood about the need to answer the right question when I heard more about the wrong questions when I listened to NPR’s Hidden Brain Podcast, “Slaying the ‘The Fee-For-Service Monster’ Moster of American Healthcare”.

 

Health and the piggy bank

This episode seems inspired by Vivian Lee, MD’s book, The Long Fix: Solving America’s Health Care Crisis With Strategies that Work for Everyone. Without question, the inefficient bureaucracy of our health care system is causing many problems and her solutions will help. It will be less bad. However, just finding a way to make it more economically efficient is not enough. Although I have not read her book yet, the podcast seems to suggest she realized this also. At the end they discuss a doctors office that does better at helping people live a better life, that office then also does better economically, and as a side effect…their patients have more prevention. While more study should be done, evidence seems to overwhelmingly indicate that we should change our objective so better health is the primary focus instead of less disease. Then if we improve the processes that promote health, a better life can be had by most and then… as a by-product many of the problems will take care of themselves.

There is much more to say about how to improve, but we must act to cause health. Overall it seems clear, we are asking the Wrong Questions if better health is our goal. This concept is also discussed in Asking Better Questions Can Generate a Better Tomorrow. We should be asking Aaron Antonovsky’s salutogenic question, “How can we understand movement of people in the direction of the health end of the continuum?” In other words, what helps people improve health such that it means more than just less disease. As we begin to achieve more holistic good, less bad has to follow.

My attempts to create more good first that also results in less bad is to generate comprehensive improvements by creating pervasive, reciprocal, selfish, selfless, synergistic interactions so everyone and everything benefits. As more and more of us engage in these actions, we will move toward a better world for everyone and everything, which will also mean less problems. And when we do have problems, which we will, our increased capacity and better health will enable us to handle those issues more effectively.

I look forward to hearing how you do good from selfish, selfless, synergistic interactions  #SelfishSelflessSynergy.

Please share how you do good…

Be Well’r,

Craig Becker

Be selfish, selfless, & synergistic so everyone and everything benefits!

#SelfishSelflessSynergy

Please share your thoughts and questions below.

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Imagine a Better Future then Create It = A Simple Example

I thought this would be a simple post, then I saw how all these connections run through my life. The post was just going to share: 

My wife is amazing. She cooks delicious, wonderful, mostly vegan food. In that respect we eat a lot of fruits and vegetables. This of course means we have a lot of skins and inedible parts left over that traditionally are thrown in the trash or go down the disposal. I compost, which is an amazing and powerful natural “soft” or natural process.

I take the scraps, that would be garbage, and put them in a container in my yard, which for me is an old garbage can with the bottom cut out, with my grass clippings and other yard waste. Over time this waste turns into rich soil. In other words, I grow soil, as I learned from the incredible Will Allen (see Growing Healthier Food, People, & Communities). After leaving the waste in the composter for 6-12 months, it turns into healthy soil that I then put in the garden to grow my fruits and vegetables. A circular economy. I thought that was an amazing efficient and effective process that was circular. Then my wife made it even better. Before I put the scraps in to be compost, my wife put them on high in the Insta-pot and made vegetable broth (here is the recipe she used).Wow!

This documents Selfish/Selfless/Synergistic benefits. In other words, it is a great way to Practice Paneugenesis. This is a way to develop a personal circular economy that is regenerative. It makes tomorrow and TODAY Better. It is a way to give to all and get for yourself – Selfish and Selfless because more clean air and water, so it is Synergistic as we Give & Get by making a Positive Impact.

Then I started thinking…

We all recognize, during this terrible pandemic the world is not what we want it to be. We saw this coming, Bill Gates warned us in his 2014 TED presentation. Despite knowing what was possible, action was not taken. From my perspective, I don’t think we did anything because the best we could’ve gotten, at least the  way it was presented, was not bad, or things would end up the same as they were.

Taking actions would mean we could keep what we have. If we took action we would have had less bad – No Pandemic. Of course this is great, but it did not inspire action. In my compost example, simply using scrap food gave us the benefit for better, more convenient and less expensive vegetable broth, besides no need to go to the store, extra waste. We got more than not bad, less garbage, for that action. For me and it seems most of us, the getting and giving something seems to motivate action. Selfish, Selfish, Synergy is how to get and give at the same time. #SelfishSelflessSynergy

It is likely the warnings of a “possible” future pandemic did not inspire action for many reasons. One reason is because nothing like this has happened in our lifetime. How could we imagine it as a possibility and why would it happen now?? We all most have assumed what we are doing must be working well enough. As noted, things always work, until they don’t. To me the main reason action was not taken was because if action was taken, the result would be nothing – NO PANDEMIC. We would be left with what we already

Most of us want to make a positive impact, we want to feel good and we want to give. While it may seem contradictory, being Selfish and Selfless is Synergistic and by Giving We all Get…better. Our minds do not know how to handle nothing, a not bad outcome. It is also logical, why do we need to take action to keep what we already have? If we want a better future, not just a less bad future, however, we need to have an emotionally rewarding outcome we can get to move toward.

If we put these actions into a mathematical formula, it could look like this:

Selfish +Selfless = Synergy with a Remainder of Get & Give  with a leftover of Positive Impact

In other words, we need an “Operationalized Idealized Outcome” to move toward. #SelfishSelflessSynergy to Give & Get for all so everyone and everything benefits.

Using scraps for broth and soil is a simple example of how I and my family attempt to generate comprehensive improvements by creating pervasive reciprocal, selfish, selfless, synergistic interactions so everyone and everything benefits. It is how I give and get. I am anxious to hear how you cause your positive impact – please share! Thank you.

Be Well’r,
Craig Becker

Be selfish, selfless, & synergistic so everyone and everything benefits!

#SelfishSelflessSynergy

Thank you for reading, please comment below and contact me:
Email: BeWellr@gmail.com