Month: March 2021

More than a “Whack a Mole” Life

You are better than this! Society pressures us to live a “whack a mole” life. Problems in life are like moles in this game because a new problem keeps popping up. We then spend our time whacking them down, or fixing problems (like gif above). This is like Sisyphus because this makes it difficult to move forward. Fixing problems uses up our time an energy instead of using it to create a better future.

Fixing problems mistakenly feels like progress, however we never move forward, we just don’t move backward. I analogize it like never getting past 0 in the video below.

You are better than this. We all want a better future or what I refer to as +3 where we exceed expectations. We need to devote our time and energy toward generating comprehensive improvements. If we spend all of our time looking for, and finding, problems to eliminate, progress is unlikely

Vic Strecher and Jim Loehr do great work helping us learn how to build purpose and meaning in life. I recently listened to their 30 minute Purposecast, “Energize Your Life: How to Boost and Better Manage Your Energy“.

I love their work, however, as I was listening, it seems they are still suggesting if we get rid of our negatives, such as negative energy as mentioned in this talk. How, it seems like they are suggesting we shoudl be looking for moles to whack? This is contrary to Shawn Achor and “The Happiness Advantage” who documents the flaw in this approach. I addressed his work in this post Is a Problem Needed for Change? II recommend you watch Achor’s wonderful TED Presentation: “The Happiness Advantage: Linking Positive Brains to Performance“

In other words, regardless of the situation, we should do something that aligns with our values and goals that helps you and us move forward. This is captured in the “Anyway” poem.

In other words, put energy into creating what you want, Anyway. If you are spending energy ending what you don’t want, exhaustion will keep you from chasing better things. To create what we want we need to put our energy into creating more good, not just less bad (see Concept: Create More Good, Not Just Less Bad).

Creating what we want crowds out what we don’t want. To create what you want and crowd out what we do not want, it is vital to work at generating comprehensive benefits by creating pervasive, reciprocal, selfish, selfless, synergistic interactions so everyone and everything benefits, Anyway.

Please share how you are making the world better for everyone and everything and encourage all to do the same.

Be Well’r,

Craig Becker

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

#SelfishSelflessSynergy

Please share your thoughts and questions below.

Build a Net Positive Life for ALL

Life is full of positive and negative events. Both are necessary. The goal is to end up with more good than bad. Evolutionarily speaking we are more reactive to negative events, possibly because avoidance of those events was necessary or survival. The preference for negative events was documented by many researchers. These researchers also identified the need for positive interactions in our life to outnumber our negative events by about 3. The 3 to 1 ratio of positive to negative events was necessary to have net positive life according to Barbara Fredrickson’s and the Losada line, Corey Keyes with the Mental Health Continuum and many more. These findings replicated and documented the the original findings by Kahneman and Tversky that showed our innate tendency to be risk averse and to have what they termed loss aversion because negatives, or losing something, was more impactful and meaningful than the positives of a possible gain. 

This means to create a Net Positive Life, we must cause good, do good and help many. To have a net positive life, we must consistently work at better ourselves, as we help others and our environment. In other words, the +3 life I discuss from selfish, selfless, synergistic interactions relates to how we can have a net positive life and exceed expectations:

These points were driven home again from my reading of the fantastic work by Bradley and Taylor in “The American Health Care Paradox: Why Spending More is Getting Use Less”. A book I strongly recommend you read. In the book they use powerful data to document how we are all in this together, and we do best when we help each other. With powerful clarity, they document something we all already innately know, better health cannot be achieved through medical means. They end the book with:

To that end, an ever-growing body of literature suggests that broadening Americans’ historically narrow focus on medicine in pursuit of improved national health may ultimately hold the key to unraveling the spend more, get less paradox.

While medicine is good at medical care, America does have the best emergency care, our lives and health are not linear, they have multiple causes. These multiple causes mean we need to also, if not primarily, focus on the social, behavioral and environmental non-medical determinants of health because it is more effective at improving quality of life as it also decreases the need for medical care.

Throughout history, America has made an attempt to support and improve non-medical care with community health centers, HMOs, and now ACO’s. Unfortunately, the power of the medical lobby and their concern over losing paying patients caused these efforts to be watered down to a focus on medical care. Without question, medical care is crucial for specific illnesses. Medical care is vital for acute, short term care, I am alive because of it. However a larger content is more predictive and necessary to improve public health. Bradley and Taylor also show us many successful efforts in America that resulted in better health. These attempts also were significantly less expensive and better for all involved. 

America Actually Spends Less On Healthcare

With clarity, they demonstrate America does NOT spend the most on healthcare if you account for all the factors associated with health, not just medical care. Medical care and social services are interrelated. Nations that spend more on social services enjoy a higher quality of life and better health and spend much less on medical care – because it is not needed. America spends the most on treatment and rescue care because America’s system neglects the social, behavior and environmental determinants of health.

America’s neglect of social, behavioral and environmental determinants of health has resulted in very bad outcomes. Despite spending so much on medical treatment, America lags other peer nations in 

  • Life expectancy
  • Infant mortality
  • Low birth weight
  • Injuries and homicides
  • Adolescent pregnancy
  • Sexually transmitted diseases (STDs),
  • HIV Aids
  • Drug related deaths
  • Obesity, diabetes
  • Heart Disease
  • Chronic lung disease, and
  • Disability rates

Quite an indictment of our current system. Medical care is good at treating disease, what it is designed to do, it is not good at creating health, it is not designed to do that, medicine is about eliminating disease. We must remember health is the PRESENCE of physical, mental and social well-being and NOT MERELY the absence of disease and infirmity. The movie, “Escape Fire: The Fight to Rescue American Healthcare” by Shannon Brownlee demonstrates this in stunning clarity.

To build a net positive life for ourselves and our nation, we must generate comprehensive improvements by engaging in more social, behavioral and environmental interactions that facilitate health for all. I look forward to hearing about your selfish, selfless, synergistic interactions that help everyone and everything benefit.

Be Well’r,

Craig Becker

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

#SelfishSelflessSynergy

Please share your thoughts and questions below.

🧘🏻‍♀️🧘🏽‍♂️🧘🏼‍♀️MorningYoga is Great🧘🏻‍♀️🧘🏽‍♂️🧘🏼‍♀️

My family and I have now found a way to do 10 minutes of yoga a day, each morning, and it is great! Most mornings we meet using one of the available technologies – WebEx, Zoom, FaceTime, MS Teams, since our girls live in different cities. My daughters were the inspiration for yoga and now my wife and I are amazed because 10 minutes of yoga each morning has helped us increase our mobility and have a better day. Smart girls!

There are many options on the internet. We chose to join Kassandra for 10 minutes of yoga each morning and have liked her sessions. Here is her day 0 video.

We started her 30 day challenge and are now doing those 30 days for a second time. I now feel a desire to do yoga each morning because it makes me feel better and helps me feel ready to start my day. I also now notice significantly better flexibility, all from just 10 minutes of yoga a day.

I encourage you to try this, it is only 10 minutes. You don’t need to drive anywhere or even change your clothes. We have enjoyed adding this habit to our day. Please let us know how it has helped generate comprehensive improvements because it is a pervasive, reciprocal, selfish, selfless, synergistic interactions from which everyone and everything benefits. Also please share if you find other good videos online.

Yoga is a way to practice paneugenesis with selfish, selfless, synergy. It is selfish because it is good for me, I feel better so I am better to others, selfless, which also makes it pervasive and likely reciprocal which generates synergy so we all do better. Thank you Kassandra for helping!

Be Well’r,

Craig Becker

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

#SelfishSelflessSynergy

#GoodMorning

Please share your thoughts and questions below.

 

Survival of the Fittest Misleading

Life is dynamic which keeps things interesting. It is also why we are bad predictors of the future. We have created intricate measures and theories but they still cannot tell us what the future will be because when anything changes, everything changes. As John Muir explained:

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe. – John Muir

We are all interdependent and nobody can survive without everything else. We need many abilities and capacities because the unexpected often happens and we must adapt. This means we need critical thinking so we can quickly adjust and adapt to our ever changing landscape. Survival of the fittest seems to have turned into an understanding that the strongest will survive. This, however, is a misunderstanding of what the fittest means. The fittest means the most adaptable.

Since all is connected, to create a thriving society, like a thriving forest we must be able to help each other. Dr. Suzanne Simard demonstrated that plants communicate with each other through their network of roots (or “Wood Wide Web” – see Tree’s to Nuts to People – ALL Connected SuperCooperators) to send messages about needs. A forest then, based on messages sent, diverts water and carbon to the most needed plants to help the forest thrive over any individual plant. Like plants in a forest, Martin Novak explains we humans are also SuperCooperators.

books

We are not competitors and when we collaborate and work as cooperators with others and the environment, everyone and everything benefits. As Tim Galloway explains in, “The Inner Game of Tennis” (see The Inner Game of Tennis Provides a Focus for Life), competition is really high level cooperation. We cooperate to play a game that will enable us to improve our capacities and play our best game.

What does this mean? To create the life we want it would benefit us to continually improve your abilities and capacities by learning more and helping others. We are all interconnected, sometimes we need help, sometimes we can help others. Both situations exist, and we don’t know when these different needs arise. Having more capacities enables use to better adapt to meet the every changing needs of our life. Improved capacities benefits adaptability which makes it more likely everyone and everything benefits.

Please share how you are learning more so you can create pervasive, reciprocal, selfish, selfless, synergistic interactions so everyone and everything benefits. Together we can generate comprehensive improvements.

Be Well’r,

Please share your thoughts and questions below.

Obvious Finding: More Health Behaviors, Better Performance

With my colleague, Martha Chapin, we finished a study and published the results in the Journal of Postsecondary Education and Disability, 34(1), pages 65-75. The findings from the study outlined in the article, “Contributing Factors to Academic Performance for Students with Disabilities”, suggests college support services should focus more on nurturing, supporting, encouraging and reinforcing health promoting actions in the physical, social, emotional, spiritual, intellectual, vocational and environmental areas. The focus on encouraging these behavior was suggested because the more students engaged in these health promoting actions, as measured by the Salutogenic Wellness Promotion Scale (SWPS),  the higher their life satisfaction, grit, and resilience. More SWPS measured health promoting actions was also associated with better performance in college as measured by Grade Point Average (GPA).

Often we think health is secondary, however, engaging in actions that enable health is being shown over and over again to the be the latent, or hidden, underlying cause of desirable outcomes. Engaging in health promoting behaviors is not something you should do when you have time or after being successful, engaging in health promoting actions makes it more likely you are successful, just like Shawn Achor demonstrated in the Happiness Advantage: Linking Positive Brains to Performance.

In other words, this study provides more evidence to support the obvious. To get the life we want, it would be beneficial to create pervasive, reciprocal, selfish, selfless, synergistic interactions so everyone and everything benefits. This supports the contention that Practicing Paneugenesis can contribute to generating comprehensive improvements.

Below is the abstract of this published article:

Please share how you are Practicing Paneugenesis by taking action to create the life you want. Thank you.

Be Well’r,

Please share your thoughts and questions below.