What’s Love Got To Do With It? – Live Life Like You Mean It
Jul 3 2010

“What’s love but a second hand emotion.  Who needs a heart when a heart can be broken.”  So go the lyrics of Tina Turner’s famous song What’s Love Got To Do With It (wikipedia link).  Check it out on YouTube if you haven’t heard it in a while.  I kept thinking of that song when I was reading a book recommended to me by someone, who I’ve come to respect greatly, with decades of experience in the field of psychology.  The book is called Living Like You Mean It: Use the Wisdom and Power of Your Emotions to Get the Life You Really Want (Amazon link) by Ronald J. Frederick, Ph.D.

It’s a valuable book for any manager/leader/entrepreneur to read because it discusses in simple terms how many of us have challenges processing our emotions and using them as tools to get a better understanding of what is happening inside of us and outside of us.  So many of us have been trained not to fully feel our emotions or stop them because we have been judged, place judgment on them, or simply feel we can’t deal with them right now.  We are a bundle of feelings and they surface, just like thoughts, to give us data points to help us navigate this crazy world.   I was speaking to one of our entrepreneurs at the Austin Technology Incubator recently and he said something like “I don’t have time to feel right now.”  I could relate to that statement because when I was running my companies, I put many things on the back burner and one of those things was my feelings.  The same thing happens when you are parenting little kids who take so much of your mental and physical energy…you feel like you have to keep up a front of having it all together so the kids don’t see what you are processing.  But you know what?  Even if they don’t see it, they feel it.  Of course your ‘gut feeling’ is always right there but sometimes we ignore it and defer to the ‘powers that be’ when if we had only listened to it earlier we might have taken action earlier and ended up in a better place earlier.

Dr. Frederick used very powerful examples based on his client’s stories that many people can relate to.   It’s hard to summarize this book, so I’m just going to highlight some key quotes/takeaways:

He says that “in general the spectrum of our emotions is actually made up of eight primary feelings and their related shades and combinations,” which are Anger, Sadness, Happiness, Love, Fear, Guilt-Shame, Surprise, and Disgust. (p. 54-55).  He lumps Guilt-Shame together as one category but makes a distinction that I found very enlightening.  Guilt is feeling bad about something you did and shame is feeling as if you are a bad person.

The fear of feelings is apparently common.  “In fact, most of us are afraid of our feelings.  We’re afraid to feel the full extent of our emotions and afraid of being emotionally alive and present with others.  We’re afraid of being vulnerable, of drawing attention to ourselves, of looking like a fool.  We’re afraid of being overwhelmed, of losing control, of getting out of hand.  We’re afraid of being seen for who we really are.”  So “We distract ourselves, push our feelings aside, stuff them back in, and hope they’ll go away.  But they don’t.  They keep trying to get our attention, to be heard, to be responded to — that’s their nature.  They reemerge as the sense that something is off, odd, or not right; as worry, irritability, restlessness, anxiety, or depression.” (p. xiv-xv).

In the last few years there have been many studies on emotions leading to a better understanding of how the brain works.  “We now know that emotions can play a more powerful role than thoughts in bringing about well-being and lasting change.  Our feelings can arise much faster and be more intense than our thoughts.  At times, no matter what we do to suppress them or how hard we try to control them, they’ll have the edge.  In addition, recent discoveries in the field of neuroplasticity…reveal that emotional experience actually has the power to rewire our brain!” (p. xvii).  “In recent years, technological advances have enabled scientists to understand more precisely just how the brain functions.  Joseph LeDoux, in his fascinating book The Emotional Brain, clearly illustrates how the neural connections that run from the emotional parts of the brain to the thinking parts of the brain are actually much stronger and more numerous than the connections that run in the other direction.  This helps explain why at times emotions are able to overwhelm our thoughts and dominate our thinking and why it can be difficult to control strong emotions through rational thought alone.” (p. 18).

There are so many ways we avoid our feelings that I can’t type them all here but I recognized myself in many of the descriptions including things like “Overthinking issues, getting ‘stuck’ in your head. Having to be in control or being overly self-sufficient (otherwise, your strong facade might crack and allow your emotions to come through).” (p. 78)

The amygdala is a cluster of neural circuitry deep inside our brain and is a storehouse for significant emotional memories.  It also gauges the emotional significance of events and it’s the place where fear originates so it has the ability to overwhelm rational thought and overlook reality.  It has the ability to hijack the brain.  (p. 90).

He discusses letting yourself actually feel the emotion through it’s entirety.  When you don’t, it never gets really dealt with and you keep reliving it instead of letting the emotion come through like a wave to its natural conclusion.  It’s a process and doesn’t happen overnight.  Attaching a label to a feeling (e.g., anger, sadness, etc.) dampens the fear response and decreases emotional distress. (p. 94).  He also gives tools to help you name and process the feeling.

As a business person and a parent, understanding and paying attention to your feelings about situations can help you make better decisions in all aspects of your life.  I know so many entrepreneur’s who look back and wish they had listened to their ‘gut feelings’ during critical times but they were too afraid to do so.  I’ve been there and done that!  The maternal (parental) instinct (based on feelings) is strong and I’m not sure if there have been any studies done but I’m guessing that instinct has saved many a baby’s life.

We shouldn’t be afraid of our feelings because they “1. Impart information.  2. Provide insight.  3. Give us guidance.” (p. 135)

Here’s to your emotional health and well-being!  I’ll end this post with a quote the author has on p. 131 that starts Chapter 7 of his book: “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk to bloom.” – Anais Nin.

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The 39 Clues and Children’s Chatter
Jun 23 2010

I took the kids to Barnes & Noble a couple of weeks ago to look at books and play with the train set in the kids section.   When I can’t think of anything else to do, I go there because I can get a Starbuck’s hot chocolate or passion tea lemonade and hang out with them while they look at books.  My son happened upon a book series on display called The 39 Clues (there’s even an official website!) and for some reason he decided he wanted the books.  I think there are 9 in the series and he was excited because the 9th book took place in the Bahamas which was a place they were about to go to with their dad.  Although he’s not quite the recommended age (9 to 12 years) for the books, I was thrilled he wanted to read them.  He’s a good reader, but he really hasn’t been that interested in sitting down for any length of time and reading a book.  He loves any and all things sports related and usually prefers to play Wii NFL Madden football than read a book.   He asked me almost every day since the day he saw them if the books were here…well they arrived today.

This book series seems to be about kids searching out clues around the world to unlock and discover the secret to their family’s powers.  It’s apparently a New York Times bestselling series and it comes with special clue cards.

Being the frugal mom/person that I usually am, I told him that I would go check them out online first before buying them and of course they were cheaper online at Amazon so I ended up buying him The 39 Clues Book 1: The Maze Of Bones – Library Edition (39 Clues. Special Library Edition), The 39 Clues Book 2: One False Note, The 39 Clues Book 3: The Sword Thief, and The 39 Clues: Card Pack (v. 1) (Amazon Links).  It will be interesting to see if he likes them and gets hooked.

As for children’s chatter, I love listening to my kids having conversations with each other.  The things they talk about are so funny and interesting.  While driving around running errands with them after work today, they decided to ask me how babies are made and I explained to them as simply as I could how a baby gets inside a mommy’s tummy.  They grasped the concept but not really the details as I didn’t get into the mechanics of how it happens.  [My daughter usually says she does not want to have babies.  I ask her why and she says because her tummy would get big.  But then a few minutes later, she’s playing with her baby dolls! My son hopes to only have boy babies because other than his sister, he much prefers hanging with his buddies.]  Anyway, they laughed and then started talking to each other about turning into sand.  My daughter said she wanted to turn into sand after she died.  My son said that according to the Chinese, you become an animal after you die.  He asked me if that was true and I just told him that some people believe certain things and no one really knows what happens after someone dies.  My daughter kept asking her brother if he wanted to turn into sand and after a while he agreed that he would also want to turn into sand.  She then smiled a victorious smile because she got her brother to agree to something she wanted to do.  I feel so blessed that they usually get along really well with each other right now.  They really seem to look out for each other and make sure the other is OK.  I hope it lasts and I can’t wait to overhear their next sandy conversation. 🙂

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Outliers Or Inliers Like The Rest Of Us?
May 18 2010

I recently finished reading Outliers: The Story of Success (Amazon link) by Malcolm Gladwell.  Gladwell also wrote The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (Amazon link) and Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (Amazon link).  I have not read either of the other two but have heard much about them.  They were and continue to be top sellers.  I was sent a copy of Outliers by I’m guessing a publicist several months ago when I was more actively blogging.  I didn’t get around to reading this one until just recently and it was a very interesting read.  My overall takeaway is that I’m screwed.  I’ll never be an outlier, but my kids might have a chance.

He proves through a series of statistics, research, and anecdotal stories that outliers basically have to a) be born at the right time, b) have access to the right resources, c) have the right support/encouragement, and d) have had 10,000 hours (approximately 10 years of experience) in a particular skill when a bunch of economic factors line up.  Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, and Bill Joy, founder of Sun Microsystems, had about 10,000 hours/10 years of coding under their belts due to a series of fortunate occurrences that enabled them to start their businesses at the right time.  They were both born around the same time as was Steve Jobs.  In Rockefeller’s day there were 14 other Americans including Andrew Carnegie and JP Morgan born within nine years of each other who were part of the top 75 all time richest people in the world.

I’m too old now to figure out how to get 10 years in of doing something like coding to make me an outlier.  I have no idea if I was born at the right time.  I do happen to like the year I was born.  It’s a cool year.  Currently my set up is all about encouraging/supporting my kids and as adults we don’t usually get that same kind of encouragement/support.  The only thing I have been doing for a long time in different forms and fashions is writing.  I took a huge break from singing.  I have a lot of hours logged into thinking too much (not sure how useful that is) and I’ve been in the business world for some time.  So my conclusion is that the odds are stacked highly against me being an outlier, but that’s OK because the odds are currently in favor of my kids being outliers. Well, I think most kids at their age have the potential to be outliers.

My son loves to play soccer and practices at least 3 times per week with games on weekends.  My daughter loves swimming but only gets to practice once per week.  My son wants to be a professional soccer player.  At his age, I think I was lucky just to know how old I was let alone what I wanted to do when I grew up.

I also learned the importance of cultural ways of communicating in urgent situations.  He describes how several plane crashes could have been avoided if the Korean pilots were not playing to a cultural notion of not defying their superior.  It was worse fate to contradict a sleep-deprived captain or challenge a New York sky control person that risk death.  I can see that playing out in all sorts of relationships…business and personal.  I come from a culture where despite living most of my life in America, we were taught to respect our elders and not challenge them.  I had/have a challenging nature so I had a harder time communicating in my family, but I also picked up some of those ways of communicating so I can appear passive when I don’t necessarily think/feel passive.  In certain cultures, communication is rarely direct.  It’s often implied and those who are seen as being in positions of authority or someone you don’t feel you can challenge, the person in the perceived lower position ‘hints’ or talks in non-threatening ways to influence the person in authority.  Cultures who aren’t used to that can make false assumptions about people who communicate that way.

There were several other interesting chapters in between but my final takeaway that I could relate to had to do with the color of your skin.  Malcolm Gladwell is 1/2 Jewish and something like 1/8 Black Jamaican.  His great-great-great grandmother was bought by a White slave owner in Jamaica who favored her.  They had a son whose skin color let him escape slavery and get an education resulting in him marrying another ‘mulatto,’ as they call people of mixed race, and their kids were protected from slavery.  Gladwell’s mother had an opportunity to study in Europe and she met his dad.  The South Asian culture (as I believe the African culture is too) is very much into skin color.  The lighter your skin, the better off you are or shall we say are perceived as more socially elite. People are still judged by the color of their skin.  I notice it much less now than I used to even among my South Asian peers, but it’s still there.  I’m often the only brown person in a business meeting and often the only woman too.  Fortunately in the technology entrepreneurship world, there are a good number of South Asian brown men so I don’t always feel out of place in that regards.

So, Outliers was a good, fairly easy read with interesting factoids and observations.  Now I will wonder if my kids will be seen as Outliers some day.  They are already outliers to me!

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The Life of Books
May 10 2010

I’ve been asked several times by people what business books I read, and honestly I don’t read too many of them.  This could partly explain why I’m not a millionaire yet.  Maybe I have ADD (which many entrepreneurs purport to having in some form or fashion), but a book really has to get my attention and ones presented in fable or story form seem much easier for me to read. I used to devour books (mostly fiction), but with all I have going on, I’m lucky if I can get through one book every few months.  However, as things have started to settle down a little bit in my life (knock on wood), I’m trying to read more books.

Fred Wilson did a post a while back listing the books he recommends for entrepreneurs (e.g., Atlas Shrugged, Shakespeare) which resulted in a guy named Zachary Burt creating a wiki for people to list recommended books for entrepreneurs.  Siddhartha, by Herman Hesse, is on this list and one of my favorites.  I used to give all my Intro to Entrepreneurship students a copy of Siddhartha as a good-bye gift.  It’s one of the few books I’ve re-read at different times during my life and each time I take away something slightly different and more.

I wrote a post a few weeks ago about a book I read during a much needed break called The Happiness Hypothesis and I just finished Outliers by Malcom Gladwell.  I plan to write about books more often on this blog and highlight any connections I see between the content of the book to entrepreneurship and parenting.  The books will range from business related, to fiction, to classics, to possibly space exploration but I believe you can learn something from one book that later can help you assimilate (consciously or un) something you experience in the real world or read in another book.  I also plan to update the design of this blog and add a page listing book recommendations.

If you have any books you think I should add to my pile, please let me know in the comments or by emailing me.  I will be linking to Amazon for books I read and for full disclosure, if you happen to buy a book from that link, I will eventually get a small dollar % of that purchase.  To date in the three plus years I’ve been blogging, I have yet to receive a check from Amazon so I don’t anticipate writing about books will be a lucrative endeavor!

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The Happiness Hypothesis
Apr 3 2010

I actually finished a book from beginning to end when I went out of town for a much needed week long break a couple of weeks ago.  This may not seem much to many of you but to me, I haven’t been able to concentrate (or have the time) to finish any book in a few years it seems like.  The book I read is called The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (Amazon Link) by Joseph Haidt.  Many of us search for happiness and never find it or are looking in the wrong places.  We’ve all heard the saying that happiness comes from within.  Well that’s partially true according to Haidt but there are so many other factors.

He performed extensive research and referenced many of the great thinkers, psychologists, philosophers, doctors, etc. to come to some conclusions of his own.  I think many entrepreneurs are happy when they are able to see the tangible results of their efforts, but many think they will be happy if only they were to accomplish this one thing.  But as we all know, there’s always the next thing, and we as a species have a hard time enjoying where we are and what we have accomplished.  We have a hard time being happy with who we are because we compare ourselves to others.

The author directs you a couple of times to the website  http://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu/Default.aspx run by Dr. Martin Seligman, founder of Positive Psychology at University of Pennsylvania, so you can assess your own level of happiness. “Positive Psychology is a new branch of psychology which focuses on the empirical study of such things as positive emotions, strengths-based character, and healthy institutions. His research has demonstrated that it is possible to be happier — to feel more satisfied, to be more engaged with life, find more meaning, have higher hopes, and probably even laugh and smile more, regardless of one’s circumstances. Positive psychology interventions can also lastingly decrease depression symptoms. The research underlying these rigorously tested interventions is presented in the July/August edition of the American Psychologist, the journal of the American Psychology Association.”  You have to register to do the surveys.

Here is the review of the book by Publisher’s Weekly from the Amazon site.

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak, lamented St. Paul, and this engrossing scientific interpretation of traditional lore backs him up with hard data. Citing Plato, Buddha and modern brain science, psychologist Haidt notes the mind is like an “elephant” of automatic desires and impulses atop which conscious intention is an ineffectual “rider.” Haidt sifts Eastern and Western religious and philosophical traditions for other nuggets of wisdom to substantiate—and sometimes critique—with the findings of neurology and cognitive psychology. The Buddhist-Stoic injunction to cast off worldly attachments in pursuit of happiness, for example, is backed up by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s studies into pleasure. And Nietzsche’s contention that what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger is considered against research into post-traumatic growth. An exponent of the “positive psychology” movement, Haidt also offers practical advice on finding happiness and meaning. Riches don’t matter much, he observes, but close relationships, quiet surroundings and short commutes help a lot, while meditation, cognitive psychotherapy and Prozac are equally valid remedies for constitutional unhappiness. Haidt sometimes seems reductionist, but his is an erudite, fluently written, stimulating reassessment of age-old issues. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. –This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Since a couple of weeks have now passed since I read it and life has gotten in the way, the details are no longer clear to me but some of the things I remember are:

    • I found it odd/irritating that most of the experiments referenced (e.g., monkey’s taken away from their mother and put in cages with wire frame mothers, babies being left alone to cry, etc.) were done by men.  Freud, Spock and others thought babies should be sent to a baby farm away from their parents.   There were a couple of women (Anna Freud) who also bought into some of this stuff, but I wonder if she had children at the time.  I guess to me it seems obvious that happiness is partially influenced by your relationship with your parents/family and the amount of support/love you get from them.  If your primary caregivers don’t accept you for who you are and don’t provide an environment where you are encouraged to discover your passion, it can make finding that inner happiness harder.  There are those who make it to the top of the proverbial ladder who are still unhappy.

 

    • I resonated with the example he used of the elephant and the rider.  My favorite animals is the elephant and I used to collect images of them.  According to Haidt, we forget that as humans we are both the elephant and the rider.  As rational thinking beings we believe we are the rider controlling everything but if that elephant (base, primal, survival) decides it wants/needs something, there really is not much the rider can do other than find ways to train the elephant to move in another direction.  The elephant can be responding to fear, love, soul starvation, body starvation, boredom, etc. but the rational rider has to think of the long term effects of reacting to those urges and guides the elephant to safer ground.  As a flawed species, we don’t always do the right thing, our elephant desires are much stronger than we are and we fall off.  But then we must get back up on the elephant and try again, because if we don’t the elephant runs a muck and tramples a bunch of people in its way.

 

    • A study done on 4 year olds and marshmallows is an indicator of a person’s ability to achieve and in some way feel more happiness.  I, of course, asked my kids the question and they passed.  The study has a grown up in a room with a 4 year old and the grown up shows the 4 year old a plate with one marshmallow and another with two marshmallows.  The grown up tells the 4 year old that he/she is going to leave the room for a little bit.  If the 4 year old waits until the grown up gets back, the 4 year old can have two marshmallows.  If he/she can’t wait, then he/she could ring a bill bringing back the grown up who would give them the one marshmallow.  Those 4 year olds who could wait, did better overall in education, test scores, etc. and by exercising self restraint tended to be happier individuals.  I’m not quite sure the direct tie, but when I asked my kids if they would wait, they both said they would so I temporarily felt a little relief as a potentially good mom.  🙂

 

  • The big takeaway is that people usually can’t or don’t make significant changes in thinking or relating to people if they can’t train or convince the elephant why it’s better or at least cause the elephant to react in disgust to something.  Trying to convince the rational rider why it’s important to lose weight if he/she is fat is intellectually easy, but until the elephant is trained/convinced/physically disgusted it usually is a moot exercise to attempt to lose weight just based on rational thinking alone.

At any rate, it was a really good, though provoking read.  I started two other books The Art of Choosing (Amazon Link) by Sheena Iyengar and Outliers: The Story of Success (Amazon Link) by Malcolm Gladwell which I plan to blog about soon.  The Art of Choosing (like The Happiness Hypothesis) were my uncle’s books and I had to leave them with him when I came back home so I’ll have to get my hands on a copy so I can finish it.

May you be well.  May you be happy.  May you be free from suffering.  These phrases are part of the loving kindness meditation. Here’s another Amazon link to The Happiness Hypothesis.

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