Tennis and life

After years of playing tennis I've realized that I get more out of it than just physical exercise and releasing pent up energy or aggression. There are three other things. First, while I don't particularly like dancing (especially the kind where you just stand separate from your partner and gyrate aimlessly) tennis comes close to what others probably get out of ballroom dancing: fluidity of movement combined with a purpose. I've always admired Sampras and Federer for their effortless, graceful yet powerful movement. I've tried to emulate that.

Second, when you get deep into a match I find it's also like a form of meditation because you are so focused on one task that everything else falls away. When this happens we reach the “flow” state described by Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi in Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.

Third, one of my main goals in life is to find balance. In tennis it's integrating the mental challenges with the various physical challenges. Trying to find the right blend of power, touch, spin, tactics and even deception (by setting up to make it look like I'm going one way then going another at the last instant). Then there are the various challenges. How to handle a power hitter? How to handle a much younger player? How to pace yourself in a 2+ hour match in 90+ degree heat? How to play with an injury? How to play when your game is "off"? And how to handle a loss? I think a lot of this spills over into other parts of life.

Happiness vs. Vitality

I reviewed The Happiness Trap by Russ Harris a while ago. Just recently I received the latest newsletter from the author which had an interesting observation.

[I]f we believe that happiness is the same as feeling good, we are constantly going to be struggling. Expecting to feel good all the time is like expecting a crocodile to be your best friend. You’re soon going to be disappointed. In ACT, we generally stay away from using the term “happiness”, as so many people think it means “feeling good”. Instead, we talk about “vitality”: a sense of being fully alive and embracing each moment of life, regardless of how you are feeling in that moment. If we were to define happiness in ACT terms, we would define it as living a rich, full and meaningful life in which you feel the full range of human emotions; or as the sense of vitality and wellbeing that comes from living by your values (something the ancient Greeks called “eudemonia”).

I like this idea of vitality and eudemonia (also referred to as “flourishing”). In fact, I wrote a paper on the Greek concept of eudemonia. Edith Hamilton best summarized it in her The Greek Way as: “The exercise of vital powers along lines of excellence in a life affording them scope.”

Tips for maintaining objectivity

Here is one page summary of cognitive distortions thanks to Michael Prescott. Has some good advice!

The Happiness Trap Review

The Happiness Trap: How to Stop Struggling and Start Living by Russ Harris is one of the best self-help books I’ve ever read. Yes, that’s a bold claim, especially with how many books of this kind fill the shelves of bookstores. I’ve read a lot of these books over the years. Almost all of them offer variations on one of several themes. Think positively. Repeat affirmations to counter negative thoughts. Bolster your self-esteem. All of them, according to Harris, share the same trap. “To find happiness, we try to avoid or get rid of bad feelings, but the harder we try, the more bad feelings we create.” This trap comes from the shared definition of happiness as feeling good. The Happiness Trap adheres to a different definition of happiness: living a rich and meaningful life.

Living such a life doesn’t automatically mean we’re feeling good all the time. We will still have negative feelings and challenges to overcome. The goal of The Happiness Trap then is to give us strategies to deal with negative feelings without denying them. Harris offers six core principles.

1. Defusion. Painful or unpleasant thoughts are defused by various techniques such as labeling them. When one notices such a thought instead of suppressing or denying it we create some distance by saying “I’m having the thought that …” In doing so we put some distance between the thought and us. In other words, we strive for objectivity.

2. Expansion: consists of making room for unpleasant thoughts and feelings.

3. Connection: being fully aware of your here and now.

4. Distinguishing between your thinking self and observing self. The various techniques in The Happiness Trap get us out of our thinking self and into our observing self.

5. Values: what kind of person are you and want to be? What is significant and meaningful to you? What do you stand for?

6. Committed action. All of this business about being objective and mindfulness must be followed by a commitment to action if we truly want to change.

These principles form the core of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), developed by Steven Hays. While Hays and others have published a number of books on ACT they were written for therapists applying ACT to different conditions. The Happiness Trap translates ACT’s principles for laymen interested in applying these principles. As Harris points out ACT also stands for something else:

A – Accepting your thoughts and feelings and being present in the moment,

C – Connect with your values, and

T – Take effective action.

The Happiness Trap holds a lot more insights and techniques than I can do justice to here. Overall I like several aspects of The Happiness Trap and ACT.

1. They don’t try to suppress or ignore emotions. The recommended methods aim at honoring these emotions while trying to get beyond them.
2. They emphasize mindfulness and objectivity.
3. The end goal is to get us to act, not just to idly analyze our feelings.
4. Values play a key role because ultimately this is what motivates us to action: what is important to us.

As I said at the beginning The Happiness Trap has joined the small group of my favorite books. It offers a realistic guide with a number of helpful activates to get us to move beyond self-limiting thoughts and emotions so we can obtain, express and enjoy our values.

How to say No: Update

Back on December 31, 2007 I posted a review of The Power of a Positive No and outlined their basic method of yes-no-yes. This means when faced with saying no to someone you first state your interest (the first "yes"), say your no (that you can't or won't do what is requested) then end with an alternate proposal (the second "yes"). I have been applying this since that review and can report that it does help in two ways. It helps me to resist doing things I don't want to while still maintaining a relationship if the request is coming from some with whom I have a continuing relationship.

Here is an example from work. A broker I deal with on my accounts asked me to remove something from one of our reports (while copying two of my account contacts). I said that my company policy wouldn't allow it even if I agreed with him but that I would investigate it further by discussing it with our technical expert. The key is that I offered to write an e-mail or letter that indicates that the recommendation in our report is our best advice but does not affect how we look at the account. The broker thanked me for the offer but said he was willing to wait to see what happened with our technical expert's review. I believe my explanation about being limited by company policy but willing to help if I could kept the broker on my side and left him willing to see how things play out. I think if I had left off the final "yes?" the situation could have escalated.

Made to Stick Review

Have you ever needed to make a memorable point? If you answered no then you must live by yourself, work in a job with no interaction with people, don’t have kids and aren’t married. For the rest of us every day we’re faced with making a point, asking for someone to do something, convincing someone of your position and so on. Some people do it better than others. A lot better. Why? What makes some people so effective while the rest of us struggle?

Chip and Dan Heath have studied this question and concluded that all of us can craft messages that “stick” by applying several principles which are explained in Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die.) Being true to their own advice even their book cover is catchy: it has what appears to be duct tape across the front.)

Their formula for success is SUCCES.

S: Simple. Find your core idea and make it compact.

U: Unexpected. Find something unexpected about your core idea and communicate it in a way that keeps your audience guessing. You do this by focusing on what questions you want your audience to ask.

C: Concrete. Make it easy to understand by translating jargon into laymen’s terms. Too many times we slip into using our profession’s jargon and think everyone else understands our lingo.

E: Emotional. Your audience is constantly asking, “What’s in it for me?” Keep this in mind or you’ll lose them!

S: Stories. When possible wrap your message in a story.

This last feature - how to tell stories - has become a cottage industry. But this approach recognizes that we become more involved and receptive when listening to a story as opposed to a dry lecture or a litany of facts. (See The Secret Language of Leadership by Stephen Denning.)

The Heaths provide many examples and stories to support their principles. In the interest of keeping this entry short I have only reported the key points (in a fashion typical for an engineer).

Coming from an engineering background where the currency of the field is facts, facts and even more facts, I’ve come to appreciate the effectiveness of appropriately packaging and presenting these facts to improve how they’re received. The Heath’s advice is sticking with me.

Review of The World is Flat 3.0

Do you ever debate buying a book? You know what I mean. Something about the cover or title catches your eye. You pick up the book, skim it a bit then put it back onto the shelf. The next time you go back to the store you go through the routine again. And again. Finally you break down and buy the book. After reading it you wonder why you didn’t buy the book the first time. That’s the story of The World Is Flat 3.0: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century by Thomas L. Friedman. I must have picked up the book five times before buying it. I wish I had bought it sooner.

Not that this book is perfect. A 100 or more pages could easily be trimmed with tighter editing and removing repetitive passages and Friedman’s name-dropping stories. But his premise is interesting and particularly applicable to individualists. By “flat” Friedman “means equalizing, because the flattening forces are empowering more and more individuals today to reach farther, faster, deeper, and cheaper than ever before, and that is equalizing power.”

Friedman contends we are in the third version of globalization. In Globalization 1.0 countries were the key agents in the world. Globalization 2.0 shifts from countries to international companies; Globalization 3.0 shifts again with individuals becoming the focal point.

The World is Flat identifies ten flatteners behind this evolution. While I won’t discuss each one they fall into three categories: political, business practices and individual empowerment. The key political flattener was literal: the flattening of the Berlin Wall in 1989 which enhanced the free movement of best practices. Most of the other nine flatteners deal with corporate practices such as work flow software, outsourcing and off shoring which drew formerly isolated countries such as India, China, Mexico and others into the world market. As the corporate practices lowered barriers between countries other developments occurred to enhance the ability of individuals to obtain information and, more important, to express their ideas that normally would have no outlet. Of course, we’re talking about the Internet, search engines and blogging. Traditional media outlets like TV and radio (except call-in talk shows) are just that: outlets in which the participants passively receive media output with limited ability to have their voices heard.

Blogging, personal web pages, etc. allow individuals to express themselves and to form collaborative virtual communities. In addition, as Friedman notes, small and medium size companies hire the most people, not the mega-corporations. Flattening allows these small businesses to compete better with the big boys. All of these developments provide tools to empower individuals like no other time in history.

These developments also could bode well for preventing wars. While some conservative thinkers fear (appropriately) the growth of Islamic terrorism and the rebirth of totalitarianism, Friedman shares something both interesting and hopeful: the Dell theory of conflict prevention. “No two countries that are both part of a major global supply chain, like Dell’s, will ever fight a war against each other as long as they are both part of the same global supply chain.” In other words, economic interdependence can trump political agendas. One can only hope that this theory is true! Of course there are no guarantees. Political leaders can force their agenda onto an unwilling citizenry. However the ease of being able to do this is getting more difficult as the world flattens.

Returning back to the individual, Friedman offers some advice to succeed. “The most important competition is now with oneself – making sure that you are always striving to get the most out of your imagination and then acting on it.”