Whose Screw is Loose?

Is it mine?

Last week I had this piece in the New York Times Motherlode blog. It ran in tandem with KJ Dell’Antonia’s response to it. In case you missed them, they are about how my daughter's course selections for next year triggered my anxiety about how much to push for prestigious colleges and KJ's lack of anxiety about it and her heartwarming belief in passion and hard work. Together, they are still generating comments, which is good, since there’s no such thing as bad publicity, I am told. If only I could publish my blog in the NYTimes everyday, I’d get a lot more comments on it. Of course, I would have to grow a thicker skin. Maybe just let my tendency to eczema fulfill itself…

Because some of those comments – hoo boy. Let me tell you. I’ve tried not to read too many of them, because I can only stand so much. Plus, I am suggestible, so it’s best not to pay too close attention or I might start (really) believing them.

Interestingly, every comment I saw suggested or downright declared that I had better seek help for my mental illness. Which, you know, rankles, since I’ve been doing that for years. And none of those professionals has ever told me I’m crazy. Except one, but she was joking. I am pretty sure.

Meanwhile, every comment the husband read was about how the commenter hadn't been a bit concerned one way or another about college, yet his/her child had grown up to be an exemplary human with absolutely no stress or intervention of a parental nature.

Yet my friends told me they thought the comments were overall kind of in agreement with me.

Go figure. We find what we are looking for, I guess.

*

I thought, Readers, you might be interested in a few background details about the posts.

First of all, Gym Mom immediately identified herself. Not to worry. We are still on excellent terms. In fact, she emailed that she was “excited and proud" to make her debut in the Times. So all is well there. And you can see she has an excellent sense of humor.

I, too, have retained mine, despite glancing at one too many exhortations to let my kid eat lunch already. Far too many commenters use as evidence of my mental illness and my terrible mothering the “fact” that I am “making” the 9th grader skip lunch. Hello? She took lunch this year, her first year in high school, because I/we insisted. She has put her foot down about next year. None of her friends take lunch, so why should I force her to if she doesn’t want to? Eventually, one HT from Ohio wrote in explaining why she avoided lunch all through high school: "my high school cafeteria was like something out of The Lord of The Flies, and anyone who could avoid it, did." Of her cafeteria experience, the 9^th grader says, simply, that it's full of “drama.” 

Furthermore, since we live in a town that has its school schedule organized for the benefit of the all-important athletic teams that “need” to practice in the afternoons, high school starts at 7:30 a.m. and ends at 2:07 p.m., and not at the time that would most fit with adolescent development and support academic achievement. (Do NOT get me started on that.) The point is, the 9^th grader can have lunch slash snack when she gets home.

By the way, many of these kids take that extra period and use it for art or music, because they’re only allotted time in a regular schedule for one or the other, and this way they can take both. So it’s not as if it’s only the Type A tiger cubs who drop lunch.

Second of all, almost better than having something published was emailing with KJ Dell’Antonia about publishing it. After she accepted my initial essay, I decided I wanted to rewrite it, making it less flippant and self-deprecating, which doesn’t play well when Motherlode readers are ready with their comment-trigger-fingers. Subtlety doesn’t really work, as I’ve found on both occasions I’ve published in Motherlode. In fact, half the readers don’t even finish the piece, which I could tell this time, because they criticize me for being too invested, when I concluded by letting the 9^th grader make her own decision about her extra class. Yes, that little factoid eluded most readers. KJ told me she hashed out her response with her husband, who comes down a little closer to my side than she, and then it was a go. Still, she worried that she was “letting me out to hang,” because my piece was going to offend people who didn’t have ways or means of getting their children into top colleges. I could see that my piece hinged on my emotional conflict, while hers was a reasoned, logical argument, and therefore I would be blasted by people who didn't read the subtext, but I told her it was fine. I am all about conflict. So I put my head on the block and wham!

I am still here.

Highly Effective To The End

Ferriss and Covey. They are both bald.

Stephen Covey died July 16th.  I read it first on Facebook. A friend posted the news on my wall. I felt a pang of sadness and Googled the news. A brief article on CNN reported that he'd died, at 79, due to complications following a dreadful bike accident a few months ago. Must have been a difficult few months for him and his family. He died, the report said, surrounded by his wife, children, and grandchildren, as he'd always wanted.

Of course he did, I thought. Of course he managed to die the way he wanted to. He was Stephen Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. His Habit #2 is Start With the End in Mind. Literally, as I explained in this post. His last moments had to be successful. And they were.

This made me feel good.

I wondered what I could say about him besides, "Thank you for increasing my blog's page hits every time I mention you.  I've enjoyed poking fun at you, but I've also admired your willingness to put principles and values at the center of what you do."

But what else could I say? Then a friend of mine sent me Frank Bruni's article from yesterday's NYTimes. Frank Bruni, I recall, used to be a food critic. Now he's an op-ed pundit, which means that now, instead of food, he critiques whatever he wants. Fine. Bruni responds to an article in the Sunday Travel section about Tim Ferriss and the fancy clothes he takes when he travels, and the way he gets around rules to make life sweeter for him. Tim Ferriss, for those who live under a rock, is a lifestyle guru. His books, the 4-Hour Body and the 4-Hour Work Week, the latter with a subtitle about getting rich, have sold millions.

I am proud to say I've read none of them. However, I have read whatever the New Yorker has written about him, and I did see that Travel spread. As did Frank Bruni. And it pissed him off. Bruni pinpointed for outrage two travel tactics Ferriss adopts. The first: putting a starter pistol in his luggage, if he's going to have to check it, because any kind of gun in a suitcase will attract attention to it--and the airline will never lose it. (Don't do this on international travel or they'll try to lock you up with your suitcase--book possibility: the 4-Hour Interrogation). The second: instead of paying for airport parking, just let your car rack up parking tickets on the street. You'll pay less for the tickets than for the garage.

Okay, I'll admit it. I liked the jacket Ferriss was wearing, and until I realized who the article was about, I thought maybe I could afford one like it. I'll also admit that I thought the starter pistol in the suitcase was an audacious, but kind of funny, idea. Frank Bruni, however, set me straight, fulminating that sure, go ahead and cause concern and mayhem behind the scenes at the airport, as long as it benefits you. He says, "Don’t pay for airport parking, he [Ferriss] advised in The Times, if the accrued tickets from leaving your car on the street won’t be as expensive. Sure, you’re unlawfully hogging a space someone else might make legal use of; maybe you’re thwarting street sweepers, too. Not your problem. A conscience is for chumps." 


Readers, I was chastened. I was sorry I'd been amused. And I agree with Frank Bruni that Ferriss, guru of the year, has made millions off of the principle of getting the most for yourself, damn the consequences to others.

Can you imagine what Stephen Covey would say about him? Upon what are Ferriss's principles centered? Luckily for us, there's an appendix at the back of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People to help us. Covey lists about a dozen possible centers for your life--Friends, Spouse, Money, Family, Work--and the way these various centers can skew your values and therefore your behavior and your life.... A quick scan leads me to Self. If your self is your center, then your principles are centered on the need to justify anything that serves your best interest, and are "adapted to need." In other words, they are amorphous, flexible, and are therefore not really principles at all.

Covey's appendix continues with Church and Principles as other possible life centers. All of these possible principle-centers, according to Covey, lead us astray, except one. Principles. So even though he's a member of a church, Church is not the Covey-approved center for life. It's principles. Which is why, really, we can admire Covey, or hate him, but we can't say he's trying to shove his particular church, the Mormon one, into the center of our lives. He's aiming for something universal. This is the polar opposite of what Bruni describes as Ferriss's "epic narcissism."

As for Ferriss, I've already admitted I haven't read his books. I am responding to Frank Bruni's response to an article about him. Maybe Bruni is wrong about Tim. I doubt it, though. I am curious to see if, eventually, Tim Ferriss re-evaluates his life, and finds a principled Principle-center for it. In the meantime, I guess we've got Frank Bruni to help us. And he's not even bald yet. I wonder if he's read Stephen Covey? At least we've still got his book.

A Baker's Dozen Rules of Success

Otafuku, Goddess of Mirth

It's summer, or so I've heard, although the current weather in New York State suggests otherwise, and summer is a time to strip down: in clothing--to a single layer; in meals--to light fare; and in blog posts--to an easy-to-read list.

Here are 12 nuggets sifted from the many books I've read in the last few months, plus one extra, in a list.  And, readers, I dreamed it. Isn't that weird? That's only happened to me once before. I dreamed a poem, and then I sort of woke up, so I scribbled it down on a notepad. When I got up for real in the actual morning, it was just a line of gobbledygook, of course. Alas. My life might have taken a totally different course. (Possibly a terrible one--poets are usually obscure and earn very little dinero until they go out in a flame of tragedy, Billy Collins and Maya Angelou excepted. No thank you.)

1. Smile and be strategic. Think what you want to achieve from any transaction. (Dale Carnegie)
2. Build your goals around solid principles. (Stephen Covey)
3. Find people who believe in you to help you believe in yourself. (Noah St. John)
4. Shape your mind to support your goals through positive thinking, affirmations, or intentions. (Norman Vincent Peale and Everyone Else)
5. Focus on the present. (Carnegie and others)
6. Find time to meditate. (Deepak Chopra and others)
7. Make sure you rest. (Carnegie)
8. Develop a growth mindset—believe you have the capacity to change and improve. (Carol Dweck)
9. Choose goals that are difficult but achievable. (Heidi Grant Halvorsen)
10. Find work that is intrinsically rewarding: provides you with autonomy; provokes your desire for mastery; fills you with a sense of purpose because you're doing it to make a difference in the world. (Daniel Pink) 
11. Work that challenges and engages you will help you achieve Flow, which leads to   the feeling of satisfaction, happiness and success. (Czikszentmihaly)
12. Practice, practice practice, but practice wisely. Seek out coaches or mentors who can keep you working your edge. (Matthew Seyd and others)
13. Don’t worry about success, find meaningful work and do some good in the world.  (Real actual people I know who are successful)

Not bad. And the only mention of money was my own, in the second paragraph. Just saying....

Setting Goals: Heidi Grant Halvorsen, Ph.D., Tells Us How

http://3.bp.blogspot.com

I've been tormented since high school by a book called, If You Don't Know Where You're Going, You'll Probably End Up Someplace Else. We read it for a career seminar. Tormented, because I've spent a lot of time unsure where the hell I am going, and it has turned out to be true. It is also true that I didn't know until a couple of months ago that the title of that book is a quotation from Yogi Berra, who apparently, though I have never seen him, played some sort of sport and spoke in aphorisms.

So it is fitting, and probably no coincidence, that the first chapter of Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals, by Heidi Grant Halvorsen, Ph. D, is called "Do You Know Where You Are Going?" I suspect that Heidi Grant Halvorsen, Ph.D., learned that quote was by Yogi Berra before I did. Or she got that book in her high school's career seminar and lived a directed, goal-oriented life ever after. Which is one reason she has a Ph.D and I don't. 

However, this isn't about me, it's about goals. After swimming around in the soup of success-defining, it’s about time to get to something concrete. Goals. Goals and setting ‘em.  I think we can all agree that one definition of success is achieving goals. 

I’ve already posted once on Heidi Grant Halvorsen, Ph.D., former protegé and current colleague of Carol Dweck. As I mentioned then, the book has a lot in it, and I’m working on it. She writes well, and with humor. So maybe I ought to just quote extensively. Writing humorously about something someone else has already written about (somewhat) humorously, has proved challenging.

I am all for a challenge, though, readers, yes I am! I’m all for challenge, for difficult goals. Difficult, but attainable, goals. This is the ideal goal, readers. A difficult, but attainable goal. All right, all right. 

Okay, so onward, through part one of Heidi Grant Halvorsen, Ph.D’s book. As an aside, let me just say, that she has a good name. Symetrical, initial-wise, and rhythmical to say, which must be why I always write her whole name, instead of calling her “Halvorsen,” in faux-intelletual mode, or “Heidi,” in insulting familiar mode. And Ph.D. Well. 

Anyhoo. She starts out by talking about how goals that work are specific. (“Lose 5 lbs,” not “lose some weight.”) Goals that work are difficult, but realistic. And then, right on page 9, there’s a quiz you can take, to discover whether you tend to more abstract thinking about behavior, or more concrete. So I answered the questions. There were five of them, for example,

• locking a door is

a.     putting a key in the lock

b.     securing the house

After answering the questions—no wrong answers, just different ones, people—you score them. If  you get a 6 or higher, you tend to be more abstract. Each a or b has either 1 or 2 points assigned to it. Except for this last one,

• greeting someone is

a.     saying hello

b.     showing friendliness

For these answer scores,  a=2 and b=2³. Two cubed equals 8.

Why, I asked myself, did Heidi Grant Halvorsen, Ph. D., give this last answer this extra weight?

The husband was irritated by this quiz, by the way, because he felt it, as are most quizzes in books of these sorts, was leading.

So what about that 2³? I mean, you will almost certainly get a score of at least 6, if you answer all five questions.  Who wouldn’t? I suppose Heidi Grant Halvorsen,  Ph.D,. is having a little joke on us. A little in-joke, perhaps? A little in-joke for Ph.Ds in psychology—and anyone with a Master’s in Education, or a passing interest in child development—mayhap?

The answer to who wouldn’t get a score higher than six is someone who hasn’t passed the transition from concrete to abstract thought. Someone like my 10 year old daughter. Try it on yours, and let me know.

Come to think of it, it's impossible to score less than 6 on this quiz. Even if you pick answers with a score of 1 for the first four questions, the least points you can accrue in the fifth is 2. 1+1+1+1+2=a leading question. Hmmmm.

  

Let's return to the idea that a goal should be difficult, but not impossible. According to Heidi Grant H., Ph.D., people tend to do what’s expected of them, and not much more. So we ought to expect more and then we’ll get it. And when we expect more of ourselves, and surprise ourselves by achieving it, then we set up a “high-performance cycle,” (p. 7), which increases our motivation to keep on working towards difficult, but not impossible goals.

What does the abstract/concrete dichotomy have to do with this? H. G. Halvorsen, Ph. D, adds that abstract goals are why-focused, and concrete goals are what-focused. Well, apparently, we all tend to think about distant goals in abstract terms. Like, Hey, yeah, of course I want to enroll in that evening class to learn computer programming next summer—sign me up. For next summer.  When we’re more abstract, we’re more focused on the reasons why we want to do a particular thing. In the short term, we tend to be more concrete. This can work against us. Like, Hey, what do you mean I won a free course in computer programming and it starts day after tomorrow—no way, I can’t do it. I have to rearrange my manicure and find someone to watch the kids, and I’ll miss my Zumba class. So, no thanks.

As with most dichotomies, they have their ups and downs, and their plusses and minuses, and their uses and abuses. And here’s some advice, via HGH, Ph.D: once you have your difficult, but not impossible goal, you use your concrete skills to establish your first step.

You use your abstract abilities to motivate yourself—I’m going to learn computer programming so I can hack into ETS’s mainframe and screw up their standardized tests so our kids won’t have to waste so much time taking them next year. And you can use your concrete abilities to focus on the nitty-gritty—I’m going to take the subway to the bus to the elevator to the registration desk and sign up for that computer programming class tomorrow afternoon and then reward myself with a manicure.

You use your abstract, why-thinking, to keep you motivated towards a goal, and you use your concrete, what-thinking, to help you step-by-step through the challenges that arise in pursuit of that goal.

The upshot is you need both what-thinking and why-thinking. Because in setting future goals, we tend to be a little over-confident that we will have the time and the energy and the motivation. Like, after just one computer class I’ll be able to hack into the Educational Testing Service’s computers. It’ll probably take more than one.  So we need our concrete what-thinking to help us see that we’re going to actually need a whole degree before we can hack into the mainframe, and a degree starts with a single credit, so let’s get this show on the road. 

Is Success High Concept?

Well, yes and no. After all, in some respects, success is simple to define: achievement of aims, whether they be material or intellectual, monetary or hallucinatory. What's the big deal? Why even bother to examine it? When you do examine it, however, you find the word can open up into a real umbrella concept.  Therein lies the fun.

http://school.discoveryeducation.com/clipart/images/unbrella.gif

So, after that brief pause to justify myself to you, my scores (possibly that is a misleading descriptor, but let's stick with it for now) of readers, let me move onward under my umbrella!

Carol Dweck's book Mindset is high concept. That means you can sum up her idea in a sentence or two. I am very proud of myself for learning this term, lo these two decades ago, and finally being able to use it. So, as I mentioned in a previous post,  her idea is that achieving and sustaining success and feeling successful depends on whether you have a fixed or a growth mindset. People with fixed mindsets feel that intelligence and personality are established genetically and are pretty stable throughout life, while people with growth mindsets believe that these traits are improvable, influenced by effort.

I liked her book. It was easy to digest. Growth is better. You can change your mindset from fixed to growth. She tells you how. Bam. Done.

Then there's her former student, now her colleague, Heidi Grant Halvorsen, and her book Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals. 


Ah-ha, I said when I saw it, because not only is it another book by a woman (thanks be I found another one after that disastrous side-expedition into Florence Scovel Shinn), but also, yes, Goals. In all my researching, goal-reaching has become a very theoretical prospect. You know, establishing values and principals (S. Covey, et. al.) and it might just be time to get back down to some practicalities. Also, ah-ha, because a protege of Carol Dweck ought to be nice and high-concept herself. Perfect for a blog post. Perfect for a boggled mind. Perfect for we of the short attention spans.

Alas, Heidi Grant Halvorsen's book is a wee more involved than I'd hoped. Indeed, I'm only part of the way through it. Granted, I've been to a reunion, had that thing published in that paper, and read several other books, including Fat Men From Space by Daniel Pinkwater for my mother-daughter book club. It, too, was high-concept: don't eat too much sugar. Then again, if the main character hadn't had that cavity, that invasion from outer space wouldn't have happened. So maybe that's not so high concept after all. And I've been digging into Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman, which uses the word I hate most in the English language (heuristic) so many times in the first section that I had to hyperventilate and recover with a novel by Heidi Julavitz. I also had to administer David Copperfield, not possible to swallow at once.

So I've digressed. However, I'm here to say that Halvorsen's book has some interesting tidbits to ponder. So far, she points out that having thoughts or wishes or general goals for the future is not the same as having goals. Goals are concrete things you can work towards. Furthermore, contrary to what many of the self-help books say, all the confidence in the world won't assure you'll reach your goal. You need self-control. Furthermore, self-control is affected by use: if you expend a lot of it avoiding eating a marshmallow sitting in front of you, then you might not have a lot left to apply to your dissertation. Luckily, you, and by you I mean we, can develop more self-control, and figure out how to use it wisely. We can learn how to set appropriate goals, and in general, learn how to succeed.

That was just the introduction, my scores of readers. In the very first part of chapter one she says we must set goals that are specific, and difficult. Not impossible, but difficult.

So you can see that this is going to be a multi-step investigation. Not at all high-concept. But I will help you through it. My first goal is to finish the book. No, wait, that is not a difficult goal. How about: finish the book and explain it wittily without eating several handfuls of chocolate covered almonds every time I sit down to it.

Now that's a goal I can work towards. Crunch.

Sink that Putt: Perception and Success

Did you know that if you hold a gun, even a plastic toy gun, you are more likely to assume that someone you see is holding one, too?

If this isn't an argument for gun control, I don't know what is. George Zimmerman was holding a gun, so this made it more likely that he'd think Trayvon Martin's pack of skittles was a gun than if he'd been holding a cup of coffee.

But I'm not here to talk about Trayvon Martin, as disgusting as that situation is.

How to Live: Inventing on Principle, Part II

image via Creative Commons

Worldly success is incidental for the successful. That was how I ended my last post. How noble. How sublime. How true.

Yet everyone who says this has worldly success. I mean, maybe lots of other people say it, too, and they have no worldly success. We don't hear them. Or if we do, we don't really believe them when they claim there are more important things to life than worldly success.

But these successful people who deflect the question of worldly success have my ear because of their, uh, worldly success. It's great to know they have these underlying principles. But to implement them, they need a little cash. Cash-olla. Cash flow. Le money.

Which reminds me of a recent article in the New Yorker about a positive rash of books on success being published in China. Most of these books are about--everyone, all together now--climbing the corporate ladder, getting rich, getting powerful, getting WORLDLY SUCCESS. These things have been pumped out to the people for a few years now, instilling the values of getting ahead and the principle of every person for his- or herself. The standard model of success.

I'm not linking to this article because I can't remember my password to my online New Yorker account and I'm too lazy to figure it out. So trust me when I tell you this.

The author (Leslie T. Chang, if you want to look it up on YOUR online accounts, my dozens of readers) points out that the Chinese rash of pulling-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps books parallel a similar surge in American books of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries here in the USA. Horatio Alger books, for example, all about making it in the working world. The standard model of success.

Yes, well, there was a lot of poverty around then, and a lot of people needed to accumulate a basic level of comfort. So it made sense. And it makes sense in China, too.

But once the standard of living rose to a pretty decent level for most people in the US, the tone and tenor of these books changed. The self-helpers started urging the self-helpees to remember that there is more to life than work and making money.  People started to realize that the principles of getting ahead extolled in these up-by-your-bootstraps stories don't foster the best in people. It's hard to switch gears from scramble-up-the-ladder-gear to make-the-world-better-for-everyone else gear until you have some basic amenities, though. Yet the gear always does change.

And according to this article in the New Yorker, there's a faint note of the same refrain sounding now in China.

I'd say that people like Bret Victor and his ilk are playing that tune loud and clear. But it hard to have principles other than earning money unless you have some.

I'm not saying they're wrong. I'm saying they're right. I'm saying there's more to success than money. But first you need some money to believe it.

Highly Effective Habit # 1: Be Proactive

After my last post, I was all set to make fun of my next book's title, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, by Stephen R. Covey, because, who is he kidding? He's saying "effective," but meaning "Successful," and success means.....etc., etc., etc. Please see my previous post, etc, etc, and we are simply talking in euphemisms.

That was going to be the gist of my argument. Except a couple of my tens of readers, the husband and my faithful reader Scrollwork,* commented that I seemed to have overlooked a wee part of the dictionary's definition of success. The part of the definition that says that success, n., is the achievement of intention; the achievement of something desired, planned, or attempted.

Hmm. Well, yes, now that I look a little more closely, I have to admit they are right. And that this definition does not actually have anything to do with wealth, status, or money per se. That I overlooked this aspect of the definition says a lot more about my mindset than anything else, I suppose. Or about my reading comprehension skills.

So I am forced to face up to Stephen R. Covey and his 7 Habits  and not make fun of his so-called euphemism. I am forced to admit that Effective can actually be a synonym for Successful. And I am forced to examine more than the title of this book, which several reputable people who aren't at all pretentious have recommended to me.

Why make fun of it in the first place, you might ask? It is an international bestsellar, after all. 

Why? Because I'm intimidated, of course. 

This is one of those daunting books that say, Look, here are 7 simple rules for being successful, and all you have to do is all this scary stuff about evaluating yourself and your behavior and your values and your principles, your goals, your motivations, your psychological hangups, and pretty much everything else that your life has been carefully constructed to obscure -- and you have no chance of really understanding without therapy.

But it costs about $16 plus tax, and one session with a paid professional is at least 10 times that, so--might as well give it a shot.

Habit #1: Be Proactive

Be pro-active, as opposed to re-active. Take charge of your behavior. Don't let things happen to you because you are passive.

This habit is about concentric circles...

http://www.ansci.umn.edu/dairy/dinews/10-1circle.jpg

Your circle of concern is all the stuff that is on your mind, and the smaller circle is the stuff over which you  have some control. So you worry about global warming, but you can't control that. What you can do is drive less and walk more. Or you worry that you're going to get all flabby and old and wrinkly and then die; but what you can do is starve yourself, get Botox, and exercise like hell. And eventually die.

So focus on today (Geesh, this sounds familiar), and what you can do today to further your goals. Like make that appointment for that Botox.

Some things within your Circle of Influence: yourself; being happy; being a good listener; admitting mistakes; setting goals and following through.

Some things within your Circle of Concern: the weather; mistakes; other people's flaws and annoying habits.

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdLoZhpqyiSkOS9ysmfsqW0sg_zhdSCWaOhyphenhypheno-HmO2c9XzNdSgOdYLaqmp62oJylbD4THlsT8khBl931qMVEQstCcLni8aiO2IHNC-0NcVWC16V0TIdHvOe73LyRous_2ghSliUAp2YLFE/s1600/flood+001.jpg

Covey has a nice coda to his chapter, a little lesson about a stick. On p.21 he says, "'When we pick up one end of the stick, we pick up the other.'"  He means that you can choose your response to a situation, but you can't choose the consequence. The consequence is outside our Circle of Influence. There's no way around this, he says. If you cut off the end of the stick, you've still got two ends, the one you're holding, and the other one, the consequence, that you can't control.

So this is a nice way to try to deal with control: that which you can control, that which you can't. The truth is that there's not too much you can actually control, beyond your own responses. (And some of those are involuntary.) Which realization is quite anxiety-provoking, don't you think? 

And anxiety is at the root of it all, whether you're a nail-biter or a control freak. Anxiety is just another way of trying to control the uncontrollable, through such magical thinking as, If I worry obsessively about every single thing that could go wrong, then nothing will go wrong. But if I forget just one little thing, all bets are off. 

So I'm afraid to say it, but the best thing to do here is to take deep breath and try to relax, then make a choice, and then another breath and another choice. That is within your Circle of Influence.

The good news, according to Covey, is that the more proactive you are in your life, the larger your Circle of Influence becomes.

http://www.womensownresource.org/rope/images

And also, if you have a dog, you can toss the stick to him, and he'll chew it to bits.

*Scrollwork, by the way, has an Etsy shop where she sells fantastical, "upcycled" clothes that, if I were 25 years younger and lived farther east, or south, or definitely west, I'd be happy to pair with some Dr. Martens and wear dancing.

Suggestible

The inevitable moment has arrived. I've collected a small stack of self-help books on Success. I had to, after all. Research. The thing is, I'm not sure I'm ready for them. I'm afraid.

What if, when I open them, I discover that everything I'm writing about has already been written in them? More important, what if, when I read them, I learn that I actually possess some quality that would eliminate the possibility of my success. What if I fail the checklists? I know they're going to tell me I have to have faith in myself, or some similar pablum. Well, hello? Need I say more?

And then there's the other fear, the one I really don't want to admit to my tens of readers. The fear that after reading these books, I will become an INSUFFERABLE self-promoter with a falsely inflated ego. You see, I am suggestible. I know that. I've read some self-help books in my time. Louise Hay? I've affirmed. Julia Cameron? I've tried to believe in G.O.D. and ask the universe for whatever I need.

Once, I borrowed a guided relaxation/self-improvement tape from a housemate who was relentlessly pursuing escape from herself. In the tape, I had to picture myself in a lovely place, yadda yadda, picture myself relaxing in a comfy seat in this lovely place, yadda yadda. Then I had to imagine a young child coming into view, approaching my maturer self, and offering a gift to the older me. The tape told me to accept this gift. Well, I pictured, for some reason, the young child handing me a gold ring, and then, although the tape didn't tell me to, swallowing it. Strange, I thought, I am swallowing this symbolic gift from my symbolic inner child. Hmmm.

Nevertheless, I felt one hundred percent relaxed afterwards.

Later on that day, I told a friend who happened to be a very religious Christian about this experience. She said that I had to be careful with these sorts of visions, because the Devil can come to people that way.

Now I don't believe in the Devil, but I am suggestible. I was disturbed enough by her reaction to mention it to the professional I was then seeing twice a week. Dr. B, a nice, Jewish professional in a beautiful house in Weston, MA, laughed--laughed, at me-- and said, "You're very suggestible."  If your shrink tells you that, you know it's true.

So am I ready for Dale Carnegie and that guy who wrote The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People? I think I have more prep work on my own definition before I swallow theirs.