Monday #26: Values Clarification

A couple months ago I introduced you to Todd Kashdan, social scientist and author of Curious? Discover The Missing Ingredient to a Fulfilling Life. Reading this book, I’m impressed by how convincing Kashdan is when he makes the point that much of what zaps the meaning from our sense of self, our our work and our relationships with others can be considered a basic lack of curiosity. When we think of curiosity, I daresay we define it as an outward view of the world and of others. Curiosity is often regarded as a wonderment of the world outside ourselves. Kashdan feels that true curious people, however, are as interested in what’s going on inside themselves as they are in the world they occupy. What’s more, curious people can identify and honor their own personal values.

Talking about values is ubiquitous in our lives when we discuss important stuff like family, work and education– especially in an election year! Values are the bedrock of all the things that we strive for to make our lives better and it is generally assumed that, if we have more good values, we will be better liked by others– and this is not entirely untrue. But, in Curious? Kashdan approaches the notion of values as a tool for self-discovery and, through identifying them, as a way for the individual to gain insight into what drives and motivates him/her in all the things we do in the world.

With an alphabetical listing of common values, readers are encouraged to identify their personal top ten values and to then prioritize them into most important, very important and least important. He implies that we often go through life without consideration for our true values and how they influence our decisions and our actions.  Knowing our values makes it easier to make decisions about what direction to move in and “adds layers of meaning to any activity when we can connect our behavior to cherished values.” Keeping a list like this in our midst provides us with a “map” to get back on track when we feel unmoored and validates us when we worry about whether we are being truly authentic.

In doing my own values inventory I was relieved to find some of my deepest beliefs and ideas defined as values, but I was also struck by the sense of guilt I felt for choosing some values that seemed more shallow and selfish than others. I would imagine that this feeling comes from close encounters with people in my life who don’t share the same values that I do which, of course, shines a light on these relationships and lends new insight as to why our interactions with each other are the way they are. When you identify the ten values that occupy your being–truly occupy your heart and soul– you realize that the people and places you find yourself with can either complement or conflict with what is actually the very fiber of your being. You can find Kashdan’s list of values at the end of this post. Look over them for yourself, think about what you feel is most important for you, not what you want others to think about you… what is it that makes you tick? What are the values that you feel truly define you? Circle your ten, prioritize them and then contemplate what this might mean for your interactions in the world at large.

TRY THIS WEEK: Value your values. They are YOU.

Kashdan Values As A Catalyst

Monday #25: Lookie Here

A few weeks ago, a friend texted me this picture and asked me to guess what it was. I love optical illusions and games like this so I took a few guess-what-this-is shots of my morning today.

I was pretty close to being right about the picture my friend sent me but it got me thinking about my life as, primarily, a visual person and ways that what we see affects how we learn. I have always been better at understanding things I can see in colors and shapes and I pride myself on being able to visualize things– a painting, an object that needs to be assembled or fixed and things like home renovations and room arrangements– I can see possible solutions in my imagination. I don’t, however, do well with lists of instructions or recipes and prefer to watch someone do something and then attempt to do it from what I’ve seen and heard.

Social scientists have broken down the types of learners into three, main categories: visual, auditory and kinesthetic. Visual learners remember faces but forget names, dream vividly and often in color, have good spatial sense and, as a result, a good sense of direction. Auditory learners remember names well, enjoy sounds and music and typically sing or play an instrument, use rhyme and sound in learning and visualize better with background sounds. Kinesthetic learners use their bodies and sense of touch to gather information about the world around them, appreciate textures, use large body and hand gestures to communicate and think of issues, ideas and problems while exercising.

Further categorizations of learning styles are verbal, logical, social and solitary and most people are a combination of all these categories with one stronger tendency leading the way. Classrooms, unfortunately, still tend to favor auditory learners and scorn kinesthetic learners who simply cannot sit still. Learning styles have huge implications on how students learn, particularly if the teacher’s own learning style is in opposition.

So, what is the picture my friend sent me? It’s the oil circles that formed in a pan of water after it was used to fry breakfast sausage. Think it looks like modern art? Hmmm. Not sure but it makes for a good visual puzzle. My morning close-ups were some ripening bananas, my range top, backsplash tile, a floating tea bag, a boiling pot of chili for tonight’s dinner and the salt residue on my car. Take out your camera phone the next time you see something that, when looked at up close, appears gloriously abstract and see if anyone can guess what it is. At the very least, they will turn on a part of their brains trying to figure it out. Have a great week, friends!

TRY THIS WEEK: Keep your eyes open for beautiful and unexpected patterns in your world.

Monday #24: Finding Balance

When it comes to the aspects of your life that require figuring out, do you think of everything all at once and find yourself feeling overwhelmed? I have to admit that, for all my emphasis on creative thinking, sometimes I do. Thankfully, I have several amazing people in my life who talk me off the ledges of my anxiety, who remind me that problems can be solved one step at a time and that mulling over all of one’s worries at one time never really solves anything at all.

But, in the middle of a personal crisis, it can seem like everything in the world is going wrong and that things are insurmountable. This morning I was thinking about the ways that we are either effective or ineffective at dealing with the adversity in our lives. To me, it seems to be all about balance. I’m sure you’ve woken up in an emotional funk, right? Emotional funks are a pain in the neck because they can come out of nowhere and, what drives me the most crazy is that they can come at you right behind a wave of high emotional bliss. Tackling an emotional funk is a highly personal thing and one person’s tonic can be another person’s black hole.

Here is what I know about regaining balance when stress and anxiety creep in:

• Take a breath. Perhaps the best way to stop your mind from going into overload is to stop and take a breath. Acknowledge the day, your body, your vision, where you are standing in place and time. In a life so full of hurrying, we should really do this more often but especially when stress is present. Simply pause in the place where you are to take inventory of what your five senses are receiving.
• Connect. Being in your own head isn’t always the best place to be. Connecting with others is a surefire way to crawl out of a dark corner in your mind. Try calling someone you care about and asking them about their life or their day. Finding out what is going on with others is the perfect antidote to wallowing in our own thoughts and it strengthens the relationships that enrich our lives.
• Move. And do it outside in the world! Stress often makes us feel like we don’t want to do anything at all. It makes us tired and lethargic. Fight the urge to do nothing and do what you can whether it’s running ten, crazy miles or taking a short walk around your neighborhood. Get the blood flowing, breathe deeply and expand your lungs, notice the world outside your door. Say hello to a passerby.
• Do one thing. I know there’s a million things on your LIST. And, if your to-do list is like mine, you know you can never accomplish it all in a day, a week or maybe even a month. So, pick one thing that you can do today and do it. Whether it’s making a phone call or writing an email that you’ve been putting off or something that requires leaving the comfort of your daily routine, just do it. Then, take a pen and cross it off your list. Tomorrow, start on another thing.
• Be grateful. There’s a lot of talk about gratitude these days but study after study continues to show that regardless of a person’s level of adversity, those who can find true gratitude in their lives tend to reap a whole host of benefits from personal well being to professional success. It’s hardest to be grateful when you feel like nothing is going your way but these moments of thankfulness can be the points that form a path forward out of our own emotional funk.

Recently, I’ve started getting a subscription from the folks over at the Daily Good, a great website committed to publishing inspiring news. Each day I get a themed collection of daily good in my inbox–an essay, an article and a quote. Today’s quote was from Anais Nin.

“It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see.”

I like the idea of renewed perception as the cure for familiarity because it says to me that, sometimes, we can get our balance back just by doing things a little bit differently. How do you get your balance back, friends?

TRY THIS WEEK: Striking the balance.

Monday #23: Food Ideas, Anyone?

With Alice Waters in Pasedena at the AHS Symposium.

I love food. I love to eat it, make it, think about it, read about it, and talk about it with other people. I’m one of those people who believes that a good dinner party with family or friends is akin to a religious experience and who craves the ambiance and vibe of my favorite, noisy and bustling restaurants. For years, I have been the primary person in my home who buys the food, prepares the food and serves the food. Sometimes this can be a chore, as you might know if you are also this person, and often I am less than inspired when it comes to thinking up something to make, but I would be lying if I said that these meals weren’t the moments that punctuate the passage of each and every one of my days.

Once upon a time, I got more than a couple of those recipe swap chain letters in the mail. I participated in one or two but I don’t think I ever got the 24 recipes that I was promised for playing along and I’m sure that I don’t remember loving and using all the recipes that I did receive. I’ll admit that now, when I get those recipe swap chain emails, I delete them. Sorry, guys. I prepare a homemade meal nearly every single night but, for the most part, I have a serious problem with recipes–even though I love to watch cooking shows, and even though I am an avid reader of cooking columns and a surfer of food web sites. I think of myself as more a gatherer of food ideas and, when I prepare a meal, I use ingredients I have on hand, I don’t measure things out exactly, and I try to keep things simple. I’m also a rather frugal cook when it comes to the day to day–my ideal price point for a weeknight dinner is to average $10-15 for four people with some nights, like pasta or bean nights coming in at much less and others coming in at more. I buy meats and fish that are on sale and I always look for ways to turn leftovers into future meals.

A couple of weeks ago, the Times reviewed a new book by Tamar Adler called An Everlasting Meal. Adler took her own experience of a war time cookbook from 1942 called, How To Cook A Wolf, and translated it into a 21st century guide to cooking instinctively within a budget. Her belief is that many of us don’t cook because we’ve been lead to believe that cooking has to complicated to be good. If you go to her book’s Amazon page, you can scroll down to a wonderful little video about her philosophy of food and cooking. I also ran across a great little section in the fitness & nutrition section of the Times called Recipes For Health that breaks down cooking ideas into an index of individual ingredients so that you can get ideas for the things you actually have in your refrigerator right now.

A good friend of mine who is trying to eat healthier and save money by preparing more meals at home recently asked me for some of my food ideas. I have found that it’s actually a little difficult to approach this in a how-to fashion because so much of what I do is simply intuitive for me by now. Years of working in restaurants during college and a collection of foodie friends has turned me into someone who feels at ease in the kitchen with just the fewest ingredients but that’s not always easy to deliver in a how-to way. My tastes lean toward Mediterranean and I frequently employ a tomato, onion and garlic combination with just about everything. I also rely heavily on beans and like a Mexican flair with lots of spicy heat. I will happily take on a simple stir-fry but I do not cook traditional Asian and I do not generally make complicated desserts (I stick to pies and “rustic” fruit tarts or basic cookies) because there are too many steps and too many things that can go wrong. By no means do I always get it all right and I have been presented, on many occasions, with the mom-you-didn’t-quite-hit-the-mark-tonight look. But, when working in my comfort zone of ingredients, I can usually pull off a great meal without having to take an extra trip to the supermarket.

So, I thought it would be fun to share pantry staples and food ideas! Because, while I plan to go out and buy Adler’s book, I feel the same way about cooking as I do about teaching–often the best ideas are the ones next door to you. What are the items could you not be without in your refrigerator or pantry and how do you make the most out of your meals? Even if you have just one idea, please share it here!

Here are some of my favorite food ideas:

• Tomatoes: Fresh are wonderful for salads, salsas and sandwiches but I always keep several cans of diced tomatoes, no salt added, to use in sauces for roasted meats or to stir into a vegetable sautee. Recently I made a tapenade out of black olives, capers, garlic, red wine, olive oil, and 4 anchovy filets–you whir this all up in a small food processor or a “Magic Bullet” gadget which you can pick up at a place like Walmart for very little money and which will make cooking all kinds of things so much better. I laid out boneless, skinless chicken thighs (you could also use bone in, or breasts, or whatever you want) in an oven dish, poured the tapenade over the chicken and then topped it with a can of diced tomatoes and baked, covered, on 375F for 45 minutes. The chicken was delicious and I used the leftover sauce to marinade another batch of chicken the next night, which was even tastier after all the flavors melded. Canned tomatoes can create a simple and delicious sauce for pasta with just garlic, salt, pepper and a little parmesan cheese and are an easy go-to when your cupboard is bare.
• Eggs: I love anything that you can do with an egg and my crew loves basic breakfast for dinner, but I find omlettes to be one of the most elegant things to prepare for a simple and healthy dinner because you can take any leftover you have–meat, legume or vegetable–and add cheese (or not) to create a hearty, inexpensive meal from scrambled eggs. Serve with rice, pasta or a nice slice of bread and you have perfection. The other thing I like to do with eggs is to plop them (fried, over easy) onto a salad for a lunch or a light dinner. If you prepare your salad with all your ingredients on a plate, sprinkle with dried herbs (I like an “Italian” blend) a nice balsamic vinegar or squeeze lemon all over it, you can fry an egg in olive oil and slide the whole thing onto your salad so that the hot oil drizzles right in.
• Dried Beans: I make beans about once a week, usually black beans. You soak them overnight and then commit to watch them for about two hours while they cook on low-medium heat, not allowing them to burn. My standard seasoning to the water is lots of cumin, onion powder, garlic powder, oregano and some red pepper flakes. That’s it. I serve them with brown rice, salsa and cheese, I put them on corn tortillas with grilled chicken or shrimp and fresh tomatoes, cilantro and lime, and then I use them the next day for a soup by adding chopped onion, celery and carrots with low sodium chicken broth.
• Veggies: My favorite veggies to have on hand are spaghetti squash (cut in half, scoop out middle, bake skin side up on an oiled baking sheet for 45 min. on 375F), greens for sauteeing (broccoli rabe is my favorite… dunk into boiling water bath for 2 minutes and then transfer to sautee pan with olive oil and garlic… I also like kale and spinach), broccoli and cauliflower (wash and chop, drizzle with oil, like a prepared “basting oil,” and put in a hot oven at 425F for about 15 minutes, top with parmesan cheese for extra yumminess), and eggplant (skin, chop and sautee with olive oil, garlic and any other veggies, particularly zucchini and tomatoes). If you make big batches of roasted or sauteed vegetables, leftovers can be added to omlettes, soups or pasta sauces the next day. White and red wine are a standard in my sauteed foods for deglazing the pan, vegetables or meats. Cooking wines are OK but inexpensive table wine is even better… all the Yellow Tail varieties, for example, are just fine and you can enjoy a glass while you are cooking!
• Brown Rice: I like to have a batch of brown rice for the week. I serve it as a side to my mains, sprinkle it on a salad for extra heft, add it to soups, toss it into a pan of scrambled eggs for a fritatta effect or, recently, create “rice bowls” out of leftover cooked meats, chopped lettuce or greens, sliced vegetables and cheese. Squeeze with a lemon and drizzle with oil. My kids even like brown rice reheated in a microwave with margarine, salt & pepper and parmesan cheese for an afternoon snack.
• Polenta: Buy the kind in a box that you make with water, not the formed tubes. I sometimes use polenta under the black beans instead of rice, or pat out into little patties that are baked with vegetables and cheese like little polenta pizzas. You can even oil these patties and put them on a grill to serve as a starchy side.

My refrigerator and pantry always have pasta, rice, canned tomatoes, capers, olives, jarred garlic, black beans, red/white cooking wines, chicken broth, onions, lemons, olive oil, a good vinegar (red wine or balsamic), dried oregano and basil, onion powder, cumin, red pepper flakes, bread crumbs (for sprinkling on baked meats and fish), a basic cheese like provolone or cheddar, parmesan cheese, lettuce and greens, in season fruits and vegetables and a nice loaf of bread. Gadgets I can’t be without are my mini food processor, my baking stone and a veggie chopper I got from Pampered Chef. I also like having a panini press because it makes any sandwich into a hot, grilled delicious meal. I am a huge soup maker and will take just about anything and throw it into a soup kettle and serve with a nice loaf of bread for dinner. I buy meats on sale and then freeze them and I purchase sale fish once a week or more and generally broil or bake with a basic olive oil/lemon/white wine baste. In the heat of the summer, I will serve a dinner of fruit salad topped with vanilla yogurt and a salad or even a nice cheese and bread with a salad. I always make more than what the meal calls for so that leftovers can be eaten the next day for lunch or dinner and then stretched into new combinations after that.

Preparing good food is a wonderful way to be creative and I’d love to hear what you do in your kitchen, friends! Leave a comment so that we can all share FOOD IDEAS!

TRY THIS WEEK: Make up something new for dinner!

Monday #22: Happiness Is Easier Than You Think

When I have a problem to solve, I become a muller. A ruminator. I try to think of every possible outcome and how I will deal with it. I imagine elaborate scenarios in my mind, down to little details, I script conversations and I develop plans… Plan A, Plan B, etc., in an attempt to understand and be in control of what will happen so that I, and anyone else involved, will be closer to the seductive win-win. But doing this takes up a heck of a lot of creative energy and thought time and, while it might be part of this Type A leaning disposition of mine, it probably doesn’t get me any closer to the win-win– to happiness. In fact, there’s scientific proof that it doesn’t.

Harvard social psychologist, Dan Gilbert (also known as Dr. Happiness), has spent his life researching happiness, specifically as it relates to personal choice and the often unexpected outcomes of life. He calls the type of ruminating and predicting that we do affective forecasting. After a series of events that tried his ability to cope, the death of a mentor, the end of a marriage and academic issues with his son, it occurred to Gilbert that while his whole understanding of what had just happened implied he should be devastated, he was actually coping and “moving on.” He wondered if it’s possible that our human predictions, our affective forecasting, of how we will respond to extreme stress could be inaccurate? And, if this is true, why? Why do we spend so much time trying to predict how we will feel about something that hasn’t happened yet and why are we often so wrong when we do?

In the past 2 million years, the human brain has tripled in size. Over this time, inside these big brains of ours, a new part developed–the prefrontal cortex–which would separate us from any other living creature. Simply put, the prefrontal cortex is an experience simulator. It’s what’s I’m using while involved in my Plan A and Plan B exercises and it’s also what’s being used when, for example, we look at a menu and decide what we want to order because we can imagine what is being described accurately enough to know whether or not we would want to eat it.

The problem with the simulator is that it works rather badly, being subject to something called the impact bias. In a fascinating TED talk, Gilbert illustrates this point by comparing two case studies: the person who wins the lottery and the person who becomes paraplegiac. Given the choice between choosing these two outcomes, nearly everyone would choose the lottery over the loss of their legs, however, when studied one year later, these two case studies actually reveal individuals with equal levels of happiness. In a Times interview, Gilbert states that humans, in general, tend to experience an emotional baseline of 75 on the 1-100 scale of personal happiness. The impact bias, then, basically ensures that good outcomes will not actually be as good as we think they are and, perhaps more importantly, that the bad outcomes we stress over will not affect us as profoundly as we fear. In fact, the human tendency is to always assume greater impact from things that are forecasted to have a negative outcome. We err on negativity. But, Gilbert says that we humans do not understand the extent to which we are wildly resilient.

“Because,” says Gilbert, “Happiness can be synthesized.” That’s right, when it’s missing, we make it! And we don’t even know we do it. He likens it to a psychological immune system whereby humans, primarily unconsciously, change their views of the world in order to make themselves feel better about the world in which they live. Natural happiness is what we get and is the kind that is more or less stumbled upon; synthetic happiness is what we make out of what we get. Synthetic happiness is as real as natural happiness and it generally turns out better than we could have imagined.

The experiment that Gilbert uses to show how synthetic happiness is created is one where subjects were shown six art prints by Claude Monet. Participants were asked to arrange the art works in the order they liked them best, from one to six. After they ranked the art, they were told that they would receive one of the prints as compensation but that only (their) choices numbers 3 and 4 were available, and that they could only have one. As one would predict, all subjects chose their third choice over their fourth because, of course, they liked it better. Later, when asked to rank the same six art works again, number 3 shifted to the number 2 position and number 4 to the fifth position. What they got was now perceived as better while what they did not was perceived as lesser.

What’s the takeaway? In a short video on Big Think, Gilbert gives a great synopsis of his theory of happiness and how it relates to the trendy “present moment living” movement and “mindfulness,” which he regards as the mindsets of mosquitoes and toasters.

We are remarkable in our ability to adjust and adapt to almost any situation but we seem not to know this about ourselves and so we mistakenly predict that good things will make us happy for a long time and bad things will slay us and, by and large, both of these things are untrue. But forecasting for the future is how we live happy lives… our ability to look into the future and think about what will make us the most happy is the way that we get to a present that pleases us. I don’t see these things as being at odds, I see them going hand in hand.

I don’t believe that I will stop my ruminating any time soon but Gilbert’s assessment gives me pause to contemplate the ways that fear and anxiety can consume the problem-solving mind and create negativity where it need not be created. And, perhaps knowing about, and trusting in, our own capacity to navigate through the rough terrain of our lives is actually one step closer to true happiness.

TRY THIS WEEK: Think about the big picture.

Monday #21: Healthy Thoughts

When I am stumped for a Monday Blog topic, I often turn to health and fitness. During the first year of this blog, my post on the beginning of my running habit was the most read post and I think that it can probably be said that many of my posts relate to the health of the mind and the spirit. Living on the east coast, I am a Times reader and one of the ways I consume news is to hit up the Top 10 list that is constantly being updated on the home page. There is rarely a day that goes by when there isn’t at least one fitness (body or mind) story in the list. Last week, everyone and their brother was reading an article on the physical pitfalls of yoga (hey, I like yoga alright but, truthfully, reverse warrior never feels good to me) and, today, the number seven slot is occupied by an interesting column on anxiety. People may not always do the right things to be fit, but we sure do like to think about it.

And, despite the fact that the horrible Friday song by Rebecca Black dominated search engines for the better part of a year, I was thrilled to stumble upon the Times’ roundup for the top health articles for 2011. I love the Health section at the Times and I always find a fascinating blend of information on mind and body fitness there as well as a wealth of ideas for eating and cooking. Last year, top diet searches revolved around lower carb, higher protein intake, hot themes were meditation, self-compassion and exercise in middle age and beyond. Stories on our personal relationships were very popular, with an article called The Happy Marriage is the ‘Me’ Marriage coming in as the all time top read article of the Times for 2011.

Yes, I was a little stumped for today’s blog and I will admit that if not for my little pop-up reminder, I might have completely forgotten it was Monday! But, thinking and living healthy is always a good thing. Feed your mind on some of these great articles this week, Friends. Be well.

TRY THIS WEEK: Think about the ways you live healthy.

Monday #20: Speaking In Metaphors

Hello, Friends… I’m speaking in metaphors today. I’ve chosen five words– they’re my five words for 2012– and I’ve waved the wand of figurative language over them. I’m sharing them with you and inviting you to find your own five words for 2012! And, feel free to use mine.

TRY THIS WEEK: Find the figurative language in your life.