What Makes Us Happy?

New studies are finding the keys to contentment. Some people who seem to have all the raw materials for happiness–looks, money, success, and love–seem perpetually glum.

The answer is not good fortune. Psychologists have known for decades that even winning the lottery won’t make a person happier over the long haul. People simply adapt. Think of what happened when you got your last raise: Odds are, you felt great for the first few paychecks but soon adjusted to it, and now you may be back to feeling underpaid. Such observations have led researchers to conclude that each of us has a set point for happiness–a level of contentment that stays constant through changing circumstances, such as the loss of loved ones or winning big bucks. If this all sounds a bit depressing, take heart. Recent breakthrough research shows we can make ourselves happier–and how to do it.

The Science of Happiness
Some of the most exciting research in psychology is in a field called positive psychology, a discipline that aims not just to relieve suffering but also to increase happiness. For the past 6 years, Martin E. P. Seligman, PhD, and his colleagues have been working to unlock the secrets of living the good life. Seligman, founding director of the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Authentic Happiness, has found that the key to happiness appears to lie in our internal qualities and character strengths, not in external events. What’s more, he says, we can use these qualities–work with them and enhance them–to make ourselves happier over the long run.

A couple of years ago, Seligman’s group described and classified the 24 character strengths that make people thrive, including creativity, curiosity, bravery, and kindness. But all these traits aren’t equal when it comes to producing satisfaction. Combing through questionnaire responses from more than 5,000 study participants, the researchers found that happiness was most strongly associated with a core subset of the character-trait list that they labeled heart strengths: gratitude, hope, zest, and the ability to love and be loved. Topping the charts was love, says Nansook Park, PhD, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Rhode Island and a study author. “Relationships with other people are what make us the happiest,” she says.

Creating New Habits
Seligman’s team made a list of 100 “interventions” that people through the ages have suggested as routes to contentment–culling ideas proposed by Buddha and self-improvement gurus alike–and set out to test them. It was, Seligman says, the most ambitious, controlled study of happiness ever done. Last summer, the results of the team’s efforts were published in American Psychologist.

For the study, the researchers enlisted more than 500 visitors to Seligman’s Web site. The adults completed online questionnaires to assess their level of happiness; then each volunteer was assigned to do one of six exercises for a week. Some wrote and personally delivered a gratitude letter to an individual who had been particularly kind to them but whom they had never adequately thanked, for instance; others recorded three things that had gone well each day. People in a control group wrote about their early memories every night for a week–an exercise that wasn’t expected to have much of an impact on their moods. Every few weeks for the next 6 months, the volunteers filled out questionnaires measuring their happiness and depression.

As it turned out, all the exercises, including that of the control group, temporarily bumped up happiness levels. But some interventions proved to have a much bigger, more lasting effect than others. For example, the group that spent a few minutes each night writing about what had gone well that day felt happier for the full 6 months of the study.

“Most of us focus on our weaknesses and on what we don’t have,” says Carol Kauffman, PhD, a life coach and an assistant clinical professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School. “[By listing good things,] you’re training yourself to reverse your focus from what you did wrong to what you did right. You’re emphasizing your strengths,” and that seems to change the way you feel. Kauffman uses the what-went-well-today intervention with her patients–and does it every night herself.

The “gratitude visit,” which focused on building one of the four heart strengths, also produced a lift in happiness scores. In fact, “The exercise decreased depression and increased happiness more than any other intervention,” says Park.

“Gratitude is an affirmation of the goodness in one’s life and the recognition that the sources of this goodness lie at least partly outside the self,” says Robert A. Emmons, PhD, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis. “It’s a very social experience, and it’s restorative in times of stress.”

Seligman’s study did show, though, that a single gratitude visit went only so far: The happiness boost lasted a month and then dissipated. But some people took the initiative to pay gratitude visits to additional people–and their happiness scores stayed high even after 6 months.

“There’s no quick fix,” says Christopher Peterson, PhD, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan and Seligman’s frequent collaborator. “The only way to become grateful is to act like a grateful person over and over.”

In the study, one other intervention proved effective–and this one suggests that it’s not essential to have those major heart strengths, so long as you play to one of your character strengths. The last group of participants identified their top five strengths and then used one of them in a new way every day for a week. A person who wanted to exercise her curiosity, for instance, might have read a book on an unfamiliar subject one day, researched her family tree on another, visited a museum on a third, and so on. That, too, lifted spirits for at least 6 months in those who continued the exercise.

How You Can Be Happier
Using your character strengths helps compensate for weaknesses or vulnerabilities that otherwise can interfere with happiness, says Karen Reivich, PhD, a research associate at the University of Pennsylvania and coauthor of The Resilience Factor. She sees herself as a recovering pessimist: “Part of my brain is always scanning the horizon for danger.” Instead of telling herself that her concerns are unwarranted, Reivich exercises a strength that comes naturally, drawing on her creativity to counter the dour, gloomy part of her personality. “I’ve created an ‘awe wall’ covered with poems, my children’s photos, a picture of a lavender farm. And every day I work on it a bit.

“I may add a cartoon that made me laugh and a picture drawn by my young son,” she says. “It’s hard to be basking in all these reminders of wonder and simultaneously be filled with dread.”

Reivich and other researchers say that strategies like these, used consistently over time, lead to long-lasting change. Her pessimistic habits are starting to atrophy, says Reivich. “At first the change happens at the surface, in a conscious change in behavior; then it begins to take place more deeply, becoming almost effortless. That’s because I’m repeating the exercise until it becomes a new habit. If I focus my attention on noticing good and thinking about the things I can control, I’m using my attention and energy to build optimism and happiness rather than to deepen worry and sadness.”

All of this begins to explain my own pleasure in life. I took Seligman’s questionnaire and answered how closely 245 statements described me. I find the world a very interesting place: Yes, I certainly do. I always keep my promises: Yes–or I feel terrible. According to my responses, one of my signature strengths is curiosity. That rings true. During even a quick trip to the store, within minutes I’m discussing how to grind wheat with the baker or what the fishing’s like with the fish man. My husband has learned to get a cup of coffee and wait me out. It’s the exchange that makes me happy, as well as learning something new.

So, by Seligman’s measure, my happiness is less and less surprising. After all, I make my living by asking people questions about themselves and their occupations. I’ve found a way to use my natural strengths in my work.

Even if your job isn’t a perfect match, the research on happiness suggests that you can still find ways to play to your strengths. For example, if you know that one of them is gratitude, try starting a staff meeting about a troubled project in a new way: Instead of discussing what went south, ask everyone to talk about one thing that is going well, and then thank each of them for their contribution. “That’s a very different way to start a meeting,” says Reivich. “And the team’s reaction will feed your own sense of happiness.”

Such conclusions are heartening. If satisfaction can be learned and practiced, if contentment is a muscle anyone can learn to flex, then there’s hope for all of us, even those with unfair burdens or dour dispositions. It doesn’t matter that none of us live fairy-tale lives. We can still live happily ever after.

Three Roads to Happiness
When positive psychologists talk about happiness, what they mean is a sense of deep contentment. There are three routes to achieving it, Martin E. P. Seligman, PhD, has found, and the most satisfied people pursue all three.

One is the pleasant life, full of pleasure, joy, and good times. The second is the engaged life, in which you lose yourself to some passion or activity, experiencing what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, PhD, calls flow. And the third is the meaningful life: It may not have many high moments or blissful immersions, but it is packed with purpose.

“The notion of three pathways is important,” says psychologist Karen Reivich, PhD. “We all know people who aren’t smiley-faced, so we may say this person isn’t happy. But what Seligman is saying is, ‘Hey, that doesn’t mean you can’t have a great life.’ These broader conceptions of happiness are more liberating.”

Relationships Tip the Balance
One way to see what makes people happy is to see what happy people are like. When researchers looked at the traits shared by volunteers who scored high on measures of happiness, one floated to the top: the ability to love and be loved. Relationships with other people are what make us happiest, says Nansook Park, PhD, a psychologist at the University of Rhode Island. “Our connection to others is the foundation of humanity.”

But love doesn’t necessarily mean romance. “We’re talking about close relationships with other people–friends, parents, children. Humans are social creatures, and when we’re engaged with our fellows, we are happiest,” explains Christopher Peterson, PhD, a psychologist at the University of Michigan. “We were not created to sit alone in front of a keyboard all day.”

If your top character strength isn’t love, don’t think you’re shortchanging yourself on the relationship front. Using your strengths–whatever they are–will likely connect you to others, too, says Park. Take expressing gratitude. “Gratitude boosts the morale of the person who receives it,” Park explains. “That person tries to do better, and your relationship with him or her becomes stronger and you both feel happier.”

Curiosity, as well, inevitably links us to others, says well-being researcher Todd Kashdan, PhD, an assistant professor of psychology at George Mason University. “You meet someone, ask questions, and the other person begins to reveal things about himself. You ask more, and the other person feels accepted. Curiosity builds a relationship.”

by Dorothy Foltz-Gray - Prevention.com

The 5 Secrets To Forgiveness

Many of us have been emotionally, physically or spiritually hurt. That pain often turns to anger and resentment as we replay the events over in our heads, reliving the moment again and again. This, in and of itself, is very destructive behavior because we continually pull the past into the present preventing any sustainable level of growth. Here are a few things to consider if your having difficulty in moving forward.

1. Forgiveness can break the connection - When there is someone in your life that your having a hard time forgiving, the energy of that person and situation remains within you. When you find it hard to let go and forgive another, you remain connected to that person. You continue to allow the pain, the abuse and the trauma to remain with you. This is a choice. Forgiveness is not something that you can or cannot do. It is simply a matter of choosing to change your thoughts, beliefs and ideas about a given situation or person in your life.

2. Forgiveness will bring you closer to who you are. When you are unable to forgive, you deny your own power as the creator of your life and hand it over to the other person - basically saying you are subject to the will of another. The reality is you are a very powerful being who has been given free will and the unlimited power to create whatever you want to be, do or have. Once you remember this, forgiveness will become second nature because now you understand nothing can exert itself against you. The only things that come to you are those things you have drawn to you through your thinking.

3. Forgiveness allows others to grow. The act of forgiveness allows the other person to move on. Until you are able to forgive and release a person from the responsibility for your pain, this person remains connected to you. Forgiveness creates harmony because you are handing the other person a passport to more freedom and joy. In doing so you are creating an environment in which you can thrive.

4. Self forgiveness removes layers of shame and guilt. It means being willing to exercise compassion towards yourself. Let go of the fear of unworthiness and failure and learn to accept that, just maybe, the Universal powers approve and accept you as you are.

5. Give yourself a gift. By forgiving, you empower yourself and your spirituality. You heal deep-rooted pain that perhaps you thought was long gone but has survived, living under long held resentments. By forgiving you are one step closer to your journey of self-growth and healing.

Written by Robert Hunt

50 Self-Help Classics

A great resource for anyone seeking a ‘bite-sized’ look at the philosophies of many self-help legends. Carefully selected works which have had, for decades, a profound impact on those who read them and then applied the principles.

1. James Allen As a Man Thinketh (1904)
2. S Andreas & C Faulkner (eds) NLP: The New Technology of Achievement (1996)
3. Marcus Aurelius Meditations (2ndC)
4. Martha Beck Finding Your Own North Star (2001)
5. The Bhagavad-Gita
6. The Bible
7. Robert Bly Iron John (1990)
8. Boethius The Consolation of Philosophy (6thC)
9. William Bridges Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes (1980)
10. David D Burns The New Mood Therapy (1980)
11. Joseph Campbell (with Bill Moyers) The Power of Myth (1988)
12. Richard Carlson Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff (1997)
13. Dale Carnegie How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936)
14. Deepak Chopra The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success (1994)
15. Paulo Coelho The Alchemist (1988)
16. Stephen Covey The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (1989)
17. Mihaly Cziksentmihalyi Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (1991)
18. Alain de Botton How Proust Can Change Your Life (1997)
19. The Dalai Lama & Howard Cutler The Art of Happiness (1999)
20. The Dhammapada (Buddha’s teachings)
21. Wayne Dyer Real Magic (1992)
22. Ralph Waldo Emerson Self-Reliance (1841)
23. Clarissa Pinkola Estes Women Who Run With The Wolves (1996)
24. Viktor Frankl Man’s Search For Meaning (1959)
25. Benjamin Franklin Autobiography (1790)
26. Shakti Gawain Creative Visualization (1982)
27. Daniel Goleman Emotional Intelligence (1995)
28. John Gray Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus (1992)
29. Louise Hay You Can Heal Your Life (1984)
30. James Hillman The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling (1996)
31. Susan Jeffers Feel The Fear And Do It Anyway (1987)
32. Ellen Langer Mindfulness: Choice and Control in Everyday Life (1989)
33. Lao-Tzu Tao-te Ching (The Way of Power)
34. Maxwell Maltz Psycho-Cybernetics (1960)
35. Abraham Maslow Motivation and Personality (1954)
36. Phil C McGraw Life Strategies: Doing What Works, Doing What Matters (2000)
37. Thomas Moore Care of the Soul (1992)
38. Joseph Murphy The Power of Your Subconscious Mind (1963)
39. Norman Vincent Peale The Power of Positive Thinking (1952)
40. Carol Pearson The Hero Within (1989)
41. M Scott Peck The Road Less Traveled (1990)
42. Ayn Rand Atlas Shrugged (1957)
43. Anthony Robbins Awaken The Giant Within (1991)
44. Florence Scovell-Shinn The Game of Life and How To Play It (1923)
45. Martin Seligman Learned Optimism (1991)
46. Samuel Smiles Self-Help (1859)
47. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin The Phenomenon of Man (1955)
48. Henry David Thoreau Walden (1854)
49. Marianne Williamson A Return To Love (1993)
50. Zig Ziglar See You At The Top (1975)

Compiled from the book “50 Self Help Classics” by Tom Butler-Bowdon:

How Super-Achievers Work

CARLOS GHOSN CEO of Renault (France) and Nissan (Japan) Focus relentlessly. Ghosn does, while running two Global 500 companies.

I go from Paris to Tokyo every month and spend between one and two weeks there. The week when I am in Tokyo is the week when I have the Nissan executive committee meeting, the design meeting, the product decision meeting, the investment meeting, the board meeting–all the important meetings are taking place during this week. I do the same thing at Renault. To put decisions into action, I hand them to the executive committee.

Every month is different. In March, I will be one week in the U.S. (I’m also head of Nissan’s North American operations), one week in Japan, two weeks in France. But everybody knows that the first week of the month I am in Paris and the third week of the month I’m in Japan.

I have an assistant in France, one in Japan, and one in the U.S. They are all bi-lingual: Japanese and English, French and English. My assistants screen all the mail and documents. I’m very selective. They know exactly the topics I am interested in and what should be diverted to other members of the executive committee. For meetings on a single topic that aren’t regular operational meetings, I’m very strict. The maximum is one hour and 30 minutes. Fifty percent of the time is for the presentation, 50% is for discussion.

I do my best thinking early in the morning. I always ask that my first meeting not happen before eight. When I need more time to think, I wake up earlier. If I don’t do six hours of sleep I’m in bad shape, but I’m usually up by six.

The risk in holding two jobs is that you are going to lose some details. We have organized ourselves in a way where I still see many, many people in both companies, so I consider myself in really good contact with reality. Some things I have to sacrifice. When I was in Japan running Nissan, I used to visit one dealer a month and one plant every two or three months. Now dealer visits are once every six months, and plants are once every year.

It is also important to take a distance from the problem. I do not bring my work home. I play with my four children and spend time with my family on weekends. When I go to work on Monday, I can look at the problem with more distance. I come up with good ideas as a result of becoming stronger after being recharged.

Stress builds up when you know that there is a problem but you do not clearly see it, and you do not have a solution. We’re all human. I want to assure you I feel the same pain and the same stress and the same jet lag as anybody else. You have nights when you cannot sleep, and the stress is unbearable. It happens to every single person in a job like this. — Interviewed by Alex Taylor III

MARISSA MAYER VP, Search Products and User Experience, Google Don’t just cope with information–revel in it.

I don’t feel overwhelmed with information. I really like it. I use Gmail for my personal e-mail–15 to 20 e-mails a day–but on my work e-mail I get as many as 700 to 800 a day, so I need something really fast. I use an e-mail application called Pine, a Linux-based utility I started using in college. It’s a very simple text-based mailer in a crunchy little terminal window with Courier fonts. You can log onto the server directly, so you don’t have the “headers are now downloading” problem that you do in client applications like Outlook. I do marathon e-mail catch-up sessions, sometimes on a Saturday or Sunday. I’ll just sit down and do e-mail for ten to 14 hours straight. I almost always have the radio or my TV on. Sometimes it’s the news. Sometimes it’s a sitcom. I actually like the two streams of information. I guess I’m a typical 25- to 35-year-old who’s now really embracing the two-screen experience.

I’m very speed-sensitive. With TiVo, for example, I just seem to spend too much of my life looking at the PLEASE WAIT sign. I adore my cellphone, but there’s just a second of delay when you answer it: Hello, hello? I do have a BlackBerry. I don’t use it at work because we have wireless throughout the office. I like my laptop a lot more, especially now that I have an EVDO [broadband cellular] card that gives me online access almost everywhere.

I almost always have my laptop with me. It’s sitting with me right now. We are a very laptop-friendly culture. It’s not uncommon to walk into a meeting at Google where everyone has a laptop open. One caveat is that [chairman and CEO] Eric Schmidt has a large aversion to sitting next to somebody who’s typing, so we advise people who want to have a good experience in a meeting with Eric not to bring their laptop.

To keep track of tasks, I have a little document called a task list. And in the same document there’s a list for each person I work with or interact with, of what they’re working on or what I expect from them. It’s just a list in a text file. Using this, I can plan my day out the night before: “These are the five high- priority things to focus on.” But at Google things can change pretty fast. This morning I had my list of what I thought I was going to do today, but now I’m doing entirely different things.

I’ve been trying to figure out how to make time that was previously unproductive productive. If I’m driving my car somewhere, I try to get a call in to my family and friends then. Or during dead time when I’m waiting in line, I will hop on my cellphone and get something done.

My day starts around 9 A.M. and meetings finish up around 8 P.M. After that I stay in the office to do action items and e-mail. I can get by on four to six hours of sleep. I pace myself by taking a weeklong vacation every four months.

I have an assistant, Patty, who handles calls from the outside, answers e-mails, letters, and requests. She does a great job with scheduling. In an average week I’m getting scheduled into about 70 meetings, probably ten or 11 hours a day. On Friday, Patty lets me out early–around 6, and I go up to San Francisco and do something interesting.

From 4 to 5:30 every day that I can, I’ll sit at my desk to answer any question that shows up on my doorstep. We have a big sign-up sheet outside. We joke that we should get one of those deli number tickers–”Now serving No. 68!” But we have nice couches and power for laptops and things outside the door where people wait. The average seems to be around 13 people per day. Sometimes they show me mockups or new demos of ideas they want to advance. Sometimes they have a presentation they’re working on. Or sometimes they just want to ask me a question about Google’s overall management. Anything is fair game. So if they ask, “Why are we in China?” I try to answer as candidly as I can. — Interviewed by David Kirkpatrick

HOWARD SCHULTZ Chairman, Starbucks Rise early–and have the occasional jolt of joe.

I get up between 5 and 5:30, and naturally the first thing I do is make some coffee; depending on my mood, it’s either an espresso macchiato or one of our Indonesian coffees in a French press. I’ll take my coffee, read three newspapers–the Seattle Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times –and listen to a voicemail summarizing sales results from the past 24 hours. This has been my routine for 25 years.

There are always Starbucks with their lights on somewhere around the globe, and we open five new stores every day. So I’ve learned how to leverage my time. In the early morning I focus on Europe. I’ll call Greece or Spain or wherever, either at home or on the drive into work, to talk about challenges–do the numbers make sense?–or to congratulate them. These personal conversations are very important.

At work the first thing I do is read the flash report, which is our roadmap of what we do that day. We manage day-to-day in our business. I’m proud that we are so nimble–we have great information flow to make that happen. So we attend to U.S. business during the day, and of course at night I’ll be speaking with Asia.

I’m always stopping by our stores–at least 25 a week. I’m also in other places: Home Depot, Whole Foods, Crate & Barrel. I was just in a great [home improvement] store, Tokyu Hands, in Tokyo; it’s fun and it grabs you. I try to be a sponge to pick up as much as I can. I’m traveling internationally now one out of every seven weeks. China is going to be very significant for us, and it’s something I’ve been spearheading. The travel can be brutal–I got back from China five days ago, and I’m still a little under the weather. The airplane is my time to read, which I do voraciously. I carry a Treo powered by GoodLink, which works well globally. I’m not a big e-mailer, though; it’s a crutch that hinders person-to-person communication. I don’t really have any secret tools or books or tricks–other than I could always use a good cup of coffee. — Interviewed by Andy Serwer

BILL GROSS Chief Investment Officer, Pimco Cut through the noise.

I get up about 4:30 A.M. and check out the markets. I have a Bloomberg and a Telerate and some other machines downstairs. Bloomberg is the most important: You can get a review of the most recent New York play or you can get a 50-year currency history of the Brazilian real. It’s amazing what you can access. Anyway, I check out Japan and Europe. I make myself some breakfast and then head off to work about 5:45 A.M. and get into the office about 6.

The first hour or two is used for acclimating to the markets and various economic data releases. Lots of big, macro numbers–GDP, the unemployment number, other employment statistics–typically come out around 5:30 A.M. Pacific time. These are things that influence economic growth and inflation going forward, which in turn affects bond prices.

For a portfolio manager, eliminating the noise is critical. You have to cut the information flow to a minimum level. You could spend your whole day reading different opinions. For me, that means I don’t answer or look at any e-mails I don’t want to. Other than for my wife, I’ll only pick up the phone three or four times a day. I don’t have a cellphone, I don’t have a BlackBerry. My motto is, I don’t want to be connected–I want to be disconnected. I sit in the middle of a 70-person trading room on the third floor of an office building that overlooks the Pacific Ocean. I’m surrounded by six Bloomberg screens. After I’ve assimilated the economic releases and market moves, then I’ve got portfolios to manage. Pimco manages about $550 billion, and I have direct responsibility for about $200 billion. I check out the status of the various portfolios I manage and determine whether they have enough of this or too much of that, and go to work.

Of course, there some days when there’s not much actual trading. When you’re managing $200 billion, we need the rest of the market to be accommodating in terms of volume. On a day when there’s not much partying going on, it sort of inhibits the ability to get something done. So if you were a fly on the wall, you’d see me just sitting here, examining screens, examining relationships between different bonds or currencies. There’s a lot of dull downtime. An outside observer might wonder, “What the hell is he doing to earn that much money?” But that’s the nature of the business.

The most important part of my day isn’t on the trading floor. Every day at 8:30 A.M., I get up from my desk and walk to a health club across the street. I do yoga and work out for probably an hour and a half, between 8:30 and 10. There’s only been two or three times in the past 30 years when someone has come across the street and told me I should get back to the office. One of them was the 1987 market crash. There’s an understanding here that that’s my haven. Some of my best ideas literally come from standing on my head doing yoga. I’m away from the office, away from the noise, away from the Bloomberg screens–not to mention that standing on your head increases the blood flow to your brain. After about 45 minutes of riding the exercise bike and maybe ten or 15 minutes of yoga, all of a sudden some significant light bulbs seem to turn on. I look at that hour and a half as the most valuable time of the day. — Interviewed by Jon Birger

WYNTON MARSALIS Artistic Director, Jazz at Lincoln Center Challenge each other–but don’t hold grudges.

You don’t want trumpet players and musicians being your primary business decision-maker. It’s not possible for me to do that and write music, program the season, and conduct the band. I really do let people do their jobs, so when we come together, we know what each is supposed to do. But I weigh in on everything.

I’ve never sent an e-mail. I have a computer but haven’t plugged it in. I do have a cellphone. I just learned how to text on it. I do everything longhand or talk it out with my staff, and then they type it.

I have to do a lot of other work besides playing and composing–like speeches and fundraising–but everything is for jazz. Even if I’m talking about American culture or American people, it’s really about jazz. So it all goes to what my skill set is. I’m really not an organized person. For me, my philosophy is “Just do it all, all the time.” I rely on my team. Right now we’re writing a script about Count Basie’s music for a young people’s concert. Phil Schaap, the curator, is responsible for the history element. I explain the music–riffs, breaks, calls and responses, orchestration, short chords–those things I’ve taught many times. We all talk it together, get an outline, and then revise from that.

In terms of managing the Lincoln Center orchestra, we’re part of that continuum of jazz. Our thing is to create the sort of relaxed environment that’s part of our music. Most of us came from jazz people, so we have that in us naturally. There are always tensions that come up. Part of working is dealing with tensions. If there’s no tension, then you’re not serious about what you’re doing.

But there’s a certain warmth in there too, and a familiarity. We challenge each other, we fight, but we don’t have a lot of grudges. The music is about improvising and being able to create new things at the spur of the moment with other people. There’s not a long line of people who can do that in the context of a groove. To find a groove means practice, practice, and more practice. I’m very serious about this. We rehearse a lot, and everybody comes to rehearsal. And I will send you home if you’re not playing right.

Now, I do lose my temper. If the young band members aren’t practicing, aren’t playing right, I will cuss them out. But I’m not volatile. We have the same system of understanding, the music, and a love between each other. It’s a flow. — Interviewed by Ellen McGirt

A.G. LAFLEY Chairman, President, and CEO, Procter & Gamble Take a break, even if you work Sunday nights.

I’ve learned how to manage my energy. I used to just focus on managing my time. I’d be up in the morning between 5 and 5:30. I’d work out and be at my desk by 6:30 or 7, drive hard until about 7 P.M., then go home, take a break with my wife, Margaret, and be back at it later that evening. I was just grinding through the day.

During my first year in this job, I worked every Saturday and every Sunday morning. Now I work really hard for an hour or an hour and a half. Then I take a break. I walk around and chit-chat with people. It can take five or 15 minutes to recharge. It’s kind of like the interval training that an athlete does.

I learned this in a program called the Corporate Athlete that we put on for P&G managers. I did the two-day program, where I also learned to change the way I eat. I used to eat virtually nothing for breakfast. Now I have a V-8 juice, half a bagel, and a cup of yogurt. And I eat five or six times a day. It’s about managing your glycemic level. You don’t want to boom and bust.

The other piece of the Corporate Athlete program is spiritual–things you can do to calm the mind. I’ve tried to teach myself to meditate. When I travel, which is 60% of the time, I find that meditating for five, ten, or 15 minutes in a hotel room at night can be as good as a workout. Generally, I think I know myself so much better than I used to. And that has helped me stay calm and cool under fire.

A key to staying calm is minimizing the information onslaught. I can’t remember the last time I wrote a memo. I write little handwritten notes on my AGL paper, and I send notes, a paragraph or less, on my BlackBerry. I prefer conversations. That’s one reason my office and our entire executive floor is open. The CEO office is not typically a warm and welcoming place, but people feel they can come in and talk in mine. We have goofy-looking pink and chartreuse chairs with chrome frames and upholstered backs and seats.

I still work weekends, though not the killer hours I used to. On Sunday nights, [HR chief] Dick Antoine and I get together at his house or my house or on the phone and go through some part of our leadership development program. We started doing this shortly after I became CEO, because I know that the single biggest contribution I will make to this company is helping the next generation of leaders become the best that they can be. — Interviewed by Patricia Sellers

AMY W. SCHULMAN Partner, DLA Piper Rudnick Gray Cary Be compulsively organized–and delegate.

Many successful women have become successful because they’re just awfully good at being compulsive and organized and doers. But at some point that becomes paralyzing. I think men have traditionally been much better at not micromanaging. It’s hard to be successful and be a control freak, because if you cling to things, you’re going to be a bottleneck. Delegating to other people–appropriately delegating–is very liberating. There isn’t anybody on my team I don’t trust 100%. Remember, I’ve been building this team for ten years.

I have two assistants now. I have an assistant from 7 in the morning till 4 in the afternoon, and then an assistant from 4 to midnight. I wake up somewhere between 5 and 6 A.M., and get to the office about 8, before the phone calls start. On the days that I’m not traveling–I travel probably 50% of my life–I try to get home by 7:30 P.M. I typically don’t sign off e-mail until midnight.

I get around 600 e-mails a day. I divide them into four categories, and I deal with them immediately, by and large. First are e-mails that I forward to someone else. Next are where somebody’s giving me information that I need to cascade to somebody else with instructions. Third are the ones that I can read later on an airplane. Fourth are those that require me to respond immediately.

I used to have two cellphones because coverage is erratic. I decided one service provider worked best here and the other there. At some point I decided that was insane.

I don’t leave my cellphone on. I’m often in meetings or with clients, and I don’t want people to assume that they can dial my cellphone and get me, unless it’s an emergency. You can’t leave it on if you’re in a meeting with the CEO or a witness. It’s really important to focus on the problem at hand. You get into a rhythm of a conversation, and you have to honor that rhythm. People get anxious when they feel they’re going to be interrupted. What a good lawyer brings to a problem, in addition to creative solutions, is a quality of attentiveness. You can’t listen with half an ear.

The BlackBerry was at first a significant intrusion on family life. But my family has gotten used to the fact that I’m more relaxed if I can take care of my e-mails. I don’t generally look at my e-mail during mealtimes, and I try not to look at it in movie theaters.

Everybody I know who has a BlackBerry has a good BlackBerry-falling-down-the-toilet story. Mine did while I was flying across country. There was one of those NO FOREIGN OBJECTS signs, and I thought, “Oh, my God, there goes the fuselage.” So I run out and I say to the flight attendant, “I’m really sorry, my BlackBerry’s fallen down there.”And I guess this had happened to her so many times, she said, “Well, do you want some gloves and, like, you can reach in?” I like my BlackBerry, but there’s absolutely no way I’m sticking my hand down an airplane toilet to get it. I thought, “God, there are people who have actually taken gloves and done this?” — Interviewed by Roger Parloff

VERA WANG CEO, Vera Wang Group Get away from the routine.

My bedroom is my sanctuary. It’s like a refuge, and it’s where I do a fair amount of designing–at least conceptually, if not literally. I spread out on my side of the bed, and I may be looking at books to get ideas, or just thinking things through. Staffers send me stuff at home, and I always read it at night–the only time when seven people aren’t coming to me at once. I’m able to think in a more peaceful way than when I’m in my normal routine. My normal routine is pretty much putting out fires all day in my office.

It’s hard to juggle being a businessperson with being a creative person. You have to organize yourself–PR needs me for PR, and the licensing division needs me for licensing, the bridal people need me for bridal. I prioritize by going to the next collection that’s due. And as the collections get bigger, it gets more challenging.

I hate phones. All businesses are personal businesses, and I always try my best to get back to people, but sometimes the barrage of calls is so enormous that if I just answered calls I would do nothing else. I ask my assistant, P.J., to find out if someone needs an answer in three minutes–or can they wait two days, or can we make a date for when I get back to them? Now, if I were to go near e-mail, there would be even more obligations, and I would be in Bellevue with a white jacket on.

My staff is always able to reach me. As an owner I am always accessible. That’s the big difference. I am the CEO, not the COO, but at times I’ve still had to be partial COO to fix all the myriad things that can go wrong: calm dissatisfied clients, handle employees who want to leave, or renegotiate. These things are very hard to manage in addition to being creative. And that is the challenge of owning a creative business. — Interviewed by Jia Lynn Yang

JOHN MCCAIN U.S. Senator (R-Arizona) It’s a game of pinball, and you’re the ball.

The hardest thing to do is to establish priorities. This morning we had a committee meeting on telecommunications. Now, I’m for à la carte cable. I don’t see why some widow from Sun City should have to pay for ESPN if she doesn’t want to. At the same time, I had to bounce over to the Armed Services Committee–we’re involved with what I think is a scandal with a C-130 cargo airplane. Then I just met with Chamber of Commerce President Tom Donahue, who worked with me on immigration. Later I’m going to meet with a group of people on lobbying reform. And then I’ll be meeting with a Congressman who wants me to help him out on something. The key is deciding what are the most important issues to focus on. Priorities come from the constituents, and a lot of it is instinct by now. I’ve been in this business a long time.

I read my e-mails, but I don’t write any. I’m a Neanderthal–I don’t even type. I do have rudimentary capabilities to call up some websites, like the New York Times online, that sort of stuff. No laptop. No PalmPilot. I prefer my schedule on notecards, which I keep in my jacket pocket. But my wife has enormous capability. Whenever I want something I ask her to do it. She’s just a wizard. She even does my boarding passes–people can do that now. When we go to the movies, she gets the tickets ahead of time. It’s incredible.

My most valuable resource is my chief of staff and writing partner, Mark Salter. We’ve been together for 17 years. I cannot imagine my professional life without him. When we’re writing a book or speech, he’ll come in to the office in the afternoon or evening with a tape recorder. We talk about the outline, then the details of it, then get into the minutiae. He writes most of it, and then we go over it together.

It’s the perfect partnership, with him doing most of the work. He’s a remarkable man. I gave a speech on the floor of the Senate to wrap up the debate on the torture amendment. It was the only time when there was total silence on the floor of the Senate. We wrote that together.

I rely on staff to take care of things that I know they can, usually back in Arizona. We’ve got very talented, experienced people who take care of constituent issues. People don’t care if I personally get involved, or if I put somebody who is a hell of a lot smarter than I am on it. But if something is important for me to pay attention to, like immigration issues, which have grown for us since 9/11–I focus on it.

We decide on a case-by-case basis about whether to do the Sunday shows, if it would have some value to get my viewpoint or knowledge out there. I’m going to do Jon Stewart again, and The Colbert Report. That’s good stuff, an interesting audience for me.

You lose battles in politics. I do get good and angry. Really angry! By God, I’m not going to let them beat me again. I don’t like to lose. After the 2000 race for the presidential nomination, I spent at least ten days–and in many ways it was the most wonderful experience of my life–wallowing in self-pity. It was really fun. Freeing. Then I just woke up and said it was time to get over this. The people you represent don’t want you this way. You’re still their Senator. And besides, America doesn’t like sore losers. I also don’t hold grudges. It’s a waste of time. What’s the point? Frankly, the sweetest revenge is success. — Interviewed by Ellen McGirt

JANE FRIEDMAN CEO, HarperCollins Be open to ideas that come over the transom.

Really, I have to admit: I’m an e-mail addict. It keeps me connected to work even when I’m not at the office. I do about an hour of e-mail in the morning after I’ve skimmed the newspapers. I usually have to go out for lunch, but I hate it. I’d rather have lunch at my desk and read though e-mails between meetings. My day usually ends in the office at about six o’clock, but then I go to two or three parties a night. Authors, who are the most important people in our company, really appreciate it when the CEO turns up at their event. In between, I check e-mail on my BlackBerry. I can write answers, but I still don’t know how to compose e-mails on it. I don’t love my BlackBerry, but it keeps me in touch with things. Then, no matter when I get home at night–and it’s usually late–I do at least an hour or two of e-mail. It’s usually when I’m watching Law & Order reruns.

I have this thing about reading all my e-mails. Most people just go delete, delete, delete, but I don’t. Other than obvious spam, I read everything that comes in, even unsolicited proposals. I don’t read the whole thing, but I’ll read the cover letters, and there are moments I feel that somebody has something. I got an e-mail from a 12-year-old Chinese girl that sounded so wonderful to me that I sent it over to the children’s division, and they’re going to be publishing her book. It’s called Snowbird. — Interviewed by Devin Leonard

JUDGE RICHARD POSNER U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, Chicago Seek the most efficient mode of communication.

I usually think of the digital revolution in terms of reducing the costs of transferring information. For people like me, whose work is basically intellectual and not heavily dependent on personal contacts, the effect is wholly positive. The older, conventional means of collecting, communicating, and manipulating information were very inferior. It’s also enabled me to work at home.

I came here from lunch with a political theorist at NYU, and it was an extremely valuable conversation. For him to convey his comments about my book, a conversation was the most efficient mode of communication. It’s just that in my line of work, that type of face-to-face or even voice-to-voice communication is relatively infrequent. I have very, very few telephone conversations.

I have become entirely e-mail dependent in the sense that I would not dream of going anywhere overnight without my laptop. I can’t even substitute a BlackBerry because so much of the stuff that I get involves substantial attachments. So I carry a laptop everywhere. With e-mail there’s a kind of oppression factor, especially on Mondays. But it’s a very small price to pay.

I usually get up around a quarter to 8 and don’t get to the office till about 9:30, 10 A.M. I usually go home after lunch and then spend the rest of the afternoon and evening, except for dinner, up till about 11:30 P.M., working. I’m working on opinions, or writing a book or blog, or something else.

When court is in session we hear six cases a day, sitting in three-judge panels, and split it up so that each judge does two opinions. I usually write my first draft of the two opinions in the evening after the arguments. So maybe four hours’ worth of time to write two opinions. I’m a very fast writer. I can write 20, 30 manuscript pages in an evening. I do revisions later, but I find it more efficient to get something down that indicates where the gaps in my thinking are, and what research has to be done, and so on. — Interviewed by Roger Parloff

HANK PAULSON Chairman and CEO, Goldman Sachs Work the phone–and the clock.

I’ve never used e-mail, but I’m a huge voicemail user. I do a couple hundred voicemails a day. And I return every call right away, whether it’s a client or someone in the firm. There are positives and negatives to this. I don’t have a lot of time for small talk. Occasionally there are wing nuts who call, and I pass them on to Julie, my assistant. But Julie doesn’t screen my voicemails. The people at Goldman Sachs have to be able to get to me. Clients have to be able to get to me.

I’ve always spent a lot of time on the phone. Even when cellphones were a novelty in the 1980s when I lived in Chicago, I was using one of those huge Motorola phones as I walked from the train station to the office. This past Christmas, my wife, Wendy, and my daughter, Amanda, and her husband and I spent ten days hiking in Chile, and my daughter took so many pictures of me with this big satellite phone attached to my ear.

When I got back to the office in January, I called 60 CEOs in the first week to wish them happy New Year. I had never done that before, but it was great. I asked them about their business and their relationship with Goldman. I spend at least a third of my time on Goldman people and culture–we have to be the employer of choice in our industry. So I spend time at business schools and am very involved in recruiting. Last year we started a Chairman’s Forum to raise awareness of the importance of business judgment. I taught more than 25 sessions to all 1,200 of our managing directors in Asia, Europe, and the U.S. That’s culture-building.

Forty percent of our earnings comes from outside the U.S., so I travel a lot. Whenever I travel, I take time to exercise. When I go to China–which I’ve been to about 70 times in the past 16 years–I book my flight so it arrives at 6 A.M., which is the earliest you can land. I check into the hotel and go right to the treadmill in the gym. Then, starting at 8 A.M., I’ll go back to back to back until 9 at night. I’ll get up the next day and do the same thing. I make sure to leave in the evening so I can be back at work in my office in New York the next morning.

I’ve always been very efficient and disciplined. If I have a business dinner, people know that it should start at 6:30 and be over by 8:30. When I’m home in New York, I’m asleep at 10. I’m up at 5:30 and try to work out four or five times a week. Once or twice a week, I run four miles in Central Park. I used to do seven-minute miles. Now I’m up to 8½ or nine. — Interviewed by Patricia Sellers

“I’ll just sit down and DO E-MAIL for ten to 14 hours straight.”

–MARISSA MAYER, Google

“To FIND A GROOVE means practice, practice, and more practice.”

–WYNTON MARSALIS, jazz trumpeter

“I find that MEDITATION in a hotel room can be as good as a workout.”

–A.G. LAFLEY, Procter & Gamble

“I don’t write e-mails. I’m a NEANDERTHAL–I don’t even type.”

–JOHN MCCAIN, Republican Senator from Arizona

“Most people just go DELETE, DELETE, DELETE. I read everything.”

–JANE FRIEDMAN, HarperCollins CEO

(FORTUNE Magazine) - By Alex Taylor III, David Kirkpatrick, Andy Serwer, Jon Birger, Ellen McGirt, Roger Parloff, Jia Lynn Yang, Ellen McGirt, Devin Leonard, Roger Parloff and Patricia Sellers - From the March 20, 2006 issue.

10 Rules To Live By

There’s really no way to sum up the game of life with a simple set of rules, but I’ve come up with a set of guidelines that have served me pretty good. I would love to hear your own.

1. Focus on what you want: Do you focus on the road ahead or in the rearview mirror filled with the past? By focusing on the past, you tend to worry about the future because your focus carries the negative experiences from your past into your present. “Hold a picture of yourself long and steadily enough in your mind’s eye, and you will be drawn toward it.” - Napoleon Hill

2. Never give up: Thomas Edison said it best — “”Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.”

3. One day at a time: We achieve our dreams one day at a time, so set goals for each day that will take you, step by step, toward your desire. The pyramids weren’t built in a week so learn to be patient. Do the best you can, enjoy this day, and be satisfied with what you’ve accomplished.

4. True happiness lies within you: Don’t waste time and effort searching for happiness, peace and contentment in the world outside. Reach inside yourself and pull out the better angels of your nature and give to someone else.

5. Learn to be grateful: “Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos into order, confusion into clarity…. It turns problems into gifts, failures into success, the unexpected into perfect timing, and mistakes into important events. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today and creates a vision for tomorrow.” - Melodie Beattie

6. Expand your comfort zone: Not a whole lot can change or happen when we stop challenging ourselves. Bob Parson’s probably said it best when someone told him they we’re concerned about they’re security. His response was, “Security is for cadavers.”

7. Your closer than you think: There’s an old Chinese proverb that goes something like this: “The temptation to quit will be greatest just before you are about to succeed.”

8. Don’t take yourself seriously: Learn to lighten up. Life is a game. Don’t sweat the little stuff…. ’cause it’s all little stuff.

9. Be nice: What is that old saying? You can catch more flies with honey than vinegar. Just another way of saying you can win people to your side more easily by gentle persuasion and flattery than by hostile confrontation.

10. Get out of your way: As Warren Buffet said to a University of Washington audience several years ago regarding how he and Bill Gates became so successful: “Everybody here has the ability to do anything I do and much beyond. Some of you will, and some of you won’t. For those who won’t, it will be because you get in your own way, not because the world doesn’t allow you to.”

Written by R. H.

5 Simple Ways to Make the Most of Your Intelligence

Your brain needs exercise just like a muscle. If you use it often and in the right ways, you will become a more skilled thinker and increase your ability to focus. But if you never use your brain, or abuse it with harmful chemicals, your ability to think and learn will deteriorate. Here are 5 simple ways anyone can squeeze a bit more productivity out of the old gray matter.

1. Minimize Television Watching - This is a hard sell. People love vegetating in front of the television, myself included more often than I’d like. The problem is watching television doesn’t use your mental capacity OR allow it to recharge. It’s like having the energy sapped out of a muscle without the health benefits of exercise.

Don’t you feel drained after a couple hours of TV? Your eyes are sore and tired from being focused on the light box for so long. You don’t even have the energy to read a book.

When you feel like relaxing, try reading a book instead. If you’re too tired, listen to some music. When you’re with your friends or family, leave the tube off and have a conversation. All of these things use your mind more than television and allow you to relax.

2. Exercise - I used to think that I’d learn more by not exercising and using the time to read a book instead. But I realized that time spent exercising always leads to greater learning because it improves productivity during the time afterwards. Using your body clears your head and creates a wave of energy. Afterwards, you feel invigorated and can concentrate more easily.

3. Read Challenging Books - Many people like to read popular suspense fiction, but generally these books aren’t mentally stimulating. If you want to improve your thinking and writing ability you should read books that make you focus. Reading a classic novel can change your view of the world and will make you think in more precise, elegant English. Don’t be afraid to look up a word if you don’t know it, and don’t be afraid of dense passages. Take your time, re-read when necessary, and you’ll soon grow accustomed to the author’s style.

Once you get used to reading challenging books, I think you’ll find that you aren’t tempted to go back to page-turners. The challenge of learning new ideas is far more exciting than any tacky suspense-thriller.

4. Early to Bed, Early to Rise - Nothing makes it harder to concentrate than sleep deprivation. You’ll be most rejuvenated if you go to bed early and don’t sleep more than 8 hours. If you stay up late and compensate by sleeping late, you’ll wake up lethargic and have trouble focusing. In my experience the early morning hours are the most tranquil and productive. Waking up early gives you more productive hours and maximizes your mental acuity all day.

If you have the opportunity, take 10-20 minute naps when you are hit with a wave of drowsiness. Anything longer will make you lethargic, but a short nap will refresh you.

5. Take Time to Reflect - Often our lives get so hectic that we become overwhelmed without even realizing it. It becomes difficult to concentrate because nagging thoughts keep interrupting. Spending some time alone in reflection gives you a chance organize your thoughts and prioritize your responsibilities. Afterwards, you’ll have a better understanding of what’s important and what isn’t. The unimportant stuff won’t bother you anymore and your mind will feel less encumbered.

I’m not saying you need to sit on the floor cross-legged and chant ‘ommm’. Anything that allows a bit of prolonged solitude will do. One of my personal favorites is taking a solitary walk. Someone famous said, “All the best ideas occur while walking.” I think he was on to something. Experiment to find the activity that works best for you.

Conclusion - I hope you aren’t disappointed that none of the techniques I’ve proposed are revolutionary. But simple, unexciting answers are often the most valid. The challenge is having the will to adhere to them. If you succeed in following these 5 tips, you’ll be rewarded with increased mental acuity and retention of knowledge.

by John Wesley - Pick The Brain

[tags]brain, intelligence, sleep, read, television, exercise [/tags]

Law Of Attraction Blunders

Learning about the “Law of Attraction” can be one of the grandest blessings you can receive in your life. When you learn the true “cause” of your experience of reality, and that you can actually ALTER that reality in any way that you wish, it opens a door of Infinite Possibility!

After all, imagine that any level of wealth can be yours! Your life can be enriched with the most fulfilling relationships imaginable! You can spend your time doing only those things you love, and in return, experience abundance that seems impossible from the outside looking in!

However, too many people learn only the “basics” of the Law of Attraction, and as a result make 10 common mistakes that make it appear as though this universal law does not apply to them, and in fact gives them results completely OPPOSITE of what they desire.

Before going into these mistakes, let’s review what the Law of Attraction actually is. It’s deceptively simple: Energy attracts Like Energy.

Broken down a little more, this means that everything in this Universe (physical and non-physical) IS Energy that vibrates at various frequencies. And it is the nature of the vibrations of this Energy to “attract” themselves to vibrations of a similar frequency. In other words, one “cluster” of Energy attracts itself to other “clusters” of Energy in which it is in vibrational resonance.

This happens on both a very small and very large scale. For our purposes, we are talking about the very common idea that our “thoughts create our reality”.

This simple statement leads to people making the following mistakes and assumptions, because while thought IS Energy, and it DOES attract, it’s not always so straightforward.

How many of these mistakes apply to you?

1. Believing that “Positive Thinking” is enough to attract what you want.

The reality is that many people use various forms of positive thinking on a conscious level (such as affirmations), only to cancel out those thoughts on a subconscious level.

For example, telling yourself “I am lean, healthy, and energetic” when the mirror says something different, usually results in your subconscious saying, “No you’re not!!”. Further, this subconscious rebuttal is generally highly charged with emotion, and thus a very powerful attractor.

Therefore, if left unchecked, the use of affirmations can give you a very strong OPPOSITE result of those things you are affirming, because at a much stronger level of conviction, you are canceling the positive message with a negative one.

2. Asking yourself, “Well, where is it?”

People ARE impatient. When they learn about the Law of Attraction, they often have high hopes that they will simply make their lists of desires, cut out pictures, or in some other way design their reality, and then after a couple of days, weeks, or even months, they’re looking around saying, “Well?? Where is it??”.

The problem isn’t that the Universe can’t deliver quickly. The problem is that you were never REALLY vibrating in a place of trust that what your desires is yours. You are more “testing the theory”, then becoming impatient when the Universe doesn’t deliver on your time schedule.

What you may not realize realize is that from the beginning of the process, there has been resistance. There has been a lack of “allowing” in terms of how and when your desire will be fulfilled, which shows itself through your expression of impatience.

Which leads to mistake number 3:

3. Determining ahead of time, HOW and WHEN you will attract what you want.

The Law of Attraction works because and when you allow it to. The nature of the Universe is infinite. Our conscious minds are not. When we have a desire, we very often tend to “figure out” how the Universe is going to deliver - be it through our jobs, the lottery, or some other source in particular.

When you attach yourself to one particular outcome, you are cutting off an infinite (literally) number of other ways your desire can be attracted.

4. Allowing your emotions to be led by “external evidence”.

This is where people tend to give up. Because their experience of reality is different than what they are trying to attract, they allow themselves to feel frustrated, which of course, only acts to attract more of what will frustrate them.

This all starts because there is, on some level, a basic lack of trust that the Law of Attraction actually has scientific basis. Because after all, if you have TOTAL trust/faith, then your vibration will reflect that and two things will happen: 1) Your desire will come to you as quickly as possible, and 2) You literally won’t give external reality a second thought, because you’ll realize that what you’re looking at now is simply a result of what you’ve been attracting to that point, and that change is on the way provided you hold your NEW vibration consistently.

5. Not taking care of your limiting beliefs that run at a deeper level.

As mentioned earlier, you have a lifetime of limiting beliefs that have helped to create the reality that you are now trying to change. You have manifested everything around you based on these beliefs, and the feelings associated with those beliefs.

These beliefs run so deep, that you hardly consider them “beliefs”. They occur to you as just “how things are”. Further, these beliefs have very specific emotions attached to them, and chances are you can FEEL these emotions on some level every time one of these beliefs shows themselves.

How will this show up?

Let’s suppose you’re wanting to manifest a large amount of money. When you think about that, there might be a certain emotion that immediately comes up for you. This might be associated with a thought like, “I’ll never be able to attract that. It’s too much.”. This might be connected to a feeling that you don’t DESERVE that amount, or you might feel frustrated with the “bigness” of it.

Either way, these negative emotions are the very energy that is REPELLING what you want! When you learn to RELEASE those emotions, you clear the way for the Universe to deliver what you desire, whatever it is. But until and unless you eliminate the resistance, you will not be in vibrational alignment with what you desire, and thus you can NOT experience it!

There are several “releasing” methods available, such as “The Sedona Method”, and EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) that can quickly and easily eliminate these energetic blocks.

By Bob Doyle: These are just 5 of the more common mistakes that “newbies” to the Law of Attraction make. There are several more that we list at our web site, http://www.wealthbeyondreason.com, where we also delve into how to reverse these mistakes so that the Law of Attraction can become a monumentally powerful force in your life! A free multimedia “Law of Attraction” seminar is also available at the Wealth Beyond Reason web site.

FEAR: It’ll Make You Scream, It’ll Make You Cry, It’ll Leave You Shaking In Your Boots

But don’t panic. Advice that will help you vanquish this enemy within. Fear is the real king of the jungle. It rules our actions, consciously or not. It makes us wuss out of skiing down a black-diamond slope and spaz out while hitting on that hot Lindsay Lohan look-alike. But why? And how can we stop it?

Remember that cost-cutting report you were supposed to deliver to your boss last week? How could you forget? You’ve thought of little else since the deadline came and went, and you’re pretty sure he hasn’t forgotten about it, either. You owe him an explanation, but you’re way too terrified to go into his office and give him an excuse.

Instead, you sit in your cubicle, sweating profusely, hyperventilating, imagining the worst. Now your boss is standing over you, grinding his molars–you can actually hear them. He waits for your explanation You want to tell him that a two-day deadline was perhaps a bit unrealistic. But you can’t. Your ears are buzzing. Your face feels hot. A bead of sweat falls from your forehead to your desk. This, you realize, is how the wounded gazelle feels facing the hungry lion on the savanna plains. You stagger on, but it’s useless. You can’t get away.

In this era of terror threats and job threats, of orange alerts at home and monkeypox abroad, we can’t avoid dread any more than we can control its cause. But we can control our fear. It starts with knowing the enemy. What often seems like an all-encompassing emotion is actually manufactured in a small knot of neurons called the amygdala, the brain’s Fear Command Center. When it senses a threat, it unleashes adrenaline and pumps blood to muscles, sharpening our senses and prepping us for action. How well we initially respond to challenges may largely be a function of biology.

Yale University’s Charles A. Morgan III, M.D., who’s currently studying the physiological toughness of Green Berets and Navy Seals, has found that his subjects have higher-than-normal levels of a brain hormone called neuropeptide Y, which he believes counters the adverse affects of an adrenaline surge. “They’re more relaxed and have clearer mental focus under severe stress,” explains Morgan. “They’re excited by risk, but they’re also very conscientious about performing well.”

Civilians like us can also benefit from high anxiety. Fear of failure, unemployment, and homelessness drives us out of bed and off to the office in the morning. And, when the pressure’s on, it helps us concentrate harder and focus more. It’s when panic gets in the way of work, say, or our sex lives that we should really be scared.

Psychologists, sex therapists, and others trained to treat these so-called “performance-based” fears will tell you there’s no miracle cure for panic. But we can keep it from ruling our lives. Here’s how.

At Work

A creative executive once worked for a brilliant guy who managed by reign of terror. When he wasn’t reaming the staff during meetings, he was tearing apart their work, constantly dismissing it as the worst he had ever seen. And that was on a good day. The entire crew was working scared until someone got the nerve to confront him. Suddenly, the verbal tirades stopped. The lesson? Whether we’re terrified of a bullying boss or an impossible deadline, the most effective way to wrangle fear at work is to face it down–the sooner the better.

“One of the chief causes of stress is avoiding stress,” says Ben Dattner, Ph.D., an organizational psychologist and the president of Dattner Consulting, L.L.C., in New York. “If your boss sets unrealistic sales goals, you’re going to have to confront that sooner or later.” We need to learn how to stand up to the big man and, similarly, get over our dread of falling short. Some strategies:

* If that big assignment finds you hiding beneath your desk, it may be because you’re still hung up on some past failure. Eileen Wolkstein, a career counselor and executive coach in New York, suggests focusing on a recent achievement–such as when you earned praise for your work on an earlier project or even when you broke through the 300-pound ceiling on the bench press. Think about the effort you poured into those tasks–the grit, the stamina. Now do the same with your new assignment. As Wolkstein notes, “A lot of skills you’ve developed elsewhere can transfer to your job.”

* When you’ve got a beef with a workplace superior, write it out before confronting him, suggests Wolkstein. Then choose an ideal delivery time, such as when he’s not overwhelmed. (FYI: In the men’s room is not a good moment.) And don’t be combative: Use “I” not “You.” (Correct: “I feel this idea won’t work.” Incorrect: “Your idea is butt-headed.”) “Your message will be better appreciated if you engage in a dialogue,” says Wolkstein. “You’re not there to be right. You’re there to communicate.”

In Society

When top football running back Ricky Williams was a rookie with the New Orleans Saints, he was a panicky head case. He’d conduct post-game interviews with his helmet strapped on, and he’d recoil from giddy fans, feeling sick to his stomach. So great was his terror of speaking to people, he couldn’t even place an order at Burger King. “I thought everyone was staring at me all the Time,” he later told Sports Illustrated. “The stress skewed my view of reality.”

With the help of a therapist, Williams eventually overcame social-anxiety disorder, a disease that afflicts some 10 million Americans. It can be a dread of something specific, such as talking at a shareholders’ meeting, or a more widespread panic. But both are generally fueled by a profound fear of rejection–a feeling everyone can relate to (even you). The next time social interaction drives you into a cold sweat, consider these game plans from Charles di Cagno, director of the Public Speaking & Social Anxiety Center in New York:

* Scared to give that presentation? “Practice in a similar situation,” says di Cagno. First, rehearse standing in front of friends with your hands at your side and your feet in place (that is, don’t sway). Next, get comfortable reading aloud, going at an even pace and pronouncing every word. Then try speaking for a couple of minutes on a topic you know cold. Now prep your speech, outlining just a few key points and anecdotes. “If you work in manageable steps,” promises di Cagno, “you’ll build confidence faster than by just doing a presentation to death.”

At Play

From the chairlift it looked simple enough. A quick chute through some aspens, a patch of moguls, then nothing but lush, untouched snow. But your gut drops as you stand atop your snowboard, 12,000 feet up, staring down a 50-degree run. Whose idea was this? Oh, yeah–your stupid friends, who are already gouging the powder with hard, swooping eurocarves. But you can’t bail now. So you plunge in, and right away you know you’re going way too fast. You can’t turn, can’t stop, can’t even breathe. And the trees? They’re speeding right at you? You crouch low and tight, bracing for impact, thanking God and the guy at the board shop for your shiny new helmet.

This moment of prime-time terror is brought to you courtesy of a biological phenomenon called the anxiety curve. When our emotional state is at the lower end, we don’t feel much fear or pressure, so we’re easily bored and distracted. When we’re on the high end, our panic is so great that we can’t focus on anything but our fear. By controlling our dread of big waves or nasty slopes, we can learn to perform somewhere in the middle–or that ideal state of excitement that sports psychologists call “the Zone.” The surest way to get there is to face down challenges and tune out that voice that says, “No way, dude?’ Try these mantras instead:

* What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

Research has shown that the more we Pace a terrifying challenge–like that 50-degree slope–the better we perform. “If you’ve successfully dealt with a certain stress before,” explains Yale’s Morgan, “you can fall back on a memory of behavior. You’ll perceive that you have more control, and that gives you confidence.” But just boarding or surfing isn’t enough. Board or surf in the very conditions that freak you out. Then keep doing it, again and again.

* I think I can, I think I can.

Block out thoughts like, “The wave is too big” or “The trail is too steep.” These fern’s become self-fulfilling prophecies, says New York clinical sports psychologist Jonathan K Katz, Ph.D., because they drain our energy. “I’ve constantly told Wimbledon players to focus on the next point, not the one they just lost;’ says Katz, who’s also worked with Olympic hopefuls and some New York Mets. So what if you ate coral a minute ago? Get out of your head and back on the wave.

FEAR FACTORY

In his five seasons as executive producer of the NBC reality TV series Feor Factor, Matt Kunitz has become an authority on freaking people out. “We try to tap into people’s primal fears,” says Kunitz. “Fear of heights. Fear of spiders and snakes. Drowning. We’ve done a lot with cockroaches.” He’s especially proud of a stunt from last season, in which contestants were wrapped in a body bag then submerged underwater. “It was a simple thing to get out of, but five out of the six panicked completely,” he says. “The one guy who made it went last, so he knew exactly what to do.”

Kunitz, bemoans the fact that the most successful contestants often make for TV bores. “The big, macho guys–they rarely win,” he says. “It’s not about being physical, it’s about focus and being in the right mind-set.”

This year Kunitz is really aiming to crush morale. “We’re going to put them on a metal beam and shoot 2 million volts of Tesla lightning bolts at their heads,” he says giddily. “It’s going to be complete psychological terror.”

L.C. Smith is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn. He’s not afraid of anything–except his dentist.

See How Easily You Can Win By Losing

Why lie about it? Losing sucks. Nobody likes to lose, whether it’s in work, politics, sports or love. But here’s an angle you may not have considered: Losing can actually be good for you. Losing takes you by the throat and says, “Listen, doofus, there are a few things you need to reconsider.” It demands that you take a fresh look at your faults and misguided expectations.

In fact, if you’re ready to learn from it, the experience of losing can help turn you into a winner. As Walter Anderson writes in The Confidence Course, “True success is always the last of a string of failed attempts to get it right.”

Now, at some point in life, you probably got the idea that you’re supposed to win all the time. Society encourages men to be competitive in whatever they do, both professionally and personally, notes Scott Hall, PhD, an assistant professor at the University of Dayton who specializes in men’s issues.

“It tends to be all or nothing, black or white,” Hall says. Yet the most successful people stress the process of winning rather than the end results. For instance, basketball players like Michael Jordan are extremely competitive but seem primarily motivated by a love of the game. They want to win, but more than anything, they want to play.

That’s not to say that you shouldn’t care about the quality of your performance. Nobody goes into anything hoping to lose, and there’s nothing wrong with wanting to succeed in whatever you do. “This becomes a problem, though, when the outcome isn’t what you want and you judge your worth as a person based on that,” notes Hall. In other words, the question isn’t whether you win or lose–it’s whether you’re willing to accept some losses now so you can get better in the future.

Losing like a winner
So, what can you do to help turn a losing situation around? You can start by throwing a tantrum. Pout and piss and moan. Then, once you’ve gotten that out of your system, forget about it. That may be easier said than done, but being aware of your anger or disappointment can help you turn negatives into positives.

“Recognize the fact that you have to let go,” Dulberg says. “Ask yourself how dwelling on this will move you forward. If you can come up with one good reason, dwell on it all day. But if you’re really honest, you won’t be able to.” Next, move on to the hard part: learning from the situation.

“We seldom, if ever, have any control over outcomes. What we have control over is the process,” says Wilbanks. “If you went out and attained your personal goals, even if you still lost, so what? The guy who got the job you wanted may have been better qualified than you, the girl who turned you down may have had a boyfriend–that’s the part you can’t control.

That’s not a life-killer. What’s a life-killer is when you go out and get your head handed to you over and over again and never stop to ask, ‘Why?’” Yet if you’re willing to dig into the reasons you lost, Wilbanks adds, you’ll eventually overcome them. “The learning part of losing is finding out where you are in your process,” Wilbanks concludes. “There’s a great Zen saying I tell athletes: ‘I get knocked down seven times, but I get up eight.’”

By Sam Dunn - Mens Fitness Magazine

Pitfalls of Perfectionism

It’s the 2004 French Open, and Venus Williams has just claimed her seventeenth victory of the season — no losses. In her moment of triumph, she turns to reporters and says, in near-perfect French: “I haven’t worked hard enough. Sometimes, I’ve wanted it too much. Sometimes, I haven’t wanted it enough. Sometimes, I didn’t listen to my coaches. Sometimes, I didn’t listen to myself.” She adds, “I hate mistakes in everything, not just on the court.” So, what’s wrong with perfectionism?

Findings from decades of personality research say plenty. Even though perfectionists are often high-achievers, they are also at risk for eating disorders, sexual dysfunction, obsessive-compulsive disorder, depression, divorce, and suicide. They lead a life of continual anxiety and fear of failure. Even when they succeed, like Venus Williams, perfectionists never feel satisfied.

According to psychologist Gordon Flett of York University in Toronto, perfectionism is particularly dangerous for athletes and people who exercise regularly. They often over-train and burn out, by pushing their bodies beyond their limits. Instead of letting up, they exacerbate their injuries, potentially causing permanent damage. Simply put, they cannot tolerate flaws.

Exceptionally talented athletes may be protected from the pitfalls of perfectionism for a while, but inevitably everyone runs into obstacles, either on or off the playing field. “Even if you are a champion, someday you will lose a game or get injured or just get old,” says Flett. “Perfectionists don’t respond well. They become extremely angry with themselves and depressed.”

The obsession with exactitude tends to cover all aspects of life. Perfectionists are very rarely obsessive about only one aspect of their lives; they “hate mistakes in everything,” just like Williams. If they don’t have the perfect body, they develop an eating disorder. If they don’t have the perfect marriage, they get divorced.

Flett calls this type of all-or-nothing thinking the “just right” phenomenon. If something isn’t “just right” to a perfectionist, then it might as well be thrown away. This may explain the high incidence of suicide among perfectionists: They think that if life isn’t perfect, then it’s worthless. Get rid of it.

But not all perfectionists are the same. Flett identifies three different types perfectionism, each with a distinctive array of drawbacks. Some perfectionists are almost entirely self-motivated. In spite of any amount of praise they might receive from other people, these self-oriented perfectionists can always find fault with themselves. Karen Kain, Canada’s prima ballerina and one of the most respected dancers in the world, gave over 10,000 performances in her career. In her biography, she wrote that she received satisfaction from about 12 of them. Her primary feeling about her abilities was disappointment.

Other perfectionists feel as though the world expects them to be impeccable. In a classroom setting, these are the children who won’t try new things because they’re scared of looking foolish. They often must cope with sadness or anger, because they perceive the demands of others as unreasonable and unfair. Since they need to appear perfect, so-called “socially-proscribed” perfectionists almost never ask for help. They keep problems to themselves and let them fester.

A third group of perfectionists extends their high standards to everyone else in the immediate orbit. “They demand the same thing from others that they demand in themselves, which seems fair to them,” says Flett. Personal relationships are nearly impossible, and marriages fall apart. They are the world’s worst bosses.

All perfectionists can benefit from learning how to set more realistic standards for themselves. Often when a perfectionist fails to meet a goal — say, running six miles — she’ll try to overcompensate by aiming even farther, so the next day she’ll try for eight miles. They adjust their standards, but in the wrong direction. Perfectionists can learn to undo such potentially harmful logic through counseling.

Perfectionists also harbor other destructive beliefs: for example, that they will be unloved if they aren’t perfect. Since being truly perfect isn’t possible, they will never feel truly convinced that they are loved.

“They don’t get the message that love isn’t contingent upon accomplishment,” says Flett. Learning to accept the flaws in themselves and others is not the pathway to mediocrity; it’s the high road to a more loving — and satisfying — life.

Jennifer Drapkin - psychologytoday.com

What It Takes To Be Great

Research now shows that the lack of natural talent is irrelevant to great success. The secret? Painful and demanding practice and hard work. But how hard, painful or demanding is it when your doing something you love? Not Very.

What makes Tiger Woods great? What made Berkshire Hathaway (Charts) Chairman Warren Buffett the world’s premier investor? We think we know: Each was a natural who came into the world with a gift for doing exactly what he ended up doing. As Buffett told Fortune not long ago, he was “wired at birth to allocate capital.” It’s a one-in-a-million thing. You’ve got it - or you don’t.

Well, folks, it’s not so simple. For one thing, you do not possess a natural gift for a certain job, because targeted natural gifts don’t exist. (Sorry, Warren.) You are not a born CEO or investor or chess grandmaster. You will achieve greatness only through an enormous amount of hard work over many years. And not just any hard work, but work of a particular type that’s demanding and painful.

Buffett, for instance, is famed for his discipline and the hours he spends studying financial statements of potential investment targets. The good news is that your lack of a natural gift is irrelevant - talent has little or nothing to do with greatness. You can make yourself into any number of things, and you can even make yourself great.

Scientific experts are producing remarkably consistent findings across a wide array of fields. Understand that talent doesn’t mean intelligence, motivation or personality traits. It’s an innate ability to do some specific activity especially well. British-based researchers Michael J. Howe, Jane W. Davidson and John A. Sluboda conclude in an extensive study, “The evidence we have surveyed … does not support the [notion that] excelling is a consequence of possessing innate gifts.”

To see how the researchers could reach such a conclusion, consider the problem they were trying to solve. In virtually every field of endeavor, most people learn quickly at first, then more slowly and then stop developing completely. Yet a few do improve for years and even decades, and go on to greatness.

The irresistible question - the “fundamental challenge” for researchers in this field, says the most prominent of them, professor K. Anders Ericsson of Florida State University - is, Why? How are certain people able to go on improving? The answers begin with consistent observations about great performers in many fields.

Scientists worldwide have conducted scores of studies since the 1993 publication of a landmark paper by Ericsson and two colleagues, many focusing on sports, music and chess, in which performance is relatively easy to measure and plot over time. But plenty of additional studies have also examined other fields, including business.

No substitute for hard work

The first major conclusion is that nobody is great without work. It’s nice to believe that if you find the field where you’re naturally gifted, you’ll be great from day one, but it doesn’t happen. There’s no evidence of high-level performance without experience or practice.

Reinforcing that no-free-lunch finding is vast evidence that even the most accomplished people need around ten years of hard work before becoming world-class, a pattern so well established researchers call it the ten-year rule.

What about Bobby Fischer, who became a chess grandmaster at 16? Turns out the rule holds: He’d had nine years of intensive study. And as John Horn of the University of Southern California and Hiromi Masunaga of California State University observe, “The ten-year rule represents a very rough estimate, and most researchers regard it as a minimum, not an average.” In many fields (music, literature) elite performers need 20 or 30 years’ experience before hitting their zenith.

So greatness isn’t handed to anyone; it requires a lot of hard work. Yet that isn’t enough, since many people work hard for decades without approaching greatness or even getting significantly better. What’s missing?

Practice makes perfect

The best people in any field are those who devote the most hours to what the researchers call “deliberate practice.” It’s activity that’s explicitly intended to improve performance, that reaches for objectives just beyond one’s level of competence, provides feedback on results and involves high levels of repetition.

For example: Simply hitting a bucket of balls is not deliberate practice, which is why most golfers don’t get better. Hitting an eight-iron 300 times with a goal of leaving the ball within 20 feet of the pin 80 percent of the time, continually observing results and making appropriate adjustments, and doing that for hours every day - that’s deliberate practice.

Consistency is crucial. As Ericsson notes, “Elite performers in many diverse domains have been found to practice, on the average, roughly the same amount every day, including weekends.”

Evidence crosses a remarkable range of fields. In a study of 20-year-old violinists by Ericsson and colleagues, the best group (judged by conservatory teachers) averaged 10,000 hours of deliberate practice over their lives; the next-best averaged 7,500 hours; and the next, 5,000. It’s the same story in surgery, insurance sales, and virtually every sport. More deliberate practice equals better performance. Tons of it equals great performance.

The skeptics

Not all researchers are totally onboard with the myth-of-talent hypothesis, though their objections go to its edges rather than its center. For one thing, there are the intangibles. Two athletes might work equally hard, but what explains the ability of New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady to perform at a higher level in the last two minutes of a game?

Researchers also note, for example, child prodigies who could speak, read or play music at an unusually early age. But on investigation those cases generally include highly involved parents. And many prodigies do not go on to greatness in their early field, while great performers include many who showed no special early aptitude.

Certainly some important traits are partly inherited, such as physical size and particular measures of intelligence, but those influence what a person doesn’t do more than what he does; a five-footer will never be an NFL lineman, and a seven-footer will never be an Olympic gymnast. Even those restrictions are less severe than you’d expect: Ericsson notes, “Some international chess masters have IQs in the 90s.” The more research that’s done, the more solid the deliberate-practice model becomes.

Real-world examples

All this scholarly research is simply evidence for what great performers have been showing us for years. To take a handful of examples: Winston Churchill, one of the 20th century’s greatest orators, practiced his speeches compulsively. Vladimir Horowitz supposedly said, “If I don’t practice for a day, I know it. If I don’t practice for two days, my wife knows it. If I don’t practice for three days, the world knows it.” He was certainly a demon practicer, but the same quote has been attributed to world-class musicians like Ignace Paderewski and Luciano Pavarotti.

Many great athletes are legendary for the brutal discipline of their practice routines. In basketball, Michael Jordan practiced intensely beyond the already punishing team practices. (Had Jordan possessed some mammoth natural gift specifically for basketball, it seems unlikely he’d have been cut from his high school team.)

In football, all-time-great receiver Jerry Rice - passed up by 15 teams because they considered him too slow - practiced so hard that other players would get sick trying to keep up.

Tiger Woods is a textbook example of what the research shows. Because his father introduced him to golf at an extremely early age - 18 months - and encouraged him to practice intensively, Woods had racked up at least 15 years of practice by the time he became the youngest-ever winner of the U.S. Amateur Championship, at age 18. Also in line with the findings, he has never stopped trying to improve, devoting many hours a day to conditioning and practice, even remaking his swing twice because that’s what it took to get even better.

The business side

The evidence, scientific as well as anecdotal, seems overwhelmingly in favor of deliberate practice as the source of great performance. Just one problem: How do you practice business? Many elements of business, in fact, are directly practicable. Presenting, negotiating, delivering evaluations, deciphering financial statements - you can practice them all.

Still, they aren’t the essence of great managerial performance. That requires making judgments and decisions with imperfect information in an uncertain environment, interacting with people, seeking information - can you practice those things too? You can, though not in the way you would practice a Chopin etude.

Instead, it’s all about how you do what you’re already doing - you create the practice in your work, which requires a few critical changes. The first is going at any task with a new goal: Instead of merely trying to get it done, you aim to get better at it.

Report writing involves finding information, analyzing it and presenting it - each an improvable skill. Chairing a board meeting requires understanding the company’s strategy in the deepest way, forming a coherent view of coming market changes and setting a tone for the discussion. Anything that anyone does at work, from the most basic task to the most exalted, is an improvable skill.

Adopting a new mindset

Armed with that mindset, people go at a job in a new way. Research shows they process information more deeply and retain it longer. They want more information on what they’re doing and seek other perspectives. They adopt a longer-term point of view. In the activity itself, the mindset persists. You aren’t just doing the job, you’re explicitly trying to get better at it in the larger sense.

Again, research shows that this difference in mental approach is vital. For example, when amateur singers take a singing lesson, they experience it as fun, a release of tension. But for professional singers, it’s the opposite: They increase their concentration and focus on improving their performance during the lesson. Same activity, different mindset.

Feedback is crucial, and getting it should be no problem in business. Yet most people don’t seek it; they just wait for it, half hoping it won’t come. Without it, as Goldman Sachs leadership-development chief Steve Kerr says, “it’s as if you’re bowling through a curtain that comes down to knee level. If you don’t know how successful you are, two things happen: One, you don’t get any better, and two, you stop caring.” In some companies, like General Electric, frequent feedback is part of the culture. If you aren’t lucky enough to get that, seek it out.

Be the ball

Through the whole process, one of your goals is to build what the researchers call “mental models of your business” - pictures of how the elements fit together and influence one another. The more you work on it, the larger your mental models will become and the better your performance will grow.

Andy Grove could keep a model of a whole world-changing technology industry in his head and adapt Intel as needed. Bill Gates, Microsoft’s founder, had the same knack: He could see at the dawn of the PC that his goal of a computer on every desk was realistic and would create an unimaginably large market. John D. Rockefeller, too, saw ahead when the world-changing new industry was oil. Napoleon was perhaps the greatest ever. He could not only hold all the elements of a vast battle in his mind but, more important, could also respond quickly when they shifted in unexpected ways.

That’s a lot to focus on for the benefits of deliberate practice - and worthless without one more requirement: Do it regularly, not sporadically.

Why?

For most people, work is hard enough without pushing even harder. Those extra steps are so difficult and painful they almost never get done. That’s the way it must be. If great performance were easy, it wouldn’t be rare. Which leads to possibly the deepest question about greatness. While experts understand an enormous amount about the behavior that produces great performance, they understand very little about where that behavior comes from.

The authors of one study conclude, “We still do not know which factors encourage individuals to engage in deliberate practice.” Or as University of Michigan business school professor Noel Tichy puts it after 30 years of working with managers, “Some people are much more motivated than others, and that’s the existential question I cannot answer - why.”

The critical reality is that we are not hostage to some naturally granted level of talent. We can make ourselves what we will. Strangely, that idea is not popular. People hate abandoning the notion that they would coast to fame and riches if they found their talent. But that view is tragically constraining, because when they hit life’s inevitable bumps in the road, they conclude that they just aren’t gifted and give up.

Maybe we can’t expect most people to achieve greatness. It’s just too demanding. But the striking, liberating news is that greatness isn’t reserved for a preordained few. It is available to you and to everyone.

(Fortune Magazine)

20 Ways to Reclaim Your Life

Feeling on edge? Maybe it’s your job. Or your wife. Or a 3-foot putt to break 90. Whatever your worry, consider it quashed.

1. Drink more OJ
Researchers at the University of Alabama fed rats 200 milligrams of vitamin C twice a day and found that it nearly stopped the secretion of stress hormones. If it relaxes a rat, why not you? Two 8-ounce glasses of orange juice daily gives you the vitamin C you need.

2. Put a green dot on your phone
This is your secret reminder to take one deep breath before you answer a call, says Susan Siegel, of the Program on Integrative Medicine at the University of North Carolina school of medicine. Not only will you feel better, but you’ll sound more confident.

3. Spend quality time with a canine
Yours or someone else’s. According to research at the State University of New York at Buffalo, being around a pet provides more stress relief than being around a two-legged companion. As if we needed a study to determine that.

4. Go to Starbucks–with your coworkers
Researchers at the University of Bristol in England discovered that when stressed-out men consumed caffeine by themselves, they remained nervous and jittery. But when anxious men caffeine-loaded as part of a group, their feelings of stress subsided.

5. Shake it out
When you’re facing that big-money putt, shake out your fingers, relieving the tension in your forearms, hands, and wrists and shifting your focus to the only thing you can control: your preshot routine. You won’t think about making–or missing–the shot, says Alan Goldberg, Ed.D., a sports-psychology consultant in Amherst, Massachusetts.

6. Bring a radio to work
And set it to the blandest music station you can find. According to a study at Pennsylvania’s Wilkes University, Muzak lowers your stress levels at work, while also reducing the risk of the common cold. We knew Celine Dion had a purpose.

7. Shut up and smile
Freaking out about a speech? Smile, look at the audience, and keep quiet for 2 seconds, says T.J. Walker, president of Media Training Worldwide. It’ll slow you down and create the impression that you’re relaxed and in control. The audience will then feel more comfortable, leading you to actually be relaxed and in control. Now start talking. Unless you’re a mime. In that case, as you were.

8. Talk with your hands
To keep calm in a job interview, rest your arms on your lap, with your elbows bent slightly, and have your fingers almost touching, says Walker. This will keep your body relaxed, which will keep your tone conversational.

9. Run fast
Bike hard. Punch the heavy bag. And we don’t mean your mother-in-law. A University of Missouri at Columbia study found that 33 minutes of high-intensity exercise helps lower stress levels more than working out at a moderate pace. What’s more, the benefits last as long as 90 minutes afterward.

10. Hit the sauna after your workout
In an Oklahoma State University study, those who combined sauna use with group counseling had greater stress relief, feelings of relaxation, and sense of accomplishment compared with those who only had their heads shrunk.

11. Remember the lyrics to your favorite song…
…name at least 30 states, or assemble the All-Time Band of Guys Named James (the James Gang doesn’t count). In other words, give your mind any all-consuming challenge, as long as it has a definite finish–unending problems cause more stress, says Toby Haslam-Hopwood, Psy.D., a psychologist at the Menninger Clinic in Houston.

12. Lay The Journey to Wild Divine
It’s a CD-ROM game that works like this: Three biofeedback sensors worn on your fingers sense your stress level and translate it into your ability to perform tasks such as levitating virtual balls or controlling birds in flight. The more you play, the more mastery you gain over your emotions. Go to CreativeLivingInstitute.org for more information. It sells for about $150.

13. Find a breathtaking view
Now take a breath –and a good long look. You’ll walk away from the brink with a sense of context and a bigger perspective, which will make the 5,000 things on your to-do list seem less daunting, says Allen Elkin, Ph.D., director of the Stress Management & Counseling Center in New York City.

14. Imagine you’re on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire
When dealing with a screaming child in a car or any other acutely stressful situation, ask yourself how long you could listen to it if someone gave you $100,000, suggests Elkin. Suddenly, it’s not so awful, is it?

15. Say you’re sorry
What, now the kid is screaming on a crowded airplane? Immediately apologize to everyone around you. By acknowledging that you may have made a mistake or hurt someone else, you can help clear the air, and that will reduce your stress level, says Charles Emery, Ph.D., an associate professor of psychology at Ohio State University.

16. Forgive
Now someone else’s kid is screaming on a crowded airplane? And the mom is too wrapped up in this week’s People to do a thing about it? Let it go, says Carl Thoresen, Ph.D., a psychologist at Stanford University. Realizing that you can’t control someone else’s behavior is difficult, but it’s one of the best ways to destress.

17. Add trees to your commute
Even if it takes you out of your way, it may make your ride less stressful. An Ohio State University study found that scenic drives were more calming than those involving strip malls and endless, disheartening asphalt.

18. Water a plant
It’s nurturing, it doesn’t take up much space, and for 10 seconds, the world is not about you, which can be a huge psychological relief, says Elkin.

19. Ditch the dingy shower curtain
And hang up something in a cool color like green or blue. According to Leonard Perry, Ph.D., an extension professor at the University of Vermont, cool hues are more soothing.

20. Schedule medical tests for early morning
Rather than spend the entire day anxious about an afternoon DRE, get fingered first thing in the a.m., when your cortisol levels are already naturally elevated, says David Spiegel, M.D., medical director of the Stanford Center for Integrative Medicine.

BONUS #1: Meditate
Researchers at West Virginia University found that 35 participants who underwent “mindfulness meditation” saw a 44 percent reduction in psychological distress over 3 months. Just sit quietly for 10 minutes a day and focus on your breathing.

BONUS #2: Find a shoe-shine guy when your flight’s delayed
Walking lessens the frustration, and having a destination keeps your mind busy, says Michael Nuccitelli, Psy.D., a psychologist in Brewster, New York. You’ll also have fine-looking shoes. And if this magazine has taught you anything, it’s that ladies notice fine-looking shoes.

By: Steve Calechman - Mens Health Magazine

Would $40,000 Make You Happy?

Is that a lump sum or do I have to take the annuity? Penelope Trunk gives her take. “It’s not jet money.” Which was a way of saying, it was a good deal, but it won’t earn enough money to pay for a private jet. No matter what size the pile of money is, there’s always a way to see it as small.

Looking for happiness through financial success? Wondering what the magic number is? It’s $40,000 according to Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert. Really. So technically, most of you should be happy. And if you’re working for the next big raise, forget it. You’re better off working on teaching yourself how to look at your money with a different eye.

I remember when I passed the $100K mark. My boss loved my work and gave me a raise that put me at $125,000. But a competitor offered me $140,000 and my boss told me he wouldn’t match it. At that point, I had no kids, no mortgage and no car payments, so I didn’t need the money. But I recognized salary as a gauge of prominence in my field, and although I was making $125,000 I felt under appreciated.

Eventually, I left that job for one that paid more than $200,000 a year, and I lived the aphorism that you have to spend money to make money. I couldn’t take high-end clients out to dinner in my refurbished wreck of a car, so I leased a BMW. Dressing as well as my clients cost an arm and a leg. And I hired an assistant to manage my personal life since my new position left no time for that.

You might scoff at my choices, but I was not unique among those whose salaries hit six figures: My expenses rose with my salary, and my desires expanded with my bank account. You might think, “That won’t happen to me,” but how foolish you would be to assume you would be the exception to the rule.

In fact, the rule is well established in research: The first 40 thousand makes a big difference in one’s level of happiness. Happiness is dependent on being able to meet basic needs for food, shelter, and clothing. After meeting those needs you need to turn to something other than consumerism. Because additional money has negligible impact on how happy you are. Your level of happiness is largely dependent on your outlook.

Maybe you’re thinking there’s another magic threshold beyond forty thousand. Like maybe 40 million. But you’re wrong. When I ran in circles of venture capitalists, there was a common phrase, “It’s not jet money.” Which was a way of saying, it was a good deal, but it won’t earn enough money to pay for a private jet. No matter what size the pile of money is, there’s always a way to see it as small.

So for those of you looking for more happiness, realize that a new job or a new home won’t be nearly as rewarding as a new outlook. Optimism makes people happy. Raising your standing on the optimism scale will impact your happiness more than raising your worth on the pay scale.

Here’s a ten-second test to figure out how optimistic you are:

Think of something really bad that has happened to you. Do you think:
1. It has made me a better person.
2. I made some mistakes, but bad things happen to everyone sometimes.
3. Nothing ever goes right for me.

Think of something really good that happened to you. Do you think:
1. I am good at creating my own success.
2. I got lucky.
3. In the end it didn’t turn out to be that great a thing.

If you chose the first answer both times, then you probably already feel pretty happy regardless of your income. If you didn’t answer one both times, then a shift in the way you think could dramatically improve your happiness.

The good news is that you can train yourself to think positively. Watch how happy people behave. The cliché about gaining strength through adversity might annoy you, but happy people live by those words.

If you took the test above and picked the third answer both times, you probably blame your life on external things so that you don’t have to take responsibility for your plight. Happy people take responsibility for their success and consider failure a temporary fluke. To change your thinking, start assuming responsibility for your emotions.

If you chose the number two answers, you probably tell yourself, “I’m not happy but I don’t know why.” Start believing that if you take action, good things will happen. Tell yourself good things happen because you expect good things and bad things happen to make you stronger.

Maybe you’re thinking, “Forget it. I don’t believe any of this works. And I can’t do it anyway.” But that’s part of your problem, isn’t it?

You can visit Penelope’s site here: http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/

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