Category Archives: Career

Posted on

Nerve Lesson #11: Keep Your Eyes On A Guiding Principle

Nerve by Taylor Clark is a great read. It is an entertaining and insightful look into fear. He shares some key methods to deal with fear, anxiety, and stress. I didn’t say overcome fear because our fears are here to stay (for the most part). The hero’s of the world acknowledge the fear and move forward with it.

Lesson #11: Keep your eyes on a guiding principle.
“Fear, anxiety, and stress can make the universe seem chaotic and bewildering, so it’s always helpful to have a compass to steer you through the maelstrom…devotion to personal values is a crucial part of learning to live with anxiety and stress…our emotional pain helps highlight what’s really important to us…’If you flip anxiety over, it tells you what you care about, what your values are’…”

“He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how.”-Friedrich Nietzsche

Posted on

Nerve Lesson #10: Build Faith In Yourself

Nerve by Taylor Clark is a great read. It is an entertaining and insightful look into fear. He shares some key methods to deal with fear, anxiety, and stress. I didn’t say overcome fear because our fears are here to stay (for the most part). The hero’s of the world acknowledge the fear and move forward with it.

Lesson #10: Build faith in yourself.
“…developing confidence that you can handle intense fear and stressful predicaments is absolutely vital…remember, worry research shows that people handle worst-case scenarios far better than they ever expected, and therapists like David Barlow like to plunge their clients into deep terror to show them reserves of strength they didn’t know they had. And in addition to building confidence through fear exposure, we can also do it through the ways that we talk to ourselves and handle worrisome visions of the future. Here’s a useful practice: next time you imagine something you fear coming to pass, visualize yourself not enduring it miserably or falling apart but coping with it well, demonstrating grit and resilience.”

Posted on

Not Enough Prefrontal Cortex

“Why are there so many mean, cheating, cussing, crazy students at school, Dad?” This is how my most recent discussion with my 14 year old son started the other day. I went on to explain to him one of the reasons why teens are impulsive, risky, rude, ‘crazy’, get in car accidents, experimented with illicit drugs, and talk about and have sex. Answer: overactive nucleus accumbens & not enough prefrontal cortex. “Ugh, Dad.”

It turns out that a brain area known as the nucleus accumbens is VERY active in teens and is the area of the brain associated with the processing of rewards aka sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. On the flip side, the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that helps us resist such temptations & is essential in our ability to make rational choices, is less developed in teens. In fact it has been shown that kids with ADHD have an immature prefrontal cortex (studies have shown that this immature prefrontal cortex eventually catches up to its peers with about a 3 year lag time).

So teens nucleus accumbens is more active than their prefrontal cortex, but as they develop into their early 20’s, there prefrontal cortex (usually & hopefully) becomes more active than their nucleus accumbens. Thus we see what we call maturity. We also see more rational choices, less car accidents, less impulsive & risky behavior.

You see, son, science can be helpful & fun…

(information based on a book: How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer)

Posted on

Nerve Lesson #8: Reframe The Situation

Nerve by Taylor Clark is a great read. It is an entertaining and insightful look into fear. He shares some key methods to deal with fear, anxiety, and stress. I didn’t say overcome fear because our fears are here to stay (for the most part). The hero’s of the world acknowledge the fear and move forward with it.

Lesson #8: Reframe the situation.
“when the procession of negative biases and anxious thoughts starts marching through our heads, we always have an important choice to make: do we buy into a falsely pessimistic interpretation of what’s going on, or do we learn to see things differently? ‘I like to say you can make an emotional molehill into an emotional mountain, which is what people do all the time’..according to psychologist Kevin Ochsner…he stresses the importance of recontextualizing: staying grounded in reason and reminding ourselves of the doubtlessly more positive reality of our situation…’When you change the way you appraise a situation, you change your emotional response to it.'”

Posted on

Nerve Lesson #7: Learn To Accept Uncertainty And Lack Of Control

Nerve by Taylor Clark is a great read. It is an entertaining and insightful look into fear. He shares some key methods to deal with fear, anxiety, and stress. I didn’t say overcome fear because our fears are here to stay (for the most part). The hero’s of the world acknowledge the fear and move forward with it.

Lesson #7: Learn to accept uncertainty and lack of control.
“Anxiety and stress feed on our negative response to feeling uncertain or powerless over the future…anxiety expert Robert Leahy suggests…taking a hint from the well-worn Serenity Prayer, which aspires to ‘the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.’ When we’re troubled about something uncertain or uncontrollable…Leahy recommends a simple practice to help us accept reality…suppose you’re worried you might be laid off from your job. Leahy says that if you bask in your uncertainty (that is, expose yourself to your fear about the future), repeating the distressing thought It’s possible I could be laid off to yourself without resisting your anxious emotional reaction, then you (and your amygdala) will eventually begin habituating to it. With enough exposure, the idea loses its power and becomes almost dull.”

Posted on

Nerve Lesson #6: Expose Yourself To Your Fears

Nerve by Taylor Clark is a great read. It is an entertaining and insightful look into fear. He shares some key methods to deal with fear, anxiety, and stress. I didn’t say overcome fear because our fears are here to stay (for the most part). The hero’s of the world acknowledge the fear and move forward with it.

Lesson #6: Expose yourself to your fears.
“If you want to remain locked into a fear indefinitely, then by all means, avoid the situations that make you anxious. but if you want to give your amygdala a chance to get over a fear, you must exposure yourself to the things and ideas that scare you…a good rule of thumb…if anxiety is stopping you from doing something that isn’t objectively dangerous, do it anyway….get in the habit of moving toward your fears rather than running away. When you do so, even ‘failures’ become successes, each exposure two steps forward to one step back.”

Posted on

Nerve Lesson #5: Mindfully Disentangle From Worries And Anxious Thoughts

Nerve by Taylor Clark is a great read. It is an entertaining and insightful look into fear. He shares some key methods to deal with fear, anxiety, and stress. I didn’t say overcome fear because our fears are here to stay (for the most part). The hero’s of the world acknowledge the fear and move forward with it.

Lesson #5: Mindfully Disentangle from worries and anxious thoughts.
“We know now that worry does us no good, yet trying to stop our fretting altogether is well nigh impossible…Evelyn Behar, the worry expert, suggests two paths for detaching from this internal chirping. One is to take the mindfulness route: the more you learn to simply watch your worries and let them coast by without getting entangled with them, the more you see them and their predictable patterns as if from far above. ‘Or,’ behar continued,’you can postpone worry. You write a worry down and agree that later on you can worry about it for thirty minutes, which frees you up to focus on the moment.'”

Posted on

Nerve Lesson #4: Redirect Your Focus

Nerve by Taylor Clark is a great read. It is an entertaining and insightful look into fear. He shares some key methods to deal with fear, anxiety, and stress. I didn’t say overcome fear because our fears are here to stay (for the most part). The hero’s of the world acknowledge the fear and move forward with it.

Lesson #4: Redirect your focus.
“…the culprit in cases of meltdown under pressure isn’tfear but misdirected focus: we turn our attention inward and grow preoccupied with worries about results, which undercuts our true abilities. Clutch athletes and cool-headed heros concentrate on the present moment and on the task at hand, a habit we can all develop through practice…psychologists say that even pausing a few times a day and being present for a moment with what’s going on around you (rather than with the monologue in your head) can help you to better inhabit the current moment.

Posted on

Nerve Lesson #3: Train, Practice, and Prepare

Nerve by Taylor Clark is a great read. It is an entertaining and insightful look into fear. He shares some key methods to deal with fear, anxiety, and stress. I didn’t say overcome fear because our fears are here to stay (for the most part). The hero’s of the world acknowledge the fear and move forward with it.

Lesson #3: Train, Practice, and Prepare
“Whether you want to make better decisions under stress, handle life-threatening situations with composure, or perform your best when pressure hits, training is the only reliable way to ensure success; through repetition and experience, you program yourself to do the right thing automatically….and keep the U.S. military’s eight Ps in mind: Proper prior planning and preparation prevents piss-poor performance.”

Posted on

Running Towards The Roar

So many times in life, we hesitate. We miss the opportunities before us because of that little voice inside our head that tells us: “we can’t do that” “you are not enough” “you are going to fail” What would our lives be if we ran past that little voice into the arms of our fears? or dreams?

Posted on

The Truth About Split Infinitives & Prepositions At The End of Sentences

These 2 grammar rules haunted me throughout my schooling.  And for no reason!

In today’s excerpt – certain grammatical “rules” that are widely viewed as correct come from the invalid application of grammatical rules from Classical Latin and Greek to the English language by British authors writing hundreds of years ago. Though they have been routinely violated by writers from Shakespeare to Hemingway, two such “rules” are the prohibitions against split infinitives and ending a sentence with a preposition:
“The first prohibition against the split infinitive occurs in an 1834 article by an author identified only as “P.” After that, increasingly over the course of the nineteenth century, a “rule” banning split infinitives began ricocheting from grammar book to grammar book, until every self-conscious English-speaker ‘knew’ that to put a word between ‘to’ and a verb in its infinitive was barbaric.

“The split-infinitive rule may represent mindless prescriptivism’s greatest height. It was foreign. (It was almost certainty based on the inability to split infinitives in Latin and Greek, since they consist of one word only.) It had been routinely violated by the great writers in English; one 1931 study found split infinitives in English literature from every century, beginning with the fourteenth-century epic poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, through wrongdoers such as William Tyndale, Oliver Cromwell, Samuel Pepys, Daniel Defoe, John Donne, Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and others.

“Rewording split infinitives can introduce ambiguity: ‘He failed entirely to comprehend it’ can mean he failed entirely, or he comprehended, but not entirely. Only putting ‘entirely’ between ‘to’ and ‘comprehend’ can convey clearly ‘he comprehended most, but not all.’ True, sentences can be reworded to work around the problem (‘He failed to comprehend everything’), but there is no reason to do so. While many prescriptive rules falsely claim to improve readability and clarity, this one is worse, introducing a problem that wasn’t there in the first place. Yet as split infinitives in fact became more common in nineteenth-century writing, condemnations of it grew equally strongly. The idea that ‘rules’ were more important than history, elegance, or actual practice … held writers and speakers in terror of making them. …

“Why is it ‘wrong’ to end a sentence with a preposition? … Who, upon seeing a
cake in the office break room, says, ‘For whom is this cake?’ instead of ‘Who’s the cake for?’ Where did this rule come from?

“The answer will surprise even most English teachers: John Dryden, the seventeenth-century poet less well known as an early, influential stickler. In a 1672 essay, he criticized his literary predecessor Ben Jonson for writing ‘The bodies that these souls were frightened from.’ Why the prepositional bee in Dryden’s syntactical bonnet? This pseudo-rule probably springs from the same source many others do: the classical languages. Dryden said he liked to compose in Latin and translate into English, as he valued the precision and clarity he believed Latin required of writers. The preposition-final construction is impossible in Latin. Hence: it is impossible in English. Confused by his logic? Linguists remain so to this day. But once Dryden proclaimed the rule, it made its way into the first generation of English usage books roughly a century later and thence into the minds of two hundred years of English teachers and copy editors.

“The rule has no basis in clarity (‘Who’s that cake for?’ is perfectly clear); history (it was made up from whole cloth); literary tradition (Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Samuel Johnson, Lord Byron, Henry Adams, Lewis Carroll, James Joyce, and dozens of other great writers have violated it); or purity (it isn’t native to English but probably stolen from Latin; clause-final prepositions exist in English’s cousin languages such as Danish and Icelandic). Many people know that the Dryden rule is nonsense. From the great usage-book writer Henry Fowler in the early twentieth century, usage experts began to caution readers io ignore it. The New York Times flouts it. The ‘rule’ should be put to death, but it may never be. Even those who know it is ridiculous observe it for fear of annoying others.”

Author: Robert Lane Greene
Title: You Are What You Speak
Publisher: Delacorte Press
Date: Copyright 2011 by Robert Lane Greene
Pages: 33-34, 24-25

Posted on

Shift In Physicians Top Desires List

Emergency Medicine News:
December 2010 – Volume 32 – Issue 12 – p 28
doi: 10.1097/01.EEM.0000391513.92946.d3
Career Source
Career Source: Millennial Physicians Put Lifestyle at the Top of their List
Kartz, Barbara

Free Access
Author Information
Part 2 in a Series

Only 26 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds say they are happy, according to a Harris Poll in the September-October AARP magazine, with 55 percent of them saying they’re frustrated by work. But that may be changing if my research about millennial physicians is any indication.
Image…
Image ToolsEarly this year, I sent a three-section questionnaire to the 147 emergency medicine residency programs listed in the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine’s directory, requesting that it be distributed to all residents, preferably third- and fourth-year students. The response rate was just more than eight percent, based on approximately 3,100 residents in their junior and senior years combined. This wasn’t a state-of-the-art research project with control groups, and the conclusions drawn are mine based on the information collected.
A whopping 81 percent ranked lifestyle as most important, with nine percent ranking position profile first, and eight percent ranking compensation first. Compensation was second most important to 67 percent of respondents, with position profile at 17 percent and lifestyle at 13 percent. The least important category, chosen by 73 percent of respondents, was position profile, with 13 percent choosing compensation and only two percent choosing lifestyle as least important. The Millennial physician is considerably more concerned with his time off the job than on. And these physicians have a lot to say about the parameters of their job search.
I also asked them to rate 14 job search parameters in order of importance. The results showed a distinct leaning toward lifestyle as a primary motivating factor. The parameters were:
* Geographic location
* Peer group of physician colleagues
* Partnership opportunity
* Equal equity ownership opportunity
* Proximity to major airport
* Hourly income
* ED trauma level
* Benefits
* Proximity to recreational venues
* Shift length
* Incentive income (based on production)
* ED volume
* Schools for kids
* Spouse’s job

Location, location, location was the number one choice of 67 percent of respondents with 88 percent putting it into their top two choices. This is such an overwhelmingly obvious response that I think we are looking at an entire generation of young physicians who place their primary emphasis on location and lifestyle. Will this change over time? It might; my experience has shown that a large number of physicians change their priorities after three to five years of work experience. Some decide to chase a title while others seek higher earnings or better lifestyle, and all are more open about where they go to get it. But, of course, that was over the past 20 years; that may be changing now.
Hourly income was of primary concern for 29 percent, with more than 69 percent putting it into their top three. Fifty percent also put ED volume and trauma level as one of their top three. A peer group of residency trained physicians was the primary position-related item important enough to feature in the top three for more than 67 percent of physicians. Also of importance was shift length, with 54 percent placing it in the top three positions of importance.
Noticeably missing in the top three were both partnership and equal equity ownership potential with less than four percent placing these in the top two positions of importance, and a few respondents leaving these two items off their lists altogether. Equally interesting were the incentive income results. Not one physician rated it as most important, with less than 36 percent putting it into the second or third level of importance. In contrast, hourly income was ranked in the top three by 69 percent of physicians, demonstrating a desire for guaranteed compensation. This is backed up by the 58 percent placing benefits in the top three positions of importance. I believe this shows a stronger desire for employee status than independent contractor status or partnership. This is the exact opposite of what physicians graduating between 1997 and 2007 were seeking. Their catch phrase was “fee-for-service,” and their favorite word was “partnership.” It seems pretty clear that attitudes are changing in this area as well. Young physicians seem to be seeking guarantees with their incomes as opposed to relying on their own abilities to move patients and generate billing in order to earn.
The spouse’s job was the number one concern for 37 percent of the physicians and in the top three for more than 48 percent. I believe this demonstrates a rise in dual-income physician families as well as an increase of female physicians with husbands who work. With this category figuring so highly in the primary importance ranking, I would surmise that physicians consider the spouse’s job more difficult to find than their own, and have a willingness to defer to the spouse when it comes to selecting a job market. This also could be showing an understanding on the part of the physician respondents that the emergency medicine job market is wide open. Schools figured into the top three choices of importance for 52 percent of physicians, with 48 percent spread fairly evenly across the board from fourth to last place.
Proximity to major airports figured prominently in the top three for 31 percent of physicians, with an equal amount of respondents placing it in the fifth position. Also note the strong showing for proximity to recreational venues: Half placed this in their top three categories of importance, with more than 37 percent ranking it in their top two. Interest in time off the job is important for a large percentage of young physicians.
Comments about this article? Write to EMN at emn@lww.com.

Posted on

Play in the Now

Recently, I have been learning a great deal about time. The best time, and many would argue, the only time is in the now. This book excerpt is a fun reminder to live in the now. Play in the now. Stop rushing around this season. Be IN the NOW.

It comes as no surprise that the God of the universe’s earliest name for us to call Him was/is: I AM. The great eternal now.

In today’s encore excerpt – for those who are already expert at their craft there are perils to rushing or overrehearsing. Here Paul Shaffer frantically tries to reach Sammy Davis Jr. to select a song and schedule rehearsal before his appearance on the David Letterman show:

“Every time I called [Sammy Davis Jr. to try and select a song or discuss rehearsal] he was either working or sleeping. He never did return my calls.

The morning of the show I was feeling some panic. Sammy was flying in and we still didn’t know what he wanted to sing. At 10 a.m. the floor manager said I had a backstage call. It was Sammy calling from the plane.

‘ ‘Once in My Life’ will be fine Paul’ he said. ‘Key of E going into F.’

‘Great!’ I was relieved.

I was also eager to work out an arrangement. We whipped up a chart, nursed it, rehearsed it, and put it on tape. That way when Sammy arrived he could hear it.

Then another backstage call. Sammy’s plane had landed early and he was on his way over. When I greeted him at the backstage door with a big ‘We’re thrilled you’re here,’ I was a little taken aback. He looked extremely tired and frail. He walked with a cane.

‘We have an arrangement, Sam. You can rehearse it with the band.’

‘No need baby. Gotta conserve my energy. I’m just gonna go to my room and shower.’

‘I wanna make it easy for you. So I’ll just play you a tape of the arrangement on the boom box. That way you’ll hear what we’ve done and tell me if it’s okay.’

‘Man I know the song.’

‘I know Sam,’ I said ‘but what if you don’t like the chart?’

‘I’ll like it, I’ll like it.’

‘But what if the key’s not right?’

‘Okay, if you insist.’

I slipped the cassette in the boom box and hit ‘play.’ To my ears the chart sounded great. Sammy closed his eyes and in Sammy style nodded his head up and down to the groove. He smiled.

‘It’s swinging man,’ he said ‘but think of how much more fun we could have had if I hadn’t heard this tape.’

His words still resonate in my ears; the notion still haunts me. Sammy sung that night but as he was performing, I couldn’t help thinking that his carefree feeling about time – as opposed to my lifelong notion of the pressure of the time – was coming from a higher spiritual plane. As a musician, I’ve always thought I rushed. I still think I rush. The great players never rush.

It reminds me of that moment when I watched Ray Charles turn to his guitarist just as the young guy was about to solo and say, ‘Take your time son. Take your time.’ ”

Author: Paul Shaffer
Title: We’ll Be Here for the Rest of Our Lives
Publisher: Flying Dolphin Press
Date: Copyright 2009 by Paul Shaffer Enterprises Inc.
Pages: 234-235

Posted on

C.U.L.P. Initiative Assignment #1: King’s Speech

This year a few of my friends are helping me to explore the Upper Limit Problem(s) in our lives. I hope to share a few thoughts via movies etc. to explore this concept throughout 2011. The 1st “assignment” is watching the movie titled: King’s Speech.

WOW! This is a MUST see movie. It is about relationships, friendship, and a new concept that I am just starting to explore based on The Big Leap by Hendricks.

The Upper Limit Problem is the concept that we all live in our little box of excellence: we have acquired through experience a comfortable space of expertise.

The Upper Limit Problem is the human tendency to put the brakes on our positive “energy”/feelings when we’ve exceeded our unconscious thermostat setting for how good we can feel, how successful we can be, and how much love we can feel.

Questions to explore:

What was the King’s Upper Limit Problem(s)?

How did he overcome them?

What are your Upper Limit Problem(s)?

How can you overcome them?

Posted on

#4 Emotionally Intelligent Moment of 2010

EQ Moment #4:
“I’d like my life back,” says BP CEO

Tony Hayward rose quickly through the ranks of corporate infamy because of a simple statement made during the largest oil spill in US history. This quote became an oft-used sound bite, used to represent the out-of-touch C-Suite in business today. As facts about the cause of the accident slowly unfolded, and thousands of gallons of oil rushed into the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, Tony Hayward was one of several spokespeople the media relied on for answers, and BP relied on for leadership and poise.

Hayward lacked emotional intelligence when it mattered most. He was obviously aware of his own feelings about the event, but was blind to how sharing them would affect others. Hayward had not fully grasped the gravity of the situation or what was happening to the people in the gulf, and presumably didn’t try to put himself in the shoes of those affected by the spill. It was ridiculously inappropriate to portray himself as a “victim” of the disaster. His true colors shone brightly under the pressure of the spotlight, which in turn dimmed his—and BP’s—relationship with the public. Hayward’s low EQ had a direct and negative impact on the company’s bottom line.

A few days later, Hayward’s perspective had seemingly changed. He said, “I made a hurtful and thoughtless comment on Sunday when I said that ‘I wanted my life back.’ When I read that recently, I was appalled. I apologize, especially to the families of the 11 men who lost their lives in this tragic accident. Those words don’t represent how I feel about this tragedy, and certainly don’t represent the hearts of the people of BP—many of whom live and work in the Gulf—who are doing everything they can to make things right. My first priority is doing all we can to restore the lives of the people of the Gulf region and their families—to restore their lives, not mine.”

This response was emotionally intelligent, and a decent attempt at a save, but it was already too late—the perception of the CEO as being self-centered and out-of-touch was cemented in people’s minds. Though we may never really know why Hayward resigned, he became the villain figure for the entire tragedy, and thus a huge liability for BP. Perhaps in resigning he had decided it was indeed time to get his life back.

Posted on

Emotional Intelligence: Self-Awareness

I just finished a very thoughtful book titled: Emotional Intelligence 2.0.  Here are some brief notes that I learned about Self-Awareness.  The book focuses on 4 parts to E.I.-Self-Awareness, Self-Management, Social-Awareness, and Social-Management.

Self-Awareness:  To know yourself as you really are & to notice and understand your emotions

1. Allow yourself to sit with an emotion and become fully aware of it especially when emotions pop up or boil to the surface

2. Know who pushes your buttons and how they do it

3. Use books, music, and books to analyze and look at your emotions

Finally, keep a journal of emotions based on these 3 key points.

Posted on

“Constructive” Criticism

Does “constructive” criticism work?  Answer: NO!  Dale Carnegie’s #1 rule: Don’t Criticize, Condemn, or Complain is founded on the reality that we DO NOT respond to criticism.

Why? Because he writes: “ninety-nine times out of a hundred, people don’t criticize themselves for anything, no matter how wrong it may be.”   He goes on to say that “criticism is futile because it puts a person on the defensive and usually makes him strive to justify himself.  Criticism is dangerous, because it wounds a person’s precious pride, hurts his sense of importance, and arouses resentment.”

In fact, the father of behavioral psychology, B.F. Skinner, “proved through his experiments that an animal rewarded for good behavior will learn much more rapidly and retain what it learns far more effectively than an animal punished for bad behavior.  Later studies showed that the same applies to humans.  By criticizing, we do not make lasting changes and often incur resentment.”

So when will we “get this”? Constructive criticism DOES NOT WORK.  We must turn to the positive.  Wouldn’t it be exciting to try it!  What if the next round of evaluations at the office were filled with all things positive?  How might the climate change?

“Consider the annual performance planning process…a process dreaded by leader and subordinate alike!…What is possible when we focus on unleashing potential by giving direction, position, and conditions to individuals rather than assessing potential as under-performance or failure to perform?…focusing on what we want rather than what we don’t want activates the inherent strengths, gifts, and creativity of each person…”-Janet Harvey, MA, MCC

Posted on

Visualization, The Power of the Mind, and Metaphor

“Your brain has a difficult time distinguishing between what you see with your eyes and what you visualize in your mind.  In fact, MRI scans of people’s brains taken while they are watching the sun set are virtually indistinguishable from scans taken when the same people visualize a sunset in their mind.  The same brain regions are active in both scenarios.”-Travis Bradberry & Jean greaves, Emotional Intelligence 2.0

I have pointed out in the past the power of the placebo (see Hippocrates Shadow by Newman), and here again, it is clear that we do not tap into the power of our minds to transform our lives.  The use of visualizations has been shown to be very powerful during prayer (see Seeing Is Believing by Greg Boyd), and the use of metaphor and other visualization exercises can be a powerful way to change one’s perspective.

Posted on

Smile & Laugh More: It’s good for you!

“French university researchers measured the power of a smile by having two groups of subjects read the same comics page from the newspaper.  One group of subjects was instructed to hold a pencil in their teeth while reading (which activates the muscles used in smiling), while the other group held the pencil with their lips (which does not activate the muscles used in smiling).  Those who were unknowingly “smiling” found the cartoons far more humorous and had a better time while reading them than people in the group that weren’t smiling.”-Emotional Intelligence 2.0, Location 1102-1113