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[post_content] => When our four-year-old daughter came home from her first day at a Montessori preschool, she handed me a swatch of cloth with several buttons sewn neatly onto it. “Where did you get this, sweetie?” I asked.
“I made it!” she exclaimed proudly. She also informed me that she had chopped apples with a “grownup knife” and cut flowers with pruning shears.
I couldn’t believe it. This girl had barely used scissors and never played with a needle before. We weren’t excessively protective parents, but we had no idea that she was capable of doing tasks like these (without hurting herself even). Part of the secret, we learned, was the mixed-age class. In a group of kids ranging from three to six, the older ones were instrumental in inspiring and instructing the younger ones. The teacher explained that when a child sees an adult perform a complex task, she won’t assume she’s capable of doing it herself. But if she sees another kid do it, she naturally thinks, “I’m going to do that, too!” This is one of the many ways I’ve been inspired and instructed by children – and it has informed how I work with adults.
When my wife founded The Dragontree, we wanted to provide a space for people to relax and heal. It wasn’t until some years later that we recognized a shared ambition to support people in whole-life wellness, which includes helping people to discover and actualize their potential. But while a young child may assume she can do what another child can, this isn’t always true for adults. We see other adults doing great things and often think, “I don’t have what they have.”
Most adults have old, fixed ideas about their capacities, largely influenced by teachers and parents. The best research on this subject comes from Carol Dweck, who studies childhood learning and self-esteem, and coined the terms fixed mindset and growth mindset. A fixed mindset refers to a belief that one’s ability in a given area, whether strong or weak, isn’t going to change. Thoughts such as “I’m not good with numbers,” or “I can’t sing,” or “I’m not an organized person” all indicate underlying fixed mindsets.
In contrast, a growth mindset entails the belief that, whatever your current ability, you can work at it and get better. Dweck found that kids with growth mindsets enjoy a challenge, are more confident, and have a stronger work ethic. It probably seems obvious that knowing you can improve your lot would be more empowering than believing you’re stuck with it, but we rarely take the time to investigate and question our deepest beliefs.
Indeed, one of the tricky things about changing a fixed mindset about, say, your skill at math, is that you may also have a fixed mindset about your inability to change your mindset! (“It’s just the kind of person I am!”) Thus, there’s a something of a catch-22 here: in order to shift from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset you must have a growth mindset around changing your mindset. However, I find it useful to remember that these two configurations – fixed and growth – aren’t equally valid. It’s not a case of “different but equal.” A fixed mindset is inherently incorrect. Though we may fiercely insist that it’s true, it’s not. We can change. We can grow. We can improve. Always.
In his 2014 TED Talk, The Psychology of Your Future Self, psychologist Dan Gilbert teaches that people usually believe they’re unlikely to change much in the future – but they’re wrong. “All of us are walking around with an illusion,” he says. “An illusion that our personal history has just come to an end. That we have just recently become the people that we were always meant to be and will be for the rest of our lives.” It’s true, his studies show, that our rate of change slows down somewhat as we get older, but it doesn’t slow down nearly as much as we believe it will. “At every age from 18 to 68 in our data set,” Gilbert continues, “people vastly underestimated how much change they would experience [in values, personality, friends, and preferences] over the next ten years.” He suggests that it’s easier for us to see how we’ve changed in the past than it is for us to imagine how we’ll change in the future. “Human beings,” he states, “are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished.”
So, if the science shows that you’re bound to change whether you believe it or not, why not believe it? A willingness to believe (i.e., hold a growth mindset) moves you from the passenger seat to the driver’s seat. If you believe you’re capable of change and growth, you can be a conscious creator of the life you desire.
A critical factor in making productive change is the recognition and acceptance of your current status. Many of us have a hard time giving ourselves an honest self-appraisal because of our upbringing. If you or your parents were raised during wartime there may have been a “stiff upper lip” policy of denying weaknesses and carrying on stoically.
Later generations faced a different obstacle – the self-esteem movement. In retrospective studies of the movement that picked up speed in the 1980s, Dweck and others found that kids who were always told they were great tended to grow into young adults with fixed mindsets that didn’t serve them. They saw themselves as awesome regardless of the facts or their quality of participation. And the inevitable dissonance that resulted when they underperformed often provoked disillusionment or depression. The fixed aspect of a fixed mindset implies a kind of rigidity, and thus a painful reckoning when disproven.
I believe it’s important to love and accept oneself completely (what you truly are is awesome) but what happened here might be seen as a form of “bypass.” Rather than help kids to face their deficiencies, we decided it was favorable to pretend they didn’t have any. The self-esteem movement, at least when understood and applied shallowly, aimed to help kids believe in themselves by giving them a gold star no matter what. The “participation trophy” is a good example. How can we grow (or track that growth) if we aren’t honest and accepting of our actual starting point?
Now, let’s get back to that disparity between adults and young children. In our work through the Dragontree to facilitate the emergence of people’s greatness we’ve encountered so many folks who see themselves as fundamentally different from (i.e., inferior to) those they see as great. I’d like to challenge this belief.
While Dweck’s research deals mostly with intelligence and success, we feel the growth mindset also applies to things like our capacity for healing, happiness, power, spiritual connection, and love. For instance, beliefs such as, “There’s no soul mate out there for me,” “I don’t have a connection to a higher power,” “I’m going to be sick for the rest of my life,” “I don’t have what it takes to change the world,” and “I’m just not an optimistic, light-hearted type of person” all reveal fixed mindsets and are therefore untrue – except perhaps in this moment.
If you feel an urge to emerge – to come into your power and make a positive difference – but something is holding you back, I encourage you to first unearth the fixed mindsets that are undermining you and challenge them. If it feels like too much of a stretch to completely reverse a negative belief, start by “trying on” a minor shift in a positive direction, coupled with an openness for things to get better. For example, if you’re mired in “I’m going to be sick forever,” trying to replace it with something like “I feel like a million bucks” may produce some cognitive dissonance; your mind may simply not buy it. But beginning with a statement like, “I allow myself to heal,” is harder for your mind to argue with. And even if a negative belief about yourself is factual right now, holding a growth mindset entails admitting that you don’t know what will happen in the future. Thus, a very small nudge in the direction of growth might look like replacing “I’ll never meet my soul mate” with “I haven’t met my soul mate yet.”
If you don’t believe you have what it takes to be great, answer me this: what do think is the actual, measurable difference between you and, say, Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa, Mahatma Gandhi, or Rosa Parks? Were they smarter than you? You can learn. Were they more spiritual than you? You can open yourself to that realm of experience. Were they more dedicated than you? You can begin a consistent devotion to your dreams right now.
This last point is worth emphasizing. In order to be a conscious creator, you need to be able to hold a vision of the change you wish to see. That is, you need to hold it consistently until it’s actualized (and then update it as needed and continue the practice). For many who are mystified as to why they’re unable to bring about the changes they desire, the answer is as simple as this: they keep changing their mind and/or getting distracted. If you notice you’ve been doing this, don’t punish yourself for it (we live in incredibly distractible times); just recognize it and get back on track.
Finally, if you have trouble believing you’re capable of greatness, it may be worthwhile to journal about “What is greatness?” Greatness isn’t the same as fame and it doesn’t require breaking world records. (I’m not trying to convince you that even if you spend your life doing bong hits and playing Nintendo, you can still be great in your own way. Let’s be real here.) Human greatness may not have a universal definition, but I believe it’s much more common than we recognize. There’s greatness in storytelling, greatness in healing, greatness in communication, greatness in teaching, and greatness in feeding the poor. There’s greatness in the smallest of places.
I’d love to hear your feelings about greatness and living to your potential. What have your challenges been? How have you overcome fixed mindsets?
Be well,
Peter
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[post_content] => I got a new sleeping bag for our camping trip this weekend. I didn’t go to REI because I wanted the wide, old-fashioned kind with flannel inside. If the temperature drops below 50, I’ll probably be chilly because it’s not much more than a tube-shaped blanket, but I like it. As I was recycling all the extraneous stuff that came with it, a little slip of paper fluttered into the bin and the words on it caught my eye. It had the name of the small company that made it, and below that: “We appreciate you, dear customer!” I see these things a lot and wouldn’t usually give it a thought, but this one made me pause.
I’m looking forward to the road trip to our camping destination. I love road trips – especially in areas I’ve never explored. As I’m passing through a new town, if there’s one thing that makes me think, “I could live here,” it’s the presence of small businesses. Driving through miles of Walmarts, Home Depots, Targets, and Subways doesn’t do it for me. Seeing “Millie’s Coffee” or “Bud’s Hand-Carved Lawn Animals” or “Aunt Sissie’s Famous Pies” – that’s the stuff that makes me want to pull over.
Small businesses were already at a disadvantage before the pandemic. Now they’re really in peril. But there’s something about the experience of visiting a small business and the customer/purveyor relationship that many people really value. When we shop with a small business, not only are we choosing that “small business experience,” we’re also saying, “I want businesses like this to continue to exist.”
It works in both directions. My wife and I are also choosing the “small business experience” – from the purveyor’s side – and we really understand the sentiment of appreciation on that slip of paper. We feel grateful every time someone purchases something from us (I doubt Mr. Starbucks feels that way) and it goes a lot farther than you might think.
The most obvious reason we appreciate your business is because it allows us to feed and provide for our family. But it also enables us to devote ourselves to this work – it makes it possible for us to spend time writing uplifting articles to counter all the bad news out there. It makes it possible for us to invest ourselves in learning all that we can to be better educators and healthcare practitioners. It supports a team of dozens of others to earn a good living doing their healing and service work for the wellness of our community. It enables us to direct our earnings into the non-profit we started – the Well Life Foundation – to support women in vulnerable populations.
And beyond the monetary aspects, we appreciate that so many of you have touched our hearts, inspired us, and taught us. Every single day we get messages from members of the Dragontree community telling us what you’re passionate about, what you’re creating, and how you’re making the world a better place. I’m sure the makers of my sleeping bag do appreciate my business, but I doubt they get to have this kind of experience through their clients. I know it may be hard to swallow that it’s an honor to serve you, but it really is. We feel so blessed to have this avenue for helping people heal, grow, and connect.
As a business based largely on physical touch, it’s difficult to know what the future will hold for us. More than ever we’re focusing on ways to serve you without being in your six foot bubble. And when the time is right, we’ll reopen our doors (with masks on) and welcome you back into our spas.
Thanks for being in our lives,
Peter, Briana, and Everyone at The Dragontree
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[post_content] => As a younger adult, I often had mixed feelings about Valentine’s Day. If I was single, I felt left out. If I was in a relationship, I felt obligated to participate in all the Hallmarky ways. But over the years I’ve come to a place of ease and enjoyment around it.
Being married to someone who loves holidays and freely reimagines them, I’ve learned to appreciate the opportunities they provide (to tune in, to remember the sweetness, etc.) and to take liberties to personalize them. I choose to experience Valentine’s Day as a celebration of LOVE in all its forms. The V-Day industry focuses mainly on the passionate, romantic type of love (lingerie and roses anyone?) – known in Greek as eros. And eros is delicious, but it’s just one of the many kinds of love.
Next there’s familial love – AKA storge – that love between parents and children, between siblings, between cousins, between aunts and uncles and nephews and nieces. It’s often called an “instinctual” love because it so naturally occurs between those who share blood and living space. There’s usually an unspoken sense of safety within the storge container. There’s a unique bond to having shared the same recipes, the same challenges, the same vacations, the same clothes, etc., with these folks.
Then there’s the love of friends, or platonic love – AKA philia – sometimes called “brotherly love,” though more in the way that your friends become like brothers and sisters. We don’t always have romantic partners, and we sometimes lose or become estranged from family, so for many people platonic love is the most stable, abundant, and important form in their lives. The great potential of platonic love is that we can include so many souls in it. We’re limited as to how many family members we can add, and most romantic relationships are monogamous, but it’s fully possible to have brotherly/sisterly love for hundreds or thousands of humans – and in so doing, to dissolve the sense of separation between ourselves and the rest of the world.
Some make a separate distinction for hospitality – guest love (xenia) – or the way we treat strangers and visitors when we’re in the position of host. While it may seem less significant than the previous forms of love – eros, storge, and philia – there’s something beautiful and virtuous about rising to this occasion. Think of someone you know who is the quintessential host – you feel cared for, you feel your needs are being anticipated, you never feel unwelcome. Can you humble yourself and serve in that way? This form of love is one of the main driving forces behind the Dragontree and to a great extent it arose from my wife’s natural aptitude for it. If you haven’t been to one of our spas, come experience it sometime!
Next is Divine love or unconditional love – agape. Agape describes a kind of love that transcends any causes or conditions. It transcends our humanness – it doesn’t come with any strings and it isn’t stoked by the needs of the body or mind. It’s the broadest form of love. In religious contexts, it’s the term for the love of God – from God to human, from human to God, and from God through human to all of the universe.
Finally, there’s love of oneself – philautia. Self-love has often been regarded with some scorn, especially in the past, before the advent of modern psychology and the great leap in understanding of human needs that came with it. It was previously conflated with arrogance and pride, but pure self-love is entirely positive. It’s the way all of us should feel about ourselves – and I don’t use the word “should” to mean that you’re bad or wrong if you don’t love yourself. I mean it to indicate that if you were able to sweep away all of the sad, outdated, judgmental – and ultimately meaningless – criticisms of yourself aside, you would have no reason to deny yourself love. You would see how it only hurts you to withhold love from yourself.
So if you’re looking for a fresh and expansive experience this Valentine’s Day (or anytime) I invite you to consider these various forms of love and devote yourself to one of them. Is there one that you’ve had trouble with? What gets in the way of letting the love arise freely in you and flow outward? Can you let the love itself melt the blockages and do its loving thing? Please share about your experience below!
So much love,
Peter
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[post_content] => When our four-year-old daughter came home from her first day at a Montessori preschool, she handed me a swatch of cloth with several buttons sewn neatly onto it. “Where did you get this, sweetie?” I asked.
“I made it!” she exclaimed proudly. She also informed me that she had chopped apples with a “grownup knife” and cut flowers with pruning shears.
I couldn’t believe it. This girl had barely used scissors and never played with a needle before. We weren’t excessively protective parents, but we had no idea that she was capable of doing tasks like these (without hurting herself even). Part of the secret, we learned, was the mixed-age class. In a group of kids ranging from three to six, the older ones were instrumental in inspiring and instructing the younger ones. The teacher explained that when a child sees an adult perform a complex task, she won’t assume she’s capable of doing it herself. But if she sees another kid do it, she naturally thinks, “I’m going to do that, too!” This is one of the many ways I’ve been inspired and instructed by children – and it has informed how I work with adults.
When my wife founded The Dragontree, we wanted to provide a space for people to relax and heal. It wasn’t until some years later that we recognized a shared ambition to support people in whole-life wellness, which includes helping people to discover and actualize their potential. But while a young child may assume she can do what another child can, this isn’t always true for adults. We see other adults doing great things and often think, “I don’t have what they have.”
Most adults have old, fixed ideas about their capacities, largely influenced by teachers and parents. The best research on this subject comes from Carol Dweck, who studies childhood learning and self-esteem, and coined the terms fixed mindset and growth mindset. A fixed mindset refers to a belief that one’s ability in a given area, whether strong or weak, isn’t going to change. Thoughts such as “I’m not good with numbers,” or “I can’t sing,” or “I’m not an organized person” all indicate underlying fixed mindsets.
In contrast, a growth mindset entails the belief that, whatever your current ability, you can work at it and get better. Dweck found that kids with growth mindsets enjoy a challenge, are more confident, and have a stronger work ethic. It probably seems obvious that knowing you can improve your lot would be more empowering than believing you’re stuck with it, but we rarely take the time to investigate and question our deepest beliefs.
Indeed, one of the tricky things about changing a fixed mindset about, say, your skill at math, is that you may also have a fixed mindset about your inability to change your mindset! (“It’s just the kind of person I am!”) Thus, there’s a something of a catch-22 here: in order to shift from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset you must have a growth mindset around changing your mindset. However, I find it useful to remember that these two configurations – fixed and growth – aren’t equally valid. It’s not a case of “different but equal.” A fixed mindset is inherently incorrect. Though we may fiercely insist that it’s true, it’s not. We can change. We can grow. We can improve. Always.
In his 2014 TED Talk, The Psychology of Your Future Self, psychologist Dan Gilbert teaches that people usually believe they’re unlikely to change much in the future – but they’re wrong. “All of us are walking around with an illusion,” he says. “An illusion that our personal history has just come to an end. That we have just recently become the people that we were always meant to be and will be for the rest of our lives.” It’s true, his studies show, that our rate of change slows down somewhat as we get older, but it doesn’t slow down nearly as much as we believe it will. “At every age from 18 to 68 in our data set,” Gilbert continues, “people vastly underestimated how much change they would experience [in values, personality, friends, and preferences] over the next ten years.” He suggests that it’s easier for us to see how we’ve changed in the past than it is for us to imagine how we’ll change in the future. “Human beings,” he states, “are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished.”
So, if the science shows that you’re bound to change whether you believe it or not, why not believe it? A willingness to believe (i.e., hold a growth mindset) moves you from the passenger seat to the driver’s seat. If you believe you’re capable of change and growth, you can be a conscious creator of the life you desire.
A critical factor in making productive change is the recognition and acceptance of your current status. Many of us have a hard time giving ourselves an honest self-appraisal because of our upbringing. If you or your parents were raised during wartime there may have been a “stiff upper lip” policy of denying weaknesses and carrying on stoically.
Later generations faced a different obstacle – the self-esteem movement. In retrospective studies of the movement that picked up speed in the 1980s, Dweck and others found that kids who were always told they were great tended to grow into young adults with fixed mindsets that didn’t serve them. They saw themselves as awesome regardless of the facts or their quality of participation. And the inevitable dissonance that resulted when they underperformed often provoked disillusionment or depression. The fixed aspect of a fixed mindset implies a kind of rigidity, and thus a painful reckoning when disproven.
I believe it’s important to love and accept oneself completely (what you truly are is awesome) but what happened here might be seen as a form of “bypass.” Rather than help kids to face their deficiencies, we decided it was favorable to pretend they didn’t have any. The self-esteem movement, at least when understood and applied shallowly, aimed to help kids believe in themselves by giving them a gold star no matter what. The “participation trophy” is a good example. How can we grow (or track that growth) if we aren’t honest and accepting of our actual starting point?
Now, let’s get back to that disparity between adults and young children. In our work through the Dragontree to facilitate the emergence of people’s greatness we’ve encountered so many folks who see themselves as fundamentally different from (i.e., inferior to) those they see as great. I’d like to challenge this belief.
While Dweck’s research deals mostly with intelligence and success, we feel the growth mindset also applies to things like our capacity for healing, happiness, power, spiritual connection, and love. For instance, beliefs such as, “There’s no soul mate out there for me,” “I don’t have a connection to a higher power,” “I’m going to be sick for the rest of my life,” “I don’t have what it takes to change the world,” and “I’m just not an optimistic, light-hearted type of person” all reveal fixed mindsets and are therefore untrue – except perhaps in this moment.
If you feel an urge to emerge – to come into your power and make a positive difference – but something is holding you back, I encourage you to first unearth the fixed mindsets that are undermining you and challenge them. If it feels like too much of a stretch to completely reverse a negative belief, start by “trying on” a minor shift in a positive direction, coupled with an openness for things to get better. For example, if you’re mired in “I’m going to be sick forever,” trying to replace it with something like “I feel like a million bucks” may produce some cognitive dissonance; your mind may simply not buy it. But beginning with a statement like, “I allow myself to heal,” is harder for your mind to argue with. And even if a negative belief about yourself is factual right now, holding a growth mindset entails admitting that you don’t know what will happen in the future. Thus, a very small nudge in the direction of growth might look like replacing “I’ll never meet my soul mate” with “I haven’t met my soul mate yet.”
If you don’t believe you have what it takes to be great, answer me this: what do think is the actual, measurable difference between you and, say, Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa, Mahatma Gandhi, or Rosa Parks? Were they smarter than you? You can learn. Were they more spiritual than you? You can open yourself to that realm of experience. Were they more dedicated than you? You can begin a consistent devotion to your dreams right now.
This last point is worth emphasizing. In order to be a conscious creator, you need to be able to hold a vision of the change you wish to see. That is, you need to hold it consistently until it’s actualized (and then update it as needed and continue the practice). For many who are mystified as to why they’re unable to bring about the changes they desire, the answer is as simple as this: they keep changing their mind and/or getting distracted. If you notice you’ve been doing this, don’t punish yourself for it (we live in incredibly distractible times); just recognize it and get back on track.
Finally, if you have trouble believing you’re capable of greatness, it may be worthwhile to journal about “What is greatness?” Greatness isn’t the same as fame and it doesn’t require breaking world records. (I’m not trying to convince you that even if you spend your life doing bong hits and playing Nintendo, you can still be great in your own way. Let’s be real here.) Human greatness may not have a universal definition, but I believe it’s much more common than we recognize. There’s greatness in storytelling, greatness in healing, greatness in communication, greatness in teaching, and greatness in feeding the poor. There’s greatness in the smallest of places.
I’d love to hear your feelings about greatness and living to your potential. What have your challenges been? How have you overcome fixed mindsets?
Be well,
Peter
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Great article, thank you 🙂
You’re welcome!
Compels me to examine my focus, thank you
You’re very welcome.
You are so right about what is most important, and that is loving life. I have been teaching that for years, as the foundation of what I call an Enchanted Life. To have a world of people who love life, would bring about tremendous change quickly. When we love life, we want to tend to, nurture, protect and enjoy that life. Since I am a teacher of the Sacred Feminine, the message she brings is exactly this, love LIFE herself. The more you love life, the more she will love you back. So many people blame “life” for their woes. They say, life sucks, life is hard, etc. But I say, Life is extraordinary, life is incredibly beautiful, life is a magical mysterious creative play. It is the way that we conduct our lives that might suck or be hard. And the good news is that, we have a choice in this, we can refashion our lives, with the energy of life as our guide.
You are a wise man
with love
Rhianne Teija NewLahnd
Thanks for sharing, Rhianne. You are doing such important work in the world! The sacred feminine is the medicine for this time!
Be well,
Peter