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At a party some years ago I noticed a guy across the room with a big personality. Like a strong double-ended magnet, he appeared to either attract or repel everyone around him. Eventually someone introduced us. He was a successful and intimidating businessman, and for some reason he seemed to like me.
At one point he leaned in with a sly grin as if he were about to confide something in me. Then he said, “You know what I love to do at parties? I meet someone, find out what they believe in, and then I explain why they’re wrong about all of it. I systematically tear apart their whole worldview. They walk away like they just lost their compass!” He laughed like he genuinely relished those moments.
Although I was disgusted by this admission I also found it fascinating. Of course, it’s not unusual to witness power struggles for dominance – especially between men, between dogs, between couples, and between parents and children.
But most power struggles begin with a disagreement, and – on the surface, anyway – that seems to be the cause of the struggle. What was less common in this case was that this fellow was consciously setting out to dominate others he didn’t yet know and was looking forward to the satisfaction he’d feel when he “won.”
Though a psychologist might say the guy’s social behavior was pathological, in a way it was just a more obvious and one-sided expression of something many of us engage in on a routine basis.
When absorbed in a power struggle we may believe that we’re just righting a wrong, correcting a mistake, or doing the right thing. But if we were to stop and ask ourselves honestly where we’re coming from, the truth is often that we just want to win and/or that we can’t bear losing.
In the book The Courage to Be Disliked, authors Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga argue that rarely are our arguments about the topic we believe; mostly they’re driven by the desire to prove our power and make the other person submit. They advise that when we recognize we’re in a power struggle it’s best to step down without reacting.
“Admitting mistakes, conveying words of apology, and stepping down from power struggles – none of these things is defeat,” they write. “The pursuit of superiority is not something that is carried out through competition with other people.” The term superiority here simply means personal excellence, not superiority in comparison to someone else.
Kishimi and Koga (summarizing the work of psychologist Alfred Adler) explain that power struggles hinge on the belief that one’s stance on an issue makes them right. “The moment one is convinced that ‘I am right’ in an interpersonal relationship, one has already stepped into a power struggle. At that point, the focus of the discussion shifts from the rightness of the assertions to the state of the interpersonal relationship.” Then it’s no longer a conversation. It’s a contest.
Though he doesn’t use the term “power struggle” Author Vadim Zeland makes a similar point in Reality Transurfing. He describes the energy behind these struggles as “pendulums.” Like the giant swinging pendulum of an enormous clock, they’re fueled both by collective adherence or opposition to an issue. When you’re presented with a pendulum, whether you jump aboard in agreement or fight it tooth and nail, you’ve jumped aboard it and are being taken for a ride.
He advises stepping back (mentally) and disengaging, imagining you’re like a ghost – so the swinging pendulum doesn’t trigger you or affect you in any way. It just swings right through you.
I encourage you this week to notice the power struggles and pendulums in your life. What happens when you engage with them? What happens when you attempt not to engage? Are you able to? Is there a part of you that desires the conflict? Does it feel disappointed if you step back? If you engage in a power struggle and “win” how does this feel? If you notice a power struggle between others, can you witness the energetic conflict beneath the words? Do you feel called to bring light to it? What happens if you do?
Be well,
Peter
[post_title] => Our Curious Urge to Dominate Each Other
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Optimism is a choice and it’s a possibility that available to all of us. If optimism hasn’t come naturally to you, it’s simply a consequence of habits of thinking which can be changed. Changing the way you think takes focused effort, but it works more quickly than you might guess. Plus, the fast return on your effort helps support your enthusiasm to keep at it.
The Dreambook – the life planner Briana and I created – is an excellent tool for implementing such a change. Simply following the method in the book will make you more optimistic. You’ll be doing things like: identifying your gifts, values, and purpose and consciously bringing them into your daily activities; clarifying your dreams and figuring out what truly makes you feel happy and productive; setting goals, breaking them down into manageable plans, and scheduling those plans in your calendar; prioritizing the things that feed your soul; expressing gratitude; and more.
Besides resulting in great tangible improvements, this structure builds self-trust and a positive outlook. It works.
Beyond the basic processes in the book, you can use its planning, scheduling, and tracking tools to work in scientifically proven tactics for supporting an optimistic mindset. Here are a few to try:
- Do kind things for people every day.
- Print out pictures of friends, family, inspiring people and put them in your space.
- Meditate. It supports peace, positivity, and perspective.
- Avoid negative media (and reduce media consumption overall).
- Spend money on fun and memorable experiences (rather than entirely on stuff)
- Treat your leisure time as a deliberate and purposeful activity. Go all-in, don’t be thinking about the “productive” things you could be doing instead.
- Routinely remind yourself of your strengths. If you can’t readily think of them, ask friends to help you identify them and write them down.
- Cultivate a “growth mindset” – believe in your ability to improve, and see failure as a learning experience.
- Maintain an environment that’s full of humor, happiness, and beauty and take little breaks throughout the day to notice these things.
- When stuck in a mundane task, figure out a way that it’s going to serve a higher purpose. Even if it seems relatively insignificant in itself, what does it enable that’s more important?
- As you begin a task take a moment to expect a positive outcome (using self-talk about your strengths and track record, or simply visualizing things going well). This primes you to perform well and spot opportunities.
- Focus on what’s working well in your life.
- Make a commitment to stop complaining.
- Write down what you’re grateful for daily.
- Give a genuine compliment to someone every day.
- Catch yourself in negative trains of thought; pick up your attention and put it on something else.
- Remember that a hardship is not a sign that everything is going wrong, or that it’s bound to snowball into more hardship. Every day people turn hardship into opportunity.
- Before speaking / posting, ask yourself: (1) Is it true? (2) Is it kind? (3) Is it necessary? (4) What is my purpose? (5) Does it improve upon the silence?
- Slow and deepen your breathing – this helps slow down your mind and promotes more evolved thinking.
- Sit / stand up straight. Don’t slouch.
- Journal about your positive experiences – this grows them and helps them sink in.
- Appreciate small changes in the right direction. Lots of small changes are more likely and more sustainable than one giant change, and they amount to the same degree of change.
- Exercise.
- Exchange touch more often. A hug, a pat on the shoulder, a handshake, a massage – we’re wired to associate welcome touch with feeling safe, calm, and connected.
- Make it harder for yourself to engage in behaviors that don’t serve you (e.g., put the candy out of reach).
- Make it easier for yourself to engage in behaviors that are good for you (e.g., put your exercise equipment in a place that’s easy to access and pre-determine when / where / how you’re going to exercise).
- Prioritize your relationships!
- Don’t get pessimistic by focusing on short-term downward trends; back up far enough to see the broader trend toward betterment.
- Read about the lives of impressive people.
- Believe in human potential, ingenuity, and compassion. We can accomplish incredible things.
Whew! That’s enough to completely revolutionize even the most cynical pessimist’s perspective.
I encourage you to copy/paste or print out that list and stick it in your 2022 Dreambook and work these approaches into your schedule. Pepper your pages with reminders. Give each one a good, consistent shot. Positive people don’t just have a better experience of life, they change the experience of those around them.
You rock,
Peter
[post_title] => 30 Strategies for Becoming an Optimist
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During a particularly hard break-up in my 20s, a friend advised me, “The more present you are during this process, the bigger the present you’ll get out of it.” And though I barely understood what that meant, I gave it a try and an odd thing happened. I saw that I was choosing the big, dramatic grieving process I was going through. And that meant it was optional.
In The Art of Presence, Eckhart Tolle says, “Through thought you cannot possibly grasp what presence is.” But he gives some clues to point us in the right direction. He says it’s there, “when you’re not thinking about the last moment, or looking to the next one.” And he uses phrases like “a state of relaxed alertness” and “a spacious stillness,” to describe it.
Thich Nhat Hanh said, “The most precious gift we can offer others is our presence.”
Our presence is tremendously rare and hugely valuable. Especially in this age of epidemic distraction, it’s increasingly difficult and uncommon to choose a voluntary time-out from technology, data, and our own mental analysis. But unlike the artificial value of a coin that accidentally got stamped with a head on both sides, our presence can do for us what nothing else can. And we can make it more abundant by simply choosing it.
Although it may not put food in our belly, most other problems disappear with presence. The need to fix or relive the past disappears. The need to avoid certain unwanted events in the future disappears. Even if we're working on something now that will benefit us in the future, with our presence, we work on it now in order to work on it now. And that’s enough.
The allure of distraction, which so often threatens our presence, dissolves when we practice being present. Do you know the word obviate? I like to write using words that almost everyone understands, but there’s only one word I can think of that means “to make unnecessary,” and that word is obviate. Learning to deepen our presence obviates the urge for distraction and mental departure from our current reality.
With presence, we perceive all kinds of intelligence and detail that we’re otherwise deaf and blind to. We know when to eat and when to stop eating. We know how to move our body in a way that doesn’t cause pain or injury. Our work becomes more interesting. Our relationships become healthier. We listen better and we feel heard.
With two kids, my presence is requested almost incessantly. I hear the word Papa at least 100 times a day. Often, I hear it ten or more times in quick succession. We all yearn for someone’s total presence with us. These are the moments of connection between what is the same in both of us. Presence uncovers what’s real in this moment. And that’s refreshing, exciting, and affirming.
When we’re all so busy that we see time as a commodity, it can seem that giving our presence to someone else is like giving away our treasure. But are we actually giving something away?
Of course not. When we “give” our presence we gain the present. To withhold our presence means both we and the other person miss out.
So, how can you learn to be more present? It takes practice. If you’re new to this, I don’t recommend making a goal like, “I’m going to be more present from now on.” I don’t want to discourage you, I just want you to be realistic about what you’re up against – a lifetime of habits and a sea of tantalizing distractions.
Try something a bit less ambitious, such as this: Once a day, as you begin some activity – whether it’s buying groceries, playing Candyland, eating a meal, and listening to a friend’s problems – select this activity as an exercise in presence. In your mind, identify what exactly you’re doing – “I’m vacuuming the floor” – and devote yourself to that. Don’t run away in the middle of the activity. This means don’t pick up your phone, don’t depart in your mind to explore other thoughts and ideas, don’t visit the past, don’t anticipate what’s next, don’t judge. Just dwell in the present. Be saturated by the present. Feel everything. Accept everything. And let each next moment come.
Over time, quicker than you might think, you’ll start regaining your attention. You’ll be able to focus on something for more than five seconds. You’ll begin to yearn for this, which will make your practice much easier. And as you start willingly selecting more and more moments to be completely present, you’ll experience an unending offering of presents.
Be well,
Dr. Peter Borten
[post_title] => A Free Pile of Presents Just for You
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At a party some years ago I noticed a guy across the room with a big personality. Like a strong double-ended magnet, he appeared to either attract or repel everyone around him. Eventually someone introduced us. He was a successful and intimidating businessman, and for some reason he seemed to like me.
At one point he leaned in with a sly grin as if he were about to confide something in me. Then he said, “You know what I love to do at parties? I meet someone, find out what they believe in, and then I explain why they’re wrong about all of it. I systematically tear apart their whole worldview. They walk away like they just lost their compass!” He laughed like he genuinely relished those moments.
Although I was disgusted by this admission I also found it fascinating. Of course, it’s not unusual to witness power struggles for dominance – especially between men, between dogs, between couples, and between parents and children.
But most power struggles begin with a disagreement, and – on the surface, anyway – that seems to be the cause of the struggle. What was less common in this case was that this fellow was consciously setting out to dominate others he didn’t yet know and was looking forward to the satisfaction he’d feel when he “won.”
Though a psychologist might say the guy’s social behavior was pathological, in a way it was just a more obvious and one-sided expression of something many of us engage in on a routine basis.
When absorbed in a power struggle we may believe that we’re just righting a wrong, correcting a mistake, or doing the right thing. But if we were to stop and ask ourselves honestly where we’re coming from, the truth is often that we just want to win and/or that we can’t bear losing.
In the book The Courage to Be Disliked, authors Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga argue that rarely are our arguments about the topic we believe; mostly they’re driven by the desire to prove our power and make the other person submit. They advise that when we recognize we’re in a power struggle it’s best to step down without reacting.
“Admitting mistakes, conveying words of apology, and stepping down from power struggles – none of these things is defeat,” they write. “The pursuit of superiority is not something that is carried out through competition with other people.” The term superiority here simply means personal excellence, not superiority in comparison to someone else.
Kishimi and Koga (summarizing the work of psychologist Alfred Adler) explain that power struggles hinge on the belief that one’s stance on an issue makes them right. “The moment one is convinced that ‘I am right’ in an interpersonal relationship, one has already stepped into a power struggle. At that point, the focus of the discussion shifts from the rightness of the assertions to the state of the interpersonal relationship.” Then it’s no longer a conversation. It’s a contest.
Though he doesn’t use the term “power struggle” Author Vadim Zeland makes a similar point in Reality Transurfing. He describes the energy behind these struggles as “pendulums.” Like the giant swinging pendulum of an enormous clock, they’re fueled both by collective adherence or opposition to an issue. When you’re presented with a pendulum, whether you jump aboard in agreement or fight it tooth and nail, you’ve jumped aboard it and are being taken for a ride.
He advises stepping back (mentally) and disengaging, imagining you’re like a ghost – so the swinging pendulum doesn’t trigger you or affect you in any way. It just swings right through you.
I encourage you this week to notice the power struggles and pendulums in your life. What happens when you engage with them? What happens when you attempt not to engage? Are you able to? Is there a part of you that desires the conflict? Does it feel disappointed if you step back? If you engage in a power struggle and “win” how does this feel? If you notice a power struggle between others, can you witness the energetic conflict beneath the words? Do you feel called to bring light to it? What happens if you do?
Be well,
Peter
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