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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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I find that so many people I talk to are depleted, exhausted, and spread thin from their daily lives. There is just soooo much to do. Right?
Well yes, the universe is full of a billion and more opportunities.
And yet, what I really see as the underlying issue in most peoples depleted exhaustion is that they aren't claiming or reclaiming their own energy.
When we give parts of our minds, our attention, to things that are not currently in front of us, or not currently needing our direct input - our energy is depleted.
When we aren't clear around our own boundaries - our energy is depleted.
When we're worrying about some unseen, unknown, future - our energy is depleted.
And hence we're worn out.
But we can change that. It's our own personal revolution - consciously claiming our energy. Because we can. And we must.
Here's a quick and easy 7-minute meditation for you that you can do any time to take your power back.
Love,
Briana
PS - If you enjoy this video, you can
download another 5-minute guided meditation to help you ground and reconnect to your breath, body, and soul. Visit
brianaborten.com/meditation to download, and feel lighter, calmer, and open to hearing your inner wisdom with more clarity.
[post_title] => The Exhaustion Epidemic (and a Cure) - video
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I was jogging on the mesa behind our house and my thoughts went to the upcoming holidays and my cycles of introversion and extroversion. For me, social gatherings inevitably spur a yearning to be alone or look at my phone or eat. As I gazed at the peaks and valleys of the mountain range in front of me, I realized that this pattern is an expression of the cycling of yin and yang that’s present everywhere in the universe. I’d like to share my thoughts with you in the hope that it will make for a more balanced holiday season.
In social behavior, this cycle moved from an outward orientation (yang) to an inward orientation (yin) and back. Texting, talking, dancing with others, partying, and co-working are all relatively outward activities. Reading the news, playing a video game (alone), taking a bath, eating, and meditating are all relatively inward activities. After some outward activity, most people feel a desire to go inward. After some inward activity, most people feel a desire to go outward.
We see this cycle from inward to outward to inward to outward, or from expansion to contraction to expansion to contraction, throughout the human body (breathing and the beating of the heart), human behavior, and the natural world. This undulating pattern is seen in the waves of our oceans, in waves of sound and light, in the movement of sexual intercourse, in waking and sleeping, and so much more.
When our inward-outward social patterns are relatively balanced, it works. But if there’s a compulsion to go inward and stay there, to always be gazing at a screen, to be in our bubble, or to eat on autopilot, it’s worth looking at. The same is true for someone who is always socially-engaged and feels uncomfortable going inward or being alone. People can become stagnant in one phase or the other. So I propose we use the holidays as an opportunity for a social experiment and personal growth. I believe both inward and outward activities can be either shallow or deep, and going deep gets us out of stagnation by fulfilling us and moving the cycle along.
Here’s a graphical representation of the inward-outward cycle. I labeled something like 70% of the range of both inward and outward activities as “shallow.” This doesn’t mean they’re frivolous, just that they aren’t soul-nourishing in a way that moves the cycle forward. If we make small talk with our coworkers, then play Candy Crush, then send some emails, then eat lunch while browsing a magazine, and so on throughout the day, this curve would look much flatter – we’re moving from shallow external activity to shallow internal activity and never approaching the “peaks.”
It’s hard to be black-and-white in defining what’s shallow and what’s deep, and what’s outward versus what’s inward – but it’s something we can feel. I called eating an inward activity, but of course there could simultaneously be an outward element of social interaction. Coworking could be very outward or somewhat inward, depending on whether it’s very collaborative and verbal or just a bunch of people introverting near each other. Reading about celebrities is what I’d call a “shallow inward” activity. Talking about celebrities is what I’d call a “shallow outward” activity. Meditation is usually a “deep inward” activity. And having sex – or more specifically, connected love-making – is usually a “deep outward” activity.
Thus, in both inward and outward activities, there’s an opportunity to go to a certain depth where the orientation becomes both internal and external. So, while meditation is an inward activity, when you really go deep with it, there can be an expansiveness, a transcendence of your small self, a sense of connection with everything – and therefore an outward orientation. Similarly, while traveling is mostly an outward activity, when we witness the vastness of nature or the beauty of other cultures or the oneness we all share, the profundity of such an expansive moment can turn us inward. We come into our hearts and are silenced and grateful.
I created a more descriptive diagram of what’s going on. This sphere with a hole through the center, kind of a donut shape, is known as a torus. When dealing with energy, it’s called a toroidal field. Humans have toroidal fields of energy that move in both directions. That is, the energy can move up from the center, then outward, down, and up through the bottom. And it can also move down through the center, then outward, up, and down through the top. What I mean to depict here is that when we go deep, we go through whatever state we’re in and move toward the opposing state. When we go outward and deep, this fulfills our urge to extrovert and takes us inward. When we go inward and deep, this fulfills our urge to introvert and takes us outward. Yin becomes Yang and Yang becomes Yin.
What does this all mean in practical terms? There’s nothing wrong with being introverted or extroverted, and nothing wrong with shallower activities, but if you find yourself getting stuck in either phase, or having difficulty with either phase, try going deeper. As a general guide, bringing your full presence to whatever you’re doing will take you deeper.
In an outward-oriented setting, like a Thanksgiving social gathering, how can you get more real? Can you ask what challenges your friends are facing and be totally present for them? Can you connect more deeply than a conversation about turkey or the weather? Can you share what’s alive for you right now? Can you finally be who you really are around your family? When you’re with people can you be 100% with them? If you find yourself in a game of touch football, can you lose yourself in the spirit of play?
How can you make your introverted periods really count? If you sneak off to the bathroom to play on your phone, can you put it down for a minute and really go inward? Can you feel and acknowledge and accept what’s coming up for you? Can you invite the feelings and take the time and presence to see where they lead you? Can you hear your inner child, meet it with your mature inner adult, and give it what it needs to be at ease – so you can return to the party in a lighthearted way? Can you remember to prioritize meditation and other forms of deliberate stillness throughout the busyness of the holidays?
What happens to your phases of introversion and extroversion when you intentionally go deep in both directions? I’d love to hear about your experience in the comments section below.
With love,
Peter
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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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