Always Do Your Best

As I have said in the past, I like to read self-help books. A while ago a couple of different friends of mine both recommended a book called The Four Agreements. They actually both recommended it to me within days of each other, which was one of those synchronicities that made me at least think to pay a bit more attention. Anyway, I found the book in a pile of free books on the street one day, and I've just recently been reading it.

The fourth agreement is "Always Do Your Best."
As I was reading this morning I came across the following passage: "keep doing your best--no more and no less than your best. If you try too hard to do more than your best, you will spend more energy than is needed and in the end your best will not be enough. When you overdo, you deplete your body and go against yourself, and it will take you longer to accomplish your goal."

This feels to me very much like what I was saying about pacing. We want to, above all, honor our health. If we sacrifice our health early in a long process, then our chances of finishing decrease. If we can continue to work while maintaining our health, we improve our chances of finishing.

Diff'rent Strokes

That was a TV show in the 70s, I think. With Gary Coleman.

But I was just thinking about how some people go about doing things so differently.
I was looking at a dissertation proposal with a comment from the committee chair to the effect that an abstract was unnecessary for the proposal and can only be written last anyway. I know that this is not an uncommon theory--one I've heard before.

It doesn't match, however, my experience. And so I think of the old expression "different strokes for different folks", or the related "one man's meat is another man's poison." I love the abstract. I love trying to write an abstract. I love the perspective it can give me, and I love the fact that it's something that can be done quickly. Trying to write the abstract, forces me to try to see the big picture and seeing the big picture can help me find structure and keep my writing focused and the details related to the big picture.

Now I can understand, to some extent, the opposite position. You don't really know what the abstract's final form will be until you've gotten the whole paper written, because you learn as you write. You always have to revise it at the end. So I can see how, for some people, it may seem more efficient not to write it until you know what the final form will be.

The balance of efficiency definitely shifts depending on how well you write and what benefit of perspective you get from the exercise. One thing about writing an abstract is that it is something that every writer should be able to do in 30 minutes. You probably won't have a perfect abstract after 30 minutes, but you will have a draft. That's a low cost in time.
Of course it's possible that those 30 minutes will also have a high cost of frustration.

That's neither here nor there.
Different people work differently. What works for one won't work for another. Like trying to write an abstract as an exercise, you want to try different things to see what works for you. For me, I lean towards writing as a means to clear my ideas. But other means may work better for others. Others, for example, may be more visually oriented than I, and may therefore want to use a tool that allows spatial and visual relations to help work through the relevant ideas.

To some extent, one way to interpret the above is to suggest that if you, as a writer, are not getting the results you would like, maybe the thing to do is to try some new approach, and to experiment with the way you work.

Choices

What choices do we get to make and how are we going to make them?

We want to understand our goals, and the context in which we work (that is to say those things that we cannot or will not try to change), but our options are what deserve the great focus. What kinds of outcomes follow from our choices? It is in the focus on the choices that we are most empowered because we are focusing on our actions.

I'm thinking about this right now because I'm anxious. And I'm worrying about things that are beyond my control. I'm not thinking about what I can do; instead I'm thinking about what I can't do, or at least what I believe that I can't do. And that doesn't really feel very good.

This post, then, is an exercise on focusing on things that I can do. Writing, for me, offers an opportunity to work on directing my attention. It's not a meditative sort of thing, but it does force my focus on to the present, and on to what I can do.

If Cognitive-Behavioral psychology is correct in presuming that negative emotional states are strongly related to the stories we're telling ourselves, then an exercise like focusing your attention to write about something positive will help us change the stories that are giving us trouble.

For me, fear is a big problem, fear of other people. But to let that rule me? I have choices of how to act, and as I pursue my choices, I want to choose those that are the most able to help me face my fear. And one of those choices is to keep in mind that any possible course of action has negative potential outcomes, many of which have little or nothing to do with me. So I know that I could choose to focus on negative outcomes for any and all potential courses of action. Or I can try to choose the course of action that will help me move towards my own goals, even in the face of the fear-inducing negative outcome.

I haven't figured out how to choose to turn off the emotional switch. I think that's possible, too. But for now, I know that in the long run, I feel best when I choose a course of action and resign myself to the possibility that it has something bad in store for me, because I see that there is also a possibility that it has something good in store for me.

The Placebo Effect

How is it that a placebo effect exists?
In writing about What the Bleep Do We Know?, I got an e-mailed comment about the part of that movie that talks about the effect of the mind on water--there are a series of pictures of water molecules showing how each had been affected by being labeled in different ways (presumably through the action of the mind). What if we had a bottle of "confident" water? or "peaceful" water? What would happen if we drank that water?

Now I don't know how to evaluate the accuracy of the science of the shaping of the water molecules, but I do feel pretty darn confident that the placebo effect exists, and, though I haven't actually studied the placebo effect, that there is plenty of research out there to support the notion of the placebo effect.

How is it that it operates? One possible explanation that we might imagine would be to link the water molecules of What the Bleep with the placebo notion: in the process of taking the placebo, our believing mind alters the molecules in some way. Another possible explanation (and the one I imagine most people would favor over the What the Bleep explanation) would be that our mind acts directly on our body--by believing that changes will occur, we may create those chances purely through the power of the mind. To explain the placebo effect--an observable phenomenon--somehow requires physiological change through action of the mind, whether that causal path is direct or indirect. I have come up with two possible explanations, but I daresay more could be imagined--both variations on the two basic themes I laid out, or development of some other theme (e.g., supernatural entities?).

If the placebo effect exists, is it possible that it can be consciously exerted--for example by repeating "I am confident", one grows in confidence? That would seem to be the rankest version of pop psychology and using affirmations. But does the logic of the placebo suggest that possibility?
We might argue that the placebo effect can only be unconsciously activated, but that requires a Freudian view of the mind, and one wonders whether we really want to believe that there is some entity called the "unconscious" or whether Freud's theory, which characterizes the unconscious as a sort of independent agent, relies on human conceptualization and thus creates a division that is not accurate with respect to the placebo effect. (I daresay someone has studied whether the placebo effect is only unconscious or not; I haven't researched that.)

If we acknowledge that there is a possibility (not a certainty) that we can consciously invoke the placebo principle through such behaviors as repeated affirmations, at what level does the possibility become great enough to try such actions? And though I dismiss affirmations as pop psychology, there is no doubt that there are therapeutic with significant empirical research to support them that suggest that we can improve our moods through behavioral modifications (like affirmations).

For me, especially at those moments when things seem the most difficult, the level of possibility doesn't have to be very high. It seems to be worth the chance, because the cost of changing my behaviors to promote is so low. The effort doesn't contradict other efforts to change my situation, and costs nothing but a little effort.

Following this logic, then, it seems that to the extent that we can imagine a possibility, and we can imagine the steps to get there, we can then use our minds to help us move there by focusing on that goal ("I am confident!").

This post is a little of a hodge podge, because I was also thinking about the role of imagination in work as academics or philosophers: when faced with an observed phenomenon, we can use our imagination to generate different hypotheses about the causal factors of interest (as I did with the placebo effect).

We can also use our imagination to hypothesize connections of significance: if there is such a thing as the placebo effect: how can that be significant to the individual? What can be done with the placebo effect? Maybe you could institute a whole program based on it (which might be a health pogrom, not a health program)? Or maybe you would want to limit attempts to apply the placebo effect as treatment to only some cases (say ones with low risk, or ones that are not treatable by other means).

Our imaginations are keys to a whole realm of possibilities in academic work. Judicious use of imagination, along with careful qualification (e.g., the conscious placebo effect is possible, not certain) can lead to fruitful lines of discussion.

Believing in yourself

Either you do or you don't. I wonder what the proportions are on the split: how many do believe and how many don't. Me? I'm up and down. Some days I do. Others I don't. Some days I do stuff and it clicks. Others it doesn't. Some days, yes; some, no.

Believing in yourself is a good thing. Psychologists talk about believing in yourself as "self-efficacy"--a trait that has been correlated with a number of other positive traits, like success in school and psychological well-being.

I've been having some trouble believing in myself recently. But that difficulty is not necessarily reflective of a with me. That point was driven home to me today, talking with a writer who had gotten some difficult feedback on her dissertation. "I don't have anything to say," she told me. I'm sure she believed it. Partly she believed it because the feedback she had received had projected that. Partly she was just forgetting herself. The same writer has also told me about her own sense of the work's importance, and of her experience of others who have been interested in her work. Which is the reality? Is it true that she has nothing to say because one person told her that? Or is it true that she does have something to say, because someone else told her so?

I used to think that brutal honesty--with self and others--was always the way to go. Nowadays, I'm not as certain of the truth. It's easy to find a flaw. But what does a flaw mean? Or, as they say in industry, is it a feature or a bug? Is that flaw a flaw from all perspectives?

I lean now more toward practicing optimism and practicing believing in myself (as any reader of this blog is surely aware by now). It seems like the logically soundest route to follow. Now I admit that this route is more appropriate for those of us who have trouble believing in ourselves--those who do believe in themselves maybe ought to watch out for hubris, instead. Anyway, for those who doubt, it seems like practicing your belief in yourself is generally the best practice, because it leads to action, rather than hesitation.

For writers suffering from any sort of writer's block due to lack of self-belief, it's a worthwhile exercise to step back from the project for a moment and to explore the reasons that motivated the project at the start, as it's often the case that we have good reasons for our work, it's just that in the process of working on the details and research, we lost sight of that driving force.

Attitude Management

As I often do, I want to talk about habits of focus.

Today I'm thinking about the effects of focusing on the past and on other things that you can't control, and how that affects your attitude.

We have come to where we are in our lives--wherever that may be--as a result of many factors. Some of the factors may have been our choices, other things may have been due to the choices of others; some may not have been choices at all but accidents of fate.

It is worth understanding the past inasmuch as it gives us information about how to proceed into the future. As Santayana said "Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it." For this reason it is important to understand the factors that affect us--especially the responses and feedback we get from our professors. But beyond using information from the past to guide us into the future, we want to get our attention off the past as much as possible. And especially we want to get our attention off the things that upset us.

We want to know about the past, so that we can make good decisions for the future. We don't want our focus on the past to disrupt our present.

In particular, I'm thinking about focusing on negative things. I don't know about you, and I won't invite you to test this--because I don't want to prompt anyone to enter a negative emotional state--but when I think about times when I have been treated poorly and unjustly, I get upset--even about things that happened many years ago. By focusing on past hurts, I can feel the pain even today.

Again, I don't know about you, but in the long run I work better when I'm happy and optimistic and operating from a place of interest. I can generate spurts of effort fueled by anger, but they tend to leave me exhausted and unhappy.

I think a key role in attitude management--especially in avoiding the emotional downs that come with focusing on bad experiences from your past--is to keep looking at the future and asking what are you going to do next? What kinds of action can you take in the face of past wrongs? How can you use the options that are open to you to move forward and succeed in your project? The focus on the future, and on the goal of completing your project has an implicitly optimistic underpinning: it looks towards a future that you hope for.

A similar focus issue, which plays an equally important role in attitude management, is to keep you focus on the things that you can do, and to try to build from them.

Recently I have been working with a writer who has been working on the dissertation for over a decade--well over a decade, really. Our correspondence is filled with rehearsal of past problems, of personal weaknesses, of excuses for what can't be done, and for what was once wanted. But none of that material helps the dissertation move forward. I am tempted to write "You write beautiful, long, eloquent excuses for why you can't do the work; if you were to spend as much effort, and write a third as much on the things you're telling me you can't do, you would make far more progress."

What the Bleep Do We Know?

I loved this movie. It was quirky, odd, and often hard to believe. I also thought it profound, and often hard to reject.

I found it inspirational. The simple message acted out by Marlee Matlin--who early in the movie shouts "I hate you" at her reflection in her bathroom mirror, and later, looking in the same mirror, writes "I love you" on her body with makeup--is a worthy one for most of us to practice. Love and acceptance of others is grounded in love and acceptance of ourselves.

But there's a lot more in the movie than just that. I enjoyed the animated description of the human neurological system and how repeating patterns reinforces neurological structures. And many of the speakers were very interesting, and had credentials that were hard to ignore. It may be easy to dismiss someone who says she is channeling another being, but it's pretty hard to dismiss professors from universities like Stanford (as I write that, I see how my perspective as an academic has framed it; I have no doubt that there are people in the world--religious or spiritual people--who would find it easier to dismiss a university professor than a channeler).

I mentioned this movie a few posts ago, and someone commented on it (thanks for the comment!), which reminded me of how much I liked the movie and how the movie shares the view that we have the ability to recreate our experience of the world into new patterns. Actually, I think the movie would make a stronger claim: that we have the ability to shape the world through our exertion of will. Personally, I might accept that claim. But in terms of writing an essay that can provide useful ideas to you standard dissertation writer, I think the stronger claim is unnecessary and might be distracting.

You, of course, should view my writing and What the Bleep Do We Know? with the same sort of critical eye that you read academic works: what parts make sense and what parts don't? How strong is the argument? When is it using good evidence? and when poor? And so on. And there I go--I set out to talk about a specific resource--the film I liked--and ended up talking about a general process: how to read.