There is a huge difference between smiling by simply raising the edges to your mouth, and getting your whole face, or even your whole body involved.
When your expression is positively contagious everyone wins.
The next time you smile, remember to smile with your eyes.
It’s amazing how much people undermine themselves:
Here are two quotes from James Clear’s book, Atomic Habits:
You should be far more concerned with your current trajectory than with your current results.
And;
You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.
The things we do, and the plans and systems we put in place, and the habits we develop here and now are what determine the outcomes we are heading towards. Part of self-sabotage is looking forward and not believing we can achieve our goals, so why make the effort? The targets are too big, or too far away.
It’s the small thing that you can do today that move you to a bigger goal. Small, repeatable things that become habits. These small things undermine self-sabotage. When you surround yourself with small positive, incremental changes, your trajectory changes, and the people around you notice. Maybe it’s possible that you can help change the trajectory of others around you as well? Undermine self-sabotage by making small positive changes can be contagious.
I think this idea came from Terry O’Reilly’s book, ‘This I know’, but I listened to it a couple years ago and am not 100% sure? The idea is to go the extra inch, rather than the extra mile.
The easiest place to see this in customer service. The cashier who takes a little extra care in bagging your items. The waiter who tops up your water glass before you need to ask. The hot dog vendor who asks if you’d like your bun toasted. The hotel front desk clerk who asks if you’d like a city map with local restaurants, or who remembers your name the next time you see them.
So many people talk about going the extra mile, but really it’s just an extra inch that can make the difference, (or for that matter the extra centimetre). It doesn’t often take much work or effort to make someone’s day, to provide better than average service, or to simply be accommodating to someone you love and care about.
A kind gesture, a simple change in tone, a thoughtful question, a smile. It’s not about going terribly far out of your own way, it’s simply going the extra inch.
What I find interesting is that it’s often easier to do this with strangers rather than those you are around daily. We seem to take advantage of our relationships and not make the extra inch of effort with people we spend time with every day. Instead, we are quicker to snap a response, or to be snide, or just impatient. We feel like the extra inch is actually an extra mile.
It’s not. In this way, life is a game of inches, and it’s much more fun when we are able to see this and just go that extra inch for those that can do the same for us more frequently, because we are around them more often.
I felt it. I mean I really felt it. A rhythmic wave resonated throughout my body. Before this moment I had enjoyed music but I never had it consume me so completely. And I was surrounded by others who felt the same way.
It was the early summer of 1992, and I was 24 years old. My uncle had introduced me to an NLP teacher, paying for me to take his course, and I loved it. NLP or Neuro Linguistic Programming is about harnessing communication patterns, that we all use, in more effective and powerful ways. The course I was in was very interesting because it seemed as if half the people were there to learn to be more effective and the other half seemed to be there for therapy.
The 9-day course started on a Saturday and ran daily from 8am to 4pm through the week and into the second weekend. It was the Friday morning and we were told we were in for a treat. We were taken to a small room filled with drums, shakers, tambourines, cow bells and assorted traditional music makers. The lesson was on rapport and we were going to use music to demonstrate it.
I think there were about 18 of us in this small room and we were broken up into groups of 2, 3, and 4, depending on the number of similar instruments. I don’t remember if we ended up with 5 or 6 groups. Next, each group was given a different beat to play. For instance, the cow bell players got tap-tap, tap-tap, pause, tap-tap, while a few drummers got a beat of 1-2, 1-2-3, 1-2-3-4, 1-2. That second example would have been the most complicated of the options with most others being quite simple.
We got counted down and everyone started playing their own beat in their groupings. As someone that doesn’t have musical training, it was good to have other people playing the same beat as me so that I could follow along and not be too distracted by the other groups. That said it was a ruckus in this small room. To put it kindly, we were making noise, horrible and loud clattering, pounding, clanging, dinging noise. It was awful.
I understood that we were supposed to build rapport and the music was somehow supposed to come together but it didn’t. There was just noise. We switched instruments and tried again. Noise. We switched beats. Noise. We switched instruments again, and I was given cow bells. More noise.
We were tired, and we were overwhelmed with the echo of instruments clamouring out of synch, and then something interesting happened. A professional dance instructor that was taking the course had a big gourd shaker in his hand, he stepped forward into the middle of our circle and connected with an older man on drums. This older gentleman that the dancer connected with was a retired music teacher. They sped up the beat slightly and I could hear their individual beats come together as if they were one pattern. The dancer with the gourd shaker was dancing to their beat and my beat fell into synch with his feet.
That was the moment it happened for me, and it was obvious that it was happening for everyone else in the room… our noise became music. But this was so much more than music, it was a wave of sound that reverberated through my body. I watched the dancer and realized that his gourd and feet were the backbone of the beat. We were all following his lead. Then I looked at the retired musician’s drum and I realized that it was him driving the beat. Then I looked at my cow bells and realized it was me that was leading the beat. Then I really understood what was happening. We were in perfect unison, we were one.
None of us were in the lead. All of us were in the lead. This was full rapport. We were all connected, all one beat, all one musical experience. We built up the sound to a full crescendo, it was all-consuming, bordering on ecstasy. There was a countdown, 3-2-1, and we all stopped playing. The instant silence was a final exclamation on an overwhelmingly beautiful experience. For the first time in my life I had felt, truly and to my core felt, the sound of music.
Yesterday the piano tuner came to our school for our piano’s yearly tuning. I asked him if he used a machine or if he tuned by ear?
”I use a tuning fork for the first note, then I’m good.”
Later in the day I was in my core fitness class and I was doing an exercise where I was supposed to be activating my gluteus (my butt muscles), but I kept activating my quadriceps (front leg muscles). The Physio at the class asked me to show her how I sit down, and it turns out that I don’t know how to go from a standing to a sitting position properly.
A little background here, I have a bad lower back, and deal with discomfort or pain on a regular basis. For decades now I’ve been compensating for my lower back by using it less and using my legs more. While this protects my back for working too hard at a given moment, it also limits my range of motion and creates tightness in my upper legs and lower back that makes things worse.
The challenge, however is that after decades of misuse, I have no idea what the sensation is to use the correct muscles? Essentially, I can’t ‘tune in’ to the feeling of what it’s like to do the right motion versus doing the wrong motion. As I’m being coached and physically guided to use the correct muscles, and my Physio says either, “No, you are still activating your quads,” or, “That’s good, you’ve got it,” my internal reality feels no different. I can’t distinguish what I’m doing differently.
While the piano tuner has spent 40 years finely tuning his ear to be honed to the sounds needed for his trade, I’ve spent almost as long dealing with a bad back and tuning out certain muscles that I should be using to help me be more mobile and agile. He has become an expert at doing something very well, while I’ve become an expert at doing something very poorly, and I am now a novice at doing it correctly.
Like with most things, it’s probably much easier to learn something correctly the first time, compared to unlearning and relearning it. But that process of correcting ourselves is seldom something we can do on our own. We can’t tune in if we don’t have that reference point, that tuning fork, that coach/mentor, or in my case physiotherapist. We often aren’t aware of how we’ve tuned out, and we need outside help to help guide us to tune in.
Where do you need to tune in more? Who are you going to get to help you?
I just finished listening to this book, ‘Educated’ on Audible. It was thoroughly enjoyable and yet hauntingly disturbing. I left a review:
5 out of 5 stars
By David Truss on 2019-11-07
Two stories in one.
This wonderful book is at once the story of a woman escaping the clutches of a broken home, steeped in zealot faith, violence, and mental illness, while also being the story of a young girl yearning for acceptance and love from her dysfunctional family.
I can’t help but feel blessed to have had the upbringing that I had after reading this memoir. What struck me most, besides the horrible way Tara was victimized by her family, was how she kept returning, allowing herself to fall back into such an unhealthy environment.
I struggled to understand the draw, the appeal, to seek out her family’s love and approval when each time she tried she was pressured into conforming into a life that made her feel justifiably tortured. How could she possibly want to try again? And yet she did, and did again…
Tara’s story has helped me understand why an abused wife would go back to her husband, or why an abused child would remain silent. It defies logic. But logic is not the metric at work. In a way it is love, or at least the desire to be loved. In a way it is dependency, or at least the illusion of need, though I don’t have the experience to understand such a need.
Like I said in my review, this is a story of someone victimized by ‘zealot faith, violence, and mental illness’. This triangle of despair left Tara feeling trapped. It should have been easy to leave but it took courage to escape the bonds of family and the desire for acceptance. While Tara was able to escape, I believe that many do not. I believe that any one or two of these traps that victimize children are enough to take hold and imprison that child in a cycle of pain and suffering… to compel them to remain in an unhealthy environment, while someone from the outside ponders why the child would choose to remain in such a circumstance?
From the outside, it is easy to judge, to question, and perhaps even to blame someone for not escaping such a past. But that judgement or blame is undeserving. I am reminded of Plato’s Cave. But I realize that even when someone is able to see that life is more than just shadows on a wall, they might still accept the shadows as what really matters. We cannot easily break the bonds of our childhood and enter another realm. Tara struggled but she escaped the cave. Many do not.
It was 21 years ago when I was on my practicum to become a teacher that a student taught me a valuable lesson. The kid was a bit of a handful and he often acted out in class. He was quite manageable for my teacher advisor, and for me when my advisor was in the room, but he’d act out in an exaggerated way when I was teaching this grade 6 & 7 class on my own.
I don’t remember what the issue was, but one day he did something and I held him back after class. I waited for students to leave then I went over to his desk and sat down next to him. I only remember one thing about the conversation, during my little monologue I said to him, “You’re acting like a little 9 year old!”
He spoke up in response, “I’m 10.”
I froze. Staring at him blankly, I thought to myself, I told him to act his age… and he is… he’s being a little kid in a class of little kids.
After that he was still a challenge at times, but I gave him more responsibility to help me out and he responded well. When he acted out a bit, I remembered his age and that he needed help and guidance. He didn’t need a teacher that was expecting him to act like a mature 15 year old when he was just a 10 year old kid with a lot of energy, being asked to sit at a desk for long periods of time.
I don’t think I’ve ever told a kid to act their age again. In fact, the only times I’ve ever thought that since this incident has been when adults act and respond like kids. I must admit I find that disappointing. But when kids make immature choices, that’s often when they are acting their age.
It was many years ago, but I remember the situation well, having told it a few times. One of my online teachers was dealing with a student who was cheating. It was obvious, yet the student refused to admit it. His work was plagiarism of a student who had already completed the course… it wasn’t exact, but paraphrased sentence by sentence. This wasn’t done on questions with a single answer, it was done on two assignments where students were sharing personal opinions. Even if this student shared similar views to the original author, the essays could never match so well structurally, sentence by sentence, and idea by idea. The student’s father got involved and treated my teacher poorly and so she asked me for help.
When I called, I got a mouthful of rudeness, I could barely get a word in. I tried to explain but didn’t get a chance. Then the next day the student called me. He was condescending. He asked me how long I’d been out of the classroom, and asked me if I understood the word ‘collaboration’. He got to me a bit and I gave a bit of a snarky response. At that point his mom jumped in and I realized that I had been on speakerphone. She went on a full tirade.
I should have hung up. I should have ended the call. But two things played in my mind. First, that I should not have been snarky, second, that if they were underhanded enough to bait me like that, they were probably also capable of recording the call. So I listened to the abuse. I let her rant, I would occasionally begin to respond, only when asked, and then I would be cut off with another attack. And I took it. One thing made it bearable…
I’ve met a number of kids who have had a challenging parent in my career as an educator. A parent that was overbearing, or over-controlling, or unreasonable. I’ve met some kids that have both parents come in like two mamma bears protecting their kid, and while they might or might not be dealing ideally with the situation, they are genuinely caring for their child. I’d never met (albeit this was just over the phone) a kid before who had two completely angry and bitter parents.
I thought of what this kid’s experience at home must be like? I wondered if this kid had a role model that didn’t treat the world like it was against them? Did his parents treat him like they treated me? Did he have siblings or did he face their wrath alone? I imagined what it would be like for me if when I did something wrong, rather than my parents calling me out, they doubled down and defended me? I sat on the phone listening, but the abuse I took didn’t hurt. I felt genuinely sorry for this kid. I hoped this way of dealing with a problem that he was experiencing was not the only way that he experienced problem solving at home.
In the end, I gave a choice to the family. He could redo the essays, he could take the zeros for plagiarism on these two assignments and move on, or he could drop the course. I told the teacher that all email correspondence with the parent should be cc’d to me as well and that any phone calls should be directed to me. I didn’t want her to have to take any abuse.
There ended up being one more similar issue, and my conversation with the kid’s dad at that point actually went well for me, but I again felt sorry for the kid. I felt empathy. I wondered if the lack of face to face communication made my first interactions challenging, and maybe, hopefully, it would have been different had we met in person. I wondered if this kid’s parents were always angry or if this experience triggered something awful? I wondered what they were dealing with in their lives that I don’t have to deal with in mine?
I don’t think I would stay on the phone if something like that happened again. I don’t need to take the abuse. I know that I won’t be as likely to be snarky, even to someone treating me in a condescending way. But the best lesson I got from this was to remind myself that when I’m dealing with an angry person, I don’t know why they are so angry? I don’t know what their lives are like? And I don’t have to live the angry lives they live.
I get to choose my disposition. I can feel empathy for people that give themselves less choice than I have. I can move on after these interactions without feeling bad, if I know that I handled things as best as I could with the resources and experience that I have… and I need to remember that this applies to them too. They did they best they could, given their experiences and circumstances. I don’t choose to look back on this experience with anger. I’m not upset that I didn’t handle it better. I don’t pretend that it didn’t have an effect on me or I probably wouldn’t be writing about it now. But I will meet more angry people in my life, and I believe that I’m more resilient and more prepared for that time, thanks to this experience.
___
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
I was dreaming. In the dream there were a group of kids lost in play, and nearby a young boy was sleeping. His mom gently woke him up. The boy, as it turned out in the dream, had Aspergers. I don’t know why that was relevant? He lay there, newly awake, saying a few incoherent things, and then he said, “This is my life.”
Suddenly my entire dream was about this statement. In my dream, I actually planned out writing this down. A young boy wakes up and is disoriented, then he comes to a realization that ‘oh, I have woken up, and this is my life’. How seldom are we ‘awake’ enough to truly understand this profound statement?
Recently I listened to the audio book ‘In Love With The World – A Monk’s Journey Through the Bardot of Living and Dying‘ by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche. In it he spoke of the idea that we die every night and are reborn each morning. We completely lose our consciousness, our identity of who we are, when we fall asleep. And we wake up anew. With waking comes the realization of who we are, and our consciousness returns to us, ‘this is my life’.
Do we take the time to truly appreciate the wonder of waking each day? Of being reborn to who we are and who we can be? Each day is a new day, each breath a first breath, each moment a moment to be fully present… Like kids, fully immersed in play.
This is my life. This is your life. How will we choose to live it ‘now’?
Wake up.
When you are in the stern of a canoe, you need to master one important stroke, the J-stroke. No matter how good the paddler in the bow of the canoe, the boat will drift towards the side that person is paddling on, and away from the side the stern is paddling on. Paddling at the back of a boat steers the boat the other way. The J-stroke is what you do at the end of the stroke to push water away from the side of the boat and steer it straight, rather than letting it drift.
The J-Stroke (Click image for instructions on openboater.wordpress.com)
When you first learn this stroke, it has 2 distinctly noticeable parts. First there is the power part of the stroke that pushes the the boat forward. Then your ‘J’ pushes water away from the boat to steer it. As a beginner, these two parts are quite separate and so the boat lunges forward, then is steered, lunges forward, then is steered… It should go without saying, but if you are spending time on steering, you are not spending time helping the boat go forward.
As you get better, you start to realize that you can put these two parts together and eventually the boat ‘feels more like’ it is heading in one direction, rather than bouncing between going forwards and being course-corrected. I say feels more like’ it’s heading in one direction because no matter how good you are in the stern, you are always doing some course correcting, unless you and your partner in the bow are perfectly in sync every stroke. It’s just that when you are good at it, this course correcting becomes a smooth part of moving the boat forward.
However, moving from two distinct parts to one continuous stroke is not easy. What makes it harder is that when you try, and it doesn’t work, you end up feeling like you have to steer even more to make up for not being able to pull it off. So many new paddlers will stick with the lunge forward then steer process, and avoid getting better.
You’ve heard it a thousand times before: “The definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result”. Paddling stern in a canoe can be one of those things, because if you don’t intentionally try to put the two parts of the stroke together, you will always be stuck in the lunge forward then steer parts of the J-stroke. Coaching can help, but intentionally trying to put these parts together, and failing and having to compensate, is far better than thousands of strokes just repeating the two parts separately. It will not go smoothly for quite a while, then eventually you’ll realize that things are smoother and you don’t have to think as much about steering with every stroke you take.
Where else in our lives can we take this lesson? Where do we break things up when we should be building them together? How can we use this idea to build up good habits or eliminate bad ones? What daily rituals do we have problems with, that we can integrate with things that we already do well? How can we steer ourselves in the right direction, without even realizing that we are steering?
