Oxygen mask

Carol Gilligan’s Stages of Moral Development (see below), which stemmed from the idea that women’s stages of development differ from men’s as Kohlberg, Piaget and Erikson had laid out, explains that first one learns to care for oneself, then one internalizes norms about caring for others and tends to neglect oneself, finally one becomes critical of the conventions one has adopted and learns to balance caring for self with caring for others.

Carol Gilligan’s Stages of Moral Development

Whether it is our roles as parent, leader, manager, teacher or caregiver many of us become caught in the conventional web of self-sacrifice equating with goodness. To go further we may even become attached to this identity, in that we want our children, constituents, team members, students and patients to see that we are sacrificing ourselves for their betterment; we believe that that’s how they can see our value. But as Gilligan’s model explains this conventional view is an intermediary stage along our paths that warrants further development.

Positive Organizational Scholarship professor Robert Quinn writes this in regards to business leadership in his book “Building the bridge as you walk on it.” He describes the Normal State and the Fundamental Leadership State below:

Figure 1: Quinn’s ‘Normal’ State

Figure 2: Quinn’s ‘Fundamental State of Leadership’ State

Quinn, Robert (2004) Building the bridge as you walk on it. San Francisco: Jossey Bass.

A tendency in leaders, as we see them today is to believe that the job requires them to know the right answer, the right time, the right direction, never leaving room for error or uncertainty, except the certainty of falling into a rabbit hole. The belief is that always knowing what is right makes a leader; that is what exhibits an ability to ‘be in control.’ Missing the reality that this sort of action is only a concern for individual survival.

Putting the two models together, we can only become effectively and safely ‘Other- Focused’ and ‘Externally-Open’ if we are ‘Internally-Directed,’ and we can only be ‘Internally Directed’ if we take time to care for ourselves, to be aware of our own values and worth. As the FAA goes on to explain “This advice may seem cruel, but there is a very practical reason for it. If the brain is starved of oxygen, one can get confused or pass out and be unable to help themselves or their child.”

Ok, heavy stuff. Imagine it metaphorically or literally, either way, it doesn’t seem healthy or beneficial to others around us to neglect our ourselves in our pursuits to guide others.

There is another interesting link between these two models. While Gilligan’s model initiated from the need for a more female-focused explanation of moral development, I would argue that it carries validity for both male and female when acting in a leadership capacity. As spiritual teacher Mark Whitwell addresses, we’ve become focused on the duality of things: right/wrong, male/female, giver/receiver, leader/follower but Quinn’s Fundamental State of Leadership acknowledges that being a leader requires being externally open, which may result in following the ideas of others. Perhaps the role of leader and follower is less dualistic than we perceive it? We progress by recognizing our capacities to lead and follow. In the same way, we progress by recognizing the non-duality of our masculine and feminine sides. Our feminine side is associated with being in touch with emotions; which in intense work environments men and women can be scrutinized for. As Kouzes and Posner have brought to light in their leadership book Encouraging the Heart, working in a professional environment does not require checking your heart at the door. In this book they report research from the Center for Creative Leadership that found the single factor that differentiated the most successful managers from the least was higher scores on affection, expressed and wanted.

Bottom line:
• “Always give from the oveflow of the well, not its depth” –Sufi saying
• Get in touch with your feminine side

Image
Oxygen mask courtesy of mockstar

This article first appeared on Positive Psychology News. To see the original article, click here. To comment on this article, click here.

Contentment is one of those buzz words that we usually hear linked with any discussion around ‘the good life.’ It is referred to either directly or indirectly in most of the scales listed on Authentic Happiness. But is contentment an attitude that we choose bring to our lives or is it an effect of our well-lived lives? Do those iceberg beliefs or deeply held beliefs that about who we are and how we believe the world should operate that “float” beneath the surface of our consciousness dissolve once we find contentment or do we need to remove those iceberg beliefs in order to find contentment?

Positive emotion researcher Barb Frederickson suggests that fear elicits a desire to escape, anger the desire to attack, disgust the desire to expel, guilt the desire to make amends, shame the desire to disappear, sadness the desire to withdraw… all specific action tendencies associated with certain negative emotions. If I were to ask you to feel these emotions in your body, each of them would encourage a real action, some sort of ‘doing.’ This idea of emotion leading to action is what we are most familiar with. Because actions are seen and observed by others, they are viewed as the essence of our contribution as human beings. On the other hand, an emotion or state like contentment elicits inaction; something more foreign in our Western minds.

The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali includes contentment, known as santosa, as one of the five niyamas or ‘shall dos’ in our dealing with the internal world, decreeing “as a result of contentment, one gains supreme happiness.” He talks of contentment not as complacency but reverence. Frederickson suggests that instead of prompting action, contentment ‘prompts a mindful broadening and integration of a person’s self-views and world views.’ As negative emotions are an alarm for our sympathetic nervous system to respond and protect us from harm, perhaps positive emotions and states of being, specifically contentment are there to elicit a response from our parasympathetic nervous system, to relax us, to calm us to breed thoughts of serenity. As Desikachar explains, contentment is the accepting of what has happened…what we have and what we’ve been gifted with.

Then contentment must be both an attitude that we bring to our activities and one that is a result of our actions. This is where our iceberg beliefs (samskaras in yogic terms), our impressions of ourselves and of the way we think things should/should not be based on prior experience, can prevent us from finding contentment. If we enter into activities allowing our iceberg beliefs to lead the way, than our experiences will inevitably be tainted and perhaps ‘doomed.’ If we take habitual action to remove our iceberg beliefs then contentment can follow; we are no longer weighed down by the accumulation of past thoughts and actions but freed to experience and find joy and peace in time and space as we are actually experiencing it. Which draws back on my previous post about in the moment savoring.

But, what habitual actions can we take to remove these iceberg beliefs so that we can experience contentment? Research found that people who practiced meditation at least three times per week, in conjunction with Fordyce’s program to increase happiness showed improvement over the program alone Smith, Compton, & West 1995). This is especially valuable in dealing with stress (Kabat-Zinn, Lipworth, Burney & Sellers, 1986.) Creating this time of calm in the day builds positive emotions of interest and contentment, which helps people realize feelings of centeredness that they may not have realized before. Experiments conducted by Isen, Johnson, Mertz, & Robinson (1985) have demonstrated that positive emotions built from mindful exercises produce unusual, flexible, creative and receptive patterns. Isen suggested that positive affect “enlarges the cognitive context” (Isen, 1987), an effect recently linked to increases in brain dopamine levels (Ashby, Isen, & Turken, in press).’

Without being too grandiose, I’d venture to say that we can find evidence all around us that in fact those iceberg beliefs do not have to be accurate just because they occurred once before. We can put these large and small misperceptions of ourselves or of our environment into new perspective. So, it seems contentment is both contingent upon and fundamental in the removal of iceberg beliefs.

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Frederickson, B. ‘Cultivating Positive Emotions to Optimize Health and Well-Being Prevention & Treatment, Volume 3, Article 0001a, posted March 7, 2000.

Isen, A. M., Johnson, M. M. S., Mertz, E., & Robinson, G. F. (1985). The influence of positive affect on the unusualness of word associations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 48, 1413–1426

Smith, W. P., Compton, W. C., & West, W. B. (1995). Meditation as an adjunct to a happiness enhancement program. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 51, 269-273.

This article first appeared on Positive Psychology News. To see the original article, click here. To comment on this article, click here.

In his research on savoring, Fred Bryant calls out Freud and Skinner’s assumptions that people naturally experience pleasure in response to positive events. To some of us it might seem ridiculous…we’d wonder, how is it possible to not enjoy the good stuff? I mean we’re not talking making lemonade out of lemons, we’re talking, feeling psyched about a well-deserved promotion. Well, I must admit, it’s a relief to know that the equation isn’t that balanced; that we aren’t all predisposed to know how to ‘be present’ and savor the good things in life. For some of us, it takes work and the recognition that if we aren’t stopping to savor we are missing out on the actual reality of our lives. In some cases it may take an understanding of what those ‘good things’ are for each of us. Perhaps that’s one of the places where the ‘meaning’ branch of Seligman’s positive subjective experience intersects with the ‘pleasure’ branch. Where goal setting and circle of life exercises are helpful for us to know what makes us feel pleasure and what we feel warrants savoring. In other cases, it’s the simple pleasures that some of us have the most trouble appreciating.

Included in Peterson and Seligman’s Classification of Character Strengths and Virtues (aka Manual of the Sanities), is included the strength of “Appreciation of Beauty and Excellence” indicating that being able to recognize, be present and appreciate positive experiences is something that some of us are just simply ‘better at.’ As we are always careful to point out, this certainly does not preclude the fact that those of us who don’t naturally know how to savor, can’t learn to. In fact, it is just the opposite. In his book Savoring Fred Bryant suggests ways to learn to savor or to mindfully engage in thoughts or behaviors that heighten the effect of positive events on positive feelings. Bryant’s work also supports 3 temporal forms of Savoring: (1) Anticipatory (2) In the Moment and (3) Reminiscent. Meaning, we can savor a positive event before it happens by getting excited in preparation for it, we can savor the positive event as it occurs and we can savor a positive event by remembering it.

But besides making us feel good, for the pragmatists out there to whom ‘feeling good’ isn’t enough you may be wondering, what’s the point of savoring, what does it do for us?? Nobel prize winner for his work on hedonic psychology, Daniel Kahneman, points out that ‘humans plan for their future and use their past as a guide to their future…(making) remembered or anticipated and integrated hedonic value a convenient shorthand for decision making online.” Thus, making our mental representation of remembered and anticipated pleasure functional in our lives. It helps us make good decisions because it reminds us of what served us well in the past. Barb Fredrickson’s Broaden and Build Theory of Positive Emotions puts the final button on this jacket, proving that positive emotions create an upward spiral in our experiences, emotions, relationships, mental capacities, etc. So by reconnecting with those positive emotions that we felt in the past, we can enhance our current mood and perceptions of current situations thereby creating even more positive emotions and experiences. Yogic philosophy, which I’ve begun to study more in depth recently, places greatest emphasis on non-attachment, which would suggest that identifying with our past and/or our future only hinders us, as it takes us away from experiencing the present reality. Placing greater emphasis on the ‘in the moment’ savoring. When I asked my yogiraj why exactly ‘being present’ was so important he reminded me that things happen to and for us when we live in the moment, we have no need to craft and orchestrate them because by placing our attention on them we are allowing our intuition to take hold. He’d likely call what Kahneman talks about as our karma, our experiences of past and our future that affect our present.

So, back to where we started, while we all have positive experiences in our lives, many of us may need guidance on how to recognize and appreciate the positive and to activate a savoring quality in our lives. Just because good things happen doesn’t mean we know what to do with them! There is a William Blake quote that I’ve shared with those people in my life who just can’t seem to find the light switch in the dark room that they are trapped in. “There is a moment in every day that the devil can not find”…I’d like to add on to that “savor it!” A good beginning…..

Look for me on the 29th of each month. Love to hear your comments.
MU

This article first appeared on Positive Psychology News. To see the original article, click here. To comment on this article, click here.

Miriam Ufberg, MAPP ‘06, lives in New York City where she manages a yoga studio, which is part of the first national family of studios. She is a registered yoga instructor with a focus on scoliosis and spinal fusions. Mimi completed her BS in Marketing from the University of Maryland and worked for 5 years as an Advertising Executive for clients such as Volvo, British Airways and the Financial Times. She completed her Masters in Applied Positive Psychology where she focused on positive organizational development, leadership authenticity and the role of meaning in life and character strengths for emerging adults.  Miriam Ufberg’s articles appear here on the 29th of the month.

This article first appeared on Positive Psychology News. To see the original article, click here. To comment on this article, click here.