This video is the first in a series about how to focus from my online course, the Science of Finding Flow.
“If you can’t focus enough to think deeply, you won’t ever fulfill your potential.”
This video is from “The Science of Finding Flow,” an online course I created as a companion to my book The Sweet Spot: How to Accomplish More by Doing Less. Want to go on to the next class or start the course from the beginning? It’s free! Just go to The Science of Finding Flow course page. Enjoy!
This post is taken from The Science of Finding Flow, an online course I created as a companion to my book The Sweet Spot: How to Accomplish More by Doing Less.
“When was the last time you checked your email, messages and social media feeds? How much time do you spend each day checking?”
People often ask me what they should do instead of numbing their uncomfortable emotions with busyness, or social media, or work.
Most of us need to practice not-numbing but just letting ourselves feel however we are feeling. Here’s how:
Take a moment to identify an emotion that you are experiencing. Where in your body does it live? Is it in the pit of your stomach? In your throat? What does it really feel like? Does it have a shape, or a texture, or a color?
The key is not to deny what we are feeling, but rather to lean into our feelings, even if they are painful. Be mindful and narrate: I’m feeling anxious right now, or this situation is making me tense. Hang in there with unpleasant feelings at least long enough to acknowledge them.
The way to super-charge this exercise is to move from labeling your emotions to truly accepting them, to surrendering all resistance to them. This is tricky because you may really, really, really not want to feel what you’re feeling, and you might be doing this just because I said earlier that emotions that are processed tend to dissipate.
It can be scary to expose ourselves to our strongest emotions. Period. Take comfort from neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor, who teaches us that most emotions don’t last longer than 90 seconds. You’ll probably find that if you can sit still with a strong emotion and let yourself feel it, even the worst emotional pain rises, crests, breaks, and recedes like a wave on the surf.
Can you let yourself feel your strong emotions? If so, you are allowing yourself to feel what you are feeling truly. Now, can you surrender your resistance to your emotions?
Here’s one way to do that using a two-minute meditation.
Letting yourself feel what you feel is essential to this work.
This can be a really hard process, I know. I was just trying to do it with my daughter, who was feeling depressed and anxious about a social situation in her middle school. The idea that she would allow herself to feel depressed—that she would not try not to feel sad—was outrageous to her. “But I DON’T WANT TO FEEL SAD!!! I DON’T WANT TO FEEL ANXIOUS!!! I DO NOT ACCEPT THESE FEELINGS!!!” she raged at me.
Clearly, not everyone is ready for a radical process like this one.
But if you are ready, go for it. This process is the foundation of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, which is clinically proven to improve quality of life and mental health. I feel certain that no matter how busy and important you are, you can find two extra minutes to improve your life and your health!
Once you can let yourself feel what you feel, pat yourself on the back for demonstrating emotional courage and for doing what Martha Beck calls “turning up the dial on your willingness to suffer.”
Beck explains, drawing on the work of the founder of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Steven Hayes, and his book Get Out of Your Mind & into Your Life:
“[Hayes] suggests that we picture our minds as electronic gadgets with dials, like old-fashioned radios. One dial is labeled Willingness to Suffer. It’s safe to assume that we start life with that dial set at zero, and we rarely see any reason to change it. Increasing our availability to pain, we think, is just a recipe for anguish soufflé.
Well, yes…except life [will] upset you every few minutes or so, sometimes mildly, sometimes apocalyptically.”
The basis of ACT is that we try something a little crazy: abandon all attempts to avoid or rush through unpleasant emotions—and focus entirely on turning up the dial on our Willingness to Suffer. Back to Beck:
“What this means, in real-world terms, is that we stop avoiding experiences because we’re afraid of the unpleasant feelings that might come with them. We don’t seek suffering or take pride in it; we just stop letting it dictate any of our choices. People who’ve been through hell are often forced to learn this, which is why activist, cancer patient, and poet Audre Lorde wrote, “When I dare to be powerful—to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.”
There are LOADS of benefits to having this sort of emotional courage — being willing to feel whatever we feel. You can now have that difficult (but necessary!) conversation with your boss or mother that you’ve been avoiding for months because you were worried about the emotional fallout. You can now stop pretending to be something you aren’t — instead of hiding yourself out of fear of what people will think. You can take calculated risks. You may still be afraid, but at least you aren’t making decisions based on your fear. You can do the right thing, even when the right thing is hard.
You can handle whatever uncomfortable, complex, or painful emotions may come—knowing that, what will you do differently?
Please remember that emotional courage—turning up the dial on our willingness to suffer—is about developing happiness, love, and wisdom.
Our emotions—the good, the bad, and the ugly—carry important information with them. Emotions are how your heart talks to you, telling you what choices to make.
As Omid Kordestani, a senior advisor to Google, reminds us, “In life you make the small decisions with your head and the big decisions with your heart.” If we want to be happy, we need to practice feeling, to practice listening to our heart. This is the way to know who we are and what we want.
This post is from a series about authenticity from the “Science of Finding Flow,” an online course I created as a companion to my book The Sweet Spot: How to Accomplish More by Doing Less. Want to go on to the next class or start the course from the beginning? It’s free! Just go to The Science of Finding Flow course page. Enjoy!
This video is the last in a series about how to focus from my online course, the Science of Finding Flow.
“Focusing nowadays is no easy task, but I KNOW YOU CAN DO IT! Start small and work your way up.”
This “class” is from “The Science of Finding Flow,” an online course I created as a companion to my book The Sweet Spot: How to Accomplish More by Doing Less. Want to go on to the next unit or start the course from the beginning? It’s free! Just go to The Science of Finding Flow course page. Enjoy!
I’ve been studying the problem of email overload and compulsive email checking for years now. The problem is massive, but totally solvable.
There are three main strategies for making email a more powerful and efficient tool. First, make compulsively checking email much less gratifying. Second, make checking email on a planned, set schedule much more gratifying. Finally, and most obviously, reduce the amount of time it takes to read and respond to email. Here’s how:
1. Set up three different email accounts and a “to read” folder or tab:
Batch emails that you like to read but don’t have to read together, either on their own tab or by using a reading app. For example, I use the free app unroll.me for emails from the publications and authors that I love. All of my newsletters and breaking news alerts go into an Unroll.me folder automatically, and so they never clutter my inbox. I read through this folder every morning from the Unroll.me app; it’s an activity that is more like reading the newspaper than it is like checking email.
You’ve now got a work inbox that contains only messages you need to read and respond to when you are working. You can check your personal email when you get home or on the weekend, and you can set aside time to read all the interesting stuff when you aren’t trying to get your work done.
2. Relentlessly unsubscribe. I mean it: Any newsletter or publication that you haven’t read and found interesting in the past three months gets deep-sixed. Marie Kondo the heck out of your email inbox: If a subscription doesn’t spark joy, unsubscribe. Just do it.
For most people, this is so much harder than it sounds, because of their FOMO (fear of missing out). Businesses rely on your FOMO to get their promotions in your hot little hands. Remember that every coupon is available with a quick Google search. So is every event calendar. And even every blog post. Unsubscribe, unsubscribe, unsubscribe.
3. Get to inbox zero every single day. This is how you will ultimately make this method more gratifying than compulsively checking email all day long. The first day you do this, you may have so many emails in your inbox that you need to declare email bankruptcy, or you may need to move ALL of the emails in your inbox to a folder to deal with later.
This means you must block off enough time each day to get all the way to the bottom of your inbox in one way or another. If you need X hours a day to deal with your email, make sure you’ve scheduled X hours daily. Then, when you are in your scheduled time to read and respond to your email, respond to them all in one standard way or another. If a particular email takes more than five minutes to read and respond to, put it in a folder (“to do this week”) and add whatever it entails to your task list. That email is a different kind of work now—it’s a part of a project or something that requires more than just emailing.
4. Take your work email account off your home or personal computer and your phone. This is the truth: You can’t efficiently respond to emails from your phone; you can only monitor what is coming in. And this will keep you from being present wherever you are and doing whatever else you are supposed to be doing.
You are now a strategic email checker. You will respond thoughtfully and thoroughly to your emails, which will not hurt you at work but improve your standing.
(Do you check your work email on your phone when you’re just waiting in line and want to “get stuff done”? That’s a whole other problem. Don’t do it. Let yourself daydream; it will make you more creative when you return to work.)
5. Now remove your personal email account and junk account from your work computer. The first time I checked my work email after doing this, I mostly felt disappointed. It was so much less stimulating. There was nothing in my inbox that I could quickly delete, and nothing fun and stimulating that I could read in two seconds.
This disappointment is important because it started to decrease my deep and persistent desire to check constantly. But another great thing happened: I got to the bottom of my inbox! I replied to everything the same day I received it! How awesome! And satisfying! This accomplishment was so inherently rewarding that it reinforced my new, more strategic email-checking habit.
Culture is changing for women, thank goodness. This is so huge it made me weep. I love #annieleibovitz.
Kids today are more stressed and exhausted than they’ve ever been — and the pressures on them to achieve are only mounting. Join me and Katherine Dinh, Head of Prospect Sierra school tomorrow for an intimate discussion about how to help kids achieve more, but stress less.
Fill out the form below for a chance to win free tickets this exciting event at the Berkeley City Club tomorrow, May 16 at 8:00 pm. We’ll select 4 names at random at 5:00 PM PST tonight.
How come your family knows how to push your buttons? Because they installed them… I had a great teacher in India who said to me, “If you think you’re spiritual and evolved and enlightened, go home for Christmas.” –Elizabeth Gilbert
When I was little, I had a controversial grandmother. She was the woman my grandfather remarried after my father’s mom’s premature death. We pretty much only saw her twice a year: once for a family reunion, and once for a Christmas party. I adored her (except that she always smelled like cigarettes and had a lot of rules). But my parents and aunt and uncle were very tense around her.
Fights rarely broke out at the parties—I think my grandma was too dignified for that—but I do remember a lot of stress surrounding this difficult person in our lives. She knew how to push people’s buttons.
Do you have someone difficult to deal with this holiday season? Here are three strategies that work well for me.
1. Make sure the difficult person has a job to do, and then let them do it their own way. Things were always better when my grandma had a job in the kitchen. For a lot of people, conflict is born from an unfulfilled desire to feel useful and to be a part of something larger than themselves. Start by giving the difficult person a way to focus on something besides themselves.
Tip: When you ask someone for his or her help, provide a rationale–any rationale–for the favor. One study showed that the word “because” tends to trigger automatic compliance. For instance, you might say brightly, “It would be great if you could peel the carrots, because we need carrots peeled for dinner.” As bizarrely repetitive as that may sound, it should work better than, “Would you peel the carrots for me?”
2. Take care of your own needs first. This one is about taking precautions to keep yourself balanced and prevent your fight-or-flight response from kicking in. It’s harder to regulate your emotions when you’re tired, for example, so if you’re at a party with the difficult person and you start to feel spent, consider leaving early, lest you get sucked into a confrontation. You might risk insulting your host, but that’s generally better than ruining the party by making a scene. Similarly, research shows that keeping your blood sugar stable will make you less aggressive if you get angry, so don’t skip a meal if you are headed into a difficult situation. If you need to leave the room and do some deep breathing, do it–even if the difficult person needs you to talk about politics right now. If we can stay calm, we are more likely to engage the brain circuits that make us better problem-solvers in challenging situations. (Also, we have more fun.)
Neuropsychologist Rick Hanson’s advice can help us take this even further:
Also see how taking care of yourself has good ripple effects for others. Deliberately do a small thing that feeds you—a little rest, some exercise, some time for yourself—and then notice how this affects your relationships. Notice how healthy boundaries in relationships helps prevent you from getting used up or angry and eventually needing to withdraw.”
The exception: When our “need” is to be right. Often we feel a strong desire to show the difficult person the error in his or her ways. But this won’t make the situation easier, and it won’t make us feel better in the long run. Find a different (and more positive) way to feel powerful; for example, turn your attention to helping someone in need, perhaps even the difficult person him- or herself.
3. Give up on trying to fix him or her. This means accepting the difficult person for who he or she is, including the discomfort (or even pain) that they are creating. Practicing this sort of acceptance is about dropping the fantasy of how we think things ought to be. You might have a fantasy of a sweet, close relationship with your daughter-in-law, for example, and so you feel angry and disappointed every time she does something that doesn’t live up to this fantasy. But be aware that she likely feels your disappointment, and feels judged. She knows you are trying to change or “fix” her, and that doesn’t feel good–it hurts her, in fact, and hurting someone, however unintentionally, does not make her easier to deal with.
An alternate approach is one of empathy. Rather than judging what the person does or says, just try to listen and understand where he or she is coming from. This doesn’t mean that you need to agree with the person, just that you’re showing him or her a basic level of respect as a human being. Research suggests that engaging with a person this way–acknowledging his or her point of view without judging it–can make him or her feel more understood… and, as a result, less defensive or difficult.
Here’s how to practice acceptance and empathy: Take a deep breath. Look at the difficult person with kindness and compassion, and say to yourself, I see you, and I see that you are suffering. I accept that you are anxious and scared, even if I don’t understand why. I accept that you are making all of us anxious, too. I accept that your trouble has become my trouble for the time being. When we acknowledge and accept difficulty as something that just is, we let go of the resistance that creates stress and tension. There is a lot of truth to the adage, “What we resist, persists.”
When this person is speaking, try not to interrupt with counter-arguments or even with attempts to try to get him or her to see things from a different, perhaps more positive point of view. Instead, try to paraphrase back to the person the points you think he or she is making and acknowledge the emotions he or she seems to be expressing. For instance, if he seems ticked off about something, you might say, “It sounds like that really makes you angry.” In this way, you let them know that their experience matters.
We are all just looking for love and approval. This holiday season, the greatest gift we can give a difficult person–and ourselves–is to accept them fully, with love.
If you liked this post, you’ll love this printable page, 7 Ways to Feel More Loved and Connected. And my new book,The Sweet Spot: How to Find Your Groove at Home and Work has a whole section dedicated to improving our relationships — I hope you’ll consider ordering it now.
(1) Pre-order the book.
(2) Fill out the form below to get a gift card and/or a signed bookplate (we’ll mail them to you).
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Thank you SO MUCH for your enthusiasm and support. Pre-orders are VERY MEANINGFUL for authors, and I am very grateful for yours!
Warmest regards,
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Nov 12: How to Find Stillness in a Storm
with James Baraz
Nov 19: How Not to Have a Breakdown
with Katrina Alcorn
