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stress

Valuing The Growth of Empathy

by admin on June 18, 2009 · 1 comment

in Dealing with A Personal Recession, Increasing Personal Resilience, Social Entrepreneurs, The True Self

What is the dollar value of empathy?

What a ridiculous question!  But I ask it because heightened empathy may be one of your most important acquisitions during this recession.

Many of us who are middle class are used to being able to control our destinies.  But now job loss, loss of savings, and foreclosures becoming middle class realities.  (I write as one of those affected, not from a safe distance. )

We can either look backwards at what we thought our life was like and feel deprived.  We can go a little crazy because we can’t make sense of what is going on now.  Or we can look ahead and start building anew, confident that we can make our lives better even as we face completely unexpected, life-altering events.

I assume you are someone who wants to thrive.  The most important moments for you are occuring right now, while you are, metaphorically speaking, turning your gaze away from the past and starting to look in the direction of an unknown future.  You are still, yet inside you are moving.  Your eyes scan parts of life that you couldn’t see when you were immersed in your own world.  What happens now — inside of each one of us — is what we will build our next chapter on.

I believe that truly letting go — daring to look openly, without clinging to the past — unleashes the best in us.  Those who stay trapped in resentment, numbness, or hyper-positivity, are by definition those who are still holding on, trying to make life stay the same.  It’s a losing battle.

Letting go doesn’t drop us into nothingness — it opens us up to a deeper connection to life.  We are built to pass through ambiguous times so that our heightened connection to life can become firm enough to inform our next steps.

Empathy – being able to see the world as others see it — will be your gift for persevering.

Can you see, by experiencing fear about money, how crippling poverty is?  Can you see, by losing your career, how many people are dealing with loss and how important caring for others is?  Can you see, by your own struggles to stay in your home, how important home is?  Can you see, by your own efforts to start a new career or a business, how important courage is, how essential support is?

Opening up to seeing the world as it is, fully, is painful…it can feel like resting on a knifepoint.  But if you can stay open, or at least not block that opening with anger, resentment, and numbness, your heightened awareness will, without your even trying, seep into your everyday life.

You will find that because you have become more, you can do more in the world.  You can start that book you are meaning to write, you can begin over and enjoy it, you can find greater depth in your relationships, you can find a new calling, you can create a new way to be happy.  You will cease curating your limitations and focus more on trusting your potential.

There is no prescription for something you must do with your greater empathy — it is your gift to use as you choose.

We’ve all heard people who have been through difficulty say that it was the bset thing that ever happened to them…because without the challenge they would have never been able to create the life they now have.   Those words are ones you can utter too; they are the sign of the deepest kind of success in life.

Those words are cold comfort now, while you are passing through the darkness.  They are not meant for you now.  But make them your beacon, and one day you will utter those words in your own way, and you then will be a beacon for others.  The example of the life you created out of your loss will help others.

No darkness lasts forever.  Especially not this one.

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How to be Productive When You’re Scared and Confused


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by admin on June 17, 2009

in Dealing with A Personal Recession, Increasing Personal Resilience, Keep on Truckin', The True Self

One of the keys to making it through unemployment or business difficulties is to stay productive.  Not “busy”, but productive.  Being productive means taking action that produces results.  Being busy has a lesser goal:  to keep our minds off unpleasant emotion, such as fear.  (Being numb accomplishes the same thing.)

To paraphrase FDR – we should fear fear, or at least have a very healthy respect for it, because fear, not the circumstances around us, is what derails us in a crisis.

I’m a huge fan of stress research, especially the work done in the 1990s by Kathryn Cramer.  I recommend her book, Staying on Top When Your World Turns Upside Down as a step-by-step guide to making it through overwhelmingly negative events (such as the economy falling apart).

I’ve held teleclasses to teach “supercoping” skills, and the one thing I notice people have the most trouble grasping is how to take action in dire circumstances.  The idea of rallying your loved ones around you and of taking good care of yourself are easy to grasp, if sometimes difficult to execute.  But what about taking action?

Your productivity is an excellent way to measure your well-being in a crisis. You won’t KNOW what’s going to work, but being productive means engaging actively in creating it.  If you experience excessive numbing out or getting “excessively busy,” especially when the crisis is no longer fresh, you will benefit by making being productive a goal.

Fear and confusion are two impediments to productivity.  Here’s how you can counteract them.

FEAR: If you are paralyzed by fear, you may be  (a) too alone with your problems and (b) overwhelmed by one aspect of your situation that is threatening your well being.  For many of us, those problems are financial.  My suggestion is to gather your best, most non-judgmental people to help you face into the situation and come up with alternatives.  Too often we “hold on as long as we can,” thinking that is the right thing, rather than analyze our situation and let go — in order that we can stay productive.

My grandfather, a real estate investor during the 1920s, lost all his holdings because he tried to save his largest one, an elegant apartment building he lived in.  Had he moved to a lesser property, he would not have become destitute and my mother would not have been shuffled from relative to relative (and to an orphanage) as a child.

Holding on is not the goal:  thriving is.  You will be amazed at the power of a group of caring people to help you come up with solutions to even the worst problems.  It’s important to identify the threat that is causing such fear and to minimize it.  Holding on to real estate (or a career path or a personal habit) is not as important as holding on to your own well being and potential for growth.  Fear of loss, not loss, is what derails us.  We can come back from loss if we focus on productive action.

CONFUSION: Confusion eats away at productivity.  Not being sure what action to take is normal and healthy when you are in a game-changing situation.  I’ve found it helpful to deliberately structure action into three stages:

Stage 1:  What if? Just write down your ideas without judgment.  In fact, spend time making them into big, interesting, engaging ones.  Not “how can I scrape by?” but “how can I thrive?” The dirty little secret is that if you engage your deep interests in crafting your next move, you tap into an unstoppable source of  energy and you will shine while others run out of steam.

Stage 2: Could it work? Is your idea feasible?  How have others done it?  Is the market still there for what you want to do?  Explore, seek advice, learn more so you can refine — or dismiss — your idea.  A wrong path discarded is just as valuable as a good one embraced.

Stage 3:  Let’s roll! When you have a feasible direction, give it your all and start implementing it.

Each of these three stages is productive because it leads you forward.  At each stage, you are doing different things.  One of the tricks to mastering ambiguity and change is to value the steps in the process, not just hunger for the result.

I hope this helps you.  I’ve made it my personal goal to get better at functioning at this high level; this recession is providing plenty of practice!

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