Inside your head
Everybody knows the state of Flow. Flow is when you’re engrossed in doing something. You may forget time and place. You may forget to eat or sleep. You’re doing what you’re doing, and your entire attention is focused on that.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote a book about it back in 1990, based on many years of research into happiness. And the book is excellent. No other book I’ve read discusses human happiness (and unhappiness) so clearly and fluidly.
So what is it that makes us happy?
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What I “discovered” was that happiness is not something that happens. It is not the result of good fortune or random chance. It is not something that money can buy or power command. It does not depend on outside events, but, rather, on how we interpret them. Happiness, in fact, is a condition that must be prepared for, cultivated and defended privately by each person. People who learn to control inner experience will be able to determine the quality of their lives, which is as close as any of us can come to being happy.
– Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in Flow
While webresearching about learning, I found some info on learning styles. It seems there are different basic approaches to learning.
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This book is about the fears that we all have in our lives to some degree. Fear of failing. Fear of succeeding. Fear of decisions. Fear of aging, of loss or of helplessness.
The books basic premise is, that your aim should not be to get rid of your fears. You should feel your fear, but not let it stop you from doing things you really want to do.
The book describes three levels of fear. The first level is the actual event that you fear – say losing you job. The second level is the deeper fear, triggered by the first level – eg. rejection (if being fired would make you feel rejected). Beneath that on the third level there’s only one fear: The fear that you won’t be able to cope. If you knew in advance that you could take it, there would be nothing to be afraid of. So all fear reduces to fear of not being able to cope.
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The next lot of books arrived from Amazon yesterday, and I speed-read the first one in a couple of hours.
This book is the sequel to “getting to yes”. The first book outlines the classic techniques for skillful, issue-based negotiations. The sequel, subtitled “Negotiating with difficult people”, presents strategies you can use when the methods from the first book don’t work.
The book’s only 140 pages long, but well presented, well structured and with lots of illustrative case stories from difficult negotiations. And hey, it’s 6$ at Amazon. Read the two books, if negotiation is a part of your life – and isn’t it always?
There’s a new series on TV2 about anger management. It turns out that in most cases where we danes are hopping mad inside, we try hard to maintain a calm exterior.
Which got me thinking: Might this also be going on at work..?
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When and how do people change? And when do they get stuck in situations and problems that seem hopeless? This is the focus of this book, Change: Principles of Problem Formation and Problem Resolution.
The book is based on the authors’ experiences with brief therapy. Unlike traditional psychotherapy, which tries to uncover the “deeper” causes of problems, brief therapy focuses on solving peoples current problems. Why spend years of therapy going back to the hypothetical root cause of some problem, when what you really need to do, is get rid of the issue now. And even IF you find the cause of the problem, you still haven’t solved it.
The authors claim to have helped 80% of their clients in 4 sessions or less!
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Walking down the street, it’s easy to fall into the habit of noticing all the things you don’t like. The next time you’re out shopping, driving your car or just walking around somewhere, try this simple exercise to break the habit…
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