Self-Improvement
Still being in something of a cloud of unknowing as regards my teaching schedule next semester – although I know for sure it’s going to be a challenging one – and having a quick weekend away with my mother for the last few days of my booked annual leave – I did the best I could with my itch to get preparing and purchased a few pop psychology titles. An occasional weakness, particularly if they’re titles by Paul McKenna, as I’ve already confessed.
So the titles for this weekend are McKenna’s new publication: ‘Control Stress’ (with free hypnosis CD!), the fabulously entitled ‘How To Get Things Done without trying too hard’ by Richard Templar (who would not be seduced by a title like that), and the girlish pinkly and four-leave clover –covered ‘the glass half-full: How optimists get what they want from life and pessimists can too’ by Suzanne Segerstrom; and actually this is by far the densest in terms of complexity of text and documented research-based conclusions. Oh but it was the cover which seduced me.
I know the jury’s out on whether such titles are ever of benefit save for the authors themselves (at least if they are as business savvy as McKenna) or the publishing industry which promotes them. But sometimes there’s the odd thing which sets one thinking. I do like McKenna for this and don’t care that he’s garnered much of his information from elsewhere and repackaged it. These little factoids from the new book:
1. The need to pace oneself. We humans are designed for a sprint rather than a marathon. Something I read about recently in the Observer highlighted this; Oliver Burkeman talking about the benefits of ‘burst working’; going at a task at maximum capacity for short periods, and in fact dividing larger tasks into much shorter bursts of effort. Then you rest for a while. McKenna cites the phenomenon of the ‘ultradian rest phase’, a biologically timed relaxation response of fifteen minutes or so after about 90 minutes of strenuous mental or other exertion. I’m getting this principle into my head more and more, having always previously been a bit of a stamina girl – when, and only when, I’d got around to actually starting a task in the first place. I suppose you need a bit of both, the long haul mentality as well as the sprint. It’s a question of recalibrating which has the most emphasis.
2. The Pareto Principle. I love this one, having come across it in other slick time-management type essays. Discovered by Wilfred Pareto, a nineteenth century economist, who found that twenty percent of the world’s population held eighty percent of its wealth. The principle holds for plenty of other areas of life, or so the theory goes. Twenty percent of your work/ time spent working yields eighty percent of the results/ benefit, for example. And other more fun interpretations. You might find you wear twenty percent of your wardrobe eighty percent of the time. But it’s the work one which I think offers the most food for thought. My experience actually is that it’s true. The relatively quick but difficult to write proposal, email, module outline or even diary-detailing can yield an awful lot of beneficial setting-things-in-motion. Sometimes the psychological effort required to tackle such tasks is quite enormous so it’s good to remind myself that this work is generally concentrated effort well spent. Time for a bit of well deserved reading and reflection, subsequently.
3. I’d never heard of this one before. The ‘Law of Requisite Variety’, which states that ‘the part of a system that has the most flexibility ends up in control of the system’. You what? Well, in other words, it pays to keep an open, and optimistic mind. The more flexible and adaptable your thinking around problems is, and the greater span of solutions and possible projects you can come up with, the more likely you are to advance in your career (or social/ professional network) and its hierarchy. Now this I do find to be true to the work experiences I’ve had so far and also helpfully pointing towards future successful strategies. Absolutely. It’s a question of not pinning so much on a project of your dreams that you can’t readjust and transfer your ideas and creativity elsewhere. Mind you, I find this to be more useful in a work scenario than an individual creative project where tenacity in the face of non-interest/ rejection/ incomprehension can definitely be an artistic advantage. I guess that with a work scenario, the big goal is to find a way to flourish. And these days, flexibility is certainly required for that.
Thumbs up for ‘Control Stress’ then. And lots of interest in Segerstrom’s ‘Glass Half-Full’ also, although be aware that the style is considerably more essay-like and academic. Studies show this and that and reading the book I thought about half of it actually perfectly obvious (believing that you generally succeed in life, or expect to succeed in your individual goals, will tend to generate more stamina and perseverance in goal-attaining and life in general) though half again quite interesting and potentially helpful: Relentless optimism can have a deleterious effect on emotional and physical resources – family commitments and health. As we get older it becomes less easy to make up for the overspend of energy, and can lead to immune system suppression. Well I suppose that this is common sense too. A too great desire for high achievement in say work and social worlds can lead to ‘resource conflict’. Don’t we know it. It’s all a question of budgeting, and Segerstrom is keen to have us re-think our non-work hours so that we are maximising activities in which we are engaged or creative, and minimizing…alas, watching TV. She has quite got it in for the television. It’s easy, it’s passive, it’s lowest common denominator mass media, etc.
Oh dear. I do cavil slightly at this – why such blanket condemnation of such a brilliantly accessible form of media, which isn’t ALL rubbish, though of course plenty of it is. But why is TV condemned, and cinema not mentioned, for instance? Segerstrom decides she should give up watching ER and have an early night instead. Perhaps she should, although to me this still sounds like cutting a potentially enjoyable recreational hour with plenty of food for thought, and subsequent social discussion, for one of health necessity; shouldn’t she be make sure she gets enough sleep anyway? I don’t know. It seems to me that judicious watching of TV is no better or worse than seeing a film or play or listening to the news etc. It’s only the blanket passive consumption that saps us of initiative when it comes to controlling our down-time schedules. Ah – but that’s the tricky thing sometimes, I know…
Thanks also to this book I now know the Greek term for well being : eudaimonia – ‘eu’ meaning ‘good’, ‘daimon’ meaning ‘spirit’ (so that’s where Philip Pullman got the term…). Aristotle used the word, arguing that true happiness was not feeling good so much as being true to oneself. Eudamia means being your best self. This sounds considerably more worthwhile that merely attempting inane cheerfulness all the time, and to be fair this former definition of optimism is clearly espoused in Segerstrom’s pink covered tome.
So finally the deliciously titled ‘How to Get Things Done without trying too hard’. This is a serious mixture of the bleeding obvious platitude and the refreshingly new insight. It’s simple flash-card like formula of brief (usually just one page) text facing emboldened chapter title is designed for dip-in addiction; you feel that just one more page might just provide the key to life being All Sorted Out. Even the busiest businessman can’t be put off by its sound-bite structure. Here are two I liked. One – keep a notebook and use it for to-do lists. Yes, yes. I do this all the time. It’s almost a displacement activity in itself. But try this to get your day off to a good kick-start: make your first three items 1) something quick and easy, 2) something you enjoy doing, and 3) something you’ve done already. Quite nice to have official permission to do this, even if you’ve a tendency to get going like this already. A run up to the big task(s) of the day which are often pretty unpalatable to start with. Also, Templar advises you to buy a large file and sort out everything needed for the week ahead on a Sunday night. I might try this. But I’ll probably just end up buying a really nice file or two, as I have a bit of a stationery fetish like many academics and writers. But this is a brisk book to get you in the mood for self-organisation. Get to it!
As a coda, a couple of things I picked up from the media last week. One could even combine the two techniques.One, to keep mood levels high, habitually remember one good thing from the previous day. Two, to alleviate stress levels, have a cup of tea. Really. It’s official. I’m very pleased about that.
So the titles for this weekend are McKenna’s new publication: ‘Control Stress’ (with free hypnosis CD!), the fabulously entitled ‘How To Get Things Done without trying too hard’ by Richard Templar (who would not be seduced by a title like that), and the girlish pinkly and four-leave clover –covered ‘the glass half-full: How optimists get what they want from life and pessimists can too’ by Suzanne Segerstrom; and actually this is by far the densest in terms of complexity of text and documented research-based conclusions. Oh but it was the cover which seduced me.
I know the jury’s out on whether such titles are ever of benefit save for the authors themselves (at least if they are as business savvy as McKenna) or the publishing industry which promotes them. But sometimes there’s the odd thing which sets one thinking. I do like McKenna for this and don’t care that he’s garnered much of his information from elsewhere and repackaged it. These little factoids from the new book:
1. The need to pace oneself. We humans are designed for a sprint rather than a marathon. Something I read about recently in the Observer highlighted this; Oliver Burkeman talking about the benefits of ‘burst working’; going at a task at maximum capacity for short periods, and in fact dividing larger tasks into much shorter bursts of effort. Then you rest for a while. McKenna cites the phenomenon of the ‘ultradian rest phase’, a biologically timed relaxation response of fifteen minutes or so after about 90 minutes of strenuous mental or other exertion. I’m getting this principle into my head more and more, having always previously been a bit of a stamina girl – when, and only when, I’d got around to actually starting a task in the first place. I suppose you need a bit of both, the long haul mentality as well as the sprint. It’s a question of recalibrating which has the most emphasis.
2. The Pareto Principle. I love this one, having come across it in other slick time-management type essays. Discovered by Wilfred Pareto, a nineteenth century economist, who found that twenty percent of the world’s population held eighty percent of its wealth. The principle holds for plenty of other areas of life, or so the theory goes. Twenty percent of your work/ time spent working yields eighty percent of the results/ benefit, for example. And other more fun interpretations. You might find you wear twenty percent of your wardrobe eighty percent of the time. But it’s the work one which I think offers the most food for thought. My experience actually is that it’s true. The relatively quick but difficult to write proposal, email, module outline or even diary-detailing can yield an awful lot of beneficial setting-things-in-motion. Sometimes the psychological effort required to tackle such tasks is quite enormous so it’s good to remind myself that this work is generally concentrated effort well spent. Time for a bit of well deserved reading and reflection, subsequently.
3. I’d never heard of this one before. The ‘Law of Requisite Variety’, which states that ‘the part of a system that has the most flexibility ends up in control of the system’. You what? Well, in other words, it pays to keep an open, and optimistic mind. The more flexible and adaptable your thinking around problems is, and the greater span of solutions and possible projects you can come up with, the more likely you are to advance in your career (or social/ professional network) and its hierarchy. Now this I do find to be true to the work experiences I’ve had so far and also helpfully pointing towards future successful strategies. Absolutely. It’s a question of not pinning so much on a project of your dreams that you can’t readjust and transfer your ideas and creativity elsewhere. Mind you, I find this to be more useful in a work scenario than an individual creative project where tenacity in the face of non-interest/ rejection/ incomprehension can definitely be an artistic advantage. I guess that with a work scenario, the big goal is to find a way to flourish. And these days, flexibility is certainly required for that.
Thumbs up for ‘Control Stress’ then. And lots of interest in Segerstrom’s ‘Glass Half-Full’ also, although be aware that the style is considerably more essay-like and academic. Studies show this and that and reading the book I thought about half of it actually perfectly obvious (believing that you generally succeed in life, or expect to succeed in your individual goals, will tend to generate more stamina and perseverance in goal-attaining and life in general) though half again quite interesting and potentially helpful: Relentless optimism can have a deleterious effect on emotional and physical resources – family commitments and health. As we get older it becomes less easy to make up for the overspend of energy, and can lead to immune system suppression. Well I suppose that this is common sense too. A too great desire for high achievement in say work and social worlds can lead to ‘resource conflict’. Don’t we know it. It’s all a question of budgeting, and Segerstrom is keen to have us re-think our non-work hours so that we are maximising activities in which we are engaged or creative, and minimizing…alas, watching TV. She has quite got it in for the television. It’s easy, it’s passive, it’s lowest common denominator mass media, etc.
Oh dear. I do cavil slightly at this – why such blanket condemnation of such a brilliantly accessible form of media, which isn’t ALL rubbish, though of course plenty of it is. But why is TV condemned, and cinema not mentioned, for instance? Segerstrom decides she should give up watching ER and have an early night instead. Perhaps she should, although to me this still sounds like cutting a potentially enjoyable recreational hour with plenty of food for thought, and subsequent social discussion, for one of health necessity; shouldn’t she be make sure she gets enough sleep anyway? I don’t know. It seems to me that judicious watching of TV is no better or worse than seeing a film or play or listening to the news etc. It’s only the blanket passive consumption that saps us of initiative when it comes to controlling our down-time schedules. Ah – but that’s the tricky thing sometimes, I know…
Thanks also to this book I now know the Greek term for well being : eudaimonia – ‘eu’ meaning ‘good’, ‘daimon’ meaning ‘spirit’ (so that’s where Philip Pullman got the term…). Aristotle used the word, arguing that true happiness was not feeling good so much as being true to oneself. Eudamia means being your best self. This sounds considerably more worthwhile that merely attempting inane cheerfulness all the time, and to be fair this former definition of optimism is clearly espoused in Segerstrom’s pink covered tome.
So finally the deliciously titled ‘How to Get Things Done without trying too hard’. This is a serious mixture of the bleeding obvious platitude and the refreshingly new insight. It’s simple flash-card like formula of brief (usually just one page) text facing emboldened chapter title is designed for dip-in addiction; you feel that just one more page might just provide the key to life being All Sorted Out. Even the busiest businessman can’t be put off by its sound-bite structure. Here are two I liked. One – keep a notebook and use it for to-do lists. Yes, yes. I do this all the time. It’s almost a displacement activity in itself. But try this to get your day off to a good kick-start: make your first three items 1) something quick and easy, 2) something you enjoy doing, and 3) something you’ve done already. Quite nice to have official permission to do this, even if you’ve a tendency to get going like this already. A run up to the big task(s) of the day which are often pretty unpalatable to start with. Also, Templar advises you to buy a large file and sort out everything needed for the week ahead on a Sunday night. I might try this. But I’ll probably just end up buying a really nice file or two, as I have a bit of a stationery fetish like many academics and writers. But this is a brisk book to get you in the mood for self-organisation. Get to it!
As a coda, a couple of things I picked up from the media last week. One could even combine the two techniques.One, to keep mood levels high, habitually remember one good thing from the previous day. Two, to alleviate stress levels, have a cup of tea. Really. It’s official. I’m very pleased about that.
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