Gaining Perspective Deliberately

IN THE MOVIE, The Game, Michael Douglas plays Nick Van Orton, the wealthy son of a wealthy man. The story begins when Nick’s brother (Sean Penn) gives Nick a birthday present: A life-changing experience, sort of like a personal-growth workshop, except it doesn’t take place in a classroom — it takes place in your life, and you never know who is an actor and what is real. The game is especially tailored to you and you never know what is staged and what isn’t.

The creators of the game make Nick’s well-ordered life completely fall apart. All the things he identifies with — his money, his calmness, his place in society — are taken away from him. His life is destroyed one piece at a time.

When Nick tries to find out if this is all part of the game, it appears the company was a big scam, stole all his money, and left town. They very realistically give Nick the impression they took him for everything he’s worth. He lost his mansion, his credit cards, his Swiss bank accounts. He was penniless.

While all this is going on, we (the people watching the movie) really don’t know what the truth is, and we see Nick going through all these miserable experiences and on the one hand we’re seeing it as anybody would — just miserable experiences and nothing more — and at the same time we are half-viewing it with the question, “I wonder if this is the perfect experience to teach him to be happier?” Because we realize these experiences are teaching him against his will to care more about people, to appreciate what he had, and for the first time in the movie, we feel he is actually engaged in his life. He looked deeply bored with his predictable life before the game started.

He was a snob who lived in a bubble and didn’t really experience real life or real connections with regular people. He needed nobody. But now he has no money, and he has to rely on the kindness of a waitress in order to get something to eat.

Is this a humbling experience, a potentially life-changing experience for Nick? Or is it merely misfortune? We, the viewers, really don’t know until the end of the movie.

Watching the movie was a great demonstration of a profound fact: That the same experience can be seen in at least two different ways, both of them equally valid. One way of looking at it only makes you miserable without any benefit. The other one helps you learn to be a better person, to have better values, and to be happier.

And of course, the thinking viewer will also eventually realize while watching the movie, that all of life is like this.

Someone might get an ulcer, and that is clearly just a hassle and he has to take medication that gives him dry mouth or whatever...or... this is an indicator-beacon that says change your life — the way you live your life produces too much stress.

With the first viewpoint, he just feels frustrated and that probably just makes his ulcer worse. The ulcer itself becomes another stressful thing to add to all the other stressful stuff in his life.

With the second viewpoint, he may feel motivated to change his life in ways that’ll make him feel better. The second viewpoint, the better one, the one that doesn’t come naturally to anybody but the most buoyant optimists, is a reframe.

The point of view you have about something is like a frame around a painting. You can take a painting and put it in an old beat-up frame and it looks like trash. Or you could put it in a fancy, museum-style frame, and it would have an entirely different feel.

Reframing means seeing the same situation in a different way. It means to see the same picture through a different lens. It means to see the same event in a different context. It means interpreting a situation a different way — in a way that makes things better. It means reinterpreting an event in a way that helps you feel better and get more done.

We automatically see (interpret, understand) the events in our lives in a certain way. You found out in Antivirus For Your Mind that it really helps to scrutinize the way you naturally explain setbacks and find mistakes in your explanations. You look at your explanations and ask, “Is it true?”

But sometimes you can’t answer that question. Either you don’t know or the answer cannot be known at all. That’s a good place to use reframing.

You must explain events. If you don’t do it deliberately, your brain will do it automatically. What explanation should you use? When you don’t know whether an explanation is true or false, what criteria should you use?

The only intelligent criteria to use in that case is, “How helpful is it?” Does your explanation help you feel better and get more done, or does it hinder you?

If you find your interpretation isn’t either true or false (either you can’t find out or there is no objective way to decide), and you find out it is definitely not helpful, unfortunately, you can’t just leave it at that. You have to come up with another interpretation. Your mind will not allow “no explanation.”

Your explanation can certainly be provisional — good until something better comes along, like a scientific theory — but you’d better choose your best explanation or your brain will do it for you.

Learn how this can best be done: Grow Stronger With a Good Reframe.

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Free Hugs

SOMEONE anonymously left a link to the video below on the article Peace, Love, and Oxytocin. I watched it, and the video raised my mood. I hope it does the same for you and everyone you share it with.

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Doing Less More Often Gets More Done

Making progress is good for your mood. In the following article, Klassy Evans, the editor of Self-Help Stuff That Works, explains a way of thinking that can help you make progress:

I USED TO NEGLECT my fingernails. I would garden and fix and repair things and move boxes of books for our business, and all these activities damaged my nails. But I ignored it. My nails got fairly well mangled. Then I tried to make up for lost time by giving too hard of an effort, which left and my cuticles red, and made ridges on my nails.

It was like I was angry at them. I attacked them. I pushed them back too hard in my impatience and they tore a tiny bit. Or I pulled off little pieces of dried skin and sometimes it took a piece of good skin with it, so I got little red hangnails. In other words, when they finally looked so bad I just had to give myself a manicure, I overdid it. I tried to fix the damage from my own neglect. But not in a gentle way.

I lived my life that way, too.

One morning I was looking at my nails, and I thought about something my dear friend, Bonnie, had told me. She'd always had beautiful cuticles. One day I asked her how she did it. She said she didn’t do anything. They just grew that way. Her nails are smooth. Her cuticles soft and even. Hmmmm. When I let my nails go, they don’t look like that, so I pressed her a bit more. Then she said, "I really don't do anything to my nails except gently push the cuticles back." I think the key word here is gentle.

Another woman I know (she’s a manicurist) told me the best cuticles she sees are on women who push back their cuticles when they’re done with the dishes.

So, I got my fingertips wet. Then I got out an old soft cotton napkin and very gently cleaned my nails, just a little bit. It was so gentle it seemed like I was being a pansy. But it worked pretty well. They looked surprisingly better when I was done.

Gentle action had gotten less done, but it was a pleasant process and I had obviously done nothing to harm them.

It felt odd to baby myself like that. It felt sort of silly. I’m used to the more masculine approach to life I got from my dad: Do what needs to be done and it doesn’t matter how you feel about it. I’ve been “getting my nails done” like a battle. But I learned to take care of my nails more like a farmer caring for the land.

Battles are often necessary, but they're temporary and harsh. It's not a good way to take care of a body that seems to need daily care. My cuticles and nails are much better off when I do a tiny bit of gentle care each day rather than an intense hour of care to make up for the week or two of neglect.

To accomplish things, both kinds of action are necessary. I think traditionally, men tend to accomplish great things with intense effort; women tend to accomplish great things with constant, gentle pressure. You can’t raise a child or raise a crop by infrequent, intense efforts, just like you can’t work out only one day a week. The body needs to move, but an all-out effort for six hours on a Saturday won't work. Your body wants daily exertion. It wants — and needs — regular movement.

I had taken on my dad's attitude. He was kind of proud of how much he could take. My neglected nails were a way of saying: "See how busy I am, how hard I’m working? I’m not some silly girlie-girl, always worrying about her nails."

This is true for me in so many ways. Is it true for you too? Are you too tough with yourself? Too harsh? Awhile ago I was thinking that I often try to take on too much because I know I’m capable of doing that much, even though I may not be up to it at the moment. This is like going to the gym to lift weights and knowing I’m capable of doing sixty pounds on some machine, but right now I can only do about 30. The way to build a muscle is often trying to do a bit more than you feel you can, but sometimes it's not a good idea to force yourself to do 60, even though the body has done it in the past or could do it in the future. It's best to do what I can do. Even if that seems really “light weight.”

This "male" take on life — that you must give it your all — has its place. But it also causes unnecessary harm if applied to things that grow (like children, crops, muscles, and even habits). Gentle, steady, regular efforts are not weak. A small plant can break through a concrete driveway just by gently pressing upward day after day after day, a little on a little.

This lesson is universal. Would you have more power in your life — and less pain and damage — if you were a little less harsh and forceful with yourself and more gentle?

By doing less more often, would you accomplish more? What if you did what little you can every day you can? What if you didn't worry about how hard you worked out, but focused instead on how regularly you worked out?

It's worth a look. Doing less more often can get more done.

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