The reason why I love working with Young Professionals so much is that this is such a pivotal life-stage for many.  All of the biggest questions regarding how one’s life is going to happen get answered, one way or another, during these 20 or so years.  It is worthy to note that our generation is the first generation ever to have a socio-cultural expectation to do whatever it is that fulfills our potential and makes us “happy.”  Our parents and grandparents may have occasionally been lucky or privileged enough to say the same, but the bulk of them just got jobs, had kids, acquired mortgages, and only really thought about life fulfillment in their 50s (AKA mid-life crisis).

The so-called “Quarter-life crisis” is the SAME crisis, its just that this generation has had it pretty good, so we should be able to pick exactly what will make us “happy” right from the get go.

Scared yet?  You should be.  I mean you’d better get this right because you’ve been given all the time in the world to “find your passion.” You’ve spent thousands of dollars in a liberal arts school to dabble around, or even worse, went “all in” on grad school on the hopes that your late-teen career crush was the real thing.  After all, that’s what I did.

I used to tell my clients desperate for answers about WHAT TO DO that my own path was just dumb luck.  I majored in psychology because it was fun, and some test I took in 8th grade said I should be a psychologist or a cop, and I liked the idea of having a “Dr.” in front of my name.  If that wasn’t bad planning enough, I realized (in senior year, oy!) that I can’t do squat with a BA in Psychology!  So I decided on grad school.

I am happy to report, that I am doing exactly what I hoped to do 10+ years ago when I made that decision.  And I absolutely LOVE it.  I love the therapy; the intricate strategy of mind and emotion; the snake charming of defenses that need not exist in my care; the tears that should have erupted years ago; the pride that blooms simultaneously from fruited plant and careful gardener;  the kindness I teach that spreads to friends and family of my clients.  I love it all, and I used to claim it was luck that I got here.  But I was wrong.

After many years of managing the woes of many a YPer who can’t figure out what will make them “happy,” I have concluded that it was not luck, bur rather, what I was able to accomplish with my luck.  You see, there are many opportunities to act on our world, and luck happens to all. Yet only those with the wherewithal to capitalize on fortune get to reap its fruit.  Below I have put together a list of considerations in the spirit of a great, albeit clichéd idea: It is not the goal, but the journey.  I contend that I am in the fulfilling place I am today NOT because I have made a series of lucky choices, but because I have kneaded my choices together with their successes and failures into the passion I have today.

HOW TO MAKE CHOICES:

1)  Realize that your fear of making the wrong choice is based, poorly, on the notion that the goal will decide if you made the right choice or not. You, in fact, decide that based on what you do with your choice after you have chosen it.  And even if, despite your best efforts, the choice is deemed a failure, what you picked up attempting to make it a good choice will no doubt be a great harvest.

2)  MOVE!  You must do something, anything, different in order to get your mind thinking in new ways.  Creativity in any direction will lead to a honing of emotions toward what will make you happy and fulfilled.  Don’t know what to do in your career?  Learn to surf, or cook, or garden.  Volunteer your time to something. Take a class in anything.  The one place where you need not be practical is in your creativity.  So do WHATEVER and it will get the necessary juices flowing to figure out your career.

3)  Need less.  Want more.  Sometimes we go into the wrong things because of ego-needs.  The most common example is enduring a job you do well in order to satisfy your need for approval and validation.  The problem with that is you may not actually LIKE what you do well!  I’m really good at statistics...bet you didn’t know that.  Others include a need to be dominant (hence woeful managers), a need to feel secure (hence woeful financiers), a need to impress (hence woeful doctors, lawyers, and blingers by any means).  If you can get your issues in order so you don’t have those ego-needs than what you do becomes what you want to do...for real.

4)  Focus on the love of others first.  No job in the world, however impressive, is going to solve the emptiness you feel if no one really cares who you are or what you are doing.  If you can get just one person to see the good, bad, and ugly of you, and still accept who you are at your most genuine and vulnerable, then finding your passion will be a much less pressured process.  You will no longer search for who you “should” be, because according to others, you already ARE who you should be.  If you can know passion through them, then identifying it out in the world should be easy.

5)  When in doubt, help others out!  Ask ten people who engage in activities that help the world if they love what they do and 9 will say “absolutely.”  I know that is certainly true for me.  Seeing people change for the better gives me the best kind of energy.  If you are bright, capable, and bewildered, then why not do something useful for others.  We could use your help.  Join the ranks and there are infinite ways to tailor your interests into helping professions.

So I hope these ideas get you motivated to do something forward with your life.  The only guarantee of stuckedness is to stay put.  There’s really nothing to fear about making the wrong choice. Even if you lose it all to a fool’s decision, you will be alright.  There’s always the comeback.  There’s always the phoenix. So make your decisions the right decisions, no matter the endpoint, and you will have a “happy” life.

April 8, 2010

Couch to 5Kindnesses

The weather is getting nicer, and people are naturally getting more active.  But for most of us, exercising is not as simple as strapping on your favorite pair of sneakers and hitting the local track or gym.  For the non-athletes, it marks the beginning of yet another summer of promises, another round of personal challenges that have been unsuccessful in the past, and another mustering of strength to fight the emotional demons that have seemingly always won before.

I know all too well because I have been there, and in fact I am still there.

I grew up a plump little boy with an excess of girth that would be more befitting of boys a foot or more taller than I.  Though adequately active, I came from a plump lineage, which meant I was allowed to eat portions of food enough for three children and I had (have) the genetic predisposition to hold onto every ounce of it.  

So I grew up with poor eating habits and a slow metabolism, but it didn’t end there.  Enter ridiculously cruel bullying children and you have the “perfect storm” of poor self-esteem.  So I didn’t just over eat because I was hungrier than most kids, which I was.  I also did it because I didn’t know to deserve more than a guilty pleasure.  I ate because I wanted SOMETHING to feel good and easy and reliable.  I ate because, well...SCREW THEM!  I ate out of rebellion. I ate to alleviate frustration.  I ate because I wasn’t told not to.  And, sure, I played little league and touch football with the neighborhood kids, but for what I was eating I should have been playing twice as hard and four times as long.  

And I hated.  I hated the teasers, obviously.  I hated the thinner, stronger, broader, more “chiseled” boy-men.  I hated the world for constantly showing me what I wasn’t.  I hated my body, the jiggles, the rolls, the “man boobs.”  I hated my self for finishing the bag.  And when I was old enough to start exercising, I hated the gasping, burning, sloppy pain.

When kids like me grow up to be adults, we have the power to change, yes, but what we lack is the “emotional physique” to get the enormous job done.  Our spirit has been abused and tortured by others and we’ve participated.  And while we can physically make changes in our lives, few honor the INTERNAL struggle or the EMOTIONAL weight that holds the physical weight close to our bones.

Hatred of yourself, your body, others you assume are judging you, others you assume have it better than you, and others you believe have put you there is truly what makes us “prone to injury.”  Somewhere along the way I had the good fortune to conclude that my exercise regimen must focus on these injuries first, and my “cardio” and my “abs” will have to be secondary gains.  And what IS the exercise routine for hatred, you may ask?  You guessed it: Empathy, leading to forgiveness.  (For those reading who didn’t guess this, please see the preceding blog on Empathy.) Though this time, the empathy was not only targeting my anger of the world and others, but it was also targeted at myself.

You see, there were good and valid reasons why I was the way I was, and why my body looked the way it did, and functioned the way it did.  And too there were good and valid reasons why others were the way they were, and treated me the way they did.  There are good and valid reasons why I was taught the eating habits I inherited.  While I could detail all of these reasons they can be effectively simplified to this:  Everyone, including myself, was doing the best they could.  My parents did the best they could with the tools and misfortunes they had picked up in their lives.  The bullies did the best they could too.  And hardest to swallow of all:  I was doing the best I could with the cards I was dealt.  I STILL only do the best I can.  I am happy I have been able to make successes.  At 33, I am the most fit I’ve ever been. Right now I am in the middle of the most taxing exercise plan I have ever attempted (I’m “bringing it!” thanks to P90X), and I can admit that if I had not worked hard to forgive myself and others, if I had not worked to learn to be kind to myself and others, I would not have a strand of hope to complete it.

When kindness sinks into who you are, it becomes easy to laugh at what would normally “injure” your ego.  The athletes that blaze by you in the track are not intrinsically “better” than you anymore, they simply were given different cards in life.  The judgers are not evil, they just don’t realize the hidden struggle that you carry.  The pain you feel exercising does not induce self-judgement, shame or worthlessness.  Instead its a symbol of how courageous you can be.  Your body is not disgusting anymore. Its at most a saddening symbol of abuses that have been perpetrated on you.  Much like seeing an image of an abused animal evokes sadness rather than disgust.

So I urge anyone considering a “couch to 5K” program this summer to also consider and prepare for a sort of...“cross training.”  Work from your couch to the 5 Kindnesses:

Be kind to your body, be kind to those you envy, be kind to your circumstances, be kind to those you blame, and please, be kind to your self.

Empathy saved my life.  Those who know me, both professionally and personally, would say that I am a good person, a happy person, a kind person.  Some have even been so bold as to confront my endearing outlook on the world and the people in it, claiming denial, naivete, even stubborn optimism.  I assure you my happiness and acceptance of my world and the people in it came not from those qualities, but from their stark opposites: brave awareness, experiential learning, and flexibility of belief in the face of rejecting optimism.

Early in my career, empathy provided me with quite a challenge.  I was in the “wet clay” stage of developing my therapeutic style, and had become enamored with Carl Rogers (feel free to google) and his “person-centered therapy”.  On the surface, its primary application appeared to be simply restating in the therapist’s own words what the client had said to them, as a means of conveying an active understanding of the client’s struggles.  Indeed, many regard Rogers’s work as an empathic technique, at best.  But as I read deeper in to his theory it became clear that the technique was functionally useless if the therapist didn’t actually believe the shoes in which they were attempting to walk.  Reading Rogers, I concluded that the therapist, under his theory, would actually have to reach an understanding so deep, that the therapist could genuinely say to him/herself, “Yep, if it were me, I’d do the same thing.”  

OK, so I could get behind feeling depressed if I had my clients problems.  And I could agree that I would feel anxious if I grew up with my client’s anxiety provoking parents.  So far, so good.   Then I hit a road block.  I began working with gang-affiliated teenagers in an inner-city hospital.  I was tasked with running an anger management group for them, and a coinciding parenting group for their parents.  This certainly taxed my genuine empathy skills.  How could I say “Yep, I would do that” when we are talking about selling drugs, mugging people, “initiations”, prostitution and the like. And don’t get me started on their parents!  Neglect, abuse, absent fathers, treating their children like furniture, not people.  Their actions were even more vicious because the children for the most part were defenseless.

Certainly, in the battle between judgement and empathy, judgement had the upper hand.  And Rogers alone, wasn’t cutting it. I couldn’t help but judge, then get angry.  I mean...HOW DARE THEY!  The very thing with which I was tasked to help these kids to do, I couldn’t do myself.

Not willing to let it get the better of me (after all, I was a kind, good person, wasn’t I?),  I had to figure out what I hoped was the missing piece to this; something deeper, that would fundamentally change my perspective about people.  I would not find it in a psychology book.

My saving grace?  His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso (again, google away).  Never before was it so succinctly put to me that the problem was not them, it was me.  By reading his outlook on Buddhism, and the world at large, I found out unequivocally, that the problem in my judgement of others, was that I maintained judgement of myself.  Indeed that was the case.  There was plenty for which I had not forgiven myself.  I held the belief that I mustn’t.  I must maintain a scolding vigil, lest these misgivings reappear.

I began to understand that self-judgement was a slippery slope.  Like most people, my subconscious superego theorized that if I can do that then what else was I capable of.  This sent subliminal shock waves of fear through me, and in the face of these gang kids, and there single moms and grandmoms, it led to my judgement of them.

Judgement has a purpose: to separate you from them.  You would never do that, would you?  You could never be them, could you?  His Holiness convinced me in one simple idea:  We all come from the same place. If I am to believe this, then I have to concede that, if I am a “good person,” so are they.  And if that is true, then their immoralities are a consequence of their environment, molding them from the beginning, when they were still raw, beholden, and permeable to everything and anyone around them.

It was the parent’s group that clinched it.  Listening to their immoral choices made it all the more easier to accept that their kids (you know, the muggers, rapers, dealers) couldn’t have stood a chance against the powerful learning of their early years.  I know I couldn’t....  Wait...  I know that if I was in that house, then I would probably have ended up like them!  I did it! I found my genuine empathy!  I truly believe it.  It is within me to be a mugger, or a rapist, and it is by fortune alone, that my environment taught me differently.  Even now in recollection, I can still feel the cascade of relief and freedom I felt the day I made that miraculous self-discovery.  And it plotted my course from then until now.

Today, I keep a running tally.  Everyone new I meet, professionally or personally, I put them to the unknowing test.  I challenge them to prove to me that my theory still holds true.  If I ask enough questions, if I was non-judgmentally curious enough, could I still say, “Yep...I'd do the same thing.”  The score so far?  100% yes.  And you must imagine I’ve seen a LOT of people, and heard a LOT of stories by now.

So yes, challenge away.  I am a good person, a happy person, a kind person, yet.  But I didn’t get there by shying away from reality.  I got there from bravely launching myself into the lives of others, unafraid of what I might find in their closets and under their rocks.  I dive head first, under the assumption that people start good, and then life happens.  Even those that hurt me.  

I hope the same for you.  I hope you blow out the candle in your own punitive vigil.  Forgive yourself, and then get curious.

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