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Martha Stewart and resilience For many, not giving into the emotion surrounding a crisis may be hard to imagine. So let's review the steps a resilient person like Martha Stewart goes through when faced with a serious crisis. First you feel the emotions. But if you stop there, what you will do is a knee-jerk reaction probably ending up in anger. Although that's perfectly natural, such intense emotions activate an older portion of the brain that automatically overrides your higher thinking centers. A resilient person, on the other hand, will respond like Martha did when she gave lemons out to reporters -- announcing that she would make lemonade. Her Mom must have taught Martha the same thing my Mom did: When dealt a lemon (a bad situation), make the best of it by making lemonade! Good advice! The next step a resilient person will take is to avoid wasting energy on regret and unhappiness -- and just move on. This attitude of looking forward instead of back over their shoulder is a key component of resilience. So Martha lost 20 pounds, is writing a book and starting an exciting show, and totally focused her attention on being happy and productive. > from article: What Can We Learn from Martha Stewart? By Dr Jill Ammon-Wexler        ~ ~ ~ ~ Longcuts vs. Shortcuts Amanda Levy, an executive coach.. says the Authentic Happiness coaching has given her new tools for her lifelong battle with depression, which she traces to a family history of mental illness. “I now have this marvelous way of looking at myself that confirms that I’m not demented and that has shown me day-to-day ways to improve my well-being.” Levy swears by the Longcuts vs. Shortcuts exercise, which advocates spending extra time on a routine activity. Instead of buying Mom a birthday card, “longcut” the task by creating one yourself. Instead of juggling e-mail and paying bills while dutifully chatting on the phone with a friend, why not just focus on your friend? “Most of us multitask and end up completely empty at the end of the day,” says Levy. “If you take one task and longcut it, you end up feeling that the day is far more meaningful." > from article The Glee Club - by Willow Lawson, Psychology Today > related book Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment - by Martin E. Seligman, PhD. ~ ~ ~ ~ on the flow of life Flow is perfect attunement with a larger-than-self energy that carries us through our lives. I view this energy as Spirit, compassionate and wise. Trusting the wisdom of flow means going with what’s presented to us as gracefully as possible, rather than flailing around in opposition. Our life’s flow propels us in certain directions. Of course, we do everything possible to create optimal outcomes, but we also must know when to ease off. The art is learning to go where the current takes you rather than maniacally micro-managing every detail of your existence. Going with the flow safeguards your life force. Here’s a basic law of energy: to realize your dreams, you must give them some breathing room. Do the footwork--but also stand back a little, let the universe work its magic. Paying attention to these signs about flow gives you a choice of behavior. Judith Orloff, MD. - in her book. Positive Energy : 10 Extraordinary Prescriptions for Transforming Fatigue, Stress, and Fear into Vibrance, Strength & Love ~ ~ ~ ~ I think that the short answer to why I look so young is that I do yoga every day. I am also a pretty happy person... being happy is probably the secret to keeping yourself young. When you approach life with a certain amount of enthusiasm, you'll always have that youthful energy. No matter what the situation is, I approach it like a naive beginner. I like to try new things and meet new people. All of that helps to keep me young. Kellie Martin - Tony Bray interview, August 2003 > photo from Mystery Woman [2005 Hallmark tv series - Kellie Martin also directed an episode] > related pages : awareness / thinking.....the child self / playing

I've been straining for decades to push psychology over into art, to recognize psychology as an art form rather than a science or a medicine or an education, because the soul is inherently imaginative. The primary function of a human being is to imagine, not to stand up straight, not to make tools and fire, not to build communities or hunt and till and tame, but to 'imagine' all these other possibilities. And we go on imagining and imagining, irrepressibly. James Hillman - quoted in W-ISDOM list [see newsletters] > his books include: Archetypal Psychology and The Soul's Code > image from book: Marie-Louise von Franz. The Interpretation of Fairy Tales

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Her emotions are always close to the surface. And it's helped make her one of Hollywood's best actors, and one of the most well-adjusted 30-year-olds in any profession. Is she as uncomplicated a person as she seems to be?

"Yeah. I'm not a very complicated person. I don't feel like I need a lot of things to make me happy," says Hilary Swank. "Part of that is my upbringing, not needing a lot of things around you. It's the truth. It really is." CBSNews.com / 60 Minutes - Mike Wallace interview, Jan. 30, 2005 [photo: Steve Granitz / WireImage.com] > related pages : intensity / sensitivity

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My story as the originator of The Enchanted Self, A Positive Therapy and Educational approach to Well-being began when I interviewed women not part of my practice to see how negative messages had affected their development. They confirmed the negative effects of many of these messages but they also told me about some wondrous parts of themselves. They shared successes and feeling good, feeling strong, feeling powerful, feeling whole. And as we talked they also shared that seldom did they talk about these parts of themselves. They said perhaps because no one encouraged them to and also because they tended to disregard these heightened moments almost as soon as they happened, bogged down by other duties and pressures.  Many of the women told me that they were so delighted to give this part of themselves -- this happy part of themselves time to really exist and be relished.

Later when I began to call this part our ENCHANTED SELVES other women immediately were thrilled thanking me for giving this part of ourselves a name.  Your see, they explained again and again, without a name we tend to ignore and diminish even treasures such as our Enchanted Selves. Dr. Barbara Becker Holstein - from her article What Are  The Seven Gateways of Enchantment? [psychjourney.com] also see her article Practical Steps to Enchantment -  Improving Your Self Esteem and her site The Enchanted Self

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.. .. There's little scientific evidence to support the idea that attitude influences survival.  For every study that finds a positive attitude enhances one's odds of survival, there are at least three that find no such effect, said Dr. Pamela Goodwin, a medical oncologist who directs the Marvelle Koffler Breast Centre at Mount Sinai Hospital at the University of Toronto. What is useful, psychiatrists and cancer specialists say, is to adopt whatever philosophy helps you stick with your treatment plan and to be "authentic," that is, to acknowledge and express your honest feelings, positive or negative.  And if, at some point, it is no longer realistic to hope for a cure, to refocus your hope toward a more realistic goal: maximizing day-to-day quality of life.

Dr. Jerome Groopman, chief of experimental medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and author of "The Anatomy of Hope," noted that a study published this year in the journal Cancer found that lung cancer patients with optimistic outlooks fared no better than those with bleaker expectations. "There is this burden that patients carry... that is derived from some of the New Age books of the 1970s, that depression, anger and unprocessed emotions are what cause cancer," he said. "This is completely unsubstantiated." Such a notion may lead some cancer patients to conclude that "as the disease progresses, your character flaws will lead to your own demise," Groopman said. "This is extremely cruel, scientifically incorrect -- yet a very widely held notion." Dr. Jimmie Holland, an attending psychiatrist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York and author of "The Human Side of Cancer," agreed. "People can be pessimistic and do well," she said. from article Ignore pressure to be optimistic - For the seriously ill, such expectations can create guilt and add stress, and there's no proof that a sunny outlook pays off. - Judy Foreman, LA Times August 23, 2004

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People's beliefs about their abilities have a profound effect on those abilities.
Ability is not a fixed property; there is a hugh variability in how you perform.

People who have a sense of self-efficacy bounce back from failures; they approach things
in terms of how to handle them rather than worrying about what can go wrong.

  Albert Bandura  - from book: Daniel Goleman. Emotional Intelligence

.... related page:.....emotional intelligence resources

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"This compassionate and humorous book - Positive Energy - offers clear tools to safeguard one's life force while encouraging a courageous participation in life and all it brilliantly offers us. I'm so grateful for Judith's generosity in covering so much ground in such a succinct and wise way!" Alanis Morissette  -- from drjudithorloff.com "We're taught to be ashamed of confusion, anger, fear and sadness, and to me they're of equal value as happiness, excitement and inspiration."      Alanis Morissette [imdb.com bio] ..related page:..emotion

 
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I want more than anything else in this life to be happy. I had an unhappy enough childhood; I don't want to be unhappy anymore. ...  Money doesn't buy you happiness. ...  Work is a part of [happiness], the extent to which I can be both creatively challenged and fulfilled.  Like operating on a few levels simultaneously, maybe it's the right brain and left brain, being able to contribute to my work that's stimulating.

I'm generally a very feeling person in terms of social injustice, and that's important to me, and, you know, a fine spring day. Ashley Judd - from article She's got Cole Porter under her skin - By Desson Thomson, Washington Post, July 5 2004 photo at left : in Hello Kitty T-Shirt from YouthAIDS - Ashley Judd is YouthAIDS Global Ambassador photo at right by George Pimentel - © WireImage.com from Cannes 2004 - De-Lovely - Party

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I am happy I did what I did in my life. I would do everything again. In my whole life. Of course you wish you could delete the mistakes and the stupid things you said.  But it doesn't work that way. You can't go back and pull out the few unpleasant moments and still be who you are. You have to live it out. .......Uma Thurman from "Re-made in China " by Michael Specter, November 2003 issue of Vogue - posted on Style.com ....one of the books by her father, Robert Thurman : Inner Revolution: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Real Happiness

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Why do we always forget that there is nothing powerful and beautiful in the whole field of human culture which did not originally spring from a sudden happy thought? What would become of humanity if no one had any more sudden intuitions?... Carl Gustav Jung ....from C.G. Jung Psychological Reflections : An Anthology of His Writings, 1905-1961

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Sociologist C. Ellison has found that the spiritual disciplines of prayer and meditation enhance many people's sense of acceptance and intimate relationships. In their book, The Varieties of Prayer, sociologist M.Polomo and polster G. Gallup report that 9 in 10 Americans pray from time to time and that 86% of these people say they sometimes experience a deep sense of peace and well-being while doing so.  As they mentally share their deepest desires and concerns in prayer, they may experience a sense of solace and guidance. ....from The Pursuit of Happiness -- by David G. Myers, PhD image from cover of Contemplative Prayer by Thomas Merton, Thich Nhat Hanh

.... related page:......spirituality

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Martin E. Seligman

Martin Seligman.. has spent 20 years researching depression and his findings have helped influence how therapists treat the condition. That background gives Seligman the authority to talk about happiness without being written off as a self-help guru or Pollyanna. His recently released book "Authentic Happiness" details the research findings and how they apply to daily life. "I believe psychology has done very well in working out how to understand and treat disease," Seligman said in a recent interview. "But I think that is literally half-baked.  "If all you do is work to fix problems, to alleviate suffering, then by definition you are working to get people to zero, to neutral. What I'm saying is, 'Why not try to get them to plus-two, or plus-three?' ... "Even people in great pain want more than to merely endure. They want the good things in life, just like the rest of us." In previous work, Seligman has described an effective technique for countering what he refers to as "catastrophic thoughts." The trick is first to recognize the despairing idea -- "I'm the weakest employee in the department, and I'm probably going to get fired" -- and then check it against real evidence, as if the statement were being uttered by another person trying to make you miserable.  "Did anyone actually say I was doing consistently poor work? So my last project fell apart -- yet the one before that was praised highly. Given the expectations, everyone in the department is struggling." By arguing with yourself in this way, Seligman has shown, you can separate beliefs from facts, defusing many pessimistic assumptions by editing them according to logic and evidence. In effect, you act as your own therapist, talking hard sense to yourself precisely when your thoughts begin to darken. ... Psychologists find, for example, that depressed people often turn small foibles and mistakes into stinging self-criticism. If they get a bad grade, it's not because they didn't prepare: It's "because they're not very smart." If they lose a tennis match, "it's time to quit: They've never been athletic." If they actually win, or get a good grade, "it's all luck." In studies during the 1970s and 1980s, Seligman and other investigators showed that depressed people who learn to recognize and disarm this kind of reflexive pessimism and self-attacking can free themselves of feelings of worthlessness, fatigue and other symptoms of the condition. They are no longer depressed. They have pulled themselves from the depths. Seligman argues that they can get to even higher ground, using techniques that rely partly on the work of the Hungarian-born psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a leading researcher in the field of creativity. In experiments using moment-to-moment mood monitoring, Csikszentmihalyi has shown that creatively successful adults and teenagers tend to experience regular periods of what he calls "flow." from article Searching for a happiness strategy by Benedict Carey [LA Times, Dec 9, 2002] official site for the book Authentic Happiness - with multiple excerpts, newsletter, and self-tests on attitudes. happiness factors, optimism etc: authentichappiness.com Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment - by Martin E. Seligman, PhD.

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Just say 'No' to positive thinking. ... You don't have to sacrifice what you have to get what you want. ... You've got to use your genius, or your life will never be enough. ... What gives you energy? Use it. What depletes? Dump it. ... Support what takes care of you.       Barbara Sher    ["Live the Life that You Love" - KOCE TV program: Feb. 28, 2002] *her book:*Live the Life You Love

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