Values In Action - Strengths and Virtues

“Success is achieved by developing our strengths, not by eliminating our weaknesses”

Marilyn vos Savant

One of the key insights of Positive Psychology is that happiness and satisfaction are markedly increased through the exercise of virtues and strengths.

Positive Psychology has identified six core virtues:

1. Wisdom and knowledge
2. Courage
3. Love and humanity
4. Justice
5. Temperance
6. Spirituality and transcendence

These core virtues in turn are comprised of 24 strengths or 'Values in Action'. The research has shown that each of us has relatively enduring preferences and propensities for certain of these strengths and that satisfaction and happiness are increased whenever we utilise these strengths and values in our daily lives.

The creators of the field of Positive Psychology, Prof. Martin Seligman and his colleagues, have developed a test to measure your key or signature VIA (Values In Action) strengths. You can access the test from the following web page:

http://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu/

once you have registered, select ‘VIA Signature Strengths Questionnaire’.

Take a moment to complete the test and determine your top 5 or so strengths. Alternately, look through the following list of strengths and pick out 5 that really speak to you; that you consider to be the most important and valued for you.

VIA Strengths

• Creativity
• Curiosity
• Open-mindedness
• Love of Learning
• Perspective
• Bravery
• Persistence
• Integrity
• Vitality
• Love
• Kindness
• Social Intelligence
• Citizenship
• Fairness
• Leadership
• Forgiveness & Mercy
• Humility & Modesty
• Prudence
• Self-Regulation
• Appreciation of Beauty
• Gratitude
• Hope
• Humour
• Spirituality

By focusing on these and other strengths and virtues in your life you can build emotional resources and resilience. Using these will increase and strengthen your ability to enhance your life and create happiness both in your own life and the lives of others.

Strengths based living is definitely a crucial step to life enhancing, so add it to the tools you use to make the most of your life. Look at all the contexts of your life and find ways to enhance them using your key strengths and values. You'll make a positive and fantastic difference.

life enhancing smiles,

Grant

Authentic Happiness & Positive Psychology

“Purpose is what gives life a meaning.”

 Charles H. Perkhurst

Research in Positive Psychology has shown there are three major components to enhancing your happiness and your life: Pleasure, Engagement and Meaning.

The Pleasurable Life

The more you increase and experience pleasure in life, the more happiness you'll feel during and immediately after these experiences. However, such positive feelings are short-lived. Think about relaxing in a warm bath, or enjoying a massage; in the middle of the experience, you are filled with relaxation and positive feelings. A day, week or a month later, the experience is merely a dim memory and doesn’t contribute to lasting feelings of happiness.

The Engaged Life

Engagement is about flow, absorption and gratification. Whenever you engage fully in an experience, with total involvement and concentration, you’ll usually find you are left feeling strong, alert, refreshed and invigorated. Indeed, research in Positive Psychology has shown that engagement and flow measurably increase levels of happiness and life satisfaction. The positive effects of engagement are not short-lived either. Flow builds psychological and emotional capital. It can bring exhilarating feelings of transcendence, and help dissolve emotional problems and challenges.

The Meaningful Life

Of all the components to happiness, meaning provides the longest lasting, strongest and most durable effect. By having a purpose that is bigger than yourself, by living a life of meaning and significance, you can measurably increase your levels of happiness and life satisfaction. Purpose and meaning are the paths to truly enhancing your life.

Using this knowledge

As you can see from the diagram above, to create an enhanced life of happiness and satisfaction, you need to focus on all three components of happiness. You need to put in place activities and processes that increase the amount of pleasure and engagement you experience. Most importantly though, these need to be underpinned with a foundation of meaning and purpose.

The outcome of this blog is to help you understand what this means and guide you in achieving this in your life, so stay posted and I'll continue sharing with you practical ideas and strategies from NLP and Positive Psychology for how to get more out of life.

great life enhancing wishes,

Grant

Question Everything - an interview with Barry B. Longyear

A life enhancing interview with author Barry B. Longyear

I was recently re-reading a wonderful book 'The Enemy Papers' by author Barry B. Longyear, one of my favourite science fiction writers, and I came across this quote:

"Instead believe this: question everything, accept the wholeness of no truth nor the absolute rightness of any Path. Make this your creed... for in this creed stands your right to freedom."

Now, this is a life enhancing creed I've lived all my adult life, passionately and assiduously, and I truly believe it is important and life enhancing.  So, Barry's words struck such a major chord, that I was immediately motivated to interview and ask him to share his thoughts on happiness, freedom and questioning everything...

About Barry B. Longyear

Barry B. Longyear is the first writer to win the Hugo, Nebula, and John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer all in the same year. In addition to his acclaimed Enemy Mine Series, his works include the Circus World and Infinity Hold series, SF & fantasy novels, recovery and writing instruction works, and numerous short stories. Barry's multiple award winning novella 'Enemy Mine' was also made into a movie and is well worth a watch.

Writing is obviously a life enhancing activity for Barry.  According to his online bio, "My reason for writing these days is the ride. I love it. Once a story grabs me, I am literally transported elsewhere, and the eyes I get to look through, and the scenes I get to see, are always captivating and are frequently sustaining."

And I can attest that reading Barry's books is equally captivating and grabbing and for me life enhancing as they provide more than just entertainment.  Barry's writing explores important values and ideas.  For example his Infinity Hold series is about justice and morality:

"They found a planet no one wanted and upon it created an unsupervised gravity well for unwanted human debris: political activists, terrorists, the criminally insane, and the insanely criminal. It was a dump in the middle of a lethal desert with no support facilities, authority, control, or law... What does a society of rejects and criminals dropped into a crucible of horror and desperation come up with as a legal system?" As the wikipedia entry on Barry says: "The Infinity Hold series... is more a work of sociology than science fiction."

What I can also definitely say, is that reading a Barry B. Longyear book provides a fascinating ride through idea space.  And personally, I find that incredibly life enhancing :-)

So without further ado, here's Barry, with his take on Happiness, Freedom and Questioning Everything.

"My goal, often reflected in my writing, is to maximize happiness. Being alive is usually, but not always, an aid to that. Freedom is nearly always an aid to that."

 Barry B. Longyear

Q. How do you define freedom? What is freedom for you? Why do you think its life enhancing and important?

How do I define "freedom?"  Freedom is choice. To increase an individual's freedom that person's choices must be increased. As far as political freedom goes, I support the libertarian concept of freedom to be, do, and act anywhere and in any manner up to but not including restricting the choices of others. Freedom is happiness enhancing simply because doing what I want to do makes me happier than having that taken away from me by force.  For that reason, freedom is important to me personally. For things I value, such as the USA, creativity, prosperity, intelligence, information, and many other things, freedom works better than any of the statist/interventionist schemes that have been devised.


Q. Your books often involve scenarios that presuppose or are based on the ideas of 'freedom from' and 'freedom to', for example in 'Enemy Mine' the two principle characters need to gain freedom from their societal prejudices and stereotypes in order to create the freedom to work, live and survive together. What motivates you to explore these concepts?

When I write stories, I do not  "explore concepts." Stories (mine, at any rate) are not about ideas, gimmicks, hardware, trends, or scientific discoveries. Stories are about people. Everything else is  what the people in the story are experiencing. In the case of the two main characters in "Enemy Mine," to survive they needed to work together, and to do that, they needed to change. In other words, they needed to grow up. In the context you put it in your question, they needed to let go of self-imposed limitations to increase the number of their choices. In other words, they needed to grow up.


Q. Why do you think it's important and life enhancing to 'question everything' and how do you support yourself to do that in your own life? What advice do you have to help people achieve that in their own lives?

The closer we are to truth, the better chance we have of understanding and utilizing reality and what's in it. Questioning dogmas of all kinds has brought us everything from the light bulb to string theory and made it possible to support billions of persons on this planet, as well as the ability to wipe out all of them. Unquestioning obedience to dogmas brought us the Inquisition, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, every benighted idiot who believes that blowing up a bus full of school children is something God wants, and has crippled most of the world's economies.

As for my own life, I am a recovering alcoholic and prescription drug addict, clean and sober for the past 28 years. I have described what was necessary for me to question and then change in my novel Saint Mary Blue.

Advice is dangerous to give; there is always the danger that someone might actually take it. The following is from a speech I never gave:

. . . Unaware that I was doing so, I've been guided by what in school I thought was an old-fashioned cornball slogan: "Truth, Duty, Honor."+

Truth. That's an important value I picked up at SMA (Staunton Military Academy).  Truth. "the property of being in accord with fact or reality." Truth isn't what we hope is real. Truth isn't what we want to be real. Truth is not what we feel is real. Truth is what is in fact real.

Duty. This is the value that keeps me up some nights and then helps me sleep once I've done my best to do what I know needs to be done. Dictionary definitions of "duty" are filled with words such as "obligation" and "conduct," but don't seem to carry the weight of the word as I learned it at SMA. "Duty" is doing what "Truth" has shown needs to be done, whether those changes involve the world, my country, my fellow humans, or myself.

Honor, as I learned it here, is the quality of doing one's duty by the light of truth.

Q. Who are your role models for 'life-enhancing'? Are there any exemplars that live enhanced lives that you look to for inspiration in your own life?

The only "life enhancing" role model I ever had was a famous jogger who dropped dead during a run. Role models for raising my freedom and pursuit-of-happiness index, however, are too many to list. They include soldiers, sailors, airmen, scientists, politicians, civil rights leaders, men and women of business, writers, actors, philosophers, artists, and anyone who overcame insurmountable obstacles to achieve worthwhile goals. At the top of my personal list are George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.


Q. What books do you feel have inspired you the most or have enhanced your life by either the writing of them, or reading them?

Of books by others, there are simply too many list. I thought to list authors, but that would be rather extensive, as well. Of my own works, certain of them were meaningful to me in that I was either working out necessary personal issues, world problems, or both. In particular I would include The Enemy Papers, Infinity Hold\3, The God Box, Saint Mary Blue, Yesterday's Tomorrow, and especially Sea of Glass.

Barry B. Longyear

http://www.barryblongyear.com

The Enemy Papers

Infinity Hold³

Manifest Destiny

 

Heaven'ing

Heavening \Heav'en'ing\, v.

To place in happiness or bliss, as if in heaven; to beatify.

Source: Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary

A good friend, who is both a psychotherapist and life counselor, recently sent me an email that prompted this current blog entry. In it, he said:

"I trust you did not place a patent on your 'Heavening and Helling' concept as I have used this as a tool with a couple of clients with good effect."

And of course... no, I don't have a patent on the concept of heavening :-) It's freely available for anyone and everyone to share and use, and yes it really does work to enhance life, so I thought I'd share it in some detail in today's blog entry.

So what is heavening?

I originally came up with the concept of 'heaven-ing' one night a few years ago, when I was laying in bed attempting to sleep through the loud noise of a raucous party the neighbors across the road were throwing. Rather than lay there, tossing and turning and focusing on the noise, getting myself more and more angry with fantasies of going across the road and shutting them up with a baseball bat, I decided instead to focus on something more positive in order to distract myself. I thought it would be fun to explore the idea of heaven and to design what heaven would be like if I were its creator. So rather than 'hell-ing' - creating hell in my own life, by focusing on the negativity of the noise and lack of sleep, I decided to do 'heaven-ing' - enjoying the creative fun of playing with the details and fantasy of heaven.

As I lay there, exploring heaven, thinking through how it would work, what it would contain, who would populate it, what rules it would run by, what magic it might provide... I found myself drifting off in a very pleasant state of happiness and joy. Heavening was fun and it worked it's positive magic in my body and mind. I gently drifted off to a very peaceful sleep and awoke refreshed next day, with the noisy party a distant and trivial memory.

The experience of heavening was so enjoyable and delightful that I decided to continue playing with it each night before sleep and at other times when I had some spare moments to fill. I did heavening when standing in lines and queues. I did heavening when sitting in traffic or waiting for the traffic lights to change. I did heavening in the shower and while doing the dishes and chores. Heavening became an integral, ongoing and life enhancing part of my life.

Heavening as a skill and resource

I also realised that by doing heavening, by creating a place in my mind that was a wonder-filled and beautiful space, I was creating a skill and a resource that would stand me in good stead for the rest of my life. You see, no matter what happens to my life, no matter what happens to my body, as long as I am conscious and can think, I will always be able to go to the heaven I have created in my imagination. Even if I'm unwell, or locked away or end up paralysed and unable to communicate, no matter what happens, the more I develop, populate and envision my version of heaven in my mind, the greater the resource and skill I have for taking myself to a wonderful place. I am literally heavening my life. To me, that seems very very life enhancing.

The positive effects

I also noticed another interesting and positive effect from the process of heavening. The more I designed and detailed the concept of heaven in my mind, the more I started to notice and see the parts of the world that matched or echoed my heaven.

I remember the first time I noticed this effect, a week or two after I'd started doing heavening. My beloved and I were out kayaking on the lake that we live beside. It was a perfect blue-sky sunny day. Not a breeze in the air. Not a cloud in the sky. Just azure blue stretching across the horizon. The lake was a mirror. We were the only people there. Drifting across the lake in our kayaks, a pelican gliding past, barely skimming the water, floating on a cushion of air. Absolutely magical!

And I realised that this was just like heaven. Literally. This was something out of my dreams of what heaven would be like. The sun, the sky, the warmth of the air, the peace and tranquility, the freedom. This was heavening on earth. I shared my insight with my darling and we both celebrated and savoured just how heavenly our experience was right then. My process of heavening inside my mind overflowed out into my world. My Reticular Activating System - the central core of our nervous system that is responsible for filtering and directing our attention - became attuned to all that was heavenly in life, and now continues to mark out and highlight the positive and heavenly aspects of my day to day life. Heavening inside my head now spreads to amplifying heavening in my everyday life. It's wonderful and truly life enhancing.

Moving away from helling

From the process of heavening and it's effects in my mind and life, I also began to notice and see when other people are doing the converse. I've noticed how often people do helling in their lives - how they literally generate ongoing hell in their daily lives through self-fulfilling prophecies and negative beliefs and behaviours.

This has lead me to notice the seeds of helling in my own behaviours or thoughts, and to move away from those and replace them with their opposites. I can now avoid the enemies to happiness and enemies to heavening in my life and instead choose to amplify the processes of life enhancing and happinessing.

Choosing happiness

You see, heavening and helling are skills. You get to choose which skillset you want to practice and put into action in your life. And you cannot not choose - not choosing is a choice! - you are condemned to the freedom of choice, and I suggest you choose powerfully.

Choose to practice and do heavening in your own life. Doing it now will mean that you will have enhanced both your inner and outer worlds and produced ripples and echoes throughout your relationships and life. It's easy. It's fun. And it brings heaven onto earth. Right now, right here.

Fascinatingly, the spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle, writes in his book 'A New Earth' that:

"It is interesting to note that many biblical scholars suggest that the esoteric meaning of prophecies in both the Old and the New Testament that speak of the collapse of the existing world order and the arising of 'a new heaven and a new earth' are talking not about heaven as a physical location but instead as an inner realm of consciousness. Literally they are suggesting that 'A New Heaven' will arise on Earth as an emergence of heavening in human consciousness."

You know, you really do have a choice. In any situation in your life, you can choose to focus on the positive or the negative. You can choose to celebrate joy or failure, positivity or negativity. By doing heavening you direct your mind and consciousness towards joy and positivity and out of that emerges a new way of being that is truly life enhancing.

As my friend said in his email, heavening really can be used to good effect. It works and it helps. I've shared it with you, and I own no patent on the concept. So feel free to use it to enhance your life and the lives of those you care about.

Heavening \Heav'en'ing\, v.

To place in happiness or bliss, as if in heaven

Want to learn more, get a copy of my book: Avoiding the Enemies to HAPPINESS!

life enhancing wishes
Grant



Some highly recommended heavenly reading:

How to Achieve a Heaven on Earth

What would it take to make this world a paradise? Tackling the momentous question of how individuals can envision and enact positive change, this collection of 101 essays from some of today's most notable thinkers, leaders, artists, and writers focuses on how to achieve a Heaven on Earth.

Life: Heaven on Earth: 100 Places to See in Your Lifetime

From the Great Pyramid and the Sphinx to the mysteries of Easter Island and Stonehenge, the editors of Life draw on the world's finest photography to reveal why you must include these truly special 100 places in your life's itinerary.

Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives

A clever little book by a neuroscientist translates lofty concepts of heaven, infinity and death into accessible human terms. What happens after we die? Eagleman wonders in each of these brief, evocative segments. Are we consigned to replay a lifetime's worth of accumulated acts? Is heaven a bureaucracy, where God has lost control of the workload? Will we download our consciousnesses into a computer to live in a virtual world, where God exists after all and has gone through great trouble and expense to construct an afterlife for us? In bite-size vignettes, Sum explores deep human notions of heaven and provides engaging explorations into the human psyche. It is a well-executed and thought-provoking book.

Sharing and Savoring

Putting feelings into words produces therapeutic effects in the brain

I came across some fascinating research the other day that supports the intuitive insight that verbalising your feelings helps dissipate and make them less intense.

The brain imaging study by UCLA psychologists examined the effects of verbally labeling negative emotional images and showed that the amygdala, a region of the brain that serves as an emotional alarm system, was less active when subjects labeled the feelings engendered by the negative images. The study also found another region of the brain, the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, was more active during emotion labelling. This region is located behind the forehead and is associated with inhibiting behavior and processing emotions.

According to the study's main author, Associate Professor Matthew D. Lieberman, "When you put feelings into words, you’re activating this prefrontal region and seeing a reduced response in the amygdala... When you put feelings into words, you seem to be hitting the brakes on your emotional responses." Lieberman also suggests, "Putting our feelings into words helps us heal better. If a friend is sad and we can get them to talk about it, that probably will make them feel better."

To me, this is a life enhancing research result that backs up what we all intuitively know: talking with a therapist, a loved one, a good friend, or even writing in a journal, helps us cope with and overcome feelings such as anger, fear and pain. Conversely, holding our feelings in, not expressing them and not consciously acknowledging them gives them power and makes them more likely to overtake you.

We all have times when we experience negative life events and are overwhelmed by negative emoting. The cool thing is that you now know that by practicing self-awareness and consciously labeling your emotions, you'll shift the response in your brain. Additionally, you now have life enhancing research evidence to encourage you to verbalise your feelings and share them with supportive friends. Getting your feelings out in the open makes them less intense.

Meta-emoting

Another life enhancing and useful tool for coping with negative emoting is the NLP technique of 'meta-emoting'.

The word 'Meta' (from Greek: μετά = "after", "beyond", "with", "adjacent", "self"), is a prefix used to indicate a concept that is an abstraction of another concept. So for example, a meta-language is a language about languages. Meta-data is data about data. And meta-emotion is emotion about emotion.

According to wikipedia, "Meta-emotion refers to the emotional reactions to one's own emotions (second-order emotions about primary emotions). An example would be being angry (the primary emotion) and being afraid of one's anger (the meta-emotion)."

This is a very powerful concept. You can get yourself into all sorts of psychological and emotional strife if you don't track your meta-emoting and control it.

For example, if you get scared of something such as talking in front of people, then you get scared about being scared, you create a loop that feeds back on itself and amplifies the fearing. This is typically a recipe for inducing a phobia - fear about fear about fear...

On the other hand, if you choose a meta-emotion that is more resourceful and positive, you can easily transcend and transform primary emotions via your meta-emoting. In the example above, if instead of fearing the fear, you chose to find the fearing as humorous and entertaining, then you'd find that the meta-emotion magically changes the primary emoting of fearing into something more resourceful. It's hard to do full on fearing when you are laughing at the fear :-)

By bringing your emotions to consciousness, labeling them, then consciously deciding on what your outcome is and what meta-emoting you are going to do, you create amazingly generative responses to the 'negative' events that occur in your life. And that is very life enhancing!

For those who are interested, here's an insightful read at UrbanMonk.net that talks in detail about the effects of meta-emoting: Meta-Emotions - The Downward Spiral to Unhappiness and How to Avoid Them

Celebrating Failure

Another thing I want to bring to your attention in discussing the importance of verbalising and sharing your emotions with others, is the notion of 'Celebrating Failure'. In NLP we make the distinction between content and process, and suggest that 'process' is often more important for control and change than is 'content'.

For most people, the word 'Celebration' evokes the notion of positivity, happiness and joy. However, from an NLP perspective we would say that this is the typical 'content' of celebrating.

The 'process' of celebrating on the other hand involves intense emotional responding, performance or sharing with others and stimulation. This process is normally applied to positive content. However, without realising it, many people apply the process of celebrating to negative content. They 'celebrate' failure, disaster and negativity.

So the thing I want to highlight, is to make sure that when you share and verbalise your feelings, you don't overdo it and transgress into celebrating failure. The idea is to express your feelings so that you alleviate them, not to amplify and celebrate them and make them an ongoing focus. Express them and let them go. Your life enhancing happiness and peace of mind depend on it.

Savoring Positivity

The other thing that links to enhancing your life by expressing your feelings is the research from the field of Positive Psychology on 'savoring'.

Dr. Fred Bryant, Professor of Psychology, Loyola University, Chicago has studied the effects of savoring for the last 20 years. His recent book, Savoring: A New Model of Positive Experience, describes the numerous benefits of savoring and its links to happiness.

Savoring involves enjoying and appreciating the good moments and aspects of each and every day. It's about sharing and celebrating the positive. This includes reminiscing about past experiences, really savoring and amplifying what's happening in the present and building strong positive anticipations for future events.

Fred's research shows that people who strongly savor their lives in an ongoing way, report higher levels of joy and life satisfaction. These positive emotions then broaden and build across contexts helping to buffer against stress and negative emotional experiences.

In his book, Fred recommends a number of strategies for enhancing your life through savoring, and of them the following are incredibly aligned with this blog entry:

• Sharing - sharing the emotional experience of an event with others increases enjoyment of it.
• Journaling - Writing a daily journal in which you recall the day's positive events enhances the savoring experience.
• Awareness - Intentionally sharpening your awareness for an event by focusing on and verbalising the positive emotions enhances the experience.

Practicing Mindfulness

So I hope you are now convinced of the usefulness and importance of becoming more conscious of your emotional experiencing, including both its negative and positive aspects, and of expressing your emotings appropriately. The wisdom of such 'mindfulness' practice is backed up by ancient esoteric traditions, such as yoga and buddhist philosophy. It's healthy and life enhancing.

With negative emoting, express it, share it and let it go. Become aware of and actively practice positive meta-emoting. And finally, savor and share every positive emotional experience that you can.

Get the most juice out of every moment of your life. It's your life, and you and those you care about will benefit immensely if you enhance your life through sharing and savoring.


positive smiles and great wishes,
Grant


Fred Bryant's Book on Savoring:

Excellent books on Positive Psychology: