Mindfulness and Body

Laura Boggess has been hosting our book discussion at The High Calling, and we’ve been talking about Ellen Langer’s Mindfulness. We’ve now reached the tenth and final chapter, “Mindfulness and Health.”

It’s a long chapter, and leans to the dense. It’s full of academic and medical studies. It’s not a good chapter to read when you’re in bed at night, assuming you’re trying to stay awake long enough to finish reading. Or perhaps it is a good chapter to read if you’re having trouble falling asleep. My wife has held on to a sociology book from college for just that purpose.

Langer’s point is simple, and seems rather obvious – what goes on in the mind can affect the body. It can affect your health.

The trouble is that it isn’t obvious to everyone, including a lot of doctors. Medical schools teach doctors how to deal with physical health. Specialties like psychiatry exist for mental health. It’s only been fairly recently that the two have begin to step into each other’s territory. (And psychiatry itself has branches of practice – some looking for physical causes and physical solutions for mental problems, while others seek different kinds of approaches and treatments.)

As for Langer’s point – the mind can affect the body – I’m a textbook case.

As I mentioned before, for several months I’ve been dealing with a back issue – bulging disc likely pinching a nerve. It’s been unpleasant. For two weeks in August, I worked from home, because I was at maximum strength pain meds and driving wasn’t a good idea.

The problem has been slowly improving, with the help of a combination of both physical and mental exercises. I recognized fairly early on what was happening – I transfer stress straight to my back. So I’ve been in physical therapy and “mental therapy” – having daily conversations with my brain.

At work, when I see heavy stress coming, I begin talking with my brain. I essentially start preparing it (and me) for what I see happening and how we’re going to deal with it. And it works. I talk myself into calm and let the stress wash right over my head.

The proof is what happens when I get ambushed by stress – when I don’t see it coming. Bam! Straight to the back. And sometimes, both things happen – I see it coming and when it comes it throws an unexpected curve. The resulting pain falls somewhere in the middle.

I’m also talking with friends about it. My old way of dealing with stress goes back a long, long time. Change is difficult; old patterns have to be broken and new ones put together.

I’m actually putting into daily practice the kind of mindfulness Langer advocates. I haven’t agreed with everything she says; I’ve taken issue with some parts of her book that I think slip over into pseudo-science and opinion.

But here, despite all the dense academic stuff, she is making a good point. Problems in the mind can manifest themselves physically. That doesn’t mean all physical problems come from the mind, but it does mean the mind if a lot more powerful than we give it credit for, and problems in the mind, or even ways of behaving, can lead to physical problems.

To see more posts on Ellen Langer’s Mindfulness, please visit The High Calling. And thanks to Laura for leading the discussion groups these past several weeks, and putting up with my occasional rants about the book.

Edith's Glass

I was born and raised in New Orleans. The first 10 years of my life coincided with the last days of segregation. Half a century later, certain scenes from childhood remain as vivid as if they just happened: shopping with my mother at the A&P grocery store, and being cautioned to use the “white” water fountain; restroom facilities marked “white” and “colored;” whites sitting in the front half of the bus and blacks in the back half; separate seating areas at the movie theaters. Restaurants, hotels, schools and recreational facilities didn’t have such designations because the entire facilities themselves were segregated and separate.

Segregation could be personal, too. My mother had a maid who ironed and cleaned; my mother kept a separate drinking glass just for her. It was called “Edith’s Glass.”

In the 1960s, under the force of federal court decisions and laws, integration of the schools began. Our television screens were filled with images of protests, shouting and screaming outside the public high schools in the city. About three years later, desegregation arrived the high schools in the suburbs, including the one my older brother had graduated from – the same one I was due to attend beginning the following year. The upheaval at our high school was so bad that federal marshals were stationed there every day for the entire school year to prevent racial attacks, fights and violence.

My distraught parents were nearly beside themselves with worry. They faced either sending me to a private high school, which the family couldn’t afford, or a parochial high school, which meant I could be brainwashed by Catholic priests, brothers or lay teachers. They decided brainwashing was preferable to poverty. My father made the contacts to enroll me in a Catholic high school not far from our home.

My parent’s anguished discussion swirled about me and above me. It was odd being the object of so much talk but not actually being part of it. One night at the dinner table, as the discussion turned inexorably to high school, I unexpectedly joined the conversation. I told my parents I was going to the public high school – the one with the federal marshals, fights, protests and violence. A stunned silence followed my announcement. When my father asked why, I shrugged. “I don’t know, but that’s where I’m going.”

My first day at the high school, I can remember being far more worried about upperclassmen hazing me than I was about a racial confrontation. There were no fights, no protests, no violence. After a few days, the federal marshals left. Some 60 black students attended a high school of 2,000; our suburb was about 95 percent white. But the troubles of the year before had given way to understanding and acceptance by the students and teachers. Over time, it wasn’t unusual to see blacks and whites becoming friends, and then no one noticed at all.

No problems occurred the entire time I was in high school. And it was toward the end of my junior year that Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and racial tensions ran high all over. But nothing happened at my school. Some previously unbridgeable chasm had been bridged.

As Ellen Langer might say in her book Mindfulness, the global “characteristic” of race disappeared into the individual characteristic of people and who they were.

We’ve been discussing Mindfulness at The High Calling. This chapter, “Decreasing Prejudice by Increasing Discrimination,” is one only an academic could love – rather dense language, a narrative difficult to follow, and citing lots of studies involving college students. (I’m always suspicious of studies of college students by college professors; I don’t know how applicable these studies are to the general population.)

Yet Langer raises an intriguing question – can you reduce prejudice by increasing discrimination? She says this: “A mindful outlook recognizes that we are all deviant from the majority with respect to some of our attributes, and also that each attribute or skill lies on a continuum. Such an awareness leads to more categorizing and consequently fewer global stereotypes, or …increasing discrimination can reduce prejudice.”

Of course, she doesn’t explain what she means by “the majority” or if it is even possible for a “majority” to exist if we are all “deviant” in some regard.

If she means reduce the “global” label by increasing the “individual” understanding, then – her studies of college students aside – there is something that rings true.

And Edith doesn’t need a separate glass; Edith simply needs a glass.

To see more posts in our discussion led by Laura Boggess, please visit The High Calling.

Mindfulness on the Job

Most of my career has been in corporate staff positions. Right out of college, I was a newspaper copy editor for nine months. From 2000 to 2003 I was a freelance consultant. And from 2003 to 2004 I worked as the communications director for an urban school district. The rest of my career – a total approaching 35 years – has been in corporate environments.

Corporate staff jobs have been essentially control positions, expressions by an organization to control its environment. (This goes back to the mass production model of business mostly associated with Henry Ford and the automobile, but that’s another story). Corporate lawyers, IT staffs, HR people, PR people and similar functions have been about control – controlling or mitigating external events and regulating and standardizing internal processes. The idea is an organization does all these activities to help its businesses be efficient as successful.

Whether any organization could ever control its environment is open to debate. Even if it’s possible, control is usually of short duration. No organization can control its environment permanently – but it can act and function like it has the ability to do that. And that leads to what Ellen Langer in Mindfulness would call mindlessness on the job.

Organizational mindsets are, collectively, the organization’s culture. They are often self-sustaining as behaviors are rewarded or penalized and as people of like minds are identified and prepared for leadership.

When it works, such a culture can be rewarding for all concerned – executives, employees, customers, investors, vendors and all the other various constituencies. When it doesn’t work, a culture of control can still function like it does work, but requiring changes in how different social, economic and political realities are understood and acted upon.

I’ve told a version of this story before, but aspects of it apply to the discussion here. In the mid-1990s, I asked the IT department for help in creating the company’s first web site. I didn’t get laughed at, but I was politely refused. “The web is a flash in the pan,” I was told. “It’s like 8-track tapes. You’ll be wasting your money.” This was the clincher: “The future is not the web; the future is Lotus Notes.”

The person who told me that sincerely believed what he was saying. Behind the statement were very large investments the IT organization had made in Lotus Notes, including a lot of money and a lot of people (mostly programmers). It was, in other words, a “vested interest.” Because of the resources committed, no alternative would be, or could be, considered.

Within months, the folly of that commitment had become clear. The web turned out not to be a flash in the pan; in fact, Lotus Notes was beginning to look a lot like 8-track tapes. A new CIO arrived from outside the company, asked who was in charge of web development, and was told “well, there is this guy in PR.”

Yet the commitment to Lotus Notes remained stubbornly in place. After a few years of growing dissatisfaction, a “web front-end” was added to make the system work more like the web. It didn’t work very well. In the meantime, ignoring the web as a corporate activity allowed people all over the company to pursue whatever they wanted to pursue with web sites – and eventually more than 500 were created.

It took more than a decade (and a lot of money), but eventually the company abandoned Lotus Notes. There was a brief revival when it was renamed Domino, but the only result was a new name.

Mindlessness can exist in all kinds of ways and in all kinds of work. Langer describes quite a few examples, although she misses the “vested interest” cause of mindlessness.

My own area of focus – corporate communications – is not immune. When change comes to any control function, it can be resisted, and often bitterly resisted. When the change prevails, it invariably comes from outside the function.

And that leads to another potentially destructive mindset – that good ideas only come from the outside. A lot of bad ideas can come from the outside, too.

We need a better way to do these things.

We’ve been discussing Ellen Langer’s Mindlessness over at The High Calling. To see more posts on this week’s chapter, “Mindfulness on the Job,” please visit The High Calling.

Bad Boy of the Book Discussion

We’ve been discussing Ellen Langor’s Mindfulness over at The High Calling, and my responses to the various chapters have careened from understanding and agreement to puzzlement and disagreement. Last week, I was encouraged and even inspired by what she had to say on aging and mindfulness. This week, I would have thrown the book across the room except I’m reading it on my Kindle.

This chapter is “Creative Uncertainty. “Out of an intuitive experience of the world comes a continuous flow of novel distinctions,” she says. “Purely rational understanding, on the other hand, serves to confirm old mindsets, rigid categories. Artists, who live in the same world as the rest of us, steer clear of these mindsets to make us see things anew.”

Well, I thought, there’s at least three conditional statements stated as facts and packed in one paragraph, with not a shred of evidence offered. I’m generally a right-brain thinker working in a largely left-brain environment, but even I have trouble with those statements as facts. But I continue on.

“By keeping free of mindsets,” Langer says, “even for a moment, we may be open to see clearly and deeply.” I doubt seriously that anyone, left-brain thinker or right-brain thinker, artist or engineer, is capable of being free of mindsets. Even artists. Perhaps especially artists (and I include myself as a writer in the definition of “artist”). “Being free of mindsets” is itself a mindset.

Langer argues for encouraging creativity by teaching “facts” in an unconditional manner. “Facts shouldn’t be taught as unconditional truths,” she says, “when they might be better seen as probability statements that are true in some contexts but not in others.” I read that, and my antennae start twitching. Here we go, I think; it’s all relative, and my truth is my truth and your truth is your truth. And I’m moving beyond uneasiness, because I know where a line of argument like this can lead, especially from the perspective of faith in God. It leads to belief in nothing, including creativity.

She gives an example of how something should be taught as a conditional or probability statement. “Imagine the impact of a divorce on a child initially taught ‘a family is a mother, father and a child’ versus ‘a family could be…’” She says that objections to that approach will spring from faulty comparisons. Perhaps she should consider other studies, in addition to her own, that say something very different.

But I continue reading. As Langer might say, my mindset is working overtime, because now I’m doing close reading, and I begin to find examples of her own statements that she sees as faulty in others.

“After we reach college,” she says, “we encounter teaching done in a conditional manner. We are taught about theories, models, hypotheses, and not just ‘facts.’” I should point out that this statement is presented as an unconditional truth – the very thing she argues against.

Here’s another one: “The dampening of creativity in students by unconditional teaching is compounded by most textbooks. Scientific investigations yield only probability statements and not absolute facts. And yet, these probabilistic data and information that are true only under certain circumstances are presented in textbooks as though there were certain and context-free.” I might add, exactly like they’re being presented in this chapter of Langer’s book.

She cites a few of her own studies as supporting evidence, but even I could pick them apart for the information that wasn’t being considered. She also cites a poem by William Wordsworth, an anecdote about Winston Churchill’s intuition, a photographer’s lecture and a personal anecdote about tuna fish sandwiches.

I’m trying to take this book seriously; I really am. I’ve second-guessed my own particular mindsets to see if I’m completely misinterpreting what I’m reading. I even sent an email to the book discussion leader, suggesting I not link my post because it might derail the discussion. (She told me to plunge ahead.)

Yes, I think I’ve become the bad boy of the book discussion group.

Laura Boggess is leading the discussion of Mindfulness at The High Calling. To see others’ responses to this chapter, please visit the site. 

I don't plan to retire

It might have been a coincidence – perhaps not – but I was asked a question this past week as I was reading chapter 6 of Mindfulness by Ellen Langer, entitled “Mindful Aging.” And the question, by a friend, was this: “Have you thought about what you’re going to do when you retire?”

I’m of an age when that question is not unusual. At work, there are two of us about the same age, and then there’s a gap of some years, and then one person 10 years younger and then several 20 years younger. And then all those 20-somethings, many of whom I helped to hire.

My answer to the question: “I don’t plan to retire.”

Now there may come a time when I “retire” from where I officially work. But I don't plan to “retire.” I see it simply as a new phase of what I’ll be doing in life, assuming health and physical condition cooperate.

Retirement, for me, won’t be about the pursuit of “leisure.” I can’t imagine myself living from golf game to golf game (I don’t play golf), nor can I imagine myself in some retirement community in Arizona, going shirtless to the grocery store.

But it will be about the pursuit of something, but not leisure.

And it won’t be about surrounding myself with grandchildren. (Note that I use the plural; Cameron is going to become a brother next May.) I dearly love my grandson and grandchild to come, but they won’t be around me all the time. And that’s as it should be. They, and their parents, have their own lives to live. I can love and influence and be there when needed – but I can’t dominate and I can’t direct.

I do know some of what I’ll be doing.

I have a desire to get more involved in missions, a desire that’s been quietly growing since I did a short-term missions trip in 2002 to Eastern Europe. The desire is not to become a missionary in a foreign land, but simply to become more involved. That’s all I understand for now.

And I will be writing. Writing has been a part of my life since I was about 9, and it always will be, as long as I can hold a pen, press a letter on a computer keyboard, or speak into a microphone or video camera.

Most of my writing has been in corporate communications – speeches, articles, papers, news releases, reports, and now tweets and Facebook posts. But that has been changing, and it will continue to change.

A novel manuscript I’ve been working on for five years has caught the interest of a small, new publisher. It’s now been edited by an extraordinarily gifted editor and published author. The draft contract in sitting in my email box, and it seems fair and reasonable (although I’m asking my attorney to look it over). Given how fast this can happen today, it may be published by the end of this year.

It’s not serious or literary fiction. It’s a story, one that had been bottled up inside me for three years before I wrote the first word. It started on a airline flight to San Francisco, when I was listening to one of those music channels and heard a song called “Luna Rosa” (sung in Italian). The song evoked an image in my mind – a priest dancing on a beach at sunset. It was an image that wouldn’t let go. The beach is gone, and so is the sunset but the image of the dancing priest remains and lies at the center of the manuscript.

What I’ve learned is that publishing this manuscript, while gratifying and exciting, is not the point. The writing, the telling of the story, is the point.

So, no, I don’t intend to retire. I intend to “mindfully age,” as Langer describes in her book.

I still have too many stories I’m supposed to tell.

Over at The High Calling, Laura Boggess has been leading a discussion of Mindfulness. To see more posts on this chapter, please visit The High Calling.

A Miss and a Hit

We’ve been reading Mindfulness by Ellen Langer for the current book discussion at The High Calling, and this week’s focus is Chapter 4 – “The Costs of Mindlessness” and Chapter 5, “The Nature of Mindfulness.” I believe Langer has a serious point to make about how mindlessness – doing things almost by rote because we’ve always done this way – can lead to bad results and negative outcomes. But her evidence for the costs of mindlessness gets a little thin.

She cites a 1975 Harvard Business Review article by Theodore Leavitt, “Marketing Myopia,” for how the railroad industry mindlessly destroyed itself by continuing to see itself as a railroad industry instead of a transportation industry. The article was rather famous for several years in the business community; I can remember my then-boss handing me and the other speechwriters a copy of the article and told it was a quotable resource for speeches. But even then we understood that it was one way to look at what happened to the rail industry – and only one way.

Some of the other evidence for mindlessness she cites includes a wife “unlearning’ how to balance her checkbook because she’s turned that activity over to her husband, an anecdote about the author’s nieces, and the example of Miss Havisham in Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. There is other evidence she cites I’m more comfortable with, but these examples are more anecdotes than evidence. I suppose she might say I’m trapped in the mindlessness of not being open to new information, but Miss Havisham? I love the novel but it is a novel, no matter how much truth it might contain.

There’s also a statement she makes that I have to question, and the statement, made in an almost offhand way, is that advertisers conspire to make us mindless. That is a pretty broad generalization. Most advertisers (including the federal government, political candidates, companies and even public interest groups) are not so much focused on making us mindless as they are on us buying their product, service, belief or position. That one offhand statement made me pause and question what I was actually reading here. There are costs to mindlessness, to be sure; I’ve seen them and experienced them. But I don’t think Langer makes a compelling case here.

But I continued on to Chapter 5, “The Nature of Mindlessness,” and I found her to be back on firmer ground. She describes mindfulness, the opposite of mindlessness, as a continual creation of new categories of thinking and thought, paying attention to both the situation and the context; welcoming new information; openness to different points of view; and the importance of process rather than a slavish devotion to outcome.

My own business career has been a perpetual state of tension between outcome and process. Business people like outcomes. Outcomes are things like sales, profit and return on investment. And sometimes we forget that there’s a process that precedes every outcome, as Langer points out.

A typical conversation I’ve found myself having over the course of decades concerns this tension. The organization has something it wants or needs to announce publicly. Communications people are often told “here’s the news” and proceed to write the news release and plan other communications.

But there’s a question that needs to be asked first – what is the desired outcome? Does the organization want a lot of attention, only a little attention, or a lot of attention by a small (or large) number of people? Defining the desired outcome results in the creation of a process to achieve the outcome. Announcing the news in a traditional news release may do exactly the opposite of what’s desired, but a mindless belief in the effectiveness of news releases may actually contribute to not achieving the desired outcome, or achieving the wrong outcome.

Mindlessness and mindfulness are everyday occupations.

To read more posts on these two chapters of Mindfulness, please visit The High Calling, where our discussion is being led by Laura Boggess.  

Mindfulness

For most of my adult life, I’ve worked for large corporations. Right out of college I worked for a news paper for a time, and I worked for myself as a consultant (mostly for large companies) from 2000 to 2003. Then I spent nine months at St. Louis Public Schools, before returning to corporate life.

The corporate model of business organization has been changing for the last 30 years. The paternalistic, lifetime employment, mega-company that seemed to dominate for most of the 20^th century is largely gone, replaced by (some would say) more realistic relationships between organizations, employees, customers and other stakeholders. Some would say that, and some forget that organizations mat change while organizational mindsets linger long after.

Corporations, like all other organizations – government, academia, the NGOs or “non-governmental organizations, churches – have mindsets. People often refer to organizational culture, but it’s less cultural, I think, and more of a mindset. Mindsets can be good things – accomplishing and creating and achieving and making money, and that it what corporations are supposed to do, make money. Mindsets can also be bad things, followed so rigidly that they can take organizations right over the cliff.

The thing about mindsets – good and bad – is that they tend to be focused and relentless. They can be like the proverbial steamroller, no matter how much uncertainty and counter-information is available.

This focus – including the exclusion of ideas, issues and events that might suggest that an alternative way or means or process might be preferable – is related to what author Ellen Langer calls “mindlessness” in her book Mindfulness, which we’re discussing at The High Calling. Mindlessness doesn’t mean idiocy; it means doing things because this is the way you’ve always done them – the things you do without thinking once, much less twice – regardless of the realities confronting you. (Think of a corollary practiced almost religiously by certain governments: “Since we’re technically bankrupt, let’s keep spending money.”)

Mindlessness in any organizational setting can be destructive. As the mindset keeps crashing against change, new facts, news issues and new problems that it can’t resolve, the choice becomes either change or construct ever more complex fictions to maintain the mindset.

I’ve seen both choices made. I’ve even seen both choices being made at the same time. There have been times when I’ve been part of the mindset, and (more typically for me) times when I’ve said there’s a different reality we have to face, we don’t control what affects us, we don’t control what affects our business and we have to think and act differently.

Sometimes the organization has listened; sometimes the organization has no choice but to listen. And sometimes the organization doesn’t listen, and behaves very typically when the change or issue or event happens as predicted.

They shot the messenger.

I’ve taken my share of bullets over the years. I’ve also had the opportunity to be part of the change. I’ve learned that both kinds of experiences are, unfortunately, necessary, to understand why people and organizations behave the way they do. The home mortgage disaster is an example of  how mindlessness at all levels and across the economic spectrum – government, individuals, banks, brokerages – led to disaster.

Often the message has to be one the organization doesn’t want to hear: “We have to make ourselves vulnerable. We have to admit we don’t have all the answers. We have to respond to what people are concerned about, even if the science says the concerns are baseless.”

It is not an easy thing to convince an organization. It’s easier to ride the mindlessness flow. But truth still must be told and acted upon.

To see more posts on Ellen Langer’s book Mindfulness, please visit The High Calling. Laura Boggess is leading the discussion, and this week we’re looking at the first three chapters.