Category Archives: mindfulness

Choose Your Cohorts Wisely

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Who do you want in your boat out at sea?

NaBloPoMo 2021:  Do Good, Kid

Who are or have been the most influential people in your life?  Did you choose them for that purpose, or did they just happen to you?

Looking back on clinical rotations throughout medical school and residency, I still smile or shudder.  We had fun and learned eagerly on my general pediatrics team, when the attending regularly took us outside for teaching rounds.  On another rotation, we missed teaching conferences for hospital rounds all month, and every day was moral drudgery.  The culture, explicit and implicit, of any group, large or small, determines the bulk of the experiences among the people in it.

We do not choose our families of origin, nor our acquaintances of proximity early in life.  In adolescence, forces beyond our comprehension push us in and out of social groups, often at high mental and emotional cost.  If we are lucky, we find and can stick with people who stimulate us, challenge us to think and learn, and help us discover our best selves.  Who did you have growing up who did this for you?

At some point as adults, we need to take responsibility for our social contacts.  If I hang out with people who overeat and overdrink when I really want to lose weight and get healthy, I need to ask myself some important questions. It’s not that they intend to sabotage my efforts at self-care.  They are who they are and do what they do for their own reasons.  But I cannot underestimate their influence on me when I’m with them.  The human need for acceptance and belonging is primal, and manifests primarily in group norms.  No matter our fervent intentions and strong core values, given enough time and exposure, we are all at risk for succumbing to the pressures of conformity.  So when we have an opportunity to select our tribal membership(s), such as for work, it’s better to be clear about what kind of culture we value, and whether our choices align with that standard.

The older I get, the less energy I have to waste. How will I spend this precious resource—my time and attention? What value can I bring to my relationships, and how will they feed me in return? Straight up social reciprocity is a natural human trait, but I’m aiming higher. I want to be my best self and make a meaningful contribution, and I seek others who want the same. Once we find each other and recognize that shared, greater goal—that higher ethos—our mutual return on investment in relationship becomes synergistic and exponential, and benefits more than just ourselves. We are better, together, for society at large.

Focus, goals, and personalities evolve over a lifetime.  Mutually enriching relationships in a previous life phase may wane in significance over time.  Or we may grow closer with age, flourishing in parallel rather than divergence.  I think either is okay, if it’s done with awareness, intention, and grace.  Cultivating meaningful relationships is a lifelong practice in these three skills.  If we find and run with others committed to this lifelong training, then we may all realize the fruits of its mastery–or at least of progress–faster, and hopefully with a little less suffering and a lot more fulfillment.

Judge Judiciously

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NaBloPoMo 2021:  Do Good, Kid

The person who cuts you off in traffic is not (necessarily) an a**hole; nor is the person who voted for the other candidate (necessarily) stupid, evil, or out to destroy the country.  These are judgments we make, knowing nothing else about people, driven too often by a toxic cocktail of negative emotion and prejudice.  I wrote a few days ago about resisting early closure and asking more and better questions, in order to come to better conclusions—to make better judgments.

What good does it do us to judge quickly?  It feels decisive and righteous, for one thing.  It can make our decisions easier and faster when we don’t stop and question our assumptions and biases, or examine the influence of our own emotional baggage.  We get to dwell in the comfortable, if somewhat distorted, status quo of our own worldview, perhaps oblivious to the unintended impact of all that we ignore and dismiss.  This works for a while, maybe.

But we’ve probably all experienced that humbling moment when we realize how a snap judgment led us seriously astray.  What did it cost us?  Perhaps we lost a great job opportunity, or damaged a relationship that we care about.  Did we ruin a negotiation?  Maybe we lost someone’s trust, which we may never fully earn back. 

I’m not saying we should never make judgments.  Decisions must be made, after all.  Hiring, firing, mergers and acquisitions, voting, marriage—all human relationships and collaborations require us to dance, sometimes in elaborate steps of give and take, call and response, and iterative, reciprocal disclosures and choices. I think drawing premature, oversimplified conclusions closes more doors than it opens, especially in our minds.

So when is judgment required and important?  What makes judgment ‘good’?  I think it’s when our core values are at stake and at play.  I witness someone lying because telling the truth is costly or painful.  I know that another person says they believe one thing, and yet their actions speak differently, for whatever reason(s).  Does a given decision before me align with my core values of honesty, integrity, fairness, inclusion, kindness, and generosity?  If not, I can judge the action, and not necessarily the person who makes it, as dishonest, lacking integrity, unfair, exclusionary, unkind, or selfish.  If I make a judgment, I should be willing to defend it with conviction.  In my mind that means employing both evidence and sound reason, not just escalating emotions—unless, of course, I am aware that my judgment comes from exactly the latter.

This is an all too human foible that we would all do well to recognize.  When we see someone judging suddenly and severely, we can ask, ‘What core value, belief, or identity do they feel being violated here?’  This type of judgment can rarely be reasoned away with evidence to its contrary.  Read The Culture Puzzle by Moussa, Newberry, and Urban, Why We’re Polarized by Ezra Klein, and The Power of Us by Van Bavel and Packer, to see how our various strongly held identities trigger intense emotional hijack when we feel them to be threatened.  Under such conditions we slide into tribalist survival mode, aggressively attacking our perceived attacker, elephants loose, operating in fixed rationalization the whole way. 

If we can take a few deep breaths and withhold our own judgment for a moment, exercise some curiosity, empathy, and compassion, and not take their words and attitude personally (especially if they are judging and attacking us), perhaps we could see them as a fellow human, get a glimpse of what really matters to them, and appreciate why they’re so riled up. Maybe we could even learn something new. We can de-escalate. And once we do that, we can render wholly unnecessary our need to judge in return. How liberating.

Ask More and Better Questions

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View of I-70 from Silver Plume, CO, 2015

NaBloPoMo 2021:  Do Good, Kid

What one habit do you really wish all people would practice more? 

What difference would it make to humanity if we did? 

How could/would you incite a movement in this direction? 

Who would you recruit to help? 

Who does it a lot/enough/too much/effectively already? 

What are these people like? 

What else do you admire about them?

What else else??

My biggest pet peeve is early closure (asking far too few and poor questions, then jumping to poor conclusions). 

How would it have changed your engagement with this post, if at all, had I opened with that declaration? 

To walk my title mantra talk, it occurred to me to introduce my thesis—that we should all practice asking more and better questions—posed as a question. 

How would readers answer, I wondered?  The possibilities are infinite, OMG how awesome! 

Where would the conversation go after that, I asked myself? What else would I ask in response? The subsequent questions came to me, in the order above, as I embraced my premise in full. And wow, it felt liberated, generative, potentiating, and FUN! I would love to have this conversation!

Asking questions, more than answering them, is how we learn and grow.  Finding the best questions to unlock innovation and connection—I can think of few more satisfying undertakings.  Those questions stop us in our tracks.  We look up, straighten our posture, cock our heads.  Mental gears that don’t usually turn get cranked, sparking action potentials where none ever occurred before.  Magnificent questions carve novel landscapes of insight and creativity within, before, and between us—ah-HA!

More than anything, excellent questions help us connect. 

When you have a great idea, what do you want most when you share it?  You want people to ask you about it, right? 

And what engages you most when they ask–what are the greatest benefits? Maybe they help you flesh out a rudimentary notion, find flaws, discover applications, strengthen your argument? Maybe they point you to perspectives you had not yet seen? Maybe they trigger even more interesting questions that you had not thought to ask before?

Even converting statements to questions, as I did in the last three sentences, can alter the course of an encounter, yielding much more rewarding depth and complexity—no?

I have a friend who used to meet any concept outside his comfort zone immediately with, “That’s a bad idea.” Guess how fast I stopped sharing things with him? Thankfully, I have friends like Donna, Christine, Stacy, Nicole, and others, who will respond to even my most outlandish assertions with, “Ooo, tell me more?” “What made you say that?” “How does that relate to…?” “Where will you take this?” and the like. Our conversations inevitably end in my scribbling exuberantly, and those musings often show up on this blog. When I find myself mired in the dysfunctional narratives of my most challenging relationships, it’s the open, honest questions I ask myself that get me unstuck.

Be the person people want to tell their ideas to. Inhabit the safe place where your loved ones, those you lead, and anyone who needs you can bring their nascent, brilliant, opinionated, eccentric, flawed, WRONG, and any other thoughts. Ask more and better questions for clarification, understanding, exploration, collaboration, and connection, among other things.

Notice that the most generative questions often start with ‘What’ and ‘How’, and their answers are almost never yes, no, or some other binary choice.  The most fun exception might be, “HELL YES, or no?” 

Lastly, if you’re surrounded by pitiable interrogators, substitute their banal queries with the most fascinating ones you can muster, respond to those instead, and see where that goes.  Maybe they’ll take the hint and follow suit, and voila, you’ve started a movement.

I really love the questions below.  What are your favorites? 

Onward in curiosity, friends.

What assumptions do I make here?

What do I not know?

What is up with that?

What is the evidence?

How do I know? 

How sure am I, really?

How would I feel in that situation?

What is my objective here?

What does this person really care about?

What am I committed to first?

What next step(s) will move us toward our goal(s)?

What would I give for this?

What does this person need from me?