Follow Your Strong-Moments

Marcus Buckingham's articles in the Huffington Post keep reverberating with me. As a psychologist, he is concerned with women's happiness (dear to all our hearts!) and has written that women today are less happy than they have ever been, and worse, are increasingly unhappy.

To test yourself as he tested many thousands of women, answer these questions (answer below):

1. How often do you get to do things you really like to do?
2. How often do you find yourself actively looking forward to the day ahead?
3. How often do you get so involved in what you're doing you lose track of time?
4. How often do you feel invigorated at the end of a long, busy day?
5. How often do you feel an emotional high in your life?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"Women who could answer positively to the questions above had, on some level, simply decided that they were going to be happy. They made that choice." He has the prescription for "those of you reading this and thinking "I can be happier. I want to be happier in my life."

1. "Focus on moments, more than goals, plans or dreams."

These strongly positive moments he calls "strong moments." "When you do experience a strong-moment, it is authentic. It is true...you know how a specific moment made you feel...Whatever you are picturing, it will be a vivid, detailed moment, and as you think about it now, you feel yourself change...This moment, and the emotions you feel as you relive it in your mind, is you, in truth."

2. Accept your strong-moments.

Accept "which moments strengthen you and which don't reveals to you exactly how you can live out your dreams, whether at home or at work."

3. Strive for imbalance.

"Balance is the wrong life goal" Buckingham says to "pinpoint the strong-moments in each aspect of your life and then gradually target or tilt your life toward them. This means being as deliberate as you can about making them happen. It means investigating them when they do happen, looking at them from new perspectives, and celebrating them. Above all, it means giving them the power of your attention."

4. Learn to say "yes"

To a full, if imbalanced life.

Take the strong test at the sidebar, and check out his articles and books, "Now, Discover Your Strengths" and "First, Break All The Rules."

Turns out, I am a "Creator." A lot of this could be true of me (and many I know). It says my best quality is my "ability to find patterns invisible to others" (and I thought mathematicians like my friends are paid to do that!) Find time to be by yourself (I am very good at that.) The test cautions to "Be careful: Don’t think so long, you never do anything" (which might explain my total lack of productivity, even as far as answering mysterious email messages are concerned) and calls, my "smartest career move: Any job where you’re paid to produce new content." which might happen in the future, although it hasn't happened yet with this blog. I'm okay with that. I do already have lots of strong-moments. Guess that makes me happy.

What about you? It's a fun test to try.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marcus-buckingham/what-the-happiest-and-mos_b_301406.html

If you can answer in the affirmative to the above questions, you have chosen happiness

1) "Focus on moments, more than goals, plans or dreams"
2) "Accept what you find"


Accept what you find"

Meshing Business and Religious Practices Effectively

All over the world, everyone wants to connect their religious faith with their daily lives and occupations. During a recorded conversation at Washington's National Cathedral today, David W. Miller of the Avodah Institute and Princeton University, at the Center for the Study of Religion,


David W. Miller

claims that ninety percent of Americans believe in a higher power. There is a danger in not discussing religion in the workplace, he claims, because religion covers the world. He says that companies are having a variety of responses to religion:

1) the ostrich approach - to bury it and ignore it.
2) to clamp down and stifle it.
3) take the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" approach, and the best is
4) "faith friendly" as an approach to spirituality that they can take into the conference room. This is not to condone faith-based privileges of one faith over another, which Miller says should not be any part of a publicly-traded company, but one where differences in religion are acknowledged.

How can employees and companies bring together faith and work? Miller says that in general, employees want to be respected and appreciated by their co-workers, while most would like to have more time for friends and family. They really want to work well and "finish well" with companies.

Companies and employers can constantly ask themselves how they can make the world a better place, how they can help their employees, how they can improve their practices, whether they are paying well enough, and giving enough benefits.

How can employees manage the complexity and ambiguity of religion in the workplace? Miller says that through prayer and righteous action, an idea from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, employees can be given permission to think through difficult questions and follow through. Persuasion is very difficult and yet very important. Accountability is being expected week-to-week, and workplace pressures are increasing. Having a set of values and faith can provide a moral compass in jobs, in the services of neighbors and in the worship of God.

Miller on legislation: Christians believe in the freedom of the human spirit to make choices, and that God will be there for us, always. He says that capitalism is a place of choice: good/bad, constructive/destructive. Miller looks at Wall Street not as an out of control system, but as a place of cycles. He admits there were a few irresponsible people, and the system rewards certain sets of measurements legally and makes huge rewards for exceeding expectations.

He says that the system is systematically competitive, but thinks that regulation and the echo effect of asking whether anything has been learned and should something be different next time, has produced caution. He says that different questions are being asked in boardrooms, and that the appetite for risk has diminished temporarily. As far as healthcare legislation is concerned, he says that "a Gordian knot will have to be cut".

On bonuses: While regulations may tighten up somewhat, he says that business leaders must figure out the reward system for themselves. He says that the self-examination of industries may change the way bonuses are given out, for example looking at a long-term structure of payouts. He also said that faith leaders should encourage massive generosity. Business leaders have opportunities to redirect large bonuses and money to charitable purposes.

On globalization: He alluded to the influences on American businesses of globalization (not negatively) because other parts of the world, outside of America and the English-speaking world are growing explosively. He says that economic trade moves faster than political decisions. Even as businesses leave America, other areas of the world are improving from those same businesses abroad. He sees the resurgence of manufacturing in America's knowledge economy.

His final advice on how to integrate the demands of the workplace and church? He says to swim with someone, find friends and don't do it all alone.


Samuel Lloyd, photo courtesy: Episcopal Church

The Very Reverend Samuel T. Lloyd III of Washington's National Cathedral led the interview-style discussion with insightful questions. We thank him for his effort and his courage to confront these issues of business economics and religion in an open, recorded conversation. The prophetic nature of the discussion addresses today's societal challenges affecting us in our daily lives and in our futures.

Of course, we also love being able to watch the entire service of Eucharist online. The close-ups and camera work are phenomenal. The internet makes the worship service available to all of us.They take the Cathedral experience up to a whole new level. For that, we can only offer our heartfelt gratitude -- and our donations.

We also apologize for any inaccuracies.

Online Travel Journals: A New Source of Inspiration

If you are planning to travel, why not plan to write a travel journal when you go? Online travel sites let you access your journals from anywhere, give you unlimited virtual real estate to post entries and photos and allow you to get guest book messages from family and friends. They also provide wonderful online entertainment.

A friend of mine has been keeping a journal with photos of travels in My Trip Journal. It's a fantastic website and a really great way to learn about other countries as an "armchair traveler". The photos and the way the journal entries bring the writer close to you and other people and places to life are truly priceless.

It's also interesting how someone else can travel to the same faraway place as you've been and see many of the same sights and yet have a different experience. With a good writer, these special sights can be revisited again and re-experienced in the best ways. They can be described in lights and detail that take time and thought to write. It's also possible to see what has been missed on your visit that should have been seen (ouch!), what can be seen in another visit and where to stop for awhile in the future. Writing voices that you recognize really bring these places to life. Since you know how the writer sounds, the journal is an extension of their personalities, a way to follow them as they meet new challenges, a way to learn how to react differently yourself, and wonder how you would do in their shoes.

This is a wonderfully fun website to visit, and a treasure of the internet. It's also a generous legacy of the traveler to take the time to write impressions and stay in touch. It's also a fine way for business travelers, teachers and professors to keep records of lengthy trips. The human side of traveling, the transportation adventures, hotel, restaurant, sightseeing and shopping experiences recounted are useful records to use when planning a trip.

What fun they are to visit just for pleasure and use as information resources before traveling. I don't hear about these journal sites very often in the media as a networking or employment tool or mind-boggling money-maker for the founders. I wonder if these journals, or at least the one of my friend, could become a book. It's now possible to vicariously enjoy the travels of others, conveniently and without delay. Wonder if it's possibly a business necessity of the future. Personal travel videos might very well become more popular.

My Trip Journal is at http://www.mytripjournal.com/
Off Exploring at http://www.offexploring.com, Travellers Point at http://www.travellerspoint.com/onlinediary.cfm and Travel Journals.net at http://www.traveljournals.net/join.asp also offer trip journal sites.

HealthMap Alerts Users of Outbreaks, Has iPhone App

HealthMap is an easy-to-navigate website we can all use to benefit everyone else's health. It was founded in 2006 using data-mining techniques to search through the Internet from sources such as "news reports, curated personal accounts, official alerts, blogs and chat rooms - to track and map infectious disease outbreaks". The HealthMap site averages 10,000 unique visits a day, including regular users from the World Health Organization, the CDC, and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control and has software to alert all users of the website of outbreaks.

Healthmap
http://www.healthmap.org/en

"We also expect to increase global coverage and identify outbreaks earlier," says HealthMap co-founder Clark Freifeld, a PhD student at the MIT Media Lab and research software developer at CHIP who calls it "grassroots, participatory epidemiology... We aim to empower citizens in the cause of public health, not only by providing ready access to real-time information, but also by encouraging them to contribute their own knowledge, expertise, and observations. In enabling participation in surveillance, we also expect to increase global coverage and identify outbreaks earlier."

HealthMap co-founder John Brownstein, PhD, assistant professor in the Boston Children's Hospital Informatics Program (CHIP)concurs, saying "We hope individuals will find the new app to be a useful source of outbreak information--locally, nationally, and globally...As people are equipped with more knowledge and awareness of infectious disease, the hope is that they will become more involved and proactive about public health."

In addition, a new iPhone application has jus been announced of a collaboration between Children's Hospital Boston and MIT's Media Lab called Outbreaks Near Me. It "builds upon the mission and proven capability of HealthMap, an online resource that collects, filters, maps and disseminates information about emerging infectious diseases, and provides a new, contextualized view of a user's specific location - pinpointing outbreaks that have been reported in the vicinity of the user and offering the opportunity to search for additional outbreak information by location or disease"[Children's Hospital, Boston]

The site carefully filters information before displaying on the website. Users can submit new data and photographs to HealthMap for use in "Oubreaks Near Me". After being approved by managers of HealthMap, the users' alerts are posted onto the map as well.

Outbreaks Near Me was developed with support from Google.org and is available at no cost for download in the iTunes App Store. For more information on Outbreaks Near Me, visit: http://healthmap.org/iphone.php.

Thanks again to Monika for the idea.

Religion and Science: Summary Of A Discussion

Washington National Cathedral

The recent triple train wreck of Serena Williams-Joe Wilson-Kanye West had me craving good manners. Watching the Very Reverend Samuel Lloyd III interviewing journalist Barbara Bradley Hagerty and the service following at Washington's National Cathedral proved quite restorative.

Hagerty's interest lies in finding circumstantial evidence of God, and she has interviewed over eighty scientists with questions about God and religious experience. This post, taken from my notes, is not meant to give a total summary but inspire you to listen to the entire fascinating interview and read her book.

Barbara Bradley Hagerty

The full interview is a delight to watch at the website of the National Cathedral linked here. They talk about Hagerty's new book, Fingerprints of God: The Search for the Science of Spirituality and her religious experiences. The theme rolled all around the fraught relationship between God and scientists. It's to the credit of Dean Lloyd to offer this discussion of religions and science and how they help each other.

The Very Reverend Samuel T. Lloyd III

Never say "Never"

Trying to find proof that God is intelligible, and that divine intelligence stitches together the universe, there are many connections to be found between the experiences of different world faiths. Hagerty says that no religion should claim to have an ultimate claim on "truth" and that there should be respect given to other religions.

Science may or my not ever have proof of spiritual reality, but Hagerty says "it's too early to say it never will." Why people believe what they believe is what journalists and scientists are looking at.What we bring to it is important to the discussion of the way our brain connects with God. Hagerty says that we don't need to be afraid of the science, and that we can all go forward to explore the science of religion.

Thoughts have power

Believing in the usefulness of drugs after the Tylenol drug scare made Hagerty leave the Christian Science Church but she wanted to remain Christian. In 1995, she had a religious experience on a mountaintop in Tennessee that made her want to pursue the question of how God enters our lives.

She found that across world religions, the "religious experience" is shared widely. Hagerty interviewed over eighty people of different faiths: nuns, monks, chanting sikhs and so on. In the religious experience, all of them agreed there is a sense of light and of love, a feeling of one-ness with a supreme being and with the universe. There is, too, the sense of having a connection with others that continues on.

All who were transformed changed ambitions, friends and careers. For example, before being transformed, men tended to value wealth, achievements, material advantages and winning respect. After, they valued more the realms of spirituality, peace, family, honesty and good will.

Scientists are studying the brain at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and finding that at religious moments in almost all religions the brain's frontal lobes light up and parietal lobes go dark. This contributes to a timeless, spaceless sense, a sense of eternity.

Prayers affect your world

A great deal of brain research still has to be done, to be sure. The point is that there are commonalities of experience if not of doctrine. The studies with prayers are within a branch of science called psychoneuroimmunology.In NIH studies on couple bonding called "love studies", there is growing proof in experiments that couples feel connections even when separated in space and time.

While it is not clear how prayers and thoughts affect others, it is clear that the brain has receptors involved in religious acceptance. There is scientific controversy and a great deal of scientific skepticism about religion in general. But there is growing acceptance of the idea that consciousness may extend beyond the brain.

Good News For the Super-Literate

How many times have you wanted an old book only to find that it's out-of-print? Worse, it's unavailable. Recently, say in the last fifteen years, it's been possible to buy some out-of-print books online. Now Google has announced more good news for you and your most literate friends and family. It's possible to buy out-of-print books at a growing number of bookstores around the world with the new $100,000 Espresso Book Machine or EBM from Google's Book Search and On Demand Books. It will print and bind "any one of the more than 2 million books old enough to fall out of copyright into the public domain."[Wired]


Espresso Book Machine (EBM)
Version 2.0

The newest Version 2.0 succeeds Version 1.5 at some locations.

The main beneficiary of this new method, apart from consumers, would be individual booksellers around the world that can compete with Amazon, now the biggest bookseller, and sell these books for $8.00 or less almost instantly. If getting into Harvard's Libraries isn't possible, a desired book can be obtained from the bookstore nearby after September 29, 2009.

Current locations include Ann Arbor & Grand Rapids, Michigan; Provo & Salt Lake City, Utah; Manchester & St. Johnsbury, Vermont; Lake Forest Park & Bellingham, WA; Columbia, MO; San Francisco, New Orleans, New York, Washington, Cambridge, Mass; in England: London and Canterbury; the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Alexandria, Egypt; all over Canada: Edmonton, Hamilton, Waterloo, Montreal, Miramichi, New Brunswick; Melbourne, Australia. For full addresses, see this page at ondemandbooks.com.

"The company hopes to sell 60 more printers in the next year, bringing the number of machines globally to about 90.[Wired.com]

Sounds like just the thing for the yacht, or even the country house.

Out-of-touch Senators Support American Gun Industry

Yesterday's announcement that guns could be allowed onto Amtrak trains legally struck a discordant chord within me. I do take trains in the northeast and want them to be improved on as far as facilities and services are concerned. The gun ban incidentally makes riders like me feel safer. Allowing guns back on trains is a step in the wrong direction. After Amtrak, other train companies could follow.

Today's Editorial in the New York Times has the even more alarming news that:

despite pleas from Amtrak that it lacks the manpower, equipment and extra financing to effectively meet the deadline...it faces a shutdown if federal funds are lost.

Great. Who says this isn't getting to be a socialist country if guns are legally permitted on trains despite corporate and popular resistance? The article says that the administration's threat to allow guns on Amtrak is "a genuflection to the gun lobby" and "lunatic reasoning". I fully agree.

My side of this non-debate is almost silent -- where is the anti-gun voice? Why say "yes" to the gun lobby? Even kids know that guns are only meant to scare and kill. The ban on guns was "wisely adopted five years ago after the terrorist railroad atrocities in Madrid."[New York Times]

I am wondering why these Senators are caving to the gun lobby, and what financial kickbacks they receive to push through this legislation. (If so, they're corrupt -- "out-of-touch" is a politeness). It's demeaning and doesn't inspire international respect. America is good at showing an aggressive face to the world, yes, but not one that inspires respect and loyalty. It needs to work harder in that direction, and the new administration has a window of opportunity to do just that. Acquiescing to the demands of the gun lobby is contemptible to the very idea of humanity.

On a practical level, allowing guns will not be productive. On a philosophical level, it speaks to a well-funded, active and successful gun lobby army residing in Washington and their ability to corrupt. The need is huge for them all to get out a bit and get the bigger picture. Trains are good for moving large numbers of passengers around efficiently. While trains should be more socially respectable they should also be affordable to smaller budgets and busy, scheduled citizens. Trains should help cut greenhouse gases and overcrowded highway traffic. They should be desirable to drivers, non-drivers, and passengers of all ages and nationalities. It's fantastic and pleasant to take a ride in a wonderful European train that resembles a plane flight more than it does a grinding, clunking, old fume-y American railway carriage.

What all the American passenger train companies and Amtrak (the most visible one) needs to do is rise to higher international standards of safety and comfort. It needs to improve its trains (plugging holes where air conditioners drip water onto the seats, for example) and make the interiors have at least springs in the seats (also, for starters) and make rides smoother for passengers. The last thing it needs is to spend more money making trains worse -- more unfriendly and strict to its supporters.

Think of the tourists who would visit America and spend money. They must get a negative perception of safety in this country. Those gun lobbyists and "elected officials" should visit another country, forewarned that it is hugely unsafe because a lot of passengers are legally carrying guns (and hate tourists). These "elected officials" appear not remotely conscious of their blatant inhumanity and crazy, unwelcome actions. How are they achieving their mandate to improve America?

If the nation is so poorly led that it can't be bothered to do the right thing for train companies and for the populace of train-riders, then good luck with "going green" and "sustainability" and all that. Who cares?

Reproductive Empowerment Central To Gender Equality

Why were slaves needed?

"They were used to provide labor in agriculture, trade and industry. Some slaves were employed in the administrative sectors of the state, kingdom or empire. Other slaves served in the military; some performed domestic chores, a few others were sacrificed and some satisfied the personal needs of individuals."

This interesting article expands on the slave trade in pre-colonial Africa. Why am I wondering about the African slave trade? It connects to anti-abortionist activists here in America and everywhere who would try to change (and stop) women's individual reproductive decisions intrusively and aggressively. To achieve gender equality, women need some control over their futures -- as mothers, employees, and ultimately as human beings.



Anti-abortionists and anti-family planners in America have long puzzled me. But I see it is all about control of a woman through her fertility. Fertility is a fact confronted and shared by women everywhere and is a point of common ground for all women of certain ages. Control by men of women has long been achieved through physical strength combined with reproductive aggression and power.

Women should not have children simply to make the point that they can make them; they need to really, really want to look after them for a very long time. They should expect to do so with constant interruption of their schedules and should expect to live to serve the needs of their children. It may "take a village" to raise one, but women with contraceptives have freedom to decide family size if they seize the opportunity courageously and assertively.

Today, while getting a house appraisal for an insurance company, the appraiser happened to drop a nugget of information that stuck in my mind. He mentioned that a house on the oceanfront of Maryland had a slave room in the attic as we do (although that Maryland house has a thousand acres) and he said that the owners had kept a male slave in that room whose sole raison d'etre (reason for being) was to procreate with female slaves. Being from Canada, I found this idea both shocking and fascinating (out of ignorance). Curious to research this concept further, I also found another interesting article called "Reproductive Rights and African-American Women." It says that:

"In the course of U.S. history, white women have had to fight for their right to choose when to bear children, whereas black women have had to fight for their right to procreate at all. And while white women’s reproductive choices have been limited, black women’s choices have often been eliminated.

During slavery, a black woman’s reproductive capacity was treated as an economic commodity. Slave procreation increased slave owners’ free labor source so black women were turned into baby-making machines. Fertile women were often rewarded by slave owners with more rations and decreased workloads while less fertile women suffered increased abuse and were sold more often.

Then, in the early 20th century, the model of eugenics, which proposed that human perfection could be achieved through selective breeding, was used as evidence in legalizing the forced sterilizations of black women. Thus, when Margaret Sanger’s birth control movement allied itself with the eugenics movement, black women became suspicious of Sanger’s interests and the gap between white and black women widened."...

"Given this history, it is little wonder that black women remain suspicious about white-led reproductive-health campaigns and few have allied themselves with pro-choice organizations. The “choice” terminology associated with reproductive health and rights has not been easily embraced by black women, for whom the debate is about much more than the right to make a free choice about abortion. It encompasses issues of access to contraception, prenatal care, infant mortality and adolescent pregnancy. It means having the power to choose not only whether and when to have children, but to have healthy reproductive lives and give birth to healthy children. It is about equality and empowerment.

The contemporary feminist movement should expand its view of reproductive freedom beyond the concept of choice. Protecting our rights to safe legal abortion services is a critical component of a larger struggle for reproductive health and rights for all. History has shown us that women’s reproductive freedom is not just an issue of choice, but an issue of public health, of civil rights and of human rights."

Family size decided consciously by the mother creates female empowerment. While it is true that contraception is about "equality and empowerment" it is also ultimately a personal matter for a woman. Some say contraception where available historically made family sizes smaller, while others say that enthusiasm for education and business did so. I do know that complex financial, social and physical influences determine family size. Women often have to think of not having children and must plan for it. Why women do decide to have children is an interesting question to ponder in another post.