On Change

Self-Acceptance

Fighting Death: A short-short story

Making the Most of Gratitude, Acceptance, and Striving

The life well-led may reduce to balancing gratitude, acceptance, and striving.

Gratitude is important because there’s much to be grateful for that's easily forgotten. Acceptance is important because much is resistant to change. Striving is important because we should be growing and achieving.

To encourage your balancing that triad, list things that you should feel grateful for, are wise to accept, and should strive for.

To prompt your thinking, My Psychology Today article today offers some examples. They're derived from my clients, friends, and me.

How Much to Try to Change? How Much to Accept?

My Psychology Today article today tells a composite story of a person who decided to stop fighting and start accepting. It then asks the reader questions to help them decide what they want to fight for and accept in their life.

“I’m Afraid I’m Not Good Enough” Why good often IS good enough

The pursuit of excellence is widely lauded. Of course, “best and brightest” people and the organizations they work for may be wise to demand excellence. But we mere mortals, rather than insisting on excellence, may be wiser to pursue just good. That can be true both in career and in relationships. I make the case in my Psychology Today article today.

Dime a Dozen: Coming to Peace With Being Ordinary

At some point, many of us come to have to accept that we're more ordinary than special. My PsychologyToday.com article today may help people make peace with that.

An Ordinary Life: A short-short story

As my PsychologyToday.com contribution today, I offer a short-short story called An Ordinary Life.

Ambition Versus Gratitude for What One Has

I've always been driven but I'm having to make peace with the reality that I probably won't achieve most of the big dreams I had when I was younger. I talk about it in my PsychologyToday.com article today.

A Scientist's Search for Meaning

Hannah was working on among the most meaningful projects: trying to uncover the genes that cause early heart attack. And yet she suffered a crisis of meaning that made her quit. 

In my PsychologyToday.com article today, I offer a short-short story about her.

A Workover: Coping with a Co-Worker Who Drives You Nuts

On my KALW-FM (NPR-San Francisco) radio program, I do Workovers: People phone in with their work problem and I try to help.

On PsychologyToday.com I'm posting edited transcripts of some Workovers. Here's today's offering:

Making Peace with Your Aging

Perhaps the hardest thing to accept is your aging. Each sign of decline is a reminder that you’re moving ever closer to the end, and the closer you get, the more limited your powers and the more likely you’ll be in pain.

Yet accept it we must because, even if you take good care of yourself, decline and end are inevitable.

But it’s a lot easier to say “Accept it,”  than to accept it. Perhaps the internal dialogue in my PsychologyToday.com article today will help.

Aging Gracefully

Even if we eat lots of veggies and walk that 45 minutes a day, Father Time catches up with all of us.

I’d be disingenuous to say that the following tips will make your old age “the golden years.”  The aphorism, “Getting old isn’t for the faint of heart” became a cliché for a reason. But perhaps the tips in my PsychologyToday.com article today can at least put a little gold plating on those years.

Is That All There Is?: How much can we really expect from life?

Do we manufacture enthusiasm to hide our disappointment that there isn’t that more to life than our modest contributions at work, our on-again/off-again family relationships, that kitchen remodel, that upcoming vacation of beaches, monuments, and shopping, let alone the home team’s “big” win?

Is that all there is? Should we aspire to more? I explore that in my PsychologyToday.com article today. HERE is the link.

Days of Our Work Lives: An unvarnished look at work today: Part I: David's Saga. Episode 14: The Marriage

Days of Our Work Lives

Part I: David's Saga

Episode 14

The Marriage

In the previous episode, David and Susan settled into life in Sage River, doing their jobs remotely. Less stressed, they were able to work on their parenting skills.

Next, they turned to their marriage. Sitting by the fire, Susan began. "You know, we've become more like roommates than anything else."

"I just care more about work than you do. We only have a certain number of heartbeats. I believe life is best-led when we spend as many of them as possible contributing, being productive."

"That's just too Calvinist for me. I need to leave room for pleasure. If I work nonstop like you, I'll burn out."

"I did have two heart attacks, you'll recall."

"Well, shouldn't that have been a wake-up call?"

"It was, for a couple weeks, but then you somehow forget. Or you think, "Better a short but very productive life than a long and happy but less contributory one. I mean, I could be happy spending all day hiking with the dog, watching comedies, eating, having sex..."

"That's one thing we don't have."

"I don't know if it's just that my sex drive is lower than yours or that I'd simply rather be working."

"That scares me, David."

"Whatever the reason, that's who I am. You know it, I know it. We've tried everything: positions, fantasies, how-to books, toys, porn, sex therapist: 'Communicate your needs better, make date nights, light candles.' Same advice you get in Redbook but none of it works for us. Remember when we walked out of the therapist's office, you said, "For our 150 bucks, we'd probably get more benefit from retail therapy?"

"So what do we do?"

"What we are doing: accepting each other as-is. I've read a ton that says that mismatched sex drive is the most difficult sex problem to cure. We've worked hard at it for a decade and all it has done is made our relationship worse. I think we're wisest to follow The Serenity Prayer: accept what you can't change."

"That is a tough one to accept, David."

"Is there really only one definition of marriage? One definition of love?... Susan, do you love me?"

"I'm not sure what love is anymore."

"You know I love you and what that means for me is that I'm always glad to see you, be around you, do the things we enjoy doing together. And we have the memories of our years together. It gives our relationship substance. Isn't that enough?"

After a long silence, Susan changed the topic to common ground. "So, Mr. Only-So-Many Heartbeats, now that we're settled in Sage Valley, shouldn't we be doing some volunteer work?"

"Good point but what would make the biggest difference?"

HERE is the next episode.

Should You Try to Change Someone?

We all get frustrated with people and thus are tempted to try to change them.

Unfortunately, the odds are poor of being successful in doing so. Much of who we are is hard-wired or the result of early experiences.

Even shrinks, spending years with patients, have a hard time fundamentally changing them. Patients are usually satisfied with tweaks around the edges and learning to accept their basic selves for who they are.

If therapists, highly trained at that sort of thing, find it difficult to fundamentally change people, is it not hubristic of us as bosses, co-workers, romantic partners, and friends to think we can?

I am reminded of a study that looked at 92 couples on the brink of divorce. They were assigned at random to one of two types of relationship counseling. One group's therapists tried to get the people to change. The other group's therapists tried to get them to accept each other as they are. Six months later, most of the couples in the "change each other" group had filed for divorce. Most of those in the "accept each other" group chose to stay together.

So next time, you think about trying to change someone, think twice. Examples: 

If you're a boss with a supervisee that frustrates you, after a brief attempt to try to improve them, you may be wise to get them transferred or to let them go, offering to help them find a better-suited position. 

Try to focus on your romantic partner's good qualities and accept that their bad ones are unlikely to fundamentally change in the near future. If that's not acceptable to you, after a brief attempt at remediating the person (and yourself?) it may be wise to cut your losses. 

By the way, that's one of the many hidden liabilities of having children: you can't cut and run. 

We Are All So Damn Fallible

If something's excellent, there's nothing to fix. So I tend to look for problems.

In recent years, I've trained my sights on the U.S. government's failings:

• Going into such great debt that we've mortgaged our children's future, with China the main bank that will decide whether to modify our loan or leave us hanging.
• How despite repeatedly being told, the government let Bernie Madoff rip off billions of dollars from people. How despite being repeatedly told of dangerous conditions in a peanut processing plant, the warnings were ignored. How despite the Christmas bombers' father credibly warning the CIA about his son, he was allowed to fly--while the government spends a fortune to screen all of us at airports. The most recent report said that despite spending billions, we are utterly vulnerable to terrorist attacks, especially biological.
• The major federal "entitlement" programs: Social Security and Medicare teeter on the brink of bankruptcy despite ever increasing funding from us.
• Since the Korean War more than a half century ago, the big mighty U.S. military has a poor won-loss record let alone cost-benefit record: Viet Nam, Iraq, Afghanistan. We can't even capture the person we say is our highest priority: Osama Bin Ladin.
• Our public schools, despite our spending ever more, near the world's top in per capita spending, are near the bottom in international comparisons of student achievement. The main way we seem to be able to reduce the racial achievement gap is by stunting Whites' and Asians' achievement rather than by improving Blacks' and Latinos'.

Yet my friend Warren Farrell made an on-point criticism of me: He urged me to come to grips with the fallibility of the human condition--that there is ample fallibility not just in government but in nonprofits and for-profits, as well as, of course, in individuals. I also need to remind myself that the world simply hasn't been around long enough for us to solve many problems: for example, cancer, slow learners, and getting the warrior to resolve conflict peacefully.

I'm trying to be more accepting of the human condition.