This is just a smattering of Social Work prn posts that have gone up in the last month or so. Enjoy. ;}

Social Work and the Power of Belief
My usual routine, most Tuesdays and Thursdays, is to wake up at 5:30. I stumble through finding clothes and brushing my teeth, grab some small breakfast, take my vitamins, pin up my hair and go to the gym where I CrossFit five days a week. When I get done, I’m woozy and exhausted—but by the time I get home I’m starting to get my brain and my energy back. I wash the grit off my hands and sit down at my computer—still relatively filthy from the mats—and post my Social NetWorker entry for the morning. (Read more…)

Hunting That Elusive Internal Motivation
I’ve told you about CrossFit, and I’ve told you about my sometimes-favorite strategy for personal change (that is, gettin’ coached!). There were great allegories for social work there, but there’s an obvious and important aspect that I didn’t mention: The coach can’t always be there. (Read more…)

Authenticity and Better Business in Social Work
I learned early on that in order to be a good businessperson, I had to pretend to be someone other than myself. I had to pretend to be “big business”—or at least “bigger business”. I had to stay aloof and withdrawn from my clients, so they would know I was “professional”. I had to use words like “we” and “us” to talk about my company (even though I was a one-man band, back then). And no personality—not in the business world! I had to be slick and sere and professional at all junctures. At networking functions, I had to have a canned approach (as a response to everyone else’s canned approach) and there wasn’t going to be any of this banter about issues unrelated to business. (Read more…)

Mental Clarity and the Power of Now
I’m four or five chapters into Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now, a book that seems to have temporarily rescued me from myself. Ever get that voice going in your head? The one that won’t shut up? (Note: I do realize that I’m writing about the voices I hear in my head to an array of mental health professionals. No, this does not bother me. Well, at least until I hit “publish”...!) (Read more…)

The Social Work “In”: Create a Positive Environment for Ideas
When you’re running a business, you want lots of ideas. Every new idea is an alternative option you can take advantage of to make everything better, so the more options, the better. You want to create a positive environment for new ideas and you want to engender a mindset in yourself that takes advantage of new ideas when they float through your head—instead of rejecting them without really thinking about them. I think many of us are actually conditioned to this kind of instant rejection. We’re so used to our lives as they are, we often fail to notice subtle opportunities to change our lives dramatically because we’re simply not expecting to see them. (Read more…)

Fear, Listening and Opportunity in Social Work
I was inspired to riff on Bob’s post yesterday when I read the following: “One of the most common reasons is that they don’t want people to talk about them because they are afraid of what they might hear.” He’s right, folks—it is too late. Everyone you make an impression on (good or bad!) has an opinion of you that they’re reasonably likely to share whether you see them do it or not. The great part of this is that you, as social workers, and every individual and company under the sun have the resource you need to change all your word of mouth for the better: Your Ability To Listen. (Read more…)

At the same time…

You have a personal responsibility—to yourself, as a human being—to be a positive customer. I do, too. Especially considering the state of business in this day and age, you are going to encounter businesses that treat you unfairly, or make glaring mistakes, or leave you feeling mistreated, feeling that your money was ill-spent. It’s going to happen. Make peace with it NOW.

Recognizing that you’ve had a bad experience does not give you leave to be difficult, or hateful, or… well, a whiny bitch. (I’m allowed to curse. I’ve been that whiny bitch.) It doesn’t give you the right to trample someone’s time—not the salesperson, not the customer service representative, and no, not even the CEO.

You do have the right, as a paying customer, to voice your concerns and tell the company about your experience. But if you don’t approach it constructively, everyone loses. And ruining someone’s day because you’re grouchy doesn’t solve the problem.

I am speaking to you as the consumer: You are in an extremely unique position to see everything a company is doing wrong. You must use your powers for good. Help them—don’t screw with them. There’s a very good chance that it’s all a mistake, and they didn’t even realize there was a problem. They can learn from their interaction with you. Don’t do something that inclines them to dismiss it: “Just another obnoxious customer we’d rather not have anyway!”

And if it isn’t just a mistake, if they honestly are lazy or neglectful or morally deficient… wouldn’t you rather be the force that encourages positive change? You know that a negative confrontation doesn’t beget change as often as a positive one. (I know you know, deep down in your soul, even if you’re inclined towards the former.) Don’t seize the accidental opportunity to be a prick. Be a good influence. Spread faith and love everywhere you go.

Unicorns. Rainbows. Fluffy bunnies.

I’m freaking serious!

Be nice, folks.

This week began the first principle in Dale Carnegie’s book for a small group of Alt MBA students who expressed interest in taking How to Win Friends and Influence People in measured steps. Until Sunday night (and hopefully much longer!), we’ve resolved not to criticize, condemn, or complain.

I have a teeny case of the high horse here, but this is still hard for me. If you’re used to criticizing and complaining, it can be hard to give up. It can be hard to see how it could possibly benefit you to quit! In fact, it can feel a lot like you’re giving up your power to affect the world around you—after all, many of us learned directly from our parents that the best way to change other people was to harp at them. (Don’t worry. You’re not alone.)

The thing is, criticism and complaints don’t actually get you anywhere. You may feel like they’re letting you vent, getting it out of your system, or helping you work through a difficult problem—but the criticism and the complaints parts of the equation don’t get you closer to those goals. They set you back from them. Any specific negativity will do this. If you’re succeeding, it’s in spite of yourself. (Incidentally, some incredibly successful people have removed complaints from their routine, not even counting Dale.)

You know as well as I do that resolutions like this one are tough, but the effects they have on your life are amazing. You start to understand people better, and it’s easier to empathize with them. It’s easier to imagine yourself in someone else’s shoes and grok what they’re going through. It dramatically reduces the amount of negativity, conflict, and drama in your life. (You think your life is hard? Quit criticizing, quit condemning, and quit complaining. It will get ridiculously easier—almost overnight!)

I don’t care what you have to do. Bite your tongue. Use a substitute (at one time, I was partial to “bananaphone”). Replace one set of habits with another. Stand on your head, or give someone a buck, or toss a piece of chocolate into the trash every time you hear a complaint coming out of your mouth. (Or switch your 21-day no complaints bracelet to the other wrist, and start all over again.) It doesn’t matter what it takes; if you make this happen, you’ll see a great change in your life, and you won’t be all that sure you want to go back to the way things were.

What are they worth anyway, complains and criticism? They remind you that you’re feeling bad. They don’t lead you to solve the problem—the more you complain, the less you’re solving anything at all. Often, complaints make the people around you uncomfortable (depending on their intensity, and your environment) and unfettered criticism definitely makes someone somewhere feel bad—if not, you have to wonder if they’ll eventually find out, which isn’t all that enjoyable either.

Instead of criticizing, try to understand what the other person is going through. Realize that you’d probably be doing the same thing if you were them. Offer constructive suggestions, but don’t simply tell a person what she’s doing wrong. That never helps. Tell her what she’s doing right—and help her along.

Instead of complaining, build an intelligent plan to manage the thing you’d otherwise be complaining about. Make a change. Make a lot of changes! Don’t bemoan your lot—fix it. You’ll get more done in less time, and your friends will quit worrying that someday, it’ll be them you’re complaining about. Be positive, be optimistic, and be constructive. You’ll feel great about yourself, and productive, too—you’ll grow faster.

You know me, I’ll do anything in the name of conscious growth. ;}

So give it a try, will you?

There is no feeling quite like gratitude.

If you’re feeling bad, or tired, or negative, or angry, or scared, or worn down, or doomed, or deadened, the salve you’re searching for is gratitude. Hell! If you’re feeling great and want to do something neat, want to funnel your energy in an excellently positive direction, gratitude’s your man.

I participated in my first (and only) sweat lodge almost a year ago at Burning Flipside, and one of the things that stood out about my experience was the effect gratitude has on me. It was very intense emotionally, but the most intense part was the gratitude. It was also the most important part, though I didn’t know exactly why. It was an essential part of everything. Maybe it’s the life blood of the cosmos. Whatever it was, it was powerful.

I learned to generate gratitude accidentally, when I was at a Learning Strategies weekend seminar. Millicent hooked me up to a (somewhat silly) heart rate game and told me to send love to the planet. So I did. It felt surprisingly awesome. I didn’t know I could send love to something until I tried sending love to something, but that wasn’t even the best part. Sending love is neat, but an amazing side effect of sending love was discovering that I could manufacture gratitude out of nothing.

Feeling feelings on purpose instead of just reactively is a super useful tool (for dozens of reasons). With very little practice I have gotten to the point where I can be grateful for something completely random, or absolutely nothing. Sometimes I use it to encourage good behavior in my body (like remembering something useful, or having sudden inspiration, or staying particularly healthy, or doing a new feat of physical exercise), but sometimes I use it just to feel good. I’m grateful for you, universe, I say. I’m grateful to be in you / around you / you. You are freaking awesome.

Sometimes I give my unconscious a cake. Hello, unconscious dudes, I say. Here is a nice cake for you! (I have noticed in the past that the cakes I give to my unconscious dudes are always normal mainstream cakes—expensive sugarsome confectionary concoctions, the kind of thing I craved before my jihad against poison. I don’t know what this means, but feel free to psychoanalyze.) In whatever case, it’s a symbol of gratitude. (Or of bribery.)

As I got better at it, I didn’t give cakes so often anymore. I mostly just created the feeling.

I can make it very very intense. Grateful! It floods me, it’s warm and electric and extremely mellow. It tends to obliterate lesser feelings. It fills up and heals and makes better.

It’s quite worth a try!

I recommend starting with something you know you’re grateful for, and focusing on feelin’ the feelin’. Pay attention to the shape and texture of it, the expanse of it, taste and color, and remember what it feels like to feel it. Later on, you can make it happen just by remembering it and feeding it.

Go! Gratitudify.

[Note: Oddly enough, I had this all written up and ready to post sometime in the next few days before I even realized that Martin Luther King Day was coming up. Serendipity much?]

As I already mentioned, I’ve been reading Made to Stick—off and on, sometimes the hard copy but mostly listening to the audiobook in the car on long drives. It’s such a good audiobook that I often found myself pausing the recording to talk back to the narrator. Granted I spent four hours on the highway between Austin and San Antonio that day, but we had some good conversations. ;}

The other day, I listened up to ‘round page hundred and something. The title of that last section was Brown Eyes, Blue Eyes.

And so the narrator proceeded to tell me about a woman named Jane Elliott—an elementary school teacher in Iowa—faced with the task of explaining Dr. King’s death to a classroom of third graders. She helped them to understand discrimination in an extremely concrete way by dividing the students into groups—brown-eyed kids and blue-eyed kids. The first day, she announced that the brown-eyed kids were better than blue-eyed kids. The second day, she reversed it. Segregation was the rule; the “better” group sat in front and was told that they were smarter (the rest had to sit in the back). The down group had to wear collars that allowed their eye color to be identified at a distance. They were kept separate at recess. And that classroom of third graders acted accordingly: “I watched those kids turn into nasty, vicious, discriminating third-graders… it was ghastly.”

It’s a fascinating experiment for dozens of reasons, but here’s the part that stuck with me:

On the day when they were in the inferior group, students described themselves as sad, bad, stupid, and mean. “When we were down,” one boy said, his voice cracking, “it felt like everything bad was happening to us.” When they were on top, the students felt happy, good, and smart.
         Even their performance on academic tasks changed. One of the reading exercises was a phonics card pack that the kids were supposed to go through as quickly as possible. The first day, when the blue-eyed kids were on the bottom, it took them 5.5 minutes. On the second day, when they were on top, it took 2.5 minutes. “Why couldn’t you go this fast yesterday?” Elliott asked. One blue-eyed girl said, “We had those collars on…” Another student chimed in, “We couldn’t stop thinking about those collars.

There’s a much more detailed explanation of Jane Elliott’s exercise, on Wikipedia.

Now, Made to Stick includes this story because it’s an excellent example of concrete stickiness—the kind of thing you remember for the rest of your life. (Those kids did.) But I go off on a different tangent, because this is stuff we should already know but often forget: When you feel bad, you do badly. When you feel good, you rock.

It totally kneecap’d me. (Can you tell I’ve been reading tough-guy gumshoe fiction?) Of course the kids performed better when they were on top. They were sure of themselves. They were confident. They knew they were great, capable of amazing things. “Better than” translates well to “awesome across the board”. Good feelings = great work. No doubt!

And of course the down group felt rotten. Distracted. Incapable. Lesser.

The fact that the kids did their work twice as fast when they were convinced of their own greatness didn’t really surprise me, but it reminded me how important it is to keep in mind. We tear down our kids every day. Our school systems are organized based on negative possibilities (and negative consequences). We assume that kids are irresponsible trouble-makers, and (huge surprise) we get irresponsible trouble-makers. And when was the last time you went out of your way to make sure you felt good? Pleased with yourself? Proud of yourself? (I hope recently—and often.)

Confidence and certainty feel better. It’s not just about kids. Unhappiness is unproductive. Misery takes effort. It may not feel that way, being that we’ve learned it so well, but I’m starting to think it’s true. It’s not worth it. Let it go.

Remind yourself of your inherent awesomeness. (Or you can email me. I’ll remind you.) Do someone else that favor, too, and make their day.

This is difficult to write.

I started writing this Friday, and I’ve been working on it for days. This is really a dramatic change, if not a sudden one. It feels like an about-face, and it’s a little embarrassing. I’ve been thinking on it for a long time. I’m absolutely sure about it now.

Here’s what I started with: hometown negativity.

Over the last two or three years I have expressed a lot of unhappiness about Youngstown, where I lived for twelve years before moving to Austin. By then, Youngstown seemed representative of everything that was wrong with the world; dead economy, abandoned buildings, friends with unwanted pregnancies and DUIs, and people I cared about displaying careless attitudes about sex, safety and sanity. It felt like an environment feeding on itself. It felt like a bad place to be.

While I lived there, I was constantly avoiding social interaction. Everything happened at a bar, with alcohol, which is one thing, and cigarette smoke, which is another. None felt moderated: If we were getting drunk, we were getting very drunk. As a result, I spent a lot of time at home, by myself. On top of that, business felt wrong – the whole vibe felt wrong. If someone was doing good business in Youngstown, it definitely wasn’t me. Without a solution I was pretty sure I’d be closing up shop in favor of fast food job security, because who else would pay the rent on my cardboard box? Family finances were headed downhill. It was time to move to greener pastures while I still could. So I did.

The contrast between the incredibly unhealthy space I occupied in Youngstown and the overwhelmingly positive space I now occupy in Austin was unbelievable. It reinforced my certainty that Youngstown was a dangerous place to live – the environment, the influences, and many depressed, thoughtless people. To me, Youngstown was synonymous with trapped.

As you might expect, I wanted the people I loved out of that city. I wanted my friends and family to make their own decisions, but I wanted them to know where I stood: Not in Youngstown. I expressed this frequently.

As it turns out, I was kind of wrong.

Anything out there is only what we perceive it to be, but I didn’t have access to another perspective – at least, not that I knew. One fellow with whom I crossed paths had a plan, and seemed to have the funds to back it up, but he was just one possibility. There were others, I’m sure now, but I didn’t know them. They didn’t exist for me. I don’t think I realized what was going on until this year, when I started to really pay attention.

There was something happening in Youngstown back then, and it’s become much more powerful since. Something really interesting: the presence of revolutionaries!

My reality then was that Youngstown was a lower circle of hell, and irredeemable. It’s all rather shameful. Irredeemable?? Oy. Anyway, that’s the way I felt. I felt that way recently. But then I started learning about the people who are doing something positive in Youngstown, and I’ve changed my mind. I mean, really changed my mind!

This year I started hearing some crazy things out of the Mahoning Valley. Crazy, crazy things. Hearing that people were working hard, creating a new vision of the city they wanted to live in. What?? You mean you can make something what you want it to be?! Hell, I knew that! I sure never tried to apply it to a whole town. Business building is something I am really interested in, but city building? Sounded too big. Maybe impossible.

But then I started to hear all about how it was working.

I’m always a little astonished to find out what a dip I can be. Because why shouldn’t it work? Why on earth shouldn’t every single person in Youngstown be as powerful as I’ve always been so sure human beings can be? And why shouldn’t I expect them to manifest that, and make something wonderful? I don’t frickin’ know. But it’s awesome!

So, I’ve been reading Brooke Slanina’s Oakland Stage blog, and a ton of others; Brooke goes on and on about the possibility of growth in Youngstown, but there’s always this underlying thread that it’s dependent on what Youngstowners themselves are willing to do. The city needs the effort and focus of citizens to survive, and more than that, to become brilliant. All of my Youngstown negativity would still be real to me, if it weren’t for the time and attention of really real people working to make it better. Those people exist, I have discovered, and they have the intelligence and creativity and pure force of will to back their awesome ideas! Brooke hasn’t been kidding me all this time. She’s not fucking around, either.

Youngstown has been all over the national news. NPR covered the city’s plan for “shrinkage” – go ahead, laugh. It’s a great plan! John Edwards’ poverty tour, Youngstown 2010, the awesome activities of the Youngstown Business Incubator, not to mention stuff on C-Span, in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal – it’s time to pay attention! People are doing something now. They need help.

The idea of watching and not helping gives me horrible physical pain. They’re doing what I always wanted, when I was disconnected from everything, but never knew quite how to start. If I had known this was going on before the Austin Vortex drew me south, who knows what might have happened? But that was then, and this is now. And we can help now.

I have some big ideas about how I can affect Youngstown’s new energy from where I am, but most of them will take time. Some of you are still there, uncertain or struggling. You know something needs to be done, but you don’t know what to do. This is something you can do. At the absolute least, it’s time to start taking action to change the way we think about this city.

I used to tell people to leave before they no longer had a choice. But that’s not fair. It’s not fair to the city, or to the people who are working hard to make it better. And it sure as hell isn’t fair to those who might leave because they “have to”, when in staying they could make an incredible difference.

If you can stay, and make that difference… please do.

God, I understand needing to make one’s fortune elsewhere. If I had known all this would happen, I might still have gone south – many people are having a hard time making ends meet in the rust belt, and I am intimately familiar with that wavelength. You don’t have to convince me. If you’re that person – the way I was last year – then for heaven’s sake go and do what you need to do.

But some of you… some of you are doing okay. Some of you can make a real difference by staying, by getting in the loop with other Youngstown revolutionaries and making all of this work.

Whoever you are, whatever situation you’re in, I am trying to persuade you to believe in this. And now I’m going to persuade you to say something. Because it’s easy.

I’m going to tell you exactly what you can do to help.

No matter who you are or what’s going on, there are three things you can do to start helping right now, with almost no effort on your part! It doesn’t take much to get the word out, and here are some really easy ways to do it.

I know that many of you want to do something positive, but you feel stuck. Oh god do I know that feeling. But there are so many people who want to help, and who can use your help. If you are feeling stuck, or afraid, it’s okay. Email me. IM me. Comment here, and we’ll help each other. The more of us that band together to create this thing, the faster it will happen and the more amazing it will be. Youngstowners are envisioning a healthy economy, a growing city, an urban paradise – but they need people to make it happen. If that sounds as awesome to you as it does to me, then I’ve done what I set to accomplish with this first post! (That makes me so happy.)

I’m doing something from 2200 miles away. What are you waiting for?!

Ladies and gentlemen, butches and femmes, delicious blog-reading visitors of all shapes, sizes, origins and orientations: We have come full-circle.

Positivity was the first Usual Error workshop I posted publicly about, and today it is the most recent workshop I have attended—twice!! I have gone through two cycles of Usual Error presentations, give or take a few that I missed in the first round. The first set happened at the Resource Connection; the second set happened at the Human Potential Center. The ones I missed the first time around turned out to be awesome, and the ones I got to attend twice had grown and improved by my second time! It’s really obvious how organic and essential this material is, especially now that Kyeli, Sera and Pace have finished the first draft of the book. Which, I might add, Marty will be illustrating. I mean, how cool is that!?

I won’t repost my notes from the first Positivity workshop, because they’re already here! But I will post the additional notes I took this second time, because some of them are particularly fabulous—and I’m proud of how easily they came to me. I really, really love this stuff.

First things first: LOTS of people came to this workshop. It was wonderful! We sat in a huge circle and relaxed happily in the yummy Human Potential Center atmosphere.

Choice phrases of the afternoon:

• Pace described the amygdala as the “Oh-Shit Center”. The Oh-Shit Center is balanced out by saying “That makes me happy!” (When it’s true, of course.)
• We bond socially by coming together to overcome adversity, so having problems is good! How else can we grow and learn?
• “It’s sooooo muddy here!” (That one was just me.) The “Awesomesa”. The wonderful word that is “oubliette”. Is “oubliette” a she? Also, there were a bunch of Cure jokes I didn’t get. Er.

The Triad’s depth of feeling charges the entire workshop with positivity. Kyeli expresses concepts on a level that I can utterly relate to, really believing strongly in the changes she has the power to make. And Sera, while soft spoken, explains her ideas in incredibly simple, honest statements—warm, truthful, heart-filled! Pace’s indescribable enthusiasm is absolutely infectious and dude, so exciting to share and experience. The Usual Error content is one thing. But what these three ladies bring to it in their individual (and collective!) perspectives and personalities is another. This changes everything.

We talked about words. I can’t do this. I can’t make it Friday night. I have talked about this extensively before. Using these words has absolutely trapped me in the negativity of my schedule when in fact I am in complete control of ME and what I decide to do. It’s an incredible thing to realize and take hold of. Sera demonstrated the difference between doing a thing and moving past it, using Conor to illustrate board-breaking in martial arts. Conor was awesome. Standing there in the center, holding the bases of his palms together so hard his arms trembled, dutifully standing still and holding strong for the experiment! And I love this illustration. If you aim for the board, you are stopped. If you aim past the board… you go through.

Then we talked about some other things. “I’m no good at…” “I’m just not very…” Bah! In so many cases, the unconscious already knows the thing, knows how to do it right. If you give your unconscious the opening to provide that information to your conscious self, you can suddenly—miraculously—be or do that thing! And of course, the opposite will hold true, too. This also seems pertinent in cases of “That’s not like you…!”

What we tell ourselves and others has a profound effect on who we all are. Expecting the best from others may make your social experiences better in many ways!

And then there was teasing.

Why do people do this? The teasing I tend to get from my extended family (and often my mother as well) is not okay. I’m going to talk about this for awhile, and I want you to understand that I love my family—even the members thereof that I don’t really see or talk to. Even in misunderstandings, I know they love me back. But this analysis of communication is really important to me. And if one of them were to read it and understand what I’m talking about, and later connect with me just to better understand how we can communicate… that would be awesome. But this particular subject upsets me. So I’m about to get a little bit upset. So… especially if you’re one of those family members… try to get my meaning on this. Because I would really, really like that connection.

The teasing I get from Marty… is mostly okay. Marty and I have come to know one another deeply and well, and the teasing we do generally reflects that. He has earned my trust in that respect. But my family hasn’t.

My father and I connect well—he doesn’t really come into this discussion at all. The rest of my family is another story. It bums me out to talk about this, because I’d love for the case to be otherwise. The fact is that I haven’t spent that much time, cumulatively, with the rest of my family. And the teasing that happens there often oversteps reasonable boundaries by quite a bit. Interestingly enough, it seems to be mostly the male members of my mother’s side of the family… but not exclusively.

For some reason—and the Triad backed this up with the things they suggested—it does not feel like oversensitivity on my part. It does feel hurtful. It does not feel simply playful. But to be playful—is that why they do it? We have gotten so uncomfortable genuinely communicating with one another that we resort to this 24/7 “playfulness”? I have so little time with my family, we can’t even spend that small amount of time really connecting? Oh, I don’t know.

I didn’t agree so much before with the Usual Error’s take on teasing, but now I feel differently. Let us speculate hypothetically on a situation where a cousin I barely know teases my boyfriend in a way that… bothers me. Seems to have a point, but bothers me. If my cousin at that time says, Megan, I don’t know you well, but I feel protective of you, and care about your well-being—that’s why I am teasing your boyfriend—well, maybe that’s why he does it. And maybe that’s okay. I can be understanding. I can chill.

But maybe he just wants to get his jabs in. Maybe he’s been jabbed so often, you know? This teasing thing. Sure, it’s one thing if it’s just teasing—especially teasing that doesn’t piss me off or make me upset. But… what if it does? What if he’s not, without him even really understanding it? What if it steps right on over the line?

This workshop, I went around and around in my head, wondering.

It’s bad enough if his teasing is just a… a shield. For honesty that makes him uncomfortable. But it’s so much worse if he jabs and uses honesty as an excuse. And more than that, it’s even worse if he does that to his children—then his children will jab for the sake of jabbing, using honesty as an excuse, passing along those habits and reactions to their children, passing along that discomfort with communication…

Back on down the line, is it ever actually rooted in positivity? Who starts the jabbing to begin with, just feeling a bit uncomfy with expressing real feelings? Maybe! Maybe some of it! And this idea, this is only acceptable because no one has compassionate communication skills. Where does it begin? Because—in this hypothetical situation—it has perpetuated a cycle where my cousin can (hypothetically) pretend he’s protecting me while transferring old nastiness that he doesn’t even know is nasty, previously directed at him by someone who didn’t even know it was nasty… onto someone I really DO know, really do care about deeply!

No wonder it’s hard for me to connect with my family!

Hypothetically!!

If you know how to communicate, if you DO communicate… teasing REALLY IS fairly marginal. No big deal! But if you DON’T—if you don’t even KNOW HOW —Bad. Lots and lots of bad.

Are you getting this? This is a big deal to me. Tell me if you’re getting this. I’m going to move on. And, I mean, there’s not a whole lot to move on to. You’ll notice that this part, this teasing part, this was the big revelatory stretch for me. But we still do have Endings, which Tanya mentions relates to the recency effect. Remind me to look that up in Wikipedia. We talk about the hippocampus, which makes memory stick. Pace explains the hippocampus to Kyeli in terms of DRAM, which cracks me up! And then there is something about remembering the unusual set, and NLP, and a few other things…

It’s all good. Even with those alarming realizations thrown into the middle, it’s all really, really good. And that’s all I’ve got. Man, this is long. But worth it!

(Parts One and Two, if you missed them.)

You can tell when I’ve gotten excited; I write novels.

What I have to get across to you, though, is that I’m not just getting your regular run-of-the-mill excited. I’m getting these-ideas-can-really-HELP-people excited. I moved to Austin knowing that I would be joining a community of people more intensely interested in communication and understanding, more concerned about the welfare of another person, more inclined to find out exactly what’s going on in someone else’s head. But I didn’t realize at the time that I’d be putting myself in a position to learn such amazing things about myself and other people. I don’t think I had any idea what was about to happen to me. And I would never want to go back to being the person I was before—who knew and understood so little. Who knows what bridge I crossed? I’m here. And there will inevitably be more bridges.

Would you like to rephrase that more positively?

You might not even believe what a difference this makes. You might not get it until you try it. I’m just warning you now, because I didn’t quite get it either. Until I tried it.

Now, I hadn’t really bothered to try it until this point. I had read plenty of books on the subject—thinking positively, using optimism, creative visualization and all that. And it’s all good stuff, I’m a huge fan of these ideas. But the thing that has worked the best for me so far… with the least effort, in fact!... has been this one. Right here. The one I’m going to explain to you now.

It has to do with obligation.

I wrote a post about obligation not long ago. I was reading a great book by Dale Carnegie and there were just too many great intersecting ideas for me to be able to keep my mouth shut. And I’m going to go so far as to quote my own post, so that we’re clear. This is what I’m talking about:

The first thing I’ve done is implement a Usual Error technique(...): language reform! If I express obligation in any way, one of several potential helpers (including myself) may say, “Would you like to rephrase that more positively?” And immediately the landscape of my brain is changed, and I do not say “I have to do this thing… I should do this thing…” I instead say, “I want to do this thing! I would like to do this thing!” And then I find out if I really want to do it.

And sometimes I don’t do it.

But most of the time, I do do it. And when that happens, it takes on a completely different feeling, not a feeling of obligation and entrapment and inevitability, but instead this feeling of control, a feeling that I hold power over myself and my destiny and, well, my work day! Even the ickiest responsibility is transformed because I have actively made a decision to do that thing, I have decided that I want to do that thing.

This idea has actually made a really big difference in the way I feel on a day-to-day basis. I don’t know that I really expected that kind of a difference when I started. It certainly sounded like a great idea. I hoped it would change something in a positive way. And it was easy to implement, so there was no reason not to try it. It did make a difference. I am happier and calmer and less prone to upset because I feel like I do the things I want to do—I no longer feel blackmailed into being unhappy. Even when my hormones have kicked up, the last two weeks, I still mostly feel in control of who I am and what responsibilities I take on. That’s a big deal!

You can do this, too. It’s so easy to start. Just start replacing words in your everyday conversations! “Should” changes to “Want”. Must, have to, need to… it all changes to want, would like. You might find out that you don’t really want that thing, but that’s important! If you really don’t want to do it… if there is nothing indirectly causing you to want to do it… why on earth would you do it!? This can go pretty deep, and we can talk about it for ages, but think about it. Some of those things you’re dreading, you want to do them, even if the very idea of tackling them makes you cringe. There’s a reason you want to do them. If we come at it from the wanting… instead of the shoulding… we can be so much happier.

These things really do stick, especially when you’re not expecting it. For instance, when you’re balancing the books. Yes, my accounting was the last place I expected to be implementing a Usual Error tweak. I can’t tell you if it helped—I’m still short on cash. But it made me feel better. It made me feel less panicked, less driven. And that was the point. When Kyeli said that the purpose of the Positivity workshop was to teach people ow to be “obnoxiously happy”, she was not kidding. I love being obnoxiously happy!

Teasing is an interesting example of how negativity can get out of hand.

When the triad went through these points in the workshop, I didn’t get the impression that they meant the teasing section as a sub-category of positive rephrasing… but I can’t help thinking of it that way. (My brain is squirmy like that.) Much of the time teasing is just teasing, and not a big deal. But sometimes, we use teasing to say something negative that we wouldn’t get away with otherwise. And that’s not okay.

The triad’s examples were really good at showing us how teasing can really turn negative and harmful, and things like that happen all the time. Sometimes it’s better to put yourself in the other person’s shoes before you say something that’s “just teasing”. Calling it teasing doesn’t change it, in many cases—it just helps you avoid the consequences. (And not even that, a lot of the time!) So if you’re going to tease someone, come from a positive place. It’s safer, it’s happier! And there’s less scary undercurrent. I know you’re familiar with the scary undercurrent!

...And they all lived happily ever after!

We remember endings. We remember them so well that we will often forget how wonderful or difficult something has been, just because the ending might be different. Because of this we have a special trick we can pull, and you never know when it might come in handy! The trick is in controlling the end—making the end happy.

The last day of your vacation. The commute home from work. Conversations before bed. We can make them good, and they’ll be extra sticky because endings are already sticky.

I have some other things to say about endings. “Endings” was at the end of the workshop, appropriately. It’s little but it’s good. And ending the workshop—the whole series, actually, because Positivity is the last section in their setup—reminds me how good I feel about the whole thing. Which makes a kind of funny point.

This last workshop was an incredible beginning to my weekend of learning new things at SXSWi. It happened at exactly the right time for me, even though I was tired from my first day at Interactive. I was reminded that obligations and limitations are unnecessary to a human being who is powerful and limitless, and capable of doing or making whatever she wants! We give ourselves less credit than we are due. It’s not that my week sucks; it’s that my week is interesting because it’s challenging. The phrasing makes an amazing, believable difference. Openness, honesty—with others, with oneself—a diaspora of polite social fictions, canned responses, thoughts that come from Out instead of In. Our language affects our thought. And effort does not equal value! What we do becomes who we are. You’re not really pretending anymore. It all matters in wonderful ways. We can take our toxicity in hand and heal ourselves. We can do whatever the fuck we want!

Isn’t that bizarre!? And… does it make you feel as good as me? Because, wow. Someone handed me a comment sheet at some point; I wrote like a madwoman all over the thing. I feel strongly about this. I want us to really pay attention, here! These things are important. And they make me happy! I love solutions! I even love problems, when I think about them under these circumstances! Problems are so… solvable!

You can go to these workshops, too. They’re really nice. Informal, relaxing, exciting! The next set is happening at the Human Potential Center in Austin, and there’s more information here. They have a $20 sliding scale. If you’re dead broke, go anyway! They want an audience, they want feedback, and they want people to benefit from these ideas! If you can afford to send some cash their way, please, please, please do. What they’re doing is incredibly valuable to you and me and all of us. They are worth our time and they are really worth our support.

And, hell! You could even write about them in your blog. ;}

(Part One, if you missed it.)

I learned these things from three hot chicks:

Wonderful ideas energize me, and that makes me really happy!

Our amygdalas are focused on negative emotions. Did you know that? If you have any memory at all of being a lizard or a monkey or a cave chick, you remember that your amygdala took careful account of every shitty thing that happened to you—for the express purpose of avoiding it next time! That time you almost got eaten by that dinosaur? Your amygdala totally filed it away with a big red sticker. DO NOT GET EATEN BY DINOSAUR.

So it’s not terribly surprising that we hoomans tend to remember negativity. You and I who remember the bad parts and end up in a downward spiral of unhappy, we are doing something that comes naturally—but we don’t have to keep kicking ourselves for it. It’s what we all do. Human beings are just not high enough on the food chain to have discarded their excellent memory for negativity.

There is a solution! (And it’s NOT anything to do with cyclical self-punishment.) You’re not stupid, you know when something wonderful has happened to you. You know when something pleases you, you know when something has given you a good feeling. So say so! “That makes me really happy!” Well, it does! And the best part of it is, it’s incredibly contagious. If you find yourself saying it all the time, chances are the people who spend time with you will find themselves saying it, too!

Damn! Just TYPING it makes me really happy!

We are made of meat.

Yup, read it again. We are made of meat. We are not machines, we are not perfect, we are flawed, we are constantly changing, we are organic, growing creatures, and we are incredibly wonderful. Problems, negative emotions, psychological issues, physical frailties, they are a part of us. They make us what we are. Cells must die so that new cells may replace them. We must change. We must grow. So the next time you’re kicking yourself for feeling bad… for thinking the “wrong” thoughts… for having made a mistake… do you get what I’m saying? It’s okay. It’s okay to feel those things! No downward spiral is necessary. We are made of meat!

I cannot describe the wiggling, screeching glee I experience every time I remember that I am made of meat. And you are made of meat, too! We are all made of MEAT! It’s okay to be human. There’s nothing wrong with that! It’s okay if I didn’t do the precise, logically thing. I am not an entirely precise, logical person! Nobody is. If you are like me (and who knows if you are?) you too have felt the downward spiral. Something goes wrong. You feel a negative emotion. You identify your negative emotion. You are embarrassed and resentful of your negative emotion! You feel another negative emotion in relation to having felt a negative emotion. You kick yourself for this new negative emotion! And the negative emotions, oh, they grow numerous and much stronger… they outnumber us ten thousand to one! We cannot defeat them, so we join them…

Poo.

Yes! I said poo! Do not join the legions of negativity! They don’t need you! They breed like rabbits! We need you. We need you to help prove the sheer power of positive thinking. We want you. We love you and you’re important to us. Your happiness is important to us. Because what is the human race if all we do is cry and resent? Where is the thing that makes us strong? If we don’t stand together and make something better, where are we then?

G.I. Joe is so frickin’ cool.

You can’t solve a problem if you don’t know there’s a problem. You can’t solve a problem if you can’t define the problem. (Unless you get seriously lucky.) Those legions of negativity, they whisper that we are bad because we have a problem. But truthfully, we are that much closer to solving the problem, just because we know what’s going on! Dude, G.I. Joe had it down. How cheesy does it sound now? Knowing is half the battle. Duh.

I searched high and low for a video clip to link in; I couldn’t find one. YouTube would probably get sued. You think about this. Visit the Usual Error site and think about joining us at one of the workshops. I have Part Three to write… ;}

Yes.

I am finally going to tackle this behemoth, this big, beautiful leviathan! On the tenth of March, oh so long ago in each of our personal histories, the Usual Error covered my favorite subject… drum roll… Positivity!

Positivity! This great, powerful force inside each of us, this monster of increase! Positivity is my favorite subject for an insane number of reasons, and just by explaining this workshop to you, I am going to cover a great big chunk of them. But first, I’m going to tell you about the Usual Error, concept and convoy, because I really haven’t told you enough about them. I have mentioned them here exactly twice: My interesting financial preview and a much lengthier missive regarding obligation. Both were tiny pieces of the whole, but the whole is too important for me to be just skipping over. Today we discuss the whole!

The Convoy: They Who Convey!

Pace, Kyeli and Sera are a beautiful married triad in Austin. All three women give you that vibe—the one that makes you feel like a valuable human being, surrounded by other valuable human beings who care about you and support you! It’s a very safe, compassionified community feeling. And these ladies, you will discover, are geniuses of communication and problem solving. Sometimes they completely blow me away. By which I mean, their points are utterly worth your attention.

The Concept: The Usual Error

The many wonderful ideas that Pace and Kyeli and Sera have presented are gathered under one very prominent umbrella, which is the Usual Error. The Usual Error is a concept that describes how human beings as a general rule tend to assume that other people are just like them. You do it. I do it. The only person we really know and experience is the person inside our own heads, and other people at least look a little bit like we do. So why shouldn’t they be the same on the inside, too?

We love the Usual Error because it’s an error. We will spend the rest of our lives learning about those around us, because we are all so incredibly wonderful and different. (That is delicious.)

I feel that these workshops have made an amazing difference in the way I deal with people and problems. Sure, I’ve been reading like crazy, and many of the books I’ve been reading do align with these ideas. But the Usual Error series is a very particular set of lessons and the process that allows us to understand them is very different than just reading a book about a certain way of doing things. In some cases, the triad’s process alone has resulted in mnemonics that hugely assist us in remembering to apply the lessons to our lives. I can read a book six times and still be shaky about applying it if the concepts are not suggested in a way that stick. For some reason, the Usual Error really sticks. Really sticks.

You can visit the Usual Error gals at UsualError.com. For me, I am going to start writing Part Two...