Talk is Cheap...
I’ve decided to start posting some personal musings in this space, because I’ve wanted to work on starting a blog for ages now and I’m comfortable with the audience here reading what I expect I’ll be putting out. The level of candor I could feel comfortable sharing with my audience has been the biggest reason, I think, why I haven’t started one already. Fortunately, I was recently inspired to create a specific group on my Facebook page called “Freethinkers” which I’d be comfortable posting links and thoughts I would rather not expose to the varied responses of the rest of my FB network. The success of this in helping me feel much less inhibited on that social network made me realize I could use a simiilar tactic with the blog idea. All I’d need was a core group of people with whom I can be candid.. and this is it, for me.
For one thing, I don’t need to worry about people feeling awkward, jumping to conclusions, needing explanations or just shutting off whenever I talk about being a cleft palate patient. And for another thing, a great deal of my thinking goes toward working on strategies to deal with my own depression and issues with procrastination. Often I feel embarrassed to reveal to others just how much thought I put into it, but I feel that this crowd will understand. I think there might be about as much stigma attached to talking about struggles with mental health issues as there is to cleft palate, and some of it is overlapping in terms of the assumptions people make. Anyway… what follows is just what has been on my mind lately.In my ongoing search for practically useful inspiration, I recently started the book The Power of Self-Confidence by Brian Tracy. I was turned onto it by a random page I found about four simple steps Navy SEALS supposedly use to “conquer fear” (http://qz.com/450517/us-navy-seals-conquer-fear-using-four-simple-steps/). The steps are as follows:1. Goal Setting2. Mental Rehearsal3. Self-talk4. Arousal control.Item #1 seemed to line up with the thinking of Viktor Frankl and Stephen Covey about the need to “see something positive in the future (in the near future, if possible) that serves as an anchor to your inner balance”, as the website explains it. Item #2 isn’t something I’d experimented much, but I had read and become interested in the topic via the same book the article mentioned, The Power of Habit by Charles Duhig. Item #3 seemed to be the stuff of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, which I’ve experimented with but not with much success. It is, however, a very interesting — and scientifically validated — body of work. As for Item #4, I’d experienced some comparable effects connected to my efforts at meditation.It was Item #3 that mentioned The Power of Self Confidence and, deciding self-talk was something I could really do to learn better and with some degree of trust for the site’s book recommendations after it mentioned The Power Of Habit, I checked it out from the Navy General Library Program. The Power of Self-Confidence is a boldly optimistic book (the subtitle is “Become Unstoppable, Irresistible, and Unafraid in Every Area of Your Life”). However, given the subject matter, I allowed that the tone might be appropriate and I read on.It wasn’t long before the book started covering familiar territory from The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey, asserting that one needed to first identify and commit to a set of values before attempting to construct an edifice self-confidence. I’ve tried doing this many times over the years in many different ways, and at this point my feelings on the matter were “easier said than done.” This book, however, pleasantly surprised me by including a clarification on what values are which seemed to shed new light on the issue:“When you select a value, if it’s to be one of your values at all, it becomes inviolable. Either it is a fixed value and you live every part of your life consistent with it, or it is not one of your values.” Having been jaded so many times by pretending to commit to a set of values I had just painstakingly articulated — and then clearly forgetting to focus on those values within a week — I know that you can’t just pick a value and commit to it tomorrow and every day afterward for the rest of your life. It’s just not realistic. However, perhaps this benchmark for what a true value is could help me identify values that I do hold, that I really do adhere to — at least indirectly — all of the time. And then once I knew what they were, maybe I could work to clarify them and thus strengthen my relationship with them.So with this line of thinking in mind, I began to compile a list of values which I may actually hold. The first few, which I hold and am happy to hold, are:*Hope — I don’t believe in giving it up, ever. You can always choose your response to what happens to you, even if that change is just a change in attitude. This goes back to having something to hope for which you can connect to the present moment.*Innovation — This is really an extension of having hope. It means I believe there are far more possibilities than there are impossibilities in any situation, and that a solution can be found to nearly any problem if you just employ creativity and vision in your thinking.*Non-judgment — I’m not sure what a better term for this is. It means giving people the benefit of a doubt and not (or at least trying not) to judge them at face value. “Never judge someone before you’ve walked a mile in their moccasins,” “Judge not, lest ye be judged,” all that. This certainly comes from my being a cleft patient growing up, and maybe my Christian upbringing a little as well. I would call it "empathy", but I've become somewhat skeptical in recent years of the extent to which you can know the mind of another human being without appreciating his or her background. "Sympathy" might be better, or "non-labelling."After this, it became a bit harder to clearly articulate things that I believed in and according to which I lived my life. I wanted to say “skepticism”, but I’m not quite sure it’s entirely something I’m proud of, to be honest. Often it seems to amount to a questioning of the value of having hope (I believe the mind is complicated enough for me to be able to say that even though I question the validity of my own hope sometimes, I’m still never without it.) I’d like to say “empirical skepticism” is one of my values, that I have a method for making the assumptions I do, but I know that it just wouldn’t be accurate at this time. Similarly, I’d like to say “assertiveness” is a value of mine, but if I were being honest the true word for it might well translate better to “stubbornness.” These are things for me to work on.There was, however, one breakthrough. Although I am somewhere between “agnostic”, “atheist” and “Eastern-influenced” in the religious realm, I do feel a desire to try and be a "good" person. I could describe my motivation in terms of my own version of the so-called “Atheist’s Wager”: if there is a God or a karmic consequence following my death, it would expect me to have depended upon my own reason and live my own life to the ethical best of my understanding. I do like to try and take causality out of the equation, though, by considering how each action could be its own reward or punishment, for good or ill. I referred to this value of mine as “honor”.“Honor” wasn’t very convincing, though, because I wasn’t really sure about my basis for distinguishing good from bad actions. What does it really matter, if there’s no guarantee of reward or punishment after death, or if being motivated to an action by its reward or punishment belittles the act anyway? It was really that “after death” that was getting me. I’ve heard it said that the present is all there really is and all we ever really need be concerned with, but it seems obvious to me that the perspectives of “past” and “future” are integral parts of our experience of the “Eternal Present Moment”. That's why I feel such a need to have hope and setting goals: it's how we interact with the universe. I really think Stephen Covey was onto something when he wrote we are “goal-striving beings”. If life doesn’t interest you, you need to set a more interesting goal for yourself and then proceed to believe in and work toward achieving it. But what good is Hope if your life is going to end, if everything you’ve ever known is someday going to just end?Covey’s answer to this in the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is to focus on your legacy. He recommends visualizing your own funeral, what you would really like people who knew you to be saying about you. Not because of the validating accolades, but as a representation of the sort of rippling effect your existence has left on the universe. If you can truly identify with a set of values, then death won’t scare you because you’ll have dedicated your life to the temporal expression of timeless natural laws. Again, finding such values has always eluded me. There was, however, one quote on my list of values that grew more and more interesting the more I thought about what it might really represent. Just three words: “Talk is Cheap.” In a way, it was skepticism toward my own tendency to pretend to commit to something and then not follow through. But if you asked me at any given point in that process, I would always agree that talk is cheap and what I really needed was to put my money where my mouth is. I wouldn't be able to be so specific with “skepticism” or “honor”.And then it occurred to me to consider the problem from the lens of Gandhi’s famous quote about happiness: “Happiness is when what you think, what you say and what you do are in harmony.” Thoughts, words, actions. That’s what “talk is cheap” is about. But happiness isn’t the value under consideration — it’s integrity. Happiness, presumably, could be the byproduct of such a thing.So, “honor” is replaced by “integrity” on my list, and I feel I may have discovered a powerful truth about what’s important to me. I want to be someone whose word is to be believed and who tries his best at what he sets out to do. There’s more, though:To backtrack a bit, the philosopher Kant once proposed a benchmark to tell “good” from “evil” actions called the Categorical Imperative. Basically, it asks what the world would be like if everyone acted in the manner that you were about to act yourself. It occurred to me that this is another way of consdering your legacy / impact on the world, and that it’s already at work while you’re alive. There are consequences to everything you do that ripple outward. Singly they could be misinterpreted, but collectively they give a true picture of what your priorities and principles are — who you are.Your integrity, that harmonious and/or chaotic interplay between your thoughts, words, and actions, is your style of responding to the stimuli in your life. Thinking in terms of the Categorical Imperative could perhaps help us hone better principles that are better-suited to spreading in the world. This is where I’m at, now — in my thoughts at least, and now my words. There is certainly some overlap between the three components: We do our thinking much in terms of words, expectations and promises to ourselves, we use words to put our thoughts together, and speaking, writing or just creating a space in which to thinking constitutes an action in itself. Actions and the habits they form tend to influence thoughts, just as thoughts lead to words and actions.One disturbing habit of mine which I would like to reduce is to talk about new goals, strategies and ideas to others soon after I come up with them but before much actual work or application has taken place. I’ve read this described as a form of “cheating” in which you claim a mental reward from the sharing of your goal before you’ve done the actual work of achieving. It recommends keeping such things quiet until you know you are committed to making them a reality.Well, I’m choosing to share these ideas because writing is also an action, and keeping a blog of some sort is an action which I’ve been mentally telling myself I mean to do for years now. And now I’ve come full circle, which seems like an appropriate turn of phrase. I envision having integrity between thoughts, feelings and actions to be a bit like achieving a geometrical symmetry within a state of flow. If "integrity" does represent the temporal expression of a timeless natural law, then maybe it's not out of place to recall the old philosophical image of the nature of God: a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.
For one thing, I don’t need to worry about people feeling awkward, jumping to conclusions, needing explanations or just shutting off whenever I talk about being a cleft palate patient. And for another thing, a great deal of my thinking goes toward working on strategies to deal with my own depression and issues with procrastination. Often I feel embarrassed to reveal to others just how much thought I put into it, but I feel that this crowd will understand. I think there might be about as much stigma attached to talking about struggles with mental health issues as there is to cleft palate, and some of it is overlapping in terms of the assumptions people make. Anyway… what follows is just what has been on my mind lately.In my ongoing search for practically useful inspiration, I recently started the book The Power of Self-Confidence by Brian Tracy. I was turned onto it by a random page I found about four simple steps Navy SEALS supposedly use to “conquer fear” (http://qz.com/450517/us-navy-seals-conquer-fear-using-four-simple-steps/). The steps are as follows:1. Goal Setting2. Mental Rehearsal3. Self-talk4. Arousal control.Item #1 seemed to line up with the thinking of Viktor Frankl and Stephen Covey about the need to “see something positive in the future (in the near future, if possible) that serves as an anchor to your inner balance”, as the website explains it. Item #2 isn’t something I’d experimented much, but I had read and become interested in the topic via the same book the article mentioned, The Power of Habit by Charles Duhig. Item #3 seemed to be the stuff of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, which I’ve experimented with but not with much success. It is, however, a very interesting — and scientifically validated — body of work. As for Item #4, I’d experienced some comparable effects connected to my efforts at meditation.It was Item #3 that mentioned The Power of Self Confidence and, deciding self-talk was something I could really do to learn better and with some degree of trust for the site’s book recommendations after it mentioned The Power Of Habit, I checked it out from the Navy General Library Program. The Power of Self-Confidence is a boldly optimistic book (the subtitle is “Become Unstoppable, Irresistible, and Unafraid in Every Area of Your Life”). However, given the subject matter, I allowed that the tone might be appropriate and I read on.It wasn’t long before the book started covering familiar territory from The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey, asserting that one needed to first identify and commit to a set of values before attempting to construct an edifice self-confidence. I’ve tried doing this many times over the years in many different ways, and at this point my feelings on the matter were “easier said than done.” This book, however, pleasantly surprised me by including a clarification on what values are which seemed to shed new light on the issue:“When you select a value, if it’s to be one of your values at all, it becomes inviolable. Either it is a fixed value and you live every part of your life consistent with it, or it is not one of your values.” Having been jaded so many times by pretending to commit to a set of values I had just painstakingly articulated — and then clearly forgetting to focus on those values within a week — I know that you can’t just pick a value and commit to it tomorrow and every day afterward for the rest of your life. It’s just not realistic. However, perhaps this benchmark for what a true value is could help me identify values that I do hold, that I really do adhere to — at least indirectly — all of the time. And then once I knew what they were, maybe I could work to clarify them and thus strengthen my relationship with them.So with this line of thinking in mind, I began to compile a list of values which I may actually hold. The first few, which I hold and am happy to hold, are:*Hope — I don’t believe in giving it up, ever. You can always choose your response to what happens to you, even if that change is just a change in attitude. This goes back to having something to hope for which you can connect to the present moment.*Innovation — This is really an extension of having hope. It means I believe there are far more possibilities than there are impossibilities in any situation, and that a solution can be found to nearly any problem if you just employ creativity and vision in your thinking.*Non-judgment — I’m not sure what a better term for this is. It means giving people the benefit of a doubt and not (or at least trying not) to judge them at face value. “Never judge someone before you’ve walked a mile in their moccasins,” “Judge not, lest ye be judged,” all that. This certainly comes from my being a cleft patient growing up, and maybe my Christian upbringing a little as well. I would call it "empathy", but I've become somewhat skeptical in recent years of the extent to which you can know the mind of another human being without appreciating his or her background. "Sympathy" might be better, or "non-labelling."After this, it became a bit harder to clearly articulate things that I believed in and according to which I lived my life. I wanted to say “skepticism”, but I’m not quite sure it’s entirely something I’m proud of, to be honest. Often it seems to amount to a questioning of the value of having hope (I believe the mind is complicated enough for me to be able to say that even though I question the validity of my own hope sometimes, I’m still never without it.) I’d like to say “empirical skepticism” is one of my values, that I have a method for making the assumptions I do, but I know that it just wouldn’t be accurate at this time. Similarly, I’d like to say “assertiveness” is a value of mine, but if I were being honest the true word for it might well translate better to “stubbornness.” These are things for me to work on.There was, however, one breakthrough. Although I am somewhere between “agnostic”, “atheist” and “Eastern-influenced” in the religious realm, I do feel a desire to try and be a "good" person. I could describe my motivation in terms of my own version of the so-called “Atheist’s Wager”: if there is a God or a karmic consequence following my death, it would expect me to have depended upon my own reason and live my own life to the ethical best of my understanding. I do like to try and take causality out of the equation, though, by considering how each action could be its own reward or punishment, for good or ill. I referred to this value of mine as “honor”.“Honor” wasn’t very convincing, though, because I wasn’t really sure about my basis for distinguishing good from bad actions. What does it really matter, if there’s no guarantee of reward or punishment after death, or if being motivated to an action by its reward or punishment belittles the act anyway? It was really that “after death” that was getting me. I’ve heard it said that the present is all there really is and all we ever really need be concerned with, but it seems obvious to me that the perspectives of “past” and “future” are integral parts of our experience of the “Eternal Present Moment”. That's why I feel such a need to have hope and setting goals: it's how we interact with the universe. I really think Stephen Covey was onto something when he wrote we are “goal-striving beings”. If life doesn’t interest you, you need to set a more interesting goal for yourself and then proceed to believe in and work toward achieving it. But what good is Hope if your life is going to end, if everything you’ve ever known is someday going to just end?Covey’s answer to this in the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is to focus on your legacy. He recommends visualizing your own funeral, what you would really like people who knew you to be saying about you. Not because of the validating accolades, but as a representation of the sort of rippling effect your existence has left on the universe. If you can truly identify with a set of values, then death won’t scare you because you’ll have dedicated your life to the temporal expression of timeless natural laws. Again, finding such values has always eluded me. There was, however, one quote on my list of values that grew more and more interesting the more I thought about what it might really represent. Just three words: “Talk is Cheap.” In a way, it was skepticism toward my own tendency to pretend to commit to something and then not follow through. But if you asked me at any given point in that process, I would always agree that talk is cheap and what I really needed was to put my money where my mouth is. I wouldn't be able to be so specific with “skepticism” or “honor”.And then it occurred to me to consider the problem from the lens of Gandhi’s famous quote about happiness: “Happiness is when what you think, what you say and what you do are in harmony.” Thoughts, words, actions. That’s what “talk is cheap” is about. But happiness isn’t the value under consideration — it’s integrity. Happiness, presumably, could be the byproduct of such a thing.So, “honor” is replaced by “integrity” on my list, and I feel I may have discovered a powerful truth about what’s important to me. I want to be someone whose word is to be believed and who tries his best at what he sets out to do. There’s more, though:To backtrack a bit, the philosopher Kant once proposed a benchmark to tell “good” from “evil” actions called the Categorical Imperative. Basically, it asks what the world would be like if everyone acted in the manner that you were about to act yourself. It occurred to me that this is another way of consdering your legacy / impact on the world, and that it’s already at work while you’re alive. There are consequences to everything you do that ripple outward. Singly they could be misinterpreted, but collectively they give a true picture of what your priorities and principles are — who you are.Your integrity, that harmonious and/or chaotic interplay between your thoughts, words, and actions, is your style of responding to the stimuli in your life. Thinking in terms of the Categorical Imperative could perhaps help us hone better principles that are better-suited to spreading in the world. This is where I’m at, now — in my thoughts at least, and now my words. There is certainly some overlap between the three components: We do our thinking much in terms of words, expectations and promises to ourselves, we use words to put our thoughts together, and speaking, writing or just creating a space in which to thinking constitutes an action in itself. Actions and the habits they form tend to influence thoughts, just as thoughts lead to words and actions.One disturbing habit of mine which I would like to reduce is to talk about new goals, strategies and ideas to others soon after I come up with them but before much actual work or application has taken place. I’ve read this described as a form of “cheating” in which you claim a mental reward from the sharing of your goal before you’ve done the actual work of achieving. It recommends keeping such things quiet until you know you are committed to making them a reality.Well, I’m choosing to share these ideas because writing is also an action, and keeping a blog of some sort is an action which I’ve been mentally telling myself I mean to do for years now. And now I’ve come full circle, which seems like an appropriate turn of phrase. I envision having integrity between thoughts, feelings and actions to be a bit like achieving a geometrical symmetry within a state of flow. If "integrity" does represent the temporal expression of a timeless natural law, then maybe it's not out of place to recall the old philosophical image of the nature of God: a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.
Replies
Hey Jon, that was an interesting read. I\'m happy to see you are fighting to achieve your goals. I faced many of the doubts you mentioned and this semester I decided to change my way of thinking in order to have positive thoughts. Sometimes, it gets really hard to keep following this new way but I am already noticing some improvements in my life. If you want to talk with someone, you can talk to me anytime. If you create a blog, leave a link so we can check it!
Thank you, Guilherme. I appreciate both the time it must have taken to read through my musings and that you got something from it. \"Fighting to achieve goals\" is pretty accurate. I\'ve been trying to focus on my habits lately. But that\'s a subject for another ramble. Best of luck with your own efforts to grow!