Author Archives: circleofpractice

The Vision Thing

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George H. W. Bush never got the vision thing, and neither did I.  All the self-improvement gurus like Covey stress the importance of “Begin with the end in mind.”  I just couldn’t seem to get a glimpse of what, if anything, my mind had in mind.

Moreover, glomming together a bunch of superlatives left me cold and unbelieving.

But at some point I tried.  And tried again.  And again.

Slowly a picture began to unfold.  Instead of asking myself what I wanted my whole life to look like, I began to ask myself what I would like just a small piece of it to look like:

  • What makes my life meaningful?
  • What do I want my family to be like?
  • What do I want my relationships with my friends and family to be like?
  • What kind of work and play do I enjoy?
  • How will I practice the ideals I value?
  • What do I want our home to look and feel like?
  • What kind of financial shape to I want to be in?

As I began to look at these smaller domains of my life, it became easier for me to describe an ideal of how I would like them to be.

But probably the most important thing I have learned about writing a vision is that it is an ongoing and never-ending process.  We change.  We grow and mature.  And as we do so will our visions.

So I review my vision nearly every day to remind myself of who I want to be and what I want my life to look like.  And if it dawns on me that the vision I’m reviewing no longer paints a picture of the life I want to live, then I revise it to paint one that does.

Your comments and questions are greatly appreciated!

Financial Health, Part 2

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So if financial health doesn’t consist of a person’s income, what does it consist of?

A household is like a little economy.  We all need food, clothing, and shelter to survive.  So a household needs an income in order to continually replenish these things by way of exchange.  Moreover, if our income exceeds the costs of those basic needs then we have a surplus that we can choose to spend on luxury items or services, save, or give away as charity.

Beyond that, our households are tied to certain cultural norms and status symbols which we consciously or unconsciously strive to meet or obtain.

I think financial health begins with mindfulness; being aware of what we are spending our money on and why.  Without this mindfulness we can be very much like the addicted gambler at the slot machine.  We buy another pair of shoes when we already have ten pair at home, the same way the gambler pulls the handle of the slot machine, both expecting happiness from the next purchase but finding none.

There is a Chinese proverb from the Tao Te Ching that speaks to this issue: He who knows enough is enough will always have enough.  In America, no matter how much we have we always seem to want more.

And more is not enough.

How can we practice mindfulness with respect to our money?  Why am I going to the store?  Do I have a list of things I need, or am I going to look for something I crave?  Are there certain things I compulsively buy whether I need them or not?  I heard of a girl in college who had 125 sweaters.

Is what I’m buying bringing lasting satisfaction, or am I only scratching an itch?

Financial Health, Part 1

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What is financial well-being?  If we’re going to have a practice to achieve financial health, then we need to know just what that is.

I think all too often we equate our financial health with our level of income.  For most of us, we go to school to go to college to earn a degree to get a good job.  As we climb the ladder at work our income becomes a measure of how successful we have been in our efforts.

But income is not a very good indicator of financial well-being.  Consider two people, Jack and Jill, who both earn incomes at the $250,000 level so talked about in the news.  What do their levels of income tell us about them?  Are they equally financially healthy?

According to Wikipedia, in 2006 1.93% of American households had incomes exceeding $250,000, compared with a median household income of about $50,000.  So they earn a high income when compared with most Americans, and are probably either professionals or business owners with a high level of status.  But beyond that what can we infer?

Suppose both are 50 years old, and that Jack has a net worth of $125,000 while Jill has a net worth of $1.25 million.  What happens to either of these persons if they were to lose their jobs tomorrow?  Jack has less than half of his former annual income available to meet expenses, while Jill has five times that same amount available.  That is, assuming they consume at their current level of income Jack would burn through all of his assets in less than half a year, while Jill could meet five years of such expenditures.

Would you expect Jack and Jill to have the same level of anxiety if both lost their jobs tomorrow?  But that is exactly what the positive psychologists are suggesting when they use a person’s income to measure the impact of money on a person’s emotional happiness.

There is little correlation between income and happiness because income, by itself, has very little meaning regarding a person’s financial health. 

I will pursue this topic further in my next post.

My Keystone Habit

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According to Charles Duhigg in The Power of Habit, a keystone habit is one that is tied directly to lots of other habits in one’s life.  Change the keystone habit, and change your life.

I’ve determined my keystone habit to be my daily planning process.  When I do this every day, I generally get my practice done and keep the main thing the main thing.  When I don’t, the crosshairs of my focus gradually move from what’s important to me, to what’s urgently pressing upon me.  And my practice goes by the wayside.

So I’ve been working hard to make this planning ritual part of my morning coffee time every day:

  1. Review my vision.
  2. Review my goals.
  3. Review my project lists.
  4. Review my calendar.
  5. Review my tasks by domain.

You’ve probably seen a list like this before.  I sometimes think I’ve read every self-help book ever written, and you could find a list like this in one of Stephen Covey’s books, or say Dennis Waitley, or David Allen.

I have struggled with every item on the list.  My step-father was and is a successful business man and a great list maker.  He always kept his To Do list prominently in the middle of his desk.  He had a list for every day, for every job, for every work crew.  He was great at getting things done.

I resisted this key insight into successful living into my thirties, and by then it was a tough habit to learn.

Life would be so much easier if only we would learn from our parents.

Your comments and questions are welcomed and encouraged!

Practicing Aerobics, Frugality, and Sustainability

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About four years ago I started riding a bike.  Gas had got up to about $3.50 per gallon, and I was (and still am) driving a Honda Pilot – a 15 mpg gas guzzler.

When I was a kid, I was riding my bike with a friend along a busy highway.  We went up from the road onto the sidewalk, but my rear tire stayed on the road and I wiped out into the right hand lane of the highway.  Fortunately there were no cars behind me and I just got scraped up.  But it scared me, and I quit riding my bike on the road.

So I wasn’t an enthusiastic biker.  My desire to save money outweighed my fear of the road.

I had a heavy duty basket put on the front of my bike, and two saddle bag baskets installed on the rear.  The saddlebags are good for lighter weight, more voluminous stuff. The front basket can haul an amazing amount of weight, at least 50 and maybe even 100 pounds.  The mitigating factor is my ability to hold it steady on the road.

At first I used the bike for short trips to the grocery.  Gradually I became more confident and began to take longer trips.  I just tried to keep the pedals moving.  I began to enjoy it.

About the only time I take the car now is if I have a passenger, I’m pressed for time, or severe weather.  Otherwise I’m biking – joyfully.

I have gradually realized many benefits from riding the bike.  I don’t just ride the bike for exercise; I’m always trying to get somewhere, either run an errand, go to work, or visit someone.

That is, I’m accomplishing transportation I would otherwise need my car for, as well as getting exercise.  And that’s nearly every day.  I mean, how often do you go a day without getting into the car?

Meditation and Emotional Affect

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Affect is that term psychologists use when the rest of us would use words like attitude, outlook, or mood – a positive or negative disposition.

How’s your affect?  For years mine was passionate, anxious, and irritable.  I complained, criticized, and always expected the worst.

But now I am seldom anxious, accept myself where I am, and expect to bless and be blessed.  What happened?

Well I saw some good therapists, gradually became more self aware, accepted who I was, and began to meditate; more or less in that order.

But what I believe has had the greatest impact on my emotional state is meditation.  For years I was on medication for anxiety.  Now my only prescription is roughly ten minutes of meditation, three times per day.

The fruit of this meditation has been equanimity.  It didn’t happen all at once.  But with regular practice over the course of maybe 60 days, noticeable changes began to take place.

Moreover the meditation itself has been a process of experimentation, observation, and modification.  As you probably know, there are a myriad of ways to meditate.  Some work better for me than others.  I’ve tried:

  1. transcendental meditation,
  2. observation of the breath,
  3. various kinds of pranayama or yogic breathing,
  4. Chanting via kriya yoga.

The last has worked best for me; surprisingly so.  If my therapist had not assigned it for homework, I never would have tried chanting.  But chanting may not work best for you.  And there are many modes of meditation I still haven’t tried.

The empirical evidence is growing of the many positive benefits of meditation.  Moreover there is also growing evidence that positive affect leads to a higher quality of life in general.

I encourage you to try some sort of meditation, and to keep trying and experimenting until you find a method that works for you.  Especially if you, like me, suspect yourself of having a negative disposition.

Practicing Self-awareness

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Perhaps the most beneficial practice in my repertoire came from a book I read many years ago, The Artist’s Way.  In the book the author, Julia Cameron, described a practice called The Morning Pages that I have more or less continued ever since.

The basic idea is to write three hand written pages of stream of consciousness first thing in the morning.  Three pages, regardless and heedless of quality; just get whatever is in your head onto the page.

By doing this day after day I made a few discoveries.

  • First it gave me some separation from myself, and enabled me to see myself from another perspective.
  • Second, if I wrote just as fast possible without thinking or critiquing, something interesting would come to the surface.
  • Third, if I continued to write past the first and second page, my unconscious mind would seem to vomit something up on the third page that might be particularly telling.

By interesting I don’t mean interesting to the world in general, but to me in particular.  Something about that process would reveal me to myself; enabled me to face, and eventually embrace, my shadow self.

I have found this to be a very powerful thing.  It is hard to look into the eyes of our shadow, or to even admit it is there.  But to see it, to accept it, and to understand the desire or fear it represents is transformative.

Moreover hopes and dreams are expressed we might otherwise dismiss as unrealistic, or impossible.  How we interact with others, but especially how we feel about others and ourselves is revealed through these morning pages.

And it’s cathartic. It seems to still the voice of the inner critic, and purge oneself of negative thoughts.

Balanced Living through Domains of Practice

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What domains of practice enable us to do is shine a light on a particular aspect of our lives.

Suppose a person did not recognize these several domains.  She might say, “There is only one domain in life, and that’s the real world.”  So what?

That “real world” might mean different things in different cultures.  In America I think it’s safe to say it means being vocationally successful.  And yet a person can be vocationally successful and one day wake up to find herself lonely, unhealthy, stressed out, and searching for meaning.

A domain serves as a kind of lens that brings into focus an area of life that might otherwise get overlooked in the highly competitive world we live in today.  If there is only the real world, it’s easy to keep doing those things that make that needle the real world measures us by go higher and higher, until one day the oil light comes on and the engine seizes.

Dividing one’s life into domains and somehow observing or measuring what’s going on there is like having the dashboard on the car to tell you whether all those systems that keep the car going are functioning properly.

I learned this the hard way.  I would usually come to realize that a certain aspect of my life wasn’t functioning properly by some catastrophic failure.

It’s like that old Fram oil commercial, “You can pay me now, or pay me later.”  It is so much more cost effective to regularly change the oil in a car than it is to wait till it dies on the road from lack of oil.

Domains of Practice

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I consider a domain to be a subset of my life experience where a certain set of rules, relationships, or skills obtain that either don’t obtain or are of diminished importance in another such subset.

I have divided my life into nine of these domains of practice: spirit, mind, body, emotion, family, society, profession, personal finance, and household.

  1. I define spirit to be those ideas and processes I associate with meaning making, purpose, and faith.
  2. By mind I mean those cognitive processes by which I come to know and understand the world.
  3. By body I mean the physical vessel that I associate with me.
  4. By emotion I mean the interface between the mind and body, and the social sphere I move in.
  5. By family I mean my immediate family of spouse & children (including step) as well as extended family of grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins.
  6. By social I mean those relationships with people beyond family members of people I know, such as friends and acquaintances, as well as those larger communities and cultures of people that I may not know that I live and work with, yet which I may influence and am influenced by.
  7. By profession I mean the means or intended means of one’s livelihood.  The skill associated with, or required by such vocation.
  8. By personal finance I mean what a household does with the money it has earned, inherited, or borrowed.
  9. By household I mean the maintenance of the living environment, the preparing of meals, and activities related to the care of children that are not directly interpersonal (that is, a conversation or letter written to a child, or a date with a child where conversation or personal interaction is the primary intent I would categorize as family).

I believe I came to recognize these nine domains because I do care about whether I am competent in each, and because I have recognized some kind of skill deficit in that domain that did not carry over from some other domain in which I was already competent.  Your list might be different from mine.

Choosing What to Practice

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This may seem like a silly post.  We practice the thing we want to be good at, right?

Well, is there anything we do we don’t want to be good at?  Consider the domains of your life, such as spirit, mind, and body; or family, friends, and community; or professional, financial, and household.

In other words, a domain of life is a kind of abstraction, where a certain set of rules, skills, or relationships apply that do not obtain in another.  There may be a certain amount of overlap, but in general the different domains require different competencies in order to be successful.

Is there any domain in which you live that you wouldn’t choose to be competent? Suppose you are an accountant, married with children.  Just to be an accountant implies a certain level of competence.  In general a person would need to go to college and earn a degree in accounting to even be considered for an accounting job placement.

But beyond that, what do we expect?  Does the person expect to continue “practicing” accounting in the sense of going above and beyond what is required for her job in order to get better at accounting?  Does she have a professional practice?

What about being married with children?  How do we get better at being a spouse, or parent?  Being married with children generally implies we live together; that we pay our bills from a pooled income; that we maintain our home together; and that we parent our kids together.  But how do we become competent at those things?  Does being a good accountant imply we will be a good spouse and a good parent?

This week we will be looking at the idea of domains of practice.