Book Review The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking by Oliver Burkeman

I recently attended a two-day workshop on developing publicity for SMEs.  The course was mainly about teaching you how to write a press release that would attract media attention and where to distribute it.  It was an excellent, practical workshop but even it was permeated with a section on positive thinking.  I am all for realistic goal setting and love quoting one of my first sales mentors that that the only thing more contagious than enthusiasm is the lack of it.  However when someone starts quoting The Secret and the pseudo-scientific Law of Attraction my bullshit monitor starts ringing alarm bells.  Rhonda Byrne, the book’s author, claims to have never studied physics or science at school, and yet when she read complex books on quantum physics she understood them perfectly because she wanted to understand them.  The wish is often father to the thought.  I studied quantum physics at Cambridge.  The desire to understand quantum physics burned within me but the reality is that the mathematics was beyond my understanding.  So I switched to economics.

Thus when Amazon recommended the The Antidote and I read in the summary that it is our constant effort to be happy is what is making us miserable I decided to buy and read the book.  My decision was reinforced that 209 of the 228 reviews were positive.

The key message from the book is that there is an alternative path to happiness and success that involves embracing failure, pessimism, insecurity, and uncertainty―the very things we spend our lives trying to avoid.  Burkeman writes well.  The book begins by demonstrating why so many of the 'Positive Thinking' schemes fail.  Burkeman then examines a diverse range of sources: Buddhism, stoicism, cognitive behavioural therapy, and doubts on the concept of the self to arrive at a philosophy that says authentic happiness is only achieved when we can confront our fears and overcome the challenges that life inevitably brings.

While a I am a great believer that nature is twice is important as nurture as fellow alumnus of Cambridge I think his study there has had major effect on Burkeman.  He studied Social and Political Sciences matriculating in 1994.  I was 30 years earlier but Cambridge still has the reputation of being the ultimate rationalist university.  The common impression that Oxford is stronger in politics and the humanities, while Cambridge is stronger in the sciences and engineering.  At Cambridge you are taught to doubt everything, and always seek rational basis for belief, particularly if it can be either be proven by experimental science or mathematics.  Free and open debate that allowed differing opinions to finally reach a conclusion was another core principle.  While he studied the “soft sciences” the Cambridge approach is definitely inculcated in this book.  The other great benefit of Cambridge is the tutorial system.  I had to write two essays a week and then defend them in an hour long session with my tutors.  Under that discipline you learn to write and to think.

My guess is that many of the reviewers have not read many books based on this approach and it is another reason for its popularity.  Unfortunately with the rise of political correctness and moral certainty by their students, universities (including Cambridge) are becoming places of censure and prohibition.  Regrettably books like The Anecdote are going to become rarer.

Book Review: Emotional Enlightenment: Managing Feelings for Success by Jane Birdsell

Each of the four Amazon customer reviews of this book gave it five stars.  I only gave it four.  Jane Birdsell has been Nursing Instructor, a Public Health Nurse, and a mother of two children. After her children started school, she obtained a Masters degree in Counselling Psychology from the University of Calgary. For 25 years, she worked as a psychologist conducting her own private counselling practice and teaching Personal Development Seminars.  Accordingly this book is written is a practical manner and for that reason I like it.

My biggest issue with the book is that it focuses on emotions and not temperament.  Chapter Two defines the Primary Emotions as Fear, Anger, Sadness and Happiness and then in Chapter Four Birdsell reverts to the six emotions of Darwin’s Biological Theory of Emotions: Fear, Surprise, Anger, Disgust, Sadness, and Happiness.  The six emotions are particularly defined in terms of facial expressions. 

I must confess I still have much difficulty with the Six Emotions/Facial Expressions model.  I have done Paul Ekman’s course, failed miserably and this week during another Emotional Intelligence course that spent 90 minutes on facial expressions failed again.  The only cheering news about this failure is the research from the Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology at the University of Glasgow, published in February 2014.  The research asked the observers to characterize the faces based on those six basic emotions, and found that anger and disgust looked very similar to the observers in the early stages, as did fear and surprise.  As the number of observations rose, people could eventually make the the distinction between the two, but when the emotion first hit, the face signals are very similar, suggesting, the researchers say, that the distinction between anger and disgust and between surprise and fear, is socially, not biologically based.  This gives me some hope.

However the same situation can give rise to different emotions.  Suppose you are driving on a winding road by the edge of a high cliff, you may be concerned about the danger of the road.  Your passenger, on the other hand, perhaps thinks about the beauty of the view. You will probably feel frightened, while your passenger may feel joy.  I would suggest that temperament is the cause of the difference.  In the case of the driver, the Doublechecker component is more dominant, while in the case of the passenger it would be the Mover or Artist component.

On the other hand the final chapters of the book are some of the most useful I have read in the area of emotional intelligence as Birdsell channels Stephen Covey by focusing on empathic listening “Seek First to Understand, Then to be Understood”.  When instead of responding to another person with advice and suggestions, Birsell says it is much better to say nothing and concentrate on walking in the other person’s shoes.  She notes that the mere act of silence is often enough to lift the speaker out of his or her self-inflicted misery.  Also instead of reacting with recommendations, it is much better ask “feeling” questions or make sympathetic statements such as that must have been overwhelming.

Another part of the book I really enjoyed were the cartoons at the beginning of each chapter.  They are easily the best collection of Emotional Intelligence cartoons ever made.  They were worth the price of the book alone.

The True Colours of Emotional Intelligence

 

I recently came across this article: When it comes to emotional intelligence, are you red, blue, green or orange?  At the CIPS Annual Conference in London, both Andrew Newnham, group procurement director at ITV, and Elinor Williams, head of marketing procurement at Marks & Spencer described how they people according to their colour and adjusted their relationship approach.

What I found particularly amusing in the article was the total inconsistency in the profiling methodology.  Newnham classified people as predominantly red, blue, green or orange. Reds are task driven, competitive, and quite loud.  If you are blue you like relationships, you care about people.  If you are green you tend to be a thinker and like analysing data. If orange: you are all about creativity.  Williams said M&S also categorised people by colour, either as red, meaning results driven; yellow, about ideas and vision; green, concerned with the team; and blue, all about logic and analysis.  While the red box is the same, blue and green have switched their positions and yellow has replaced orange.

Don’t get me wrong colour is a terrific clue to understanding the core emotional drives of people.  Each of the seven Humm components is associated with a dominant colour. This is reflected in dress, discussions about the house or office, and in the colour of their car.  You can see the seven colours on the Practical Emotional Intelligence logo.  Movers prefer yellow, Hustlers red and gold, Politicians blue, Double-checkers brown, and Normals liked black, white, and grey. The two most introverted components, the Artist and the Engineer like purple and green respectively.

There is famous joke about the guy who sold fishing tackle. I asked him, “My God, they’re purple and green. Do fish really take these lures?” And he said, “Mister, I don’t sell to fish.”

The joke is good but the subtext is even more interesting.  When you think about it, of all the sports fishing is perhaps the one that most appeals to the introvert; hence you would expect the most popular lure colours to be purple and green.

There is an emotional choice to colour and this explains why McDonalds has yellow arches, Donald Trump nearly always wears red ties, lawyers wear white shirts and grey suits, and large companies often have blue logos.

The Emotional Intelligence of the German People

My wife and I recently spent a week in Berlin as part of extended 5 week holiday in Europe.

Berlin recently over took Rome to became the third most visited city in Europe after Paris and London.  The whole history of Berlin is fascinating but I was quite struck how the Germans are facing their past Nazi history.

The most revealing location is the Topography of Terror museum which is about the rise and actions of the Nazis.  The museum is located on site of buildings which during the Nazi regime from 1933 to 1945 were the headquarters of the Gestapo and the SS.  The new museum was finally opened in 2010 on the 65^th anniversary of the end of WWII.  There is a permanent exhibition area inside which focuses on the central institutions of the SS and police during the “Third Reich” and the crimes that they committed throughout Europe. With the help of mostly photographic material on a “ribbon of panels” and documents (facsimiles) presented at subject-oriented lecterns, visitors are led through the major themes of the exhibition’s five main segments: The National Socialist Takeover of Power (I); Institutions of Terror (SS and Police) (II); Terror, Persecution and Extermination on Reich Territory (III); SS and Reich Security Main Office in the Occupied Countries (IV); and The End of the War and the Postwar Era (V). 

There is also an temporary exhibition trench which is currently showing “Berlin 1933–1945: Between Propaganda and Terror” and addresses National Socialist policy in Berlin and its consequences for the city and its population. It shows how the National Socialists were able to gain a foothold in “red” Berlin and gradually establish the city as the political center of its leadership. The main chapters of the exhibition are arranged in different colors in a trench along the exposed segments of a cellar wall and provide information about: Berlin in the Weimar Republic (I), Establishing the Führer’s Dictatorship (II), Berlin and the “People’s Community” (III), Wartime in Berlin 1939–1945 (IV); and Berlin and the Consequences of the Nazi Regime (V).

I am not a trained historian but credit to the Germans, it looked like nothing was being held back and there are multiple school tours underway.  The story line is that the German people fell under the spell of a brilliant psychopath who manipulated his way into power, ruthlessly used it to obliterate any opposition and then ruined the country.  It is up to the German People and Government to ensure that they do not allow such an event to happen again.  Confronting your sick emotional past openly and then taking steps to ensure it is not repeated to me is true emotional intelligence.

We saw several more examples of this emotional self control in Berlin.  A wonderful example is the brilliant Norman Foster Dome on the top of the Reichstag building.  It is transparent to reflect that government needs to be transparent.  The politicians debating in the Bundestag can also look up and see the people walking around above them.  The idea is that the politicians need to realise it is the people who are on top in a democracy not them.

During the summer there is light & sound show next Reichstag that also is worth seeing and again reinforces the messages that it is important that government must be transparent and the people must not allow a psychopath to gain control ever again.

If you are fan of Homeland Series 5 has just started and not only is it partially set in Berlin but also is dealing with similar themes. 

If you want to read my travel blog about Berlin go here.

Recognising the Type A personality

I recently came across this blog about understanding the Type A personality by Elizabeth Scott, a prolific blogger and author on Stress Management. 

According to the blog there are four behavioural characteristics of Type A Behaviour.

• Time Urgency and Impatience
• Free-Floating Hostility or Aggressiveness
• Competitiveness
• Strong Achievement-Orientation

In addition the blog says there four physical characteristics that often accompany TAB:

• Facial Tension (Tight Lips, Clenched Jaw, Etc.)
• Tongue Clicking or Teeth Grinding
• Dark Circles Under Eyes
• Facial Sweating (On Forehead or Upper Lip)

If you look at the first list and know the Humm-Wadsworth components you quickly realise the congruency between a Type A personality and the Politician or P component.  High Ps are driven by the desire to win and are competitive, assertive and impatient.  However recognising a Type A as described in the blog is fraught with issues.  To use physical characteristics as suggested in the blog is really risky.  Constitutional psychology developed in the 1940s, which held that the size and shape of a person's body indicated intelligence, moral worth and future achievement has been discredited.  Dark Circles under the eyes can simply be due to fatigue or aging.  Facial sweating can be caused by being hot or nervous.  Teeth grinding can be due to crooked teeth or sleep apnoea.

However there are more useful clues that can be used to recognise Type A people and they can be summed up by the acronym TOPDOG which stands for Talk-Organisation-Position-Dress-Office-Gambit.  This is a simple framework you use when you first meet someone. First, Talk. What a person says and how it is said are major clues to a person’s temperament.  Typically Type A/Politicians are egotistic and refer themselves constantly.  “I did this, I like that, etc.”  They suffer from I-strain.  They are good with words and articulate and use audio words like listen and hear. 

“What do you do for a living?” would have to be one of the most common conversation starters — and with justification, for the decisions a person makes about the career and organisation can be very revealing about his or her personality. Working at a McDonald’s is very different from working at a bank, which is different again from a firm of lawyers. Even within an industry there can be major differences in the corporate personality and, on the whole, people will tend to work for an organisation that fits their personality. How do you work out the personality of an organisation? Simple, you just need to look at the cover of the annual report, which for many organisations is on their website, typically under investor relations.  Type A people like to work in large organisations, particularly those where the employees wear uniforms. 

Next consider the position of the person you are going to meet.  If the position requires the holder to make decisions, be a team leader and be persuasive it likely that person is a Type A/Politician.  Most managers have a high P component.

Dress and general appearance are key signals of the personality.  Shakespeare said, “The apparel oft proclaims the man” or, the modern equivalent, “I dress to make a statement about myself”.  The dress of the Politician is conservative and blue is their favourite colour.  Maggie Thatcher always wore a blue dress, conservative politicians nearly always wear blue ties.

It is the offices of the aggressive, assertive people which give them away. It is often in the most dominant position in the building and larger than the surrounding offices. Even if the offices are the same size you will see status symbols such as name plates, degrees and certificates on the walls, pictures with famous people and the desk in a dominant position.

Finally, consider the gambit. I have taken this term from the game of chess, where it is used to describe the opening moves. In a similar fashion someone may keep you waiting for a meeting or they might be punctual.  I agree that Type A people are impatient and hate to wait in lines.  They hate wasting their own time but are indifferent to wasting the time of others.  Consequently they are generally the last to arrive at a meeting.  Another clue is how soon he or she first uses your first name.  Type A/Politicians are typically late, do not apologise, and then will address you formally and take some time before using your given name.  They are working out your status.  Another clue is their business cards.  Just as their offices are festooned with qualifications, so are their business cards.