emotions Archives - Page 4 of 12 - Joshua Spodek

Awareness / Blog / Freedom

Non-attachment, caring, and motivation

I'll post today's topic as a question. I've asked it of people who know more about Buddhism than me for more than ten years. No one has given me an answer I've found satisfactory. Though I put it in Buddhist terms, I hope no one gets hung up on the details of one religion or philosophy. I mean the question in a general way because his actions and philosophy, while magical, have analogies in our lives. We might not believe in Buddhism, but we don't exactly consider the concepts foreign. Some element of being detached from outcomes seems common to personal development, whether in Buddhism or in the common advice of our times "You shouldn't care so much what other people think," which I don't…

September 11, 2012

Awareness / Blog / Fitness / Tips

Too much is a problem too

I hear people talk about those who have less -- usually less materially or less opportunity -- as deserving help and compassion. With due respect to their problems, I'd like to consider another challenging situation: having too much. First let me preface the huge difference between having too little and too much: people with too much can cut back. People with limited access to resources or opportunity can't usually create them out of thin air. People with too much may not know how to cut crap out, but they can. Big difference. Walking around New York last visit, I saw people with a lot more stuff and opportunity than I saw in Asia. But I didn't see them happier. On the contrary, I saw many…

September 3, 2012

Blog / Leadership

More on power, leadership, lawlessness, justice, and amnesty

The New Yorker published a piece, "The Fairness Trap," echoing the issues I wrote on yesterday in the context of the U.S. foreclosure and Greek economic crises. In both cases, people's desire to punish people conflicted with clearly better economic solutions, according to the author. He talks about fairness, basically the same concept as justice -- reacting to emotions like outrage, indignation, and self-righteousness over agreeing on criteria to evaluate future outcomes on and trying to achieve the best one based on those criteria. A major problem with fairness, justice, outrage, indignation, self-righteousness, and the like is their subjectivity. We may personify justice as holding scales, but no scale can evaluate when an outcome or behavior is right or wrong, just or unjust, fair or…

August 25, 2012

Handling annoying requests from your superiors at work

A client wrote with a challenge. He does sales on commission. Some assistant managers, also on commission, ask him to do small tasks that take him off the sales floor, helping their chances for commissions at his expense. He mostly acquiesces to their requests. On the occasions he declined, he "lashed out," showing intense emotions coworkers interpreted as mood swings. His question touches on what happen in many places where people lash out when they don't know what to do, so I'll treat that aspect of it. Learning how to handle complex business and social situations applies everywhere. I wrote him the following (slightly edited): Lashing out and having mood swings go hand in hand with not knowing what to do or how to do…

August 23, 2012

Awareness / Blog / Fitness

Three things I learned from yoga

You can learn a lot from yoga. I'm no expert, but I did it a couple times a week for a couple years a few years ago. My teacher was great, if anyone wants a recommendation for someone in New York City. I learned three things I didn't expect that I found valuable. I haven't seen them written up elsewhere, not that I read much on yoga since I find most yoga writing too new age-y, so I thought I'd write them up here. I should mention I don't find yoga more life altering than any other physical activity. Some people attach a mystical aura to it, with all the foreign words and claims to thousands-of-years-old heritages, but I find any physical activity can give…

August 5, 2012

North Korean children’s nearly unbelievable performances

Art / Creativity / Education / NorthKorea

North Korean children’s nearly unbelievable performances

The pictures below don't even approach showing the almost unbelievable performance ability of North Korean children. Joseph's pictures showcase their talent better. But no images can show the professionalism, dedication, and raw talent these kids have. The pictures below are from the Children's Palace, which trains children to perform and create art and puts on incredible performances. After their performance last time, my travel groupmate who was starting a school to train opera singers, reacted with disgust at the performance. As I understood, he saw their type of performance -- technical perfection that could only result from repeated drilling and repetition devoid of personal expression -- as destroying everything he valued about art -- personal expression and emotional exploration. He saw children whose artistic world…

August 4, 2012

Leadership / NorthKorea

What do you think of “leaders” whose people suffered

It's hard not to think little or disparagingly of "leaders" who ruled and gained position not through merit but by accident of birth or through having little confidence (I read Russia installed Kim Il Sung over others more competent). Through no malevolence, you wish they could have known or even experienced some of the suffering they contributed to, even if they didn't intentionally create it, let alone if they intentionally create it. It makes you wonder what they thought of what they did. Did they realize the effects of their actions? Did the system shield them from learning? Were they crazy? Did they like what happened? Is it possible they could have done nothing else? Could I misunderstand? These are my thoughts when I find…

July 23, 2012

Blog / Leadership

Leadership, personal development, choosing to care, and emotional pain

Devoting yourself to something means emotions can get attached. This happens as much in professional leadership as in personal lives. In professional environments you can choose to care deeply about your work or not. Entrepreneurs can devote themselves so much as to lose everything in a project. Athletes and teams that come in second often seem more crushed, despite being the second best in the world, than those who merely qualified to compete and finished far behind. And who among us doesn't know the pain of a relationship ending? Success means you will fail along the way. Nobody wins every game they play. No relationship lasts forever (this isn't news to you, but at the very least one of you will die first). All companies…

July 22, 2012

Awareness / Blog / Leadership / Tips

You don’t find your passion, you create it

A client asked how to find your passion (in the context of relationships, as you'll see). I wrote the following (slightly edited). -------------------------------- You don't find some single latent passion within you, if only you can find it. You create it. What is passion? It's powerful emotion. Emotion doesn't come from out there. It comes from in here. How do you create something in here? Not by looking out there. By growing, learning, building, exploring, and developing skills in here. Stuff out there gives you something to work with, but your passion is inside you. You have a zillion things you like, each of which could grow to into one of, or the, overarching source of passion that drives your life. Until I found out…

July 15, 2012

Awareness / Blog / Leadership

Every moment counts

If you like improving your life enough to read my stuff, you probably know about a study (probably one of many) that found that people who won the lottery and people who had accidents that left them in wheelchairs both returned to the same emotional levels a year later. What do you conclude from such results? How much can we misunderstand ourselves if winning the lottery doesn't help out lives? Or if spinal injuries don't? These results sounds counterintuitive. Most of us would prefer winning the lottery to losing control of our arms and legs, or even just not winning the lottery. But if winning the lottery doesn't improve our lives, why do we feel like we'd rather win than not? And what importance, if…

July 14, 2012

Art / Blog / Education / Leadership

A leadership dream

Since posting on lessons leaders can learn from method acting, I've been thinking about parallels between acting and leadership -- in particular how acting changed when Constantine Stanislovski led changing the art to expressive and internal from impressive and external. "Impressive and external" means the actor tried to impress the audience with outward showiness. "Expressive and internal" means the actor tries to find emotions inside and express them. You know what acting before looked like. Jon Lovitz and John Lithgow mocked that style on Saturday Night Live in its Master Thespian sketches in the late 80s (this transcript of a sketch made me laugh after all these years). I haven't studied the history of acting, but I think the comedy sketch gets some of the…

July 8, 2012

If you crave something you don’t have, people who have it will always be able to control you

The title of this post speaks for itself so I'll keep it short. I just keep seeing people wishing they had more than they need not realizing how they are creating jails for themselves, giving others control over their lives. If you always want more money, people with more money will get you to work for them. If you want fame, people with access to media will get you to work for them. If you want power and influence, people with power and influence will get you to work for them. You get the idea. Oh, and when they get you to work for them, they won't reward you for it. If you don't crave something, someone will try to convince you that you do…

July 6, 2012

Blog / Freedom / Tips

Another awesome blog — this one on living richly

I began yesterday's post on how cutting costs improves your life intending to write about a blog I just found and enjoyed. As per my extensively field-tested and verified practice of sharing what you love, I'm sharing the blogs I enjoy reading and find improve my life. The blog is called Mr. Money Moustache. The author writes about living well by getting rid of crap. By word count he writes about money, but, as readers of this blog would expect, I like it because of the values and emotions it's about: freedom, fun, independence, joy, relationships, and things like that. Money brings so many people down. It doesn't have to. It's just a medium of exchange. You can use it to account for what you…

July 1, 2012

Awareness / Blog / Tips

Sharing what you love fills your life with sharing, love, and stuff you love

Sometimes it seems like everyone I talk to hears about burpees. I enjoy them. Doing them fills my life with the emotions they support -- friendship, freedom, and motivation. I talk to people about leadership, nature, science, curiosity, and so on. I tell people how I figure things out after I analyze things. All these things make me feel good. Sharing these things -- by sharing I mean communicating and behaving consistently with -- improves my life. For this post, you could substitute anything you want for the term love. Sharing what you value, find meaningful, makes you happy, brings you joy, rewards you, etc will give the same results for those things. Four results of sharing what you love First, when people know what…

June 27, 2012

Blog / Fitness / Freedom

Burpee overview

[This post is part of a series on my daily exercise and starting and keeping challenging habits. If you don't see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view the series, where you'll get more value than reading just this post.] Yesterday I started to consolidate posts on burpees but when I realized it was the day after the six month anniversary of starting doing them daily, I wrote a six-month review, which ended up as a long post on friendship, freedom, and motivation. It reinforces that sharing what you love fills your life with sharing, love, and the stuff you love. As people who have read all my posts on the Model and Method know, a thing's value, meaning, and purpose…

June 25, 2012

On creating emotions

I was talking to a friend who felt mildly depressed about learning to manage your mood. She had read my friend's story I posted recently about changing his emotions. (As an aside, I have to rank his experiment among the most effective practices you can do to learn to manage your emotions.) I talked to her about how most of my clients can change their environments and behavior easily. To change your environment you can hang out with different friends, change your job, get rid of your tv, etc. To change your behavior you use willpower -- even if they don't think they can change long-term, they at least realize they can go to the gym once. We spend most of our time working on…

June 17, 2012

Awareness / Blog / Freedom / Leadership

Living by your values

A client asked about something in his personal life. He does things one way that most parts of society do differently. To be clear, his way harmed no one and was in no way illegal, but he was concerned that people who learned about it might freak out. Sorry I have to keep the details to a minimum, but we all recognize his situation is universal. We all have things we do a certain way that society/family/school/church/government/etc does differently. A great thing about the internet is that we can easily learn that millions of others also do it that way, even if we can't meet them in person. You can't anticipate or change other people's expectations before you meet them. Like everyone, you also have…

June 12, 2012

Art / Blog / Leadership

Leadership lessons from method acting

Leadership and acting have a lot in common. Both crafts require practitioners to be aware of and to manage their emotions and those of people around them. They evoke different emotions -- leaders generally don't try to get people to cry and actors generally don't get people to work weekends -- but their crafts overlap nonetheless. I've linked to Inside the Actors Studio before and I'll keep linking to them. I'm in the middle of watching the host, James Lipton, interviewed by the great comedian (and apparently friend), David Chappelle for the 200th episode of the show. I'm only half through the episode and I'm already seeing the parallels and learning from them. They show some deeply personal clips of the emotions and techniques to…

June 11, 2012

Blog / Entrepreneurship / Leadership

Difficult lessons in leadership

You learn leadership through experience. I've had occasion to recall some of the most challenging and educational experiences of my development. I'm not proud of them. I wish they had never happened. But they formed me as much as anything. The painful experiences I co-founded Submedia in the late 90s. By the early 2000s we had nearly run out of money and were having trouble paying our debts. My PhD in physics, however useful for some things, hadn't prepared me for running a business. Neither did a childhood with little business training. Loneliness I don't know how my best attempts at leadership looked to others, but looking back, I think the best way I imagined to solve the problems was to work harder. I didn't…

June 10, 2012

Awareness / Blog / Freedom / Nature

What is progress?

Almost daily I face what I see as the key misunderstanding between how to lead your life to everything you want from it and how to follow what society tells you to. If you're lucky the latter will bring you what you want. You're guaranteed to produce for others, but you may never create what you want for yourself. By contrast, the former -- leading your life based on your values, meaning, and purpose, which are based on your emotional reactions (what motivates you, how you motivate others, etc) -- will always lead to a rewarding life, always great by your standards, no matter how things turn out. People call growth progress and by growth they mean the material outputs of society, which may be…

June 8, 2012

Awareness / Blog / Nature

How you see the world when you see it from space

I came across some quotes from astronauts who had seen the Earth from space that increased my sense of the beauty and fragility of life here -- as far as we know, the only life at all. The quotes surprised me partly because I think of astronauts as cowboy- and engineer-types. That surprise strengthened the feeling of the quotes, because you don't expect cowboy engineers to promote protecting the environment, look for the beauty of nature, or talk about peace on earth among different cultures. Or at least I didn't. Everybody knows "One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind," "The eagle has landed," and "Houston, we have a problem." I think you'll enjoy these, especially if you haven't heard them before.…

June 6, 2012

Awareness / Blog / Freedom / Leadership

Creating your emotions — my friend’s incredibly successful story

A recent conversation with a friend who also coaches highlighted some important observations of mastering your emotions and improving your life. We were talking about my Model and Method and how you can predictably and consistently create the emotions and motivations you want. He described how he started putting this stuff into practice. He had learned techniques to change emotions -- basically to choose new environments, beliefs, and behaviors. He hadn't put them to use much when he noticed he had felt depressed for a while. As many of us know, when you feel depressed, you often don't want to change how you feel. You just want to wallow in your misery. Feeling other ways feels fake, like happiness means you're ignoring how things really…

May 31, 2012

Blog / Leadership

Why people flip out (including yourself) and what to do about it

The pattern: overly intense emotions We've all experienced someone losing their cool around us. People flip out. They scream or raise their voices. Or, alternatively, sometimes they withdraw and act depressed or powerless. They make rash decisions. They get difficult to be around, etc. Sometimes you're the one whose emotions get out of control. Some people describe the pattern as "being emotional." Since I say people are always feeling emotions -- calmness, satisfaction, and laziness being emotions, for example -- I specify that losing your cool means your emotions became intense. The problem with the pattern Intense emotions override other emotions and rational thought. People feeling intense emotions react without thinking -- the opposite of leadership. You don't like working with people like that. One…

May 24, 2012

Blog / Freedom / Leadership / NorthKorea

Robert McNamara on Vietnam and leadership (or lack thereof) that led to the war

Following up on Vietnam, leadership, and the War Remembrance Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, I wanted to include some quotes by Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam war. As the BBC's obituary noted, To anti-war protesters at the time, McNamara became something of a hate figure, an arrogant ultra-hawk responsible for escalating the war. He fully supported, Johnson's decision to put ground troops into Vietnam in a bid to prop up the unstable South Vietnamese government and prevent political disintegration which would have aided the Communist cause... By 1966, McNamara had begun to question the wisdom of US involvement in Vietnam and, a year later, was privately advising Johnson to end the war by negotiation. He initiated a full investigation of…

May 22, 2012

Blog / Leadership / Nature / Tips

A leader and physicist’s view on morality, ethics, and judgment

Wrapping up my series on the counterproductivity of leading with morality, ethics, and judgment, I'll present a model based I got from Einstein. Without all the emotion judgment can grip you with, you can understand the physics model easily. Then you can apply it to the emotional situation. Then I bet you'll improve your life. Before Einstein: the problem of the aether Before Einstein, people created a concept called the aether. They saw light traveling through a vacuum and figured something must be there, so they created a concept. For years they looked for properties of it. No one succeeded. You might remember the Michelson-Morley experiment from high school physics that famously couldn't detect the aether. That was a problem. People were looking for something…

May 10, 2012

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