Colleagues Become Family Quotes

Typically, people who exercise, start eating better and becoming more productive at work. They smoke less and show more patience with colleagues and family. They use their credit cards less frequently and say they feel less stressed. Exercise is a keystone habit that triggers widespread change.

Dedicate yourself above all else to becoming the-best-version-of-yourself. It is the best thing you can do for your spouse, your children, your friends, your colleagues, your employees, your employer, your church, your nation, the human family, and yourself.

At the college where I teach, I'm surrounded by circus people. We aren't tightrope walkers or acrobats. We don't breathe fire or swallow swords. We're gypsies, moving wherever there's work to be found. Our scrapbooks and photo albums bear witness to our vagabond lives: college years, grad-school years, instructor-mill years, first-job years. In between each stage is a picture of old friends helping to fill a truck with boxes and furniture. We pitch our tents, and that place becomes home for a while. We make families from colleagues and students, lovers and neighbors. And when that place is no longer working, we don't just make do. We move on to the place that's next. No place is home. Every place is home. Home is our stuff. As much as I love the Cumberland Valley at twilight, I probably won't live there forever, and this doesn't really scare me. That's how I know I'm circus people.

for power in its most naked form, for power not to improve the lives of others, but to manipulate and dominate them, to bend them to his will. For the more one learns—from his family, his childhood playmates, his college classmates, his first assistants, his congressional colleagues—about Lyndon Johnson, the more it becomes apparent not only that this hunger was a constant throughout his life but that it was a hunger so fierce and consuming that no consideration of morality or ethics, no cost to himself—or to anyone else—could stand before it.

Take, for instance, studies from the past decade examining the impacts of exercise on daily routines.4.10 When people start habitually exercising, even as infrequently as once a week, they start changing other, unrelated patterns in their lives, often unknowingly. Typically, people who exercise start eating better and becoming more productive at work. They smoke less and show more patience with colleagues and family. They use their credit cards less frequently and say they feel less stressed. It’s not completely clear why. But for many people, exercise is a keystone habit that triggers widespread change. “Exercise spills over,” said James Prochaska, a University of Rhode Island researcher. “There’s something about it that makes other good habits easier.

The most direct path to Party was raising pigs. The company had several dozen of these and they occupied an unequaled place in the hearts of the soldiers; officers and men alike would hang around the pigsty, observing, commenting, and willing the animals to grow. If the pigs were doing well, the swine herds were the darlings of the company, and there were many contestants for this profession. Xiao-her became a full-time swineherd. It was hard, filthy work, not to mention the psychological pressure. Every night he and his colleagues took turns to get up in the small hours to give the pigs an extra feed. When a sow produced piglets they kept watch night after night in case she crushed them. Precious soybeans were carefully picked, washed, ground, strained, made into 'soybean milk," and lovingly fed to the mother to stimulate her milk. Life in the air force was very unlike what Xiao-her had imagined. Producing food took up more than a third of the entire time he was in the military. At the end of a year's arduous pig raising, Xiao-her was accepted into the Party. Like many others, he put his feet up and began to take it easy. After membership in the Party, everyone's ambition was to become an officer; whatever advantage the former brought, the latter doubled it. Getting to be an officer depended on being picked by one's superiors, so the key was never to displease them. One day Xiao-her was summoned to see one of the college's political commissars. Xiao-her was on tenterhooks, not knowing whether he was in for some unexpected good fortune or total disaster. The commissar, a plump man in his fifties with puffy eyes and a loud, commanding voice, looked exceedingly benign as he lit up a cigarette and asked Xiao-her about his family background, age, and state of health. He also asked whether he had a fiance to which Xiao-her replied that he did not. It struck Xiao-her as a good sign that the man was being so personal. The commissar went on to praise him: "You have studied Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought conscientiously. You have worked hard. The masses have a good impression of you. Of course, you must keep on being modest; modesty makes you progress," and so on. By the time the commissar stubbed out his cigarette, Xiao-her thought his promotion was in his pocket.

We fail to take responsibility, to act productively in the interest of ourselves and others. And in our attempts at a better life, we are often severely limited or thwarted by the immature and socially inept behavior of ourselves and others. There is a great fabric of relations, behaviors and emotions, reverberating with human and animal bliss and suffering, a web of intimate and formal relations, both direct and indirect. Nasty whirlwinds of feedback cycles blow through this great multidimensional web, pulsating with hurt and degradation. My lacking human development blocks your possible human development. My lack of understanding of you, your needs perspectives, hurts you in a million subtle ways. I become a bad lover, a bad colleague, a bad fellow citizen and human being. We are interconnected: You cannot get away from my hurt and wounds. They will follow you all of your life—I will be your daughter’s abusive boyfriend, your belligerent neighbor from hell. And you will never grow wings because there will always be mean bosses, misunderstanding families and envious friends. And you will tell yourself that is how life must be. But it is not how life has to be. Once you begin to be able to see the social-psychological fabric of everyday life, it becomes increasingly apparent that the fabric is relatively easy to change, to develop. Metamodern politics aims to make everyone secure at the deepest psychological level, so that we can live authentically; a byproduct of which is a sense of meaning in life and lasting happiness; a byproduct of which is kindness and an increased ability to cooperate with others; a byproduct of which is deeper freedom and better concrete results in the lives of everyone; a byproduct of which is a society less likely to collapse into a heap of atrocities.

Addicts wear the shit out of that word, to the point where it becomes synonymous with “I fucked up again, can we just pretend it never happened.” Our families, friends, co-workers, colleagues, are all sick of hearing us apologize. It’s meaningless. There is nothing to it, a simple cop-out for whatever insane behavior we recently

It is when you begin expressing your ideas and turning your knowledge into action that life really begins to change. You’ll read differently, becoming more focused on the parts most relevant to the argument you’re building. You’ll ask sharper questions, no longer satisfied with vague explanations or leaps in logic. You’ll naturally seek venues to show your work, since the feedback you receive will propel your thinking forward like nothing else. You’ll begin to act more deliberately in your career or business, thinking several steps beyond what you’re consuming to consider its ultimate potential. It’s not necessarily about becoming a professional artist, online influencer, or business mogul: it’s about taking ownership of your work, your ideas, and your potential to contribute in whatever arena you find yourself in. It doesn’t matter how impressive or grand your output is, or how many people see it. It could be just between your family or friends, among your colleagues and team, with your neighbors or schoolmates—what matters is that you are finding your voice and insisting that what you have to say matters. You have to value your ideas enough to share them. You have to believe that the smallest idea has the potential to change people’s lives. If you don’t believe that now, start with the smallest project you can think of to begin to prove to yourself that your ideas can make a difference.

I like the idea of being rigorous about friendship. My friends tend to be accomplished, overcommitted people, many of them with busy family lives and heavy-duty jobs. I understood it wasn’t always easy for them to get away. But this was part of the point. We were all so used to sacrificing for our kids, our spouses, and our work. I had learned through my years of trying to find balance in my life that it was okay to flip those priorities and care only for ourselves once in a while. I was more than happy to wave this banner on behalf of my friends, to create the reason—and the power of a tradition—for a whole bunch of women to turn to kids, spouses, and colleagues and say, Sorry, folks, I’m doing this for me.

There is nothing that says you have to settle for less than you truly want in any area, just because most people do. Even if most people includes your friends, family, and colleagues. You can become one of the few people that actually achieve extraordinary success in EVERY area of your life, simultaneously. Happiness. Health. Money. Freedom. Success. Love. You really can have it all.

Groupies and hangers-on somehow fancy themselves entitled to the narcissist’s favour and largesse, his time, attention, and other resources. They convince themselves that they are exempt from the narcissist’s rage and wrath and immune to his vagaries andabuse . This self-imputed and self-conferred status irritates the narcissist no end as it challenges and encroaches on his standing as the only source of preferential treatment and the sole decision-maker when it comes to the allocation of his precious and cosmically significant wherewithal. The narcissist is the guru at the centre of a cult. Like other gurus, he demands complete obedience from his flock: his spouse, his offspring, other family  members, friends, and colleagues. He feels entitled to adulation and special treatment by his followers. He punishes the wayward and the straying lambs. He enforces discipline, adherence to his teachings, and common goals. The less accomplished he is in reality – the more stringent his mastery and the more pervasive the brainwashing. Cult leaders are narcissists who failed in their mission to "be someone", to become famous, and to impress the world with their uniqueness, talents, traits, and skills. Such disgruntled narcissists withdraw into a "zone of comfort" (known as the "Pathological Narcissistic Space") that assumes the hallmarks of a cult. The – often involuntary – members of the narcissist's mini-cult inhabit a twilight zone of his own construction. He imposes on them an exclusionary or inclusionary shared psychosis, replete with persecutory delusions, "enemies", mythical-grandiose narratives, and apocalyptic scenarios if he is flouted. Exclusionary shared psychosis involves the physical and emotional isolation of the narcissist and his “flock” (spouse, children, fans, friends) from the outside world in order to better shield them from imminent threats and hostile intentions. Inclusionary shared psychosis revolves around attempts to spread the narcissist’s message in a missionary fashion among friends, colleagues, co-workers, fans, churchgoers, and anyone else who comes across the mini-cult. The narcissist's control is based on ambiguity, unpredictability, fuzziness, and ambientabuse . His ever-shifting whims exclusively define right versus wrong, desirable and unwanted, what is to be pursued and what to be avoided. He alone determines the rights and obligations of his disciples and alters them at will.

The psychology professor Richard Aslin once commented to me that he felt the idea of “consciousness” was a proxy for a whole host of variables correlated with our mental lives. We use “consciousness” as shorthand to easily describe the functions of a multitude of inborn, instinctual mechanisms such as language, perception, and emotion. It becomes evident that consciousness is best understood as a complex instinct as well. All of us come with a bucketful of instincts. Our incessant thought pattern jumps around. We have feelings about one idea, then its opposite, then our family, then an itch, then a favorite tune, then the upcoming meeting, then the grocery list, then the irritating colleague, then the Red Sox, then … It goes on and on until we learn, almost against our natural being, to have a linear thought.

Time and again I’ve watched hearts break open, so that true and authentic leaders can emerge. But that process depends on a brave first step: facing the reality of what is and not being deluded by the powerful, seductive dreams of what can be. Of course, this doesn’t mean there’s no role for dreams. We need dreams. But willfully ignoring what is true is not the same as dreaming. It’s delusion; and delusion leads to terrible decisions and, even worse, the destruction of trust. The first act of becoming a leader is to recognize this being so. From that place, we get to recognize what skills we need to develop and who we really are (and are not) as leaders, and to share our truth in a way that creates authentic, powerful relationships—with our peers, colleagues, and families. Grant us leaders who can do this and we just may create institutions that are less violent to the self, our communities, and our planet.

Business was booming and people were getting rich. Many bureaucrats enjoyed the new sense of power they had over their fellow citizens, and became known as kleine, or small, Hitlers. Hitler and members of the Nazi Party continued in their insane quest to become the leaders of a unified Europe. Never mind that this unification would be by force and that it would draw the entire world into another major catastrophe. Already Jews and others, who were considered undesirables by the Nazi régime, were fleeing the country.... That is, if they could afford the passage out. Hitler’s expansionary philosophy was apparent, but no one would risk speaking up. Even friends could not be trusted, and so it became a time of great anxiety. Fellow workers turned in colleagues if they thought it could advance their own position. In some cases, even family members could not be trusted! Hitler said “By the skillful and sustained use of propaganda, one can make a people see even heaven as hell, or an extremely wretched life as paradise.

Subject Line:  This means a lot… Or Would love to get your opinion…   Email Text:  Dear friends, family, and colleagues:    Thank you so much for reading this email. This isn’t an easy one for me to send, but it is extremely important to me, so I sincerely appreciate you investing your valuable time reading (and hopefully responding to) it. This email is going out to only a select group of people. Each of you knows me well, and I’m hoping will give me honest feedback about my strengths and most importantly, my weaknesses (aka “areas of improvement.”) I’ve never done anything like this before, but I feel that for me grow and improve as a person, I need to get a more accurate picture of how I’m showing up to the people that matter most to me. In order to become the person I need to be to create the life and contribute to others at the levels that I want, I need your feedback. So, all I’m asking is that you take just a few minutes to email me back with what you honestly think are my top 2-3 “areas of improvement.” If it will make you feel better to also list my top 2-3 “strengths” (I’m sure it will make me feel better J), you are definitely welcome to. That’s it. And please don’t sugarcoat it or hold back anything. I will not be offended by anything that you share. In fact, the more “brutally” honest you are, the more leverage it will give me to make positive changes in my life. Thank you again, and if there is anything else I can do to add value to your life, please let me know. With sincere gratitude,   Your Name

how difficult it is to say, “Boy, did I mess up,” without the protective postscript of self-justification—to say “I dropped a routine fly ball with the bases loaded” rather than “I dropped the ball because the sun was in my eyes” or “because a bird flew by” or “because it was windy” or “because a fan called me a jerk.” A friend returning from a day in traffic school told us that as participants went around the room, reporting the violations that had brought them there, a miraculous coincidence had occurred: Not one of them had broken the law! They all had justifications for speeding, ignoring a stop sign, running a red light, or making an illegal U-turn. He became so dismayed (and amused) by the litany of flimsy excuses that, when his turn came, he was embarrassed to give in to the same impulse. He said, “I didn’t stop at a stop sign. I was entirely wrong and I got caught.” There was a moment’s silence, and then the room erupted in cheers for his candor. There are plenty of good reasons for admitting mistakes, starting with the simple fact that you will probably be found out anyway—by your family, your company, your colleagues, your enemies, your biographer. But there are more positive reasons for owning up. Other people will like you more. Someone else may be able to pick up your fumble and run with it; your error might inspire someone else’s solution. Children will realize that everyone screws up on occasion and that even adults have to say “I’m sorry.” And if you can admit a mistake when it is the size of an acorn, it will be easier to repair than if you wait until it becomes the size of a tree, with deep, wide-ranging roots.

Important: Be sure to put the outgoing email addresses in the BCC field of the email, so that each recipient doesn’t see everyone else you’re sending it to. (Or, you can copy and paste, then send the email to each person individually.) Subject Line: This means a lot… Or Would love to get your opinion… Email Text: Dear friends, family, and colleagues:  Thank you so much for reading this email. This isn’t an easy one for me to send, but it is extremely important to me, so I sincerely appreciate you investing your valuable time reading (and hopefully responding to) it.  This email is going out to only a select group of people. Each of you knows me well, and I’m hoping will give me honest feedback about my strengths and most importantly, my weaknesses (aka “areas of improvement.”) I’ve never done anything like this before, but I feel that for me grow and improve as a person, I need to get a more accurate picture of how I’m showing up to the people that matter most to me. In order to become the person I need to be to create the life and contribute to others at the levels that I want, I need your feedback.  So, all I’m asking is that you take just a few minutes to email me back with what you honestly think are my top 2-3 “areas of improvement.” If it will make you feel better to also list my top 2-3 “strengths” (I’m sure it will make me feel better ), you are definitely welcome to. That’s it. And please don’t sugarcoat it or hold back anything. I will not be offended by anything that you share. In fact, the more “brutally” honest you are, the more leverage it will give me to make positive changes in my life.  Thank you again, and if there is anything else I can do to add value to your life, please let me know.  With sincere gratitude, Your Name

Even male children of affluent white families think that history as taught in high school is “too neat and rosy.” 6 African American, Native American, and Latino students view history with a special dislike. They also learn history especially poorly. Students of color do only slightly worse than white students in mathematics. If you’ll pardon my grammar, nonwhite students do more worse in English and most worse in history.7 Something intriguing is going on here: surely history is not more difficult for minorities than trigonometry or Faulkner. Students don’t even know they are alienated, only that they “don’t like social studies” or “aren’t any good at history.” In college, most students of color give history departments a wide berth. Many history teachers perceive the low morale in their classrooms. If they have a lot of time, light domestic responsibilities, sufficient resources, and a flexible principal, some teachers respond by abandoning the overstuffed textbooks and reinventing their American history courses. All too many teachers grow disheartened and settle for less. At least dimly aware that their students are not requiting their own love of history, these teachers withdraw some of their energy from their courses. Gradually they end up going through the motions, staying ahead of their students in the textbooks, covering only material that will appear on the next test. College teachers in most disciplines are happy when their students have had significant exposure to the subject before college. Not teachers in history. History professors in college routinely put down high school history courses. A colleague of mine calls his survey of American history “Iconoclasm I and II,” because he sees his job as disabusing his charges of what they learned in high school to make room for more accurate information. In no other field does this happen. Mathematics professors, for instance, know that non-Euclidean geometry is rarely taught in high school, but they don’t assume that Euclidean geometry was mistaught. Professors of English literature don’t presume that Romeo and Juliet was misunderstood in high school. Indeed, history is the only field in which the more courses students take, the stupider they become. Perhaps I do not need to convince you that American history is important. More than any other topic, it is about us. Whether one deems our present society wondrous or awful or both, history reveals how we arrived at this point. Understanding our past is central to our ability to understand ourselves and the world around us. We need to know our history, and according to sociologist C. Wright Mills, we know we do.8

When people start habitually exercising, even as infrequently as once a week, they start changing other, unrelated patterns in their lives, often unknowingly. Typically, people who exercise start eating better and becoming more productive at work. They smoke less and show more patience with colleagues and family. They use their credit cards less frequently and say they feel less stressed. It’s not completely clear why. But for many people, exercise is a keystone habit that triggers widespread change.

show simply facilitates a crossing of paths between people who love each other very much, but who’ve become estranged by misunderstanding.” “But how can you gauge that? I mean, whether or not a, um, Convergence is a good idea?” “Well,” said Sashi. “Essentially, I talk to you, and then my colleagues will conduct a number of conversations with Lorelei, both on-screen and off. And with anyone else who’s relevant and wants to participate in the healing. Then we make a decision. We would

In addition to the external barriers erected by society, women are hindered by barriers that exist within ourselves. We hold ourselves back in ways both big and small, by lacking self-confidence, by not raising our hands, and by pulling back when we should be leaning in. We internalize the negative messages we get throughout our lives - the messages that say it's wrong to be outspoken, aggressive, more powerful than men. We lower our own expectations of what we can achieve. We continue to do the majority of the housework and child care. We compromise our career goals to make room for partners and children who may not even exist yet. Compared to our male colleagues, fewer of us aspire to senior positions. This is not a list of things other women have done. I have made every mistake on this list. At times, I still do. My argument is that getting rid of these internal barriers is critical to gaining power. Others have argued that women can get to the top only when the institutional barriers are gone. This is the ultimate chicken-and-egg situation. The chicken: Women will tear down the external barriers once we achieve leadership roles. We will march into our bosses' offices and demand what we need, including pregnancy parking. Or better yet, we'll become bosses and make sure all women have what they need. The egg: We need to eliminate the external barriers to get women into those roles in the first place. Both sides are right. So rather than engage in philosophical arguments over which comes first, let's agree to wage battles on both fronts. They are equally important. I am encouraging women to address the chicken, but I fully support those who are focusing on the egg. Internal obstacles are rarely discussed and often underplayed. Throughout my life, I was told over and over about inequalities in the workplace and how hard it would be to have a career and a family. I rarely heard anything, however, about the ways I might hold myself back. These internal obstacles deserve a lot more attention, in part because they are under our own control. We can dismantle the hurdles in ourselves today. We can start this very moment.

In the story, Ivan Ilyich is forty-five years old, a midlevel Saint Petersburg magistrate whose life revolves mostly around petty concerns of social status. One day, he falls off a stepladder and develops a pain in his side. Instead of abating, the pain gets worse, and he becomes unable to work. Formerly an “intelligent, polished, lively and agreeable man,” he grows depressed and enfeebled. Friends and colleagues avoid him. His wife calls in a series of ever more expensive doctors. None of them can agree on a diagnosis, and the remedies they give him accomplish nothing. For Ilyich, it is all torture, and he simmers and rages at his situation. “What tormented Ivan Ilyich most,” Tolstoy writes, “was the deception, the lie, which for some reason they all accepted, that he was not dying but was simply ill, and he only need keep quiet and undergo a treatment and then something very good would result.” Ivan Ilyich has flashes of hope that maybe things will turn around, but as he grows weaker and more emaciated he knows what is happening. He lives in mounting anguish and fear of death. But death is not a subject that his doctors, friends, or family can countenance. That is what causes him his most profound pain. “No one pitied him as he wished to be pitied,” writes Tolstoy. “At certain moments after prolonged suffering he wished most of all (though he would have been ashamed to confess it) for someone to pity him as a sick child is pitied. He longed to be petted and comforted. He knew he was an important functionary, that he had a beard turning grey, and that therefore what he longed for was impossible, but still he longed for it.” As we medical students saw it, the failure of those around Ivan Ilyich to offer comfort or to acknowledge what is happening to him was a failure of character and culture. The late-nineteenth-century Russia of Tolstoy’s story seemed harsh and almost primitive to us. Just as we believed that modern medicine could probably have cured Ivan Ilyich of whatever disease he had, so too we took for granted that honesty and kindness were basic responsibilities of a modern doctor. We were confident that in such a situation we would act compassionately. What worried us was knowledge. While we knew how to sympathize, we weren’t at all certain we would know how to properly diagnose and treat. We paid our medical tuition to learn about the inner process of the body, the intricate mechanisms of its pathologies, and the vast trove of discoveries and technologies that have accumulated to stop them. We didn’t imagine we needed to think about much else. So we put Ivan Ilyich out of our heads. Yet within a few years, when I came to experience surgical training and practice, I encountered patients forced to confront the realities of decline and mortality, and it did not take long to realize how unready I was to help them. *   *   *

Vohs and her colleagues suggest that as societies began to use money, the need to rely on family and friends diminished, and people were able to become more self-sufficient. “In this way,” they conclude, “money enhanced individualism but diminished communal motivations, an effect that is still apparent in people’s responses today.

FOR MY SPIRITUAL LIFE... What’s the ONE Thing I can do to help others... ? What’s the ONE Thing I can do to improve my relationship with God... ? FOR MY PHYSICAL HEALTH... What’s the ONE Thing I can do to achieve my diet goals... ? What’s the ONE Thing I can do to ensure that I exercise... ? What’s the ONE Thing I can do to relieve my stress... ? FOR MY PERSONAL LIFE... What’s the ONE Thing I can do to improve my skill at ________... ? What’s the ONE Thing I can do to find time for myself... ? FOR MY KEY RELATIONSHIPS... What’s the ONE Thing I can do to improve my relationship with my spouse/partner... ? What’s the ONE Thing I can do to improve my children’s school performance... ? What’s the ONE Thing I can do to show my appreciation to my parents... ? What’s the ONE Thing I can do to make my family stronger... ? FOR MY JOB... What’s the ONE Thing I can do to ensure that I hit my goals... ? What’s the ONE Thing I can do to improve my skills... ? What’s the ONE Thing I can do to help my team succeed... ? What’s the ONE Thing I can do to further my career... ? FOR MY BUSINESS... What’s the ONE Thing I can do to make us more competitive... ? What’s the ONE Thing I can do to make our product the best... ? What’s the ONE Thing I can do to make us more profitable... ? What’s the ONE Thing I can do to improve our customer experience... ? FOR MY FINANCES... What’s the ONE Thing I can do to increase my net worth... ? What’s the ONE Thing I can do to improve my investment cash flow... ? What’s the ONE Thing I can do to eliminate my credit card debt... ? BIG IDEAS So how do you make The ONE Thing part of your daily routine? How do you make it strong enough to get extraordinary results at work and in the other areas of your life? Here’s a starter list drawn from our experience and our work with others. Understand and believe it. The first step is to understand the concept of the ONE Thing, then to believe that it can make a difference in your life. If you don’t understand and believe, you won’t take action. Use it. Ask yourself the Focusing Question. Start each day by asking, “What’s the ONE Thing I can do today for [whatever you want] such that by doing it everything else will be easier or even unnecessary?” When you do this, your direction will become clear. Your work will be more productive and your personal life more rewarding. Make it a habit. When you make asking the Focusing Question a habit, you fully engage its power to get the extraordinary results you want. It’s a difference maker. Research says this will take about 66 days. Whether it takes you a few weeks or a few months, stick with it until it becomes your routine. If you’re not serious about learning the Success Habit, you’re not serious about getting extraordinary results. Leverage reminders. Set up ways to remind yourself to use the Focusing Question. One of the best ways to do this is to put up a sign at work that says, “Until my ONE Thing is done—everything else is a distraction.” We designed the back cover of this book to be a trigger —set it on the corner of your desk so that it’s the first thing you see when you get to work. Use notes, screen savers, and calendar cues to keep making the connection between the Success Habit and the results you seek. Put up reminders like, “The ONE Thing = Extraordinary Results” or “The Success Habit Will Get Me to My Goal.” Recruit support. Research shows that those around you can influence you tremendously. Starting a success support group with some of your work colleagues can help inspire all of you to practice the Success Habit every day. Get your family involved. Share your ONE Thing. Get them on board. Use the Focusing Question around them to show them how the Success Habit can make a difference in their school work, their personal achievements, or any other part of their lives.

You decide whom you say NO to. You are entitled to choose your tribe, regardless of what society imposes on you. You decide who in your life drains you of energy, and then purge them so you can soar. This does not mean you become a hermit; it means you choose your family, your friends, your colleagues, your tribe, your life.

She had become reconciled to the idea of an eternal shadow; she discovered that, far from being a threat, her bodyguards were much wiser sounding boards than many of the gentleman courtiers who fluttered around her. Police officers like Sergeant Allan Peters and Inspector Graham Smith became avuncular father figures, defusing tricky situations and deflating overweening subjects alike with a joke or a crisp command. They also brought her mothering instincts to the fore. She remembered their birthdays, sent notes of apology to their wives when they had to accompany her on an overseas tours and ensured that they were “fed and watered” when she went out with them from Kensington Palace. When Graham Smith contracted cancer, she invited him and his wife on holiday to Necker in the Caribbean and also on a Mediterranean cruise on board the yacht owned by Greek tycoon, John Latsis. Such is her affection for this popular police officer that she arranged a dinner in his honour after he had recovered which was attended by her family. If she is dining with friends at San Lorenzo, her favourite restaurant, her current detective, Inspector Ken Wharfe will often join her table at the end of the meal and regale the assembled throng with his jokes. Perhaps she reserves her fondest memories for Sergeant Barry Mannakee who became her bodyguard at a time when she felt lost and alone in the royal world. He sensed her bewilderment and became a shoulder for her to lean on and sometimes to cry on during this painful period. The affectionate bond that built up between them did not go unnoticed either by Prince Charles nor Mannakee’s colleagues. Shortly before the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of York in July 1986 he was transferred to other duties, much to Diana’s dismay. In the following spring he was tragically killed in a motorcycle accident.

I have not in this book discussed homoerotic behaviour, and that particular form of male bonding and female bonding loosely called ‘the homosexual community’. These large subjects require extensive treatment. But, very briefly, it should be said here that there may be analytic and practical profit in seeing male homosexuality as a specific feature of the more general phenomenon of male bonding. For a variety of obvious and more subtle reasons, male homoeroticism is socially organized differently and occurs more frequently than the female variety. There are a host of other differences which, in part, reflect the biologically based patterns which must accompany such a profound matter as seeking erotic contact, establishing sexual identity, and defining sexual role. The effect of homoerotic relationships in work, political, and other groups is of considerable interest in terms of many of the questions I have raised in this book. From a strictly biological viewpoint, there is no good reason for forbidding or even discouraging homoerotic activity, though in terms of Euro-American family structure and sexual attitudes there may be sociological reasons. As I have tried to indicate, there are important inhibitions in much of Euro-American culture – if not elsewhere too – against expressing affection between men, and one result of this inhibition of tenderness and warmth is an insistence on corporate hardness and forcefulness which has contributed to a variety of ‘tough-minded’ military, economic, political, and police enterprises and engagements. Of course, a fear of homoeroticism is not the only reason for this – a number of others have been described here too. But homoerotic activity has been widely and powerfully defined as aberrant (though as Kinsey has suggested, about half American males have had homosexual activity, while at least a third have had experiences culminating in orgasm). Much guilt and uncertainty must plague many of the participants in these relationships. So must the insecurity about possibly being or becoming ‘queer’ or ‘bent’ among other men who may feel drawn to their colleagues and friends in ways I have described but whose repertoire of explanations of their feelings is overwhelmed by their community’s assertion that men tender with each other are unmanly and unreliable. It remains a worthy subject of exploration to learn more about the dynamics of tender male interchanges, both for the sake of scientific understanding, and perhaps for providing information on the basis of which greater sympathy and opportunity may confront persons often harassed and disdained by themselves as well as others. That this may accompany a changed ideal of manhood, of corporate structure, of political acumen, and of the role of hard dominance, is not accidental but intrinsic to the whole argument of this book.

I remind myself: This will not make me feel loved, so if that’s why I’m saying yes, that’s not a good reason. The love I want will not be found here, and what I will feel in its place is resentment and anger. I’m committed to a particular, limited amount of things in this season, and if what’s being asked of me isn’t one of those, then it stands in the way. That’s why knowing your purpose and priorities for a given season is so valuable—because those commitments become the litmus test for all the decisions you face. Picture your relationships like concentric circles: the inner circle is your spouse, your children, your very best friends. Then the next circle out is your extended family and good friends. Then people you know, but not well, colleagues, and so on, to the outer edge. Aim to disappoint the people at the center as rarely as possible. And then learn to be more and more comfortable with disappointing the people who lie at the edges of the circle—people you’re not as close to, people who do not and should not require your unflagging dedication. To do this, though, you have to give even the people closest to you—maybe especially the people closest to you—realistic expectations for what you can give to them. We disappoint people because we’re limited. We have to accept the idea of our own limitations in order to accept the idea that we’ll disappoint people. I have this much time. I have this much energy. I have this much relational capacity.

Happiness has a surprisingly bad reputation. Some people assume that happy people are stupid, or smug, or superficial. In fact, research shows - and I think you'll really see this borne out by your own experience - happy people are more interested in the people around them and more interested in the problems of the world. They're more altruistic. They give away more money. They volunteer more time. They're more likely to help out if a friend, family member, or colleague needs a hand. They're healthier, and they have healthier habits. They make better team members and better leaders. When we're unhappy, we tend to become isolated, defensive, and preoccupied with our own problems. When we're happy, we have the motional wherewithal to turn outward. So, if it is selfish to want to be happy, we should be selfish - if only for selfless reasons.

If we were to take another example, and apply the same rules, it becomes obvious just how inappropriate and harmful this trope is. For some (not all) trans people, one element of being trans is the physical process of transition. It can be joyful, it can be painful, it can be messy, and it can involve surgery. The same could be said of parenthood. Conception, pregnancy, and childbirth are necessary parts of making a family for the majority of people. Like medical transition, it is vital that we're educated about these processes if there's a chance we'll find ourselves personally affected. And luckily, in both of these cases, the medical information is freely and easily available online, through public health initiatives, in libraries, and from the relevant medical authorities. But it would never be appropriate to approach a new mother in a cafe and say, 'so, did you rip your vagina giving birth to that one?' When greeting a colleague returning to the office after maternity leave, we don't ask if we can examine the stretch marks and possible scars, or ask about hemorrhaging and post-natal incontinence. If we're close friends or family, we might well talk about the most personal physical aspects of creating and delivering a baby - the same is true of transition. But the need to be honest and close with our loved ones doesn't make the intrusion of strangers okay.

Though his impudence and inconstancy strained his relations with family and colleagues, Dostoevsky appears almost to have cultivated these stresses as major sources of his fiction, most directly of the novel Poor Folk, the first draft of which he completed about a year after resigning his commission. The novel, like almost all of Dostoevsky’s writing, is a study of the forces that constrain human freedom, both exterior forces such as money and power, and interior ones like illness and sexual desire. Moreover Dostoevsky immediately set about questioning the very distinction between the two realms, showing how subjective experience becomes objectified in material objects of desire and fear, and vice versa. However, like most of Dostoevsky’s fiction, Poor Folk also revealed his belief in the power of fiction to redeem the world by manifesting an imaginative realm in which freedom is – or, at least, can be – sovereign.

No. I wouldn’t see what Mary saw until I’d been witness to the untimely decline of a generation of colleagues exhausted by the demands of jobs that never paid them enough, drowning in debt to care for children riddled with disorders that couldn’t be cured; and the cousins—and the best friend from high school—who ended up in shelters or on the street, tossed out of houses they could no longer afford; and until the near-dozen suicides and overdoses of fortysomething childhood classmates in a mere space of three years; and the friends and family medicated for despair, anxiety, lack of affect, insomnia, sexual dysfunction; and the premature cancers brought on by the chemical shortcuts for everything from the food moving through our irritable bowels to the lotions applied to our sun-poisoned skins. I wouldn’t see it until our private lives had consumed the public space, then been codified, foreclosed, and put up for auction; until the devices that enslave our minds had filled us with the toxic flotsam of a culture no longer worthy of the name; until the bright pliancy of human sentience—attention itself—had become the world’s most prized commodity, the very movements of our minds transformed into streams of unceasing revenue for someone, somewhere. I wouldn’t see it clearly until the American Self had fully mastered the plunder, idealized and legislated the splitting of the spoils, and brought to near completion the wholesale pillage not only of the so-called colony—how provincial a locution that seems now!—but also of the very world itself. In short, I wouldn’t see what she saw back then until I’d failed at trying to see it otherwise, until I’d ceased believing in the lie of my own redemption, until the suffering of others aroused in me a starker, clearer cry than any anthem to my own longing.

REPORTING PEOPLE - an epidemic in Poland? (as usual, just a topic to be discussed on a lesson) The topic of reporting people, an activity still widespread in post-Communist Poland, has cropped up during yesterday's family gathering at my place. Real-life examples of reporting on people: - one person works for a government agency. Someone has recently (2017) called their supervisor to report her, saying that her workload was insufficient, - some person was a lecturer at a university. He then set up his own private practice and started earning significantly more money than his university colleagues. He started being frequently called to come and present all his financial statements at the Revenue. Spending a significant amount of time there, he made friends with the investigator, who informed him those were his work colleagues who continually reported him, - when my Dad bought his first 'real' car after the fall of Communism, someone from the area called the Revenue to inform them of this fact. He had to demonstrate how he had paid for it, - in the past, I gave classes at a language school in Poznań. It seemed to me I had a great contact with the students and that they were satisfied with the course (always smiling, laughing and talking a lot...). I quit the language school, because I took up another course at the uni and the hours overlapped. After a while, some woman contacted me via social media, telling me that the students had been dissatisfied with my teaching, saying I covered the material in too slow a manner. I was 21 years old, the woman approximately 10-15 years older (so you'd expect some more maturity). It came as a shock to me, as I had really not noticed any dissatisfaction and I really cared a lot about the students' satisfaction with the course. Fortunately, I later met a woman who had been one of the students at the course, and it turned out the students had actually been dissatisfied with HER teaching, saying her pace was too FAST. (It was a beginner's course for older people who had had no contact with English...). She invited me for a coffee and explained to me a few things. For example people's capacity for lying. She was a manager at a government agency, so she must have had some experience. - some coffee has also become a subject of me being reported recently. Thank you for your attention ;) feel free to disagree

The only way I’m going to be successful doing this,” I continued, “is to make the pressure on the inside greater than the pressure on the outside!” Think about that for a second—or an hour, or all day—however long it takes for the idea to sink into your soul. The pressure on the inside must be greater than the pressure on the outside! Think about that the next time someone talks trash about someone in the office, especially if it’s a person you don’t necessarily care for. Is the pressure to get involved in that conversation greater than the knowledge within that gossip amounts to nothing good at all? If so, you’re in danger of getting involved with miserable people and becoming miserable yourself. So you have to make sure that the pressure within is greater than the external pressure you’re getting from your colleagues, friends or family members.

Take, for instance, studies from the past decade examining the impacts of exercise on daily routines. When people start habitually exercising, even as infrequently as once a week, they start changing other, unrelated patterns in their lives, often unknowingly. Typically, people who exercise start eating better and becoming more productive at work. They smoke less and show more patience with colleagues and family. They use their credit cards less frequently and say they feel less stressed. It’s not completely clear why. But for many people, exercise is a keystone habit that triggers widespread change. “Exercise spills over,” said James Prochaska, a University of Rhode Island researcher. “There’s something about it that makes other good habits easier.

The side which is first to forgive shall become the strongest

Government alone cannot restore the economy to health. Innovation is a primary driver of economic growth. One way of measuring inventive creativeness is through patent applications. Chetty, along with Alex Bell, Xavier Jaravel, Neviana Petkova, and John Van Reenen, studied the childhoods of more than a million patent holders, linking family income with elementary test scores and other key factors. Children at the top of their third-grade math class were the most likely to become inventors—but only if they also came from a high-income family. High-scoring children who were from low-income or minority families were no more likely to become inventors than affluent children with mediocre scores. Successful inventors were also less likely to be women, Black, Latino, or from the Southeast. Chetty called these failed inventors the “lost Einsteins.” “If women, minorities, and children from low-income families were to invent at the same rate as white men from high-income (top 20%) families, the rate of innovation in America would quadruple,” the authors said. The most ominous finding by Chetty and his colleagues was the effect of Covid-19 on educational progress. Using a popular math program called Zearn, the economists plotted the achievement of children from upper-income families versus those from lower incomes. When schools shut down and instruction switched to remote learning, children in the upper-income tier suffered a small drop in the lessons completed, but low-income children fell in a hole—a 60 percent drop in the rate of progress in learning math. The long-term economic prospects for those children are dire. “We’re likely to see further erosion of social mobility the longer this lasts,” Chetty said. The American dream was drifting farther out of reach for another generation.

Come February, all of our off time was spent composing letters for the hundreds of valentines we sent out around the globe. Valentine cards had become a tradition of ours, born of the fact that we could never get ourselves organized in time to send out Christmas cards. With our ever-enlarging network of family, friends, and Foreign Service colleagues, we found that Paul’s hand-designed valentine cards—usually a woodcut or drawing, sometimes a photograph—were a nice way to keep in touch. But they could be labor-intensive. One year’s design was a faux stained-glass window, with five colors in it, each of which had to be hand-painted in watercolors—which took hours. For 1956, we decided to lighten up by doing something different: we posed ourselves for a self-timed valentine photo in the bathtub, wearing nothing but artfully placed soap bubbles.

It’s also becoming clear that we can’t treat genes and the environment as two distinct forces that act independently of each other. Each one influences the other. In 2003, Eric Turkheimer of the University of Virginia and his colleagues gave a twist to the standard studies on twins. To calculate the heritability of intelligence, they decided not to just look at the typical middle-class families who were the subject of earlier studies. They looked for twins from poorer families, too. Turkheimer and his colleagues found that the socioeconomic class determined how heritable intelligence was. Among children who grew up in affluent families, the heritability was about 60 percent. But twins from poorer families showed no greater correlation than other siblings. Their heritability was close to zero. It may seem weird that the environment itself can change heritability. We tend to think of genes as rigid purveyors of destiny, the inescapable agents of heredity. But biologists have always known that the two are intimately linked together. If you raise corn in uniformly healthy soil, with the same level of abundant sunlight and water, the variation in their height will largely be the product of the variation in their genes. But if you plant them in a bad soil, where they may or may not get enough of some vital nutrient, the environment will be responsible for more of their differences. Turkheimer’s study hints that something similar happens to intelligence. By focusing their research on affluent families—or on countries such as Norway, where people get universal health care—intelligence researchers may end up giving too much credit to heredity. Poverty may be powerful enough to swamp the influence of variants in our DNA.

According to Shweder and his colleagues (1997), purity norms can govern a range of issues, including what foods can be eaten, who is fit and unfit to prepare them, and how foods must be cleaned or treated before they can be eaten. Purity norms also address the specifics of which sexual activities are permissible and what is forbidden, deviant, or “dirty”; allowable and inappropriate sleeping arrangements involving the members of nuclear and extended families; what sorts of clothes can and cannot be worn at different times or in specific places and settings, especially in temples and other sacred locations, or during religious rituals; how a range of organic matter, such as corpses, blood, feces, and so on, should properly be dealt with to avoid the risk of pollution; and which other social groups one can interact with, as well as how and when it is permissible to interact with them, and how to avoid becoming tainted by members of “lower” groups. The subject matter of the issues governed by such norms shows a fairly clear affinity with the subject matter regulated by disgust, and the defining contrast between purity, on the one hand, and dirt and contamination, on the other, further implicates the emotion. The Co-opt thesis holds that disgust will provide the motivation for individuals to comply with purity norms that they have acquired, and that disgust also shapes the punitive motivations that are directed at violators. Initial experimental evidence has begun to flesh out this picture in more detail (Rozin et al. 1999).

François de La Rochefoucauld once said, “We’re so accustomed to disguising ourselves to others that in the end we become disguised to ourselves.

She was lonely, that was the truth, really lonely. Her working hours were so long she’d given up on the idea of having a family—she couldn’t even hold down a relationship—and when she went on an expedition, she was set apart from her male colleagues by problems they didn’t have to think about. Not only periods, or where to pee safely, not even the endless jokes about her physical strength. But the sense she was never really going to get what she wanted. More than a few times a colleague had reached out a hand when she didn’t need help, and squeezed too hard. She’d been talked down and talked over. She’d missed a couple of promotions she should have got. And yet, deep down, she knew she couldn’t really blame anyone else. Out of some strange mad desire not to upset the status quo, she’d become complicit. She had laughed when she should have been angry, or said nothing when she should have said a lot. She’d belittled her own achievements, calling them small or unformed or even lucky when they were none of those things. And it wasn’t simply opportunities at work she’d lost out on: she had—and, again, this was her own choice—missed the weddings of her closest friends, just as she’d missed their children’s christenings. Only a month ago her oldest friend had written, inviting her to Scotland for her godson’s birthday, “But I guess it will be difficult for you to get away.” And it was true. Some nights Freya worked so late, she took her sleeping bag out of her locker and slept on the floor under her desk. She actually kept a toothbrush there and a set of spare clothes.

Novelist and leftist activist Don Winslow is promoting a video which calls for citizens to become cyber-detectives to monitor an report to authorities their neighbors, colleagues, friends and family members who might be Trump supporters.

First published in 2020 this book contains over 560 easily readable compact entries in systematic order augmented by an extensive bibliography, an alphabetical list of countries and locations of individuals final resting places (where known) and a day and month list in consecutive order of when an individual died. It details the deaths of individuals, who died too early and often in tragic circumstances, from film, literature, music, theatre, and television, and the achievements they left behind. In addition, some ordinary people who died in bizarre, freak, or strange circumstances are also included. It does not matter if they were famous or just celebrated by a few individuals, all the people in this book left behind family, friends and in some instances devotees who idolised them. Our heartfelt thoughts and sympathies go out to all those affected by each persons death. Whether you are concerned about yourself, a loved one, a friend, or a work colleague there are many helplines and support groups that offer confidential non-judgemental help, guidance and advice on mental health problems (such as anxiety, bereavement, depression, despair, distress, stress, substance abuse, suicidal feelings, and trauma). Support can be by phone, email, face-to-face counselling, courses, and self-help groups. Details can be found online or at your local health care organisation. There are many conspiracy theories, rumours, cover-ups, allegations, sensationalism, and myths about the cause of some individual’s deaths. Only the facts known at the time of writing are included in this book. Some important information is deliberately kept secret or undisclosed. Sometimes not until 20 or even 30 years later are full details of an accident or incident released or in some cases found during extensive research. Similarly, unsolved murders can be reinvestigated years later if new information becomes known. In some cases, 50 years on there are those who continue to investigate what they consider are alleged cover-ups. The first name in an entry is that by which a person was generally known. Where relevant their real name is included in brackets. Date of Death | In the entry detailing the date an individual died their age at the time of their death is recorded in brackets. Final Resting Place | Where known details of a persons final resting place are included. “Unknown” | Used when there is insufficient evidence available to the authorities to establish whether an individuals’ death was due to suicide, accident or caused by another. Statistics The following statistics are derived from the 579 individual “cause of death” entries included in this publication. The top five causes of death are, Heart attack/failure 88 (15.2%) Cancer 55 (9.5%) Fatal injuries (plane crash) 43 (7.4%) Fatal injuries (vehicle crash/collision) 39 (6.7%) Asphyxiation (Suicide) 23 (4%). extract from 'Untimely and Tragic Deaths of the Renowned, The Celebrated, The Iconic

My friends tend to be accomplished, overcommitted people, many of them with busy family lives and heavy-duty jobs. I understood it wasn’t always easy for them to get away. But this was part of the point. We were all so used to sacrificing for our kids, our spouses, and our work. I had learned through my years of trying to find balance in my life that it was okay to flip those priorities and care only for ourselves once in a while. I was more than happy to wave this banner on behalf of my friends, to create the reason—and the power of a tradition—for a whole bunch of women to turn to kids, spouses, and colleagues and say, Sorry, folks, I’m doing this for me.

In today’s world, maintaining focus has become incredibly difficult. That’s because everybody is vying for our attention. And I’m not just talking about our family members, friends, or colleagues. I’m also talking about marketers, YouTubers, or bloggers. Nowadays more than ever, the ability to attract people’s attention is one of the biggest sources of income for many companies. In short, your focus is worth a lot of money, which is why YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram do everything they can to keep you glued to your screen.

No child can avoid emotional pain while growing up, and likewise emotional toxicity seems to be a normal by-product of organizational life—people are fired, unfair policies come from headquarters, frustrated employees turn in anger on others. The causes are legion: abusive bosses or unpleasant coworkers, frustrating procedures, chaotic change. Reactions range from anguish and rage, to lost confidence or hopelessness. Perhaps luckily, we do not have to depend only on the boss. Colleagues, a work team, friends at work, and even the organization itself can create the sense of having a secure base. Everyone in a given workplace contributes to the emotional stew, the sum total of the moods that emerge as they interact through the workday. No matter what our designated role may be, how we do our work, interact, and make each other feel adds to the overall emotional tone. Whether it’s a supervisor or fellow worker who we can turn to when upset, their mere existence has a tonic benefit. For many working people, coworkers become something like a “family,” a group in which members feel a strong emotional attachment for one another. This makes them especially loyal to each other as a team. The stronger the emotional bonds among workers, the more motivated, productive, and satisfied with their work they are. Our sense of engagement and satisfaction at work results in large part from the hundreds and hundreds of daily interactions we have while there, whether with a supervisor, colleagues, or customers. The accumulation and frequency of positive versus negative moments largely determines our satisfaction and ability to perform; small exchanges—a compliment on work well done, a word of support after a setback—add up to how we feel on the job.28

You will never be able to tell your friends or family what you really do for a living. You will never be the celebrated hero, rather always the unsung protector in the shadows watching over those who need the sacrifice of you and your colleagues.

A bubble is a fragile thing, and often in the evening the professors talked worriedly about its bursting. They worried about political correctness, about their colleague on TV with a twenty-year-old female student screaming abuse into her face from a distance of three inches because of a disagreement over campus journalism, their colleague in another TV news story abused for not wanting to ban Pocahontas costumes on Halloween, their colleague forced to take at least one seminar’s sabbatical because he had not sufficiently defended a student’s “safe space” from the intrusion of ideas that student deemed too “unsafe” for her young mind to encounter, their colleague defying a student petition to remove a statue of President Jefferson from his college campus in spite of the repressible fact that Jefferson had owned slaves, their colleague excoriated by students with evangelical Christian family histories for asking them to read a graphic novel by a lesbian cartoonist, their colleague forced to cancel a production of Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues because by defining women as persons with vaginas it discriminated against persons identifying as female who did not possess vaginas, their colleagues resisting student efforts to “de-platform” apostate Muslims because their views were offensive to non-apostate Muslims. They worried that young people were becoming pro-censorship, pro-banning-things, pro-restrictions, how did that happen, they asked me, the narrowing of the youthful American mind, we’re beginning to fear the young. “Not you, of course, darling, who could be scared of you,” my mother reassured me, to which my father countered, “Scared for you, yes. Vith this Trotskyist beard you insist on wearing you look like an ice-pick target to me. Avoid Mexico City, especially de Coyoacán neighborhood. This iss my advice.” In the evenings they sat in pools of yellow light, books on their laps, lost in words. They looked like figures in a Rembrandt painting, Two Philosophers Deep in Meditation, and they were more valuable than any canvas; maybe members of the last generation of their kind, and we, we who are post-, who come after, will regret we did not learn more at their feet.

In 1925, Gerardo Machado defeated the conservative Mario García Menocal by an overwhelming majority, becoming Cuba's 5th president. A colleague of Alfredo Zayas, he was also a popular Liberal Party member, and a General during the Cuban War of Independence. General Machado was best known for rustling cattle from the Spanish Imperial Army’s livestock herd, with the good intention of feeding the poor during the revolution. This brazen act of kindness won him a great deal of support among the people. As President, he undertook many popular public projects, including the construction of a highway running the entire length of Cuba. During the beginning of his career as president, he had the National Capitol, as well as other government buildings, constructed in Havana. At first, he did much to modernize and industrialize the mostly agrarian nation. Benito Mussolini and his march on Rome impressed Machado. He admired Mussolini for demanding that liberal King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy elevate the Fascists to power, instead of the Socialists. Although Mussolini originally started his political career as a Socialist, with power and wealth he became a staunch anti-communist. When he was elected as the 27th Prime Minister, he turned Italy into a Totalitarian State. Machado’s ambitions and admiration of Mussolini caused him to emulate the dictator and to misread the importance of his own office. Becoming a “legend in his own mind,” he overreached and started down a slope that led to his administration’s failure and earned him the hatred of the Cuban people. From the very beginning, he fought with the labor leaders and anarchists for control of the labor unions, which represented the workers in the sugar industry. This brought him into a serious conflict with the plantation owners who were mostly wealthy Cuban families and Americans. Keeping the cost of labor down became a priority for the Sugar Barons, and Machado used patriotism as a tool to keep the workers in line. His dictatorial, arrogant ways created unrest within the labor force, as well as with the politically active university students.

To do this, we follow five “R’s”—recognize, respect, regulate, reshape, re-story. Awareness allows us to recognize the autonomic state and accurately name it. We then respect the ways the state has activated in service of survival remembering that the nervous system is always acting to keep us safe. Putting the word “adaptive” before the words “survival response” reminds us that no matter how irrational our behavior in the moment may seem or how crazy our story may feel, a familiar cue of danger has come to life and our nervous system has enacted an old pattern of protection. Next, we bring a bit of ventral regulation and then begin to explore ways to reshape the pattern. Finally, we listen to the new story that is emerging. Through understanding how the autonomic nervous system takes in embodied, environmental, and relational experiences, we become active operators of our systems and authors of our own autonomic stories. Understanding how to find the way back to a ventral state is key to living a balanced life. When we begin to find a foothold in regulation, we can look at any problem with the emergent properties that accompany a ventral state—curiosity, creativity, and the ability to see options and explore possibilities. From this place, we have the autonomic resources to see our experience in a new way, and we often find a path to resolution in a way we never thought possible. A polyvagal perspective on life is not only a theory but a way of being in the world that is experienced from the inside out. Looking through the lens of the nervous system and listening to our autonomic stories, we shape our systems toward ventral regulation, and engage with our systems in new ways. When daily life is lived from a polyvagal perspective, we make a commitment to being aware of our autonomic experiences and becoming a regulated and regulating presence not only for ourselves but also for our partners, family members, friends, colleagues, and the people we naturally come into connection with during a day.