Observations-Engagements

Human potential implies the need to change and grow, for potential is something not yet there that could be there. For people, change is largely a matter of examining and then changing beliefs.

In a leadership meeting at the Wright Leadership Institute this morning, Dr. Robert Wright of the Wright Leadership Institute suggested that beliefs fall into an intersection of beliefs and expectations between the individual and the world, as suggested by these questions:

What’s my belief about nature of the world?

What I can expect of the world?

What’s the world’s belief about nature of me?

What can the world expect of me?

Beliefs are often mistaken, and those are the four categories of where mistaken beliefs fall.

Human change and development as an intentional act considers to additional questions, Dr. Wright suggests:

What are the beliefs you are challenging?

What are the new beliefs you are building?

The institute’s MORE Life training is one of the best overall training experiences you can do to find answers to those questions. To read why I recommend for business, read the blog post at:

http://bit.ly/aqSQd0

Better yet, use this code to register for free: LinkedIn

I’ll be there challenging my own beliefs about myself and building new leadership skills and beliefs by leading the production team. Hope to see you there, too.

What beliefs are you challenging?

Tags: Transformation, Wright Leadership Institute

During the late 1960s and through the early 1970s, intensive group experiences captured the attention of journalists from major media, articles in national magazines like, Look, Newsweek, Playboy, and The New Yorker; best-selling books; and appearances on major television shows by authors and practitioners. Accounts in smaller newspapers followed, with articles by the Associated Press wire service spawning local reporting by local papers like the Milwaukee Sentinel.

Books, both popular and academic, as well as academic articles from the era, opened with wide-eyed wonder and almost surprised prediction at the prevalence and importance of growth group training, viz: The book Carl Rogers on Encounter Groups, opens with a chapter called “The Origin and Scope of the Trend Toward “Groups.”” Psychologist Dr. Carl Rogers wrote that “the planned, intensive group experience” was “the most rapidly spreading social invention of the century, and probably the most potent” (Rogers, 1970, p. 1).

In a textbook Group Procedures: Purposes, Processes and Outcomes, published a couple of years later, the authors wrote, “The use of groups to increase self-understanding and to improve the quality of interpersonal relationships is a sweeping social movement affecting psychology, medicine, education, social work, even business and industrial leadership,” (Diedrich and Dye, 1972, p. v).

Those books and the articles in the popular media followed the publication, in 1967, of the book Joy: Expanding Human Awareness, by William C. Schutz. The cover line of the paper back copy gives the reason: Joy was the book that “made encounter groups famous.” The goal of encounter groups (groups of six to 12 participants who meet for the purpose of personal growth) was to help participants experience joy through self awareness, created as the members disclosed themselves to one another through honest and open self expression.

Groups went under various names like encounter groups (perhaps the most famous), T-Groups (for training groups, the earliest historically), sensitivity training (one of the corporate terms for group training, and process groups (a more generic and descriptive term). Those groups share a key characteristic that the are leaderless—the leader generally facilitates a process rather than sets and guides an agenda. This description of sensitivity training, from the journal article “Training Groups, Encounter Groups, Sensitivity Groups and Group Psychotherapy,” provides a good description of growth groups and their workings:

Sensitivity training is any of a set of experiences, including but not restricted to the training group, attempting to help each participant to recognize and to face in himself and in others many levels of functioning (including emotions, attitudes, and values), to evaluate his behavior in light of the responses it elicits from himself and others at these various levels, and to integrate these levels into a more effective and perceptive self. . . . The trainer is the experienced leader or facilitator within a sensitivity training group who serves as a resource to the group. . . . He does this by calling the attention of the group from time to time to the behavior which is being exhibited and the relationships which are emerging in the group, and by helping the group to clarify its own goals and procedures (Gottschalk, L.A. MD, et. al, 1972, pp. 88-89).

This post on group dynamics is the second in a series of posts on social intelligence and group dynamics, written as part of my studies at the Wright Graduate Institute for the Realization of Human Potential. The first is “Social Intelligence.” Future posts will expand on those ideas and provide the broader historical context in psychology.

Tags: Wright Graduate Institute

The New Yorker arrived in the mailbox today, a much-anticipated weekly event in the Canright household, for as long as I’ve lived in one. Today I see in the table of contents the tag, “Psychotherapy under siege.” I can hardly wait to get to the article, by Louis Menand,  a professor of English at Harvard.

“Head Case: Can psychiatry be saved?” is a review of two new books critical of the treatment of depression in America. As I study the history of psychiatry and psychology, with an interest in and emphasis on existential psychology and  human potential practices, articles like Menand’s help build the case of all that’s wrong with the perception and treatment of psychological disorders. As Menand writes:

There is suspicion that the pharmacrutical industry is cooking the studies that prove that antidepressant drugs are safe and effective, and that the industry’s direct-to-consumer adversiting is encouraging people to demand pills to cure conditions that are not diseases (like shyness) or to get through ordinary life problems (like being laid off).

He then cites the frequent criticism of the psychiatric profession’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), as I wrote about in the post “Ill Definition.” Menand goes on to note that complaints are not only from “sociologists, English professors, and other troublemakers” but also from the psychiatric profession  itself. Here’s another passage worth quoting at length:

As a branch of medicine, depression seems to be a mess. Business, however, is extremely good. Between 1988, the year after Prozac was approved by the F.D.A., and 2000, adult use of antidepressants almost tripled. By 2005, one out of every ten Americans had a prescription for  an antidepressant. IMS Health, a company that gathers data on health care, reports that in the United States in 2008 a hundred and sixty-four million prescriptions were written for antidepressants, and sales totaled $9.6 billion.

Now that’s depressing. And it’s one reason why health-care costs are so high in the United States.

The rest of the article covers the pharma-centric treatment of psychiatric disorders in general and depression in particular and explores the dodgey role of the FDA. Along the way, the authors Menand reviews and the experts he interviews critique cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), mention the “rapid collapse of Freudianism” and its implications, and report on the history of the DSM, much like that covered in the “This American Life” radio report “204: 81 Words.”

Whether it’s the impending update of the DSM or the current health-care reform debate, the over-definition of mental disorders and the role of drugs in their treatment is becoming more prominent in the news. Menand’s article provides a good overview.

Tags: drugs, New Yorker, psychiatry

The way we define things and how we name them determine how we view the world and, as a result, how we act and treat one another. Modern neuroscience shows that human perceive not the thing itself but a copy, an illusion created by the human brain, a copy that is as created by mental beliefs and attitudes as much as it is generated by energies in the physical world. Things are not as they appear, and how things appear can change over time.

A story I heard today on the radio show “This American Life” illustrates how powerful definitions are and what it can take to change them. “204: 81 Words,” covers the history of how the American Psychiatric Association (APA) decided in 1973 that homosexuality was no longer a mental illness. It’s about both the power of a family story and a social label, artfully and informatively told by National Public Radio reporter Alix Spiegel.

The story’s professional theme shows how the 81 words in American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) that defined homosexuality as a disease were replace by 204 that say it is not. For years, psychiatrists treated it as a disease to be cured, and psychoanalysts probed patients to see where the causes lay in family history.

I assume that “This American Life” host Ira Glass and his crew decided to rebroadcast the show, originally aired in 2002, because the forthcoming fifth edition of the APA’s manual, DSM-5, to be published in 2013, is now available for public comment. Comments are due April 20, 2010.

The story’s family theme focuses on the power of family stories. The reporter, Spiegel, is the granddaughter of a man who played an important role in revising the DSM description of homosexuality. Her family’s family story was more or less single-handedly responsible for the change. The granddaughter, in telling the history, found that the true story was much more complex and her grandfather’s role much less central, though still important.

I am not sure how Spiegel and her family changed through her telling of the story and the consequent shattering of the myth of her grandfather. I’d like to, for family stories provide a powerful organizing device for a family and the perception of its members. A change in the narrative generally changes the characters in the future, but his is not in Spiegel’s scope.

My personal interest centers on how things become named–more properly how people use language to designate aspects of human experience with words that have meanings upon which people act. “80 Words” recalled how appalled I am at the number of psychological experiences have been labeled diseases that should be treated by drugs.

About two years ago, I got into a cab on the way home from Midway airport and had a conversation with an extremely articulate and bright cab driver about philosophy, politics, and, of all things, drugs. When I mentioned that the drug seller’s on the streets of the city were not necessarily the biggest causes of the country’s drug problems, and my driver took that bait.

“Oh yeah, the real pusherboys work for the big drug companies,” he said.

“Makes the guys on the street seem like rank amateurs,” I replied in agreement.

Turned out we had both read an article in The Chicago Reader that week (2/14/08) called, “How Shy Became Sick.” That article and the book it profiles, Christopher Lane’s Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness, provides a critical bit of history on the development of the psychological profession in recent years. It convinced me that if I had been in high school in the mid 90s rather than the mid 70s, I would have been on meds.

I would have been a very different person, and not for the better, though it occurs to me that I was on meds not sanctioned by the psychological profession. But that’s a different story.

“204: 81 Words” is well worth the hour it takes to play.

Neuroscience is wired. News reports on the latest discoveries in neuroscience appear with increasing frequency, as shown by a Google Trends graph (bottom line) on the search term “neuroscience.”

With advances in medical technology, especially magnetic resonance imaging, developed in the 1970s, neuroscientists have been able to watch the brain in action and gain a much more detailed look at how the brain processes information. As a result, neuroscientists have gained insight into the overall structure of the brain and which areas are responsible for what functions and the biochemical processes through which the brain communicates with the body.

Since the mid 1990s, for instance, neuroscience researchers have been mapping the portions of the brain responsible for emotion. In 1996, researchers in England identified a tiny brain structure called the amygdala as the crucial bran area for the perception of fear (Trudeau, 30 October 1996). The amygdala isn’t logical. It just reacts. “Before we are even consciously aware of something the amygdala has activated the fight-or-flight reflex and activated the fear system,” said Kerry Ressler, a psychiatrist at Emory University and investigator for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (Hamilton, 4 September 2009). (Note: All references appear at the end of the post, with links.)

Indeed, of all the recent neuroscience research, perhaps the most relevant to learning and development is research on emotions: how they work to connect the brain and the body and their critical role in human learning and development. “The inextricability of thought and emotion is one of contemporary psychology’s most important discoveries,” wrote Winifred Gallagher. The Greek separation of “supposedly lofty cognition, which focuses on reason and absolute truth, and funky emotion, which centers on subjective value judgments” has been brought back into a whole over the last 10 years, as “scientists have discovered that thinking and feeling often have a chicken-or-the-egg relationship and are heard to tease apart” (Gallagher, 2009, p. 29).

One of those scientists, Dr. Candace Pert, pharmacologist and former Chief of the Section on Brain Biochemistry of the Clinical Neuroscience Branch of the National Institute of Mental Health, has done pioneering work on brain chemistry, communication between the mind and the body, and the biochemical nature of emotion. In her view, the mind is in the body’s nervous system as much as it is in the brain. “The body is the unconscious mind,” she wrote. The chemical mechanisms of communication between the brain and the body are short amino acid chains called peptides and receptors, and the information that they carry is experience, by both the brain and the body, as emotion. To Pert, “emotion creates the bridge between mind and body” (Grodzki, 1995). As Pert wrote, “Neuropeptides and their receptors thus join the brain, glands, and immune system in a network of communication between brain and body, probably representing the biochemical substrate of emotion” (Pert, 1999, p. 179).

The implication is that emotional awareness and expression is critical to learning and development. Indeed, both memory and actual performance are affected by mood, Pert’s research shows. Emotions are both the arbiters of what people remember and what people learn. The human brain is bombarded by sensory input. In order for the brain not to become overwhelmed, it needs some mechanism to decide what information is important to pay attention to and what information should be ignored. Pert concluded that “our emotions . . . decide what is worth paying attention to” (Pert, 1999, p. 146).

Researchers studying attachment theory and its role in parenting say something similar and take it a step further. “How emotion is experienced and communicated may be fundamental to how we come to feel a sense of vitality and meaning in our lives,” wrote Siegel and Hartzell (Siegel and Hartzell, 2004, p. 59). Their experience and research suggests that “emotions shape both our internal and our interpersonal experiences” and, as a result, allow us to integrate our experience within our selves, deepen our connection to others, and prepare our bodies for action. Emotional communication is especially important to how children develop and learn. “The experience of emotional joining helps children develop a stronger sense of themselves and enriches their capacity for self-understanding and compassion (Siegel and Hartzell, 2004, p. 68).

Couples therapist Sue Johnson goes so far as to call attachment theory the “science of love.” Listen to her explain the origins of attachment theory from pioneering psychoanalyst John Bowlby in “Hold Me Tight,” a February 2010 CBC “Ideas” interview  and title of her book.

It’s a physical as well as an emotional process and becomes the equivalent of a dance between the mind and body. “Emotions are at the nexus between matter and mind, going back and forth between the two and influencing both,” Pert wrote (Pert, 1999, p. 189). Neuropathways are forged in the brain, though mechanisms that include attachment, and those pathways, along with the emotional tendencies that our individual neuropathways support, serve as a filter our experience. As a result, we cannot objectively define what is real and what it not. We are, in a sense, the product of our emotional experience and select information based on that experience, both past and present. Even so, the biochemical receptors in our brains and body can and do change. “Emotions and bodily sensations are thus intricately intertwined, in a bidirectional network in which each can alter the other,” Pert wrote (Pert, 1999, p. 142). Because that generally unconscious process can be brought into consciousness, “even when we are “stuck” emotionally, fixated on a version of reality that does not serve us well, there is always a biochemical potential for change and growth” (Pert, 1999, p. 146).

References

Gallagher, W. (2009). Rapt: attention and the focused life. New York: The Penguin Press.

Grodzki, Lynn (1995). “Approaching a theory of emotion: an interview with Candace Pert, Ph.D.” Retrieved from http://primal-page.com/pert.html on 20 June 2009.

Hamilton, J. (4 September 2009). “In the future, science could erase traumatic memories.” National Public Radio broadcast retrieved from http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112531962.

Pert, C. (1999). Molecules of emotion: the science behind mind-body medicine. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Siegel, D. J. & Hartzell, M. (2004). Parenting from the inside out: how a deeper self understanding can help you raise children who thrive. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher.

Trudeau, M. (30 October 1996). “Brain and Emotion.” National Public Radio broadcast retrieved from http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1041718.

Tags: neuroscience

One of the more profound experiences I have had in learning how to participate in and lead small groups is my experience joining a group of people I did not know in the role of host. The host role, as understood in etiquette, is the person who meets and greets people and makes sure that they feel comfortable. Typically, the host either knows everyone or represents the place, as in a restaurant.

As an assignment in a personal power learning laboratory at the Wright Leadership Institute, however, the host or hostess role is an assignment given to a new member of the lab, a small group for learning personal life and leadership skills. Assignments form a major part of the learning methodology at WLI and collectively make up the Assignment Way of Living, in which students do assignments in their daily life to master life and leadership skills and behaviors.

The idea behind the Host/Hostess assignment is to introduce yourself to a group. It’s a counter-intuitive assignment in some ways because most of us generally think of a host or hostess as someone who welcomes other people to a party or a restaurant and makes them feel comfortable with the place or with the other guests.

In the Host assignment, in contrast, it was up to me to make myself comfortable, to make myself part of the group. WLI assignments are rooted in the existentialist concept of authenticity. They allow an individual to discover, explore, and practice their own sense of self in relation to other people and to ultimately take responsibility for their own sense of well being. The host assignment is a perfect example.

As a host in this sense, you take responsibility for including yourself in the group. The assignment can be done quite literally, with the new group member greeting each person as they enter the group or serving refreshments before the group begins. Further, the group host may work to see that other group members include themselves in the conversation.

The assignment was quite profound for me. Like many people, I was used to having others include me in a conversation or see that I felt comfortable in a situation. I realized in doing the assignment that it was not up to others to see that I included myself or felt comfortable. It was up to me.

By extending myself to people I did not know and make sure that they felt comfortable with and knew me, I gained a greater acceptance of other people in the group–and of myself as a member of the group. This was a critical first lesson on group dynamics–that belonging to a group is a critical responsibility of the group member.

I belonged not because the other group members helped me belong but because I decided I belonged and, in effect, proved it to the other group members in my performance of the assignment by my welcoming behaviors, which, ultimately, showed them that I had made the effort to get to know them in some personal way. Therein lies a key skill in mastering groups, whether for task performance, business networking, or social interaction.

Tags: existentialism, Transformation, Wright Leadership Institute

Humans learn and develop. How fast, how much, how far, and to what end is open to individual chance and choice, but learning and development themselves are not. Humans are learning beings that develop throughout their lives. How humans as individuals and as a species understand learning and development and harness that understanding to positive ends determines the course of our evolution and the legacy we in this time leave to those in future time.

That is my basic belief on learning and education and why I have placed so much importance on learning throughout life. It’s why I continue to participate in training groups and why I decided to get a doctorate in human potential at a relatively late stage in life.

The philosophies, education and technologies, and research on human learning and development are described in the overview paper linked to this post. The paper suggests that an individual’s immediate awareness of emotional experience is a principal determinant of that individual’s ability to learn and develop, connect with other people, and feel satisfaction and meaning in life. It is also apparent to me that biological and medical research over the last 15 years is providing an empirical, scientific basis of what philosophers and psychologists have theorized about learning and development for well over the past century.

Read why in “Foundations of Learning and Development: An Overview,” one of the papers I have written for my master’s degree at the Wright Graduate Institute for the Realization of Human Potential.

Tags: human potential, Wright Graduate Institute

I’m stepping back tonight after completing the second part of a week and a half of the 2010 Men’s Leadership Development training, in which I and my leadership colleagues have been setting the themes and planning our goals for 2010. We’ve been using Dr. Judith Wright’s Evolating model for personal transformation as both a touchstone and tool to guide our ongoing planning.

Liberating is the fourth stage of the model, before rematrixing, which I wrote about on Monday. The Evolating model describes a process of “discontinuous change or transformation to a more advanced stage of being,” and as a result, it deals with ways of being and styles of attitude more than concrete goals.

Liberating is just that–a liberation in the form of new behaviors, attitudes, and ways of being. Liberating comes after the revelating stage, in which patterns of behavior or thinking are revealed.

Revelating is the insight that may or may not lead to change. In many cases, an insight into a faulty thinking pattern may remain an insight, and the faulty thinking remains. With liberating, you experience the freedom of breaking through, of trying new things, of experiencing new sensations and feelings, of thinking in new ways, or all of those and more.

My liberating experience started last week as I noticed some long-standing attitudes that have limited my firm’s growth for years. Many lie in the experiences I had in growing up in small businesses on both sides of my family, and I have seen both how those experiences have kept the firm going for 20 years but with a pattern of control that limited their size.

The pictures at the top of the page, of my 50th birthday celebration, are another example of liberation. I almost didn’t have a party at all, and instead I used the experience as an ongoing project of looking back in order to look forward.

Seeing what I have accomplished, as well as the gaps–personally and as a result of my family experiences–has been freeing, showing me what I have to draw on as well as where I need to retrain myself. Therein lie the seeds of liberating behaviors that lead to lifelong lasting change–and business growth in 2010.

Tags: Evolating, Leadership, Transformation

Rematrixing is the fifth stage in Dr. Judith Wright’s Evolating model for personal transformation. Rematrixing is the crux of the model, the stage that separates real long-term, core change from learning and growing, the stage where a person experiences, in Dr. Wright’s words, “discontinuous change or transformation to a more advanced stage of being.”

My leadership colleagues and I have been working through the model last week and this week at Men’s Leadership Development Week at the Wright Leadership Institute. I have previously posted on the engagement and revelating stages of the Evolating model.

In revelating, we are gaining insight into the way we operate, revealing the matrix of rules, myths, and beliefs from which we operate. As in the movie, The Matrix, that set of rules myths and beliefs are extremely powerful in determining the nature of a person’s reality–and only as powerful as a person makes them.

In the terms of Dr. Alfred Adler, the Viennese psychiatrist who founded the field individual psychology beginning about 100 years ago, people operate on a set of mistaken beliefs learned in childhood. Therein lies the foundation of a person’s matrix, and it’s a deep foundation because it goes back generations, for the family and as a result for the individual.

Rematrixing is a difficult job that takes intention, discipline, support, and accountability. It goes beyond setting and achieving goals; it’s completely new ways of being, thinking, and acting. It’s living in a completely new way and involves shifting beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors, as well as achieving goals.

We will start by mapping our existing matrix and clarifying our new matrix. We should end up with a map that looks like a network diagram, with core sets of beliefs as the nodes.

From that, we will plan individual change, including support systems and disciplines to change one small thinking pattern and behavior after another. More on how that works to come. . .

Tags: Evolating, Leadership, Transformation