Barbara Ehrenreich’s Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World
I recommend this as a bracing read that worked like a jumper cable on my thinking.
I think I inhaled Positive Thinking from a young age. It definitely came from the USA. My dad read Dale Carnegie. My sister once recommended Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich. I think that most people born into the English-speaking world would have picked this kind of thing up... in the groundwater.
I am a natural optimist. But a friend recently described herself as a pessimist, and then said something really interesting. She said
Pessimism is my shield
She explained that, in a world where everyday news is depressingly bad, it is best to set one's expectations low. She agrees with Barbara Ehrenreich's 2009 Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and The World. It's not so much the everyday practice of positive thinking that the author takes issue with. She suspects that it is the tip of a major iceberg in American culture. If you have to cling so hard to the belief that everything is rosy in the garden, doesn't that suggest that you might be fooling yourself? Beyond a certain point doesn’t the whole thing flip over into its opposite?
Barbara died in 2022, a much-decorated New York Times writer with a reputation as a contrarian.
She argues in this book that Americans are brainwashed with positive thinking, so that it is considered bad manners to do anything else. 'Have a nice day' and smiley emojis invade everything, but in fact the USA scores badly on international happiness scores - well below Finland. Oprah champions winners, Deepak motivates the faithful, everyone is encouraged to 'be their best selves' and unleash the 'giant within'. From Norman Vincent Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking (5 million copies) to Rhonda Byrne's The Secret (30 million copies).
Ehrenreich points out that she is not setting out to be a buzz-killer. But she trained as a scientist - PhD in cellular biology, Rockefeller University - and inclined to ask awkward questions like 'where is the research to support that belief?'
If you drink the Kool Aid, you are deceiving yourself. Another friend of mine was raised in a cult in the Mid Western USA. She described the regime that prevented people from questioning authority. She recently revisited the place, and was shocked to see how many of her friends were still there, years later.
We have had our own version of thought control in this country.
My own conclusion: in the end, it's neither positive or negative thinking that we can rely on. The key is critical thinking skills that equip our young people to decode manipulative media. And in the meantime, a dose of scepticism is a good medicine.
Multi-cultural Challenge
The factory was highly efficient, but heading for a problem. The Lithuanians weren't talking to the Hungarians. Neither were talking to the Poles. And the Irish supervisor was left guessing at what was happening on the shopfloor. He just knew it wasn't good.
He spoke to his manager. His manager called me. What do you suggest, she asked?
Having looked around the factory, it occurred to me that there was an obvious communication problem. It was a problem of language , but also one of culture. So let's tackle it as a matter of intercultural understanding, I said.
Proposed solution: take the whole complex situation into the kitchen. Invite them to cook for each other. Show us your best dish!
The man cooking the Hungarian goulash was fiercely defensive of the huge pot, shouting at people about the right ingredients. The Lithuanian lady cooking meatballs smiled and welcomed help. The Polish blinis were coming along but a little late.
Eventually we sat all together and cracked open a few bottles of wine. The boss stood and made an inspiring speech about achieving market leadership in 18 months.
All agreed that the intervention was a great success.
‘Keep doing what you are doing!’
Andrew O’Brien, Commercial Director, Dalcassian Wines and Spirits
A CEO Talks about her experience of In Your Stride coaching
I was introduced to Barre at a time when there was a lot of stress in the workplace. As a CEO you can feel alone and isolated…. you can become immobilised which can over time impact on working relationships. Barre helped me to unpick what belonged to me but more importantly what part of what was causing me to be stressed was not mine to own but belonged to others. He provided me the space to examine and explore key issues that were impacting on me in a non-judgmental way. Re-building my confidence and working relationships he has given me the tools to support myself when times get tough.
What words would you use to describe the processes and approaches he used?
Non-judgmental, safe space, trustworthy, challenging in a constructive and positive manner, non-critical, rethink positions.
Were there any insights you gained from the work?
Everyone needs to take time away from the day-to-day operations and create space for themselves to evolve, grow and re-balance.
Michele Kerrigan, CEO, GROW Mental Health Services.
Justin McCarthy, Editor, the Farmer’s Journal:
“Barre developed a foundation strategy for the business that with minor tweaking over the years continues to serve the business with distinction over a decade later.”
“Subtle, non-invasive, trustworthy, relaxing, open and helpful.” - Steve McGettigan, Chairman, Bective Rangers Football Club, Dublin
“Subtle, non-invasive, trustworthy, relaxing, open and helpful.” - Steve McGettigan, Chairman, Bective Rangers Football Club, Dublin
“Subtle, non-invasive, trustworthy, relaxing, open and helpful.” - Steve McGettigan, Chairman, Bective Rangers Football Club, Dublin “Subtle, non-invasive, trustworthy, relaxing, open and helpful.” - Steve McGettigan, Chairman, Bective Rangers Football Club, Dublin
Wayfinding
Wayfinding is the purpose of inyourstride.
Wayfinding means finding your way, finding your mojo, finding your creative spark.
How is this done?
Movement and stillness, talking and listening, action and reflection, body and mind.
Wayfinding consists of 4 kinds of walk:
The Change Walk: takes an ‘outside in’ approach first, then an ‘inside out’ approach. ‘Outside in’ to get a fix on all that is changing in the environment, big on evidence and questioning. ‘Inside out’ to start assessing your own position, interests, goals and fears.
The Decision Walk: Rehearses making up your mind, offers fresh perspectives to test your judgement, blends logic, analysis and intuitive feel. Reduces the noise factor to get at the signal.
The Leadership Walk: Gets you ready to be brave. It is big on truth, but is also about love and passion and what lights your fire. This walk is about articulating a vision.
The Review Walk: reflects on what has happened, to learn from it, to get to the nub of it and what it means, be it a project, an event, an interview, an ‘achievement’ or a ‘failure’.
These walks distil my experience of working in the field of innovation and creativity over a 30 year career. They are informed by thinkers from a diverse range of fields, from philosophy to cognitive science. Walking with me helps you to find your way. It lets the fly out of the bottle.
Leadership lessons from the Roman Emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius on Authentic Being
Marcus’ work is an answer to the question ‘How should we live?’ It is direct, but directed at himself rather than at others as a doctrine. He uses his journal to stay close to the path of truth. Authentic being, he is saying, involves
Self-awareness: a curiosity about what makes you tick, is the basis of all the other elements. This gradually develops into a reflective practice.
Gratitude for what is: this is developed as a disposition and a discipline.
Awareness of reality: a firm objective grasp on reality as a result of working at the truth.
Embracing simplicity: what you need is much less than what you want. Bring the two closer.
Responsible freedom: rather than being a victim, live a life of no excuses.
Service to the community: his philosophy is not an ivory tower. His path is directed outwards, and that is his leadership role as emperor.
Philosophy for him is the daily exercise of wisdom. His book, Meditations, serves as a record of his daily practice in this regard. As such it is an invaluable account of the philosopher-emperor’s inner dialogue.
Rory McIlroy, Northern Ireland golfer, before his victory over the USA in the 2023 Ryder Cup:
““I’ve read Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations. I’ve studied Stoicism for a while and read a lot of those sort of books,” he said.
“I just thought as a former emperor of Rome and seeing that we are in Rome, I thought it would be a good time to revisit some of his thoughts, and I revisited them on the way to the course.”
What if?
What if the Brexit referendum had gone the other way? What if you had taken that job in the States? What if you hadn't moved back in with your parents for Covid?
'What iffery' is the name we give to these guesses about what might have happened if things had gone differently. It is an old parlour game, and the possibilities are endless. But this is a game we mostly play in our own heads, a post mortem after the fact as we retrace our steps, going back over the turns we took, and the other turns that we didn't take.
At its best, it can be a useful self-questioning after the fact. At its worst it is a rabbit hole. The analysis turns into rumination, we blame ourselves obsessively, and we can't move on.
Think about the movie Groundhog Day for an illustration of this loop.
Sport is where you can see this at work: the keeper who lets in the winning goal has got to dig the ball out of the net and get on with the game. The tennis player who double faults on her serve feels stupid, but needs to rebuild her confidence quickly for the next point. Everyone remembers the poor sucker who missed the kick. In business as in sport we need to get over ourselves, to move on from our mistakes and avoid indulging in destructive self-blame.
What iffery is a parallel universe of things that never happened. Is it any wonder that we can intuitively accept the theory of multiple universes even if we don’t understand the physics? It is a form of magical thinking that flies in the face of the facts. In this lumber room of history, Hitler was strangled at birth, Partition never happened, David Cameron slept in and didn't call a referendum on EU membership in 2016.
Notice though that Donald Trump is clearly a resident of this twilight zone, with his apparent conviction that the 2020 US Presidential Election was stolen by Biden. And the whole subject of 'fake news' has raised our awareness of the fragility of truth. How do we know what we claim to know, and what grounds do we use in defending it other than personal prejudice?
Before we get carried away by epistemology and historiography, let's focus on a useful distinction in psychology that I believe can help us manage the difficulties caused by what iffery.
Counter-factuals:
There are two different kinds of counter-factuals. Upward counter-factuals take the form of 'if only I did something different, it wouldn't be so bad', or 'if only I hadn't done 'x', it wouldn't be so bad.' 'If only I didn't get that tattoo on holidays.'
Downward counter-factuals take the form of 'things could have been worse', for example, 'Brexit was only passed by 51.9% of the UK electorate, which is the barest winning margin.'
Upward counter-factuals will tend to be demoralising regrets. Downward counter-factuals will be consoling. The two represent opposite stances. Who is likely to adopt each of these stances?
The perfectionist will tend to blame themselves immoderately, and so often use upward counter-factuals. The antidote is self-compassion.
Top sportspeople master the psychology of counter-factuals
How does a top sportsperson deal with adversity? Take Novak Djokovic at 2 sets down against Jannik Sinner in Wimbledon on July 5th. At the break both men sat for a few minutes to rest. One was facing the possibility of a major career breakthrough if he could see things through (Sinner - what an appropriate name!), the other was close to going out of the championship he won last year (Djokovic). In those few moments the balance shifted. Perhaps Sinner woke to the scale of what he was doing. Perhaps Djokovic called on reserves of self belief. One thing he did not do was blame himself for the mistakes in those 2 sets he had just lost. Seven times in his career he has come from 2 sets down: of course that has to help. It makes upward counter-factuals less likely to crowd the brain. We know that the great sportspeople seem to find those reserves of self-belief. But perhaps what we didn't see was how toxic upward counter-factuals can be to that process.
When sportspeople talk of 'staying in the present moment', I believe that the psychology of counter-factuals plays an important part.
Try this:
Online Solitaire with the Undo button top right
If you want to play with counter-factuals, there is a way of gaming it that is quite accessible. In online Solitaire, use the 'Undo' button to replay your moves. Nothing in the game is irreversible, unlike in life. In the completely useless and trivial world of Solitaire, you can retrace your steps to your heart's content to see what if you had moved this card instead of that.
Perhaps in the recesses of his Mar-o-Lago residence, there is someone playing Solitaire, and using the 'Undo' button to revisit the events of December 2020 and January 2021. A solitary player with 74 million people looking over his shoulder.
Reflecting on 2021
Peppa Pig
We know that we live in strange times, at a period that is hard to describe, given all the factors involved, environmental, political, economic, etc. But while thinking about the year we have just lived through I have come to the conclusion that there is one word that captures the kind of leadership we are seeing more and more of in the world:
Unembarrassability
Is this a word? I am not sure how to spell it ... the spell-checker is telling me it's not right. But I know what it means, and I am sure you do, too.
For example:
Whether it's Peppa Pig or denying the reality of a Christmas party, Boris cannot be embarrassed, it seems. The same is true of Donald, shamelessly feathering his nest, and promoting alternative facts. And of Vladimir granting himself ever-higher political office while incarcerating his opposition.
These men simply cannot be embarrassed. Unlike you or me, they share a strange phenomenon with robots and AI generally: they don't blush!
2021 has shown us that if you want world domination, forget Left and Right, Red and Blue. What you need to do is to LOSE THAT BLUSH. And that busybody conscience that goes with it!
An exotic location for a company off-site
The Traditional Company Off-site: not
Pilita Clark wrote about company off-sites in The Financial Times and The Irish Times. She regrets the fact that she never got to go on one of these junkets, never got to sip tequila by the pool in some exotic location.
But she asks an interesting question: what happens to these events now, with Covid? One company has come up with an interesting idea. They shut their offices in San Francisco and LA, and saved a lot of money. Now they can offer those exotic off-site locations to their staff as an alternative to working from home (WFH). So they now have 3 options: WFH, or work in the office, or use this attractive third option. Standard Chartered bank are offering their 75,000 staff the chance to work from hubs near home, so they can avoid the commute.
My solution is more practical than that: take a walk! For 15 years I have been taking clients for a walk. No phone, no screen. Just you and me. It's amazing how many office problems can resolve themselves in the great outdoors. And Covid has made this approach especially relevant: socially distant, 100% outdoors, a 90-minute walk and talk.
Decision Snapshot no.1:
You wake with the alarm. 7am. You shut it off. You lie there, facing the first decision of the day. Will I move to get out of the bed? Maybe even asking the question in that way indicates that you are not going to. The moment has passed. Your eyes stay closed… have never opened. Sometimes not deciding is a decision.
The kids had a great time sledding
Plan ‘B’
We were on a family trip to Galway from Dublin. It was Christmastime, and there was a lot of snow, at least, a lot of snow for Ireland. The car was struggling from the start, and gave up outside Athlone, which was about half way to our destination and very inconvenient. The four of us got to a nearby hotel, and settled for plan ‘B’, as the car was going to take some time to fix. The hotel was comfortable, by a lakeside, not crowded, warm and dry. The breakfast buffet cheered the four of us up considerably.
But what I remember best about what followed was this: the friendly staff allowed us to take trays out of the kitchen to use as sleds, so that the kids spent hours sliding down every slope available. It turned out to be a very enjoyable Plan ‘B’.
It pays to have a Plan ‘B’. People say with a wry smile ‘If you want to make God smile, tell him your plans’. Or ‘Man proposes, Allah disposes’. The idea is that we humans overestimate our influence and span of control. The bleakest version of this view is probably that of Epictetus, the Stoic philosopher. He used a metaphor to describe human freedom: we are like a dog attached to a cart that is rolling downhill. Our freedom is measured by the length of the leash, and the time taken for the cart to reach its inevitable destination. I don’t accept that fully, perhaps because I believe we are always hoping to jump onto the cart and put on the brakes! But maybe I have watched too many Hollywood films. And I like the Stoics’ emphasis on the conditionality of our freedom.
Stephen Jenkinson argues in Come of Age, the Case for Elderhood in a Time of Trouble that the most senior age group in North America today lacks wisdom. And a significant part of their foolishness is the failure to accept life’s limits and conditions. Of which mortality is the most fundamental. We cannot simply extend our lives like re-mortgaging a house.
So I believe that experience teaches us to ‘hedge our bets’ and allow for the unforeseen when it comes to making plans and decisions. Always have a Plan ‘B’.
“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”
— Simone Weil.
Get outta my face!
The London Underground
I was in the Tube in London some years back when I witnessed this small drama: an elderly man in a pinstripe suit was sitting beside a young Indian woman who was talking volubly to her friends. All hands and eyes and expression. Suddenly the older gent said ‘No!’ quite loud. He made a gesture with his forearm, waving it up and down between them like a barrier. The message was clear: he was laying down a boundary between them. He was clearly feeling that she was crossing the line, invading his space.
He might as well have shouted ‘Get outta my face!’
People who study these things refer to ‘personal space’. Apparently there is an invisible boundary line at about 18 inches from the skin surface, marking our territorial space.
Animal studies add another interesting layer to this picture. Swiss biologist Heini Hediger identified 3 such boundary lines among animals. He showed these as 3 concentric circles.
The outermost zone he called ‘Flight distance'. If a lion is far enough away from a zebra, the zebra will continue to graze in comfort. But if the lion comes closer, the zebra will run off.
Closer in is ‘Defence distance'. If the lion crosses that line, the zebra will attack rather than fleeing.
Finally there is ‘Critical distance’. If the predator is too close, there is nothing for it but to freeze and play dead.
All very well, you might say, but don't assume these zones apply to human behaviour. I disagree: the gent in the pinstripe suit is Exhibit ‘A'. And I would argue that our maps of personal space are complicated by the following factors:
Our buffer zone is fluid, depending on the nature of the threat or attraction. You might have a cast on your foot, and that would increase the area of vigilance or ‘no fly zone'.
Think of the impact of the pandemic on all this: someone coughing 20 feet away can provoke an immediate defensive reaction in us, ever since the aerosol was identified as a risk factor.
Neuroscience reveals that our sense of anticipation is a key factor. Our threat-response reflex has proved itself essential to our survival. Further, of particular relevance to our recent experience of the pandemic, it appears that dopamine is released in the body before a hug… the anticipation of the hug is enough to trigger the hormonal response… the effect before the cause.
Maybe what we are really talking about here is the trade-off between freedom and security. The pandemic has radically shifted the balance, with significant political consequences that will play out over the short to medium term. In the meantime, good luck finding the sweet spot between ‘too close’ and ‘too far’ in your social life.