Say it Better

Knowing When Fear is a Friend

 A gang rape of a teen girl, took place over several hours at a high school, with onlookers who did nothing.  It happened just last month in an adjacent county to where I live.  Among the many reactions to this horrific incident, here’s the first that’s positive and proactive for women, albeit an action than can seem self-serving.

A local author is co-offering a free self-defense class. As someone who chronicled her recovery from violent abuse in her book, Skinny, Tan and Rich: Unveiling the Myth, Maryanne Comaroto will teach emotional self-defense techniques.  Her colleague will teach physical self-defense techniques.

Comaroto’s core message is “TLC: Trust yourself, love yourself and control yourself."  Reflecting the insights in security firm founder Gavin DeBecker’s excellent book, The Gift of Fear, Comaroto suggests that,  “One of the things we typically don’t do is trust our intuition. It’s the first indicator we maybe in danger.“  

That’s the money quote for me, one I hope each of us has grown into knowing and doing by this stage in our lives.

Whenever you’ve felt profound fear, it was linked to the presence of danger, imminent pain or death.  Said DeBecker in a National Public Radio interview, “When we get a fear signal, our intuition has already made many connections.  When you feel fear, try to ‘link’ it back to a past situation where the feeling that was similar to see if your fear is, in fact, justified.” 

While the media often portrays human violence as random, de Becker points out that it seldom is random. In fact, you can anticipate the patterns of impending danger in most cases, if you listen to your instinct of genuine fear and take action.  DeBecker’s book offers specific criteria for how you can better protect yourself by learning to recognize and act on the intuitive signals you pick up but reject as unfounded.

Worry, on the other hand, is the fear we manufacture.  Worry, anxiety, concern and wariness all have a purpose, but they are not fear.  Any time your dreaded outcome cannot be reasonably linked to pain or death and it isn’t a signal in the presence of danger, then it really should not be confused with fear.  

Worry is a form of self-harassment.

Worry will not bring solutions.  Worry distracts from finding solutions.

To free yourself from worry sooner, understand what it really is.  Most people worry because it provides some secondary reward such as:

• Worry is a way to avoid change; when we worry, we don’t do anything about the matter.

• Worry allows us to avoid admitting powerlessness over something, since worry feels like we’re doing something.  Prayer also makes us feel like we’re doing something, and even the most committed agnostic will admit that prayer is more productive than worry.

•  Worry is a cloying way to have a connection with others.  Worry somehow shows love.  The other side of this is the beleif that not worrying about someone means you don’t care about that person.  As many people who’ve been worried about know well, worry is a poor substitute for love or for taking loving action.

• Worry is a protection against future disappointment.  After you complete an important project where the success of your approach won’t be known for some while, for example, you can worry about it. 

Ostensibly, if you can feel the experience of failure now, rehearse it, so to speak, by worrying about it, then failing won’t feel as bad when it happens.  But how would you want to spend the time while you find out:  worrying, playing or initiating another action on another endeavor?

There is a Pay-off for Worry But Not a Healthy One

For some people, worrying is a “magical amulet”, according to Emotional Intelligence author, Daniel Goleman.  Some people feel it wards off danger.  They truly believe that worrying about something will stop it from happening. 

Most of what people worry about has a low probability of occurring, because we tend to take action about those things we feel are likely to occur.  This means that very often the mere fact that you are worrying about something is a predictor that it isn’t likely to happen.

The connection between real fear and worry is similar to the relationship between pain and suffering.  Pain and fear are necessary and valuable components of life.  Suffering and worry are destructive and unnecessary parts of life.  Worry interrupts clear thinking, wastes time, and shortens your life.

When worrying, ask yourself, “How does this serve me?”

To be freer of fear and yet still get its gift, consider these techniques: 

1. When you feel fear, listen.

2.  When you don’t feel fear, don’t manufacture it.

3. If you find yourself creating worry, explore and discover why.

We Choke on Anxiety

Anxiety, unlike real fear and like worry, is always caused by uncertainty.  it is caused, ultimately, by predictions in which you have little confidence.  If you predict you will be fired and you are certain that your prediction is correct, you don’t have anxiety about being fired, but about the ramifications of losing a job. 

Predictions in which you have a high confidence free you to respond, adjust, feel sadness, accept, prepare, or to do whatever you need to do.  You can reduce your anxiety by improving your predictions, thus increasing your certainty.  It’s worth doing, because the word anxiety, like worry, stems from a root that means “to choke,” and that is just what it does to us. 

Our imaginations can be fertile soil in which worry and anxiety grow from seeds to weeds, but when we assume the imagined outcome is a sure thing, we are in conflict with what Proust called an inexorable law:  “Only that which is absent can be imagined.”  In other words, what you imagine -- just like what you fear -- is not happening.

 

"self-harm"

A sad, sad term for another unexpected side-effect of the tragic still-unfolding story that is getting less and less coverage. Some become so desperate they take it further.

How a “National Shame” Can’t be Hidden Any Longer

Watch a smart mob in action right now. The growing mob is google bombing. You, too, can use this powerful tool when you are outraged or inspired by some action and you want to draw the world’s attention to it.

Within 24 hours the bloggers of Brazil managed to stick two google search words, “National Shame” on the action they protested.

Here’s why they are google bombing and how they are doing it.

The president of Brazil’s Senate, Renan Calheiros, traded political favors with a construction company that covered some of his personal expenses. He almost got away with it. The Ethics Committee of the Senate recommended that he be impeached. In spite of that indictment, in a closed-door session, his Senate colleagues voted to let him off the hook. In the past, there was not much the people of Brazil could do at that point. But this Internet-connected world has changed the rules of engagement.

Outraged, Rodrigo Stulzer jumped into action. On his blog he advocated that others join him in google bombing.

How?

He asked other bloggers to write about the incident, and include the words “national shame” in their blogs and in their comments in each other’s blogs. Thus the growing crowd of online voices cements the connection between the Senate of Brazil, the vote it took and the words “national shame.” Collectively they raise that connection to the top of searches done via google for “national shame.”

In effect Stulzer and others proved that the Senators can run away from their vote but they can’t hide from it.

As of today, Stulzer had “gathered nearly hundred comments and trackbacks” according to journalist Paula Goes’ thorough coverage.

Reports Goes, at the same time, in another part of Brazil, Blender Blog suggested a more efficient way to google bomb:

“Instead of going around posting that the Senate is the national shame, I'd suggest you to do something different: NATIONAL SHAME. The more people link to these words like I've done, the quicker Google will show the world that the Brazilian Senate is the national shame. So, is anybody up for helping?”

I was intrigued by how various bloggers kept the pressure up. Read the rest of Goes’ story to see more ways to keep a campaign alive and spreading. Yet notice how many stories vy for that ignoble top search spot of "national shame."

Cyber-activism is happening all over the world. We can use variations of these same tools to protest a dangerous product or to celebrate companies that are going green or involving customers in product design. See what comes up now, for example, when one searches for an honest political candidate or a valuable service or a safe product.

By the way, what comes up first when you google search your organization, favorite interest, cause or colleagues? (We’ve all googled our own name at some point.) As the world flattens it become a more accessible world stage for any of us to play a bigger role. We just have to discover smarter ways to partner with each other and harness the power of us.

I stand in awe of …

… Wendy’s insightful political commentary over at I Want to be 60.

Investigate Before You Donate This Holiday

Women are often generous volunteers and contributors, yet we want to use our resources wisely. Start by checking out a non-profit at Charity Navigator.

Does it match your values? Does it use your money well?

For example I agree with Michael Angier’s values and process:
“My personal belief is that commerce has the greatest potential for creating peace and harmony in the world. It’s just not smart to go to war with people you do business with. In addition, I believe that helping people help themselves goes much further and creates less dependence than simply giving money and food. Giving people a hand up instead of a hand out resonates with me as a more lasting and beneficial means of reducing starvation and poverty.

My intention was to find an organization that did this, and I feel we succeeded. After doing our due diligence, we chose FINCA (The Foundation for International Community Assistance). They have a 4-star rating with Charity Navigator, and their values are consistent with our own.

FINCA provides financial services to the world’s poorest families so they can create their own jobs, raise household incomes and improve their standard of living. As FINCA loans rotate among members of the community—and as members’ savings are re-invested in the neighborhood—opportunity and economic vitality increase.

We all deceive ourselves …

…. and others sometimes. We just have different flashpoints that move us to various patterns of deception, sometimes achieved by omission.

Ah, what’s left unsaid.

Watching the actor Ed Harris play Edward Carr in Neil LaBute’s masterful one-man play, “Wrecks” is to inevitably face one’s own menu of omission and rationalization. At least that’s what I felt when watching it.

As John Lahr explains in his New Yorker magazine review of the play, “In ‘Oedipus Rex’ the drama is about the search for self-awareness; in ‘Wrecks” the drama is about the lack of it.

In ‘Oedipus Rex’ the King is a victim of the caprice of the gods, and is, therefore, tragic. In ‘Wrecks’, the moral horror arises not by chance, but by choice, and Carr is, therefore evil.”

In the play, Carr observes, “It’s just amazing what we do, as people, you know, to run from the past… God, the swamplands we’re willing to wade through to get around the truth!”. Yet, as Lahr notes, “ Carr is an example of the very thing he inveighs against.”

Watching that play, I couldn’t help but think of our president Bush, admonishing so many

This sounds strikingly similar to Lahr’s conclusion about LaBute’s play. (It) “is not a glib exercises in negativity but a masterly attempt to shed light on the ways in which we manufacture our own darkness. It offers us the kind of illumination that Tom Stoppard has called ‘what’s left of God’s purpose when you take away God.’”other people about doing the right thing – as he sees it. Warning the “leaders” in Iraq to do a better job and ignoring the effect his continued actions in that country are destabilizing the whole region. That’s led to an inadvertently un-summit this week, where the emperor had no clothes.

Ah the sins of omission - and determined lack of self-awareness.

What we don’t yet know

Yes. Yesterday, Rupert Murdock’s News Corporation did cancel the book, IF I DID IT.

Yet, as of this writing, Amazon still has the page up. Reading the comments section, you’ll find the intensity of feelings, just by reading the tags. They include boycott (44), shameful (21), murderer (16), guilty (9), repulsive (9), scum (8), sick (8), blood money (6), boycott regan books (6), evil (6), liar (6), killer (4), disgusting (28), pathetic (11), shame on amazon (8).

Yet there’s some big questions left unanswered so let’s take the most likely path when there’s a big controversy. Follow the money. But that’s a dead end. So far.

Some questions. Who had the original idea for this book? Who actually owns the underlying rights to the book? How much money was really involved and where did it go? What does Simpson think he was doing and what will he do now? Having written that I realize how I do not care. Move on