Evolving minds (youre always on your way to another version of yourself)

Evolving minds (youre always on your way to another version of yourself)Evolving minds (youre always on your way to another version of yourself)Why do people behave the way they do?For centuries, philosophers and psychologists have debated personal identity, and what makes a person. And although today we know a lot mora about what it takes for a person to persist in time, we certainly dont know everything.Anas Nin, the great French-born novelist, once wrote Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.Follow Ladders on FlipboardFollow Ladders magazines on Flipboard covering Happiness, Productivity, Job Satisfaction, Neuroscience, and moreSince you were born, you have encountered innumerable people, experiences, books, films, and cultures that have continuously shaped your perception, cognition, memory, knowledge, etc. Even though you the same person, it is i ndisputable that you have evolved over the years.Change isnt simply an important aspect of life - its life itself. Your mind and body are changing every second of every day.Daniel Gilbert writes in his book, Stumbling on Happiness,Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think theyre finished. The person you are right now is as transient, as fleeting and as temporary as all the people youve ever been. The one constant in our lives is change.All of our experiences are constantly changing us.Your natural personality (e.g, introvert/extrovert, and character traits) may not significantly change. A major personality change usually isnt part of this evolving process.Although a persons behaviour may change under different circumstances, personality is fairly stable and not easily altered, says Dr Michele Leno, DML Psychological Services, PLLC.But your worldview or reality about life and living it keeps changing to shape you into who you think you should become. You dont possess the same consciousness as your younger self.Many people today still believe that who they are now is pretty much who they will be forever, according to researchAfter examining the responses of more than 19,000 people gathered over four months in 2011 and 2012, the researchers - Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard University and author of the book Stumbling on Happiness, Jordi Quoidbach, of the National Fund for Scientific Research in Belgium, and University of Virginia psychologist Timothy Wilson - discovered that even though most people acknowledge that their lives have changed over the past decade, they dont believe change is constant.How you think and everything you consider to make informed decisions about your life and career is still evolving.If you are a life-long learner, you evolve rapidly than you realise because of the different mental models, ideas, and life principles you learn about every day.The reality is, we are constantly changing, evolving, and being changed by everything around us. You are either becoming a better version of yourself or worse version of yourself if you are not open to growth.Recognising that we are constantly working to evolve ourselvesis critical to success, says leadership development expert Liz Bentley.She calls this process stepping into your power.Your consciousness (and the physical body) is in a perpetual state of reassembly, always becoming with or without your consent.For millions of people, emotional struggles sabotage their ability to demand the best of themselves as they evolve. So they end up living the realities and expectations of others.To take complete control of your evolving process, and move closer to the best life you want for yourself, you need to improve your self-knowledge and notice when your environment or people around are drawing you to their perceptions and whether thats what you want for your future self. Adjusting your self-conception to account for this truth may be profoun dly liberating.The French philosophical giant, Michel Foucault, once saidI dont feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning.In life, we never cease to become, even when you pursue happiness, marriage, or a better retirement, and ultimately get what you want, that new reality changes what you want about life, and has an effect on your worldview going forward.Our environment, our relationships, and our perspectives will remain in continuous change, and with this change will arise new difficulties, new directions, new understanding.As we evolve, we take pride in the accomplishments of each passing stage of life, but time will demand that we continue to roll and change.The important thing to remember as you evolving is to aim to become better than who you were yesterday and not to hang on to who you were and limit your potential growth. Be careful of the natural temptation to hold ti ghtly onto the past.To latch onto and aim to maintain a particular state or stage of life is an untenable fantasy and a deliberate rejection of potential metamorphoses. Whether we wish it or not, existence is always interfacing with and altering us, as we are it. To accept this truth is to reorient oneself away from delusions of destination. To deny it is to reject the opportunities offered by change, to yield to what Nin calls death, writes Jordan Bates.To change is to vacate the past and move ever-closer to a better end.But careful you dont become anything. The possibilities are endless and exciting. Your future reality and what you become should be a choice you alone should make. Beware of the influences around you.R. Buckminster Fuller, a renowned 20th-century inventor, systems theorist, author, designer, and futurist once saidI live on Earth at present, and I dont know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing - a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary p rocess - an integral function of the universe.Integrating this idea into my own life has been a gradual and ongoing process. I endeavour to immerse myself in my chosen experiences and open myself up to new and better transformational experiences.And the more Im able to do this, the more I feel that, though changing, I am precisely where I need to be - not stressing too much about the past, or worrying endlessly about the future but making the most of the activities and environments available to me presently.Closing thoughtsYou cannot stop change, you can shape it.You are constantly changing - on a journey you have no choice but to take - embrace the inevitable and shape it to your advantage.Personality traits are fairly stable for everyone, but different perceptions, worldview, and exposure to diverse environments and culture are changing our minds about life and living it.You and I are in the processes of becoming, and choosing to see ourselves in this light can have a big impa ct on your understanding of human transformation.This article first appeared on Medium.

How to prevent burnout even when youre in love with your job

How to prevent lassitudo even when youre in love with your jobHow to prevent burnout even when youre in love with your jobDo you feel passionate about your job? The vast majority of professionals we surveyed recently said they were. Deloitte conducted a marketplace survey of 1,000 full-time U.S. professionals in a range of industries to better understand the drivers and impact of employee burnout. And we were surprised to landsee the role passion plays in the prolonged stress that leads to burnout.With 87% saying theyre passionate about their current job, you might think the number of burned out employees would be relatively low. Youd be wrong.Three in four respondents told us they have experienced burnout in their current job, with more than half telling us they felt burned out more than once. Of course, passion does help to mitigate burnout somewhat - rates were higher among those who reported bedrngnis feeling passionate about their job.But in some ways, passion may also contribu te to burnout. When we asked survey respondents why they dont use all of their vacation days, the top reason cited was, I worry that issues would arise if I was away from my work.Passion is a wonderful thing. It drives purpose, engagement, and productivity. But when you become so passionate about one aspect of your life that you forget about the others (like vacation, for example) then it can be a sign of trouble.I know this from personal experience how easy it can be to miss the warning signs of burnout when you are passionate about what you do. But here are some lessons I learnedabfertigung before you check-out Mindfulness can be a powerful thing. Take the time to check-in with yourself and reflect on how you are feeling in body, mind, and purpose. Awareness is half the battle when it comes to preventing burnout.Make recovery a priority Dont let your vacation days go to waste. And dont forget to make recovery a daily part of your life. Small breaks throughout the day can have an i ncredible impact overall.Let go This may be one of the hardest things to do when you are passionate about your work, but its important to trust in your team members. Whether its delegating projects, requesting coverage for your vacation, or simply asking for help, your colleagues can have your back because youll have theirs as well.Get your move on Whether its a leisurely walk, a high-intensity interval training (HIIT) session, or your favorite Zumba class exercise releases the feel good chemicals in our brain called endorphins, improves mood, and clears the mind.Have an attitude of gratitude A thank you seems simple, but dont overlook its powerful and lasting effect on your life. Research shows that the practice of gratitude can lower blood pressure, improve sleep and immune function, and help us feel calmer.Talk it out In our survey, we asked respondents how they deal with their burnout and over half (51%) say they talk to friends or family. Connecting with your social support ne twork is a great way to not only relieve stress but also learn new coping mechanisms. When I experienced burnout, connecting with a friend and mentor helped me step back and reassess what was important to me in my life.If you are a leader in your organization, then its not only yourself you should monitor but also your teams. When asked about the reasons why they felt burned out at their current job, survey respondents reported that lack of passion wasnt the problem. Instead, lack of support from leadership was cited as the most common reason.Its not surprising that employees want to see and feel that their leaders support and recognize the work that they do. After all, wouldnt any employee want a boss that is as passionate about them as they are about their work?April is Stress Awareness Month and what better time to start developing positive habits in stress management. Plan your vacation days, be mindful of your well-being, and show your appreciation and support for your colleagu es and teams. Kindle your passion, but dont let it burn you.Please read our disclaimer information here.This article first appeared on Thrive Global.

You are not who you say you are and Ernest Hemingway

You are not who you say you are and Ernest HemingwayYou are not who you say you are and Ernest HemingwayI sometimes wonder what Ernest Hemingway was like. Not Hemingway the novelist, nor Hemingway the adventurer, but Hemingway the man - the Hemingway that lived, embodied in flesh and blood, who said ordinary things and who, for the most part, lived in an ordinary way.When I wonder this, I get pulled away by flashes of foreign memories scenes from his life in Paris as told in A Movable Feast, the laughs and the sadness that came with The Festival of San Fermin in The Sun Also Rises, and his moving depiction of what it means to do-what-you-ought-to-do in The Old Man and the Sea. But behauptung memories dont feel enough. They are what his cultural image is built on, and they maybe give you a sense for his style, but they dont bleed in a way that makes you feel like you know someone.Any intentional sequences constructed in my mind by his words are not a complete representation. They unm ask a setting, they outline a belief template, and they bring to the foreground what gives us context to uncover what is in the background, but to landsee the man, Ive realized, is to look beyond his words and to read into his silences.In the brde few decades, neuroscientists and developmental psychologists have uncovered something that philosophers of language began to suspect in the middle of the 20th century The manifestation of our conscious experience is in large part determined by the linguistic concepts we use to understand the world around us. These concepts categorize our experience, which in turn allows us to impose artificial boundaries on reality so we can make it a little mora coherent as we move through life.The words Hemingway uttered and the sentences he wrote may capture some fragrance of the truth, but they dont fully map us to the territory. They dont give us a way to look beyond the conditioned linguistic boundaries that confine us, and they dont tell us anything about what cant be said. Our memories are, of course, formed by these concepts, and thats useful as far as our need for a coherent narrative goes, but to understand what lies beneath all of this, we have to sit with what remains undefined.When I think of Hemingway the man - as I think of any other person in my life and their person-hood - I find myself looking in the spaces between the words. Im not interested in who they say they are, nor do I find what others associate with them all that compelling, but what interests me is what they embody - what they leave for interpretation what they act out in the space they dont verbalize what they say with their silences.Humans like labels. We define ourselves by them. They get us through life, for the most part, mora effectively than if we operated without them. But as we get comfortable relying on them, we forget something Their utility is in what they accomplish, not what they represent. They are valuable, yes, but what they represent is an approximation - occasionally wrong, often problematic. You are not the words you define yourself by, and I am not the person with a disposition that can be captured by a written scene.What makes me, me, and you, you, is how we connect to the ever-changing reality around us. Its what we say-without-saying as we manipulate our understanding of a stimulus into a response, and what we embody as we move through the trials of space and time.One of Hemingways most honest scenes takes form at the end of A Farewell to Arms, where after a period of fighting in the First World War, the main character illegally escapes its bounds. As we get to the last section of the novel, its just him and the woman he loves, pregnant with his child, without any of the brutality that has kept them apart until then. Its quiet and beautiful.There isnt much room left at this point to take the story anywhere else, so what happens next is sudden. Catherine, the woman, goes into labor. Its difficult painful. Frederic, the main character, waits for as long as he has to until they give him the news the baby is stillborn. Before he even has the time to process this, Catherine begins to hemorrhage.In a flash of a moment, Frederic goes from having everything to nothing. There are no words that can do what he experiences any justice. The world has nothing to offer but silence. When the inevitable occurs, he ignores what the nurses tell him he can and cant do, walking into the hospital room to hold Catherines lifeless body. And this, finally, is where Hemingway reveals himself, ending with the least satisfying final line Ive ever readAfter a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.Thats it. There is no closure. There is no attempt at making sense of what is essentially senseless. There is just him, the hotel, and the rain.This ending is unsatisfying because its real more real than the string of words that contain it. We dont get to know what happens nex t because it doesnt matter what exactly happens next. If we tried to define it, we would lose the thing that makes it hurt the thing that makes that character who he is the thing that, perhaps, makes Hemingway who he is.Now, maybe its naive to impose on a writer his person-hood more from what he didnt hint at the end of a fictional novel than from the words and the sentences he explicitly wrote about his life. But applied to Hemingway, I dont suspect thats true. His famous iceberg theory states that The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water, and writing - like an iceberg - gains not from what is apparent on the surface, but from what is spoken between the lines. The ocean below whats visible shapes more of the current than the waves on top.Within this ocean, there exists a world we cant talk about in any satisfying way without distorting the essence that makes it true. Its complex and multi-dimensional, extracting its meaning not from any singular cause but from a confluence of partial interactions between a chaotic set of axioms. The more you try to define it, the more it eludes you. The closer you get to its trail, the further away it begins to move.What we are left with, then, is a dichotomy a) we have the waves on top, which we can define fairly well with our words, and b) we have the undefined space below the surface that continually affects those waves. The trouble, naturally, is that we often impose too many of the characteristics associated with what we know onto what we dont know.None of us can understand the depth of the ocean - or what makes a person who they are - by trying to see it through a myopic lens (with the words we use to talk about ourselves) because the connection is illusory. The only honest way to truly see what we cant talk about is to watch the space that maintains its silence to observe what is embodied in the omission and to look at what is happening in the world rather than getting caught up in futile attempts at describing it.When you finally do this, a pleasant sincerity unveils itself you realize that silence has its own sound, and it creates words in its own rhythm, and once you learn to speak its language, it tells you everything that the conceptual alphabet cant verbalize into meaning.More and more, we live in a world where we are defined by who we say we are rather than who we really are. It seems like we would rather talk than do the work required to understand what it is that we truly embody. Its easier to speak than to be silent, of course, so not only do we never observe the space that we need to observe to see the truth, but we dont even give ourselves the chance to create it to begin with.In leaving Frederic as he does, Hemingway makes no effort to hide behind false words. He puts it to us to read between the lines and to interpret what little there is left of the story. His silence doesnt tell us anything specific about the character because he knows that his words have reached their limit. The character is as he is, and he will do as he does, as he deals with reality.Hemingway wasnt the first to intentionally employ such techniques in his work. Even in the visual arts, the concept has a personenname negative space - the area we find around the subject of a piece the area that gives form to what exists to be highlighted. What Hemingway did do, however, as he showed himself, was cement its association with the edifice of truth.We can spend our whole life describing ourselves without seeing who we truly are. In the process, we may even uncover every answer to every question our mind can formulate. But the only answer that matters doesnt have a corresponding question. It lives in what we cant talk about.Want to think and live smarter? Zat Rana publishes a free weekly newsletter for 30,000+ readers atDesign Luck.Thisarticlewas originally published onDesignLuck.com.