Category: Psycology

Change Your Actions, Change Your Mind

I haven’t had much time to work on the blog lately. I got a promotion at work a few months ago, which was kicking my butt until I accepted an even better offer out of state. After giving my notice at work, my employer decided to let me go. So I have a couple extra weeks to get our house ready to list, pack up, and move to Kansas City, Missouri for the new job.

At first I was bummed about their decision to not let me finish out the last two weeks, but let’s look at the positive side. I get to spend more time with my family for the next few weeks. I don’t have to go to work tired when our daughter isn’t interested in sleeping through the night. And my wife is pretty happy to have me around the house more, too!

And thank God we decided to prioritize our spending and build up our emergency savings. The situation would have been different if I had made the decision to live paycheck to paycheck and suddenly found myself with no income for the next four weeks. There are actions I have taken to change the way I think about the world, to practice forgiveness and acceptance, and to accept responsibility for any situation in which I find myself.

For some people, getting let go would have resulted in the feeling that a great injustice has occurred, and a few years ago that is exactly how I would have reacted. But it became apparent that the world is not happening to me, but the world and I are symbiotic. As German philosopher and psychologist Ludwig Klag says, “[T]he world pushes back as we push through it, no mind is an island but always with other ‘things’ from the world.” Which brings us to the difference in the way optimists and pessimists think about the world. A broken leg means not being able to walk and lost wages for the pessimist but the optimist thinks, ‘Oh, joy. I get some time off work to pick up that book I haven’t had time to read!’ Optimists and pessimists react differently to the same situation, which tells us that the problem is not ‘out there’ in the world, but ‘in here’ in our minds.

Ludwig Klage
‘The world pushes back as we push through it’

Rather than think about how the world affects me, I have to think about how I affect the world. There is so little we have control over, but one thing is certain, we have control over our own actions. I ask myself what is my motivation when I make a decision. Is it out of self interest do I think about how it will affect others? For example finding a way to have an emergency savings account rather than buying myself something I don’t need. Even better is taking the time to discuss these decisions with the people who will be affected. My wife and I spent a lot of time discussing the decision to leave my job and move back home. And the decision was based primarily on what was the best thing we could do for our daughter.

If this is something you have struggled with, just know that over time you will get better at thinking about others the more you practice doing it everyday. If you change your actions, you will change your thinking.

One more thought before I wrap up. With my schedule unexpectedly opening up, I’m already filling it with things to do. I love to work, and I’m always thinking about how I can be more productive. Which brings me to this; When I was in college, an architect that we interviewed in our professional practice seminar said we could either be great with our families or great at our jobs, but we couldn’t be great at both. Ever since I heard that I wondered if it were true and what kind of person I would be. It wasn’t until I heard Ramit Sethi talk about the stories we tell ourselves that prevent us from reaching our full potential that I knew it wasn’t. Many times our self doubt is the result of what psychologists call cognitive distortions. These cognitive distortions are created by our often imperfect perceptions of the reality around us and an unquestioning acceptance of what we expect our lives should be. There’s a really great book on this subject, The Lies We Tell Ourselves by Jon Frederickson.

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‘Embracing life on its own terms can be difficult. As we embrace life as it is, our illusions collapse. We need emotional courage to bear the pain without running, explaining, or justifying.’

What is stopping me from being a great father and husband and being great at my job? When I find myself thinking that I have to make a choice between one or the other I have to question if I even have to make a choice! I have found that these decisions are most often driven by selfishness. ‘I don’t like my job so I can use family as an excuse to get out of work.’ or ‘Hanging out with the family isn’t that fun so I hide out at work.’ Truth is the only choice I have to make is to not be selfish. I can be great at my job and great with my family if I choose to. The only thing that can prevent me from being great at anything is me and my own silly mind.

Top Books for Better Dadding

How early should you start reading to your baby? You can start the same day they are born if you are so inclined. The psychologist in the NICU told us reading to our baby is one of the most important things we can do for her cognitive development. Newborns are taking in a lot of information so read to them and let your baby hear your voice and the variety of sounds that it produces. If you are running out of things to say to your baby (after all it is a one sided conversation for many months) and find your vocabulary is limited to few sentences repeated over and over you can just read books you enjoy outloud to your baby. It’s a win-win situation!

What to Expect: The First Year

Heidi Murkoff; Sharon Hazel

My wife and I read this book together while she was pregnant. There are a lot of myths and other misinformation that we pick up through life about being a parent and how to take care of our children. For example, I always thought you had to pat your baby on the back to make them burp after eating. Not so at all. Most of the time babies burp on their own, just make sure you are holding them upright should more than air come up with that burp! This book is a great starting point for knowing what to expect when you are a first time parent and how to just about any situation that you can think of during your first year as a parent.

The New Dad’s Survival Guide: What to Expect in the First Year and Beyond

Rob Kemp

The New Dad’s Survival Guide was one of the first books I picked up while getting ready for our daughter to arrive. If I were going to write about book about what you need to know as a first time, I wouldn’t, because Rob Kemp already wrote an excellent book to cover what you need to know. It’s about more than how to change diapers and burp your baby, but also covers things to like how to communicate with your partner and a heads up for some of the mistakes we make when trying to adjust to this new way of life.

The Gardener and The Carpenter

Alison Gopnik

What is your approach to parenting? Are you trying to shape your child into a specific person following strict guidelines or do you allow your child to come into the would and learn to flourish on their own? I think Dadding teaches me as much about myself as I can teach my daughter Parenting is a fairly new term. In the past thirty years, the concept of parenting and the multibillion dollar industry surrounding it have transformed child care into obsessive, controlling, and goal-oriented labor intended to create a particular kind of child and therefore a particular kind of adult. Gopnik shows that although caring for children is profoundly important, it is not a matter of shaping them to turn out a particular way. Children are messy and unpredictable, playful and imaginative, and very different both from their parents and from each other. The variability and flexibility of childhood lets them innovate, create, and survive in an unpredictable world.

The Consolations of Philosophy

Alain De Botton

I read this book to my daughter in the NICU. There was a local bookstore down the street from the hospital and this book was mentioned in an finance book I was reading at the time (Hagstrom). The book is an insightful look into how philosophy helps us to understand ourselves and the world around us. I read his book The Architecture of Happiness while I was in college and it completely changed the way I felt about what I could accomplish as an architect. Consolations changed the way I felt about what I could accomplish as a human being by changing my perspective.

Investing: The Last Liberal Art

Robert G. Hagstrom

In the year leading up to our daughter’s birth I was trying to learn as much as I could about personal finance and investing. I knew enough to know that the more money I invested the greater my annual income would become. I didn’t expect this book to be such a paradigm shift in the way I thought not just about investing, but innovation and insight. Hagstrom uses Charlie Munger’s ‘Latticework of Mental Models’ as a basis for understanding business models and how we can take the principles from one discipline and apply them to others. Depth of knowledge is great, but breadth of knowledge is where true innovation comes from.

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What Matters?

I recently rejoined Twitter to try and promote this blog and follow a few traders I like from Options Action. I recently shared that I left social media altogether and life has never been better for me. Less distraction, more progress toward my goals. But I bit the bullet and signed up, because that’s how this machine works.

Everyday we encounter the world outside of us and respond to what we sense (sound, sight, smell, taste, temperature, texture, etc.). We are struck with emotion every step of the way, sometimes intense, sometimes subtle. Emotions are involuntary, no matter how much you believe you are a rational person. Emotions are precognitive, like reflexes. If you are in sound health they work, if not you should see a doctor.

Feelings are different, and typically confused with emotion. Feelings are just your opinion of the emotions you are experiencing. You can call them thoughts if you do not like to consider yourself a ‘feely’ kind of person. How you feel about your emotions determines how you will act upon them. For those that insist upon arguing you are not driven by emotion, let us just say it this way-Your opinion about your emotions determines how you will react to them. Opinions are not facts.

We live in a world with more stimuli than ever before, with each stimulus encountered comes an emotional response. Those emotions tell us what is going on in the world around us. You cannot make decisions without emotion (read Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain by neuroscientist Antonio Damasio for more information.)

Social media and our smart phones act like a sixth sense, alerting us to something happening outside of us. The emotional responses come and go so quickly we don’t even have time to ‘feel’ them until we have already reacted. A tweet about a new venture by someone I follow was attacked by other twits about an unrelated subject and as an expression of schadenfreude. I, of course, wanted to jump in and defend them. But do they need me to defend them? Does it matter anyway?

I put down the phone and went to check on my daughter, still soundly sleeping. As I stood there at her crib feeling a great sense of love and compassion (and a little bit of fear as I leaned in closer to see if I could hear her breathing!) I was reminded of what really matters in life.