Narcissism is a formed of learned helplessness

This is also a stub to be expanded over time.

Narcissism is a form of learned helplessness.

It is a conditioned pattern of taking care of one’s emotional needs.

Most of what are called “personality disorders” are emotional. They are the result of inadequate emotional health and fitness.

They are similar to inadequate physical health and fitness, comparable to high blood pressure, lack of cardiovascular fitness, or lack of mobility or strength.

And similarly, full health can be restored by addressing the causes, not treating the symptoms.

Emotional Health and Fitness

Another placeholder to revisit and expand later.

We need to start talking about emotional health the way we talk about physical health and mental health. More accurately we need to separate emotional health from mental health. But all three are distinct and interconnected.

People have started using the term “emotional health” but we need to go a lot farther. Much of what is called mental health is really emotional health.

They are three different things because our physical, emotional, and mental selves are separate parts. Most importantly, they are nurtured and developed and healed in different ways.

Our emotional, mental, and physical health connect and influence each other.

There are plenty of stories about emotional health affecting physical health. We know the inverse is true.

The term “mental health” as commonly used applies more to emotions than the thinking mind. Yet thinking has a health and fitness of its own as well.

We need to say mental health much less often (it belongs more in math departments) and start talking about emotional health instead.

For starters, building emotional fitness is closer to how one builds physical fitness. And healing emotional disorders is closer to how we heal physical disorders.

Inflation Expectations

Listening this morning to an economist from PIMCO on Bloomberg Radio. “We don’t talk about it much, but the dominant driver of inflation is expectations. He cites a lengthy Janet Yellen speech from 2015 or 2016, which, “after about 40 footnotes, basically concludes the same thing, that expectations drive inflation.”

So, is it possible that the internet has changed the mechanism for inflation expectations? Everyone gets price information from everywhere, instantaneously.

Untitled [the coming collision]

[this draft is pretty rough but I’m going to post it so I have to look at it again. June 2019]

Someone is going to do a study of what happens in a client relationship. They are going to prove that interpersonal influence between people happens at an emotional level. This is hardly news, but no one yet has presented the influential, definitive study that brings it into widespread acceptance.

Finance and economics have been revolutionized by the study of how people actually make decisions. It turns out this is a messy and biased process. One model suggests we have two parallel processors, one intuitive and emotional and the other logical and deductive. The intuitive processor is more powerful and dominates our behavior.

The intuitive processor is very fast and can process many things simultaneously. It runs our body and our physical behavior. It doesn’t seem to be entirely emotional but it includes our emotional self. Our conscious awareness of it involves physical sensations, emotions and feelings. Our experience of it is mostly effortless. It holds our wants, fears, and values.

The deductive processor includes our conscious attention, our thoughts, and our language. It is Homo sapiens’ newest part. It processes (holds in awareness) a few things at a time, maybe 5 to 7 things[1].

I like to think the intuitive emotional processor actually makes all our decisions. The deductive rational processor influences it with stories, plans, and strategies to get what we want. The emotional processor acts on those. But it does all the doing

There is a lot of entertaining research by now about how we decide. We like the same wine better when we believe it’s more expensive. We can’t keep our New Year’s Resolutions. Advertisers push our buttons constantly with great success.

We routinely choose things which make us less happy, healthy, or wealthy. We make most choices, for better or worse, in the blink of an eye[2] and have dozens of emotional and cognitive biases in how we make them. And it’s not even clear that we care that we are like this.

The compelling research that is missing is into how this process works in relationships with other people. There are a few researchers who have studied romantic relationships[3].

But no one has really presented the compelling story of what makes us choose in a sales dynamic, or when influenced by a leader.

We’re going to find the same thing we did about picking wine or shoes or something off the menu. It is a biased and emotional process. In other words, it’s about our feelings.

Like many other “discoveries” of behavioral economics and finance, all of this is hardly unknown to humankind. Someone just needs to do what Kahneman and Tversky did with their groundbreaking article in the 1970s.

Sections to complete:

What alumni of the Stanford Graduate School of Business discovered about its Interpersonal Dynamics course in the years after they graduated.

How emotional connection creates influence, and how that influence is a source of power in organizations, as defined and studied by Stanford’s Jeffrey Pfeffer.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

[1] It might only hold one thing at a time, but quickly cycle through a handful of them so that it looks like we are tracking 5 to 7.

[2] And then spend enormous amounts of time and energy making up arguments to explain why we made them when often we have little idea. Our “logic” often looks more like the arguments on one side of a court case than the deliberations of a judge or jury.

[3] Notably John Gottman. Also Sue Johnson.

Expert Intuition and Unconscious Competence: System 1 is Trainable (draft)

The marvelous Kahneman book Thinking Fast and Slow has a section discussing System 1 vs. Expert Intuition. He refers to an running debate with another scholar which became a collaboration. This debate isn’t fully described, but seemed to start with the contrast between the flaws and biases of System 1 and the power of expert intuition.

As Malcolm Gladwell described in his seminal book Blink, the power of expert (conditioned) intuition is so extraordinary it is hard to overstate. Observing and celebrating intuitive skill is one of great primary entertainments as humans. We adore great skill in every endeavor from art to sport to basic daily tasks.

I don’t think Kahneman wrote about expert intuition simply being a trained System 1 (I do need to review that section of the book).

System 1 is trainable.

System 1 learns by conditioning, through repetition. It is actually being trained constantly and cannot help being trained. System 1 learns anything we practice and makes that action unconscious. And we are practicing all the time. We are what we practice (1).

In fact, many of System 1’s flaws arise from conditioning earlier in life, particular in our formative years. Often this training was a remarkably successful adaptation to the environment we lived in. Years later in different environments System 1’s automatic adapted behavior gets us into trouble (2).

This isn’t just true for “unhealthy” environments in our formative years. Even if we have the most healthy, secure, balanced family life, System 1 develops habits which can be limiting later in life.

System 2 has a version of this conditioning. It develops mental models which become unconscious and can be limiting if we don’t update them, or if we fail to see they do not completely fit the present situation.

Final note: probably need to revise the picture with the elephants in captivity.

———

(1) Strozzi Institute of Embodied Leadership teaches, 1) we are what we practice, 2) we are practicing all the time, 3) do our practices serve us?

2) David L. Bradford, Stanford Graduate School of Business, “In my experience, people get into more trouble from over-using their strengths than from their weaknesses.”

Use your elephant, Luke

I am riding my elephant and I come to a tree fallen across our path. Do I,

  1. Get off the elephant and try to move the tree with one arm while trying to restrain the elephant with the other?
  2. Allow the elephant to push the tree out of the way. The elephant wants to. He has already agreed to walk this path?

Use your elephant, Luke.

Outline for a real article on this.

UseyourelephantLuke

 

Attachment (draft)

  • Connection 

plus

  • Conditioning (a process of the adaptive unconscious, aka red brain) which shows up as feelings and unconscious behaviors.
  • Ideas (a process of the cognitive mind, aka blue brain) about connection in general and with specific other people 

The two processes influence each other, around and around. Together these create our expectations. They make our “attachment personality.” 
Around and around, and then engaging with other people. 

These processes form our attachment bonds, aka relationships. 
Like all personalities, our attachment personality is remarkably (and I’d argue unexpectedly) stable. That can be good or a problem. 

Free market omnivores (draft)

This is our challenge: 

  • Our freedom of choice. 
  • The way we make choices.
  • Unexpected consequences of markets. 

In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan describes how food travels from the earth to our tables.  Great book in its own right. 

The problem referred to in the title is that we have to choose what to eat, in a way our ancestors did not. And we make choices that are not compatible with our physiology. 

Other research shows that our emotional brains make the choices. 

So big industrial food companies cater to our emotional brains. These consumer brand companies are not evil. They are just doing what sells food. 

But what sells food isn’t good for us. What sells food is what pushes the buttons on our emotional brains. So the food companies evolve to sell food that our elephants pick, like Lucky Charms or McDonalds or Pizza Hut. 

Even “healthy” food is sold to our emotional brains. Consider Pollan’s “American Pastoral” for example. Or me eating bran muffins because of newspaper stories in the 1990s. 

This is behavioral economics at its best (or worst). 

A yoga video for older, plumper people

reminder all posts are drafts, or I will never get them done enough to post. 

This was originally entitled yoga for old, fat men. And I decided the title above was less violent. 

Standing pose. Things to note. 

  1. Initially I can reach about half-way down my shins. 
  2. My feet are the only yogi-looking thing about me. And maybe my bald head. 
  3. I can’t stand with my toes and ankle bones touching, but if I “spread the backs of my knees” by rotating my thighs back and out, then I can. 
  4. Spreading my legs helps make space for my belly, which really helps, especially being able to breathe. 
  5. Breathe and relax without stretching the arms towards the feet. 
  6. Bend the knees and hold each big toe with 2 fingers. 
  7. Then breathe and relax and gently straighten the knees more.

Finish with Jefferson Curl cycle. 

  1. Fall over like diving over your hips. 
  2. Jefferson curl up. 
  3. Arch back. 

Talk about 

Breathing

Mukunda