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Book Review for “U-Turns: What if You Woke Up One Morning and Realized You Were Living the Wrong Life?”

Anita Ryan — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 04:16:17 +0000

“What if You Woke Up One Morning and Realized You Were Living the Wrong Life?”

All of us dream from time to time of overhauling our lives; of shedding the old self, with its tired habits, complacency, and disillusionment, and taking on some utterly different, more focused and fulfilled life. Bruce Grierson, authored a book titled, U-Turns: What if You Woke Up One Morning and Realized You Were Living the Wrong Life?(Bloombury, Apr. 2007. 352p)

Grierson examines people who have experienced a conversion, an epiphany, a paradigm shift, an awakening, and these life-altering reversals his title calls “U-turns.” He considers the stories of more than 300 people who made such changes. He shares dozens of cases of these reversals: retail executives who suddenly turn into committed anti-consumerist activists, the politician who switches parties and a Wall Street bond trader who drop everything one day and moves their family to a farm on the Canary Islands. Others in humbler quarters routinely do the same: the ad executive who becomes a media critic, the prosecutor who becomes a social worker, an army lawyer “charged with prosecuting homosexual soldiers” devotes the rest of his life to defending homosexuals against prosecution and the butcher who becomes a vegan. I add Bill Gates who is spending less time earning money than giving it away and pulling other billionaires into the deep end of global philanthropy with him.

What if it seemed YOU were living the wrong life?

Do you keep living it or do you follow the “brain in your gut” and get another life? There are those who chucked families, fortunes, power, and prestige and others in the crunch who turned 180 degrees and chose paths different than the ones they were on. Gauguin, Apostle Paul, Gandhi, Rosa Parks, Cassius Clay and Malcolm X, — but many are unknown. These turnarounds may be secular, political, and religious. Some work out well, others don’t.

Eckhart Toller, in 1977, at the age of 29, after having suffered from long periods of suicidal depression, says he experienced an “inner transformation”. He woke up in the middle of the night, suffering from feelings of depression that were “almost unbearable”. Tolle says of the experience,

I couldn’t live with myself any longer. And in this a question arose without an answer: who is the ‘I’ that cannot live with the self? What is the self? I felt drawn into a void. I didn’t know at the time that what really happened was the mind-made self, with its heaviness, its problems, that lives between the unsatisfying past and the fearful future, collapsed. It dissolved. The next morning I woke up and everything was so peaceful. The peace was there because there was no self. Just a sense of presence or “beingness”, just observing and watching.

Others results are wrenching, some are baffling and a few are downright alarming. Grierson shares commentary from philosophers, psychologists, researchers and theoreticians to his discussion of personal change. Some stories crumble under scrutiny.

Daily someone experiences a wake-up call. They sense they have gotten things terribly wrong. Somehow, they are on the wrong side. Something” tells them that life can’t go on this way. And so, on moral, or at least deeply personal, grounds, they make a “U-turn”. All of us dream from time to time of overhauling our lives. Of shedding the old self, with its tired habits, complacency, and disillusionment, and taking on some utterly different, more focused and fulfilled identity.

The shift may be sparked by an external event—the collapse of a marriage, the loss of a mentor, a close brush with death a dead end route that leads straight to jail or prison—that sharpens the urge to invest what life remains with meaning. Very few experience the flash of desire for change act on it as Malcolm X did in his transformation from petty criminal to revered African-American leader. With most of us it stops with the dream or thinking.

Often the reversal is simply the result of a private crisis of conscience. One day, after years of uncomfortable mental conflict, you can’t quite meet your eyes in the mirror. You stop. You confront the choices that have taken you slowly or rapidly off course. You defect—blowing up bridges behind you, marching into the arms of a new future sometimes greatly disconnected with the first life. However it comes there are the pregnant moments where a very tiny change in input results in a huge change in output.

I immediately think of the “inevitable” midlife crisis, however, Grierson does away with the concept of the mid-life crisis, I think not convincingly. . He contends the seeds of change are sown long before the actual shift. Although his subjects and most of us like to tell our story as one of a lightning bolt of inspiration with a complex narrative point (for the sake of good storytelling), Grierson sees it as more of a gradual shift in perception. We can think “My God, I’m lost and there’s no hope” or “I’m lost; maybe this is a good time to make a change.”

Although there are exceptions, the U-turner is most often male, usually about 40 and with a substantial income, which seems logical enough. It’s tough to change and easier if you can afford it. I have often said with some humor, “I like to dedicate my life to making plenty of money and at 40 see that as useless, keep the money, but do something that makes for change.” Rick Warren’s book so popular with the Baby-boomers comes to mind. The Purpose Driven Life was selling a million copies a month for a while. Warren said the book was not necessarily for really religious people. He called it a non-denominational book that urges people to explore what they were put on this earth to do. A lot of the Promise Keepers and so on were the ones driving up the book sales but there were people drawn to that idea who weren’t particularly religious. It is a particular hunger for meaning. “What was I put on earth to do? What Should I Do With My Life? Am I exploiting my unique attributes?

Grierson notes that there aren’t many women among the U-turners.

Grierson’s larger mandate in the book becomes clear in the final chapter’s subtitle, “Is America Ripe for a Mass U-Turn?” The premise is that people are vulnerable to massive change in low moments. And you could say that’s its sort of a low moment for America in a lot of ways. America’s classic confidence is wavering a little bit. It is a time of growing instability and those are the moments, at least on a personal level, when people become receptive to change. It is that whole metaphor of gradual change that you cannot detect until it happens. It looks like a sudden phase change but it isn’t.” What role will 9/11 continue to play in our psyche? The housing Bubble burst? The sharp downturn in the market? The lost of jobs? The increase of personal and national debt? How will that change person and America?

Grierson cites Buddha:

Only by finding and acting on our true calling can we save the world.

And Gandhi:

We must be the change we wish to see in the world.

According to Grierson, it’s possible to save the world only if individuals collectively create a tipping point by embracing “an irresistible truth whose time has come.” I don’t know exactly what that means but I want that hope.

By Gerard Howell

Book Review for "The Power of Full Engagement"

Anita Ryan — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 18:56:29 +0000

Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz offer The Power of Full Engagement to demonstrate that managing energy, not time, is the key to becoming physically energized, emotionally connected, mentally focused, and spiritually aligned on and off the job.

The authors present a holistic approach to development, renewal, and leadership that provides powerful insights and incentives to individuals in every walk of life.

While some of the book does pertain to our roles as leaders in organizations, it definetly sketches a profile of how their principles apply to the whole person.

“Leaders are the stewards of organizational energy—in companies, organizations and even in families. They inspire or demoralize others first by how effectively they manage their own energy and next by how well they mobilize, focus, invest and renew the collective energy of those they lead. The skillful management of energy, individually and organizationally, makes possible something that we call ‘full engagement.”

Consider the opening paragraphs of this book.

“We live in digital time. Our rhythms are rushed, rapid fire and relentless, our days carved up into bits and bytes. We celebrate breadth rather than depth, quick reaction more than considered reflection. We skim across the surface, alighting for brief moments at dozens of destinations but rarely remaining for long at any one. We race through our lives without pausing to consider who we really want to be or where we really want to go. We’re wired up but we’re melting down.”

“Most of us are just trying to do the best that we can. When demand exceeds our capacity, we begin to make expedient choices that get us through our days and nights, but take a toll over time. We survive on too little sleep, wolf down fast foods on the run, fuel up with coffee and cool down with alcohol and sleeping pills. Faced with relentless demands at work, we become short-tempered and easily distracted. We return home from long days at work feeling exhausted and often experience our families not as a source of joy and renewal, but as one more demand in an already overburdened life.”

The authors, Loehr and Schwartz, developed a Corporate Athlete Training System based in 25 years of research with some the world’s greatest athletes to help them perform more effectively under brutal competitive pressures. They recommend the following principles:

Principle 1: Full engagement requires drawing on four separate but related sources of energy: physical, emotional, mental and spiritual.

Principle 2: Because energy diminishes both with overuse and with underuse, we must balance energy expenditure with intermittent energy renewal.

Principle 3: To build capacity we must push beyond our normal limits, training in the same systematic way that elite athletes do.

Principle 4: Positive energy rituals-highly specific routines for managing energy-are the key to full engagement and sustained high performance.Making change that lasts requires a 3-step process:

Define Purpose,
Face the Truth and
Take Action.

The authors describe the connectivity of the 4 sources of energy (physical, emotional, mental and spiritual) in “The Mind and Body Are One”. Two key words are used, flexibility and resilience. Notice:

Physical strength, endurance, flexibility and resilience we readily grasp at the physical level, however these markers also are applicable to our mental, emotional, and spiritual capacity.

“Emotional flexibility reflects the capacity to move freely and appropriately along a wide spectrum of emotions rather than responding rigidly or defensively. Emotional resilience is the ability to bounce back from experiences of disappointment, frustration and even loss.

Mental endurance is a measure of the ability to sustain focus and concentration over time, while mental flexibility is marked by the capacity to move between the rational and the intuitive and to embrace multiple points of view.

Spiritual strength is reflected in the commitment to one’s deepest values, regardless of circumstance and even when adhering to them involves personal sacrifice. Spiritual flexibility, by contrast, reflects the tolerance for values and beliefs that are different than one’s own, so long as those values and beliefs don’t bring harm to others.

In short, to be fully engaged requires strength, endurance, flexibility and resilience in all dimensions.”

From their research the authors offer many cases examples to demonstrate that their approaches are factual and that they work. It’s a breakthrough discovery and could save careers and help transform organizations if their approach is followed.

I say “if” because, like any new regime, this approach will run into a set of corporate obstacles, principally the resistance of top management in finding and implementing these ideas. Some of what the authors advises, wise though it may be, will run right into the face of traditions in the workplace many are unwilling to change.

The authors plainly apply one of Aristotle his leading principles (in medio stat veritute, “virtue lies in the middle”), however, they show that balance is not static–a middle, dead zone–but is found by balancing one extreme (stress) against the other (recovery). That’s the key to full engagement.

Stress and recovery have to be done in balance (as with physical exercise) and it is necessary to plunge fully into both to get out of the dead zone in the middle. Most performance in today’s organizations is in this middle ground between rest and stress; but the high achievers stretch their capacity enough to let it bounce back stronger the next time after a reprieve. Most workers and managers don’t do either: they live and work in a zone of half-tired, half-dozing caused by our culture’s ignorance of–and hostility toward–managing energy naturally and effectively.

The back end of the book is devoted to “The Training System” which are chapters that guide the reader to take action and get results. Attitude, rituals, daily tasks, diet, vision, and purpose are analyzed and described. And a summary of the Corporate Athlete caps it off, including some useful charts.

For the American who lives in digital time, whose pace is rushed, rapid-fire, and relentless, facing crushing workloads, and who tries to cram as much as possible into every day so that who is wired up, but melting down, I recommend the reading of this book for the secret of full engagement and a healthful, happy and balanced life.

Review written by Gerard Howell

Book Review of Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes by William Bridges

Anita Ryan — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 21:01:04 +0000

A few years ago my life was in major transition moving from a vocation in which I had worked for 40 years into a slowdown vocation for the last 5 or 6 years moving toward my retirement. I wish I had knowledge and access to William Bridges book, Transitions: Making Sense of Life Changes (2004, DeCapo Press, a member of the Peresus Book Group.).

The book acknowledges that life is a series of transitions whether it is in personal, job, marriage, dreams or physical challenges. A transition involves specific steps that take us from the ending of something, through a period of limbo, to a new beginning.

Bridges refers to the three stages of transition as the ending, the neutral zone and the new beginning.

Each portion of the transition has movements that to understand is to help one know where in the process one might be. When I looked back over the changes vocation of my career I saw a pattern of detachment, a time of limbo, and then a recommitment or attachment to something new. I discovered that an emptiness or void usually occurred as a prelude to a new beginning. This gray area between the old and the new is area of letting go of the past and realigning ourselves to new dreams and goals.

The Neutral Zone is a normal part of human life, disorienting and painful, confusing and frustrating, but necessary for our personal growth.

Bridges noted that frequently we fail “to discover our need for an ending until we have made most of our necessary external changes.”

We get to the new house or new relationship, waking up to find that we have not let go of our old ties. Or we find that maybe the old thing was somehow right for us and the new thing is wrong.

One of the book’s greatest lessons is the necessity of

letting go and saying goodbye

to some part of ourselves or our lives in order for anything new to happen to us, or for real change to occur. Often, we hold onto the past for dear life, refusing to let go of an old self image, a career or dream we no longer love, or a person we no longer want to be with, just because of our dread fear of the unknown future.

Only by learning how to end things can we really learn how to begin things.

This Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition updated and expanded will impact your daily life. Perhaps the outline of the book will encourage you to pick up the book.

Part one is about The Need for Change. The chapters are: Being in Transition, A lifetime of Transitions, Relationships and Transition, and Transitions in Work Life.
Part two discusses The Transition Process Itself. The chapters are: Endings, The Neutral Zone, and You Finish with a New Beginning.

Author William Bridges presents us with a powerful plan for understanding the many stages of life a human being is destined to go through, how these changes lead us into new experiences, and how to cope with the endings that are inevitable before we can have these new experiences. With tools and techniques outlined in this book, transitions don’t have to be scary and tentative; rather can be something to anticipate with excitement.

One constant about life is that it will change. This book will help you get ready for it.

What new begininng are you not starting because you are afraid to let go and say goodbye?

Review by Gerard Howell

Book Review for "The Five Secrets You Must Discover Before You Die"

Anita Ryan — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 19:57:23 +0000

Five Secrets You Must Discover Before You Die

“We do not have to wait until we are old to become wise.

We can discover these secrets at any age and the sooner we discover them,

the more fulfilling our lives will be.” – John Izzo, Ph.D.

I just read a great book that should be read by everyone of any age.

What makes life worth living? How can we live in a meaningful and joyous way?

Do we need to fear death?

Dr. John Izzo addresses these questions in his latest very readable book, The Five Secrets You Must Discover Before You Die (2007 Berrett- Koehler Publishing, Inc). Izzo found that the two things humans want most are to find joy and contentment (happiness), while living a full life with meaning. After interviewing 200 persons between the ages of 60-106 from every sphere of the work-world, race and religion, he discovered five inspiring secrets that provide a good blueprint or road-map to use for our journey toward finding happiness and purpose. The following is a brief synopsis of each secret:

1.Be True to Yourself. Follow your heart and your dreams, not the dreams someone else has for you. This may mean making a radical change in your life, or simply making small adjustments. Continually examine your life is to make sure you are following your own true path. This is largely a western value, linked to the Greek philosopher Socrates, who said: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” One way to do this is to look more carefully at what you call a “good day” and a “bad day.” If you are having more “bad days” than “good days” you may not be true to yourself. One can agree that if one doesn’t engage in self-reflection one will likely live another’s life of one’s own.

2.Leave No Regrets. Although all of the people whom Izzo interviewed had some regrets, people who had the fewest were the happiest. Izzo found the purpose-filled women and men interviewed were proud they’d taken risks. “People regret what they did not do, even more than what they did.” A common theme is that people were less regretful about failed risks that they were about the failure to risk more. At the age of 68 I resonate with that insight, though I am so far from some of those events where I failed to act that I wonder if I have forgotten the circumstances that created the hesitation.

The greatest fear expressed was not the fear of death, but the fear of dying with regrets about life. What about the conversation you intended to have with your parents before they become infirmed or died? Are there conversations that you, the parent, need to have with a child?

3.Become Love. Love not primarily being a feeling, but a choice. Being kind is something you can choose even in hard situations. However, the more you focus on acting with love, the more you will find happiness, says Izzo. This begins with choosing to love one’s self and breaking away from thoughts that are self-defeating and self-critical.

Make loving relationships a priority in your life. Am I spreading love and kindness in the world of my inter-actions?

4.Live the Moment.Living the moment means living your life now rather than simply planning it. “We must always live in the present moment, the only moment in which we have any power,” writes Izzo. One woman said, “You have to stop judging your life and start living your life. Stop keeping score trying to decide if you are winning. Instead live each day fully and stay in the moment.”

Rather than focus on the past or the future, Izzo says, “… experience each moment with gratitude and purpose.” Several wise elders revealed how they start each day with a prayer of gratitude for the opportunity to live that day, and end the day with thanks and appreciation for the day’s experiences.

Do I anticipate with a sense of joy what I will be doing today? For what am I grateful at this moment?

5.Give More Than You Take. Even while our society prods us to strive for worldly “security” through wealth, power and fame, Izzo’s seniors reminded him that people really do get a deeper sense of meaning by feeling they’ve made a difference. Izzo indicates, “When I asked people what gave their life the greatest meaning, people told me again and again people that being of service and knowing that you made things better because you were here was by far the greatest source of meaning.”

You have the power to give freely. People long to make a contribution. Giving connects people to something larger than themselves – whether it’s a Supreme Being or the entire human experience on journey.

Is the world a better place this week because of my contribution? What kind or generous act have I taken today?

Izzo says there is a great deal of difference in knowing and going. When you know you have to go – you have to put the five secrets into practice daily.

I strongly recommend this book for reading. I read it on a plane flight and spent much of the night thinking about how to put these secrets into action.

What Secret speaks most to you and what actions do you plan to take to implement that secret?

Gerard Howell

Sometimes the Best Resource for your Office is your Thinking. How Do Successful People Think?

Anita Ryan — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 20:36:59 +0000

I love John C. Maxwell and his books.

I have been reading his latest book ” How Successful People Think”. Maxwell breaks down several types of thinking and how it all works together to accomplish a successful thinker. I have been most intrigued by his chapter on harnessing creative thinking.

With the economy the way it is currently, motivation is at an all time low.

Everyone is wanting to be successful.

How can you motivate individuals to not just work in their jobs but actually excel?

The office environment is becoming stale and mediocre. Here are some tips I think Maxell nails.

I believe just embracing these few ideas can make a difference in success and failure,

in not only your office environment but your personal life as well.

At an economic time of failure, creative thinkers don’t fear failure. To be creative you are already entrenched in the idea that you could look ” stupid”. Yet, despite that creative thinkers press on. They don’t let ideas that don’t work keep them from coming up with ideas that do. Allowing yourself and others to think creatively gives you a whole pool of ideas to draw from. “Creativity compounds given enough time and focus.” People are drawn to creative thinkers and their ideas. So the more you embrace and allow creative thinking in your office environment the more people will be drawn to you and your company.

What does that look like?

Encourage Creativity: Allow the people in your office to be open about their ideas
Place a High Value on Trust among Team Members and Individuality: Let people feel safe to share their ideas and what has worked and what hasn’t. Don’t stifle the individual. Each member of the team has something vital to share that is unique.
Embrace those who are creative: ” Weed out the dullards- and nurture the nuts.” Brainstorming sessions are great times to promote energy, ideas, laughter and motivation.
Focus on Innovation, Not Just Invention: ” The best way to make a living with your imagination is to develop innovative application, not imagine completely new concepts. ” Give me a good idea and I will give you a better idea”
Willing to Let People Go Outside the Lines: ” All human development, no matter what form it takes, must be outside the rules: otherwise, we would never have anything new. ” Allow people to think outside the lines into a whole new dimension.
Appreciate the Power of a Dream: This application allows the creative thinker to truly take a blank slate and imagine what if , without restrictions. A creative environment invites the freedom to dream.

Creativity and motivation will come when you think successfully.

Invite and encourage your employees thoughts and ideas about the future of the company.

You will be surprised at the response and how a little creativity can open up a whole new world.

I would love to hear how your company and employees are thinking out of the box and

reaching success!

Quotes taken from ” How Successful people Think” by John C. Maxwell