INSIDE THE PAGES:

The Peripatetic Philosopher

Reviews a Manuscript

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© July 1, 2015

NOTE:

Dr. Fisher is often asked to review or endorse a manuscript soon to be published as a book, but he seldom does.  This is an exception.  The manuscripts text is in white and/or underscored; comments are in red.  It is the equivalent of a conversation with the author and his text.

We feel that other people are raptors, and we must protect ourselves from them.

This is the blind side of paranoia.  The seeing side of paranoia, which society abhors, is actually protective as it keeps us alert.  This is consistent with the author’s premise.

We worry about what others think about us. We seek control or seek comfort.

This list is not inaccurate, but it implies that many of these natural inclinations are “wrong,” which is not true.  There is a time to take flight – from a job, a relationship, a company, a group or an ideology – when it fails to enhance the individual as a viable and engaged person.

Alone or together, these unhealthy messages, experiences, thoughts and emotions trigger self-defeating or even self-destructive actions. Unhealthy thoughts, enervating emotions, and unhealthy experiences lead to doing things that are disparaging to self and others.

Paradoxically, it is the head that tells us what, while the heart that tells us why.  This is the basic reason why religion is so important and why its importance is so often misunderstood.

We are in our Heart when we are using both our emotional (Heart) intelligence as well as our Neocortex—our right/left brain hemispheres (our Imagination and Intelligence).

It is only me but I prefer the terms cognition and intuition to imagination and intelligence.  Technically, intelligence is only one aspect of cognition.

Gaining the courage to consciously create change is like developing a muscle—it is developing mental and emotional literacy, enabling us to make sense of the messages that our conscience sends us through our feelings.

Perhaps this will be discussed later, but you cannot restore what you do not fully understand.  Understanding requires defining the specific problem or problems that you have comforted in your experience.  Taking that definition and without prejudice or denial uncovering the chronic sources that constantly get in the way of healthy intercourse 

We believed: Who I am is myself. Being myself is all I need to be. Happy is who I am. Confident is who I am. Connected is who I am. Valuable is who I am. Loveable is who I am.

Since I have written extensively on confidence as well as being one’s own best friend, the problem as I see it is that we can get too wrapped up in otherness.  It is unlikely that many of the questions posed here would a person ask him or herself, until or unless someone else first brought their attention to that specific matter.  

Habits are formed by repeated behavior, which often if not always is a result of imitating others, being influenced by others, being told what is right or wrong, good or bad, and not simply based on experience.  Saying "I believe" repeatedly in any case is not believing.

Being in your Heart is to connect with others in healthy ways—to have empathy for what others think and feel, and to see that those thoughts and feelings trigger them to take certain actions. Rather than being critical, comparing or competing, you are compassionate.

That is powerful.  Comparing & competing represents imitative behavior which couldn’t be more destructive. 

Feel: I’m completely jealous. I compare myself and what I’m driving and how I’m spending my money and what I’m getting paid to Stan. I know to beware of comparing. I feel comfortable enough with Stan to reach out to connect with him.

My sense is that he is not jealous but envious.  Jealousy is something taken away from someone or the fear of it being so; for example, the love of a wife, whereas envy is something you don’t have but want.

Eventually, the mind is clean—you will no longer feel the pain and will know what to do next time.

I’m uncomfortable with this analogy.  In my work, and I have counseled thousands over my career, “scrubbing their thoughts” of their poisons would only drive them deeper into their soul.  

What seemed more appropriate was first to surface these thoughts, then aid the person to accept these thoughts as part of their ideal type, good or bad, enhancing or limiting, then once on the surface to assist the person in dealing with them.  

Perhaps you might get to this same point by this suggested routine, but not in my experience.

If you are what you have experienced, then you are stuck within that experience.

Not if you acknowledge that you are that experience.  

Experience doesn’t happen in a vacuum.  It may happen accidentally or subliminally as if by osmosis.  People in my experience are not that alert, aware or conscience of how they have come to arrive to be the troubled persons that they are.  

It takes work for them to understand for it is as if they are viewing a motion picture in their heads.  Furthering that analogy, like a motion picture seen in a theatre, it doesn’t change by seeing it repeatedly.  It only changes when it ceases to be a motion picture. That takes time and work. 

So, your thoughts about green food affects your feelings, which affect your actions. To eat or not to eat—that is the question. 

Diet is a good source to illustrate habits as tastes and likes and dislike originate in the home at an early age.  Being Irish, I was brought up to a bland diet.  I have only escaped that diet on rare occasions as I prefer it to fine dining. 

Courage is …. bravery in fighting an enemy and boldness in accepting risk or sacrifice for a noble or generous purpose (Webster).

Courage is a consequence.  It is active, whereas hope is passive.  Hope is not audacious; courage always is. This makes audacious hope an oxymoron.

Our brains respond to what we experience. We set up patterns for thinking so our brain knows what to do when something happens.

Leon Festinger called this “cognitive dissonance,” and for reason.  We can play incredible games on ourselves coming to believe what we feel is “what is,” or reality, when it is a fantasy trapped in an enigma and allowed to bombard our senses.  

President Reagan told a story of WWII bravery that was actually a film he had seen.  Brian Williams of NBC News imagined himself in “Harms Way” with the US military in the Middle East when it was a figment of his imagination.

We usually use our brain to make choices.

My sense is the opposite of this.  We first feel and then we think, and not the reverse of this.  Thinking then justifies or rationalizes the choices we make.  It is why we find truly brilliant people often doing outrageously stupid things. 

Being willing to feel opens the chance to find out what your feelings mean-to change or have courage to go on. 

We make conscious choices, but we don’t choose our feelings; our feelings choose us.  

That is why so many people are vulnerable to mass movements becoming “true believers.”  It is why advertising, social networks, polls, politics and celebrities have such influence.  Better that we acknowledge the influence to avoid being a puppet on a string.

Choosing to feel opens the door to change and courage, adding purpose and value to our emotional experiences.

Again, the author gets back to my original premise.  The problem is that we are programmed by education, experience, religion, politics, and yes, interests to classify behavior in terms of instrumental and/or terminal values.  

What is never said but so often true is that we may have the wrong culture for our times, which directly or indirectly contributes to these misdirected sensitivities. 

 “It’s me! It’s me!”

Distill this, and courage turns out to be the courage to know your own heart.

Anything is possible if we can obey our conscience to change our thoughts. 

This is “what” the moral – not the “universal” – compass is, but I hope the author explains “why” the moral compass has been lost in contemporary society as the central guidance system of the individual.  We have become increasingly robotic and mechanical. 

For us to combat this onslaught, this “Second Machine Age,” the individual must assay his reliance on artificial intelligent guidance systems (e.g., “Siri” for traveling), and what they mean beyond their obvious convenience. 

 I fully expect, given how dysfunctional our conscience has become that robotics will replace what is otherwise authentic (i.e., our conscience).      

Most of us use our conscience compass daily.

I respectfully disagree.  I think most of us are on automatic pilot and that the Second & Third Machine Ages are swiftly taking over.

The truth is that we can choose our experience.

Yes, but more typically our experience chooses us.  

We fall into a job, a lifestyle, a relationship, a geography and then feel trapped in a cage of our own making, but one constructed primarily while on automatic pilot. 

This will only happen if we have the courage to listen to our conscience and change. Being present and alert to what we are experiencing and realizing that we are worthy and accepted gives us the courage to be a conscious creator. 

Feelings Are Messengers

This cannot be emphasized too much.  Feelings are facts to the individual experiencing them.  We are more feeling than thinking animals, while we tend to see our cognitive dissonance as an aberration.

Change is hard.

It is hard because it is not understood.  Change is of only secondary importance.  Change comes about naturally over time once we change the way we think.  Order comes from within.  

To establish this order takes more than good intentions, more than a change of attitude.  It requires a radical change in the way our mind sees the world and processes information.  It requires a structural change in the way we think. 

The reason the behaviors in this book are needed is simple: We have forgotten how to listen to our conscience.

Yes, this is true, but the “what” is not sufficient to explain the “why.” We are addicted to noise, addicted to company, terrified of silence or being alone.  

We are addicted to what other people think (of us and everything else) and echo their sentiments by being guided by and addicted to secondary sources.  The last person we listen to, indeed, the last person we trust is ourselves. 

Follow Your Conscience

To do this you must be in touch with your conscience.

Try the principles for yourself. Test them. See if they enable you to choose to be you. Let’s run this play together and see what happens for you.

Many will be able to relate to this story, but perhaps they will take away from it the wrong message.  The critical word in this biographical sketch is “control.”  You were “out of control” but found a way to operate beyond control that put you back in control. 

Once we try to control a situation we lose control.  You can counter intuitively sense this, which forms a bridge to further development.  Excellent story!  

Think of when you have chosen to be yourself. How did that feel? What do those feelings mean?

This is not the focus of this book, but I have seen many damaged people the result of well-intentioned but damaging perpetrators in parents.  An entrepreneur had a bonanza year making $2 million.  

Two years later he was broke and deeply in debt.  A college student found he had an I.Q. of nearly 200, and promptly flunked out of school, and has drifted through life with unfulfilled promise.  The first person thought he was “rich” and the second person thought he was “smart.”  

The first person, whose parents reminded him he wasn’t as smart as his older brother, failed to see he was lucky and spent as if he had the Midas touch.  The other person was lauded for his cleverness but was never taught by his parents that intelligence is not a test score but what intelligence does.   

Examples of intrinsic motivators include: dreams, visions, goals, drive, ambition, mission, desire, appetite, passions, and hobbies.

It is why monetary raises and career promotions have little staying power.  Extrinsic motives are tied to instrumental values (concrete things) while intrinsic values are tied to terminal values (abstract things).  I have known men who sacrificed everything to become CEOs, only to ask themselves, “Is this all there is?” 

Why Don’t Others Follow Me?

Perhaps it is because you are a different confection. People follow others because they see in them, not necessarily consciously, but nonverbally (symbolically) and intuitively what is missing in themselves.  Leadership is therefore complete followership without exception.  

Our core motives do not develop in us over time, but rather they are embedded in us when we are born (part of our nature). Still, we need to identify them and choose them to supply the motivation we need to exercise courage, to obey conscience, and to be creative.  

I prefer to call this core our essence or what we are born with.  Each individual conscience is a carte blanche impressionistic psyche that may or may not reach fruition. 

Other motives, our acquired motives, can develop in us (nurture) and may influence how and what we choose to think, feel and do—depending in part on the situation or culture.

I prefer to call these acquired motives our personality, which is adaptable to many influences and many possible changes.  Not so our essence. 

Experience Change, I show you the strategies we use either to protect ourselves or experience our potentials. 

Yes, the present is all we have, and the future never comes.  We can look back to see ahead, but only if we are firmly situated in the present.  All we have is “now.”  Today!  As I like to put it, we get a report card every day of our lives and only God and each of us read it, but everyone else is aware of it. 

The job they have, the person they marry-every choice is clouded by their belief: I am stupid.

I look at this differently.  I know a brilliant man who spent twelve years at university and completed the course work for a difficult Ph.D., but failed time after time to successfully write his Ph.D. dissertation.  

He is the prototype of many others who have had similar failures, yes because someone told them they couldn’t do whatever, but mainly because of a lack of confidence.  Confidence is the quintessential essence of what is said here.

Satisfaction may happen for a moment, but unless what we do enables us to be who we want to be it does not last. If we do something that assists us in our progression in who we are being, then it lasts.

Satisfaction is never a one-time experience—it is a pattern we develop. Many people think of satisfaction and happiness as synonyms.  They are not.  Satisfaction is the joy of doing something worthwhile.  

Happiness is a state of mind that once you attempt to define it you lose it.  The wise person who listens to himself will move to satisfaction and away from dissatisfaction whatever the consequences. 

Why do we keep choosing some stupid things over and over?

Because most of us are on automatic pilot.

It is painful to change because our previous choice has been protecting us from feeling something, from having to do something, from taking accountability for what is happening, from feeling wrong and from changing my perception of who I Am.

The irony here is that life is nothing if it is not constant changing, yet habits of the heart are like old friends we don’t want to discard no matter how damaging to our souls.  We can blame it on friends, obligations or circumstances, but these are fall guys for our chronic robotic stuckiness. 

We feel what they are feeling and feel connected to them. The only way to feel connected is through emotions. 

How differently we see this.  My sense is that sad movies give us relief from ourselves without engaging the self that is sad.  It is a way of experiencing sadness vicariously without enduring the trauma.  It is detachment not integration.  It is an emotional experience that calls for no action.   

The Boss Experience continued…My experience with my last boss was that I would come to work afraid for my job every day. I was barely keeping my head above water, giving the minimum effort possible in every arena of my life.

This is a beautiful and telling story.  It is vital to the essence of this book.  Kudos to the author!  We are in a bullying society where mismanagement at every level has put us in the mess that we are currently in, and always the worker suffers.  

Alas, I have spent a good deal of energy addressing precisely the essence of this dilemma.  The reader should apply these habits to this and realize that nothing is final as long as the person has faith in himself.  Unfortunately, as revealed here, loved ones suffer when the bullied or abused person at work brings his frustrations home.  

The phantom security is the culprit.  Employers who mismanage operations and project their frustration on workers do not deserve loyal employees.  Workers should simply pick themselves up and move on.  No job is worth the heartache or damage that it may cause.

“Have you ever tried to change another person? How did that work for you? Did that person hear, understand, and magically start doing things your way? Or did you become frustrated, irritable, and angry at their inattention to your plan for how they should behave? Have you ever tried to change something about yourself that was out of your control? I have. It was fruitless.  I decided to make peace with what I couldn’t change, and it instantly made my life better!”  

--Marshall Goldsmith

Indeed, the only person you can change is yourself.

You have just chosen what you experience, no matter what experience happened to you. You will be present.

There is no difference between an experience you are working through from a minute ago or 10 years ago. They are previous experiences where you get to choose your experience by going from your Head to your Heart.

The Head-to-Heart framework enables you to eliminate the pain the first time you recognize it, rather than reliving it over years of experience.

Several things come to mind.  People tend to marry people who remind them of one parent or the other.  Often this proves disruptive, traumatic and counterproductive especially if the parent is abusive physically or psychologically, a gambler or addicted to alcohol or drugs.  

Then again, a person tends to remarry the prototype of the person just divorced.  You say, how is this possible?  It has been my experience in counseling more than a thousand highly qualified people in the hi-tech industry that the heart rules the head, and not the other way around.  Experience is not always a learning experience.  

These experiences are painful because we are healing the previous experience by getting the poison out. But we feel much better when we do what it takes to get the poison out.

This has been reduced to “coping.”  Again, in my experience, it is not a prudent strategy.  Often I have seen mounting internal stress and strain leading to aberrant behavior in an attempt to cope.  

The psychological deterioration is segmentally revealed by atypical behavior, such as not dressing or practicing typical good hygiene, swearing, bad mouthing others, coming into work late or not at all, avoiding friends and colleagues at lunch or in conversations.  

Ultimately, internal stress and strain (on the job) can prove beyond the person’s capacity to cope when unanticipated external demands strike at home (major illness in the family) throwing the person into a financial tailspin.  My wonder is if someone in that stressful state will find substance with this book.

I could have asked him about his projects, his meeting with corporate, or his family.

It so happens Mllennials are on the horizon.  They look at things differently.  As I have written elsewhere, Millennials do not have the same sense of authority as earlier generations.  They are not into rebellion or untoward behavior.  They’re earnest, optimistic and confident pragmatic idealists.  

They fiddle with things that amuse them rather than being dreamers.  You could call them life hackers.  They’re not into religion or therapy or the alphabetic soup of Ph.D., M.D., or LLD.  

Nor are  they into culture; they simply ignore it.  They are not intimidated by authority.  They simply ignore that, too.  

They are life hackers who embrace the system, but as they interpret it in the present.  It remains to be seen if Millennials will see this work as a relevant litmus test to their purposes. 

In this chapter, I will cover the Personal and Relationship levels, and discuss the Group level in the next chapter.

Returning to Millennials, where this book may resonate Millenials want constant approval posting photos nearly every waking hour on social media.  They have massive fear of missing out or not being included which is devastating to them.  

They are interested in celebrities, but not obsessed with them as they see them “just like them.”  

They don’t go to church although they believe in God.  They don’t sleep around, or if they do they don’t plan on producing a child.  They don’t worship big, not educational institutions or big jobs or traditional religion, but they do expect a new and fulfilling experience.  

Delightful experience is more important to them than making a lot of money or having big cars, big homes and big boats and great wealth.  

They are cool and reserved and not all that passionate.  They are informed but inactive and are not self-conscious about it.  

They are pro-business but not into wealth, but surprisingly frugal, which is reflected in the lowest household and credit card debt than any previous generation.  

They love their mobiles but prefer texting and tweeting to talking on them.  

They are not sarcastic or condescending, but if they read something that doesn’t please them they don't make a case about it.    

Could this be the first generation truly comfortable in a climate of work without managers?  

In their young lives – born since 1990s – they have experienced nothing but explosive change on nearly a daily basis, and don't expect this to change.  

And my fingers go to work to pull off any stray pieces of skin that didn’t get clipped properly. All the while, I’m computing, digesting and pondering about something that’s on my mind.

Pen Pondering is using your mind by putting pen to paper to think through your experience. Pen Pondering is great because no one is grading your paper. You are not writing to please someone else. If you are hesitant to pen ponder, you are thinking way too hard about it.

This is excellent advice, but I wonder about the creative verve of the Millennials.  We are inclined to believe in our children.  God knows these children don’t seem to feel a need for our belief in them.

The key is to find the pattern that works for you and do it in a healthy way.

Absent here is the most important aspect of this process, listening.  Listening is far more important than checklists, writing or even pondering.  

The relationship is the experience, but what we choose to experience within it is up to us.

The author is talking about love without saying the words.  Love is an exercise in self-forgetfulness getting beyond the ego to sharing a common heartbeat.  With love we can lose ourselves in work without regard to rewards.  

Kahlil Gibran called this “love made visible.”  So, the relationship is not only with another person.  It is a matter of how life pulsates through our veins.  When relationships are founded on love, we are vulnerable, defenseless for we are driven by trust.  

Should that trust be broken, it is unlikely that that  relationship can survive.  It is the reason relationships in general tend to be tentative, superficial, circumspect and shallow.      

Here is where we can be present and accountable and powerful in every relationship we have. I believe we can’t be truly happy unless we first have a relationship with ourselves where we feel we are worthy and accepted.

Indeed.  Self-acceptance is critical.  Before we can have a friend we must be a friend starting with ourselves.  If we love ourselves, that is, if we like ourselves, we accept ourselves as we are, not as we are thought to be, or are meant to be, but as we actually are; with that comes tolerance of others.  

The key to loving others is impossible without first loving, respecting and appreciating ourselves.  Any other relationship is a mockery.   

We do our best to not engage when we are in our heads. When we are having a head-to-head, we only say things that hurt each other and the conversation never moves forward.

This is so true.  Emerson says, “What you say speaks so loudly I cannot hear you.”  It is hard to listen when the mind is sick and cluttered with contempt.

 You may have experienced it already, as I have. Kitchen sink-ing is when someone brings up every poor choice you’ve ever made, including the kitchen sink.

Good point here.  I hope the reader fathoms its importance and what it says about the character of the person so engaged. 

They believe their experiences are telling them they are not worthy and accepted so they are trying to prove that they are not wrong and alone. When you can forgive yourself and be present to what others are experiencing, you will sense what others are thinking and feeling by looking at what they do.

How important this is!  How it gives the person the perspective of reading the other person’s mind, when all the person is doing is reading the other person’s behavior based upon knowledge of their own behavior. It is right to emphasize this.

You create with focused, vigilant and committed effort to choose. Creation is a powerful play.

I am not discounting the author’s take on creativity.  I just see it differently.  This description is mechanistic and I see creativity as a process; a process that percolates through the soul without barriers, alert to stimuli, but more stimulated by the unconscious.  

You cannot force the mind to think, or to engage the unknown.  We are trained to be critical thinkers, which is to deal with what is already known.  That is how education functions.  

Most innovated thinkers have been college drop outs (Gates and Jobs) or with little or no formal education (Ford and Edison) or clerics such as the first scientist (Roger Bacon).  

Each thinker was guided by curiosity in an eclectic process.   

“Everyone has untapped creativity. The mistake many managers make is trying to instill or install creativity into people, rather than removing the interference (fears, uncertainty, and negative voices) that blocks it.” --Alan Fine

This is true, but culture is not an individual affair but a collective one.  The structure of work determines the function of work, the function of work determines the culture, which has been established over time with a history and set of values that includes beliefs, experiences, and approaches to doing things, in turn that culture dictates organizational behavior. 

If this is consistent with the culture the individual brings to the work situation everything should go swimmingly well.  If not, the worker might best move on to a more appropriate work situation.  

Never have I seen an individual changing the work culture, but I have often seen the work culture changing the individual.    

Since culture is what a group of people think, feel, and do, you gain influence as a leader by changing what all constituents or stakeholders in the organization are thinking, feeling and doing.

This I submit politely is absurd.  Show me a single institutional or corporate entity that has been culturally changed by an individual. This is not only absurd; it is naïve.

Rebellions are powerful because they break through the old way of doing things so that new ways of thinking can emerge. New ways of thinking often produce exponential new results.

Personal rebellion is necessary to establish individual identity. 

We grow, unfortunately, from our societal programming from the outside in.  

We first come to personify the beliefs, values, and experiences of our parents, teachers, preachers, peers, and everyone else who has access to our pliable learning selves.  

Personal authenticity is not possible until and when we challenge this mindset, and ferret out what has meaning and relevance to ourselves and what does not.  This is difficult in our culture and it takes backbone that is often missing in our development.  

Consequently, we can have a very productive but counterfeit life never taking a “time out” to go against the predominant grain and find out what is actually important to us.  

To help you choose your personal experiences and track your progress, I have created the Personal Experience Planner (PEP) and the Personal Experience Graph (PEG).

I am not comfortable with mechanistic rebellion, which I see this as being, but given the reluctance or disinclination of most people to rebel constructively, if at all, perhaps it is necessary.