Show Up Anyway: What Sumo Can Teach Us About Resilience

I watch a lot of sumo wrestling. One of the things I love most about it isn’t just the strength or the ritual — it’s the raw, visible lesson in resilience.

Every once in a while, a top-ranked wrestler has an absolutely terrible tournament.

Not just “off their game.” Catastrophic by anyone's standards.

I once watched an Ozeki, 2nd highest rank in the sport, win a tournament and then come back the next tournament and lose 13 out of 15 matches. It was horrifying! 

In most professions, that kind of reversal would trigger panic, excuses, or disappearance. But in sumo, there is no hiding. He showed up every day, stepped into the ring, and fought, and lost. Yet, he kept showing up and trying his best. 

That’s resilience in its purest form.

In January 2026 one of my favorite wrestlers, Ura, had a 4–11 tournament. Four wins. Eleven losses. One of his losses was especially cruel since he should have won it. In fact, he did win it. He beat the Yokozuna Onosato. The judges overturned his win by claiming a rule that doesn't exist (dead body rule) and ruled the match was a tie and made them wrestle again. And the 2nd time the Yokozuna won.  

Imagine beating the best wrestler in the world, feeling that victory, and then having it taken away. Publicly. Officially. Final decision.  His comment when asked about it was - I can't be expected to beat a Yokozuna twice in one day. Which is an unusually direct statement of annoyance from a Japanese sumo wrestler. 

And yet, despite how clearly unfair that situation was, he showed up the next day smiling.

Not fake smiling. Grounded smiling. Ready-to-fight-again smiling. In fact, one of the reasons I like him so much, is even when he loses, he laughs it off, and just shakes his head. 

He keeps showing up. He keeps competing. He he loses a lot. But he keeps engaging fully, even when the results aren't going his way. It's one of the reasons he's a fan favorite. 

The Myth of Winning Streaks

We like stories of constant progress and uninterrupted success. They’re clean. They’re inspiring. They’re also rare.

Real performance - whether it is in sports, leadership, activism, inclusion work, and personal growth - looks much messier:

• Strong seasons and weak seasons

• Big wins and painful reversals

• Fair calls and unfair rulings

• Breakthroughs and plateaus

No one wins every match. Sometimes you don’t just lose — you lose a lot.

The question isn’t whether you’ll hit a bad stretch.

The question is: Will you show up anyway?

Showing Up Is a Skill — Not a Mood

Most people treat showing up as an emotion-based decision:

“I’ll show up when I feel confident.”
“I’ll show up when things are going well.”
“I’ll show up when I’m winning.”

But resilience doesn’t work that way. Showing up is a behavior — and behaviors can be trained.

In behavioral science terms, you don’t wait for motivation. You build the response pattern first. Action comes before confidence more often than the other way around.

Sumo wrestlers don’t get to skip a day because the last match was unfair.
They don’t get to opt out because their record is embarrassing.
They step out onto the clay anyway.

The Discipline of Continuing

There’s a special kind of strength in continuing when:

• You know the odds aren’t in your favor

• You feel discouraged

• The last outcome was unfair

• Your record looks bad

• Others are counting you out

Continuing builds identity. It says: I am someone who engages, regardless of outcome.

That identity matters more than any single result.

The Quiet Power of Composure

What struck me most in these losing tournaments wasn’t just participation — it was composure.

No public meltdown.
No visible bitterness.
No withdrawal.

Just steady presence.

That doesn’t mean there’s no disappointment. It means disappointment isn’t in charge.

That’s emotional self-management in action — the same skill set that helps leaders navigate crisis, helps targets of bullying avoid escalation traps, and helps change-makers keep going when resistance shows up.

The Lesson

You will have seasons where things don’t go your way.

You will have stretches where you lose more than you win.
You will experience unfair calls.
You will feel the sting of reversals.

Show up anyway.

Step into the ring.
Do the work.
Engage the moment.
Keep your composure.
Return tomorrow.

Because resilience isn’t built in the victories.

It’s built in the days you show up while losing.

Leadership Takeaway: Show Up Anyway

Resilient leaders don’t wait to feel confident before they act — they learn how to regulate their emotions so they can stay engaged, steady, and effective even during setbacks. Showing up is a trained response, not a personality trait.

If you want a practical, behavioral-science approach to emotional self-management, response control, and conflict resilience, start here:

📘 Learn more: Mastering the 5 Managerial Superpowers
Learn how to control your emotional responses, interrupt escalation cycles, and stay constructive under pressure — so you can show up anyway, especially when it’s hardest.

Core skills: self-awareness • emotional regulation • strategic responding • conflict resilience • anti-bullying communication

Humanism is a great social equalizer

I have the same dignity and worth as everyone else... and so do you!

My Humanism – for me – eliminates power differentials. 

Using Humanism  I don’t need to be afraid – all humans are – human – we are all equal.  When you internalize that – the idea that some people are higher up or intimidating - just doesn’t happen – they are human. Just like me.

And yes - I do have an online course to teach you - not only what Humanism is - but how to live your Humanist values fully so you can experience the benefits Humanist thought provides in your daily life.

https://humanistlearning.com/livingmadesimpler1/

I'm told I give really good advice.

Whether you are dealing with a difficult situation at work, or you want to reconcile with an estranged family member.  I can help you think more clearly and therefore more effectively about your problems so that you can solve them in a way you are going to feel really good about.

How do I do it? Applied humanist philosophy. Actively invoking your ethics as you decide what to do about any given situations, tends to yield good results. Seriously it does.

First, taking the time to think, interrupts your instinctual response so that you can choose your response.

Second, thinking about what a good response would be - first requires you to do some thinking about what a good or ideal outcome is.  Notice, this involves the word - good - which involves moral judgement.

Third, once you know what it is you ideally would like to have happen, you can be strategic about how you go about accomplishing that.  I spend a lot of time talking to people who have an outcome in mind and are doing the exact opposite thing to what they should be doing to get what they want.  It's crazy to me.  Take some time to think about the consequences of your actions so that you can have some idea of whether want you want to do will work or not.

Finally, I help give permission to people to strive to be a good person. It's really ok.  Your struggles are normal. Life is hard. Choosing to embody your values doesn't guarantee success, but spending some time  engaging in critical thinking and challenging your assumptions helps.

One way to think of Humanism is that it is the applied study of what it means to be a good human being.  Think of what a good person would do - and then do that.

The compliment to Humanist morality is critical thinking.  We humanists do both.  Compassion tell us what a good outcome is. Critical thinking helps us create a strategy to actually accomplish it.

Finally - the last component is responsibility. We know what the right thing to do it. We have a plan on how to accomplish it. But none of that matters if we don't take action.

Reason and compassion in action. That is what Humanism is. And it really does make life easier.

If you want to learn more about how to actually apply the humanist philosophy in your daily life- I have an online course to help: https://humanistlearning.com/livingmadesimpler1/

Practicing Humanism When You Are Angry

Being a good person is sometimes very hard. Especially when mad. The point of morality though, is to do the right thing, even when under stress.

This is why I describe Humanism as a practice. Yes. It’s a philosophy. But it’s also a moral framework through which I make decisions. This framework is only useful – if I actually use it.

Most of the time, that is easy. But sometimes it isn’t. Like when I get mad. It’s very hard to see the humanity in people who scare me and make me mad. Because let’s be clear – we get mad when we get scared.

Knowing this about myself and about everyone really, helps me to step back from my anger and think about the fear that is driving it so that I can think more rationally and therefore compassionately about the situation I find myself in.

Sure, I could blame the people scaring me. Or … I can remind myself to put my Humanism into practice and practice what I preach.   Sometimes this is easier to do than others.  But it is always eventually doable if I keep reminding myself that I should act in accordance with my values.

Do I do this perfectly? Oh heck no. No one does. This leaves all of us open to being called a hypocrite. And we all are. Every one of us. The next time you go all holier than thou on someone and you are ready to call them a hypocrite. Don’t. Look in the mirror first.  In order to claim the moral high ground, you must first be moral.  And that means, stepping back from your anger, reminding yourself of your values and making a conscious decision to use your values in deciding how best to respond to the situation that is scaring you and making you angry. The goal is to not kill your values with the very hands you use to defend them.  It’s a challenge to be sure, but taking on that challenge is what it means to be a moral person.

To learn more about how to more effectively live by your values – take my course – Living Made Simpler.

https://humanistlearning.com/livingmadesimpler1/

Lego Life Skills

It’s not what you think.

My son is 10. He LOVES legos.  I love philosophy and a group called The Book of Life which is an offshoot of the School of Life. They basically compile the best knowledge about how to live life fully and successfully. And recently, they came out of lego movies about philosophy! And I love them.

As they say – Lego is a surprisingly good medium for getting big ideas across. Check out this one – No One is Normal.

Then check out the rest of them at: http://www.thebookoflife.org/lego-the-movies/

Reading People’s Emotions

This is a basic life skill and it’s easier to do than many people realize.

The secret – is that the world doesn’t revolve around you.  When you see someone, you are probably making a LOT of assumptions. Your assumptions about them have to do with you and your biases, concerns, fears, insecurities etc.  Part of our assumption is often that – whoever this person is – they are responding to us.

The reality is: they probably aren’t responding to you.  They are their own person with their own fears, insecurities, hopes, dreams and families etc.

If you want to understand what is motivating someone, you have to stop assuming it has to do with you and start actually paying attention to them. Remind yourself that you don’t really know them. They could have lost a child recently, or lost a job. They might be going through a divorce or starting a new love affair. They might have been bullied when they were a kid, or been raped at some point in their past. Their behavior has almost nothing to do with you.

When you open yourself up to the possibility that you don’t actually know enough about them to know what they are responding to and why, other people start to make more sense. Now you are a curious enough to actually look at their behavior with fresh eyes and perhaps ask them questions to get to know them so that you can better understand them.

As soon as you stop assuming they are responding to you or as you would, you can see their emotions more clearly because you have gotten past the filters that were blocking your view because all you could see was yourself and how you would respond if you were them. They aren’t you. Their world doesn’t revolve around you. Allow them to be who they are and you will have a much easier time understanding who they are and what they are experiencing in any given moment.

This sort of advice can be found in my book: The Humanist Approach to Happiness: Practical Wisdom and Living Made Simpler – my life skills course.

What skill sets do children need for the future?

The 6C’s – Skill set for effective lifelong living and learning.

I love it when best practices coincide with a humanist approach to life.  It turns out that early childhood education specialists, Doctors Golinkoff & Hirsh-Pask, have narrowed down the key list of skills children should learn so that they can learn how to learn so that they can keep learning as they grow up.  (See more at: http://dupagechildrens.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/ELRAC_Brochure_11_11_2013_update.pdf)

Why is all this learning important? Because success in life is largely a measure, not of what you know, but of how you use the information you have. So the synthesis of information is important AND knowing how to acquire new information if it turns out you are mistaken is also important.  Because the only thing worse than being wrong is continuing to be wrong because you don’t know how to correct your mistakes.

Anyway – the 6Cs – the skill set we need to focus on to help our children learn.

• ·         Collaboration (building new knowledge and approaches with others);
• ·         Communication (persuasively arguing – and listening – to share ideas);
• ·         Content (the 3R’s and so much more);
• ·         Critical thinking (selecting and synthesizing the information needed to perform the task at hand);
• ·         Creative innovation (using content and critical thinking to envision new solutions to old problems);
• ·         and Confidence (the old saws about perspiration and perseverance have much to offer).

Freedom isn’t Free

Wisdom from Eleanor Roosevelt on the limits and benefits of individual liberty

I am currently reading You Learn by Living: Eleven Keys for a More Fulfilling Life by Eleanor Roosevelt. And you honestly all should read it because it’s all the same stuff I write about in my blog and my book about Humanism, but it’s from Eleanor Roosevelt!  Which basically means, I’m not an out there crazy person preaching crazy thoughts. This is in fact deep wisdom.

 I have always thought of Eleanor as a role model for the sort of person I should aspire to be. Now that I have read her book, I feel even more strongly about how amazing she was as a woman.

Anyway, back to the idea of freedom.  One of the quotes in the book is about Freedom and self-discipline. She says,

“When you come to understand self-discipline you begin to understand the limits of freedom. You grasp the fact that freedom is never absolute, that it must always be contained within the framework of other people’s freedom.”

I like this quote because it talks about the connection between responsibility and freedom. We humans don’t exist in a vacuum. We are interdependent. The struggle we all have is in finding the balance between personal autonomy and social obligation.

This struggle can’t be solved by taking an extreme position. Absolute autonomy is a myth. Your actions do affect other people and you have a moral obligation to consider the impact your actions will have on others. Failure to do this is a failure in your morality.

The other extreme is just as bad. If social obligation is taken to an extreme, it becomes social subjugation and that’s a terrifying thought.

The Humanist approach is to accept that it is our responsibility to balance our need for autonomy and our social obligations in a way that benefits us and the society in which we live, or a socially embedded form of autonomy. This isn’t easy to do and we don’t always get the balance right, but I would suggest that actively being conscious of the need to do this yields better results than just winging it does.  The added bonus is that making an effort to ensure that your actions help others and yourself feels really good.  As Eleanor says, it is a sign of emotional maturity to approach life in such a balanced and responsible fashion.  In fact, it’s the definition of being responsible.

 What is your favorite quote about freedom and responsibility? 

How to Forgive

How to find closure when no apology is given.

There are times in our lives when other people treat us poorly. They may not mean to. Or they may just be pathological individuals who harm everyone they meet. Usually, no apology is given and when it is, the person is so busy defending their own ego that the apology sounds hollow.

The number of famous people caught in scandals who then say – I’m sorry that you were offended by what I said. Not, I shouldn’t have said it and I was an idiot. This is the classic nonapology apology that is little more than an acknowledgement that someone else got hurt, but it still isn’t really my fault.

There are several things you can do for yourself to help you get over something when no apology is made. If you want to know how you can be happy despite what happened, this is how. Consider these as essential life skills that will help you move forward. 

Acceptance:

The key to getting over these things is to accept that you aren’t going to get the apology you deserve.  I mean think about it. If this person was capable of a real apology, they probably wouldn’t have hurt you in the first place.

Understanding:

Many times we want an apology because we need to know why something happened. Why did this person act the way they did. We can’t find closure because we just don’t understand what motivated the other person to behave so badly. The truth is they may not even know why they did what they did. Maybe they are mentally ill. Maybe they were under stress you didn’t know about. Maybe they were working on instinct and were afraid. People do really stupid things when they are afraid or stressed. The way to get over this is to understand, you don’t actually need to know the reasons why. It won’t change what happened. It won’t help you contextualize what happened. I won’t change anything. Most people feel the need to understand because what they are really hoping for is to massage their own ego and absolve ourselves of any lingering guilt we may feel over our own actions which may not have been so wonderful either. 

Motives:

You may want to spend some time thinking about WHY you feel you need an apology. Often it is because of our own ego. We want our hurt to be acknowledged by the person who hurt us. It may be that we want to be acknowledged as being right in whatever conflict occurred.  In almost every case, if you feel you are owed an apology you will find that your desire for an apology has more to do with your insecurities than with what the other person did or did not do.  If you deal with your insecurities, you will find that you don’t actually need the other person to apologize. And this is good because an apology isn’t likely to happen.

Responsibility

You may feel that in order to start healing, you need an apology. This is an excuse. Healing is hard. It means accepting what happened. It means accepting your role in what happened so that you can learn and grow from it. It means integrating what happened into your life into your understanding of who you are and more importantly, who you now want to be. Seeking an apology is a way to avoid the hard work of healing by continuing to blame the other person for all that is wrong in your life. That way it isn’t your fault it is theirs. If you want to find closure, take responsibility for your own healing. Don’t continue to give your power away to someone else.

Yes, you were wronged. You may have been traumatized. You may have scars both physical and emotional that will never heal. So what? You are responsible for your actions in response to what happened to you. You can continue to cast blame or you can get on with moving on and focus your time and energy on what comes next.

Compassion

When you recognize that the other person is too damaged to apologize you will probably stop feeling the need to make them responsible for what happened.  Compassion really is a selfish emotion to feel. It is something you do for you. It helps you to stop blaming them for what they did. It helps you accept the reality of what happened. It helps you to focus on your needs and your own failings so that you can let go of the anger so that you can let go of the pain and allow yourself to heal.

Are you still holding on to pain and wishing and hoping for an apology?  What has helped you to let go and find closure?

10 Qualities of Cultured People

What a letter from Anton Chekov to his brother can teach us about what it means to be a good human being.

There is a great article over at Brain Pickings on the qualities of cultured people. It was written by Anton Chekov – link here: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/01/29/anton-chekhov-8-qualities-of-cultured-people/

As a Humanist, I love this list and wanted to translate it into a list of 10 basic rules for Humans and therefor Humanists.

1.   Respect everyone you meet, regardless of station.
2.  Have sympathy for everyone you meet, including those who annoy you.
3.  Do not cause harm to others.
4. Be honest, it makes life easier
5.  Don’t wallow in self-pity
6.  Don’t brag
7. Cultivate your talents and put them to good use
8.  Try to keep things clean and try to make your life beautiful
9.  Ennoble your sexual instincts, don’t treat lovers as objects, they are real humans just like you.
10. Always strive to improve yourself. 

And I just realized I’ve written my very own 10 list. aaaaggh! Forgive me. Just be good. Carry on. 

How to create a strategy that actually works.

4 steps to creating a strategy that will turn your dream goal into a reality.

As a Humanist I take problem solving very seriously. I want to accomplish my goals and not just dream about them. I wrote a blog post a little bit back on how to gain clarity of purpose. Today I want to talk about how to create a strategy that will actually work.

Recently I have gotten involved in anti-bullying work as a result of publishing my book – The Bully Vaccine. One of the things I’ve learned and that we all pretty much knew is that schools and teachers and administrators, however well-intentioned they may be, are not well equipped to help kids end bullying. There are some systemic reasons why this happens that I’m not going to get into here.

Suffice it to say that IF we want to help reduce or eliminate bullying, these systemic problems need to be resolved.   Wanting to change the way schools operate as it relates to bullying is a noble goal.  The real question is how we want them to change and what we can do to make sure those changes actually occur. Without a solid strategy we would be working aimlessly.

Deciding on a goal is easy. And most people are pretty good at that. The difference between people who are successful at actually creating the desired change and those who don’t is the ability to create a strategy.

Most people don’t. They just start doing whatever they think will work based on what they assume the problem to be and hope for the best, fail, get discouraged and decide that nothing can be done. Here are the steps to creating a strategy that will work instead.

1)      Laying the Ground Work

Someone who is strategic instead decided on a goal and then does a bit of research. How are things set up right now. Why are they set up that way? What are the goals that drove the system we have right now. Without knowing that – you won’t be able to develop a strategy that works.

2) Research

The next bit of research is to find out what actually works to solve the problem. What doesn’t work and what makes things worse is also important to know so that you can avoid those mistakes when you plan your strategy.   Most people don’t take this step either. They just assume they know and never bother to challenge whether what they think they know is even so. As a result, their strategies fail; they blame others and give up discouraged.

3)   Having a Plan

Once you know what you are dealing with and what you need to do to fix the problem, you can develop a plan, what exactly are the changes that need to be made? What do you want to keep of the old system and what needs to be changed to accommodate the best practices that are known to work.  It is only once you have a plan on what you would like to see happen that you can start to develop a strategy for how to accomplish it.

4) Strategy

Your strategy is the steps you need to take to implement the plan. Who do you need to talk to, who is in charge of the policies that need to be changed, what is the process for creating and implementing those changes. If your strategy has to do with education and disseminating new information, how are you going to disseminate it to the most possible people?

Having a goal is just the beginning. If you want to be successful, you need a solid strategy of how to get there.

Standing Alone

While it often seems like we are all alone, the truth is, we are never alone. It only seems like we are.

In one sense, we are alone, in our own heads. We have a theory of mind that allows us to posit that other people have thoughts going on in their heads in much the same way we have thoughts going on in ours, but that is only a theory. We are stuck in our own heads. So, in that sense, we are alone all the time.

However, we are also biologically related to all life on the planet and chemically made up of the same stuff that makes up the universe. It's mind blowing when you think about it.

If we focus on just the humans and our connection to them, there are 7+ billion of us alive at the moment. We are all similar yet different. The key is to understand and accept the similarities and differences at the same time. When you can do that you get that each human is real, not just an abstract idea of a person, but a real person with a real life and real problems and real loves and a real job you know nothing about. The problem we have is that when we interact with other humans, we see and judge the interaction through our own lens of experience. The problem is that this provides us with a distorted view of the interaction. The other person or persons have their own lenses they are viewing things and judging things by and their own distortions.

What helps improve interpersonal interactions is to accept that your view is limited and inaccurate and seek to grasp the inherent realness of the other person’s experience. This requires you to get out of your head and to consider the other person as a person and that requires compassion (despite what horrid thing they may have done).  The beauty of doing this is that the act of consider people compassionately takes you out of your head, where you are stuck, and connects you emotionally to other people so that you aren't alone anymore. 

This aspect of compassion is the reason every major philosopher and teacher and religion teaches compassion in some form. It's incredibly powerful and helps eliminate that feeling of aloneness that is at the heart of most of our existential angst.

As to the question about ethical principles - all of our principles are a product of learning and experience and shared community. So even if you think your principles are yours alone, they aren't. They are a rather arbitrary mix of your own thoughts and what you have learned from and with others. Ethics is a communal activity. You can't do ethics or be moral in isolation. You can only be moral in relationship to other people. So no, in that sense, you don't stand alone even when you think you are.

What do you do to combat the feeling of being alone in the universe? 

Positive Perseverance

While persevering is no guarantee of success, there can be no success without it.

Life is hard. Sometimes annoyingly so. I feel like my husband and I have been going through a period of bad luck where things just aren’t going our way. It’s frustrating. But, we stick at it, and keep plugging along working to make things better for ourselves, our family and the world in which we live.

What keeps us going? Well, first, that we don’t have an alternative. Things are what they are and we have no choice but to deal with them. We might as well tackle these things with a positive attitude.

I liken this to my son who hates doing homework and is bored doing it. Whenever he says, I’m bored, I say, so am I, so get the homework done so we can go do something else more fun. Drudgery is a part of life. Get it done and move on and the better the attitude you have about the drudgery, the quicker you get it over with. Fighting it just draws it out.

The next thing that keeps us going is hope.  Hope for the future. Again, we may continue to have bad luck. There is only so much that we can control in our lives. But that shouldn’t stop us from making an effort. There is a lot we can control and by doing those things we improve the possibility that our luck might change. That we may get a break.

An example of this is looking for a new job. There are still way to many people out of work and it doesn’t matter how well qualified you are, you may still lose out on a job to another candidate. Don’t take it personally. My husband lost out on a job a while back that he was actually the top candidate for until another guy lost his job and became available and knocked my husband out of the running. Sometimes things like that happen and sometimes you catch a break. The point is that unless you persevere and keep trying you won’t even be in the running.

For me, the work I do is lonely. I’m a writer. I post stuff and rarely does anyone respond. But sometimes they do and sometimes you find that you had a tremendous impact on someone else’s life. Like yesterday I got a call from a mother who told me that her daughter has become totally empowered because of a book I wrote. If I wasn’t out there persevering despite the lack of positive response, I would not have even met that woman in the first place to have had that impact.

You never know what will come of your efforts. Possibly nothing. But even if that is true, it is still worth it to positively persevere. Because you just never know.

Do you have a story of perseverance you’d like to share? Please share if you do because it will help motivate the rest of us to keep going when the going gets hard. 

Negotiating with a child

How a Humanistic Parent uses negotiation to help their children learn how to think critically and better navigate social interactions.

I realize a lot of parenting experts counsel against negotiating with a child. They say it erodes parental authority. I think they are wrong. I negotiate with my child all the time. Negotiation is an important skill. It helps the child learn to use their words to get what they want and that is so much better than them thinking the only way to get what they want is through a tantrum. It helps them develop verbal skills, reasoning, and compassion.

Here are some basic negotiation techniques to help you get the most out of your child:

Treat negotiation like a game.

Negotiation done well is fun. Sometimes I throw in absurd conditions into the negotiation to see what my son will do with it.

Both sides must be willing to give and take a bit.

This helps your child understand and learn that you will be flexible only if they will. Reciprocity is a good thing for kids to learn.

You can’t always get what you want.

I often allow my son to attempt negotiation even when I know what he is trying to negotiate isn’t something he will succeed at. As he “forces” me to give him good reasons why I won’t give in, he learns quite a lot about my reasoning in the process. And, assuming I have a good reason why not to give in – he deserves to know what those reasons are.

Diminishing returns:

This is a trick I learned from my dad. If you offer a fair deal and your child refuses it – trying to get more, you start negotiating in the other direction, meaning, the deal the child is getting keeps getting worse and worse. For example, if you are negotiating a weekend bedtime and you offer an extra ½ hour and they want an extra hour – you might drop it to 15 minutes and if they keep trying to get their hour – drop to 10 minutes, 5 minutes, regular bedtime, ½ early. The reason to do this is because part of the art of negotiation is knowing when to stop and take the deal you have if it is a good deal. It doesn’t take long for them to understand that the more they protest, the more they are losing and they should take a good deal when it is offered.

Do you negotiate with your child? If so what are some of the techniques you use? 

Finding Clarity

Gain Clarity, Get Committed, and Capture Your Goals With Critical Thinking

Humanists are by and large internally motivated. Our philosophy helps us to prioritize our ethics and find balance between our competing needs, desires and responsibilities. Plus, and this is a big plus, the time we spend on learning how to think well helps us to find clarity.

I say this because a LOT of people think that critical thinking is boring and intellectual. But spending some time learning how to think about how you think is actually the key to gaining clarity and from clarity commitment and motivation to accomplish your goals, whatever they might be. 

So, let’s talk about the process of finding clarity in the context of critical thinking and Humanist ethics and how this will help us to be more successful in life. 

First up: Refection.

What do you want to accomplish and more importantly, why?

If you want to gain clarity of purpose in your life, you need to spend some time considering why you think the things you think and whether what you think is even so. This is the power of critical thinking and the power of why. Asking yourself why helps you properly define the real problem you are trying to solve. This helps bring clarity and puts in you a position to be successful! In a way that focusing on what you want to accomplish won’t.

Next: Visioning.

Now that you are clear on your goal, the next step is to consider what an ideal solution to your problem might be. And again, we have to do something thinking to get this right. If you don’t want your solution to be limited, you need to ask yourself is what if.  What if things were different? What if I could end world hunger? What if there were no limitations put on you. Finding the motivation to take on the world is tough. Spending time thinking about what if possibilities helps you gain the motivation by helping you truly understand what is at stake and what can be gained by your efforts. 

Finally: Strategy.

Once you know what you want to accomplish, why you want to accomplish and what the benefits are to acheiving your goals, the next step is to develop a pragmatic strategy to accomplish it. Pie in the sky ideas are great but they won’t become reality unless you do some hard thinking about what is possible in reality. What steps do you need to take to get there. What will actually work vs. what do you just think will work. And again, critical thinking is key. If your assumptions about what works and what doesn’t is flawed, you aren’t going to succeed.  Critical thinking is key.

Here is a nice exercise, share with me what your goals are and more importantly why you chose that goal.  

Getting rid of nagging thoughts

How critical thinking skills can help you focus and not fret.

Nagging thoughts plague everyone. The problem is that they are rarely productive. They prevent us from thinking about the things we should be. Why? Because our minds aren’t always under our full control.

The way I get rid of nagging thoughts and anxiety is to address them. What am I afraid of? What can I do to avoid that? As soon as I have a plan to deal with the possible negative consequences, my brain relaxes and allows me to move forward with what I was supposed to be doing. This works every time and it’s very easy to do.   I have another blog post on why Proper Planning is Not Pessimistic, if you want to learn more (http://humanisthappiness.blogspot.com/2012/08/proper-planning-is-not-pessimistic.html)

Interestingly enough, the skill of questioning yourself and your motives is an essential aspect of critical thinking and freethought. Humanists practice them because they help us solve our problems, even if our problems exist only in our imaginations.

This rational approach to dealing with managing anxiety and worry only works if you have otherwise normal brain functions. If you are suffering from OCD, this won’t work.  OCD has a very strong genetic component and it is considered a disorder. Meaning people suffering from it aren’t able to control it without assistance from a professional. If you have OCD or suspect you might, talk to your doctor and seek professional help. You will be glad you did. Admitting your problem is beyond your ability to control is actually a relief as it puts you in a position to finally get your problem under control.

For everyone else – practice critical thinking. It really does help manage anxiety and worry rather well.

I’m curious to know what other people do to manage their nagging thoughts. Do you have a system that works well for you? If you do, please please share!

Embracing Uncertainty

How to reduce stress and improve your results by embracing life's uncertainty.  

There is a positive thinking movement also known as the Law of Attraction. As a Humanist, I have mixed feelings about it.  On the one hand, I like the idea of being positive.  I like the idea of imagining a better future and then working toward those goals.  After all, without positive thinking, the motivation to do and try new things wouldn’t be there.  We have to believe we can create change to even try.

The problem is that all that positive thinking doesn’t help you if it prevents you from planning for potential difficulties. The road to a better, happier life isn’t easy and no amount of positive thinking is going to change that basic reality.

Life is uncertain.  You can plan for success; however you define that, all you want. You can do everything right and still fail through no fault of your own. Good people have bad things happen to them. That is just the way of the world. Life is uncertain.

I think one of the reasons why people are so attracted to positive thinking is because it gives them a way to control their fears and nervousness.  It is a way for them to believe they have control over things they don’t actually have control of.

The Humanist approach is to embrace reality. And that means, embracing uncertainty. Accepting that there are some things beyond your control doesn’t have to cause you stress. It turns out that the fear you don’t have control is worse than accepting that you don’t. Once you accept that the outcomes of your endeavors are ultimately unknown, it frees you up to focus on the things you can control instead. Do your best and hope for the best. But it is always a good idea to be prepared and to have an alternative plan in place just in case things don’t go as you had hoped. That isn’t pessimistic. It is just good planning.

What do you do to control the stress created by uncertainty? Do you use the Serenity Prayer? Do you have a silly little ritual you perform that helps or a mantra that you repeat to yourself? Don't  be ashamed, we all do. I personally close my eyes and remind myself of how much I love my husband and son when I get stressed out. It helps me every time. Rituals are a way of coping with the stress of uncertainty. I’d love to hear what your quirky ritual habits are. 

No Promises

As a Humanist life skills coach, I will never tell you how to get rich quick. That’s because, very few people get rich quick. Even overnight sensations spend years slugging along before they get their big break. My husband and I joke that it will probably take me 8 years of hard work to become an overnight sensation. And even then, I might never be.

Image: "Try Win Lose Dice"
by Stuart Miles

FreeDigitalPhotos.net

This doesn’t discourage me though. Even though there is no magic formula to succeed in life, that doesn’t mean all hope is lost. While it would be nice if I could wish upon a star and get my dream’s desire, in the real world, reaching your dreams takes hard work and quite a bit of luck. 

I can control the hard work. It’s the luck part that is frustrating. But I don’t allow that to discourage me. Here’s why.

1. I know that if I don’t at least make a good faith effort, I have no chance of success at all. So if I want to be successful, I have to make an effort. No good is going to come to me just from wishing.
2. Even if I never achieve my dreams, the journey is still worth it.

We all have things we want to improve in our lives. Whether it is our finances, our love life or our looks, there is always something that could be improved. And, as a Humanist, I think we should absolutely be taking constructive actions to improve our lives.  However, I also think that we would be fools to wait until our lives were perfect before giving ourselves permission to enjoy life.

Whenever I am struggling with something or frustrated and ready to give up on some project I ask myself one simple question. What am I doing with my life?  The answer is always the same. Living it.  While I have short and long term goals, my ultimate goal is to live my life to the fullest. Even if I don’t ever accomplish my other objectives, as long as I’ve lived life fully and did my best, I’ve succeeded.  If I manage to help other people in the process - bonus. 

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If you want to learn more about how to live life successfully as a Humanist and without all the magical nonsense about how just improving your thoughts can improve your life - check out my life skills course - Living Made Simpler

You Ain’t Leading

Do you even know if they want to cross the bridge?
Renjith Krishnan/ FreeDigitalPhotos.net

File this under Humanistic Leadership. Lots of people like to think they are leaders, but if no one is following you, you ain’t leading.

It’s amazing how many leaders don’t get this. They get mad at people for failing to see how brilliant they are or how important the work they think needs to get done is. If people aren’t following you, the problem must lie in the stupidity of the followers who are refusing to follow. Right? Wrong. If people ain’t following you, it’s your fault. And launching ad hominen attacks on the people you would like to have follow you isn’t going to endear you to them.  

If you want people to follow you, you first need to take the time to find out what it is THEY want to accomplish. They could care less about what you want. What they want to know is how you are going to help them accomplish what THEY want. But unless you are willing to find out what THEY want, you aren’t going to be able to help them see how your plan of action will help them. If you want people to follow, you need to step back, consider the problem from their perspective, and help walk them through step by step how what you are proposing is going to help them and you get to your shared goal.

Never underestimate the intelligence of your followers. They aren’t stupid if they aren’t following you, they are just being skeptical, and that’s a good thing. If you want to lead people, you first need to give them a good reason to follow you.

(If you want to get more information on Humanistic Leadership - visit http://humanisticleadership.com/ )

Know Your Limits

Image: Phaitoon / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

I am getting ready to publish a 6 week humanist life skills course. It will cover issues like ethics, responsibility, compassion and critical thinking. I have been teaching this course for a while now and on the last day of my most recent class, one of my students asked about how humanists felt about humility.   I answered that humanists think being humble as an important part of our practice as humanists.  After all, we can never be sure we are right, even with the best of information and we would rather find out we are wrong that continue on in a delusion that we were right.

This got me thinking  though, part of what I like about my class is that every unit of the class builds upon the last. We spend an hour on ethics only to conclude that as strong as humanists ethics are, they are limited by our ability to think well. So the next week we spend an hour talking about the hows and whys of critical thinking, only to realize that it doesn’t matter how well we think, we are always going to be a, to a certain extent, not completely right so we need to temper our thinking with compassion to ensure that we are humble in our conclusions. Then we spend an hour talking about compassion only to realize that as important as compassion is, you will get yourself into trouble if you don’t temper your compassion with responsibility. 

All the major aspects of the Humanist philosophy, in and of themselves, are not sufficient on their own to help you lead a happy and fulfilling life. All are limited in their usefulness.  To be effective, we need to accept our limits and find ways to shore up the limitations in our ethical system and our critical thinking methods and to make sure our compassion is wielded responsibility and that we don’t allow our responsibilities to overwhelm us. In other words, ethics, compassion, reason and responsibility work best when used together because they shore up the limitations in each of the individual elements.

The beauty of Humanism is precisely that it encourages to be realistic and therefore humble. We don’t pretend to know any great truths. We are just trying to do the best we can given the inherent limits places on us by our knowledge and our nature. 

So the next time you are beating yourself up for not being perfect. Take solace in the fact that knowing and accepting your limitations is actually a good thing.