Here Is A Writing Exercise That Will Make Your Life Better

Let's start with the assumption that every time we write something, we're trying to evoke a mood in the reader. One valuable tool to use here is description of the setting. The words you choose when you're writing about the environment your characters are in will shape the way the reader sees your characters and their experiences.

As a writer, you want to be able to convey as many different moods as possible. I've found I'm really good at articulating some emotions and really, really terrible at others. Here's an exercise I use to help me build my descriptive skills:

Every couple of days (and this is important - you could do this exercise every day if you wanted to, but don't go more than a week without!) stop what you're doing, and really look at the spot you find yourself in at that moment.

You don't want to think about ANYTHING besides really looking at whatever is around you. What do you see? What does it look like, sound like, smell like? You don't have to write a word of this down, you know: the point here is the observing. Spend a minute or two focused on being very aware of your environment.

Now stop. Shift into writer mode now. How would you describe this scene if you were happy? How would you describe it if you were sad? How does the landscape look to an angry person? How would it be seen by a person bubbling over with excitement? Again, you don't have to write this down - just think through the language you would use to express that mood to the reader. I usually do this for a mood or two and then move on with my day; over the course of regular practice, you'll have an opportunity to practice viewing the environment through a wide range of emotions if you switch it up each time.

That's it. That's the whole exercise. It'll make you a better writer. When you're writing a scene, stop and ask yourself how your characters see where they are. Share that information with your readers. It'll make your text better and more rewarding.

Here's the nifty off-label application. Don't forget that you are the main character in your own life. Every now and then, stop. Take a look around. Become aware of how you feel right now. Ask yourself "How would I describe this if I was happier?" Just going through that process boosts the mood. It's a little jolt of positivity that can come in really handy sometimes.

How To Count Your Blessings

Part of the reason we feel compelled to buy so much stuff, all of the time, is that we've lost the ability to be content with what we have. In fact, many of us don't even know what we have! Our closets are packed, our basements are piled high with boxes we haven't opened in years, we rent so much storage space for our stuff that self-storage is now a $22 billion dollar industry in the US.

Imaging what we could do, individually and collectively, with that $22 billion dollars. Would we have as much debt? Could we fund better schools for our kids? Would it be easier to help make sure our neighbors don't go hungry or senior citizens don't freeze to death?

Cultivating The Art of Contentment

An essential element of deciding when and how we're going to spend our money is learning how to be content with what we actually have. Frankly, I don't think most of us are very aware of what we have: we're too busy working to accumulate more, more, more to pay attention to the items we interact with every day.

But we can change this. Our parents & grandparents talked about 'counting your blessings' - and even today you see lots of people who are really into gratitude. They keep gratitude journals listing three things they're thankful for every day, for example, or make a point of telling someone that's made a difference in their life how much they matter.

I think these are great practices. They're just not enough if we want to enjoy life more and buy less stuff. For that, we've got to focus in on the tangible world, intensely and often.

This is how it works. As often as possible, when you're using an object or item, say out loud one of the benefits you can identify about it. For example:

Boy, this pen writes nicely!

I love how well the brakes on my car work.

This shirt is really comfortable.

This toothpaste tastes good.

I can fit everything I need to into my tote bag!

You might feel a little silly at first when you start this practice, but over time, a funny thing will happen. As you get in the habit of recognizing and articulating what you like about the possessions you have, the drive to replace them drops off significantly.

In fact, you might even wind up a little happier. I've found this happens especially with items I use all of the time. Let's take the coffee maker. Trust me, the coffee maker in this house gets a lot of use! And I think I've found every way to praise the coffee maker that there is. It's easy to use. It works fast. It makes good coffee. The coffee stays hot for a long time. There's a friendly little beep that lets me know when the warming unit is shutting off. It's easy to clean. The coffee pot is a little focal point of goodness in my life, and when I engage with it, I'm happier as a result.

It's not a spectacular coffee maker, mind you. It doesn't make espresso or lattes or wash my windows or anything like that. But it's a good coffee maker that does what its supposed to do, consistently, and recognizing and maintaining some level of awareness of this fact creates a bright point in my day.

You might be surprised how many bright points are waiting to be recognized in your day. Enjoying what we have reduces our desire to acquire more. That's essential if we want to get our lives back under control. It all begins with counting your blessings.

Looking for Balance: The Need for a More Sustainable Way of Life

This morning, I read this really great article by Arianna Huffington, Burnout: The Disease of Our Civilization. In it, she articulates so much of what is wrong, really, really wrong, with our current way of life.

Her focus is on the corporate workplace, and she points out that too much time spent frantically engaged in money-making activity is neither good for the company nor its employees. There are numerous examples of employers providing mechanisms for some element of life balance - and many of these companies are very successful, national or even global brands.

She also talks about how our lifestyle is impacting us on a personal level. One stat that jumped out at me was the fact that the average smartphone user checks their device every six and a half minutes. That's 150 times a day.

I don't have a smartphone, but I'm as guilty of this as the next person. I always want to know what's in my email, on Facebook, on Twitter. I'm becoming increasingly aware of the compulsive nature of this behavior, while at the same time, puzzled. What, exactly, do I think I'm going to miss?

Personal Choices Lead To Cultural Change

I can't change the way the world operates all by myself. However, I can change what I'm doing. I need to be more mindful about the way I consume information, and how tethered I am to the internet.

One thing that really started me on this journey toward a more sustainable lifestyle was a bit in a Martha Stewart magazine that said we spend 95% of our lives indoors. That seems so incredibly, egregiously wrong.  At the same time, observing how much time I (and the people around me) have their attention focused on a small screen, is troubling.

In Syria, right now, little children are dying from chemical weapons attacks. The situation in Egypt is chaotic, and frankly, the situation in the United States is not exactly wonderful. But we don't pay attention to that when we have wonderful diverting Twitter streams full of who in the world will play the next Batman?

One of the fundamental ideas that's pivotal in creating a more sustainable way of life is learning to consider attention as a consumable resource: you only have so much, and you need to be selective where you spend it. I squander my attention, and that leads to bad choices and limits my ability to help others.

But this can change, and it will change. I'm not advocating for totally unplugging from the world - I can't support my family if I don't work - but there needs to be healthier limits than the ones I'm currently using. It's time to explore what those are.

Losing Home: The Impact of Declining Social Structures on our Quality of Life

You should know who Ray Oldenburg is.  Way back in 1991, he wrote "The Great Good Place" and it's there that we see one of the first descriptions of how society falling down as retail rose. There's a lot in there about community planning and suburban development. Bedroom communities, for example, are entire neighborhoods where people retreat to sleep at the end of a workday - and then leave again in the morning for work and school.

Oldenburg identified some ways in which changes in the ways we live impact the quality of life we have. The big one is the disappearance of social structures -the formal and informal community groups people used to belong to. I realize this is a broad description, but it used to be a big category. You'd find everything in it from church membership to participation in your kids' PTA.  Some social structures were organized for very serious purposes - think of your volunteer fire department - while others were more fun, such as the community softball team.

Some Quotes from Roy Oldenburg

In the absence of informal public life, living becomes more expensive. Where the means and facilities for relaxation and leisure are not publicly shared, they become the objects of private ownership and consumption.

Life without community has produced, for many, a life style consisting mainly of a home-to-work-and-back-again shuttle. Social well-being and psychological health depend upon community. It is no coincidence that the ‘helping professions’ became a major industry in the United States as suburban planning helped destroy local public life and the community support it once lent.

 Totally unlike Main Street, the shopping mall is populated by strangers. As people circulate about in the constant, monotonous flow of mall pedestrian traffic, their eyes do not cast about for familiar faces, for the chance of seeing one is small. That is not part of what one expects there. The reason is simple. The mall is centrally located to serve the multitudes from a number of outlying developments within its region. There is little acquaintance between these developments and not much more within them. Most of them lack focal points or core settings and, as a result, people are not widely known to one another, even in their own neighborhoods, and their neighborhood is only a minority portion of the mall’s clientele.

The Rise of Retail

Nature abhors a vacuum, but nature's got nothing on a brand manager desperate to keep their job. It's not rocket science to see that people have a deep-seated need for community. If the community is no longer there, people will seek out the connection and purpose that community provided somewhere else. Retailers have stepped in to fill that gap.

Think about the classes offered at home improvement stores like Lowe's and Home Depot. In some measure, people take these classes because they want to learn how to accomplish a specific task, such as installing closet dividers or replacing a toilet. But there's something deeper going on here. When people gather, with like minded individuals, who all have a common challenge, they're forming a community. Some of the need that would have once been filled by the casual sideline conversations that take place while parents watch their kids' soccer games, for example, has now been moved into the retail environment.

We Lost Home, Too

Other thought leaders, such as Jean Zimmerman, in Making Scratch: Rediscovering The Pleasures of the American Hearth, and Shannon Hayes, in Radical Homemakers, have detailed how the erosion of community structures Oldenburg documented has extended even further.

Home, which has traditionally been the center of all human endeavors, has evolved into a place to be avoided or escaped. It's very weird: as houses get larger and larger - Bloomberg News reports that
the median new house built in the U.S. is now about 50 percent larger than its counterpart from 30 years ago - people are spending less and less time in them.

Part of this is economic. Large homes are expensive to acquire and maintain. You generally need at least 2 incomes to keep the household going. When everyone is working outside the home, there's no one left inside the home.

When there's no one left inside the home, the home becomes no more than a house -and a house as it stands is not an exceptionally compelling place to be. Retail and the entertainment industry provide an attractive alternative. For a few - or not so few- dollars, you can have an experience designed to delight you, or at least satisfy you, and don't you deserve it? After all, you've worked so hard this week, paying for the house you don't want to be in.

It's a vicious cycle. We have to be willing to look at it critically, examine our role in it, and finally, if we're going to change our lives, step off of it. I think it starts with taking home back, but it can't stop there. Isolation within the home is part of the root of this problem. We need to build communities and connections with people, both online and in real spaces, if we want things to change. We need Oldenburg's Third Spaces, free from the influence of commerce.

It's not going to be easy, but essential things never are.

Transitions

I quit one of my jobs today. It wasn't a bad job, as ghostwriting gigs go: the clients are pleasant, knowledgeable people; the money decent and always paid promptly. But I just couldn't do it anymore. Here's why:

It's no secret that the world's best brands are successful because they do a great job of meeting their customers' needs. That's Marketing 101, right there. But what isn't so well understood is that human needs are incredibly complex. They have both tangible and intangible components.

That's why when winter rolls around and you go coat shopping, you're not just looking for a coat that's warm, weatherproof, and affordable. You want a coat that's stylish as your community of choice defines stylish, so you can feel good about yourself and your place in society.

My now-former clients do a great job educating business leaders about the complexities of human need and teaching them how to best meet as many of those needs as possible in the retail setting. Better, more comprehensive customer service leads to more sales, greater organizational profitability, increased market share...it all sounds good, right?

Except for one little thing. 

I have become increasingly convinced that having too many of our needs - of both the tangible and intangible variety - met by retailers is disastrous. It's a catastrophe on the individual level, and collectively, for our society as a whole, it's a cluster-fuck of truly epic proportions.

People who can buy everything - everything from apples to aspirations, eggs to esteem, chocolate to confidence - are people who don't need to do anything. We don't need to make, manufacture, discover, or create. It all comes from the store. When all of our needs are met for us, we don't even have to think.

People who don't think make bad decisions. When we're not thinking, we make decisions that actually go against our own self-interest and the well-being of the communities we live in. Look around your circle of family, friends, co-workers and acquaintances. Look at society at large - especially as it's presented to us on the news.

Do you see a lot of good decision making going on?

The other day, I was down at a little local grocery store in my neighborhood. A young couple stopped in. They were in search of hamburger patties.

"We don't sell the pre-made patties," the proprietor told them, "But we do have the meat - we grind it fresh every morning!"

The young woman shuddered, and the young man slid a comforting arm around her shoulders. "No thank you," he said. "We'll just get some someplace else."

That young couple had a twenty mile drive ahead of them, in any direction, before they'd find a store that sold pre-made hamburger patties.  There was high quality, freshly ground beef right in front of them. But they were willing to travel a significant distance (and I don't know what gas costs where you are, but it starts at $4/gallon up here) to find hamburger patties already made for them.

Why?

I believe that the narratives we've been given by marketers - stories about what we need and who were are - hold some, if not all, of the answer to that question.

One of the most pervasive marketing messages, delivered daily in dozens of different ways, is "You shouldn't have to work so hard." It's a message that helped spur the public enthusiasm for electricity, with countless labor-saving devices that promised to free women from a lifetime of drudgery at the washboard or slinging sad irons. Decades later, we've internalized the message so completely that no one wants to do anything - even if the task is no more taxing than shaping a few ounces of ground meat into a patty.

This type of thinking is destroying us. I don't want to contribute to the problem. I want to help solve it. We can take our lives and our futures back from the marketers. We just have to remember how to meet our needs without the assistance of retailers.

Reading Between the Lines

There's a PSA running on Quebec radio that goes something like this:

"911"

"Yes, my air conditioner is broken."

"Lady, this is 911. For emergencies."

"Yes, my air conditioner is broken and it's getting hotter in here by the minute. My address is 6595 Any Street."

"I understand, Ma'am. We'll send someone over right away."

Then it cuts to a message about you can call for help with domestic violence.

A not-unrelated story: a friend, detailing the physical and emotional abuse that led up to the dissolution of her relationship, shared a story where her partner broke her cat's leg by throwing the cat across the room. She said, "The vet knew. And probably also knew that I was in a DV situation before I did. "She fell" sounds a lot like "I walked into a door" or "I fell down the stairs".

How much of our ability to save each other, to care for each other, to break the cycle of abuse, is dependent on our ability to read between the lines. It's not enough to hear what is said. You have to hear what is meant. Sometimes that means listening for the words that aren't there, the things that aren't said.

There are reasons his is difficult. The first is that we're collectively not in the habit of paying attention at all. Never mind listening to what isn't said, we don't hear what is said. We're not present in our conversations. Sometimes we don't even know who we're talking to at all:



There are reasons we don't pay attention. We're busy. We're overwhelmed. We have places to go, people to see, important things that require our attention more than what or who we're currently engaged with. We live our lives on autopilot: how many times have you driven a familiar route - let's say from home to the office - only to realize you didn't see anything along the way? Our minds are continually occupied and this keeps us from living the lives we're supposed to have.

The 911 dispatcher gets thousands of calls a day - some of them from people who are calling because their air conditioners *are* broken, which is generally outside of 911's scope of service. It takes a cultivated awareness to pause long enough to think "Maybe something else is going on here!" and discern the meaning behind the words.

Vets, like other health care providers, are forced to see more and more patients in less and less time to make their revenue model work. It takes experience, compassion and a cultivated awareness to stop long enough in the normal course of events and say "Cats don't just fall like that. What's really going on here?"

There's very little education in our lives about how to develop our awareness, to discern the meaning behind the worlds, to look a little deeper. But that's exactly what we must do if we're going to change the lives we live, the lives other people live. If we're going to build a better world, we need to start paying attention.

On the Latest IRS Scandal: Do Good Management Practices Apply Only To People We Like?

Right now, on my desk, I've got a notice saying I need to pay the IRS nearly $2,000. The tax man is not my favorite guy right now - I don't think anyone ever likes to pay taxes.

That being said, I'm more than a little uncomfortable with the coverage surrounding the IRS conference expenditures. The agency has reportedly spent $50 million dollars for 220 conferences, over 2 years. That works out to roughly $227,000 per conference, although some conferences cost far more (one is reportedly $4 million!) and some obviously less. The IRS has 106,000 employees, according to Wikipedia.

One piece of information I haven't seen so far is how much is spent on conferences by other government agencies of comparable size over a similar time period. Numbers without context aren't tremendously helpful. I would like to see an agency-by-agency breakout of this information, and I bet other people would too. Just saying "Oh, they spent $50 million!" is good for whipping up the emotion - $50 million being spent by people you don't like just sounds terrible - but we can't forget that ALL of the money the gov't spends is taxpayer money; not just that spent by the IRS.

But that's not even the biggest part of the problem. The troublesome bit is the outrage leveled at the fact that the IRS employees were participating in team building exercises. Some of these exercises were fun! They involved dancing! People were visibly smiling and having a good time!

It would be interesting to have performance assessments of the IRS employees before and after these conferences, both self-assessments and objective third party assessments. Because here's the thing: team building exercises, morale boosting drills and the like are all designed to improve performance. They're a tacit acknowledgement that all work is performed by people, and people have complex emotional and psychological needs. When you take steps to meet those emotional and psychological needs, your employees perform better. This is not rocket science. This is Management 101.

For example, let's look at police officers. Due to the nature of their work, police officers are regularly exposed to traumatic events. That's why good police departments make sure there's counseling & support services available for their teams. Healthy, strong bonds between police officers not only provide for better law enforcement, they keep every one safer.

IRS employees are probably among the most hated professionals in the country. They have a thankless task that is complicated and ever changing. The tax code is more that 73,000 pages long. And budget crunches (believe it or not in the context of this story)mean that there are fewer employees doing more and more work. This is not a recipe designed to deliver top performance. In fact it is the opposite: put people in a difficult, high-stress job that everyone hates them for having.

Every single IRS employee is a person. Is it such a stretch to see that these people might need some emotional support? That their morale might be impacted by having everyone hate them?

If we agree that the IRS employee teams are performing a needed function, aren't these employees entitled to the same management tools and techniques people in other industries use to get top performance from their teams? Or is good management something we reserve only for the people we like?

We can argue about the amount of money spent all day, and somewhere, someone probably is. But let's stop the discussion about whether or not it's appropriate that the IRS employees have access to the type of team building, morale building exercises that are common practice to provide employee support and boost performance in many industries. People who are treated well do better work. Retaining skilled IRS employees is always going to be more cost-effective than attracting and training new employees. If that takes a little dancing and some cupcakes, so be it.