Starting in my 20’s,
my mother would at various times (like my birthday) pass on the advise of her
mother and her very elderly aunts, of which two lived into their 100s and
another well into their 90s. “Have a little something wrong with you. Not enough to kill you, but enough to make
you think about what your doing.”
The older I become,
the better I understand this advise. Due to various aches and ills, I’m a lot
more mindful of what I eat, how I exercise etc. etc. I’ve noticed that when I’m
fully present, not only do I remember things better, but I figure out solutions
to problems, am more sensitive to the people I’m interacting with and
ultimately my sense of well-being and contentment, is significantly increased.
While aging has
certainly made me more mindful, the real key to learning how to do it came about
as I was trying to solve a costume problem.
Our town was
celebrating its 250th anniversary and I needed to make a number of
Revolutionary period men’s outfits. I was stumped about how to make a “shirt
waist.” I decided to take a close look at how men’s shirts were made, and
stared at every male that walked into the gym where I was working out. After
observing the first two men, I had it figured out.
In the course of any
given day, I saw lots of men in shirts, but I wasn’t paying attention. By
focusing and being mindful, I was able to solve my problem in less than 10
minutes. Finding that solution, gave me a burst of energy and enthusiasm the
rest of the day.
Problems, mistakes
and negative experiences have a purpose, whether they are apparent at the time
or not. It’s how you approach them that makes the difference. According to Dr. Ellen
Langer, the Harvard researcher, specializing in mindfulness, “We suffer from an illusion of certainty and would
prosper from realizing that since everything is always changing and everything
looks different from different perspectives, this ‘certainty’ is mindless and
robs us of control.”
Langer specializes
in non-meditative mindfulness, which she defines as the continuous creation of new categories;
openness to new information; and an implicit awareness of more than one
perspective. (Langer, 1997, The Power of Mindful Learning p. 4).
From her research
on mindfulness in people living with chronic conditions, Langer concluded three
things: "The first is you see you
don't have it all the time, so it's not quite as bad as you thought. You know,
people are depressed, they think they're depressed all the time. No one is
anything all the time. People who are dyslexic, it turns out that most words,
over 90 percent of the words, they're reading they tend to read correctly, yet
they define themselves by their illness.
"So
what happens is first you see you're not as bad as you thought you were.
Second, by seeing that sometimes it's better, sometimes it's worse leads you to
ask the question — well, why? And you may well come up with a solution. And the
third, even if you don't, that whole process is mindful, and the 35-or-so years
of research we've done shows that that kind of noticing new things leads to
health and longevity." Thinking Counter Clockwise to BeatStress.”
To develop
mindfulness, Langer recommends five steps:
• Seek out, create and notice new things
• Realize how
behavior can be understood differently in different contexts: All statements can be true based on the
context in which they are delivered.
• Reframe
mistakes into successes. How can a failure
be helpful to you in another way.
• Be aware that
stress-indeed all emotion-is a result of our views about events.
• Be authentic. Be
true to yourself.
Learn more about
mindfulness, as described by Langer:
• Mindfulness in theAge of Complexity: Harvard Business Review The Magazine March 2014 Interview
with Ellen Langer
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