David Brooks wrote Nine Nonobvious Ways to Have Deeper Conversations in a recent New York Times article.

• Ask open-ended questions (what was it like … tell me about a time …)
• Make them authors not witnesses (not what happened but what they experienced)
• Listen 100% present
• Don’t fear the pause (most of us stop listening to a comment halfway through so when a person stops talking take your time to digest what you heard and respond.

“Humans need to be heard before they will listen,” Amanda Ripley

You can’t pursue money.  It outruns you.

Seeking to be the best at what you do brings remuneration in two ways:

• You will be your happiest
• You’ll make more money

Your chances of making more money come not from pursuing it, but by not trying so hard to make more and try harder at being the best.

Being hunkered down with lifestyles altered since March makes it challenging to stay motivated.

• Just waking up, bouncing around from crisis to crisis like a pinball, obsessively texting, and living moment to moment with no greater goal is what a lot of us are doing these days.

Motivation comes from having a plan – specific goals even when usual routines have been disrupted.

Motivation comes from seeing vividly in your mind’s eye what is worth your time and effort – everything else is just a distraction.

Thanksgiving Day 2020 will be the strangest one in anyone’s memory because for health reasons we’re avoiding the usual family gatherings or if they proceed uncertainty hangs over the holiday.

Saving Thanksgiving comes down to counting blessings you never thought about by comparing the current coronavirus with the pandemic of 1918.

• Back then, no radio, no records, no television – no Netflix or YouTube.
• No widespread ownership of telephones, certainly no cell phones.
• No Amazon, no Hello Fresh or Instacart, no drug store deliveries.
• No Zoom.

But we have it so much better now. 

• Locked down but not disconnected with friends and loved ones.
• The ability to work from home because of digital technology that we have.
• Lifesaving medicines and vaccines on the way, something that was never available in 1918.

This time we may have to give up early holiday shopping or going to the movies on a full stomach but there is also this.

Thanksgiving may have become a routine family gathering that we took for granted but now with more to be thankful for than ever, the holiday has new meaning and importance.

When we get a few moments to ourselves or go to bed at night, it is a good bet that we rifle through our mind for negative things that have built up all day.

Just as we can remember negative thoughts so easily, the mind can be trained to also recall positive thoughts.

• Start by remembering acts of love and kindness.
• Move next to the gratitude you have for not only major things but the many little things that often get pushed aside by negative thoughts on replay.
• Don’t forget to appreciate family and friends, letting go of anger and animosity not for their sake but for yours and start or maintain a program of health and wellbeing that aids the physical side of stress reduction.

Phones, constant communication, too much screen time, digital distraction, not enough alone time to think and trying to multi-task are sources of anxiety that can be uprooted from our minds with three positive steps.

My two favorite sources for stress reduction are Dale Carnegie’s How to Stop Worrying and Start Living and Mayo Clinic’s anxiety and resilience expert Dr. Amit Sood.

Lowering stress begins with this:

• Assume that everyone around you is struggling and is special. Be kind.
• If it won’t matter in five years, it isn’t worth stressing out about today.
• Sometimes a step back can be a move forward. An adversity may be preventing a catastrophe.

“Not only does our response to stressors — real and perceived — start with the brain, but in the form of chronic, toxic stress, it ends up harming the brain.  It’s a kind of perfect feedback loop.”  — Amit Sood, MD

One thought can make you resilient as long as you keep thinking it.

• The day we quit is the day we fail.

You can’t fail no matter what happens as long as you don’t give in.

And there is a gift in getting headwinds on your way to success.

For every failure that makes you redouble your efforts is a reminder of how badly you want to achieve your goal.

Studies show those who remain cheerful and enthusiastic show less cognitive decline in their mid-life and later.

More important is that an attitude of positivity is accretive to our health from the moment we adopt it.

• Eliminating can’t and won’t is the first place to start.
• Balancing a negative thought or bad outcome with something good.
• Cultivate an attitude of never judging yourself in the eyes of people who don’t approve of you but see yourself the way people who like you do.

Some people are raised in negativity but they can change it with a commitment to these three things.

Look up not down, out not in, toward others not away.

We don’t get into a car and wish it to its destination — it takes a roadmap or at least knowledge of where we want to go. 

In the meantime we find a way to enjoy the ride.

But in our lives we often do not know our destination let alone have a plan for getting there.

• Without a plan it’s hard to enjoy the ride because we have to rely on luck to keep us engaged.

There’s been a lot of talk about living in the present but living in the present is happier when we know where we’re going.

Happiness increases when we can see the finish line.

Why do we obsess about a single mistake instead of constantly repeating our many successes?

• Our ears hear and our brains record every mistake we make or for which we are criticized and then we put them on replay – what if we hit STOP. 

• To that end, try to look at yourself through the eyes of those who love you – whether two legged or four legged.

• Do not outsource the precious real estate of your brain to those who make you feel undeserving. 

No negative thoughts can exist in an atmosphere of healthy self-love.

Recognize your fears and turn them into action.

• Busy people have less anxiety so come up with an action plan at the first signs of concern.
• Fear is fed by compounded worry so acknowledging fear prevents us from piling one worry on top of another and another.
• The feelings you embrace are multiplied so if they consist of many layers of concern and anxiety, they never need to become reality to make us ill. The more positive things we can cram into our brain, the more it dominates our head.

First acknowledge the fear and turn it into action.

No matter what is bringing you down, there are two things that can be done to pick up your mood.

• Relentlessly find ways to be grateful – This doesn’t just mean show gratitude, it means spending time and effort busily finding things for which to be grateful. A friend told me he was actually grateful for the seasonal flu.  Why?  Because he knew it would go away within a week and that his health would return.  That’s working at gratitude. (He was almost back to 100% in less time).

• Never giving up hope – Try this: the next time you or someone else is down in the dumps, see if you can identify their lack of hope.  Humans don’t do well without hope and sometimes we are the ones to kill it off because of how we think.  Think of hope as fuel – the more we pump it in, the further we can go.

Only 40% of our happiness is in the genes, the other 60% is up to us supported by research in The Journal of Happiness Studies.

“[It’s] completely possible to rewire our brains for happiness … You have a choice.  It’s no different than deciding what to wear or what food to order.  When it comes to happiness, there’s a lot we can do about it.”

The words of Santa Monica psychotherapist Susan Zinn who suggests:

• Abandoning the pursuit of perfection.
• Volunteer, laugh, feel grateful, eat well, exercise and connect with a higher power.
• Be spontaneous and enjoy short-term pleasures to achieve peace of mind.

More than half our happiness is from nurture not nature according to Zinn.

Bucket lists are a popular way to live the life you want to the fullest so why not make one for COVID isolation.

• Accept the feeling of loss and even anger and let go of anxiety that makes close quarters isolation even tougher. 

• Spend more time in the present – being close together does mean being closer in relationships. Cultivate periods of 100% presence with others not just being close by.

• Practice gratitude by thinking about those who have it worse and the simple joy of survival as an individual, family or group of people.

Fear, anger and anxiety fades when you focus on acquiring skills needed to endure and by letting go of the roadblocks to acceptance.

This says it all about showing kindness a main part of your life from Dr. Amit Sood, the resiliency trainer at Mayo Clinic:

“When you are wishing somebody well, you are wishing two people well … One person is the person you’re wishing well… and the other is yourself.” 

The world is tougher than ever but the solution for making it nicer one person at a time is to be an advocate for someone else and share in the benefits.

Okay, here it is –

Spend two minutes with your family or friends at the end of each day but here’s the trick – treat them like you haven’t seen them in a month!

We’ve been on top of each other since last March so it is understandably difficult to show the enthusiasm and person-centered interest to those close to us as we may have been able to do prior.

The script is:  “I am about to come in contact with some special people and I am going to make them the sole focus of my attention at the end of each day.

Another technique that breeds gratitude which makes us feel better is to not get out of bed before thinking of five people who are a big part of your life who care about you.

Worth a try?

If you’re like most of us, you’ve probably been on your own back for years.

How did that work out?

Try approving of yourself instead.

This is not an act of arrogance but a source of gratitude for the things you bring to the table.

Self-criticism doesn’t work but finding ways to be more approving of yourself does. 

When you have no hope, you tend to see anything you can do to change things as hope-less.

• Get your mind off yourself
• Initiate an act of kindness – As crazy as that may sound doing acts of kindness for others increases the serotonin in the brain acting as an anti-depressant and stress reliever.
• Focus on what has worked out for you in life – to obsess over things that didn’t work out or that are painful creates more hopelessness.

Imagine outcomes in your mind’s eye that work out for you instead of replaying scenarios that didn’t – that’s a positive step toward cultivating hope instead of despair.

The more we worry, the more stressed we become.

The more stress, the more cortisol our brains make leading to health problems.

We worry because we learn to worry but we can unlearn it as well.

• 99% of the time what we worry about never happens
• The 1% when it does, it rarely happens the way we think
• Replace worrying with thinking with your head not your heart.
• For every worry no matter how large or small, you need a suitable plan to deal with it.

Concern is forethought – worry is fear thought.

Athletes benefit from their “free agency mindset” in which they see their skills as a marketable benefit.

Non-pro athletes should, too.

Not testing the market with our skills is leaving money and happiness on the table.

• • Everyone knows their strong suit – test the market.
  • There is no such thing as the right time – the right time is when someone believes they need you.
  • Becoming a “free agent” doesn’t always mean it’s time to leave a job but can serve to confirm staying another year.

Most people don’t look for their next job until they’ve lost their last job but with a “free agent” mentality, you’re always where you are supposed to be.