November Summary

Should I call it a success? Meh.

My goals were to exercise every other day, and to journal four times a week, while keeping up with a blog.

My exercising was better than average, though I didn’t make it to every other day consistently. For a couple weeks, I journaled four times, but more often three. I did, however, get up some decent blog posts.

So, I didn’t meet my goals, but I had marked improvement. However, there was a bit of a cost. In my efforts to add virtues to my life, other things got neglected. Changing my routine caused some memory lapses, most notably in sending the wrong medication to daycare (I had some quality shitting-on-myself time over that one, but no harm done). So I learned a thing or two about stretching myself too thin, and adopted a morning checklist to keep my duties straight. I did learn something about motivation, though.

At the local bookstore, I found a book about Navy SEALs. Holy crap, those guys are intense! The devotion to excellence is truly inspiring, not to mention their eagerness to keep learning, no matter the source. As right and proper as it is to take issue with the politics & economics of war, I have to say, these gents lit a fire under my ass!

For my next step, I have an appointment on Dec. 1 for a quit-smoking program. I’ve done it before, but it didn’t last more than a few months. I wasn’t planning to do that until the New Year, but hey, never a bad time for that, eh?

I think that that will be quite enough goal for December, but I plan to have a Back In The Saddle month in January. After all of the holiday craziness, it will be a good time to refocus. Let’s be accountable to be better!  

Respect, How Sesame Street Got It Wrong.

One of the challenges I’ve found with having kids is that simple questions can be harder than they seem at first. Defining “uncle” to a three-year-old mind, with a three-year-Old’s attention span can be tricky, and a parent can see the language through fresh eyes, and a teeth-grinding headache.

One definition that I wrestled with for years is ‘Respect.” Try it; it shouldn’t surprise you that it’s a slippery one.

This changed one morning when Sesame Street was on, and ‘respect’ was the word of the day. Naturally, I was tickled pink; Sesame Street usually has some pretty solid educational chops, so I thought that my long dilemma was over.

Their definition was this: “Treating other people how they want to be treated.”

Nope. No no no hot-water-burn-baby NO! (hope you caught the Rainman reference, or I’m going to seem like one sick fuck) And here’s why:

How does a bully want to be treated? Full submission and humiliation for their amusement. Submitting to that would be indulgent and self-erasing psychic suicide.

Or the extremely drunk girl who tried to drag me into the ladies room of a pub for a few minutes of sweaty affection. Treating her how she wanted to be treated would be exploitative, and scummy on my part. It’s not hard to see that it would be more respectful to check-in with her affections after she had slept it off (I did, and she was over it).

So in a moment of inspiration, I told my child what ‘respect’ meant: treating people as though they were smart and responsible. That night, I updated it to “kind, smart and responsible.”

By Jove, I think I got it!

“Kind” is pretty self-explanatory; engaging in conversation without attack, and honestly trying to understand the perspective of the other. By “responsible,” I mean taking ownership of our own words and actions. No blaming, and no making excuses.

“Smart” is a little trickier. Not everyone is born with the same mental horsepower, and only so much can be learned. Likewise, there are lots of people who are gifted in academic smarts, but are bloomin’ morons in other areas. When I say “smart,” I’m thinking of someone who is reasonably aware of the consequences of actions, can keep their observations in their context, and above all, know what they don’t know.

But here is where the crash-test-of-ideas is important. Back when I was young, single, chronic, and spending a lot of time by myself, I thought these insights made me a freaking genius. When I sobered up, I got quite a humbled, and I learned the value of peer review. I think that peer reviewing in a blog would be better than casual conversation, because it gives people time to digest and formulate a better response than a right-now reply. At the same time, nothing beats the dynamics of real flesh-and-blood conversation after the brains have had time to digest individually

I find this one to be particularly important to nail down. A lot of people are talking about respecting others; a lot of people with authority positions (schools and employers), are demanding that you respect your peers, on pain of banishment. However, their “respect” seems more indulgent than anything resembling equality.

I think that this definition can solve a lot of problems. If people keep this definition at the front of our minds during difficult conversations, we could get a lot further, a lot faster.

Micromanagers

Now, I’d like to take a moment to address a problem that affects us all, infecting nearly every workplace, and many other organizations.

The MicroManager.

You will know these people be their tendency to give you detailed instructions on every aspect of your job. They have more “good advice” than Oprah, and they rarely have an actual management position or title (actual managers don’t have time for the fiddly-bits of your job).

They also have a virtually unassailable defense mechanism, developed over years of pissing people off: “I was just trying to be helpful..,” making their assailants feel like turds for not appreciating their good intentions and un-asked-for assistance.

But their charitable contributions always just feel wrong, and I think I’ve figured out why. A truly helpful person will give you the respect and credit of assuming that you already know things. A helpful person isn’t so damn condescending!

So why am I writing about this on the ManCrafting blog? Well, firstly, because I hate them so fucking much! But like all things that stir such an emotional reaction, it reflects something of myself that I find disdainful. We all want to be the Wise Counselor – the resident Gandalf – without having lived the hard life of significant accomplishment that we see in those with genuine wisdom. As for myself, I couldn’t help but notice that people (myself included) didn’t like to hear advice. This is how, as a young man, I learned to keep my “wisdom” to myself.

Now that I’m a little more seasoned (if cranking a 30-years-old hard rock hit from a minivan is seasoned…Nailed it!), I may offer a different perspective to people in a conversation with friends, but that’s about it.

But how is the ManCrafting blog different from this? Well, I’m not offering this to anyone who didn’t ask for it, and I’m trying not to say what someone ‘should’ do (I just cringe at any sentence that starts with “You should…”). But in my long search for The Answer (nothing yet, but if I find It, I’ll be sure to post It here), I’ve come across some good ideas. I’ve found others with a fondness for good ideas, and I want to weigh and measure our good ideas against one another, so I don’t leave these ideas unchallenged. Let’s have an idea crash-test together!

And when some micromanager starts in on us, I think it’s time we stopped suffering these fools lightly; a polite reminder of their rudeness may be in order.

Limit of Willpower

So, after saying that I wanted to “Go boot camp on this shit,” my goals may seem a little weak. I’m going to journal four times a week, and exercise every other day. No weight loss goal. No rep-increase goal, just having the routine.

There are several reasons for this. Firstly, it’s the consistency that’s the goal. I started exercising in the New Year, and sometimes, I could keep it to every other day, more often, once or twice a week. On occasion, there were 10-day gaps. This is the problem I’m trying to solve.

Also, I am 41. Trying to push myself too hard is likely to lead to injury. Not only is it more important to keep functioning for my job, but also to be able to play with (and pick up) my kids.

It’s also smarter to implement goals gradually. While some people can change their habits on a dime, most people don’t. One of the causes of this is what some researchers have found about the limits of willpower. Roy Baumeister did a study where participants were asked to eat radishes, and not the fresh-baked cookies (Roy, you sick FUCK!). These poor souls gave up on the following puzzle long before the ones who were told “Radishes? Pfft! Have a cookie!”

In fact, Dr Baumeister has done a lot of study, and found that not only can willpower be depleted, but it can be strengthened with effort and practice. I have yet to read his book “Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength,” but it sounds promising!

As for me, there was a time a few years ago when I found that my patience with my kid was less than ideal. Upon reflection, I found that I had been spending a lot of my patience at work, mostly on a particularly odious shit-wit. I decided that my family was WAY more important than this turd, so I started letting him know when he was pissing on my nerves (I totally mis-typed this, but on re-read, I like how it sounds, so it’s staying as “pissing on my nerves!”) I later found that this was consistent with Mark Murovan’s (University of Albany) finding that the self-motivated & self-regulated got less drained than people-pleasers. I didn’t make him look like an idiot, but I sure made it clear when he was making himself look like an idiot. It was a public service that was more popular before the age of participation trophies. (Anyone remember when “he didn’t suffer fools lightly” was a complement?) But I digress…

Asides from these factors, I expect to spend a fair amount of time maintaining the blog and FB page. Not to mention my family, and a full-time job. So, if my exercise and journaling goals seem a little weak, it’s all part of a bigger picture.