8 Training Rules for Flourishing

This morning I reworked a presentation I’d given to the North Bay Chapter of Bay Area Coaches (International Coach Federation) a few months ago. While I wasn’t entirely satisfied that I’d linked two topics together—Appreciative Coaching and new Neuroscience findings, I found a clearer path for my next audience of coaches, therapists and human resource professionals at the University of British Columbia June 23-25, titled An Eye on Coaching. What I want to do is to condense the scholarly literature into a few easy rules that any coach (including me) and any client can remember.

Here are my 8 Rules for Flourishing:

1. Activate mind AND body (linked in flourishing). Do age appropriate exercise, laugh, study jewelry making or bridge building. What lights your fire?
2. Focus on what you want—See it in your mind’s eye. Make a neural path for it. Act toward it.
3. Focused activity almost always leads to positive feelings. This is the principle of FLOW (see Csiksentmihalyi discuss this himself on TED). Positive feelings allow a “broaden and build” approach to achievement.
4. Attention=enjoyment (you can learn this)… Buddhist monks have highly developed attention (that part of their brain is more active than others’).
5. Expectation of pleasure can work in direct opposition to things that upset you. Giving in to negative feelings doesn’t appease them, but reinforces them. Pouting, carrying a grudge, even talking about how angry you are, makes the anger bigger, not smaller. Better to go for a walk.
6. Value the unexpected—in seeing new perspectives we increase our vitality. Seek out difference.
7. Control your decisions, rather than your wishes. To have your wishes fulfilled, particularly when that fulfillment is at the price of your freedom is life numbing. Do you really want to make $250,000 working for a despot?
8. Love someone or some being. Love them joyfully! Love a dog or a goldfish. Love your niece or your grandson. Love your spouse, your poslq (person of the opposite sex living in the same quarters), your neighbor as yourself, your garage mechanic.  THIS IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN ANY OF THE OTHERS!

I’ll spend more time on each of these in weeks to come.