Tag: motivation

Performance psychology

“Getting Back to the Truth: Nothing is Free”

Dr. John Panepinto

Trends offer valuable information especially if you dig deeper into the patterns. One trend that’s been mirroring the rise in access to technology is the belief that you can gain what you need for next to nothing. Search engines and AI offer lots of data for the price of a few keystrokes. And you have more computing power on your smartphone than the Apollo space flights.

But there’s something else going on here. With information expanding at an exponential rate, some have offered that information should be “free.” What does that mean? And what are we missing?

Information may be cheap, but relationships are not free. Regardless of the type of relationship there is a currency. And life is a process of relationships. There always is a give and take that speaks to the quality of the current flowing between.

Alive?

Information is not a relationship. Sorry, Siri. Artificial intelligence may be an exciting informational advancement. But it’s not a relationship. Relationships are living, open, dynamic systems. You can’t plug them into a socket. Even virtual reality requires coming back, at some point, to “real” reality.

Even “cheap” has a price and typically it’s someone else’s back. My immigrant grandmother worked in a sweat shop and received a pittance for pay. I witnessed the damage to her back firsthand. This occurs daily all over the world…

As information expands, the number and quality of relationships changes as well. You may have 500 followers or “friends,” but how much do they influence your life? How many of the hundreds you only know by “likes” truly know what you’re like?

Information may be cheap or free, but it won’t do the work for you. Every role requires effort. You may find a “how-to video” but unless it has something to do with a “thing” like changing a tire, the advice is typically worth the price you paid.

You always have to earn trust and competence. Deep and trusting relationships are developed over time with intense commitment. Your road to a championship, a title, or a spot on the Olympic team will require your time, sweat, tears, and willingness to fail, learn, and change.

Even the opportunity isn’t free because for every champion there are multitudes who don’t get the chance or have the resources to even try. In the words of Thomas Gray, “Full many a flower is born to blush unseen and waste its sweetness on the desert air.”

Many…

If you are looking for free and easy, think twice. Who you become in the process of “paying the price” for excellence and deep, meaningful relationships is… priceless.

photo credit: Simon Lohman, unsplash.com

Performance psychology

Why Can’t We Let Go?

Dr. John Panepinto

Following a brief detour about “odds,” we take another important question for this era that may seem or look different:

“Why can’t we let go?”

We often hear “let it go” in many contexts. We are quick to give this advice to others, yet we may say to ourselves, “I know I should let it go but…”

Why is it so hard?

Our lifespan has changed in the blink of the universe’s eye, yet we have extremely new and unexperienced aspects of mind that help us time travel. This is a unique human capability and one that only fully develops in the middle of our third decade on the planet. Until that point, our typical state of mind orients toward the present time and short-term products. And only slowly do we develop the ability to time travel beyond our New Year’s resolutions.

The image of “letting go” matters as we understand and find meaning globally in images and forms. It’s a wordless and intuitive space that continually fills us in on ourselves, our relations, and what is happening in the world around us (this connects with the question of self-guidance). Context matters but we often don’t make it wide and deep enough. So, we struggle with understanding how letting go does NOT diminish us—as long as we are following our goals and aiming toward our future self.

Letting go is a form of saying “no” to one path while saying “yes” to another. A reason we struggle to let go is we are open systems existing in systems that are complex and have a great deal of uncertainty. Donella Meadows, in her book, Thinking in Systems, offers:

“Systems surprise us because our minds like to think about single causes neatly producing single effects. We like to think about one or at most a few things at a time…. But we live in a world in which many causes routinely come together to produce many effects.”

The “mind” that Meadows refers to can be highly influenced by the ego, a mental structure that filters and manages experience. It’s the structure that chirps loudly when things don’t go your way. But a main feature of the ego is that it works from what it already knows–a fixed identity. It is not very open to change, editing, or accommodating new information. And it’s certainly going to resist transformation.

The ego works from “I believe” and “I expect” and is a worthy helper—but not a good leader at all. Not letting go and wanting more of the same are two of its main energizers. Yet growth requires beliefs and expectations to align with higher goals, values, and principles. Which means a lot of letting go in order to grow, in order to make space for complexity and growing capacities.

It all starts with understanding. Understanding deepens and widens what you know and what you can come to know. In this, the ego becomes a servant of the mind. And self-mastery, which requires healthy portions of letting go, becomes a central goal regardless of the endeavor.

photo credit: Brett Jordan (unsplash.com)

Psychology

What Are the Odds?

Dr. John Panepinto

Having a large sample size with three decades of experience, I have always been fascinated with how people perceive “odds.” People in certain positions will throw the statistics and odds around as if they are facts. They never are and they only exist in probabilities. Here’s a fun example from a recent NFL game:

If you’re the Philadelphia Eagles and living in probabilities, you feel great, and the odds of a win are with you for about 98% of the game.

Then you lose.

Odds and probabilities have their place. But you can’t measure potential. It can be intuited, but it remains in abstract form. Something you sense, something you feel. Yet potential is just as real to the individual as any other thought or feeling. The subjective experience connects with the future in some way not presently describable in high resolution. But this is so with all intuitive experiences. You just know.

The other narrative ignored by taking odds as facts happens when you follow intuition—when you act on potential. The legendary martial artist, Bruce Lee, offered an idea about this: “A goal is not always meant to be reached, it often serves simply as something to aim at.”

When we place odds inappropriately on the individual, we place a unique life into a general context. We place unmeasurable potential against measured actualities that are not of the same quality. Here’s a snippet from the NCAA on baseball trajectories sourced from high school and college surveys:

While data explaining “surprising confidence” isn’t offered, the part of the story that will never be measured is how much the other 92.7% learned about themselves, relationships, and life by having a goal of “going pro.” Having “something to aim at,” as Bruce Lee says. And how applicable the qualities nurtured were in their development. Aiming high may not be reached, but it provides meaning and direction in the process of uncovering an evolving sense of identity and purpose.   

In the final analysis, you make it, or you don’t. But “making” it is not as important as who you are becoming along the way. If you are true and live by true principles of development, you are always “making it.”

Sources: ESPN.com; NCAA.org; 2018-19 High School Participation Survey

Mental Health, Psychology

New Year’s Resolutions

Dr. John Panepinto

What would you want to stop, start, or improve in the year to come? As the new year rings in, these thoughts fill the air everywhere. From a recent poll, here’s what Forbes Health reports as the most common resolutions for 2024:

What about you?

I will leave out the data on reaching these New Year’s resolutions, because, well…it’s historically not good.

Why?

In my experience, two factors impact reaching these goals—or not. And they turn out to be processes that are not common although we talk about the concepts often in Above the Fields of Play.

The first process is reflection built into the structure of your day. The second process is being resolute to your structure, to execute centered on your priorities.

Both processes are the heart of living on purpose, and further developing the intrinsic qualities that bring newness and meaning to each day. So, you don’t have to wait a year or a month. You can start today with these two processes. Build your daily structure based on your top priorities. These reflect how you value time and what matters most. Then reflect back each day on effort and improvement.  

I wish you the best in 2024 and hope each day on your journey is the adventure you imagine.

Happy New Year!

Source: Sarah Davis, editor, Forbes.com; 12/18/2023

Mental Health, Psychology

Why Seek Help?

Dr. John Panepinto

A theme of Above the Fields of Play is to examine larger scales and deeper roots of what development and well-being mean over time. For the next few posts, I will focus on important questions unique to our era regarding mental health. This is not to dismiss the “good old days.” Times have changed, and many questions are framed differently right now.

The first question is: Why seek help?

The decades-long rise in anxiety, depression, hopelessness, and suicide has begged us to ask what underlies these symptoms. Ups and downs are a part of life, and sometimes things fall apart before major changes. Looking beyond medical concerns and imbalances in neurotransmitters, if most adults have experienced anxiety and depression in their lifetimes, can we consider this to be a developmental pattern? Is this a function of change, transition, and adjustment?

It depends.

People are in different stages of growth, and within each individual, development is asynchronous. The performer, athlete, or student has experienced the physical domain being ahead of the mental. We can do it before we believe we can do it.

The same applies to the reasons for seeking help which fall along a continuum. Some individuals don’t believe in counseling. Within the core belief system is a deep sense of privacy and a belief that you need to work it out, pick yourself up, and dust yourself off. They might seek help when they reach wit’s end.

Maybe.

Others along the expanse will seek help in some form at some time, and this tipping point differs for everyone. As several public figures have modeled, seeking help is not a sign of weakness. It’s a sign of hope and the belief that working through pain leads to resolution and growth. Challenges have the potential to make us more resilient and capable–and they are inevitable if you are fully engaging life.

Each day we are learning the ever-changing answers to three important questions of self-guidance. When the answers falter or our solutions do not help with the confusion and ache, we may seek help to uncover what we can’t discover ourselves. (I will address these three questions in the next post.)

Finally, a key principle to seeking help is the gift of uniqueness. We are given one life, and it is ours to care for and develop—we make the ultimate choices. And research on the gold standard of mental health treatment, Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT), offers ideas about “helping” that should give us pause.

  • Cognitive change does not occur without affective motivation. Meaning, the individual wants something in their life to change. You can’t force this outside-in, and logic alone is not helpful.
  • Effectiveness declines the more rigid the practitioner is with the protocol. Meaning, we don’t fit into templates, and we want to be heard and understood first and foremost. Psychologist, Alan Schore suggests we should reframe “Talk Therapy” to “Communication Therapy” as much of resonance and repair occurs nonverbally within the attunement of the relationship.
  • Change occurs within the flow of the relationship. Meaning, who you are taking the difficult journey with matters. Conditions matter. Process matters… and both in the relationship have to care deeply.

People seek help for well-being in different ways—and in far different ways over the last few decades. Some may seek professional help, while others choose self-help or rely on their support system. One size does not fit all. If you are not sure what’s right for you, talk with someone you trust or consult with a professional. Answers start to appear when you ask the right questions.

Speaking of…next time: those three self-guidance questions.

photo credit: Evan Dennis (unsplash.com)