Create a self-critical moral dilemma and ruminate about it

A bigger part, though, is our fundamental misunderstanding of the relationship between our environment and temptation. Temptation is the mocking sidekick who shows up in any enjoyable environment, urging us to relax, try a little of this or that, stay a little longer. Temptation can corrupt our values, health, relationships, and careers. Because of our delusional belief that we control our environment, we choose to flirt with temptation rather than walk away. We are constantly testing ourselves against it. Self-efficacy. Self-soothing. 8 Take note of the second item on our list of the components of adversarial intelligence: flexibility. As it turned out, very happily, this was already one of Darwin's greatest character traits. Flexibility would become one of Darwin's greatest allies in the coming struggle. Luckily, Darwin had learned flexibility of thought from two of his earliest selfobjects: his brother, Erasmus, and his famous grandfather, also named Erasmus. Darwin's family was full of free-thinking Unitarians who were not limited by prevailing paradigms, and who were already skilled at thinking outside the box. Darwin, unlike Fitzroy, was not to be bound by previous thinking--even the thinking of powerful men and institutions. Interestingly, Charles Darwin recognized this quality in himself and he valued it highly. We support and are supported by others in community. Once we relinquish our substances, we'll have to face ourselves before we can discover what's possible in our relationships. The hope is that, as we explore our own destructive patterns and cope with our demons in a way that opens the path for growth, we can turn to our partner and discover a friend. It's certainly a significant source of rough-patch distress, and one of our most glaring theaters for marital dysfunction. According to Karly Mitchell, a financial planner in Fairfield County, Connecticut, There's a high percentage of people who don't deal with money, other than on a day-to-day basis.

They don't do planning, they don't understand it, they don't know how to deal with it, it's not talked about. Couples don't set goals. So often someone will come in and say,I was trusting my spouse to deal with this. ' But they don't sit down and give each other a goal or a pathway: Where do we want to be in ten years, in twenty years? They don't check in--ever. We must gather the past into the present and be drawn into what lies ahead. Therein lies the vitality of life, for the future is that which we do not possess. That makes it frightening, though invigorating too - invigorating of the friendships that move into the morrow as well. Moreover, seeing your friendships as future-orientated, as opposed to comfortingly shaped by the past, reflects an aspect that feeds friendship itself. Nietzsche was a philosopher who was convinced that on the whole we don't know ourselves, or our friends, very well - though it's part of the gift of friendship that with friends we can come to know ourselves, and them, better. There's a parallel here, then, for the future is unknown too. It is not yet disclosed to us, as we are not wholly disclosed to ourselves, and as our friends have not yet fully revealed themselves to us too. Friendships with a future, then, are probably formed by individuals who have a mix of the ladder-type and circle-type within them. They like to have friends around them, for it is good to have wide circles of friends. They figure that with most people it is better to be friendly even should you feel otherwise because, first, at a day-to-day level, it makes for a happier life; And dealing with the shock and distress when we fail. Sometimes the temptation is as trivial as having a second slice of cheesecake. Other times it's a major-league challenge, like agreeing too quickly to an irresistible deal even when we know we can't deliver on schedule. I see this thinking all the time among my successful clients. They love a challenge.

They award themselves merit points for triumphing over temptation. Avoidance to them is not an achievement. It's the negative option created by passivity. It happens by default. This impulse to always engage rather than selectively avoid is one reason I'm called in to coach executives on their behavior. He wrote in his journal: No previously formed conjecture warped my judgment [of what I observed directly with my own eyes]. As we continue to examine the story of Darwin and Fitzroy, we will find that flexibility and creativity go hand in hand. And what about you: What is your own capacity for flexibility of thought? Are you locked into a default response to the problems that come your way? Are you boxed into one strategy for facing adversity, or for dealing with whatever particular challenge presents itself? Are you clinging to your views and beliefs about what the challenge means, and what is even possible? All of these things will inhibit your capacity to master your challenge. For one thing, this kind of rigidity of thinking attenuates what we now call fluid intelligence, the ability to visualize and conceive of alternative explanations and views of the world-- in other words, to think outside the box, as Darwin had to do. Can you adapt to the possibility of new views of the world, and even to revolutionary new strategies for understanding its challenges? Can you be open to an altogether new way of looking at the challenges in front of you? In marriage, money easily becomes a hidden currency for pressing emotional and spiritual questions: Am I worthy? Will I be cared for? Can I care for myself ? Do I have enough? This gives rise to two types of confusion.

First, people mistake their emotional needs for financial needs, freighting their spousal money conflicts with projections of childhood wounds and past grievances. Our attitudes toward money reflect deeply embedded messages that we pieced together from observing our families in childhood. One Bay Area money coach I spoke with spends a large part of her time with clients delving into these messages. Using Jungian-style archetypes (the Warrior, the Victim, the Fool), she tries to help people recognize and then rectify their troubling scripts. The second confusion is that, when money differences arise, couples mistake them for thoroughgoing marital incompatibility. and, second, because to expose every friendship to the full force and struggle of personal change and revelation would be asking too much. That's only possible with the closest friends, and anyway, friendships thrive on fun too. He's a bit intense', we say of the mate who should lighten up. But getting the mix right - finding a sustainable balance between the pleasures of the past and the exhilaration of the future - is tricky. It highlights another set of ambiguities. They are those of closeness and distance (what is appropriate and how do you redress the balance when someoneinvades your space'); honesty and dissimulation (how truthful can you be with a particular friend or is it often better to obfuscate, or even tell a small fib); loyalty and the need, sometimes, to make a break. In fact, when you start to look, it quickly becomes apparent that in a million little ways, as well as some large ones, friendship is often a matter of nothing less than faking it. Or, to use Shakespeare's phrase,most friendship is feigning'. 2 It's one of the most common behavioral issues among leaders: succumbing to the temptation to exercise power when they would be better off showing restraint. I had an unusual case with a longtime client named Stan. After years starting and selling companies and running a Fortune 50 corporation, Stan retired at age seventy to serve on a few boards, consult a little, and fulfill his dream of giving away half his fortune via a foundation to support medical research. He installed his wife as the foundation's head and his two grown daughters as her lieutenants. Stan called me, inviting me to sit in on a family meeting at his home in Connecticut.

Minutes into the meeting, I could see the problem. Stan's family was ignoring him. He would bark out commands to his wife, a formidably accomplished woman, and she would respond, I am your wife and the head of the foundation. Don't confuse me with one of your employees. Stan had this exchange more than once and still didn't take the hint. Happily, Darwin could. 9 Upon his return to England, Darwin soon cloistered himself in his study at his new country home at Down. Here he carefully reread his journals and examined many of the specimens he'd brought or sent home. He began to make notes in a series of special notearticles that he would keep secret for almost twenty years. He was working out the problem in the same manner in which the continents had been raised: slowly, methodically, step-by-step, drip by drip. Darwin continued to meet with Fitzroy through these years--especially the early ones--at Down House, where he would invite Fitzroy and his wife to stay. (Both men had been married shortly after their return to England. ) But now, interestingly, Darwin kept his most radical thoughts under his hat. He discussed only the most mainstream aspects of his thinking with Fitzroy, sounding him out to see just how far Fitzroy--the devout Christian and creationist--would go with him. Money stress has a striking power to feed an atmosphere of marital gloom. It so seeps into our consciousness that we have a hard time identifying accurately the distinct marital concerns it contaminates. Money worry makes all our other worries feel worse, which is why it's no surprise that couples that have high levels of debt also tend to experience greater conflict about other marital issues such as sex and in-laws. Having money doesn't seem to help nearly as much with these problems as one would expect. In the leafy precincts where Karly Mitchell plies her trade, affluent professionals and high-net-worth individuals struggle with financial discord and duplicity just like everybody else.