What is the very first, and smallest, action step?

The first order of business is to stimulate them. The three supreme strategies are ensuring a division of labor, emphasizing identity, and playing fair. Once you stimulate your instincts, you can begin to co-op (cooperate) by applying your instincts strategically and creatively. As you familiarize yourself with your cooperative instincts, reflect on your current use of them with friends and neighbors, family and colleagues. Stimulate the Division of Labor Long before the great economist discovered the economic efficiency of the division of labor, Mother Nature invented it with the evolution of your body. She created a group of specialists that work together for the benefit of the common good. From cells to organs, each has a job to do, and each benefits from the job performance of others. Nothing tries to do everything at once--it would be inefficient. Such a compensatory model is supported by findings that suggest that a high degree of involvement in one's work is associated with feeling that one's leisure is unsatisfactory (Gee & Baillie, 1999). Support for the compensatory model of work and leisure has been established by others as well (Melamed & Meir, 1981 Miller & Weiss, 1982). Other research suggests that spillover between work and leisure occurs as well, such that the experience of work is reflected in the experience of leisure and vice versa (Rothbard, 1999 Rousseau, 1978). However, no research in this area addresses extremes in experiences of work and leisure. Thus, research is needed to determine if those with callings tend to have passions outside of work as well (i. e. , spillover) or instead if those with passions are compensating for a work experience that reflects a job or career orientation (Wrzesniewski et al, 1997). Support for the hypothesis that callings are passions to those who have them comes from recent research on the effect of work orientations on employment transitions (Wrzesniewski, 1999). When talking about their experience of the jobs they had recently found, people with calling orientations talked about their work in ways that were strikingly different from how those with job orientations talked about work. Although both groups generally found their work likable, the ways they talked about the work in their jobs were rather different. We could not have been further from the truth. It turns out that fat is a necessary part of our metabolic processes.

We need fat in order to properly use many of the vitamins and nutrients we consume. When did we make this discovery? Probably about thirty years too late for some people. Now we have a whole generation of young people, who because of their carbohydrate-rich food choices, are becoming a nation of obese adults. Never before has a nation experienced the kind of obesity problems this nation faces today. Never have we had so much, to have so little. These young people experience low self-esteem, weight-related health problems and a range of emotional problems, thanks to the issue of obesity. How can we try to help them fix this problem? Your legs might not like walking a mile after dinner while the stomach merely digests the delicious meal, but the end result is that they both perform their task for the good of the whole. In groups, too, we each have our specialties to contribute. Men hunted collectively, but each man brought a specialty to the party. While one selected saplings for spears, another perfected the technique for sharpening them in the fire. Another became adept at throwing them, and another studied kills to discover where the killshots should pierce the game. The same would be true for women- some became adept at gardening, others at harvesting wild plants. Together they could put a meal together. Furthermore, specialization was passed down via apprenticeships. When a young boy was ready to join the hunt and needed to learn how to throw a spear, he no doubt was attracted to the best spear thrower to teach him. If a young woman wanted to become a healer, she would apprentice to the clan's medicine woman. For example, one respondent from the calling orientation group of our study explicitly rejected calling her job work, instead saying, It's not (work). Work, as work goes, I could do without it.

I have enough to do here at home to keep me happy for the rest of my life. I get my satisfaction from the people I'm with, my patients and their families. Work itself, forget it. (Do you consider that work, when you're with the patients and families? ) No, not when I'm there, no. Another respondent from the calling group talked about her sense of calling and its close relationship with helping others: (What do you like most about your job? ) I'm fulfilling a personal call. It is ultimately, enduringly fulfilling. According to usDA guidelines, calorie requirements vary from age group to age group, from gender to gender. So how do you determine what your individual needs are? You can set up a log to record your daily calorie intake for about a month. Take note of your weight every day. If you don't gain weight during this month, you eat your recommended calorie level in order to maintain your weight. Now take this caloric information, use the food pyramid and include a combination of foods that will help you achieve this recommended daily intake, and still be enough to be filled and please the palette. You now have an individualized healthy eating regimen. This is the safe and safe way to achieve weight loss goals. It did not become an overnight problem, and it will not disappear overnight. Fitness is to be able to cope and manage the daily stress of life, good physical and mental health, especially when maintained by proper diet, exercise and habits. Division of labor not only allowed the tribe to innovate faster, but it also created dependency on each other. The hunting party was successful only if the tip of the spear was sharp--they were all dependent on the wood selecting specialist.

Recall that being perceived by your mate as dependable makes you more attractive, and others depend on each specialist, another example of how tightly woven your instincts for success are. You can enhance cooperative effort between people by increasing their awareness that they are dependent on each other. Social psychologists have discovered that when an individual feels others are depending on her to act in an expected manner (cooperatively), she is more likely to do the expected behavior. Consider the coach who's giving a pep talk before the final playoff game. Everybody is part of the team and everybody has to do their job for the team to win. True, yes, but not as powerful as the winning coach who emphasizes the dependency between the players and reminds them of their personal responsibility to each other to support each other during the game. Building teamwork by emphasizing that each player is dependent on each other for success, not dependent on the more abstract team, is a smart play. A project manager is wise to clarify in a team meeting the expectations and responsibilities for each participant, but wiser still is opening up the discussion so the team members interact with each other to personally reiterate and describe the roles and responsibilities they are to exchange with each other. It's like I just said, I like people and I like to see people get helped. And we've seen a lot of people helped. THE DOMAIN OF FOOD - FOOD AS FUN OR FRIGHTENING Callings and passions are human inventions. They are afforded by lives in which work options are highly varied, leisure time is plentiful, and the options for engagement during leisure are legion. In contrast, pleasure at eating is something we inherit from our mammalian and primate progenitors. It is one aspect of the general adaptive tendency, in evolution, to link pleasure with the satisfaction of basic biological needs. We did not invent the pleasure-eating link, and, on the contrary, are at risk for spoiling it. Thus, in terms of quality of life, our aim is to preserve something old rather than to create something new. For most of human history, for almost all people in developing nations today, and for many people in developed nations, food remains something anticipated and enjoyed. For our ancestors and less fortunate contemporaries, the negative side of food and eating comes from the risk of not having enough food to eat. Nutrition refers to the maintenance of our body, in our ability to keep it healthy and functioning as it is supposed to do. Our ability to provide the body with all the necessary foods, vitamins and minerals so that we continue to thrive in our daily life processes is part of overall fitness.

Physical, mental and spiritual condition is good. The body's physical condition occurs when all the body, physical and mental processes function as peak levels. What does it take to achieve the full body fitness? It takes more than just taking a trip to the gym, or a walk in the park. Many factors come into play when we consider the physical condition of our body. The daily intake of food, vitamins and water are absolute necessities, and most often thought out items. What about conditioning our bodies to cope with life every day? Does our physical exercise have anything to do with our body's physical condition? I'd be willing to bet that when a division of labor is absent or out of balance in your household, stress is paramount. It's a safe bet since it is true for your body. A family meeting in which everyone hears each other's household responsibilities is much more effective than individually nagging each other to get the chores done. Learn to leverage dependency in your communications. How many times have I told you to bring down your laundry? or You never help--bring down your laundry. I can't do everything. These phrases don't get the results: Mother and daughter work together to get the laundry done. The mother who knows how to co-op by creating a division of labor with her 16-year-old daughter says, I can only wash your clothes if you have your laundry downstairs before dinner. She is leveraging dependency by implying Doing your laundry is dependent on you getting it to me. But just as we have created a world in which our work can be infinitely interesting and broad-ranging and our leisure can bring us into new and exciting worlds and challenges, we have also created a developed world in which food is plentiful, accessible (indeed, hard to avoid), varied, highly palatable, and relatively cheap. Built to find, consume, and conserve food, we (in the developed world) are now immersed in a world full of food.