Yin and Yang--the Great Balancing Act

In article 1 you'll learn to watch how anxiety sparks in your mind, and how this is a signpost pointing to your most important personal beliefs and expectations. The map will start out fuzzy and become clearer as we go. In article 2 you'll learn how to distinguish between different internal voices that influence your approach to disagreement. We'll use the example of a polarizing issue like the topic of vaccinations to show how it's possible to move from a black-and-white interpretation to one that has a little bit more room for exceptions and gray areas, opening a door for productive one-on-one conversation. In article 3 you'll see how cognitive biases complicate our disagreements and lead to situations where there's no practical way to be completely fair about a decision--for example, a hiring decision--and learn what we can do to reduce the damage of biases in these situations. In article 4 you'll learn how to spot speculation, stereotypes, and oversimplifications masquerading as smart opinions. I share an example from my life of a political conversation with close friends to show how speaking for ourselves, rather than trying to speculate what others think, can make a difference between breaking and building those relationships. In article 5 you'll learn about the power of asking questions that lead to surprising answers. We'll talk about belief in ghosts and the supernatural to show how questions can guide a conversation to new and insightful places that are otherwise missed. It became an unthinkable point in my life. Suddenly, my life had purpose again. My mom's death had purpose again. That singular moment changed how I felt about her death. It changed how I thought about death as a whole. In the beginning of my grief, I completely I ignored it. I never used past tense when I spoke of my mom. I remember having a panic attack when my dad asked me to come to their house and clean out my mom's closet. I was livid. She hadn't even been dead a week and he wanted me to throw all of our memories away. Okay, now what is a mental model?

A mental model is a model that is created and tried in our conscious mind. Conscious in this sense implies awareness about our surroundings and our relation to the world. Let's see a practical example. Imagine yourself on the beach, gazing at the ocean. Your eyes capture light and focus it onto your retinas, which in exchange react by sending neural stimuli to the brain. As your brain receives the stimuli it creates the picture of the ocean in your mind. By this point, we've only addressed the visual information receptors. But this information doesn't tell you what an ocean is. What makes you understand what the ocean is in your mind? The mistake made by most parents is that they don't treat children as equal in potential; The children should be thankful for the pouring of knowledge into their heads. By so doing, they make us dependent on them. We become accustomed to waiting for the solutions to problems, for the instructions they would give us. Many parents will say to their children: The one time I let you make a decision on your own and you blew it! So I am telling you again, just listen to me and you cannot go wrong. But then, what happens when the time comes to live on our own? Nothing short of a disaster! We will not be prepared for making our own decisions. Instead of teaching us how to walk through life with a straight spine and open eyes, we will have been taught to seek outside help. My `I'm-so-misunderstood' expression almost always got me out of trouble at school and with strangers.

I would slightly tilt my neck to one side, squeeze my nose and forehead upwards, and raise my left eyebrow a little higher. It was like a well-rehearsed magic trick that always had the desired effect. I put on the sham: `Sorry, Uncle, you misunderstood me. I don't smoke. I saw you puffing non-stop and that's why I was hoping you didn't have any more cigarettes. Placing my right thumb on my chin with the right index finger covering my upper lip to resemble a moustache, I added, assertively, `Uncle, cigarette smoking causes cancer. Please don't smoke so much. I'd hit the bullseye. What followed was a long-drawn-out monologue that began with the bad monsoon responsible for the crop failure in his village, Boidara. The focus is on how educators can help ameliorate the effects of trauma by reducing symptoms for all students so that schools are safer and everyone feels less stressed. Now to address the question about differing vulnerabilities: As described at the beginning of this article, trauma is not the event. While children (and most adults, too) will have an acute stress reaction to a shocking event, those with a resilient nervous system and social support may, like the polar bear in the video, shake off the shock and go on to the normal grieving process if they also sustained losses. Those who rebound, remaining (largely) free of PTS symptoms, are the individuals with strong resiliency factors. The strongest ingredient of resiliency is a secure attachment and bond with a child's primary caregiver during the first three years of life. This is because a solid secure attachment helps build a resilient autonomic nervous system. Specifically, the ventral vagal branch of the parasympathetic nervous system begins to develop immediately after birth as loving eye contact, feeding, holding, nurturing touch, and playful connections emerge between newborn and mother (or primary caregiver). This branch continues to mature through a process called myelination, which hastens regulation for a solid eighteen months. An interruption to the bonding process is, by the nature of a baby's dependency, a threat to survival--a shock that, without intervention and repair, delays parasympathetic resiliency, leading to complex developmental trauma. When the attachment is consistently safe and the bonding between the pair is pleasurable and secure, a sense of trust that adults can be depended on to protect them from harm, provide for their needs, and give support for their growth is then firmly established. This can lead to a long road of depression, anxiety, and insecurity, which usually will lead to a lifetime habit of telling yourself those negative things.

Mindfulness is also the key to living in the present moment, which is you forcing yourself to focus on that moment in time. It takes some practice, but just like any form of exercise, over time, it will become easier and will not feel like work at all, it will feel natural for you. When you get together with people you care about and share a few laughs, memories and even goals, this can refresh you and get your mind back on the right track. It is always a good idea to have your support system in place so that you can turn to them in times of need, and make sure that you are always available to help them whenever you can. Do not fall into the habit of thinking that you can handle everything by yourself, this is not healthy and it also promotes isolation, so gets help when you need to. Make sure there is someone that you feel that you can trust and who you feel comfortable with, this will make it easier for you to actually go to them for assistance when you need it. Being mindful is bringing your awareness and attention to the present moment and accepting how you may be feeling at that moment. This can assist us in decreasing stress. It is also a key to being a better leader, if you can change your mindset, your behavior and your employees and partners will follow. However, there are also lessons we are taught that are inaccurate, and if we carry them into our adult life, they will negatively impact the way we interact with the world and the people around us, which will hinder our success. It is no secret that children take problems in their families onto themselves. For example, a child has parents who argue much more often than a couple should. The child often hears this discord and notices that their name comes up regularly in their parents' arguments. This causes them to think, I'm the reason Mom and Dad do not get along. That means I am a bad child. This pattern of thinking results in their self-esteem plummeting. Because they do not place a high value on themselves, they are willing to accept bad treatment from other people and do not expect much out of them. They have learned to think this way over a long time of conditioning. Now let's move on to the bright side. In article 6 you'll learn why we need people who disagree with us on our team.

I'll share the story of a series of attempts to discuss gun violence and gun control proposals to show how our disagreements become more productive when we build our arguments together. In article 7 you'll learn how the physical space and medium that we have disagreements in impacts the outcome of those disagreements. I'll use this lens to dissect a heated disagreement about immigration enforcement, and you'll learn why it's important to cultivate a neutral space where people are expected and even encouraged to disagree with one another. And in article 8 we'll explore the topic of dangerous ideas. You'll learn why it's important to allow for disagreements about topics that some believe are too dangerous to even talk about. At the back of the article I've added a bunch of articles I recommend for further reading, organized by the article they contributed most to. Like Prometheus's gift of fire, the gift of disagreement is not intrinsically good and must be considered alongside our own value system. The gift of disagreement has never been taught within the context of the kinds of conversations we're having today, so we must also take responsibility for the unintentional damage we cause by participating in and magnifying unproductive disagreements. We can't avoid disagreements any more than we can avoid weeds, and the more we try to eradicate conflict from the world, the more conflict we push into the shadows, where it only grows stronger and returns next season. Like they meant nothing to us, to him! I couldn't understand why he wanted her things gone so soon. If I had it my way (and, of course, I did) I'd keep everything the same. I wanted everything to still feel and smell like my mom. I wanted to be able to open her bathroom door and smell Elizabeth Arden's Red Door perfume. I wanted the smell to be so disrespectful it smacked you on the top of the nose when you entered her room. It really didn't matter if she was no longer physically there with me, with us. Yes, in my mind, I knew she was gone. But I figured that if everything in my parents' house still left traces of my mom, then it would maybe feel like death never happened. Like she never left us for her rightful place in the Upper Room. At this point you start utilizing mental models.