How to spot an opportunity

By Unstuck | April 8, 2015
Stuck moment: My life, in a word? Uneventful. Sure, I’ve got plenty of things to do. And I do them. Every. Day. The same. Way. Why don’t interesting things happen in my life?
*   *   *
Way back in 1969, Peggy Lee sang the Grammy-winning song, “Is That All There Is?” It’s the story of a person who experiences life’s milestones and ends up disappointed each time. Isn’t there more to it? Is that all there is?
We’ve all felt it at times. Maybe we rushed to adulthood with open arms, surprised to find it riddled with responsibility and taxes. Or our marital bliss became a grind of daily compromise. Perhaps that promising new job devolved into paperwork and PowerPoint.
We’re left wondering, Where’s my opportunity? When and where does my ship come in?
The answer is: Right there, right where it’s always been. But we need to see differently so we can recognize it.
DON’T WAIT FOR A KNOCK ON THE DOOR
If we could give Peggy one piece of advice, we would share Thomas Edison’s observation: “We often miss opportunity because it’s dressed in overalls and looks like work.”
Opportunity rarely presents itself as a straight line to happiness. It’s more like a nudge in our brain or a hello from a stranger. It might be something we failed at. A new problem. A disappointment. Or feeling so stuck that remaining the same simply isn’t a choice.
And it’s not just how we see the world. It’s how we think about ourselves that can blur possibilities. Worrying what other people care about definitely clouds our vision. So does sticking to only what we know. And if we’ve convinced ourselves that we’re not lucky enough for opportunity, well, then we’re probably not on the lookout for one.

But you can change that. Grab some overalls and let’s get to work.
ARE YOU READY FOR AN OPPORTUNITY?
First, reset what opportunity means. In plain terms, it’s a chance to make a difference for yourself and/or for someone else. That’s it in a nutshell. We can change something — usually for the better.
The form it comes in is specific to what matters to us as individuals. And whether we can see it or not depends on how we think and act. Here are three ways to check if you’re in opportunity mode or not.
1. Say something new comes along in your life. Do any of these immediate reactions sound like you?
• “I can’t deal with that right now.”
• “How do I get out of this?”
• “It can’t be good.”
• “Now what?”
Maybe you have too much on your plate, or you’re going through a rough patch, making change seem untenable. But if this is your typical response, your ability to see opportunity is diminished.
2. What’s your attitude toward accepting things as they are? Do you generally say to yourself:
• “Could be better, but could be worse. I can handle it.”
• “I don’t like to rock the boat.”
• “I can’t change it, so why bother?”
• “I wish someone would find a better way.”
These thoughts indicate that you’re probably not looking for opportunity. As wonderful as a change might be in your imagination, you aren’t letting go of what you know.
3. Do you think luck is only for the lucky? Yes? We agree. We believe that we make our own luck. Luck comes from being prepared. From identifying what you want, creating a plan, and working toward your goal. Luck comes from being flexible. From considering the impossible possible. Luck comes from putting yourself out there.
And when you’re out there — feeling, thinking, and acting lucky — you are seeing differently. You’re in a frame of mind that helps connect the dots of new possibilities.

LET’S CONNECT THOSE DOTS
So that nudge or hello or disappointment has come to be. You suspect there might be a there there, but you’re not sure. This is when we search for the relationship between seemingly unrelated things (which is usually where opportunities reside).
First, you need an open mind. We humans are quick to judge, so this takes practice.
• Drop your biases. It can be refreshing to release a concept you long ago locked in a box as wrong or beneath you.
• Lose self-consciousness. If you feel judged, you’ll think and act according to someone else’s rules.
• Be a learner, not an expert. There is no right or wrong in possibility, only wonder.
• Listen more than you talk. You’ll discover dots you didn’t know existed.
So you can engage your curiosity. Digging into a topic creates new ideas and improves perseverance. Here’s how to activate your curiosity.
• Ask more questions. “Why?” and “Why not?” are fruitful inquiries. Questioning what you take for granted is another rich stomping ground.
• Pay attention to something you’ve ignored. It never ceases to amaze us how interesting topics become once we know the backstory.
• Try something new. You’re a blank slate ready to absorb and question and learn.
Then you’ll start to find patterns. Sometimes the connections leap out, but other times it helps to look at the dots from various angles.
• Create clusters. What are the commonalities? The striking differences? Beyond physical properties, you could consider emotions, history, difficulty, reliability, cost, and any other aspect that describes the information.
• Move things around. This makes it easy to spot too much or too little of something. When you arrange the clusters in different combinations, notice if a new rule emerges, or something new altogether. Is there a unique quality that stands out from the rest?
Now you’re seeing things differently. It’s the perfect time to ask questions like: How can this be improved? What if it could be…? Do we really need all that…? If we could start over we’d…
It doesn’t have to be a radical change — a small shift sometimes makes all the difference. And an opportunity is born.
(SOURCE)

Learn Self-Control Through Science

Written by Taylor Kreiss, Psychologist

92% of Americans routinely fail their New Year's resolutions. It’s a large rate of failure, and much of it is due to a lack of effective self-control strategies.

“The most important scientific discovery about self-control is that it can be taught.” - Walter Mischel, psychologist

The rest of this article explains 5 science-backed strategies for self-control. They are listed in order of effectiveness, so aim to employ the earlier strategies over the latter. With some effort, they can help you turn your New Year's resolutions into new realities.
Regulation Strategies

1. Situation selection
2. Situation modification
3. Selective attention
4. Cognitive reappraisal
5. Response modulation

Situational Selection 
Your first and best strategy for self-regulation boils down to deliberately choosing where you end up. Alcoholics should avoid bars. Dieters should only eat at health food restaurants. Addicts should not spend time around Hunter S. Thompson types.
Think in terms of where you are, what it's like and who you’re there with. Choose situations that encourage good behaviors and avoid situations that tempt counterproductive behavior.
Situation Modification
You probably need to attend class, go to work or be in other situations that render the first strategy moot. Thankfully, you can usually change your situations. You can modify them to help you achieve your goals.
If you’re trying to quit smoking, throw out your cigarettes and tell your friends not to give you any. The more work it takes to get them, the less likely you are to smoke. Laziness is often the stronger vice.
If you want to stop contacting your ex, delete his/her phone number and unfriend them. If you have no access, you can’t communicate.
Ever hear of website blockers? They are apps that restrict your ability to visit preselected websites (like Facebook and Reddit). If you’re in class and you have trouble paying attention, apps like these can be tremendously helpful. They limit access to distractions.
All of these examples aid self-regulation by changing the situation you are already in. They set up the situation to reduce temptation and encourage good behavior. These strategies adjust the world around you, making it is easier to achieve and harder to fail.
Selective Attention
If you’re standing with business clients and they’re eating junk food, you can’t just walk away or ask everyone to trash their munchies. What you can do, is focus your attention in a way that will help you resist temptation.
Don’t face the buffet. Don’t stare at the food or focus on how good it smells. Choose instead to focus on something else. Pick someone to speak with and invest your attention in the conversation. Heck, people forget to eat for hours when they’re engaged in an activity that consumes their attention.
The idea is to guide your focus constructively. Don’t let your attention get stuck on a temptation and you’ll be less likely to give in.
Cognitive Reappraisal
Once you have chosen your situation, modified it and decided what to pay attention to, you can change how you think. This strategy is about altering your mental representation of the situation.
Is your goal to feel better about yourself in the new year? You could focus on external behaviors like exercise and nutrition, or you could change your appraisal of your self. You could shift from “I’m ugly” to “I love how I look.” It’s difficult, but it works if you do the work to track and change your thoughts.
If you can imagine that cookies taste awful, and really make them gross in your mind, they will have less pull on you. This one sounds funny, but it works. If you can consciously reappraise something, it can help you achieve goals and self-regulate.
So think about how you’re thinking, and think about how a change in thought might help you achieve your New Year's resolutions.
Response Modulation
This is your last and least effective line of defense. It requires that you flex your willpower and forcibly change your behavior. Cue Shia LaBeouf's motivational video and “just do it!!”
This strategy can work, but it’s pretty difficult. When you’re standing right in front of your temptations, they have their strongest psychological magnetism and it takes a lot of effort to resist.
Everyone eventually falters in this method, so best to avoid having to use it. Nip the problem in the bud. Select your situation before you have to change it. Pay attention to constructive things before you have to change your appraisal. Lastly, good luck to you if you must actively resist temptation.
And don’t forget to have some fun, too: life isn’t all about resisting enjoyable things!
A huge thank you to the brilliant Angela Duckworth Ph.D. for helping me understand these practical strategies. Most every part of this article was inspired by/taken from her self-control lecture. I know I speak for all of her students when I say she’s the absolute best.

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Taylor Kreiss is an existential positive psychologist who writes about the science of human flourishing. For more articles like this one, follow Taylor here.

(My Source)

From November, but still a good read this holiday season:

How We Can Deepen Our Sense Of Gratitude

I can never forget the last twenty minutes of my final graduate course. My professor asked us to pull out a piece of paper and pencil in seven descriptions of how we would like to be remembered this lifetime. Not only did he share his list, but he also left us with some thoughtful encouragement. He reminded us to turn on our blinkers and be mindful of the times where we may drive ahead. Most importantly, acknowledging those allowing us to pass through - our family, friends, coworkers, and those with whom we come into contact.
November is a time of giving thanks and it prompts us to ask, “Who or what am I grateful for?” The challenge in deepening our gratitude is that we are often busy. The distractions and worries of daily life can consume us and leave us possibly asleep to the real riches of our lives. To cultivate an engaged and grateful heart, we are asked to create intentional time and space. As a photographer, this thought illustrates and reminds me of one of the basic principles of every single art form, which has not to do with what is there, but with what is not. In visual arts, this is called negative space. The blank space allows us to see the nonnegative space in all its hues, shadows, color, mystery and light. What is not there gives what is there meaning.

"I don't have to chase extraordinary moments to find happiness. It's right in front of me if I'm paying attention and practicing gratitude." - Brené Brown

What if cultivating time for reflection is our negative space to experience a living, breathing encounter in our daily interactions? What if we allowed gratefulness to exist in simple words of compassion others offer to us? What if love is the way it feels to lay our hand on a dear one’s shoulder? What if the greatest beauty of the day is the shaft of morning light? By seeing with our eyes, listening with our ears, and receiving with an open heart, there becomes a simplification and familiarity with gratitude as an orientation and attitude towards life.
For the last five years, I have adopted a ‘gratitude training’ into my evening routine. I spend five minutes to ask myself, “What am I grateful for today?” To deepen my reflection, I ask the following questions:

• What inspired me today?
• What do I take for granted?
• What advantages have I received in my life?
• Who has supported me along the way?

By integrating these questions into my everyday life, I am able to observe a situation from another perspective, one that is more generous, reasonable, forgiving, loving, and big-hearted. It trains the heart and mind to another set of eyes and creates space for a sense of wonder. It reminds us to not take for granted the simplest pleasures, our health, senses, the love and friendship that surround us, and the gift of life itself. In my experience, those sorts of revelations help. It is the consciousness we bring to our lives which constructs meaning and how we choose to respond in any given situation.
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Tam Lontok is a lifestyle photographer based in Southern California. She enjoys writing and coordinating retreats to empower young adults in remembering they are loved and created whole. Her superpower lies in her compassion, but Trader Joe’s Chocolate Coconut Almonds continues to be her daily kryptonite.
 (source)

A recent study done by The Conversation has drawn the same conclusion that music lovers have known for years: Dancing with others is good for your health. People are drawn to music for many different reasons. Whether it be spiritual, emotional, physical, or cultural, music has been a part of the human experience for thousands of years. The innate desire to move to a beat is a quality that we are all born with. Seriously, even babies do it.
While dancing can be taught and practiced to perfection, every single human has a natural ability to synchronize to a beat. It is one of the building blocks of humanity that continues to evolve just as humans do. As The Conversation notes in their study, “it turns out that when you synchronise even a small movement, like the tapping of your finger in time with someone else, you feel closer and more trusting of that person than if you had tapped out of time.”
The rave community is well-versed in this simple scientific fact. People love good music and love a good show, but what really makes the EDM genre truly powerful is the community that accepts everyone and anyone. When you dance with others, whether it be moving to the same beat or dancing in synchronicity, the individual merges into a collective whole. “When we watch someone else do the same thing at the same time as us, our brain ends up with a merged sense of us and them. It feels like we ‘become one,” the study concludes.
The Conversation took things one step further to test additional benefits of dancing in synchronicity with others. The study took place in Brazil, where 264 young people participated in various dancing activities that were synchronized versus non synchronized and high-exertion versus low-exertion. The study measured pain tolerance and feelings of closeness before, during, and after the dancing activities.

“Not surprisingly, those who did full-bodied exertive dancing had higher pain thresholds compared to those…in the low-exertion groups….we also found that synchronisation led to higher pain thresholds, even if the synchronised movements were not exertive. So long as people saw that others were doing the same movement at the same time, their pain thresholds went up.”

So basically, dancing in any synchronization with others increases your pain tolerance and helps you to connect with others. Music literally is group therapy – a concept that EDM champions Above & Beyond is quite familiar with. Moral of the story? Tap into those primal desires and dance!

It’s good for you.

(source)

Play Has A Place In The Good Life

Taylor Kreiss, Founder of Oughtology

“We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

I have two left feet, so I’m glad Nietzsche wrote metaphorically. With this quote, I think he was saying something true and profound about the importance of play – that it’s an essential part of living a good and balanced life.
What I hope to convey are some philosophical, scientific and personal reasons for why we should all get serious about messing around. I hope that by reading this, you’ll feel compelled to actually pencil in some time for more frivolity.
Philosophically Speaking
Are you familiar with the bestselling book The Top 5 Regrets Of The Dying? As the title suggests, it’s about what dying people wish they had done differently. The information is philosophically valuable because it sheds light on what we ought to do now to ensure we use our time correctly and live our best possible lives.
Here are the top five regrets:
1.“I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.”
2.“I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.”
3.“I wish I had let myself be happier.”
4.“I wish I’d had the courage to express my true self.”
5.“I wish I’d lived a life true to my dreams instead of doing what others expected of me.”
In America, we have a mild obsession with “success” in financial and status-building terms. There’s a productivity imperative that’s always nagging us to work work work and “make something of ourselves.” But dying people rarely look back at their lives and wish they’d spent more time rat-racing. Instead, we tend to wish we had prioritized enjoyment and authentic pursuits with the people we loved.
With this philosophy in mind, play isn’t just a bit of foolishness or an indulgence. Instead, it’s integral to living the good life. It helps us avoid regrets like “working too hard” and “not being happy enough.” Play facilitates social bonding and keeps us in touch with friends. It can even be an indicator of what kinds of activities we ought to pursue in our work to “express our true selves” and “realize our dreams."
It’s important to get out and frolic a bit or, as Nietzsche would put it, “Hit the dance floor and shake your tail feathers” (which is probably not how Nietzsche would put it, but you get the idea).
Scientifically Speaking
Play is just plain fun, which is a reason enough to want more of it but there are also scientific reasons to believe that play is instrumentally vital for well being.
Psychology has recently gotten serious about play and its benefits for kids and adults alike. Studies suggest that flirting, humor, imagination, sports and other forms of play bolster positive emotions, creativity, engagement, relationships and even achievement.
I’m not going to delve off into the nitty-gritty of any particular studies, as my purpose is more of a philosophical persuasion in favor of more play, but I’ve included links (see bottom of page) that I recommend for further reading. What I’d like to emphasize is that these are not just intuitions or flights of argumentative fancy; the scientific community has much to say about the value of play. Here are some examples:

• It’s been shown that play is generally lacking in individuals who end up in jail. 
• Time for play is often abundant in the lives of those considered to be creative types. 
• Just getting up and wiggling your body playfully can improve your mood. 
• Social play improves relationships.
• Taking time to play can make you more productive.

As Positive Psychology superhero Christopher E. Peterson put it, play is “…a robust predictor of how satisfied we are with our lives.”
Personally Speaking
This isn’t going to be one of those “Hey, I was a schmuck, but now I’m awesome” kind of stories where I discovered play and my life transformed overnight, but I did have a eureka moment that helped me reengineer many of my habits and thought patterns in a positive way.
Back in my university days, I was depressed. I was having trouble getting out of bed to face the day and it seriously sucked. There was at least a full year there where people would say I wasn’t my usual happy-go-lucky self and they’d continually prod me to find out what was wrong.
Thankfully, I was living next to a fascinating woman who helped me out of my funk. Olivia was one of the all-time eccentrics. I would usually run into her while she walked her pet chinchilla through the nearby park (shoeless of course). She’d read me poems she had written about her past lives. She informed me that during her psychedelics phase that she had taken LSD over 200 times. She was 65 years old. She was a hippie, a philosopher, a published author and one of the most authentically caring people I’ve known.
One day I decided to share my life’s concerns with her. Her response? "Have more fun." She said it simply and with the kind of conviction that comes from a lifetime of experience. It was her mantra and I think it’s one of the all time greatest pieces of advice I’ve ever received. It resonated with me and helped me reprioritize my activity in a way that got me up and moving.
There are some compelling reasons to think that play is more than just a good time. Philosophically, scientifically and personally, I think it’s a bonafide necessity. If you agree, take a couple hours this week to “have more fun.”
Further reading: 

• Ted Talk: Play is more than just fun
• Psych today: The power of play
• Psych Today: When work is play

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Taylor Kreiss is the founder of Oughtology, a movement focused on using positive psychology and philosophy to live The Good Life. For more articles like this one and to like Oughtology, go here.

(Sydney Hell's source)