Heroes Not Zombies

My brain seems to work in a particular kind of a way. It’s good at spotting connections, building patterns. I’d say it’s a creative brain. When I read a book certain words or passages ring bells, make lights flash, prod my memory of other passages I’ve read elsewhere and I build on what’s already there, not just in a way that gives me more knowledge in my store, but, rather, more dynamically creates something new. Some new understanding that can change my view of who I am and what kind of world I live in.

In my consulting room I find that’s one of the crucial questions I want to find the answer to – what kind of world does this person live in?

I think we all have brains that work that way actually. I think that’s how we learn, connecting new experiences and observations to our previous ones. It’s a constant process and, at best, it increases our understanding.

Sometimes the connections seem quite serendipitous. Do you get that? When a particular word or phrase or idea seems to keep popping up everywhere for a while? I don’t mean the obvious recurrences which come from reading a few books on the same subject area. I mean they pop up in books, newspaper articles, movies, song lyrics and so on. I’m sure I could write a post or two on specific words that do that but let me tell you about one of the ones that’s popping up just now – virtue.

Now this is a word I’d say I probably have never used and it’s not even a word that has held any appeal for me, but I was reading The Happiness Hypothesis recently and came across Jonathon Haidt’s discussion of virtues. He begins by telling of Benjamin Franklin (you can read about his virtues here). I’m a Scot living in Scotland but I quote Benjamin Franklin almost every day. Not a wide range of quotes mind, just one. However, this was a brand new story and it intrigued me. What do I do when something catches my interest? Google it, of course. Well, Franklin’s virtues sounded a bit archaic to me but his little descriptions of each one I thought revealed a man of remarkable insight and balance. But they didn’t feel quite right for me.

Haidt goes on to link this idea of virtues both to the ancient Greek and religious virtues and to the modern practice of positive psychology. That lead me to pick my two Seligman books off my shelves again and remind myself what he’s said. I say remind myself but to be honest I had no recollection of him using the term virtues at all so it was really going back to notice what I failed to notice first time round. Seligman’s virtues seemed different from Franklin’s. Different but not completely different (sorry, this is the way my mind works but now I’m thinking, I wonder what Monty Python’s virtues are? OK, back to the subject) You can read about Seligman’s virtues here.

What I did next was what I often do with such things. I sat in a cafe with a notebook and pen and wrote the words down over a two page spread. It’s a kind of mind mapping technique (not the fancy Tony Buzan variety, just a simple way of seeing connections and patterns). What I do is take the key words or phrases that are bubbling in my brain and write them out not randomly but in clusters so that words which have some connection for me are written close to each other and those that don’t seem so strongly connected are written further apart. Am I making that clear? I should take some photos of the process cos its actually quite a visual thing.

That gave me three clusters of Franklin’s virtues and four of Seligman’s. Only two of the clusters overlapped. So now I had five discreet clusters to consider.

Here are my clusters –

1. Action
2. Limits
3. Calm
4. Transcendence
5. Wisdom

And here’s how I arranged Franklin’s virtues –

Action

• Resolution
• Industry
• Sincerity
• Justice

Limits

• Temperance
• Frugality
• Moderation
• Chastity
• Humility

Calm

• Silence
• Tranquillity
• Order
• Cleanliness

And here’s how I arranged Seligman’s

Action

• Courage
• Humanity
• Justice

Limits

• Temperance

Transcendence

Wisdom

This shows they agree on only two areas of virtue – action virtues and limiting virtues. Both of these make sense from a psychological point of view. We are acting/reacting creatures. We are continuously picking up signals from the world and adapting to, or reacting, to them. We are engaged creatures. As Donne said “No man is an island”. We interact with others, building and breaking relationships, communicating, sharing, cooperating and competing. It seems sensible to me that if we are thinking about what kind of qualities and characteristics we want to build as we grow then a fair number of them should be action ones. The second area of virtue is limits. This makes sense too. In fact, The Happiness Hypothesis explores this well. We need boundaries and oppositions to push against, to stimulate growth and to help us focus and not waste our energies with uncreative dispersal.

The cluster in Franklin’s virtues which is missing from Seligman’s I’ve labelled “calm”. I toyed with labels of “rest”, “non-doing”, or “peace”. However, “calm” seems to fit. I think we need that in life. We need to have times of doing and we need to have times of not doing. We need stimulation and we need calm. It’s a healthy counter to all the busy-ness, all the doing (all the GTD-ing?). If we don’t develop the capacity to sit still and to be calm from time to time we burn out.

That leaves two clusters to account for – both from Seligman. Transcendence and Wisdom. I like both of these. He describes transcendence as those actions that take us out of ourselves, that connect us to whatever is bigger than us as individuals, and he also says transcendence is what creates meaning for us in life. We are for sure meaning-seeking creatures. We’re always trying to make sense of our experiences and explain them. I find this a useful concept. It captures multiple levels of connection – relationships, community, cultural, global, even encompassing the concept of spiritual. And Wisdom? I think the way he describes Wisdom it’s about awareness. Wisdom, for me, is our noticing the inner and outer worlds, learning, reflecting and increasing our understanding of our daily experience.

I suggest you look at both these sets of virtues (and any other author’s virtues) around these five areas – with Franklin, I’ve given you his thirteen already clustered here, and with Seligman I’ve only given you his “virtues” but I suggest you expand them out to map his “Strengths”. Then choose. Choose which virtues you resonate with and which you’d like to grow in your own life. I think you should also change the language to use words which make more sense to you.

Finally, I really didn’t like Franklin’s method of the black marks (too punishment-orientated for me!) and I’m unhappy with Seligman’s singleminded focus on “strengths” (reduces the chances of strengthening what needs strengthened) so, for me, I’m going to pull in another popular idea – intention. OK, intention stuff can get a bit too wacky for me, especially when it becomes “cosmic ordering”! But the phenomenon that we are what we pay attention to strikes me as true. We interpret daily experiences from the perspective of our mindsets and we grow in the areas we focus on and nurture. You can see my personal choices here. I’m not recommending them as a catch-all or one-size-fits-all set because I believe we are all different. I’m sharing a method with you here, one you can make your own. We are all continually changing, growing and developing.

We are all becoming not being.

YOU are the hero of your own personal story if you take hold of it and write it yourself. Or you are the zombie in other people’s stories, drifting through life on automatic pilot. It’s your choice.