Heroes Not Zombies

In another post I’ve described this idea of virtues. What interests me is this. Which characteristics and qualities would I hope to develop in my life? I believe that we all create our own personal hero narratives as the main way of having a sense of self and of growing and developing that self. This kind of life project of growth has been variously described by other authors. Jung focussed on what he termed “individuation”. The evolutionary biologists, contemporary neuroscientists, and neurophilosophers have all shown that human beings are continuously in a process of development of strengths, characteristics and qualities.

I’ve conducted my own synthesis of Franklin’s and Seligman’s virtues and strengths to come up with a personal virtue map.

Here’s an image of the map –

You’ll see this has five main “nodes” – each of these refers to a major virtue cluster – Wisdom in the middle (because for me that’s the centre of it all), then Calm, Action, Transcendence and Temperance. Around each of these nodes I’ve picked a few qualities or characteristics that I’d like to be part of how I grow.

Here’s a summary –

Wisdom (which is about awareness of the world)

• Curiosity
• Love of Learning
• Creativity
• Understanding

Curiosity and Love of Learning are simply what they are – reflecting, enquiring and learning.

Creativity encompasses the ideas of ingenuity, of novelty, and of emergence.

Understanding encompasses the ideas of perspective, judgement, emotional intelligence and empathy.

Calm (stillness and serenity)

• Silence
• Tranquillity
• Slow

Silence is about finding times without talking, without music or noise. It’s also about valuing conversation, not trivialising it.

Tranquillity is that calm that allows you to remain unflustered or unfazed in the face of trivial difficulties and random events.

Slow is about taking your time, savouring and relishing what you are doing.

Action (engaging with the world and with people)

• Resolution
• Perseverance
• Industry
• Sincerity
• Kindness
• Fairness

Resolution is deciding to do certain things and actually doing what’s been resolved to do.

Perseverance is sticking at something to see it through.

Industry is about being active

Sincerity, kindness and fairness are values which can be used to assess the quality of acts towards others.

Temperance (living within limits)

• Moderation
• Frugality

Moderation is about enjoying something without spoiling it by taking it to excess.

Frugality is about not being wasteful, spending productively and well.

Transcendence (living beyond our selves)

• Appreciation of beauty
• Gratitude
• Hope
• Humour
• Zest

Appreciation of beauty in all things – the physical world, people, the Arts.

Gratitude and hope are the building blocks of positivity. Gratitude looks back and keeps positive experiences alive whilst hope looks forward and creates the conditions for positive experiences in the future.

Humour and zest are forms of passion. Humour is a lightening of the heart and zest is an energy of the heart.

So, what’s next? I created the mindmap using Mondomo (the map’s name is “virtues”) and exported it as a jpeg which I’ve now printed out onto a 6 x 4 inch index card. I’ll start carrying it around with me and my idea is reflect on it every morning and every evening. By doing that I hope I’ll bring focus and intention to these “virtues” – and if they’re worth developing, I’ll experience the payoff in an increased quality of my life. I’ll keep you posted!

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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. (more…)

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