A Bourgeois Prejudice: Thoughts on Tattoos and How They May be Killing You

Posted on August 28, 2019 by Dr Joseph Russo

I don’t have any tattoos. You can check if you want 🙂 First of all, they cost money, don’t they? Secondly, I cringe at sight of them; seriously, and when I see one, I default to a projection of uncleanliness. Now, OF COURSE, many who have them are perfectly clean people – I’m just reporting my projections here in the service of transparency. Just being honest.

I get over it rather quickly. After all, my favorite professor of all time has tattoos all over his arms. And many of my students have them, and many of them are outstanding scholars. Still, I cannot help myself. I wonder why someone would spend the money to forever (forever!) mark themselves up like that.

Anyway, it turns out that your tattoos are slowly killing you. Your wonderful neighborhood tattoo artist gave you more than ink.

New research has revealed that nanoparticles from tattoo needles are traveling to the body’s lymph nodes — a possible explanation for some allergic reactions to tramp stamps, cutesy calf ribbons and inspirational quotes.

Initial research in 2017 showed that pigments leak from the tattoo site and amass in the body’s lymph nodes. A new study into the phenomenon has identified chromium and nickel particles migrating the same way, according to the journal Particle and Fiber Toxicology.

“We were following up on our previous study, by trying to find the link between iron, chromium and nickel and the coloring of the inks,” said study author Ines Schreiver, of the Federal Institute for Risk Assessment in Germany. “After studying several human tissue samples and finding metallic components, we realized that there must be something else…Then we thought of testing the needle and that was our ‘eureka’ moment.”

Using powerful X-rays, researchers found tattoo needle particles were only present when coupled with pigments containing titanium dioxide — an abrasive agent commonly used in white tattoo ink.

Nevertheless, there is a silver lining for all you tattooed ladies and gentlemen: it could probably only poison you slowly.

“The fact that all pigments and wear particles are deposited in lymph nodes calls for special attention to be placed on allergy development,” says Schreiver. “Unfortunately, today, we can’t determine the exact impact on human health and possible allergy development deriving from the tattoo needle wear. These are long-term effects which can only be assessed in long-term epidemiological studies that monitor the health of thousands of people over decades.”

This whole thing reminded me of a recent opinion piece by Lance Morrow in the Wall Street Journal, reproduced here for my own reference and for your enjoyment. The writing belongs to the WSJ and I claim no ownership. Here is what he had to say about tattoos:  

Warmer weather comes, and women put on summer dresses. Arms and shoulders are bare. People will wear shorts, bathing suits. And we will become aware, again, of the tattoos—of the immense acreage of human flesh committed to artists’ ink.

The tattoos may be discreet and coy and subtle, winking from the deltoid, or from halfway up the calf; they may be exotic and cryptic and hieroglyphic, or they may have nothing more interesting to offer than the cliché of a skull. They may be sweepingly narrative, covering the chest, shoulders and back with constellations and galaxies, or with epic scenes only a little less ambitious than an 18th-century canvas by Jacques-Louis David : Someday I expect to see his “Oath of the Horatius” inked across a guy’s chest, armpit to armpit.

Beyond such now-commonplace pageants lie the mad, all-body inscriptions—every square inch of flesh inked with something or other, like the blackboard of a schizophrenic genius. Do some of these announce mental illness? Gang loyalty? One can’t know, but in any case, they amount to a species of self-obliteration.

The phenomenon is startling to one whose eyes were trained, in an earlier time, to expect human flesh to be uninscribed—nature’s blank page. A man of my generation would think of tattoos in terms of a sailor who got drunk in port and came away with “MOTHER—SHANGHAI 1937” on his bicep; or else of a survivor of Auschwitz with a number inked on his forearm by a Nazi.

Mine is a bourgeois prejudice: I think of tattoos as disfigurements. At one time, the tattoo was regarded as a no-class thing: The Right Sort did not wear them. Now, that is mostly, though not entirely, changed. I know plenty of people who defend them, sometimes in surprisingly eloquent and metaphysical terms. Tattoos, they say, are an expression of the committed character: the body articulate—skin in the game.

Those, I suppose, are the extremes: self-obliteration and self-expression. A problem is that tattoos, by their very nature, involve an aspect of arrested development: The body is permanently stamped and burdened with an impulse of the moment.

Stipulate that tattoos are an ancient art adapted to 21st-century culture, which exaggerates and manages to falsify so much. They are intended to be at least decorative and at most significant—personal statements of some kind. Or perhaps a moment’s lark. Some people develop the habit of getting tattoos. It gets to be compulsive, even an addiction.

Anyway, one’s own flesh is the papyrus upon which personal truths or decorations, or great historical scenes may be inscribed. But flesh, being human and mortal, will not last nearly as long as papyrus—as long, say, as the 2,100-year-old Dead Sea Scrolls.

A life proceeds through its brief, allotted time with evolutions and surprises. One learns and changes. It is hard to see the sense in permanently committing one’s flesh to be the billboard of the long-ago whim of a 19-year-old sitting down in a tattoo parlor with a girlfriend whose name he will not quite remember in a few years.

Moments pass. Tattoos remain and will become an embarrassment, an item of chagrin—and in any case will turn, over time, into a sadly shriveled and withered and blotching thing.

The one tattooed is not the artist, so the case for self-expression may be weakened. The artist would be the man with the needle. You are merely the flinching canvas on which he inks an aurora borealis, or “Have a nice day” in Japanese.

For a time when I was young, I wore a beard. The great thing about a beard is that you can shave it off. At one time, in the 1970s, I wore a loud and particularly hideous orange necktie with floral patterns; it was about 8 inches wide. I am colorblind, but that’s no excuse. In its next life the tie might have become a tablecloth in a vegetarian restaurant in a shopping mall.

In the 1970s, no one particularly noticed the tie, for it was an era of surpassingly awful taste, when men wore leisure suits and Nehru jackets, or shirts with collars that had the wingspan of a condor and bore hideous designs, like patterned wallpaper from 1924. I owned a pair of bell-bottomed leather trousers of which I was proud.

But like my beard, those decorative items could be removed. Taking them off was a rebirth. One will do stupid things, and it’s a good idea to make sure they are reversible. By simply shaving or undressing, one might reset the self—might cancel what one now recognizes as errors of youth—and so, unencumbered and refreshed, might embark on new experiments.

If I had worn a conspicuous tattoo instead of an orange necktie, then I might have the tattoo still, an inarticulate blotch that left me to mutter: “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

Posted in General Musings, People (in general), State of the Nation | 2 Comments

Learning is Supposed to Feel Uncomfortable

Posted on August 21, 2019 by Dr Joseph Russo

It is said (and I say it, often) that therapists, mentors and coaches “disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed.” I couldn’t agree more!

Peter Bregman – a coach – describes his experiences in a recent workshop:

The process our workshop leader asked us to follow was simple enough. We broke into small groups as she directed, taking turns being the “leader” while the others in the group played various roles. She was a good teacher — she described what we had to do, then showed us how, then asked us to do it. Describe, demonstrate, do. That’s a solid teaching methodology.

But I was finding the do part far more difficult and stressful than I had anticipated. I was outside my comfort zone, clumsy, tentative. I tried to follow her directions, but I stumbled in front of the others, and it felt embarrassing.

Here’s the thing:

While the act of learning is primarily intellectual, behavioral, or methodological, the experience of learning is primarily emotional. And it’s the emotional experience of learning — of being a beginner and making mistakes, often publicly — that often keeps people from even trying to learn.

Later that day I met a woman who was teaching a different workshop at the retreat center.

“You’re so lucky,” she said. “I haven’t participated in a personal development program for 30 years.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“I lead workshops,” she told me. “And I’m known. I couldn’t participate in one.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because people trust me as a leader,” she responded. “They see me a certain way. I think they might lose trust in me if they saw me as a participant.”

“I don’t want to be harsh,” I told her, “but honestly, I wouldn’t trust you as a leader if I didn’t see you learning as a participant.”

And yet, I understand her fear. Because while learning may not be that hard, being a learner — a beginner at something — can be very hard. Especially in a group. And especially when we see ourselves, and want to be seen by others, as skilled and confident.

In fact, being a beginner — being awkward, uncoordinated, inept — can even feel shameful. But it’s not. It’s just a stage we must go through in order to become graceful and coordinated and competent. And our unwillingness to experience this stage can hinder our future growth. This is especially true of areas where you’re already an expert.

So, what can we do to make it a little easier?

First, know that it’s brave to be a beginner. Understand that it takes courage and vulnerability to expose your weaknesses and try new things.

Then look for learning situations where the stakes are low — maybe a class where you’re not expected to be an expert, or you don’t know anyone else. Admit, out loud, to the rest of the workshop if it makes you feel better, that you are going to take some risks to approach something in a new way. Be the first to raise your hand and try something, letting others know that you may flub it.

And feel everything. That’s what’s called emotional courage. If you are willing to feel everything — embarrassment, shame, failure, awkwardness — then you can do anything.

And whatever you do, don’t stop learning. As Michelangelo said, “ancaro imparo,” I am always learning.

Go to workshops. Push yourself, especially in the areas where you are already accomplished, so you can get even better. Keep thinking of yourself as a learner. Take risks to try new things. Stay in the discomfort of learning long enough to truly … learn!

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Switch to a Dumb Phone and Get Smart(er)

Posted on August 20, 2019 by Dr Joseph Russo

As many of my readers know, I don’t allow the use of technology in my classrooms. This includes smartphones, tablets, computers … whatever.  Instead, I encourage them to listen to me and to their fellow students as we digest important concepts.  I suspect that electronics usage is ultimately tied to lower grades, not higher ones.

Well, in a new survey of 3,425 university students, one in five respondents said they engaged in problematic smartphone use which in turn was tied to lower grades, mental health problems and a higher number of sexual partners.

Previous research has linked excessive smartphone use to mental health issues such as anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and problems with self-esteem.

In the new study, published in the Journal of Behavioral Addictions, a research team from the University of Chicago, University of Cambridge, and the University of Minnesota developed the Health and Addictive Behaviors Survey to assess mental health and well-being in a large sample of university students.

The researchers used the survey to analyze the impact of smartphone use on university students. Just over a third (3,425) of students invited to take the test responded.

The self-reporting survey consisted of 156 questions. Based on their responses, the students were given a score ranging from 10 to 60, with a score of 32 and above being defined as problematic smartphone use. This definition was based on a threshold recommended previously in clinical validation studies using the scale.

The researchers found that one in five (20%) of respondents reported problematic smartphone use. Problematic use was also more prevalent among female students: 64% of all problematic users were women.

Problematic smartphone use may include the following: excessive use; trouble concentrating in class or at work due to smartphone use; feeling fretful or impatient without their smartphone; missing work due to smartphone use; and experiencing physical consequences of excessive use, such as light-headedness or blurred vision.

Importantly, the researchers found a link between problematic smartphone use and lower grade point averages (academic achievement).

“Although the effect of problematic smartphone use on grade point averages was relatively small, it’s worth noting that even a small negative impact could have a profound effect on an individual’s academic achievement and then on their employment opportunities in later life,” said Professor Jon Grant from the Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Neuroscience at the University of Chicago.

While students reporting problematic smartphone use were more likely to be less sexually active than their peers (70.9% compared to 74%), the proportion of students reporting two or more sexual partners in the past 12 months was significantly higher among problem users: 37.4% of sexually active problematic smartphone users compared with 27.2% sexually-active students who reported no problem use.

The prevalence of six or more sexual partners was more than double among sexually active problematic smartphone users (6.8% compared to 3.0%).

“Smartphones can help connect people and help people feel less isolated, and our findings suggest that they may act as an avenue for sexual contact, whether through sustained partnerships or more casual sex,” said Dr. Sam Chamberlain, Welcome Trust Clinical Fellow.

In addition, alcohol misuse was much higher in those with problematic smartphone use compared to the control group. No significant link was found between phone use and any other form of substance abuse or addiction, however.

In terms of other mental health problems, the researchers found that problematic smartphone use was significantly associated with lower self-esteem, ADHD, depression, anxiety, and PTSD, mirroring similar findings elsewhere.

“It’s easy to think of problematic smartphone use as an addiction, but if it was that simple, we would expect it to be associated with a wide range of substance misuse problems, especially in such a large sample, but this does not seem to be the case,” said Chamberlain.

“One possible explanation for these results is that people develop excessive smartphone use because of other mental health difficulties. For example, people who are socially isolated, those who experience depression or anxiety, or those who have attention problems (as in ADHD) may be more prone to excessive smartphone use, as well as to using alcohol.”

“Smartphone use likely develops earlier in life — on average — than alcohol use problems and so, it is unlikely that alcohol use itself leads to smartphone use.”

The study does not establish cause and effect. In other words, the researchers cannot say that problematic smartphone use leads to mental health issues or vice versa.

In addition, the team points out that the effect sizes were generally small, and that more research is needed into positive and negative effects of smartphone use and mental health, including how this might change over time.

Source: University of Cambridge

Posted in General Musings | 2 Comments

Russo’s Alphabet Relationship Theory

Posted on July 24, 2019 by Dr Joseph Russo

In my work as a life coach, and occasionally in my work as an executive coach, I am asked, “what kind of relationship should I strive for?” My reaction is usually, “wait, what?”

But then I remember that relationship health or sickness is right up there on the list of stressors in life (the others being death, of course, along with divorce, taxes, and moving households). ALL relationships require a lot of work and people are wise to think long and hard about what they want. But there is only one kind of relationship we should want in our lives. Read on!

In our society today, we can pick and choose the relationship we want. There are the so-called fu*k buddies, and then there are marriages of convenience, arranged marriages, etc., along with relationships that more closely resemble a merger in the business sense than a marriage in the traditional sense.

Truly, there is only one kind that benefits both partners and that is the committed relationship.

Nature allows for committed relationships as a means to continue self-growth and flourishing. Yes, I mean that you will grow and flourish in the right committed relationship. If you aren’t, then it is time to seek relationship help. But first we must pause and remember the definition of the word “committed.”

Webster’s defines it as: feeling dedication and loyalty to a cause, activity, person, relationship, or job; wholeheartedly dedicated.

Note the emphasis on “wholehearted.” You gotta give all that you got. Every bit of your heart. And you need to lean into the other person without fear of falling. They need to lean into you.

So, in such a wholehearted, committed relationship, BOTH of you flourish and grow.

In explaining the kinds of relationships that are out there, or to illuminate the kind of relationship one finds themselves in, and to highlight, gradually, the kind of relationship one should strive for, I have developed what I call Alphabet Relationship Theory™

It’s all rather simple: I encourage my clients to think of relationships like letters of the alphabet. And, then, I ask them to re-imagine what letter of the alphabet most closely resembles what they have now. I conclude by challenging them to imagine what the best relationship might look like in terms of letters in the English alphabet. To wit …

Perhaps the worst relationship is a “T” – with one person completely dominating the other; lording over the other; not allowing the other to grow. Think here of the micro-manager, or the abusive husband (or wife).

Next worst would be an “L” relationship – with one person at the foot of another, forever tied to their ups and down and never being allowed to stand. The so-called co-dependent relationship is perhaps best represented as an “L.”

Then there’s the “V” relationship – where, at one time – usually in the beginning – the two people shared a lot but then grew apart and away from each other. Not good. Business partners have at times experienced this dynamic. Arranged marriages often demonstrate this as well.

Recently, I added the “N” relationship – the most recent example of which was the Dianna-Charles-Camilla relationship of 25 years ago. Poor Princess Dianna stood to the right and Charles to the left, with Camilla propping him up*. It was destined to failure.

*Remember the song? “Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, here I am, stuck in the middle with you.”

“H” relationships are not as bad, but still not good. In this relationship, the couple have something between them – perhaps a child or a business – but are on “separate tracks” in life. We know a lot about parallel lines, don’t we? For example, they will never merge or cross. Many relationships come to resemble an “H” and to me, it is sad.

I could go on – but you will have to wait for my book on the subject for more detail (smiles). In the meantime, here are some more teasers. Take the “F” relationships, for instance. Can you imagine what that would be about? Or the “Z” relationship. “Q” relationships are those with a narcissist where you have become but an afterthought in his world, a little curlicue. You can imagine others.

The best relationship of all is the … wait for it … the “A” relationship.

In an “A” relationship both partners wholeheartedly lean into each other in equal measure. If one grows, the other does too. And between them they have a shared “something,” be it a business, their faith, a child or children. If one partner should die, the other will not fall completely to the ground, for together they have built that middle strut of balance.

You want an “A” relationship, but to get there you must know yourself, and know what you want in the other person. And you need to know what you DON’T want. You must have license to fail, or fall, and know that the other will be there to catch you.

Are you in an “A” relationship? I hope and pray that you are. I am.

[Alphabet Relationship Theory is a trademark of Dr. Joseph V. Russo, 2019, all rights reserved.]

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Go Forth and Fail

Posted on July 13, 2019 by Dr Joseph Russo

In my classes, usually on the first day, I acquaint students with one of “Dr Russo’s Maxims” – that, as freshmen, “you won’t necessarily know what you are doing, but go forth and fail anyway. I cannot know that you are trying if you don’t fail the first time (and maybe thereafter).”

The other Maxim is this: There are only two kinds of people in the world: Those with issues and the … dead. [I borrow this last one from Dr Christian Conte, perhaps the very best professor I myself have ever had (Twitter: @Dr_Conte).]

Back to the first maxim: Go forth and fail.

When I was working (I mean in my earlier career as a finance guy, operations guy, and sales guy), I had a wide vinyl banner made and then hung above the door in our offices in Manhattan. Employees saw it every time they left the office on their way to do whatever they were going to do – be it talking to a customer, trying to sell something, or to just living life.

Failure is the precedent action to success. You won’t have an idea about you’re doing until you fail, and then it comes into stark focus. Failure reminds you of your basic humanity, which of course is as a broken person. Failure reminds you of the basic nature of the universe, which is total anarchy and chaos. Success in the face of failure, or rather, because of it, is a moment of clarity, a completing of some unseen circle.

They say that practice makes perfect. Or perfect practice makes perfect. I disagree. In the words of Mel Brooks’ wife, Anna Maria Louisa Italiano, known professionally as Anne Bancroft, “practice until you cannot get it wrong.” In other words, look for failure. Look for it and isolate its antecedents. Develop a muscle memory around what you are trying to do.  

Find ways to fail and eradicate their root causes. Yes, the list may seem endless, but for any given endeavor there are ways to minimize them and to ensure success time after time.

Even Walter White, he of Breaking Bad fame, had to experiment with different ways to make crystal meth. He came to the task with rich knowledge about the chemistry but had to deal with unknown unknowns, like getting a source of methylamine. He failed, then succeeded spectacularly.

Kids, don’t try to be Walter White. But learn to embrace failure. Go forth and fail. You will be all the better for it.

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Validation

Posted on July 5, 2019 by Dr Joseph Russo

Years ago, while pursuing a graduate degree in counseling psychology, a class I was in was shown a delightful little movie entitled “Validation.”

I recommend watching it before continuing with this (rather long) blog post about what it takes to learn how to self-validate.

In our society today, far too much time is spent hand-holding young adults and saying, “it’s not your fault. Here, let me do it for you.”

We fail to teach that nothing substitutes for hard work and discipline.

Of course, hard work and discipline are learned traits, and often the result of our upbringings. If our parents have strove to instill discipline on the way to some ingrained sense of self, then they have done their jobs. The notion of self-efficacy – the idea that if I think I can, then I will think that I know I can – is born of countless tough lessons in life.

Recall “The Little Engine That Could” (an old nursery rhyme, a story about determination and grit).

A little railroad engine was employed in a station yard for such work as he was built for, pulling a few cars on and off the switches.  One morning he was waiting for the next call when a long train of freight-cars asked one of the larger engines in the roundhouse to take it over the hill.  

“I can’t; that is too much a pull for me,” said the great engine built for hard work.  Then the train asked another engine, and another, only to hear excuses and be refused.  In desperation, the train asked the little switch engine to draw it up the grade and down on the other side.  

Of course, the little engine immediately thought, “well, if the larger engine cannot do it, what makes you think that I can?” But he knew that was an excuse and nothing would be lost by trying. So, he began to think, “yeah, sure, I just might be able to do this.” He put himself in front of the great heavy train.

As it went on the little engine kept bravely puffing faster and faster,

“I think I can, I think I can, I think I can.”

As it neared the top of the grade, which had so daunted even the larger engines, the little engine went more slowly. He kept saying, “I—think—I—can, I—think—I—can.”

He reached the top by drawing on bravery and then went on down the grade, congratulating himself by saying, “I thought I could, I thought I could.”

If parents have done their jobs, then most likely they will have encouraged failure, or at the very least, stood by while failure was encountered and dealt with. This is the process of building what psychologists call self-efficacy, or the idea that through repeated effort and determination, the child will finally arrive at a solution that is far more lasting than had the parent done the job for them. Helicopter parents are failing their children by not allowing for this process to unfold.

But many of my clients – particularly those born when helicopter parenting became vogue – have come into adulthood without a sense of self-efficacy so needed in life. Is it any wonder, therefore, that the Bernie Sanders and AOC’s and Elizabeth Warrens of the world are so appealing to a young generation of Americans who want everything given to them?

No wonder at all.

The problem is that no amount of government, no amount of “free” stuff, can ever instill in us the inner strength and determination needed to make the world a better place.

Developing inner strength is a function of self-validation.

Validation means to express understanding and acceptance of another person’s internal experience, whatever that might be. Validation does not mean you agree or approve. Validation builds relationships and helps ease upset feelings. Knowing that you are understood and that your emotions and thoughts are accepted by others is powerful. Validation is like relationship glue. 

Self-validation is accepting your own internal experience, your thoughts, and your feelings. Self-validation doesn’t mean that you believe your thoughts or think your feelings are justified. There are many times when you will have thoughts that surprise you or that do not reflect your values or what you know is true. You will also have feelings that you know are not justified. If you fight the thoughts and feelings or judge yourself for having them, then you increase your emotional upset. You will also miss out on important information about who you are as a person.

Self-validating will help you accept and better understand yourself, which leads to a stronger identity and better skills at managing intense emotions. Self-validation helps you find wisdom.

But it isn’t easy. 

To get there, you must engage in reflection, which nowadays is a lost art. Increasingly fewer of us stop to reflect upon how we are in the world, relying instead on others to tell us. The problem with that is no one will ever be as brutally honest in pointing out your blind-spots as, say, a loving parent might do.

Step One: Be Present and Reflect

Reflection requires that you be present, in the moment, at ease, at peace and in place where you can be brutally honest with … you. To be present means to ground yourself and not dissociate, daydream, suppress, or numb your emotions. Being present means listening to yourself.

Feeling the pain of sadness, hurt, and fear is challenging and difficult. But avoiding emotions often results in quite negative consequences. They have a tendency of building and building until they boil over in rage and depression (which is rage directed inwardly).  

Accepting your emotions deprives them of their power. Even anger, perhaps the most powerful emotion next to love, is a good thing if properly channeled. And, once accepted, loses its power over you. Acceptance allows emotions to pass and will aid in the building of resiliency. And resiliency is the first step toward “I know I can, I know I can.”

Step Two: Be Truthful

I advise my clients to “tell the truth as fast as you can.” This means that for reflection to work – to really do the heavy lifting of resiliency – you must learn to accurately label your emotions. Take anger: perhaps in upon reflection, you arrive at what actually triggered it. You find the precipitating event. Maybe you reflect on the ways you feel the anger in your body and consider the actions that go with it.

When you observe and then accurately describe your internal experience, you do not interpret or guess or make assumptions. You would say, “I feel angry, and it started yesterday after my friend canceled lunch. I sense tightness in my stomach, so maybe there is fear as well.”

Saying, “I am a total loser, and no one wants to spend any time with me,” is to be untruthful with yourself. And falsehoods tend to build and boil over. By remaining truthful – by telling the truth as fast as you can – you are (viola!) engaging in self-validation! You build trust in yourself — you as the one person in this world who will always tell you the truth.

Step Three: If all else fails, GUESS

Sometimes you cannot be sure what you are feeling or thinking. In these situations, try saying something like, “If someone else were in this situation, they would probably feel sad. Am I sad?”

Take a moment and guess at it. If you want to hide, maybe you are feeling shame. Maybe you are thinking shameful thoughts. You can notice where you feel body sensations: fear, for example, is often felt in the throat. If you are feeling fear, maybe you are thinking scary thoughts. Guessing your emotions and thoughts based on the information you have will help you learn more about yourself. 

Step Four: Remember that those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it!

Sometimes you will have thoughts and feelings that are based on events which have happened before. Maybe you are afraid when people argue, because, in the past, arguments led to your being hurt. Validate yourself by saying, “It’s acceptable and understandable that I am afraid of arguments, because when I was young, my parents would hurt each other during arguments.”

Maybe somewhere in your “miserable past” (I am thinking of Julie Andrews singing these words in The Sound of Music) you encountered a similar situation and, without the skills of adulthood, retreated into pure emotion. Think about those times. Relive them and in doing so, isolate the feelings. Then, go back to Step One.

Step Five: Get Over It and Normalize

Everyone has emotions. No one is happy all the time. It is normal to feel sad, angry, hurt, or ashamed. After all, when your friends have these emotions, you (as the good friend that you are), leap to the first opportunity to tell them, “hey, you’re not so bad. I think you’re wonderful.”

Why not tell yourself the same thing? Remember the words of Carl Jung:

“The acceptance of oneself is the essence of the whole moral problem and the epitome of a whole outlook on life. That I feed the hungry, that I forgive an insult, that I love my enemy in the name of Christ — all these are undoubtedly great virtues. What I do unto the least of my brethren, that I do unto Christ. But what if I should discover that the least among them all, the poorest of all the beggars, the most impudent of all the offenders, the very enemy himself — that these are within me, and that I myself stand in need of the alms of my own kindness — that I myself am the enemy who must be loved — what then?”

If you are sad because you didn’t get a job you wanted, remember that others would be sad if that happened to them. Check out whether what you are feeling is what most other people would experience, and validate those feelings as normal, even if you don’t like experiencing them.

Step Six: Engage in what I call “Radical Genuineness”

Be you. As mentioned above, never lie to yourself. Do not pretend to be someone you are not, because in so doing you are rejecting who you are. This is one of the highest levels of invalidation.

Remember this: who you are is different from what you do. You are not your behavior. This notion will free you to change some of your behaviors and perhaps alleviate some of your suffering. The alcoholic can wallow in self-pity and condemn himself for being just that, an alcoholic. But if he were to stop and say, “perhaps I am not, not an alcoholic, but rather someone who has a problem with alcohol,” then maybe he could step out of himself and address the behavior while knowing that he is not his behavior. He, his true self, is something else altogether. Does that make sense?

Concluding Thoughts

Self-validation is one of the critical steps for living with intense emotions. It is part of forming relationships and thriving. Practice and more practice will help you self-validate more easily.

From the time we are born, we need validation. Loving parents offer consistent validation to their children, validating their feelings, their perceptions, their gifts and talents, their form of intelligence, their interests, their kindness, caring, and intuition. You are very fortunate if you received this kind of validation from your parents as you likely learned to do this for yourself from their role modeling.

I know that self-validation is not only possible, but absolutely necessary to feel content, inwardly peaceful, secure, worthy, and have loving relationships with others.

Stop judging yourself or, at the least, comparing yourself to some unimaginably high standard. Take loving action in your own behalf: eat well, get enough sleep and exercise, speak up for yourself with others without blame, create a balance between work and play, move yourself toward doing work you love, and so on.

You will discover yourself feeling better and better about yourself and needing less and less validation from others as you take these steps.

Posted in Counseling Concepts, General Musings, People (in general), People in general | Comments Off on Validation

Relax, at least you’re an American

Posted on June 30, 2019 by Dr Joseph Russo

Sometimes, the advent of July 4th gets me down. I am traveling on university business and as I sit in a hotel room in the middle of Germany – itself the epicenter of once-fanatical and now renewed nationalism – I am reflecting on the notion of Nationalism and, in particular, American Nationalism.

At one time in my life, that I was an American would have gone unspoken. One of those givens in an otherwise long equation to be solved, something to simply take for granted. Sure, it came under attack in the 60’s, when any number of radicals decided (for me, you will note) that America wasn’t worth the time of day and to therefore call oneself an American was somehow anachronistic. Happily, or perhaps naively, I walked around that noose.

It came under renewed attack in the 1980s when the radicals decided (for me yet again) that Ronald Reagan was illegitimate and a cowboy and surely the reason we will have all perished in a nuclear cloud of smoke. He was of course the epitome of “American” and happily we benefited from his time in office.

It came under attack again with the rise of Islamic terror and the Left’s knee-jerk response to apologize for all that American stood for as the reason for such violence. I recall asking a friend of mine, “do YOU feel a need to apologize? I mean, what did we do wrong?” Silly me – the answer was clear as day to those on the Far Left: America is full of white nationalists bent on destroying the world. If we simply apologize, they won’t fly airplanes into buildings, right?

Sadly, then, I began to wither under these repeated attacks and to doubt my basic, inherent Americanism. No need to send me away to a re-education camp. I was “getting” it: America is the reason for all the woes in the world and to be an American is to be, in essence, a white nationalist. AOC and other recently elected members of Congress (Ilhan Omar among them) remind us every day that merely having a border and wanting to enforce that border are signs that American nationalism is a malignant tumor to be cut from the face of the earth.

But wait a minute.

What is nationalism anyway? And is it inherently a bad thing? Can I be an American Nationalist and a good person at the same time?

Denis Prager’s column gives me hope that, yes, I can be. I reproduce it here for my own personal reference (and yours). I am withering no more.

PRAGER: Clarity About Nationalism

In order to make arguments for nationalism, we must define it.

The first definition in Merriam-Webster is “loyalty and devotion to a nation.” But in a second paragraph, it adds, “especially: a sense of national consciousness exalting one nation above all others and placing primary emphasis on promotion of its culture and interests as opposed to those of other nations or supranational groups.”

Let’s be clear: If the second paragraph is the only definition of nationalism, nationalism is always a bad thing. Furthermore, I acknowledge that this definition is what some people have in mind when they call themselves nationalists.

At the same time, even anti-nationalists would have to acknowledge that if the first paragraph is the definition of “nationalism,” nationalism can often be a beautiful thing.

So, if we are to be honest, the answer to the question of whether nationalism is good or bad is “How do you define it?”

Dictionary.com offers seven definitions.

  1. spirit or aspiration(s) common to the whole nation.
  2. devotion and loyalty to one’s own country; patriotism.
  3. excessive patriotism; chauvinism.
  4. the desire for national advancement or political independence.
  5. the policy or doctrine of asserting the interests of one’s own nation over others
  6. an idiom or trait peculiar to a nation.
  7. a movement, as in the arts, based upon the folk idioms, history, aspirations, etc., of a nation.

Note how it is only when we get to the third definition does the definition turn pejorative: “excessive patriotism; chauvinism.”

Therefore, a) based on the competing definitions of the term, b) assuming both definitions can be true and c) if intellectual honesty is to govern our discussion, we can reach only one conclusion:

There is good nationalism and there is bad nationalism — that is the ONLY accurate assessment (not “nationalism is always good” or “nationalism is always bad”).

Therefore, morally speaking, nationalism is no different from anything else in life.

  • There is moral violence (in self-defense, in defense of innocents, in defense of a society under unjust attack, etc.) and immoral violence (murder of innocents, wars of aggression, etc.).
  • There is moral sex (consensual sex between adults and, in the Judeo-Christian value system, within marriage) and immoral sex (such as rape, incest and with a child).
  • There is moral use of a gun (in self-defense, etc.) and immoral use of a gun (against an innocent, etc.).
  • Knives are used morally by chefs and surgeons and immorally by murderers, muggers and torturers.
  • Even love must be morally assessed according to context. Love is not always beautiful and moral. Germans’ love of Hitler, Chinese people’s love of Mao and Russians’ love of Stalin were evil.

Nationalism is beautiful when it involves commitment to an essentially decent nation and when it welcomes other people’s commitment to their nations. Nationalism is evil when it is used to celebrate an evil regime, when it celebrates a nation as inherently superior to all others and when it denigrates all other national commitments.

One should add that nationalism is evil when it celebrates race, but that is not nationalism; it is racism. Nationalism and racism may be conjoined, as German Nazism did. But they are not definitionally related. While some Americans have conjoined American nationalism with race (such as the Confederacy, the Ku Klux Klan and currently various fringe “white identity” movements), American nationalism, based as it is on the motto “e pluribus unum” (“out of many, one”), by definition includes Americans of all races and ethnicities. That is how conservatives define American nationalism.

I have never met a conservative who defined American national identity as definitionally “white.”

Otherwise, nationalism — the celebration of one’s nation and one’s national identity — is almost always a beautiful thing.

The creation of nations was a major moral achievement. It got people to identify with something beyond their families and tribes, which always involved violent feuds and warfare. The creation of the nation is one of the main reasons the West developed morally and in many other ways ahead of other cultures.

And the lack of a unifying national identity is one of the two main reasons (the other being corruption) that much of Africa lags behind other regions. If Hutus and Tutsis would have identified first as Rwandans, one of the worst genocides in the contemporary world — the Hutu slaughter of nearly 1 million Tutsis in a little over three months in 1994 — would likely never have happened. It was murder at a greater pace than the Nazi genocide of the Jews in the Holocaust — and without any modern machines of death. It was done one-on-one almost entirely using machetes.

Today, nationalism in Europe is increasing primarily because of the belief among many Europeans that the European Union is overbearing and because many Europeans do not believe that a “European” identity can offer anywhere near the comfort, emotional sustenance and communal ties a national identity offers.

Human beings need a descending order of commitments: first to something bigger than oneself (a God), then to oneself, then to one’s family, then to one’s community, then to one’s nation and then to humanity. It is neither possible nor praiseworthy to cry over a family killed in a car crash on the other side of the world as one would cry over the death of one’s own family or a family in one’s neighborhood or in one’s own country.

The great teaching of the Bible is “Love your neighbor as yourself.” It does not say “Love all of humanity as yourself.” Love must begin with our neighbor. It should never end with our neighbor, but it must begin with him.

Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk show host and columnist. His latest book, published by Regnery in April 2018, is “The Rational Bible,” a commentary on the book of Exodus. He is the founder of Prager University and may be contacted at www.dennisprager.com

Posted in General Musings, State of the Nation | Comments Off on Relax, at least you’re an American

Please Delete Facebook – And Here’s Another Reason Why

Posted on June 19, 2019 by Dr Joseph Russo

My regular readers know that for several years now I have recommended quitting Facebook. In my doctoral research, I came to read dozens of studies about how this social media site was contributing to a rise in depression diagnoses, an uptick in anxiety disorders, and (generally speaking) an increasingly useless waste of time for the average American.

Facebook began life as a way for founder Mark Zuckerberg to compare the attractiveness of girls in his dorm.  Hence, “face” book.  I needed no other reason to quite the site once I discovered that!  I mean, seriously?  In this age of #MeToo, are we willing to further subsidize such idiocy?  We are busy tearing down statues to confederate generals on the basis of ill repute.  Why not quit Facebook?

People will do stupid, disgusting things.  In the old days, it was limited to childhood pranks in the neighborhood or to alcohol-induced showmanship down to the local bar.  You went to jail and hopefully came out somewhat reformed.  Nowadays, you post videos of your stupid, disgusting acts and sit back and watch the “Likes” accumulate. Facebook is now a platform and as we know, juvenile stupid disgusting things said and done on the Internet never, really, go away.

Consequently, Facebook has had to engage so-called “content moderators” who look at this crap and decide whether to delete it. As with anything stupid and disgusting, one-upmanship abounds and the content moderators are overwhelmed, so much so that moderators are dying.

The following story is copyrighted to The Verge, an online magazine. I am posting it here for my own reference and yours, in hopes that it will encourage you, too, to quit Facebook. Here are its key findings:

  • Facebook’s content moderation site in Tampa, FL, which is operated by the professional services firm Cognizant, is its lowest-performing site in North America. It has never consistently enforced Facebook’s policies with 98 percent accuracy, as stipulated in Cognizant’s contract.
  • For the first time, three former Facebook moderators in North America are breaking their nondisclosure agreements and going on the record to discuss working conditions on the site.
  • A Facebook content moderator working for Cognizant in Tampa had a heart attack at his desk and died last year. Senior management initially discouraged employees from discussing the incident, for fear it would hurt productivity.
  • Tampa workers have filed two sexual harassment cases against coworkers since April. They are now before the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
  • Facilities at the Tampa site are often filthy, with workers reporting that the office’s only bathroom has repeatedly been found smeared with feces and menstrual blood.
  • Workers have also found pubic hair and fingernails at their desks, along with other bodily waste.
  • Verbal and physical fights at the office are common. So are reports of theft.
  • The Phoenix site has been dealing with an infestation of bed bugs for the past three months.
  • Facebook says it will conduct an audit of its partner sites and make other changes to promote the well-being of its contractors. It said it would consider making more moderators full-time employees in the future and hopes to someday provide counseling for moderators after they leave.

[the story begins here]

By Casey Newton [Twitter: @CaseyNewton] June 19, 2019, 8:00am EDT

At Facebook’s worst-performing content moderation site in North America, one contractor has died, and others say they fear for their lives. Take, for instance, Keith Utley, who loved to help.

First, he served in the Coast Guard, where he rose to the rank of lieutenant commander. He married, had a family, and devoted himself utterly to his two little girls. After he got out of the military, he worked as a moderator for Facebook, where he purged the social network of the worst stuff that its users post on a daily basis: the hate speech, the murders, the child pornography.

Utley worked the overnight shift at a Facebook content moderation site in Tampa, FL, operated by a professional services vendor named Cognizant. The 800 or so workers there face relentless pressure from their bosses to better enforce the social network’s community standards, which receive near-daily updates that leave its contractor workforce in a perpetual state of uncertainty. The Tampa site has routinely failed to meet the 98 percent “accuracy” target set by Facebook. In fact, with a score that has been hovering around 92, it is Facebook’s worst-performing site in North America.

The stress of the job weighed on Utley, according to his former co-workers, who, like all Facebook contractors at the Tampa site, must sign a 14-page nondisclosure agreement.

“The stress they put on him — it’s unworldly,” one of Utley’s managers told me. “I did a lot of coaching. I spent some time talking with him about things he was having issues seeing. And he was always worried about getting fired.”

On the night of March 9, 2018, Utley slumped over at his desk. Co-workers noticed that he was in distress when he began sliding out of his chair. Two of them began to perform CPR, but no defibrillator was available in the building. A manager called for an ambulance.

The Cognizant site in Tampa is set back from the main road in an office park, and between the dim nighttime lighting and discreet exterior signage, the ambulance appears to have had trouble finding the building. Paramedics arrived 13 minutes after the first call, one worker told me, and when they did, Utley had already begun to turn blue.

Paramedics raced Utley to a hospital. At Cognizant, some employees were distraught — one person told me he passed by one of the site’s designated “tranquility rooms” and found one of his co-workers, a part-time preacher, praying loudly in tongues. Others ignored the commotion entirely and continued to moderate Facebook posts as the paramedics worked.

Utley was pronounced dead a short while later at the hospital, the victim of a heart attack. Further information about his health history, or the circumstances of his death, could not be learned. He left behind a wife, Joni, and two young daughters. He was 42 years old.

On Monday morning, workers on the day shift were informed that there had been an incident, and they began collecting money to buy a card and send flowers. But some site leaders did not initially tell workers that Utley had died, and instructed managers not to discuss his death, current and former employees told me.

“Everyone at leadership was telling people he was fine — ‘oh, he’ll be okay,’” one co-worker recalled. “They wanted to play it down. I think they were worried about people quitting with the emotional impact it would have.”

But the illusion shattered later that day, when Utley’s father, Ralph, came to the site to gather his belongings. He walked into the building and, according to a co-worker I spoke to, said: “My son died here.”

In February, I wrote about the secret lives of Facebook contractors in America. Since 2016, when the company came under heavy criticism for failing to prevent various abuses of its platform, Facebook has expanded its workforce of people working on safety and security around the world to 30,000. About half of those are content moderators, and the vast majority are contractors hired through a handful of large professional services firms. In 2017, Facebook began opening content moderation sites in American cities including Phoenix, Austin, and Tampa. The goal was to improve the accuracy of moderation decisions by entrusting them to people more familiar with American culture and slang.

Cognizant received a two-year, $200 million contract from Facebook to do the work, according to a former employee familiar with the matter. But in return for policing the boundaries of free expression on one of the internet’s largest platforms, individual contractors in North America make as little as $28,800 a year. They receive two 15-minute breaks and a 30-minute lunch each day, along with nine minutes per day of “wellness” time that they can use when they feel overwhelmed by the emotional toll of the job. After regular exposure to graphic violence and child exploitation, many workers are subsequently diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and related conditions.

My initial report focused on Phoenix, where workers told me that they had begun to embrace fringe views after continuously being exposed to conspiracy theories at work. One brought a gun to work to protect himself against the possibility of a fired employee returning to the office seeking vengeance. Others told me they are haunted by visions of the images and videos they saw during their time on the job.

Conditions at the Phoenix site have not improved significantly since I visited. Last week, some employees were sent home after an infestation of bed bugs was discovered in the office — the second time bed bugs have been found there this year. Employees who contacted me worried that the infestation would spread to their own homes, and said managers told them Cognizant would not pay to clean their homes.

“Bed bugs can be found virtually every place people tend to gather, including the workplace,” Cognizant said in a statement. “No associate at this facility has formally asked the company to treat an infestation in their home. If someone did make such a request, management would work with them to find a solution.”

Facebook executives have maintained that the working conditions described to me by dozens of contractors do not accurately reflect the daily lives of the majority of its workers. But after publishing my story about Phoenix, I received dozens of messages from other contractors around the world, many of whom reported having similar experiences. The largest single group of messages I received came from current and former Facebook contractors in Tampa. Many of them have worked closely with employees at the Phoenix site and believe working conditions in Florida are even more grim.

In May, I traveled to Florida to meet with these Facebook contractors. This article is based on interviews with 12 current and former moderators and managers at the Tampa site. In most cases, I agreed to use pseudonyms to protect the employees from potential retaliation from Facebook and Cognizant. But for the first time, three former moderators for Facebook in North America agreed to break their nondisclosure agreements and discuss working conditions at the site on the record.

Employees told me that pressure from managers to improve its performance has taken a toll on the workforce. Cognizant’s contract with Facebook is coming up for renewal, and with the entire company struggling to hit the 98 percent accuracy target, there are widespread concerns internally that Cognizant will lose Facebook’s business.

Contractors told me that Cognizant had lured them away from less demanding jobs by promising regular schedules, bonuses, and career development, only to renege on all three.

They described a filthy workplace in which they regularly find pubic hair and other bodily waste at their workstations. Employees said managers laugh off or ignore sexual harassment and threats of violence. Two discrimination cases have been filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission since April.

They said marijuana use is so prevalent that the site manager jokingly complained at an all-hands meeting that he had gotten a contact high walking in the door.

More than anything else, the contractors described an environment in which they are never allowed to forget how quickly they can be replaced. It is a place where even Keith Utley, who died working alongside them, would receive no workplace memorial — only a passing mention during team huddles in the days after he passed. “There is no indication that this medical condition was work related,” Cognizant told me in a statement. “Our associate’s colleagues, managers and our client were all saddened by this tragic event.” (The client is Facebook.)

Utley’s family could not be reached for comment. Employees who began working after he died told me they had never heard his name.

“We were bodies in seats,” one former moderator told me. “We were nothing to them — at all.”

Shawn Speagle was 23 and employed at an online education company working with English language learners when he visited a Cognizant job fair. A recruiter there described to him a role in which Speagle would primarily help businesses analyze engagement on their Facebook pages. He might have to do some content moderation, the recruiter said, but Speagle entered the interview believing he was about to embark on a new career in high technology — one that he hoped would eventually lead to a full-time role at Facebook.

Cognizant offered Speagle $15 an hour to do the job full time — a marked improvement over his previous job, which was seasonal. Only after he began training did he realize that the job would not, in fact, involve helping businesses with Facebook marketing. Instead, two weeks after Speagle was put onto the production floor, a manager told him he and a colleague would be reviewing graphic violence and hate speech full time.

“For our associates who opt to work in content moderation, we are transparent about the work they will perform,” a Cognizant spokesman said in response. “They are made aware of the nature of the role before and during the hiring process, and then given extensive and specific training before working on projects.”

But had his managers asked, they would have learned that Speagle had a history of anxiety and depression, and that he might not be suited well for the role. No one did.

 “They just said me and [my colleague] were very meticulous and had a lot of promise to move up to the SME position,” Speagle said, referring to the subject matter experts who make $1 more per hour in exchange for answering moderators’ questions about Facebook policy. “They said Facebook is basically shoving all of their graphic violence content to us, that they didn’t want it anymore. So they had to move more people to cover it. And that’s all that we saw, every single day.”

Speagle vividly recalls the first video he saw in his new assignment. Two teenagers spot an iguana on the ground, and one picks it up by the tail. A third teenager films what happens next: the teen holding the iguana begins smashing it onto the street. “They beat the living shit out of this thing,” Speagle told me, as tears welled up in his eyes. “The iguana was screaming and crying. And they didn’t stop until the thing was a bloody pulp.”

Under the policy, the video was allowed to remain on Facebook. A manager told him that by leaving the video online, authorities would be able to catch the perpetrators. But as the weeks went on, the video continued to reappear in his queue, and Speagle realized that police were unlikely to look into the case.

Speagle had volunteered at animal shelters in the past, and watching the iguana die on a regular basis rattled him. “They kept reposting it again and again and again,” he said, pounding the table as he spoke. “It made me so angry. I had to listen to its screams all day.”

Cognizant’s Tampa facility opened in a maze-like office park in the summer of 2017, about two months after the Phoenix facility came online. It operates out of a single-story building next to a pond fed by two storm drains. On most days, an alligator emerges from one of the drains to bask in the sun.

Before the office opened, the company began advertising work on Indeed and other job sites, using opaque titles such as “social media analyst.” Initially, applicants are not told they will be working for Facebook — only a “large social media company.”

Cognizant was not always straightforward with applicants about the nature of the work in Tampa. Marcus*, who worked in management, told me that a recruiter had persuaded him to leave a more normal job with the promise of a regular schedule, performance bonuses, and a good work-life balance. Once he joined, though, he was made to work nights, and the bonuses never materialized.

Marcus was made to moderate Facebook content — an additional responsibility he says he was not prepared for. A military veteran, he had become desensitized to seeing violence against people, he told me. But on his second day of moderation duty, he had to watch a video of a man slaughtering puppies with a baseball bat. Marcus went home on his lunch break, held his dog in his arms, and cried. I should quit, he thought to himself, but I know there’s people at the site that need me. He ultimately stayed for a little over a year.

Cognizant calls the part of the building where contractors do their work “the production floor,” and it quickly filled with employees. The minimum wage in Florida is $8.46, and at $15 an hour, the job pays better than most call center work in the area. For many content moderators — Cognizant refers to them by the enigmatic title of “process executive” — it was their first real job.

In its haste to fill the workplace, Cognizant made some odd staffing decisions. Early on, the company hired Gignesh Movalia, a former investment advisor, as a moderator. Cognizant conducts background checks on new hires, but apparently failed even to run a basic web search on Movalia. Had they done so, they would have learned that in 2015 he was sentenced to 18 months in prison for his involvement in a $9 million investment fraud scheme. According to the FBI, Movalia had falsely claimed to have access to shares of a fast-growing technology startup about to begin trading on the public market.

The startup was Facebook.

Movalia was eventually fired, but employees I spoke with believed his tenure exemplified Cognizant’s approach to hiring moderators: find bodies wherever you can, ask as few questions as possible, and get them into a seat on the production floor where they can start working.

The result is a raucous workplace where managers send regular emails to the staff complaining about their behavior on the site. Nearly every person I interviewed independently compared the Tampa office to a high school. Loud altercations, often over workplace romances, regularly take place between co-workers. Verbal and physical fights break out on a monthly basis, employees told me. A dress code was instituted to discourage employees from wearing provocative clothing to work — “This is not a night club,” read an email to all employees obtained by The Verge. Another email warned employees that there had been “numerous incidents of theft” on the property, including stolen food from the office refrigerator, food from vending machines, and employees’ personal items.

Michelle Bennetti and Melynda Johnson both began working at the Tampa site in June 2018. They told me that the daily difficulty of moderating content, combined with a chaotic office environment, made life miserable.

“At first it didn’t bother me — but after a while, it started taking a toll,” Bennetti told me. “I got to feel, like, a cloud — a darkness — over me. I started being depressed. I’m a very happy, outgoing person, and I was [becoming] withdrawn. My anxiety went up. It was hard to get through it every day. It started affecting my home life.”

Johnson was particularly disturbed by the site’s sole bathroom, which she regularly found in a state of disrepair. (The company says it has janitors available every shift in Tampa.) In the stalls, signs posted in response to employee misbehavior proliferated. Do not use your feet to flush the toilet. Do not flush more than five toilet seat covers at one time. Do not put any substances, natural or unnatural, on the walls.

“And obviously the signs are there for a reason, because people are doing this,” said Johnson, who worked at the site until March. “Every bit of that building was absolutely disgusting. You’d go in the bathroom and there would be period blood and poop all over the place. It smelled horrendous all the time.”

She added: “It’s a sweatshop in America.”

The workday in Tampa is divided into five shifts, and desks are shared between employees. Contractors I spoke with said they would frequently come to work and find their workstation for the day in dire condition — encountering boogers, fingernails, and pubic hairs, among other items. The desks would be cleaned whenever Facebook made one of its regular planned visits to the site. At other times, employees told me, the office was filthy.

Florida law does not require employers to offer sick leave, and so Cognizant workers who feel ill must instead use personal leave time. (They are granted five hours of personal leave per pay period.) Missing work is one of the few reasons Cognizant regularly fires its contractors. And so to avoid receiving an “occurrence,” as the company calls unapproved absences, contractors who have exhausted their break time come to work sick — and occasionally vomit in trash cans on the production floor.

A worker named Lola* told me that health problems had resulted in her receiving so many occurrences she was at risk of being fired. She began going into work even when she felt ill to the point of throwing up. Facebook contractors are required to use a browser extension to report every time they use the restroom, but during a recent illness, Lola quickly took all her allotted breaks. She had previously been written up for going to the bathroom too many times, she said, and so she felt afraid to get up from her desk. A manager saw that she was not feeling well and brought a trash can to her desk so she could vomit in it. So, she did.

“Then I was crying at my desk,” Lola said. “I was like, ‘I can’t go on.’ My co-workers said, ‘Just go home.’ I said, ‘I can’t, because I’m going to get an occurrence.’” She stayed at her desk and cried.

Employees told me about other disturbing incidents at the Tampa site. Among them:

An employee who used a colostomy bag had it rupture while she was at work, spilling some waste onto the floor. Senior managers were overheard mocking her. She eventually quit.

An employee who threatened to “shoot up the building” in a group chat was placed on paid leave and allowed to return. He was fired after making another similar threat. (A Cognizant spokesperson said the company has security personnel on site at all hours. “Our goal is to ensure that our employees feel assured that they work in a safe environment,” he said.)

Another employee broadcast himself on Facebook Live talking about wanting to bash a manager’s head in. Another manager determined that he was making a joke, and he was not disciplined.

In April, two women who work at the Tampa site filed complaints with the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission alleging that they had been sexually harassed by two of their male co-workers. According to the complaint, the men regularly discussed anal sex in the office. When the women were not receptive to the discussion, one of the men said he “was going to start a YouTube channel and record himself shooting up the place,” according to the complaint. On April 3rd, the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office came to the site to interview the women. According to the officer’s report, one of the men had been photographed following one of the women to her home.

A Cognizant spokesman told me that the employee has been suspended while the claims are being investigated. But some workers say they are still concerned.

“Every time I get an email or a phone call from my clients, I worry that there’s been a shooting — and I know that’s their worry as well,” said KC Hopkinson, an attorney who represents several current and former Cognizant employees in Tampa. “They go in there every morning asking, ‘what am I going to see today? And am I going to make it home tonight?’”

Hopkinson told me that her clients who have reported incidents to human resources are generally either ignored or retaliated against, a claim that was echoed to me by several other employees there. In some cases, the site’s human resources staff has followed workers who filed complaints to the bathroom and questioned them about what they were doing for the few minutes they were inside. (“We take allegations such as this very seriously,” a company spokesman told me. “Cognizant strives to create a safe and empowering workplace.”)

“I wouldn’t want my worst enemy to work there,” Hopkinson said. “It’s a terrible, terrible environment.”

For the six months after he was hired, Speagle would moderate 100 to 200 posts a day. He watched people throw puppies into a raging river and put lit fireworks in dogs’ mouths. He watched people mutilate the genitals of a live mouse and chop off a cat’s face with a hatchet. He watched videos of people playing with human fetuses, and says he learned that they are allowed on Facebook “as long as the skin is translucent.” He found that he could no longer sleep for more than two or three hours a night. He would frequently wake up in a cold sweat, crying.

Early on, Speagle came across a video of two women in North Carolina encouraging toddlers to smoke marijuana and helped to notify the authorities. (Moderator tools have a mechanism for escalating issues to law enforcement, and the women were eventually convicted of misdemeanor child abuse.) To Speagle’s knowledge, though, the crimes he saw every day never resulted in legal action being taken against the perpetrators. The work came to feel pointless, never more so than when he had to watch footage of a murder or child pornography case that he had already removed from Facebook.

In June 2018, a month into his job, Facebook began seeing a rash of videos that purportedly depicted organs being harvested from children. (It did not.) So many graphic videos were reported that they could not be contained in Speagle’s queue.

“I was getting the brunt of it, but it was leaking into everything else,” Speagle said. “It was mass panic. All the SMEs had to rush in there and try to help people. They were freaking out — they couldn’t handle it. People were crying, breaking down, throwing up. It was like one of those horror movies. Nobody’s prepared to see a little girl have her organs taken out while she’s still alive and screaming.” Moderators were told they had to watch at least 15 to 30 seconds of each video.

Speagle helps to take care of his parents, who have health problems, and was afraid to quit Cognizant. “It was tough to find a job down here in this market,” he said. To cope with the stress, he began binge-eating pastries from the vending machines, and eventually put on a significant amount of weight. He sought out the on-site counselor for support but found him unhelpful.

“He just flat-out told me: ‘I don’t really know how to help you guys,’” Speagle said. The counselor he spoke with had been substituting for the regular counselor, who had more training. Cognizant also offers a 24/7 hotline, full healthcare benefits, and other wellness programs. But the experience soured Speagle on the site’s mental health resources. Other times, when he was having a particularly bleak day in the queue, a manager would hand him a bucket of Legos and encourage him to play with them to relieve the stress as he worked. Speagle built a house and a spaceship, but it didn’t make him feel better.

By last fall, Speagle told me, he was sleeping only an hour or two each night. The lack of sleep, coupled with depression, made it difficult for him to exercise. He began lashing out at his parents. Meanwhile, at work, he felt micromanaged by his team leaders, who pressured him to moderate more posts.

“I felt like I was trapped inside my own body,” he said. “I couldn’t, for the life of me, get up from my desk, or I would be yelled at to stay in my desk. So I was trapped at my desk and in my body. I was so scared.”

Cognizant periodically purges large numbers of staff members in what have come to be known as “red bag days” for the red bags that managers give to the newly fired to collect their belongings. Sometimes the dismissals are related to job performance, and sometimes employees aren’t given any explanation at all. Speagle was laid off as part of a red bag day last October.

In February, he went to a psychiatrist, who diagnosed him with PTSD. He is currently in treatment. Meanwhile, he has gone back to school to get his teaching certificate. Seeing so many children harmed on Facebook made him want to make a positive contribution to the lives of young people, he said.

“I really wanted to make a difference,” Speagle told me of his time working for Facebook. “I thought this would be the ultimate difference-making thing. Because it’s Facebook. But there’s no difference being made.”

I asked him what he thought needed to change.

“I think Facebook needs to shut down,” he said.

Last week, I visited the Tampa site with a photographer. It had received a deep cleaning the night before I visited, according to two employees I spoke with, and the bathroom sparkled. As I walked the floor with the site manager and a Facebook spokeswoman, I noted that most rooms smelled of cleaning products.

Work stopped while we were there to ensure we did not see any Facebook user’s personal information. Moderators, mostly in their 20s and 30s, chatted at their desks, or shot baskets in one of the miniature hoops around the building. The site’s senior managers, who employees say are normally cloistered in their offices, made a show of walking the production floor and chatting with their subordinates.

Every few feet, a wall decal or poster offered an inspirational platitude. Exhortations to always try your hardest and maintain a positive attitude were punctuated with other signs that came across as slightly more sinister. “No news is good news,” read one. “Our reputation depends on you,” read another.

We saw an activity room where workers are invited to participate in yoga sessions, and a break room presided over by a small Buddha holding an electric candle. Across the room from the Buddha, coloring books were fanned out on a table beside windows overlooking the alligator pond.

The tour ended about an hour after we arrived.

“That was a dog-and-pony show,” an employee named Bob told me over the phone the next day. “That was completely staged. We’re out there playing games, and the senior management are out there interacting with people — it’s all a facade.”

Facebook sees a similar facade when it visits the site, he said.

The person responsible for managing Facebook’s growing contractor workforce is Arun Chandra, whose title is vice president of scaled support. Chandra arrived at Facebook last November after a long career at HP, where he helped to oversee the company’s global supply chain. In his new role, he told me, he hopes to gradually improve contractors’ standard of living while also working to ensure they become more effective at their jobs.

Signage inside a stall of the women’s bathroom at Cognizant in Tampa, FL.

“I’m trying to address the macro picture, and move the bigger things forward in the right way,” said Chandra, who struck me as energetic and deeply sincere. “We’ll never solve 100 percent, but I’m trying to show I can solve 80 to 90 percent of the larger problems.”

Chandra has visited more than a dozen of the company’s far-flung partner sites in the United States and abroad and has plans to visit them all. When he arrives, he likes to pull rank-and-file contractors into rooms and ask them about working conditions without their managers around. He told me that in the Philippines, content moderation has become an attractive career track, and that everywhere he goes, he meets moderators who take great pride in their work. “The level of enthusiasm people have is amazing,” he said.

This spring, Chandra organized a summit of around 200 leaders from content moderation sites around the world — an event he plans to hold twice a year, with another coming this fall. Up until now, vendors have had different policies and programs for promoting workers’ mental health. At the summit, they agreed to share information about their approaches — effectively agreeing to stop competing on the basis of who does a better job taking care of workers.

“We have to run a very large-scale platform. We have to take care of the community. And that means we have to get a whole lot of work done,” Chandra said. “But that is not at the expense of [contractors’] well-being.”

Chandra plans to launch a new audit program later this year to promote better working conditions. That will include more surprise visits — an effort to get around the dog-and-pony-show phenomenon I observed last week. He also plans to stop evaluating partners on the sole basis of whether vendors achieve a 98 percent accuracy rate — instead, he said, Facebook will develop a balanced “scorecard” approach to measuring vendors’ performance. Chandra intends for worker well-being to be part of that score, though Facebook has not yet determined how it will be measured.

In May, Facebook announced that it will raise contractor wages by $3 an hour, make on-site counselors available during all hours of operation, and develop further programs for its contractor workforce. But the pay raises are not due to take effect until the middle of 2020, by which time many, if not most, of the current Tampa workforce will no longer work there. Turnover statistics could not be obtained. But few moderators I have spoken with make it to two years on the job — they either are fired for low accuracy scores or quit over the working conditions. And so, while the raises will be a boon to a future workforce, the contractors I spoke to are unlikely to benefit.

Nor will the many contractors who have already left the job. As in Phoenix, former employees of the Tampa site described lasting emotional disturbances from their work — one for which neither Facebook nor Cognizant offers any support.

I asked Chandra whether Facebook should hire more content moderators in house, rather than relying on big staffing companies. He told me that Facebook’s business changes so quickly that it might not be possible. But he did not rule it out.

“I completely get the debate,” he said. “If anything, I’m very empathetic to the entire conversation, having spent a lot of time with these people. I don’t think we have a better answer right now.”

In the meantime, Facebook is building a “global resiliency team” tasked with improving the well-being of both full-time employees and contractors. Chris Harrison, who leads the team, told me that he aspires to build a wellness program that begins at the point of hiring. He wants to screen employees to gauge their psychological fitness — a move that might prevent someone like Shawn Speagle from being assigned to a queue filled with graphic violence — but says Facebook is still working to understand whether this is possible under employment law.

Harrison plans to make “resiliency” — the art of bouncing back after seeing something awful — a key part of contractor training. He helped to develop new tools for moderators that can automatically blur out faces in disturbing videos, turn them grayscale, or mute the audio — all things that can reduce the psychological harm to the moderator viewing them.

Eventually, Harrison hopes Facebook will offer post-employment counseling to moderators who suffered psychological harm on the job. “Of course, we should do that,” he said. But the idea is still in the earliest discussion stages, he said. “There’s just so many layers of complexity globally. It’s really, really hard to pull it off in a legally compliant way.”

I asked Harrison, a licensed clinical psychologist, whether Facebook would ever seek to place a limit on the amount of disturbing content a moderator is given in a day. How much is safe?

“I think that’s an open question,” he said. “Is there such thing as too much? The conventional answer to that would be, of course, there can be too much of anything. Scientifically, do we know how much is too much? Do we know what those thresholds are? The answer is no, we don’t. Do we need to know? Yeah, for sure.”

“If there’s something that were to keep me up at night, just pondering and thinking, it’s that question,” Harrison continued. “How much is too much?”

If you believe moderation is a high-skilled, high-stakes job that presents unique psychological risks to your workforce, you might hire all of those workers as full-time employees. But if you believe that it is a low-skill job that will someday be done primarily by algorithms, you probably would not.

Instead, you would do what Facebook, Google, YouTube, and Twitter have done, and hire companies like Accenture, Genpact, and Cognizant to do the work for you. Leave to them the messy work of finding and training human beings, and of laying them all off when the contract ends. Ask the vendors to hit some just-out-of-reach metric and let them figure out how to get there.

At Google, contractors like these already represent a majority of its workforce. The system allows tech giants to save billions of dollars a year, while reporting record profits each quarter. Some vendors may turn out to mistreat their workers, threatening the reputation of the tech giant that hired them. But countless more stories will remain hidden behind nondisclosure agreements.

In the meantime, tens of thousands of people around the world go to work each day at an office where taking care of the individual person is always someone else’s job. Where at the highest levels, human content moderators are viewed as a speed bump on the way to an AI-powered future.

In such a system, offices can still look beautiful. They can have colorful murals and serene meditation rooms. They can offer ping pong tables and indoor putting greens and miniature basketball hoops emblazoned with the slogan: “You matter.” But the moderators who work in these offices are not children, and they know when they are being condescended to. They see the company roll an oversized Connect 4 game into the office, as it did in Tampa this spring, and they wonder: When is this place going to get a defibrillator?

(Cognizant did not respond to questions about the defibrillator.)

I believe Chandra and his team will work diligently to improve this system as best as they can. By making vendors like Cognizant accountable for the mental health of their workers for the first time and offering psychological support to moderators after they leave the company, Facebook can improve the standard of living for contractors across the industry.

But it remains to be seen how much good Facebook can do while continuing to hold its contractors at arms’ length. Every layer of management between a content moderator and senior Facebook leadership offers another chance for something to go wrong — and to go unseen by anyone with the power to change it.

“Seriously Facebook, if you want to know, if you really care, you can literally call me,” Melynda Johnson told me. “I will tell you ways that I think that you can fix things there. Because I do care. Because I really do not think people should be treated this way. And if you do know what’s going on there, and you’re turning a blind eye, shame on you.”

Concluding Note

Disgusting and sad. There will always be people who revel in the absurd and the disgusting and the absolutely inhuman stuff. But why give them this platform? Why be a part of it?

I say, “Delete Facebook from your life and do something else with you time.”

Posted in Blogging, Business, Counseling Concepts, General Musings, People (in general), People in general, State of the Nation | Comments Off on Please Delete Facebook – And Here’s Another Reason Why

Resilience in the Face of Harsh Criticism – Here’s a CURE

Posted on June 18, 2019 by Dr Joseph Russo

Most of us have been “gobsmacked” at some point in our life. Learning how to deal with it is crucial

I love that word – gobsmacked. I learned it whilst living in Australia a few years back. Basically, it means surprised but in a rather negative way. Usually it comes in the form of a verbal wallop that rocks our world. It blasts everything about us and tests (perhaps confirms?) what we thought about ourselves.

Bad supervisors abound. The Peter Principle™ is alive and well. Consequently, many “leaders” are more likely to talk than to listen. Bad leaders have no filter and tend to say whatever is on their minds. Insecure in their position, they are apt to blame others. A bad supervisor may have said …

  • “You aren’t hearing me! Shut up, shut up, shut up.”
  • “Think about leaving — I need warriors not wimps”
  • “You only want to be right. You are manipulative. You don’t care about others”
  • “This line of work does not suit you”
  • “I think it’s time you consider looking for another job”
  • “The hole you’ve dug for yourself is just too deep.”

In my own life I can recall a comment from a superior who, in hindsight, was the one most unsuited for his role. He should never have been promoted into a position of such power. But, no matter – he was the one in charge.  He said to me in an annual performance review, “I cannot believe you have a master’s degree in this stuff! You are fucking clueless.”  To this day I can still feel my physical response – a sickening bile rising in my throat. My weak knees. My urge to flee (rather than stay and fight).

Even less severe comments are just as damaging to our self-image. Snide little passive aggressive comments can be just as powerful.  And for most of us, there is no amount of courage that can be summoned in the moment to fight back.  Most people will describe their immediate emotional response to both severe and less-severe comments with words like dumbfounded, flabbergasted, shocked, stunned, or numb.  They reported a welling of shame and embarrassment. Words like worthlessness, hurt, sadness, and self-doubt, came out.

Look, we all crave approval from our superiors. At the same time, we fear hearing the truth, or at least the “truth” that our most critical inner self believes to be the case. When someone delivers the truth, we are stunned that someone else sees what our inner critic has been telling us all along – that we are useless. We all live with an undercurrent of terror that we aren’t worthy. Critical feedback only confirms this.

Moreover, critical feedback threatens two of our most fundamental psychological needs: safety and belonging through worth. Safety is all about physical safety but also social safety. Belonging through worth is all about those erstwhile notions of social acceptance, self-respect, self-regard, or self-confidence. Safety is often over-valued in the sense that little of what a boss does and says can actually result in being less safe in a strict sense. After all, words can never hurt us, right?

But there are times when feedback does include threats to our safety. The most common feedback (if we can call it that) is, “I’m going to fire you.” In this moment our lives flash before us. All that we have worked toward, or are working for, is now threatened, almost at an existential level.

Fear is a natural response. Fear and dread. Fear of becoming destitute. Dread of the immediate future.

Anyway, the only answer is to build what therapists call resilience, otherwise known as thick skin. While most of us crave the approval of powerful people and hope that their positive endorsement might finally quiet feelings of nagging inadequacy, it is inescapable that when it doesn’t come, or when the exact opposite is delivered, we are crushed.

Leaders – supervisor, bosses – who engage in this kind of character assassination are themselves suffering from any number of inadequacies of their own. But this piece isn’t about them. It’s about what YOU can do to find the relevant “truth” inside of harsh criticisms and thereby build resilience.

We need to learn how to play the game, so to speak, and to take relentless criticism with the old-fashioned inner knowledge that, “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.”

  • It isn’t easy, but once you learn that YOU are responsible for your own safety, you can endure almost any delivery.
  • You are responsible for reminding yourself of your own self-efficacy.
  • You are responsible for scouring the feedback for actionable truths.
  • Remember this: The feedback is either true, false, or more often, a mix of the two.
  • Learn, therefore, to parse out the falsehoods and hang onto the kernels of worth.

There is a process that can be followed, and researchers call it the CURE. It’s an easily remembered acronym and involves processes of …

(C) Collecting Yourself. Breathe deeply and slowly. Remind yourself that you are safe.  It can act as a signal that you don’t need to be aroused for physical defense. Noticing your feelings helps, too. Are you hurt, scared, embarrassed, ashamed?  The more connected you are to these primary feelings the less you become consumed with secondary effects like anger, defensiveness, or exaggerated fear. Collect yourself by consciously connecting with soothing truths, for example by repeating phrases like, “This can’t hurt me. I’m safe,” or “If I made a mistake, it doesn’t mean I am a mistake.”

(U) Understanding What’s Going On. Seek understanding. Be curious. Ask questions.  Ask for examples. And then just listen. Detach yourself from what is being said as though it is being said about a third person. I call this “going clinical.” Step outside of yourself and bypass the need to evaluate what you’re hearing. Simply act like a good reporter trying to understand the story.

(R) Recovery. When it’s right, simply remove yourself. Explain that you want some time to reflect and that you’ll respond when you have a chance to do so. Give yourself permission to feel and recover from the experience before doing any evaluation of what you heard.  Simply say, “I will take a look at that.”  However, don’t engagement in agreement or, for that matter, disagreement. Simply promise to look sincerely at what you were told on your own time. You can end a challenging episode by simply saying, “It’s important to me that I get this right. I need some time. And I’ll get back to you to let you know where I come out.”

(E) Examining what you were told. If you’ve done a good job reassuring yourself of your safety and worth, rather than poking holes in the feedback, look for truth. If it’s 90% fluff and 10% substance, look for the substance. There is almost always at least a kernel of truth in what people are telling you. Scour the message until you find it. Then, if appropriate, re-engage with the person who shared the feedback and acknowledge what you heard, what you accept, and what you commit to do. At times, this may mean sharing your view of things. If you’re doing so with no covert need for their approval, you won’t need to be defensive.

Don’t go about living life waiting for someone to come along who will point out just how worthless you truly are.

You aren’t.

Every single human being has worth. If you can learn to cultivate your resilience you become far better equipped to deal with a life that was never meant to be fair. Don’t let the bastards get you down.

Posted in Business, Counseling Concepts, General Musings, People (in general), People in general | 2 Comments

Manana Never Comes – Start TODAY

Posted on June 9, 2019 by Dr Joseph Russo

If I have learned anything in my old age it’s that I am far more disappointed by the things I didn’t do, than by the things I did do. Indeed, many people spend most of their time thinking about what they will do and who they will be(come) mañana.

But this means that you are forgetting to live in the present moment. We don’t do what we want to do today, and then we fool ourselves by thinking that tomorrow will be different than today. Remember this: Tomorrow is a fantasy—you can’t finish something if you haven’t started it. The point of this post is that all of us need to stop postponing to tomorrow what we can do today. Said another way, “start living the life that you want today.”

After a while, and with repeated effort at excusing our own inaction, we in effect become our excuses. Excuses are an easy way out for not doing what you want most in life.

Long ago, researchers looked at what motivates people to change. Their work arose, principally, out of the smoking cessation movements of the late 1950s and early 1960s and what was then perceived as people’s inability change, to stop smoking. One useful model that came out of all of that research was the so-called Stages of Change Model, which has as its components the following stages: Pre-Contemplation, Contemplation, Preparation, Action and then Maintenance. I will write in more detail about the Stages of Change Model in another post.

In my work as a coach (and previously as a counselor), I find that most clients are stuck in pre-contemplation (with respect to whatever it is that they want to address). In fact, when they do come to see me, the “problem” is not the problem insofar as their own assessment of trouble is concerned. We work to uncover that as sessions unfold.

Here’s the thing: Change happens the moment you stop fearing, and then start wanting, something. Most people fail to accomplish what they want simply because they do not start. We know that procrastination is a passive behavior—much like watching television, we merely stare at our dreams but do nothing to enact them.

Of course, what is really happening is a kind of “overthinking,” or what I call 100% disease. We will only commit to what we want to do when we have de-risked everything about it. The problem with overthinking and with 100% disease is that nothing is ever certain. As I say in my classroom, nothing is ever proven. Period.

I am reminded of this notion: If babies were overthinkers, we wouldn’t learn to walk.

Moreover, when we think too much, we start to doubt ourselves. When we judge our abilities, not “knowing” becomes a barrier. To become good at something we must experiment first. To achieve what you love requires courage—you must take the first step into the unknown.

Naturally, if you want to do something different, people will tell you “watch out.” Not because they want to protect you—it’s their own fear they want to hide. There’s one thing most successful people have in common. And it’s not just courage—they have clarity. Once you know what you want it’s easier to go for it.

Overthinking clouds our dreams. When you really know what you want, you become unstoppable. So, how can you get there?

Answer: decide what you want most in life and then “burn your ships.”

Think of a dream as like a shining beacon, a lighthouse. It is the physical manifestation of a mission. No matter how tremendous the storm, no matter the winds of evil, you will always get there safe. Having a mission in life gives you clarity and direction.

A mission clearly defined is all about designing your life around a clear purpose. I especially like this graphic (above) borrowed from a recent piece in Psychology Today.

Notice that it has three key elements:

  1. Your purpose: Your Why. What drives you? What makes you enjoy what you do regardless of the difficulty? Purpose provides clarity and drives your actions—especially your choices. It can even extend your life (see https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/flourish-and-thrive/201906/the-importance-having-sense-purpose)
  2. What you do: All the activities you perform (routines, work, hobbies, roles you play, etc.). For this I add the axiom: How you do anything is how you do everything. Make sense?
  3. Your achievements: The result of your actions. It doesn’t matter how driven you are or how much you do. The impact you create becomes your measure of personal success. Another axiom: you are the sum-total of all the choices you’ve made in life.

When what you do is aligned with your purpose, it drives personal fulfillment. When what you do creates a positive impact, it gives you the motivation to continue doing it or to do it more often or wanting to improve your craft. When what you achieve is aligned with your purpose it makes you feel good. Yet another axiom: Dale Carnegie once said, “Happiness is wanting what you get.” It means blooming where you are planted. It means that you are grateful for your achievements.

The intersection between your purpose, what you do, and what you achieve defines the life that you want.

Nothing is perfect, including that graphic above. Life is not perfect. But that diagram is a great place to start when looking for the life that you want. It will mean that you are headed in the right direction.

Who was it that said, “Beyond a certain point, there is no return. This point has to be reached.” And to get to it, you MUST start. Like the baby learning to walk, you must take the first step. You must find that point of no return.

One other thing: Relax: Nothing is under control. You cannot either control external events nor other people. But you can control your choices. Your decisions will get you closer (or not) to accomplish what you want the most in life. Waiting for tomorrow doesn’t help.

The Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortéz was on a mission back in 1519. His commitment to conquer Mexico was such that retreat was not an option. That’s why he ordered his men to burn all the ships. The only way to keep everyone from quitting was to take their transportation back to Spain off the table. Hence, a point of no return. The only way forward is … forward.

Burn your ships. Be them comfort or fear or procrastination, you must burn them. The point of no return is when your purpose and what you do are aligned. Only you can tell you what to desire. No one is better suited than yourself to design, build, and enjoy the life that you want.

Start today. Manana never comes.

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