Having Fun Yet? Lessons from “Good Will Hunting”

Have you seen the 1997 movie, “Good Will Hunting?”

Matt Damon plays a troubled, self-educated genius (Will Hunting). He falls in love with a Harvard student played by Minnie Driver (Skylar).

In one scene, Will and Skylar are having coffee at an outdoor café. Will stares lovingly at Skylar who is absorbed in her organic chemistry book. She really needs to study, she tells him, because she wants to get into medical school.

Will asks if he can help and Skylar asks if he has ever read about organic chemistry. “A little,” Will replies. Skylar thinks he’s joking. “No one reads organic chemistry for fun,” she says. Will doesn’t reply.

It occurs to me that Will might be thinking, ”Of course some people read organic chemistry for fun. I do.”

Indeed, some people study calculus for fun. Others have fun reading English or French literature. What one person finds boring another finds to be a blast. I had the insight that fun, as well as every other emotion we experience, is created, not discovered. Reading organic chemistry is fun if one chooses to see it that way. There is nothing inherently boring or exciting about anything. Anything.

Consider the possibility that this is true of all our experiences. We think that one experience is inherently more fun or enjoyable or exciting than another. Just the opposite is correct. We create the feeling and then attach it, incorrectly, to the experience.

That night, I had a conversation with a woman who was worried about money because she had less money than she would like and she was suffering because of it. She dramatized her worries by saying she was “in survival.” Her circumstance of having less money than she would like describes the condition of every human being on the planet no matter how much money they have. She chose to call this condition being “in survival.”

I’m not saying poverty is preferable to riches (or that riches are preferable to poverty). But consider what becomes available if we accept that our happiness is independent of our circumstances and that we can be happy no matter our circumstances. Not because those circumstances are inherently happy or unhappy but because we choose how we will be in the face of our circumstances.

We think our circumstances have to be great for us to be happy. This is a trick we play on ourselves to keep us trying to fix our circumstances and then wondering, with each fix, why we aren’t yet happy (certainly a new car, new house, new relationship, new job will change everything. Right?).

Until we recognize that our happiness is independent of our circumstances, we are doomed to live the saying,”The more things change, the more they remain the same.”

Change Management: We Aren’t Creating A Future…We’re Recreating A Past

Have you noticed that history repeats itself? Have you noticed that today’s news is exactly the same as the news from 100 years ago? The settings for the stories have changed, but the stories are the same: What’s happening in the latest war? What scandal is grabbing our attention? How’s the economy doing?

On a personal basis, are you in a relationship where you are in conflicts that never gets resolved? Are you in a job that has grown boring because nothing ever changes? Or are you in a job where change is constant but you’re unhappy because you look into the future and can’t see how things will ever change? Have you noticed that life isn’t quite as exciting today as it was when you were 7 and hated to go to bed and couldn’t wait to wake up?

Why does our human history and our personal history keep repeating itself? It’s because we don’t really create a new future. We simply repeat the past and call that the future. Instead of creating a new future, we recreate a past that has already happened and call that the future.

Consider these decisions from the past that create our behavior in the future: We didn’t like spinach in the past, so we decide to never eat spinach again in the future. We didn’t like a ballet we went to, so we decide we’ll never go to another one in the future. We’ve been on diets, lost weight and put it on again, so we decide we’re never going to go through that frustration again in the future.  We trusted someone in the past and got burned, so we decide we’ll never trust again in the future. We resisted change in the past so we resist change in the future as well.

Change, by definition, occurs in the future. But what evidence do we tend to use to decide what to do in the future?  Don’t we, in fact, tend to look for evidence from the past

and then make decisions about how we’ll behave in the future?

We look to our past experience, project that experience out into the future and imagine that the future will be just like the past. And, guess what? It usually is. In fact, the future can’t be anything other than some variation of the past. We’ve created that future by predicting it from our past. Case closed!

Now you know why history keeps repeating itself. Organizations often create futures (called “strategies”) based on the past and then live into that past...not the future. Individuals create futures (called “visions” or “dreams”) based on the past and then live into that past…not the future.

It’s a self fulfilling prophecy: We create a future based on our past and then wonder why the past is just like the future.

But to create a truly new future we have to let go of the past. It no longer exists. But we also have to recognize that the future doesn’t yet exist either. We can look back and see that we’ve created our past. What’s not as obvious to us is that we’ve already created our future by filling it up with so much of our past.

You know why the saying, “Today is the first day of the rest of your life” is a cliché? Because it’s so obviously accurate. But today won’t be the first day of the rest of your life is it’s already filled up with what you did yesterday.

Today, when you create your to do list, really create it. Not from your past, but from what you choose for your future. 

Conflict Resolution Training: Lessons From “The Soloist”

Have you seen the movie, “The Soloist?” It’s based on a true story about Steve Lopez, an LA Times reporter and Nathaniel Ayers, a homeless man whom Lopez encounters on the street.

Ayers was a brilliant musician with a great future ahead of him until he started hearing voices in his head that told him the world was an unsafe place. These voices led him to a life on the streets where the reporter encountered him.

We may think we’re very different from Nathaniel but are we really? Don’t we also believe some (certainly not all) of the voices in our heads? Like us, Nathaniel didn’t believe every voice he heard. But he did believe some of them.

Consider the possibility that it’s the voices we do believe, the one’s we’re sure are “true” that keep us stuck.

For example, consider the statement, “Change takes a long time.” Let that one rattle in your mind for a moment. This is a statement commonly held. Almost everyone I encounter believes it.

But is it true or are we, like Nathaniel, believing voices that aren’t real?

Consider instead this voice: Change happens in an instant which, of course, it does. We experience this almost daily when we go from a dreaming state to a waking one.

It’s actually not the change that takes a long time. It’s getting ready to change that takes a long time. How long do smokers wait before they decide to quit? How long do dieters obsess before choosing to stick to a diet? How long do people who “hate exercise” delay before going for a daily walk?

The change happens in an instant. It can take a lifetime to get ready for that change. Some people never do.

Now consider being in a relationship where there’s conflict. How long do we wait before making the instantaneous decision to give up being right? How long do we wait before making the instantaneous decision to forgive? How long do we wait before making the instantaneous decision to listen to what people tell us they need to resolve the conflict?

We define the waiting as “hard” and confuse that with the actual change which is easy.

So watch “The Soloist” and, as you do, imagine that a little bit of Nathaniel is in each one of us and it’s that “Nathaniel within” that keeps us stuck doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome.

Conflict Resolution Training: It’s Time To Change Our “Human Nature”

Folks, it’s about time for “human nature” to change. Whose “human nature?” Yours and mine.

Have you noticed that the news today is basically the same as it was yesterday, a year ago, a decade ago and a hundred years ago?

Perhaps the “news” of your life is the same as it has been for decades. I spoke with a woman the other day who hadn’t talked to an uncle for 16 years because she thought he had criticized her hairstyle at a family gathering when she was 12.

It seems that we are stuck in a time warp of conflict and recrimination.

I was listening to a radio show and the host facetiously said, “Let’s kill all the judgmental people.” While you may laugh at this, it accurately reflects the reason the world is as it is. In fact, it accurately reflects why all our personal “worlds” are as they are.

Consider that we will stop the fights in our life if we will stop fighting. We will feel less judged if we will stop judging. We will resolve our conflicts if we give up having to be right.

We act as though our conflicts are “out there” with the other people in our lives and, if they would only change, our world would be just fine.

The transformation in our thinking about “human nature” will occur when we stop putting “human nature” out there with other people and realize that it is our human nature we are speaking of and our human nature is endlessly malleable.

“You can’t change human nature” is exactly accurate if we think of human nature as only what other people possess. We can always choose to change our own human nature.

I’m sure you’ve heard the old joke about the man who goes to his doctor because he has a terrible pain in his head. The doctor asks him when the pain started and the man answers, “When I began hitting myself in the head with a hammer.” The doctor asks the patient, “Why are you hitting yourself in the head with a hammer?” The patient replies, “Because it feels so good when I stop.”

We laugh at this joke because we recognize how close it hits home. We “know” we can change our behavior any time we choose, yet we keep hitting ourselves in the head with our version of a hammer. But the joke is on us. We act as though it’s the other person who is wielding the hammer.

Unlike in the joke, however, it may not immediately feel good when we stop hitting ourselves in the head. Anything we’ve been doing for a long time will be missed. We’ve become comfortable feeling a particular way and we don’t feel good when we stop. In fact, we miss that feeling because we no longer feel like ourselves. Or, put another way, we miss what we’ve come to identify as our “human nature.”

But if there is ever to be any hope for changing our lives and changing what we read in our newspapers, we‘ll have to be willing to accept discomfort in exchange for peace.

Put another way, we can stop hitting ourselves in the head with a hammer anytime we choose.