Friday, July 30, 2010

“Psychology: Getting along with difficult people • Columnists (www.HometownAnnapolis.com[[[SHIFTIN ...” plus 3 more

“Psychology: Getting along with difficult people • Columnists (www.HometownAnnapolis.com[[[SHIFTIN ...” plus 3 more

Psychology: Getting along with difficult people • Columnists (www.HometownAnnapolis.com[[[SHIFTIN ...

Posted: 29 Jul 2010 10:13 AM PDT

Wouldn't it be nice if everybody could just get along? Whether we are at home with our family, at work, driving on the road or out in town, wouldn't it be great if we could all be in agreement with one another and relate harmoniously?

Well, forget about it. It's not likely to happen.

Conflict arises when people have differing or even incompatible agendas, wants and needs. We all know that people with similar world views and goals are more likely to get along with one another, but it is inevitable that we are going to have to deal with some "difficult" people in our lives. Difficult people are those who seem to take great joy in making us miserable or in stepping on our dreams. They vary in how directly they conflict with us, but the bad feeling is often the same after we interact with them.

Being able to identify difficult people and understand what makes them tick can go a long way toward relieving our suffering. By identifying the problem, we give ourselves the opportunity to prepare a more effective response and thus regain control over our own emotions and life.

Here are a few "classic" categories or descriptions of how some difficult people operate. Read over each one and see if it accurately describes anyone in your life. Then read the solution to dealing with that type of person and see if it might help.

THE KNOW-IT-ALL: These people are driven to prove to you that they know everything about everything. They may be arrogant and opinionated, and their emotional goal appears to be showing you how smart they are, at your expense. They may try to intimidate you or show you up in some way to make themselves appear smarter. They often use the phrase, "Well, actually ..." when correcting others. If they are ever shown to be wrong they may become defensive or even irate. Think of a meaner version of Cliff Claven from "Cheers."

THE PASSIVE-AGGRESSIVE: This may be the most frustrating personality type of all because of its "stealth" factor. Often appearing to be cooperative or agreeable on the surface, these people rarely follow through and may actually sabotage the very things they have agreed to do. They may be "yes" people on the surface to avoid confrontation, but their deep-seated feelings of resentment lead them to bring you down with counterproductive behaviors. They are masterful at making others feel like they are being mean or unreasonable in their expectations, even if the expectations were all agreed upon at the outset.

THE DICTATOR: While the dictator is one of the more obvious difficult personality styles, the likely position of power the dictator holds may make it difficult to depose him. Dictators are bullies who operate by intimidation and threat. They are often very demanding of people and also highly critical of others. Dictators like power and often ingratiate themselves to those higher up in the food chain while being brutal to those they perceive as below them. Never wrong themselves, their rule is "do as I say, not as I do," and by the way, don't ask any questions. They can be confrontational and even aggressive when challenged.

THE COMPLAINER: You have to wonder if anything ever goes right or is good enough for these poor souls. They are often profoundly negative and can look out on a sunny day and see the one cloud in the sky. Unfortunately, they often are quick with "no" and pointing out the reasons why something won't work. They can be "dream stealers" by trashing an idea before it even has a chance. They ultimately prefer complaining to actually solving problems, because somewhere during childhood they drew reinforcing attention from this style. They can suck the life right out of a situation and create doubt and uncertainty when confidence is needed.

Each of these styles has its own complex origins, but they are all maladaptive attempts to defend and survive. For example, The Know-It-All is secretly suffering from self-doubt and low self-esteem. The "smart" act is meant to keep others at bay while propping up their sense of self-worth. The Passive-Aggressive is mired in resentment while feeling powerless to express himself. The Dictator was likely "dictated to" himself when growing up and may be seeking payback, while The Complainer usually feels helpless and is in dire need of attention from others.

By understanding that these issues are the other person's challenge and by "responding" instead of "reacting" to them, you can detoxify the situation. Validating their area of concern while staying calm, relaxed and confident in yourself puts you back in control of your situation. Even then, though, interacting with difficult people can be complex and difficult.

If you have noticed a high volume of negative or toxic interactions with others, you may want to know more about them, and possibly more about yourself. By understanding others and knowing more about your own style, you may be able to live a more peaceful and happier life. Counselors often can help flesh out the dysfunctional dynamics of relationships in order to create greater harmony.

Instead of relinquishing power over your life and letting difficult people "make" you feel bad, try identifying, understanding and defusing them. Set your goals, make your action plan, and move difficult people out of your way on the road to realizing your dreams. With a little thought and the appropriate responses to difficult people, you can be back in the driver's seat of your life journey.

Dr. Scott E. Smith is a licensed clinical psychologist with Spectrum Behavioral Health in Annapolis and Arnold. For services or ideas regarding this column, call 410-757-2077 or write to 1509 Ritchie Highway, Suite F, Arnold, MD 21012.

Five Filters featured article: "Peace Envoy" Blair Gets an Easy Ride in the Independent. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

Op-Ed: THE INTERNET Is it reshaping our brains?

Posted: 29 Jul 2010 02:25 PM PDT

Christopher Chabris is a psychology professor at Union College in New York. Daniel Simons is a psychology professor at the University of Illinois. They are the authors of the new book, "The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us."

THE LATEST ATTACK on the Internet and on computers in general is Nicholas Carr's book, "The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains."

Carr and other digital alarmists make a case that seems plausible, at least on the surface. They argue that the advent of the Internet and the proliferation of new communication tools trap us in a shallow culture of constant interruption as we frenetically tweet, text and e-mail. This in turn leaves us little time for deep reading, reflection and serious conversation — pensive activities traditionally thought to build knowledge and wisdom.

The alarmists cite the concept of "neural plasticity" and talk of technology "rewiring" the brain to convince us that the new distractions make us not just less willing but less able, on a physiological level, to focus.

Whenever you hear that something is changing your brain, you ought to be worried — or at least the person telling you wants you to be worried. But does a cultural change like this necessarily entail a fundamental change to the brain? Most of the evidence these critics offer is anecdotal: They report feeling less able to concentrate and think clearly now than they did before they started frequenting the Internet. But it could be that they are less able to concentrate now than they were 10 to 15 years ago simply because they are 10 to 15 years older.

The appeals to neural plasticity, backed by studies showing that traumatic injuries can reorganize the brain, are largely irrelevant. The basic plan of the brain's "wiring" is determined by genetic programs and biochemical interactions that do most of their work long before a child discovers Facebook and Twitter. There is simply no experimental evidence to show that living with new technologies fundamentally changes brain organization in a way that affects one's ability to focus.

Of course, the brain changes any time we form a memory or learn a new skill, but new skills build on our existing capacities without fundamentally changing them. We will no more lose our ability to pay attention than we will lose our ability to listen, see or speak.

The idea that the Internet might make us dumber has some intuitive appeal, because it is easy to see how the cognitive performance of people around us drops when they are distracted. Who among us is not scared to see a driver chatting on a phone and looking back at the kids while weaving through city traffic? But the notion that prolonged focus and deep reading mark the best path to wisdom and insight is just an assumption, one that may be an accidental consequence of the printing press predating the computer. To book authors like us it seems a heretical notion, but it is possible that spending 10 or more hours engrossed in a single text might not be the optimal regimen for building brainpower.

Preparation for chess

Before the Computer Age, chess grandmasters used to study chess books before matches. But now they use laptops to review hundreds of games in rapid succession, in effect "downloading" into their minds knowledge that is customized for their next opponent. They access the knowledge as they need it, discarding it after the match, and the result is that today's grandmasters play the game better than their predecessors did. Visual perception and attention work the same way: They grant us conscious but temporary access to the information in our world that we need at any moment, then quickly discard it as we shift attention to other places, objects or events.

If we consider all the implications of this "just in time" approach to acquiring and using information, we may be forced to reevaluate the nature of knowledge, wisdom and intelligence. It may make less sense to focus on the capabilities of an individual person, and more sense to think about the individual plus the cloud of technology and information that he or she has access to at any given moment. This human-computer-Internet collective is more knowledgeable and arguably more intelligent than a single human being could be alone. By this view, as more and more information becomes available on the Internet, we become not dumber but smarter.

For every way the Internet gives us to waste time, there is a way to increase the scope and diversity of our knowledge and to work collectively on problems. It was not long ago that scientists worked mostly within their own laboratories, collaborating only with students and assistants. Today scientists are more likely to collaborate in larger, more diverse teams that often span the globe.

With rapid access to diverse information online, ideas, data and resources can be shared faster and on a scale that was impossible at any point in history.

Affecting our intelligence

Although the case that technology increases our intelligence is at least as plausible as the gloomy idea that it is changing our brains for the worse, there are real downsides to the instant availability of torrents of information. The danger comes not from the information itself, or from how it could rewire our brains, but from the way we think about our own knowledge and abilities.

As the psychologists Leon Rozenblit and Frank Keil discovered, people tend to suffer from an illusion of knowledge: a tendency to mistake surface-level familiarity with deep understanding. As more information becomes readily available, that sense of familiarity grows and grows, and with it the illusion of knowledge.

On-demand access to reams of data can also trick us into mistaking knowledge we could obtain quickly for knowledge we already have and can act upon. And if the illusion leads us to neglect the acquisition of true knowledge, we as individuals could become dumber as a result.

Additionally, the more different ways technology gives us to multitask, the more chances we have to succumb to an illusion of attention — the idea that we are paying attention to and processing more information than we really are. Each time we text while we are driving and do not get into an accident, we become more convinced that we can do two (or three or four ...) things at once, when in reality almost no one can multitask successfully and we are all at greater risk when we do so.

Our capacity to learn, understand and multitask hasn't changed with the onslaught of technology, but our confidence in our own knowledge and abilities have.

So Google is not making us stupid, PowerPoint is not destroying literature, and the Internet is not really changing our brains. But they may well be making us think we're smarter than we really are, and that is a dangerous thing.

 

THE LATEST ATTACK on the Internet and on computers in general is Nicholas Carr's book, "The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains."

Carr and other digital alarmists make a case that seems plausible, at least on the surface. They argue that the advent of the Internet and the proliferation of new communication tools trap us in a shallow culture of constant interruption as we frenetically tweet, text and e-mail. This in turn leaves us little time for deep reading, reflection and serious conversation — pensive activities traditionally thought to build knowledge and wisdom.

The alarmists cite the concept of "neural plasticity" and talk of technology "rewiring" the brain to convince us that the new distractions make us not just less willing but less able, on a physiological level, to focus.

Whenever you hear that something is changing your brain, you ought to be worried — or at least the person telling you wants you to be worried. But does a cultural change like this necessarily entail a fundamental change to the brain? Most of the evidence these critics offer is anecdotal: They report feeling less able to concentrate and think clearly now than they did before they started frequenting the Internet. But it could be that they are less able to concentrate now than they were 10 to 15 years ago simply because they are 10 to 15 years older.

The appeals to neural plasticity, backed by studies showing that traumatic injuries can reorganize the brain, are largely irrelevant. The basic plan of the brain's "wiring" is determined by genetic programs and biochemical interactions that do most of their work long before a child discovers Facebook and Twitter. There is simply no experimental evidence to show that living with new technologies fundamentally changes brain organization in a way that affects one's ability to focus.

Of course, the brain changes any time we form a memory or learn a new skill, but new skills build on our existing capacities without fundamentally changing them. We will no more lose our ability to pay attention than we will lose our ability to listen, see or speak.

The idea that the Internet might make us dumber has some intuitive appeal, because it is easy to see how the cognitive performance of people around us drops when they are distracted. Who among us is not scared to see a driver chatting on a phone and looking back at the kids while weaving through city traffic? But the notion that prolonged focus and deep reading mark the best path to wisdom and insight is just an assumption, one that may be an accidental consequence of the printing press predating the computer. To book authors like us it seems a heretical notion, but it is possible that spending 10 or more hours engrossed in a single text might not be the optimal regimen for building brainpower.

Preparation for chess

Before the Computer Age, chess grandmasters used to study chess books before matches. But now they use laptops to review hundreds of games in rapid succession, in effect "downloading" into their minds knowledge that is customized for their next opponent. They access the knowledge as they need it, discarding it after the match, and the result is that today's grandmasters play the game better than their predecessors did. Visual perception and attention work the same way: They grant us conscious but temporary access to the information in our world that we need at any moment, then quickly discard it as we shift attention to other places, objects or events.

If we consider all the implications of this "just in time" approach to acquiring and using information, we may be forced to reevaluate the nature of knowledge, wisdom and intelligence. It may make less sense to focus on the capabilities of an individual person, and more sense to think about the individual plus the cloud of technology and information that he or she has access to at any given moment. This human-computer-Internet collective is more knowledgeable and arguably more intelligent than a single human being could be alone. By this view, as more and more information becomes available on the Internet, we become not dumber but smarter.

For every way the Internet gives us to waste time, there is a way to increase the scope and diversity of our knowledge and to work collectively on problems. It was not long ago that scientists worked mostly within their own laboratories, collaborating only with students and assistants. Today scientists are more likely to collaborate in larger, more diverse teams that often span the globe.

With rapid access to diverse information online, ideas, data and resources can be shared faster and on a scale that was impossible at any point in history.

Affecting our intelligence

Although the case that technology increases our intelligence is at least as plausible as the gloomy idea that it is changing our brains for the worse, there are real downsides to the instant availability of torrents of information. The danger comes not from the information itself, or from how it could rewire our brains, but from the way we think about our own knowledge and abilities.

As the psychologists Leon Rozenblit and Frank Keil discovered, people tend to suffer from an illusion of knowledge: a tendency to mistake surface-level familiarity with deep understanding. As more information becomes readily available, that sense of familiarity grows and grows, and with it the illusion of knowledge.

On-demand access to reams of data can also trick us into mistaking knowledge we could obtain quickly for knowledge we already have and can act upon. And if the illusion leads us to neglect the acquisition of true knowledge, we as individuals could become dumber as a result.

Additionally, the more different ways technology gives us to multitask, the more chances we have to succumb to an illusion of attention — the idea that we are paying attention to and processing more information than we really are. Each time we text while we are driving and do not get into an accident, we become more convinced that we can do two (or three or four ...) things at once, when in reality almost no one can multitask successfully and we are all at greater risk when we do so.

Our capacity to learn, understand and multitask hasn't changed with the onslaught of technology, but our confidence in our own knowledge and abilities have.

So Google is not making us stupid, PowerPoint is not destroying literature, and the Internet is not really changing our brains. But they may well be making us think we're smarter than we really are, and that is a dangerous thing.

Five Filters featured article: "Peace Envoy" Blair Gets an Easy Ride in the Independent. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

Tony Schwartz: Tony Hayward is the Identified Patient

Posted: 29 Jul 2010 09:37 AM PDT

In psychology, the term "identified patient" refers to a family member -- often a child or a teenager -- who acts out and then gets scapegoated for behavior that's really just a predictable response to the stress of dealing with a dysfunctional family.

Tony Hayward, now the former CEO of BP, is noxious and repugnant for all the obvious reasons.

But Hayward is also BP's identified patient. It's true he wanted his privileged, aristocratic life back, even in the midst of the environmental catastrophe his company caused. It's true he wouldn't give up yachting on the weekends, even at the height of the crisis. It's true that he was way out of his depth dealing with the disaster for which he was ultimately responsible.

Hayward misbehaved by saying what he felt. But is there any reason to believe he is appreciably worse as an executive than any of his colleagues? He did spend nearly 30 years rising steadily through the ranks at BP, and he was the guy who reached the top.

Hayward was thrown overboard so that BP has someone to blame, and doesn't have to look at the deeper dysfunctions of an organization that chose him as CEO in the first place. It's exactly what happened at so many banks during the subprime crisis, when they needed sacrificial lambs to appease their critics.

BP's mid-level employees have done a better job than Hayward at putting a caring face on the company in its tv ads. This morning I watched Fred Lemond, head of the cleanup efforts, tell me three times over the course of ten minutes that BP will be there till the last drop of oil is gone.

Before that, it was Darryl Willis, head of claims for the oil spill, explaining in his Louisiana drawl why he and BP are committed to working around the clock to assure that every innocent victim of the crisis gets reimbursed for their losses.

"Folks were talking about paying claims in 30 to 60 days, and I knew that was going to be about 30 days too long," Willis told a reporter. "We needed to get people's claims paid as quickly as possible."

These are the sorts of things we want to believe about the leaders and the companies that operate in our communities.

Unfortunately, the evidence suggests that BP's ads are far more about damage control and public relations than they are about real concern and prompt action.

BP has paid out only a fraction of the claims it has received. On Tuesday, NBC ran a story quoting a series of small businesspeople describing their frustration in trying to get losses reimbursed by BP. Even where claims were paid, recipients got only a fraction of what they sought.

The bigger issue here is the myopic worldview of so many executives who run large public companies. It isn't sufficient any longer to say their only responsibility is to their shareholders, particularly when those shareholders are mostly short-term speculators, who buy in and out of their companies.

We need CEOs and senior executives willing to be reflective -- to ask themselves at least three critical questions about any significant strategic choice they face:

1. How will this decision add longer-term value not just to the company, but also to the larger community we serve?

2. What are the potential costs of this decision to any of our constituencies, and am I doing enough to mitigate them?

3. Is this a decision that reflects me operating at my best?

Great leaders are characterized by a big view -- the broadest possible perspective on the effects of their actions, and the constituencies they influence. The world's biggest companies now have the power and reach of large countries, and a corresponding need to think beyond their own borders.

It's all well and good that Tony Hayward is finally gone. The deeper problem is the system that produced him.

 

Follow Tony Schwartz on Twitter: www.twitter.com/TonySchwartz

Five Filters featured article: "Peace Envoy" Blair Gets an Easy Ride in the Independent. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

Christian Living Resources, Bible Study Tools, Jesus Christ

Posted: 29 Jul 2010 01:42 PM PDT

In his appearance on Michael Brown's Line of Fire show, Martin Ssempa said that homosexuals have not been arrested or killed under current law. Canyon Ridge Christian Church provided a transcript of a short portion of the show (oddly calling it an "unedited interview") where Ssempa responds to charges from Jim Burroway at Box Turtle Bulletin:

Brown reads a written challenge from Jim Burroway posted on Box Turtle Bulletin, and Martin responds regarding death penalty provision and allegations of gays being killed or imprisoned.

One aspect of Burroway's challenge was for Martin Ssempa to post the bill. Ssempa told Brown he would do it but did not. Ssempa goes on to discuss his view of government and says that his pastor's group does not favor the death penalty. He calls the bill "a draft" which is not true unless you think of all bills as drafts. The bill published in the Uganda Gazette is a bill, which can be amended but it is clearly more than a draft. Drafts cannot be read in Parliament, drafts are not sent to committee where they await committee report. Bills can be amended, but they can also be voted on. But I digress.

Ssempa ends his placation of critics by saying this:

I just want to let you know in the history of Uganda for the last 50 years we've had this law, since we've had a law against homosexuality, no homosexual has been arrested or killed for homosexuality.

Ugandan activists have contested this claim and said that often they are brought in on trumped up charges as a pretense to harass them for their sexual orientation. I have been tracking a story from Gulu of a woman who was burned to death because she made a pass at another woman but cannot as yet offer conclusive evidence. However, this clip from a recent British documentary, Africa's Last Taboo, documents in detail the arrest and detention of two gay men in Mbale under the existing sodomy law.

Please note that this situation is ongoing and was initiated prior to Martin Ssempa's statement that such things do not happen in Uganda. I have another clip where Julius Oyet tells a homosexual that he will be arrested when the law takes effect. Martin Ssempa told Line of Fire there would not be a witch hunt. When it becomes a criminal offense to remain silent if you know homosexuals, what do you think the effect of that will be? If this can take place under current law, what could happen under this new law?

 

Five Filters featured article: "Peace Envoy" Blair Gets an Easy Ride in the Independent. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.
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