I’m watching Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed, on Book TV this morning. I should be paying bills, doing laundry, and getting ready for this incredibly busy week. Instead I’m reading her blog and listening to her beautiful, cogent views. She’s the one who went out into the work world with no job and no money as research. She has created a movement of professional workers.
Last week she blogged about the absurd logic of the bestselling The Secret. She’s researching the self help world–Its “don’t worry, be happy” intolerance and disrespect of suffering and pain. For research she also hired business coaches and found them to be unhelpful. Something, fortunately, that I haven’t experienced from my clients.
At the same time, Oprah came out in whole-hearted support of The Secret and I have nothing but respect for her.
Somewhere in all of this is a better way. Somehow both of these women are right. Because Men Are Easy could be seen as the worst of Ehrenriech’s examples, I want to step in right away with a response:
Don’t ignore suffering and pain. In fact, pay attention to suffering and pain. They are signals that you’re thinking is off track, that it’s time to pay attention and clarify what’s going on. They are signals to step back and observe.
Prayer, meditation, martial arts, and professional training are all cultural methods for stepping back from stressful situations, fear and pain, to clear one’s thinking. When your thinking clears and your perspective broadens then you are more capable of creatively responding to what you are being hit with. The alternative is to live in the circular, repetitive thinking and perpetuating what’s happening around you.
So the key is not to just think happy thoughts. The key is to understand the relationship between feelings and quality of thinking and also the relationship between quality of thinking and one’s current level of awareness.
The other point I make in my book is that tradition is gone. The psychology world tends to focus on the pain and the interactions of the person with others.
As Erhrenreich clearly sees, people are victims of systems that exploit them. I write about how tradition is gone. We are all having to reinvent everything–how to work, parent, partner, eat, exercise, worship, spend, etc. Business, health, and education systems–our systems of support–are rapidly changing, often struggling to survive.
Key life skills for this demanding world are the capacity to step back from fear to broaden one’s perspective, the capacity to care for one’s self as best as one can, and the capacity to design one’s life in the face of life’s challenges to the best of one’s ability.
Also essential is a vision of how you want to live and feel. If you don’t have that, how can you get there? The Secret is about creating a “guidance system” but it certainly isn’t all you need.
Men Are Easy’s way of looking at one’s self in the world is more encompassing than philoosphical, psychological, or religious views of self. It involves the processes of thinking and awareness, one’s life in household and work, and one’s life within a culture. It arises from a systems view with its focuses on processes rather than things and on the interactions among levels of systems rather than on simple cause-and-effects. The result is a view of the world that is more in sync with nature and with whom we are.
I stand by Men Are Easy because it makes sense and it works. My biggest fans are the most successful women I know. A growing list of women happily married with careers they love and children who love them. What better endorsements can I have?
Thank you, Barbara, for your hard work. And, thank you, for critiquing the coaching world and advice world. You demonstrate “The Secret” to a rewarding, meaningful life.
There is no one “secret” to life. Life is a complex evolving system that requries real skills. Don’t think for a moment that an image will magically create those skills. It’s the job of culture to transmit those skills and we’re eratically scrambling to figure them out.
At the same time, thank you, Oprah, for acknowledging that putting out a “guidance system” is the Secret for moving forward.
