Harvard-22-Mindfulness as A Way of Being-Psychology of Leadership-Tal Ben Shahar [eTati].mp4

good morning welcome we've had a few guest lectures throughout the the semester today is a particular honor for me and for the class professor Ellen Langer is or has changed the field of psychology more than any other person in the field so a thousand years from now when our great-great-great-great children will will read the history of their great great great grand grandparents and what they did they will read about professor Langer it is a great honor to have professor Langer here many of you know her studies we discuss them throughout the class and today she will share some of her most recent work from her book on becoming an artist Thank You professor Langer okay thank you Tao I don't know if a thousand years from now people will still be reading but the lovely introduction what I want to ask you to do is play along with me okay this is what we're going to do today we'll play then I'm going to persuade you hopefully of the cost and pervasiveness of mindlessness and then once I've gotten you scared about being mindless all the time and to me what we're going to do is figure out how to protect ourselves okay so first we play what is this we are playing okay what is this it's a cow okay now this is the way the world is when we first meet it we see we have no idea what it is we're seeing and at that point it can turn out to be many many different things then we come to know it sometimes somebody just labels it for us or we quote figure it out and we see it's a cow the problem is that now it's almost impossible not to see the cow okay initially again it have been many different things and now it's reduced to this single thing how much is one in one ok well it turns out that one in one is two if you're using the base 10 number system for using a base 2 number system one in 1 is 10 if you add one one of chewing gum to one wad of chewing gum what do you get one all right now the way we've learned almost everything about our worlds ourselves is on through this mindless learning where we try to reduce uncertainty we think we know it we no longer have to pay attention to it and the result is that we're frequently in error but rarely in doubt ok what we want to do is learn how to stay open to subtleties I mean what is this yeah but I've scheduled already we haven't even begun ok this part of this at least is found in many of your intro psychology books and you have if I can show you here always hated these but here you have a young woman her eyes or nose her chin ok and you also have an old woman here's her nose her mouth and her chin that's as far as it usually goes however here you also have a man here's his nose and here's his moustache alright now the only reason I'm showing you this is because when I talk about being trapped in a rigid perspective which is what it means to be mindless it doesn't matter if there if it's occupied by one or many things once we think we know it we tend to ignore all the other ways it could be understood in fact is that a young woman or is it an old woman who's had a lot of plastic surgery is it an old woman or is it a woman who's lived a very mindless life and is that a man or is it a woman in drag or what we don't know but we think we know now I was at this horse event many years ago and this person asked me if I'd watch his horse for him because he was going to get the horse a hot dog well I said to myself and my best Harvard EES what is he kidding horses are a Divis they don't eat meat and then he came back with a hot dog and the horse ate it and then I said wait a second then I realized well doesn't it depend on how hungry the horse is how big the horse is how much grain had been mixed in with the mead in the horse's past and at the present day all of that gets lost and the facts that we take is unconditional truth I was at a friend's house she's making me dinner and the fork was on the right side of the plate I felt like some natural law had been violated and I had to keep myself from taking the fork and putting it where it belongs and I said well where did this come from you know the horses were herbivorous that I got from school here it was a simple case that at one time my mother said the horse goes on the light of the horse the horse and the fork go on the left side of the plate and even if I can generate many reasons why it would make sense for the fork to go on the right side it still feels wrong once we lock ourselves in it's very hard to find the key to unlock that now I went to make a purchase I gave the cashier my credit card she saw it wasn't signed she asked me to sign so I signed it she ran it through the credit card machine then gave me the credit card slip and asked me to sign it I didn't signed it and then she compared the two signatures now it would be odd if they didn't match having signed both of them in her presence and then I thought about it and this has become very important in understanding this concept when your mindless you're not there in some very real way to know that you're not there right and so then it became clear that I may be mindless just as frequently as anybody else but I'm oblivious to it that's the problem that if you want to change and get rid of this thing you can't just decide it would be nice to do it because the moments it occurs to you to do it typically are the moments that you're not present Oh being in the present is something else that I find interesting everybody out there wants to be in the present but nobody thinks they're not in the present right that to be in the present all you need to do is follow some of the simple things I'm going to suggest today which is be mindful and what that means is simply actively notice new things but we'll get to that you'll get to it right now all right when I'm talking about mindfulness and this is mindfulness without meditation we're simply talking about is active state of mind that results from actively noticing things doesn't matter if what you notice is smart if it's silly it just has to be new for you when you notice new things that puts you in the present that makes you sensitive to context and perspective now your behavior when you're mindful shouldn't be chaotic and you can have your rules and routines but your rules and routine should be guiding what you're doing not overly determining what you do the phenomenological experience of this mindfulness is the feeling of engagement the feeling that people often Envy when they see somebody else who seems to have a passion you know that I spend a lot of time I walk around and people not infrequently say to me why are you smiling and for years I had been defensive and I realized that the question should be why aren't they smiling that when one is mindful you're actively engaged you feel fully alive and it's a very easy process to bring about but most of the time we're mindless now we're trapped in a rigid perspective relying on these distinctions and categories that we drew in the past on that means the past is going to over determine the present again we're trapped in a single perspective we're insensitive to context and these rules are means govern what we do we just let it play out almost as if we're robots and typically as mindlessness comes about by default not by design but not always I'm going to talk later about pretending being inauthentic and whenever we're inauthentic what we're typically doing is deciding how to be based not on what's going on in the ongoing situation but based on something from the past so we take it from the past and say this should work now and then mindlessly enact that script I'm going to argue that most and I mean most I probably even mean all but that's a statement that's too big to make of our suffering no matter what it is we'll have mindlessness behind it and so for 30 years now we've been doing research study after study where we teach people to be mindful we take many different measures and we find out that we get vast improvements in both physical and psychological well-being interestingly you think about it no matter what you're doing whether you're taking notes whether I am giving a lecture you're giving a lecture playing a musical instrument playing a sport having a conversation eating a sandwich no matter what you're doing you're doing it either mindfully or mindlessly and the consequences of engaging in this mindlessness are enormous here are just a few of the results we found over time now okay when you get down to the alcoholism allergies and arthritis AGD I just realized this morning that their role is which suggests a whole research program as I go through the rest of the alphabet okay so now here is um I thought that many people won't agree with but I think can be persuaded over time now I want to argue that mindfulness should be the baseline this is the way you should feel all the time not on rare moments okay but the problem is as I said before that when your mindless you're not there - no your mindless so it's hard to figure out how to make that change and that's what all this new work that I'm going to talk about is about right what I think that will lead to an enormous increase in mindfulness for us as individuals as a culture and so on if we all begin some new creative task doesn't have to be creative but I mean I you know in the arts or something but the choice of the arts is because we tend to be a little less evaluative there we begin some start take up pottery photography a new musical instrument for me it was painting and just throw yourself in it and the excitement you'll feel from that total engagement then tells you this is how I'm supposed to feel the moment you don't feel that way is the moment you have to change something in your lives okay so in other words while we don't we're fully there when we're mindful we're not there when we're mindless but in the transition from mindless a mindful to mindless on we're there to notice that if we take advantage of it on something in a situation should change it's very easy for me to say throw yourself into these new activities but we don't throw ourselves into the new activities because of a list of roadblocks this is not an exhaustive list just the ones that I talked about in the new book and I'm going to go over I'm going to go over a few of these clearly there's not going to be time to deal with all of them but I have research on each of them so let's let's talk first about mindlessly faking it so I'm going to argue that animals no I'm just presuming that our pets know have you noticed that pets go towards some people they stay away from others that if you're in a bad mood somehow the pet knows and leaves the room especially during an argument but that's just my experience with my pets but dolphins I have research okay so we have trainers of dolphins they're going to now be instructed to be mindful or mindless when they're mindless they're told what we want you to do is think about all the things you know to be true about dolphins and just repeat this information to yourself right the mindful trainers are told what we want you to do is think about how this particular dolphin that they're going to interact with is different from all the other dolphins and how this dolphin is different today from the way he was the last time you interacted with them okay so now we have the trainer in the water thinking mindfully noticing new things thinking mindlessly relying on certainties from the past the dolphin is released we time how long it takes a dolphin to swim to the trainer and how long the dolphin stays and clearly I wouldn't be telling you about this if we didn't find that they swam there faster and they stayed longer children know if we're mindless or mindful there are lots of people sadly who stay in relationships on for the children's sake and preten thinking the children don't know okay the argument I'm going to make is that the children do know and it's not good for them animals no children no so what we did hat was to have campers interviewed by people who were purportedly coaches from another camp the coaches were trained to be mindful or mindless they're going to interview the child then we're going to have another interviewer come by and speak to the child to get a sense of what that last interaction felt like to him okay when the interviewers were trained to be mindless they were told we want the children to like you so we want the whole interview to be very positive so pretend you're interested in what the child has to say when the coaches were trained to be mindful they were told we want the children to like you we want the interview to be positive they want you also to notice subtle changes in the child's behavior throughout the course of the interview verbal and nonverbal behavior and then they follow the same script ask the same questions then again each of the children are interviewed by somebody else and we ask them several different things we don't have time to go through all of them now but basically we ask the child about have a child feels about himself how he feels about the person who just interviewed him how he feels about the camp we assess his willingness to help other people and so on many measures all significant all showing us that children are negatively affected by adult mindlessness so they have to be noticing it in order to be affected by it adults know whether or not we're mindless right now what we did was to have people on who were going to be selling magazines door-to-door and in the mindless condition they read a script they memorize the script and then they were told so go out and sell and what we want you to do is um practice it until you're really satisfied with your performance and then give that performance repeatedly the mindful group also dealing with the same script was told learn it but now make it new in very subtle ways that only you would know they go out and sell somebody comes along after them to find out how the person they were selling to felt about them and what we find where do we find that people who made it knew in very subtle ways we're seen as more charismatic okay animals children adults everybody seems to know whether or not we're there whether or not we're being genuine the next question was asking is it even visible in the things that we do oh let me see I have to take my lead now from the slide um this is a class of leadership so let me tell you another study in leadership first I think it's probably clear to you how being mindful the mindful noun leads you to be perceived as charismatic so that in and of itself speaks and important ways to effective leadership to my mind charisma is probably the most important factor with respect to who we're going to follow but there is a special problem that Christine Calico me pointed out to me years ago when she was a senior here which is a special problem women have now when women who are not typically the leaders and when women assume leadership positions and they decide well they'll act like men there disparage if they act like women they're not taken seriously so the problem is what to do to have women as leaders and so what we did was we ran a study where we taught these women regardless of their leadership styles to be mindful or mindless which was equivalent to the way they were doing it before and we found that those who were trained to be mindful were considered more genuine they were like more trusted more and again considered more charismatic and now it starts to get really interesting for me and the question is that okay people know whether or not we're mindful is it also visible somehow in the things that we produce now let me tell you how I got to this so not that long ago I started painting now I had to do this mindfully I couldn't mindlessly follow rules because I didn't know any all right so I make this painting and I loved it some other people also seem to like it I said well what's going on here I mean it's a dog but there's nothing accurate about it all I know was that I put my entire self into it and had a fabulous time while I was painting it and the question was somehow was that visible just give you a little chance to see the fun I've had with this okay it's a Greyhound bus okay maybe just one more the another Sharpay the wrinkled dog so this is before and after surgery okay now the question was was the mindfulness in the eye of the beholder or wasn't actually on the canvass in some way there you see he's muscular in the mirror although not in life Picasso said each time I undertake to paint a picture I have a sensation of leaping into space I never know if I should fall whether I shall fall on my feet and that's something very important because we're afraid often to allow ourselves to be in the present to be mindful and not mindlessly follow a script because we don't know where it's going to take us but that's the reason that we want to do it because when we don't know exactly what we're going to do the experience of figuring that out is what is psychologically and physically enlivening so can people tell if art is mindfully or mindlessly executed so to give you an example of a study very simple we have people draw copy it copy it again versus draw copy it this time copy it again but this time make it new in very subtle ways that only you would know they do so we then take all these drawings and we show them to mix them all up we show them to people and to find out what their preference is and overwhelmingly they prefer the mindfully executed drawings and the people who made them prefer that can you hear it in music on what we did was to take several orchestras and now orchestras are playing typically the same pieces over and over again which is a prime candidate for mindlessness so what we do is we have them take these pieces and we say okay what we want you to do is remember a very satisfying performance you gave of this and then just replicate that verses they're tall we want you to play this piece but now make it new in very subtle ways that only you would know now it's very important have run this study because we finally can be sure that the difference is that people were noticing creating were subtle this was classical music they weren't playing jazz also interesting was that the instruction is given individually and the question is what is the final performance the group effort going to sound like right well what we did was we after they played in these one two different ways we asked them how much they enjoyed their performances and they overwhelmingly preferred playing it in this mindful way we recorded the performances and played them for people who were sophisticated in music and again overwhelmingly they prefer the mindfully played piece on can people see it in written work well you know the answer is going to be yes that I'm going to show you that when I talk about mistakes okay so the conclusion so far is that mindfulness is visible to other people it's even visible to animals it's visible and the things that we do so it doesn't make much sense for us to continue pretending okay now one of the roadblocks that keep us from this mindful creativity it's good for us to do its enlivening on what we do we do better but still we're often hesitant to engage our mindfulness partially this is because of our fear of negative evaluation and it's interesting we pay lip service to the idea that everything cuts both ways everything has good things and bad things about it but what we really mean by this is that oh it might have six bad things and three good things which then renders it bad and what I'm suggesting is that the very same thing is simultaneously good and bad and in the mind of the observer not in the thing being evaluated okay so imagine a company what they're going to do is they want to produce a glue so they put in lots of resources they have a lot of ego involved in this and then they find lo and behold the blue fails to it here now that's terrible when a terrible failure until they thought to make it post-it notes all right the very success of which depends on its failure to adhere these other people created this defogger to save the plant of the crops in Florida so they spray the cops in Florida and instead of saving the plants what happened is it produced an icy snowy substance that ended up killing the plants terrible failure somebody else took the very same device machine and use it now to create snow for skiers when the weather doesn't cooperate is it a success or failure well it depends on the context now if I asked you do you want to meet my friend tall he's very impulsive why would you say yes but I said you want to meet my friend tall he's very spontaneous well then surely you'd want to say yes I said you want to meet my friend tall he's so predictable that some could see it as boring you want to meet my friend tall he's so stable the kind of guy you can count on and so on all of our evaluations cut in these different ways so it makes no sense to be afraid of engaging where we're going to be on where somebody is going to use some negative evaluation also evaluations are made typically in the service of the evaluator not really um as a result of that which is being evaluated that's for talk at another time this is the one that I want to focus on today the fear of making mistakes this is why most people will think twice about beginning some new tasks especially you right that even though you're the years where you're supposed to be learning new things you're already so successful that to try something new could only have the effect it would seem of bringing you down right if you were already on top now mistakes are kind of interesting so I live two lives I paint and enjoy myself fully then I stand back as a psychologist and I try to understand what's going on I do some studies to see if it's true just for me or there are some general truths so I'm painting this painting I dip the paintbrush into that open color that's what I think I'm doing in fact I dipped it into magenta as soon as I paint I realize oh my goodness I used the wrong color now my reaction was crazy what difference did it make I had only made the decision moments before but still it felt again very wrong now there are some general principles about decision making there in order for something to be a decision it means there is uncertainty the moment we make the decision we react as if this is the only way it could be all that uncertainty is forgotten and we get locked in okay so I say I used the wrong color I reach for a paper towel I start rubbing it out now I notice gee I like them even more now than I did before and that's kind of interesting what's going on okay so that it occurred to me that a mistake may actually be a cue to be in the present now think about it that if the weather person says it's going to be 55 degrees today and it turns out to be 60 degrees he's wrong if the weather person says it's going to be about 55 degrees today and it turns out to be 60 degrees she's not wrong all right that the more rigid our plan the easier it is for us to make an error also that what I did here that seemed to have some general principle behind it was rather because I was there and noticed that I liked it even more I then went forward well now if you make a mistake and you go forward rather than go backward you can't mindlessly follow the plan because the plan probably didn't include this making you know this particular mistake all right so then you're going to take your cues from the ongoing situation and presumably end up with something that's better okay now another thing is that mistakes also often add interest to the things that we're doing I was thinking about man-made versus machine-made rugs manmade rugs are much much more valuable the difference between the two is primarily errors just think of the regularity you know you have that's a a B a B a B and you could fall asleep easily whereas if it were a B ABC ABD a being those off letters on being errors that draw the viewer in so we don't want to get rid of these mistakes necessarily and certainly not so quickly okay so if we incorporate the mistake that will lead us to mindfully attend to whatever it is we're doing and the results as the other research has shown should result in improve products so is this true okay so now we do two studies a study that people are going to be drawing and a study where people are going to be writing essays three groups say group that's not going to make any mistake and then two groups are they're going to force to make mistakes one of these groups we're going to say if you make a mistake forgive yourself it's human to earth the other group the important group is going to be told if you make a mistake don't go backwards go forward and incorporate the mistake into what you're doing okay so the procedure is they're given these instructions to forgive themselves in advance if they make a mistake or to incorporate then we ask everybody to list what they had for breakfast now they're told we want them to write or draw about morning so they start writing or drawing about morning halfway through we give them a questionnaire that says we know how difficult it is to think about morning and now morning is spelled mo you are in ing so by asking them what they had for breakfast we're priming a.m. and now they say oh my goodness it was supposed to be grief and loss but they were supposed to be drawing about they continue we then find out afterwards how much they enjoyed it we show the drawings and the essays to other people and again what we find is that those that were mindfully inactive those that incorporated the mistake and went forward does it use the mistake as a cue to be mindful ended up being evaluated their essays and drawings were preferred they were seen as more creative more fluid more of whatever it is we asked okay that LMS is the languor mindfulness scale that seems to not surprisingly I guess be correlated with creativity the Confucius said being ashamed of one's errors turns them into crimes John Cage and era is simply a failure to adjust immediately from a preconception to an actuality both similar thoughts to what I've just said another roadblock is the rule of absolutes we take information in like it is a cow the fork goes over here one and one is to freeze our understanding and in doing so we give up a great deal of control if I said to you let's say you see a sign and the sign says keep off the grass what most people do is they keep off the grass now contrast that with a sign that says Ellen says keep off the grass now you'd say who is this Ellen maybe she doesn't live here anymore maybe I can negotiate with her right the world that we experience is almost fully socially constructed by taking people out of the equation we forget that these were whatever it is we're interacting with whether to have this kind of a table here this kind of a microphone to have me here and so on that these were decisions decisions again require uncertainty for them to be decisions all of that is hidden from us and so it then leave us in a position where it's hard to deviate so for instance you know I go into an art supply store and I see you know a hundred different kinds of paintbrushes well that can be very intimidating and then you read the instructions on them and they say tell you how they should be used now it's even more intimidating each thing I look at I notice how little I know and I'm afraid to begin but then I step back and I say who said so where does this come from it was just people like me who painted and said oh it works in this way or that way you know some of it is just common sense that if you have a giant canvas and you're starting with a little paintbrush could be interesting but it's going to take you a long time to complete it and if you have a tiny canvas using a very large paintbrush but these were decisions okay so once you put people back into the equation turns out that it's easier for us to deviate from what these norms are suggesting okay so um Adam grant and I did some research on this when he was a student here the first study very simple people are going to take a test they're going to be given ten questions and then it's rigged so they're going to succeed or fail where these success groups do uniformly well but let's consider the failure what they're told is they're given ten questions now they're just given the ten questions or they're told these ten questions have been selected from 200 questions or they're told these ten questions have been selected from 200 questions by eight people at the Miller testing agency or these ten questions have been selected by the Miller testing agency so we introduce people in two ways it's a small group of questions cold from a much larger set must be by people and they're either told that it was done by people or not both of these are ridiculous both of these treatments if you think about it whatever questions you're asked there always are a larger set of possible questions you could have been asked and who's doing the choosing obviously people so it shouldn't have any effect yet it did have a very big effect it turned out that when we put people back in the equation when we made the fact that this was all a social construction salient to people then when they failed they were able to cope much better with the failure okay they notice that they didn't do well but they were anything but devastated by it give me another example you're in a hospital you're on a bedpan you're very uncomfortable now one case we say your nurse is on someplace else there is another nurse right outside the door who's busy doing some work do you interrupt her and if so how long do you wait versus your nurse Betty Johnson is busy elsewhere there's another nurse so notice that other nurse still isn't named who's right outside your door so on and so forth well as soon as we take this role nurse and we inhabit it with a person what happens is people are much more likely to meet their own needs do you understand what I'm suggesting here that we know that if I wanted to persuade people to leave things just as it is what I would do is um take away from them any notion that this was created by people you want to have a sense that things can be other than they are you know you're looking to paint for example you don't have a canvas if you buy into the silly stuff that the only thing you can paint on is something you buy in a an art supply store then you clearly can paint but you turn around and you have napkins paper towels you have shoe boxes you have on whatever in your house which would easily as something on which one could paint okay once you realize that the world is a social construction it's easier to reconstruct it so that it works better for you I don't have time to talk to you about social comparisons but this is the way we often keep ourselves miserable and in place and afraid to exercise our mindful creativity we evaluate ourselves next to in contrast to somebody else and all of these evaluations are largely these evaluations are mindless we don't pay attention to what the dimension is you know if I say you're better at tennis than I am what does that mean does that mean you have better ground strokes you're faster you have a better serve what does it mean we don't pay attention to the particular zuv the performance is this my very best performance and perhaps your weakest because the social comparison then wouldn't be very good to predict what's going to happen next and so on okay if you want to read more about that and see it discussed in in a new book an interesting quick finding is that whether you see yourselves as better or worse than other people we find what the more likely it is that you make these social comparisons the more likely you're going to experience guilt Envy defensiveness regret blame and have unmet cravings okay all of these rely on evaluations the less evaluative you are the less you should experience any of this okay so now I paint this picture a friend of mine who knows that I'm at least of average intelligence he knows that I used to have horses he's an educated person he sees this and he says Ellen you know horses can't do that with their back legs okay now if he saw it hanging in a gallery chances are he assumed it was intentional and he'd approach it differently now contrast that a different frame now you can't see this so well in the painting but in I mean in the slide but in the painting the white dog as she explained to me the white dogs windows are not nearly as clean as the black dogs now she sees us painting in a gallery and she says to me on you know isn't that the way it is and I said isn't what the way is and she said that you know the white dog is center stage he's not doing as good a job as the black dog the white dog even has his own food bowl and she made a whole political statement out of this all right now consider these two people these two friends who is better off okay because in either case was what they were attributing to the paintings relevant to me as the painter all right now we've done studies many many studies let's just talk we have women who don't like football they're going to be watching the Super Bowl people who don't like rap music are going to be listening to rap music people who don't like classical music and then we listen to classical music and so on and what we do is have them just look at it or listen or they're instructed notice one new thing about it notice three new things about it notice six new things about it that's all we're asking them to do is know it doesn't matter if what they notice is smart or silly just that it's new for them and what we find is the more they notice the more they like the thing that they've noticed and when Steven Long was a student here I did this study where he had chocolate that was wrapped in Godiva chocolate wrapping or an inexpensive candy wrapper so we have it was Godiva or inexpensive chocolate wrapped in Godiva or wrapped as if it was inexpensive and on people ate it and then evaluated it and what we found not surprisingly is when they thought they were eating Godiva they liked it more you get a halo effect even for chocolate but what was interesting is that when they thought it was Godiva they spent more time tasting it in that more time the more noticing of it you make things interesting to you as you actively notice things that's the essence of engagement okay now it's interesting because people say about their work about their long-term relationships you're too young to have very long-term relationships that if you look at your parents and your parents friends and so on that people believe things have to get old they have to get boring you know when I first met you it was so exciting and now it's the same old same old and I think about that and it occurred to me you know how will view say you're all over 18 right now have any of your parents said you know I've known you for 18 years and at this point you know you're really starting to bore me okay so and we don't even do that with our plants what's the difference between plants and children from our jobs and long-term relationships the difference is that when you have children when you have plans you expect them to change you expect them to grow so when we look for those changes and there are always changes what happens is we end up liking the thing that the target of our attention on you know there's a research literature on mere-exposure effect and I don't know if you know it but it's the more times you see something the more you like it we'd have to amend that a little bit the more you actively engage it the more you're going to like it it's boring it's just water when the face of the water in time became a wonderful book a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger but which told its mind to me without reserve delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as it uh turd them with a voice that's Mark Twain writing about water anything can be made interesting leave this with me can let me hear you okay well you're smart enough to know that there's something wrong but still okay can you see what's wrong though with words on this poster okay it's very hard to break out of this mindlessness now we don't taste things because we think we know we don't hear things because we think we know what it sounds like on we don't think exciting thoughts because we're trapped by some of the things that we learn before so our mindless learning leads us to be stupid our mindless saying you become so expert at seeing what you expect to see that we actually become blind dan Simon did an important study where he had people watching a videotape of a basketball game in the middle of the videotape somebody walked in who was wearing a gorilla suit people didn't notice this is true just as you didn't many of you didn't notice the correct way of reading the slide before what we did is we said to people okay we're going to show you a videotape of a basketball game all basketball games are like all other basketball games which is why we call them basketball games and just as surely each basketball game is different from every other basketball game so we want you to pay attention to the ways it's the same in the ways it's different again that should be an empty instruction those people saw the gorillas Gertrude Stein Arosa Rosa's arose by learning the way all roses are alike we run the risk of becoming blind to their differences they tend to mindlessly accept absolutes and judge ourselves by criteria as if they are perspective free we pretend so as to meet these criteria if you're making mistakes etc and hesitate to become mindfully engaged things are all the while changing and noticing changes keeps us engaged the famous painter Ellen Langer says a rose is not a rose is not a rose Diane Arbus famous photographer said my favorite thing is to go where I've never been that's still famous painter Ellen Langer says right where we are is where we've never been to some of the recent conclusions they suggest you'd be authentic a mindlessness is visible so it doesn't you're not fooling anybody anyway mindful engagement is the essence of charisma don't assume we know it our mindsets are stable and we confuse the stability of our mindsets with the stability of the underlying phenomenon things are changing you want to hold it still fine but it's changing nonetheless social comparing is largely mindless criteria a person determined and so can be changed and feeling engaged results from noticing creating novel distinctions ok so on great fun awaits if we allow ourselves this kind of mindful engagement I mean that seriously it's easy it's fun all right which is nice because it's also good for us so the penultimate conclusion if we begin a new creative venture we can come to know what mindfulness feels like if we continue the activity we will more generally increase our mindfulness if we increase our mindfulness will improve our psychological and physical well-being and all the while we're doing this whether we're at work or play we're going to feel fully alive ok so I suggest that what we want to do is begin at personal Renaissance I've told you the way I think that it can easily be done and so let me end just by wishing you all more mindfulness there's probably time for one or two questions if anybody has any yes yes they sold more magazines as you would expect all right well um yes we never you

Channel: Công la

Views: 34,355

Rating: 4.8095236 out of 5

Keywords: 22, April, 28, Mindfulness, as, A, Way, of, Being, Guest, Lecturer, Ellen, Langer, Psychology, of, Leadership, Tal, Ben, Shahar, eTati

Id: DKyHldiUTP0

Length: 49min 14sec (2954 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 31 2012