Counter Clockwise (Ellen J. Langer)
Re-Thinking Our Present Environment
Nursing Home Study: patients in the experimental group had more control over their environment, and therefore more reason and opportunity to think about it.
Making choices results in mindfulness
Not making choices results in mindlessness
Application: Can we restructure our environments to promote more attentiveness and decission making?
Re-Thinking Our Past Environments
Counter Clockwise Study: asking experimental group to live as they had lived twenty years ago in a retreat like environment (a former monastery) The experimental group focused upon reliving the past as if it were present whereas the control group talked about the past in terms of the present
Application: while we will always interpret our past in terms of our present and even future it is important to view the past first in terms of its own context.
Mindful health defined as "freeing ourselves from the constricting mindsets and the limits they place on health and well being and becoming guardians of our own health and well-being."
We need to integrate what medical science knows about most people most of the time with what we know about ourselves at this particular time.
-We are likely to know far more than anyone else about our past
as well as our present situation and our future possibilities
-We should become more mindful, attentive to all these aspects of ourselves
-We should become especially mindful of the contexts of our past present and future
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Robert Greenleaf in Servant Leadership says that "Foresight is a better than average guess about what is going to happen when in the future." The foresighted person has a sort of moving average mentality in which past, present and future are bracketed together moving as one, and sees the past, present, and future as one organic whole. This rhythm encourages a high level of intuitive thought from events in the distant past, to the present, and into the indefinite future. One is at all times, historian, contemporary analyst and prophet.
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Psychology of Possibility
In most of their research, psychologist try to describe and understand what is. "But knowing what is and knowing what can be are not the same thing."
"My interest is in is in what can be and what subtle changes can make that happen. My research has shown how using a different word, offering a small choice, or making a subtle change in the physical environment can improve our health and well being. Small changes can make large differences..."
>The psychology of possibility is more positive, less evaluative and more process-oriented than most scientific research>"
"Too many of us think the world is to be discovered rather than a product of our own construction and thus to be invented."
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Capital on this website is defined as the accumulation of labor in various forms We are all familiar with financial capital in the form of money, etc. and physical capital in the form of homes, cars, computers, etc. However, this website is primarily concerned with human capital, social capital and cultural capital.
Human capital is the accumulation of our labor in terms of our body, our health, our strength, our skills, our talents, our identity etc. The world of our personal human capital is something that we construct more than we discover.
Social capital is the accumulation of labor in the forms of social relationships and institutions Again while they exist partly outside of us to be discovered, they are also shaped to a great degree by our own behavior.
Cultural capital is the accumulation of labor in the form of shared languages, ideas, values, symbols, etc. Again while most of culture exists outside of us to be discovered we each have a shared culture which we help to shape for outselves and others.
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"We imagine the stability of our mindsets to be the stability of the underlying phenomena, and so we do not think to consider the alternatives. We hold things still in our minds despite the fact that all the while they are changing. If we open our minds, a world of possibility presents itself."
Merton