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I had a completely different post planned for today, but my RSS reading has uncovered a pattern of posts talking about Heath Ledger dying, depression and Seasonal Affective Disorder. As someone who’s dealt with S.A.D. and bouts of depression for many years, I’ve learned that there is no magic formula that will make it all better. Through a lot of trial and even more error, I HAVE figured out that there are some behaviors that are sure to make it all worse. That’s the angle I want to take in post.

Disclaimer: I’m not a doctor, therapist, shrink, priest, or licensed electrician. If you are in pain - physical, psychological or otherwise - PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE get medical help. If it’s truly dire, call 1.800.SUICIDE immediately! There is no shame in asking for help, ever.

With that being said, here’s what I’ve learned from my own bad example over the years:

1. Do Not Assume It’s “Just the Winter Blues.” S.A.D. is a real disorder, just ask the Mayo Clinic. Medical conditions have medical treatments such a drug therapy, talk therapy and light therapy. If you can’t function in your normal life during the dark autumn and winter months, talk to a doctor. If your doctor says something asinine like, “It’s all in your head,” (yes, that really happened to me) find a new doctor.
2. Do Not Load Up on High Carb and High Fat Foods. I know it’s tempting to sit on the couch and eat potato chips and M&Ms all winter, and it’s okay to do that sometimes, but make sure to get some fruits and veggies, too. Try having a salad or some clear soup before lunch and dinner. Your hips and your mood will thank you.
3. Do Not Skip All Exercise and Fresh Air. Baby, it’s cold outside and the last thing you want to do is venture outdoors, but your body is designed to move. Any type of exercise at all - even slipping around on the ice for 10 minutes at lunch - will pump some blood and endorphins to your brain. Even a cloudy day outdoors will send more light to your brain than sitting in a brightly lit office all day.
4. Do Not Sit in the Dark. I spent an entire Chicago winter napping on the couch watching bad daytime television. It drove my roommate crazy and nearly drove me to the brink of insanity. Full-spectrum lighting is your friend. If you can’t find full-spectrum bulbs at your local home improvement store, try a simple Google product search. They are energy efficient and affordable instant mood boosters.
5. Do Not Commit to Lots of Stressful Activities. Most people have lower energy levels in the winter, even if they don’t have full-fledged S.A.D. The dark days of January are not the time to begin your novel, become president of the board, or plan the social event of the season. Cut back on non-productive, stressful interactions as much as possible, at work and in your personal life.
6. Do Not Avoid Your Friends and Family. This may seem like a contradiction to item 5, but it’s really and extension of the theme. Save your social energy to be around people that you enjoy and make you laugh. I rarely have enough spare energy in the winter to make nice with people that I don’t like. I ALWAYS feel better after a meal or movie with my siblings or close friends. Also, this is a great opportunity to shamelessly milk physical affection from your Significant Other if possible. Familiar touch is a great mood booster!
7. Do Not Feel Bad Because You Feel Down. Let’s revisit #1. S.A.D. is a medical condition - like the flu. You don’t feel bad about yourself when you get the flu, so quit the head games about dealing with S.A.D. I have parked a huge light therapy lamp on my desk and tell all my co-workers about my condition whenever they ask. I live in Michigan. It’s dark. I get tired and depressed. That doesn’t make me weak, and it doesn’t make you weak either.

I really, truly hope this is helpful. If it isn’t just remember, only 60 more days until Spring And leave better ideas in the comments!

Photo courtesy of kearley.

Okay, this is not a blog about politics, but it is a blog about change on all levels - including changes in societies. So, I’m going to indulge myself for a moment here and talk a bit about the current U.S. Presidential primaries.

At the time of this writing, Hilary Clinton and John McCain have shocked everyone by finishing first in their respective parties’ primaries in New Hampshire. Now, I’ll set aside for a moment that New Hampshire is a weird little state that is not at all demographically representative of the entire United States. The polls all predicted other people winning, and the polls turned out to be very wrong.

Candidate of Change

It seems, so far at least, that this election is going to be about the candidates making claim to being change makers. McCain, Obama, and Clinton to name a few, have all positioned themselves as the Candidate of Change (hear booming voice from the Heavens).

This is logical because all the data indicates that the American public is dissatisfied with the current state of Presidential leadership. When our situation is bad, we want to change it. When the President is admired (let’s use Ronald Reagan as a recent, if controversial, example), the voters often choose someone who is seen as capable of continuing their policies. Since the current President is not so universally loved, voters seem to want his polar opposite.

The question I would ask is, Is this real change, or just a cyclical reaction?

I Don’t Need to Walk Around in Circles

History if full of circular patterns. Stretch your mind for a moment and think back to the 1920’s and 1930’s in the United States. The “Roaring ’20s” were a time of great social permissiveness, when women started to wear short hair and short dresses and people drank bootlegged, illegal liquor. The 1930’s was a time of great economic depression and politics that focused on using government to help keep the country employed and the hungry fed. In today’s language, the politics of the day were quite liberal.

In the 1940’s and 1950’s, the focus of government shifted toward much more “conservative” policies emphasizing national defense (there was that issues with the Second World War, followed quickly by the Cold War) and business-friendly policies and regulations. These changes fueled tremendous economic growth, but not for all members of society.

The 1960’s and, to some extent, the 1970’s were much more liberal in focus and eventually led to the conservative backlash of the 1980’s.

Are you seeing a pattern here? As some have said, society often swings back and forth like a pendulum. A pendulum pattern is a type of change, but it’s a temporary and cyclical change. It’s like a person gaining and loosing the same 20 pounds over and over again.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, yes someone will win the Presidential election. And that person will probably make changes to how Things Are Done. But will those changes be true, lasting changes or just another swing of the pendulum?

Photo courtesy of dougieladd.

This is the second part of my personal story of change. To start at the beginning, please read Part 1.

In my last post, I left off with my experience of learning to play and compose music. As I mentioned, I began to realize that patterns play a powerful role in how our ears - and eventually our minds - receive certain musical sounds. The best thing about this discovery is that it gave me a framework for understanding a lot of things about the world. Human behavior may be the most important of those things.

This section of the story will deal mostly with my study of human and organizational behavior, and how they affect my work and outlook on life today.

Acting Out
“Life is but a walking shadow,
A poor player which struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more.” William Shakespeare

Do you remember high school?

Yeah, me too.

I don’t know how your high school worked, but at my high school (graduating class size: 102), if you weren’t a jock, you weren’t anyone. I definitely wasn’t a jock, so I had to find myself a social niche. By my sophomore year, I figured drama club was as good a choice as any. I made a lot of friends through acting, some of whom are still my friends today. On a more intellectual level, I began to learn how to become an observer of humanity.

What do I mean by that? Acting involves a lot of watching. In order to create a character that is believable, a good actor has to know how humans interact. This requires studying other people and yourself intensely. Through acting, I learned to step outside of myself and watch from the perspective of the detached observer. High school definitely wasn’t my favorite time in life, but being able to become a watcher, rather than a participant, in some of the drama (pun intended ;)).

Over time I got to be a pretty decent actor and became pretty serious about it. I was even serious enough to decide to study theatre in college. That didn’t last very long. As I’ve written about in the past, I made a rapid change decision. However, I’ll always carry the lessons I’ve learned about the value of observation.

How Come People Act Like That?
“They take your love and your money.
They take your sugar and your honey.
They take you skinny or fat.
Hey, how come people act like that?” Muddy Waters

On the very first day of my very first philosophy class, my professor started his lecture with, “Philosophy is an experience of radical freedom.” I was hooked. After 18 years in a small town where people did pretty much the same things as everyone else, I was ready to question everything. Over the last few years I had begun to piece together how patterns and rhythms effect human experiences and I’d also developed my powers of observation. That turned out to be a great platform from which to begin the study of philosophy.

Very early on in my studies, I realized that I have no patience for esoteric questions. There are philosophers that study things as useless as “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” but I was never one of them. Sure, at times I got hung up on questioning whether we actually exist, but for the most part I focused my coursework on ideas that I could apply in the real world. The great thing about philosophy is that it really addresses the human condition. If you stick with it, it can help you answer questions like, “What is the best way to live?”; “Why should I be ethical?” and even “Why do people act like that?”

I soaked it all up for four years, accumulating knowledge and maybe even a little wisdom. As I was writing my senior thesis (on the intersection of ethics and friendship), I seriously contemplated a career as an academic. Unfortunately, the current academic environment doesn’t really allow a lot of space for the exploration of such basics questions. The last thing I wanted to do was write 800 pages on Hegelian understandings of Spirit (which one of my professors actually did).

When I spoke with my advisor about my future career possibilities he told me very bluntly that it would unlikely that anything I wrote in philosophy would make any difference until at least “500 years after you’re dead.” I decided that I had to do something that would help the world a little quicker than that!

Getting Things Done
I will get things done for America -
to make our people safer,
smarter, and healthier.
I will bring Americans together
to strengthen our communities.
Faced with apathy,
I will take action.
Faced with conflict,
I will seek common ground.
Faced with adversity,
I will persevere.
I will carry this commitment
with me this year and beyond.
I am an AmeriCorps member,
and I will get things done. The AmeriCorps Pledge

In the very funny Broadway musical Avenue Q, there is a song that asks the question, “What do you do with a BA in English?” I was facing a similar dilemma. I graduated from college in 1999, at the very height of the dot-com boom. I was watching my classmates take jobs as investment consultants starting at $90,000 a year. None of those types of opportunities interested me at all and the recruiters in freshly pressed suits didn’t want to talk to me anyways. At the time I decided that eventually I would get old, fat, and rich, so I should seize the moment and do something useful for the world.

There are a lot of service opportunities available to fresh-faced college grads in the United States. After checking out a few options, I decided to join the AmeriCorps National Civilian Community Corps. The NCCC is a full-time, 10 month commitment to serve. Corps members are assigned to a campus and to a team. Community groups in the campus service region can apply to have a team come to them and perform service work. I was really attracted to the possibility of traveling throughout a region in the country and doing a variety of work, so I joined.

I have to say that being a Corps member was a great experience, but difficult. I met some amazing people and some incredible jerks. I got to go to the White House and shake Bill Clinton’s hand. I also swept up a lot of dead cockroaches, ate Army food, and wore combat boots.

From the very beginning of my AmeriCorps service, I had plenty of opportunities to study human interactions and organizational transitions. My team’s very first assignment was disaster relief, which was a challenging and high stress situation. Talk about rapid change! The situation we were in was constantly changing, from where we were sleeping, to the work we were doing, to people loving us, and then being mad at us.

My team leader taught me a tremendous amount about how NOT to help people cope. I don’t want to place too much responsibility on her, because she was young and under a lot of pressure. Let me just say that by using my powers of observation I was able to deduce that people cope best with rapid change when they have a stable platform from which to work. When my teammates and I felt like our work was meaningful and secure, we could tolerate almost anything the outside world threw at us. When everything was in flux, including our leader’s faith in us, it became much more difficult to do good work.

Because NCCC teams never stay with a project for more than 6 weeks, I had the chance to work with many types of organizations. Some were small and nimble, others were immovable bureaucracies, and still others were just struggling to survive. I realized that there is a sweet spot between chaos and efficiency and that very few organizations can stay there for long.

In the end, I realized that the NCCC was not a great fit for me at that time in my life and I terminated my service early. I certainly don’t regret my time as a Corps member, but there came a point when I was done. I ended up taking the first job that was convenient and getting out of town.

Not-For-Profit
The exempt purposes set forth in section 501(c)(3) are charitable, religious, educational, scientific, literary, testing for public safety, fostering national or international amateur sports competition, and preventing cruelty to children or animals. The U.S. Internal Revenue Service

Immediately after AmeriCorps I was working at a dead-end job that was amusing, but not as challenging as I wanted. Over the course of a long, cold winter (made quite a bit better by the introduction of my best friend and significant other), I did a lot of soul searching and tried to figure out where I might fit in any kind of a career track. Clearly academia wasn’t going to work. Serving in AmeriCorps only left me more aware of the acute needs of people in the U.S. and around the world. I realized that I had to something that could impact people immediately. I decided that in the end I could best be of service by working in the nonprofit or NGO sector.

My first nonprofit job was at a very small agency. At its height, it had four full time staff members. I barely made a living wage, but I had the chance to learn at a pace that I never dreamed of in school! That organization went through 2 mergers in 3 years, first with a smaller agency and then with a larger agency that eventually swallowed it up. When I worked there I learned about changing funding environments, service environments, client demographics, legal requirements, accountability, oversight, and so much more. It was great work and I loved every minute of it (except for the crying kids!). I was able to watch as the organization evolved from a very team-oriented structure to more command and control. As the agency began to struggle more with funding, the director became much more interested in controlling the details. Clearly it was getting to be time for me to leave.

At the time I left that job I was one year into a Masters degree in Public Administration (MPA), with an emphasis in nonprofit management. I was quickly running out of money to pay for school, and I was in need of the new job. Fortunately, the best possible solution presented itself: work for the school and get free tuition! My studies and my work complimented each other very nicely. I was able to continue my studies of organizational structures, planning tools, administrative systems, and all of the other things needed to keep an agency running, while literally working to help keep agencies running.

I’m still working at the same school, and I’m still helping public and private community groups develop systems, manage knowledge, and generally change in intelligent and sustainable ways. When people ask for the elevator pitch about what I do, I tell them that I help organizations ask good questions and get good answers.

Sometimes I find myself sitting in a meeting, but moving my mind to the perspective of the outside observer. I’m present physically, but my brain is absorbing everything from afar. I watch how the people in the room talk to each other (or at each other) and try to figure out the story lines behind the spoken words. Every day of my life I get to use my brain and help people. It’s a pretty charmed life, which has only been enhanced by this blog.

Thank you for making this possible.

This is where I’ll leave my story for now. To be honest, this has been a difficult couple of posts for me. In some ways I’m not confident that my story adds a lot of value to this blog. I’m also feeling a little more exposed than I’m entirely comfortable with (which is why it’s taken me so long to finish this!). I hope you’ve found something interesting in this series. If you have questions, or would like to hear more, let me know about it in the comments.

Photo courtesy of cnw.

It’s time to share my story. So much of blogging is about the personal within the community that I’ve decided to get a little more personal about who I am and why I’m here.

Whenever someone decides to devote a significant amount of time to one fairly narrow area of inquiry – say, personal and organizational change – you kind of have to ask why. What’s the motivation for me to spend so much time on this when I could be curled up with a good novel or watching Harry Potter movies?

For the last week I’ve been thinking about my life story. I’ve begun to realize that many of the events I’ve been through and many of the experiences that I’ve sought out have led me down this very path. Now, I’m not in to sensationalistic public confessions (and I haven’t done anything all that sensationalistic in my life, anyway), but it seems to me that it would provide a lot of context to my readers if I were to share some of this perspective.

A Child Apart
“If there is anything we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could better be changed in ourselves.” Carl Jung

I was an only child for the first 3.5 years of my life. It was great. I had my parents’ undivided attention, a huge yard to play in, lots of presents, and the feeling of entitlement that many only children have.

Then my mother had twins.

I love my little sisters to death and I’m grateful every day that I have them in my life, now. At the time of their birth, however, I was unwillingly forced to learn my first hard lessons about change management. All of the sudden, everything in my world was different and I didn’t like it one bit. I’m quite sure that my lifelong interest in change was born on my sisters’ birthday.

The other interesting thing about having twin sisters is that my relationship with them will always be radically different from their relationship with each other. I’m not sure that anyone who isn’t a twin could possibly understand what it feels like to have an exact genetic copy of you running around in this world. From their first attempts at noise-making all the way up to now, they have their own way of communicating with each other. It’s a language I don’t speak, but I’ve always been curious about it.

Observing my sisters’ interactions was probably my first experience of research. I wasn’t a part of them, so the only thing I could do was stand apart and watch. This was a normal thing for me and it spilled over into lots of areas of my life. I was a curious kid and spent a lot of my childhood reading, looking at bugs and trees outside, and creating stories.

In a lot of ways, none of that has changed.

Music & Patterns
“Every Good Boy Does Fine” The Treble Clef

I was lucky enough to go to a school that hadn’t yet cut all music, gym, and art programs. My elementary school music teacher was a fantastic educator who truly loved music and teaching children. He taught us to read music, sing, keep time, and have fun with it all. Between those early classes and the gift of an incredibly cheap guitar from my aunt, I was soon asking for guitar lessons.

I took lessons on and off for a number of years until I got to be a pretty decent guitar player. After a while I began writing songs, which gave me the chance to work on combining words and music. A few years of this helped me notice that music is fundamentally a combination of patterns. Certain patterns of notes/sounds are pleasing to the human ear, while other patterns sound dissonant. This isn’t all that different from patterns of events. In the course of our lives, certain events are very comfortable and familiar, while those that deviate from those usual patterns are challenging and uncomfortable.

Like most people, I didn’t like the challenging and uncomfortable events that occurred in those days. I had a lot of anger problems as a kid and I was brutally hard on myself for even the most minor mistake. My family went through some challenging economic times and I took a lot of responsibility on myself for problems that I didn’t cause and couldn’t solve. Internalizing all of these negative emotions took a toll on my and I’ve had to deal with that ever since.

Fortunately, I never lost my curiosity and ability to step outside of myself and observe the world around me. This talent has served me well, as I’ll explain in future posts.

Ed. Note: If you can’t tear yourself away, continue on to Part 2.

Photo courtesy of cnw.

This time of year is always a challenge for me. The days are short and usually gray. My office is cold and work is piled up to the ceiling because of the year-end rush. All of these things combine to make me just a little cranky

If you ever struggle with a lot of feelings of negativity, I’m going to suggest an exercise that you’ve all heard of, but I’m guessing lots of people have never tried: Make a List of Things That You Are Grateful For. Like a lot of advice, this is completely unoriginal, but people keep doing it because it works. The U.S. has continued a holiday dedicated to being Thankful for over 400 years not because we’re crazy about Pilgrims and cornucopias, but because it makes us feel better.

Here are my 5 top things I’m grateful for right now:

1. My job, which gives me an opportunity to use my brain and help people.
2. The river behind my house. It just keeps flowing every day and reminds me to move forward.
3. The cool looking violet lights on the instrument panel of my car. They’re so much nicer than plain old white!
4. The Internet - best thing Al Gore ever did
5. Local food. I plan to eat and enjoy a lot of it tomorrow.

Ed. Note: I’m very grateful to learn about the 2007 Season of Gratitude just in time to participate. If you are interested in reading some very inspiring posts about gratitude, please visit the Balanced Life Center which has been posting on this theme for the last 30 days.