Top Ten Ways I Thrive (yes, even in this economy)

Welcome back!

I was recently asked to list my top five to ten strategies for “thriving.”  Given the body I inhabit, I picked ten.  Here they are:
1)  (I bet this is a unique top pick)  GREAT DRUGS…legitimate ones, of course.  I would literally be dead were it not for biotechnology and the pharmaceutical industry.  Daily inhaled and oral medications keep me breathing and digesting with the best, and I am thankful for that every day.  My willingness to accept the need for them, and to follow a diligent routine has to be my top strategy.
2)  A sense of purpose.  This has come to me late(r) in life, but is rapidly rising to the top of the list of things that keep me going.  I now understand (I think) why my soul picked this particular body to reside in this time around.  It was a mystery for awhile why I went to an elite medical school, only to retire after 5 years of practice.   Then why, of all things, I became  a certified personal trainer?  And then, a wellness coach?  Huh?  I thought the idea was to go into medical research and somehow help to cure CF…
Now, every day I coach people like myself to incorporate exercise into their routines just as it is becoming a medical certainty that exercise is VERY important for people with CF.  Because of my MD, I am asked to speak and write about this topic.  I am passionate about the importance of exercise in keeping myself healthy, and have been told that I am a “beacon of light” for the CF community.  Now that is a sense of purpose.
3)  A sense of humor.  One of my signature strengths is humor, and it is a good thing!
4)  My two sons, who have revealed within me a depth of love and feeling I never would have known.  They keep me going.  They keep me attentive to caring for myself…because they need me.  They keep me laughing…and screaming (it’s good for the lungs).  They, amazingly, are capable of both warming every cell in my body and driving me crazy at the same time.
5) Connection with others.  The love and support of my partner, my family and my friends, specifically, provides an immeasurable amount of fuel to keep me going when times are not so great.
6) Faith.  This is a hard one to describe, as I am far from religious.  My faith is centered on a felt sense of trust that I am connected to a greater whole, one that was there before I was born and that will be there when I am gone.  When I am lucky and can let go of my brain for awhile (in meditation), I don’t feel separate from this greater whole at all.  That keeps me going.
7) Movement!  When I don’t exercise every single day, I feel like I am letting myself down.  My dedication to pushing my body is what brings me to age 48 in pretty good shape (for someone with my genotype).  Of this, I am certain.  Certainly, I don’t do now what I did in my 20’s.  But, as I’ve said countless times before: I ran until I had to jog.  I jogged until I had to jog/walk (now).  When I can’t do that anymore, I’ll walk fast.  Then…I’ll just walk.  If there comes a time when I can’t walk, , I’ll roll (but I’ll push myself!).
Sleep!  I love to sleep, and sleep loves me.  I don’t function well without 8 hours…at least.  Sometimes I take 2 hour naps in the afternoon, and I refuse to feel bad about it.  I know my body…it is worthless when it needs sleep.  I acknowledge that it needs more sleep than the average body.  When I lose sight of this, I remember the constant battle that takes place in my lungs, and then happily surrender.  This probably should have gone up there after the drug thing.
9) The unending quantity of information on the web makes lifelong learning as easy as finding the on switch.  Since ‘love of learning” is another SS,  I’m never bored.
10) Dogs…I collect them (six today).  I know…you are probably scratching your head, but if there is one thing that keeps me in the moment, it is a dog.

What keeps you going?

Taking Contol of and Responsibility for Your Health

Is it Take or Bring?

I never know.  But for purposes of my acronym, it has to be Take.

T is for:  Take complete control of what you can, and take complete responsibility for each of your actions.  In a word, be accountable to yourself, because if not you, then who?

When it comes to living with ongoing health challenges, it is very easy to surrender control––to doctors, to “experts,” to nurses, to your spouse, to family members who “know what is best for you,” to your horoscope, etc.  The problem with this is that it leads to a “crisis in confidence,” as Margaret Moore et al discuss in their white paper entitled, The obesity epidemic: a confidence crisis calling for professional coaches (http://www.wellcoaches.com/images/whitepaper.pdf).  A true crisis occurs when we let others control what happens to us.  When we consistently let others decide for us, we gradually lose the belief that we have our own answers.  Then we are in trouble.

Marty Seligman, the “father” of positive psychology, demonstrated the severity of what happens when control is not an option on some very unlucky dogs back in the late 1960’s.  These poor creatures were first “taught” to become helpless (an unforeseen outcome of the experiment) as they were harnessed to another dog while receiving random, painful electrical shocks given simultaneously to both dogs.  One dog in the pair had a lever it could press to end the shock.  The dog without the lever would also receive the benefit of the shock ending, but this seemed as random as the shocks.   To the second dog, pain was random and inescapable.

Subsequently, both dogs were placed in a box with a shallow board dividing it into two sides.  When a shock was applied on one side of the box, the dog simply needed to hop over the divider to escape the pain.  The dogs from the previous experiment that had been taught to press a lever to stop the pain found this option immediately. What do you think the dogs that had “learned” that pain was inescapable did?  They simply lay down and accepted the pain.  They didn’t even look for an escape!  They had learned helplessness.

What do these poor dogs teach us?

We need to find where we do have control, any control, and cease it!  You may not have control over your cancer returning after a remission; but if it does, you have control over how and if you want it treated.  You have no control over how long you have to wait for an organ transplant, but you have complete control of what you will do while you wait.  You may not have control over how bad your next flare of MS will be, but you do have control over how much rest you get as you wait for your health to stabilize.

What you take charge of can be small.  It can be as simple as determining the time you will go to sleep.  But it needs to be your sole responsibility.  And you get to reap both the benefits AND the costs of whatever it is…

That brings me (or takes me…I don’t know) to responsibility, the other half of the “Take” strategy.

Taking responsibility for everything you do is really a corollary of “Take control of what you can” because if you take control, then by definition, you are responsible.  Conversely, when you let someone else decide, you have no responsibility for the outcome.  Good or bad, someone else made it happen.  The good news is…it’s not “your fault” when something goes wrong.  You get to blame someone else.  The bad news is that when something goes well…how can you claim any credit?  When your successes are not perceived as being brought upon by YOU, you don’t get to develop self-efficacy.

Self-efficacy is simply a person’s belief that they are capable of reaching a goal or achieving a certain level of performance. . Self-efficacy is huge in importance when it comes to happiness…so important that it will get its very own post someday soon.  Guess what is the opposite of self-efficacy?  Helplessness.

I read somewhere that E+R=O or, Event + Response= Outcome.  I would give credit to whomever came up with it, if I could remember, but such is the state of my hippocampus.  Anyway, I like it.  It’s very clear, and obviously true.  If we think of our illness as the Event, and our overall Wellbeing and Happiness as the Outcome, then R (response) is clearly quite important, right?  R is about taking control, and taking responsibility.