Today, I heard is international beer day, also some other day but I forget which. Anyway, what are we supposed to do with an “international x… day?”

Are we supposed to consider as a human race the significance of a a particular topic? I know on international women’s day for instance, organizers around the word hold rallies and events showcasing women’s contributions, how to advance the cause in specific ways, as well as important things to address like sex slavery and female friendly businesses.

But what do we do on international beer day? Do we consider the role beer plays in making poor people poorer? creating unwanted pregnancy? reducing anxiety and improving communications? loosening the boundaries of creative thinking to improve problem solving?

Every behavior and element has a good and bad history as well as lots in between. We can’t universally label anything as good or bad. As Edward de Bono tells us, every situation has pluses, minuses and interesting points. 

So what is your “topic” of the day? Mine certainly won’t be beer. Maybe we could make up our own x.. day? Like today is clean desk day, or staying focused on my project day, or being healthier day.

What if we devoted all our mental resources to making one part of our personal world better? Rather than dare I say it “thinking about beer all day”?

Last week, I came across an ad for a podcasting course that said “35% of all people prefer to listen to information and ideas” Where do marketers get these figures from – the Miyagi principle? For those unfamiliar this goes “everything we know, everywhere was made up at sometime by someone” 

Some take this to extremes, without any basic for what they have made up. Most noticeable of course on the Internet. I hate how research and surveys and figures in percentages at plopped down as though they were facts on websitesI Do 35% of people have preferred representational system of auditory? 

I tried to find some figures on job satisfaction for instance and they ranged from 80% dissatisfaction to 80% satisfaction. How can two sources have such different results. And yet our brains go ” I believe that” and drag up all your experiences about working and satisfying your jobs have been. In other words, we make the facts fit what we already believe.

I love how brains do that, it’s really the foundation of perception. Which is why marketers are so good at finding numbers and “facts” to support what they want your to believe. What do you plant to anchor these perceptions? How do you set expectations for yourself and other people? 

The podcasting thing I rejected out of hand based on my own preferences and experiences (it may be true, I don’t know). I do not like having to go at the speed of sound – talking rate when I can absorb the whole idea in a couple of minutes if it’s written out. It also forces me to go at their pace.

On the other hand, when listening to a pod cast I also have time to let my thoughts wander a little and connect what is being said  or even pause the track and go investigate it.  Because with text I have to find my place again. 

I also think that for many auditory is a very influential sense for many. It is one of our first senses – babies are aware of sound and voices in the womb after all. As kids we have people talking at us all the time – and they are often more powerful than us. Which is probably why some totally tune out I guess – hate being told what to do. 

More to the point though – how many of your beliefs are based on what someone else has made up?

The consequences of having to save face can be catastrophic as we’ve seen with the Fukushima power plant recently.

So what exactly is this “face”? We can be lulled into thinking this is just a problem in certain cultures. 

We all have the need to be seen in a certain way.  When someone is disrespectful – when they don’t give us the courtesy we deserve, we feel that loss of face. That the other is not seeing us how we imagine we should be seen and is not treating us as an important human. 

And of course to ourselves we are the most important person in the world – just get in a situation where your survival is at stake (like holding your breath) and see if your unconscious mind thinks you are really irrelevant. It is healthy to want to be treated with respect. 

Identity is amazing.  It’s like our self organizing principle.  It enables us to know what we want to do think and say. How many times have your said “I’m the kind of person who…”? When something happens to challenge our view of ourselves, it can threaten our whole sense of identity. 

In fact in terms of making a change in your life, one of the most powerful target points is changing identity. Robert Dilt’s neurological levels model explores this.

For instance, if you want to lose weight, you can clean out your kitchen as one way to stop over eating, but a more powerful way is to become the kind of person who doesn’t over eat.

Our sense of self or “our face” is actually defined by the reactions of other people and our interactions in the world. It’s like a 3-D model of us and what we are capable of, what we value, what we believe and how we are likely to behave. For more about how we develop and create this representation, see “Consciousness: creeping up on the hard problem“ 

So when someone threatens our sense of self, it can be devastating especially if that sense of self isn’t strong through lots of connections.

Many people experience the terror of being humiliated, preventing them doing things where they might fail. A friend and I went roller skating and because he didn’t look cool (being the first time he’d skated) he sat on the sidelines all night. Because of course when you do something the first time you aren’t going to be or feel that competent.

Fear of incompetence and particularly fear of not being perfect can have truly devastating consequences. Like not trying, not admitting you don’t know, or having to be right. Or even not asking for help when your nuclear power plant is in meltdown.

I’ve been watching the devastating scenes of the tsunami destroying whole towns in Japan yesterday. The newscaster then switched to an interview with a foreigner who was living some way away, but who had lost power and transport. His biggest concern was that he had no food. In fact it was the first thing he mentioned “we don’t have any food”.

And it struck me that people really believe they will perish without food for a day or two. Which is absolutely not true in case you’re wondering. I have a friend who always prepares and takes snacks even when she will only be away for 2 hours. I read a novel a while ago where the heroine was trapped in a cave in for 3 days and emerged like a skeleton from lack of food.

If this were really true we wouldn’t need those weight loss TV shows, just lock them up for a couple of days and whammo – 50% of their body weight gone.

While we can’t survive without water for more than a few days depending on conditions, we are designed to survive the some time without food (months even depending on conditions). Especially those of us with lots of storage i.e. fat. While it wouldn’t be comfortable to not eat a couple of days without it wouldn’t kill you. What it would do is lower your metabolism when your body went into conservation mode. Think bears hibernating.

Anyway, I digress. What is the effect of believing you will perish unless you eat every couple of hours? Number one would be obesity. Or you might be obsessed with food – it would take priority over other activities and things. It might cause you to worry about keeping your job or making money may be (where is my next meal coming from?).

To put it in perspective, we don’t usually obsess about where our next glass of water is going to come from or our next breath. These things are generally background unless we don’t have them. Yet these are much more critical than a steady supply of food.

What are the consequences of your untested beliefs? Some people with agoraphobia for instance believe something dire will happen if they leave the safety of their home – that the panic will overwhelm them.

Yesterday was an amazing day. I helped deliver my new baby grand daughter. Her name is Ella and she is tiny and gorgeous of course. It was a relatively fast birth, as they go. Within 3 hours the little bundle slid out and took her first breath. No time for the civilized accessories of modern pain killers.

Albert Einstein once explained relativity as “a minute sitting on a hot stove seems longer than an hour with a pretty girl.” For my daughter at the time each minute would have been very long. 

But at the end, she said “I don’t remember the pain.”

This is really the nature of physical pain. Once it’s over, and for child birth there is mostly an abrupt end, it’s gone. You can remember having the pain, but not actually re experience it. 

When it comes to emotional pain, it’s a completely different story. That extraordinary gut wrenching feeling of being rejected or of grief for a loss, of fear, loneliness can be re experienced time after time like some personal Ground hog day nightmare. 

My favorite comment in that classic movie was Bill Murray talking about a day he had that was absolutely perfect for him and saying “Why couldn’t I get that day over and over again?” Because for some reason, most of us rehash the emotionally painful experiences over and over, rather than the amazing ones. 

But apart from that, is emotional pain the same as physical pain, if we can re experience it by recalling the original situation? Consider that physical pain is felt in different areas of the body, from pain receptors sending information to our brain. Whereas our emotional states come from our interpretations of the external world. They are visceral sensations we generate in response to our perceptions (for instance threats to status, connection or self image).

They are entirely different pathways.

Sometimes it’s hard to get started. I was thinking about this the other day (instead of just starting probably).

When I have a book to study, I don’t have to think about what to do first – the sequence is there. I don’t have to decide where to start, what to focus on or what the most important part is. I just start at the beginning and in a couple of paragraphs I have momentum. If it’s well written and clear, I get good insights that are exciting. If it’s bad even I just read faster and skip the boring bits. This gives me a sense of achievement, flow, completion, momentum and I feel productive.

What doesn’t feel productive is the kind of thing I did yesterday. Spending all day doing search engine marketing. Because I’m having to decide what to do next. And I don’t necessarily know which tasks are leveraged because it isn’t something I do all the time.

So I end up feeling slightly inadequate, but also frustrated. So is the feeling of momentum really productive? 

When I was 4 I went to an ice skating show. I was mightely impressed. I imagined being able to whirl around and leap and dance on ice just like those performers. The reality was a little different. When I finally got my Dad to take me ice skating, I spent most of the afternoon on my very cold wet bum, apart from the time spent hanging off the rail.

What is easy to do in my imagination .. when I learn about something all the pieces come together and I get the whole picture … is painfully slow and full of gaps/obstacles when I put it into practice. So I tend to go learn more stuff instead. Even worse, I sometimes think that because I’ve done it in my mind I don’t have to do it in reality – it becomes a substitute rather than a template.

And I see this all the time. Someone bases their self esteem on being capable, so they only do the things they know they are going to do well. Because everytime they put something into practice that in their mind they do brilliantly they feel inadequate. They fail to live up to their own expectations. 

It’s the expectations that are the real problem. Setting the bar too high based on what we simulate in our minds. If we had the expectations of a beginner rather than what is eventually possible we wouldn’t have the disappointment of failing to live up to that comparison.