The Frazzled Entrepreneur's Balance Beam

The Endangered Working Male

Several years ago, my friend, Dr. Jed Diamond explained how masculine acculturation was creating a huge obstacle for men in the workforce: both young and old. As the world moves from an industrial model to a "post-industrial" (or knowledge-based) economy, the skill sets most in demand evolve away from brute strength (construction and manufacturing) and systems and problem-solving (engineering, etc.) and toward sharing, empathy, and networking. These last are the very skills that have traditionally been beaten out of the males of our western culture. Those men who, in the past, have dared to develop their "feminine" side have paid dearly with their self-esteem (dancers, artists, decorators, florists, etc., etc.). As a result, the driving force behind our economic engine is reflecting the skills that empower it: it's becoming decidedly female.

Now, we find ourselves plunged in a global recession. As national economies falter, one after another, and the world-wide demand for goods and services dries up, companies cut back on staff and unemployment skyrockets. Who are these people being laid off? They are overwhelmingly male. The bulk of the male job market remains focused in traditionally 'macho' corners of the economy; and these are exactly the corners that are losing jobs at a frightening pace. In a well-publicized article last week, The New York Times reported that fully 82% of the job losses in this current recession have affected male workers.

Want A Meaningful Life? Get a Balanced One!

In my experience, many people think of creating a balanced life only in theoretical terms: "It's a great theory, but id doesn't solve any of my practical problems." That's often followed by, "I ought to do something about that when I'm not so busy." Of course, those "I'll have to do something about that when . . . " statements are all really just blowing smoke. You know that you can make time for anything that's really important to you. 'Balance' just isn't one of those things, now, is it? Most people can't make the connection between living an imbalanced life and those sad, quiet moments when it strikes them that they're running around in mad circles, going nowhere, and feeling very lost and empty. Do those moments ever creep into your consciousness, when you stop long enough to allow yourself to feel?

From time to time, regardless of how busy you are, everybody at least briefly surfaces for some emotional air. At those rare and often uncomfortable moments, you're given a glimpse of what your life could have (or should have) been. I can't remind people often enough that pain is nothing but life trying to get your attention. Emotional pain is no different. There's a message behind it. In this case the message is: "Hey you! You're not getting what you need!" Now, why do you think that is? What's going on that would make you feel that way? And, more importantly, what can you do not only to silence that painful message, but to correct the issues that are causing your emotional 'smoke alarms' to go off on a more-or-less regular basis?

Prayers That Are Always Answered

Not everyone will like what I have to say here, but that's OK. I'll say it anyway, and it might just resonate with some. Prayer can be a dicey subject; many times people would sooner talk about the intimate details of their sex lives than get involved in a conversation about prayer. For some people, that topic conjures up images of superstition and anti-intellectual, unscientific bias. For others, prayer evokes strongly-held (if not fanatical) convictions that easily translate to "It's my way or the highway." Yet, prayer is an essential element of conscious human life, whether or not we're prepared to acknowledge it. You can't stay on your life's track without it. Yes, I know that's a radical (and, perhaps, unscientific) statement, but that doesn't make it any less true.

Besides having an aversion to prayer, people also bring to the idea a great deal of personal baggage and misconceptions. As a man who has struggled with prayer for almost sixty years, I can attest to the fact that prayer itself, in addition to the concept of prayer, evolves over time. If your understanding and experience of prayer rests unchanged since elementary school, then it's no wonder you might be having difficulty with it. The one thing that I can categorically say about prayer is that it has nothing whatever to do with telling God how to run the universe. What prayer is and why it's important will take a little explaining.

The Courage to Change the Things I Can

Why does change (both creating it and dealing with it) take courage? It's certain that change requires courage, but we're not always certain about why that should be so. To be frank, the cause can be traced back to the fundamental stopper: inertia. Whether change in movement takes place in the physical or intellectual and emotional realms remains incidental, the process is the same: it takes energy to overcome inertia. Whether it be a change in velocity or a change in direction, change requires energy and we have innumerable excuses for why we need to conserve our energy (excuses that have nothing whatever to do with the price of oil.

The cost to an individual to expend energy for change must be enormous — or at least it must be perceived that way. In the May, 2005 edition of Fast Company magazine, it was reported that over 90% of all people who have been told that their medical condition requires them to change their personal habits -- or else -- either fail to change them at all, or, within a short time, revert back to their old habits. Human inertia exerts a kind of extreme resistance to moving out of our comfort zone and, in many case, to moving at all. We feel much saver when we don't need to make decisions, let alone take action. Shifting our minds and our behaviors, putting our free will into gear (and keeping it there in life's uphill climbs) requires genuine courage.

What Do You Need? What Do You Demand?

I was talking with a psychotherapist earlier today, and he made what I considered to be a very interesting distinction: between needs and demands. For a long time, I've been interested in the interplay between 'needs' (as Abraham Maslow and others have dealt with them) and 'wants' (those desires that help us to move forward). In the process, I've discovered that, as your wants are satisfied, they become needs. This is the way we grow, building upon our personal experiential history, one step at a time. This also explains why, for people who have chosen the path of self-fulfillment, our lives become increasingly more complex. And, as a side issue, it also gives us a solid rationale why our society grows incrementally in complexity as well.

Examine how your life has unfolded thus far. If you're reading this at all, it's only because you're interested in how your life is unfolding. Observe how, from season to season as you grow and develop (and that never stops, no matter your age), everything becomes increasingly complex. Even when you begin to 'slow down' and 'simplify' when you've entered your maturity, that only happens because you've already developed with such depth and complexity that you can no longer sustain a more superficial, external complexity at the same level you could have when you were younger, and your world was simpler. Complexification is not an option; in fact, it's one of the four principle forces behind the evolution of the universe.

The Miracle of Midlife

A genuine miracle happens to everyone at midlife.Not everyone recognizes it for what it is, although some do. Others think of it as a 'midlife crisis' and use it as an excuse for getting involved with any number of bizarre or self-destructive behaviors. Many things happen at midlife; not all of them feel good. That boundless stay-up-all-night and work-the-next-day energy starts to fail. Oh, the stay-up-all-night part is still very much there, but the next day's toll grows harder and harder to bear. On the inside, the fountain of enthusiasm that used to carry us through even the worst times starts to run dry. Worst of all, we start thinking back to those 'good old days.'

So, how dare I suggest that midlife brings a miracle, when, for so many people, it can be so painful? It would serve you well to think back on what you know about pain. What's its purpose? Why does an organism like you and me hurt? Both physical and emotional pain have a serious function: they alert us that something's wrong. Pain is the 'smoke alarm' of the body and the mind. Pain warns us that something's not right with us. Yet, when many of us face the pain of encroaching middle age, what do we do? We try to bury the alarm in diversions. When you do that, you kill the messenger without ever listening to the message.

Surviving the Utopian Delusion

I grew up in a Baltimore Catechism kind of world. Just about any Catholic from a practicing family in my generation will know exactly what I mean by that (for the rest of you, just be glad you didn't). I had no idea what 'Original Sin' meant, except that there was some unexplained tenuous connection between what a couple did many thousands of generations ago, and me. It didn't seem all that bad (being disobedient and eating some fruit) but, I was assured, it had some very nasty consequences. Asking, 'Why do I have to suffer for what they did?" didn't get me very far. It was 'God's will' and that was that. It left a curiously bad taste in my mouth that God was that kind of a Meanie.

Fast forward a whole bunch of years into post-graduate theology. Somebody finally shares the understanding that 'Original Sin' is a Biblical metaphor for the human condition. At long last, the light came on! "Aha!" There's a theological name for our common boundless capacity for self-delusion: Original Sin! Who knew? 'Original Sin' identifies that little piece of insanity in each one of us that refuses to accept reality, that denies responsibility, that indulges in wishful thinking, that jumps to conclusions, believes unfounded rumors and always imagines the worst. Call it what you will: 'Original Sin', the 'human condition', our 'tragic flaw' — whatever — this weakness at the core of our human being-ness turns any Utopian dream into a nightmare.

Fear - the Favorite Tool of Demagogues and Despots

Throughout history, those who would claim and hold absolute power had at hand a weapon far more powerful than any that human artifice has been able to conceive: that weapon is (and has always been) fear. No consequence carries the same impact as the threat of that consequence. The power of fear as a weapon lies rooted in the fundamental human instincts: self-preservation and the pleasure principle (seek pleasure, avoid pain). The effectiveness of fear lies, not in the pain that it inflicts (generally, that's non-existent), but in the victim's sense that his or her personal security has been compromised. In Maslow's hierarchy, the need for security is just one step away from the need for physical sustenance.

Take, for example, one of President Franklin Roosevelt's most famous and most often-quoted 'Fireside Chat' remarks: "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." Even the attack on Pearl Harbor — an actual event, and not a threat — left the United States shaken, but still confident. Ironically, once the Second World War had ended, the country was almost immediately plunged into a frenzy of fear, stoked handily by the Republican Senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy. 'Duck and cover' pervaded our elementary schools not because of a Communist attack, but because of the fear of such. In the name of national security, the civil rights of countless innocent people in many walks of life (especially the media) were violated.

Confronting Your Worst Enemy

When I was growing up, all of us — at least the boys — were indoctrinated into the 'cowboy culture'. Nobody didn't know about Roy Rogers, Hopalong Cassidy, Buffalo Bob, and the Lone Ranger and Tonto. We all had something 'cowboy' (usually a pair of toy six-shooters). All of us could sing Home on the Range (at least the first verse). We knew "Oh, give me a home, where the antelope roam" ( . . . and I'll show you a dirty house?). We were told that "seldom is heard a discouraging word, and the skies are not cloudy all day." Of course, at some point, we grew up, and those 'discouraging words' seem to be everywhere. Perhaps it even makes you long for a "home on the range."

There's just one problem with this very attractive fantasy: that's just what it is . . . a fantasy. Our difficulty arises from the fact that we believe that the obstacles to our happiness (those 'discouraging words') are coming from outside. Consider this: if someone you despised walked up to you and told you that you and your ideas would never amount to anything, what would go on inside you? Certainly, you'd be annoyed, perhaps even angry or outraged. But, would you feel less about yourself? Most likely not. Probably, you'd 'consider the source' and let the words bounce off you like the nonsense they are. Such 'discouraging words' have no effect.

Jump Out Before the Water Boils

There's a story (it turns out that it's only an urban myth) that, if you put a frog in a pot of water and slowly increased the heat, the frog would get boiled to death before realizing it needed to get out of the hot water. [In fact, actual experiments prove that, at some point, the water would become uncomfortably hot and the poor amphibian would leap to safety.] Frogs, it turns out, may have more sense than humans. Animal instincts aren't very likely to be overridden by conscious choice.

No one should ever forget the deeply troubling experiments carried out by psychologist Stanley Milgram at Yale University in the early 1960's. Milgram proved that behavior could be incrementally influenced by authority figures until most subjects would behave unethically. His experiment involved having a subject deliver an increasingly large electrical shock to a 'patient' under orders from a 'psychologist' in charge of the experienment until the shock reached (or exceeded) what the subject had been told was a fatal level. Two factors came into play here: 1) unethical instructions given by authority fitures and 2) instructions were gradually degraded until, at some point, they passed the 'boiling' point. Since the 'frog' never felt only emotional pain, he or she never jumped out of the (virtual) pot.