A version of this article originally appeared on Forbes. Sign up for my newsletter to get my articles straight to your inbox.

“Cool girlfriend syndrome” is the term I gave to my tendency to act chill and low maintenance so my boyfriends would love me more.

If that’s not bad enough, millennials do the same thing in our careers all the time:

Boss: Hey you don’t mind staying late tonight, right?

You: Absolutelynotatallwhatsoever, what’s up?

Source: Pexels

But it gets us into trouble.

In this example, overworking can actually undervalue you, as I wrote about in my Forbes article on why millennials aren’t getting promoted. To get promoted, writes Slade Sundar, COO of Forte Interactive, Inc., “you'll need to prove you're more than just a nose-to-the-grindstone type.”

Here’s another example of cool syndrome:

Coworker six months your senior: Do you know how to do [insert highly specialized technology acronym here]?

You: Yeahduh. [You don’t even know what the acronym stands for.]

Coworker: Great can you do that today? My plate’s all full.

Committing to projects without knowing what we’re doing sabotages our chances of learning things right and getting better. We become known as someone who will take on anything nonchalantly but do a mediocre job. At the end of the day, people who pretend to know everything aren’t trainable, nor are they good collaborators or leaders.

A final example:

You: Want to hear this brilliant idea I have?

Coworker: I guess.

[At the next company meeting] Coworker: So I had this idea that maybe we should [insert your idea here].

Everyone: That’s brilliant!

You: Oh cool.

Sometimes millennials think that if they just put their heads down and do good work and don’t complain, they’ll eventually be recognized and rewarded. But, as I’ve covered before, this is rarely the case. Researchers at the University of Notre Dame found that less agreeable employees earned an average of 18% more annually than their agreeable coworkers. Those who demonstrated more agreeable traits were, conversely, less likely to receive promotions. Research also shows that we tend to think agreeable men will make worse leaders.

Of course there are millennials on the opposite side of the spectrum, who are entitled and pushy. But I believe many millennials fall into the former category: we’re trying to get ahead gently, with style, and it’s not working.

There’s another, more existential concern I have about cool syndrome. It eventually blurs the distinction between what we know and don’t know, like and don’t like, need and don’t need. Eventually we realize that we haven’t stood up for ourselves in months, that we’ve sacrificed our life for little reason, and that we’ve been pretending for so long that we don’t even know who we are or what we want anymore. We might look like we have it together, but our careers are coolly falling apart.

Here’s what I’ve learned about cool girlfriend syndrome: The girlfriends who say “Oh nothing” aren’t more lovable. They’re just annoying. In our relationships and at work, people want others to be open, vulnerable and fallible. If your company, or your significant other, doesn’t value you for these fundamentally human traits, they should hire a robot. 

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Source: Pexels.com

Perhaps it’s the fact that I started off the day with some freshly baked blueberry lemon scones that I whipped up at 7am or that I’m now sitting with my laptop and a fresh bowl of homemade frozen yoghurt that I’m inspired to write this particular post.  But either way, it’s becoming clearer to me weekly that working from home is the way to go.  Naturally, as a psychologist in private practice this is not exactly a fully viable option as I’m certainly not planning on inviting clients to my home any time soon (or like ever).  However, as a professional wearing numerous hats outside of my clinical practice, there are plenty of opportunities for setting up shop at home.

The truth is that as freeways in major cities become increasingly clogged up (Portland, Oregon has finally succumbed to this horrendous fate), and technological advances are speeding ahead, the landscape of work has changed significantly over the decades.  Add the fact that now more families need a dual income to survive and that daycare costs are sky-rocketing, many women in particular are finding a balance between running after toddlers and logging in a few hours of work without leaving their front door.

While many are quick to say that working from home is filled with distractions, competing demands, a dinner that is quickly burning on the stove while baby is crying in the other room, the fate is not so grim.  In particular for millennials who tow the line between digital immigrant and native, technology is second nature.  Using Skype for a conference call is nothing out of the ordinary.  Given a lifetime of multitasking, manning the homestead is requires no great stretch of the imagination.  In fact, perhaps even more so for reformed Apple-product toting hipsters setting up shop with their fancy lattes in hand. 

The truth is that the benefits of working from home can far outweigh the cons when you take into account some of the following factors:

1)Elimination of commute.

While this may seem like an obvious one, the truth is that it’s not just about time spent behind the wheel.  In most large cities, traffic is aggressive and traffic is angry.  Merging is a full-contact sport, tired cranky drivers flood freeways and let you in on every one of their frustrations through their swerving, erratic lane changes and basically nearly killing you on a daily basis.  Or maybe that’s just Portland’s I-5.  Either way, I, for one, arrive at the office feeling victorious just for making it in one piece and then immediately feel wiped out.  The same thing happens when I’m returning home.  The mental and emotional fatigue of this daily grind can be exhausting.  By simply not leaving the house if you don’t have to, this chronic stressor is eliminated.

2) Healthier food and exercise options abound.

It’s amazing how much better one eats when decisions aren’t rash, made out of starvation and there is no office snack drawer filled with processed and sugary treats.  When you spend a morning hard at work, you don’t really even need to abide by the staple meal times.  You eat when you’re hungry, not out of boredom and can tune into actual hunger cues.  I can’t tell you how many times when working from home I’ve been typing away like a fiend only to realize it’s 3pm and I haven’t had lunch.  Even when the fridge isn’t full, I can usually hard-boil some fresh eggs, make a cup of tea and fresh toast and still feel satisfied (or maybe it’s just because I described breakfast, my favorite meal of the day).

Further, staying home can often mean you also get the best of exercise.  Whether it’s hitting the gym during a lull, or simply making a run for the outdoors during those fleeting moments of sunshine at 2pm, being home all day will eventually make you stir crazy.  And with all that energy you saved from not battling traffic, you’ll be even more invigorated for a powerwalk, run, or some weights.  Many of my clients do exercise videos from home through following favorite YouTubers.  It doesn’t get much easier than that!

3) Inactivity fatigue is decreased.

It was only recently that I finished reading Chris Crowley and Henry Lodge’s Younger Next Year For Women: Live Strong, Fit, and Sexy—Until You're 80 and Beyond (because I need to be reading about my 80s right now apparently).  They made a fascinating point about individuals avoiding exercise after a long day of work due to fatigue.  They argued convincingly that while we have the experience of physical fatigue, it is biologically not possible if we have been sitting all day long.  What we are actually experiencing is psychological or mental fatigue and mistaking it for physical tiredness.  In actuality, the body is craving movement! 

How does this relate to working from home?  I don’t know about you, but I move around quite a bit when working from home.  I do some laundry, scrub a sink, send emails for a few hours, get up, look in the fridge, close the fridge door, sit and read, you get the idea.  It’s riveting.  The point is that when we are home we don’t have the strict confines of a cubicle or the nosy glances of colleagues who are wondering why we keep getting up.  Fidgety-ness is actually quite normal when we’re expected to be in one position for a long period of time without breaks.

4) Mood is enhanced due to less rigid structure and environment.

Overall, it’s easy to see that given the right circumstances, mood can actually be greatly improved through staying home.  Granted, this can also mean you are getting a little bit of help.  Maybe you hire someone to help with cleaning the house while you are locked up in your home office.  Or you have a babysitter play with the little ones while you take a conference call.  If you are able to set appropriate boundaries at home that actually allow you to get some work done, you can also reap the benefits of a much more relaxed environment.  Hair can be unwashed, and pajama pants can be left on all day long.  This is no reason to get sloppy or go frumpy-chic.  However, when you are typically heading into the office for work, letting yourself indulge on off days is completely ok.  Light a candle, pull a blanket over you, make a hot cup of tea and pull your laptop in your lap, or your file folders or whatever it may be.  The truth is working from home can be a lot more comfortable than any work environment would ever really allow.

Not to mention….nap-possibilities.  We’ve all been there.  We barely slept the night before and tossed and turned incessantly only to be panicking as the clock strikes closer to our wake time.  We get anxious over the lost sleep and even more anxious at being functional, looking professional and so forth.  Enter the beauty of hitting the snooze button (just once) or a midday nap.  Studies consistently show how much sleep deprivation impacts productivity.  By ensuring better sleep, we are also better workers.  And sleeping during the work day is just one more benefit of working from home.

5) More gets done!

The overall impact of a better mood, more exercise, less stress is obvious—more quality work gets done.  You are more relaxed, thinking clearly, well-fed and able to focus on the task at hand.  Many times we are “working” but simply spinning our wheels.  Nothing we are producing is actually of any quality.  Or we suddenly get pulled into our bosses’ office and end up rattled all day.  At home we may not be protected from nasty emails but truthfully even if we did end up tearful, no one would be the wiser for it. 

And it’s not just about all the work that gets done professionally.  When we talk to our therapy clients about time management, we discuss the critical nature of breaks and eventually switching tasks so we don’t burn out.  So you shouldn’t be surprised if on days spent working from home you find yourself with dinner on the table, freshly washed clothes and your inbox empty!

Moral of the story: at your next evaluation meeting with your boss, bring up flex schedules and working from home.  Or if you’re on the job market, don’t be afraid of wanting the flexibility of only going into the office a few days a week.  Yes, boomers may call us lazy or wanting special privileges.  But the days of stay at home spouses is also quickly diminishing and list of household and work items piles up by the day.  I’d love to avoid the cliché, but it’s true—it’s about working smarter, not harder.

For more Millennial reads, follow me on Twitter at MillenialMedia.

Source: Anikei/Shutterstock

When it comes to fostering social connectivity and helping people maintain close-knit human bonds, Facebook appears to be a dual-edged sword. On the one hand, previous research has found that excessive use of Facebook exacerbates feelings of perceived social isolation and loneliness under typical, everyday circumstances.

On the other hand, during a crisis, two recent studies report that Facebook social networks can: (1) create a safety net for the bereaved after the death of a loved one; (2) serve a vital role in helping to fortify a sense of community in the aftermath of a catastrophic disaster.

Social Networks Foster Connective Recovery After the Death of a Close Friend

Of course, face-to-face interactions are always going to be an essential part of maintaining the social fabric of "real world" communities and any wholehearted, intimate relationship. That said, social scientists from Boston and Menlo Park recently discovered that Facebook social networks provide a surprising level of emotional support during the grieving process after the death of a close mutual friend.

For this study, William Hobbs, a postdoctoral fellow at Northeastern University's Network Science Institute and visiting fellow at Harvard's Institute for Quantitative Social Science, teamed up with Facebook data scientist Moira Burke, who is based in Menlo Park, California. Burke's research bridges computer science, social psychology, and the study of friendship networks in online communities using large-scale computational analysis and Facebook datasets.

Hobbs and Burke's new study, “Connective Recovery in Social Networks After the Death of a Friend," was published online ahead of print April 24 in the journal Nature Human Behaviour. This is the first large-scale investigation into resilience and recovery within social networks after experiencing the death of a friend.

Friends and acquaintances of the deceased increase interactions with each other not only in the acute grieving period but for at least two years after.

Source: Courtesy of Will Hobbs

Hobbs and Burke used California state vital records to identify recent deaths. They characterized “close friends” as anyone who had interacted directly with the person who died via Facebook in the months before the study began. For the record: To maintain every user's absolute privacy, the Facebook data was aggregated and "de-identified" or “masked” in a way that totally scrubbed any identifiable associations to a specific individual or circle of friends.

The Facebook bereavement data included approximately 15,000 social networks that had mourned the death of a friend in recent months. The study control group of friends who had not experienced a recent death included approximately 30,000 Facebook networks. 

After analyzing swaths of FB data, the researchers found that close friends of the deceased immediately increased their interactions with one another by 30 percent in the first few weeks following the death of a mutual close friend. As would be expected, these interactions faded a bit in the following months. But ultimately, communication levels stabilized. It appears that the abyss in the social network caused by the death of a friend fills up again like a tidal pool that ebbs and flows. 

Anecdotally, I can corroborate these Facebook “safety net” bereavement findings. Last October, my soulmate Nicole Haran (1969-2016) died at the age of 47. Immediately after Nikki's death, Facebook became a central hub that kept all of her close friends and acquaintances tethered together during the most paralyzing stage of our collective grief, shock, and disbelief.

Within my larger social network of Facebook friends, Nikki was the epicenter of a “two degrees of separation” subset of random people that were her colleagues through the extensive New York theater world—most of whom I’d only met once or twice. My communication with our random mutual Facebook friends dwindled after the period of acute mourning. But, just as Hobbs and Burke had discovered, in the months since, one way all of us continue to keep Nikki's spirit alive is by posting random things that remind us of her in memoriam. 

For example, a few days ago, I wrote a Psychology Today blog post, “The Neuroscience of Hearing the Soundtracks of Your Life,” which concluded by paying tribute to Nicole Haran. Within an hour of posting this on Facebook (with a tag to Nikki) I’d received dozens of comments from random people within our mutual social network who I hadn’t heard from in months. Additionally, lots of people shared songs that stirred their own autobiographical memories of Nikki, such as "And the Healing Has Begun" by Van Morrison which echoes the sentiment of our collective bereavement process. These songs are like "bonus tracks" or iTunes "deep cuts" in Nicole's "This Is My Life" soundtrack that will now be available for posterity like an online time capsule. 

The outpouring of love and kindness via Facebook in memoriam to Nicole over the past few days has made me verklempt. But, it's also been cathartic for everybody within this grieving social network. In a statement, David Lazer, who is a core faculty member in the Network Science Institute at Northeastern said,

"Death is a tear in the fabric of the social network that binds us together. This research provides insight into how our networks heal from this tear over time, and points to the ways that our digital traces can offer important clues into how we help each other through the grieving process."

For what it’s worth, I can anecdotally corroborate the above sentiment based on my experience in the past six months and how Facebook has helped all of us who love and miss Nikki Haran cope with each stage of the grieving process. 

There is one important caveat: Hobbs points out that their research didn’t analyze the subjective experience of how people felt emotionally during their mourning period. Hobbs and Burke only looked at "recovery from a death" based on statistics of social media connectivity, which is obviously a limited universe. That being said, Hobbs concludes,"Online social networks appear to function as a safety net. They do so quickly, and the effect persists. There are so few studies on the effect of the death of a friend on a network. This is a big step forward." 

Online Community Pages Create Community-Building Infrastructure After Disaster

Facebook can also help build a sense of community after a natural disaster, according to a 2016 study by researchers from Charles Darwin University. The report by Douglas Paton and Melanie Irons, "Communication, Sense of Community, and Disaster Recovery: A Facebook Case Study," was published in the journal Frontiers in Communication. For this study, Paton and Irons studied the grassroots response to acommunity Facebook page in the aftermath of a 2013 Tasmanian wildfire.

Paton says this was the first paper of its kind to explore whether people's engagement via Facebook after a catastrophic event could translate into the development of more enduring, functional relationships. The researchers found that in the aftermath of a catastrophic event Facebook (and other social media platforms) can help disseminate critical information and unite people. 

Additionally, the researchers found that when people are brought together during a disaster, they often form a strong bond that can last a lifetime. Paton and Irons conclude that reaching out to others and building a sense of community that begins online can accelerate recovery efforts after a disaster, as well as create the blueprints for an enduring local framework in the future.

Because Facebook and Twitter have become so ubiquitous, so quickly—it's easy to forget that every social media platform we use today is still in its infancy. i.e. Facebook was launched by Mark Zuckerberg et al. as a Harvard-only social network in 2004 and didn’t go mainstream until 2007. Twitter was created in 2006. Instagram came on the scene in 2010. 

As we all know, social media has become a juggernaut that will inevitably play an increasingly pivotal role in our everyday lives...through the good times, and in times of crisis or bereavement. As with any media technology, it's helpful to have empirical research that pinpoints best practices for optimizing the benefits of social media, while minimizing the downsides.

It's important to remain cognizant of the psychological booby traps of excessive Facebook use—such as exacerbating perceived social isolation and reducing valuable time spent connecting face-to-face with friends and family. That said, during a catastrophe or while grieving the death of a close friend, the latest research suggests that Facebook can play an important role in bringing people together by assembling a dynamic "online social safety net" for all parties involved. 

I was saddened to learn this morning that the Toronto-based gallery 'Visions' canceled a show by non-Indigenous artist Amanda PL after concerns were raised that her art  "bastardizes" Indigenous art. 

Those who accuse Amanda of "cultural genocide" may have the good intension of preserving longstanding artistic traditions. Or they may be fuelled by monetary concerns; they may want to ensure that the flow of money for Indigenous style art is not "misdirected" toward non-Native artists. Or they may be motivated by guilt or anger over the horrendous historical mistreatment of native peoples and a desperate wish to somehow make up for it. Whatever their motive, I believe their actions are highly misguided, and in the long run serve to shut Indigenous art off from the natural ebb and flow and fusion of creative inspiration and expression that has unified different peoples since the dawn of humanity. 

I research the creative process and how it fuels the evolution of culture. The creative impulse may draw inspiration from cultural traditions but it is not delimited by ethnicity. We are naturally able to draw upon anything at our disposal, anything we happen to stumble on that strikes a chord or resonates or affects us in some way, to work with as raw materials in creative process. When Isaac Newton said "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants", the races of these "cultural giants" didn't matter; what mattered is that he had assimilated their ideas more deeply perhaps than their own biological children had. Their ideas then permeated Newton's thoughts, and under the influence of Newton's unique worldview (which was a function of his time, place, and so forth) gave birth to new ideas. The threads that connect Newton to the people whose ideas he built upon transcend human notions of race or creed or kin. 

And cross-cultural creative influence isn't limited to cultural giants; it permeates our world, now more than ever. You may like to travel; perhaps you are creatively inspired by the food, or architecture, or artistic designs of someone with completely different cultural roots from your own. You'll never know the person who made that desert or designed that building or painted that painting. But what they created may sink itself so deep into your psyche that it affects you in conscious and unconscious ways, penetrates into your dreams, and ends up in your own creative expressions. Creative inspiration defies the labels and distinctions that humans use to categorize themselves.

Flow of cultural outputs across artificial agents in EVOC after four iterations with an eroding barrier between columns 3 and 4. Each cell represents a different agent. Different cultural outputs are represented by differently coloured cells. This run used a toroidal world, which means a particular cultural output can be transmitted from an agent on the far left to an agent on the far right (and vice versa). Notice how the barrier impedes the natural flow and fusion of cultural ideas.

Source: Liane Gabora

I've written a computer model of cultural evolution called EVOC (for EVOlution of Culture) in which artificial "agents" interact with one another by sharing and creatively building on each others' ideas. It is highly simplified, so you have to take the results obtained with such a model with a grain of salt, but its outputs can sometimes surprise you in ways that bring to light forces operating in real societies, and get you to think about them more deeply. One of the things you can do with EVOC is erect artificial barriers that impede the flow of ideas between different 'cultural' groups. Sure, such a barrier effectively stops agents on one side from messing with ideas on the other side. But it slows down the evolution of ideas across the entire society as a whole, as well as reducing cultural diversity, and impeding the natural creative fusion of ideas that makes real human societies feel vital and "alive".

I'm concerned about the increasing frequency of claims of cultural appropriation, along with the self-righteous labeling of artists who are authentically honouring the creative forms that inspire them, as "uneducated". I don't personally know Amanda PL, though I think her art is gorgeous and inspiring (you can check it out here). Nor do I personally know those who run the Visions gallery or who accused her of 'bastardizing' Indigenous art. But in my view, it is those who make such accusations who are engaging in cultural genocide. Such behaviour threatens to erect a fence around particular artistic forms that impedes their completely natural interaction with other artistic forms, and this kind of interaction is the hallmark of the creative process. Indeed, it isolates Indigenous art from the frothing sea of cultural interactions that defines our humanity and that enables culture to evolve.

Perhaps, had the exhibit not been shut down, someone would have bought a painting by Amanda instead of a painting by an Indigenous artist. But perhaps, had it not been shut down, young Indigenous artists, inspired by Amanda's perspective on their own cultural traditions, would have taken taken certain artistic forms in completely new and fascinating directions, opening up whole new realms of artistic possibility. 

Source: Mark Anthoness/Shutterstock

Co-written by Gleb Tsipursky, Intentional Insights Co-Founder and President, and Peter Slattery

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Charities that use their funds effectively to make a social impact frequently struggle to fundraise effectively. Indeed, while these charities receive plaudits from those committed to measuring and comparing the impact of donations across sectors, many effective charities have not successfully fundraised large sums outside of donors focused highly on impact. 

In many cases, this situation results from the beliefs of key stakeholders at effective charities. Some think that persuasive fundraising tactics are “not for them” and instead assume that presenting hard data and statistics will be optimal as they believe that their nonprofit’s effectiveness can speak for itself. 

The belief that a nonprofit’s effectiveness can speak for itself can be very harmful to fundraising efforts as it overlooks the fact that donors do not always optimize their giving for social impact. Instead, studies suggest that donors’ choices are influenced by many other considerations, such as a desire for a warm glow, social prestige, or being captured by engrossing stories. Indeed, charities that have the biggest social impact often get significantly less financial support than rivals that tell better stories but have a smaller social impact. For example, while one fundraiser collected over $700,000 to remove a young girl from a well and save a single life, most charities struggle to raise anything proportionate for causes that could save many more lives or lift thousands out of poverty.

Given these issues, the aim of this article is to use available science on fundraising and social impact to address some of the common misconceptions that charities may have about fundraising and, hopefully, make it easier for effective charities to also become more effective at fundraising. To do this it draws on academic research across different fields to highlight four common mistakes that those who raise funds for effective charities should avoid and suggest potential solutions to these mistakes.

Don’t forget individual victims

Many fundraisers focus on using statistics and facts to convey the severity of the social issues they tackle. However, while fact and statistics are often an effective way to convince potential donors, it is important to recognize that different people are persuaded by different things. While some individuals are best persuaded to do good deeds through statistics and facts, others are most influenced by the closeness and vividness of the suffering. Indeed, it has been found that people often prefer to help a single identifiable victim, rather than many faceless victims; the so-called identifiable victim effect.

One way in which charities can cover all bases is to complement their statistics by telling stories about one or more of the most compelling victims. Stories have been shown to be excellent ways of tapping emotions, and stories told using video and audio are likely to be particularly good at creating vivid depictions of victims that compel others to want to help them. 

Don’t overemphasize the problem

Focusing on the size of the problem has been shown to be ineffective for at least two reasons. First, most people prefer to give to causes where they can save the greatest portion of people. This means that rather than save 100 out of 1,000 victims of malaria, the majority of people would rather use the same or even more resources to save all five out of five people stranded on a boat or one girl stranded in a well with the same amount of resources, even if saving 100 people is clearly the more rational choice. People being reluctant to help where they feel their impact is not going to be significant is often called the drop in the bucket effect. 

Second, humans have a tendency to neglect the scope of the problem when dealing with social issues. This is called scope insensitivity: people do not scale up their efforts in proportion to a problem’s true size. For example, a donor willing to give $100 to help one person might only be willing to give $200 to help 100 people, instead of the proportional amount of $10,000.

Of course charities often need to deal with big problems. In such cases one solution is to break these big problems into smaller pieces (e.g., individuals, families or villages) and present situations on a scale that the donor can relate to and realistically address through their donation.

Don’t assume that matching donations is always a good way to spend funds

Charitable fundraisers frequently put a lot of emphasis on arranging for big donors to offer to match any contributions from smaller donors. Intuitively, donation matching seems to be a good incentive for givers as they will generate twice (sometimes three times) the social impact for donating the same amount. However, research provides insufficient evidence to support or discourage donation matching: after reviewing the evidence, Ben Kuhn argues that its positive effects on donations are relatively small (and highly uncertain), and that sometimes the effects can be negative. 

Given the lack of strong supporting research, charities should make sure to check that donation matching works for them and should also consider other ways to use their funding from large donors. One option is to use some of this money to cover experiments and other forms of prospect research to better understand their donors’ reasons for giving. Another is to pay various non-program costs so that a charity may claim that more of the smaller donors’ donations will go to program costs, or to use big donations as seed money for a fundraising campaign.

Don't forget to empower donors and help them feel good

Charities frequently focus on showing tragic situations to motivate donors to help. However, charities can sometimes go too far in focusing on the negatives as too much negative communication can overwhelm and upset potential donors, which can deter them from giving. Additionally, while people often help due to feeling sadness for others, they also give for the warm glow and feeling of accomplishment that they expect to get from helping.

Overall, charities need to remember that most donors want to feel good for doing good and ensure that they achieve this. One reason why the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge was such an incredibly effective approach to fundraising was that it gave donors the opportunity to have a good time, while also doing good. Even when it isn’t possible to think of a clever new way to make donors feel good while donating, it is possible to make donors look good by publicly thanking and praising them for their donations. Likewise it is possible to make them feel important and satisfied by explaining how their donations have been key to resolving tragic situations and helping address suffering.

Conclusion

Remember four key strategies suggested by the research: 

1) Focus on individual victims as well as statistics
2) Present problems that are solvable by individual donors
3) Avoid relying excessively on matching donations and focus on learning about your donors
4) Empower your donors and help them feel good. 

By following these strategies and avoiding the mistakes outlined above, you will not only provide high-impact services, but will also be effective at raising funds. 

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Connect with Dr. Gleb Tsipursky on Twitter, on Facebook, and on LinkedIn, and follow his RSS feed and newsletter.

I feel tense watching the finals of relay event in track and field. The baton exchange is so easily mishandled, and the humiliating consequences of error are so complete for the athletes. Even so, whether I feel full empathy if a bad exchange does occur has qualifiers. If it is Olympic event, when a rival country other than the United States suffers this mistake, my Olympic spirit goes off the rails. Pleasure mixes with pity.

What should I make of my pleasure, my schadenfreude?

Clearly, taking pleasure in another’s suffering takes one into morally dubious territory. Eulogies never begin with, “Yes, he was a good man, quick to find pleasure in the misfortune of others. We will miss him deeply”

People who confess to their schadenfreude can be excoriated. Just ask “Jane Fenton,” who in a pseudonymized piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education a few years ago, admitted to occasionally feel happy when one of her students failed. She received a mudslide of vitriol from about half of those commenting on her piece, prompting her to write a rebuttal in her defense.

However, Ms. Fenton’s emotional repertoire is actually quite normal. Schadenfreude, despite its guilt-inducing ways, is a natural, pretty much inevitable emotion permeating social life in both nuanced and bold forms. Why is this? One reason is the brute fact that misfortunes happening to others, in the competitive arena of work and love, can lead to our gain. The evolutionary logic drives home the simple conclusion that any event from which we benefit will please us to this degree. Otherwise, we would not survive as a species. Yes, I want this job dearly, but why don’t you, my rival, go ahead and take it. I’ll step aside. No, this it not the way the world works. And so, if my rivals suffer a setback, a part of me, within my reptilian brain says, yes.

Imagine you are in love with someone. This person is attractive and has a great personality, which largely explains your feelings. But, exactly because of these features, a rival lurks in the wings, causing you fits of jealousy. This person is caught stealing from the company. How do you feel? Unadulterated pity? Secret joy that this person may no longer be a credible rival? Certainly a mix of these feelings. In the mating game, the battleground of adaptive fitness, all can seem fair.

At the same time, we also have a passion for justice. We want good people to fare well and bad people to suffer. Despite the seemingly random, wacky way events often evolve, we want to believe that fate trends toward a pattern of just outcomes – something approaching karma. When someone deserves their suffering, there is something deeply satisfying– and pleasing in this (which, by the way, was when Ms. Fenton felt schadenfreude, when the student’s behavior rendered him or her roundly deserving of failure). This is especially true if misfortune comes to someone who has mistreated us unjustly. Their comeuppance, coming in the form a misfortune, is personal, a kind of revenge consummated by fate. In such cases, the pleasure is sweet in the extreme and probably free of moral alarm.

Consider the boyhood experience of late Yale historian, Peter Gay. He suffered the indignities of persecution as Jew in Nazi Germany, before escaping to the America in 1939, through the prescient ingenuity of his father. Both he and his father were intense sports fans. Indeed sports became a needed distraction from the ever more abominable mistreatment from the Nazis. By the 1938 Olympic games, he and his father identified with America rather than Germany, despising as they did the racist notions of Aryan superiority which the Nazi hoped would be on display during the games. Gay and his father attended many of the events and cheered passionately for the American athletes and felt disappointed when German athletes won.

One event occupied a special place in Gay’s recollection of that time, which he described with fresh enthusiasm in a memoir, written seven decades later. This was the women’s 4 X 100 relay, expected to be easily won by the Germans, a fact that depressed Gay and his father. The race proceeded at expected, with the Germans starting strong and widening their lead with each baton exchange, the American’s a distant second. But, as the baton was passed to the anchor of the German team, a mishap occurred. Gay remembers his father leaping to his feet and shouting “Die Madchen haben den Stab verloren!” (“The girls have dropped the baton!”), as the American runner, Helen Stevens went on to finish first and “. . . the unbeatable models of Nazi womanhood put their arms around each other and cried their German hearts out.”

For Gay, this event remained “one of the greatest moments” of his life. “Schadenfreude,” he concluded, “can be one of the greatest joys in life. Splinters such as these in a time that gave me little pleasure provided instances of pure happiness.”

You can watch the race on YouTube. The passing of eighty years takes little away from the experience. You want an extra dollop of guilt-free schadenfreude? Drink in Hitler and Goebbels’s reactions to the loss.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKqD_h34V30\

Source: Shawn Meghan Burn

The sexual harassment shenanigans of Bill O’Reilly and Roger Ailes at Fox News remind us that sexual harassment remains a workplace problem. In the larger scheme of gendered violence, perhaps sexual harassment does not seem like a big deal. But it is.

For one, it is an affront to our American values of equality in the workplace. Americans should be uncomfortable with the fact that this is an additional workplace stressor experienced disproportionately by women and that it represents a form of workplace gender inequality.

But we should also care because of the human and organizational costs of sexual harassment. Research tells us that victims perceive sexual harassment as annoying, offensive, upsetting, embarrassing, stressful, and frightening. Sexual harassment often results in emotional and physical stress and stress-related mental and physical illnesses). Research in the United States links sexual harassment to increased absenteeism, job turnover, transfer requests, and decreases in work motivation and productivity.

Sexual harassers may be supervisors, peers, customers, or clients. Although men sometimes experience sexual harassment (mostly young men, gay men, members of ethnic or racial minorities, and men working in female-dominated work groups), the vast majority of those who experience it are women. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in the United States estimates that between 25 and 50 percent of women have experienced sexual harassment in the workplace. When women are minorities, either statistically because there are few of them or because they are ethnic minorities, they are often at increased risk for sexual harassment.

Psychologist Louise Fitzgerald and her colleagues identified three behavioral dimensions of sexual harassment. Gender harassment refers to verbal and nonverbal behaviors that convey insulting, hostile, and degrading attitudes toward women such as questioning women’s competence for a particular job, displaying pornography, calling women “bitches,” and making obscene gestures. Unwanted sexual attention includes suggestive comments about a woman’s body as well as unsolicited and unreciprocated sexual advances. Most of the reported harassment at Fox falls into this category. Last, sexual coercion refers to requiring sex as a condition of employment or job rewards. Legally, it is often called quid pro quo sexual harassment. Many of the women harassed by O’Reilly and Ailes said that they experienced job-related repercussions for rebuffing the men’s sexual advances, or expected to if they spoke up. For the sake of their careers, most stayed silent.

From a feminist psychological perspective, sexual harassment arises from traditional expectations and relationships between the genders that overflow into the workplace although they are irrelevant or inappropriate. It is also conceptualized as being about power. Because it intimidates and discourages women in the workplace, it reinforces workplace gender hierarchies that privilege men. Some men abuse their organizational power to sexually coerce or intimidate women and to allow sexual harassment to occur unabated. Indeed, organizational tolerance—the degree to which an organization is perceived by employees to be insensitive or tolerant of sexual harassment—affects its frequency and severity. In some organizations sexual harassment complaints are not taken seriously, supervisors sexually harass, perpetrators are not meaningfully punished, and women who report sexual harassment face more harassment. From this standpoint it is unsurprising sexual harassers Ailes and O’Reilly got away with it for so long. After all, Roger Ailes was CEO of Fox News and O’Reilly the host of a highly rated show bringing in millions of advertising dollars.

Fox ultimately fired Ailes and O’Reilly and maybe fear of similar lawsuits will stimulate organizational reform. Maybe we will see more organizations proactively create anti-harassment cultures accompanied by strong managerial support. Perhaps newer, more egalitarian forms of masculinity will mean that in a few generations women will be less likely to be sexualized in the workplace and men won’t replicate old-fashioned gender ideologies in the workplace. But right now, it is downright sad that many affected women feel they have to put up with sexual harassment in the workplace. We don’t want to hurt our careers or harm relationships. We anticipate retaliation and need our jobs. We know colleagues, supervisors, or CEOs won’t support us and that we will become pariahs in our workplace. Pursuing legal avenues of redress is untenable given the high personal and financial costs. 

Source: Harshit Sekhon, CC 2.0

Today, a career counseling client started our first session by asking me, “How do I know who I am?”

Here is a fleshed-out version of my answer:

You must first look at your past—it’s a decent although imperfect predictor of the future. So look at the one or more of your significant accomplishments in which you at least didn’t mind the process. Any commonalities among them? For example, were you working alone or on a team? As the chief or an Indian? What was your motivation's driver: Money? Belief in the mission? You got to use a particular ability, for example, technical, social, artistic, fix-it/build it, persuading, organization, rigorous reasoning?

But looking backward isn’t enough. Looking at your potential and desired future provide more data points. Doing that also releases you from your past’s shackles. So, do you see an area of your untapped potential? Anything new you're curious to immerse yourself in? Where does your optimistic yet realistic self picture yourself in one year? Five years?

The process in the previous two paragraphs has a liability—It too often generates unrealistic goals. People tend to excessively weigh their interests over their abilities. And most people's interests are in but a small percentage of career options:  the arts, sports, fashion, journalism, entertainment, the environment, and non-profit ventures. Many more people would love a career in those fields than the jobs available. That’s why many employers in those fields so often use low-pay temps, volunteers, and interns. So unless money matters little to you or you’re willing to take the long odds against sustainably making a middle-class living in those fields, the introspection of the previous two paragraphs should be tempered by this question: Given what you’ve now discovered about yourself, how might you use one or more of your key attributes and desires in a career that won’t make you live forever with three roommates and on a diet of ramen and cat food?

By the end the session, my client had identified key building blocks for his career choice: solo work in which he uses numbers to make important decisions. We used that to identify two careers he’d like to consider: IRS agent and CPA specializing in competitive intelligence.

His homework is to: 1. Listen to the recording of the session (I encourage clients to record sessions on their phone,) to verify or refute the centrality of the career building blocks we identified in the session. 2. If one or both of the careers we identified remain of interest, use GoogleSearch to find relevant articles and videos. 3. If either of the careers or another he uncovers in the process remains of interest, search LinkedIn to see profiles of people in that career. That can unearth the training and job path toward such a career. Also search Indeed.com or a dream employer's website to see ads for related jobs. That can tell you more about what's required to get hired.

The takeaway

So, considering the questions above, might you want to be pursuing a career different from what you’re doing now? If so, do you want to do homework like what I assigned my client?

Regarding your outside-of-work life, do your answers make you want to change how you spend your discretionary time?

The Best of Marty Nemko is now in its 2nd edition. Marty Nemko is a career coach and can be reached at mnemko@comcast.net.

Source: Spring Blossom Copyright © 2017 by Susan Hooper

A few weeks ago I was stopped in a line of traffic at a red light when I noticed a bumper sticker on the car in front of me.  The background of the bumper sticker was a cheerful red, and the message was written on two lines of white letters in a bold, square font.  The top line, in larger type, said, “Zen Buddhism.”  The line beneath it, in smaller type, said, “Don’t even think about it.”

I had to laugh and then, as the light changed and the traffic began to move forward, I quickly offered up a prayer of thanks to the gods of serendipity, because this message could not have come at a better time in my life.

For a few weeks before I saw that bumper sticker, I had been brooding—“obsessing” might be a better word—over a set of painful circumstances that had left me feeling any number of negative emotions, including shock, anger and disappointment, along with a keen sense of betrayal and injustice.

Without going into the precise details, I will summarize the circumstances this way: I learned that someone whose good opinion I greatly valued had formed an extremely negative view of me.  This person also had an inaccurate recollection of a situation that occurred a few years ago in which we both had been involved. 

Reaching out to this person to correct the record was not an option.  As galling as the circumstances were, it seemed that I would have to learn somehow to live with them.  But unfortunately, this was precisely what I had not been able to do.  I found myself waking up in the middle of the night several times a week, turning over the events in my mind.  Even during the day my preoccupation would inevitably surface, no matter what else I was doing, and I would once again be overwhelmed with disappointment and dismay.

My dilemma might make more sense if I explain that I am one of those people who goes through life wanting everyone to like me and fretting about whether I might have inadvertently offended or upset anyone I recently encountered, whether friend or stranger.

I often feel compelled to apologize for my actions—even though, I am repeatedly assured, no apology was expected or necessary.  “You worry too much,” is a phrase I have probably heard at least as often as most other people have heard the inevitable platitude, “Have a nice day.”  

Thus, it seems I am constitutionally incapable of shrugging off with blissful indifference someone else’s poor opinion of me—especially when, I firmly believe, it has no basis in fact.

And yet, in my most lucid moments, I realize that, aside from trying to be consistently polite and kind to those I meet, I cannot control what other people think of me, and therefore it is futile to worry about their opinion of me.  This is where the Zen Buddhism bumper sticker was so helpful: It reminded me that, with respect to my recent painful discovery, I needed to find a way to simply stop thinking about it.

I am happy to report that, in the couple of weeks since my moment of traffic-light enlightenment, I have had some success.  I am still puzzled and dismayed by what I learned earlier this year, but I no longer wake up often in the middle of the night in a state of despair, and I no longer find myself obsessing about it several times a day.  For those facing a similarly frustrating bout of I-can’t-stop-thinking-about-it, I offer the following tips for calming a restless mind.

Talk it out.  Currently I don’t have a therapist, but I do have a small circle of highly intelligent, perceptive and sympathetic friends.  With the patience of the bartender in the Harold Arlen/Johnny Mercer song “One for My Baby (and One More for the Road),” they listened to me tell my tale of disappointment and injustice until, in the words of the song, it was “talked away.”

Find parallels in the dilemmas of others.  A few months before my own small tribulation, I spent many evenings on the phone with a close friend who had been callously dropped by her boyfriend after a relationship that lasted nearly five years.  He turned out to be a manipulative creep who had masterfully concealed his true character until the moment he heartlessly dumped her.  Listening to my friend work through her feelings of confusion, outrage, despair and betrayal gave me a perspective to put my own experience in context—even thought it was a circumstance quite different from a romantic break-up. 

Let time be your therapist.  Years ago, while I was working in a high-pressure job, I had a colleague who used to say, during one crisis or another, “This too shall pass.”  She was right every time; I don’t now remember what any of those crises were—although, happily, my colleague became and has remained a dear friend.

In the midst of my unhappy obsession of several weeks ago, I was sure I would be waking up in the middle of the night for the rest of my life, plagued by my relentless cavalcade of negative thoughts.  At the time it was early spring, and unseasonably cold weather had kept the trees in the woods behind my home bare and leafless, just as they were in the coldest months of winter.  Because I moved to this home last fall, I had not yet experienced a spring here, and—as a former city slicker—I found it impossible to imagine that this forest of barren trunks and branches could ever be green and leafy again.

But of course I was wrong.  Within the space of a week, it seems, the branches of the trees sprouted small buds, the buds became leaves, and now, as I look out my windows, I can observe a dozen or more shades of green in the canopy of leaves in the forest, with birds flitting from branch to branch and calling to one another in a melodious, carefree chorus.

Acceptance can be a hard plateau to reach, especially when a small, agitated part of one’s mind has spent weeks constructing roadblocks along the path to that destination.  But the view from the plateau is lovely: The sky is blue, the wind is calm, the sunlight filtering through the spring leaves is warm and welcoming.  This might be a pleasant place to stay for a while.

Copyright © 2017 by Susan Hooper

Spring Blossom photograph copyright © 2017 by Susan Hooper

Source: Dreamstime/Free Image

Earlier this month many people all over the country – and even other parts of the world – were horrified to watch the video of 69 year-old Dr. David Dao being brutalized and dragged off a United airplane by law enforcement. Although I prefer not to watch violent experiences on social media, as a clinician and researcher who studies race and trauma, this event came to my attention when I was asked by the Huffington Postto comment on the incident. From the video, it appears that the officer banged Dr. Dao’s head on an armrest before dragging his bleeding and unconscious body down the aisle like a piece of oversized luggage.

What crime did Dr. Dao commit to prompt this assault? Was he an international terrorist? Did he attack another passenger? No, he was a customer who paid for his ticket and was asked to give up his seat for a United employee. His crime was that he did not conform to Asian stereotypes of being docile and silent. Dr. Dao, a lung specialist, refused to surrender his seat due to obligations he had to his patients in Louisville, Kentucky. United personnel thought this was reason enough to have him forcibly removed by law enforcement.  Dr. Dao is later seen on video, with blood dripping from his mouth, begging to get back into his seat in order to serve his patients. Finally, he is so disoriented from the experience, he asks for someone to kill him.

Shockingly, no medical care is being offered. Dr. Dao could have been suffering from a broken neck when his limp body was being dragged away, yet no paramedics assist and he is not loaded onto a stretcher. He may have been suffering from a concussion as he tried to stagger back onto the plane. There is no evidence that United cared about anything other than getting that plane in the air with their employees. Ironically, this incident caused further delay as the plane had to be emptied so Dr. Dao’s blood could be cleaned off the aisle.

Just having flown United to and from San Francisco for a conference, with another United cross-country flight scheduled the next week, I felt sick as I saw the images. Not only was I a loyal United customer, Dr. Dao was a part of my own medical community in Louisville, Kentucky. Until last fall, I had served as faculty in University of Louisville’s Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences.  I remain clinical director of the Behavioral Wellness Clinic in Louisville, where, among other things, we evaluate and treat people suffering from racial trauma. In my experience, one of the main causes of racial trauma is abuse by law enforcement, with hostilities from employers coming in at a close second. Seeing Dr. Dao being abused by law enforcement is triggering to people of color all over our country who have been likewise abused by law enforcement either directly (i.e., racial profiling, threats, sexual assaults, beatings) or indirectly (i.e., had loved ones abused or executed by police). This shows that not only will they harm the most stigmatized groups (Black Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Native Americans), but even “model minorities” are not safe. I participated in a forum at Duke University last month on race and policing, and Pulitzer Prize winning author and professor Douglas Blackmon said something chilling and insightful, “The US legal system was designed to bring justice to White people and injustice to people of color.”

In a blame-the-victim fashion, some people tried to smear Dr. Dao to justify what happened. United Airlines initially defended the indefensible, and it took over two weeks for them to admit what they did was wrong. I can't imagine the harm this caused to Dr. Dao, his family, his practice, and his patients. Would things have gone differently if Dr. Dao was a White doctor? It’s impossible to know for certain in any one individual case, but it is hard for me to imagine this happening to a White physician. What I can safely say, however, is that these sort of incidents happen far more often to people of color and contribute to an ongoing perception in marginalized groups that the world is not safe.

I got an email from United Airlines yesterday, sent to all frequent flyers. CEO Oscar Chavez acknowledged that “corporate policies were placed ahead of our shared values.” The remedy? United will no longer force customers to leave their assigned seats once seated (good), they will pay more for volunteers to get off the plane (a no-brainer), and (bizarrely) they will pay people more for lost luggage. Although I would love to believe this is all in the name of doing the right thing, it seems to me these changes are really in United’s financial interest anyway, given the bad PR from this event and the ultimate cost to the airline from the debacle that lead to the grounded flight. Furthermore, the letter does not at all acknowledge the trauma caused to people who watched this event in real-time and on video, and notably the trauma inflicted on vulnerable people of color who have a long history of victimization by police.

I asked my staff to set up a meeting for me with Mr. Chavez. What I wanted to say is that if United wants to make this right, they should create a fund to treat people suffering from racial trauma and support research efforts aimed at helping these victims. I wanted him to understand that this wasn’t just one person, but the event had ripple effects throughout communities of color. But I got no response, which was disappointing but not surprising.

In terms of my own process, this video was traumatizing to me personally. Although I have never been injured by police, I am reminded of the clients I have seen for racial trauma, caused by a myriad of indignities – too many to list here. I had nightmares twice this week about airplanes and Dr. Dao. The United event sends me a message, loud and clear. It reminds me that no matter how hard I work, no matter what elite schools I graduate from, no matter how many people I heal, no matter how much respect I garner from my peers, I am expected to be an “obedient Negro” anytime someone with a badge tells me to. Otherwise, that officer has the right to crack my head over a metal armrest, drag me down an aisle unconscious, and toss my bleeding body into a crowded airport with no accountability or medical care. This is a warning to people of color everywhere.

Despite the well-intentioned lies I was fed a young person – education will save you – it will not. “Get a good job, rise up, show them you are better.” Nope, neither my psychologist license nor Coach purse will be an adequate deterrent if I say "no" to an officer for any reason. My only recourse is unquestioned obedience and a deferential smile that lets them know that I remember my place. This was true 200 years ago and is still true today. Law enforcement will do whatever they want to us, whenever they want, in the name of those in power.

Was this video traumatizing to you? If so, please share your comments below.

Source: Jimilee K, CC 2.0

Here is the latest of my short-short stories that are composites of real-life events with psychological or practical implications.

Ever since Janice lost her husband, her world kept getting smaller. Now she spends most of her time walking with her folding shopping cart to the supermarket, watching apolitical romantic movies, and cleaning her condo even if it doesn't need to be cleaned.

She ends most days sitting in her appropriately named Stressless chair, listening to the adagio movement of some symphony, concerto, or sonata as she drinks hot chocolate even on warm nights because she and Herbie used to.

When Janice was motivated, she’d add a third activity to the music listening and hot-chocolate sipping: She wrote in her journal. She’d go on “runs:" For a few entries, she’d write love thoughts, then a few on aging, then a few on career. But this night, she decided to list all her dilemmas:

Should I go back to work? Back to secretarial would be easiest but, something new? Scary. Am I too old to learn?

Should I date? All my girlfriends tell me to: “Janice, you’re meant to be partnered.” “Herbie would want you to.” “I know this great, well good, guy.” But the thought of taking my clothes off in front of another man…

I know I should get together more with my girlfriends. That’s the problem—It’s a “should.” Maybe if I forced myself, it would become more of a want?

Maybe I should throw a party. But I run around like a chicken without a head and the party still comes out worse than other people’s. But still…

Should I go on a cruise? Maybe a singles one? Oh, I can’t resist eating. I’d gain ten pounds in the eight days, seven nights.

My belly and hips are getting bigger. Should I go on a diet again?

Maybe I should take piano lessons again. It’s only been 60 years. It was so laborious. Maybe if I just tried to learn to play by ear?

Should I stop dyeing my hair? It’s the only part of me that’s really phony, but everyone would be shocked to see me. I could just see it at Christmas. The family would say, “That looks so nice” and be thinking, “God, she’s aged” or “Why in the world did she stop coloring her hair?!”  Maybe I should just stop wearing makeup. That’s scary too.

Should I join a church? I'm such an agnostic these days, it feels hypocritical, but it did feel good to go, maybe get involved. Maybe I should go church shopping. I don't have to buy.

Janice ended that journal entry with a big question mark. Then she dug up a red sharpie and outlined it in red, closed the journal, put it in its hiding place between the water heater and its insulation blanket, and went to bed.

She awakened in the middle of the night and went on match.com.

The takeaway

Many people ruminate a lot and finally, when they’re good and ready, sometimes without rhyme or reason, suddenly act. Are you ready? Should you be?

The 2nd edition of The Best of Marty Nemko is now available. Career and personal coach Marty Nemko can be reached at mnemko@comcast.net.

There is no greater apology-challenge than that of listening without defensiveness, especially when we don’t want to hear what the other person is telling us.  

This is because words of apology, no matter how sincere, will not heal a broken connection if we haven’t listened well to the hurt party’s anger and pain.

It’s impossible to overstate how difficult it is to shift out of defensive mode in order to give an apology that's not just a quick way out of a difficult conversation. When the injured party approaches us in an angry or critical way, our automatic set point is listening for what we don’t agree with. It’s so automatic that it takes motivation, courage, and good will to observe our defensiveness and practice stepping aside from it.  

Non-defensive listening that heals broken connections and makes our apology heartfelt requires us to;

*quiet our mind,

*open our heart

*ask questions to better understand the essence of what the critical party is saying.

*listen for what we can agree with rather than focussing on the exaggerations and errors which may inevitably be there.

It also requires that we:

*stop ourselves from interrupting, making corrections, and saying things that leave the critical party feeling unheard or cut short.

 *get past our defensiveness when the other person is saying things that we don’t agree with and don’t want to hear, and instead let her voice and her pain affect and influence us.  

*refrain from bringing up the other person's crime sheet,.

*save our different perspective for another time when it can be a focus of conversation rather than a defense strategy.

All of us are more motivated to improve our talking skills than our listening skills. Yet our capacity to listen without defensiveness is perhaps the number one skill on which success in our intimate and work relationships depend.

Don't we all know the excruciating pain of being on the receiving end of the non-apologizer's defensiveness--that person who won't listen, care about our feelings, take responsibility and feel remorse?

Why Won’t You Apologize? is a slender book that will help you to understand how much the simple apology matters and teach you how to give an apology that heals. And join Brené Brown and me for our new online course on the power of apologizing at COURAGEworks.

We each take turns unwittingly hurting others and being hurt by them, so learn all you can about being on both sides of the equation.  

Hard stuff to put into practice, but so worth it. 

The environment will continue to deteriorate until pollution practices are abandoned. ~ B. F. Skinner

If you are thinking about pollution, it does not mean that you have a dirty mind. ~ Anonymous

Pollution is choking the planet. Pollution takes many forms: radiation, particles in the air, chemicals in the streams, and plastic in the oceans, among others. Many people are aware of the threats to their health and the health of the planet in abstract terms, while failing to see the direct impact on themselves or their options for action. One way to approach the issue of pollution is to explore the psychological barriers to perception and action and strategies for lowering these barriers. Here, I discuss 4 barriers and 4 corresponding response strategies.

[1] Perception. The first barrier is that much of the present pollution is either not captured by the senses in principle or not captured because it is removed from experience. For example, we cannot feel radioactive radiation, but only its effects when it is too late. Whereas we can see smog, especially from a distance, we cannot see the smallest pollutants (particulate matter). Other pollutants, such as scraps of plastic floating in the oceans or inside the animals that ingested it might be visible in principle but they are removed from view.

The first strategy to bring pollution to awareness is to make it visible. Much progress has been made to image big data. Humans are sensitive to color, which means that degrees of pollution in a system such as the atmosphere, the oceans, or a local river, can be conveyed in color. The color red is a natural candidate for the signaling of danger. Where applicable, the sense of smell may be addressed such that pollution is associated with disgust. This is a natural association (e.g, the smell of feces), which can be generalized. For example, a carbon-dioxide alarm could involve the release of a foul odor.

[2] Cognition. Humans are naturally interested in the causes of things, but they may find it difficult to connect pollution with dangerous outcomes such as illness when pollution is present as a seemingly static feature of the background. In such a case (e.g., asbestos in the air), pollution is a condition instead of a recognizable effective cause.

The strategy to lower this barrier is to allow people to see variation in pollution so that they can appreciate the linkages between that variation and variation in outcomes such as health. To help this reframing from condition to cause along, one might highlight past successes in reducing pollution (as in, for example, the campaigns to lower car emissions and to remove lead from gasoline altogether).

[3] Agency. Inasmuch as pollution is seen as a problem affecting a large but diffuse space, from the village to the planet, individuals may either see little hope for personal intervention or feel little responsibility to intervene at a cost to themselves even if such intervention is promising. These impressions reinforce hopelessness or narrow-minded egotism or parochialism.

The strategy to lower this barrier to is to stimulate the sense of causation, once liberated, to encompass the person, the corporation, or the local or state government as influential agents. The free-rider problem, once thought to be insurmountable, can be attacked with the variety of interventions leveraging group dynamics, communication, commitment-making, and agreements regarding how to fine violators.

[4] Self and identity. A final barrier is the lack of psychological engagement. Some people may understand the perceptual, cognitive, and interventional issues, but simply don’t care. Pollution, be it local or global, may simply not connect with the way they see themselves.

To lower this barrier it is necessary to link pollution to core values. Personal freedom, equality before the law, loyalty to one’s family or clan are examples of core values held in many regions of the world. Moral codes and ethical norms are grafted onto such values, and most people respect them and respond when they are violated. Another core value is purity. Most cultures have some sensibility to animals, things, or actions they consider unclean, although the specifics vary widely. The common root is the emotion of disgust triggered by toxic food. Humans and other animals expel some toxic foods from their bodies if they have ingested them by mistake. Only humans have come to experience the sense of being revolted by such toxins, and culture has refined this capacity into a moral sense. In most cultures, humans find the idea of incest repugnant, for example, although there is variation in how they define incest. This final strategy, then, may involve efforts to get people and their institutions to care about pollution by making it revolting and thereby moralizing it. Moralization, in turn, enables the generation and enforcement of norms, laws, and punishments, as well as rewards. People who care about an issue such as pollution in a visceral and ego-relevant way, will not see pollution as a mere externality that will come out in the wash.        

Source: Lucas Piero/Pexels

By the time I was 12 years old, I:

• Had read the King James version of the Bible from cover to cover three times
• Had memorized many passages of Scripture (King James, of course!)
• Could quickly find Bible verses without an index (known as a “sword drill”)

The leaders of the White evangelical church that I attended were delighted by this. My peers elected me as the church youth group president. But most important to the church was that I had a “personal relationship with Christ”. A personal relationship with Christ guaranteed that when I died I would be going to Heaven to join other Christians. And going to Heaven also meant avoiding Hell.

A personal relationship with Christ involved a strict moral code that included praying and reading the Bible daily. I did this “religiously”, partly out of a fear of going to Hell. The religion I learned was a solitary experience. Research indicates that solitary religious experience is common in White Christian churches.

Despite doing everything the church expected, I never felt fully accepted there. It is possible that my isolation in the church was because of discrimination. My Japanese American mother, sister, and I were the only people of color in the church. A large national study indicates that Asian American Christians experience more race-based discrimination than Asian American non-Christians. It is possible that many of the Asian American Christians in the study were in White churches like the one I was in.

As I entered high school, my family gravitated to a mainline Protestant Asian American church. My parents were members of this church before I was born. The emphasis there was on being a part of the church community, which is common in Asian ethnic churches. I immediately felt accepted. I developed lasting friendships in this church.

I suppose some of the people at the evangelical church I left thought I was going to Hell for joining a more liberal church than theirs. And they probably thought my Asian American church friends were going there, too. But my interpersonal relationships became as important as my personal relationship with Christ. Compared to the acceptance I felt at my Asian American church, the lack of acceptance at the White church was a kind of hell.

My uncle, the Rev. Dr. Dickson Kazuo Yagi, captured how relationships are more important than religion. His response to White evangelicals condemning his Buddhist relatives to Hell was: “…why would I want to spend eternity with a bunch of White people that I don’t even know or care about? I’d rather go suffer in Hell with someone I love.”

I didn’t find acceptance in a White church during a critical time of my life. Had I found acceptance there, perhaps my life would have been different. I still might be headed for Heaven. But I’m happy to have exchanged someone else’s definition of a future heaven for the moments of heaven on earth I have experienced in community with people of color.

The results of a study, published last week in JAMA Psychiatry, has sounded the alarm (once again) that those of us who live in states where “medical marijuana” is legal are more likely to not only use but also abuse cannabis compared to folks living in states where they are not allowed to smoke their doctor’s prescriptions.

Almost two-thirds of the citizens of the United States live in states permitting medical marijuana use for a variety of conditions, from chronic pain to post-traumatic stress disorder. Approximately 200 million Americans can now seek a physician’s recommendation to use marijuana--although the federal laws remain left in the smoke of this rush to leafy well-being. 

In other words, don’t be quick to light up in front of that DEA agent, unless you know he or she really, really likes you.

Nonetheless, the authors of this JAMA Psychiatry article state that they found that marijuana use by individuals without an official blessing by a healthcare provider increased in states with medical marijuana laws from 2001-2013, as did the number of citizens considered to have a marijuana use disorder. This becomes a public health concern, as there are those who can experience significant psychiatric disturbances as a result of heavy marijuana use. 

Some other  harms from acute marijuana intoxication as well as chronic use may include impaired driving and learning capacity, poor educational and other social outcomes, amotivation, and adverse fetal outcomes; those are just a few that are being studied.

As if cell phones and one-more-Corona were not enough to keep those of us who do value our lives off the highways, now we all must contend with the world driving stoned.

In an accompanying editorial in the same issue of JAMA Psychiatry, we are reminded that it is particularly important that those in the psychiatric and psychological worlds understand that individuals with mental illness are more likely to use marijuana, and both acute intoxication and chronic use can exacerbate psychiatric symptoms. Also, early cannabis use has been associated with onset of psychosis and risk for suicidality, and cannabis use can interfere with the treatment of mental disorders.

Of course, it is important to be reminded that the potential health benefits from cannabis and cannabinoids include treatment of childhood epilepsy and pain reliefs.

It follows that further research is needed to investigate how marijuana is consumed by those who use it for medical reasons, including doses, frequency, routes of administration, and concurrent use of other substances, including alcohol—and other psychotropic drugs.

If we are going to prescribe it, use it, and abuse it, all of us need to be educated in what it really means to prescribe it and use it and abuse it—as my guess is that cannabis use is only going to increase.

Even a small Jersey cow like our Maple can make a lot of milk in a day – more than a family with three children at home can drink. How much more depends on many variables, like what she is eating (grass, grain, or hay); when she last gave birth, and whether or not her calf has weaned.

In those times when milk accumulates in our refrigerator, I make cheese. When that excess is not enough to make a hard cheese (four-five gallons for a nice cheddar), I make soft cheeses, one of which is mozzarella – a soft, stretchy, mild cheese that is easy to freeze.

Now is a mozzarella-making time. Maple, feasting on sweet spring grass, is giving us more than three gallons of milk a day. Her calf, Cedar, only two months old, drinks a gallon and a half of that; we take the rest. Thus, on average, I am making mozzarella once or twice a week.

Nevertheless, despite the fact that I have made mozzarella close to a hundred times, the process remains a mystery to me. I have no idea how liquid milk becomes a lumpy mass that, when heated, can stretch into six foot strands so thin you can see through them.

Sometimes the process works. Sometimes it does not. I know I could do more research into the chemistry of the transformation and the physical properties of milk; I could buy gadgets to help me measure the acid content of the curds. Yet, I resist.

I have come to the conclusion that it is actually OK for me to embark upon this process of making mozzarella again and again without knowing for sure whether or not the cheese will come out perfectly.

Why am I happy embracing this unknown? In part, because of what I have learned through the process itself.

1. There is no one mozzarella.

I learned the basics of mozzarella from a book (Home Cheese Making by Ricki Carroll). The process seems simple enough. Heat the milk. Add citric acid. Add rennet. Let white curd form within clear whey. Cut the curd. Scoop the curd out of the whey. Add salt. Heat the whey. Put the curds back into the heated whey. Press until the curds start to congeal. Then stretch! And stretch! Round into a ball. Chill.

Nevertheless, regardless of how hard I try, the cheese never comes out the same way twice. Sometimes I hit that perfect pitch in which a ball of congealed curds spins itself into long silky strands. Other times the curd congeals and turns smooth, but won’t stretch without breaking. Then there are those times when the curds harden into a bumpy mass that I call “moon cheese” due to its resemblance to earth’s lunar twin. 

In my early cheese-making years, I was disappointed if I did not succeed in achieving the ultimate stretch every time. But then I realized: each type of mozzarella has its uses. The softest mozzarella melts into a delightful bubbly puddle, but when you try to grate it, balls into annoying clumps. A harder mozzarella grates with ease, enabling all kinds of cooking options. Moon cheese, in turn, while somewhat chewy, grates into perfect, even shreds which hold their shape even when broiled.

Simply put, there are an infinite number of mozzarellas, located along a spectrum of possibilities. No one recipe and no one formula, can represent all of what is possible. Any one recipe is an average; it reduces these varieties to a common denominator. I am finding them all.

2. A little mystery makes the process far more interesting.

Not knowing which mozzarella will appear makes the process more interesting.

Yes, I could take a scientific approach and create a chart that would measure every degree of temperature and every increment of time and every quantity of ingredient that contributes to the differences. I could attempt in my cheese making process to replicate the same exact steps over and again. If I wanted to become a cheese expert or sell a uniform product, I might. But I don't. I just want to make our extra milk into edible food.

The fact is I am never patient enough to stand next to the stove waiting for the cheese to get to the exact “right” temperature at the “right” time. I am always doing other tasks simultaneously. As a result, it is inevitable that at some point in the process, something goes awry: the milk gets too hot, or the curd doesn’t form, or the curds stay too long in the whey, or the whey boils over and turns my stove top into a boiling hot springs.

Even so, most of the time a cheese emerges, and most of the time it is delicious. Each cheese that emerges, then, expresses the tangle of conditions and commitments that enabled it to take the particular shape that it did. I celebrate those differences!

Letting the process flex with the times, not knowing how the cheese is going to come out, helps kindle a sense of excitement and anticipation. Will it stretch or not? Will I get that glorious feeling or settle for a solid rock?

3. I learn through movement.

By not becoming a cheese expert, nor following one recipe armed with instruments to measure every stage of the process, I not only stay in touch with the many mozzarellas, I also free myself to learn through movement.

I pay more attention through my senses – to how the milk looks, smells, tastes, and feels in my hand. I attune myself to notice when the curd is firm enough, ready to separate and reheat.

At any moment of the process, I am aware that tiny increments of change in the temperature, time, and quantities of the ingredients will make a difference. I remember: any moment of any process there are options, and there are discoveries to be made. What is it possible to create?

I also pay more attention to the choreography of the process. In making mozzarella, I am making movement patterns -- stirring, cutting, sifting, spooning, squeezing – with various instruments, including the most versatile of all, a human hand. These movements open me to a sensory knowledge of the milk, the curds, the whey, and over time, the cheese gets better.

I learn to feel my way to a good temperature, to a workable consistency, and to a resilient stretch. I learn to make adjustments in time and temperature that create more workable options. I gather information that only comes with the experience of making mozzarella again and again.

4. I exercise faith.

When the mozzarella stretches to the heavens, I admit, the moment feels like a miracle. Just looking at a pot of milk, I never would have known that the possibility for such a transformation was possible. It is hard to believe, even when it happens right in front of my eyes.

Yet, in that moment, it is also clear: belief is not enough. It is not enough for me to believe that the milk will convert into stretchy goodness. I have to make the movements that invite a reality that seems unimaginable to manifest. I have to embrace the unknown. I have to feel my way through. 

When I believe, and when I act as if that belief were true, it can be.

Same with life.

By allowing my mozzarella making to ebb and flow in the moment, and by choosing to learn through movement, I know: the cheese will not always be perfect. I will not always experience the burst of happiness that happens with the ultimate stretch.

However, I like better what I am getting instead: the knowledge that there is no one perfect outcome to any process; and a sensory education to a multitude of mozzarellas. I get a constant reminder to believe in miracles and to do the work of making those miracles real.

And once I am done writing this blog, my kids will get pizza for dinner.

“In this world, you get what you pay for.”– Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

Source: Shopping by Andres Rodriguez Flickr Licensed Under CC BY 2.0

Open any marketing textbook or go to a marketing conference, and you will find that customer value is one of the most cared-about and talked-about concepts. Marketers spend their time thinking about exactly what their product or service’s value is, and how to provide more of it to customers. In fact, one of my favorite definitions of marketing is “a set of processes for creating,  communicating, and delivering value  to customers”. This is one important reason I love this profession, and am delighted and proud to be a marketer. It’s great to be able to spend one’s life thinking about how to provide more value to people. After all, isn’t this is the essence of serving somebody?

How is it possible then that the media reports stories of confused, upset, and outraged customers so often? Here are some recent examples:

• An iconic Canadian brand called Dad’s cookies discontinued its chocolate chip version, sticking to its more popular flavors like oatmeal and oatmeal raisin. Customers were heart-broken at what they saw as the company’s betrayal. One typical social media reaction was “So annoyed, I've looked everywhere for these as they are my absolute favourite”.
• A popular Cadbury chocolate called Freddo raised its prices from 25p to 30p in England. Customers were outraged calling it “the biggest scandal of the 21st century, and tweeting “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more.”
• An American television show called “Devious Maids” was cancelled after four seasons. Loyal viewers were extremely frustrated and infuriated. They demanded that the show be revived and even launched a Change.org petition to force the network to bring it back saying, “Please Lifetime, please A+E Networks. Just do that for your fans. We're not asking much. We really hope you'll hear our plea.” The petition garnered more than five thousand supporters.
• Spirit Airlines routinely generates anger and scorn from its customers because it uses an a la carte pricing model, selling tickets for a really low base price and charging separately for everything from printing boarding pass at the airport, and checking bags, to getting an assigned seat, food, and so on.

We read and hear about these stories just about every day. People get upset when prices go up, when companies discontinue products, when they change formulations or features, or start charging for things that were free before.  Some of this outrage is manufactured, but much of it is genuine, creating real negative feelings in people. It feels like instead of delivering value, marketers are taking away value from customers. What’s going on?

In this blog post, I want to argue that this outrage and negative feelings may be tempered once customers understand what value means to customers and what it means to companies are two different ideas. And these two concepts of customer value, one from the customer’s perspective, and the other from the company’s perspective, clash with each other.

What Value Means to the Customer

At its heart, every product and service provides two kinds of benefits to customers: functional and hedonic. Functional benefits are those that the customer derives from the actual product performance and which is related to its core purpose. When staying in a hotel room, for example, the functional benefits received by the guest include having a safe place to stay and being able to sleep peacefully in a quiet and comfortable environment. These are the basic functions of every hotel room, the essence of what it is supposed to do. Hedonic benefits are indirect, intangible, and emotion-producing. Such benefits may include a sense of pride from staying in a nice hotel, or the sensual pleasure from sleeping on a comfortable bed.  For a customer:

Customer value is the sum total of all functional and hedonic benefits derived from the product’s bundle of features.

What Value Means to the Company

Source: Value by J. Lighting Flickr Licensed Under CC BY 2.0

For a company, the definition of customer value is very different. Professor Russell Winer defines it as“Customer or perceived value is a measure of how much a customer is willing to pay for a product or service” and pricing expert Hermann Simon provides this definition: “The price a customer is willing to pay, and therefore the price a company can achieve, is always a reflection of the perceived value of the product or service in the customer’s eyes. If a customer perceives a higher value, his or her willingness to pay rises. The converse is equally true: if the customer perceives a lower value relative to competitive products, willingness to pay drops.”

Customer value is defined in dollars and cents, simply as how much money the customer is willing to pay for the product. This is a fundamental difference from the customer definition. To appreciate this point, let’s conduct a thought experiment.

Imagine that the aforementioned hotel wants to increase the value it delivers to its guests. There’s one guaranteed way to accomplish this:  add more and more features to the hotel room. It can provide free parking, plush bathrobes, a delicious breakfast,  a rocking chair in the room, and so on.

Even as the thought of getting all these freebies may excite us as customers, from the company’s perspective, we can quickly see just how infeasible doing this is. Adding every new feature to the hotel room costs money. More features provide greater customer benefits and value, but they also increase costs. For the company, functional and hedonic benefits have to be translatable into economic value, as measured in dollars and cents. The company can only provide features that the customer is willing to pay for. To the company:

Customer value is the total amount of money that the customer is willing to pay for the functional and hedonic benefits received by the product’s bundle of features.

Resolving the Conflict Between These Two Viewpoints

In a nutshell, the difference in the two definitions boils down to this. Customers want as many functional and hedonic benefits as the product or service can deliver. They are always hankering for more. However, companies can only deliver benefits that customers are willing to pay for, and nothing more.

Source: Shopping Ecstasy by David Blackwell Flickr Licensed Under CC BY 2.0

It’s a simple economic calculus for the company. If the customer cannot pay for a feature, take it out of the product, or stop offering the product altogether. The chocolate chip cookies aren’t selling well, so discontinue them. The prices of cacao beans and sugar have gone up, so raise the price of the candy bar. If not enough people are watching the TV show, then cancel it.

In the end, every ethical marketer wants to deliver the maximum possible value to their customers. However, they are constrained by being able to only offer benefits that customers are willing to pay for. Once customers understand this basic truth about business decision making, I think a lot of their confusion, anger, and frustration will be reduced. They will understand where the company is coming from.

About Me

^{This blog post is an excerpt from my  forthcoming book, “How to Make Good Pricing Decisions: A Guide for Managers and Entrepreneurs.” I teach marketing and pricing to MBA students at Rice University. You can find more information about me on my website or follow me on LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter @ud.}

I have treated many men over the years who have suffered from erectile dysfunction (ED).  A small number were simply in need of education: they put pressure on themselves to perform under trying circumstances, or they expected too much given their age. Others were diagnosed by urologists as having an organic problem: a blockage of blood flow or an interfering disease such as diabetes. And some were rooted in relationship issues such as control struggles or a lack of physical attraction. Prior to the availability of ED medications such as Viagra, most of these men were treated with behavioral individual or couple’s psychotherapy that included take-home exercises. The primary objective was to help reduce the client’s self-focus and performance anxiety, and to help him to refocus on the pleasure of intercourse. While the discovery of ED medication has been a relationship-saver for millions of couples, many men—and their partners—refuse to use these drugs. The following are 5 reasons men (and their partners) avoid taking advantage of these medications. These reasons may be employed consciously or unconsciously.

1. Shame and Embarrassment: Given the long-standing correlation between a man’s penis and his self-esteem it is no wonder many men are too embarrassed to admit to themselves and others that they have an erection problem. Even when told medication may end their suffering the mere need for, and use of it bothers many men. Unfortunately, this attitude only brings increased failure and shame.

2. Negative Side Effects:  This can be a legitimate excuse given that some of these medications cause aggravating sinus issues, headaches, heartburn, and vision problems. Those with heart problems will need to consult their cardiologists for options. Nevertheless, many men balk at even the slightest side effect to avoid having sex with their partners.

3. Lack of Effectiveness: Some men claim that the medications do not work for them. However, I have found that many of these individuals failed to take the medications as directed by physicians. For example, most ED drugs require a man to take them at least an hour before attempting intercourse. But many men lose track of time or are too impatient to wait the required time before having sex; some unconsciously sabotage their success.

4. Anger and Retaliation: One way a man can retaliate against his partner if he is angry or upset is to convey the message that he is no longer interested in, or turned on by the partner. Oftentimes these men are passive-aggressive and refuse to connect their anger, impotency, and refusal to improve their sexual functioning, even if the clinician points it out. The anger and desire for revenge enables these individuals to misuse the medications or to avoid a medical evaluation.

5. Lack of Sexual Attraction:  These medications are not meant to increase a man’s sexual desire—some libido and attraction for the partner is usually needed for the drugs to be effective. Many men will not admit that they lack attraction for their mates and continue to keep their lack of functioning a mystery. Non-symptomatic partners often enable the problem by discouraging the use of ED drugs. Many of these individuals claim, despite the scientific evidence, that if their partners need to take drugs to achieve an erection, they are not sexually attracted to them. “It just isn’t natural. If he really finds me attractive he wouldn’t need the help of a chemical,” a wife said.     

I am sure there are more reasons men and their partners avoid using ED medications, but I will defer to my readers to bring them up and discuss. One thing most sex therapists are certain of: “Use it or lose it.”