13. July 2010 by John Schinnerer.

From Newsweek article, Creativity Crisis… 

‘Kyung Hee Kim at the College of William & Mary discovered this in May, after analyzing almost 300,000 Torrance scores of children and adults. Kim found creativity scores had been steadily rising, just like IQ scores, until 1990. Since then, creativity scores have consistently inched downward. “It’s very clear, and the decrease is very significant,” Kim says. It is the scores of younger children in America—from kindergarten through sixth grade—for whom the decline is “most serious.”

The potential consequences are sweeping. The necessity of human ingenuity is undisputed. A recent IBM poll of 1,500 CEOs identified creativity as the No. 1 “leadership competency” of the future. Yet it’s not just about sustaining our nation’s economic growth. All around us are matters of national and international importance that are crying out for creative solutions, from saving the Gulf of Mexico to bringing peace to Afghanistan to delivering health care. Such solutions emerge from a healthy marketplace of ideas, sustained by a populace constantly contributing original ideas and receptive to the ideas of others.

It’s too early to determine conclusively why U.S. creativity scores are declining. One likely culprit is the number of hours kids now spend in front of the TV and playing videogames rather than engaging in creative activities. Another is the lack of creativity development in our schools. In effect, it’s left to the luck of the draw who becomes creative: there’s no concerted effort to nurture the creativity of all children.

Around the world, though, other countries are making creativity development a national priority. In 2008 British secondary-school curricula—from science to foreign language—was revamped to emphasize idea generation, and pilot programs have begun using Torrance’s test to assess their progress. The European Union designated 2009 as the European Year of Creativity and Innovation, holding conferences on the neuroscience of creativity, financing teacher training, and instituting problem-based learning programs—curricula driven by real-world inquiry—for both children and adults. In China there has been widespread education reform to extinguish the drill-and-kill teaching style. Instead, Chinese schools are also adopting a problem-based learning approach.

Plucker recently toured a number of such schools in Shanghai and Beijing. He was amazed by a boy who, for a class science project, rigged a tracking device for his moped with parts from a cell phone. When faculty of a major Chinese university asked Plucker to identify trends in American education, he described our focus on standardized curriculum, rote memorization, and nationalized testing. “After my answer was translated, they just started laughing out loud,” Plucker says. “They said, ‘You’re racing toward our old model. But we’re racing toward your model, as fast as we can.’ ”

Overwhelmed by curriculum standards, American teachers warn there’s no room in the day for a creativity class. Kids are fortunate if they get an art class once or twice a week. But to scientists, this is a non sequitur, borne out of what University of Georgia’s Mark Runco calls “art bias.” The age-old belief that the arts have a special claim to creativity is unfounded. When scholars gave creativity tasks to both engineering majors and music majors, their scores laid down on an identical spectrum, with the same high averages and standard deviations. Inside their brains, the same thing was happening—ideas were being generated and evaluated on the fly.

Researchers say creativity should be taken out of the art room and put into homeroom. The argument that we can’t teach creativity because kids already have too much to learn is a false trade-off. Creativity isn’t about freedom from concrete facts. Rather, fact-finding and deep research are vital stages in the creative process. Scholars argue that current curriculum standards can still be met, if taught in a different way.

To understand exactly what should be done requires first understanding the new story emerging from neuroscience. The lore of pop psychology is that creativity occurs on the right side of the brain. But we now know that if you tried to be creative using only the right side of your brain, it’d be like living with ideas perpetually at the tip of your tongue, just beyond reach.

When you try to solve a problem, you begin by concentrating on obvious facts and familiar solutions, to see if the answer lies there. This is a mostly left-brain stage of attack. If the answer doesn’t come, the right and left hemispheres of the brain activate together. Neural networks on the right side scan remote memories that could be vaguely relevant. A wide range of distant information that is normally tuned out becomes available to the left hemisphere, which searches for unseen patterns, alternative meanings, and high-level abstractions.

Having glimpsed such a connection, the left brain must quickly lock in on it before it escapes. The attention system must radically reverse gears, going from defocused attention to extremely focused attention. In a flash, the brain pulls together these disparate shreds of thought and binds them into a new single idea that enters consciousness. This is the “aha!” moment of insight, often followed by a spark of pleasure as the brain recognizes the novelty of what it’s come up with.

Now the brain must evaluate the idea it just generated. Is it worth pursuing? Creativity requires constant shifting, blender pulses of both divergent thinking and convergent thinking, to combine new information with old and forgotten ideas. Highly creative people are very good at marshaling their brains into bilateral mode, and the more creative they are, the more they dual-activate.’

For full Newsweek article click here.

Enjoy the week! And color outside the lines!

John Schinnerer, Ph.D.

P.S. For a FREE pdf copy of my award-winning book on emotional intelligence and the creativity that positive emotions can bring about, click here. The book is titled Guide to Self: The Beginner’s Guide to Managing Emotion and Thought and was awarded Best Self Help Book of 2007.

Posted in Emotion & learning, Curiosity, Danville CA, Emotion & productivity, Optimal Human Functioning, Resiliency, Managing Anxiety, Creativity, Dr. John Schinnerer, Emotional IQ, Innovative brand research, Emotional management, Positive Psychology | Print | No Comments »

25. June 2010 by John Schinnerer.

From UCLA press release on EurekAlert!…

‘Neuroscientists can predict your behavior better than you can

Surprising UCLA brain scanning study has implications for advertising, public health campaigns

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” — John Wanamaker, 19th-century U.S. department store pioneer

In a study with implications for the advertising industry and public health organizations, UCLA neuroscientists have shown they can use brain scanning to predict whether people will use sunscreen during a one-week period even better than the people themselves can.

“There is a very long history within psychology of people not being very good judges of what they will actually do in a future situation,” said the study’s senior author, Matthew Lieberman, a UCLA professor of psychology and of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences. “Many people ‘decide’ to do things but then don’t do them.”

The new study by Lieberman and lead author Emily Falk, who earned her doctorate in psychology from UCLA this month, shows that increased activity in a brain region called the medial prefrontal cortex among individuals viewing and listening to public service announcement slides on the importance of using sunscreen strongly indicated that these people were more likely to increase their use of sunscreen the following week, even beyond the people’s own expectations.

“From this region of the brain, we can predict for about three-quarters of the people whether they will increase their use of sunscreen beyond what they say they will do,” Lieberman said. “If you just go by what people say they will do, you get fewer than half of the people accurately predicted, and using this brain region, we could do significantly better.”

“While most people’s self-reports are not very accurate, they do not realize their self-reports are wrong so often in predicting future behavior,” Falk said. “It is surprising to find out that some technique might be able to predict my own behavior better than I can. Yet the brain seems to reveal something important that we may not even realize.”

The study, the first persuasion study in neuroscience to predict behavior change, appears June 23 in the Journal of Neuroscience.

For the study, Falk, Lieberman and their collaborators sought people who did not use sunscreen every day. The study group consisted of 20 participants, mostly UCLA students, 10 female and 10 male. The participants had their brains scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) at UCLA’s Ahmanson–Lovelace Brain Mapping Center as they saw and heard a series of public service announcements. They were also asked about their intentions to use sunscreen over the next week and their attitudes about sunscreen.

The participants were then contacted a week later and asked on how many days during the week they had used sunscreen.

Lieberman and Falk focused on part of the brain’s medial prefrontal cortex, which is located in the front of the brain, between the eyebrows. This brain region is associated with self-reflection — thinking about what we like and do not like and our motivations and desires.

“It is the one region of the prefrontal cortex that we know is disproportionately larger in humans than in other primates,” Lieberman said. “This region is associated with self-awareness and seems to be critical for thinking about yourself and thinking about your preferences and values.”

The researchers developed a model based on 10 people and tested it on the next 10. They shuffled the 20 people in different ways to test the model. There are more than 180,000 ways to divide the 20 people into groups, Falk said.

“We ran a simulation of the 180,000 combinations, developed our model on the first 10 subjects on each of the 180,000 simulations, and tested it on the second 10,” Falk said. “We saw a very reliable relationship, where for the vast majority of the 180,000 ways to divide the group up, this one region of the brain, the medial prefrontal cortex, does a very good job of predicting sunscreen use in the second group.”

This finding could be relevant to many public health organizations, as well as the advertising industry, Lieberman and Falk said.

“For advertisers, there may be a lot more that is knowable than is known, and this is a data-driven method for knowing more about how to create persuasive messages,” said Lieberman, one of the founders of social cognitive neuroscience.

Neural focus groups

While 19th-century department store pioneer John Wanamaker (quoted at the beginning of this release) advertised effectively for his stores in newspapers, he still said he was wasting half his advertising budget — only he didn’t know which half.

“We’re learning something about which half,” Lieberman said.

While advertising agencies often use focus groups to test commercials and movie trailers, in the future they and public health officials perhaps should add “neural focus groups” to test which messages will be effective while monitoring the brain activity of their subjects.

“A problem with standard focus groups,” Falk said, “is that people are lousy at reporting what they will actually do. We have not had much to supplement that approach, but in the future it may be possible to create what we are calling ‘neural focus groups.’ Instead of talking with people about what they think they will do, a public health or advertising agency can study their brains and learn what they are really likely to do and how an advertisement would be likely to affect millions of other people as well.”

“Given that there are emerging technologies that are relatively portable and approximate some of what fMRI can do at a fraction of the cost, looking to the brain to shape persuasive messages could become a reality,” Lieberman said. “But we’re just at the beginning. This is one of the first papers on anything like this. There will be a series of papers over the next 10 years or more that will tell us what factors are driving neural responses.”

“We hope to build a sophisticated model of persuasion that may incorporate multiple brain regions,” said Falk, who studies the neural basis of persuasion and attitude change. She has been hired by the University of Michigan–Ann Arbor as an assistant professor of communication studies and psychology and a member of the university’s Institute for Social Research, starting in September.

While some people have emphasized reasoning and emotion as key areas on which to base advertising campaigns, a key question may be whether messages and advertisements can be produced that “make people feel, ‘This is about me and is relevant to my preferences and motivations,’” Falk said. “Perhaps effective messages reinforce our values, our self-identity, what motivates us. We will learn much more as we continue this line of research over the years.”

Neuroscientists will learn whether they can predict behavior better and are likely to obtain a more nuanced understanding of the roles played by different parts of brain regions, said Falk, who this March received UCLA’s Charles E. and Sue K. Young Award for outstanding research and teaching. She is interested in how to make more effective health and other public service messages aimed at young adults.

“There is still much we do not know about how to get people to make healthier choices,” Falk said. “We hope to learn much more about what makes messages more or less persuasive.”

Different brain regions may be important for persuading people to tell or e-mail their friends about a health message, product or service; Lieberman and Falk are studying this issue of “creating buzz” as well.

However, the implications of the research go far beyond advertising, Lieberman said.

“There are many applications beyond how you make a good 30-second commercial,” he said, “including how teachers can communicate better so their students won’t tune out or how doctors can convince patients to stick to their instructions. We all use persuasion in some form or another every day.”

Beware of hucksters

Some people are already offering “neuro-marketing,” purporting to help businesses sell their products and help candidates run their advertising campaigns, Lieberman noted. They may, for example, recommend what colors and sounds to use in commercials. Is this effective, or are they claiming expertise they do not possess?

“In general, they are taking simple views of how different parts of the brain work and are saying it is important to turn a particular part of the brain on when advertising, and therefore you should do more of this or that,” Lieberman said. “For instance, they will say you want to activate the amygdala because that is the brain’s emotion center. Typically they are not looking at the relationship between what happens in the brain when someone is exposed to an advertisement and what actually are the outcomes that you care about. For example, do people change their behavior? Does someone spread the message to others? Instead, they are giving generic analysis, and my guess is that the vast majority of the advice they are giving is not accurate.

“To really understand the relationship between the brain’s responses to brands and persuasive materials and desirable outcomes, you actually have to measure the outcomes that are desirable and not just say what should work,” he said. “There are many folks claiming to be neuroscientists who have read a little introductory neuroscience, and that is not enough expertise. It’s almost infinitely more complicated than that.”

Co-authors on the Journal of Neuroscience paper are Elliot Berkman, a UCLA graduate student of psychology in Lieberman’s laboratory who will be an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Oregon this fall; Traci Mann, a professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota–Minneapolis who was formerly on UCLA’s faculty; and Brittany Harrison, a former UCLA undergraduate student.’

John’s Thoughts…

Okay, so I love this study. This excites the hell out of me. The idea that we are finally at the point of using neuroscientific tools to be able to somewhat accurately predict human behavior is astounding.

However, here is the pitfall with this particular study. The researchers have said several times that humans are notoriously bad at self-report. In other words, we are not very good at telling other people what we will do or what we have done. We know memory is unreliable and varies according to what emotional state we are in at the present moment. We know we are poor predictors of how we will behave in the future. We know we don’t do well at predicting how future events will make us feel.

 And yet, the release says, ‘participants were then contacted a week later and asked on how many days during the week they had used sunscreen.’

So we don’t truly know how frequently people had used sunscreen because their recollections will vary based on how they were feeling at the moment they reported that information.

And I’ve been here before from a researcher’s perspective and it’s a maddening chicken and egg scenario.

The other problem I see coming down the road is the ethical debate. I am absolutely for the development of this technology with the assumption that it will be used for constructive, socially desirable messaging. And that is a BIG assumption. Once the technology is fully developed, anyone can get their hands on it. Once the technology is in the hands of individuals who lack ethics, values and social and emotional awareness, we’ve got a serious problem. Because then the technology will be used to craft powerful, predictive messages that are fueled by nothing more than revenue. That is dangerous.

The next step, in my mind, is to teach more individuals social and emotional awareness so that more are acting towards the greater good, more are joining the advanced human team, more are aware of their top values AND acting in accordance with them. Only when we reach this plateau of human development will such technologies have a chance of fulfilling their idealistic promises (and I’m all for idealism!).

In any case, I’m still excited about the study. I think they’ve done tremendous work and this is the harbinger of a new vista in neuroscience. Congratulations to the team at UCLA!

John Schinnerer, Ph.D.

Award-winning author, founder of Guide To Self

Real Men, Real Emotions, Real Potential

http://drjohnsblog.wordpress.com

Posted in Neuropsychology, Awareness, Danville CA, Memory and recall, Neuromarketing, San Francisco Bay Area, Subconscious mind, Consciousness, Innovative brand research, Dr. John Schinnerer, Unique marketing research, Chief Marketing Officer, Customer Engagement, Brand Equity, Business & psych | Print | No Comments »

11. June 2010 by John Schinnerer.

From Science Daily…

‘New Software to Measure Emotional Reactions to Web

ScienceDaily (June 9, 2010) — While most people have intuitive reactions to Web sites, a group of Canadian scientists is developing software that can actually measure those emotions and more.Aude Dufresne, a professor at the University of Montreal Department Of Communications, led a team of researchers that are designing a new software to evaluate the biological responses of Internet users.Simply put, the new software measures everything in Web users from body heat to eye movements to facial expressions and analyzes how they relate to online activities.

The technology is now being tested at the newly opened Bell User Experience Centre, which is located at the telecom giant’s Nun’s Island campus. Bell will use the University of Montreal technology to investigate how people react to Web sites. Such studies will provide companies with facts on how they can improve online experiences.

“With e-commerce and the multiplication of retail Web sites, it has become crucial for companies to consider the emotions of Web users,” says Professor Dufresne. “Our software is the first designed to measure emotions at conscious and preconscious levels, which will give companies a better sense of the likes and dislikes of Web users.”‘

For full article, click here.

Between the fMRI, neuromarketing and emotional measurement software, we have to be more mindful about our media consumption.

Cheers,

John Schinnerer, Ph.D.

Real Emotions for Real Men

Guide To Self, Inc.

Posted in Visual Attention, Emotion recognition software, Danville CA, National speakers, Brain plasticity, Visual perception, Neuromarketing, Real Men Real Emotion, Men's feelings, Emotion and technology, Awareness, Innovative brand research, Emotional IQ, Dr. John Schinnerer, Measuring emotions, Unique marketing research, Customer Engagement, Men's emotions, Subconscious mind, Emotional mind, Business & psych | Print | No Comments »

10. June 2010 by John Schinnerer.

If you’ve been following my blog, Shrunken Mind, you’re aware of the vast power of the unconscious mind - that part of the mind which I refer to as the ‘back office’ of the mind. In the ‘back office’, activites take place that are automatic, uncontrolled and outside of your conscious awareness. Despite this, the workings of the unconscious mind have a profound effect on the consious mind and on your behavior. In science, we’ve been working on figuring this out over the past 20 years with the help of fMRIs and MRIs.

There are a few areas of expertise that continually seem to be at the cutting edge of this area of expertise - sales and marketing. Up until recently this has only been of some concern to me, as I stay on the bleeding edge of the area and can afford some awareness and protection to myself, my family and my clients.

However, a new study came out this week which caused me great concern. Check out the snippet from the article from New Scientist and see if you agree.

‘Unconscious purchasing urges revealed by brain scans

 15:56 09 June 2010 by Ewen Callaway   You spend more time window shopping than you may realise. Whether someone intends to buy a product or not can be predicted from their brain activity – even when they are not consciously pondering their choices.The ability to predict from brain scans alone what a person intends to buy, while leaving the potential buyer none the wiser, could bring much-needed rigour to efforts to meld marketing and neuroscience, says Brian Knutson, a neuroscientist at Stanford University in California who was not involved in the research.Neuromarketing, as this field is known, has been employed by drug firms, Hollywood studios and even the Campbell Soup Company to sell their wares, despite little published proof of its effectiveness.

Rather than soup, John-Dylan Haynes at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, Germany, attempted to predict which cars people might unconsciously favour. To do so, he and colleague Anita Tusche used functional MRI to scan the brains of two groups of male volunteers, aged 24 to 32, while they were presented with images of a variety of cars.One group was asked to rate their impressions of the vehicles, while the second performed a distracting visual task while cars were presented in the background. Each volunteer was then shown three cars and asked which they would prefer to buy.

First impressions

The researchers found that when volunteers first viewed the car that they would subsequently “buy”, specific patterns of brain activity could be seen in the brain’s medial prefrontal and insula cortices – areas that are all associated with preferences and emotion.These patterns of activity reflected the volunteers’ subsequent purchasing choice nearly three-quarters of the time, whether or not the subjects had given their undivided attention to the images of the cars when they were first shown them.Previous studies have shown similar patterns of activity when we make explicit purchasing choices. What this new study suggests is that these brain regions size up products even when we are not consciously making purchasing decisions. The brain appears to be imparting automatic or possibly even unconscious value onto products, as soon as you’re exposed to them, says Haynes.

Secret desires

While Knutson acknowledges that the volunteers’ choices might have been different if they had been making a real decision about which car to buy, he reckons the study may still be of use to neuromarketers – specifically as a subjective way of determining whether a consumer might buy a product or not, without having to be explicitly asked.’

For the full article, click here.

In the past, I’ve been involved in some neuromarketing and emotion studies with large health care providers and consumer goods manufacturers. At the time, it was fascinating, compelling and educational. The more I get to know about it, the more concerned I become. TV commercials, billboards, radio spots and magazine ads already have sufficient influence over our minds to make me highly uncomfortable. My unease is only reinforced by the piles of studies showing how Madison Avenue is influencing the ‘back office’ of our minds.

To protect yourself and your families, my best suggestion is pause the TV during commercials and skip over them if you have TIVO (or the equivalent. Even if you have TIVO, studies have shown the brain recognizes roughly 30% of the content of TV ads even when you are skipping through the commercials at high speed!

If you don’t, at least mute the radio or TV during commercials. From what we know in science, the brain is malleable like a lump of clay. And these commercials leave tracks in the brain like running a finger tip through wet clay. The more you are exposed, the deeper the groove becomes in the clay (your brain) and the more influence they have over you. Don’t let your children mindlessly watch tv commercials.

Your brain is impressionable. Guard it. Be mindful.

All the best,

John Schinnerer, Ph.D.

Teaching Real Men Real Emotions

Guide To Self, Inc.

Award-winning author

Award-winning blogger

Keynote speaker

Posted in Visual Attention, Unsconscious mind, Subliminal messages, Danville CA, Brain plasticity, Visual perception, Neuromarketing, Real Men Real Emotion, Well-being, San Francisco Bay Area, National speakers, Awareness, Innovative brand research, Emotional IQ, Dr. John Schinnerer, Measuring emotions, Chief Marketing Officer, Brand Equity, Mindfulness, Organizational psychology, Subconscious mind, Consciousness, Business & psych | Print | No Comments »

23. May 2010 by John Schinnerer.

By John Schinnerer, Ph.D.

Guide To Self, Inc.

A worthy, successful and productive career as an executive requires behaving according to a set of personal values.  Values are the core beliefs upon which you operate your life. You may be aware of your core beliefs or you may not. In my executive coaching work, I’ve noticed that the many executives and managers do not have a clear idea what their top values are.

To get the most from your life, you must believe at your core that you are a worthy individual – worthy of loyalty, worthy of respect, worthy of friendship, worthy of quality friends, worthy of taking time to refill and renew yourself, worthy of a flourishing and productive life. To get the most from your life, you must know your values like the back of your hand.

Values are the guide rails by which we navigate through life. Values set the trigger points for your shame and guilt. When you veer too far from a particular value, your emotional alarm goes off in the form of guilt.

Henry David Thoreau -  ‘The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.’

Ours is much too busy and noisy a world. Our lives take on a frenetic pace and people lose track of the values that give life meaning and purpose. Everyone says they are for values. The problem is their actions are not in keeping with their words.

Leaders who are unaware of their values are more likely to be inconsistent, fearful, and self-conflicted. The less we know what our values are, the more ambiguous our lives are. The more we understand our values, the better able we are to make right choices which lead to right action. This leads to decisive acts of courage which are primarily the ability to say what needs to be said and do what needs to be done in spite of what people around you are doing.

There are several ways different ideas related to values: ethical energy, strengths and personal principles. When you throw in values themselves, you have consilience, or proof of the worth of an hypothesis due to the convergence of separate lines of research. And, as each of these ideas has a great deal of merit and inherent worth, let’s take a look at all of them.

Ethical Energy Defined

According to the authors of The Power of Full Engagement, ethical energy is…

‘… the connection to a deeply held set of values and to a purpose that is beyond our self-interest. Anything that ignites the human spirit serves to drive full engagement and to maximize performance in whatever mission we are on. The key muscle that fuels ethical energy is character – the courage and conviction to live by our values, even when doing so requires personal sacrifice and hardship. Ethical energy is sustained by balancing a commitment to others with adequate self-care….the capacity to live by our deepest values depends on regularly renewing our spirit – seeking ways to rest and rejuvenate and to reconnect with the values that we find most inspiring and meaningful.’

The alternative to living according to your values is to operate in survival mode, fueled by fear, mistrust and anxiety. Survival mode is marked by a sense of desperation where you are focused on filling your immediate needs for capital, sales and competent peers. Survival mode is also characterized by the mentality of a victim. Life happens to you, not because of you. If you are passively accepting everything that comes your way as inevitable, you are not living according to your values. You are living in survival mode.

Strengths Defined

Martin Seligman, author of Authentic Happiness, has put a slightly different twist on values. Seligman states, “To be a virtuous person is to display, by acts of will, all or at least most of the six ubiquitous virtues: wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, and transcendence. There are several distinct routes to each of these six. One can display a virtue, such as justice by acts of fairness and loyalty.” Seligman calls these routes strengths and each is measurable and acquirable. They are ubiquitous across cultures.

According to Seligman, there are seven criteria by which we know that a characteristic is a strength.

First, a strength is a trait, a psychological characteristic that can be seen across different situations and over time. 

Second, a strength is valued in its own right. We value a strength for its own sake, even in the absence of clear beneficial outcomes. While a strength can produce good consequences, it doesn’t have to. 

Third, a strength can be seen in what parents wish for in their newborn children. Strengths are states we desire that require no further justification. 

Fourth, onlookers are usually elevated and inspired by observing strengths. Strengths typically produce authentic positive emotion in the doer – pride, satisfaction, joy, and fulfillment – and the observer – inspired and uplifted. 

Fifth, strengths are supported by the dominant culture in the form of institutions, rituals, parables, maxims and children’s stories.

Sixth, role models and paragons in the culture compellingly illustrate a strength or virtue. 

Seventh, they are ubiquitous. Strengths are valued in almost every culture. They are not quite universal, as some exceptions to every rule can be found. And they are ubiquitous. They take place everywhere.

‘Try not to become a man of success, but a man of value’ Albert Einstein

Values Defined

Each individual has a set of beliefs and ideas about abstract concepts called values. They describe how much worth a person places on various ideas, objects, or beliefs. Societies have values that are shared between many of the participants in that culture. These values may be put into four categories:

·               Ethics (good, bad, moral, immoral, amoral, right, wrong, permissible, impermissible)

·               Aesthetics (beautiful, ugly, unbalanced, pleasing)

·               Group Norms (political, ideological, religious or social beliefs and values)

·               Inborn (inborn values such as reproduction and survival, a controversial issue)

For the purposes of our discussion, we are concerned only with the group known as ethics and to a lesser extent, group norms. There are five features that are common to most definition of values. Values are concepts or beliefs. They are about desirable behavior(s) and/or end states. Values transcend specific situations. Values guide selection or evaluation of behavior and events and they are ordered by relative importance.

On occasion, we encounter ethical problems which pit two of our most cherished values against one another. In such a situation, we cannot act in a way that is in keeping with both these values. We solve such problems by prioritizing our top values that are relevant to the situation. Each of us has a set of prized values. Many of us simply are not aware of them.  We must have an awareness of our values as well as the intention to act upon them for values to be useful to us.

Stephen Covey and colleagues call these prized values our personal principles. He cautions against self-centered values such as “self respect” or “a sense of accomplishment” because they can lead us to develop pragmatic, utilitarian relationships with other individuals.  Covey suggests that we adopt prized values that are more holistic and anchored in the fundamental realities of nature, spirit and healthy interpersonal relationships.  Prizing your family higher than your career is a good example of adopting holistic and healthy values. However, it must be noted that as far as this author knows, Covey’s work is not based on empirical research and cannot be considered as part of the consilience towards the proof of the inherent worth of values.

Why Values Are Essential

Let’s look at how living according to one’s values can lead to a more fulfilling and purposeful life. Imagine that you could do whatever it is that brings you the most joy in your life. Picture anything you like that is deeply fulfilling to you. What you have then is a picture of a person living in accordance to his or her most cherished values.

There is a close link between values and living a fulfilling life. Once your values are clarified, you will have a map that guides you through key decisions. Through this process we learn what is most important to the client and what is not. Part of my work is to help clients discover what is truly necessary in their lives. Clarifying values helps clients to take a stand, to take calculated risks, and to make choices based on what is personally fulfilling to them.

By its very nature, honoring our values is fulfilling, even when times get tough. You can suffer through discomfort if you know it will pass, while you rest comfortable in the knowledge that you are living in accordance with your values. Making decisions based on your top values will always lead to a more fulfilling decision. This leads to right behavior and a fulfilling life.  Some examples of values are creativity, helping others, independence, family, emotional management, power, peace of mind, lifelong learning, and spirituality. They cannot be touched, but they can be seen. You see them being acted out in how people behave.

Someone living perfectly in accordance with values will feel the pain of a disturbing situation, and perhaps some psychological disturbance, but will remain tranquil at the center. Equanimity is the ideal. Equanimity means evenness of mind, or in this case, evenness of emotion. When possible, excessive negative emotion is to be deflected or rerouted. No one lives perfectly in accordance with their values. The goal is to remain constantly aware of your values and to strive to behave in accordance with them.

Values remind us of our authentic self and our unique role in the universe. All of us benefit from a series of ethical guideposts which we can use to steer our actions towards the greater good

If you are interested in advanced training of the mind for your self or staff, call now (925) 944-3440. Or check the website at www.GuideToSelf.com

About the Author

Dr. John Schinnerer holds a Ph.D. in educational psychology from U.C. Berkeley. He helps clients discover their best possible selves via positive psychology. His offices are in Danville, California. Dr. Schinnerer has been an executive, speaker and psychologist for over 10 years. Dr. John Schinnerer is Founder of Guide To Self, a company that coaches executives to happiness and success using the latest in positive psychology. Dr. John Schinnerer hosted over 200 episodes of Guide To Self Radio, a daily prime time radio show, in the SF Bay Area.  Dr. Schinnerer’s areas of expertise range from positive psychology, to emotional awareness, to anger management, to executive coaching. Dr. Schinnerer wrote the award-winning, “Guide To Self: The Beginner’s Guide To Managing Emotion and Thought,” which is available at Amazon.com. His blog, Shrunken Mind, was recently recognized as #1 in positive psychology on the web by PostRank (http://drjohnblog.guidetoself.com).

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