A Reality check on Reality shows....how about we all get real ourselves?

The Feb 7th, CBS Sunday Morning show did a segment called The Real Deal on Reality TV. The gist of the segment was that millions of people are thrilled to be watching others lives and all the drama they can create. In many cases, these Reality shows highlight the worst of our behaviors, yet they also normalize these behaviors as if 'this is as real as it gets'. In truth, these Reality shows are often staged and edited to present a very skewed portion of what's happening--yet the viewer only sees what the producers feels will heighten the drama. American Idol's auditions imply that everyone gets a fair shot, but many who have participated in this experience acknowledge that some of those selected are there simply to give viewers the opportunity to laugh and mock. Many talented folks who have gone through the huge effort and expense to get to these auditions with the belief that the show is actually looking for good talent, are ignored and wonder why those with no talent get exposure when they don't. So much for reality...

As I watched and listened to this segment I kept thinking that for so many people, instead of getting real in their own lives, they watch other people's lives on these reality shows. But why? Because at the end of the hour, their own lives haven't changed, they haven't learned how to create whole and dynamic lives of their own but instead have watched other people living a fake reality. Why is that more fun than building their own?

My gut answer is that most people don't know how to create their own lives. Why? Because the examples they see through the media--TV, movies, on-line, magazines, social networking sites etc., rarely are about building whole and dynamic lives but consistently shows drama, pain and fear. It's seen so often that people actually think that TV/media reflects 'reality' and it ends up being a more powerful teacher than what they're learning in their homes or at school.

I once had a client ask me about two different TV characters. She was wondering which was the better one to copy. She was serious. She was living in a very chaotic home and left on her own to grow up and figure out how to be a good person. The only examples she could come up with was to use one of these two characters. This was long before Reality shows had taken over the airwaves but I think her question reflects the why Reality shows have become so dominant. People are lost and watching a Reality show is about watching others who are lost and confused too. And if the producers of the show are good---the 'real people' on the shows will be more lost and confused than the viewer so the viewer can vicariously feel good that 'at least I'm not as messed up as X". Lost meets lost and everyone feels fine because people don't realize there's an alternative. But there is and that's why I created the Life Puzzle so long ago.

Life Puzzle is about being real and building your own whole and dynamic life. It's the anti-Reality show. It's about spending your time learning to love your SELF, discovering your own way of creating your life and at the end of each day, the wonderful satisfaction of the on-going and growing journey of living fully. Now, how do we get everyone to turn off Reality shows and turn on getting real and making their Life Puzzle?

We’ll have a great economy if we would all just get sick…

Health care is the number one growing industry in our country. So, if you’re looking for a career change or dealing with unemployment due to being kicked out of the auto industry, airline industry, manufacturing industries etc., you should become a nurse. The Bureau of Labor statistics shows it to be the number one job for the future economy.

And it is a great career field that is both financially and intrinsically rewarding. Helping people who are sick to get better is a wonderful thing. But of course as we employ more and more in the health care field, they’ll only be busy if there are a lot of sick people. And that’s the tricky thing about a growth sector of the economy being tied to health care—it’s got a very curious feedback loop. In order to make it a growth industry that pays for all the doctors, nurses, specialized equipment, drugs etc., it requires customers who are sick and continuing to be sick. And that creates a secondary feedback loop that we need to examine—a lot of sick people results in a country that is no longer thriving on personal or economic levels.

You can already see the early signs of this as the obesity rates of our country have sky-rocketed and with it a serious rise in diabetes and heart disease throughout the entire population. Chronically ill people work less productively and/or for those who are working, they spend more and more of their income on health care instead of housing, healthy food, technology, and other areas where people might be employed instead of the health care system. You can see over a decade or two this is going to result in a United States that isn’t thriving at all.

But there’s another option that would shift us from being a nation of sick people with an economy dependent on health care as the largest employment sector. Let’s shift the dollars out of the health care system and into the household enterprise system.

Now, bear with me because I’m going to suggest a whole new way of building our economy from the ground up. It starts at home by finally recognizing that the work done in our homes provides the cornerstone setting for a new, vibrant economy. From the raising of our children through to the caring of our elderly, the inclusion of the household as a business enterprise and employment sector that is part of the measured and monetized economy will enable us to build a much stronger economy overall.

I’m not talking about welfare or paying people to stay home and do nothing, I’m suggesting that we need to ‘professionalize’ the work done in our homes to the level that we expect of other industries like health care, business, law, education, or technology. And in doing so, we include it into our economic measurements and monetize it. This would provide a massive new employment sector for our economy. It would also produce far greater outcomes for so many children and families—which ultimately produces far better outcomes for the entire country. As you’ll see, to continue to exclude this work as part of the measured and monetized economy is literally to look a gift horse in the mouth.

Here’s why—the future belongs to the highly educated and that means we will need humans who are operating at full human capacity. How do we best achieve this? It starts with recognizing that ‘human development’ doesn’t just happen—it has to be fostered from pre-natal care through birth and early childhood years to its highest levels. Humans are an interesting species in that they have the longest childhoods of any species on the planet and to be fully capable of being on their own and building optimal lives—they must be taught how to do this. In the 21^st century, our childhoods have extended out to almost 24 years because the sheer volume of data and skills that one must learn in order to negotiate life to its utmost. Five thousand years ago the time and energy spent to raise a child to adulthood required significantly less accumulation of data and skill sets by the caregiver to complete the work necessary to enable that child to walk into adulthood ready to take on the world. But today, the knowledge and skills sets that a child must acquire in order to be fully functioning into adulthood requires the adult who is raising the child to have a much higher level of accumulated data and skill sets too. In fact, to achieve this level of data and skill accumulation—we must provide training, schooling etc., equivalent to that which we expect of other professions such as technology, health care and/or financial management.

Because we have not recognized this and raised the bar for the household enterprise to be viewed as a ‘profession’ we’ve missed out on one of the most important employment sectors available to us to build a thriving economy. To continue to perpetuate this travesty results in a lose-lose for us all and at its worst, it results in the sicker and sicker population that now fuels the ever-growing health care sector of our economy.

We can get sick…or we can get well—it’s a choice.

If we reframed the economy to include the household sector, we could employ millions of people—though not only in the household enterprise itself. Even more importantly, it would foster a B2B ripple effect out into the greater economy. The market sectors of technology, education, home building, and entertainment to name just a few would all be direct beneficiaries. Dollars will circulate through the household enterprises and spread out into these other areas that are needed in order for the household enterprises to achieve the high level outcomes expected through this new professional sector.

It isn’t that difficult for us to come to the conclusion that we need to raise the bar and add the household enterprise to the professional ranks and pay for high quality output. Why is the raising of our children any less a profession than an engineer? We expect an engineer to have advanced training and skill development in order to be capable to produce a set of drawings for a bridge that are engineered correctly and that we would feel confident to drive over. If we want the same level of confidence that our children will achieve full human capacity and be ready to be a part of our economy as they reach adulthood, the household enterprise needs to be given the equivalent professional respect and that will only happen if it is included in our economic measurements and monetization.

As we enter the 21^st century’s second decade, it is clearly a very different world. We know education is a vital part of every child’s potential success and yet we only professionalize this when they leave the home and go to day care and/or enter the school system. As a result, millions of children receive less than optimal care-giving simply because the adult(parent) is either not trained in this work as a professional and/ or forced to be outside the home seeking employment in another area in order to have the funds necessary to live life.

Going to work in the household enterprise sector could be the equivalent of going to work for Hewlett Packard or the Red Cross. Imagine the rise of thousands of small, medium and large non-profit businesses who will be the centers for hiring, training and managing teams of employees who work in this new professional field. Just as a professional at Hewlett Packard works out of their home office yet has virtual connection with team members in their community or across the world, so too could going to work for a Household enterprise business result in an employee who works at home but has connections to a team of other equivalent household professionals. What a great career field—and the outcomes—vibrant children who have, from day one, had the opportunity to engage with a professional whose knowledge and skills ensure optimal human development for this child.

Once you begin to wrap your head around this new way of seeing the work done in the home from the perspective of the household enterprise, it is easy to see how many terrific benefits are created for our children, our communities, our economy and the world. Taking this step now provides the opportunity for a new employment sector to arise just as many of the consumer industries of the past begin to retract. The future looks bright in this employment sector as we redirect the economy to pay for this now vital work.

We will of course, always need health care. But there’s a difference between needing health care as a small portion of an economy that supports a generally thriving population of healthy people vs. it being the major sector of the economy that supports a generally marginal population of sick people. We know already that we are on this sick path, but we could turn this around in one generation by adding the household enterprise sector into the measured and monetized professional economy.

Immediately people will ask how this can be funded but this is less an issue of money than an issue of where we want to put our money. Briefly addressing this issue (a subsequent article will go into more detail) some funds will come as we redirect out of health care into household enterprises. Current grant funders may direct their funding for this new sector—seeing that it produces far better outcomes and higher employment than even the current social service system. The rise of local currencies would enable another source of funding since obviously household enterprise businesses are locally centered (finally an employment sector you can’t outsource to China!). Another option would be a State bank as a source for long term funding. The money is there—we need only to determine that we want the household enterprise to be included in the economic measurement system—once that happens, the money can flow in, out and around the economy just as it does in any other sector such as health care, engineering or buying a new Smart phone!

Food Inc., meets Health Care reform

The movie, Food Inc., offers a big view of the American food system. Like our banking/financial system, over the last 30 years, the American food system has resulted in a few big players controlling the grand majority of the food system.

Most of us take the food system for granted. We have year-round access to every type of food imaginable at amazingly low prices. What an incredible system we are blessed with so what could be wrong with this?

What we don't see is how this food system is possible. Few of us are aware of how our food is produced. There's a wall a mile high around our food production systems and as Food Inc. shows, the bBig AG systems don't want you to know or see what's happening. Because they know if you did--you would be shocked at how this system abuses the farmers, the animals, the land and YOU. For while you might think that year-round access to all types of food at incredibly low prices benefits you, what you discover by watching Food Inc., is that you are paying a very big cost for this apparently thriving system.

In order for our food system to function as it does, you have to accept a food system that increasingly risks your safety and increasingly reduces a fresh food system to a highly processed food system that centers around just a few food items--corn, soybeans, and wheat being the big three. Big AG takes these 3 products, processes them in many different forms and voila, you have a cheap food system.





But you'll notice something else--on the way to this super efficient, high processed and super cheap food system--America has gotten incredibly fat and unhealthy. In direct correlation, you can see how, as we became ever more processed in our food system, we became ever more unhealthy. Take just one issue: Type II Diabetes. This used to be called "Adult-onset" diabetes because most people did not get this type of diabetes until late in their 40's or 50's. But now, our children are increasingly exhibiting this illness and it is reaching epidemic proportions! One in three of our children will become Type II diabetic in their lifetime.



So how cheap is our food system? Not very if you were to do a true cost accounting. Because that highly processed food system results in obesity and diabetes which costs a fortune to care for through the health care system. Have you noticed your insurance premiums going up lately? Well, this scenario guarantees that it will continue to rise for the next 30 years as more and more of our children are diagnosed with diabetes! Now, factor that cost into a cheap food system and you can see the 'beneficial' aspect of year-round access to amazingly inexpensive food disappears. Add to this the human loss of all these people having to care for Type II diabetes, how this limits their lives, impacts their families and will implode our health care system carrying these costs and a belief that we have a cheap food system requires you to live in total denial.



Last year, when the financial system collapsed--we discovered that some banks were "too big to fail" We also learned that if they're too big to fail...they're just too big. I ask you to consider this same scenario related to our food systems. Big AG controls 80-90% of the food system which makes them "too big to fail "too. Isn't it time we realized as well, that if Big AG is too big to fail..it is simply too big? You may have watched your life savings disappear when the financial system collapsed...what happens though when the Big AG system collapses? Don't wait to find out.



Anyone who reads this Life Puzzle blog knows how important a factor good nutrition is in building a whole and dynamic life. Against the challenges that this Big AG food system presents, there's still plenty you can do. Grow your own food, buy at local farmers' markets, join a CSA farm (there are now 3000 of them in the US), ask restaurants in your area to buy from local farmers and post it on their menus, join a community garden or put a garden in your own front yard! Take a step today to get yourself out of the 0-5/status quo Big AG food system. Go 6-10, take responsibilitiy and proactively take charge of your life!

The Age of the Unthinkable....

Last week I did a presentation to Community College women (staff) who were at their summer conference. The focus was on wellness and managing stress in these chaotic times. I was sharing the Life Puzzle model as an example of living in the present moment while accepting that things are constantly changing. I shared that the Life Puzzle is a framework that enables you to be 'resilient'. As you become accustomed to recognizing that 'adding more pieces' over the course of your lifetime is normal and joyous it gives you the capacity to deal with what comes. This runs contrary to how many of think we're supposed to live--getting our lives fixed, safe and secure--and unchanging.

Coincidentally I was reading a book by Joshua Cooper Ramo, The Age of the Unthinkable. This book discusses the reality that our world is changing so much that what we once thought 'unthinkable'--suicide bombers, the Internet, another great Depression and 7 billion people to name a few--now is all around us. It is a an 'insecure' world and try as we might to apply old ways of addressing these fast changes--what he's discovered is that if we're going to create 'deep-security', we must change the way we see the world. We must give ourselves permission to try new ways of responding. At about page 100 I thought--he's talking about being a Life Puzzle maker!

As I continued reading--I could see that he is confronting the 0-5 side of the Choosing Continuum--the reactive, passive, maintain status-quo world where, frankly, most people live and most of our systems--medical, business, education, law and even our families support and reinforce. And he's saying--that's not going to cut it for our future---it is time to switch directions and become proactive, empowered and self-responsible. In Life Puzzle terms--that means going to the 6-10 side of the Choosing Continuum and building a life that that you create and take responsiblity for--day by day and piece by piece.

Now, of course, this book was addressing the big picture, big systems---like governments solving problems or financial systems redesigning. But remember, those big systems are made up of lots of individual people. If we're going to build what Ramo calls a 'deep-secure' world--it starts with each and everyone of us, individually taking the step into Life Puzzle making.

So, if you ever wondered if it was time to jump out of the 0-5 status-quo and into the 6-10, create your own future---in the Age of the Unthinkable...that time is now! The Life Puzzle gives you a framework on which to do this---a piece at a time with the whole YOU in mind!

I ended my talk at the summer conference with this line--"The only security in life is insecurity--learn to love it". I could see the audience faces scrunching their eyebrows at a phrase that seems to be an oxymoron. I know what they're thinking because the first time I heard this--I rebeled against it and thought--no, that can't be right. But it is. When you really get this, then no matter what stress or change occurs--you realize you can accept and deal with it in the now.

That's what living in the Age of the Unthinkable is saying too. That as much as we might want to try to control the world--a better strategy is to accept that change is all around us and be part of creating the solutions when necessary. For too long we've sat passively by and thought someone else would take care of everything, fix it all and make it safe. But with systems crashing down around us despite billions of dollars invested to prevent any changes--we can now see that this is a false security. If you want to create what Ramo call deep-security--wake up, become resilient (Life Puzzle maker), empower yourself and be ready for whatever changes show up. Because they will be showing up!

The 10K rule results in a lot more happiness!

"So, step out of yourself and look down on this event from 10,000 feet", I said to my client, Gina*. She had called expressing hurt and anger about an experience she'd had with a co-worker and wanted to know what to do about it. *name changed

She responded---"I know you want me to be the 'bigger person here', but then she gets away with what she did to me and that just makes me more angry!"

"No, I answered, I want you to be an adult instead of the emotional child. Because right now, the 'little hurt child' is running this event over and over in your mind, isn't she? And I know you've told me before that when this type of thing occurs--it spirals out into overeating, withdrawing from the world and isolating your self."

Gina responded, "Well, yes, but shouldn't there be a right and wrong here? She was rude and that's not acceptable to me. Why does she get to do the immature behavior, but I don't?"

A moment of silence please while we all chuckle over that.

"Gina, I said, "you don't come to me for counseling so I can encourage you to stay stuck in old and useless patterns. You come to break this cycle--and that's why you need to begin practicing the 10K rule."

"When events like this happen--and you have a 'feeling' of 'hurt--I want you to feel that feeling---and then instead of the old pattern of nursing this hurt, wanting to withdraw--I want you to stop, deep breath and step outside of this event and look down on it from 10,000 ft. Look down on this event as a mature adult instead of the hurt child and as you make this shift--ask your mature adult SELF--how do I want to manage this hurt feeling instead of letting this hurt feeling manage me (ie, nursing it, running this event over and over in your mind, wanting to withdraw).

"What you'll get from this vantage point Gina is the ability to see that this 'event' is just an event. It is not something that has to ruin my day, have me figuring out ways to seek revenge etc., Instead, from the 10K view, I feel the temporary feeling of 'hurt', I realize I can let it go and then get focused on positive things I want to do with my day. "
Also, Gina, from this view, you can also see the other person and see that they're in their own 'melodrama' and you were just a 'blip on the screen' event that gotcaught up in it. When her melodrama crashed into you, then you created your own melodrama that wants to crash back into her. What you'll see is that everyone is letting the 'emotional child' respond vs. the rational adult. The world of angst that's created produces a lose-lose situation.

We need far more consciousness Gina--and responding to life's event as a mature adult frees up your life to be lived fully instead of chasing your tail over these on-going events. Because for sure Gina...there will be more and more events like this. I can guarantee it! But if you begin practicing the 10K rule--and separate out and begin managing your feelings, you'll avoid a lot of grief.

Managing our feelings doesn't mean blocking or numbing--what it means is we "feel the feeling' and then we step out to the 10K level and begin managing it. Yes, it means managing hurt--but it also means 'managing' rapt joy of watching a sunset--feel the feeling, let the warmth run through your body--but you don't stay stuck there forever and never move on--you recognize the joy, from the 10K view, you see it's part of a temporary event, honor it and move on. Same with hurt--you feel the feeling, let the angst 'bubble up', but you don't stay stuck there either. You move to the 10K view, see its part of a temporary event, honor it and move on!

Unfortunately, Gina--most of us do get stuck in our hurt/anger feelings. We take it personally, respond like the wounded child and then we waste so much of our life turning a temporary event into our lives, running it over and over again in our minds....but not moving on.

So, practice the 10K rule, feel the feeling, manage it and move on to live life!