In the first study, reported in the Journal of Positive Psychology, researchers at the University of Missouri found that ”Our work provides support for what many people already do — listen to music to improve their moods,” according to lead author Yuna Ferguson. “Although pursuing personal happiness may be thought of as a self-centered venture, research suggests that happiness relates to a higher probability of socially beneficial behavior, better physical health, higher income and greater relationship satisfaction.” In two studies by Ferguson, participants successfully improved their moods in the short term and boosted their overall happiness over a two week period. The study’s co-author, Kennon Sheldon, added that the research “…suggests that we can intentionally seek to make mental changes leading to new positive experiences of life.” This study is summarized in Science Daily.

The other study, conducted by researchers at the University of Groningen, found that music is not only able to affect your mood — listening to particularly happy or sad music can even change the way we perceive the world. That is, music and mood are closely interrelated. Listening to a sad or happy song on the radio can make you feel more sad or happy. However, such mood changes also change your perception. For example, people will recognize happy faces if they are feeling happy themselves. The researchers had their test subjects perform a task in which they had to identify happy and sad smileys while listening to happy or sad music. Music turned out to have a great influence on what the subjects saw: smileys that matched the music were identified much more accurately. And even when no smiley at all was shown, the subjects often thought they recognized a happy smiley when listening to happy music and a sad one when listening to sad music.

Researchers reported that “…Your brain continuously compares the information that comes in through your eyes with what it expects on the basis of what you know about the world. The final result of this comparison process is what we eventually experience as reality. Our research results suggest that the brain builds up expectations not just on the basis of experience but on your mood as well.” This study is summarized in Science Daily.

But most of those sources have a deeper origin that the surveys and research don’t tap into. Major changes in our society and world have created a “new normal” of continuous turmoil and disruption. This new environment is pushing both organizations and workers to redefine success beyond the long-prevailing rewards of money, power and position; and towards criteria less focused on self-interest but more adaptive to living and working within what is now a “post-careerist” culture. Much current stress reflects the strain of this growing transition. It’s inevitable and necessary.

That is, many men and women, along with the leadership of companies they work for, are already redefining success. The emerging criteria include having meaningful, visible impact through one’s work; a company that supports people’s continuous learning, expanding their capacities and creative contributions. Redefining success for organizations is reflected in a management culture promoting innovation, collaboration, and transparency; that attracts and retains people who look for that environment. It’s also reflected in sustaining success within a fluid technological and economic environment, through serving the many stakeholders on whom success depends.

In short, this evolving redefinition of personal success meshes with organizational practices that promote long-term business success. In those companies, the norms are collaborative engagement, support for innovation and commitment to having impact on something larger than just your own advancement. You can find good examples of this mesh in many of the interviews Adam Bryant conducts for the New York Times with CEOs of innovative companies.

What Drives The Need To Redefine Success?

Most people realize that we now live and work in an era of rapid transformation in technology, networking and globalized communications. It’s the “FTY era” — of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. It’s coincided with the rise of the Gen-X, Gen-Y and the Millennium generations within the workplace. The younger generations look for immediate feedback loops in both their social and work lives. They expect that transparent, honest feedback will filter out the best ideas and people, as entrepreneur Michael Fertik has written. They expect to work harder and to be paid less at first; and they’re hungry to develop marketable skills and a trajectory for their careers.

Doing all that effectively is success to them. But it requires workplaces that support their orientation and mentality. Consequently, many of the visible forms of stress reported by the surveys are a reaction against the absence of such a work culture or worse: those serving only the older, narrow pursuit of self-interest and material success. That old view is increasingly disconnected from the realities of what works in our post-careerist culture. It’s disconnected from the motives and orientation of younger generations but also from the baby boomers and older Gen X workers as well.

That is, the management and leadership cultures of many organizations remain stuck in a 20th century mentality of top-down, “command and control,” position-based authority. Lack of communication and openness; inadequate support for learning, collaboration or teamwork are typical. And management behavior that includes abuse, hostility or arrogance exacerbate the above. For example, the older mindsetcreates significant boredom from lack of mesh between people’s capacities and organizational limitations upon utilizing. Moreover, some suffer under non-responsive, unsupportive managers; or those who areoutright abusive, arrogant or narcissistic.

A survey of 2000 workers found 47 percent of those surveyed said their managers made them feel threatened, rather than rewarded; and 24 percent thought their bosses were poor communicators and lacked empathy. That’s counterproductive and destructive for performance. Other research confirms that demoralization rises when work isn’t very engaging; or when opportunities for continued growth and expanding competencies are limited or blocked. Such environments don’t provide the flexibility, skill-based recognition and transparency that companies need to sustain success in today’s world.

Men and women who are creating a new definition of success embody what I’ve called the 4.0 career orientation. Interestingly, it’s an evolution beyond seeking personal meaning and self-development through work, the focus of many in the last couple of decades. The 4.0 view of success includes those, but extends beyond them to have impact on something larger than oneself; and seeing a connection between one’s work and its contribution to a product or service that’s socially useful and adds value to the human community.

Their perspective about success includes ability to keep up with rapid change, an innovative mindset, thriving on flux and unpredictability, and embracing — even enjoying — instability. They look for companies that are in sync with their values and perspectives. This view is reflected in Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s statement that “We don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services.” And, that some don’t grasp ”…the idea that someone might build something because they like building things.”

Redefining success includes being both highly competitive and collaborative at the same time; comfortable with rapid change and unpredictability but impatient with old-style, position-based authority vs. authority from actual contribution and creative output. As Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen has pointed out,successful people in the above sense believe that an idea “…either works or doesn’t work.” They’re not impressed by appearance or attempts to dazzle without substance.

The redefinition of success is also visible in movements to create successful businesses that also contribute to the solution of social problems, as Richard Branson and other business leaders have described. For example, Oxford University’s Colin Mayer has called for redefining the purpose of the corporation, so that public companies can better serve the needs of society, including their stakeholders, rather than just their shareholders.

These shifts towards redefining success are consistent with studies that show, for example, that humble leaders are more highly effective than those who are egocentric. The latter are more associated with a self-focused view: their own success and importance. Similarly, a study by the National Bureau of Economic Research, reported in Slate, finds that productivity rises in the presence of good bosses who support learning and growth. And, new research finds that happy workers have nearly 40 percent higher productivity and creativity than less happy workers, according to the research.

Overall, a company in tune with this emerging redefinition of success will ensure that its products, services and brands support maximum flourishing for customers, workers and society. As Dov Seidman points out, it’s marked by high degrees of transparency, interconnection and interdependency. Phil Libin, CEO of Evernote, illustrates this environment as well, saying, ”We always try to ask whether a particular policy exists because it’s a default piece of corporate stupidity that everyone expects you to have, or does it actually help you accomplish something? And very often you realize that you don’t really know why you’re doing it this way, so we just stop doing it.”

To summarize, some of the new criteria include success at:

• Building, contributing, and innovating so as to benefit people and institutions for the long run, not only oneself or one’s allies.

• Serving the common good, something larger than just your own needs and desires.

• Personal growth of your capacity for empathy, compassion, self-awareness; and harnessing the self-centeredness that’s part of being human.

• Strengthening your mental capacities for flexibility, openness, nimbleness, and making productive connections with others.

• Being collaborative, non-defensive, informal, and engaged as a team member who’s focused on the objectives or mission, rather than self-promoting at others’ expense.

Redefining success in today’s workplace, then, is less characterized by self-interest alone, and more by expanding one’s capacities and impact through support and contribution to the larger effort or mission. It’s marked by moving beyond extracting value just for yourself, to contributing value.

A version of this article appeared previously in The Huffington Post.

The most recent study sheds more light on how this occurs.. Previous research has found dysfunction of specific brain regions, such as the amygdala, associated with emotions, fear and aggression, and the orbitofrontal cortex, the region which deals with decision making. The connection between these regions is diminished in psychopaths. Subsequent studies found, for example, that psychopaths displayed significantly reduced brain matter in regions related to understanding others’ emotions or experiencing moral behavior, guilt or embarrassment. Another found reduced connectivity between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala, which could help explain the impulsive antisocial behavior of some psychopaths.

In the most recent study, researchers examined the MRIs of participants – volunteer prisoners who met the criteria for psychopathy — when exposed to scenes depicting people being intentionally hurt and showing facial expressions of pain. The psychopaths showed significantly less activation in parts of the brain that reflect capacity for empathy. for monitoring one’s behavior, understanding consequences of actions, and developing moral decision-making. This diminished brain activity inhibits the likelihood of such individuals being able to show empathic concern for others or valuing other’s wellbeing. The study was conducted by researchers at the University of Chicago and the University of New Mexico, and described as follows:

Prisoners who are psychopaths lack the basic neurophysiological “hardwiring” that enables them to care for others, according to a new study by neuroscientists at the University of Chicago and the University of New Mexico.

“A marked lack of empathy is a hallmark characteristic of individuals with psychopathy,” said the lead author of the study, Jean Decety, the Irving B. Harris Professor in Psychology and Psychiatry at UChicago. Psychopathy affects approximately 1 percent of the United States general population and 20 percent to 30 percent of the male and female U.S. prison population. Relative to non-psychopathic criminals, psychopaths are responsible for a disproportionate amount of repetitive crime and violence in society.

“This is the first time that neural processes associated with empathic processing have been directly examined in individuals with psychopathy, especially in response to the perception of other people in pain or distress,” he added.

The results of the study, which could help clinical psychologists design better treatment programs for psychopaths, are published in the article, “Brain Responses to Empathy-Eliciting Scenarios Involving Pain in Incarcerated Individuals with Psychopathy,” which appears online April 24 in the journalJAMA Psychiatry.

Joining Decety in the study were Laurie Skelly, a graduate student at UChicago; and Kent Kiehl, professor of psychology at the University of New Mexico.

For the study, the research team tested 80 prisoners between ages 18 and 50 at a correctional facility. The men volunteered for the test and were tested for levels of psychopathy using standard measures.

They were then studied with functional MRI technology, to determine their responses to a series of scenarios depicting people being intentionally hurt. They were also tested on their responses to seeing short videos of facial expressions showing pain.

The participants in the high psychopathy group exhibited significantly less activation in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, lateral orbitofrontal cortex, amygdala and periaqueductal gray parts of the brain, but more activity in the striatum and the insula when compared to control participants, the study found.

The high response in the insula in psychopaths was an unexpected finding, as this region is critically involved in emotion and somatic resonance. Conversely, the diminished response in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and amygdala is consistent with the affective neuroscience literature on psychopathy. This latter region is important for monitoring ongoing behavior, estimating consequences and incorporating emotional learning into moral decision-making, and plays a fundamental role in empathic concern and valuing the well-being of others.

“The neural response to distress of others such as pain is thought to reflect an aversive response in the observer that may act as a trigger to inhibit aggression or prompt motivation to help,” the authors write in the paper.

“Hence, examining the neural response of individuals with psychopathy as they view others being harmed or expressing pain is an effective probe into the neural processes underlying affective and empathy deficits in psychopathy,” the authors wrote.

Decety is one of the world’s leading experts on the biological underpinnings of empathy. His work also focuses on the development of empathy and morality in children.

The study with prisoners was supported with a $1.6 million grant from the National Institute of Mental Health.

From the research, published in PLOS ONE, and reported by Science News: The study assessed the quality of social relationships on depression over a 10-year period, and is one of the first to examine the issue in a large, broad population over such a long time period. Nearly 16 percent of Americans experience major depression disorder at some point in their lives, and the condition can increase the risk for and worsen conditions like coronary artery disease, stroke and cancer.

Our study shows that the quality of social relationships is a significant risk factor for major depression,” says psychiatrist Alan Teo, M.D., M.S., a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholar at the University of Michigan and the study’s lead author. “This is the first time that a study has identified this link in the general population.” Digging deeper into the results, the researchers found that certain positive and negative aspects of relationships also predicted depression. Social strain and a lack of support — especially in spousal relationships and to some extent with family members — were both risk factors for developing depression later.

“These results tell us that health care providers need to remember that patients’ relationships with their loved ones likely play a central role in their medical care,” Teo says. “They also suggest that the broader use of couples therapy might be considered, both as a treatment for depression and as a preventative measure.”

While the results confirmed the researchers’ assumptions about relationship quality, they did not find a correlation between the frequency of social interactions and the prevalence of depression as predicted. Even if participants were socially isolated, having few interactions with family and friends, it did not predict depression risk. Teo says this finding should also translate to mental health treatment considerations. ”Asking a patient how she rates her relationship with her husband, rather than simply asking whether she has one, should be a priority,” Teo says.

The researchers say that the study’s significant effect size — one in seven adults with the lowest-quality relationships will develop depression, as opposed to just one in 15 with the highest quality relationships — indicates the potential for substantial change in the general population. ”The magnitude of these results is similar to the well-established relationship between biological risk factors and cardiovascular disease,” Teo says. “What that means is that if we can teach people how to improve the quality of their relationships, we may be able to prevent or reduce the devastating effects of clinical depression.”

The current survey was summarized in a Forbes article, by Susan Adams. She writes:

Some 83% of American workers say they feel stressed out by their jobs, up from 73% a year ago, according to a new study by Harris Interactive for Everest College. The No. 1 reason workers feel stressed, according to the survey: low pay. This is the third year of the survey and the third year that less- than-adequate paychecks were the top stressor for workers. The study was conducted by phone among 1,000 adults between Feb. 21 and March 3.

While pay was the biggest source of stress last year, the percentage of workers who pegged it at No. 1 rose this year, from 11% to 14%. This year unreasonable workload also ranked as a top stressor, with 14% saying they had too much to do, up from 9% last year. Annoying coworkers and commuting tied for the next-most-stressful parts of the job, at 11%. The next-worst stressor was working in a job that was not the person’s chosen career (8%), poor work-life balance (7%), lack of opportunity for advancement (6%) and fear of being fired (4%).

The complete essay:

Four decades ago, an economist named Albert O. Hirschman prophesied a rising gap in the quality of schools. As he reasoned: If the quality of public schools deteriorated, affluent families would switch to private schools. Hirschman labeled this the “exit” option. The parents of the remaining kids would try to restore quality via “voice”—that is, by appearing at school board meetings, speaking out, writing letters. But these activists would be doubly handicapped. Public schools—being insensitive to profit—are less responsive to voice. And the desertion of wealthier parents would tend to deprive the public schools of influential voices.

Once you start looking at the world through the Hirschman lens, the paradigm of exit and voice is all around. Suppose you are unhappy at work: Should you complain to the boss or simply quit? Or maybe you are the boss: How much should you mollify employees—or customers—to keep them from leaving? It might depend on the presence of a third Hirschman factor: loyalty.

Broadly speaking, markets are all about exit: If the stock is a lemon, sell it. Politics deals in voice (just listen to talk radio).

What Hirschman grasped is that the strongest organizations (in either sphere) foster exit as well as voice. Both corporations and school districts have customers or members whom they need to retain—though at some point, it’s best to let the dissenters go.

Hirschman died late last year, at 97, and a massive, erudite biography by Jeremy Adelman will be published next month. “Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman” (Princeton University Press) chronicles the amazing saga that brought him from the caldron of Hitler’s Germany to a revered place in American letters. “Interestingly,” Mr. Adelman tells us, “Hirschman made no mention of his own exits—Berlin, Trieste, Paris.”

Perhaps he didn’t have to. When Hirschman wrote “Exit, Voice and Loyalty”—a 126-page burst of lucidity—in 1970, its relevance was stunningly apparent. Organizations were in disrepair. The government and campuses had been rocked by Vietnam; big corporations were on the defensive. Which tactic, Hirschman wondered, produced the greater effect: protesting the draft or fleeing to Canada? To whom did the ailing General Motors listen: the silent customers defecting to Toyota or Ralph Nader, the vocal activist?

Born in 1915 in wartime Berlin, Hirschman was reared in a Weimar Germany that was a hotbed of the avant-garde—modernity in culture and radicalism in politics. By the eve of his 18th birthday, the Reichstag had been reduced to ashes, as had his family’s belief that assimilation as Germans immunized them as Jews. The adolescent Hirschman decamped solo for Paris, acquiring a personal resilience that would inform his masterwork. For the rest of his life he would renounce extremes. In his biographer’s piquant phrase, Hirschman dwelled “in the neglected, ravaged space between the romance of revolution and the firmament of reaction.”

If “Exit, Voice and Loyalty” had a broader purpose, it was to make organizations more resilient. Economists, Hirschman noted, didn’t worry about organizational decline; in the economist’s neat models, a bankrupt firm was replaced by another. For Hirschman, upheaval was more frightening. By the time he was 30, he had fought against Franco in Spain, served as a courier for the anti-Mussolini underground in Trieste, enlisted in the French army, and fled to Spain over the Pyrenees and then to America. Having lived history at warp speed, he was done with cosmic doctrines. He preferred the moralism of Albert Camus, the pragmatism of Adam Smith.

“Exit, Voice and Loyalty,” which still inspires Hirschman groupies, grew from one of his beloved “small ideas,” his observation that the poor performance of the railroads in Nigeria did not inspire a clamor for reform. The most disgruntled freight customers defected to private truckers, and their voices were thus lost. More recently, had it not been for Federal Express, sopping up the customers with the most urgent business, the post office probably would have faced a mass riot. Recognizing this truth, totalitarian regimes such as Cuba have preferred to weaken the potential for unrest by tolerating some emigration (exit).

Hirschman saw that when organizations make it easy to exit, voice is weakened. Yet, for voice to be effective, a possibility of exit must be present. Partners in business—even in marriage—trade in voice, but the unstated potential for exit, no matter how remote, gives their requests (“Empty the garbage, please”) particular urgency. Exit and voice coexist in “seesaw,” as Hirschman wrote, but their effects are distinct. When you say to the waitress, “The hamburger is overcooked,” your message is clear, though the waitress may choose to ignore it. If you stop patronizing the restaurant, the meaning is less certain. Were you driven off by the hamburger or something else altogether?

Exit is forceful, but it rules out using voice later. However, the reverse isn’t true. Voice, the default tactic in social groupings, is reusable but messy and not necessarily persuasive. When it’s easy to bid adieu (say, to a brand of detergent), voice isn’t worth the trouble. Firms must rely on the third leg of Hirschman’s stool, “loyalty.” Or as he put it, “Loyalty holds exit at bay”—a truth not lost on the folks who conjured up airline frequent-flier miles.

Loyalty carries no weight, of course, in the stock market, where “exit strategy” is an honored term. And since the appearance of “Exit, Voice and Loyalty” more than four decades ago, financial markets and American culture generally have only become more fickle. Loyalty to geography, religion and firm struggles with the pace of modernity. Professional sports are less appealing because players desert their teams; pensions have fallen into disregard because corporations, which once prized their workers’ loyalty, now value their exit more. And the Internet enforces an exit bias: Habits of behavior and even “friends” are dispatched at a keystroke.

What would Hirschman say today? His biographer writes that he “neither touted the exit-market option nor the voice-political one.” Yet Hirschman was an economist, and his first concern, one suspects, was his colleagues’ neglect of the power of voice. He skewered Milton Friedman for writing that parents can “express” their views about schools “directly”—by switching schools—or through “cumbrous political channels.”

But what was “cumbrous” about voice? A noneconomist, he noted dryly, “might naively suggest that the direct way of expressing views is to express them!” Hirschman also chided political scientists for neglecting exit.

But 2013 is not 1970. The world has moved on, has embraced markets more and social adhesiveness less. So perhaps it is time for some balance, for social structures that listen better and slow the impulse to quit. To paraphrase a cry from the decade that sparked Hirschman’s remarkable book, we should give voice—lest it atrophy—a chance.

They and others reflect the impact of living in today’s world, especially since the new century began. Our lives now exist within a new normal of uncertainty and turmoil, of unpredictable events and rapid social change, as well as ever-evolving technology that infiltrates every aspect of daily life. This new environment raises an important question: What describes a fulfilling, positive and psychologically healthy life today? Moreover, what can you do to create it?

That’s where our traditional thinking and prescriptions fall short. Many of our assumptions about psychological health remain frozen within a 20th-century mindset, which has diminished relevance in today’s world. To explain, take a step back and look: Prior to 9/11 and especially since the economic meltdown of 2008, you were more likely to experience adversity or disruptions that were more predictable, more linear, than those today. Disruptions followed a fairly understandable course. Back then, you could reasonably anticipate returning to some level of stability. Wars eventually ended. The economy went through recessions, then recovered. You might suffer a career or relationship setback, but could assume there was a path to recovery.

In that world, a psychologically healthy life was mostly equated with successful management and coping with emotional damage from early trauma and conflict, which can occur during early development or subsequent life experiences. If left unhealed and unconscious, the damage becomes visible in symptoms and dysfunction, to different degrees. Increasing your consciousness about how your conflicts play out in life, and learning to manage their residue, are of course essential paths toward a happier and better-functioning life.

The problem is, that’s not enough, today. It won’t ensure what you need for continued growth and development of your emotional, mental, and relationship capacities. Yet you need all that, along with a positive, proactive spirit, to adapt to change and disruption in ways that create well-being and success in life.

Actually, even before the current era, the old formulation had its downside. Managing your old conflicts and adapting well enough to achieve reasonable success also included embracing certain values and behavior, such as adversarial competition, power-seeking, emotional disconnection, and materialism. As the 20th century came to a close, that often meant living with accumulating trade-offs and compromises within your soul, in order to maintain your “success.”

Today, people face new kinds of challenges and events in the quest for well-being and success. They reflect a world of rapid global interconnection, constant flux and unpredictability — a world turned upside-down by the events of the first decade: terrorism that’s come home to roost, economic meltdown at home and abroad, the rise of previously “underdeveloped” nations, social and political upheaval and polarization, and career uncertainties.

In short, we live in a highly interconnected, unpredictable, digitalized world of continuous flux, disruptions, uncertainties and insecurity. In contrast to previous decades, there’s no longer any equilibrium to return to after disruption. The healthy person has to be able to live successfully with disequilibrium. Consequently, a description of a psychologically healthy life and what supports it must be relevant to 21st-century realities.

East Meets West: A Psycho-Spiritual Path

A promising path to healthy personal development — both success and well-being — lies in the growing convergence and cross-fertilization between Western psychology and Eastern spiritual traditions. Some examples: the series of collaborations between Western scientists and Buddhists, sponsored by the Dalai Lama and the Mind and Life Institute, Deepak Chopra’s work on the nature of consciousness, and Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan’s meditation teachings that incorporate modern scientific knowledge. Moreover, a growing body of clinical observation and research in psychology and psychotherapy shows that long-term emotional, relational and creative well-being and success are linked with collaboration, mutuality, flexibility, transparency, empathy and compassion.

A theme emerging from this growing East-West convergence is that dysfunction and stagnation within the “non-equilibrium” world we now live in stems from too much self-interest and preoccupation with one’s self — intense focus on “getting” for yourself or extracting from others for your personal gain and benefit. Several practices and perspectives can help you move through such self-absorption and toward the mentality, spirit and behavior that support healthy, continuous “evolution” in your life, psychologically and spiritually. Some examples:

Practice “forgetting yourself.” A healthy personality grows from curbing self-interest and engaging in in something larger than just “me.” That includes looking at others and situations in your relationships and work through an expanded perspective, one that extends outside of your own narrow vantage point — outside your own lens. It includes looking at yourself through the eyes of others, including those you are in conflict with, and reflecting on what you see from that vantage point.

Expand and grow your dormant capacities and latent qualities. You can help them flower once you realize that you’ve been living within a self-imposed, limited definition of who you are. The latter is shaped by family, career and social conditioning. And that narrow view of yourself, including some of your beliefs and values, constrains rather than frees your capacity to grow and evolve. However, it’s possible to free yourself from those self-imposed constraints. It starts with recognizing the self-imprisonment you’ve lived with. Then, you can identify and begin to activate dormant capacities and qualities, and discover more of who you can become in life.

Put your energies and capacities in the service of the common good. That means something larger than just yourself. Doing that supports both success in your outside life and internal well-being. In today’s rapidly-transforming world, you need both. This might include a mission outside of your work, or within it. It might mean making an effort to let go of your resentments and reconciling with family members with whom you have differences or grievances, or extending yourself to engage with diverse people you usually keep at a distance.

Embrace the reality of impermanence and change. It’s the nature of life itself, no matter how much you try to avoid or deny it. Doing the latter only leads to frustration or bitterness when you have to face that reality, eventually. Whether in your relationship or at work, embracing impermanence and change pulls you out of the fixation with your own thwarted wants or desires. It enables you to put your energies into another form, another venue, that could lead to new kinds of fulfillment and positive energy.

Understand and learn from your karma. That means healing the residue of old issues in your past, perhaps with a therapist who also understands that healing includes incorporating and living with the aftereffects of your past actions, like scar tissue. Even after you’ve changed or corrected what caused problems in your life, you have to find a way to co-exist with their consequences, while also continuing to grow beyond them.

Describe the “life footprint” you want to leave behind. What do you want it to look like, and for whom? Examine how your current way of life will lead to your becoming a “good ancestor” to the generations that follow you.

This article was originally published in The Huffington Post

For the complete article, click here.

Among the latter are many academic studies, based on controlled experiments in which college students are the participants. They construct artificial, experimental conditions, and then draw broad conclusions from the findings. Most seriously, they often neglect to study actual people in business environments. Moreover, some of the studies use definitions of “power” that don’t fit the realities of today’s organizations. Those flaws affect their conclusions.

For example, recent research found that “powerful” people are more likely to wait for future rewards rather than go far rewards in the present, because powerful people are more able to anticipate their “future.” Researchers from the University of Southern California conducted a series of four experiments in which participants were given “high-power” and “low-power” roles. The study reports that:

Afterwards, the participants were asked to make a series of choices between receiving $120 now or increasing amounts of money in one year. On average, low-power team workers were only willing to take the future reward if it was at least $88 more than the immediate one. High-power team managers, on the other hand, were willing to wait for future rewards that were only $52 more than the immediate one.

Researchers concluded that power holders are willing to wait for larger rewards because they feel more connected with their future selves; that they experience less uncertainty about their futures along with an increased tendency to see the big picture.

The problem with this conclusion is that it doesn’t match reality very well. Many people in power positions as defined by the study — positions of authority and higher rank — fail to consider or anticipate long-term consequences when making decisions affecting “rewards” in their career roles or personal lives. For example, celebrities and sports stars who squander their money or talent. Or business and financial leaders who led the country into near-economic collapse in recent years.

I think the researchers confused “power,” as they defined it, with something else: the capacity for perspective and larger vision of the “rewards” one aims for, in work or life in general. That builds confidence for distinguishing between what to go after short-term vs. what to postpone for a larger “payoff” down the road. It strengthens your capacity to act accordingly. And that’s a personal capacity, not a function of having power, per se.

That is, the research confuses power in a role or position with the mental and emotional capacity for a vision-based strategy that achieves long-term, long-range goals; a picture of what you’re aiming for, striving to “evolve” towards. It might concern career and business objectives as well as personal life goals. In both situations, such a vision “pulls” you towards it. That enables you to forgo more immediate, short-term rewards or success in the service of your long-range aims.

Such a mentality is a mixture of emotional attitudes, values and actions. It’s different from having power over others in a role-related situation, especially in the old-style, increasingly dysfunctional command-and-control organization. In contrast is the vision-oriented perspective that embodies “power-with” rather than “power-over,” necessary for collaboration and teamwork. The latter perspective is increasingly visible among business leaders and others creating business models that combine long-term financial success with contributing to the social good, as entrepreneur Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group has advocated. And others, such as CSR writer John Friedman, who has emphasized the links between engaging multiple stakeholders and creating sustainable business practices.

Another study reporting dubious results found that people in positions of power and authority — again, as defined by the researchers in controlled experiments — are quicker to recover from rejection, and will seek out “social bonding” opportunities when they are rebuffed. Why the research is dubious becomes clear when you examine it.

The study focused on how being in a position of power influences your responses to subtle acts of rejection. In a series of experiments, researchers at UC Berkeley assigned participants to either “high- or low-level positions” in a workplace. Then, they were told they hadn’t been invited to an office event. Low-level employees reported feeling stung by this rejection. But the high-power ones were relatively unfazed, and more likely to seek out social bonding activities, such as a hiking club, to improve relations with their coworkers.

Next, participants were told they would be working with someone in either a supervisory or a subordinate role. They received feedback from that person that was intended to be a snub or mild rejection. Those assigned to supervisory roles acted with indifference to perceived snubs from their “underlings” while subordinates took offense to barbs from their “bosses.”

One glaring problem with this study: Apparently, none of the participants were employees of actual organizations. Most were college students. And those who weren’t had responded to a solicitation via an online questionnaire.

In fact, I suspect most anyone who actually works for an organization could offer some alternative, real-life explanations. Aside from the possibility that some people just wouldn’t be bent out of shape by a rejection, I think most people would wonder if a high-power person who appeared unfazed might be an arrogant narcissist who dismissed or ignored the rejection. Or, that the person might silently stew while plotting retaliation. Examples of both are legion in real organizations.

Finally, a study found that power enhances well-being. This research indicated that power leads people to feel more authentic, more their “real self,” which, in turn, enhances well-being. I think this reflects a somewhat different view of “power.” That is, it likely taps into an experience of “power” different from the old-style hierarchical, role-related command-and-control; and more of a sense of inner strength and confidence about oneself based on heightened self-awareness. The latter are sources of well-being and effectiveness in both careers and personal life.

But here, too, one should be cautious. One might feel very authentic and experience well-being with his or her power, and yet be a destructive narcissist who leads his or her company into ruin. Or a dictator. Self-awareness can be disconnected from morals or positive values, or deformed by pathology. As always, the psychological makeup of the person is key.

This was originally published in The Huffington Post.

The latest research about this, published in the journal Psychological Science, was conducted by Susan Charles, UC Irvine professor of psychology and social behaviour, and her colleagues. Here’s what they reported:

Our emotional responses to the stresses of daily life may predict our long-term mental health. The research suggests that maintaining emotional balance is crucial to avoiding severe mental health problems down the road. The study examined this question: Do everyday irritations add up to make the straw that breaks the camel’s back, or do they make us stronger and “inoculate” us against later tribulations? Using data from two national, longitudinal surveys, the researchers found that participants’ negative emotional responses to daily stressors – such as arguments with a spouse or partner, conflicts at work, standing in long lines or sitting in traffic – predicted psychological distress and self-reported anxiety/mood disorders 10 years later.

“How we manage daily emotions matters to our overall mental health,” Charles said. “We’re so focused on long-term goals that we don’t see the importance of regulating our emotions. Changing how you respond to stress and how you think about stressful situations is as important as maintaining a healthy diet and exercise routine.”

The results were based on data from 711 men and women between 25 and 74 who had participated in the Midlife Development in the United States project and the National Study of Daily Experiences.

According to Charles and her colleagues, the findings show that mental health outcomes aren’t affected by just major life events; they also bear the impact of seemingly minor emotional experiences. The study suggests that the chronic nature of negative emotions in response to daily stressors can take a toll on long-term psychological well-being. “It’s important not to let everyday problems ruin your moments,” Charles said. “After all, moments add up to days, and days add up to years. Unfortunately, people don’t see mental health problems as such until they become so severe that they require professional attention.”

Following a recent talk to a group of business people, a man cornered me and said, “I work hard, I’m pretty successful, I have stable, second marriage and kids who are doing well…and yet I often feel unsatisfied with my life and don’t know why. Am I disturbed?”

His question reminded me of an ongoing controversy over the forthcoming revision of the Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the DSM-5. Many are criticizing it for turning normal variations of human emotions and behavior into mental disorders. That’s likely to generate more diagnoses for depression or ADD, for example. Its most prominent critic is Allen Frances, the psychiatrist who chaired the committee that drafted the previous edition. Among his and others’ criticisms is that the revisions will lead to more drugs to “treat” ever-expanding definitions of mental disorder.

From that and the subsequent experiments, researchers concluded that “power holders may be willing to wait for the larger rewards because they feel more connected with their future selves, a consequence of experiencing less uncertainty about their futures along with an increased tendency to see the big picture.”

But here’s the problem with the research: It confuses “power” with a sense of perspective and larger vision of what one is aiming for in life. The latter builds confidence about what one chooses to go after short-term, vs. what one postpones for a larger goal. That is, in real life many people in power positions, as defined by the study — positions of authority and higher rank in a hierarchy, nevertheless fail to consider long-term consequences in their personal lives or career roles. For example, celebrities and sports stars who squander their money or talent. Or business leaders who led the country into near-economic collapse in recent years.

Aside from that fatal flaw in the researchers’ conclusions, I think there’s a larger issue: Their findings confuse “power” with the capacity to seek and strategize for long-term, long-range goals, by virtue of having created a larger vision for oneself that is, a picture of what one is aiming for, striving for, that embodies meaning and purpose. This can apply to personal life goals or to career and creative aspirations. In both situations, such a vision that “pulls” one towards contains a perspective that allows one to forego more immediate, short-term rewards or success, in the service of a long-range vision. That’s an overall mentality; a mixture of emotional attitudes and values different from having power over others in a role-related situation.

First, the research findings: In a series of studies, researchers at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management initially assessed people’s differences regarding their “religious” vs. “spiritual” orientations. The researchers defined “spirituality” in terms of direct experience of self-transcendence and the feeling that we’re all connected. In contrast, “religiousness” was defined as a code of conduct that’s part of a tradition.

In my view, the two definitions are not at all mutually exclusive, and that contaminates, somewhat, the findings associating political conservatism with religiousness, and spirituality with political liberalism. The researchers explained those in terms of underlying values, that conservatism and religiousness both emphasize the importance of tradition, while liberalism and spirituality both emphasize the importance of equality and social harmony.

The Key Finding
When participants in the study meditated they subsequently reported significantly higher levels of spirituality, and they expressed more liberal political attitudes. That is, meditation led both liberals andconservatives to endorse more liberal political positions.

“Spiritual experiences seem to make people feel more of a connection with others,” said lead author Jacob Hirsh.”The boundaries we normally maintain between ourselves and the world tend to dissolve during spiritual experiences. These feelings of self-transcendence make it easier to recognize that we are all part of the same system, promoting an inclusive and egalitarian mindset.”

But how such feelings translate into specific political positions is questionable. You might consider yourself more conservative or more liberal concerning, say, the role and size of government, personal privacy issues or social policy; and yet be very spiritually oriented, according to the researchers’ own definition, independent of your political position.

Nevertheless, to the extent that movement towards politically liberal ideas does occur from meditation, I think that’s best understood as one possible manifestation of a broader and deeper phenomena: Meditation triggers awakening. It expands and elevates your overall perspective — about the relationship of your being to the whole; the “oneness” of life and the universe. You awaken to the flow of ongoing change and impermanence that characterizes life. Self-transcendence tunes you in to the reality that we’re particles of stardust, literally, traveling together on this planet at this moment of time.

Awakening pulls you out of the narrow vantage point of the “me” that’s defined you; that’s conditioned via immersion in the world of human struggles, desires and the pressures to adopt the values and beliefs that surround you. All of that forms the narrowest sense of who you really are. All of us become fixed within it, unable to see that there are so many more facets of who we are — qualities of emotion, thoughts, creative capacities — that we’re capable of unfolding. Think of a hologram. You can see different parts of its images depending on how you look at it, as different angles of light reflect off it. They’re all there to begin with.

Another feature of awakening is that you develop greater compassion and empathy when you focus on them in meditation. Research finds that when you focus on those emotional attitudes regions of the brain associated with them become activated, and brain regions associated more with analytic thinking are more repressed. Of course, combining both empathy and compassion with strategic, analytic thinking is the basis for wise action. But our current culture over-emphasizes analytic thinking, which can swamp and smother the capacity for empathy. The result is an out-of-balance perspective. That’s reflected in dysfunctional personal life, but also in public policy and ideology that promotes narrow, selfish objectives at the expense of the public good.

Increased empathy and compassion may occur with age, alone, to some extent. A study of late middle-aged adults found that, in contrast to younger adults, they were more able to react empathically to the experiences of others. They were also more likely to try to look at things from the perspective of others. For some, transformation may occur suddenly, as a dramatic awakening about oneself — the “Scrooge” experience. Research on people who experienced profound, sudden change found that they did experience overwhelming stress or disaster prior to their breakthrough.

But hitting rock bottom isn’t a necessary ingredient for awakening. You can bring it about through conscious effort in meditation. As Deepak Chopra has pointed out: “Our minds influence the key activity of the brain, which then influences everything; perception, cognition, thoughts and feelings, personal relationships. Meditation makes the entire nervous system go into a field of coherence. All the neural networks adhere together synchronistically. And no other experience other than meditation does it quite that way.”

That’s consistent with the view that meditation and spiritual development enhances positive evolution. You’re always changing and evolving in one direction or another, whether you think you do or not. A recent, large-scale study revealed that people change even with respect to personality traits and interests over time that you think remain stable. More significantly, you continuously evolve throughout your lifetime. It’s either in a healthy direction, towards greater tolerance and wise understanding of people’s differences; and towards curtailing the power that ego and self-interest has on your attitudes and behavior. Or, you’ll evolve in the direction of greater entrenchment and stagnation, into the most narrow, limited and deformed versions of yourself.

There, you may descend into greater selfishness, greed, and the endless, frustrating desire for control and possession. That constricts your response to enacting what’s possible in life. It can also be psychologically damaging. In contrast, recent research has found that increased spirituality is linked with better mental health. A greater sense of oneness and connectedness with the rest of the universe is associated with lower levels of specific neurotic traits; outgoingness and greater positive engagement with others; and a sense of forgiveness towards people’s faults or transgressions.

Overall, spiritual awakening reduces self-absorption and self-interest. As one’s sense of belonging to a larger whole becomes strengthened, greater tolerance, empathy and compassion for others do emerge. That may include political opinions that coincide with those that are described as more liberal, in the context of today’s political culture and ideological differences. And that may be what the research I cited tapped into.

This article first appeared in The Huffington Post

This is a guest post by John Friedman, head of communications for corporate citizenship for Sodexo. A thought-leader in CSR and sustainability, John has published widely in these areas, including The Huffington Post, and his work has been cited by Forbes and other publications. 

When any company or organization demonstrates that it is conducting its business in a way that benefits society, improves (or at least mitigates negative impacts on) the environment and is able to do so in a way that is profitable, it lives the values of sustainability and, in theory, everyone benefits. While smaller organizations may have it easier – in terms of getting buy-in and ensuring that practices support the desired objectives – they also struggle for financial resources. Conversely, larger multi-national organizations may (but not always) have more financial means but engaging a larger, decentralized workforce and a more complex supply chain can be difficult to say the least.

When big multi-nationals commit to sustainability they do so recognizing the challenge (although in my experience that is sometimes underestimated) as well as the massive opportunity to make a difference. The most successful companies, I have found, commit fully to the strategy based not on short-term market trends or a desire to ‘look good’ but rather based on their core and foundational values that have served them well for years. Staying true to the culture helps them to overcome the hurdles and obstacles that come up in the course of doing business. ‘Stay the course, because this is who we are’ is a stronger rallying cry than ‘this is the new way and we told you it would be rough.’

One such company is Sodexo. While not a household name the company works – often behind the scenes in schools, colleges and universities, hospitals, retirement communities and in companies – providing what the company categorizes under the umbrella term ‘quality of life services.’ And what the company does, and the manner in which it does it – is getting some well-deserved attention.

Last week, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Sodexo was one of the companies recognized by inclusion in RobecoSAM’s The Sustainability Yearbook 2013. The yearbook is widely regarded as the world’s most comprehensive publication on corporate sustainability performance. And Sodexo not only earned ‘sector leader’, it was the only company recognized as ‘gold class’ (a category reserved for the leader and those within 1 percent of the leader’s total score). It earned the top score in the social and economic areas, and in the 94^th percentile for the environment. The company was also named ‘sector mover’ for the greatest year over year improvement.

Because of the size and complexity of the company –the 20^th largest employer in the world with 420,000 employees spread across 34,000 client sites and 80 countries – the measurable achievements tell only a part of the story. Overcoming the communication, culture, language and distances to spread the programs is a Herculean task.

But the impact the company has just as immense in every phase of its business; from suppliers to customers. Indeed, the company estimates that it touches the lives of 70 million people every day, whether than be through healthier choices in school cafés, reducing energy and hospital-acquired infections, to serving remote sites like mining operations, to benefit and rewards services that help bring new clients to local businesses and therefore build local economies.

Since its founding, Sodexo has recognized its opportunity and responsibility to contribute to the economic, social and environmental development of the cities, regions and countries where it operates. From this fundamental, the company created ‘The Better Tomorrow Plan,’ a set of measured, actionable objectives that span a wide range of efforts ranging from reduction in waste and energy use to building a massive global supply chain that sources locally whenever possible.

Methodology

This yearbook is published by RobecoSAM, a leading asset management company focusing on sustainability funds and the international accounting firm KPMG. Each year more than 2,000 companies are evaluated for inclusion in the yearbook, using up to 120 financial, environmental, social and economic indicators to evaluate companies in eight sectors.

This post was originally published in Sustainable Business Forum.

Meditation and mindfulness: the words conjure images of yoga retreats and Buddhist monks. But perhaps they should evoke a very different picture: a man in a deerstalker, puffing away at a curved pipe, Mr. Sherlock Holmes himself. The world’s greatest fictional detective is someone who knows the value of concentration, of “throwing his brain out of action,” as Dr. Watson puts it. He is the quintessential unitasker in a multitasking world. Click here for the complete essay.