Page 4 Module 1- Education
Understanding And Motivating Yourself
With grateful thanks to Roy WMetzninger, part of whose presentation this section is based on
During this period we are here as an expression of what I gather is some wish on the part of you as individuals, as well as you collectively, through your organisation, schools, colleges and universities, to think a bit about something known as “the whole person.” Frankly, the role of
teaching to such a group is something of an experiment for me.
For some years, I have been involved with the insurance business. I had the interesting experience
of being a member of the Citizens Advisory Committee to the industry, and for a while I served
as a psychiatric consultant to the industry working with agents who were having trouble
in the sales role. Of course, the ultimate qualification is that I have a role as a consultant and I am also one of your clients. I must say I feel some considerable humility at having been asked to speak
with you, to share some thoughts that I have about your future careers, not only because you are learners but because the world is a complicated place. I will be talking to you directly as a person, not just as a learner.
Frankly, standing before you as a group is not the most personal situation I can imagine. I thought of
many ways I could avoid this altogether and still convey my message, but none of them worked. So
here I am, but I intend to pretend that you are one person whom I know well, and address you in your personal capacity. It’s all about YOU, THE WHOLE PERSON.
There is a significant reason why I feel a certain burden of responsibility. This stems from the fact that I have some concerns about you as individuals.
What I say may sound challenging. I would be less than candid if I did not lay out the fact at the onset, although I do so with some hesitation. It would be ill-bred and unfair, indeed, for me to take advantage of this opportunity to belabour or criticise you, as if to score cheap points. I have absolutely no wish to do that, and no reason even to appear to be doing that. At the same time, I think there are some objectives, problems and opportunities that need looking at. They are not all pleasant or comfortable ones. Yet you as individuals ought to be foremost in thinking about these matters, no matter how provoking they may be. Presenting them may well provoke strong disagreement among you, but I feel some responsibility to speak plainly.
I may very well say things that you won’t like to hear at all. What I can offer is not some kind of expertise but a different perspective. My perspective is that of a behavioural scientist, a psychiatrist one of these guys with a high level of empathy and a need to be helpful. My special perspective is based on some knowledge of human motivation, conflict and mental illness.
Since the beginning of your formal educational lives, you are taking part in a learning exercise that will take up the first 16 years of your life, followed by a further number of years in which to follow your dream career, thereafter followed by your working life in your chosen path. It is essential that you lay down a firm foundation on which to build your future.
Life is a journey in which you need to work with other people, to understand their needs, their objectives and their dreams….the stuff of relationships and how you deal with them will lead to a successful and happy life. You need to understand yourself and who you are and present the “whole person” to all the people you come into contact with during your lifetime.
Life is tough, so being the best that you can be and working on developing and improving yourself….Ego…Id…Number 1, is the beginning and the end of how you inter-relate with others. You will never know it all but then we are all in the same boat, so think of yourself as a team-player where you have skills that others don’t and vice versa. By employing these tactics in your life it will breed success, happiness and fulfilment.
In order to be successful you need to recognise and identify your strengths and weaknesses. Building up your strengths and minimising your weaknesses will strengthen your leadership skills, earn respect from your peers and make you a Whole Person. Be honest with yourself and try to see yourself as others see you. There is nothing wrong with being humble. Listen to and learn from your superiors and elders who have all been there and done that. Learn from their experiences. By being attentive you will spot the opportunities, avoid the problems and learn by other’s mistakes. Do not blindly follow, but apply your wisdom as you grow in all that you do. Do not be scared of challenging the establishment. It is not perfect, it never will be perfect, because it is designed for the masses. But, YOU can make a difference by being true, faithful, and honest with yourself, create and be a valuable Whole Person to yourself and those around you.
I am not a human mechanic. I have studied psychiatry which is all about human behaviour, feelings, action and reaction to life’s circumstances. We are not perfect machines and I assist people in having a happier, fuller, more meaningful life.
One of the thoughts that occurred to me is to wonder if many of you feel that education is a necessary evil in order to reach your objectives and that it will magically open the door to a life of financial security. This is indeed not the case and you should rather consider that the role of education in your life is to open your eyes and your mind to opportunities which will improve your chances of having a better life. Knowledge, like faith, is acquired and you have to work at it every minute of every day, day after day. Indeed, you should never stop learning throughout your entire life.
Be conscious of the fact that your self worth is not all about money, wealth and status. Joy of life and personal happiness are not determined by material possessions.
The first question regarding motivation which you need to ask yourself is, how do you set goals and objectives? You are an individual and you may desire to be a salesman, an engineer, a doctor, a scientist. YOU need to be smart about focusing on the subjects in school and their role in accumulating knowledge, and later on, skills, in your chosen career. By choosing your career you are controlling your destiny, thereby fulfilling your purpose in life. You need to take the first steps and to continue walking the journey of your life. Your teachers and faith in God will help achieve your goals.
The next question I want to ask you is about your relationships with other people. If there is anything that we in psychiatry believe, and discover again and again and again, it is what a difference relationships in a life make. It is the very essence of our process of the treatment of the mental state of health. Truly, in my perspective, it is the only thing that gives human life any meaning.
Today accepted norms of dealing with people seem to be distant, superficial, casual, promoting a tendency to see people as things, instruments to exploit, to use and discard. It makes it easy for us to think of people as objects rather than real beings with feelings and concerns, persons who struggle with conflicts and problems.
The new modern worldwide social standard of communicating with people via electronic and social media including telephonic and internet communications, can lead to instant results of success or failure in relationships with others. It is so impersonal that almost anything goes and contributes to lack of cohesion of people with others. Inter-personal relationships are far less important in a competitive world that is based on survival of the fittest, or smartest, or the most chic, or the most cool.
Relationships with others are so important. We live in an era where opportunities to socialise with others are measured by access to the trendy clubs, pubs, malls and arcades which generally is mostly ‘show and tell’ rather than meaningful discussions about subjects to do with life which could rather take place in coffee shops, on park benches, classrooms and school halls with like minded people who wish to share and test their knowledge by having meaningful discussions which help develop one’s psyche and helps to create the Ego…Id….Who am I? Where have I come from? Where am I going to? And why?
All these questions which need to be asked and answered will help you become a ‘Whole Person’.
Unfortunately, the consequences of the insidious, socially sanctioned withdrawal from people is not only that we rob our lives of the richness which feelings can give it, but what is worse, a sterility and emptiness develops in the relationships with those whom we regard as our most intimate friends. Our relationships with our family have, in so many cases,
become so routine, so ordinary, and so devoid of continuing affective engagement that we literally use each other as pieces of furniture, as elements of the household that keep the machine running. For many it has led to a state of affairs in which sharing in any close and intimate way is gone. Relationships in which the excitement of discovery has been replaced by the boredom of habit.
Do these remarks describe your relationship to the people who count? Indeed, what can you say about the consistency or the quality of your relationships with others?
Do your relationships to the important people in your life reflect a willingness to exchange, to share, to become involved?
A lack of closeness, a lack of intimacy, a lack of sharing, can provoke a frustrated reaction of resent-ment or depression, or encourage the members of a family to seek the sustenance and excitement
elsewhere. This is all the easier for the many opportunities for doing other things outside the
household available to every member of the family. This point was underscored with the findings of one social scientist who examined some suburban middle class families. He was curious to know just how long these families spent together, and took the evening meal as his point of investigation. The places were set, the food was on the table, all the kids in from the other room, the television turned off, and everybody seated. How long did they all spend at the table together? The total elapsed time when all were in the presence of each other was something under seven minutes. This hardly permits much sharing of any kind, and certainly nothing that would qualify as intimate.
Margaret Mead has referred to the modern home as a launching pad. And in truth, if you think of your own experience, how many of you children are only passing through on your way to somewhere else? To what extent are you so busy and so full of your own thing that there is very little time to share anything at all with your family?
It is true that relationships have become sterilized and mechanical, there is progressive disappearance of the qualities that make people human.
I refer specifically to feelings, an exchange that goes on between individuals that carries meaning
and significance. Somewhere inside that sack of skin of yours we have feelings attached to what is important to us. It is this special arrangement of values and feelings that make us distinctive and unique, and it is only by sharing these perspectives with others, that others will truly get to know us. Concealing feelings, distorting them, withholding them or hiding them may give us every appearance of a conventional, normal human being, but they also ensure that no one will know us for what we really are. What is worse, we may lose that special capacity to get to know others.
In truth our relationships have too often become habitualised, and frankly rendered trivial. There are, of course, many real pressures and demands that promote this sad state of affairs and make it hard for us to become intimate with those who are close to us.
Altering this state of affairs has to start with some recognition of the problem, and then it
can proceed with efforts to explore, to inquire, to learn, and to share.
It will not surprise you to hear a psychiatrist say that the way in which one conducts these relations with others is through talk. Indeed, these very questions I confront you with today can be a means of sharing, of inquiring, of learning, both about oneself and those with whom one is close. Unless one talks and then avails themselves of this capacity to share feelings that is so uniquely human, they are very unlikely to discover that part of themselves that is
supposed to keep them human; feelings, thoughts, values, concerns. Each of you needs an opportunity to share those, to examine them, to talk about them. Which brings me to my
last point.
Part of this question about your relationship to others is to ask you about your relationship to yourself. At this moment I am suggesting that you think about yourself as a kind of other.
I am aware of how hard it is for most people to be truly honest with themselves. The need system, combined with our defense patterns and coping devices, is sometimes not successful in showing the rest of the world how we think we look. Sometimes we believe it ourselves, as if part of us were out there looking back, saying: “What I see looks good.” We sometimes buy our own lies about ourselves. We find it too painful, too awkward, too embarrassing to struggle with such problems as, what does make you anxious? What does make you unhappy? What does make you go?
The last question was asked of me by several of you in the questions I referred to earlier,
as if somehow I knew the answer. Obviously I do not know. But you individually do. I would suggest that one of the things important in maintaining a good relationship with yourself is to look at the things that worry you, that stop and make you think, that motivate you.
A second thing I would refer to in regard to relations to yourself has to do with responsibility. Here I am not referring to a kind of general responsibility for others, responsibility for the world, responsibility in an external sense, but a kind of
internal responsibility. I am talking about being responsible for one’s own feelings, one’s own behaviour, one’s own thoughts, one’s own actions. This is an uncommon quality and it is indeed remarkable to see otherwise sophisticated and intelligent people who systematically blame the world or other people, or external events or any number of other things for the problems they have, the feelings they have, the mistakes they make, or the disappointments they experience.
Of course it is normal to project blame, especially in moments of tension or anxiety or frustration. Certainly people do make us angry with the things they do or say. But even then, whatever they did, the plain fact is that the anger is my anger, no matter what its cause. I may justify its existence by pointing to someone else’s act or word, but I must accept the consequences of my own feelings on my own behaviour and on the world around me. I cannot smash a face in a moment of fury and then accuse you of having done it.
It is tough to embrace the implications of this kind of responsibility, realising that we are, in the last analysis, the only ones who can be responsible for what we do, think, or feel. It is the mark of maturity to acknowledge this responsibility and to leave the projecting of blame, of mistake, of inadequacy to the neurotic or the immature.
One aspect about managing one’s own feelings, that I think is worth talking about has to do with the issue of loss. If you stop to think about it, one might consider loss one way of defining life. Literally from the moment of birth, our experience with loss begins. One has
lost the warmth and comfort of the womb. Throughout childhood all of us have experienced a succession of losses. The loss of our favorite toy or blanket. The loss of childhood. The loss of that comfort of being a child and dependent upon mother. The loss of dependency itself. Throughout our adolescence, teen years and into maturity, we continue to have
experiences with loss. Some of us have lost a great deal – our mothers, our fathers, our homes, our worldly goods, our self esteem. Some of us have even lost our tempers.
This experience with loss continues until it culminates in the ultimate loss of all – the loss of life. It is a curious fact that something which is so universal as the experience of loss is so little understood by most of us. Most of us react to loss as if it shouldn’t have happened, and there must be somebody somewhere who is to blame for it. Many of us are accustomed to finding the guy who did it and nailing him to the wall, as if having thus crucified him, our
loss will be replaced. It is clear that loss, in spite of its great frequency in the lives of all of us, is not easy to manage for any of us.
I am reminded of an experience of one of my colleagues. He was very much interested in the blind. Part of his work took him to a center for rehabilitation where he found that a number of people who were newly blind for reasons of disease or accident had great difficulties being rehabilitated, as if they had not accepted that fact. They persisted in the fantasy that they would again see, denying their blindness.
So this psychiatrist, rather than acting like the good and comfortable and giving person he was, found himself in the position of having to be the shock troops, literally reducing the blind person to tears and anger. Only after such a reaction of anger, of bitterness, of sadness about the loss of sight could the process of rehabilitation begin. Such newly blind persons had first to grieve, to accept the reality of loss in a manner precisely similar to those bereaved by the loss of a person very close to them.
The grieving process, this work of adjusting to loss, is an exceedingly important process, not
only for losses for those who have lost someone or something of great importance to them, but for all
of the rest of us as well. Attempts at denial, or pretending that the loss is not real, or that it is not
worth grieving about are obstacles to the emotional growth of adjustment. It is much like that poignant
picture, in a lesser degree, of the widow ten years after the death of her deceased husband who shows
you his room, where you see the clothes still on the floor, the cigar in the ashtray on the dresser, the
loose coins scattered on the table as they were the moment he died. Her fantasy is very plain: for her,
he is not dead, he has only gone away and he will soon be back. It is clear that so long as she retains
this fantasy no real adjustment can occur. It is impossible for her to invest in new things, to find
new sources of satisfaction as long as she denies the loss, clings to the fantasy, and refuses to grieve.
Each one of us, as she, must allow ourselves the time and the permission to react to loss, to experience its impact, and to express the feelings which loss will mobilise. This is work that people need to do. A failure to do so is like confining one’s self, or that part of one’s self, to a silent and invisible
prison which precludes a renewed investment in life.
One last remark on this subject of one’s responsibility to oneself. Each of you has needs that must be fulfilled – needs for support, for love, for attention, for concern, for gratification. It is the task of each of you to seek ways in which these needs can be met consistent with the resources you have, and the resources available from the environment. The proper balance between the needs of others and the needs of yourselves is not easy for anyone to achieve. Seldom does this balance stay long balanced, for time and experience introduces continuing change. But it is important that you take a clearer look at the needs that are important to you, and to ask what it takes to attain them, and at what costs, and from whom? Unless you recognize these needs, face them squarely, examine their implications and understand their nature, you risk resorting to unrecognized and perhaps illegitimate means for meeting them which are, in the long run, costly for you and for those who are close to you. Denying
them is seldom possible for long and never as helpful as honest scrutiny. Good or bad, pleasing or upsetting, attractive or undesirable, these needs are there and they warrant your attention.
What I have tried to suggest are some benchmarks, some points of departure by which each of you can pause to take stock of your own state of mind. I intend these questions as ways of looking at your own motivation, your own style of living, your own relationships to yourself and to the people who are important to you. I am convinced that these tough questions are not only central to your survival and happiness, but also central to staying human; surely
that is not incompatible with being a good and successful person.
Treat each day as an opportunity to create a ‘Living Lifestyle’ and develop your Whole Person.