When you add it all up – incessant Web surfing; over-allegiance to chat rooms, forums and discussion groups; fixation on online pornography, gambling and games; music, movie and other media downloading; and a wide variety of other fixation – the portrait of a society and indeed a world sitting on its derriere, breezing through one
screen after another emerges.

By some estimates, as many as 10% of Web users are living with one or more forms of Internet dependency, which has now been given the name of Internet Addiction Disorder, or IAD. IAD, as acknowledged by the American Psychiatric Association, is characterized by individuals who devote gargantuan amounts of time to online activities to the detriment of their careers, studies, families or loved ones, and social and community participation.

If you find yourself spending increasing amounts of time online and experiencing a growing sense of anxiety when you’re not online, you may be at risk. What’s more, the phenomena is not confined to the Internet per se. People who check their cell phones, pagers, telephone answering devices, and any electronic information or communication gizmos on a too frequent basis may be exhibiting addictive behavior.

Are you spending less time devoted to career, community, social and recreational pursuits because of the amount of time you find yourself online. You know you’ve gone too far when you’re experiencing relationship woes, loss of friendships, loss of sleep, and, in particular, career or academic jeopardy.

The key to overcoming any addiction is to first acknowledge that you indeed are afflicted. Following that acknowledgment, you then have to summon the requisite motivation to change. Without realization and motivation, nothing is likely to happen.

Unquestionably, the Internet is a marvel of our age. The ability to find answers, make connections, order goods, satisfy curiosities, control the vast sea of knowledge contained therein is certainly enticing. It boggles my mind to think what Da Vinci, Newton, Einstein, and other geniuses throughout human history could have achieved aided by the knowledge they could have gained using the Internet. At the same time, such geniuses, being all too human, may too have fallen into some of the same traps in which we mere mortals now find ourselves firmly ensconced.

As with so many aspects of life, the key to using the Internet effectively is to achieve a fine balance. First, if this works for you, establish a time limit for daily use. Thirty minutes a day many not be enough, three hours may be excessive. At work, depending on your job responsibilities, all day may be the norm. Thus, your task is to choose the limits for your personal life.

Recognize that excessive Web use may be the indicator of problems in other aspects of your life. Are you devoting time here because there are voids elsewhere? Or are you using the Internet as a tool of procrastination in shirking your responsibilities? If you recognize that you’re using the Internet to avoid the challenges of life, shying away from battles that need to be fought, it might be a good idea to speak to a therapist.

Most of us surf the net alone. But if you find reading up on the news or keeping current in some other pursuit is rewarding and enjoyable, you don’t have to forsake your family or friends in the process. Can you arrange your space so that you and your significant other, you and your children, or you and whoever can be online at the same time in close proximity, such as at the same table, so that, much like playing cards or a board game, you achieve a variation on the theme of togetherness. That in itself may go a long way towards alleviating some of the problems that excessive time on the Internet may be causing.

What step will you take now to turn from the screen, to go out and enjoy time with the people you value – proving to them that you do?

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Neuroscientist Tania Singer and her team recruited volunteers to play a game. Some were asked to play by the rules. Others were instructed to ignore them. To not play fair.

After all participants played the game together, they were then asked to observe each other in a second activity. Scientists measured some of the volunteers’ brain activity as they observed some of their former game opponents apparently being subjected to different levels of pain.

Result?

The brain areas that signal pain became active in all who thought they were observing pain in others. This provides neural evidence of their empathy.

Yet, when those who’d played “unfairly” in the earlier game appeared to be in pain, male volunteers who observed them showed significantly less empathetic brain activity than when they saw fair-players in apparent pain. In fact men felt more desire for revenge.

For women the response was different. They showed the brain responses of empathy regardless of how they felt about the participants’ moral behavior. Earlier research supports this finding.
Regrettably, I feel I’d respond more like a man in this experiment.

Learn more about how our brain affects our behavior in Donald Pfaff’s book, The Neuroscience of Fair Play. Relatedly read On Being Certain and Predictably Irrational.

Here’s the good news. Men and women can use meditation to change our instinctively negative reactions – even in the face of unfair or otherwise negative behavior. Monitoring the brains of Tibetan monks at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, neuroscience professor Richard Davidson found that the monk’ first instinct was compassion rather than anger.

Here’s the bad news, at least for many of us.

To become that compassionate, monks spent at least 10,000 hours in meditation. Learn more about the power of compassion in Emotional Awareness, a book by the foremost expert on reading faces and on lying, Paul Ekman.

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I wonder if this sounds familiar at all. Have you ever had this experience at work? Begun a meeting or a conference call, or even initiated a project, running full steam ahead and expecting others to keep up. Or perhaps you’ve been the one pulled by someone else. We do it all the time.

In my pursuit and practice of Working for Good over the past three decades, I’ve found that how we work is as, if not more, important than what we do. We can work in a green business, a social service organization, or some other endeavor focused on making the world a better place, but if we treat others and ourselves with disregard or disrespect in the process, we end up creating something far short of our intention. The process is the product.  And the process is about connecting.

The more I practice the skills of Working for Good–which I identify as awareness, embodiment, connection, collaboration, and integration–while carrying the intention to serve through my work, the more I relate to an insight by Mother Teresa:

I never look at the masses as my responsibility; I look at the individual. I can only love one person at a time—just one, one, one. So you begin. I began—I picked up one person. Maybe
if I didn’t pick up that one person, I wouldn’t have picked up forty-two thousand. . . .The same thing goes for you, the same thing in your family, the same thing in your church, your community. Just begin—one, one, one.

Working for Good is essentially about how we show up for one person at a time, and for each person we encounter. There is no “saving the world,” but there is co-creating it with one another. To do that, we have to truly be with one another. The place we start from is always the same. Right here. And the time of our departure is always the same. Right now.

Try this: Slow down. Connect with yourself. Connect with whomever you are with. And move from there.

Image courtesy www.sxc.hu.

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“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.

Are you upset with your sweetheart; unsatisfied with your raise; bearing physical pain; worried about something; suffering from depression; feeling ignored?  Yet you say “I’m fine” and sweep your emotions under the rug.  We’re not dealing with burnt toast, folks.  The experiences and issues that weave the threads of your life together warrant both attention and discussion.  What’s worse…many of you keep silent the good stuff as well.  If you’ve got a brilliant idea; can help out a situation, love someone with all of your heart… Well, SPEAK ON, DEAR FRIEND!  We spend half of our lives biting our tongues when we should speak up and share ourselves!  Chat up your truth –the connection you make will bring solution, satisfaction and peace of mind.

Net-net:  You want to “stickitivity”, folks? Create an unshakably positive, people-packed future by seeking authenticity in all who surround you.  But more importantly, choose respect for yourself by unabashedly standing in truth and talk it up!  Reveal its power and revel in the liberation it returns.

©2000-2009 by Kimberlie Dykeman. SOAPBOX® is a registered trademark of Kimberlie Dykeman.  This article contains excerpts from copyrighted SOAPBOX® vignettes and Kimberlie Dykeman’s book “Pure Soapbox”.

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Instinctively he reacts in one of two ways:

1. Stepping Back (saying little, going blank-faced, silent or even walking away) or
2. Escalating Up (counter-attacking, speaking louder, standing closer).

It’s instinctual – beyond our conscious choice. These are rapid, thin slices of gut reactions and responses. The charged air change happens in milliseconds. We’ve already made each other wrong.

Worse, we know it is easier to escalate up into conflict rather than over into connection – and more likely to end badly. That happens because our primitive brain is wired for survival.

Put more bluntly, self-protection trumps happiness or helpfulness in the sequence of gut instinctual reactions. Yet we can reduce the fear response and increase our ability to make connection, even in times of potential conflict. With practice, these steps have helped me, with this caveat: One can be convincing without being right.

“There is no greater mistake than the hasty conclusion that opinions are worthless because they are badly argued.” ~ Thomas Huxley

Unless I fairly state his position first, he and bystanders will instinctively doubt mine.

The most likely way to change your mind or his is to:

1. Slow down your responses, especially when you feel like acting more rapidly.
2. Speak to his positive intent, especially when you feel like maligning his motives.
3. Re-state his view fairly, completely, without negative, emotion-laden descriptors As the author of Trust Me, Nick Morgan advises, “You have to argue the other side’s case on its own merits. To forestall criticism and avoid inflaming a debate further, understand and be ready to give the other side’s position. Fairly. First. And forthrightly.”
4. Ask for confirmation that you got it right, listen fully to his response and then confirm you hear any modifications he suggested.
5. Then and only then can you state your position and expect to be heard.
6. Brevity is better. It is less likely you’ll be interrupted and more likely you’ll be understood. (This is a point I struggle to practice.)
7. Ask others to comment. That’s when you see your stand through their eyes.  In so doing, you will know how to address what most matters to them. You may change how you feel about the issue.

“Honest disagreement is often a good sign of progress.” ~ Mahatma Gandhi

There’s an added benefit in taking this approach.

You are strengthening the thread of conversation – so others are more inclined to keep talking about the issue rather than getting sidetracked.  I called this Triangling in a book I wrote long ago, Getting What You Want. When two people can focus on the issue in front of them (the third point in the triangle) rather than on each other’s reactions, then it becomes safer to talk about the issue. You may feel less instinctual need to attack the other person or defend yourself.

Bottom line benefits: Afterwards, you may like yourself and the other person better.

Plus with this approach:

1. It is easier to stay calm and in the conversation.
2. Everyone has a greater chance of being heard rather than feeling attacked.
3. You are more likely to sway others and to be open to change.
4. Rather than being destroyed, relationships may even be strengthened.

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According to David Holmes’ research up to 40% of the information displayed on MySpace is fabricated. Holmes believes that many people are being brutalised by the online experience of assuming you can trust someone and suddenly finding you cannot. One day you are pouring your heart out to a virtual buddy, and the next this “soulmate” is simply gone.

They got bored, or found someone else, or simply switched off. It is no semantic detail that users often talk of “friending” rather than befriending.

As well, a third of people on social networking sites give false information about themselves, according to emedia. Why all this ‘lying’? They say they are worried about the security of their personal data. Falsification maintains privacy, though of course also undermines the value of social networking sites. Or again, according to recent YouGov research, ten percent of teenagers said they have been bullied online, by being bombarded with instant messages and emails that make their life a misery.

The “casual callousness” of the Internet is partly at work here. Who has clicked ‘Ignore’ on Facebook? Someone contacted you whom you hardly know or even don’t much like. In the real world, such callousness is usually avoided because you can read the signs and avoid the direct confrontation. Online, the issue is forced. You have to give the virtual cold shoulder.

Anyone who has received an email that struck them as blunt understands this reaction. Yet, now that some send a cancellation, a rejection, even a notice of dismissal by email – on the grounds that it is more efficient – the world can seem a little less humane, less friendly.

Online living is deskilling us, found MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle. We are less able to be alone, or manage and contain our emotions. Instead, we are developing new intimacies with machines that lead to new dependencies – a wired social existence, ‘a tethered self’. Paradoxically, online friendship hovers between communication and solipsism.

Yet, for good and ill, the Internet is as much a part of modern friendship as a pint of beer or a phone. The answer is to be wiser not about the Internet but about friendship. What is it, what does it take, what are its perils as well as its promise?

Professor Ray Pahl, for example, studied how people use Blackberrys. He found that they are used to keep people at bay as well as to stay in touch with those they love.

Yet at an experimental village in Canada where all the houses were wired to make getting online as fast as turning on the telly, neighbours physically met up more as a result.

There is a vital difference between apparent friendliness and friendship – and between different kinds of friends, from work colleagues, through people in the pub, to personal soulmateship. Hold onto this hierarchy because if friendship is flattened human life is eroded too. And friendship is what’s most vital for happiness according to Aristotle.

Then the practice of differentiating the kinds of friendships – and deepening them – might begin where we face the greatest “newness” – online. For starters, why not take this Friendship Intelligence Test?

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The most obvious example is the a-ha. You study a science problem from every angle, yet have no idea whether or not you really understand it; then suddenly, without any effort on your part, you suddenly “get the picture.”

To understand why our brains might have developed such a mechanism, consider how we recognize a face. You’re walking down a busy street; you subliminally see but do not consciously notice hundreds of passersby. Nevertheless, your visual system is silently looking for good matches for faces from your past. When it “recognizes” a face as being quite similar to Joe Blow, your college roommate, it notifies you that you are looking at Joe Blow. This recognition occurs at an unconscious level; the feeling of knowing that it is Joe is an unconscious visual system calculation of the likelihood that the face actually is Joe’s. Without this mechanism, all perceptions from the trivial to the urgent would be given equal weight. With this feeling of knowing as part of perception, the unconscious brain can steer us toward looking at or thinking about things that it considers important.

However, we are subject to all sorts of perceptual errors. To grasp how difficult it can be to shake an unjustified sense of correctness, look at Muller-Lyer optical illusion.

Though the two horizontal lines are exactly the same length, we “feel” that the top line is longer than the bottom one. Our intellect tells us they are equal; our unconscious perceptual processes tell us that they are unequal. Worse, even knowing they are the same length cannot dispel the clearly irrational feeling that one is longer than the other.

Take-away point #1:

Just as we cannot consciously will ourselves to see the two horizontal lines as equal, we cannot will away false feelings of knowing.

Take-away point #2:

There are two types of knowledge—that which can be scientifically (empirically) tested, and that which cannot. Whenever you have a sense of “being right,” ask yourself if this feeling can be objectively tested. For example, you can measure the length of the two horizontal lines and “know” whether they are equal or unequal. You can ask the passerby if he is Joe Blow from college.

But, for those thoughts and ideas that cannot be objectively tested, you must operate with considerable caution and due respect for the possibility that your “sense of knowing,” no matter how overwhelming, can be dead wrong.

The antidote to unjustifiable “certainty” is a healthy dose of humility. It might even be that your biology is preventing you from seeing that a contrasting view has a grain of truth.

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The good news is we can support each other to change in positive, far-reaching ways. For example, Dr. Mimi Silbert at Delancey Street has transformed more than five thousand former drug addicts, pimps and thieves into productive citizens. Individuals who were once warehoused in prisons now have jobs that contribute to society.

In our book, Influencer, my co-authors and I chronicle the work of Silbert and other powerful influencers. We discovered eight principals these change agents use to resolve some of the world’s toughest challenges. Here are three:

1. Change the Way You Change Minds

Change starts with a change of mind. Before people will abandon long-standing behaviors and adopt new, healthier behaviors, they must believe two things. First, they must think, “I can do it!” and second, they must believe that, “If I do, it’ll be worth it.”

To help yourself or others believe they can change and that it will be worth it, create personal experiences. Instead, of trying to persuade or convince them, help people experience the new behavior and the resulting consequences for themselves.

To do this, take others on field trips where they can watch the target behaviors in action. For instance, when a production plant full of automobile employees didn’t believe their Japanese competitors actually produced more per employee; executives flew a team to Japan where they watched their competitors in action. Now they believed.

2. Find Vital Behaviors

How do you lose weight? You could follow a strict diet. Or perhaps you could take weight loss pills. It turns out neither approach is successful. However, if you study people who have successfully lost the weight and kept it off, you’ll discover a few vital behaviors that lead to the difference. These successful people ate breakfast every morning, exercised at home, and weighed themselves more than once a week.

Masters of influence understand that key results stem from changing a handful of vital behaviors. Instead of selecting the trendiest technique or solution, they go to great pains to locate the few behaviors that matter by studying those who have succeeded in the face of failure.

3. Make the Undesirable Desirable

Humans seek pleasure and avoid pain. So, when the requisite task is noxious, painful, or boring, find a way to make it more desirable. You can either change the task itself, or help people view it in a new way. Individuals who take pleasure in their work tie it to core values and human consequences. For example, help people see how a job, although not particularly interesting, is intimately tied to customer satisfaction.

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In this uncertain economy, many are terrified of the “R” words.  Recession. Reorganisation. Redundancy. Because they are in the news and on our minds, we are more likely to act out of fear.  Scooby Doo, the children’s cartoon dog, madly barks “ruh roh!” when things go wrong.   When feeling fearful, it is easy for us to adopt an upset “ruh roh!” reaction to even small problems especially if there’s a cascading series of them.

Worse yet, next we can fall into feelings of discouragement, hopelessness then disengagement. That dip downwards is contagious, like a billowing dark cloud.  It can pervade entire companies and communities. And a leader’s mood profoundly impacts the team’s performance according to a Harvard Business Review article.  Yes, your mood dramatically affects everyone around you – just more if you are the leader

Yet, as I explain in Gospel of Joy, anyone (perhaps you?) can be a catalyst to ignite the spark of “can do” spirit in a workplace, community organization – or home.  Start by adopting the attitude you want to have today.  That’s mood management. Like fear, joy is contagious. In short, How will you perceive your day?  That’s YOUR choice.

Perceptions drive and affect attitudes and behavior.  Whether it’s marketing a brand, making a relationship work, motivating ourselves to do better, being innovative or creative or making a contribution – how we view our current circumstances is how we create our reality.   Your choice to act resilient lifts others up to emulate it – even when they weren’t intending to feel better.  We are instinctively imitative animals.  That’s why your positively contagious mood becomes a performance enhancer for you and for those around you.

What’s the nourishing mood food to sustain you in sticking to positivity? Gratitude, hope, compassion, listening, cheerful enthusiasm, generosity, forgiveness, laughter, reverence, energy and vitality, love and equanimity.

Are you willing and ready to choose joyful working and living  – with others, you trendsetter you? It just might catch on.

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