In a previous post I wrote that a key pathway to psychological health and resiliency in today’s world is learning to “forget yourself.” This post describes ways to do that in three important realms of your life – your work, your personal relationships, and your life “footprint.”

In the earlier post I explained that “forgetting yourself” doesn’t mean neglecting your own legitimate needs or concerns. Rather, it means letting go of our human tendency to overly dwell on ourselves – our own concerns, needs, desires, slights, complaints about others, and so on. Psychological health and resiliency in today’s world grows when you can do that and put your energies in the service of something larger than yourself: problems, needs and challenges that lie beyond your own personal, narrow self-interest.

That may sound like a paradox, but it’s based on a new reality: Today’s world is changing more rapidly than you can imagine and is becoming immensely interdependent, interconnected, unpredictable and unstable. In this new environment you can’t create or sustain a positive, healthy life through the old ways of reactive resiliency, of coping and hoping to rebound.

That is, chronic unhappiness, dysfunction and overt emotional disturbance lie in store for those who remain too locked into thinking about themselves and who use old solutions to achieve success in relationships and at work. For example, trying to achieve power and domination over others, and thinking you can hold on to that. Fearing collaboration and avoiding mutuality with people who are different from yourself, or with whom you have differences. Looking for ways to cope with stress and restore equilibrium or “balance” in your life. And overall, being absorbed by your own conflicts, disappointments and the like. The latter are inevitable, and dwelling on them is a breeding ground for resentment, jealousy, and blame. That’s a dead-end. The consequences are visible in people who are unable to handle career downturn, who experience mounting relationship conflicts and who suffer from a range of psychological problems like depression, boredom, stress, anxiety and self-undermining behavior.

In contrast, positive resiliency in today’s environment is the byproduct when you aim towards common goals, purposes or missions larger than just your own narrow self-interests. That keeps you nimble, flexible, and adaptive to change and unpredictable events that are part of our new era. Then, you’re creating true balance, between your “outer” and “inner” life.

Here are three ways you can move through self-interest. Each describes a shift, or evolution from the older, reactive form of resilience to the new, proactive form:

Upgrade your career to the 4.0 version; Practice “Harnicissism;” and Become a Good Ancestor

Yeah, I know — those descriptions sound odd. In future posts I’ll elaborate on each of them. But this overview will help stimulate your thinking about what they look like in everyday life.

Upgrade To Career 4.0 The most savvy men and women already know that today’s workplace requires a high level of collaboration with very diverse people. You need to align your talents and skills with common objectives, whether a product or service. That means diminishing your ego in the service of teamwork towards that larger purpose, while constantly looking for opportunities for learning, growth and impact. In essence, that’s the 4.0 career upgrade.

To oversimplify for the sake of contrast, the 1.0 career is doing whatever kind of work is necessary to survive. The 2.0 orientation is what most people think of as “careerism” – aiming for increasing personal power, authority and position within an organization. The rise of Career 3.0 during the last 20 years reflected a desire for more personal meaning and sense of purpose through work.

The more recent emergence of the 4.0 orientation goes beyond the self-focus of 3.0. It’s a shift away from self-promotion and purely personal ambitions – whether for increasing authority or personal “happiness” – and towards effective, creative contribution to goals larger than the purely personal. It means looking for ways to have impact on something that matters, as you continue to learn and grow your capacities and talents.

From the 4.0 perspective, you move through self-interest, not into it. You’re tuned in to the larger picture, in which you’re one player, while finding ways to make a positive contribution to the service or product. It includes being aware of how you’re perceived by others, and looking for ways to be collaborative rather than self-promoting at others’ expense. As a CEO recently commented, “the definition of success is the company, not an individual.”

Practice “Harnicissism”

Don’t go looking it up, because there’s no such word. I made it up to describe the second pillar. “Harnicissism” is shorthand for learning to harness your narcissism. I don’t mean that everyone is narcissistic in the pathological sense. Most people have tendencies towards self-interest and self-absorption, and those are often reinforced and promoted by cultural norms and values. They impact and distort our romantic and sexual relationships, as I’ve written in another post here. Those same tendencies cripple effective interactions and relationships in general, and will undermine positive resiliency.

But in fact, research shows that we’re not innately narcissistic. So, a second pillar of resiliency in today’s world is leading yourself towards mutuality and equality – “power with” rather than “power over” – people in your sphere of relationships. From the perspective of “Harnicissism” you’re aware that you’re serving a larger purpose than just your own agenda: the “third entity,” the relationship itself. It’s that third entity that supports and strengthens your intimate relationship, that with your children, co-workers, or groups that you’re a member of.

The shift, here, is from primarily self-interest, towards openness and mutuality in service of a shared goal. For example, it’s a shift away from maneuvering, dominating or subtly manipulating to get your own way; to get your own needs and desires met at the expense of the other person — or even, as is often the case — at the expense of the relationship itself.

You can practice “Harnicissism” through transparent exposure and two-way openness, as opposed to being in relationships that are transactional and commercial, operating with a “return of investment” philosophy. In fact, research shows that more effective, productive relationships are forged through cooperation and mutual support rather than by power struggles. Those actions are fueled by both empathy and “indifference,” as I described in previous posts.

Become A Good Ancestor

This third pillar of resilience refers to everyday actions that help support a healthy, sustainable planet – for your own life, your children, your community, and all humans, around the globe. Others who come after you will live with the “footprint” you leave behind. That’s why I call this pillar becoming a “good ancestor.”

That is, growing recognition of climate change, along with climate disasters like the Gulf oil eruption and political upheaval around the world has raised awareness that everyone’s well-being, security and future way of life are highly interconnected. We’ve all become global citizens. Your individual actions and “footprint” will impact the health of the planet and the lives people who come after you.

Becoming a good ancestor represents a shift from selfish consumption of resources, from fear of others who are different, towards actions that help sustain the health and well-being of both the human community and the planet. For example, it’s harder to enjoy and consume pleasures for yourself when you’re highly aware of the suffering of others, whether from famine, natural disasters, polluted water, torture. All such events circle back to impact each of us. Actions that help you become a good ancestor strengthen your own capacity to deal with the disruptions and upheavals that are in store for all of us; with being able to handle a “non-equilibrium world with flexibility and positive actions.

All three of these pillars of resiliency rest upon being able to “forget yourself” in the ways I’ve described. They are the vehicle for acting with empathy, a broadened perspective, and sense of responsibility for not only yourself and immediate relationships, but for the human community and the planet. When you “forget yourself” through flexible, focused actions, you’re better able to experience stability, success and well-being through tumultuous times, like a gyroscope that keeps a ship stable through choppy waters.

In a previous post, I wrote that your inner life is usually neglected, in contrast to your outer life.  I gave some guidelines for identifying and reducing the gaps between your inner and outer life.  That’s an important step towards building psychological health and resiliency that works in today’s 21^st Century world of heightened interconnection and instability.

Here, I’ll describe some specific steps you can take to strengthen your inner life and make it the driver of your decisions, choices, and actions within your outer life.

Think of your inner life as something you develop through practice, similar to building stronger muscles, or developing skill in a sport or play a musical instrument. Below are some inner life practices most anyone can do. The more you do, the better, because they reinforce each other.

Fill Your “Inner Reservoir”

• Sit quietly, without distraction. Observe your breaths as you breathe slowly, in and out. Count each breath as you exhale, from one to 10; then repeat. Twenty minutes daily is ideal, but if you do only five, that’s a good start.

An “entry-level” meditation-breathing practice, this one builds an emotional shock absorber.  It helps maintain centeredness and focus when dealing with your outer life demands and conflicts.

Some forms of meditation are rooted in Eastern and Western religious-philosophical traditions; others in current medical and scientific knowledge about effective stress-reduction. All provide a range of physical and emotional benefits that strengthen your inner life. Ongoing research supported jointly by the Dalai Lama and the U.S.-based Mind And Life Institute shows that meditation produces changes within specific regions of the brain associated with greater internal calm, resilience to stress, and focused concentration.

Amazingly, one study found that the sound of a shotgun going off near an advanced meditator’s head produced virtually no change of brain activity in response to it. Want to test out how steadily you can hold your own concentration? Go to this web site.

Advanced meditators were able to hold their visual focus in this experiment for its entire duration.

Meditation heightens your consciousness and mental control.  It also contributes to a stronger immune system and a more robust cardio-vascular system. It helps you awaken to what the real “drivers” are in your outer life — where you may be acting unconsciously or with illusions and rationalizations you’ve acquired from dealing with your outer life demands.

Counting your breaths (you could also focus on an object) not only increases your concentration, but also loosens your entanglement in the “flotsam” and “jetsam” of your outer life. This helps increase your attunement to your inner life; to your true self that lies beneath all the layers of accommodation and adaptation you’re acquired through immersion in the outer world.

This practice shifts your perspective towards just observing the ebb and flow of your emotional states with less knee-jerk reactivity to them. It’s like filling an inner reservoir with clarity and mindfulness that you can carry with you in each moment within your outer life.

A fringe benefit: Reducing your total number of breaths per minute to 10 or less, for 15 minutes twice per day (each inhale/exhale counting as one) has been found to lower blood pressure, according to recent research.

Grow Your Positive Emotions And Human Connection

• Focus your consciousness on emotions of compassion, empathy, and connection towards people around you, especially those who suffer or with whom you’re in conflict. Imagine those emotions occupying the main window on your computer screen. Deal with negative or indifferent emotions by visualizing them within a smaller, background window, or hidden in a file

This practice strengthens your inner life by attuning you to our shared human condition. It builds respect and tolerance for others, especially in the face of external differences, which may dominate your field of vision.

Cultivating positive emotions cultivates your inner life and also heals something most of us suffer from in our outer world-dominated lives: “Empathy Deficit Disorder,” which I’ve written about in a previous post. In a culture in which we define virtually every variation of human emotion and experience as a “disorder,” we’ve overlooked one of the most harmful. It results from being so overdeveloped in your outer life that you lose touch with your own heart; with the reality of your interconnection and interdependence with other humans.

Research shows that you can practice and strengthen positive emotions with practice. People who practice this through meditation show heightened brain activity in regions linked with positive emotions like joy and humor; and with feelings of compassion towards people who suffer. They also show diminished activity in brain regions associated with negative or destructive emotions like anger, resentment, depression, or self-pity. In short, practicing certain emotional states strengthen patterns within the brain associated with them.

This means that your brain is capable of being trained and physically modified through conscious practices. As you make efforts to change your feelings and thoughts in ways that build your inner life, you reinforce brain activity in regions associated with it. In effect, you can learn to change your brain activity, which reinforces changes you make in your thoughts, attitudes, and behavior.

The upshot is that you can actually learn to “grow” compassion, tolerance, and cheerfulness. You can physically modify your brain through conscious practice. In effect, what you think and feel is what you become.

This practice for growing positive emotions also helps builds awareness of your commonality and connection with other people, through recognizing them as fellow humans who suffer and struggle as you do. You might try picking a particular situation or encounter with a stranger as a target for practicing compassion and empathy. For example, when you’re dealing with the checkout person at the grocery store, try to generate positive emotions towards that person, as an experiment. Try to see that stranger as someone who shares, along with you, a desire for love; who’s experienced some kind of loss or disappointment along the way; or who has hopes and dreams to fulfill. In other words, a stranger who’s different from you but also like yourself, beneath those differences.

This practice is especially helpful when, say, a particular co-worker makes you want to reach for a blunt object. Or when you find yourself having malevolent fantasies about your kids the third time they start fighting with each other in the same evening.

But probably more challenging is feeling compassion and empathy towards someone you actively dislike, or with whom you’ve had big-time conflicts – perhaps an ex-spouse, or someone at work. Here, try seeing that person through the eyes of your inner self rather than through your outer self. The latter is where you experience your differences. Instead, imagine how and why that person might experience his world as he or she does; why that person might have the negative attitudes or feelings he shows towards you. Try to do that without judging.

Practicing compassion and empathy in these ways strengthens your inner life by attuning you to our shared human condition. It builds respect and recognition for others, even where there are conflicts. You become a more balanced, broadened and tolerant human being. Notice that when empathy and compassion are awakened, you tend to respond with a changed outlook or new action directed towards others, with less concern about your own self. Look at the spontaneous outpouring of help that usually occurs to the victims of natural disasters like earthquakes or tornado.  At such times, you’re letting go of your usual hyper-focus on getting and achieving things in your outer world.

A good source for practices that support compassion and empathy are the guided visualization and meditative practices developed by Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan (1916-2004), an internationally recognized meditation teacher and scholar. Head of the Sufi Order International, his teachings reflected a universalist perspective, based on the common core of Hindu, Buddhist, Judeao-Christian, and Islamic meditative practices. The site also includes multi-media visual and musical models that accompany specific meditative practices.

Increase Your Mind-Body Health

Incorporate aerobic exercise or virtually any kind of physical activity into your schedule.

• Try a class in Yoga, Qi Gong, or Tai Qi
• Commit yourself to healthy diet and nutritional practices

Aerobic activity releases chemicals that enhance positive mental states and well-being. Research finds that it also has robust antidepressant effects.

Sustained aerobic exercise or virtually any kind of physical activity are important practices because a healthy mind-body is the infrastructure for your inner life. Aerobic activity releases chemicals that enhance positive mental states and well-being. Research shows that it has robust anti-depressant effects, equal or superior to medication, over the long run.

Another benefit for your inner life: Many kinds of physical activity require internal discipline, focus, and a desire to sustain the activity necessary for to reach a level of sufficient level of skill. Research shows that activities as diverse as mountain climbing, dancing, bike riding, or swimming contribute to a sense of internal mastery and self-control.

Moreover, aerobic activity expresses your physical energy within the larger environment. That, itself, enlarges your perspective about where your individual life fits in relation to the forces and features of the natural world and the cosmos. Your preoccupations and absorption in outer life tend to recede when you’re within the larger context of the natural world and the physical challenges you face within it. A friend who trekked to the base camp of Mt. Everest told me how the physical challenge, combined with being surrounded by the majesty of the mountains and their “indifference” to human desires, shifted her perspective about her entire life. It caused her to rethink everything she had held important.

Eastern practices like Yoga, Qi Gong, and Tai Qi blend flexibility, balance, and rhythmic motion with mental discipline and concentration These activities increase your attention to your inner world by integrating physical flexibility, balance, and rhythmic motion, on the one hand, with mental discipline and concentration on the other. Practicing that integration also diminishes the stress hormone cortisol, according to several research studies.

Good sources for state-of-the-art information about mind-body health include the web site of Andrew Weil, M.D.; The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine; and the Center for Mind-Body Medicine.

Open Yourself to Sensual and Sexual Experiences

• During your workday, take a brief walk outdoors, or visit a museum or art gallery. Write down how it affected you when you return to your workplace.
• Set aside time with your partner for slow, mutual physical stroking or massage, without thinking of intercourse or orgasm as the goal. Light candles, play music and agree to talk intimately – but not about outer life stresses.

Sensuous pleasures and beauty through art, music, or the natural world springboard you out of overimmersion in your outer life by “speaking” directly to your inner life. These nonverbal mediums evoke emotions, mental and even physical states that otherwise remain asleep when you’re too immersed in work and home activities.

Many people whose inner life is out of balance with their outer don’t realize that healthy sexual activity can help build greater balance between them. When mutuality, openness, and non-exploitativeness are part of the fabric of your whole relationship, emotional and sexual, then sexual/physical pleasure becomes an inner, not just outer experience – what some researchers call “spiritual sexuality.” That is, some individuals report a transcendent experience that combines heightened, whole-body sensations with intense emotional-spiritual connection, in which you lose yet retain a sense of your individual self at the same time. That’s the experience of two inner lives connecting.

Serve Something Larger Than Yourself

• Find a way to serve people or causes in need of help.

Giving to others strengthens your inner life by stimulating a “soul-to-soul” connection. It awakens your realization that we’re all global citizens. In fact, a common theme among people who create true balance between their inner and outer lives is that they feel pulled to giving, in some way, to the larger human community, through some kind of service. Some do this as a result of a natural evolution towards wanting to volunteer their time talents; others, from a sudden awakening.

Scott Harrison is an example of the latter. He had become a successful, well-known event promoter in New York City by his late 20s. In the spring of 2004 something awakened in him, he told me, which caused him to see that he had been living primarily to gratify himself. “I realized that I could either live selfishly, or for others,” he said. He decided to volunteer with Mercy Ships, an international organization that provides volunteer medical services to impoverished people, such as in West Africa.

Using his original training as a photojournalist, Scott began chronicling the work of the Mercy Ship and its medical volunteers through photos and stories posted on a web site/blog and in newspaper articles. He originally intended to spend just a month on the ship, but it was such a powerful experience that he remained with it. On a brief return visit to New York in the summer of 2005 he told me of the impact it had -aboard the ship, in a tiny compartment with cockroaches; working with health care workers who treat people who have nothing at all, not even drinking water; and who were afflicted with the most horrendous medical conditions and diseases. “It totally changed my world view,” he told me. “It was like looking through a different pair of glasses.”

Subsequently, he founded a highly successful international charity focused on creating fresh water wells in impoverished countries.

A good source of information about volunteer organizations  is Idealist.org.

Your Work and Life Balance Revisited….

Strengthening your inner life can change how you behave in both parts of that old work-life equation.

In the work realm, you might reexamine what you’re doing – whom you work for and with, and what your work contributes to the things you value. At the most radical end, you might change employers or careers, or go out on your own to pursue a dream. Or you can seek new assignments with your current employer that align with your personal values and goals.

In your home and personal life, a stronger inner life might lead you to give some time to help others, say through volunteer work. Or get involved with a social or political cause you believe in. You might decide to take that music appreciation course you’ve considered for years, or finally build that backyard garden you’ve seen in your imagination.

A rising theme among people who create true balance between their inner and outer lives is that they feel drawn to serving the larger human community in some way through their work, their values, and way of life. Both younger and older people express this. It’s reflected in the steady rise of volunteerism, and also in a  MetLife Foundation/Civic Ventures Survey that found that rising numbers of people want the work they do to contribute to the greater good and improve other’s lives, not just their own. They want to have impact. This shift reflects a broader rise in our culture that I described in a previous post as the “4.0” career.

Some people make significant changes in their work and personal lives when their inner life is awakened, like Scott did. Most people are unlikely to make a radical change. But examples of those who do can help stimulate your own thinking about how you might want to shift or redirect your own life, to build greater inner-outer balance. Like a woman who owned a high-end restaurant who sold her business and opened an orphanage after a chance encounter with some abandoned children while visiting another country; a man who took a “lesser” position at a smaller company in a part of the country where he and his family found a better quality of life; a lawyer who left Washington and became a Park Ranger. Or a senior vice president of a major corporation who resigned and bought a small business in order to have more time for parenting his two sons.

Such examples can help you focus on what would create better attunement between your own inner and outer life. They can point you to answer questions like these:

• Which of your current career goals, relationships and commitments are truly in harmony with your inner life?
• Is this the job or career you truly feel in synch with, despite the money it may pay or what people tell you that you should want?
• Are you and your partner devoting enough attention and effort to keeping your relationship positive and energized?
• Do you know why your son or daughter seems troubled or depressed? Have you even noticed?
• How can you become more transparent in both your public and private life?

As you develop your inner life and balance it with your outer, you’ll be likely to find that the old conflicts of work vs. life don’t cause you stress or even dominate your thoughts anymore.

In fact, you may find they disappear.

Meet Linda and Jim, who consulted me for psychotherapy.  Linda is a lawyer with a large firm; Jim heads a major trade association.  They told me they’re totally committed to their marriage and to being good parents.  But they also said it’s pretty hectic juggling all their responsibilities at work and at home They have two children of their own plus a child from her former marriage. Dealing with the logistics of daily life, to say nothing of the emotional challenges, makes it “hard just to come up for air,” Linda said.  Sound familiar?

Or listen to Bill, a 43-year-old who initially consulted me for help with some career challenges.  Before long, he acknowledged that he’s worried about the “other side” of life. He’s raising two teenage daughters and a younger son by himself – one of the rising numbers of single fathers.  He’s constantly worried about things like whether a late meeting might keep him at work. He tries to have some time for himself, but “it’s hard enough just staying in good physical health, let alone being able to have more of a ‘life,’ ” he said. Recently, he learned he has hypertension.

It’s no surprise that these people, like many I see both in my psychotherapy practice and my workplace consulting, feel pummeled by stresses in their work and home lives. Most are aware, at least dimly, that this is unhealthy – that stress damages the body, mind and spirit. Ten years ago, a report from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, found that 70 percent of all illness, physical and mental, is linked to stress of some kind.  And that number has probably increased over the last decade.  Much of this stress comes from struggling with the pressures of work and home – and trying to “balance” both. The problem seems nearly universal, whether in two-worker, single-parent or childless households.

I think these conflicts are so common because people have learned to frame the problem incorrectly to begin with. That is, there’s no way to balance work life and home life, because both exist on the same side of the scale – what I call your “outer” life. On the other side of the scale is your personal, private life – your “inner” life. Instead of thinking about how to balance work life and home life, try, instead, to balance your outer life and inner life.

The Other Balancing Act

Let me explain. On the outer side of the scale you have the complex logistics and daily stresses of life at both work and home – the e-mails to respond to, the errands, family obligations, phone calls, to-do lists and responsibilities that fill your days. Your outer life is the realm of the external, material world. It’s where you use your energies to deal with tangible, often essential things. Paying your bills, building a career, dealing with people, raising kids, doing household chores, and so on. Your outer life is on your iPhone, BlackBerry, or your e-calender.

On the other side of the scale is your internal self.  It’s the realm of your private thoughts and values.  Your emotions, fantasies, spiritual or religious practices.  Your capacity to love, your secret desires, and your deeper sense of purpose.  In short, it embodies who you are, on the inside.  A “successful” inner life is defined by how well you deal with your emotions, your degree of self-awareness , and your sense of clarity about your values and life purpose.  It includes your level of mental repose:  your capacity for calm, focused action and resiliency that you need in the face of  your frenetic, multitasking outer life.

If the realm of the inner life sounds unfamiliar or uncomfortable to you, this only emphasizes how much you – like most peple – have lost touch with your inner self.  You can become so depleted and stretched by dealing with your outer life that there’s little time to tend to your mind, spirit or body. Then, you identify your “self” mostly with who you are in that outer realm. And when there’s little on the inner side of the scale, the outer part weighs you down. You are unbalanced, unhappy and often sick.

When your inner life is out of balance with your outer, you become more vulnerable to stress, and that’s related to a wide range of physical damage.  Research shows that heart attacks, stroke, hypertension, diabetes, a weakened immune system, skin disorders, asthma, migraine, musculoskeletal problems – all are linked to stress.

More broadly, when your inner and outer lives become unbalanced, your daily functioning is affected in a range of ways, both subtle and overt. When operating in the outer world – at work, for example, or in dealings with your spouse or partner – you may struggle with unjustified feelings of insecurity and fear. You may find yourself at the mercy of anger or greed whose source you don’t understand. You may be plagued with indecisiveness or revert to emotional “default” positions forged during childhood, such as submissiveness, rebellion or self-undermining behavior.

Even when you’re successful in parts of your outer life, neglecting the inner remains hazardous to your psychological and physical health. Without a developed inner life, you lose the capacity to regulate, channel and focus your energies with awareness, self-direction and judgment.  Personal relationships can suffer, your health may deteriorate and you become vulnerable to looking for new stimulation from the outer-world sources you know best – maybe a new “win,” a new lover, drugs or alcohol.

And that pulls you even more off-balance, possibly to the point of no return. The extreme examples are people who destroy their outward success with behavior that reflects a complete disengagement from their inner lives – corporate executives led away in handcuffs for indulging in ill-gotten gains, self-destructive sports stars overcome by the trappings of their outer-life successes, political leaders whose flawed personal lives destroy their credibility, clerics who are staunch moralists at the pulpit but sexual predators or adulterers behind closed doors.

These are our modern-day counterparts of Shakespearian characters like Macbeth or Coriolanus, whose “outer” lives are toppled over by unconscious aims, destructive arrogance or personal corruption.

Of course, most people want to function well in the outer, material world.  Doing so is part of a successful adult life.  But what you choose to go after in work and life often reflects values and behavior that you’ve been socially conditioned into through your family and society.  Much of that can be hard to see because you’re immersed in it.  What gets lost along the way is what your inner life might tell you about the consequences and value of what you pursue in your outer life.

But there’s good news: Reframing your challenge from trying to balance work and home to balancing your inner and outer lives will help you build overall health, internal well-being and resilience in your pursuit of outer life success.

That is, servicing your inner life builds  healthy, positive control over your life —  mastery and self-directed action, not suppression or rationalization.   A stronger inner life creates a solid moral core and harmonizes your inner and outer selves.  It informs your choices and actions by providing the calm and centeredness essential for knowing what demands or allures of the outer world you want to go after, or let pass; and how to deal with the consequences of either.

For example, clarifying which of the personal commitments, career goals and relationships you want or don’t want.   Whether this job or career is what you really desire, despite the money it pays or what people tell you that you should want.  And, whether you believe that your  relationship gives you and your partner the kind of positive, energized connection you want and need.

In short, a strengthened inner live brings your “private self” and your “public self” into greater harmony. That’s the foundation you need for dealing with the stress-potential of outer world choices and conflicts; for knowing how and why you’re living and using your energies out there in the ways that you do. With a robust inner life you feel grounded and anchored.  You know who you are and what you’re truly living for. Your inner life builds a state of heightened self-awareness and wholeness; a “heart that listens,” as King Solomon asked for.

Finding The Gaps

Brad was a financial consultant, noticeably underdeveloped in his inner life.  One day he came face-to-face with a classic inner-vs.-outer dilemma. For him, that triggered an important awakening.  He was debating whether to leave an out-of-town meeting early, which would create some difficulties, in order to be at home for his daughter’s 18th birthday.

I asked him the simplest question: Which choice would he be more likely to feel good about at the end of his life? Tears came to his eyes as he said that he knew in his heart that it was being at his daughter’s birthday. He told me that he felt enormously troubled by the fact that he’d been trying to rationalize away what he knew he valued more deeply.

At that moment Brad was able to see the gap between his inner life values – his true self — and the choice he was about to make based on his outer life conditioning – his false self.

His awakening to his inner-outer gaps is instructive.  A good initial step toward awakening your inner life is to identify the gaps between what you believe in, on the inside, and what you do on the outside.  Everyone has those gaps.  Here’s an exercise that can help you awaken to them:

• First, make a list of what you believe to be your core, internal values or ideals (5- 10 entries).  Perhaps it includes raising a strong, creative child; close friendships; expressing a creative talent that’s important to you. It might include your spiritual life; an intimate marriage or partnership; or contributing your talents, energies or success to the society in some way.

• Next, make a parallel list for each item on your list, describing your daily actions relative to those values: How much time and energy do you spend on them in real time? What are your specific behaviors regarding each? Be detailed in your answers – note the last time you took an action aimed at nurturing that creative child, building your marriage or giving some meaningful help to the less fortunate. Don’t be surprised or ashamed if you find that very few of your daily activities reflect those key values.

• Assign a number from 1 to 5 measuring the gap between each value and your behavior – 1 representing a minimal gap; 5, the maximum.

• Identify the largest gaps. Now think about how your inner values could redirect your outer-life choices in those areas. What would you have to do to bring the inner you in synch with the outer you? What can you commit yourself to doing?

• Write it all down and set a reasonable time frame for reducing your gaps.

Developing your inner life is a practice, like building a muscle or developing skill in a sport or musical instrument.  Look for future posts, in which  I’ll describe some practices most anyone can do to build a stronger inner life.  They involve your mind, body, spirit and actions in daily life.  You will see that the more you do, the better, because they reinforce each other.  And they contribute to building greater psychological health and resilience in today’s world.

In Part III of “becoming sane….” I wrote that our prevailing model of psychological health needs revision for today’s world – for outward success in a changing world, and for internal well-being.  I concluded by saying that a key to emotional resiliency and, more broadly, psychological health, in current times is learning to “forget yourself.”

So what does that mean?  Not thinking about your own needs?  Not looking out for yourself?  Not quite.  I’m using the phrase “forget yourself” to highlight an important capacity for health, survival, and “happiness” in today’s tumultuous, interconnected environment: the capacity to focus more on problems, needs, and solutions beyond just your own.  That is, the person who is too absorbed in his or her own self, own conflicts, own disappointments, and the like is much less able to engage the larger dilemmas and issues in positive, solution-oriented ways.  And that deficiency circles back to create dysfunction, damaged relationships, and career downturns.

Along the way I’ll be writing more about specific ways you can learn to “forget yourself” in your work, your relationships and your role as a global citizen. Here are some guidelines that help lay the foundation.

Three Responsibilities:

Think about your responsibilities as a human being living in today’s world, and on this planet.  Specifically, consider the following three responsibilities. They can serve as helpful guidelines for moving through and beyond the tendency we all share — to focus too much on our own selves.

Responsibility for your own mind-body-spirit

Recognize that it’s your job, alone, to continue learning and developing your emotional, mental, creative and physical capacities. Enlarging these capacities helps provide the flexibility and adaptability you need to deal with changes, good or bad. Don’t become like the character John Marcher in Henry James’ “The Beast In The Jungle,” who waited passively, believing that something significant was going to happen…and ended up with a failed life.

Responsibility for those less able

Part of the new criteria for psychological health include this awareness:  You grow through your efforts to help and support others, less able than yourself, to find and follow a healthy path in this world. Find someone who needs and would welcome your aid, whether your children or family member. But stretch further, to include a stranger or those within the extended world community who suffer from lack of clean water, from famine, disease or torture. Organizations and individuals who could use your help are a click away on the Internet.

Responsibility for the planet

Reflect on the fact that your actions at home or in your community can help maintain a healthy, sustainable planet for future inhabitants, including your own descendants. Or, they can further jeopardize the environment they will live in. Look at your own actions in your home, your community, and at work. Ask yourself, are you becoming a “good ancestor?”

Some Steps You Can Take:

Loosen the grip of self-interest

Use self-awareness to observe – and contain – your self-serving tendencies. It’s human to have them; healthy, to keep them at bay. Your emotional well-being and success in today’s world is interwoven with how well you engage and connect with something larger than your own needs and desires. Don’t neglect them, but when they dominate your field of vision, your heart shuts down. You can’t build the tolerance and proactive behavior that you need to keep “evolving.” An old saying goes, “If you want to see into your future, look into a mirror.” Everything you think, say, and do, steadily molds who you’re becoming down the road. What do you see in that mirror?

Practice connection and engagement

The metaphor of Google that I used in the previous post is a good guide for stretching yourself towards actions and attitudes that promote positive engagement.  Seek out ways to engage in and demonstrate greater collaboration, non-defensiveness, informality, a creative mindset, flexibility, and nimbleness. Assess yourself along these criteria — in your life as a worker, in your relationships, and as a member of the larger human community. Identify which of those criteria you could strengthen, and begin to do it.

Identify your commonalities with others

Focus on what you have in common with others rather than on the surface differences between you. That builds empathy, especially important for success within an increasingly diverse society. Research shows that you can train your brain to do this. Begin by stepping outside your own mental and emotional perspectives and visualize entering another person’s inner world. Seek to understand it, no matter how different from your own. Remember, what’s “right” from one perspective may be “wrong” from another.  As I wrote in a previous post, empathy is a core ingredient of adult psychological health. It helps expand your mental and emotional perspectives to more fully understand those with whom you have differences – without having to abandon your own views.

Reduce the gaps between your public and private life

Politicians aren’t the only people whose public image is sometimes at odds with their private actions: We all have gaps between our motives or values and how we present ourselves in pubic. Aim for transparency in your interactions and transactions. Better it comes from you than from discovering it’s been posted on Google or YouTube. More deeply, reflect on unconscious attitudes that might drive your behavior. As the philosopher and mathematician Pascal wrote, “The heart has reasons of its own, which Reason itself is unaware of.” Seek help when you suspect you’re being pulled by emotions or behavior you don’t understand or just can’t deal with. But find a mental health practitioner who’s tuned in to a more evolved, integrated picture of adult health.

Shift your perspective in difficult life situations

Too often, we personalize negative experiences and react with resentment or self-undermining actions. That’s another form of self-centeredness. Healthy adult behavior here means recognizing those tendencies in yourself but not indulging in them. In short, aim towards not taking things personally. Be “indifferent” to those reactions by focusing your energies instead on creating a pro-active, realistic strategy that either improves your situation or changes it. “Indifference” in this sense activates your creative problem-solving capacity for dealing with conflicts at home or at work, as I wrote in a previous post about intimate relationships.

Define your “life footprint.”

Imagine you have one or two years left to live. An unpleasant thought, for sure, but it can help in this way: Make a list of what you would want to contribute to the world through your emotional, intellectual and creative powers during your remaining time. This focuses you on thinking about what kind of “footprint” you want to leave on the larger community and the planet. What does that require of you, from this point forward? As an aid, write down how you currently apply your mental and emotional capacities, and what that means long-term. Think of your life as a work of art that you’re creating along the way. When you envision reaching the end-point, what will the picture look like that reveals your purpose for having been here? Do you want to make any changes, starting now?

There are people who illustrate some of the above themes as they shift towards healthier lives. For example, a corporate executive who stepped back and identified new business opportunities through sustainable, “green” practices, and initiated them throughout the company.  Inspired by Bono’s (Product) Red campaign, he created a company project that supported a philanthropic goal. “It was time to bring my personal values into alignment with my business perspectives,” he said. Like others who are beginning to think in similar directions, he sees business success as interwoven with serving the common good.

Or the couple who revamped their relationship by reviewing what they wanted their “life footprint” to be. They realized they wanted a greater sense of connection and mutuality between themselves, but also through what they did with their talents and energies. One began a business that had been a longtime dream; the other moved to a company that provided more opportunity for growth and creative expression, but less money. “Sure, there are trade-offs,” one of them told me, “but the bottom line is better for our lives. We feel more integrated, more engaged.”

So – all that’s a start.  More to come!

In previous posts on the theme of “becoming sane in a turbulent, interconnected, unpredictable world,” I described why conventional emotional resiliency doesn’t work in the 21^st Century; and what that means for building a psychologically healthy life in today’s world.

In this post I’ll explain why many of the conflicts men and women deal with today stem from this contradiction:  The criteria for adult psychological health accepted by the mental health professions and the general public doesn’t really describe an adult. Nor, for that matter, does it describe psychological health.

A contradiction, to be sure, so let me explain: As we entered the world of the 21^st Century our definition of psychological health was largely defined by the absence of psychiatric symptoms. The problem is, that’s like defining a happy person as someone who’s not depressed.  Moreover, sometimes what appears to be a psychiatric symptom reflects movement towards greater health and growth in a person’s life situation.

But more significantly, our conventional view of psychological health is, in effect, a well-adapted, well-functioning child in relation to parents or parent figures.  Or, a sibling who interacts appropriately in a social context with other siblings. Either way, it describes a person functioning within and adapted to a world shaped and run by “parents,” psychologically speaking.

That is, we pretty much equate healthy psychological functioning with effective management or resolution of child- or sibling-based conflicts. For example, resolving and managing such child-based conflicts as impulse control; narcissistic or grandiose attitudes; and traumas around attachment, from indifference, abandonment, abuse, or parenting that otherwise damages your adult capacity for intimacy or trusting relationships.

Healthy resolution of sibling-type conflicts includes learning effective ways to compete with other “siblings” at work or in intimate relationships; managing your fears of success or disapproval; containing passive-aggressive, manipulative or other self-undermining tendencies; and finding ways to perform effectively, especially in the workplace, towards people whose approval, acceptance and reward you need or crave.

It’s no surprise, then, that many people feel and behave like children in a grown-up world. Examples permeate popular culture.  A good one is the popular TV show, “The Office.” It often portrays the eruption of these sibling-type conflicts, as the workers act out their resentments or compete with one another to win the favor of office manager Michael, another grown-up child who is self-serving and clueless about his own competitive motives and insecurity.

Unconscious child-type conflicts are often visible within intimate relationships and family life, as well.  They provide a steady stream of material for novels and movies. You can see, for example, fears of abandonment in a man who demands constant attention and assurance that he’s loved; or low-self worth in a woman who’s unconsciously attracted to partners who dominate or manipulate her. Of course it’s critical that you learn to become aware of and manage effectively whatever emotional damage you bring from your early experiences into adulthood. We all have some.  That’s a good starting point for adult psychological health, but it’s not sufficient.  A well-adapted member of a community of other “children” and “siblings” within a psychological world of “parents” is not the same thing as a healthy adult.  Especially not within today’s interconnected, non-linear world.

So – without a picture of what a healthy adult would feel, think and do in the current environment, you’re left with questions but few answers. For example:

• How can you maintain the mental focus to keep your career skills sharp and stay on a successful path at work when you suddenly acquire a new boss who wants to take things in a new direction? Or if your company is acquired by another, or goes out of business?
• How can you best respond, mentally, if you have a new baby and a drop in family income at the same time that globalization sidetracks your career?
• How can you handle the pressure to work longer or do more business travel when your spouse faces the same demands?
• What’s the healthiest way to keep your relationship alive with fresh energy – or avoid the temptation of an affair?
• And how do you deal emotionally with the threat of terrorism — always lurking in the background of your mind — while enjoying life at the same time?

We now live within a world where the only constant is change, and where a new requirement is being able to compete and collaborate with everyone from everywhere about almost everything.

Doing that with self-awareness and knowledge of how to grow and develop all facets of your being – that’s the new path to adult psychological health.  But you need to know where to find the path.

Learning From The Business World?

Actually, I think we can learn a lot about what’s needed for psychological health from changes occurring in the business world. In many respects, the most progressive companies are ahead of the game.  They’ve had to learn ways to build sustainable practices, in the face of climate change. They’ve learned to develop models of collaboration and connection; ways to engage with and learn from diverse people and talents.

They’ve had to develop strategies for navigating through a tumultuous, global economy and remain successful, while dealing with anxieties that are part of charting a course in unknown territory, as Robert Rosen has described in Just Enough Anxiety.

All of the above applies to the men and women I work with, both through executive consulting and in psychotherapy.  They’re in the trenches, dealing with constant change and conflict in their business or career environment, and in their personal lives.  Some are looking for ways to have clear impact from their work and talents, beyond just acquiring power or money, or even “meaning.”  Some are company leaders figuring out how to link long-term financial success with environmental and social responsibility.  Others are individuals trying to heal emotional conflicts in their personal lives, or find ways to help their children prepare for a future whose biggest constant will be change.

Trends in the business community are relevant to a new model adult psychological health, because each of us needs to develop ways to deal with new domestic and global uncertainties that can hit home any day, in our individual lives, and the business world has been gradually doing this already.  That is, progressive businesses can teach us something about psychological health is because they’re already illustrating it.

Take the example of Google. If it were a person, Google would display in many respects the model of a psychologically healthy adult relevant to today’s world. Its corporate culture and management practices embody such qualities like transparency, flexibility and collaboration with diverse people.  Non-defensiveness, informality, a creative mind-set and nimbleness, all aimed at aggressively competing for clear goals within a constantly evolving environment.

Similarly, a successful and psychologically healthy life reflects building those qualities into your emotional attitudes, mental perspectives and behavior; especially such capacities as cooperation and service to something larger than yourself.

If you confine your view of psychological health to good “management” of your conflicts – the old 20^th Century view – that will keep you too focused on self-interest, especially power, money, possessions.  And that will take you down a dead-end today.  Focusing on self-interest is an ineffective strategy in today’s interconnected world. It leaves you feeling like a vulnerable child rather than an adult when forces outside your control disrupt your world and your self-centered goals.

Of course, we have to take care of ourselves. But banking just on self-interest to achieve long-term success and internal well-being is like expecting to get to your destination while standing in place because you’re more comfortable there.

A successful and psychologically healthy adult subordinates self-interest to the common good; to serving something larger than just yourself; not just your narrow goals. This is based on the awareness that your own well-being is intertwined with that of others who share this global community; that all of us are parts of an interdependent whole, like organs of the same body.  The psychologically healthy adult learns to become proactive, innovative and creative; enjoys growing and developing within a changing environment, and with diverse people; values positive connection and is flexible in situations of conflict.

Overall, being a healthy adult – the “parent,” yourself — requires broad, tolerant perspectives and purposeful actions in the service of clear objectives. That’s the foundation for supporting the well-being and survival of the global community, including future generations. In effect, it’s being an engaged global citizen.  That may sound like a tall order, but those are human, not super-human capacities.  They exist within most everyone.

A good way to describe the path to psychological health – including external success and internal well-being – is learning to “forget yourself.”

Yes, that’s a paradox.  In future posts I’ll explain what I mean, and what it looks like in your work, your relationships, and in your actions as a global citizen.

In Part I of “Becoming Sane in a Turbulent, Interconnected, Unpredictable World,” I wrote about why you need a new kind of emotional resiliency for success and well-being in today’s world.  Here, I’ll extend those thoughts about resiliency to psychological health in general.  Just as we need to redefine resiliency, I think we need to reformulate what a psychologically healthy adult looks like in this transformed world.  Here are my ideas about that:

Throughout most of the last century, adult psychological health has been largely equated with good management and coping skills: Managing stress within your work and personal life; and effective coping with or resolution of whatever emotional conflicts you brought with you into adulthood – and we all bring along some.

So, in your work that might include being clear about your career goals, and working your way up a fairly predictable set of steps to achieve power, recognition and financial success – all the things that we’ve equated with adult maturity and mental health.

At home, it would mean forming a long-term relationship that withstands the power struggles and other differences that often lead to affairs or even divorce.  You would assume that the healthy adult doest that via compromise at best, or disguised manipulation at worst.  In addition, you would accept “normal” decline of intimate connection and vitality over time.

But the fallout from the worldwide upheaval over the last few years have turned all those criteria of health upside down.  To be clear, it’s important to be able to manage conflicts that could derail your career or personal life.  But doing that isn’t enough to ensure future success, sanity or well-being in this turbulent and highly interdependent world we now live in.

Massive, interconnected forces within this globalized, unpredictable world add a host of new emotional and behavioral challenges to living a psychologically healthy, well-functioning and fulfilling life.

I deal with the fallout almost daily: People who’ve functioned pretty well in the past, but now feel as if they’re standing on tectonic plates shifting beneath them. Despite their best efforts, they struggle with mounting anxiety about the future of their own and their children’s lives, and confusion about their values and life purpose.

There’s the former Wall Street financial executive who told me he’d always defined himself by “making it through the next end zone” in his career, working long hours to ensure financial success. Now, as his company – and career – crumbled, he found that in addition to sacrificing time with his family, he had sacrificed his health: He has diabetes and high blood pressure. “Kind of a reverse ‘deal-flow,’ ” he lamented to me.

And the management consultant, pressured to ratchet up her travel to keep her career on track. “I’d been coping with everything, I thought,” she told me, “though I don’t like needing Zoloft to do it.” Instead of her career becoming more predictable as she gained seniority, her career propelled her into an even wilder ride. “Now I don’t have enough time for my daughter or my husband,” she said. “What kind of life is this? . . . My husband’s checked out, emotionally. And what am I teaching my daughter?”

Or the lawyer, who’d prided himself on “eating what I kill, and I’m a good killer.” He told me he has “more money than I ever dreamed of,” but also says that, “secretly, I hate what I do for a living.” But what’s the alternative, he asks, without “looking like a dysfunctional failure if I opt out?” After a failed marriage, he entered therapy and had begun to realize how his father’s unfulfilled dreams of “success” have impacted his own life — when suddenly his father died. “I’m in a tailspin,” he says; depressed and confused about what his own purpose in life is.

All of these people were on the kinds of life paths they expected would bring them predictable rewards. But counting on that linear upward climb is now hazardous to your mental health.

In fact, following that old path can make you more vulnerable to dysfunction and disturbance in the days ahead.  That’s a prime reason for building the new pro-active resiliency that I wrote about.  It provides a necessary foundation for what you need going forward.

Life In A Changing World

To better understand the mental health impact of what’s been happening in people’s lives, let’s look at it in a bit more detail.  Men and women are discovering — often painfully — that the emotional attitudes, goals and behavior they thought would lead to successful, fulfilling and psychologically healthy lives suddenly leave them at a loss. They’re faced with new psychological challenges posed by the globalized, environmentally fragile, diverse and unpredictable new environment.  And they don’t know how to respond.

We’ve all become starkly aware that unforeseen circumstances can create widespread turmoil in all sorts of ways. For example, the actions of some mortgage lenders in the U.S. triggered worldwide economic turmoil and upheaval that began in the fall of 2008 and has affected everyone’s lives. Entirely new global business paradigms can create upstart competitors or put you out of business. Turbulent shifts in weather patterns, water and food shortages, and civil strife resulting from climate change impact everyone.  And the threat of terrorism is a scary backdrop in everybody’s lives.

It’s as if we’ve all been deposited in the Brad Pitt movie “Babel,” in which the inadvertent actions of two goat-herding boys have tragic consequences for lives on three continents. Welcome to the “butterfly effect,” where a small change somewhere far away can produce far-ranging consequences. That’s part of the “new normal.”

Moreover, the interconnected world impacts us in other ways, as well:  People become almost instantly aware of human rights violations or natural disasters wherever they occur.  Not to mention personally embarrassing moments that become instantly available thanks to Google and YouTube. And, if you wish, your moment-to-moment activities are available around globe through your Facebook and Twitter posts.

Other examples of the transformed world include companies shifting to green business, because the impact of climate change has highlighted the need for sustainable business practices, in order to stay competitive in a shifting global economy. More broadly, a new business model that combines financial success with serving the common good receives increasing attention.  It’s been raised in discussion at a recent World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland and promoted by singer-social activist Bono and other social entrepreneurs.

These are among the many features of our “non-equilibrium world.”  They have the potential to impact your career and relationships in major ways; and, therefore, your mental health.

The latter impact is visible in the workplace, in which the management and business culture is increasingly unpredictable. The new conditions require you to be more pro-active, innovative and creative on behalf of your own career development; and not take anything for granted.

At the same time, both younger and older workers say they want their work to have impact on something larger and more meaningful than just their own personal gain, but without giving that up, either.  And outside of work, men and women increasingly seek relationships of respect, mutuality and authenticity, regardless of whether they take the form of traditional marriage.

All of these shifts create new challenges for your psychological health. Just trying to “cope” with stress isn’t enough. Trying to “balance” work and life doesn’t work very well. Nor does managing your emotional conflicts from childhood help you find the healthiest ways to deal with new conflicts brought about by our interconnected world.

In subsequent posts on this theme of “Becoming Sane…” I’ll explain why our 20^th Century understanding of psychological health is unable to support positive human development in our 21^st Century world.  And, in contrast, what you can do to build psychological health in this new era.

Now I’m not an economist (see former Undersecretary of Commerce Ev Ehrlich’s blog for such matters).  But I started thinking about Bernanke’s comments — and the reactions from some Republicans and assorted “anti-tax patriots” who came out with guns blazing (metaphorically….so far) — from a psychological perspective.  I find some psychological attitudes and ideology about the role of individuals in society driving the reactions to what Bernanke raised.  They’re visible as well in the angry, hostile response to the health care legislation and, more broadly, the fear and loathing of “government takeover.”

Here’s what Bernanke said:

“These choices are difficult, and it always seems easier to put them off — until the day they cannot be put off anymore. But unless we as a nation demonstrate a strong commitment to fiscal responsibility, in the longer run we will have neither financial stability nor healthy economic growth.”  And, “To avoid large and ultimately unsustainable budget deficits, the nation will ultimately have to choose among higher taxes, modifications to entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare, less spending on everything else from education to defense, or some combination of the above.”

In The Washington Post story reporting Bernanke’s speech, writers Neil Irwin and Lori Montgomery point out that:

“…the economic downturn — with tumbling tax revenue, aggressive stimulus spending and rising safety-net payments such as unemployment insurance — has driven already large budget deficits to their highest level relative to the economy since the end of World War II. This has fueled public concern over how long the United States can sustain its fiscal policies.

The upshot of what we’re facing appears to be this: Our current way of life is unsustainable.  So what’s a possible remedy, according to Bernanke and others?  Raising taxes, not lowering them.  Cuts in Medicare benefits.  Raising the retirement age.  And bringing rising health care costs down.  To  do any or all of that requires a different mentality about our responsibility and obligations to others in our society.  And it’s not pleasant.  That’s the psychology part.

That is, we’re highly attached to the ideology that we are and should be separate, isolated individuals; that each of us should look out for one’s own self-interest.  And we define that largely by material acquisition and money.  Hence, opposition to “redistribution” of wealth, even though that’s exactly what we do via taxes that support all the services that we expect society to give us.  We also define our self-interest as psychologically healthy, mature, even; the hallmark of a succesful life.  Those that don’t do as well are not my problem.

Except now they are:  We’ve been hit with the reality that our world is so interconnected that someone else’s “problem” is also our own.  To consider subordinating some of our personal wants and goals for the larger common good feels foreign and frightening.  Yet that’s exactly what we’re faced with doing. It begins with shifting our mental perspectives towards recognizing that we’re all in the same boat — not just we Americans, but all of us in this global community.  And it means stimulating the emotional counterpart of that perspective — the hard-wired capacity for empathy.  And then, making the sacrifices that result from embracing the new realities.  The economic collapse has made the need for those shifts very apparent.  We’re faced with learning to sacrifice in ways that we’re not used to doing, in order to thrive as individuals and a society in the world as it now exists.

But such shifts meet with strong, ingrained resistance and denial.  They’re fueled  by unrealistic, almost delusional notions that pursuing self-interest at all costs will lead to success and well-being. So, for example, Republicans pounced on the suggestion of increasing taxes.  They also went after remarks by Paul A. Volcker earlier this week, who spoke very directly in favor of higher taxes.  He said that the U.S. might have to consider a European-style sales tax, known as a value-added tax, to close the budget gap.  He said “If at the end of the day we need to raise taxes, we should raise taxes.”

That’s a pretty direct, unvarnished statement of reality.  But Republicans accused Obama of plotting a big tax hike, for nefarious purposes.  ”To make up for the largest levels of spending and deficits in modern history, the Administration is laying the foundation for a large, misguided new tax, a first-time American VAT.” Sen. Charles E. Grassley said in a statement.

Onward goes the struggle between facing reality and dealing with it, or not facing it….and still having to deal with it

It’s becoming clear that our understanding of emotional resilience – what it is and how to achieve it — (and, more broadly, psychological health)  doesn’t mesh very well with today’s realities. Conventional descriptions of resilience and pathways to mental health don’t enable you to handle the challenges and stresses we face in the 21st Century.

Let me explain. Resilience is generally defined as the ability to cope successfully with misfortune or traumatic events. Being able to bounce back from adversity and keep on going. What helps you do that includes, for example, reviewing your strengths, focusing on positive thoughts and feelings, learning stress management, looking down the road to what you can manage better. And, by getting psychotherapy and medication when you’re unable to bounce back very well on your own.

Prior to the 21st Century, that view of resiliency and how to build it was more relevant than today. The adversity and disruptions you were likely to experience were more stable, in a sense. The world was more predictable, more linear, with respect to the kinds of stresses and disruptions that would occur – as emotionally troubling as they might be.

Most of our thinking about emotional resilience and healthy functioning, then, fits a world in which unanticipated negative events are fairly predictable. They follow a fairly understandable course, following which you can reasonably anticipate a return to some form of previous stability. In that world, wars eventually ended. The economy went through recessions, then recovered. You might suffer a career or relationship setback but could assume that there was a path to recovery.

That notion of resilience and the ways to build it remain an important foundation for mental health. But they don’t help so much when you’re faced with the challenges of today’s environment. That’s because the very notion of resilience and the strategies for bouncing back are reactive. They focus on responding to something that happens to you, rather than on what you need to be doing proactively, as part of your way of life.

Starting with 9-11, and especially since the economic meltdown that began in the fall of 2008, we’ve been living in a world that’s rapidly transforming beneath our feet. Today’s world is an interconnected, interdependent, diverse, unpredictable and unstable global community. And that’s created new psychological challenges for everyone, challenges that require a highly proactive mentality.

Without it, you might feel like the woman who consulted me recently. Even before she sat down she said,  ”I don’t know whether to reach for the Prozac….or Prilosec!”

Her grim humor masked her “recession depression” and other emotional battering. She didn’t know what would help. I’ve witnessed that a great deal in the last few years: Career and financial worries or losses; the ripple effect of those upon family life; anxieties about what sort of future one’s children are headed into, especially with climate change and terrorist threats; and the increasingly polarized views about our government’s role in people’s lives. Research and clinical observation show that all of the above are taking a psychological toll on relationships, families, career expectations, and on people’s entire sense of what they’re living and working for — their life purpose.

Unfortunately, those of us in the mental health professions haven’t been much help with these issues. Most of us continue to look through the rear-view mirror at a model of resiliency and health defined by coping with and managing conflicts in relationships and the workplace; conflicts that you can bounce back from and reestablish some kind of stability…all while continuing to pursue self-interest, such as getting your needs met, your personal goals achieved, your “happiness” acquired.

But today’s world of ongoing disruptions, continuous uncertainties and insecurity has become the new normal. Seeking to bounce back to stability and focusing on self-interest, which we’ve learned to think is the pathway to success, health and well-being, isn’t the right ticket.

In short, there’s no state of equilibrium you can bounce back to. In this highly diverse, interdependent, interconnected world.  Trying to do so is a fast ticket to dysfunction and derailment. You can’t reestablish equilibrium within a constantly shifting world. But engaging these new realities in positive ways will support your success and well-being.

Research shows that you can proactively build specific emotions, thoughts and actions that are effective for adapting to life in the non-equilibrium world we now live within. That’s encouraging, because I think we’re evolving towards a new definition of psychological health via rethinking resilience.

The criteria of a new, proactive resiliency – maybe call it “prosilience – may sound contradictory because they include letting go of self-interest in your relationships and work. The new view of resilience emphasizes being flexible, open and nimble; being able to shift and redeploy your personal resources – emotional, creative, intellectual – towards positive engagement with others.

Resiliency grows from putting your energies, your values, emotional attitudes and actions in the service of the common good – something larger than just yourself. That’s what supports both success in your outside life and internal well-being. And in today’s rapidly transforming world, you need both.

In the future look for new posts about perspectives, research and actions that relate to “becoming sane in a turbulent, interconnected, turbulent world.”  Through them I hope to contribute to a revised and needed reformulation of what psychological health and resiliency are in today’s world — in all realms of life:  intimate relationships, career challenges, engagement with diverse people, and in our responsibilities as  global citizens.

Rich points out that the “tsunami of anger” today is illogical, in the sense that the health care legislation is less provocative than either the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or Medicare.  He also reminds us that the new anger and extremism predated the health care debate:

The first signs were the shrieks of “traitor” and “off with his head” at Palin rallies as Obama’s election became more likely in October 2008. Those passions have spiraled ever since — from Gov. Rick Perry’s kowtowing to secessionists at a Tea Party rally in Texas to the gratuitous brandishing of assault weapons at Obama health care rallies last summer to “You lie!” piercing the president’s address to Congress last fall like an ominous shot.

He’s pointing out that major changes are occurring in the demographics of our country.  These changes – and others, concerning what people look for in relationships and in their careers —  are beginning to have major impact on us psychologically, including our psychological health.  For some, they generate tremendous fear that can give rise to hatred and aggression; a desire to “take back our country.”

Rich points out that:

Demographics are avatars of a change bigger than any bill contemplated by Obama or Congress. The week before the health care vote, The Times reported that births to Asian, black and Hispanic women accounted for 48 percent of all births in America in the 12 months ending in July 2008. By 2012, the next presidential election year, non-Hispanic white births will be in the minority. The Tea Party movement is virtually all white. The Republicans haven’t had a single African-American in the Senate or the House since 2003 and have had only three in total since 1935. Their anxieties about a rapidly changing America are well-grounded.

Then, in a similar analysis, Charles M. Blow writes in his column:

It’s an extension of a now-familiar theme: some version of “take our country back.” The problem is that the country romanticized by the far right hasn’t existed for some time, and its ability to deny that fact grows more dim every day. President Obama and what he represents has jolted extremists into the present and forced them to confront the future. And it scares them.

Even the optics must be irritating. A woman (Nancy Pelosi) pushed the health care bill through the House. The bill’s most visible and vocal proponents included a gay man (Barney Frank) and a Jew (Anthony Weiner). And the black man in the White House signed the bill into law. It’s enough to make a good old boy go crazy.

Blow cites a recent Quinnipiac University poll that found Tea Party members to be just as anachronistic to the direction of the country’s demographics as the Republican Party. For instance, they were disproportionately white, evangelical Christian and “less educated … than the average Joe and Jane Six-Pack.”  Blow points out that this is at the very time

when the country is becoming more diverse (some demographers believe that 2010 could be the first year that most children born in the country will be nonwhite), less doctrinally dogmatic, and college enrollment is through the roof. The Tea Party, my friends, is not the future.

Well said.  Mounting demographic and psychological research are confirming and extending what Rich and Blow describe.  In fact, several strands of change have been underway and coalescing into a changing psychology of people – their emotional attitudes, mental perspectives, values regarding work and relationships, and behavior towards people in need or who suffer loss.  These are shifts within a wide range of thought, feelings and actions.  Here are some of them:

Volunteer service – Data show that the number of volunteers is steadily growing among all age groups.  People describe volunteerism as part of their sense of  responsibility to help others in need, not something for padding their resume

Donations of organs by living donors to strangers.  That number is steadily rising.  For example, kidney donations from living donors have outnumbered those from deceased donors since 2003.

Hands-on philanthropy — Increasingly, donors want their contributions to have more visible, direct impact upon people’s lives.  They are turning away from contributions to already well-heeled organizations like universities or cultural centers.  On the rise are such examples as purchasing a goat for a family in an impoverished part of the world to provide its livelihood; or  paying the salary of a schoolteacher in a Third-World country.

Responsibility for a healthy planet.  Differences about global warming notwithstanding, the last several years have witnessed a steady shift towards feelings of greater responsibility for the planet’s health, across the board.  For example, grass-roots environmental activism now spills across traditional socio-economic lines, as well as across racial-ethnic differences; steadily rising financial contributions to environmental organizations; and increasing alliances between business interests and environmental groups.

Redefining “success” As I wrote in a previous post about the “4.0 career,” men and women increasingly want careers to provide more than personal recognition and financial reward.  They want meaningful work, opportunities for continued learning and growth, a positive management culture and a team-oriented, ethical environment. Research shows they want to have impact through their work on something larger than their own personal success.  These themes are especially pronounced among younger workers – the leaders of tomorrow.

Relationships are transforming. Surveys by the Gallup organization and other groups find that the quality of the relationship is more important to people today than simple allegiance to the institution of marriage.  Census statistics and other data confirm this, showing, for example:

• Steady decline in the marriage rate over the last several decades, while cohabitation has steadily risen in each of those same decades.
• About half of all households today are headed by people who are single.
• Unmarried couples are as likely as married couples to be raising children: it’s currently approaching 50%
• Between one-quarter and one-third of gay and lesbian couples are raising children; also a steadily rising number.
• Surveys find that at least 30% of those polled admit to having had an affair.  It’s not that people view affairs as desirable – especially when children are involved –  but they aren’t viewed as immoral, either.  See my recent post about six different kinds of affairs people have today, and their consequences.
• Attitudes towards gay relationships and gay marriage are changing.  Although surveys tend to show opposition to gay marriage, that, too, is shifting.  While  acceptance of gay relationships has steadily increased, opposition to gay marriage has steadily decreased, when tracked over the last several years.

These are just some of the pervasive shifts occurring are you read these words. All have implications for our emotional lives, our mental attitudes, and our actions.  I think this evolution underway requires us to re-think what constitutes psychological health in this changing world.  Our criteria have to change as people are faced with adapting to living, working, and relating to others in a very different world.

Charles M. Blow stated it well, at the end of his column.  Referring to the extremeists, he writes:

You may want “your country back,” but you can’t have it. That sound you hear is the relentless, irrepressible march of change. Welcome to America: The Remix.

What’s different about the emerging 4.0 career is that it’s an expansion beyond looking for greater meaning and sense of “purpose” through one’s work.  It also includes a desire for impact on something larger than oneself, beyond one’s personal benefit.  It’s becoming visible in the pull men and women report towards wanting to contribute to the common good -  whether it’s through the value and usefulness of a product or service.

The 4.0 career is part of the emerging new business model focused on creating “sustainable” enterprises.  It’s part of what’s known as the new “triple bottom line” — financial, social and environmental measures of success.

In this and in future posts l’ll describe some 4.0 career themes and how men and women illustrate them.  This is important because the transformations now underway in global societies, which became more dramatically apparent following the economic nosedive in September 2008, have tremendous implications for career survival and success.  The unstable, unpredictable new world upon us makes the 4.0 career orientation the path towards both outward success and personal well-being in the years ahead.

As a step towards finding the 4.0 career path, consider this little historical nugget: Thomas Jefferson left instructions that his tombstone engraving should make no mention of his having served as President.  Incredible, you say?  Well, if you visit his gravesite at his Charlottesville, Virginia homestead, you’ll see that it’s true:  His tombstone describes him as founder the University of Virginia; the author of the Declaration of Independence; and the sponsor of Virginia’s Act for Religious Freedom.  Jefferson saw those three as his real achievements.  He believed that they had more impact on the world than his “career position” as President.

Observing this is a good starting point for thinking about the kind of impact you want to have on the world through your career – the broad scope of your creative capacities, your talents, your skills, your experience.  That is, think of what you do and it’s consequences upon human lives beyond your own; not just the position or title you acquire (or are trying to hold on to); or the financial/material assets you accrue.

Looking further down the road, what kind of legacy are you creating right now, at each moment?  In short, what do you want to be remembered for?  Thinking about that will also point you to look at how much “space” your career – as it currently exists — occupies in your life, relative to your values and to other potential uses of your energies that are important to you.  These reflections will begin to broaden your perspective about what’s important to contribute through your life, long-term, how to integrate that into your work, and what would help you get from here to there.

As you look at that whole picture from the standpoint of your life impact, factor in everything that affects and is affected by your current work.  For example, does your community or geographic location, including things like your daily commute, really work for you, in relation to the long-term impact you hope to have?

What impact would working more from home have, if you could arrange that?  Or, if you became more accessible to your children’s schools and activities?   What would be the impact of giving more time to cultivating friendships, community connections, or your personal interests? Asking yourself such questions helps shape your definition of what you really want to be living and working for, and how to make it happen

The essence of the 4.0 career orientation is that it’s more integrated.  It grows from being conscious of the reality that your life is an interconnected, integral part of the physical, social and political world we live in.  That helps you realize that you’re steadily creating your “life footprint” all along the way.  Here’s a step you can take to bring that into focus:

Create Your “Life Footprint”

Bring into your awareness the reality that your life is finite.  Imagine that you know how much time you have remaining, and use that to guide you towards identifying the life priorities and actions that you need to alter, or focus more on, in order to create the “footprint” you want to have left upon the world.

Think of your mission as becoming a “good ancestor.”

• How do you want to use your mental and emotional and creative energies in your remaining time?
• What legacy will your actions and decisions create?
• Are you satisfied with that?  If not, what can you alter, beginning now?

Below are a few exercises you can do with your partner and on your own, to help you evolve towards the 4.0 career.

By Yourself:

• Recall the talents or interests that got your attention when you were young.  List them, and reflect on what happened to them along the way.  What would you like to reclaim, reactivate, or develop now, in order to create greater impact through your work?  What changes or sacrifices would that require?

With Your Partner:

It’s essential that you and your partner/family undertake any shifts you want to make as a team.  If you’re not aligned with each other, it’s not going to work for you as a couple or family.  Set aside a block of time to talk with your partner about your deepest desires and aspirations for your lives, individually and together.  Listen to each other; ask questions, but hold off commenting or judging on what you hear.  Just learn from each other.

Some guides for beginning the dialogue:

• Why do you think you’re here, on this planet, at this moment in time?
• How did you come to the career you now have? Why do you continue to do it?
• What parts of your work have the most impact on the organization’s service or product?
• Does your organization’s service or product align with your own values?
• What parts of your work stifle or limit your capacities?
• What could make your work more meaningful with respect to the larger mission?
• Did you turn away from any passions or interests that pulled you when you were younger, which you regret not having pursued?
• If so, how could you try to reclaim them?

Some additional suggestions:

• Make a list of the talents, experiences, unfulfilled creative needs and challenges that you would like to incorporate into the next phase of your career in order to build the legacy you desire.
• For each item on your list, write down what changes you would need to make in your career/personal life to make that occur.
• What are the resources you currently have; what ones would you need to acquire to make those changes (related to education, financial, location, life-style, etc.)?

With your partner, compare and discuss where you are aligned…and how to deal with where you aren’t.

…the party of trickle down and weapons of mass destruction, the party of birthers and death-panel lunatics. This is the party that genuflects at the altar of right-wing talk radio, with its insane, nauseating, nonstop commitment to hatred and bigotry.

Glenn Beck of Fox News has called President Obama a “racist” and asserted that he “has exposed himself as a guy, over and over and over again, who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture.”

Mike Huckabee, a former Republican presidential candidate, has said of Mr. Obama’s economic policies: “Lenin and Stalin would love this stuff.”

The G.O.P. poisons the political atmosphere and then has the gall to complain about an absence of bipartisanship.

And over the weekend, such civil rights leaders as John Lewis were subjected to racial slurs; Congressman Barney Franks was slammed with homophobic labels as he walked to the Capitol.  Much of this occurred with the egging on of Republican House members, shouting and sign-waving from the balcony, as they watched Tea Party members engaging in what Michael Steele described as just “stupid things” being said by “idiots.” But they aren’t.  They are statements of bigotry and racism.

The interesting thing, psychologically, is what propels this in 2010, and how pervasive such intolerance is, in our country.  I think it may be more widespread in appearance than in reality, however, though it certainly looks like the former.  And Herbert is dead-on when he writes,

…it is way past time for decent Americans to rise up against this kind of garbage, to fight it aggressively wherever it appears. And it is time for every American of good will to hold the Republican Party accountable for its role in tolerating, shielding and encouraging foul, mean-spirited and bigoted behavior in its ranks and among its strongest supporters.

I think the real trends across our culture are in opposite directions — towards greater, not lesser tolerance; towards awareness that we’re all interconnected in this globalized world, and that we rise or fall together, as a species. Demographic data and surveys increasingly show these trends.  Moreover, hate talk is nothing new.  I recall as a youngster hearing one of the “granddaddys” of bigoted talk shows, the infamous Joe Pine.  And going back to an earlier period, Father Coughlin spouted a fascist, antisemitic ideology under the guise of religion.  But these people, including members of the John Birch Society (which called President Eisenhower a communist!) were recognized by the masses as extreme, bigoted, out-of-touch with the “real America” (to borrow one of Sarah Palin’s favorite phrases).  It should be remembered that the paragon of modern political conservatism, William F. Buckley, denounced the Birchers and their ilk.

What’s changed is that today the bigots — and the showmen who use bigotry and fear as a career development strategy — have a nationwide platform via cable TV, the Internet, blogs and other media. Those broad-reaching outlets weren’t  available until recent years.  I think this gives rise to an illusion that this kind of ideology and mentality is widespread.  In fact, it may just be more widely available, and  because of that, people who are drawn to such thinking are able to for a more cohesive community of the like-minded.

The current G.O.P. bears responsibility, however,  for those who become pumped-up by extremist, fear-driven, hate-driven talk and become dangerous.  It’s allowing itself to be taken over by such thinking and its consequences.  There seems to be no room left in the G.O.P. for reasoned, conservative argument; for positions that can be articulated and serve as a basis for opposition and compromise with the majority party of Democrats.

As Herbert writes,

A party that promotes ignorance (“Just say no to global warming”) and provides a safe house for bigotry cannot serve the best interests of our country. Back in the 1960s, John Lewis risked his life and endured savage beatings to secure fundamental rights for black Americans while right-wing Republicans like Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan were lining up with segregationist Democrats to oppose landmark civil rights legislation.

Since then, the right-wingers have taken over the G.O.P and Mr. Lewis, now a congressman, must still endure the garbage they have wrought.

One measure of how all this  plays out in reality across the country will be  public reactions to the health care legislation and the Republican’s efforts to repeal it, as we head towards the 2010 elections.

In his review, Dwight Garner explains that Judt is describing the “political and intellectual landscape in Britain and the United States since the 1980s, the Reagan-Thatcher era, and he worries about an increasing and ‘uncritical adulation of wealth for its own sake.’ What matters, he writes, ‘is not how affluent a country is but how unequal it is,’ and he sees growing and destabilizing inequality almost everywhere.”

It’s heartening to see at least one “public intellectual” – a vanishing breed – lay out in a direct, forceful argument the accumulating toll of greed and self-centeredness that has dominated our recent political and social landscape.  Judt describes these themes as “elevated to a cult by Know Nothings, States’ Rightists, anti-tax campaigners and — most recently — the radio talk show demagogues of the Republican Right.”

Judt observes, for example, that the notion that taxes might “be a contribution to the provision of collective goods that individuals could never afford in isolation (roads, firemen, policemen, schools, lamp posts, post offices, not to mention soldiers, warships, and weapons) is rarely considered.”  Click here for the full Times review.

I think Judt’s theme about serving the “common good” is growing throughout our culture.  It’s increasingly visible, for example, in the recognition that humans are “wired” for empathy and for serving something larger than their just their own needs — many of which are socially conditioned to begin with and fuel self-centeredness and narcissism.

In that vein I wrote about healing our “empathy deficit disorder” in my previous post, and author Jeremy Rifkin has argued much more broadly and in great depth about the rise of an “empathic civilization” in his major, well-documented new book.

I also see the awakening of interconnectedness and service to the common good increasingly visible in the rise of a new business model – one that combines having impact on the common good as well as achieving financial success.  The green business movement incorporates much of this emergence, as well as related trends towards sustainable investment, social entrepreneurialism and venture philanthropy.  I would add to those the growing recognition of the need for a psychologically healthy management cultures, as well.

Interesting, also, in Judt’s book is his argument that the left and right have switched sides, in a sense.  That is, he explains that today the right pursues radical goals, and has abandoned the “social moderation which served it so well from Disraeli to Heath, Theodore Roosevelt to Nelson Rockefeller.” He argues that it’s now the left that is trying to conserve “the institutions, legislation, services and rights that we have inherited from the great age of 20th-century reform.”  For another interesting take on the “reversal” of the left and right from the 1960s to the present, see economist Ev Ehrlich’s two-part essay on his blog, Ev Ehrlich’s Everyday Economics.

It sounds lame, but true: We’re sure living through some interesting times….

The FreePress reports that the legislation calls for new and existing for-profit corporations to elect status as a for-benefit corporation with the purpose, among other things, of creating public benefit.  The bill, called the Vermont Benefit Corporation Act, defines “public benefit” as “a material positive impact on society and the environment, as measured by a third-party standard, through activities that promote some combination of specific public benefits.”

Will Patten, executive director of Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility, backs the measure, saying “It’s a no-cost, positive piece of legislation that might have an impact on Vermont’s economy.”  Green Mountain Roasters is reportedly a prime candidate to become a benefit corporation, upon approval by two-thirds of shareholders, should the legislation become law.  Click here for the complete article.

This kind of hybrid corporation makes good sense in this era of economic and organizational turmoil and change — one that calls for out-of-the-box thinking about ways to combine economic success and service to the common good.  Increasingly, economists and others are observing that our institutions and their leadership vision are locked into 20th Century thinking and realities; and that new kinds of thinking and structures are needed to address the complex, interconnected issues facing societies and people today.  Harvard’s Umair Haque, among others, has been addressing these issues in his writings.

And the older one’s say, “These young people just don’t understand how to function within an organization.  They want recognition, promotion, everything before they’ve earned it, like we have.  That’s not how reality is.”

It reminds me of a couple that once said about each other – “It’s not that we see things differently.  It’s worse than that:  We’re seeing different things!”

Exactly.  So, what can we make of this?  Is it simply the current generation gap?  I think it’s more than that.  It’s part of a broader, growing shift in the mentality of adults towards career, personal life and the role of business in society.  But it’s more visible and pronounced in the so-called Gen X and Gen Y workers, who are the offspring of those “older” workers – the Baby Boom generation now at midlife.

Some interesting research and survey data sheds light on what’s occurring.  For example, a study of 3,500 wage earners conducted by the Families and Work Institute of younger workers.  One finding was a dramatic shift among younger workers in how they handle hostile or abusive work environments:  They won’t stay very long in them, in contrast to how older workers traditionally behave – acceptance and suffering.  The younger workers tend to leave, confident that they’ll find something better.  Or, they “play” with the situation, not letting it get to them emotionally, while they craft an exit strategy.

Puzzling to older workers is that younger careerists want to know, “How quickly will I take on new responsibilities? How meaningful will my work be — immediately?”  They look for a collaborative atmosphere in which all members of a hardworking team share responsibilities.  Older people see this as immature impatience, and fail to recognize that younger workers bring a lot of energy and passion to work environments that offer the opportunity for having impact and input.

At the same time, research shows that younger adults value family and personal time as much as career advancement.  They reject the often-debilitating trade-offs between them, while the older generation has more prone to accept – and suffer from – those trade-offs.  For example, the Families and work Institute survey found that, above all else, younger people want to be able to shut the door after work and go home to a stimulating personal life that fuels their energy.  And they won’t work very long for companies that don’t enable them to do that.   Some of that phenomena is reflected in Fortune’s list of “best companies to work for.”

Younger workers often ask prospective employers about flexible work schedules before talking about pay or the 401k plans.  Those kinds of features are more important to them than pay.  In fact, research shows that young adults increasingly say that money is not the measure of success for them.  They want something deeper from their work.  They are more critical about whether they actually enjoy what they do at work.  Overall, they want their work to allow them to thrive as people, and leave them more choices in their lives.

How odd that sounds to many people who accommodated themselves to the careerist culture that still prevails, but which has also generated conflict among those same older careerist who long for more personal meaning and fulfillment (see my post about the “4.0” career.)

The Family and Work Institute’s survey found a dramatic shift, from the early 90s to the present decade, from 80% of younger adults who wanted to climb the traditional career ladder to just 60%.  Moreover – another oddity to those within the older mentality — younger workers also show a trend towards “serial jobs.”

That is, they quit if they want to have a longer vacation or pursue a personal interest or desire.  Then, when they’re ready, they return to their career.  According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average 18- to 34- year-old invests only 2.9 years in a job before looking to greener pastures.

To the older mentality, of course, none of that computes.

The broader shifts in our culture become more apparent when you look at some data about MBA students and graduates.  For example, a 2007 Hill & Knowlton survey found that 75% of top MBA students say corporate reputation will play a critical role in deciding where they want to work.  The survey was conducted among students at elite business schools in Europe, Asia, and the U.S.  They cited quality of management among the key drivers of corporate reputation.  And 40% of those surveyed rated social responsibility as an “extremely” or “very” important measure of reputation; 34%, having an environmental/green policy.

When asked to name the top factors in career choice, issues of sustainability — corporate governance and ethics, social responsibility, and environmental policy — ranked third, right behind the broad categories of career opportunities and company performance.  ”The best talent, like the most attractive real estate, will always be in scarce supply,” said Paul Taaffe, chairman and CEO of Hill & Knowlton. “The future winners in the corporate world will be the ones who are the quickest to recognize this and take action to enhance and protect reputation.”

Similarly, a 2007 survey by MonsterTRAK found that 80% of younger workers said they want to work in a job that has a positive impact on the environment.  And 92% said they would choose working for a “green” company.  Other research shows that employees working at companies with clear corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs report the most job satisfaction.  They stay at their jobs longer and are more content with senior management then their peers at companies with lackluster CSR programs, according to a survey conducted by Kenexa Research Institute. MBA candidates who consider sustainability a top priority may have more opportunities than ever: The number of CSR job listings has more than doubled over the past three years.

While salary is still a high priority for most MBA students at top business schools, more of them, especially women, cite business’s social responsibility as a top concern.  That’s according to a 2008 survey conducted by the Aspen Institute Center for Business Education, a part of the Aspen Institute Business and Society Program.  The survey was conducted on 1,943 students at 15 business schools around the world—from Wharton to the London Business School to the University of California, Berkeley—on a variety of issues, including business ethics, business school coursework and the corporate recruitment process.

“In a broader sense, the most important finding is that students seem to be taking a more holistic view of the role of business in society,” says Nancy McGaw, deputy director of the Aspen Institute Business and Society Program. “But the findings also suggest that while students may have these values, many of them sense those beliefs are not valued by employers or linked to career opportunities.”  For example, only 50 percent of students who were surveyed felt that recruiters placed a high value on personal integrity, and only 7 percent said they think recruiters place high value on their understanding of sociopolitical issues.

Discussion of business and society issues has become more commonplace in business schools, however.  In 2007, three-quarters of the respondents agree that they feel free to raise issues related to the social responsibility of companies in the classroom – up from 70 percent in 2002.

I think one upshot of these shifts and trends is that we’re witnessing the leading edge of an emerging business model that combines financial success with serving the common good – addressing social problems through products and services that are useful, helpful and enhance well-being.  It parallels a growing shift in the adult mentality, towards building internal well-being and outer success – integrating psychological health, healthy leadership, and global citizenship.

What I call 4.0 is a shorthand way of describing a new evolution I see in people’s attitudes, behavior and desires about their work and career.  Think of 1.0” as more of a survival orientation to work.  It’s how people think about and engage in their work when they’re in situations of extreme hardship, political upheaval, or within socio-economic conditions that limit their opportunity and choices.  That probably describes the situation for the masses of people throughout most of history, and of course it exists today.  In such situations, just earning enough of a living to survive and support yourself and your family is your target, your criteria of  “success.”  Today, the conflicts that people experience within version 1.0 often concern working conditions, discrimination and limited opportunities for getting onto a career path that can lead to something better.

Version 2.0 emerged with the political and economic environments that gave rise to the modern “career”; that is, mostly within increasingly large, bureaucratic organizations from about the late 1800s into the early 20^th Century.  Those organizations required layers of management and administration – white-collar jobs.  Advancement became possible along a defined path, and was available to people who could gain a foothold within it, usually because of educational opportunities and/or social class advantages they were born into.  Seeking recognition, power, status, and material perks from steady advancement define success with Version 2.0.  It still predominates within today’s career culture.  It’s where you find the conditions that generate, for example, work-life conflict, boredom, workplace bullying, hostile management practices, and subtle racial and gender barriers to moving up.

Version 3.0 arose just in the last few decades.  It reflects the desire for more personal meaning and fulfillment through work.  People within this career version are less satisfied with just the money, power and position characteristic of version 2.0.  The 3.0 careerist wants more compatibility and balance between work and life, and is less willing than the 2.0 careerist to stick with an unfulfilling job, or to settle for one when job-hunting.

Surveys illustrate the 3.0 orientation in various ways.  For example, in the pushback against the longer hours companies increasingly pressure you into.  Or against being available via BlackBerry or cell phone 24/7, even while on a vacation.   Also, increasing numbers of people say that moving up is a downer for them; that they dislike their new jobs when they do move up the traditional career ladder.   For example, a recent Families and Work Institute report finds that promotions are being turned down by workers in the thick of their careers.  Workers used to be eager to take on more responsibility, and now they aren’t, as much.

The 3.0 careerists want professional life to nourish the capacity for developing talents or interests outside of work, instead of pushing them aside.  In short, they want less fragmentation and more integration among the different parts of their lives.  More than just having a successful career, they want their careers to serve and support a successful life.

What, then, is Version 4.0?  It’s what I think is a new but increasingly visible evolution beyond 3.0.  In the 4.0 orientation, the person wants not only work that enables more personal self-development, but looks for opportunities to connect with, serve and have impact on something beyond or larger than oneself.   That is, the 4.0 careerist not only wants a career that enables you to integrate personal life goals and values with what you do at work; not only have sufficiently meaningful work, personally, but also be able to have a positive impact on human lives through work.

Consequently, the 4.0 careerist is highly proactive, looking for and seizing opportunities for new learning, and creative growth, within the organization; and having positive impact on something larger than oneself through his or her career.  That is, the 4.0 careerist is oriented toward a sense of service to and connection with the larger human community through the product or service he or she is contributing to.

Just more money, advancement and increasing recognition aren’t sufficient.  In short, the 4.0 careerist wants work that is personally rewarding, but that also contributes to the greater good, beyond his or her own personal gain.  They are attracted to organizations whose philosophy and management practices are supportive of those goals; that value innovation, are transparent, psychologically healthy – and philosophically committed to the “triple bottom line:” financial success, social impact and environmental responsibility.  Career version 4.0 looks to be part of an emerging new business model – one that’s sorely needed in our current business, social and political environment.