The ‘inspiration’ for this blog came from one of my usual sources – The Observer newspaper last Sunday. What was slightly unusual was that the quotes below came from an article about a woman who’d fallen on hard times and successfully taken up playing poker as a way to make money to support her family.
I’m not particularly interested in poker or card games generally because I know, for whatever reason, I’m pretty crap at them. This woman wasn’t and she said one or two things that were a) interesting to me in their own right and b) interesting at these times of challenge, based on her experiences of playing poker.
I have written 2 or 3 times in this blog about the importance in retirement of intelligent thinking. In brief (very brief) that’s avoiding, what is sometimes called faulty thinking or irrational beliefs depending on the branch of psychology you’re applying.
I’m trying for positive, problem-solving type thoughts and I was trying to apply them recently when, as I admitted in a previous blog, I had a bit of an emotional dip in these difficult times. The puzzle is that we’re not actually finding them difficult, in fact in most ways we’re quite enjoying our lives under lockdown. I expect now they’re, at least for the moment, coming to some sort of end, I dare say I’ll get quite sentimental about them.
But still, there was a dip, and I did try and work out why this might be. Perversely I started out by examining my emotional state. Why is this perverse you ask? Because, as a psychologist in ye old days, I’ve never found any study of emotions all that helpful. There’s somewhere between 6 and 56 of them depending on who you read. The whole area of emotions and the psychology attached to them, has always seemed to me, and still does, a messy business.
If you took the emotions route you’d probably start by asking, am I sad, angry, anxious, worried, lacking confidence, frightened (all negatives I admit)? There’s a few there for a start. But if you can manage to distinguish between sad and anxious or whatever, your next step is likely to be, what’s making me feel that way? And that’s where, in my book, your thinking comes in to play.
I’ve always preferred a focus on our thinking processes as a method for better understanding why we feel (and behave) the way we do. It’s important to remember, thinking is just another term for the words we use (the language) those that are going on inside our heads. Thinking or self-talk, as it is sometimes called, are umbilically linked, they may even be the same thing.
Back to the article I mentioned at the beginning of this retirement blog, written by a Russian woman, Maria Konnikova. She used what she wrote about as a method for improving her poker-playing skills. She wrote in the article, how we frame something affects not just our thinking but our emotional state – the words we select – the ones we filter out and the ones we eventually choose to put forward – are a mirror to our thinking… our thinking has real consequences in terms of our emotional well-being, our decisions and the way we implicitly view the world and our role in it
She goes on to say, how we phrase sentences can determine whether we have internal or external locus of control. For example, blaming bad luck was not helpful to her playing skills. Gosh, I remember those terms (locus of control), they used to be among my favourite ideas from the world of psychology but I’d quite forgotten about them until I saw them in this article.
Not quite sure what’s cause and effect or chicken and egg, which comes first, in all the above but, taken as a whole, it seems to me to make good sense. So no better time as lockdown comes to an end (or does it?) to apply the above and give a bit of thought to our thinking.
For instance, are we going to be internal or external loci of control people? What kind of language will we use to ourselves (and I suppose to others) about what’s happening as we emerge from lockdown. I suppose in ye olden days I could have written a whole article about what might constitute a helpful mind-set for these unique times.
Fortunately I only have a 1,000 words (and the brain to go with them) to accommodate any thoughts, so this encourages / demands that I be mercifully brief. Something on the lines of, what worked well for me during lockdown? What actual steps / actions will I take starting next week to make this happen again? What happened to me to make me appreciate my retirement life and that I want to remember? How can I provide myself with a tangible reminder of what I want to achieve? If this was a new start, what would I want to be different from my old lifestyle? Any random acts of kindness, as they are sometimes described, would I want to carry on with?
Back to this locus of control thing. How will I spot myself engaging in external locus thinking (it’s not my fault, they should / n’t have done that, I give up, the world’s not fair), and replace it with thinking that gives me a sense of being in control? How can I encourage myself to use more Internal locus thinking – I can deal with this challenge, I’ve done it before, it’s something new so that makes it exciting, I can break it down, take it a bit at a time.
I have no doubt if you give it a bit of thought at this potentially watershed moment, you will be able to come up with additional examples or even better ones instead. Pause for a moment and ask yourself, what kind of thinking would be most helpful to me at a time like this? I’m just taking this opportunity to remind you all that there’s an opportunity here.
As Mrs Summerhouse put it, how do we come out of this thought-wise?
PS WordPress seems to have stopped, for no reason, offering me the drop-down capital at the beginning of each blog. Very annoying I had grown to like it.