Mindfulness

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Mindfulness Motivation in Daily Life

• Insights and Provocations

Jackson Kytle
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A bit of context

• Focus on psychological involvement in daily life
• An experience not often examined
• Worrying is not examining

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My purposes today

• Focus your attention on the quality of
  psychological experience in human existence,
  especially your own
• Put some concepts in play that help us think
  about motivation and about daily life
• Share my insights and questions
• Ask us to think about how we think, how the mind
  processes experience

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This is a sampler
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Swimming in the current

• William James and the stream of consciousness
• Heading bobbing in the current, can we get to the
  bank to rest and reflect?

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Three Problematics in Daily Life

• Self-motivation
• Learning
• Quality of lived experience, especially as shaped
  by self-motivation and learning

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INSIGHT

• For most people, lived experience is, well, bumpy
• Managing self-motivation is a daily project
• So is managing the monkey mind

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INSIGHT

• We cannot easily control the Fordist production
  systems in which we must work.
• We can control the ideas we bring to making
  sense of lived experience.

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Four Facets of Mindfulness
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Learning

• To appreciate how the human mind works when it
  comes to managing a life
• To be critical of the concepts and theoriesmind
  setswe have inherited
• To create moments of psychological involvement to
  add quality to daily life
• To create moments for reflection in a busy life
  and for connecting human actions to an ethical
  life project

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INSIGHT

• Human beings are marvelouspattern-seeking,
  meaning-makers
• Some elements shared with other species
• We see the world in chunks, small and large!

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Terms vary for this adaptive advantage

• patterns
• frames
• mental models

• mind sets
• stereotypes
• naïve theories

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INSIGHT

• At the same time,
• a mind set
• can be wrong!

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INSIGHT

• Another limit to human meaning-making
• when we move through the life world
• as if sleep walking

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Listen to Maxine Greene
If teachers today are to initiate young people
into an ethical existence, they themselves must
attend more fully than they normally have to
their own lives and its requirements they have
to break with the mechanical life, to overcome
their own submergence in the habitual, even in
what they conceive to be the virtuous, and ask
the why with which learning and moral reasoning
begin.
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Maxine read Alfred Schutz

• Social phenomenologist, once at The New School
• He wrote about becoming awake-in-the-world an
  complex ideal that Greene put to good, consistent
  use

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Contrast being half awake in the world to

• Pursuit involvement on the ancient savannah, or
  the modern mall
• Mind and body are focused, behavior is purposeful
• If not scared to death, mood can be positive with
  lively fantasies

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Pursuits are, variously

• Fun!
• Limit the vision of other pursuits
• Expose our minds to manipulation by corporate
  interests

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Listen to John Dewey

• We always live at the time we live and not at
  some other time, and only by extracting at each
  present time the full meaning of each present
  experience are we prepared for doing the same
  thing in the future.

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Personal examples of involving experiences

• When playing or listening to music
• When playing a sport
• When meeting a new friend

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• When doing something risky
• When participating in a true belief group
• When teaching
• When alone in a strange natural environment

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INSIGHT

• We humans learn to manipulate psychological
  experience all day long from that first coffee to
  settling down with a book or television before
  bed.

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Lets switch gears we need concepts!

• The nature of psychological experience,
  motivation, and daily life are old, old topics in
  human affairs.
• We join the conversation late.

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Abraham Maslows work

• Wanted a humanistic psychology, avoiding the
  reductionism of behaviorism and the negativism
  of existentialism
• Wanted to focus on growth, being, and
  self-actualization, not deficiency
• His methodsinterviews and questionnaires of
  psychologically healthy people

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Characteristics of Maslows peak experience

• Sense of wholeness, an integrating experience
• Critical judgment suspended, loss of ego
  centeredness
• Clear perception
• Perception of beauty and goodness, if not awe

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and

• Sense of self as active, responsible, bigger and
  stronger
• Feeling of gratitude
• Disorientation in time and space after the peak
  experience
• Sometimes the onset of the experience is
  unexpected, sudden, as if by surprise

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Underlying all the claims

• Perception seems changed for a short period
• Mood becomes positive, which generalizes to most
  evaluations
• A powerful psychological experience!
• Sometimes the result is high tension and
  excitement
• At other times, a plateau experience defined by
  peacefulness, quietness, the feeling of
  stillness.

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Mihaly Csikszentmihalyis Theory of Flow

• Chaos, a natural and uncomfortable state which
  consciousness returns to if not ordered by human
  action
• Wanted people to control psychological experience
  because events are less under control
• Flow total involvement with life heart,
  will, and mind joined together in effortless
  action
• Nearly identical psychological experience to
  Maslows peak experience

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His methods

• Started with a Maslow-like method of interviewing
  people with flow experiences
• Created the Experience Sampling Method, using
  pagers and programmable watches, timed to go off
  eight times a day at random intervals

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Csikszentmihalyis theory of flow

• Learn to focus on and improve quality of
  psychological experience
• Flow most likely under three conditions
• Clear purposes
• Relevant feedback on performance
• Challenge and skills are in balance
• Attention becomes ordered and invested

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Listen to Ellen Langer

• Most activities are neither positive nor negative
  in tone what matters is what we invest in them.
  (Very Jamesian!)
• Need to challenge premature cognitive
  commitments
• Students develop a fear of negative criticism and
  pursue the illusion of the correct answer.

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Langer continued

• To increase mindful learning
• focus on questions
• on learning as a process, and
• on self-regulation
• To increase unmindful learning
• focus on answers
• on learning as outcomes, and
• on expert authority

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Three Dimensions of Psychological Experience

• Mood
• Attention
• Awareness or consciousness

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INSIGHT

• A critical distinction is needed
• Psychological involvement
• Social engagement

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Listen to Thich Nhat Hanh

• Ethical responsibility to live authentically and
  take care of others
• To try to control wandering attention, the
  monkey mind
• Focus on breathing in meditation

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Dont feed the monkey
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THE LIFE PROJECT

• Life as a project -- a long, bumpy search to
  become an authentic human being whose actions are
  guided by ethical purposes

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ONE LAST INSIGHT

• Motivation, learning and environmental demand
• an intimate, dynamic connection!

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DAILY DEMAND ENVIRONMENT
PEER GROUP
PERSON
MENTORS
REFLECTION TOOLS
WORK TASKS
BUILT ENVIRONMENT
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Three practical implications

1. To change direction in a behavior or life, change
   the group you belong to let the group socialize
   you.
2. Challenge the brain-mind-body to do its work by
   seeking demand environs.
3. As we get older, we need to increase demand
   environments and predicaments.

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Thank you!

• See my website www.wanttolearn.org
• Give me your email address if you would like a
  copy of my talking points and slides.
• Email me at jkytle_at_healthcarechaplaincy.org/
• Book signing shortly.