The healthiest and happiest human beings I’ve come across make a self-determined or autonomous life look easy because they have something the rest of us struggle with – self-acceptance.  From childhood pals who were reared by remarkably supportive parents or from successful people who I’ve interviewed who have grown to accept themselves, these individuals fully understand and appreciate their own natures and they fully accept the nature of mankind, farts and all.
 
You may think that you just read a typo. 
 
You didn’t.
 
Enjoying deep satisfaction with life (your highly individual life), first requires a recognition that you are an animal, with all the earthy appetites and functions of beasts.  The good news is that you can and ought to enjoy your animal instincts and acts: eating, sleeping, moving (exercise), sex and, yes, even bodily excretions!
 
As one of my best friends, (who wishes to remain anonymous on this point and who honks loudly when he blows his nose) happily posits, “Expulsion from all bodily orifices is pleasurable!”

The late great 20th century psychologist, Abraham Maslow had this to say about ninenty-nine percent of us, "Even the normal member of our culture feels unnecessarily guilty or ashamed about too many things and has anxiety in too many situations. Healthy individuals find it possible to accept themselves and their own nature without chagrin or complaint or, for that matter, without even thinking about the matter that much.”

I’ll never forget when Sandy McAfee, one of my favorite lifelong friends and now in his robust eighties, once photocopied and distributed an obscure medical magazine piece about how farting frequently and even forcefully was a sign of good intestinal health.  The gist of the article was that pushing gas was not only quite necessary, but that a diet that produced gas is healthy and that holding it in is unhealthy.  I was a teenager at the time and loved it, still do.  I especially loved the fact that a pillar of the community such as Sandy distributed this important news to many a shocked matron.  A guest physician on “Oprah” once described how a diet high in whole grains, beans and other methane-producing foods was healthy.  Oprah grimaced.  She could have and should have laughed with glee.
 
Maslow found that the very healthy psychologically are lusty and enjoy the simplest physical experiences.  They are good eaters and good sleepers.  I've found that they're nearly always exercisers and know that moving blood around the body sets off a cascade of reactions that increases health, happiness and longevity.  They have strong sexual appetites and are not ashamed about it.  They’re often fierce competitors and love to win.  They recognize their own animal natures – the dangerous as well as the sensuous and gracious.  And they do so with what Maslow called, “the stoic style… They can take the frailties and sins, weaknesses, and evils of human nature in the same unquestioning spirit with which one accepts the characteristics of nature… nature as it is and not as they would prefer it to be” 

 
I remember being in the Upper Canada College Preparatory School library reading about and looking at pictures of Auschwitz and Buchenwald.  I was ten or eleven years old and the deep sense of dread that I felt then about what humans are capable of remains with me to this day.  This dark side of human nature is a very hard truth to swallow, but once you do, and it need only be once, then you are forewarned and forearmed.
 
Accepting our propensity for evil is also helpful for accepting your own personal failings, large and small.  When you commit shameful acts – we all do, then it’s easier to remember how much worse others have behaved, and then to grasp a bit of grace and forgive yourself.  As the late founder of the City Church of New York, Rev. R. Maurice Boyd used to quote, “Look back on your own transgressions in life with ‘tender contempt."

If you learn to accept your own true nature, then you should also become more integrated.  Meaning you will become more genuine to others.  You will lose artifice and become the same true self to everyone you know, from bosses to children.  This is just one of the great benefits of self acceptance.  And if you are truer to yourself then you are also more free to express yourself.  You won't have to edit your thoughts or words.  Think of Julia Child who would spontaneously blurt out her joy and pain, exasperation and fascination.  Think of Jack Welch who recommends rolling out a keg at even the smallest wins in business.

Self acceptance is not easy to achieve.  For children, it's imbued by supportive parents, teachers and role models.  For adults, it takes introspection and often the help of a good psycho therapist.  (And good ones are hard to find.)  Then it takes courage to put yourself on a path that is truly yours.  If you do find your path that's where the next great trait of the best among the successful comes in -- autonomy.  An autonomous, self-directed life -- that's the subject of our next installment.

Cheers from Sonoma!

Donald

Check out Donald Van De Mark's series on the 19 Personality Traits of the Best Human Beings

Donald Van de Mark is a motivational speaker and has interviewed hundreds of leaders in business and politics including: Andrew Weil, MD, former U.S. Senator Bill Bradley, Jack Welch, Starbucks' Howard Schultz and Intel's Andy Grove, in his nearly 3 decades as a correspondent and anchor at CNN, CNBC and public television. He is the host of The Wisdom of Caring Leaders and The Wisdom of Teams, training videos used by corporations and schools to teach leadership skills.

Donald integrates practical tips from these great leaders to provide a riveting motivational speech on the personality traits of successful people.

Jobs are lost.  Investment portfolios are down.  And those are just the cyclical traumas.  The more unnerving truth is that everything’s changing and the changes seem to be accelerating: Technology, media, the acceptance of gay people, the rise of women to real power, Communist China as a formidable capitalist, a globalized, multi-racial America… and most of all: a BLACK man in the WHITE House!  A black man who saves Wall Street, who is changing the way we respond to pollution, the way we interact with the world, the way we buy and distribute health care.
 
Making it all the more of an affront to those who resist evolution – is that Barack Obama won’t play his part.  He’s a black man who appears more: intelligent, grounded, successful and noble than any of his white competitors. It’s a world turned upside down.  To those who resist change, it’s felt as an attack on their ideals, their status, their world view and even their grip on reality.  That is scary!
 
That fear then morphs internally into anger and that is understandable and completely natural.  But make no mistake.  It is reactionary to its core.  As such it is powerful and dangerous.  It springs from the oldest part of the animal brain – the reptilian stem.  It’s very much part of all of our natures – and when activated by fear, we have little control over it.  Congressman Joe Wilson admitted as much when he said that yelling “You lie!” at the President during his speech to Congress was “spontaneous.”  At that moment, Wilson is the crocodile snapping at splashing prey, he is the front line soldier firing at sounds in the dark.
 
It’s important to remember that his appalling outburst comes from a southern conservative – the kind of person who reveres rank and is schooled in good manners.  All the niceties of our mammalian and analytical brains are no match for the reptilian stem when we are scared and mad -- in both senses of the word.

Resistance to change twists even the most sophisticated minds.  I know of bright, discerning, globally-minded individuals who loathe Barack Obama.  They honestly believe this elegant, calm moderate is ruining the country.  Their children are shocked at their parents' reaction and whisper that it can only be latent racism.  It may be that, but I believe it’s simply that those who do not accept the reality of change become ever more isolated, fearful and angry.
 
The problem for Joe Wilson and millions of older, white, straight traditionalists is that their world is rapidly shrinking.  The local newspaper is a shadow of its former self, or gone.  The computer is ever more baffling.  Employers push diversity. Young people are coarse and demanding.  Even money doesn’t insulate anymore.  Brown people, gay people, strange invaders of all shades and persuasions now populate the media and workplace, if not one’s own neighborhood. Just like Clint Eastwood’s, Walt Kowalski in the movie Gran Torino, the islands upon which these static personalities sit, grow smaller.
 
It reminds me of America in the early 1960’s which is so brilliantly portrayed in Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men.  The world is shifting beneath people’s feet.  Everyone’s a bit off balance.  We know how history plays out.  Women and African Americans demand opportunity and dark, fearful forces fight back.  Blood is shed.
 
Change is exciting.  Change can be liberating.  But change can also be dangerous, because those who refute it often have no control over their reactive, reptilian and sometimes violent responses.

Check out Donald Van De Mark's series on the 19 Personality Traits of the Best Human Beings

Donald Van de Mark is a motivational speaker and has interviewed hundreds of leaders in business and politics including: Andrew Weil, MD, former U.S. Senator Bill Bradley, Jack Welch, Starbucks' Howard Schultz and Intel's Andy Grove, in his nearly 3 decades as a correspondent and anchor at CNN, CNBC and public television. He is the host of The Wisdom of Caring Leaders and The Wisdom of Teams, training videos used by corporations and schools to teach leadership skills.

Donald integrates practical tips from these great leaders to provide a riveting motivational speech on the personality traits of successful people. 

“They won.  We lost.  Next.”  Barry Diller

Barry Diller, who has led TV networks, movie studios, home shopping empires and now a variety of online companies, is a person who demonstrates an eagerness for experience.  I worked directly for this mercurial mogul for nearly a year when he was running QVC.  During that time,  we unsuccessfully tried to take over Paramount Communications and then CBS Television. 
 
Diller loves change and loves shaking up his staff so much so that we were always scrambling to incorporate the latest technology and information systems.  He loved to travel: planes, boats  and helicopters.  You haven’t lived until you’ve choppered into mid-town Manhattan. His appetite for new experiences pervaded his life in large ways and small.  He wanted to ride the wave of technological disruption in retailing  and  I once watched him roam around a small table, sampling three different dinners in his apartment at the Waldorf-Astoria.  He was always experimenting, always looking forward to the next opportunity.

In late December, 1993, I issued a press release for Diller where he only tersely accepted defeat in his $10,000,000,000 battle for Paramount before announcing his intention to tackle another.  Read, word for word, by two of the three network news anchors that night, Diller said, “They won.  We lost.  Next.”
 
The strongest individuals thrive on steep learning curves and get bored of the status quo relatively rapidly.  Sabeer Bahtia, who co-founded Hotmail, told me that creative and ambitious people look for their next job within two years of landing their current positions.  I challenged him, until I realized that throughout my career, I had done just that.  I may not have moved within two years, but within a couple of years, I was always at least preparing for the next move.
 
Being open to new experiences is why these happy high achievers are also good at getting outside their “comfort zones,” because for them, doing the same old thing is uncomfortable.  They don’t just accept, they welcome constant change and the exhilaration of being slightly off balance.
 
One last note about this trait: I know of it well. Among my dearest and oldest friends is the McAfee family of Pepper Pike, Ohio.  In our shared Canadian summers, they have been beacons of health and happiness to me.  One reason I’m sure is that they’re always game to try new things.  Nina McAfee, the matriarch, is always organizing new adventures: bicycling, concerts, rafting, plays, kayaking, parasailing. As I grew up, the McAfees skied every mountain in the west, cavorted with wildlife in The Galapagos Islands, read  most of the best-sellers and tried every new board game.  My family gathered year after year at the same sunny watering holes and drank.
 
Trust me.  Being open to new experiences is better.

Check out Donald Van De Mark's series on the 19 Personality Traits of the Best Human Beings

Donald Van de Mark is a speaker and has interviewed hundreds of leaders in business and politics including: Andrew Weil, MD, former U.S. Senator Bill Bradley, Jack Welch, Starbucks' Howard Schultz and Intel's Andy Grove, in his nearly 3 decades as a correspondent and anchor at CNN, CNBC and public television. He is the host of The Wisdom of Caring Leaders, a leadership skills training video used by corporations and schools.

Donald integrates practical tips from these great leaders to provide a riveting motivational speech on the personality traits of successful people. 

I just saw Nora Ephron’s “Julie and Julia.” I was charmed and delighted by Meryl Streep’s portrayal of the cooking icon, Julia Child. But even more so, I was impressed with Julia Child: her fearlessness, her egalitarian nature, her global outlook, her expressiveness, her joy, her sense of humor, her disregard for convention, her determination, her hearty appetites, her love-soaked marriage, her self-directed life… I could go on and on.

In an interview that Streep did in the U.K. with John Hiscock, she talked about the woman she portrays:  “Julia’s approach to her day was one of energy and appetite and a blanket determination not to let troubles get you down. It’s a great quality and she really had it… When you talk about passion, Julia Child just didn’t have it for her husband or cooking; she had a passion for living. What was compelling about her was her joie de vivre and her unwillingness to be bogged down in negativity. She loved being alive and that’s inspirational in itself.”

Why and how was this six foot two inch, far-from-pretty, diplomat’s wife so in love with life? I believe she was for several reasons, not the least of which is that she was, a success. But she was a success at life and love as well as cooking and writing because she shared several of the personality traits of the psychologically healthiest human beings. I touched on some of them above, but here’s a more explicit list:

1. She and Paul were global not national or provincial in outlook
2. She treated everyone with a healthy dose of respect, and idolized no one
3. She was comfortable, even excited with the unknown
4. She was a good animal with hearty, shameless (in the good way) appetites
5. She recognized the reality of all situations (remember her comment to her sister as they gazed at themselves dressed up for dinner!)
6. Her light-hearted and non-hostile sense of humor
7. She and Paul’s disregard for 1950’s convention, such as McCarthyism and professional limitations on women
8. Her blurt-it-out expressiveness
9. Her deep, enduring love affair with Paul, her husband
10. Her joy

These are not complicated, God-given or DNA infused qualities. These are traits that you and I can develop. I'm not going to get into tips and techniques on how to develop these traits here -- that's part of other blog postings and a book I'm working on.

What I want to get across in this short essay is that you and everyone should be thinking, feeling, behaving, and most of all being more like a Child -- Julia Child!

Cheers from Sonoma,
Or as Julia might have said, “Bon Appetit!”

Donald

Donald Van De Mark series on the 19 Personality Traits of the Best Human Beings:

• Introduction: The Good Among the Great: Personality Traits of the Best Human Beings

1. Superior Reality Recognition

• The Clearer, More Efficient Perception of Reality
• Andy Grove, founder of Intel absorbs reality
• The Role of Reality and Choice in Your Destiny

2. Open to New Experiences

• Healthy High Achievers and Curiosity
• Knowing Your Desires and Letting Them Guide You

Donald Van de Mark has interviewed hundreds of leaders in business and politics including: Andrew Weil, MD, former U.S. Senator Bill Bradley, Jack Welch, Starbucks' Howard Schultz and Intel's Andy Grove, in his nearly 3 decades as a correspondent and anchor at CNN, CNBC and public television. He integrates practical tips from these great leaders to provide a riveting motivational speech on the personality traits of successful people. Donald is also the host of the corporate training video, The Wisdom of Caring Leaders.