One immune cell type appears to attack any type of cancer.

IMMUNE ATTACK! —
One immune cell type appears to attack any type of cancer.
We don’t know enough to know whether this is useful yet.
JOHN TIMMER - 1/22/2020, 1:57 PM

While cancerous cells look a lot like normal human cells, they're still different enough that the immune system regularly attacks them. Obviously, this attack sometimes bogs down, allowing cancer to thrive and spread. Figuring out how to get the immune system back on track has been a major focus of research, and success in the area has been honored with a Nobel Prize.

Despite these successes, many patients aren't helped by the newer immune-focused therapies, raising questions of what else we still need to figure out to help cancer patients. A new paper highlights something we may have missed: a class of immune cells that appears to be primed specifically to attack cancer. But the finding raises questions about what it is on cancer cells that the immune cells are recognizing and why they fail to keep cancer in check.

Finding cancer killers
The start of this work was pretty simple: a large international team of researchers grew a mix of immune cells called "T cells" in the presence of cancerous cells and looked for cells that grew rapidly. This rapid growth is typically a sign that the immune cells have been activated by something they recognize—in this case, the cancer. They identified one particular lineage of T cells that grew well and named it MC.7.G5, confirming yet again that most scientists don't belong in the creative industries.

One notable thing about the MC.7.G5 cells quickly became apparent: MC.7.G5 didn't simply grow well in the presence of cancer cells; it killed them. So, the authors tested a variety of different cancer types (lung cancer, melanoma, colon, breast, and more). These cells don't have much in common. They're activated by different mutations, start out with different populations of proteins on their surface, and have many other differences from one another. So it wasn't clear what the T cells could possibly be recognizing on their surfaces in order to attack them. Yet attack them they did.

To find out, the researchers did an experiment that wouldn't have been possible just a decade earlier: they used a gene-editing construct to eliminate every single protein-coding gene that we know of in the genome. Lots of individual populations of a cancer-cell line had a single gene knocked out and then were tested to see whether the MC.7.G5 immune cells could still kill them. If any cancer cells were left alive, then the gene edited in them would be essential for producing the molecule used by the immune cells to recognize cancer.

FURTHER READING
Treatments that cause the immune system to attack cancer earn a Nobel...
The experiment identified a series of genes involved in putting a single protein on the surface. But, of course, that protein is also present on normal cells. How could it possibly be responsible for the cancer cells being recognized as distinct?

Fortunately, we know a lot about the family of molecules that the protein, MR1, belongs to, as well as a bit about MR1 itself. The larger family includes the molecules that help the immune system recognize self from non-self by binding to bits of the cell's proteins and presenting them on the cell's surface for the immune system to check out. If either these molecules or the proteins they present look different, the immune system attacks. So, that makes a degree of sense as something that can trigger the immune system to go after the cancer cells.

MR1, however, doesn't work like that. Instead, it brings some of the cell's metabolites to the surface. And the researchers confirmed that it has to bind to something in order to make it to the surface. They hypothesize that it's a metabolite that's specific to cancer cells, but they have no idea what it might be.

Stay on target
While there are still some question marks about what causes these immune cells to pick out cancerous cells, there's no shortage of evidence that they do so effectively. The researchers tested the immune cells against resting and dividing normal cells and got no response. MC.7.G5 didn't kill healthy cells that were stressed or damaged. So, there's no indication that the immune cells accidentally go off target and kill healthy cells.

The researchers also confirmed that the cancer-killing T cells are defined by the standard receptor that T cells normally use to recognize infected cells. They made a copy of this receptor's genes and inserted them into T cells from an unrelated individual. They also killed cancerous cells from at least two different sources.

Finally, the authors injected lymphoma cells into immune-compromised mice, then added the cancer-killing T cells. In control mice without the cancer-killing cells, the lymphoma took over the bone marrow, eventually accounting for about 80 percent of the cells there. With the cancer-killing cells injected at the same time, the bone marrow in the mice consistently had far fewer cancer cells (consistently less than 10 percent of the total cells). This indicates that the immune cells can help keep cancer in check but may not be able to consistently eradicate it.

Does that mean, as the BBC has claimed, that these cells "May treat all cancer"? Well, to begin with, the T cells were seemingly unable to eliminate cancer in mice. That's more significant than it seems, in that lots of potential treatments seem to work well in mice, but few ever advance to the point of clinical trials in humans, much less end up being used as treatments. This is a case when mouse assays are helpful for knowing what deserves a closer look but far from the last word on a topic.

Do we all have cancer killers?
These cancer-killing immune cells were also obtained from at least two individuals, suggesting that they may be present in all humans. Yet humans regularly suffer from cancer, so there's clearly something that keeps them from doing their job. At this point, we don't have the slightest clue as to what that something might be.

Then there's the issue of what the cells are recognizing that allows them to identify cancer cells. Whatever it is, it's not widely present on healthy cells. But the body has a dizzying number of specialized cell types, so we've barely scratched the surface of testing whether these cells might attack some healthy cell types. However, if the authors are right about a couple of things, there's a very good chance the cells might.

The authors suggest that the target of the cancer-killing cells is a metabolite presented on the surface by the protein MR1. And, because the gene-editing screen didn't pull out any metabolic enzymes, they suspect that the metabolite is essential for cancer cell viability. It's difficult to understand how something central to cancer cell viability, produced using the same genes found in normal cells, isn't ever produced by normal cells.

None of this is to say that this discovery won't end up being important. But we really need much more information before we're in a position to judge whether it is or not.

Nature Immunology, 2020. DOI: 10.1038/s41590-019-0578-8 (About DOIs).

IF YOU CLAIM TO CARE ABOUT THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT, NUCLEAR FISSION IS A
TEMPORARY WORKING ALTERNATIVE TO OIL AND GAS.

Attention Elon Musk and interested parties...As George Carlin might say...just in case you give a shit...would you consider building slow-poke nuclear reactors with the capacity to reuse spent fuel rods. I suggest you build these small reactors all over North America as quickly as possible in order to provide clean Electricity for our current polluting economic system. Climate change can be mitigated with safe nuclear fission reactors in the short term while the better solution, fusion reactors, remains in the development stage. Wind and solar power are not currently enough to mitigate the usage of Coal and Oil, (are you understanding this, China) and time is short....very short for Biodiversity on planet Earth. The social genius Carlin also mentioned, loudly, that Nature does not need you, you need nature.
Signed: N.J. Raglione. Director...The World Friendly Peace and Ecology Movement.

Harry and Meghan’s Big Funding Source Is Private. Sort of.

Benjamin Mueller 12 hrs ago

a close up of a traffic light: St Mary’s island in the Isles of Scilly. The archipelago off the southwestern coast of England is part of Prince Charles’s Duchy of Cornwall.
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1/4 SLIDES © Tom Jamieson for The New York Times
St Mary’s island in the Isles of Scilly. The archipelago off the southwestern coast of England is part of Prince Charles’s Duchy of Cornwall.
LONDON — Every six months or so, Alan Davis sets out from his seaside bungalow on a far-flung island off the southwestern coast of England carrying a rent check of 12.5 pounds (about $16) for his landlord.

But this is no ordinary landlord, and no ordinary rent check.
Mr. Davis lives on a tiny corner of the Duchy of Cornwall, the property empire controlled by Prince Charles, the heir to Britain’s throne, who has quietly turned an inheritance of rundown farmland into a billion-pound real estate conglomerate. By a quirk of British law, Mr. Davis has to pay the prince for the privilege of living on his land, piddling as the checks may be.
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“It’s a feudal way of carrying on,” Mr. Davis said. “They put their finger in and demand money. They’re a law unto themselves.”
Prince Charles’s fortune, long shielded from scrutiny by parliamentary indifference and obscure accounting, spilled into public view this month when his younger son, Prince Harry, announced that he and his wife, Meghan, were quitting their royal duties. In trying to prove that they would renounce taxpayer money, Harry and Meghan gave Britons a peek at the shadowy world of ostensibly private finance that bankrolls the family and its mansions, gardens and considerable staff.
But what the royals call private contains, by any other measure, a generous mix of public giveaways: medieval landholdings passed from one male heir to the next, sweeping tax relief, indemnity from some laws and exemptions from others, ownership of long stretches of coastline and all the treasure buried in Cornwall.
Those perks have delivered Prince Charles substantial wealth. Income from the duchy has nearly tripled in two decades, to £21.6 million, about $28.3 million, last year. But the uproar over Harry and Meghan’s funding has raised uncomfortable questions for the prince and the royals about whether any of their income can truly be considered private.
Coming on the heels of Prince Charles’s brother Andrew being kicked off the royal front lines for socializing with the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, such scrutiny is another dent to the royal mystique.
“Harry has chucked a grenade into the forecourt of Buckingham Palace,” said David McClure, the author of a book about the royal family’s wealth. “It’s weakened the foundations of the royal family and their money, and it’s raised issues that don’t just apply to Harry but have been bubbling under the surface for at least a decade.”
Among the biggest of those is the special treatment afforded Prince Charles’s property empire, an estate that, among other things, pays for the upkeep of his country mansion and furnished £5 million last year for the families of Harry and his older brother, Prince William.
Formed in 1337 to provide the royal heir with an income, the duchy came with fringe benefits: the right to unclaimed shipwrecks on Cornish shores, washed-up whale and sturgeon carcasses, and at least 250 gallons of wine from boats docking at Cornish ports.
Nearly 700 years later, Prince Charles has held onto some anachronistic perks. Into his 20s, the prince is said to have received feudal dues of 100 silver shillings and a pound of peppercorns from the mayor of Launceston in Cornwall.
But with the help of British real estate heavyweights, he has transformed his sleepy holdings into a thriving business covering 200 square miles, turning the focus from rural land to profit-rich urban holdings.
The duchy has a vast footprint, stretching from the rocky shores of Cornwall to south London, and from medieval castles to a granite-walled men’s prison. It recently bought a 400,000-square-foot supermarket warehouse north of London.
A spokeswoman for the duchy said in a statement that Parliament had “confirmed its status as a private estate” and that the Treasury had agreed that its tax status did not confer an unfair advantage. “The prince has always ensured it is run with the interests of its communities as an equal priority,” the statement said.
The duchy’s holdings reflect how the royal family’s wealth has become concentrated in the hands of Prince Charles and his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, whose own estate, the Duchy of Lancaster, paid her £21.7 million last year. Together, the two duchies bankroll more than a dozen members of the family, supplementing a taxpayer grant of £82 million last year reserved for official duties and the upkeep of several palaces.
Despite lawmakers once deeming its current income “an accident of history,” the Duchy of Cornwall has mostly avoided harsh questions, in part by playing up its interest in traditional architecture and sustainable practices across its humbler holdings: scores of farms, much of Dartmoor National Park in Devon and rivers throughout Cornwall. But analysts say that obscures fierce commercial instincts.
“If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck and swims like a duck, you sort of assume it is a duck,” a Labour lawmaker told duchy officials during a 2013 hearing. “The Duchy of Cornwall looks and behaves like a corporation.”
But the duchy does not pay taxes like a corporation. Instead it sits in a sort of legal limbo, using its royal status to skirt corporation and capital gains taxes even as it argues that, as a private estate, it has no obligation to open its books. The duchy said that its capital gains were all reinvested in the business, obviating the need to tax them, and that only companies paid corporation tax.
Prince Charles pays tax on his duchy income only voluntarily, and after deducting what analysts believe to be about £10 million that he deems official and charitable spending. He has also written off tens of thousands of pounds that he pays for gardening at Highgrove, his country house, on the basis that members of the public were occasionally invited in.
“The Duchy of Cornwall can be whatever it’s convenient for it to be,” said John Kirkhope, who wrote a doctoral thesis about the duchy in 2013. “If you want to inquire into its privileges, you can’t, because it’s supposedly a private estate, in the same way I have a private bank account. But when it’s convenient, it’s also a crown property, so that for example it doesn’t pay the same rate of tax as any similar entity would pay.”
The duchy’s powers go even further.
It inherits the possessions of anyone who dies in Cornwall without a will or next of kin, a power that in some years has yielded hundreds of thousands of pounds. The duchy funnels the money into charities after deducting its own costs.
The duchy owns the right to mine in Cornwall, even under private homes — a right that it registered to extend as recently as eight years ago.
Most extraordinarily in critics’ eyes, the duchy has the right to be consulted on any legislation that affects its interests. Over the years, governments have interpreted that to include bills about hunting, road safety, children’s rights, marine access and wreck removal. A 2008 planning law exempts the duchy from ever committing a planning offense.
A similar carve-out gives Prince Charles unusual power over homeowners on the Isles of Scilly, a picturesque archipelago off the southwestern coast of England, and in Newton St. Loe, a village near Bath.
People like Mr. Davis own their homes there, but the duchy owns the ground on which they are built. Such an arrangement is not uncommon in England, but homeowners would usually have the option to buy the land. Not on some duchy land.
That enables the duchy to charge small ground rents to homeowners grandfathered into long leases, like Mr. Davis. Once those leases lapse, it can also raise rents to thousands of pounds per year, making it difficult for people to sell or mortgage their homes.
In one case, a couple built a house on the Isles of Scilly, only for the duchy to force them to sign a lease bequeathing the property to Prince Charles’s estate upon their death, said Lord Berkeley, a Labour peer in the House of Lords.
“They set up an arrangement where tenants are too frightened to do anything, for fear of losing their property,” said Lord Berkeley, who tried unsuccessfully to push through a bill in 2017 ending the duchy’s special landlord status and removing its tax exemptions. “In what we like to think of as a democratic country, that doesn’t seem fair to me.”
Nor have lawmakers approved of how Prince Charles handles the duchy’s accounting. He pays rent to the duchy for Highgrove, his country house. But because the money goes into the duchy’s revenues, it empties back into Prince Charles’s pocket as income.
The duchy said the prince paid rent, at market value, to avoid the duchy taking on costs it shouldn’t. Still, he is effectively paying it to himself — and allowing himself to take a tax deduction.
“He pays money out from one pocket and receives it back in the other pocket,” Mr. Kirkhope said.
Polls show that the public is dubious of government funding for anyone outside the core line of succession. And Harry and Meghan’s departure has intensified the focus on how and why the public pays for the royals’ lifestyle.
Palace aides have indicated that Prince Charles may dip into his personal investments, rather than the Duchy of Cornwall, to fund Harry and Meghan’s lives in Canada. But that and much else remains unresolved, including how long British taxpayers will pay for the couple’s security.
“It’s the third rail of public discussions about the royal family: royal finances,” said Patrick Jephson, a former private secretary to Diana. “It is royal people and royal advisers’ least favorite topic of conversation.”
Mr. Davis says that among people the Isles of Scilly, around where he lives and pays his rent to the duchy, the mood has hardened against Prince Charles.
“They hate him basically,” Mr. Davis said. “Most people can’t abide him. All the money he gets goes out of the island. And that’s how he can afford to give Harry £2.3 million to live his lifestyle.”

WASHINGTON — President Trump told his national security adviser in August that he wanted to continue freezing $391 million in security assistance to Ukraine until officials there helped with investigations into Democrats including the Bidens, according to an unpublished manuscript by the former adviser, John R. Bolton.
The president’s statement as described by Mr. Bolton could undercut a key element of his impeachment defense: that the holdup in aid was separate from Mr. Trump’s requests that Ukraine announce investigations into his perceived enemies, including former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his son Hunter Biden, who had worked for a Ukrainian energy firm while his father was in office.
Mr. Bolton’s explosive account of the matter at the center of Mr. Trump’s impeachment trial, the third in American history, was included in drafts of a manuscript he has circulated in recent weeks to close associates. He also sent a draft to the White House for a standard review process for some current and former administration officials who write books.
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Multiple people described Mr. Bolton’s account of the Ukraine affair.
The book presents an outline of what Mr. Bolton might testify to if he is called as a witness in the Senate impeachment trial, the people said. The White House could use the pre-publication review process, which has no set time frame, to delay or even kill the book’s publication or omit key passages.
Over dozens of pages, Mr. Bolton described how the Ukraine affair unfolded over several months until he departed the White House in September. He described not only the president’s private disparagement of Ukraine but also new details about senior cabinet officials who have publicly tried to sidestep involvement.
For example, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo acknowledged privately that there was no basis to claims by the president’s lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani that the ambassador to Ukraine was corrupt and believed Mr. Giuliani may have been acting on behalf of other clients, Mr. Bolton wrote.
Mr. Bolton also said that after the president’s July phone call with the president of Ukraine, he raised with Attorney General William P. Barr his concerns about Mr. Giuliani, who was pursuing a shadow Ukraine policy encouraged by the president, and told Mr. Barr that the president had mentioned him on the call. A spokeswoman for Mr. Barr denied that he learned of the call from Mr. Bolton; the Justice Department has said he learned about it only in mid-August.
And the acting White House chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, was present for at least one phone call where the president and Mr. Giuliani discussed the ambassador, Mr. Bolton wrote. Mr. Mulvaney has told associates he would always step away when the president spoke with his lawyer to protect their attorney-client privilege.
During a previously reported May 23 meeting where top advisers and Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, briefed him about their trip to Kyiv for the inauguration of President Volodymyr Zelensky, Mr. Trump railed about Ukraine trying to damage him and mentioned a conspiracy theory about a hacked Democratic server, according to Mr. Bolton.
Charles J. Cooper, a lawyer for Mr. Bolton, declined to comment. The White House did not provide responses to questions about Mr. Bolton’s assertions, and representatives for Mr. Johnson, Mr. Pompeo and Mr. Mulvaney did not respond to emails and calls seeking comment on Sunday afternoon.
Mr. Bolton’s submission of the book to the White House may have given the White House lawyers direct insight into what Mr. Bolton would say if he were called to testify at Mr. Trump’s impeachment trial. It also intensified concerns among some of his advisers that they needed to block Mr. Bolton from testifying, according to two people familiar with their concerns.
The White House has ordered Mr. Bolton and other key officials with firsthand knowledge of Mr. Trump’s dealings not to cooperate with the impeachment inquiry. Mr. Bolton said in a statement this month that he would testify if subpoenaed.
In recent days, some White House officials have described Mr. Bolton as a disgruntled former employee, and have said he took notes that he should have left behind when he departed the administration.
Mr. Trump told reporters last week that he did not want Mr. Bolton to testify and said that even if he simply spoke out publicly, he could damage national security.
“The problem with John is it’s a national security problem,” Mr. Trump said at a news conference in Davos, Switzerland. “He knows some of my thoughts. He knows what I think about leaders. What happens if he reveals what I think about a certain leader and it’s not very positive?”
“It’s going to make the job very hard,” he added.
The Senate impeachment trial could end as early as Friday without witness testimony. Democrats in both the House and Senate have pressed for weeks to include any new witnesses and documents that did not surface during the House impeachment hearings to be fair, focusing on persuading the handful of Republican senators they would need to join them to succeed.
But a week into the trial, most lawmakers say the chances of 51 senators agreeing to call witnesses are dwindling, not growing.
Democrats, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Chuck Schumer, the minority leader, said the Bolton manuscript underscores the need for him to testify, and the House impeachment managers demanded after this article was published that the Senate vote to call him. “There can be no doubt now that Mr. Bolton directly contradicts the heart of the president’s defense,” they said in a statement.
Republicans, though, were mostly silent; a spokesman for the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, declined to comment.
Mr. Bolton would like to testify for several reasons, according to associates. He believes he has relevant information, and he has also expressed concern that if his account of the Ukraine affair emerges only after the trial, he will be accused of holding back to increase his book sales.
Mr. Bolton, 71, a fixture in conservative national security circles since his days in the Reagan administration, joined the White House in 2018 after several people recommended him to the president, including the Republican megadonor Sheldon Adelson.
But Mr. Bolton and Mr. Trump soured on each other over several global crises, including Iranian aggression, Mr. Trump’s posture toward Russia and, ultimately, the Ukraine matter. Mr. Bolton was also often at odds with Mr. Pompeo and Mr. Mulvaney throughout his time in the administration.
Key to Mr. Bolton’s account about Ukraine is an exchange during a meeting in August with the president after Mr. Trump returned from vacation at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J. Mr. Bolton raised the $391 million in congressionally appropriated assistance to Ukraine for its war in the country’s east against Russian-backed separatists. Officials had frozen the aid, and a deadline was looming to begin sending it to Kyiv, Mr. Bolton noted.
He, Mr. Pompeo and Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper had collectively pressed the president about releasing the aid nearly a dozen times in the preceding weeks after lower-level officials who worked on Ukraine issues began complaining about the holdup, Mr. Bolton wrote. Mr. Trump had effectively rebuffed them, airing his longstanding grievances about Ukraine, which mixed legitimate efforts by some Ukrainians to back his Democratic 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton, with unsupported accusations and outright conspiracy theories about the country, a key American ally.
Mr. Giuliani had also spent months stoking the president’s paranoia about the American ambassador to Ukraine at the time, Marie L. Yovanovitch, claiming that she was openly anti-Trump and needed to be dismissed. Mr. Trump had ordered her removed as early as April 2018 during a private dinner with two Giuliani associates and others, a recording of the conversation made public on Saturday showed.
In his August 2019 discussion with Mr. Bolton, the president appeared focused on the theories Mr. Giuliani had shared with him, replying to Mr. Bolton’s question that he preferred sending no assistance to Ukraine until officials had turned over all materials they had about the Russia investigation that related to Mr. Biden and supporters of Mrs. Clinton in Ukraine.
The president often hits at multiple opponents in his harangues, and he frequently lumps together the law enforcement officials who conducted the Russia inquiry with Democrats and other perceived enemies, as he appeared to do in speaking to Mr. Bolton.
Mr. Bolton also described other key moments in the pressure campaign, including Mr. Pompeo’s private acknowledgment to him last spring that Mr. Giuliani’s claims about Ms. Yovanovitch had no basis and that Mr. Giuliani may have wanted her removed because she might have been targeting his clients who had dealings in Ukraine as she sought to fight corruption.
Ms. Yovanovitch, a Canadian immigrant whose parents fled the Soviet Union and Nazis, was a well-regarded career diplomat who was known as a vigorous fighter against corruption in Ukraine. She was abruptly removed last year and told the president had lost trust in her, even though a boss assured her she had “done nothing wrong.”
Mr. Bolton also said he warned White House lawyers that Mr. Giuliani might have been leveraging his work with the president to help his private clients.
At the impeachment trial, Mr. Trump himself had hoped to have his defense call a range of people to testify who had nothing to do with his efforts related to Ukraine, including Hunter Biden, to frame the case around Democrats. But Mr. McConnell repeatedly told the president that witnesses could backfire, and the White House has followed his lead.
Mr. McConnell and other Republicans in the Senate, working in tandem with Mr. Trump’s lawyers, have spent weeks waging their own rhetorical battle to keep their colleagues within the party tent on the question of witnesses, with apparent success. Two of the four Republican senators publicly open to witness votes have sounded notes of skepticism in recent days about the wisdom of having the Senate compel testimony that the House did not get.
Since Mr. Bolton’s statement, White House advisers have floated the possibility that they could go to court to try to obtain a restraining order to stop him from speaking. Such an order would be unprecedented, but any attempt to secure it could succeed in tying up his testimony in legal limbo and scaring off Republican moderates wary of letting the trial drag on when its outcome appears clear.
Katie Benner, Nicholas Fandos and Sheryl Gay Stolberg contributed reporting.
Katie Benner and Nicholas Fandos contributed reporting.

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Corbin Hiar, E&E News and Lisa Riordan Seville - NBC News - Thursday, January 16, 2020

PHILADELPHIA — Last May, an air monitor on the border of the East Coast's largest oil refinery recorded a level of benzene, a cancer-causing gas, more than 21 times the federal limit.
In June, an explosive early morning fire rocked the Philadelphia Energy Solutions refinery, terrifying nearby residents. Weeks after the disaster, as PES filed for bankruptcy and wound down operations, another air monitor in the network that rings the facility quietly registered the same sky-high reading for benzene. Long-term exposure to the sweet-smelling chemical has been linked to leukemia, lymphoma and a host of blood and immune system disorders.
That monitor, on the edge of this 1,300-acre complex of steel and pipe, is across an expressway from schools, parks, a strip mall and hundreds of homes.
Charles Reeves lives less than a mile and a half north of both air monitors in the largely African American neighborhood of Grays Ferry. A community organizer in this area of low-slung row houses, Reeves keeps tabs on the news in the neighborhood. He said no one informed him or his neighbors that they may have been exposed to benzene until he was contacted by NBC News, E&E News and the Investigative Reporting Workshop, a nonprofit newsroom based at American University.
"Poor people don't get information," said Reeves, 61, a grandfather and prostate cancer survivor. "Whichever way that blows, we're going to be affected."
The refinery disaster in June unleashed over 5,200 pounds of deadly hydrofluoric acid. A 4 a.m. leak inside a unit that produced high-octane gasoline caused a series of explosions that sent a ball of fire into the night sky. One blast hurtled a slab of metal bigger than a school bus across the river. Quick action by workers meant no one was killed or seriously injured. The refinery ceased production in August.
The catastrophic blaze provided a stark illustration of the hazards the refinery has long posed for Philadelphians. But even in its wake, officials gave no formal notice to residents that the same facility had registered among the highest benzene levels of any refinery in the country, according to data submitted to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Philadelphia Energy Solutions, or PES, is just one of a dozen refineries of the more than 130 refineries operating across the country that have consistently exceeded the EPA's "action level" of 9 micrograms per cubic meter of air, according to data compiled and analyzed by the Environmental Integrity Project, a watchdog group that advocated for the fenceline monitoring program now required at all refineries.
High benzene readings registered by the network of monitors around a refinery don't necessarily translate to dangerous levels in the community, according to the city and EPA. But former EPA officials who examined the hard-to-access data compared ongoing high benzene concentrations around the Philadelphia refinery and near other top benzene emitters to levels more often seen in China and India. And they criticized local and federal officials for failing to address the problem or adequately warn the public.
That information could also come into play for investors eyeing the South Philadelphia site. Its creditors are looking to unload the refinery at a closely watched bankruptcy auction on Friday, as both residents and former workers watch from the sidelines.
The pollution threat from the bankrupt refinery didn't begin last spring or end in July 2019 for Reeves and his neighbors.
Opened in the late 1800s and long operated by Sunoco, the refinery was temporarily saved from insolvency in 2012 by a group of investors led by the Washington, D.C.-based private-equity giant Carlyle Group.
For more than a year and a half prior to the fire, air monitors near the blast site and along the perimeter of the refinery registered troubling levels of benzene, according to "fenceline" data submitted by refineries to the EPA.
The data, which EPA began posting early last year, shows the refinery exceeded the benzene emissions limit for all but 12 weeks from the end of January 2018 to late September 2019 — an 86-week span.
That may have exposed thousands of Philadelphians to troubling levels of benzene, including children like those who often play in the streets of Grays Ferry.
More than 297,000 people live within three miles of the refinery. About 60 percent of those residents are minority, and nearly 45 percent live below the poverty line, according to census data.
"The residents of South Philadelphia bear the environmental cost of the refinery and get almost none of the benefit," said Peter DeCarlo, an atmospheric scientist who spent the last eight years at Philadelphia's Drexel University. "It's a classic environmental justice issue."
In June, PES sent local and federal regulators a plan for how it aimed to cut benzene emissions, which the company mainly blamed on leaks and a neighboring facility.
Since then, city officials have not spoken publicly about the high benzene readings or the plan for addressing those emissions.
Bankruptcy battle looms
Now Reeves and other clean air advocates are fighting to keep the 335,000 barrel-per-day refinery closed.
They would like to see the site, which has been home to oil storage facilities since shortly after the Civil War, converted to a less polluting commercial use. At least one advocacy group, Philly Thrive, is planning to bus opponents of reopening the refinery to New York City, where the PES auction will be held in the offices of the refinery's bankruptcy lawyers.
Advocates have also pressured Mayor Jim Kenney to oppose bids that include fossil fuel components. The Delaware bankruptcy court that's overseeing the refinery sale has granted his administration a consulting role during the auction.
Labor unions, on the other hand, want to see the refinery back up and running. Most of the hulking refinery was unaffected by the blast. More than 1,000 oil workers lost their jobs last year when PES abruptly closed, citing financial fallout from the fire.
They argue the refinery benefited the Philadelphia region.
"There's an idea out there that we weren't good neighbors. But that's false," said Ryan O'Callaghan, a laid-off worker and former president of United Steelworkers Local 10-1.
"We all live around the refinery," said O'Callaghan, who grew up in Grays Ferry and now lives seven miles away. "I belong to a social club in South Philly. Most of my time is spent there."
PES first filed for bankruptcy in 2018 to shed debt it blamed on EPA's ethanol mandate for gasoline.
PES is currently owned largely by its former creditors, according to bankruptcy filings. Credit Suisse Asset Management and Bardin Hill Investment Partners, which each control more than a quarter of the company, are now the primary owners. Carlyle maintains a 15 percent stake and Energy Transfer Operating LP, Sunoco's parent company, owns just over 7 percent.
Soon after the refinery shut down, Mayor Kenney created an expert panel to help the city evaluate its options. But Kenney didn't inform the Refinery Advisory Group of the benzene issue, said Mark Alan Hughes, the chairman of the advisory group's environment and science committee.
Potential buyers of the PES refinery or investors in the land should know about the benzene problems and potential legal liability for the emissions, Hughes said.
"If it becomes clear that there is a very strong lawsuit here, then it's going to affect your bidding," said Hughes, who is also the faculty director of the University of Pennsylvania's Kleinman Center for Energy Policy.
Carlyle and Credit Suisse Asset Management didn't respond to requests for comment on the refinery's benzene emissions or how they could affect the sale. Bardin Hill declined to comment and Energy Transfer Operating LP directed questions to PES, which also didn't respond to inquiries.
James Garrow, a spokesman for Philadelphia's Department of Public Health, said in a statement that "it is a well-known fact that refineries emit benzene during operation." He said that a city-run air monitor a half mile from the refinery didn't record excessive benzene emissions after the disaster and that any "responsible bidder" would seek out such information.
Reeves, the community organizer, was critical of the city's outreach efforts around the refinery sale.
"The same people, the same companies that allowed the stuff to happen are trying to decide what happens in the future," he said.
"Where are the people who still live here, who can't afford to leave?" he asked. "We're still getting kicked to the back."
Americans at risk
PES and most other U.S. refineries began monitoring benzene emissions on Jan. 30, 2018, to comply with a 2015 EPA rule that tightened emission standards for refineries.
In proposing the regulation, EPA argued that benzene — a naturally occurring component of crude oil and still a key ingredient in gasoline — is mainly released by leaking equipment. It's a good "indicator of other air toxics emitted from fugitive sources," the agency said.
When the rule took effect, PES was planning to go public and warned potential investors that the "fenceline monitoring requirement may lead to corrective action measures, including the installation of additional pollution controls, even if the refinery is otherwise in compliance with its air emissions permits."
The benzene monitoring requirement forced PES and other refinery operators to place air monitoring tubes around the borders of their refineries and then measure and analyze the amount of the carcinogenic gas that those monitors detected every two weeks. For refineries whose average annual emission topped the action level of 9 micrograms of benzene per cubic meter of air, the regulation required operators to determine the cause of the refinery's excess emissions and create a plan to reduce them.
"We project that no refinery should exceed that fenceline benzene concentration action level if in full compliance" with the stricter emissions standards, the rule said.
In weeks before and after the 2019 fire, some of the monitors along the fenceline repeatedly hit 190 micrograms per cubic meter. The emissions levels, however, could have been even higher since PES noted that the reading "exceeds instrument calibration range."
"Oh my god," said Bob Sonawane, a toxicologist who worked in EPA's Office of Research and Development for more than three decades. "The numbers that you're saying are very, very high, like some things happening in China, India and many other places."
In a corrective action plan required by the refinery rule, PES blamed many of its high benzene readings on a different company's petroleum terminal across the Schuylkill River as well as its own "benzene tanks and benzene unloading operations" that it argued are "nonrefinery operations and therefore not sources to be controlled." The refinery operator also promised to conduct additional sampling and inspections and work with the neighboring facility.
Garrow, the health department spokesman, said the city didn't receive the PES document until three days after the June 21 refinery disaster. But even then, city officials did not tell the public. At a press conference on June 25 about the refinery fire, Mayor Kenney told reporters "there are no findings that would suggest a threat to public health."
Eric Schaeffer, executive director of the Environmental Integrity Project and former head of EPA's enforcement office, cast doubt on the refinery's attempt to explain away its high benzene readings.
"The monitoring they report is supposed to screen out background levels, including what comes from upwind sources," he said.
The plan also doesn't appear to be working. As of Sept. 25, 2019 — the last biweekly period EPA has posted online and more than two months after PES stopped producing fuel — the refinery's average annual emission level was 49 micrograms per cubic meter. That's higher than any other refinery that reported data to EPA and over five times the benzene action level.
Yet Sonawane, the toxicologist, said even the federal action level is "not protective of public health."
A hazard summary he worked on while at EPA warned that anyone exposed to air with more than 0.45 micrograms per cubic meter of benzene over their lifetime would have a greater than one in 1 million chance of developing cancer "as a direct result of continuously breathing air containing this chemical." That risk increases to more than 10 in 1 million at the level set by the federal refinery rule.
In Grays Ferry, that means residents, over a lifetime of exposure, may have been breathing air of a quality that the EPA estimates could be linked to an incidence of cancer of more than 100 adults out of a population of 1 million.
Children in the neighborhood could be at even greater risk of developing certain cancers, Sonawane estimated, citing research published after 2003, when EPA last reviewed the health dangers posed by benzene.
For example, a 2015 analysis in the American Journal of Epidemiology found "children might be affected at lower benzene levels than adults."
Silent regulators
Public health advocates are critical of Philadelphia and EPA for staying mostly silent about the benzene levels in South Philadelphia and around the country.
"That makes no sense," said Schaeffer, with the Environmental Integrity Project. "It's bad government and bad corporate management."
Schaeffer criticized Mayor Kenney for failing to tell residents about the benzene problem and for not talking about the company's response, as the powerful investors who own the refinery try to sell it off.
Schaeffer was also critical of his former agency. While city officials may have incentives to keep quiet because of the impending sale, Schaeffer said that the "EPA shouldn't have quite the same constraints."
"That's why you have feds overseeing all these state and local programs," he said. "So they should be on the hook, too."
Public health and the environment are a top concern for EPA, the agency said in an email, and it has worked to reduce emissions from all types of facilities, including refineries. When it comes to informing the public, EPA said it often lets local partners take the lead.
Asked about the agency's response to the PES plan to reduce benzene emissions, the agency said that it "does not comment on ongoing potential enforcement activities unless and until we take a public action."
For his part, Reeves expects little to change for the residents of Grays Ferry and other fenceline neighborhoods.
"The [bankruptcy] judge right now is making decisions without the input of the community," Reeves said while his grandchildren and a group of boys he mentors played on the street outside his home. He added that refinery workers had "told us to move."
But moving, he said, is not an option for many people in his neighborhood.

Sir David Attenborough warns of climate 'crisis moment'
By David Shukman
Science editor
16 January 2020

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China needs to tackle climate change - Attenborough
"The moment of crisis has come" in efforts to tackle climate change, Sir David Attenborough has warned.
According to the renowned naturalist and broadcaster, "we have been putting things off for year after year".
"As I speak, southeast Australia is on fire. Why? Because the temperatures of the Earth are increasing," he said.
Sir David's comments came in a BBC News interview to launch a year of special coverage on the subject of climate change.
Scientists say climate change is one of several factors behind the Australian fires; others include how forests are managed and natural patterns in the weather.
Sir David told me it was "palpable nonsense" for some politicians and commentators to suggest that the Australian fires were nothing to do with the world becoming warmer.
"We know perfectly well," he said, that human activity is behind the heating of the planet.
BBC announces new climate change coverage
What is climate change?
Where we are in seven charts
Greenland's ice faces melting 'death sentence'
Download the updated BBC Energy Briefing (10.4MB)
What does Sir David mean by 'the moment of crisis'?
He's highlighting the fact that while climate scientists are becoming clearer about the need for a rapid response, the pace of international negotiations is grindingly slow.
The most recent talks - in Madrid last month - were branded a disappointment by the UN Secretary-General, the British government and others.
Decisions on key issues were put off and several countries including Australia and Brazil were accused of trying to dodge their commitments.

"We have to realize that this is not playing games," Sir David said.
"This is not just having a nice little debate, arguments and then coming away with a compromise.
"This is an urgent problem that has to be solved and, what's more, we know how to do it - that's the paradoxical thing, that we're refusing to take steps that we know have to be taken."
What are those steps?
Back in 2018, the UN climate science panel spelled out how the world could have a reasonable chance of avoiding the most dangerous temperature rises in the future.
It said that emissions of the gases heating the planet - from power stations and factories, vehicles and agriculture - should be almost halved by 2030.

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Australia has been badly hit by bushfires
Instead, the opposite is happening.
The release of those gases is still increasing rather than falling and the key gas, carbon dioxide, is now in the atmosphere at a level far above anything experienced in human history.
As Sir David put it: "Every year that passes makes those steps more and more difficult to achieve."
Why does this matter right now?
This year is seen as a vital opportunity to turn the tide on climate change.
The UK is hosting what's billed as a crucial UN summit, known as COP26, in Glasgow in November.
Ahead of that gathering, governments worldwide are coming under pressure to toughen their targets for cutting emissions.
That's because their current pledges do not go nearly far enough.

Assuming they are delivered as promised (and there's no guarantee of that), there could still be a rise in the global average temperature of more than 3C by the end of the century, compared to pre-industrial levels.
The latest assessment by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) lays bare the dangers of that.
It suggests that a rise of anything above 1.5C would mean that coastal flooding, heatwaves and damage to coral reefs would become more severe.
And the latest figures show that the world has already warmed by just over 1C.
What happens next?
As things stand, further heating looks inevitable.
"We're already living in a changed world," according to Professor Ed Hawkins of the University of Reading, a scientist whose depictions of global warming have often gone viral on social media.
He uses bold coloured stripes to show how much each year's temperature is above or below average - different shades of red for warmer and blue for colder.



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Our Planet Matters: Climate change explained
The designs now adorn T-shirts, scarves and even a tram in Germany.
At the moment, Prof Hawkins uses dark red to denote the highest level of warming, but regions such as the Arctic Ocean have achieved maximum level year after year.
Such is the scale of change that he's having to search for new colours.
"I'm thinking about adding dark purple or even black", he told me, to convey future increases in temperature.
"People might think climate change is a distant prospect but we're seeing so many examples around the world, like in Australia, of new records and new extremes."

What else is on the environmental agenda this year?
The natural world, and whether we can stop harming it.
While most political attention will be on climate change, 2020 is also seen as potentially important for halting the damage human activity is having on ecosystems.
Sir David has a blunt explanation for why this matters: "We actually depend upon the natural world for every breath of air we take and every mouthful of food that we eat."
World leaders are being invited to the Chinese city of Kunming for a major conference on how to safeguard Nature.

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The northern white rhino (seen here) is down to just two animals, making it "functionally" extinct
A landmark report last year warned that as many as one million species of animals, insects and plants are threatened with extinction in the coming decades.
A more recent study found that the growth of cities, the clearing of forests for farming and the soaring demand for fish had significantly altered nearly three-quarters of the land and more than two-thirds of the oceans.
One of the scientists involved, Prof Andy Purvis of the Natural History Museum in London, says that by undermining important habitats, "we're hacking away at our safety net, we're trashing environments we depend on".
He points to the impact of everything from the use of palm oil in processed food and shampoo to the pressures created by fast fashion.
And while the need for conservation is understood in many developed countries, Prof Purvis says "we've exported the damage to countries too poor to handle the environmental cost of what they're selling to us".
The gathering in Kunming takes place in October, a month before the UN climate summit in Glasgow, confirming this year as crucial for our relations with the planet.
Follow Davidon Twitter.

What is climate change?
Climate-related words and phrases explained
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This Is How To Overcome Impostor Syndrome: 4 Secrets From Research
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Eric Barker Unsubscribe
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Barking Up The Wrong Tree

January 16th, 2020


Before we commence with the festivities, I wanted to thank everyone for helping my first book become a Wall Street Journal bestseller! To check it out, click here.



This Is How To Overcome Impostor Syndrome: 4 Secrets From Research


(Click here to read on the blog)


Impostor Syndrome is like being a secret agent -- in the most depressing way imaginable.

No matter how hard you work, no matter how much you achieve, you still feel like a fraud. You still question your ability and you're waiting to be exposed. More formally, it's often referred to as "a failure to internalize success." You attribute your accomplishments to luck or insane amounts of effort, but never talent or skill.

Ask yourself these questions:

From The Secret Thoughts of Successful Women: Why Capable People Suffer from the Impostor Syndrome and How to Thrive in Spite of It:
Do you chalk your success up to luck, timing or computer error?
Do you believe “if I can do it, anybody can”?
Do you agonize over the smallest flaws in your work?
Are your crushed by even constructive criticism, seeing it as evidence of your ineptness?
When you do succeed, do you secretly feel like you fooled them again?
Do you worry that it’s a matter of time before you’re “found out”?
If you're nodding your head, you're not alone. 70% of people have felt it at one time or another -- with some experiencing it chronically. And some very big names have been afflicted with it:

Albert Einstein:

...the exaggerated esteem in which my lifework is held makes me very ill at ease. I feel compelled to think of myself as an involuntary swindler.
Maya Angelou:

I have written eleven books, but each time I think, “Uh-oh, they’re going to find out now. I’ve run a game on everybody, and they’re going to find me out.”

I can only dream that I will one day reach their level of astounding fraudulence. Jeez, look how inferior my fraudulence is to theirs. I'm a fraud at being a fraud... Seriously, there's a lesson here: these two make it abundantly clear that no amount of achievement is going to convince you. That approach won't work.

And much of the advice we get isn't helpful either. Merely "telling yourself you're good enough" has all the scientific rigor of a Hallmark Card. Self-affirmations are as likely to cure this as they'd cure baldness. We need real answers, not platitudes.

Funny thing is there's a whole pile of scientific research that addresses this issue. It's called "self-efficacy." The concept was coined by Albert Bandura. He's widely considered the most influential living psychologist and one of the most cited of all time. If there was a Mount Rushmore for psychology, his face would be up there. Bandura's book is Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control.

Now I hate when people use phrases like "learning your own value" because while it sounds really nice, nobody explains how to actually do it.

Time to roll up your sleeves, bubba. We're gonna fix that.

Let’s get to it...


So What The Heck Is Self-Efficacy?

It's “perceived ability to succeed at a given task.” It's a belief, not an objective measure of ability. But it’s a thermonuclear powered belief and has an eye-popping effect on your life, whether you know what it is or not.

From Self-Efficacy:

Perceived self-efficacy refers to beliefs in one’s capabilities to organize and execute the courses of action required to produce given attainments… People’s beliefs in their efficacy affect almost everything they do: how they think, motivate themselves, feel, and behave.

It can even be more important than skill. No doubt, actual skills are critical. If you have self-efficacy but no real driving ability, I'm not getting in your Uber. But that said, if you don’t believe you can accomplish something, you probably won’t try. And even if you do try, when you meet resistance, you’ll give up.

And the effects of self-efficacy beliefs have been found in a staggering number of diverse arenas: academic grades, weight management, social behavior, health habits, occupational performance, etc.

From Self-Efficacy:

Where performance determines outcome, efficacy beliefs account for most of the variance in expected outcomes. When differences in efficacy beliefs are controlled, the outcomes expected for given performances make little or no independent contribution to prediction of behavior.

"Oh, so it's self-esteem and confidence."

That's not what I said. Don't put words in my mouth... Um, actually, I just put words in your mouth. ANYWAY, point is, self-efficacy is distinct from self-esteem and confidence, otherwise I promise I'd be writing a post on self-esteem and confidence because explaining new words is hard when old ones work fine.

Self-efficacy is your belief about your ability to accomplish a specific goal while self-esteem is a judgment of personal worth. My self-efficacy about my ability to eat ice cream might be high, but I don’t think that makes me a good person. And confidence is more generalized, while self-efficacy is task-specific. You can be a very confident person and still not have self-efficacy when it comes to performing an appendectomy.

So how does this relate to impostor syndrome? Well, impostor syndrome is fundamentally a belief issue. You could be saying, “I don’t have impostor syndrome, I actually suck at this and my results confirm that.” Instead, you're saying, "I'm aware my performance is solid but I don't believe it's due to talent."

Impostor syndrome is about your lack of belief in your skill at something. Having self-efficacy is a healthy amount of belief in your skill at something. If we increase the latter, we get rid of the former. We need to get you to believe that your ability -- not luck or mere hard work -- is the primary active ingredient in your success.

(To learn more about how you can lead a successful life, check out my bestselling book here.)

So how do we do boost self-efficacy? Bandura lays out 4 things that will do the job. They all have big, fancy academic sounding names that make my spellchecker go heavy on the red underlining. We're gonna translate them in to English-that-people-actually-speak because I don't like migraines any more than you do.

Let's start with the one that is, in general, most powerful...


1) Enactive Mastery Experience

When most people perform well they attribute it to skill on their part. (Maybe they are too inclined to attribute it to personal skill, but that's a topic for a different, much more cynical post.)

But if you're dealing with impostor syndrome, this natural tendency to assume you're a virtuoso is on the fritz. You do a great job and the default attribution bucket isn't skill -- it's luck, overwork or invisible elves that accomplished everything while you were napping.

Many interpret enactive mastery experience as "keep working hard and you'll see it's your natural ability that's causing the results." If that was true, impostor syndrome wouldn't exist. In fact, if you don't actively change your default attributions, merely seeing yourself succeed isn't going to fix impostor syndrome -- it's going to make it worse.

From Self-Efficacy:

...the impact of performance attainments on efficacy beliefs depends on what is made of those performances. The same level of performance success may raise, leave unaffected, or lower perceived self-efficacy depending on how various personal and situational contributors are interpreted and weighted (Bandura 1982a).

So what do we have to do? You need to notice the system you use. Your process. Yes, you have one. No, I have not been spying on you.

You probably take it for granted. Or it's a blur as you anxiously drive yourself crazy due to deadlines or trying to meet insanely high standards. It's probably habitual at this point and therefore often subconscious, like driving a car, but there are things you do each and every time that are producing these consistently good results. (And if you're not consistently getting good results then you don't have impostor syndrome, and I'm not getting in your Uber.) Everyone does not do these things you do in your process and that's one of the reasons not everyone gets the results you do.

Look at the system as separate from you. Like the recipe that makes a good cake. When you have a solid recipe, or good instructions, you feel in control. And what's control? It's the exact opposite of luck. When you recognize that you have a system, and the system is producing those results consistently, the depressing magical thinking of impostor syndrome fades. You have a new "why" that's responsible for those solid results.

What would your reaction be if I told you, "I took 10 weeks of tennis lessons and my tennis luck increased dramatically!" You'd laugh. Systems and training don't increase luck. They increase skill. You're just not noticing or acknowledging the system you use. (And if I was your system I'd be pissed that Mr. Luck and Ms. Overwork were undeservedly getting all the credit around here.)

When work is a blur it's easy to think you just got lucky. But I'm guessing you've noticed that people who are very confident about their abilities can often explain them to you. They're aware of their system. Step outside yourself and notice what you do that gets the results. As the great Carl Jung once said: “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

And what if that doesn't convince you? Then set up an experiment. If you attribute your results to your lucky rabbit's foot but you can repeatedly achieve the same results without it, then it's hard to argue that dismembered mammal limbs are responsible for your success.

From Self-Efficacy:

When there is much subjectivity in judging the adequacy of one’s performances, as in social competency, an illusorily created low sense of efficacy endures despite repeated performance attainments that indicate personal capabilities (Newman & Goldfried, 1987). Dislodging a low sense of personal efficacy requires explicit, compelling feedback that forcefully disputes the preexisting disbelief in one’s capabilities.

"Oh, I'm a fraud. I only do well because of hard work." Fine. Set a time limit on how much effort you put in and see if the world comes crashing down. But before you start, think about your system and how you will do the things you always do in that shorter time frame.

If you get 90% of your usual results in half the time, that's not "hard work." That's talent.

(To learn the two-word morning ritual that will make you happy all day, click here.)

Okay, "enactive mastery blahbity blah" is the method that works best in general. But what's the method that works best for people who are unsure of themselves -- like people with impostor syndrome?


2) Vicarious Experience

In English: "Watching other talented people work."

If you're reading this, you take your skills for granted. When you see that people who do similar things to you do well and a much larger group of people who do not do those things fail, you'll realize your system works and there are other (inferior) methods that you're choosing not to use. This means you have control. Control means not-luck.

Problem is, when people with impostor syndrome look at others, they usually look at the wrong people. Often they compare themselves to people who have zero talent and have great difficulty finding their way out of the house every morning. Yeah, this makes you feel better but it doesn't convince you you're talented -- it just means you're not an idiot. Other times people with impostor syndrome compare themselves to the top 1% which acts like a fast acting injection of depression concentrate, and is utterly debilitating.

Instead, think Goldilocks: you're not looking to compare yourself to "too cold" or "too hot", you're looking for "just right." Bandura says you'll get the best results by observing others who are your peers or slightly better than you.

From Self-Efficacy:

Persons who are similar or slightly higher in ability provide the most informative comparative information for gauging one’s own capabilities (Festinger, 1954; Suls & Miller, 1977; Wood, 1989).

How does this help? Plain and simple: it's inspiring. "If they can do it, I can do it." They have a system. It works. You have a system (if you take the time to notice it) and it works. You'll probably see what they do is pretty similar to what you do. You both get good results and you're peers. It's not luck.

You can even leverage vicarious experience without the vicarious part: it's called "self-modeling." Watch yourself working successfully. Look at good work that you've done. Smart emails you've sent. Great presentations or reports you've put together. Anything that resonates with you and makes you say, "Hey, this is impressive work -- oh, and I'm the one who did it."

From Self-Efficacy:

Self-modeling has remarkably wide applicability and often succeeds with inveterate self-doubters where other instructional, modeling, and incentive approaches fail (Dowrick, 1991; Meharg & Wolterdorf, 1990). Apparently, it is hard to beat observed personal attainment as a self-persuader of capability.

Let your "best self" be your role model.

(To learn how to deal with passive-aggressive people, click here.)

We don't just want to watch others work, we also want to get help from our friends. But the trick is getting the right kind of support that will kill your impostor syndrome and not increase it...


3) Social Persuasion

Translation: support and encouragement. For people who have impostor syndrome, simply seeing results isn't enough to boost belief in their ability... but seeing results and having others praise them does the trick.

From Self-Efficacy:

...skill transmission and success feedback alone achieved little with individuals beset with strong doubts about their capabilities. But skill transmission with social validation of personal efficacy produced large benefits.

Tell your friends you're going through a tough time and could use their support. There are three tips from the research you'll want to keep in mind here:

1) If the positive feedback is insincere, you'll see right through it thanks to the negative, skeptical lens of impostor syndrome. It has to be legit praise.

2) Support from experts is preferable. Praise from someone who doesn't understand the arena is easily dismissed.

3) Positive feedback about your hard work is nice but them praising your ability is better. If you keep getting praised for your hard work, it's easy to conclude that you don't have talent.

From Self-Efficacy:

Evaluative feedback highlighting personal capabilities raises efficacy beliefs. Feedback that the children improved their capabilities through effort also enhances perceived efficacy, although not as much as being told that their progress shows they have ability for the activity.

You don't want white lies about your lightsaber abilities, you want sincere compliments. And you'd like them from Yoda. And it's nice to hear you worked hard but it's better to hear, "The Force is strong with this one."

(To learn the 4 harsh truths that will make you a better person, click here.)

We've covered systems, models, and support. What's left? Oh, feelings. You can never get away from the power of feelings, like it or not...


4) Emotional / Physiological States

Your feelings and moods matter. And if you think they don't matter then you're in real trouble because they're still influencing you and you're not even noticing it.

Not getting enough sleep, being hungry or just having a bad day can exacerbate impostor feelings, but unless you take the time to establish those are the underlying causes, you're just going to feel awful and default to blaming yourself for being a fraud.

From Self-Efficacy:

Mood activates the subset of memories congruent with it through an associative mood network. Thus, a negative mood activates thoughts of past failings, whereas a positive mood activates thoughts of past accomplishments… According to Teasdale (1988), negative episodes and depressed mood activate a global view of oneself as inadequate and worthless rather than just activating unhappy memories.

Here's the problem: we are absolutely terrible at figuring out the true causes of our feelings. You think you know why you're feeling something but it's just inference. You think you're cranky because of what your partner said but it's actually because you've been running on five hours of sleep for the past three nights.

But here's the upside: you can now use your knowledge of this emotional blurriness to your advantage. Since the cause and meaning of feelings is all about interpretation, you can choose to interpret them differently. The court of emotions has an appeals process.

If you can reframe the feelings into something transient or unrelated to the task at hand then your self-efficacy doesn't plummet.

From Self-Efficacy:

...if the meaning of an affective state is altered by attributing it to a nonemotional or transient irrelevant source, the state does not affect evaluative judgment because it is considered uninformative for the judgment at hand. For example, interviewers who attribute their accelerated heart rate to having rushed up a set of stairs are less likely to wonder about their capabilities to manage the interview situation than interviewers who read their pounding heart as a sign of distress.

Yes, you're fidgety before the big meeting. But that physical feeling has to be interpreted. You don't have to believe it's nervousness because you're a faker. It could be excitement or anticipation.

Reframe your feelings and you can reframe impostor syndrome... and that can reframe your life.

(To learn more about how to make friends as an adult, click here.)

Okay, we're all Bandura'd out. We covered a lot, time for the sum up -- and we'll also answer the looming question: even if you beat impostor syndrome today, how do you know that this newly found self-efficacy will last?


Sum Up

This is how to overcome impostor syndrome:
Enactive mastery experience: Recognize your system. Tennis lessons don't increase tennis luck.
Vicarious experience: If they can do it, you can do it.
Social persuasion: I, for one, happen to think The Force is very strong with you. So there.
Emotional/physiological states: Reframe feelings. You're not antsy because you want this blog post to end, you're just so very very excited to be reading it.
People are afraid that even if they develop self-efficacy they'll backslide into impostor feelings. Don't worry. If you really go out of your way to push hard on the 4 principles above, self-efficacy can become as stubbornly lodged in your brain as the feeling that you're a fraud is now.

I don't know about you but I'm all for positive feelings that are irrationally resistant to change.

From Self-Efficacy:

They continue to adhere to the fictitiously instilled efficacy beliefs even after the persuasory basis for those beliefs has been thoroughly discredited. Efficacy beliefs created arbitrarily survive behavioral experiences that contradict them for some time (Cervone & Palmer, 1990). Lawrence (1988) provides suggestive evidence that efficacy beliefs created by fictitious success may gain strength through a cognitive self-persuasion process.

The old saying is "fake it till you make it." But with impostor syndrome, you've already made it. The race is over. You won.

Now it's time for you to finally enjoy it.


***And if you want a daily insight, quote or laugh, you should follow me on Instagram here.***


Email Extras

Findings from around the internet...

+ Want to know which qualities made children more likely to earn more -- or less -- as adults? Click here.

+ Want to know what makes top performers different from most people? Click here.

+ Want to know if its better to tackle easy or hard tasks first? Click here.

+ Miss last week's post? Here you go: New Neuroscience Reveals 5 Secrets That Will Make You Emotionally Intelligent.

+ Want to know what makes kids more likely to experience burnout? Click here. (And many thanks to the great Dan Pink for some of the above links.)

+ You read to the end of the email. I appreciate it. (If you skipped down here you *are* an impostor. Tsk-tsk.) Crackerjack time: What happens when you ask the users of Reddit which accounts are bots? For the very clever answer, click here.

Thanks for reading!
Eric

PS: If a friend forwarded this to you, you can sign up to get the weekly email yourself here.

My Friends! My Friends!

Our man in the slot has disappeared!
Is it a miracle or Hockey magic!
Without our man in the slot this game will be tragic!
Our coach must be sleeping
behind the bench!
Please wake him up
And stop him from dreaming!
Wait! Wait!
Our man in the slot
Our player most Holy!
I see him now in front of their goalie!
He is taking his shot...
And by God what a shot!
Let us bow our heads and pray...
Hooray! Hooray!
It's not what I feared!
This game is not tragic!
This game is not weird!
With the magic of Hockey our man in the slot
Has re-appeared!
And scored the winning goal!

ATTENTION LEADERS IN WASHINGTON AND IRAN AND AROUND THE WORLD.

STOP THE BLOODSHED, PLEASE!
YOU WILL NEED ALL YOUR SOLDIERS TO HELP SAVE THE PLANET FROM FIRES AND FLOODING
CREATED BY CLIMATE CHANGE.
THEY WILL NEED PICKS AND SHOVELS AND MEDICAL SUPPLIES FOR THE WORK AHEAD AND
IF YOU WISH TO SLOW THE HUMAN POPULATION GROWTH ON THIS PLANET EARTH, SIMPLY RETURN TO THE CONCEPT OF
NON-VIOLENT BIRTH CONTROL WHERE BETTER EDUCATION SYSTEMS INCLUDE BIOLOGY AND SOCIAL FAMILY PLANNING METHODS
FOR BOTH SEXES.

CREATING WAR IS EASY COMPARED TO REBUILDING AFTER A DEVASTATING
EARTHQUAKE OR A TYPHOON OR A HURRICANE AND SO WHY CREATE MORE DEVASTATION WHEN
THERE IS SO MUCH ALREADY HAPPENING AROUND THE WORLD.
AUSTRALIA IS BURNING AND THEY COULD CERTAINLY USE A FEW MILLION UNARMED SOLDIERS TO HELP PUT
OUT THE FOREST FIRES, TODAY.

TODAY, SCIENCE IS PROVING HOW THE RISING TEMPERATURE OF THE PLANET IS MELTING OUR POLAR ICE CAPS AND CREATING
FLOODING IN MANY LOW LYING COUNTRIES AROUND THE WORLD. IN REACTION TO THIS YOUNG PEOPLE AROUND THE WORLD ARE MAKING THIER
VOICES HEARD AND THEY ARE ACTIVATING TO STOP OUR INDUSTRIAL POLLUTION AND TO SLOW GLOBAL WARMING.
lISTEN TO THE CHILDREN, PLEASE!

GOVERNMENTS AROUND THE WORLD DO HAVE THE MILITARY ABILITY TO CREATE WARS AND TO MURDER EACH OTHER
BUT PLEASE LEAVE INNOCENT CHILDREN OUT OF YOUR WAR PLANS! I SUGGEST ONLY THE MOST VICIOUS MILITARY
LEADERS FACE UNARMED AGAINST EACH OTHER ON AN ABANDONED ISLAND IN ORDER TO TALK PEACE OR PLAY CHESS.
I ALSO SUGGEST THEY DO NOT LEAVE THE ISLAND UNTIL THEY HAVE SIGNED MULTIPLE AND BINDING PEACE TREATIES.
THANKS FOR READING!
SIGNED: NELSON RAGLIONE. DIRECTOR OF THE WORLD FRIENDLY PEACE AND ECOLOGY MOVEMENT. HUMAN4US2.BLOGSPOT.COM
WE ARE ALSO ON FACEBOOK.
P.S. THANK YOU GRETA THUNBERG!

THE GREAT GRETA THUNBERG.

REUTERS
WORLD NEWS
DECEMBER 9, 2019 / 9:40 AM / UPDATED 8 HOURS AGO
Activist Thunberg turns spotlight on indigenous struggle at climate summit
Isla Binnie

MADRID (Reuters) - Teen activist Greta Thunberg turned a spotlight on the struggles of the world’s indigenous peoples against climate change
on Monday, appearing at a U.N. summit alongside other young campaigners furious at the West’s failure to tackle the crisis.

Indigenous communities from the United States to South America and Australia have mounted increasingly vocal campaigns against new fossil fuel projects
in recent years, finding common cause with the young European activists inspired by Thunberg.

Pursued by a media scrum ever since arriving at the two-week conference last week after crossing the Atlantic by catamaran,
Thunberg stayed largely silent during her first official appearance at the summit, to allow a young Native American, a Ugandan,
a Philippine and a Pacific islander to speak.

“Their rights are being violated across the world and they are also among the ones being hit the most and the quickest by the climate and environmental emergency,”
Thunberg said of indigenous communities.

Indigenous activists argue that their communities contribute almost none of the fossil fuels emissions driving climate change,
but bear the brunt of extreme weather and loss of wildlife.

Rose Whipple, of the Santee Dakota, native to Minnesota in the United States, called for an approach based on tradition and technology.

“The climate crisis is a spiritual crisis for our entire world. Our solutions must weave science and spirituality and traditional ecological knowledge
with technology,” she said.

The meeting to address the implementation of a 2015 pact struck in Paris to limit temperature rises to well below 2 degrees celsius was shifted to Madrid
after riots over inequality broke out in Chile, which had been due to play host.

“While countries congratulate each other for their weak commitments the world is literally burning out,” said Chilean activist Angela Valenzuela.

The low-lying Marshall Islands became the first nation to comply with a requirement in the Paris Agreement to increase its planned emissions reductions in 2018,
a move bigger emitters are under pressure to follow by 2020.

Carlon Zackhras, representing the atoll nation, said rising sea levels threatened his home, which is only two meters above the waterline.

“We are having to deal with issues we did not create,” he said.

Editing by Matthew Green and Giles Elgood

Our Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Dear Brittany Andrew-Amofah: 

 Our present school systems across Canada are based on providing a work-force for Canadian industrial companies.
Unless those companies are creating projects and systems that benefit our natural environment and do not destroy and pollute the environment, we are programming children to act as workers for polluting and dangerous industrial status-quo companies! 

 We need to provide new and better and different school environments where nature is the teacher and is helped along by University trained Botanists and Zoologists and Biologists.

 One project example is a large Glass Green House filled with birds and plants and children and computers that explain and describe the species of each plant and bird and of course, our own HomoSapient specie.

 
 Music would play in the Green-Houses to help grow the plants and the birds and the children.
They would include computers explaining what birds make what sounds and which instruments make what notes. Earphones would be provided for private listening.

 Our present status-quo school systems are based on the old imperial hierarchy and that must be changed if we are to protect Mother Earth. There are so many better non-political and non-exploitive methods of education that urgently need to be researched and implemented.
Thanks for reading!

Signed: Nelson Joseph Raglione
Director of the World Friendly Peace and Ecology Movement.. human4us2.blogspot.com

The Greenpeace Challenge.

Taking on the oil industry
Inbox
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Jesse Firempong, Greenpeace Canada Unsubscribe
Nov 24, 2019, 1:28 PM (2 days ago)

to me


Nelson,

As Venice floods and wildfires rage in Australia and California, the realities of the climate crisis are growing starker every day.

Challenging the industries responsible is a global effort. That’s why I wanted to share some of the ways that Greenpeace is working alongside local communities in multiple countries to achieve a world beyond oil.

Here’s a whirlwind tour of some of the places Greenpeace supporters are taking action for a transition from oil to clean energy:

Investigating fossil fuel companies in the Philippines

In September, Greenpeace activists and representatives from climate-impacted communities blockaded a Shell refinery in Batangas City. Filipinos have also successfully petitioned the Philippines’ Commission on Human Rights to launch a landmark investigation into 47 major fossil fuel producers’ responsibility for climate-related human rights abuses following 2013’s Typhoon Yolanda (Haiyan), which claimed the lives of more than 6,300 people and affected millions more. The results of the investigation are expected any time in the coming months.

Campaigning for a Green New Deal in the US

In the US, Greenpeace is campaigning for a Green New Deal, which includes a just transition to renewable energy, creating millions of green jobs and halting any major oil, gas, and coal expansion projects. Taking action alongside grassroots groups, Greenpeace has opposed new pipelines, blocked the largest fossil fuel thoroughfare in the country, and stood up against unjust, anti-protest laws pushed forward by oil companies. These kinds of laws not only intend to silence voices, they disproportionately affect Black, Brown, Indigenous, trans, and queer people.

Defending the Great Australian Bight

Greenpeace is campaigning to defend the Great Australian Bight, an area off Australia’s southern coast where Norwegian company Equinor has set sights on drilling for oil. The Bight is a breeding ground for endangered southern right whales and contains the Great Southern Reef, 85% of whose animals can’t be found anywhere else in the world. Equinor's latest drilling plan was rejected by the government in November but the company has a chance to resubmit it. Hundreds of thousands of people have written to Australia’s government and to Equinor to say the project will never get their blessing to drill in this treasured oceanscape.

Standing up for the Amazon Reef in Brazil and French Guiana

When an incredible reef was discovered at the mouth of the Amazon River between Brazil and French Guiana, it was clear to us that it had to be protected. French company Total was interested in drilling for oil, but after two million people took action Brazil’s government denied Total’s license. Even after this historic win, another oil company (BP) wants to open up a new oil frontier in the region. Greenpeace is campaigning to protect the reef from oil development.

Challenging the car industry in Germany

In Frankfurt, at the International Motor Show in September, Greenpeace worked with other environmental and sustainable transport groups to organize a massive protest against the internal combustion engine. About 25,000 people participated (including 18,000 on bikes!), highlighting the role of the car industry in driving the climate emergency — and calling for renewable-powered public transport, walking and cycling infrastructure.

Supporting Indigenous communities in Russia

In Russia, Greenpeace is supporting Indigenous communities opposed to the impact of oil development on their livelihoods and culture. The majority of the Nenets and Khanty people in Siberia were not properly consulted when Russian oil company Surgutneftegas made plans to drill in the wetlands of the village of Numto, where many among the reindeer-herding Indigenous communities oppose the project.

Scaling oil company headquarters in New Zealand

Although the New Zealand government banned new offshore oil and gas exploration permits in 2018, they did not revoke permits that were released before the ban. Austrian oil giant OMV still holds 17 permits that, if exploited, would be catastrophic for the climate and risk disastrous oil spills in New Zealand’s pristine waters. This past summer, after Greenpeace activists staged a 10 hour climb on the OMV headquarters in Wellington, over 100 people handed in a petition to OMV.

Upholding the rights of future generations in Norway

The Norwegian government is taking advantage of the melting ice caused by climate change to open up a new oil frontier in the Arctic. The Norwegian Constitution that says that the State shall ensure for everyone, including future generations, the right to a safe and healthy environment. That is why Greenpeace and Nature and Youth brought a case against the Norwegian Government. Oil is Norway’s biggest export, and it is burned all over the world. This makes Norway the 7th biggest exporter of emissions on the planet.

Occupying oil rigs in the UK

We’re in the midst of a climate emergency, but oil company BP intends to drill for 30 million barrels of new oil off the coast of Scotland. That why’s this summer Greenpeace climbers prevented BP’s rig from leaving the Scottish coast for five days. This was followed by a further stand off in the North Sea between the rig and the Greenpeace ship, Arctic Sunrise, which prevented the rig from reaching the drill site.

What can you do here in Canada?

Here in Canada, Greenpeace is working with frontline Indigenous communities to stop the Trans Mountain tar sands pipeline and tanker project. Three First Nations, Coldwater, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh, are taking this battle to court. They’re asking you to support their legal challenge with a donation as they defend their drinking water, sacred sites, and coastal waters. They go to court in December and could halt this destructive pipeline and tanker project with their courageous action.

All funds donated to their Pull Together legal challenge fund before December 3rd will be matched by a group of generous funders up to $50,000. Please make a donation today in support by visiting Pull Together and have your gift doubled.

Taking on one of the world’s most powerful industries is no small task, but when millions of us come together, to stand for what we believe is possible, it sends a powerful message to decision makers.

We are the generation that ends the age of oil.

Jesse

Communications Officer, Greenpeace Canada

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We don't accept any money from companies or governments so we can be independent and challenge anyone who threatens the planet or peace.
To help us keep fighting climate change, defending our oceans and protecting ancient forests, please make a regular donation.
Thank you!

This Is How To Be Resilient: 4 Secrets To Grit When Life Gets Hard

Barking Up The Wrong Tree November 25th, 2019 Before we commence with the festivities, I wanted to thank everyone for helping my first book become a Wall Street Journal bestseller! To check it out, click here. This Is How To Be Resilient: 4 Secrets To Grit When Life Gets Hard (Click here to read on the blog) "I quit" is rarely said flatly. Whether it's said to yourself or others, it's usually "I QUIT!" or "Ugh. I quit..." (cue *sad trombone*). And that's because quitting is rarely done at the height of rational deliberation. It's usually based on feelings in the moment. You feel fear, anger, anxiety, impatience or frustration and then suddenly you snap and it's time to call it a day. We talk about grit and other global perspectives on resilience but the minutiae of actually coping with intense negative feelings in the moment is often left vague. And that sucks because it's usually the hardest part. We've discussed how to deal with problematic thoughts, but that's just the warmup before the championship match. Negative feelings are much more powerful, harder to question and very difficult to disentangle your mind from. We identify with our emotions so readily. "I feel it, so it must be true" is often our default setting. The whole rational deliberation part gets skipped. Feelings are summary judgment. We usually don't even second guess them, and even if we do, they often simply overwhelm us. You can sometimes ignore the Chatty Cathy in the back of your skull criticizing your every action, but feelings grab you by the throat. Literally. Anger, panic or grief can make you feel like you can't breathe. Heart going like a piston, about to explode out of your chest, and you're asking yourself, “Oh, this is what a heart attack feels like...” Instead of persisting with our goals, we quit, procrastinate or do whatever the feeling dictates to escape the discomfort. It's a literal form of "emotional blackmail." But we need to stay in the game when things get hard. Often, resilience is associated with being tough and rigid. But that's not gonna get you very far with feelings. We're not trying to be invulnerable. That's impossible. We're going to be flexible. You cannot avoid or resist all pain in life. You'd have to have a head full of prions to believe that. But we can live with our discomfort better. We can manage it and have a better relationship with it. So how do we do that? We're gonna turn to one of the leading, research-backed mindfulness tools out there: Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. We'll draw from five different books on the subject (Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, A Liberated Mind, The Confidence Gap, and ACT Made Simple) because: Feelings are tricky I am, apparently, a masochist. Let's get to it... The Bizarro World Paradox Of Feelings Why do we have such trouble dealing with feelings? Because the problem-solving rules that work for the normal world don’t apply here. Normally, when a problem comes up we can always avoid it, deny it, or kill it. But feelings are inside that closed system called your mind which has a different rulebook. From Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: If I told you, ‘Vacuum the floor or I’ll shoot you,’ you’d immediately start vacuuming the floor. If I said, ‘Paint the house or I’ll shoot,’ you’d soon be painting. That’s how the world outside the skin works. But if I simply say, ‘Relax, or I’ll shoot you,’ not only would the directive not work, but it would have the opposite effect. Trying to deliberately control your brain with your brain can be an M.C. Escher-on-shrooms-level nightmare. From A Liberated Mind: ...in order to get rid of something deliberately, we have to focus on it. If we are working to get rid of something, we need to check to see if it’s gone. When we do that with internal events laid down by our own history, such as memories, we have now reminded ourselves of the events connected with these memories yet again. When we do this with echoes of the past, we increase their centrality and build out the history we have with them. Any attempt at suppression only amplifies the difficulty. So we avoid, procrastinate or quit which has disastrous effects on long-term goals and happiness. And that means you're not in control of your life anymore. You're not doing or achieving what is meaningful to you. Life is no longer a pursuit of happiness and fulfillment, it's a pursuit of whatever is not-pain. From Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: There is an inherent paradox in attempting to avoid, suppress, or eliminate unwanted private experiences in that often such attempts lead to an upsurge in the frequency and intensity of the experiences to be avoided (Wenzlaff & Wegner, 2000). Since most distressing content by definition is not subject to voluntary behavioral regulation, the client is left with only one main strategy: emotional and behavioral avoidance. The long-term result is that the person’s life space begins to shrink, avoided situations multiply and fester, avoided thoughts and feelings become more overwhelming, and the ability to get into the present moment and enjoy life gradually withers. Some people might say they can suppress feelings. Yeah, you're correct. You can. But research shows you can't suppress the bad without also suppressing the good. If you want your life to be as numb as your mouth during dental work, by all means, go ahead. So how do we control our negative feelings? Easy answer: You can't. Control is the problem, not the solution. Any rigid attempt to resist negative feelings won't work in the Willy Wonka land of emotions. The only way to win the tug of war with feelings is to drop the rope. We must go from avoidance to acceptance. I've said it before and I'll say it again: acceptance does not mean caving and giving in. You don't have to like, agree with or obey the feelings. But you can't ignore, avoid or fight them. Acceptance means allowing them to unfold without judgment, resistance or compliance. From Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: Acceptance, as we mean it, is the voluntary adoption of an intentionally open, receptive, flexible, and nonjudgmental posture with respect to moment-to-moment experience. Acceptance is supported by a “willingness” to make contact with distressing private experiences or situations, events, or interactions that will likely trigger them. If you wait until you feel good to do what is important, you may be waiting the rest of your life. (In fact, research shows this is exactly why procrastination happens.) To escape the finger trap puzzle you don't pull out, you have to push in. In fact, studies show the ability to accept negative emotions has bigger benefits than job satisfaction or emotional intelligence. From Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life: People who are more emotionally willing to experience negative emotional experiences enjoy better mental health and do better at work over time. The effect is significantly greater than the effects of job satisfaction or emotional intelligence (Bond and Bunce 2003; Donaldson and Bond 2004). Some might complain that if we can't change feelings and all we do is accept them, we'll be trapped in a world of hurt. Nope. Because after we accept, we expand. We can't diminish the feeling voluntarily, but we can expand our attention to give us greater perspective and dilute its influence. A tablespoon of salt in a glass of water tastes awful; a tablespoon of salt in a swimming pool isn't even detectable. (To learn more about how you can lead a successful life, check out my bestselling book here.) Okay, all this sounds fine but how do we do it? We're gonna “name it and tame it.” NAME is an acronym, by the way: Notice, Acknowledge, Make Space, and Expand. Let's get started... 1) Notice Notice how you’re feeling. Yes, that sounds dumb and obvious. No, it’s not. When someone says, “Calm down” in the heat of an argument, what's the inevitable response? “I AM CALM!!!” We often don't know how we're really feeling in the moment unless we check. Scan your body. Consciously notice how you're feeling. Tense? Breathing shallow? Heart racing? Focus on the raw sensations. You don't want to identify with the feelings ("I am anxious") you just want to sense what's going on ("There are some anxious feelings.") The feelings are not you, just like an ache in your elbow does not make you "an achy person." Be like a scientist studying it. Where in your body do you feel the anxiety? Back of your head? Center of your chest? If this feeling was an object, what would it look like? Observe it. Don’t judge it. It’s not good or bad; it’s just a sensation. Negative feelings actually have a very short half life if we don't feed them. You know this but you forget it like clockwork all the time. Now the anxiety or fear or anger is going to try to recruit your brain to help it out. And your brain will play along because brains hate unemployment. They love to start spinning stories. The feeling wants to sustain itself. And it will, by getting your brain thinking, “I can’t stand feeling this way,” “I have to get rid of this feeling.” And then you're halfway to procrastination or quitting. The feeling wants you to fuse with it; to go from being "an angry feeling" to "I AM ANGRY!" That basically gives the anger or anxiety the steering wheel, and all your goals go out the window. Once your brain gets engaged it will start spitting out thoughts and weaving them into a story that will fuel the emotion. You'll wrestle with it or justify it or deny it, and all that does is keep it alive. Just return to exploring the feeling. Study it, but don't identify with it. Sensation, not rumination. Remember, feelings don't last forever if you don't perpetuate them. A bad feeling is the single most important thing in the universe... until you realize it's your feelings that are telling you that. (To learn the two-word morning ritual that will make you happy all day, click here.) It's hard to stay focused on the feeling without complying with its wishes to run away, to give up or to punch somebody. The feeling is everywhere, screaming about its importance. You can’t get away from it and it will tell you complying with its wishes is all that will bring you relief. Basically, it's like the marketing campaign for a Marvel movie. We're gonna need help from step 2... 2) Acknowledge Label the feeling. Anxiety. Fear. Grief. And don't say, "I am anxious", say, "I'm noticing anxious feelings." You don't want to identify with it and have it hijack your brain. This is what leads to stupid decisions you later regret. Look at your feelings instead of from your feelings. It's a thing you're experiencing, not what you are. Neuroscientists and hostage negotiators both know about the power of labeling feelings. Giving it a name isolates it and reduces its power. It gets your amygdala to chill and engages your prefrontal cortex to curtail the emotion. (To learn how to deal with passive-aggressive people, click here.) You've labeled it. It's contained. It's not burning quite as strong -- but you're still uncomfortable. Okay, time to... 3) Make Space You want to make space for it inside your mind. You're not letting it hijack you. You're inviting it to pull up a chair. Don't fight or avoid or comply. Let the feeling be. You may be screaming to yourself, "I DID WHAT THE BLOGGER-MAN SAID, NOW WHY HASN'T IT GONE AWAY YET?" Wrong. Bad. You're rabidly pulling on a door marked "PUSH." Remember the paradox. You cannot kill it or suppress it. And if that's what you find yourself trying to do, none of this will work. You must accept it. From The Confidence Gap: The purpose of expansion is to make room for difficult feelings— to accommodate them, not to evict them. So if you’re practicing expansion hoping it will get rid of your fear, then you’re still in avoidance mode, still trying to avoid or get rid of it. And as you’ve seen already, that won’t work. You can’t reverse hundreds of millions of years of evolution that have primed you to feel fear when facing a challenge. Trying to get rid of your fear will only amplify it. Remind yourself why you're doing this. There are wonderful things in this life. To experience them you can't just run away from anything that upsets you. That's not the path to resilience. From ACT Made Simple: Also remember that acceptance is always in the service of valued action, so we can enhance it by explicitly linking it to values: “Are you willing to make room for this feeling if this will enable you to do what really matters to you?” (To learn the 4 harsh truths that will make you a better person, click here.) You've noticed the feeling, labeled it and made some space for it. Final step? 4) Expand We can't get rid of the feeling or avoid it -- but we can expand our attention so that its relative importance shrinks. This happens naturally anyway but we're actively assisting the process, instead of waiting for some greater problem to supersede it, or it to slowly fade. Look at it like a stage play. Right now, the theater is dark with a huge spotlight on that feeling. We're not yanking the feeling off the stage with a hook; we're bringing up the theater lights so the rest of the play is visible. Take a deep breath and turn your attention to the world around you. The feeling is welcome to stay where it is. This is not distraction; you're just inviting more people to the party. From Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life: Look around you when you are exposing yourself and observe what else is happening in the world around you. If there are people there, notice them. If there are objects, or buildings, or plants or trees, notice them. Do not do this to diminish the thing you are struggling with. The point is to add to your experience— in addition to these feelings there is also life going on all around you... You'll start to get perspective back. You won't feel the need to be reactive to the feeling, running away or obeying its dictates. You can make wiser decisions in line with your values, instead of raging, wallowing, procrastinating or quitting. You intuitively know there's more to life than the one feeling that is seizing your attention. But we forget this when we're in the grip of it and often make poor decisions as a result. Overfocus on a feeling is like looking at the world through a straw. So accept and expand. You don't want to miss the big show. (To learn how to have a long awesome life, click here.) Okay, we've covered a lot. Let's round it all up and learn the proper way to motivate yourself to actually follow through and do all this when the moment calls for it... Sum Up This is how to be resilient: The Feelings Paradox: Problem-solving doesn't work in the Wonka-ville of feelings. Accept and expand. Notice: If we always knew how we felt people wouldn't shout "I'M NOT ANGRY!!!" during arguments. Scan your body to really notice what's going on. Acknowledge: Labeling is a powerful way to reduce the impact of negative feelings and to prevent yourself from identifying with them. Make Space: Invite the feeling to pull up a chair. (They're not used to this. It's probably how a telemarketer feels when someone is nice to them.) Expand: Bring up the stage lights. Dilute the salt water. Engage with the world outside your head. "I don't want to procrastinate anymore." "I don't want to get anxious and paralyzed by fear." "I don't want to quit when the tension gets high." While well-meaning, these goals are lame. They're “dead person’s goals.” A dead person’s goal is anything a corpse can do better than you can. In other words, they're defined by a negative, what you're not going to do. Killing bad habits and reducing friction is great, but what's it worth if you don't know where you're headed? As Nietzsche said, "Don't tell me what you're free from; tell me what you're free for." From ACT Made Simple: In ACT, we want to set “living person’s goals”— things that a live human being can do better than a corpse. To move from a dead person’s goal to a living person’s goal, you can ask simple questions like these: “So let’s suppose that happens. Then what would you do differently? What would you start or do more of? And how would you behave differently with friends or family?” “If you weren’t using drugs, what would you be doing instead?” “If you weren’t yelling at your kids, how would you be interacting with them?” “If you weren’t having panic attacks or feeling depressed, what would you be doing differently with your life?” We don't want to miss all the great things in life because we're afraid of emotional pain. We want to be able to take more and more of the world in -- but have tools to cope with difficult feelings when they arrive. That's how we persist and grow. Know what happens when you can deal with negative emotions and keep pursuing "living person's goals"? You start really living. ***And if you want a daily insight, quote or laugh, you should follow me on Instagram here.*** Email Extras Findings from around the internet... + Want to know the five ways to boost resilience in your children? Click here. + Want to know a professional photographer's simple secrets for taking more flattering photos? Click here. + Want to learn how to boost your children's creativity and problem-solving skills? Click here. + Miss last week's post? Here you go: How to Be Happier Without Really Trying: 4 Odd Secrets From Research. + Want to know how to give people advice they'll be delighted to take? Click here. + You made it to the end of the email. Now that's resilience. And I thank you. Okay, Crackerjack time: Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, HBO Max, Amazon Video, Apple TV, Showtime... MAKE IT STOP. JUST WANNA WATCH TV. Luckily, Polygon has put together a great comparison guide to all the major streaming services so you can make a good decision on which to subscribe to. Check it out here. Thanks for reading! Eric PS: If a friend forwarded this to you, you can sign up to get the weekly email yourself here.

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