“How to Be” in the Age of Obama

"Change" and "Hope" are the buzzwords of the new Administration. They're also the buzzwords for survival in the 21st Century...at the individual level, the business level, and perhaps (given the unrest in our post-atomic age) the level of our species. Whether you're a poet, a teacher, an entrepreneur, a linebacker, a parent, or a mid-level corporate manager, you will not thrive going forward in the Age of Obama unless you're optimistic, creative, and flexible.

Think about these facts:
• There are currently over 150,000 books available on amazon.com that deal with optimism
• Positive Psychology was the most popular course offered at Harvard last year
• Most Fortune 500 companies and many government agencies have hired a creativity consultant within the past year
• The number of Business Schools offering courses in creativity has doubled in the past five years.
• Forty-three books and 407,000 websites are devoted to creative parenting alone

It's clear that our current culture values - indeed insists on - optimism and creativity at the personal and institutional level. Clearly (as demonstrated by the number of businesses seeking bailouts from us the taxpayers), any corporation mired in the business plan of the last century is passé. Corporations (and their employees) must find innovative ways to survive. Gone is job security, company loyalty, and the gold watch and pension you expected at age 65. Speaking of which, the very concept of retirement itself is quickly becoming a thing of the past. Most retirement-age individuals I know are not going out to pasture on the golf links of Florida; they're getting involved in start-ups, volunteering at non-profits, teaching yoga, skydiving, and organizing political fund-raisers.

Look at how our families have changed. The makeup of the 20th Century family included a mom, a dad, two and a half kids, and a dog. Today's prototypical family may include two moms, four kids (adopted from Africa, Colombia, Viet Nam, and Russia), and a tree (instead of the dog, whose rights would be violated by pet ownership).
Look also at how education has changed. Students at liberal arts colleges in the 20th Century majored in Classics, World History, English Literature, or Psychology (based on Freudian theory). Today, my students major in Women's Studies, Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, World Health, Urban Planning, African and American Studies, and Psychology (where by the way, Freud is barely mentioned).

If you're an artist or a musician today, you need to be more than the talented painter, sculptor, or composer that got you noticed in the last century; today you need to be a brand, a marketing commodity. One of my creativity students (a talented artist herself), for example, conducts a course for artists, teaching them how to dress, interview, and develop a web "presence" to get their stuff "out there."

One more example of the change (and also the hope) to come: psychologists are no longer limited to face-to-face office meetings with clients to conduct therapy. New and innovative ways to deliver help to clients is available through teletherapy, web-based therapy, and in-home computer programs (for instance, check out afterdeployment.org, a free site devoted to helping troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan deal with mental health issues in an anonymous environment).

The way I see it is that we have two choices:
1) We can complain about the fast-paced changes occurring in our institutions and businesses and long for "the way things used to be" (this choice will soon render us irrelevant).
2) We can indeed meet these changes with optimism, flexibility, and creativity.
In future posts, I'll be discussing some of the strategies we can use to inject optimism and creativity into our personal and professional lives. Change is upon us. Only by actively, creatively, and hopefully taking part in change, can we manage it and direct it to the benefit of ourselves and our society.