Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
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What are the common struggles in finding life direction?
At the University of Missouri, psychologist Ken Sheldon studies the science of knowing what to want, how to set your sights on targets that will actually make you happy if you achieve them. Ken Sheldon, welcome to Hidden Brain. Hey, I'm happy to be here. I want to take you back to 1981, Ken. You just finished college and moved to Seattle. You wanted to become a musician. You started a band.
How did it go? rock musicians can be kind of flaky and unreliable and we were all in our 20s and everybody had different goals everybody was kind of self-centered and they might not have been committed the way we thought that they were or maybe the guitarist slept with the singer unexpectedly and You know, there's a lot of things that can just get in the way of having a smoothly functioning unit. We just weren't able to make the agreements and follow through with them that we would have needed to make real progress.
I understand that at one point you were recording songs for a radio song contest and things didn't quite go smoothly.
Yeah, I had recorded my tracks on the song that we were going to submit to this contest. And I left for a weekend hiking trip, expecting that the bandmates would put their tracks down so we could send in the song the next Monday. And I got back and nobody had done anything. And it was very disappointing. I remember walking in the rain, it was Seattle, wondering what to do next, and coming to the decision that this was probably not going to give me a way to make a living, and that music, or at least this particular band episode, was not going to work out. And that I needed to get serious about maybe something else.
How did Ken Sheldon navigate his early career choices?
What happened to Ken, of course, has happened to millions of people. Maybe it's happening to you right now. You set your heart on something and then find the thing you wanted doesn't look anything like the thing you thought you wanted. So Ken did what lots of us do. He flailed around looking for something new. He signed up for a master's program.
Yeah, it was a program at Seattle University in existential phenomenological psychotherapy. Wow. Yeah. That's a lot of syllables, but it is a certain tradition within existential philosophy and counseling psychology. It's a legitimate approach to helping people. And I was very interested in that program, not so much because I wanted to become a therapist. but more because I've always just been very theoretically oriented and these were new ideas that I didn't understand that seemed like they might be very relevant to this search for clarity, the search for what to do with myself.
Again, Ken was doing what lots of us do. We look to the outside world to give us answers to questions about what we should do with our lives. Ken's foray into existential phenomenological psychotherapy was short-lived. The answers he was looking for were not forthcoming.
I really enjoyed the year. My fellow classmates, we formed a tight cohort. We did things together. I learned a lot. And the main thing I learned was that I didn't think the answers I was looking for were going to come from that area of knowledge. So what did you do? Well, I once again stopped doing that. I dropped out after the first year. And in the end, I felt kind of stuck.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What are the common struggles in finding life direction?
1:39–3:34
2
How did Ken Sheldon navigate his early career choices?
3:34–39:36
3
What is the significance of intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation?
39:36
4
How can societal expectations misguide our goals?
23:31
5
What insights can we learn from Ken's research on happiness?
23:13
6
What was the outcome of the EST training?
13:11–34:54
7
How do cultural messages shape our aspirations?
34:54
8
What findings emerged from studies on law students' well-being?
31:35–47:05