When a person takes the Quality of Life (QOL) Inventory, he or she rates each of the 16 areas of life according to how important it is (from 0 to 2) and how satisfied he or she is with it (from -3 to +3). Then the individual scores are combined according to a scoring algorithm to yield an overall QOL score that can be compared to national norms, showing how this persons satisfaction compares to the general population.
What interests me is the way the weighting works, where the importance level is multiplied by the satisfaction level for each item.
If the importance level is 0 (Not Important), the area of life is essentially removed from consideration. It can’t raise or lower the overall QOL score, even if it is an extreme value (-3 or +3). That seems reasonable. For people with no desire to have children or have contact with children, it wouldn’t make sense to lower their satisfaction levels because they had no children. It’s a ways of saying this area of life is irrelevant for me.
What I find particularly interesting is the way marking areas of life Important (1) rather than Extremely Important (2) puts a ceiling on overall QOL scores. Consider a person who thinks all items are important. That person’s maximum possible range of total weighted values is -48 to +48 (16 times +/-3 times 1). Another person who rates all areas of life Extremely Important (2), has a maximum possible range of -96 to +96 (16 times +/-3 times 2).
This implies two different approaches to raising life satisfaction scores:
- For an area with a negative satisfaction score, one can work to raise the satisfaction score or reduce the importance score or both.
- For an area with a positive satisfaction score, one can still work to raise the satisfaction score. But instead of reducing the importance score, one could work to raise it.
Does it make sense to think about modifying both sides of the QOLI like this, or should one view the importance levels as fixed representations of the way a given person weighs the 16 areas of life?
If it makes sense to modify the satisfaction level as well, what are the positive interventions targeted at doing so?
I know this may be like “teaching to the test” but I think the question is an interesting one: Is a person with more Extremely Important areas of life endowed with greater potential life satisfaction than a person with fewer Extremely Important areas?
Categories: Positive Interventions · Scoring QOLI
Mike Frisch and I have signed an amazing book deal with Sterling Press of Barnes & Noble to write a book about life lists, which is one of my passions. Here is an article from today’s USA Today Life section in which this is mentioned:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/religion/2008-01-14-bucket-list_N.htm
Also, Mike and I will be prominently mentioned in an article in the McClatchy newspaper chain that will come out on Sunday on the same topic.
Happy New Year!
Caroline Miller
Categories: Goals and Values · News
I have been thinking about what we learn in relationship over and over: what our experience teaches us is self-specific and not exactly generalizable to anyone else. So love means offering ideas and concern in a spirit of humility that we don’t really know the exact right answer for anyone else, even the people closest to us.
What Any Lover Learns
Water is heavy silver over stone.
Water is heavy silver over stone’s
Refusal. It does not fall. It fills. It flows
Every crevice, every fault of the stone,
Every hollow. River does not run.
River presses its heavy silver self
Down into stone and stone refuses.
-
What runs,
Swirling and leaping into sun, is stone’s
Refusal of the river, not the river.
Archibald MacLeish
Collected Poems 1917 - 1952
Comment on this poem from a good friend: We do prefer that the world be fluent satisfaction to our own need and perception, and it is only in denial of that satisfaction that we grow and learn and change.
Categories: Children · Love · Relatives
September 14, 2007 · 3 Comments
When I was much younger, the Beatles came out with two songs around the same time, and we used to joke about having them together on the same single 45 record.:
Can’t buy me love…
Give me money, that’s what I want.
I guess most of us have ambivalent thoughts about money. There is evidence that money — over a certain threshold — does not substantially increase happiness. That raises three interesting questions:
1. What is the threshold? There is one threshold that represents having enough at the moment to eat, drink, be sheltered and clothed. There is another threshold that represents a certain security that one will have enough for the duration, including certain life goals such as educating one’s children. This is a stretchy threshold. It changes as the stock market goes up and down. It also goes up for people with particular talent for finding things to worry about. There is yet another threshold that represents a certain independence from any particular job. With enough money, one has a certain confidence that he/she can always leave the current job if it gets worse.
2. Why is it that we tend to equate more money with more happiness? I remember seeing a $12,000 rocking horse in a Niemann and Marcus catalog, and the thought that crossed my brain was, “Well, there has to be something for people like Bill Gates to spend their money on.” But it’s still a rocking horse and can give just a rocking horse’s worth of pleasure.
3. Is there a point where happiness goes down when money goes up? Do people lose something by becoming too rich? They certainly lose privacy. Perhaps life becomes a little less safe. There’s probably some research out there on this.
Categories: Money
September 13, 2007 · 1 Comment
Promotion? Yeah, promotion! Why in the world would anyone promote the idea of relapse as a positive step? Hang with me a minute. Of course the notion of relapse prevention has arisen mostly from the addictions field. When someone has learned to abstain from substance abuse and then falls back into it, we call that a lapse, or if significant and long-lasting enough, a relapse. You can’t really have a lapse or relapse unless you can truly claim that you have already demonstrated a substantive change in your behavior in the chosen direction and have been able to sustain that change to the point that it feels “ego-syntonic” or “normal.” Only then can we describe reversions to old function as relapse. So to talk about relapse promotion is to acknowledge that most of us, in the striving toward positive psychology or qoltc living, haven’t yet really arrived. When we can truly say we’ve had a relapse will be a glorious day because it will imply that we’ve actually acquired enough new and stable behaviors in our life to say that we are living a more positive life or our quality of life has truly improved. So I guess I’m saying I look forward to my first QOLTC relapse!
Allow me to wonder a moment about how we get there—–how do we stay focused enough , vigilant enough, and practice these new skills enough to truly make them our own? That’s obviously not an easy task. What we are asking for is the ability to continuously monitor our thoughts and feelings, the capacity to confront and challenge and change negative cognitions, and to have at our disposal the tools with which to do all this. And, all the while, we have a tremendous proclivity to “lapse” into our old (probably mostly sub- or pre-conscious) ways of behaving- which for most of us is to keep our eyes peeled for threats. Obviously, our work is cut out for us. But is it do-able ? Of course. I was counseling an older couple once who asked if I really thought that they could change at their age. I hesitated a moment and then said-”you know, that’s my job description-teaching old dogs new tricks.”
So how do we get there?-to the point where we can be worthy of a relapse? We keep that vigilance, we monitor our thoughts and feelings, we practice over and over again those new skills and slowly we arrive. It’s kind of like thinking about going through your whole day without ever making a left turn-not just driving (like UPS is trying) but even walking. Think about that- how hard would that be? Better yet, try it. (Interestingly, as I was thinking about this, I realized that two rights don’t make a wrong, but three rights do make a left!) So keep striving to make your QOLTC journey right and you can’t go wrong!
All my best on your journey,
walt
Categories: Goals and Values
I decided to do this week’s homework a little differently. I thought about how I might answer a question about what qoltc is as if it were a phone or email query from an ad. Hopefully succinct but enticing. Here’s my shot at that- would welcome feedback.
Qoltc is an empirically-based approach that is designed to help you improve the quality of your life. Our first goal will be to assess quality of life for you right now, looking at the 16 primary dimensions that define most peoples lives. We’ll then look at where you want to be- what areas of life you would most like to improve. We will then use the CASIO model, a five step problem solving approach, to help you move toward those goals.
The general goals are to help you live a life filled with inner abundance, enjoy a measureable amount of quality time, and commit youself to living a life consistent with your values.
walt
Categories: QOLTC definition
Last week, my family and I took on a corn maze adventure. (You can see the maze here: http://www.dairyview.com/). The corn maze had three paths: easy, medium, hard. We took the mid-level challenge. Our goal: navigate through the maze, find each of the six numbered stops (numbers 7-11), punch our game card at each stop, then get out and have ice cream!
We got lost. Repeatedly. Or, we found the same numbered stop–#11–again and again. We’d think we found the way to stop number 12, we’d see the post in the distance, one of the kids would run to it, jumping with excitement. Then the kid–11-year-old Sam or five-year-old Elly–would scream: “Oh no! It’s number eleven. Again!” It was funny the first five times it happened. Then we got frustrated. My son said, “We’ll never finish.” As we tried again, my daughter moaned, “We’re going around in circles.” No kidding!
We planned the maze trip as a play-outing on our vacation–along the lines of going to the park or playing miniature golf. And though frustrating, it was fun. We laughed a lot. But we also learned something about ourselves and each other and the way we function as a family. My husband was in it for the steps: he didn’t care how long we were in the maze as long as he accumulated pedometer miles. My son was obsessed with finishing: getting the cards punched and getting to the next maze. My daughter took on the role of relieving tension by expressing the obvious (We’re soooo lost!) and being silly, so that we would laugh. Both parents were content to let the kids lead until we got to number 11 for the third time. Then, map girl (that would be me) tried to get us out. We made it to number 11 twice more before we tried a new direction! In the end, we all took our turns playing the various roles: whining, joking, and navigating–which is good news. I read somewhere that families who are flexible in their roles fare better than those who are rigid.
Afterwards, I wondered if a maze adventure might be a good way to build work-team unity–or family unity. It certainly provides ample opportunity to have fun and learn about how we function in life. In the maze, the journey teaches as much as the destination.
In the end, we made it through the maze and managed to find all six stops. Our trail was 2.5 miles of maze which took us three miles of walking to complete. Afterwards, we had ice cream. I’ll measure the success of the outing by what both kids said the next day: can we do the maze again???
Rochelle Melander
http://www.RightNowCoach.com
Categories: Learning · Play
I love the emphasis in the QOLTC book’s chapter on creativity not being the exclusive province of any particular group, that we all have the capacity for some sort of creativity in us. “Creativity is most simply creative or original problem solving in any or all spheres of life.” So creativity can mean figuring out how to make coffee with the fewest dirty utensils. It can mean figuring out how to arrange a kitchen so that what you need is always close to hand. It can mean being a confirmed foodie who is always in search of ways to cook or present food that increase the pleasure of the eaters.
It can be tied up in activities that take a lot of repetitive steps, such as knitting a sweater or making a Rya rug. The 4ft by 2ft Rya rug pictured to the right is one that I made last year. My husband figured out the overall pattern in the shape of my business logo, given a collection of materials my mother had bought 15 years ago and never used. I did the knotting and made a lot of small decisions about how to make it work. So he was macro-creative and I was micro-creative in this case.
Creativity can mean learning to understand the signals of mood changes in the people around you and figuring out how to respond in ways that ease tension and restore hope. It can mean knowing how to give criticism in a way that the other can take in. It can mean figuring out how to run a conference call so that everybody gets a chance to voice his/her opinion and be heard (now that’s a challenge!)
When I was growing up, I somehow got the message that I was smart — but not creative. What a limited view I must have had of creativity!
Categories: Creativity
The QOLTC book defines Goals-and-Values as “beliefs about what matters most in life and how you should live, both now and in the future.” (p. 173).
I’ve always had trouble talking about my goals and values. They seem to be on the periphery of my vision, always there, but evading direct expression. During my software engineering career, I never could answer that horrible interview question, “Where do you want to be in 5 years?” in a way that felt real.
Perhaps my problem was that I had an idea of goals and values that was too rarefied, too conceptual. I do have strong ideas about how I want to live. Most involve finding the expert means between deficit and excess. I want to be a warm and supportive wife and mother without suffocating my family — neither writing the scripts for my husband and children nor washing my hands and neglecting them. I want to enjoy life’s pleasures but still live simply with as little waste as possible. Ah there’s a goal, every week to roll out to the curb the smallest amount of garbage of anybody on my street! I worked for a summer in college on a German farm. There I learned that water that washes vegetables can also water plants outside the door.
Some people find meaning in life from religion and spiritual traditions. But even people who don’t have religious beliefs can live lives of meaning. In the Goals and Values chapter in the QOLT book, I think this is my favorite stimulus for thought: “The need for secular meaning can spring from the existentialist assumption that since life has no inherent or absolute meaning, we must, therefore, invent one and dedicate ourselves to a meaning in order for our lives to cohere, make sense, or be coherent.”
This week there has been a New York Times story and a Talk of the Nation session on the subject of Life Lists. For those of us who have trouble looking directly at our goals and values, Life Lists can be a fun way to see them out of the corners of our eyes. I may enter something on my list like “Make a quilt.” It’s not the quilt itself that is important to me. It’s that I value dedicating time and patience and care to learning and performing handwork. The quilt is just a manifestation.
Kathryn
Categories: Goals and Values
Welcome, fellow members of the Quality of Life Therapy and Coaching Academy, to a place to share observations and questions.
Today we talked about activities that can increase satisfaction in the Helping area, i.e., helping others in need or helping to make your community a better place to live. One way to come up with ideas for Helping is to review one’s personal goals and values.
I particularly like the following snippets:
Helping and service to others is a major untapped source of joy, inner peace, and contentment. (p.264)
An effective helping routine tends to be small + simple + habitual
I have a good friend who was an eagle scout. He still has the boy scout service coin that his grandfather used and he uses it himself every day. He puts it in his left pocket first thing in the morning and shifts it to his right pocket when he has done a good deed for the day. He gave me one as a gift because he knew I admired it.
I have another friend who puts “Help someone” on his to-do list every morning.
The much maligned Pollyanna was an expert in this facet of life. The book, Pollyanna, might be a good text for people thinking about helping as a source of satisfaction.
The discussion ended with this quotation from Mother Theresa:
We cannot do great things. We can only do small things with great love.
Kathryn
Categories: Goals and Values · Helping
