Being your best self over the next four years

It’s 1,455 days until the 48th President of the United States is Sworn In

At the time of this writing, the 47th President of the United States hasn’t even finished his first week in office but his impact has been profound. He’s signed an unprecedented number of Executive Orders, some of which do not lend themselves to easy interpretation and have unsettled large swaths of the public and their confidence that programs that are important to them, or, in some cases, essential to their well being, will continue to be there for them.

It’s easy to get caught up in this. There’s a 24 hour a day echo chamber of news that seems to lean toward provocative ways of positioning each new edict from the White House following the well established patterns of social media which has learned that unsettling news tends to increase engagement with algorithmic precision. Watching news broadcasts or reading much of the on-line coverage of what’s taking place inside the beltway these days will undoubtedly trigger you in some way and start you down a path toward four years of frustration and angst that will metastasize in you over time. This is exactly what happened to me during the President’s previous term in office and why I am posting this column today. I choose not to do that to myself again and I suggest you consider some of the following tactics to avoid joining the growing population of the permanently triggered.

First, I suggest going on a news diet. As an ardent supporter of quality, ad-supported journalism, I am by no means suggesting that you avoid news but I believe it’s a good time to review what sources you truly get your news from and consider which ones provide you the most objective view of current events sans the rhetoric and innuendo that conflates facts with opinions or worse, agendas. You can make this assessment intuitively or you can use something like Ad Fontes Media’s most recently published Media Bias Chart which rates news sources on both bias and reliability.

Those platforms that appear at the center top of the chart are those that Ad Fontes Media’s team of human raters, mostly retired academics and journalists themselves, who have gone through rigorous training and employ a rigorous set of principles embodied in their “Content Analysis Rating Tool” provide a way to quickly suss out where you can choose to get your news. If you see platforms, publications or podcasts that you routinely engage with that appear on the lower left or lower right of the chart, you may want to consider relying less on them as they tend to be loose with the facts and generous with their rhetoric. A more comprehensive version of the chart is available on AdFontesMedia.com at the following link: Media Bias Chart. Note, I serve as Ad Fontes Media’s Chief Strategy Officer, so I may be a bit biased in my recommendation.

Along the same lines as above, I strongly suggest discounting, or avoiding altogether, “news” that is promoted on social media. What you often see is algorithmically selected based on previous content that you’ve consumed and the science of engagement that has been honed into what I describe as “enrage to engage.” You will end up in a filter-bubble of your own making and quickly be inundated with content that will send you over your emotional edge. It’s so easy to get sucked in and find yourself constantly seeing red and increasingly triggered which can have health consequences, both mental and phyisical. Don’t do this to yourself.

My good friend, Rishad Tobaccowala, author of Rethinking Work, recently published a column on LinkedIn that highlighted a piece in the Atlantic entitled: The Anti-Social Century that put forward, I think rightly, that the age of social media is far from social. Being social is spending time – IRL – with friends and colleagues. The conversations that you have, without the aide of angst inducing technology, will inspire you, help you recognize that you’re not alone, lift you up when you need it and leave you hopeful about the future. Make a commitment to yourself to spend more time each month with friends and less time staring into screens endlessly doom scrolling.

Another tactic that I recommend is to not swing at every pitch. There’s going to be a lot more unsettling and even upsetting news emanating from the current administration if their first week in office is any indicator. Decide what’s truly important to you and what, while disappointing, isn’t necessarily the end of your world and choose to not react to it. Conversely, when something is important to you and you feel the overwhelming need to speak out, by all means do so, but cite facts and avoid rhetoric when you do. We need to de-escalate the discourse in our increasingly polarized world and make a reasonable case for what we believe that is free of the ad hominem attacks that are neither helpful nor productive. Finding common ground, no matter how elusive, is the only path toward common understanding and common sense. And remember, when someone comes after you for your views without receipts for their point of view and based solely on what they believe to be your personal traits, that’s not a license to reciprocate with vitriol. You’re better than that.

Lastly, I encourage you to have faith in our institutions and the dedicated professionals who endeavor to serve the American people within them. They are clearly under assault right now and while there will be some that are ultimately negatively impacted, I believe that, on the whole, they will hold. Our system of checks and balances, brilliantly established by the framers of the constitution, will ultimately function and restore a level of equilibrium that we can all live with. I know that right now it’s harder to hold this belief than at any point in our past, but our system of government has endured 238 years without breaking and I have to believe that it will continue long after the current assault on it is but a distant memory.

So, at the end of the day, it’s your choice how you respond to current events. I am fond of saying that, in life, events can control you or you can control events; the latter is preferable. These next four years may be the very best application of that mantra. I recommend chosing to remain as “untriggered” as possible in these uncertain times. Focus on sources of truth with strong journalistic underpinnings and wean yourself from rage inducing scrolling through social media. When events become too close to home for you to ignore, respond, don’t react. Use facts, not rhetoric and make your case with as little emotion as you can so that those you are intending to sway with your words aren’t blinded by unnecesary rhetoric and personal attacks. Spend time with friends and family, reconnect with them where the only technology involved is the glass that’s holding your favorite beverage. When all else fails, binge watch the first five seasons of The West Wing. This nearly twenty year old program holds up incredibly well and the writers were incredibly prescient with regard to the issues that the fictional White House had to deal with. Every episode is a parable of what the Presidency and the West Wing can achieve when they are inspired by their higher angels and that fictional zeitgeist will again prevail in our real world White House. One week down, and only 208 left to go until then. We can do this!