Aug. 26, 2024: Professor Cindi Gilliland, Ph.D., teaches us about “The Power of Love” — Attend, Mend, Ascend
Monday Morning Magic from Inkandescent® PR + Publishing Co. — In her latest TEDx Talk, “The Power of Love,” Professor Cindi Gilliland, Ph.D., knows love has the power to transform us, others, and the world.
A psychologist, Professor Emeritus, Management and Organizations Dept., Eller College of Management, University of Arizona, and the president of Gilliland Consulting in San Diego, Cindi describes the important benefits of love and shares her personal journey toward greater love using the three steps of AMA: Attend, Mend, and Ascend.
“What if the best thing we could do to increase our chance to have a long, healthy life could also benefit our family and friends and maybe even the whole world?” asks Cindi, who received her Ph.D. in social psychology at Michigan State University in 1992. She has taught 20,000 undergraduate, graduate, and executive students in her thirty-four-year university career.
Since 2019, she has been a Clinical Full Professor of Organizational Psychology in the Division of Behavioral and Organizational Sciences at Claremont Graduate University (CGU). Cindi is also an award-winning Professor of Practice Emeritus in the Management and Organizations Department at The University of Arizona. Cindi’s professional interests include resilience, well-being, love, and positive relationships. She has been married to Dr. Stephen Gilliland for 31 years, and they have two adult children, Austin, 30, a Senior Associate at Breakthrough Properties in London, UK, and Caitlin, 27, a Ph.D. student in clinical neuropsychology at UCSD/SDSU in San Diego, CA.
Please scroll down for the details of her 2024 TEDx Talk and watch the 15-minute presentation above. Stay tuned for a book on the topic by Cindi coming in 2025.
Until next Monday: May your heart be full, your life be filled with joy, and may you attend, mend, and ascend all of love’s challenges. — Hope Katz Gibbs, founder and president, Inkandescent® Inc. Inkandescent.us
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Cindi Gilliland’s TEDx Talk: The Power of Love
The Beatles said All You Need Is Love, and decades of science suggest they were right. The Harvard Medical School Study of Adult Development has tracked hundreds of people for over 75 years to learn what leads to longevity and good health, and they’ve found, as expected, that those who smoke, drink, or overeat often fare worse. Still, do you know what factor has the most significant impact? It’s having warm, positive relationships. In other words, it’s love.
We need love today more than ever. Our current era is one of 24-7 connectivity, yet what our Surgeon General calls an epidemic of loneliness. We focus so much on career and financial success, but we act like loving relationships will naturally grow in whatever cracks of time are left over. We don’t know how to love ourselves and others enough to end war, feed the hungry, or avoid massive species extinction. Simply put, our brains have grown faster than our hearts.
I relate personally to this imbalance because growing up, I got good grades, but I didn’t know how to love myself or others very well. I had anxiety, depression, and eating disorders, but I hid what I saw as these shameful weaknesses behind a brittle, jaded shell that I thought was sophistication. At 17, I wanted to become a corporate attorney, live in a glass penthouse, and tie my tubes at 21. I think my kids are glad I changed my mind on that.
Even then, I secretly longed to find more love in life. I’d caught glimpses of happy relationships in books and TV, and I knew well what unhappy ones looked like deceit, abandonment, and endless tug-of-war. I knew what I did not want, but I had no idea how to find something different.
Luckily for young Cindi and all of us, there IS a roadmap to greater love, and I call it AMA, which is also how you could tell someone to “Go love!” in Spanish. Ama is spelled AMA, and to grow love, we do three things: attend, mend, and ascend. Attending means learning about healthy love and ourselves relative to it. We mend thoughts and behaviors that reduce our ability to give or receive love. When we ascend, we savor, amplify, and celebrate the joy love brings us. Let’s look at each part of Ama in turn.
First, we attend to love and ourselves. Underpinned biochemically, love has been defined as an emotion, a relationship, or a positive energy exchange. We often associate love with romance, but it also includes love for ourselves, our friends and families, our communities and world, and those of faith, the Divine.
We can attend to ourselves by writing a personal love history. My parents collectively had seven marriages and six divorces, and my mom left my Dad and me when I was two. I didn’t see her for months and then only on weekends. When I was five, she drove to my dad’s on Thanksgiving Day and found me crying alone in the snow with no coat, and she sued for custody. The court psychologist asked me who I’d rather live with, and I chose my mom. When she won custody, I didn’t see my Dad for almost a year, and I was sure it was because I hadn’t chosen him.
Early experiences create what psychologists call our attachment style, or what we think, feel, and do in close relationships. After the inconsistent early care, my attachment style became anxious, meaning I crave love but fear losing it, and I can be clingy and insecure in relationships.
We can see how our attachment style impacts us now through self-distanced observation, which is watching how we think and act as if we were outside looking in. It’s helpful to do this because thinking and memory don’t work as they seem. We feel like we have video cameras in our heads, that when we remember something, we’re playing a recording, but really, we’re more like directors than videographers.
We don’t passively record our lives, we actively create perception, our version of reality, because in this complex world we choose what we focus on and decide what it means. To see this, self-observe your inner dialogue, the voice or voices most of us hear in our heads. Mine was anxious and self-critical, often telling me I’d said or done something “stupid.” If a friend ended a conversation abruptly, my inner voice would say I’d upset her, not that something else had come up. I rejected securely attached dating partners, saying they didn’t light a spark and instead kept trying to draw love from avoidant ones uncomfortable with intimacy.
What do you see when you self-observe? Are you kind, accepting, and generous toward yourself and others? Or are you often emotionally detached, angry, or afraid? Do you see the worst in yourself or others because your inner voice tells you to?
When are your perceptions TOO generous? Do you ignore or excuse injustice, neglect, or abuse? Sometimes, I accept less than I should have from people. Like the boyfriend who wouldn’t let me record him playing the song he wrote just for me, but it turned out he was playing the song for two other women. Or the graduate advisor who was emotionally abusive to me for years and threatened to tank my career if I left. How often have I allowed myself or others to suffer when I might have escaped, offered support, or helped create change?
It can be painful to see our shortcomings when we attend, but doing so is worth it because if we create perceptions that limit love, then we also have the power to change those perceptions, which is how we begin to mend.
The first step in mending is to unlearn fear of our feelings. People avoid pain even as mild as boredom, distracting themselves with food, drink, shopping, and social media, and most of us learn to swallow our feelings to fit in as we grow up. In high school, I saw that successful dating meant playing hard to get as if it were a race to see who could care the least. And it can be scary to smile at a stranger or reach out to a long-lost friend, even though research shows we’re more likely to enjoy the experience and get a positive reaction than we think. Opening our hearts to love does not risk the pain of loss.
But it turns out that feeling a wide range of emotions leads to better health and well-being. It’s not possible or reasonable for us to always try to be happy. Life isn’t always good or fair, so when we try to avoid sadness or anger, Brene Brown says, “we run straight into the arms of fear, perfectionism, and the desperate need to control.” This is not love but toxic positivity. Barb Frederickson tells us In Love 2.0 that a better life motto than “Stay Positive” is “Stay Open.”
When we’re open to our emotions, we find they come and go, and sometimes they’re sweet summer breeze and sometimes golf ball hailstones, but even the worst storm DOES pass, and the most effective umbrella? Support from those we love.
We can also give ourselves support. Mindful self-compassion is learning to comfort ourselves the way we would comfort a suffering friend. Now, when my inner voice begins to squawk, I stop, hug myself, and say, “That hurts. Everyone hurts sometimes. Thanks, voice, but I’ve got this.”
Harmful behavior should also be mended. As Bell Hooks told us, love is both a noun and a verb: when we love someone, we don’t just wish them well; we take positive action toward their well-being. We can reduce our prejudice by practicing seeing each person we meet as a unique individual, looking for commonalities, and treating them with kindness and respect.
And we can mend self-harming behaviors, too. Once I learned about attachment style, I promised myself that the next time I met someone attractive who was warm and secure, I would give them a chance even if at first I found them boring. (SLIDE 4) Six months later, I began to date Stephen, now my husband of 31 years. We’ve never had the crazy rollercoaster of fights and cold shoulder and making up that I‘d confused with romance, and it turns out healthy love isn’t dull; it’s the best part of life.
The natural world also helps us mend. Caring for pets and plants makes us healthier and happier. Time in nature lowers pain and inflammation, improves our immune system and mental focus, and makes us kinder. (SLIDE 5) Hiking helps me become more like the person my puppy, Percy, thinks I am.
Many of us love our pets dearly, and we should extend that love to all life, even creepy crawlies because all beings are precious, interconnected, and worthy of care. Science shows many assumed distinctions between humans and animals aren’t real. Bumblebees can learn to open puzzle boxes by watching other bees; prairie voles mate for life and share much of our same neurobiology of love; and parrots can initiate and enjoy video chats with each other. Animals are smart and social, and they have lives of value, just like us. Caring for them gives us another chance to give love.
Attending and mending our love brings more joy, awe, and gratitude to our lives, and when we savor and amplify these good feelings, we ascend.
Practicing mindfulness connects our thoughts and feelings to the present, so we feel what’s in our hearts and bodies now rather than getting stuck ruminating about the past or worrying about the future. When mindful, we’re better able to feel and savor others’ love. We’re more likely to be grateful for our heart’s love capacity. We’re more likely to act with generosity instead of fear.
We can also celebrate love through prayer and metta, loving-kindness meditation, breathing in good wishes for ourselves, and breathing out the same for others. I’ve practiced metta daily for at least 20 years, and it makes me feel more connected, hopeful, and peaceful.
Finally, we ascend through love rituals. Before going to sleep at night, Stephen and I asked each other three questions: What was the best thing that happened to you today? What did you do today that you’re proud of, and what are you looking forward to tomorrow? We then express gratitude for one action, big or small, that the other partner took today. We’ve done this for 25 years, and it helps us stay close to each other amid busy lives. Families or friends can do this, too, or create their own rituals to savor and celebrate their love.
Attend, mend, and ascend has been powerfully transformative for me. At 59, I’m a work in progress, but I’m happier, healthier, have better relationships, and am more active in my community than when I was young. Ama brings more joy and health and helps grow peace, connection, and better lives for all. So what are you waiting for? Go, love. AMA!