Simple changes

Early this morning a plane I was on touched down in Detroit, ending a whirlwind 48-hour trip to Vancouver, the University of British Columbia, and a small scientific meeting entitled “Bridging the scales of disease dynamics”. An outside observer would have seen two days of 40 researchers alternately giving and listening to PowerPoint presentations, breaking occasionally for coffee and lunch -– this is how meetings go. But had this observer turned his focus on me and looked me square in the eye for a minute or two, he might have seen something else.

As I’d done before, I was experimenting on myself. Again, nothing illicit was involved: no drugs, no stealing, no maiming, no breach of written law. But as I’d done with my body at the beginning of summer (reshaping it through a new exercise program and changes in diet), and as I'd done periodically with my writing (trying to adopt the styles of different authors), I was now trying out a new attitude and outlook.

This particular experiment had been underway for a couple weeks but only in a vaguely conceived way, that is, until Tuesday, the day before I left for the meeting. I’d been reading The Lively Art of Writing by Lucile Vaughn Payne, a small book I'd picked up at a used bookstore at the end of September. Geared mainly toward high school students putting together the beginnings of style, the book gave mostly innocuous advice on how to tie paragraphs together using hooks, avoiding the passive voice, that kind of thing. But one passage I was reading on Tuesday struck me as more life coach than kindly grammarian:

"In real life we are bored and exasperated by passivity. When we come into contact with apathetic, characterless people who limply allow themselves to be pushed around, who never make a decision, never respond, never take the initiative, we feel like giving them a good shaking. Complete passivity is unnatural; it offends some basic sense of life in all of us, some insistent demand for human statement and identity."

Sounds just like Dr. Phil, right? By coincidence (or maybe design), I’d also been reading a book on alternative careers in science, Put Your Science to Work by Peter Fiske, which espoused the same philosophy. I'd been taking stock of my own strengths and weaknesses in a process known as self-assessment.

"Understanding your own particular strengths and idiosyncrasies helps you develop pride in your individuality. This is what is known as self-confidence, and it comes through loud and clear come interview time.... Self assessment brings with it a measure of understanding and control, not only for you in your job search but also for your interactions with other people."

I might have once dismissed these maxims as a load of self-congratulatory hooey, but in light of life changes I won't go into here, they now sounded like good ideas. I'd started taking charge of my destiny, and the things I identified as my strengths -- writing, presenting, the ability to engage anyone in conversation -- I now bore proudly.

By the time I boarded the plane on Wednesday, I was determined to take a few more steps, physical in nature: stand up straight, look people in the eye and not break first, address all with confidence and a smile whenever possible. For someone used to staring at the ground two feet in front of himself, the change to looking straight ahead and into the eyes of oncoming people traffic was uncomfortable at first but quickly became addictive. Late Wednesday and all of Thursday and Friday, I'd been walking through crowds -- at the airport, on the streets of Vancouver, wherever -- with these precepts in mind. Metaphors materialized: we were all players in a jungle game, and I was out for alpha. I thought of a biology lab assignment I'd had as an undergraduate: observe flamingos at the zoo and everytime two came together record the winner and loser based on head position, who turned first. I felt belligerent and headily empowered.

By Thursday 4:30 pm, poster session time, I’d pumped myself so full of, well, myself that I was ready to take on anything. I sold that poster like a used car salesman two sales away from making employee of the month. When I was not selling my work, I was looking around, checking out the competition. I thought of how scientists would probably like to believe the written word is objective, uninflected, and sufficient to communicate a point. We ought to be able to stand around at one of these meetings and speak in monotone while shoe-gazing and get our point across just the same. But I was now seeing, or at least believing I saw, that this was not the case. I'd come to play strong, with full force of personality.

Long story short, or at least shorter, the rest of what I experienced at the meeting right up until I left Friday afternoon was affirmation that this world view was correct. A new attitude, a new outlook, not entirely comfortable at first, was yielding results: my poster was a success, and I felt I'd made friends with everyone I met. The only hitch -- when does this start feeling natural?