​Labor Day, Halloween, Thanksgiving . . . the summer is almost over but the indulgent holiday season is near. This study we conducted found that many of us spend months getting rid of that excess weight gained during the holiday season. The study showed that according to yearly national weight patterns, it takes American’s nearly 5 months to lose weight gained between Thanksgiving and Easter. 

From their analysis of the weight patterns of over 2800 individuals researchers found that, in the US weight patterns begin rising around Thanksgiving, and peak around Christmas and the New Year. It isn’t until after Easter, about a 5 month period, that weight patterns even out with only slight fluctuation between April and November.  

The researchers also analyzed yearly weight patters in Germany and Japan. Similar to the US, those in Germany weighted the most around Christmas/New-Year period and those in Japan weight the most during Golden Week in April – a major Japanese holiday. Each country also showed a peak in weight for New Years. 

“Everyone gains weight over the holidays — Americans, Germans, Japanese," explains , co-author Brian Wansink,  author of Slim By Design, “Instead of making a New Year’s Resolution, the best time to make a resolution to keep the pounds off this holiday season is now!”

The 10 Principles of Burning Man

Burning Man co-founder Larry Harvey wrote the Ten Principles in 2004 as guidelines for the newly-formed Regional Network. They were crafted not as a dictate of how people should be and act, but as a reflection of the community’s ethos and culture as it had organically developed since the event’s inception.
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Radical Inclusion.  Anyone may be a part of Burning Man. We welcome and respect the stranger. No prerequisites exist for participation in our community.
Gifting.  Burning Man is devoted to acts of gift giving. The value of a gift is unconditional. Gifting does not contemplate a return or an exchange for something of equal value.
Decommodification.  In order to preserve the spirit of gifting, our community seeks to create social environments that are unmediated by commercial sponsorships, transactions, or advertising. We stand ready to protect our culture from such exploitation. We resist the substitution of consumption for participatory experience.
Radical Self-reliance.  Burning Man encourages the individual to discover, exercise and rely on his or her inner resources.
Radical Self-expression. Radical self-expression arises from the unique gifts of the individual. No one other than the individual or a collaborating group can determine its content. It is offered as a gift to others. In this spirit, the giver should respect the rights and liberties of the recipient.
Communal Effort. Our community values creative cooperation and collaboration. We strive to produce, promote and protect social networks, public spaces, works of art, and methods of communication that support such interaction.
Civic Responsibility. We value civil society. Community members who organize events should assume responsibility for public welfare and endeavor to communicate civic responsibilities to participants. They must also assume responsibility for conducting events in accordance with local, state and federal laws.
Leaving No Trace. Our community respects the environment. We are committed to leaving no physical trace of our activities wherever we gather. We clean up after ourselves and endeavor, whenever possible, to leave such places in a better state than when we found them.
Participation. Our community is committed to a radically participatory ethic. We believe that transformative change, whether in the individual or in society, can occur only through the medium of deeply personal participation. We achieve being through doing. Everyone is invited to work. Everyone is invited to play. We make the world real through actions that open the heart.
Immediacy​. Immediate experience is, in many ways, the most important touchstone of value in our culture. We seek to overcome barriers that stand between us and a recognition of our inner selves, the reality of those around us, participation in society, and contact with a natural world exceeding human powers. No idea can substitute for this experience.

GenCon invades Indianapolis every year with 70,000 people who crowd into the convention center, the football stadium, and into five hotels because of one reason:  They all love games.  Not things like Monopoly or chess, but super-complicated European boardgames, role-playing games, strategy games, deck-building games, and so on.  Over the four days of the convention, there are over 1500 different events ranging from tournaments, film festivals (about games), dances, concerts, auctions, costume parties, virtual reality dungeon crawls, and lots of long lines. 
 
It was my first time, and it's a people watching spectacle.  I had tons of questions for people, such as 1) Why do you come here for 4 days and only play one game over and over, 2) Why did you get married here? and 3) Why are you dressed up like a hawk?  I realized that when I asked these "Why?" questions, people would often give me short, unthinking answers.  
 
My big breakthrough was when I asked the same questions without using "why":  1) What is it about this game that makes it so addictive, 2) When was it you decided to get married here? or 3) What were some other costumes you were thinking about, and how did you narrow your costume down to a hawk?  At this point people really opened up, and our conversations were a lot more interesting and fun.
 
One Take-away: Rephrase Why questions into What or When questions. 

​Why:  I don’t know, but it seems to work
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​The Global Leadership Summit is held in Chicago about the same time as GenCon every summer.  But it's also  simulcast to 400 locations and over 405,000 people.  You also don’t have to dress up like a hawk to go there.  For two days you hear great business speakers.  (You can download the notes from the speakers below at the link at the bottom).
 
One speaker was a hostage negotiator with the FBI for many years, and he had tons of great insights:
 
●  Mirroring - Repeat the last words that they just said. It lets them know you are listening. With upper inflection, it is an invitation to expand on what they just said. 
●  "You’re right" is what we say to people who we have to maintain relationship with and you just want to shut up.  It's better to say "That's right."  It's what husbands always say.
●  Effective pauses - give people the chance to talk. 2/3 people are not comfortable with silence. 
●  Don't say "I understand." That's what people say when they want you to be quiet so they can talk. 
 
But one thing he said really caught my still sensitive GenCon ear.  He said, “People get threatened and defensive when they hear the word ‘Why?’  It reminds them of having to explain why they did something wrong as a child, or it reminds them of when they have had to justify a less-than-intelligent decision as an adult.”

Instead he said that using other words – like when, what, or how – causes a person to think more and to think more collaboratively:
         
         • What happened that led you so see things that way?
         • Where have you seen this before?
         • How are we going to [go to Disneyland if your grades don’t improve]?
 
This whole cast of speakers was great.  The conference sent around bullet points from all of the speakers, and you can download them below.  Definitely worth downloading and either reading now or copying over to your notes app to read later.  No Darth Vader costume required.
 
One Take-away: Rephrase Why questions into What or When questions. 
Why:  It makes people less defensive and more collaborative
 

When you ask people what they’re most proud of, people usually mention about the same types of things:  their kids, a career accomplishment, or how they lived their life.   
 
But it’s an unfair question that totally catches people off guard and they usually blurt out the first thing that comes to mind.  It’s like when you see somebody blindsided on a talk show by being asked, “What’s the funniest, most hilarious thing that ever happened to you?” or “What’s the most amazing, incredible, phenomenal  experience you’ve ever had?”  You’re just not going to get the real answer with 1.2 seconds of thought.   But what’s interesting is when people voluntarily say what they’re proud of or what their most amazing, incredible, phenomenal  experience was.  When they volunteer this out of the blue, it means they’ve given it a lot of thought.
 
There’s an famous man at the University of Chicago and who’s a legend in academia in the area of how people make decisions.   Let’s call him Adam.  We became friends and during a late dinner Chicago a couple years ago, our conversation turned to parents. Although Adam’s parents had passed away long ago, he said – out of the blue –  “What I’m most proud of in all my life, is how I was there for my parents in their later years.”  

What?  That’s what he’s most proud of?  I don’t even know what that means.

Here’s a guy who’s published libraries of stuff, whose work has changed at least one industry, who has two successful kids, and what he’s most proud of is “how I was there for my parents in their later years”? This wasn’t a “tell me the funniest thing that ever happened to you” kind of answer.  He had clearly thought about this a lot.  

Taking care of aging parents is particularly very emotionally hard.  It’s good if you can see it as a blessing, but even a saint can’t see it as a blessing day after day while they are trying to juggle the rest of their life.  Having both a wife and brother who do this daily, I can see the grinding burden it can have even on very strong people.

What’s interesting about Adam’s perspective is that it is very forward looking.  It says “Regardless of how I feel today, how will I look back on this moment in the future?” If the answer is “With great pride in how I handled it,” that’s powerful to keep in mind.  It even goes beyond “no regrets” thinking.

Right now it’s 4:08 AM, and for the next week, I’m sleeping here on the couch in my 92-year old Dad’s room in the retirement home (or trying to).  Although I’d rather be staying and eating with my brother, I think it means more to my Dad that I’m staying here.  

If someone asked you today what you’re most proud of, what’s a nonobvious answer you might answer?  
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It's useful to also think about how this looks down the road.  If you think about what going to do today, or this month or this year, what will you be most proud of having done in five years?  It’s a great set of farsighted glasses to try on.