A Podcast Sponsor … And A Friend

We are pleased to announce our first official sponsorship at The Humanity Project. Yellow Strawberry Global Hair Salon, located at 1007 E. Las Olas Boulevard in downtown Fort Lauderdale, Florida, has signed on for the next six months to sponsor our weekly podcasts. We’re more than pleased, really. We’re proud of their support and grateful to these good friends of The Humanity Project.

Efforts by Yellow Strawberry to improve the world begin with its dynamic owner, Jesse Briggs, who is regarded as an icon in the hairstyling business. Jesse is a great character, full of ideas and jokes and wild tales of his past. We’d like to feature him on one of our podcasts soon, in fact. Jesse believes in giving back to the community that supports him and he’s helped out many organizations, including the Multiple Sclerosis folks recently. Luckily for us, Jesse has adopted The Humanity Project as Yellow Strawberry’s special cause. You may recall that the great folks there worked on their day off at a “Cutathon For Humanity” in November, raising nearly $2,000 for us. These volunteers included renowned stylist Maurice Tidy, who was creative director at Vidal Sassoon for 23 years. Since the cutathon, Jesse has collected small donations from customers by keeping a container dedicated to our group at his styling station.

Yellow Strawberry is known as THE salon around this part of South Florida. It was recently voted “Best Hair Salon” by local newspaper readers. The young women and men who work there are all friendly, talented people who have given their time for The Humanity Project. Through our association with Yellow Strawberry we’ve gotten, not only some much-needed money, but also new members and a couple of especially bright and committed volunteers to help us. We hope if you’re anywhere near Fort Lauderdale, you’ll visit Yellow Strawberry for a great cut or coloring or for hair extensions or whatever you may need. Say hi to Jesse if you drop by. As we said, he always has a good story ready for anyone who cares to listen. And we can assure you, he’s a man well worth listening to. Thanks, Jesse! Thanks, Yellow Strawberry!

Famous Quotes

If you’re a regular visitor to The Humanity Project website, you’ve probably noticed the famous quotes on our home page. Of course, there’s the permanent quote from Gandhi: “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” But we also have a feature below the Gandhi quote, a little box that changes six times weekly. We call this, “The Humanity Spotlight.” In addition to brief news about our group, the spotlight offers famous quotes nearly every day.

I mention this because our latest edition of The Humanity Podcast on this website is all about some of the great thoughts that have appeared on our home page. The new program is a fun look back at just a few of the significant ideas we’ve quoted by great thinkers, along with our own thoughts about how these quotes fit into our work at The Humanity Project. We hope you’ll want to check out the show. Just return to the home page and click on The Humanity Podcast, then click on the most recent posting called, “Great Minds, Great Quotes.”

From Henry David Thoreau’s insightful comment, “What a man thinks of himself, that is what determines his fate” to the Irish proverb that says, “The longest road out is the shortest road home” – those and more are included in the podcast. It’s all part of our effort to bring the best of humanity to our website, and to you, free of charge each day in an effort to help us lead better, more self-confident lives. Perhaps the great thinkers of the past still have much to teach us. At The Humanity Project, we believe they do.

Why Do We Doubt Ourselves?

The Humanity Project wants to shine a light on a problem that’s inside us each, though in different ways. We doubt ourselves, too easily and too strongly and too often. We see ourselves in completely irrational ways, feeling that “I’m not good enough” or “There’s something wrong with me.” Why does this seem to happen in everyone? I’ve noticed the same tendency in people when I visited a Peruvian town 11,000 feet high in the Andes and I’ve seen it in folks from cultures all over the world. It seems a virtually universal part of being human.

But why? Well, let’s simply look at how we’re raised, for starters. We grow up as helpless children, dependent on other people’s judgments about what’s right and what’s wrong. Not just right and wrong morally, as in “That’s not nice Johnny!” but also right and wrong factually, as in “That stove is hot and can burn you, Sally!” They tell us how the world works, what’s what and why’s why for everything. We don’t know, but THEY know, all those adults but especially our parents. That’s part of the message we absorb all our young lives. Add to that the constant reminders many of us get as kids from adults and siblings and peers that we’re just “wrong” somehow: not smart enough, kind enough, tough enough, athletic enough, good-looking enough. Whatever it is. And that’s only part of the picture. What about the personal problems our parents pass along, the self-doubts and fears they’ve suffered from all their lives? We see how they feel about themselves and so we may learn to feel much the same way. Of course, abusive, addicted or otherwise seriously messed-up parents greatly multiply the damage to a child’s self-confidence and self-trust. The factors that make us what we are seem very complex indeed. Then as we mature, we begin to realize that we sometimes are wrong and others are right about things and that the opinions of others are critical to our success. We also learn the need to please others to make friends, get along with teachers and later with employers, and so on. I’m not saying this completely explains why we doubt ourselves but I think it suggests why this happens.

So what can we do about it? At The Humanity Project, we believe the first step is identifying this as a serious individual problem – one that’s so universal among individuals that it’s also a serious social problem. It damages individual lives and therefore damages society in many ways. By bringing this problem of self-doubt into the open and talking about it, we make us each realize that we’re not alone. It’s ok to discuss this. Open discussion should help us to see some of the specific ways this self-doubt diminishes our individual lives – and in turn, that should give us better tools to prevent that from happening so much. We also gain strength by being part of a community that says, “There is nothing wrong with you – except that you think there’s something wrong with you.” Our group has many plans and many ideas for addressing this self-doubt tendency. We need members and donors and supporters who want to help us spread the word and find new and better solutions. Please join our work.

Turning The Inside To The Outside

The Humanity Project is still very new. And we’re very much a work in progess, focusing and improving our efforts as we go along. Part of the challenge, it seems, is that we’re trying to do something that’s pretty tough to accomplish. We want to take an inner experience most people would recognize in themselves, a tendency to frequently feel strong and irrational self-doubt, and we want to then explain that this is not limited to them. That’s what we always believe, isn’t it? “I’m messed up, sure, but most people don’t seem to be.” That’s wrong. It’s a problem we all face, though in different ways within different people. To our group, this tendency is the elephant in the room. No one wants to talk about it, but everyone knows it’s there. This tendency toward unhealthy self-doubt is seen by many people as a painful but inescapable part of their life.

The Humanity Project stands for the belief that this is not an inescapable part of anyone’s life. That’s the very crux of our idea: Humans don’t NEED to suffer from this kind of destructive self-doubt. We know of no evidence that shows this self-doubt is somehow hard-wired into our brains. It’s a learned tendency, something we begin to acquire as kids. (In next week’s blog, we’re going to talk about how this process seems to begin in children, starting us mistrusting ourselves from early life.) But for now, let’s just say that this process obviously happens to all of us, to varying degrees. The Humanity Project thinks it’s time to point out what this is: A widespread, serious problem that damages individual lives and ripples out from individuals to damage society. That’s not an easy idea to communicate without sounding “New Agey” or flakey – but it isn’t either one of those things. It’s a fact of life. So let’s drag it out from inside our minds and push it into the light, call it the problem it is, and see what we can do about it, individually and as a society. Because there’s another fact already proven many times by people, both famous and anonymous folks. Humans have the ability to change, to gain real self-confidence and self-trust. The Humanity Project wants to explore new ways we can increase awareness of the self-doubt tendency and find ways to help us rise above it in everyday life. That’s both our mission and our challenge. We hope you’ll want to join our effort.

Turning The Inside To The Outside

The Humanity Project is still very new. And we’re very much a work in progess, focusing and improving our efforts as we go along. Part of the challenge, it seems, is that we’re trying to do something that’s pretty tough to accomplish. We want to take an inner experience most people would recognize in themselves, a tendency to frequently feel strong and irrational self-doubt, and we want to then explain that this is not limited to them. That’s what we always believe, isn’t it? “I’m messed up, sure, but most people don’t seem to be.” That’s wrong. It’s a problem we all face, though in different ways within different people. To our group, this tendency is the elephant in the room. No one wants to talk about it, but everyone knows it’s there. This tendency toward unhealthy self-doubt is seen by many people as a painful but inescapable part of their life.

The Humanity Project stands for the belief that this is not an inescapable part of anyone’s life. That’s the very crux of our idea: Humans don’t NEED to suffer from this kind of destructive self-doubt. We know of no evidence that shows this self-doubt is somehow hard-wired into our brains. It’s a learned tendency, something we begin to acquire as kids. (In next week’s blog, we’re going to talk about how this process seems to begin in children, starting us mistrusting ourselves from early life.) But for now, let’s just say that this process obviously happens to all of us, to varying degrees. The Humanity Project thinks it’s time to point out what this is: A widespread, serious problem that damages individual lives and ripples out from individuals to damage society. That’s not an easy idea to communicate without sounding “New Agey” or flakey – but it isn’t either one of those things. It’s a fact of life. So let’s drag it out from inside our minds and push it into the light, call it the problem it is, and see what we can do about it, individually and as a society. Because there’s another fact already proven many times by people, both famous and anonymous folks. Humans have the ability to change, to gain real self-confidence and self-trust. The Humanity Project wants to explore new ways we can increase awareness of the self-doubt tendency and find ways to help us rise above it in everyday life. That’s both our mission and our challenge. We hope you’ll want to join our effort.

Join The Project

Welcome to 2007! I’m going to keep this first blog of the new year about one simple thing: We want you to become a member of The Humanity Project. Not to get your $40 membership fee (though heaven knows we need it …), but to get you involved. In fact, if you can’t afford the fee, send us an email and we’ll work something out so you can join anyway. This is our sixth month of operations (we had several months of writing and website design before our August launch) and we feel that now is the time for us to build a much broader base of real people. That’s been our goal all along but this seems the moment to get it rolling faster.

Since our office is in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, that’s where we’ll begin to hold monthly meetings soon, talking about new and better ways to spread the optimistic message of The Humanity Project. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t join if you live in Chicago or San Francisco or Des Moines – or London or Tokyo, for that matter. One of the advantages we think our organization has is our reliance on the Internet. We can have active members anywhere there’s a computer. Involved people who send us monthly feedback, suggestions, ideas and who, in time, may want to start live local chapters. Please look over our website to see what we offer, and especially where we’re going with this idea. At this very early point, our potential exceeds our accomplishments but we need your help to realize that potential. Our group says one of the best ways to make a healthier, more fulfilled human race is to persuade people to be healthier, more fulfilled individuals. But that can be a tough sell when most of us struggle with bad feelings about ourselves that diminish our lives. The Humanity Project offers us each an important reason larger than ourselves to tackle this effort: Our responsibility to humanity as a whole. Please join in our campaign to change the world, one person at a time.