Former U.S. President Ronald Reagan generated loyalty in politics that was unheard of at the time. A former actor, he was best known as the great communicator! When he died, the outpouring of loyal leaders as well as citizens was amazing. Keep in mind that the torch bearer for the original conservative movement in the 1980′s had changed parties from Democrat to Republican. So even this man had to work his way through political minefields to get settled, all while keeping a loyal fan base later called Reagan Democrats.

Loyalty in sports is legendary. Sports fans around the world will stay with their teams through thick and thin. From basket ball to base ball to football, loyal fans are generated by the skilled use of marketing as much as winning records.

For some who root for the underdogs, the Green Bay Packers are a choice that has resulted in sports bars catering to Packer fans in most major metropolitan cities in the United States! That is a fan base folks, with tons of loyalty to go around. Several other sports franchises would love to have such a loyal set of fans spread all over the world, in football or other sports.

How did the Packers generate such a fan base and more importantly how can those lessons apply to our empowered volunteers? Let’s examine this a bit more to find out.

Football appeals to a wide audience, including women and even high status people. It isn’t a one social class attraction. This is true of volunteering as well. Interestingly enough, the very successful are often giving of their time on weekends for volunteering, just as football fans devote their time on weekends for their team in stadiums across the United States.

From a recent Forbes article I read recently, “Laura Vanderkam, author of What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast (Portfolio, 2012) and What the Most Successful People Do on the Weekend (Portfolio, 2012), says successful people know that weekends are actually the secret weapon in professional success. “You need to hit Monday ready to go,” she says. “To do that, you need weekends that rejuvenate you, rather than exhaust or disappoint you. Cross-training makes you a better athlete, and likewise, exercise, volunteer work, spiritual activities, and hands-on parenting make you a better worker than if you just worked all the time.” The bold on volunteer work is mine in this quote.

If the rich and successful see volunteer work as worthy, so should everyone who is aspiring to be successful, no matter how far they have managed to get towards that goal.

With the health benefits of volunteering already established long ago, another study furthers that truth.

A national survey of 3,351 adults conducted by Harris Interactive on behalf of UnitedHealth Group demonstrates that volunteering is good for your health.

Here are some of the takeaways from this research: “Companies that encourage and sponsor volunteer activities are also likely to engender goodwill and loyalty among employees. And of the employed volunteers in the survey who volunteered through their workplace, 81% agreed that volunteering together strengthens relationships among colleagues.

The survey suggests that nationally, more than half of all employees have volunteered. At UnitedHealth Group, 81 percent of employees and 96 percent of executives volunteered last year, so they clearly believe in the benefits—both tangible and intangible—of having employees engaged in their communities.” Again, the bold word loyalty is mine in the  above quote.

How does all of this help the empowered volunteer? If the wealthy and successful find volunteering worthy, then it can apply to anyone else who aspires to be either wealthy or successful.

It most certainly can apply to the poor also, but the health benefits for the poor will outweigh the other aspects gained from volunteering. The wealthy have access to better health management so this nails down what volunteering can also do for them, it is the social and intangible features they are looking for, as well as networking.

Loyalty, what is it worth? Well, ask the sports franchises who have had winning seasons but then when they are down their fans abandon them.

Fan loyalty is a study all in itself and I am not going to dwell on it very long, I only offer to point out that for the only major sports franchise in the U.S. who are still owned by the public and not owned by one wealthy owner the Green Bay Packers have a loyal fan base second to none! Other sports have the NY Yankees with a great loyal fan base that travels well. There are other teams that would qualify for high fan loyalty, such as the Dallas Cowboys.

So how did these teams do this and how can it apply to volunteering? First off, the Packers use volunteers throughout the year to help with their program. They even pay low wages for volunteers to shovel by hand the entire stadium every time a snow fall threatens to interfere with the next game! They always have to turn away the volunteers they have so many show up when they put out the word for help! Talk about loyal.

The second thing is that winning helps, a bunch. Consistent winning helps enormously. 

The Packers have several TV and radio programs every week where players make guest appearances and fans can meet and get signed stuff from that player. So if you are willing to wait an average of 3 hours before taping the show, you can meet a player or the coach. Pretty nice, and this is NOT the norm in every NFL football program by the way. Some teams I have found out don’t even support a short program each week for the coach to meet the fans live! Wow, what a missed opportunity to build loyalty.

Shriners

How do you apply this kind of thinking to volunteering?

Well, an example of one group’s success is the Shriner’s promotion of their Shrine East/West Football game by inviting the public to enjoy dinner and a presentation with the college players who are hoping to be drafted a few months from the game to visit with fans the night before the game. It costs money for the event, but most of us never get close to real players in this type of setting. Meeting the players and getting photo’s and autographs is exciting and intimate, just like being in the audience of a  Packer TV show, no matter which of the shows you visit each week. It promotes goodwill and loyalty! Fans love it and so do volunteers.

Several volunteer groups have sponsored race cars over the last few years. NASCAR fans are so loyal and they are very energetic. For the volunteers who manage to get passes to the drivers area or pit row, the effect and resulting loyalty is dramatic. It lasts for a very long time.

Loyalty is valuable, it is coveted and it is required for long term success in most organizations. In the next post we will continue exploring how to generate loyalty.

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In the first Pillars of Health Wisdom post we reviewed stress, how to combat it in real life and then we showed how some sources of data and research gave us insight into how to deal with our busy lives for a healthier and longer life expectancy.

We also encountered the new word, positivity and how it can be utilized for better individual health, mainly through meditation exercises.

This post will show other pillars of health for the empowered volunteer but it will also move past the individual and embrace the greater good of society beyond what we saw in The Status Syndrome, How Social Standing Affects our Health and Longevity by Michael Marmot in the last post.

Meditation has been documented in the history of mankind for thousands of years.

It seems that the western traditions did not embrace this practice nearly as early or as readily as the eastern cultures did. Philo of Alexandria is perhaps the first westerner to really investigate the “spiritual exercises” that we now call meditation. A Roman philosopher Plotinus also developed a system of meditative techniques we are told but they did not catch on with Christian meditations.

Saint Augustine also delved into meditations but he was in the end not satisfied with the results.

Meditation in the Old Testament is seen as influencing Judaism as well, with Jewish culture and writing seemingly always containing some form of meditative tradition. This would put Christians on firm footing for the use of meditation as a spiritual exercise, even if it was not found in the Bible.

Several translations of Genesis have the word meditation included in Genesis 24:63. This is true for all the translations that this author reviewed except for the Revised English Bible of 1989.

Even the online Hebrew translation has the word “meditation” in the verse, so I am inclined to go with the translations of those who have carried the Torah from the days of antiquity to the present day and to discount the one Bible translation which omitted the term.

This should end any claim that meditation is solely the process of eastern traditions and the practice of such exercises will make the practicing member suddenly a lapsed Christian. If someone lapses their Christian beliefs due to meditation, those beliefs were already on wobbly supports before the the individual conducted any meditation practices.

Meditation has more than just some benefits to mental concentration and an improved vagal tone connecting one’s heart to their brain. But if that was all it gave practicing members it would still be worth the effort.

The kind of meditation studied by Barbara L. Fredrickson, PH. D. in her book, Love 2.0 was of a Buddhist tradition called Loving-kindness Meditation (LKM). She found that, “The fact that reflection on social connection appeared to penetrate the body to affect enduring heart rhythms made us take a closer look.” She is referring to the medical health benefits here.

They found that the physical vagal tone improvements and other aspects on health were verified. These were rigorous scientific studies, with double blind population groups.

They also found what many church goers already knew, if a group does something in unison, their heart rates often synchronize. Evidence suggests that when a group synchronizes like this, they broaden their minds collectively.

Negative emotions narrow your views of the world, positive emotions broaden your views of the world. Meditation is one direct method of raising your positive emotions!

When this and other aspects of meditation happen people often feel more connected to each other and to the world as a whole. That concept alone has tremendous implications for society if we could just get enough of a population density to employ the techniques.

Fredrickson writes, “Clearly something powerful was embedded within this simple thought exercise.” She continues, “From the perspective of emotions science, LKM is not the least bit supernatural”.

Meditation in the United States has had a mixed history. The Beatles were known to have used Transcendental Meditation (TM), which had ups and downs according to how prominent the profile of the latest celebrity membership was at that time.

Some studies found merit in the practice but then some claims by the leader for “flying” were simply not true, at least for the observed physical body.

Claims of spirit flying or astral projection have yet to find any study validation that I am aware of. Things like this and others, popularized in books such as Wisdom of the Mystic Masters, by Joseph J. Weed tended to give new age thinking a bad reputation, something that meditation often found itself included into even if it was unrelated to crystal therapy and other such practices on the new age front.

Practitioners of martial arts brought versions of meditation to the United States after WWII. These forms of meditation were highly influenced by the style that it was learned under, with the associated cultural leanings that accompany any such culture transfers. Karate and Kung Fu members tended to reflect their styles in their meditation practices.

I learned meditation personally in 1979 from a Hopkido practitioner who was my dorm neighbor in college. He was an anthropology major and he was a black belt who usually refused to teach others in the dorm due to the aggression many in our house exhibited.

When some of us did persuade him to work with us, we were taught meditation and breathing katas, which were simply an arrangement of moves coordinated with the forceful intake or exhaling of breaths.

Meditation was focusing on an object, often a candle that flickered if one was practiced enough with an immobile object. The idea was to strengthen one’s individual ability to focus.

Every martial art style seemed to have meditation in it. Ninja’s, popular in the 1990′s had several levels if the books and printed material were to be believed. Most martial artists I knew liked the meditation but declined to follow any of the eastern religious underpinnings.

When I was in boot camp, one die hard gym rat had aspirations of becoming a U.S Navy SEAL. We constantly saw him sitting next to his “rack” meditating after normal working hours. The Christian cross he wore certainly did not reflect any eastern religious traditions either. He claimed a high accomplishment in a martial arts style that I was unfamiliar with at that time so I don’t recall which one it was. I remember him as the most even keeled guy I ever met. I don’t know if he made it into the Teams, but his chances seemed pretty good to us at the time.

He was sure in control of his emotions during boot camp and he could do hundreds of push ups, on demand. He said it was all due to his mental training, much of which he credited to meditation.

Also popular the last few decades is the Edgar Cayce meditation techniques, which are available online. The Association for Research and Enlightenment (ARE) is a very fun place to visit, located in Va. Beach, Va. Edgar Cayce was a Christian clergyman who became known as the sleeping prophet.

LKM is a better scheme of meditation than I was taught for what I need in the hear and now and also for what I am suggesting for the empowered volunteers out there. It seems also to be the most studied version of meditation too.

While improving your focus is worthy and achievable, it is more helpful to achieve the health improvements associated with this specific type of meditation. There are many people who need to register a much needed break from the stress induced impact of their job or their commute or other stress producing portions of their lives. They need LKM and most have never heard of it.

Today, it is very hard to have too many stress busting processes. LKM is a great technique that works and has great value for every single person who has excess stress.

The key to LKM is that it produces a measurable effect on the human body reflected in the body language which studies with solid empirical evidence have reflected, “will take whatever positive feelings you generate in LKM are likely to imbue the rest of your day with more positivity as well.”

Furthermore, the “Pathways through which LKM seeds subsequent moments of positivity resonance are wholly physical.” Fredrickson continues, “Since nonverbal gestures are contagious, your openness also allows others to become more open and relaxed. Meeting each other with openness like this increases the odds that the two of you will come into sync.”

If you ask any salesman, they would love to have a method of generating more rapport with their clients. Every businessperson would love to go into meetings generating and emitting nonverbal signals embedded with positive feelings which the other members would pick up on and react more positively to, hopefully helping his or her presentation close positively. Teachers would love to have their students receive the messages more deeply due to positive messaging transfer too.

Things usually go better with positive vibrations!

The message received through a more positive delivery method always has a better chance of being received more positively, and therefore it also has a better chance of being accepted.

The old saying, it’s not what you say, but how you say it really resonates when you used LKM.

Everyone would love to have more positive interactions in their lives! This is the one thing that an individual can do that can ensure your positive emotions will be generated and received by many if not most of those around you.

Every empowered volunteer should carefully consider this technique for their own health as well as their impact in spreading the volunteer message. If you present your message in a better tone, it will be heard more clearly and it will be received more readily.

So LKM gives the meditating member better health over time and also puts the member into a better state for presenting the empowered volunteer message! This increases the potential for success in membership building, thus helping the charity too. Everyone wins under these circumstances.

Below are links to studies which are current and give compelling reasons for engaging in positive mental training for better individual health and also for better results in interactions with other humans.

1) Can Meditation Change Compassionate Behavior?

http://www.mindandlife.org/can-meditation-change-compassionate-behavior/

2) Meditation causes compassionate action?

 http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/meditation_causes_compassionate_action

3) Morality and Meditation?

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/07/opinion/sunday/the-morality-of-meditation.html?src=me&ref=general&_r=1&

So take heart if you read this article dear empowered volunteer.

The next time you meditate, know that you’re not just benefiting yourself, you’re also benefiting your neighbors, community members and as-yet-unknown strangers by increasing the odds that you’ll feel their pain when the time comes, and act to lessen it as well.

4) This link is a deep study which many people may find too much to digest. It is offered for those who like to really dig into the material and know that the findings are sufficient to produce the effect claimed.

http://brainimaging.waisman.wisc.edu/publications/2013/WengCompassionPsychSci.pdf

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Stress moderation is at the top of the pillars of health care wisdom for the empowered volunteer. You can actually die from stress related effects.

When volunteers think of how to work their time around volunteer projects they don’t automatically think of stress. Their passion for the volunteer group or the charity supported by the group helps them prioritize their emotions and their time management. Simply put, they make it work no matter how much effort it takes to get the job done.

For the empowered volunteer, what is the incentive for someone who is not already involved in the represented group to join, pending their busy, busy, busy schedule? Obviously if they have a passion for the charity they might be persuaded. But what if they are not passionate for the charity? What then? They say that they are too stressed and that they don’t have any time! Then the empowered volunteer needs to refer to the pillars of health wisdom!

The empowered volunteer is all about helping people. That must be the first priority, above all other things.

If you put people first, the other things will find a way to resolve themselves, one way or another. Happy passionate people solve problems and they also brag about the experience. They also have better health, statistically speaking. First, let’s tackle the stress issue and then we will address the other health studies and how they affect our message.

Stress is manageable in our lives. But for those who find themselves under extreme stress they should explore the science discoveries from the power of positivity.

This topic was addressed by Barbara L. Fredrickson, Ph. D. in her book, nicely named Positivity! In it she presents credible and robust scientific evidence on how proper meditation helps humans deal with stress. Then she moves on to give concrete examples of how to meditate and other features in order to help drive your health benefits from lowering the effects from stress on your body. She has placed guided meditations and other simple tools on her website, which is very easy to use and worthy of a visit for anyone who would like to feel better in our stressful world. This kind of easy to do it yourself stress modification is why Dr. Fredrickson’s book and website are a pillar of wisdom for the empowered volunteer.

http://www.positivityratio.com/index.php

Once you go to the site, use the tools tab or the take the test tab and see how you are faring on an individual level. With over two decades of research on this subject along with tons of behavioral science supporting data going back several more decades it is worth checking it out and seeing if you can benefit. To be honest, everyone can benefit unless you just don’t want to let it help you. Meditation has been used by many civilizations for thousands of years, from Christians like St. Augustine to Chinese Kung Fu monks.

Never underestimate how you can improve your life with small changes that affect your health in a magnified way beyond the small time and effort you expend.

Decades of data from research into how social status affects your health are also available and helpful for the empowered volunteer to understand for their pillars of health wisdom. Scientists use the term social economic status (SES) for these kinds of studies and conversations about them. SES is in general terms an individual’s social level in society. Usually this is divided into three areas, low or working class, middle class and upper middle class or upper class status levels. Low class is the working people, usually living from pay check to pay check. Poverty level is below this group.

Middle class is the group who was lifted by many factors after WWII, but one of the most controversial was the GI Bill, which allowed many of those returning from the war to attend college and then better their lives with better paying jobs and more upward mobility. In this case, a veterans group was instrumental in helping pass this important piece of legislation, one which in looking back historians and economics agree was a huge success.

Harry W. Colmery, a former national commander of the American Legion and former Republican National Chairman, is credited with drawing up the first draft of the GI Bill.

Some people reading this will be surprised that a former Republican Party National Chairman could have been involved with promoting a middle class path towards education back in the days after WWII. Back then, only the very rich could afford college. But keep in mind, political parties change over time and their policies change over time too.

The GOP today is not your grandfather’s party! The current Republican Party thinking on education is reflective of some of those changes in mindset regarding middle class education at the high school level as well as for higher education and is thus beyond the scope of this post.

SES is very important to the empowered volunteer from the point of those who are least likely to be volunteering and which also can benefit the most from volunteering, health wise.

Upper middle class is more often defined as someone who has physical assets which generate enough income so that if that person suddenly stopped their regular employment they could still live off their passive income. This status level is worthy of achievement and is the focus of another pillar of wisdom, that of wealth which will be addressed in a forthcoming post. For our purposes here, the higher the status the better the likely hood of good health is expected.

Michael Marmot, in his ground breaking book 2004 book, The Status Syndrome, How Social Standing Affects Our Health and Longevity has reviewed and distilled the data results from over three decades of studies in order to write about how we can benefit from this knowledge.

One key to his book was that if someone has little autonomy over their lives, as most working class people find themselves, then they are more likely to have lower health.

This is true for many countries beyond the United States too. It goes further though, for those people reporting “the greater the degree of inequality of material deprivation and of income, the worse the health.” He found that low control over one’s life to be the big central factor that linked everything to health, happiness, etc.

In America’s past labor unions were often the only way for laborers to exert any form of control over their lives. Before the unions formed, safety and other factors we take for granted today were not common in many industries.

For those people then and even today in many industries, having some control over their life could determine their future health. Volunteering is one path towards restoring some form of control over one’s life if it is not found elsewhere. Each person can control how much they volunteer and where, and to what extent for each group they join.

This kind of life control opportunity can help them if they are in a job where they have little or no control over their lives. 

The main thing here is that no matter what your station in life, you can do things to help your health and your mental or emotional wellbeing. The positivity ratio is so simple once you start that you will wonder why you have not heard of it before. I would suggest starting with the guided meditation and then moving on where ever you are comfortable. This tool is absolutely awesome for its potential to help people with high stress jobs.

The health harming aspects attributed to many working class jobs should surprise no one. They have been apparent for generations of American workers. From swing shifts to heated environments too hot to stay in for very long to extended nursing hours for patient coverage. The potential ways to combat the negative effects seem to have escaped the general public’s notice, until now hopefully. Even middle class American’s can use this information to their advantage so that the stress from the job doesn’t inflict further harm to your health.

Knowing the health harming effects of low autonomy is important for the health of employees and management.

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Group with the Optimist Creed

This sentence is found on the second line of the Optimists Creed. The Optimists are a group of individuals who promote children’s or youth activities in the community where the group meets.

Properly called Optimists International, they are focused on helping kids in communities. Their site is, http://www.optimist.org/.

I have the Optimists Creed on the wall in my office. I try and repeat it out loud as often as I remember. It is a wonderful set of positive sentences which when read aloud can help program your mind into a better area. I have done this off and on since I was a member of the group, back in Iowa in the late 80′s.

Back then after every weekly morning meeting, we would repeat the creed as a group, outloud. It really helped me kick off my day to see and visit with so many positive people. I really loved the atmosphere and the energy everyone brought to the breakfast meetings. Note, some clubs have evening or lunch meetings. I could not have worked my schedule as a Navy Recruiter around anything but a breakfast meeting so I am glad my group met early, around 7 AM.

There are many worthwhile youth groups in America. I have never found another which helps the members in this unique way though. The members gain through their associations with each other a great deal even before they apply their talents for helping the kids on community wide projects.

You can check out their website to see what the local Optimist group close to you is actively participating or sponsoring.

Optimists are very well known for their happy attitudes and attempt to bring this upbeat nature to their programs and activities for the youth in their communities. From the website the current numbers for Optimists International are 87,000 individual members who belong to 2,900 autonomous clubs. Optimists conduct 65,000 service projects each year, serving six million young people. Optimists also spend $78 million on their communities annually. These are some real good numbers reflecting extensive leverage of action for the size of the population doing this great work.

For the Empowered Volunteer to totally grasp the reality of these numbers, the membership in 2007 was 123,865 and club totals were 3,918.

The decline is dramatic over the last 6 years!

The decline of nearly 37,000 members and almost 1,000 clubs is reflective of the economic decline for sure, but also I submit it is due to the lack of knowledge of how much volunteering can do for the individual’s personal health and mental well being.

See the posts on this blog regarding the various health studies relating to social connections and social capital and increases in individual status for associated ideas and related data. If more people knew how much they gained from volunteering this and many other groups should see a steady increase in membership.

This is the purpose of the empowered volunteer, to get the message out for both the individual benefits as well as the incredible nature of many of these civic groups for the public to see.

I will reprint the Optimists Creed in full below to illustrate just how positive this groups creed really is. I don’t personally know of another group’s creed which even comes close to such positive thoughts.

The Optimist Creed
Promise Yourself …
To be so strong that nothing can disturb your peace of mind.
To talk health, happiness and prosperity to every person you meet.
To make all your friends feel that there is something in them.
To look at the sunny side of everything and make your optimism come true.
To think only of the best, to work only for the best, and to expect only the best.
To be just as enthusiastic about the success of others as you are about your own.
To forget the mistakes of the past and press on to the greater achievements of the future.
To wear a cheerful countenance at all times and give every living creature you meet a smile.
To give so much time to the improvement of yourself that you have no time to criticize others.
To be too large for worry, too noble for anger, too strong for fear, and too happy to permit the presence of trouble.

I personally love this creed! It is a great way to start any day when you recite it out loud. I highly recommend doing so and then track your results. You will be surprised how effective this practice can be in making you a bit brighter for the rest of the day, with carry over to the next in many cases!

Being an Optimist was for me a pleasure and a fond memory. I networked my way into other groups from this initial membership and gained even more individual pleasure from extending my personal connections and relationships among adults. I stopped being just the local Navy Recruiter and became myself again. I really needed the balance of adult relationships after the total commitment needed to find worthy candidates for the US Navy.

This demanding job of finding sailors to man the expanding US Navy back in the late 80′s was all encompassing and all consuming. I needed a diversion from my duties and many of my “formal requests” from my command to join groups were denied. This group and the Freemasons were finally approved formerly by Navy Recruiting District Omaha. I was thrilled. I has already networked my way to meeting several Optimists and Freemasons at the local YMCA, so I was ready to petition.

Freemasons are often members of other worthy groups

I networked my way into joining the local Freemasons Lodge in Newton, Iowa next (you had to petition and then be initiated after you passed the famous voting process) and this combination of groups and the many friends I developed helped me tremendously with the stress and strain of Navy Recruiting which each military recruiter was dealing with back then. I owe a lot to both groups for keeping me sane during these very difficult times!

I also networked my way to visiting, in uniform a US Navy function with NATO! I was formerly invited by a Marine Major who liked my involvement with the Optimists, as he was also in his community of Va Beach, Va. So he invited me to join him as his guest for the Icelandic NATO celebration. I was delighted, but the stipulation was I had to do it in full dress uniform. He was dressed in his, so that was understandable.

I was by far the lowest ranking of Navy personnel there visible and several times I had to state I was a guest and not the help as one officer or another would try and hand me some plate to take away, they just could not allow an enlisted person to be a guest!

But the Icelandic food was great and I got a personal introduction to the U. S. Admiral in charge of the whole East Coast of the US. This is very rare experience for a junior enlisted sailor for those of you not familiar with military formalities. Enlisted folks only see such senior officers when they stand at attention at change of command ceremonies or when they serve meals.It is very rare to have a one on one private chat with one, especially at that officers request!

I was a Petty Officer 2nd Class at the time, MM2 (SS/SW) for those who know and care about the rate and warfare designations used in the Navy. It is very rare for a private conversation to take place between two individuals of such divergent ranks, which the admiral initiated when he saw my recruiting badge. He had an interest in where I was recruiting as well as how things were going in the recruiting world after the First Gulf War, particularly how the war had impacted our efforts.

This informal conversation played a huge part in my continued service in the Navy later on when the Admiral’s Chief of Staff called my command at NRD Omaha on my behalf. Literally within minutes of that call an unjust circumstance against me was straightened out and my new orders to stay in the Navy were arriving on the curly paper that was the fax machine back then. Such is the power of networking! My wife and I were trilled to move to my next assignment.

My point is that you never know when simply being in a very worthy group can change your whole life as this one event changed mine. If I had not sought out adult company to balance my work related needs I would never have been able to network my way to visiting with the senior most officer on the East Coast.

I also balanced my need for adult company with a new found Masonic brother who had been a POW during Viet Nam War. His stories helped me make sense of a world when I needed the help and I was and still am very grateful for his kind conversations.

I am sure many of you can find this youth group worthwhile today, even if you need to start one yourself. Consider helping this or another group of your choice by volunteering today. You never know when a small thing could change your life forever.

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Even knights need face to face time!

In this post we will examine why face to face time is beneficial and superior to interactions that are conducted through other mediums, like chat rooms or other social media.

Barbara L. Fredrickson, a professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill has written a new book about love. In it she goes through the data of love and its components. As a researcher she has followed that book with other publications in scholarly journals. The theme of her work is that positivity is good for individuals in multiple ways. She also looks at love from a science point of view and how to enrich the experience.

Humans view love in different ways, but one thing that seems to be true, love leads to social connections. Love also has a physical impact on our bodies. Some love is just connecting with others rather than romantic.

The kind of interaction the internet provides is very different from the face to face type of those who join fraternal or civic groups for instance. Physical interactions such as those found in volunteer groups, “ affects the cardiovascular system called the vagal tone”, she says in a forthcoming issue of Psychological Science while writing in a recent Tampa Bay Perspective on March 31, 2013.

The brain is connected to the heart by the vagus nerve. This direct connection supports the old saying of a negative life experience in the area of love breaking the heart. The two are really physically tied together!

Fredrickson studied the health benefits and concluded, “In short, the more attuned to others you become, the healthier you become, and vice versa”. Furthermore, she writes, “This mutual influence also explains how a lack of positive social contact diminishes people”. If you can align yourself in a positive and passionate cause, you can’t seem to do anything but help your health and the cause in most cases, it would seem.

She goes on to explain that the ability to connect with people is a use it or lose it talent and can be strengthened or lost depending on how it is exercised. As any volunteer will tell you, interacting with others is one of the more frequent things that most do. To interact well and stay on course for helping the cause takes a lot of effort and attention. This is more often than not done face to face, with other passionate volunteers who also want to help.

The benefits of face to face time that volunteers get can be very helpful to the health of all participants. Positive interactions with positive people are the most beneficial it seems, which makes sense. However, connecting with other people is part of the human experience and that is what charity groups and the volunteer groups that support them offer in the volunteer experience.

Volunteers by definition are not paid so they must see other less obvious benefits if they are to justify their time and effort. With science hot on the trail of other health benefits seen in positive relationships, everyone should be considering somehow positioning themselves for more happiness as well as physical and mental health improvements.

Find a cause or charity that you can be passionate about and join. Make it a highly positive experience and the health benefits should show up, according to the research. However you might be too happy and busy to notice.

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Social network world wide

Michael Marmot, in his book “The Status Syndrome, How Social Standing Affects Our Health and Longevity” makes the case through massive data gleaned from many sources over 30 years that health can be determined by social status, with the level of integration of a society as a predictor of the health of that society.

This idea was first predicted by pioneering Sociologist Durkheim and while now called Social Capital many studies find the connection valid as a predictor of social health as well as potential aid for the individual participant to learn from and apply for their own lives.

In other words, the better connected a society is the better the level of trust and the better the health of the society as a whole would be expected. This does not always mean the rich are expected to have better health on the macro level or whole society level. Many other things enter into this line of thinking. How close an individual is to others in society for instance plays a huge role in their life expectancy.

Life expectancy can also be extended as a society during wars as demonstrated by Amartya Sen who found that in Britain during the war years an increase in life expectancy existed and was thought to be from the positive effects on societies’ social integration which directly reflected mortality rates.  War brought folks together in a way that focused their efforts and their common cause, resulting in longer life for society as a whole despite the deaths from the war.

Durkheim, a father of Sociology studied social integration from religious, domestic, and political points of view with regards to suicide rates. His findings supported his conclusions that the more integrated a society was the less the rate of suicide would be. Specifically in 19^th century Europe he found that Protestant countries in Europe were often found to have higher rates of suicide than countries where the population was mostly Catholic.

In general the rates of suicide were even lower for Jewish populations. His conclusions from these studies were that the strong and unified society for the Jewish population and also for the Catholic population supported people and resulted in lower suicide rates than the Protestant populations where a more individualist approach to life was observed.

Please note this does not endorse one religion over another, it cites how populations in specific countries implemented their respective religions and how that part of their lives impacted their health.

Durkheim went on to study the effects of marriage on populations and the effects of war on total population suicide rates as well. He concluded that social integration was one of the biggest factors in not only the health of a population but in the individuals as well. Now called social capital and studied for the last 30 years or so before Marmot’s book in 2004, social integration can be applied by the individual confidently for both status raising health impact as well as strategies for health improvement through social connections.

The bottom line is that individuals can do things to increase their social status. They can do things to increase their social capital.

They can also significantly raise their health expectations by positively driving these aspects of their lives!

If you take the proper actions, you can improve your chances of not only extending your life but having a better quality of life. Many people would expect that the rich would as a society outlive the poorer societies. Money is not the single best predictor of longer life however when it comes to societies.

Ichiro Kawaichi from Harvard University was a researcher who took on this question on the relationship between the differences in social capital and the good or low health expectations. His team used surveys to quantify the level of trust in groups and then looked for the expected results of health levels. Societies that can be viewed as high in social cohesion like Japan who is rich, Kerala which is poor, or in the middle like Costa Rica have better health than others with equal wealth but less social cohesion, concludes Marmot in his book, The Status Syndrome. So the amount of money of a society is less a predictor of health than many people would think.

Another aspect to health is the impact on individuals who have low control over their lives, or at least a perception of that low control.

Marmot writes, “Furthermore, the greater the degree of inequality of material deprivation and of income, the worse the health”. Low control was the link in this issue between health and living poor. Generally speaking, the poor view their lives as having less control and the well-off view their lives as having more control over their individual decisions.

This concept of health and income inequality with regards to an aging population is something we in the United States will confront in greater degrees in our future as our economies seem to be driving a greater economic wedge between the poor and the rich. Can government policy changes help overcome the health disparities predicted or perhaps resulting from the poor who have low control over their lives and yet will be entering the government health care system at greater rates in the next few years?

This post is right now concerned with the individual and how that member of society can positively impact their potential future health by making changes in their lives. These changes need to be cost effective and also not barred by social status. They need to be within the reach of the normal American. I believe the studies cited in this post reflect that potential for the normal American to positively impact their lives. These studies and many others show an individual’s health impact positively improving by increasing social connections. This is one reason for someone to join a group!

The empowered volunteer’s mission is to help people understand the benefits of joining their respective group.

In short, the stage is set for the Empowered Volunteer to take charge of their lives and reap the potential impact on their health and mental wellbeing while helping others find their way towards these same benefits. This is truly a win-win situation.

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