 Today is March 30th, 2022, and we're in the third year of the coronavirus pandemic. My name is Ken Birdness, and I'm coming to you from Hawaii up on the North Shore. And today we're going to, well, let's first check in on our statistics. The statistics are looking good for us. Coronavirus is receding at all indices, not only here in Hawaii, but at the U.S. as well. Unfortunately, in the global neighborhood, it's still surging in many places around the world. So we're not out of the woods yet, and we have to be very careful. And the scientists are talking about the possibilities of new variants. So we have to really take care of that as well and be prepared, which we weren't when it first came in. That's for sure. I'm very fortunate today to have my good friend and fellow psychologist, Greg McDonald, with me. He teaches out at Capulani Community College, and he is not only a psychologist, but he's a professional musician. So we're going to be talking, among other things, about the coronavirus, and the arts, and especially music. And I'm looking forward to that very much. So without further ado, let me introduce you to Greg McDonald, my good friend. Very happy to have you here with me today. Yeah, looking forward to it. I think the last time we did anything together was at Shirokea in Alamon shopping center. Yeah, I remember that well. I was interviewing musicians, working musicians. I figured musicians who were making a lot of money didn't need to be interviewed, but the ones that are out there every day, slopping it around, needed to be interviewed. That was the gist of my program. And although you weren't a musician, you were somebody that I thought would be interesting. And that was the first time we did something like this. So we were talking about soundtracks, because we're both really movie buffs and soundtracks at a lot. So we're having a lot of fun with that. I remember that fondly. Yeah, that was good. I haven't told the audience yet, but part of your, of course, you're a professional musician, but you and your wife play the steel drums. And they've probably seen you around the island. And if they haven't, they may have run into some of your CDs that are available. But today, you've got your guitar with you. So I'm going to turn it over to you. And if you could introduce your guitar, let's talk about music and coronavirus and problems. Sure. OK. This is my guitar. You can't see the whole thing, but you don't need to see the whole thing. First of all, Ken said, I'm a steel drum player. As Corona affected all of us and we had no gigs, I decided maybe I'd like to learn another instrument. So I began messing around with guitar and I'm not really a guitar player. But we had an idea to use the guitar to talk about kind of. How people get isolated in whenever they have a serious disease doesn't just have to be COVID. And I thought, oh, how interesting. I think I think I have an idea, but, you know, I'm not really a guitar player. I always selfie facing, but Ken is always encouraging. So he said, show me what you have in mind. So I did. And he said, would you be willing to do that for the show? So I'm going to do that. OK. Don't expect a song. I'm not at the point of playing songs. I do mostly courting, which means harmony parts, OK, but enough to explain the idea. OK, if you if you heard a song that went like this, how would you like it? Times never changing. I'm going to assume anybody listening is going, that's not even a song and you would be correct. What I'm doing is I'm just isolating one note. And I use that idea to talk about how we get isolated from everyone else. We get isolated because maybe maybe our job is at risk if we don't get vaccinated or maybe we can't go to movies and restaurants or entertainment. Can't see friends together other than a few small ones now and then can't visit people in the hospital. Worry if you're going to go to the grocery store, whether you pick up a banana after somebody who coughed on it, you're going to get the virus. You know how it goes. Masks drive you nuts. Social distancing. I could go on. You got the list. OK. So we go from being isolated to each one of those things kind of feels like this, you know? Each one of those is like, it's oh, no, now it's worse, right? That's it. Now I'm losing my job. You know, I can't go to the hospital and visit my friends, all right? So we get more and more isolated. Now, when we're isolated, it's sometimes hard to move outside of that. So I thought, OK, you know, when you're playing a chord on guitar, you never just play one note. You have to bring in other notes. OK, so let me bring in another note. Now, all of a sudden or it's not quite so isolating, right? And maybe that note has a friend. So you can go by time making here is breaking isolation, right? Because once you've got those three friends, each of them have friends and then you can play an entire chord and each of those friends have friends. So then you can get your group together with another group and play another chord and then another chord. And then all of a sudden, you've got enough to make a chord progression, which I'll show you how it goes. OK, now it's not great, but you get the idea. Breaking isolation requires other people or contacting other resources somehow, not just getting in that kind of depressed, small, little cocoon where you can't see any way out of it. And that was really the idea that Kent kind of liked. And I said, well, I don't know. I don't know what else I might want to say other than on the guitar. You can also play songs that are happy if you're happy or sad if you're sad. But the interesting thing about sad songs is they tend to make people happy. I'll tell you why, not the listener, but the player. If you're feeling sad as a musician and you play a sad song, it's like that sadness goes out of you into another instrument and makes music. So you actually feel better playing it, playing a sad song. So an instrument can do a lot for you, but an instrument requires a relationship. And that's just what I got through saying, remember, we went from this to a whole relationship with six other people, if you want to call it that. And that's I think when we talk about the wellness wheel in a minute, you'll kind of see that sometimes when things happen to us. We forget the other elements of our life that are surrounding us. We just see the little isolated place. And there are some some elements of life that are probably just great that we forget about. Absolutely. You know, one of the things that other musicians tell me is the joy of playing together. And I've seen some lot of creative work with people who are in choirs, who are in orchestras, who are in bands, despite the fact that they're at different locations, somehow managing to meld their music together, very difficult. But you can see the joy that it brings to them to be finally back together with other people playing music. And but even if you're alone, music can make you joyful. I know that when I'm depressed, I go on YouTube and I dial in a choir or I dial in a singer or I dial in a band who's playing music that I love and all of a sudden my day has changed. I've gone from being depressed or anxious or whatever to feeling really good. Maybe you could just sort of share a little bit about how music makes you feel good, both listening to it and playing it. Now, you've already talked about playing it, the joy of that. But tell us a little bit more about that and also about listening to others play. Sure. You might have to call me time on this, because I could talk forever. Just give me. I will. OK, all right. When I when I practice, I'm so consumed with what I'm doing and trying to make something happen that you get in a space that I think artists get into, which is that there's no time. If you said I'm going to if I said I'm going to practice an hour and my wife calls me for dinner that six hours later, I go, I just started. You know, so in terms of joy, it's almost beyond joy. It's even when you're not doing well. It's like if you just feel like there's something happening and you're helping make it happen, and it's slowly getting better. That's the way I feel about just practice by myself. Playing with others, I rarely ask this question, but playing with others in a way has ruined me for working in a regular environment where you have meetings, you know, like staff meetings, for example, because when you're playing with others, let's take a small group of maybe four or five. I was playing with them and we were in the middle of a song and somebody started just saying, OK, you take it, you take it, meaning make up a solo. Right. And it was frightening. But as soon as you start making up a solo that you don't know where you're going, it's as if the band is holding you from making a mistake. It's absolutely incredible. They just are holding. They're holding the place for you. It's like a placeholder. And my experience of it was almost spiritual in that. It was like if you've ever if you've ever done a fallback exercise where there's a mattress behind you, it would like somebody was holding up a mattress behind me and I could lean all the way back in the mattress and continue to play without paying any attention and it would all work. And that, unfortunately, that gave me a way to measure when it's working and when it's not. OK, most of the time, it's a lot of work when you're playing to make sure everything's happening. Right. There's only a few moments that you really get that kind of a feeling and the band has to be pretty tight with egos not all out there. It's my turn and all that kind of crap. But you take that experience and you put it in a group meeting like one of those required group meetings that I won't name any places that I've worked and I'm not talking about Capulani Community College, but I've worked in a lot of places where I'm not, where you have these boring meetings that you have to go to every week. And I sit there with the memory of what it's like when a group of people work together. The musical, the musical memory of how it's what's it's like when everything's working. And the meetings never feel that way. Yeah. They never feel that way. People have agendas, people are afraid of this, somebody doesn't want to talk, somebody does want to talk, somebody, as you know, it's like, it's like, in a way, it kind of, it kind of made it difficult for me to be in meetings because it just always not like that feeling I had several times when I was playing in the really good bands. I'll stop. I've had that feeling many times in meetings. So, you know, I totally understand, but that's a whole nother show. So we can get into that on that one. And in another show, I'd like you to I'd like you to tell us about playing with your wife, that must be very special as well. So but in the meantime, let's just just don't say any jokes about our haircut. Right, exactly. You know, the thing that I thought of when you were talking, though, I was I was thinking about Joseph Gamble and his idea of follow your bliss. As a professional musician, you've followed your bliss. It puts you in that space that is so wonderful that it counteracts those terrible effects that you get from something like coronavirus. And I think the thing to our audience is to realize that following our bliss is different paths for everybody. So for you, it's music for other people. It may be art for me, it may be movies, whatever it is. Somehow we've got to get to those paths and get off the coronavirus depressive, anxious, upset paths that we get ourselves stuck on. So that's that's really important. Yeah, I was hoping to take some time to go into happy music. But I think you're right. I think we should move on to the other side. I mean, music affects our heart. It reaches us emotionally. But of course, you and I as psychologists also read people with our brain and we reach them cognitively. And I know that you've been working with your students on wellness, which is the exact opposite from coronavirus. Coronavirus is illness and we're working in wellness. I mean, how different can you get? And that is a great solution. And I know you've been working with a wellness wheel. And we've talked about this before. Maybe we could take a look at that and you could talk a little bit about the wellness wheel and how it works and how we help people, how you help your students understand the wellness wheel, but also how psychologists can help people get better and focus on their bliss through the wellness wheel. Yeah, OK. Oh, here it is. OK. OK, it's small, but I think I can see it. OK. The wellness wheel, the idea of a wellness wheel has been around for a long time. This is between myself and Ken, we kind of made our own because not all of them have the same set up and so forth. But there is an idea here and the idea, it looks it looks complicated when you look at it right now. But if you just look at, yeah, there you go. If you look at the outer ring where it says job career, family, social growth, and then the other categories. Each of each of those are some aspect of all of our lives. All right. And then. The way the way I use this with students is when we're talking about wellness is. People don't they don't usually always pay attention to other areas of their life. Like if you ask how they're doing, they're likely to say fine or funky or something like that. So if you look at there's one small area here, it's called happiness. The idea here is as the as the what looks like railroad tracks or lines go further out, it means that you're doing better in that area. So it's like it's like we used to use the phrase. It's probably probably sexist nowadays. If you saw a good looking woman, you'd call her. Well, that's a 10, you know, as a 10 and not at the best. So these these cross lines are a way that a student can say can assess themselves, which I think is important rather than always looking outside themselves. You know, humanistic psychology is not being a giving you answers. It tries to give you ways to find your own answers. And so what this does is it lets them kind of diagnose where they're at. So if you took the if you took happiness and you saw I you just see a little yellow spec down there, the person that rated that would basically be saying, I don't have much happiness. I'm not going to go over all of the areas because it would take too long. You can kind of see how it works, right? But you can see on the right. Take a look at the right hand side, if we could do that up. It goes from terrible to terrific. Yeah. So at the bottom, if there's a small amount like that, yellow one. And you can see the score of the individual in addition to looking at the color. The score for happiness is two. So it's only out to the two level there where it's two. So that would be bad, you know, right? His rating of himself for happiness is bad. He is not happy. But as you move out, you see that it moves toward the terrific things. And you can see where he's feeling or she's feeling bad about themselves at the further out they get or the more color they get in those things. The better they feel about themselves. So this is a way that Greg and I have looked at focusing on where the problem is with the individual and clearly Greg has it down right. I mean, his happiness score is the lowest. Well, actually, growth is the lowest. And the happiness actually goes out two spaces, as you can see, the yellow. And that green, that sort of. I want to I want to say vomit green, but I don't I don't think that would be appropriate for the show. So we'll just say an unpleasant green is only at the first one, which means their growth is terrible. They're stunted, they're stopped. Whereas you move out to something like their physical health where they managed to keep their physical health during the, say, the pandemic. If we're talking about somebody in the pandemic, that's that's much bigger. So I'm guessing when I did this thing and I need to confirm this with you, Greg, I sort of set it up as a typical thing for a student that they might say to you in response to your how do you see yourself on this wheel? Is that some of the things the feedback that you've been getting? Yeah. Yeah. What what usually surprises them is that they they've never even thought about rating themselves in other fields. And the the the interesting thing is, well, if you're really high in doing well in another field, then you're doing well in a different one. What is it that you're doing in that in that field that's doing so well? And can you take any of that knowledge and learning and plug it into the one that's so low? Now, that may not be an answer they can come up with. But what it does do is it it begins to ask the all important thing, which is what's the right question? You know, what's the right question rather than the answer? What's the right question? So if you say, how can I dip into that area to help that other area? They may not know exactly, it's kind of abstract. But at that point, you have to start somewhere. And that's this gives if nothing else, this gives them a starting point. And if I've never done this with it, but I thought about it, maybe in the second or third week of class, when students kind of know each other, give them this and have them track it through the whole semester and maybe touch base in like a breakout room or something each week and have them talk about whether there's been any movement, any way, any way good or bad and what, how come? Something like that. I haven't I haven't put it in that much of practice yet. Really, I just use it as a tool to understand that they live in a lot of arenas and some are doing better than others. And here's a way to plot that out, know where you are. One of the things that I've noticed about that and thinking about this, and I just thought of this looking at the graph again, where we've got somebody who's low in happiness and in growth, but they're high in physical health. So I'm thinking of a friend of mine who, like many people in Hawaii during the pandemic, when we were isolated and we were locked out and we couldn't visit people, got into physical health. And the way she did this and some people do it with running, some people do it with other sort of individual or alone sports. She did it with stand up paddling and she could go out and stand up, paddle away from everybody else by herself in some of the beautiful areas of this island and be by herself and just feel at one with the ocean and feel relaxed and feel part of the Ina, if you will. You know, and it really helped her. It helped her with any kind of depression that came in or negative thoughts that she had. And I remember when I was training for the Honolulu Marathon more years ago that I cared to admit. But it was hard, you know, I mean, physical exercise can be hard, but there also comes a point where all of a sudden you're in that spot that you talked about earlier with music. And it took me a long time to get to that, but I was running out at Alamoana Park and it was getting close in time to the Honolulu Marathon. And all of a sudden I felt light. I was running 10 to 12 miles regularly at that time. And finally, it stopped being a chore and I was running free. And it was like this altered state of consciousness that just filled me with a feeling of well-being. And I think a lot of people, because they've had time to focus on something and if it's, for instance, physical health, they might have encountered something like this. I know my friend who was standing up paddling felt just very, very good. And I would talk to her afterwards and she would literally be high with good feelings about that thing. So, you know, one of the things I hope for people, whether they're students or people watching this program, is if they take a look at something like a wellness and find out where they're doing well and try to help themselves with that in the areas that they're not doing well, could find something like that. I don't know. What do you think? I think that that kind of a goal is so much better than delving too much into self-understanding. You know, I love Freud. I love the unconscious. I love all the stuff that can mess us up from way back when. Yeah. And I don't have any grub. I don't have any complaint about that. It's just that the longer that I worked in the field with patients, the more I realized there's only a few patients who you really want to be able to do that with because you really need long term. And the truth is, you know, they don't have. We don't have long term anymore. The insurance companies don't allow it. And even if you were willing to see somebody for free, you still might not have long term because people are moving around and all that kind of stuff. So things have to be shorter. And I think the idea of going for the space that you and I talked about, you know, that one that gets you there from either running or practicing at something that brings you elation, that gives you some steam to run on, even though there might be unfinished business in your past. Absolutely. You know, I wish we could go back and have a little more time with music because like I say, music does that for me. I no longer can run marathons. In fact, I have a hard time running, period. But I still remember those times and I remember other times where I was following what I loved to do. And when you do that, everything sort of fades. It's sort of like my background here, which I've got blur on and it sort of faded away. So we can concentrate on what we're talking about. That's interesting. Yeah, but that's sort of what, you know, following your bliss is about is focusing right now. Yeah. And everything sort of blurs behind you or around you and you're into that. And think of this background as coronavirus and we're sort of blurring coronavirus out. Right. That's that idea. That's sort of fun. Yeah, definitely. What are some of the other things that you've noticed with the we've only got a couple of minutes left. Any last minute words on the wellness wheel, something that you noticed that we haven't talked about yet that you have enjoyed working with students on the wellness wheel about? Nothing comes to me right away other than what I mentioned that I have never expanded it over a whole semester. And I think that would be the next leg. Usually, usually what I've done is I've done it under the umbrella of a topic that we're studying, you know, so it would be one week and never kind of tracked it. I think I think that's I wouldn't change anything in the wheel not for now anyway, but I think running it for a while would be a lot would be interesting to do. You know, I should do it myself. You could take it every day. Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, it's yours. You don't have to show anybody, you know, give you feedback. Yeah, and you can modify it. Like, for instance, Greg and I took that wheel and we put what we felt were important areas of people's life like family, like physical health, like mental health, like career and job opportunities, which are affecting your financial stability, growth, how much we feel that we're progressing in life. There's a lot of people, especially with coronavirus, felt stunted, felt stopped. They felt like the coronavirus was a stop sign saying, go no further. You know, do no more of what you've been doing. You're just going to have to sit home and watch television all day and bemoan the fact that we're locked in. No, not that stop sign away and take a look at the other things. Your social life, for instance. Now, I know that many of the students that I work with out at have worked with out at Chaminade University miss that social life of college campuses and miss the fact that they're together with the with people. I don't know. Are you seeing that at at Capulani as well? That missing the social aspects of education? Now, that's a topic for another session. Yeah, I say that is really bad. No one's connecting with anybody. Of course, you know that because nobody said nobody's around. You know, there's no face to face stuff happening. But the little bit of face to face stuff that is happening isn't that well attended. And it worries me a little bit about the future of education. But, you know, maybe that's another topic, too. I would, you know, I hated going going on going online. I always told the staff if I ever had to go online, I quit. But we were thrown online in the middle of the virus, right? So we I had to learn it. And then I stayed with it for the next two years. That's four and a half semesters of doing online. I still hate it, but I did see a nice way that you could blend some of the good stuff from that with face to face. If we ever get to go back to face to face, sort of a hybrid idea. Yeah, absolutely. And that's what I experienced as well. And we're coming very short on times. And Greg is absolutely right. That's a good topic for another time. But all these are concerns that touch upon the problems that we're facing today, whether it's coronavirus or whether it's the war in the Ukraine. We need to all find a way to, again, what we were saying earlier, follow our bliss and make our life once again productive and very happy. With that, I would like to say thank you to to Greg for being here with me today and for bringing your guitar along and talking to us about the the wellness wheel. It's been a pleasure and I've really enjoyed it. I hope the audience has gotten something from it. And of course, I'd like to thank Jay and Haley and all the technical staff who help us here and especially you all for tuning in and in, you know, and being our audience. That's something that is very important to us. And if you have any questions or any comments, please let the show know and we'll talk about it next time. So thank you very much. And once again, thank you for being with me, Greg. Yeah, thank you for having me. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn and donate to us at thinktechhawaii.com. Mahalo.