Personal Development Articles
Personal Development Articles
Do Less, Get MoreHave Your Cheese & Eat It Too!
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Solving this taunting little riddle may have more to do with being successful in life than you may first imagine. Today, everything is so fiercely competitive that success depends upon widening your vision and challenging such sacred cow injunctions as "you can't have your cheese and eat it too." The plain truth is that you can and should try with everything you've got. Why settle for anything less? Who wants to choose between a rock and a hard place? Be the canary that swallowed the cat and have a high-paying, low stress job. Go for the whole Kahuna. Have your cheese and eat it too.
Below is a simple and easy 1-2-3 formula that can result in more cheese than you will ever know what to do with.
1. Dream BIG
Many people do not see the connection between their dreams and reality. Most successful people do. The simple truth is this: Anything you can dream, you can do. You can act to shape reality or you can react to what it seems to be doing to you. Fortunately, you don't have to have an IQ of 150, be drop-dead good looking, know people in high places, have an Ivy League MBA or be born with a silver spoon to be successful in life. But you do have to dream BIG and then be willing to do whatever it takes to make that dream come true.
Anyone can dream little dreams, but it takes boldness to dream big, and then an extremely clever approach and tons of hard work to translate those big dreams into reality. It is usually somewhere in between that process where dreams are likely to fade. Sometimes it takes hard work, undoubting belief and blind courage to keep dreams alive. It certainly takes considerable energy.
Your beliefs are what drive dreams and keep them from fading. You have to believe in your dreams and you have to believe in your ability to make them come true. You also have to believe that you are meant to prosper beyond your wildest dreams. Abundance is a reality, not shortage. You are only limited by what you allow yourself to believe. If that notion is tough to swallow, try some water.
Unfortunately many things can happen in life that dampen your spirit and self-confidence. One such thing is the experience of failure. Some failures at the wrong time even have the power to convince you to cancel your dreams. Then you end up choosing between eating it or having it or worst of all, no cheese at all.
There are always two ways out of this dreadful failure dilemma. First, most failures can be seen as great opportunities to start over again with better information. Actually the greatest inventions and discoveries followed repeated failures. So, your reaction to failure is a choice. Secondly, if the failure is that devastating, you can always re-arrange your dreams to accommodate the situation. That is the beauty of dreaming. Dreams don't have to be that specific. They are only limited by your imagination and they can certainly be fluid and changeable. It is the next two steps of this success formula that require the particulars.
2. Be Clever
Beware of something: No matter whether you are dreaming of being a famous movie star, a wealthy dot.com entrepreneur, a gold medallist in the Olympics, a best selling author or a top college professor, the competition is much fiercer than you can ever imagine. The first step in taking a dream to success is to come up with a remarkably unique and clever approach that separates you from the crowd. This is where you have to get rid of everything you think you know. It is what you think you know that is too common and un-clever. Most present knowledge is based on mistakes and incorrect information that encourage staying stuck in the status quo.
Being clever is a complex process that goes way beyond simple creativity. Cleverness may involve a combination of using critical thinking, listening to intuitive feelings, becoming sensitive to the importance of good timing, studying principles in nature, or developing 3-D/360-degree vision. It also requires utter mental flexibility and openness to suspend all pre-judgments and delete expectations as to certain outcomes as a result of your efforts. Moreover you must have an insatiable drive to verify basic assumptions, challenge sacred paradigms, and let go to the unknown. The only safe assumption you can make about being clever is that you can never be clever enough.
Being clever is not something you can do by chance when you feel like it. You have to embrace the attitude of continuous growth and self-improvement. You also have to loose your ego so that you can ask for, listen to, and apply valuable feedback. When you think you are onto something exceptionally clever, it may just be your pride. Or, your dream may not be directed at doing the right things for the right reasons. These are times when you need a second opinion that may contradict your own.
The most ingenious cleverness involves the application of psychological power points, or "P" Points for short. These are the well-timed, well-placed little things you can do to get the biggest results. "P" Points help you reverse the typical 80-20 rule so that you can begin to get more by doing less. This is the simple art of being smart.
Common examples of commercial "P" Point applications are newspaper headlines, media sound bytes and advertising jingles. Common examples are the strategic use of silence, proactive preventative actions and competing against yourself. Personal "P" points are being an excellent role model, learning the art of power communication and maintaining a positive attitude during adversity.
3. Work hard
By the time you start getting clever, you have already experienced the value of hard work. Being clever is hard work. Life seems to make things most difficult once you get to the point of making some progress in translating your dream into a product. This is when you need to muster all the reserves of strength you have stored deep inside you. Even though your awareness of this strength may have faded from failures and setbacks, it is still there.
The challenge ahead requires mental, emotional and physical strength. This means maintaining a totally positive attitude in extreme adversity, voiding your mind of all negative thoughts, and conjuring up a supply of tenacity that you thought never existed. Then you must adapt a do or die mission statement and carry out specific activities persistently and consistently, one by one until they are done.
The most important "P" Point to discover is the value of getting more in sync with the natural way of life. This means taking the time to understand, appreciate and learn from the things that happen in life, before charging ahead in a frenzied, misguided attempt to force artificial control or unnatural change. First things first is the wise admonition here.
Somewhere along the line luck may introduce your hard work to opportunity. At this point, it may require fine tuning your sensitivity to hear and see the little things you can do, which will get the biggest results. Stopping short of complete follow-through of these little things may jeopardize much effort and rob you of what you now deserve. Close but no cigar. Like being clever, you can never work too hard, especially when it comes to follow-through with critical details.
Success is guaranteed by following three simple steps. When you dream big, become clever and work hard, there isn't any success beyond your grasp. However, don't be deceived by the simplicity of this success formula. Success won't come quickly or easily, but you will be so involved you won't even notice that. You will be having your cheese and eating it too.
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The smartest thing you can do in your life is to work on closing the gap between where you are and where you want to be. However being where you want to be isn’t that easy or everybody would already be there.Being smart and getting to where you want to be requires you to solve the baffling paradox of how to have your cake and eat it too. Part of the solution involves reconciling two seemingly opposite, contradictory things: (1) actively managing your life and achieving goals and (2) passively understanding life and letting go to accept something that is already yours to enjoy. The other part of the solution involves reversing the order you typically proceed in doing these two things.
Passwords to The Prosperity Zone
You can only begin to see the whole solution to this perennial paradox from The Prosperity Zone. This is where you want to be. Here you start becoming whole and are at your best physically, emotionally, vocationally, socially and spiritually. More than likely you are doing too much to make too little progress in getting to your prosperity zone. Below are twenty “passwords” that can help close this gap. This is the simple art of being smart in doing less to get more.
1. Dream big. Everything starts with a dream and dreams are free. If you don’t dream big, how can you expect anything great to happen to you? It is through fulfilling your dreams that you begin to gain a sense of being where you want to be. Of course you have to do something to make your dreams come true. This is where being smart counts in doing the little things that get the biggest results.
2. Slow down. The world today is like a merry-go-round moving 1000 mph. Everything is blurred and you can’t see where you are going let alone how to get there. By moving so fast you are probably doing a lot more than you need to be doing to be where you want to be. Slowing down will enable you to see more of what you need to see and less of what you don’t need to see. This helps you get further in closing your gap by actually doing less.
3. Manage yourself. Eventually you figure out that the only thing you can really manage is yourself. This comes after wasting much time and effort trying to control everything and change all the other people in your life. Self-management involves developing the right attitudes, practicing the most productive behaviors and eliminating destructive habits. Managing yourself in getting to where you want to be is just doing the most important things smarter and forgetting about the rest.
4. Maintain balance. Being out of balance in anything is not natural and it requires much extra effort to restore. Thinking or acting in one extreme or the other isn’t smart. It hides the best vantage point, which is always in the middle. This is the best place to see where you want to be and how to get there quickly and easily. Also, when you are in the middle you can close your gap in both directions, which doubles your progress.
5. Close gaps. You may still be spreading unnecessary chaos and the result is widening the gap between where you are and where you want to be. There can be gaps between who you are and who you pretend to be, between what you know and what you need to know and between what you want and what you need. Sooner or later you have to start restoring some order to the chaos you created by closing your own gaps. Identifying what those gaps are is half the battle and it only requires smart thinking.
6. Be reverent. We are all “guests” in this life and we need to learn some manners. Good manners are what we display when the practical utility of the Golden Rule finally sinks in. When you begin to treat all things with fundamental kindness, fairness and politeness you will stop wasting so much time and energy repairing mistakes from negative Karma.
7. Be responsible. You are much more aware and responsible for what you are doing than you may want to openly admit. Closing the gap in getting to where you want to be requires accessing the genuine power that comes from being responsible. Responsibility is making the right choices that get the right consequences. Again, this usually involves doing less and getting more. Irresponsibility results in many mistakes that have to eventually be corrected, which is doing too much to get too little.
8. Stop assuming. Much of the information you have in your head comes from the answers to questions you ask. When you get lazy and let your mind start answering questions your mouth should be asking, you can end up with an abundance of wrong or complete information, which only takes up valuable brain space. This type of bogus information may be behind many of your mistaken efforts that get so little results.
9. Enjoy everything. You are supposed to enjoy life with minimal effort. The more things you can understand and like, the more happiness and contentment you will have. Most of those things are right under your nose. When your likes, interests and preferences are limited or when you aren’t appreciating what you have, you are cheating yourself out of much contentment and enjoyment. Also, thinking the grass is greener in the other pasture is a sure way to keep on doing more and getting less.10. Create purpose. A big part of life is finding purpose and meaning. You made an agreement to accomplish something special in exchange for your life and you were also given the talents to accomplish that purpose. This is where you want to be and you can only get there by discovering and carrying out your unique purpose. Everything you do and think is aimed at getting you here, but a lot of what you are doing involves too much to get too little.
11. Live now. Spending too much time being a passive spectator in worrying about the past or dreaming about the future wastes valuable opportunities to live now. You need to be here now so that you can take advantage of the many opportunities to enjoy what you have, close critical gaps between where you are and where you want to be and accomplish important goals on the way to your dreams. Living in the now usually requires much less thinking effort than drifting between time zones.
12. Let go. What you have to let go of is what your mind thinks it wants so you can give into the more important things your soul needs. What your soul needs are the simple things that are much more satisfying. These are the freedom to express and receive understanding, compassion, creativity and love. Ironically, it is your mind that deceives you into doing so much to make such little progress in getting to where you want to be. Your soul is smarter than your mind and resisting that fact is a good example.
13. Repair things. If you are normal, you have probably left a wake of destruction behind you in the way of damaged interpersonal relationships. You can’t move forward until you go back and repair the damage that you knowingly or unknowingly created. You start by seeking forgiveness from those you hurt or affected negatively. This humble act of seeking forgiveness can close a big portion of your gap.
14. Be assertive. Your going back and forth between the extremes of being passive or aggressive when you deal with other people only helps widen the gap between where you are and where you want to be. Neither approach is smart. You can only begin to have your cake and eat it too with other people when you start standing up for yourself in a way that doesn’t offend or hurt others or yourself. This is simply exercising responsible freedom and another example of the value of balance.
15. Don’t judge. The mind’s tendency to critically judge runs contrary to one of our soul’s most basic needs, which is to understand. Most of the time your judgments are extremely unproductive. They preclude much chance for enjoyment and virtually destroy creativity. Wrong judgments also result in much effort to correct them or worse yet, to maintain them. Judging is doing much and getting little in return.
16. Become sensitive. Sometimes you can miss important clues as to how to accomplish your goals by being too insensitive or by not listening to your intuitions. One important thing to which you should become more sensitive is in knowing when the point of no return is nearing with something that you are doing, especially in interpersonal relationships. Sensitivity to points of no return can help you avoid doing too much to get too little.
17. Communicate better. Today, babble rules. The chances that you are understanding others and being understood by them is not something you can assume without checking it out. All interpersonal relationships require superb communication skills and you need to invest heavily in making improvements in the way you talk, write and listen to assure more accurate and complete communication. Getting it right the first time is being smart and getting more by doing less.
18. Make improvements. One of the most fundamental processes in life is growth and development. Making improvements and getting better at what you are doing is a natural part of life. This is one area of your life with which you should never be satisfied. It isn’t that you aren’t good enough, but rather that you have so much more potential to be better. Resisting this reality is what keeps you doing more and yet getting further from where you want to be.
19. Keep focused. Nothing ever gets accomplished if it isn’t kept a priority until it is completed. Your purpose, goals and priorities must be kept in correct order and in sharp focus because of all the other distracting entertainment going on around you. It is too easy to lose this needed intense focus and wander from one thing to the next, doing much but getting nowhere.
20. Laugh more. Laughter is the nourishment the heart needs, similar to food for the body and ideas for the mind. Very few things in life are tragedies in which you can’t find some humor. The biggest thing you should be laughing at right now, is yourself for doing so much but getting so little. Isn’t it time to get smart?
Top Ten ways to Do More and Get Less
1. Not living your life around your most important values.
2. Staying in an abusive relationship (or a dead-end job) hoping it will get better.
3. Making excuses as to why you can’t go back to school, get physically fit, be assertive or do anything else that would help your to feel or perform better.
4. Talking too much and not listening enough.
5. Expecting things to turn out a certain way and then getting disappointed when they don’t.
6. Getting what you want and what you need mixed up.
7. Worrying or complaining about anything.
8. Trying to change another person’s beliefs or behavior without changing anything about yourself.
9. Not noticing the connection between the choices you make and the consequences they bring and continuing to do the same thing, expecting different results.
10. Not realizing how much reality you actually create, especially in creating chaos when you think you are restoring order.
“P” Points
Psychological Power Points (“P” Points) are the little things you can do to get the biggest results in closing the gap between where you are and where you want to be. These “P” Points translate the twenty passwords into action. For instance, in improving communication you can practice “two-eared” listening to hear what is said or not said from how it is said, work on blocking out distractions to understand the other person better or think about how you can best say something without risking misunderstanding. Below are ten useful “P” Points to help you do less and get more.
1. Start noticing the power you have to choose how to react to another person who is not treating you with respect or fairness. Then try expressing your concerns assertively by explaining how this mistreatment makes you feel and asking that they stop doing it.
2. Force yourself to look for something positive in an event that seems to be mostly negative. Gradually start practicing a more positive attitude during adversity.
3. Pick two people who you hurt and write them a letter asking for forgiveness. Pick another two people who have given you something important and thank them.
4. Redo your work office space to make it more personal and reflective of the important things in your life. While you are at it, arrange everything for maximum efficiency.
5. Seek frank and accurate feedback from someone you trust and respect in order to close the gap between how you perceive yourself and how others perceive you.
6. Pick the most important gap to close in your life. Establish a measurable goal, identify what barriers are in the way, write down specific activities that you will do to accomplish your goal and plan how you will reward yourself for succeeding.
7. Start listening to your silent intuitions and act on them. Keep score of how many times they are correct.
8. Make a conscious effort to enjoy more things that are all around you. Take the time to look for value in ordinary, everyday things that are free to enjoy.
9. Write down a few of your most important beliefs. If they are based on assumptions, verify their validity by reading, asking questions or getting more information. Afterwards, think about how quickly you adopted that belief with minimal evidence and also how long it will take you to get rid of it once it turns out to be wrong.
10. Identify a few of the negative habits you “accidentally” adopted from your parents and make a pledge to yourself that you will replace them with their positive counterparts.
What are you waiting for? You should be working on closing your gap with some of these useful “P” Points and Passwords.
A secret ingredient of most success is likability. What you may lack in talent can easily be made up with likability. The degree of your likability is based on ten important behaviors that are under your control. Here are ten simple suggestions, which will improve your likability and increase your success in all personal and professional areas.
1. Look your best.
Like it or not, we are all judged on how well we look. It is not a secret that our appearance plays a major part in the degree of success we have in anything from getting a job to finding a marriage partner. Unfortunately, we do judge books by their covers. It only makes sense for us to try and look our best and make a favorable first and lasting impression. It is one of those little things you can easily do to get big results.
Most of us aren’t lucky enough to be born with drop-dead gorgeous or handsome movie star good looks, but that doesn’t mean we can’t do certain things to look our best. A few ordinary things that can improve your appearance include a friendly smile, warm and alert eyes, high energy, fashionable clothes, an easy-going nature, sensitivity and a pleasant voice.
Other appearance improving behaviors are good grooming and hygiene, proper posture, adequate rest, regular exercise and all of these other suggestions below. It pays to cultivate all these things to help present your self in the best possible light. Getting off on the right foot in looking your best is the quickest and surest way to get where you want to be.
2. Demonstrate a positive attitude.
We all know that it makes much more sense to have a positive attitude rather than a negative one. Negative attitudes don’t get anybody anywhere. The thing we need to practice is having a positive attitude when things aren’t going well or when we just don’t feel like it. Other people respond to us much better when we are positive. Being positive is highly contagious but so is being negative. Negativity of any sort decreases likability. This is especially relevant when it comes to something as important as your basic attitude toward life, which drives all the rest of your behavior. Do you express a positive attitude toward life consistently?
When others see you maintain a consistently positive attitude, even when things are going miserably, your stock value goes up considerably. We all like a good role model to follow and when you concentrate on being positive during adversity, you are being the best possible role model for others to like and follow.
Besides all this, there is a more concrete, practical reason for maintaining a steady positive attitude. A positive attitude improves the smile lines on your face, whereas a negative, pessimistic one only helps you develop an unattractive frown or scowl. Warm smiles open doors and cold frowns close them.
3. Treat others with reverence.
There has never been a more practical, effective rule guiding our interpersonal behavior than the Golden Rule. There is never a situation in which this rule doesn’t produce positive results. As children, we learned the value of treating others the way we wanted to be treated ourselves and it always worked well. Somewhere along the process of growing up, many of us have forgotten this simple but valuable rule.
We all want to be treated with polite respect, listened to, given reasonable freedom, be considered equal and be seen as worthwhile. When we give these things to others, we always get it in return. When we are controlling, judging, dishonest, uncaring, disrespectful, impatient and intolerant of others, that is what we get back in return too. What is so hard about understanding the likely consequences of the way we treat others? The choice is really a no-brainer. A big part of increasing our own likability is treating others as if they were already being that way.
4. Focus mainly on yourself.
It usually takes awhile to finally figure out that focusing on others and trying to change them is a complete waste of time and effort. People make changes for themselves, not us. And we can’t ever make others happy, only unhappy, so why try? If you are trying to change another person, the smart thing is to change something about yourself or your approach to that person which forces them to change in reaction to your change. Doing nothing and wishing for the other person to change first is not smart.
When you finally learn this lesson and begin to stop wasting so much of your time and energy worrying about other people, you have freed up much more of these valuable resources to use making yourself more likable. The idea has always been to control what you can control and let go of the rest. The only thing you can come close to controlling is yourself. Many of us have much to improve when it comes to likability and so time and energy are too precious to waste worrying about what other people are or aren't doing.
Probably the most important thing to focus on within yourself is the gap between where you are and where you want to be. How big is this gap? What are the main barriers that are keeping you from getting to where you really want to be? Can increasing your likability be a helpful shortcut?
5. Practice humility.
Our world today makes it easy to be an egomaniac with the lure of personalized license plates, Web Pages, monogrammed clothing and all the other ways we have invented to draw attention to ourselves. But other people like humility, not big egos. If you have to tell people about yourself to get them to show interest, it will not do anything to improve your likability. On the contrary, there is nothing more other people like than a “quiet achiever” who has plenty to brag about, but doesn’t.
Even if you are lucky enough to become famous and achieve much success, being humble is a small but powerful way to stay as likable as the way that got you famous and successful in the first place. Sometimes we forget how we got to where we are and it is good to have that humbling realization. I try to humble myself by realizing just how little I know compared to all that is knowable. I also like to lie on the ground at night and look up at the stars to remember how insignificant I am compared to all that is.
Although most of us aren't famous celebrities, we all still have plenty of things about which we can still practice being humble in order to improve our likability ratings. We all have valuable knowledge, skills and abilities that we can use to help and serve others. When we learn to use our talents humbly, our help is much more likely to be accepted. It will also be more effective. The act of helping others unselfishly is a good way to boost likability. Do you do enough for others without wanting credit or expecting to get something in return?
6. Control negative behaviors.
Just like negative attitudes, negative behaviors such as worrying, blaming, complaining, arguing, moodiness, lying and gossiping, make us appear more unattractive both physically and socially. The smart way to control these behaviors is to slow down enough to catch each moment of opportunity that you have to react to each new situation in a positive way rather than in a negative way. Then it gradually becomes a positive habit that you don’t have to control.
Understanding our own motivations behind negative behaviors can help too. Most negative behaviors are just a lazy way of not doing what we can to change something we don’t like. Take complaining as an example. By complaining, we really just want someone else to solve a problem for us, instead of doing something about it ourselves. With worrying, if we take the time to do what we can to prevent the thing about which we are worrying come true, then we no longer have anything to worry about.
When you engage in negative behaviors such as reacting with anger or telling yourself how hopeless a situation is, you start feeling bad and that attracts more negative behavior. Then of course you start feeling worse. When you engage in positive behavior such as being assertive or solving problems, you start feeling better and start acting better. Then it becomes easier to keep going in that direction.
7. Act Smart.
Being smart is not necessarily imposing your high IQ on the rest of the world. Even people of average intelligence can act smart to improve likability and increase happiness and success. Acting smart involves plenty of ordinary things like asking good questions, taking the time to look below the surface of something in order to spot relationships, listening to your intuition, paying attention to the details of how something works and expressing your creativity.
The best way to define being smart is “doing whatever it takes to close the gap between where you are and where you want to be.” That way smartness can mean more than just pure intelligence, which is not necessarily a likable sort of thing. In some situations high intelligence might even be intimidating. On the other hand, other people like smart people who get results by working hard, being clever and ingenious, thinking critically to sort through difficult problems, applying common sense and practicing all these other useful suggestions.
One of the best ways to start acting smart is to realize even small slips of your unlikable habits may be keeping you from being where you want to be. Sometimes all your past good behavior gets forgotten with one slip at the wrong time and place. That is a smart insight to allow yourself to have.
8. Be Balanced.
By being balanced you can sometimes literally double both your likability and success. One of the most important areas that affects likability is the way you respond to others who are being unlikable. If you are passive and let them roll over you, that doesn’t do much for your likability at all. If you go the opposite way and react aggressively and roll over them, you are sure to become unlikable. The balanced approach is being assertive, or standing up for your self without stepping on toes. When someone hurts your reputation with malicious gossip, the assertive approach is to confront the person with your hurt feelings.
Another way to double likability is to try and look at both sides of something. If you automatically exclude somebody else’s point of view that is different from yours without trying to understand it first, you are excluding the person and he or she certainly won’t like you. Taking the time to understand the other side of the coin can also give you something more to enjoy. The more you have to enjoy, the happier you are and the more you will be perceived as likable.
Being in balance in all the major areas of your life is a healthy position that can’t help but result in much likability. Such balance involves learning how to work and play, pay equal attention to your self and others, talk and listen, think and act and give and take. The main benefit of being in the middle is that you can see in all directions and that increases your alternatives and helps you make the best choices.
Are you getting out of balance in certain areas of your life? Do you try to see both sides of an issue without judging and being critical?
9. Enjoy things.
If there is one thing I have always tried to keep in mind it is my appreciation for all the opportunities there are in this life to enjoy things. In fact, there are very few things you can’t enjoy if you simply suspend your tendency to judge things before you try them. When you can relax and enjoy the simpler things in life, you become happier and more content on the inside and that improves your external likability. Enjoying people is an excellent way to start doing this. Everyone has an interesting story that is worth listening to.
One lesson that seems to take some of us a little longer to learn is the one that helps us realize "you never get to have what you want until you learn to want what you have." This makes perfect sense from a gift-giver’s perspective. Why give something more to someone who can’t even appreciate what he already has? Learning to enjoy things that are right in front of you is a good way to increase your enjoyment and that should be enough reason in itself to do that. The fact that such an attitude will probably bring you more things to enjoy is icing on the cake. Why would you even hesitate a moment?
If the things you usually like to do seem to be getting too expensive for you to enjoy these days, it is time to make a list of items that represent "real wealth." These are the simple, inexpensive pleasures you can get from taking a walk in the forest, watching a sunset, reading a good book by the fireplace, making an imaginary gourmet meal out of left-overs, or listening to some great music on a comfortable sofa. Do you enjoy things enough? Can you appreciate simple pleasures?
10. Grow and improve.
An important attitude to have is that growing and improving are a natural part of life for everyone and everything. We are all in the process of getting better at what we are doing. This is not to mean we aren’t okay as we are. It simply means that we can all get much better and by not doing so, we are just loitering.
By putting all the above ten suggestions into practice, you are already improving and getting better. For instance, when you start paying more attention to your appearance, act smarter, be more reverent with others, show a positive attitude during adversity and control your negative behaviors, you improve your overall likability and increase your chances for success. This in turn builds self-confidence and that subsequently improves likability even more.
Likability is a simple but powerful way to close the gap between where you are and where you want to be. It is an extremely easy and effective tool to help you get more by actually doing less. Being more likable has big payoffs. Are you sure you are likable enough? Which of these suggestions will be most helpful to you in improving your likability? What needs to happen before you decide to get busy becoming more likable?
Finding purpose to our lives can provide us with valuable meaning. Such meaning can give us the right direction and structure we need, which will eventually lead to the success and contentment we want. I have discovered six inter-related purposes to my life that give it more meaning than I will never need to keep on giving a command performance to the end.
Fitting in and making what we are fitting into better
We are all on a journey in life. The psychological aspect of this journey involves a combination purpose of fitting in and making what we are fitting into better. In my own experience, I have found that we often start out focusing too quickly on the second part of this purpose. We try to change things and make them better before we learn how to fit into something that was here long before we were and will remain long after we are gone. At least I know I flip-flopped these priorities.
In the beginning I started out being convinced that everybody and everything in life needed changing. For a long time I thought my main purpose in life was simply to change others with my chaos-spreading behavior. My particular brand of chaos involved imposing complex and unusual ideas about life and how people should live it, with my high energy, creativity and multidimensional thinking.
I liked to push people’s buttons and upset their ordinary, comfortable mindset, challenging them to expand their thinking. Entire viewpoints were my main target. I also liked to take things apart in an attempt to understand them better, forgetting to put them back together again afterwards. In the first part of my life I operated under the impression that everything needed to be taken apart and changed.
In looking back, I now realize I rebelled against a psycho-spiritual reality that nobody can change: We have to learn how to fit into life and everything of which we are a part first, before we can be successful in making anything better and achieve the happiness, contentment and success for which we are searching. Our psychological selves stubbornly battle to avoid this perceived loss of free will and freedom. The irony is that once we let go and give in, our free wills and our destiny merge into the same thing. This is something no one can fully understand until the experience actually happens.
Once we understand the necessity of fitting in first, we begin to see most things are just fine the way they are. At that point we begin to see the few things that do need changing and start gaining the skills that are required to make these changes. Our focus moves toward trying to restore order by seeing clearly through the chaos and confusion, which we all create by failing to try and fit in before we try to rearrange life to our liking. The other purposes we start fulfilling are remembering, understanding, growing, serving, and enjoying.
Remembering
Much success in life is contingent upon remembering important things we need to know. Much of what we need to know is unconscious and consequently we have to increase our listening skills to hear our faint brain whispers, which are offering clues. One of the most important things for us to remember is what unique goal we promised to accomplish in return for the opportunity to have this life. Other important things to remember are answers to questions such as Who am I? Where am I going? and How do I get there? Another part of remembering involves the gradual recall of all these other purposes we have in which to find more meaning.
Understanding
One of the biggest challenges in life is trying to get along with others. The best way to get along with others is to try and understand them more. Once you understand something, your need to control or change it decreases. This is one of the most important insights about life in general- most things really doesn’t need controlling or changing, at least by our preferred mode of “attacking” them. Having this ah-ha insight frees up much energy to do other more important things and to even understand more. With understanding comes knowledge and with knowledge, wisdom. Wisdom is real genuine power that can get much done easily and quickly, such as discovering the best ways to create the most productive chaos and to restore the most helpful order.
A useful bit of wisdom is in understanding the three basic processes in which everything in the universe engages, including us: Creating, destroying and maintaining. Once we learn to fit in, we see how to create, destroy and maintain the right things to restore the best order.
Creating involves giving unconditional love, acceptance and compassion. It also involves discovering new and unusual ways to combine opposite appearing things to benefit us all. The destroying function is solving problems, resolving conflicts, purging wrong beliefs and information, changing artificial viewpoints and shedding unproductive behavior and attitudes. The maintaining function is sorting out the valuable answers, solutions, truths and principles that are worth keeping apart from all the chaos that is going on around us. Sometimes this takes much attention, nurturing, creativity and perseverance.
Growing
Everything in this universe has a common purpose, which is growing. Humans also share that purpose in making improvements and becoming the best we can be in whatever we are doing. Whether we are learning as a student, teaching as a professor, being a child or parent, helping a friend in need, working at our job, or playing on vacation, our primary purpose is to give the best performance possible. This is no time for half-efforts or mediocrity. Life is not a trial run. This is it. Becoming better at what we are doing is a natural process that is only difficult when we make it so by struggling against it.
Serving
Perhaps service is the highest purpose we can discover and carry out. Much like growing and improving, serving is a natural thing. Our service is a way we settle up the karma we created with the negative, irresponsible choices we made earlier in trying to change life before we learned how to fit in. The emphasis is on what we can do for each other to make life a little more pleasant, meaningful and rewarding. Service is always a win-win situation that is mutually satisfying for both the server and served. It is one of those rare activities that is innately rewarding in itself. The nice thing is that we are getting rewarded for undoing things we shouldn’t have done in the first place.
Enjoying
Although life has its fair share of tragedies and unhappy moments, there is virtually an unlimited supply of things to enjoy. Life is meant to be enjoyed. Even work or conflicts can be enjoyable with the right attitude. The right attitude is one of acceptance and lack of judgment in forming an unfavorable opinion before you give things a chance. The best enjoyments can often come from the simpler things in life, such as watching romantic sunsets, listening to a friend talk, or taking a relaxing nap on a comfortable couch on a Saturday afternoon. The fact is, you can’t enjoy the bigger things in life until you learn to enjoy the littler, ordinary things right under your nose. This is a subtle part of fitting in.
Personal growth can be greatly stimulated when you ask yourself five critical questions and then struggle to get the right answers. This process requires you to use critical thinking, creativity, open-mindedness and above all else, brutal honesty. Here are the five questions:
What can I really control?
It seems to me that the process of growing up involves the gradual realization of how we have wasted so much time trying to control uncontrollable or irrelevant things. Once we start becoming more aware of the illusion of control, we begin to see the few things we can in fact control. Then we go about learning how to best influence the most important things on this short list in more positive, productive ways.
At the top of this control list is the need for more self-management. Especially critical, is the area of controlling our own interpretations of things that happen to us and our reactions to those interpretations. Our interpretations are often wrong and reactions ineffective. The smart reversal of focusing back inwards toward ourselves to better manage these interpretations and reactions is the first real step in personal growth. Unfortunately this important shift usually isn't a smooth one or one you can hurry along, but it does start with the question.
How do I sabotage my own success?
The fear of success is insidious. Probably most of this type of fear is based on some major assumptions of what might happen when you become successful. What will you have to do to achieve it? What will you have to give up? What will it be like? What will you have to do to maintain it? What will happen to you if you lose it? Your mind can go fairly wild with anticipation, before you even become successful at what you are trying to do. In this sense you are preventing your own littler successes from happening, which could have led to bigger ones.
Facing your darker side is not pleasant or easy, but you will never get anywhere until you take ultimate responsibility for where you are or where you aren't. You can't begin to close the gap between where you are and where you want to be until you see who created that gap- yourself. Once you take ownership for all your own best self-sabotaging behaviors you are ready to try and answer the next question.
Why Don't I apply all the good things I learn and know?
Some day I would like to download my brain to retrieve all the fabulous learning that has passed through it. For nearly forty years I have been taught, guided and motivated by the best of the best from the cliffs of Big Sur to the red rocks of the Australian outback. But why did so much of that good stuff not take? Why do we learn so many good things and then not apply them? If I had applied one tenth of the things I knew were right and good, I would have blissfully dissolved in Nirvana by now.
I suppose we all have to come to grips with the question of why we keep pushing the dessert away. My own answers seems to have most to do with my insatiable need to avoid boredom and stir up new excitement. I always need a new challenge and being able to do something well is anti-climatic. In the end, though this is a question you have to look yourself in the mirror and ask and keep asking until you get your answer. Some say it is later than you think, so what are you waiting for?
For whom (or what) am I doing all this?
It usually takes a very long time to understand why you need to give yourself permission to do something just for yourself and for its own intrinsic worth, without any regard for other people or reasons. It takes even longer to start doing that. Long ago I learned that you couldn't make another person happy, only unhappy. But that still didn't keep me from making a mad effort to achieve things with the main intention of trying to either please or impress someone else. This was my attempt to "prove" my worth. The sense of satisfaction and accomplishment never seems to come to you when you are really doing something for someone else or for some ulterior motive.
A major growth surge occurs when you shift focus from the outside to your inside. When you stop doing things for the wrong reasons and cease competing against others and start doing them for yourself, competing against yourself, you finally start getting a genuine sense of satisfaction. And you also start winning more. The early injunction we all get against selfishness is what keeps you from making this shift. You have to shed your guilt first.
What is the best I am capable of?
Many of us dream of greatness but only a few take the first step to develop a detailed plan to get there. Even less endure the difficult voyage that is usually involved. Part of the reason for this status quo is the catch-22 position that we perceive. On the one hand we are teased into believing we can do anything we put our mind to. On the other hand there are subtle warnings everywhere that tell us not to set our goals too high so we won't doom ourselves to unnecessary disappointment and failure. So to be safe we often settle for far worse than second best. Of course the rest of the reason is we can only accomplish real greatness when we cease trying to do it all for the wrong personal reasons.
The truth is you are capable of doing anything you think you are capable of doing. But that doesn't mean it will just happen by magic. If you are not willing to be flexible with your goals and how you can achieve them, to make difficult choices, exchanges and sacrifices, take risky chances and persevere long enough to make your dreams come true, then they won't. This is competition against your own self at its best. The icing on the cake is when you start accomplishing things for no reason other than it is the natural thing to do.
Having the courage to ask these five critical questions and then making the effort to find answers will open a large door ahead to your personal growth. Real growth then occurs when you become free to de-personalize it.
I have come to the conclusion that there is but one fundamental ideological difference between human beings. This fundamental difference has to do with a choice we all have. Although this choice can show up in an endless variety of forms, it is still a simple A or B choice. The choice is the degree to which we believe ourselves able to affect reality and the subsequent amount of responsibility we claim for that power.
In other words, we can choose (A) to be optimistic actors who believe we can create realities and help determine our own future, or we can choose (B) to be pessimistic reactors who believe we have to accept and adapt to all the things that happen to us. Of course many people choose to be somewhere in the middle between these extremes. Some even figure a way to combine both choices. These are the people who have their "cheese" and eat it too. Where are you?
We may make this basic choice semi-consciously and that is a shame because it determines our main outlook about life and effects everything we do. If we choose viewpoint A, we trust in the inherent goodness of life, include mostly everything and have no need for artificial restrictions on freedom. If we choose viewpoint B, we are somewhat suspicious about life, exclude many things and see the need to establish equality for fairness and protection. If we choose both, be do both as may be most appropriate.
Smart people lean a little more toward viewpoint A in being optimistic and proactive because it seems as though it is the only practical thing to do to be reasonably happy and successful and because of the results they usually get. They think that by waiting to react pessimistically you can miss valuable opportunities and end up with unnecessary unhappiness and lack of success. They have questions such as: Why is it so hard for many people to see the value of believing that we are all ultimately responsible for where we are, what we have and what happens to us? Why do some people reject the notion that they can change things for the better by making a choice?
Part of the problem is that discovering our power and owning full responsibility for our lives is something that comes upon us gradually. The more we believe in our ability to affect reality, the more reality we affect and the more responsible we feel. Then of course, the more we believe the more we succeed and so forth. Naturally, that process can go in the reverse and make recovery difficult.
The catch here is that there is an important lesson to learn before you are in a position to consciously choose the A viewpoint. First you must take the time to get more in sync with the natural way of life. This involves fully appreciating, understanding and learning from all the things that happen in life, before you charge ahead full speed in a frenzied attempt to artificially control and unnaturally change things you don't like. After all, you have to learn how to fit in first before you can be effective in making what you are fitting into better.
Once we begin seeing our own enormous power and start acknowledging the responsibility we have, we see the same potential in everyone else too. But of course they don't all see what we see. Telling them doesn't seem to help either, because a person's reality- right or wrong- is all that he or she has to hold onto.
Let me digress to a slight warning here. When you have a strong belief you think would be of value to others, you need to stop and do a reality check on being right. If there is just a slight doubt, there is credible consensus and the idea has stood the test of time, those are good signs. Over-certainty, alarming disagreement and sudden brevity should be warning signs. History is full of livid examples of influential people who failed to do this reality check. We have a few going on right now.
One thing has struck me as being true with just enough doubt to be convincing. Personally, I have only experienced a continual growth in the positive belief of my power and increasing acknowledgment of responsibility. It has never reversed or gone sideways on me and I have never seen anyone else give up this positive belief for the more negative, reactive one. But I have seen people switch to the positive side from the negative one. This is enough proof for me.
So, assuming I am correct, what can be done to convince the masses of the reality of their awesome power and responsibility? First, they have to feel a need to ask for it and second, it has to be delivered correctly by people who are on solid ground with their own power and responsibility. Furthermore, it takes considerable time to help understand and remove the many layers of "fog" that have contributed to such a B viewpoint choice to deny power and responsibility. Such a vision doesn't happen overnight or by chance alone- positive or negative.
There is also another slight obstacle. We are all a little guilty of the strange tendency to sabotage success by pushing it off until the last possible moment. We all know how to be successful and content, but it is the hunt and surprise for this prize that results in loitering, lazy irresponsibility and other more bizarre types of failure. We know we can do it eventually so there's no rush. But maybe there is.
Sometimes you can get so out of practice by not doing something that it becomes near impossible to do when you most need to. Such is the case with reclaiming our power and responsibility. With many people, the true vision is too far ahead to see clearly. So, the task is for the believers to share the value of their beliefs and bring the positive vision closer. This has to be done gently, kindly, cleverly and by example, once we have the right understanding about the way of life.
If you have a positive vision of being able to influence reality and accept your full responsibility, then you have to figure out how to be successful in helping others see what you see. The first thing you should do is stop and reflect upon how you came upon your own vision. This may take some careful thought and intensive listening. The experience should provide several clues as to how to be a successful sharer.
Personally, I have taken the long way back home. I am not sure exactly when and how I became convinced of my power and responsibility beyond any doubt. The fundamental belief always seemed to be there and was never seriously challenged even though I have had more than my own share of personal tragedies and disasters. But I can remember some subtle but powerful lessons taught along the way by other people of positive vision. Maybe they all worked together to guide my beliefs collectively and that is the way it usually happens for everyone.
If my own process is common, then it would make sense to acknowledge this fundamental choice and accept where you are right now- believing you are an optimistic, proactive reality changer or a pessimistic reality reactor. If you are in the second group, ask yourself if you are being successful and truly happy and content. If not, seek out someone with positive vision and ask where and how he or she got it. What do you have to lose?
If you already have positive vision and are not sharing it, you have a responsibility (and you know it), to figure out how to share it. There are only a few rules. Do it gently, kindly, cleverly and most importantly, by example, after you have taken the time to understand the natural way of life and change. Sorry, but if I were any more explicit, I would be violating my own rules. Besides, there has to be a little challenge and surprise or it wouldn't be such a pleasurable, soul-enhancing experience. Discovering this secret and then figuring out how to be successful in sharing it with others is the most important purpose we have in this life. It is what we are all about. There can be no better way to bring unity than by reconciling such a fundamental difference in ourselves and others.
Peace of mind is something we all search for with varying techniques and results. One common problem confronts us all in our attempts to capture this elusive state of mind. Half this problem is discovering what we must do to cure our lack of peace of mind. The other half is figuring out how to actually apply this cure.
Eventually, we discover that we must let go of our selfish desire to control life in trying to make it into what we want, so that we can give into understanding and accepting life for what it is. We make two mistakes in trying to apply this cure. One is resisting this inevitable surrender because we don’t like to be forced into what we think is submission and obedience. The reality is that our minds are only trying to surrender to our souls as part of a plan we helped design.
The other mistake we make is in wanting to control and speed up this surrendering process itself, once we decide to let go and give in. But this is like trying to use football skills to perform a ballet or trying to force yourself to fall asleep. Neither works very well.
The main symptom of this problem is a nagging perception that there is a gap between where we are and where we want to be. First, there is a fairly large gap between what we know and the unconscious things we don't know. One important unconscious gap is between the role we want to play in life regarding who we are and where we are going, as opposed to the role that we originally agreed to play in exchange for the opportunity to join the "play of life."
Our conscious gaps can involve longing for more intimacy in our marriage, wanting more success in our careers, or needing more progress in our physical fitness efforts They can also include desiring more happiness in our personal development or yearning for more meaning and contentment in our spiritual growth.
Let’s explore this gap problem. The source of the problem is that during much of life we really don’t know who we are, where we are going, or how to get there. We fumble around a lot in the dark looking for a flashlight. Without knowing it, we are looking for the original role in life we agreed to play, along with other related information we have forgotten. Of course, we deny not knowing these things and do a lot of pretending, and it is this denial and pretending that creates a sense of gap in not being where we want to be.
Whatever you are doing right now is serving the purpose of getting you to where you want to be. This may be difficult to see when you just lost your job while trying to improve the quality of your life or when you feel angry, desperate and hopeless while trying to reconcile a broken marriage. But, this is only because you can’t see the whole picture all at once or you would see where these undesirable events, feelings and thoughts were taking you. Don’t we eventually see a positive purpose in everything?
For the sake of simplicity, let’s say our life has two halves with a half-time intermission. During the first half we create gaps and the second half we close gaps. During half-time we learn how to make the transition between the roller coaster, ego-driven material world of creating gaps and the more peaceful, soul-driven spiritual world of closing gaps. This is where peace of mind is born.
How do we create gaps and close them? In anything, there are usually two main ways to get where you are going. You can either run faster or shorten the distance to where you are going. In the first half of life you run raster to try and get where you want to be. During half-time you wake up to the folly of your failed efforts of not getting to where you want to be. You realize that you were trying to change things before you took the time to understand them well enough. Then in the second-half you start shortening the distance to where you are going by rearranging some key attitudes to see that you are already where you want to be and always have been. You actually start getting more by doing less.
The first half of your life you try to get where you want to be by picking up the speed. You get smarter with education, more successful through job promotions, happier by doing what is enjoyable, and wiser from experience. More than anything, you become prouder for being in control, thinking you are closing gaps when in fact you are still creating them.
Sooner or later though, you reach a turning point and experience a situation you can’t control no matter what you do or how hard your try. This is one experience you will never forget. It will take you to places in your mind, heart and soul you have never before visited. Variations of this experience will keep reoccurring until you finally see what you have been doing wrong. Your mind has to accept life and where it is taking you because your soul has already determined this. Continued resistance just delays the inevitable. You have arrived at half-time.
Half-time is a critical part of our life. It involves the shift from one major viewpoint to another. You are about to change your basic approach to life. You go from chasing things in order to control life and make it into what you want, to understanding life better and accepting it more for what it is. You wonder why you didn’t do this from the beginning, but realize that mistake is what got you to where you are now.
During this in between stage of your life is when you are most ready to change and grow. You discover that you wanted to be somewhere else before you ever took the time to understand where you where. You start remembering who you are, where you are going and how to get there.
There are certain transformational attitudes you start experiencing at half-time, which help facilitate your growth and movement into the second half. If you are starting to experience any of the following such attitudes, you know you are in your half-time. Here are a few of the telltale attitude changes:
· Shifting from an external focus on others toward an inward one on yourself.
· Discovering the freedom to wisely choose your interpretations and reactions to the things that happen to you, rather than thinking you can control or prevent those things from happening in the first place.
· Uncovering the awesome power you have each present moment to make new choices that will forever change the direction in which you are going.
· Becoming responsible and reverent by thoughtfully exercising free choices that don’t infringe upon the freedom of others.
· Expressing creativity in the form of non-judgmental understanding, acceptance, nurturing, compassion and unconditional love.
· Striving for balance in seeing both sides of things in order to close the gap between the two halves of life and become whole.After your half-time break, you are ready to start the second half of your life. You begin closing the gaps you created in the first half. This time you are armed with a clearer purpose, improved understanding, more creativity, and better timing. Your abilities to express love, acceptance and compassion help too. This second half also involves guiding others to see and understand this process through which we are all going and helping them to make their gaps less disturbing.
You now realize why it is smarter to first understand, accept and enjoy where you are, before you think you need to be somewhere else. Now you are where you want to be and know you have always been there. You have discovered the recipe for peace of mind. This recipe is a secret worth sharing. It is not new, just old and retold. We hope we have been successful in sharing our version.
Mary and John argue all the time. They can't seem to communicate as well as they used to and they are going in opposite directions with their interests and friends. Both are feeling they are doing all the giving and are wondering if they are even with the right person. Job commutes and money matters are creating extra stresses, which they haven't even begun to deal with.
The couple spends all their time complaining about each other's annoying habits and has forgotten what the initial attraction was. Other pastures are starting to look greener and resistance to temptation is weakening. The relationship is on a downhill slide. Unfortunately, this scenario is a common one. What goes wrong in many relationships such as this on?
Having an intimate, long-term relationship with another human being is both the challenge and the opportunity of a lifetime. Successful relationships offer the most important things in life and even some things you can't get anywhere else.
The rewards range from the peace and contentment of unconditional love and acceptance to the exhilaration and joy of growth, happiness and success. Of course unsuccessful relationships can result in the punishment of unhappiness, heartache, loneliness, anger and poor self-confidence, which in turn, can all interfere with future relationships.
Healthy relationships also offer the fantastic opportunity for both people to "have their cheese and eat it too." Mary and John can experience both the freedom of independence and the security of dependence and both the complete acceptance for who they are along the encouragement to become better. On the other hand, a failed relationship can leave Mary and John wondering if they can ever get any of these things by themselves, alone.
Why do so many relationships fail? The reasons are discussed below.
Selfishness
Healthy relationships require a natural balance between giving and taking. The more this balance is disturbed in either direction, the greater the uncomfortable feeling that something isn't right. Lopsided selfishness is a core problem that shows up as many different symptoms in unhappy relationships.
The trick is to realize there is only one way to achieve the needed balance and that is to put your stubborn ego aside and take the first step in doing the giving. The simple rule of Karma is when you give you get and when you take you have to give. When John waits for Mary to become more sexually responsive before he is willing to give her want she wants- to be supported emotionally and acknowledged for her other assets- he will be waiting in vain. An naturally, green pastures start looking even greener.
Keeping a balance sheet is another waste of time, because that approach also keeps you from doing what you need to do now, to get balanced. Of course, if John is doing all the giving he is probably either with the wrong person or hasn't expressed his needs clearly, assertively or frequently enough. Maybe he just complains passively, which gets him nowhere. Or since he is not getting what he wants, he withholds what he thinks Mary wants.
Inequality
We are all really equal and any treatment to the contrary is disrespectful and offends our souls deeply. It also kills any kind of good feelings we might have been trying to give the other person. John's unequal treatment of Mary may show up in the way of a subtle sexist attitude that works its way through the foundation of their relationship like termites. The end result for both people is to imagine more inequality and then look toward greener pastures, which usually doesn't have a happy ending for anyone. Mary starts looking for emotional intimacy and John starts looking for physical affection.
Oddly, inequality is a red flag that should be seen in the beginning of a relationship before there is too much investment. Why didn't Mary see this inequity when first dating John? Did she sense it and just ignore her own intuition?
Inequality is not something you are likely to have much success at changing and it is not something you can overlook. This just reinforces the importance of making a good selection to begin with, which may be an underlying problem with all these other reasons for failed relationships.
Intolerance
We all have many differences and when we focus too much on them, we can easily become irritated. It is important to keep the right perspective. It is the differences between people that make things interesting and challenging. Trying to change all the ways another person is different from you is futile and frustrating. Never the less many people still try to do it.
When Mary complains about John leaving lights on, loading up the hamper with three changes of clothes per day and playing the TV late at night, he just fires back about her credit card spending, coffee cups in the sink and overflowing trash cans. Where does that get either Mary or John? Nowhere, of course.
Healthy relationships require partners to focus on each other's strengths, not minor weaknesses. Mary has an excellent job, keeps herself appealing, has many interests and is active in community affairs, whereas John makes good money, is a good conversationalist, keeps physically fit and has an overflowing positive attitude about everything. These are the things they should be focusing on.
The bottom line is that we all have foibles and shortcomings that can get under another person's skin, and the less we complain about these things in our partner, the less he or she will complain about us. Unfortunately the opposite is usually what happens and once it starts it is difficult to stop.
Incompatibility
Too many couples start out a relationship being so far out of alignment with their characteristics, interests, values and needs, that it doesn't take very long to dissolve whatever the initial attraction was. This is basically a problem in mate selection and not something that is worth tolerating. Another problem is when two people grow apart. This situation results in the same consequences.
Incompatibilities are not likely to disappear and are real sources of unnecessary conflict. For example, If John smoked, was an eternal pessimist, had low energy, tended to be devious, wasn't very smart or educated and was unappealing, while on the other hand, Mary was bright, energetic, a non-smoker, attractive, trustworthy, an incurable optimist and highly educated, would they really have a fighting chance?
You might ask why would such an incompatible couple get together in the first place? But the fact is that this is not such an uncommon scenario as you may think or even want to acknowledge for yourself.
Compatibility of moral values, sex drives, recreational interests, intellectual abilities, spiritual development and other basic needs is what makes a relationship enjoyable and comfortable. Unless two people are exceptionally changeable, what doesn't start out right will end wrong. At the least, the relationship will be uncomfortable and unsatisfying. This is a warning to be more patient in waiting for the right person and to take your time in evaluating the beginning of the relationship with both your head and heart.
Immorality
Healthy relationships are founded on honesty. Without honesty there is no trust and without trust there is no commitment. Without commitment the relationship is merely an "experiment" doomed to fail. Immorality is one of those non-negotiable items in life that many of us struggle ferociously to deny, but sooner or later reality wins out.
Immorality is doing anything intentionally that hurts another person, words included. When Mary catches John lying about finances or where he has been and he lies about those lies, he is implying she is either stupid or not worthy of being told the truth. Either way it is going to hurt and even make her angry. These feelings won't disappear.
Once trust is eroded through lies, infidelity and other forms or immorality, it isn't likely to come back. Immorality is probably the most flagrant violation of the most important rule of human relations: The Golden Rule. What could be a simpler guide than for John and Mary to treat each other the way they both want to be treated themselves? It is so obvious but so widely disregarded. But it can't be disregarded forever.
Poor communication
It is almost ironic that it is good communication that usually starts a good relationship, while it is poor communication that most always ends relationships. Mary and John started out talking through the night and now all they do is yell, accuse, complain or withdraw. All that they need to talk about festers and boils inside.
Good communication requires intentional listening to respect and understand the other person better, open expression, thinking about what you are saying, and appropriate reactions. It also involves little kindnesses, not always having to be right, the courage to confront potential conflicts and consistent assertiveness.
John needs to start listening to Mary, take the lead by paying attention to her emotional needs, ask if there is anything more he can do and then learn how to ask for the physical affection he wants in a tender, sincere way. Mary needs to ask for emotional support and acknowledgment of her other assets assertively, without appearing to be complaining and without withholding something as basic as physical affection.
Too often, in the beginning of a relationship something important does not occur. This is the open communication of expectations. It is the assertive communication of basic expectations such as recreational preferences, money management practices, and sex needs, that sets up clear, visible boundaries. It is the unspoken expectations and unclear, invisible boundaries that, when crossed, start the deterioration of the relationship. Then John and Mary's communication typically escalates into loud arguing or dwindles into silence and it is just a matter of time before the relationship is over.
The quitting habit
Quitting anything has become so easy these days that it is a difficult habit to stop. With the technology and speed of today, we have learned to want everything now if not sooner. If we don't get what we want immediately, we give up and move onto something else. Taking the time and effort to deal with any little obstacle in our way is viewed as a waste. We even avoid potentially difficult things when we anticipate that we won't get what we want right away.
Relationships can't be easy all the time. They are designed to put is in a safe arena where we can grow as human beings. This can be an uncomfortable, time-consuming process. Part of the design is conflict, which blocks us from getting what we want right away and takes time and effort to resolve. Too many people like John and Mary walk away when the going gets tough. There is nothing to be learned in doing that though.
Mary and John started out on the right foot, but they both allowed their relationship to go South by making many common mistakes. They can't quit yet though, because they really haven't tried. They won't cure the relationship overnight, but by working together on one problem at a time, they will be headed back in the right direction and get immediate satisfaction for their efforts.
The chance of a relationship surviving is obviously related to the degree of these other "failures." But there is an X-factor and this is the willingness of two people to stick it out during the toughest of times and work through the difficult conflicts to get to the other side. For Mary and John to rebuild their relationship they have to find out how to change their little failures into successes, one by one. Their best starting point is to communicate about their miscommunication and how they both allowed that to occur.
There can be no greater accomplishment or reward than making an uncomfortable, mediocre relationship into a satisfying, flourishing one. Actually, the opportunity will keep coming back until you get it right, so what are you waiting for?
Most of what Phillip McGraw means in "getting it" in his book Life Strategies has to do with getting along with other people. This basic skill is an integral part of everything we do in life and so it can't ever be emphasized enough. Here are twenty five tips about getting along with others that I learned along the way to getting it:
1. Trying to change another person is mostly frustrating and futile. When you figure a way to change something about your approach to the other person, he often has to change something in his response to you. Then you have some changes going on. One small change may lead to a bigger one.
2. We all want to feel accepted and be assured that we are quite okay as we are with all our shortcomings, before we are reminded of these faults and told that there are other things we could be doing better. If you want to challenge someone to change or become better at something, you have to invest some time building rapport by conveying understanding and acceptance, first.
3. Most interpersonal conflicts have to do with competing individual needs. Resolution of such common conflicts has to do with choosing the right response in three possible situations. The first thing you have to do is to determine whose needs are most important. Are the other person's needs more important and urgent than yours? If so you need to sacrifice and give into the other person. Are your needs more important? If they are you need to speak up and make a case to convince the other person, and (c) Are both your needs more or less equal? If that is the case, what is a compromise or a viable alternative? Relationships in which you are giving, taking or compromising too much are ones you need to walk away from.
4. We all secretly want to have our "cheese" and eat it too, but some of us are a little more adept at figuring out how to do that. For instance, we all want to be recognized as unique individuals and have the freedom to be the way we want to be. Yet at the same time we all demand to be treated fairly and equally (especially when the consequences aren't so pleasant). Another example is that we all want the challenge of a new adventure and the comfort of familiar stability. Figuring out these and other paradoxes in life leads to much happiness and success, and our solutions make exceptional gifts to other people. Life often works in paradoxes and knowing how things work is real power.
5. We all have a small piece of the puzzle and when we make contact with others and share our pieces, we all get a bigger and clearer picture of the reality we are trying to fit into and make better. A balanced interdependence gets us all where we want to be quicker and easier.
6. Probably the most fundamental difference between people is the degree to which they believe they can influence reality and achieve their dreams. Some people are proactive optimists who are willing to do whatever it takes to make things happen to be where they want to be. Others are powerless pessimists who wait and react to the things than happen to them. Everyone wants to have control of his life, but it takes a positive belief to do that, despite the many negative failures and obstacles we all face. Sharing your own positive attitude in a gentle, non-threatening way can have a big impact with people who don't have it but want it.
7. Being likable is a big part of getting along with others. All this requires is for you to show interest in others, have a positive attitude, focus on your own shortcomings, be balanced, enjoy things, act smart, and learn and improve.
8. Although people are slightly hesitant to talk about themselves, but they would rather do that then listen to you talk about yourself. The best way to start a conversation is to ask people about themselves. They'll get around to you soon enough.
9. When somebody says or does something to offend you or hurt your feelings, you need to be assertive and stand up for yourself and let the person know the consequences of what she did. Being passive and letting such behavior go or being aggressive and fighting back never has a good outcome. Those approaches just build resentments or collect enemies.10. Be tolerant of things another person doesn't have any control over. It is not fair to remind someone of impervious conditions. And never impose any feedback on someone before he asks for it.
11. Avoid setting up unnecessary defensive climates in communication with others by making a conscious effort to not convey superiority, over-controlling behavior, dogmatic certainty, accusations or judgmental attitudes. Being equal, accepting, tentative and non-judgmental will assure open communication and the best possible outcome.
12. Learn to walk away from destructive, emotional situations where you can't win from losing. And don't waste you time hanging around toxic, negative people. They just drain your positive energy and rob other more deserving people of your attention.
13. Other people notice more about you when you would rather be invisible. It is during adversity or when you feel terrible that you need to act your best to leave the best impression with other people. That impression will be a lasting one.
14. Like it or not, we all judge a book by its cover. It is essential to always appear your best, regardless of the looks you were blessed or cursed with. A warm smile, stylish wardrobe, pleasant voice, proper grooming, polite manner and peaceful eye contact can put you on a level playing field with anyone.
15. Know ahead of time that people can be worse than you imagine and don't make a big deal about it. Expect the worst and you will always be pleasantly surprised.
16. Listen to others with both ears, hearing what is said along with how it is being said (or what isn't being said) to get the full meaning. Other people liked to be listened to and they like to be heard and understood even more.
17. Take a genuine interest in other people. We all have intriguing and valuable tales to tell one another.
18. We are all insecure and vulnerable enough without having to have our self-esteem attacked. Besides, belittling is probably the worst thing you can do to another human being, besides gossiping. Building up a person's self-confidence makes a friend for life.
19. If you have to criticize someone else's way of doing something, take some more time and show him or her to do it better.
20. Conflicts are the way human beings grow. Have the courage to talk honestly, apart from all the negative feelings you are having, to get through the conflict rather than run from it. The only ground rule is that both people have to be willing to do this.
21. If there is one thing people dislike unanimously it is another person with a big ego. On the other hand, a humble, quiet achiever is everyone's favorite person.
22. Don't take your stress out on others. They have enough of their own to deal with.
23. Sometimes the hardest way to be with other people is the thing that has the best impact: Being patient.
24. Don't make promises with other people, which you can't keep and always keep the promises you do make. Promise-keepers are the most popular people because anyone can be a promise-breaker.
25. When all else fails, practice the Golden Rule of treating others the way you want to be treated yourself.
Attitudes are complicated things. At the same time they often drive behavior, can be made up of those same behaviors and even bring about consequences, which may reinforce those behaviors and the attitude itself. Formation of a 'wrong' attitude is a negative vicious circle that is hard to break.
Having the right attitude is critical in just about everything you do. The wrong attitude can quickly spell doom for the best effort. What exactly is the right attitude? It is something we can easily spot if it is there or not, but it is not so easy to define. Below are ten critical behaviors, which I think all work together to define the right attitude.
Temperance
The wiser course eventually leads us to the value of moderation and avoiding extremes. This even includes having excessive optimism or an overly positive attitude, which can actually get on other people's nerves. It is unfortunate that this wiser course of temperance takes so long to learn. In the process of learning the right attitude of temperance we can alienate too many other people with extremes in either negative or positive behavior when all we are really trying to do is get accepted and be liked. We just don't go about it in the right way the first time around and need this hindsight lesson.
Harmony
Success requires us to be in sync with others, be cooperative and work together as a synergistic team. This does not mean you have to be overly conventional, uncreative and put your own uniqueness and personal needs aside for the sake of the group. It just means you have to figure out how to get along with other people the best you can. Having the right attitude with all these other behaviors can go a long way toward that end. Harmonious songs are the most pleasing to the ear and there is always a symphony in the making when it comes to interpersonal relations.
Maturity
Maturity doesn't have to mean being dull and over-serious or confining yourself to an "act your age" syndrome (you are never too old to be silly and have fun). It simply means that you take responsibility for the connection between your behaviors and their consequences, especially how they affect other people. Another definition of maturity I like comes from Stephen Covey. According to him the mark of a mature person is when he or she fulfills all promises made and only makes promises that can be delivered.
Positivism
The trick is not to set up a showdown between positives and negatives, but to adopt a wait and see, neutral attitude. Allowing things to happen without pre-judgments will reduce your disappointments, which will in turn increase the likelihood of positive outcomes. This reversal makes having a positive attitude much easier. When you are more able to have a positive attitude when things are going well, then having one when things are just average becomes easier. That in turn prepares you for being able to have a more positive attitude when things start going sideways or downhill, when it is the hardest and most noticeable by others. That is when having the right attitude counts most. It is a matter of practice.
Patience
The world is going at such a fast pace that it is easy to get caught up in a compulsive desire for immediate need gratification. However, the person who exercises a little patience and willingness to wait for something will never go unnoticed these days. The attitude to have is that anticipation is still half of the enjoyment. Also, being patient with others is a sure way to make a friend. Very few things will cancel the world if not done immediately. Besides, when you take a little time to think about something you can often discover a better way to do it. At the least you will avoid having to do it over again to correct mistakes because things were too rushed the first time.
Integrity
Integrity is not made up of honesty and morality. These are the things that show when you are integrated. You are integrated when: (a) you achieve internal consistency with self-management, and (b) there is congruence between this internal consistency and what people see on the outside. Then you are able to walk your talk naturally and be the kind of role model other people respect and want to follow. There is nothing more annoying than a person who says one thing and does another. Inconsistent moods, unpredictable reactions and relative morality are a sure path to failure. It is your integrated wholeness that sets up success between right behaviors and right results.
Reverence
When you treat other people with respect, politeness and gentleness something happens. You get it back in return. I think this pleasant consequence generalizes to everything else in life. We have been designated as the keeper of this planet and have an obligation to do an excellent job in this regard. The best way to do this is to treat everything the way we would like to be treated ourselves. That guideline is the ultimate moral compass and is guaranteed to work correctly all the time without any maintenance whatsoever. Reverence towards all things is a cornerstone of the right attitude that forms a very strong foundation below the surface.
Acceptance
I think life reacts the same way that people do when they are over-controlled, judged and misunderstood- not very well. When you invest heavily in trying to control things and people, most of the time you are just setting yourself up for failure and disappointment. Nothing wants to be controlled, just accepted and understood. By focusing more on the few controllables that are actually under your influence, you can do a much better job on those things. You will not be wasting valuable time doing so much and getting so little in the way of results. Acceptance and understanding determine if something needs changing and if it does, they offer valuable clues how to do that more effectively.
Tenacity
Life isn't always kind and easy. If we want to survive the most difficult, trying situations, we must develop fortitude and learn to hang in there when things start getting tough. This prepares us for the strength that is required to win life's best prizes. Weakness and quitting are not behaviors that are looked up to and people who display them are not in favor with others. Anybody can give up, but the tenacious person will have both success and respect and admiration from others. Besides all this, it is perseverance that builds the most important thing a human being can have, which is self-confidence. There is no such thing as the right attitude without self-confidence.
Tentativeness
When all is said and done, what is left that you really know for sure? "Very little," is the only honest answer. So why profess to know certainty? Why do battle over a belief that you can't prove to be true? Taking a more tentative approach allows you to relax, open up and learn much more. Personally, I have never felt more energy, wellness and excitement than the moment in the second half of my life when I discovered I was still a student and not the teacher. This was the right attitude that improved both my likability and smartness. It didn't hurt my credibility and success either.
By striving to develop these ten virtuous behaviors, you will be showing the right attitude. The right attitude will bring about the right consequences, which will increase your success rate in anything. The real winner will be your self-confidence, which may be what really drives the right attitude in a positive vicious circle.
If you want to achieve more, get psyched! Getting psyched isn't about increasing adrenaline though. It is about applying useful psychological principles, which by the way, aren't always just common sense dressed up as fancy psycho-babble. Below are a few useful psychological principles worth exploring in your pursuit of personal and professional excellence.
Human Learning
One of the more influential human processes is one that isn't complicated at all. We learn everything we know by simple associations, by modeling others, through sudden insights and by getting rewarded for making desired responses. Knowing this basic process, you can manage negative behavior better and replace it with more positive, productive behavior.
To eliminate negative behaviors, you should be more cautious in avoiding simple associations that strengthen bad habits, become aware of the tendency to acquire unproductive routines just from watching others and look closer to find out what is rewarding your negative behaviors to keep them going. In developing positive behaviors to replace unproductive ones, you can start making sure you are rewarding your achievements with meaningful rewards and practicing some of these other psychological principles below. You can also increase your sensitivity and listen closer to important insights, which can give you valuable clues as to how things really work. One such useful insight is that sometimes small, but well-placed and well-timed efforts produce the best results.
Individual Differences
People are all different when it comes to their abilities, needs, and motivations. Even the same person can be different in these things at different times. Not acknowledging these differences can be the cause of much unnecessary failure. Unfortunately, in the interest of convenience and cost we devote too much effort in identifying similarities to justify easier group prescriptions. We always want to hurry up and cure everything all at once in one easy swoop.
Sometimes you need to stop and take a little time to study the situation in order to understand it better. Things may not always be the way they appear to be. One worthwhile activity is to study and document your own thoughts, beliefs, moods and expectations just prior to a performance and then see what was connected to success and what was connected to failure after the performance is over. The performance can be a job interview, a speech, an interaction with another person, or an athletic event. This can be an eye-opening experience that questions the heart of common sense. Becoming more aware of your own individual differences gives you valuable, accurate information on which to base your goals and activities.
Growth & Development
An important principle that has been uncovered by human growth and development studies is that such development usually occurs in a sequence of systematic stages over a period of time. Consequently, it is important to set goals and activities that follow a natural pattern of development. Missing a critical stage of development on the way toward an important goal can throw you off the right track altogether. And you don't have the swimming skills of salmon to climb waterfalls.
In personal relationships, you can't achieve genuine intimacy without first exercising patience to build rapport and then developing courage to work through difficult conflicts. To win a race you have to plan a fast start, train to maintain a strong pace and reserve something to be able to kick into high gear for a fantastic finish. When your game plan acknowledges the stages of development of something and your goals are based on getting through those stages, a positive outcome is more likely.
Accommodation
Our eyes have to use the process of three-dimensional visual accommodation to switch back and forth between the foreground and background of something to be able to make sense of it. In a similar fashion, we must be able to switch our attention back and forth between broad focus on the external environment and narrow focus on details within that environment.
Broad focus is visualizing the bigger picture and end goal, whereas narrow focus is noticing all the particular details necessary to get where you want to go. If you over-attend to one of these at the expense of the other, you give up valuable ground in achieving your goal. You can easily forget where you are going when you get bogged down in details, and you can bump into a tree or two by looking too far into the forest.
It is the constant switching back and forth that catches subtle changes in one viewpoint that may impact the other in dramatic ways. A short-term investment of time or money may change a long-range business plan in not so small ways. And when you begin to slow yourself down enough, you begin to notice not only what you are attending to, but also how you are attending to it. You may be missing valuable information that impacts the big picture in major ways.
Gestalt
Gestalt psychology gave us many valuable laws of perception, which can be used to understand and avoid unnecessary mistakes. One such principle is the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, much like the weaker individual hemp fibers making up a stronger rope. Average individual players can work well together to become an outstanding team. The synergy from something greater than our own individual efforts can provide a major boost to our achievements. On the other side of this, the whole that we create may end up developing its own identity and even have power over us. Then we become the dog being wagged by his tail. This is not the way things are supposed to be.
Other important gestalt principles are closure, or our tendency to finish incomplete situations and proximity, or our tendency to see things that are close together as similar. We may need to be aware of how we can actually be foolishly finishing something with incorrect information, just to finish it. Or, we may mistakenly think things have a connection when in fact they don't. They just appear together by chance.
The Bell Curve
Most achievement falls within the larger average portion of the bell curve. Under this umbrella, where there is a lot of room for improvement, gains can come quickly and easily. But the closer you get to perfecting your achievements, the further out toward the end of the curve you move. Once there, the harder you have to look for new ideas or activities to keep moving forward and then the harder you have to practice them.
The last few obstacles guarding the door to being a successful expert at excellence are the most difficult ones to remove. They are either the heaviest and most bulky, or they can become invisible or difficult to see. There is no shortcut through this statistical reality but being aware of it can help you plan better.
These are just a few of the many valuable psychological principles that are available to help give you an edge in your pursuit of excellence. By practicing these and other basic psychological principles, you will be making a plan and setting goals that are more likely to be in line with the way life works. You will be getting psyched and improving your achievements.
Can Broken Marriages Be Fixed?
Thirty years ago I got out of the marriage counseling profession because I became disillusioned from so many failures. It wasn't marriage counseling anymore. It was becoming divorce counseling. Heck, I was a good marriage counselor but couldn't even fix my own broken marriage. Now at least, I know why. Sometimes you have to walk away from the trees to be able to see the forest. Other times you have to fail before you can figure out how to succeed.
After three failed marriages counteracted by three decades of success at "fixing" a variety of prisons, professional sports teams and private businesses, I think I finally know what the problem is with trying to fix broken marriages. The principles are the same with fixing anything that is broken. Besides, the harder you look, the more relationships you see between things, including marriages, sports teams, prisons and businesses.
First of all, let me define “broken marriage” so we get started at the same place. A broken marriage is any one that isn’t fully satisfying and fully functioning, according to the perceptions of the partners who are involved. That about covers most marriages right? I am using this broad definition because there really can’t be any more precise way to say what is or isn’t broken other than individual perceptions. A person who has to wear bifocal glasses may feel just as impaired and challenged as a person who just had triple by-pass surgery. Who is to say who is more “broken?”
Can broken marriages be fixed? Just like fixing anything that involves people, it depends on the answers to three tough questions:
1. Can the marriage work?
2. Do the partners want the marriage to work?
3. Will both partners make it work?These three questions are not as straightforward as they appear. They involve other difficult questions and detailed answers that can’t be assumed. It takes a lot of digging, growing and being honest to get the needed information. The troubled marriage partners have to be able to talk about what is going on and answer these questions completely and accurately. They are often not able to do that. Then it is up to the marriage counselor to make interpretations, which may be wrong. On the bright side, the process of just exploring answers to these three questions can often be healing in itself. It is certainly always worth the effort.
Let's take a look at what is really involved with each question.
Can the marriage work?
This first question may seem as though it should follow the second one, but maybe that is the problem. Whether something is fixable or not needs to be determined before there is any more wasted time and effort. When marriages end, it is because one or both of the partners have come to the conclusion that the marriage is not fixable- either to the degree or manner that is desired. What might be most important here is the underlying belief by the partners as to whether or not the broken marriage can be fixed.
The answer to this first question requires brutal honesty in assessing how the marriage started, what has happened in between, and where it is most likely to go in the future. There are some other important questions themselves, which can shed light on predicting the most likely outcome.
Here are just a few of the questions, which need the right answers: Are the partners in the marriage for the right reasons? Have those reasons ever been communicated? Are the reasons adequate for a healthy, productive marriage? Did things get started off on the right foot? Is there too much water under the bridge with incidents of infidelity, anger or unhealthy habits?
Other critical questions include these: Does the marriage have enough of the core essentials such as sufficient emotional health, unconditional love, compatibility of interests and values, tolerance, flexibility, physical and sexual attraction, and open communication? Is the marriage viewed with enough sacred reverence? Has the marriage gone past the point of no return? Are there outside forces that need to be identified and addressed? Was the marriage even meant to be in the first place?
My first failed marriage involved too much water under the bridge with infidelity. Once trust is eroded there is no getting it back and no marriage can survive without trust. This broken marriage also didn’t have enough of a foundation of unconditional love, equality or emotional health to stand up against the experimentation, selfishness and insanity of the late sixties and early seventies. In looking back, it didn’t get started right either, as we were both on the rebound. Believe it or not, it wasn’t a bad marriage by today’s standards, but it certainly wasn’t good enough.
My second marriage was one big learning experience of how not to act in a relationship, which went way past the point of no return. The only unanswered question is why it lasted 20 years. That marriage never got started right, as expectations and values were too vague, without any communication to help clarify them. Actually good communication would have revealed that these expectations and values were too conflicting. Opposites may attract, but they get old after awhile. Moreover, I didn’t bother trying to figure out the reason for some of the mental red flags about which my heart was trying to warn me from the very beginning.
After this experience, you might think that I would have improved in my mate selection process, but it only go worse. I haven’t yet determined whether I am just a slow learner in interpersonal situations or whether I am a hopeless, idealistic romanticist who never wants to give up on relationships.
My third short-lived two-month marriage disaster wasn’t even meant to be. It was just a warning for others to avoid such a relationship altogether. There was nothing good about it except that it ended quickly, there were no children involved and we never have to see each other again.
All these marriage failures are moot now. Fortunately, I did eventually find my true love and we can now demonstrate what a mature, healthy, loving relationship is for others to see, even if we aren’t married. We are happy fifty-five year old lovers though, and that is better.
One problem in particular always posed a challenge for me in all my relationships and I am sure it is a common one. This problem is the issue of differences in people's perceptions. Can a broken marriage be fixed when the two partners have different perceptions to critical questions such as these: How broken is the marriage? What is it that needs to be fixed? When does the marriage become good enough? Do things need to be "fixed" or just understood? How do we fix what is wrong? Who needs to change most or first?
Exploring these key differences can often uncover important clues as to what may be "wrong" and offer some powerful solutions to building bridges that help the couple move forward in strengthening their desire to make the marriage work and gaining the skills necessary to do so.
Unfortunately, this first question of whether or not the marriage can work is where the road to rationality runs out. Whoever has a clear picture of when enough is enough or when something just can't be fixed? No one has ever had enough experience at trying everything to fix such a thing as a broken marriage, so there is no clear point at which to arrive in feeling 100% sure that the broken marriage can't possibly be fixed and it is definitely time to bale out.
After all is said and done, all you have to go on in trying to answer this question is your gut feelings. However, there are some common sense guidelines to at least consider. When you don't start something out right, the finish can't help but be wrong and when a house isn't built on a solid foundation it will eventually crumble. Furthermore, when things just aren’t meant to be, there are too many obstacles, or you can't agree on what needs fixing or how to fix it, then all efforts will probably be in vain and quitting has to be a viable option.
Exploring this first question together to try and reach agreement on the answer is going further than most partners in a broken marriage and may be enough to justify going on to the next two questions. Of course, when one or both partners arrive at a "no" answer, there is usually no need to go any further. Marriage is not meant to be that adversarial or lopsided.
Do the partners both want the marriage to work?
Thinking we want a marriage to work is not enough. First of all, there is a big difference between what we think we want and what we may actually need. Our wants and needs may be trying to "recruit" two entirely different people on their own without letting us know it. And our needs run from simple basic ones such as physical, safety and security to higher, more complicated ones such as self-actualization, creativity and spiritual enlightenment. When any of these wants or needs aren’t met, there is a problem. There are just too many seemingly greener pastures out there. Together, this problem and perception explain much of our present day high divorce rate.
I always thought I wanted brains, beauty and personality in my mate, but what I needed was unconditional love, emotional health, good communication, sexual sppontaneity, and spiritual compatibility. Oddly, when I gave into what I needed, I got all the other things I wanted. What I didn’t do was to sacrifice anything that I needed. It took many failures to learn that lesson.
Secondly, too much of what is going on inside our heads is just a response to something unconscious which drives us. We often do not even know what we want or need, so how can we possibly get it or worse yet, expect another person to give it to us? I think my second wife needed unconditional love but I don’t think she knew that. If she had communicated that need, I might have been able to give it to her. Then there may not have been any reason for all the arguing. But of course there was no communication for that to happen.
Thirdly, the choices we have to make in order to satisfy our wants and needs often involve conflicts between our heads and hearts. When the head and heart cannot agree on these things there cannot be any success, just turmoil. What I learned the hard way was that true love is what happens when you finally reconcile the war between your head and heart. I did this by starting to listen to my intuition, which is a handy walkie-talkie between my head and heart.
Unfortunately, no one else can tell you how to solve such a difficult conflict or even show you how to do it. This is the main failure of the self-help industry. These gurus are trying to do too much. All they can really do is show you where the water is. They can’t make you drink it or drink it for you. The trick has always been to make the water irresistible and then be patient. Being too much in a hurry is a common cause of failure.
Lastly, and most important, the partners may want the marriage to work, but may not want to do all the things that are necessary to make it work. Knowing what all these things are can lead to a better ability to answer the next question. If a hundred bad choices have already been made during the last several years of the marriage, are both partners wanting to spend a few more years and make the hundred-fifty right choices it may take to get back to the starting block?
You can’t just wish a broken marriage to be repaired by magic without first investing some time and effort to find out what it will take. Then you have to really want to do it. You see a rich doctor’s beautiful new home and want one too. Are you willing to invest a couple of hundred thousands of dollars in education, sit in a classroom until you are gray, spend a third of your income in taxes and malpractice insurance, work 12 hours a day and be on call 24 hours a day? Probably not. Some broken marriages may require more sacrifices than either partner wants to make.
The saddest scenario about this second question is when one partner wants the marriage to work and the other one doesn’t. This difference is usually based on the one partner's convincing perceptions as to what is wrong or that the marriage isn't fixable to the degree and way that he or she wishes. Actually this fundamental disagreement is a “no” answer to the first question of can this marriage work? There is no way to force agreement on this one. Having the courage to walk away is what is needed.
Will both partners make it work?
Marriages require teamwork, and just like businesses, professional sports teams, or any other type of organization or institution, they need a detailed game plan for team members to follow. This is especially true when the team is broken.
First, there needs to be a mission statement that clearly and passionately communicates the ultimate outcome that is desired from the marriage. Marriage vowels used to do this in a round about way, but they seem to be losing their impact these days. Hence it might be a good idea to copy a successful business practice. What could it hurt?
A marriage mission statement could be something like, “To have the best marriage in the world to help us both grow and get more of everything together than alone,” or “to soothe each other’s souls with daily loving and understanding for the rest of our lives wherever they may take us.” If the basic expectation of the marriage is not clear, how will you know if you are or aren’t headed in the right direction? Broken marriages are headed in the wrong direction and need much re-routing. Agreeing on where you want to go is the first step in forming the necessary teamwork to be successful.
Next, there has to be communication and agreement about core values that will ensure the success of this mission. Even bottom-line driven corporations and professional sports teams have to allow people to express the basic values of their souls including love, compassion, creativity, growth, and understanding, if they are to survive over the long haul. Conflicts in these essential soul values dooms any marriage, business or sports team, sooner or later.
Finally, there have to be very specific activities each partner will commit to accomplishing in order to help the marriage achieve its mission. These “assignments” need to translate that ultimate purpose into routine, every day behavior consistent with core values.
One partner may have to agree to work hard on communicating her needs more directly instead of continuing to assume her partner can read her mind. She may also have to learn to leave off the colorful adjectives that turns simple assertive expression into complaining,
On the other hand, the partner in this situation may have to agree to control his tendency to be defensive about his lack of mind-reading ability or his own perceived inadequacy of giving his partner something to complain about. He may even have to start asking more questions. Or both partners may need to work on improving their ability to listen more to understand, to control their tendency to over-react, give up unhealthy habits, or to stop interpreting non-verbal behavior.
The more detailed the partners can be about all the things they will do to fix parts of the broken marriage, the more likely they will succeed. Sometimes it isn’t what is being done that is as important as the fact that something is being done. Something always has to be done to fix a broken marriage.
Unfortunately, having a marriage that can work in which the partners want it to work is simply not enough. Life is too complex today with too many pressures, obstacles and temptations. You must know where you are going, have the uncompromising desire to get there and be in possession of the required tools to make progress. Without a plan, you are just wandering around without any clear destination, destined to get nowhere quickly without even knowing it. That is not smart. Developing a detailed action plan is what works.
I guess if there is a single most important thing I have learned from fixing things, it is the value of buying time. Everything has to be at a readiness point to be fixed. Buying time to get a broken marriage to that readiness point can be wisely spent focusing on two of the most basic, but conflicting human drives. We all have a strong mental need for a sufficient sense of freedom and equality. These are especially important to us as individuals in a marriage partnership.
When we perceive that we don’t have enough freedom and equality we can all behave in very bizarre, unproductive ways. Arranging or setting rules to safeguard these two critical needs may be the most important role a third party, such as a marriage counselor, can bring to the table. Buying time and using it to increase both partners’ sense of freedom and equality will decrease the intensity of the problems and improve hope. Both these things can bring marriage partners closer to a readiness point to be fixed.
If a marriage couple passes the first two questions and then takes the time to (a) write a mutual mission statement for their marriage (b) openly communicate about the values on which it has to be built, and (c) plan specific contributions each will make to help them both get where they want to be, then the answer to our original title question is YES! We had to take the long way around to answer this question correctly, but maybe taking the easier, quicker path is why I experienced so many earlier failures.
Marriage is a sacred contract and it was never meant to be taken lightly. Seeking a divorce, unless under extreme conditions such as abuse, should not be an option before you have gone through the above process and can honestly say that you have done everything possible to try and fix the broken marriage. Then when you determine it is not fixable, you are justified and right in moving on.
We are evolving to a point in life and work where personality power and even character power no longer suffice in helping us get to where we are going. What we are all in the process of developing now is authentic spiritual power. The Prosperity Zone is where such power, or in modern self-help terms, permanent “cheese,” is stored. Our evolution is taking us to this ultimate cheese factory.
There is a common journey we all make in remembering where this place is. Typically, there is a powerful life-changing event that has to get our attention first before we start the initial journey back to the cheese zone. This event is what I call the “brick wall phenomenon.”
The brick wall is a paramount situation in your life that demands a cure, but the more you try to control it, the more out of control it gets. The maddening frustration that results from all your failing efforts takes you to your own version of Dante’s Inferno where you reach the very edge of faith, hope and sanity.
My own brick wall was mid-life unemployment. I was at my peak professionally, armed with a Ph.D., world-class training and over 30 years of management experience in a variety of small and large work settings. I had just about everything a person could possibly want to be happy and content. Then because of some bad personal choices I made in my insatiable desire to chase greener pastures, I suddenly ended up jobless, homeless, penniless, humorless and hopeless. This was a dismal, cold place with no light or warmth whatsoever.
The more I tried to get out of this self-dug hole, the deeper it got. Nothing I had learned in 50 years of education, training, professional experience or living was of any help at all. All I wanted was some relief and my patience and efforts certainly deserved that much.
Using the reserves of my own intelligence, creativity, perseverance and flexibility, I was certain I could regain control and get to where I wanted to be. I expected some results, because I wasn’t asking for anything that much (just to get back to the surface) and I wasn’t giving up. But I was making a courageous effort that was in vain. The hole just kept getting deeper and darker, because without knowing it, I was digging more.
I can never be sure what the turning point actually was in my particular situation, but I think it had to do with relearning the notion of responsibility. I had always thought that we are responsible for all that we do and all that happens to us, but this time the experience went from my head to my heart to my soul, and finally to my hands (my behavior). My “recovery” involved the inescapable truth that I was responsible for this undesirable predicament in which I was drowning. The more the reality of this realization sunk in, the more the brick wall started to magically dissolve.
In looking back, I think I woke up to the fact that my approach to life wasn’t correct. I was either trying to do the right thing for the wrong reasons, or I was trying to do wrong thing for the right reasons. Another critical insight I had involved learning the difference between what my mind wanted and what my soul needed. My mind wanted a job to feel useful, some money to pay a few bills, a comfortable place I could call home and another person with which to have a personal relationship. What I now know is that my soul needed something a little more important- the opportunity to express some compassion, love, understanding and creativity with the rest of the universe.
I believe this brick wall experience is designed to frustrate us to the point that we finally give up and give in. What we are giving up on is the illusion that we can control our material world and do certain things to get certain results. After all, that is what we have been educated, trained and told to do. What we are giving into is the next stage of our evolution, which is spiritual development.
This next stage of development leads us to an entirely different viewpoint. We go from focusing on external things we think we want, to turning inwardly to learn what our soul needs. This is the process of growing up spiritually. This is when we begin to accumulate the only authentic power there is- spiritual power. This is permanent cheese.
Such power helps us get better timing. With better timing, we finally learn to slow things down to a dead halt to see and hear something very simple but profound. What we hear are the “Sounds of Silence” sung years ago by Simon and Garfunkle. What we see are the “visions planted on our brains,” or the many choices and consequences that we have before us each and every moment.
Spiritual power helps us become more aware of the simple process of Karma. When we make positive choices, there are positive consequences and when we make negative choices there are negative consequences. I made too many negative choices and ended up in a negative place where I never want to visit again. When I started making positive choices, I gradually started to hear and see positive consequences. The only thing I can’t figure out is why it took me so long to learn this critical lesson. I guess some of us just have to take the long way home.
When you locate your prosperity zone and tap into the unlimited supply of spiritual cheese that is waiting for you there, you begin to understand the original choice which keeps coming back again and again until you finally make the right choice. The right choice is always the one where you do the right thing in the right way for the right reasons, which has the right consequences.
The only choice is between continuing to use ineffective, disgenuine personality power to increase the bottom line of your external world or try effective, genuine soul power to express compassion, love, creativity and understanding to make life just a little better for everyone. This really isn’t much of a choice when you see and hear the consequences. Personality power results in a nagging void, superficial happiness, short-term success and a feeling of dissatisfaction and incompleteness. Soul power heals and leads to wholeness, real happiness, genuine long-term success and blissful contentment.
The goal of our spiritual development is to remember the secret contract we made with life before we were even born. This is the ultimate responsibility we have to assume. In exchange for our life, we agreed to accomplish something of value and importance that only we could do. This is our unique, special purpose for being here on earth. Spiritual power facilitates the understanding of this “contract” and the development of our special talents to carry out this purpose. All the experiences we have are all aimed at helping us remember this sacred responsibility to which we agreed.
During my personal journey, I was always intrigued with a paradox I have renamed to be “You can’t have your cheese and eat it too.” I mistakenly took this to mean that I couldn’t have both what I thought I wanted and what I actually needed. I knew it had to be either one or the other with this and all the other either-or dilemmas. I never succeeded at disproving that myth until I realized my approach to the problem was entirely wrong. I wanted to get what I wanted before I was willing to accept what I needed. I had my priorities reversed. The carriage was before the horse and the tail was wagging the dog.
Here is a great secret revealed: We are all destined to be able to have our cheese and eat it too. There is an unlimited supply and variety of cheese in the Prosperity Zone. All we have to do is slow time down enough so we can begin to hear the whispers and see the shadows that will help us remember the responsibility we have with the many choices that confront us moment by moment.
The biggest choice always has and always will be whether to continue searching for ways to exercise our personality power to achieve what we want or to accept soul power to understand and fulfill the needs of our soul and the souls of others so we can get on with our highest priority, which is accomplishing our primary purpose. When we truly see and hear the consequences of these two paths, it is impossible to not make the right choice. Then the two paths become one and there is nothing but cheese all around us.
If there was one positive thing the decadent, hedonistic drug and sex culture of the sixties taught me it was the wisdom of the omniscient fiat “Tune into the now.” The only trouble was, it took me over thirty years to fully understand the real message through its psychedelic cellophane wrapper.
It is fine to analyze the past in order to understand it better and then plan for the future to better arrange desirable outcomes. That is responsible living. However, nothing ever gets done to change anything in any temporal zone other than the now. If there are things going on today that are not so desirable, we must seize the moment right now to act. We can’t wait until we can get it perfect or be assured of flawless outcomes. We need to do what we can now, not later. Talking won’t do it, only doing will get it done.
There is a book every parent should read, along with every educator, employer and politician. In this landmark book, “Ask the Children,” author and speaker Ellen Galinski seized a precious moment. She challenged some basic assumptions we all make about what motivates the younger generation and then took the time to find out the real truth by simply asking the children. On the top of their wish list, they want us to stop dumping our own stress on them and to start listening more. That would take much less time, effort and money than more anti-violence, anti-teenage pregnancy, anti-substance abuse and other social programs would involve. It is a cure that all of us can take part in.
Although these findings have wide applicability in helping us all learn how to deal more effectively with the younger generations’ value revolution, it is the process itself which is the real learning moment to appreciate. We need to slow down, question some of our most sacred assumptions and find out the real truth. Then we need to do what we can as individuals to make what changes need to be made little by little. Our model can be the eighth-grader in the inspirational movie, “Pay it Forward.” He definitely seized the moment.
How can we seize these moments of opportunity? A good starting point is to slow down and try to understand why something is happening, especially seizing the moment to see some positive lesson in the most unpleasant circumstances. The older generation may not like the moral erosion, artificial affluence and other destructive influences that are going on today, but guess what? We all helped create this state of affairs. We invented the “Information Age” and embraced all that was to come with it. That realization may be a bit difficult to swallow.
It may be the little things we can each do to help influence positive changes that count most. Here are a few little things I find to have a big influence on producing positive change.
Understand what is going on
All the unhealthy things going on today can’t be changed without some understanding. First we have to take the time to understand how we helped bring about these things that disturb us and understand what we are doing to perpetuate them. Then we need to learn how to stop doing that. It is through this type of understanding, that we will begin to see some opportunities to seize in acting now to play our own small, but important role in making things better.
Why did we create all this unhealthiness? Maybe so we could experience its unpleasantness firsthand in order to know this is not what life is really suppose to be like, instead of just taking someone else’s word for it. When you begin to know something is “wrong” from direct experience, you are more likely to be able to stop it, in the right way and for the right reason. I hope we weren’t just bored, but if that is the case, we may need to explore more productive alternatives to getting unbored. Whatever the reason, taking ownership of the results is always the first step in correcting the problem.
Challenge assumptions
The biggest assumption I have been challenging lately is the one about so many bad things needing remedies. Who’s to say most things aren’t really progressing the way they are suppose to? Or maybe we are just over-focusing externally on the big group picture at the expense of our own internal, smaller individual ones. I know that when I don’t challenge this assumption, I get caught up in fighting symptoms and never discovering any cures. I also know that when I start challenging this assumption I begin to catch glimpses of the little things I can do myself to make it a slightly better world.
Are we assuming the youth today aren’t voting because of apathy or laziness, when it may be that they are saying something we need to be listening to? Are we assuming that couples are just giving up too easily in their marriages when they have never learned the art of loving or how to select the right mate? Are we assuming that the present chaotic socioquake of values is destructive when it might be just what we need most? These and other assumptions are worth challenging.
Ask more questions
I use to think you had to be born with common sense, but when I started applying my own best advice of asking more questions, my own store of common sense started growing exponentially. Asking questions to increase common sense is useful in many ways. One important use is in solving problems. If we want to learn how to stop violence, sexual promiscuity and moral corruption, then we need to ask some questions, particularly, “what am I doing myself to perpetuate these things?” If you want to learn how to be a better parent or employer, then you need to ask your children and employees how to do that. If you want to find out about something you don’t understand then you need to ask someone who does. You need to ask more questions.
Just asking questions may not take advantage of an opportunity fully enough. You may need to ask the right person the right question in the right way. There is an art to asking questions that get the most accurate and useful information. Asking questions to which you already have your answers is certainly not a way to do this. Nor is forcing artificial, incomplete or dishonest answers.
Listen, listen, listen
You haven’t begun to listen until you force yourself to shut up when you are on the edge of your seat and want to say something so badly you can’t stand it. After that you can start mastering the art of “two-eared” listening, which is hearing what is actually being said through all the noise of how it is being said. This is probably the case with violence. When you start using both ears you can also hear what is not being said that may be more important than what is being said. This is probably the case with corruption and immorality.
Good listening skills also include fine tuning your sensitivity to catch moments of opportunity. One powerful moment is waiting to share what you know until someone else asks you, rather than imposing it. Another one is listening for questions because that is when your answers will actually be heard. Also, none of us should underestimate the power of being a good role model and that is an opportunity that occurs continuously. Do as I do has always been the simplest and surest way of instruction.
Shed the stress
The speed and demands of modern day living bring much stress. Trying to avoid this stress can be stressful in itself. We all know that we need to establish healthier routines to limit the destructive effects of distress, but what we don’t know is how the stress we are feeling effects other people with whom we are interacting. According to the children, it is not good.
Shedding stress is a conscious decision to make now. The next time you are in the middle of getting stressed out and you are about to talk with another person, stop and think about how contagious stress is. Having one interaction that is not contaminated by a previous situation’s stress can open the door for many more. That is an opportunity to seize right away. We need all the stress-free moments we can get.
Focus on Now
It is ironic that we have to fight so hard to not do this. Our escape is in thinking back to better times in the past and dreaming ahead to better ones we hope for in the future. Oddly, both are actually occurring now. The only trouble is, we are not taking advantage of all the opportunities to act now. We are too busy trying to get it perfect or guarantee certain results. Now the trouble with that sort of thinking is that it may be based on wrong assumptions, not asking enough questions or poor listening.
Focusing on now requires that you slow down and understand why and how something unpleasant is happening. This is so you may see how you are taking part and then learn what to do to stop that. If I am annoyed at my psychology students’ lack of motivation and deficiency of critical thinking, then I have to be bold enough to ask them and myself, “How I am contributing and what I can do to change my teaching approach for the better?” If I think good motivation and good critical thinking skills can be used to change some little things that may be wrong with the world today, take the time to find out if this is really true, and then act, I have seized the moment. I will be changing things for the better.
I have studied the "love phenomenon" personally and professionally for over 40 years now and would like to share a few things I have discovered in my studies. First, it may be that we are being artificial and limiting in trying to describe and explain something in a generalized way, that is really more of a highly personal experience. Love may be slightly different each time it is experienced. However, I know from a personal standpoint that there are several different and distinct kinds of love and that even the same kind of love isn't exactly the same each time it occurs.
Here are the different kinds of love that I have seen and experienced:
Parental Love
This love is designed to allow us to fulfill our innate nurturing/teaching role of taking care of more vulnerable people to help them grow. It incorporates other types of the higher loves, like altruism. Their aren't any utilitarian concerns in this type of love, it just is, without much thought or effort. When a person's nurturing needs go unmet and have to be transferred a marital type relationship, this love becomes unhealthy and unproductive.
Puppy Love
This is a pre-romantic type of love that we start feeling from an immature, rose-colored glasses stage of early development. It is much like what we feel for a brand new puppy before we have to get in the routine of feeding, bathing and cleaning up after the grown-up dog. We are infatuated by the other person and are slightly overwhelmed by a few points of attraction, missing the other two-thirds of reality. This type of love is usually short-lived and can occur frequently throughout our lives.
Platonic Love
This is a mental love we think we have for another person, devoid of strong emotional or physical attraction, or at least a need to act on those levels. We are in love with the other person's personality, intellect or position in life as more than just friends. Our platonic love of another can often be a defense mechanism to protect us against emotional vulnerability and be miscued and not returned as the same kind of love by the other person.
Romantic Love
This is the idealized powerful type of "Romeo & Juliet" love that everyone has a preconceived, vivid image of in his or her mind. This is being in love with love. It comes with total preoccupation with the other person, an overwhelming feeling of completeness, unbridled inspiration to be your best, extreme hypersensitivity and blissful timelessness. This type of love suddenly hits you on the head like a ton of bricks and keeps getting stronger and more intense until you feel as though you are going to explode. However, it comes straight from the heart and denies any and all red flags. It can often show as a war between your head and heart, in which there are no winners. Unfortunately, sooner or later reality does kick in with romantic love to lessen its glamour, intensity and joy, but with concerted effort this type of love can be rekindled in a healthy relationship.
Addictive Love
This is an unhealthy destructive type of love, which, like any other addiction, you don't seem to have any control over. The epitome of addictive love is a love-hate relationship, which dominates the participants in a vicious circle of kissing and yelling. Usually something very drastic has to happen to break the hold of addictive love, as it has the power of heroin, alcohol, coffee, sex and cigarettes all combined. The dynamics of addictive love involve powerlessness and over-dependence. The cure is getting to know what you are trying to run from.
Lusty Love
This is the type of love that is based solely on a high degree of physical attraction that can be just as compelling as addictive love. Lusty lovers do not need to be attracted to anything else other than the lust they feel for each other. Lusty love is often a moral test that few survive, but it eventually fizzles out no matter what the starting temperature. This type of love is not likely to develop into a healthier one, although it can be a legitimate part of one.
Chemical Love
I've never been able to figure out this type of love but I do know for sure that it exists. In any social situation there is a high chance that you will make intimate eye contact with someone and then your entire being is pulled to that person like an electronic magnet. Your "chemical" attraction is beyond understanding. Most often, the feelings are there, but neither party acts on them out of fear of the unknown or possible rejection. Sometimes the pull is merely a meaningful coincidence aimed at providing you with some important "higher" information to grow, which may be interpreted wrongly as sexual in nature. Chemical love is probably the most uncertain kind of "love" there is, with no guarantees as to the outcome of following it up. It can end up as many of these other types of love.
Utilitarian Love
This kind of love is an unwritten "contract" implying the love between two people is mutual so long as each gets something useful from the relationship. When the utility of the relationship stops paying dividends to the participants, such as important needs not getting met, the love feelings fade and the relationship is in serious jeopardy. Too many unhappy marriages are based on this type of love. It is not likely that this kind of love will evolve into a higher, healthier one within the present relationship. There is a certain amount of selfishness that is keeping both people from growing.
Creative Love
This is the mysterious force of the universe that opens the doors to unlimited worlds and understanding. It is the vague passion of artists, musicians and writers feeling a compelling need to communicate some important aspect of truth and reality that they have intimately experienced, for the benefit of others. We all have varying degrees of these urges, but it takes intense self-discipline to translate them effectively into products. Creative love is problem-solving at its finest. The mind becomes multidimensional and fluid to see things most people miss. All of a sudden there are more answers to questions and what questions there are seem more important than the typical answers.
Brotherly Love
This kind of love is the Golden Rule put into action. We treat our "brothers" as we want to be treated- with genuine respect, dignity, freedom, and caring. Most social problems can be cured with this type of responsible, reverent love. We probably can't develop a capacity for higher love without mastering this one, although it should come naturally.
Best Friend Love
Love of our best friend involves a combination of all these other healthy loves, without the need for a physical/sexual connection, although that aspect could be quite near the surface. This type of love is based on instant liking, peak communication, trust and comfort with another "soul mate." This is the best arena to receive and apply valid and valuable criticism to help each person grow. Although there may not be any phone calls or letters for long periods of time, you are always there for each other. This type of love is more or less permanent.
Normal Love
The best way to describe "normal" love is that it is probably a combination of mild to moderate degrees of all these other kinds of love. This kind of love offers enough of everything in a relationship to make it satisfying. There is good physical, intellectual, emotional, social, and spiritual compatibility and there is enough trust to plan a lifetime together. Normal love can sustain a healthy marriage so long as there are no extreme stresses that can break it, such as infidelity, physical illness, unhealthy addictions, chronic unemployment, severe mental illness, or acute financial crises. Of course, growing apart and lack of good communication are the silent killers or normal love.
True Love
This is a once in a lifetime, enduring, unconditional love that everyone should experience, but few actually do. It often occurs in a moment of serendipity and comes with the suspicion of a prior lifetime connection and all sorts of déjà vu sensations. True love is the healthiest of loves for a relationship, based on equality, open communication, tolerance, unqualified giving, respect, trust, value compatibility, and mutual growth. It is probably a merging of romantic, normal and higher love. Very little in this life has the ability to challenge true love. True love grows stronger with reciprocal positive energy.
Altruistic Love
This love is unselfish and unconditional giving to others purely for its inherent value. There are no ulterior motives for doing kind and gracious things for other people. True altruistic love has to evolve gradually, because our egos have a hard time giving up their need for recognition of what we are doing for others. This kind of love does not involve personal relationships as an object, but can certainly be a common behavior of healthy love types.
Higher Love
This is the love of spiritual enlightenment in which the person becomes extremely aware and reverent of all things in the universe. It is a consequence of a conscious search for wisdom, spiritual wholeness, and unity with the divine. This love understands the underlying unity of all opposites and it is very whole, complete and fulfilling. It transcends all the other loves by leaps and bounds. This love is quite compatible with other normal and higher loves, but not unhealthy, destructive, immature ones. It is through this type of love that we make most of our evolutionary gains in self-actualization, finding our true selves, and moving toward our fullest potential as human beings. Higher love has the most positive influence on changing things that need changing in everyday living.
We are blessed with many types of love to experience in this life. The marvelous thing about love is that we really don't have to do something to experience it, other than letting go, giving into it and not trying to control it. Eventually, healthy love will guide us all in the right direction toward the ultimate goal of higher love.
On September 11, 2001, unconscionable, cowardly terrorists viscously attacked America. This horrific event has profoundly affected the whole world. Personally, I think this is going to be the most significant event in my lifetime. We are already beginning to see widespread, long-range changes.
This heinous tragedy challenges the depths of my soul and thinking to come up with sensible meaning and find some good from all the loss. All throughout my life I have experienced many significant disasters and several personal tragedies, but sooner or later they all took me to a better place. At the time I would have opted out of most of the experiences, but now in retrospect, I wouldn’t trade any one for all the gold in Fort Knox. I like where I am now, and I wouldn’t be here without having been stretched from the hard lessons of those painful, unforgettable experiences.
I realize that in the mist of all the overwhelming sadness and losses we have all experienced, it is difficult to think of any good things that can come from this diabolical, senseless horror. But for the sake of our minds, hearts and souls we must try. Here is my small contribution in identifying some potential good things that can gradually help heal the physical and emotional trauma that will probably plague us for some time to come.
1. This event is a harsh, uncomfortable, but needed wakeup call that inevitably reminds us of some things we can never forget. One important thing we can never lose sight of is that freedom is never free. It always has a hidden cost we have to pay. Some other important things we should never forget is that life is fragile, time is short and that things are really not under our control. Terrible events such as these have a way of helping us get in touch with what is really most important in life. They also remind us of a higher power we have to give into and rely on.
2. We are being given an important opportunity to express some very basic needs of our souls. These critical needs are expressing love and compassion for the victims and brave rescuers, trying to understand the meaning of what happened and being creative in helping out and coming up with a way to respond that is most effective. This is an adversity of the worst sort, but it is through adversity that we grow the most personally and spiritually. It is disturbing and painful but it will take us to a better place.
3. This calamitous event is an opportunity for parents and teachers to teach children disturbing realities of life and important values by which to live. Children may be the most vulnerable to the adverse effects of seeing and hearing what is going on and they need our attention, guidance and assurances.
4. There is no doubt that catastrophes such as this one bring good and bad into sharp focus. With this event there are no shades of gray to be debated or redefined. This particular disaster is helping motivate us to stand up and fight for what is right and good, no matter what that may mean. Such certainty is reassuring and comforting in the middle of such chaos and confusion.
5. The majority of the world is coming together to fight a common cause. This may help us all realize that the things we have in common are much more important than our differences. When we put our petty differences aside and work together there is not much we can’t accomplish. If we can dream it and think it we can do it by working together until it gets done. This unity has tremendous power in making the world a better place for us all.
6. Such a cataclysmic event produces powerful feelings and stimulates much thinking and communication. We can improve our sensitivity and love toward one another and expand our ability to think critically, be creative and communicate better. These major improvements will do much to increase our overall effectiveness and happiness. Progress in modern day living requires these faculties to be at their best.
7. No matter how right or innocent we are, we have to take ownership for anything we may have done in the past which may have some how contributed. It is probably the most difficult thing to do when we have been wronged, but never the less we need to be honest and examine what we can do better. This is a painfully humbling cleansing process that can bring about extraordinary growth in the human spirit.
8. Episodes like the one we are presently trying to survive present many opportunities for true heroes to be born who outnumber the villains. It is always better to have such an advantage. When heroes come in white hats at a time like this, we listen to what they have to say and follow their cues. They also help us re-evaluate our hero system.
9. We are being challenged to solve an extremely elusive, complex and hidden problem. These unforgivable sins of our enemy demand justice and retribution, but there are presently no known prescriptions for doing this, with guarantees and without ill side effects. This challenge will no doubt bring out the best of our creative thinking and problem solving abilities. We face the difficult dilemma of how to do the right thing in the right way to get the right results.
10. Being safe is one of the most fundamental needs of all human beings. We need to rid our country and the rest of the world of as many threats to peoples’ safety as we are able to. This terrible tragedy is motivating us to focus on defending ourselves and giving us the wisdom, courage and strength to do what we need to do to restore safety and order.
Having experienced both the ups and downs of the financial seesaw in my lifetime, I learned two valuable lessons: (1) you can't buy happiness and (2) you can't wish it into being from nothing. I wasn't any more successful in finding happiness whether I had and ocean view and flashy convertible or whether I was jobless and broke.
It took the loss of everything to make me realize that genuine happiness has to be discovered. You can't make that discovery until you take the time to find and enjoy simple things of real wealth. These are inexpensive, often free things and activities that afford great pleasure and enjoyment, right under your nose.
I suppose I probably started thinking about this notion after watching two daughters go through hundreds of dollars worth of Christmas and birthday toys and yet didn't see a real sense of enjoyment or genuine happiness. That made me think back to my childhood days and remember the hours of fun and pleasure I had being totally absorbed with the unlimited supply of free, imaginary "toys" in my backyard and basement. I had discovered real wealth in those places and it didn't cost a cent. Oddly, those days made more sense.
During the last few years I have made a quest of locating, taking advantage of and cherishing moments of real wealth. These are activities and things that give me genuine enjoyment and a sense of real connection to life. Here is my top ten real wealth secrets that don't require a bank loan or second mortgage. Try some of these or discover your own list.
1. Go to Value Village, Good Will Industries or other similar dirt-cheap used clothing store. Buy some exceptionally comfortable, appealing "bumming clothes" that will wear you out before vice versa. Use these to change into when you get home from work every day.
2. Take a bike or car ride through the closest countryside and stop to appreciate the paradoxical beauty of dilapidated old barns or other aged buildings of character. If you don't have a camera, borrow one to capture the best moments and then hang the picture on your living room wall or put it on a note card to send a friend. If the owner is around, ask to take a lose board to make something with.
3. Watch a sunset from anywhere you can. I have never seen a bad sunset, unless the clouds or rain completely took over. Add a picnic basket, friend, blanket, and bottle of good wine and you have affordable ecstasy at its simplest.
4. Make sure you have the most comfortable sofa or chair that is available in which to flop, take a nap, read a great book or watch a classic TV movie. Enjoy this pleasure at least an hour every day.
5. Build a campfire in the woods and cook wieners and "smores." These taste every bit as good as surf and turf in an expensive restaurant.
6. Take a walk anywhere holding hands with your true love. It doesn't have to be at water's edge on a beach at sunset. It can be a leisurely stroll through the neighborhood or wandering through a shopping mall or quaint stores. Meander without a particular destination or time frame. Enjoy the closeness and scenery.
7. Explore your natural creativity and tinker with an arts and crafts project. Make something like a rustic birdhouse out of old barn boards, driftwood, bark, rusted tin or the tons of free stuff hiding around the corner. Then give your finished product to a friend.
8. Engage in the art of people watching at a busy intersection, city park, local library, laundry-mat, or other public place. If you are adventuresome, strike up a conversation with an interesting-looking stranger. Share stories.
9. Find a private spot and listen to some of your favorite music. Close your eyes and daydream yourself into the fantasy place from which you imagine the music is coming.
10. Take the time to write some thank-you notes to a few people who have influenced your life in small, but important ways. Do this on a note card with a picture you took on your countryside jaunt.
Take the time to discover the many sources of real wealth close by that don't have to be bought. They usually last longer and can be repeated whenever you want.
The real power we have as human beings is the ability to make choices. We can best use this power when we begin to understand more about the choices we have already made. There are two things we can do to increase our understanding. One is to zoom in on the details and see the inter-relationships between our past choices. The second is to zoom out to the bigger picture, see some of the unconscious choices we have made, and acknowledge them.
Relationships between choices
All choices you make are aimed at trying to close the gap between where you are and where you want to be. This big gap is made up of many smaller choices and those gaps are made up of even smaller ones. In order to make the right choices and be where you want to be, it is necessary to understand the relationships between all these circles of choices.
For instance, you may want to make more money and to do this you may have to get smarter than you are. If you choose to become smarter, you will have to choose to do many other things such as reading more of the right books, taking college classes, making friends with smarter people, acknowledging unproductive thinking, becoming open-minded enough to challenge sacred paradigms, re-arranging recreational priorities, and many other things.
Or, you may want to become more appealing for a perspective relationship. To do this you may have to become less overweight. If you choose to do this, you must subsequently choose to adopt an overall healthier life style. This in turn requires you to make many other choices such as giving up a junk food habit, stocking your refrigerator with healthier foods, going to Weight Watchers, starting an exercise program, becoming more informed about diets, resisting second helpings, distancing yourself from other overweight people, etc.
If the gap between where you are and where you want to be is huge, it is because you have made too many wrong little choices along the way and they have caught up with you. Fortunately this isn't fatal. Although you can't just make a single choice to do something to close this big gap, there is still hope. When you start realizing the awesome power you do have to make the right choices at each new moment that comes along from here on out, you begin to immediately make more progress than you would have imagined possible. This is power in choice.
Unconscious choices
The process of growing up involves becoming more aware now of what we haven't been aware of in the past. We are evolving to know what has previously been unconscious. As we increase our understanding of life and become more aware of our power in making choices, we increase our understanding of bigger choices we have the ability to make. Actually we have already made some of these bigger choices unconsciously and just don't know it. Our "plan" is to become fully self-actualized and this involves owning the responsibility for making all the choices we have made and will continue to make-whether they seem voluntary, coerced, mistaken, unconscious or even impossible.
There is one big unconscious choice we all make that has widespread consequences. Ownership of this choice is extremely difficult to swallow. The choice is what parents to be born to. Actually, this is only half the choice- our parents pick us too. It is more of a partnership. And furthermore, this choice is just part of a bigger choice, which is what special purpose we agree to accomplish in exchange for our life.
Taking the time to understand why you picked your parents and why they picked you, can help you uncover the special purpose you agreed to accomplish before you were born. Not knowing this purpose is a big part of the gap between where you are and where you want to be. Sooner or later in your life, this gap demands to be closed. The sooner you get started the easier it is.
If your parents are still alive, it is simply a matter of going straight to the source and asking some deep questions. What were your parents' dreams? What were they most driven to accomplish? Were they fulfilled in their lives or is there still some unfinished business? What were their special talents? What were their weaknesses? What do they think their successes and failures were? What important values, characteristics and abilities were they successful in giving you? Where do they think they fell short in parenting? What hopes did they have for you? How have you let them down?
If your parents are no longer around, you may have to reconstruct memories by asking similar questions to brothers, sisters, relatives or family friends. That is what I did.
When I took the time to explore this unconscious choice, I was amazed at the many meaningful "coincidences" I discovered between who my parents were and where they were going, and who I am and where I am going. Our individual journeys suddenly appeared to have been mysteriously, but purposefully interconnected.
Another thing I found out was that I made critical judgments about all the seemingly good and bad things my parents did to me and then chose to either embrace or rebel against those things in my own life. They were very loyal to their jobs and honest people and so am I. They were timid in accepting responsibility in life, while I welcome it. Either way, their parenting resulted in me being where I am today and I wouldn't want to be any other place. At first this was hard to swallow, but in looking back, I don't think any other parents could have done all that mine did by chance.
There were just too many coincidences between who my parents were and who I have become to be viewed as random or accidental. Somehow I knew they were the best parents to help me in my journey. They pointed me in the right direction and gave me all the traveling tools I needed to succeed. Maybe I was just the right son to help them complete their journey.
Both my parents were persevering and hopeful no matter what the circumstances were. This tenacity and optimism saved my sanity and life during my own darkest moments. Both my parents practiced deep religious convictions. This earlier religious training encouraged my passion for spiritual understanding. Both parents were amateur actors and community leaders, but oddly poor communicators. These abilities and shortcomings both led me to study, practice and teach good communication and leadership to others.
My parents modeled a wholesome relationship, which is now one of my highest priorities after too many failures. Neither had a college degree, so I got enough degrees for both of them. Both took our family on many trips. Travel later exposed me to other cultures and profound insights, which have shaped my thinking and behavior in significant ways. My parents were avid readers and it was my own reading that led to writing. My father was even in the publishing business and mother was a teacher. What a coincidence!
The list goes on with negatives that helped me to be a better, more complete person. My parents were strangely intolerant, unaffectionate, unorganized and impossible to please; on the other hand, I am extremely tolerant, affectionate, organized and easy to please. They had small dreams and I have big ones. They failed to support some of my most important choices, whereas I am completely accepting of all my own daughters' choices and those of other people.
All these things- good, bad and indifferent- had a good purpose in my development with a happy ending. My parents must have known exactly what I needed and I must have known precisely what they could give me. We found and selected each other. It was part of a plan. There is no other reasonable explanation.
In a sense, I am just continuing my parents' journey. Aren't we all just trying to learn more, discover our special talents and use such knowledge and abilities to make things a little better for ourselves, our children and others? One of the most important things my parents passed on to me was the value of keeping life easy and simple. I have always embraced that philosophy. Life doesn't have to be as complex and difficult as we sometimes make it.
Understanding the inter-relationships between our choices and acknowledging the unconscious choices we have made, such as who our parents will be, can help us make the right choices. By making the right choices, we can be most effective in accomplishing our purpose. This is the lion's share of what makes up the gap between where we are and where we want to be. Making a choice to accept responsibility for all our choices is the first step in closing that gap and achieving the wholeness and contentment we crave. There is power in choice.
I particularly like Oprah Winfrey's recent analogy of the continuum of God's voices going from whispers to earthquakes. Here is the way this continuum plays out during our journey through life.
Whispers
Whispers are the subtle but important clues as to who we are, where we are supposed to be going, and how to get there. They are tiny pieces of our private map that somehow fit together with other people's pieces to reveal the bigger, collective map.
Whispers can be chance meetings between two people who have helpful information to exchange, moments of serendipity where your efforts meet luck, or intuitive red flags warning you to avoid doing something. They can also be second chances, windows of opportunity during adversity, valuable insights about life's governing principles, good advice from a friend, or bursts of vague creative energy aimed at stimulating you. They can even be a playful tug of war between your head and heart.
You often miss hearing these helpful whispers because your brain is already overloaded by a plethora of useless information, and because you are traveling 1000 mph in a frenzied effort to figure out everything all by yourself and be the master of your own destiny. Oddly, you often rebel against the best possible advice even when you know it is right.
Whispers are the kindest, softest way you can be told what to do without being controlled, bullied or made to feel inadequate. It is the most successful approach, but it rarely works the first time around. You usually have to experience failure repeatedly before you can see and hear all the obvious clues that have been right there under your nose from the beginning. After all, the obtuse takes a while to see, but the obvious even longer. Needless to say, many people miss posted signs and waste much time traveling wrong roads.
Bricks
Sometimes you get so caught up in your own self that you need to get hit in the back of the head with a brick in order to listen to something that might be much more important than what you are presently thinking or doing. The pain from the impact of the brick gets your immediate attention for a while, but unfortunately it can fade quickly and get lost among all the other animated distractions that are more fun to attend to.
Bricks are much more noisy, intrusive yells. They are warnings for not listening to the whispers. They can show up in the form of an IRS audit, getting caught having an affair, being fired from a job, worrisome credit card debt, or an acute physical illness. Or they can be situational depression, weekend alcoholism, being told off by a friend, or failing at something that is really important to you. Bricks usually make significant bank withdrawals from things you have or want.
Unfortunately few of us respond very well to getting hit in the back of the head with a brick. We seem to want to dodge them, put on a steel helmet or throw them back. Accordingly, there is something bigger waiting for us.
Brick Walls
After considerable practice you learn to tune out all whispers and dodge the bricks so well that it takes something bigger to get your attention. This is a big brick wall that you can't go through, around or over, no matter how clever you are or how hard you work to defeat it.
The maddening thing about these brick walls is that they only get bigger, stronger and more insurmountable the more effort you put into dealing with them. The situation becomes so frustrating, you are eventually forced to listen. What you hear is what you may be doing wrong to get where we need to be, so we can make some changes and finally get somewhere in using your special talent to accomplish your private mission.
Brick walls can be chronic back pain, prolonged unemployment, an unexpected divorce after three decades of a decent marriage, a missed promotion you worked hard all your career to achieve, a disastrous business failure, the loss of a child or some other seemingly unfair event you don't deserve. The purpose of this powerful event is to let you know who is really in charge so that you can be reminded to pay more attention to the messages of the bricks zooming by, which failed to remind you to listen to the helpful whispers.
Earthquakes
When you learn to deny, avoid or do sneaky end runs around the brick wall to get to where you want to be, it takes something even bigger to get your attention. These are the earthquakes that show up in the form of cancer, accidental death of a loved one, HIV, bankruptcy, devastating natural disasters and a variety of other powerful events that can re-arrange your landscape forever and even wipe away everything you have. This is a harsh way of getting someone's attention, but sometimes it is the only way.
You can react to an earthquake by either being a hero, victim or villain. If you wisely choose the hero path, you learn the most important thing in life, start enjoying everything and get rewarded with incomparable happiness, success and contentment. If you choose either of the other two paths, you have more to learn the hard way and life becomes a major struggle.
You can often misperceive the purpose of an earthquake in your life. You may assume it is a punishment for being "bad" or doing "wrong" and react adversely by building a brick wall to top all brick walls. These brick walls are all the complex social problems we don't know what to do about like homelessness, atheism, severe mental illness, criminal behavior, hopelessness and helplessness, all the addictions, fanatical religious terrorism and suicide.
Earthquakes are really the highest forms of tough love. Their purpose is to let us know in no uncertain terms that we are lost in our journey, that we need to ask for directions, and that we should start listening to the bricks so we can eventually tune into the whispers.
There are lots of scrapes, bruises and broken body parts along this bumpy, winding journey on which we are all going. But anyone who has been through the whole continuum of God's voices knows it is for our own good and always results in getting us to a better place. As Oprah says, get to where you are supposed to be going faster and easier by listening to the whispers first.
Here are ten thoughts definitely worth thinking.
Life Is Driven More By Thoughts Than Physical Realities.
Your attitudes, beliefs, expectations, understanding and judgments help determine much of what happens to you. For instance, if you have a positive attitude, believe you can do something and expect to be successful, you will work harder to do the things that will help bring about success. On the other hand, if you have a pessimistic attitude, doubt your ability and expect failure, you will sabotage yourself by not trying very hard to do any of the things that might lead to success. Even if you are "realistic" and expect mixed results that is what you will get.
What You Think You Know May Not Necessarily Be So.
Your head is full of much incorrect and incomplete information. This is due to many unverified assumptions, faulty beliefs, wrong judgments, unfair expectations, oversimplified thinking and the tendency to exclude anything that doesn't fit neatly with what you already "know." You only begin to make progress when you realize how little you know. Then you can re-learn what you already know and haven't used, learn what others know and you don't, and dare to learn what nobody knows.
Likability Is A Simple Key To Success.
Plain and simple likability is a small door that opens larger ones. Likability is a matter of appearing so average that you actually stand out. Being likable is just doing ordinary things like showing interest in others, listening to them, helping them get what they want and sharing your suspicions and secrets, all with genuine warmth, concern and a smile. Likability builds trust and trust is the foundation of personal relationships. Good relationships are essential to success and happiness.
Wherever You Are It Is For A Positive Purpose.
It is difficult to see a positive purpose in life's tragedies and the other harsh things that happen, which you don't feel you deserve. But these "earthquakes" must be interpreted correctly for you to get an important message about where you are going and how to get there. Such earthquakes happen to let you know you are lost and need to ask for directions. When you interpret such events as "punishment" you get more lost.
There Is No Clear Beginning Or Ending.
The mind likes simple explanations to complex events. This includes the deceptive practice of seeing simple linear cause and effect relationships. In reality many more inter-relationships are going on below the surface that are inseparable. One example is the relationship between our thoughts and feelings. Another is our interaction with others. Yet another is the illusion of time. Everything you have done or thought in the past, effects what you expect of the future and both effect what you are doing in the present. The best solution to this dilemma is to be fully present in the now moment.
You Can't Make Another Person Happy, Only Unhappy.
You can waste a considerable amount of time and effort trying to please other people, which only results in frustration and failure. Only when you begin to please yourself by doing the right things that are enjoyable for their own sake, will you begin to demonstrate the happiness and contentment others can learn from. It takes awhile to see the futility of trying to change others. The only way to do that is to focus on your own likability and your approach to other people.
You Can Only Change What You Understand.
You have two basic functions in everything you do: (1) to adapt or fit in, and (2) to change what you are trying to fit into for the better. You become more successful when you blend in with what you are trying to change and get to know the details of how it works. The tendency is to prefer the second part of this equation to the first. This error in sequencing leads to incorrect information and lack of understanding. Fitting in first leads to discovering what actually needs changing and the best ways to bring about these right changes.
Where You Are Looking From Is More Important Than What You See.
What you see depends upon what you are looking at and that in turns depends upon where you are doing the looking. The object is to get the best and biggest view. You can do that by looking for viewpoints that open up to bigger ones. You know you are on the right track when you start noticing that what you see behind you differs from what you see ahead. You are making significant progress when you start reconciling those differences.
Some Things Aren't The Way They Appear
Sometimes up is really down and yes is no. People act on distorted perceptions as if they were as factual as gravity, failure is really an opportunity to start over again with better information, questions are more important than answers and change can bring about security and stability. Most important, we often embrace priority reversals without questioning them and end up as a dog getting wagged by its tail. Oddly, the discomfort from these illusions is what actually helps improve our visual acuity so we can see more clearly what is and what isn't. You always have to fail before you succeed so you can learn to stop doing the things that keep you from being successful
Communication Is Worse Than You Can Imagine.
We all have our own private interpretations of what our ears hear other peoples' mouths say that their minds meant. To this confusion add the endless variety connotations that follow words from one person to the next without any consistency. And on top of that add the misunderstanding that we can interpret non-verbal communication verbally, which we can't possibly do. The result is a tower of babble. The safest assumption you can make is that you are probably not communicating as well as you think. Choose your words wisely, think before you talk and clarify likely misunderstanding.
Practice thinking these ten thoughts and delete much useless mental clutter that will make room for the important things.
Super Secret: Reversible RealitiesThere is a small peephole to infinite creativity. It is so obvious that you can easily miss it. This is the profound realization that things are not always as they appear. The result is that all you think you know may not necessarily be so.
Sometimes up is down and sometimes when you are too sure of something, you are more likely to be wrong. What you see really depends more on what you are looking at and from where you are doing the looking. Of course, you can't see this without changing viewpoints and by the time you do that you may have forgotten what you were trying to see. This can be confusing but it doesn't have to be.
Eastern philosophy has always told us of the importance of balance. The reason balance is so important is that this is the only viewpoint from which you can see the two reversible realities of life. This is a super secret that has widespread implications, especially when it comes to applying creativity to achieve success and satisfaction.
As children we start out with the magnificent gift of reversibility thinking and consequently, we don't miss half the picture. We see what is before and behind us, above and below us, inside and outside us, all at the same time. As children we live in the now moment which is a combination of the past, present and future all rolled into one. Needless to say children don't have a time management problem.
As we grow older our brains divide everything into this or that and one half eventually takes over the whole screen, so to speak. We are left with 180-degree 2-D vision until we are able to find our way back to the middle of things. This is the only location where we can begin to look left-right, up-down and inside-outside once again. Eventually we have to undo what we do.
Reversible realities make up a secret worth looking for. Here are some practical applications of this super secret.
Problems & Solutions
The solution to a perplexing problem is often found by examining and understanding the problem itself. Some problems are just symptoms of more core problems, some problems need to be broken down into smaller, more manageable parts, and some problems aren't meant to be solved.
Divergent problems such as freedom vs. equality, justice vs. mercy, rights vs. privacy, and long-term vs. short-term interests do not have final solutions. With these types of problems all we can do is restore balance when the pendulum swings too far in one direction or the other. The only tentative answer in these situations is striving for a dynamic balance.
Large social problems such as criminal behavior, homelessness and drug abuse can only be solved by tackling the individual conditions and individuals that are involved, one at a time. The medical insurance problems of our country are just a symptom of each individual's unwillingness to assume ultimate responsibility for themselves as opposed to be taken care of and wanting to blame someone else when something goes wrong.
Questions & Answers
It is the questions that we begin to ask and not the answers we find, which really open the doors to progress. The quality of answers you find are only limited by the quality of questions you dare to ask. When you start asking questions about questions you will find more answers that you could ever use.
You can start by asking yourself three important questions. These are: Who are you? Where are you going? How are you going to get there? We can ask each other these questions, share our answers and get further than ever expected. Another good idea is to question assumptions, which are answers to questions that haven't been properly asked.
Success & Failure
The key to success is in understanding your failures. Failure is actually a great opportunity to start over again armed with insider information. Unfortunately we are often brainwashed into believing failure is fatal and it becomes such an unpleasant experience that we are motivated to avoid it altogether. We run away from it when we should be running towards it. You always have to get to know something that you are trying to avoid, before you can.
As we are running from the threat of failure, the viewpoint at our backs has all the important lessons and clues as to how to succeed. Hence the origin of the phrase "hindsight." All we have to do is stop, turn around and look. Listening helps too. Everyone has a valuable lesson to share.
Chaos & Order
You can't find simple, valuable principles and truths until you wade through all the chaos and complexity to get to the other side. In the process you have to become uncomfortable enough with confusion in order to be motivated to see the few important things you need to see to get where you are going.
At some point you have to admit how much you don't know and start asking the right questions to get the information you need in the way of directions and traveling methods to get on the best road. This is so you can begin to know when you are creating more unnecessary chaos so you can stop doing that and start restoring the best order
Behavior & Attitudes
There are always two ways to get where you are going quicker and easier. One is to run faster (behavior) and the other is to shorten the distance to where you are running (attitude). The interplay between these two things is amazing.
Sometimes you can get the best results by flip flopping the normal sequence of these things, while other times you can make the best progress by doing both things simultaneously. Often you can change your entire circumstances with a mere change in attitude. When you do both at the same time the finish line comes to you. Either way, you are actually getting more by doing less.
Thoughts & Feelings
Your thoughts and feelings are so tangled up that you don't know which causes which. When you slow down you find out it doesn't really matter. If you don't like the way you feel, you identify the particular thought that is contributing most to that uncomfortable feeling, so that you can choose another attitude or behavior to get you where you want to be.
If you don't like what you are thinking you do something to feel differently because you can't think the feeling away. The more you try, the worse it gets. That's called a vicious circle and it will hold you hostage for as long as you let it. If whatever you try doesn't work you ask a different question or turn around and get to know what you are trying to avoid.
The choices are always endless. All you have to do is something and even if you don't do anything, your thoughts and feelings will change. The only thing you have to do is make sure one doesn't rule too much over the other, unless it has a good reason to.
Where You Are & Where You Want To Be
There always seems to be a gap between where you are and where you want to be. The more you explore where you are, the closer these two places become. It is a fact that you don't get what you want until you learn to want what you have. What you have always hides important clues to help you get what you want.
The more you try to understand this bigger gap, the closer you get to where you want to be. This is because you are closing all the littler gaps that make up this bigger one.
Wants & Needs
During the chaos-creating, gap-spreading part of your life you are obsessed with chasing after all the material things your mind thinks you want. These are all the things that you think will give you happiness, success and contentment. However, the more you chase, the more empty-handed you are. The more empty-handed you are the more frustrated you become until you finally have an ah-ha moment. This is when you become inclined to turn around and look in the opposite direction. Then you start migrating back toward the middle of things.
The closer you get to the middle, the more you start getting glimpses of the important simplicity just on the other side of complexity. These clues are what convince you to finally give up your mind's wants and give into your soul's needs. The more you nurture your simple needs of loving, understanding, finding purpose, being compassionate, exploring creativity and finding wisdom, the more you begin to get your earlier wants satisfied.
By now you have gotten through the maze and landed in a position of balance and harmony. From here you can see in all directions and reconcile the illusion of opposing realities. What you have is a whole 360-degree, 4-D field of view. You have found the super secret of reversible realities, which will unleash your creativity and help you solve life's most important paradox. This is how to have your cheese and eat it too. Isn't that what everyone wants?
Throughout the history of personality theory and the attempt to explain why people behave the way they do, one consistent theme seems to keep re-emerging. This is the categorization of personalities into four core groups with primary differences in roles, motives, characteristics, viewpoints, skills and weaknesses that drive behavior. All these roles have both positive and negative aspects and people can be either introverted or extroverted and psychologically healthy or unhealthy in playing a particular role.A few names for these groups include Hippocrates' bodily temperaments, Jungian types, Marston's leadership styles Keirsey's temperaments, Smalley and Trent's animals and Hartman's colors. Taken all together, these various theories offer a good composite understanding of human behavior that allows for both constancy and the freedom for change. I have taken the liberty to combine all this information under animal types because they are easiest to visualize.
The four different animals in the human universe are Lions, Beavers, Golden Retrievers and Otters. Each animal type is described below to help you discover who you are. Obviously many people see themselves as mixed species, but the fact is that you are generally more one way than the others and this is the natural role/personality you were born into.
The process of both personal and organizational development starts with acknowledging the unique importance and value of all these four basic roles. Individual personal development begins with learning your chosen role and then becoming an expert at it so that you can use those skills smartly in learning how to understand and work better with the other roles. The self-actualized person becomes a master of all four roles, able to use each to get further along the path of success, happiness and contentment. But everything starts with mastering the role you were born into.
Lion
The main role of the lion is one of leadership to find the right path and direct others along that path. The primary goal of a Lion is to sort through all the chaos and restore order. The Lion's main faculty is thinking and the predominant personality traits of the Lion are stamina and dominance. The Lion's main gift to others is vision and main demon is being a villain. Primary motives of the Lion are power, perfection and productivity. The Lion's style is assertive, controlling, thorough, confident, determined, competitive and responsible.
Important needs of the Lion are to be respected, to be right and to look good intellectually. The Lion's skills include being logical, organized, proactive, strong, goal-oriented and self-disciplined and having vision of the future. The main way the Lion learns is by searching for governing principles and translating those abstract ideas into concrete actions maps.
Possible weaknesses in the Lion include the tendency to be impatient, demanding, selfish, argumentative, insensitive, dogmatic, critical and obsessive. The biggest faults Lions need to avoid are not being too certain about being right and not making abstract ideas practical and concrete enough for others to understand. The turning point in a Lion's growth is in discovering the importance of likability.
Beaver
The main roles of the Beaver are to find ways to get things done efficiently and to help others get what they want. A primary goal of Beavers is translating practical ideas into routine action. The Beaver's main faculty is perception and the predominant personality traits of the Beaver are sociability and compliance. The gift the Beaver has to give others is altruism and the demon to avoid is being a victim. Primary motives of the Beaver are intimacy, popularity and security.
The Beaver's style is nurturing, compassionate, industrious, dedicated, loyal, well mannered and sincere. Important needs of the Beaver are to be understood, to be appreciated and to be good morally. The Beaver's skills are helping others, knowing how to get things done, and being quality-oriented, orderly, analytical, dedicated and dependable. The main ways Beavers learn are following instructions from others, watching demonstrations and practicing.
Possible weaknesses of Beavers include the tendency toward having unrealistic expectations and being judgmental, inflexible, overly perfectionistic, moody, unreceptive to change, suspicious and self-critical. The main faults Beavers need to avoid not being open to other better ways of doing things and not missing the forest from the trees. The turning point in a Beaver's growth is the shift in focus from caring for others to self-care.
Golden Retriever
The main roles for the Golden Retriever are to guard valuable principles and traditions and to guide others along the wisest path to get where they are going. The primary goal of a Golden Retriever is to keep others from going astray. The gift the Golden Retriever has to give other is wisdom and the demon to avoid is being an indifferent bystander. The Golden Retriever's main faculty is judging and the predominant personality trait of the Golden Retriever is steadiness. Primary motives of the Golden Retriever are peace, independence and clarity.
The Golden Retriever's style is tolerant, even-tempered, diplomatic, simple, agreeable and pleasant. Important needs of the Golden Retriever are independence, to be accepted and to feel good inside. The Golden Retriever's skills include being a good listener, inventive, grounded, caring, affirming, adaptable, traditional, patient and considerate. Golden Retrievers learn best by understanding through internal reflection and applying important insights as to how life works.
Possible weaknesses of the Golden Retriever are the tendency to be timid, uninvolved, overly conservative, indirect, indifferent and indecisive. The biggest faults for Golden Retrievers to avoid are not seeing all the implications about the important insights they experience and not approaching conflicts with courage and openness. The turning point in a Golden Retriever's growth is getting the courage to confront conflicts assertively.
Otter
The main role of the Otter is to entertain others. Otters' main goal is to spread around enjoyment of the simple pleasures of life. The Otter's main faculty is feeling and the predominant personality trait of the Otter is influence. The gift the Otter has to give others is enthusiasm and the demon to avoid is playing mixed roles. Primary motives of the Otter are fun, freedom and adventure.
The Otter's style is sociable, playful, spontaneous, trusting, forgiving, open to new experience, lively and hopeful. Important needs of the Otter are attention, to be liked and to look good socially. The Otter's skills are being persuasive, motivating, fun-loving, outgoing, optimistic, and creative. Otters usually learn best by seeing, "feeling" and trial and error. Otters also follow their strong intuitions.
Possible weaknesses of Otters include the tendency to be unfocused, hurried, impulsive, naïve, too permissive, too talkative, disorganized, lacking in follow-through and undisciplined. The biggest faults of otters are not taking their time doing something right the first time around and not being as clever as they need to be to have the most impact on others. Otters also have trouble being alone and controlling their energy flow. The turning point in an Otter's growth is the realization some things are serious.
Here are the four roles people play summarized in the following table.
TABLE 1.0: FOUR ROLES PEOPLE PLAY.
FACTOR
LION
BEAVERGOLDEN RETRIEVER
OTTERMission Leading Helping Guiding Entertaining Main
FacultyThinking Feeling Judging Perceiving World Viewpoint Life is a problem to be solved Life is what you make it Life is evolving, but some things are permanent Life is a game (or a play) Principle Goal Sort through chaos, restore order Translate practical ideas into routine action Spread harmony, keep others from going astray Spread enjoyment of simple pleasures Gift Vision Altruism Wisdom Enthusiasm Demon Being a villain Being a victim Being a bystander Playing multiple roles Primary Motives
Power, perfection, productivity Intimacy, popularity, security Peace, independence, clarity Fun, freedom, adventure Typical
StyleAssertive, controlling, confident, determined, competitive, responsible, independent, pragmatic Nurturing, compassionate, dedicated, loyal, well-mannered, sincere, emotional, thoughtful, intimate Tolerant, even-tempered, diplomatic, agreeable, simplistic, pleasant, accepting, satisfied Sociable, playful, spontaneous, trusting, forgiving, lively, hopeful, carefree, optimistic, happy, fun-loving
Skills Logical, organized, proactive, goal-oriented, stamina, self-disciplined Quality-oriented, orderly, analytical, industrious, dependable Good listener, inventive, grounded, adaptable, patient, considerate Motivating, persuasive, creative, sociable, charismatic, positive Learning Method Discovering governing principles Instructions, demonstrations, practice Applying insights and principles, reflection Seeing and feeling, trial and error Needs To be respected, to be right, to look good intellectually To be understood, to be appreciated, to be good morally To be independent, to be accepted, to feel good inside To be noticed, to be liked, to look good socially Weaknesses Tendency to be impatient, arrogant, selfish, demanding, intimidating, argumentative, insensitive, dogmatic and critical of others Tendency to be unrealistic, judgmental, inflexible, moody, unreceptive to change, jealous, suspicious, unforgiving and self-critical Tendency to be timid, uninvolved, overly conservative, indirect, indifferent and indecisive, silently stubborn, self-depreciating
Tendency to be unfocused, hurried, impulsive, naïve, too permissive, disorganized, too talkative, undisciplined, inconsistent Faults Being too certain, not being sensitive to other people Rejecting beneficial change, not seeing the forest from the trees Hesitancy to take risks, avoidance of conflict Self-centeredness, having to redo something to get it right Growth Turning Point Developing likability Taking care of self Facing conflict Getting serious Problems and conflicts between people can occur four different ways: (1) people not knowing their natural personality/role or rejecting it and confusing themselves and others in the process (2) people seeing their roles as better and more important than the other roles and not improving weaknesses by learning from others (3) people misperceiving each other's roles, and (3) people reacting to each other from the negative side of their roles.
You can usually learn the most from the people who are different than you. Unfortunately you often resist this opportunity and miss out on 75% of the possible learning from the other three roles.
Here are some interesting learning scenarios.
The impulsive, disorganized and unfocused Otter can learn the value of better self-control, organization and focus from the Lion. The selfish, demanding, impatient Lion can learn the value of altruism from the Beaver, patience from the Golden Retriever and forgiveness from the Otter.
The indecisive Golden Retriever can learn determination from the Lion and overcome being too timid and conservative by watching the sociable, creative Otter. The moody and suspicious Beaver can learn from an even-tempered Golden Retriever and a trusting Otter.
Beavers can help Lions to soften their communication, inspire Golden Retrievers, and encourage Otters to complete things. Golden Retrievers can calm Lions, teach relaxed attitudes to Beavers and play with Otters. Lions can appreciate Beavers, provide vision for Golden Retrievers and give freedom to Otters. Otters can teach Lions charisma, make Beavers laugh more, and excite Golden Retrievers. The positive exchanges are endless.
In nature all things work together harmoniously. Just look around. The wind and rain both do their things by cleaning and blowing off the leaves of a bush that is getting ready to go dormant in early winter. The mighty oak tree gets that way from a tiny acorn. The small delicate orchid requires a special environment and accepts a short existence. Worms are okay with being underground most of the time while sharks keep busy swimming even when they sleep. Human nature is where we reject our chosen roles, try to be something we are not or exclude other people's roles and end up getting out of sync with our selves and one another.
We humans are unique on this planet with our self-awareness. The purpose of this extra ability is to allow us to find out who we are and where we are going. Each of us has valuable clues to share though our unique roles and special talents. Sharing differences so that they we can compliment each other and get to a better place together is what growth is all about. That process starts with understanding our primary roles and special talents so we can see how our small piece of the puzzle fits with all the other ones to form the bigger road map.
All articles are copyrighted by William S. Cottringer, 2002.
http://webpages.charter.net/ckurtdoc/personal_development_articles.html
Published by William S. Cottringer
Last Updated: March 15, 2002
