I read a quote on my tea bag the other morning from writer, humorist, poet, Dorothy Parker. It read: “The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.”

It got me to thinking about boredom. It’s my experience that when we say we’re bored, we are really saying that we are bored with our thoughts. They are the same, stale thoughts that have been coming around for years.

The common wisdom is: Change your thoughts and change your life, but you cannot change your thoughts without getting curious about what else is available.

Curiosity is a catalyst.

I must admit that, in the past, I wasn’t as curious as I am now. Sometimes I got so caught up in a position, an ideology, or the right way of doing things, that there was no room for something new to enter. Let’s be kind and call it what it is – Being a Know-it-All.

When you know it all, there is no room for anything new. And most know-it-alls I’ve known, including me, were easily bored, and could be quite boring when they talked about the same thing.

Ms. Parker was spot on; curiosity is the saving grace to boredom.

But in order to get curious, you have to recognize that you are bored. It’s the recognition of that state of mind, while it’s happening, that will open the door to curiosity.

Noticing your boredom in midstream gets you to wonder what else is possible. It gets you curious as to what else is available.

Curiosity has a way of breaking the bonds of boredom and letting in new light that illuminates new pathways with new ideas.

If you are a dyed-in-the-wool Know-it-All, take it from one who’s been there, you’re boring the pants off people and you’re boring yourself to death.

Curiosity is the cure. It may have killed the cat, but it is the best catalyst for pulling your head out of a dark orifice.

All the best,

John

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While I was cooking dinner last night, The Grasshopper popped in and offered a tasty tidbit – “The Verge of Distinction.”

I had to chew on that for awhile.

I certainly knew what verge of extinction meant, but this turn of a phrase got me curious.

I turned to the dictionary and read many meanings for “distinction,” but this one caught my eye: “Excellence that sets someone apart from others.”

Then this question arose: “What excellence do you possess and project that sets you apart from others in a way that benefits you all?

In the past, I have referred to that excellence as “Your Gift.” We were given something that we didn’t have to work at, that comes to us easily, sets us apart from others, and this distinctive gift gives us an opportunity to use it to our and others’ advantage.

The Verge of Distinction is recognizing and using your gift.

Non recognition is what keeps people in jobs and pursuits they’re unsuited for. Reminds me of a story . . .

I took the last job I had in my broadcasting career for the wrong reason – Money.

I certainly had the credentials and the skill set for the position, but what I was denying was that this job was going to delay me from doing something I was more suited for at that stage in my life.

The good news, although it didn’t seem like it at the time, was getting fired from that job. After the scary thoughts of being without work calmed down, I realized what an opportunity this was.

It became clear to me that I was using what came easy to me, communicating, in too small of an arena and it had been benefiting but a few. Although I was handsomely compensated, in the larger scheme of things, it was a Lose-Lose proposition.

I didn’t have the guts to quit; I had to wait for reality to cut off my pay and open my eyes to a new way.

Perhaps you’re at a crossroads in life and wondering, “what’s next?” Before you take that next step, consider your gift and how best it can be applied so that more than a few will benefit. That’s the “Verge of Distinction.”

How can you distinctively use your gift? It’s something to get curious about. Here’s how: Write down this question on a note card and place it by your bedside: “How can I best use my gift?”

Ask the question of yourself each night before going off to sleep and don’t act too surprised when an answer comes to you from out of the blue. Make a habit of asking yourself this type of question before entering a quiet state of mind or before retiring for the night.

This practice will open your eyes to distinctive new ways of making your old ways extinct.

All the best,

John

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It’s my experience that most people have been exposed to “The Moment.” The Moment is a time when time stood still. There was nothing else to focus on but what was right there.

People remember The Moment and mistakenly attempt to recreate it by revisiting the place where The Moment occurred. The Moment cannot be recreated because each one is like a snowflake, never to be duplicated.

The Moment is available each moment but we fail to notice because we have The Moment cataloged as an event. An event may have happened in The Moment, but it is not The Moment.

The Moment is an ever present sacred place where life happens. We become too busy with our life’s circumstances to notice the presence of The Moment. In fact, there are many who are so far away from The Moment that they don’t know The Moment exists.

When we get caught up in our life’s situations, we become blind to The Moment. We forget that it exists, and by forgetting, we fall into the trap of attempting to capture time in a bottle.

No moment is more potent than another. They all contain the same power – the ability to live life now.

We either spend most of our life dwelling on the past, which no longer exists, or in the imagined future which won’t be any different if we don’t pay attention to The Moment we’re in now.

This moment is the only time there is. If you close your eyes to it, you close yourself off to the opportunities it presents.

When you are in the moment, you are in a powerhouse of creativity. It’s the only time where any action can take place. You can’t act in the past, which is gone, and you can’t act in the future which isn’t here yet. You can only act now. Remember: When the future does get here, it won’t be the future; it will be now.

Now is the only time there is and now is “The Moment.”

Start noticing that The Moment is always here. The more often you notice and focus on right now, the more life you will live, rather than waiting for life to happen.

Your life begins when you focus on the moment you’re in.

All the best,

John

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It’s my opinion that the word “prejudiced” is tossed around too easily, too often, and may not be an accurate reflection of the facts.

The Grasshopper opened my eyes to this distinction the other day when he asked: “Does it make you prejudiced if you’re uncomfortable?”

Perhaps a little groundwork would be helpful. We get many of our beliefs by accident, by social, cultural and parental conditioning. I call it the “Hatfield and McCoy Syndrome.” People get many of their prejudices handed to them early on without their permission.

They act out many of these a accidental beliefs for a lifetime, sometimes to their advantage and quite often to their disadvantage.

Somewhere along the way you may begin to question one of these beliefs that you find isn’t working for you. You are presented with new information that counters what you have always believed and you begin to have psychological, back and forth arguments in your head. This may lead you to form a new intellectual belief on the topic. You now stand up and speak out for this new position.

Now comes the sticky wicket.

What if you are presented with a real live example of your old belief vs. your new belief? If you describe what you now think, you may be credited, in some circles, for your enlightened view. If you make the mistake of describing how you feel, that same circle may label you prejudiced.

Let’s take one of the talk show “Hot Topics” out for a spin – Gay Marriage.

Let’s pretend you grew up in a culture where homosexual behavior was labeled deviant, unholy, ungodly and plain old sick. You may still hold to that opinion, or you may have intellectually outgrown that position and now give voice in support of their cause.

Let’s further imagine that you decide to go to a rally to support gay marriage and then find yourself terribly uncomfortable seeing some people of the same sex romantically kissing even though you believe in their right to do so.

Are you prejudiced or are you uncomfortable?

If you give voice to that discomfort, there will be many that will still label you as prejudiced. That’s evidence of most people not appreciating the “Hatfield and McCoy Syndrome.”

Your conditioning will often take longer than your intellect to kick into gear. Your comfort level with your new opinion may lag behind.

Each generation of the Hatfields and McCoys watered down their feud to the point that it no longer engendered the level of discomfort that once existed. It took time.

It may take time for your discomfort to go away; that doesn’t mean you are prejudiced and can’t express your “something new” to say.

All the best,

John

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The Grasshopper joined me for tea this morning and said, “Love comes through you, not from you.”

The meaning was immediately clear to me. Love is always available, although seemingly not always present.

When someone you love moves on or passes away, the love doesn’t go away because the source that love came from never breaks up with you or dies.

Love is still present even though the person isn’t. It’s no longer being expressed to you through them, but it’s still available in inexhaustible amounts.

Let’s move away from love for a moment and talk about money. Let’s pretend that you are in line for a big inheritance from your rich uncle. You find out at the reading of the will that he left everyone a sizable sum except you. He cited that he left your entire share to the cat hospital. You are shocked, angry and feel unloved. Now suppose that you hit the lottery that same day for even more money than your uncle was supposed to leave you.

The money came to you, but you may, after the initial euphoria, still be upset that you didn’t get it from your uncle.

We develop preferences where love has to come from and when it doesn’t come from that source, we feel unloved. Our sadness from our loss may pass with the passage of time, but the love will never pass away.

Love is always available; you just have to be open to it to allow it to come to and through you. If you have a preference where love has to come from, you may spend the rest of your life feeling unloved.

You may, as the old adage says, not be able to live on love alone, but living without it is a lonely existence.

Let me leave you with the opening lyrics from a song called, “Love is All Around.”

I feel it in my fingers
I feel it in my toes
Love is all around me
And so the feeling grows

All the best,

John

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“Follow the Leader,” like many maxims, can cut both ways. If the leader you are following is heading off a cliff, it’ll be the last old adage you’ll ever utter.

The Grasshopper offered this alternative this morning when he said, “Follow in the fruitful steps of those who came before you and you will lead by example.”

So how do you know who to follow? In all cases, you initially have no choice. We follow the shapers of our beliefs – our early care givers, and we adopt their beliefs as our own. And all of this is done without our permission. We are like little apes and we mimic what we see and hear until it becomes who we are.

That means we were exposed to all the “good” and “bad” our leaders had to offer.

There comes a point, if you’re paying attention, when you discover that many of your beliefs aren’t serving you; you are serving them. That means if you continue that belief, you will walk off the same cliffs some of your leaders did.

Suppose for example that your leaders had a “there’ll never be enough to go around” mindset, or one that communicates that people with a lot of money have character flaws. What do you think the chances of your bank account dropping into the ravine are? Pretty good would be my guess.

Choice is always an option. You can choose to play follow the wrong leader, which are your beliefs that aren’t working, OR you can begin to notice those beliefs when they rise up and interrupt them in midstream.

Here is your first clue that you are blinded to choice: When you say any form of “That’s the way I am.” Sad to admit that there’s a part of me that wants to throw that person off the cliff myself. A more accurate statement would be, “That’s the way I was conditioned.” The second statement is not as concrete as the first and allows for choice.

You can choose a response to any given stimulus instead of going with your conditioned reaction. You open the door to choice when you notice you are running conditioned behavior. Just noticing the behavior in action gets the behavior to slow down long enough for us to notice there is another path. That’s the choice point.

Fruitful footsteps are the ones you take when you recognize that the current path you’re on will soon have you “walking on air,” and not in a good sense.

Fruitful footsteps are a result of choice, not chance. Chances are you’ll become more of the leader you would like to follow when you offer yourself a choice.

All the best,

John

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Is there something that can set you off – a word, a gesture, a sound, a sight, a smell? These are referred to as stimuli or triggers because they stimulate or trigger a reaction.

We’ve all fired off our triggers at the most inappropriate times, most often without any pre-thought; they just went off.

I wish I could tell you I had a foolproof way of that never happening again. I don’t. If it’s valuable to you, I do know a way to get them to fire less, so we don’t shoot off our mouths or shoot ourselves in the foot as often.

Oftentimes, we don’t know the trigger to our behavior. We could spend a lot of time looking for it or spend lots of money with a therapist to help us find it. The problem with that approach is that some behaviors have multiple triggers, and trying to find them all would take longer than a lifetime.

The more triggers a pattern of behavior has; the less likely you are to find them all, and it’s more likely that pattern will stay in place. For example, there are thousands of triggers for eating and some appeal to each of the senses: Sight smell, hearing, taste and touch. For some, the smell of bread baking can trigger the desire to eat a whole loaf. They weren’t born with that trigger, it was conditioned.

So if we can’t consciously find all the triggers, how do we get a trigger guard on them all?

Here is a technique that I use when I conduct a Smoking Cessation or Weight Loss seminar: I guide people into a more relaxed frame of mind and offer them a “one-size-fits-all” suggestion. The suggestion is this: “Whatever those things are that triggered you to (fill in the behavior) in the past, those very same things begin now to trigger feelings of being calm and collected. And when you’re calm and collected, you make much better choices.”

Your subconscious knows all the triggers because the subconscious is where all the reactions to them are stored. When you non-specifically address them all (“whatever those things are”), your subconscious knows exactly what you are referring to. The next suggestion, “those very same things begin now to trigger feelings of being calm and collected,” throws a switch in your mind to have a different reaction to those triggers – to be calm and collected. The final suggestion, “and when you are calm and collected, you make much better choices,” alerts your mind not only to all the better choices, but to the fact that you have a choice.

I am forever grateful to Dr. Dave Dobson for teaching me this technique which he called a “Subjective Reversal.” The subject (or trigger) reversed the automatic response and opened us up to choice.

It’s a powerful exercise, but it’s only powerful if you use it.

Think of the behavior you would like to change; just don’t burden yourself with trying to find out why it happens. Then offer yourself the suggestion “That whatever those things are that triggered this behavior in the past, those very same things begin now to trigger feelings of being calm and collected.” Then use any mind quieting method you know to enter the “Cauldron of Change” known as a quiet mind.

Like all developed skills it takes a bit of practice. Each time you do it, you apply mental calamine lotion to an itchy trigger finger.

All the best,

John

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Best as I can tell, anger is an emotion and angry is a mindset.

Anger has a short shelf life and angry can last a lifetime. Our challenge is to prevent one from turning into the other, or if that’s already happened, how to outgrow being angry.

If you haven’t experience anger, you haven’t lived. Anger invades your whole body and plays havoc with all your body’s functioning – heart rate, blood pressure, fight or flight response, etc. Anger is an unmistakable feeling that will let you know you’re alive, but if it hangs around too long, it’ll kill you.

This is a totally unscientific observation but it’s my experience that angry people have a more pain filled life and die younger. I don’t see a lot of old, angry people. I’m sure they exist but they are too small a sector to qualify as a minority group.

You may ask the question: Does being angry cause their demise or are they angry because they are in pain? Both.

My experience is they were angry long before the pain took over, and the pain acts as a catalyst to keep being angry alive.

Anger takes you over, but you have to work at staying angry. Staying angry involves entertaining the same thoughts day after day about incidents that caused you anger. Your body had sense enough to let the anger go, but your mind wants to hold onto being angry.

You may have never looked at it this way before, but you being angry is a self perpetuating event. You cause your own pain and demise by allowing this mindset to go unchecked. In fact, you feed it more fuel when you fire yourself up with justifications for being angry.

Every story you tell justifying you being angry, keeps that mindset in place and insidiously gnaws at your body causing it to wear down more quickly.

So what’s the remedy? It’s the same remedy for every pattern of behavior. Notice that you have it and interrupt it while it’s happening. It’s the continual noticing and interrupting that will allow you to grow into a new, supportive mindset.

Being angry is not going away on its own. It needs an assist from you; otherwise you’ll stay in your own stew.

Being angry is suicide on the installment plan. If you are sufficiently angry, I wonder how soon you’ll come up with another plan – one that allows for anger but won’t let you stay angry about it.

All the best,

John

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I had a visit from The Grasshopper yesterday during my daily, morning dog walk, or as we like to call it, “The Puppy Prance.”

He said, “Rely less on faith when facts are available.”

I had to let it sit for a day before I could offer any interpretation.

I believe we have to take many things on faith. For instance, we take it on faith that our car will start up when we turn the key. If we don’t have faith that will happen, we will deal with doubt more often than is necessary. So faith plays a valuable role in our life. It saves us from changing our name to “Thomas I. Doubt.”

We often rely too much on faith when facts are available, and it can be the cause of lots of avoidable angst.

There is a reason that one of my favorite quotes is “The reason life doesn’t work is because people don’t keep their agreements.” It comes from the founder of EST, Werner Erhard. My experience is that a huge majority of people who agree to do something, don’t follow through. If I take them at their word, I’m going to be disappointed more often than not. This causes me to sidestep my faith and call on the facts, especially early on in any sort of relationship.

Reminds me of a conversation I had with my teenage grandson . . . “Poppy, why do you ask for things more than once? I hear you on the phone asking the same question lots of different times during your calls.” My response to him was, “When I die and you are at my funeral and people ask, ‘What was your Poppy good at?’, your answer should be, ‘He checked on shit.'”

It is at the beginning of any agreement where facts best take the lead. After the facts are established and there is a track record of them being adhered to, then let faith back in the door.

We humans are flawed and, more often than not, we don’t keep our agreements. Don’t take that on faith; check your life experience and you can verify it as fact.

Having this knowledge will have you play the odds more often, and will result in you getting played less.

Bottom line: When you check on the facts, you can have more faith.

All the best,

John

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The Grasshopper went “Annie” on me this morning when he said, “Sun in the morning, angels warning.”

It took me a few moments to process his offering and “Illumination” was the overarching message.

Whether the sun is visible or not, it’s always present. It may be obscured by a cloud, or shining on another part of our world, but it’s there.

The angel’s warning is not to fall into the trap that when illumination is not shining on you that it’s not available. It is.

Sometimes it gets clouded over by too much thinking, or gets crowded out by envy of others who we perceive live in a sunnier environment. You have as much access to illumination as anyone currently on earth, or who has ever lived.

Once you know it’s available, it’s just a matter of finding ways to sun yourself.

A quiet mind is the quickest portal I know to endless sunshine. When your mind gets quiet, you bask in the golden rays of illumination. As the Grasshopper reminded us in the past, “Serenity is the birthplace of creativity.”

There are many routes to a quiet mind and if you haven’t pursued one yet, I’m betting your disposition is less than sunny. Allow me to amend the words of one of the most famous sunshine sayings, “A day without orange juice is like a day without sunshine.” If you substitute the word “quiet” for the words “orange juice,” you have a proper warning.

If you are living under a dark cloud, I heartily recommend finding a way to a quiet mind. There are countless ways to get quiet; you just have to step off in the direction of your choice.

One of the easiest ways to begin is to take a few moments to notice what’s going on in your body. The more you focus on the sensations in your body, the less focus you have for the thoughts in your mind. Do my Relax in 2 Minutes routine which requires doing an inventory of your body parts and noticing the sensations going on in each of them. It’s just one of the ways to spread your blanket out on the beach and catch some rays.

Let any glimpse of sunshine act as a reminder that illumination is one less thought away.

All the best,

John

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