If you got paid for every thought, you’d be a very wealthy person.

There is no shortage of thoughts that run around in our heads, so which ones do we pay attention to that pay dividends?

If you monitor your thoughts for just a few minutes, you will make a major discovery about thoughts – they think you, you don’t think them. Thoughts have a mind of their own, but one thing they have in common is they all clamor for our attention.

Which ones deserve our attention?

The first act of separating the wheat from the chaff is to pay more attention to thoughts that are based in fact, and less attention to those dripping with opinion.

I suggest that you take just 2 minutes anytime today and observe what thoughts are occupying your mind. Observe without participating in the thoughts; just watch them parade by. What you will discover is that most of your thoughts are opinions, conjecture and a game of not connecting the dots.

Those are thoughts that are entertaining to watch but pay no dividends, kind of like watching “The Biggest Loser.”

The thoughts that pop in that are based in fact are the ones are worth paying attention to. Thoughts that are verifiable will take you to the bank; those that can’t be verified will keep you bankrupt.

How much of your thinking can you verify? It’s worth paying attention to. Just doing a simple 2 minute exercise like the one I recommended gets you in the habit of prioritizing the thought process. It makes you aware of what you are thinking.

Once you become aware of the value of your thoughts, you have the ability to interrupt the ones that rob you blind, and listen to the ones that put money in the till.

This is not financial advice. It’s an accounting system for your mind that lets you pay more attention to the thoughts that will pay off.

You’ll never know for sure whether this is a fact or an opinion unless you do the experiment.

All the best,

John

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It occurred to me that everyone is consistent even if it’s in their inconsistency.

As I have stated before, I worship at the altar of consistency but I have recently discovered that I am biased to the brand of consistency I adore.

The brand that gets me to dress up for church is the one where I can count on something or someone to produce consistent results that I like. If you are consistently producing things I don’t like, I call that inconsistent – a newly discovered shortcoming on my part.

I loved that basketball star, Michael Jordan could produce 30 plus points on a consistent basis; I didn’t like that tennis great, Jimmy Connors consistently hit his forehand into the net on long back and forth exchanges.

So my discovery is that I truly don’t like consistency; I just like my brand of it.

This led to a bigger discovery for me and perhaps you – that we really don’t like the truth, just our version of it.

I like to define truth as that which has no opposite. Genuine truth is self evident and is not debatable. The minute that you can muster an argument against your truth, it’s not the truth. It’s a conditioned opinion that you bow down to – a false god, if you will.

If you are consistently spouting the truth, you are inconsistently hitting the mark, because it’s only your brand of the truth that you speak. Your brand excludes all the other brands. The whole truth is everyone’s brand mixed together, not splotches of the mix you happen to like.

Be careful when you are speaking the truth because you’ll be consistently inconsistent. Once in a blue moon it’ll be solid truth, but most often it will be scattered, prejudiced blather.

I believe it’s in our best interest to label our truth for what it actually is – an opinion that we’ve come to like. When we label what we are offering as our opinion, we can consistently be genuine without the inconsistency of claiming to know the truth.

It’s my opinion that you will communicate more effectively with opinion than you will with the truth, and you’ll do it more consistently.

All the best,

John

It looks like the New Year has turned into an acronym for me. This is what I awoke to in my head this morning.

N – Notice   

E – Empathize

W – Wake Up

Y – Yes

E – Eschew

A – Act

R – Respond

These are the things I trust I will get better at in 2012. They aren’t resolutions per se; I look at them more as guideposts or trigger words.

NOTICE means to notice what’s going on outside my head. There’s a big world out there begging for my attention.

EMPATHIZE that my gifts are not your gifts and vice versa. I could have more of what you have by being more like you; I just have to know what it’s like to be you.

WAKE UP is a waking reminder that I walk around half asleep, and I consider myself a pretty observant person.

YES is an answer I’ll be giving more often. Yes contains possibilities that No never considers.

ESCHEW means to avoid the path of least resistance; it rarely leads anywhere special.

ACT on wonderful ideas that have been literally handed to me by a creative part of me that I’ll never fully comprehend.

RESPOND rather than react to life. I always have a choice not to react in the same way that didn’t work before.

I hope these trigger some guideposts for you as well, as we step in to a brand new year.

All the Best & Happy New Year!

John

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How much water do you drink on a daily basis? If you’re like me and most people, not that much.

I think I drink more water than the average bear but my sense is it’s not enough.

Many people increase their water intake when they go on diets and cut back when their diet is over. There is a direct correlation to the decrease of water and the increase of pound “creepage.”

Some people who go on monastic diets eat nothing but one food to get them skinny. They find some exotic grain found only in the foothills of the Andes and consume it until they succeed. You know the rest of the story. They gain the weight back because what they are doing is not long-term repeatable or feasible.

Drinking more water regularly is repeatable and pays dividends. In my opinion, it’s a habit worth developing. Reminds me of two stories . . .

Some 40 years ago I was introduced to seltzer by my stepfather. It was a staple of his upbringing and it was in the house all the time. It was an acquired taste for me. It was bland and bubbly, but it did produce belches you could take pride in. What I noticed, after it became a habit, was that I was drinking more seltzer and less sugared drinks, to the point that I rarely drink sugared drinks now. Seltzer is something that’s always in my house and everybody who lives here reaches for it naturally.

I was reading a story of former supermodel, Elle Macpherson who is the mother of two and is in magnificent shape at age 47. She eats rather well as you may imagine and she drinks lots of water. In fact, she offers this challenge to women (and I suppose to men as well): “I challenge any woman to drink 3 liters (about 100 ounces) of water everyday for a month and sleep for 7 hours a night, that she won’t lose weight, look better and feel better.”

I don’t know what the magic number is for water intake but I suspect it’s somewhere between the number we’ve always heard – eight glasses a day (64 ounces) and the amount in Macpherson’s challenge. Our challenge is to make more water intake a daily habit rather than a temporary fix. You may make more trips to the bathroom but it will give you more opportunities to look in the mirror and see how good you look.

Bottoms up!

All the Best & Happy New Year!

John

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“If I stop dancing, I’m gonna’ fall down.” That’s the unspoken, often unknown, mantra of the person trapped in their life story.

Your life story is a scenario you created and are determined to live out, even if you are not right for the role.

There is a lot of dancing necessary to keep the illusion of the life story alive. “The show must go on,” and so it does.

“My feet are killing me” is the common complaint of life’s dancer, yet they never attribute their aches to the dance.

Someone living out a life story is a perfunctory performer. At some point, others may catch on to our lack of realness and they try and explain it to us, but we dance away to perform another day.

How do you know you are trapped performing your life story? One way is to notice the number of different acts you put on for different people. Each set of people get a set performance. The more dances you do, the less life you have.

The key to getting out of a never ending life story is to end the dance. Stop performing and discover who you really are – The life beneath the life story.

Discovering the life beneath the life story begins when you notice you are reacting rather than responding to life. Reacting calls for a set dance for a certain set of circumstances – a two-step here, an electric slide there and a wide repertoire for everything in between. That’s a lot to keep track of.

Responding to life has no set dance. You still get to interact with others but you bring them a fresh you every time. Responding is based on trust. Trust that there is a deeper part of you that knows the appropriate response to any of life’s circumstances. This will keep you from mentally scrambling through your dance database to put on the perfect show.

No show is necessary with the real you.

The real you responds to others, never reacts.

Begin to notice how many different dances you do. The more you have the more reacting you do. If you’re not dancing for the pure enjoyment of dancing, you aren’t living, you’re reacting.

Responding will allow you to retire your dancing shoes and soak your feet in the calm, soothing waters of your life that lies beneath your life story.

If you are tired of dancing, start trusting that you can stop. When you do, infinite responses open up to you and you discover you only have one dance partner – Life itself.

All the best,

John

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’tis the season for upsets, or so it seems.

My guess is that our seasonal upsets are driven by the chasm between the way it is and the way it should be.

Christmas time, for many, is a “way it should be” time. We should all be loving of our fellow man, have our hearts filled with joy and see the world through the eyes of a child, like when we were little girls and boys.

That just may not be the way it is for you right now. That’s the way it is.

When Christmas Past and Christmas Present have a difference, the fireworks make it seem more like the 4^th of July.

If you can catch yourself about to erupt to the pain of “the way it isn’t,” you will preserve the Christmas Spirit for you and those you care about. If you hang onto the way it should be, you will put a pile of coal under everyone’s tree.

One of my favorite sayings is: You’re rarely upset for the reason you think. You think you’re upset because of some specific stimulus. Upon inspection, that’s rarely the case. The stimulus becomes the excuse to be upset when, in fact, it’s often what the stimulus stimulated from a time in the past that’s causing the upset. “It was better then,” may be the thought and the reality is, “it’s not that way now.” The resulting upset could cause Santa to crash his sleigh into the side of a mountain.

Your biggest ally this holiday season and throughout the year is your ability to take a breath. Notice that you are upset, take a deep breath and just sigh it out. Do it a couple of times for good measure. You will find that this interruption of your upset is enough to keep you from upsetting the sugarplum cart.

If you can notice yourself caught between the “way it is” and the “way it should be,” that’s often enough to prevent the Grinch from stealing Christmas.

Merry Christmas,

John

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I keep a pen and pad on my nightstand because The Grasshopper visits at the oddest hours. I was awakened in the middle of the night and wrote down his message: “The path to where you want to go starts on the path you are currently on.”

I believe that’s another way of saying you can only begin from where you are.

The old punch line, “You can’t get there from here” is totally inaccurate. Here is the only place you can begin.

Our sorrows begin when we want to jump to a new path without taking into account where we currently are. There is a lot of misdirection in that strategy. We hop all over the place like a toad on a hot sidewalk. That’s not a successful strategy for finding a path to a refreshing lily pad.

Think of the person (you) who may be dissatisfied with something going on in your life. Perhaps you want to escape such circumstances. If you don’t start on the path that you are on, you will have multiple, unfulfilling flights of fancy.

Weight loss will be a giant flight of fancy for millions in a little over a week. Many are even contemplating that new path now. They are envisioning what they want to look and feel like down the line, but don’t acknowledge where they are now.

Where they are now is the only place to begin. It begins with acknowledging what is here at the moment. Here at the moment is a body that is carrying X amount of pounds. We are so bound and determined to get to where we want to go that we forget to look at where we are.

This isn’t a suggestion to get into a “fat slob” assessment of yourself. That’s never worked in the past, and if it has, it was only temporary.

The new path begins by unemotionally assessing where you currently are. For example, “My body is weighing in at 200 pounds.” My face is fuller than it was a year ago, and my stomach is hanging over my belt. I am winded after walking up 7 stairs. The clothes in my closet don’t fit me.” That is where you are.

The minute pejorative expressions enter the conversation, you are no longer where you truly are. You are in a conditioned world you made up in your head that is far removed from the facts. “I’m a big, fat, ugly load” is an opinion, not a fact. Here is where the facts are.

You are unlikely to get down the path with opinions. Opinions may get you fired up with willpower, but willpower will only take you so far down the path.

It takes personal honesty to face the facts, and once faced, you truly know where you are – Here! If you want to start someplace else, you will do lots of wheel spinning. Someplace else is filled with mantras that never work and are totally devoid of facts. “I am healthy, wealthy and wise” is a noble notion but devoid of the facts that you are 50 pounds overweight, on the verge of bankruptcy, and have a documented history of making unproductive decisions.

It is wonderful to have goals but you’re unlikely to reach them if you don’t start here. Here is the land of grounded assessments. They are grounded in the facts. Once you have that level of honesty with yourself, minus the invectives, you are at a starting point that has greater odds of getting you to finish.

Make 2012 be your “Dragnet” year – “Just the facts, ma’am” and see how much further down the path you go.

All the best,

John

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Renaissance man, Gregory Bateson left us with the concept of “Paradoxical Communication.” For lack of a more detailed explanation, think of it as an instruction we’ve all received at one time or another – “Do as I say, not as I do.” That’s difficult to do, especially when you don’t know the difference.

We’re all really adept at paradoxical communication because we were taught very well by our parents and/or other early care givers. It seems we have all bought into, at some level, the fantasy that we should be judged on our words rather than our actions. That’s a paradox.

We can’t be taken seriously about our positions if we are standing in another position. If our own shoes hurt, why would we pass them on to someone we care about? It’s because we don’t recognize the level to which we are participating in paradoxical communication.

“Monkey see, monkey do” is more accurate than “Just do it,” but the latter is more ingrained than the other.

The trick to outgrowing anything is to first notice that you are doing it. I can assure you we are all paradoxically communicating; it’s just a matter of degree.

How often do your actions not match up with your words? Do a personal inventory and you’ll be amazed. It’s like a visit to the attic you haven’t looked at in years.

The sadder news is that we pass on this trait. The ones we care most about are the victims of our fantasy, just as we were the unwitting recipients of a philosophy that looked good on paper, but won’t help us pass the test.

The test in life is getting results. Results are hard to come by when we participate in paradoxical communication.

A productive step to outgrowing paradoxical communication is to immediately stop being an expert on what we talk about but don’t do. (Think Oprah on losing weight and keeping it off).

Again, it takes recognition that we are involved in a paradox. Once noticed, we have a better chance of outgrowing a philosophy that keeps us and those we pass it on to stuck.

Start small. Just notice one pearl of wisdom that’s still in the oyster that you’re claiming as your own and give it up. It will lead you off the slippery road of paradoxical communication, which is loaded with good intentions, onto a road with traction that only leads to good deeds.

All the best,

John

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How many times have you said or heard someone say, “Nobody’s perfect” or “I’m not perfect”?

I disagree. My claim is that everyone is perfect, yet no one is perfected.

I think of one of my favorite quotes from The Buddha: “Everything is as it should be.” Basically he is saying everything and everyone is perfect the way it is, because reality is perfection.

Every moment can only be the way it is – Perfect. The same is true with people. They can only be the way they are in this moment. Their behavior is perfect because it’s a reality.

We all have the same source material – the life force that animates us for a lifetime. This source material is perfect. It animates our bodies as long as they last. We have a hard time matching up to that level of perfection.

I believe it’s more accurate to say that no one is perfected. That means that no one lives up to their perfection. It doesn’t matter how smart we are or how gifted we are, we are not perfected. It’s the slice the baloney example in reverse. The saying goes, “No matter how thin you slice it, there are always two sides.” You never get down to one. On the flip side, you never get up to 10, (unless you were Bo Derek in the late 70s).

No one is perfected is a new way of looking at our potential. There is lots of room for growth; we just have to know that perfection is a possibility and that it exists. In fact, it exists in you right now.

You are already perfect. If you want to be perfected, you have to work towards it.

To get back to the perfection we are is not a matter of addition but subtraction. We spend a goodly part of our life adding things to ourselves in order to be perfect. The path to perfection is subtracting all the things we thought it took to be perfect. Subtraction is like the lunar rocket shedding stages until it reaches its core. When that happens, we are on our way.

Many of the beliefs and patterns that we have acquired stand in the way of getting back to our perfect self. It’s a matter of noticing the things that are standing in the way, and working on outgrowing their hold on our ability to return to perfection.

Noticing your patterns is the beginning of the subtraction process. Interrupting patterns, as you notice them running, puts you on a path to your perfection.

My guess is no one will get to perfection, but what if you could start shedding stages – You might not get all the way there but you may go far enough to take you over the moon.

All the best,

John

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I woke up groggy this morning and The Grasshopper gave me a groggy thought, or so I thought – “Having second thoughts about first impressions.”

It took a while to sink in but I think I now appreciate the essence of it.

Did you ever, while reading, spot a spelling mistake? The answer is “Yes”; we’ve all done it, but did you notice the process of how you knew?

You were reading along and you went past the misspelled word and a few words or a sentence later you went back and noticed the misspelling. What happened? Your eyes saw it but it didn’t immediately register with you consciously. It did register with your feeling sense. If you pay attention, you will notice an odd sensation that causes you to go back and take a second look.

You sensed it was misspelled which caused you to look again.

We may not get a second chance to make a first impression, but a first impression may benefit by a second thought.

Have you ever had the experience of immediately not liking someone? They may have not even said a word or done anything, but you flat out didn’t like them. You got a feeling sense before you got the thought of “I don’t like them.” Upon second inspection, you may notice they have the look of someone you detest which triggered your initial sensation. Your second thought was then to be more open to them.

I am a big proponent of trusting your gut, but sometimes it makes sense to take a second look at what your gut is responding to. It may be that your initial response was accurate, but it doesn’t hurt to do a quick inspection.

Traditional “second thoughts” are usually a debate inside your head. That is not what I’m referring to here. That debate could go on forever and you may never act.

What I am suggesting is that your first impression is always in your body; it’s a kinesthetic experience. The thought always comes afterward. The second thought I’m referring to is the one that gets you to double check your sensation, not debate another thought ad nauseam for supremacy.

Your first impression will always be your first impression. My question is: Does it require a second thought?

All the best,

John

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