Have you ever been the victim of a personal, verbal attack? Silly question, eh?

Even the most sainted among us has been on the receiving end of this lashing of tongue.

For whatever the reason, it can come at the most inappropriate of times, like say the holidays.

As the old axiom goes, “forewarned is forearmed.”

The best defense of such an attack is biting your tongue. It’s less harmful to you than a retaliation of biting remarks, and it gives you the opportunity to bring what’s needed to the interaction – Charity.

It’s my personal experience that personal attacks come from wounded people. They are genuinely hurting.

You may or may not be the source of their hurt, but that will not be obvious to them; you are their target. It must be obvious to you that only a hurting person attacks. This advance knowledge will help to avoid the downward spiral that most personal attacks lead to.

This is not a recommendation to avoid standing up for yourself; it’s more of a suggestion to save it for another day.

One of my favorite quotes from Dr. Robert Anthony rings out like a caroler’s bell when I experience such an onslaught: “You’re never upset for the reason you think.” That may or may not always be true, but it’s a good starting point.

If you can view your attacker as being wounded, you are less likely to take them on if you recognize they are temporarily blinded and crippled with emotion. Remember: Even the tamest dog can bite. This decision not to engage is the biggest, charitable contribution you can make this holiday season or any season.

“Let there be peace on earth and let it begin with me” is more than a song we hear around the holidays; it’s a prescription for dealing with a wounded attacker.

They were upset before you even showed up. You just conveniently happened to be the last straw on the camel’s heiny.

It’s difficult not to take a personal attack personally. It takes courage to be the adult in the room when this happens and I’m not telling you it’s easy, only necessary if you want any chance at future peace.

The attack they are launching at you is a pin prick compared to the gash they are feeling in their heart. See if you can find it in your heart to turn the other cheek.

All the best,

John

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Here is a definition from The Grasshopper Daffy Book of Definitions:

UPHILL SLEDDING – Attempting to enjoy that which you don’t have.

Wailing for what we don’t have leads to more of the same – don’t have. It’s a matter of focus.

If your laser vision is on lack, you won’t lack for things to lament.

If you focus on what you do have, it has a multiplying effect.

Here are just a few Holiday “Do’s and Don’t’s” for downhill sledding:

Do take the time to list your blessings and check it twice.

Don’t put envy on your Christmas list. It turns into coal.

Do take time to appreciate what you have.

Don’t miss an opportunity to be kind. It’s the gift that gives back.

Remember this axiom: Focusing on lack will always take you back; noticing what you have will give you the priceless gift of the present.

Who else wants a downhill sled for Christmas?

All the best,

John

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The famed Irish Poet, Brendan Behan reportedly said to a nun tending him on his deathbed, “Ah, bless you, Sister, may all your sons be bishops.”

If you engage your imagination, you can craft some famous last words for some famous people living or dead. For example:

Jackie Gleason – “And away we go.”

Julian Assange – “I’m leaking.”

Calvin Klein – “I’m going out of style.”

Your last words, no matter how poignant or memorable, will pale in comparison to your deeds.

What will you be remembered for? If it’s only for a handful of sayings, they only scratch the surface of who you really are.

My sense is you’d rather be remembered for what you did, not what you didn’t do or say.

We all make mistakes in life, many about which we hold regret. The one thing we don’t do becomes our undoing for however many days we have left.

This one thing is something I wrote about a number of years ago. It’s truly what you’ll be remembered for if you muster the courage to do it. Not only that, it will free you from the burden of carrying a heavy weight until you breathe your last words. It’s called:

“The Opportunity”

Almost everyone longs for The Opportunity but this chance doesn’t present itself to most.

The Opportunity is presented to only a few and most of them do not act on it.

The small percentages of people who do act on The Opportunity have peace and contentment for the balance of their days.

The unsettling news is that the people who never had The Opportunity presented to them, and the ones who did and passed it up, share something in common.

They either regret for the rest of their life that they never got The Opportunity, or they forever rue not acting on it.

Maybe you’re one of the fortunate ones who have The Opportunity right now.

What are you going to do with The Opportunity if you’re lucky enough to be one of the chosen?

It takes courage to act on The Opportunity.

Will it be peace and contentment or lifelong angst? It’s your decision.

What could The Opportunity be that eludes most, is presented to few, and is acted on by fewer?

The Opportunity to make it right.

All the best,

John

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It occurs to me, based on my vast experience with Santa Claus, that there is no sackcloth in Santa’s Sack.

It’s not a present he delivers even to naughty little girls and boys.

Sackcloth is sooo Christmas Past.

“Who’s still wearing sackcloth,” you ask? – Those who haven’t found out how to get to Christmas Present.

Guilt is a feeling about something that’s past that you have no control over now because it’s over. The event is not happening now but you keep reminding yourself of it and reliving it every time you feel the roughness of the sackcloth against your skin.

It’s time to update your wardrobe.

Reminds me of a saying I heard along the way, “You always do the best you can do in accordance with your present level of awareness.”

Picture this scenario: You come home from work and you’ve had an especially rough day. The kids are acting up a bit and you lose it and scream and yell at them. 15 minutes later you get the gift of awareness that they were only being kids and didn’t really need to be treated to your outdoor voice. You begin to feel guilty and out comes the sackcloth. “I’m such a bad parent, blah, blah, blah . . .”

You did the best you could with the awareness that you had at the time. Guilt enters the picture when you judge a past action by a current level of awareness. Wearing sackcloth will do nothing to change a past behavior; it will only keep you scratching at it.

This is not absolution for the consequences of your behavior. That’s a debt that always has to be paid. Recognizing that you are judging a past action by a present level of awareness will get guilt out of the way of making amends.

Guilt delays right action. The time you spend preoccupied with the faux pas of fashion (sackcloth), is time and energy wasted in not finding a remedy.

The remedy is getting the focus off of you and on to a solution. That’s hard to do when you are being pricked by the skin of dead porcupine.

Guilt is a signal to do something about your actions; not a license to perpetually dress poorly.

If you really want a great surprise from Santa this year, burn your sackcloth, make amends, and you’ll receive the gift of recognition – which is the gift of Christmas Present.

All the best,

John

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I was sharing Christmas memories with a friend the other day. It’s amazing what sticks with you most about past Christmases.

It must have been all that talk that prompted a visit from The Grasshopper. He said, “Memories are like feathers from an empty nest.”

It seems that most of my Christmas memories were either from my childhood or from when my children were young. There were lots of traditions passed on and new ones created during those times.

All of my children have children and it’s heartwarming to recognize some of the traditions they have brought forward to their families that we created together.

There is also a bit of melancholy associated with having fewer feathers to tickle the holiday spirit.

I’m reminded of one of my Mother’s phrases: “Children are only lent to you.”

Memories are wonderful but can become like The Grinch who stole Christmas. If all your focus is on what you had, your heart warmth can quickly turn to heartburn.

Memories contain energy; they can fuel you forward or burn you up. It’s really a choice we get to make every time we find ourselves on Memory Lane.

If you choose to extract the power, rather than long for or regret the content, you can light your holidays brightly.

I love Christmas time because there is always love in the air. If you take the time, you can see, hear, feel, smell and taste it.

If Christmas past is dragging you down, take a nice deep breath, exhale slowly and choose to begin a new tradition of making new memories.

Create your own version of “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

All the best,

John

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TV’s loveable curmudgeon, Dr. Gregory House offers us the diagnosis that “Everybody Lies!”

It’s a memorable line simply because it’s true.

It’s my personal belief that the more lies we tell, the less life we live.

The prescription seems to be to find out how many lies you can live with.

This is not a dictate to stop lying; that’s impossible. It’s more about recognizing the process at work and assessing how much life it is draining from you.

Lying runs the gamut from “If you are living a lie, you are not living,” to “Lying just enough to get by.”

Neither position is morally justifiable no matter how eloquent our rhetoric. So this is not about flogging yourself for lying. It’s more about risk assessment.

The home spun remedy that your mother gave you was noble: “Tell the truth and you won’t have to keep track of your lies.” That’s another way of saying that each lie causes you to waste energy each time you prop it up. Too many lies = Too little life.

So how do you know if your lies are sucking the life force out of you? Look at the symptoms.

Are you sleeping poorly? Drowning your sorrows? Edgy all the time? Constantly defending yourself? The warning signs are endless. The telltale result is this: The more we lie, the more we die.

It’s really easy to spot someone else’s lies. That’s not as helpful as recognizing our own. Or as Jesus said it another way, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”

The journey towards truth (or more life) is a shedding process. You’ll never get rid of every flake of dandruff, but certainly enough to lighten the load on your shoulders. A few flakes = a few white lies; too many will snow you under.

How many are too many? Only you can answer that question.

If you desire to feel more alive, you have to be willing to let go of your lies. You’ll never drop all of them, just enough of them to unburden yourself from the full time job of keeping a lie alive. The truth is this practice works. The only question left is: “How much truth are we willing to tell?”

Our life depends on it.

All the best,

John

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I’ve never had a dear, close friend who couldn’t make me laugh until it hurt.

As l look back over the years and over the friends, that’s the main quality that attracted me to them in the first place.

Since I have the good fortune of working from home, I spend most of my hours with a friend who makes me laugh every day – our dog, Snuffy.

I won’t torture you with all the funny dog stories. (That would be like the stranger you meet who shows you pictures of their grandchildren.)

What I will tell you is that laughter is the main thing missing from all the depressed people I have ever met.

The natural question that came up for me was: “Did the depression cause them to stop laughing, or did the lack of laughter cause depression?”

The answer I came up with is: It doesn’t matter!

The antidote to depression is always the same – laughter.

Some people need training in laughter. They have forgotten the child like quality we all have. It just needs to be coaxed out to play.

Reminds me of a story . . .

Back in my radio days I was interviewing for a job in Wilkes-Barre, PA and the program director said he wanted a morning man who could tell funny jokes on the radio. I told him I wasn’t a joke teller, per say. He said he would provide me with some generic joke sheets and I could customize them for my show. I told 50 jokes the first day. I would love to have a recording of that program to remember how bad it really was.

The good news that came out of this daily joke hunt was that I now filtered for funny – at least funny for me. This trained me to laugh on a daily basis.

When I look back on any gloomy period in my life (and we all have them), laughter was suspended.

A number of people during the holidays find their way into a dark corner and hide themselves from laughter. The Grinch has stolen their mirth.

The story of journalist, Norman Cousins has been well documented in the book and movie, Anatomy of an Illness. Cousins nursed himself from the brink of death back to health by training himself to laugh by watching funny movies. He said, “”I made the joyous discovery that ten minutes of genuine belly laughter had an anesthetic effect and would give me at least two hours of pain-free sleep,” he reported. “When the pain-killing effect of the laughter wore off, we would switch on the motion picture projector again and not infrequently, it would lead to another pain-free interval.”

If you are experiencing the holiday blues, you are in pain. There is a reason this ancient proverb has endured: Laughter is the best medicine.

You can look for ways to justify your depression or you can take that same energy and pursue laughter.

I would certainly recommend that you seek counseling if you find yourself severely depressed. I would also note that any recovery would be ably assisted by laughter.

I’ll leave you with this holiday suggestion: Let Ho, Ho, Ho remind you to Ha, Ha, Ha.

All the best,

John

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Seems just about everyone has a favorite Christmas movie – It’s a Wonderful Life, Elf, The Polar Express, A Charlie Brown Christmas, Christmas Vacation, etc.

The one that sticks with me most is Miracle on 34^th Street (The Original). It stars a young Natalie Wood beginning to doubt the existence of Santa Claus. It’s a delightful film about believing and doubt.

Beliefs are something we all share in common. If you mentally exist, you believe.

Beliefs, by their nature, are exclusionary. The minute you commit to one, all the others on the same topic are on the outside looking in.

The stickiest of wickets is believing that your belief is right. “Right” is a word that has wronged for centuries. It’s also exclusionary. It makes anyone who believes differently from you on the other side of the fence.

The reason I like the little girl in “Miracle on 34^th Street” so much is because she has doubts about her beliefs. It’s a childlike quality we can all aspire to because, by adulthood, our beliefs are more solid than month old fruitcake – no room for doubt.

Just like we bring out the holiday decorations once a year, it would serve us well to plug in an old belief and test it once a season to see if it still lights up – meaning, “Is it useful?”

Is there a long held belief you own that’s worthy of some doubt?

Doubt is the catalyst that makes you look in more than one direction.

Is this the season to dust off your doubt and bring it out?

Who purposely decorates their tree with burned out lights? – You and me when we refuse to use doubt to help us see.

Beliefs get re-gifted from one generation to the next never being questioned for their truth. Sadly, when we get to this true believer stage, there’s little room for doubt.

If no one else gets it for you this holiday season, you can give yourself the gift of doubt. It lights up the dark corners of Christmases past to see if their gifts are bright enough to light the way to a less rigid future.

This Christmas make sure the most enlightening gift is on your wish list. It’s the “Talking Thomas” doll – You just pull a string and he says, “I doubt it!”

All the best,

John

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There really is something magical about home.

Home is more than a place to hang your hat, as the old expression goes. It’s a refuge.

It’s more than a house, an apartment, or a room. It’s a love filled womb.

Everything is taken care of when you are home.

The multi-talented, Jazz/Pop singer, Michael Bublé sings an enchanting song about this sought after, soft landing called “Home.”

Truth be told, home isn’t a place; it’s a feeling.

The feeling you get when you are home cannot be described in words. It’s the peace that passes all understanding.

If you are attempting to find home by mentally seeking it, you will always encounter noise. There are no magical thoughts that get you to the peace of home. In fact, it’s the absence of thought that ensures you find your way to that ‘homey’ feeling.

If you hear the song “(There’s No Place Like) Home For The Holidays” this holiday season, let it serve as a reminder that home lies beneath all the hustle and bustle and is always there to welcome you.

Your job is to find a way to let the noise calm down. When you take steps to calm the noise in your mind, you are at the threshold of peace, and if you take the time to look down, you’ll see a door mat that says, “Welcome Home.”

All the best,

John

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I know something about you that nobody knows.

You know it and I know it, but no one else does.

What is this personal secret that you, I and everybody else are withholding from the world?

That we have our own best interest at heart!

Some of you just bristled at this notion. That’s because you translated “your own best interest” as selfish.

It’s not; it’s survival.

Our own best interest is how we thrive and survive. Those who act on this secret thrive more than others.

Take the late Mother Teresa as an example. I’m sure most would agree with the label of “Selfless” when describing Mother Teresa. Nothing could be further from the point. She had her own best interest at heart, otherwise she could never have performed at the level she did.

Your own best interest is performing the life mission that’s so natural for you. Look at the people who are the most peaceful in their own skin and you will find folks serving their own best interest. Their work is as effortless as breathing for them.

Note: This work does not need to be grandiose or on the world stage in order for you to thrive. Your mission of having your own best interest at heart may be as simple as being the best parent you can be.

We get caught up in the conditioned idea that there must be a nobler purpose for us and we flog ourselves for not finding it.

Your purpose is hidden in plain view. It’s to have your own best interest at heart. It’s the one thing that helps you serve others better.

If you’ve ever flown on an airplane, you’ll probably be familiar with this instruction from the flight attendant before take-off: “Place the air mask over your nose and mouth first and get oxygen flowing before placing the mask on your children.”

That instruction goes against our instincts but it is the best solution, and it serves your best interest. You need to be breathing properly before you can help others.

Your interest has to be served first in order to benefit others, otherwise what you are doing will always feel like a burden.

Unburden yourself by serving your own best interest.

The prescriptive observation of “When you feel better, you do better,” underscores the importance of having your own best interest at heart.

Finding your own best interest is finding out what’s most important to you. When you make that discovery, align all your efforts in that direction and you’ll begin to breathe easy again, and so will everyone else around you.

All the best,

John

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