“You don’t have to be religious to be a preacher.” So said The Grasshopper on a walk the other day.

All of us preach at one time or another, and all of us are guilty of not practicing what we sermonize. That’s just waxing philosophical while our personal shine remains dull.

When we’re not walking our talk and preaching to anyone within earshot, we may as well be saying, “if you only knew what I knew, you’d be as successful as I’m not.”

There’s a notable distinction between “preach” and “reach” – the former doesn’t get you to the latter.

I don’t know anyone who likes to get preached to and the upshot is this: rarely does preaching work.

Reaching people demands less preaching.

Preaching has a thick air of superiority surrounding it; reaching is cloud free.

Reaching people means that you have to care about them enough not to chew your cabbage again. In order for someone to digest what you are offering, they need to feel a sense of closeness and trust. Preaching connotes standoffishness.

Here’s a mental exercise worthy of your time: Stand in front of a mirror and deliver your message. Is it preachy? You may be totally on point but if they can see up your nose, it’s time to recompose.

I wish I could tell you a foolproof way to stop preaching, but I haven’t mastered it myself yet. Perhaps a start is to lower your soapbox a few inches at a time until you’re on an even keel with whomever you want to offer a message. It’s from this vantage point that we begin seeing eye-to-eye.

All the best,

John

The Grasshopper asked me a question yesterday: Are you going to be memorable or missed?

I had to let the question sit before I could offer a response. I’m not sure I can directly answer yet, but I can explore the topic and see what pops.

When I go through my memory banks, I recall many incidents of people declaring that they missed someone. In most cases, it was someone who had died and, more often than not, the person was their mother. That’s not surprising due to the unmistakable bond that many people carry throughout their lives with their mom. It just makes sense that they will be missed.

I have the general sense that dads will fall into the memorable category. That may not seem “fair” if you’re a dad and want to be missed, but it does seem to be a reality, at least the way I see it.

Here’s the rub: It also seems to me, when considering one’s legacy, that the person who will be missed wants to be memorable and the memorable person wants to be missed. What to do?

It’s probably more complicated than this but it seems the missed person listened more and the memorable person talked more. So, if there is any validity in this observation, one key to shifting your legacy in the direction of the other column is to do more of what the person whose legacy you want does.

It’s the shifting of your efforts that will get you more points in the other column. Perhaps your efforts will even get you the best of both worlds – being both missed and memorable.

After reflection on The Grasshopper’s question, I don’t think I’ll live long enough to be totally missed but there’s still time to move in that direction.

How do you answer the question? Is there a direction in which you want to move? Do you need to listen more or do you need to be listened to more? Only you know for sure.

Here’s something I suspect for sure: most of the memorable candidates won’t listen long enough and will miss the point.

All the best,

John

To reach someone, you often have to get below their level of conditioning. It’s not an easy task.

Observe any adult argument about opposing beliefs and, if you look closely, you will see one’s conditioning fighting with another’s. The chances of them reaching one another are highly improbable.

The reason the military prefers young recruits for enlisted positions is because they are not yet fully conditioned. They are more easily conditioned than someone just a few years older – easier to get through to with the regimented, military method of doing things.

So how do you get past people’s conditioning? You can try and reason with them or you can “fact them” to death, but those strategies have long odds for success.

To reach someone, you have to reach their emotions, not their intellect.

Ask any successful copywriter, screen writer, or gifted teacher how they get through and the answer is not with an assault of facts. They’ll give the conditioned intellect enough to keep it occupied but most of their success happens below conditioning.

Your emotions fuel your beliefs. If you can adjust the emotions, the beliefs will follow in lockstep.

Look at any public service announcement on TV for mistreated dogs or starving children. Do they regale you with the facts and the reasons for these happenings? No, they present, emotional, visible evidence that bypasses your intellect and causes you to feel. They get below your conditioning of “not to give” and then issue a call to action to call now and give.

So, what if you are not a trained persuader, how do you get through? Your chances get better when you present from your emotions, not your reasoning. Warning: Don’t make a false, emotional argument; they’re transparent. Be real. When you become real, you have a better chance of making another feel.

Your facts can be argued all day when you reason. When you talk to another about your feelings, they can’t be disputed by them because they belong to you. If you need a formula, try the one I learned from Jerry Stocking: “When you do X, I feel Y.” “When you don’t call me when you’re on the road, I feel you don’t care about me.” That’s a far cry from the argument starting, “You never call me from the road and never think about me when you’re away.”

Your facts and figures will always be there when you need them, so set them aside when you want to get through. Unless you want to stay farther apart, speak from your heart.

All the best,

John

There’s a game many of us play and it’s not much fun. I call it “Hiding from Hurt.”

You play when you pretend that something doesn’t affect you. The best overt examples I can think of come from football and boxing. When a football player or a boxer takes a vicious hit, they oftentimes smile and shake their head at the perpetrator as if to say, “that was nothing.” They are hiding from hurt.

Hurt is cumulative if you let it go unacknowledged. It multiplies rather than abates when you keep it locked away behind “private” gates.

Hurt is an anchor that keeps your forward progress to a minimum. You can only go so far carrying that weight.

There’s a song from the late 60s whose lyrics suggest a strategy to come out from hiding. It’s a strategy of admission. The song is “I’ve Been Hurt” by Bill Deal and the Rhondels. The opening lyrics don’t mince any words:

“I’ve been hurt (hurt)
Hurt (hurt) hurt (hurt)
Yes, I’ve been hurt

I’ve been hurt like
I’ve never been hurt before.”

What keeps us from admitting? One answer is the perception of appearing weak or vulnerable. You can almost appreciate the response of the football player or boxer, not wanting to look weak. They want the opponent to think they’ve taken their best shot and they’re still standing.

That strategy outside the ring is far afield from a solution.

Acknowledging hurt is the first step in “shaking it off.”

Hurt is a feeling that needs to be acknowledged and fully felt before it can even begin to make an exit. You may always remember the experience but the pain will start to subside when you don’t let it hide.

It takes some bravery to come out from hiding but the reward is a lightness that can’t be weighed.

All the best,

John

What stops you? Asking myself that question the other day, I came up with this answer: Attitude is a governor.

I found out about governors when I was a teenager. Cars back then had a valve in them that, when adjusted, could limit the top end speed of a car. It was called a governor. Now it’s a computer chip.

So what stops you from going faster? Do you roll along and then, all of a sudden, find yourself slowing down? You set out to do something but then your governor kicks in and you can’t get to the requisite speed to complete the trip on time, or at all.

Our governor is an attitude – a conditioned mindset that we may not even be consciously aware of.

Years ago, I can remember scoffing at the notion of “the fear of success.” I labeled it an old wives’ tale. Who wouldn’t want to be successful? I arrived at the conclusion that people weren’t willing to work hard enough to be successful. That mental balloon received the prick of reality when I was working harder than I knew how but wasn’t garnering success – at least my version of it.

My fear of success kicked in when I was getting close. I discovered it was an attitude I owned about people who were financially better off than I was. I remember driving the 18 miles to work and seeing the homes get bigger and more expensive along the route. I said to myself, “What do these people do, sell drugs?”

I wanted what they had, and because I didn’t have it, I made it their fault. It was shortly thereafter that I found one of the secrets to success: Emulate, don’t envy. Find out how they do what they do, rather than piss and moan about them.

I also discovered that my attitude about them had to change, otherwise I would only go so far with emulation. My conditioning was that “rich” people were somehow evil. Once I examined that attitude in the light of day, I found that rain fell on the rich and the poor, meaning the proportion of “evil” was the same in all financial classes.

Attitude is something that needs consistent work to get to the point of actually changing. It’s not a one-time observation. Every time you notice that old attitude rear its head, interrupt it. Don’t make a counter argument, just interrupt by noticing it. The interruption could be as easy as saying to yourself, “My attitude about ‘X’ is making a statement.” Just that noticing is enough to interrupt the attitude.

Each time you notice, the attitude gets weaker and then, at some point down the road, you find that it has changed. It doesn’t change because you’ve created a mantra about change or took a class about change; it changes when it consistently gets interrupted by noticing.

Noticing is something worth cultivating and if your attitude is anything like mine was, noticing will also increase your net worth.

All the best,

John

Have you adopted a new mindset about something? You may have been steeped in an old way of thinking but something came along and opened your eyes. Voila – Metamorphosis!

Here’s something you may have never considered: The old mindset is still there. It’s just not prominent. Just like the physicists tell us that we cannot destroy matter, the old mindset is indestructible.

If you once believed it, it’s still there. You may not act on it, but it’s like that goofy picture you have of yourself from way back when. It still exists, somewhere.

The point of this revelation is to not beat yourself up when you discover it’s still there. Let’s pretend that you had terrible parents. You vowed that you would never be like them when you had children. You kept your promise and your kids are never treated to the style of parenting that you had until . . .

Remember that fateful day, when, without thinking, your mother or father showed up in you when you said or did something like them that you swore you’d never do? Give yourself a pass.

Don’t extrapolate that you have become them, you haven’t. You just were presented with the reality of “It’s still there.”

It’s a time to notice, not negate. Notice that some old patterning paid you a visit and don’t use it as an excuse to negate all the wonderful growth you’ve accomplished.

Reminds me of yesterday . . . I was on the telephone with customer service and the person on the other end was doing a poor job representing their company. They were a chapter behind me and I don’t even have any expertise in their area. It was quite evident that this person didn’t know how to help me but that didn’t prevent them from continuing to chatter away about nothing. I interrupted them several times and stated that they were not answering the question that I asked. I’m sure you own the experience of being in the middle of a customer service call and being disconnected. You were hung up on. So was I. I was livid and some vile words left my mouth – words I thought I outgrew. They were “still there.”

I could have easily given myself a long reprimand for using such words and maybe even scheduled a visit to a confessional. The only thing that’s really necessary at that point is to notice that “it’s still there.” It’s not who you are; it’s who you were and it just stopped by and had you try on its costume.

Final thought: Issue an apology if one is necessary but keep the sack cloth in the closet. Feeling bad about something that’s “still there” delays you from getting back to who’s here now.

All the best,

John

The Grasshopper disguised himself as the “Care Bear“ and delivered this: “No one can make you care but there is a price to pay for not caring.”

Caring presupposes that you include others; not caring keeps others out of your life.

If there is only room in your life for you, you don’t care.

Caring is giving of yourself, not just your resources.

Bending the Hallmark slogan a bit, “When you care enough to give the very best,” you give yourself.

The longer the list of things you don’t care about, the less inclusive your life will be. When that list is made up of mainly people, the less people you will have in your life.

From my vantage point, not caring is often a protection mechanism – protection from being hurt. The underlying pattern is this: If I keep it at arm’s length, it can’t hurt me.

Are you keeping life at arm’s length?

There’s not a list of things you must do that gets you to caring. For example, don’t volunteer at the retirement home if you don’t feel it because your lack of caring will be transparent.

It’s best to notice how much you don’t care and discover that it’s the wall between you and the world. Once you discover the correlation, then you can get curious about what you can care about. You don’t have to include everything, but beginning to care about one thing is a start.

You can go a lifetime justifying what you don’t care about. That exercise will produce a long list that someone can read at your funeral that few will care to attend.

All the best,

John

Did you ever notice that the conversations in your head go nowhere? The same argument that you had yesterday, last week, last year, last millennium or beyond is still going strong, and still going nowhere.

If your mind had an announcer for what was going on in there, he/she would say, “And the thought loops just keep on coming.”

The key to finding an exit ramp from the thought loop is to notice that you’re caught in one. Just take a step back and witness the conversation continuing. You become the audience rather than a participant. It’s really entertaining when you stop to notice. There is a whole production going on in there just waiting to be noticed.

Noticing disengages you from the conversation. You become present to it rather than consumed by it. It’s really a monumental step forward in discovering that you are not your thoughts. They are independent of you. You can prove that to yourself by just taking a moment and witnessing what goes on in your own head.

You discover that you are much deeper than thought. It’s quite the discovery.

It’s interesting to me how serendipitous life can be. When I was struck with the idea for this post about conversations in our heads the other day, I got an email from Jerry Stocking inviting me to read his blog post called “Visible and Invisible Thinking.” It details a process of not only noticing the thoughts but how to deconstruct them so they lose their hold on you. I invite you to read it by clicking here.

Discovering you begins by noticing you are not your thoughts or the labels you affix to yourself. You can notice and pull apart that thinking apparatus and construct a lighter method of living.

All the best,

John

The Grasshopper donned his fireman’s helmet early this morning and had this to say: “In an emergency, it’s more advantageous to focus on what you can do vs. what you can’t do.”

Time is your enemy in an emergency; ask any EMT or firefighter. The more time spent on “can’t” has your solution burn to the ground. Reminds me of a story . . .

I used to work with the world’s laziest engineer back in my radio days. I may be exaggerating a bit with the word “laziest,” but I don’t think I’m that far off. He did have his upside though. He was the best engineer I ever worked with when there was an emergency.

When I asked him to do routine things, he brought out his string of lame excuses why he couldn’t get to them. It was maddening. Every minor project took days of asking and cajoling to get completed. But in an emergency, off came his Clark Kent glasses and on went his red cape. There was no longer any red tape. He flew to the rescue and in “faster than a speeding bullet” time.

There are some people you hope never to share a foxhole with. They would be the “can’t be done” crowd. The image of Nero fiddling away while Rome was burning comes to mind.

There is a time for well reasoned, long winded, “can’t be done” conversations. In an emergency is not that time. Emergencies call for laser focus and speedy decisions. That’s how people who are known as “leaders” gained their reputation. Reminds me of a story my friend, Paul told during a communications workshop . . .

He asked participants to imagine this: You win a contest where the “Today Show“ asks you to come on and do a live segment and interview your favorite performer for 5 minutes. The producer asks if you can come up with enough questions to fill up 5 minutes and you enthusiastically answer, “Yes!”

You are now on the set with your favorite performer and you are 30 seconds away from air time. All of a sudden, the producer is talking to you in your earpiece and announcing that an attempt on the Pope’s life has been made. Your segment has to be cut to 90 seconds before they cut away to Rome. Paul now asked, “Would you be able to pare down your questions, on the fly, to the most important ones for your interview?

There are times when there is no time to phone a friend. That’s an emergency. It’s time to focus on what you can do. If you get lost in the loop of what can’t be done, you may as well stick a fork in yourself because you’re done.

We have all faced emergencies in the past and will face more in the future. It’s the nature of reality. The question is this: What response will you have – Can or Can’t? One puts a firehose in your hand; the other causes you to hopelessly rant.

All the best,

John

The Grasshopper offered a small morsel that’s a mouthful: “The biggest impediment to change is the mindset of ‘I don’t have to change.'”

The hidden part of that observation is that the mindset may be hidden from some people. They may think they are open to change when, in fact, their actions suggest otherwise.

It seems odd to me that people who take the most self-help courses fall in the category of “resistant to change.” That is my experience. My guess is that they believe by taking the course, it will change them. It won’t. Only a series of sustained actions after the course or reading the book will bear fruit. Their patterned belief is that something outside of them will change them. They will take that belief into their next course and get the same results they got before. Their mindset has to change before change is possible.

There are others who own the mindset of “I don’t have to change” that isn’t hidden from them. They have an air of “I know better” about them. You will often witness them lobbying for you to change to their way when their way clearly isn’t working for them. No one likes being wrong, but these people loathe it. They will lobby long after their argument has been disproven that they were right. They will stay on an intellectual path that bears no fruit.

“Results” win all arguments.

In order to get results, you have to act, not proselytize or show up at yet another course.

If people “don’t get you,” it’s your fault. There is something you are doing that isn’t working. That something needs to change.

The next time someone tells you that what you’re doing isn’t working, you may want to take that as a wake-up call that your notion of “I don’t have to change” needs to change.

All the best,

John