Today’s blog is actually a rant. I have a love/hate relationship with email and texts.

I love the convenience of getting a message to someone right away and receiving a rapid response; I hate how imprecise and misconstrued those messages can get.

One culprit for miscommunication is punctuation. I’m not a full-blown punctuation snob because I make enough punctuation errors not to be qualified to offer criticism, but critical I am. Call me old school, but lack of punctuation plays a factor in miscommunication in shorter form messages like texts and tweets. The lack of commas and periods leaves the door wide open for head scratching.

“An old dog can’t learn new tricks can he learn some old ones before trying new ones.”

How many ways can you punctuate the above communication and get a different message? Let’s try two different versions.

1. “An old dog can’t learn new tricks, can he? Learn some old ones before trying new ones.”

2. “An old dog can’t learn new tricks. Can he learn some old ones before trying new ones?”

The first one is a question and a directive; the second is an assertion and a question.

The point isn’t punctuation, but expediency. Even if all your I’s are dotted and your T’s are crossed, there is still lots of room for misinterpretation in a written piece of communication. If you need a textbook example, just look at the number of contested wills that were carefully constructed by some highly educated people.

Rather than write a long email response to someone, pick up the phone or have an in person meeting if possible. It will save you the time you spend miscommunicating back and forth in a text.

A tone can be read into keystroked words that isn’t actually there. That may cause feathers to fly when someone was just attempting to be wry.

I love texts and emails; I just hate their limitations.

Here’s my suggestion: If it’s important, pick up the phone.

All the best,

John

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At one point in my life, I was not into reading fiction. I went for decades without reading a story. I read voraciously, but not fiction.

I mostly read books on philosophy, psychology, metaphysics, self-improvement and the like, but not fiction.

Then somewhere in the early 1990s I started to read fiction again. Here’s the story . . .

I went to the beach with my wife. We spread out our blanket, set up our chairs and did the beach thing. Eventually, my wife stretched out on the blanket and began to take a beach nap. Side note: Beach naps are one of my favorite experiences.

As she lay there asleep, I noticed that she had a paperback with her, what my youngest son ’til this day refers to as a “Beach Book.” It was titled THE FIRM by John Grisham.

I picked it up and began to read it. By the end of the first chapter, I was hooked. Safe to say, this was now my book. I poured through the pages at lightning speed wondering where this story went. Time passed in a hurry as I was following the exploits of the lead character chapter after chapter. My imagination was engaged.

This began a chapter in my life where I started to read mostly all the Grisham books that came out, several that were made into movies.

For some unknown reason, I stopped reading fiction again for well over a decade. I went back to reading heady stuff and factual material. But that changed a couple of weeks ago when I picked up a “Beach Book.”

I started to read it and I couldn’t put it down. It was as though I was propping my tired eyelids open with toothpicks to stay awake so I could read the next chapter.

This story really doesn’t have an end, only a beginning. The beginning is engaging our imagination. For me, it took fiction to do it; for you it may be something different. The point I’m making is that if you’re anything like me, you leave your imagination dormant for too long a period of time. This causes a staleness and a sameness to how we approach life. Imagination opens the door to a fresh breath of air.

Author, Wayne Dyer offers us this piece of wisdom: “Imagination is the force of creation.”

If your imagination has been in hibernation, I request that you wake it up and see where the two of you go.

All the best,

John

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I’ve become wiser about both halves of life since I now have requisite experience in the second half.

Here’s what I’ve discovered.

The first half, as I’ve mentioned before, is a gathering phase. I call it addition. The second half is a letting go phase. I call it subtraction.

One of the things we add along the way is knowledge. I’m not suggesting that we let go of our knowledge, just not add so much importance to it.

The benefit of subtraction happens when we discover that we are most useful when we are a conduit for wisdom vs. a container of knowledge.

All the fact and figures don’t add up when we cram our minds with them and leave no room for wisdom to assemble them.

Wisdom is letting go of what you know and letting an answer come through you rather than from you.

If your goal is to be the smartest person in the room, it’s a good bet that you left wisdom at the door.

Wisdom doesn’t want to one-up anyone. It just wants to be there for the moment that it’s needed. You crowd out your wisdom when you lean on your facts.

Wisdom allows for flexibility; facts are like iron girders.

You don’t have to wait until the second half of life to cede more often to wisdom than to facts. Anyone young or old can tap their wisdom just by letting go of having to know.

Gather all the knowledge you can. It’s fulfilling and fun. Just don’t fool yourself into thinking that the more you have, the wiser you are. It’s just not the case; it never has been.

How do I know? To quote singer, Judy Collins, “I’ve looked at life from both sides now.”

All the best,

John

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I already know that when I take Snuffy, the Black Nosed Beagle for a walk this morning that I will see the streets strewn with empty fireworks containers used to celebrate the 4th of July.

As I may have mentioned before, I’m not a big fan of fireworks, especially in the hands of untrained people. But this isn’t a rant about fireworks; it’s an observation about us.

Superficiality is the equivalent of human fireworks. I wonder how many people woke up empty this morning after their spectacular display yesterday?

Yesterday, they again chased superficial in search of the big bang they are looking for and, as usual, only got a few ceremonial pops. You would think the empty feeling they awoke with would be evidence enough to look in a different direction.

But no, the next celebration is already being planned for with deep hopes that this will be the one. That hope will follow you to the grave, unless you discover that superficial has all the firepower of an empty fireworks container.

Your depth cannot be held by a container but it contains the energy to light up your life for a lifetime. Your depth isn’t out there in the exploding sky. That’s a sparkly toy that will be useless after you play with it once. But we seem hellbent on buying the new and improved version in order to get a bigger blast.

What we are really looking for when we chase after the showy explosions is an implosion. Implosion is the discovery of depth. Rather than chase the comet across creation, find the core of your combustion that allows you to be comfortable with who you are wherever you are.

Depth can’t be bought but the good news is you already own it. You just have to dig past the empty fireworks containers to find it.

Declare your independence from superficiality and you’ll find what you’ve been looking for – a much deeper you.

All the best,

John

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Call me late to the party, but it recently occurred to me that we spend most of our lives focused on problems and precious little time dedicated to solutions.

Listen to anyone, including yourself, talk about problems. After a time, you can recite the problem and all its facets from memory because you’ve heard it so many times.

Then notice how much time you’ve given to solutions – precious little.

I think there is a good reason for this imbalance being a fact of life – lack of flexibility.

We only see one solution and that solution is usually deemed too big a mountain to climb or simply out of our reach.

What is the cure for inflexibility? Options.

Before we can select a solution to work towards, we have to explore options.

The first step in exploring options is to stop reciting the problem.

Watch anyone practicing a piece of music on the piano. They may play it for 20 seconds and make a mistake. They go back to the beginning and start over and make the same mistake 20 seconds in. They go back to the beginning again and repeat this ritual countless times.

What would happen if they backed up only a few seconds and picked up their playing from there? They know the beginning of the piece by heart, so going back over what they know doesn’t bring them any closer to a solution. You know your problem intimately. It’s time to get to the hand holding stage with a solution. That takes options.

Develop the practice of asking, “What are my options?”

That question, alone, will pull you out of the tailspin of describing your problem yet again. “What are my options?” gets you focused on two things:

1. That options are available.

2. That options lead to a solution.

Without options, we are left with only our problem.

Are you looking for the next person to tell your problem to or are you looking for a solution? One strategy leads you to a familiar place – Nowhere; the other opens the door to “Somewhere.”

Arriving at a solution becomes much easier when we explore our options.

All the best,

John

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It just occurred to me that we give the lion’s share of our attention to beginnings and endings and give precious little attention to the middle.

The middle is where most of life happens, yet we rarely celebrate it. We are big on birthdays (beginnings) and thoughtful with our accolades and eulogies about endings, but the bulk of our existence gets short shrift.

The middle is what is happening now. It’s worth celebrating. We don’t have to save our attention for a beginning or end. We can just stop at any point along the way and give attention to the middle.

We will stop our busyness to give attention to a beginning or end but we keep our head down and plow through the middle without attention.

When is the last time you sent a note, email, text of appreciation to someone for no good reason? Sure, you remembered their birthday or some other special day, but when’s the last time you just picked up the phone to say, “Hello”?

“Meet me in the middle” has taken on a whole new meaning for me. It spotlights that any point in time is just as worthy of my attention as is any beginning or end.

Let an Oreo Cookie be your reminder that most of the sweetness is in The Middle.

All the best,

John

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I have to admit that, in the past, I would not have been described by many as a patient person. I, like many, thought that patience delayed desired results that could happen sooner.

I soon found out that my timeline was not the only thing to consider in getting results.

My impatience often got me results with ruffled feathers. That’s OK in an emergency, but everything is not an emergency.

If you approach all endeavors with an emergency timetable in mind, you will deal with lots of impatience and get less cooperation from others and experience delayed results.

I have a new definition for patience: It will take the time it takes.

That means that you have to be flexible. If you cannot anticipate and pivot from monkey wrenches and roadblocks to what to do next, you will be spinning your wheels in frustration which is impatience on steroids.

Yes, there are real deadlines. Train, plane and boat schedules come to mind. Then there are self imposed deadlines that may be unrealistic because they don’t allow time to deal with the ubiquitous “Murphy” should he show up with his attorney.

There has to be breathing space built in or you will spend too much time attempting to catch your breath.

Here’s an example of impatience on parade: I occasionally watch a very talented woman host a news hour on TV in the afternoons. She talks very fast which causes her to make more speaking mistakes than she would if she slowed down just a bit. Additionally, she doesn’t give you time to breathe and process what she’s saying. I’m guessing she grew up with one impatient parent that she unwittingly emulates. Her impatience to get to her point has her gifted observations and questions get lost in her rapid fire delivery.

That’s a self imposed deadline that gets in her way. My broadcast coaching experience tells me his woman could easily write her own ticket to greater things if she would just take the time it takes.

What are you rushing that could benefit by more space? I’ve told the following story before but it bears repeating. There was a rookie heart surgeon assisting an accomplished doctor during open heart surgery. They were about to do a procedure that had to happen in 45 seconds or less to be successful. The seasoned surgeon observed how impatient his young assistant was up to this point and then took the time to say this: “We’ll have plenty of time if we don’t rush.”

What are you rushing towards that, if you took time to breathe, would happen in much less time?

Impatience is any timetable’s enemy. It seems like it would move things along faster but the reality is it slows things down.

Here’s my parting piece of advice for the perpetually impatient: If your arms are folded and your foot is tapping, take the time it takes and get the results you’ve been lacking.

All the best,

John

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Here’s an argument that’s accurate but one that will be lost on just about anyone you present it to – You are the cause of your feelngs.

The counter-argument is: You did X, therefore I feel Y. In other words, without your stimulus, I wouldn’t have had that response.

If the stimulus is the cause of your feelings, you would have to have that response every time the stimulus was presented.

Pretend you are in a bar and you see some creepy looking person giving you the “once over.” As a response, you get, as we used to say, “the skeeves.” Same bar, 15 minutes later and you get the same look from someone who looks rather inviting. Are you reviled?

You set it up that the same stimulus can generate a different response depending on whom it’s coming from. By setting up a selective response, you cause your feelings – both the good and bad.

No where is this more apparent than in language. Some words delivered in a certain tone of voice may have you chew the other person’s head off for using them in your presence. How dare they cause that response in you! Same words in the same tone of voice delivered by someone near and dear often delivers a different response.

That’s because you have set up in advance how you are going to feel in a certain set of circumstances. Thus, you are the cause of your feelings.

Reminds me of a story . . .

I was conducting a corporate, stop smoking seminar in Virginia about 5 years ago. When describing tobacco fields, I describe that there are a lot of flies in the field that land on the leaves. I rhetorically ask, “Do you know what they leave on the leaves?” I then answer my own question – “Fly shit.” The room laughs.

But I saw this one woman recoil at the phrase. After the class, she came up to me an told me she enjoyed the seminar but that I had made her feel uncomfortable using the phrase I did to describe fly droppings. I explained that to underscore the point of all the chemicals and foreign matter contained in tobacco that this phrase seemed to drive the point home best with the hundreds of thousands of people the seminar has been presented to. She repeated that I made her feel uncomfortable.

I knew my explanation was going nowhere so I borrowed a story from NLP Guru, Richard Bandler and asked the woman if I pushed her buttons. She said, “Yes.” I then asked her if her buttons were on the inside or outside, but cautioned her that before she answered, if she said they were on the outside, I would have to call men in white coats to come and get her. She laughed. I then asked, “If they’re on the inside, how could I have access to them?”

I then said, “You’re pushing your own buttons.” She set it up that she would be upset in the presence of certain words. She caused her own feelings.

We all cause our own feelings. it’s usually a conditioned response to a given stimulus. If you want to change your automatic feelings to a given stimulus, you have to change your response to the stimulus.

If you want to continue to give people power over you, stay addicted to your response to their stimulus. They’re just using your conditioning to hook you time after time. But remember, you set up how you were going to feel in the first place. If you set it up, you can dismantle it.

It takes some practice but it’s quite possible to change your response to a given stimulus. Here’s one way to do it: Put a wedge between the stimulus and response. That means to catch yourself about to respond in the way you normally do, then allow that response to pass by and wait for another one. If you wait, another response will surface. This new response will get you out of robotic answering mode and it will have different feelings attached to it.

We can spend the rest of our lives blaming circumstances and other people for causing the way we feel, or we can discover that we cause our own feelings.

When you discover you are the cause, you cause new feelings to happen.

All the best,

John

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The Grasshopper gave me a new entry for my personal dictionary – PREHAB.

We all know what “rehab” is. That’s rehabilitation which always happens after the fact.

Notice the attention most people give to rehab; it gets the lion’s share and sits on a high rung on the priority ladder.

PREHAB doesn’t occupy the same space for most people, and lack of it puts the curse of walking under a ladder on us.

It’s truly amazing the amount of torture we will put ourselves through when rehabbing. It rarely dawns on us that we could give less than 10% of that effort to prehabbing and prevent the arduous task of rehabilitation.

You’ve heard the expression, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” That wisdom is summed up in the word, “PREHAB.”

What is it you would give maximum attention to if you knew, in advance, that lack of said attention would lead to the demise of something you prize?

Prehabbing is noticing and then changing your priorities. Prehabbing how you relate to another is worth your notice, as is how you treat your body.

A couple of examples: If you are divorced or heading there, chances are pretty good you forgot to prehab. If you have a self-induced physical condition that’s causing you disease and pain, you have taken your body for granted and will have to pound yourself into a cure.

We live the fairy tale that we will be unaffected by our destructive habits until the moment of truth when rehabbing is our only lifeline. Sadly, even rehabbing isn’t an option if we pass the point of no return.

Prehabbing works, you just have to work at it.

You can easily see the downward spiral someone else is on but, again, we live the illusion that we’re immune to the rules of reality. It may be time to notice the path YOU’RE on as well.

An easy maxim to remember is: If you always do what you always did, you’ll always get what you always got. If you’re getting more than your share of pain and suffering, you’re headed to rehab.

You can head that trip off at the pass by getting into the habit of prehabbing. It begins by noticing where your habit patterns will lead. Then it’s time for a personal intervention. That means to take action and interrupt the habit pattern while it’s happening.

This repeated intervention is the ounce of prevention.

Most people know they are living a lie by pretending “that” won’t happen to them. Yes it will, unless you begin prehabbing.

There is a prefabricated medication to avoid rehabilitation. It’s a daily dose of PREHAB.

All the best,

John

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Question: How much laughter is in your day? Not, yesterday, not last week, but every day in general.

Answer: If not much, you’re on a bus to bleakness.

The most miserable people I have known rarely laugh. My observation is they generally have more sickness than people who do make laughter part of their day. The non laugher will claim that the sickness caused their misery, but if you do a historical check, their misery was in place long before the malady.

Laughter is a natural thing that some have been conditioned out of. That’s the bad news. The good news is that you can condition yourself right back in.

You can learn to laugh just like you can learn piano. Both take practice.

Laughter is medicine and it is worth relearning.

If you recognize that you’re morose, just think of anything that’s made you laugh in the past. That’s a smile starting point. Seek out things that make you laugh. This will start giving you more radar for what’s funny to you and you will begin to see it everywhere.

Most importantly, learn to laugh at yourself. When you perfect that skill, you finally discover that you’re not perfect because to think you were is laughable.

If you have been labeled “Serious,” that’s code for miserable. You need to learn to laugh.

It doesn’t cost anything and the benefits are too numerous to list.

Bottom line: Laughter is the remedy for misery.

I realize I’m stating the obvious here to people who already have made laughter a part of their life. This is more an attempt at an intervention for those who live under a cloud. My request to you is to LOL!

All the best,

John

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