There is a huge difference between arguing and retreating and I’m not sure we’ve parsed the difference to our best advantage.

I assert that knowing the difference will make a difference.

Most people know when they’re about to enter an argument. There are telltale signs – jaw gets set, face gets flushed, fur is up, etc. Whatever happens for you that tips you off that you’re about to get into a verbal tiff, is worth noticing when it happens.

That’s your choice point – Argue or Retreat.

I am not going to lobby for one or the other because both of them have their uses. What I will encourage is to notice which choice you’re about to make.

NOTE: Retreating is not giving up; it’s taking time to reassess your strategy.

Arguing can communicate to others what you are fervent about. It can also indicate to you what’s important enough to give your full throated endorsement to.

When arguing is counterproductive is when you know, in advance, it’s going to go nowhere. That’s when it’s best to bring out the white hankie.

Do a quick assessment: How many arguments have you entered that you knew there would be no exit from? My guess is hundreds, if not thousands.

The trick is to get that awareness upfront rather than after the fact. After the fact writes history books; upfront prevents another endless war.

Sidebar: Some people like to argue for argument’s sake. My poster child for that strategy is law professor, Alan Dershowitz. He is the first person I would call if I needed a serious argument to be made on my behalf. I’m pretty sure he would be further down on my list if I just wanted to chat. People like Professor Dershowitz make their livelihood by arguing.

What will you do the next time? Argue or retreat? No one really knows the answer to that question, but it’s worth knowing that you do have a choice.

Some of the sagest advice you could offer will fall on plugged ears if it’s delivered to someone who is in a mindset to argue. Develop the sensory acuity to sense the state of mind of the other person you are about to interact with. If they are in a less than resourceful frame of mind, retreat and save your wisdom for another time, otherwise you will probably argue to no avail.

If you want to be right, argue, but remember what The Grasshopper said many moons ago: “Some people would rather be right than happy. And preferring to be right, they are left out.”

All the best,

John

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It seems to me that every day can be our birthday. It just depends on how open we are to letting something new come through.

Let’s pretend the following statement is true: There’s a bundle of joy waiting to be born every minute.

How open are you to letting it through?

Happy Birthday!

John

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Best as I can tell, we all have a firm belief in something. It’s the “firmness” of the belief that determines if we’ll grow or not.

For example, many folks have a firm belief in their religion. Few take the time to recognize that almost all members of any faith inherited that belief.

Rather than answering the “What’s your religion?” question like this: “My religion is ______________,” a more accurate answer would be, “My conditioning is (fill in the name of your religion).”

But this isn’t about religion; it’s about firmness and how our conditioning puts the “firm” in firmness.

Your level of firmness in a belief is the level to which you are stuck with that belief. This is quite helpful to know especially when we are arguing for a belief that has no evidence to support it. That would be most beliefs.

It’s my experience that highly conditioned firm believers, who lack evidence for their belief, are more likely to dig in their heels when contrary evidence is presented. The refusal to look at or entertain a countering fact indicates deep conditioning that leads them to firmly plant their foot in do-do again.

The question isn’t whether your belief is right; the question to ask is: “Is my belief working?”

“Right” leads to resistance. “Is my belief working?” leads to “Yes or No.”

Once you discover that a belief isn’t working for you, no matter how deeply conditioned it is, or how long you’ve held it, you naturally begin to let the air out of firmness.

It’s usually not a blowout; it’s more like a slow leak. Your level of openness to new ideas just sneaks up on you and you’re surprised at your ability to outgrow that which was so firm.

When this happens for me, it first arrives as a half smile with the attendant, self-deprecating thought: “How could I have been so stupid?”

Take the time to inspect your beliefs and find out which ones aren’t working for you. Just doing this little exercise is often enough to start the process of outgrowing a firm belief.

It’s the one time in your life that you’ll appreciate going from firm to pleasingly plump.

All the best,

John

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Perhaps you have noticed that we create reasons for everything. There is rarely an absence of reasons, and when there is, we use this catch all piece of nonsense:”Things happen for a reason.”

NO THEY DON’T! Never have – Never will.

Apply a bit of logic and you’ll see that piece of reasoning is born out of fairy dust.

The way our brain is wired has us experience an event first and then reason about it second. Reasons don’t cause reality, they interpret it.

The phrase most used under this reasoning umbrella is, “It was God’s will.” What a hubristic statement that is. That means we are assigning a human trait to our version of the almighty. We are giving God reasoning power. We are attempting to make God into our image and likeness, rather than the other way around.

We act first and reason second. If it happened the other way around, I wouldn’t be writing this blog post.

Creating reasons is magical thinking gone amok.

Let’s pretend you are the finalist for a job you really want and you turn out to be the second choice. After you get the unwelcome news, you begin to spin out reasons. “They hired the other person because (fill in your reasons here).” Notice that you can list reasons all day long and still have some left over.

Would you like an answer that gets you out of the reasoning mode and focused on the reality at hand? In the job scenario listed above, one of the answers that accomplishes this goal is: “I didn’t get the job.”

Please notice the period at the end of that sentence.

Let the period be your reminder to STOP!

The minute you begin the next sentence, you go into the never ending land of reasoning, and with each step, you move farther away from reality.

Start training yourself to answer “Why?” questions with a verifiable fact.

We look for reasons to validate or mitigate our feelings about an occurrence. Notice that each one of those reasons moves you away from dealing with the reality at hand.

Any sentence that begins with these words, “The reason I . . . ” is a clue that you’re about to get something smelly on your shoe. You’re about to step into dog shit.

I will readily admit that reasoning can be fun. It’s a great exercise to use our imagination in a diversionary way. Try it out. “Why did the chicken cross the road?” To get away from Colonel Sanders comes to mind.

Learn this lesson: Things happen and then we reason about them. The sooner that happens, the sooner you’ll deal with reality rather than reason about the hand you were dealt.

It’s not an easy lesson to learn but a necessary one, especially if you want to function better in the world as it is, rather than pretend you live in one that isn’t.

All the best,

John

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The Grasshopper was up bright and early this morning and nudged me out of bed with this: “When you live in your head, your life is dead.”

I needed a bit of time to process this offering until it became clear. How often do we attempt to explain our life rather than live our life?

It’s the explaining that sucks the juice out of life. Simply put, we talk ourselves out of life.

Alfred Korzybski‘s famous line came to mind: “The map is not the territory” followed by its more modern day cousin: “The menu is not the food.”

Explaining your life is like trying to get sustenance from the tasty looking pancakes on the menu cover, only to get a mouthful of plastic and cardboard.

Living in your head isn’t real. It’s an attempt to create real rather than feel.

Real life can be felt; a life that’s dead can only be talked about.

Constantly planning your life is a full time job that doesn’t pay a salary. Have you ever noticed that life doesn’t go according to plan? Any effective teacher will tell you that the syllabus they worked on all summer goes out the window before the first week of fall classes is over. They have to adapt to life. The ones that don’t have a teaching style deader than Latin.

When you attempt to live life in your head, it’s as though you’re on a never ending search for an artificial sweetener rather than tasting the sweetness of life.

Life is spontaneous; living your life in your head is attempting to create spontaneity. That’s about as effective as faking sincerity.

Head dwellers are caught up in the notion that life should be a certain way and when it doesn’t match up, they do some more planning – planning a life that never gets lived, only thought about.

Are you still unsuccessfully looking for what you planned many moons ago? Your plan has an evidence trail. You’ve received an abundance of clues that your plan isn’t working and each time you ignore them, you get another mouthful of menu.

Plan a party, plan a vacation, plan your dream house, but don’t plan your life. The more time you think about every little detail, the less time you have to live life which is beyond the pale.

All the best,

John

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I had one of life’s happy accidents this morning. I was reading someone’s blog and they misspelled a word that took me off on a track I would have not gone on to without spotting their error.

He wrote that he “wondered off” when he meant to write “wandered off.”

We all wander off. We leave the present and we revisit the past or mentally wander into the future. It’s an every day occurrence. Too much wandering cheats us out of lots of life because life always happens now. Whatever is going on now is your life.

When you catch yourself aimlessly wandering off, here’s something that you can do that will not only bring you back to the present, but it will also engage your creativity and add more fullness to your life – Wondering off.

The late Dr. Dave Dobson taught us about the magic contained in the word, “Wonder.” Wondering engages our creative energy. When you wonder, you are exploring possibilities subconsciously, or as Dave liked to say, “Other than consciously.”

“Wondering off” is simply asking yourself a question and then going about your life while your creative part works on an answer.

Here’s the difference between wandering off and wondering off: Wandering takes you to the same places you’ve already been; wondering opens new doors.

It’s a more productive use of your time to wonder rather than wander. When you catch yourself wandering off, you could ask yourself a purposeful question like this: “I wonder what I could do now that would be more useful than wandering off?” Then just go about your day and notice what your creativity delivers.

The key is to catch yourself wandering and then interrupt it with wondering. In investment terms, wondering is making deposits and reaping dividends; wandering is spending all your money on depreciable assets and depleting your account.

Make a deposit into your creativity bank today and wonder about something. That doesn’t mean to “think about it”; that’s just wandering. Wondering is asking yourself a question and then letting it go as you go about your day. By making this activity a practice, you will discover the miracle of compound interest as your creativity works behind the scenes.

Wonder before you go off to sleep, or as you head out for a walk, or just before you’re about to go into some quiet time. You can wonder anytime you choose. Alternatively, wandering chooses you.

Make the choice to wonder rather than wander and see how much more life you can live.

All the best,

John

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Like all words, “Spring” can be an acronym. Here is one way to enjoy spring more:

S. Leave room for “Spontaneity.” It’s often the catalyst for new discoveries.

P. Pounce on opportunity; it doesn’t visit that often.

R. Rejuvenate your mind. That means to create space in there. Remember that rejuvenate rhymes with meditate.

I. Inventory. What have you added during this life that you can now begin subtracting? It really lightens your load.

N. Replace the word “Never” with “Not up ’til now.” It keeps you open to the possibilities that never negates.

G. Gracias. Be thankful more often and you’ll find more ways to nurture the feeling of gratitude with you.

Aren’t you glad I didn’t select the word “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”?

All the best,

John

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We live in a world of fluff – non specific communication that leads us into infertile fields that don’t bring forth any harvests.

Nowhere is fluff more prevalent than in customer service. The amount of non usable information offered is staggering.

Let’s pretend you ask, “When will my package be delivered?” The fluff answer is “Soon.” I don’t know about you, but my daily planner doesn’t have a date called “Soon.”

Rather than this becoming a rant against customer service, I am making a plea for you and me to clean up our language so that we can have more fertile, productive exchanges.

How much fluff are you using? If you are having trouble communicating what you want, your requests are filled with fluff. If you accept fluff as an answer, you may as well say, “Please consider me as stupid as what you just said.”

I detest staff meetings, always have and always will. There is no bigger amount of fluff generated than at a meeting run by a purveyor of fluff. Here is actual verbiage from a meeting I attended years ago:

Fluffer: We really need to get going on this.

Staff Member: I hear you; we’ve got to get the ball rolling.

Fluffer: We’ve dropped this ball in the past and I don’t want it to happen again.

Another Staff Member: it can’t happen again.

Fluffer: I’m glad we’re all agreed.

That was all that was said. I’m sure you can imagine that this same topic resurfaced at many meetings in the future with no resolution.

Let’s look at the fluff. “Get going” and “this” are fluff words with no specific direction. “Get the ball rolling” = more fluff. What does that mean? “I don’t want ‘it’ to happen again.” What is “It”? What does “Agreed” mean?

Let’s do a quick unfluffy rewrite:

Our budgeting deadline is October 20th. Today is September 30th. We have 20 days to get our budget submitted. Here’s what I want each of you to do by 5 p.m. on Friday. (Give specific instructions as to what you want each to do by 5 p.m. on Friday).

One of my favorite quotes is from Werner Erhard: “The reason life doesn’t work is because people don’t keep their agreements.” As spot on as I think that observation is, I believe it would be more complete if people knew specifically what they were agreeing to.

That takes fluff monitoring.

I did a blog post on hinting last year. Hinting is filled with all sorts of fluff. So if you’re a hinter, you are a lousy communicator and will get less of what you want.

Fluff contains no direction.

Please don’t misinterpret what I’m saying. I think “shooting the breeze” with a friend is a fun thing to do and most often those exchanges are filled with enough fluff to make sandwiches for the entire neighborhood. No harm, no foul – just two friends enjoying a “Fluffernutter.”

When it’s important to you to have a common understanding of what’s being communicated, that’s when fluff monitoring and fluff challenging are essential.

When you hear a fluff word like “Soon,” and it’s important to you to know when soon is, respond by asking, “When specifically is soon?” If you pretend you know when soon is, you will be disappointed when your version of soon arrives and you don’t have what you requested.

I’m not going to give you my entire dictionary of fluff. You can easily come up with your own. Just pay attention to the non specific language that you and others use. More importantly, notice that fluff rarely, if ever, delivers what you want.

It’s springtime in the northern hemisphere, a perfect time to clean up our fluff.

All the best,

John

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I’m sure I’ve written about this before, but part of me wants to revisit it again – Arguing for our limitations.

There are countless things to argue about, but none less productive than an argument for our limitations. There are few things less limiting.

If you need a textbook example, look no further than a politician lobbying for a position that has failed miserably in the past. No credence is given to the abject failure of the policy, only the pontification of the proposed merits.

Facts aren’t considered when arguing for a limitation.

Most of the beliefs we own are limitations. They limit us from believing something else is possible. Once our beliefs become concrete, we become cement heads.

I once did a talk show and had the head nutritionist for the state as my guest. She was proposing a commonly held, de facto belief that it’s the amount of calories that you consume that determines if you will gain or lose weight.

I showed her a documented experiment I had read about. They took a female patient and put her on a 1500 calorie per day diet for three days and put her twin sister on a small watermelon only diet (5000 calories a day) for the same period. The sister who ate only watermelon lost more weight.

She immediately launched into the dangers of fad diets, something I was not proposing. I was just asking her if this fact disproved that weight gain or loss is more than just about calories. She came up with a zillion justifications but could not and would not answer the question. She was arguing for her limitations, which leaves no room to consider facts.

How do I limit myself? Let me count the ways.

Like the main character in the book, “Ishmael” says, “There is no argument to end the argument.”

Some people like to argue. They’re the ones I want representing me in court. They are not the people I would choose to hang around with because I find myself drawn into their limiting world of argumentation.

What limitation are you arguing for?

It’s easy to find. Just find something that’s not working in your life and see how many arguments you make to stay on the same course you’re on.

Arguing for our limitations is a national pastime. If we want to move forward, we need to find a new favorite sport.

Begin to notice what you argue for and you’ll discover that your argument is the limitation that prevents you from entertaining something new.

The formula for staying stuck is arguing for your limitations. The surefire cure is simple: Stop arguing!

All the best,

John

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What constitutes living? It sounds like a question ripe for a bevy of Facebook responses.

I asked that question to no one in particular and here’s the answer The Grasshopper gave: “Live the moment you’re in.”

That, for me, is living. Conversely, attempting to live in a moment you are not in is “Deading.”

I had a tree surgeon come by yesterday and remove a lot of dead wood from a big oak tree in our front yard. It got me to thinking about all the dead wood we deal with everyday – moments that contain no life.

We attempt to live in lifeless moments never noticing that they have the ability to break off and rob us of our life.

Lifeless moments are ones that are over and done, or ones that may never arrive. We spend so much time dwelling on these moments that we forget to live.

Living is a now phenomenon – not a 5 minutes ago or 5 years in the future thing.

Living is a byproduct of keeping track of your attention. The minute it wanders off, you are no longer living; you are, instead, accepting a cheap imitation of living.

Want more life in this lifetime? Pay attention to the moment you’re in.

One little practice that delivers more life is to start paying attention to things that you do with automaticity. Start with something as simple as washing your hands. Most of us aren’t present to our hand washing. We’re off in another moment while our hands wash themselves. Sense the feel of the soap and warm water on your hands, hear the water splashing about, notice the suds being washed away, smell the aroma of clean hands.

As silly as this may sound until you try it, is that a simple practice like this delivers more life. It opens you up to the notion that you can live more life each day by paying attention to the moment you’re in.

There are countless theoretical answers to the question, “What constitutes living?” But living your life by a theory is truly “Theo-rectical” – living with your head up your ass.

There is no substitute for the experience of life that present moment awareness brings.

All the best,

John

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