I was watching some old video from my dearly departed mentor, Dr. Dave Dobson and was reminded of how powerful a bonding tool he left us.

Dave called it “Other Than Conscious Communication.” One of the key elements of OTCC is the ability to bond with someone outside of their conscious awareness. It is not some fluffy, philosophical notion; it is a lightning quick, verifiable way to bond with another.

Simply put, this technique involves acknowledging acknowledgement.

All people have behaviors that they exhibit. If you pay attention for just a moment, you’ll be able to see a piece of behavior they display – the way they walk, talk, breathe, arrange their body positions, etc.

For example, their voice has a tone and a cadence, a specific volume and pitch, not to mention an accent. You can take any piece of any behavior and feed it back to a person in the same way they are giving it (tone cadence, volume, pitch, etc.) and, if you pay attention, you will see them acknowledge it. The acknowledgement may come in any number of ways – a quizzical look, a smile, a head tilt, a body or breathing shift or something else. Whatever way it comes, you will notice it if you pay attention. The interesting thing is that their acknowledgement of your feedback goes on outside of their conscious awareness.

The next step completes the bond – Feedback their feedback. If they smile, smile. If they tilt their head, tilt yours the same way. If they shift their body, shift yours in the same way. If they raise their eyebrows, raise yours. You are acknowledging their acknowledgement. It’s like a silent handshake that establishes rapport.

It’s easy to practice and it produces a bond that no conscious Dale Carnegie-like technique can match. I practice it everywhere with strangers – in the supermarket, in airport waiting areas, or just walking the dog. For example, while out walking, I watch the driver of an oncoming car and notice something about them – their body position behind the wheel, the way they hold their gaze, like the furrowing of a brow, or the way they tilt their head. I quickly mimic one of those behaviors. Part of them will notice and do something back. Quite often, in this scenario, it’s a smile or a wave. I just smile or wave back to this total stranger and we have a bond. I can’t tell you how many people wave to me while I’m out walking the dog.

Reminds me of a story . . .

My business partner and I went to New York City in 2004 to meet with a potential client. After the meeting, we walked the busy streets of Manhattan around Times Square. I was silently playing with Dave’s bonding technique as we walked and talked. All of a sudden, my partner asked me what I was doing because he noticed a number of people smiling and waving at me. He knew I was up to something but he didn’t know what. I explained how I was acknowledging their acknowledgement. He was intrigued.

I request that you put this bonding tool in your kit right away. Think of it as an early Christmas gift from me to you – a bonding technique that’s stronger than glue.

All the best,

John

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What did I learn from my enemies? My sense is if you can answer that question, your maturation level is head and shoulders above the rest.

Enemies in this context may be someone you were friendly with before, like an ex, an old boss, a parent or another family member. For whatever reason that warm fuzzy turned into the steely cold attitude you have towards them now.

You may never have warm feelings for them again, but don’t let that stop you from finding out if you learned something from them that serves you well today.

It’s an exercise in appreciation. Reminds me of a story . . .

Anyone who ever attended military basic training can verify the phenomenon I’m about to outline. You have a trainer who insults you, works you to exhaustion and finds any number of dastardly ways to break down your resistance. You come to hate them. You’d be surprised at the number of people who graduate basic training and want to go have a beer with their trainer. They came to appreciate what the trainer did for them.

Others hold animosity towards the person forever and never fully appreciate what they learned by being associated with them.

I’m not asking you to overlook bad treatment from people in your life. Address it if you can. Nor am I asking you to mend a fence with this person. I’m only suggesting that you find something productive or useful that you learned from this person and appreciate them for it. You don’t even have to express your appreciation to them, only to yourself.

Here’s the result: If you are adult enough to answer the question “What did I learn from my enemies?”, you are on your way to experiencing the salve and clear headedness that maturity brings.

I’ve experienced too many people who carry around the “Those Bastards” model around in their head to know for sure that they don’t mature.

If you attempt to find out what useful thing you learned from that bastard, you will experience appreciation, which is a sign of maturity.

All the best,

John

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We primarily tend to think of relationships as romantic ones, but we have them with everyone we meet. Some of them last and some of them don’t. It seems to me that the one common thread to any successful relationship is work.

Relationships take work.

You may consider yourself blessed to be in a relationship that just seems to run under its own steam and doesn’t need any work. WARNING: Rocks ahead!

If you get in a relationship and “set and forget” it, you can forget about it lasting.

Life, for most, is busier today than it’s been in the past. For example, you may work multiple jobs. NOTE: if you are a working parent, you are working multiple jobs even if you only have one. Your time is not your time as much as it used to be and you may take for granted the wonderful relationship you built and watch it crumble before your eyes.

If you are too busy to work on your relationships, you will have less people to relate to in your life.

I suspect we can all plead guilty to the practice of taking some relationships for granted. We will pay a price for doing so.

For those rebuilding relationships, the work doesn’t need to double; you just have to recognize that work is a constant. Once you get back on track, work is still required. Work is a small price to pay for something that pays so many dividends.

If you are unwilling to put in the work, it may be a sign that you don’t want to be in that relationship any longer. That’s also a valuable thing to know. But before it gets to that point, you have a choice to either put on your work clothes or sit on the couch. One action suggests you’re ready for relationships; the other makes you an unrelatable slouch.

All the best,

John

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I was struck by this phrase from out of the blue yesterday: “You remind me of a time I can’t remember” – A Grasshopper moment for sure.

I’m not sure what it means or the stimulus that made it pop in. I just know that it has more essence than a random thought.

I did have a conversation with a friend the day before Thanksgiving about his father who’s suffering the onset of Dementia/Alzheimer’s. I also was asking questions of another old friend on Saturday about someone’s well being – someone I haven’t seen in over a decade.

Perhaps those people and their stories got me to wondering about times that have faded past memory.

I’m sensing there’s a deeper application of the phrase and I’m fishing for it as I write this blog.

We all have a time we can’t remember and I sense there is a part of us that we get reminded of from time to time that we can’t remember either.

We have become so conditioned to associate our thoughts to who we are, that it makes sense to pause and reflect on who we were before we had thoughts. We were the same essence – just without thoughts.

The time we can’t consciously remember is the time before thought. We may revisit that time briefly in a moment of reverie or reflection, when we only experience something without the aid of thought. Think of a time when your breath was literally taken away by something of beauty. Your thoughts were as absent as your breath at that moment.

There is a part of us that doesn’t lend itself to thought filled memories, but only to the experience of those memories. That’s the part that we’ve lost touch with. It gets crowded out by thought.

There is a place of knowing without knowing what it knows. We inhabited that place before we could think, and visit there now only when our thinking pauses.

I believe we would all benefit by more pauses so that we can experience the absolute serenity and beauty of a time we can’t remember.

All the best,

John

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“Do the difficult things while they are easy and do the great things when they are small,” said Lao Tzu.

When we overlook small, we look past our present into a future that will likely never be, because we discounted the building blocks of ABC.

It makes sense that when the foundation is solid and properly laid that our chances for success increase. If I asked “why” questions, I would want to know why we close our eyes when pouring the foundation.

Rather than ask why, I just recognize that we do, over and over again.

We often lament that XYZ is for other people not us. I submit that if you looked at the bulk of possessors of XYZ, you would find ABC as their base.

There’s a reason old axioms hang around; they’re based in basics.

Measure twice, cut once.

Garbage in, garbage, out.

And my personal favorite . . . If you always do what you always did, you’ll always get what you always got.

“But I already know all that stuff” is what we invariably say as we look towards the future and ignore today.

The tool most suited for growth is the one we most often leave in the toolbox – Recognition.

Recognize that small is worth paying attention to. Recognize that this moment is the only one that will take you to the next, so don’t ignore it or you make your future a Xerox copy of your past.

Moments are small but when they are maximized with recognition, they take us even farther than XYZ – “To infinity and beyond.”

Your creative future is encased in the current moment. To release it, you have to pay attention to the moment.

When you look past ABC, your future is spelled out for you. It’s a jumbled mess.

All the best,

John

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On first blush, there doesn’t seem to be a difference between being “taken care of” and being “tended to.”

I submit it’s the difference between a Lamborghini and a Yugo.

Pretend you are at a restaurant and your server is “tending to you.” Now imagine you are at that same restaurant and that same server is “taking care of you.” Which scenario feels better?

To me, “tended to” feels like something is missing; “taken care of” feels complete.

This isn’t a critique on waiters and waitresses; it’s an observation on how we experience parts of ourselves.

Are you tending to your needs or are you being take care of?

I had an awakening experience over the summer that convinced me once and for all that there is a part of us that takes complete care of us. The feeling is indescribable and the experience is unmistakable. Everything is taken care of and nothing is missing.

The trick in getting to this experience is to stop tending to things.

That’s another way of saying, “Stop trying to figure everything out and discover the place where all the figuring has been done.”

When we “tend to things” we are attempting to exert conscious control over all possible contingencies. “We will figure it out” is our battle cry. That approach involves a lot of head noise that crowds out solutions.

We experience the part of us that takes care of us when we cede conscious control. In the religious world, this practice is commonly referred to as “Let go and let God.”

When we let go of the noise, we not only bathe in a sea of creativity, but also experience being totally taken care of. It’s a blissfully, reassuring experience that returns us to our conscious world with more ability to tend to things.

You don’t need more tending to; you have enough of that already. You need to be taken care of and that experience is closer than your next thought.

All the best,

John

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A good story has an arc – a beginning, a middle point and an ending. So it is with life.

I read somewhere that we all check out (die) in the middle of some story.

Reminds me of a story . . .

It was late September 2002. I was having a telephone conversation with my father and we were talking football. He was a lifelong Philadelphia Eagles fan and I’ve been a New England Patriots fan since the early 80s. I told him my team was going to the Superbowl that year and he scoffed. “How can you be so sure this early in the season?” I said, “It’s just a feeling.” He said he thought the Eagles would make the playoffs but thought they were a year or two away from the Superbowl.

The Patriots did go to the Superbowl that year and two years later the Eagles went too and, as luck would have it, so did the Patriots.

My Dad died less than a month after we had that conversation. He didn’t live to see either of our predictions come true. He died in the middle of an arc.

That didn’t prevent him from enjoying wherever he was on the arc. He was involved with something mentally and physically right up until he left us.

The arc is our life story. Within that story, we can choose where to focus – backward, forward or wherever we are right now. It’s the focus on our current position that brings us the most juice. Going backward and forward drains our energy and our joie de vivre goes down the drain.

If you’re watching a movie that has really captured your interest you know what it’s like to be absorbed in the moment. If, on the other hand, you stop to look at your watch and determine that the movie has been running for an hour and 50 minutes and it’s only 2 hours long, you suddenly discover that there are only 10 minutes left. You have checked out of the moment by putting your focus elsewhere and have ruined the experience.

Outside of death row residents, hardly anyone knows precisely how much time they have left. It seems a shame that too often we focus on where we’re not, bringing tension and pain to whatever time we do have left.

It’s true that we will leave this plane of existence in the middle of some arc. Doesn’t it make sense to forget about the time line and enjoy the only time we have – now?

I enjoyed that conversation with my father and he did too. Little did either of us know that soon his time would be through.

All the best,

John

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I’ve written and read enough about gratefulness that I wasn’t sure there was anything new to say, until this morning.

As we approach Thanksgiving in the U.S., we will express our thanks and gratitude in our traditional way. It got me to wondering about an incentive to do it with regularity past this one day.

We’ve heard all the benefits of being grateful, but I think one of them gets overlooked. It makes us feel good.

How many other ways are we attempting to feel good that have side effects? The list is long and getting longer.

Expressing gratitude makes us feel good every time and there aren’t any heebie-jeebies or hangovers attached.

If for no other reason, entertain gratitude because it makes you feel good. You can be selfish about it without any guilt.

The more gratitude you express, the better you feel.

Don’t be grateful for any esoteric reason, do it because it makes you feel good. “Be Selfish, Be Grateful” may not show up on a bumper sticker, but maybe it should, because it makes you feel good.

Entertain making gratitude a daily ritual. It can take less than a minute and the feel good results are instantly measurable.

Please pretend that I’m making this up and don’t take my word for it. Do this experiment: Quickly assess your current mental state, then bring to mind the things you are grateful for (little things, middle things and Mama & Papa Bear things). Do it for a minute or two. Then when you’re done, assess your mental state again. You will be able to directly measure how much better you feel.

If you need to feel good, interrupt the thing you normally do that has downside effects and practice being grateful. The result is this: You arrive at the same place without falling on your face.

All the best,

John

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“You’re not accountable for your thoughts, only accountable for your actions,” so said The Grasshopper this morning.

It’s amusing to me that we hold ourselves accountable over that which we have no control and avoid accountability over that which we do.

How often do you beat yourself up over thoughts you are having? That is a huge waste of energy and primes the pump of guilt.

I don’t know about you but I have all sorts of thoughts from A to Z run through my head – Appropriate to Zany, and everything in between. If I take time to castigate myself for having a thought, I keep that thought in place. The best remedy I’ve found for letting go of a thought before it attempts to make me accountable is this phrase: “I had that thought, now I’m having this one.”

This little mantra lets me focus on the process of thoughts rather than get bogged down with any undeserved guilt or shame.

There is no shame in having a thought; it can only become shameful if you act on it.

Back to accountability . . . How often do we justify our shameful actions? Just listen to any politician caught with his or her pants down or hand in the cookie jar. The accountability for their actions turns into a dance of denial. We do the same thing. We don’t want to be held accountable for our actions.

This approach goes against nature. Paraphrasing Newton, “For every action there is an equal but opposite reaction.” Or as the musical poet Smokey Robinson wrote, “No matter what you do or say, there is gonna’ come a day, ain’t nobody get away – dues got to pay some dues.”

You are paying dues to a union that doesn’t represent you if you’re holding yourself accountable for your thoughts. If you are avoiding accountability for your actions, the universe will collect your dues one way or the other.

Final thought: Before a thought turns into an action, we have the opportunity to choose. That’s accountability in action.

All the best,

John

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I have yet to become an aficionado of numerology but I can’t deny the power of numbers.

We, as a society, seem fixated on them.

12 shopping days ’til Christmas

2 minute warning

7 steps to (fill in the blank)

It seems we play some sort of numbers game until our number is up.

Conversely, I doubt a dog considers that he only has two Milk Bones left; numbers are a human phenomenon.

I will admit that numbers have the ability to get us to focus – “Sale ends in 1 hour.” But what escapes our focus is that we made numbers up. We created them, as we did language, to explain our experience.

There aren’t any words or numbers capable of explaining our experience, yet we make the effort every day. That’s being human.

There is a place where words and numbers don’t exist. It’s a sacred place where they are not allowed. In fact, if you think or utter a word or number there, you are immediately tossed out.

This place cannot be quantified or described. All efforts to do so are cheap gift shop replicas.

I’m going to use a word to describe this place – Quiet.

The land of Quiet has no measurable land mass, so we describe its terrain by another word – Infinity.

This infinitely quiet place is the birthplace of all new ideas that we inadequately use words and numbers to describe.

The moral of the story is we need not describe this place but only experience it. It’s the experience that we truly want, yet we keep it at arm’s length by attempting to describe and quantify.

If you forever stand on the side of a pool wondering what it feels like to be immersed in its thousands of gallons of wetness, you’ll talk about it but you’ll never own the experience.

I wish I could tell you that you’d feel 10 times greater if you jump in, but I can’t quantify an experience. I can only use feeble words to entice you towards your own experience of quiet.

I’d write more but the water slide is calling me.

All the best,

John

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