The Grasshopper woke me up with a question and an answer this morning. He asked: “What’s on the other side of fear?” And then he answered his own question when he said, “Opportunity.”

How often have we heard that America is the land of opportunity? Did you ever stop and think why that opinion is so accurate? One reason is because people who have successfully seized opportunity had to move through fear to get it.

Look at any business truck you see on the highway. The owner of that business, large or small, at one time took a risk that had them move past fear into the land of opportunity.

Everything we want is on the other side of fear. Read that sentence again and let the message sink in.

Every excuse we own is on this side of fear; opportunity is on the other side.

The grass IS greener on the other side. Opportunity is the verdant field we all claim we want. The question we have to ask is: Are we willing to jump the fence to get there?” Fear is the fence that separates us from opportunity.

Is “look before you leap” an excuse or is it a precaution? It depends. If you are always saying it, it’s probably an excuse – a pat answer to anything that challenges you. It’s a precaution when you have made plans to accept the challenge. It helps you carefully plan a way to get to the other side. But even when all the plans are in place, we have to act in order to get to the other side of fear.

Fear keeps us from the land of opportunity.

You don’t need to take my word for it that this notion contains truth. Just look at your own situation and validate it for yourself.

Once again I’m reminded of what my 4^th Grade teacher said, “You can have what you want or your reasons why not.”

Fear is loaded with reasons why not; opportunity only has options. The only question left to ask yourself is: Am I going to select the option to move through my fear?

Once armed with this knowledge, you can never complain about not having the opportunities you want. They’re available to you and me on the other side.

I’ll leave you with a memorable line from the movie, THE TOWN: “I’ll see you again – this side or the other.”

All the best,

John

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If you live in Vermont or Passaic, New Jersey, my apologies; you may not yet be able to appreciate my thoughts on rain.

Rain is nature’s cleanser. It washes away things that weren’t intended to stay. You know that unmistakable smell that’s left when the garbage truck leaks on your local road? Rain takes that away.

But what about our ability to make rain – tears?

Tears wash away the smelly thoughts that are stuck in our head. It’s human nature’s rain.

We have been conditioned not to cry – men more than women, and what a sad thing that is.

We often fight our natural inclination to cry and pay the price in pent up thoughts that keep us sad.

Tears are emotional rain and as human beings we are experiencing a drought.

There is such a thing as a good cry and we would be well served to allow ourselves the opportunity to have one more often.

I’m not going to logically convince you that this is an effective method for cleaning out some upsetting thoughts. It takes personal experience to validate the theory. And as my late teacher, Dr. Dave Dobson said, “Theory is bullshit and defending your theory is bullshit squared.” So, don’t take my word for it; validate it for yourself. You may just find that personal rain can alleviate your pain.

All the best,

John

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What are the Top 10 things that keep you from doing what you want to do?

1. FEAR
2. MONEY
3. TALENT
4. OTHER PEOPLE
5. AGE
6. LACK OF CONNECTIONS
7. LACK OF EDUCATION
8. INERTIA
9. PRIOR COMMITMENTS
10. LACK OF PASSION

I just listed my 10 reasons that keep me from having all that I want. My guess is your list would have many similar things on it.

“But they’re facts,” you say. Here’s my question: How come we never let facts get in the way when we do go for what we really want?

Reminds me of a story . . .

When I was 17 years old I went to work for my father in the summer. He was a construction foreman and he got me a job as a laborer – the most physically demanding job I’ve ever had. One day I was cleaning up a room after the bricklayers had built the walls. There were scaffolds to take down, extra cinderblocks to be removed and a thorough cleaning of the room, which included scraping of hardened cement from the concrete floors. Apparently when they had poured this concrete floor they didn’t completely smooth it properly and there was a small section of unsmoothed concrete sticking up. I went at it with my scraper attempting to remove it. I was hitting it with all the strength I had and it wasn’t coming up as easily as the hardened cement did. The labor foreman came by and I demonstrated the difficult time I was having removing the extra concrete. He watched for a fashion and then said, “Give me that scraper boy.” He got it to come up in less than a minute. He handed me back the scraper and taught me one of the major lessons in my life when he said, “You gotta’ want to do it.”

When you really want to do something, facts rarely get in the way.

When we assert that we can’t do something, we make it more solid than the concrete I was attempting to remove. Yes, there are such things as physical impossibilities, but they are rarely the things we cite when we give reasons for not having what we want. I’m reminded of my 4^th Grade teacher, Miss Wagner who told us, “You can have what you want or your reasons why not.”

This isn’t a pep talk; it’s more of a suggestion to self inspect our reasons and notice that too many of them are just excuses.

Once we begin to notice how many of our excuses are masquerading as facts, we find that our top 10 list gets whittled down, making more things possible.

It’s easy to compile a list; it’s harder to inspect that list and find out how many things are possible that we have labeled out of our reach.

This inspection exercise provides great benefit but like the man said, “You gotta’ want to do it.”

All the best,

John

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We exist. We really had no say in the matter about our existence. One day we just recognized that we existed and living began.

Living is noticing and taking advantage of your existence.

“I exist” is the foundational piece to living.

“I’m here, now what?” is the main question that starts us living. I’ve found that we have to ask it more than once.

There are many times in our lives that we find ourselves not living. We just plow through existence and call it a life. The recognition of not living is a stepping stone towards living.

Please don’t confuse living with having. Living is a feeling that can be felt but can’t be described; having is having a lot of words to describe how to get to a feeling. “If I only had ___________, then I would feel alive.”

The feelings from having are shallow; the feelings from living have incredible depth.

A question that brings you back to living is: What makes me feel alive?

What stokes the aliveness within you? What makes you feel like you’re more than moving through life? That’s a question worth reflecting on each night before retiring and each morning upon awakening.

We slip into periods of unaware existence where we just go through the moves. When you get the recognition that you are just existing, you have to ask yourself, “Who did the recognizing?” It was the aliveness in you wanting to come out to play.

Living is feeling alive again.

We all get the blues and without them we wouldn’t have an appreciation for the times “we’re in the pink.” But bouts of the blues, left unchecked, can lead to existing. Certainly, fully feel the pain that’s associated with your blue state and seek help if necessary, but at some point it’s helpful to recognize that the way out is lighted by what makes you feel alive.

Getting back to living is the purpose of existence. The first step on the way there is to notice that you are just existing.

Feeling alive is living life to its fullest. Take advantage of your existence and find out what makes you feel alive. That’s living!

All the best,

John

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What is the purpose of management? The simple answer is to manage – People or things.

Let’s stick with the tricky task of managing people. I spent a number of years formally managing people and I did it well and I did it poorly. What I found was that the difference between my success and failure came down to how I approached the people.

The situations where I failed miserably happened when I treated the people like employees; in the successful cases, I treated them like people.

My management style was the same in both cases but my approach was different.

When I was managing poorly, I remember wondering why I couldn’t get the people to buy in to the mission. I immediately made it their fault. It took some reflection to notice that the fault was mine.

Poor management has a top down feel to it – I’m the boss, you’re the employee, we have a job to do, so let’s get it done.

Good management has an invisible hierarchy – You know who’s the boss; you know who’s the employee; you know the job that needs to be done, and it gets done without blatantly implying the managerial structure.

People can feel when you are treating them like people, and they feel differently when they are being viewed as employees.

My basic tenant of management is this: If people think you have their best interest at heart, they will work diligently for you, and sometimes you will hear comments like: “You are/were the best boss I’ve ever had.”

But even if you have peoples’ best interest at heart, you will fail if you view them as employees. That’s when you hear all sorts of nasty comments about your role as the boss.

The difference between the two approaches seems to come down to the difference between the words “assessing” and “judging.” When you are assessing peoples’ skills as a manager, you are in a more fact based mode discerning their strengths and weaknesses. When you are in judgement mode, your assessments carry more weight – and that weight can be felt by the people you are managing.

Judgement adds lots of baggage to the facts. It seems the more judging we do, the more people feel like employees. When we set our judements aside and assess only the facts, our units will feel more like a family.

My experience is that judgements get in the way of managing effectively. It’s not likely you will like everyone you manage, but you’ll manage more effectively if you follow the old biblical verse, “Judge not lest ye be judged.”

All the best,

John

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Due to the recent hurricane, we were without power for a few days. Our routines changed. I can’t remember the last time I played “500 Rummy,” but I know I never played by candlelight.

We went to bed earlier and there were no TVs or computers, but ample batteries for the flashlights so we could read. We were inconvenienced but thankfully not ravaged like many others in the storm’s path.

The power came on 2 days later and things quickly got back to . . . “normal.”

It got me to wondering how many times we return to our routines after having a brush with a challenging situation in our life. If we just go back to the way it was, did we really learn anything from the experience?

The logical thing to do is to assess what we did to get ourselves in that precarious position and then take preparatory steps to avoid arriving at the same place again. Here’s the sad news: Logic doesn’t rule our lives – our routines do.

We do go back to the way it was more often than not and painful lessons are not our teachers but, rather, ghosts of our future.

Just like our power had to be interrupted for us to execute new behaviors, we have to interrupt our personal routines that take us to the same destination so we can arrive somewhere better.

Interruption is an agent of change but it must be applied regularly in order for it to have long term results. Interrupting a behavior once is not long-term effective; doing it repeatedly is a proven program for change.

I can’t tell you the precise number of interruptions of behavior that allows change to take place; I only know that the method works. It’s sort of like spit shining shoes in the military. In basic training you are given a pair of leather boots with porous grain and you have to get the toe of the boot to shine like patent leather. It requires a process of filling the holes in the leather with polish and then dipping your polish cloth in water and rubbing in circles where you just placed the polish. Then you repeat the process again and again and again – more polish, more water. You keep rubbing in circles and it seems like the shoe will never shine, until that one moment when you see a portion of the toe begin to look like a black mirror. Yahoo!

Interruption of behavior is the tried and true method for change; we just have to work at it. It may feel like you are going in circles, but at a certain point a light shines through and there is no going back to the “normal” you.

All the best,

John

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Here’s today’s question: If sarcasm died, how many mourners would there be?

Sarcasm is defined in the dictionary as a “biting remark” which stems from the Greek word, “Sarkazein” which literally means “to tear flesh.”

Here is another question: What if you used sarcasm and no one got it? Reminds me of a story . . .

I grew up on the east coast of the U.S. where sarcasm is a staple of life. Perhaps it’s a way of protection in such a concentrated population area, but I’ll leave that question for the philosophers and anthropologists to sort out. When I was in my mid 20’s, I moved to the Midwest and it was there that I made this discovery: “These folks don’t get me.” What I said sailed right over their heads. It wasn’t an immediate discovery but after a time of getting blank stares and people looking away in avoidance, it became apparent that they either didn’t like or appreciate sarcasm.

What I learned was that sarcasm is hurtful to many people and not “funny” as I intended it to be.

I wish I could report that my Midwest experience was a lesson fully learned, but it wasn’t; it was more of an observation on my part rather than an overcoming.

What I have learned over time is that sarcasm is not a great tool for communication. It has its spot in the tool box, but should be used sparingly. Comedians may profit from it, but my sense is that it pays negligible dividends in our everyday lives.

I’m not going to march in a parade protesting sarcasm but I will offer you this challenge: Notice how often you use it but, more importantly, notice how often it doesn’t work. It may make you the center of attention, but is it the quality of attention you are looking for?

My personal discovery is this: The less often I use sarcasm, the more people I get through to.

If you’re looking to exact a pound of flesh, sarcasm will certainly work, but If your goal is to reach another human being, keep sarcasm out of reach.

All the best,

John

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What does our culture not value that is highly rewarding? – Vulnerability.

For many, to be vulnerable is to appear weak – a fate worse than death.

Vulnerability has gotten a bad rap and I don’t believe it’s been explored fully enough to see and, more importantly, feel the benefits it delivers.

I recently attended a workshop with ten people – 9 men and 1 woman. The purpose of the workshop was to wake up. What I discovered is that an essential step towards awakening is allowing yourself to open. That means dropping your guard and allowing yourself and others to discover what’s really there. It was highly scary, at least for me.

I saw others open like flowers and wanted the same for me. What were they doing that I was missing? They became vulnerable. My experience in the past was that when you are in a group with 8 other men, it’s not the cultural norm to display your underbelly, but one-by-one I got to witness just that.

It became glaringly apparent that to get what this workshop offered I had to become vulnerable. The good news is I didn’t have to will it to happen; I only had to be willing to let it happen, and it did. I became vulnerable and the reward was an openness I had never before experienced.

Our culture idolizes strength and abhors weakness which is our Achilles heel. That mindset delivers far more defeats than victories yet we continue to employ it even though we’re losing the battle.

I highly recommend you get curious about vulnerability. You may have to dismantle lots of conditioning to get there but I can attest that the reward exponentially outweighs the risk.

The insight I got was this: If you are attempting to hold your shit together, just notice what you’re holding on to.

All the best,

John

Have you ever witnessed an accident waiting to happen and done nothing about it? If you’re human and you’ve been conditioned to mind your own business, you’ve bitten your tongue countless times.

The upside seems to be that you can say “I told you so,” but that’s not as satisfying as it’s cracked up to be, at least not for me.

I have spoken when it’s none of my business if I noticed the outcome would be far worse than the upset my observations would produce. Have I been wrong? Yes, many times. But this isn’t about me; it’s about us.

How do we discern when to speak up or clam up?

Through much trial and error, I’ve found that the successful speak up signals I receive come from my gut and the less than successful signals come from my head. If it seems so logical that it has to be shared, it’s probably time to zip you lip. But if your gut is leading the way, it’s probably time to open your mouth and say what you say.

Jerry Stocking offers another rule of thumb that can be applied here: Paraphrasing: “Speak when you normally don’t and don’t when you normally do.”

If you have a rule to speak up no matter what, your counsel will be ignored more often than not. If your rule is to always mind your business, you will witness a lot of avoidable pain.

Minding our own business may have been taught to us as good manners but may stand in the way of us offering a helping hand.

There is risk in speaking up or clamming up, so risk is no longer the issue. The issue is: Can I be helpful or not? The operative words in that question are “or not.”

Our ego will always think our advice is helpful; deeper parts of us may not agree. “Look before you leap” has been with us for centuries but an up to date version might be: “Check in before you speak out.”

It’s a way of getting your mind out of “Mind your own business.”

All the best,

John

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I often ask people who say “I can’t,” what would happen if you could?

It usually gets one of two responses.

1. They reiterate that they can’t.
2. They get a quizzical look on their face.

If I get “I can’t” again, I usually say something like, “Pretend for a moment that you could.” What I’m going for is that quizzical look which suggests they are searching for what’s possible.

I’m not looking for a manufactured “Yes I can.” That has the staying power of a pep rally. My goal is to get them on a search that goes past “I can’t.”

Yes, “I can’t” is sometimes masquerading as “I won’t,” but for the most part I find that “I can’t” is just a mental block on what’s possible.

When we focus on what can’t be done, we literally put blinders on our imagination and a governor on our creativity.

Creativity often comes when we juxtapose disparate things and come up with a connection, or as 18^th Century Theologian, Sir William Palmer said, “Creativity is the power to connect the seemingly unconnected.”

“I can’t” stops such a search right in its tracks. It’s like the person who throws a wet blanket on a brainstorming meeting by interjecting why each suggestion can’t be done. It stops the search every time. No search, no possibility.

I’d never ask you to stop saying “I can’t,” only to notice how often you say it.

Just by noticing your frequency, you begin to get an idea how often you cut off your creativity. This recognition, alone, is enough to get you curious about what’s possible, which is the goal.

Start noticing how often “I can’t” shows up. It’s the first step to opening the door to possibility and creativity.

The only proper use of “I can’t” seems to be: “I can’t help but noticing.”

All the best,

John

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