The Grasshopper* cleared up one of life’s mysteries over the weekend when he said,

“One of the bigger mistakes you make is to misconstrue your behaviors with you.”

We are judged on our actions, so it logically follows that since we produced those behaviors, they must be who we are.

A person who spews hateful thoughts and does dastardly deeds must, indeed, be those thoughts and deeds.

Not so.

You inhabit the vehicle those words and actions come from, but you are not your car.

You are sitting in the driver’s seat but most of what is done behind the wheel is done on auto pilot. You have been programmed to drive the way you do.

You are not your programming, no more so than Harrison Ford is Indiana Jones. You are acting out a script that has the whole world believing that’s you.

Even though you are not your behaviors, you still have to pay the consequences for your actions. Doesn’t seem fair, but as The Grasshopper also reminded us, “Fair is for fairy tales.”

Recognizing your behaviors, while they are happening, is the moment of discovery that they aren’t you. When you catch yourself in a behavior, you realize that behavior came from your conditioning. You are executing a stimulus/reaction connection that’s programmed to automatically fire.

Catching yourself in midstream is how you discover you. You are the part that does the noticing. The real you is the noticer of behavior, not the executer of it.

If you truly want to discover who you are, begin to notice your behavior, while it’s happening.

Noticing has two immediate benefits:

1. It dispenses with the useless diversions of guilt and recrimination.
2. It helps you outgrow the behavior.

Noticing lets you know that you really have a choice, one that’s been hidden from you by the automatic nature of behavior. When you notice a behavior in action, you finally get to use that free will you’ve been hearing so much about.

Many have willpower confused with free will. They think if they are strong enough they’ll be able to overcome their conditioning. That works for a time and then the behavior returns.

Noticing and interrupting a behavior, while it’s happening, weakens the conditioning. The more often you do it, the weaker the behavior gets and eventually it goes the way of all good flesh.

When you notice, you’ll never again misconstrue you with what you do.

*The Grasshopper is the part of you that lets the truth slip out from time to time. Not the relevant truth but the truth that can only come from the one source of everything.

All the best,

John

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Here is the obvious piece of wisdom we overlook on our way to failing to do something – We must start before we stop.

The opposite is the norm – We stop before we start.

Failure’s biggest contributor is inertia. We don’t start on a path because we’ve already judged in our head that we will fail.

But here’s the rub . . . it’s really not the act of failing that scares us; it’s the perception of how we’ll be viewed if we aren’t successful. It’s that view that prevents us from starting. Again, we stop before we start.

The fear of failure boils down to this: It’s the fear of what other people will think.

Let’s pretend you are a lousy bowler. You went once or twice when you were a kid and now you are in mixed company as an adult and find yourself at a bowling alley.

Your first ball is a gutter ball; you miss everything. The same is true of your second. You now announce that you don’t want to play anymore and you’ll just watch the others. Why did you stop?

If no one else was there and you had the bowling alley all to yourself, you probably would have continued rolling balls down the lane until you saw some improvement. No fear of failure because there was no one there to witness it.

There’s no secret as to why golfers perform much better on the driving range than they do on the course – lack of witnesses.

The amount of things we don’t attempt due to other peoples’ opinions is staggering.

Why doesn’t the shy kid ask the girl to dance? It’s not so much that she’ll say “No,” it’s more about others witnessing his unsuccessful request that keeps his action at parade rest.

What’s really at risk? Your image – the thing that you made up and got comfortable with. It’s the perceived tarnishing of the imaginary vision you hold about yourself that prevents you from starting.

Failing is an everyday occurrence in everyone’s life. We have lots of experience with it, so we’re not really afraid of it.

The fear of people finding out that we aren’t who we think we are is what stops us from starting.

The people who find out that they aren’t the image that they’ve been trying to protect are the ones who start with much more regularity. And here’s the math: Those who start succeed more than those who don’t.

So here’s a thought starting question for the weekend: What would you start if you let go of your imaginary image?

The answer you’ll get is this: There’s no stopping me now.

All the best,

John

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Being a hypnotist, you may think that my next statement is peculiar.

“There is no power in a suggestion.”

Yesterday, I was doing one of the hundreds of radio interviews I do each year on the topic of hypnosis and one of the hosts asked me if I ever used my “power” to influence someone to do my bidding.

My response was that I have no power to make anyone do anything. He said, “But you have the power of suggestion.” I said there is no power in a suggestion itself. The real power of a suggestion is the timing of its delivery.

How many times have you offered valuable advice at the wrong time?

There was no power in that suggestion. All suggestions are inert, unless they come with proper timing.

The old axiom of “The teacher will be there when the student is ready” aptly explains this phenomenon.

You can have the best suggestion a person will ever hear in their lifetime but it will die on the vine if given to an unfertile mind at the wrong time.

The key is to prepare the soil so your suggestion is received without resistance, so you can use what is also the key component of telling a joke – timing.

The mistake we all make is throwing up on people. That means we offer unsolicited advice without any sensory acuity as to whether that person is in a frame of mind to receive it. We just want to have our say when we want to say it and we wonder why they don’t follow our sage advice. Reminds me of a story I’ve told a few times . . .

Suppose a wife wants her husband to take her to a new movie on a Friday night. She hasn’t said anything yet and it’s Friday. She looks out the window and sees her husband coming to the door. She also notices that he has steam coming out his ears. She guesses he’s had a rough day at work. But nonetheless she wants him to take her to the movies tonight so she asks him as soon as he enters the door. How effective is her suggestion?

Perhaps you just laughed at how stupid her strategy was but may not recognize how often you use a similar strategy.

What if upon noticing the steam, she joined the conversation going on in his head and said something like, “Honey, it looks like you’ve had a bear of a day, please tell me about it.” She lets him launch into his story as she prepares him his favorite beverage and leads him to a comfortable chair. Possibly a soothing shoulder rub is involved. When she notices the steam has subsided and he’s back to his normal self, she says, “There is this new movie I’ve been dying to see and I would really like you and me to see it tonight.” What are her chances for that suggestion taking hold now versus a half hour before? Much better!

That’s the real power of suggestion.

You must pay attention otherwise you are scattering seeds on hardened soil.

Now this may seem like pure common sense to you, and it is. The reality is how uncommon the practice is.

I don’t know if you’re ready to hear this suggestion or not, so put it on ice until it makes sense to you – Become aware or you’ll be talking to thin air.

All the best,

John

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One of the biggest complaints we make is that of being stuck. We treat it as though it’s a physical condition, which is rarely the case, unless you’re stuck in snow.

Stuck is having our thoughts stuck in place. It’s the second cousin to being bored. Reminds me of a story . . .

It comes from my old radio days when we actually played records. Every now and then, at the most inopportune time, the record you were playing would get stuck in a groove. It would play the same phrase over and over again. Whenever I hear “Philadelphia Freedom” by Elton John, I think back to when I was in Syracuse, New York in the world’s dirtiest, radio bathroom. I was playing that song on the air and it got stuck. I’m sure it was comical to others seeing me running down the hall adjusting myself to get back into the studio to remedy the situation, but it wasn’t fun at the time.

Being stuck is never fun. It’s being possessed by a repeating thought.

The reason it’s paralyzing is because there is no room in your mind for a remedy. Your mind is fond of playing broken records.

You can’t do anything about it unless you become observant of your thoughts.

If you are stuck in life, you are stuck with the same thoughts. It’s really that simple. I know there’s a mantra that says, “Change your thoughts; change your life,” but that always suggests to me that we have some control over the thoughts to put in our mind. We don’t. Think of the last time you “thought positive” and failed.

Rather than select the thoughts you want to think, which only lasts as long as the life of a fruit fly, become like a cop on a stakeout listening to a wire tap. If you’re in that situation, you can’t participate in the conversation, you can only listen. When you passively listen to your thoughts, without engagement, your thoughts begin to flow because they are not meeting any opposition.

When you attempt to cut off your thoughts, it has the same success rate as attempting to stop a thunderstorm – none. Just observe them as they pass by and you keep movement in the equation.

Becoming aware of your thoughts doesn’t change the situation you are in but it keeps your thoughts flowing. Do the arithmetic. What’s most likely to get you to a solution – stuck thoughts or ones that are flowing?

The law of averages suggests that a flow of thoughts is more likely to produce a solution than one that’s stuck.

Train yourself to observe your mind. It’s always looking for an argument. If you engage in the debate, your new thoughts will have to wait as you busy yourself staying stuck on point.

The quickest way to get unstuck is stop arguing with your thoughts. It’s always a stalemate. Let them flow and you have a better chance of finding a solution downstream.

All the best,

John

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We all create something every day. Whether it’s a creation that benefits mankind or just plain ill will, the creative spark comes from the same source.

We may consider our creations paltry or say we have none at all. That’s just not accurate. If you are a living, breathing, thinking human being, you create.

Most of our creations come through the filter of conditioning, making them re-creations. Most often we are like the bored, stage actor doing HAMLET for the 735^th time. We keep parroting the same lines.

Sometimes we break out of our predictable patterns and put a new twist on an old dance step. That’s creativity seeping under the door.

Creativity is neither good nor bad; it’s like Switzerland – it’s neutral.

The question is: “How do you use it?”

You can use electricity to light a city or electrocute yourself. The source is never accountable for its use, we are.

Are you using this commonly available resource to recreate yesterday and turn it into tomorrow, or are you open to creating something new?

No one has more creativity than you. At the beginning of this game of life, we are all given the same amount of Monopoly money. How well we use it determines the quality of our creations.

Using creativity to create something new begins with knowing we have unfettered access to it. The only thing that stands in our way are the canals we’ve dug to channel it to the same place every time.

So how do we get our creativity to flow in a new direction? For starters, notice the direction it’s flowing in now.

We get so used to living on automatic pilot that we don’t see that we’ve created the life we’re living. Once you notice that you are the creator, rather than a victim, that’s when you are at the doorstep of creating something new.

The old expression of “When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging” comes to mind. That means to notice where you are and also notice that you’ve taken part in the digging. These are the beginning steps of reconditioning.

Once you’ve noticed and taken responsibility as to where you are, you’ve made a space for creativity and it begins to flow in.

Instead of “Poor Me” being the foundation of your life, the act of noticing transforms it into a creative command called “Pour Me,” and a new foundation begins to pour. The active ingredient that comes out of becoming aware is creativity.

The eye opening piece is that we have created the life we have. The transformational piece is to acknowledge that. That’s when you begin using your allotment of creativity to renew rather than re-do.

All the best,

John

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By and large, arguing for your beliefs is arguing for your limitations.

The Grasshopper popped out of the tall grass the other day with this thought:

“Beliefs are relative truths.”

The whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God is rarer than a lime seed. That, however, doesn’t prevent us from believing that we have cornered the market on truth with our personal beliefs. And we argue.

Look at the embarrassment known as Washington, DC. The argument for limitations plays out every day and the only progress we make is toward gridlock.

Rarely do we evaluate whether our truth is working. Sadly, when all is said and not done, we would rather be right than happy. If you read that prescription bottle carefully, you’ll find the main ingredient is glue. It keeps us stuck on a belief that isn’t working.

We get most of our beliefs by accident, through conditioning. Most of our beliefs belonged to someone who came before us who couldn’t validate them either. That didn’t prevent them from passing them on under the guise of truth, and it insures that we propagate that relative truth to others – one that’s relative to our conditioned beliefs.

One way out of this sticky wicket is to begin noticing something new about our beliefs. What’s old about our beliefs is that we are right. We already know where that strategy takes us – Nowhere!

The new thing to notice and ask about our beliefs is this: Are they useful?

Do your beliefs produce results or resentment? It pays to notice.

The ultimate success strategy begins by noticing that something isn’t working. Reminds me of a story from a world class, gone, but never forgotten, story teller, Dr. Dave Dobson . . .

Dave was a pilot and a keen observer of human nature. He asked us what we would do if we were piloting a plane and it suddenly went into a nose dive toward the ground at 500 miles per hour. The answers came fast and furious. None of us were pilots so we kept giving the same answers like, “Pull up on the wheel.” Dave answered every answer with the same question. He said, “What would you do if that didn’t work?” Finally a woman said, “Pray” and Dave again asked, “What would you do if that didn’t work?”

He then asked in his Socratic style, “Would you like to know the answer?” We all said “Yes.” He said the answer to the question of “What would you do if that didn’t work?” is “ANYTHING ELSE!”

What prevents us from attempting anything else is the belief that we are right – a belief that isn’t working.

How useful is your truth? The test is simple. Does it get results or does it deluge you in debate?

Here’s a suggestion: Make this an ANYTHING ELSE Weekend and free yourself from the shackles of relative truth.

All the best,

John

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There has been so much written on the topic of gratitude that it seems appropriate and useful to filter it all down to one word – “Blessings.”

What have you been blessed with?

We tend to give these blessings such short shrift and hide them in the corner rather than display them in a place of honor.

Even more to the point, we rarely celebrate them.

The conditioned tendency is to focus on all the “curses” we’ve encountered, even though they pale in comparison to the blessings.

We seem to give more attention to what’s awry instead of considering what’s working.

This is the main reason I created my CD set called “I Love My Body.” It’s an exercise in self appreciation and self acceptance. Have you ever just stopped to consider all that your body does for you? It’s to be celebrated.

The shift in point of view from cursed to blessed is one move many people will never take. They will stay mired in myopia and never get to see the vistas that blessed reveals.

This is more than a suggestion to think positive. It’s more about arithmetic. You have more blessings in inventory than you ever count, and leaving them unaccounted for results in you starving at a smorgasbord.

There is a magical old song that I’ve come to love even more as the years pass. It’s called COUNT YOUR BLESSINGS. My favorite version of it is on Diana Krall‘s CHRISTMAS SONGS CD.

Counting my blessings is a pre-sleep ritual that I’ve conditioned myself to do. There is no better time to imbue your mind than at bedtime.

If there is one small thing you can do to shift direction, it’s to shift your focus.

May I humbly recommend a strategy to do just that? As the song says, “Count your blessings instead of sheep.”

All the best,

John

P.S. The results of my “Quotes” survey are in. I asked you to pick your favorite between these two:

“The reason life doesn’t work is because people don’t keep their agreements.”

“Talk doesn’t cook rice.”

The hands-down winner, by your vote, was: “Talk doesn’t cook rice.” Thank you for participating.

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If I were looking for a label, “Sentimental” would be one I’d choose for myself.

I’m a romantic at heart and a tad old fashioned. Even though women have been liberated for years, I still hold doors open for them. I take time to look for greeting cards that fit my feelings for the people I’m buying them for. Peoples’ special dates are important to me and I remember and make an effort to make a connection.

I believe in celebrating birthdays, anniversaries, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Valentine’s Day and special occasions of all sorts. I’m Hallmark’s dream customer.

Sentimental is a power source that fuels me. I never recognized that before. I just looked on it as a label.

I suppose I could have a higher or lower octane fuel, but sentimental seems just right for me.

This is not a plea to switch over to my brand of gasoline, just a gentle reminder to get curious about what fuels you.

It’s a fun discovery and something worth celebrating.

All the best,

John

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Here is one of the dumbest and most insightful warnings ever uttered: EXPECT THE UNEXPECTED.

The dumb part is believing that you have the ability to expect all of which you didn’t expect.

The profound part is that “Expect the Unexpected” is one of the few totally true things you will ever hear in this lifetime.

Contingency plans are certainly a way to prepare for the unexpected, but no plan that has ever been conceived covers all the contingencies.

What plan could have prevented the tragic reality that has come to the people of Haiti? You can’t prevent the unexpected because you didn’t expect it. You can only respond to the unexpected. Please give!*

The unexpected is “Reality” by a different name. People spend a lifetime attempting to control reality instead of doing the only thing they are capable of – responding to it.

The unexpected is the norm. It happens every day. There is no person who has ever lived who expected every reality, but every person has the ability to respond to that which they didn’t expect.

You cannot bend the unexpected to your whims no more than you can get sprayed water back into a hose.

What you can do is notice that you’re all wet and begin responding.

“If only” is a reaction; “Here’s what I’m going to do now” is a response.

I’m all for backup plans. They serve us quite well, but they can never equal the most powerful tool you have in your bag – Response!

*The American Red Cross, they always respond.

All the best,

John

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One of my favorite songs is SOMEWHERE OVER THE RAINBOW. It touches a part of me that I can’t describe in words.

It speaks of a place that we all long for, but as another song reminds us, we go LOOKING FOR LOVE in all the wrong places.

The Grasshopper put two of my favorite phrases together in a sentence for me this morning. It explains the two different paths cited by the songs above. He said, “You find the end of pretend when you stop chasing the horizon.”

The end of pretend is recognizing that we can’t find ourselves outside ourselves. That’s where we go “Looking for Love.” It’s a string of one night stands that lacks the wholeness we feel when we travel to that wonderful internal place of peace that “Over the Rainbow” describes.

When we chase the horizon, we chase an illusion that we’ve built – one that says, “When you arrive there, then you’ll be happy.” That’s the trouble with illusions, when you move towards them, they move away from you. You never arrive; you just endlessly strive.

“Over the Rainbow” is not a mystical destination like Oz; it’s a feeling of being connected to something that feeds our soul and grants us peace. “Over the Rainbow” gives us a sense that everything is taken care of.

You’ll never reach the horizon but you can travel over the rainbow. It just requires that you discover the end of pretend. That means to stop the chase for just a moment, and realize in that instant of clarity that what you are looking for is never outside of you.

If you need a physical reminder, stop and buy a package of lemon drops and bring one out when you recognize the fruitless chase. It will be your cue to allow your troubles to melt as you travel “Over the Rainbow.”

All the best,

John