My father died 5 years ago today. I feel very fortunate to have been with him the day he passed. I never fully appreciated all my dad’s contributions and frustrations until after he was gone. I think that’s the way it is with fathers.

By and large, they provide the cocoon we grow up in and are commonly the primary breadwinner. This has them go away from the nest in a quest to scale that ladder and provide for the rest. It’s a role that we fathers grow into. There isn’t any formal instruction, other than what we learned on the job – through our own parental conditioning.

The best example of lack of fatherly acknowledgement comes from a comedian’s bit that I saw on TV many years ago. He was relating a story about a young boy and his father tossing around the football in the front yard. It was more than playing catch. The father was schooling his son in the finer points of the game. They did this night after night and on weekends. Eventually the son made the elementary school football team and his father remained his personal coach. He played high school football as well and was an outstanding player – and his father remained his coach, his biggest fan and his transportation to and from every practice and every game. The boy goes on to play college football and has a stellar career and dad remains his mentor and stays in constant contact. Finally, he gets drafted by a professional football team and scores a touchdown in his very first game. The TV announcers make a big deal of the event as they always do and his teammates swarm around him with high fives and butt pats. Eventually, he takes a seat on the bench and the TV camera comes in for a close-up and the player looks directly into the camera and says, “Hi, Mom.”

Based on professional and personal experience and training, it’s my observation that most women lead their lives dissatisfied and most men lead their lives frustrated – all due to cultural, parental and social conditioning. Women eventually get to the point and ask, “Is this it? Is this all there is?” There is usually some kind of falling apart at that point. Their cultural patterns of behavior are beginning to come unglued. The good news is that most women, on the other side of this milestone, put their lives back together and figure it out, way before men, that nothing on the outside is going to make much of a difference. It’s what’s on the inside that becomes their compass for the rest of their journey.

Men usually never get to that point until it’s time to die. They are too busy crafting solutions to problems that are unsolvable – thus the constant state of being frustrated. As Alan Watts said in Buddhism – the Religion of No Religion,

“Anyone who lives under the dominance of a double bind is living in a state of chronic frustration. He is devoting his life to solving a problem that is meaningless and nonsensical precisely because it has no solution.”

There is a message in there for men and also for women who want to know their man. The message is we don’t have instant answers – although we will give you one because that’s been our conditioning – to have to know and know right now. We don’t always know but we think we’re supposed to. That’s the double bind that leads to men’s frustration.

I never recognized the mountain that my dad and most men attempt to scale until after he died. The lesson learned for me, and for any man who wants to drop that 40 pound backpack filled with unrealistic expectations, is to just let go. Let go of the social mask we have been conditioned to wear and begin to accept that we cannot solve everyone’s problems and that our instant answers are often empty calories. 

Learn from those who came before you so that you, and those behind you, can sidestep this unsolvable maze.

Thanks, Dad! I finally got it!

Just got the pictures back from Michele’s Wedding. Who is Michele? She’s my friend who asked me to present the bride on behalf of her family at her wedding. She’s also the former radio personality, Michele with one “L.”

Michele is one of the genuine people you get to meet in life. There is nothing pretentious about her. I was asked to present a toast at her wedding and I thought you may enjoy seeing the full transcript which offers perspectives on friendship and persuasion. 

Today is Snuffy’s birthday. Snuffy is our beagle and today he is 4 years old. You don’t even have to be a dog lover to appreciate the specialness of birthdays.

Birthdays are a big deal at our house and I must admit I’m the instigator.  My approach to birthdays is that it’s an opportunity to celebrate the uniqueness that you have developed over the years. We all come from the same source material – the one source – yet we all have that snowflake quality about us.

If you aren’t feeling especially special, here is a Hybrid Haiku to focus on:

If you ever get blue

Here’s something to celebrate

God chose YOU to imbue

All the best,

John

P.S. Happy Birthday!

I got to wondering why Solitaire is played so much on computers at home and at work. The obvious answer was it was one of the first games put on computers. I was looking for something a bit deeper.

Solitaire is not a hard game. In fact, most children pick it up very quickly after a few go rounds. So how is it that it’s still the main game of choice when someone is goofing off at the office or passing the time on the computer at home?

Here’s one perspective. Solitaire has 7 piles of cards to work with when you initially lay out the cards. You can keep track of 7 piles with minimum effort. That got me to thinking that our intellect is only capable of keeping track of roughly 7 bits of awareness at any one moment in time.

So Solitaire doesn’t really stretch you. In fact, there is no real benefit whatsoever – other than to pass time or to goof off. It’s not a challenge. Checkers is more challenging than Solitaire. Chess is even more of a challenge. So how come these games aren’t played with more frequency?  Perhaps you’ll find an answer in the paragraphs below.

Solitaire is a treadmill.

If you find yourself regularly playing Solitaire at work, you need a new job.

If you continually play it at home, you are avoiding something that needs attention.

Solitaire will never fill the need in you. And if you thought this was a dissertation on computer game playing consider this:

Excessive food consumption will never satiate your emotional hunger. Abuse of alcohol and drugs will never take away the source of pain you are attempting to deaden. These behaviors are signals that you need something else in your life – an epiphany.

You need to notice that you are playing too small of a game – one that will have you repeat your experience and never stretch you and open you up to what life has to offer. Did you ever wonder, “How good could it be?”

The first step is to recognize you are playing below your talent level. That recognition alone is often enough to get you on the pathway to self discovery. Staying on the path requires that you put yourself out there. It’s like one of my teachers Dave Dobson says, “The ripe fruit is out on the skinny branches.”

The key to begin changing patterns of behavior is a 3 step process:

1.  Recognize a pattern while it is running – not 15 minutes later.

2. Interrupt the pattern while it is running. Deliberately stop what you are doing at that moment.

3. Immediately begin to wonder what productive thing you could do that would be better than what you just interrupted.

These are the first steps to finding a deeper you. The consistent application of the above formula will cause new productive patterns of behavior to form automatically. You may then find yourself buying a chess set or one of my Hypnosis CDs or DVDs.

All the best,

John

I have 3 favorite quotes that keep popping up in my conversations. I think they communicate some valuable information.

I know whom I heard them from for the first time but I cannot validate if that person was the originator. It’s kind of like my friend and business partner, John Leslie, a former radio personality says, “If you don’t know the answer to something, just put the question on the air and someone in you audience will know.” If you know for sure, please let me know.

3 Favorite Quotes

The 1st one I heard was in a church basement at a seminar I was attending in Syracuse, NY in 1975 conducted by Dr. Robert Anthony. He said,

“You’re never upset for the reason you think.”

The 2nd quote fell upon my ears in 1986 when I was attending NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) training in Philadelphia, PA. It was spoken by John Grinder – co-founder of NLP. He said.

“If you always do what you always did, you’ll always get what you always got.”

The 3rd quote I read in a book about est (Erhard Seminar Training) somewhere in the late 70’s or early 80’s. The author of the quote was Werner Erhard, the founder of est who said,

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

I hope these quotes get you curious as they did me.

All the best,

John

I just brewed my morning tea. The teabag had a message on the label. It read, “Happiness is every human being’s birthright.”

Hogwash!

Birthright suggests entitlement. You are entitled to very little, if anything. Entitlement is one mindset where problems take shape and they stay in that mold, often for a lifetime.

Happiness is an option. You are not entitiled to be happy. Happiness is a choice. President Abraham Lincoln said, “Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.”

Also, happiness is not a mindset that’s permanent. As Jerry Stocking says, “If you in anyway seek to avoid the downside, you will miss at least 1/2 of life.”

Happiness is ego based and the ego is always searching for it. When the ego finds happiness, it wants to trap it in a jar and preserve it for another day.  Happiness comes and goes just like the sunshine.

Look for happiness wherever you happen to be and enjoy its presence.  There is some effort involved. It may not just show up because you think you’re entitled to it. If you go to a party expecting to be entertained, you may be disappointed. If you bring the entertainment with you, the chances for lightheartedness increase.

Simply stated, a happy person is one who has more happy moments that an unhappy person. They take the time to seek it out rather than waiting for it to happen. Remember: It’s the quality of each moment that makes a quality life.

All the best,

John

P.S. The contributors to The Declaration of Independence were wisely accurate when they wrote, “the pursuit of happiness.”

Today is the original Columbus Day – the one we used to celebrate before legal holidays in the USA were moved to Mondays. It commemorates the discovery of America. This got me to wondering about discoveries of all sorts and here’s what popped in.

We tend to think of discoveries as something new. My perspective is they are something old. They have always been there but were just covered up. Suppose you were raking a pile of leaves and found something extraordinary. You may say you discovered it. What if you changed your angle of view just a few degrees and declared that you “uncovered” it?

You have uncovered something that always existed. This may seem like an exercise in semantics and it’s more.

The more is that its always been there for your benefit but it has been hidden from view. How may things are hidden from your view because they are covered up by a pile of thoughts?

When we make the effort to think ourselves to a solution, we add more leaves to the pile ensuring that we will never get to our personal “uncovery.”

The path to personal uncovery is getting S P A C E between our thoughts. That’s where all the uncoveries come from. S P A C E is the cosmic leaf blower – the shortcut to the treasure that’s always been around.

There are many ways to get space between your thoughts – hypnosis, meditation, yoga, tai chi and paying attention to the present moment just to name a few.

A few moments of space will have you discover more about yourself than years of thinking will ever produce. So if you are looking for a new world, a great place to start is in the gap between your thoughts. It’s the most fertile field for growth and however you get there is worth the effort.

All of my hypnosis programs are designed to get you to experience that space. Order them now at John Morgan Hypnosis or Grasshopper Notes and uncover what you’ve been looking for.

All the best,

John

I attended a funeral this morning of one of the most unforgettable people I have ever met. He was a real estate agent named Joe “Pete.” Joe sold me my home 26 years ago. I would run into Joe every 5 years or so by accident and he always remembered me and my family members which always impressed me.

Joe and I didn’t socialize. He just sold me our home but in the process made such an impression on me that I have told many, many people countless stories about him. Joe knew how to make people comfortable. He was easy to be around, funny, savvy, and a character.

I didn’t know anyone at the funeral but I felt compelled to go. I had to let his surviving loved ones know how memorable of a person he was, eventhough I only spent hours with him.

So let me pose a question. Is there anyone who has made a lasting, positive impression on you that you have never acknowledged? Is there someone you may have grown apart from whom you never thanked for the contribution they made to your life? Now may be the day to dust off your gratitude and let that person know.

Expressing thanks forgotten can open up places in you that you have yet to discover. Additionally, I can assure you that you will bring sunshine to the life of the person you have yet to thank.

All the best,

John