Sterger is a new word I have come up with. It’s a new way of looking at things.

Sterger is really forward thinking. Most of our thinking is about the past and mistakes we have made, and that has a lousy track record for getting things done.

Sterger is a way to craft our future by laying out some stepping stones to follow forward.

For example, we often spend time lamenting why we didn’t do what we should have done. It never gets us what we want but we do it anyway.

Rarely do we envision what we don’t want and reverse engineer it so that it doesn’t happen. That’s Sterger.

It’s sort of constructive negative thinking.

Think of an action that would lead to something that you would regret. Play out that scenario in your mind so that you take yourself into the future and feel all the fallout from your action.

Now it’s time for Sterger. Find the choice point where your action plan goes awry and choose a different action. Sterger is a productive way of avoiding disappointments.

Sterger is a simple concept that just needs application. It simply has you look at things backward before they happen.

Note: It’s helpful to find the true meaning of Sterger by practicing it while looking in the mirror.

All the best,

John

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It’s been said that laughter is the best medicine. Based on my personal history, that seems to be the case.

Looking back over my close friendships in life, they all had one thing in common. Each person could make me laugh until I couldn’t breathe, and then make me laugh on top of that.

In my case great friends = laughter.

Genuine laughter is so spontaneous. It comes from a special place – a place of healing.

I’m sure some researcher could tell you all the physiological benefits of laughter but it goes deeper than the research. There is a part of us that wants us to laugh because it knows that laughter is in our best interest. Maybe that’s the reason I gravitate to people who made me laugh.

Laughter is not a commodity; it’s a necessity.

If you can’t find something to laugh about several times a day, you are compromising your health.

Think about any sourpuss you know and just notice their condition of health. Reminds me of a story . . .

Many years ago we had a very serious couple live in our neighborhood. He was a psychiatrist and his wife was a psychologist. They had a little boy named Danny who used to play with our boys. That’s how I got to know the parents, through the son.

Danny was a pensive kid and I can honestly tell you I never saw him laugh. It became evident when I met the parents. The father was so stiff that you would have guessed that his spine was surgically fused together, and the mother lived constantly in the shade. Her cup never even got to half empty. They were like a skit on Saturday Night Live, even though it hadn’t debuted yet.

The topic of conversation was always on the down side and they never cracked a smile. They were the sickliest people I can ever remember. Danny had every malady you could imagine and never once did these brilliant people deduce that their approach to life was causing their ills.

A day without laughter is a wasted day.

Find something to laugh about today and again tomorrow. It’s really a matter of focus.

Focus on laughter and you may find your personal HMO.

All the best,

John

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It may not be overtly obvious but it seems that everyone, at some level, wants to be saved.

That’s one of the reasons people get married. They want to be saved. That’s why others change jobs, relationships, careers, states, countries, lifestyles, etc.

Anyone who wants to be saved feels helpless, no matter what false bravado is presented for the world to see.

Here’s the good and bad news rolled into one – no one can save you – not your spouse, your lover, your lifestyle, your career, your parents, your children or a giant lottery jackpot.

So what is it that we all want to be saved from? The common answer is circumstance. The deeper answer, when you take the time to explore it, is yourself.

We want to be saved from ourselves.

No matter how confident someone appears, if you dig a little bit, you will find someone who has self esteem issues. They think they should be better than they are and are afraid they can’t be. They look outside themselves for an answer.

There is good reason Renee Zellweger‘s line from the movie, Jerry Maguire movie is so popular. “You complete me” represents the part of us that wants to be saved. Most people are looking for a savior, not a partner.

What is so scary about ourselves that causes us to seek saving?

We seek to be saved from the part of us that’s impermanent. We don’t like that there is a temporary nature to this thing called our self. We are afraid of dying.

Death has many faces. There is the one that’s usually followed by burial. That’s not the one we fear most. We are most afraid of the death of the person we made up and got comfortable with – our self image. When our image becomes threatened, we look for someone or something to prop it up. We want to save our image. You’ve heard the phrase “A fate worse than death.” That’s the death of who we believe we are.

We go on a quest to find someone or something to fill in the gaping gaps of this dying image. They may temporarily save us from the raindrops that smear our exterior paint but they’ll never be able to hold off the flood that will knock down the walls.

You can’t save your self. It’s going to die; it’s just a matter of how long you want to prolong the pain of keeping it alive. Examine the problems in your life and notice how many of them are fed by this false sense of self. When it dies, so do the problems associated with it.

The thing we are looking to save is the cause of most of our difficulties.

There comes a time in life when this self image starts to come unglued. It’s at this point that we begin the senseless fight to hold it together. These are the most difficult times in our life. We expend so much energy on keeping alive that which is aching to die. This is when we seek saving the most.

Spiritual teacher, Eckhart Tolle offers a prescription for finding life past our self. He says, “Die before you die.”

Who we believe we are must die in order for us to live life to the fullest. This is the real crossroads in life – one trail keeps you looking for a savior; the other helps you find your true self.

This isn’t an easy process, but a necessary one.

One of life’s hardest lessons is to tell the truth up front. It saves so much agony on the back end and allows us to get on with our life much sooner.

The truth is no one can save you.

All the best,

John

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There are more acorns in our front yard that I can ever remember. I’m sure the Farmers’ Almanac has a take on that.

Here’s what I’m noticing. The squirrels don’t seem to take more acorns than they need. They don’t seem to fatten up when the supply is plentiful or get anorexic when it’s lean. It got me to wondering.

How many of our needs are mind induced?

It’s easy to list the abuse of drugs, alcohol and food as self induced needs, but there are so many more.

Here’s a blank to fill in. I need ______________.

If it falls out of the area of air, water, food, shelter, etc., it’s really a desire.

We weren’t born with desires. We collected them along the way.

Desires are what get us to create. The question then becomes: “What am I creating?”

Have I created something that’s doing harm or have I created something that’s serving me well? Many of us never ask that question about our conditioned desires.

Most people have confused their desires as needs. Who really needs a cigarette?

What I’m about to suggest may only seem like semantics until you put it to the test. The next time you catch yourself saying, “I need (blank),” notice if it’s really a need. If you notice that it’s not a real need, change the phrasing to: “I desire (blank).

By doing so, you begin to recognize that you are the creator of your desires. If they are serving you well, enjoy. If they are causing you harm, it’s time to re-create.

By differentiating needs and desires, you discover that you are the creator of behavior. Once armed with that knowledge, you may get curious about what else you can create that serves you better.

All the best,

John

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The Grasshopper was poetic this morning.

If your headlines are mainly sizzle and your story leaves others confused
They will probably look elsewhere for friendship
Rather than re-sift through your pile of clues

People like a good mystery but will tire of it quickly when there are too many twists and turns.

One of the best questions I was ever asked was: “Is it hard to be you?”

If it’s hard to be you, your life is a mystery with too many self imposed plot turns keeping you from finding an answer.

The clues are always there. My friend, Jim was with the L.A. County Sheriff’s office for 28 years and says that criminals bring clues into a crime scene and take clues away with them. You just have to know where to look.

The clues of your mystery are in plain sight. They probably have been brought to your attention many times, but you ignored them and moved on to another plot twist rather than solve what’s right in front of you.

You’re not alone. We all ignore clues to some degree which cause us to utter: “It’s hard to be me.”

What makes it harder to be you is a refusal to work with the reality that’s present rather than escaping to the fantasy that isn’t.

The curse of creativity is that many of us use it to evade rather than address. The evasion leaves us like an unresolved musical chord – a song filled with tension.

If you really want to solve your puzzle, the pieces are all on the table. You just have to expend some effort putting them together.

Mysteries don’t solve themselves. The process begins when you get a clue.

All the best,

John

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“Give what you want to receive” is an operative strategy in human relations. From personal experience, I believe it is flawed.

I have mentioned before that I worship at the altar of consistency. It’s an aphrodisiac for me. It’s the one thing that I make an effort to give but I rarely see it reflected back.

The second thing I cherish is someone having my back. It’s one of the things I go out of my way to provide to others, but again I don’t see a lot of it on the return visit.

So, I could easily deduce that the people I am expecting something in return from are flawed. That’s not the case. The flaw is that they are under-informed by me.

One of the larger mistakes we all make is to think that people think like us. They don’t. We assume that they make the same assumptions with the same set of facts. They don’t.

Giving has nothing to do with receiving. There is no quid pro quo.

Giving is expecting nothing in return, other than the warm feeling you get from doing it.

When you expect something in return, you set yourself up for disappointment. What mother breast feeds her child thinking that I’m doing this for you so that someday you will provide for me when I can’t provide for myself?

Give what you give because it’s part of your character, not for an ulterior motive. Giving is giving and receiving is receiving. They run on separate tracks. When we believe it’s a two way street, we are mistaken.

Expecting to automatically get back what you give goes against the grain. If you want what you give, you have to ask.

The answer to getting what you give is in the asking, not the expecting.

We rarely ask for what we want. We expect it. Every time we don’t get what we expect, we assign the blame outward.

There is an old NLP axiom that reads: “The meaning of the communication is the response that you get.”

If you desire what you are giving and not getting it, your communication skills are lacking. That means you are not asking for what you want; you are having people guess. There are low odds on that strategy working.

Just as fat never turns into muscle, giving never equals receiving.

The magic is in the asking. When you make a specific request, you will get instant feedback, no more guesswork about your relationship with the other person. Either you will get what you ask for or you won’t.

If you are expecting without asking, you will continue to live unrequited in your own world where no one else knows the rules.

Here’s an acronym you can use to remind yourself of the biblical prescription on how to get what you give: A.S.K.

“Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.”

All the best,

John

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I am amazed at all the ways we learn to block out something that’s ever present – Fear.

We fight with it, suppress it, deny it, sugar coat it – anything to chase it away.

It seems we rarely, if ever, cooperate with it.

Sometimes an enemy becomes a friend when cooperation becomes an option.

How do we cooperate with fear? We give it what all of us want – recognition.

Recognizing that you feel afraid is one of the best ways to give acknowledgement to that which you’ve been hiding from.

Fear’s power is anticipation. Its muscle comes from what’s yet to come. That’s the mental part of fear. You can’t cooperate with fear in your mind, because it multiplies into a thousand thoughts. The place to cooperate with fear is in your body where there is only one feeling to cooperate with.

Cooperating with fear means to feel it.

The temptation when we feel fear is to talk about it. That’s an attempt to make it go away. The minute we get tired of talking, it attacks us with full force.

Fear like any other feeling wants to be felt. It’s not going to go away until it gets its way. It’s darn persistent.

Rather than arm wrestle with it and lose again, cooperate with this sensation by feeling it fully. That means to notice what goes on in your body when you are feeling afraid. Keep your attention on the feeling and not the story that’s producing it.

Cooperating with fear is like giving it warm milk at bedtime. When we put our attention on the feeling of fear, it begins to metabolize itself and drift off to sleep.

If you would like to tuck in fear for the evening, allow yourself to feel it in your body.

The way to keep fear permanently in place is to keep doing all the things you’ve been doing. The remedy for giving it a rest is to cooperate with it.

Fear will always be with us. Sometimes it serves us and sometimes it gets in the way. If fear is getting in your way too often, keeping you from doing what you want to do, it’s time to fully experience the feeling in your body.

Ask yourself this: Why do people abuse things like drugs, alcohol, food, and other people? Answer: To make the fear go away.

It really doesn’t go away, only you do. In case you haven’t noticed, your attempt at numbing yourself isn’t working because your fear never rests. That’s because you run from it rather than feel it.

Undigested fear will poison you and take its toll. It’s time for a new approach.

When you feel fearful, let yourself fully explore the feeling in your body – not you head. Keep your attention on the feeling. The temptation is to stop feeling and start talking. Resist that temptation and stay with the feeling.

We’ve been asked over the years to face our fears. That’s only a partial solution. Feeling them fully makes them less of a bully.

All the best,

John

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