What is the essence of you? What’s your main quality?

Are you Kind? Decisive? Loyal? Thoughtful? Insightful? Honest? or something else? What’s the quality that is mainly you?

You may be all of the above, but one quality stands out. That’s your main quality.

Not sure? Don’t be embarrassed; ask someone who knows you well. They will have an answer.

Once you identify your main quality, ask yourself this: “Am I using it to my best advantage?”

Chances are, if you are struggling, you don’t recognize your main quality and aren’t using it to serve you best.

Your main quality is best used when it flows into everything you do. It’s not being used to its finest advantage if you use it for work and not for home or vice versa, and it’s not in your best interest to hide it under a rock.

This much I know for sure: Your main quality comes to you easily. It’s there without you having to think about it, but if you don’t recognize it, you’re not offering yourself the opportunity to take full advantage of it.

“But I don’t like to brag.” No one is asking you to announce it to the world, just begin to notice your main quality and make sure it’s part of everything you do.

It’s not about exalting, but rather about being practical.

If you are discounting your main quality, you are being discounted.

If you are struggling, you are not making use of your main quality. You’ve got something of value, but you may be letting it gather dust in the back of the closet.

Here’s a weekend project: Find your main quality and get curious about how many ways you can insert it into the things you do.

What you will find is that you have a natural catalyst that will propel you forward.

The two ways to activate your main quality are to recognize it and to use it.

You can’t get the blue ribbon for being you unless your main quality is in everything you do.

All the best,

John

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I had this extraordinary thought come to me yesterday: “If you had all the beliefs I have about you, you wouldn’t be you; you’d be me.”

It got me to thinking how personal and powerful beliefs are.

No one has the same collection of beliefs that you do. That makes them personal. Their power comes from their ability to direct our thinking into specific channels. This power itself is neutral. It will flow into any belief we own without prejudice.

What you believe about another is, for the most part, not evidence based, but belief based. You see them and their actions through a filtering system that is unique to you and your conditioning.

This is more than saying that everyone believes differently. This is gaining a perspective that people will not behave exactly like you unless they are you, and judging them for not doing so is missing the point that our beliefs are unique to us. We’re the only one to have this particular collection. Others have a different set causing them to behave differently.

Sidebar: It is prudent to note that reality will not always act in accordance with our beliefs. That alone should demonstrate how unreliable many of our beliefs are.

The reality is this: Human beings are “Human Believers.” We too often believe that others should act the way we believe they should. That’s impossible for them because they are not us.

When you attempt to make another into your image and likeness, you are pretending to be God. That belief will shatter when you discover that you can’t clone you.

It makes for a more peaceful existence when we have a functioning level of tolerance for another’s beliefs. That’s because attempting to make theirs just like ours is an impossible task no matter how much you believe it.

All the best,

John

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We’re all familiar with the “Fight or Flight” response. When fearful, we either fight or flee.

I think during this time of high volume, political dissention that we should highlight the less often discussed reaction to fear – Freeze!

It’s not factual that reaction to fear is an “either or” proposition as in “Fight or Flight.”

Dogs when faced with fear will engage, run away, or just be paralyzed in place by fear. Such is the case for humans as well.

Registered voters will either vote or not vote; those not registered freeze.

The current actions of those engaged in the political process make others so fearful of that process that they freeze in their tracks and do nothing. How sad.

It’s your right to vote or not vote. You remove that choice when you freeze.

I wonder what the percentage is of people who rail against the political process, but when it’s time to take action, they just freeze?

Bitching and moaning is a right guaranteed by the first amendment, yet I don’t think the founding fathers expected a people who were thirsty for liberty and freedom to freeze.

This is really a rant about those who complain and do nothing about it. They freeze their complaint in place by their inaction.

Words without action are just words.

Sometimes it makes sense to retreat so that you can fight another day, but you negate that choice when you lie there and do nothing.

All the best,

John

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What makes us push on when every shred of evidence indicates we are wrong?

Is it stupidity, being bullheaded, stick-to-itiveness, blind faith or something else?

I don’t have an answer, only the practice of pushing on against the current.

It’s not an easy choice. It’s fraught with head winds, brick walls, no results and ridicule; yet we push on.

Is it fear of losing or denial that we’ve lost? I’m reminded of the words of legendary football coach, Vince Lombardi regarding a loss his team just endured. He said, “We didn’t lose; we just ran out of time.”

For the most part, I don’t think we accept loss well and dress it up in other clothes and pretend it’s something else.

Yet, Thomas Edison pushed on past the point where most of us would have given up. He had more than hope pushing him forward.

What is that intangible?

I wish I could answer that question and identify that which has us push on in spite of overwhelming odds. It would be a major discovery.

I guess I’m not the only one asking the question about pushing on. Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, in his quest to know, offered us the Serenity Prayer:

God, grant me the serenity

To accept the things I cannot change;

Courage to change the things I can;

And wisdom to know the difference.

It’s the difference we all wrestle with.

My sense is the wisdom does not come from our intellect otherwise we would have given up long ago. After all, the facts are the facts. The wisdom to push on comes from somewhere else.

I don’t think I’ll ever get to name that place; I only hope to discover it.

If you are pushing on, the only comfort I can offer you is that you are not alone. The difference we are looking for has a distinction, and it’s that sought after distinction that will determine if we push that light switch on or off.

May the force be with you!

All the best,

John

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Back in August of 2009 I wrote a blog post about the 4 Signs of Immaturity. Thank God I didn’t say the list was all-inclusive because I’ve found another one – undependability.

Yesterday, The Grasshopper delivered this: “Learning to be dependable is learning to be an adult.”

Sidebar: I’ll admit that “adult” can be a polarizing word depending on one’s maturity level. If the lyrics in your head are “I won’t grow up” from Peter Pan, or you’re still singing “I don’t wanna’ grow up; I’m a Toys ‘R Us kid” from the TV commercial, adulthood is something you’re still rebelling against.

Being dependable is a mark of maturity. There is nothing more satisfying to me than dealing with people who do what they say they are going to do. I am reminded every day why Werner Erhard‘s quote is one of my favorites. “The reason life doesn’t work is because people don’t keep their agreements.”

If, more often than not, you agree to do something and you don’t follow through, you are undependable and locked in by another sign of immaturity.

Yes, we all forget from time to time that we agreed to do something that just slipped our mind. That’s a far cry from the slippery slope of undependability.

We expect children, teenagers and young adults to be immature because maturity is a learning process. Those who learn maturity become dependable; those that don’t have earned their soiled reputation.

Please don’t confuse maturity with success. There are many people who are successful who are not dependable. They are generally the people you refuse to do business with again. They may have all the talent and expertise to do the job, but their lack of maturity makes their delivery schedule and them undependable.

It’s never too late to become dependable. It’s a process that takes regular practice in doing what you say you will do. Once learned it becomes second nature and will come to you naturally.

If you are serial disappointer, start small and follow through. It will serve as a stepping stone on the pathway to maturity.

Also, it’s helpful if you keep your lips zipped. The telltale clue of undependability is a grandiose litany of what you’re going to do. Don’t over promise because you’ll always under deliver.

If you are undependable, you are immature and you will continue to be less than you can be.

You’ll know you’ve reached maturity when you can confidently say, “You can depend on me.”

All the best,

John

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I watched a woman who clearly had a physical handicap, haltingly out walking for exercise yesterday. I remarked to myself, “What a testament to the human spirit.”

Here was this woman, overriding any acceptable excuse not to exercise, displaying her human spirit.

What is the human spirit?

We all have it, and yet we all constrain it from doing its best.

The human spirit is what animates us and differentiates us from being dead.

Yet, many of us are the walking dead, without an acceptable excuse, because we keep our human spirit on a leash.

How do we confine the spirit we all have?

It’s done through patterning.

We all learn patterns of behavior and thinking. Some of the learning is conscious; most of it is conditioned without our permission. We learn most patterning by accident and then that accident becomes a way of life.

Are you rude? You didn’t go to a formal class to learn it but, nonetheless, you were schooled. Think about it, who would consciously decide to learn rudeness?

Taking the learning one step further, you have channeled your human spirit into being rude, because like water, spirit will go wherever there is a route.

So we channel our malleable human spirit through patterning, most of which was done outside of our awareness. It seems like this patterning keeps us stuck in place.

Not for the woman out walking yesterday.

What made her human spirit flow into a productive pattern of exercise versus into an acceptable excuse not to?

I would only be guessing because I don’t know this person, but my sense is that she discovered that our human spirit will flow wherever we channel it.

That means that we have to begin to recognize where we are allowing it to flow now. That’s easy to determine, just look at your patterns. That’s where your human spirit is flowing.

In order to redirect the flow, it’s essential to recognize a confining pattern while it’s happening, not during a guilt trip, or on the therapist’s couch after the fact. That’s just a history lesson, not a plan of action.

When you begin to recognize your patterns in action, you create a space for the flow of human spirit to go somewhere new. Repeated recognition, while the pattern is happening, creates a channel for your spirit to flow away from that which is holding you back into something new that’s more productive for you.

To save your spirit from stagnation, begin to recognize where it’s pooling now and you’ll quietly create a channel for its escape.

The human spirit is remarkable; we just need to lead it where we want it to take us. That’s done through using our gift of recognition. It’s the catalyst for producing new channels for our human spirit to animate.

I’d write more but I want to catch up with that woman who’s out walking.

All the best,

John

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The Grasshopper had an addendum to yesterday’s post. When I heard it read aloud, he added, “Imitation is limitation.”

When we imitate someone, we are always one off from the original. It can be great entertainment but it’s rarely a satisfying substitute for the real thing.

Enter “Emulation.”

Emulation takes the best of what someone has to offer and allows you to adopt it and add your own style. Imitation makes you a poor man’s copy cat.

When I was in the radio business, most novice broadcasters imitated the person who influenced them to become a radio personality. As I’ve mentioned before, a wise program director once told me that I could never be the guy I was imitating, but that guy could never be me either. That’s the day I went from imitating to emulating.

When you adopt successful strategies and incorporate them with your personal style, you get to see the frame from which another operates and can then make decisions to go outside that box to create something new.

Learn the difference between imitation and emulation. It will make you a true original.

All the best,

John

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The Grasshopper hopped into a telephone conversation I was having yesterday when he said, “Limitation is learned early.”

It immediately made sense.

A friend and I were discussing peoples’ attitudes and beliefs about money and then the topic turned to childhood learning. I recalled something Tony Robbins said some 25 years ago: “Ask a group of kindergarteners who the best artist in the class is and all the hands will go up. Ask the same group a year or two later and notice the lack of hands being raised.”

It’s helpful when you are constrained by a belief to notice that belief in action. Part of the noticing is to recognize that the belief was born after you were, because you were not born with beliefs.

Beliefs, whether useful or not, are learned. For example, sadly, the belief that another race is inferior can easily produce a 5 year old bigot with the requisite conditioning. That’s an early limitation.

This isn’t a treatise on parenting because frankly, we are all amateurs in that arena. There is no manual to follow other than the one that was modeled for you during your own upbringing. Yes, each generation makes adjustments to the process, but the art of limitation is still taught.

The real gift comes as an adult when we notice our learned imitations in action. Sometimes it produces a laugh and other times a tear. The emotional reaction isn’t the gift; the noticing of the limitation in action is.

Beliefs, for the most part, are limitations, even a belief in the most accepted of things, like gravity. The limitation of gravity would suggest to most that heavy hunks of metal can’t fly through the air. The Wright Brothers noticed that limiting belief, and in doing so, made room for a new belief that didn’t have that gravitational pull.

Sometimes someone has to point out to us that our beliefs are limitations, and sometimes that realization arrives in an “ah-ha” moment.

The question you don’t want to get caught up in is whether your beliefs are right or wrong, but rather if they serve you or not. If they are not, you are lashed to a pole by your limitations.

Back to money: Putting silver spoon prejudice aside, people with money don’t have the same beliefs about money that people without money do. The real limitation isn’t that you don’t have money; it’s the conditioned limitation about money that keeps you in the red. It’s learned early.

What were your parents’ attitudes about money? Odds are, your attitudes are slightly watered down versions of theirs.

Whether your limitations are about money or some other thing, the route to rectification begins with recognition.

Begin to recognize your beliefs in action and you’ll pause them long enough for a new idea to take root – one that’s not so limiting.

The limitation about limitation is that we don’t take the time to recognize it in action.

Recognition, alone, will do more to move you forward than another mental trip down limitation lane.

All the best,

John

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Limbo is more than a spine testing dance or a hypothesis about the afterlife; it’s a frame of mind that keeps you in a state of wait.

The trapped Chilean miners had no choice but to wait, but we do. Yet, many of us don’t choose; rather we set up shop in Limbo.

Limbo is waiting without anticipation. You are just suspended in time without any view of a horizon or light at the end of a tunnel. It’s truly a “no place” place to be.

You can’t envision what you want because you wear blinders in Limbo.

Limbo is like being in shock; all you can do is fuzzily think about how you can’t move.

Like shock, you arrived in Limbo by accident, but you stay there by your own hand by reinforcing your lack of options.

When you deduce that you only have one option, you stay in a self induced coma known as Limbo.

The one option of permanently waiting is Limbo.

Please don’t confuse the waiting of Limbo with patience. They are different approaches.

Patience suggests something will happen; Limbo is just waiting.

A patient person will take action within their patience, while a “Limbonian” just dies on the vine. Perhaps an example would be helpful . . .

Suppose you have to be patient to go on a vacation. You have to wait until next summer before you can go. You don’t have a time machine to speed up the days but you do have the ability to take action on a variety of fronts. You can set up a weekly savings plan that will give you money to spend on vacation. You can buy discounted sunscreen in the off season in preparation for your summer getaway. You can plan the clothing you want to take, bone up online about the restaurants and sights you want to visit, and the list goes on and on.

In Limbo, you only have one option – waiting.

Limbo is the mythical kingdom of the mind known as no action.

Limbo is being overwhelmed by the mountain; getting out of Limbo is noticing the foothills and taking steps towards them.

The rescue begins by recognizing there are options and then taking action on those options no matter how small.

Here is the 2-step dance for getting out of Limbo: Notice & Move.

You don’t have to bend over backwards to get out of Limbo, just notice you have options and move towards them – a step at a time.

All the best,

John

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Willpower is weak and powerful at the same time.

It’s most often the initiator and rarely the finisher.

Living on a diet of willpower will make you heavy with failure.

Willpower gets a bad rap, and deservedly so, because it is so misinterpreted and misused.

I’d like to make the case for willpower and give it its proper due.

Think of willpower as the match that’s used to light the fuse on a bomb. The match cannot insure that the fuse won’t fizzle out and fail to detonate the explosion necessary to get what you want, but without the match, the process may never begin.

Willpower is a sprinter, not a marathoner, yet we treat it as such, and we attempt to use its power for the long haul. That’s like selecting a chainsaw to prune your bonsai tree.

Willpower is the initial action, period. When you attempt to expend it past its role, you inflict harm on yourself and others. You cause yourself unnecessary pain and failure, and you pollute those you have influence over with pseudo-science.

“Willpowerers” claim to have the answer, but fail to recognize it’s only the answer to the first question of a lengthy exam.

It takes willpower to begin a long journey, but if it’s the only thing in your backpack, it’s highly unlikely you’ll make it to the mountain top.

Look at someone who uses willpower almost exclusively. What you’ll notice is someone devoid of satisfaction. Their life is a task and they rarely bask in what they’ve accomplished, because their focus is on the next project. Willpower for them is like the drug, amphetamine that keeps them from resting and reflecting long enough to discover peace and an easier pathway.

Willpower keeps you separated from your strength. When we have the notion that it’s I alone who makes things happen, we negate the source of our power which is the creative void where willpower cannot enter.

No one is better than willpower to get the ball rolling, but if you don’t employ your other teammates your chances of scoring a goal are slim.

You are not alone. You just have to stop using your willpower long enough to ask for help. It’s in abundant supply once you discover there’s more than “I.”

If your life’s mantras are “tough it out,” “nose to the grindstone,” “just do it” or anything similar, you are misusing the power of willpower. They are great appetizers but a steady diet of them will give you acid reflux.

The ancient Chinese wisdom could have just as easily been stated as, “The longest journey begins with willpower.”

All the best,

John

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