Here’s one sign a relationship is in trouble – When you start giving or receiving serial apologies.

Serial apologies are the universal “tell” that your relationship is on the skids.

Relationship in this context is any association you have with another human being – business, personal, casual or serious. If you are giving or receiving a regular dose of “I’m sorry,” you have the biggest clue that you or this other person will not come through.

Most serial apologizers are lacking in another “A” word – Action!

There is no action taken on the offense they are apologizing for. For example, if you are getting a steady diet of “I’m sorry for being late,” the apology can only be taken seriously if the person takes action to arrive on time.

If apology and action don’t go hand-in-hand, you’ll be dealing with serial apologies.

An apology with an excuse or a justification attached is a warning sign that you’ll be getting that apology again, because the person isn’t really apologizing; they’re stalling until the next time they have to apologize.

Stalling in this context is lying.

How many of your apologies are not genuine? If it’s more than one, you are a serial apologizer.

If you notice serial apologizing in another, it’s useful; if you notice it in yourself, it’s transformative.

Here’s a tip: Don’t be sorry for that which you are not sorry. By doing so, you will interject more honesty into a relationship and keep secret agendas to a minimum. That sort of transparency will help you make sounder decisions about advancing your relationship or not.

If you find yourself continually apologizing, you are attempting to keep secrets that everyone can sense at some level.

Genuine apologies are the closest thing we have to an “Undo” button in life; serial apologies just ensure we’ll do it again.

All the best,

John

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Do you wake up with the same thoughts each day? You’re not alone.

It’s your own personal “Groundhog Day” – The same thoughts leading to the same actions.

Some motivational gurus got us to buy into the notion that if you change your thoughts, you’ll change your life. That statement is accurate, but the method we use to change our thoughts keeps the same thoughts in place.

The premise of the “Change your thoughts, change your life” approach is that all we have to do is get rid of our current thoughts and replace them with more productive ones. We are to do this with positive thinking and affirmations like, “I will only think positive thoughts.”

Where that strategy falls apart is when we finally notice that we have no control whatsoever as to the thoughts that pop into or out of our head. We have been taught by our positive thinking training to just replace that smelly thought with a flowery one. That never works!

So how do we change our thoughts, change our life?

Noticing our thoughts is a start. Rather than condemning them and looking to perform surgery on them, it would be wise to just put them under observation and watch them heal on their own.

A morning practice might be to just notice that “I’m waking up with the same thoughts I had yesterday.” This is enough of a practice to get some new thoughts moving in.

The next step to change your thoughts is to slightly alter your physical routine. You may notice that your daily rituals are anything but varied. We are boring creatures of habit. My experience is that this sameness of activity has a correlating effect on our thoughts – Same activities, same thoughts.

When you adjust what you do with your body, it has a corresponding effect on your thoughts. It doesn’t have to be a major change, just an adjustment or two on a regular basis. For example, you may have a sequence of doing things upon awakening. Vary the sequence and see what happens. If you pee first, pee second. Vary your physical routine regularly and you’ll start to notice a new variety of thoughts.

One thing I have learned from personal and professional experience is that subtlety is the friend of change. The temptation is to “Go BIG“; that’s usually a big flop.

If you are tired of waking up the same, put a little change into your game. After all, it’s no accident this adage has hung around so long: “Variety is the spice of life.”

All the best,

John

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Imagine wearing the clothes you wore at your 6^th birthday party to work, school or wherever today. Unless you’re still 6, they’re not going to fit; you’ve outgrown them.

That’s pretty obvious. What isn’t so apparent is that we still have patterns of behavior we learned at an early age that look as silly on us as our 6^th birthday party outfit would, yet we wear them every day.

If we become aware of them, these are the patterns we vow to get rid of. Vowing is where the wicket gets sticky.

Think of something that really had meaning for you at one time but doesn’t mean that much to you now. Chances are you didn’t vow your way to your new found attitude; you just outgrew the old one. For example, think back for a minute about some goofy clothes you wore as a teenager. They were meaningful to you then but you wouldn’t be caught dead in them now, even on Halloween. You didn’t vow to stop wearing them; you mentally outgrew them.

Outgrowing is something that just happens over time, but for some that process hardly ever happens. That’s because they are too busy vowing to get rid of the old habit pattern which doesn’t allow enough room for a new pattern to take hold.

Some would call it determination; in most cases it’s lunacy.

Does this mean we shouldn’t make an effort to put this pattern behind us? No, it simply means we have to retool our methodology.

Just look at your track record in attempting to get rid of something. If you’re like me, it’s abysmal. The rub is this: We never really get rid of anything; we just outgrow it.

You still own all the patterns you learned, but the ones you’ve outgrown, you don’t use anymore.

Stop making resolutions and start becoming aware of the patterns you want to outgrow. Giving attention to a pattern, while it’s running, waters it down. Your patterns need your attention, not a solemn vow.

The formula for outgrowing something is to give it as much attention as you can muster. Just notice when you are running or about to run a pattern that’s not working for you. Your attention will begin the process of outgrowing that pattern; vowing just keeps it in place.

Vowing has you fighting with your patterns; attention just has you notice. All victories I’ve had by fighting my patterns have been temporary. Any pattern that I’ve outgrown happened on its own.

There is a way to accelerate that natural process of outgrowing something. It’s called attention.

If you must have a vow, make it this: “I vow to have this pattern until I don’t.” At least this way you are giving attention to the pattern, rather than fighting with it again.

Giving them your attention will have you outgrow patterns more quickly, instead of making vows about things that will never change.

All the best,

John

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There seems to be, by anyone’s barometer, a lot of unrest going on. It’s like dog poop; it’s everywhere.

The good news is there had to be rest before there was unrest, otherwise we would have nothing to compare it to. It’s like my late teacher, Dr. Dave Dobson would say, “You have to be whelmed before you can be overwhelmed.”

Unrest and being overwhelmed are states of mind, nothing more. It’s like the old axiom goes, “It’s not what happens to you but what you think about what has happened to you.”

The way back to rest is to notice that you are experiencing unrest. Recognizing your restless state of mind, while it is happening, is the quickest way to get your mind to calm down and return to rest.

It’s an amazing feat to watch unrest take over our mind. It can start as a minor annoyance and work its way to a full blown assault in a mere matter of minutes. There is always a point at which you can affect the outcome. Most often we ignore that point and take justification in our unrest which just has it burrow in deeper.

If you desire more rest than unrest, you have to train yourself to notice the choice point. The choice point is when you notice the unrest. When you start to notice the internal dialogue that fuels the fire of unrest, you spray water on the fire. Noticing shows you the fire hose. Your choice is to use it or not.

Most unrest takes on a life of its own and seemingly doesn’t give you the option of seeing that hose. You have to notice the unrest first and then you’ll see that you have options.

If you are upset, this means you have to notice that you’re upset in order to have any chance of finding a choice. Without noticing and choosing, your unrest will stick with you for much longer periods of time.

Unrest needs acknowledgement, not justification, in order to have any chance of morphing back to a state of rest in a quicker time frame.

From a state of rest, you can make any point more cogently and keep the fires of unrest at a manageable level.

Rest or Unrest: That is the question. The answer comes down to a choice – Yours!

All the best,

John

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I was watching a photography lighting demonstration when the instructor said something that caught my fancy. He said, “Sometimes you have to go too far to know you’ve gone far enough.”

His photographic message sunk in right away, but I sensed there was a broader application to his remark.

I’m not a fan of the phrase, “pushing the envelope” because it has been so overused, but its practice does help us to discover when we’re in the uncomfortable zone between far enough and too far.

If we make going too far a habit, we will pay a heavy price, but if we never go too far, we may never know the joy of going far enough. We will play it safe. Granted, we will have fewer ups and downs in our life, but that ultimately translates to less life – A life of quiet desperation.

Richness of life requires risk – the risk of going too far.

My experience with people who won’t even go near the borderline is that they fear more of what people will say about them than they fear the feeling of going too far. What others think of them prevents them from living life more fully.

Here’s a secret that you may not have come in contact with yet: People are going to think what they think about you no matter what you do. They make that determination early on in your relationship and it rarely changes. Take parents for example; they often think the same things of their grown children that they thought of them when they were little. It reminds me of the great line from the movie, SABRINA featuring a character named Linus who was played by Harrison Ford. This question was asked of a man who knew Linus as a youngster: “What was Linus like as a boy?” His answer was, “Younger.”

When figuring out life’s recipe, sometimes you have to add too much salt. The experience will get you past bland and you will know, more than theoretically, the perfect amount.

Living our life in our head is theatre; getting offstage and into the audience once in awhile may take us too far, but it does let us know we’re living a false, sheltered existence that contains far too much drama and not enough real life.

You have to go over the edge to know the edge. Again, in life, if you do this all the time, you’ll suffer severe cuts; if you never do it, you’ll never cut it.

All the best,

John

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The Grasshopper stopped by yesterday with this profound, tasty treat: “There aren’t new truths, just new discoveries.”

The truth is always the truth; it doesn’t morph when circumstances change. Truth is the underlying reality that no situation on the surface can alter.

The problem as I see it is that we mistakenly label many things as the truth and then we discover something new that counteracts that truth, and we call it a new truth. Chances are that neither of them are true, just discoveries along the way.

Just look at the heady topic of physics. There’s Newtonian Physics and then there is Quantum Physics. Newtonian Physics was the gospel truth until the discovery of Quantum Theory, and then it became the prevailing truth.

The truth is the foundation on which discoveries are made. Resultant discoveries point in the direction of truth but never really pinpoint its location.

Truth cannot be defined nor located, but it exists everywhere.

Our truth is not “the truth,” just a discovery we hang onto until a new “truth” takes its place.

I believe The Grasshopper is reminding us that our relative truths change with new discoveries and are really not the truth at all. The reminder is simply this: Our way is not the only way.

You may have discovered a preferred way of operating that may or may not be working for you, but either way, it’s not the truth. When you label it as such, you are apt to resist any new information that could lead you to a new discovery.

Also, labeling your preferred way of thinking, doing and believing as the truth, makes you a pain in the ass. And that’s the truth . . . or as close to it as I can come.

All the best,

John

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