It just occurred to me that we give the lion’s share of our attention to beginnings and endings and give precious little attention to the middle.

The middle is where most of life happens, yet we rarely celebrate it. We are big on birthdays (beginnings) and thoughtful with our accolades and eulogies about endings, but the bulk of our existence gets short shrift.

The middle is what is happening now. It’s worth celebrating. We don’t have to save our attention for a beginning or end. We can just stop at any point along the way and give attention to the middle.

We will stop our busyness to give attention to a beginning or end but we keep our head down and plow through the middle without attention.

When is the last time you sent a note, email, text of appreciation to someone for no good reason? Sure, you remembered their birthday or some other special day, but when’s the last time you just picked up the phone to say, “Hello”?

“Meet me in the middle” has taken on a whole new meaning for me. It spotlights that any point in time is just as worthy of my attention as is any beginning or end.

Let an Oreo Cookie be your reminder that most of the sweetness is in The Middle.

All the best,

John

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I have to admit that, in the past, I would not have been described by many as a patient person. I, like many, thought that patience delayed desired results that could happen sooner.

I soon found out that my timeline was not the only thing to consider in getting results.

My impatience often got me results with ruffled feathers. That’s OK in an emergency, but everything is not an emergency.

If you approach all endeavors with an emergency timetable in mind, you will deal with lots of impatience and get less cooperation from others and experience delayed results.

I have a new definition for patience: It will take the time it takes.

That means that you have to be flexible. If you cannot anticipate and pivot from monkey wrenches and roadblocks to what to do next, you will be spinning your wheels in frustration which is impatience on steroids.

Yes, there are real deadlines. Train, plane and boat schedules come to mind. Then there are self imposed deadlines that may be unrealistic because they don’t allow time to deal with the ubiquitous “Murphy” should he show up with his attorney.

There has to be breathing space built in or you will spend too much time attempting to catch your breath.

Here’s an example of impatience on parade: I occasionally watch a very talented woman host a news hour on TV in the afternoons. She talks very fast which causes her to make more speaking mistakes than she would if she slowed down just a bit. Additionally, she doesn’t give you time to breathe and process what she’s saying. I’m guessing she grew up with one impatient parent that she unwittingly emulates. Her impatience to get to her point has her gifted observations and questions get lost in her rapid fire delivery.

That’s a self imposed deadline that gets in her way. My broadcast coaching experience tells me his woman could easily write her own ticket to greater things if she would just take the time it takes.

What are you rushing that could benefit by more space? I’ve told the following story before but it bears repeating. There was a rookie heart surgeon assisting an accomplished doctor during open heart surgery. They were about to do a procedure that had to happen in 45 seconds or less to be successful. The seasoned surgeon observed how impatient his young assistant was up to this point and then took the time to say this: “We’ll have plenty of time if we don’t rush.”

What are you rushing towards that, if you took time to breathe, would happen in much less time?

Impatience is any timetable’s enemy. It seems like it would move things along faster but the reality is it slows things down.

Here’s my parting piece of advice for the perpetually impatient: If your arms are folded and your foot is tapping, take the time it takes and get the results you’ve been lacking.

All the best,

John

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Here’s an argument that’s accurate but one that will be lost on just about anyone you present it to – You are the cause of your feelngs.

The counter-argument is: You did X, therefore I feel Y. In other words, without your stimulus, I wouldn’t have had that response.

If the stimulus is the cause of your feelings, you would have to have that response every time the stimulus was presented.

Pretend you are in a bar and you see some creepy looking person giving you the “once over.” As a response, you get, as we used to say, “the skeeves.” Same bar, 15 minutes later and you get the same look from someone who looks rather inviting. Are you reviled?

You set it up that the same stimulus can generate a different response depending on whom it’s coming from. By setting up a selective response, you cause your feelings – both the good and bad.

No where is this more apparent than in language. Some words delivered in a certain tone of voice may have you chew the other person’s head off for using them in your presence. How dare they cause that response in you! Same words in the same tone of voice delivered by someone near and dear often delivers a different response.

That’s because you have set up in advance how you are going to feel in a certain set of circumstances. Thus, you are the cause of your feelings.

Reminds me of a story . . .

I was conducting a corporate, stop smoking seminar in Virginia about 5 years ago. When describing tobacco fields, I describe that there are a lot of flies in the field that land on the leaves. I rhetorically ask, “Do you know what they leave on the leaves?” I then answer my own question – “Fly shit.” The room laughs.

But I saw this one woman recoil at the phrase. After the class, she came up to me an told me she enjoyed the seminar but that I had made her feel uncomfortable using the phrase I did to describe fly droppings. I explained that to underscore the point of all the chemicals and foreign matter contained in tobacco that this phrase seemed to drive the point home best with the hundreds of thousands of people the seminar has been presented to. She repeated that I made her feel uncomfortable.

I knew my explanation was going nowhere so I borrowed a story from NLP Guru, Richard Bandler and asked the woman if I pushed her buttons. She said, “Yes.” I then asked her if her buttons were on the inside or outside, but cautioned her that before she answered, if she said they were on the outside, I would have to call men in white coats to come and get her. She laughed. I then asked, “If they’re on the inside, how could I have access to them?”

I then said, “You’re pushing your own buttons.” She set it up that she would be upset in the presence of certain words. She caused her own feelings.

We all cause our own feelings. it’s usually a conditioned response to a given stimulus. If you want to change your automatic feelings to a given stimulus, you have to change your response to the stimulus.

If you want to continue to give people power over you, stay addicted to your response to their stimulus. They’re just using your conditioning to hook you time after time. But remember, you set up how you were going to feel in the first place. If you set it up, you can dismantle it.

It takes some practice but it’s quite possible to change your response to a given stimulus. Here’s one way to do it: Put a wedge between the stimulus and response. That means to catch yourself about to respond in the way you normally do, then allow that response to pass by and wait for another one. If you wait, another response will surface. This new response will get you out of robotic answering mode and it will have different feelings attached to it.

We can spend the rest of our lives blaming circumstances and other people for causing the way we feel, or we can discover that we cause our own feelings.

When you discover you are the cause, you cause new feelings to happen.

All the best,

John

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The Grasshopper gave me a new entry for my personal dictionary – PREHAB.

We all know what “rehab” is. That’s rehabilitation which always happens after the fact.

Notice the attention most people give to rehab; it gets the lion’s share and sits on a high rung on the priority ladder.

PREHAB doesn’t occupy the same space for most people, and lack of it puts the curse of walking under a ladder on us.

It’s truly amazing the amount of torture we will put ourselves through when rehabbing. It rarely dawns on us that we could give less than 10% of that effort to prehabbing and prevent the arduous task of rehabilitation.

You’ve heard the expression, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” That wisdom is summed up in the word, “PREHAB.”

What is it you would give maximum attention to if you knew, in advance, that lack of said attention would lead to the demise of something you prize?

Prehabbing is noticing and then changing your priorities. Prehabbing how you relate to another is worth your notice, as is how you treat your body.

A couple of examples: If you are divorced or heading there, chances are pretty good you forgot to prehab. If you have a self-induced physical condition that’s causing you disease and pain, you have taken your body for granted and will have to pound yourself into a cure.

We live the fairy tale that we will be unaffected by our destructive habits until the moment of truth when rehabbing is our only lifeline. Sadly, even rehabbing isn’t an option if we pass the point of no return.

Prehabbing works, you just have to work at it.

You can easily see the downward spiral someone else is on but, again, we live the illusion that we’re immune to the rules of reality. It may be time to notice the path YOU’RE on as well.

An easy maxim to remember is: If you always do what you always did, you’ll always get what you always got. If you’re getting more than your share of pain and suffering, you’re headed to rehab.

You can head that trip off at the pass by getting into the habit of prehabbing. It begins by noticing where your habit patterns will lead. Then it’s time for a personal intervention. That means to take action and interrupt the habit pattern while it’s happening.

This repeated intervention is the ounce of prevention.

Most people know they are living a lie by pretending “that” won’t happen to them. Yes it will, unless you begin prehabbing.

There is a prefabricated medication to avoid rehabilitation. It’s a daily dose of PREHAB.

All the best,

John

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Question: How much laughter is in your day? Not, yesterday, not last week, but every day in general.

Answer: If not much, you’re on a bus to bleakness.

The most miserable people I have known rarely laugh. My observation is they generally have more sickness than people who do make laughter part of their day. The non laugher will claim that the sickness caused their misery, but if you do a historical check, their misery was in place long before the malady.

Laughter is a natural thing that some have been conditioned out of. That’s the bad news. The good news is that you can condition yourself right back in.

You can learn to laugh just like you can learn piano. Both take practice.

Laughter is medicine and it is worth relearning.

If you recognize that you’re morose, just think of anything that’s made you laugh in the past. That’s a smile starting point. Seek out things that make you laugh. This will start giving you more radar for what’s funny to you and you will begin to see it everywhere.

Most importantly, learn to laugh at yourself. When you perfect that skill, you finally discover that you’re not perfect because to think you were is laughable.

If you have been labeled “Serious,” that’s code for miserable. You need to learn to laugh.

It doesn’t cost anything and the benefits are too numerous to list.

Bottom line: Laughter is the remedy for misery.

I realize I’m stating the obvious here to people who already have made laughter a part of their life. This is more an attempt at an intervention for those who live under a cloud. My request to you is to LOL!

All the best,

John

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It may seem obvious to you but it recently dawned on me that curiosity leads to creativity.

I will admit there are many who are more curious than me. I admire them, but up until recent years, I haven’t emulated them.

If you want creativity to show up, it’s quite useful and, dare I say, downright necessary to get curious.

It seems to me that curiosity is the fuse that ignites creativity or causes you to create things.

I think of my father who was always curious about how things worked. He built everything from cabinets to skyscrapers. I was much less curious. I sought information but never delved deeply into it. It hampered my ability to create. I was at the hand holding stage with curiosity; my father, on the other hand, was married to it.

I don’t know how the switch happened but I’m much more curious these days and a lot more creative than I’ve ever been. They seem to go hand-in-hand.

When you’re curious, you open up a lot more circuitry in your brain. You add possibility to uncertainty. The opposite is also accurate. When you aren’t curious, your ability to create gets stuck and your lack of thirst to know won’t allow you to grow.

When we think we know enough, we close off our curiosity and, thus, our creativity.

The good news is that curiosity is a transferable skill. That means that you can get curious about anything and the creative benefits stream into all areas of your life, not just what you were curious about.

You become more creative in areas where creativity previously was absent.

If you aren’t feelng very creative in your life, may I recommend a dose of curiosity. A small amount will get you started. Once you get a taste of the advantages it delivers, you’ll schedule more time for curiosity.

If I put bumper stickers on my car, this would be the one I’d affix: GET CURIOUS!

All the best,

John

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I am writing this on a Friday and TGIF popped into my head. It seems to have more meaning than the traditional usage today. Perhaps it’s an alternate acronym.

TGIF – The Gut Isn’t Fallable.

Sensations lose their meaning when they are subject to interpretation. A raw sensation is reality which has no opposite, no spin or no alternate meaning.

Gut feelings (sensations) are not debated before they are expressed – only opinions and theories go through that process.

What is your gut communicating that you keep ignoring while your head is busy weaving a story?

We know immediately when something’s not OK, but we often debate that feeling in an attempt to make it go away.

We also know when something is “right without rules” – translation: OK. If you need a rule to validate a gut feeling, you are about to pollute the raw sensation that’s being sent.

Whether you are reading this on Friday or not, make the effort to calibrate your own “Cold” and “Hot.”

Then you’ll be able to separate your sensations from your thoughts about them. It short-circuits endless debate, and you can move more quickly to a solution, rather than living in fear of retribution.

All the best & TGIF,

John

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Have you ever played the “What would you do?” game?

What would you do if you won the big lottery jackpot?

What would you do if your mother and your girlfriend were drowning and you could only save one?

What would you do if you if you found out your boss was stealing money from the company, but if you told, you’d have to give back the giant raise you just received?

I’m sure your questions could be more creative than the ones I’ve offered, but what is the point of the game? It’s to have you envision yourself in an unlikely situation and predict what you would do.

You may think you know what you would do, but that is only theoretical. What you would actually do when actually faced with those circumstances may be a lot different than you think.

So what?

It’s my assertion that we too often think our way through life rather than live our lives.

That means we are dancing in our imagination and not stepping out on the dance floor.

What have you been daydreaming about for decades that you’ve never made one attempt at? That’s escapism of the highest order. You are postponing living waiting to hit the big jackpot. You have a better chance of seeing the “Great Pumpkin” on halloween.”

I think daydreaming is a wonderful thing to do to bring moments of pleasure our way. If it becomes a way of life, you have no life.

Like The Grasshopper told us earlier this year, “Life is a contact sport.” That means you actually have to rub up against life to feel alive.

The question isn’t “What would you do?”; the question is “What are you doing?”

What are you doing to make that dream come true? What steps are you taking right now?

If you’re not moving in the direction of your dream, it’s a pipe dream, and continuing to play “What would you do?” is a surefire way to make sure it never comes true.

All the best,

John

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Are you the next thing on the schedule? Is someone next on your schedule?

Scheduling is an organizing tool that gets things done but can also remove the feeling of importance from you or someone else.

When you are on a schedule, there is a time constraint put on you or another, and the ability to explore whatever is scheduled more deeply is missed.

Scheduling serves a wonderful purpose. It keeps our trains, buses and planes on time and it allows businesses and households to function more smoothly. Where scheduling gets in the way is when you feel you are being squeezed into someone’s day.

The formula for failure seems to be: Treating X like it’s the next thing on the schedule rather than X being the schedule.

It’s a matter of attention. If you are scheduled, your attention is more on your schedule than it is on the person who is scheduled.

Physicians are accused of this all the time and, frankly, many I’ve experienced are guilty as charged. But this isn’t a rant on doctors.

The ability to have your attention on whom you are with when you are with them keeps your focus on them and scheduling becomes invisible. It’s still there in the background, but it doesn’t get in the way of a connection. The interesting thing is that when you give your full attention, the interaction often comes in ahead of schedule.

This works with tasks as well as it does people. Giving your full attention to the task at hand has it happen in less time than it would if you’re also focused on the next scheduled event.

If you’re looking for a good example of task focus with people who have a busy schedule, I invite you to watch a pharmacist work. Most of the ones I’ve witnessed have laser focus when filling a prescription. It must be something they’re taught in school. It results in fewer mistakes and they stay on schedule.

Here’s my final thought on today’s schedule: If you are doing important work or you want to convey importance to someone you are working with, give it or them your undivided attention. Translation: Make attention the only thing on your schedule.

All the best,

John

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