Always have a toothpick handy!

In my ”about” bio at the top of the page,  I mentioned that I moved to South America in 2004 to retire and work on my Spanish.  It was a great plan!  What I didn’t tell you is that everything in retirement didn’t work out exactly how I planned it.  If it had, I would probably still be relaxing in Ecuador. 

Before I explain what happened I have to share a funny line I heard from one of my co-workers in August of 2004.  We were talking about my upcoming decision to retire and he said, “I myself have also planned well for retirement.  I have saved enough money over the years so that I will be able to live like a king for the rest of my life….. that is, as long as I die by February of 05′!!! ”

That line really cracked me up when he said it.  Little did I know that life was going to throw a bit of a curve at me making my real retirement eerily similar to his tongue-in-cheek witicism.   Without going into all the gory details I am bemused to tell you that I went broke!  I lost it all due to some poor choices and a little bad luck.  Now I find myself starting over again at the age of 61 and I have to say, I have never been happier!

I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be! 

I spent so many years on the fast track in Las Vegas trying to amass all the goodies and toys that I could.  I thought that that was how you kept score.  You need to amass all the material things that you could.   WRONG!   All that approach does is give you ulcers with worry and constant stress and anxiety.  I now know that instead of increasing my material wants, I should have been decreasing my material desires. 

Don’t get me wrong, I like money as well as the next person because it gives you a security and freedom to do the things you want for yourself and your loved ones.  Where I went wrong was  thinking that the only reason for doing something was to make money.   The correct thinking should have been, and still is, the truism;

You will get everything in life that you want, if you just help enough other people get what they want! 

I realize I have lost my money but I haven’t lost my wealth.   I have my health, my talent and a new zest for life that has been missing for many years.  

I wandered around with no direction for about 18 months.  I was a headless vector!  I finalized a “War of the Roses”  type of divorce and went through a bankruptcy.  I wasn’t sure what I was going to do until my son gave me the idea of starting this blog.  I now see the real mission of my life.  I not only want to rise out of the ashes myself but with your help maybe assist others who are in the same boat as me.  I realize I am in the autumn of my life but I have never been more jazzed and motivated than I am right now.  

I’m not worried about dying…I’m now worried about not living!

No one wants to die.  Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there.  And yet death is the destination we all share.   No one has ever made it out alive.   And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life.  It is Life’s change agent.  It clears out the old to make way for the new.  Right now the new are my sons and the youth of the world, but someday not too long from now, they will gradually become the old and be cleared away also.  Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Our time is limited, so we can’t  waste it living someone else’s life.  We can’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking.  We can’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out our own inner voices.  And most important of all, we must have the courage to follow our hearts and intuition.  They somehow already know what we truly want to become.  Everything else is secondary.

So my days of being a headless vector are over!  I can’t wait to see what tomorrow brings!  Later, Rick

PS.  I need your help!!  What can I do to make my blog better and what more can I do to advertise it?  I will cherish  your comments and/or advice.  Let me know.  Thanks for sharing some of your valuable time with me!  Rick

AND, if we will get our butts off the couch once in awhile and move around a little bit we might find that not only will our emotions get better but we might just burn off a calorie or two!

I mean, we ought to be ashamed of ourselves.  I sure don’t need the Surgeon General to tell me that we Americans are killing ourselves with our forks.  All we need to do is sit on any street corner in America or any mall and gape with wonderment at the mass of overweight human protoplasm shuffling along in their endless search for the next nacho plate or twinkie.  It is amazing.  The kids are no better.   I now understand why some animals in the wild will eat their young to improve the species!

It doesn’t have to be that way.  All it takes is the decision to make better choices.  Of course any change is going to be met with resistance.  (See the post on homeostasis)  The key is not to try to do too much too soon.  That’s why 80% of the New Years resolutions to lose weight have already been broken less than 2 months into the new year!  A pound is 3,500 calories.  So to lose a pound we need to eliminate 3,500 calories either by cutting back our intake or increase our burning off of calories.  Small changes are the key.  Just move around an extra 30 minutes a day and choose to knock off one or two lattes a week or some other little treat that does nothing for us and we can easily realize a pound or two loss each month.     That’s about 15 pounds a year with no muss or no fuss.   That’s not very much you say.  Well, just look at the alternative.  If you do nothing but continue with your same sedentary lifestyle and eating habits I can almost guarantee that one year from now you will be about 10-25 pounds heavier than you are now.  The choice is yours and a no-brainer.  10-25 more or 15 less.  Net loss of 25-40 pounds of ugly fat in one year!   Next case!

“If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”

The above quote from Henry David Thoreau is inspiring. It is also incomplete, for it is also true that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams he will meet with something called homeostasis.

Homeostasis is a basic survival mechanism that Maslow said was in our basic heirarchy of needs.  It is the tendency of a system or organism to stay the same. It is like a thermostat that keeps your changes within a certain range. Call that range your comfort zone. In order to learn and grow, it is necessary to step out of your comfort zone, yet every time you do, homeostasis kicks in, slowing your progress or halting it altogether.

Homeostasis often shows up as fear. You’ll be moving along nicely toward a certain goal when, seemingly out of the blue, you get panicky and stop. You get a much anticipated job interview or you have a proposal accepted or you have a great business idea and once the initial excitement wears off you are left with the sick certainty that you cannot live up to the opportunity.

Because homeostasis is a systemic response to change, it can feel like self-sabotage. There is an important difference: sabotage implies that some part of you has an active desire to undermine your progress. In contrast, homeostasis is a value-neutral, automatic response to change. It is not the result of a secret desire to fail or of any hidden agenda other than the built-in tendency of the system to stay the same.

If you mistake homeostasis for self-sabotage, you may waste precious energy beating yourself up for limiting beliefs or hidden agendas. If, indeed, you have such issues, it will be well for you to address them. However, you can be in marvelous mental and emotional health, free of limiting beliefs, and still run into a brick wall when homeostasis kicks in.

Fortunately, the better you understand homeostasis, the less power it will have over you. Here are some key points to keep in mind.

1. Homeostatic fear shows up whether the change involved is good or bad. The intensity of your fear and resistance is related to the size and pace of the change, not to the quality (good, bad, wise, unwise) of the change.
2. Homeostatic fear can crop up in family, friends, colleagues and clients as well as in yourself. Remember, this does not have to mean that these people have a secret desire to sabotage you. Their concerns may simply be the way the family or group is expressing its natural resistance to any change.
3. While you cannot root out or prevent homeostasis and its attendant fears, you can negotiate with them.
   • Break the change in question down into smaller steps. This reduces the intensity of the resistance. (Remember, homeostasis increases with the SIZE of the change, not the NATURE or VALUE of the change.)
   • Pace yourself. Making the change over time also reduces the intensity of the homeostatic reaction.
   • Analyse the actual risk.  Seek reliable information about the scope of the risk you are taking and the best means to meet it. The better your information about the actual risk involved, the less huge it will seem.
   • Set milestones and celebrate when you reach them. This gives you a conscious history of successful change and makes it easier to move into scary territory in the future.
4. Design an environment that supports learning and growth and avoid people, places and things that undermine learning. While a certain amount of resistance is inevitable (that’s the whole point), why waste any more of your energy and attention than is absolutely necessary on overcoming the tendency to stay stuck? Make a list of aspects of your environment and brainstorm the choices you can make in each to support stepping out of your comfort zone. For example, you might choose to ask your friends to support you in using empowering language or you might choose a gym based on its culture and values.
5. Commit to fundamental personal practices that keep you centered, whole and flexible. Such practices instill in you a sense of stability and groundedness that minimizes the feeling that you are at grave risk when you step out of your comfort zone. Helpful practices include exercise, meditation, journaling, participating in a support group and having a personal coach. 
6. Reframe setbacks as perfectly created exercises in the workshop of your life. It will be easier for you to move through homeostasis if you let go of the fantasy that there is or should be a point in your life after which you will have “arrived” and will no longer need to change.

  Remember that great Simon and Garfunkel song from the 60’s?   One of the verses went:

People talking without speaking, 

People hearing without listening. 

How true, how true!!  Truly good listeners are very rare.  We all love it when we come across one because they make us feel so good.  They seem to hang on every word we speak and can actually feed back what we say to us thus confirming how important they feel we are.  We recognize them easily.   Good listeners make us feel important and we trust them.   To stand out today, you don’t need to be a great listener –just be a good listener because everyone else is so terrible at it.   Unfortunately, for most of us, listening is tough.  We seem to have so many distractions that get in the way.  We have all experienced situations in which we have been  speaking with someone and all of a sudden we realize that although we have been hearing the sound waves excaping the speaker’s mouth, we have no idea what they have been saying.  We have been caught with our minds wandering and have been justly embarassed by our inattention.   

It’s sad that nobody taught  us how to be good listeners when we were younger.   Why do some people seem to do it naturally?  Do they know something the rest of us don’t know? 

 Read on and discover the secret to being a good listener. 

I had the pleasure about 20 years ago of attending a seminar in Las Vegas.  The speaker talked on many subjects but the most interesting to me was a short session on something called  Neuro-Linquistics.  He showed that as powerful as our remarkable brain is, it can only process new information one bit at a time in serial fashion.  In other words, our brain, the most powerful computing instrument known to man can only process one bit of information, one after another, in single file.  It can’t process two bits of information at the same time or in parallel fashion.  Now, of course our wonderful brain can process new information very, very quickly but still; only one bit at a time.  To prove that, for example, we can’t think of brown cow and white horse at the same time.  You can think of the cow and an instant later think of the horse but not both at the same time. 

So what does that little known fact have to do with our listening skills with others? 

We all have this little voice inside of us.  It’s constantly carrying on a dialogue with us.  Call it what you want but our little voice never shuts up.  It’s talking to you right now as you read this article.  It’s saying things like, “I wish this guy would get to the point, or, I’m really spending too much time on line or, this is the best blog I have ever been to.”  Whatever it says, its no big deal when you are reading.  If your inner voice distracts you, you can just go back and reread what you missed.  No harm, no foul!

  However, it’s not that easy when you have another human being across from you.  Now if your inner voice distracts you, you’re in trouble!  All you can do is pretend you were listening and hope you get lucky.  Or, you can just apologize and say something inane like, “I’m sorry, I just checked out there for a bit and didn’t hear what you said.”   The problem is that brain of ours can only process information in serial fashion.  Since there are two voices playing, we have to choose which one to listen to….our inner voice or that of the person we are speaking to.  We can’t listen to both at the same time!  The problem is that we tend to listen to our internal voice above all others because it is US.  It is who we are and our egos won’t let our inner voice be shut out by others.  This fact sure makes it tough to be a good listener.   The solution, however, is easy!  The key is to shut down our internal voice which frees us up to totally focus on what the other person is saying. 

The technique is simple.  All you have to do is repeat silently and verbatim to yourself exactly what the other person is saying as they are saying it.   By doing that, we totally shut down our internal voice and focus 100% on what the other person is saying.  Try it.   It works like magic.   Go grab someone and start a conversation.  You will remember exactly what they are saying because you are 100% laser focused.  We all, at times, let our inner voice begin to interrupt when we are speaking with others.  It doesn’t have to be a sales situation either.  We can be talking to our wives or husbands or kids or anybody in any situation.  We are the victims of our inner voice.  So, the next time you find your mind wandering and you recognize that you aren’t paying total attention like you should…you can get back on track immediately by shutting down your inner voice using this technique.  

Please let me know if this technique worked for you.  Thanks for sharing some of your valuable time with me.  Rick