simple truths

Things don’t just happen.  There is a process and if you can get in tune with the process, before you begin, you can save yourself valuable time and headaches.

You would think this is obvious, but for many of us, it seems that we ignore it and jump right in.  Then we fail, and give up saying “we tried our best” when really we just tried wrong.

The reason why we act this way is that there is no point that we are more motivated to act than at the beginning.  In fact, as you know, typically, change doesn’t happen until the pain in not changing is greater than the pain in staying the same.  So at that point when you are looking to “do something” typically you are rather motivated, and want to jump right in and “get ‘er done.”

This lesson is true in so many ways.  How many painful divorces could have been saved, if the couples read books on why people divorced before they got married and self selected out?  How much angst could have been saved if you called the DMV to learn how to set up a new title before you went in and had to go back and forth four times?  How much money could have been saved if you had simply read the fine print carefully BEFORE you signed the contract?

You get the idea.  The lesson is simple to remember, but hard to implement.  So start taking a little to learn how things work before you start and see how much smoother your life goes!

This is a tough post, but bears taking a shot at.

Let’s start with relationships.  The goal in relationships is to become intimately related, but not become so attached that you become lost in the relationship.

Or perhaps we should look at fears.  Don’t be so fearful that you don’t take risks, but make sure that you have enough fear not to do something stupid.

Or perhaps we should think about working.  Work to earn enough money to live, but don’t work so much that it becomes what you are living for.

You get the idea.  We are constantly walking along a tightrope.  And one misstep can push us off in either direction, either of which is the wrong place for us to be.

The problem is that typically in the cases mentioned above maintaining the middle requires constant vigilance – and constant work – and many of us would rather stop the work, and just go to one side or the other.  However, if we do that, we fall off the tightrope, and hurt ourselves even more than if we would have focused and stay in the middle.

So realize that life, is about staying balanced, and in doing so, you will find continued happiness.

You can’t be fully engaged in this world, until you learn to take responsibility for yourself.

Of course, innately we do not want to take responsibility for ourselves, since that means we have no one to blame for our unhappiness.

But guess what.  We don’t.  And if you have been doing it for years, where has it gotten you.  Nowhere.

Pushing off responsibility is a defense mechanism.  It allows us to say, “I’m not at fault, when something goes wrong, I’m still perfect.” and walk away with our self esteem intact.

However, it’s a lie.  And intuitively we know it.  And it hurts because when we live with lies such as these, we know we are trapped, and the emotional energy it takes to keep our lives working on a day to day basis in its trapped form it much to hard to manage.

So step number one if you haven’t already done so is to admit that you are responsible for yourself, and that you have NO ONE to rely on but yourself.  You have no one to bail you out.  You have no one.  Except you.

Now, that is not to say, you can’t use your personality, skills, or even money, to cultivate friends and family that care for you, and that will be there for you.  But if they aren’t, well then, that’s your fault for not doing a very good job isn’t it.  Don’t go blaming anyone else.

If something in the world happens that you didn’t prepare for, well, you should have done a better job preparing.   If someone you know does something to you that you don’t like, you should have done a better job at choosing friends, shouldn’t you?

So ultimately, if you think about it, we really are responsible for everything that happens to us, and to believe anything else is not true.  And as we know, living with truth is the key to happiness.  So take responsibility for yourself, and see how it impacts your life for the better.

There are two ways to give in marriage.  Give and give and give regardless of what you receive back.  Or to make sure there is always a balance of giving and receiving between the two parties.

Both of these are false.

In truth, the person who is in love, isn’t keeping a tab.  It’s not part of the game.  I’ll explain.

You see, when you love someone, you accept them for who they are, for their good and bad traits – and love is a CHOICE that you make.  You choose the person on whom you will bestow your love – and once you choose that person, you can’t take it back (well, more or less).

Now this is not to say, you should choose who you give your love too easily.  You can only choose one person, and you better choose wisely.  Why waste such a precious gift on someone who won’t appreciate it.  Why give a thousand dollar bottle of wine to me as a housewarming gift, I’m happy with anything in the $10-$15 dollar range – that is a Merlot.

However, once you  choose your love object, the giving that you do is a physical expression of your love.

More specifically, giving is our way of connecting with our love object.  There is us, there is them, and the giving creates the connection.  So in our mind there is a connection, then the giving is the physical manifestation of the connection.

As we know, actions are all that really matter in this world.  So when we give, we are reconfirming our commitment to our love – and connecting to our love.

And you know what that is good for?  Our relationship!   And you know who the relationship is good for?  You!  So by giving to your beloved, you are really giving to yourself.  And in fact, if you can keep that in mind, it makes the giving oh so much easier.  So as you can see there is simply no place for keeping score in giving in love.

But you say, what if the person, doesn’t appreciate your gifts?  Well then find gifts they do appreciate!

Further, the more you give, the more invested in the other person you will become, and the more you will come to love them, and tighten your bonds to them.  So the more you give, the more you love, the more you give.  You get the idea.

Now having said that, if you are in a place where you are bitter about giving too much or want to keep score, what it really means is that YOU aren’t feeling the love in your relationship.  So you have a different problem.  Not one about not being given to, but one of not feeling loved.

So if that is the case, don’t lose the forest for the trees, and focus on what is really missing in your relationship from your perspective, but definitely, keep on giving!

Want to save an average of 15 minutes a day?  Stop checking your mail.

It’s easier than you think.  Much easier.

First, set up things so you can login online to see all of your financial statements.  (You already simplified down to no more than two brokerage accounts and one bank, right?)

Then sign up for an online bill paying service that accepts paper statements, like Paytrust (paytrust.com).  All of your bills go straight to them, and you pay them directly online.

Then pay everything that you can on your credit card (remembering that you are still budgeting to make sure you are paying down to 0 each month).

Since you have already set up your bills so that they are all due around the same time of the month, all you have to do is login once a month, and pay them all.  Then balance your checking accounts.  An hour of work a month, and all your bills are paid.

It’s that simple.  Really.

Oh yeah, once a month, remember to clean out all the junk mail for your mailbox, and around your birthday check if your Grandma sent you a birthday card – or did she go electronic too?

I am a salesman, but what makes me effective, is that I don’t sell.

I just can’t do it.  It feels manipulative, and dishonest.

I present options, and let my clients make up their mind.  If they want my opinion, I present it, and I can’t tell you then number of times I have given people suggestions that go against my own best interests.

When I was just starting out, someone told me that “business is relationships” and to a large degree it is correct.  As as we have discussed, relationships are based on honesty.  So the more honest one can be in a relationship, the better the relationship can be, and therefore the better the business can be.  It’s really that simple.

Of course, my relationships are multi-year.  In fact, I have clients I have worked with for over ten years now.  So I don’t know if this would hold true in a car dealership or electronic store.

Of course, that is probably, why I can’t stand going in there.

I recently found out that I am a “highly sensitive person (HSP)”.

Now honestly, I have known this all my life, but sometimes, it takes a someone else to give a concrete term to bring to life what you already know.

What HSP has always meant for me is a gift.  I can read people and situations incredibly well.  Scary well.   It’s almost a sixth sense.  (Of course, it has it’s bad parts too, but its beyond the purpose of this post.)

So with that in mind, let’s review the thought from yesterday, that people put up a facade when dealing with others to protect themselves and their, oh so fragile, self-esteem.

There is a certain percentage of the population that I bump into, that really bothers me.  They are loud.  They are outgoing.  They are smiley.

Now don’t get me wrong, some of my best friends, are loud and outgoing, and in the past a few of them have also been quite smiley.

However, these people that I meet, rub me the wrong way.  My spidey sense goes off.  These guys are faking it.  I just couldn’t stand being around them.

It’s interesting, but these people, often find themselves in positions of power.  This is NOT to say that everyone with these attributes in positions of power are like this, but it seems to me that a higher proportion than expected of these people get to these positions.

You have probably met similar people as salesmen along the way.

I realized recently that I don’t have much of a tolerance for these people, and perhaps it is because, I myself was being fake about who I was, in my own way, and that internal struggle made me very uncomfortable.  I wonder if now that I am being myself, if I will find myself more tolerant them, and just feel sorry for them, and their unfortunate situation.  I hope so.

The general take away from this is that when we are frustrated at someone else and judgmental towards them, the true reason is often because we are really frustrated at ourselves for not fixing our own issues – otherwise, we probably wouldn’t have even noticed the issue with them in the first place.

In fact, I recently heard an old saying that talks directly to this point, “when you point your finger towards someone else, there are three fingers pointing back at you.”  So remember, that next time you don’t like something about someone else, perhaps it is time to look within and see what you don’t like about yourself.

I read a few books over the weekend, which really added value to my life.  After all, self-help books are the poor mans therapist, right?

Anyways, one of the books that I was reading (Risking, by Viscott) said the following, and I thought I would share it.

He explained, that the only if we are being true selves, and allowing people to accept us for our true selves, can we ever actually experience true self acceptance – and feel worthy of being our selves.

I am going to take a step back and apply this to myself, a little, and perhaps it will serve as a reminder to myself when I look back on this in the future, and a lesson to the rest of you.

For much of my life, and perhaps even now, I wanted nothing more than to be accepted by the world.   The basic fallacy that I was living with, was that if the world knew who I was, they wouldn’t accept me, so I pretended to be someone else.  Now in reality, the change between the “real Josh” and the “pretend Josh” wasn’t that great.  However, in my mind, the result was that I never really found world-acceptance since they were only accepting the pretend Josh, and therefore never actually found self-acceptance.

However, once I was able to tell myself that I didn’t care what the world thought of me, and that I wasn’t going to show them a  “pretend Josh” any more, I quickly found that no one stopped liking me, or dropped me as their friend, and my life kept going on as before.  Well, this soon lead to self acceptance.

Which leads to the  following irony: The path to self-acceptance is through not caring what anyone thinks about you AND realizing that people like you for who you are.

Do you understand the power of projection?  I didn’t.  But I do now.

Let’s cut to the chase.  We view the world through our eyes.  Well that seems obvious, but the scary part is that we just don’t realize how deeply engrained this habit is.  (Now of course, I am writing this blog and projecting on you that you too have a deeply engrained capacity to project, and perhaps not, but I’ll assume that for now!)

The upshot of our projection is that we go around in a daze overestimating and underestimating ourselves, and not really being in touch with the real world.  We live in our own made up world a large percentage of the time.   Pretty scary if you think of it.

We project how much people like us, or dislike us.  We project how honest someone is, or dishonest.  We project how caring someone can be, or how heartless.  It’s all in us, and while it might be rooted in reality, it is equally possible that it is baseless.

So I challenge you to look at your world through the eyes of someone who IS projecting.  Make that assumption.  Then once you know you are projecting certain things on other people, really judge them and see if they meet your projection – or if perhaps the reality if different than you have made it.  Perhaps you will justify things but perhaps you will figure out that you have been living in a world of illusion.

I hear voices.  Constantly.

Before you call the looney docs, let me explain.  Please.

As far as I can tell, there seems to be two voices inside me competing for my attention.  The guttural and the analytical.  The guttural voice underlies everything, but is typically drowned out by the louder analytical voice.  Now, every once in a while, the guttural voice pops out and has a chance to say its part and the analytical voice gets to take it into account.

However,  I feel that for me too often, it is only in retrospect that my guttural voice is telling my analytical voice “I told you so.”

So it is time to learn to quiet my analytical voice, since only by being able to hear BOTH voices can I truly be conscience.

And with that introduction, I began the process of finding a good meditative practice.