Last week I was noticing that in many respects I was waiting.  Waiting for something to happen that I would take as my cue, for me to act or make a change.  And I realised that my particular situations were much like other people I was interacting with, where I could clearly see that it was them who needed to make the change first.

And as Michael Jackson’s song, Man In The Mirror, seems to be always playing somewhere in a day at the moment, the message struck home to remind me that we  have to always start with the Man in the Mirror.

photo credit: newtype2011

So I’d decided to write about this and then when I got back to my computer I saw Brian’s comment;

“Shift your focus to where they are at. Lose any concern for anything, except that to want the best for them. Not what you think will be the best for them. But that they are happy”. 

This is my biggest challenge with regard to my ex wife, as her happiness also involves the one she’s with – a previous friend. There’s so much hurt there, along with my regrets. I can imagine any person of greatness, Buddha, Christ, etc., would do just what you suggest. I am on the fence myself. Your words sit in front of me like a fork in the road and there is great emotion about taking either path. 

“Soon you will have great relationships with each of them as Individuals and they will love you and want to be around you”. 

This is the part, I suspect, where faith takes over for someone in my place. It certainly connects to how I’ve always wanted to be. Thanks Rob.

I believe there is a huge misunderstanding commonly held about greatness.  People generally believe that genuises are born not made.  That some people are naturally greater and more capable than others.

And so all our stories of legendary figures, from Robin Hood to Leonardo Da Vinci to David Beckham make them seem destined to triumph.  Especially when it comes to religious icons like Jesus, Buddha and so on the tales become more and more supernatural.

Religion has been accused of many, many crimes.  It has motivated wars, slaughtered non-believers and so on.  But the worst, by far, has been the instances where it has led people to believe that they are not equal to and so capable of the same potential as anyone else living or dead.

There is nothing stopping you or I being as great as Buddha, or Jesus, or any other individual.

It is just the mythology that surrounds those who achieve greatness that makes them seem removed from the same struggles that we face.  As if the greatness they eventually achieved was inevitable before birth.

I don’t think that is true and I think it demeans their achievement.

If you try to piece together accounts of the man, rather than the legend, you will find instances where they struggled to accept what they knew was their path.  Of course, we know that they arrived there in the end, but we have the abbreviated version.  We missed out on the doubt and insecurity they felt while they got up to speed with what they knew must be done.

We are all physical and so we all face physical limitations.  The distinction is that some people understand and accept that while they are physical beings, their sense of consciousness isn’t.  And so they do not limit it to their body, they allow it to fly unrestrained.  Therefore they were able to burst far beyond the limitations of their physical senses and explore a greater universe of thought.

In other words, they literally transcended their circumstances, found a better way of looking at it and returned to the physical world with such an enlarged view of the world that they caused it to grow towards their level of consciousness.

As Brian says, there are at least two paths open to him (and to you).  One will lead to you seeming to achieve greatness and the other can range from good to awful.

It often is too scary to take the road to greatness because it feels like too big a leap to make from where you are.  It involves more unknowns than you are comfortable with.  Which means that the choice feels like walking across a high tightrope without any certainty that there is a beam to walk across.

Yet everyone who has ever performed a heroic deed, has ever forgiven another, found a breakthrough innovation or has ever overcome a problem has followed this same process.

The Way To Making Lasting Inner Change

Any comfortable change begins internally.  If the outside world changes before your inner landscape is ready for it, you will feel upset and/or uneasy with the changes.

And so the path to greatness or even to just avoiding pain begins when you are able to become more flexible.

People get depressed when they see no way out, which is another way of saying that they are trapped in their current perspective.

People feel bored and in a rut, not because there isn’t, or couldn’t be, anything exciting in their life, but because they lack the ability to look at their life with a fresh perspective.

The happiest people are those who have the most flexibility of thought.  If the way they look at a situation feels bad, they are able to find new perspectives until they improve the way that they feel.  Sometimes this can be pollyannaish and lead to a skittish and shallow happiness.  This is because the person is afraid of the negative perspectives and so avoids noticing them.  But the deepest levels of happiness and awareness comes from being able to see from every possible vantage point, both light and dark as in the diagram above.

]]> http://livewithoutconflict.com/blog/key-making-lasting-change/feed/ 0 http://livewithoutconflict.com/blog/stress-anxiety-overcome/ http://livewithoutconflict.com/blog/stress-anxiety-overcome/#comments Wed, 10 Jun 2009 13:00:19 +0000 Rob McPhillips http://livewithoutconflict.com/blog/?p=949 Life is like a continual tight rope walk.  A balance between wanting to get to what we desire and dream of and walking through the valley of what frightens us.

On the one hand we have passions that inspire us and on the other we have fears that prod us into states of stress and anxiety.  Our experience in life is determined by how well we can maintain our balance in this continual journey.

Everyone naturally gravitates towards happiness.  The problem is that to reach anything, that we think will bring us happiness, involves walking through the valley of fear.  Those that are not happy, are those who have lost their balance walking through the valley of fear.

“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Happiness is essentially the recognition that you are free.  Stress and frustration are the feeling of being trapped and limited.  Anxiety is the fear that you may be limited and vulnerable.

I would like to talk a little about the structural basis of stress and anxiety, so that we are able to see more clearly how to ovecome them.

Our entire experience of humanity is the perception of limitation.  We are limited in what we can do because of time.  Limited by space.  We are limited by our physical capability, our mental capability and our emotional capability.  Time after time we meet barriers and seemingly insurmountable obstacles.  Our experience is truly defined by the boundaries of our perceived limitations.

Yet what one believes is impossible, another can do again and again.  Not so long ago, it was believed that it was physically impossible for human’s to run a mile in less than 4 minutes.  However once Sir Roger Bannister achieved that feat, it became commonplace.

Some people believe it is impossible for them to make new friends easily.  Some believe it’s impossible to make money easily.  Some believe it’s impossible to get their kids to behave.  But there are others who are able to make these things happen time after time.

You see, what you believe is possible is determined by your thought structure.  What I like to call your Human Operating System.  And this thought structure, coming through the limitations of your perceptions is inherently flawed.  So unless you ‘upgrade’ your Operating System, you limit what is possible in your personal universe.  The more limited the possibilities in your universe, the more problems you get, as the the true universe conflicts with your personal version of it.

The diagram below shows this visually.

So the more aware you are of what you believe and perceive and the more you challenge your view, the more you’ll update and so expand your Possibility Zone.  As a result, there will be less and less problems in your life.

However what many people find is that, while they believed expanding their possibility zone would achieve a blissful state, there is still issue after issue to deal with.

What actually happens is that there are less problems, but you develop a much more refined level of sensitivity.  Therefore you become aware of minor problems that never previously registered.  There is a perfect physical analogy to this that might make this clearer.

In the last 80 years, medicine has been one of the areas that has made most significant advances.  We have identified and found solutions for hundreds of new diseases and ailments.  I think we can agree that our general level of health is better.  We live longer and are far less likely to suffer from debilitating illnesses and chronic pain.  But take a look at the following statistics.

In the 1920′s there were 8 reported incidents of sickness per 10 people.

By the 1980′s that had risen to  21 reported incidents of sickness per 10 people.

That’s a 160% increase in reported sickess.  So are we less well?

The difference is one of suffering threshold.  How much pain or discomfort we are willing to put up with.  Previous generations grew up watching people suffering and dying from terrible diseases such as Tuberculosis and so on.  When others around you have such serious and easily observable conditions, it seems churlish to complain about feeling a little lethargic.

When the standard for being ill is having a serious illness people are less likely to notice or complain about niggles.  But when you take much of those big illnesses out of the picture, people begin to notice anything less than perfect health.  So despite objectively being in much better health, people now actually report more ailments and niggles.

Likewise, some people live in states of great turmoil.  Yet others who live in relative peace can suffer a relatively equal or greater amount of stress from incidents that wouldn’t even register to the other.  It’s all just a case of where your thresholds are.  And this is what is at the root of anxiety.

Anxiety is often confused with the symptoms it brings.  The real issue is not the sweating, the palpitations and so on.  Nor is it even the incident that triggers the symptoms.  The real cause of stress and anxiety is the level of your thresholds.  With a higher threshold the incident wouldn’t cause an anxious response.

Life is continual movement.  Inhaling and exhaling.  Up or down.  Contraction and expansion.

So in every area of your life, you are either growing and expanding or shrinking in your status or capability.  You are either becoming more confident or less confident.  Richer or poorer.  Healthier or less healthy.  Closer or further apart in your relationship.  Happier or less happy.  Better able to handle stress or less able.

The thing is that the less that you do, the less you are comfortable doing.  Conversely, the more that you do, the more you are comfortable doing.

Perhaps the most common source of anxiety comes from social interaction.  What typically hapens is that people feel shy, or anxious, and so they avoid interacting.  Maybe they do interact, but they interact through proxy.  By which I mean they put up a shield, a defense mechanism, that they hide behind.

But without facing their fear and moving through it, they haven’t raised their threshold and so the same things still frighten them.

Reaching your fear threshold is like walking up to a fire.  Your temperature increases, your heart beats faster, your mouth goes dry.  The closer you get to the fire, the more amplified the fear becomes.  And so it feels that if this is how bad the fear of it feels, well the feeling of it actually happening must be enough to annhiliate me.

Actually though, what happens is that you discover that the fire is a mirage.  You don’t get burned because because once the event is here, the anxiety is gone.  Anxiety can only be based on anticipation.

Sure sometimes it’s replaced by intense embarrassment or pain.  But that is just another threshold.  And going through the experience will raise your threshold, regardless of whether it turns out well or not.  So next time, the same event won’t cause the same level of anxiety.

However, if you shrink from the fire, you never find out that it is just a mirage.  And so you get stuck by the heat of the approach.  You become stuck.  Debilitated by your inability to get beyond your fear.  Because you never venture closer to the fire, your thresholds lower.  Therefore more and more frightens you.  Until your entire life becomes surrounded by fire.  A prison of fear.

Your quality of life, in every area, relationships, finances, social life, career and so on is determined by your thresholds.  By how low a quality you will accept and by your willingness to face your fears and raise them.

Everything that you want, but don’t yet have is gained by raising your thresholds.

Everything that you don’t want and currently have, in your life, is eliminated by raising your threshold levels.

I have long believed that the concept of ownership is an idea that is mistaken and outdated.  It is at the root of all conflict and until we come up with a refined upgrade we will never live in peace.

photo credit: gjofili 

What I find particularly exciting about the time in which we are living, is that so many of our long cherished and almost unquestioned precepts on which our civilisation has been built are reaching their breaking point.  

Our financial system is crumbling, we have discovered that we can no longer declare war on someone when we don’t like what they are doing and succeed easily, our penal system is already oversubscribed and authority everywhere is losing control.  All of these are glitches in our collective Operating System and all are due for a major upgrade.  

Let’s just think about this for a moment.

photo credit: indichick7 

The planet we live on is thought to be about 4 and a 1/2 billion years old.  

Our species has existed for about 100,000 of those years, maybe 500,000 if you take a looser idea of what being human is.  

The longest a single person has lived for is 130 years, give or take a few years.

Yet we have convinced ourselves that we have a God given dominion over our planet.  What is it that makes us believe that we have any more right to breathe than any other creature or plant?

There are many species that have lived happily long before us and there are species that will live happily long after us.  I wrote recently in the post on depression and compassion about how we slant our view of the world to put ourselves at the centre of it.  Well, our cultural view of ourselves, works to put ourselves bang at the epicentre of the universe and anything else we can conceive of.

Older religions were based on an idea of Gods taking a very active concern over our activities.  Maybe they wanted sacrifices, (note the sacrifice was always someone lesser than us that we owned, an animal, a virgin etc) or were squabbling amongst each other about our destiny.  

Current religious views from the Judaic path, ie Judaism, Christianity and Islam, are all based on their followers being the Chosen Ones.  And therefore at the centre of concern and importance.

As we have become more educated about the world around us and discovered that the sun does not revolve around our planet and that actually we are merely one, of literally billions of planets, we have clung for dear life onto the idea that our planet is special because it is the only one with sentient living beings on it.  

Have you noticed how everything is based around the idea that we are at the centre of importance?

Life is all a story we tell ourselves.  And we naturally choose the story that meets the needs of our ego.

Let us look at the history of our species with the facts as clearly as we can.

It looks like we evolved out of Africa.  And so one day, in search of a more bountiful source of food, some walked and settled in different parts of the world.  With climate and geological changes, the land mass became more fractured.  As a result people became more separated and developed their own individual civilisations, religions and cultural myths. 

After mastering the art of agriculture, people began to settle and so about 10,000 years ago the first societies started to take shape.  

The Nomadic perspective of living off the land changed to a view of mastering the land.  A significant shift in perspective.  And so was born the myth of ‘Man’s dominion over the earth’.  Instead of being seen as a bountiful provider, land was seen as property, an object that Man could manipulate.  And so began the objectification of the world.  

photo credit: babasteve 

Over time, fear and insecurity led to the notion of formal ownership of property.  As the idea of Nation States were born, borders were set.  And so Man became foreign to his Brothers and Sisters.  What was once free for all to roam became fenced off and separated from each other.  Some are allowed in, if they are deemed useful, but others aren’t.  The entire basis for this discrimination, segregation and infringed freedom is force.

The only thing that contradicts the power of these Laws is, if someone with a bigger stick is able to come in and claim ownership.  Then they get to set their rules.  Just like the law of the playground. 

When new land was found, such as the United States and Australia, land became a free for all.  Whoever can reach an unclaimed piece of land owns it.  Sonds very like the rules of the games I played as an infant?  

Who really owns the land to grant it to another anyway?

And today people are selling plots on the moon and ownership and naming rights to stars.  On the Internet we are sold domain names.  In our shops we are sold the flesh and skins of animals.  Many pharmaceutical companies are alleged to have bought up certain healing plants so that they control and profit from their use.  And as Susan Jeffers did, companies can buy the rights to certain words and images. But who really owns these?

If someone mugs and kills someone for their wallet and gets caught they go to prison.  But if someone kills and conquers a country, she becomes Queen, or Emperor or whatever, becomes worshipped and can set the rules and tell the story that gets passed down and becomes the new cultural myth.  

Isn’t there something a little flawed in this picture?

I understand the argument that you need order or chaos will reign.  And that all of our lifestyle, which allows us the time and ability to progress, is built on these principles.  Clearly communism and revolutionary alternative systems are not the answer.  However we do and will need to consider the basis of our ideas of ownership in our own minds.

Why?

photo credit: bob watt 

Because all conflict originates with a dispute of ownership.  Ownership of property, of God, of sovereignty and of perception.  Essentially the conflict boils down to who owns the correct version of reality.  In other words wanting to be right.

Out of the belief we are right comes the idea that we are sovereign over.  Not very long ago, Wives and Children, were (and in some cultures still are) considered the property of their Husband and Father.  Wives pledged to Love, Honour and OBEY.

It is the idea of ownership that causes us to look at people and animals as objects, things that we can do with as we please.  Because they are ours.  This then leads us into a world where slavery and abuse can exist.

We are giving birth to a new idea of the world.  Our growing sensitivity to the pain and suffering of others is pushing for these changes.  The specific example I gave is one of many cases that demonstrate that our current view does not work.  So too is the music industry’s losing battle with piracy.  Ditto Hollywood.  Ditto Prada and every other form of property.

Peace can only come when we stop trying to be God.  We do not own anything, not even our body.  We merely borrow for a relatively short period of time.  Then it returns to the Universe’s recycling centre.  

The world is not ours to change.  It is ours to experience.

Today something has inspired me to revisit that topic, but to emphasis it in a stronger way.  Watch this video and I’ll be here waiting when you get back.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqantZJ6WwM[/youtube]

While I feel this point so strongly, and hopefully while the video above has put you in a more receptive state to this message, I’m going to spill out the frustration I feel when I see people wasting hours, days and even years on living a miserable existence when it could so easily be different. 

photo credit: Aitor Escauriaza

I can remember when I was a very small child.  I used to look at roads or trails that I did not know where they led to and wonder if down them there may be a shortcut to somewhere I wanted to go, but I knew was far away.  People waste their time, their money and their life on looking for such shortcuts.  Yes, you don’t have to be wasteful in reinventing the wheel from scratch. It is possible to learn the process and stand on the shoulders of others.

But so many people want to believe, as I did as a child that somewhere 300 miles away might be found in a 5 minute walk or drive, if only we found a secret path.  

Dieter’s are seeking the magic diet that will make them slim without changing their relationship with food.  

Desperate men are looking for the magic phrase, or deodarant, that will suddenly make supermodels fight each other for the chance to sleep with them. 

photo credit: Axel Hecht

Insecure women are pumping themselves full of poison hoping people will believe their biological clock works in reverse.

And everyone is running around thinking that if only those other fools would not be so selfish and foolish and do things the way I wanted all would be well.

I’ve been involved in the diet and self help industry for long enough to know the way it works.  People want results without being prepared to pay the price.  It’s understandable.  When I get the bright idea of some new project and the time comes to do it, it always seems so hard to get started and my mind seeks any distraction to avoid the drudgery and uncertainty ahead.  So I completely understand the mental process, but I also know that just beyond that sticky patch is the most fulfilling flow state. 

photo credit: Arthur Legardo

I have noticed that so many people never get beyond that fear and overwhelm and so when a new diet comes out or a book that says it’s discovered a path that can metaphorically take you 300 miles in 5 minutes, there’s a stampede.  

The paradox of life is that we want to get as much as we can for as little as we can give, but we only enjoy what we have, when we give all we have.

People always fall for the story that there’s just this mountain to climb and then there’s eternal paradise.  The truth is that paradise is a state, not a place.  And state’s are always changing.  There are only plateaus, but never a final destination.  There’s always a higher mountain.  Because ultimately all the fun is in the climbing.

photo credit: Falashad

It doesn’t matter how many long lost secrets you unearth, stuff is always going to go wrong.  People will disappoint you, betray you and leave you.  Things will happen right out of the blue that will turn your life completely upside down.  You will fail.  And fail again.

But that does not have the power to affect how long you feel negatively about it.  It does not matter what happens to you, you can still maintain your own balance.  

And that thing that feels like a punch to the stomach, you can take that, recover and pick yourself up without wasting your time dwelling in self pity or bitterness.

You know, if there’s one person that I look at and admire above all others, it would be Jesus.  And this often gets confused.  Not for any of the religious reasons.  I don’t believe he was born uniquely special.  I don’t believe any of the supernatural stuff, like the immaculate conception, walking on water or even the resurrection.  

My admiration for him comes solely because of his strength of character.  He had perfect integrity.  Nothing swayed him from his inner truth.  Not being beaten.  Not riches or power.  Not the threat of death.  Nothing.  And so he was pure and untainted by the world.  He was what we all would be if we did not sell out to our fears and greed.

The rest of us get seduced by greed or fear.  And some get lost because instead of standing for something, they become an amalgamation of the worlds wants.  Right now on this planet there are millions of people walking around squandering oxygen because something went wrong and they gave up.  

They tried to get their dream job or get their business going and something didn’t work or someone discouraged them and so they gave up.

They loved and lost and it hurt so deep that now they have given up.

They tried and made a fool of themselves and so now they try no more.

You don’t have a choice.  As Nick said, if he doesn’t keep trying, he’ll never get up. But with persistence, he’ll find a way that defys logic.  And so will you.  

You are either living or dying.  Growing or decaying.

Growing is the process of struggling against the forces that depress you so that you can again rise to the top.  Decaying is simply the state of rotting in your bitterness or pity.  

People grieve those who have died.  Yet death is just giving up.  I grieve those who have given up as they breathe.  They shuffle about, but are just waiting for the slow, miserable physical decay to catch up.

Up until last year, I was pretty reclusive.  I wrote a book and a website, interacted with a few Clients and answered Reader’s emails, but that was about the level of my interaction.  I’d never hung out at forums, taken courses or spoken to other Writers.  You see I only valued what I learned.  And I learned quicker alone.  Interaction slowed me down, because I had to wait for other people to catch on.  Like the Hare with the Tortoise, in my arrogance and impatience, I overlooked the power of friendship. 

photo credit: scott_48074

It’s so much harder to do anything alone.  It’s like living without the wheel, electricity and chocolate.

In an upcoming post, I’ll be talking about my Sister.  We are very different in styles.  She is much more sociable.  Now academically, I outshone her easily.  Yet despite having more qualifications she had much greater success in the jobs market.  

Aside from one or two, she has got every job she applied for.  And she works at a senior level.  You see, she does a good job, but more than that she has a network of people, collected from school and every job since, that help her know how to best position and apply herself.  

Apart from one job that lasted six months before the company hit trouble and restructured, I have never been hired for a job that used my brain.  You might think I have personality issues or interview poorly.  Yet everywhere I have worked, I got great references from and could go back to any of them.  Many of them I have.  

When I have been at day long interview assessments I have always reached the last few.  I just missed the final cut.  But you see I never had a network to tip me off about unadvertised positions.  No one ever wanted to be the first to take a chance on me.  To do that someone needs more than logic, they need an emotional connection.

I couldn’t create that and so I’ve always had to take the longer route and do anything I wanted to do by myself.  Some people have someone more experienced to guide them on their path.  I’ve never had a Mentor to show me the pitfalls and shortcuts, so I have had to rely on books or expensive courses and figure out the steps for myself.

photo credit: diy.disco

In whatever you want to achieve there are always multiple paths.  Some people get there by what they know.  But there are others who get there by who they knew.  Sometimes people feel this is unfair, but really it’s just a different skillset.  Probably an easier, less painful and more valuable way to get what you want.   

Now I’m not a social person, but I’m not socially dysfunctional.  It’s not that I don’t like people or can’t get along with them.  More that small talk bores me and I’m a little uncomfortable with it, so the payoff never seemed worth the risk of rejection.  I know what I’m here for and what I’m built for and it isn’t small talk.  So it’s often easier for me to write an 800 word blog post than to know how to respond with a quick 2 line comment. 

But now I have reached a point where I have gone as far as I can alone.  I needed to be isolated until now because I needed to develop trust and conviction in my own independent opinions.  Towards the end of last year I realised that I had gone as far as I could from study and contemplation and it was time to interact with the world more actively.  To share and express myself as honestly and fully as I could.  In doing so here, your comments and questions have made me dig deeper and gain greater clarity.  And so I enjoyed the interaction and wanted to create it at a deeper level.

Then I joined Facebook and Twitter to work out what they are about.  Initially they baffled me, especially Twitter.  But just from being there for a while, I stumbled across some really interesting people who were working in various ways to help people get more from life.  And I gained so much in interacting with them.  

Relationships really are the shortcut to everything you want in life.  If you want to avoid or quickly move through life with minimal pain and negativity, it’s going to come through other people. 

I know that the next step for me is to end my isolation and become more involved in relating to people and through them relating to Life in a deeper way.  I think it’s probably true for you too.

photo credit: Flyinace2000

Today as the world becomes faster and more competitive, we need to be able to develop relationships.  The world is gradually moving towards oneness and unity.  It benefits us in so many ways to be a part of networks in the coming years.  Networks of all kinds.  Networks of physical friends, networks of professional contacts and networks of like-minded people.  People often talk of multiple streams of income, but it is more important to have multiple streams of friendship.

As I said, I have started by building a network of friends on Facebook, Twitter and also LinkedIn.  I’d like you to join me there.  But we need multiple networks, you might not be on there or you might want to keep that network to certain other relationships.  That’s why I’ve been looking into adding networking features into my websites.  

Just yesterday Google invited me to try out their new feature, Friend Connect, that helps websites add social networking features.  You sign in with one log in and can have Friends across your favourite websites.  I jumped at the offer and so at the top of the page, to the right, you’ll see a box that looks like this;

I would love it if you would join here and we could both add to a new stream of friendship.  At the moment it’s quite limited in it’s functionality.  So it might not be the ultimate solution, but it will be a start we can work from.

I made a quick video to show how easy it can be to join Friend Connect here

photo credit: Nomad Tales

Yet the truth is that all these problems have their origin days, weeks, months and even years previously. Problems are the outcome of imperfect design. They may stay hidden for a certain period of time, but eventually they will reach a situation where they will be exposed. This is a manifestation of what I spoke about a couple of weeks ago; The truth will out.

The problem didn’t occur when you noticed it… it was bound to occur due to your attitude, your perspective or your behaviour. You just became aware of it.

For example, according to the media, everyone right now is shocked and panicking at the state of the economy. Yet the problem has not just occurred. It was obvious for the last two or three years that this was about to happen. The problem is not that people have too little confidence in the economy. The problem was that for the last three years people have had too much confidence. More confidence than the facts warranted. Collectively we became carried away on the wave of a boom.

photo credit: rimesparse

I started to look for work in 1988. It was a bad time, after the excesses of the eighties and the beginning of the recession. There were similar attitudes and pessimism then and I wanted to understand why. I read a couple of books to understand the situation and one particularly made an impression on me.

It demonstrated how we have economic cycles where people lose all sense of perspective economically and then veer dramatically and believe the entire system is about to collapse. It demonstrated how confidence in economic wellbeing was linked to such unrelated things as permissiveness, the length of skirts and many other factors.

From the South Sea Bubble to the 1930′s depression. It related how people would sell their houses to invest in a sure thing, tulip option, only for it all to crash in 1637.  Over and over again in various countries in relatively predictable cycles.

photo credit: Aidan Wojtas

It explained to me how markets worked. Especially, ‘The Greater Fool principle’. This is the idea that someone makes money on something. Others hear about their success and follow them into the market. Then their success becomes known and everyone floods into that market. But eventually there’s no-one left to buy from them and so the market crashes.

This is how when Joe Kennedy realised that Shoeshine boys were investing in the stock market that the price couldn’t go up because there were no greater fools to come into the market. Back in the late eighties, Sir James Goldsmith made an impression on me with his similar prescience. He saw what was happening in the market realized it was all about to crash and sold everything including his house and office. On the Black Wednesday when everyone else realised what happened, no-one could get in touch with him because he’d sold everywhere he was contactable.

photo credit: TheTruthAbout…

Back in the eighties the pre-crash talk was all about how new now Economists could master the economy and prevent such feats of nature as booms and busts.

In the last couple of years, the talk, here anyway, was all about how the influx of Immigrants have pushed up the demand for housing and so house prices will always rise.

All crap.

When an average salary is not enough to buy a house, when you have people taking out 60 year mortgages and banks lending 125% mortgages, it’s a sure sign that there’s no-one else to enter the market.

There are always cycles and seasons. There will always be booms and busts that reflect the confidence of people. And equally there will always be reasons that make sense to everyone who wants to believe them. It’s just another way people try to make the world fit in with their belief structure rather than pursue truth.

It’s wanting to be right rather than happy.

In just the same way there are problems cropping up for you and I, that do not have to be problems if we broaden our level of awareness and catch them before they crash into our awareness.

It all depends whether we want to be right or happy?

photo credit: Werner Faymann

And so all that generates an enormous amount of pressure to not screw up. To portray exactly what the person you are trying to impress wants to see. And so people feel this anxiety because they don’t know exactly the impression they need to make.

If you ever feel this kind of anxiety, I’m going to take one moment now to give you a strategy to relieve it instantly.

Forget trying to create an impression.

It’s nonsense. Even if you make the ‘right’ impression, you’re just causing problems down the line.

If you are trying to con someone into hiring you for a job that you’re not suited to, you need to make a good impression.

If you are trying to sell someone a heap of worthless junk, you need to make a good impression.

If you are a lying, cheating, bullying Lover, than you need to make a good impression.

If you want something from other people that isn’t really a match with your skills or attributes you have, then your success in getting them is like success in a lottery. It depends on your first impression matching with what they are looking for.

But otherwise you just need to be yourself.

Personally, I know that I often don’t give a great first impression. People have told me that they initially thought I was aloof and stand offish. But I don’t worry about it any more. Because one of two things is going to happen.

Either we will never meet again, in which case they are irrelevant to me and I to them. Or they’ll get to know me and over time discover the real me.

It’s the same thing, with making a sale or getting hired.

Over time a Buyer, Employer or Lover can evaluate the best fit for them. Or maybe they can’t. In which case they lose out, you move on and forget about them.

There are tons more lined up behind them, who are just as rewarding to sell to, work for or love.

photo credit: sergis blog

If you wanted to hire the best Golfer, would you hold interviews to make a decision?

Of course not. We both know that one man stands head and shoulders above the rest. But it wasn’t through first impressions was it?

photo credit: minds-eye

You see, the truth will always out.

Any Golfer can hit one great score and be in the lead at the end of the day. Less can still be there at the end of two days. Much less again can win a 4 day tournament. Very few can win the most in a season. And only one can be the best over five or ten years.

Many Actors or Actresses have hit movies. Same thing with Singers or Writers. But few have more than one. And very few have hit after hit.

It’s the same in any field. Over time the best will be the only one still standing. The Pretenders will all fall away as obstacle after obstacle reveals the truth.

The purchase, recruitment or relationship that is based on a misleading first impression, won’t work out.

Sooner or later the truth will out. The product will fall short. The new Recruit will make mistakes and cause problems. And Prince Charming will turn out to be a wife beating, cheating scumbag.

You see, over time people can much more accurately pick the best or most appropriate. But when forced to make a decision from a snapshot they make mistakes.

You have to not need the sale, the job or the relationship right now. You have to be comfortable in your own skin, metaphorically stand on your own two feet and then people will pick up on your confidence, based on your certainty, and you’ll make the great first impression. Because you’ll be an exact match for what they need.

And those Client’s, Employer’s and Lover’s that if you got involved with would cause problems and heartache down the line, they won’t buy because their muddled thinking will cause them to be swayed by the veneer of someone else’s first impression.

Be the yourself and sooner or later you’ll be recognised by those you are the best match for and they’ll seek you out. But when you pretend to be what you’re not, you’re just causing problems for later.

‘an apple a day keeps the Doctor away’

to me relates to the importance of consistency.

photo credit: bestfor

I think we all have a tendency to want to deal with an issue and want to shut the door on it for good. I know I’m especially prone to hoping if I can just get this thing done, I can forget about it. I’m hopeless at consistency. It’s one of the reasons why I feel well suited to what I do because I look at issues from lots of different vantage points. But a side effect is that it means I’m less productive in a lot of ways. Instead of ploughing ahead towards a result, I get up everyday and reinvent the result.

But life is a process, not an event.

You can’t put in a marathon weightlifting shift and come out looking like Arnold Schwarzenegger.

photo credit: whyld

You can’t set aside two days a year for housework and breathe a sigh of relief that it’s over until next year.

And equally, you can’t grapple with an issue that’s causing you stress, resolve it and then expect that it’s resolved, never to raise it’s head again in any form.

You have to use the insights from the issues that cause you stress as the stimulation for your personal evolution as part of a general growth process, rather than as a bothersome obstacle to what you think you really want to be doing.

Back when I had a Health Club, the exercise machines broke fairly often. I used to look at that as an inconvenience. Now I’m not good with mechanics and I hated messing with them, so I worked out a deal with someone who enjoyed working with them for a free membership.

He looked at the machines and situation differently. He understood why they went wrong and worked out a maintenance schedule. The machines went wrong less and less often.

Everything has a cycle. When you understand the cycle and work with it, problems happen less and less often.

Work out the cycles of the important parts of your life, friends, family, career, money and maintaining your health and wellbeing and make maintaining the health of these a part of your daily life.

Today and every day.

photo credit: Emily VanWormer

The breaking point is either the point in the strategy that for some reason no longer fitted with who you are or what you wanted to do. And so you jumped off course before reaching your goal.

Or it’s the point where the design of the strategy proved to be flawed and so failed to reach you, your goal, even though you followed it’s lead.

Most of us live our lives by default and so we become overwhelmed by trying to satisfy a number of contrasting demands. This strategy doesn’t work so we get stressed when we hit our tolerance level for coping. That’s the breaking point for that strategy.

Maybe you seek to be loved by pleasing others. The breaking point for this strategy is when you have to choose who to please or when pleasing someone else means sacrificing your own happiness.

A robust strategy that will always work is based in purity.

Google’s unwavering dedication to providing more and more relevant search results works. Other search engines lost because they became less pure as they balanced the need to cash in.

Tiger Woods has been dedicated to winning at golf all his life. Nothing has got in his way and distracted him from winning. I’m sure there are other Golfers potentially as talented, but who had more balanced lives.

photo credit: mandj98

Dominoes Pizza stood out from countless other competitors because of their pure focus on speed of delivery.

photo credit: stu_spivack

Buddha focused only on enlightenment, overcoming the distractions of both comfort and self denial.

When you have a strategy that works, if you follow it purely, you will succeed. If you dilute your strategy, you will fail.

If your strategy fails, you learn from it and redesign a better, more robust strategy.

For example, we commonly think of strategy as something to be used in a military, business or team setting.

An army can seek to outnumber, bombard, siege or exhaust an enemy.

photo credit: pingnews.com

A business seeks to be the cheapest, the best quality, the most accommodating, the most convenient or the most advanced.

A sports team can aim at having individual skills or being a solid hardworking team.

photo credit: Lori Greig

But the quickest way to failure is to try to do them all.

What does any of this have to do with you?

Well you want to be loved, admired and respected, don’t you?

Not only that, but you want to be the most loved, admired and respected by certain people, such as your Parents, Partner, Children and Boss etc, don’t you?

photo credit: AZAdam

And to be loved, admired and respected, you have to stand head and shoulders above all others for something. You can stand out as the prettiest, the most understanding, the brightest, the most fun, the most romantic, the most loving etc.

But if you follow the herd, which most of us do, trying to be as good as John at that or as naturally whatever as Jane at this, you’ll end up mediocre at a lot of things and blend into the anonymous crowd.

You have to have a strategy for life. Not because you’ll get the girl, or because it will fill the gap for the way your Father never loved you. But because it is what you are.

You were built and designed to fit into the mosaic of life. But we are all so busy, trying to make ourselves copies of some other square that the space we would complete lays empty.

photo credit: johannesfreund

You are what you are. Not by mistake. But by design.

If you are unhappy with what you are, it is only because you do not see what you could be. What you could be cannot be seen in the world, because otherwise you would not be. What you can be can only be found by looking within.

Purity, by which I mean the integrity between what you feel and what you do, is the way to find you. Compromise is selling your soul for a trinket or a compliment. Stay pure and you will find your way to the edge of evolution and you will find behind you a crowd who love, admire and respect you as the leading example at whatever it is that you are designed for.

But by then you will not care about the love, admiration and respect for you will understand that purity has it’s own reward, with a value far beyond anything anyone else can give you.

Want an example?

Jesus pushed the strategy of only responding with love beyond all limits.

Now what is your strategy that you can follow with equal zeal?

Once you start to do that you get lost in the flow of negativity and bitterness until you lose all perspective and are unable to dig yourself out. Once this happens you’ve lost your free will and ability to choose your response and direction.

One of the ways of maintaining perspective is to understand that no one is all bad or all good. I’m sure there has been at least one person in your life that you once thought was great and now can’t stand. Which is right?

Both.

It depends on the time and context in which you met the person. Let me explain…

Sometimes you can look at something and recoil in disgust. Say for example that you open your fridge and find a rotting piece of fruit or a bottle of soured milk. It’s offensive to your senses, isn’t it?

Or how about a plant or flower that has died? One that once looked so pretty and full of life, but now it’s all dried up and dead?

It’s not that the fruit, the milk or the flower or plant is ugly or that it inherently disgusts you, it’s just the timing of when you meet it.

In other words, a week earlier, the fruit would have delighted your taste buds. The plant would have pleased your eye and the milk quenched your thirst.

But a lack of nutrients caused the fruit, the flower and plant to die and a build up of bacteria caused the milk to sour. And so you met them at the ugliest moment in their life, when they were dead and decaying.

It’s just the same with people. If you meet them when they feel unloved, unnurtured, frustrated and generally not at their best they might disgust and revolt you. They really aren’t repulsive, they’re just lacking something.

Yet you might see them at another time or in another context and think them to be the most pleasant and attractive person you’ve met in ages.

Your ability to be happy. Your ability to exercise your free will and direct your life is entirely dependent on your ability to choose your response whatever others do. It isn’t easy, but with time and effort you can achieve it.

It is also the key to making people in your life more pleasant. Loving them when they are lacking helps to restore them to what they could be. Hating them just takes you both away from what you could be.