What is the most important skill to develop and keep using, daily, if you want to live a life you love?

We live as if things never changed. Even though we hear, read, that the only thing that is constant in life is change.

And yet, our minds, the machine-like part of us that cannot learn, won’t learn, and fancies itself YOU… our minds tell us, moment to moment, that life will remain the way it is in that moment.

Is that crazy or what?

  • When something bad happens, the reaction is not to the bad thing, but to the idea that the results of the bad thing are life-long.
  • When something good happens, the reaction is not to the good thing. It is to the idea, to the notion, to the ce

Never practice surgery on your family and other lessons for life…

662311125cd60dbfa86171ea8e68a6b3Developing the habit to look before you leap

You have habits, thought patterns, beliefs, practices that guarantee that your life will not change, especially won’t change for the better.

When you do a course, read a book, or talk to a coach, you want to do and change the most important thing about your life: drop 30 pounds, start a new business, or leave your husband.

You are unprepared.

You are like a medical student: you need to practice surgery on cadavers before you cut open your mother or father… translating for those that can’t see the forest for the trees: you need to develop the practices that are building blocks for a good life.

It’s amazing how much you can get if you quietly, clearly, and authoritatively demand it…

stresscurve002_opt

Everybody dreams of a stress free life… even though stress wakes you up. Stress as in challenge. I am not talking about the anxiety where you are fighting what if scenarios… that will never happen.

My countryman, who worked in Canada, Selye Janos (aka Hans Selye), was an endocrinologist, who was the first to demonstrate the existence of biological stress.

Stress response, what stress can do to your body.

But in his groundbreaking book, “Stress without Distress” he showed that stress also keeps us alive.

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Selye ((Quotes
Adopting the right attitude can convert a n

How dead are you? If your life is not a roller coaster, then you are not alive.

how-dead-are-youWhat you are, instead alive, is a walking dead, resigned, and settled for the little that, it seems, life has to offer. To you. You see others, seemingly happy, seemingly alive, and you feel regret, shame, and envy.

Your heart, where rain forests and colorful birds, and life used to live, is devastated. The lush rain forests gone, the birds gone, life: gone.

Your ups and downs are tiny, not like a roller coaster. They are about money, or noise, or that you are fat, or skinny, or that you are aging. Irrelevant circumstances.

Maybe it is about someone being sick, maybe dying… but that is also a circumstance.

The feeling that you are insufficient for the task that is in front of you

3052758966_aff579c03d_zThis feeling can be colored by fear, dread, can feel like anxiety, but at the root of most fear is a sense that you are insufficient for the task that is in front of you.

Not big enough, not smart enough, not fast enough… Not enough = insufficient.

Now, for most people, feeling this is all they need to run for the hills.

For some people, they can hang in there, waiting for the feeling to subside.

For some people, unless they feel up to the task, they won’t even start.

For me: I know that unless I feel that and go beyond it, doing what I don’t feel I can, several times a

Getting really smart is scary

flowers for algernoon, a tale of getting smartOne thing the book Flowers for Algernon did not prepare me for is how scary it is to get too smart too quickly.

I have been experimenting with different capacities… what they do, what behavior, what insight they possible.

One of these capacities increased my capacity (it had been turned on, but not ful