To trust or not to?

Years ago, while going through a transformational workshop, I had an experience that I would like to relate to you. There were a little over a hundred of us in this large meeting room at a local hotel. During one of the breaks all of the chairs were removed from the room. When we came back in, the room was completely open and spacious.

 

The trainer informed us that we were about to do an exercise on trust. The instructions were simple. Each of us was to go around the room and in a ten minute period of time have a single interaction with as many of the others as we could. We weren’t required to talk to everyone and we could pick and choose who we did and did not interact with. But the interaction itself was very specific. We were to walk up to a person, smile, look them right in the eye and say either “Hi, I trust you” or “Hi, I don’t trust you”. Loud dance music was played so that even though we were all together in the same room, each conversation was a private one.

 

Now the thing here is, none of us knew each other. We were all different people from different walks of life who had each independently signed up for this class. So there were no no preformed relationships. The only things people could base their decisions on was what the other person looked like or sounded like when they walked up and said hello.

How did things turn out? Click here to read on and see.

One event. Multiple Stories. Why? pt2

Because of the tint applied to our vision there are things that happened that I will not have seen but you will and vice versa. And there are things that happened that neither of us will have seen.

 

Finally and probably the biggest one of them all is generalization. Life is complex and intricate. We would run out of time and get nothing done if every time we spoke about an event we started from the beginning and filled in every single detail of what happened.

 

For example, I can tell you I made a sandwich. Or I can tell you each step involved in making my lunch, every ingredient that went into it, where I found each one, how I decided what went into it and what did not, and how it compared with other sandwiches, that I have eaten. All of that data is relevant and I might share it once, but not every time I make or eat a sandwich, because I know you don’t care about most of those things and through your own process of deleting, distorting and generalizing, most of what you are going to remember is that I told you a story about a sandwich.

 

That’s all well and good you say. Great. We generalize.But what does that have to do with anything? Click here to read on and see.

How could you possibly know?

Every person has their own interpretation of the events that happen in life. What is excruciatingly painful for one person might be only a mildly bad thing to someone else. Each experience is our own and unique. Nobody else will ever feel exactly the same thing about the same event.

 

That’s why it’s so common to feel alone when a negative experience happens. You are alone in your own little world surrounded by pain and suffering. Nobody else is having YOUR experience. When this happens we want to shut everyone out and not let them in. We feel that nobody can help us or give us useful advice. No one can have our experience so how can they help us?

 

Maybe it hasn’t happened to you personally. Maybe you have only seen this type of thing in the movies or in books. But, I am sure you know what I’m talking about.

 

They make that “mistake” of saying I know how you feel and suddenly you explode. You rail out at the other person screaming and kicking and punching, bellowing forth at the top of your lungs how there is no way they could every possible understand what you are going through.

 

It never makes things better, but we’ve all done it. What does make things better though? Click here to read on and find out.

An observation and a suggestion

A bit more of my slightly different perception of things.

 

People, when excited about a particular thing, have a tendency to emphatically state something to the effect of, it changed my life! Or it was truly a life altering experience. They declare such a thing loudly and boldly, often pausing between each word and also placing extra emphasis on each word to show just how serious they are about what it is that they are saying.

 

While I appreciate the severity of their declaration and share in the joy that something that happened to them had a profound effect on their life, I also kinda giggle somewhat inside at how ridiculous it sounds to me whenever someone says anything like that.

 

Why? Because everything that happens to you alters your life in some way. There are no non-life altering events.

 

Click here to read on and see why I say this and also about an unusual habit I have.

I think it should be called the dis comfort zone

While growing up, we learn things about the world, things that help shape who and what we are. We have all these different experiences with relationships and environments and based on those experiences we make decisions about what is and is not possible, about what can and cannot be done.

 

After getting burned a few times by life, our lives begin to fall into a certain pattern. A general routine gets formed and from that point on we pretty much blindly follow the pattern day in and day out for the rest of our lives.

 

That pattern is called our comfort zone and it is one of the biggest stumbling blocks there is to our growth as a person. It is called our comfort zone, even thought it is not necessarily a place we enjoy being, because it is what we are used to. It is familiar, comfortable. In our comfort zone life still happens and things are somewhat random, just in a way that we have control of.

 

Our comfort zone includes all of our beliefs, traditions and habits. Once we learn something new and accept it into our way of being, it becomes part of our comfort zone. And sadly once that happens our brains pretty much turn off and we live on auto-pilot. We don’t think about that thing anymore. It just is.

 

Why is this a problem you say? Click here to read on and find out.

Does fear run your life?

Fear.

 

It’s such a simple short little word. Yet it can evoke some pretty scary nightmarish images within our minds. Many people’s lives are nearly completely run by their reactions to it. The things they do or avoid doing as part of their daily routine are tailored specifically around the things that they are afraid of. With all the horror movies and Fear Factor type TV shows, it is certainly a topic that we as humans are fascinated with exploring.

 

Fear is a perfectly healthy, natural response to things that have the potential to be harmful to us.  It is what tells us to run when we are in the wild and encounter a bear. In that case fear is both useful and appropriate. But when the fear reaches a certain level our logical minds shut down and we just start randomly lashing out and reacting in whatever way we have to in order to get away from the object that we fear. Or worse yet it can literally cause both physical and mental paralyzation, complete shutdown.

 

Neither of these responses is helpful or good. What can be done about this?

 

Click here to read on and find out.

Do you concur?

Just today, while doing some reading, I came across a bit of data that I find to be true from past experience, but have never really thought all that much about.

 

When I was probably around ten or so, my local rec center had this game called Super Pac Man. It was basically Pac Man with a slight twist. IF you don’t know who or what Pac Man is, please buy a ticket back to the ’80s. I promise it will be worth the cost.

 

The game had both regular and “super” power pellets. The super pellets made Pac Man much larger and let you munch your way through some barriers and basically ignore the ghosts. If you consumed both of the power pellets one after then other then,for a brief time, you became an awesome, enormous, dot munching, ghost crunching, unstoppable force that zipped around the stage wreaking havoc and destroying barriers. After which you returned to the standard mild mannered, ghost fearing, dot muncher.

 

Is there a point to this history lesson? I promise there is. Click here to read on and find out what it is.

Pay it Forward

It seems kind of sad to me that when most people think of  Haley Joel Osment they really only remember this young kid saying “I see dead people” Don’t get me wrong. The Sixth Sense was a great movie that I enjoyed very much. The twist at the end even kind of surprised me.

 

But that actor played another role just a year later that was much more impactful and inspiring. This second movie only did a fraction as well even though it had a much more more powerful message. In Pay It Forward, Haley Joel Osment plays Trevor McKinney, a young middle school student. His teacher, played by Kevin Spacey, challenges his class to come up with and put into action a plan that will change the world for the better.

 

His classmates each come up with their own ideas, donating money to charities and starting food drives and things like that but nothing out of the ordinary. It seems like it might be an impossible task. After all if you were eleven years old and your teacher asked you to change the world, what would you do or say?

Click here to read on and see what he came up with.

Do not take my word for it.

After over six months of sharing my life lessons with you, it occurs to me to mention something that should have been posted on day one or two. I urge you not to believe a single word that I say. Does that sound insane?  Perhaps some explanation is in order.

 

Most of the posts in this blog are an accumulation of literally thousands of hours of research and experimentation on how to live a happy life. It is the skills and ideas that have taken me from an angst ridden frustrated angry person to one who is happy, enjoys life overall and has a great sense of inner peace. I have looked at hundreds of problems from countless different angles and whittled down the massive numbers of potential solutions until I have found the one or ones that will work the best.

 

After seeing that my life works for me and that I am happy, many other people take what I say on faith, without testing it. This is foolish and to some degree saddens me. Still confused?

Click here to read on and see why I say what I do about this.

Are you coachable?

We all want successes and victories in life right? But it’s not easy when life keeps throwing us curve balls. Just around the bend is always some new set of experiences that we have no idea how to handle. And nearly every time we start to think we may be just about to be getting to the point where we can start to tread water with our current problems, the next waves hits us.

 

Now, if we were reincarnated life after life, over and over and were able to remember each of our past lives, this wouldn’t be such a problem. Each life would have some similarity to the lives that had gone before it. Then every life after the first would be easier as we would remember what we did before and be able to better gauge what decisions we had made that were good and which to avoid making in the future.

 

It would be easier, but such is not the case. Reincarnation may or may not be real, but if it is we don’t carry those past memories into future lives. However, that idea does bear within it the seed that will, once it bears fruit, assist us in solving many of our problems.

Click here to read on and see how we can benefit from the experiences of others