HDClarity

We hear it in baseball broadcast booths all summer long: “He’s a .333 hitter. He’s gone oh for two. He’s due.” But is this accurate? Should you bet on this? Or are you just wishing for an outcome that has no basis in the data, and setting yourself up to lose? The gambler’s dilemma can teach us a lot about all our interactions.

When you flip a coin, it can land in one of two states: heads or tails. The statistical probability that it will land in either of those positions is 50%.

So if I flip a coin six times and it comes up heads all six times, what’s the probability that the next toss will end up tails? It’s simply gotta come up tails this time, right?

The coin has no memory. (At least it’s got that over the baseball player!) On any given toss, it’s going to land either heads or tails. The odds are 50/50 on every toss, even if it’s been one way for 10 straight tosses. So betting your future on tails coming up after six consecutive heads is very risky. The coin is not “due.” Your chance of getting tails is 50/50. Period.

Yet we make this kind of bet all the time. The .333 hitter? He’s got a one in three chance of getting a hit. That stat is the result of hundreds of at bats (depending on how much of the season has passed). It’s what he gets paid for. He fails to get a hit two-thirds of the time (that’s another whole article) and gets paid for that one in three stat.

So he’s gone oh for two. What are the odds he’ll get a hit in his next at bat? 100%? Now, there’s the gambler’s dilemma. Simply put, his average is still one in three.

It is what it is. We develop expectations from our Knower/Judger (our favorite batter is “due”) and then freak out when our wishes (and that’s really all they are) don’t come to pass.

I’m reminded of the fable of the frog and the scorpion. Scorpions have batting averages; nearly 100% of the time, they’ll sting anything nearby. It is in their nature. When you clearly see the data, how could you possibly fantasize another outcome?

The data is always there

How many of your struggles (assuming you have one or two) can be attributed to expectations not supported by data? Really frustrated when your favorite batter doesn’t get a hit on his third attempt? He’s a .333 hitter. Period. Can’t believe the coin came up heads again? 50/50. Period. Tired of having to deal with that direct report who just tells you what you want to hear and then doesn’t act after the conversation? It’s in his nature. Period.

The interpersonal statistic can be useful two ways. You might witness a friend, employee, or family member performing outside his statistical norm—having a bad day. If you review the data and see he’s basically “on” 90% of the time, then you can rest assured he’ll be back on track, like a .333 hitter. But not necessarily today!

On the flip side, when you really need 99% performance out of someone who might be a .333 hitter (in your world) and you dare to expect it, you’re probably in for some frustration.

Our K/Js frequently assign wishes to outcomes that ignore data, and then we bet our emotions on those wishes. But ballplayers go through slumps. Coins fall the same way six, seven, eight, and more times in a row. People act according to their nature no matter how much we want them to act otherwise. Who’s responsible for your frustration? Look at the data that’s in front of you and you can end the frustration of losing on bad bets.

Why do we ever change anything? Because we want to. There really is no other reason. The question is, how do we develop the desire to change anything? This story of a frustrated baby (who would grow up to use the story in his newsletter…) and his response to recurring pain in the patella, or kneecap, explains it all.

The year was 1947. A small boy had mastered high-speed crawling. (Rallyists show promise at an early age.) My home had well-worn and well-loved hardwood floors, and I would fly around the dining room, the hallway, my parents’ bedroom, and another room we called the den with tremendous grace and style. But I would not go into the living room. Why? There was an obnoxious oak door saddle in the archway that would pound my knees as I thumped over it. I was not equipped with the suspension needed to traverse this rough patch without doing damage.

So I avoided that room. There was nothing of interest in there anyway. Chairs. Lamps. No TV. There was an old wooden radio, but if no one was in there, it wasn’t on.

But when Pop came home and Mom was cooking dinner, Pop would plop down in his easy chair in that living room (I still have the chair), and now there was something of interest…Pop!

I would put the old butt in gear and head for that painful obstacle, thump my knees, and start crying, which worked—at first—’cuz Pop would come pick me up. You younger parents recognize this ploy.

Eventually Pop got tired of comforting me and schlepping me over to his easy chair and left me to my own devices. Thump, thump, cry, cry, cry, crawl over to the easy chair. Repeat on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.

Then one day out of sheer frustration at the pain in my black-and-blue knees, I rocket-crawled over to the archway, stood up, took two halting steps over the door saddle and fell back down for the final crawl to the chair. Those were my first steps ever, and they were totally unassisted. In fact, Pop barely caught the action, looking over his newspaper. Mom missed it entirely.

But here’s my point. Not until I was incredibly frustrated at the pain I had to endure to get to my father did I make a change, take a risk, rearrange my world for the better.

Using frustration to your advantage

This dynamic is at the core of every change you or I will ever make. It’s the positive that comes out of frustration. We’re frustrated because we’re not getting/achieving/accomplishing what our Knower/Judger says we’re supposed to. We don’t want to feel that frustration any longer. We change something.

We can also use frustration to change the source of the frustration—expectation. Without an expectation, there’s no reason for frustration. So every time you find yourself feeling extremely frustrated, you have two choices, and both are valid:

A. You can manage (lower) your expectations so that the comparison of what’s expected to what’s going on isn’t so different, and the result is not judged so negatively.

B. You can change something.

There are certainly situations where simply lowering your expectations in lieu of making drastic changes makes sense. Look at your expectations for your kids, for example. We all have fantastic expectations for our kids (Harvard, NBA, NASA scientist, etc.). But they have something to say about their lives, much more than we do, and there’s not a lot we can do about it. Drop the expectation, and frustration disappears.

But in situations where expectations are more or less dictated by job descriptions, health issues, etc., changing is the only way to lower frustration. And you’ll only make changes when you want to.

Here’s my next point. Either of these solutions to high frustration levels is totally internal. Made by you.

By this stage of your life, you’ve most likely tried to order the other person to perform at a level that doesn’t frustrate you. It’s a Dr. Phil moment. “How’s that workin’ for ya?” My guess is, about as well as my demanding that Pop move his easy chair to the dining room would have worked.

So what’s left? Let it go. Lower your expectation. Change your routine to adapt to the reality of what’s going on. Like my infant self, you might find yourself rising to an entirely new level of skill and experience.

For the past two months, I’ve been accosted with a certain phrase: trust but verify. Reagan used it to get into Gorbachev’s head during negotiations in the 1980s, and now I’ve heard it first from a client and second from my rally car driver. So I dissected the concept, and here’s what I’ve concluded.

If I trust, what value is there to verification? If I don’t trust, then why kid myself? If I feel (from my Knower/Judger) that I need to verify, where is the trust?

Trust, I think we all agree, is a valuable contributor to a productive relationship, whether that’s between spouses, business partners, or rally-racing teams. When you and I trust each other, we can count on each other to be accurate, timely, supportive, etc.

But trust implies an expectation. I trust that you will do what you say you will do. Most of us take our fellow human’s word as reliable, right? But some folks continually tell us what we want to hear, and then perform below our expectations. “Sure, I’ll bake cookies for the sale.” Yeah, right.

Remembering my mentor’s warning that expectation is the source of all frustration, we see a spiral of dysfunction being generated.

A. You trust me.

B. I don’t follow through.

C. We discuss this, and your K/J tells me I was wrong.

D. Now you feel the need to verify.

E. Maybe I now follow through.

F. So you trust again.

But eventually, I’m going to fail you again. I’m human. Why can’t you handle my human frailty? Mostly because your K/J rule says your trust must be honored.

Verifying Slows Us Down

In some cases, a breach of trust is inconsequential. At the other end of the spectrum, it can be deadly. Military training builds unquestioned trust into its vertical management model. On the battlefield, one cannot spare the resources to verify that the ammunition said to be coming is indeed coming.

But your son telling you he’ll clean his room is another story. Most of us will not die if the socks aren’t picked up.

In the middle of this spectrum is my hobby of rally racing. A few weekends ago, while flying along an icy one-lane road in Northern Michigan, my driver (a very talented one) began to repeat back to me every other “note” I read him. “Right five over small crest.” “Right five?” It was as if he’d lost all trust in my calls…and we’d already been racing quite successfully for three hours. When we stopped for a moment, I asked him about his responses, and he quoted Reagan with a chuckle: “Trust but verify.”

That got me thinking. We can race that way. I’ll speak a “note” into the intercom and wait for his verifying question, and then acknowledge his verifying question. But at speeds approaching 90 miles per hour on glare ice, there’s not going to be enough time for that transaction, so we’ll probably need to slow down. And that’s not what we want.

Dilemma.

How fast can your operations work when you stop to verify? Will things work better if you just trust? And what will you do when the inevitable human failure arises?

Taking Another Road

If we’re truly gifted with free will, then you can choose to launch back into verification. Or you can forgive. The verification path is the K/J route and not really a choice but more of a knee-jerk reaction. Forgive? Now that would be the Learner/Researcher route.

Forgive? Are you kidding, Kim? I know. The high Dominants out there reading this will feel somehow threatened and that they’re enabling failure. But I know that when I blow a call at speed in a rally car and it causes my driver to quickly correct in a panic, or worse, go off the road at high speed, I have already learned, and it won’t happen again. Nothing he says to me is going to make me adjust any faster, but dropping it and continuing to race will maximize our performance.

If both parties know what the desired outcome is and are on the same page, my experience is that “trust and forgive” will get you up to speed faster than “trust and verify.” Obviously if the failures continue, you might want to change the rules, players, or communications channel.

The continuous pattern of verifying and being frustrated will take its toll. And this mechanism feeds on itself. The more you verify…the more opportunity to find fault…the more fault found…the more justified the verification process…and trust evaporates.

A successful team’s success runs on trust. Period. No time for verification. Sure, mistakes are made. Corrections are made. Then you do it again. Better.

It’s our human dilemma. Our parents, teachers, ministers, villages, experiences all teach us valuable lessons about what to do in certain situations. Over time these lessons define us. They become our “Roles” in life. Locked in stone. Unchangeable. But are they? Can we move out of the Role and into the Soul?

I write constantly about how we operate in one of two interactive states. We’re either operating from our Knower/Judger persona (interacting with our environment based on past experiences and feelings) or our Learner/Researcher persona (accepting new data without judgment and feeling comfortable about what we want). I’ve frequently named these states our Role and our Soul.

Our K/J or Role persona is what pops out on our DISC or Myers-Briggs (or any other) predictive behavior assessment. These assessments are frequently used to help organizations understand “where you’re coming from” in terms of predicting your behavior and reactions.

Your DISC profile, for example, will tell us what degree of Dominance, Influence, Compliance, and Sensitivity you’ll use with teammates. A high “D” will take charge. A high “I” will tend to tell you what you want to hear. A high “C” will almost always color between the lines (and want you to do the same), and a high “S” will be the peacemaker.

But these profiles only define our roles in society. The lessons we’ve learned from past experiences and feelings condition us to repeat certain behaviors over and over again until they actually define us. In classic psych jargon, it’s operant conditioning. We’ve been positively reinforced for certain behaviors and negatively reinforced for others.

Even the dictionary definition of role helps us understand our K/Js:

Role:

Noun

1. An actor’s part in a play, movie, etc.
2. The function assumed or part played by a person or thing in a particular situation.

Do you yearn to ditch some of the Role behaviors you’re known for?

Examples:

• Your direct reports fear you and so won’t contribute ideas and creativity in the workplace.
• You don’t play and romp with the family because it’s not one of your K/J “rules.”
• You can sell ice to Inuit, but you’re not sure if your customers (or friends, or lovers) are buying because they want to or because you’re just that damned good.
• You’re a peacemaker, and after doing it at home in the morning, all day at work, and all evening before bed, you’re just exhausted.

These are all shout-outs from your Soul. They come from that part of you that can actually see the data for what it is and wants change. But alas. That Role can be too powerful. And you do what you’ve always done. Still getting what you’ve always gotten.

The piece of the Soul I want the reader to remember is the part that wants.

Athletic coaches are always declaring that the team won or lost because they wanted it more, or didn’t want it enough. I totally believe that. Take the Baltimore Ravens in Super Bowl XLVII. Underdogs in both rounds of the playoffs and the Super Bowl, luck just seemed to flop their way.

I see evidence of this every day. At a recent rally in Michigan, Canadian privateer Antoine L’Estage overcame an eight-second deficit in the last two stages to beat current American champ (and Subaru-backed) David Higgins by six seconds. Who wanted it more?

I bet you have stories of overcoming odds when the want piece of your Soul has kicked in. I just want the clear data part of your Soul to see that it happens. That it can happen. And that it can happen as often as you want it to.

Now apply that to your Role issues.

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

~ Viktor Frankel

When your Role is telling you to do what you’ve always done, can you insert your Soul in Frankel’s space? Ask yourself “Is this producing what my Soul wants?” and choose your response. Your life will change—if your Soul wants it to enough.

Regular readers of this newsletter are pretty familiar with our concept of the Knower/Judger. It’s the part of you that lives by your embedded rules of life. It knows right from wrong…frequently to the exclusion of outside information. Usually I berate the K/J as the source of a lot of frustration and conflict, but this holiday season I’m letting my K/J off the hook and thanking it for all the good things it brings.

What’s good about the K/J? First, it helps us get through thousands of daily interactions and decisions without actually having to think about and make all those decisions. It’s hard work to stop and make choices all the time. So we internalize what it is we’re supposed to do when such and such happens…and we do it.

We take the same route to work. We vote for the same party. We drink the same coffee. We answer the same questions the same way. We are, for the most part, robots, programmed by the choices we’ve made and the more or less successful outcomes produced by following these paths.

In fact, we actually make very few decisions, especially when you consider that many of the choices we do make, we don’t even think about. When to get up in the morning, what to wear, how to greet people…these decisions are made on autopilot, handled by the K/J. Thank you, K/J! I don’t want to have to think about all those things. I want to save my “choosing” for the important things in life.

Imagine the chaos if we had to make decisions every time one of those red octagonal signs with four white letters presented itself when we were driving. The K/J rule to stop at stop signs keeps us safe. It also has very little risk of running afoul of someone else’s K/J rule or any systematic change in our highway laws. It’s a stable and successful K/J rule.

Look at your K/J rules about what makes a joyful holiday season, most of them based on choices made many years ago.

Fireplaces. Snowy landscapes. Candlelight services. Stockings on mantels. Kids in laps. Smells from the kitchen. Holiday music, either secular or religious. Jingling bells. Santa. Model trains. I’m sure you can add more.

If you don’t believe that you have rules about the holidays, wait till someone in your family brings a significant other into the scene and some new K/J rules are introduced. “You’re making what for Christmas Eve?” K/J rules keep us in our comfort zone, and we don’t like having them challenged, even when they are rules about what brings joy, peace, and love.

I know it will be hard to comprehend, but we can have other, more sinister K/J rules embedded in our holidays. You know the in-law who’s always right and who always makes you feel little? That’s your K/J rule! Or the argument you always get into with your sister? Programmed. Unless you move into your Learner/Researcher and “choose” to change it, it’s gonna happen. And, believe it or not, it places the combatants squarely in their comfort zones because what’s expected happens and all’s right with the world.

So here’s my suggestion for the next month. Keep the truly enjoyable K/J rules and choose to let go of the more irritating ones.

Hug the kids. Cook the double-decker pizza. (Yup, that works in my house!) Watch Jean Shepherd’s A Christmas Story (or White Christmas or It’s a Wonderful Life) three times. And let go of the battle with the in-laws. Maybe drink a little less. If you think about it in advance, you know your K/J responses that don’t help. Just check them at the door.

I’m letting my K/J off the hook this holiday season. It’s not always the villain, and it’s not always trying to keep me programmed in mediocrity. It’s frequently my friend, my stability, and the source of my comfort.

Merry, happy everything to everybody.

According to my dictionary, the term “expectation” was first used about 1540 in the Common Era. In about 1555, the term “frustration” appeared…and they’ve been linked ever since. It seems frustration has been following expectation for almost 500 years. If you got rid of one, could you get rid of the other?

An expectation can be defined as:

1.     A strong belief that something will happen or be the case in the future.
2.     A belief that someone will or should achieve something.

Our Knower/Judgers (which record experiences and feelings throughout our lives) cause us to develop certain expectations. On a cultural level, we expect things like warm greetings in the morning at the office, or that people will wait their turn in line.

We can reasonably expect that we’ll receive an Egg McMuffin when we order one and that the dog will show unlimited affection when we return from a hard day at the office. Our kids are generally expected to perform both academically and athletically better than we ever did at their age. The list of expectations based on our K/J rules of life is practically endless.

We continually bet our emotional stability on the myriad life rewards we expect. “If Johnny doesn’t call and ask me to the prom, I’ll just die!” “If that son of a bitch doesn’t give me a raise by June, I’ll just quit and work for his competition.” “Sylvia, I’m so disappointed in your grades.” The list goes on.

Frustration can be defined as:

1. The feeling of being upset or annoyed as a result of being unable to change or achieve something: tears of frustration rolled down her cheeks
2. A deep chronic sense or state of insecurity and dissatisfaction arising from unresolved problems or unfulfilled needs

Negative feelings about not achieving some expectation are inherent to the concept of frustration. And just as frustration follows expectation in the history of English usage and in the dictionary, I would say that frustration would be impossible without expectations. Think about it. How could you be frustrated if you had no emotional investment in the outcome?

Want to reduce your frustration in the coming year? Manage your expectations!

During the last years of his life, my mentor, Jut Meininger, spent countless hours on the phone with me trying to get me out of my K/J and into my Learner/Researcher to wrap my mind around the concept of just giving up expectations. “Expectations,” he would tell me, “are the foundation of all frustration. No expectations? No frustration!”

It took a while to learn (and I still fail at it often), but I did learn to manage my expectations to some degree, and you can too. It’s simply a matter of giving up something that isn’t serving you well. After all, frustration compromises your productivity, well-being, happiness, etc. Why would you want to be frustrated?

Start with what’s close

“I have expectations of my spouse, kids, co-workers,” you tell me. Sure you do. It’s human nature. But what generates most of the frustration in our lives? Bingo! People and relationships that are important to us.

Here are some expectations we can try giving up:

• Your son or daughter has to score goals while playing soccer.
• Your boss has to recognize your contributions in order for you to love coming to work every day.
• Husbands should just be good listeners when they come home instead of suggesting ways to fix a problem.
• The wife should just button it up, ’cuz you had a rough day too.

Can you see how expectations lead you right down the slippery slope? What happens when you don’t get what you expect? Frustration! Withdrawal. Sometimes resentment. But where did it start? With the other person’s inability to meet your expectations?

Now I’m not a finger-pointing guy. But if you were a third-party observer of some of the interactions outlined above, who would you deem accountable for any downstream interpersonal dysfunction? The person with the expectation or the person who failed to meet it?

When you feel yourself getting frustrated, think back to why. What was your expectation? Why did you have that expectation?

I’m not saying that you shouldn’t write up a direct report for consistent failure to produce an agreed outcome. But I don’t see the failure of the direct report as a catalyst for frustration. It’s a motivator to fire the person. And why would we fire out of frustration? We would fire someone based on L/R data that says we’re paying for a job that’s not getting done.

Frustration is an emotional state you can choose to stay out of. The key, as my mentor would still be telling me, is to give up the expectation.

We all have an “inner child,” don’t we? Sometimes it’s curious and investigating. And sometimes it’s mischievous and rebellious. Sometimes it just loves unconditionally (puppies and kittens come to mind), and sometimes it functions like a paranoid schizophrenic (temper tantrums).

Who are you when your child takes over? Jekyll or Hyde?

Most of us have the ability to be—and history of being—both Jekyll and Hyde. But why do we present ourselves so differently? It’s my experience that your “inner child” exists both in your Knower/Judger and your Learner/Researcher (but not in both at the same time). When you tap into that child, your behavior will be either childish or childlike, depending on whether you’re operating from your K/J or your L/R.

As we age, our world teaches us the “rules of life.” We all learn them differently based on our families, communities, schools, churches, etc. In this way, our K/Js develop and then essentially run our lives. The K/J becomes the autopilot that simplifies our reactions to stimuli. We inherently know how to react to things. The older we get, it seems, the more entrenched these rules become.

Psychologists agree that most of these rules are ingrained by the time we reach the ripe old age of six or seven. We know our “place” on the playground. We know our family’s “place” in society. We learn the rules about money, relationships, power, etc. very early in life. We’re not children, in the purest sense of the word, very long. Our developed K/Js help us feel good about doing and accomplishing the things we’ve learned that are “right.” Conversely, we learn to feel negatively about the things we do or accomplish that our rules tell us are “wrong.”

Think about the parent rules you’re carrying around right now.

• Finish your plate.

• Go along to get along.

• Can’t fight city hall.

• Obey.

• You’ll never amount to anything.

The messages we internalize very early really do affect us for the rest of our lives unless we become aware of them and decide to change them. But that’s fuel for another article.

Suffice it to say, these rules help produce reactions that can appear childish. We may be adults, but when something occurs that we don’t like, we can appear childish, arguing, throwing temper tantrums. Road rage occurs. Prejudices take over.

A typical childish behavior is to use phrases like “It’s not fair!” and “If such and such happens, I’ll just die!” We engage in such behavior when we see that some K/J rule we’ve internalized has been broken and our (normally high) expectation has not been met.

Childlike behavior, on the other hand, hearkens back to the time when we actually were children…with few cultural boundaries, free to behave spontaneously without worrying about whether or not we broke some rule.

Picture yourself before the rules took over. Innocent. Trusting. Fun-loving. Loving in general. Childlike.

People operating in their L/Rs tend to appear childlike. But it’s not easy. You have to ignore your rules and the answers they give you so you can hear new data and have new ideas. As we age, acting childlike seems to become more difficult even though we may see benefits.

If you’re having trouble telling whether you or someone else is acting childish or childlike, think of Dr. Wayne Dyer’s advice: “When given the choice of being right or kind—choose kind.”

Being right and defending your opinion comes from your K/J. That outward defense of your position is childish.

Being kind is the only reaction a newborn (without K/J rules) has. Innately childlike.

Observe interaction at your house, in your office, or in some social environment and watch the “inner children” of the participants. Childish or childlike? And then ask yourself the old Dr. Phil question: “How’s that workin’ for ya?”

A. Fear

B. Anger

C. Joy

Choose one!

While some of you might have some sort of emotional attachment to fear or anger, I’ll bet you picked C. Why? Because the other choices are emotions that cause us pain, stress, suffering, and struggle. And we usually don’t want those things. What are our emotions, anyway, and how can you change them to get more of the emotions you do want?

Fear [feer]

noun

1. a distressing emotion aroused by impending danger, evil, pain, etc., whether the threat is real or imagined; the feeling or condition of being afraid. Synonyms: foreboding, apprehension, consternation, dismay, dread, terror, fright, panic, horror, trepidation, qualm.

Who has never been paralyzed by fear? I’m a member of a local Toastmasters club, and the reason people seek out this organization is that they fear speaking in public more than death itself!

Fear is generated by the Knower/Judger comparison of what we know to be safe, comfortable, and survivable with what we think can happen in the future. We find the probabilities of a negative outcome too high for our personal risk model. We simply judge the impending outcome as negative. It’s an emotional connection to a future event.

An·ger [ang-ger]  

noun

1. a strong feeling of displeasure and belligerence aroused by a wrong.

Cut off right at the exit ramp? One-finger salute! Boss cancels your vacation week? Pissed! Anger is the emotion we feel when something that has happened violates our K/J rules of life. “It ain’t fair!” It’s an emotional connection to a past event.

Paul Erkman is a prominent psychologist who outlined six emotions as the basis of all our emotions:

• Happiness
• Sadness
• Anger
• Surprise
• Fear
• Disgust

These are all based on our K/J rules of life and on how events—either past or future—are judged. Happiness is based on “I’ve experienced this before and found it entertaining or fulfilling, so I’m comfortable finding it so now.” Sadness is the opposite. Surprise occurs when we experience an unpredicted outcome to a familiar set of circumstances. If the unpredicted outcome is offensive because it violates one’s K/J rule set, it results in disgust.

The point I want to make here is that all these emotions have two things in common:

1. They are judgmental in nature, comparing an occurrence with what we think is “right.”

2. They are either based on the future (fear) or the past (happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, or disgust).

Eckhart Tolle is fond of explaining the past and the future as pure fantasy. The past has passed. And it only exists as we’ve perceived it through our K/J filters anyway. Most likely, others did not perceive it the same. Nothing can change the past. It is what it is.

And Tolle’s future is even more of a fantasy since it hasn’t even happened yet. To feel fear, we have to extrapolate some set of circumstances that we perceive will occur in the future. To Tolle, there is only now, no future and no past. That means neither fear nor anger can ever be based on reality. We don’t need either. (Read Tolle’s book The Power of Now to learn more about what he has to say.)

Many people say we do need fear and anger. Fear protects you from risk. Anger (typically in the form of frustration) motivates you to make change in your life. But do you choose to be afraid or angry so that you can use these emotions? Usually we have knee-jerk, K/J auto-responses that result in fear or anger.

And when asked to choose fear, anger, or joy, you chose joy.

Joy [joi]  

noun

1. the emotion evoked by well-being, success, or good fortune or by the prospect of possessing what one desires.

While anger points to the past and fear points to the future, joy lives in the present. This moment. Now. And we can only experience it when fear and anger are set aside…or we’ll miss it.

So just as you chose joy at the beginning of this article, I urge you to set aside your anger and your fear and choose it now…and now…and now by being aware of all the things you have to be thankful for. ’Tis the season. Stop. Shut off history and future to eliminate anger and fear. Make the assertive choice to bask in joy this Thanksgiving season.