March 29, 2024

Our Teachers Are Waiting

From Volume 6, Issue 1:“When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.”

~ Buddha Siddhartha Guatama Shakyamuni

Where do these teachers come from? The proverb seems to place responsibility for “appearing” on the teacher. It’s as if teachers were limited resources, sitting on the sidelines of life just waiting for students. My take is that “teachers” are an unlimited resource, with dozens, hundreds, perhaps thousands of teachers for each one of us.

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A Gift for the Knower/Judger

From Volume 5, Issue 12: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.

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Childish or Childlike?

From Volume 5, Issue 11: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

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Don’t Let a Little Black Swan Scare You

From Volume 5, Issue 9:The term “black swan” refers to the shocking discovery that not all swans are white, something the world was sure about until new data came in. Now it’s used for big, bad surprises, like discovering that playing fast and loose with marginal loans and generating huge annual returns on investments couldn’t go on forever and would lead us into a recession. We all have black swans in our lives, but we can change the way we deal with them so they aren’t constantly causing stress.

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Why I’m Going Against Yoda (and Mom, Dad, and Mrs. Merriwether)

From Volume 5, Issue 8:Occasionally I challenge the wisdom of the Jedis by claiming that Yoda’s famous quotation from Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back—“Do or do not. There is no try”—is just not a productive attitude for most of us. Yoda’s words tell us that we should be able to step off cliffs and not plummet to our doom. Or drive a Rally Ford Fiesta in a World Rally Championship event and win. But if you buy into this thinking, you’re setting yourself up for a lifetime of frustration and feeling like a failure. There’s a better way to approach doing, and yes, Yoda, there is a try.

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Running the Susan G. Komen 4K

From Volume 5, Issue 7:It has not been unusual in my life for me to obsess about a small thing just to see the big goal go unattained, or even be obliterated. The problem is, I don’t know I’m doing it until it’s too late. The ego gets involved, and before you know it, that big dream you’ve been shooting for is whisked out of your hands. Take these race day stories as an example of what not to do when you have a goal in mind.

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Breaking Down the Bureaucracy Within

From Volume 5, Issue 6:A client I worked with about 20 years ago recently discovered something shocking. The carefully created process his company developed to get from initial meeting to satisfied client—a process that worked well when I was working with them—had ballooned from 40 steps to more than 600! It had become a monster. As we discussed his problem, I realized that organizations are just bigger versions of ourselves, and that we’re all in danger of creating these kinds of monsters within.

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