If you live in Vermont or Passaic, New Jersey, my apologies; you may not yet be able to appreciate my thoughts on rain.

Rain is nature’s cleanser. It washes away things that weren’t intended to stay. You know that unmistakable smell that’s left when the garbage truck leaks on your local road? Rain takes that away.

But what about our ability to make rain – tears?

Tears wash away the smelly thoughts that are stuck in our head. It’s human nature’s rain.

We have been conditioned not to cry – men more than women, and what a sad thing that is.

We often fight our natural inclination to cry and pay the price in pent up thoughts that keep us sad.

Tears are emotional rain and as human beings we are experiencing a drought.

There is such a thing as a good cry and we would be well served to allow ourselves the opportunity to have one more often.

I’m not going to logically convince you that this is an effective method for cleaning out some upsetting thoughts. It takes personal experience to validate the theory. And as my late teacher, Dr. Dave Dobson said, “Theory is bullshit and defending your theory is bullshit squared.” So, don’t take my word for it; validate it for yourself. You may just find that personal rain can alleviate your pain.

All the best,

John

ACCOMPLISH ANYTHING
LOSE WEIGHT & KEEP IT OFF
STOP SMOKING FOREVER
SLEEP THROUGH THE NIGHT EVERY NIGHT
IMPROVE YOUR SELF CONFIDENCE
I LOVE MY BODY
RELAX IN 2 MINUTES
FEEL FOREVER YOUNG
VIRTUAL MASSAGE

What are the Top 10 things that keep you from doing what you want to do?

1. FEAR
2. MONEY
3. TALENT
4. OTHER PEOPLE
5. AGE
6. LACK OF CONNECTIONS
7. LACK OF EDUCATION
8. INERTIA
9. PRIOR COMMITMENTS
10. LACK OF PASSION

I just listed my 10 reasons that keep me from having all that I want. My guess is your list would have many similar things on it.

“But they’re facts,” you say. Here’s my question: How come we never let facts get in the way when we do go for what we really want?

Reminds me of a story . . .

When I was 17 years old I went to work for my father in the summer. He was a construction foreman and he got me a job as a laborer – the most physically demanding job I’ve ever had. One day I was cleaning up a room after the bricklayers had built the walls. There were scaffolds to take down, extra cinderblocks to be removed and a thorough cleaning of the room, which included scraping of hardened cement from the concrete floors. Apparently when they had poured this concrete floor they didn’t completely smooth it properly and there was a small section of unsmoothed concrete sticking up. I went at it with my scraper attempting to remove it. I was hitting it with all the strength I had and it wasn’t coming up as easily as the hardened cement did. The labor foreman came by and I demonstrated the difficult time I was having removing the extra concrete. He watched for a fashion and then said, “Give me that scraper boy.” He got it to come up in less than a minute. He handed me back the scraper and taught me one of the major lessons in my life when he said, “You gotta’ want to do it.”

When you really want to do something, facts rarely get in the way.

When we assert that we can’t do something, we make it more solid than the concrete I was attempting to remove. Yes, there are such things as physical impossibilities, but they are rarely the things we cite when we give reasons for not having what we want. I’m reminded of my 4^th Grade teacher, Miss Wagner who told us, “You can have what you want or your reasons why not.”

This isn’t a pep talk; it’s more of a suggestion to self inspect our reasons and notice that too many of them are just excuses.

Once we begin to notice how many of our excuses are masquerading as facts, we find that our top 10 list gets whittled down, making more things possible.

It’s easy to compile a list; it’s harder to inspect that list and find out how many things are possible that we have labeled out of our reach.

This inspection exercise provides great benefit but like the man said, “You gotta’ want to do it.”

All the best,

John

ACCOMPLISH ANYTHING
LOSE WEIGHT & KEEP IT OFF
STOP SMOKING FOREVER
SLEEP THROUGH THE NIGHT EVERY NIGHT
IMPROVE YOUR SELF CONFIDENCE
I LOVE MY BODY
RELAX IN 2 MINUTES
FEEL FOREVER YOUNG
VIRTUAL MASSAGE

We exist. We really had no say in the matter about our existence. One day we just recognized that we existed and living began.

Living is noticing and taking advantage of your existence.

“I exist” is the foundational piece to living.

“I’m here, now what?” is the main question that starts us living. I’ve found that we have to ask it more than once.

There are many times in our lives that we find ourselves not living. We just plow through existence and call it a life. The recognition of not living is a stepping stone towards living.

Please don’t confuse living with having. Living is a feeling that can be felt but can’t be described; having is having a lot of words to describe how to get to a feeling. “If I only had ___________, then I would feel alive.”

The feelings from having are shallow; the feelings from living have incredible depth.

A question that brings you back to living is: What makes me feel alive?

What stokes the aliveness within you? What makes you feel like you’re more than moving through life? That’s a question worth reflecting on each night before retiring and each morning upon awakening.

We slip into periods of unaware existence where we just go through the moves. When you get the recognition that you are just existing, you have to ask yourself, “Who did the recognizing?” It was the aliveness in you wanting to come out to play.

Living is feeling alive again.

We all get the blues and without them we wouldn’t have an appreciation for the times “we’re in the pink.” But bouts of the blues, left unchecked, can lead to existing. Certainly, fully feel the pain that’s associated with your blue state and seek help if necessary, but at some point it’s helpful to recognize that the way out is lighted by what makes you feel alive.

Getting back to living is the purpose of existence. The first step on the way there is to notice that you are just existing.

Feeling alive is living life to its fullest. Take advantage of your existence and find out what makes you feel alive. That’s living!

All the best,

John

ACCOMPLISH ANYTHING
LOSE WEIGHT & KEEP IT OFF
STOP SMOKING FOREVER
SLEEP THROUGH THE NIGHT EVERY NIGHT
IMPROVE YOUR SELF CONFIDENCE
I LOVE MY BODY
RELAX IN 2 MINUTES
FEEL FOREVER YOUNG
VIRTUAL MASSAGE

What is the purpose of management? The simple answer is to manage – People or things.

Let’s stick with the tricky task of managing people. I spent a number of years formally managing people and I did it well and I did it poorly. What I found was that the difference between my success and failure came down to how I approached the people.

The situations where I failed miserably happened when I treated the people like employees; in the successful cases, I treated them like people.

My management style was the same in both cases but my approach was different.

When I was managing poorly, I remember wondering why I couldn’t get the people to buy in to the mission. I immediately made it their fault. It took some reflection to notice that the fault was mine.

Poor management has a top down feel to it – I’m the boss, you’re the employee, we have a job to do, so let’s get it done.

Good management has an invisible hierarchy – You know who’s the boss; you know who’s the employee; you know the job that needs to be done, and it gets done without blatantly implying the managerial structure.

People can feel when you are treating them like people, and they feel differently when they are being viewed as employees.

My basic tenant of management is this: If people think you have their best interest at heart, they will work diligently for you, and sometimes you will hear comments like: “You are/were the best boss I’ve ever had.”

But even if you have peoples’ best interest at heart, you will fail if you view them as employees. That’s when you hear all sorts of nasty comments about your role as the boss.

The difference between the two approaches seems to come down to the difference between the words “assessing” and “judging.” When you are assessing peoples’ skills as a manager, you are in a more fact based mode discerning their strengths and weaknesses. When you are in judgement mode, your assessments carry more weight – and that weight can be felt by the people you are managing.

Judgement adds lots of baggage to the facts. It seems the more judging we do, the more people feel like employees. When we set our judements aside and assess only the facts, our units will feel more like a family.

My experience is that judgements get in the way of managing effectively. It’s not likely you will like everyone you manage, but you’ll manage more effectively if you follow the old biblical verse, “Judge not lest ye be judged.”

All the best,

John

ACCOMPLISH ANYTHING
LOSE WEIGHT & KEEP IT OFF
STOP SMOKING FOREVER
SLEEP THROUGH THE NIGHT EVERY NIGHT
IMPROVE YOUR SELF CONFIDENCE
I LOVE MY BODY
RELAX IN 2 MINUTES
FEEL FOREVER YOUNG
VIRTUAL MASSAGE