Over the last couple of years, I watched nearly identical tragic romances unfold, and having a window on these two relationships reminded me not only of the immense influence of guilt on some people’s decision making, but the amazing absence of guilt that some people may feel in nearly identical circumstances. These “tragic romances” I’m referring to were fairly common stories of marriages in which the woman believed the man had become emotionally or sensually vacant, tried to address the problem, and then, out of frustration, turned to infidelity to find the attention they craved.

The woman in one of these relationships expressed very little guilt about her actions, and moved on to get divorced. In the other instance however, the woman apparently felt enough guilt that she eventually rejected a man she had told repeatedly for several years that she loved, and returned to the psychologically abusive relationship with her husband. It was the latter situation that struck me more; as this friend sobbed about the dual guilt of hurting one man to return to the one she had cheated on, I did my best to encourage her to do what she thought was right, and suggested that while it was alright to feel badly about doing something one knows is “wrong”, it’s literally toxic to ourselves to dwell in the guilt. I suggested that once she had acknowledged to herself some wrongdoing, that she “shed that shroud of guilt” and move on.

There’s a remarkable range of things a person probably should feel guilty about, but I can’t help noticing the widely disparate manifestations of guilt or lack thereof that we encounter in modern life. The other day, I was talking to a fellow whose wages were being garnished because of a student loan that was in default, and I asked him how he would feel about mass protest to dismiss or defer student debt. He said he wouldn’t support it. I asked him why – in light of the fact that bankers and politicians were dumping the debt for their financial failures on current and future generations of taxpayers through bailouts – he wouldn’t demand a reciprocal arrangement. He said that what they did was wrong, but that didn’t mean he didn’t owe the debt he had taken on.

That pretty effectively sums up the poles of the range of human responses to feeling guilt over wrongdoing right there. Regardless of the fact that a person may be able or likely to find rationalizations for wrongdoing (especially if the rewards are high enough, as with emotion or riches), there is one kind of person who will feel genuine guilt whether or not they get caught, and another kind of person who will NOT feel genuine guilt whether they get caught or not.

If you’re in the latter camp, I’m not sure why you’re reading this; there’s a decent chance that you’re mildly sociopathic! But if you’re like most of us, you may find yourself in situations where guilt gnaws at you for a variety of reasons. While guilt serves a perfectly positive purpose – it’s our own negative reinforcement for behaviors that don’t benefit us – it can also be a poison that dwells within us, and eventually destroys us.

In the simplest view, there are really only two kinds of guilt. Guilt about something you did, or guilt about something you didn’t do. They can both be incredibly self-destructive, and they can both be fairly easily dealt with, once you identify lingering guilt as the little monster that it is. But that’s probably the real problem. Many people don’t even REALIZE they’re driven by guilt. Are you? Do you fret about how you could have done a better job on something at work? About how you don’t spend enough quality time with your family? Those are both just as likely to be forms of perfectionism, which is another issue worth looking at. Do you feel guilt about how you broke little Jane or Johnny’s heart in college, or the friend you jilted at some point in the past? The first two items aren’t really that hard to deal with. It’s simple as CHANGING YOUR BEHAVIOR. Do better next time at work, learning from the mistakes you made. Spend more time with the family! How hard is that? And the latter two things can end up being almost comical once one takes the right steps toward addressing them. Quite often, when we go to repair this kind of guilt by reaching out to make amends, we discover that the person we thought we had harmed cares so little that they barely remember who we are! Sometimes guilty obsessions can honestly be that out of proportion with reality. The guilt factory in our head can be quite productive.

The strategy for minimizing guilt in your life is actually pretty damn simple. Don’t lie. Don’t cheat. Don’t fear. Communicate! Things like the infidelity I mentioned at the top arise from one’s fear of the confrontation one thinks will result from expressing one’s true feelings. Telling someone what you think will almost never have results as negative as those that come from subterfuge, deceit, and avoiding the facts.

Dealing with persistent guilt has other solutions, but they all center around self-forgiveness. If you’ve done your best to make amends or change your behavior, and are still feeling guilt, there are several things that can help you. One is simply time. While a confession or making an amend can sometimes provide instant, almost magical relief, sometimes we just need to process and heal. Another is obviously therapy. Talk therapy can really help us hear the fallacy of our own thoughts, and free us to move on. And if you have faith or a spiritual side, ponder the fact that while bringing your problem to a church figure may actually AGGRAVATE the problem, since guilt is one of the key tools of many religious organizations, the PRINCIPLES of your faith may provide an incredibly easy answer. Most faiths and spiritual practices have something devoted especially to release from guilt. Think of the entire purpose of a figure like Jesus, for instance, who – if you believe the teachings – was sent here to free us from our human flaws, partly by acknowledging that we all have them!

It may just be time to shed that shroud of guilt you’re wearing.

It’s not very becoming.

In the end though, all this talk of eastern belief probably muddles a really great practical tool for better living, which is to stop looking outside so much for someone or something that is going to give you some tidy answer. You don’t need to go to business school to start a business, you don’t need to go to church or temple to believe in God, and often, the solution to a problem is either staring you in the face or lingering nearby. You just have to develop the openness and awareness to recognize and accept it.

I’ve always been fond of the Hopi maze symbol pictured above. It has many meanings, but one of the simpler ones is that life contains a special dream for you, and no matter how circuitous a path you take, you will get there. If you look closely at the symbol, you’ll notice that although it looks like a typical labyrinth, all the paths in fact lead to the middle. This of course implies that if you want to get to the end of the maze, you may as well just get going, because no matter how many detours you take, you’re still going to get there.Which isn’t bad advice for how to live.

If you’re paying attention in life, you’ll probably notice that even the best laid plans may not work out as you expected, whether as a result of some flaw you yourself built into the plan, or because of unpredictable outside influences. This is probably one of the greatest single causes of a litany of the “problems” we experience in life. Stress, anger, disappointment, depression – many of the states we experience that we perceive as negative often are a result of a single simple thing: un-met expectations. So one obvious solution would be to lower your expectations, as suggested in MadTV’s Lowered Expectations dating service skits. Another would be to just hunker down and wait until the bad stuff passes, because it usually does.

Both of those approaches will work in some way, but if you really want to discover peace of mind and and genuine satisfaction from life, there’s another tool you can apply, which is some basic spiritual knowledge. I always feel compelled to point out that by “spiritual” I don’t mean “religious”; a spiritual approach in my opinion is simply a practical application of of the concept of “doing the next right thing”, utilizing the wealth of knowledge at our fingertips for figuring out what that is for ourselves. When it comes to “trusting life”, I often recommend checking out Rob Breszny’s Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia, because it has a humorous secular spin on how well life is in fact working out, even when we’re failing to recognize it. Another great body of ideas is presented in Deepak Chopra’s Seven Spiritual Laws material. Chopra does a great job of imparting a lot of practical tools in an engaging narrative fashion.

There are MANY ways develop a practical spiritual aspect to your engagement with experience though. My development partner Nick has pursued rigorous discipline, and the wisdom intrinsic in the various martial arts he has studied intently for decades. After years of study, he became a teacher, and in my opinion, the student/teacher evolution is one of the greatest personal development tools in existence. I experienced my own personal spiritual evolution as a result of an odd mix of growing up in a liberal intellectual college town where Eastern philosophies were pervasive, and my later experiences with addiction and recovery. But however you achieve the ability to “trust life”, there are some very simple approaches that can help you out. I’ve outlined a few below, but this is hardly comprehensive, and not exactly secret wisdom or anything. Life really is a maze, so you really should explore the labyrinth in your OWN way, the mysteries and surprises should be part of the FUN, not part of the misery!

Expect Surprises – “The Plan D” Method

The most common cause of almost all the anger and unhappiness I see people experiencing is a result of things simply not going the way they expected. The resulting anger, stress, and unhappiness then manifests not only as toxic interactions in relationships, but even diminished physical well-being, whether as physical fatigue, tension, poor immune response, or even cardiovascular issues. It is now fairly well documented that mental and emotional stress is directly connected to physical health issues. My personal approach is based on what I jokingly refer to as my “Plan D” method. Some people don’t even have a “Plan B” when they set out to do something, which is a guaranteed setup for ongoing frustration. But I add extra layers. They go something like this:

Plan A – This is exactly what I want to happen
Plan B – This an alternate plan to still achieve exactly the results I’m seeking
Plan C – This is the realization that a huge compromise may have to be made
Plan D – This is total surrender of my will to forces completely beyond my control

This requires a little extra thinking, but the energy spent on the extra thinking is more than rewarded by the energy NOT expended on frustration when things go wrong. If you want to use the war metaphor, remember there will always be another battle. And if you prefer a less hostile analogy, remember that sometimes you just need to get the house built. You can always renovate later. Plan D is probably the toughest for most of us to implement, but may be the most important one. You are not always going to get your cake. Get used to it and have a cookie instead.

Trust Yourself

This one is a continual challenge for me. My willingness to look at multiple aspects of a situation sometimes leads me to not trusting my own “gut” on something. Nick has a great approach for busting through this kind of problem. He often refers to the idea of “Don’t just do something, DO SOMETHING”, adding some extra oomph to the idea that sometimes simply taking action is the best solution to moving through doubt. I talk about self-talk a lot, because one of the greatest obstacles for trusting things to work out is simply learning that there’s a big chatterbox in our own heads that may be working against us. Over and over I find that when something went really wrong with a pursuit, I was failing to “listen to my heart”. And by that I mean a balance of rational thought and what my “gut” or instincts told me. If you have deep-rooted self-doubt issues, maybe therapy would help. But more often, we’re simply dealing with our own poor habits, and therapy can even be counter-productive. Consider a life coach. But if even that seems like too much fuss, just practice learning to TRUST YOURSELF! The solutions are almost always right there inside you. Thinking is over-rated sometimes.

Share Yourself

People aren’t typically psychic, so it’s unlikely that they know what’s going on in your head. In spite of this obvious fact, many people seem to operate on a big assumption that since THEY’RE thinking something, everyone ELSE must be thinking it. Remember that the things that you think and feel aren’t always apparent to others, even when you lay them out as a linear plan. Sharing your feelings and broader views – simply being open to others – can have a profoundly positive effect on others’ ability to support and trust you, and all this trust in life I’m talking about is really about trusting PEOPLE, not just some mysterious set of forces that we call “life”, right?

Me, I’m gonna go back to bumping into walls now. And having a good laugh when I do.

When To Say Yes To Saying No

There are lots of situations in which it’s okay to say no, and some in which it’s actually quite beneficial. First we’re going to talk about saying no as positive self-preservation, and then we’ll talk about saying no as a necessity of consumer-driven modern life. If, like me, you’re a person who has a reasonable amount of compassion and even a slightly giving nature, you’ll understand varying degrees of the “self-destructive helper” behavior. What we’re referring to here is of course the “let me drop everything I’m doing and fix your problem for you” phenomena. This is probably the most easily identifiable form of what we’re talking about. It takes a lot of other forms, but we’re going to use one real-world example, and then explore why it’s really a bigger problem than it seems, and talk about some solutions.

The Computer Guy

For me personally, this takes an amusing form that the more computer-savvy amongst you may be familiar with. Or maybe you’re on the other end of things, and are one of the self-proclaimed “Dummies” that all those books are aimed at. In any case, I work a lot at a computer, and have taught myself how to do things I need to do, like using a word processing program, basic image editing, and simpler aspects of web design. I have no programming skills, and limited hardware knowledge, but whom do all my friends call when they have a computer problem? Yup. And why do they do it? It’s partly their misconceptions about what I know, but it’s more because they know I’m patient and helpful. But over time, this free help desk service of mine became time consuming and distracting. I needed a solution.

Humor as a Tool for Positive Change

When I realized how big a problem this might be a few years ago, I at first relied on humor. With repeat offenders, I’d yuck it up saying “It’s funny how if you know a plumber, you’d never call him and say ‘hey, I have some free time this weekend, why don’t you come over and work on my septic field’, but if you know a computer guy, you have no qualms about saying ‘hey, I’ve got some time this evening, can you come over and help me re-install Windows?’ “. This was actually pretty effective, but then there were the friends that committed something more like ongoing misdemeanors, like calling and saying “hey, I can’t open this email attachment” or “Damn, I’ve been trying to fix this Word document for like 15 minutes, can you take a look at it?” With these people, I also used a little humor. An old tech support joke is to say “Did you try the RTFM Protocol?” That of course is an acronym for “Read The Freakin’ Manual”. I’d then patiently and politely instruct them to see if their program had a little bar at the top that featured the word “Help”. I’d walk them through how to use it. It’s AMAZING how many people don’t use the “Help” files provided with all major software products. And how quickly people tend to give up when confronted with problems. And that’s the real issue here.

How Saying Yes Can Do Damage

So we’ve kept things on a slightly amusing note here, but the little anecdotes above should make evident what the problem really is. While being helpful is a great quality, being lazy isn’t. And a motivated, helpful person is likely to attract a lot of under-motivated, needy people. Not BAD people, just people who haven’t figured out some of the more fun parts of the game of life by meeting simple challenges and growing from the experience. So the fact is, there are several basic problems that can arise by not knowing when to say “no”:

• You’re probably adding unnecessary stress to your own experience
• You’re preventing the person you’re helping from building simple self-reliance
• You’re probably doing this out of some sense of guilt that you might want to resolve.

Like we said, being helpful is a great quality, but a simple indicator of whether or not you’re providing “good” help is whether or not you feel stressed out by doing it. If you ARE feeling stressed out by doing it, the first thing is to learn to recognize this feeling, and then learn that it really is okay to say “no” when you need to. And it’s helpful to have language for doing this, because it’s easy to sound hostile, dismissive, or uncaring when someone asks for help and you deny them. We’re not going to get into that “guilt thing” we mentioned above, it’s beyond the scope of what we’re addressing here. But here are a few commonly suggested ideas for how to say no:

Language For Saying No

Be positive, THEN say no. Stay calm, and say something like “Wow, I know how frustrating that can be. I wish I could help, but [INSERT PERFECTLY ACCEPTABLE REASON. THERE ARE MANY]. The real problem is often that we’re simply too harried ourselves, and respond with bristliness and frustration. Which doesn’t feel very good on either end.

Be positive, then DEFER. Sometimes, it’s entirely possible that you would LIKE to help, but the timing is bad. Find out if the problem can be addressed later, and plan a time to do it. Often the person with the problem just needed a break so they could reframe things, and in the interim they figure it out anyway! If not, no hard feelings are generated either way.

Be positive, and then PASS THE BUCK. One of the worst kinds of help is when a SECOND person who doesn’t know what they’re doing gets involved with a problem. Know your abilities, and repress your inner know-it-all. Tell them you have NO IDEA how to tackle the problem, and then ask aloud “Hmmm, I wonder if we know anybody who actually knows how to do this?”

Saying No To Salespeople, Charities, and Strangers

Modern consumer-driven life has really become ugly. The most effective salespeople and telemarketers know that shame, guilt, and persistence are their most powerful tools. Shame, with the implication that somehow you can’t afford something; guilt, used as a tool by pushing the limits of your basic courtesy and decency; and persistence, in the form of mindlessly plodding forward as if you never said no. There’s a simple rule I rely on here, and I am unbending in its application. Be courteous and polite until the other party violates the ground rules of courteous interaction. Then detachedly terminate the interaction. Here’s a typical example, with a little flourish for those of you who feel compelled to be more expressive. Recently a Comcast salesman came to my door. The exchange went something like this:

LOUD, AGGRESSIVE KNOCKING AT DOOR (Already a violation of courtesy)
I answer the door, and the sales guy jumps right in:
“Hi, I’m with Comcast, and we’re offering some great specials including free installation!”
I reply calmly:
“Thanks, but I don’t like television, and am already quite pleased with my internet service”
He continues:
“Really? Comcast has the fastest, most affordable internet service around, what service are you with?”
You see, at this point, he’s already blown it. Rude knocking, ignoring what I said and plodding on. And then being JUST PLAIN NOSY.
I said:
“Wow, you’re really rude. Thanks, I’m not interested, but good luck.”
He started another sales pitch so I said:
“I wish your rudeness weren’t forcing me to close the door in your face.”
He actually started another pitch.
DOOR SLOWLY CLOSES AS COMCAST GUY KEEPS TALKING

I pondered asking him how much it sucks to have such a crappy job, annoying people like me all evening, but I don’t know how effective it is to try to expand people’s awareness. For instance, an acquaintance of mine has a lot of patterned responses to panhandlers. One of them is to say “Would I be walking to work right now if I had money to give to YOU?” Clearly, that’s neither kind nor productive. But on occasion I’ll actually turn the tables on a salesman or telemarketer, and ask them if they love what they do, or if circumstance drove them to it. If they clarify that they ENJOY being obnoxious and aggressive, that’s one thing, but occasionally a quick human chat lets the other person apologize while sharing their frustration. Mostly though, I think this strategy is more about our own ego, so I generally just leave it in the “courteous response and closure” framework. So in the end, saying no is really quite simple. Just make sure you’re clear on why you’re saying no, and then do it politely, without excuses, and without hostility. That hostility usually just comes from our OWN sense of being overwhelmed, so just remember to nip it in the bud. And if you need to delay the answer in order to compose yourself, just say “Maybe, but let me get right back to you”. Gather your wits, get back to them, and say NO.

Some of you may still struggle with this. Here’s a permission slip:

Do you ever talk to yourself? Maybe you should. I’m always a little surprised when I ask people I’m working with if they’ve ever heard of or put to work the concept of “self talk” and they say “no”, because it’s such a common tool in therapy and recovery. But on reflection, maybe that’s part of the problem. For many of us, our first exposure to the concept is probably when someone mocks the over-the-top books of affirmations that are in the self-help section at the book store, or – as in my case – in a 12-step setting when someone talks about “playing the tape” in their head. It’s unfortunate that in an attempt to teach the concept, it gets so dumbed-down as to be useless, because when used in a common-sense and practical way, it can be the one of the single most powerful tools for being a happy and successful person. So what are we talking about when we talk about “self talk”? Well, not everyone’s mind works exactly the same way, but what we’re talking about is the positive or negative messages our own thoughts guide us with on a daily basis. Do you know what kind of positive or negative messages you send YOURSELF each day? There’s a simple way to figure this out, and the results may surprise you. And before you start tailoring a NEW message, it makes sense to get in there and get a sense of what your mind is already doing.

Just Listen To Yourself!

The first step? It’s incredibly simple, but a little challenging at first. Listen to you mental processes, and make a solid commitment to do so for a few days. The first time I did this, it was at the recommendation of a life coach (more about that below). I recognized the value of what she was suggesting, but honestly thought I already knew what was going on in my head, so did it grudgingly. I have to admit I was blown away by the negative chatter in my head. I tend to operate with a bit of a “hope for the best, plan for the worst” mentality. When I keep this in balance, it’s very effective for me. I stay positive and optimistic for the most part, and do just a little mental preparation to accept occasional undesired outcomes. But when I made a conscious effort to just LISTEN to my thoughts for a couple of days, I suddenly realized that this approach of mine had drifted WAY into the “plan for the worst” zone. I was spending half my day injecting semi-negative expectations into everything I was doing. Oddly, the most important downside of this wasn’t really the negativity; I’d still show up for meetings or whatever and be my usual positive self.

No Matter Where I Go, There I Aren’t

The bigger problem was the simple fact that I was never “being where I was”. Listening attentively to my own thoughts for a few days was tricky at first. The mind tends to prefer going about its business unquestioned. But as I continued to do this for a couple of days, I noticed two more things that I didn’t think I did so often. One was a low-level constant comparison of my physique. I’d constantly look at men or women and almost silently compare myself to them. The other was a tendency to in effect say “I should do something about that” with regard to just about every negative self-perception I have. Whether it is a bad work habit, a diet or fitness pattern I’d like to change, or something I do or say in a relationship. It was as if my mind felt like simply acknowledging a fact was an adequate step for now. Which it is, until you do this every day for months or years, and it just becomes a reinforcing observation.

Don’t Gimme No Backtalk!

So once you have a sense of what kind of mental chatter you have going on, what’s next? At this point a lot of well-intentioned self-improvement gurus get it all wrong in my opinion, suggesting positive affirmations similar to the ones that the Stuart Smalley character poked fun at. This might work for some of us, but for someone like me, this approach is doomed to failure. I have a totally rebellious nature, and don’t even trust MYSELF when I tell me how great I am. And the “play the tape” metaphor? My mind doesn’t work like a tape recorder, and besides, WHO USES TAPE RECORDERS anymore? I had to try a different, two-pronged approach. One part consisted of simply focusing on being grateful, and pausing to be thankful for all the good stuff that is constantly going on around me. I’d pick a single thing in my environment, whether it was the fresh air I was breathing, the cool car across the street, or the kind person that had just held a door for me. Just putting energy into something like that would sidetrack any negative anticipatory chatter, and give my thoughts some positive momentum. The other part consisted of taking action whenever I caught myself thinking “I really should”. That’s one thing that Stuart nailed dead on. No one wants to be “shoulding all over themselves”, right?

All Self-Talk And No Action

Vincent Van Gogh said “If you hear a voice within you saying, You are not a painter, then by all means paint and that voice will be silenced.” Simply taking action has a profound impact on how we think. So what will work for you? You’ll have to figure part of that out yourself. In Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich, he talks about autosuggestion, and says “concentrate upon a given desire until that desire becomes a burning obsession”. In Deepak Chopra’s Seven Spiritual Laws of Success, he suggests you list all of your desires, and carry the list everywhere, looking at it morning, night, and before meditation. Those of a more religious bent will suggest daily affirmations and prayers. But these approaches all have one thing in common. Repetition and persistence! If you’re not sure which of the many approaches to constructive self-talk is best, there’s a great book that I find myself recommending constantly. It’s Taming Your Gremlin by Rick Carson. I’ve never tried the expanded class or workshop products, but this simple book is chock full of useful and amusing tools and metaphors for identifying the ways in which your own mind may be undermining your intentions.

So It’s All In My Head?

No. And that’s probably one of the most important parts of all of this. While books like Taming Your Gremlin are an awesome resource to get you going, you’re going to find it a lot more productive if you externalize some of this stuff and get some useful feedback. You could even just share notes with a friend, but personally I got a lot more out of some brief work with a life coach. It was life coach Dori Weinstein that turned me on to the Gremlin book. And although I get a small spiff if you buy that book on Amazon, that’s an unpaid endorsement for Dori. I got more out of four sessions with her than I did from dozens of therapy sessions in the past. And although I have nothing against therapy, this is one case where I think it would be counterproductive, because it’s so focused on reflection and introspection. Getting in touch with your self talk and changing it is a continuous and action-oriented pursuit that thrives with external input to the mostly closed system that is the adult mind. So the next time you catch yourself talking to yourself, remember to eavesdrop. And if you’re getting a bad rap, feel free to stick up for yourself.

I’m involved in a partnership venture called SEO Ann Arbor. My business partner is Don Prior, who owns Network Services Group, LLC, just about the greatest computer services business on the planet. If you want a computer network that actually does what it’s supposed to do (a radical notion!), and experts who actually communicate in English, get hold of Don. He’s also the guy to talk to if you want to learn how to lose 60 pounds in 6 months or if you simply want to meet a bad mutha … shut your mouth! Just talkin’ bout my man Don. And you can dig it.

But the reason I brought Don up is that we were talking about some of the things that go into building a business, and that led us to a conversation about how to get good at martial arts (we’re both fairly highly ranked in Japanese martial arts). Don summed up the core of the conversation by saying, “Let’s face it, everything worth doing takes time and effort. There’s no way around it.”

Does Everything Good Come from Fighting?

The next day, Ian Gray, author the blog DissociatedPress.com, responded to something I wrote in an email by saying that, “it’s an interesting reflection on the human race that one of it’s earliest personal development systems is martial in origin.”

Buncha Lazy Humans

So it occurs to me that, a lot of time, humans don’t do the hard work needed to really excel at something unless they’re forced to. When another clan of Samurai warriors is raiding your village every few months, that kind of forces you to figure out how to protect yourself. If a whole country is composed of groups of warriors who go around fighting with one another for a few hundred years, there’s going to be a pretty high sense of urgency to develop good weapons, good tactics, and good attitudes about how to live in an atmosphere of war.

That’s how the Japanese came to develop such fantastic personal development systems. They probably would have loved to sit around eating sushi and playing Pachinko, but everybody would have been kicking their ass all the time. And if you happened to be a Japanese hippie who wanted to flash everybody peace signs and wear tie-dye, you were definitely going to end up working for a guy who learned how take over villages really well.

Don’t You Wish Somebody Was Trying to Take Over YOUR Village?

Unfortunately, nobody is running around trying to hack up our villages anymore (actually, they are, but most of ‘em are way over in the Middle East, so most of us can conveniently ignore them). So what’s a guy or gal who wants to get really, really good at something supposed to do? With even a moderate amount of sense, most of us lucky enough to be Americans can easily earn enough to own a car and drink Starbucks every day. Kinda takes away the urgent need to become incredibly good at something, doesn’t it?

So sometimes you have to make your own urgency. There’s a really fun way to do it, and you can make a lot of friends at the same time. What you can do is choose a field or a craft and begin to work at it. Which one you choose is up to you, but the fact is, most of us have an activity or two that really gets us excited. Figure out what that is – that’s the one to choose.

What the Heck Does “Internecine” Mean?

Now, here’s how you create your own little internecine conflict that will help keep you motivated and move you toward mastery. Get involved in a group of people who are doing the thing. Get very involved.

But there’s a trick. To get the most out of this, you’ll want to arrange your psychological approach in a way that best suits you. If you work best as part of a group and like lots of support, join a faction of the group, and do your best to develop skills that align with the views and methods of that group. If you’re an instigator, start poking holes in the methodology of all or part of the group, and look for any good sense that comes out of the response. If you’re a lone warrior like the well-known Miyamoto Musashi, study the group’s methods from afar, but steadfastly develop your own methods, and take steps to ensure that yours are better than those of the group. If there are competitions, compete, alone or as part of your faction.

You Ain’t Bored. Go Outside and Play!

And watch out for “boredom.” If you picked an activity that truly moved you at the outset, boredom is rarely an accurate emotion. In my fifty years of working toward mastery of a wide variety of activities, I’ve noticed that what we experience as boredom is almost always the result of a defense mechanism against one of two events: (1) when we run into a problem that we don’t know how to solve or don’t think we have the resources to solve; or (2) when something about the activity scares us, maybe an encounter with somebody who is significantly better than we are or a realization that the path we’re on will take us someplace uncomfortable.

Get Busy Fighting, You Darn Hippies!

Getting through those barriers is a topic for another column. To sum up the point of this one, there’s no question that everything truly worth doing takes time and effort. Because we are inherently energy-preserving creatures, we won’t automatically devote the time an effort needed to become really extraordinary at something. But you can help yourself become extraordinary by putting yourself in the midst of a culture that motivates you to work at your craft. And to get the most out of that culture, tailor your involvement in such a way that it works best with your personality. I think you’ll be pleased with the results.

The other day I was standing at an intersection, waiting to cross the street. A local panhandler asked the man in a business suit standing next to me “can you spare some change?” to which the guy in the suit smirkily replied “change comes from within, my friend”. This tired exchange – which has probably happened thousands of times in cities all over America – got me thinking. About a lot of things: change, fear, compassion, security… a whole world of things. But but at the core of my thoughts was fear, because it’s such a fundamental force in our lives. And it often is attached to change in one way or another. And although there are lots of strategies for dealing with change and fear, I was reminded recently that there’s only one cure for fear, which I’ll touch on after we explore some more basic strategies for dealing with change.

These two fellows I encountered were a great metaphor for how we deal with change. I would bet that if you asked the two of them how they got where they are today, the panhandler would have a story about how a series of things “happened to him”, and how these misfortunes led to him having to ask strangers for money in order to survive. The guy in the suit would probably have some story about his education, his career, and how he “made things happen” and worked hard to get where he is. There may be some truth to both stories, but you could fairly bet that these two fellows had one thing in common: a lot of their actions are probably driven by fear, and what they fear is change. In the case of the panhandler, his fear is probably a more basic anxiety about getting however much cash he thinks he needs that day. And in the case of the business man, his fear probably takes a much stranger form. He probably fears two things: 1.) Not having the prestige that comes with his accomplishments and possessions, and even stranger, 2.) The possibility that he won’t have financial security in his old age, or enough money if something happens to his health.

Worrying About Security Doesn’t Create It

The funny thing about security is that it doesn’t exist, especially for those who seek it the most. Nothing makes one feel more insecure than spending their whole life worrying about their security. Interestingly, the morally decrepit business practices of the last decade or two have begun to dismantle this big illusion of being able to create security, but not many have put the pieces together in a useful way, and they go right back to the grind. Looking for more security. How many people do you know who had relatively secure jobs and were either handed what seemed like a hefty buyout, sent into early retirement, or in the worst cases, simply informed that if they still wanted their jobs, they’d have to accept completely different condtions of employment? Or how many people do you know who’ve actually had to make a significant claim against the insurance policy they’ve put thousands of dollars into, only to find the insurance company seeking as many methods as they can to avoid a payout? Or maybe you’re in that age group that has spent their entire life paying into Social Security, and only recently figured out that you won’t see a penny of that money.

The Destination vs The Journey

If you think it sounds corny to say that life is more about a journey than a destination, you obviously haven’t gone through the rather common experience of getting the perfect job, buying the perfect house, and marrying the perfect spouse, only to find that everything is perfect except you and how you feel. A lot of divorces and other manifestations of dissatisfaction really are caused by the realities of people and the world in general not matching the huge projection we place on them. As Yogi Berra said, “You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you are going, because you might not get there”. The fact is that many of us are so immersed in the modern myth of happiness that we forget what happiness is altogether.

Enjoying the Journey

So how do we get back to this place where we can enjoy the journey and stop worrying about that illusory destination? The painter Edgar Degas said “Painting is easy when you don’t know how, but very difficult when you do”. The funny thing is that in order to enjoy a life that is full of constant change, the only real solution is acknowledge that you have no idea what’s really going on in the big picture. No, it would be foolish to stop making as much money as you can and handling it sensibly; I’m not suggesting that you stop planning for the future altogether. Although if you WERE able to do so, it would make you one of the happier people on Earth, because you would have achieved the ultimate expression of the one simple thing that will make you happier in the present. That thing, as absurdly simple as it sounds, is LIVING IN THE PRESENT. If you can get into that place on your own through learning how to slow down, be grateful, breathe, and simply appreciate where you are, more power to you. Personally, I rediscovered this ability to enjoy life and be less fearful by quitting drinking, taking part in a 12-step program, and doing a lot of refresher reading. Wherever you are in life, there are a few great books to help you remind yourself how to live for right now and enjoy it, and learn that real security will stem from doing that, not from elaborate planning and a high-income job. If you don’t have issues with the words “God” and “faith” (I personally do sometimes, so tuned them out a little when necessary) Marianne Williamson’s The Gift of Change: Spiritual Guidance for Living Your Best Life is a great resource. One hook for me early in the book was her remark that “We’re in the habit of thinking fearfully, and it takes spiritual discipline to turn that around in a world where love is more suspect than fear”. We’ve become so cynical that most of us don’t realize how true that is until it’s pointed out to us. Another great refresher in getting centered in the present (which also may require some tuning out when he gets a little to “woo woo”) is Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now. There’s nothing new in this book, but the guy does a great job of putting the concepts into a very actionable form while reframing a plethora of sources of wisdom on the topic. And lastly, if you enjoy the “grumpy buddha” approach, Krishnamurti’s Think on These Things is more a critique of our confidence in modern beliefs than anything, but amongst the weighty topics it tackles in its weighty fashion is change, in rather heavy handed passages like the one where he compares the security we seek to a stagnant pool cut off from the river of life, and says:

“A mind which is seeking permanency soon stagnates; like that pool along the river, it is soon full of corruption, decay. Only the mind which has no walls, no foothold, no barrier, no resting place, which is moving completely with life, timelessly pushing on, exploring, exploding – only such a mind can be happy, eternally new, because it is creative in itself.”

Or more simply observational passages like:

“We don’t want to leave the known; so it is our clinging to the known that creates fear in us, not the unknown. The unknown cannot be perceived by the known. But the mind, being made up of the known, says, ‘I am going to end’, and therefore it is frightened.”

But reading books should just be a trigger to action. And it turns out the actions here are simple. Try being grateful. Pick one thing in your current surroundings or situation that you’re happy with, and focus on THAT. Find as many things like that as you can in your life, and you find the effect snowballs, and your life becomes your friend instead of an adversary. And then you attract more positive things. And the peculiar side effect of “making things right” NOW is that they will automatically be this way in the FUTURE. Because the future is just now, only it’s happening later.

Making Change Happen

Ironically, all this seeking of security has the dreadful side effect referenced above in that Krishnamurti passage. We spend all our time carving out some sense of stability, only to realize that it’s a prison of sorts, sometimes just psychologically, but sometimes financially. Changing our behavior is much easier than we think, once we let go of this delusion that we’ve created some kind of lasting security. One easy thing you can do is simply identify the voices that control you. Self-talk can be both a positive and a negative tool, but it’s important to at least realize we do it! We all make decisions based on a certain amount of internal dialogue. Some of these internal voices are our own, and some – especially the ones based on comparing ourselves, the ones that drive us to buy things we don’t need or seek jobs that we won’t enjoy – are ENTIRELY adopted from what other people say and internalized as our own. A book I often recommend that helped me a lot in this area was Taming Your Gremlin. It presents some easy-to-implement tools with a moderate dose of wit and humor. Another thing you can do is simply DO THINGS YOU DON’T DO. Nick and I are finishing a little book along these lines. Look for teasers soon. And perhaps one of the most expedient things you could do is seek a life coach. I got more tools for positive change in four one-hour sessions with a life coach than I have from a dozen books or the hundreds of hours I’ve spent living in fear.

The Only Real Cure For Fear

So at the outset, I mentioned fear, and the only cure for it. We can treat a lot of the symptoms of our fear by taking action, trusting life, being brave and bucking up, but something that I rediscovered recently was this: the only “cure” for fear is LOVE. If you strip fear down to what it really is, you realize that it is simply a discomfort with the unknown. And if you think of the first times we experience fear, i.e. as an infant or toddler that has little or no “rational” reason for fear, you quickly realize that the thing that makes that fear go away is when someone who cares about us gives us some love. Try it in the real world, and you’ll be astounded by the results. The next time you’re anxious or frustrated with someone or some thing, try expressing love or sympathy instead of anger. The transformative power of this – especially on another human – is astounding.

I’m always happy when I see someone cruise through college, get a job they love, and live a happy life well into their forties. Of course, if that were the only measure of my happiness, I’d probably be bummed out a lot, because honestly, how often do we see that happen? Much more often, people choose a degree for the wrong reasons – prestige, employability, or high income – and end up changing jobs soon after graduating. I couldn’t find hard statistics, but this Indiana Wesleyan University page  says that according to the U.S. Department of Education, 40% of college graduates end up working in careers unrelated to their college major four years after graduation, and it’s common knowledge that many people end up in a career unrelated or only loosely-related to their college degree. This becomes more of a pitfall with the rising education costs and sluggish economy of the last several years. So what can one do to avoid this kind of meandering path through misguided expectations and later dissatisfaction? Well, as is often the case, a little balance and self-knowledge go a long way. Unfortunately, our consumer-driven culture doesn’t encourage much balance, and the guidance we receive when entering college is often much more based on measurable achievement, and test-driven aptitude assessment. The entire system (in the opinion of this non-graduate) tends to be skewed – as I already suggested – toward financial reward and prestige. And most of the best-intentioned advice we receive as we enter college is from people who have bought into the same belief system. So we’ll serve up some fun ideas for taking a new look at who you are further on, but first a little background on why a person like me – a non-degreed person pursuing what he humorously calls his fifth career – has anything worth saying about the topic.

The Yuppie vs. Bohemian Decade

I was of college age in the eighties, the decade that gave birth to the term “Yuppie”, and the Wall Street mentality that has shaped much of our culture for the last two decades. As a result, I’m now able to see the long-term fruits of the choices people my age made back then, and how these choices affected their financial well-being, personal happiness, and even their physical health. The youth of that era were pretty clearly polarized into two distinct camps. On the one hand, there were those that bought into the beliefs based on net income as a basic measure of success, and on the other hand, those who didn’t. I fell into the latter camp. Although I excelled in academic testing (I only missed three questions on the SAT) I was much more interested in creative and artistic pursuits, and had a poorly developed understanding of the concept of long-term financial stability. Although there is a definite continuum across this Yuppy/Bohemian spectrum amongst these people I know, now that we’re all over forty, one pattern is pretty evident to me. Those who polarized toward career climbing and wealth accumulation as a measure of success have tended to reach a period of spirtual or emotional hollowness that either leads to a re-awakening, or in negative manifestations, substance abuse problems or genuine personal crises like divorce and financial problems. On the other pole are the bohemian types like myself, who I would describe as more genuinely happy and spiritually content, but often terribly ill-equipped for their later years, with no financial plan for “retirement”, a word that will rapidly become useless as the boomers and generation jones reach their sixties and seventies and find none of that “Social Security” they put so much of their income into to over the last few decades.

My Intrapersonal Stupidity

Something that probably affected me personally to a greater extent than my socio-economic values was an issue relating to the measurement of intelligence. As I said, I kind of kicked the SAT’s ass, but at the time – although it was a handy bragging point with my academically-inclined friends – it was an otherwise utterly useless accomplishment. I simply had no interest in college, and had a number of things I wanted to DO, not STUDY. And this is where my life could have been much more rewarding, if only I’d understood one simple fact sooner. I was blessed and cursed with a genuine gift for learning, which – combined with a fairly disciplined and persistent nature – made it possible for me to excel at most things I tried. This would seem like an asset, but the fact is that for years it kept me from discovering what my real passions or gifts were, and helped keep me hopping from pursuit to pursuit, never REALLY feeling rewarded. I had a nominally successful pop music career (I turned down label deals), I ran a successful small telecom firm (and sold the accounts after two years), I had a screenplay optioned out (meaning I got paid but the film was never made) and most recently I maintained a state of barely adequate self-employment for a decade doing web development and other new media work for small business clients. I say “barely adequate” because I only maintained a subsistence income, and although I LOVE the freedom of not having a “job”, I never bumped things to the next level and created self-maintaining revenue streams, even though I was fully aware that this should have been a basic objective, and I probably had the knowledge and skills to achieve it. So why this continued near success and mediocrity? I’m convinced it boils down to one simple thing, something I only discovered a couple of years ago by exploring Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences. And what was it? Well, at the core of Gardner’s work is the notion that we have seven core kinds of intelligence: Linguistic, Logical-mathematical, Musical, Bodily-kinesthetic, Spatial, Interpersonal, and Intrapersonal. I tend to test very high on all except the last one, Intrapersonal intelligence. And there’s the clincher. Imagine you were really good at everything except knowing what you were really good at! So this little insight started me on a more recent journey, which was getting clear on what my gifts are, and how my skills can help me realize them. Below are three things that helped me get a start. Maybe they’ll open some doors for you too.

So You Think You’re Pretty Smart

But what KIND of smart are you? You might want to check out the book I mentioned above – Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences – but you can also take a quick and informative quiz online at the The Birmingham Grid for Learning. It’s free, and at the end presents you with a graphical representation of how you tested. Mine is below, highlighting my “Intrapersonal Stupidity”. On the other hand, it highlights my exceptional interpersonal and linguistic skills, which, combined with some superficial Myers-Briggs tests (see below), helped me narrow in on something I probably knew all along, which is that my real gift lies somewhere in the realm of understanding people and how they communicate.

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator

If you’ve been through extensive hiring processes, there’s a very good chance that at some point in your life, you’ve been subjected to a test that’s based either directly or indirectly on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. I’d like to make clear that I have no genuine expertise or extensive knowledge of this inventory tool, and although there seem to be quite a few people who invest a lot of energy in applying and pondering the concepts, I only personally recommend it as a start point. I treated it more like a compass than a full set of navigational tools, but often recommend it to people who are struggling with sorting out their personal identity. Free versions of the basic questionnaires are widely available, it has its origins in the work of one of the greatest minds in the field of psychology – Carl Jung – and it is widely acknowledged as a credible tool, with only minor scientific criticism. For the record, I consistently test as an ENFJ. There are a number of organizations that offer professional MBTI assessments, but as I said there are plenty of free short-form versions available, like this one. This test is open to a fair amount of self-report bias, so be honest. No-one’s judging the results but you!

Your Heart & Your Head

So these little quizzes are both fun and informative, but unless you work in human resources or psychology, they’re of limited use after a point. The whole idea here is to find YOUR path and YOUR purpose, not simply put together a tidy, externally-generated assessment of yourself so you can put it on the shelf or talk about it with your friends. To help make this self-examination a useful part of a better life, you need to take little pointers like this and put them to work! The first thing to explore as you assess what your new course might be is an approach that is consistently overlooked, but perhaps the most powerful tool in your toolbox. It’s your heart. Einstein said “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them“, making him an ironic source of some great advice. The fact is, if you find yourself at a place in your life where you’re unhappy with your work – which for most of us is more than a third of our waking hours – there’s a really good chance that you “thought yourself” into this place. We tend to make career decisions based on what we think are rational questions like “will I make enough money?” and “will I be able to get a job doing this thing?“, and COMPLETELY overlook questions like “will I have any FUN doing this?” or “can I find some real SATISFACTION from doing this?“, which in my opinion is the root of the entire problem. Many of us are heavily conditioned to ignore the best-informed source of information available to us, the things our HEART tells us. The fact that I’m going to clarify this metaphor is a perfect example of how out of touch many of us are, but when I say “what your heart tells you” I’m suggesting that you give more credence to your visceral reaction to the idea of certain kinds of work. If I say “how would you like a 100 million dollar a year job as fast-paced executive of a major corporation?“, you may like some part of the idea, but if I say “How would you like to own and operate an oceanfront restaurant in the tropics?” you might actually get a mental picture in your head and relax for a moment. What do you love? What sounds like it would be fun? Yeah, it’s almost a hackneyed cliche to say Do What You Love & The Money Will Follow, but the fact is that if you do what you love, the kind of contentment you experience makes the exact volume of income a little secondary, and you generally find you still make enough, because you’re already happy before you get a “paycheck”.

Mentors & Coaches

For me, having a trusted sounding board has been a crucial part of what has been a very rapid personal evolution. I highly recommend finding a decent life coach, even if you don’t engage in a long-term working relationship. Many have short-term and per-session packages, and for just a few hundred dollars, you will probably get a kick in the butt that equals twenty years of career counseling. A good life coach is like a therapist that kicks your ass instead of helping you dwell. If you’re bringing the right attitude to the relationship, you should be able to get all sorts of fresh strategies and the motivation to enact them in a very short time. And mentors? There are a multitude of ways to approach this. The simplest is the direct method, which is simply identifying someone in your professional life that you respect or admire, and ASKING them to be a mentor. If they’re an entrepeneur or professional worth their salt, they’ll know what this basically means, perhaps be flattered, and be capable of giving you a simple yes or no answer. If they say no, you’ve at least probably strenghtened a professional relationship through your expression of trust or respect. My personal strategy has been a little quirky. Because I give the impression that I’m more intelligent than I am, a lot of people in my professional life have a hard time accepting that I really need this kind of relationship. So you know what I do? I DON’T TELL THEM that they’re my mentor. I just allow a more humble relationship with them than I would with other people, and whenever you ask people questions and show interest in their answers, they become veritable fonts of valuable information. EVERYONE loves to show what they know. There’s no need to make the process official.

So do you know of any good self-assessment tools? Feel free to share.

I don’t mean that you have to work before you can go snowboarding – I think we all understand that we have to work before we can play, even if we don’t always like it. What I’m talking about is the idea that whatever you set out to do, there are going to be obstacles and delays on the way to success.

I ran into this the other day when I wanted to install base moldings in my new martial arts school. My architect wanted me to use plywood made from bamboo. It’s expensive, I really like it. But before I could nail the moldings into place, I had to order the plywood, receive it, cut it into strips, sand it, apply a finish, and cut it to length. The whole project took me four days, but actually installing the molding only took the last half of the last day.

Only 10% is the “good stuff”

If it sounds like I’m complaining, that’s because I am …. a little. But what I’m really trying to do is point out something that happens in virtually every significant activity, and that’s this: planning, preparation, and problems are often 90 percent of the projects we do. And if we ignore this truth, we’re doomed to be frustrated and often doomed to fail. On the flip side, if we recognize this at the start of a project, we’re much better prepared to move forward.

Three things you can do

Here are three things you can do to get ready for all the stuff that gets in the way of the things you want to do:

1. Hire a professional

2. Plan

3. Mentally prepare

Hire a professional

If you have the means to hire professionals, they are usually much better prepared to deal with the stuff that has to be done along the way. They have the tools, the knowledge, and the experience to either avoid the obstacles or deal with them along the way.

Of course, you still have to find the right person for the job, and if you aren’t aware of the obstacles that can arise in your project, you will probably underestimate how long it’s going to take him to get it done.

So, even if you do hire a professionals, you still have to plan and mentally prepare.

Plan … but not too much

It won’t surprise you when I say that planning means learning as much as you can about your task in advance, and figuring out the most efficient way to proceed. I’m a big advocate of planning, but if you read my other post on thewellnessaddict.com, you’ll know I’m a bigger advocate of taking action … BIG action. I know way too many people who never get started because they’re always working on their plans. So even though you should plan your projects, I think mental preparation is the single most important thing you can do to help you get through the stuff that gets in the way of the things you want to do.

Half of preparation is 100% mental

If you haven’t heard me say “attitude is everything,” then I haven’t said it often enough or loud enough. Attitude is everything!

Or almost everything. And attitude when starting new tasks can be really, really important. The most successful people I know are those who start projects with these attitudes: (1) they WILL succeed; (2) there WILL be problems, obstacles, and detours; and (3) they WILL persevere despite the problems, obstacles, and detours. Just going into a task with these three attitudes can make a huge difference in the outcome.

And in a funny way, mental preparation for the problems, pitfalls, and predicaments can be a very important part of planning. If you expect a problem and are prepared to deal with it, whatever it might be, you’ll be far better prepared and not nearly so discouraged by it.

So definitely dream about your desires. Dream big, and picture your goals clearly and in great detail. Then, when you know exactly what you want, think about where things can go wrong. That’s the stuff that’s going to get in the way of the things you want to do. Whatever you do, don’t let that stuff discourage you! You’ll get through it if you’ve planned and prepared, and you’ll be smiling at the other end.

Building a Better Fork

The fact is that – aside from possibly having an actual chemical imbalance that may require professional treatment – when we feel like our plate is too full, we’re probably just using the wrong utensils, or our “eyes are bigger than our stomach” as the old saying goes. Part of the problem is often that once you’re bumped up into some level of stress, there’s a good possibility that your mental faculties are slightly impaired, and the effect can snowball a little, so that things that are actually very manageable seem in our mind to be an un-tameable monster. We’ll discuss more sophisticated forks in a future piece, but one simple tool that I turn to myself on occasion, and that I’ve shared with others numerous times with instant results is what I call the Breakdown Scale. If you have a big ball of confusion in your head right now, grab a pen and paper and try the simple method below.

The Breakdown Scale

First, without prioritizing or trying to order things, list the things that are eating at you. Second, we’re going to use a scale where zero is no stress at all, and ten is a figurative nervous breakdown. Go through the list, and try to honestly assess how stress-inducing each item is. There’s nothing scientific here, but you may notice a couple of things right away. The first is that once you externalize these items, before you even score them, you may notice that the hurricane in your head was really only three or four things, and simply writing them down alleviated half of the stress and confusion. Another thing that you may notice – especially if you really DO have a lot going on – is that if ten is a nervous breakdown, the total of all the individual items could easily be over twenty, depending on the highly subjective nature of the scoring we’re doing here. So first, let’s talk about the scoring, and then we’ll touch on what to do with the numbers. As we said, this is highly subjective, so for one person, something like moving to a new home can be a 9 or 10 by itself, while for another person, moving is simply time and work, with little stress attached at all, and may be only a 2 or 3. The same applies to lots of things in life. We all find different things stressful.

What To Do With These Numbers

Well, if you only had two or three items on your list, and the scores were similar, just arbitrarily pick one item to tackle, do as much as you can about it, and whatever you CAN’T do anything about, make an achievable task list for the item, and LET IT GO for now. Then do the same with the other item or items. If your list was a little more elaborate, we’ll apply the same principle. Here’s an example I’ve recreated from memory from years ago when I learned to use this method. I was changing jobs, was in an unhealthy relationship, and was in the process of moving to a new city as well! My head was a frantic but undefinable mass of mental flotsam and jetsam. I was PARALYZED. Here’s roughly how I scored the list: Moving 8 Relationship 12 (yes, this is cheating for dramatic effect) New Job 5

Using A Fork & Knife In Unison

That’s a pretty darn short list to make someone crazy in the head, right? Simply looking at the list and the numbers immediately gave me a framework to operate within though, and an opportunity for a little humor. Of COURSE I was freaking out; my “Breakdown Scale” was at 25! I was in double-breakdown mode! The reality was that looking at the short list and the simple numbers gave me a start. Yes, from a subjective point of view the relationship score was off the scale, and yes, even if I were less dramatic in the scoring, I’d still be over ten. But what it helped me realize was that I needed to carve this big rump-roast of trouble into bite-size pieces. “Moving” was like a big piece of meat in itself. I needed to slice it into little bites like “call utility companies”, “buy more boxes”, and “take items to Goodwill”, all of which are quite easy to swallow, and can be paced over several meals. The “Relationship” score was off the scale because relationships can be like open buffets, pot lucks, or all-out food fights. It depends on what the parties are bringing to the table. I realized that with that item, I needed to sit down and discuss the menu with my dining partner before I even knew what the score really was. So how do we tackle such a wide variety of things with justs lists and numbers? With logic and and common sense. And more food metaphors to keep it amusing for ourselves.

Creating Bite Size Pieces, and Making a Diet Plan

The way to approach this list has two simple rules:

• Small achievable items first
• Break big items into little items

Nibble at the appetizer or small salad before you tackle the entrees. Make sure to clear the table and take your time between courses. If some item on your plate is unwieldy and keeps sliding around, maybe you shouldn’t be eating so fast! Put it into a to-go box and snack on it later. If you know how big your plate really is, and how big a meal you’re tackling, pretty soon you’ll be in the Clean Plate Club with no signs of indigestion at all.