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.

You know what? It works!

I don’t know what all other people use to get happy, but here’s what worked for me: (1) start each day with a personal affirmation (“It’s gonna be a great day!” or “I am really happy!”); (2) notice all the good things (there are a LOT of ‘em); and (3) when people ask how it’s going, answer with a VERY positive response (“How’s it going?” “GREAT!” or “How are you?” “FANTASTIC, but I’m gonna get better!”).

That’s it. That’ll be one million dollars. please.

Remember those history lessons in school, when we learned about Lewis and Clark, the team of explorers who endured unimaginable trials to travel from the Eastern side of North America all the way to the Pacific Ocean? There were hundreds of settlers who followed them, but when the settlers found a fertile valley or an abundant prairie, they stopped, built a home, and found a way to wrest a living from the land. Being first would have given Lewis and Clark an incalculable advantage, but there was something about the way they defined themselves that didn’t let them stop and put down roots.

There’s two kinds of people in Business Land

Are you a settler? Do you find it comfortable to buy a franchise or a system created by a previous adventurer in your line of business? Or are you an explorer? Do you struggle with the idea of adopting pre-packaged business systems? After several decades in the Business Land, I’ve noticed that there are two kinds of people in our world – settlers, the kind who can happily plug away within the rules and networks created by other people, and explorers, the kind who simply have to find their own path no matter how much more difficult or financially challenging that might be. Though I don’t say it with either pride or shame, I can say with certainty that I fall into the latter group.

Because my life is a whole lot happier since I accepted the fact that I can’t get passionate about a path that’s already been blazed, I thought I’d share a few thoughts about how to get comfortable if being an explorer is just the way God made you!

And let me get this out of the way right at the beginning of this little soapbox speech – I don’t believe that one way is inherently better than the other. I have a bunch of friends who have bought existing businesses, franchises, or business systems, and many of them are doing very well. In fact, most of them seem to have a lot more free time than I do. The thing is, I don’t really know if that’s because they’re running systems that are designed to be run in only 50 – 60 hours a week or because I’m running or helping to run seven businesses* and my average work week is about 90 hours. But, as my accountant likes to say, I have “entrepreneurial ADD.”

* Just for the record, the businesses I’m involved in are as follows: the Japanese Martial Arts Center, the Law Office of Nicklaus Suino, the South Side Business Association, SEO Ann Arbor, the Shudokan Martial Arts Association, Ivanhoe Apartments, and Master and Fool, LLC, the company that owns this blog, thewellnessaddict.com.

Everybody explores, but not everybody’s an explorer

By the way, one way NOT to tell if you’re an explorer in the land of business rather than a settler is by how much business education you consume. The most successful business people I know, regardless of their “Biz-O-Type,” are rabid consumers of books, seminars, videos, and classes. They are constant students of the game. But the settlers, the folks who can find a program, adopt it, and make it work, seem a lot better at simply digging in and getting to work using the information they’ve found.

Those of us who are doomed to be explorers, try as we might, seem unable to accept the idea that somebody has already explored the region we’re in and mapped out the best way to get around. We simply have to explore it for ourselves. If there’s a fort built on the highest hill in area, we’ll look for another hill. If there’s a road from one valley to another, we’ll take a detour through the woods.

The thing is, most explorers I know have experienced a lot of angst about the fact that so many of the settlers are making a better living than they are and seeming to have an easier time doing so. I’ve experienced this same angst, but at 50 years old, I’ve gotten past that, and along the way I figured out a couple things about it. One is that though you CAN change who you are, it’s usually a lot better for you to live a life in accord with your true nature. The other is that, once you embrace who you are, you’ll waste a lot less energy trying to act like a settler, and that energy can be put to good use in exploration.

You might be an explorer if …

Regardless of which type you are, if you’re entrepreneurial you’ve certainly experienced the intense feelings of hopelessness and boredom when you worked as an employee. However well paid you might have been, you’ve no doubt had to practically stab yourself in the tenderloins with your breakfast fork to get yourself to go to work. I recall thinking at those times something along the lines of “this is really stupid and I just can’t get myself to do it.”

If you then quit working for others, as many of us have, you may have found some really well written business systems and tried to adopt them. Most settlers I know have successfully adopted all or part of many pre-existing systems. Besides being incredibly generous with their knowledge, they are happy to tell you “this is really smart and you should do it, too!”

But the explorer, who has not only quit working for others but has seen many of the same business systems as the settler, and often many, many more, just can’t seem to get excited about those systems long enough to put them fully into practice. Their response to some really terrific pre-existing opportunities, even when they completely understand the benefits, is something like “this is really smart and I just can’t get myself to do it.”

Hey, some of my best friends are settlers!

If you’ve had that experience several times, or many, many times, as I have, I’m here to tell you to stop agonizing about it, and recognize that you are probably hard-wired to be an explorer rather than a settler. It does NOT mean that you can’t be successful or that other people are inherently better business people than you are. What it probably does mean, however, is that you are going to have to find your own way in the world of business, so you might as well buckle down and start doing stuff. If you’re an explorer who’s not exploring, you’re acting like a settler, and the only thing you’re going to find on the road more traveled is hopelessness and boredom. You don’t have to abandon common sense, but you do need to see the possibility of new discoveries before you to keep you engaged and motivated.

And when you stop worrying about how the settlers are doing in the settlements, you can focus on your exploration. After all, if they were explorers, they’d be finding unexplored new territories instead of building ramparts around the forts in which they live. You need to keep your eyes on the horizon to see what’s ahead of you, and be able to recognize the beauty in the sunset beyond the next mountain range. And remember that sometimes being the first person to find a new valley can give you an incalculable advantage. Nobody says explorers can’t spend a little time figuring out how to help the first wave of settlers find their way to the valley. If the valley is beautiful enough, those settlers will be willing to pay handsomely for an accurate map!

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 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.

Are you more motivated by charity than by greed?

I just finished reading a really interesting book. It’s called Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior The authors are Ori and Rom Brafman, and I highly recommend it. These guys make some surprising points about the way our irrational sides undercut our rational decision making. One part of the book that really stayed with me was about how altruism and avarice compete for our attention. Almost all of us are sometimes giving and sometimes greedy, and it’s really tough to be both at the same time.

They tell a great story about Switzerland, I think it was. The government wanted to store nuclear waste near a certain town, and they wanted to find out the best way to present it to the townspeople. So they commissioned a study that asked half the people a question designed to appeal to their altruistic side, and half the people a question designed to appeal to their avaricious side.

Radiation – It’s Not Just for Breakfast Anymore

The first question was something like this: Your country needs a place to store nuclear waste, and we want you to help. Would you be willing to support your country by agreeing to let us store the waste near your town?

The second questions was something like this: Your country needs a place to store nuclear waste, and we want you to help. Would you be willing to agree to let us store the waste near your town in return for a payment of $2,500?

You might think a lot more people would want to get paid for the “privilege” of having nuclear waste stored nearby. But the truth is, the percentage of people who agreed when they were asked to volunteer in order to help their country was a lot higher than the percentage of people who agreed when they were offered money.

People are Basically Good …. Unless They’re Greedy

And the authors said that this kind of thing happens a lot. They talked about some studies that showed that when people make altruistic decisions, one part of their brains activate, and when they make decisions based on personal gain, a different part of their brains activate. They also explained that it’s almost impossible for both the altruism center and the avarice center to activate at the same time. And what’s really surprising is that altruism may be a better motivator than greed!

Would You Buy a Used Car to Save the Planet?

If this is true, it could have a profound effect on marketing strategies. Maybe if you’re a marketing expert you already know this, but based on what the Brafmans said, it’s going to be critical to make sure your marketing and sales materials appeal only to one side of your customers’ minds – either the giving side or the greedy side.  And if I’m right about this, your advertising dollar might be a lot better spent appealing to the giving side. I’m planning to do a lot more research on this idea, and I’ll try to write a column about it when I find out what data is available.

But here’s a point that’s a lot more important if you’re into personal development. You may be a lot “better” person that you think you are. Do you know if you’re motivated more by a good cause than by a good paycheck? Would an appeal to your inner St. Vincent de Paul be more likely to succeed than an offer to your inner Gordon Gecko?

When you Absolutely, Positively Have to Get Something Done

Here’s one way you might be able to find out – take some time to imagine a high-stakes situation similar to the nuclear waste example I pointed out earlier. Would you, really, truly, be more likely to agree to accept a risky or difficult situation if you thought you were helping out your country, your church, your family, or your company? When you put yourself in the shoes of the Swiss townspeople in the story who were offered money, did you do a mental calculation like I did … “Jeez, they want me to put myself, my family, and my neighbors at risk for a lousy $2,500. They’re gonna have to do a lot better than that!”

If you can figure out what approach works better for you, you’ve got a very powerful leverage tool for following through on personal development challenges. If there’s something you want to do or you’ve been meaning to do but just can’t get yourself started, why not take some time to figure out what would motivate you better to get started – personal gain or some benefit to your community. Take some time to write out a list of the reasons to do it and put the altruistic reasons in one column and the avaricious reasons in another column. When you can clearly see which column motivates you better, re-read that column several times. For each entry, visualize how it’s going to feel to attain the reward when you succeed. Make the visualization part of your daily routine, and I bet in a few weeks your desire is going to be very strong! I bet almost nothing will stand in the way of you taking the steps you need to reach your goal.

Remember – don’t just do something, DO SOMETHING! Get started today, pair up your goals with rewards that really get you passionate about achieving. And please let me know how it turns out for you. I think it’s going to be fantastic!

So what’s your story? In my case, Nick’s request that I tell the story of my recovery as a “hero’s journey” made me aware of two things. One was that as important as this story was, it wasn’t my “hero’s journey”. And two, that in spite of having a clear idea of what my “real” story was, I wasn’t sure how to tell the story any more, and in fact, wasn’t sure if I really even wanted to take that book off the shelf at all! Let me explain. I experienced a LOT of death and loss around me as a youngster, as well as some sexual abuse experiences. This had a tremendous impact on my development, but not in ways that would be obvious to people I had just met. Often in my life, when meeting someone knew, the way things would play out would be that  in the first moderately in-depth conversation that took place, they’d make a remark like “oh, you’re one of those people who’s always looking for some deeper meaning in things”, or something to that effect. If you’re a “survivor” type, you may be familiar with this response, and you’ll immediately understand the mild annoyance that a remark like this might engender. For a long time, my response to this harmless kind of remark would be to “tell my story”, at whatever pace the listener seemed able to stomach things. This either made them figuratively run in horror, or immediately bond much more deeply, either out of kinship, sympathy, or respect. So if the story was true, and people connected with it on some level, what was the problem? Well, the problem was that by “telling the story”, I was in a way perpetuating it. In spite of all my assumed self-examination and the evolution I had pursued in other ways, the profound effect of this seemingly simple aspect of our behavior had escaped me somehow.

So how did I become aware of this pattern, and what did I do about it? Well, I first recall it coming up around the time I got sober a few years ago, in a conversation with a woman I had just met who I thought I might be interested in getting more involved with. We were talking about ourselves the way people might as they start letting some barriers down, and I started to share some of my “old story”. Suddenly, I realized I was only doing this out of habit, and that I had a NEW story I’d rather tell. A story about being excited with my life and new things I was doing, and things I’d like to still do. I shared what was going on, and she quite simply said “Yeah, we all have a story don’t we? I wonder if maybe that’s one of the things that limit us?” We then had a really long discussion exploring the importance of “having a story” as a way to define ourselves, but how once you get the story outlined pretty well, you have probably also managed to freeze your growth in a small way. I decided around that time to stop telling my “old story”, and instead remain aware that I can write a NEW story. This had a compelling impact on my personal relationships. If you’re someone who has been through the more intense things that life throws our way – loss, violence, or random misfortunes – you may have become something of a survivor, and probably attract other people like this into your life. Many of my best friends are people who had an exceptional challenge thrown their way, and grew through it rather than being beaten down. But once I took this new view that I was “starting a new book”, I suddenly realized that even the most inspiring of these friends of mine still had little footnotes of their story kicking around. One friend, who is a brilliant writer, singer, mom, and amateur athlete, will still randomly toss out a joke about her sister that sexually abused her. Another friend, who is a remarkably talented songwriter and performer, amazingly takes what are actually positive parts of his story – his previous successes in the music industry – to perpetuate a failure to evolve!

As a friend, I have no choice but to call these friends out on this, usually with some positive result. So now I’m going to call YOU out:

What’s your story?
Does your story limit you?
Does your story have useful lessons in it?
What parts of your story can you put on the shelf as an informative chapter?
What’s your NEW story?

There are lots of ways to explore these issues, and the one my friend Nick shared – the “Hero’s Journey” – is just one. The simplest way is to simply be honest with yourself and identify the themes you seem to repeat as part of how you explain yourself, see which ones may need some resolution, finish the chapter, and start a new one. If you’re living and breathing, you haven’t finished the book! Start the next chapter RIGHT NOW, it’s as easy as putting your old book on the shelf and starting a new one.

* Oddly, psychology has historically focused on aberrant behavior rather than healthy behavior. Barbara Fredrickson is one of the better known and respected psychologists who study positivism. Her books like Positivity: The 3 to 1 Ratio That Will Change Your Life can give you some actionable methods for re-writing your story.

I got reminded of an important business concept this morning at a meeting with one of my young business mentors. His name is James Snider and he has great insight into all things business. If you want someone to review your business from beginning to end who can focus on the financials better than almost anyone I’ve met, get hold of James at On The Top Management.

Anyway, James and I were reviewing the website for one of my businesses, and we started talking about obstacles for potential new clients. He pointed out that you need to have a very clear idea of what action you want your web visitors to take, and that anything that slows them down or prevents them from taking that action should be gotten rid of. I couldn’t agree more, and if you want a really fun read on this topic, pick up Seth Godin’s book The Big Red Fez, which I’ve mentioned before. It’s all about making sure the monkey (your web visitor) knows exactly how to find the banana (the button or other action tool you want your visitor to push). But for now, let’s focus on getting rid of obstacles.

Let’s use the website for a martial arts school as an example. As a dojo (martial arts school) owner, I know I always want to show my visitors how cool our school is – our cool facility, our extraordinary instructors, our history, and the amazing techniques some of our people can do. But James suggested that most people who want to start martial arts probably have a lot more basic concerns.Some of the issues he suggested were:

How do I get to the dojo?

Is it hard to find?

I’m nervous about going in by myself.

What class should I go to watch?

Will it be scary?

If he’s right about these concerns, then all the pictures and video of cool techniques might actually work against us. Brand new people who visit the site would be frightened by dramatic throws instead of reassured by how easy and safe the dojo looks. And our research shows that he is right for most potential new students.

In the larger world of business, you can see this process get played out again and again. Auto makers who show their cars in racing scenes and who emphasize horsepower are targeting a certain segment of the car-buying market, but they are also missing out when it comes to appealing to car buyers with more pedestrian concerns. On the other hand, Saturn went a long way toward capturing the buyers who just wanted a reasonably priced vehicle without having to go through the haggling process. There’s also a lot to be said for car makers who offer an online ordering process – potential purchasers can assemble the car of their dreams, trying out different feature packages and paintjobs, and they don’t have to actually place an order until they’re quite sure of what they want.

Just about every business could benefit from this “get out of the way” analysis. James manages a very successful import repair facility in Ann Arbor, and they do a better job of making non-car people comfortable than just about any auto shop I’ve ever visited. At the same time, customers have to drive into what is unquestionably a repair shop, with all the attendant noises, smells, and rough looking guys with greasy hands. I know all the guys there, and they are very nice people, but a timid client might still be intimidated by the atmosphere. It’s just possible that if James could figure out how to make the place look and feel like a department store, he might win the business of the least car-savvy clients.

Anyway, a great thing to do for any business is to have an objective person look at your website and your client intake process and tell you about anything that seems confusing or frightening, or anything that takes customers away from the clear purpose of enrolling them in your sales process. You can then make a much more educated decision about where to focus your attention. I guarantee it!

I recently read Tell to Win by Peter Gruber, and I recommend it highly. It’s entertaining and it’s a great resource for learning how to tell your story effectively. But one of the points Gruber makes that is not only entertaining but really valuable is about making sure you use your time effectively.

The Monkey Story

In the 1970s, when Gruber was a young studio head at Columbia Pictures, he had a conversation with Jack Warner, the founder of Warner Bros. Warner had asked Gruber how things were going for him at the studio. The conversation is a fantastic lesson, so I’ll quote it word for word here:

Gruber: “It’s like a tidal wave. People just keep coming into my office with one problem after the other. It never ends.”

Warner said, “Let me tell you a story. Don’t be confused. You’re only renting that office. You don’t own it. It’s a zoo. You’re the zookeeper, and every single person that comes in the office comes with a monkey. That monkey is their problem. They’re trying to leave it with you. Your job is to discover where the monkey is. They’ll hide it, or dress it up, but remember you’re the zookeeper. You’ve got to keep the place clean. So make sure when you walk them to the door, they’ve got their monkey by the hand. Don’t let them leave without it. Don’t let them come back until it’s trained and they have solutions to their problem. Otherwise at the end of the day, you’ll have an office full of screaming, jumping animals and monkey shit all over the floor.”

What a great way to explain how to manage from the top! Remember, you’re the manager, not the actor, pipe-fitter, screenwriter, typist, whatever. So the point of the story, which I’m sure you get, is that to effectively manage, you have to be very careful what tasks you agree to do. Instead, you want to put people on the right track to solve their own problems, or put them in touch with other people who can help them.

Business is Even Faster Today!

Even though it’s a great point and a great story, I think it actually doesn’t go far enough. Business is much faster than it was even five years ago, so  we have to find ways to get things accomplished in a fraction of the time it used to take. You might work more hours, hire more employees, or contract out the tasks that take you away from leading your business. However, one big key, maybe the biggest, to getting your business as fast as it needs to be, is efficiency. You have to learn to get three things done in the time it used to take to do one thing. Here’s a helpful way to do just that, which was actually suggested to me by Ian, who also writes columns for thewellnessaddict.com and is a very smart fellow:

When someone comes into your office trying to unload their monkey on your desk, you should do more than just make sure they leave with it (I mean the monkey, not your desk)! Instead, find a way to send them away with one of your monkeys, too. Let me give you a couple of examples of what I mean by this.

Learn to Say “Yes, But …”

The first example is kind of silly, but it’s simple and it works. My wife, Pam, and I move a lot. Poor woman, she supports me in all my business ideas, and helps me move from place to place when I start new businesses. I don’t know what I’d do without her. Anyway, almost every time we move we have a garage sale. Somehow every year or two we accumulate enough stuff to hold a three-day garage sale – I swear I have no idea how it all fits in our house.

So Pam has become an expert at unloading stuff quickly. When people come to our garage sales – and we advertise so we always have a lot of people – she engages them and talks to them about whatever items they are interested in. If they pick up a $20 item and ask, “Can you let me have this for $15?” she immediately says yes, but also says this, “I can give it to you for that price, but you have to find something else to take. How about this sugar bowl for $5?” They almost always leave with the item they want as well as one or two items that we probably wouldn’t have been able to sell except that Pam made it a condition of getting the item they wanted. They come for one item but they leave with two or three feeling like they got a great deal. We make a few more dollars and get rid of stuff that we don’t want to move.

Have Your To-Do List Ready

Here’s a more serious example for business. Review your to do list every day. Keep a mental note (or better still, write it down) of likely people to help you with each task on your list. Make a habit of imagining who might be able to work with whom (who said daydreaming is a waste of time?). That way, when one of those people comes into your office trying to unload their monkey on your desk, conjure up your list while they’re talking about their problem.

Once you’ve got a couple of tasks in mind that might fit them, and maybe a couple people they could work with on those tasks, you’ll be surprised at how often you can work out a way for them not only to leave with their own problem, but with one of yours, and how often solving one can help solve the other.

Try Giving Away Monkeys Today

I’ve written before about a guy who does contract work for me who came to ask for more money. His problem, as he saw it, was “not enough money.” He was basically asking for more hours and a raise. As it happened, I was thinking about ways to hand off more of my daily work to someone so I could concentrate more on marketing and strategy.

I did give him a small symbolic raise, but what I really did was point out the opportunities to do more within the projects we already had going together (sending him away with his monkey). I also gave him two of the tasks I was doing every Wednesday, freeing up about three hours in the middle of the day that were previously tied up (sending him away with one of my monkeys). I’m pretty pleased with the results – and I think he is, too – but I’m even more pleased that I was not only able to remember the lesson that Jack Warner taught Peter Gruber, but to improve upon it slightly.

That’s a great feeling in business – to accomplish something while remembering a lesson learned, and maybe learning something new from it. Being able to pass it on like this is also a great feeling. So, if there’s one point I hope you’ll take away from this post, it’s this one: Keep Your Dang Monkey, and Take One of Mine, Too!

A guy who does contract labor for one of my businesses came to me this morning to ask for more money. I was surprised at how carefully he had thought out his plan. I’ll call him “Keith” to protect his identity.

First, he listed all the money problems he was having. “My cars needs work, I have no savings, I have a bunch of credit card debt.” Then he suggested how he could take over some tasks that I do. “I could cover your work on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday mornings,” he said, “and that would leave you more time to do marketing or whatever.”

Now, if you own a business, you’re probably thinking that I should be doing back flips, right? Here’s a guy offering to take away some of my daily grind to give me more time to develop my business. As a matter of fact, he’s pretty good at the work, and almost every one of my clients who works with him likes him a lot. And, he works for a reasonable hourly amount.

So where’s the problem?

Here’s the problem: I’ve been meeting with this guy once a week for the past year and a half to help him learn about business. I’ve coached him on marketing, encouraged him to go out and find new clients, set up systems for him to generate new business, and overall just done everything I can think of to put him in a position to help grow our business. Which could potentially net him a ton of money. Yet he’s still thinking like an employee.

So, what would I say to him if he was sitting right here? I’d say, Keith, you should have come to me to offer to cut your own wages! If you want to get rich, work for free! As long as you look for and receive an honest hour’s pay for an honest hour’s work, you’re going to be an employee. Only when you can get your mind around the idea that real wealth is created rather than earned will you begin to realize your potential as a member of our organization. Or any great organization.

If that sounds like a crazy idea, let me give you a concrete example (I’m going to use made up numbers to further protect Keith’s identity). In this particular business, we’ve found that, given our current level of effort and expenditure on advertising, with normal repeat clients and new clients through word of mouth, we can expect to average about $80,000 a month in gross income. We’ve been doing it long enough to know that that’s pretty much how it works out, and until we come up with a breakthrough way to market our service, we can depend on that average over the long haul.

By the time we pay our fixed overhead, health insurance, employees, corporate taxes, investors, and me, there’s about $10,000 left to pay Keith and our other independent contractors, and to reinvest in the business. I know it’s not a ton of money, but I like the business and it spins off a lot of other work for me. Anyway, the pool of money available to pay Keith is finite, and in some ways the more we pay Keith the less we have available to be creative in trying to grow the business.

I’ve got ten apples, right, and you want four. That leaves only six apples for me, and if you’re still hungry in six months, I know you’re going to come back to me for another apple. But let’s flip the paradigm on its head. What if you could increase the number of apples I had, with the promise that you’d also get more?

“Why would I want to do that,” you might say. “I could just go out and start my own business.”

Sure, but think about two things. One, why haven’t you done it? And two, if you start a business yourself, you have to be prepared for all the work involved: incorporation, setting up the office, hiring employees or independent contractors, dealing with vendors, and, the most critical and challenging part of every business, selling. What if I told you that instead of doing all that work, you could concentrate on only one aspect of the business, get really, really good at it, and potentially make tons of money?

Well, that’s exactly what I’m telling you! I have a business with an absolutely rock solid service that’s head and shoulders above everything else in the area. The facility is in place, the reputation is impeccable, and the follow-up service for the clients you’d bring in is fantastic. In fact, I’m going to give you lots of opportunity to serve those clients and find other ways to generate income from them. All you have to do to help is find a way to bring in new clients on your own initiative.

If you make the number of apples I have get bigger, I’ll give you some of those apples. I’m happy to give you more apples because more clients means more word of mouth, more momentum, more energy in the room, more opportunities for growth, more ways to serve both the existing clients and the new clients better. Everybody wins!

I interact with a lot of folks in their early twenties, and when they’re getting into the job market, a lot of them talk about jobs they’ve considered. You’d be surprised how often one of them says, “that job had lousy pay. They wanted to pay me on commission.”

I tell them this: “if you want to get rich, go back to those guys and tell them you don’t want the base pay at all. Tell ‘em you’ll work on pure commission for six months. Get another part time job to pay your rent if you have to. Doing pure commission sales could be the most important learning experience in your financial life.”

I think you get it. The reason I say this is that if they learn to create wealth for other people, rather than trying to earn money, they’ll be able to create wealth for themselves. I’ll repeat that in a different way. A critical step toward getting rich is to realize that you must create wealth rather than earn money. Earning money means you’re limited to the hours you can work and the pay you can convince somebody to give you. Creating wealth means you’re limited only by your imagination and ability to learn.

If you want to get rich, work for free! Now don’t just do something, DO SOMETHING!