I’d be willing to bet that at least once a week, you have some kind of subtle panic reaction when you think about what you’re doing with your time. We see this everywhere – people are always saying “I’d love to, but let me check my schedule” unconsciously knowing darn well that they just generally feel like life won’t let them have enough time for anything.  I even find myself occasionally pausing when someone asks me about doing something as simple as meeting for coffee. It’s like I have some time account somewhere that I fear is overdrawn because I haven’t balanced the ledger recently, and I’m worried I’ll get penalties for bouncing my time checks or something. Part of this is simple time management stuff, but part of it may be the QUALITY of your time, rather than the quantity of it. The facts are that first of all, time is an arbitrary measure of something that can’t be stored or saved. Or deferred. It’s going to “keep going”, to the extent that it exists at all. The second thing is, we actually have more leisure time than at almost any point in human history.

So how could giving away some of your time possibly ease your frustrations about how much you have? Well, a recent study by a trio of academics from Wharton, Yale, and Harvard ended up with some interesting results. This piece from the Association for Psychological Science covers it in detail, but the gist of the idea is that when subjects were given either an altruistic task to complete, a mundane task, or leisure time, the subjects that were assigned a task that involved helping someone tested as perceiving themselves to have more time than even the subjects who had enjoyed leisure time.

Feeling short on time? Maybe you should stop reading and go give some of it away!

I definitely found myself coming off the rails a bit this week, and strangely, I’m glad I did. It was a great reminder of the things that mostly keep me centered, and a reminder that a certain balanced diligence is required to lead a happy rewarding life. So what had me all in a tizzy? It turns out it was the same thing that is probably at the root of almost all uneasiness, anger, or other unbalanced states. Things weren’t going my way. It started a week ago with some interpersonal challenges related to projects I’m working on, and then I worked all weekend, and things started snowballing at the beginning of the week with a series of  rescheduled meetings and missed deadlines. By Wednesday morning, I was officially a mental trainwreck.

So what did I do to get “normal” again? I remembered a short list of things that that will always get me back on track. A few of them are questions that will just give me perspective, and a few are reminders that keep me going daily. But before I do any of them, there’s one other thing I do.

Breathe.

It’s amazing how often we forget to do that, and sometimes just pausing, taking a few normal breaths will make all the difference in the world. Stand up to do it if you can. Roll your neck a little. Let your shoulders hang. Then breathe again. When you feel more calm and centered, try asking yourself a few questions:

Do I need a break?
Am I eating well?
Did I sleep okay last night?
Can I really control this?

A lot of the most driven people I know simply forget to stop working or forget to eat, or work too late and end up short on sleep. If you’ve done any of these things, TAKE A DAY OFF for cryin’ out loud. In spite of your irrational belief that the world will shudder to a halt if you do, we’re sorry to say it won’t. Get a good night’s sleep, get your routine in order. Eating, sleeping, and physical activity should come naturally, but get derailed a lot in modern life. And the control part? Chances are, you have little or no control over half of the things you’re worked up about, and instead of focusing on how the world around you needs to change, you probably need to think about how YOU need to change to accept it, so you can be happier in it. What helps me personally do that is part pragmatism, and part prayer. Below is what I do to clear my plate a little so I know what to expend my energy on. I’ll leave you to your own devices in the prayer department if you’re so inclined.

Make a List. Duh.

Many of us are so used to making our own kinds of lists to stay organized that we may forget that there’s more than one way to make a list. One of my tools in times of duress is recommended in varying forms by a multitude of success and motivation gurus, and takes two simple steps:

First, just spew out a list of all the stuff that seems to be on your mind, without prioritizing. Try to let stuff just pop into your mind, and onto the paper without analyzing its importance.

Second, go through the list, and use whatever you prefer – numbers, asterisks, whatever – to sort the items into three basic categories:

1.) Things that could be taken care of in the next hour. Phone calls or emails you’ve put off, taking out the trash, whatever.
2.) Things that could be done TODAY. A trip to the store or the post office, a task that takes a few hours, etc.
3.) Things that won’t get done today, and require some planning and organizing. You can transfer those to a to-do list later.

Third, do all those little things! And when you’re done with the little things, tackle those “today” tasks. The simple act of making the list may actually make you feel more stressed than before you made it, but you’ll be amazed at how much more at ease you are after notching off a few trivial tasks. Then you’ll be more willing to relax a little, and that’s when your mind does its best work – when it is naturally processing information unfettered by a flurry of trivial tasks.

Feel better yet? I do.

I think I’ll take a day off.

The other day, I ran across this 1983 New York Times article questioning whether “stress addiction” was a legitimate phenomena. Given the behavior of the typical cellphone toting, iPad poking, Twittering Tumblr-tagging teen, or the number of people you see walking down the street eating lunch as they text and talk to the earpiece in their ear, I think we can safely lay that debate to rest, and assume that some form of stimulation or stress addiction seems to afflict a lot of modern people.

So why does it seem like some people seem comfortable, even eager to add more stress-inducing activities to their life, while others seem to be trying everything imaginable to reduce the stress factors in their life? I think one of the first problems in “dealing with stress” is that there isn’t even a widely accepted definition of what it IS. This University of Maryland page says it’s a form of anxiety, which “is a feeling of fear, unease, and worry”. Merriam Webster says it is “a physical, chemical, or emotional factor that causes bodily or mental tension and may be a factor in disease causation”.

Good Stress & Bad Stress

That dictionary definition above highlights a common misconception about the broad array of things we might call “stress”. From a common sense point of view, and in a view that is becoming more pervasive in health and wellness circles, stress can actually be a GOOD thing. In its simplest form, it’s a heightened reaction to external challenges or stimuli. So as long as the those external stimuli aren’t so persistent and intense as to overwhelm the individual, it’s a healthy survival response that helps us meet and overcome challenges. Historically, war has been one human activity that would reliably overwhelm the human organism, leaving many of its survivors with sometimes permanent stress-induced mental and physical health problems. But what about the crazy, stressful activities that people INTENTIONALLY engage in, like skydiving, bungee jumping, running for political office, or working in the finance industry?

Maybe You’re A Stress Addicted Chaos Junky

Strangely, like almost anything else, it is in fact possible to be addicted to stress or chaos, as mentioned at the top. The same chemical processes that are going on in the brain when you’re screaming and waving your arms on the trading floor may be very similar to those that are occurring when when you’re overindulging in your drug of choice. I’ve been on both sides of this fence, so I can speak with some expertise. Before I entered recovery a few years ago, I maintained the most immaculately orderly home and work environments you will encounter. The most common remarks people would make about my character would usually reference my organization, cleanliness, and grooming. Little did they know that these external things were the only thing anchoring the turmoil in my heart and head; my external world was a desperate attempt to maintain order SOMEWHERE, and physical objects and strict schedules make this fairly easy. Interestingly, after a few years of personal evolution in recovery, I find my home and workplace are often a lot messier, but I’m probably getting ten times as much done as before, and perhaps more importantly, I’m HAPPIER.

Your Personal Best Stress Level

I’m of the opinion that – as is so often the case in contemporary culture – the emphasis on reducing stress in our lives is oversimplified, ill-conceived, and is an easy monetization tool for the health care industry. A couple of problems with most people’s approach to stress are that a.) they lack the self-awareness to usefully define their stress levels, and b.) they lack the self-awareness to usefully define their stress levels. Yes, the two reasons I’m suggesting are the same. On the one hand, many people aren’t aware that the very tools they use to create organization in their lives are in fact the number one source of their chaotic and stressful existence. On the other hand, most people are unable to separate anger over personal dissatisfaction (i.e. frustration with unexpected outcomes, etc.) from a normal “stress” reaction. I personally THRIVE on a significant level of stress. The thing that will take me into an unhealthy zone in this regard is WAITING. Not because I demand that things be done on “my time”, but because I’m most centered when I’m “doing”. So if – like me – you struggle to maintain a high enough stress level in your life to satisfy your addictive nature, below are some tools I recommend for enhancing the overall chaos level in your life. Maybe embracing them all can make you finally snap, and then ease back into your own “good level”.

5 Sure-fire Tools To Enhance the Level of Chaos in your Life

Email

If you really want to escalate the level of disruption, distraction, and disorder in your day, use email. According to this NYT piece, in a 2007 study a group of Microsoft workers took – on average – 15 minutes to return to serious mental tasks after responding to incoming e-mail or instant messages. Email is a great tool for chaos generation all around. Also make sure you always have at least 10 messages in your inbox that require replies, send important messages as you LEAVE the office each day, and check it first thing in the morning. I jest of course. I just named three of the basic things that destroy attitudes and productivity. The point is, email is a useful tool, but if you don’t use it with some conscious thought, it will eat half of your day, and keep you in a perpetual tizzy. Empty your inbox. Could that one message be handled better with a quick phone call? MAKE IT. Is there going to be anything in your inbox at 7am besides problems that someone left you late yesterday? Probably not. Wait a couple of hours and get your workday going before you disrupt it!

Multitasking

Face it. You’re not. Unless you’re amongst the 2 percent of people who CAN, according to research, and there’s a 98 percent chance you aren’t. So really all you’re doing when you multitask is under-performing, and stressing yourself out. But if you really are seeking that level of stimulation, there’s probably no better way to achieve your goal than texting and talking while driving, typing an email while talking on the phone, or doing all of this while you’re having lunch with me. Because then I’LL get stressed out, because ill-manners make me angry, and since you’re on the phone, my polite nature will force me to wait until you’re done to scream at you, which will add to YOUR stress level.

Saving Stuff

According to 2010 figures from the White House Office of Management and Budget, Americans spent 8.8 billion hours completing government forms. That’s just government forms! In America, employees print an average of 45 sheets of paper per day, and 30 percent of all employees’ time is spent trying to find lost documents. No wonder there are over 50,000 primary storage facilities in the US alone. We’re all afraid of throwing that thing out, because Lord knows when you’re going to need it! But seriously. Try a system like the Noguchi Filing System or a variation of the 43 Folders method, and those piles of documents that are crucial to national security – even though you don’t know what’s in them – will disappear.

Meetings

Have lots and lots of meetings. Hell, have a special meeting just to talk about all the meetings you’re having. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, unnecessary meetings cost U.S. businesses approximately $37 billion in 2005 alone. I think your team should meet to discuss that problem. I’d share more thoughts on how the the travel and task switching aspects of meetings consume more time than the meetings themselves, but I’m late for a meeting.

Time Travel

You’re going to find this hard to believe, but I have a time travel machine. In fact, this is one of my favorite chaos generation tools. I bet you have one too, and don’t even realize it. It’s right in your head. I’d bet a nickel that one of the greatest productivity inhibiting, stress-generating tools at our disposal is in use nearly constantly by all but the most advanced Zen Masters. I have to confess that even while typing these words, I thought about a couple of meetings this week, and answered the phone twice, transporting myself across time and space to a place full of problems that actually don’t concern me right now, and that I can do nothing about. Want to stay in a constantly stressed state? Think about everything BUT where and when you are right now.

The Solutions

I don’t have one. That’s up to you. There are thousands of books and websites out there offering solutions to your stress-related problems, but frankly, I find merely searching and browsing these sources stress-inducing. Why not try a simple approach. Pause. Take an honest look at how you use technology, for starters. And then examine if you’re simply angry that things aren’t the way you want them to be, and get to work on changing them in manageable steps.

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:

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.

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.

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!

First of all, the serenity prayer often associated with Alcoholics Anonymous:

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
the courage to change the things I can;
and the wisdom to know the difference.

Okay. Before I do my own deconstruction, let’s observe how much it resembles a mother Goose rhyme from 1695:

For every ailment under the sun
There is a remedy, or there is none;
If there be one, try to find it;
If there be none, never mind it.

And here’s how I re-frame it to make it not only palatable to myself, but quite useful.

“God grant me the serenity”

Let’s stop right there. I do coincidentally believe in God in a way that I won’t go into here, but I don’t necessarily find this grant-seeking useful here. So I change it to:

“Whoa. Chill out for a moment”

Okay, now I can think about what to do next:

“to accept the things I cannot change”

Still not crazy about the wording, but now that I’ve slowed down for a moment, I ask myself “wow, can I really do anything about this right now? If I can, I do. If I can’t, I put it in my little “to review” box for later consideration, and let it go for the moment.

And then…

“the courage to change the things I can”

If I really need to, I just buck up a little and remind myself that whatever it is I’m contending with, it’s highly unlikely that it’s insurmountable.
And lastly, that bit where it goes:

“and the wisdom to know the difference”

Well, just by slowing down and re-assessing, I’ve already exercised some wisdom. I let it all go, knowing that if I made an unwise decision, it’ll come and bite me in the ass and I can do this all over again.

So here’s my version:

Whoa, chill out for a minute. Time out!
Can I fix this right now? Cool. Let’s do it.
No? Okay, let’s take care of this as soon as we can.
We’ve done the best thing we can do for now, which is identified it for review.
Let’s move on.

Damn I’m havin’ a good day!

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!