I remember the day I lost my job at the end of 1999. As if it were yesterday. I had been given the boot.

Jump!

Our department had obviously become ‘expendable.’ Large numbers of people got the bullet that same day, but I was the only one with a Cheshire cat grin on my face. My colleagues were sure I had lost my marbles. From their perspective they were right.

I felt liberated!

I left the office and was heading for the parking lot together with my next-cubicle colleague, who concluded, “You must be insane!” This after I shared with him that I wasn’t the least bit worried about ‘unemployment’, and that I had plunked down $15,000 for a series of seminars by a self-help guru. “You’re positively crazy,” he confirmed his assessment of the situation. We arrived at his car, exchanged farewells. His car was a brand-new German import. Interesting choice, I said to myself, invest in a car or invest in your Self. It seemed a no-brainer. On the drive home, in my own old car, I felt an enormous weight lifted off my shoulders. “I’VE JUMPED – I’M FREE!”

Of course, my other voice wanted to be heard, too. “Beat, you delusional clown, what are you going to DO now?!”

Getting fired was the proverbial kick in the ass I had secretly been fantasizing about. Now that it happened, it changed my life. It was the last day I have ever worked for “a boss” again. I’ve been “my own boss” – self-employed, unemployable – for almost 11 years now.

For millions of people all over the world, the recession has been a curse. For a relative few, it has been energizing – a catalyst for change. With hindsight they all agree, had they not been pushed, they would never have jumped, would never have made the leap.

Great Relevant Resources & Sites

• Dare! <- great video!
• Comic-Con: Women Who Kick Ass
• For some, hard times are a gateway to new careers

“Surprise is the essence of humor, and nothing is more surprising than truth.” – Bill Watterson (author of Calvin & Hobbes)

The now-famous Gorilla Test is a comedic, amusing, funny, laughable, little experience while you’re a spectator, watching it from a distance. It’s an altogether different experience when the beast shows up in your life. You’ll find that pointing at the invisible gorilla is not a fun thing to do when people who lack a sense of humor are involved. If you can’t laugh at yourself, then you’re not much of a person. Life rule: don’t mingle with humorless people.

“Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.“ – Albert Camus

After an accident, the difference between feeling upbeat and being cranky ultimately boils down to whether you dwell on what went wrong, or you remember what was right before the accident. When my grandparents died, I inherited a plaque (pictured on the right) which loosely translated says, “Bright Moments – Don’t Cry Over Their Passing. Smile To Have Known Them.” Why the plaque ended up with me, one of many grand-kids, I’ll never know. I’m just upbeat it did.

More than 10 million Americans moved from one county to another during 2008. The map below visualizes those moves. Click here – you’ll be taken to an interactive map over at Forbes’ website. Click on any county to see comings and goings. Black lines indicate net inward movement, red lines net outward movement.

(via swissmiss)

“Babies” – the movie – we went to see it on the weekend. So glad we did. It was an uplifting and delightful experience!

As we watched the movie, I heard myself humming along … “we watch them grow, they’ll learn much more than we will ever know, what a wonderful world … (Click here the hear the song). The film’s closing scene – a new citizen of the world standing firm, standing tall, wind swept, brimming with confidence, “Come on, bring it on!” – is priceless.

If you’re a parent, you’ll find that none of the babies featured in the film are yours, of course. But you’ll also find it doesn’t matter. It feels just the same. You could be watching a home movie featuring you and your child, which would be a different movie, but the feeling would be the same. The language of babies is universal … as are the languages of music, of sunsets, of ocean waves and of snowflakes (expand the list as you see fit).

It’s a movie you want to see with your heart rather than with your mind. The distinction is important, because access to the heart is granted through feelings, not through rationalizations.

“Babies” the movie confirms, if need be, that babies – and people – are the same all over. And the audience’s reaction to the movie demonstrates that it’s not the babies that are “cute,” “cutest,” “good,” “bad” or whatever, but our thinking that makes them so. Even the movie’s title attempts to make clear, babies are just … babies. However, the urge to judge is so strong,  in some, you even see rankings appear.

The enduring tendency of human kind, the one that has survived all other tendencies combined, is progress. If you’re fearful about the future, or wish to further strengthen your faith in it, or if you simply want to have a good time, Babies the movie – the four babies in it, but also all the babies not filmed – are yours for the taking, well, yours for the price of a movie ticket.

You have seen “Babies” the movie yourself? What are your impressions? Please share!

People have great potential for nurturing and growing their strengths, but they run out of steam if asked instead to focus on correcting their deficiencies. Easier said than done? Actually not, developing strengths isn’t difficult to do.

Greater Potential In Strengths Than In Deficiencies

Confirming common sense, recent research shows that humans possess greater potential for nurturing their strengths, than for correcting their deficiencies. Greater potential also means greater motivation. For an excellent 2-minute video on the topic, click here. When I was a child, my parents marked our growth with penciled marks on the kitchen door frame. We – the kids – asked to be measured twice daily! We couldn’t grow fast enough – growth can be incredibly motivating.

However, at school the focus changed. Now we are asked to focus mostly on areas that are lagging behind in growth. (Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining and profoundly moving case for creating a different educational system). Little wonder that 10, 20 and 30 years later only one in every three workers believes that his or her work is aligned with their growth and their strengths. Continuously asked to focus on what’s lacking within, students in the classroom and people at work end emotionally and spiritually disengaged from school and work, sometimes to the point of hating it. Heart attacks indicate a spike on Monday mornings – when the stress of having to resume dissatisfying work is greatest. Suicide rates among young people are of concern to anyone interested in the nation’s health. The consumption of drugs, mostly legal, to ease peoples’ minds has reached epic proportions and keeps growing (to the satisfaction of the drug makers). How to reverse the trend?

Treat The Itch, Not The Scratch

Instead of band-aiding the outcome – stress, depression – ‘attack’ the root cause. Instead of focusing on what’s missing, focus on developing what’s there. This simple shift in focus is all it takes.

Love Your Work, Love Your Life

The notion it’s a good thing to love your work is sometimes received with skepticism. To say you love your work in some places only gets you seen as full of you know what. And the claim that work can actually set you free has been given a very bad rap by dictators throughout history. But forced labor isn’t work.

Work that appeals to your strengths and is aligned with your purpose in life will elevate you and benefit you in every way. Look around you. People who love their work are in the average three times more likely to have and outstanding quality of life, than people who don’t. Successful men and women work more, not less. Almost without exception, people who “don’t need to work for money” anymore work as if their life depended on it. Which it does. It quite simple, really: work – and keep growing – or die. Ask anyone forced to retire.

Find And Develop Your Strengths

Figure out what makes you stand out. If you and the people who love you do not come up with an answer right away, decide what will make you stand out. The point is, get started, you can always make adjustments over time. Consider getting yourself a copy of Tom Rath’s “Strengths Finder” book.

Do not compare yourself to others – comparing is not strengths finding. A tulip is not the best tulip she can be by comparing herself to a rose. Just be yourself. Besides, everybody else is already taken. Being you, and knowing your strengths, is essential also in knowing when an opportunity (such as a promotion) is in fact an opportunity, and when accepting it would be a disservice to yourself.

Relevant Quotes

• “Let me tell you the secret that has led me to my goal: my strength lies solely in my tenacity.” – Louis Pasteur
• “You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing you think you cannot do.” – Eleanor Roosevelt
• We all have strength enough to endure the troubles of others.” – La Rochefoucauld

To achieve personal growth, to marry and have children is a sure bet (another sure option is to start your own business). However, the primary responsibility of a parent is to awaken the spirit of the child, and all too often the experience of the child is everything but. Indeed, many kids have their spirits broken instead.

The Sorry State Of Parenting

When measured by results and outcomes of parenting, it’s clear we have in this country and around the world outstanding and poor parents at the same time. That said, in sheer numbers, poor parenting seems rather the more popular of the two. This sorry state of parenting is at least in part due to parents’ inability to respond to the challenge – parenting looks easy from the distance, yet is hard in actual practice. Many politicians and religious leaders (leaders?) are making matters worse by declaring, in effect, that values are not a question of principle but of circumstance, that obstruction is the smart thing to do, and all choices are either-or and you cannot have both.

The Challenge: An Unknown Future

People who are now in their 50′s can expect to live another 50 years. (By comparison, as mere 200 years ago the average life expectancy was 37 years, and 100 years ago it was 47 years). And as creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson points out – in the enclosed TED talk (click here), he challenges the way we’re educating our children -  children starting school now will begin to retire starting in 2070. How do we parent ourselves and our children for so much future and for so many unknowns? I believe security in the future will increasingly come from confidence in the ability to grow bigger than our challenges. Material possessions, acquired knowledge, status and past successes will remain important, but less so.

Yet Every Day Is Another Chance To Be Better Parents Ourselves

Every day we are given a new chance to be the best parent we can be – for our children and, as importantly, for our inner child. It is easy, too (all things being relative). To “awaken the spirit of the child,” it is enough to learn to look at yourself through kind eyes. If you do, you will naturally catch yourself doing things right more often, rather than focus on mistakes much of the time, and build on strengths, rather than correct deficiencies. Kind eyes will bring about the care and understanding needed to nurture your spirit. Kind eyes work equally well for your children, of course, provided you keep in mind that you are not living through your children. Your kids have been given their own spirit and their own path. Awakening and nurturing their spirit does not mean to gain control over them. Kahlil Gibran sums it up beautifully in his poem, “On Children.” To read it, click here (then click on the “View Full Screen” icon located in the upper right). Alternatively, if you’re interested in how dolphins do their parenting, click here.

Relevant Quotes

• “Cherish your visions and your dreams as they are the children of your soul, the blueprints of your ultimate achievements.” – Napoleon Hill
• “We go about our daily lives understanding almost nothing of the world. Except for children – who don’t know enough not to ask the important questions – few of us spend much time wondering why nature is the way it is.” – Carl Sagan
• A four year old child’s next door neighbor was an elderly gentleman who had recently lost his wife. Upon seeing the man cry, the little boy went into the old gentleman’s yard, climbed onto his lap, and just sat there. When his father asked what he had said to the neighbor, the little boy said, “Nothing, I just helped him cry.” – Anonymous
• “It’s difficult to make forecasts, especially about the future.” – George Bernard Shaw
  

These days, as a life coach, I meet more people who were used to the good life, then something happened, and now they are wondering where it all has gone. It happens, they found out, not just to other people.

If something (bad) happened in your life, it might be not a big deal. You feel no worse than lost in an unfamiliar place. Or what happened was a major event and you’ve been stuck in it for a while, sinking deeper, banging your head, bleeding, the walls far from crumbling. There must be another way, you hope, knowing full well that hope alone by itself is overrated.

You’ve never been work-shy. Hard work is in your nature, but you realize your nature is part and parcel of what got you into this bad place in the first place. Massive action is needed, but by itself it won’t be enough.

You don’t want to pick a remedy worse than the ill it is supposed to cure. You don’t want to cure loneliness with a drink, only to find yourself lonely and drunk. You know the danger signs, you’ve seen them and ignored them enough in the past. But the way out you don’t know.

If this sounds familiar, the good news: there is nothing wrong with you. If your radio plays the wrong tune, you simply adjust the tuning. Likewise, if your life produces wrong outcomes, do not question yourself, simply adjust the tuning. The bad news: it’s not that simple, and will take time.

To “adjust the tuning” and find back to the good life, you must basically tune yourself… back to yourself. Sometimes it begins by re-membering who you are. Once you re-member yourself, you realize you’re not alone. How so? For the sake of brevity (additional information in future articles), let’s single out just the aspect of knowledge.

First off, all knowledge comes from learning – are you still learning? Have you made yourself a lifelong student? If not, it would be your step number one. Is there an alternative? If you think there is no need to learn further, or studying is too hard, or too late, or too expensive, your only alternative is ignorance.

Second, locate, access and use all knowledge, not just yours. There are at least three “libraries” of knowledge available to each of us:

• Personal Stuff: Personal stuff covers everything you learned in life, the hard way or otherwise, as part of a conscious learning effort. It’s all in there, but might take effort to retrieve. The best way to retrieve is to think in writing, i.e. write it down.

• Instinct: We share it with other life forms. At the technical level, instinctive knowledge is embedded in the DNA. The more science knows about it, the more impressive it becomes. Plants and animals, sometimes in a cosmic dance together, do stuff that boggles the mind. We humans generally underrate and under-utilize instinctive knowledge. It’s a mistake. Get back in touch with your instinct.

• Universal Wisdom: The universe shares its wisdom with us, quite freely. All we need to do, is tune in. If you’re like me, when you were an infant you thought the music was in the radio – I used to imagine little people performing orchestral music right inside the radio set – but later you see the musicians actually live and breathe elsewhere. The same is true for thoughts. At the beginning you think they are in your mind, but later you see they are actually “out there” and our brains merely transmit them. Universal wisdom is yours for the asking, oops, for the tuning.

To summarize, be a lifelong student and in the process learn to locate, access and utilize all the knowledge, not just yours. Before long you will find yourself back on the path to the good life. Bon voyage!

QUOTES

• “Ideas are changed not by will, but by other ideas.” – Maxwell Maltz
• “I use not only the brains I have, but all I can borrow.” – Woodrow Wilson
• “Nurture your mind with great thoughts, for you will never go any higher than you think.” – Benjamin Disraeli
• “Change your thoughts and you change your world.” – Norman Vincent Peale

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