Fulfillment

Fulfillment

When last we met back in August I was talking about the whole idea of becoming aware of what I am feeling and what those feelings are trying to communicate to me. I say they are trying to communicate, but that probably overstates it a bit. After all, feelings have no brain. They are by definition irrational. So when I think I'll control my anger or fear I am expecting the impossible. I may bury a feeling, but the only place to hide it is in my gut somewhere. Some day it will return and it will bring with it all kinds of other feelings buried along with it and I'll find myself in a spot I don't like.

If I'm actually wanting to live a erich, rewarding life, one that has reached fulfillment, dealing with my feelings in real time needs to be part of the equation. The previous posts dealt with the feelings and their meanings, but as someone said once, self knowledge of itself is worthless. That knowledge needs to be put to use, and all those many years when I had no idea what to do with the feelings I learned all kinds of ways to distract myself from knowing that vital information. Even today as I was writing this I distracted myself several times. It's been email, a phone call, checking my calendar a little Christmas shopping, which I know I'm not going to do...you get the idea.

It is incumbent on me to check in with myself regularly so I know what I'm feeling. And I have also found out that I'm afraid all the time, so the practice for me is to ask my self to recognize what I'm afraid of. Then I can figure out what I need to face it. At that point I can also then see if other feelings are hanging behind the fear.

Today what I've discovered is a continuation of work I've been doing over the last couple of weeks. I have known for some time that some of the work I've been doing is really ground breaking. This whole idea of feelings, especially in the workplace, but also everywhere else is more important today than ever before. I think the reason is that the further our species advances the less our lives are threatened, particularly in an immediate sense. My survival is not at risk. 

So then I need to find out what the fear is and it turns out it's not complicated. I'm afraid my ideas will fail in the market place. People won't want to do business with me and then I won't have the stuff I want and on and on. If it sounds to you like I don't trust myself, you are correct. So rather than proceed find out by saying what I have in the marketplace I distract myself.

But I'm on to myself today and I'm back on track and finishing this post. And the motivation is fulfillment. That's what I want in my life. And let me explain what that means to me, so there's no confusion. I think fulfillment is the result of living a life that is true to the liver. It's based on acting in pursuit of my best values, sharing my wealth (in whatever ways it's measured) acting as though my relationships are mutually important, not just to one of us. Knowing my feelings and honoring them, and showing up each day to see what I can contribute. If I live my life that way, I will know my life is full. And I know that because when I have done those things I had felt powerful and content. Not content for all time, but for the moment. And powerful not over others, but over my intentions and actions.

And as I stand in my power today I am aware that a revolution is in progress in our world that is not unlike the one we had a century ago. Historians call that one the Industrial Revolution. People began using machines instead of human power to accomplish many tasks which were difficult and repetitive. People began to move from the rural farm communities to the cities where the factories were.

Our revolution is similar because people are moving out of the factories as computers and robots have taken over many of those jobs. It is also similar in that the work force is unskilled at many of the new tasks and the skilled work force is looking for employment that is as yet non existent.

Come back tomorrow and we'll begin to explore what the New Revolution looks like from here.

. Decision

Welcome back, fellow explorers of the world of Resistance. As you know, we're talking about the four parts I've identified for myself with regard to this stubborn friend of mine. I've written about Information, Analysis, Reaction/Response and that brings us the the final one, Decision.

We have discovered that the body observes something, then it analyzes whether this threat is one to run from or kill to avoid. This is followed by an effort to know the feeling so that slowing down can occur and a response can be formulated instead of a knee jerk reaction taking over.

Now that we've come this far that doesn't preclude impulsive action. And we've pretty much all acted impulsively from time to time. The key to impulsive action in my case is what the guys on Car Talk refer to as "absent the thought process..." This means to me that action has preceded Decision. My American Heritage Dictionary describes impulsive as Inclined to act on impulse rather than thought.

I hope we haven't come all this way to decide to act impulsively now. So my next step is to Decide a plan of action. And since the situation is prompted by my feeling, I want to get connected to what each feeling means. I look at them this way:
     
      Sad- Response to loss. If I think I lost something I'm sad. It may be something I had such as losing                 my sunglasses, or a relationship, such as the death of a loved one or loss of friendship or lover.               And it may be the loss of something hoped for such as a piece of business, a job, a new friend               or many more. Sadness requires being comforted, usually by a person, not a behavior or                         substance. Inappropriate comforting can cause addiction, because it's avoidance instead of                       comfort. The time frame here is the Past. It happened.

      Mad- Response to a boundary being violated. When someone steps on my toe I get angry. That's                     appropriate. I need to make sure my response is as well. Without making excuses or                               apologizing I can make sure the person understands where my boundary is. It is totally unfair                 for me to assume anyone knows where my boundaries are if I haven't told them. Fences are                   words, but few other things are. The time frame here is Present. It is taking place now.
   
      Glad- When I am gratified my something the appropriate response is Glad, or Joy, not to be                               confused with pleasure, which is enjoyable, but relatively meaningless. It has few lasting                         effects. Joy on the other hand stays even through pain, because it is a state of being as                             opposed to circumstance. The time frame here is Timeless. Time has nothing to do with it.

      Afraid-  Response to a future event. This is worry, projection and all the things that predicting the                         future has attached to it. And Frer is actually a great friend. It helps me want to stop for a                         red light. It helps me look at a threat and decide what to do about it. The time frame is                             Future, so I actually have time to make a decision if it's not life or death. Which it almost                         never is.

So here's the frame work I have for making that all important decision instead of reacting mindlessly and creating problems for myself, usually with people who are important to me either for love or sustenance.

I know how hard and complicated this looks. And I'm not going to say it's easy. I am saying that it's surprising simple. Getting in touch with the message my body is sending to me is actually an act of blessing myself. Once I get accustomed to blessing myself I begin to realize how valuable I actually am. And the more valuable I am the less shame and defensiveness is present in me.

C'mon back for the next chapter in the journey to Fulfillment. Which is actually the prize st the end of the rainbow. At least for me.

3. Reaction/Response

The next chapter of our journey is the Reaction/Response section. As I've done it, I spent most of my life doing anything not to feel. I learned early on that feelings were wrong and bad. Smart people and good people didn't need or have feelings. 

You probably know by now that nothing could be further from the truth. I don't choose to feel or not feel. My body does it without permission from my brain. My brain, like everyone's, reacts to the world around me as it observes what's going on around me. Something happens and faster than you can say "huh?", it has seen, analyzed and sent a message to my brain to pay attention. Now the oldest and therefore most experienced part of me is sometimes referred to as the lizard brain. It's the part most closely associated with survival. It is known as the amygdala in the scientific world.

The amygdala's function (one of them) is to assess risk and determine if I should run from this threat or kill it. This is survival at the primal level. It assumes that all risks are life or death. So let me ask you to consider the last time your life was threatened. If you're like me you can't recall. What that means is that I have to learn how to not react from the amygdala place. I have to slow down and think about a response to my feeling which would be more appropriate than the running/killing reaction.

But, easier said than done. After a lifetime of reacting to situations or ignoring them it's difficult to learn to slow down and think before acting. And you may share my experience of trying to tell myself to do something I've never done before and expecting I'll behave toward myself any better than I behaved for mom and dad. Commands have never worked for me before and they haven't worked for clients I've worked with either. So, what's a poor boy to do?

I've tried different things; none with any kind of results that were reliable. Here's the one thing I tried that has succeeded much of the time.

Over the last several years I've tried various ways to practice being in the present. After all, my entire life is taking place in this moment. I can either do something which contributes to my life or something that doesn't. And contribution takes on many guises. They are not all related to work. They are not all related to play. Those contributions are the elements that together are creating my life. They come in different sizes, shapes and colors. Some are hard and sturdy, some are ephemeral and some are frivolous. The objective is to create something I can enjoy and be grateful for while I struggle and while I rest and recuperate. I'm really looking for Fulfillment. And that's a topic for another day.

As I have struggled to be in the moment I realized that there is one thing necessary for the moment. That is to know my feelings: Glad, Mad Sad and Afraid. Those only happen in real time and they are always real time. They are perhaps a definition of the moment. They are always present to a greater or lesser degree and when I know where I am with all of them I am in the moment. I am also prepared to notice when one of them spikes, which may give me an opportunity to react from a more mature or developed part of my brain that the lizard locale.

The fourth part is next. See you soon.

Uh oh!

Oops, i goofed. In the event that you've been paying more attention than I have to what is unfolding on this page you will realize that the first step in dealing with Resistance is not Analysis, it's Information. There is nothing to analyze until the Information is identified.

So, here's part of being me that makes it difficult to be me. While I speak with clients all the time about the idea of multi-tasking and the illusion that it's not only possible but laudatory. We talk about how most of the mistakes they are criticizing themselves about are lapses of attention and focus. So what was I doing yesterday? Only trying to do more than one thing at a time. Furthermore, there was no reason I needed to do that. Yes, i had plenty to do yesterday. And I had plenty of time to do it in. Yesterday's 24 were all the hours I needed to live my life of yesterday.

But part of the way that I go blind in the resistant part of my process is to have all kinds of distracting behavior I can lapse into without giving it any thought. Actually they are designed to make sure I don't give it any thought. If I thought about what I was doing I'd get to it. Just like I eventually do when I do my laundry. Apparently there is a part of me that doesn't like satisfaction as much as discomfort. I think I trust that state of chaos and confusion more than I trust satisfaction and comfort. We'll come back to this at a later date.

It appears that one key to getting to the Information part is discomfort. But discomfort by itself isn't enough. I need to be willing to look at the source of discomfort. I need to realize that my discomfort is all about the laundry not being and not getting done. And that's another way of saying I'm stuck. The laundry isn't getting done, and I'm not doing something else which would be equally valuable.

And even the valuable needs to be rated. Let's say I have a project to complete and I have 10 days to have it ready. And I have the laundry piling up. I don't actually want to do the laundry now (or ever) and I like the project so I may decide that now is a good time to get started on the project. 

What a perfect distraction! But if I'm thinking that I am actually hurting myself. I am taking care of something that has little or no urgency attached to it and I also have the mounting anxiety that I'll need the laundry done and all I'll have done is a part accomplishment of a project which is not important from a time standpoint. Which means there's no reward for getting started early. Unless and until I take care of the most important thing that also has some urgency attached to it, I will remain stuck.

Now the Analysis phase comes into play. Which I already wrote about. The next post is Reaction/Response.

See you soon.

Resistance: 1. Analysis

Now that we've broken through Denial only to discover that nothing has changed, except that I know I've been hoping this thing that's bothering me will go away if I ignore it. It's possible at this point to hope for the return to Denial, but it really deserves another name, because once something has a name it's hard to go back to pretending it doesn't exist.

I've come to call it Resistance. And as I said in the last post, it's another way to be stuck, because it is its own type of blindness. Now, even thought I know the thing is there a part of me is keeping me from addressing the situation. Imagine a rather mundane example of this. I go through this with laundry. I don't want to do it. I ignore it, I postpone it, I rationalize it, I put it off as though it will wash itself and put it away. I do this for as long as it takes to get me to decide to do it. And when I get around to doing it there's a process I've discovered I go through. For the sake of our discussion I call it Analysis.

First I start to let myself be aware that there is laundry to do. Then I have to come to the realization that I am the one who needs to do it. I check to see if I'm running out of clothes. Actually, clean underwear. That's the one for me that is the final issue that can push the action button and get me to do it. The problem is that I have lots of underwear and I now have so much of it that I always do the laundry before I run out of underwear.

This situation has actually been a gift because I need another tool for deciding when to do it that's new. This calls for Analysis! You'll say, "Duh!" And I'll acknowledge that as correct as your harsh judgment of me is, it isn't informative or helpful. I need to take a look at the cause of my Resistance. And although it took me a little while to say it out loud, the truth is I want someone else to do it for me. What I really want is for my Mother to do it for me. Just like she did until I went to college.

And even deeper is that I don't want my mother to do my laundry, I want to be taken care of. Someone should love me and as a result do my laundry because she loves me.

I can't tell you how many arguments I had with my ex about her wanting me to know what love looked like to her. I didn't know, because I am a lousy mind reader and she wouldn't tell me because I was supposed to know. But that's an entirely different issue. This issue is just about my parents and me, not about Analysis. But it is a clue to my Resistance.

Now that I am aware of the nature of the Resistance, I get to decide whether I want to be an adult or not. But at this point I now know the nature of the problem I am facing and I get to go to the next step.

Tomorrow.

C'mon back and see where this path goes.

My Friend (?) Resistance

You might well ask yourself, since I'm not there, what is this thing with friendship? Make friends with Fear, with Resistance. You might think someone me, thinks you're socially challenged, that you can't pick your own friends.

No i know better than that. When I was a kid my father always wanted me to change friends when I got into trouble. As though I wouldn't do anything like that on my own. Probably more about him than me.

I am sure you are quite capable of making friends. I am merely introducing you to something you already know. It's not a person, but a part of you. And remember we started with feeling, then moved on to one of them: Fear. From there we ambled into Courage and Denial. We left off with needing that Courage to overcome the Fear I met after I broke down the wall of Denial that blinded me to my impediment.

We talked about needing to be friends with that Fear thing so I knew the difference between fear for my life and something much less threatening, like stopping for a red light. I need to have a relationship with my Fear that isn't reactionary, but responsive.

Okay, now we're all up to date.

So that part of you that has courageously broken through the blindness of Denial is now facing a new form of blindness: Resistance. If you're anything like me Resistance is something making you look like being blindly stubborn or frivolously unconcerned about anything. For me this is just the lack of getting to know and appreciate my Resistance. If I want to be my friend I evaluate the thing I might be resistant to and ask myself if my resistance comes from an awareness of the thing being something I don't want to do, or if it's something I don't want to look at. Because I'm afraid.   

Yes, I know we already dealt with Fear. I perhaps led you to believe it was gone, dealt with. 

No such luck. The Fear that we dealt with was necessary to get to this fear. Bu remember, Fear is now your friend. You've made a relationship with it that allows for conversation and maybe even negotiation. Which is where we are at this point, negotiation. One a person becomes aware of a Resistance point the next thing is the negotiation part. I think the negotiation can be broken down into four components: Information, Analysis, Reaction/Response, Decision.

I assert that when we have stepped through this process, a sound decision will be able to be made by you. One you can live with and both learn and prosper from, almost ending with a preposition.

Each of these deserves its own space, so we'll take up the Information piece tomorrow.

C'mon back. The fun is just beginning.

After Denial

After Denial 

I see denial as a type of blindness, and although it's serious and could persist for the rest of my life that part is optional. There is treatment and even a cure for Denial, if I can take my denials one at a time,

Much of my life I approached problems with the attitude I was taught: Do better! Try harder! And while there may have been times in my life when I held back effort knowingly, for the most part I did the best I could at the time. I think most humans operate that way. If someone isn't telling me what to do, I go at it to succeed. If it would be possible to try harder, I would need to become aware of what it was that was causing me to hold back.

I can remember times when my parents told me to do something I didn't want to do, like was the dishes. Once I realized I had to do a good job or do it over, and that I would be at it until it was finished I figured out how to do the task and get it behind me.

So my problem is not about trying hard or doing better, it's about not doing. I don't do some of the things that are most important to my success. And I don't necessarily mean work or business success. Sometimes it's doing something I know I'd enjoy, or doing something to take care of myself or a million other things.

My friend Denial allows me to say I'm happy, I'm fine, life is good, blah, blah, blah. And I'm not really lying because something is missing. That missing thing is Awareness. And isn't awareness the magic elixir? Certainly once I'm aware of the thing I'm not doing I'll just jump in and do it. Who was it talking about "Git 'er dun" some time not too long ago?

We Americans just love to roll up our sleeves and knock that baby out in no time. And that might work if the job is cutting the grass or something like that. A task that's well defined and limited. The end point is obvious and achievable in a predictable amount of time. But some things require more of me. They want what's inside. So, when I great through my friend Denial with the gift of Awareness, then I meet my other pair of blinders, Resistance.

All the Awareness in the world is helpless against the power of Resistance. Come back tomorrow and we'll talk about making another new friend.

Fear then Denial

There's a word that has dogged me all my life. It has been my best friend in terms of my behavior. I have relied on it as a mountaineer relies on the sherpa. I have trusted it at least as much as the doctors who treated my lung cancer. And it has been more reliable than any friend or relative in my life. I know exactly what it will do and how effective it will be.

But Denial has a poor reputation. Some say it obscures the truth from me and that's hurtful. But I've never had much use fr the truth. It would get me in trouble when I was a kid. It made me want to study more for tests. It made me think life was too much work, and too boring.

Okay, let's back up. I just described what I did with the judgments I had, all of which add up to my thinking that I was not going to get enough. I wouldn't have enough fun. I wouldn't have any freedom. I was going to be sad. 

But again, I am still operating at the judgment level. Maybe the question is, where do these judgments come from? I finally realized I was protecting myself from some imagined future. None of the things I mentioned had or were happening. They were all projections of the future. Or perhaps I could say they articulated my Fear. 

As you are no doubt aware, Fear is about the future. I'm only afraid of what's happening now when my life is threatened. Otherwise everything I'm afraid of is in the future. I won't have any fun or freedom in the future. It will be boring. So I need to take care of that now. The problem is that I am in denial about the consequences that will produce. This is Denial in my life.

So let's take a look at what Denial has actually gotten me. It allowed me to be unaware of how prepared I was to take tests, so it allowed me not to study,which allowed me to fail tests and courses. It allowed me to accept lesser performance from myself at work, with relationships truly with all the activities and decisions in my life. Denial has always allowed me to accept less from myself because I couldn't trust myself to do what needed to be done, as I described in yesterday's post.

So, in my case, Fear brings on Denial, which eases my anxiety and widens the gap between who I am and how I am acting. That's what I call a loss of Integrity.

More soon.

 

I

Yes, a powerful ego statement. And one that is frequently misunderstood by me. 

Here's what I mean. The articulation of the word is a specific statement of fact, but I often haven't thought about what it means. Certainly it refers to the being encased by my skin, but beyond that, what are my beliefs and judgments of that? Do I ever identify what that means to me? 

Most of my life I have taken it for granted that I know what it means. I have assumed everyone else knows as well as I do. And while you may recognize the obvious flaw in that statement, it may be truer than it appears. In fact, others may see me much clearer than I see myself. The reason is simple. I'm hiding from myself. I don't want to admit things about myself because it's scary. If I admit there are things I'm unhappy with I'd have to change them.

Or not. Here's the big one for today. I don't trust myself. And of course I don't merely distrust myself for one thing, but for numerous things; all of them just barriers to change. This is where my resistance lives. After the breakthrough from Denial, Resistance comes to my rescue.

This is a step by step process. First i identify I'm stuck. That's been protected by Denial for some, long time. Now if I just didn't trust myself to get unstuck that would be one thing, but I don't trust myself to find out why I'm stuck. I don't trust myself to come up with a plan to change. I don't trust myself to take the action I come up with. I don't trust myself to continue to pursue. I don't trust myself to come up with alternatives if the first try doesn't work. 

I'll bet by now you get the picture. It's becoming clearer to me.

What I think I'm describing is the why and the how it is that I'm out of another I word, Integrity.

Integrity describes the situation in which I am and do what you see. Where there is no difference between my speaking and my appearance.

Few things, if any are more deleterious to my success as a human being.

More soon.

OWNING

Ever notice that the Declaration Of Independence cites the importance of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness as fundamental to us as Americans, but the Constitution cites Life, Liberty and Property.

I suppose the idea of happiness doesn't lend itself to legislation, but property is rather important. Actually, I'll bet most Brits in the 18th Century didn't and couldn't own property. But I spoke enough about History this week already. I'm interested in today, today.

For some time I've been known to say that everything I owns also owns me. If I own a house or a car or even a house plant, the owned requires care and maintenance. Without those two things instead of an object of appreciation I have an object of deterioration and potentially, shame.

I've probably been talking about this for several years, and I've made some strides toward ridding myself of excess baggage. I no longer own my residence and that's a choice I'm happy with. I gave up my car, and as important as those things were to me at one time, being without them is surprisingly easy.

When I moved to my present apartment about 3 years ago I knew one thing for sure. I didn't even want a house plant. The light isn't that great for plants, but the real reason is I don't want to take care of one. Or several.

Is this because I'm lazy and don't want to do anything? Apparently not because I seem to be doing stuff all day long. And even late into the night. So one might ask what all this amazing free time that doesn't get taken up with watering and feeding and repotting and cleaning up and, and and?

In my case it's been the winter of my discontent to quote Mr. Steinbeck. Business is okay but kind of slow. I realized my routine was no longer serving me. I quit my suport group, not because I don't want one, but I realized the one I created in order to get what I wanted wasn't giving what I was looking for. I'm not dating anyone and there isn't anyone on the horizon. The CDs, books and old clothes are leaving and will be gone in a few days.

I'm becoming unowned. I'm looking forward to it, but of course I'm impatient.

What's new?

It's not boring, I can tell you that. And I feel lots lighter. 

GITTIN' 'ER DUN!

As most of you know, it doesn't take a whole lot to get me irritated. And if you read yesterday you know I want to comment on stuff I saw in the paper on Sunday. One of my largest irritations is the way business relationships are managed. As a disclaimer I am probably writing about this because it's safer than writing about personal relationships. But I can acknowledge that whatever dysfunction exists at work also happens at home.

I have no direct experience with any of the people involved in what I read so all I'm writing about is what I read and how it affected me. No quotes or attributions, just my responses and of course my judgements about how this is universal bad acting on the part of everyone in business.

Okay, no more disclaimers. I have been in work relationships in which theoretical agreements are made. That's the kind of agreement the boss offers and asks words to the effect of, What do you think? As though I have options. Other than relinquishing expectation of receiving my next paycheck.

One of the guys I read about said his organization has goals everyone has agreed with and the results are published to the entire company every month. The way my mind works, the negotiations about goals included a set of guidelines (with numbers) from the top. This is followed by an expectation that group and individual goals would fill in the blanks to make those numbers happen. Gitti' 'er dun! And then he goes on to say the organization is driven by metrics that are rated on a scale of 1 to 5. One of which is Gittin' 'er dun! He's even proud about expecting that at the interview level, and continues through everything they think about.

I don't know about you, but I have a history of not getting things finished that I was dedicated to finishing. And, yes, the first reason is that I just put it off for some reason, good or bad in my eyes. And I suspect everyone does or has doen that in their lives. Here's where the rubber meets the road for me. Since this is such an overwhelmingly common occurrence. making it a metric is guaranteed to be deadly. It's going to assure that people will hit the mark, but not necessarily meet the real expectations.

I did it, but is is any good? Or as good as it should have been? Am I and my team proud of this? Have we re-negotiated the outcome as we proceeded? Have we stewarded our process or have we filled in the blanks.

Management is all about efficiency, so they love to check off, Got 'er dun. But how often do we need to do it over? Or have an unhappy customer.?

Tomorrow about moving up the ladder and being human at the same time.

HISTORY

Anyone who has a memory of certain teachers has had the opportunity to find how those people have changed over time. I had a teacher of American History in my junior year. He had a nickname handed down from classes that preceded mine of Bobby D, teenage idol. He was a priest and we were seminarians, theoretically on our way to becoming one like him, and we were thrown together to see what would happen.

He was a priest, but also a human. That was a difficult concept back in those pre-Vatican II days. The world was different then, and I don't mean better or worse, just different. He was a guy who was in love with American History, especially the Civil War, but few of us really gave much of a dam one way or the other. We just wanted to get it over with. And he was quirky a kind of way most of us are, but in a way that drew the attention of teen age boys. So, many of us had fun at his expense, but behind his back. I don't recall any issues raised in class, but the lunch room was another story.

All this is to say I got a life lesson from him that serves me to this day, and hoodaeverthunk? He assigned us the task of bringing the Tribune Book Section from the Sunday paper in every Monday. And during that class period, the Revolution or War of 1812 or the discoveries of Lewis & Clark were set aside for the purpose of helping us discover what it might be like to live the life of a reader. Because we are all interested in something, not just the Civil War, he knew we could expand and enrich our lives by reading and discovering all the things we weren't learning in school. And at the same time we would be entertained. What a concept! What teaching! A man who thought beyond the curriculum, not in rebellion but in service to the point of the curriculum. After all, we have gone on to write 50 years of history since then, and my appreciation of it has grown significantly. But I remember today that lesson, which continues to be part of my life today all these years later. And I'm grateful.

When this occurred to me yesterday, as I was jolted or nudged by what I read in the paper I started to think about writing this and I remembered him. And I wasn't going to mention him, but as I write it I've been thinking he deserves the recognition. So I googled him. And I discovered he passed away in November at the age of 85, after having served his God and his parishioners after his teaching career ended. After all his calling wasn't to the classroom but to the Flock. He wasn't attached to any of the Church scandals and seems to have been a well respected man. There was a comment from another former student who obviously came after me and thought this was one of his favorite teachers. That comment calls me to remember many of my teachers and be grateful for them all, the good and the bad and the middling. At this point I can see how I learned from them. Different things from each to be sure and much more than was contained in the texts.

Today I can be grateful to them all and say, thank you. Your challenges and sacrifices are things I have deep appreciation for today. And in recognition of them all, Reverend Robert Dovick, Bless you and your life.

I hope to see you tomorrow on the topic of what I was jolted by yesterday.

ONE MORE SHOPPING DAY

That's right, ladies and gentlemen, there is only one more shopping day until the CREATIVE SELFISHNESS workshop happens. You know, the one hosted by that imaginative partnership EBB, Ellen, Bill & Bill. If you haven't heard yet, please refer to the previous post here to get more details.

You might ask yourself why should I get up at or before the crack of dawn, make myself at least half way presentable, and show up at 7:30, yes AM?

Even though you didn't, I am going to pretend and say I'm glad you asked. Some would say February is not the cruelest month, but I disagree. If we were actually having winter this year we would be wondering if it would ever be over. But we're Chicagoans and we know we'll pay for the pass we've gotten so far and we'll be sorry.  We're expert and knowing and waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Mardi Gras is over and unless you're one of those who relish the season of denial called Lent, the only thing to look forward to this month is more places offering pepper and egg sandwiches. If only more of them did it better.

But I digress.

On top of all that, V-Day was just last week, and who doesn't need some respite after that. That's the holiday during which it is almost impossible to win. Whatever your hopes and dreams of that event are, what are the chances of being hooked up with someone who sees it the same way as you? It's either much bigger or much smaller than yours. And how many of us can actually tell ourselves, let alone out partners, how we actually feel about it?

On the heels of this and the expectation of endless dreary days of the waning winter, we of EBB offer you the chance to see how to make the 364 1/4 other days of the year filled with much more of what you want, need, deserve, have earned and needed. And without compromising the hopes and dreams of your loved ones.

If you're just a little curious about what that might look like, come and see us in the morning. 

You'll be glad you did.

CREATIVE SELFISHNESS

Welcome to the Paeon blog, where we talk about big stuff. Today it's about a frequent topic in the world of 21st Century Americans: Getting Stuff Done. Or gettin' er dun. or some other version you may prefer.

Of course this is about the judgement that life will be better when all the shit on my do do list is scratched off and I can catch a breather. Truth is, the person making that list is YOU. The truth is, you have a reason for making that list the way you do and you might be unaware or merely clueless about what is driving you there.

Enter We Three Coaches. We call ourselves EBB because we too are added to whatever that's called when an abbreviation is made out of the...you know what I mean.

We have a 90 minute workshop coming up this next Tuesday, February 19th. We know you need to get stuff done and get to work and ll that so we scheduled it for 7:30AM. And we'll have you out at 9:00AM so you can go about practicing what you'll find out about yourself. And it'll be fun. Promise. That's because EBB doesn't take themselves too seriously. THe work we do it too important to weigh it down will sad faced and dour expressions. We have lives too and if we're down, it gets in our way.

Been there. Done that. Tired of it. Doing different!

Come for the fun and take away the lighter load you may be better able to carry. Have a laugh, maybe some coffee, maybe meet new people. Who knows?

One thing is for sure. You will walk away changed in some way. Not entirely, but in some way. We hope to see you there. Where? Here's the link.
http://www.eventbrite.com/event/5291823988/?ref=enivtefor001&utm_source=eb_email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=inviteformalv2&utm_term=attend&ref=enivtefor001#

Sign up now. You won't be sorry.

E-Ellen Burton
B-Bill Campbell
B-Bill Flynn