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This past weekend, I got the opportunity to spend a rare few moments outside playing in the snow with my daughters. I feel that each moment I spend with them, especially when they are so young, is like watching the sand fall from the top chamber of an hour glass…Time keeps on slipping away, and the innocence of youth, while so invigorating, will no doubt be a thing of the past in a few short years. I have to admit I can get quite depressed and down when I think about it, and I know when it hits me especially hard at night it’s time to go to bed!

As parents, my wife, Shelly, and I want to make sure we provide a great foundation for our girls to build from as they mature. Much like many parents want to establish an account for their children, so they have something saved up for future monetary expenses, we want to make sure we establish an account of life lessons for our children, so they have something saved up for those social situations they will undoubtedly face, and for those decisions they will need to make down the road. We quickly realized that this is not some far-off goal that we have years to work toward. Once our older daughter started school, the lessons had to start coming quickly, because with increased social interaction comes increased complexity and demand for problem-solving.

Please note that while it would be wonderful to say that I exhibit all of these characteristics I wish to instill upon our children, truth to be told, I have a lot of work to do in regard to many of these lessons!  If I could get them to learn these lessons, I would be absolutely thrilled. Many of these lessons, unfortunately (for me) were lessons I didn’t learn from my parents, and I had to learn them the hard way. I want to leave this world a better place than when I came, so if I can leave this world with two fine women who had learned these lessons, I would feel that I accomplished that goal!

Here is installment number one of the life lessons I want to make sure my daughters learn:

1. Your mom and dad love you — always. No matter what you do or what happens, we will always be there to support you.

2. Always be good to your sister — There is no need for competition or envy in this family. Everyone is loved equally and has the same opportunities for growth.

3. By simply being, you have made Mom and Dad’s life better. You taught us how to be more patient, compassionate, loving, and understanding. Life has never been as good as it is now before you came into this world.

4. Use your imagination and dream often. Those who accomplish the most dream the most. If you don’t dare to dream, you will always play it safe, and your personal growth will be stagnated.

5. Every day is a blessing. The fact that we live to see another day should be celebrated, and never taken for granted. Appreciate the time you spend with those who are special to you, because you never know how long they will be around.

6. Have a sense of humor about you. Life is way too short to be serious the whole time. Shelly may argue that I follow this a little too liberally from time to time!  Humor is a tremendous tool for breaking the tension in certain situations, so to understand how to utilize humor appropriately is a tremendous asset.

7. Ask for help when you need it. Everyone has strengths, so utilize the strengths of others when you need assistance. By relying on others, you show others that you value and trust them.

8. Never stop learning. Learning begins before you are born, and it continues until you leave this earth. You are never too old or too knowledgeable about anything to stop learning.

9. Do your best to try to get along with as many people as you can. By desiring to connect with others, you lower the resistance and reluctance of others to connect with you.

10. People have the right to their own opinions and preferences, so judgement need not apply. Everyone has the right to feel the way they feel and choose to act the way they choose, just as you do. Be wary of judging others.

11. Push for collaboration, not competition. Celebrate the successes of others, and do what you can to help them reach their goals. When you collaborate, you tap into a “spirit-based” mentality, where barriers are broken down and true greatness is the end result.  Everyone wins.

Come back tomorrow for the rest of the lessons! Have a great day!

-Victor

I really liked this article written by Angela at Powered By Intuition.  I highly recommend the read!

Who is More Intuitive Men or Women? | Powered by Intuition.

“I don’t consider myself bald, I’m just taller than my hair.” ~Seneca

I am bald…I’ve come to terms with it.  I used to have such thick and curly hair (it looked like Josh Groban’s).  There were many youthful days that I detested my thick, curly locks, and prayed for straighter, thinner hair.  I know there’s a “God” out there, because he sure delivered on my prayers! 🙂

I am at peace with my baldness now, but it wasn’t always that way.  I thought, for years before going bald, that I was completely safe.  You know that whole, “If your mom’s dad has a full head of hair, then you don’t have to worry about being bald” belief?  Well, let me tell you, it’s completely false.  A man’s baldness has to do with the genetics of both sets of grandparents.  Imagine my shock, when I noticed at age 18 that the corners of the front of my hairline were starting to thin out.  I didn’t catch it at first — a bald man actually pointed it out (rather gleefully at that), and even though I could start to see what they meant, I was in denial, hanging on to that belief that I was safe, based on my genetics.  Boy was I wrong.

You could say that losing your hair puts you through the stages of grieving: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.  I spent a lot of time in denial, not too much in anger, didn’t bargain much, wasn’t too depressed, and slid into the acceptance pretty readily.  Denial was the kicker.  I didn’t want to accept change.  Maybe it was the stigma of being bald; maybe it was how I would be perceived by others; maybe it was something else.  Whatever it was, I didn’t want to face it.  I didn’t want to accept change.

For some reason, I feared losing something — maybe it was just my hair, or maybe it was something that having hair represented…I don’t know…But accepting the change was tough.  My fear of losing whatever it was that I was going to lose by losing my hair was causing my denial and resistance to the change.

How many times do we fear change, and resist it and deny that change is inevitable in some circumstances?  How often do we spend more time fighting change and figuring out ways to keep things just the way they are, not realizing that it is just so much more work to fight the “system” than to figure out how to solve the problems associated with the challenges that lie ahead?  Just like fighting a receding hairline, you can fight it, deny it, and get angry about it, but what does that accomplish?  The end result is inevitable, and just the same.  Some change comes whether we want it or like it.

Now, I take baldness in stride.  I laugh and tease my older daughter when she draws a picture of me with no hair.  I question why she draws me that way, and she just tells me it’s because I have a bald head.  Being ever so kind, she quickly draws another picture, this time with a generous amount of hair on my head.  Obviously she’s a smart girl who knows how to stroke my ego! 🙂

I enjoy the ease of managing my very short hair.  It doesn’t require brushing or combing — that’s nice.  After years of getting frustrated with curly hair that had a mind of its own, it’s nice to not have to worry about my hair.  I like the look too, in all honesty.

When I think about how much I dreaded losing my hair and the “awful” things I perceived and predicted to come along with hair loss, I just have to laugh.  My prediction of how bad things would be never matched what actually played out.  Not even close.  Now that I wear my hair short, I wouldn’t have it any other way, no matter how much hair I have (or don’t have).  I am actually happy about the circumstances I once fought and resisted for so long.  Life is good!

Besides, if losing my hair is the worst thing that happens to me in this lifetime, I think you’ll agree that I have lived a pretty good life.  I can live with that…

When you face a change in the landscape of life or work, I challenge you to embrace the change.  Think about the possibilities — the opportunities that may lie beneath the surface.  Instead of fighting change, accept it, and figure out how to move ahead, given the changes.  By shifting to a problem-solving mode, you will be in a much better position to cope with the changes you face.  You never know — perhaps you’ll even be pleasantly surprised at how well things actually turn out in the end!

Have a great day, and best wishes!

-Victor

“Life is not an easy matter…You cannot live through it without falling into frustration and cynicism…” ~Leon Trotsky

I attended a convention this past fall — it was a networking event.  I don’t know about you, but whenever I am attending an event like this, I feel like we’re all a bunch of dogs, sniffing each others’ behinds.

At this convention, I met a lot of people who asked me, “So, what is it that you do?” or, “Tell me your story, Victor,” and I would tell them that I help people build better relationships.  More times than not, I would get a polite glassy-eyed stare and a nod (which means that they believed I couldn’t really do anything for them), and they’d move on to the next person.  Once in a while, I would meet someone who was genuinely interested in what I was doing and what I had to say, and it developed into a nice conversation.

One person in particular who I had talked with at the convention had written a book, and had it self-published.  I liked the look of their book, and I asked them for the name of the company they went through, and I wrote it on the back of one of my business cards.  I tried finding the card after the convention, but I must have inadvertently given it to another “end sniffer.”  I “friended” this person on Facebook, and then messaged them, asking for the publisher’s information again.  They accepted my friend request, but they didn’t respond to my message.

A few weeks later, I got an email from them, saying, in a nutshell, “Hello — it was nice meeting you at the convention — is there anything I can do to support you?”  I responded that it was nice hearing from them too, and I was wondering if they would be so kind as to provide me with the publisher’s information.  Again, no response.

So yesterday, I got another email from this same person…Here’s what it said (including my internal commentary in parentheses):

“How is your new year going?” (Doing great, but the year is almost 1/4 done…It’s almost March.)

“What are you launching this year?” (Um…Maybe a few bottle rockets around the 4th of July.)

“Would you want to build your list?” (Yes, of course.)

“I am doing a best seller campaign and it is a way to promote you and your list too…” (Cool.)

“How can I support you this year, my dear friend?”

Your dear friend?  Excuse me?

This is where I got a little bit frustrated.  I had asked them twice for the same information, getting no response.  It’s clear they aren’t listening to what I have to say.  More accurately, it’s clear they don’t care about me — they don’t value me — they appear (to me anyway) to be completely self serving.

This prompted me to think, “Are they really listening?”  Maybe I could say that they can support me by donning a gorilla suit, putting on some red pumps and Dorothy’s dress from “The Wizard of Oz,” throwing on a cowboy hat and riding a stick horse, while galloping in time to the “Chicken Yodel” in the local Wal-Mart parking lot.  Oh, and they could also support me by telling me the name of the publisher they went through for their book.

Do you think even that would garner a response?  I seriously question whether it will.

Frustration…What is it?  That is a good question.  More so, what is going on in our minds which causes the sense of being frustrated, because, if we know what causes it, maybe we can use the brain to sort of “prevent” or “minimize” future frustration.

I know why I felt frustrated.  I knew that I felt that this person did not value me.  They didn’t respect me to the point where they could simply read and respond to my email.  I don’t throw emails out asking for responses if I don’t intend to respond.  It’s disrespectful.  I felt that the only reason I was valued by this person was to use me to further their own endeavors — there wasn’t the intention of mutual benefit.  That’s frustrating.  To sum it up, I felt very disrespected, used, and certainly not valued.

I thought that frustration was based on anger, because it’s hard to determine which comes first — anger then frustration or frustration then anger.  So, I started to look around at what I could find out about brain studies related to frustration.

It turns out that research on the topic of frustration reveals that there are really two emotions at play.  One emotion is emotional distress, which stems from decreased activity in the middle of the brain, which contains dopamine neurons.  Dopamine is connected to our “pleasure system” and provides feelings of enjoyment and reinforcement which will in turn motivate us to do or to continue doing certain behaviors. When a person anticipates a reward, only to find out the reward has been omitted, there is decreased firing in this region, which is then coded as a learning signal. We end up learning from this experience that what we had anticipated didn’t come to fruition.

The second emotion is frustration, obviously.  This occurs when we see increased firing in the right insula (located in the area beneath our right ear and temple) and the — get ready for it — Right Ventral Prefrontal Cortex, or RVPFC.  This is located above our right eye.  Both of these areas are actually parts of our pain-processing system, so it could be said that frustration is a painful experience. 🙂

After reading this, it made a lot of sense.  When do we get frustrated?  When something doesn’t occur that we expect to occur.  When we expect our printer to print out a couple of pieces of paper, and it doesn’t (always at the least opportune time), we get frustrated.  We expect the pages to print promptly (the reward) and when they don’t (the omission), we experience emotional distress and frustration.  So true.

So, what can be done to decrease frustration?  Not much, other than learn from past experiences, which means that I likely won’t be asking, once again, for the publisher’s information from this person.

However, it is so tempting to reply using my “gorilla in red pumps” response…Just to see what happens.

Maybe I should fish that email back out of the trash and send it…

Photo source: freedigitalphotos.net

“I do not whine – kids whine.” ~ Exerpt from Tough Mudder Pledge

Last week I enlisted to take part in my first competetive athletic event of my adult life.  I enlisted to be part of the “Tough Mudder” competition, which will take place here in Wisconsin on September 8 and 9.  I will not be alone, thankfully, because I know some other people who are going to be taking part in the event.  It feels nice to know that I will be training and preparing for an event with others who will be going through the same process.

Am I fearful?  Am I worried?  Heck yes!  I never climbed a 12-foot-high wall before; I never jumped off a 15-foot-high plank into cold, muddy water; I have never run through a network of live electric wires; I am going to be running through flames; I am going to have to confront my claustrophobia, climbing through pipes into cold water.

I have six months to train — I am not in “bad” shape, but I am guessing that my muscles are a bit weak throughout my body.  I do a lot of running, but I don’t do much full-body training, so the preparation will be a challenge.

I’ve faced worse obstacles before.  I used to weigh eighty pounds more than I do now, and I worked it off, so I am not afraid of a challenge.  However, any challenges I face, and any fears I have to overcome still require work.  I will have to overcome physical and mental tests to get there.  In the end, I will be running, crawling, climbing, and grunting through what I predict to be the most challenging physical event I have ever taken part in.

My subconscious mind is comfortable with me right now — it tells me that I am safe and well off just like I am.  I don’t need to change my routine; I don’t have to exercise more, eat differently, or work out differently.  I am safe and comfortable, so why should I ever put myself in harm’s way?

My conscious mind is telling me it’s time to challenge myself again.  It’s telling me it’s time to get more active, exercise more muscles, and start changing the way I eat.  My conscious mind is telling me I have become too comfortable, and I need to put my neck out there and try something new.

Over the next six months, my conscious mind has to beat my subconscious mind into submission, to the point where it not only accepts the changes, but buys into them and adopts the changes as the new “normal.”  In the end, I will have grown in many ways — and most of all, my subconscious mind’s interpretation of what is “safe” or “comfortable” will include things that it today feels “unsafe” and “uncomfortable.”

I’m okay with that.  It’s just a wimp anyway.  It needs to grow a pair…

Here’s to a new “safe” and “comfortable!”  Tough Mudder, here I come (whether you like it or not, subconscious mind).

Have a great day!

-Victor

Photo source: thingstodoinlandempire.com

I wanted to share this article with you from Jodi Chapman, because I think she conveys a great message!

Here’s her post:

It’s Okay to Feel Afraid.