Were it not for the very real and serious consequences wrought by a political system that values victory over compassion, politics in the Untied States as it is currently constituted would amount to not much more than bad theater. What I find much more interesting is how the corporate media in America spins, misinforms, and propagandizes the concerns of the people in order to create a false sense of hopelessness, helplessness and artificial consensus; what Noam Chomsky calls manufacturing consent. 

Just today (10.22.08) an Associated Press poll asserted that the Presidential election is too close to call; this makes no sense to me. This is the same John McCain who roughly 90% of the time voted in agreement with the historically unpopular President Bush, who is currently riding his prop pony and shrinking approval ratings into a dust bowl-like sunset, whistling past an international war crimes tribunal. Logically John McCain and his political agenda should be similarly unpopular.

To my mind there is likely an ongoing attempt by the super rich base of the Republican party to once again subvert the will of the people and to steal yet another Presidential election.

Here is how I think it may be transpiring:

The bought-and-paid-for, subservient corporate media is softening the ground by persistently reporting that the election is a back-and-forth virtual draw; meanwhile likely Democratic voters in swing states are being surreptitiously prohibited from voting using similar if not identical voter caging methods that were so effective in the Florida 2000 and Ohio 2004 elections.

Should John McCain be announced the winner, very possibly after court intervention, the corporate media will once again claim that the race had been close all along, thus providing the super-rich, Republican, Christian fundamentalists plausible deniability and the keys to what is left of the kingdom. This corruption of democracy and free will has worked out quite well for those gluttonous, fear-mongering, narrow-minded people benefited by the status quo but not quite so well for the rest of us

However, (and if you have visited this website even once you had to know there would be a however), all hope is not lost.

Our government is not broken, the method of selecting who governs is broken and the fix is simple in theory and inexpensive in practice; campaign finance reform is a must. Publicly funded elections would to a great extent take the super-rich and corporations out of the picture and make the candidates more responsible to the people. Give free radio and TV time to all candidates (not just the Democrats and Republicans), and shorten the election cycle to six months. If we can’t be convinced to vote for any candidate in that time there should be a “none of the above” option like the ones used in Nevada and some European countries. Finally, for the purposes of increasing voter turnout, make Election Day a national holiday.

I believe these five simple changes would shift the balance of power away from the few and redistribute it to the many, making our elected officials more accountable to the people they are hired to represent.

One last thing – vote on November 4^th – if for no other reason than to honor those who have given and continue to give their lives for the privilege.

While creating these podcasts/blogs over the past year, I have tried to avoid overtly political content; the reason being that long ago I realized regardless of political affiliation, there will be no heroes riding in at the last minute to save us.

We will have to do that for ourselves – hence the nature of this website.

Whenever I feel my personal peace growing to the point of it being uncomfortable, I can always count on the corporate media to try to disrupt it with tales of blood and terror. On my most charitable days, to say that I am merely disappointed in the media and its performance as informant to the masses is about as generous as I can be. Over the past few days, watching the corporate media project their visions of worldwide financial catastrophe has brought to mind one of my first jobs out of high school.  

I was a telemarketer (que horror movie music).

My job was to set sales appointments for a company that sold and installed solar water heaters. Part of my sales pitch was that a homeowner could redirect money they were already spending on their utility bills; combine that with state and federal tax credits and they could save money and energy without having to come up with any out of pockets expenses.   

A jewel in the rubbish that is the Bush administration is that they have bankrupted the U. S. economy to the point that progressive, populist, but heretofore politically suicidal revenue streams will have to be considered. I favor Gore Vidal’s suggestions to dramatically reduce the U. S. military budget, tax the property and investment portfolios of all churches, and legalize and tax drugs – or at the very least decriminalize them.

It is crucial to understand that despite what we have been told recently and will be told in the coming days, weeks and months; there is enough money to achieve a greater good for not only the American people, but all of humankind!

Any one or a combination of all three of these seemingly radical ideas would produce a pool of wealth that combined with technologies that have existed since the early 1970s would provide every man, woman and child on the planet with clean water and safe housing; to say nothing of education and health care. To paraphrase Buckminster Fuller, Now it is simply a matter of will.

Coming soon: Are we watching the 2008 Presidential election being stolen right in front of our eyes?

Rest assured that Dave and I (mostly Dave) are working to remedy the issue and plan to return next month with a new podcast.

In the meantime, be Peace filled and take care of yourselves so that you may be of better service to others.

This month’s podcast is based upon a video made by Terence Gorski and Claudia Black entitled Building Healthy Relationships. Mr. Gorsky and Ms. Black use the analogy that building healthy relationships is like building a house. When you’re building a house, the first thing you do is clear the land. The relationship equivalent of clearing the land is a program of personal growth: that is, you proactively working on you being as healthy as you can possibly be. You see this in 12-step programs when it is suggested that people not get involved in any new intimate relationships for the first 12 months of their recovery. Once you’ve established a successful program of personal growth, then you can set the foundation for your relationships. Gorsky and Black referred to the foundation of healthy relationships as the Three C’s: Communication, Caring, and Commitment.

Communication is the first C – the cornerstone, if you will – because without communication it is impossible to care about somebody as an individual. You can care about them as a human being – you don’t want to see them hurt, you don’t want to see them bleeding – but in order to care about an individual, you have to know somebody as an individual – and again, the best way to do that is through communication. After communication and caring comes commitment, and there are three commitments in any healthy relationship. The first commitment is to yourself; because if you’re not healthy, then there’s no healthy you to bring to a relationship. If you’ve ever flown on an airplane, then you’ve probably witnessed a really good example of this. Flight attendants will stand at the head of the cabin and say that in the event of cabin depressurization, a yellow mask will fall from above. They always tell you to put the mask on yourself first before you put it on your children or anybody who is sitting around you. The reason for this is obvious – if you’re not able to function, then you can be of no service to anybody else. The second commitment in healthy relationships is to your partner, because like a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, relationships are only as healthy as the sickest person in them. So if you’re healthy and your partner is not, then by definition your relationship is not. The third commitment is to the relationship itself. An easy way to remember the commitments in healthy relationships is “me, you, we.”

After you’ve cleared the land and set the foundation, you can begin to build. It’s helpful to understand that healthy relationships unfold in stages, with each stage representing a deeper level of intimacy. Before I describe the stages that healthy relationships go through, I’d like to refer you back to the March podcast entitled, “When Your Feet Hurt, Everything Hurts.” In that podcast there was an exercise where you were asked to describe the character traits that make up the perfect partner and the perfect friend for you. The Big Aha behind this exercise was that in actuality what you were doing was you were creating a blueprint for the person that you wanted to be. Because “opposites attract” works with magnets, not with people. So now, armed with this list of the things that you are looking for in a friend, by paying attention and observing other people’s behaviors, and gauging those behaviors against your list, you can determine how intimate you’d like your relationships to be, weeding out those that may be a detriment to your personal peace.

The first stage is casual contact, and that’s everybody that you come into contact with – everybody that you wave to, that you smile at, you nod at on the street. In the casual contact stage, your only obligation to these other people is that you do no harm. Before I describe the deeper levels of intimacy, it’s important that it be understood that as you graduate to deeper levels of intimacy, you don’t abandon the more shallow levels. Even the most committed relationships will have casual moments where your only obligation to your partner is to do no harm.

The next level of intimacy in healthy relationships is called companionship. The definition of companionship is when events are more important than people. And it works like this: You’ve passed the casual contact stage to the point that you are now involved in activities with these people. While you’re involved in these activities, you’re measuring their behavior against the list that you have for the people that you want to attract into your life. For example, if kind and compassionate are on your list, and you observe somebody berating a waitress because they got their order wrong, well then that’s a red flag, and you may not want to go on to the next level with that person.

The next level of intimacy that healthy relationships go through is friendship. And that is when the person is more important than an event. If you’ve ever given up a weekend afternoon to help somebody move – you’ve carted big heavy boxes up and down stairs – that’s a pretty good indicator that that person is a friend.

The fourth stage of intimacy in healthy relationships is what Gorsky and Black refer to as the romantic love stage. The romantic love stage includes passion as well as sexuality. This is where you might share some deep passion of yours; share some long-held belief – aspects of your life that you just don’t share with everybody. A lot of people make the mistake of jumping from casual contact right to romantic love. This is where you hear people say things like, “Well I fell in love,” and while I certainly don’t want to rule out the possibility of falling in love, a far greater number of people find themselves surprised and disappointed. Using the process that I’m describing in this podcast allows you the opportunity to grow into love.

The final stage is committed love. This is when you begin to make obligations and commitments to your friend or partner. At first the commitments start out small - yes I will have dinner with you, yes I will go away for the weekend – and eventually they work themselves into things of a much larger nature – yes I will marry you, yes I will go into business with you, yes I will buy a house with you – as long as the things that you are obligating yourself to do not undermine your commitment to yourself.

As I mentioned earlier, once you reach a deeper level of intimacy, you don’t abandon the more shallow levels. Another thing about these stages is that they’re fluid – not all parties in the relationship will be in the same stage at the same time. This is very important to understand, because it is the cause of a lot of conflict in relationships. You might be in a stage where you want to be with this person, friendship, and they might be in a stage where they want to go to an event, companionship. But if you understand that these stages are fluid, and you’re gong to be in one place, and they’re going to be in another place, and sometimes you’ll both be in the same place and that’s magical, but you allow for both parties and all parties to be where they are and can openly and healthily communicate about any discomfort that arises. That’s when you can be fairly certain that your relationship is healthy.

Before I end this month’s podcast, I’d like to share with you a couple of very common mistakes that people make in relationships. The first is staying in a relationship too long. If your partner has proven that he or she is unwilling or unable to maintain a healthy relationship, yet you continue to participate in the relationship, that’s a mistake. And in last month’s podcast I provided a process that will help you extricate yourself from such relationships. The second mistake that people make is giving up on relationships too early. If every time you have conflict in a relationship you leave the relationship, then what happens is you never learn to deal with conflict, which undermines your personal growth and well-being.

Healthy relationships are essential to personal peace. And as I’ve mentioned several times before, I’m a firm believer that world peace will become a reality when enough people find peace within their own heart.

Not all conversations fall into the “I feel great!” “This is wonderful!” “I love you!” categories. Some very necessary conversations by way of their content will be more difficult than others. To my mind, the goal of healthy communication is to be understood – not to be right. It has been my experience that when I approach even the most trying of conversations from that perspective, that I simply want to be understood, that a lot of the defensiveness inherent in these difficult conversations goes away. Whereas on the other hand, when I approach conversations with the need to be right, and if someone else has a different point of view than I do, then I’ve made them wrong before I even start. And that, more times than not, leads to defensiveness and further frustration. So one of the things I have for you in this podcast is a five-step process for having those kinds of conversations where you think going in that the person you’re going to have it with may be a little bit defensive, or maybe not so receptive.

As I describe this process, I will not only provide you with the steps, but I’ll also try to provide you with some of the logic behind each one of them. One thing that is important to know about this process is that these five steps are sequential. So follow them in order, and no skipping around.

Step number one is check for timing. Is the person that you’re going to have this conversation with ready to listen? Are they tired, are they busy, are they upset? It may be wise to set an appointment: something along the lines of, “Hey, I have something I’d like to talk to you about. When is good for you?” If there’s never a good time, then a very loud and clear message is being sent. The message is, “I don’t care what’s on your mind.” If you’re unfortunate to find yourself in one of those kind of relationships, then I have something for you during the last half of this podcast.

Step two is state the facts. What has happened that has caused you to want to have this conversation? A couple of things about stating the facts: you want to avoid using words like always and never. If you were to say something like, “Well you’re always late,” if that person can think of one time when they weren’t late, then you have just undermined your entire case. Likewise, if you say something like, “You never think of me,” if that person can think of one time when they’ve thought of you, again, you have undermined your case. When you’re stating the facts, what you want to do also is avoid opinion. You know what opinions are like: everybody’s got one, and most people are highly vested in theirs.

Step three: state your feelings. No one knows how you feel until you tell them. You also want to speak for yourself. If you were to say something like, “Everybody thinks that you’re a slob,” if the person you’re talking to can find one person who doesn’t have that belief, then again, you have undermined your argument. Also when you’re stating your feelings, it’s very helpful to use the words I feel because nobody can argue your feelings – nobody can rightfully tell you what you should or shouldn’t feel. Here’s where people who are not used to identifying or articulating their feelings go off the rails. When teaching this process to my students, I used to get answers like, “I feel you’re wrong.” Well, “you are wrong” is a thought, it’s not a feeling. It’s an opinion. So in order to do step three you’ll need to sit down and identify how you feel.

Step four: state your needs. What do you need to have happen? What do you need this other person to do? Have a solution. Now during step four, behavior discussions are fine, but character discussions are not. You can talk about the person’s behavior, but you cannot call them names. These are not conversations that you can have by the seat of your pants. To do this process correctly, to get the maximum benefit from it, you’re going to have to sit down, and you’re going to have to think about what are the facts, how am I feeling, what are my needs? The more time you spend preparing for these difficult conversations, the better chance you have of being understood.

Finally, step five: ask for a response. Check for understanding. This is where mirroring works really well. You can ask, “What did you hear me say?”

Obviously this five-step process works best if all parties involved want a healthy relationship. But what if you are involved with someone who is either unwilling or unable to participate in a healthy relationship? Ernie Larson has a process that he calls, “Stuck in Wait.” In other words, you feel like you’re stuck in a relationship waiting for somebody else to modify their behavior to something more healthy and beneficial. Stuck in Wait is very similar to the difficult discussion process. It allows a person to set some boundaries. It also allows a person to remove themselves from an unhealthy relationship knowing that they have done everything that they could possibly do to save the relationship.

In step one, you decide how long you will wait. This immediately gives you some semblance of control in the relationship, as you are the one who is setting the time frame. Six months, nine months, a year, six weeks – it’s purely up to you, but what you want to do is you want to keep that number to yourself. This allows you to change your mind. I’ll use a very common example from the classes I’ve taught on drug and behavioral addiction and recovery. Let’s say that you have decided to wait six months for somebody to get into a recovery program. You keep that time frame to yourself because if you tell somebody that you’re going to wait six months, and then things get too bad and you can’t wait six months, that person can come back at you and say, “But you said I had six months!” It also allows you to decide to wait longer if you want to. So again, step number one: decide how long you will wait, and keep it to yourself.

Steps two, three, four and five are exactly the same as the process I described earlier in this podcast. State the facts, state your feelings, state your needs, and check for understanding.

There’s a sixth step to the Stuck in Wait process – Ernie Larsen calls it Creating a Crisis. It works something like this: Let’s say you’ve decided you will wait three months for somebody to get into a drug and alcohol recovery program. You’ve kept that time frame to yourself. You’ve mentioned the facts, that drug and alcohol use is causing damage to the family. You’ve said how you feel – you’re scared, you’re frightened, you’re confused. You have stated your needs; you’ve checked for understanding. At the end of that three months, the person has not changed their behavior. So step number six is again, Creating a Crisis. This crisis has to be something that will mean something to the person you had the conversation with. If the crisis that you’ve created is meaningless to this other person, then there’s no point to creating the crisis. One last note on creating a crisis: you cannot be bluffing. You have to have said what you meant, and meant what you said. If you have said that you are going to leave, and then you don’t, then you never have to be taken seriously again by that person.

It is my sincere hope that all of your conversations are free and easy, and that none of your relationships ever get to the Stuck in Wait point. But I believe that it’s better to have these tools in your toolbox and not need them, than it is to need them and not have them.

If you have ever been in an unhealthy relationship (and quite frankly who hasn’t?) then you know that almost nothing causes more stress. Being in an unhealthy relationship adversely affects every other aspect of our lives.

This is the second of a three-part series. In part 1, I suggested that the cornerstone of healthy relationships is communication, and I said that without trust communication is impossible. I also introduced the “Platinum Rule;” that is, building trust by treating people the way they want to be treated. As opposed to the “Golden Rule,” which is treating people the way we want to be treated.

I first heard of the Platinum Rule when I was working as a corporate consultant in the mid ‘90s for a company called Persona. What attracted me to Persona was their Persuasive Communicator series of products, which I would come to find out, was based on Charles Osgood’s work in the 1950s at the University of Illinois. Mr. Osgood suggested that we all instantly and subconsciously upon meeting someone new ask ourselves two questions, and based upon how we answer these questions we can identify a person’s preferred communication style.

At Persona we adapted this very useful bit of information to the business environment – that way a manager or salesperson could adapt the information they wanted to convey in a way that would most readily be accepted and understood.

I would like to take just a couple of minutes to give you just the briefest of descriptions of what continues even after 50 years to be studied and applied in business today and is typically at least an 8-hour workshop for Persona clients. Very simply, what you’re doing with Charles Osgood’s two questions is gauging a person’s observable behaviors.

Question 1) How much is this person trying to control me?

Imagine you are using a horizontal line to gauge how much the person is trying to control you, with a lot to the left of the line and not to the right.

Question #2) How much emotion does this person give off, including body language? You then use a vertical line to measure how much emotion this person is giving off, with a lot at the top of the line and not at the bottom.

The more grey area you can conceptualize when answering these questions, the more you will be able to customize your message.

After answering these two questions what you have are two imaginary intersecting lines that make four areas: top left area is high control/high emotional; bottom left area is high control/low emotional; top right area is low control/high emotional, and bottom right area is low control/low emotional. Each of these four areas represents a person’s preferred communication style, the one they feel most comfortable with. In other words, the one they have the least resistance to. The idea being that speaking to somebody in the language that they’re most comfortable with reduces their defensiveness and builds trust.

We are all at least a little bit of all these styles, but the point is we have preferred styles and depending on how you answered the control and emotion questions, you now have access to valuable information that allows you, if you want to, to treat a person the way they prefer to be treated and that is the essence of The Platinum Rule. The Golden Rule of treating people the way we want to be treated works great provided everyone wants to be treated like we do, but we know from experience that is not always the case

There were general behaviors that almost all healthy people respond to favorably:

Reliability-doing what we say we will do when we say we will do it.

Openness- telling the whole story even if the story is uncomfortable; openness is also means freely giving and receiving feedback.

Acceptance-what Buddhist call “right speech” – not criticizing or putting someone down.

Also Honesty-saying what you mean and meaning what you say.

Again, Persona’s curriculum is specifically designed to help people foster healthy relationships with people that they’ve just met. To more specifically help you apply the Platinum Rule to your current relationships, I have two more questions for you.

This exercise is an exercise designed to get at the specific actions that build trust inside existing relationships and it’s most beneficial when done by both you and whomever you wish to have a healthier relationship.

These questions come in the form of sentence completions.

Question #1) I feel loved, cared for, or appreciated…when you and that’s when you fill in the blank with a specific behavior…

Specifics are the key here, to say something like I feel loved when you adore me is too general – what specific behaviors can your friend, partner or family member do that when they do them you feel loved, cared about and appreciated?

When teaching this exercise to my students, one of the big fears was that whatever this behavior was going to be, it was going to be something huge, expensive. It doesn’t have to be that way, and typically it’s not. When I did this exercise with my wife a few years back, some of my answers were “I feel loved when you empty the dishwasher” – that’s pretty specific. Now when I see the empty dish rack, my wife is not only telling me she loves me, she is showing me.

This takes the guesswork out of relationships. I have known my wife for over 25 years, and even after all that time I don’t guess right enough to enjoy doing it. This also helps to avoid the all too common experience of someone putting a great deal of effort into organizing a date or an event only to find out that their efforts would have been better appreciated if they had been more in line with the friend, partner or family member’s preferences.

Question 2) Again a sentence completion- I feel unloved, disrespected, or taken for granted when you and this where you fill in the blank with a specific behavior again.

I can’t emphasize enough how important specifics are in this exercise! What are the specific behaviors you want your friend, partner or family member to stop doing, because when they do them you feel unloved, uncared for or disrespected?

I want you to pay particular attention to the way they these sentence completions are worded: “I feel, when you”

I feel keeps the responsibility for our feelings where they belong, with ourselves, and it keeps us out of the denial, projection, blame game and the When you keeps the responsibility for your friend, partner of family members behavior where it belongs, with them.

When you are actively seeking to make your relationships healthier and you are involved with someone who is doing likewise, this kind of information is invaluable. So it’s important that both you and your friend, partner of family member complete both of these sentences and after you finish the sentences, be sure to share them.

Magic can and does happen! Specifics and Practice are what encourages positive results!

But what if you are not in that type of relationship – what if you’re willing, but your friend, partner or family member is not? In our next podcast I will share with you a technique for having those difficult conversations, and a process that puts you back in control of your life should you find yourself involved with someone who is either unwilling or unable to function in healthy relationships.

That is next month at optimisismisaskill.com

In any verbal communication, there is a person who is sending the message: the sender. And there is at least one person who is supposed to be receiving the message: the receiver. In between the sender and the receiver there are several things that distract from and/or distort the information being conveyed. You see both the sender and the receiver have filtering systems, which are comprised of their personal beliefs, their personal histories, and how they physically and emotionally feel at the moment that they are trying to communicate. Are they tired? Are they angry? Are they distressed over something? Between the sender’s and the receiver’s filters is something called noise. In this case, the definition of the term noise is not limited strictly to those things we hear with our ears. Noise consists of anything that you can perceive through your five senses. Some examples might be: a sound outside the room that you’re in, a strange smell, a physical pain you’re experiencing, an attractive person walking by in the background as you are trying to listen to the conversation. Noise also includes anything you might be saying to yourself while the conversation is going on – your self-talk – it’s cold in this room, I’m hungry, what is this person talking about – anything that distracts you from hearing the message is considered noise.

Gordon Graham, a leader in the field of self-image psychology, working in both the change management and the addiction/recovery fields, suggests that due to what goes on in the communication process the average person hears only every third word. That might sound something like this, “Gordon leader field image in change the fields that what in the process person every word.” While that might put you on the same page, some conversations require that we be on the same paragraph. Some require that we be on the same sentence. And some require that we be on the same word. How many times has it happened to you – you thought you heard what the other person was saying, but you missed it – either by a lot or by a little. And because you missed it by a lot or by a little, not you’ve got trouble.

For this podcast I want to illustrate how to build trust through communication. And I want to provide a method of communication that is in effect an insurance policy against the complications that come from miscommunication.

Your insurance policy is something that I refer to as mirroring. It works like this: it’s a four step process.

The first step is that the sender sends an uninterrupted message. Step two is that the receiver repeats back in their own words their interpretation of what the sender said. Step three – and this is your insurance policy – the receiver asks the question something along the lines of, “Did I understand you correctly?” “Is that what you meant to say?” “Is that right?” Asking a question like that allows the receiver to be 100% wrong in their understanding of what the sender was trying to communicate. Step four – the sender confirms that the message heard was correct or not, and if not, the sender restates the part of the message that was misheard or the entire message if need be. And then you begin the process again, until both the sender and the receiver are satisfied.

It’s very important to understand that the goal of communication is to be understood – not to be right.

To help you visualize both the mirroring process and the communication process, there’s a document that you can download on the optimisimisaskill.com homepage.

In our last podcast, When Your Feet Hurt, Everything Hurts, I suggested that when you’re involved in an unhealthy relationship, every other aspect of your life suffers. Now I’m not going to define what is or isn’t a healthy relationship, except to say that healthy relationships require that all participants either be healthy or be sincerely working towards it.

The cornerstone of healthy relationships is communication. Without communication, caring about someone as an individual is impossible. Now that’s not to say that we don’t care about our brothers and sisters around the world who suffer from either natural or man made disasters and sometimes both. I want to suggest that to truly care about another individual, you have to truly know that person as an individual. And the best way for that to happen is through healthy, effective communication.

One of the more underrated components of healthy communication is trust. Think about it. If you don’t trust someone, do you even really care what they’re trying to communicate to you?

So how do you build trust? Well, there’s two ways, really. First, through your actions – you do what you say you’re going to do, when you say you’re going to do it. And the second is through verbal communication. In the mid- to late- nineties, I worked for a management consulting company, and we had a technique that we referred to as “the Platinum Rule”. The Platinum Rule says that we treat people the way that they want to be treated, not the way we want to be treated. Let me give you an example of how that works. After leaving that company I became a teacher, and for about eight years I taught drug- and behaviorally-addicted parolees how to get into recovery, change their dysfunctional behaviors into healthy ones, and hopefully stay out of prison and get off parole. Now I consider myself to be a very open person – I’m one of those touchy-feely kind of people – I like to get involved and rub elbows and get in people’s space so that I can get to know them, and they can get to know me. Dealing with the clients that I was dealing with in these classrooms, that was a prohibitive barrier to reaching understanding. Due to the hostile environment in which many of these men and women were either living in or had just come from, these were people who needed at least three feet of space before they could begin to feel comfortable. So if I’m leaning over their shoulder trying to show them how to do an exercise, they’re not listening to me. Because what they need is their space. My preferred communication style is not only not relevant – in this case it’s a deterrent – the noise in their head, their self-talk, is saying, “Get away from me.” It’s so loud that communication is next to impossible. If I treat them the way I want to be treated, then communication is lost. But if I respect how they want to be treated, their defenses come down, and there’s a better chance to be heard.

OK, so how do you get to the specific information – and specifics are the key, that will tell you how a person wants to be treated? For a person you don’t know very well or at all, say a new co-worker or someone new to the neighborhood, they key is to observe. Go slow and watch. And if you pay attention, you will get the information that you’re looking for. Now if it’s a person that you are already in an established relationship with, say a friend or family member, what you do is you ask.

In our next podcast I will give you specific questions to ask that will provide you with the specific information that you’re looking for. Again, the goal is to communicate in a manner that is meaningful to those you want to be in a healthy relationship with.

I believe that relationships are a measure of the quality and quantity of the amount of Peace that individuals live with. And as I’ve stated many times, world Peace can become a reality when enough people find Peace within their own heart. To be involved in an unhealthy relationship only takes us further and further away from the Peace, love and understanding that we all crave.

The focus of the past nine pod casts has mainly been about creating this personal peace within ourselves. It is my current plan to address over the coming months what I personally believe to be the largest deterrent to one developing personal peace. And that is being involved in relationships with unhealthy people. Just as a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, a relationship is only as healthy as the sickest person in it.

When I was teaching addicts in the

In the future I plan to go into greater detail in what I consider to be the fundamentals of healthy relationships. Building trust through communication, developing intimacy, and identifying the various stages that healthy relationships go through – how to determine just how healthy your relationships are. I’ll provide you with techniques for having those difficult conversations, the goal being to articulate our inarguable feelings in such a way as to reduce the defensiveness of those you are having that difficult conversation with. I’ll give you a tool far more valuable than the “Golden Rule” in developing trust in healthy relationships – something I call the “Platinum Rule”. I’ll provide you with a method to reduce the stress that comes with miscommunication. All of this with the understanding that the cornerstone of healthy relationships is personal growth.

Because I value and appreciate your time, it is my desire that each one of these pod casts provide you with some information that you can use to positively impact your life, I’d like to end this pod cast by giving you something to think about, and an exercise to work on.

‘Opposites attract’ may work very well for magnets, but it doesn’t always work very well for people. Take a look at the relationships you have in your life. Who are your friends? Are they people who have nothing in common with you, or are they people you share lots of common interests with? Okay – here’s the exercise.

First, you’ll need a pencil and paper. Then what I’d like for you to do is to create a list of the traits that you look for in a friend. So for example, what you’ll find on my list – number one is a low-maintenance friend. I want somebody who can handle their own life without bringing too much drama into mine. I’m also looking for somebody who is optimistic about the future and is working to create a brighter future for themselves and everybody else. That’s just a couple of things. Your list can have as many different things on it as you’d like, but create a list that identifies the character traits that you are looking for in a friend. One of the reasons that this is one of my favorite exercises is that there is this great ‘aha!’ at the end of it. When I did this with my students, what they thought they were doing was creating a list of what they were looking for in a friend. But what they were actually doing was creating a blueprint for the person that they want to be.

Remember – ‘opposites attract’ works with magnets, not people. So if you’re looking for somebody who is low-maintenance, then you have to be low-maintenance to attract them. If you value honesty, then you have to be an honest person. If you are not an honest person, you can attract an honest person, but that relationship won’t last very long. If they are healthy and they value honesty they will soon see that you are a dishonest person, and they will distance themselves from you. Because healthy people have boundaries and they enforce them. If they are honest and they are not healthy people then what they will do is they will take on your dishonest character traits; because unhealthy people either don’t have boundaries or they have them, but they don’t enforce them. If you value physical health, where will you find physically healthy people? They’re out getting healthy – they’re outside doing things. They’re not sitting on a couch. So you have to get out and do those things where you will find physically healthy people.

So there you have it – a list of what you’re looking for in a person, and a blueprint for who you want to be. Now after looking at your list, if you deem yourself to be falling short in any of these areas, I’d like to recommend that you go back to the October pod cast, “You Can Change Without Growing, But You Can’t Grow Without Changing.” There you’ll find information on a process for change, some of the barriers to change. There you’ll find a downloadable document that you can use to create your own master plan for success regarding behavioral changes.

I look forward to any comments or questions you have on the subject of building healthy relationships. Next month look for a pod cast on how to build trust and reduce stress using good communication skills

In practice, there is almost no difference between meditation, prayer, and self-hypnosis. All three of these actions share similar physical characteristics. Whoever is doing them is doing the same thing. We become still; we become quiet; we go within ourselves.

All of our lives, we have been programmed, we have been taught to pay attention to our thoughts and almost ignore our breathing. Meditation in its simplest, most pure form just reverses the focus of our attention. We become aware of our breathing. We breathe in…and we breathe out. We breathe in…and we breathe out. That’s meditation in its simplest form. A very common mistake that people who are new to the practice of meditation make – one that often undermines and causes people to give up the practice altogether – is the misconception that we calm our minds in order to meditate. That’s 180 degrees opposite of what we actually do when we meditate. We meditate to calm our minds.

Understanding levels of consciousness is also important when beginning a meditation practice. There’s beta, that’s us fully engaged in our daily lives, driving our car, going to work, talking to our friends and family – that’s a conscious state. The other three levels of consciousness are referred to as subconscious states. There’s alpha. Alpha encompasses everything from daydreaming through trance-like states, to deep dreaming. We also experience alpha when we’re watching television. That’s one of the reasons that television is so insidious. We are in a trance-like state, being bombarded with messages of fear and consumerism and crass commercialism. And when we’re in this state, these messages that we are getting – they take hold, they take root. The next lower subconscious state is referred to as theta. In theta, lucid dreaming is possible. And after that, the fourth level, delta – non-dream sleep. There are your levels of consciousness. Beta – wide awake, alpha – trance-like daydream state, theta – lucid dreaming, delta – non-dream sleep.

Tying this all together, through the simple act of shifting our focus away from our thoughts and towards our breathing, we can reach subconscious states. And in these subconscious states, there are lots of different things that we can do. There are lots of different tools that you can apply that help you in different areas of your life. Just some examples are accelerated physical healing, performance programming, dream programming, stress management, past life regression, habit control for those of you who are trying to quit smoking or stick to diets.

Which brings me back to Dialog with Feeling. When I began this journey of self-discovery 20 years ago, I was like most people. I was all too willing to abdicate the responsibility for my emotional well-being to anybody and everybody. I used words like, “you make me mad,” and “you make me happy.” Everybody does it. Take the next 24 hours – test this for yourself. Listen to people talk around you; listen to radio; listen to television. See how many times people blame their emotional state on other people. More to the point, see how many times you do it. How many times do you say other people are responsible for your emotional well-being? “You make me happy.” “You make me mad.”

What I learned is that our feelings are a unique language. Unique to us as individuals. And our feelings tell us much more about ourselves than they do about anybody else. However, most people have that backwards, and they try to use their feelings to figure out other people. I’m upset, therefore there’s something wrong with you. The meditation technique Dialog with Feeling enabled me to interpret my feelings and what they said about me. Instead of using my feelings to figure out other people, all of a sudden I was able to decipher my feelings in such a way that it freed me from the disempowering language of blame. But at the same time it enlightened me about the root causes of my emotions. As an extra bonus, I came to the realization that there’s no such thing as a negative emotion.

This podcast is designed to provide you with the basest of theories regarding meditation and hypnosis. For those of you interested in the actual practice of Dialog with Feeling, there is an additional download wherein I use guided imagery to take you from the beta state to the alpha state, and then through the Dialog with Feeling exercise.

I find in my practice usually I’m working with some feeling that I’m uncomfortable with – anger or fear or something along those lines – it doesn’t have to be one of those feelings. It could just as easily be the feelings of joy, happiness or peace. The biggest obstacle to enlightenment for people who are doing this meditation occurs when they judge the information provided by the subconscious mind. It’s our conscious mind that rationalizes – “That can’t be it,” “It doesn’t work that way.” Our subconscious mind will not lie to us.

Let me give you a personal example of how the Dialog with Feeling meditation technique works. A little over 16 years ago, my wife and I got married. We were married in

As I said at the beginning of this podcast, this is most enlightening and liberating thing that I have learned in my journey. Enlightening because I use my feelings now to better understand myself. And to paraphrase the Dalai Lama, to learn one thing about yourself is more beneficial than to learn a thousand things about somebody else.