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

Nothing could be further from the truth!

Every thought thought, every word spoken, every action taken sends energy rippling through our consciousnesses. In our minds this energy sounds like our self talk, that constant internal dialog we have with ourselves all day, everyday, in our bodies the energy takes the form of neuropeptides, the amino acids that we respond to at the cellular level creating our emotional and ultimately our physical states of being and our actions speak very clearly for our spirit consciousness.

Everything we feel, think, say and do effects us personally, which in turn influences our homes, families, friends and communities, which then goes on to impact ever more comprehensive environments to the grandest of scales. This is what the Buddhist refers to as interdependence.

It is also useful to understand that these changes particularly in regards to the self are often immediate. This is where Alan Watts suggests that the major western spiritual philosophies have misconstrued the concept of Karma. In the west Karma has come to be associated with some sort of spiritual savings account. Do “good” now and good will come to you in the future; do “bad” now and at some point in the future bad will befall you. Where as in the major eastern philosophies Karma is instantaneous; when you are doing “good” you are said to have good Karma, when you are doing “bad” you are said to have bad Karma.

If that makes sense to you, if you can feel that then rather than ask ourselves do I make a difference? We might better ask ourselves what kind of difference do I want to make. What kind of world do I want to be a part of creating?

The self empowering yin to the disempowering yang of projection, blame and denial is something I refer to as “Radical Responsibility”. Radical responsibility suggests that we are responsible not for our actions, but also for the way that we think and the way that we feel.

The first step in the process is to become responsible for our actions. While it’s true that we are not always responsible for what happens to us radical responsibility aligns itself with Victor Frankl’s assertion that we are always responsible for our response to what happens to us and our true autonomy lies in our ability to say no. No I will not support an illegal, immoral war, I will not sell out the future of humanity for short sighted gains in the present, no I will not demean or devalue our brothers and sisters. Each and every one of us has the ability to say no and that is where our true freedom lies.

The next step in the process is to become responsible for how we think. Regardless of how we were raised, how we think today is our responsibility. I was raised at one point to believe that Santa Claus was real; if I still believe in Santa Claus that’s not my parents responsibility, that’s mine! I feel very fortunate that I was raised as Martin Luther King suggested to judge a person by the content of their character and not the color of their skin, but had I been raised to be a racist, I can not fault my parents for that anymore. I am an adult; I am responsible for how I think and if the ways that I think are not leading me towards the actions that I desire then I am responsible for changing the way that I think.

Finally we take responsibly for how we feel. It is so deeply ingrained in our society that other people can make us happy or other people can make us sad, that we are not even conscious of it. Ultimately what we do when we use that kind of language is that we make other people responsible for our emotional well being. Eleanor Roosevelt alluded to this when she said no one can make us feel inferior without our permission. What radical responsibility suggests is that no can make us feel anything without our permission and since we give them the permission we can take it away.

Most of us can not even identify our feelings, let alone interpret what these feelings mean for us. In a future pod cast I will share with you a mediation technique that I call “Dialog with Feeling” that will allow you to get to the meaning of your specific feelings.

I remember very clearly 20 years ago when I was first exposed to this information, I was reluctant, I was very comfortable being able to blame other people for what was going on in my life, but the more I stated to work with it I the more empowered I felt. My successes were mine, my mistakes were mine too, but I learned from them and mistakes are only mistakes when you don’t learn from them. The bonus to all of this was that I began to realize that since I am solely responsible for my thoughts, my actions and my feelings I wasn’t responsible for anybody else’s thoughts, feelings and actions and nobody could make me; nobody could manipulate me by suggesting that I was and more to the point I wasn’t able to manipulate myself by believing that I was responsible for other peoples thoughts, feelings and actions. Radical responsibility puts us back in control of how we live our lives.

In previous pod casts I have detailed processes for engineering healthy, positive behaviors and mental attitudes. I invite you to revisit those pod casts and if you have any questions or comments feel free to contact me via the comments button on the www.optimismisaskill.com web page.

I would like to leave you with one of my favorite anecdotes. This story relates to how even seemingly insignificant acts of an individual contribute to the greater good.

When President Kennedy gave the mandate to NASA to put a man on the moon, that objective initiated the expenditure of thousands of employees, millions of dollars and billions of man hours. One day a custodian at NASA was asked to describe his job, his response, putting a man on the moon.

There is little doubt in my mind that world peace can become a reality when each person finds peace within their own heart. I believe that the most important job facing humanity and the most subversive thing that any single person can do is to take responsibility for their own lives and to make it their objective to become as peaceful and compassionate as they possibly can.

And so just as that janitor whose job sweeping the floors contributed to putting a man on the moon our feelings, thoughts and actions contribute to the state of the world as it is.

The construction of a world with peace and prosperity for all of its inhabitants is well under way; I encourage you not to take your contributions lightly.

Each of us has a group of cells in our brain called the reticular activating system. Part of the reticular activating system’s job is to filter out all of the information that comes to us that we do not see as something valuable or as a threat. Imagine what it would be like living day to day having to take in all of the information that is presented to us every moment – every sight, every sound, every touch, every taste, every smell. We are inundated with information all day long. And the reticular activating system’s job is to keep us from wandering through life like a deer in the headlights.

So what does the reticular activating system have to do with finding a jewel in the rubbish? By training our minds to find the benefits in what others perceive as negative situations, we can use those jewels to enrich our mind, body and spirit. That’s what this podcast is about. Taking situations that for the most part might be seen as negative, and finding something positive in them that we can then use to fortify our faith in the future of humanity. Or, at the very least, help us to create more health and happiness in our own lives.

I’d like to start looking for these jewels at the macro level, and then work down to the micro level, more personalized. We can start with the history of the United States, for example. Howard Zinn wrote a very powerful book called A People’s History of the United States. For those of you unfamiliar with this book, it starts out with the Native Americans swimming out to greet Columbus, and the most recent edition ends with the current Iraq war. When I finished reading A People’s History, I put the book down and felt very optimistic about the future. There is degradation, and slavery, and genocide and imperialism, but also there are numerous examples of people getting along, people helping each other out. People do care about one another. We like to see our friends and neighbors succeed and be successful. And in situations where we can, we’d like to help. American history is ripe with examples of people helping their neighbor. It’s not until somebody comes along and points a finger at “those” people over there – be afraid of “them” that we start to become conservative in our compassion.

Another example from A People’s History of the United States that I found just glorious in its celebration of a people’s will to be free is the chapter on the Vietnam War. By the end of the Vietnam War, the United States government had dropped nearly 500 pounds worth of bombs for every man, woman and child in Vietnam. And yet we could not bomb those people’s will to be free into submission. The mightiest military in the world cannot suppress a people’s will to be free.

The third and final example from A People’s History that I would like to share with you also has the benefit of being scientifically sound. Energy doesn’t dissipate. Just as ice becomes water, and water becomes steam, all of the energy that went into the various people’s movements – the civil rights movement, the peace movement, the gay and lesbian liberation movement, the labor movement – all of the various movements – that energy didn’t just go away. We don’t see it in the corporate media, but that energy is out there now. It just splintered into thousands of little cells all over the world.

So there you have it – three examples from A People’s History of the United States. People get along; you cannot bomb a people into submission, and there are thousands of smaller cells of activism throughout the world today. People fighting, sacrificing, for your freedom and mine. I’m not saying that we ignore the atrocities; what I’m suggesting is that by searching for the jewel in the rubbish, we will reinforce our healthiest attitudes – the benefits of which are a healthier and happier mind, body and spirit.

Up until several years ago, I was very anti-corporation. And then I heard a Buckminster Fuller lecture entitled Integrity Is All That Will Matter. (correction: The Buckminster Fuller lecture is actually entitled “Only Integrity is Going to Count“) Bucky said the same corporate infrastructure that allows a Coca-Cola to be purchased in every corner of the world is the same infrastructure that will be necessary for fresh water, medicine, education, food to reach every corner of the world. So while world trade organizations, at least at this stage in their development, appear to be sociopathic in their behavior, they are laying the groundwork – they are laying the foundation – for altruism, peace and prosperity to reach every corner of the globe.

The last large-scale example I’d like to share with you is the 9-11 World Trade Center bombings. And for some people, that may be too fresh to find anything good that may have come out of that. It was an atrocious, horrible event. But, if you search hard enough, it’s there. Nothing is entirely good, or bad. I’m of the belief that empathy is a very valuable skill. And I’m also of the belief that practice makes progress, and in order to get better at something, we must practice. The 9-11 bombings allowed the American populace to practice that empathy. To be aware of what people in the Middle East live like on a daily basis. To be aware of what people in Belfast, Ireland lived like. We now have a greater understanding of the fear that people around the world live with every day. And that greater understanding, that greater capacity for empathy, can only serve us well.

Those are very large scale examples of finding something good in what can easily be seen as a very negative situation. I’d like to bring it to a more personal, micro level now. When I was teaching, I used to do an exercise – I called it the “Hindsight is 20/20” exercise. All of us probably have numerous examples in our lives of how this works. There are situations that we find ourselves in that while we’re in them appear to be horrible, terrible, just devastating events. But with the benefit of having lived through them; sometimes a lot of time, sometimes a little bit of time later, we are able to identify where we have grown personally by living through what we perceived at the time to be negative situations.

The Dalai Lama said in his book The Art of Happiness that, “My enemies give me my best opportunity to practice patience and tolerance.” I am not aware of any enemies that I have, but I have ample opportunity to practice patience and tolerance with the relationships in my life. As I’ve mentioned in previous podcasts, I use affirmations quite frequently. What I’m about to share with you, I use whenever I allow somebody else to upset me. I have found this to be the most liberating thing in my life, and in a future podcast, I will share with you a meditation technique that you can use to delve even further into this process. Those people that I allow to upset me are doing me a favor by pointing our part of my personality that I need to investigate further. What this way of thinking does is turn everyone in my life into a gift to me. Those people who support me, those people who love me – those people are clearly gifts. But those people I allow to upset me are also gifts, because they bring attention to an aspect of my personality that needs some healing.

I’ve come to believe that mistakes are only mistakes when I don’t learn from them. And even if I don’t learn from them, they’re truly not mistakes, because as William Blake said, “A fool who persists in his folly will become wise.” All of our choices can be enlightening ones. I don’t think we make mistakes. We create learning opportunities.

I’d like to recommend another book, called Pronoia from Rob Brezsny. I read one passage in this book and instantly became a more patient person. He said that those people that we perceive to be slowing us down, impeding our progress – what they may be doing is ensuring that we get there on time. Because getting there too fast sometimes can be just as detrimental as getting there too slow. In the book he uses a premature birth as an example of arriving before you’re supposed to can be detrimental to your health.

Again, I am no Pollyana. I choose to see peace and compassion because it helps me to be a more peaceful and compassionate person. But being human, I get stressed out, and sometimes my reticular activating system constricts to the point that all I see is the fight or flight mentality. Even after nearly 25 years of practice, I can actually allow myself to get so stressed out that I forget to look for the silver lining. One of the measures I use to gauge my success is how quickly do I get back to being centered, how quickly do I get back to being peaceful. Sometimes it takes months, sometimes it takes minutes, but I always get back because I want to. I know how, and I take every opportunity to practice.

Hopefully during this podcast you have seen that those opportunities to practice are literally everywhere around us at all times. While working on this podcast, I remembered the reported words of Timothy Leary on his deathbed. His body was wracked with cancer, he was in a great deal of pain. He was asked by one of his friends how he could remain so positive and optimistic in the face of such agony. His response was, “What choice do I have?”

I’m Dave.

Jim: We are the co-producers of the podcasts here at OptimismIsASkill.com. We’re having a really good time doing this, and we’re hoping that you find the information enlightening and enjoyable. For the past four podcasts, you’ve been hearing my voice exclusively, and I thought it would be a good idea for you to become somewhat acquainted with some of the other members of the team.

Dave: I’m the guy that does the engineering. There’s Anna, who’s providing the musical soundscapes, and Colleen who does the transcription and the marketing. And there’s Brent, who’s providing us with the webspace and the encouragement to continue this production.

Jim: In a moment you will hear Part Two of the podcast, “You Can Change Without Growing, But You Can’t Grow Without Changing.” In Part One we discussed some of the barriers to change; in Part Two we will discuss some of the tools and processes that you can use to make the change process more comfortable.

I found it very useful to have a map when trying to adopt changes. When I’m trying to go someplace or do something, if I know where I’m going and how to get there, I tend to get there much easier. I’m not one of those guys who will drive around lost. I will stop and ask for directions. At OptimismIsASkill.com there is a document that you can download that will assist you in getting to where you want to be, as far as behaviors and attitudes might be concerned.

At the top of the document is a line that says “Goal.” In that line you would write whatever it is that you are trying to accomplish. Let’s say that you want to become more physically active. Beneath that are three columns.

The first column is “Task.” What are the specific tasks that you need to do in order to become more physically active? So let’s say that you decide that you are going to go for a walk three days a week. And you’re going to play basketball two days a week. Those are the specific tasks that you need to do in order to become more physically active.

The middle column is “Time”. When are you going to do these things? Be specific – when are you going to take that walk? I’m going to walk Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and I’m going to play basketball Tuesday and Thursday evenings. If you don’t know when you’re going to do these things, chances are you won’t do it. Someday never comes.

The third column is “Team.” Whenever you’re trying to adopt a new attitude or a new behavior, it’s very beneficial to have support. Under the third column you will write down who you can rely on to ensure that you actually do the new behaviors. Who can you count on to call you up and ask, “Did you go play basketball Tuesday and Thursday? Did you go for a walk?” The reason that we need a team, the reason we need a support team for adopting new behaviors is each and every one of us has something inside of our subconscious mind. Ernie Larson calls it “The Guardian.” The Guardian’s job is to protect what is normal. Not what’s good for you, not what’s bad for you, just what’s normal. His job is to protect the comfort zone. So if your comfort zone includes coming home and sitting down in front of the TV after work, and it does not include getting out and going for a walk, your Guardian will tell you all kinds of different reasons, come up with all kinds of rationales why I don’t need to go for a walk today. And if you listen to that Guardian, you will end up not accomplishing your goal of becoming more physically active. That’s the value of a support team when adopting new behaviors or attitudes. There are lots of things working against any change that we try to adopt, but having someone encourage you during these times of transition can be the difference between success and failure.

The thing that I find incredibly helpful when focusing on change is keeping my eye on the ball. What is it that I’m trying to attain? There’s a reason that “Just Say No” doesn’t work. The Dalai Lama, in his book “The Art of Happiness,” talks about “Just Say No” doesn’t work because people don’t like to deny themselves anything. Rather, he suggests that you focus on what you’re trying to accomplish and that way you’re not denying yourself anything, you’re actually working towards something. It’s easier to accomplish these goals if you keep your eye on the ball. Diets are a really good example. If you continually remind yourself that you can’t eat that cheeseburger, it will be difficult for you to continue the diet. But, if you stay focused on the fact that you are going to live longer, and be healthier, and lose weight and look better, it will be a lot easier for you to turn down the cheeseburger.

Five years ago my wife and I decided we were going to move to Hawaii. It took me three years to stop seeing this move as a loss. I was focusing on losing my friends; I was focusing on losing my job that I was good at, that I was happy about doing – I was focusing on all of the loss and none of the gain. If I had had to make that move during those first three years, I would not have made it. Then that third year I began to see the benefits of moving to Hawaii. I began to see that my life could slow down. I could devote more time to pursuits that I had been too busy to pursue before. When that shift in awareness happened, all of a sudden I couldn’t get to Hawaii fast enough. Focusing on what you want, rather than on what you are giving up in order to attain what you want only makes the attainment of the goal that much easier.

The tools and techniques that we’ve been discussing and will discuss in the future are not mutually exclusive. You can apply these tools and techniques to any change in your life that you wish to make. I’d like to leave you with a quote from one of my personal heroes, Gandhi, who said, “We must become the change we wish to see in the world.” If you want peace, happiness, prosperity and health, we must do it for ourselves first. And then, like ripples in a pond, as our peace grows, the peace in the world will grow as well.

I’d like to congratulate all of you who have stuck with us through the first podcasts. I realize from personal experience how difficult personal development can be. It’s not always easy work, but it’s always good work. Join us again for our next podcast where we will take real live world situations and do as the Buddhist say – Find Jewels in the Rubbish.

Several years ago I was sitting in traffic, stopped at a red light, and the car in front of me had a bumper sticker on it that said, “Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.” I had a couple of hours that afternoon and sort of instinctively I followed this guy around – poor guy, he thought I was stalking him, I’m sure. It didn’t occur to me until much later in the day what that meant – ‘everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.’ Everybody wants to get better, but nobody wants to change. Not only is that impractical, it’s impossible. We are always changing, all the time. Every time we learn something new, we’ve changed. Everything around us is changing, ALL the time.

The speed of change is happening faster and faster. I remember sitting down at dinner, and my parents used to say, “It sure seems like time is speeding up.” Well, I’ve said that too, but I’ve grown to understand that time may not be speeding up, but the pace of change is speeding up, and that makes it seem like time might be speeding up.

There’s a book called The Singularity is Near that discusses the speed of change, and how technology is increasing that speed not at a linear level, but at an exponential level. As the speed of technology increases, the speed of change increases. And as humans, in order to keep up we have to learn to adapt to this change – and do it well.

With the speed of change happening faster and faster, this presents some challenges for us as humans. We like patterns. We like routines. We develop comfort zones. And comfort zones really breaks down to ‘what have I gotten used to.’ To illustrate just how uncomfortable even the slightest change can be, let’s try something. If you’re driving, wait till you get home before you do this. Fold your arms across your chest. You’ve got your arms across your chest, now take the arm that is underneath and put it on top. See how uncomfortable that feels? That’s just changing your arm position. Imagine how uncomfortable major life changes can be.

You can get used to anything. You can get used to governments lying to you, unhealthy relationships – the human animal can get used to almost anything. There was an HBO documentary that I saw a couple of years ago where people were living underneath the subway tracks in New York City. No light, rats the size of gallon milk jugs, but there was an entire city down there. People had gotten used to coming out from underneath the tracks at night, living their lives, and going back underneath the tracks during the daytime. It was amazing. But it does illustrate the point that people can get used to anything.

While comfort zones do provide some stability in our lives, they also present some issues when change is imminent. Back in the original podcast, I laid out some of my reasons why I believe that humanity is on the verge of a great leap in evolutionary awareness where things are going to start to get better – better than what we’ve gotten used to..

There are two ways that you can be out of your comfort zone. You can be out of your comfort zone because you are doing worse than what you are used to. You can be out of your comfort zone because you are doing better than what you are used to. My concern is for people who have gotten better than what they are used to. This is where self-sabotage starts to come in. You find yourself in a situation that is better than what you have gotten used to, and all you know is that you are uncomfortable – even in the new, healthier environment. To say that peace and prosperity is not included in all of our comfort zones currently is not a stretch.

Before we start talking about how to deal with change in a healthy way, let’s talk about some of the barriers to change. The first barrier to change that I find prevalent is “Cultural Ideals”. In other words, “this is how we do it where I come from.” Or “this is how we do it as a male, or a female, or this is how we do it in my family.” We set up rules, and unless we look at these rules and decide whether or not these rules are still relevant to us, we can let these rules dictate our lives from beginning to end.

The second barrier to change is “Habits“. Habit is auto-pilot. It’s something we’ve done so often that we don’t even really have to think about it any more. How many times have you gotten into your car after work and driven home and not really been aware of the right hand and the left hand turn that you made. You just sort of showed up at your front door.

Another barrier to change is “Attitude”. Attitude speaks to why are we changing. Are we changing because we want to change, are we changing because we see the benefit of change, or are we changing because we are being forced to? If you are changing because you’re being forced to, chances are it is not going to be as easy a change as you might like. You might drag your feet, dig your heels in, do slovenly work. Attitudes are a big barrier to change; however the most insidious barrier to change is “Perceived Lack of Personal Power. You don’t believe you can accomplish the change! Perceived lack of personal power is addressed in the last two pod casts, “Low Self-Esteem is the Root of All Evil”. I encourage you to check those out if you haven’t.

There are three typical responses to change. Let’s say you find yourself out of your comfort zone. The first response is to “Get Back” to where you feel comfortable. This is where self-sabotage comes in. Again if you find yourself in a situation that is better than what you have gotten used to and you feel uncomfortable about it, you might do something unconsciously that allows you to get back to where you feel comfortable. Relationships are really good example of self-sabotage, and I’ve done this myself. I have gotten into relationships with people who were very good for me, but I didn’t feel at the time that I deserved that relationship. It’s not like I said, “I don’t deserve this relationship,” but I did something that caused that relationship to end and I found myself back involved with people who weren’t good for me.

Another response to change is to “Replicate” your comfort zone, if you can’t “Get Back” you recreate it where you are at. After I left corporate change management, I got into personal recovery, drug addiction, behavioral addiction, alcohol addiction. I worked with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation for eight years; I had thousands of students in that time. There were several of my students who told the same story. They had been incarcerated for many years. They had lived in a cell, and when they were released they went home and found themselves in a house, in a bedroom twice/three times the size of the cell that they had been living in for years prior. They felt uncomfortable in that environment. More than one student told me that they moved their stuff into the bathroom of their house because it was more like a cell, where they felt comfortable. That is recreating your comfort zone where you are at. “Getting Back” and “Replicating” your comfort zones is more of a ‘the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t know’ mentality.

The third typical response to being out of your comfort zone is to “Transform” your comfort zone, change what you feel comfortable with. I have found it very useful to break down the change process into three steps. Each one of these three steps would work individually, but when you combine the three it really is very powerful. The first step in the change process is a “Change in Awareness”. You become aware that there is a new, different, better way of doing things – that’s “Change in Awareness”. Second is “Attentive Change.” When you discover that there is a new way of doing things and you want to change to that particular method, you have to stay focused on that method. The third is “Incremental Change” – little-by-little through staying focused with “Attentive Change” you will adopt the new behavior, and it will become your new behavior over time. An example of this is the way our kids are being taught to cover their mouths when they cough. When I was in school, we were taught to cover our mouths by putting our hand over our mouth when we coughed; our kids are not being taught that nowadays. Nowadays our kids are being taught to cover their mouth with the inside of their elbow. It makes sense from a “Change of Awareness” standpoint because if I sneeze into my hand and touch a door knob, and you follow me and touch that door knob, you now have my germs. I am not touching too many things with the inside of my elbow so I am spreading less germs. That would be “Change in Awareness”; now that I know that there is another way of doing it and a way that I perceive to be better, I have to stay focused on that new way of doing it or I will revert back to the old way. Every time I sneeze I have to tell myself cover your mouth with the inside of your elbow and incrementally a little bit at a time, over time, little bit, little bit, little bit… now that is my new norm, when I sneeze now I sneeze into the crook of my elbow.

That’s it for part one of “You Can Change Without Growing, But You Can’t Grow Without Changing” in a couple of weeks we will discuss the process of change and some tips that you can use to make the change process more comfortable.

Now that you know how to change your thoughts from negative to positive, the next thing that has to happen is that you have to become aware of it. We are habituated to think negatively. The trick is to pay attention to what you’re thinking. And whenever you catch yourself beating yourself up emotionally, telling yourself you can’t do this, that the situation is hard, that you are bound to fail, replace those negative thoughts with positive ones.

Another thing you want to be aware of is you behavioral and environmental cues. If you are in an environment where you continually find yourself thinking negatively, it might be in your best interest to reduce your exposure to that environment. If you find yourself behaving in a certain manner, where afterwards you end up beating yourself up emotionally, telling yourself you’re no good, then I would like to suggest to you that it’s be healthy for you to stop doing those behaviors.

We’ve discussed affirmations, we’ve discussed awareness, now let’s add visualizations to the process. I find visualization to be an insufficient description of what I’m talking about. When you say “visualization, what most people will think is just seeing themselves doing some behavior. That works, but there are things you can add to it that make it work better, and I’d like to suggest that you use all of your senses. Not only sight, but sound and taste and touch-an example is sports psychology. Every professional sports team, most major college athletic programs have somebody on their coaching staff whose job it is to get people mentally prepared to play the game. If you’re on a baseball team, and you play third base, what a sports psychologist would do, is they would get you into a place where you could visualize being successful at playing third base. But they wouldn’t just say “see yourself make the play”, they would suggest to you that you hear the sound of the bat as it hits the ball. Feel the ball as it hits your glove. Hear the air as you throw the ball across the diamond to the first base. Hear the sound of the ball hitting the first-baseman’s glove. Feel the feeling of being successful as you throw that person out at first base. Incorporate all of your senses-what does the ground feel like beneath your feet?

Another thing that can help you feel better about yourself is if you start to achieve some of the things you’ve set out for yourself. Goal-achievement is a wonderful way to begin to feel better about yourself. On our website, Optimismisaskill.com, there is a document that you can download that will help you begin to create a plan to achieve some of your goals. Very simple process. First identify: what is the goal you are trying to achieve? Second is for you to identify the steps necessary in order for you to achieve that goal. Third, identify the resources available for you to help you achieve that goal. Fourth, you want to identify a start date: when are you going to start- and I would suggest to you- give yourself some credit, and write the date that you first download that document- because you’ve thought about achieving the goal, you’ve started the process.

Another thing that’s very important is for you to identify when you want to achieve the goal by-have a “date accomplished”. If you don?t have a date in mind that you’d like to have the goal accomplished by, then you don’t have a goal, you have a dream. And lastly, identify any possible barriers that might prevent you from achieving your goal, so that you’re not blind-sided by them.

Now, your goals may be very large; you may not be able to accomplish them all in a short amount of time, but having a list of things you can do to help you achieve that larger goal, and then doing one or two of them, and checking them off; what that does is that it allows you to put your head on your pillow at the end of the night feeling like you’ve actually achieved something, feeling like you’ve gotten closer to achieving that goal. I like to tell my students: “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.”

Another thing that fosters healthy self-esteem is keeping your word. All too often, we say things that we don’t mean, and then when we don’t come through, what we do is we beat ourselves up, which feeds back into the negative self-talk cycle we discussed earlier. For some of you, these are going to be new behaviors, and I’ve found it very useful to use support when attempting new behaviors. What I’d like to suggest to you is that you find some people who have your best interests at heart, and share with them what you’re trying to go through. So, let’s say you’re trying to improve your negative self-talk. Tell your friends! Tell your family. Tell the people who love you that this is what you’re doing. And help them be on the lookout for this, and whenever they catch you downgrading or degrading yourself, have them call you on it. “Hey, you just said you couldn’t do this! Is that really the energy you want to put into this effort?”

There’s a saying that practice makes perfect. We’re humans; “perfect” is an unattainable goal. But practice does make progress. This new behavior of loving yourself, treating yourself well, being kind to yourself- it’s going to take practice. It may feel phony at the beginning because of all the practice you’ve had at NOT loving yourself. But practice makes progress, and eventually, over time, the new behavior of loving yourself and being kind to yourself will become your normal, everyday default mode.

Let me give you an example of what I?m talking about regarding practice. Think of something that you are really good at right now. Playing music, cooking, playing sports-ask yourself this question. Are you better now, than when you first started? My guess is, you’ll probably say yes. Now ask yourself another question. Why? Why? Probably because you practiced. You spent time visualizing yourself being good at it, you spent time thinking about being good at it. What you have been doing all of this time is planting those positive seeds that create the positive reality.

Now that you have the raw material to create positive change in your life, we have to discuss how to avoid self-sabotage. Many times we have tried to improve our health and tried to improve our situations and stations in life, but something seems to go wrong.

In our next podcast, we will discuss how to overcome the tendency we have to self-sabotage.

host: jim mclelland - music: anna huff - transcription: colleen mclelland - engineering: dave huff

Buddhists believe that to be born human is to be born into an exalted state. And they believe that because humans have a higher capacity for reason than any other animal. If being born human is an exalted state, and it’s a miracle to be born healthy, how is it that people have become so dissatisfied? I’m not sure where it started, this low self esteem, how it came to pass that so many people are dissatisfied with their lives. It can go back thousands of years. Let’s just say it can go back to the beginning of organized religion. Back to a time when priests were the only ones who were allowed to read. In essense what the church was saying was “God’s very complicated and you couldn’t possibly understand Him. But tell you what, you give us some of your land, maybe give us some of your livestock, and we’ll tell you everything that you need to know about God.”

Again, the underlying message is that you are not intelligent enough to know what God has in store for you.

The underlying truth is that we are all gods, we are all THE god. It serves those in power for us to believe that we are NOT as powerful as we really are. But in reality, we are creating our very existence, every moment of every day.

Today you can see the suppression of our self esteem the way governments treat us. In essence, what they’re saying is that we’re not smart enough to understand our brothers and sisters around the world.

“Those people over there, they speak a funny language, they eat funny foods, they dress strange, they treat their women differently than we treat our women. You couldn’t understand THOSE people! But tell you what, you give us a portion of your yearly income, and we’ll tell you everything you need to know about them.”

Even more insidious, the messages we get through the media every day. Every day we are bombarded with messages that we’re not good enough, we’re not beautiful enough, we’re not smart enough. We are bombarded with messages that if you don’t have this product you’ll never have any friends. All day long, we are told you are not good enough, you’re not smart enough.

Here’s a challenge for you: watch some television. And over the next twenty-four hours, see if you can find a commercial that tells you that you’re fine just the way you are. It won’t happen.

So how does this continual bombardment of negativity regarding ourselves affect us? It creates a massive gulf between us and any other human beings we come into contact with. If we’re walking through our day, believing and knowing that we are not good enough, that we’re not special- anybody who comes up to us and suggests otherwise is automatically a suspect. They must want something from us, or they’re not intelligent enough to know what’s really going on, and therefore, they’re a mark to be played. Now imagine the stress that comes with living with somebody twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week that you do NOT like. Now imagine that person is you. That kind of stress makes people physically ill. If you look at the word “disease”, it’s in the spelling of the word: dis-ease. Dis-ease, not at ease.

You can’t love other people more than you can love yourself. If you’re walking around full of self-loathing, what happens is that you treat other people poorly, you treat other people with disrespect, you treat other people with disdain, sometimes in an attempt to make yourself feel better about yourself. As if somehow treating other people poorly boosts you up, as if cutting off other peoples’ heads makes you taller.

So you’re walking around now, not liking yourself, not trusting anybody else, and with that kind of hostility that you’re projecting out into the world, what you are also doing is that you are calling that back into yourself. So you’re walking around with this wall up, not letting anybody get too close, walking around thinking that the world is horrible, projecting that energy out there, and now you’re starting to attract other people who feel that way. Which only validates that you’re no good, the world is no good. And another thing that it does is that anybody who doesn’t feel this way, anybody who is trying to feel healthy and happy- they don’t want to spend too much time around you! So what happens is that now you are left with only people who are of a like mind. All the peaceful people are on the other side of the street from you. All the people who are hostile, they’re on your side of the street, and if you don’t look for the other people, it’s easy to convince yourself that everybody is hostile, and everybody’s out to get you.

And when you think that way, and when you behave that way, that’s the kind of world you create.

Racism is a global application to self-loathing. Low self esteem is the root of all evil. It allows you to treat other people poorly. It allows you to think of them as “less than”. It allows you to try and fill that hole in your soul with demeaning behavior towards whoever you choose to put at the bottom of your particular ladder. You get to treat them almost as sub-human.

I heard a Gandhi quote: “Become the change you want to see in the world”. That’s how healing your self esteem affects the world. You feel better about yourself, you start to treat other people better, they start to treat other people better, and before you know it like ripples in a pond, you have peace!

I spent eight years working in the addiction and recovery field, and one common denominator seems to run throughout all of the students and clients that I’ve dealt with. There’s a hole in our soul that we try to fill with money and power and sex and drugs, and it simply doesn’t work. The only thing that does fill that hole is loving ourself, being accepting of ourself, treating ourselves well. Treating ourselves as if we were the best parent in the world, and, at the same time, we are also the child of the best parent in the world.

How, then, to begin to heal ourselves? Let’s start with something we’re already doing all the time, and something that we’re very good at. Let’s start with affirmations.

We create our reality every day. We think things into existence. The average person has about seventy thousand thoughts in a day. And seventy-five percent of those thoughts are negative. So thoughts creating reality, thoughts being energy-what the average person is doing is creating negativity, creating dysfunction, creating disease in their life seventy-five percent of the time.

Examples such as “I’m not good enough”, “this is hard”, “I can’t do this”- these are the type situations that set up failure in our lives. There are the type thoughts that set up sabotage. Other examples are: “there’s not enough”; “the world is a hard place to live”.

Thoughts equal energy. Everything man made existed first as a thought. Take a look around you. Everything man-made existed first as a thought. The car that you drive- somebody sat down and wrote on a piece of paper where the stick shift was going to go, where the cup holder was going to go. And eventually, through thought and action, there you have your stick shift and your cup holder. Manifestation is simply taking thoughts and putting action to them and creating something where nothing existed but thought before.

In order to heal our self esteem, it’s important that we begin to change our self-talk. You can try and change your behavior, but without changing your self-talk first, the first time something goes awry, you will fall back to the old self-talk “Well, see, I knew that wasn’t going to work” . This, again, sets up self-sabotage. This defeats any efforts that you might have put into changing your behavior. Self-talk cycle is a three-step process. The first step is our self-talk, the things that we say to ourselves, whether they’re good or whether they’re bad. Our self-talk leads to our self-image, who we believe ourselves to be. Our self-image then leads to our behavior. An example might be: “I can’t get a job. Nobody’s going to hire me.” If you say that to yourself enough, you will come to believe that you are unemployable. What happens then is, you don’t find work. Or maybe somebody kicks your butt and says “Hey, get up and go find some work!” If you do not believe that you’re employable, what happens is you’ll go look for work, and the first time something goes a little bit wrong, first time things don’t break the way you think they should go, your self-talk begins to tell you “See? You’re unemployable.” You don’t get the job. Then that behavior feeds your self-talk, and it becomes a vicious cycle that some people never break out of. To change the negative self-talk is a very simple process. It’s called “Affirmations”, and there are three “P’s” associated with affirmations-very simple formula. The three “P’s”? are:

• Personal
• Present tense
• Positive

The first P, Personal, you have to affirm for yourself. You can’t affirm for anybody else.

The second P is Present tense, as if you are doing it now. Remember, thoughts equal energy, and when you are thinking about something, you are actually doing it, just like the person who thought about the cup holder before he actually created the cup holder. Thoughts are the first step in the process. So, merely thinking about it, you have begun the process.

The third P is Positive. That’s the fun one, because that’s where you get to think about what you want to have happen. It is infinitely healthier for you to think about what you want to have happen, rather than what you don’t want to have happen. An example of the three P’s of Affirmations: if I were to give a speech in front of a room full of people, I might say to myself: “I am good at speaking in public.” “I” is the Personal, “am” is the Present tense, and “good at speaking in public” is the Positive.

Do this enough, and what it does is it overwrites the negative programming that many of us suffer from. I pick up affirmations from music, from lyrics; I pick up affirmations from movies, I pick up affirmations from things that I hear people say. What I just described was intellectual affirmation. Thinking yourself into being able to do. And that’s beneficial, but that’s like driving in a lower gear in your car. A way to move into overdrive is to add emotional affirmations into your intellectual affirmations. Emotional affirmation is very simply recalling a feeling that you have had in the past where you felt good and whole and complete and healthy. Marrying that energy with your intellectual affirmations - when you bring your intellectual and emotional energies together - all I can say is I really hope what you’ve been focusing your energies on is something that you want, because it’s coming. It’s coming quick.

End of Part 1

host: jim mclelland - music: anna huff - transcription: colleen mclelland - engineering: dave huff

Science, specifically quantum mechanics, has pretty well illustrated that at the subatomic level - protons, neutrons and electrons - that there is no difference between you and me and any other matter that exists in the universe - rocks, trees, birds, bees. There’s no difference.

Technology, through the internet and cellular technologies - you don’t even need a computer any more. Ideas can be everywhere at the same time. The same idea can be everywhere at the same time. It is very possible to have a common, shared awareness.

Religion has consistently come from one of two camps. There is an Eastern, organic universe where God is everything. There’s a Western, mechanical universe where God made everything and God is everywhere. However you choose to approach religion, they all say pretty much the same thing - God is everywhere, or God is everything. Everywhere includes you and me. There are seemingly apparent physical differences. That is easily explained to me when I consider the union of opposites, which suggests that nothing exists in the absence of its total opposite. Without a front, there can be no back. Without an up there can be no down. You are a different assemblage of protons, neutrons and electrons, but we’re all the same energy.

When those people who have put their faith in science and religion and technology come to the realization that their particular filters suggest that everything is everything, we’re all one, that we are all an infinity-plus number of facets expressing the same essence - that shift will lead people to treat others with compassion and empathy and patience and tolerance. And I believe that that is inevitable.

When I’ve told this story in the past, there are people who get it right off the bat. And then there are people who look around the world and see the horror and the degradation and the slavery and the genocide, and they wonder that if we are coming to a head where we are beginning to recognize that we’re all one, then why is this going on? That’s answered when you look at nature.

Look at animals. Animals who are wounded, injured, dying - they are the most dangerous. I see another one of the dominant dogmas of our time - the scarcity model - that suggests there’s not enough of everything to go around so I need my share of what there is - and I probably need to take a little bit of yours too because there’s not enough to go around - that scarcity model is dying. And the fear and desperation that exists in the world right now is the dy