This is the best definition of worry that I have ever seen.

It is so good that it prompts us to actually put a stop to it.

Think of it the way Dr. Amit Sood sees it:

“Worry is the interest you pay on a nonexistent threat – the principal.  Or, if a threat actually exists, then each time you pay an installment on this principal, worry is a proportion that is added to the original”.

We drive with the airbags already deployed according to Dr. Sood.

Think of it like that.

Before it happens, we expect the worst.

99% of the things we worry about never happen.

And for the 1% that does, what we feared wasn’t exactly what eventually happened.

In other words the negative thoughts we increasingly bring upon ourselves are worse than what we fear.

Or as Mark Twain put it: “I have suffered several terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened”.

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You are old when you outgrow the zest for enthusiasm.

Young people are naturally enthusiastic.

They haven’t been fully indoctrinated by the workaday world that often muzzles enthusiasm and discourages happiness.

Yet I know college students who are older than a 60-year old in their attitude and I have known 60-year olds who have the enthusiasm and curiosity of a teenager.

Botox erases lines but doesn’t infuse enthusiasm.

Personal trainers can get our muscles optimized in all the right places but they cannot show us how to be forever curious.

The world is youth oriented with 95 million Millennials coming of age and as old as 32, but there are a few things that belie age.

1. Smiling more is the best surgery for your face – it makes others open to relating to you.
2. The good old days were never that good, just old.  The real “good old days” are the ones we haven’t lived yet – the ones that are ripe with promise.
3. Diversity in interests, friends and passion are the true age interrupters.
4. An open mind is an eternally youthful mind
5. Humor is the great elixir that heals life’s hurts.

Or as Katy Perry sings:  “We can dance until we die, you and I…we’ll be young forever”.

We’re looking in the wrong place.

You will never find the right person for you by casting a net and hoping to snag them.  The divorce courts are filled with people who tried that trick one time too many.

Finding the right person is about finding what’s right for you or as the author Melody Beattie says, “to meet the right person you have to be the right person”.

1. Instead of checking the dating sites looking for the qualifications of others, sit down and take a look at your qualifications.  What makes you you?
2. Be able to name the five qualities that are most important to you in another person in order of importance.   Believe it or not, this isn’t easy to do. Knowing that, say, honesty, ethics, sense of humor, shared values or whatever may matter most to you is what you desire most in another.
3. Love at first sight happens because the people falling in love know exactly what they are searching for – no accident there.

Ironically, the more we look inward at ourselves, the more we attract people who possess the qualities we desire.

One more thing.

After a losing streak of bad relationships, take six months off – no dating, just hanging out with friends.  Spend the time to answer and embed the 5 qualities that you value most into your head.

Then when you start dating again, don’t be surprised if your luck changes.

I know.

It worked for me.

We all value being real and being honest.

The latest trend is young girls making YouTube videos and asking if they are pretty or not.

The New York Times recently ran an article on a 13-year old girl named Sammie who posted a video “Am I Ugly Or Pretty”.  She received 72,000 views in just a few months and 2,000 comments.

Sammie said she learned a lot about how cruel people can be.

Especially people who don’t know you.

Let’s put this one in perspective right now.

Beauty is hard to define and this is not really about beauty.  It’s about insecurity and looking to strangers to get that which many of us do not have.

1. Everyone is beautiful in their own way.  Is the second runner up in a beauty contest chopped liver?  Is a beauty contest even worth entering? If I ask you to tell me the most beautiful person you know, will you describe someone physically striking or the essence of a special person?
2. The only opinion that matters is yours – really.  Look into the mirror and see your soul. That is how to judge beauty.  Did you ever have a grandma who was ravaged by the years, hard of hearing and a mere shadow of what she used to be in her youth but you thought she was the most beautiful person ever.  She was.
3. Never, ever give control of your self-esteem to another person – not even a trusted one.  You are the guardian of all that is good about you.  This responsibility is not to be outsourced to another person.
4. Life is not a beauty pageant.  Can you name anyone more beautiful than Mother Teresa of Calcutta?
5. Don’t confuse good looks with self-esteem.  “Good looking” people are sometimes not nice.  And nice people are not always “good looking”.

If you must ask anyone to be honest with you and say whether you are beautiful, make that person you.

And the answer is yes.

I worked in television news where your likability is the most marketable asset.

TV stations and networks use what is called a Q Score to determine likeability.

Robin Roberts and Ellen DeGeneres are among the national TV figures who have high Q Scores and local TV anchors, sports and weather personalities are also tested because likeability means everything.

It also means everything to the rest of us.

Tom Brady, the New England Patriot’s star quarterback, is well liked in spite of the fact that he is good looking and has a beautiful wife.  We should hate him, right?

Here is Brady’s secret according to media consultant Randy Lane:

1. Be self-deprecating — “I’m the worst speller on the planet…”
2. Share your inner-dialogue — “I suddenly realized that I looked like a jerk…”
3. Be vulnerable — “I don’t think you ever have it all figured out.” Tom Brady

In short, be humble.

Humility allows people to get to know us and like us.

That’s what we all want – the two “A’s”.

We look for it when we do presentations.

We crave it in family and relationships.

It is the secret to being loved by others and encouraging love of self.

When we offer others unconditional acceptance and approval, we provide the glue that makes us stick close together.

Remember the power that we all have every day to offer those we care about the gift of approval and acceptance.

One of my readers tells me of a psychologist friend of his who has developed a way of shaking awake couples whose marriages are mired in arguing.

The first half hour is devoted to the litany of complaints from both the wife and her husband.

At that point, the psychologist asks the wife to leave the room while she (presumably) thinks he’s going to read the riot act to her husband.

Then he tells the husband “Buddy, you & your wife can come here once a week for a long time and do this and make my car payment for me or you can walk out of here today and never see me again if you answer this question correctly.  Do you want to be right or do you want to be happy?”

It could just as easily work the other way around – the advice delivered to the wife and this is not to say that real issues should be avoided.

When arguing becomes a sport in which both spouses look to rack up points, the marriage is not going to be happy.

Choose your poison.

Be right or be happy.

14-year old Carleigh O’Connell is a Jersey Girl and thereby special to this Jersey Boy.

Unfortunately she was denigrated by bullies who made fun of her butt by spray painting “Carleigh’s Ass” on a cement abutment at the Jersey shore.

This is New Jersey – they’re going down.

Carleigh shows us the textbook way to stand up to such cowards by harnessing the power of social media.

She posted a photo in Facebook snapped with the graffiti in the picture and told her mom to post it as well.

Here’s what Carleigh’s mother wrote:

“[Carleigh] decided that she was going to be stronger than hurtful words on the concrete and that she was going to be proud of her figure … She also told me that she feels complete sympathy for the teenagers across the country who face this everyday. She understands and wants all of them to find strength inside to rise above the nastiness and be empowered by who you are, how you are made and what is in your heart”.

Many commenters said they wish they had Carleigh’s butt.

Isn’t Carleigh beautiful?

Isn’t she smart?

That’s what Uber does.

The popular replacement for mundane taxicabs allows customers to rate their drivers and now it has become known that the drivers also get to rate their customers.

In one article I read on this, the author was concerned that this information could be used against customers who were continually rated as being less than the best.

The company might even one day discriminate against their call for a ride if Uber drivers as a group thought little of you.

Whatever happened to the notion that the customer is always right even if he or she is a jerk?

But take this issue to folks under 30 and you’ll see that they think vendors and service companies such as Uber have a right to rate customers.

It’s only fair.

This is also a generation that has pioneered rating college professors on their teaching abilities.  As a professor, I rather looked forward to my ratings at USC.

Got me to thinking.

What would my rating be if the people I came in contact with in daily life could rate me from A to F.

Even my wife?

Especially my wife.

360-degree input has arrived and is just as useful as a tool for all of us to up our game and bring out the best we have to offer in terms of humanity and human relations.

What do you think?

If we could devote 1/100^th of the time we spend to being physically fit and direct it toward training our core values, we would transform ourselves and realize our dream to become all that we can be.

Self-confidence doesn’t come from books or from pep talks.  It comes from the inner core of our being.  And the way we develop it is to get in touch with what our vision is for ourselves.

May I offer a few examples?

• Honesty – when we see ourselves as an honest person and picture it vividly all the time, we tend to make honest decisions and live up to the reputation we set for ourselves when life happens.
• Compassion – Just a word until we picture what kind of a compassionate person we want to be.  Often, we are compassionate to some people and not to others.  But when we visualize the type of compassion that we are striving for, the virtue unfolds.
• Self-confidence – Accept the fine person you are and don’t try to change it.  But what about becoming better?  We tend to do the right things automatically when we accept the gifts that make us unique and even different.
• Intimacy – The number one malady of most human beings is the failure to risk intimacy.  That is, to share our humanity with others.  We hold back in fear of being hurt.  If we see ourselves as individuals who want to show the warmth of our being to others, we become more approachable and happier.

All good training begins when we stop trying to fix everything that is wrong with us.

Focus on what is right.

The habitual action of making assumptions and responding as if they are facts stresses marriages.

When you’re sure you’re right, you are most often dead wrong.

When we fail to differentiate the difference between reality and our imagination, we guarantee failure to communicate.

So how to change?

A fact is something that can be observed and verified.

This month is August.

An assumption is something that is only accepted as true.

You can imagine how many misunderstandings we have had as husbands and wives over that which has been assumed rather than what is so.

There are lots of books on marriage.

And lots of psychiatrists and psychologists who will be happy to schedule you in for 45 minutes, but one of the best ways to eliminate the fuel for fighting is to take the time to get the facts first.

I could have been your doctor.

Scary thought, eh?

Yes, when I was 21, someone close to me kept nudging me to go to medical school even though I was happy being a radio and TV personality.

So they arranged an interview with the Chief of Medicine at Temple University Hospital and during the interview he asked me more about the Philadelphia radio and TV scene than I was able to ask about the virtue of a career in medicine.

Even if I applied and was admitted to med school, I often wonder whether I would have been living someone else’s life.

Do you ever feel like that?

Steve Jobs told the graduating class of Stanford that they should stop living someone else’s life.  That he was optimistic he could survive his Pancreatic cancer and have a few more decades to do what he loves to do.

Obviously Jobs didn’t beat his cancer but he lived even his final moments exactly as he wished.

We are on loan to life.

Our children are temporarily in our custody then we must set them free.

We must someday say goodbye to all those we love and must surrender all the material things – including money – to others.

All the more reason to be selfish about one thing.

It’s your life.

Live it exactly the way you want.

In every way.

You never win an argument.

Not even if you think you’ve won.

Dale Carnegie used to say the best way to win an argument is to avoid it.

But there’s even better advice.

Understand the other person’s point of view before you ask them to understand yours.

We become focused on what we’re saying and if what we’re saying is rejected, then we feel rejected.

Give up the urge to be right.

Choose your arguments carefully.

Once, while meeting the parents of a girl I was dating, I witnessed an impressive example of this at dinner when her mother picked a fight with her father.  He tried for about a minute to react and then quickly – almost like magic – he said, “You’re right” because it wasn’t worth it to him.

When it is worth the debate understand how to stay cool (courtesy of Amit Sood):

• Stop your negative thoughts.
• Exhale deeply for a few breaths and watch your frustration leave with your breath.
• Redirect your thoughts to something you feel grateful for or someone you feel compassionate about.
• Evaluate what has you stressed using gratitude and compassion as your guide.
• Negotiate what you were doing but with a calmer mind and fresher perspective.

Hint:  assume the other person has positive intent, which will help the disagreement avoid the damaging rage that frequently erupts.

We can be lonely in a group of people.

Some spouses feel alone in their marriages.

All the Facebook friends and Instagram contacts does not guarantee that we are not lonely in our lives.

Loneliness is the feeling of being without friends and the closeness that comes from interaction with others.

Being alone is a regenerative state to help us get in touch with feelings, desires, dreams and allow us time to solve problems and deal with them.  It can also be a time of great focus on that which we have a great personal interest.

The best way to avoid loneliness and get the most out of being alone is to:

1. Work to have a solid support group of friends, family and associates at the ready for when you need them.
2. Never forget that time spent alone can be very valuable when it is a part of the more social aspects of our lives.
3. Use time alone to recharge and invest in yourself.
4. Use alone time to pursue your dreams.  No one ever realized big dreams without devoting one-on-one time with those dreams so that they can pursue those dreams in the future.

I love speaking before audiences but when I am done, I look forward to an equal and opposite amount of time alone with my thoughts to regenerate my feelings and balance my life.

Being alone, then, is a tool to help us avoid loneliness that brings sadness.

The Eagles had it right in “Take It Easy”:

“We may lose and we may win though we will never be here again”

In the radio industry right now some formerly ethical and moral people have sold their souls to make more money and acquire power.

It’s logical to want to earn a living and have an influence in this world especially in what we do, but far too often we lose sight of the end game.

Losing is transformational.

“Losers” almost always have another day as tomorrow’s success.

And winning is overrated when you have to sell your soul to chase money and might.

To avoid this sorry fate, the new mantra should be win or lose, we will never be here again so take it easy and be the person you want to be – not the unhappy one it is so easy to become.

My best friend, Jimmy, used to say that all the time as a reminder that often we know what is best for us and we just stop doing it.

Meanwhile we expend lots of energy and anxiety trying to find new ways to do what we already know works.

I said “It worked so well I stopped doing it” just today to remind myself that I am still guilty of walking away from doing what I know works.

In this case, I like to stay physically fit.  I have gyms and treadmills in both my Arizona and New Jersey homes.  But when I was away from the equipment on vacation at a rented beach house I had none of that.

I had to rely on what used to work better than all this equipment that I own.  It’s called The Royal Canadian Air Force Fitness Plan – you know, just for the week, right?

I had it right way back then when I couldn’t even afford a treadmill so what I’m saying is – I’ll add the extra goodies in but I’m going back to what worked well for so long that I stopped doing it.

It could be anything.

Or everything.

Do I have any company out there?

There are lots of ways to bully people but one of the most popular ones is to make fun of them because they are fat.

For decades thin-is-better has gotten out of hand.

Healthy is best and people of all sizes and shapes can be healthy.

Fat shaming is particularly odious on social media where it seems the worst elements of bullying have found a new and powerful way to hurt people.

Fat shaming or any other kind is a direct reflection on the person doing the bullying and it hurts the victim.

The beauty Marilyn Monroe would be considered too fat to be a model by today’s standards.

Here is how to support friends or children who are losing confidence because they are being held to social media ridicule for being too fat:

1. Fat shaming doesn’t lead to weight loss but it does lead to a serious loss of confidence.
2. Your body was given to you to love and protect.
3. Even skinny people can be “big hearted” – the size of your heart matters more than the size or shape of your body.
4. Even a doctor does not get to fat shame a patient for health reasons — allow no one to be the weight police.

Be proud of yourself and your body.

The only thing that matters is to be the fine person that you are.

Now we know.

A study done by Advisor Perspectives has nailed it down to the penny.

So how much household income is necessary to achieve happiness?

$75,000 a year.

More in some states.  Less in others.

New Jersey it takes $95,700 but in Missouri $70,271.

It takes only $65,800 to achieve happiness in Mississippi and $122,175 in Hawaii.

Making more will not increase your happiness significantly and yet almost all of us devote our lives to making more money even though we have no idea when enough is enough or not enough is preventing us from being happy.

What if we had a metric for happiness not related to income.

Happy moments together.

Friends in our lives.

Loved ones with whom to share our experiences and dream our dreams.

Wouldn’t that be a way to get the most for the money you earn and then some?

Place a real value on things that money can’t buy and you’ll discover the road to fulfillment.

I thought you might like to see what you need to earn in all 50 states so here it is.

My friend John Dowd, Jr (also known to SiriusXM “70’s on 7” listeners at Jaybeau Jones) writes:

“Many confuse self confidence with conceit and arrogance.  Self-confidence is something others can feel, while arrogance is an external reaction to a situation that others can see.

We can’t control how others react to our self-confidence.

Some will champion it; others may be threatened by it.

In those situations we must keep moving and send those who are threatened a silent blessing in hopes that they discover inner confidence on their journey.

Self-confidence originates in the heart from a place of love and a need to do well to help others. Arrogance and conceit are powered from fear.

Start today and every day centered in your heart with 100% self-confidence”.

I subscribe to his daily motivators and thought you might like to see John’s work here.

On my media website I wrote about a radio executive who was fired by his best friend since first grade – the godfather to his son and executor of his will.

And the firing was done in an unnecessarily cruel way.

In our quest to be successful and self-fulfilled, we are often making compromises that hurt the ones we love.

It has happened to me, perhaps to you as well.

The feeling of being betrayed by someone so close to you is more than an empty feeling, it is a raw rejection that seemingly never goes away.

I once heard a psychiatrist say that people who have had their heart broken should stop glorifying the person who broke their heart.  It just makes things worse and keeps the pain front and center.

She suggested instead of saying “no one will ever love me like that again” to substitute “he wasn’t that good looking anyway”.

Which prompts the thought that when we are betrayed by a friend, instead of obsessing over the ingratitude of it all, think constantly of someone else in your life who could be called a friend and for whom you are truly grateful.

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