Battling Haters

Haters use love to get to people giving compliments one moment and then overreacting the next.

It seems the world is full of haters because we are so connected on digital devices and in real time.

The best way to handle a hater is not to be one.

Not even to get back at them when they do something hurtful.

Dislike the deed not the person. 

Forgive, but don’t forget.

Take control of the one narrative that matters most – the life you want to live.

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Controlling Anger

We’re not born with self-control.

If we’re lucky others show us by example or we develop it on our own.

Reminding yourself when you have resisted reacting instead of responding helps build and reinforce the confidence to keep inappropriate anger in its place.

Focus on what’s being done right.

Anger is appropriate when it expresses a feeling without hurt.

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Trying to Improve

It’s not what other people think that holds us back.

It’s how we look at ourselves.

But that person is not you.

What you are today is you.

More important than failing to become that which you are not is to never stop trying.

No one perfect lives on this earth.

Be the fine person you are.

Don’t look to anyone else to tell you that.

Look at yourself favorably and others will do the same.

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Happiness Hacks

Chasing happiness is like trying to net a butterfly – better to let it come to you.

Even the worst day can be followed by the next better day. 

The more it hurts, the more it helps to be grateful (especially for little things).

Fear of something bad drags us down, but evidence proves our fears are ill-conceived 99% of the time – and the 1% doesn’t happen the way we feared it. 

You can catch another person’s bad mood or negativity with regular exposure to them – run.

Fulfillment translates into happiness – set a goal each day and accomplish it because the feeling of accomplishment soothes a lot of unhappy thoughts. 

Stress is a killer – of relationships, happiness, health – so practice letting go of trying to control what is out of control and you will finally be in control.

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Detox from Digital

The New York Times tech writer Farhad Manjoo turned to meditation.

Escaping the digital world with app blockers, heightened self-control or even going offline doesn’t work in a world driven by digital connectivity.

There’s meditation that Manjoo says actually helps him to not care as much about the commotion in the digital world and makes him nicer, refreshed and more focused.

There’s heeding to this important warning signal.

If you’re reaching for your phone, the conversation you’re in is not holding your interest.

If you are with a person you care about but you are constantly checking your phone, you don’t care about them as much as you think.

If you’re lost in the black hole of Instagram, Facebook, SnapChat or social media, you need to jump start a new life in real time.

The phone is not going away – it shapes what we see, hear, how we interact, our commerce, everything.

When losing your life to a mobile device, it is time to reexamine the life you are living.

That may be the best gift you’ve ever gotten from a smartphone.

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Finding Extra Courage

The thing about courage is that everyone has it.

No one can give it to you.

It comes from within and you didn’t get this far without it.

Knowing that helps but how to get a boost of extra courage when it is needed?

Banish failure thoughts.

Replay images in your mind’s eye of times when you rose to the occasion even against all odds.

Courage is your gift to get after you help another person to awaken theirs.

Just saying the word courage or repeating it silently in your subconscious activates your full life’s worth of courageous actions ready for the next challenge.

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Overthinking is not thinking. It is obsessing

Overthinking takes a good idea and makes it a weaker one.

Simplicity is better than overthinking.

When you’re not happy taking a good idea and making it succeed then you are overthinking.

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Feeling Busy All the Time

Calm is the answer to busy.

Busy doesn’t mean productive – it often spells bouts of increased anxiety topped off by a feeling that important things are still not getting done and another round of anxiety follows.

Calm is a word we don’t hear much these days.

Calm is also a key component to dealing with stress.

Nick Foles, the unlikely Super Bowl MVP last year for the Philadelphia Eagles tries to act as a calming force instilling confidence and security in his players.

Creating an atmosphere where admitting mistakes comes easy.

Doing the right thing is the ultimate decider of how to use valuable time.

To gain the quality of being calm, practice on others by showing them how you can calm down a situation and help instill confidence in them.

It’s true multitasking will make you feel busy and focusing too much on digital devices will make you feel overwhelmed and under pressure.  But simply cutting these things out will not work.

Develop calm in others and you will develop calm in yourself.

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How to Finish Tasks in 5 Hours a Day

Cut interruptions and turn an 8-hour day into a very productive 5-hour day.

This has been confirmed in a 3,000 person 8 country study including the U.S.

But 49% in the U.S. said they need to resort to overtime to do the work that helps them stay employed.

Work creep has moved into our lives.

Four-day work weeks have been shown to reduce stress and make us more efficient because we have to make better decisions on the use of our time.

But, if you’re not in a position to opt for a four-day workweek as the employees of Gray Advertising in New York offers (for 85% of their employees’ salary), then one move makes a big difference.

End constant contact through email as you’re working.

Anything that competes for your time must be managed or else work creep returns, anxiety builds and you become less effective in your work.

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Perfection Anxiety

Trying to be perfect causes anxiety.

The problem with perfection is that few are only perfectionists in one portion of their life.  In other words, it influences every aspect.

On the other hand, when you need a serious operation, you want the surgeon to be a perfectionist.

When dining at an expensive restaurant, you expect the chef to be a perfectionist.

And perfectionists know that even in recreational sports designed to help them relax, they can’t help wanting to be perfect.\

Perfection anxiety cannot be reduced by trying to be what you’re not.

But an awareness that you don’t have to be a perfectionist when doing everything, like your morning run, provides some control, some balance.

Caring enough to be the best is admirable and desired as mentioned above.

But view it as a skill – a gift – that can definitely be balanced with effort.

A successful boxer doesn’t have to punch every person they meet to prove they can do it nor does a perfectionist have to spend 100% of their life creating pressure that robs them of the happiness they’ve earned by killing themselves to be the best.

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  • Hi Jerry,

    Perfection is such a great topic!

    I admit that I aim for perfection, taught to me, in part, by my folks, and later in the Air Force, and during my TV and radio career. (You and I have chatted before.)

    In 1967, I was a kid just out of high school in suburban Boston and helped put together a small radio station in our town. Yup, the FCC found out about the operation, showed up in person, and as the two-man crew left, they whispered: “We get a lot of these stations, but yours is the most professionally-run that we’ve ever seen!” WOW!

    The local papers did a couple of stories about two brothers and a friend running this station out of our friend’s home. It caught the eye of a local resident who, it turns out, was the film director at Ch. 7 in Boston. He asked if I’d like a summer job in his film department? And, my friend with the keen electronic background, ended up in Master Control.

    (Later, he moved to Dallas to open his own audio company, went on the road with folks like Cat Stevens and Willie Nelson, today operates his own station QX-FM.com and recently opened a communications and broadcast museum, profiled on this Texas program: http://thetexasbucketlist.com/2016/04/the-texas-bucket-list-texas-museum-of-broadcasting-and-communications.)

    I’m getting ahead of myself. :)

    One day at work, as I was splicing commercials together, my boss, the film director, asked me about a problem that impacted commercials on the air. Turns out that during my inspection and cleaning of the commercial film reel being readied for broadcast, I had failed to remove a three-inch piece of masking tape used as a reminder that a missing commercial needed to be inserted at this point on the reel. The head of engineering came down and was none too happy with me as the film reel gummed up the projector, and I couldn’t blame anybody, but myself. It was a very strong lesson learned.

    Time marched on and I continued working Ch.7 as a writer, producer, and assignment editor and spent 13 years during the infancy of rock and the later switch to talk, much of the time as a news anchor, at WRKO. And, as you know, Jerry, perfection was an absolute key to success

    Attention to detail (is that different from perfection?) is so paramount in all walks of life, even at home with the family. But, my wife believes that I’m a bit too gung-ho while she’s the complete opposite.

    For example, she’ll constantly forget to turn off, say, a closet light, leaving the switch-flipping to me. So, as you can see, the issue of perfection can be a source of irritation. But, in my experience of 40 years in broadcasting, perfection leads all of us down the golden path.

    My apologies for being so long-winded!

    Ron