John Glenn was the first American to circle the earth in orbit in the early 1960’s when America was losing the space race to the Russians.

Much later at 77 years old, Glenn was the oldest man to ever enter space aboard the space shuttle. In between, he served almost two decades as a senator from Ohio and died recently at the age of 95 – a full life indeed.

Two things.

America needs goals and we as individuals need dreams. Too often we fantasize about our futures without realizing that we have one life and one chance to do all we can to live those dreams.

And, the lesser known story of John Glenn’s wife, Annie, who had a serious stuttering problem for almost 50 years until she came upon a program that purported to help stutterers overcome their disability.

It is said when Annie Glenn called her husband after completing the protocol, he was moved to tears. Annie Glenn then spent the rest of her life helping others deal with stuttering.

Whether our goals are in outer space or deep within ourselves, John and Annie Glenn show us that pursuing your dreams is not just rocket science.

It is the life we deserve.

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Repeat after me …

I’ve done it before. I can do it again.

If I’ve never done it before, I will use an IOU from the many things I have done well in the past.

I am not afraid of failure – I will learn from it.

Assume a virtue if you have it not.

If I don’t believe in me, I don’t have the right to ask anyone else to believe in me.

Now, repeat again and again during the day.

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The best way to deal with difficult people is to make it difficult for them to be difficult.

As much as you may despise their behavior, do not try to change the difficult person. They love that.

Deliver the message that you don’t take them seriously.  They hate that.

Use humor to avoid giving their trouble legitimacy. 

Fog the issue if pressed.  In other words, blow them off.

Difficult people are looking for attention and control.

When they realize that they can neither get your attention nor gain control of your decisions, they may try, but they will fail.

The most difficult person to deal with is one who has earned your trust, one that you are related to or who controls your pay check.

In all case, shift from reactive to proactive to put them in their place.

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Research, metrics, focus groups and other tools exist to help us make better decisions.

But Proctor & Gamble (P&G), General Foods and others have big budgets to test and market new products and yet still don’t bat 1.000.

Before the iPod, MP3 players were a cult product.

When Steve Jobs introduced the iPad, people said who needs a tablet when you have a phone and a laptop.

This is the stuff that humility is made of.

When we make major decisions, we can stick to the facts or we could get the facts and factor in our intuition.

Doubting our gut is always a bad bet if for no other reason than our inner feeling wants to tell us something.

Learn to listen to your intuition, your gut feeling and along with facts better life decisions can be made.

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A recent study in the publication Nature suggests mind wandering is more helpful than hunkering down and becoming obsessed with that which causes anxiety.

Mind wandering?

Let your mind wander away from perceived threats.  As Harvard Medical School points out getting a grip on threats may not be as effective as allowing the mind to wander.

We obsess by focusing in on anxiety not letting go of it and that makes the anxiety even more unbearable.

“So when you’re next feeling anxious or wired, try allowing your mind to do what it naturally does — wander!”

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If you do this one thing, everything else will fall into place.

Manage others exactly as you would like to be managed.

Talk to them the way you best respond to others.

Ask them to help you, don’t tell them – the way you like to hear it.

Show the compassion and understanding that managers often lack but everyone craves.

Build others up, do not tear them down because all of us hate that and yet it is so pervasive in today’s work culture.

Harvard promotes working in teams, but not without the human relations skills to deal with divergent points of view.

In other words, if there is one way to become more effective at managing people, you need only one thought all day.

Manage others exactly as you would like to be managed.

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Thanksgiving weekend marked the revival of the hit television series Gilmore Girls.

A generation or two curled up to watch the new episodes on Netflix but also to go back and watch complete previous seasons.

Binge-watching has been made possible by Netflix and it is a useful tool to consume TV content on your schedule.

What if we binged on friends putting aside extra time to catch up with people who are important to us?

Or binge on family and relatives.  The author Dr. Amit Sood always says each Christmas he counts the number of Christmases he has left with his mother and father based on actuarial tables, not to get depressed, but to get inspired to share these valuable moments.

There are people in our lives right now that need to hear our voices, see our faces and spend time 100% focused on them.

What a wonderful way to extend the gift of binge-watching to enhance meaningful relationships.

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No one is going to surprise us what is causing anxiety and stress in our lives because chances are we already know. 

We already know what is eating us alive but we don’t seem to have the will to stop it.

The smartphone is not making us happier, but we know that and continue to hold it in our hand and focus more attention on that than people who really matter.

Social media, email, texting and an endless path to connectivity has actually made us less connected to people we used to experience in person, but that’s not a revelation either.

Multitasking is inefficient and more stressful than setting priorities yet a day doesn’t go by that someone with a phone in hand says, “keep talking, I’m listening” while they sit there distracted.  And that person sitting there is also us.

Taking on too much work that we cannot complete is a recipe for burnout only because one of the most important words is not being used – no.  Saying yes and killing yourself is not a good outcome but it is the one chosen time after time at work.

Hating on people at work is what other people do, right?  It is a total waste of time because eventually what you dislike in another changes the good things about you.

Not enough exercise and healthy diet makes us tired, disagreeable and sick.  Still, look where most of us go to eat lunch.

And having a career and raising a family is stressful beyond description.  We do it, but we often don’t do it well if we’re winding up burned out.   It’s not the total amount of time you spend with family members, it’s the total time you spend 100% present.

Burnout is often self-inflicted because in almost every instance, there is a better choice.

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There are almost too many ways to coax us into being more productive.

But here’s the one I love, use and would like to share with you this morning.

It’s called the 3 P’s.

Purposeful positive progression.

Every time you touch a project or task, try to advance it in some positive way that makes sense for your end goal.  It is not necessary to complete it all at once.

The fastest way to be unproductive is to take on or assign big projects or tasks to people who understandably will be overwhelmed so where to begin?

Want a new job?

That’s a big process.  Divide it into small steps that positively take you toward your goal.  Working draft of a resume.  Find out what your services are worth elsewhere to establish a fair base.  Isolate the companies you want to approach, etc.

Need to do a major presentation on top of everything else you do? 

Divide it into a handful of smaller steps that will take you to completion.

There is a great saying.

Want to get something done?

Give it to a busy person to do.

Because by necessity everything busy people touch moves their work in a purposeful positive progression toward success.

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Who succeeds all the time?

I want to meet that person.

But those who succeed more often than others have a positive pattern they follow whether they can articulate it or not.

Learn from every failure – As painful and disappointing as failure is to experience, it is that powerful a motivator and teacher to help us to our next success.

Assess your failures to see if there is any pattern that keeps repeating itself, then make adjustments.

When tempted to focus on your failures, spend time more constructively finding people in your generation who overcame theirs.

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