Keep your expectations low and your motivation high for the best possible outcome.

When it is the other way around, disappointment from not achieving our goals soon derails our hopes and chips away at our ability to sustain the motivation needed to achieve our original goals.

Dash those expectations if you want to remain happy and productive.

And if you want to have high expectations about anything, make it about your ability to maintain a high level of motivation under all circumstances.

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Yesterday Oprah tweeted that she lost 26 pounds while eating bread every day on Weight Watchers.

That one tweet drove Weight Watcher’s stock up so much that Winfrey, who owns 10% of the company, made $12.5 million in one day.

All good.

But on the same day, a little noticed story on Huffington Post about a mom who defended her daughter from a Dillard’s salesperson who wanted her to use Spanx to reign in her figure popped up with an ad for none other than Weight Watchers.

Her mother told the world and the salesperson in a tweet that “she did not need you telling her that she is not perfect”.

In one example, dieting gets us to perfection and in another the use of body control shape wear does it with a big fat ad for a weight loss program in the middle of a story about body image.

And therein lies the problem.

There is no perfect and there doesn’t need to be.

We come in all shapes and sizes and that is just fine.

Instead of dieting and shape wear alone, we could use some self-love and teach it to others.

When we love the body we have, we are truly attractive starting from the inside and it costs us nothing.

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The rage among parents is to set up play dates for their young children as a social component of their children’s lives as well as a lifeline for theirs.

There is a support group in the community in which we live in suburban New Jersey devoted to parenting issues such as these.  Perhaps you have something similar where you live.

Well, here’s a news bulletin — adults need play dates, too.

When I was on-the-air in radio and TV, I cannot remember any of what I did feeling like work.  But today, in a consolidated media industry that is virtually run by hedge funds and investment banks, undertakers are having more fun.  Employers are more concerned with efficiency of scale rather than happy and productive people.

My favorite professor in college had us laughing so hard we didn’t think he even had a lesson plan but it worked so well I adopted the same approach when I was appointed a professor of Music Industry at the University of Southern California.

Play stimulates creativity, which is why even a day at the beach can get the creative juices flowing again.

Clowning around is not clowning – it’s stress relief.

Don’t think you can do it?

Remember what your face must have looked like when your toddler was working their way through the terrible twos.

Just reading this isn’t going to change much for us, but prioritizing play – even (and especially) at work is the secret sauce that is missing from our stressful lives these days.

The more serious our business and personal life, the more unhappy it tends to be.

Ironically, the more playful we are at living our lives all day long, the more serious we are about productive business and personal happiness.

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When you succeed and it still doesn’t feel like a victory.

When you endure even though others would have given up.

When you believe in others and not yourself.

Where a life well lived feels like it just still isn’t enough.

When we look for affirmations from our parents even when we’re now an adult.

Believing we’re good enough is not a feeling.

It’s a conviction.

A decision.

Make the decision today that you will no longer harbor any thoughts that you’re not good enough.  It’s fine to want to be better but we are wasting our lives looking for that which we have already achieved.

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Phoenix Coyotes fighter John Scott was voted by the power of social media to this years NHL all-star game.

The league thought they would let the fans decide who deserved to play but Scott who hardly ever scores and was traded recently then shipped to the minors polled big time.

There was so much pressure on the NHL to include him that they found a way to get Scott back to the majors just for the game. Meanwhile Scott has played the good solider and said all the right things.

Some observations:

• If you’re not ready to have social media influence your decisions, don’t use it.
• Obviously Scott (a fan favorite in Phoenix) is not fast enough or good enough to play with the other all-stars but today average fans think differently about what a star is.
• People like authenticity. Scott is old school. Sticks up for his players and as mean as he is on the ice, he’s that nice off.
• The most talent does not mean as much to the changing fan base as it does to sports leagues.

For the rest of us, the takeaway may be that heart matters as much if not more than talent.

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The Buffalo Bills named Kathryn Smith as the full-time NFL female assistant coach yesterday.

This is a big, meaningful victory for men as well as women and for all of us who are parents and want to see equality across the board in sports.

This is also a big victory for the federal program known as Title IX, which prohibits discrimination based on sex in any federally funded education program or activity.

Young men have grown up watching their sisters succeed on their own in sports and the world and NFL is ready for bending the gender barrier further.

A victory for young children who now have another female role model to look up to.

When feminism was at its height, my sister said to me something I obviously never forgot:  Equal rights are the best thing to ever happen to men.  It frees men to be part of the solution.

So if you have a mother, a wife, a sister or child, root for Kathryn Smith and all the many other women who will make sports more diverse and therefore better.

And the NFL – no dummies – is on the sidelines encouraging this metamorphosis because 45% of their fan base is women.

Now they have something real to cheer about.

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This is just as important as compassion to others because we are fallible human beings – we make mistakes, we are not perfect.

But so do others.

They make mistakes that make them less than perfect.

The best way I have ever heard of showing compassion to yourself is from Amit Sood, MD who says “Look at yourself with the eyes of the person who loves you the most.”

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When things are going great, it doesn’t take much to feel good about yourself.

But when faced with adversity, it is human to see gradual erosion in self-confidence.

You know, we still feel fine and can handle our jobs and lives but we just don’t feel like we have an abundance of confidence.

• Look out for self-damaging statements like “I screwed up (blank)” or “I didn’t (blank)”.
• When words like “didn’t”, “couldn’t” and their relatives “don’t” and “can’t” start coming out of our mouths, take notice and stop them in mid sentence.
• My theory is – why should we contribute to knocking ourselves down.  Life is tough enough without us heaping on more insults in our own direction.
• Reject negative comments or projections aimed at you by others.  Untended, these comments can contribute to a critical loss of self-esteem.
• Build confidence around a feeling of well-being not based on the premise that everything we do must succeed.  Example:  “I will out work anyone”.  “No one cares more than I do”.  “In a tough situation, I want me to handle things”.  When we build self-esteem through truisms about our motivation and conviction to succeed and not on how things are going lately, we can maintain the highest level of self-confidence at all times.

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The founding member and guitarist for the Eagles died a month after he and the group was to be honored at Kennedy Center.

The event was postponed because of Frey’s deteriorating health from multiple conditions.

And now Frey’s death immediately follows the music industry losses of the icon pioneer David Bowie and pop singer Natalie Cole.

The death of a musician is like losing family because music is the soundtrack of our lives.  We know exactly where we were when we first heard a song that resonated with us and can relive any live performances we attended even until this day.

As baby boomers age and they inevitably experience the loss of other seminal artists it is a good time to recognize what we can do when we experience loss.

Live and appreciate life in the present because when we lose those that we love, we will always have happy memories to live on for the rest of our lives.

That’s true of the people dear to us whom we miss and mourn and those that we did not know personally but who made our lives happier because they were in them.

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Celine Dion’s husband, Rene Angelil died yesterday at the age of 73.

He struggled with throat cancer for years and in a very public interview, Celine Dion told of how she was feeding her husband with a tube and helping him overcome the fear of dying.

But it is her message of life that lives on.

“It’s important to open your eyes in the morning and look at yourself in the mirror and ask two questions: ‘Are you dead, or do you have a ticket to ride’ … There are just two tickets. If you’re alive, have a good day. Because today is the most important day of your life.”

Dr. Amit Sood, the Mayo Clinic physician, teacher and author, believes there is something positive about contemplating the finite nature of years one has left.

Better to make the years ahead filled with more meaning and fewer regrets.

We best remember those we have loved and lost by making their best qualities part of our being and we live life to the fullest when we realize that if you’re alive, have a good day.

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