The professional golf instructor Sandy LaBauve has a great way of balancing happiness with productivity.

Think of what is important to you as the four tires on a car.

It may be faith, exercise, family and work.  Substitute your own priorities.

What drives you?

Then – and this is the part that will help keep life in balance when one of these “tires” needs inflating —  you devote attention to the one that is going flat and pump it up.

That way you’re literally always in the driver’s seat in achieving all four of the things that make you happy and productive.

“Just as your car runs more smoothly and requires less energy to go faster and farther when the wheels are in perfect alignment, you perform better when your thoughts, feelings, emotions, goals and values are in balance” – Brian Tracy

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The author Pico Iyer wrote a piece in The New York Times over a year ago that I have not been able to get out of my mind.

It was called The Joy of Quiet.

But joy is not the only benefit – it is increase productivity and a happier life.

Iyer wrote, “The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug”.

In 2007 Intel mandated 4 hours of quiet time every Tuesday morning for 300 engineers and managers.  No phone.  No email.  Most of those participating recommended that it be extended to others.

The average office worker, by the way, gets only three minutes of uninterrupted time according to researchers.

The average American teen sends 75 text messages a day.

And the average American spends at least eight and a half hours in front of some type of screen each day.

We’ve got no time to think, enjoy, interact or recharge.

Iyer suggests an “Internet Sabbath” every weekend – no online connections from Friday night until Sunday morning.  Okay, that’s not going to work for me.

There’s yoga, meditation and tai chi.

Long walks on weekends without a cell phone.

Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows about how much time we spend online, suggests that people who spend time in rural settings “exhibit greater attentiveness, stronger memory and generally improved cognition.  Their brains become calmer and sharper”.

Even simply becoming aware that a lack of quiet is a problem empowers us to find a workable personal solution.

“When things come at you very fast, naturally you lose touch with yourself” – Marshall McLuhan

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When new drugs are tested, placebos are used to ferret out whether the drug actually works or whether people just think the drug works.

Depressed people can have a 30 to 50% chance of feeling better whether they take an actual anti-depressant pill or a sugar pill.

Hotel room attendants who were told that they were getting a good workout from their job showed a significant decrease in weight, blood pressure and body fat – all this in just 4 weeks. (Published in Psychological Science, 2007)

Four weeks of simply thinking they were getting a real workout.

Patients with an irritable bowel condition were given inert pills and told that these pills worked by a mind/body process.  The patients started feeling better.  In other words, the medicine worked even after patients were told it was a placebo.

Asthma patients who were treated with placebos said they felt just as good as if they inhaled the medicine albuterol.

The mind is more powerful than the body.

We can harness the power of positive expectations today and every day.

If you expect good to happen, chances are they will.

We already know that when we expect bad, it never disappoints.

So, cop an attitude – a positive attitude about something you expect will happen and see if it doesn’t work for you, a friend or a loved one.

“Human beings are not made to take shortcuts … You’re to live your life, moment by moment. Your life isn’t here to entertain you – it’s to be lived.” – David Rotenberg, The Placebo Effect

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Sports stars get to negotiate contracts every few years with new benefits, conditions, incentives and pay.

There is something alluring to being able to refocus our wants and needs every few years.  And that’s what I recommend in my book – become a free agent.

At the same time each year, get away from your routine and take inventory of what you want next in life.  Too often, we just stay at the same job or with the same group of friends because it’s the easiest or safest thing.

Even if you want to do next year what you did last year, signing a mental contract with yourself gives more meaning and commitment to the time you are going to devote.


And if a change is brewing, thinking of yourself as a free agent instead of a person looking for another job can be transformative.

I recommend an off-season (to take inventory of your goals), pre-season (to acquire the skills you’ll need), “the” season (to ply those skills) and post season (to achieve new highs).

I sign a one-year free agent agreement with myself every year after carefully considering my goals, desires and dreams.  My off-season is a one-week vacation at the Jersey shore, which allows me to think more freely away from my regular routine.

“Find out what you like doing best and get someone to pay you for doing it” – Katharine Whitehorn

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One of the most amazing and destructive foibles of human kind is that we seem to have an innate knack of focusing on what’s wrong in our lives rather than what is right.

Life is a constant challenge and maybe that is why we learn inadvertently to give more weight to the things that plague us.

Some experts say that excessively focusing on what’s wrong is actually a biological instinct that makes it harder for us to live in the moment.

As long as we are alive, we will experience more right than wrong.


Focusing on what’s wrong tends to add stress to our lives.

Retrain the brain to focus on the good things that happen – it is our right.

“Why not accept the right that is right and savor it” – Amit Sood

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Ever shop for a greeting card only to find that the words of another are not suitable for what you want to say?

Some of us express love by saying the words “I love you” and that’s great.

But there is another way – one in which your actions speak louder than those three words.

An act of love.

The father who slipped a note into the glove box of the car he bought his daughter just in case she was ever involved in an accident – a note that said “I’m not angry about any accident, I’m just happy you are okay”.

Not asking your son or daughter who got 4 A’s and one B, what the B was for.  They’ll tell you on their own and will appreciate the fact that you waited.

Two acts of kindness from you for every one act you observe in another.

Some of us are shy about saying words like “I love you”.  Providing the evidence makes it all the more meaningful.


“Actions Speak Louder Than Words”

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Down And Out

When things go bad, they often get worse instead of better.


This is because we are confronted with the entire dilemma all at once often making it difficult to change with one decision or in a short period of time.

In sports, when a team gets down by a considerable score, it’s almost always over.


Several years ago, the Philadelphia Flyers hockey club faced elimination from the semi-final round in The Stanley Cup Playoffs.  The Boston Bruins won three games and all they had to do was win one more to advance to the finals.

The Flyers did what only a handful of professional sports teams have ever done – come back to win a best of seven series when they were down 0-3.   Their coach, Peter Laviolette simply asked his players to win just one game.

And when they did, one turned into two.  Two into three and miraculously, they won the fourth to win the series and advance to the finals.


And that’s the secret.

When we’re down and out at work, at home, financially, in our personal lives – chip away and try to fix one thing first.


Small steps without discouragement are the way back.

“The elevator to success is out of order.  You’ll have to use the stairs one step at a time” – Joe Girard

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Over the weekend a friend told me the story of a man who chased another man into a department store, pinned him to the ground and proceeded to bang his head against the floor mercilessly.

A do-gooder tried to get him to stop the beating but it continued.

He then warned the man that he had a firearm and that if he didn’t stop smashing this man’s head against the ground, that he was going to shoot him which he did and the man died.

But every picture doesn’t always tell the true story, as my friend pointed out.

Turns out the dead man was punishing the perpetrator he chased down who killed his wife and raped his young daughter.  In other words, the wrong man was shot.

We all alarmingly live our lives based on assumptions rather than fact.

A fact is something that can be observed and verified. 

Friendships are lost because of assumptions.

People are marginalized because of assumptions.

Even our own lives are lived based on what we assume we want to do for a living, who we want to be with and how we want to spend our time – not always the real reasons.

I share this story because it is fresh in my mind and hopefully will serve as a reminder of the great price we pay for acting on assumptions that we make instead of facts that we verify.

“To assume is to presume” – Jude Morgan

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Hall of Fame hockey goalie Bernie Parent is getting to be as good stopping worry as he was stopping pucks.

Here is Parent’s secret for living in the moment:

“I’d like to call myself a spontaneous person. When it feels right, I do it, at that very moment. Do you know what I don’t do? I don’t plan vacations a year ahead of time. The present moment enables you to enjoy what life is all about. Capture it, and let it captivate you. Slow down and enjoy your surroundings, nature, your family and friends, your health, and most importantly, yourself.

“If you start to worry about things that may happen 15, 20 years down the road, then your thinking shifts. You’ll constantly be worrying about your investments, health, etc. You’ll be living in fear. And the only way to walk away from this is to remove yourself from your own imagination and the uncertainties that you’ve created, and focus on this very moment”.

We prepare for the future with forethought.

We start worrying when it becomes fear thought.

We work to pay off our college loans and then a mortgage with car payments along the way.  It’s always something in the future.

We try to control as much as we can in life until, if we’re lucky, we discover that we can control virtually nothing.  The secret is letting go.

“The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it.”
 ― Eckhart Tolle
 

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Sounds like a big promise – too big to keep – but there is a valuable way to have confidence on demand when you need it most.

Here’s the secret.

Often times we forget about what we have done well or accomplished, but have very little trouble remembering that which we have done wrong, our failures.

So when we need to be at our confident best, what do we do?  Recall those vivid failures that keep haunting us.  The disappointments that are so vivid we can bring them back alive in a nanosecond.

Try this instead.

I keep mental IOU’s for little successes I have had that could boost my confidence when I need it most.  They are in my head or on my iPhone.

Example:  I had never published a paid website, but I had succeeded at programming a radio station.  So when I decided to invest in Internet publishing, I called in an IOU from a past success to give me a shot of confidence on demand.

Better yet, small IOUs are as good as big ones.  Really.

Helping to plan your best friend’s wedding is an IOU that comes in handy when you’re thrown a new challenge at work. 

Confidence is confidence.  File it and use it later.

In the end, this is our new mantra for gaining confidence on demand. 

Repeat after me:

“I’ve done it before so I can do it again”.

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