Choosing your friends

“Choose your friends based on the health of their character.  It’s the beginnings of disease to expose healthy things to sickness.” – Seneca

What are your friend’s thoughts, habits, ideas and actions?

If you hang out with a dirty person, you are likely to get a little dirty yourself.

Plastic Water Bottles – an Environmental Liability

When I was a kid there was no such thing as bottled water.  Nobody would buy a bottle of water.  I recall when it first came out and thinking about how ridiculous it was – who would spend money on water? 

Somewhere people got the idea that drinking tap water is bad for you.  So Coca-Cola and Pepsi took tap water from Detroit and filtered it and sell it to you at a crazy mark-up (Dasani and AquaFina).  

Many people want to drink water because it’s a lot better for you than sugar drinks – so we buy bottled water for convenience.   

But a bottle of water takes 2000 times as much energy to create (plastic, trucking, handling) than tap water.  And the bottle is an environmental liability forever.  People may drink up to eight 12-ounce containers of fluids a day on average. Imagine that – for one of 8 billion people on earth to satiate themselves for a couple hours, a plastic bottle is produced and discarded on the earth.  That is going to cause a huge problem.   There is an island of plastic floating in the Pacific Ocean the size of Texas!  This is not good!

If you “recycle” your plastic water bottles it will take a lot more energy still.

So, get a water filter (I use a Brita-style pitcher) and metal or glass water bottle and fill them up at home for free, and use them at work, and in your car and everywhere else.  When I go on a plane trip now, on my packing checklist is an empty water bottle.  I go through security and then fill it up at bottle refill stations they have in airports now.

Let’s stop the plastic bottle madness.

You in?

Making Needed Changes

In my work, I coach and train people all the time.  I see some jump at improving themselves or their work, and I see some outwardly or covertly resist change.  The latter often get left behind.

Low performers only change when they have to.  High performers change before they have to.

“If we don’t change, we don’t grow.  If we don’t grow, we are not really living.  Growth demands temporary surrender of security.” – Gail Sheehy

Sometimes we don’t want to change because we are unfamiliar with something new, and while what we are doing now isn’t working well, at least we know it and are comfortable with the routine.  

Often I see people not change because it wasn’t their idea.  The new idea doesn’t match their self-image of who they are. 

Another common reason is that they see any suggested changes as a criticism of what they are doing now and they just dig their heels in to prove they are right and the new idea is wrong or won’t work.  It’s their ego’s default defense mechanism.

“When you are through changing, you are through.” – Bruce Barton

How do you deal with changing what and how you are doing things to get better?

How are you seeing it?

How we see our life, our challenges, and the world makes all the difference.

For example, a study showed that people who see old age as something good (wisdom, joy, liesure) live 7.5 years longer than people who see it as doom (inability, decrepitude, pain).

What about how you see the world and your situation?

“When we change the way we look at things, the things we look at change.” – Wayne Dyer

It's on you

“For those who approve but do not carry out, who are stirred but do not change, I can do nothing at all.” – Confucius, The Analects of Confucius

Your goals and dreams require your action – and lots of it.

Defeat

If we won all the time we wouldn’t learn anything and would not try to get better.

“A defeat may break your heart, but it’s worth it of it opens your eyes.” – Dr. Mardy Grothe

In order to have a breakthrough, something has got to break.

What defeats have you had in your life that, after a bit of time, you realize it made you better?

Kindness

Sharing a smile.  Caring.  Being kind.

Maybe life is not that complicated.

“It is a little embarrassing that, after forty-five years of research and study, the best advice I can give to people is to be a little kinder to each other.” – Aldous Huxley

“Kindness can become its own motive.  We are made kind by being kind.” – Eric Hoffer

“This is my simple religion.  There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy.  Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.” – Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama

Being kind puts a little distance between you and your own problems, and feels good.

Substitution

Everyone has a full schedule.  

Nobody has the capacity to start doing something, adding something to their routine/days, unless they stop doing something else or do less of something else.

So – the process of getting better is substitution.  Stop doing something – or so much of something, and start doing something better.

What will you spend less or no time on from now on and what better activity will you put in its place?

Happy, with problems.

People who have problems but are not dissatisfied with them don’t do anything to get better.

Eventually, those problems cause something really bad to happen.  Then (scared, upset, threatened, angry) people do something.

GoFundMe is not a substitute for good planning, decisions, habits or discipline. 

Are you going to wait for something bad to happen, or do something now?

Your words matter – to YOU.

Are you a victim?  Are you behind?  Are you underperforming?  Are you guilty?  Are you unhappy?  

There is a powerful tool you have, that you may have been misusing against yourself to say.

It’s the words you use to describe your situation.

What words do you use to describe your situation to yourself and others?