BUFFY THE LIFE SLAYER

I was examining the "table readings" provided by a cutesy, theme restaurant. Among the color pictures of desserts the size of which do not exist in the real world and the variety of beers offered so you will not realize how short changed you're getting on dessert, was a rather curious card which read:

"I am EMPOWERED to make sure that you ESCAPE FROM THE EVERYDAY.
If you need anything just ask!"

This preprinted 3 X 5 card was signed by Buffy, the waitress.

Do you really need to "escape from the everyday?" Even if you think you do, do you really believe Buffy could do it for you? If she could, who empowered her to make your life more exciting?

"Everyday" is what makes up your life. Every big and important or little and inconsequential thing you do added together equals the sum total of your existence. Why would you want to "escape" from that which makes you up?

Buffy, stick to apologizing for the desserts.

Lesson: Without everything that has happened in your life, you'd be someone else.

PERSPECTIVE

Remember the last time you dug a ditch 100 feet long, one foot deep?


My ditch went from a shed to a fence at the lot line. Ten minutes of digging, followed by one minute of rest. Ten digging, one resting. After about 3 repetitions of the preceding, I looked toward the fence and it seemed, if anything, to be getting further away.

Do any of your life's goals, when concentrating on them, seem to be getting further away? We're told to focus on our goals, to visualize accomplishing all we want, and to imagine how we will feel when we have what we want. When we do concentrate, focus, visualize and imagine, we drop to our knees in frustration over how far we have yet to go.

After two more repetitions in my quest to dig to the distant fence, I put down the shovel. I expelled a big sigh and out of the corner of my sweat stung eye, I caught a glimpse of the shed, my starting point, which was now further away from me than the fence was.

Lesson : Don't be discouraged about how far you have to go; look at how far you have come.

GOAL FEVER

Do you get really frustrated when somebody tells you that the way to attain all of your personal and professional objectives is to set effective goals?

It aggravates me because I believe I set effective goals. My goals are written, definitive, committed to and environmentally acceptable. Yet I don't always get what I want. I should, shouldn't I? I follow all the rules.

Don't all politicians enter the race with the goal of winning? Don't you strive to accomplish your work goals? Don't you enter tennis or golf matches with the goal of winning?

During the opening ceremony of the '92 Summer Olympics, swimmer Ron Karnaugh's father died. Ron committed to swim in his father's memory. When it was Ron's time to race, he wore his father's hat in the pool area, looked up to the sky as if to ask his dad for some additional inspiration, dove into the pool and finished sixth.

I've discovered over the years, as I'm sure Ron did on that Olympic-sized day, that I can set all the goals I want but if there are five swimmers faster than I am, I lose.

To avoid frustration and aggravation, consider this statement: A true goal is a commitment to accomplish some worthwhile outcome that is WITHIN YOUR CONTROL.

This doesn't mean you should not envision and aspire to accomplish desired results out of your specific control. It's important for you to have a direction and focus. But it's also important for your own emotional health and well being to recognize the level of influence you really exert over certain goal attainment.

Maybe there is a need for two different levels of goals?

Level One Goals — goals you strongly influence by your own actions. For example: finishing college, learning a foreign language, running in a marathon.

Level Two Goals — goals you influence by your actions but the ultimate decision as to whether the goal will be accomplished rests with somebody or something else. For example, sales objectives, games, politics, winning a marathon, etc.

Attaining Level Two Goals is certainly desirable, but remember a completed level two goal will always be the successful attainment of a series of Level One goals, with a dash of luck thrown in. Life is enough of a challenge without whipping yourself over results that are not within your direct control.

Lesson:  It's useless at best and frustrating at worst to set a goal whose outcome depends on something outside oneself.

THE ANTI COACH

It was third down, two yards to go for a first down at our opponent's ten yard line. We (St. Patrick High School) were on a roll. I was playing fullback on that memorable Sunday afternoon. (The afternoon was memorable because we were on our way to a touchdown. This touchdown could win the game for us and winning was a unique occurrence for the St. Pat's Shamrocks back then.) The coach called all the shots and sent in the halfback with the play the coach felt could get us the touchdown and salvage some degree of respectability, not to mention his job. The halfback joined us in the huddle with the play. The coach, in all his wisdom, had called my number, I was going to carry the ball.

Just before we broke the huddle, the halfback leaned over to me and provided the coaches words of encouragement, which you are unlikely to find on a motivational poster, Coach said. "whatever you do, don't fumble." To this day the ball has not been located, and I picked up the name "Cinderella" because I missed the ball.

Golfers, do you ever say to yourself, "O.K. duffer, whatever you do, do not put this ball in the water." Then you tee up an old scuffed, scratched, oblong, "water ball" just to give validity to your pessimism.

"Whatever you do don't say anything about the big bump on Aunt Martha's nose." A sure way to get into a nose bump discussion with Aunt Martha.

Our minds cannot focus on the opposite of an idea. You can't focus on not doing something. You do a major disservice when you tell yourself or others what NOT to do. Focus on what you want to see happen, not on what you do not want to see happen

This positive focus is not only important when dealing with ourselves, look what happens when we focus on what we don't want others to do. Since I'm already on the football coaches manure list I'll just dig myself in a little deeper.

While playing football in college, the coaches took movies of each game. (This was B.V.-- Before Video.) They took movies to "help us become better players." The way our coaches conducted those session they worked in much the same way as the electric chair helps convicted murders become better citizens.

I remember one game in particular. The camera focused on an opposing player running around end, and as luck would have it, yours truly was the only one between the runner and a sizable gain. I never had the quickest reflexes even so, I felt pretty good about myself and my abilities--until exposed to a little help from my coaches.

The camera was able to isolate just the runner and me. He faked; I bought it, put a great tackle on where he used to be and, in compliance with the law of gravity (which had just been enacted), settled in a cloud of dust. It was all natural turf in those days. The camera caught every agonizing moment of that play.

(Anybody who has ever played in a sport where movies or video tapes were taken by the coaching staff, knows what is coming.) At the next practice session, when the coach came to the part of the movie where the tackle was missed, he showed the play, rewound it, showed it again, rewound it, showed it again, and rewound it for what seemed like half of my life. All the time he was telling me, and anyone else who would listen, while also reinforcing my "failure" visually, what a lousy tackler I was.

What had my coach accomplished? Did I see myself as a "tackler" or a "non-tackler" when I left the meeting? I was just coached for a whole hour on how not to tackle!

Sports are an easy way to demonstrate the negative effect of focusing on what you don't want to happen, but its not the only way.

I'm sure many of you remember Karl Wallenda, the founder and father of the famous high wire act, the Flying Wallendas.

I'm also sure it would surprise Karl to find his tale being told around the campfire in many personal-improvement training programs. His story is called, curiously enough, the Wallenda Factor.

The Wallenda Factor, as reported, goes something like this. Prior to his death in 1978, according to his wife, the lovely and talented Mrs. Wallenda Factor, all Karl thought about was falling. He obsessed over the wire, the winds and the whatevers. While that line of thinking does not sound unusual or unwarranted, it could be fatal. Because as we have said there's no future in focusing on what we don't want to have happen. For Karl that turned out to be literally true.

Focusing on falling was probably not the best thing for Karl to think about before boosting himself 75 feet in the air over downtown San Juan, Puerto Rico.

The obvious, yet often ignored, point of the WF is if you get what you think about most, why would you think about what you don't want?

Do you define major portions of your life by what you're against?


Lesson:  Focusing your energy on what you don't want to happen not only doesn't work, but doesn't leave much energy for what you do want to happen.

BUCK,BUCK,BUCKET

I believe you get up each morning and pick up your personalized "stress bucket." As you go through the day your bucket gets full. When your bucket is full, what do you do? You dump your bucket.

Mature people have a healthy, productive way of dumping their buckets. They exercise, laugh, meditate, garden or breathe deeply. Immature people simply dump their buckets into someone else's bucket.

Immature people are those people who call a meeting, burst through the door like crazy persons yelling, screaming, and exit feeling so much better. But the immatures leave a room full of people so uptight those attending the meeting won't be able to exhale for a week.

You see the immatures at work, on the highways in the grocery stores and in the airports taking it out on whomever. They dump, feel temporarily better, move on and leave a trail of stressed people strewn in their wake.

Not only do the immatures come off like spoiled children, they are also ineffective. The reason dumping one's buckets into another's doesn't work in the long run was best explained by that distinguished philosopher Forrest Gump. In the movie of the same name, Forrest's friend was throwing rocks in anger at her old house. Forrest looked at her and Gumped: "Sometimes there's not enough rocks."

Lesson:  Your stress is like a boomerang -- it's useless to toss at anyone else.