You probably haven’t noticed I was depressed recently. I hope this post will help you.
Despite what many think my ranting has a dual purpose. To be authentic. To help you as well as myself. We have far too many shallow people. I am a smart man but I'm working out my life as I go along just like you. The last two months have been the most traumatic of my life. I married the love of my life only to awaken one morning with her having absconded with everything I had owned. Everything!! By the time I entered my office that morning she had not only left with everything she had changed her Facebook status as well. She took more than things. My hard earned reputation. Emptied my bank and PayPal accounts. Literally everything. And worst cheated on me. So, here is the point to this personal, very painful story.
I went into a state of depression which you would not have known. Wondering what did I do wrong. Where could I have been better. I worked hardest on myself not her. I forgave her. Then I went back to work. So, here is why you should listen carefully. All change comes from the inside out. And, if love or a business does not work out, you open the blinds, and go back to work on every area of your life. Just like I did. Because my friend, it takes guts not stupidity for me to write this. If I can rise above what has happened to me, so can you. Whatever you are going through I understand you. You will be just fine. Now stand up into the light.
Monday, September 24, 2012
How My Depression Can Help You Turn Your Life and Business Around - Jim Woods
Sunday, September 23, 2012
Friday, September 21, 2012
Who Were You Meant to Be? - Cheryl Richardson
Everyday WISDOM
“My spiritual growth started when I was around 42,” Louise Hay began. “I had been married to a delightful Englishman who had given me the opportunity to learn the social graces, manners, and ways of operating in the world that had been missing from my childhood. I grew up in a violent family, and we never went anywhere or did anything. I ran away from home at 15, and while I did learn survival skills, I had no skills for living well in the world. So, when I married this man who was very worldly and had the best of manners, I learned a lot from him. We did all sorts of wonderful things together, and just as I was telling myself that good things can last and we’d probably be together forever, he told me he wanted a divorce. I was shattered.”
My goodness, that must have been awful, I told her.
“Yes. My husband was a prominent person, and our divorce was all over the newspapers. It was a very painful time because I immediately told myself, ‘See, once again, you can’t do anything right.’ But when I look back now, I see that the marriage was an important door that needed to close in order for me to move toward the next step on my pathway. If I had not been divorced, I would never have become this Louise Hay. Instead, I would have stayed the dutiful little English wife—a very good wife according to my concept of it, but not who I was meant to be. It was time for it to end.”
As I listened to Louise, I thought about the classic wake-up call, the often-abrupt and unexpected rupture that can occur in a comfortably numb life. I certainly had my share of these before I finally started to wake up—gut-wrenching heartbreaks, the shame of being fired from a job, and a real fire that destroyed our family business. In fact, it was that fire that ultimately brought me out of my deep sleep and planted me firmly on the spiritual path.
“It was a year later, after dealing with the loss of my marriage, that a new door opened,” Louise continued. “I had a friend who invited me to a lecture at a Church of Religious Science in New York. She asked me to join her because she didn’t want to go by herself. I agreed, but when I arrived, she wasn’t there. I was left to decide whether or not to attend by myself, and I decided to stay. So there I was, sitting in this lecture, when I heard someone say, ‘If you are willing to change your thinking, you can change your life.’ While it sounded like a small, tiny statement, it was huge to me. It caught my attention.”
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I asked her why she thought that was, and she admitted that she didn’t know. “I have no idea why it caught my attention because I was a person who never studied anything. I remember having a friend who kept trying to get me to go to the YWCA for classes, and I wasn’t interested. But something about this subject spoke to me at that time, and I made a decision to go back. I can now see the perfection in my friend not showing up. If she had, I probably would have had a different experience. You see, everything is perfect.”
Everything is perfect. When Louise said this, I realized that hearing that phrase is like hearing that everything happens for a reason. It’s a tough message to swallow when faced with tragedy or deep pain of any kind. But, by training ourselves to see the perfection in our most difficult moments—a perspective that, at first, can only be seen in hindsight—we learn to trust Life. We come to understand that, while we might not like a certain outcome, Life may be leading us in a new, more appropriate and beneficial direction.
Everything happens for a reason or Everything is perfect are beliefs born from a decision to see life as a schoolroom. When we choose to become a student of life who learns and grows from his or her experience, everything does, in fact, happen for a reason. In this way, we make our most difficult moments mean something by using them to our spiritual advantage.
Cheryl Richardson is the New York Times best-selling author of Take Time for Your Life, Life Makeovers, Stand Up for Your Life, and The Unmistakable Touch of Grace.
Wednesday, September 19, 2012
Staying Thankful - Wayne Dyer
It’s my contention that the universe not only will, but must provide you with what you conceive of. So if you complain about what’s missing from your life—including the money that you believe to be in short supply—you’ll be offered experiences that match that energy. When you say, “I love my job, but I’ll never get rich at it,” you’re aligning with a frequency that will give you what you think. This is why, I believe, the rich often get richer . . . it’s certainly been true for me since I left poverty behind me some 60 years ago.
By staying focused on what I intend to create, by believing that the universe is all-providing, and by knowing that I’m worthy of the unlimited beneficence of the Source of being, I just keep attracting prosperity to me. And by being unattached to what shows up, which means that I have no desire for more and more, I’m able to let it go easily. What remains a mystery to so many remains a simple truth to me.
Stay in a state of gratitude, and let the awesome yet unexplainable Tao proceed to do nothing and yet leave nothing undone. Rather than asking for more—which implies shortages and, therefore, creates a vibrational match to more shortages—focus on what you have and how thankful you are for everything that has shown up in your life. Continue .....
Friday, September 14, 2012
How I Overcame Depression and Failure - Jim Woods
You probably haven’t noticed I was depressed recently. I hope this post will help you.
Despite what many think my ranting has a dual purpose. To be authentic. To help you as well as myself. We have far too many shallow people. I am a smart man but I'm working out my life as I go along just like you. The last two months have been the most traumatic of my life. I married the love of my life only to awaken one morning with her having absconded with everything I had owned. Everything!! By the time I entered my office that morning she had not only left with everything she had changed her Facebook status as well. She took more than things. My hard earned reputation. Emptied my bank and PayPal accounts. Literally everything. And worst cheated on me. So, here is the point to this personal, very painful story. I went into a state of depression which you would not have known. Wondering what did I do wrong. Where could I have been better. I worked hardest on myself not her. I forgave her. Then I went back to work. So, here is why you should listen carefully. All change comes from the inside out. And, if love or a business does not work out, you open the blinds, and go back to work on every area of your life. Just like I did. Because my friend, it takes guts not stupidity for me to write this. If I can rise above what has happened to me, so can you. Whatever you are going through I understand you. You will be just fine. Now stand up into the light. Jim WoodsThursday, September 6, 2012
How to Sink a Startup - Entrepreneurship Strategies - Gary Emmons
When Noam Wasserman (HBS MBA 1999) spent his MBA summer internship working for a VC firm, he observed important universalities in the decisions that founders faced. He also saw that the "fundamental implications of those decisions were getting the startups into trouble down the road." That's when Wasserman realized that he wanted to learn more about the dilemmas inherent in launching ventures. He returned to HBS, first to earn a PhD (in 2002) and then as a professor, dedicating his research to the pitfalls of founding and how to avoid them.
Based on a decade of research, Wasserman's new best-selling book, The Founder's Dilemmas: Anticipating and Avoiding the Pitfalls That Can Sink a Startup, draws on data gleaned from nearly 4,000 high-potential startups and 10,000 founders, while incorporating case studies and anecdotes about the follies and triumphs of prominent entrepreneurs such as Tim Westergren of Pandora and Evan Williams of Twitter. YouTube cofounder and former CEO Chad Hurley has called the book "an invaluable alternative to real-world trial and error."
A past recipient of the HBS student-voted award for teaching excellence, Wasserman developed and teaches the popular MBA elective Founders' Dilemmas. In 2011, the course was named one of the top entrepreneurship courses in the United States by Inc. magazine.
Read an excerpt from The Founder's Dilemmas: Anticipating and Avoiding the Pitfalls That Can Sink a Startup
Garry Emmons: What's a common instance of ill-advised behavior by entrepreneurs?
Noam Wasserman: Splitting equity with your cofounders is a prime example. My data, drawn mostly from high-tech and life-science startups, show that 73 percent of teams decide on terms in the venture's first month, and the majority finalizes the split at that point. But there's a real danger in splitting equity too soon and setting it in stone. It is inevitable that change will come to the venture and the founding team, putting that early split into disarray and imperiling the team. Splitting equity early can be valuable in maintaining team stability when a venture is just launching, but devising a static split doesn't properly reflect the fluid nature of startups.
My research also shows that 33 percent of startups split 50-50, usually when the team is splitting early. In these cases, the founders are assuming that every member is equally valuable and will continue to be as the venture grows, or they are avoiding a serious conversation about the split. Such an arrangement ignores life's vicissitudes and a venture's changing business requirements. Imposing vesting terms on themselves and their cofounders can offer some protection for founders and the venture.
Q: "Rich vs. King" is a concept that you've introduced to the venture lexicon. Please explain it and give an example of how it affects decision-making.
A: At almost every stage of a startup's evolution, founders face a tension between attracting the resources needed to maximize the venture's value and maintaining control of the enterprise—what I call the Rich vs. King dilemma.
Rich vs. King is central for two reasons. First, data that I analyzed with Dr. Tim Butler of HBS and that I detail in the book show that Rich and King dominate the top motivations of entrepreneurs. Second, at key forks in the road, Rich options directly conflict with King options. For example, on the one hand, founders who do not raise money risk handicapping their venture if money dwindles or dries up completely. On the other hand, founders who accept funding risk losing control of their venture since there's almost always an amount of control that founders relinquish in exchange for funding. That's why founders need to understand which one is most important to them, so they can make the best decisions for themselves at those critical junctures.
Q: But for a novice founder, wouldn't having an experienced VC as a board member be a good thing?
A: Not necessarily. The Rich founder should pursue the best VCs, but the King founder should think seriously about avoiding VC funding and finding other ways to learn about the road ahead. Each type of founder has a different definition of success and varying degrees of outside influence they will and should tolerate. A Rich founder whose firm is lacking in human capital, experience, and capital may benefit greatly from a VC's experience, contacts, and financial resources. A downside is that VCs often will be inclined toward courses of action that a King founder might not like.
Also, it's important to remember that in the key areas of relationships, roles, and rewards—the "Three Rs" of momentous early choices made within the founding team—many decisions come at the outset, often before any mentors are involved. In the pre-mentor phase, founders should prepare as we do in the classroom, learning about the fateful decisions ahead and where each choice is likely to take them.
Q: What do you hope readers will take away from the book?
A: Awareness of the road ahead, matched by an awareness of who they are as entrepreneurs. Knowing one's strengths, weaknesses, and motivation is critical to making the right decisions. Armed with awareness, founders will be better equipped to anticipate and respond to the many decision points along their journeys, beginning with when-to-found considerations and moving into idea generation, building the team, finding financing, and ultimately culminating with their exits.
What I'm really trying to do is to get founders to understand how early decisions can enable or inhibit them from achieving their goals.
Garry Emmons is senior associate editor of the HBS Alumni Bulletin, where this article first appeared. via hbswk.hbs.edu
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How to Overcome Performance Anxiety - Tamara Chansky
"Whenever you do a thing, act as if all the world were watching." — Thomas Jefferson
Yikes. Is that a solution, or the DSM-IV definition of social anxiety disorder?
The house lights dim, the stage is dark save for one spotlight, the kind that follows your every move. You stand up to your moment — your big moment — to make a difference. OK, so maybe you're just standing up to order your morning coffee. But the words fail you, your tongue ties, and in a fury you find that your jumbled mind has just ordered the nonexistent: double decaf lafté... No! No!, I mean, I meant latté! Double decaf latté! The crowd laughs wildly (in your head). Zap! That made-a-mistake feeling stays with you for hours. Meanwhile, the imagined audience, who never really noticed in the first place, has moved on to other business of the day, in which, shockingly, you do not play a starring role.
This is good news.
The humble and highly reassuring fact that we should be brushing our teeth with three times a day is that no one cares. Not in that way. Now, if you instead had stumbled and dropped that double decaf "lafté," people would have swooped in to help. Fact is, once you make it past middle school, people mostly care in good ways, in the ways we need. People aren't on the sidelines judging our lives with the clipboard and whistle, and neither should we. Mistakes, hiccups, guffaws, even awkward silences are the order of the day. At any given moment they are happening to millions across the globe. It's not personal, not a deep, permanent flaw: It's just part of being alive.
So, with apologies to Mr. Jefferson: We are the ones who perpetuate the unhelpful view that we are on display and that all the world is watching. But we don't have to. We can instead choose to duck out from under the stage lights and realize that the idea that life is a high-stakes performance exists only in our own heads. And nota bene, if we do insist on focusing on what the audience is seeing rather than focusing on what we're doing, well, chances are we might actually not do as well. You can't be on stage and in the audience at the same time, time travel being what it is these days.
Whether it's "order panic" that beleaguers you, or performances with a higher degree of difficulty, maybe even those with actual audiences who have bought tickets or are missing episodes of Mad Men to see you, know two things: First, you are not alone. Public speaking tops the charts from every fear survey since the beginning of number-crunching time. Second: These moments don't have to be terrible, and could even be enjoyable if you heed one important detail. From athletes to virtuosos, making peace with your audience inevitably comes down to one thing: forgetting they are there. Except at the end, with the applause, at which point, your eyes and your heart should open wide.
Public speaking and other performance situations can breed fear in the hearts of the most decorated men and women, and can set those decorated hearts racing. But the moments that we dread are usually ones that we are supremely qualified to handle, if only the amygdala (the hub of the brain's fight-or-flight system) in an effort to protect us from threat, wasn't actually creating more of it by holding our minds and tongues hostage.
It's not the situation that's the problem — the task is easily in your range. The problem is your overzealous worry system that has you gearing up for an attack.
How do we turn off the alarms and do our best work? Whether we are asking where the bananas are at the supermarket, asking someone out on a date, or singing Puccini, remember that this isn't about performing and being judged, it's an opportunity to connect on the most basic level. And that's what we all want. And that's what we all do.
Here are five strategies to not let your amygdala ruin your day.
Stay in Your Time Zone: The Present: What's the best use of your time, 15 minutes of catastrophizing or 15 minutes of planning to succeed? When you have an upcoming event, don't project into the future doing the preview and cringe of worst case scenarios that aren't likely to happen, stay in the here and now and do your job. Try something novel, focus on what you actually need to do right now to make things turn out better: practice, get advice, get sleep. This is what athletes do. Putting on their game face doesn't mean focusing on winning or losing, it's warming up, concentrating on their feet, their swing, or their form. So stay in the present and give yourself the gift of being prepared, not scared.
Think Process Not Perfect: When we do an event-in-review in our minds, we freeze frame on what we wish we'd done better or differently, and completely overlook the overall impression we've made based on all those (forgettable to us) moments that worked out just fine. Not every moment is a standalone spot-check of our self-worth. Lower the stakes, not the standards. We aren't judged by single snapshots; we all have those moments that are less than flattering, but we are more than that. The feature-length films of our lives contain the good, the bad, and the ugly, and that total package adds up to something pretty great.
What's Your Mission? How do we forget about the critic? Refocus on why you're there in that moment. So you're going to your first Al-Anon meeting and dreading the introduction. Remember, big picture is that you're there to get support. And the people you're talking to want to give it. Or, at a job interview, anchor yourself with truly what you can see draws you to the job and what you'd have to offer. Giving a fundraising presentation to a parent group? Don't get hung up on the particular choice of words, focus on the meaning — that's the message. Nothing burns through panic like purpose.
Think the Best of Your Audience and Focus on the Best, Too: OK, let's say you can't forget that your audience is there. Fine. But if that's the case, then remember who they really are. Chances are they are not hungry wolves waiting to attack you, given the fact that they want or need to hear what you have to say. Yes, there will always be the grumpy person here and there, but not every bell tolls for thee. The guy snoring in the front row is tired. The cranky, know-it-all guy in the fourth row was that way before you came along, and will continue to be that way long after you pack up and head home. So as you are looking out at the sea of faces, make good choices. Fix your gaze on the smiling faces who are nodding their heads in agreement or tapping their feet to your beat, rather than the ones that are shaking their heads or busying themselves with their Blackberries.
Finesse the Flaws: I'm OK, You're OK: A grade-school music teacher conveyed one of the most basic lessons of life, as often happens in those tender years: If you make a mistake during a performance, as long as you don't jump up and down pointing to yourself accusingly and have your facial expression or gestures say in so many words "That was me!" then the audience will not even notice. Beyond that, as adults, we can learn how to finesse a mistake to our advantage: Find a humorous excuse and join with your audience rather than seeing them as the madding crowd, say: "Let's try that again," or, "Oh — this could be a very unfortunate moment, let's all pretend that didn't happen, OK?" Then keep going, and people will see what a cool, well-adjusted person you are who knows full well that a small glitch or stumble over words barely scratches the surface of your vast, limitless self-worth. Or, if you're not quite up for that interpretation, know that you will have totally faked them out. Bravo! Well done.
This concept of leading the way through a mistake was demonstrated to me, unforgettably, a few years ago at a rock concert. Russian-born singer-songwriter Regina Spektor was performing at the Electric Factory, a gritty venue for diehard fans in Philadelphia. In the middle of an amazing show, Regina suddenly forgot the words to the song she was singing. Without missing a beat, she gestured the microphone out to the audience and we were more than happy to fill in. No one was judging Regina at that moment, I'm pretty sure we all felt like her new best friend. Not wanting to merely leave it at Wow, that was a close call!, Regina took that moment to a new destination. At the end of the song, she said, "This is so exciting! I made the biggest mistake of my tour... in PHILADELPHIA!!" The crowd went wild. Yes we were watching, and by dint of a few forgotten lyrics, we all connected in that moment, and it was even more sublime.
©Tamar Chansky, Ph.D., 2012, Previously published on Huffington Post
Do You Control Your Thoughts? - Anupam Kher
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Do You Control Your Thoughts?
The answer is yes!
Your life is not hopeless as there are many things that make life worth living. The point is: where do you wish to focus? On the half-empty glass or the half-full glass?
Thoughts are a double-edged sword. They are the foundations for the creative process and they are also the basis for turning our mindsets negative and even destructive. It is the same mind that creates the eternal art of Leonardo da Vinci, the mathematical genius of Albert Einstein and also the madness of Adolf Hitler.
It is now estimated that, on an average, 60,000 thoughts cross our minds every day. The sad part is that most of us have no control over our thoughts. One of the best attributes of a thought I have heard is that it is like mercury: you can never catch it! I think it is pretty much obvious why we should have some control over our thoughts; unless we do, we become their slave. The finest logical deduction I have read about how thoughts shape our destiny is by His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama. He says:
Take care of your Thoughts because they become Words.
Take care of your Words because they will become Actions.
Take care of your Actions because they will become Habits.
Take care of your Habits because they will form your Character.
Take care of your Character because it will form your Destiny.
And your Destiny will be your Life!
I don’t think there is anything more to be said on this topic after you have read, and absorbed, this simple elegant truth by one of the greatest spiritual masters of our times.
There is, however, one aspect of the thought process on which I wish to comment. It is the link between thoughts and depression, a syndrome that is endemic these days. The causes of depression are myriad but they get worsened by our recurring negative thoughts, which ensnare us.
Some of us have the ability to rationalize any untoward incident, but a large number cannot, and get sucked into depressive thoughts, which at the very worst, can virtually paralyze them. That antidepressants are among the largest selling pharmaceuticals only reflects how rampant depression is in our rootless societies where the anchor of a joint family system has been yanked out.
So, how does one try to control thoughts? One way to control anger is to count backwards from fifty to zero. Another method is to try to recall the happy moments of your life. Like memories of your childhood, the beautiful sunset that you last saw, the tender moments with your mother or the touch of your loved one.
It is not just enough to think of these as visuals; you should also feel these moments. If you do so, you will realize that your fit of depression is momentary. Your life is not hopeless as there are many things that make life worth living. The point is: where do you wish to focus? On the half-empty glass or the half-full glass?
Anupam Kher has a repertoire of over 450 films in a career spanning more than 25 years. He has also built up a formidable reputation as a motivational speaker and theatre actor. via healyourlife.com
