“My life is the complete opposite of everything that I want it to be.”

Jerry says, “Since all of your instincts are wrong, then the opposite must be right.”

George immediately realizes that this is a great idea. So, instead of ordering his usual lunch, he orders something totally different. Suddenly a beautiful woman turns to look at him. Now, instead of relying on his usual unsuccessful pick-up technique of pretending to more wealthy or more sophisticated than he is, George simply says:

“Hi. I’m unemployed and I live with my parents.”

She looks at him with a big smile, and answers in a sultry voice. “Hello.”

Later, George takes the woman to a movie. Sitting behind them are two tough looking men who are speaking loudly and kicking their seats. Instead of his normal reaction of shrinking in fear, George stands up and tells them to shut up. Stunned by this direct response, the men cower. Later, George has a chance interview with George Steinbrenner. Instead of trying to flatter him, George confronts Steinbrenner, telling him off for doing a lousy job with the team, and Steinbrenner immediately hires him. Now, with a beautiful girlfriend, new-found confidence, and a dream job, George realizes the power of his new strategy.

George’s new life happened because he identified routine patterns of thought and behavior that don’t work, and found a new way of being that allows for growth, freedom and prosperity. His path to growth includes four essential steps:

1. Objectively look at your situation and, without blame or guilt, acknowledge that there’s a problem. When we do this, new opportunities appear that we could not have imagined
2. Be honest with yourself and with others about who you are; your inclinations, skills, strengths, and limitations. As George discovered, we are most effective, successful, and charismatic when we are honest about who we are.
3. Act with courage. George tells the two loud men in the movie theater to shut up, even though his natural inclination is to do nothing, or to run away. George found that fearful things shrink when confronted head on; they appear to be threatening thugs but are, in reality, just a lot of noise and distraction that dissolve when looked at directly.
4. Speak the truth. George learned that successful people actually want to hear the truth, even when – or especially when -  it is difficult to hear.

As George demonstrated, and as all wisdom traditions tell us, we can choose how we respond to the people and events in our lives, and create new ways of being that bring about positive transformation.

Image by thinkpublic.

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Consider your Circles of Connection.  On whom can you most depend and how?  What can you ask of each other?

Two key, interwoven questions to consider:

• How are you honing your main talent for a more fulfilling life?
• How are you using that talent to be helpful to those in your tribes, your circles of connection?

To practice your greatest talents more often and maximize your value for and with others, visualize a set of circles of relationships, with the strongest connections in your inner circle and the weaker ties further out.  Here are the rewards for picturing them, then the plan for identifying those circles.

First the rewards.  Circles create a context for your life that…

1. Enable you to make wiser choices with …
   • more grace towards yourself and others, and
   • less stress or regret.
2. Equip you to be …
   • less rushed and more focused, and
   • able to accomplish “first things first.”
3. Use your best talents more often to hone them sooner.
4. Provide help that is appreciated and often reciprocated.
5. Collaborate in ways to use best talents  – and benefit all participants.

Now, look at your circles:

In light of your …

• top two goals (one for work and one for life) for 2009.
• two kinds of resources – yours and those you can attract from others.

… what is your “first things first” plan for each month?  What tasks will you do “first thing” each week, each day … each hour?

To become higher-performing and happier – with others, see how you want to involve them in the next chapter of the adventure you want for your life story in 2009.

Picture your personal circles in a more concrete way using Christopher Allen’s helpful template. When done, consider people you’d like to move to a closer circle or further out or add to a circle. How will you make it more likely to happen?

(I add a first category to Allen’s four circles)

1. My Main Friend
   • To whom would you turn first for any kind of help, sympathy, celebration or other need to connect? (How many would not turn to a spouse, other kind of partner or family member first?)
2. The Support Circle
   • Any time, night or day, you can rely on these 3-5 people, some of whom may be kin.
3. The Emotional Circle
   • You can turn to these individuals for sympathy and whose death would be devastating to you. You may have a “non-mutual” emotional connection with them. Many have 10-15 people in this circle yet others have 7 or 20, according to Allen, yet other research shows those numbers are going down.  Increasingly individuals have just 2 to 3 people in this circle.
4. The Trust Circle
   • You have experience with each person in this circle, instances that made you feel you could trust them. You feel strong ties to the 40 to 200 people in your circle.
5. Familiar Strangers
   • People you recognize and they may have heard of you. Individuals here may be a two or three degrees away “friend” such as those who have befriended you at Facebook or LinkedIn because you share a mutual friend or friend-of-friend.  These are weaker ties than those in your Trust Circle yet are also valuable in job-hunting and other needs.

The world is not comprehensible, but it is embraceable.

- Martin Buber

When you finish writing your top two (actionable) goals and then crafting your Circles of Connections, tell me how you would improve this approach – or suggest a better approach to planning for a positive 2009.

What emotional shifts, if any, happened in you as a consequence of this process? Did it help you picture your opportunities? Did you discover a way to be more valuable for yourself – or someone else?

Concluding caveat from Tom Paine, “It is not in numbers, but in unity, that our great strength lies…”

Check these other posts for some additional insights:

• Christopher Allen’s helpful template at www.lifewithalacrity.com.
• Thoughts on weaker ties.

Photo by Daniel.

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Maintaining and growing friendships has become increasingly important to me as I age. In fact, VibrantNation.com, a social networking website dedicated exclusively to women 50+, has recently released a study that reveals that we are of the first generation of women in history whose personal networks at midlife and beyond are actually growing over time. The stereotypes of shrinking connectedness and increasing isolation belong to the women of generations past, clearly not the women of my own Boomer cohort.

In fact, I am often pleasantly surprised by the spontaneous level of intimacy with which women 50+ interact upon chance encounter. For instance, by the time we’ve stood together in line at the women’s room at a concert, we may know each others’ marital status, number and issues with various grown children/grandchildren, health problems and solutions, and so on. Similar exchanges are taking place online everyday at Vibrant Nation as well as on other social networking sites such as Facebook, where women 55+ are the fastest-growing segment.

That said, developing on-going relationships is a new skill for many of us–one I am attempting to learn, the way women newly divorced return to the dating world on shaky legs. This is in part because when I was my daughter’s age, I was too busy liberating workplaces to make maintaining and growing personal friendships a priority. In fact, back then, a good friend was considered to be someone who understood when you had to cancel a social lunch for a business meeting.

Ironically, the inspiring interest in friendships amongst our daughters’ generations can be considered an unintended (but happy) consequence of Women’s Lib. Having earned our older Gen X offspring the nickname “The latchkey generation” is not the part of my generation’s legacy of which I’m proudest. Given how often we were still at work when they came home from school, they turned to one another and the notion of social peer packs was born.

Gen Y, their younger siblings, have taken this even further. They showed us the way to integrate friendship fully into their lives, mostly through the gift of technology, which keeps them connected all the time. Now the friendship equation is reversed: social friends help each other figure out how to make money. For example, my daughter is laying plans to rep her friends’ artistic abilities to ad agencies–a win/win scenario for a generation who, by and large, value their friendships above traditional workplace ambition.

Happily, it is not too late for the women of my generation. committed to making up for lost time, to reach out to others for non-business reasons. We can take a page from our grown daughters to use social networking to keep us connected–and when we do, to remember to put friendships first, professional advancement second.

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Then one day, I got up the courage to go to the dictionary.  The definition of humility I like the best is “a lack of false pride.”  These words gave me permission to see I didn’t have to be better than anyone else.  More difficult to swallow at first was that no one had to be worse than me. All of that was false pride.   If I could start my meeting assuming we were all on equal footing – coming to the table with individual talents and no answers, things got easier and I seemed to become for myself and others, a more delightful person to be with.

Here’s a tip I use to prep for meetings now that makes me feel empowered and no less or more powerful than anyone else:  I concentrate on what I most want to give to this client, or group.  What in my heart of heart do I know is MINE to give – my gifts.   I give very little thought to what I want to get.   I listen for what others have to give as if I am being given the best they have to give and that collectively we’ll come up with the solutions and answers we need.  In the end, I feel I have played “my part” and I am a “part of” the whole.  It is always personally satisfying.  The results are usually terrific.  It makes me happy.  After all, what I am looking truly for is all the joy I can experience.  I love the whole pie.  I’m no longer so interested in just accepting crumbs.

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According to David Holmes’ research up to 40% of the information displayed on MySpace is fabricated. Holmes believes that many people are being brutalised by the online experience of assuming you can trust someone and suddenly finding you cannot. One day you are pouring your heart out to a virtual buddy, and the next this “soulmate” is simply gone.

They got bored, or found someone else, or simply switched off. It is no semantic detail that users often talk of “friending” rather than befriending.

As well, a third of people on social networking sites give false information about themselves, according to emedia. Why all this ‘lying’? They say they are worried about the security of their personal data. Falsification maintains privacy, though of course also undermines the value of social networking sites. Or again, according to recent YouGov research, ten percent of teenagers said they have been bullied online, by being bombarded with instant messages and emails that make their life a misery.

The “casual callousness” of the Internet is partly at work here. Who has clicked ‘Ignore’ on Facebook? Someone contacted you whom you hardly know or even don’t much like. In the real world, such callousness is usually avoided because you can read the signs and avoid the direct confrontation. Online, the issue is forced. You have to give the virtual cold shoulder.

Anyone who has received an email that struck them as blunt understands this reaction. Yet, now that some send a cancellation, a rejection, even a notice of dismissal by email – on the grounds that it is more efficient – the world can seem a little less humane, less friendly.

Online living is deskilling us, found MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle. We are less able to be alone, or manage and contain our emotions. Instead, we are developing new intimacies with machines that lead to new dependencies – a wired social existence, ‘a tethered self’. Paradoxically, online friendship hovers between communication and solipsism.

Yet, for good and ill, the Internet is as much a part of modern friendship as a pint of beer or a phone. The answer is to be wiser not about the Internet but about friendship. What is it, what does it take, what are its perils as well as its promise?

Professor Ray Pahl, for example, studied how people use Blackberrys. He found that they are used to keep people at bay as well as to stay in touch with those they love.

Yet at an experimental village in Canada where all the houses were wired to make getting online as fast as turning on the telly, neighbours physically met up more as a result.

There is a vital difference between apparent friendliness and friendship – and between different kinds of friends, from work colleagues, through people in the pub, to personal soulmateship. Hold onto this hierarchy because if friendship is flattened human life is eroded too. And friendship is what’s most vital for happiness according to Aristotle.

Then the practice of differentiating the kinds of friendships – and deepening them – might begin where we face the greatest “newness” – online. For starters, why not take this Friendship Intelligence Test?

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Conversely, what can bring us down the most – if we let it – is rudeness, indifference, and other negative words and actions from others.

So here is a simple but powerful and transformative – that is, intense – experience for you.

First, make a list of the people you don’t like who impact your life.

This can include those in your professional and personal world, and those in the public eye, who rub you the wrong way or who — if you didn’t believe in kindness and compassion or at least in avoiding jail — you’d flat out enjoy punching in the nose.

Surely a few folks spring to mind.

Consider each person on your list in this regard:

What is it about this person that is worth emulating?

Instead of focusing on their disagreeable qualities, that is, for each person shift your perspective to what their best qualities are … more particularly, to the aspects of their character YOU could learn from and perhaps use more of.

Everyone has something worth emulating. Though certain people may deserve to be jailed or impeached, even they have qualities worth appreciating and emulating.

It is our reactionary egos that are prone to completely trash those who seem to have a negative influence in some way on us.

Our egos are primitive; if somebody strokes them, that somebody is good, and if somebody kicks them, that somebody is bad.

This lingering reaction creates the notion of dislike, or hate, which blocks our mind and heart from focusing on anything but the negative. But by focusing on the negative, we are doing by far the most damage to ourselves.

Honing in on what we don’t like in people won’t change them, but it does make us far less peaceful, productive and happy. It becomes a habit that perpetuates the self-damage. Plus it makes us considerably less attractive to others.

This is not a call to accept being taken advantage of by people; if changes need to occur to avoid those circumstances then by all means do what is ethical to make those changes.

But it IS a call not to let those people – really, your own ego – pull you down into discord where you don’t deserve to be.

The key then is not to let your ego rule, but to try to focus on what is worth emulating in those “unlikeable” people.

And the second step is to extend that practice to daily life.

The next time you encounter someone who seems disagreeable or worse, don’t focus on what makes him or her so lousy. Focus instead on what it is about this person that is worth emulating. Keep striving to do this until it becomes a habit you don’t even need to think about.

You will be quite surprised at how this shift in your perspective reduces your overall anxiety and enables you to achieve more … and achieve it happily.

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In this uncertain economy, many are terrified of the “R” words.  Recession. Reorganisation. Redundancy. Because they are in the news and on our minds, we are more likely to act out of fear.  Scooby Doo, the children’s cartoon dog, madly barks “ruh roh!” when things go wrong.   When feeling fearful, it is easy for us to adopt an upset “ruh roh!” reaction to even small problems especially if there’s a cascading series of them.

Worse yet, next we can fall into feelings of discouragement, hopelessness then disengagement. That dip downwards is contagious, like a billowing dark cloud.  It can pervade entire companies and communities. And a leader’s mood profoundly impacts the team’s performance according to a Harvard Business Review article.  Yes, your mood dramatically affects everyone around you – just more if you are the leader

Yet, as I explain in Gospel of Joy, anyone (perhaps you?) can be a catalyst to ignite the spark of “can do” spirit in a workplace, community organization – or home.  Start by adopting the attitude you want to have today.  That’s mood management. Like fear, joy is contagious. In short, How will you perceive your day?  That’s YOUR choice.

Perceptions drive and affect attitudes and behavior.  Whether it’s marketing a brand, making a relationship work, motivating ourselves to do better, being innovative or creative or making a contribution – how we view our current circumstances is how we create our reality.   Your choice to act resilient lifts others up to emulate it – even when they weren’t intending to feel better.  We are instinctively imitative animals.  That’s why your positively contagious mood becomes a performance enhancer for you and for those around you.

What’s the nourishing mood food to sustain you in sticking to positivity? Gratitude, hope, compassion, listening, cheerful enthusiasm, generosity, forgiveness, laughter, reverence, energy and vitality, love and equanimity.

Are you willing and ready to choose joyful working and living  – with others, you trendsetter you? It just might catch on.

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As a submarine officer, I had plenty of opportunities to see ships tied to the dock, ships in transit in the harbor, and ships in the open sea. All of them have this in common: they are held afloat by the water that is outside the ship.

All ships also share this: they all have water inside them. Water inside a ship can either be disgusting or refreshing.

So, ships have water both inside and outside their hulls, and the balance between them determines the state of the ship.

The disgusting water is normally in the ship’s bilge. Bilge water enters the ship in many ways, most of them small and uncontrolled. Bilge water is unfiltered, uncleaned, and uncontained. It always has oil, dirt, and grime floating in it. Looking at bilge water is nauseating. When a ship has too much bilge water, it will sink.

The refreshing water is contained inside tanks. It enters the ship in a controlled fashion, and it is filtered or distilled to make it clean for use. Ships use this water for cooking, cleaning, showers, and running the engineering plant. This water is cool, clear, and inviting. Ships have a limited capacity for holding refreshing water, but they still hold it.

The water outside the ship always contains a bit of the gunk and grime that makes bilge water so disgusting. It doesn’t contain much of this junk, just enough to make it unfit for direct use by the ship’s crew and engineering plant. Systems in the ship put energy into it to clean it and to make it fit for use. In some cases, these systems take the bad stuff from the incoming water and put it in the bilge for a time until the ship’s crew can pump it overboard in a safe way.

The events, interactions, conversations, and relationships in our lives resemble the water both around and inside a ship.

Like water outside a ship, the things that happen external to us have both good and bad pieces to them. In most cases, the good far outweighs the bad even if it takes work to separate them.

Like the refreshing water inside a ship, we may have to work to separate the good from the bad, and we may have to keep some of the bad with us for a while until we find a healthy way to get rid of it.

Like bilge water, the bad events and interactions with others that we experience look pretty nauseating, and, if we let them build up inside of us, they can sink us. They can sink our attitude, our confidence, our ability to interact positively, and our ability to see events clearly.

The people around us, the relationships we engage in and experience, the situations we face; all combine to either keep us afloat or to sink us. Our outlook, our effort to focus on the good, and our willingness to invest energy into relationships will determine the outcomes we experience. The energy that we invest in these areas lets the refreshing water in and keeps the bilge water out.

Sadly, when we let bilge water fill us, we do not get rid of it in a healthy and controlled fashion. Instead, we spew it on the people around us, and, if they are not careful, it can get inside of them as well.

Two people carrying lots of bilge water will find it difficult to maintain a healthy relationship. So, do your part to build healthy relationships by:

1. Filtering and distilling your experiences to pull the good from the bad,
2. Storing the good inside you, and
3. Finding a healthy way to get rid of the bad.

Just as all the water in the ocean cannot sink a ship if it does not get inside, all the negative in the world cannot sink us or our relationships when we do not let it inside.

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We don’t listen to words. We don’t believe “controlled” facial expressions. Our primal knowing cuts through social masks to feel the fear. Within seconds, we communicate our feelings with each other – intensifying whatever feeling we have. “Some stress is healthy and necessary to keep us alert and occupied,” says researcher, Spencer Rathus. In fact, “Most people do their best under mild to moderate stress,” finds Janet DiPietro, a developmental psychologist at Johns Hopkins University.

Unfortunately, since our brain is wired to help us survive, we feel fear faster, more intensely and longer that any positive emotion. Plus we spread it faster.

Worse yet, research shows that we least like the person in the situation who looks or sounds most unhappy. That’s a downward spiral that isolates the most vulnerable person in the herd while making the rest increasingly upset and reactionary.

That’s why Emotional Freedom author, Judith Orloff believes that “Fear is the mother of all negative emotions.” It is often expressed as anger, blaming or frustration. “Fear renders intelligent people dumb. They are not clear-headed or intuitively in synch enough to make brave decisions,” found Orloff. Consequently, when you first begin to feel fearful or angry, change the channel in your mind. Rather than catastrophizing about the future, focus on your current situation. Your best bet is to immediately:

1. Breathe deeply and slowly, inhale and exhale – even for just a minute.
2. Think of what you can do – even a small thing – towards making the situation better.
3. Take that action, then plan the next one.

In effect, you are viewing the source of your fear as an obstacle not an insurmountable wall. As Nelson Mandela said, “Fear is contagious, so is fearlessness. The sooner you act to change your mood and behavior the less damage you’ll do to yourself or your relationships – and the more options you’ll have.

With practice this three-step Mood Channel Change Habit will become second nature. Inevitably that leads to a happier life with others.

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