Always glad to pass along a terrific quote.

And for readers, you’ll like Roger’s brief audio on the power of “flinching” when it comes to discussing price. Roger tells how a simple flinch made one speaker an extra $1,000 in 15 seconds. Check it out here.

Recently, my little one has been getting into ‘trouble’ more and more often at school. Seems she is now being targeted and labeled as a ‘problem’. You can read the full details on my blog – I left NOTHING out. http://lovethatfeeling.com/blog/what-my-kid-a-juvenile-delinquent/

All I want to say here is that it wasn’t until someone else started picking on my kid that I saw my own reflection!

AH-HA!

We’re hoping that for everyone concerned, we can agree to the fact that there is NO ‘problem’, but rather a wonderful learning experience from which we will all grow. Having an instant family (having no children from my previous 23 year marriage) has already taught me more in the last 4 years than I learned in my 52 pre-child years combined. And it continues daily!

Thanks to both Peter and Charles for sharing your views. My experience confirms your points completely!

Great article as always… in my case, very timely as well. I want to start off by saying kids are definitely the ‘problem’! (especially my little one, as you’ll see in my blog post: http://lovethatfeeling.com/blog/what-my-kid-a-juvenile-delinquent/

I’m human. I can’t throw the first stone because I’m just as guilty as most – if not all parents – at one time or another to blame my kid for making my life miserable. In fact, my little six-year-old can bug the shit out of me every single day… if I let her.

Also, I’m not the “Not-My-Kid” kind of parent.

HOWEVER…

Oops, did I suggest that you’re an old dog, Charles? LOL

Hey, that makes two of us, my good friend! I haven’t even taken my new high-tech phone out of the box. I got it for free when I changed phone plans last fall. My current phone only sings and dances. Apparently, the new phone sings, dances, tells bed-time stories (great for us old insomniacs), and I think I read someplace that it may even pour a drink. So why haven’t I cracked that box open yet?

Well, like you, I’m aware that there is a HUGE learning curve to all the new toys. Heck, up until last week, I only knew how to make my old phone sing (that’s make calls and retrieve voice mail, for those of you who don’t know my warped code). THEN… just on a lark, I got myself to figure out this ‘Text Message’ feature! Now there isn’t a day goes by where Maggie and I don’t throw a fun little jab or two or three at each other via TM. We’re having a ball. Mind you, she’s 12 years my junior, so of course she’ll catch on that much faster, right?

In fact, you’d think she would be teaching me… but NNNNOOOO!!!! See, us old guys can still teach you young whipper-snappers! We’re not ready for the scrap heap quite yet, right Charles?

Anyway, I signed up for the video series on watched the first one. TOP NOTCH QUALITY CONTENT AND DELIVERY as I’ve come to know and expect. That’s why I’ve been on your list since 2001! Looking forward to the rest of the series.

All the best from Toronto,
Russ

Hey, thanks for all the old-dog compliments… I think.

And Russ, I ‘m beaming right now because of your top-notch-content remarks (and if you happen to go out and alert everybody in the known universe to visit the site and watch the videos, that’d be way cool).

…like being a politician!

HOL (howling out loud) – you are warped, dude… and in the best way possible.

I find myself wondering. If there was someone threatening the very life of my wife, or my children, or my grandchildren. What would I do? How far would I go to stop them killing the people who are close to me, the people who I love and respect, the people with whom I have many shared values.

If that threatening someone was absolutely hell-bent on destroying one of those lives at any cost – even at the cost of their own life. Then what would I be prepared to do?

It is not a simple choice of, ‘am I prepared to take a life or not’. It is a question of which life of the two should be taken. It eventually comes down to whether I am prepared to destroy one life to save another.

It is not such an easy decision.

More often than not we delegate that decision to our political leaders. Our political leaders want to be seen as strong and as capable of safeguarding those people that we love, and respect and with whom we share common values. They have that as an additional agenda. It is not enough to be strong and capable, they have a need to be seen as strong and capable.

It is that need to be seen as strong and capable which I think is seen as justification for additional deaths on top of those minimum deaths necessary to safeguard the people we love, respect and share values with. We dissociate ourselves from those extra deaths by calling them collateral damage. It can’t really be helped, can it?

Whilst we delegate our decision making on ‘whether we can destroy one life to save another’ to our politicians, our politicians delegate the safeguarding role to the armed forces. It neatly detaches us ‘normal’ people from the messy end of the safeguarding job. In short ‘we’ don’t have to do the politicians’ violent bidding. The cost is that we don’t have to argue too much if there are a few extra deaths. And we don’t have to look in the face of the threatening someone (or the collateral damage) as the light fades from their eyes.

We ‘normal’ people keep it compartmentalized and… neat.

We do all this to enjoy the luxury of relative safety without the responsibility of making and acting out that dreadful decision.

Sometimes though, responsibility shows us it’s face.

Can you see what it looks like?

Excellent, excellent points. We elect good people and delegate to them the job of managing our country. But when our delegatees begin delegating, and then the delegatees’s delegatees begin delegating, the chain of responsibility grows awfully tenuous. This is made worse because we usually fail to properly supervise all those people. Theoretically we the people are at the top of the power structure, but our chronic lack of attention has created a power vacuum there, so our public servants have filled that vacuum by morphing into public officials. What irony.

And it’s our own damn fault for abdicating in the first place.

http://lovethatfeeling.com/blog/new-meaning-for-a-nickel-bag/

I’m thinking of changing my blog motto to, “The world is a crazy place. Period!”

Well, except for a handful in hiding. Come out, come out, wherever you are!

Russ

This article spawns so many thoughts, each of which I could easily turn into passionate ’soap box’ material. I’ll just throw out some of my bigger ‘ropes’ and hope someone picks up and runs with a ‘thread’.

* I believe the vast majority of the world’s population to be peace-loving people. We live in an ever-shrinking world where people are more awake and aware than ever before of their own personal roles and responsibilities. We can see with our own eyes, and especially our hearts, that ‘THEY’ are the same as ‘ME’… real people who just want to LIVE!

* War is BIG BUSINESS and the world’s leaders are very active and WILLING participants at their citizen’s expense! There ARE better ways to deal with differences. Enough said here.

* This will likely piss off many veterans and their families. My own draft ‘lottery’ number was very high in my year of eligibility so I guess you could say I was lucky. Still, I would have consciously chosen NOT to take part in any ‘war’ games. Peace NEVER comes by attacking/killing a perceived enemy. Peace can only come by attacking/killing the PERCEPTION that there is an enemy.

* Having said that, we all have the right/responsibility to protect and defend ourselves. I believe this is hard-wired into every human being and given a fair chance, the ‘common man’ would easily figure out how to get along with his neighbor if (s)he wasn’t fed a constant stream of ‘enemy’ crap and fear propaganda by their teachers and leaders. Call me naive, but I sincerely believe that ‘John and Jane Everyman’ would rather help than harm. “Let there be peace on Earth, and let it begin with me” is innate in every human being.

Again, these are just a few of my most passionate thoughts. The next time you watch CNN, take your eyes OFF the relatively few tanks and gun-slingers. Instead, focus on vast majority of every-day citizens – communities of people who only desire to live in peace with their families – who are being denied these basic human rights because of the beliefs and decisions of a handful greedy ‘leaders’.

Love and peace to all from Toronto
Russ

These are all excellent points. I don’t think anybody sane questions the right to self defense. The problem comes when we get into so-called preemptive self defense – where we don’t wait to be hit, but strike first because we know the other guy is about to do something drastic. The paranoiac “knows” that other guy is plotting things, but his “facts” may not be fully connected to reality.

And what about managed emergencies such as the one depicted in the movie “Wag the Dog”, where the leaders’ objective is not defense but something else entirely? There are an awful lot of gray areas in real life (as opposed to theoretical discussions).

Now, I’m not much of a pacifist, but neither am I a “shoot-first-and-let-God-sort-them-out” kind of guy. If you or I have something valuable, there will always be somebody who wants to take it away from us. So it’s up to us to keep our wits about us and protect ourselves and those we care for… while we make sure we don’t become the enemy we’re defending against.

As my granddaddy used to say, “Not many easy answers in real life.”

First, I’m the one who tugged on Charles’ sleeve about the photo. And, I agree Charles, adult, mature conversation requires mutual respect (a quality we share). The perhaps trite statement, “we can disagree without becoming disagreeable” IMO, is one foundational block of conscious, healthy relationships.

And, yes, real integrity is a heart-driven quality, and from this place we are able to focus on the personal-ness of relationships.

In teams, there are the two elements of trust and trustworthiness. For me, the place to start is trustworthiness. As Gandhi said, be the change you want to see. If I am trustworthy then often trust of others takes care of itself.

For me, adapting to others who are different from me has to do with my values. If I truly value diversity, then adapting comes more easily. If I am coming from a (often unconscious) fear-based place that internally says, “why can’t others be like me?,” then adapting can be quite a struggle.

Integrity here, for example, is: when it comes to diversity, and I say I value diversity, is there alignment and congruence between what I think, say, feel and do when I’m in a situation that calls for me to walk my value (of diversity) talk? And, if not, what’s getting in the way?

Peace,
Peter

Peter, you bring up an interesting issue. Who we are, deep down inside, is what determines how the entire world relates to us. Being trustworthy ourselves is the best and most powerful place to begin improving our relations with others.

I’m reminded of the Hawaiian doctor who cleared an entire ward of criminally insane patients without ever interviewing any of them, simply by expressing deep, heartfelt apologies within his own mind for seeing them as insane. He changed his image of them within his own heart, and the outer reality shifted to sanity for patients who never even knew what the doctor was doing. Why are we not doing the same every day of the year for every person we know (and know of)?

Further, that question: “Why can’t others be like me?” and its mirror image “Why can’t I be like everybody else?” are the two ugly stepsisters keeping us from living happily ever after. But the day we discover that both of those questions are trick questions, and that there is no rational answer to either of them – that’s the day we receive our open sesame to self esteem and self respect.