E=WELL, EVERYTHING ...The Lost Prudence

Cheerio Christian and Faith

So far we’ve looked at one aspect of mental energy and we’ve looked at an overarching principle that relates to our complete energy system. This week I want to hit on a critical aptitude that relates to our emotional energy: being offended.

I’m watching all around me … and have been for years … and seeing how easily people get offended. Announcing, “I’m offended,” is basically telling the world that you can’t control your own emotions, so everyone else should do it for you. 

Recently, your Mom ran across the following on FB. It shows the unrealistic and unreasonable expectations that people can have when they are on vacation. These are actual complaints received by Thomas Cook Vacations. As you might have imagined, I have been unable to resist the temptation to make comments.

1. "They should not allow topless sunbathing on the beach. It was very distracting for my husband who just wanted to relax."
Comment: Did your husband tell you that he was distracted or were you just jealous of what YOU saw?

2. "On my holiday to Goa in India, I was disgusted to find that almost every restaurant served curry. I don't like spicy food."
Comment: Really? Curry in Indian restaurants. Who knew that all Indian restaurants now serve British cuisine.

3. "We went on holiday to Spain and had a problem with the taxi drivers as they were all Spanish."
Comment: I have had a similar problem in St. John’s Nfld … actually, if the cabbies there spoke Spanish I might have had a better chance.

4. "We booked an excursion to a water park but no-one told us we had to bring our own swimsuits and towels. We assumed it would be included in the price."
Comment: Wow, what decent waterpark doesn’t have every known size and design of swimsuit waiting for lame customers like you?

5. "The beach was too sandy. We had to clean everything when we returned to our room."
Comment: I know right. I’ve found the same thing whenever I’ve gone to the beach. I can give you a list of beaches that are not sandy at all (which, coincidentally, they also have no people because most people are really lame and are actually looking for beaches with sand. Sheesh … go figure).

6. "We found the sand was not like the sand in the brochure. Your brochure shows the sand as white but it was more yellow."
Comment: How unlucky of you to find the very spot where they let the dogs pee. I bet it was whiter 100 metres in either direction.

7. "It's lazy of the local shopkeepers in Puerto Vallarta to close in the afternoons. I often needed to buy things during 'siesta' time -- this should be banned."
Comment: Thank you for your comment. We’ll have one of our agents call you at 3am (hopefully, you aren’t one of those lazy foreigners who only sleeps at night)

8. "No-one told us there would be fish in the water. The children were scared."
Comment: Your children are normal. You, however, are a testament that genetic weakness can rise above natural selection since you have reproduced. Good job!

9. "Although the brochure said that there was a fully equipped kitchen, there was no egg-slicer in the drawers."
Comment: Our deepest apologies. We would have refunded you your entire $3000 for the suite and $4000 for your family’s airfare, however, we have spent it on egg-slicers for all the suites in all of our resorts worldwide. FYI - the egg-slicers will arrive the day after you leave (whenever that is).

10. "I think it should be explained in the brochure that the local convenience store does not sell proper biscuits like custard creams or ginger nuts."
Comment: It’s funny you mentioned that because the previous rendition of our brochure grew to in excess of 10,000 pages because we had meticulously listed every single imaginable thing that the local stores did not carry. When I came on strength as the new manager I suggested that we reduce the brochure to bare essentials so as to not be cost-prohibitive, and instead, offload the responsibility of managing expectations to our clients and provide a simple brochure to all local store owners to warn them about ridiculous clients.

11. "The roads were uneven and bumpy, so we could not read the local guide book during the bus ride to the resort. Because of this, we were unaware of many things that would have made our holiday more fun."
Comment: Our apology. It appears that you were the only one who did not read the introductory material that we sent you, which reads: “Due to the uneven and bumpy road conditions enroute to your resort, you will be unable to read your guide book. We strongly urge you to read it during your flight, rather than sleeping … you can sleep during the bus ride which, because of the uneven and bumpy road conditions, should rock you gently asleep so that you will arrive full refreshed at the resort."

12. "It took us nine hours to fly home from Jamaica to England. It took the Americans only three hours to get home. This seems unfair."
Comment: Actually, we’ve had similar complaints from the Americans who vacation in the Isle of Mann. We have a list of Americans who are prepared to house-swap … but stick to those in Florida because if you pick the ones in Alaska you are pretty much limited to vacationing in Canada’s Yukon territories or northern Russia.

13. "I compared the size of our one-bedroom suite to our friends' three-bedroom and ours was significantly smaller."
Comment: We’ll send a couple of our stewards up with a room-stretcher at 3am, the time when we do all room-stretching. Of course, you will want to be out of your room at that time because it can be a chaotic process.

14. "The brochure stated: 'No hairdressers at the resort.' We're trainee hairdressers and we think they knew and made us wait longer for service."
Comment: With that comment you must truly be trained hairdressers. We have an opening if you need a job.

15. "When we were in Spain, there were too many Spanish people there. The receptionist spoke Spanish, the food was Spanish. No one told us that there would be so many foreigners."
Comment: That’s very strange indeed. We were not aware that any of our foreigners spoke Spanish.

16. "We had to line up outside to catch the boat and there was no air-conditioning."
Comment: Actually, there is A/C outside, but only at night.

17. "It is your duty as a tour operator to advise us of noisy or unruly guests before we travel."
Comment: Good point. And to be truly comprehensive, we should also advise everyone of lame guests who have ridiculous and unrealistic expectations.

18. "I was bitten by a mosquito. The brochure did not mention mosquitoes."
Comment: We apologize. We don’t like making promises that are beyond our control to keep. We used to advertise whale-watching too but after a sufficient number of no-shows, we had to stop making that promise. We are pleased that you had a personal encounter with one of our indigenous fauna. (you might find it helpful to know that the contact information for the CDC can be found in your suite).

19. "My fiancée and I requested twin-beds when we booked, but instead we were placed in a room with a king bed. We now hold you responsible and want to be re-reimbursed for the fact that I became pregnant. This would not have happened if you had put us in the room that we booked."
Comment: Our sincere apologies. How inconsiderate of us to force you to have sex. We are prepared to contact the local social services office in your hometown so that you can be relieved of the burden of caring for a child that you simply did not want. On second thought, we won’t wait for your permission … we need to have the child removed from your house because the two of you are too stupid to realize how ridiculous your e-mail is. We have also paid for a full-page advertisement in your local newspaper, showing your pictures and warning people that you two are easily offended and might become dangerous.

OK, I just had to have fun with that one.

Here’s the point. Managing expectations is an incredibly important habit that we need to develop. I will deal with this more fully in October. For today, I simply want to zoom in to one aspect of this … and that is the ease at which we take offence. The bottom line is that making yourself offence-proof is a very mature practice. Solomon wrote it this way in Proverbs 19:11:

A person's wisdom yields patience; it is to one's glory to overlook an offense.

One translation says, “it is prudent for a wise person to overlook an offence.”

I was pleased a number of years ago to learn that the Canadian Mental Health Association was a leader in the field of positive psychology … the paradigm that teaches that mental health should not be defined by negative examples (poor mental health) but by what a healthy mind looks like and what mentally healthy people do. One of the healthy practices that they highlight is the practice of forgiveness. It is clear to me (and confirmed by both life experiences, Scripture, and your Mom’s counsellor training) that it is almost impossible to get even close to emotional/mental health if we are harbouring resentment or unforgiveness in our heart. Almost impossible. The CMHA has recognized this. Forgiving someone for something they said or did or didn’t say or didn’t do is a very healthy mental habit. 

We don't forgive someone for their sake ... we forgive them for our own.

But I want to go you one better. How about not taking offence in the first place? If you can get yourself to the point where you don’t even take offence in the first place, then there will be nothing for which you need to extend forgiveness.

Just a technical point here. Forgiveness is not the same as pardoning someone. To pardon someone means to not (or no longer) hold them accountable by making them pay consequences. A pardon means that the debt has been wiped clean … especially at a societal level. Forgiveness is different. Forgiveness is about wiping the slate clean in our heart. Regardless of whether the person who offended us still has to suffer consequences (do the crime – do the time), we can choose to eliminate the emotional debt inside of us as if it had never happened.

Overlooking an offence is to never write anything on the heart-slate in the first place. This is an incredibly healthy emotional practice and will change your life when you become skilled at it. Without the inner burden of offences that build up, we are emotionally FREE … and have an incredible amount of emotional energy that can be directed towards the things that are actually important to us.

I once heard bitterness put this way … “bitterness is like drinking poison in the hopes that it will kill your enemy.”  That would be stupid. Harbouring bitterness is stupid and self-defeating (and self-destructive).  When you feel offended by someone, please remember that at that moment, you have just entered the road to stupid. Your Mom and I didn’t raise no dummies ... don't go down that road.

It is prudent for a wise person to overlook an offence. Be prudent.

In July we’ll talk about change.

I love you both.

Dad

E=WELL, EVERYTHING ...The Lost Discipline

Give it a rest Guys

OK, that sounded harsh. It wasn’t meant as a rebuke … it’s my introduction to this post.

Here’s the looking glass model again.

Now notice the title: Mobilizing, Focusing and Renewing Energy. Today I want to dig deeper into the “renewing” part.

Our society has lost all knowledge about the importance of recovery and renewal. Everyone acts like they’re an energizer bunny that can just keep going and going and going. We look suspiciously at people who walk around saying that they talk to God, but we do nothing about the millions who walk around acting as if they ARE God (as evidenced by their belief that they have a limitless supply of energy …. which is measured by their complete lack of pursuing energy renewal).

We have an energy crisis …. a human energy crisis. I’m a broken record on this topic and will continue to be until people listen. We are finite creatures with limited energy … energy which must be renewed and energy which must be focused for optimal use (we’ll get into that in much more detail in August).

Energy Renewal

From the June 8 post, let me remind you of Energy Principle # 2:

Because energy capacity diminishes both with overuse and underuse, we must balance energy expenditure with intermittent energy recovery.

Both of you know what happens you maintain exertion for too long without a break; you get fatigued. You are capable of lifting a 10-lb weight straight out to the side (arm extended sideways) 200 times … if you did it in 20 sets of 10-reps, followed by a period of rest between each set. Get it all done in 10 minutes. But if I told you to simply hold a 3-lb weight out the side (arm extended) for 10 minutes, even Schwarzenegger would shake his head NO. Why? Because with very little life experience we all quickly learn that it is not intensity of energy expenditure that produces burnout, impaired performance and physical breakdown … but rather the duration of expenditure without recovery. This is why interval training has become such a key part of physical training. Even marathoners spend the majority of their time in interval training … because it strengthens the mind as well as the body.

Speaking of the mind, it turns out that it works the same way. You’ve seen people (maybe even yourself) work on a crossword puzzle until they get stuck. They set it down and go grab a coffee or take a walk or just do something else. 10 minutes later they return, pick it up, and get 3 or 4 more words. Did they get smarter in those 10 minutes? Of course not – they simply gave themselves recovery. The brain, like the body, requires a recovery period between periods of stress or exertion.

We tend to understand physical fatigue more readily. The muscles physically fatigue and we feel that burn when, in the absence of oxygen, glucose and glycogen is used as a fuel, and the rapid breakdown of these “sugars” produces lactic acid. We are less aware of the biochemistry of mental fatigue … that a natural depletion of specific chemicals occurs and lessens the ability for synaptic firing. The mechanisms are different, but we can also experience emotional and spiritual fatigue, requiring recovery and renewal in those areas as well.

Regarding the natural fatigue of life, here some technical aspects of how to think about this as it relates to our emotional side:

See if you can assign the following 20 emotions to the 4 quadrants (hint: 5 in each):

Serene    Angry    Burned out    Confident    Depressed    Joyful    Fearful    Tranquil

Anxious    Relaxed    Exhausted    Mellow    Connected    Challenged    Defensive

Defeated    Resentful    Hopeless    Peaceful    Invigorated

This means that we need to become aware of which emotions are high/low negative and which are high/low positive. The negative ones provide us a barometer of dysfunctions within us. As for the positive ones, we need to intentionally oscillate between high and low for the sake of energy renewal.

Here is a simpler version that I hope resonates with you. It helped me when I first saw it.

Recovery is a lost discipline. What I have learned is that I need to intentionally – strategically – tactically, building recovery into my life … into my routines … into my schedule. The world around me is suffering spectacularly from this lack of discipline. Society itself even seems to be hardwired against it, spreading the notion that taking time for a break or rest is a sign of weakness. Actually, it is a sign of wisdom. The final 10 years of my career were my most productive … BECAUSE I learned to build recovery into my routines. More specifically, I built strategic disengagement into my life … that way, I was able to be more fully engaged when I needed to be.

I love you both very much.

Dad

E=WELL, EVERYTHING ...The Lost Art

Happy 9^th Anniversary Christian (and Ashley) …and good morning Darlin' Baby:

Today I want to talk about something very important to me. I already know that you won't listen. Oh, you might be polite and pretend to listen, but you really won't ... until you fail, falter or stumble in a particular way ... then you'll remember this and read it again. 

Last time I spoke about the 4 valences of energy: today's post centres around a certain aspect of mental energy.

It’s been too many posts since my last original poem, so let me start today with one … but to keep my creative juices alive I’m going to write it in rhyming iambic pentameter:

I need to warn you of an ancient beast
That lurks in wait to make of you a feast.
It lies below the crest, until it’s come
With pow'r and teeth and speed: Da-DUM Da-DUM.

The beast is “hurry.”  It attacks by pretending to be your friend, but you don’t even realize he’s your enemy until he almost fully devoured you … then it’s almost too late. We have but one weapon to fight it, but it seems that nobody is skilled anymore in the use of this weapon. Actually, I don't feel that the word skill is quite accurate. I feel it is more like an art: a lost art.

It is the Art of Slowing.

SLOWING is the only way to defeat HURRY. And defeat him you must because he is probably already consuming you.

I have been teaching on the notion of SLOWING for more than a decade, yet I find the same struggle each time I start the conversation. My listeners don't believe me. It's like trying to describe a globular world when your hearers are flat-earth believers. 

I hope you'll trust me that this is important ... so to get your attention let me toss 3 grenades at you... 3 deeply profound thoughts from 3 heavyweight thinkers:

“Hurry is not of the devil; hurry is the devil.”

“Busyness is the archenemy of spiritual authenticity.”

“Muddy water becomes clear only if you let it be still for a while”

The pedigree of the men providing these words should give you pause to pay attention to their opinions. The first is from Carl Jung, arguably the father of modern analytic psychology. The second is from Bill Hybels, arguably one of the most intensely driven leadership thinkers in the evangelical Christian world in the past twenty years. The third is from Dallas Willard, arguably one of the premiere hybrid academicians of the last thirty years, a genius in both philosophical and theological thought.

Let me back up a bit. My formative TV years were the 60s ... which didn't just have amazing shows like Star Trek (TOS). It also had goofy shows like the rural sitcom, Green Acres. Here is the show's synopsis: an upper-middle class couple moves from a Park Avenue condo to the slower setting of a country farm. The humour came from the ever-present conflict between the husband, who craved the need to slow down, and the wife, a high-society woman who craved the city life. Silliness and inane dialogue aside, I think it was really TV's first stab at addressing America's growing realization that life was moving too fast and there was a deep need to slow down. It actually ran for 6 years.

I was a kid who enjoyed that show. What did I care about the sober message behind it? Why would I want to pay close attention to the subtext ... I was a kid? But I wished that I had because maybe I might have started paying attention sooner to the "muddiness" that would eventually grow inside me as I grew up, got a job, started a family, and became a contributing member of society.

Not paying attention can cost you. BIG!  It would eventually cost me a personal setback (sounds as good as any other euphemism for emotional breakdown) which left me pondering deeply about how life got out of control. My remediation led me to countless books ... one of the more important ones in my early re-tuning being John Ortberg's, “The Life You’ve Always Wanted (Spiritual Disciplines for Ordinary People)." Dr. Ortberg really got my attention with the following confession: 

I called a wise friend to ask for some spiritual direction. I described the pace at which things tend to move in my current setting. I told him about the rhythms of our family life and about the present condition of my heart, as best I could discern it. What did I need to do, I asked him, to be spiritually healthy?  

Long pause. 

“You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life,” he said at last.                          

Another long pause. 

“Okay, I’ve written that one down,” I told him, a little impatiently. 
“That’s a good one. Now what else is there?”
I had many things to do, and this was a long-distance conversation, so I was anxious to cram as many units of spiritual wisdom into the least amount of time possible. 

Another long pause. 

“There is nothing else,” he said.

John's confession was worth the price of that book to me. What struck me most wasn't his mentor's wisdom, albeit supremely wise. No, what really caught my attention was John's responses and thought process that were driven by the impatience within him. I was him. I might have even been worse. At that time there were moments (sometimes whole days) when my inner engine was stuck on high-idle, revving at ridiculously high cycles for no earthly reason other than my own warped expectation of how events should be unfolding and my drive to make life work at my speed. Do you remember the speed at which I demanded things? Messed up at times, right? Have you become me? (hope not)

This may well have been my first honest look inside of me ... my first real trek into self-awareness. It wasn't intentional or strategic ... it was driven by my crash 'n burn and the overwhelming fact that my approach to living wasn't working very well. Dr. Ortberg's book was like a 2x4 across the head, saying, "PAY ATTENTION."

After a 3-year journey out of "the shadow of death" I emerged a different person. I would hear comments from others around me that, "you've changed ... you don't take life so seriously anymore." Truth was, I actually took life a lot more seriously after my climb out of the pit. It was ME that I didn't take so seriously. The new me was really really new. And I remember how that climb out of the pit began ... it began when something inside of me realized that the only path forward was by moving my heart from city speed to country speed. It began with me intentionally slowing down.

Since then I have paid attention to not only myself but also everyone around me. What I've been witnessing is disturbing to me, and I'm not seeing any improvement. Most people suffer from "hurry sickness," Dr. Ortberg's term for this inner condition. It is everywhere! OK, maybe not everywhere ... but certainly everywhere that I look in the world in which I live. But apparently, there are groups of people who do "get it," as we read in Lettie Cowman's Springs in the Valley;

“In the deep jungles of Africa, a traveler was making a long trek. Coolies had been engaged from a tribe to carry the loads. The first day they marched rapidly and went far. The traveler had high hopes of a speedy journey. But the second morning these jungle tribesmen refused to move. For some strange reason they just sat and rested. On inquiry as to the reason for this strange behaviour, the traveler was informed that they had gone too fast the first day, and that they were now waiting for their souls to catch up with their bodies.” 

Jungle tribesmen know what they need to do to restore life’s balance. Do you?

We live our lives at a frenetic pace and have convinced ourselves that the only way to bring about harmony, order, clarity and balance is to work faster, think quicker, and hurry harder! But how is that working for us? The answer is self-evident; all our hurrying is not producing what we’re after … a sense of “timefulness” … the feeling of having enough time. What we actually experience is often the opposite. 

The solution?  Slow down!

Admittedly slowing down is hard to do because we are a time-obsessed generation due to our belief that time-management and hurrying will mitigate our ever-increasing TO-DO list. We live on fast food from drive-thru windows so we can eat in our cars to be good multi-taskers. We read about programs to help us lose weight, grow hair, improve our sex life, and build sustainable life skills all in 10-20 days because any longer is just too slow … and those are just the tabloid headlines we scanned as we scurried through the grocery store “express lanes” where customers with 10 items or fewer are treated with distinction. Self-help schools numbering in the hundreds (or thousands) teach (and tease) us that it’s possible to microwave maturity. But none of this is working for us. Be encouraged though … the Holy Grail of time management and productivity has been discovered (rediscovered actually ... it's really quite ancient) and it is changing lives. It is the art (and science) of slowing down.

Working smarter and thinking more wisely lead to greater accomplishment, but only after first slowing down. Working smarter and thinking more wisely make sense … but why slow down? How can slowing down help you to accomplish more? The first thing you must realize is that being hurried has nothing to do with being busy. In other words, you need to step back and check your assumptions about the value of hurrying. Most great or highly effective people are often busy, but seldom hurried! The key is to stop thinking about just doing things and start thinking about doing the right things­ …things that are important rather than just urgent. 

In his classic booklet Charles Hummel said that, “we are governed by the tyranny of the urgent.” If we are to break free of this tyranny then this will require a new paradigm … a fresh perspective (this is next week's topic). Ortberg speculates that if you imagine yourself accomplishing fewer, but better things, perhaps you can also imagine doing them at a slower pace too. Hence,doing the right things is step 1; step 2 is doing things right.

I wonder how many of us can claim John Wesley's words as our own; 
“Though I am always in haste, I am never in a hurry because I never undertake more work than I can go through with calmness of spirit.” 

In, “The Power of Full Engagement,” Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz note, 
“It is no coincidence that every enduring spiritual tradition has emphasized practices such as prayer, retreat, contemplation and meditation – all means by which to quietly connect with and regularly revisit what matters most.” 

Jim Loehr is one of the founding members of the Human Performance Institute. A few years ago I pulled this off their website: 
“When clients come through our program, one of our aims is to help them slow down, to put aside their preoccupations and their pressing demands for long enough to step back and take a look at the choices they are making.”

Busyness has become an addiction to many, and like any addiction, after a while you crave more of it while enjoying it less. Ultimately, it enslaves you and robs from every area of your life; you can’t function without it yet you also don’t enjoy it. Dr.Ortberg, who is both a church pastor and psychologist, diagnoses this malady with the term, “hurry sickness”: “we don’t hurry because we have a disordered schedule; we hurry because we have a disordered heart.” The “sickness” shows itself in some interesting ways. We do things to avoid short-term pain (while knowing the loss of future gain) and seek short-term pleasure (while knowing the future loss) … all because urgency dictates that we “need” the best results now. 

Here's the art you need to perfect in life ... it comes from Ortberg's advisor:

Ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life!

This is a choice, and therefore, it is a mental exercise. It will give you more time to think, ponder, cogitate, meditate, and essentially provide more opportunity to increase your power of focus (because it will give you time to stop and actually decide what's important).

If you are interested in some tips and tricks on how to do this, check out my business blog for March 23, 2015 and March 30, 2015.

I love you guys.

Dad

E=WELL, EVERYTHING ...Through the Looking Glass

Morning Guys

New month - new theme. It's all about energy.

Ever since Isaac Newton postulated his 4 laws of thermodynamics (energy movement and transition), and his 3 laws of motion, mankind has known that the universe is best described in terms of energy and energy conversion. Since I don’t want this post to be about physics but about personal growth, then let me get to the chase … 4 of these 7 laws have direct implications to us as human beings. Here they are, in my own words:

Simplified Energy Law: Energy can be neither created nor destroyed; it is finite.
Application: We have limited energy; we are not energizer bunnies that can go without renewing energy.

Simplified Energy Law: Everything in the universe naturally “winds down” and tends toward disorder and chaos; it takes new energy to create structure and organization.
Application: Our natural tendency is towards disorganization and chaos; it takes “new” energy to oppose that tendency.

Simplified Motion Law: Things keep moving the same way unless some new force is applied. 

Application: If you want to get a new result, you have to do something new (Einstein said that doing the same thing but expecting a different result is insane).

Simplified Energy Law: Two systems of different energy, when opened to each other, eventually become identical; the smaller system eventually generally looks more like the larger system than vice versa.
Application: We generally grow up to become like the family, friends and communities that we are a part of; it takes effort to oppose that tendency.

Back in 2005 when I attended the Willow Creek Leadership Summit I saw what has probably been the single most important presentation in my life because it connected a bazillion dots in the mental picture that I was building about how to create and sustain a healthy, effective and productive life. Jack Groppel, co-founder of the Human Performance Institute, spoke about the 4 Human Energy Laws. (I’ve shown you his video about the “boar in the bushes.”) This talk exploded open for me not just a new mental model but also an entirely new cadre of literature which I voraciously consumed.

His colleague and also co-founder of the HPI is Jim Loehr. Jim, along with Tony Schwartz, wrote, “The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal.”  This book is in my top 5 all-time reads and is a book to which I often refer. The book explains in more detail what Jack had presented at the talk, that the goal is to mobilize, focus and renew energy … whether as an individual or as a manager/leader (or parent). In their teachings they present 4 new energy laws ... or principles ... not of the universe, but of human beings: 

Principle # 1 – Full-engagement requires us to draw on four separate but related sources of energy: physical, emotional, mental and spiritual.

Principle # 2 – Because energy capacity diminishes both with overuse and underuse, we must balance energy expenditure with intermittent energy recovery.

Principle # 3 – To build capacity, we must push beyond our normal limits (“no pain, no gain”). We can benefit by targeting specific "muscles" for improvement, training in the systematic way that high performance athletes do.

Principle # 4 – Positive energy rituals – highly specific routines for managing energy – are the key to full-engagement and sustained high performance.

When Jim or Tony or Jack talk about the first principle they refer to each of the energy levels as valences, reminding me of my chemistry and physics courses. Electrons can be found at more or less energetic levels within an atom, depending on the energy introduced to the system. And when that process is controlled to harness and then release energy in a specific way, that energy can be focused … like a laser!

OK I promised this post wouldn’t be about physics. But here’s the thing … they refer to our 4 basic constituents of physical, emotional, mental and spiritual using words that I see typically in physics discussions: quantity; quality; focus; force. As a meteorologist who had my head in the clouds for many years, my mind immediately created the following image, which I have used in training sessions since 2007 (it wouldn’t surprise me if this is exactly what they show at HPI training sessions because the words and concepts lend perfectly to this model ... one day I may sign up for one of their sessions to see if I'm right).

Just look at that diagram and reflect on it … that’s all I’m hoping from you this week. Just think about it. It is a powerful metaphor for effective and productive living. As you are thinking, consider the following … for full engagement we need to be physically energized, emotionally connected, mentally focused, and spiritually aligned.

Finally, think about the word “integrity.” Typically that word evokes thoughts about honesty and being a person of your word. There’s another side. The concept of INTEGRITY means that the “whole thing is working well, undivided, integrated, intact, and uncorrupted.” Being a person of integrity means being a whole person, an integrated person, with all of your parts working well and delivering the functions that they were designed to deliver. It truly is “running on all cyclinders.”

We speak about our physical, emotional, mental and spiritual sides as if they are separate, but they’re not. The ancient Greeks separated them to make it easier to discuss them … and I think they did us a great service from a teaching perspective. But the ancient Hebrews didn’t believe in such separations … they believed in a blended or fused system where everything works together. Timothy Ferris, (the “4-hour Body” guy) feels the same way, as he writes, “the Cartesian separation of mind and body is false. They’re reciprocal.”

Over the next 3 weeks I want to zoom in to three specific truths which I’ve learned that relate directly to this discussion about human energy; I believe that they are truths which our society has lost and that desperately need to be recaptured because we are in an energy crisis: a human energy crisis. People are fading all around me, and for too many, the "lights" have almost gone out.

I love you guys.

Dad