What are you feeding your mind?
Sunday, August 26th, 2007In The 1% Club, Positive Mental Nutrition refers to an ultra-healthy mental diet. A healthy mind, like a healthy body, must be continuously fed a diet (more…)
Archive for the 'Daily Life' Category
The Stranger
Tuesday, June 12th, 2007The piece below was sent to me from 1% member Palmer Bayless. We could not determine the source but thought everyone with a 1% mentality would appreciate it. It is called “The Stranger”
The Stranger…
A few years after I was born, my Dad met a stranger who was new to our small Texas town. From the beginning, Dad was fascinated with this enchanting newcomer and soon invited him to live with our family. The stranger was quickly accepted and was around from then on.
As I grew up, I never questioned his place in my family. In my young mind, he had a special niche. My parents were complementary instructors:
Mom taught me good from evil, and Dad taught me to obey. But the stranger…he was our storyteller. He would keep us spellbound for hours on end with adventures, mysteries and comedies.
If I wanted to know anything about politics, history or science, he always knew the answers about the past, understood the present and even seemed able to predict the future! He took my family to the first major league ball game. He made me laugh, and he made me cry. The stranger never stopped talking, but Dad didn’t seem to mind.
Sometimes, Mom would get up quietly while the rest of us were shushing each other to listen to what he had to say, and she would go to the kitchen for peace and quiet. (I wonder now if she ever prayed for the stranger to leave.)
Dad ruled our household with certain moral convictions, but the stranger never felt obligated to honor them. Profanity, for example, was not allowed in our home… Not from us, our friends or any visitors. Our longtime visitor, however, got away with four-letter words that burned my ears and made my dad squirm and my mother blush.
My Dad didn’t permit the liberal use of alcohol. But the stranger encouraged us to try it on a regular basis. He made cigarettes look cool, cigars manly and pipes distinguished. He talked freely (much too freely!) about sex. His comments were sometimes blatant, sometimes suggestive, and generally embarrassing.
I now know that my early concepts about relationships were influenced strongly by the stranger. Time after time, he opposed the values of my parents, yet he was seldom rebuked… And NEVER asked to leave.
More than fifty years have passed since the stranger moved in with our family. He has blended right in and is not nearly as fascinating as he was at first.
Still, if you could walk into my parents’ den today, you would still find him sitting over in his corner, waiting for someone to listen to him talk and watch him draw his pictures (continue…for the rest of the story) (more…)
Drink, drink, drink
Wednesday, May 30th, 2007Now there is one more reason to stay away from soft drinks, or at least minimize their prominence in your diet. A new health scare erupted over soft drinks last week as evidence surfaced that a popular preservative in most fizzy drinks may cause (more…)
Can You Hear That?
Friday, May 11th, 2007Can you hear yourself think? Can you hear God speaking to you? Sometimes, in this day and age, it can be hard to silence the noise around us long enough to hear God’s voice? I was driving home yesterday and saw 6 people walking independent of each other down the sidewalk. The first 5 women were all holding mobile phones to their ear as they walked. The last person, a man, appeared to be (more…)
A Blind Spot In Marriage. Have You Seen It?
Monday, May 7th, 2007When driving, we’ve probably all shared the experience of beginning to merge into another lane of traffic, only to be interrupted by a loud horn from another driver we were about to collide with. We weren’t intentionally trying to crash into the other car, of course. We just didn’t see it. We looked in our mirror, glanced quickly over our shoulder, didn’t see another vehicle and confidently began our lane change. Where did the other car come from? It was in our (more…)
Billions of Potential Thoughts
Friday, May 4th, 2007There are literally billions of potential thoughts you could choose to think at any given moment. It’s great news that you are not limited to thinking in only one way. Your thoughts can be totally different and consequently, your life and experiences can be totally different. In a private MasterMIND session yesterday, I explained to a group of new clients that every thought (more…)
Refining Your Long-Time Horizon
Thursday, May 3rd, 2007I fielded a phone call earlier this week from a long-time client asking for advice about her teenage son who was trying to recover from a pretty significant mistake. To say the least, it was an unwise decision, generated in part by crooked thinking, by asking himself the wrong question. This young man is not alone. Our biggest regrets often originate when we factor in only a short span of time, such as a year, month, week, or even the next 15 minutes. Reflect for a moment on the choices you’d love to buy back, if you could, that were facilitated by a short time perspective. Teenagers and adults alike are quite vulnerable to this type of spontaneous, feeling-driven thinking. On the other hand, we tend to make wise decisions when we take into account the longest (more…)
Now It’s Safe To Eat at KFC??
Monday, April 30th, 2007In an associated press release this morning, it was reported that Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants will eliminate Trans Fatty Acids. KFC’s fried chicken buckets soon will be stamped with a health message along with the famous likeness of its founder, Colonel Harland Sanders. The banner will proclaim that its chicken has zero grams of trans fat per serving. Obviously, this is good news for people that ingest fried chicken on a regular basis. Trans-fatty or not, fried foods are one the top “Low Energy” foods you can choose to put in your body. Also note that trans fatty acids are much more likely to be found (more…)
Thinking Huge in God’s Will?
Friday, April 27th, 2007I often get asked the question of how to Think Huge and more specifically, “How do you think Huge in God’s will?”
First of all, thinking Huge refers to establishing goals that you don’t currently know how to achieve. God desires to do meaningful things through each of our lives. God desires to take us places we’ve never been and bless us in ways that we haven’t even imagined. The challenge is that our idea of what we can accomplish and what God wants us to accomplish are worlds apart. It is so tempting to set routine, standard, hohum (more…)
The Crazy Cycle: Are you on it?
Monday, April 9th, 2007Steve and I had the opportunity to interview Emerson Eggerichs on the radio show a few weeks ago. He is the author of Love & Respect as well as Cracking The Communication Code. After reviewing my notes from the show, I wanted to distill this critical message and share it with you in the most succinct way possible. I think this understanding is essential to maximizing your full potential in marriage. This is based on Ephesians 5: 22-33 from the New Testament. Here goes… The Crazy Cycle in marriage (Which triggers and fuels itself) can be summed up like this: “Without love, she reacts without respect. Without respect, he reacts without love. Around and around they go—on the Crazy Cycle.” Is there win-win solution that will keep us out of this dilemma and if so, what is it? Yes, there is definitely a solution. The solution is (more…)
