Volunteer Victims

It’s a great temptation to volunteer as a victim. Do you know that we sign up for that job?

A man who dined regularly in his favorite restaurant complained about the bread. It wasn’t fair, he emphasized, that other restaurants served lots of bread. But here he gets only one piece.

So the next time he came in, they served him four pieces. He still complained it wasn’t enough.

On his next visit his server brought him a dozen pieces of bread. The man still complained.

For his next visit they put a large basket of bread on the table. But still he complained. “The other restaurants give all the bread you can eat.”

They decided to be ready for him the next day. They had an enormous loaf of bread prepared. It was six feet long and two feet wide. Four people carried the loaf to his table. They plopped it down in front of him. It took up half the table and hung over both sides. The chef stood back, pleased with himself, to see how the customer would react.

He looked over the loaf and commented, “So, we’re back to one piece again, are we?”

Like this man, we volunteer to be victims, but in more subtle ways. We believe life is unfair, people are untrustworthy and we are getting a bad shake. We think everyone should know just how terrible things are and we feel obliged to tell them.

One man says of a friend that he hates to ask her how she is feeling because he knows ahead of time what she will say. “You get an organ recital from her,” he says. She dwells on her health problems to the exclusion of everything good in her life.

The problem is, life sometimes is unfair and we can be victimized. But the greater truth is, people can decide whether they are victims or are victors. They can feel helpless and miserable, or they can try to feel strong. Happy people have learned that they cannot always control their circumstances, but they can often control how they will respond.

Lewis Dunning said, “What life means to us is determined not so much by what life brings to us as by the attitude we bring to life; not so much by what happens to us as by our reaction to what happens.”

You were born to be a victor! You were meant to be happy! Will you claim your birthright today?

-- Steve Goodier

Image: flickr.com/Donnie Ray Jones

Resisting the Blame Game

Image courtesy of Kavitha Shivan

A mother heard the family cat yowl in pain. She knew where to look – she looked for her son, Mike. “Stop pulling the cat’s tail, Michael!” she chided.

“I’m not pulling his tail,” the boy retorted. “I’m just standing on it. He’s doing the pulling.”

He, of course, is no different than any of us. Often, our first impulse is to blame someone or something else for problems. It’s the cat’s fault. Or the school’s fault. Or my parents’ fault.

I once heard a story of a 40-year-old woman who was jogging in a U. S. state park when she was attacked and killed by a mountain lion. Her family immediately filed suit against the state because of its “failure to manage the mountain lion population” and because it didn’t “react to reports of cougar activity in the area by posting warning signs.”

But an interesting thing happened. Her distraught husband felt it was wrong to blame the state or anyone else for his wife’s death, even though he stood to possibly win a small fortune. Against her family’s wishes, he dropped the law suit. “Barbara and I have always taken responsibility for our own actions,” he explained. “Barbara chose to run in the wild and, on a very long shot, she did not come back. This is not the fault of the state, and people should take responsibility for themselves.”

I would like to meet that man. He no doubt believes that the Blame Game is a no-win in the long run. He seems like a person who would rather spend time fixing what’s broken than fixing the blame for it on someone else.

This isn’t about law suits – it’s more about whether we are essentially victims of life or whether we are powerful and responsible people. An important step in gaining mastery over your life is to resist the urge to make something or someone else responsible. Like novelist J. K. Rowling (of Harry Potter fame) said to graduating Harvard students, “There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you.” Certainly background and circumstances have influenced who we are, but who is responsible for the person we become?

An important decision I made was to resist playing the Blame Game. The day I realized that I am in charge of how I will approach problems in my life, that things will turn out better or worse because of me and nobody else, that was the day I knew I would be a happier and healthier person. And that was the day I knew I could truly build a life that matters.

-- Steve Goodier


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All Filled Up

I recall reading that a man from Virginia Beach (Virginia, USA) filed a law suit against his hospital. He opted to have surgery in order to lose weight. So he had his stomach stapled -- a procedure that reduced the size of his stomach so he couldn't eat as much.

A couple of days after surgery he sneaked down the hospital corridors to the kitchen. There he raided the refrigerator and ate so much that his staples burst.

The law suit? He claimed it was the hospital's fault. They should have locked the refrigerator.

And no – I don't know how the suit came out. Just the staples.

He wanted to make other people responsible for what he put into his mouth. Which raises the question: who decides what we bring into our lives?

One man told me, "I'm not a garbage truck."

"What do you mean by that?" I asked him.

"I mean that sometimes other people want to dump their garbage on me,” he said. “They fill themselves up with negativity and complaints and want to dump all of that garbage on me. I’m not going to take all of their garbage. They may need to get rid of it, but not all over me.”

He believes people need to be responsible for the garbage in their lives. And that’s probably true for the good stuff, too. For me, that includes just about everything. It means I am responsible for everything I put into my mouth, but also for everything I choose to watch and hear. Some of it’s good and some of it’s garbage. It even means everything that comes into my head through my eyes and ears. It’s also about everything that fills up my time. Everything.

And to be honest, I don’t always do a great job with everything that comes into my life. But I am clear that what I allow in is up to me, not somebody else.

• When we fill our bodies with the right foods, they perform well.
• When we fill our heads with learning, they won’t easily stagnate.
• When we fill our minds with healthier attitudes, we will have a better outlook.
• When we fill our hearts with a little more courage, we will be able to face life with confidence.
• When we fill our talk with more gratitude, we will be happier.
• When we fill our lives with more love, we will never be alone.

Only we can decide how to fill ourselves up.

Have you heard the story of the two wolves? A common version of it goes like this:

An old Cherokee chief was teaching his grandson about life...

   "A fight is going on inside me," he said to the boy. "It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. "One is evil - he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, self-doubt and ego.
   "The other is good - he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith.
   "This same fight is going on inside you - and inside every other person, too."
   The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, "Which wolf will win?"
   The old chief simply replied, "The one you feed."

Only I can choose what should come into my life. Only I can choose which wolf to feed. And only I can choose what to do about it today.

-- Steve Goodier

Image: flickr.com/Tambako the Jaguar

It's a Choice

One man tells of driving a long and lonely road, the last 65 miles of it unpaved, in order to watch Hopi Indian ceremonial dances in the state of Arizona. After the dances, he returned to his car only to find that it had a flat tire. He put on the spare and drove to the only service station on the Hopi reservation.

“Do you fix flats?” he inquired of the attendant.

“Yes,” came the answer.

“How much do you charge?” he asked.

With a twinkle in his eye, the man replied, “What difference does it make?”

This is what has been called a “Hobson’s choice.” A Hobson’s choice is a situation that forces a person to accept whatever is offered or go without.

According to Barbara Berliner (The Book of Answers), the phrase was inspired by sixteenth-century entrepreneur Thomas Hobson, who hired out horses in strict rotation at Cambridge University. There was no choosing by the customer – it was strictly Hobson’s choice.

But most of the time we really do have a choice, and the choice we make does make a difference. We may not always believe it. We may feel as if we have no choice, but almost always there is a choice in the matter. And when we realize that most of what we do we do by choice, then we are taking control of our own lives.

Someone challenged me to try an experiment that completely changed my perspective. “For the next seven days,” he said, “eliminate the words ‘I have to’ from your vocabulary and substitute the words ‘I choose to.’ Don’t say, ‘I have to work late tonight.’ Instead, say, ‘I choose to work late.’ When you choose to do it, you take control of your life. Instead of saying, ‘I have to stay home,’ try ‘I choose to stay home.’ The way you spend your time is your choice. You set the priorities. You are responsible. You have control.”

In just seven days I was no longer saying “I have to” and I felt better about my decisions. I learned that there is very little in this life I actually HAVE to do. You and I decide to do certain things because we believe that it will be for the best. When we eliminate “I have to” from our vocabularies, we take control.

Try it for a week (after all, it’s your choice) and you see what happens. I think you’ll see it’s a change for the better.

-- Steve Goodier

Image: freeimages.com/Sam Hatch

Six Traits of Healthy Families

It takes some adjusting to live in a family, and some people have difficulty making it work. Maybe that's why comedian George Burns used to say, "Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city." Sometimes that's true. But it's also true that more happiness can be found when we learn how to make our family life better, whether we live in a family or just visit relatives from time to time.

Family consultant Dolores Curran, in her book Traits of a Healthy Family (1984), drew on responses of more than 500 professionals who work with families of all kinds and shapes. A number of core values and behaviors surfaced in families these professionals generally consider to be healthy. Here are a few of those top qualities. How many do you find in your family?

• Families considered healthy practice good communication and listening. In fact, they work on this.
• In these families, members experience plenty of affirmation and support. A migrant worker who often spends weeks away from home puts it like this: "Home is a place to go back to if things get rough out there." It is where you are valued, affirmed and loved.
• When they are together, healthy families try to have a good time. Author Charlie Shedd says, "Whenever parents ask me, 'How can I keep my children off drugs?' I say, 'Have fun.'" Evidently, the family that plays together, stays together.
• These families share the work, too. There is a sense of shared responsibility. Everyone helps out; everyone pitches in.
• There is a high level of trust in healthier families. The fastest way to drive a wedge between family members is to violate that trust.
• Finally, these families usually share a common religious core and move toward similar spiritual goals.

No family is perfect -- far from it! But families that work on these six traits will soon find themselves happier and healthier.

-- Steve Goodier

Image: freeimage.com/Samantha Villagran