Picking fights or temporary amnesia?

You may get the impression that people you meet desire to pick fights or just make your life difficult. They may seem to aim to prevent you from doing what you wish to do. Perhaps they appear suspicious of your choices or strongly disagree with your ideas. Would they be forgetting you also have opinions? To you, these people may be illogical. They seem irrational or inflexible. Their opinions may seem clouded by closed-mindedness, prejudice, resentment, jealousy, ignorance or a lack of desire to understand you. When you judge other people you forget you also judge yourself.

Consider a cultural centre with an older generation of members who speak native languages and desire to preserve and share their national traditions. At the same time, the younger generation doesn't speak the native languages and feels left out or unwelcome at cultural events they don't understand. Imagine a council with mostly older members as well as a few younger members. Where the president and other older members fervently resist change, yet desire young people to be more active in the cultural centre, this may put you in a quandary about what to do.

If you choose to see life not as an endless battle for those unreachable final results, but as an endless series of experiences to learn, then you may ask yourself why people behave as they do.

If you choose to view contention as a teacher, then the reason for encountering disagreeable people becomes clear. A journey is a process to enable you to identify root causes of feelings.

If you choose to ask why people resist your agenda, and ideas you view as necessary and sensible, then you may grow to sense meaning in both individual and collective agendas, and how either one alone is seen as a threat.

If you choose to imagine yourself in the position of contentious people, raise your awareness to their full experience, then you may realize you may fear losing a concrete sense of who you are.

If you choose to empathize with hidden fears, and re-create or refine your vision, then you're more likely to arrive at an acceptable compromise and result in more people embracing change.

If you choose to recognize that a single agenda of self-definition can be served for all, then distinctly different yet, remarkably connected experiences of each person can be embraced.

If you choose to rise above your own temporary amnesia, not be provoked by rigid disagreement, then you will recognize that each position taken is simply an effort to reinforce who we really are.

If you choose to see a given situation from multiple points of view, and present strategies that would appeal widely, then you're likely to discuss possibilities considered meaningful to everyone.

Delay isn't denial

Remind yourself that just because events do not unfold when you want them to, this doesn't mean you will be denied what you hope to experience. What about the gift of anticipation? You may not yet have learned waiting can be good for you. Perceived delays can actually be desireable.  Tell yourself you're simply being prepared for what is to come.  You'll enjoy the future more  because you have occasion to savour how it evolves and get things out of each step. Recognize the benefits of what you gain from waiting will outweigh the things you don't like.   Short-term discomfort will help you appreciate the longer time gains. You can also reframe irritations. After all, your attitude determines if you choose to like or dislike what happens. What about you?

For example, if you get uptight waiting to hear whether or not you were chosen for a new job, you may be focusing on the wrong things.  Make allowances.  Put your expectations aside.  Do what you can and focus on 'the here and now'.  What about positive experiences right in front of you? Aren't you missing out on the pleasure you could be experiencing where you are today?

Consider you may dwell on ways people irritate you.  When you magnify what you dislike, you focus on faults and will find it difficult to strengthen meaningful, successful relationships.  If you desire relationships, realize you have idiosynchrosies and weaknesses just like other people. Rather than be a complainer or a nag, highlight the good qualities. When to talk negatively about other people, this reflects back on yourself.  It detracts from your sense of success. 

Negative thinking causes you to second guess your choces. We all have good qualities inside.  Encourage, appreciate and praise friends and situations.  Remind yourself you shape yourself based on what you choose to experience.  The passage of time is required for relationships and situations to develop depth and longevity. Rather than focus on what is missing, why not be grateful for what success you already have or have had on the road to new kinds of success?

Success in any area of your life is accessible as you believe in yourself and your potential. How you feel about yourself comes across in what you do, how you think, behave and treat people. What goes around comes around and expecting success will contribute to experiencing it. Define what this concept means in your mind.  Your life will evolve as you attract your imagined views.  Remind yourself you do not only work on your timeline. Variables outside your control influence the where, when and how you will experience success. Hold on and believe.

Realize contentment

Success is embodied in feelings of contentment.  Peace arises when you aren't comparing who has more or less than you. Being yourself and accepting all that you are brings you a sense of success. What makes you believe a sense of success evolves from external things or action? 

True success is felt as you are deeply grounded in being yourself, when you're not searching for consolation or hoping to do what you have not yet done.  Drop comparisons.  To see yourself as neither higher nor lower, in terms of where you are, this is success.  You can become intuitive and sense life offers more possibilities than your senses have the capacity to realize.

Success is more than a state of mind.  Its a state of being.  Rather than think about what you must do to understand and achieve, why not experience success without thinking?  Be happy without a cause.  Attract and create the feelings you envision.  Success is sensing the possible and being it.

Imagine success regardless of your external situation. Anything with a cause is never permanent, but time dependent and predictably disappear. Feelings and circumstances that have no cause will last forever.  Become successful through your own inner transformation.  Look inside yourself for the truly impersonal experience.

Setbacks are worth it

It's not unusual to feel as though you may come face to face with a prospective disaster. What is it about people, opportunities and events that seem to arrive just in the nick of time? It may not be easy to understand why we seem to be held back from what we desire to do, and then, you realize that maybe something beyond you has good reason to intervene. Consider this story:

Early Monday morning, Mary was in a hurry to get to the office. She had scheduled new client appointments and felt they would lead to a bonus she needed to move to a better neighborhood.  As she rushed around her apartment finishing last minute preparations, the phone rang. her babysitter was sick. Understanding as Mary was, this left her in a bind. Her trusted neighbour was away.  She thought of taking her baby to the office.  Her secretary might understand? Maybe not! Mary thought twice and decided to contact a friend who agreed to look after her baby. In order to get baby to her friend's home, Mary had to take a different route to work. In doing so, she encountered unexpected traffic hold ups in construction. As time passed, her stress level rose. 

After she dropped her baby off with her friend, she headed back toward the city and the office. Just as she thought she was getting ahead, she encountered a minor road accident which set her back again.  When the ambulance had a hard time getting though to the handful of victims, the car in front accidentally backed into hers.  There was more damage than a broken tail-light. Mary was forced to call her office to cancel those anticipated appointments.  She felt devastated. After all, those leads had taken a year to become real prospects.   At that point, she felt that everything was against her. Something about Murphy's Law, you know, when anything and everything can go wrong, then it will? She tried to stop her mind from thinking that way.

Once in the garage where the mechanic was looking at Mary's car, she sat down and sipped a coffee.  The radio was blaring and just after 8:45, the station cut programs to a news bulletin. 

"Flight 11 crashed at roughly 490 mph (790 km/h or 425 knots) into the north side of the North Tower of the World Trade Centre, between floors 94 and 98."  Mary was clearly astonished. The mechanic came running into the waiting area to listen to the rest of the broadcast.

"Do you believe that?" he asked, scratching his head. "That can't really be! It's crazy!"

"Oh my gracious!" replied Mary, covering her mouth with her hand.  "My office is on that block."

"You're darn lucky, lady!" cried the mechanic. "Good thing you weren't there on time today!" He went back to work but left the radio on. He wanted to do things to take his mind of the news. 

Just after 9am, the radio station cut to another bulletin: "Flight 175 crashes at about 590 mph (950 km/h) into the south side of the South Tower, banked between floors 78 and 84." (More gasps)

As she sat back in disbelief to make some phone calls, all Mary could think was how thankful she was for her sick babysitter, for the road construction and accidents that had held her up, for the cut on her hand that had required time to retrieve a band-aid, her for her dear old friend who lived in suburbs, for things that had set her behind that morning.  Setbacks were worth it.

Why do people choose to lie?

What is so difficult about admitting you made a mistake? How many people have you met who would prefer to lie rather than to swallow their pride and admit they miscalculated or were ignorant of certain facts? Do their dishonest tendencies rub off on or tempt you to do the same?  You don't have to follow this example.  If you do lie, it would be helpful to learn to understand when and why.  Only then you will you be able to see benefits of making different choices. 

Societies we live in promote excellence and encourge us to strive for perfection. Some people haven't yet grasped that learning involves falling down and figuring out how to get up again.  Making mistakes is an acceptable and effective way to learn.  Think back to when you become aware of the power of language and how you could use it.  During childhood, you may have learned to lie without bad intentions.  You may have aimd to test what or whom to manipulate. You may have learned to lie to avoid punishments or to strategically get things you wanted.

As you aged, you may have devised white lies to protect other’s feelings, and seen lies as harmless.  Yet, if you have evolved to lie with neither compassion nor conscience, that is more problematic.   Such individuals may be compulsive liars who lie to protect themselves, to look good, gain financially or socially and avoid judgment or reprimand.  Compulsive liars become transparent and gain a bad reputation.  People realize this tendency and come to pity the liar. Both the liar and observers recognize that lying is a choice, yet a person can only change himself.

Thos people who lie mainly for personal gain may be diagnosed as antisocial personality disorder, also known as being a sociopath, and often encounter repeated trouble with authorities.  Lying has been known to worsen with time. When you get away with a lie, you may continue your deceptions. Also, liars often feel it necessary to continue lying to to cover their past dishonesty. 

Why is it that we hold people to different standards when it comes to telling the truth?  We expect, for example, less integrity from politicians than from scientists.  We have a vision of purity for clergy, teachers, law enforcement, bosses, and we imagine politicians and other kinds of people will at least shade the truth for personal gain. Somehow, real accountability is lacking. What will it take to change ways we respond? Do you forgive, seek respite or act differently?  

Why do we dislike liars? It’s a matter of trust.  These people break an unspoken agreement to treat others with respect as we desire to be treated.  Serious deception may make it impossible for us to trust another person again. You may evolve to assume guilty until proven innocent rather than thinking a person is honest unless his behavior leads you to believe otherwise. Since trust is on the line, admitting lies as soon as possible is desireable.  If the truth only comes out once it is forced through confrontation, the repair of trust is less likely.

If you're a parent, teach your children to come clean about lying.  No matter how big a whopper they may have told, tell them you prefer to hear the truth from them, no matter how bad, than be deceived.  Show them nothing is more sacred in your relationship than your bond of trust.     Draw from stories to illustrate the long and short-term drawbacks of deception.

Which strategies help you to best detect whether you're being misled? There is no guaranteed way, but behavioural clues may give you reason to become suspicious:

Avoidance of eye contact: With a few cultural exceptions, and exteme shyness aside, people typically make eye contact at least half the time they speak with you.  If you see them avoiding eye contact or looking down during a specific part of a conversation, they may well be lying.

Curious voice variations: A variation of voice pitch or rate in speech can be a sign of lying. Note also lots of umms and ahhs. Where a person searches to explain an event, an absence or lack of information you would assume to be simple, the lag time may mean they have things to hide.

Body language. Turning your body away, fidgeting, covering your face or mouth with a hand, shaky hands or legs can indicate deception. Sucking on fingers and changing the subject from the task at hand are also often signs of more than observable nervousness. Guilt may be visible because a liar is unable to contain feeling uncomfortable or tempering a conscience.

Contradicting oneself. When a person makes assertions that just don’t hold together, you may have good reason to be suspicious.  Consider a person who invites you to join a club and then, tells you he never invited you in the first place, just after your role as treasurer enabled you to discover inaccurate financial books, well, listen to your instincts. When someone changes subjects, he may be trying to sway your attention from the crux of the dishonesty.

Recognize that if you lie a lot, even about what you think are unimportant things, you are likely to develop bigger problems that will eventually cause you real relationship, financial or legal troubles. Figuring out what is driving you to lie will help heal this self-destructive behavior. This may mean going into treatment with a therapist to discover why you feel the need to deceive. Ask yourself what you may hide from. Remind yourself all roads to self-discovery are beneficial.