Positive Feedback

Right now, I'm in the midst of training to become a Dale Carnegie Trainer. Because I'm "fast-tracking" things a bit, it's quite a hectic schedule I'm keeping.

For the past five weeks, and for seven more, I am a Group Leader for a Wednesday night class, that finishes around 10:30pm. Four four weeks (two gone and two to go) I'm in a Monday night study group that finishes at 8pm, and next week I start again as a Group Leader for a Tuesday night class, again finishing around 10:30pm. So for two weeks I will have Dale Carnegie on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday nights.

Did I mention that there's also homework?

On the 17th June I will be in Edmonton for a training course to as the crucial step to becoming a Dale Carnegie Trainer, which is eight days long (Sunday to Sunday), 8am till 8pm.

It's tiring, especially when you add full-time work and a family and all the other commitments we have... but it's worth it.

Over and above the fact that I'm chasing my dreams to become a professional coach and speaker, the tremendous personal growth I'm enjoying and the positive feedback make the lack of sleep all worth it.

Today I received and email from one of the other two people from Calgary who are also training to become a Trainer and his opening words were "You will be an amazing trainer!"

I thought about what a good feeling I get from being around positive people who live the Dale Carnegie principles relating to good human relations. None of it is revolutionary. In fact Dale Carnegie began teaching his program 95 years ago.

Being a positive person, and genuinely caring about others takes as much energy as being negative and selfish, but the feelings you get and the way you make people around you feel is vastly different.

Spiritual peace.

It occurred to me as I was walking around the campus of the George Washington University on our recent trip to DC, that as a species, humans spend a lot of time and energy studying ourselves.

Relating to health, body and mind, there are four and five year courses on physical fitness, medicine, nursing, physiotherapy, dentistry, occupational health, anatomy, biology, immunology, pharmacology, sociology, women's studies and more.

When you look at all of the courses available at the post-secondary level, a striking number are related to the study of ourselves. Why is it then that suicide rates are just as high now as they were in the 1950s? One scary aspect of that is that men are three times more likely to commit suicide than women.

When it comes to depression, more drugs are being prescribed than ever to treat this epidemic and larger volumes of younger people are on anti-depressant medication.

And no-one is surprised that obesity is a huge factor in the health of people in the 21st century. You only have to look at the people walking towards you on the street to see that poor diet and insufficient exercise plague far too great a proportion of the population.

In Canada the obesity rate for children under 18 has tripled (3% to 9%) in the last 30 years and more than doubled for the 25-34 age group and over 75 age group. While Canada's obesity rate is at 24%, it's at 30% in the United States.Officially obesity is calculated as having a BMI (Body Mass Index) over 30. What that means in real terms - An adult male who is 5'10" and weighs 210lbs or an adult woman 5'4" weighing 175lbs are considered obese. The only exception relates to body-builders, who have larger than average muscles.

So with all this study of ourselves, why do we have so many health problems?

Shouldn't we be getting healthier?

Why are they predicting that Generation X'ers will have a shorter life expectancy than their parents?

We study ourselves, but do we even know who we are?

We learn and learn but what do we know?

Theoretically we know so much about how we operate as human beings, but we don't know how to do it. It's one thing to understand intellectually, it's completely another to know and feel something spiritually.

You can read books about golf, but you'll never become a good golfer without swinging a club. Life is about experiencing first hand and learning "on the job". Life is a work in progress.

It seems with all our attention we have lost the focus.

The goal should be pure happiness, spiritual peace, calmness. But it seems our goals are status, achievement, material wealth, knowledge, power and the rest of what Gordon Gekko espouses in the movie 'Wall Street'. Greed is not good if it makes you sad.

Our education system does not encourage learning for the sake of happiness. It encourages learning to "make it in life", to gain employment and to become successful. Unfortunately success is rarely defined as happiness, as serenity.

I never once had a meditation class at school. No one ever told me that I could be happy without everything that money can buys, and in fact that the only things that make you happy are what money can't buy.

Indeed many of the health issues faced by people today are not solely because McDonald's seems to be on every street corner. Free will continues to exist. Obesity, depression, suicide, and other social issues derive themselves from deeper issues related to lack of self-worth and insecurity.

As a race we need to spend less time studying ourselves and more time understanding ourselves, not on an intellectual level, but on a spiritual and holistic level.

We should feel what our body needs. Ask it. Trust that the answer is correct. Know that if we are true to ourselves and trust what our body tells us we need we won't go wrong.

It's only when we choose to believe what someone else thinks about us as the truth, that we run into problems.

We're back!

We're back... but our luggage is still on holidays!

After a week of travelling, wearing down the rubber on our shoes, developing monster blisters (not me, my wife did!), seeing more American history than Abraham Lincoln, and eating more food than we should have eaten in two weeks we're back in Calgary. Unfortunately I can't say the same about our poor bags.

We were scheduled to return from Philadelphia via Chicago into Edmonton at 10:30pm. But as our flight to Chicago was delayed by an hour and we only had an hour layover in Chicago, we would have missed our connecting flight. So we re-routed through Toronto, on a later flight. We arrived at 1am into Edmonton, but 48 hours later, our luggage is still officially somewhere between Chicago and Edmonton... although I have a sneaking suspicion it's sitting in some dark corner of the Edmonton airport.

Luggage issues aside, we had an awesome time. It was great to see the originals of the great US historical documents, like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution with its amendments. I did learn a lot about north American history, and came to realize something new about the United States.

The country really is a lot poorer than it lets on. When you figure how much the government pays for the various wars it fights, money that could be allocated to looking after it people, you can see visible signs that there really isn't so much prosperity.

It struck me on the first day we were there. Our hotel was near the Lincoln Memorial, which is at one end of the famous Reflecting Pool. We walked along the Reflecting Pool from the Lincoln Memorial past the Washington Monument to the Capitol building. I was staggered that the Reflecting Pool was green with algae and slime. The grass surrounding the Pool was patchy at best, but riddled with weeds and not mown. Actually a very untidy sight that I would expect to see in a poor ex-Soviet republic. Then, rather than having a pretty building where food, drinks and souvenirs were sold, it was literally a tent, and the washrooms were a row of Port-A-Potties. Hardly impressive.

In general many of the buildings were run-down, and poorly maintained. In many ways it did remind me of the many poor European cities I had visited, certainly not the image United States would like to portray to the outside world.

When you go further and look at the health system, frailty of the economy, and the general slide of the nation from the world's primary economic powerhouse, to a diminishing influence, it all bodes poorly for the US.

As a Canadian (I think of myself as one, as it is the place I call home) it is sad for me to see our nearest neighbour in such strife, and hopefully the ill effects will not creep to far across the border.

I'm not holding my breath.

Slavery

One theme that we noticed on this trip, similar to our other trips to the United States is a recurring theme of the abolition of slavery in the country, something the nation is very proud of.

What was interesting however if the definite racial division that still exists. Having always lived in a country that is predominantly of the same skin colour that I belong to, I had never really experienced any real visible racial segregation.

This trip to Washington DC and Philadelphia opened my eyes a little. It's true that there are no more "slaves", but it seems the people of African descent are still "servants". It seemed there were two classes of jobs, one for the black people and one for the rest. The blacks were in lower class jobs (and I say that with all due respect, but they are generally thought of as undesirable or dirty, but they are by no means any less important than any other job role our world requires to operate efficiently)- McDonald's and fast food restaurants, security guards, cleaners, waiters etc. Now, absolutely we saw black people wearing suits and working in high-demand jobs, but it seemed that we almost never saw any white people working in the first list of jobs.

We took a tour of the Arlington Cemetery in DC, and the bus drivers were all black, but the guides were all white.

I now understand more what Oprah talks about when she says racism still exists in the USA in a big way. Although there is officially no slavery, it is apparent that there are jobs that white people won't do because it's below them, but are happy to see black people work at.

Doing a job because you are owned by your master and having now choice is one kind of oppression, but being free and still feeling like you don't have a choice is a whole new kind of oppression... mental oppression. The kind that the Soviet Union wielded over it's "republics" like the Baltic States.

Slavery is abolished, but there is still some work to go before the races could be considered equal.

The Secret (Published Article)

I'm sure many of you had seen the movie or read the book "The Secret". It's a very well marketed concept, but the interesting thing is that nothing in there is really revolutionary, and neither does it claim to be.

Briefly, “The Secret” is the Law of Attraction, which states that you will attract into your life what you think about, whether it is positive or negative. Your thoughts determine your destiny.

What I found interesting was that so many people underestimate the power of intention and positive thoughts. Look around in your own life at what you have. What you see physically in your world - your friends, relationship, job, possessions, wealth etc are all a manifestation of your emotional, spiritual and physical well being. For example, if you are emotionally depressed, you may have very few friends. If you believe that "money is evil" then you are unlikely to be rich. If you don't place health as a priority in your life you may be overweight or underweight and unfit.

To change anything on the outside, we must first change on the inside. You won't become fit and healthy if you don't have the internal desire. You won't become wealthy if you think about being poor.

After changing our attitude, we must then change our actions. Ideas or words without actions will produce little more than ideas alone.

Colonel Harland Sanders, the founder of Kentucky Fried Chicken, started the business as a retired man with a small pension and an old car, but with a chicken recipe he knew in his heart was a winner. He approached restaurant owners and planned to sell his chicken recipe to them. In return they would give him a residual for every piece of chicken they sold - 5 cents per chicken.

The first restaurateur he called on turned him down. So did the second, and the third. In fact, the first 1008 sales calls Colonel Sanders made ended in rejection. Still, he continued to call on owners as he traveled across the USA, sleeping in his car to save money. Prospect number 1009 gave him his first "yes" and after two years of making daily sales calls he had signed up a total of five restaurants. Still Harland pressed on, knowing that he had a great chicken recipe and that someday the idea would catch on. The Colonel's smiling face in so many cities across the world shows that the idea did catch on. Colonel Sanders franchise actually helped many people succeed in the restaurant business.

Colonel Sanders had an idea, and a positive attitude that his idea would succeed. But the path to success isn't just about wishful thinking. Success is due to action, action and more action.
I guess my point is that some people criticize “The Secret” because it seems so abstract. I don’t think any of those people in the movie are saying that by thinking about something it will magically appear. What does happen is that thinking certain thoughts will put you in the correct frame of mind to see certain opportunities and then have the courage and foresight to act correctly to make the dreams materialize.

The secret to a happy and successful life lies in, firstly, knowing exactly what you want, and secondly focusing your attention on achieving that. Setting goals and making time to achieve them is the best way to advance forward.

Every day when you wake up you begin the rest of your life. Every morning you decide how you will live that day. You choose your own life and your destiny.

Awesome!

Last night was my first night as a Group Assistant on a Dale Carnegie course and it was awesome. It began with some nerves. I thought about how well I knew my previous group and how we had become friends, and now I was back at the start with 35 unfamiliar faces.

But it wasn't the same. I was in the class knowing the material already and I had extra confidence that the others didn't have. I was able to mix with the group and talk easily with people, going up to complete strangers and start a conversation. And by the end of the night I knew almost everyones first and last name.

These are two skills that I always believed belonged to others, but now I see in myself that same ability and it was an awesome realisation.

It was also a lot of fun, even more than the first time, because the nerves left very quickly, and the ability to really enjoy the time was there.

Finishing Dale Carnegie for the first time was a great experience. Starting it all over again is simply awesome!