My Riffs

Part of getting wiser is recognizing patterns. Specifically, recognizing patterns in yourself and adjusting early on. Wisdom is recognizing potentially bad patterns in ourselves and making adjustments far in advance prior to any mistakes. Learn your patterns and learn from your patterns of behaviour. 

A sure way to be something we're not is to attempt to be someone else. Yeah we should look to good examples and try follow their example. But when we start trying to be someone we're not, we end up being nothing at all. A mature person finds who they are and doesn't try to become someone else.

People are imitators. We imitate those closest to us. The saying I've heard goes something like "show me your three closest friends and I'll show you who are". You will imitate those you are closest to. So make sure those closest to you are worth imitating.

By in large we act in our own best interests. And of course that's not a bad thing. It's called survival. I wonder though what it would look like if we acted in the best interests of everyone around us though. I suspect many of our behaviours would be different.

What can you do when things get out of control? Reign in everything you have control over. You can't take charge of a storm, but you can take charge of your response to the storm.

Doing the right thing is more important when nobody is watching than even when they are watching. It's important to do right when people are watching, of course. But doing right when nobody is watching is harder and thus more important.

I have this instinct (and I think many people have this) that when something against me where I want to blame "them". It's so easy to do. But this doesn't help me. Finding blame doesn't help me. We can't control what happens to us, but we can control what we do with what happens to us. When we assign blame we give up control. It's good practice to learn to own everything that happens to us. Unfair and bad things WILL happen, but if you own them, you can shape what they do to you. So stop blaming "them" and own your response.

There’s always unforeseen consequences to our actions. We try and think ahead and minimize the negative outcomes from any given action. But we never know the outcomes of our actions until they’re complete. And there’s always unforseen ones. All you can do is adjust once you know of the unforseen consequence.

The results from positive reinforcement for outweigh the results from force. So when there is opportunity for positive reinforcement, always use it. Force wears out FAST. Positive reinforcement never wears out.

A very emotional and moving call to personal ownership from a former Navy Seal.

If you want to know what someone thinks, ask them. You may actually hear what they think. Or you may hear what they think you want to hear. Or you may hear the watered down version. Or you may hear the specialized version for just you... If you really want to know what someone thinks, plug your ears and just watch what they do. You will learn a lot more about what someone really thinks by observing their behaviour. Your behaviour is a dead giveaway for what you think.

The toughest behaviour to handle and fix is when we do something and our behaviour has unintended consequences. Sometimes we do something that makes someone feel a way we didn’t intend. Sometimes we will never know how we made them feel, but when we do learn the unintended consequence of our behaviour, we must own it. Even if it wasn’t intended. Being quick to say “sorry, please forgive me’ is a major key to good relationships. Owning our behaviour, whether we intended it or not, is the right thing to do. I’ve hurt people completely unintentionally. We’ve all done it. And it’s best to own that behaviour and make amends.

You're either contributing to the problem or the solution. There is one good way to know if you're contributing to the problem or the solution. That being, if you're contributing love. If you're contributing love, you are not part of the problem.

Sometimes you have to make your body do something before your mind and heart will follow it. Usually this happens when we don't want to do the right thing, but force ourselves to do it.

What’s your pet peeve? I’m sure we all have an answer readily available. We’ve somehow made pet peeves acceptable, as long as they’re termed just that way. But pet peeves aren’t a free pass. If you have a pet peeve (or pet peeves) you’ve likely uncovered something that needs to be fixed. Don’t let yourself off the hook by calling it a pet peeve.

You can tell a lot about a person by two things: 1. How they treat themselves 2. How they treat others Watch and learn these two things about someone, and then you know a lot about them.

Wow! Life gets busy and cluttered. It's increasingly getting harder to get everything done in a given day. We have more efficiency than ever, but we're no less busy. How do we regain some time every day? Reduce clutter. Our world is cluttered materially, but also digitally. It may not be spring, but it's a new year. Maybe it's time to review your digital world. I spent the last two weeks reviewing and cleaning up. I hope to gain more free time from this. Here are a couple ways to cleanup your digital world: - Go through your mailbox and unsubscribe, unsubscribe, unsubscribe. (saves time everyday, saves you from wanting things you don't need) I have unsubscribed from over 45 different regular mailings. - Go though your mobile device and turn off as many notifications as possible. On an iPhone you can customize notifications down to turning off individual app badges. Go through your device(s)and get familiar with how notifications work and customize them. - G...

One measurement of maturity may be, when you’re having a bad day, do you make others’ day bad too?

The more junk I carry the more junk I will attract. Junk is magnetic. Learning to put down the junk is one of the most important lessons and disciplines one can learn.

What we eat is actually very important for our health, both physically and mentally. The same came be said though for non-food diets. What we feed will grow and demand more. If you feed laziness, it will grow and grow. If you feed negativity, it will grow and demand more negativity. If you feed your desire for junk food (junk music, literature, video) it will grow and demand more. So it's just as important to be careful what actions, thoughts and tendencies we feed. They will grow. Feed the positive thoughts and actions; starve the negative or potentially dangerous. What you feed will demand more and grow accordingly.