Thank You!

One of my Facebook friends recently shared a video of Sly and The Family Stone performing "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)" on the Dick Cavett Show.

Seeing it reminded me that Sly and The Family Stone were one of my favorite musical groups during my youth, and that TYFBMEA was one of my absolute favorite songs.

So I re-shared it, with this note: "I might ask to have this played at my memorial service when I'm gone. This, and the last movement of Brahms' Requiem."

Now, what you have to understand is that for DECADES, I have said that if I gained enough favor with enough people to have a large funeral, I wanted to have Brahms' "Ein Deutsche Requiem" performed. The last movement, in particular, expresses so well the confidence with which Christians can face death, that it dominated my internal soundtrack in the days after my mother's death.

But in the days since that Facebook post, "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)" has absolutely joined it at the top of my post-mortem playlist. As I played it over and over, I realized that I love this song more than ever.

I have found a video recording of the 45 on YouTube that I like better than the Dick Cavett Show performance, so here it is. This song makes me wish I had a huge, high-powered speaker system. I want to blast it so that my neighbors down the block are compelled to dance.

Enjoy!

I believe in the power of music to enhance personal performance, if only by helping to calibrate our moods. For that reason, I have often started my days with Wagner's "The Ride Of The Valkyries." More recently, when preparing to make prospecting phone calls for LegalShield, I have fired up John Williams' title music for the 1978 "Superman" film.

Now, "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)" may replace both of them. Why? Because it reminds me that in the end - in the very end - the specific results of any specific effort simply don't matter as much as I have believed they do. Specific results matter less than skill, and skill matters less than the enthusiasm that will fuel the continued, repeated effort needed to gain skill (go ahead, re-read that as many times as you need to).

Did you know that the root of "enthusiasm" means "possessed by a god, inspired"? To do something with enthusiasm means to do it as if God were doing it through you.

I believe that the Creator of all things bright and beautiful possesses an infinite capacity for delight. So you know what? If a prospecting phone call ends with the other person agreeing to meet with me, I want to say, "Thank you." Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin.

And if a phone call ends with the other person saying "I'm not interested," I want to say, with no loss of enthusiasm (thank you, Mr. Churchill), "Thank you." Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin. Because it's not about their specific response on that specific call. It's about me making that call, and the next one, and the one after that. It's about me relentlessly being mice elf, agin and agin.

Quite seriously: this song could help me to become a millionaire. But that's not the half of it.

When I made that comment on Facebook about my memorial service, it really was just a passing comment, but the more I've thought about it since, the more I have realized how real it is for me.

I want to live the rest of my life in such a way that in the end, everybody who knew me can hear this song and say, "Yep, that was Elwin."

What song(s) would you want to be identified with?

B.C. and Me, Part 3: Getting Excited

It has been way too long since I wrote anything here about LegalShield. I'll catch up over the next few days, Lord willing and da crik don't rise.

Brian Carruthers' book, "Building An Empire: The Most Complete Blueprint to Building a Massive Networking Business," continues to inspire and challenge me. I still have to work at maintaining a stance of teachability as I re-read portions of it.

He makes much of the fact that in network marketing it is critical to follow the system that the company you're working with has in place.

While he never names LegalShield specifically, the system he describes looks totally like LegalShield's system to me. It consists of seven steps:

1. Get excited
2. Make your list
3. Book a Private Business Reception (within first 3-5 days)
4. Book a Private Conference Call (within first 3-5 days)
5. Weekly Business Briefing
6. Trainings (Events and Calls)
7. Corporate Convention

There's more, but he treats other things as ancillary to what one graphic calls the "Seven Step Funnel."

Now, about that first step...

As I've said before, in high school I was so strongly emotional that sometimes I wished I could be like Star Trek's Mr. Spock. When the Army sent me to Okinawa, I became involved with Campus Crusade for Christ, whose teachings helped to deepen my distrust of my emotions. A single image, in particular, burned itself into my brain. It looked something like this:

The idea of it was that we should base our faith on facts, not on feelings; that when our faith lines up with facts, the appropriate feelings will follow. But I took it to mean more: that feelings should be ignored.

That led to a lot of bad stuff for a long time.

I am learning to pay attention to my feelings without being controlled by them (I think). But still, when I saw that the first step of the system was to "get excited," I recoiled. The idea of willing oneself into a specific emotional state as part of a system for conducting a business repulsed me. Indeed, it sounded cultish.

Until I thought about it a little more, and realized that we talk ourselves into emotional states every day. That performing artists will themselves into emotional states before going onstage. That athletes will themselves into emotional states before going onto the field or the court. That soldiers will themselves into emotional states before a charge. That emotions energize motion, that they are fuel for action. That, in short, emotions are always in play, and it is advantageous to play them well.

Then I thought about it a little more more, and realized that in order to get excited, I simply had to contemplate the facts about LegalShield:

1. We offer people the opportunity to gain wisdom, power and prosperity via access to the legal system for a monthly cost that is less than that of a night at the movies. 
2. We offer identity theft detection, and have licensed investigators who will do whatever it takes for as long as it takes to restore a member's identity to its prior condition after a breach.
3. As a LegalShield rep, I can get paid well, get paid daily and get paid forever.
4. As a LegalShield rep, I can get paid well, get paid daily and get paid forever on someone else's work.
5. The company has a declared goal of creating more millionaires than any other company.
6. I have begun doing the things that reps who have already earned $1 million or more did to get there.
7. A survey indicates that 60% of Americans would like to have a legal services plan if they knew that such a thing existed. Our market penetration is less that 2% of the population. That means that 58% are just waiting for someone to tell them about it.
8. The company's new mission statement speaks of helping people to gain life-transforming skills, and the title of the corporate business opportunity presentation now has the phrase, "a powerful journey." These suggest that LegalShield is positioning itself as a personal development company for its reps. I have always wanted to help people do better at life; sponsoring associates may become my best way of doing that.

You know what? I'M EXCITED.

MEMO TO MYSELF, 20150614

STOP saying that you want things that you are not working toward.

I Didn't Intend To Write This, Until I Did

Lately I have been toying with the idea that all behavior comes down to one of two things: intention or distraction. At any given moment, you are either pursuing a clear intention, or you are being distracted from doing so.

More than that, it has occurred to me that perhaps all of the things that I say have kept me from reaching my goals - fear of failure, fear of success, discouragement, confusion, ignorance - boil down to one thing: distraction. That anything that draws attention away from achieving an intention is just a form of distraction.

Even an intention serves as a distraction from other intentions; but at least pursuing any given intention strengthens the intentional muscles, so to speak. It's the periods of time without conscious intention that suck the power out of my life. So, lately, I have been monitoring myself, by simply asking myself occasionally, "What am I intending right now?"

It's a bracing question, and sometimes asking it helps me to shift gears - to re-focus on an intention.

That's what started me writing this piece - I caught myself being unintentional, and decided to give my attention to writing about intention. Which I've wanted to do for a while, anyway.

So here we are. This is what I am working/playing with:

1. All behavior may be described as enacting an intention, or engaging in distraction from intention.
2. By the very act of giving my attention to something, I either advance an intention, or I distract myself from intentions.
3. I can choose at any moment how to direct my attention. 

That last proposition seems huge to me. The ability to choose what to give our attention to may be the greatest power we possess - and I think that for most of us, it is undervalued, overlooked, and underdeveloped (it may be severely curtailed or even shut down in people with malfunctioning brains).

Indeed, the ability to choose what to give our attention to may be described as the ability to distract ourselves from distractions, according to Columbia psychology professor Walter Mischel.

Mischel authored "the marshmallow test," an experiment in the 1960s and 70s (when he was at Stanford), in which young children could receive a marshmallow (or cookie) immediately or receive two by waiting 15 minutes. The self-control exhibited by the children who waited has been linked to them generally going on to live more successful lives.

In a New York Times piece about Mr. Mischel's work, Pamela Druckerman writes (italics mine):

Part of what adults need to learn about self-control is in those videos of 5-year-olds. The children who succeed turn their backs on the cookie, push it away, pretend it’s something nonedible like a piece of wood, or invent a song. Instead of staring down the cookie, they transform it into something with less of a throbbing pull on them.
Adults can use similar methods of distraction and distancing, he says. Don’t eye the basket of bread; just take it off the table. In moments of emotional distress, imagine that you’re viewing yourself from outside, or consider what someone else would do in your place. When a waiter offers chocolate mousse, imagine that a cockroach has just crawled across it.

That chunk of advice could be useful for almost anyone at some point - I'll tell you in my next post how a visualization changed my eating habits instantly years ago. For Christians, I think "Imagine that you're viewing yourself from outside" is downright Biblical.

Consider that in Ephesians, Paul goes to considerable length to establish that Christians are, as parts of Christ, seated at the right hand of God in the heavenly realms. Anyone who really believes that of him/herself is bound to view everything in this life as from the outside - at least occasionally, if not perpetually.

This is the literal meaning of "ecstasy" - mentally standing outside of oneself (it is not specifically an emotional state, although that has been attached to it). So I'll go ahead and say that having an ecstatic mind is part and parcel of being Christian, and that the most apparent benefit of said mind is self-control.*

In any case, many people, Christian or not, could benefit from Paul's instruction to exercise care in what we give our attention to:

Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable — if anything is excellent or praiseworthy — think about such things. (Philippians 4:8)

May more and more of your attention be given to conscious intentions.

___________________________
*How would a group of people who believe this interact with each other?

Memo to myself, 20140314: DO TODAY

Try this for the remainder of this month: DO TODAY.

Plan the week. Plan the month. Plan the quarter. Plan the year. Plan the next five years.

But do today.

Do not look at the weekly calendar while doing. Look at today's.

Do not even look at tomorrow's to-dos, until you have done today's.

Do not even look at yesterday's to-dos, until you have done today's. If there are to-dos left over from yesterday, begin working on them AFTER you have done today's.

Plan long-term, work short-term. In doing, let today trump tomorrow AND yesterday.

DO TODAY.

Memo to myself, 20140221

You have neither the right nor the responsibility to manage other people's emotional states. Which is a good thing, since you also CAN'T. Managing your own is work enough.