Light in the Darkness

One of the great joys of December is all the holidays of Light. The nights are becoming longer and longer. There is so much darkness in our days - and then the businesses and the homes start to twinkle like stars in the sky come down to Earth to bless us with what we most need. It's pretty, yes. But it is even more a symbol. Light in the darkness is Hope personified. The only real defeat in life is Despair.

Here is my little town of Ashland, Oregon, in the mountains just 14 miles from the California border, offering up Hope and Joy to the darkness....

Why Celebrate Beethoven by Becoming a "Point of Light"?

Beethoven's Birthday today!

Even if you don't love his music, it is undeniable that the man gave the world a great gift - soaring music in so many different genres, that influenced every generation that came after him.

OK, so the man was a genius.

But we all have gifts. ALL of us. And they need to be savored and relished for our own enjoyment - painting, coloring, writing, building dog houses.

And we need to keep reminding ourselves that some of these gifts need to be shared. The yarn group I started at my local Unitarian church has produced warm shawls and lap robes for Meals on Wheels and the local Senior Center. I have a bag, a la Santa, of 40 hats, gloves, scarves, etc. to share with the Emergency Food Bank. If you are food-insecure, you don't have $ for warmth. And if you can lower in the inner temp because you have sweaters, you can save some more $ to apply to food.

And I offer free classes every term at my local senior college. I do free health talks at the Food Co-Op. I do free work in reiki and other healing work as a percentage of my total work time.

In my parents generation - and among working class and Southerners today, especially - community work was an integral part of life. Everyone, of every income level except the dirt-poor, knew that they had a responsibility [that means, not optional] to give back out of whatever abundance they had - money, time, prayer, or all three.

The shredding of our social safety net - and Republicans going after "benefits" that we working people of America paid for, over a 47 year work life, like Medicare and Social Security - means that we have to band together as never before.

As a Hindu scripture reminds us, "Do not berate or think badly of the poor, because many poor were once prosperous - and you may someday lose your prosperity as well." In other words, we are all in this together.

So inventory what you are good at. Can you cook? (free cooking classes) Can you crochet? (sit over here by me) Can you build things? (Habitat). You get the picture.

Beethoven was a genius, and you and I are not going to have the earth-shattering impact that he had. But consider these words from Middlemarch: : "The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."

Every year when I pay my property taxes, I feel like the hero that I am. I am taking care of my community, without fuss or complaint. There are so many unhistoric acts of making our worlds a better place we can take.

Honor the man immortalized into the depths of space..... make your mark on your small corner of the world.

https://www.amazon.com/Red-State-Blue-Heart-Victoria/dp/1974032272/

The Secret Truth Behind the "War on Christmas"

The Truth Behind the “War on Christmas”

Of course, you know there is no war on Christmas and never was. The folks who claim otherwise are the slice of America that bemoans the Most Favored Religion status that Christianity had half a century ago. You know, religious pageants by all the kids at the PUBLIC school (including the kids whose parents were trying to teach them a different religion, or wanted their kids to have only science as their guide to life. The latter is sad, but certainly it is every parent’s right to not have a religion shoved down their children’s throats.). Christian religious decorations all over the schools. Christian religious symbols all over public, paid for by your tax dollars, government buildings, where the whole community needs to enter to receive a dog license, contest an easement or just go to work. Easter (not Spring) Break, which followed a Christian religious holiday.

Eventually, when enough new Justices were added, people who revered the Constitution and its hallowed separation of Church and State, the Supremes decided that it was all too egregiously unconstitutional. Hallelujah, said the vast majority of devout Christians, who could see the dangers to their religion in becoming a de-facto State Faith. Religion is irredeemably damaged when it gets wrapped around political power. Examples abound, both today and in previous centuries. [Email me PRIVATELY for details.]

The reason you can say Merry Christmas to someone and that someone has no idea what you really mean is because Dec 25 is a secular, civil holiday for the entire nation of citizens, as well as a religious holiday for a slice of those citizens, and the word “Christmas” has been appended to BOTH of them. If you say Merry Christmas you could be wishing someone a happy secular, civil holiday – or you could be greeting a co-religionist. You could be greeting a co-religionist and wishing them a happy BOTH holidays. Is this crazy? Ya sure, you betcha.

HOW did we get to this crazy state of affairs? The way we get to most messes: a cabal of people tried to get ascendency by grabbing power, not by earning respect. In this case, a group of Christian lawmakers thought of a clever way to make their religious holiday a national holiday – establishing their religion as the State Faith without being so overt about it that even a conservative Supreme Court couldn’t stomach it. The law establishing Dec 25th as a national, civic – secular! – holiday stated that Christmas was a holiday that was about family (not religion) and as such was embraced by all corners and segments of American society. It wasn’t true then, but the law made it so!

And that, dear devout and religious Christians, is why you can’t “Put Christ in Christmas” unless you are talking about your private religious celebrations, where he’s pretty well entrenched, you’ll have to admit. No, you can’t get Christ into a secular, civil holiday because – establishing your religion is unconstitutional in the USA. The national shopping, eating, visiting-family, commercial holiday with Frosty and Rudolph belongs to We the People. It’s a civic holiday and capitalism and customers can do whatever we like with it. THAT is the result of your co-religionists trying to pull a fast one with the US Constitution a century ago. Let that lesson sink in, really, really deeply. The reason that Christmas is no longer exclusively a day that a religious leader was born is 100% your own damn fault. 100%. You created this mess. It’s all on you. And this is one genie you will never, ever get back into the bottle.

You COULD repeal the designation of Dec 25 as a national holiday and have it return to just being a personal-choice day that religiously-inclined people can ASK their employers for [no guarantees, and it is close to the end of most companies’ fiscal year, so – good luck with that], but neither you nor the rest of us will get a paid holiday. Much less Dec 24th, Dec 26th or any other day prior to New Year’s. Wanna start using your personal vacation time to have a day or two off and skip the whole family travel thing? Hmm? Didn’t think so.

Neither will the rest of the overworked, exhausted 350 million rest of us who look forward to the only long Federally-encouraged family time off from work.

Because of the confusion with both holidays using the same words, people who are not aggressively trying to get back those halcyon days of unconstitutionality – which includes Christians who want to protect their religion as well as those of other, or no, faith tradition – coined the respectful Happy Holidays, to acknowledge that civil holiday, as well as Yule (Wiccans & other Neo-Pagans), Solstice (everyone), Hanukkah (Jews) and Bodhi Day (Buddhists). Respect is the foundation of a law-based, justice-focused democratic society. Respect is good.

And why do I say “Christians who want to protect their religion”? Well, if a holiday is purely religious, you have control of it. If you allow the name and the date to be used as a national secular holiday, then it belongs to all of us, and that includes Madison Avenue, the retail industry, Hollywood and any and all other commercial ideas that the human mind can think up.

you really follow the teachings of that marvelous, inspirational Jewish Palestinian construction worker of two millennia ago, start campaigning for a national, secular Yule Holiday on the 21st, or the 26th or some other late-December day [we need a long holiday close to New Year so we can have that family and rest time], so you can have your religious holiday back. The only thing you can’t have: Your religious ancestors wanted to force everyone to celebrate their religious holiday, as a way of either converting us all, or rubbing our faces in a de-facto theocracy.

Them days are gone for good, no matters what lies a President or politician tries to spin. You can’t slip a theocracy past the Supremes in the 21st Century, even a pack of Republican Justices. But you can put Christ back into a new exclusively-religious holiday. Heck, you could even move it back to when the Messiah was actually born – late March or early April. We’ll still have Christmas, that “family holiday enjoyed by all sectors of American society. “

Deck the halls with boughs of whatever and happy eggnog to us all, every one!

2 Reasons Why "I Don't Know" Is Your Best Road to Health, Wealth & Peace of Mind

Can “I Don’t Know” Be Your Place of Peace?

I mention in a newsletter a free offer of an onsite consult and add “Please, God, not Medford.”   One of the readers is incensed enough at what she assumes is an arrogant, superior Ashland attitude to tell me so.  Real reason: I passionately loathe red-light ticket-cameras; evidence suggests that they are a revenue-generation scam, unrelated to road safety.  So I avoid Medford except for select shopping districts which I can get to without passing the revenue-scams.  She jumped to a completely erroneous conclusion, because she assumed that she knew.  She was absolutely certain, in a situation where she had NO actual information.  All she had was a trying-to-be-funny remark and an Ashland mailing address. 

Our brains are primed to do this by millions of years during which our ancestors were lunch to every passing carnivore.  The “assume it’s an enemy” neural pathways that run through memory and limbic system are the culprits in the “jumping to a conclusion” problem.  But being sure in a situation where certainty is not immediately warranted forms a major barrier in our road to inner peace.  Think I’m exaggerating?  OK.  Eliminate all national politics from the calculation and think about the last 5 times that you got yourself into a tizzy about something.  Ask yourself WHY you were so certain that you knew the other person’s motivation and ethics.  Do this on paper, not in your head.  So you have three columns:  What I Was Sure Of; WHY I Was 100% Sure; What I Discovered When I Asked or Researched.

For most of our tizzies, that last column is blank.  We never check our assumptions. 

Now, please hear me clearly: many times we are sure because our inner wisdom has perceived one of the English-language’s covert verbal attack patterns.  Even when we can’t verbalize how we know, we accurately know that the person is an Enemy.  But it’s not our inner wisdom in every single case.  Sometimes it is our brain taking a short-cut from input to conclusion, bypassing evidence completely.  In psychology, we call this Filling in the Gaps.  Our brains “save time” by filling in the information gaps in what we see, hear or read, by filling in the gaps with beliefs, prejudices and memories of people superficially similar to this person.  This allows us to feel (limbic system, remember?) that we have the preparation for an adequate conclusion. 

In the case I started with, all my client knew about me was that I teach great classes, I write books and I live in the Ashland zipcode.  What info does a person have in all that to come to conclusions about why I avoid Medford?

The major motivation for striving to limit the short-circuits to certainty is the damage that our anger causes in our relationships, with strangers as well as loved ones, and the legitimate shame that we feel when we discover the real reason behind people’s actions.  Naturally, the road to forgiveness, of ourselves as well as others, beckons, but how much better to never go down that road at all!

It IS possible to take control of this Filling in the Gaps.  Start with awareness of the problem.  Practice stopping in your mental tracks every time you feel a conclusion forming, about anything.  Ask yourself, “WHY am I certain?”  If you can interrupt one in a hundred of your leaps to conclusion, it is a start.  As you start this process, you will get to the point where less and less of your precious peace of mind is poisoned with conclusions that you were certain about – for which a better conclusion would have been “I don’t know.”  Not knowing is an amazing place of power.  Some Not Knowing isn’t worth more effort, like why the bank teller was short with you.  [Best bet: a personal problem.]  Say a prayer, send Reiki and move on. 

As Mark Twain reminds us, “It’s not the things you don’t know that will get you into trouble.  It’s the things you know for sure that just ain’t so.”  Amen.

Victoria Leo’s books are available wherever you buy books, including Journey Out of SAD: Beat the Winter Blues – 2^nd Edition, so relevant now, and her newest:  101 Healthy Meals in 5 Min or Less (2^nd Ed) and Red State, Blue Heart  Visit her at https://blastthruthosebarriers.thinkific.com/courses, www.soaringdragon.biz, www.youtube.com/user/humanbio4everyone/videos, https://www.facebook.com/Soaring-Dragon.  

Inspiration: Light in the Darkness

All we need when we are worried or confused is one light in the darkness.  That light is always there, if we are willing to see it.  Not an upending of whatever outcome we don't like, but an amelioration of pain - or any other way to be happy, without the person or outcome that we wanted for all the good reasons that we want things.

And Light never shows off so well in the daylight as it does in the dark night.  Gratitude in the dark times is the graduate degree in wisdom.  To have some peace and contentment when everything goes your way is easy, but gratitude in deep night?  That's the Victoria Cross.... for Valor under the fire of Life.

https://youtu.be/9lo7wtnqPsA

For more resources:

www.soaringdragon.biz

New books:

https://www.amazon.com/Red-State-Blue-Heart-Victoria/dp/1974032272/

Humor, inspiration, thought-provoking essays on how to make American culture healthy and kindly

https://www.amazon.com/Healthy-Meals-Minutes-Less-Transformation/dp/1979815445/
101 Healthy Meals in 5 Minutes or Less

https://www.amazon.com/Busters-Healthy-Longevity-Through-Barriers-ebook/dp/B01MZ4HNRZ

101 Stress Busters

Online classes

5 Tools in 5 Minutes/Day:  Strategic Self Care for Entrepreneurs & Other Busy People
https://blastthruthosebarriers.thinkific.com/courses/106742

Kick Dieting to the Curb
https://blastthruthosebarriers.thinkific.com/courses/76428

http://blastthruthosebarriers.thinkific.com/courses/pain-free-without-drugs

4 Powerful Reasons Why You Have to Listen to Rudolph ... every day from Thanksgiving to New Years

Don't you just hate it when you have to listen to Rudolph and Frosty prior to December 24th??

No? Me, neither!

I put up holiday wreaths on the doors the week before Halloween. I have decorations in the windows now. Gonna start listening to holiday songs and singing lustily with them for two solid months...

WHY? you ask.

Yeah, I know, having holidays go on and on can be annoying. What other cultures do is they have numerous holidays throughout the year. It reminds people of joy and love and the essential sweetness of life at regular intervals year-round.

We benighted savages of the USA really only have two holidays - July 4th (one day, big deal) - and the period from Thanksgiving to New Years. We are forced to work too many hours, with no or expensive health care "benefits", we have practically no holidays, we spend our weekends doing the chores that we can't do during the week. We are the most anxious people on Earth - and no wonder! Every other industrialized nation on earth removes the basic worries of life - health care and education, elder care help and baby care support - so that citizens can soar and strive and live good lives.

So we are exhausted, scared/worried and desperately needing rest most of the time.

When you only have one extended holiday, when you have to pack a year's worth of joyful play into one month of weekends and (if you're lucky) a week off from the long-hours grind.....

Even I, who absolutely practice what I preach and do the 5 Tools every day of the year, yearns for the plethora of official holidays that the rest of the world enjoys. Sure I make every Sunday a spiritual and creative oasis, but - it IS more fun to have fun when the rest of the community is smiling as well.

So - tired of Rudolph by Dec 1st? Have compassion on the rest of us holiday-deprived revelers. And work for a nation where the national good trumps corporate greed. Bless us all, every one.

Trying to Pull a Fast One a Century Ago, Bites the Conniving Sneaks in the Butt – A Lesson for Us All, Every One.

Donald Trump is touring the country on a self-proclaimed Victory Lap, telling audiences that when he is President, they will be able to say Merry Christmas to each other instead of the let’s-include-all-Americans Happy Holidays greeting. His real message is that religious Christians have been oppressed and suppressed by the insistence on recognizing that Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and atheists are Americans too, and deserve courtesy and respect. Absurd. Everyone modifies their message for who they are talking to, from Presidents on down.

But the whole “Keep Christ in Christmas” movement forgets one supremely important – and instructive – point and that is: There are two completely separate holidays being celebrated on the same day and having the same name! There is, of course, the religious holiday and there is the secular holiday.

Let’s start with some facts about the religious holiday. The earliest Christians knew that Jesus was born in the last week of March or the first week of April, the two week lambing season when “shepherds are keeping watch over their flocks by night.” Nearly everyone knows that. For the 1st hundred years, the “birthday” was a solemn spiritual day, with prayers and (in some venues) fasting. Nearly everyone doesn’t know that Jesus’ Birthday was moved to December 25 because that was Mithras’ Birthday; this occurred as Christianity was becoming an empire-building political force, and co-opting existing faiths, through the coercion of Roman legions if need be, was the major proselytizing tool. Christians violently suppressed every other faith they came in contact with during that first millennium. My ancestors had been creating bonfires for Yule (Dec 21st) and getting blind drunk for eight days to two weeks. Along with excessive eating of yummy, unhealthy things and bringing fir trees indoors, which they continued to do when their rulers saw the power-advantages of going along and becoming nominally Christian.

So if you want to have a religious holiday, go to church services, don’t buy any presents or send any cards, don’t decorate the house or get a tree, stay indoors for 24 hours and pray. No TV, no matter who is playing who. Breathe, and pray. Silently or in your family group. For unto us a child is born. Pray.

That’s the religious holiday.

So how on Earth did we end up with another, completely separate holiday, completely (by law) secular and with the same dang name??? It’s an insane situation. The secular holiday should be moved to December 24 or 26th and called Winterfest or something. Or Jesus’ Birthday should be moved to spring. He might end up having a birthday and a death day very close to each other, which has a very satisfying symmetry, doesn’t it? The two holidays aren’t impossible to separate. The Unitarian Caroling group I’m part of sings lustily and enthusiastically at the mall for hours, providing outreach to people who’ve never met a Unitarian, and sticking strictly to the Frosty the Snowman genre of songs, of which there are a plethora. Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire has nothing whatever to do with a Middle Eastern guy/god who preached that all people are brothers and sisters, but it is a lovely

paean to the glories of winter in northern latitudes.

So, how did we end up in this silly mess?

We are experiencing the inevitable – absolutely inevitable – result of trying to pull a fast one. Every single time you connive and cheat, the result is going to be very, very bad for you. Call it karma, call it divine retribution, call it the human inability to see past the immediate goal that you want very much to the logical result of pulling that scam. Whatever your ideology is, the result is the same. Steal and you are going to get screwed. It may take a while but it will happen.

A century ago, just before the turn of the last century as I recall, a group of passionately Christian Congressmen with total contempt for the foundational American principle of separation of church and state, and every American’s right to live in a secular democracy, not a theocracy, got together and hatched a plan to circumvent the establishment clause of the US Constitution. As Phase 1 of a stealth plan to turn our beloved country into a Christians-only playground, they proposed a bill for a new national holiday. They wanted to make Christmas a national holiday, with mandated day off from work (or overtime pay) for all those good Christian folk who, until then, had to work on that supremely holy day. [As I still have to with my religious holidays, or take a personal day off, as is proper in a secular democracy where faith is a personal, not national, choice.] They also hoped that making that religious holiday a national holiday would be followed by making Easter and all other Christian holidays national holidays as well. [That was too much for the rest of Congress to swallow – and the Supreme Court, as conservative as it was, would never have gone along.]

They managed to pull their Christmas absurdity with a preamble stating that Christmas was a national family holiday, when families gathered and solidified their bonds – good for the country, appeals to patriotism, are you hearing the Amens yet? – and persons of all conditions and creeds bought presents and trees – appeals to business greed! – and so, a national celebration should be enshrined as a legal holiday. That had just enough stealth-verbiage to get through and get past the Supremes.

So – the reason religious Christians had their religious holiday turned into a market-economy extravaganza is that a bunch of religious zealots tried to violate the establishment clause. As a result of which, by law, their holiday was hijacked by the secular celebration. How we cope? Some people celebrate both holidays. Some people celebrate only the secular holiday. Jews took the insignificant Chanukkah and turned it into a major holiday so that their kids would have something to get, and get presents for, while all their friends are celebrating secular Christmas. They didn’t have to. “Christmas,” by law, belongs to all of us – trees, songs, lights, drinking and eating, being with family or being depressed because we don’t have family, decorating the house and lights, lights, Lights

.

So go ahead and celebrate the secular holiday. It belongs to you! And make a solemn vow, on December 25th and every day of the year that follows, to NOT take an ethical shortcut to your heart’s desire. It may take a hundred and twenty years to come home to roost, but it will. If you think you got away with it, it’s just your failure to perceive how the earthquake your ethics-shortcut set off will bring some aspect of your life tumbling down, down the temporal road. Play fair and you’ll never have the personal equivalent of this Christmas mess in your life.

Happy Holidays! Merry Secular Christmas to all!

Feeling Stressed and Down?

Many people get “down” at this time of year.  An ex-boss of mine said that she hated autumn because all she saw all around her was the living world dying.  But that dying was only in her mind.  Nature never dies.

What it does is sleep.  The upper layers of grass fall away, and the roots remain, waiting for the return of the light in spring.  Trees lose their leaves so they can effectively hunker down and take their own hibernation time.  Roses drop their last blooms in December, just before the Solstice.  The Great Sleep overtakes nature, a time when the summer’s focus on growing, growing, growing can turn into the winter’s focus on restoration.

If you have the blues because you think you see Death all around you, be of good cheer.  The world is only sleeping.  And tonight, at 8PM PST, the nadir will be reached and the Light will begin to return to the Northern Hemisphere again.  We will all receive the promise that life is eternal and the Great Sleep will end in another cycle of furious growth and resplendent colors.

When nature goes inward, it is an invitation for the human animal to rest as well.  If you’ve been on frantic overdrive, realize that you are creating the definitions of Success and Failure that are driving you crazy.  Perhaps this year you can realize it and next year you can stop it?  At least consider that option.  If you don’t rest enough– thinking rest = laziness because that’s what corporate culture tells you, for their own greedy reasons – consider resetting your beliefs.  You do need 7+ hours of actual sleep and at least another half-hour of meditation, yoga or Reiki each and every day, if you want to live a long and healthy life.  The laws of biology apply to everyone, regardless of their income and Great Importance in The World.  The reason I get so much done in my working time is because I regenerate my energy through exercise and through rest.   You can’t keep dipping into your reserve tank forever.  Eventually, the well runs dry.  Consider this for the next 24 hours.

Most of our “downs” are, like the belief that we are observing Death all around us, or the belief that we’re not allowed to rest, thus self-created, which means that they will fall away in the moment when we stop believing lies.  [Not all “downs” are products of our thoughts.  If you get down every winter, you may have a biochemical form of temporary depression called Seasonal Affective Disorder.  Get my book Journey Out of SAD and take your life back.]

The biggest source of self-inflicted pain at this time of year is the self-diagnosed Failure.  If you are down to your last dime, you are absolutely kin-less and friendless, and the food bank is out of food, then, yes, you have a real problem.  For most of us, it seems like Armageddon but if we get a solid 9 hours of sleep, and take a couple of naps, we’ll awake to the realization that what we are really facing is a mismatch between what we wanted and what we got.  This is a situation where the believers in a benevolent spiritual presence or benevolent spiritual laws have a real leg up.  They take a deep breath and sink into the comfort of knowing that whatever is in front of them is an opportunity to gain wisdom, and get on with living a kind and benevolent life themselves.  Maybe there’s a food bank in another town.  Maybe the local church has a warm place to spend the night.  Those of us who don’t have that philosophy need a world-view that encompasses the truth that we’re not supposed to go from pleasure to pleasure with nary a discomfort to be had.  That ain’t – and never has been – the human equation.  Into every life, some rain must fall, especially if you live in the Seattle metro area.

It seems obvious, but millions of people make themselves literally sick from fighting against this reality.  

If my first book hadn’t been botched by Prentice-Hall, I’d have been a millionaire in the 1980s.  I wouldn’t be working so hard for my daily tofu in 2015.  So what?  The road that “failure” sent me on lead me to the love of my life, a new career in comprehensive mental and physical healing and a completely different vision of why I was born.  

Why couldn’t I have a million AND the world’s best husband?  Why did my mother have to die in the grips of awful Alzheimer's?  Only children ask that question, grasshopper.   Adults let all the emotions generated by expectations of everlasting happiness fall by the wayside or slough off their backs like rain off an anorak.  Adults look around them and find the beauty in what IS, without comparing it with any imagined reality. 

It is Solstice Night.  In a matter of hours, the cosmic hourglass is turned over and the light begins to return to my half of the world.  Light is good.  It banishes SAD, and it makes it easier to step over, not into, the furball your cat coughed up overnight.  But the deeper Light – the Light of wisdom –is even better.  May we all awake tomorrow morning to welcome not only more light, but more Light. 



Visit my website www.soaringdragon.biz and explore all my programs for transformation - blasting you through barriers that are keeping you from the life you were born for!  The Facebook group Healing Minds, Healing Bodies also gets my announcements of new Webinars series.  Friday mornings Pacific and on YouTube humanbio4everyone after that.  Another webinar series on Wed mornings in 2016 on Creativity and it's link to health, wealth, and blasting through barriers

1 Simple Step to Improve Your Home Life in 2016

Even the most career-obsessed person knows that an unhappy home life sucks the energy and joy from your life.  And most of us are more balanced than that. So here is one simple step to make a big difference in your personal happiness for 2016 – and you’ll make your spouse or partner much happier as well.

Here’s the scenario that most of us live with:

Ø  There is no demarcation in communication between the tactical (kids’ dental appointments, other calendaring, the bill that needs paying) and the strategic (where are we going on vacation next year, what % of our time are we spending on kids, parents, hobbies, our spiritual growth, an irritation I have with you, an important way in which you are disrespecting me, my time or my importance in your life).  The tactical gets sandwiched into whatever snippets of time are available.  The most important strategic questions – the primary relationship and its emotions, meaning the meaning that the relationship has in our lives, how valued we are, how trusted you are – require undivided attention and a calm interior, so they never get aired until the bucket overflows on a particularly stressful day.

Ø  Important conversations (both tactical and strategic) about finances, vacations, problems or opportunities with the kids, problems and opportunities with in-laws, ourselves, our careers, our <fill in the blanks> gets sandwiched in to a brain that is tunneled on the stress of the moment.  A tunneled brain cannot even absorb all the details and nuances of the issue, much less process it with both analytic and intuitive wisdom. 

Ø  Because we cannot absorb the full reality that is being presented to our tunneled brain, we lose most of the context and half the content.  Our spouse correctly concludes that we aren’t listening and (possibly incorrectly) that we really don’t value them. 

Ø  Whoever is paying the bills, dealing with the teacher or the nasty neighbor, or mediating the in-laws knows what’s going on, but the other partner really doesn’t, so that miscommunications with the external world occur, wasting everyone’s already scanty free time. [The time you should be spending at the gym, right?]

Some people have a weekly What’s Going On? Meeting in which they coordinate the tactical.  It’s a step toward wisdom, certainly.  It’s a rare family that sets aside well-rested, unpressured time to tackle the strategic.  You need to.

To the rescue – the mandatory weekly Family Meeting!  Have a scribe, either the person with the best handwriting, or the person who really loves to take notes or who is the most comprehensive note-taker [that would be my partner], or both/all parties on a rotating basis.  Start with the tactical stuff.  Write everything down!  This ensures that whoever dealt with the problem, challenge or opportunity isn’t the only adult who knows who said what and what was done.  

So far, so tactical.

Then start on the strategic, specifically the non-relationship-oriented events, plans, goals.  Brainstorm.  Talk about retirement, or your career plans, or the possibility of relocation, or what kinds of investments you both really care about.  Focus on listening twice as much as you talk.  Take three long, deep breaths and don’t respond to any idea that upsets, scares or enrages you until you are calm again.  Have a Time Out process.  Stand up and stretch.  Talk about reducing expenses on things you want but don’t need, so that the longer-term strategic needs can be met – or even the strategic wants, like a life-altering trip to India or above the Arctic Circle, can come true without incurring debt.  You can forego the $5 cup of coffee if you know what you are getting instead.  Keep your eyes on the prize!

The last element of the Family Meeting is the relationship.  Keep reminding yourself that no human being is going to support you in your life goals, including your business and career goals, if they are disrespected themselves.  Cheer when your spouse trusts you enough to bring up something that s/he wishes you’d do or not do, or do differently.  You are finding out about it while s/he still loves and trusts you.  If I had a dollar for every male friend, colleague, relative or client who has told me in bewilderment that he has no idea why his wife is divorcing him, I would have a fully-paid condo in Lahaina.  With the exception of the 3% of humanity who are sociopaths, people are only mysterious when we aren’t listening.  Coaxing problems out of hiding when they are still small and fixable keep the garden of love well-weeded.

And that is the most effective, most powerful boost you can give your career and your life for 2016.