Nelson Mandela, Racism, Rage, Brexit, Donald Trump & Having Genuine Goodness WIN

Today is International Mandela Day.  Hold that thought for a bit.

This week we discover that 65% of people who voted for Britain to leave the European Union either didn’t realize the vote was “serious” or, having come down from their emotional state, want a second vote so they can say Stay.  What’s with all the rage?   I call it being Drunk on Dudgeon.  Just like drunk on alcohol variety, if you are drunk on dudgeon, you are not capable of making decisions in YOUR long-term, real best interest.  You are so overwrought (drunk) on how badly you’ve been treated by [someone, some group of people, some organization or just The World in general], that you are supremely easy to manipulate in ways that shoot you in the head [really harm YOU in a serious way] and give someone else power.  Or that give you a short-term feeling of power at the expense of actually having power.  That last is really important: feeling something isn’t the same as having that something be actual reality.

In the British case, a wide swath of English working-class folks, especially “white” English, believed the nonsense of Boris Johnson and others who just flat out lied with the intention of making a bid for Prime Minister/power themselves [the manipulation] because they were angry about their declining economic prospects and subsequent economic safety and power.  And those dingbats in Brussels were acting imperious and not compromising or respectful.  All the details are irrelevant.  People felt a loss of power and turned to the short-term pumping up that rage gives you in place of cold, strategic, implacable planning.  I know that when you “feel” powerless [it’s in quotes for a reason; voting strategically gives you real power], rage is the easiest neural pathway to take.  I know.  But it is also exactly – exactly – equivalent to destroying your goals and dreams.  Why wait for your Nemesis to do it?  Do it to yourself. 

Aristotle said that you can be angry – but make sure that you are angry at the right time, in the right way, with the right person.  The Brexit voters who were manipulated by (really, really easily-checked) lies were not Done To By The Man.  They did it to themselves, by letting themselves get Drunk on Dudgeon.

In the Star Trek universe, a wonderful quote by an actual human whose name I’ve forgotten has been mis-attributed to the Klingons.  Revenge is a dish best served cold.  That means: don’t get Drunk on Dudgeon!  Think, cold and calm and analytical.  Do ONLY what actually advances your long-term agenda, not your short-term emotions. 

This is a universal human problem.  Every culture on every continent, of every skin color and sex has this same problem because it happens in the human brain.

In the USA right now,  groups of people are squaring off with each other, all Drunk on Dudgeon.  Socially conservative white working class Americans, along with quite a few black working class folks, have settled on racist demagogue Donald Trump as the “alcohol” to get drunk on.  Some Black Lives Matter activists have responded to a string on highly-publicized police killings of black men and women to use hateful rhetoric against all police officers, demonizing all white cops as killer racists.  It is completely predictable that demonizing rhetoric will resonate in a mentally-unhinged black military veteran (or two) who will get Drunk on Dudgeon in their turn and become mass killers of well-intentioned, innocent police officers.  There are legitimate grievances all around, as President Obama has so eloquently reminded us.

He also reminds us, so beautifully, and without using my exact verbiage, that becoming Drunk on Dudgeon instead of being strategic does not serve the long-term best interests of any genuinely harmed parties.  Unstrategic hate and rage only burns the world down.  It has never, in all ten thousand years of human civilization, led to justice.     

In my book, Take Back Your Lost Heart, I analyzed why the Montgomery Bus Boycott was so successful.  Remember: successful.  The keys were going after the strategic issue and targeting the bus company’s revenues; being strategic and keeping tempers cold [remember the Klingons] so that the boycott had a lot of allies among business owners, among progressive and humanistic white civilians and even among some police.  Polarizing the city exclusively along color lines didn’t happen.  A significant percentage of the cars picking up non-bus-riding black folks needing to get to work were white-driven.  Good was battling Evil all right, but the organizers were not stupid enough to make every white person in town their enemy by labeling them as such.  THAT, my friends, is why they won. 

Contrast that with screaming and taking over the podium so that the thousands of people of all colors who came to hear a candidate talk can’t do so…. A super-leftist candidate at that.  Sound strategic to you?

Giving up Drunk on Dudgeon and getting very, very cool always wins.  Always.  Nelson Mandela, whose birthday we celebrate today, had a cold and analytical soul.  He could take his righteous rage and stop it dead, then channel it into cold, analytical thinking.  When things were at their worst, there was little he could do but endure. His last 12 years in prison, though, he played the white power structure like a Stradivarius violin.  He never lumped his jailers (mostly working-class, politically-powerless guys) in the same bag as the rich pukes who ran the country. His narrow-thinking, Drunk on Dudgeon fellow prisoners were appalled, and criticized him as a “collaborator” but he was right and they were stupid.  The jailers (cops), as bad as some of them were, were just products of the same crazy system as the thousands of black men and women killed by the security services or local cops.  And some of them were decent guys stuck in a bad situation.  

So, this Mandela Day, let’s ALL start thinking like Madiba.  Strategic.  Cool.  Calculating.  And when someone of any color, of any sex, on any issue tries to play us like a Strad, manipulating our emotions, let’s stop, take a deep breath and think about the bigger picture, the long-term real goals and really, clearly think it all through, as both President Obama and Mr. Nelson Mandela remind us to.  If Madiba could take down apartheid with cool, analytical, strategic thinking, why on earth are we using stupid confrontational tactics (on all sides) and expecting to win? 

Giving up Drunk on Dudgeon is hard.  It’s hard to give up the easy path.  But we’re not in this to go down the stupid, easy path.  We can represent the finest behavior humanity is capable of – and the smartest.  Like the end of apartheid, like the bus boycott, we good people of this country and this world will win, but only if we are cool, analytical, strategic.  The best way to honor Nelson Mandela today, and every day, is to emulate his smarts, his courage and his violin-playing.  He won.  When the urge to spew self-righteous anger and hate starts getting too much to hold back, remember – HE WON.

We will, too.  I have faith.  

What is the #1 "Pain Point" people come to me to relieve? Go ahead and give it your best guess....

 What is the #1 quest people come to me for?  It’s not fame and entrepreneurial fortune, although many of them do, and I can definitely show people how to get more fortune.  It’s not a better career, although ditto.  It’s not freedom from physical pain and significant health problems, although many of them do.

Nope, the absolute #1 quest is – clarity.  If there were a tagline for this age it might very well be “I’m so confused and I don’t know what to do.”  What they mean is that what they really WANT is buried so deep under layers of “This knowledge is too scary – don’t, whatever I say, let me know this truth” that they couldn’t excavate it with a power-shovel.

Truth is so scary for so many of us because if we knew what we really needed and what we really wanted for ourselves we would have to initiate really, really scary conversations with people about the amount of relative power we have in our lives.  We might need to have conversations that threaten our financial survival or our definition of ourselves. 

When someone comes to me seeking clarity, it is nearly always true that clarity is being deliberately obscured as a self-protection mechanism by the person’s deep unconscious.

I particularly admire the clients who, when they start to realize what clarity would really mean, take a deep breath, strap on their Courage backpack, take their Courage vitamins, and plunge into the depths.  When that happens, the most glorious transformations become possible.  Sometimes, the reality isn’t as scary as the nightmares dreamed up by their (frequently mistreated or emotionally abandoned) child-selves.  Sometimes the reality is about right.  Sometimes the reality is much, much worse.

What is always true is that the courage to dive deep and face truth with deep breathing and slow steps and as many emotions as come up is a rare and glorious commodity.

The people who walk that path to their own and genuine truth, whether they are looking for clarity, more entrepreneurial success, a better career, better health or better something else, are my personal heroes.

God bless you all, every one!  You are the brave souls who bring light to human life.  Bless you all, every one.  

Get a FREE Getting Unstuck session!  Not a sales pitch, a real session.  Contact me at www.soaringdragon.biz or call 253-203-6676

Seek Happiness, yes! Insist on character and integrity in yourself, yes! They go together, yes, yes!!

 Character, integrity and self-control: Starting to look kind of attractive, actually

Do more of what makes you happy.  It’s so easy for this to become a joke, an invitation to self-indulgence and hedonistic indifference.  I was struck this week at how American culture has shifted from character values that I grew up with.  A woman that I gifted with a $100 piece of exercise equipment complained to the Facebook group admin because the equipment didn’t fit under her bed.  Oh, waaah.  [I mistook the vendor and posted it wrong, then corrected it.  Hint: the originally-described equipment wouldn’t have fit under her bed, either.  And since when am I or anyone else responsible for something fitting under your bed?  Bring it back or otherwise deal with it.]  

How I was raised: if someone gives you something as a gift, the ONLY acceptable response is “Thank you.”  Then shut up, completely, permanently and forever.  Even if it’s the wrong size, the color is horrible and it doesn’t fit under your bed.  You don’t pretend to be grateful to the gifter’s face and then spew complaints to an authority-figure third party or the rest of the family or Facebook Friend cohort behind your gifter’s back. 

People used to think less of you for that kind of weasely behavior.  No more.  And maybe that’s a mistake.  Maybe we want to take our culture back in the direction of character.  Maybe we want to embrace actions of integrity – like talking TO people, not ABOUT people.  Maybe we want to deal with it a bit more and whine a lot less.

I know that after the Great Recession, in which I and millions of other Americans lost our shirts, with a weak, contingent-labor-loving employment paradigm, and about 1% of the previous level of economic and emotional safety, a lot of us are very, very frightened, to our cores.  Frightened of outcomes that would be unthinkable in any other advanced First World country, like living on the street.  And when people are scared, and know that they have no power to get back at their oppressors, they look for the nearest easy, weak target for their rage.  They find that easy, weak target in people less able than themselves – people who are financially struggling even more (and can’t fight back effectively), who are disabled, who are a minority color or religion or culture.  Or even just the nice people like me who are kind, generous and not as sly and political as they are.

What if we all just collectively cut it out?

Do more POSITIVE THINGS that make you happy.  Color with your kids, then put them to bed early and relax with a book for an hour.  Make nice with your neighbors who like you kids and will supervise their homework while you go to the gym, listen to Taylor Swift and improve your health.   Find the “free museum” day and take yourself off for a date with joy.  As the frustrations of the day build up, stop, take five deep, slow breaths and visualize tropical paradises or some of your life’s happy memories.  You have them, you know you do! 

Do this enough times and you won’t come home ready to spew lies and vitriol on your fellow-travelers through the travails of life.

Do more of what makes you genuinely happy.  Kicking the dog – or your fellow struggling humanity – will never do it.  My mother taught me to have courage and be kind a half-century before Disney turned it into a cliché.  Do more of that – and you will be happy.  

Having trouble being happy?  Call for a FREE Getting Unstuck session!  No sales pitch, a free roadmap to how to make life less fraught and more fun.  You deserve to be happy....

Call 253-203-6676 or email victoria.leo.reiki@gmail.com.   www.soaringdragon.biz

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Laugh for the Day.....

A client who loves cats and who knows that I love all three species of critters who live at my house, wondered why I have a lovely, spacious room in the house devoted to the critters, who are never allowed into the business part of the office/home. Well, two reasons:

1) I want to be able to work with clients who are allergic to cat dander, rabbit dander and/or are frightened of furry mammals.

2) there was this time.....

There was this time, many decades ago, when I was doing a consulting business in my home, and I would clear out the living room to a preternatural level of Clean before every client visit. Then one day, a particularly potentially-lucrative client came. I was in my best suit, my presentation was going very professionally, and my cat, who clearly was offended at being ignored, came trotting out of the bedroom with a pair of undies in her mouth. From the stinky To Be Laundered pile, natch. Which she dropped on my potential client's FOOT, double natch.

So, class, what do you think? Did that client sign a lucrative professional consulting deal with our heroine?

The furry mammals have their very own lovely, spacious room in the house, and never, ever are allowed anywhere NEAR a business visitor.

Now you know, grasshopper.....

WHY Do Women Keep Taking Early Retirement? Is it really as insane as it seems to financial analysts?

What’s wrong with women?  As usual, nothing at all that kicking sexist cultural norms in the nuts wouldn’t cure.

Today I read yet another online article on why one should not start taking Social Security benefits until full retirement age, and even age 70.  The author, as they generally do, especially decries the female penchant for retirement at age 62.  You’re read all the mathematically-based reasons to wait.  Let me point out some reasons why people are not stupid or ignorant for starting benefits early.

Argument #1:  You get a bigger paycheck in your 80s and 90s if you wait to start collecting in your 70^th year.

Absolutely true.  You can look at your family tree and decide that you come from long-lived stock and you probably will live long and prosper.  However, do be aware that by doing that, you give up $20,000/year of income for 8 years.  In order to recoup that, you have to live to at least 83.  Will you?  Are you sure?  If you’re not sure, then game theory suggests that you are not stupid to go for the bird in the hand.  My sister comes of long-lived stock and she never retired.  She died at age 65 because, her DNA notwithstanding, she hated doctors and didn’t get a problem checked out, which ended up killing her.  She got $0 in benefits for her 40 years of hard labor.  Which brings us to….

Argument #2: Practically everyone will live to their 80s and 90s.

Actually, we won’t.  Half of us who reach 60 will die in our 60s and 70s.  That 60 is the new 40 rubbish conveniently forgets statistics.  Some of us develop serious health problems in our 50s and 60s.  Many women need to retire before full retirement age because of serious health problems.  And at least half of us will succumb to something before we hit 80.  So, no, age isn’t just a number.  Our bodies have a sell-by date.  If you are gifted with strong DNA, be grateful.  Don’t be arrogant.  Be grateful.  Be grateful every day.  If you feel compelled to give someone advice on how they could instantly solve their health problems with Positive Thinking, take a deep breath, and shut up.  Take another deep breath and continue shutting up.  Stay that way for the rest of your life.  Excellent.

Argument #3:  Women will live longer than men, so they should be super-diligent about not retiring until at least full-retirement age.  Why do they keep taking retirement at age 62?  They’re insane!

No, they’re not insane, they are conventional.  Men consistently look for wives who are on average 5-8 years younger than them.  And they expect their women to be moons to their planet, ready to accommodate what they are doing in their lives to what the Mister wants.  So when Himself retires, he will be 66 or 70 and his wife will be – how old now?  That’s right, 62 or younger.  By age 62, she has an impatient spouse who wants to buy an RV, travel, golf and expects his lifetime sidekick to be on his page, not someone who says “Sorry, dear, I have to wait to collect benefits – perhaps continue working – until age 66 to maximize my economic security when you are dead and buried.”  At a practical level, if you want to have some fun with the old geezer, who is likely to kick the bucket at a younger age than you, you’d better grab the gusto now.  And you need to retire now, so you can have two retirement checks to pay for the RV, the travel and the health care.

Which brings us to a REAL problem that these articles usually miss, and that is: whoever gets sick first, ends up using up most/all of the available cash on THEIR needs, leaving the surviving spouse destitute or close to it.  And guess who, statistically-speaking, dies first?  And who ends up in dire poverty?  THAT is a good reason to postpone retirement, ladies.  That comfortable block of retirement savings will go up in smoke when Himself gets sick.  He’ll demand it.  You’ll either lovingly allow it, or be too afraid to say “It’s time to let go, dear” when he wants another round of fruitless or low-probability treatment, and the rest of the family is just as terrified to let go as he is – and who won’t be subsidizing your grocery bill when it’s all over and you’re beyond broke.  

This is the only really compelling argument for living on his Social Security plus pension only, and leaving your spouse or personal-income entitlement untapped until your own full retirement age.  A couple fewer trips for him, equals a better chance of staying out of really dire poverty for you.  Someone who truly loves you won’t put his pleasure ahead of your safety. 

Human behavior, as in the case of women who take early retirement, is usually not irrational at all, when looked at from the frame of reference of the person making the choices. 

Purge your irrational choices with a comprehensive program of blasting away damage from the past and leaving YOU in charge of your choices - from ice cream to Social Security and picking who to marry...   50% more in your program when you choose a 30 Day or more program at www.soaringdragon.biz before July 7. 

Do You Want the FDA and Medicare to Save You From Isolation and Dementia?

A select committee of the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine has identified a BIG problem for Americans as we age: hearing aids are not a covered medical expense in Medicare, and Congress has a history of resisting changing that.  Costs average at least $5000/pair and research indicates that at least half of us who need this help try to do without, with results that vary from uncomfortable to disastrous.  Sociologists, social workers and medical researchers have long linked hearing loss to increasing social isolation in elders.  If you can’t hear, you can’t keep your social networks strong, which in its turn is closely linked to poorer physical and mental health.  Now Alzheimer’s researchers, including Dr. Frank Lin at Johns Hopkins, part of the committee, say that an aging brain that is over-tasked with trying to discern language from faint, muffled sounds is a brain that is deprived of the power to maintain cognitive tasks.  In other words, if you need a hearing aid and don’t get it, you are making cognitive decline inevitable.  

The obvious answer, for those who can’t afford a $5000 set themselves, nor the Medicare Gap policies that can cover them, is to do without.  As the Boomer generation continues to swell the elder ranks, this is becoming a public health problem.  In addition to the purely humanitarian aspect, adding to the ranks of dementia is not in the best interests of the nation.  Some members of the committee want the FDA to make hearing aids an over-the-counter purchase to help drive down the cost, while other members caution that hearing aids require careful tuning so the comparison with OTC reading glasses doesn’t really fit.  The committee also asked for more consumer information, including forcing vendors to tell buyers if the product can only be tuned by a particular provider (locking you in if you don’t like the service) and forcing vendors to unbundle the product and services, so that people can determine how much fitting and tuning they want (or really “can afford”.)

The committee also had specific suggestions for helping an elder who needs hearing assistance and can’t afford a hearing aid: speak more slowly and distinctly, not more loudly; face the listener; reduce background distraction noises, so meeting in a library is better than a crowded coffee shop; turn off the radio and TV; rephrase, rather than repeating yourself.  The latter is particularly important.  If the person can’t hear certain sounds well, using different words will be more likely to lead to comprehension.  And do your best to get Congress to change its mind…. Which will undoubtedly require a new Congress, one focused on improving the lives of ordinary Americans.   No elder should be forced to slide deeper and deeper into an isolating silence because they lack the financial resource to both hear and eat. 

Don't Stay Stuck!  Blast through the barriers that are preventing you from living the life you want!  You CAN do it!  www.soaringdragon.biz

Should Everyone Skip College and Just Start a Business? Angela Duckworth and grit

 A colleague of mine, whose brains and good sense I respect, made an impassioned case to a group of women this week, about an upcoming book she was planning, in which she intends to encourage women to forget about college and just start a business.  I’m simplifying in the interests of making this article shorter than her book, but at the 20,000 foot level, she believes that 1) economic independence is the key to every other form of empowerment, and 2) sexism is rampant so 3) start your own business.  And you don’t need a college degree to be successful in business.

Sounds good?

Well, I see some problems.  There are some kinds of work that just do not lend themselves to self-employment at all – police detective, forensics scientist and firefighter come to mind – and for others, entrepreneurship is the Hard Way.  It is possible to be a sole practitioner MD, for example, but the realities of business life in the USA make that a suicidal choice.  You can be an organizational whiz and start a business, but there ain’t much low-hanging fruit in that market.  Contrast that with the joys of being able to focus exclusively on what you do well, because the 40 hours/week of marketing for business is on someone else’s shoulders.  A good senior admin can have salary, benefits, vacations, praise and advancement in a government or business.  I needed two master’s degrees plus a year’s study in hypnotherapy to be able to rapidly and permanently demolish the barriers keeping my entrepreneur clients from their heart’s desire.  Not to mention state licensing.  The number of occupations that can yield much better results for economic independence within an organization are legion.  My own choice to solopreneur does not mean that I buy into the “everyone should be an entrepreneur” ideology. 

The 2^nd problem I have with my estimable colleague’s advice is the Don’t Go To College.  If you are eschewing academics in order to get an AA in an in-demand, highly-saleable skill like radiology/solography tech (another business you can’t set up in your garage, thank you, legislature), or take on a plumbing apprenticeship, then hooray, I agree with you 100%.  Now close your eyes and imagine an army of women taking up the plumbing tape.  Six figure income entrepreneurship and very little marketing moxie required.  Auto mechanics is mostly computer programming and intelligence at this point in history.  Electricians. Drool, drool, drool.  So, yes, let’s stop pushing everyone into college, and get most young Americans into job-ready occupational training.  I know that the USA has an understandable wariness about repeating the “black kids go to trade school, white kids go to college and then law school” or “boys get trained, girls get typing” paradigm.  Our President is a black lawyer; our First Lady is another black lawyer, but that’s not the norm.  Yes, I get it.  BUT – a focus on giving kids career-ready training does not have to become a vehicle for holding back races or sexes.  What we have now is an entire generation crippled by education debt getting a BA/BS or even graduate degree in a field like Documentary Film Production that doesn’t have much chance of leading to economic stability. In contrast, you can create a product and huckster it with no formal education at all, beyond basic literacy.   I understand the disillusion with college.

The You Don’t Need College argument misses a key point though:  College teaches you how to think rationally and critically, possibly for the first time in your life.  It forces people who have no knowledge of how science works to learn about experimentation, reproducibility and some basic statistics.  And it requires you to sacrifice your time and your impulsive choices to a dedicated quest for a goal.

On the same day that my colleague denounced wasted time in college, I read about Angela Duckworth’s research on grit, the ability to stick to a long-term course of action, and delay gratification of short-term urges in the pursuit of a big reward.  Many researchers before her have impressive results on the advantage of persistence and emotional resilience, over other factors like talent, intelligence or other gifts of one’s DNA.  Here’s her TED talk, for some details:

https://www.ted.com/talks/angela_lee_duckworth_the_key_to_success_grit?language=en

Here is a national Geo article:  http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/10/141015

Listen to this:
“…what college admissions officers and business leaders have told her they're looking for these days from applicants is in keeping with her findings. It's no longer students who've padded their résumés by doing a little bit of everything or just prospects with the best college grades; they want people who stuck with something meaningful to them over time and demonstrated some level of mastery, and it doesn't necessarily matter in what.”

Business leaders have told me this over and over again: they want to hire someone who has a college degree, in anything.  Why?  Because it proves that the person can persist in a goal FOR YEARS.  Including jumping through hoops that don’t always make sense to the 18-year-old mind.  Academia has some crazy hoops indeed.

The ability to persist at a goal for years, and the ability to jump through your client’s hoops, are essential skills of any worthwhile undertaking, including being successful in business.  If you genuinely don’t want anyone telling you what to do, about anything, ever, you only have two options: a lower business income than your potential or therapy to blow up the mental blockage caused by an early-life authority figure.  I’m serious.  Nobody who is both honest with you and successful in business has the psychology of a tantruming two-year-old. Clients expect you to be working for them, not doing what you damn well please, when you damn well please.  If you don’t serve their needs, they won’t buy from you.  The sweet spot is finding something that makes you want to soar with creativity and joy AND is the solution to a major pain-point experienced by people with lots of money.

When I took the grit test (URL below), one of the items asks you about persisting in a goal for years – one of the attributes of a college grad.

https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~duckwort/images/8-item%20Grit%20081011.pdf

So, no, I don’t think you should ditch college and just go straight into business.  For one thing, knowing some history, geography, anthropology, math, English grammar and vocabulary will enhance your business potential and keep you from embarrassing yourself with stupid mistakes. Get that broad education that you didn’t get in high school, distracted as you were by blazing hormones and immaturity, and couple it with a concentration in something sale-able, which could include business.  If you really love creating documentaries, make it a double major and prepare yourself to use one profession to bankroll the other.

At least an AA in something sale-able is more relevant than ever before, and the full education of your mind and soul through all those basic subjects toward a bachelor’s at an inexpensive university is even more essential.  Take that preparation and then fly into entrepreneurship, if that fits your personality and your market analysis.  Or fly with another set of dragons, into another form of lifetime fulfillment and joy, like I did. 

Victoria C. Leo blasts through the barriers that keep her clients from their heart’s desire.  Find the program that blasts through your problem at www.soaringdragon.com, join her Facebook group Healing Minds, Healing Bodies, or email for a FREE Getting Unstuck session at victoria.leo.reiki@gmail.com.