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.

What do you invest your life in?

My dearest friend for 27 years died this week after a very short illness.  I'm very glad that her illness was so short, for her sake, but have struggled with the huge hole in my heart.  Such a loss, such an angel she has been.  The outpouring of support and affection for her, and for her husband and two daughters, has belied the fear that some of my clients have: why should I spend my life being a good person?  No one will care or remember me.  If you pour good wine into a golden goblet, it will taste ambrosial.  If you pour good wine into a peeling vessel, or one with holes, you'll end up with nothing. It's not being good, kind and generous that is sometimes wasted; it's continuing to pour your good wine into rubbishy glasses that is the potential problem.  So stop wasting time with biological relations who aren't good, kind and generous, even if they are your descendants.  Spend your time exclusively with good people.

The Dhammapada tells us that what we surround ourselves is what we ourselves become, so surround yourself with the good and virtuous.

I loved Cindi Johnson because she was so lovable: kind, generous, funny, smart, tenacious, dedicated to her remedial college math students (how many lives did she save by helping low-income kids get their AA and start a career-track?) and always ready to open her heart.  But I really loved her because of who I became, year by year, because of her.  At my wedding, where she was matron of honor, I told my assembled friends that I was the person I was because they had honed me and shaped me, year by year, like you create a sparkling gem from an unprepossessing stone.  To the extent that I am good and virtuous, it is because I surrounded myself with the good and virtuous, and walked away from the mean and selfish.

I will miss Cindi at one level or another until the day I die.  And her legacy is much, much more than just three grandchildren.  Her legacy is also the array of sparkling gems that her life honed and polished, all the lives that deviated from their course and moved closer to goodness and virtue.

Every faith and wisdom tradition on earth, now and in the past, extols the value of one precious gem vs. a pile of junk-stuff, and the value of one good person to change the world.  They were right.  I was blessed by this good woman's life for 27 years.  There is no greater epitaph for a life.

It's a good year. No, it's a bad year. No, it's.....

We so blithely talk about having a “good” or “bad” year.  What we mean is a time in which we got what we wanted out of life - we had health, a good marriage, a nice income, low stress – or we had a time that presented many challenges, sometimes intense challenge on one front – exceptional health challenges or frustrating unemployment .  My “bad” years frequently feature being nibbled to death by ducks – dozens of mild to moderate problems, but constant and relentless  - that lead your psyche to believe that the Lords of Creation have it in for you (as a Christian client referred to it) or that life is just a constant struggle with one stumbling block after another.

2015 was a difficult year for me.  2016 is shaping up to have lots of challenges as well.  I lost 5 weeks of my life to a serious bronchitis attack and now my beloved sister is riddled with cancer and breathing through her last weeks, the latter hitting with almost no warning.   Why did my goddess, angel and animal spirit cards, not to mention my Akashic consults, all tell me that this was going to be a “good” year?  Are they wrong – or nuts?

Maybe the latter is closest to the truth.

I think the disconnect can be explained by a story from one of the Buddhist scriptures, which I will paraphrase and shorten.  A farmer had a young son who was an excellent helper.  That’s good, his neighbors told him.  Then the boy broke his leg and it set poorly; he would always have a limp.  That’s bad, his neighbors said.  Years pass and the nation is at war.  All the young men are conscripted for military service.  All the fathers lose their young male labor and have to work hard in the fields.  Except our farmer.  Because the boy limps, he is excused from military service.  That’s good, the neighbors say. The young man does not die in the war and remains to help work on the farm, albeit at a reduced capacity.

This constant mental categorizing event outcome as “good” or “bad” is the major cause of our life’s dissatisfaction.  If things aren’t good or bad, but just are, we can move on to maximizing the value of what we have, like the farmer.  His emotions weren’t up and down, fluctuating with the “story” that his mind created about reality, like his neighbors were doing.  Some people read the story and think that the moral is that you have to wait to decide if something is good or bad, because of course the story ends up “good” – the young man does not die.  But the real meaning is much more profound.

So what about me?  Maybe I can be very sad, weep and journal and be hugged, but my sister’s untimely death isn’t “bad,” per se, just very, very sad.  Maybe it just is.  Maybe the bronchitis just is.  [Compare this with “the bronchitis is actually good because it got me to cut back on the number of overseas trips I was planning for 2016, which were exhausting to think about, much less do” which is the psych cognitive-behavioral approach, and a very good one it is, too, in getting us to see another possibe interpretation of the available facts.  But with all its virtues, it is only turning bad into good, not walking away from bad and good as categories, period.]

So I don’t think all those cards and Akashic messages were wrong.  It was my interpretation of them that was off-base.  They didn’t say I would have a “good” year.  They said that many blessings were coming to me.  It was I who mistranslated that into “nothing sad is going to happen.”   When I take a more balanced look at the year, the blessings – so many more than in 2015 – stand out in stark relief.   My gosh, what a shower of blessings, in business, in health and in new friendships and spiritual relationships.   Not nothing but blessings of course.  But blessings there are.  And all of it – without being labeled good, bad or both/neither – just is.

If you ask me how the year is going, I may make you comfortable by saying, “Many blessings,” because small-talk doesn’t require philosophy or truth.  But know that I know what kind of year I’m having.  I’m having a year in which I am alive, and all of it just is.

The Nurturing of Life