The Fulfillment Forum - Living Wisdom

Viktor Frankl's Logotherapy Revisited - LOGOTHERAPY FOR FULFILLMENT

2012-06-08T08:38:00.000-05:00

According to the saintly Viktor Frankl -- consistent fulfillment for normal persons comes only by nurturing the physical, psychological and philosophical aspects of existence. Because we homosapien creature-selves are first and foremost spiritual beings who crave meaning over almost everything else once our basic needs are met, anything less will leave a person immature, wounded and dissatisfied with life. Logotherapy is the name Viktor gave the soul health system of personal meaning he devised for his own salvation while enduring almost three years in the ante-room of Hell at Auschwitz during the Holocaust. We have found no reason to rename his approach although we have seen enough societal changes since his mid 20th century books appeared to add the benefits of communal belonging among good women and men and to use the term spirit wellness in our own books. These include NICE GUYS FINISH FIRST, LOVERS FOR LIFE, GRACE UNDER PRESSURE, THE PASTOR’S HANDBOOK, THE PSYCHOLOGY OF LEADERSHIP and the entire graduate school curriculum we offer.

Our golden Maslowvian logo appears above while our behavioral equation is shown below.

LOGOTHERAPY (Spirit Wellness) = f (Personal Meaning x Communal Belonging)

Viktor has passed away but we believe he would approve of our continuing development of Logotherapy. After all -- as he said regarding his relationship with Sigmund Freud in Vienna --

Sometimes a dwarf riding on a giant’s shoulders can see further down the trail than the giant can.

The first stirrings of the concepts and practices that later became world class Logotherapy which we of the DeVille Logotherapy Learning Center also think of as Spirit Wellness -- occurred in the fertile mind of a precocious Viennese teen age boy who grew up within walking distance of Sigmund Freud’s home office. Viktor Emil Frankl came of age between the two greatest tragedies of the psychopathic twentieth century world, the two World Wars with up to a hundred million casualties of wounded and slain men, women and children, the collapse of three great empires and a ravaging financial collapse that took ten miserable years for a recovery. Viktor was the well loved son of a civil servant father in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and a very bright mother in a physically, emotionally and spiritually comfortable Jewish family. And although Freud’s constructs were spreading over the civilized world -- influencing the human sciences so completely that it took us a hundred years to discover his mistakes, young Viktor boldly wrote Freud a letter questioning the lack of personal meaning and human spirituality in his psychoanalytic concepts. Then Freud, at the peak of his vast powers, rather than crumpling Viktor’s letter into his waste basket, answered with a letter of his own, suggesting that the boy might like to correspond with him from time to time because he found his ideas interesting. The concept of a teen age boy having Sigmund Freud as a pen--pal boggles the mind but it is indicative of whom Viktor Frankl was already becoming as we discovered when we were lecturing on the same campus, Professor DeVille was first of all being tutored by Viktor personally and then they flew aerobatics together in his sport aircraft in the mid sixties.

After his university years, medical school, marriage and a psychiatric residency -- the Frankl family was swept away by German and Austrian Nazis during the Holocaust when six million Jews were butchered in the German Gulag of death camps. One Frankl daughter had fled to Argentine and so survived while a strong and sturdy Viktor who remained in Austria to protect his elderly parents. He was in deep distress between fleeing to freedom and remaining in Vienna to care for his elderly parents. His dilemma was resolved when he found a spiritual sign. It was piece of a plaque from his family’s synagogue that had been burned by the Nazis. It had the commandment that made up his mind -- he stayed on to do what he could for his parents.who

Honor your father and mother that your days may be long on the earth,

The entire family was murdered except for the strong young psychiatrist was spared to labor on railway track repair crews for the trains arriving daily with boxcars stuffed with countless European Jewish men, women and children. These were the death trains for which Adolph Eichman was to be executed by the Israeli Government some years later for coordinating the loading and transported of millions of victims. For almost three years Viktor labored long and hard -- never knowing from day to day when his number would come up and he would be sent to the Auschwitz gas chambers that killed and furnaces that processed twenty thousand victims every week. Always pragmatic, the Germans thriftily sold the victims’ hair like straw to stuff mattresses for the German Army and saved their rendered body fat for making soap and sent the gold melted from their teeth to Swiss jewelers. We can hardly imagine the horror of life and death in the murder camps but against all odds Viktor not only survived the ordeal with his spirit intact, he also found personal meaning despite the misery by setting up an evening medical and counseling corner to serve the sick and fearful in his barrack building. In that gateway of death, against all odds, he learned that there were ultimately two kinds of humans -- those narcissistic souls who identified with the evil aggressors and used hatred and violence in an attempt to survive at the expense of their fellow prisoners. Then there were the peacemakers who clung to their spiritual ideals to the best of their ability when starving and being treated as if beasts. Then, to his surprise, Viktor discovered that the peacemakers were far more likely to survive than the aggressive narcissists. Of course, every victim was stripped bare to his or her basic soul -- forcing his true character to emerge -- and thus Viktor also met the ultimate test. He mentally composed his first book THE DOCTOR AND THE SOUL in the doorway of Hell, where all his dross was burned away until only the pure gold of a saintly character remained. And once liberated by American troops, this survivor of the Holocaust returned to Vienna, regained his strength, forgave his tormentors rather than brooding on the past and in a decade or so this brilliant man became the successor to Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler in the Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy. He also served as the President of the Austrian Medical Society for Psychiatry, a full professor at the Viennese University, the Chairman of the great Vienna Polyklinic Hospital and eventually the author of enough Logotherapy books to empower tens of millions of readers in thirty four languages. He wrote THE DOCTOR AND THE SOUL, THE UNCONSCIOUS GOD and especially MAN’S SEARCH FOR MEANING that the United States Library of Congress rated as one of the ten most influential volumes ever published. Since Guttenberg! And when the scriptures of the various religions are removed from the list because they are required reading for so many worshippers, MAN’S SEARCH becomes one of the five most valuable books of all time. This is why we require reading it as the first collateral volume for every student that studies within our Logotherapy Learning Center. In essence, the Library of Congress was saying that Franklian Logotherapy is more valuable to individuals and to society than Sigmund Freud’s Psychoanalysis, Alfred Adler’s Individual Psychology, Eric Berne’s Transactional Analysis and B F Skinner’s Behaviorism although it was written for normally frustrated rather than for deeply disturbed souls. There was only one Viktor Frankl but it is impossible to imagine what the six million victims would have contributed to the world had they not been snuffed out of existence by the monsters of the German speaking coalition in the abominable Third Reich. It was surely a case where the lunatics were running their own asylum.

Of course, one the best things about Logotherapy is the fact that it offers spirit wellness or soul health wisdom for normal men and women who haven’t a hint of mental illness complicating their lives. Of course we do not see normality as the narrow white line down the middle of the highway but the entire highway of sound human interactions. Nevertheless, life is seldom a rose garden for humans. At the very best our beloved parents and elderly relatives sicken and die before our very eyes and give us a preview into our own ultimate end. We all must cope with the tragic human quartet of suffering, guilt, rage and the death dread. Some years ago a sample of graduates from schools as divergent as Harvard, Southern Methodist, Washington State and Idaho State -- twenty years after graduation, reported that their lives were far less satisfying than they had expected them to become. Many responders couldn’t point to the collapse of a marriage, the addiction or death of a child or a parent or a financial disaster as they lived the good life of the upper middle class. They felt that life was passing them by as did seventy-eight percent of Americans surveyed as recently as the 2008 recession.

This discontent or life style frustration isn’t mental illness at all -- but what Freud called the common Discontents of Civilization, that Frankl considered Existential Frustration and we DeVilles think of as Spirit Bankruptcy. This unhappiness even among the most successful people is often caused by the too secular manner in which we humans who have vital spiritual needs love, labor and lead others. In this case it became obvious during one of our FRONTIERS OF FULFILLMENT seminars -- for the Affiliated Women’s’ Clubs of Arizona at the University of Arizona in Tucson. We have paraphrased Catherine Hendricks who spoke to us as one of many frustrated and consistently unhappy souls. She said --

I’m one woman who did everything well. I stayed out of trouble in school, married the right guy and joined a great company when it started taking women seriously. I’ve made sound business decisions along the way and shall surely become a VP before I’m forty. I live in a home my parents think a mansion and have two beautiful children. I do a job thousands envy. Obviously, I have everything. Right? Wrong! Much of my life feels incomplete and caught up in trivia. My kids are rebelling with sex and drugs and I’m almost certain my husband is having an affair with a little twerp. I feel deeply dissatisfied at the most inopportune times, as if nothing counts except for my sixty hour work weeks and paying for the house and the Mercedes. There must be more to life than this but when my therapist asks what‘s missing, I can’t even tell her. I worry that I’m going mad to feel this way despite my accomplishments in my company and my prestige in the community. What do I do when I’ve won everything I’ve ever wanted and it isn’t enough to keep me happy?

What indeed?

We see four common symptoms occurring within Existential Frustration or Spirit Bankruptcy. They are:

OPPORTUNISM -- Being too pragmatic -- living haphazardly without a valid life plan.

CONFORMISM -- Being too flexible -- joining the in --- crowd, even when it is wrong.

FATALISM -- Being too easily defeated -- content with gaining the low hanging fruit of life.

FANATICISM -- Being too narcissistic -- denying to others the benefits you expect for yourself.

Fortunately, all four symptoms can be resolved with the applied knowledge and wisdom of Logotherapy found in Viktor’s book MAN’S SEARCH FOR MEANING and our own YOUR SEARCH FOR A MEANINGFUL LIFE - Click the link to download

Next -- a well regulated life as we teach and Catherine and her husband learned to their lasting satisfaction -- includes these spirit wellness elements.

SPIRITUAL VALUES -- Serving life wisely with ethical virtues.

POSITIVE ATTITUDES -- Making it easy for others to mature.

HIGH EXPECTATIONS -- Finding the best ways to contribute together.

MATURING BELIEFS -- Living within the realities of scientific knowledge.

RESPONSIBLE CHOICES -- Doing due diligence before deciding to act.

We the authors neither conduct psychotherapy nor do we recommend the use of psychotropic drugs for creating positive mood changes. We rely instead on the innate resilience of normal persons to make life deeply rewarding through sound soul health. Therefore, we have learned that by adopting Viktor’s brilliant concepts and methods -- by combining his great work about personal meaning with our insights into communal belonging -- we can sometimes see somewhat further along the path toward fulfillment than many behavioral scholars and orthodox practitioners. But then, we should, because rather than dealing with mental ailments per se, we focus on finding life-style solutions for men and women who learn to cope with life’s consistent discontents. No person can continually glide smoothly through a life that is almost inevitably disrupted with times of suffering, rage, guilt and the death dread from the tragic quartet of life. Only psychopaths go through life without some emotional and spiritual suffering. Fortunately, Logotherapy offers ordinary persons several superb methods for maintaining your personal meaning in a satisfying community among good people with whom you share life‘s many satisfactions.

Another Logotherapy equation looks like this multiplication process.

SPIRIT WELLNESS (Logotherapy) = f (Existential Psychology x Metaphysical Philosophy)

Both of our behavioral equations support the clear message that a consistently purposeful life-style always includes some degree of personal meaning as multiplied by communal belonging among decent persons with whom we share love, labor and leadership. Personal Meaning comes out of existential or life-style psychology while Communal Belonging emerges largely from meta--physical or cosmic philosophy. When Professor Frankl and Professor DeVille were lecturing on the same campus, Viktor graciously tutored Jard in Logotherapy. And Jard instructed newly rated private pilot Frankl in survival aerobatics in his sport aircraft -- in order to avoid dangerous situations and to maneuver out of unexpected in-flight emergencies. As Frankl taught so well: Personal love, labor and leadership -- at the very heart of human life, can indeed be filled with purposeful values, attitudes, expectations, beliefs and choices -- once we understand the true meaning of meaning.

Of course, there is no one great MEANING OF LIFE written in letters of fire across the heavens -- valid for all persons at all times and in all places as taught by a bearded guru on a mountain top. Our personal sense of purpose is always subjective and usually complex -- but our lives can indeed become deeply significant and consistently satisfying when we live wisely and well with sound psychospiritual values and choices. Pastor Rick Warren of Saddleback Church in Arizona tapped into this human need very well with his best selling book -- THE PURPOSE DRIVEN LIFE. Good events can occur, can be made to happen -- despite the fact that a great many psychologically normal Americans and Europeans report that a largely secular or materialistic life style has become frustrating and pointless for multitudes when their need for personal spirituality is neglected. Each person must find or create his or her own source of meaning despite the widespread frustration currently sweeping through our secular world. In other words -- to consistently prosper spiritually, we can succeed best by graciously sharing our benefits with those persons and the society that enables us to win them.

Pyramid

Our Maslowvian type pyramid -- the golden DeVille Logotherapy Learning Center logo, reveals the physical, psychological and philosophical movement of a meaningful existence despite the many conflicts within every commercial society. Literally millions of women and men agreed with the United States Library of Congress that Viktor’s soul health approach is so potent because we humans are all programmed emotionally to mature upward through each aspect of life. It is when something goes wrong in our lives that we fail to mature as we could have and should have grown to maturity.

We often find ourselves struggling to create consistent sources of purpose and significance without compromising our souls because we must cope with good and evil -- with right and wrong at almost every step of life‘s journey. The very perceptive Richard Gist who is a retired United Methodist minister, recently wrote a thoughtful article for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune newspaper, in order to educate the frustrated and discontented persons who use religious concepts to deny personal freedom to many in a variety of issues such as birth control, gay marriage and generous policies for the people with whom they disagree. The retired pastor said -- and we paraphrase him within our parentheses.

It’s basic to the spiritual journey we all make (from the cradle to the grave) to realize that we all react often to a secret world of our own invention (Sigmund Freud called this trait the unconscious aspect of our human minds) both within ourselves and beyond ourselves in the real world. As long as we do this (benefit too much from our own subjective and self-serving choices at the expense of others) we are ensnared by our own distorted imagination and prejudices (our inevitable pain, rage, guilt and the dread of death). And who of us has escaped this our self-created trap (of narcissistic subjectivity (that judges the worth of all humanity by our own ego defensive values, attitudes and beliefs)?

It may be some degree of stupidity that makes the poverty stricken wife and child beater good old boy in a rusty roofed shack on the flood plain of a creek place a Vote Republican sign in his yard. It would certainly more intelligent to elect politicians who don’t automatically and always work in favor of the one percent who do everything they can to keep wages low and prices exorbitant. But it is also the unconscious workings of a wounded mind that is deeply fearful of

and enraged by recent racial and gender and financial benefits that make him very vulnerable to clever manipulators like Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich. He lives in a cruel world filled with the tragic quartet of suffering, guilt, rage and looming death, Recent research reveals that at least forty percent of American voters will reject a second term for President Obama simply because he is a black man -- regardless of how cleverly the racial resentment is rationalized. For a century the dirt poor rural and inner city Whites could console themselves by devaluing and abusing the even poorer Blacks with state supported terror. For a century thousands of Black Americans were lynched by angry mobs of White men. And now research from the University of Alabama reveals that most of such murders occurred during long spells of very hot weather or low cotton prices when frustrations were running high. Virtually every southern politician who faced a strong opponent played the race card -- would try to sink the challenger as pandering to Blacks -- who if given the vote would steal their white jobs at the sawmill, ravish their wives and daughters and spread their sexual diseases through the community. But when that consolation of apparent racial and gender superiority was lost to the rural whites and President Johnson predicted that the passage of civil and gender rights laws would turn the South against the Democrats for a generation -- he was too optimistic. The passage of such legislation lost the rural vote for progressives forever. The fear and resentment spread from the Gulf South into Oklahoma, Iowa and Kansas, into Wyoming and Montana and even into distant Idaho where with few Negroes to fear and hate -- there were always the even poorer reservation Indians. The human mind’s ability to justify its greed and cruelty is virtually unlimited. Or what was Freud’s fixation on our unconscious all about?

Logotherapy virtually always captivates the interest of persons who meet it with even a modicum of self-awareness. When we did Logotherapy Leadership programs for the University of Arizona at Tucson -- a thousand or so hard nosed middle managers during an eight year period, rated them at a hither to unseen 3.68 on a four point scale. And when we did a Logotherapy program for the MENTAL HEALTH SOCIETY of INDIANA -- so many people lined up to get copies of our NICE GUYS FINISH FIRST, that the manager of the facility threatened to turn off the lights so his employees could go home before midnight. We very busy persons may not often talk about meaning per se -- certainly not at work -- but making one’s life count for something significant is an area of importance to almost every reasonably normal person who becomes aware of Logotherapy’s benefits. By way of example, Professor DeVille had just completed a Logotherapy Leadership program for a mid-size power tool manufacturing company when a manager stopped by his table and perused our FRONTIERS OF FULFILLMENT course book. Sharon Johnson examined the table of contents and pensively said ---

Given my all too hectic life of doing my job here, relating with my husband and children, caring for my home, serving the church and doing a little something for society -- I wish you had spoken on this topic.

Here are the major principles of Franklian/DeVille Logotherapy --

LOGOTHERAPY PRINCIPLES

1. Our most satisfying satisfaction comes from our experiencing a consistent sense of purpose in sound relationships with good persons where we belong.

2. Every psychospiritually maturing person can develop a personally significant life-style during the most rewarding and the most difficult of times.

3. Liberated souls have enough maturing wisdom to find a sense of meaning among the good people with whom we share love in joyful situations.

4. A sense of meaning and satisfaction virtually always occurs as the result of some legitimate activity we complete or a loving relationship we establish.

Franklian Logotherapists generally hold the following assumptions in the real world of working and playing – loving and learning and worshiping and persevering constructs that form the second half of our primer -- YOUR SEARCH FOR A MEANINGFUL LIFE.

1. All normal persons have a persisting desire to win spiritually meaningful satisfaction although we usually must discover or even create a sound sense of purpose for ourselves.

This first assumption is that our search for meaning is a major spiritual factor in our attitudes and activities. Living purposefully is much more important for normal persons than grubbing endlessly for possessions, prestige, pleasure and power. When we live with a sense of meaning in our activities and attitudes, we can persevere through life’s bad days as well as enjoying the most satisfying of times.

2. Our second Logotherapy assumption is that each person is a subjective soul who weaves body (soma), mind (psyche), and spirit (logos) together. Our bodies and minds supply the pragmatic aspects of existence while our souls are what we become in the Cosmic scheme of love, labor and leadership.

3. Life can become meaningful under all circumstances – during the most benevolent of times and also through the most unfortunate. This third assumption is about cosmic reality. This is something mystical all persons experience consistently when we identify with the Cosmos and embrace life and love with a psychospiritual mind-set.

4. A spiritual life has some valid requirements which all persons must fulfill if our choices are to be meaningful. This fourth assumption is that existential meaning focuses our normal life-style choices. When embedded in ultimate meaning – or cosmic reality, this working meaning of life can be expressed pragmatically. This is done by projecting the verities of faith, hope and love into society through our ethical virtues and responsible choices and by following the sound promptings of an awakened conscience.

5. Women and men normally maintain their search for psychospiritual meaning through their entire lives. Assumption five is that we are all free enough to focus our need for meaning among good people and that this can be done under any and all circumstances. It includes a victory of spiritual values, positive attitudes and high expectations despite any and all painful events. Jesus, the finest Logotherapy or life-style counselor demonstrated this when he courageously faced suffering and an ignominious death because the truth of his ministry angered the religious and political establishments of his day.

6. Each individual is a unique soul consisting of his or her own physical, psychological and philosophical values, attitudes, expectations, beliefs and choices. While we speak of these three traits individually because we cannot write about all of them at once -- in each person’s life they are as inextricably linked together as the ingredients of a cake after it is baked.

You will learn many of life's secrets download YOUR SEARCH FOR A MEANINGFUL LIFE.

Finis

VITE -- JARD DeVILLE

EDUCATION

1947 -- Journalism - San Bernardino Community College

1954 (A B) - Religion/History/Writing -- Pasadena College

1963 (M Ed) - Education/Educ. Psych -- U. of Cincinnati

1967 Curriculum Development -- University Of Illinois

1969 Academic Administration -- University Of Wisconsin

1977 (Ph D) Existential Psychology -- Calif. Western University

Currently -- Logotherapy Research, Teaching and Extensive Authorship

CAREER

Military Airman -- U S Army Air Forces -- Pacific And Asia.

Minister And Counselor -- Western Hills Church, Cincinnati.

Psychology Professor / Student Counselor -- Illinois Olivet College.

Psychology Professor / Psych. Dept. Chair -- Utah Westminster College.

Director -- The Learning Disabilities Clinic Conjoined With U. of Wisconsin

Adjunct Lecturer -- Leadership Logotherapy University of Arizona -- Tucson

Author / Leadership Consultant (International -- 20 hard copy and E-books

Founding Director -- www.logotherapylearningcenter.com On Line Grad School

A far more complete resume of Professor Jard DeVille’s contributions can be seen by entering his name on Google or by downloading his major gratis book

YOUR SEARCH FOR A MEANINGFUL LIFE.

Existential Psychology & Narcissism - Mini-Quiz For The 99%

2012-05-08T14:53:00.000-05:00

EXCERPT FROM Your Search For A Meaningful Life DOWNLOAD FOR FREE

When we use existential as in existential psychology, existential alienation or an existential vacuum, we the authors mean only that the topic under discussion relates to the satisfying, mediocre or disappointing lifestyle men and women choose or have thrust upon them by society. For us, existential or life style values, attitudes, expectations, beliefs and choices have no connection with the purposeless European philosophy formerly called existentialism or know now as secular nihilism.

The anti-spiritual or too pragmatic devotees of nihilism which is a selfish belief in disbelief (or of meaninglessness) have devastated entire nineteenth and twentieth century generations with a hundred million battle deaths plus a great many political, religious and financial disasters within many nations. Life can still become nasty, brutish and short for many naïve or simply unfortunate women and men from a society that seems to have lost the ability to serve its members with wisdom.

Consider the sad fate of the millions of families who have lost their employment,life savings, educational opportunities and homes since 2008 because of the greed of a relatively few narcissistic investment bankers like Bernie Madoff and his ruthless narcissist peers who dominate the American Congress so completely that our much despised legislators have only a nine or ten percent approval rating by their victims.

EXCEPT FROM Your Search For A Meaningful Life DOWNLOAD FOR FREE

It was Sigmund Freud who resurrected the ancient Greek myth of Narcissus who was so enamored with his own beauty and charm that he rejected the worth of all other persons and eventually destroyed himself. Freud wove this all too common human failing into his psychoanalysis treatment system to represent the many neurotic souls who remain too selfish to co-operate with women and men in sound relationships and ventures.

The narcissistic scams that caused the world wide financial disaster of 2008 -- with a double dip recession threatened across Europe in 2011 and 2012 when few new jobs were created -- were neither acts of God nor the normal vicissitudes of fate. They were orchestrated by no more than three hundred or so wicked investment banker sharks and their greedy remoras. These were the primary users and abusers One percent of society who invented the mortgage bundling and other wicked schemes that sabotaged the world’s financial system in order to increase their already vast personal and institutional fortunes. Those greedy investment bankers certainly verified the old French witticism:

Behind every vast fortune is someone’s limitless greed and his great crime.
This was surely the case during the early twenty-first century mortgage scam that ravaged the world by those three hundred or so financial manipulators who control so much wealth that they fancy themselves beyond the physical, political, legal, financial and pychospiritual values and traditions that keep most ordinary persons honest stewards of their responsibilities and rewards.

These financial narcissists that included reactionary politicians, fundamental preachers and ideological plutocrats -- certainly did not feel required to obey the rules and regulations of governance and business that keep the peasants of society laboring for as little income as possible! The limitless narcissism of no more ideologues who could be carried aboard one Boeing 747 on a single flight, has made it much more difficult for we honest, hard working people to find consistent sources of life-style satisfaction for ourselves, our families and our institutions.

We reasonably well adjusted homosapien creature-selves have always been self-centered to some degree, although the narcissistic approach to existence emerged full blown from the anti-spiritual European assumption that we humans evolved by chance from a series of meaningless events - that we sentient beings appeared on earth because of a great Cosmic accident. Thus, a rigorous spirituality and sound ethics seemed pointless superstitions to deeply secular men and women. Both spirituality and ethics were often replaced by the less demanding feel-good esthetics of literature and the arts. Therefore, since the origins of life per se were considered a random event and human life a meaningless accident rather than spiritual and purposeful in nature -- the powerful triad of narcissistic users and abusers emerged in society; they prospered in virtually all research universities, governments, association, religions and corporations -- eventually deciding that our grubbing for personal possessions, power, prestige and pleasure could satisfy our souls. Thus, it seemed to make sense to secular minded manipulators that ordinary people should be satisfied by simply eating, drinking, fornicating and being merry because tomorrow we die. The narcissistic triad that we shall later discuss in greater detail include the following narcissists with their most damaging yearnings that well up out of their badly wounded souls --

REACTIONARY POLITICIANS WHO CRAVE TOTAL POWER OVER HUMANITY

FUNDAMENTAL PREACHERS WHO CRAVE OBEDIENCE AS GOD’S PROPHETS

IDEOLOGICAL PLUTOCRATS WHO CRAVE ENOUGH WEALTH TO DEFY DEATH

The cleverly orchestrated financial assault pre-2008 against society eventually self-destructed because great greed creates conflicting bubbles that inevitably burst after the perpetrators have taken to their golden parachutes. The recent financial manipulators simply couldn’t bring themselves to stop raiding our industrial civilization when they had already garnered enough wealth from ordinary families to cripple the entire world. This is why eight out of every ten contemporary Americans report that they are deeply frustrated with the way our nation’s politicians have stopped protecting the ordinary citizens who have neither the knowledge and wealth nor the time and strength needed to protect themselves from clever abusers who so corrupted our political system that the people cannot rely on it. Our many reactionary legislators have allowed this narcissistic triad of manipulators to cripple our once affluent middle class with its vast purchasing power that for decades kept America prosperous. As the great Elizabethan Era Lord McCauley wrote - virtually every dynasty, society, company or religion eventually commits suicide when the vested aristocracy refuses to adapt as circumstances shift and the powerful elite must change their ways or perish.

Much personal and communal cooperation simply fades away among the secular users and abusers who live primarily for possessions, power, prestige and pleasure -- who often plunge ruthlessly along without a lasting sense of spiritual purpose for their labors and permanence in their relationships. Faith, hope and love are considered delusions of weak souls who haven’t the ruthlessness and strength to wrest everything they desire from a naïve society. The peasants shall have to be satisfied with their weak families and friends, their work and simple games and their absurd worship -- while the manipulators skim the cream off the top. This is still the rationalization of wounded souls who are driven neurotically to seize so much wealth and power from society that they can never be challenged again. Not even by death! Of course this self-defeating narcissism of crippled creature-selves appeals to the young, restless and discontented as well as to many narcissistic adults who are determined to become powerful and prestigious in life regardless of whom they use and abuse along the way.

Living for more and more possessions, power, pleasure and prestige alone, rather than completing purposeful activities and developing permanent relationships, goes against the grain of every personalized or living religion and every legitimate philosophy of existence. Normally healthy women and men are first, last and always spiritual creature-selves who need both the mystical and earthy aspects of life within the Cosmos in order to become completely human. Unfortunately, narcissism and nihilism do virtually nothing to open avenues of personal meaning in places where we belong communally among good people with whom we share love, labor and leadership.

Nevertheless -- despite our inevitable frustrations and challenges of a life crippled by its obvious legitimate secular and materialistic needs, the application of Frankl and DeVille Logotherapy concepts and processes does indeed remove many discontents and frustrations through a sound psychospiritual development of personal meaning in places where we belong among good persons. Download Your Search For A Meaningful Life, to read more.

Mini-Quiz

WRITE A SAMPLE SENTENCE OR TWO THAT DEFINES THE TERM “EXISTENTIAL", TO YOUR SATISFACTION.

WHEN HAVE YOU HAD TO COPE WITH THE EVIL NARCISSISTIC TRIAD OF REACTIONARY POLITICIANS, FUNDAMENTAL PREACHERS AND IDEOLOGICAL PLUTOCRATS? THEIR VICTIMS.

Jard DeVille has published more than a score of psychology books, seminars and psychological assessment instruments. His book NICE GUYS FINISH FIRST was a powerful best seller. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF LEADERSHIP was New American Library's offering in their Executive Development Series. Download Your Search For A Meaningful Life and visit Logotherapy Learning Center and The Fulfillment Forum for Free Ebooks.

The Fulfillment Forum - Power and Purpose of Life with Free self help ebooks & eCourses

2012-04-22T22:58:00.001-05:00

The Fulfillment Forum - Power and Purpose of Life with Free self help ebooks & eCourses

What Is Logotherapy - It Will Change Your Life

2011-06-28T16:59:00.003-05:00

LOGOTHERAPY (Spirit Wellness or Soul Health) is the existential or life-style approach for developing a life filled with meaning and significance in well functioning families, faith communities, companies and neighborhoods where we find a lasting sense of belonging among the good people with whom we share faith, hope and love.

Logotherapy is a world class psycho-spiritual system for winning a satisfying life for normal persons who apply pragmatic existential psychology and mystical philosophy in the best approach to living, loving, and leading well yet identified by the human race. It helps heal people suffering from mental illness, neuroticism or psychopathy but is more often useful for normal persons making their way through the high expectations and anxieties and joys and sorrows of everyday existence.

The spiritual values, positive attitudes, high expectations, mature beliefs and responsible choices that were to eventually be woven into Logotherapy, first appeared in Jesus’ Sermon On The Mount. These key aspects of Logotherapy offer brilliant solutions to life’s challenges that Mahatma Gandhi called the most meaningful discourse about living with satisfaction and joy ever conceived by any scholar. The very fact that world class scholars are still praising these constructs two thousand years after a wandering rabbi and field preacher first uttered them in a primitive land to simple farmers and shepherds – verifies their world class worth. Logotherapy does indeed strike a resounding cord in contemporary minds and hearts for millions of normal souls. Through the last half century Logotherapy has become the action arm of existential psychology -- although it goes much further in serving thoughtful persons than psychology alone.

Those initial concepts that lead ordinary women and men through increasing knowledge and wisdom with purposefulness and generosity for the health of their souls, were next elaborated on by St. John the Beloved, Paul the Apostle, the Buddha, Lao Tsu, Soren Kierkegaard and more recent life-style scholars that included Otto Rank, Carl Rogers, Ernest Becker and others. However, it remained for Viktor Frankl, the brilliant successor to Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler as leader of the Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy, to break with tradition to systematize this very powerful approach to fulfillment, Frankl combined life-style (existential) psychological knowledge with philosophical wisdom into a unified psycho-spiritual whole that keeps lives and souls normal.

He learned that after we meet our clamoring physical needs – after a society becomes affluent and comfortable, men and women absolutely must open sources of meaning or become frustrated with their lives. Unfortunately, we humans who developed in a slow paced society that seemed changeless -- have now invented a tumultuous civilization that makes it difficult to find consistent stability and peace. Our fast changing society often forces us to adapt too swiftly for many souls to remain comfortable. We no sooner find stability than life’s demands shift once more and we are forced to find new and often painful ways to get comfortable again. For -- while we humans usually claim to enjoy changes, we resist new relationships and attitudes unless the rewards are obviously and immediately useful to ourselves.

Multitudes of completely normal persons complain of days, weeks and years of boredom at meaningless jobs that are inter-spaced with times of stark terror as society makes U Turns and frustrates them. Masses of unhappy souls report being lost in the mind-numbing routines of life until they want to scream --

Is this all there is to life, to my precious life -- that is passing like sand through an hour glass.

When do I fulfill the high expectations of my brilliant youth? Then too, a great many secular values and attitudes limit our joy and satisfaction because we humans first, last and always have a broad streak of mysticism at the core of our souls. And our metaphysical needs must be satisfied or life remains incomplete. Every civilization that left its footprints on earth arose around a religion or a philosophy that explained the meaning of their existence and offered a modicum of psycho-spiritual security. They always knew that for life to be consistently meaningful it had to include more than eating and drinking, copulating, defecating and boasting.

And when empires became so secular that they eventually faltered as did Rome, Babylon, Persia, Britain and all the rest –- they fell because their vested secular interests brought then down. Most of the crumbling societies created pseudo religions such as Communism, Fascism, and Capitalism with selfish ideologies and greedy practices that were used unsuccessfully to meet the metaphysical needs of humankind. Precisely as occurred in America during the 2007 to 2010 financial disaster caused by secular greed. We humans cannot find lasting satisfaction through possessions, power, prestige and pleasure alone. We must develop an abiding sense of purpose that sustains our positive attitudes and activities or we burn out and turn to self-defeating choices.

Logotherapy became so valuable that some fifteen million copies of Frankl’s paperback book MAN’S SEARCH FOR MEANING were devoured intellectually by men and women in a few years as it was translated into thirty-four languages. Viktor then wrote thirty more, powerful books about life, love, labor and leadership that taught many more millions of women and men the spirit wellness methods that can keep life meaningful and satisfactory. Finally, Professor Jard DeVille, who cheerfully admits to being the dwarf seated on his mentor’s giant shoulders, can occasionally see further along the path of knowledge than Viktor could. Therefore, in his twenty graduate volumes and courses about Logotherapy, DeVille integrates Frankl’s crucial need for meaning with the humanly essential need to belong that leads to the following equation.

LOGOTHERAPY = f (Personal Meaning x Communal Belonging)

Even psycho-spiritually maturing men and women must find ways to live, love, labor and lead others - by building on the crucial choices that make life meaningful and significant in places blessed by human hearts where we share faith, hope and love.

And any thoughtless approach that draws from time expired assumptions, worn out traditions and self-defeating ideologies leads to the complaint -- Too soon we get old and too late we get smart.

Katherine Hendricks, who became a successful mining company executive, lamented after a FRONTIERS OF FULFILLMENT seminar at the University of Arizona.

We paraphrase --
I seem to be working sixty hour weeks only to pay for the house and the Mercedes while my family falls apart. I sometime feel I’m going mad because I’ve won everything I’ve ever wanted and it isn’t enough to keep me happy. And I cannot even tell my therapist what has gone wrong.

Multitudes of persons feel much as Catherine did but we are pleased to report that she and her husband brought some key Logotherapy constructs into their marriage and family and that effort saved their relationship. Most people admit that they suffer through three or four disappointments for every one period of joy. A great many graduates from Harvard, Southern Methodist and other great schools reported that life and careers have become painfully boring and much less satisfying than they had expected when they graduated twenty years earlier. A great many women and men dread the final twenty years before retirement after life has no new challenges. And multitudes of career workers wither away soon after retiring because they lost the purposes of life that sustained them. About half of all new marriages fail because of sexual or financial dis-satisfactions and many careers are sacrificed in self-defeating searches for success. With eighty percent of American women and men now saying that they feel frustrated because the nation has lost its way and fear they cannot recoup their former significance. Some existential scholars call this widespread existential frustration the mass neurosis of the twenty-first century – while Frankl called it the existential vacuum of modern industrial life. We also call it psycho-spiritual bankruptcy. We all must find avenues of fulfillment as did one elderly nanny who sorrowfully counseled with Frankl because she felt that her life had been wasted.

Anna -- I’m so discouraged because my life is over. I reared another family’s children and grandchildren and had none of my own. And now they are all grown and although the family takes good care of me, no one needs me any longer. I get so discouraged that I could cry.

Frankl – You feel that your life was wasted? That you caused the children to turn out badly?

Anna -- Oh no! They’ve done well. One boy is a professor and another is a sea captain with his own ship. And the girls have dress shops all over France and Italy. They’ve all succeeded.

Frankl -- But they’ve forgotten you? Is that it?

Anna -- Not that either. When they come home at Christmas or on holiday, they always visit with me. We talk about the old days and they give me presents and some money and we go on rides with their children and dine out together. They are always generous and kind to me.

Frankl -- Anna! Anna! You have it all wrong. You should take pride from having cared for those children. You life wasn’t wasted. It was invested! Your love is still being reflected by the new generation for their own children. You taught two generations generosity and love. And as far as being useless… go to your rabbi and ask to help with the babies in the nursery during Sabbath and volunteer to help neighborhood mothers. You are needed in an avocation.

Anna -- (After a long pause) Why, Doctor Frankl, I see that you are right. My life isn’t over rafter all. Children will still care for me. (She thanked him, found places in which to use her skills as a volunteer and never returned with another lament.)

Logotherapy is neither psychotherapy nor the use of psychotropic medication because it opens consistent avenues of fulfillment for normal men and women in a complex and often painful society through spirit wellness or soul health. Logotherapy offers consistent satisfaction and times of great joy to men and women of all ages and conditions in virtually every aspect of life. Logotherapy can teach you how to –

LIVE - CONSISTENTLY ACCORDING TO SOUND PSYCHO-SPIRITUAL PRINCIPLES,

LOVE - DEEPLY ENOUGH TO MANAGE INTERPERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS WELL,

LABOR - BY SHARING THE REWARDS OF ACHIEVEMENT WITH YOUR HELPERS,

LEAD - WISELY ENOUGH TO CREATE A GREAT COMMUNITY OF ACHIEVERS.

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Coping With Change - Mini-Quiz

2009-09-09T11:16:00.016-05:00

Why do we resist change? Most People live with the illusion that humans welcome change but the fact is we do not --unless it is to our immediate and obvious advantage. And even then it is difficult for most people to cope with a major shift although they desperately yearn for something new. Read the article and take the quiz.

When Dorothy Hamill won the gold medal for figure skating during one of the Winter Olympics, it was a magnificent accomplishment for a twenty year old girl. But it's possible Dorothy did not spend one hour planning what she would do should she win her heart's desire. No sooner did she come home than a flock of leeches pounced on her, taking advantage of her innocence to use and abuse her for their own financial benefit. They confused Dorothy and brought such conflict that she went into emotional shock that complicated her life. She eventually skated again in her own ice show, having matured as an entertainer but it took almost ten years to cope with the major changes a gold medal brought to her. Of course, she isn't alone. Not a year goes by that famous young athletes and actors don't ruin their prospects through the use of drugs and the abuse of other people. Too much change that comes too fast is always a problem.

Because humans were so long evolving into what we are today, with our emotions still far more primitive than our intelligence and logic, it seems entirely likely that our fear of and resistance to change is carried in our very genes. Change came very slowly to our ancestors. We suspect that President William Howard Taft from the late 1800s would have felt more at home in ancient Rome or Greece than he would in contemporary America. There have been more changes in society from 1890/1900 when our fathers and grandfathers were born than from 200 B.C. to 1900. And the tempo of change continues to increase. Life seems to be turning upside down and that's very frustrating. Who could have believed at the end of World War II that skinny little Vietnamese riflemen, shivering with malaria in the monsoon, would maul United States Marines severely enough to lose America the Indochina War? Or that a rag-tag bunch of Islamic fundamentalists could hold American diplomats captive for years and then force a president of the United States to wreck our economic future with massive debts and to cripple the American Bill of Rights? We all resist change unless we win some immediate benefit and yet, it keeps sweeping over us despite our crying out -- Stop the world - I want to get off! No sooner do we win a bit of physical and psychological comfort than our key activities and relationships shift into a new and challenging mode and we are forced to rethink our values, attitudes and choices. We all to often fear and resist anything that is different from life when we were learning who we were and how we fit into the scheme of things.

However, simply knowing that change is inevitable and that most people resist adapting does little to move us beyond useless traditions and crippling ideologies from the past. We need to adapt and make responsible choices as did a friend of ours -- Susan Frey who'd been conditioned by her grandparents and parents to think of herself as a broodmare. Susan had married young as women of her generation were expected to do, had three children in quick succession and settled in to be a traditional housewife to a bread-winning husband. She and Harold even attended a week long seminar in which a religious educator taught that the father was the commanding officer who gave the orders, the mother was the company adjutant who stayed home and carried them out and the children were troopers who saluted and did as they were told. Unfortunately, that simplistic approach was disastrous. Sue grew weary of doing all the scut work and Harold became tired of being responsible for everything else. He fled the family, leaving Susan with no money, no job skills and no security, in other words, one of the 20th centuries major problems, an irresponsible husband and father living in a self-defeating patriarchal model of marriage, came crashing through her life. It became worse. When she turned to her family and church for support, both failed her badly.

Her parents - especially her mother - blamed her for Harold's desertion. Had Susan, her mother insisted, been a good wife her husband would have stayed home as Susan's father did when they'd faced problems years earlier. They offered largely criticism as their daughter struggled to survive. Her pastor, who'd brought into the community the military style family seminar leader, took Susan to task even more severely. He preached sermons that one Sunday condemned working mothers who sent their children to day-care centers and the next Sunday blasted lazy welfare women who failed to teach their kids the values inherent in standing on their own two feet. It was a catch twenty-two approach used by a reactionary man who hid behind a pulpit and chose out of context scriptures through which to make fear driven, anti-women attacks.

A social worker finally rescued Susan by helping her find work and child care and to enter a nursing program. Being a single parent and a working mother was the hardest thing Susan ever did, but she continued maturing until she became an outstanding nurse. She joined a religious community that supported her rather than railing at single mothers who didn't live in the traditional manner with a husband - with any man who'd have her, even if he crippled her in a drunken rage or brought herpes or AIDS home. In one of our seminars, Susan said:

Not only do most men refuse a ready made family, I wasn't eager to marry some bozo who'd give me more kids before running off as Harold did. I've had fine relationships - I'm in a loving and supportive one now - with a good guy I love. Perhaps we'll marry and perhaps we won't. Once I learned how to change my world. how to stand on my own feet with a good job, life became satisfying for me and my children.

By maturing steadily, by coping with change rather than freezing in the past, Susan developed the knowledge and wisdom needed to reject the naive advice given by her parents and pastor. Sue eventually became a fully functional person rather than clinging as a subordinate, second class wife to an immature man. She matured through persistence and hard work and is now the resident nurse in a fine manufacturing firm. So must we all mature when we set out to change our world - when we seek a better, more meaningful life.

Remember - while we are asking what the meaning of life is - life is consistently asking us what meaning we are creating for ourselves by managing change wisely. Life demands that we make our attitudes, activities and relationships personality purposeful within our families, companies and communities, in the schools, hospitals and governmental agencies in which we serve humankind. Life challenges us to mature spiritually, to focus all our powers along lines of excellence, to become fully human rather than remaining unhouse-broken barbarians who use and abuse other persons. Successful lives must be connected physically, psychologically and philosophically to individuals and organizations that are actively searching for fulfillment along avenues of achievement rather than simply accepting some decaying status quo.

SELF-FOCUS

WHY DO INDIVIDUALS AND ESPECIALLY ORGANIZATIONS CONSISTENTLY RESIST CHANGE EVEN WHEN MAINTAINING THE STATUS QUO IS HARMFUL?

WHAT HAVE YOU SEEN OCCURRING WHEN PEOPLE ARE UNPREPARED FOR CHANGE BECAUSE THEY'D ASSUMED LIFE WOULD REMAIN STATIC?

HOW FAR SHOULD SOMEONE LIKE SUSAN GO IN REJECTING THE ADVICE OF PEOPLE WHO HAVE NO REAL STAKE IN HER GAME?

Jard DeVille; Psychology Dept. Chair at Westminster College; Director of the Learning And Learning Disabilities Clinic with the University of Wisconsin, also taught in the Executive Development Program at the University of Arizona. He's published many psychology books, seminars and test instruments. He's considered by many to be one of America's foremost leadership scholars. Permission to use if attributed to author with his website address.

Visit http://www.fulfillmentforum.com for FREE psychology lifestyle eBooks & Internet Tools.

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2009-08-12T13:48:00.003-05:00

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Self-Serving Myths Of The Past

2009-07-27T12:46:00.005-05:00

Many people see our problems and feel that society is slipping out of control, that the ability to cooperate for the good of our communities has been lost, and our willingness to abide by our long-standing social contracts is compromised. It's true that an entire generation of young barbarians has grown up for whom the way to deal with others is to grab whatever you want. But it seldom occurs to us that our nihilistic system supports ruthless abusers, from back-street hoodlums to Wall Street arbitrageurs and Enron executives. Many naive women and men long for some idealized good old days, while ideologues try to bring them back. Both types ignore one important fact.

The much glorified and mythological American past that many reactionary politicians and religious leaders seek to recreate, as Henry Hyde and Jerry Falwell do, was almost exclusively for the benefit of affluent white males. It excluded Negroes, Indians, poor whites, Mexicans, and most women from any possibility of finding consistent satisfaction.

We know; we were there at the time!

Don’t misunderstand us when we criticize evil choices and call for a rebirth of spirituality. We love our American homeland deeply but we detest and want to expose the ruthless abusers who claim to be the only true Americans as they measure patriotism, success and justice almost exclusively in financial terms. If we didn’t love our people, we’d run with the wolves attacking them. Few persons understand that virtually all wars are financial conflicts orchestrated by ruthless power freaks in high places and fought to the death by poor boys who get few benefits for their sacrifices. Even as, the George W. Bush administration increased fees charging American veterans four and five hundred percent annually in the Veteran’s Affairs hospitals and excluding more and more veterans. The Bush administration prepared to destroy the Veteran’s medical program along with Social Security by privatization. Especially, when we need them desperately with the failings of our financial systems.

Understand this well.

Calling the American past, during the thirties, forties and fifties, our golden era of spirituality and morality, as so many primitive politicians and reactionary religious ideologues do, is a scheme to destroy civil and gender rights and eliminate the wages of the worker from production. It is a form of narcissistic self-deception that leads to private benefits for a few at the expense of everyone else. Here is how it really was for millions of Americans during the so called golden age of morality and decency.

RACIAL HATRED -- Only radicals with a hidden agenda or profoundly ignorant persons can say with a straight face that life in America was spiritual, was more moral when racial and sexist violence was the law of the land, was ruthlessly enforced by state-sanctioned terror. The psychopathic Mississippi or Alabama Ku Klux Klan sheriffs who beat poor people sadistically and organized forty-five hundred murders of black men, women and children during the 20th century were all too real. Louisiana politicians like Huey Long harnessed race hatred for their own benefit and used brutal tactics to block Negroes from first class citizenship. Jard saw this close-up because his father personally saved Long from assassination by two gunmen in the 1930s. Men and women of African, Mexican or Indian heritage, for that reason alone, were not permitted to vote, to serve on juries, eat in restaurants, sleep in clean hotels, use public toilets, go to schools and colleges for which they were paying taxes or hold decent jobs. For generations college educated Negroes were given only filthy, back breaking jobs in steel mills across Pennsylvania and Indiana. Black U.S. Navy gunners, risking their lives battling German U-Boat wolf packs on the frigid North Atlantic crossing during World War II, were beaten savagely by American military police for trying to get hot coffee in government canteens. When one young Black fighter ace from the famed Tuskegee Group returned home from years in combat protecting white bomber crews in Italy, the only job he could get was as a janitor in the local bank. Indian children were locked in concentration camps and beaten when they spoke the only language they knew. Japanese American parents remain locked in concentration camps while their sons were dying while fighting German Nazis as members of the famed 442 Regimental Combat team. The Go For Broke boys won more medals than any unit their size in World War II but when they came home they were denied service by everyone from doctors to barbers and renters because of their ancestry. When minorities tried to succeed professionally, to become first class citizens by enrolling their children in good schools and building their careers, hundreds of armed white men, usually led by police chiefs and blessed by racist pastors, would beat or murder them. There was a lynching of a black man about once a week for a hundred years across the south.

GENDER HATRED -- Even during the profitable postwar economic boom, women remained second class citizens. They were refused admission in universities and graduate school programs only because they were female. Georgia Tech officials denied seven highly qualified young women acceptance in its engineering programs in the middle fifties. The dean defended his decision in court, saying,

We cannot enroll them -- they would have to pass through the male gym on their way to the engineering lab.

Indecent to expose the sweet innocents to sweaty male bodies, cannot cut another door into the lab! Women still cannot serve as pastors in the two largest American denominations. Because they have no testosterone glands, Roberta quips. After all, radical men know that God created women to tend men's sexual needs and see their food is cooked! It was not until 1965 that laws were abolished that prohibited even married women from using contraceptives in order to control the size of their families. Scores of social workers were sentenced to prison by male judges for teaching poor women to use birth control methods. Corporations hired women only as secretaries, food servers and cleaning women, even if they had to earn the family living because irresponsible men fathered children and then ran away from their responsibilities. Teaching and nursing were the only professions generally open to women and they both paid badly. Many, probably most business, political, educational and religious leaders of the era wanted women barefoot and pregnant, subservient to their male lords and masters.

Entire companies still behave toward this way toward women. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) recently had to press criminal charges against the Mitsubishi Automobile Company in Tennessee to end years of sexual harassment of it’s women employees. Company executives refused to block the frequent humiliation of women and then fired those who complained about their criminally abusive supervisors and managers. The corporate executives, trained in Japan where women are little more than convenient sexual servants to men, ordered their American managers to hire nude dancers and prostitutes to entertain home office vice presidents visiting the factory. Even when they were caught, rather than correcting the abuse, the executives mounted an expensive publicity campaign to escape justice. We are happy to report it didn’t work.

Many sexist men of the lunatic fringe -- with the brainwashed daughters, spouses and girlfriends they manipulate, hate women who are succeeding beyond their abilities -- especially successful women who accept as lovers and mates only sophisticated and supportive men. Bright and competent woman understand that neurotic men are on a one way ride to nowhere, at least emotionally and culturally if not always financially, and choose not to go along with them. Talented women despise their primitive attitudes and assumptions about relationships, and that is more than most existentially alienated men of the right wing can tolerate. The haters are usually supported by fundamental preachers and reactionary politicians in an attempt to return uppity women to subservient citizenship. If that doesn't work, if self-directing women still refuse to waste their potential as menial servants and brood mares, especially if they refuse them as sexual partners, a great many angry men become violent. This was the theme of the motion picture Thelma And Louise a few years ago, in which two abused women broke away from their existentially alienated and brutal men. The macho motto of such men could well be the old New England advice that thousands of fathers gave to their sons before marriage;

A woman, a dog and a walnut tree -- the more you beat them the better they be.

SOCIAL HATRED -- Freedom of speech was limited during the Joe McCarthy madness of the fifties. Many persons had to take loyalty oaths and the attorney general of the United States kept lists of traitors who protested that the Cold War was harming America. Anyone who blamed the National Guard for shooting down students at Kent State University was called a Soviet sympathizer. Millions of naive men and women were persuaded by well orchestrated propaganda campaigns that shooting the students served the protesters right. Of course, years later former Secretary of State, Robert McNamara, admitted all this in his autobiography. We especially loved the scene in the movie Nixon where President Nixon slipped out of the White House to the Lincoln Memorial to talk to some students protesting the decade long Vietnam War. He asked;

Why do you hate me so much for defending our country against the evil communist menace?

He lectured the kids about the dangers of socialism, until one of the girls cried out with a burst of insight.

Why -- you are so beholding to those making money from the conflict that you can't stop the war either!

J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the F.B.I. For example, kept a secret dirty tricks file with which to blackmail virtually every American political, business and educational leader. Presidents Kennedy and Johnson both hated Hoover and wanted to fire him as head of the Bureau but feared that Hoover would reveal their illicit sexual and financial affairs -- Kennedy’s lust for women and Johnson’s manipulation of defense contracts to amass a personal fortune. Hoover’s greatest vindictiveness was reserved for anyone trying to end the slaughter of sixty thousand American white farm and black ghetto kids being sent to kill Vietnamese farm boys. Along with quarter million more maimed and several million ripped away from their homes. Plus the slaughter of almost three million Vietnamese civilians. He went ballistic when Martin Luther King came out in opposition of the war -- screaming around his office that he was going to get him if it was the last thing he ever did. During the civil rights struggle across the south, Hoover sent only southern F.B.I. Agents south to investigate the murder of voter registration workers. He reasoned they would be less likely to find any exculpatory evidence and he was pretty well right. Only a very few agents were successful investigators. Hoover didn’t work in a vacuum, however. A large number of reactionary politicians later named one Washington building The Hoover Building. He was their kind of guy and he had indeed served them well! Hoover was so vehemently against civil rights that Jard still wonders whether the murderous Hoover didn’t secretly orchestrate both John Kennedy’s and Martin King’s assassination. It was possible because it was later revealed that he had several assassination teams under his personal control.

Signing a petition or going to an anti-war rally was dangerous for anyone who opposed Washington's power freaks. Army officers who protested the Vietnam disaster were cashiered by the thousands. Civilians that our government branded 'Doves' usually lost their jobs and some went to prison. As we said earlier, we do indeed love America and want it to prosper but we see the United States as the people and the farms, the lakes, communities and businesses rather than as the financial, political and religious aristocracy who lust to gain all the wealth and power and prestige. You cannot convince us that reactionary sexist and racist legislators care one iota about the people of this nation! The back room conspiracies, vicious electioneering attacks and outright felonies committed by those who yearn to dominate America have destroyed much trust in and respect for government. That is why the people of Minnesota in a previous election voted into the governor’s office a popular professional wrestler, Jesse Ventura, who beat both political parties in one fell swoop.

SELF-FOCUS
How can so many persons assume that an era of coercion and brutality was more spiritual than this period when more persons have laws to protect them from ruthless and reactionary abusers?

Do the fearful ever talk about anything except reducing taxes and controlling the lives of the women and men who don’t agree with them?

DANGEROUS CONCEPTS - NIHILISM THE PHILOSOPHY OF MEANINGLESSNESS

2009-06-22T08:03:00.006-05:00

NIHILISM

Nihilism, the pragmatic operating philosophy of virtually every government, corporation and research university is a belief in disbelief, is a philosophy of meaninglessness, including the too self-defeating assumption that might makes right.

Like many disasters, Nihilism began with the finest of intentions. European scientists between 1880 and 1920 were seriously examining the earth and the universe for clues about matter and life. They peered outward toward the stars and galaxies with better telescopes and inward with microscopes, to learn many cosmic truths. Researchers like Planck, Mach, Koch, the Curies, Freud, Bohr, Darwin and Einstein used a new way of looking for knowledge. They called it the scientific method that stressed facts rather than faith. They were right of course. I don’t want to cross the Pacific Ocean in an aircraft designed according to the undisputed brilliance of Thomas Jefferson.

Secular nihilism developed out of Prussian brutality and became deeply embedded in fiercely secular German universities. It was a major tragedy as Herman Hesse had his character Heller say in his great existential novel STEPPENWULF, the brutal beast that walks upright (man). Hesse was a member of the lost generation that came of age in the bloody trenches of World War I - the generation that lost faith in European institutions for deceiving the people so badly. Heller lamented -- There come times when entire generations are trapped between eras --not knowing what to believe -- whom to trust in their search for life.

In other words, be careful what you choose to believe because the following nihilistic, scientist, pragmatic, opportunistic assumptions are crippling to human health.

SELF FOCUS - Rank the following in order of their destructive potential in your life.

1. Humans collectively form a resource to be shaped as needed by government and business, rather than being persons to be cherished because of their intrinsic worth.

2. Human spirituality is an ancient superstition rather than a normal aspect of existence that Frankl called the spiritual unconscious.

3. In seeking human progress, the successful completion of important projects justifies any and all methods used to reach society's goals.

4. The earth is a resource to be developed whenever and wherever desired rather than the home of life as we know it.

5. Each nation's rulers in government, commerce and science should be trusted to do what is right because they have better knowledge than the people they command and control.

6. Because life is the result of a great cosmic accident, individual lives and families are basically meaningless unless they serve the state or some profitable purpose.

7. Persons who do not fit into the pragmatic views of an industrial society are worthless and expendable as North American Indians were when they could not be enslaved.

8. When enough persons and organizations become opportunistic in their philosophy of operations, doing what they can get away with, taking everything they are strong enough to keep, a secular miracle occurs in which the entire society finds greater satisfaction.

BEYOND SECULAR NIHILISTIC PRAGMATISM

In the early days of World War II, when Japan's politicians were developing political ties with the Nazi's of Germany, Lithuanian police teams were enthusiastically rounding up Jewish families for shipment in cattle cars to the death camps that spread like terrible tumors across Europe. The Japanese Baltic counsul was Sempo Sugihara, an unpretentious little Foggy Bottom type civil servant who never dreamed of challenging the powerful movers and shakers who were leading his country toward disaster in a war they could not win. When this perfect office clerk, who even ate his lunch at his desk, discovered what the cruel anti-Semitic Balts were doing, he exploded in indignation and resolved to do better than his government who'd ordered him to assist the Nazis every way he could.

Sugihara established a secret escape route across Russia on the Trans-Siberian Express Railway to Shanghai and to Hong Kong. He forged passports and visas, lied to Lithuanian and German officials with his bland Asiatic smile, used money from his office accounts and sent thousands of Jewish families to safety despite the increasingly shrill protests from the Tokyo office. When he was finally dragged home in disgrace, wearing chains, he declined disemboweling himself in a ritual suicide for disobeying orders. It was not until years after his heroism that I discovered that Sempo Sugihara came out of the community of Nagasaki that deliberately stressed ethical values and responsible choices. Just to keep the record straight -- that was the community the U.S. Army Air Forces, in which Jard served, vaporized at ground zero with the second nuclear bomb.

SELF FOCUS - Rank the following in their order of importance to you.

1. Develop and widely use throughout your life and its activities a sound philosophy of service that creates first class citizenship for all who help you succeed, through an equitable sharing of the physical, psychological and philosophical rewards of commitment.

2. Strive for a sense of belonging in supportive communal groups by gathering women and men into small, intimate teams such as business growth centers, clubs or training classes, through which they find consistent satisfaction by accomplishing meaningful tasks or sharing satisfying activities with people who are important to themselves personally.

3. Draw all the people into the decision making processes of the group, for then the decisions become their own choices rather than something imposed by outsiders who don't really understand what is going on in the trenches where the real work is being accomplished.

4. Establish ways of dealing with stress and conflict before the organization becomes dysfunctional and suicidal because the vested interest groups prefer personal possessions, power and prestige far more than group purpose, performance, productivity and profits.

5. Empower persons to mature by sharing responsibilities and rewards. Avoid open-ended assignments that burn out men and women in a few years, by rewarding self-development and creativity, and by sharing the emotional results of being a true member in a good team.

6. Master the principle of human motivation -- it's a fact that people seek the relationships and continue the activities that reward them personally, while rejecting attitudes, activities and relationships that cause pain or fail to benefit themselves consistently.

7. Keep communications open by refusing to let a few fearful or greedy persons in some chain of command block the flow of vital information up or down for their own reasons, since collectively, the members of a group have total knowledge of what must be done to consistently succeed.

8. Set the stage for people at all levels of organizational responsibility and reward to find consistent satisfaction by connecting personal fulfillment to organizational greatness.

9. If you haven't the knowledge and wisdom to achieve through serving society in some area, have the decency to get out of the way and stop harming a group of good people who deserve better of life.

EXISTENTIAL FRUSTRATION

2009-06-10T09:57:00.005-05:00

Disaster in the form of existential or life-style caused frustration overwhelmed an old rural parish some years ago as a traditional way of life collapsed and a community fell apart due to twentieth/twenty-first century social and technological stresses. The farming community had been hard hit by drought, a serious decline in land values and a slump in commodity prices. Some church members were losing their sense of identity while others were living on the edge of financial disaster. Many kids were leaving and few in college were interested in returning home to farm. A brisk drug trade developed when some people tried to cope with their stresses chemically and two or three committed suicide when the stresses grew too great. Major changes had been frustrating the rural community for some time, even before the bland old pastor died and his assistant retired. The community’s spiritual, economic and social anchors were dragging and many people were frightened. When two new new priests arrived, they tried to adjust to reality by shifting with the times but unfortunately, that antagonized those fearful members who yearned to return to the past.

The young priests and nuns not only taught traditional religion, meaning to some of the people only what occurred within the walls of the sanctuary during worship, but also the virtue of demonstrating faith and love in the outside society. They wanted the people to understand the dozen debilitating American wars since World War II in spiritual terms, to ask their politicians why they were committing financial suicide in the name of faith and patriotism. The priests and nuns wanted their people committed to civil, legal and financial rights for minority people and to be generous when feeding, clothing and educating the poor migrant children who'd come north to labor in their fields. The leaders were trying to keep the church alive and attractive to the next generation by asking the people to openly discuss values that had always been irrelevant to faith as practiced in the long static community. As the farm economy faltered still more and farmers and merchants fell into trouble, some of the more frustrated and aggressive members of the parish started a campaign to get rid of the trouble-makers who challenged them. Thus, they assumed, they could return to the good old days. They didn’t understand that old traditions and ideologies succeed only in the times and situations which they evolved. One elderly member told me:

I don't even recognize my church anymore and I hate it! These priests are changing everything I know and love. Did not the holy fathers in Rome assure us for fifty years that fighting Commies was God's will and that we would be blessed for our loyalty to America and the church? Why is God punishing us now?

The fearful leaders didn't understand the law of unintended consequences. One paranoid group felt there had to be an evil plot of some kind causing their pain and some men formed a local militia to drive off the villains. Quarrels and fist fights broke out at the altar during communion and in the chancel after services. The priests were harassed at all hours of the day and night with obscene phone calls. Several cars were sabotaged and a church bus was burned and the nun principal of the parish school was forced off the road by a group of cursing militia-men in pickup trucks waving shotguns.

Both priests eventually resigned and Bishop Roy Blocker refused to send out replacements.

He said, no one trying to serve God should have to undergo the harsh judgments and treatments their priests and nuns did. The parish was no longer a community in Christ.

The church had always been a sanctuary for the several hundred farm and village families who worshipped together but it couldn't keep the world at bay in changing times. The anxious and alienated members of the parish crippled the congregation rather than adapt, when the only way they could survive was through accepting change and dealing with new circumstances. After he reopened the church, Bishop Blocker explained;

For centuries we brought our people up in a static and unchanging church atmosphere. We prided ourselves that as God’s church nothing ever changed. We were eternal. We still believe in the unchanging revelation that God made in Christ. But while God hasn’t changed, everything else has. Unfortunately, there will always be some persons who neurotically need more certitude than we can legitimately offer, a certitude that Jesus himself didn’t have in Jerusalem’s garden of olives when he questioned God’s mission for his life.

Thist is true spiritual bankruptcy suffered by many that is caused by the existence we choose or have forced on us by society. Lest you think that too strong an example of alienation, during the week this anecdote was first written, Jeff Rolvag, our handsome and charming next door neighbor hanged himself from a basement rafter not thirty feet from Jard’s desk. He had hidden his existential alienation very well but he certainly isn’t alone in his frustration and the aggression or apathy that follows.

SELF FOCUS -- Have you seen situations in families, schools, companies or communities when life style created frustration causes conflicts?

PERSONAL FULFILLMENT ASSESSMENT

2009-05-26T11:42:00.018-05:00

Use our Personal Fulfillment Assessment to assess your Life's Meaning and Belonging.

READ EACH OF THE FOLLOWING STATEMENTS AND THEN CHOSE THE NUMBER THAT MOST ACCURATELY DESCRIBES YOUR FEELINGS ABOUT IT.

             SELDOM                SOMETIMES                    OFTEN
1. I am satisfied with the way my life has a sense of purpose to it.
            1                      2                      3                      4                      5
2. I have reasons to be enthusiastic about life and my place in it.
            1                      2                      3                      4                      5
3. I study to learn better ways of achieving the good things I should be doing.
            1                      2                      3                      4                      5
4. My life is free of trivial activities and shallow relationships.
            1                      2                      3                      4                      5
5. I plan my activities with positive attitudes and high expectations.
            1                      2                      3                      4                      5
6. My life follows my master plan for living wisely and wed.
            1                      2                      3                      4                      5
7. My work seems a mission I should successfully complete.
            1                      2                      3                      4                      5
8. I work at meaningful avocations in order to help other people.
            1                      2                      3                      4                      5
9. I have satisfying relationships with both men and women.
            1                      2                      3                      4                      5
10. I act on the fact that I have the freedom to mature spiritually.
            1                      2                      3                      4                      5

Add your score and enter it here. MEANING ______

CONTINUE WITH THE STATEMENTS BELOW.

             SELDOM                SOMETIMES                    OFTEN
1. I experience a sense of awe about life.
            1                      2                      3                      4                      5
2. I feel compassion for people in trouble.
            1                      2                      3                      4                      5
3. The women and men with whom I work contribute to my life.
            1                      2                      3                      4                      5
4. When my family, company or community has trouble I help out.
            1                      2                      3                      4                      5
5. After a long trip I enjoy returning to familiar surroundings.
            1                      2                      3                      4                      5
6. I participate in sports and entertainments appropriate to my age and shape.
            1                      2                      3                      4                      5
7. I spend time with friends and relatives I love.
            1                      2                      3                      4                      5
8. I vote and/or work for political candidates I trust.
            1                      2                      3                      4                      5
9. I expect people to be ethical and honest when I deal with them.
            1                      2                      3                      4                      5
10. I try to make the world a better place in which to live.
            1                      2                      3                      4                      5

Add your score and enter it here. BELONGING_______

To plot your score, mark the MEANING score at the corresponding height on the vertical scale and the BELONGING score at the corresponding distance from the left on the horizontal scale. Then, extend both lines into the square to the point where they cross. Mark that spot for it will reveal the level of your satisfaction compared to the men and women who have used this scale in past Fulfillment Seminars. A score of 30 points vertically and horizontally registers average satisfaction. A score of 10 is low satisfaction and 50 is high satisfaction.

SATISFACTION SCALE

M        50 (high)

E

A

N        30 (medium)

I

N

G        10(low)        30(medium)        50(high)

B        E        L        O        N        G        I        N        G

Visit fulfillmentforum.com for more information about our free psychology self help ebooks, psychology courses and life style seminars about making you life count, relationships, marriage, spiritual freedom, world class leadership, career growth, parenting, influencing others - free ebooks and articles.

PATTERNS THAT AFFECT PERFORMANCE - Mini Quiz

2009-05-07T18:07:00.006-05:00

As Except From The Book" GRACE UNDER PRESSURE"

New Era, Greater Challenges

Leon Trotsky, the old Soviet ideologue, is not widely respected by large numbers of business men and women, but he made several statements that bring into focus some of the major challenges faced by managers in an era of constant turmoil. During the confusion of the Russian Revolution, the Old Bolshevik said that anyone who wanted only to be left alone in peace to do his work had chosen a terrible time in which to be born. He also concluded that trying to reorganize a society was much like trying to revitalize a cemetery. Trotsky was correct on both counts, for deep within all kinds of organizations is the desire to keep things as they were when the members first learned them. We do indeed want to preserve our vested interests without interference or loss. Many people live with the illusion that humans enjoy change. The fact is, however, that we seldom want important things to change unless the benefits are immediate and personally valuable. Even when there is an obvious advantage to changing, many people have difficulty adjusting to new circumstances and relationships.

For example, the sports and entertainment industries have produced many athletes and performers who were unable to successfully handle sudden fame and wealth. In many business and professional organizations, rapid change can have similar disruptive results when people are forced, frequently against their will, to deal with resources and relationships they resent. Many resist for so long that the organizations are destroyed as the great English historian, Lord McCauley, explained. He wrote that every great civilization, nation, noble family, corporation and community eventually commits suicide by creating so many selfish, vested interest groups that it cannot adapt when great changes occur and the entire group must adapt swiftly or perish. He went on to reveal that while there are always hungry and younger societies waiting in the wings to take over, all but one or two of the twenty two civilizations that left their footprints on earth, collapsed from their own internal contradictions and conflicts.

Managers and professionals like dentists, attorneys, and physicians, who are responsible for leading their employees to achieve together, are frequently the causes of many problems in their own organizations. They yearn, often unconsciously, to continue working through the concepts and skills they learned in the beginning. They do so because changes in relationships, techniques, and responsibilities force us to rethink ideas we already mastered, and to adapt when it seems obvious that we usually want others to do the adapting in our organizations.

For example, several years ago, when the decline of large automobile engines became obvious, one young manager was called to a meeting where he was told that his test group would be evaluating the reliability of the Chrysler Corporation's new power plant for domestic sales. When he asked about the engine, he found it to be a massive thing that produced more than 300 horsepower with commensurate fuel consumption. He protested that the competition was adjusting to rising fuel costs by developing fuel-efficient engines and that Chrysler should be doing the same thing. His manager immediately pinned him to the wall and told him to keep his mouth shut and follow orders if he wanted to keep his job. The young manager thought about the potential consequences of resisting change despite fuel costs and soon started a career in another industry. And Chrysler's small automobile came on the market with an engine and transmission built in Germany because the massive V-8 engine was an anachronism that few customers would buy. To this day, General Motors and Ford are having trouble manufacturing automobiles that American customers will purchase and Chrysler has bonded with the Mercedes Group of Germany.

Of course we all understand, at least at a gut level what resistant to change has cost our automobile industry in our current crises. Although we may not realize it is a deeply rooted human trait unless the benefits are immediate and personally valuable.

The resistance to change that so complicates the work of managers and supervisors is much more than a conscious determination to keep things as they were in the past. According to scholars like Konrad Lorenz and Carl Jung, our resistance may well be rooted in the evolution of humankind, in the development of Western Civilization itself, and in the manner in which work groups have long been led in our society.
As our civilization grew in size and complexity, humans developed the technology needed to prosper and the interpersonal relationships necessary for success. In other words, our ancestors created both the hardware (the resources) and the software (the relationships) of achievement. The hardware included tools, weapons, clothes, etc. The software included the psychology and the philosophy needed to work successfully in groups, to distribute rewards equitably, and to avoid unnecessary conflict within each community. We must still balance the use of software and hardware if our organizations are to prosper as our competitors do in Europe and Asia.

In many, if not most, cases, an organization begins as an entrepreneurial enterprise that prospers in that form as long as the founder uses both good hardware and software to serve clients well. In time, the small organization grows beyond the ability of the entrepreneur to control everything, so either the transition to professional management is made or else the company stagnates upon the death of the dynamic founder. However, it has only been in the last few decades that we have come to understand that there is a drawback to professionally managed organizations that do not change as society changes. For example, when an organization becomes so complex that people feel lost in its activities, confused about its objectives, and resentful of its impersonal approach, the organization has peaked. At that point, to become optimally successful, the management team must regain the community spirit that has so frequently been destroyed through the development of impersonal systems, a division of labor, and the rest of the Industrial Engineering/Harvard Business School approach.

In communities where men build ships for their sons and nephews to fish in or fight from, quality is never a problem. When people are hired to build products -- or small parts of products for a faceless consumer market, or for managers they do not know because they are away soaring like falcons in a deserted forest, quality and productivity are certain to be consistent problems. And therein hangs a tale for ambitious managers and supervisors who believe there is a better way to work in their organizations.

Avenues To Success

Business has become too complex to believe that profit alone is the measure of how well an organization is serving its clients and utilizing its employees. Joseph Juran, the quality specialist who, with W. Edwards Deming, gave Japan the tools they needed to prosper with small inventories in their production organizations, has blamed our leadership failure on the finance specialists of our organizations. In their pursuit of short-term profit, they neglected the quality and productivity that would have created long-range growth for their organizations. In all fairness, the finance wizards were only doing what their owners hired them to do, and since they seldom had any production or service experience, our performance calamity caught them unawares. Unfortunately, the belief that the bottom line rather than growth is crucial was accepted by the smaller organizations of our society as well.

A more reliable measure of success that far transcends the quarterly statement is a manager's ability to increase productivity and quality enough to capture more of the market without a proportional increase in expenses. Scholars like David Tansik, Edwin Flippo, and Peter Drucker report that we have come as far as possible without a restoration of creativity, a rebirth of the human element in our organizations. And that is the last thing many executives who would like to treat employees as inventory want to hear.

We must remember that we suffered our massive leadership failure while using the best administrative systems ever devised. Unfortunately, these were never enough and certainly more troublesome than inanimate resources -- while our less sophisticated competitors around the world harnessed the human strengths that can make many organizations strong, vibrant and productive!

Fortunately, the behavioral sciences, especially the research of psychology and sociology, have matured past traditional concepts to identify and teach methods that can restore to any organization the achievement that it deserves. An entire nation did that after the most disastrous defeat in its history. Japanese men and women at all levels of responsibility worked very hard to reach what first seemed to be impossible goals. They were forced to rebuild an industrial civilization in which ninety percent of its significant cities had been burned to the ground.

Obviously, I think that the time has now come when a great many Western managers must learn how to better lead their organizations’ relationships to increase productivity and quality.

To succeed in the post-cold war business climate, each manager must best utilize the organization's hardware and software, the resources and relationships to produce goods or services that will serve the market well. This means that few companies will become optimally successful without a conscious dedication to service through its products and its people. To do that well will require that each manager and supervisor learn as much as possible about human personality, productivity, and motivation and use the new concepts effectively.

SELF-FOCUS
Write a short paragraph telling how you would distinguish between those elements the author calls the hardware of production and the software of achievement in your organization.

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2009-04-23T14:34:00.004-05:00

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THE LIFE-STYLE CHALLENGE - A Mini Quiz From YOUR SEARCH FOR A MEANINGFUL LIFE

2009-04-20T14:24:00.004-05:00

The midway barker at the Minnesota State Fair didn't look much like a scholar. His fingernails were ragged and dirty and a broken tooth gave him a cynical and somewhat sinister leer. Tough Tony Gallo seemed an unlikely source from whom to learn about developing a fulfilling life. Nevertheless, he went right to one of the major elements of consistent satisfaction when he explained:

LIFE'S SORTA LIKE RIDIN' A BICYCLE UPHILL. YA GOTTA KEEP PEDALING ALONG OR YA GOTTA STOP AND GET OFF. THERE AIN'T NO REVERSE GEAR AND YA GOTTA KEEP YER BALANCE.

There you have it in a nutshell! Tony had just relieved Jard of several dollars in a futile attempt to win a stuffed panda for a granddaughter at his milk bottle toss game. Neither Jard's arm nor his aim is what either was in his youth but he was pleased with the transaction. After all, in these days of expensive psychotherapy, that was a cheap price for such excellent counsel about living joyously.

As our philosophical counselor with dirty fingernails so thoughtfully stated, each successful life has an ongoing flow that must be understood, even embraced, if we are to find a consistent sense of meaning and belonging through the powers we possess to invest in excellence. We can fulfill our potentialities only as we mature through more and more complex activities and satisfying relationships. As Tony said -- There ain’t no reverse gear.

As we have written, we humans have created a narcissistic, too pragmatic life-style that frustrates and alienates men and women and no one is automatically exempted from the lack of meaning and belonging inherent in a secular approach to satisfaction. Too many people try to get along without committing themselves to anything more meaningful or more permanent than their possessions, pleasure, prestige and power. They have naively accepted the unexamined assumption of this age that life can be made great by living through the physical and psychological aspects of existence while ignoring the spiritual or philosophical elements of life. That makes them like a person trying to relax comfortably on a two legged stool. One cannot do it, for he or she remains continually off balance without the philosophical factor in place. Living wisely - through the physical, psychological and philosophical aspects of life is vital. We knew two men who demonstrated extraordinarily well the need to mature spiritually in all aspects of life.

Bruce Bedow was a long time super-star running back in the National Football League. He lived the dream of countless young men as he set many records on the playing field. He relished proving him¬self superior to his opponents in their contests of skill and strength. Bruce especially loved the life-style of a professional athlete with admiring reporters, cheering crowds and nubile young women to whom he could relate from prestige and power rather than through mutual respect and responsibility. He boasted to his friends he'd had sex with a thousand women in his first few years of professional football. It was an adolescent male fantasy come true based on his physical ability and he is fortunate that he didn't contract AIDS as basketball star Magic Johnson did through his own irresponsible sexual choices. O.J. Simpson isn't the only wealthy celebrity to discover that cops, prosecutors and judges will bend and break the laws of their community to protect him. The multi-millionaire heir of a large grocery chain in Minneapolis shot to death his ex-wife and her lover and left the bodies in his lakeside mansion. It took the police two weeks to decide whether or not to arrest the millionaire murderer and then the city attorney politely requested he come in with his attorney. He could hardly be expected to issue an arrest warrant for a member of his own country club -- as he would for the police to haul in a hungry kid who'd stolen a bag of potato chips at one of the millionaire's stores!

The adults in Bruce's life - parents, coaches, community and school officials as well as the professional team's owners, helped freeze him in the long adolescence of professional sports. His sports fanatic father encouraged him to practice football rather than to study for his classes. When he failed a course, his high school principal changed the grade so he could continue playing on the team. The city police chief tore up many speeding and drunken driving tickets and the district attorney refused to follow up allegations by girls that he'd sexually assaulted them. Not only was Brace taught he was above the usual interactions and responsibilities of life, he failed to master the thousand and one ordinary tasks that make life run smoothly for people. The professional football team hired people to do his laundry, to clean his apartment, to drive his cars and to pay his bills. His attorneys soothed angry women he'd used and abused. They settled many barroom fights and cared for everything that would distract him from gaining a hundred yards on the playing field each week. His growth as a person was the last thing on anyone's mind. Bruce played pro football extraordinarily well but time took its toll and disaster struck.

Bruce tore an Achilles tendon and after ten years as a NFL hero, could no longer play the game that he loved more than his own maturity. Overnight, it seemed to him, the cheering ended, the reporters went away and girls no longer flocked to him. His money stopped coming and so did the nannies. The limousines vanished and he was lost in a world he understood not at all. For years Bruce haunted the stadium during games like a restless ghost and now works in a bar for a few dollars an hour and tips. His three marriages fell apart because he'd never learned how to relate to women as individuals of worth rather than as objects of his personal pleasure. A great many young men destroy their relationships with similar selfish attitudes about women. Once she saw past his fame, no strong, competent woman wanted anything to do with so self-centered a male. She could see he was a perpetual adolescent rather than a real person. Bruce recently told a reporter he'd give ten years to play one more season of professional ball. This tragic, unhappy man froze with a nihilistic approach to fife; he stopped pedaling his bicycle uphill and it has crippled him. And while the many people who used him for their personal reasons contributed to his unhappiness, the ultimate responsibility for his growth was always his own. One of his professional teammates understood this very well.

Crazy A J Johnson was considered by many sports writers and coaches to be the best defensive back in the NFL at the time. His game was so intense and wild that despite being rather small for a professional, A J was an impact player who could win a game on a single play with a timely interception. When a Vikings running back was being chided for letting A J ruin his game one Sunday, he shrugged and said:

I KNOW A J ISN'T VERY BIG BUT IT'S REALLY AWKWARD TRYING TO RUN WITH HIS HUNDRED SEVENTY POUNDS WRAPPED AROUND YOUR HEAD.

Although a fearless and fearsome competitor on the field -- and given to outlandish stories and quips that kept him prominent in the media -- A J took the big money but chose wisely for life after football. When Bruce and the boys went out boozing and picking up girls, he came home to his wife and the kids and his textbooks. He remained committed to his church and served in several community activities. He completed his M A degree and about the time he could no longer play pro ball, successfully defended his PhD dissertation to his graduate committee. Without missing a beat, wild and crazy A J the roughneck hero, became the much respected Doctor Johnson who serves quite well in a superb college with young people coming out of the ghetto he escaped by harnessing first his physical and then his mental powers along lines of excellence. A J is still pedaling along while Bruce has coasted to a stop so far as a meaningful life goes. You must do the same if you want consistent satisfaction for yourself, your family, your organization and your community.

Complete Self Focus-1. If you are completing this as a self-study course, write out your answers to the questions. If you are studying in a group, choose a small group leader to lead the discussion of the questions. Spend just a few minutes on them.

SELF FOCUS - 1
WHY DID BRUCE FAIL AND A J SUCCEED IN PLAYING THE GREATER GAME OF LIFE WHEN THEY BOTH LIVED THE DREAM OF COUNTLESS YOUNG MEN?

DO YOU THINK THAT WOMEN OR MEN FACE GREATER CHALLENGES WHEN TRYING TO WIN CONSISTENT FULFILLMENT?

THE LOVE PYRAMID - Mini Course

2009-04-01T23:07:00.002-05:00

We must insist on this right here -- up front. As St. Paul and many other brilliant scholars of the human condition told us, a satisfying life must combine faith, hope and love -- with the greatest element of all being love.

Certainly we have found nothing that even remotely takes the place of love in our lives and our relationships with each other, our children, their children and their children's kids. With love, virtually everything falls into place. Without love, nothing fits well into the mosaic of a meaningful life.

Also, after everything else you can say about humans -- after discussing the personality patterns, life-themes, values, attitudes and expectations we write about, we agree with psychological great -- Carl Rogers and with John the Beloved Disciple. There are only two kinds of people in the world. The two are not black and white, rich and poor or even male and female, as much as we appreciate that last arrangement that seems especially created for our benefit.

There are only persons who are capable of loving others and persons who do not love anyone except those who in one way or another contribute something of value to themselves.

A vital factor we must discuss in the beginning is that while the love and sexual intimacy a couple shares is vital to satisfaction, the physical attractions of our youthful years are never enough to carry a man and woman through a life-time. In our FULFILLMENT course, a companion program to this, we have written extensively about existential frustration and alienation that occurs when men and women fail to find a consistent sense of purpose in their lives. We cannot even find happiness by seeking it -- happiness is a fleeting by-product of living a consistently meaningful life. Like sleep during a restless night, the harder we pursue happiness, the faster it flees from us. When we spend our years seeking happiness through pleasure, possessions, prestige and power -- lacking a sense of purpose in our activities and permanence in our relationships, life remains secular and pointless and becomes conflicted with confusion and discouragement. And that is simply too much to expect the sexual relationship of a man and woman to overcome. Humans need more -- we believe that each person requires the crucial support that comes from living a complete life -- that occurs through:

Worshipping devoutly, relating warmly, serving faithfully, learning wisely, persevering bravely and playing enthusiastically.

Unless we develop mature attitudes and high expectations, no marriage can succeed. Most young couples who divorce and put their children under great stress simply abandon their marriages much too soon. There is a great deal to be said for toughing it out through the learning curve, for becoming better partners rather than shopping around for some wonderful and perfect lover who will cater to your every whim. You shall have to become a spiritually maturing person to whom your partner can relate in love and friendship, without becoming your stooge. Hang on until both lovers become more maturity along life's journey. Actually, in marriage as in most of life, much satisfaction comes from showing up when needed, just being there on time for the people who love you.

A loving couple that matures in faith, hope and love, through grace within the physical, psychological and philosophical aspects of life, will love far more deeply than they did during the simplistic and usually naive sexual urges of youth.

THE LOVE PYRAMID

To be at its best, love must mature up through the motivational pyramid shown here. To stop in one of the lower tiers is to limit the joy a person can enjoy in a lasting relationship.

Becoming *** PHILOSOPHICAL *** Purpose/Permanence

Doing *** PSYCHOLOGICAL *** Power/Prestige

Having *** PHYSICAL *** Pleasure/Pain

PHYSICAL LOVE -- (Pleasure/Pain) Love that is limited to the physical aspects of a relationship is focused largely on arousal, passion and tension release. It makes little difference who the partner is. Any compliant body can be used, for the person is secondary to the pleasure being received by the user. Such physical passion can be shifted from one sexual supplier to another with little or no regret or concern, from one seduction to the next, as Joe Namath boasted when he slept with a thousand women in his first few years of playing professional football. Such a person can go from one prostitute to another, from one singles bar to the next, from a tryst with one lover to a new one. One night stands, sexual fantasies, pornographic movies and books and wily seductions occur within the physical aspects of love. When one person is used for another's pleasure, even if both agree in advance, it is little more than mutual masturbation. If the other person is abused or damaged in the relationship, he or she can be discarded and replaced with no more regret than for a piece of malfunctioning machinery. Many adolescents, in the first wild rush of sexuality, relate to one another at this primitive level. Unfortunately, many adults fail to mature beyond it. They continue romancing, marrying, divorcing and romancing again in a madcap search for a perfect partner, chasing the wild excitement of youth in a stage that needs a lot more stability in order to be satisfying.

Only this morning as this chapter is being written, we attended the funeral of a friend who made a great deal of money through his knowledge and energy. Donald Knopf was as hard a worker as we've ever known, not only for himself but for the poor and needy of the community. He gave an enormous amount of time and money to helping people with problems. Nevertheless, as his friends and relatives filled the front pews, we've never seen such a complex mix of brothers and sisters, half sisters and brothers, cousins, in-laws and former wives in our lives. At the age of fifty-five Don was still falling in and out of love like a teen-ager, still drifting from one woman to the next, giving her several children before falling out of love and seeking a better partner. He never did think in terms of becoming a better husband and father rather than wanting a perfect lover who would let him feel the sexual excitement of youth again. He never matured into the second and third tier of a loving relationship and if he enjoyed a long succession of sexual partners, his dozen children from several families have had a difficult time growing up without a father.

PSYCHOLOGICAL LOVE -- (Power/Prestige) In this aspect of a relationship, physical arousal, pleasure and satiation occurs as in the physical but the affection doesn't stop there. This is a deeper relationship that binds lovers together as they mature through the more complex needs and activities of adult love. The lovers not only desire one another for what each offers, but both have a deeper investment in the other's health and happiness. They trust each other with their egos, because loving another person makes you vulnerable as well as calling up protective feelings. This is the level at which many good marriages and love affairs function, especially in the more mellow middle years and while the lovers do care deeply about each other, they may still have difficult times. After all, while you and your lover love each other, differences of opinion and a variety of needs remain. Few couples never quarrel just because they love one another. Jard knew two young people who lived together as lovers without making the final commitment of marriage. Mildred was a graduate student in psychology and Henry an executive in a huge corporation. She said, when she was being offered a teaching and research job in a distant university:

I love Harry, I really do, but he cannot leave town with me. Changing companies now would cost him a vice-presidency at 3 M and I cannot ask for that. But then, I cannot see that my research and teaching about childhood learning is any less importance to society than selling glue and sandpaper. If I insisted he come to Columbus, he's soon resent me and If I turned down my offer there to stay here with him, I'd soon feel I'd given up too much after having worked so hard for my doctorate. I have to be true to my own vision of a fulfilling life.

Millie and Harry flew back and forth for a year or so but eventually drifted apart and met and married other lovers. Perhaps it was just as well they found someone else, for their careers meant more to them when they separated than the relationship.

PHILOSOPHICAL LOVE -- (Purpose/Permanence) This third aspect of love includes the passion from the physical and the sense of belonging from the psychological as it continues to include crucial spiritual elements of a lasting love relationship. The lovers have matured beyond the limitations of psychological games that cause pain to become tender and compassionate. They live with a lasting sense of purpose and permanence in the affair for they know they belong together for life. The lovers support each other against all attackers; see the relationship as being spiritual and having mystical overtones. There is neither a desire to find a substitute sexual partner nor a determination to play a dominance game through which the lover is manipulated and used. Such a love affair has taken on a lovely patina of faith, hope and love as well as grace, a glow that is shared in mutual satisfaction. The development of love at this level takes time, although for many it comes long before the later stages of one's life. The whirling of two eccentric personalities around different centers of gravity sooner or later abraid a loving fit although for some time it may include considerable smoke and flying sparks!

To best focus your love in the philosophical aspects of life, mature as a person and behave as a loving soul:

BECOME WARM AND ACCEPTING OF YOUR LOVER -- Perceive the other as a viable and independent personality rather than as a second rate appendage to yourself.

BECOME ENCOURAGING AND SUPPORTIVE OF KEY CHOICES -- Help your lover become more and more knowledgeable and wise about life's opportunities.

BECOME TOLERANT OF LIFE'S INEVITABLE GROWTH FRICTION -- No two persons ever mature at the same rate - one will grow, causing tension and only later will the other catch up.

It's common for psychologists and counselors to recommend we accept the people we love for what they are. However, that isn't good enough for by accepting them as they already are, we may be condemning them to mediocrity. We must accept the persons we help for what they have the potential to become. Don't nag, of course, but help others mature consistently through the channels of fulfillment. Your spouse, your children and your friends and relatives deserve this of you.

Always accept the fact that you can control only one half of a relationship, your half, while your lover controls his or her half. Trying to control another adult's half is a quick step to a relationship disaster for no individual worthy of love and respect will let a neurotic control freak dominate themselves, their children and their choices.

Remember;

The only way two lovers can agree all the time is when one them stops thinking.

The only way to keep an accepting lover is to become an accepting lover.

The fact that we disagree and occasionally quarrel doesn't mean we are not in love.

Two people in the very elastic harness of marriage seldom mature at the same rate and that spells trouble in many relationships. A woman who's been a secretary for twenty years and comes home one evening to announce she's been accepted in a law school program is rocking her family's boat. So is the middle manager who informs his kids, attending an exclusive and expensive private school, that he's taking a year off work to write a novel, that they'll have to attend a public school and stop buying designer clothes.

Growth friction can be compared to movement between the earth's great tectonic plates. The silent, hidden movement can be so slow as to remain invisible for a long time although stresses keep building. Finally, the pressures become greater than the resistance and the landscape lurches into motion as an earthquake. Sometimes windows are broken and crockery smashed. Some long-standing buildings cannot take the strain and they collapse. Just as many marriages do when the relationship cannot stand the changes occurring in them because the lovers mature at different speeds and in different directions.

PROJECT ONE -- LOVE LEVEL IDENTIFICATION

To discover the level of your love for another person, physical, psychological or philosophical, in the pleasure/pain, power/prestige or purpose/permanence aspects of existence, complete this project.

FIRST -- Relax comfortably in a chair or on a bed.

Visualize in your mind the image of the person you now love or most recently loved in an adult relationship. Think of the reasons you loved this person, recall his or her good points in the physical, psychological and philosophical aspects of life. Fix the image of that lover firmly in your mind.

SECOND -- Accept the fact or a terrible tragedy.

Through an automobile accident or an unexpected illness, your lover dies suddenly. He or she is gone - there's no doubt about it. You are left alone. Accept your loss, mourn it deeply, feel frustration and anger but in time you realize you must continue living. There is your job to do and children to love, friends to support -- so you start adapting despite the deep loss.

THIRD -- Receive a great gift from God.

Through the remarkable science of cloning, God offers you a perfect double of that dear, lost lover. The clone is perfect in every detail. He or she looks talks and thinks like the lover, makes love the same way and supports you in the same manner. He or she wants your support also.

There is only one catch in your miracle. You and your newly restored lover didn't share the mutual experiences and relationships you had in the past. Both the good and the bad are missing from the relationship you and your original lover shared. You are starting at square one now.

NOW -- To identify the level at which your current love is operating, transfer your love to the newly cloned lover. Tell how you shall do that.

If you can readily transfer your love to the new lover, your love is operating at the pleasure/pain or physical level.

If your love can be transferred with some new experiences and a growing relationship, it is functioning at the power/prestige or psychological level.

If your love cannot be transferred without an entire galaxy of mutually satisfying experiences, your love is currently at the purpose/permanence or the philosophical level.

How Emotional Attitudes Effect Your Parenting

2008-12-02T12:00:00.003-06:00

Each parent should understand the importance of the attitudes youngsters hold. A psychological attitude is much like a general assumption we hold about life and our place in the broad scheme of life.

The attitudes we hold play a crucial part in the way children think of themselves and others, as well as what they plan on achieving in life.

THE SUPERIORITY ATTITUDE (I'm all right but you are not.) The first assumption that parents are superior and that children are inferior beings, is destructive to a youngster's maturing toward a successful adult life.

Some persons call this a superiority complex but it really is a sham that is used to relieve the adult's wounded ego from the pain it suffered in childhood. Such a parent is unable to admit to mistakes in judgment or to attribute sound motives to the child -- while each youngster knows he or she makes many blunders that displease a perfectionist parent.

In comparison to the perfect parent, the child who is finding his way through life, is forced to think of himself or herself as incompetent. And that often leads to the development of the second attitude.

THE INFERIORITY ATTITUDE (You're all right but I am not.) This second assumption, that one is inferior and that everyone else is a much better person, is a fetid breeding ground for mental illness with depression, schizophrenia sexual disorders and many obsessions and compulsions.

All parents are frustrated by their kids at times and occasionally resentful of the fifteen or twenty year commitment that rearing a child requires. As H.L. Mencken quipped, Our kids ruin the second half of our lives. But most of us manage to make our way through those often difficult years and eventually experience great joy from the process.

We discover that we must make allowances for young learners, must accept many trial and error attempts to succeed, when we want to have our children accept the benefits of our vast wisdom! Children almost always respond better to encouragement rather than to criticism.

In fact, no criticism is valuable, because children learn far more from correction and sound instructions from their elders. Too much criticism leads to the third attitude.

THE HOPELESS ATTITUDE --(Neither of us is all right.) This is the whimper heard within families that have been crippled or even crushed by secular values, low expectations or simply by the a culture that has little need for families that do not earn a lot of money or make sophisticated choices.

Such sufferers feel, there is no point in trying to succeed, to achieve anything good, because there is little or no hope for a person such as myself.

THE ACCEPTING ATTITUDE --(Both of us are all right.) Although the parent and child will have different interests and play different roles in the family and community, this is the only positive attitude of the four.

Believing that children are all right, even when they cannot run as fast as an adult, lift as much weight or spell as correctly, is an important act of faith, providing that one doesn't cripple them with unrealistic expectations and draconian punishments when they stumble and need more instruction and patience.

The accepting attitude doesn't guarantee perfect, obedient children but it does give them a better opportunity to mature without excessive pressure that often leads to disaster. Judge children by others of their own age and competence rather than in comparison to adults and that includes yourself.

Parents and children who mature together, in different ways and at different rates of course, are generally well adjusted people who adapt when they should and persevere when they must.

A successful parent must understand that his or her children are growing up in a family, school, city and nation that is vastly different from the institutions that shaped the previous generation's values, attitudes, expectations, beliefs and choices.

When parents cannot accept these changes, which are irreversible within every family, community and society, they establish many stumbling blocks for their children and cause a great number of unnecessarily conflicts.

Jard DeVille; Psychology Dept. Chair at Westminster College; Director of the Learning And Learning Disabilities Clinic with the University of Wisconsin, also taught in the Executive Development Program at the University of Arizona. He's published many psychology books, seminars and test instruments. He's considered by many to be one of America's foremost leadership scholars. Permission to use if attributed to author with his website address.

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A PRINCIPLE OF SOUND RELATIONSHIPS

2008-10-23T16:08:00.005-05:00

The sound Basic Principle of Life we want others to learn from us is this --

GOOD THINGS HAPPEN TO PEOPLE WHO COOPERATE WITH ME.
BAD THINGS DON’T HAPPEN TO PEOPLE WHO COOPERATE WITH ME.
GOOD THINGS DON’T HAPPEN TO PEOPLE WHO DON’T COOPERATE.

The Basic Principle is effective in normal relationships because people prefer:

PLEASURE TO PAIN IN THE PHYSICAL ASPECTS OF LIFE,
PRESTIGE TO DEVALUATION IN THE PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF LIFE,
PURPOSE TO MEANINGLESSNESS IN THE PHILOSOPHICAL ASPECTS OF LIFE.

Obviously, the world has fallen on difficult times because change has become incessant and we have accepted secular philosophies that go against the grain of human spirituality. And of course, any attempt to keep the cultural traditions of our uneducated, pre-industrial ancestors as Truth Incarnate is self-destructive. Nevertheless, that is precisely what many persons try to do. The passage of time and the flood of new persons being born and growing up changes everything until we are like the befuddled King of Siam in the musical play THE KING AND I. He sings:

When I was a boy, what was what.
Now I am a man, things have changed a lot.
Some things nearly so, some things nearly not.

We humans are inclined to pack our beliefs in bundles - to cast them in concrete with handles on them, so we can pass then on unchanged and unchallenged to our children and their children. Just as our parents and our grandparents tried to do. We will, as the king continued to sing:

Fight to prove what we do not know is so! Tis a puzzlement!

This means, of course, that you must assume the responsibility for yourself and the people for whom you are responsible because huge societies never collapse overnight And yet, they seldom adapt in time to save themselves. Half a century ago Billy Graham was saying that America was in trouble, that without a spiritual renewal such as John Akers and Lee Atwater discussed years later, we were doomed to defeat as a society. He preached that only through a spiritual restoration with strong philosophical values could we mature enough to succeed. We did respond to Graham's call, from 4 or 5 percent who said they followed a spiritual life-style in 1940, to 35 or 40 percent who say they do now, and yet we are still in trouble because of the even swifter growth of Nihilism in our institutions and our human reluctance to adapt.

Fortunately, through years of study and counseling, we have identified a Basic Logotherapy Principle of satisfaction that will help keep you on the right track as you cope with widespread nihilism and narcissism. This principle isn't what a greedy society offers people, this is what you as an AUTHENTIC or a CONGRUENT promise to the people with whom you share life. It is this:

GOOD THINGS HAPPEN TO THE MEN AND WOMEN WHO COOPERATE IN ORDER TO REDUCE ALIENATION AND TO ADVANCE OUR COLLECTIVE FULFILLMENT

The title of Jard's first major book - NICE GUYS FINISH FIRST - was fascinating to reporters, talk show hosts and newspaper editors. Some of them wanted to believe he was right but a significant number of people with closed-minded life-themes wanted to prove he was an idiot to think such obvious nonsense. Every intelligent person knows, some reporters implied, that nice guys finish last Leo Derocher, the baseball guru, even wrote a book to that effect John Kelly was the host of a killer talk show in a large Ohio city who did everything but put a dunce cap on Jard's head when he arrived before a studio audience of three hundred persons, while many thousands viewed out in the community. He even seated him on a stool before beginning his attack. Kelly then asked the studio audience to vote on the proposition that decent men and women can succeed. About half said Jard was correct, that nice people can do well, while the other half decided he was all wet, good persons don't have a chance in this lousy, rotten world. That was interesting since none of the audience had read the book; had no idea what he'd written, although they were willing enough to judge in advance. Kelly then turned to Jard and gloated over the negative vote, Now, Doc, How are you gonna handle the skeptics? He then sat down in the audience while the three cameras whirled up close, presumably to watch Jard sweat as the people grilled him.

Jard started out by agreeing with the host, admitting if you define a decent guy or gal as a wimp, a doormat, a marshmallow - such a person couldn't expect ranch in a nihilistic, pragmatic society. On the other hand, he said, I define nice guys and gals as persons like Joe Butterworth who apply life's Basic Principle through:

MANAGING INTERPERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS CONSISTENTLY WISELY AND WELL,
SHARING LIFE'S GREATEST REWARDS WITH COOPERATIVE WOMEN AND MEN,
CREATING A COMMUNITY OF ACHIEVING PERSONS WHO BELONG TOGETHER.

Jard leaned back on the stool, folded his arms and waited quietly while the cameras frantically panned around for some kind of action. Kelly was so startled by the statement that he sat silently considering the answer for thirty seconds or more and that's an eternity of dead time on television, before coming slowly to his feet. He muttered right on camera - Well, I'll be damned - I never thought of it that way. He was hooked and rather than the six minutes Jard was supposed to have, he discussed NICE GUYS for thirty minutes and sold a lot of books in the community! When the audience voted again, only two persons out of three hundred still said that Jard was all wet. He went home and the next Sunday took our minister aside to repeat the story. He concluded, If you had my conversion rate, we'd be the largest congregation in the city!

This basic element of consistent satisfaction, dealing fairly in your relationships, sharing the benefits of cooperation and offering others a community where they can belong with people who support each other - will surely go a long ways toward making your life the best it can become. It is a practical expression of the faith, hope and love that is vital to consistent growth. There is another aspect to the basic principle. It is:

BAD THINGS DON'T HAPPEN TO PEOPLE WHO COOPERATE IN OUR ACTIVITIES AND RELATIONSHIPS

You must recognize the obvious - that accidents occur, recessions come, companies fail and much more in an imperfect world. The Tragic Quartet of suffering, rage, guilt and death is all too real. However, to the limit of your abilities, you promise to be consistently open-minded and accepting of other people in your relationships. You shall neither blame women and men for your own failures nor punish them for circumstances beyond their control. You will not hide when people require your help and will end all cruel psychological games designed to hurt someone who gets sucked into some hateful scheme. Because you serve society in an organization or as a free-lance as a committed person should, according to the by-product approach to satisfaction, you will apply faith, hope and love to guarantee meaning and belonging that wells up out of your accepting life-style. You become a mature person in your relationships and that gives you better opportunities to influence other persons toward a satisfying life.

There is one more factor to the Basic Principle.

GOOD THINGS DON'T HAPPEN TO PEOPLE WHO REFUSE TO COOPERATE IN GETTING GOOD THINGS DONE

Accepting and maturing men and women don't want to be cruel even though we all are frustrated at times and tempted to become aggressive or apathetic. However, we are finite persons with limited time and resources to invest in a satisfying life. Therefore, we have not only the right but the responsibility to use our powers where they will accomplish the greatest good for ourselves, the people we support and for humankind. Be patient; don't write people off too soon. Offer distressed or difficult men and women time to understand, despite possibly negative life-themes and low expectations that you mean well. Work with them and discover ways to convince others that you do indeed work, love and play according to sound Logotherapy principles. Be very patient as you try to lead people to consistent satisfaction.

Nevertheless, as finite persons, times do come when we cannot invest still more effort in the activities of some people without depriving someone else of something vital. Some of the people we try to help, have hidden agendas or vested interests that are destructive to those you support. When that happens you should move on however regretfully, to use your time and energy for someone who will respond to your support and generosity. Even the deeply accepting Jesus said something about not casting one's pearls before swine, but then, he may have been having a bad day. We were forced to abandon Andy the musician who hates himself and everyone else. We had taken him in after he was released from prison, put him in our upstairs apartment without charging him rent and fed him for several months. Despite doing our best, he grew consistently angry and aggressive in drunken fits, swearing at and threatening to harm Roberta, our daughter and an elderly aunt, until Jard drove him away at pistol point in order to protect the family. We'd done all we could for Andy and was not going to have him abuse us in order to meet his selfish, distorted needs. Our good efforts simply could not continue for a man who was threatening violence against us and someone we love. We all have to be tough at times.
The Basic Principle is effective in normal relationships because the vast majority of people prefer:

PLEASURE TO PAIN IN THE PHYSICAL ASPECTS OF LIFE,
PRESTIGE TO DEVALUATION IN THE PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF LIFE,
PURPOSE TO MEANINGLESSNESS IN THE PHILOSOPHICAL ASPECTS OF LIFE.

Apply this principle in your relationships - Good things happen to people who cooperate with me and discover why it is so successful a method for relating to others, for enhancing your growth and influencing others to a fulfilling life-style.

Parenting Winning Children - The Guidance Psychology of High Expectations

2008-10-07T18:11:00.002-05:00

“I worried about my oldest daughter keeping her virginity while she was in high school. Now, just ten years later, I lay awake nights, anxious that my youngest girl will be crippled by AIDS or become addicted to life-devouring drugs.”

Mary Ellen Fitzsimmons, Single Mother

NEW Vital Information about your teenager. Scientists are now gaining new insights into remarkable changes in teenagers’ brains that may help explain why the teen years are so hard on young people -- and on their parents.

AN AWESOME RESPONSIBILITY

All normal parents love their children and want them to live meaningful lives among loving people with whom the youngsters find places to belong. We teach them to be as successful as we can. Because of their love, parents normally have no intention of crippling their child's physical, psychological or spiritual growth with inadequate guidance or with harsh discipline. It is our intention to maintain loving and purposeful relationships with our youngsters during their formative years. Nevertheless, because we bring our own emotional baggage with us, because many of us had less than ideal childhoods, the road to disaster for many children is paved with the good intentions of inept parents. For -- the fact of the matter is -- we make but one journey through life with each child -- and although most adults strive diligently to succeed, we can never control all society’s variables and we do have difficulty compensating for our own weaknesses. Even when we do the best we can, we spend years before learning how well we have done with our most precious assets.

Despite the best of intentions, virtually all parents I know (I spent yesterday afternoon with a group of friends, honoring a recent high school graduate who is leaving home to matriculate in Carleton College), readily admit that guiding their offspring to emotional and spiritual maturity is an awesome responsibility. Because of a combination of social, cultural and financial changes occurring across our civilization, the responsibilities each parent carries have indeed become more difficult than they were when society was less complex. One deeply concerned mother of several daughters shook her head and lamented;

I worried about my oldest daughter keeping her virginity while she was in high school. Now, just ten years later, I lay awake nights, anxious that my youngest girl will be crippled by AIDS or become addicted to life threatening narcotics. What on earth is happening to our children when eighty percent of high school girls have already engaged in high risk sexual relations and dangerous drugs are as available as soft drinks?

At one Parent/Teacher Organization meeting, when my oldest son’s now adult daughters were rowdy teenagers, a middle eastern father chided the group that Americans were having discipline problems with their children because they are too permissive. He continued to say that he, as an Islamic father, had no problems maintaining control of his daughters. The group pondered this for a moment or two and someone suggested he share his methods with the PTO members, many of whom were indeed being challenged. When he offered some obviously simplistic, rather primitive religious advice from the desert sands of Arabia, one woman grew suspicious and asked how old his always obedient daughters were. He answered, five and seven years. He then became angry when the group burst out in laughter at his advice. My son, for whom the Moslem man worked, took him aside after the meeting and kindly told him that his daughters were going to turn him inside out when they reached puberty -- unless he switched from a controlling to a counseling relationship. His said the daughters were surely going to grow up yearning to be part of their high school society and the only way he could block their desire for acceptance would be to stamp out every iota of their creativity -- or possibly keep them locked in the attic for ten years! And sure enough, I live across the street from South West High School and the oldest Moslem daughter, now fifteen or sixteen, ran past recently with a group of girls training for cross-country competition. She was wearing a traditional head scarf -- but was also clad in a T shirt over an athletic bra and a pair of short shorts. The Moslem Religious police in Saudi Arabia, who behead girls who so much as touch the hands of any man except for their fathers, brothers or husbands, would have stoned her for playing the harlot had she dressed for a sporting event in her father’s homeland. Life goes on and every generation must find its own way rather than simply adopting the past as eternal wisdom.

In his delightful short story The Reivers, William Faulkner wrote about a disobedient son’s father who is preparing to thrash him for his boyish transgressions. Before he can get his leather razor strap, the boy’s grandfather steps in to block the whipping and the angry father becomes disgusted with the older man. He grumbles, Father, when I was a boy, you had no compunction about whipping me! The elderly grandfather sighs and admits that his son is right, that he did whip him too often when he was growing up. But -- he adds, As a grandfather, I’m much smarter now than I was when your age. Most of us do learn something important while traveling life’s journey. To paraphrase an old Pennsylvania Dutch quip:
Too soon we get old and too late we stop hurting our kids. Or as H. L. Mencken griped, Our parents ruin the first half of our lives and our kids ruin the second half.

My own children are grown now and even my grandkids have kids -- several of whom are almost grown, which shall likely make me a great, great grandfather before many more years past. I have participated in my own development, that of my children and my grandchildren and now my great grand kids. Two weeks ago my wife Roberta and my youngest son took two of our great grandsons to a fabulous Minnesota Twin’s baseball bash for kids, where they could eat all the hot dogs and drink all the pop they could manage without throwing up and come home with prizes of all kinds. It was a hoot for everyone -- unto the second and third generation of our clan! I have also served as a pastor for seven years, was Director of a learning and learning disabilities center in association with the University of Wisconsin, professor of psychology and department chair at Westminster College, leadership professor in the Executive Development Conference at the University of Arizona in Tucson and a leadership consultant from London to Singapore. I have also researched and written more than a score of books, seminars and psychology assessment instruments, of which this is my most recent study course.

This study course is based in part on some of the concepts that were discussed in my books such as Nice Guys Finish First, Lovers For Life, The Psychology of Leadership, The Pastor’s Handbook On Interpersonal Relations, Frontiers of Fulfillment, The Liberated Soul and others. It isn’t a rehash of any of them but draws from my ever-increasing maturity as I continue my life-long quest for knowledge and wisdom. Parenting is written specifically for mothers and fathers who are committed to guiding their children and adolescents toward emotional, spiritual and career maturity and to life-long satisfaction. It is based on several psychospiritual principles that include these.

We must:

DEVELOP CONSISTENTLY LOVING RELATIONSHIPS WITH OUR CHILDREN THROUGH KNOWLEDGE, WISDOM AND FAITH.

SHARE THE REWARDS OF GREAT SATISFACTION AND DEEP MEANING WITH THE KIDS WE LEAD TO SUCCESS.

CREATE A FAMILY OF DEEPLY COMMITTED PERSONS IN WHICH EVERY MEMBER IS A COMMITTED STAKE HOLDER.

Those three approaches are best implemented through two principles of psychology that are easy to remember and to apply.
They are:

THE BASIC PRINCIPLE OF HUMAN COOPERATION THE PRINCIPLE OF INTERPERSONAL RECIPROCITY

The basic principle our children need to absorb from our attitudes and activities is that all men and women, boys and girls continue holding the attitudes and doing the things reward them or appear to reward them and stop doing the things that deprive them in some manner. The basic principle has these three elements to it.

Good things happen to people who do good things. Bad things don’t happen to people who do good things. Good things don’t happen to people who don’t do good things.

This is not necessarily the way the world functions, whether at school, on the playground, on the job, in the criminal justice system or in politics, but it can be our promise to those precious children whom we want to mature as courageous, successful and loving adults. Of course you are not all powerful or totally wise and we all grow weary, frustrated and crabby at times. But, we are not discussing the cosmic principles of good and evil here, but learning practical ways of improving our interactions with our children so we can guide them toward maturity and competence. Children grow ill and suffer and friends move away and discretionary income may be lost -- life has its downturns -- but to the best of your abilities, you promise to live with a sound quid-pro-quo that is put in simple words children can understand. You must communicate clearly and consistently follow up with this commitment --

When you do what I need from you, I shall grant what you need from me.

In addition, I shall not treat you badly when you are doing your best to cooperate with the people among whom we belong. And finally, I shall not make any extraordinary effort to waste my time, money and energy rewarding people who fail to cooperate for the good of this family unless I see some hope for the future.

The reciprocity principle is less cerebral -- is more instinctive in nature.
The positive, neutral or negative way you treat individuals and groups, comes from your values, attitudes and expectations that are based on your basic trust in humanity or in your basic distrust of society. The way you relate to others determines the way the vast majority of persons relate to you.

In other words:

I have just given you a very powerful interpersonal mechanism for creating a positive psychological and spiritual climate within your home, on the job and in virtually all of your relationships

I cannot take a great deal of credit for this fact of existence -- since both Aristotle and Jesus were teaching it long before I arrived on the scene -- but it still works wonders in complex situations today. Management psychologists now call this principle behavior modeling, through which we demonstrate as well as discuss the attitudes and activities that shall be rewarded. I realize this principle of reciprocity will have little value if your boss’ cousin is gunning for your job or when you are being stalked late at night by a rejected lover, but it does work in the vast majority of cases with people who are merely annoyed or frustrated without nursing hidden agendas. Actually, we often teach our children in this manner -- whether we recognize it or not. Children learn much that is both good and bad from their parents, from their attitudes and activities, although there is often a great gap between the concepts we express and the activities we pursue.

When we relate to other persons, each of us goes through a series of spoken and unspoken transactions that play a crucial role in how we manage relationships. If we demonstrate love and trust -- normal men and women as well as boys and girls are draw into our attitudes and activities. On the other hand: If we are paranoid or psychopathic and are consistently distrustful, people feel uncomfortable around us and likely deal with us cautiously even if they cannot avoid us entirely. If we are closed-minded and defensive in our relationships, our children usually learn to behave in the same manner. One very good psychologist, whom I shall call Fred to protect the guilty, muttered one night after we’d quaffed a few beers too many:

I’ve studied Freud, Adler and Frankl and rejected most of Skinner’s simplistic stuff and accepted Dugal Arbuckle’s existential approach, but one concept keeps coming to me. I believe in nurture and nature or nature and nurture -- or perhaps both! But after forty years of assessment and psychotherapy, I have found a consistent factor to explain sound mental health. Healthy and happy parents rear healthy and happy kids. And nutty and frustrated parents rear nutty and frustrated kids.

Well -- there are exceptions of course, but I modify that to include the sad fact that emotionally distressed parents usually rear psychologically inept kids, which causes them to make serious mistakes that bring suffering to themselves and to the next generation of children. Of course, remedying that -- breaking the chains of ignorance -- is what this course is all about. What you give to your kids is what you consistently receive in return, although you may go wrong by not be giving them what you thought you were offering them. I find great wisdom in something valuable Otto Rank wrote and I paraphrase:

I was resting on my bed, pondering why so many parents put so much pressure on their children, wondering why they cripple them with neuroses and psychoses and I finally reached a conclusion. They do it out of stupidity. They have no concept of sound mental health and so they rear children in haphazard ways that fail.

I find Otto Rank one of the greatest of all the mental health scholars, but I prefer the phrase, They do it out of ignorance, for while stupidity is a life-long genetic disability, ignorance may be only temporary and can be corrected. I suppose almost every teacher, professor and counselor agrees or why work with students who are doomed to repeat their parents’ blunders ad infinitum.

What parents, teachers and ministers really need to do with kids is to reverse the most common child guidance system. Rather than watching like hawks to catch the kids doing something wrong and then punishing them for it -- we must watch them like mother hens, to catch them doing something right and grant them appropriate rewards for their maturing choices. Punishment -- whether physical, emotional or spiritual, inevitably fails to accomplish what we expect as soon as a child becomes old enough to resist -- first during the terrible twos when kids learn to use the magic word -- NO! that throws many young parents into confusion. And then later, during adolescence. The only way abuse will deter a determined child is by escalating the severity of the punishment, which leads to a point of diminishing returns. In the first place, a slap alongside the head teaches the child nothing except how displeased the adult is -- he or she learns nothing about improving one’s behavior the next time around. And even if the adult follows the blow with correction, the child is usually too frightened or resentful to listen and accept the appropriate behavior. In the second place, escalating punishment either crushes the child’s spirit, making boys vulnerable to bullies or girls unable to resist abusive men, or it leads to a simmering guerilla war that poisons the home climate.

Rather than being traumatic and conflict laden, childhood and adolescence can be a grand experience for parents and offspring alike. Life remains satisfying in many families and have been great within many cultures across the world, although Socrates once wrote a bitter diatribe about the impolite and narcissistic youngsters of ancient Greece. Perhaps some rowdy boys had tipped his outhouse over! The American Plains Indians, such as the Cheyenne, Sioux and Absaroka, offered a striking example of family and community congeniality. Juvenile delinquency was unheard of -- as was theft, divorce, child or spouse abuse or even mental illness. The Great Plains children were pampered beyond reason, were reared in an atmosphere of permissiveness that would have shocked Dr. Spock. There was virtually no physical, psychological or spiritual punishment within the families or the clans and yet, infants were taught not to cry within a few days after birth, because crying could reveal the band’s presence to enemies. There was no spanking, slapping or pinching and no emotional abuse of any kind. Nevertheless, the Plains peoples reared children who were obedient, loving and loyal to parents and elders and generous to their clans for their entire lives. These stone age, pre-literate people used the Basic Principle and the Law of Reciprocity much more successfully than we industrial world persons ever have.

If you consistently use the concepts and techniques I teach in this course, you can make the most of the years you spend with your children and teen-agers. The processes learned here can mean the difference between consistent success and disastrous failure in an age when life is changing so swiftly that old traditions and worn down ideologies can no longer serve our children well. For those who haven’t seen through my approach yet -- this program is a synthesis of phenomenological or existential and behavioral elements in a child-centered guidance system.

Adolescents

Warning -- Ignoring the Following Paragraphs May Lead To Physical, Emotional and Spiritual Disaster for Your Peace of Mind and Your Child’s lifelong Welfare.

Professor Ian Campbell, a neuroscientist at the University of California at Davis, is a researcher who studies the near miraculous aspects of the most remarkable organ of human existence. This magic box is, of course, the incredible flesh and blood information processor we carry above our shoulders. Our brains can be thought of as our hardware, as the personal computer that runs ceaselessly every moment of our lives from a few months after conception until death. In fact, few physicians will declare any person dead until his or her brain wave activity has ceased completely. On the other hand, the activities of the brain -- the mind -- is analogous to software that enables most people to live their entire lives with seldom a thought about their breathing, temperature management, disease defense, wound healing, the digestion of food and blood flow. But while the autonomic system functions in a predictable manner through its chemical solutions and electronic flows, the information processing software of the brain has an entirely subjective element to it. Professor Campbell has written a great deal that is valuable for parents, teachers, psychologists, pastors or police and prosecutors who try to persuade, cajole and even browbeat young people to grow up and behave as adults. Some youngsters get along reasonably well but others do indeed find it quite difficult to bring these adult qualities into interaction with each another and their parents, teachers and pastors.

When I was a young pastor, science teacher, psychology professor, and clinic director, a red hot debate raged whether we should speak of the brain or about the mind, when we were trying to understand, teach and counsel children and adolescents. In my youth, some behaviorally oriented psychologists who were disciples of B F Skinner spoke of the brain as if it were a machine. Some of them reduced all of human activity to a response to stimuli -- with clearly predictable S-R behaviors. Some radical behavioral scientists went so far as to call the mind as much of a myth as the church‘s primitive teaching about the human soul. This led someone with a devastating wit to quip -- Psychology first lost its soul and then lost its mind. Many existential psychologists and scholars thought of the mind as a subjective but virtually independent entity that transcends the flesh and blood brain with its chemical fluids and electrical currents that ran the autonomic processes such as heart beat, breathing and so on. For decades the argument raged for years. When I was director of a dyslexic or learning and learning disabilities clinic in Wisconsin, I decided that we needed a middle way in order to help our learning disabled but obviously intelligent students to manage their lives and studies well enough to grow up and function as adults. I taught my teachers, social workers and psychologists:

The brain is the tangible instrument (the hardware of the system) and the mind is what the brain does, (the software). And there is nothing on the face of the earth that is more subjective and self-serving than the human mind.

Since I taught this body/mind interaction to the professionals that I led, at a time when no more than half a dozen medical schools in America had body/mind department, a great awakening has occurred. Now, three out of every five colleges of medicine, have departments that deal extensively with the subjective aspects of healing that can only be understood through mind/body research such as Campbell and others now conduct. I am pleased that the medical world has finally started catching up with this hard working, back country clinic director and author!

Robert Boyd of the McClatchy News Service wrote:

“Scientists are now gaining new insights into remarkable changes in teenagers’ brains that may help explain why the teen years are so hard on young people -- and on their parents.”

Campbell reports that between eleven and fourteen years of age, adolescents lose a significant percentage of the brain’s neural connections that enable them to think wisely and well. And Boyd writes that this loss in necessary because it trims unneeded connections in order to prepare the youthful brain for more complex adult thought processes. Boyd also quotes Alison Gopnic of the University of California at Berkley.

Ineffective or weak connections are pruned in much the same way a gardener trims a tree or bush, giving a plant the desired shape.

Jay Giedd from the National Institute of Mental Health was also quoted by Boyd.

Neural connections or synapses that get exercised are retained while those that don’t are lost. Teens appear to process emotions differently from adults.

Campbell went on to say:

Normal adolescents who are experiencing these brain changes can react emotionally. And girls start pruning their cells about a year earlier that boys but the losses end up to be about the same. This pruning is a case in which less becomes more. It causes an improvement in speed in information processing and a greater ability to build the long neuron chains required for complex problem solving.

I am convinced that many of the parent and teacher conflicts with older children and adolescents occur during this period in which the youngsters are trying to understand and to readjust their emotions without understanding anything about turmoil going on within. Many seldom have a clue and neither do their parents -- the teen age youngsters live as one researcher said, in a very small world of their own hormonal and brain driven urges for esteem, acceptance and admiration. They are so unaware of these confusing urges that kids, who run amok -- like the teen shooters at Columbine School in Colorado or at Red Lake School in Minnesota, are often unable to explain their murderous rage and ruthless aggression. They simply cannot offer a rational reason for their unspeakable violence. Some have no way of understanding their angst and rage. This is why Abigail Baird, a psychologist in Vassar College, insists that teenage criminals should never be tried as adults and never, ever executed for their crimes. It is much too easy for emotionally burned out police and ambitious prosecutors to convince themselves that they should meet the demands for ruthless revenge by an outraged public regardless of the facts. It is a sad fact that our ram-shackled criminal justice system puts one innocent defendant out every twenty in long term confinement or on death row. And even when a prisoner’s innocent is competently proven through evidence such as DNA, virtually every prosecutor in the land will fight to the death before releasing a prisoner mistakenly convicted of a felony.

As Professor Giedd concluded:

The teen-age brain is a very complicated and dynamic area, one that is not easily understood.

Obviously, every parent must learn sound ways of interacting with the vicissitudes of adolescent, must master patience and stop expecting youngsters to behave as adults do. It is good and usually productive to expect and plan well from the high expectations you hold for your child, but your suggestions during the years from about twelve to eighteen should be tempered by the fact that human children are never simply little adults to be set on course and then left to manage for themselves. They need your understanding and your assistance until their brain/minds become more adult. Of course, that is what this course and the book that contains is all about!

MAKING YOUR LIFE COUNT

2008-10-05T14:01:00.006-05:00

Our lifestyle psychology course NICE GUYS FINISH FIRST shows you How To Get People To Do What You Want And Thank You For It.

The only way to make reluctant persons let you win every pot at cards, take home every attractive lover or get the lion’s share of the money, is by cheating, bullying or stealing everything you want. You shall have to outwit, outrun or out-bluff the people you want to take advantage of. The major trouble with that deceptive approach is society develops its own ways of dealing with people like that. Unless you get out of town ahead of the mob coming with tar and feathers, moving every few months to new hunting grounds, life can get very painful. Of course you could take up free lance bank robbing or selling dope down by the elementary school -- after your company fires you, your kids run away from home and your spouse files for divorce.

IN THIS COURSE YOU WILL LEARN HOW TO:

Identify the personality patterns that motivate yourself and other women and men.
Consistently get inside the thought processes of the people you want to influence.
Persuade other persons to tell you everything you want to know about anything.
Identify the step by step progression of a successful interpersonal relationship.
Master several powerful conflict avoidance and conflict control techniques.
Use a refusal to cooperate as a request for additional information.
Climb the cooperation ladder to consistent interpersonal success.
Finalize agreements so there are fewer brush fires for you to fight.

MAKING YOUR LIFE COUNT

This course is about people and about succeeding or failing in life, since some degree of success and failure are the only real options that are open to us. It is written with the knowledge that neither power nor pleasure exists in a vacuum. Virtually everything good we do in life requires the cooperation of people in different ways. And every one of them has his or her own agenda that is personally important.

Therefore, you will have to overpower, out-skill, deceive, or persuade others before society will consistently allow you to share in the marbles, money, passionate lovers, prestige or promotions you want. Only in this way can you make your life count for something worthwhile.

Of course, few of the people who are succeeding are willing to share their hard-earned knowledge with you. Mentors are hard to find and they always want much in return for any help they offer.

The purpose of this course is to teach you how to predict the attitudes and activities of the men and women you must influence every day in order to keep your life successful. It also shows you how to influence their choices in ways they approve by using sound methods of personal effectiveness. You can do these things by learning and using powerful techniques developed by some very good psychiatrists and psychologists. These methods are unknown to most people, although professional therapists, consultants and social workers have been using them for decades with much success.

Most people struggle through life the best way they can, succeeding once in a while, but more often failing because they never learned how to consistently make good things happen when and where they are needed. They simply blunder along -- accepting whatever the luck of the draw offers them daily, never really taking charge of their relationships in a mutually rewarding manner that keeps people cooperating with them.

Many persons try to succeed by using the values, attitudes, expectations, and skills they chanced on in childhood. Unfortunately, in this age of relentless change, when power and authority are shared by more and more people, to depend on what you picked up as a youngster is a poor way to shape your life into a successful affair. In our conventional behavioral patterns many mistakes have been handed down from generation to generation. At home you were probably socialized not to ask embarrassing questions of your elders. At school you were expected to memorize the correct answers. And if you are like most people, you are still waiting for someone to ask the right questions so you can show what a good student you were. Unfortunately for your welfare, no one is ever going to ask them, since most of the answers you learned in school are no longer appropriate. Yet -- millions of men and women who would never imagine crossing the country by covered wagon instead of jet aircraft, who would never take some medicine man's snake-oil cure, try to succeed in life by using methods that were outdated a century ago. And then can’t understand why they aren't among the successful achievers.

Click To Read More

Grace Under Pressure - World Class Leadership Course

2008-09-29T14:37:00.005-05:00

“There are no bad regiments in the French Army -- although some regiments fail because they are commanded by bad colonels.”

Napoleon Bonaparte -- Maxims Of War

Wild Ducks

Some years ago I heard what was soon to become the death rattle of a great industrial civilization. I heard it in the angry voices of two factory owners who were at their wits end. In Sydney, Australia, one furious executive shouted that the only way to restore employee commitment would be to line his striking workers against a wall and shoot every third one.

His American counterpart in Minneapolis wasn’t so bloody minded but he was no less frustrated by his failure to win the commitment of his workers. He yearned for a major economic depression to return them to their senses so they would never again challenge his decisions. His business would suffer and his earnings decline, he admitted, but he felt it would be worth it emotionally to get the labor issue settled once and for all. He may have had his wish granted, since his company is now working at half capacity and is struggling to survive as his sons now compete with products coming from China, Japan, India, Brazil and even from an awakened and ambitious Vietnam. For we are no longer competing with ourselves -- with firms who are making the same fundamental mistakes inherent in a lockstep approach, but with hungry achievers who are coming on line abundant resources and deeply committed people.

I took neither man seriously, since they were both half out of their minds with frustration and were obviously venting their fears and frustrations -- but as they blustered, it became painfully obvious that neither executive understood the challenge nor had the wisdom and the grace to cope with the events occurring across Western Civilization. Neither owner had a sound vision for ending the crippling adversary relationships that make many American, Australasian and British businesses more and more vulnerable. Too few men and women in leadership positions have captured a vision of what a committed community of achievers can accomplish. A great many companies remain trapped in an antiquated philosophy of leadership that depends on interpersonal power and rigid control and when that fails, they become vulnerable because of increasing world competition.

We, in the Western World, still suffer greatly from the massive leadership failure documented in Harvard Business Review some years past. Of course it is ironic that more recent Harvard researchers criticized the tightly scripted industrial engineering approach to management that their predecessors in the Harvard Business School invented a generation or so ago. The fill in the blanks -- connect the dots, Harvard engineering and re-engineering approach used managers and workers as if they were emotionless robots. Workers were paid the absolute survival minimum and worked relentlessly until they malfunctioned. The so called rational approach that ignored emotions and ethics and excluded morality from a nihilistic philosophy of business, consumed people who were then replaced as if tools of production that failed.

It seemed cost effective to use up workers and to replace those who faltered with machines that never argue or want more money. Actually, dealing successfully with ego-centric humans is a challenging business that bad managers and executives strive desperately to avoid at all costs.

The Harvard approach trained plug-in executives who could shift effortlessly from one product or service to another as the best possible approach to fast stock market profits -- whether manufacturing hair driers, paint or canning peaches. The Harvard approach was always about winning on Wall Street with swift stock market killings and never about producing great products or valuable services and letting a company’s excellence persuade investors to stay committed over the long term. Many executives lose their jobs because the company suffered a bad year on Wall Street but few if any have ruined their careers by producing second or third rate products. This nihilistic philosophy of service to society worked reasonably well for dysfunctional organizations that produced shoddy goods and services. The managers could follow the lock step procedures laid down by ideological professors who never met a payroll or walked a production floor and the cash cow would give milk and cream forever. Unfortunately, the old girl grew weary and gave up the ghost when a host of international players appeared on stage and elbowed their day into the chow line. Until now, General Motors automobiles and vans suffer as many failures after three years on the road as Toyotas and Hondas have during their seventh year of service. More and more companies have become wholesalers who produce nothing of their own but pass foreign goods off to the public with their own brand names pasted on. Chrysler has managed to survive by teaming up with Mercedes while General Motors is considering a consortium with European and Asian firms in order to remain viable in the world market. Or possibly Ford and G M may combine forces in order to survive by cutting design and production costs significantly. Everything is still about the all crucial quarterly report in order to placate institutional shareholders. Very little is about manufacturing excellence although no one wants to make shoddy goods. It is just that when push comes to shove financially, the accountants on the top floor go for the stock market fast buck every time.

The computerized re-engineering approach became an item of faith, was the standard ideology revered by many who lacked the vision that sophisticated leaders apply to create effective communities of achievers. It seemed good enough to break every task down to its mind-numbing elementals, to pay the peons just enough to keep them from starving and to follow the industrial engineering lock steps to mediocrity on the world’s stage when our competitors are offering increasing excellence through their products and services.

There certainly has been no great desire to follow the wild ducks who ride the cold north wind of commerce to great heights with their organizations. These swift birds of passage upset domesticated barnyard fowl terribly with their fierce passions. Lee Iacocca carried his youthful fascination with speed to fruition when he saved an even then struggling Ford Motor Company with the original Mustang sports car. He mass produced a twenty-nine hundred dollar low tech donkey that could blow off forty thousand dollar Porsche thoroughbreds on any race track in America. He build them in several variants -- from six cylinder butterflies for elderly ladies who wanted a town coupe -- to fire-breathing dragons for white knuckle racing. I know, I bought one of the four speed, over-carburated, disc braked beasts that was sprung like a British ox cart for my wife Roberta on her thirtieth birthday. We made swift passages along the back roads through the Rocky Mountains and around the Great Lakes for years in bellowing glory. Thank you Lee Iacocca for many glorious memories imprinted on our psyches while in four wheel drifts near the limit of adhesion!

Then, there was Mary Kay with her cosmetics empire who developed an entirely new way of transforming fifty cents worth of simple ingredients into glamorous lipsticks and rouges and she did it with flair and great fun -- with girls-only house parties and gifts of flamingo pink Cadillac's for her committed achievers. Mary Kay was a sophisticated leader who really understood the social and sensual interests of women who party together, recapture a bit of romance at home and buy more of her cosmetics line than they had planned!

Dutch Kindleberger transcended the law of gravity by first designing and building the world class B - 25 bombers that James Doolittle’s boys flew to Tokyo and the evergreen P - 51 fighter from scratch on clean sheets of engineering paper. You could see the fighter parked on a tarmac at dawn and know that it was the best of the breed. That was for practice -- Dutch then went on to jets such as the F - 86 and the F - 100 and to create earth shaking rocket engines that could power towering space ships to escape velocity at his Rocket dyne Division of North American Aviation. He literally made the mountains quake! Dutch loved aircraft and he loved men and women who were thrilled by his Mad Max vision of powering Americans to the moon. Dutch would salivate at nights over his drawing board. I know -- I did quality assurance on his X - 15 and the air breathing Navajo scram jet for two summers when I was teaching science at Cincinnati’s Sayler Park School. For years I treasured a small medallion which included aluminum taken from the Eagle that Neil Armstrong had landed on the moon. Walking upright through the massive ram jet engines of the Navajo was never just a summer job for this former science instructor who sent ten times as many kids into science and technical careers as his predecessor.

And don’t forget Willy Davidson who quipped that a fellow who has only one motorcycle couldn’t consider himself much of a biker. Willy knew what his customers wanted and served them so well with his rumbling 1915 technology Hogs, that Harley Davidson is now worth more on the stock market than General Motors. I doubt that the Harvard gurus ever pondered why the Dupont executives who destroyed the Indian Motorcycle Company, failed so miserably with their plug-in management approach. The executives made bad financial decisions and a series of bad motorcycles that few riders would buy. Willy and his posse didn’t survive with clever Wall Street scams after Indian collapsed -- they did it the old fashioned way -- they earned it after Willy and other motorcycle enthusiasts snatched Harley Davidson back from the Brunswick executives who were following the Dupont crew to disaster by building bad machines. You might say that both companies were saddled with bad colonels, but Willy and his guys rescued his namesake.

Those were committed people, who multiplied their passions through their people and not one of the wild ducks, who rode the cold north wind ahead of their flocks, would have been worth a hill of beans at making clothespins or peddling sugar water to teenagers. All of them were passionate achievers who had the dual leadership ability to manage resources and relationship well.

Unfortunately, our deepening American leadership failure has included a greedy loss of vision of what creative men and women of passion and a commitment to greatness can achieve when they become committed leaders.

It is well past time to put that failure behind us, to harness the human element understood by successful leaders, by embracing and capitalizing on the universal desire of men and women to find meaning for themselves and to make their lives count in purposeful activities with their resources and through their relationships. Fortunately, I am finding signs that more perceptive Western managers are beginning to understand how commitment and excellence can be jump-started in our organizations. I surely do see it emerging from the women entrepreneurs now taking significant roles in our society. Most men have traditionally followed the Harvard paint-by-the-numbers approach, using a universal system for earning money but not especially caring whether they are working with garbage, grain, coal or with the American banking system’s money -- so long as the monthly report is good. On the other hand, most women going into business for themselves, choose areas of service where they feel a sense of meaning and purpose that lifts them beyond a satisfactory bank account in return for their accomplishments. When they reach home and family at the end of the work week, many more women than men want to feel they have contributed to society in some significant manner in addition to creating their own wealth.

For years I taught courses about the need to harness commitment and creativity, to manage resources and relationships -- to the budding executives in the Executive Development Conference at the University of Arizona at Tucson. I acknowledged the need for greater government cooperation, for improved technology, for lower interest rates, and for freedom from the tyranny of the monthly report. I then insisted that a new philosophy of leadership is needed to better utilize the reservoir of often untapped human ability that exists in every organization. In my courses, I told each group of two dozen or so fast-track executives from Saudi Arabia, France, Latin America, Australia, England, Brazil and the United States, that we must turn our organizations into surrogate communities in which people invest the very stuff of their lives at tasks or in relationships that are meaningful to them personally. I concluded by saying that in no other way could an executive or manager further a career effectively.

There is a point to this, and I cannot help but recall it every time I hear managers and executives talking about the lack of commitment offered them by their employees:

Because men and women almost always continue holding the attitudes and completing the activities that reward them personally, while avoiding the attitudes and ending the activities that devalue or deprive them of benefits, every management team receives the level of performance from the employees that the leadership group consistently reinforces in some tangible or intangible manner.

Unfortunately, in our American and European nations, frequently the level of commitment is neither what the leadership wanted nor expected.

There are no bad regiments: There are only bad colonels!

This course is about becoming a more successful leader by harnessing what we now know about effectiveness and efficiency. The research is in -- any group that becomes what I call a community of achievers can maintain its level of productivity with a significant reduction in labor costs, in floor space, and with in inventory. Any manager who cannot build a career on that improvement probably has no business cluttering the territory!

SELF-FOCUS SAMPLE
Tell what you think the author means when he writes that every management team receives the level of commitment that the leaders consistently reward.

In the physical or resource aspects of leadership.

In the psychological or relational aspects of leadership

Does your group receive the degree of commitment expected from the use of a sound quid pro quo?

If you answer yes, why does your reward system succeed?
If your answer is no, why does your reward system fail?

Facing Up to 2008 and Limits of American power

2008-09-24T14:05:00.002-05:00

In the dark Indochina night of the American soul, we wasted almost sixty thousand soldiers and a quarter million wounded, while morally weakening virtually every American institution. Multitudes of citizens have never again accepted our administrative, legislative and judicial aspects of governance with the same degree of trust that we had in them before Vietnam. This is still reflected in the twenty-two percent approval rate of the late do nothing Republican Congress. And why should we -- when our leaders not only sacrificed our own men but murdered more than a million simple peasant farmers and fishermen. They killed them in a brutal scheme to return the people of Vietnam as serfs in chains forged by brutal French colonial thieves. Worse, we supported the rapacious return of the Europeans to Indochina while Ho Chi Min and his staff were begging first Truman and then Eisenhower to help them create a humane approach to life for their people. They modeled their revolution after our own and in desperation after their pleas fell on deaf Washington ears, turned to the Communists to help them savage the French Army at Dien Bien Fu. Hard ball power players such as Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were incensed and eager to retaliate, because the ragged little peasants dared challenge their personal power to move the people of Asia around like pawns on the international board. As J R R Tolkien said so brilliantly -- Unfettered power players compromise so much in their determination to rule or ruin, that they lose the ability to distinguish between good and evil -- between right and wrong. A wicked shroud of expediency envelopes their souls as the needs and rights of others are twisted to their meet own neurotic or even psychopathic yearnings.

It has now become painfully obvious that our present cabal of hubristic proto-fascist ideologues have learned nothing about the limits of American power. We have been led for more than a decade by power brokers who are far more willing to rip and tear everything good for our middle class rather than to create anything positive. Now, anyone with even a modicum of spirituality mourns the three thousand slain and twenty-five thousand maimed men and women of the Cheney/Bush War that has the potential to explode out of control and double or triple the current costs and casualties. Three thousand dead and still counting as Cheney/Bush call for even more men and women to draw their chestnuts from the Iraqi fire. All of which should receive some concentrated attention from Republican clones of Bush who survived the 2006 massacre when the 2008 campaign brings another day of reckoning.

During the Vietnam War, Tricky Dick Nixon won the presidency after the voters drove Johnson from office, by pretending to have a secret plan to extricate America from Vietnam. He even patted his breast pocket as he campaigned -- as if he carried his plan close to his heart. Of course, Nixon’s exit strategy was to win a grand military victory over the non-white raggedy-assed little peasants, despite rebellion on the college campuses and streets of America and eventually in corporate board rooms and within the Congress itself. After Johnson left just before the ax fell, Nixon’s futile pursuit of a military victory gave America another twenty-five thousand mostly poor ghetto and farm boys slain, and another hundred thousand crippled. Only then was Nixon dragged, kicking and screaming to negotiate with the peasants armed with little more than great big A K - 47s, a handful of rice each day, plenty of ammunition and infinite courage -- as they shivered with malaria in the monsoon. They gave first French Foreign Legionaries and then U. S. Marines all the war they could tolerate, closing so near to the perimeter wire that neither American artillery nor air craft could strike them without slaying their own ground troops. His wicked choices led to Nixon’s downfall -- the entire Watergate affair was simply the cause celebre through which angry citizens drove the dark hearted, paranoid president out of office. And despite the continuing disaster Nixon stayed the course to the bitter end. It fell on Gerald Ford, to bite the bullet and withdraw all American forces from Vietnam. And, when Ford sacrificed his own reelection chances to pardon Nixon, possibly keeping him from prison, he refused to thank his benefactor.

As a line of ancient French wisdom reports -- The more things change the more they remain the same. George Bush has taken a page from Nixon’s failed play book with his very own secret plan for winning his war despite growing outrage at home. Bush’s exit strategy is to win his victory by doubling down the number of our boys and girls at risk, dooming as many American kids as it takes to secure military bases from which to dominate the oil rich region, which is why Cheney/Bush took us to war in the first place. He also wants to leave a decent legacy to his presidency and especially, to sooth his severely wounded ego. Virtually every man and woman in the civilized world now sees that this wannabe emperor wears no clothes, that he is a fraud as a leader. Many understand that his failures as a dyslexic student, a womanizing husband, a troubled father with drastic mood swings and a three strike business failure until his father gave him a share in a Texas baseball team -- have left great throbbing wounds in his psyche. He consistently reveals the symptoms of psychological overcompensation with his bombastic West Texas aggression, his devaluing everyone he meets with demeaning nicknames, his inability to read and concentrate, his violent rejection of any form of criticism and reliance on ideological fantasies rather than on facts, are some of the symptoms that plague a dried out alcoholic. To paraphrase the brilliant Otto Rank -- The road to vast power and wealth indeed passes close by the madhouse.

Bush irrationally expects successful results from compulsively repeating his self-defeating mistakes. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the Baath Party and the El Quaida leaders despised and distrusted one another, there was not a single Iraqi among the 9/11 attackers and the myth of creating a democratic Middle East was a fall back position hurriedly invented by White House spin doctors to deceive a restive American citizenry who had begun to question the logic behind the Cheney/Bush War. Bush now finds himself deep in a hole of his own making but he cannot stop obsessively digging it ever deeper.

Such a rigid inability to learn from one’s mistakes is as probably as good a short description of neuroticism and psychopathy as can be found.

Cheney/Bush ignore the bruising defeat the American voters handed the Republican Party during the 2006 election, reject virtually everything the Baker Commission identified as important and dispute the advice from the compliant generals they themselves appointed. Bush is compulsively determined to win a self-redeeming military victory where none is possible without a decade or two of bloody guerrilla warfare. An Iraqi civil war is simmering as American occupiers cause deep resentment and distrust. Obviously, a defeat of this magnitude shall shred even more his wounded ego although he no longer has any good options. Bush faces a choice of evils, clinging to the slender hope that somehow, Iraqi politicians who hate one another with a tribal virulence few Americans have ever seen can persuade their police and military forces to forget centuries of brutal warfare to cooperate according to democratic rules they do not understand.

To win a military victory and keep the lid on tight, Cheney/Bush would need to double or triple the war budget and the number of Americans sacrificed in Iraq and install a regime as cruel as any imposed by the Germans and Japanese during World War II. The war mongers would need to invent and rearm another Saddam! Johnson and Nixon installed surrogate rulers in Vietnam and the expedient decisions made in Washington hastened the Vietnamese victory and crippled the American Army for a generation. Unjust wars and the moral compromises made by politicians and generals to win them at any cost, make a mockery of the motto of our professional officer corps -- Duty, Honor and Country. Even honest and patriotic soldiers can be so worn down and frustrated that they acquiesce to the lesser of several evils. After having served America as one of them, I do not blame the troops in any way as they serve our nation wisely and well in a situation made by the proto-fascists of the Republican right wing. It is a tragedy that so many American soldiers naively danced to the tune of narcissistic politicians, plutocrats and preachers for so long -- who are spending their lives like pocket change in a mad quest to meet their own wicked ideological and financial goals.

The reactionary politicians and their fundamental preacher allies of the Republican Party may remain so stubborn that they must stay the course with an apparently neurotic and barely coherent president and his brain trust. They can filibuster every attempt to negotiate an end to the Cheney/Bush War, burn the Army and the National Guard to professional and emotional cinders with endless tours of duty and keep Cheney’s Halliburton gang busy building military bases in Iraq from which to launch an even more disastrous war against Iran. They can continue to play fast and lose with the Kurds’ against Turkey and the Shiite slaughter of Sunni Muslims in Iraq until Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt explode in resentment. Then the oil fields may well go up in flames and gasoline shall sell for five dollars a gallon across America -- crippling our airline and trucking industries and sending inflation skyrocketing.

Every wicked endeavor is filled with unforeseen consequences that are subjectively overlooked by compulsive narcissistic leaders who claw their way to power in political, commercial and religious organizations. The Cheney/Bush spin doctors may continue to egoistically assume they can manipulate middle class voters into loving or at least financing and fighting their war with their sons and daughters, while their own kids are safe at Yale, Harvard and Stanford. But we out here on the tundra are primed to complete the job well begun during the 2006 election. If the reactionaries and fundamentalists continue playing the cards Cheney/Bush deal from the bottom of the deck, they will enter the 2008 presidential election season with still more of our kids coming home in coffins, the national debt soaring out of sight and inflation stalking every retirement plan. That should galvanize their already surly constituents immensely as they vote to elect a president and even more members of Congress who will finally stop sleepwalking behind the pied pipers of Washington led by Cheney/Bush and address our legitimate concerns.

Secrets of Lovers Relationships

2008-09-17T10:49:00.043-05:00

The Loving Psychology of Life-Long Sexual Intimacy

* Do You want exciting intimacy?

* Do You want to save or improve your marriage or relationship?

* Do you want less conflict in your relationship?

* Do You want to have greater influence with your lover?

Click Here Now Secrets of Lovers Relationships or read more..

Our Printable eBook Course shows you how to create a meaningful relationship that assures permanent love and consistent joyful sexuality with printable self-focus exercises and projects in every chapter.

The Course Includes:

* Your Keys to a Loving and Lasting Relationship.

* Benefit: learn the personal tools to revitalize and fulfill your
relationship.

* Consistent joyful sexuality in your relationship.

* Benefit: achieve sexual intimacy without guilt or game playing to increase your joy.

* Predict your Personality Pattern to influence and your partners.

* Benefit: learn specific communication techniques to better influence your partner.

* Learn to manage your conflicts through the Three Stage Conflict Avoidance and Control ASRAC PROCESS.

* Benefit: learning this alone could save your marriage or relationship.

* Create Couple's Contracts that really work for you and your partner.

* Benefit: negotiate about money, sex, discipline and everything else without conflict.

* Self-Focus Exercises in every Chapter.

* Benefit: achieve personal empowerment and understanding.

* Learn many interesting things about yourself and your partner with our Personality Pattern Predictor.

Men and women are mirror image souls who need one another for fulfillment - for intimacy caresses through the long nights of winter, for the yin and yang of masculine and feminine strengths, for perpetuating ourselves immortally through our children.

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Warmly,
Jard and Roberta DeVille

Michael Moore's new film is online for free

2008-09-16T14:11:00.004-05:00

The Slacker Uprising

Come watch the trailer for the new Michael Moore movie entitled "Slacker Uprising". You will be able to download the entire movie for free on September 23rd if you sign up!

http://slackeruprising.com

God's Passion

2008-09-15T11:58:00.005-05:00

As anthropologist and priest Tielhard de Chardin expressed so brilliantly, life in the universe is no accident -- no one time collision of random factors that led eventually to humankind's appearance on this lovely planet circling an insignificant yellow star, out on the edge of a very common galaxy, with nothing to set it off from several hundred million island universes. We can hardly imagine how life established a foothold here, amidst the billions of crashing meteor strikes, millions of rumbling volcanoes and eons of acid rain in a poisonous atmosphere. We do know that free radicals and electricity are colliding continually throughout the Cosmos, creating basic building blocks of protein, under enormous pressure to burst through every seam on every viable world, into existence in every possible environment. Of course, as children of the stars we simply cannot boast that God created the cosmos for us alone, when one planet around an insignificant yellow sun would have been quite enough for our needs.

Everything exists because God's deepest passion has always been life, life in every nook and cranny of our world. From the mountain peaks to the depths of the seas, life of every shape and style emerges constantly. Life seems to ooze out of the very pores of Mother Earth. The six or eight billion year old record of fossils in the rocks is staggering in volume and complexity. When Jard was in graduate school and teaching science in the Cincinnati school system, he’d occasionally take the kids fossil hunting with picks and hammers along the creeks that carved passages through the chalk bed of the vast, primordial Mississippian Sea. The white deposits are hundreds of feet thick with the skeletal remains of creatures that look like everything from twigs to trilobites and a great many one to two inch long beaks of prehistoric squids. One year, a nearby farmer plowed up a giant squid’s beak over four feet long. Even the biology professors at the University of Cincinnati, where we were studying at the time, had trouble estimating how long its arms must have been. Perhaps, one of them finally ventured a guess, tentacles of sixty or more feet! God indeed is the Seminal Spirit and Cosmic Creator of all matter and all that has followed according to the basic principle of Continuous Creation.

Here now is our crucial point about cosmic origins, about stars and humans for men and women who want to make their lives count for something meaningful rather than merely secular and temporal.

When God’s processes of Continuous Creation produced our species through cosmic alchemy, we retained the metaphysical -- the spiritual nature of God and the Cosmos from which we came. No other species became so self-aware, with spiritual yearnings that go far beyond our physical and psychological needs. We are the only philosophical species. Like no other creatures -- we are sentient, we know that we know. We think constantly about thinking and consistent find spiritual sources of meaning and belonging or we go spiritually bankrupt.

We ponder being alive, wondering who we are, why we exist and where we are going. After making a bad choice and receiving punishment, no dog lays awake all night agonizing over what an evil thing he has done. To think about good and evil is a human concept. So is success and failure. It is our conscience, a vital part of the spiritual unconscious of which Frankl wrote, that actively seeks more than bread and circuses, more than power, possessions, prestige and pleasure. We live within the physical and through the psychological. but we dare not neglect our philosophical/spiritual needs or we wither and blow away as rootless tumbleweeds vanish in a barren desert.

Until we connect consciously to God by developing a purposeful and permanent spiritual relationship, we remain fragile individuals trying to navigate our little boats on a desperately complex voyage that stretches from eternity to eternity with very little security while traversing the void. And it is from this challenge in an age of incessant change that the many life-style frustrations of our era come to bedevil us!

Fortunately, God, the Continuous Creator and Lord of the Cosmos in whom we live and move and have our being, is the all-powerful, all wise and all-pervasive spirit who knows, understands and loves all persons. In other words;

God cares about you and all of your loved ones, although multitudes freeze God out of their lives until they are unhappy, frustrated and in desperate spiritual straits. Then, with their souls wounded, they turn to any number of self-defeating ways in a futile search to make psychology successful. Karen Horney in her brilliant book, the Neurotic Personality Of Our Time wrote --

“A great many neurotic men and women will do anything to be loved except to become loveable.”

God’s obvious passion is life; life beyond comprehension developing continually in every nook and cranny of Earth. Off the coast of southeastern New Guinea, two great tropical ocean currents collide and swirl and intermingle water so warm it is almost like a broth. This vast soup bowl is filled with incredible living creatures, thousands of which have yet to be discovered and classified by scientists. Some of them change from plants to animals and back again during their life cycles. Spiders have been found hunting prey atop Mt. Everest and incredible yard long eel-like creatures make their living feeding on bacteria spewed from the throats of volcanic vents in the eternal night and crushing pressure under two or three miles of Pacific Ocean water. And of course, the faster we create antibiotic medications to slay dangerous bacteria, they faster their strongest survivors adapt to the poison and render it useless as a medication. Nothing in life remains static, although we humans do indeed despise change in almost any form, unless it is to our immediate and obvious advantage. And even then we still have difficulties when adapting to anything new.

There is little doubt, to us anyway, that life forms continuously develop beyond our limited vision to populate the entire Cosmos, according to scientific principles of which God is the divine author. Astronomers have now identified more planets beyond our solar system than within it. And we do understand that God the universe throbs with God's passion for life; life under intense pressure to burst through at every seam in every viable environment, on every borning world. This is no little fly-by-night operation we are invited to join but the very purpose of existence! God’s passion is why there is something here, within our grasp and sight rather than nothing existing at all. If we foolishly reject psychospiritual wisdom and practices or just ignore God through ignorance, we are missing the main element of a successful and spiritual lifestyle. For the health of our souls, we must meet the cosmic needs that we all have inherited through the Lord of Life.

Despite the quarrels of some fearful persons within formal religion and academic research, there never has been any real conflict between spiritual wisdom and scientific knowledge. There is nothing that should cause spiritually minded persons to cower in the stagnant backwaters of research, education, the arts, commerce and government. Of course, science considers the how of cosmic creation while religion deals with the why of our extraordinary cosmos.

Mini-Quiz
Have you ever felt yourself connected with God in a personal manner?

How do you see God’s passion for life being manifested today?

Author's Bio

Jard & Roberta DeVille; published psychology books, seminars & psychological assessment instruments. NICE GUYS FINISH FIRST was a best seller. He & Roberta wrote 'LOVERS FOR LIFE' and other courses/books together. She's been a wonderful teacher in Minneapolis for many years. He’s considered by many to be America’s foremost leadership scholar. Visit http://www.fulfillmentforum.com for Free E-Book Courses and Internet Business Tools.

Watch the Obama campaign's new ads

2008-09-12T16:44:00.003-05:00

Watch the Two New Ads
and Tell Your Friends

John McCain's 26 years as a Washington insider have made him out of touch with Americans on everything from the economy, to health care, to the economy. He can't even use the Internet or send an email -- how is he going to deliver the real change Americans need?

Watch the Obama campaign's new ads below, then share them with everyone you know using the form.

CLICK TO WATCH Real Change

God' Will and Sarah Palin a Fundamentalist

2008-09-09T11:02:00.008-05:00

Much of the scrutiny has focused on Palin’s church, the Wassila Assembly of God. This past week a video emerged of Palin telling students there that the U.S. invasion of Iraq is a task from God. Her comments have raised concerns she could see some government actions as inevitable or pre-ordained as part of a theocratic belief in “end times.”

Palin said the construction of a new oil pipeline in Alaska is God’s will.

Watch the Video *Sarah Palin's Crazy Ideas*