Unfortunately the radio industry is an example of a perfectly good business that is not in a very good place right now.

Owners are cheap, greedy and insensitive to the needs of employees.

The industry is too male and excludes females and other minorities from top management positions.

I know literally hundreds of good radio people who are caught between either being out of work or selling their soul to the company.

What a tough position to be in.

I’ve worked for some difficult people but I can tell you that taking a check to work for people who are abusive and don’t care does not mean becoming one of them.

• Take time to be sensitive to people who work for and with you in companies where owners are brutally harsh.  Most fair-minded people will understand the position you’re in as long as you demonstrate that you understand the predicament they are in.
• When a bad company does bad things and you’re in charge, you won’t get fired for being human, checking on them, making a few calls to help them get interviews.  After all, we’ve all been there and we’re probably going to be back there again before our careers are over.
• A thought:  Pretend you are the one being fired and someday you will be asking your employee for a job.  Would they hire you based on the way you treated them?
• Being loyal to evil employers does not mean becoming one of them – think about this a lot.
• Nothing is more painful than being fired.  Compassion is the order of the day not being a robot for insensitive owners.
• In the end when you find you are being callous to the human condition, get a new job or risk losing your own humanity.
• Acid test:  If your son or daughter has to be fired, would you do it the same way?  If your spouse had to be disciplined, would you do it the way you’re presently doing it?

When in doubt, be human and you’ll save your life as well.

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Have you seen Monica Lewinsky’s TED talk about the hell she lived after having  an affair with a married man who just happened also to be the president of the United States?

How many people do you know have shamed themselves or made mistakes?  But with the Internet there is almost no path to redemption and no way to move on.

The Internet.

Cyberbullying.

Making fun of people because we will never look into their eyes face to face.

Monica’s excellent talk admits her wrongdoing but also describes the hell of our digital world where social media will drive people to depression and worse.

Until they find compassion for self.

As she puts it:  “Have compassion for yourself. We all deserve compassion, and to live both online and off in a more compassionate world”.

Here’s a link to Monica Lewinsky’s talk – she’s nervous, and 41-years old now and in a world where parents are helping children deal with haters and bullying, it’s about time we are having this conversation.

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We’ve got it all wrong.

Most of us think we fear death whether we’re 25 or 85 when it’s really life that scares the hell out of people.

We can’t do much about the fact that someday we must go, but we can do an awful lot about how we live in the time we have.

Amazing, isn’t it, that cancer patients with all the burden of treatments, side effects and worry of future outcomes can almost to a person cut through the garbage that prevents them from living the days that they have as if they are more precious.  And if they are fortunate enough to be granted more time, they are changed people.

So we have wars on everything in this world today, how about a war on fear?

• When you fear something, do it anyway.  Bet you’ll be glad and you’ll start making a habit of it.
• Banish the fear of failure this very morning. I can guarantee you are going to fail but not always.  Hockey great Wayne Gretzky’s famous line is “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”  I think of that a lot.
• Laugh at failure, it’s temporary.  Ever notice how AFTER achieving a successful goal, people can laugh about their failures that got them to their happy day?  Disrupt the timeline and start laughing at failure BEFORE you ultimately succeed.  It’s less wear and tear on your psyche.
• Franklin Roosevelt was right when he told America during wartime that  “the only thing to fear is fear itself”.

When we fear living, we run the risk of losing life.

Fear has met its enemy when you make a decision to live dangerously and believe in yourself.

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Ever notice how when teams are winning almost everything they do keeps going their way.

Until, something doesn’t.

A homerun.

A last minute goal with ten seconds to go before the end of the first period – perfect for leaving an unfortunate outcome front and center in the players’ minds.

And a losing streak is even worse.

You don’t have to play sports to experience a losing streak.  Ordinary people do.  Broken marriages.  Can’t find a soul mate.  Health problems.  Work problems.  People problems.  (Add yours here).

I know there is a lot of motivational psychobabble out there to remind us to not give up.

Hockey players clutch their sticks harder – now that’s not going to help.

Baseball players swing and miss on strike three and walk dejected back to their dugouts.

A fired employee loses self-esteem on the way home from the office for the last time.

I’ve discovered a fascinating, easy and believe it or not fun way to stay motivated when your world is collapsing around you.

Do it for someone special.

Fight back for your grandmother who believed in you through thick and thin.

Play the dating game after the umpteenth Tinder disappointment shows up looking like someone else for your kids.

Work late and think about your spouse and how he or she will be so proud of you.

Change the people you do it for every day if you like.

Or let one person inspire you in your mind’s eye.

And add yourself in to the mix.

Adversity introduces a person to him or her self and to those around them.

Don’t go through adversity alone – plow ahead side by side with the thought of someone who would be as proud of you for trying.

It has the same effect as when mom or dad showed up at a school sports event you were in.  You played your heart out.

Capture that feeling and feel it when life gets tough.

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Brian Sutton-Smith died March 7^th.

If you don’t know him – and I didn’t until I read his fascinating New York Times obituary – he devoted his life to the importance of studying play – books, talks and teaching at various colleges including The University of Pennsylvania.

The question he was constantly asked was why spend an entire life studying play.

I’d like to share his response:

“We study play because life is crap.  Life is crap and it is full of pain and suffering and the only thing that makes it worth living  — the only thing that makes it possible to get up in the morning and go on living – is play.”

In spite of his harsh viewpoint, Sutton-Smith makes a good point.

Why are we killing ourselves at work?

Why are we taking on more play dates than we can handle?

Why do we not make regular play a priority – and I’m not talking about solitary games on mobile devices here.

And after six decades of studying play, Sutton-Smith couldn’t describe exactly what play is.

Is it golf?  Is it cards?  Is it fantasy?  Games?

I’m interested in this because all of us stand to lose the full potential for our lives because one of the greatest tools in the world – mobile Internet and social media – also threatens our ability to interact and lighten up.

The takeaway is balance is more important than productivity.

Variety is truly the spice of life.

Frisbee on the beach has more benefits than we imagined.

Play reminds us of our humanity and serves as a counter-balance to our digital tendencies to communicate but not feel emotion.

Play is what we’re killing ourselves for when we work.

Oh, by the way, Brian Sutton-Smith lived to be 90.

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It’s this simple.

Either we are our own best friend or we fast become our worst enemy.

When a parent asks a child with 4 A’s and a B on their report card, what did you get the B in – we’re teaching impressionable people to be negative.  Let them start with the A’s.  There is plenty of time for the B.

When another person criticizes us, we should reject that criticism.  After all, no less than Dale Carnegie himself said, “don’t criticize, condemn or complain”.  Who are we to judge another?

When we feel that everything we do isn’t good enough, then we are being ungrateful because we can only be what we are and that is good enough if we’re giving our best.

We can either try to make everyone else better one criticism at a time or enjoy the other person exactly the way they are.  We can’t have it both ways.

Some adults laughed at TV’s Mister Rogers who always told his audience of children “I like you just the way you are”.  But Fred Rogers was right. And hearing that phrase every day is something we need to say about ourselves.

You can spend a lifetime feeling badly about yourself.

Or choose to live a life accepting yourself as the fine person you are.

There is, of course, always room for improvement but what good is improving when being perfect is not the secret to happiness.

Most people are good enough the way they are.

Pogo’s great line “We have met the enemy and he is us” is so true.

What if we revised that a bit and made it “We have met my best friend and it is me”?

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We have seen victims of earthquakes hopelessly trapped in buildings survive for many days not on food, water or medicine but only hope.

Hope is that powerful – so important that when we rob other people of it or someone takes hope from us, life becomes more difficult to live.  More dark.  More depressing.

Hope is the burning desire that something positive will eventually happen.

We don’t need hope when things are going our way.  We need hope when things are bad.

Hope is a decision we make when we are not satisfied with the present.  It is not a feeling.  It is a choice.

Unfortunately, many people make the decision to give up hope because times get tough.  Isn’t it fortunate that those trapped in that earthquake rubble decided to focus on only the positive outcome.

Bad things happen in life – no two ways about it.

But starting today, we can vow not to contribute to adversity by giving up the one thing that over the ages always seems to overcome all things bad – hope.

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Face it, we all live with self-absorbed people.

Sometimes, we are the self-absorbed.

People who can focus only on themselves are boring.  They are rude.  And they are missing out on the closeness that can come by showing sincere interest in other people.

I know a person who only needs one sentence from me and from there goes on to talk about herself for as long as you are willing to listen.

Remember that Bette Midler movie line:  “So enough about me, what about you, what do you think about me?”

Dale Carnegie always advised talking in terms of the other person’s interests.

This seems so not possible in a world where it is all always about “me”.

So I promised some strategies for living with self-absorbed people, here goes:

1. Keep interrupting them and ask the question you want to know.  If they continue to go back to their long diatribe, get up and leave.  Taking the oxygen out of the room puts an end to self-absorption.  Same is true of self-absorption by text messaging.  Stop.
2. Do not attempt to talk about you – self-absorbed people will circle back to themselves so the only defense you have is to cut it short.  If it’s your boss who is self-absorbed, start looking for a new job.
3. You won’t be surprised that no matter how many times you say supportive things, the self-absorbed person will just continue to ramble on.

The HBO series “Girls” is a parody on self-absorption.  It’s funny and true. Fans may remember the episode when Hannah (Lena Dunham) attended a funeral and somehow made the funeral about her not the deceased.  Now, this is a parody, but it is also close to the truth.

We live in a Twitter world – what if our response was no longer than a “tweet” and just as creative?

Something tells me we have discovered a new tool for putting an end to self-centered people commandeering our lives.

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Isn’t it sad that almost all of us have to battle the fear of something?

Even in spite of the reassuring reality that 99.9% of the things we fear will never come true.

And on the small statistical chance that it does, that fear is nothing like what we were dreading.

When you talk to people who have overcome fear, they will tell you two things.

Do the things you fear to do and the fear will go away from you.

And, small steps are just as effective as big leaps.

In the past, some airlines used to offer courses for fearful fliers.  They would start the classes on the ground, graduate to an actual airplane that never takes off and finally, a test flight for a very short duration that returns the fearful passengers to the airport from which the plane took off.

Understand the fear and even feel it.

Take a small step (in this case) to an airliner that is not going to take off.

Then, a very short flight to build up confidence.

No matter what worries us, ruminating over it only makes it worse.

The breakthrough invariably comes when we confront our fears and then take small, positive, reassuring steps to conquer them.

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I asked a classroom of USC students if they would like me to share with them a way in which they could do only 20% of everything they had to do each day and yet be 80% productive.

There was silence.

Finally, after a long uncomfortable pause, a young woman said “Yes, Professor” and she was the only one.

I share this because it amazes me what kind of crazy culture we live in where we feel we are required to do everything that comes our way so much so that we are willing to do more than one thing at a time (multitasking).

My students looked at me like I was crazy for suggesting that they prioritize what is important and focus on only that.  And to keep prioritizing all day long.

In other words, not everything on our shoulders has to be done today or at this moment.

Life is too stressful.  We are battling anxiety every minute of the day.

By making constant decisions as to what is the best use of our time at any given moment we discover the antidote for stressful multitasking.

An “A” priority must be done today – now, before we leave.

A “B” is tomorrow’s potential “A” and it waits to be elevated up in priority.

And a “C” is a holding list for items we want to do, are asked to do and other things that haven’t in our opinion been elevated to “A” or “B”.

I have found that most “C’s” never make it to “A” meaning you’ll never need to do them if you constantly ask yourself the question what is the best use of my time right now.

And as if I needed another reason to reject multitasking I never forget that there is nothing worse than doing something well that doesn’t need to be done at all.

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