Few things are more powerful than friendships, but when we feel betrayed by a friend, there is great hurt and the feeling of loss.

Also, self-doubt. 

After all, we often wind up blaming ourselves rightly or wrongly.

The closer we are with others, the more vulnerable we become.

So I have a 4 step road to recovery that I would like to share with you.  This applies to anyone of any age and is particularly useful with children who are devastated when they feel betrayal for the first time.

1. First and fast determine if the perceived betrayal is a misunderstanding.  Once emotions take over it is harder to resolve the misunderstandings we all have in life.
2. Accept apologies.  Not harboring anger is what friends really do.  Forgiveness does not always mean forgetting.
3. If they feel as badly as you do, consider reaching out to see things from their perspective.
4. Ask yourself if you want to remain friends with the person who betrayed you.  All healing is painful but it can also be beneficial.  Sometimes moving on is the best option.

Adversity can actually strength friendships as George Washington pointed out: 

“True friendship is a plant of slow growth, and must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity before it is entitled to the appellation.”

We earn the right to be a friend.

I love this definition of a true friend:

“Your friend is the man (person) who knows all about you, and still likes you.” (Elbert Hubbard)

Thanks for sharing these daily thoughts with people you care about and please feel free to keep the conversation going by making a comment below.

I’m bad at this and yet it is important – living in the now is the only place to be.

It makes sense.

There have been many outstanding books to extol its virtues.  Eckhart Tolle’s “The Power of Now” comes to mind.

Yet the very thing that makes us succeed – the ability to focus on the future — is not an adequate formula for personal happiness.

What is a person to do?

Not look ahead?

Just being aware of the demands of life and career is a good first step.  But I have found these thoughts helpful:

1. Appreciate the moments of today.  Do not postpone joy.
2. Forget about past hurts and move on – let go, put it to rest and feel the exhilaration that automatically places you in the present.
3. Stop worrying.  99% of that which we worry about never happens and the 1% that does occurs rarely the way we feared it.  Needless worry relegates us to the past and not the moment.
4. Start each day in the now – commit to it.  It gets harder to do as the day goes on and life happens but concentrating on today and not tomorrow’s worries will be a good beginning.
5. Give your undivided attention to someone – perhaps a friend, parent, partner or a child without the focus on you.  It’s hard in a world of digital devices and social networks, but concentrating on others is an automatic homerun for living in the present.

As I said, living in the present is not easy for me.

When all else fails I take my inspiration from this thought:

“Children have neither a past nor a future.  Thus they enjoy the present – which seldom happens to us”.  (Jean De La Bruyere).

Sir William Osler said, “Without faith a man can do nothing, with it all things are possible”.

But we are human and we have ups and downs.

Times when we are at peace with our ability to believe in ourselves, in others or how we choose to live our lives.

Sometimes unexpected events hijack our faith.

An illness, the loss of a job or the death of a loved one.  A friendship broken, angry words spoken or disruption that comes from one of life’s many hurts.

When faith wanes, channel a higher power.

Something or someone larger than life so that you gain the ability to let go of what ails you at the moment.

Did you know that Mother Teresa spent a lifetime dealing with doubts as she tended to the less fortunate people of India?  Mother Teresa said, “I have no faith – I dare not utter the words and thoughts that crowd in my heart and make me suffer untold agony”.

Mother Teresa wasn’t being scandalous.  She was being human.

So let me share with you what bolsters me when I struggle to maintain a strong belief in myself or others.

It comes from Scott Peck:

“The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy or unfulfilled.  For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers”.

Look up.

Thank you so much for sharing these daily messages with people who matter to you. 

The holidays can be such a wonderful time of the year, but they can also be a time of great loss and disappointment.

Meanwhile life goes on and we try to rally ourselves when we’ve got an unexpected case of the blues.

I’ll tell you how many people nip it in the bud.

They get busy focusing on someone other than themselves.

For example, another individual who needs a helping hand.

A person in need of a friendly ear.

Or to those who have bigger problems than we have.

One of my fellow Dale Carnegie instructors used to distribute 3×5 cards to his classes on the first day.

He would ask his students to write down and number the three biggest problems in their lives but without identifying their name on the card.

The instructor would then ask the class to pass the cards to the center aisle, collect them, shuffle the pile and randomly redistribute them to their “new” owners.

He would ask, “How many people by a show of hands would like to have their own card (with their own problems) back again?”

Never did even one person prefer their “new” problems to the ones they have.

I adopted this technique in my speaking but also in my life and the results are the same.

So, it could always be worse and if you want to make things better right now, a bit of gratitude along with the willingness to get the focus off your problems and onto helping someone else is the solution.

I love to write these daily messages to you.  Would you do me a favor and share with those who may also appreciate them?  Thank you!

Their bosses think it is money, but employees want – no, crave – appreciation.

And appreciation costs nothing to their employers.

Taraci Motivation compiled a list that compared what employees said they really wanted and what their employers thought they wanted.

For instance,

1. Employees ranked appreciation as what they say they wanted most from an employer, but their bosses thought they would rank it 8 out of ten.
2. Employers thought good wages would be what their workers said came first, but employees say it was only fifth on their list.
3. It gets worse – feeling “in” on things was ranked second by employees but employers thought their employees would rank it dead last – at tenth.

This says two things.

How out of touch employers and employees are with each other’s wants and needs which is actually alarming if you think about it.

And secondly, but more important, the awesome power of appreciation as an affordable motivator that never goes out of style.

Appreciation as the first thing that employees want is nothing new –similar studies confirmed it as long as two decades ago.

So if you want to motivate an employee – or for that matter, anyone in your life – express appreciation in person, in writing or in deed.

Voltaire said,

“Appreciation is a wonderful thing.  It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well”.

Or as someone once said,  “If you don’t show appreciation to those who deserve it, they’ll learn to stop doing the things you appreciate”.

If you want to guarantee the best Thanksgiving holiday you have ever had, here is a surefire way.

Often the football games, children, families catching up understandably affect the spirit of a holiday whose reason for being is the expression of gratitude.

So, try this as you sit down and dig into the turkey and all the goodies.

You be the one to get everyone’s attention just before the meal begins and say something like this to the person(s) who prepared the meal looking them directly in the eye.

“I want to express to you how much we appreciate the time and love that you put into this meal.  All of us at this table are thankful that you made all of this happen so that we might be together today.”

There are two key elements.

You taking the lead.

And you expressing gratitude for the group.

Don’t be surprised to see teary eyes and a wonderful human relations appetizer for dinner.

It’s also a great teaching lesson to children gathered at the table.

Try it and report back in comments.

And have a very Happy Thanksgiving.

Most of us know how to feel and how to think.

The problem is we think when we need to feel and we become emotional when we need to think.

Decision making is what steers our lives and yet it is common for people to make decisions based on emotion instead of fact.

An example is when we choose relationships because of the way we feel about another person instead of also factoring in whether the object of our affection is also right for us.

In the alternative, we can also make decisions about people sans emotion – and that can lead to trouble.

The person who quits the job she loves because she hates her boss is thinking with her heart and not her head.

One who raises a family based solely on right and wrong will find that love must also be communicated from the heart.

When I was getting divorced a counselor said to me, for a person who made a lot of good decisions in my life, I made bad ones when I made decisions based only on my heart and not my head.

François de la Rochefoucauld
:

“The heart is forever making the head its fool”.

We’ve all heard that phrase a lot and perhaps it has applied to us at various times in our lives.

How is it possible that we can become our own worst enemy?

What’s wrong with becoming our own best advocate?

As I write this I am returning from Philadelphia where a good friend of mine is battling cancer. He has not only mastered the art of being his own best advocate but has advocated for others every day of his life.

Only speaking in positive terms about himself and his potential.

Not allowing negative thoughts or words to come out of his mouth or occupy his mind.

I witnessed it as he built a Dale Carnegie franchise through exemplary human relations. 

I saw him set goals for himself that did not allow a negative thought.  In other words, my friend would not waste his time contemplating failure – just stoking his own fires until he achieved success.

In fighting his illness, he will not talk of the possibility he may die and perhaps that’s why he has lived with cancer for 10 years and counting.

We cannot control what other people say or do to us. 

But we can control what we say or do to ourselves.

So, for one day only, try to be your own best advocate – all day, all night, at work, at home.  See how it feels.

Our worst enemy is accepting the negative thinking of others, not the positive potential that can reside in all of us.

Don’t be a victim of your own mind.

In the words of Roderick Thorp:

“We have to learn to be our own best friends because we fall too easily into the trap of being our own worst enemies.”

Have you ever heard someone say, “shame on you”?

That is perhaps the worst thing anyone could say to another human being.  And yet, it is uttered even to children routinely all the time.

Dr. Marilyn J. Sorensen says “Unlike guilt – which is the feeling of doing something wrong, shame is the fear of being something wrong.”

Shame is used to control others and if you’ve been on the receiving end of someone who is trying to shame you then you also know they are really trying to control you.

Chip away at our self-confidence.

Make us fearful.

There are four ways to successfully deal with shame:

1. Accept your faults only as long as you can name an equal number of virtues.
2. Avoid becoming co-dependent to another person.  Co-dependent people earn their name because they rely on others to validate that they are good.
3. No one gets your permission to act in a verbally abusive way.  Shut it down immediately.  Separate from the person abusing you.
4. Love of self is the antidote for shame.

In the radio industry, I know of many good and dedicated employees who have been laid off due to recent corporate cutbacks and they are not even allowed to gather their belongings and say goodbye.

This is true of radio personalities who have spent decades entertaining the station’s audience and with whom their name is synonymous with the station’s call letters.

They leave with only a box of belongings in their hands often gathered by someone else.

Often, these victims of poor management develop temporary and, yes, even a permanent loss of confidence as they are literally shamed out the door.

My advice to them is always the same:

“Shame kills self esteem.  Love of self kills shame”. 

28-year old PGA pro golfer Charlie Beljan had a meltdown at the Children’s Miracle Network Classic in Lake Buena Vista, FL last Friday.

His throat tightened and his heart went into rapid heartbeat.  But he eventually played on for 5 hours carding a 64, the second lowest score of his rookie season.

Beljan then fell to the ground fearing a possible heart attack and was taken to the hospital where he had tests and spent the night hooked up to machines and still in his golf clothes.

When the tests came in, Beljan found out he suffered a panic attack and was released Saturday to continue playing in the event.   As he returned to the course, Beljan was crying on the practice range fearing that he would have another panic attack.

He had been under a lot of personal pressure.  Beljan had to place in the top ten not to forfeit his eligibility to remain on tour.  He married in the beginning of the year and his wife gave birth to their first child in September.  This was not his first panic attack.  He passed out on an airplane forcing an emergency landing with what turned out to be a panic attack a month before his son was born. 

Remarkably, Beljan won the golf tournament panic attack and all.

Made $846,000.

And qualified to play next season on the pro tour.

In the end the way Charlie Beljan won the battle with anxiety – at least long enough to win the event – was to understand that he had to live one day at a time.

Golf is a game that is played best when it is played one hole at a time.

For those of us facing anxiety and stress in our lives, the winning formula is living one day at a time and letting go of the stressors that plague us.

It’s a battle that often ends up making us feel like champions when we rise to the occasion.

As Milan Kundera says,

“The source of anxiety lies in the future.  If you can keep the future out of mind, you can forget your worries.”