There was an article in Tuesday’s New York Times about how dads are increasingly making the decisions on what toys to give to their children as part of the changing family.

According to the article:

“For the first time in Barbie’s more than 50-year history, Mattel is introducing a Barbie construction set that underscores a huge shift in the marketplace. Fathers are doing more of the family shopping just as girls are being encouraged more than ever by hypervigilant parents to play with toys (as boys already do) that develop math and science skills early on.”

Or as psychiatrist Maurene O’Brien, quoted in the piece and consulted on the new Barbie set said, “Once it’s in the home, dads would very much be able to join in this play that otherwise they might feel is not their territory.”

Actually, the toys don’t matter all that much.

What matters is giving the gift of time.

That’s what I always liked about golf as a divorced father.  Plenty of time to be together, play, talk, wait and bond.  Who said the game is too slow?

The gift that keeps on giving is always on sale for 100% off because it is free.

But in our workaday world where stressors mount hour-by-hour, we increasingly see relationship solutions as being mobile, digital and materialistic because we are so jammed on time.  Time is money and we often wind up spending it on the wrong things.

The father I saw dining with his two daughters in a Chinese restaurant in Scottsdale, AZ a year ago put on a clinic for how not to parent.

He was on his Blackberry for most of the dinner.  His young children chatted with each other while he was distracted – not their dad.

As the holidays come upon us, could this be the year that we realize that an hour spent visiting a person in an assisted living facility is a gift all by itself – one that will always be a hit.

That the toy you give a child almost doesn’t matter, but the time spent together does.

Splurging on presents for your spouses or partners is nice but non-distracted “face time” is the wrapping that makes it perfect.

Rick Warren says we must prove that our relationships are important by investing time in them:

“Words alone are worthless. My children, our love should not be just words and talk; it must be true love, which shows itself in action. Relationships take time and effort, and the best way to spell love is “T-I-M-E.”

We can give this present this year!

Kansas City Chiefs player Jovan Belcher killed his girlfriend and himself last week leaving their infant daughter without parents and his teammates devastated.

There are plenty of issues that have come to the fore:  the effect of head injuries, domestic violence and suppressing problems that need outside help.

But the thing that tugged at my heart was seeing fellow teammates question whether they had done enough to be there for their troubled friend.

Out of bad comes good, but it will not replace the two victims nor will it undo the hurt that their daughter will have to deal with.

Sometimes the good is separate and apart.

Like learning the value and necessity of being able to communicate positively at all times.

God knows we have more communications tools today than ever in the history of civilization.

My best friend used to send me a note each and every (and I do mean every) time we would meet for lunch or dinner.  Just a quickie to say thanks and share something positive.

I still have every one of his notes.

People want to know someone is listening to them.

That they care.

Now we can use Twitter and Facebook to say nice things to one another and let others know we are more than just quick “Facebook friends”.

Or email and text to say something quickly and positively.

Perfection is not attainable in this life.

Being human is quite enough as long as we all feel someone cares.

Take a chance and encourage a friend or family member.

Tell the world about a fellow worker’s accomplishments.

Get the accent off “me” and return it to where it belongs – “you”.

“The most basic of all human needs is the need to understand and be understood. The best way to understand people is to listen to them.”  — Ralph Nichols

The great motivational speaker Zig Ziglar died last week at the age of 86.

His messages were powerful as he spoke to audiences worldwide – in his heyday speaking 150 times a year and even into his 70’s preaching the gospel of self-help 50 times per year.  He earned $50,000 a speech!

Messages like:  “If you aim at nothing, you will hit it every time” and “There are no traffic jams on the extra mile”.

At the core of Ziglar’s approach to motivation is this secret to empower others:

“Our whole philosophy’s built around the concept that you can have everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want”.

But we live in a self-absorbed world where people increasingly and outwardly seek that which they want at the exclusion of others.

American politics is about no compromise.

Often employers adopt the take it or leave it attitude which has more than paved over their “my way or the highway” approach.

Empowering those close to us to achieve their goals, too.

Our fellow workers to be better because we are part of their lives.

Believing in our children enough to be their silent partner on the road to success and happiness.

It’s about relishing in the role of helping others get what they want as a ticket to getting what we want.

Ziglar said empowering others “works in your personal life, your physical life.  It works in corporate America.  It works in government.  It works everywhere”.

And some hints of how to begin empowering others as well as ourselves were revealed in Ziglar’s New York Times obituary:

Be grateful.

Believe.

Try.

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”.