Thought you might enjoy! I did!

Have an Average Day

by Michael Neill, from Catalyst

I once was talking to my friend and mentor Steve Chandler when he said to me, "Have an average day!" Taken aback, I asked him what he meant. Isn't the idea to have great days, even exceptional ones?

He told me a story about one of his mentors, Lyndon Duke, who studied the linguistics of suicide. After receiving doctorates from two universities, Duke began analyzing suicide notes for linguistic clues that could be used to predict and prevent suicidal behavior in teenagers.

Duke came to believe that the enemy of happiness is "the curse of exceptionality." When everyone is trying to be exceptional, nearly everyone fails because the exceptional becomes commonplace, and those few who do succeed feel isolated and estranged from their peers. We're left with a world in which a few people feel envied, misunderstood, and alone, while thousands of others feel like failures for not being good, special, rich, or happy enough.

When I was in the thickest cloud of my own suicidal thoughts, I was at university and I remember wishing that I could run away from my scholarship, change my name to Bob, and take a job pumping gas at a full-service station somewhere in the Midwest. Only in my fantasy, people would start to notice something special about me. They would begin driving miles out of their way to have "Bob the service guy" fill up their cars and to exchange a few words with him, leaving the station oddly uplifted and with a renewed sense of optimism and purpose.

I was, to my way of thinking, doomed to succeed.

Delusions of grandeur? Quite possibly. Depressed and miserable? Absolutely.

One of Duke's breakthroughs came when he was dealing with his own unhappiness and heard a neighbor singing while he was mowing his lawn. Duke realized what was missing from his life: the simple pleasures of an average day.

The very next weekend, he went to visit his son, who was struggling to excel in his first term at university. "I expect you to be a straight C student, young man," Duke said. "I want you to complete your unremarkable academic career, meet an ordinary young woman, and, if you choose to, get married and live a completely average life!"

His son, of course, thought Dad had finally flipped, but it did take the pressure off him to be quite so exceptional. A month later he phoned his father to apologize. He had gotten A's on his exams, despite having done only an average amount of studying.

This is the paradoxical promise of an average-day philosophy: The cumulative effect of a series of average days is actually quite extraordinary.

If we put this together with another one of Duke's discoveries—that the meaning of our lives comes from the differences we make with them, though these differences need not be huge to have a profound impact—we may well have the ultimate prescription for a happy, productive life:

Be an average, happy person making a small positive difference (and having a happy, average day). In doing this, you create a kind of exceptionality that everyone can share.

 

Michael Neill (www.geniuscatalyst.com) is a success coach, media commentator, and author. Copyright © 2007 Michael Neill. Excerpted from Catalyst (Sept. 2007), an independent journal of healthy living. Subscriptions: $18/yr. (12 issues) from 364 E. Broadway, Salt Lake City, UT 84111; www.catalystmagazine.net.

 

Calculating Cumulative Rewards

With just a little mental math, you can calculate the exceptional impact of a series of average days.

1. Choose an area of your life in which you have been trying to excel, such as writing, sales, or being a parent.
2. Consider what would constitute an average day in that area. For a writer that might be 90 minutes of writing; in sales that might be speaking with five new prospects; a parent might aim to spend an hour a day 100 percent focused on the kids.
3. Project forward. If you did nothing but repeat your average day five days a week, what would you accomplish in three months? A year? Five years?
     Writing 100 or so hours over a three-month period is enough to complete a book; in a year that would be two books, some poetry, and a screenplay. Speaking with 100 new prospects over the course of a month would definitely lead to new sales.
     A parent who spends at least an hour a day focused on children racks up 90 hours in three months. In five years, if a parent made even a small difference in each of the 1,800 hours she or he spent, the impact would be anything but average. —Michael Neill

Authenticity

“What would happen if we started to live inside our religion the way we were intended to live? What if we were allowed to be completely visible? What if we were allowed to admit our sins and shortcomings? What if we started to tell the truth about ourselves at all of our meetings? What if we let love and truth be the motto of our religion instead of secrets, guilt, lies, and looking good?”

-- http://www.motleyvision.org/?p=344#comments

Interesting Post from timesandseasons.org

1/8/2008
“This Thing Was Not Done in a Corner”
by Melissa Proctor
I was delighted when Noah Feldman accepted my invitation to give the keynote address at Princeton’s Mormonism and American Politics conference because I knew he’d offer a thoughtful and sophisticated outsider’s perspective on these issues. His latest NYT piece, a polished and updated version of his conference remarks, is even more that that, however. In challenging what Feldman calls the “soft bigotry” against Mormonism, still surprisingly so widespread, while at the same time effectively raising legitimate issues for Latter-day Saints to wrestle with themselves, Feldman’s piece does what few other articles on Mormonism have been able to do and is rightly getting a lot of attention.

Since I have spent time in conversation discussing these points with Feldman, it is perhaps unremarkable that I have mostly praise for his observations and as such won’t rehearse my significant agreements with him. Instead, what I will draw attention to are the LDS responses to Feldman which I find most interesting.

Feldman argues that “Mormonism’s political problem arises, in larger part, from the disconcerting split between its public and private faces.” The faces of the missionaries that seem to evoke wholesomeness and clean living on one hand and temple rites intended only for the worthy few, leaves outsiders uncomfortable and uncertain about the Mormon faith. Does Mormonism epitomize all-American, apple pie goodness or does its non-public sacred temple rituals, holy garments, and theocratic past define Mormonism as marginal and worthy of suspicion?

According to Feldman, Mormonism’s understanding of sacred mystery implies a certain theological secrecy leading to public distrust. When distrust and fear turn to persecution Mormons feel external pressure to be secretive about even those beliefs regarding which there may be no theological rationale for silence and which they might more readily share but for the possible persecution they might face. Silence or secrecy then becomes a protective strategy. The category of secrecy looms large in the article as one of the sticking points that ostensibly both explains and engenders continuing national bigotry. Feldman suggests that Mormonism not only began in secrecy but that Mormon theology remains relatively inaccessible to outsiders because much of Joseph’s Smith’s revelations are thought of as sacred secrets to be shared only with select initiates.

Many Latter-day Saints have a knee-jerk reaction to the charge of secrecy. However well-informed the outsider, they take these observations about the church as an accusation of shady practices so they respond like Paul when speaking of the early Christians to King Agrippa that “this thing was not done in a corner”! To demonstrate this transparency, which seems for some to imply goodness, they point to the church’s extensive international missionary program which seeks to educate anyone who will listen about the doctrines and practices of Mormon faith and issues reminders that the Book of Mormon is published in more than 36 languages and distributed all over the world. They note that the official church website publishes all major addresses by church leaders and that the current president of the church has gone on national television, agreeing to be interviewed by the likes of Larry King and Mike Wallace.

Though Latter-day Saints might bristle at this observation and offer evidence to the contrary, it is difficult to not to concede Feldman’s point. Plural marriage was a sacred secret for many years and the temple ordinances have never been meant for public consumption. Granting these points however does not do the damage that some LDS may think. Feldman draws analogies between Mormonism’s sacred secrets and medieval Islamic esotericism, kabbalistic mysticism and ancient Christian Gnosticism, effectively arguing that there are strands within Mormonism that bear resemblances to old strands within Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. If Feldman is right that “antiquity breeds authenticity,” then Feldman’s emphasis on Mormon secrecy in the context of an argument for the antiquity of such a practice does Latter-day Saints a favor.

Feldman’s recounting of Mormon history is mostly the good standard story you’d expect from an academic who has read the most important secondary sources. I do however think his account of what he calls Mormon “normalization” could have benefitted from a more careful perusal of Armand Mauss’ The Angel and the Beehive: the Mormon Struggle with Assimilation. Feldman suggests that the level of assimilation that Latter-day Saints have been able to accomplish is due largely to a deliberate reticence to discuss religious beliefs (i.e. secrecy) as a survival tactic. Mauss paints a more complex picture than the one Feldman describes by arguing that there has been and continues to be much opposition to the diffusion of Mormon distinctiveness that has led to what Mauss calls the predicament of respectability. There is evidence of a hardening position against further assimilation and sometimes an apparent desire to reverse this trend from both the leadership and laity. That we are becoming too much like the world is not an uncommon cry. Mormons are proud to be a “peculiar people.” Though Feldman acknowledges that it might be hard for contemporary Latter-day Saints to imagine such radical change, I think it unlikely that Mormonism would ever come to look like mainline Protestantism. Latter-day Saints want to be accepted as part of the mainstream, but they want to be accepted into the mainstream as Latter-day Saints.

Feldman spends very little time developing what, for me, is one of the most interesting comments in the article. Near the end of the piece, Feldman suggests that Mormon esotericism (which is perhaps less controversial a category than secrecy—I suggested early on that he use “mystery” as the native term to Mormon scripture, but that wasn’t quite right either) is reflected in the political speechmaking of Romney and defined by “the attempt to convey multiple messages to different audiences through the careful use of words.” Any effort to do this might sound coolly calculating and manipulative and these charges have certainly been thrown at Romney, but I would argue that learning how to discuss the religious premises that ground one’s moral and political beliefs in a way that is accessible without distortion is the challenge that faces every Latter-day Saint who enters the public square.

Happy Birthday to Me!

30 years ago....  I turned 8 and was looking forward to my baptism at the Joplin Stake Center.

 

25 years ago....  I officially became a "teenager" and remember riding the bus home through Aurora and wondering why I didn't feel any "different"

 

22 years ago...   I begged mom (successfully) to take me to Mt. Vernon for my driver's license...I took the car out that night for the first time (legally)!

 

19 years ago...   Bill and I celebrated my birthday along with Emily Fulkerson and Jason (who had just returned from Brazil)

 

17 years ago...   I celebrated my birthday as a brand new mom

 

14 years ago...   I celebrated my birthday as an official college graduate

 

10 years ago...   I celebrated my birthday as an almost-finished, in my last semester, graduate student

 

How the time does fly!!!!

 

This year, I am going to plan how to celebrate my birthday next year....the big 39....in a new and exciting place to which I have never been.

 

The choices so far are:

 

London

Sao Paulo

Taipei

Mittenwald/Germany

 

 

Misison Statement

For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind. 2 Timothy 1:7

 

Mission Statement:

 

To determine the values and priorities I have for myself and my family and then diligently and thoughtfully pursue the course which leads to the desired outcome.