On the Lighter Side

Quotable Quotes

Author	Quote
Rodan of Alexandria.	Never continue in a job you don't enjoy. If you're happy in what you're doing, you'll like yourself, you'll have inner peace. And if you have that, along with physical health, you will have had more success than you could possibly have imagined.

Audio of Interest
"Well - if the Pelican can..." by Peter Thomson

Video of Interest
"The Strangest Secret.." by Conant Nightingale

PowerPoint Presentation
"The Art Of Being Well.." by Dr Drauzio Varella

Books of Interest

Crucial Conversations:Tools for talking when the stakes are high.

By Patterson,Grenny,McMillan,Switzler.

Excerp page 3&4:

HOW DO WE TYPICALLY HANDLE CRUCIAL CONVERSATIONS?

Just because we're in the middle of a crucial conversation (or maybe thinking about stepping up to one) doesn't mean that we're in trouble or that we won't fare well. In truth, when we face crucial conversations, we can do one of three things: We can avoid them. We can face them and handle them poorly. We can face them and handle them well.

That seems simple enough. Walk away from crucial conversations and suffer the consequences. Handle them poorly and suffer the consequences. Or handle them well. "I don't know," you think to yourself. "Given the three choices, I'll go with handling them well." But do we handle them well? when talking turns tough, do we pause, take a deep breath, announce to ourselves, " Uh-oh,this conversation is crucial, I'd better pay close attention" and then trot out our best behavior? Or when we"re anticipating a potentially dangerous discussion, do we step up to it rather than scamper away? Sometimes,sometimes we boldly step up to hot topics, monitor our behavior, and offer up our best work. We mind our P's and Q's. Sometimes we're just flat- out good. And then we have the rest of our lives. These are the moements when for whatever reason, we either anticipate a crucial conversation or are in the middle of one and we're at our absolute worst--- we yell; we withdraw; we say things we later regret. When coversations matter the most----that is, when conversations move from casual to crucial------we're generally on our worst behavior. Why is that?

We're designed wrong. When conversations turn from routine to crucial, we're often in trouble. That's because emotions don't exactly prepare us to converse effectively. Countless generations of genetic shaping drive humans to handle crucial conversations with flying fists and fleet feet, not intelligent persuasion and gentle attentiveness.

For instance, consider a typical crucial conversation. Someone says something you disagree with about a topic that matters a great deal to you and the hairs on the back of your kneck stand up. Two tiny organs seated neatly atop your kidneys pump adrenaline into your bloodstream. You don't choose to do this. Your adreanal glands do it, and then you have to live with it. And that's not all. Your brain the diverts blood from activities it deems nonessential to high-priority tasks such as hitting and running. Unfortunately, as the large muscles of the arms and legs get more blood, the higher-level reasoning sections of your brain get less. As a result, you end up facing challenging conversations with the same equipment available to a rhesus monkey......