The Hall of Bobby

[Writing Prompt] When you die, you appear in a cinema with a number of other people who look like you. You find out that they are your previous reincarnations, and soon you all begin watching your next life on the big screen.

Bobby took one look around him and a thousand versions of him stared back at him smiling. Er, well, at least he thought they looked a lot like him. Some had long hair. Some had glasses. Some wore suits from the “Mad Men” era it seemed. Some wore farmers clothing, others wore doctor’s coats. They were all the things that Bobby had ever dreamed of, and they were standing right there. A sign above him said, “Hall B” and someone shouted, “Welcome to the Hall of Bobby”! And a loud applause broke out.

Standing next to him was a man wearing a beret. He had a feeling that the natural tendencies that he had for art somehow were connected to him. He, himself, he had been a writer. Writing like his life depended on it. Writing all the way up until the night of the… he paused… the accident.

It was all starting to come back. He had been at the newspaper office very late writing a piece for the front page. It was about 3am when he got into his car and a big giant post came out of nowhere. And then blam, he ended up here.

The man in the beret said, “We really enjoyed the pieces you wrote. You really should have chosen Carol though over your work. I think you would have lived a happier life!”

“Yes! You definitely would have,” said a man 4 chairs down. He seemed to be dressed like a drummer in a band.

An usher came by. He had wings on his back and he was dressed in white, and said, “Here’s your seat here sir,” pointing to the open seat next to the beret wearing man.

“The movie will be starting soon, please take your seat…”

“But… what is this place?” Bobby asked.

Read More:

https://medium.com/the-positopian/the-hall-of-bobby-765c2f6d43e4

The Parable of the Joyful Early Bird

Tired Tom was always a sleepy head. He was just one of those birds that could never (for the life of him) wake up early, pull himself out of his warm cozy nest, and get the good first catches of worms.

His friend Mary Mournins always had a cheer about her. She wasn’t necessarily the earliest bird that got up, but even if she did wake up late, she was always filled with joy and had a smile on her face.

On one particularly late morning, Tom was grumpier than ever. He flew out to the nearby field and searched and searched, but there were NO worms to be found and thus he had to go the entire morning without eating any breakfast.

He spotted Mary chatting with some other birds and tidying her nest and decided to go over and see what she was talking about, and maybe what her secret was to always staying so chipper.

…yes, and if I hadn’t changed my morning routine… and the questions I asked myself when I got up… I would have continued being my same old tired self…” Tom overheard her say.

Oh really?!” said one of her friends, “Can you tell us what the questions are that you first ask yourself?


Read More:

https://betterhumans.coach.me/the-parable-of-the-joyful-early-bird-7f9f2ce89d0e

How to be a World-Class Negotiator

A few nights ago, I attended a talk given by Christopher Voss, former international FBI hostage negotiator for 24 years, in which he described several of his kidnapping stories and how his entire mission in life was to help people and save lives.

Needless to say, he was the real deal. This guy is what all the characters in the movies are based on.

He talked about some of the principles of being a good negotiator in any field, whether in business or in your own personal life.

To top that all off, he wrote a book about it called Never Split the Difference which can be summed up by the following:

Life is a series of negotiations you should be prepared for: buying a car, negotiating a salary, buying a home, renegotiating rent, deliberating with your partner. Taking emotional intelligence and intuition to the next level, Never Split the Difference gives you the competitive edge in any discussion.
In fact he was saying that the Director of Product Growth at Slack, Merci Grace, gave it to ALL her girlfriends, husbands and boyfriends because it helped not only in her professional life, but in her relationship with her fiancé and family.

Right off the bat, he had an air about him that just showed his gravitas and how he could keep his cool during intense high-stakes situations.

Read More:
How to be a World-Class Negotiator

Top 10 Graduation Speeches of All Time

It was a about year ago that I got a deal for YouTube Red that gave me 6 months of subscription for $1, so I decided to try it out. I had never been a big watcher of YouTube before because I believed it was like watching TV which I always considered a waste of time. BUT, I had recently (at the time) been told that Sheryl Sandberg’s graduation speech was really good and that I should go watch it. It was May/June and all the graduations were taking place and so the first thing I did was look up “best graduation speeches” and my life was changed forever.

Having written a graduation speeches for both my elementary school and college ceremonies (which I will share at the end), I had an idea of what made a good speech and what contributes to a horrible speech.

There’s something just amazing about graduation speeches because they literally are the world’s best knowledge summed up in like 10–15 minutes. The life experience and wisdom of a single person combined with hours of their own research putting it together is something of a sight to hear.

TED talks today are really almost a streamlined fancy version of a graduation speech, given by a leading expert in their field. However, there’s just something magical about a graduation speech because you have a captive (possibly drunk, non-attentive) group of accomplished students who are about to embark on the next chapter of their lives.

Graduation (otherwise known as Commencement) speeches are more about imparting life lessons and life journeys of a person rather than informing or demonstrating their latest research. They’re meant to be aspirational while TED talks are more inspirational.

They are about someone who has already walked the path providing insight, and possible steps to get there, but most of all, proof that it’s possible (and that everything will be OK!)

While the reports are still coming in from this past month’s round of commencements for 2017, there is still a very large database of existing ones to look back on! Though, if you’ve seen Will Ferrell’s USC speech, you won’t be disappointed. Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard speech is pretty good too along with Tim Cook’s for MIT. The irony being that Harvard gave Zuckerberg an honorary degree years after he dropped out…

Read More:

https://medium.com/the-mission/top-10-graduation-speeches-of-all-time-474c4bc23fa0

Finding Joy

Wrote my first Medium article today! Here it is in full:

“Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve.” ~Napolean HIll

If one thing’s for sure, we are all on a quest for happiness. The founding fathers were brilliant to state our rights are “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” because for some reason we, as a society, are always in a constant pursuit of that elusive, ephemeral, diaphanous entity.

It continually escapes us each and every day.

I’ve been reading and researching a lot of books on Happiness and recently stumbled upon a deeper level of it that we all know as “Joy” which we’ve all heard but never have fully understood.

Dictionary.com defines Joy as, “the emotion of great delight or happiness caused by something exceptionally good or satisfying; keen pleasure; elation.”

As you can see, they are very similar, but in my many years of delving into books and hours of listening to YouTube/TED Talks/experts on happiness that JOY is actually the long-lasting version of happiness. For we are on a life-long quest to find happiness, but what we really should be striving for is longterm joy and contentment.

What’s interesting is that we all WANT happiness, and we spend most of our days trying to achieve it, only to finally not choose it because we are too busy chasing it. It’s a very strange and weird paradox that we find ourselves in.

So we fall into different ways of achieving it, which leads to both good and bad ways of “getting” it. And a lot of us go the chemical route, whether through stuffing our face out with our favorite foods, or going shopping, or doing drugs, or having sex, etc. Our brains get flushed with dopamine and we suddenly think that this is happiness. Our current culture lives on this temporary “instant gratification” strata that tricks us into believing that this is what life’s purpose is and that we should all live in constant state of hedonism because that’s what “happiness” is all about.

But, even though I’m a huge advocate of the positive psychology movement, I’ve been exploring this concept of JOY and how to find and cultivate THAT state of mind, and maintain it. Rather than searching for moments of fleeting seconds of pleasure, why not focus attention on building a support network of things that will sustain a longer-term period of contentment. That is what experts are now calling JOY.

It’s a word that has been around for centuries and is now being looked at with new light. And the jury is still out on how to ultimately achieve it, but some recent findings have found things like building a close network of friends that you can trust with your life, having a weekly game night, finding some silence and solitude, etc.

I’ve begun my own journey and will now actively choose to do things that I know will bring me joy in the long run. The easy low-hanging fruits are eating healthier and doing more exercise. Of course those are cliché and we all know those, but I haven’t actually been doing those because I give into the lizard brain of gorging myself full of pizza and fast food.

My 10,000 year old brain, back in the hunter gatherer days didn’t know when the next meal would be, so it learned to eat as much as possible and crave sugar, salt, fat. But now our neo-cortex’s can help us think much longer term and rationalize that we will actually be more unhappy if we stuff ourselves.

So following the “Eat, Move, Sleep” model, we have to return to our basics and re-train our minds and brains to think in the 21st century. It’s going to be a long journey, and building habits take at least 67 days, but starting is half the battle and it begins with a single step.

https://medium.com/@chewnami/finding-joy-d452331eefb#.zg0likrhg

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LIFTT Bags

Everyone needs a lift! When you’re down, sometimes all you need is a little pick me up.

During mass I learned a cute little thing that you can give out to the poor or just use for yourself in general for life:

Little Items For Tough Times

Such a clever name for little things you can give people when they’re feeling down or when they’re poor or when they need a pick me up!

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The GATEs We Live Behind

Did you know that we all live behind GATEs? These GATEs of our own mind that we self impose on ourselves are supposedly a root cause of our unhappiness, and I have very good reason to believe it true.

GATE stands for:

  1. Goal
  2. Action (or action tendencies)
  3. Thoughts
  4. Emotions

And these 4 things usually lead to a destructive negative cycle. But they don’t have to!

We fall into these traps because society demands that we constantly have ambitions and goals that we’re working towards. But to what end, and to what aim? Maybe sometimes, all we need to do is just be content with where we are. To stop and smell the roses. To appreciate where we are on this journey called life and not think about the destination but to enjoy the ride.

For when we have these goals, then we start taking actions, but because of those actions, we generate thoughts which may be self-conscious or causing you to live too often in the past or the future, but never the present, and thus we develop emotions around those thoughts whether destructive or constructive, but we start falling into a never-ending cycle of accomplishing goal after goal and always striving for that one last thing that we have to get BEFORE we achieve happiness. Why don’t we just start CHOOSING happiness right now instead of always wanting that one more thing that we think will make us happy.

You have to step BEYOND the GATEs of your mind. Be that fly on the inside wall of your head, and just observe what comes up. What kind of demands we put on ourselves and stress we may cause due to the actions, thoughts, and emotions we have as a result of setting those goals and achieving them. Have we ever paused and just said, “Thank You”? for getting us there? And admiring that everything we are and have done is a result of just BEING first?

Let’s just start with existing and then we can grow ourselves from the world of BEING to the world of ENJOYING 🙂

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