Can't Decide

My father used to say that when you're confronted with a difficult decision, it is better to decide promptly and risk a wrong decision than to hesitate and make no decision at all.

Holidays time is filled with choices, from those as basic as what gifts to get people to those as difficult as which family's dinner and celebration to attend. We also use the conceit of the new year to make new plans, forge new directions, and try to make better decisions and choices.

I know you're all busy with last-minute holiday shopping and negotiating where you'll be on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, so I'm trying to keep these end-of-year posts short and sweet.

My advice today is, make your decisions and be confident that you've done the best you can. If you allow circumstances, vicissitudes, and exigencies to decide for you, you'll be reacting like an audience member watching helplessly instead of taking charge and acting as the star of your own show.

Wish List

At Christmas time, many children make lists of what they want from Santa. Some of their requests are realistic, and some aren't. Mostly, they're about things the kids want for themselves. There are few requests for world peace, ending hunger, or the passage of healthcare legislation. It's not that these aren't worthy wishes to put on the list, idealistic though they may be (with the exception of the last). It's that the point of a child asking Santa for something is to indulge his or her own desires and fantasies, not to wish for things that other people want or that the child thinks he or she is supposed to want.

My point is not to make Christmas a selfish holiday or put a damper on the spirit of giving. My point is that as we near the end of the holiday season and approach the new year, this is a great time to make your own wish lists. Here are the rules:

1. You must limit yourself to one wish.

2. Your wish has to be something you want for yourself. It can involve other people and their happiness, but it has to be something that will make you feel happy and fulfilled.

3. Your wish doesn't have to be realistic, but since you only get one, it would be a shame to waste it on something utterly impossible.

Send me your lists as comments if you'd like. No, I can't grant them, but acknowledging and expressing what you really want is the first step towards achieving it.

Technical Difficulties

The phone I use for my mobile Internet connection is resynchronizing
my 5,000 contacts. It's a process that can't be stopped once started
without serious consequences. Think about processes in your life that
have a life of their own. The only way to take control of these
processes and stop them from controlling you is to achieve awareness
and consciousness. If you have examples, please send comments.

Sent from my iPhone

Consistency

Image via Wikipedia

I love words with more than one meaning.

Consistency means the ability to carry through on a promise or action time after time, as in writing a new blog post every weekday on your hour-long commute.

Consistency also means texture, as in the tactile properties or feel of something. The consistency of jello is different from that of pudding, flan, mousse, tiramisu, or ice cream.

Today, I'd like you to think about your consistency, using both meanings of the word. Do you carry through on your promises? Can the people around you rely on you to do - or abstain from doing if that's what's called for - on a regular basis? Note that reliability differs from consistency in that it involves another person and that person's expectations, while consistency can be a purely internal goal. Do you consistently align your actions with your values, and do you consistently interpret your thoughts and feelings through a state of conscious awareness, as opposed to living on auto-pilot? Do you consistently grab what makes you uncomfortable by the horns and wrestle with it, or do you suffer the puncture silently and let it fester? Remember, consistency in this sense is not an a priori value (For those of you who need translation, a priori is Latin for in and of itself.) You can consistently do things that are not in your best interest. This is called self-sabotage. Are you consistently your own worst enemy?

Now turn to the second meaning of consistency and take a look at your texture, the way you feel to yourself and others, your psychic state. Are you hard, like a rock, soft like a down comforter, mushy like oatmeal, or solid like chocolate, pliable like bread? The concept of texture provides an informative metaphor for self-examination. Determining your texture is somewhat like taking your temperature, only you have a much richer scale with more gradations on which to indicate your position.

Now, combine the two meanings of consistency, and try to determine whether your texture changes in response to external circumstances, or whether you remain, well, consistent. Does your usually cool bowl of pudding bubble and boil when someone says or does something that makes you angry? Do you morph from Manhattan schist into jiggly jello when a parent or other authority figure wags a finger at you and offers advice in the form of commands? And if changes such as these do occur, how long does it take you to cool down or resolidify?

This is all food for thought, but I suppose I'm overcooking the metaphor.

If you'd care to, please share your consistency, in the form of food or any other substance, with me and your fellow readers.

Damage Control or Adaptive Brilliance

Imagine that your company had made a decision in mid-2009 to adopt a new pricing model for 2010 that actually lowered the prices of some of your key products. From July 2009 onward, you had offered the new pricing on an experimental basis to new customers, and given its success, you started in the fall the process of converting existing customers to the new model and offering them more product for the same price they were already paying to preserve your revenue stream. As you neared year-end, some customers were still purchasing your products at your currently advertised higher prices and some of these were in the process of making their 2010 buying decisions. Then, in mid-December, your marketing team inadvertently sent an e-mail to all your existing customers - some who had already paid the higher price, and some who were about to pay it - advertising the new 2010 prices. What would you do?

One strategy would be to back-pedal and try to conduct whatever damage control you could with your customer base. You might contact all your customers again and reference the new pricing as an error. You might take a hard line and not allow any pricing adjustments. Your goal would be to preserve all business contracted - or in process - under the higher pricing model and minimize any loss of revenue from the "mistake." You would try to soothe any customers who complained but you wouldn't allow them to take advantage of the new pricing, because that would cost you money in the short term. The best you could accomplish with this strategy would be to make a bad situation a little less bad.

Or, you could try to capitalize on the "mistake" and turn it to your advantage. You might tell your customers, through a follow-up e-mail and personal phone calls, that you were so excited about your 2010 pricing, you let the cat out of the bag a little early. The e-mail might even have a picture of a cat escaping from a bag. You might also be a little coy and let your customers think that maybe, just maybe, you sent the "erroneous" e-mail purposely, to get their attention and to try to drive some sales before the end of the year. You might offer to convert them instantly to the new pricing model, which might give them twice as much product for slightly more than their current spend, and round down any differences to ensure that their costs don't increase by a cent. You might even let them spend a little less now, with the idea that they will spend a little more next year. In other words, you might try to make the most of the situation, create goodwill with your customers, and increase revenue opportunities down the road rather than simply trying to minimize the short-term downside. This is the difference between damage control and adaptive brilliance.

The question is: Do you pull the shades down tighter and try to block the effect of the light, or, having flipped the shade up accidentally, do you go ahead and let the sun shine in?

Small Change

Sometimes one letter makes all the difference.

Stuck in gridlock? Substitute an n for the d, and you have grinlock, a new word I just invented to describe a situation where everyone's face is stuck in a huge smile.

Even if you're really stuck in gridlock, just thinking of grinlock can cheer you up and relieve your tension.

Letters are the DNA of written language. A small change here, or there, and you have a totally different word with perhaps even the opposite meaning of the original.

Perception is the DNA of psychology. A small change here, or there, and you have a totally different situation with perhaps even the opposite characteristics of the original.

Here's a small example with some really big implications. To get into other people's shoes and try to see things from their perspective, trying substituting "u" as in you, for "I". Instead of I think, I feel, I believe, try you think, you feel, you believe.

I'm not suggesting that you ignore or discount your perceptions, just that you question them before you take them at face value and try to determine whether they are accurate, objective, and reflective of the present moment, or whether they are framed, filtered, and altered by past experience that no longer holds relevance; by irrational fears or unnecessary anxiety that interfere with your thoughts; or by raw, unprocessed emotion, the psychic sewage whose stink is so powerful and unbearable that we cannot do anything until we contain it.

Sometimes a small change can make all the difference.

A penny for your thoughts on this post . . .

Time

I was checking statistics for Tom Aplomb last night, and I saw one that disturbed me. Apparently it takes, on average, over 12 seconds for the blog to load on your computers. Twelve seconds? What's wrong with that? It's about the time it takes for you to blink, rub your eyes, think about - but not actually have - another sip of coffee, and presto bingo, there it is. Twelve seconds may not seem like much, but in the world of the everything-must-be-instantaneous-real-time-live-updating-you-have-53-notifications-and-287-more-tweets, it's an eternity.

First, I'd like to know from my readers if anyone has an issue with speed. I'm not promising to change anything. I'd just like to know if anyone finds the page - or pages should I be so honored - slow to load.

Second, I thought I would take this opportunity to muse briefly about how our feelings about time and the value we place on it have changed as technology has increased its role in our lives. Don't worry, this isn't one of those laments that social media sites and mobile phones have degraded the quality of time we spend with people. It's more about how, with technology making some things so easy and inexpensive, and with our tendency to do things like check e-mail and/or ping people frequently throughout the day, we often have more uninterrupted time in the morning when we get to work or at the end of the day.

To me, the question is, what do we do with this time? If I just had more time, I'd read, I'd learn to cook, I'd volunteer at the soup kitchen, I'd save the world. In reality, however, I'm betting that most of us still aren't doing these things, which means lack of time is not a blocking factor but an excuse.

So take some time, today - more than 12 seconds please - to think about what's really holding you back from doing what you want with your free time. You might consult my posts on habits and patterns. I'll try to write one soon on clinging. And remember, it's OK if it turns out you really don't want to read more, learn to cook, volunteer at the soup kitchen, or save the world. You might just want to channel-surf instead. Being honest with yourself about that means you'll be making choices instead of excuses.