God Help Us

 

by Chairman Joe McDonnell

I'm constantly reviewing my faults to see if I can stifle them. I'm all in favor of Kaizen,  the Japanese concept of continuous improvement. I'm also big on staving off continuous decline. I can't afford professional help, so I've become a self-help junkie.

I don't buy self-help books anymore. I've learned they're mostly strings of anecdotes about how losers have used the method in this book to find success in love, the stock market, or whatever it may be. The method is revealed in the last chapter. You can just read the book reviews to find out what it is.

 I read How To Win Friends and Influence People many years ago. I didn't have to read far because Mr. Carnegie gave away his method in the first chapter. His secret for success is to brownnose the rich and powerful for all you're worth. You do this by finding out what they're interested in and pretending you're interested in it too. Carnegie made sycophancy respectable. 

I don't even bother reading book reviews anymore. I get emails regularly from several self-help gurus. They make their money by selling ads on their web sites. I usually give them a scan. I'm looking for new mental ju-jitsu moves to get a grip on my personal demons. My demons are always trying to bring me down, to interfere with my continuous improvement. I'll use whatever new method I come across and it often helps. But only for a while, because my demons are clever. They mutate.

Procrastination is my demon-king and sloth my abiding sin. When I was still working, I had to go to day-long workshops from time to time to keep up my licensure. I was a social worker. Most of the sessions had to do with work, but one time the hosts threw in a guy who had a new method for getting things done. He was funny and I took copious notes. He said his method would work, but that it took perseverance.  Lack of perseverance is another of my demons.

He was not flogging his book, but I ordered a copy online to prove to myself I was serious. Following Through was full of anecdotes, like all self-help books, but it also contained some interesting methods. If you had a bad habit, say overeating, you would say to yourself, "Want that cookie? Well go ahead, but if you eat one, you have to eat the whole bag." That was a good one, but it didn't work so well for beer. Not for me anyway.

One method I've hung onto is the proximity trick. Say you've started going to the gym. You're faithful for a couple of months, but then your lazy demon convinces you to take a day off, then two. The trick is to at least start doing the easy part of what you don't want to do. You don't want to exercise? OK. Fine. But at least put on your exercise clothes. That's easy. Now that you have your exercise clothes on, how about taking a drive by the gym. Make sure it hasn't burned down. Well, now that you're at the gym....You can see how this works. This method actually works for me.  I hate taking care of correspondence, but if I put the paper, envelope, and stamps in my eating place, the letter will get written. A few grease stains don't matter.

When I was a social worker I ran into lots of worried, stressed out people. I learned pretty quickly it's no use telling people Don't worry, be happy. They can't hear you. During all those workshops I went to, a few themes kept coming up over and over: distraction, awareness, breathing techniques. These things truly work. If you can distract yourself from your worries for a minute, you can step back and put things in perspective. Examine your worries. What's the worst case scenario? Maybe I'll lose some money. Maybe I'll die. But not today. Maybe something better will turn up. Now I'm ready for some deep breathing. Ahhhh.

I'm working on my new book, What? Me Worry. Please send me an anecdote. If I use it, I'll send you a free copy. 

Everything's going to be alright.