Easy as...1...2...3

Shoulders back, head up, and a soft smile.

It has been amazing to see how much it changes my life to walk around with my shoulders back, head up, and a soft smile.

My shoulders being back, does not jut chest out like an arrogant pride-man.

My head being up keeps it out of my phone and focused on the people and objects around me.

My smile is not an intense smile like I won the lottery. That smile would be a lie.

That smile would be a lie.

My shoulders are back, where they should be. My head is up, like an adult. My smile is gentle, as if to say, “I am ok and so are you.”

The more I focus on doing these three things as I walk around, the brighter each day is and the happier the people I cross paths with seem to be.

Every time you get up from your chair, give it a try. Roll your shoulders back. Give a gentle exhale and let the tension out. Pick your chin up off your chest. You have a neck for a reason, let it show. Curl the edges of your mouth upwards, smile because you can. The world needs your smile.

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Down and Dirty

My closest friends are the people who are people who are covered in the same crap I am.

When I am down in the dumps, they get right down there with me and join me in it. Whether I am covered in mud, grease, dirt, manure, blood, sweat, or tears. They join me in the crap I am in and they are on my level.

This is how I know they are my friends, they are covered in the same thing I am.

It is hard to judge or feel judged when you are covered in the same crap the person next to you is covered in. But when someone stands at the top of a chasm tossing down a rope to a me and says, “Climb out.” It is hard to feel like they are my friend. It feels more like they want to be my savior.

Who are your friends covered in the same crap you are? Who are you getting dirty with when they are in the middle of their crap?

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Corner

Mass transit is great for getting a lot of people from here to there on the predetermined schedule. In Europe, the mass transit systems more extensive and reliable than we might be familiar with in the United States. However, most of us have at least experienced the yellow cheese wagon buses that took us to and from school during our elementary school days.

No matter what, mass transit is a great resource with a very clear purpose and definition of what it is for.

Likewise we have many things we are for or in favor of. From washing dishes and cooking dinner to getting things done at work and running errands on the weekend. We have many things we are in favor of. We even have people we are in favor of. People we are developing relationships with or maintaining long standing relationships.

We also have people who are in favor of us. People who have helped us grow and mature. Decipher between right and wrong. And people who have helped us when things were not going so well.

These are people who have decided they were for us. They put themselves aside and chose to be for us in small and large ways. The network of people we have in our corner can be as numerous and extensive as the European transit system or as simple as a bus getting school children too and from school on any given day. Either way, the system of these people are in favor us and our success.

Who are you for? Whose corner are you in? Who are you supporting and helping? Who do you have in your corner? Who could you ask to be in your corner?

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How You Doing?

“How has your week been?”

Simple question, and how we respond is what matters. We can respond with an oversimplified answer, ‘good, fine, or bad’. And that will suffice for a surface level conversation or passing greeting.

We can respond in the negative and unload all of the bad things that happened in our week regardless of any good things that might have happened in our week.

We can respond in the positive and blast all the happy-go-lucky positive veneer as if there is not hardly a single thing wrong in our corner of the universe.

Or we can be honest about where we are at and respond with the truth. It might be skewed that day or week depending on the majority of happenings in our week.

None of these responses are empirically right or wrong. When I am feeling antisocial, I will give a surface level response. And when things are generally anything other than really bad, I’ll give a positive response. Maybe it is time for me to be more honest in my responses.

How do you respond? Are you overly positive? Overly negative? Overly shallow? What would it look like to be more honest?

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Chapstick

I have never finished a stick of chapstick.

They have melted in the car or the drying machine. They have been lost in my regular routine and while traveling. I have accidentally thrown them away. And I have loaned them out and they were never returned.

As much as I would like to assume there is some creepy gnome out there with a hoard of partially used chapsticks, I am sure the issue is my ability to keep track of this little tube of lip balmy goodness.

What would it take do you think to finish a stick of chapstick? How much time, concentration, and routine would it take. Would it be the difference of buying some bulky Bluetooth tracker and then making sure it was in my vicinity at all times? Or maybe I need to take the gas station bathroom key approach and attach a one foot long piece of 2x4” to my chapstick.

In comparison, I have finished many sticks of deodorant. I do not struggle with losing them or misplacing them. They are always right where they need to be.

I use deodorant less than I use chapstick. I use chapstick multiple times a day but deodorant, for better or worse, only once a day. Why then do I struggle with losing one but not the other? They are both similarly important. They both require me to be consistent and careful about putting them away in the same place And still. I continually lose one but not the other.

How many other things in my life are like this? How many other things could easily be more useful if I was more careful and attentive to them? What other details am I missing or losing because I am not being careful enough?

How many relationships are you as careful with as you are your deodorant?

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Terminal Beard

There is a phrase referring to beards called the terminal beard length. It is the maximum length a man can grow his beard. This is the longest a given man can grow his beard.

It is not limited by the man’s ability to curate and encourage his beard to grow, but instead it is limited by his genetics. He can’t grow a longer beard because he just does not have the capacity to grow a longer beard.

There is no cream, oil, or balm that he needs. There are no supplements to make it grow longer. There are only genetics, a healthy grooming regimen, and the beard. Most other factors do not matter. Therefore, he is limited to his given terminal beard length.

Similarly, we are limited in our given capacity for friendships and relationships. There are many different hairs of relationships. Short and long, the random gray hair. The hairs that end up knotted even though we just combed them last night. Or even the hair that feels like an iron spike despite the fact that we condition every morning.

There are many hairs and lengths of hairs. But we are still limited by the terminal beard length in the deepest relationships we have. The relationships that stretch all the way out to the very longest points in our beards. We are careful to condition and oil these hairs to keep them from falling out.

Our relational capacity is then limited to our ability to be there for the relationships that matter most to us. We might care about all the hairs in our beard, but we have to stop and invest in the ones longest and strongest.

Who are your friends who mean the most to you? Do they know they are so important to you? What are you doing to curate those relationships so they continue to be your longest strongest hairs?

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Naturally Wrong

I recently realized how deep my preconceived notions colors my interactions with other people. I have a knack for learning people. I don’t necessarily learn all people, but I do learn people close to me whom I think of as friends. I learn coworkers and people I greatly respect. I learn their nuances and schedules and routines. I cannot keep track of everything but I keep track of what I can. Most importantly, I do not do any of this intentionally. My head naturally keeps track of it all. I do not understand why my head does it, it just does. A natural part of my personality. 

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This is great for me because I know when and how I should best communicate with people and what is going to work best in order to connect with them. 

The major drawback of my tendency to track people is the baggage it creates. If my brain is a cargo ship cruising across the ocean of life, the people my mind tracks get a shipping container in aboard the SS Manning’s Mind. As I have more experiences with a person, I slowly fill their container with information. In the moment, the information is useful and accurate. Long term, not always the case. 

Long term, I end up applying static information to dynamic people. Long term, the people in my mind do not get to grow or change. The information now colors how I see them, what I think about them, and how I interact with them. 

Every time I open their shipping container, I see everything in the container colored by static information. Information in dire need of an update. 

These preconceived notions keep me from allowing people to grow. 

These containers are in a terrible need of some spring cleaning.

What is a natural skill you have? What are some benefits of this skill? What are some drawbacks? How are you compensating for the drawbacks of what you do naturally?

Reconceiving,

–JT

Are You Not Entertained?

Someone recently posed the question to me, “What causes your generation to be connected to something?” Essentially, they were trying to figure out how to advertise to me. How to connect to me as a brand or a business. 

How do they advertise to me? How do they sell me something? How do they become my resource for sales and purchases? 

Simply put, “What do they need to do to sell to the iPhone generation?”

I was a little off put and realized, they needed to connect to me by connecting to me. They needed to tell me a story. They needed to bring me a message worth taking in. They needed to connect me to the story of their brand. 

We jokingly talked about how my generation and I could so easily pick up our phone and seemingly tune out a conversation with four or five other people who are all talking. 

I pointed out about how picking up our phone was not tuning out a conversation with four or five other people. It was choosing to engage in a conversation with the 300 people on the other end of our story. 

While I might be connected to a conversation about the weather, the annoying neighbors, work woes, or the funny thing a pet recently did. As soon as I pick up my phone I have real peoples’ stories to join. 

To read.

To watch.

To engage with. 

All of a sudden the surface level conversation about the weather is trivial when compared to the content online. The content of seeing a child take their first steps on social media or the content of the guy I know going through a depression and expressing his angst. When I compare the content linking me to the family who donated all of their Christmas gifts to the needy to someone else’s work woes, I find myself more interested in the family making a difference than the same sad story about work woes. 

I do not think I am justified to pick up my phone as if I have found the social trump card. 

I do think I am expected to be worthwhile in conversation. When I am in a conversation I am leading, it is my job to be worthwhile content. I need to be digging into the conversation and making it worth everyone’s time sitting around the conversation we are having. Is the content I am providing in this conversation more interesting than the weather?

The weather happens to everyone, when is the next time you are going to talk about how you happened to the world around you? When you are in a conversation are you contributing something worthwhile?  

Quality Content,

–JT

On Writing

Over the course of the last eight months I have had moments where it has been hard to come up with topics to write about. I don’t think of this because I want to end my blog, I think of this because I do not want to stop writing. I like writing. It has become a discipline for me to force myself to dig into who I am. Writing has caused me to take time to reflect and dig into how I work. I have found cobwebs in closets needing to be cleaned out. I have found golden nuggets from my childhood. I have found all sorts of different items I am so happy to have dug into. Though not every word has been profound or prolific in every way, every post has been a mild reflection of who I am. 

Every post has forced me to dig in. Not every post has been deeper than the last; but, every post has been a nugget of my own self reflection. I do not consider my writing to be the best work I have ever done. I do consider it to be collectively a success. I am drawing up on a year of writing. 

Last year I never would have thought I could have come this far. However, I am glad to have had this time. Forcing myself to dig deep and continue to be more authentic with myself has caused me to be a better person. I have caused myself to make changes in the way I interact with other people. I have made changes in the way I think about other people. I have become much more observant of my environment and how people and things work together. I am glad to get to do this in a public forum. Having a pseudo public conversation about myself so regularly has cause many private conversations to have to be deeper. To share the deepest parts of myself publicly week after week would exhaust and kill me. Having shared what I have shared, has caused me to pry the lid from many crates I thought I would never open and open crates I never knew I had. 

Writing every week has caused me to push deeper into shallow relationships I was selling short.

Where in your life are you opening up closets, cleaning out the cobwebs, and looking into who you are? Who are you sharing these deeper parts with?

Prying,

–JT

Opinions

Over time I have learned to need and to fit in. I have not often felt like I needed to fit in, whether it be with a mass or a large group. I am somewhat avoidant of large groups in general. I do not generally see the need to be a part of a larger group. I find I am most comfortable in the presence of a few close friends. 

The opinion of these people is paramount to me.

If one of these few people were to say I am pointed in the wrong direction, I would almost immediately adjust course and change direction. 

I do not generally value the opinion and voice of strangers. People I don’t know at all or very little really. I can even think of situations where complete strangers have inserted there opinions into my life completely unsolicited and I have been so repulsed. I am open to conversations about decisions I make. However, to blatantly tell me what to do or how to do what I do without any relationship with me is completely offensive. In the even one of these people were to voice an opinion about me being pointed in the wrong direction. I would reevaluate, analyze, and process their words to find the truth behind what they are saying. (There is always truth behind an opposing opinion, you have to find out what that truth is before embracing or dismissing it.) After analyzing, I would embrace or dismiss, partially or fully, their opinion and move forward accordingly. 

I have not often found value in trying to give strangers a voice in my life. I expect to earn my right to speak into their lives and vice-versa. 

Who’s perspective do you value and hold in high regard? Who’s opinion should you hold in high regard?

Selectively,

–JT