COMMON SENSE CURE TO EVERYTHING (NO KIDDING!)
By
Bill Cottringer



Okay everything—get ready to be cured and by just a few simple but profound acts. Here is my mini self-development toolbox answer to the smallest micro-computer chip: Getting maximum by doing minimum.

1. Admit that you know very little compared to all there is to know.
2. Re-define the most important things in your life to get more of them.
3. Manage time better instead of being the dog that gets wagged by its tail.
4. Get balanced in many things and committed in a few.

Let’s explore these four commonsense cure bits.

KNOWING

Stop and think about this basic reality: We can work really hard to gather all the factual information that is available to help know something to be true with certainty, but in the end we must make a leap in faith in trusting it to be so. Even our perceptions are questionable, as evidenced in the proliferation of startling color and motion optical illusions available for viewing on-line. And all the other ways of knowing are open to mistakes.

All the most successful people I know reveal that their real success started when they finally admitted to themselves how little they really knew compared to all there is to know. This self-confronting, humble admission always starts a productive allegiance to being a perpetual student that brings an abundance of learning and eventual big-time success. The main difficulty to overcome is pride and ego, which work very well to keep you from getting to this liberating point. Where every you are keep trying.

REDEFINING

How you define something helps determines how much or how little of it you have. How you define the most important things like truth, happiness, rightness, love, success, and peace of mind accounts for the lion’s share of the quality of your life. If you define success generally as the accomplishment of lofty goals, or specifically as money, power and status, you may not get those things because they may not be under your control.

The more you focus on the here and now moment and making your best effort to use your special talents and knowledge in whatever you are doing right now—whether it be parenting, listening, writing, reading, having a conversation with a friend, managing employees, teaching students or playing by yourself—to make a positive impact on the situation, the more the little successes will pile up into big ones. That is the only way to get your pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. There are no shortcuts to success. Even this simple little common sense cure takes time and is hard to apply.

MANAGING TIME

Probably the one important resource that is equally distributed to everyone is the one that is misused by most. Be honest here—If you were given a dime for every hour you have used wisely in your life and had to donate a penny for every minute you have wasted, would you be rich or poor? The simple truth is that the people who develop the self-discipline to manage time well, end up being the most successful, any way you define the term. Being master of the clock equates to being master of your life.

The single best common sense cure to managing time better will probably seem a little far out. But never-the-less, the more you view time by clocks and calendars as mechanical and sequential events from past to present to future, the less of it you have. When you realize time is much more psychological than just a second, minute, hour, day, week, month or year, the seconds magically expand and become eternal years. By being present in the now moment and avoiding wasting time walking down memory lane or day-dreaming off into the future, you can get more done than you can imagine and work more on this common sense cure to everything!

BALANCING

The trick here is to identify the few most important things in your life—family, friends, health, wealth, work, eating, church, exercise, hobbies, recreational play, community, sports or whatever, and commit to those things 100% without holding anything back. The only judgment involves whether they are healthy for you and reflect your core values. In the beginning it is a good idea to see how much time you spend doing these things. It usually isn’t enough.

With the energy and time you have left over from commitment, invest it into trying to reach a balance between the extremes of things like talking and listening, working and playing, doing and being, giving and taking, and being selfish and unselfish. A balanced position in life helps you see further in both directions, including up, down and all around. This is the exact viewpoint where I finally learned to turn my failures into successes. Being unbalanced caused me too many bruises and broken bones, literally (boating accident a year ago causing four torn ligaments in my left knee that still give me fits!).

Start the common sense cure to everything, by way of knowing more by admitting how little you know, redefining key words to get more of the good things in life, managing time better by taking advantage of its psychological nature, and get more committed and better balanced for a bigger viewpoint. You will be successfully redefining success to have more of it. That is the common sense cure for everything.

William Cottringer, Ph.D. is President of Puget Sound Security, Business Success Coach, Sports Psychologist, Writer and Photographer from Issaquah, WA. He is author of You Can Have Your Cheese & Eat It Too and The Bow-Wow Secrets: How Dogs Live Simple Lives & people Don’t. He can be reached for questions and comments at (425) 454-5011 or bcottringer.pssp.net