Bulletproof
Ciao Belli Babes,
Chris here taking enlightened finger to observant keyboard to write to you about creating a bulletproof life.
First off, Let’s admit that life has ups and down that are simply inherent to life. One day the sun is shining and the next it rains. Lovely people come into our lives and leave us through no fault of anyone’s.
We have joys and we have sorrows but when life seems to become more about sorrows than joy, we have to start realizing that we must do something about it.
There are some simple truths that, if we follow them, make life conquerable and fun. If we don’t, we lose more than we win.
Some of the tricks of life are surprising.
1. Ethics.
Yes, I know that ethics seem to be out dated as criminals have risen to the top of governments, entertainment and too many other industries. A lack of ethics is what is killing our culture and planet today.
What are ethics? Ethics are the the things a person does to align himself with actual long term survival vs. perceived short term gain that harms others.
In life we make decisions. How do we know they are correct?
What makes a decision more right than wrong is whether it creates more survival across all of life than harm.
Bombing another country for their resources may bring short term gain but it engenders an unwillingness to work with us in other countries. It engenders hate and fear. Any despot who has tried to rule through hate and fear has come to an unpleasant end.
Working with people to gain support for positive goals and enlightening them as to why these goals are a win win makes you respected and a valuable ally.
This is just one example. You have all areas of your life. Going through and making sure your decisions align more with survival than destruction for yourself and everyone in your life, makes you bulletproof.
2. Communication
What is communication anyway? Some people think that communication is talking. Have you seen news anchors and talk show hosts? They talk over each other shamelessly and interrupt in the rudest possible manner.
When I was a kid, I was taught that interrupting someone was the gravest possible social blunder.
Communication goes both ways. It is not shutting down someone because they disagree with you.
Communication involves actually listening to the other person despite what you think of what they are saying and understanding it fully. Then you acknowledge what they said and say what you want. Simple really.
But it is amazing how many people on this planet refuse to actually communicate.
Do NOT use news broadcasters or television talking heads as an example of communication. They, of all people have no clue what real communication is.
Good communication skills make you bulletproof.
3. Simplicity
When things get crazy, it is tempting to fall into complexities. Problems, when you look at them can seem so intricate that you cannot sort them out.
All problems start somewhere. There is one thing that went wrong and a bunch of other stuff followed.
You don’t have to solve the bunch of other things, all you have to do is find what went wrong in the first place and fix that. Everything else will fall into place.
Let’s take an example:
You are going along in life and you forget to check the oil in your car. This goes on for months and suddenly one day, on the freeway, your engine seizes up leaving you stranded in the middle of the freeway.
This gives you a huge slew of problems. You have to get off the freeway safely. You have to get your car towed, You have to get another car to see you thorough the period of repair. You have to make sure the mechanic doesn’t rip you off and the problems multiply out from there.
Ok, so what went wrong first? You forget to check your oil.
You then put a sticky note in your new car reminding you to check the oil regularly and take care of any other maintenance, and the huge slew of potential new problems is suddenly solved.
Sometimes the problem is not that you did something wrong. There are people whose goals in life are to make things go wrong. Sometimes it is not what but who is the problem, This brings me to my next point.
4) People who bring you down
I am not talking about someone who is going through a bad patch. And I am not talking about someone who is trying to point out pro survival activities. I am talking about a few sets of people.
One is the person who is always negative. Generally their lives are pretty crappy and they love telling you how victimized they are while offering themselves up as willing victims to anyone who comes along.
Another type of person just cannot have you doing well and will covertly tear you down every chance they get.
You know the type. They compliment you but you feel like you have been slapped.
Then there are those who refuse to handle their shit. Most people who have trouble just need proper information about handling it and they come up the line. The people who refuse to handle their shit take any suggestion you have and try to prove to you that it won’t work.
They “know best” but they are living in the gutter. They are, many times also in the victim category.
Now, I love helping people and this is a virtue that so many of us have. When there is a disaster, it is amazing how many people pitch in to help. It is a natural reaction.
When you try to help people who suck the life right out of you then make you wrong because you failed to help them, you are injuring yourself and everyone who depends on you.
Remember the first bullet point I gave you? Ethics? Ethics includes what is the greater good for you too. It is not ethical to sacrifice yourself to people who would destroy you despite how they beg and plead for your “help”. Some of them use that very characteristic, the desire to help, to destroy you.
Watch out for that and when someone has proven that they will not handle their shit or stop tearing you down or in some way injuring you and others, purge them ruthlessly from your life closing your ears to the screams about how desperate they are and how mean you are for deserting them. It is just another ploy.
When you look at the good you do on a daily basis and as a natural phenomenon inherent in you as a being, understand that someone who sucks your attention and makes you sick and upset is stealing your potential help from others who would profit from it and is thus wasting it.
Help is such a beautiful and precious commodity. It is sometimes scarce. Wasting help is a sin of magnitude and making someone feel that their help is useless so that they stop helping is a crime against humanity.
Invest your precious help in those who will use it wisely or at least those who are really trying.
Don’t let someone Destroy your help. It is not ethical.
5) Plant future “Pleasure Bombs”
There is nothing like something great to look forward to to pull you happily through the time stream and into the future.
When my kids were little, we loved making future plans. We would plan parties and create day trips that were so exciting to us. These gave us wonderful things to look forward to. We always had several fun things on the calendar.
Somewhere along the line I came up with the idea of future pelasure bombs. These are things that you plant in the future and that give you maximum pleasure when they arrive.
One time I was starting to get really busy. I could not plan days out much unless they were spur of the moment. So occasionally I would order Godiva chocolates to be delivered a month or two in advance. I would then forget I had ordered them and when they arrived, it was a happy surprise.
Pleasure bombs don’t have to be expensive. They can be simply a morning spent window shopping or getting your nails done with friends.
It can be a beautiful day at the beach or hiking. It can be a new restaurant for lunch. Or it can be sitting on your sofa with kids fresh from the tub wrapped up in blankets and watching a kid movie together.
Pleasure bombs are those things you plan that bring you together and make you celebrate life.
When I first met my husband, we had a lot of great things going on. We would make a point of celebrating these things. At one point a friend told me “You two are always celebrating”. I looked at it and agreed. We celebrated even small things and they were pleasure bombs.
Whatever you have going on, pleasure bombs are important.
In my last article about Not Giving a Shit, I discussed the happy/unhappy ratio of life. Any area where there is more unhappy is an area we will shy away from and the memories associated with that area will be painful. The areas we gravitate to are the happy areas.
If there is an area that you want to move toward but there is too much unhappy, you MUST overbalance it with happy.
If your marriage is unhappy, flood it with happy. This goes for all of life. Flood all areas with happy. Create happy everywhere you go. The unhappy will still force its way in but when it does you will be armed with happy and the unhappy will not ruin your life.
To this point, however is my earlier point about people. If you are unfortunate enough to have one of the people in number 4 above in your life, you will not ever be able to counter the unhappy as some people deal only in unhappy. Leave that and find someone who can create happiness.
I know this seems like a lot but there are only 5 bullet points here. You have my personal guarantee that if you go through your life and iron out these points, you will be pretty damned bullet proof and your life will be a LOT happier.
Write me with questions and let me know how it goes.
XO Chris
If you need help with handling ethics, click here for a free online course.
For help on communication, click here.
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