This issue is made up of the following sections:

1. Personal Effectiveness Tips
2. Questions for Growth
3. Reality Check

1. Personal Effectiveness Tips

This month's tips include tips to reduce or eliminate stress in your everyday living:

Eliminate life's needless hassles as much as possible. For me these include people who seek out chaos and drama in relationships, telephone solicitations, junk mail, spam emails, long lines in stores, traffic jams, and so on. These hassles serve only to annoy us, and drain valuable energy that we could be utilizing elsewhere in our lives. However, if you instead become proactive in dealing with these hassles, they will become less and less intrusive. This means doing the following:

• Refusing to engage in chaos/drama/gossip with others who are inclined to do so. If they want drama, they can go somewhere else. Simply hang up the phone, or walk away from the conversation.

• How many times have you picked up the phone during dinner, only to feel the chagrin of realizing that you are speaking to a telemarketer peddling magazines or the fruit-of-the-month club? Hang up. Most people try to avoid being rude, or mean, during these solicitations. They listen for ten minutes before saying no, then allow the person on the other end to continue trying to peddle their wares. Simply hang up, or state clearly that you are not interested. But do it early, and move on with your dinner. You will actually be doing them a favor, as you are letting them move on to other potential customers. Your time is too valuable to waste, however.

• Don't bother going through ads and assorted new credit card offers that you receive in the mail. Simply throw them away, without opening them. The ads are usually for services such as blind cleaning, local pizza joints with one day sales, or hemorrhoid treatment centers in your area. Deposit them in the trash, and move on. If you really want another credit card, you will seek them out anyway, right?

• Spam filters are getting better and better these days. Utilize them. I never open emails from people whose return address is gibberish, or if there are multiple misspellings in the subject line, or if they promise enlarged body parts. Instead I hit my spam button, and send them where they belong. It may sound simple, but when you receive thirty to one hundred emails a day, you can waste a good ten to fifteen minutes by opening every email.

• When shopping for groceries, avoid peak shopping days. Weekends are especially bad, and the selection in stores is usually well picked-over by the time you get there. Instead, go shopping during the middle of the week, when you know that the store will be much less busy, the selection will be better, and the checkout lines will be shorter. If you need help determining down-times for your local grocer, just ask the manager next time you shop. An additional bonus is that you can usually avoid those maniacal shoppers who spend thirty minutes at the checkout counter, armed with dozens of coupons.

• Nobody likes traffic jams, myself included. If possible, find at least two alternate routes home from work. If there is no way to avoid traffic jams, spend your time productively by listening to books on tape, or by catching up on a phone call to a friend you've been meaning to make. An hour-long traffic jam can be made much more tolerable if you take advantage of that time to do other things.

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2. Questions for Growth
1. How much time do you spend per week on activities that enrich the quality of your life?

2. What activities in your life can you delegate to others (cleaning, cooking, laundry, lawn care, accounting, etc) to free up more time to pursue the activities that are enjoyable (spending time with family and friends, working out, etc)?

3. It is now April, 2004. We are one third of the way through the new year. How many of your resolutions have you worked towards thus far? If you haven't, what is stopping you?

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3. Reality Check

What is perspective, and why is it so important? Perspective, as defined by the American Heritage Dictionary, is "the relationship of aspects of a subject to each other and to a whole." For most of us, perspective is limited through immersion in daily hassles. It is also narrow in scope due to the pursuit of a better job, more money, a bigger house, more fame, etc.

I believe that the ability to behold true perspective allows us the privilege of understanding what existence is really about. When our perspective is narrow in focus, to the point that all we see is that which pertains to our own lives, we become more detached interpersonally from one another. When our perspective is too broad in focus, we arrive at a point where we become overwhelmed with the burden of understanding the givens of existence.

What is most important is the ability to find a middle ground with respect to life perspective. Humans are more selfish than altruistic by nature (which is adaptive), but if life is only about our needs and wants, or if our perspective is the sole source of trusted information in our lives, we are in trouble.

What does this mean in your life? It means that understanding the big picture is the basis for living a better, more effective, more passionate life. Life is full of things much bigger than ourselves, and taking ourselves too seriously only serves to cause us to lose focus in this regard. It usually takes a tragedy of some sort for us to truly understand what life priorities matter most (remember 9/11, when family became most important in our lives, and when the concept of sacrifice became a daily principle?), but it doesn't have to be that way. We CAN understand the big picture in everyday life, and seldom is it about us and our needs. True perspective breeds humility, and humility, whether we like it or not, is an emotion that we should be experiencing on a daily basis. The more we understand this principle, the more grounded we become, and building our foundations from the ground up is a solid way to produce lasting changes in our lives.

This newsletter is dedicated to the memory of Michael R. Breschi

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