This issue is made up of the following sections:

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

1. Personal Effectiveness Tips

Some tips to have a more productive July:

1. Learn to balance the following in your life: Thinking, feeling, and acting (behaving). An imbalance in any of these three areas of your life will cause needless grief. Perhaps you spend too much time thinking (or reading, or planning, or any other passive and related activity) and not enough time taking action towards your goals. Maybe you tend to spend too much time taking action and never stop to truly think about the consequences of behavior unchecked. Or, you may feel like you live on an emotional roller coaster due to your powerful mood swings on a daily or weekly basis.
   1. If you tend to be a person who thinks too much and does too little, practice doing the opposite, and see what happens in your life. Instead of withdrawing into intellectual arguments or theorizing about a certain subject, get off your duff and put your ideas to work.

   2. If you tend to be a person who is impulsive, take time to slow yourself down to consider the consequences in your life. Post sticky notes in places where they can serve as reminders, leave your credit cards at home before you go shopping and take only cash, or avoid having discussions with your significant other when you are in a particularly bad mood.

   3. If you consider yourself someone ruled by your emotions, try to gain some balance by analyzing the power that emotions really have over you (none). Emotions in and of themselves have no real power. Think of them as colors on your palette, and use them accordingly. Each one in and of itself is not more significant than the others, and each one has a use. Painting without any of them lessens the quality of the overall picture. Conversely, painting in one color alone is useless if we want to capture the depth of human nature and experience.

2. Display healthy anger and annoyance. It is ok to be angry when you are treated rudely, or when customer service is poor, or when a promise is not delivered on. It is less helpful to let it ruin your night, or to stew in your anger and later take it out on the family pet. When people are rude, call them on their behavior, and as soon as possible. When you are forced to wait an hour to receive your food at the local steakhouse, make certain that the manager knows that this is unacceptable. When service that you are paying for is shoddy or unprofessional, it is perfectly healthy to call the company and complain directly. I see far too many people who tolerate rudeness and poor customer service, all because they did not want to be the person to rock the boat. Maybe the boat needs to be rocked! (And maybe you will make certain that others can avoid being treated as such).

3. Be certain to tend to the important relationships in your life. Be proactive and make time to interact with those that mean the most to you. I just recently attended a family reunion, and met cousins and aunts I never knew I even had! Now I have more quality relationships in my life, and I will make certain that I make them a priority. They are just too important to me to not do so. Remember, it is easy to take the time to send an email, or to make a quick phone call. Doing so on a regular basis greatly enhances the quality of your relationships. The better your relationships, the better quality of life you will lead.

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2. Questions for Growth
1. What have you done in the past month to improve the significant relationships in your life?

2. When was the last time you deliberately raised your personal standards in your life?

3. What prevents you from experiencing more personal satisfaction in your career?

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3. Reality Check

I was driving down the Pennsylvania Turnpike recently, on my way to my family reunion in Cape May, New Jersey, when I found myself becoming perplexed at the way the Turnpike is set up. There are no signs to inform you whether you are headed East or West on the Turnpike (which is disconcerting after driving one hundred miles or so...you have to assume you are headed in the correct direction!), nor are there any shoulders on large portions of the highway. Should you need to pull over, for whatever reason, you are forced to take up the right lane completely. Should you get hungry, your choice of dining establishments is limited. I counted maybe three McDonalds, one to two Burger Kings, and maybe two or three other eateries along the entire length of the Turnpike. Should you desire to eat a burger at McDonalds, you are either out of luck should you get hungry after passing the restaurants along the way or you need to stop and eat preemptively, knowing that you might get hungry down the road. This month's Reality check focuses on those little annoyances that we cheerfully endure in our lives, and how we can change the psyche behind that to increase the quality of living in our lives.

Upon exiting the Turnpike, I first wondered who had overseen the construction of this perplexing causeway. My next thoughts centered on the people that have failed to even put up East-West marker signs. Surely someone else who has traveled through the state has wondered the same thing, and brought this to their attention? Perhaps not. I can imagine a group of construction foreman getting together to plan the project, and nobody remembering that people need signs to let them know that they are headed in the correct direction on the meandering road. To me, this is crazy-a road without adequate signs, without adequate choice and number of eating establishments, without adequate width in certain areas. Though the scenery is beautiful, I failed to see much of it as I found myself checking my location on my atlas through upcoming city names along the Turnpike.

The bigger issue here is that we as a population put up with these petty annoyances in the name of being good citizens. We tolerate government ineptitude every time we visit the DMV (where we wait in long lines and are helped by people whom seem neither enthused nor motivated to make our experience there a good one) but we never do anything to change it. We explain away lost mail or bad service at the post office. We put up with poorly prepared food, shoddy service, general annoyances that are needless and fixable. We elect public officials who have served prison time for distribution of cocaine or who have been charged with racketeering, then complain about local government.

What is wrong with this? Plenty. Though there are certain petty annoyances in life that are unavoidable, many are easily avoided through proper action in the gestation stages. The ultimate consequences of allowing these situations to occur over and over in our lives is a reduced standard of living, where adequate is ok. By raising our standards and by holding out for quality and integrity in our daily lives, we induce small changes that add up to a better quality of life. We become better informed voters, we become more involved citizens, we become shrewd consumers, forcing those that want our money to provide better services and products. The results are a better standard of living, and a better standard of living is something that we all want. So, the more you challenge the status quo, the more you are forcing the world around you to change for the better. And that is an entirely good thing.

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