Responding To Failure Quotes

What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness. Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering and I responded… sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.

We don’t like delayed responses, but businesses aren’t meant to be short-term.

Weak and overwhelmed individuals respond to others' success by attacking it.

Failure is so common a human experience that what distinguishes us from one another is not that we fail but rather how we respond when we do.

People didn't realize it, but they needed myths to survive, just as much now as when their forebears were alive. Perhaps more. Mythology embodied the world's dreams, helped to make sense of the great human problems. Just as the dreams of individuals exist to give subconscious support to their conscious lives, so do myths serve as society's dreams. They uncover the dark, hidden places where mysteries dwell and can turn to nightmare if left untended. They make sense of injustice in archetypal terms. They give men and women a blueprint for how they may respond to success or failure, tragedy or joy.

People don't become leaders because they never fail. They become leaders because of the way they respond to failure.

What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness. Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded… sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.

So here’s something I know to be true, although it’s a little corny, and I don’t quite know what to do with it: What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness. Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering and I responded … sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.

Failure does not shape you; the way you respond to failure shapes you.

That is what lower performers do; they make others wrong for doing what is necessary in order to make themselves feel okay about doing nothing! The highest performers—the winners—respond by studying successful people and duplicating success.

If you punish people too much for failure, then they will respond accordingly and the innovation you will get will be very incrementalist. Nobody's going to try anything bold for fear of getting fired or punished in some way. The risk/reward must be balanced, in favor of making bold moves.

Responding to a moderator at the Sydney Writers Festival in 2008 (video), about the Spanish words in his book: When all of us are communicating and talking when we’re out in the world, we’ll be lucky if we can understand 20 percent of what people say to us. A whole range of clues, of words, of languages escape us. I mean we’re not perfect, we’re not gods. But on top of that people mis-speak, sometimes you mis-hear, sometimes you don’t have attention, sometimes people use words you don’t know. Sometimes people use languages you don’t know. On a daily basis, human beings are very comfortable with a large component of communication, which is incomprehensibility, incomprehension. We tend to be comfortable with it. But for an immigrant, it becomes very different. What most of us consider normative comprehension an immigrant fears that they’re not getting it because of their lack of mastery in the language. And what’s a normal component in communication, incomprehension, in some ways for an immigrant becomes a source of deep anxiety because you’re not sure if it’s just incomprehension or your own failures. My sense of writing a book where there is an enormous amount of language that perhaps everyone doesn’t have access to was less to communicate the experience of the immigrant than to communicate the experience that for an immigrant causes much discomfort but that is normative for people. which is that we tend to not understand, not grasp a large part of the language around us. What’s funny is, will Ramona accept incomprehension in our everyday lives and will greet that in a book with enormous fury. In other words what we’re comfortable with out in the outside world, we do not want to encounter in our books. So I’m constantly, people have come to me and asked me… is this, are you trying to lock out your non-Dominican reader, you know? And I’m like, no? I assume any gaps in a story and words people don’t understand, whether it’s the nerdish stuff, whether it’s the Elvish, whether it’s the character going on about Dungeons and Dragons, whether it’s the Dominican Spanish, whether it’s the sort of high level graduate language, I assume if people don’t get it that this is not an attempt for the writer to be aggressive. This is an attempt for the writer to encourage the reader to build community, to go out and ask somebody else. For me, words that you can’t understand in a book aren’t there to torture or remind people that they don’t know. I always felt they were to remind people that part of the experience of reading has always been collective. You learn to read with someone else. Yeah you may currently practice it in a solitary fashion, but reading is a collective enterprise. And what the unintelligible in a book does is to remind you how our whole, lives we’ve always needed someone else to help us with reading.

Being forced to confront the prospect of failure head-on—to study it, dissect it, tease apart all its components and consequences—really works. After a few years of doing that pretty much daily, you’ve forged the strongest possible armor to defend against fear: hard-won competence. Our training pushes us to develop a new set of instincts: instead of reacting to danger with a fight-or-flight adrenaline rush, we’re trained to respond unemotionally by immediately prioritizing threats and methodically seeking to defuse them. We go from wanting to bolt for the exit to wanting to engage and understand what’s going wrong, then fix it.

A human being can choose what to do, what to become. We are all free. No one but you can decide what you make of your life. If you let other people decide how you live, that is, again, a choice. It would be a choice to be the kind of person other people expect you to be. Obviously if you make a choice to do something, you might not always succeed in doing it. And the reasons why you don't succeed may be completely outside your control. But you are responsible for wanting to do that thing, for trying to do it, and for how you respond to your failure to be able to do it. Freedom is hard to handle and many of us run away from it. One of the ways to hide is to pretend that you aren't really free at all. If Sartre is right, we can't make excuses: we are completely responsibile for what we do every day and how we feel about what we do. Right down to the emotions we have. If you're sad right now, that's your choice, according to Sartre. You don't have to be sad. If you are sad, you are responsible for it. That is frightening and some people would rather not face up to it because it is so painful. He talks about us being 'condemned to be free'. We're stuck with this freedom whether we like it or not.

Smith felt distressed at the failure to respond in kind and interpreted it as failure on his own part. He realized miserably that, time after time, he had managed to bring agitation to these other creatures when his purpose had been to create oneness.

Every morning, he would bring her a boulder and have her try to cut it in half with the Rippling Sword. Every morning, she failed, and he took the stone away, only to bring a new one the next day. She’d thrown her training sword aside in disgust. “I can’t do it,” she had said. “Been waiting for you to say that,” he’d responded. He had taken her to a cave behind a waterfall, where he had kept all of the stones she had tried and failed to cut. There were the marks of her failure: slashes in the rocks where her madra had cut. The scars started faint, but they got wider and deeper. And the stones got bigger. “This is what you did yesterday,” he’d said, pointing to the largest rock, the one with the deepest cut. “I can’t wait to see what you do tomorrow.

You are not judged by your success, but rather, how you respond to your failures.

Errors become mistakes when we perceive them and respond to them incorrectly. Mistakes become failures when we continually respond to them incorrectly.

Failure exists. Yes! Failure exists. Don’t expect to meet all your expectations in life; however, expect to do everything you must do to realize your expectations and success. These two things success and failure have in common; they both responds to uncertainty and they are triggered by action.

In the statistical gargon used in psychology, p refers to the probability that the difference you see between two groups (of introverts and extroverts, say, or males and females) could have occurred by chance. As a general rule, psychologists report a difference between two groups as 'significant' if the probability that it could have occurred by chance is 1 in 20, or less. The possibility of getting significant results by chance is a problem in any area of research, but it's particularly acute for sex differences research. Supppose, for example, you're a neuroscientist interested in what parts of the brain are involved in mind reading. You get fifteen participants into a scanner and ask them to guess the emotion of people in photographs. Since you have both males and females in your group, you rin a quick check to ensure that the two groups' brains respond in the same way. They do. What do you do next? Most likely, you publish your results without mentioning gender at all in your report (except to note the number of male and female participants). What you don't do is publish your findings with the title "No Sex Differences in Neural Circuitry Involved in Understanding Others' Minds." This is perfectly reasonable. After all, you weren't looking for gender difference and there were only small numbers of each sex in your study. But remember that even if males and females, overall, respond the same way on a task, five percent of studies investigating this question will throw up a "significant" difference between the sexes by chance. As Hines has explained, sex is "easily assessed, routinely evaluated, and not always reported. Because it is more interesting to find a difference than to find no difference, the 19 failures to observe a difference between men and women go unreported, whereas the 1 in 20 finding of a difference is likely to be published." This contributes to the so-called file-drawer phenomenon, whereby studies that do find sex differences get published, but those that don't languish unpublished and unseen in a researcher's file drawer.

If I were to start a file on things nobody tells you about until you’re right in the thick of them, I might begin with miscarriages. A miscarriage is lonely, painful, and demoralizing almost on a cellular level. When you have one, you will likely mistake it for a personal failure, which it is not. Or a tragedy, which, regardless of how utterly devastating it feels in the moment, it also is not. What nobody tells you is that miscarriage happens all the time, to more women than you’d ever guess, given the relative silence around it. I learned this only after I mentioned that I’d miscarried to a couple of friends, who responded by heaping me with love and support and also their own miscarriage stories. It didn’t take away the pain, but in unburying their own struggles, they steadied me during mine, helping me see that what I’d been through was no more than a normal biological hiccup, a fertilized egg that, for what was probably a very good reason, had needed to bail out.

Climate change is occurring and is effectively irreversible on timescales that are meaningful to us. Our failure to prevent or even to respond significantly reflects the impoverishment of our systems of practical reason, the paralysis of our politics, and the limits of our cognitive and affective capacities.

People have explained U.S. failures to respond to specific genocides by claiming that the United States didn’t know what was happening, that it knew but didn’t care, or that regardless of what it knew, there was nothing useful to be done. I have found that in fact U.S. policymakers knew a great deal about the crimes being perpetrated. Some Americans cared and fought for action, making considerable personal and professional sacrifices. And the United States did have countless opportunities to mitigate and prevent slaughter. But time and again, decent men and women chose to look away. We have all been bystanders to genocide. The crucial question is why.

It’s no different in the spiritual realm. Our failures don’t have to define us. It all depends on how we respond. If we curse our luck, blame others, and fail to take responsibility, we’ll continue to fail. But if we face the facts, accept responsibility, and humbly get back on the right path, our failures can lay the groundwork for future success.

After enough failed attempts to rescue myself, I finally realized that I am my own worst first responder.

Unfortunately, Susan was not the only one who noticed Ricky's eyes on her; Patty was growing increasingly frustrated by his failure to respond to her overtures, or the reason

How did you act when all was not good? Did you rise to the challenge? Did you display grit, resilience, and integrity in your response? Character isn't about being perfect or always doing the right thing. Character is how you respond to your own failures. It’s when you screw up and life hits you in the mouth that you have an opportunity to reveal your inner strength.

You are a Jew?' the Dalai Lama asked him. When Kevin said yes, His Holiness said, 'Judaism and Buddhism are very much alike. You should learn more about both and become a better Jew.' I envy that. My tradition has a hard time blessing strong bonds to other traditions, especially those whose truths run counter to our own. We like people to make a conscious choice for Christ and then stay on the road they have chosen, inviting other people to join them as persuasively as they can. It is difficult to imagine a Christian minister talking to a Buddhist who has spent years studying a Christian concept and then telling him to go become a better Buddhist. In some circles, that would constitute a failure on the minister's part, a missed opportunity to save a soul. This is another way in which Buddhism and Christianity differ. Both are evangelistic - what else is a Buddhist mission doing in a suburb of Atlanta? - but the Buddhists seem to understand what Gandhi meant by the 'evangelism of the rose.' Distressed by the missionary tactics of Christians in his country, he reminded them that a rose does not have to preach. It simply spreads its fragrance, allowing people to respond as they will.

Every person fails, nobody achieves everything that he or she set out to achieve. Nobody, regardless of how many personal triumphs they enjoy, no matter how rich or powerful they become, goes through life without encountering failure. You cannot fail unless a person valiantly tries to accomplish a task. The most audacious person readily attempts difficult projects, despite feeling uncertain if they can prevail. Successful people exhibit the character to respond positively to failure. Some failures prove instrumental in altering a person’s outlook, and their revised perspective leads to brilliant successes

Your Creative Autobiography 1. What is the first creative moment you remember? 2. Was anyone there to witness or appreciate it? 3. What is the best idea you’ve ever had? 4. What made it great in your mind? 5. What is the dumbest idea? 6. What made it stupid? 7. Can you connect the dots that led you to this idea? 8. What is your creative ambition? 9. What are the obstacles to this ambition? 10. What are the vital steps to achieving this ambition? 11. How do you begin your day? 12. What are your habits? What patterns do you repeat? 13. Describe your first successful creative act. 14. Describe your second successful creative act. 15. Compare them. 16. What are your attitudes toward: money, power, praise, rivals, work, play? 17. Which artists do you admire most? 18. Why are they your role models? 19. What do you and your role models have in common? 20. Does anyone in your life regularly inspire you? 21. Who is your muse? 22. Define muse. 23. When confronted with superior intelligence or talent, how do you respond? 24. When faced with stupidity, hostility, intransigence, laziness, or indifference in others, how do you respond? 25. When faced with impending success or the threat of failure, how do you respond? 26. When you work, do you love the process or the result? 27. At what moments do you feel your reach exceeds your grasp? 28. What is your ideal creative activity? 29. What is your greatest fear? 30. What is the likelihood of either of the answers to the previous two questions happening? 31. Which of your answers would you most like to change? 32. What is your idea of mastery? 33. What is your greatest dream?

For a happy life,it's best we should ignore &overlook things,people,incidents,affairs & matters.It is not necessary that we show a reaction to everything. Step back & ask yourself if the matter is really worth responding to.

For example, as Selye seems to suggest, we cannot control anyone’s reactions but our own. Therefore, we shouldn’t work to please others or to gain their approval; we must, instead, set our own goals and work to satisfy those. When faced with setbacks or failures, we mustn’t blame others; assigning blame keeps us focused on things over which we have no power. Instead, we can respond to misfortune by learning more, working harder, and being more creative.

It is important you understand how fear affects you and how it drives human behavior so you can start to see situations and people accurately and respond more appropriately. When someone is behaving badly, attacking you, or being defensive, critical, or judgmental, it is not really about you. Fear is the real reason people behave badly. Their fears make them selfish, defensive, mean, and grouchy. Every time someone is behaving badly, step back and ask yourself, “What is this person afraid of? What fear inside me is driving my reaction to their attack? What am I afraid of?” When you can accurately see the fear behind their behavior, and yours, you will see the situation for what it really is.

DID may be underdiagnosed. The image derived from classic textbooks of a florid, dramatic disorder with overt switching characterizes about 5% of the DID clinical population. The more typical presentation is of a covert disorder with dissociative symptoms embedded among affective, anxiety, pseudo-psychotic, dyscontrol, and self-destructive symptoms, and others (Loewenstein, 1991). The typical DID patient averages 6 to 12 years in the mental health system, receiving an average of 3 to 4 prior diagnoses. DID is often found in cases that were labeled as "treatment failures" because the patient did not respond to typical treatments for mood, anxiety, psychotic, somatoform, substance abuse, and eating disorders, among others. Rapid mood shifts (within minutes or hours), impulsivity, self-destructiveness, and/or apparent hallucinations lead to misdiagnosis of cyclic mood disorders (e.g., bipolar disorder) or psychotic disorders (e.g., schizophrenia).

Our failures make us who we are; they build our character, we are defined by what we do with them, and how we respond to adversity. Without failure there is no growth, no striving for better, no adjusting, or dusting yourself off to try again.

One of the central tenets of the Western worldview is that one should always be engaged in some kind of outward task. Thus, the Westerner structures his time—including, sometimes, even his leisure time—as a series of discrete programmed activities which he must submit to in order to tick off from an actual or virtual list. One need only observe the expression on his face as he ploughs through yet another family outing, cultural event, or gruelling exercise routine to realise that his aim in life is not so much to live in the present moment as it is to work down a never-ending list. If one asks him how he is doing, he is most likely to respond with an artificial smile, and something along the lines of, ‘Fine, thank you – very busy of course!’ In many cases, he is not fine at all, but confused, exhausted, and fundamentally unhappy. In contrast, most people living in a country such as Kenya in Africa do not share in the Western worldview that it is noble or worthwhile to spend all of one’s time rushing around from one task to the next. When Westerners go to Kenya and do as they are wont to do, they are met with peels of laughter and cries of ‘mzungu’, which is Swahili for ‘Westerner’. The literal translation of ‘mzungu’ is ‘one who moves around’, ‘to go round and round’, or ‘to turn around in circles’.

The person suffering from loneliness anxiety is deeply suspicious. Even the slightest criticism hurts him. He often perceives non-existent deprecation in surface or tangential remarks. Because he feels such grave failure in everything he undertakes, because he constantly strives to raise his level of achievement and win praise and approval and at the same time employs devices and strategies which constantly alienate him from others, eventually he either gives up or responds with aggression to cover up his inner feeling of separation, anxiety, and despair.

But if one assumes that people have a choice in how they respond to external events, in what meaning they attribute to suffering, then one can interpret the constructive response as normal and the neurotic one as a failure to rise to the challenge, as a breakdown in the ability to flow.

Bring to mind a recent memory of a failure or setback. Then work through the following exercise. Notice what emotions are brought up by that memory and where you feel them in your body. How did the self-criticism sound? What words and phrases came up and how did they influence how you felt? How did you then respond to the feelings? Bring to mind someone that you love or respect. If they experienced the same failure, how might you have responded to them differently? Why would you have shown them that respect? How would you want them to perceive the setback in order to get them back on track?

Nassim Taleb writes in his book Fooled By Randomness: In Pharaonic Egypt … scribes tracked the high-water mark of the Nile and used it as an estimate for a future worst-case scenario. The same can be seen in the Fukushima nuclear reactor, which experienced a catastrophic failure in 2011 when a tsunami struck. It had been built to withstand the worst past historical earthquake, with the builders not imagining much worse—and not thinking that the worst past event had to be a surprise, as it had no precedent. This is not a failure of analysis. It’s a failure of imagination. Realizing the future might not look anything like the past is a special kind of skill that is not generally looked highly upon by the financial forecasting community. At a 2017 dinner I attended in New York, Daniel Kahneman was asked how investors should respond when our forecasts are wrong. He said: Whenever we are surprised by something, even if we admit that we made a mistake, we say, ‘Oh I’ll never make that mistake again.’ But, in fact, what you should learn when you make a mistake because you did not anticipate something is that the world is difficult to anticipate. That’s the correct lesson to learn from surprises: that the world is surprising.

How do you stay motivated?” The answer? I create new reasons to keep showing up. The unsuccessful unceasingly suggest, “If I had what [that person] had, I would retire.” But I don't believe this claim for a second. First of all, they don't know if that's true, since they can't tell how they'd respond to success.

As our respondents show when discussing these tensions, the failure of the church to adapt to new cultural realities is a fundamental issue driving the dechurched movement. In short, what worked for churches to attract and keep people in the 1980s or 1990s can be the same practices that drive people away in the 2000s.

Kashmir is India’s greatest moral and political failure. It is here that even the most civilised amongst us begin to make excuses for repression, brutality and violence. It is here that we subsume all that we otherwise celebrate under the demands of freedom, progress, liberalism, liberty and secular ideals. Since 1947, the Indian state has responded to the political aspirations and the social and the legal demands in Kashmir through militarisation, repression, and indiscriminate violence, including, at various times, the denial of democratic rights, the manipulation of elections, and the murder and imprisonment of its political leaders.

One would hope that if the world woke up to such a reality, it would swiftly acknowledge and respond to the disaster—but tragically, the world has neither woken up to the reality nor responded in a way that offers meaningful hope for the poor. It has mostly said and done nothing. And as we shall see, the failure to respond to such a basic need—to prioritize criminal justice systems that can protect poor people from common violence—has had a devastating impact on two great struggles that made heroic progress in the last century but have stalled out for the poorest in the twenty-first century: namely, the struggle to end severe poverty and the fight to secure the most basic human rights.

When people tell me population is the number one environmental problem we face today, I always respond that population is by no means primary. It’s not even secondary or tertiary. First, there’s the question of resource consumption […]. Second is the failure to accept limits, of which overpopulation and overconsumption are merely two linked symptoms.

Ava was blessed with amazing beauty but was academically challenged. Angelina tried to give her a quick introduction to computers but was horrified at Ava’s lack of knowledge and complete failure to understand. Ava called the CD drawer the cup holder and honestly thought it was her holding her coffee or drink when typing. She thought the monitor was the telly and the mouse was the roller. She kept exiting programmes instead of closing documents and kept deleting items and forgetting to save things. Things happened Angelina’s computers that never happened before: programs failed to respond and the computer kept crashing. She typed e-mails and then printed them and put them in an envelope to post them, Angelina was speechless. She even killed a machine by constant abuse for the week. It just died the screen went blank and a message came up of fundamental hard drive failure, the monitor went black and the keyboard and mouse went dead and could not be restored. It went to the computer scrap yard, RIP. Angelina ran her out of the IT dept in their firm terrified she’d cause any more mayhem. She was the absolute blonde bombshell when it came to computers

your fellow human beings, you will find it hard to ignore the fact that very few people are happy, fulfilled, and leading purposeful lives. Most of them seem unable to cope with their problems and the circumstances of daily living. The majority, settling for the average, have resigned themselves to “just getting by.” Resignation to mediocrity has become a way of life. As a result, feelings of inadequacy cause people, quite humanly, to blame society, other people, circumstances, and surrounding conditions for their failures and disappointments. The idea that people and things control their lives is so thoroughly ingrained in their thinking that they normally will not respond to logical arguments that prove otherwise. William James, the eminent philosopher and psychologist, once observed that, “The greatest discovery of our age has been that we, by changing the inner aspects of our thinking, can change the outer aspects of our lives.” Wrapped up in this brief statement is the dynamic truth that we are not victims, but co-creators in the building of our lives and the

The hallmark of a psychopath is the failure to feel remorse. However, psychopaths demonstrate other significant behaviors. For example, psychopaths seem unable to read social cues. Hence, to pass as normal, they mimic others. They may be high-functioning intellectually and able to appreciate the difference between right and wrong, but they generally lack the ability to weigh risk or recognize quid pro quo. They rarely form a life plan. They also fail to respond normally to the threat of punishment and don’t grasp the emotional implications of their behavior.

Interesting that is was the heart, even so long ago, that was thought to absorb the effects of your good and bad deeds, like Dorian Gray's scoundrelly picture. It's not the heart that remembers your moral pluses and minuses really - it's the brain. But we can't be convinced of that. No one ever sends his valentine a picture of a brain with an arrow through it; nor, in the case of romantic failure, do we say, "He broke my brain." Maybe that's because, although the brain's in the control tower, it's the heart we can feel responding to our emotions - as in, Be still my beating heart. (Not brain.)

So when your body makes these autonomic physiological changes, it’s because you have associated the future thought of standing in front of an audience delivering a presentation with the past emotional memory of your flawed public-speaking experience. And when that future thought, idea, or possibility is consistently associated with the past feelings of anxiety, failure, or embarrassment, in time the mind will condition the body to respond automatically to that feeling. This is how we continuously move into familiar states of being—our thoughts and feelings become one with the past because we can’t think greater than how we feel.

Pay attention to everything the dying person says. You might want to keep pens and a spiral notebook beside the bed so that anyone can jot down notes about gestures, conversations, or anything out of the ordinary said by the dying person. Talk with one another about these comments and gestures. • Remember that there may be important messages in any communication, however vague or garbled. Not every statement made by a dying person has significance, but heed them all so as not to miss the ones that do. • Watch for key signs: a glassy-eyed look; the appearance of staring through you; distractedness or secretiveness; seemingly inappropriate smiles or gestures, such as pointing, reaching toward someone or something unseen, or waving when no one is there; efforts to pick at the covers or get out of bed for no apparent reason; agitation or distress at your inability to comprehend something the dying person has tried to say. • Respond to anything you don’t understand with gentle inquiries. “Can you tell me what’s happening?” is sometimes a helpful way to initiate this kind of conversation. You might also try saying, “You seem different today. Can you tell me why?” • Pose questions in open-ended, encouraging terms. For example, if a dying person whose mother is long dead says, “My mother’s waiting for me,” turn that comment into a question: “Mother’s waiting for you?” or “I’m so glad she’s close to you. Can you tell me about it?” • Accept and validate what the dying person tells you. If he says, “I see a beautiful place!” say, “That’s wonderful! Can you tell me more about it?” or “I’m so pleased. I can see that it makes you happy,” or “I’m so glad you’re telling me this. I really want to understand what’s happening to you. Can you tell me more?” • Don’t argue or challenge. By saying something like “You couldn’t possibly have seen Mother, she’s been dead for ten years,” you could increase the dying person’s frustration and isolation, and run the risk of putting an end to further attempts at communicating. • Remember that a dying person may employ images from life experiences like work or hobbies. A pilot may talk about getting ready to go for a flight; carry the metaphor forward: “Do you know when it leaves?” or “Is there anyone on the plane you know?” or “Is there anything I can do to help you get ready for takeoff?” • Be honest about having trouble understanding. One way is to say, “I think you’re trying to tell me something important and I’m trying very hard, but I’m just not getting it. I’ll keep on trying. Please don’t give up on me.” • Don’t push. Let the dying control the breadth and depth of the conversation—they may not be able to put their experiences into words; insisting on more talk may frustrate or overwhelm them. • Avoid instilling a sense of failure in the dying person. If the information is garbled or the delivery impossibly vague, show that you appreciate the effort by saying, “I can see that this is hard for you; I appreciate your trying to share it with me,” or “I can see you’re getting tired/angry/frustrated. Would it be easier if we talked about this later?” or “Don’t worry. We’ll keep trying and maybe it will come.” • If you don’t know what to say, don’t say anything. Sometimes the best response is simply to touch the dying person’s hand, or smile and stroke his or her forehead. Touching gives the very important message “I’m with you.” Or you could say, “That’s interesting, let me think about it.” • Remember that sometimes the one dying picks an unlikely confidant. Dying people often try to communicate important information to someone who makes them feel safe—who won’t get upset or be taken aback by such confidences. If you’re an outsider chosen for this role, share the information as gently and completely as possible with the appropriate family members or friends. They may be more familiar with innuendos in a message because they know the person well.

I can't tell you how many times in my life I have been told that I have “control issues”. Historically, this statement has brought me annoyance—the kind of irritation that can only be described as a self-protective reaction to having my behaviours labelled for exactly what they were. Needless to say, these accusations would make me defensive. I'd pull my armour tighter and get out my weapons—anything to protect myself from the truth. I realized, one day, that there were only a few things I could control, and a whole lot of things that I couldn't. I realized that trying to control everything around me was a recipe for failure, because it simply wasn't possible. I wish I could tell you that I "let go" then—that it was a lovely, beautiful spiritual moment, and now I'm all better. But that isn't true. Because, for me, seeking to control things which can't be controlled isn't a random tick or flaw. It's a stage of communication in the language of my own mind. If I don't listen to the first whispers that tell me I've repressed some emotion or neglected to process some event—then, stage two starts. Every piece of dirt on the floor, every chewing noise, every unexpected obstacle... they all become intolerable. So, I have two choices when this happens. I can allow my desire to control the outside world to turn into trying to control it. Or, I can allow myself to hear what is being said to me—to interpret this strange language that I speak to myself in and respond with compassion. Do I consistently do the wise thing first? No. I forget. And then I remember, somewhere in the middle of neurotically scrubbing a wall. But I remember faster now than I did before, and sometimes I really am able to respond quickly. It's a journey. I'm not perfect. But I am doing the right thing, and I get better at it every time I have the chance to practice. That's what learning and letting go really is—a practice. It's never over. And it never is, and never will be, perfect.

Mankind - proud conqueror and king swings its flag of primal glory to the winds Titans of the power-myth that failed Neanderthal hunger for the flesh of war so frail So weak, so hollow-minded the primat flock responds the jester race submits For each day of war is a failure for man, enslaved in her mordial genes Illusions bleed from their fetid cores, bent to their rotten extremes We, the plague of Terra Firma, nature's grand and last mistake plant the poisoned seed of cancer, set the severed fruits awake Burning like frozen relics in god's archaic graveland Burn the visionaire Kill the ideaologies Mankind must die The doves and the angels return to their graves with flames on their pestilent wings while mushroom-clouds haunt their virginwhite skies to rape their utopian dreams Living the last days of evolution's end from the nest of humanity, the graveland vultures rend

Thoreau writes, ‘The really efficient laborer will be found not to crowd his day with work, but will saunter to his task surrounded by a wide halo of ease and leisure. There will be a wide margin for relaxation to his day. He is only earnest to secure the kernels of time, and does not exaggerate the value of the husk.’ Think of what a beautiful metaphor this is for not mistaking the husk—the outer accoutrements of productivity like busyness, or a full calendar, or a clever auto-responder—not mistaking those for the kernel, the core and substance of the actual work produced. And he then says, ‘Those who work much, do not work hard.’ I love that.” “Ours is a culture where we wear our ability to get by on very little sleep as a kind of badge of honor that symbolizes work ethic, or toughness, or some other virtue—but really, it’s a total profound failure of priorities and of self-respect.

In every area of thought we must rely ultimately on our judgments, tested by reflection, subject to correction by the counterarguments of others, modified by the imagination and by comparison with alternatives. Antirealism is always a conjectural possibility: the question can always be posed, whether there is anything more to truth in a certain domain than our tendency to reach certain conclusions in this way, perhaps in convergence with others. Sometimes, as with grammar or etiquette, the answer is no. For that reason the intuitive conviction that a particular domain, like the physical world, or mathematics, or morality, or aesthetics, is one in which our judgments are attempts to respond to a kind of truth that is independent of them may be impossible to establish decisively. Yet it may be very robust all the same, and not unjustified. To be sure, there are competing subjectivist explanations of the appearance of mind-independence in the truth of moral and other value judgments. One of the things a sophisticated subjectivism allows us to say when we judge that infanticide is wrong is that it would be wrong even if none of us thought so, even though that second judgment too is still ultimately grounded in our responses. However, I find those quasi-realist, expressivist accounts of the ground of objectivity in moral judgments no more plausible than the subjectivist account of simpler value judgments. These epicycles are of the same kind as the original proposal: they deny that value judgments can be true in their own right, and this does not accord with what I believe to be the best overall understanding of our thought about value. There is no crucial experiment that will establish or refute realism about value. One ground for rejecting it, the type used by Hume, is simply question-begging: if it is supposed that objective moral truths can exist only if they are like other kinds of facts--physical, psychological, or logical--then it is clear that there aren't any. But the failure of this argument doesn't prove that there are objective moral truths. Positive support for realism can come only from the fruitfulness of evaluative and moral thought in producing results, including corrections of beliefs formerly widely held and the development of new and improved methods and arguments over time. The realist interpretation of what we are doing in thinking about these things can carry conviction only if it is a better account than the subjectivist or social-constructivist alternatives, and that is always going to be a comparative question and a matter of judgment, as it is about any other domain, whether it be mathematics or science or history or aesthetics.

When you encounter another person…it is as if a question is being put to you. So you must think, What is the Lord asking of me in this moment, in this situation? If you confront insult or antagonism, your first impulse will be to respond in kind. But if you think, as it were, This is an emissary sent from the Lord, and some benefit is intended for me, first of all the occasion to demonstrate my faithfulness, the chance to show that I do in some small degree participate in the grace that saved me, you are free to act otherwise than as circumstances would seem to dictate. You are free to act by your own lights. You are freed at the same time of the impulse to hate or resent that person. He would probably laugh at the thought that the Lord sent him to you for your benefit (and his), but that is the perfection of the disguise, his own ignorance of it…I am reminded of this precious instruction by my own great failure to live up to it recently…

In 1978, [sociologist Albert] Bergesen used Durkheim to illuminate the madness that erupted in Beijing in May 1966, when Mao Zedong began warning about the rising threat of infiltration by pro-capitalist enemies. Zealous college students responded by forming the Red Guards to find and punish enemies of the revolution. Universities across the country were shut down for several years. During those years, the Red Guards rooted out any trace they could find- or imagine- of capitalism, foreign influence, or bourgeois values. In practice, this meant that anyone who was successful or accomplished was suspect, and many professors, intellectuals, and campus administrators were imprisoned or murdered... Over the next few years, tens of millions were persecuted, and hundreds of thousands were murdered. How could such an orgy of self-destruction have happened? Bergesen notes that there are three features common to most political witch hunts: they arise very quickly, they involve charges of crimes against the collective, and the offenses that lead to charges are often trivial or fabricated.

ONCE, a youth went to see a wise man, and said to him: “I have come seeking advice, for I am tormented by feelings of worthlessness and no longer wish to live. Everyone tells me that I am a failure and a fool. I beg you, Master, help me!” The wise man glanced at the youth, and answered hurriedly: “Forgive me, but I am very busy right now and cannot help you. There is one urgent matter in particular which I need to attend to...”—and here he stopped, for a moment, thinking, then added: “But if you agree to help me, I will happily return the favor.” “Of...of course, Master!” muttered the youth, noting bitterly that yet again his concerns had been dismissed as unimportant. “Good,” said the wise man, and took off a small ring with a beautiful gem from his finger. “Take my horse and go to the market square! I urgently need to sell this ring in order to pay off a debt. Try to get a decent price for it, and do not settle for anything less than one gold coin! Go right now, and come back as quick as you can!” The youth took the ring and galloped off. When he arrived at the market square, he showed it to the various traders, who at first examined it with close interest. But no sooner had they heard that it would sell only in exchange for gold than they completely lost interest. Some of the traders laughed openly at the boy; others simply turned away. Only one aged merchant was decent enough to explain to him that a gold coin was too high a price to pay for such a ring, and that he was more likely to be offered only copper, or at best, possibly silver. When he heard these words, the youth became very upset, for he remembered the old man’s instruction not to accept anything less than gold. Having already gone through the whole market looking for a buyer among hundreds of people, he saddled the horse and set off. Feeling thoroughly depressed by his failure, he returned to see the wise man. “Master, I was unable to carry out your request,” he said. “At best I would have been able to get a couple of silver coins, but you told me not to agree to anything less than gold! But they told me that this ring is not worth that much.” “That’s a very important point, my boy!” the wise man responded. “Before trying to sell a ring, it would not be a bad idea to establish how valuable it really is! And who can do that better than a jeweler? Ride over to him and find out what his price is. Only do not sell it to him, regardless of what he offers you! Instead, come back to me straightaway.” The young man once more leapt up on to the horse and set off to see the jeweler. The latter examined the ring through a magnifying glass for a long time, then weighed it on a set of tiny scales. Finally, he turned to the youth and said: “Tell your master that right now I cannot give him more than 58 gold coins for it. But if he gives me some time, I will buy the ring for 70.” “70 gold coins?!” exclaimed the youth. He laughed, thanked the jeweler and rushed back at full speed to the wise man. When the latter heard the story from the now animated youth, he told him: “Remember, my boy, that you are like this ring. Precious, and unique! And only a real expert can appreciate your true value. So why are you wasting your time wandering through the market and heeding the opinion of any old fool?

Self-defense is a universal exception to the state’s monopoly on legitimate violence. State failure drives the self-defense doctrine through the imminence requirement. Private violence is justified where one faces an imminent threat of death or serious bodily harm to which the government cannot respond. The imminence requirement defines that space where the state, regardless of its motives and ambitions, simply cannot help. State failure within the window of imminence is a reality for everyone. But one might expect blacks to be particularly sensitive to it. The window of imminence is often larger in black neighborhoods where various challenges stretch public resources. Certainly state failure is less galling today. Under slavery, Black Codes, and Jim Crow, the state was often just another layer of threat, and reliance on the state for personal security was more obviously an absurd proposition. Today, the malevolent state is thankfully an anachronism. That makes it easier for those ensconced in government bureaucracies to urge reliance on the state and to ignore the continuing failure of government within the window of imminence. But it is sheer hubris for public officials to ignore the inherent limits on state power and claim that they can protect people within a space where that is impossible as a matter of simple physics.

One of the most extraordinary examples of adaptation to immaturity in contemporary American society today is how the word abusive has replaced the words nasty and objectionable. The latter two words suggest that a person has done something distasteful, always a matter of judgment. But the use of the word abusive suggests, instead, that the person who heard or read the objectionable, nasty, or even offensive remark was somehow victimized by dint of the word entering their mind. This confusion of being “hurt” with being damaged makes it seem as though the feelings of the listener or reader were not their own responsibility, or as though they had been helplessly violated by another person’s opinion. If our bodies responded that way to “insults,” we would not make it very far past birth. The use of abusive rather than objectionable has enabled those who do not want to take responsibility for their own efforts to tyrannize others, especially leaders, with their “sensitivity.” The desire to be “inoffensive” has resulted in more than one news medium producing long lists of words, few of which are really nasty, that reporters should avoid using for fear of “hurting” someone. Obviously there are some words that are downright impolite if not always hostile and disparaging, but making everyone sensitive to the sensitivities of others plays into the hands of those who feel powerless.

will respond by reciprocating this desire. The difference between romance and love is that the former never leaves the terrain of desire. The subject seeking romance sees in the other the possibility of the realization of its desire and thereby reduces the love object to an object of desire. This is why romance inevitably produces disappointment. Love, though it disturbs the subject, does not disappoint. In love, one can find satisfaction with the love object. But love also removes the subject from the terrain of desire. Though love necessarily begins with desire, it doesn’t end there. When one falls in love, one falls for the other’s way of enjoying itself, for the other’s satisfaction with its own form of failure, its satisfaction with the absence of the object that would realize desire. Love targets the point at which the subject exceeds itself and is not self-identical. According to Joan Copjec, “when one loves something, one loves something in it that is more than itself, its nonidentity to itself.” 5 We seek love to escape the constraints of our symbolic identity and to enjoy our nonidentity. In the act of love, one abandons oneself. When one falls in love, one loses all sense of oneself and one’s symbolic coordinates. Love is never a good investment for the subject, and this separates it definitively from romance. This is why capitalism necessitates the transformation of love into romance. This transformation allows us to love on the cheap. Many theorists of love, like Jacques Lacan and Alain Badiou, have remarked on love’s inherent disruptiveness. But this is apparent as early as Plato’s approach to the question of love.

What is ADHD, anyway? For those still wondering what ADHD is, here’s the briefest summary I can muster: ADHD shows up in two areas of our brain function: working memory and executive functioning.[7] Working memory allows us to hold more than one thing in our brains at once. If you’ve ever run up the stairs, only to find yourself standing in your bedroom wondering what you came for, you’ve experienced a failure of working memory. Again, everyone experiences this from time to time. People with ADHD experience it nonstop, to the point where it impairs our ability to function normally. Working memory holds onto information until we’re able to use it.[8] In addition to forgetting why we opened the refrigerator, having a leaky working memory means we lose information before our brains can move it to long-term storage. We forget a lot of things before we have a chance to act on them or write them down. Our executive functions, on the other hand, give us the power to delay gratification, strategize, plan ahead, and identify and respond to others’ feelings.[9] That’s some list, isn’t it? In the same way a diabetic’s body cannot effectively regulate insulin, imagine your brain being unable to control these behaviors. This explains why ADHDers’ behavior so often defies norms and expectations for their age group — and this persists throughout their lifespan, not just grade school. ADHD isn’t a gift. It isn’t a sign of creativity or intelligence, nor is it a simple character flaw. And it’s more than eccentric distractibility, forgetfulness, and impulsivity. ADHD is a far-reaching disorder that touches every aspect of our lives. If we leave it unchecked, it will generate chaos at home, at work, and everywhere in between.

Sometimes our heart is moved to tenderness when we consider God's great wisdom with regard to each of us. At other times we can be softened only through suffering. We may then feel utterly destroyed to the point of despairing of life itself. But if, with help from on high, we gather the strength to turn to God at that point, He will find an opening so as to enter our heart with His grace. Nowadays, people are familiar with acute suffering of one kind or another. Pain and suffering have become the common language of humankind. God may well be using this to break through into our hardened and loveless world with His grace and the result would be a spiritual renaissance. He has already changed the lives of so many people, and He can easily change many more, and even extend it to the whole world. We might also be moved by the thought that our life has been nothing but a chain of errors, a chain of betrayals, a long series of failures. We see that nothing in our life is worthy of God and nothing in us is fit to look upon the Face of God. Neither can He look upon us, nor can we stand in His presence. If we turn to God with such awareness He will unfailingly find and opening for His grace. In this way, we can make a new start at any moment of our life, for we know that our God will respond. But if He is to visit man with His grace, He will first require our cooperation. He requires the presence of our human factor, little and weak though it is. He created us out of nothing, but He does not create us anew unless we consent to work with Him. Our tiny human factor is absolutely necessary to Him, so we need to align it with His infinitely great and divine factor, and the miracle of the union of our heart with His grace will then take place.

As I saw it, there was a 75 percent chance the Fed’s efforts would fall short and the economy would move into failure; a 20 percent chance it would initially succeed at stimulating the economy but still ultimately fail; and a 5 percent chance it would provide enough stimulus to save the economy but trigger hyperinflation. To hedge against the worst possibilities, I bought gold and T-bill futures as a spread against eurodollars, which was a limited-risk way of betting on credit problems increasing. I was dead wrong. After a delay, the economy responded to the Fed’s efforts, rebounding in a noninflationary way. In other words, inflation fell while growth accelerated. The stock market began a big bull run, and over the next eighteen years the U.S. economy enjoyed the greatest noninflationary growth period in its history. How was that possible? Eventually, I figured it out. As money poured out of these borrower countries and into the U.S., it changed everything. It drove the dollar up, which produced deflationary pressures in the U.S., which allowed the Fed to ease interest rates without raising inflation. This fueled a boom. The banks were protected both because the Federal Reserve loaned them cash and the creditors’ committees and international financial restructuring organizations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Bank for International Settlements arranged things so that the debtor nations could pay their debt service from new loans. That way everyone could pretend everything was fine and write down those loans over many years. My experience over this period was like a series of blows to the head with a baseball bat. Being so wrong—and especially so publicly wrong—was incredibly humbling and cost me just about everything I had built at Bridgewater. I saw that I had been an arrogant jerk who was totally confident in a totally incorrect view. So there I was after eight years in business, with nothing to show for it. Though I’d been right much more than I’d been wrong, I was all the way back to square one.

We ought to recognize the darkness of the culture of death when it shows up in our own voices. I am startled when I hear those who claim the name of Christ, and who loudly profess to be pro-life, speaking of immigrants with disdain as “those people” who are “draining our health care and welfare resources.” Can we not see the same dehumanizing strategies at work in the abortion-rights activism that speaks of the “product of conception” and the angry nativism that calls the child of an immigrant mother an “anchor baby”? At root, this is a failure to see who we are. We are united to a Christ who was himself a sojourner, fleeing political oppression (Matt. 2:13–23), and our ancestors in Israel were themselves a migrant people (Exod. 1:1–14; 1 Chron. 16:19; Acts. 7:6). Moreover, our God sees the plight of the fatherless and the blood of the innocent, but he also tells us that because he loves the sojourner and cares for him so should we, “for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt” (Deut. 10:18–19). We might disagree on the basis of prudence about what specific policies should be in place to balance border security with compassion for the immigrants among us, but a pro-life people have no option to respond with loathing or disgust at persons made in the image of God. We might or might not be natural-born Americans, but we are, all of us, immigrants to the kingdom of God (Eph. 2:12–14). Whatever our disagreements on immigration as policy, we must not disagree on whether immigrants are persons. No matter how important the United States of America is, there will come a day when the United States will no longer exist. But the sons and daughters of God will be revealed. Some of them are undocumented farm-workers and elementary-school janitors now. They will be kings and queens then. They are our brothers and sisters forever. We need to stand up against bigotry and harassment and exploitation, even when such could be politically profitable to those who stand with us on other issues. The image of God cannot be bartered away, at the abortion clinic counter or anywhere else.

Sexual Excitation System (SES). This is the accelerator of your sexual response. It receives information about sexually relevant stimuli in the environment—things you see, hear, smell, touch, taste, or imagine—and sends signals from the brain to the genitals to tell them, “Turn on!” SES is constantly scanning your context (including your own thoughts and feelings) for things that are sexually relevant. It is always at work, far below the level of consciousness. You aren’t aware that it’s there until you find yourself turned on and pursuing sexual pleasure. Sexual Inhibition System (SIS). This is your sexual brake. “Inhibition” here doesn’t mean “shyness” but rather neurological “off” signals. Research has found that there are actually two brakes, reflecting the different functions of an inhibitory system. One brake works in much the same way as the accelerator. It notices all the potential threats in the environment—everything you see, hear, smell, touch, taste, or imagine—and sends signals saying, “Turn off!” It’s like the foot brake in a car, responding to stimuli in the moment. Just as the accelerator scans the environment for turn-ons, the brake scans for anything your brain interprets as a good reason not to be aroused right now—risk of STI transmission, unwanted pregnancy, social consequences, etc. And all day long it sends a steady stream of “Turn off!” messages. This brake is responsible for preventing us from getting inappropriately aroused in the middle of a business meeting or at dinner with our family. It’s also the system that throws the Off switch if, say, in the middle of some nookie, your grandmother walks in the room. The second brake is a little different. It’s more like the hand brake in a car, a chronic, low-level “No thank you” signal. If you try to drive with the hand brake on, you might be able to get where you want to go, but it’ll take longer and use a lot more gas. Where the foot brake is associated with “fear of performance consequences,” the hand brake is associated with “fear of performance failure,” like worry about not having an orgasm.

The reality is that men are hurting and that the whole culture responds to them by saying, “Please do not tell us what you feel.” I have always been a fan of the Sylvia cartoon where two women sit, one looking into a crystal ball as the other woman says, “He never talks about his feelings.” And the woman who can see the future says, “At two P.M. all over the world men will begin to talk about their feelings—and women all over the world will be sorry.” If we cannot heal what we cannot feel, by supporting patriarchal culture that socializes men to deny feelings, we doom them to live in states of emotional numbness. We construct a culture where male pain can have no voice, where male hurt cannot be named or healed. It is not just men who do not take their pain seriously. Most women do not want to deal with male pain if it interferes with the satisfaction of female desire. When feminist movement led to men’s liberation, including male exploration of “feelings,” some women mocked male emotional expression with the same disgust and contempt as sexist men. Despite all the expressed feminist longing for men of feeling, when men worked to get in touch with feelings, no one really wanted to reward them. In feminist circles men who wanted to change were often labeled narcissistic or needy. Individual men who expressed feelings were often seen as attention seekers, patriarchal manipulators trying to steal the stage with their drama. When I was in my twenties, I would go to couples therapy, and my partner of more than ten years would explain how I asked him to talk about his feelings and when he did, I would freak out. He was right. It was hard for me to face that I did not want to hear about his feelings when they were painful or negative, that I did not want my image of the strong man truly challenged by learning of his weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Here I was, an enlightened feminist woman who did not want to hear my man speak his pain because it revealed his emotional vulnerability. It stands to reason, then, that the masses of women committed to the sexist principle that men who express their feelings are weak really do not want to hear men speak, especially if what they say is that they hurt, that they feel unloved. Many women cannot hear male pain about love because it sounds like an indictment of female failure. Since sexist norms have taught us that loving is our task whether in our role as mothers or lovers or friends, if men say they are not loved, then we are at fault; we are to blame.

Ultimately then, as one gets ready for kundalini awakening, the goal is to help those chakras clear, open, and align. Kundalini will respond with the greatest ease of motion accomplished and will demonstrate how well it knows what to do. As you begin to work through these chakras blockages or energetic reversals, you may find that those struggles look something like this. Blockages for the root chakra may look like low energy, general fear, persistent exhaustion, identity crisis, feeling isolated from the environment, eating disorders, general lack or erratic appetite, blatant materialism, difficulty saving money, or overall constant health problems. For the sacral chakra, blockages or reversals may look like lack of creativity, lack of inspiration, low or no motivation, low or no sexual appetite, feelings of insignificance, feelings of being unloved, feelings of being unaccepted, feelings of being outcasted, inability to care for oneself or persistent and recurrent problems of relationship with one's intimate partners. Blockages may look like identity crises or deficits for the solar plexus chakra, low self-esteem, low or no self-esteem, digestive problems, food intolerance, poor motivation, persistent weakness, constant nausea, anxiety disorders, liver disorder or disease, repeated illnesses, loss of core strength, lack of overall energy, recurrent depression with little relief, feelings of betrayal, For the chakra of the heart, reversals and blockages may seem like the inability to love oneself or others, the inability to put others first, the inability to put oneself first, the inability to overcome a problem ex, constant grudges, confidence issues, social anxiety or intense shyness, the failure to express emotions in a healthy way, problems of commitment, constant procrastination, intense anxiety For the throat chakra, blockages might seem like oversharing, inability to speak truthfully, failure to communicate with others, severe laryngitis, sore throats, respiratory or airway constraints, asthma, anemia, excessive exhaustion, inability to find the right words, paralyzing fear of confusion, nervousness in public situations, sometimes extreme dizziness, physical submissiveness, verba. For the third eye chakra, blockages or reversals might seem like a lack of direction in life, increasingly intense feelings of boredom or stagnation, migraines, insomnia, eye or vision problems, depression, high blood pressure, inability to remember one's dreams, constant and jarring flashbacks, closed-mindedness, fear, history of mental disorders, and history of addiction. For the crown chakra, blockages may look like feelings of envy, extreme sadness, need for superiority over others, self-destructive behaviors, history of addiction, generally harmful habits, dissociations from the physical plane, inability to make even the easiest decisions, persistent exhaustion, terrible migraines, hair loss, anemia, cerebral confusion, poor mental control, lack of intellect.

Now, with all seven of these chakras revolving in the right direction with no blockages whatsoever, your kundalini would not be able to help itself from rising into that state of bliss, which it perceives above. Ultimately then, as one gets ready for kundalini awakening, the goal is to help those chakras clear, open, and align. Kundalini will respond with the greatest ease of motion accomplished and will demonstrate how well it knows what to do. As you begin to work through these chakras blockages or energetic reversals, you may find that those struggles look something like this. Blockages for the root chakra may look like low energy, general fear, persistent exhaustion, identity crisis, feeling isolated from the environment, eating disorders, general lack or erratic appetite, blatant materialism, difficulty saving money, or overall constant health problems. For the sacral chakra, blockages or reversals may look like lack of creativity, lack of inspiration, low or no motivation, low or no sexual appetite, feelings of insignificance, feelings of being unloved, feelings of being unaccepted, feelings of being outcasted, inability to care for oneself or persistent and recurrent problems of relationship with one's intimate partners. Blockages may look like identity crises or deficits for the solar plexus chakra, low self-esteem, low or no self-esteem, digestive problems, food intolerance, poor motivation, persistent weakness, constant nausea, anxiety disorders, liver disorder or disease, repeated illnesses, loss of core strength, lack of overall energy, recurrent depression with little relief, feelings of betrayal, For the chakra of the heart, reversals and blockages may seem like the inability to love oneself or others, the inability to put others first, the inability to put oneself first, the inability to overcome a problem ex, constant grudges, confidence issues, social anxiety or intense shyness, the failure to express emotions in a healthy way, problems of commitment, constant procrastination, intense anxiety For the throat chakra, blockages might seem like oversharing, inability to speak truthfully, failure to communicate with others, severe laryngitis, sore throats, respiratory or airway constraints, asthma, anemia, excessive exhaustion, inability to find the right words, paralyzing fear of confusion, nervousness in public situations, sometimes extreme dizziness, physical submissiveness, verba. For the third eye chakra, blockages or reversals might seem like a lack of direction in life, increasingly intense feelings of boredom or stagnation, migraines, insomnia, eye or vision problems, depression, high blood pressure, inability to remember one's dreams, constant and jarring flashbacks, closed-mindedness, fear, history of mental disorders, and history of addiction. For the crown chakra, blockages may look like feelings of envy, extreme sadness, need for superiority over others, self-destructive behaviors, history of addiction, generally harmful habits, dissociations from the physical plane, inability to make even the easiest decisions, persistent exhaustion, terrible migraines, hair loss, anemia, cerebral confusion, poor mental control, lack of intellect.

SELF-MANAGEMENT Trust We relate to one another with an assumption of positive intent. Until we are proven wrong, trusting co-workers is our default means of engagement. Freedom and accountability are two sides of the same coin. Information and decision-making All business information is open to all. Every one of us is able to handle difficult and sensitive news. We believe in collective intelligence. Nobody is as smart as everybody. Therefore all decisions will be made with the advice process. Responsibility and accountability We each have full responsibility for the organization. If we sense that something needs to happen, we have a duty to address it. It’s not acceptable to limit our concern to the remit of our roles. Everyone must be comfortable with holding others accountable to their commitments through feedback and respectful confrontation. WHOLENESS Equal worth We are all of fundamental equal worth. At the same time, our community will be richest if we let all members contribute in their distinctive way, appreciating the differences in roles, education, backgrounds, interests, skills, characters, points of view, and so on. Safe and caring workplace Any situation can be approached from fear and separation, or from love and connection. We choose love and connection. We strive to create emotionally and spiritually safe environments, where each of us can behave authentically. We honor the moods of … [love, care, recognition, gratitude, curiosity, fun, playfulness …]. We are comfortable with vocabulary like care, love, service, purpose, soul … in the workplace. Overcoming separation We aim to have a workplace where we can honor all parts of us: the cognitive, physical, emotional, and spiritual; the rational and the intuitive; the feminine and the masculine. We recognize that we are all deeply interconnected, part of a bigger whole that includes nature and all forms of life. Learning Every problem is an invitation to learn and grow. We will always be learners. We have never arrived. Failure is always a possibility if we strive boldly for our purpose. We discuss our failures openly and learn from them. Hiding or neglecting to learn from failure is unacceptable. Feedback and respectful confrontation are gifts we share to help one another grow. We focus on strengths more than weaknesses, on opportunities more than problems. Relationships and conflict It’s impossible to change other people. We can only change ourselves. We take ownership for our thoughts, beliefs, words, and actions. We don’t spread rumors. We don’t talk behind someone’s back. We resolve disagreements one-on-one and don’t drag other people into the problem. We don’t blame problems on others. When we feel like blaming, we take it as an invitation to reflect on how we might be part of the problem (and the solution). PURPOSE Collective purpose We view the organization as having a soul and purpose of its own. We try to listen in to where the organization wants to go and beware of forcing a direction onto it. Individual purpose We have a duty to ourselves and to the organization to inquire into our personal sense of calling to see if and how it resonates with the organization’s purpose. We try to imbue our roles with our souls, not our egos. Planning the future Trying to predict and control the future is futile. We make forecasts only when a specific decision requires us to do so. Everything will unfold with more grace if we stop trying to control and instead choose to simply sense and respond. Profit In the long run, there are no trade-offs between purpose and profits. If we focus on purpose, profits will follow.

When you claim victory, you are much more likely to succeed. When you assume failure, you are much more likely to fail. You cannot control what happens, but you can control how you respond to it. Read that again: you cannot control what happens, but you can control how you respond to it. You are not a victim of your circumstances — you are a result of the story you tell yourself.

are capable of expressing boundless emotion, nearly all of which is intentional and nearly all of it drawn from the language of your mind. There is nothing natural about fearing failure, for example. People fail, and they respond to failure from the perspective they hold about failing. Likewise, there is no evidence for feeling guilt when you make a mistake. Your feelings about mistake–making are a product of your thinking. If

Even a dramatic career failure can become a springboard to success if you respond in the right way.

I stood before the group. “Whose fault was this?” I asked to the roomful of teammates. After a few moments of silence, the SEAL who had mistakenly engaged the Iraqi solider spoke up: “It was my fault. I should have positively identified my target.” “No,” I responded, “It wasn’t your fault. Whose fault was it?” I asked the group again. “It was my fault,” said the radioman from the sniper element. “I should have passed our position sooner.” “Wrong,” I responded. “It wasn’t your fault. Whose fault was it?” I asked again. “It was my fault,” said another SEAL, who was a combat advisor with the Iraqi Army clearance team. “I should have controlled the Iraqis and made sure they stayed in their sector.” “Negative,” I said. “You are not to blame.” More of my SEALs were ready to explain what they had done wrong and how it had contributed to the failure. But I had heard enough. “You know whose fault this is? You know who gets all the blame for this?” The entire group sat there in silence, including the CO, the CMC, and the investigating officer. No doubt they were wondering whom I would hold responsible. Finally, I took a deep breath and said, “There is only one person to blame for this: me. I am the commander. I am responsible for the entire operation. As the senior man, I am responsible for every action that takes place on the battlefield. There is no one to blame but me. And I will tell you this right now: I will make sure that nothing like this ever happens to us again.” It was a heavy burden to bear. But it was absolutely true. I was the leader. I was in charge and I was responsible. Thus, I had to take ownership of everything that went wrong. Despite the tremendous blow to my reputation and to my ego, it was the right thing to do—the only thing to do. I apologized to the wounded SEAL, explaining that it was my fault he was wounded and that we were all lucky he wasn’t dead. We then proceeded to go through the entire operation, piece by piece, identifying everything that happened and what we could do going forward to prevent it from happening again.

The automatic mechanism then duplicates this successful response on future trials. It has “learned” how to respond successfully. It forgets its failures, and repeats the successful action without any further conscious thought—that is, as a habit.

Notice something. God did not say, “What are you talking about? I have not been mean to you! I have given you everything you needed to be successful with your talent!” Nor did he say, “Gosh, you are right. It is tough to only have one talent. Here, I will do your work for you.” Neither what God had given this man nor what he had not given him was the issue. The issue was just one thing: what had he done with what was given him? How had he used it? How had he responded to the options that were available to him? Had he tried his best and failed, he would not have been graded on the failure. He was graded simply on whether or not he had acted responsibly with what had been dealt to him.

It is just as easy to imagine yourself successful, as it is to imagine failure, and far more interesting.” Joseph is a dreamer, and a dreamer of dreams; this means he has visions, images, and ideals in his mind, and knows that there is a Creative Power which responds to his mental pictures.

If I were to start a file on things nobody tells you about until you're right in the thick of them, I might begin with miscarriages. A miscarriage is lonely, painful, and demoralizing almost on a cellular level. When you have one, you will likely mistake it for a personal failure, which it is not. Or a tragedy, which, regardless of how utterly devastating it feels in the moment, it also is not. What nobody tells you is that miscarriage happens all the time, to more women than you'd ever guess, given the relative silence around it. I learned this only after I mentioned that I'd miscarried to a couple of friends, who responded by heaping me with love and support and also their own miscarriage stories. It didn't take away the pain, but in unburying their own struggles, they steadied me during mine, helping me see that what I'd been through was no more than a normal biological hiccup, a fertilized egg that, for what was probably a very good reason, had needed to bail out.

Each day when we awaken from the bookmark of yesterday’s turmoil, we make choices of how to conduct our personal affairs. Each day we must decide if we will act humanely, ethically, and accord dignity to everyone whom we encounter. Each day of living, I fill out a personal diary. I must never be too afraid to wield the pen giving authorship to my own being. Each day is a test and with each day, we fill the pages of the novel that says who we are. Our acts and omissions mark our progress. Every action is a new sentence in our self-profile. Every failure to act is a blank page. We rightfully scorn the shallow author if he or she takes shortcuts and never attempts to gather a grain of personal enlightenment, if they brazenly fail to exhibit any sense dignity, or if they ignorantly lack any tincture of kindliness for other people. We all respond to someone whom loves other people, worships nature, and demonstrates that they know how to share their benevolence with other people.

Further studies have shown that those who dissent rather than brainstorm produce not just more ideas, but more productive and imaginative ideas. As Nemeth put it: “The basic finding is that the encouragement of debate—and even criticism if warranted—appears to stimulate more creative ideas. And cultures that permit and even encourage such expression of differing viewpoints may stimulate the most innovation.” The reason is not difficult to identify. The problem with brainstorming is not its insistence on free-wheeling or quick association. Rather, it is that when these ideas are not checked by the feedback of criticism, they have nothing to respond to. Criticism surfaces problems. It brings difficulties to light. This forces us to think afresh. When our assumptions are violated we are nudged into a new relationship with reality. Removing failure from innovation is like removing oxygen from a fire.

The five most highly correlated factors are: Organizational culture. Strong feelings of burnout are found in organizations with a pathological, power-oriented culture. Managers are ultimately responsible for fostering a supportive and respectful work environment, and they can do so by creating a blame-free environment, striving to learn from failures, and communicating a shared sense of purpose. Managers should also watch for other contributing factors and remember that human error is never the root cause of failure in systems. Deployment pain. Complex, painful deployments that must be performed outside of business hours contribute to high stress and feelings of lack of control.4 With the right practices in place, deployments don’t have to be painful events. Managers and leaders should ask their teams how painful their deployments are and fix the things that hurt the most. Effectiveness of leaders. Responsibilities of a team leader include limiting work in process and eliminating roadblocks for the team so they can get their work done. It’s not surprising that respondents with effective team leaders reported lower levels of burnout. Organizational investments in DevOps. Organizations that invest in developing the skills and capabilities of their teams get better outcomes. Investing in training and providing people with the necessary support and resources (including time) to acquire new skills are critical to the successful adoption of DevOps. Organizational performance. Our data shows that Lean management and continuous delivery practices help improve software delivery performance, which in turn improves organizational performance. At the heart of Lean management is giving employees the necessary time and resources to improve their own work. This means creating a work environment that supports experimentation, failure, and learning, and allows employees to make decisions that affect their jobs. This also means creating space for employees to do new, creative, value-add work during the work week—and not just expecting them to devote extra time after hours. A good example of this is Google’s 20% time policy, where the company allows employees 20% of their week to work on new projects, or IBM’s “THINK Friday” program, where Friday afternoons are designated for time without meetings and employees are encouraged to work on new and exciting projects they normally don’t have time for.

Most people think they know pain. Everyone's done something: broken a limb, been stung by a wasp, recovered from an operation or rammed a baby through their birth canal. But chronic pain is different. It isn't just pain that lingers; it's pain that dominates. It swaddles you in its gloom and slips blinkers on you until everything you see, and everything you experience, is filtered through that pea soup of pain. The vast majority of chronic pain conditions are not only incurable but also untreatable. They don't respond to drugs, and science hasn't -- yet -- located a central fuse box to repair. So people with chronic pain not only live with pain; they're told that this is it until death they do part. It is a diagnosis that dehumanises your body as much as it eviscerates your spirit. And it's made worse because, if there's no obvious physical explanation for it -- as is the case with most types of chronic pain (diseases like arthritis aside) -- people think, consciously or not, that you're making it up. Three GPs, eight consultants, three physiotherapists, one nurse and two psychologists had tried to rout my pain in the first year of its existence. All had failed, though each had laid their failure at my door, not theirs. There's no physical reason for it, they said; or there's kind of a physical reason but not enough of a physical reason to correspond to your level of pain. Maybe, some of them ventured, possibly, do you think... could it be in your head?

Researchers who emphasize the tragic consequences of these events, however, see the effort to focus on the recovery as denial of the tragedy or its pain. The focus on pathology has become such a natural part of the thinking of social science researchers that the idea that such a focus is itself pathological is totally out of their ken. After the Kobe earthquake, twelve Japanese women tried to offer counseling help to the homeless housed in schools and other institutions, only to be rejected by most, who said in effect, “Get me some sake and sushi and I’ll feel fine.” A psychotherapist from the more sophisticated metropolis of Tokyo said, “You have to understand that talking about your feelings is not culturally accepted here.” But if that is true, then we have to accept the opposite as also being true, namely, that talking about our feelings is also a cultural phenomenon rather than the only path to recovery. The people of Kobe were unbelievably imaginative in the way they responded to the tragedy, such as finding a ship in Hong Kong that had cranes on the ship, since all dock cranes had been destroyed; working out three-sides-of-a-square railroad pathways to get around the destruction; and creating commuter routes that combined taking trains and walking. The notion that talking out one’s grief rather than working it out through creative behaviors is denial with long-lasting consequences is exactly the kind of learned superstition that infects the thinking processes of the social science construction of reality.

Soon I began to realize that cultural camouflage also obscured the universality of emotional process in institutions. For example, frequently, the leaders of a church would come to me seeking techniques for dealing with a member of the staff or a member of the congregation who was acting obstreperously, who was ornery, and who intimidated everyone with his gruffness. I might say to them, “This is not a matter of technique; it’s a matter of taking a stand, telling this person he has to shape up or he cannot continue to remain a member of the community.” And the church leaders would respond, “But that’s not the Christian thing to do.” (Synagogue leaders also tolerate abusers for the same reason.) Overall, this long-range perspective brought me to the point of wondering if there were not some unwitting conspiracy within society itself to avoid recognizing the emotional variables that, for all their lack of concreteness, are far more influential in their effects on institutions than the more obvious data that society loves to measure. Perhaps data collection serves as a way of avoiding the emotional variables. After all, the denial of emotional process is evident in society at large. If, for example, we succeed in reducing the number of cigarettes smoked by our nation’s youth but do nothing to reduce the level of chronic anxiety throughout the nation, then the addiction will just take another form, and the same children who were vulnerable to one kind of addiction will become easy prey for the as-yet unimagined new temptation. It

There will be plenty of people who will attempt to belittle or humiliate you because you have an illness, they are ignorant of the facts and are actually responding to their own fear and stereotyping; this can lead to a sufferer doubting themselves. It is important that anyone with a mental illness does not view their illness as a personal failure or a sign of personal weakness, because it isn’t.

Laubach had an experience while praying on Signal Hill behind his home in Lanao, where he was ministering to the Moros people. Experiencing total failure at the hands of a people who had no place for the gospel, he cried to the Father, “What can I do for hateful people like these: murderers, thieves, dirty filthy betel nut chewers—our enemies?” God answered him. My lips began to move and it seemed to me that God was speaking. “My child,” my lips said, “you have failed because you do not really love these Moros. You feel superior to them because you are white. If you can forget you are an American and think only how I love them, they will respond.

Dearly beloved... The president’s daughter and Cameron Roberts faced each other, hands lightly clasped, eyes locked. I, Blair Allison Powell, take you, Cameron Reed Roberts, to be my friend, my lover, the mother of my children, and my wife. I will be yours in times of plenty and in times of want, in times of sickness and in times of health, in times of joy and in times of sorrow, in times of failure and in times of triumph. I promise to cherish and respect you, to care for and protect you, to comfort and encourage you, and to stay with you, for all eternity. A willowy blonde stepped to Blair’s side, and Blair lifted a gleaming gold band from her palm. She lifted Cam’s left hand and slid the ring securely on her third nger. With this ring, I thee wed. Cameron Roberts’s gaze never wavered from Blair’s face, her voice ringing strong and clear. I, Cameron Reed Roberts, take you, Blair Allison Powell, to be my friend, my lover, the mother of my children, and my wife. I will be yours in times of plenty and in times of want, in times of sickness and in times of health, in times of joy and in times of sorrow, in times of failure and in times of triumph. I promise to cherish and respect you, to care for and protect you, to comfort and encourage you, and to stay with you, for all eternity. Roberts accepted the matching ring from a young dark-haired woman who leaned on a plain wood cane, and slipped it onto Blair’s nger. With this ring, I thee wed. An anticipatory breath shuddered through the crowd. Six uniformed of cers, the Guard of Honor, stepped in sync to form a path from the proceedings area, facing one another in a line, white-gloved hands on shining saber hilts. By the power vested in me by the United States Army, the President of the United States, and the Commonwealth of... The three male and three female of cers drew their swords with a slick of steel, their blades raised and touching to form the Arch of Sabers. ...I pronounce you wed. The couple kissed, the crowd clapped...

What area, person, or circumstance in your life do you struggle with the most? Start journaling all the aspects of that situation that you are grateful for. Keep a record of everything that reinforces and expands your gratitude in that area. Where in your life are you not taking 100 percent responsibility for the success or failure of your present condition? Write down three things you have done in the past that have messed things up. List three things you should have done but didn’t. Write out three things that happened to you but you responded poorly. Write down three things you can start doing right now to take back responsibility for the outcomes of your life.

At the same time, a faint sense of disappointment superimposed on an otherwise absorbing inner experience was in its way suitably Proustian too: a reminder of the eternal failure of human life to respond a hundred per cent; to rise to the greatest heights without allowing at the same time some suggestion, however slight, to take shape in indication that things could have been even better.

So here’s something I know to be true, although it’s a little corny, and I don’t quite know what to do with it: What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness. Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded…sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.

You're efficient when you do something with minimum waste. & you're effective when you're doing the right something." "...the degree of freedom required to effect change. Slack is the natural enemy of efficiency & vise versa." "...slack represents operational capacity sacrificed in the interest of long term health." "Imagine one of those puzzle games consisting of 8 numbered tiles in a box, with one empty space, so you can slide them around one at a time. The objective is to shuffle the tiles into numerical order. That empty space is the equivalent of slack. If you remove it, the game is technically more efficient, but something is lost. Without the open space, there is no further possibility of moving tiles at all. The layout is optimal as it is, but if time proves otherwise, there is no way to change it." "Having a little bit of wiggle room allows us to respond to changing circumstances, to experiment, & to do things that might not work." → time, money, people on job, or even expectations → Not having slack is taxing. Scarcity weighs on our minds and uses up energy that could go toward doing the task at hand better. It amplifies the impact of failures & unintended consequences. → Slack allows us to handle the inevitable shocks & surprise of life. → Slack is the time when reinvention happens. It is time when you are not 100% busy doing the operational business of your firm. Slack is the time when you are 0% busy. Slack at all levels is necessary to make the organization work effectively & to grow. It is the lubricant of change. Good companies excel in creative use of slack. & bad ones only obsess about removing it. → Only when we are 0% busy can we step back & look at the bigger picture of what we're doing. Slack allows room for that...to think ahead. → We are more productive when we don't try to be productive all the time. → Being comfortable with sometimes being 0% busy means we think about whether we're doing the right thing → Effectiveness → "The secret to top performance is to always be a little underemployed; you waste years by not being able to waste hours. Those seemingly wasted hours are necessary to figure out if you're headed in the right direction.

Daniel also places candidate answers in a very specific framework. As the candidate tells their story, Daniel continuously asks himself: Whom is this person responding to or used to performing for? Whom do they view as important to impress? Their parents? A particular peer? High school friends? A former boss? This is revealed at moments when they disclose some angles of their past successes and failures rather than others. You might be surprised how often this information comes through in the context of an interview. For instance, a person may refer to college teachers who scorned her or did not appreciate her innovations, or a person may still be wrapped up in how he was viewed as a child by his parents. Thinking about this question can give you the context people are speaking from and, more generally, a sense of their ambitions and worldview. If they are still trying to impress their high school peers, for instance, they might have focus but they are unlikely to understand the broader picture behind your company or grasp its global ambitions. Most importantly, be alert for the distinction between those who are stuck in their past and those who learned from it but are moving forward and seeking to expand the sphere of people they can impress.

Baseball is a sport of failure. It’s a profession where the most successful batters fail seventy percent of the time and the most successful teams have to endure sixty losses or more each season. To succeed in baseball, you must learn not how to avoid failure, but how to quickly bounce back from it—with optimism and perseverance. That is what positive thinking is all about. It’s about responding to life’s obstacles with a positive, never-back-down attitude. It’s true in baseball. It’s true in life.

So why are people in modern societies so often aghast at “primitive” religion, so unable to comprehend how “primitive” belief got started? In part, it is the classic human failure of objectivity—an inability to see that your own beliefs may seem as strange to others as theirs seem to you. (An African Pygmy once responded to a missionary’s description of heaven by asking, “How do you know? Have you died and been there?”) And in part it is a failure of imagination. Imagine that you are living in a small encampment surrounded by jungle or woodland or desert, entirely untouched by science and modern technology. Within the encampment, the social universe operates by largely intelligible laws; people don’t generally, say, fly into a rage and assault their neighbors without a cause of some sort or another. But from outside this universe come mighty and momentous forces—storms, droughts, deadly animals, fatal illness. You are viscerally interested in explaining and controlling these things; you readily absorb and repeat any news or conjecture bearing on this goal. And, above all, you are only human. The rest is history.

it doesn’t matter how much “failure” you’ve experienced if you decide to respond to it constructively.

What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness. Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded…sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.

I realized that I get to report in the halls of Capitol Hill because of the work of disabled activists who literally crawled up the steps of that very building to help pass the ADA. When people see me as an inspiration because I ‘overcame’ my disability to graduate college and hold a job, I want to respond that the only things I overcame were the specific obstacles in front of me. I am a return on others’ investment in policy. In the same way, every autistic person who language is in classes or winds up in a group home or institution is not a reflection of poor upbringing but rather a failure in policy.” ~ Eric Garcia We’re Not Broken: Changing The Autism Conversation

sinners . . . I was angry with God . . . I drove myself mad with a desperate disturbed conscience.”4 It is not insignificant that Luther’s own father and mother were both harsh disciplinarians, but regardless of the cause, Luther had clearly internalized a crippling image of God as judge that tormented him until he discovered grace. This message of grace and forgiveness has been a life-changing one to many people over the ages since Luther rediscovered it, but it has often been tragically accompanied by a message of fear and condemnation itself. Luther, for example, preached that one must face the horrors of wrath before one could come to grace. In other words, he believed that everyone needed to be forced to go through the horrible struggle he did before they could hear about grace. Ever since then, there has been a long history of revival preachers who have proclaimed this “pre-gospel” of fear, threat, and condemnation—telling people the bad news so they could then receive the good news, wounding people first, so they could then heal those wounds. The philosophy behind this strategy is that people need to be shaken out of their complacency and made ready to respond to the gospel. This may indeed be true for some, but for others it amounts to little more than abuse, and has resulted in a hurtful image of God being hammered into their heads that has estranged them from God, and driven them away from faith. For a person struggling with moral failure, facing up to their brokenness and realizing that God loves them and died for them despite it is a crucial step towards life. But to tell a person whose sin is self-hatred that they need to face how bad and worthless they are is like making them swallow the wrong prescription medicine—what was healing to the first person,

Every day I put love on the line. There is nothing I am less good at than love. I am far better in competition than in love. I am far better at responding to my instincts and ambitions to get ahead and make my mark than I am at figuring out how to love another. I am schooled and trained in acquisitive skills, in getting my own way. And yet I decide, every day, to set aside what I can do best and attempt what I do very clumsily—open myself to the frustrations and failures of loving, daring to believe that failing in love is better than succeeding in pride.

Sometimes it is not failure that marks us, but how we respond to that failure"- Mish(aka me)