On the website, www.theelementsofpower.com, Terry Bacon identifies four negative or dark side of influence tactics. He sates that they are: avoiding, manipulating, intimidating and threatening. I must admit, sadly, that I have been guilty of all of these at one point or another. When I think about those closest to me I can be more guilty than not and have a tendency to fall into these negative forms of influence. I learned through an experience with my son who has been my paid ( more or less, usually less) lawn care specialist.

In 2012 the #1 resolution at the end of last year was to lose weight. I'm not a betting man, but wanna take a guess what the #1 will be in 31 days? Of course it will be weight loss again. In that spirit I wanted to share with you my son's success story. He lost an incredible 50 pounds during his transformation. While that is amazing the pictures are even more so. It was awesome to see the changes that happened both to and in him during this time.

During the Thanksgiving season it is always refreshing to see all the daily thankful posts. One thing that stuck out to me is that it is important to follow the biblical advice of giving thanks in all things.

So I wanted to change things up and give thanks for some of the tough times in my life.

I came across an article in the www.dailymail.co.uk where Oprah Winfrey has said racism is still a problem around the world and the only way for it to end is for generations of racists to die out. I guess when you you are worth $2.9 billion you can be guilty of naiveté every once in a while. Given Oprah’s business track record I am not ready to call her outright stupid.

Have you ever had the words, “You need to be more optimistic,” directed at you? I’ll be optimistic and guess most reading this have heard it once or twice. In my last post I mentioned that on my very next post I would reveal the simple skill I used to get myself into the right frame of mind, even when I did not want to be happy.

This past Thursday was not one of my better days; it sucked to be blunt. I was up for my next promotion at work and did not get selected. This is not the first time something like this happened to me and certainly won’t be the last in my life time. What I found interesting was the impact not getting selected had on my thinking, emotions and energy. I felt like the guy in the picture below, every problem seemed bigger, distance farther and obstacle more impossible to overcome. The National Science Foundation published some interesting statistics that showed the average person has between 12,000 to possibly 50,000 thoughts per day. I can assure you I was in the range of 50,000 plus, and very few of them were good thoughts.