Don't blame your loss of passion on others...

Don't blame your loss of passion on others...

When others don't do things the way you think they should;
When your company does exactly the opposite of what their core values state;
When your boss' lack of management effects the entire office culture;
When you don't workout because you don't like the gym atmosphere;
When your co-workers don't do their jobs, which makes doing your job harder;
When your family/friends get on your nerves (like you never get on theirs);
When you hold others accountable for things that you don't do, but keep coming up with excuses which are ok for you but not for others;
When people do nothing and don't see anything wrong with it;
When the opportunities you seek don't appear in the time you think they should;
When you change how you treat your mate because you're not getting what you want or need (be it worship, encouragement, them taking your sided regardless of if they think you're right or wrong, taking out the trash without asking or even the lack of intimacy);
When friends or loved ones don't give you the attention you seek/need/want/desire;
When your kids don't follow your instructions, regardless of how much you talk to them;

When you feel like God isn't answering your prayers and you've done nothing to deserve not being answered:

When you can find all the fault in the world with everything else and everybody else but what you're doing is ok:

We need to Be what we Seek...And not blame others because we lost OUR Passion!!!

Don't blame your loss of passion on others...

Don't blame your loss of passion on others...

When others don't do things the way you think they should;
When your company does exactly the opposite of what their core values state;
When your boss' lack of management effects the entire office culture;
When you don't workout because you don't like the gym atmosphere;
When your co-workers don't do their jobs, which makes doing your job harder;
When your family/friends get on your nerves (like you never get on theirs);
When you hold others accountable for things that you don't do, but keep coming up with excuses which are ok for you but not for others;
When people do nothing and don't see anything wrong with it;
When the opportunities you seek don't appear in the time you think they should;
When you change how you treat your mate because you're not getting what you want or need (be it worship, encouragement, them taking your sided regardless of if they think you're right or wrong, taking out the trash without asking or even the lack of intimacy);
When friends or loved ones don't give you the attention you seek/need/want/desire;
When your kids don't follow your instructions, regardless of how much you talk to them;

When you feel like God isn't answering your prayers and you've done nothing to deserve not being answered:

When you can find all the fault in the world with everything else and everybody else but what you're doing is ok:

We need to Be what we Seek...And not blame others because we lost OUR Passion!!!

Make sure you live your dream…And don’t expect others to!!!

At the urging of one of my sons, I decided to bring back the internal voice that frequently goes against the grain.  And this is where I’m starting…

Too many times, we as people have dreams, desires and goals that motivate us but we seem to expect others around us, friends, family and/or spouses to share in those concepts.  Just because you feel strongly about something, because something gets you going in the morning or something drives you to be better, doesn’t mean that you should expect the same out of others, no matter how close they may be to you.  Just because I’m a dad, love football and wanted to play in the NFL doesn’t mean that I should push my sons to play football to live out my dream.  Just because I love The Cooking Channel doesn’t mean my spouse should want to look at it all day and night.  Just because you love the opera doesn’t mean I have to love it, or even go, although somehow it will come up that I should go just because you want me to (and you have done things that you didn’t want to but did…but that’s a WHOLE NUTHER’ POST).  We have to be comfortable understanding that OUR dreams are OURS, not everybody else’s and that’s ok.  We have to be the captain of our dreams and shouldn’t expect another soul to want what we dream about.  Working out, cooking and eating healthy is uber important to me but is it fair of me to get mad at my spouse, friends and family because they it’s not important to them??  I used to get mad at people within my circle that used what I called “excuses” as to why they couldn’t/wouldn’t exercise…I used to place those people in the “lazy” category until I said to myself “Self, working out, cooking and eating healthy are your goals, not theirs obviously you Dumb A$$).”  I had to accept the same fact I’m talking about.  Based on my son’s graduation from culinary school, my dream was for him to be a chef and eventually have his own restaurant.  He worked in the industry for a few years but decided to move on but stay within the food service industry, which confused me for a bit.  Once we talked and I asked why, he explained his move and it made sense plus me more comfortable that he made a good decision but I then realized, a restaurant was my dream for him, not his.  Some of you want your partner to support you in your business venture or personal goals but you are putting forth less effort than your “support” and it’s not even their dream/goal.    If you or your spouse have a “fairytale” life picked out or planned based on the “relationship fantasy” that most were fed since our early years (and frequently live still in), use our parents as an example or try to achieve results based on the observation of our peers, that doesn’t mean that the view should be the view of our spouse.  So let me get this straight, because one person is dreaming about something specific means the other should dream about the same thing??  How does that sound??  You really believe that?? 

I’m not saying that one shouldn’t support the other but expecting others to share in your dream seems a bit unrealistic and even selfish but then, maybe I’m not living the dream…

It's A Long Road Back...when u want it 2 b.

It's a long road back from hurt, trust me I know. It's an even longer road back when  the other person won't let go. When u wronged someone, apologized for it, what else can u do? The victim is hurt, faith and trust is shaken, of course they're thru with u. But I also know it's a lot easier 2 be mad than 2 forgive, this I know as well. As I've walked this road with another story 2 tell. We choose 2 get over or stay stuck, stay mad or let go. 2 stay mad lets me justify and not let them off the hook. I say "I can't let it go 2 quick because then it's like I'm saying its ok so i close the book. I just stay away, keep being hurt an pray 4 a better day. Because I'm the 1 that's hurt, the only thing that matters is my way. I shouldn't think about the other person, I'm not the one 2 blame. That I've hurt people in the past doesn't matter right now cuz it's not the same. Forgive and get on with your life. Can sumthin that took years 2 buildup be wiped away with 1 mistake??? For most it can but I realized I'm not 1 of those who can...so here's a toast 2 the rest of u who let people go so easily!!!

Because it's a long road back...when u want it 2 be!!!

What if your friend did what you do?

What if your friend did what you do?

Everybody has a friend/friends they count on, go to, confide in and converse with among other things.  Ask yourself these questions and think about the answers…

What if that friend treated you like you treat them?  How would you feel about that and would you be in a better or worse situation?

Could you stand to deal with them less or could they stand to deal with you more?

Do you have too much patience with them and they don’t have enough patience with you?

Should you hold them more accountable or should they hold you less accountable?

Have you been a better friend to them than they have to you? And what would they say about that?

Do they forget things that are special to you (i.e. Birthday/Anniversary) where you remember all of their important details?

When things get bad, should they “take a break” and walk away from you where as you wouldn’t walk away from them? And should you walk away from them?

We all understand that relationships (friendship, marriage, business and even acquaintances’) are never 50/50 so there is going to be constant give and take but be we also need to be honest with ourselves and ask 2 questions; 1) Have we honestly and completely accepted that person for who they are (their make-up, decision making processes or lack-there-of, etc.) and 2) Is the person they are acceptable to us?

Too many times, we have issues with others because we don’t allow, want or truly accept who they REALLY are.  We want them to be better or do things the RIGHT WAY = our way (isn’t our way always the right way?) People make mistakes, bad judgments and just F*&% Up sometimes…What do you do then? My DJ partner back in college was late for EVERY party we did on the yard which was from 9p-1a. I used to get furious because we were being paid for music starting at 9 even if it was just us and the janitor.  Every time I asked about it, the response was “Hey, nobody will be here until 10 anyway!” After a while I realized that my continued anger wasn’t going to change anything and I was mad because I wanted him to share my view.  I didn’t accept who he was…Once I did that, I stopped being mad and that was one less issue I had to deal with. I’m sure we all feel that we treat people with more positive than negative but have we ever stopped to think what our real friends think about how we treat them? What would they say if they were in the “room of truth” and weren’t afraid of hurting our feelings or having their feelings hurt? Could improvements be made if we changed our interaction with friends?

Hell No I don’t need improvements because just like everything else in my life, I know what I am doing. I don’t need to talk to anybody else (friends, family or a therapist) because I’ve got it in control.  Don’t you see how things have worked out for me in the past?

What if your friend did what you do…?

why did Bubba take his ball and go home???

as I'm laying here trying to get to sleep, for some odd reason i had a sharp memory of growing up run through my head. i grew up in portsmouth, va in a neighborhood like many others. it was a middle class black area, not in the richest and not in the poorest area of town; when middle class was truly middle class, unlike today. there were a group of us that hung out and played together, everything from touch and tackle football, baseball, basketball, video games and even built models. Sports were big and we had various levels of talent; I had middle-of-the-road sports talent as most of us played one sport or another in high school. There was Jo-Jo and Wayne, a couple of cats who were older than me, guys that you played with even though they were older and gave me a hard time being younger than they were and not as good as them.  There was Vonn, a cool, soft-spoken cat who came around every-so-often who was good in baseball and Harrell who had the basketball court in the backyard and was the fun, semi-bully that you couldn't beat. I had 2 other good friends by the name of Michael and Bubba, who looking back on it were probably my best friends (although best really means 1 but anyway...). Michael didn't play sports and as i found out much later in life, was developmentally slow but i never cared because he was always a good friend to me and i hope i was just as good a friend to him.  Last but not least was my man Bubba, who was a good friend because he, like me, was the youngest of the crew and most of the time brought his ball for whatever sport we played. When the crew was together, we mainly had a good time but i remember back in the day when got together and things got tight amongst us, Bubba would frequently take his ball and go home.  Now as i remember, he probably had the least sports talent amongst us but he never really got grief about it.   he'd eventually come back but it was only after he left us and went home, got his self together (i guess), got some encouragement, forgot about it and/or realized that he missed us like I'm sure we missed him. i often wondered why did he have to spoil the fun by getting mad and leaving?  As an adult, i now ask myself questions about all those times...was i a bad friend because i didn't stop him from leaving? why didn't i go around his house to check on him? why did he leave in the first place? why did he get mad enough to take his ball and leave? We all just played and played, with Bubba and myself losing more than the others but i never went home when i lost! Why didn't Bubba stay and keep playing like we all did? Its because he got tired of losing (or just not being able to constantly compete) and decided that "I'm not gonna stay here and take this, I will take my ball and go home", thereby ending our fun and his bad time.  

I've come to realize that we as people whether old or young, are always looking for equity in any type of relationship and when we don't find it, we retreat to our "safe places", whether people are  withholding that equity from us purposefully or not. We tend to assume that we are somehow being violated, or its being done intentionally...to somehow get at us for something and in turn, we penalize others for how we feel, i.e. Bubba took his ball and went home.  At work, if you're not being payed the wage you feel you're worth, you get mad and feel used and under appreciated; never mind that most bosses cant pay us what we feel we are worth for our employment term. So at work now, you start to give them the effort "you think" they are paying for, which generally is less than you were doing before (not that we gave back any of the money). With your friends, if you initiate calls or text messages more than your friends do with you, do you feel "some kind of way about it" and cut back or even stop taking the initiative so you wont be doing all of the work?  If your talk to your friends and you don't get the type of conversation back that you put out, are those conversations diminished?  
Being that we all are different people with many different expectations and agendas, should it really be equal?  Bubba didn't feel equal, even though i cant see how that was any of our doing...should he have been coddled to make him feel included? Should we have let him win so he felt like he was in a better place? Should he have stayed and just took it? 

As i truly believe, the first law of nature is self-preservation and when instincts kick-in, God help who ever is on the other side of that action when we all somehow feel threatened.  Do we ever stop to ask ourselves "is this being aimed at me?"  "Am i being ultra-sensitive?" "Do i ever make people feel like this?"  i cant help but ask myself have i taken my ball and gone home in the eyes of others? i sure as hell hope not but its a great question to ask my therapist when i see her next week.

Why men don't talk...Part 01

In the words of one of my favorite Hip-Hop artist’s Rakim…It’s been a long time since I left you!!!

I come to you as always, with random thoughts that emanate from my life, my eyes and situations I see.  Now I promise that I will make a more concerted effort to provide you my thoughts as I’m even creating a schedule to keep myself on more of a track to voice the issues I’ve got to get off of me.  The newest one is men and why don’t we talk.  To be honest, there are multiple reasons such as having a general inability to talk about things that really matter, the desire to get into a conversation that will probably become deeper than we really want or most frequently the reaction we get from talking.  When we do speak what’s on our minds (without thinking how its going to be taken by the opposite sex), most women either don’t believe us when we do say our reasons for not talking, tell you that your reasons “can’t be true” because it doesn’t make sense to them, or that it’s just a “cop out”…maybe you are right because you know it all and have been given the universal truth to everything but…I digress.  Ask yourself these questions:

1. would I talk if everything that comes out of my mouth is questioned for validity?
2. would I talk if every time I said something, it was followed up by a 5-15 question challenge about my statements?
3. would I talk if every time I’m in the middle of talking, you have to jump in and get your point across right then?…I’m sorry my answering the question you asked interfered with your immediate need to jump in with a thought I never asked for and cut me off...My Bad!!!
4. would I talk if most of the time, any conversation somehow turns into a “Save-the-World-ish” or “Young and the Restlessness-ish” question about what I see or want to happen 10 years into the future, What are my future plans for the next 49 months, and of course the age-old and required question “How do I see you fitting in my plans”?

I’m sure that these previous statements are going to infuriate the opposite sex and somehow this will turn into a discussion on “how a woman feels” but that’s not the topic.  It’s about why men don’t talk…And it’s an unfortunate thing because we need to learn how to better communicate with more frequency and quality but you never want to feel like its being pulled out of you.  Also, since this is coming from a man, you might as well consider the source and attempt to find something out of it that may help you instead of trying to debunk the myths you and your girlfriend’s created.  By the way, how has thinking like a man and not asking one worked for you in the past?  Still confused huh? When was your girlfriend a man? When did you ask a man you weren’t involved with questions and took his answers to be true?

Now, back to why we don’t talk.

   

TRAINING:

Unfortunately, the fact remains that we (men) never learned to talk from our fathers, never learned how to talk to women from our mothers, and have been forced to wade through the battlefield of life attempting to learn the do’s and do not’s on the fly.  Its difficult to hear all your life that you should give in to make someone happy, then you learn from the other side that you really are expected to “want to” do something not just give in to make the other person happy. Confused? What happens when my “not wanting to” isn’t accepted or liked and we are left to face repercussions? We, as men, were never taught to deal with those repercussions, and tend to give in to keep down what we see drama.  For the most part, honestly it's just that most of us are incapable of talking about something that you don't understand and have never put alot of deep thought into.

PRESSURE:

We are expected to have it all together we meet women fresh out of having the most independent (and most fun) time in our life a.k.a. COLLEGE. We are expected to know what we want in our future including career (not just a job), a woman (of course when I meet you within 6-12 months I should know what you’re all about), love (an emotion we have heard about but never really experienced…I guess like Bigfoot), if I want marriage with you (this should also be discovered within the 6-12 month time frame of meeting you). Really!!!  We are even made to feel inferior (I’m sure it’s not purposeful) because we haven’t spent the majority of our lives thinking about what we want in all these situations to come.  I’m sorry but I haven’t been dreaming or planning who I’m going to spend the rest of my life with? Sorry but I haven’t been planning who’s going to provide me security, be my protector or be there when I have a bad day, who will be there to listen to my problems, give me solutions when I can’t figure something out on my own or give me reassurance that everything’s going to be alright.  I’m sorry but I just haven’t progressed that far in my life (I’m sure I'm viewed as some sort of caveman but I can deal with that).

TIME:

No man wants to hear about the concept of time so why start a conversation.  Every woman I know, including my mother (who I love) has an unspoken issue with time.  She asks my dad to do something but never says when she needs it, then gets mad when he doesn’t do it within the time she wanted.  Hell, he never knew how urgent it was!!!  Now the opposite view is “Why didn’t he just stop and do it then, knowing that she wants it done?”  Either men take too long, don’t give you the time table you need or don’t stick to our own stated time. Now, a time table will never be given (that’s the safe way) and you may say “I’m not rushing you” but you really are.  There’s a clock ticking (in addition to the biological clock) that say “You should know by now” or “It shouldn’t take this long” although those time frames were never stated up front.  Whether it relates to sex, when you should commit, propose to a woman, take a woman home to meet your parents or decide to live together, there’s always a time frame we are unaware of.  Now for a gender that preaches from the highest pulpit about needing and wanting honesty, Why aren’t you stating these known time frames upfront?  Its been confessed to me that you don’t want to scare a man off? So I guess you’d rather trick him or slowly tighten the vice grip on him to create a pressure situation? 

Problem is if I gave you a Franklin Planner full of information for the next 36 months of my life, I then have to make sure I live by that or I’ve either lied, shouldn’t have given it to you if I’m not going to stick to it or I should have communicated any change so you would be “in the know”.  Hell, I can manage my life like that as I don’t even know what I’m wearing to work tomorrow?  But that’s the beauty as I don’t have to know what I’m wearing to work tomorrow and I can get up and figure it out.  I don’t need a weekly clothing schedule to function. It will somehow come together.

  

RECIPROCITY:

Just because something works for you or is the way you would do it doesn’t mean we all subscribe to the same theory.  Not to be anti-religious but I think the golden rules are incorrect.  “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” doesn’t work for some people because we all have different needs.  If talking to you every other day works for me but you expect communication multiple times every day, what then?  If I want things to go smooth, I’ve got to talk everyday as we know my way isn’t going to work.  Now, this is just an uncommon example but extend it to other things and regardless of the initial shock, it does make some sense.

BLOW-BACK:

When I do take the chance and express my feelings (vent to you), I have about 15 good minutes to get it out and then get over it or I’m destined to hear one of  the worst phrases a woman can say to a man: “Man Up”.  Once that comes out of your mouth, you shouldn’t expect to hear anything come out of that man’s mouth for a long time.  Why?, because that basically states that his expression is akin to being less than a man and based on that, why should he take a chance again and say something to you again so he can basically be called a female, soft or just not manly based on your statement.

This basically is a call to all men that WE have to do better.  We are desired to be leaders but in a non-traditional way.  We are expected to “want to be responsible” for others feelings and well being, be the decision maker for both people (that definitely does not mean she doesn’t want to be consulted unless its something she has no interest in), the support for a bad day at work or especially during those emotional afflictions that appear without warning.  It may be the weather, hormones, a conversation with a friend, or some type of off-the-wall feeling about something you said and how wrong she took it…doesn’t matter.  We are expected to be there through all of it and I’m just learning how to do some of it (a good therapist and a bottle of Crown Royal never hurt either  but I’m just saying…).  Step back and look at yourself – Have you told her how you feel about things?  Have you told her what your problems are?  Have you asked what bugs her about you (be prepared cuz’ she’s got some "Ish" to tell you)? Unfortunately we have to talk, not only to express our feelings, but give them some deeper insight into us.  If not, you will be telling them to be mind readers and they will be left believing the only thing we all really like is sex, ESPN, and how good women look from any Latin America country.