Virtually every airport bathroom now has signs about sex trafficking and an 800 number to report any such abuses. This led me to question myself about sexual exploitation in my own life.  I recently helped an (ex) girlfriend write her first book. In exchange I got promises of her helping me with mine (just the promises on that count), and some mostly mediocre sex.  With my ex-wife, I might have gotten my passport, which she took from me, back from her, if I only agreed to unstated demands, I met all the stated ones she texted me.  One of the unstated demands might have been to just have sex with her a few more times.

In my life there have been so many things I have done, and others I have seen done where sex is used as a currency to get what is needed.  One woman I know uses sex as the currency for getting room, board and living expenses in the guise of what David Deida would term a stage 1 relationship. In fact, that is the entire underpinning of a stage 1 relationship: one partner, stereotypically but not always the male, works and brings home money. In exchange the other partner takes care of the home and is mostly sexually available when the other partner desires such availability. 

Just typing this makes this seem disgustingly unromantic. Neither party truly benefits. It is very unclear if conditional love is true love. The same way the ultra rich are often nervous if they are being appreciated as a person or simply as a wallet, stage 1 relationships bring up that same lack of confidence in love vs. simply an expedient business relationship.

Arranged marriage, still practiced in parts of the world, was all about the business relationship first and foremost, and if the parties actually liked and grew to love each other, that was icing on the cake.

I met a woman in the Philippines whose British-Indian lover is exactly that. A successful Brahmin man, married off in his early twenties to a woman five years his senior. A beautiful alliance of two high-caste Indian families with high achiever children.  They have a 7 year old daughter, and are now in their middle years, he in his early forties, and she in her late forties. Not surprisingly, everything other than their daughter is on a path of divergence. He travels to the Philippines every six weeks to meet his lover and receive the physical lovingness his arranged marriage wife won’t, and quite likely, can’t give him.

Yet his Filipina lover is treating this man as a stage 1 relationship. While he provides security, he is not available enough to her, as a married man with 8 annual visits to her, for her to really commit to being in love and monogamous with him. He swore her his undying love and bought her a nice SUV to seal the deal. She’s there for him when he’s around, and for multiple daily codependent phone calls, but ultimately she is emotionally disengaged.  So far, the cost of the need for the feeling of the availability of sex has cost this man a brand new Mitsubishi SUV that he bought his lover with the proceeds from an inheritance which he kept secret from his wife.

There are hundreds of examples of this basic theme. Sex creates powerful emotions of validation, of acceptance, of belonging and being desired, needed and wanted. When we are having sex with another, we are the most important person in the room for the person we are having sex with. That is part of getting the attention most of our parents could never give us.

I personally believe that sex is far more than just about genital sensation. The real draw of sex is that attention, acceptance, validation. She just allowed me into her body, that is the ultimate validation!  Forget the genital sensations, we all know how to stimulate ourselves just right. If another manages to do that for us just the perfect way we do for ourselves, that’s often just a happy accident. The parts we all miss about masturbation have less to do with genital sensation and more to do with those crucial feelings of “I am accepted”, “I am enough”, “I am finally being paid attention to”, with those feelings delightfully amplified by the delicious sensations in our nether regions.

The question is how much are we willing to give up for those feelings?  How much are we willing to pretend a temporary gift to us of attention, acceptance and receptivity/penetration means in terms of real love when it may or may not actually mean that? 

Being clear eyed and truly honest with ourselves around those dynamics is one of the hardest things imaginable. If you’ve ever sat in the back of divorce court listening to the three hearings before yours, it’s the same exact themes that come up over and over again. Depending on the country, dominant culture, and legislative climate (which can sometimes be very different (and possibly less fair) than the dominant culture), there is a significant sense of entitlement and expectation of the distribution of the fruit of a lifetime of hard work in exchange for a few nights of passion.  May those nights really have been worth it!  May you be really clear on what you are looking for, on what you are getting, and on what you are willing to give up, and what your partner is expecting to receive in exchange.

To truly live your truth, may you be willing to risk rejection in the stating of your truth, and the willingness to hear your partner’s truth before getting too far down the road of (easily misinterpreted) passion.

I love the notion of Bella Figura, something I got out of one of the many novels about Italy by Morris West. Bella Figura is the notion of having an elegant posture to any outcome, regardless of whether it’s unfavorable or favorable. It’s analogous to being a good sportsman or sportswoman, who congratulates the winner on her win, even though we might have preferred to win ourselves.

Bella Figura is about handling losses with the same aplomb as a win, and also being a graceful winner, who doesn’t gloat about their win in a way that creates unnecessary hostility in the loser.

Confidence is about asking for what you want, and having a bella figura regardless of the responses you get.

“You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‘I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.”

Eleanor Roosevelt

I’ve always wished for more confidence. Occasionally I see people who really (appear to) have it. That used to make me quite envious.  What I finally realized that confidence isn’t really anything tangible. Confidence is a state of mind. Specifically it’s a state of mind that your reaction cannot dictate to me how I ought to feel.  Confidence is asking a woman to dance, to have tea with me, or even to have sex with me, and being totally ok if she says No. It has nothing to do with me. She could be married, freshly heartbroken, or have a urinary tract infection. None of that says anything about me. Yet, there are past instances where I beat myself up after getting a No for exactly those reasons, which I found out later. 

Further, beating ourselves up is never good for us. It does not serve our humility. It is superfluous and unnecessary.

I used to let other’s reactions dictate how I felt about me. If someone said no to something as innocuous as having a cup of chai and a likely fascinating conversation, I made that about me and the wrongness about me, dredging up all the past memories of when someone had said anything bad about me.

Now I realize confidence is really simply the reliance on my own powers, resources.  Essentially, the same way a gorgeous red Ferrari sportscar offering free test drives might have a lot of people decline to take a test drive, for various reasons that don’t say anything bad about the car, it means that people simply have reasons that are personally, not negative reflections on the beautiful car. People are busy, extremely environmentally conscious, unsure of their ability to handle that many horsepower, have a bad back making it difficult to get in and out of the car, are on their way to an important appointment, or have a suspended driver’s license, or a sick parent in the hospital. The car should not take anything personally. Nor should we.  

Envy is a variety of Jealousy that is positive. When my now ex-wife and I purchased a child care center, and remodeled it for a capacity of 66 children, my wife fulfilled her life long dream of being an entrepreneur, a boss, and doing it in a way that is of contribution to children.  I had this sense of envy. Here I am as an MBA managing multimillion dollar projects for software clients, and I don’t really have any freedom of choice. Not even to do the things that are better for my clients, as I found from time to time when my boss overruled me, ordering me to do things that were better for our firm at the client’s expense.

So I started buying small, low priced single family houses and amassing a small portfolio of property that over time came to exceed the value of that child care center.

My envy led to me to see that if my wife could have something, so could I. and so I did. Her achievement and my envy created a sort of benevolent competition. We both were more engaged and committed to our respective missions because we both liked succeeding ourselves and that gentle feeling of we can do even better after seeing what the other was creating. Further, we helped each other even as we tried to make our respective businesses more successful.

Jealousy on the other hand is the desire to see the other lose the thing I don’t have.  A long time ago, in management consulting, we hired a software architect for a suddenly hot software technology platform where experienced architects were in very short supply. Having been involved in the interview and selection process, our entire small team was well aware that this person made about 33% more than typical for a principal software architect role in our firm. Further, this person made it very clear that he was buying a large, million dollar very opulent house in the suburbs of where he lived, essentially a house price about four times what was the norm for the rest of the team based on our own, significantly lower salaries. In addition, he was upgrading his luxury car, and deciding between various Mercedes and BMW models. 

We were a small team of four, hired on to create a software development strategy and plan to deliver a multi-million dollar project for a large, $51B market cap client.  Quickly, all of us realized that our team member was far better at boasting about his affluence and all the amazing status symbols he was purchasing than he was at contributing to our mission to win a large project with our top tier client. This created jealousy in the team, and I must admit, in me. We were shouldering his workload while he was on the phone with his realtor and various luxury car dealers.

Finally, our team developed a case of jealousy. While we were doing the work that was assigned to him, he was getting material things we couldn’t have, and we were dissatisfied with our perception of blatant unfairness of the universe. 

Very quickly this individual was laid off for a level of demonstrated capability lagging the expectations and requirements for his role. Jealousy was a contributor to this rapid exit from our firm, if this individual had been less boastful about their material accumulation of things we didn’t believe we could have ourselves, he might have been tolerated far longer as a slightly less efficient and less capable team member who just so happened to have negotiated a very favorable pay package.

Jealousy is the major emotion in soap operas, where different stars mercilessly ruin each other’s lives.   In our teams’ case, there was a mix of envy and jealousy. We created elevated levels of performance that the person we were jealous of couldn’t match, and our jealousy made this individual quickly lose his job rather than signing up for tasks we knew he couldn’t accomplish well.

Compersion is a term used in most often in polyamory as the feeling of joy in seeing someone get the things we ultimately wish for ourselves and the people we love. It’s specifically used around the tough topics in both non-polyamorous and “poly” relationships would typically create jealousy or at least envy. For example, Steven sees his partner Mary experience love or sexual pleasure with Ramon, and with his compersion, Steven is happy that Mary gets to have the experiences of love and sexual pleasure. Steven wishes Mary to be happy and fulfilled, even if he is not always and not exclusively the source of Mary’s joy and fulfillment. With envy, Steven might feel inspired to work on becoming a radically better lover, taking tantra and communications classes and the like, so that Mary chooses him more often as her lover of choice. With jealousy, Steven might sabotage Mary’s relationship with Ramon so that Mary is more focused on Steven and stops her association with Ramon. 

Any good husband is happy to see his wife happy from getting an award at work. Yet most husbands feel very uncomfortable seeing their wives happy from sexual pleasure with another man. The prioritization of being happy at someone’s happiness over primal emotions like sexual jealousy is the root of compersion.

With compersion, which I believe is an extremely challenging emotion to master, Steven simply witnesses and supports Mary’s joy without going into comparison. With his compersion, Steven feels neither the need to take any action to better himself, or to lessen the perceptions of Ramon. 

Compersion has the energy of contended detachment. It’s good for my soul to simply witness another person experiencing joy without creating any story about myself and what I have or lack right now. Compersion also has the energy of non-ownership. The same way many corporations limit awards, education or networking opportunities to many employees, because those simply make those employees more employable elsewhere, most partners limit their significant others’ exposure to pleasure from elsewhere that might create impetus to seek other partners.

Envy is about noticing that I can be more, if this person can have that, I can emulate aspects of them and also have that. There is a comparison with others in envy, and that potentially negative energy channeled into the activities of improving myself and my circumstances.

Jealousy is the energy of self-loathing projected outward. An individual feels inadequacy and even pain at someone else’s success and joy, so they attempt to inflict pain and on them. Judas Iscariot struggled with the fact that unlike himself, Jesus was so popular and greatly adored by so many. Judas, as a trusted member of Jesus’ inner circle, was willing to see Jesus punished, even killed to lessen his own feelings of inadequacy. As you can see, being around people who are jealous can be very toxic and damaging to your successes and accomplishments in life.

Compersion is the transcendence of biologically wired sexual jealousy, designed to prevent the raising of a child by another man, or the risk of the primary partner falling in “lust” or love with another. This is an example of the Buddhist notion of “Mudita”, which is a pure joy untainted by self-interest

A banker just called me. She changed jobs and works for a different firm now. Her old boss was a college athlete, and with all the cussword filled invective of an old school coach, if you’re not hurting yourself, you’re not working hard enough.

Just as off target, her boss was very clear that nobody should feel secure, everyone is easily replaceable. The team is much bigger than the sum of its parts. Sadly, he may be learning a painful lesson that he was wrong all along, much of the business he might have been taking credit for is following her out the door.

When a manager treats humans as replaceable cogs, rather than as loving, living breathing beings who get to love their jobs and do amazing things for their customers, their boss and their firm, faceless, personalityless robot humans who hate their jobs and hope it doesn’t show through too often take over.

Humanizing work starts at the top. Leadership must be enlightened enough to model throughout the company, and at all levels of management that recognizing heart, initiative, courage and doing the right thing matters more than punching in and out at exactly the right time the way a robot would.

Be the change you wish to see. I support you!

I am a passionate tea drinker. And I’m very particular how I like it: Black tea, dunked ten times, not too strong, not too weak, with enough milk (not half and half) to make it blond. Every once in a while, my wishes are not fulfillable. Starbucks is changing vendors and is out of all teas except Green, Chamomile and Peppermint. Or, the coffee shop at the airport just doesn’t get it. Instead of telling me they don’t have any version of black tea, they give me green tea with milk. I am learning, since listening to the Surrender Experiment by Michael Singer to embrace all those occasions where I used to just get freaking annoyed, or worse.

Will walking around the terminal looking for the perfect cup of tea help me run into just the inspiring person I was meant to meet? Will it give me the exercise I really needed? Will it make me miss my flight and arrange some other detail of my life just perfectly?  Singer’s point is that every obstacle has a huge upside that he could never have predicted, or made him part of some divine plan to do something just perfectly in the universe. Michael Singer’s surrender to that is incredibly inspiring, and his life story of great success speaks to the power of letting go and just rolling with the way things unfold for us, even when our ego wishes it was exactly the opposite, or at least dramatically different.

I suffered greatly during my divorce, and literally hated every minute. I think my ex picks up on that sentiment, so even now, years later, the divorce isn’t over…

Yet, I am realizing my divorce is the greatest gift to me ever. It taught me to stand for myself, to really stand for myself. It taught me to survive, when everyone was intent on taking from me, what I had worked for, my parental rights, things that are so painful, unjust, and counter to every moral, ethical and fair principle I won’t even list them here because it defies believability. Now, I realize that time has given me great compassion, the ability to dust myself off from other setbacks that feel minor compared to the divorce. I have learned personal resilience I couldn’t have learned any other way.

How can you really look for the gift, for the divine, loving, abundance of the universe in everything? Remember a figure like that gym teacher in middle school who made you do more than you thought possible. Mine, I hated him, with a passion. Now, I remember him every time I do something physically challenging, and he reminds me I can.

What event that doesn’t match your initial expectations has a tremendous gift hidden inside it?

I was digging out egress windows in very rocky soil on a supremely hot day. This was like no other digging I had done. I had been a professional landscaper after college for two years and this was a clay gravel mix that was not yielding to my increasingly sweaty efforts. I caught myself sitting in the shade, just ruminating. There has to be a better way.  Dynamite?  Hiring an excavator? Buying a spade to round out my shovel and pick? Add water? Wait for a drier day? Finally I came to my senses. I was going to get 2 egress window holes dug, today, myself, with what I had.

There is no silver bullet other than focused effort.

I finally reached the conclusion that as long as I was in motion, I was making progress. Even if there was no visible progress.

Sometimes, it took 30 minutes or longer to fill a single wheelbarrow while prying out wedged in rocks and other aggregate.  However, if I stopped and allowed the lie that this wasn’t working to creep into my head, I was failing. If I was in motion, doing something, shoveling out a small handful of hard packed gravel, I was making progress. If I was getting a drink, I was making progress, I was keeping the machine of me lubricated, the way I would add gas to a digging machine.

If I was sitting and hoping for the hole to dig itself, I wasn’t making progress. So I kept on sweating and moving. The first hole took 4.5 hours. The second, after the formulation of my rule to just keep moving and do anything that is marginally productive took only 3 hours. I got done just in time to shower and run to a bbq where I got to make up for all the calories I lost.

Where can you just get back to movement, to doing little things? Those things will create more progress over time than you realize. It’s like the teenager who is growing. They don’t realize their growth, but everyone who hasn’t seen them for a week or two says “Wow, look how you’ve grown!”

Now, go grow, go do something!

From time to time the universe opens up the floodgates and showers me in abundance.   Often those times correspond to when I was feeling things weren’t going my way and didn’t fight, but released, and accepted reality as it is.

When I accept things as they are, the universe is always kind. When I release judging and labeling of things that don’t match my wanting, the universe gives me the full extent of what is already in the quantum field and what I have been wanting.  Once my mental muscles relax out of resisting the absence of what I want, I receive what I want.

Exercise:

Letting go of controlling outcome: my personal pattern that I do sometimes observe in others also, is that I would rather have the firm “No” that I don’t want than the lingering maybe.  The self-sabotaging me would rather have the “No”, than the “Maybe” that could easily turn into a “Yes” out of the spite and dissatisfaction of not getting a “Yes” at the time I want it for me to feel the feelings of being in control and getting what I want when I most feel like I need them.

The universal mechanism is really about equal and opposing forces at the same energy level.  If there is a strong force of allowing / receiving, there is an equal and opposite force of giving at that same energy level.  If there is a strong force of resisting, there is a strong force of promoting continued resistance at that same, lower energy level of resistance.

When I realize that:

In the quantum field of infinite possibilities and infinite abundance, the answer to my every wish is contained…

For every wish I might have, there is a person whose desire is to be able to meet that desire.  For every man wishing for a lover, there is a woman wishing for a lover and wishing to be a lover, for every hungry person hungry for a good meal, there is a restaurant looking for an appreciative customer, for every job seeker there is an employer needing a good worker, for every person with car issues, there is a mechanic looking to make a positive difference in peoples’ lives by fixing a car,…

When I feel farthest away from what I want, that is a sign that victory is near.

When I can no longer handle the unmet yet imminent possibility of what I want, and close the door by deciding I prefer the certainty of the absence of what I want, the universe must, by law, not give me what I have now abandoned my desire for, and halt the order I had previously placed.

It must do so, even if that is the equivalent of me having ordered food in a restaurant, and having grown, under the stress of being acutely hungry, very impatient. I, not seeing the waiter approach from behind with a perfect plate of delicious, steaming hot food freshly prepared just for my satisfaction, get up with annoyance, cause the waiter to drop the plate he was just about to hand over my shoulder, and leave the restaurant in frustration at the long wait, without getting the fulfillment of the order that I had placed.

I didn’t get what I wanted, not because it wasn’t coming all along, but because I lacked the trust in the universe to wait those extra moments for the successful delivery of what I want. This is a contrived example, yet I suspect all of us have blocked the achievement of our wishes in similar ways more than once.

Time is quirky. Some joke that time often moves in opposition to our desires, that “time flies when we are having fun” and “drags at work” when we aren’t having as much fun.

The real fact is that time does those things and more, it can cease mattering during times our needs are being fulfilled, and become consuming when we feel that they aren’t.  A much needed hug can feel like receiving an eternity of love and nurturing from a kind person, and can take only a few instants. A car crash can move in such slow motion that we can run through large swaths of our life in the fractions of seconds it takes from the perspective of an onlooker.  Releasing attachment to the “I should have had this wish by now” creates and maintains the joy and positive anticipation that is an absolute requisite for getting our desires met.

Reaffirming to ourselves that our time here is long enough to see this wish fulfilled, and hundreds or even hundreds of thousands more can remind us that everything is ok.

Gratitude is the anchor to a positive, positively expectant emotional state. As we express our gratitude to the universe for all the things it is giving now, has given, and is giving us now (in the act of giving that we haven’t yet perceived, but that we can express gratitude for, now, anyway) will anchor the positive energy of joy and joyous receiving.

Gratitude can alter our perception of time such that the interval of waiting for our next wish to be received is just a succession of moments of joy.

Doing things that bring us joy now, as we await the thing we want to bring us more joy will keep us in the state of joy and joyous receiving where we realize that everything is perfect and we aren’t meant to lack for anything.

When the joy seems like it’s not quite there yet, when the illusion that joy is created by external circumstances that aren’t currently in place is strongest, there is a solution. It’s to find reasons to relax, to melt into gratitude for all the things you have now in life.

You have a chair to sit on, a computer to read this on, working electricity to power that computer, eyes to read, and so much more. When you appreciate that, it lightens you, reminds you of the richness and fullness of not just the universe, but of your universe, your life.

Feel into that, and realize that the more you experience that knowing, the more this knowing creates even more things to be amazingly grateful for.

Much Love!

Fleming

There are 4 main emotional states: They are generally happy, specifically happy, specifically unhappy and generally unhappy.

I will take them in reverse order. Generally unhappy is depression. Depression is not being able to see the 10,000 items all around me right now that are amazing: clean air, sunshine, electricity, a working smartphone, smiling strangers, delicious food and all the people involved in making that available to me, and so on. Specifically unhappy is something like being unhappy with the current state of my lovelife, but otherwise being happy.

When I bought my first ever brand new vehicle (a crew cab 4 wheel drive truck to support my healing houses hobby), I dented the passenger side quarter panel within a couple weeks of owning it after having slid into a snowbank. Who knew snowbanks could create big dents?

When the incident first happened, I was tempted to be generally unhappy, deeming my brand new truck ruined and worthless. Soon, reason took over, and despite the need for a costly repair of somewhere in the $1000-2000 range, from about 180 degrees along the driver’s side of the car, the brand new truck still looked immaculate.

This taught me to adopt a viewpoint of specific unhappiness. I still drove my best ever vehicle, it was my first 4 wheel drive vehicle ever during a snowy winter, it had the best stereo ever, and there were many things to be happy about. Yet, there was this specific unhappiness, much of it centered around the shame that I had messed up a brand new vehicle and marred this new treasure so ridiculously quickly. Some major part of that unhappiness revolved on the fact that I took a freak accident and made it about me: I was careless, I couldn’t keep a new truck looking new, did I deserve a nice looking truck, and so on. The dent wasn’t the big deal. My story about what the dent said about me as a person was an unconscious choice I was making that anchored a state of happiness when circumstances for the most part were giving me a huge, warm smile.

Luckily, I recognized that the situation, that created my unhappiness causing story, was fixable, I broke my prior policy of never fixing anything that is both expensive and merely cosmetic on my vehicles. I got the fender repaired and I was back to being specifically happy.

Specifically happy means that while my job at the time was challenging, as was my marriage. My wife was not used to me working on a local project and actually being home 7 nights a week, and some of the strain was showing. Nonetheless, I was truly overjoyed with my truck and really enjoyed my 100 minute daily roundtrip commute. If I had also won the lottery, my now ex-wife had told me she loves me in both words and more importantly deeds, if I had gotten a big promotion and a lifechanging training class to successfully master all the skills to succeed at the new level of responsibility, I might have been generally happy.

Maybe, if I had just had the wisdom at the time to count all my blessings, and tell all the people in my life who are a great blessing to me, I would have gotten much closer to generally happy than I knew how to at the time. If I had known back then that doing something for another person is much more enriching than doing something much bigger for myself, I might have been much more generally happy. But that is all water under the bridge.

Life is a journey. We are always growing and evolving. Part of our intended evolution is toward a higher level of joy and happiness. Most of the time, when we choose to eat, to watch a movie, to buy something, to go somewhere, to listen to a certain variety of music, we are doing it to feel better, to get to a level of greater wellbeing. Often, that state of wellbeing is just slightly less stressed, less anxious, less immersed in our daily challenges, and more grounded, centered, aligned with what nurtures, nourishes, relaxes and renews us. However, as we understand the notion of no longer generalizing unhappiness, but instead making it specific, we move upward on the path toward joy.

As we learn to specifically be happy, about finding a dollar on the ground, about a kind gesture, about great service, about our parents, our bosses and coworkers, all the various relationships that bring richness to life, we move further along the happiness scale.

Once we learn to be generally happy, we are hitting the jackpot. When we realize that happiness is a state of mind, not a state of affairs in our life, when little bad things no longer derail us off our train of deciding to be happy, once we give that decision to be happy the mass and momentum of an 80 Million pound freight train, annoyances (even the ones we used to think are huge) no longer bug us. That is where we all want to end up. That is heaven on earth, nirvana, the promised land, and it’s a state of mind we can start practicing. Join me!

Don Miguel Ruiz says that Loving isn’t something we have to learn. We are born with the ability and gift of loving. Later we may stop for fear of hurt, but love, loving is a practice, not an art or skill reserved for just some people. Practice with the safest person in the world, you, the person you know best, who will always be with you and will always love you back. Work on that and soon the love will overflow, and more love than you could fathom will seep and flow and crash into your life.

May you be blessed always, and be bathed in divine love .

A good friend taught me a valuable lesson today.  I was on the fence whether a tenant was a good fit for a property.  They liked the property but had given the impression that they were misstating income, since they claimed to have gross income about 8x the monthly rate, but were struggling to come up with rent + deposit (i.e. 2x rent).  My friend recommended I ask the tenant 3 reasons why they like the property, and also about 3 negatives.  I tried this with a little trepidation, I’ve been in my line of business for 17 years and have done pretty well without this technique, and yet was extremely pleasantly surprised with the results.

The tenant instantly answered with three or four positives, some of which were actually items that to another resident might have been a negative. Next, I asked about some of the negatives, with the comment that I wanted to make sure she was aware the property wasn’t perfect, and that I didn’t want the post move in complaints about things that are clearly obvious, visible attributes of the property right now.  She answered that she knew the yard needs work, but that her mom was willing to help make it better, and that I wouldn’t be getting calls about that.

Asking the question, especially on the positive side, reaffirmed for the tenant, in her own words, why this property was perfect for her.  Instead of me selling her, or telling her good things, she told herself.  She will always believe herself more than anyone else.  What a great question to help her be clear on her choice, and me to be clear that based on her choice she will be a grateful, appreciative tenant getting a single family house on a very large lot at a very fair price.

I was pleasantly surprised when I tried this technique with the same friend who gave me this tip.  I actually was fishing to have my ego stroked with three good things about me, especially after being such a great follower of her advice, and asked her, “what are three things you like about me?”  The answer I got was valuable feedback that is incredibly conducive to my ongoing improvement.  What a great result from a simple question!!!

I also tried this at lunch. Usually, I ask the waiter for their favorite thing, which often doesn’t provide an excellent recommendation if the waiter has different or less healthy taste in food than I do.  Today I asked for the three best items on the menu.  Two weren’t my style at all, carb heavy noodle dishes that would require an afternoon nap, but the third recommendation was perfect, especially for a guy going to a lunch meeting an hour after leaving a breakfast meeting!

Where else can you, and I, apply the three questions: What are three things you like about ____________?

1 Page Short Application for the any Open House you got sent this link to.  Bringing this filled out shows you are proactive.  If your printer is on strike though (like mine whenever I really, really need it), I will have forms onsite as well.

See you at the open house 🙂