Intentions

People are good, trying to do the right thing, and just want to be understood and appreciated. It is also true that people are usually not trying to hurt you. Most of the time what seem like attacks are really defenses. When it feels like someone is attacking you, it is most productive to respond with curiosity. What are they defending against? Because it is also true that usually you are not attacking them either, most often it is a misinterpretation of intention.

Doing the Right Thing
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Three Beliefs

People are basically good.

We are all trying to do the right thing.

What we want is respect for our strengths and compassion for our weaknesses, to be accepted as we are.

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Merry Christmas

I hope you had a Merry Christmas! Or if you don't celebrate Christmas, I hope you experienced the joy of being with people who are filled with love and happiness. And not just today!

Doing the Right Thing
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Norad Tracks Santa

It's only a little after 10 PM here in New Mexico, but Norad reports that Santa has reached New York. Norad tracks Santa every year. You can follow his progress here.

Doing the Right Thing
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The Greatest Gift

People are always learning, growing, becoming. We are right to think that there is much more to them than what we know, even if we know them very well. We are right to give them the opportunity to surprise us, to be interested in what they might say, to listen. And it is the greatest gift we can give another person.

Doing the Right Thing
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Mysterious Friends and Strangers

One of the weirdest things we do is try to deduce the thoughts and feelings of strangers, people we know the least, more than we do our friends. The better we know a person, in other words, the more likely we are to make a correct deduction, the more likely it is that we will ask instead. Asking is a sign of the respect we have for them. It shows that we know they have depth and complicated inner lives and that we want to understand and get it right. We respect the mystery of our friends. Strangers deserve that respect as well.

Doing the Right Thing
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Let Them Be

One of the most important ways to treat people well is to let them be who they are. We do this with our friends. We accept that they are not perfect. We know they are complicated. We don't feel the need to classify them. We let them surprise us.

Doing the Right Thing
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Treat People Well

That's what my book is about, how to treat people well. Although I still believe what I've said before, the most important thing is to treat everyone the same. If you are a curmudgeon and like being one, then be a curmudgeon to everyone. If you would rather be kind, be kind to everyone.

Most of us naturally treat well the people we like or love. Doing the Right Thing is the essence of those attitudes and actions.

Doing the Right Thing
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Because It Works, Because It's True

The perspectives or strategies that I recommend in Doing the Right Thing and Achieving All Your Goals at the Same Time, I recommend to you first of all because they work. That is, you will always know how to listen and what to say so that the situation comes out well for everyone involved. You may also realize someday that they are true, because people who are treated well will show you how amazingly good they can be. Remember not to act surprised.

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Believe the Best

There is no completely accurate, fast way to understand something from someone else's point of view. It takes a long time listening very carefully to their description of it before you can even get an inkling of what they're seeing. And it is not totally productive to see something from someone else's point of view. They don't have the answer either. If they did, you would be in complete agreement with them already. You need a third point of view. One that works for everybody. But you and the other person have to start from where you are and there is no way for you to help each other if you don't know where that is.

There is a completely accurate, fast way to understand where someone else is coming from. You have to take it a little on faith, believing the best about the other person, but that is just what you want them to believe about you, so it's a good deal. The other person is trying to do the right thing. He is a good person. He is doing the best he can right at that moment. Maybe not as well as he did yesterday, maybe not as well as he will do tomorrow, but just now, the best he can. There is a good reason for what he is doing.

Doing the Right Thing
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Point of View

When taking a picture, we move around the subject in order to get a different light, a different angle, stand on something to view it from above or crouch down to get on the same level. We know that the subject looks very different from all those views and we have to move to find the best one. And yet, in our work and in our lives, we often stay in one position and think we have the whole picture, or that it looks the same to everyone, even though it is impossible for them to be seeing it from exactly the same angle that we are.

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Understanding

We need other people and yet it is so hard for us to understand them. That is because we know that we are a lot alike and we interpret people's actions based on our own point of view and motivations. We are a lot alike. But not in that way.

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Our Fellow Creatures

The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that's the essence of inhumanity.
--George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

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With All of Us

Almost anything worth doing that is going to be any fun at all requires other people. And that's the best way to learn respect for other people's strengths and compassion for their weaknesses. Not just because you like them, not just because you love them, but because you know how much you need them.

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For All of Us

It's great to have a goal for yourself, especially a big hairy audacious goal. But it's even better to have a goal that benefits all of us, all mankind and all living things. Because no matter how well we succeed for ourselves, we still live in the world as it is now, if we haven't changed it for all of us.

Doing the Right Thing
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Seeing the Future

We are all going somewhere, either a place that we haven chosen and set our course for or wherever the current takes us. It might not seem so bad to go with the flow if we could be deposited on some beautiful beach somewhere with no effort on our part, but there are two dangers. First, that we'll end up instead on a cold, stony shore. And second, that if we allow ourselves to float along like a dead thing, we will become one even before we stop breathing. Life isn't about the where we end up, it's about what we do along the way. So, we can envision a beautiful place and set a course for it. It doesn't matter if we ever get there, the journey will be much more interesting.

How do you set a goal if you don't already have one? You have to look for it. You have to see inside yourself and outwardly at the same time. Stare out the window. Walk or drive to the highest point you can find. Look into the farthest distance, it's somewhere near there.

Doing the Right Thing
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Goals

My goals are very important to me. They make me happy. I think about them a lot and make them as concrete as I can. When I see people who are unhappy, I wonder if it is because they don't have a purpose, a goal. Is it possible for a person to have no goals? Yet, we are each on a path and it will take us somewhere eventually. Maybe it's just that sometimes we don't admit to ourselves what our goals are.

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Gutzon Borglum

The Presidents are not the only residents of Mount Rushmore. The sculptor is there, too, Gutzon Borglum. He had planned to carve them head to toe, four Presidents standing together. That was one audacious goal, to carve an entire mountain! And that's one of the good things about audacious goals, even if you don't do all that you had hoped, what you do is magnificent anyway.

Doing the Right Thing
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The Presidents

Mount Rushmore is a perfect place for contemplation. If you look at the faces of the Presidents, they are thoughtful, too. Strong, serene, knowing. You can share their reverie and the magnificent view. You are in good company.














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The View

The faces on Mount Rushmore were behind me and the Avenue of Flags that led to them. I would go and visit them in a minute, but there was something I needed to figure out first. I stood outside the entrance looking the other way, down from the Black Hills toward Rapid City. Finally the distance and the perspective worked their magic and I knew what was wrong and what I had to do.

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What You Think About Is What You Attract

In my book, I say that people are not accountable for what they think and feel. No one has a right or responsibility to demand to know or try to guess what we are thinking or feeling in order to criticize, condemn, or punish us. Everyone can think whatever comes into their heads, feel whatever comes into their hearts. Even if we do say sometimes, "Don't even think about it!"

But sometimes that is good advice, because what we spend our time thinking about becomes our world. Sometimes we punish ourselves by what we think. From the outside, no one can control our thoughts. But from the inside, we are wise to choose what we think about. Because what we think about is what we attract.

Doing the Right Thing
and Achieving All Your Goals at the Same Time
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Tony Hillerman

I went to see Tony Hillerman on Wednesday at a little seminar he gave at UNM Continuing Education. If you ever have a chance to meet him, do! The most famous author we have around here and also the nicest.



He's making me laugh!








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and Achieving All Your Goals at the Same Time
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Kina'ole

My friend Christi sent this to me

Kina'ole - Doing the right thing, in the right way, at the right time, in the right place, to the right person, for the right reason, with the right feeling...the first time!
-- Hawaiian word

Doing the Right Thing
and Achieving All Your Goals at the Same Time
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