Families, Valets, and Cynics

A prophet is not without honor, but in his own country, and in his own house, and among his own kindred. –Jesus

No man is a hero to his valet. –Not attributed

People read these sayings and think, well, sure, this is because the prophet’s family is far more aware of his failings, as is the hero’s valet, so they have a more “realistic view” of the individual. But what about the other side of the coin: what about the blindness that comes with over familiarity and the small mindedness of the petty that blinds family and valets to true greatness?

I have witnessed parents denigrating their child, calling him dumb or scatterbrained because of a small oversight on the child’s part, who are utterly clueless as to the child’s greatness of intellect or talent. Every night at the dinner table they are sitting with a budding young Einstein, Beethoven, or Jobs, whose light is going to astonish many, and they sit there making fun of the child’s shortcomings and idiosyncrasies? Talk about child abuse. And, yes, the same can be said of some siblings and spouses.

And what of the valet who fails to see his employer’s heroism because it is the nature of valet’s to castigate anyone and everyone who’s light might shine greater than his?

The cynicism of family and valet’s is not a commentary on the Great or the Heroic but upon the cynic who chooses to remain blind to the complete truth about the individuals they condemn, ridicule, and dismiss. Sure. They go around saying that if George Washington had been their child or St Pope John Paul II had been their priest or minister or Winston Churchill had been their spouse or if they had worked for Henry Ford, then they would have acknowledged the greatness and heroism. The reality is that, if you are blind to the greatness of others today, you wouldn’t have seen greatness back-in-the-day.   

May God wash away all cynicism and open the eyes of the blind so that we may see the complete truth of those around us: their worth to God, their value to all who know them, and the heroic manner in which they live their lives and engage their talents in serving others.

Copyright, Monte E Wilson, 2015

Getting Beyond Going Nowhere

A buddy of mine and I were walking toward the elevators at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. We were there facilitating a training on sales and persuasion and were discussing the outcomes for the afternoon’s workshop. As we were approaching our elevator, I saw four men stepping inside and the doors beginning to close. Rather than yelling for them to hold the door, I motioned for my friend to wait.

As we stood there talking, the elevator doors opened and, as I was about to step inside, I saw the same four men still standing there. I grabbed my buddy’s arm and said, “Let’s watch.” The doors closed. A few moments passed and, when the doors opened, they were still standing there. One of the men saw me and I could see that he was puzzled but they allowed the doors to close again. When they reopened, you could see on their faces that they now realized they weren’t going anywhere.

Stepping inside, I showed the men the keycard they would need in order to push the button that would take them to the penthouse: the only floor this particular elevator went. I asked them if they’d like to come up but they scurried out as quickly as possible.

So many people live there lives in an “elevator” that isn’t going anywhere.

Sometimes all they need is for someone to give them the correct keycard. 

Sometimes they need to be shown that they are sitting still because they refuse to use the keycard.

Sometimes people need to be pointed toward an entirely different elevator.

From time to time, we all need someone to help us get beyond going nowhere: a coach who will help us see what we are not seeing, hear what we are not hearing, feel those feelings that we have spent a lifetime avoiding, all so that we can finally get moving again toward whom we were called to become and doing what we were called to do.

·      Instead of feeling hopeless and helpless, standing there in a stationary elevator, allow yourself to feel the anticipation of walking through doors where you will be making significant contributions in the lives of family members, friends, and at work. Now. Allow yourself to believe that such a life is possible for you.

·      If, up until now, you chose to only punch “B” for Basement, where you can perform all that is required of you without the slightest degree of effort, see yourself living a life that reflects the best of you—of your gifts, your talents, your wisdom, and your faith.

·      Are you weary of playing an elevator attendant? Does it feel like everyone around you is going somewhere, except you? What if you were shown a floor where you could engage your life in pursuit of a vision that filled you with a sense of purpose?

·      Maybe you are one of those individuals whom everyone sees as mega-successful, while you know there is a black hole of meaninglessness in your soul. What if you had someone in your life that could help you discover how to fill your soul with life, love, and joy?

·      Are you stuck in an elevator with people (friends, family, or coworkers) who do not know it is not moving, yet lack the skills to inspire and instruct them in how to get moving? How would your life look, what would you be experiencing and accomplishing, if you could learn these skills?

If you are stuck in an elevator going nowhere and know you need some help, I am available, as a life-coach. You can contact me at MonteThird@gmail.com to schedule a conversation about how to get moving. The first session is free.  

Copyright, Monte E Wilson, 2015

Traveling South v Heading North

Sometimes all we need is for someone to point us in the right direction…

I was talking to a friend the other day and he asked me what was it about coaching that I enjoyed so much. In answering, I told him about Rick, one of my first clients.

On our first coaching call, Rick told me that everywhere he worked he always started out receiving superb 360 reviews and accolades for his IT genius and skill sets. “Management tells me the sky is the limit and promotions are going to come quickly. But after a while … I don’t know what happens … people change their minds about me. I start getting warnings about my attitudes. I end up leaving before there is anything negative in my permanent files. And then the process begins all over again. I hate this. So does my wife.”

In our second session, I asked Rick to cite his top three values. When he started saying he needed time to think, I told him he actually didn’t and to just tell me what comes to mind. Now. “Freedom, love, and adventure,” he replied.  A nano-second later, he said, “O, no…” He saw it immediately. “Is it possible to change my values?” 

If freedom is your highest value, then how are you going to respond to the increased responsibilities that come with promotions? Rick had been a master of self-sabotage. After a few more sessions, I was able to help him change his entire mindset so that all those past behaviors would no longer be an issue. Within a couple of months, he was promoted and his career was finally taking off.

This is what I love about coaching. My greatest passion in life is helping people to get to where they want to go, both as human beings and in their careers and callings.

Like Rick, the reason many of my clients first contact me is because they are facing a specific challenge or conflict at work or in their personal lives that they can’t get through on their own. What they want is another set of eyes and ears, another perspective, a clearer head, and a wiser approach. This is what I seek to provide.

Most people get stuck in the process of working through challenges and conflicts because their attention is restricted to the surface level. What I help my clients to see is that both the questions they ask and the answers they come up with come from beliefs, value-systems, and cultural influences, that exist on a subconscious level: a level they have never investigated. Before a successful strategy for breaking through their challenges can be mapped out, however, we first need to have an adequate understanding of who the person is, as well as who they wish to become.  Why? Because “Who” always proceeds “What.”

Like Rick, what if you possess beliefs and values on a subconscious level that are actually creating the challenges and conflicts you are facing? Imagine what it would be like to be fully congruent—where your values, beliefs, mindset, and behaviors, all line up in support of your vision for the person you intend to become and the work you know you are to accomplish.

What would your life look like, if you had someone to help you discard the blinders placed on you by others, so that you could see all of the possibilities, not only for solutions to your present challenges, but for personal transformation, as well?

From time to time, we all need someone to help us: a coach who will help us see what we are not seeing, hear what we are not hearing, feel those feelings that we have spent a lifetime avoiding, all so that we can finally get moving again toward whom we were called to become and doing what we were called to do.

If you are feeling stuck or frustrated by a situation in life, please connect with me.  I may be able to help.

As always, my first coaching call is free. You can contact me at MonteThird@gmail.com to schedule your appointment.

Copyright, Monte E Wilson, 2015

Questions On Economics, The Poor, and Wealth Creation

Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. –St Peter

I first became interested in economics during the Carter Administration. Yes, children, I am that old. The economy was in the toilet with inflation around 14+% and people were suffering, especially those on fixed incomes, such as the elderly. Some were advocating the Feds spending more (increasing the national debt, printing even more bogus-currency) while others, such as Governor Reagan, were calling for a decrease in federal spending and of taxes. In all honesty, my sentiments leaned toward Carter, probably because I had voted for the guy and saw his failures as an indictment of my intelligence and wisdom. My father suggested that I humble myself and admit that mine was a foolish vote.  My dad: ever the cheerleader!

During these years, there were a plethora of books being published on The Simple Life, suggesting that we live on only the money that was absolutely necessary for survival, and giving the rest away to the poor. (Actually, many of the authors called for the government to seize all “excess” money.) The part of my personality that leaned towards sentimentalism felt that this was probably the Christian thing to do. However, there was another part of me—the part that had been influenced by dad constantly telling me, “Your feelings are not an argument”—left me doubting the assertions of evangelists for The Simple Life, especially those whom were calling for forced “charity” via confiscatory taxation. There was just something about the oxymoron of “forced charity” that troubled me.

Around this same time, I was beginning to work in underdeveloped countries where people were being beaten to death by poverty; all while their political leaders were becoming astronomically wealthy. (El Presidente: “Keep that foreign aid coming!”) In my youthful Idealism, I was going to help solve this problem, wherever I could, with charity: raise money here in the US and give it away to the poor in other countries. But it wasn’t working out. I would give the poor food one month and, upon my return a few months later, they needed more food.

This was the milieu in which my studies on macroeconomics, as well as in wealth creation, began. I was looking for historically verified and validated principles – The Laws of Economics – that would guide me in my pursuits of helping the poor escape their poverty; in coaching entrepreneurs and businesspeople; and in engaging The Powers That Be in dialogues regarding how best to move societies toward capital expansion, within a moral framework that supported the dignity owed each individual within that society, whatever their net worth.

I recently ran across my original questions from1981, while in Manila, Philippines, witnessing the fraudulently wealthy President Marcos get his comeuppance by being voted out of office and replaced by a woman of great integrity, Ms Corazon Aquino.

Here are some of those questions

What is the definition of poverty/who are The Poor? From a historical perspective, prevailing common sense saw charity as a stopgap measure, not as a lifestyle: How do we truly help the poor escape poverty and provide for themselves?

If a major part of the solution to helping underdeveloped nations is foreign aid, why is it that after billions of dollars of such aid (today that number would be one trillion dollars), these nations are as poor as they were before receiving the aid? Are there correlations between the failures of foreign aid and the failures of US’ social programs?

The market place: what is the place of civil governments, other than keeping out force and fraud? Are there correlations between degrees of government involvement in the market place and the over-all prosperity, or lack thereof, of a nation?

How is wealth generated and sustained? What are the historically proven principles for success in the market place? Further: scanning the histories of other capitalist or even quasi-capitalistic nations and then comparing these nations with those that have adopted socialism/communism, what are the direct impacts of each economic system upon the poor?

[And, for me, this final question was and is the North Star of my studies]

Do the scriptures cast any light on the answers to the above questions? I can think of a few things: Don’t steal, which presupposes private property; honest weights and measures, which prohibits fraud; we are to work 6 days a week; we are to do all we can (Jesus’ story of the widow’s mite) for the poor, but not for the lazy-poor (Paul); harming or abusing the poor, widows, and orphans, incurs God’s wrath; and then all the passages in Proverbs about planning, seeking wisdom, the blessings that comes with faithfulness and diligence, avoiding get-rich-quick-schemes, and etc.

Over the years, other questions were added and answers sought, all while seeking to see how my answers-solutions worked out (or didn’t) in the real world, both in serving the poor and in coaching my clients toward success. These questions are not those of an economist or a professor, but of a man who wishes to provide for himself, care for the poor, and see our grandchildren and great-grand children doing the same, in a nation that, once again, sees the symbiotic relationship between freedom and prosperity.

Copyright, Monte E Wilson, 2015

The Spirituality of Designer Religions

You can’t read a magazine or watch TV without hearing some rock star or movie actor gushing on and on about being a “spiritual person.” Same goes for Facebook, where people post such profound bon mots as, “I am not religious. I am spiritual.” Maybe it’s just me but this always leaves me wondering: You’re spiritual? To what spirit are you referring? It begs the question, doesn’t it?

“Being spiritual” doesn’t say enough for me to have even the slightest clue as to what you are describing or asserting about your beliefs. If we have a Buddhist, a Baptist, and a believer in Brahman, each saying he is spiritual, aren’t they all saying something categorically different? And if a word can mean so many different things to different people, why confuse your listeners with such an amorphous word?

Why, indeed.

While there are probably more reasons than I can imagine, I believe that most all of them can be traced back to two.

When I say that I am spiritual, I am letting you know that I believe in something higher than myself, but am not suggesting – the pantheon of gods forbid—that my spirituality is superior or higher or nobler than your spirituality. Well, unless, that is, your “spirituality” includes what you believe are divinely given moral codes with which I disagree: then you are “religious.” My spirituality makes no base and disgusting judgments about the behavior of others because doing so is my one sacred prohibition.

Okay. There are some behaviors upon which my spirituality demands I call down hell and damnation.

It always baffles me when people go on and on about the horrific nature of God’s Ten Commandments, only to discover that they actually have created far more sacrosanct laws than we find on Moses’ two tablets. They sit there telling me how restrictive The Ten Commandments are, how morally reprehensible or barbaric it is, and then, when I light up a cigar or order a 24 oz porterhouse or they hear about my stash of banned light-bulbs I am still using or my belief in a free market economy or of the one hundred other sacred cows of theirs that I am goring by my behavior, they want me stoned or shunned…or at least have my right to vote taken away.

Which brings me to the second reason. By referring to myself as being “spiritual and not religious,” I get to believe and behave however I choose. Is that cool, or what? There are no dogmas, no codes of behavior, and no traditions, other than those I create for myself. Maybe I’ll take a little from Buddha, a smidgen from Hinduism, and something from Jesus about loving others, and, Voila: I have my self-created designer religion that demands nothing of me other than what I want it to.

Why not just say, “I have designed my own religion”? I can’t say that because it would make me sound like I have a god-complex. Then what about professing that I practice syncretism: a combination of various beliefs and practices taken from many religions that were chosen according to what makes me feel good about myself, fits my personality, and supports my chosen cultural mores.  O. Wait a minute. Those are basically saying the same thing, aren’t they.

Copyright, Monte E Wilson, 2015

Fremdschämen and The Very Human Nature of Our Political Leaders

Fremdschämen This German word refers to that feeling of embarrassment we experience on behalf of another person … who is clueless that he has just embarrassed himself.

Germans experience fremdschämen when I use a German word, thinking I have pronounced it flawlessly.

Fremdschämen is what we feel for the drunken best man who stands to toast the bride and groom and then proceeds to regale us with stories of when he had been dating the bride.  

I remember when I heard the word over twenty years ago, while on one of my first business trips to Germany. I immediately fell in love with it because it not only describes an experience common to us all but as with most German words it also sounds like a curse word: a common practice when experiencing fremdschämen.

I frequently think of this word when someone, in effect, says, “The average human is weak, interested only in his own welfare, and, therefore, prone to making foolish, shortsighted decisions. This is why we need political leaders, legislatures, and their representatives to guide society toward what is best for all of us.” (This, of course, would be those politicians “we” voted for and not those for whom “you” voted.)

Aaaand Monte comes down with a frothy case of fremdschämen.

So. Our political leaders aren’t human? They are made from the dust of stars, while the rest of us are fashioned from mud? Politicians are altruistic, while the average citizen is a skin-bag full of self-centered and shortsighted desires? Exactly what is it that happens to human nature when an individual is elected to a political office that transforms him or her into a higher form of being? Even with only the most rudimentary understanding of logic, human nature, and political history, sane people experience fremdschämen and cry out, “Bovine excrement!” or, if you really want to mess with ‘em, “Fremdschämen!”

Why, pray tell, do you think our nation’s Founders created three branches of government—legislative, judicial, and executive: because politicians are humans, who have the same weaknesses, foibles, and mixed motives, as the rest of us. Without a vigorous and TURF-ORIENTED political system of checks and balances, “What is there to restrain them from making tyrannical laws, in order to execute them in a tyrannical manner?”  (John Adams)

Schadenfreude is another gem of a German word (thank you, Boston Legal) describing a common experience many people are having, as they watch those who believed their political leaders knew better than the hoi polloi and are now suffering the consequences of their assumptions. Schadenfreude describes, “The feeling of enjoyment that comes from seeing or hearing about the troubles of other people.” For example: “You can’t afford your insurance premium and it doesn’t cover what you need? You actually believed those political leaders who rammed this through Congress while saying that Healthcare Reform was going to provide us with health insurance that was comprehensive and affordable? O my. Hehe.” As a Christian, I do my all to resist post-fremdschämen cases of schadenfreude but, in times such as these, it is O. So. Very. Difficult. On the other hand, I don’t pretend to be a higher form of being.

Copyright, Monte E Wilson, 2015

The Free Market, Human Dignity, and Moral Responsibility

When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law.  - Frédéric Bastiat

Freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought.  - St Pope John Paul II

I espouse and defend a free market economy because, properly understood and practiced, it is the only economic system that is based on the premise of respect for private property (Thou shall not steal) and the moral responsibility for people, in the words of St Paul, to “work with your hands … and not be dependent on anybody.” Furthermore, I believe that a market economy demonstrates a far deeper respect for people and what they are capable of, as well as for their God given moral responsibilities, than all other so-called compassion-based economies that, in the West, are only thinly disguised systems for the modern State to arbitrarily define and regulate what is best for its citizens.

Where is the respect in telling someone, for example, “There there … it’s okay. We get that you are incapable of making it on your own. You can depend on the State, from womb to tomb” or “You aren’t smart enough to make decisions for your own life. The State will do it for you”? And where’s the respect for private property when, in order to care for all these dependents, not to mention a badzillion other outlays paying for “rights” no one had ever heard of until recently, the State demands an exorbitantly higher percentage of the tax-payer’s money (private property) than God Himself, who only requites a tithe? Talk about a pathological god-complex. 

Dear US Government: “You Shall Not Steal” applies to you, too!

At this point, a lot of people bring up the needs of the destitute, victims of disasters or foolishness, the mentally ill, and etc. and the question of who is responsible for caring for such people, if not the State. While this is a critical issue, for sure, I believe we must first be clear about exactly what it means to respect the property and moral responsibility of all people. If not, what we end up with are systems -- laws, regulations, and policies -- that actually disregard and disrespect those who are not destitute, victims, or mentally ill.

Underlying this debate regarding economics is the question of who defines the truth about human nature and goodness. I say “debate,” but a more accurate description may be “war,” because what we are facing here is a kind of spiritual warfare over who does the defining. While Western Civilization in general and the US in particular were grounded in the wisdom and precepts of the Old and New Testaments and, accordingly, in the belief that we humans have a given nature with a given moral compass, we now appear to be moving away from such an understanding, at lightening speed. Today, there are no “givens,” there are only competing factions of independent Definers-of-Truth being managed by a State that sees itself as the Final Arbiter of Truth regarding whose life is valuable and whose is not; whose contributions to the market place and society are useful and whose are not; and of what constitutes goodness.

As I see it, the battle here is not to place a more compassionate human face on systems (economic or otherwise) that are degrading and defrauding human dignity. All forms of governing that establishes and enforces laws and regulations that are contrary to the truth of what it means to be a human being and, as the US’s Declaration of Independence asserts, are contrary to what “the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them,” must be resisted and rejected.

I believe that only a free market economy corresponds to and compliments the truth of what it means to be a human being, including the tasks and responsibilities that comes with the gift of life and of creation. All other systems of economics actually interfere with and restrict, to one degree or another, the freedoms necessary for the individual to fully steward his personhood and possessions, before his Creator.

Copyright, Monte E Wilson, 2015