Your conscience is the measure of the honesty of your selfishness. Listen to it carefully.

What would you be willing to do, if no one were ever the wiser?

The measure of a person’s conscience is directly proportional to anything they might be willing to do, if they knew they could not get caught.

Have you ever had to make a moral decision in which it was going to outweigh something that was financially substantially to your advantage?

Which way did you ultimately decide? Did you take the financial gain or did you act morally responsibly and let it pass?

It is simple, when a decision is black and white. Start with the question, would you do something that is morally wrong? In order to even answer that question, you would have to break that down by saying, “define morally.” Given that a majority of people would agree on a majority of moral topics, we might presume there could be a meeting of the minds. Yet, the reality is, in the subset of categories, in which we do not all agree about what is morally acceptable, lies the quagmire of this emotional quandary.

Now, let’s add a situation in which you stand to make a lot of money. If in your heart, you know something is not fair to everyone, or is environmentally problematic, or is socially questionable, you are already venturing into gray territory, with regard to the definition of morality.

Now, if you are right at the point of signing your name, and recognizing the massive financial windfall that we have been talking about, will you be willing to sign your name to something that violates some aspect of morality that you would hope another person would not violate?

Make this even more complicated by adding the variable that not one other person, not even your loved ones, nor your friends, will ever know that you made this decision. Will you be willing to violate your own moral code of ethics in order to recognize this massive gain?

Life gives us continuous opportunities to define whom we are, what is important to us, where we stand on specific issues, and how we would like to model behavior, so that others around us recognize the true being with whom they are dealing.

The other side of this equation comes with karma. Some people believe in karma and others do not. I have watched karma in my life and other’s lives, for so long, it is no longer a question in my mind, but a certainty.

I have tried most of my life to empower karma to help me make these kinds of decisions, even in the darkest hour of night. When we are clear about whom we are, and how we wish to conduct ourselves, we awaken to who we are, and what we are, and then everyone automatically awakens to who, and what we are, without a single word spoken.

Understanding this most rudimentary and critical variable in life, could not be a more important cornerstone in the human dynamic.

To put it plainly, if you are not walking the talk, you are just a puppet. Be the puppeteer.

Happy Monday!

https://brianweiner.com

I believe in belief.

In belief, comes the internal power to manifest. 

Witnessing the manifestation,

empowers the next, more advanced belief.

BRIAN WEINER

Why do you suppose Ted Lasso’s sign, “BELIEVE,” became so important to everyone on the team?

Do you remember The Little Engine That Could?

We are all taught that story, because it reinforces for us at the earliest age, that if you visualize whatever outcome you are working towards, and you believe in that outcome, then you may very well accomplish it.

We are continuously looking at all of the challenges in our lives through this exact filter.

In our attempt to take on our most arduous challenges, we are leveraging this most simple of childhood lessons to our greatest personal advantage. When we conceptualize how something will ultimately succeed, we are infinitely closer to having achieved it, than we might have been, had we never given the positive mental perspective the ample room necessary to perform its regular miracle for us.

As we accrue more of these positive occurrences in our rearview mirror, we become that much more convinced that this perspective and philosophy will prevail for us time and time again. In these opportunities, we continue to reinforce for ourselves, that we will take on anything that we deem plausible, in order to elevate our own personal ability to deliver the desired results for ourselves and others.

Are we really no different than The Little Engine, telling itself, “I think I can. I think I can.” as it makes its way up the mountain?

We are continuously evolving our skills, capabilities, knowledge, resources, strengths, and mental acuity. As this happens, we find ourselves metaphorically, standing atop the shoulders of whom we were prior, and therefore able to go just that much further, towards the conclusion of whatever project, responsibility or task we have taken upon ourselves to achieve.

This gives us the runway in our mind to presuppose our success at an even harder accomplishment the next time.

These tenuous circumstances, give rise to ever greater power within each of us, and help us to further understand how much of a perpetual evolution, we truly are.

Once we really understand this, we are all the more capable of assuming that we will be able to take on almost any responsibility or any accomplishment that we deem worthy of our time and our attention.

Belief is omnipowerful. Never lose sight of that.

Happy Sunday!  *no sun in California today!

https://brianweiner.com

You are never given a wish without also being given the power to make it true. You may have to work for it, however.

What is it about our upbringing or life experience that teaches us how to make a wish come true?

I’m not talking about the fairy godmother story in Cinderella, nor the three wishes from the genie in Aladdin, but rather the innate understanding that if we have a wish, deep within us, that we are wholly empowered to manifest that into reality?

Does it come from the positive reinforcement of our achievements in our formative years?

Does it derive from continuous reinforcement that putting our efforts into studying, turns into good grades on our papers and our exams?

Does it come from working hard at an athletic, artistic or musical achievement, and collecting accolades along the way?

When we study others who have made their dreams come true, do we personalize their experience and transpose it upon ourselves, so that we feel as if we have an internal roadmap/compass upon which to rely?

There are many ways that this small, but astronomically large variable in our world gets formulated, supported, and ultimately reinforced on a regular basis.

The more that we are myopically focused on working to achieve something, the more our efforts and energies point towards a specific opportunity or conclusion that strikes us as being potentially attainable.

During this process, we are all the more focused on making our efforts and energies reflect various aspects of the prerequisites required for such a wish to come true. This can be reinforced through society, literature, media, family, or friends.

Whichever combination of these variables reinforces the prospect that this wish we are so focused on, could very well manifest, are valuable, because in the course of this happening, we are being conditioned.

This conditioning, like any form of regimen, trains us to discard the negative stimuli that wants us to believe the wish is unattainable, and instead reinforces us with information that drives us to set our sights high, in order that we might achieve what we are most desirous of accomplishing.

When we are infused with a dream, we must always remember that a dream is a starting point, and the ultimate goal is to formulate a game plan, act intelligently on that game plan, and never lose sight of the resilience necessary to capitalize on this to our greatest personal or professional advantage.

Happy Saturday!

I’ve had nothing before, and I’ve sacrificed too much, to never have nothing again.

JONATHAN TROPPER

Have you ever hit the end of the line?

When you discovered you were in this predicament, how did you turn your life around?

When you infused your world with that mentality, how did circumstances evolve around you as a result?

Once you had reversed the tide of your misfortune, did that change your perspective on life?

We are given gifts in life. They come in disguised packages, and they are many times, not what we wanted at all. In fact, at the moment that they are happening, we would be most certain to attest to the fact that they are the last gift in the world that we would want… ever.

When I was 19, my mother put a beautiful collection of her favorite aphorisms into a book for me. This one stood out for me at that age, because I just did not comprehend the impact of what it was saying…

“There is no such thing as a problem without a gift for you in its hands… you seek problems, because you need their gifts.”

I thought to myself (at the time) that this one was convoluted and not as accurate as the others. Decades later, I see it as a core truth.

If you are truly a continuous work in progress, and determined to improve upon whom you are, each and every day, you will ultimately discover this to not only be true, but also to become a way of life.

I have often said that a road with no obstacles, leads nowhere.

These obstacles give us cause to assess what has transpired, to evaluate what we are going to have to do to overcome the obstacle and ultimately, facilitates the moments of personal and professional growth.

The growth may be quite painful and most certainly not what you might have ever expected or desired, but if you are living by this perspective, you will find your way through those variables and triumph on the other side.

Does a problem really provide you with a gift that you needed? I believe when you see life through this perspective, it most certainly does.

So when you find yourself having prevailed over such an obstacle, you become that much more determined to ensure you never find yourself in similar circumstances again. Your resolution becomes emboldened. Your will has increased proportionately. Your life experience has empowered you to make a smarter decision. And most importantly…. Your tenacity and determination prevent you from ever slipping back into the abyss from whence you came.

Happy Friday!

https://brianweiner.com

Today’s aphorism comes from the show The Warrior, on Max. If you have not seen it, it is a tremendous series, that truly delivers on all fronts.

I’ll never be that me again

Do you feel that you have been consistent throughout your life?

I would be willing to bet that if you were to go back in time and visit yourself at various points on your timeline, you might discover how disparate your memory is from the reality. This is not to say that we do not have accurate memories of our past, but rather, they are colored by time, reflection and other variables.

If you were to find the opportunity to go back and revisit yourself in these windows of time, you would meet different iterations of yourself that bear close resemblance to what you might remember, and yet they are all different.

We are all a work in progress, and even if we believe there is a strong consistency, there are continuous modifications to ourselves that transpire as a result of our respective life experiences. These color our character, as well as our choices and preferences in life. 

Cumulatively we are continuously in a state of evolution. There could be moments in our past where something substantially transformative, unexpectedly took place. If we were to visit ourselves a few days before such a transformation transpired, might we meet a slightly different person?

There are parts of us that are wiser, parts of us that are scarred, parts of us that are different in our tastes, as well as our preferences, towards any one of the myriad variables in life. We might have been much more idealistic at an earlier age and have evolved into something significantly more pragmatic.

We might reflect back on aspects of our personality that we treasured, which may have been colored by events in our life. Or we might see some uninformed choices that we made at an age in which we were more likely to make emotionally-based decisions and recognize that our current personality would handle things differently. Each aspect of our lives continues to help us evolve into whom we are becoming. Each component of our being grows through continuous evolution, giving us disparate iterations of ourself.

We might look back with fondness or with regret, but whichever emotion that is stimulated, we can clearly see how much we have evolved over the course of our lifetime. With our deepest and most heartfelt memories triggering with this particular concept, we ultimately learn unique things about ourselves, that we might not normally contemplate, were we not making a myopic comparison between whom we are, and whom we used to be.

Happy Thursday!

Give people time. Give people space. Don’t beg anyone to stay. Let them roam. What’s meant for you, will always be yours.

Have you ever worked too hard to maintain a relationship with someone?

When you found yourself doing this, did you feel that you were potentially compromising your values and your morals? 

At some point, did you wake up to the reality that you were in an unhealthy dynamic that either needed to be rectified or left behind? 

We are so quick to try and nurture every positive glimmer of an opportunity or a relationship, that we are perhaps less discriminate about which of these truly warrant our focus and our attention. 

In this distinction, we are forced to sort through the variables that are connecting for us with this person, and have a greater understanding of what is going to ultimately deliver the satisfaction that would be expected from such a relationship dynamic. 

Yet there are unquestionably moments where we are confronted with variables that are not to our liking, and which give us significant pause for concern. 

In those moments, we are forced to make specific decisions as relates to the people with whom we are engaging, and in the course of making those decisions, we must ultimately weigh, and then evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of this particular dynamic as relates to our overall life strategy and goals. 

The old adage, “If you love something, set it free. If it comes back, it’s yours. If not, it was never meant to be,“ could not be more appropriate. 

The more we are determined to create confining boundaries in a relationship to potentially wrangle someone into staying in a dynamic that does not work for them, the more we expend energy that is useless and overall wasted in the course of our actions. 

At a certain point, we all must be fully confident and secure that the relationships and opportunities that should belong to us, will, and the ones that are not appropriate, will not do well. 

This may not be the easiest of terms to acquiesce to. At a minimum, we are situating ourselves on solid ground, so that we are not building castles in the sky that have no foundation and no bearing on the reality that we are living in. 

Happy Wednesday!

Kids need to marinate in love… and after about 16 years, they are really juicy.

BRUCE JOEL RUBIN

Do you provide a sanctuary for your children to become whom they most wish to be?

As you discuss parenting with many different people, you get many different perspectives as to the proper solutions to the myriad issues that arise as your children grow. 

In the course of these discussions, you might hear a full spectrum of advice, predicated upon the countless variances each of these parents utilize in the course of their journey with their children…

I distinctly remember a moment in my early parenting years in which a dad at a swim birthday party asked me whether or not I was “a referee or a coach type of parent?” I did not know what he meant, so I inquired. He said “a referee blows the whistle at every infraction, whereas a coach is more likely to allow the child latitude and only make corrections when they are going too far astray.” 

Not being one for sports metaphors, I don’t think I paid much attention at that moment, but politely acknowledged the guidance. And then I started watching my own actions and choices as a parent, and in my behavior, I recognized that I was truly being much more of a referee than a coach, and I started to change my methodologies. It really made a significant difference.

People are quick to discover frustrations in parenting. In the course of doing this, we try a lot of different things that we believe are going to work, and some of them do, and some of them don’t. It varies with every child.

Concurrent to these experiences, the world is changing at such a rapid clip that it is not even close to the same world that we grew up in, years back. If we project our expectations that our children are going to have a childhood like ours, we are not taking into consideration how much the world has truly changed and evolved. 

If you look at the entertainment engagement of children, at this age versus 20, 30 or 40 years back, you are going to lament that “they are all on multiple devices, and that they are dissatisfied with things that we felt perfectly excited about as children.” This does not take into consideration the fact that we, as a species, have evolved, and that their brains are much more interested in interactive engagement, as opposed to passive entertainment. 

The desire to sit and watch something passively for two hours is of less interest to current children than it was during our generations. As per today’s aphorism, which was taken from an incredibly moving film, called My Life, starring Michael, Keaton, and Nicole Kidman, written and directed by Bruce Joel Rubin, I believe the secret to raising a well-rounded child, is very much steeping them in lots of love and understanding. 

This is not to say that there are not needs for boundaries and repercussions, but ultimately, working to try and create mutual understanding, could not be more important in the course of having an effective dynamic between parent and child. 

Happy Tuesday!

Love, kindness and compassion are the currency of hope. 

BRIAN WEINER

When you are at the end of your rope and you are hoping/praying for a solution, what is the mechanism that stimulates another to come to your assistance?

As our world becomes evermore diversified and fractured by special interests, there are certain qualities which are common across almost all categories of humanity, and all living things.

Kindness is the lowest common denominator that the majority of all living things will instantly respond to. Kindness is spawned through heartfelt emotion that triggers when we are given an opportunity to utilize the goodness within us, and bestow that upon any other living thing.

In these selfless acts, our compassion illuminates a pathway in which we might express how we are feeling towards something else in a loving and tender manner, in order that they might flourish and thrive.

Our love is our single greatest life force. Through it, we are able to elevate our behavior above and beyond the mundane trials and tribulations of our daily existence, and instead, connect with a higher being within all of us, in which we are expressive of things that are important, and which truly resonate with others.

When we are in contact with our higher being, and we are working to elevate our presence, and bestow that upon others, it is our compassion that recognizes the circumstances that the other being is encountering and, as a direct result, we find the kindness within our heart to share resources in our world, which could serve to the benefit of the other party in need.

It is only through these continuous behaviors, that we, ourselves, are able to rise in our vibrational energy in life.

These vibrations carry us throughout our existence and escalate at appropriate moments in our lives, such that we are able to bestow upon others some of the tremendous reservoir of thought and caring, that we have to provide.

Ensuring that you are able to spend a portion of your life, giving to others in a selfless act, could not be more appropriate, nor necessary, to the modern societal circumstances that we all find ourselves facing at this moment in time.

In our willingness to understand those around us, and not judge them for whom they are, but rather to help them find opportunity to grow and flourish, we are finally in contact with our highest self.

Happy Monday!

The bad news is time flies. The good news is you’re the pilot. 

MICHAEL ALTSHULER

Are you a good steward of your own time schedule?

We are so quick to align ourselves with every deadline, and every requirement of ourselves. In that navigation, we are brokering segments of our own life against specific parameters which are presumably important to us, lest we would not give of our own time to partake.

Trying to fit everything into a life schedule can often times be a logistical quagmire. As we subdivide our time between our personal and professional worlds, we find ourselves at significant crossroads, in which we must ultimately prioritize specific variables, in order to ensure that our most important needs are met. 

While we are navigating these permutations, we are consistently evaluating details and leveraging our own resources, in order to ensure that we prioritize our best opportunities. 

As we drill down to the fine points of these choices, we do discover that there are many casualties along the way. 

These may come in the form of things that we wish we had time to learn or experience. They may come in the form of personal relationships that we wish we had more of our own time to dedicate towards or it may take the form of goals and aspirations that are imperative to be reached, and which, in many cases, overshadow some of the things we wish we could prioritize to the top of our list. 

The older we get, the more we are clear that time is our second greatest asset, falling only behind our health on the priority meter. When this happens, we become that much more protective of our respective schedule, in order to ensure we are living the life that we truly wish to live. 

There are times when we might wake up, metaphorically speaking, and recognize that we have enabled months and years to transpire in the course of our staying on some sort of a specific schedule, and as we become that much more aware of things, we might start to feel a yearning for some of the line items that became casualties in our schedule as a result of earlier prioritizations. 

Given our finite time on this precious planet, wouldn’t it make best sense to understand how and what will make us the most happy over the course of our life? 

With this knowledge clearly thought through, we are that much more capable of making the most informed decisions regarding how and where we are willing to spend our time, and with whom. 

Happy Sunday!

Never forget who helped you out while everyone else was making excuses. 

Who has been by your side, during your lowest moments?

Everybody hits a down trend at various moments in their life. 

If nothing else, these moments facilitate our ability to filter our true friends from fair-weather friends, who are only there, when we are thriving. 

Understanding the difference between these two kinds of friends could not be more important for our overall health and well-being. When we understand with whom we are dealing, we are that much more capable of making informed choices as to which information about our lives, we are willing to share, and with whom. 

People have different reasons for bonding with one another. The myriad reasons are so diverse as to defy any particular combination of variables. But as we watch the behavior of those with whom we fraternize, we are that much more aware of the dynamic that bonds us to that other person, and as a result, we can be that much more informed about the choices we might make in any single one of those relationships. 

Conversely, when you know that another party in your world is on a down cycle, are you checking in with them to let them know that you’re thinking about them and that you care? 

Are you extending of yourself and trying to help them out of the quagmire which is engulfing them, in order that they might get to safe harbor again? 

As much as we might learn about others, in these circumstances, we are also very capable of learning significant information about ourselves on both sides of the equation, both when we are down and struggling, as well as when we are thriving, and someone else in our world is hurting. 

Trying to find our own equilibrium in the midst of all of these variables is important for countless reasons. Understanding how we feel about these variables, empowers us to make wiser decisions that are less emotion-based and more oriented around the reality of a particular situation, and/or the parties within. 

In our journey, through these moments in time, we are unquestionably growing, and through that growth, we are hopefully evolving into evermore higher frequencies of being. 

It is only through these continuous engagements that we are ultimately capable of understanding ourselves, and more importantly, understanding what truly connects us with the other people in our world. 

Happy Saturday!