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My friend Pete recently let me in on a paradigm shift I found helpful. He was talking about a friend of his who, for some reason, was taking up a bit too much of his mental space. He was beginning to feel responsible for a friends bad decisions. Another friend of Pete’s said that Pete needed to be responsible TO his friend, not FOR his friend. Pete explained this meant he was responsible to be kind to his friend, understanding, helpful, professional if that’s what the relationships required and so on. But his friend’s decisions and even his emotions were that of his friend not of Pete’s. A lot of this goes back to Henry Cloud and John Townsend’s terrific book Boundaries, but I found the little phrase be responsible To and not For helpful. So, if you’re feeling guilty about somebody else’s mistakes, their depression, or their being irritated, it might be good to ask yourself if you’ve done anything wrong that has caused that, and if not, the problem really is there problem. You can be responsible to them, to be kind and comforting, but when you become responsible for them, you are going to grow tired of [...]

About every twentieth comment on this blog, somebody says something sharp or harsh. Often it’s insulting to me, personally. And I’d be lying if I said it didn’t bother me. I do go through all the comments and manually approve them. I do this about three or four times each day. I’d say I let 95% of the comments go through. The only comments I report to spam are comments that are mean spirited. When comments get mean spirited, people just stop visiting the blog, so I pull those out. That said, I encounter a lot of comments that are directed at me, personally, and can get quite insulting. A year or more ago, these bothered me a lot more than they do now. Sometimes I’d spend ten minutes or more feeling frustrated or even angry. But about two months ago, I realized something that changed my attitude all together. I realized many of the leaders who changed the world learned to love their enemies. Our greatest example, of course, is Christ. And Tolstoy learned from Christ and then Ghandi and Martin Luther King and so on. If a leader doesn’t learn to love his critics, his critics will destroy [...]

Recently I read Tom Paterson’s book Living the Life You Were Meant to Live and enjoyed it a great deal. I even took part in a 2-day life plan evaluation with somebody who works with Tom’s system (Pete Richardson in Colorado) and, together, we evaluated the significant events of my life, my working style, my management style and so on, and then hi-lighted the stuff I was good at and also the stuff I wasn’t. I left with a very clear picture of what I needed to do over the next ten years. I also left understanding what I needed to let go of. What I found out is that I am a visionary entrepreneur. I come up with ideas and I love to get them started. I also discovered I am not a manager. I can manage a small staff of self-starters, people who do not need to be managed or told what to do, but I can’t manage a team that is looking to me for specifics. In other words, I treat people the way I like to be treated. I want to come up with a vision and then given the resources to make it happen. Check [...]

My dear friend Penny wrote a small piece for a Mothers Day article on the Burnside Writers Collective site and for Relevant Magazine. I read it in a hotel room in Boulder and teared up. So grateful for people like Penny and her mom and for my mom as well. Technically, Mothers Day is actually today, so I thought I’d reprint Pensive’s article (Pensive is my long-time nickname for Penny.) Penny, you are a saint! And by the way, happy Mothers Day to you. Quinn is lucky to have such an awesome Mom. Here’s Penny’s article: I used to hate Mother’s Day. The mylar balloons, the pink cards, the stories on everyone’s lips about their plans for taking their mom out to eat or to a movie. They all seemed to taunt me in a sing-song voice: look what we have and you don’t. After a headlong flight from my stepfather at the age of 11, the mother I knew disappeared, retreating somewhere deep inside. In her place, a withdrawn but angry woman rose up to take over her beloved facial features and voice. By the time I was a teenager I had stopped caring, stopped listening to the woman [...]