What's the single best question to ask NOW for your self-development?

Q: What's the single best question to ask yourself, anywhere, any time, for your self-development?
A: What does this have to teach me?

It's long been popular in spiritual/self-development circles for people to ask, "What am I supposed to learn from this?" in the face or aftermath of a crisis. And that's useful. But it's not what I'm talking about.

I'm talking about asking the question, "What does this have to teach me?" about things in your environment. Here are a few examples from the room I'm in while I write this:

• Salt lamp - A salt lamp is a hunk of pink sea salt (i.e. salt precipitated from sea water back when the land where it is found was underwater), hollowed out and fitted with a low wattage light bulb, and set on a wooden disk for a base, with an electrical cord.What does the salt lamp have to teach me? It teaches that light comes through structure, and that both are necessary for manifestation in the physical world. Light without structure is formless, and so not obvious, not really seen; structure without light is literally in the dark and not seen. Also, it teaches that illumination comes from within, and from the connection to 'all that is' (in the lamp's case, electricity).
  
• Wooden Armoire - What does the armoire have to teach me? It teaches that something can have structure and solidity, but also be open to hold space for others. I choose what those things are. It also teaches that structure supports (I have baskets holding scarves, etc. on top of the armoire & necklaces hanging from the door knobs.)
• Black UniBall pen - What doe sthe pen have to teac h me? It teaches that simply being a tool that energy can flow through to communicate with others is useful (when I write with it, I communicate, but I also am a tool of communication for higher energies). Darkness (black ink) can be useful, sometimes just because of contrast (with white paper). Even those things that communicate can also adhere (clip on side of pen).

If you do this for a while, you'll notice that the world is almost literally screaming lessons at you, profound truths that you just have to pay attention to notice. I suspect, having just stumbled upon this today, that the lessons each person learns from the objects they choose to focus on will be the perfect lessons for that person at that moment. So you really can't go wrong!

More Lessons from Wife Swap (& its aftermath)

So I posted the item below on Saturday afternoon, and began to get hate mail. Most of it was gratuitously vile, while a few people struck a reasonable tone and made good points. To the reasonable among you, thank you. To those who just used the comments to vent their anger, has it occurred to you that perhaps praying for open hearts (Stephen's, yours, mine, heck, the entire world's) might be a more productive use of your time and energy?

Here's what I've learned from this:

• The power of prime time television - I wasn't on the show; all I did was write a blog post about it. And yet my blog has gotten more hits in the last 2 days than in the last 6 months combined.
  
• The power of controversy - A radio talent manager told me years ago that you get better ratings by stirring up controversy than by being nice. (He's the person who convinced Dr. Laura to air her real comments rather than what he called, "happy talk" -- and the rating soared.) Wow, was he right.
  
• What you put out comes back to you, amplified - While I didn't say anything mean, I am apparently guilty by association. Stephen said mean things on screen, and so that energy comes back at him, his family and me, just for writing about it.
• People are willing to judge someone based on very little evidence - Obviously, they are willing to condemn a man's entire life and being based on part of 42 minutes of (edited) television. And of course, they know him better than people who have met him. Does anyone remember "judge not, lest ye be judged"?
  
• Once people have made up their minds, they don't want to hear anything that contradicts their judgment - Heaven forbid you should bring up a different side of the issue.
• A 'public' figure is not viewed as human - People apparently feel it is fine to say horrible things to people they have never met. They say things I'm sure they would never say to a friend or family member -- or even a stranger -- to his or her face. I'm an adult, and I can take it, but I'm beginning to feel sorry for the teenagers on American Idol, who must get all sorts of crap, at a time in their lives when they're very vulnerable. Therefore...
• If you are going to be 'public', you'd better have pretty thick skin. - The problem with this is that people who develop such thick skin then begin to ignore the negative comments and surround themselves with people they feel they can trust. If those people are sycophants, that 'public' figure begins to live in an isolated, unrealistic bubble.
  
• Loyalty is not valued - To say something positive about someone who is out of favor is not viewed as loyalty, but as being vile, or stupid.
  
• Listener, viewer, reader beware: freedom of speech does not mean you have to tell the truth, let alone be civil - I've read that it's illegal to yell "Fire!" in a crowded theater, unless there is, in fact, a fire. But is is fine to threaten publicly, and to lie about the facts on the air. Of course, I should have learned this from the media darlings who make their living by spreading lies that feed hatred, but I get it at a deeper level now.
  

(And as for those of you who said, 'if you were psychic, you would have warned them' -- hey, no one asked me!)

8 Business Lessons from the "Neighbor from Hell'

I worked really hard to get rid of the 'neighbor from hell' at a condo I own. (More about that here.) She left, finally, all because I got the owner to give me power of attorney to do it. As I look back on it, though, doing this has taught me a number of lessons which are much more widely applicable:

1) Have a clear intention (don't take no for an answer) -- The neighbor from hell (NFH) had been negatively affecting my life for years now. Because of her, I had a much harder time finding an acceptable tenant for that unit than for any other unit I own (and a few are in the neighborhood, so it really is comparing apples to apples). Further, the tenant in that unit turns over immediately at the end of each lease (if they even paid the rent on time, so that I didn't have to get rid of them earlier -- and this is the only unit where I've ever had to evict anyone).

When my wonderful current tenant gave me 60 days notice, despite acknowledging the fact that she has a lease which at that point lasted another 6 months, I got desperate. And desperation turned into determination that this ends now. And somehow, when I get determined, the universe lines up behind me. (This is most defiitely a vow, which seems to be a variant on the Law of Attraction.)

2) Be nice -- My first step was to contact the owner. Of course, I'd been trying that without success for over a year. She wouldn't answer my phone calls or emails. So what I did was pay her a visit. How did I have her address? When she bought the property, back in 2006, I was nice. I called her up (got that number because the former owner was a friend -- see, I'm nice), and said, "If I can help you in any way, please let me know. And oh, by the way, please give me your contact info", which she did.

3) Be organized -- I'm fanatic about keeping people's contact information. If you give me a card, all that goes into my database, even if I don't put you on my mailing list. My database is over 3000 records, everyone from the plumber to the dentist to the health insurance company to my extended family to my clients and on and on. So when I needed this woman's address, there it was, easy to find.

4) Know the rules of the game -- It's important to know what you can do, and what you can't. Without the owner authorizing me to do it, neither I nor my tenants could evict the NFH, who was essentially a squatter, paying no rent, no water or sewer bill, no gas bill, putting slugs in the communal washing machine. My tenant couldn't put the stuff the NFH had wrongly stored in my tenant's half of the shared garage out on the driveway, or in the dumpster -- that would have been illegal. We could, however, call the police to keep an eye on the place, and file lots of complaints about the bad behavior of the NFH. We could call Child Protective Services to have the mother investigated for leaving her minor child unsupervised for a week at a time. And with the power of attorney from the owner, I can file an unlawful detainer suit, which will eventually get her out for sure.

5) You can't always be nice -- Some people, like like the Neighbor from Hell, don't respond to nice. You can ask a Neighbor from Hell something nicely, and she'll either ignore you, or smile, say yes, and then ignore you. With these people, you have to be tough. That means using all the resources available to you -- veiled threats, contracts, police, Child Protective Services, the courts, whatever. (NLP would say, "the most flexible system always wins". And by trying everything, I am being flexible as hell.)

6) Talk to people in terms they'll understand -- This is actually a basic principle of NLP, phrased as "The meaning of communication is the response you get." I always took this to mean that if you didn't get the response you wanted from the words you chose, you should try different words.

That's part of it. Another part of communication is not your words, it's your actions. The NFH basically lives by working the system (Section 8 & disability payments for 5 years that I know of, even though she's capable of painting apartments for extra income). So I made sure that the information came from an authority figure (attorney), who said that if I even filed an unlawful detainer (i.e. eviction) lawsuit, it would follow her around forever. (Translation: you'll have a really hard time finding another apartment for the rest of your life.) Funny thing, the U-Haul truck made regular appearances right after that.

7) Be transparent -- that is, tell the truth, and tell it to everyone who needs hear it. This is one of the wonders of email. You can easily have a one to many conversation. You don't have to say the same thing over and over to keep everyone up to date, and you don't have to wonder who said what to whom, or when. When I email my tenant about what's going on, I often cc the property owner, the attorney and the police. Same thing when they email me. That way, everyone is on the same page, and we can all go forward together. In fact, we all begin to trust each other more, too.

8) Reach out to the community -- When I told a friend my saga of the NFH, she said, it sounds like bad custody battle. And she has a point. The custody problem is directly between the parents, but it affects the children, and anyone to whom those kids act out. A people problem is therefore a problem for the community. This is why Child Protective Services exist. It's why police, aka peace officers, exist. It's why the courts exist. They are all her to provide formal community solutions to community problems. Use them.