"You'll hate it."

"I turned down that job two years ago, but it's perfect for you."

"Nobody makes a living that way."

Strategies to Transform Wet Blankets into Comfort Quilts.

"Calm under pressure" is a skill you can learn, and it gives you power. I used to flinch when people were critical until I worked with Rick, an Air Force veteran who had seen more action than he cared to admit.

When a bullying administrator yelled, Rick would laugh. "It's just noise," he would say, "not enemy aircraft." And he'd bounce right back into his next idea.

Recognize champion in critic. By investing time and energy to insult you, your critic acknowledges you have strength and power. Be proud!

The universe has sent you a coach. Dancers and athletes learn that coaches do not waste time on losers.

Pat Summitt, award-winning coach of Tennessee's Lady Vols, warns recruits that she yells only at best players. It's when she stops yelling that you need to worry.

Our days are a blur of perceived demands from workplaces stretched beyond leading edge to bleeding edge, from technology that allows others to locate us even in privacy of our cars and bathrooms, from children and aging parents who name us and claim us, and from our inability to find options for creating mind sets and actions that can give us a modicum of breathing space and control.

We can all sing chorus: “There’s too much to do and too little time.” We have created a commodity worth of Stock Exchange: Time. We spend it, lose it, waste it, and manage it. We’re told to make time, use time, take time and, if we’ve had a run-in with law, we might even “do” time.

Time is great equalizer, given in singular 24-hour chunks by rising of sun and setting of moon. No money can buy it, no power can hold it, no army can stop it. We need to concentrate on winning back our life -- snatching it away from blur of to-do lists, technology, and work/life pressures.

Four Truths

The more I ponder time demands, I realize four truths:

Truth 1: Simplicity isn’t simple. It’s an admirable, essential goal that most of us are working on. Simplicity takes time and requires an agreement from all those impacted by its requirements. We’ve been given day-to-day wisdom to follow in realizing already-present abundance without adding to our closet, our bank account, our larder.

Truth 2: The technology genie will not go back into bottle. Once released, our challenge becomes to wisely choose when we access technology’s power. The seductiveness of thinking we are so important that people must find us any time, any place, for any matter is ego at its worst. Consider my experience with a man who brought his computer and cellular phone along on a four-day cruise. He was not present. He missed experience. And, I think, he lost.