Chicken Soup for the Soul 20th Anniversary Edition

by Jack Canfield

  John Wooden, the great UCLA basketball coach, has a philosophy that every day he is supposed to help someone who can never reciprocate. That’s his obligation.

  When in college working on his masters thesis on scouting and defensive football, George Allen wrote up a 30-page survey and sent it out to the great coaches in the country. Eighty-five percent answered it completely.

  Great people will share, which is what made George Allen one of the greatest football coaches in the world. Great people will tell you their secrets. Look for them, call them on the phone or buy their books. Go where they are, get around them, talk to them. It is easy to be great when you get around great people.

  ~Bob Richards, Olympic Athlete

  Eclectic Wisdom

  This life is a test.

  It is only a test.

  Had it been

  an actual life

  You would have received

  Further instructions on

  Where to go and what to do!

  ~Found on a bulletin board

  In a Heartbeat

  It is not flesh and blood, but heart which makes us fathers and sons.

  ~Friedrich von Schiller

  I swore I would never play golf. The game is the direct opposite of everything I’m wired to do. I’m blessed with many things, but one of them isn’t patience. Patience I have to work at. What I love is speed — fast boats, fast cars, fast results. During the three decades I’ve been helping transform the quality of people’s lives, my message has always been the same: You can change in a heartbeat. How? You can change your focus. If you change the stories you tell yourself, you can change the meaning of what happens to you.

  The story I always told myself about golf was that it was slow and boring. But my boys started to play golf, and I wanted to do things with them, so I took up golf. Even though I hated it. But then I thought: “Why spend the time if you’re not going to enjoy the game?”

  I focused on what I liked about the sport. Golf courses are built in some of the most beautiful places in the world, so I could enjoy the view. Then a buddy pointed out that I could play by my own rules. If I didn’t want to play all eighteen holes, I could play six. I could play only the best, most scenic holes. Pretty soon I was thinking, “Hey, this sport is great!”

  When you learn to change your focus, it helps you feel gratitude for what you already have — and that is truly the key to happiness.

  What I am most grateful for in my life is my beautiful wife, Sage. She has given me more joy than everything else combined. And the only people I love as much as my wife and my children are my father-in-law and mother-in-law. I had four fathers, all of them dead, and my mother has passed, too. So Sage’s parents are my mother and father.

  So once I learned to love golf, I wanted to share it with my Pops. He’s a very strong man, a good, honorable man who spent his life in the lumber business and never had time for something like golf. But I got him playing and before long he was hooked.

  One day he said to me, “Tony, let’s go play golf!” Then he named a golf course that was a two-hour drive away, and not a particularly great course. I had to catch a flight to London first thing the next morning, but I could see how much he wanted to go, and I loved him so much I didn’t want to let him down. So off we went.

  When we got there the course was even uglier than I’d expected, and I wasn’t playing well. Then suddenly, just as we were about to tee off, three deer came prancing out of the woods and stopped right in front of us. They stood there staring, and we stared back. It was a perfect moment, suspended in time. Then, just as suddenly, the deer took off and were gone.

  As we walked back to the car I remember thinking, “You know, you’ll never know how long you’re going to have the people you love.”

  I immediately forgot the game and the lousy course, and Pops and I started having an even better time together. When we pulled up to the last hole, my father jumped out of the car and said “I’ll go first.” He took two steps, then spun around and looked at me. His eyes rolled back in his head until all I could see were the whites, then he toppled over like a big tree falling in a clear cut, crashing straight back and smacking his head on the ground. In that moment everything in my world changed, and it happened unbelievably fast.

  I didn’t know what to do. I’d never been trained in CPR. But I knew he would die if I didn’t do something. My whole nervous system started speeding up and I remembered from somewhere that I had to clear his airway and pull back his tongue to keep him from suffocating. I did that, but there was no breath in him. So I started giving him mouth-to-mouth, like I’d seen in the movies, but it wasn’t working. He was limp and changing color. I screamed for help but there was nobody who could hear me. Terrible thoughts were rushing through my mind. “If I hadn’t taken him golfing we wouldn’t be here in this godforsaken place! I can’t let him die right in front of me, without his wife and daughter by his side!”

  Then something popped into my head out of nowhere, a random CNN news show that I’d seen years ago, that I had no reason to be watching. They were talking about people who could have been saved if they’d been given chest compressions instead of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. There is already oxygen in the blood, and intense chest compressions can force it into the brain, and it’s the brain that you’ve got to keep alive. So I started chest compressions, but it wasn’t working. After three or four minutes he was still lifeless.

  I was going crazy now, and I just snapped and started shouting, “You’re not dying now! Not on my watch! You are going to be with your family!” I said a prayer and then started to smash his chest, pounding down with incredible ferocity. I pumped and pumped and then all of a sudden he coughed. And then there was a breath. He still couldn’t open his eyes. He couldn’t speak, so I grabbed his hand and I said, “Squeeze my arm right here if you understand what I’m saying right now.” He squeezed it.

  Finally help arrived, and we eventually got my father to a hospital. There was no brain damage, and they never could tell us what happened or why. There had been some kind of arrhythmia, followed by cardiac arrest. His heart had stopped, and then he came back to life.

  There are many ways to tell this story. I wanted to blame myself for teaching my father to play golf and then taking him somewhere so far from help. But then I thought: Who did I think I was? Who put me in charge of what happens? A better way to look at it was to consider the timing of his heart attack as a gift. What if we didn’t play golf, and he was driving his car when he passed out? What if he was in his workshop, alone when it happened? I wouldn’t have been there to save him.

  For some people, when an ambulance races by and just misses them, the story they come up with is, “I was almost killed.” Other people say, “Wow, God protected me today.” The quality of your life is not the quality of your events, it is the meaning you attached to your events.

  The story I choose to tell myself is that my father is alive and God guided it. I got to be part of that process, so I get more time with him. I’m going to value every moment we have together, even more than before. And we’ll be spending some of that time playing golf.

  ~Anthony Robbins

  To Connect, Must We Disconnect?

  The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that man may become robots.

  ~Erich Fromm

  As the founder of the Agape International Spiritual Center, I tweet and have friended on Facebook thousands of local members and global live streamers. Added to that are social networking conveniences like texting and calling, which keep me connected to staff and family. Oh yes, I definitely enjoy and appreciate the benefits of technology. After all, I couldn’t write this piece without it, nor could I stay in touch as required when traveling to speaking engagements, conferences, and so on. Recently — and in a spirit of honesty it was not by choice — I discovered what a shock it is to the system to be cut off, without warning, from all the mechanisms and systems we depend upo
n to communicate efficiently and effectively.

  Here’s how it all unfolded. Agape’s website was down for over a week. At the same time I was having challenges with my home computer so couldn’t access e-mail or the Internet. “Oh well,” I comforted myself, “there’s always texting and calling.” That’s when things escalated. After a hunt worthy of a search and rescue team, my cell phone was nowhere to be found. I had to laugh at myself when I observed a slight panic arising at feeling disconnected from the outside world. It was a good time to have cultivated the tools of an accomplished yogi: clairvoyance, telepathic communication, and bilocation. Not being quite there, I had no other choice but to use my household landline, which felt about as antiquated as sending messages via carrier pigeon!

  The upside of my predicament is that by forcibly having been put on “pause,” I couldn’t deny how devouring social media can be. What seemed like utterly natural forms of communicating one moment, when placed under an introspective microscope, revealed not only their addictive potential but also how their misuse is creating what I call a “high-tech, low-touch” society. Interruption technologies have become the norm. Just go out to dinner and see how children are occupied playing games on their iPads while their parents text and talk on the phone, all of them rarely sharing eye contact or personal conversation.

  Neurologists, sociologists, psychologists and other pundits are issuing warnings about the Age of Distraction in which we live. They aren’t casting blame on social media itself; how can they since it is we who have self-responsibility for how and when we use it? We hear in the news about accidents caused by a metro engineer texting or a driver injuring someone — sometimes fatally — by texting just one trivial word. Perhaps T. S. Eliot realized the timelessness of his words when he wrote, “We are distracted from distraction by distraction.”

  The message that was driven home to me is that there is a time to disconnect, to curb the insatiable appetite for where the next click might lead. Simply put, equal commitment must be given to connecting to the “inner-net.” Just as in the outer world we learn to adjust to ever-advancing technology, so must we equally participate in the inner world of ever-evolving consciousness. Practices such as meditation, affirmative prayer and visioning keep us centered, present to the now moment. They synchronize body, mind and spirit and are the antidote to the seduction of distraction, constant interruption and multi-tasking. Above all, they awaken the Essential Self. And for that there exists no technological substitute.

  ~Michael Bernard Beckwith

  How to Give Up Bad Habits

  Habits are at first cobwebs, then cables.

  ~Spanish Proverb

  Throughout my life I’ve given up many bad habits. Most recently I got off coffee. Letting go of coffee was not easy. In fact, strange as it may sound, it was even harder than when I got sober eight years ago and gave up drugs and alcohol. Caffeine was my last drug, and because it wasn’t killing me I continued to give myself permission to drink it.

  One of the main reasons we stay stuck in habits we know don’t serve us is because of our permission-giving thoughts, such as One cup of coffee a day won’t kill me. Or, I only drink on weekends. These thoughts keep us convinced that there is nothing wrong with our behavior even though deep down we know it isn’t right.

  In many cases we use our bad habits to avoid dealing with something much more difficult. In my case, I was using coffee as a final vice. As a sober woman I felt I deserved to have something I could turn to when I felt I needed a jolt. This habit seemed harmless, but when I got honest with myself it became clear that I was just using the coffee as another drug. Upon genuinely reviewing my behavior I came to realize that I had to stop giving myself permission to drink coffee and that it was time to change the habit.

  Transitioning out of a bad habit can be really uncomfortable at first. To help you ease into the process, I’ve outlined the three steps that worked for me when I put down the coffee.

  Step One: Keep it in the day

  One of the main reasons we get tripped up when we try to change a habit is that we start future tripping. For instance, when I was first letting go of coffee I’d project onto the future with thoughts such as, What will I do when I’m in Europe and I want a cappuccino? What helped me most during these future flip-outs was to simply keep it in the day. I would tell myself, I don’t need to worry about tomorrow. Today I choose not to drink coffee. One day at a time I’ve stayed committed.

  Step Two: Change your breath pattern

  The moment we change our breath pattern we change our energy, thereby changing our experience. Whenever you notice yourself about to relapse into your negative behavior, take a long, deep breath. As you change your breath you change your energy. Your calm and centered energy will support you in positive behavior and stop you from indulging in your bad habit.

  Step Three: Make it joyful

  Letting go of a negative habit doesn’t have to be torturous. In fact, it can be joyful. To really create change we need more than just willpower: We must find the joy and curiosity in it. Letting go of a bad habit is really just creating a new habit. In that new habit you can find happiness. In my case, I chose not to dwell on the loss of coffee and instead I fell in love with organic tea and have become a tea connoisseur. When you find joy in creating a new habit you can effortlessly let go of the bad one.

  If you’re ready to let go of that nasty vice, use these three steps. Keep it in the day, breathe through the transition and find joy in creating new habits.

  ~Gabrielle Bernstein

  The Two Saddest Words

  Precaution is better than cure.

  ~Edward Coke

  Two of the saddest words in the English language are “if only.” I live my life with the goal of never having to say those words, because they convey regret, lost opportunities, mistakes, and disappointment. And sometimes the words “if only” go with terrible tragedies. Think about how many times you have heard about something awful happening, accompanied by “if only he had called her back to make sure she was okay...” or “if only I had investigated that noise...” or “if only they had made sure the gate to the pool clicked behind them...”

  My father-in-law is famous in our family for saying, “Take the extra minute to do it right.” He must be doing something right, since he’s 91 years old and still making a lot of sense.

  I always try to live by the “extra minute” rule. Sometimes it only takes seconds to make sure I write something down correctly, or check something on the Internet, or move an object out of the way before it trips someone. And of course when my children were young, and prone to all kinds of mishaps, I lived and breathed the extra minute rule. I always thought about what I could do to avoid an “if only” moment, whether it was something minor like moving a cup full of hot coffee away from the edge of a counter, or something that required a little more work such as taping padding onto the sharp corners of a glass coffee table.

  I just read a news story about a student pilot who was thrown from an airplane when its canopy lifted off. The instructor, who was belted in, was fine. The student, whose seatbelt was not fastened, fell from the sky and his body was found on the ground somewhere in Tennessee. Imagine how many people are in mourning, and how terrified that man must have been as he fell from the plane and realized he was going to die. Imagine the chorus of “if only” coming from his family. If only he had been wearing his seatbelt... How simple would that have been?

  I don’t move my car one inch until I hear the seatbelt click on every passenger. I unplug the iron when I leave the laundry room for “just a minute.” I’d hate to get distracted, not return to the laundry room, and start a fire with that forgotten iron. Imagine the “if only” I’d be saying then. After I realized that I could not be trusted with a teakettle — I left it boiling on the stove for an hour — I threw it out and bought an electric teakettle that shuts itself off. And I am paranoid about fireplace ashes. I wait till they are two weeks old, then shovel the
m into a bag on garbage collection day and put the bag 20 feet away from the house in the middle of the driveway.

  When my teenage son was first driving, I worried that enforcing his curfew too strictly would cause him to speed and have an accident. A boy in the next town was killed when he drove too fast trying to make it home by midnight. So my son and I agreed on a plan — if he missed curfew he would just lose double those minutes the next night out. Ten minutes late meant 20 minutes shaved off the curfew the next time, consequences that were not so onerous that they would cause him to rush home.

  When I was in a car accident a few years ago, resulting in spinal surgery and permanent nerve damage, I handled it well emotionally, because I wasn’t the driver who was at fault. There was no “if only” thinking for me, and it’s a lot easier to forgive someone else than it is to forgive yourself.

  I don’t only avoid those “if only” moments when it comes to safety. It’s equally important to avoid “if only” in our personal relationships. We all know people who lost a loved one and bemoaned the fact that they had foregone an opportunity to say “I love you” or “I forgive you.” When my father announced he was going to the eye doctor across from my office on Good Friday, I told him that it was a holiday for Chicken Soup for the Soul and I wouldn’t be here. But then I thought about the fact that he’s 84 years old and I realized that I shouldn’t give up an opportunity to see him. I called him and told him I had decided to go to work on my day off after all. When my husband’s beloved, elderly uncle pocket-dialed me several times yesterday with his new cell phone, I urged my husband to call him back, invoking the “if only” possibility. My husband called him and was glad that he did. Now if anything happens, my husband won’t have to say, “If only I had called him back that day.”