We are fortunate with this issue to have a new voice speak to us here in Words of Caring. Mark Towers is a personable and insightful speaker/storyteller who I met at a conference in Hershey about three years ago. It was interesting that we began to talk casually in a hallway concerning relationships and found ourselves still talking in that hallway almost two hours later (As you might guess, more my fault than Mark's). Since that day Mark and I have continued to find each other at the same conference and to keep in touch by e-mail. Mark brings to us some thoughtful points on the topic of becoming a Powerhouse Person™ that are very consistent with the messages we parents and friends of DCTS have explored via the Parent Seminar. Thank you Mark for sharing your words and yourself. Please, I hope you can forgive me, but I just couldn't resist rounding out the discussion with an addendum of the small thoughts I e-mailed back to Mark relating to his article.

Finally, I wanted to provide you a small piece on the subject of control. Through the years there has been a considerable amount of control exerted in my family. Perhaps you can say the same, perhaps not, but control seems, to me at least, to be a pervasive current in our society. It likely, however, is hard to see. This is because control doesn't tend to stand out anymore, it has become accepted and is considered by many as a natural way (and even the only way) to get things done.

We talk in the Parent Seminar about "getting what we want." To the uninitiated this often involves methods of control. However, when we add, "in ways that maintain dignity and respect for self and others," the methods for "getting what we want" tend to change. This is good, and important.

But in considering "dignity and respect" I have found that not only the "ways," but also "what I want" must, of necessity, be re-evaluated. This process goes to a deeper part of me and directs my focus increasingly toward the other such that what I truly want – my satisfaction if you will – becomes that which frees me of my needs in pursuing sincerely the needs of the other. In this place control cannot exist since the very basis for it has been taken away. Thus, the other is potentially benefited, but more assuredly so am I.

Enjoy!

– John Borland –


On Becoming a Powerhouse Person™:
How to Enhance Both Your Self-Worth and Your Net Worth!
By Mark "Tenacious" Towers

Magnificent athletes, politicians or tycoons have often been referred to as “Powerhouses.” You can become a Powerhouse Person™ in your chosen field, too. Adapt these principles into your existing repertoire:

1. Worry is negative goal setting. Set aside 3-5 minutes near the end of each day and designate it as “Worry Time.” Read through your list of worries, ponder them and then go back to living “in the moment” and focusing on what’s in front of you.

2. Peter Drucker, the brilliant management guru, coined the term “posteriorities.” He asserts that it is more important to set a posteriority (what you are not going to do) than it is to set a priority. He’s correct! The first step to better time (and energy) management is deciding what you are not going to do and then proceed from there.

3. The word creation and the word reaction contain the same eight letters! Think about two things often: (1) How do I consistently add value to what I am doing? (2) How do I differentiate myself? By focusing on these two questions you may not become outstanding, but you will certainly stand out. Is that important to be known as a “creation person” in today’s marketplace? As they say in Minnesota, “You Betcha!”

4. Success used to be a set of skills. Today, it is a set of ever-expanding skills. If more learning equals more earning, then very smart people would be very rich people. This is not always the case. The key to enhancing your self worth and net worth is maximizing this formula: Learned Information + Focused Application = Incredible Transformation.

5. In the world of work, there can be no substitute for two things—likeability and superior information. You can’t always possess superior information, but you can always find ways to be likeable. Actively seek opportunities to praise others—particularly people in high places. Trust me—they need it and crave it just like everyone else does.

6. Have personal, work and leisure-related goals, but remember that they are simply benchmarks. When a benchmark is not attained, it becomes an opportunity for growth. To be goal guided and not goal governed is a strategy for resiliency and greatness.

7. A lady recently shared, “I feel that many people today are simply in survival mode.” Immediately, others agreed with her. Having this sense of powerlessness in relation to your environment creates nothing but a pity party. Don’t ever see yourself in survival mode. See yourself as a “company of one” whose stock is continually rising and take responsibility for your destiny. That’s the very essence of being a Powerhouse Person.

Copyright 2003 by Mark “Tenacious” Towers (816) 578-4516



Addendum to: On Becoming a Powerhouse Person™
By John Borland

Hi Mark,

Thanks so much for the attached article regarding, "Becoming a Powerhouse Person." Do you mind if I offer some personal points?

Regarding –

Number 1. We tend to be people who are "expectations" oriented. How we regard and relate to people and situations is predicated very much on how well the person or situation meets our expectation. Worry generally is a product in us related to unmet expectations. I agree with worry time and feel even more that we should discipline ourselves to; as you say in other words, focus not on the end, but on the process. Or, as a wise Russian priest once said, "Take life as it comes to you and blame no one, but yourself."




Number 2. "Not doing" what we are "not going to do" is every bit as much an active effort as "doing" what we are "going to do," and it is more difficult because people tend to think of what they are going to do" first and "what they are not going to do" last. " But, as it is written, "The last shall be first and the first last."

Number 3. To react is common; we all do it. But to create is rare, and forms the material that others react to.

Number 4. To paraphrase what I heard just this morning while getting ready for work: "Potential only really has value when it is realized." To have been given is important, but to use what you have been given is all-important. How will you realize what you have been given?

Number 5. The best information in the world is useless to someone else unless they can receive it through their door. How can you become a key to fit into the lock in the door of another and so open them to receive? In this way, even a small amount of information becomes more.

Number 6. This very much relates to Number 1 and largely defines who we now are and why we struggle and worry. "The goal is not to achieve. The goal is to work."

Number 7. To merely survive is to hold on to yourself; it serves no one and is tantamount to death. You have been given life freely, but with a choice: How will you use what has been freely given unto you? How you answer the choice may seem a small thing, but it is the difference between Life and Death.

I pray you are well my friend.

Thanks,

John



Control
By John Borland

I had a discussion on e-mail recently concerning the raising of teenagers. The dear lady on the other end of this discussion was asking for my reflections and hearkening back to that period of time in hers and her husband’s lives when they knew the feeling of being out of control in raising their teenager.

This whole train of thought as expressed by my e-mail correspondent has caused me to stop and consider. You see I know well that difficult feeling of being out of control with my teen. So very many times have I questioned and planned around how to handle my teen and myself in light of what he does, the focus of my pursuit being to become or remain in control.

But as I reflect on this now – and believe me the old feeling is still too much with me – I come to recognize that this pivot of thinking and action around control (whether one perceives oneself as being in or out of control) has no place in a true relationship and especially not with teens.

We can never physically or mentally control another and in vainly attempting to do so we ourselves become base. From this focus we tend to look at the other only in terms of what he or she does and we attempt to bend those actions such that both the other and outcome in our mutual situation appears as we wish or expect them to look.

Control, as such, is essentially an external argument. In it we focus on only the external appearance of the person opposite us, we deal only externally with the situation between us and we see ourselves only in terms of our external person. Control is, therefore, a superficial and false condition that can only ever lead us to angst, power struggle and ultimate warfare.

This is because in control we fail to see – and in fact actively and purposefully omit from our considerations – who the person opposite us actually is and who we ourselves are or become as we relate with them.

And in fact to be in control we must omit such considerations of the person. This is because we, quite naturally, will not allow control to exist where the other is truly and respectfully considered from the heart. Thus, for the desire for control to be fulfilled and maintained, consideration of the other cannot be. And even consideration of ourselves in the lesser persons we become must be eliminated if control is to survive. We, therefore, in control, must create a delusion of good intention around our passionate desire so as to hide even ourselves from ourselves.

For any relationship to be true the visible appearance of the common situation and even the outward look of the other and we ourselves must be nonexistent to our focus and purpose. Within the true and genuine relationship our loving concern naturally must, and can only be, for the ability of the other person to become fully who he or she is intended to be.

And our goal cannot be to produce this outcome in the other person even for his or her good – that again is within the province of the controller. Our goal, as a servant, can only be to provide, to the extent that we are able within propriety, every conceivable opportunity and a continual, warm invitation to the opening of every door to allow the other to come to their own genuine place of self by their own desire for it.

With teenagers this is most definitely true. For our teens have reached an age of awareness and emerging understanding of themselves such that, to oppose this movement through the use of control, even for good reasons and purposes (and even if that were possible, which it really is not) would become to them an affront, and in truth, a retarding of their most needed advancement to maturity.

Even with our younger children – where we define their choices more fully for them – our aim should not be one of control. Rather it should be the pursuit of loving and balanced teaching in understanding and increasingly responsible discipline such that these dear children, as they come of age, will flow freely, naturally and fully into the best and most appropriate choices for their good and the good of the others with them.

To do otherwise, even with the most obedient of children, can only lead, respectively, to the rebellious, blind and headlong undertakings, or the faltering and anxiously confused meanderings of one seeking to capture, or of one suddenly and unexpectedly receiving release from the tyranny of control.

It is, rather, the real pursuit of the true and genuine goal of relationship by a servant onto the other that becomes a different and defining activity far above that of control. For the proper pursuit of the other by us can only in truth be undertaken by following our own inner path into ourselves.

The question to be asked in a genuine relationship can never critically be, “Who is he?” This question is again external, of control, and so opposes a true and genuine relationship.

The real and essential question must first and always be, “Who am I?” This is so because the only possible way to genuinely provide opportunity for another and invite them lovingly to open themselves is to seek for a real, continual and serving change in, “Who we are.”

For how can we ever avoid the call to overstep ourselves and coerce change in another by means of control unless we begin, in acceptance and true faith, the zealous and continual work to bring release of the controls – the pride, fear, expectations, concern, threats and all the rest – we have allowed to coerce us?

Until this inner work is undertaken and peace in struggle begins in us, it is we ourselves, and not the other, who will continue to act as the barrier to our desires. We will constantly and in confusion seek freedom for ourselves through control of the external other. But we will remain blindly ignorant of the truth – that the chains, which so forcefully bind us, are the ones that we ourselves internally construct and control.

And herein lies the tremendous, unequalled value of a true and genuine relationship. No matter what opportunities we can provide or which doors we seek to open in another, when all is said and done, the willingness to open to and use what is provided lies solely with the other person. We can guide and encourage, we can hope and pray, but only the other person can actually do through the releasing of control of himself.

But, whether or not this happens, such a worthy journey into ourselves, sincerely undertaken for the sake of the other, cannot help but lead us further toward the genuine person we are so much wanting for the other and indeed so much need for ourselves.

What we ultimately learn within the struggle to genuineness is that sacrifice of ourselves for the sake of other reaps eventual reward given onto us. For to release in us the fetters of control for the sake of the other is to release also in us the need for control of this and all others. From this place of release we can then more fully and in love invite the true reward for our children, our spouses, the others with us and also ourselves.

And who can possibly deny the total, lovely and unifying value of a genuine relationship in which the other – our loved ones, especially our teens – and even we ourselves can and do gain.

YOU MAKE THE DIFFERENCE IN WHAT WE CAN DO TOGETHER!

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Last Modified: December 13, 2003