Archive for April, 2009
Love those yummy brain drugs
Posted by: | CommentsWe started yesterday looking at how our brain works. If we understand this it can help us realise the importance of dealing with our “stuff” because if we don’t we are killing ourselves.
On a typical day in the brain, trillions of messages are sent and received. The messages that are positive are carried by the Biogenic Amine/Endorphin System, (Yummy drugs).
Other messages are negative or sad, (down drugs). Most nerve centers receive input from both types of messengers. As long as this input is balanced, everything runs along on an even keel.
Stress, however, causes problems with the brain’s yummy drugs. When life is smooth, the yummy drugs keep up with demand. But when too much stress is placed on the brain, the yummy drugs begin to fall behind on their deliveries. As I said yesterday we only get a certain amaount doled out.
As the stress continues, the happy messages begin to fail because they simply run dry. Important nerve centers then receive mostly down drugs and the whole brain becomes distressed. The person enters a state of brain chemical imbalance known as — OVERSTRESS.
We all suffer from this occasionally but many of us live in overstress mode adn this is highly damaging to us, our relationships and our ability to make good decisions around investing etc.
I hope you don’t mind a bit of a left brained series but this info is fascinating and it will I hope bring you to a place fo greater action from greater understanding.
So the drugs we want our brains to give us are SEROTONIN, NORADRENALIN, and DOPAMINE
Tomorrow we’ll look at what they do and then explore how to get our brains giving us what we need.
Stay Safe ~ Dean Letfus @ www.MassiveAction.co.nz
How’s Your brain doing?
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Did you know that your brain doles out to you a daily dose of chemicals that you get to spend?
If we are healthy then this is enough energy for us to feel good all day, interact at healthy levels and generally be OK.
But the amount of adrenaline and dopamine and various other bits and pieces we get is fixed. So when we are emotionally or mentally unwell our brain keeps reserves to ensure it can cope with suppressing our feelings, feeding our unforgiveness, giving voice to our hatred, keeping up with our perfectionism or self hatred etc.
What this means is that many of us have enough feel good drugs to get through our first coffee then we’re done.
This is a scientific process, it just happens whether we like it or not and impacts us way more than we think. So have a think today at what you expend your feel good drugs on and we’ll expand this tomorrow.
Stay Safe ~ Dean Letfus @ www.MassiveAction.co.nz
It only takes a little love mixed with faith
Posted by: | CommentsI often receive “don’t break the chain” emails and instantly delete them. Once every now and again one comes along that is genuine and true. This is one of those, enjoy!!
A little girl stood near a small church from which she had been turned away because it was ‘too crowded.’
‘I can’t go to Sunday School,’ she sobbed to the pastor as he walked by.
Seeing her shabby, unkempt appearance, the pastor guessed the reason and, taking her by the hand, took her inside and found a place for her in the Sunday school class. The child was so happy that they found room for her, and she went to bed that night thinking of the children who have no place to worship Jesus.
Some two years later, this child lay dead in one of the poor tenement buildings. Her parents called for the kindhearted pastor who had befriended their daughter to handle the final arrangements.
As her poor little body was being moved, a worn and crumpled red purse was found which seemed to have been rummaged from some trash dump.
Inside was found 57 cents and a note, scribbled in childish handwriting, which read: ‘This is to help build the little church bigger so more children can go to Sunday School.’
For two years she had saved for this offering of love.
When the pastor tearfully read that note, he knew instantly what he would do. Carrying this note and the cracked, red pocketbook to the pulpit, he told the story of her unselfish love and devotion.
He challenged his deacons to get busy and raise enough money for the larger building.
But the story does not end there…
A newspaper learned of the story and published It. It was read by a wealthy realtor who offered them a parcel of land worth many thousands.
When told that the church could not pay so much, he offered to sell it to the little church for 57 cents.
Church members made large donations. Checks came from far and wide.
Within five years the little girl’s gift had increased to $250,000.00–a huge sum for that time (near the turn of the century). Her unselfish love had paid large dividends.
When you are in the city of Philadelphia , look up Temple Baptist Church , with a seating capacity of 3,300. And be sure to visit Temple University, where thousands of students are educated.
Have a look, too, at the GoodSamaritan Hospital and at a Sunday School building which houses hundreds of beautiful children, built so that no child in the area will ever need to be left outside during Sunday school time.
In one of the rooms of this building may be seen the picture of the sweet face of the little girl whose 57 cents, so sacrificially saved, made such remarkable history. Alongside of it is a portrait of her kind pastor, Dr. Russell H. Conwell, author of the book, ‘Acres of Diamonds’.
This is a true story, which goes to show WHAT GOD CAN DO WITH 57 CENTS.
Understanding “the market”.
Posted by: | CommentsThere is opportunity in every market. This is true whether you are selling a product or running a church. One of the skills anybody over 35 probably hasn’t developed is how to read the market and adjust to it. I say over 35 because they are the pre-internet generation who didn’t grow up in the global, instant information age. Life was never as fast for them as it is for the current generations.
Let’s look at 2 totally different examples, first property.
Even in a falling global market as we have right now, people, some people, are making a fortune out of property while the masses are losing their shirt. Why is that?
Well there are lots of reasons but to highlight my point, some people are correctly reading the current market and understanding that there are buyers out there who have a certain expectation of a bargain. All they have to do is secure property at levele below the current “bargain market rate” and sell those to the people wanting to buy.
Now this is hardly rocket science but virtually nobody does it!!
I have people in my forum who made nearly $250,000 in one week through knowing how to read and benefit from the current market. I have another friend who is trading several properties a week and no problem finding buyers.
We often assume that what we know is “common knowledge”. Well common knowledge is very similar to common sense, very uncommon.
The herd is always several months or layers behind what is really happening and we can benefit from that if we learn how to read the signs and act on them.
Example number 2 is church attendance. After 9/11 in the USA people flocked to churches in huge numbers. I know of pastors whose congregations doubled in size in 2 weeks.
Now I am sure there are exceptions but the vast majority of those churches have returned to the same numbers they had pre 9/11.
And again now in the current global meltdown people are turning to churches looking for hope. In 6 months they may well all be gone again.
Why don’t they stay??
Because the churches don’t know how to read their market and therefore they aren’t offering what the customer wants to buy. People are all looking for answers, whether it’s a financial, relational or spiritual need. We will only succeed if we are providing answers. My property trading friends are meeting the needs of their buyers. Too many churches keep rolling out the same material to new people as they do to their long standing members and wonder why the new ones leave, when the answer is so obvious. They aren’t getting their desperate needs met.
So whatever it is you’re marketing or providing today, think about the clients you haven’t met you and ask yourself; “What do they want? What do they need? How is my product or service going to meet that need and fulfil their desire.
Stay Safe ~ Dean Letfus @ www.MassiveAction.co.nz
Choosing friends
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This week we’ve talked about relationships and the gems that can be hidden under some odd shaped rocks.
Now it’s up to you. Consider it a bit of a challenge to get to know 1 person or an “odd” couple and prove me right or wrong.
Doing this WILL stretch you, it will force you to put your bias aside, it will teach you to love. But most of all you will actually grow. YOU will benefit by sharing a part of you with another human being.
I often think of Jesus in the Bible who was betrayed by Judas. Not only was Judas one of Jesus 12 closest friends, Jesus also gave him the money to look after knowing that Judas was a thief and would steal from it.
How’s that for commitment to a friendship.
At one of my previous churches my wife and I decided to look for an “odd” couple every Sunday and invite them home for lunch. We must have done it 50 or 100 times.
You know what happened?? We made a lot of friends. We made a lot of lonely people less lonely. We started to create a sense of community in our church that wasn’t there before. We didn’t have 1 single occasion where we regretted investing our time or money into meeting these people.
More recently I remember we had dinner with an “interesting” family.
They asked us to come to their house as their children were a handful. As we walked in we saw the wife cleaning pots in the kitchen sink. She was basically spraying floor cleaner on to them as they hadn’t been cleaned for so long. Dinner was edible, just, and had we gone there looking to be pampered or just relax we were going to be disappointed.
However what we discovered was that this family had an ill son who would always require an extraordinary amount of emotional energy and money from his parents. A father who didn’t know how to earn enough money to ensure his wife and son were looked after properly. His fear consumed him to a point where he had no friends and no support.
A mother and wife who had some intellectual challenges and coped with a sick son as best as she could.
We became good friends with these people. You couldn’t wish to meet a more loving, caring, loyal couple as friends and their son, whilst unusual, was highly intelligent and a delight to be around once he trusted us.
This relationship is a treasure to us, but would never ever have occurred if we hadn’t put a hand out to this worlds rejected gems.
Who are YOU having for dinner tomorrow night???
Stay Safe ~ Dean Letfus @ www.MassiveAction.co.nz
What are we like?
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I know life isn’t meant to be all serious. In fact quite the reverse, we need to have fun, laugh and enjoy ourselves.
But for some reason we also seem to love what I would call “drivel” in times when we should be considering things more serious.
Reading the Herald today made me think of this.
We have the global economy shrinking for the first time since World War 2. The only reason we aren’t calling this a depression is because it will sound too scary, but a depression is what we are heading into.
Now that isn’t the end of the world but it is a time for all of us to get educated and get busy taking care of our own lives and positioning ourselves and our communities to “maximise the positives and eliminate the negatives”, as the song says.
So here in New Zealand what are the major things under discussion??
Whether a smallish town in the North Island should be spelt differently by changing it from a “W” to a “Wh”.
AND whether we should adopt maori names for the North and South Island.
Calling this ridiculous is being too kind.
Not this these are ridiculous issues in themselves, (although a majority of kiwi’s might say they are), but surely we have more important things to discuss publicly at the moment.
I always picture some sealed room somewhere full of academics who are never let outside and every now and again they get told to come up with a politically correct but totally irrelevant topic to be promoted to the media. It’s like we haven’t filled our “irrelevant distraction from real life” quota.
Anyway rant over 
.
On a more positive note, the property market continues to deliver more and more cashflow as things generally deteriorate.
I was talking with a mate of mine yesterday who is looking in tourist areas where the downturn is forcing sales of units and motels. He just picked up a 13% return deal thanks to the recession.
In Auckland too cashflow is back, (borrowing money isn’t but we’re working on that), so as I keep saying, providing you know what you want and how to stay safe, now is the next best time to ten years ago to be investing in your future through property.
Till tomorrow, Stay Safe ~ Dean Letfus @ www.MassiveAction.co.nz
You are an onion
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Yesterday we looked at the layers we have with relationships. Today I want to discuss how to understand that everybody is an onion in their relating to another.
This may not be an issue for you to understand about yourself but it is critical if you are ever going to expand your horizons and learn to love others better. Remember the start of this little series was to encourage you to start to look for the good in others and build meaningful relationships to enrich your life and grow!!
So whenever you meet someone new remember first of all that you are going to judge and pigeonhole them in about 15 seconds. You will simply do that automatically, we all do. You will have to learn to realise that you are doing it and start to step back from that initial judgment and put it aside.
Why?, because people are onions. Everybody, yes even you, has a public persona that trains people to react to you in certain ways. This is our outer layer. You’ll see it in action immediately now I’ve told you about it. Watch the next person you see today and observe how they look, move, what they say and observe your responses to this.
The woman who flicks her hair over her shoulder and laughs just a little bit too loud as she shakes someones hand in the office, she is screaming “Look at me, look at me”.
Or the rough homeless looking man instantly causes you to reject him by how he looks, smells and what he says.
Keeping with these 2 examples lets look at just one possible scenario. The woman screaming look at me is probably incredibly lonely. Underneath the surface if you peeled off enough layers you would find a little girl who was rarely held by her dad, or played second fiddle to a prettier sister. She has grown up physically and now uses sex as a means of trying to make the little girl inside her feel loved so has built an exterior that demands attention and attracts everything in pants.
I have gotten to know many people like this and I am yet to find one who really wanted to behave the way they do. They just want to be loved and feel safe without sex, without complications.
When you get under their exterior projections you will find they are lovely, lonely, hurting people. And when they realise you care about them just because you care about them they become loyal intimate friends for life.
or lets look at our homeless friend. In some cases mental illness has driven someone to the streets, however often this person has been so wounded they have given up on society. He has probably been so hurt by a boss, pastor, loss of a loved one or even a pets death that he has turned his back on the world and subconsciously entered a world where he will be forever rejected.
He has an inner voice saying that the world is bad, the world is unsafe, isolation is the only way to try and feel OK. he then enters a perpetuating cycle of rejection and abandonment.
I befriended a homeless guy in my teens and I remember one day he suddenly took me to his house. He actually owned a very nice property that he never slept in full of all kinds of stuff. Once we became friends I would look forward to seeing him because he always had a big smile and a story for me. He was an intelligent, funny wonderful man.
One day he never turned up and he never was seen again. I never knew what happened but I was a richer person for having been his friend
I only found out what a great guy he was because I didn’t judge him, I just got to know him by allowing the layers to be peeled away.
Many of my close friends are “weirdo’s”, (aye Matt ). I often get asked: “Why do you associate with him or her?”. I love that because it means I see things in those people that others don’t. And to me relationship is important, we are wired for it.
And when we choose to love the apparently unlovely we will discover that we feel better ourselves because we are expanding our ability to love, to interact. We are becoming real genuine people.
Now I’m not suggesting you grit your teeth and become friends with obnoxious people.
But what I am saying is take some time to get to know someone beyond their projected exterior and find out what they are really like. You may find your soul mate or next best friend under a stained smelly overcoat in front of you at McDonalds. You may find that flirty tart at work is actually the friend you have longed for …….
Are you willing to invest the time to find out?
Stay Safe ~ Dean Letfus @ www.MassiveAction.co.nz
