Shortly after posting last weeks musings and having skimmed through the thousands of emails that follow each blog it dawned on me I owe it to my loyal followers all over the world to answer a few of the many questions they have asked in these emails. 

I realize that with celebrity comes responsibility and that I have an obligation to satisfy the yearnings these fans have for details of my exciting and fascinating life. 

So I reached into my Inbox and extracted a handful of the most frequently asked questions which I shall now answer in the hope that you will stop asking them.

Please be respectful in submitting your questions in the future. I know I am famous, an icon, a literary giant but I am entitled to my privacy and your questions about the size of my vocabulary are, frankly, none of your business.

Also, doctor/patient confidentiality precludes me from releasing the names of the psychiatrists I see each week, so stop asking.

Q. Are you a professional writer?

A. Do I get paid for writing this stuff? No, but feel free to send money. We accept Visa, MasterCard and Mars bars.

Q. Are you a full time writer?

A. Yes and no. Each weekly posting takes about 169 hours of effort, not including the extensive research that precedes the actual writing of the blog. By the time each piece has gone through pre-editing, editing, post-editing, design, layout, pre-proofing, proofing, post-proofing and legal scrutiny and Malka has given her bark of approval, the entire team is exhausted and ready to take the rest of the week off.

Q. Why are you so sarcastic?

A. Who asked you for your opinion?

Q. I have been told that you are a speaker, consultant and coach. What’s the difference?

A. A speaker is a person who knows absolutely nothing and loves to talk about it. A good speaker can talk about nothing in a key-note (after dinner) format or in half-day, full day or multi-day seminar mode. The less they know, the longer the program.

A consultant is simply a person who can’t get a job.

A coach is a person who couldn’t make it as a consultant.

If you’re looking for someone with all of these qualifications, call me.

Q. How many clients have you coached?

A. Over the years I have worked with, and coached more than four hundred people. I recently contracted with a well known survey company to contact all of my past and present clients to determine the impact that working with me has had on their lives.

I am extremely proud to report that 100% stated that being coached by me had been a “life changing” experience.

Three even said that the changes were for the better.

Q. In your blogs you have frequently referred to yourself as “having the IQ of a plant,” or not being very bright. You have even called yourself an idiot. Have you ever been professionally diagnosed?

A. Yes, I am married.

Q. Why are you so self-denigrating?

A. Why are you using big words that I don’t understand?

Q. Why do you put yourself down so frequently?

A. Because sometimes my wife is too busy doing other stuff.

No, the real reason is a more serious one. Many years ago I attended a seminar and the speaker said something that I thought was so profound that it has stayed with me ever since. He said that we should take everything in our lives very seriously. Our jobs, our careers, our families, our health should all receive the serious attention they deserve and we should do everything within our capability to excel in each of them.

He did however, caution us to never take ourselves seriously and his words resonate as strongly with me today as they did all those years ago.

So many of us spend our lives building the facade we wrap ourselves in. We are so concerned with impressing others, so fragile that we need to boast of our accomplishments, so insecure that we put others down in order to boost ourselves up, so anxious for the adoration of others, even strangers, that we expend mighty sums of our precious energy to create and maintain a certain image among those who know us 

To what end? To satisfy a delicate, little ego that resides in our heads and nowhere else.

Boy, that’s an awful lot of work. And, in the final analysis, does anyone care?

We are all flawed creatures. We make mistakes, we do and say wrong thing, we make bad decisions – and it’s all part of being human.

That’s why I don’t take myself seriously. I know where all my warts are. I am acutely aware of all my flaws.

I am not better than a single other living human and not one of the six billion of us out there is better than me.

In fact, it’s easier for me to impress others than for those to whom impressing others is important. By denigrating myself in a joking way as I tend to do I have set the bar so low that you can trip over it.

With your expectations of me so low to begin with, impressing you is really easy.

Brilliant strategy huh?

Not bad for a schmuck?

Q. Do you ever do workshops?

A. I vowed that I would never use this blog as a vehicle for self promotion so I’m not comfortable telling you that I will be doing a repeat of a workshop that I have presented many times over the past year.

I don‘t want you to know that it is called “A New Approach To Goal Setting,” that it is always sold out and that the next one is on Tuesday, March 16^th from 8:30am – 4:00pm. I don’t think it’s important to mention that there are only a few seats left.

It would be wrong for me to tell you that you can register by email at registrations@strategicpathways.net or that you can call (403) 802-3525 should you require additional information.

You probably don’t care that the registration fee includes two one-on-one coach sessions.

Q. Give me one reason why I should attend your workshop?

A. I’ll give you two.

1. This workshop will focus on four key learnings:

Understanding the difference between a goal and a prize

Goals are what we strive for. The culmination of effort expended. We have come to believe that our goals are the driving force behind our motivation. They’re not. The prize, which is an important extension of our goals, is our real source of motivation.

Why your prize is more important than your goal

You will be surprised when you learn that your “goal” is not really what you want. It is simply a symbol. What you really want is the “prize.” Defining your prize will propel you to success faster than you can imagine.

Why we don’t stay on course in pursuing our goals

There is only one reason why we don’t achieve the goals we set for ourselves, why we frequently set goals and then quickly fall off course. You will learn why this occurs and how you can immediately prevent this from ever happening again.

How to identify the essential activities we must do to win the prize

Many of us “spin our wheels” in pursuit of our goals. We do many different things in the belief that they are key to reaching our goals. You will learn the inviolate “acid test” for selecting the very few activities that are crucial for getting us there.

2. We validate parking. 

I think it’s best if I don’t say any more because it may reveal how little I know.

After all, I am a speaker.

Till we read again.