Steven Barnes's Blog, page 42

Like Any Good Halloween Monstrosity, this one won’t stay dead

Oh, it pops up about once a week in my stream, and about once a month someone says it directly.  So I’ll answer it directly: ##

A reader said:

“I’ve read a lot of things you’ve had to say about race, and they seem to be well thought out and balanced, even if I don’t always agree with everything. However, I can’t remember hearing you speak on a specific topic related to current culture. I found the following quote on someone else’s wall, and wondered if you would be willing to express...

Five Minute Life Hacks: Goal setting SUCKS (unless you do THIS first…)

Every time I write a book, and I mean EVERY time, I reach a point about half way in when it all looks like its falling apart.   The idea now sounds stupid, the characters aren’t working, the prose blows chunks,  the images and impressions make no sense.   In Lifewriting terms, this is the “Dark Night of the Soul” of the process.  I have lost all perspective on WHY I want to do it.  And for years, I would talk to Nicki’s mom Toni, and say the following: “Sweetie…do I always reach a point where...

Climbing out of the Dark Night, five minutes at a time

(Note: There has been a massive “Yes!” response to my question: shall I refine and present the “Five Minute Life Hacks” concept?   Almost ten years ago I created the 101 Program, and mostly gave it away to hundreds of people, who then shared their experiences. Now I’m revising it into an integrated program. My daily notes will address this, adding to the material already there. The first week’s material is already in place, to be offered FREE very soon.)

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When Tananarive needed to move the...

Should I go Forward? Part Deux

So…earlier/yesterday I laid down the foundation for believing I have a breakthrough in my lifetime’s work.  It is the fact that marketing genius Eugene M. Schwartz’s HOW TO DOUBLE YOUR CHILD’S GRADES IN SCHOOL seems to be making a phenomenal difference in Jason’s life in only five minutes a day.  No bullshit.

(in a spirit of total disclosure, his basic program is that you spend five minutes every day, in a totally positive frame of mind, focusing all that positivity and love on your child whi...

Shall I say more?

Three weeks ago, my life changed. My world changed. And it is possible that the next act in my drama began.  I need your help to determine if this true.  Please. No kidding.  Read this and vote.

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Since preschool, the teachers have warned us that Jason cannot concentrate, causes problems in the classroom, and so on.   I didn’t realize it until three years ago, but this translates to an actual learning problem.  His grades, finally put in clear context, were dreadful.   My boy was in peril.

S...

Give your dreams some breathing room

When I was trying to break in as a writer, I got scads of rejection slips, and every one of them hit me like a sledgehammer to the stomach.  The voices in my head were screaming monsters, filled with doubt, fear, pain, guilt, anger, and an increasingly hollow sense of futility.

 

Give up.  I’m wasting my life.  There is no hope.

 

Every night when I went to bed. Every morning when I woke up.  This was before I had a formal structure of “the Machine” but I had read Bradbury’s advice to “write...

The Vegas Shooting: a loose thread in the Gordian Knot

 

I awakened almost a year ago with insight about a solution to the race problem, a five-step solution I’ve discussed many times since then:

Love yourself Love one other person (leading to  the notion of “Num”, that there is one soul looking out through many eyes) Understand history without guilt, blame, or shame Support your tribe.  Don’t engage with sleepers or snakes. Be strong enough to fight monsters. Win with integrity and compassion.

 

I’ve also discussed The Hero’s Journey,  Musashi...

Having a Happy Childhood

Parents, please be careful with your children. They only get one childhood, and damage that occurs therein lasts a lifetime. I recently spoke with a client who has had a confused personal history: broken relationships, distorted body image, an inability to meditate, career chaos that is confusing (given her brilliance), an oddly infantalized parental relationship, and other things that have troubled me for some time.

And just recently, during an intense session, several things clicked into pl...

Conceptual Trip Wires

 

I realized that I have some very specific tactics for arguing with, or evaluating the arguments of others, and some of them specifically evolved to deal with people  smarter than I am.

I commented that I have mental “trip wires”: when after long thought I consider something to be self-evidently true, a person who ignores that truth is automatically put into the category of people I cannot trust to represent reality clearly. THIS IS DANGEROUS, because, of course, what if I’m wrong?  But it i...

Reminders to deal with the stress

Stress that exceeds our capacity to deal with it or grow from it creates “strain” and the “stress tunnels” that make our perceptions narrow and our reactions brittle.   In a danger situation, the ability to shift between wide and narrow focus on demand is critical.

Luckily, there is a way to prevent stress from becoming strain, and that is control of physiology. One of the few processes that is both voluntary AND autonomic (so is blinking) is breathing. If you breath as if you are in control...