The Element of Choosing the Right Tools for Your Path and Its Hope for Helping You Put One Foot in Front of the Other

I love to read.

Reading is one of my favorite things to do.

One of the reasons I read is to find tools to help me on my path.

I find tools to become better at getting and keeping a job.

I find tools to be a better Mom and have a better relationship with Tanita.

I find tools to deal with criticism and negative events.

I find tools to deal with pain, loss and disappointment.

I find answers for why things go wrong and solutions to correct them.

I find ideas for better health.

Tools help us put one foot in front of the other.

Without tools, we can become stuck and trapped in many situations and behaviors.

We could have problems and not know how to solve them.

There are tools for every problem.

Take the problem of wanting to remember something.

There are tools to help us achieve that.

We can use memory aids.

Visualization is an example of a memory aid.

We can create a visual for what we want to remember and locate this visual in a familiar place.

Word association is an example of a memory aid.

We can associate the name or word we want to remember with another name or another word, and through that connection, be able to remember the name or word.

I have used both these tools.

One day, when I was at the apartment gym, I met another Indian lady who told me she did cooking for parties.

I told her I would be interested in having her cook for a party sometime.

Before she left the gym, she told me her name and she gave me her apartment number.

Unfortunately I am not good with remembering numbers and letters.  I promptly forgot her apartment number.

I said “Shoot, I am going to have to wait till I run into her again.”

I was out walking several months later when I ran into her.

 “Oh my god,” I said, “I am so glad to see you.  How is your cooking going?”

She said “Good”.

I said, “Hey, I don’t have a party right now for you to cook for, but I was wondering…. could you, when you cook for your next event, perhaps make a little extra for me – like 2 servings, so I could sample your cooking. I will pay whatever you want to charge me.”

She was real sweet, “No, I am not going to charge you, because I would like you to taste my cooking. Do you like Chicken Biryani?  I am making Chicken Biryani for a party this Saturday and you can have some.  How would you like it – hot, medium or mild?”

Gratified I said “Medium”, and asked her what time it would be ready on Saturday and which apartment I should come to.

She told me it would be ready at 6 p.m. and she gave me her apartment number - M5.

“Great,” I said, “See you Saturday.”

Now I had a challenge.

I had to remember M5 until I got home and could write it down.

I had just started my walk so it would be a whole hour before I was home.

I desperately needed to remember M5, if I was to show up at the apartment for the biryani on Saturday.

I thought about a book on Memory I had read.

In this book, I learned Greek orators used visual imagery to remember their poems and speeches. They would associate different parts of their poems and speeches with different rooms of a familiar building.

It was time to give this technique a spin so I would not forget M5.

The trick was to first come up with a visual which was so striking I would not forget it and then to locate this visual in a place I was familiar with.

I decided once I found this striking visual, I would mentally hang it on my living room wall as you would a tapestry or painting.

An image popped up in my mind a few seconds later.

In India, there is a tradition of adorning the doorway of your house with a string of mango leaves.

The image that rose in my mind was this image, except that instead of mango leaves, there were 5 baby mangoes hanging on a string.

I knew I had struck gold and immediately mentally hung it on the part of my living room wall which I could see immediately as I enter my front door.

Voila! Though I came home and wrote “M5” on a piece of paper for safety sake, when Saturday came, I didn’t have to look at the paper.

The 5 mangoes on a string on the wall immediately popped into my mind and I thought: M5.

Thanks to a memory tool that was created by Simonedes in 516 BC, I was eating a delicious biryani dinner later that evening.

Yum!

On another occasion, I used another memory device to help me remember Buckminster Fuller’s name.

I am a great admirer of Buckminster Fuller, but because Buckminster sounds like a place rather than a name, or for whatever other mysterious reason, I could never recall his name easily.

One day I decided I needed to find a memory aid to help me.

“How could I remember Buckminster?” I asked myself. “What would be a good word association for Buckminster?”

Suddenly, the image of Bucky, a dog owned by one of Tanita’s closest friends and who is featured in the guest post by Don Gootee Here's Your 25 Point Checklist for Success, came to mind.

“That’s it  - I could associate Bucky with Buckminster,” I thought.

I have never had a problem recalling Buckminster Fuller’s name since.

We can use visuals and word or picture associations in many ways.

Albert Einstein used to visualize many of the problems he was working on. He believed it was one of the keys to his intelligence.

He imagined what it would be like to ride through the universe on a beam of light. It led him to develop his theory of relativity.

When I was at White Hat Security and my commissions model was going to be cast aside, it was the visual of 3 deer drinking from a stream that helped me see things in the correct light.

Have you read Unlimited Power by Anthony Robbins?

In the book, you will find other uses for using visualization.

Robbins says we should use visualization to diminish and shrink negative experiences.

The more unusual the visual, the more effective.

I thought about this and came up with the visual of bubbles.

If someone gets my goat or criticizes me, I cast the situation of the person and his/her criticism or goat-getting words into a bubble and let the bubble get smaller and float up and out of sight.

I have used this to minimize the impact of any negative thing someone does or says to me.  Because of casting the negative event into a bubble and letting that float away, I am able to let go of the ill-will and interact with that person as if it never happened at all.

You can try it.

Whenever a negative thought enters your mind related to something some said or did to you, immediately cast the negative situation of the person and the action or words into a bubble and let it float away, so you can let go and move on.

If you really want to change something, you will find a tool.

As I said, there’s nothing for which, if you go after it with mind, body and soul, you will not find a tool.

Take job search and career planning.

If you read Richard Bolles’ What Color is Your Parachute?, you will find some amazing tools.

An example is the flower tool.

Everyone should use the flower tool.

Bolles’ book inspired me to create my own tools to stand out in a crowded job market.

You can read about 2 of these tools in my posts Dare to Share and The Element of Resourcefulness, both of which were inspired by What Color is Your Parachute?.

One of the most popular posts on my blog is Resume Tips from Fortune 500 Companies.

The post is a summary of tips from Brenda Green’s book of the same name.

Read that too.

There are tools for everything.

There are tools and tools and tools to help us get in shape.

We can learn from the secrets of other people.

There are tools and tools and tools to help us invest our money wisely.

We can learn from the lessons others have learned and the approach they finally settled on.

There are tools to help us change our relationship with our children.

We can learn from the example of those who have been there and done that.

There are tools and tools and tools to help us feel better about ourselves.

We can learn what worked for someone else.

Sometimes even just knowing there’s another way of doing something is a tool.

Just say, you think the lyrics to a song have to be written before the music is scored and orchestrated.

Someone can bring you some beautiful music and say, “Can you write some lyrics for this?” and you will say “No, I can’t” because you think “that’s not the way it’s done.”

Then one day you learn that all of the music for The Year of the Cat album by Al Stewart was scored and orchestrated by Alan Parsons, before Al Stewart sat down to write the lyrics of any of the songs.

It could change your beliefs in an instant.

We should not be afraid to try out different tools until something works.

It is exciting to discover new tools.

I am not a runner, but I was excited when I found Run Walk Run.

I am not a nutritionist, so I was excited to learn everything I have learned from my friend Julia.

I was terrified to speak up in a meeting, so I was excited to learn the tips I got at Toastmasters.

I had anger management issues, so I was excited to be able to get over my anger management issues.  The tool turned out to be my mother’s death.

I had always wanted to meditate, so I was excited to finally be able to do it with the help of the book How God Changes Your Brain.

I would sometimes find myself second guessing myself when writing a post, so I was relieved to get some perspective from reading Joseph Sestito's Write for Your Lives.

On this blog I try to share my knowledge of tools.

In my post The V List… you learned about the tool that helped me become a vegetarian for a time in my life.

In my post Advice from People We Love to Hate, you learned about the tool that enabled me to kick start a new chapter of my career.

In my post How to Buy a Used Car with Confidence, you learned about the tools that helped me make a confident used-car purchase.

In my post The Art of Conversation, you learned about tools that can help you develop your conversational skills.

In my posts Letter Dropping, Letter Adding and Elections 2012 -Yes on Bath Crayons and The Carpinteria Times, you learned about tools to help you think creatively.

What about tools for making a contribution at work that gets noticed? There’s an app, oops, a post for that.

What you must understand about tools is that new ones are being created or waiting to be discovered every day.

Sometimes they will land in your lap without you even looking for them.

My posts Family Advice I am Grateful For and Are You a Mosquito in Someone's Life tell you about some tools that landed in my lap.

Some months ago my brother-in-law Pete gave me the book A Guide to the Good Life by William H. Irvine.

It was filled with tools to deal with different challenges that may arise in our lives.

Here are some of the chapter headings:

Duty: On Loving Mankind

Social Relations:  On Dealing With Other People

Insults:  On Putting Up with Put-Downs

Grief:  On Vanquishing Tears with Reason

Intrigued?

Go ahead and read the book.

Also read How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clay Christiansen, Three Simple Steps by Trevor Blake and Spartan Up by Joe De Sena.

If you‘ve been wasting precious minutes of your life, these books will help you stop doing that.

Say cheers to the new tools that arise every day.

Say cheers to your health with the Daniel Plan. It may be just what the doctor ordered.

Say cheers to kicking a habit with Suboxone and therapy.  It may be just what you need to put a chapter of your life behind you.

Say cheers to etfs and automatic investments….it may be just what your investment doctor ordered.

Don’t hesitate to talk to people.

You may be surprised at the new tools you will find through conversation.

If Atlas Shrugged and Rich Dad Poor Dad contained the tools that made you take steps to change your life once, new tools are being born every day.  Have fun discovering them.

As always, thanks for reading and have a great day and week.….M…..a Pearl Seeker like you. Thanks to Ajay for his comments on my last post, and thanks to the rest of you for your votes and pins.

P.S.  This post was inspired by a conversation with my dear friend Majella.  Thanks for making me understand the importance of tools.

P.S.2: P G Wodehouse, in making Jeeves and Bertie Wooster converse in the same quirky and unmistakable style in every book he has written about them, gives us a tool for expressing ourselves in the same way.  Ajay has used this tool effectively both in his latest comment, and in his post The Wonderful World of P.G. Wodehouse. Enjoy!