The Right Words At The Right Time

The Right Words At The Right Time


The best life lessons are a few words on the right subject, at the right time.
- Bill Allin, Canadian life coach and author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems

My now-deceased first wife was a far better teacher than I was. I was an educator.

What's the difference? A teacher teaches a prescribed curriculum, a manageable collection of facts and skills, testable and widely accepted as part of the general education of a child. An educator grows children.

I joined the profession because I admired her skill as a teacher. I learned later that her teaching skill was greatly helped by her knowledge, which she gained as a voracious reader. I was a non-reader at the time, in fact in today's terms I would be known as functionally illiterate.

On a break during a summer job I had in my sixteenth year of life, while sitting on a factory loading dock I overheard two older men talking in the yard below. One said "I never have conversations with young people. I find that until they are at least 25, they don't know enough to talk about."

Thinking about that I realized that I knew almost nothing. I had no skills that derived from hobbies or training from my parents. I couldn't claim to know much about any subject at all.

That prompted me to start learning on a grand scale. As I knew nothing about anything, I learned everything I could on every subject I could, be it on the radio or television, as a fly on the wall while meaningful conversations were taking place among older adults, or reading cereal boxes.

Thirty years later people were calling me a human encyclopedia. I finally knew something others could respect me for. Two decades after that, I am sharing some of that with you here.

One overheard snippet of conversation changed the direction of my life.

During my grade ten year, my geography teacher bought a new Volkswagen beetle, a new import to my native Canada. While casual conversations between teachers and students in those days were few, somehow I got into a casual debate with my teacher over the merits of the VW. Based on overheard conversations from others, I took the side claiming that the Beetle was junk.

To my shock, my teacher raised the issue of his new car in our next geography class and asked me to bring forth the points I had made the previous day and add more. What I knew was more rumour than fact. I had never ridden in a VW and had seen more of them advertised on television than on the roads around my neighbourhood.

While the classroom debate added nothing to the knowledge based of my classmates about Volkswagens, the experience made me realize that teaching can be more than conveyance of facts and mastering of skills.

That teacher tried to get a shy kid to speak up in a class situation by engaging a teacher in an unplanned debate in front of the whole class. I didn't lose the debate because my teacher wanted to give me an experience I had never had before, not to squash (albeit deservedly) the poorly founded opinion one of his weakest students held.

A year or so later, in a different high school, my all-business geometry teach went off-topic in class for some reason when the subject of drinking alcohol came up. He said "If I have to depend on an artificial stimulant to get enjoyment out of my life, then I had better rethink and reformulate my life so I can get more enjoyment out of living it."

After that I understood that many people willingly accept such a poor quality of life that they need alcohol or drugs or gambling or shopping sprees or any number of other addictive habits just to make them feel better about life for a short while.

Today, by what I have learned, by what I have read, experienced and thought about thoroughly, I feel so in touch with everything that exists that I can feel higher than any drunk or junk addict all day long. My high doesn't go away and it has no backlash sobering-up period.

In 1995, a couple of years after my long-divorced wife died and my children refused to see me or let me see my grandchildren, my daughter wrote me a letter in which she said "My two daughters are well and happy. I have told them that all their grandparents are dead and I don't want to upset them by having them learn otherwise."

To know that the children I helped raise I will never see again and my grandchildren will never know the wonderful experiences available to kids who know their grandparents set me on a quest to learn something new.

Why or how could a child ever come to feel that way about a parent? To me the effect was like losing your whole family in a fire, all at once, only it was worse knowing that they would all carry on their lives without me. I had something to give that was more valuable than money.

As an educator and sociologist, I had the skills to research how kids learn and develop. I learned more than most people could even imagine.

Mostly importantly, I learned that what children learn in the first six years of their lives molds the kind of people they will be for the rest of their lives. As I was a feral child who never had any toys or experiences with other children for my first six years, I was frightened of my own kids when they were little.

I thought "I'll be better with them when they are old and I can teach them stuff I know." Their mother taught them virtually everything they learned for the first six years of life of our children.

Lo and behold, our children grew to become like their mother, not like me. I'm not sad for me so much as I am sad for my children and grandchildren. My grandkids will grow to be like their mother as she grew to be like her own mother. It's how life works.

Today we have parents who are too busy to teach important life lessons to their kids. They react when the kids are bad, but they teach little when their kids need it.

Instead they give them video games and sit them in front of the television for entertainment. Think about that. Would you want a child to grow up believing that real people in their lives are just like the people they see on television? How twisted and perverse would that be?

Teaching critically important life lessons is relatively easy and fast. In most cases it's a matter of saying each one in a few sentences and allowing the kids to talk with the adult about the lesson.

If we don't teach positive life lessons, children grow to become like the people they see on television and in video games. Look around you and think about what kids in your community are doing with their lives. Sadly, this is one case where life imitates art.

We are all the worse for it.

We need to learn how and when to do the job of parenting well.

Broken people are hard to fix. Better to give them the knowledge and skills they need to prevent them from breaking.

Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to teach their children the right lessons at the right times in the right way.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/

Collection of Quotes to Touch the Heart

Hope is the ability to hear the music of the future.Faith is having the courage to dance to it today.
- Dr. Peter Kuzmic, theologian, Slovenian-born, citizen of Croatia

Expecting the world to treat you fairly because you are good is like expecting the bull not to charge because you are a vegetarian.
- Dennis Wholey, American television host and producer (b. 1939)

Laughter is a smile with the volume turned up.
- Anonymous (Google's best guess)

People laugh because I'm different, I laugh because they're all the same.
- Anonymous (Google's best guess)

No amount of darkness can hide a spark of light.
- Anonymous (Google's best guess)

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience, we are spiritual beings having a human experience.
- Anonymous (Google's best guess)

Be like the flower that perfumes the very hand that crushes it.
- Anonymous (Google's best guess)

Last night I watched a movie that was so difficult to understand that I couldn't figure it out until the very end. Then I had to return it to the store. It reminded me of life.
- Bill Allin, stalwart pilgrim of life, http://billallin.com

You don't have to win at life. Life is not about winning. Life is about playing the game and trying to influence others so that they win.
- Bill Allin, stalwart pilgrim of life, http://billallin.com

They say you can't go back to your childhood, that the places you remember will have changed. Even if they haven't, you will have changed so that the you of long ago wouldn't recognize the you of today.
- Bill Allin, stalwart pilgrim of life, http://billallin.com

When your heart breaks, it changes your life. But you had a chance to avoid the hurt. When a child's heart breaks, the child has no defences, no preparation, no means to recover. The reassembled life has no possibility to achieve it's former potential.
- Bill Allin, stalwart pilgrim of life, http://billallin.com

If you hear a great piece of music and your day is not better for it, the problem is not that the music is deficient.
- Bill Allin, stalwart pilgrim of life, http://billallin.com

No matter how much technology you have at your command and friends in your social networking site, there is no substitute for the gentle touch of another live human, for the feel of their breath on your neck, for soft whisper from their lips into your ear.
- Bill Allin, stalwart pilgrim of life, http://billallin.com

Don't think you're ugly. Everyone is beautiful sometimes, always when they smile. Don't think you're beautiful. Everyone is ugly sometimes. The difference is attitude and confidence. Even movie stars are pretty plain looking without makeup. They believe they're beautiful, so that's what they become.
- Bill Allin, stalwart pilgrim of life, http://billallin.com

What We Miss Most

When you are eight years old, nothing is any of your business.
- Lenny Bruce, comedian (1925-1966)

It's a good laugh line for a comedian. Just about everyone remembers that when they were eight years old nobody wanted to include them in adult affairs or conversations. And the adults in Lenny's audience likely did the same with their own kids.

I remember a man I overheard speaking to another man, when I was about 15 years old, saying "I don't bother trying to have conversations with anyone younger than 25 because they don't know enough to hold a decent conversation." It impressed me so much I decided to learn enough to be able to hold a good conversation by the age of 25.

I certainly didn't consider including my own children in conversations I had with my wife when they were that age. They weren't interested anyway.

I was wrong.

My kids were wrong, but maybe because of our practice of excluding our kids from adult conversations they just got used to how things were.

It's the sole purpose in life of a child to learn what it's like in the adult world they are enter within a few years. The young of every species has that same purpose.
If we, as parents and grandparents, don't include kids in our conversations, they miss out on opportunities to learn from us.

What we don't teach with intention, kids learn by our example. If our parents didn't talk about sex or even indicate that they had sex with each other, they likely didn't say much to us about the subject. We learn the hard way, probably the way our parents did. There's a pretty good chance that we and our parents both missed out on much of what we could have had and done if we and they had known more.

In turn, our kids miss out if we don't know what to teach them and how.

Kids most often follow the examples of their parents when they reach the age of majority and have to choose a political party to vote for. They have overheard discussions among their parents that led them to the conclusion that one party is better than the other(s). Most parents don't even indicate to their kids that voters have more than one choice. The young adults vote the way their parents would.

We're forced to learn too much the hard way. We make too many mistakes on stuff where there was no reason we shouldn't have known better, stuff that someone should have taught us.

Why should a child learn a foreign language and trigonometry in school if that child will never use it as an adult, but that child never receives proper instruction about how to make and keep friends, how to be a good spouse in a marriage or how to be a good parent?

We fail at friendships, marriages and parenting. We never get a chance to fail at speaking the foreign language or using trig in most cases, but that's just as well because we likely forgot most of it since we had no use for it.

Do the arithmetic. Which is more important, knowing how to make and keep friends, how to have a compatible marriage and how to be a good parent or how to speak a foreign language and do trigonometry?

That's not to put down learning languages or trig, only to state that we have other more important needs that our parents, our grandparents and our teachers seldom or never address.
We accept this because "That's the way it has always been done." It's clearly wrong, so does that mean that many generations of our ancestors were wrong? It's a sharp edged pill to swallow, but, yup, they were wrong.

When we chose to exclude ourselves from the natural courses of nature in our modern world, we didn't compensate for the important lessons that nature teaches to every other species on the planet. We miss some of the most important lessons in life. Parents don't know them so they can't teach what they don't know. Or they are reticent about teaching what they learned themselves by doing and making mistakes.

No matter, we have sports, drugs, other addictions, abuse, volunteering, exercising and lots of other ways to compensate for our lack of knowledge about important human subjects.
That won't change until some of us decide to change it. The longer we wait to change the system by teaching kids what they need to know as adults, the bigger the job will be.

It could all change in a flash if school curriculums were changed. That's not hard because curriculums change almost every year to some extent.

Doing nothing is easier. Except the problems keep getting worse.

Maybe we should talk about this subject more.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers that provides material that all kids should know but that most never get at home or in school.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

An Important Life Lesson

God changes not what is in people, until they change what is in themselves.
- The Qu'ran

The greatest opposition that most people face about changing themselves is from themselves.
The greatest deterrent to social change resides with those who want social change but are not willing to do anything to advance the cause.

The most severe reason why our world's worst problems continue and often get worse is because people complain about them but refuse to work together to make anything different.

Why this reluctance? We want to look after ourselves and to protect or secure what we know as our greatest priority.

Nothing in the world changes unless and until humans change it. Excluding climate and weather, of course, which have the ability to change themselves as consequences of outside influences (usually from the sun).

Why do we not want things to change? Most of us face too much change around us every day. We have equipment that breaks down, commitments that get delayed because others didn't keep theirs to us, a bill we forgot to pay on time, upsets with loved ones, weather and illness that prevents us from doing what we had planned. The list of factors that affect our lives is endless and most of them we have little or no control over.

We don't want to have to change ourselves because too much is changing around us already that we can't control. So, what's he big deal? Why are we so focussed on ourselves that we're prepared to ignore problems we could solve elsewhere?

Somebody told us that we should be able to control our lives. Somebody led us to believe that we would one day reach a plateau where we would have mastered enough skills and have enough control that only minor things could go wrong. Somebody told us that one we day we could "have it made." Somebody told us we could have the perfect job and the perfect mate.

Those happened when we were kids. Those same people, trying to be encouraging and helpful, neglected to tell us that we are fallible, that we have weaknesses, that we would inevitably trust people who would lie to us and break our trust, that nobody is perfect including us, that our hearts would be broken. That sometimes life gets us down so much we think it sucks.

They also didn't give us the information we needed to understand that mistakes and failures are inevitabilities of life. Or the skills to be able to cope with life's downturns that sometimes make impending disaster seem certain.

They didn't teach us that worrying produces nothing and only does harm. Worry never solves anything, absolutely nothing. It not only wastes time, it harms our health and often our relationships with those closest to us. We worry when we think something might happen. We worry for ages, though what we worry about almost never happens.

This is the base from which we approach each new day. Change? Who the hell wants change when the world is swirling around us at a pace we can't keep up with?

Here's a suggestion. Let's teach kids the lessons that we wish we had been taught ourselves. Let's give them the tools they need to avoid the pitfalls we have faced and overcome in our lives. They won't avoid the pitfalls and failures, but they will be able to recover from them faster and with less grief.

Let's do that.

That's change though, isn't it? Yet a painless way to change.

While we're at it, teaching our kids, let's teach them about love. Not lust, not love of money (greed), not hero worship or domination, not abuse or addictive behaviour. These things masquerade as love in some places. Let's teach our kids about real love.

We may have to find out what real love is ourselves before we teach it. For those of us who grew up without love in our lives, finding real love is extremely hard. But doable.

That's painless. The lessons have to be searched out for many of us because they aren't taught commonly to all kids.

Let's teach our kids to have self respect and to respect others. If they love themselves, they won't have trouble respecting others. That's easy. And painless.

But it is change. And it won't happen by itself.

A saying I learned as a child went "God helps those who help themselves. And God help those who are caught helping themselves." It was a kind of ironic joke.

I like the version in the holy book better: God changes not what is in people, until they change what is in themselves.

What's to argue? It costs nothing. It will ease the pain of life's miseries.

Eventually it will make for a happier, more loving, more charitable and more peaceful world.
It's worth a little of your time.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book that provides the means to make social change without upset or revolution. It's a peaceful way to make changes in ways that will not defy any political ideology or religion.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

The Road To Success Leads Through Failure

Don't be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

One of the toughest lessons to learn, especially for those who live in the western world, is that our bodies were designed to work hard, to struggle, to overcome. This does not set well with people who were raised on the belief that the easy life was ahead, that leisure was the way of the future. We were designed to overcome, but it isn't necessary that we overcome difficulties that we could easily have avoided.

Ease and leisure were never the way of the future, except in the minds of those whose intention was to profit from designing and producing products to sell to us using the hook that our lives will be easier. Did dishwashers, computers or televisions make our lives better, considering all of the consequences that resulted from their use?

Technology gives us the opportunity to learn more, to grow, to expand who we are. But it comes at a cost. In some cases, the cost has been obesity, broken marriages, families with two working parents who still can't make ends meet and kids who play video games at home because their parents feel it's too dangerous for them to be alone on the streets. True, those are not immediate consequences, but downstream results of life changes that resulted from using these "essential" technologies.

Emerson's point is that it's all right to make mistakes, to experiment and fail, because life is about experimenting. That means that more learning comes from failure than from success. We can accept one change without buying into a series of life changes that sometimes result from it.
Success brings an end to growth for many people, whereas each failure gives an opportunity to rebuild ourselves better than ever before. Setbacks are opportunities for those who know how to rebuild themselves. These are not skills that are widely taught in schools.

What we must be cautious about is experimenting with things that could have tragic consequences. Usually that requires us to investigate the consequences that have resulted from other people doing something we anticipate doing ourselves. If they have caused too much grief, the risk must be assessed before launching into the new venture.

An example would be people who experiment with taking drugs. In most cases, people who begin taking illegal drugs have been encouraged to do so by others who want company (or sales). Often the first experiments are free offerings. Tobacco companies have done this outside of schoolyards--mostly recently in some African countries--giving free cigarettes to children as young as six years. Kids only a couple of years older than that have been offered free street drugs. Kids don't know the downside of taking street drugs.

These children and even adolescents and adults who try street drugs have usually not been advised about how using them has destroyed the lives and the futures of many people who used the same drugs before them. Very few people will experiment with a drug if they have met someone whose life and family have been destroyed by drug use.

Many people would say that "Common sense should prevail." It should. However, common sense is not innate to us at birth. All common sense (if there be any such thing) is taught commonly, to all people, usually in childhood. People don't use common sense if they have not been taught how to apply themselves to a decision about experimenting with something new.

At the rate we can see from newspapers and lists such as the Darwin Awards that people have not used common sense, we must conclude that it has not been taught to every child. Walk through supermarket aisles and you might believe that almost none of the people you see have been taught the common sense rules of sharing space with others.

Common sense is a series of life skills that should be included in the curriculum of every school district. Every one of those skills is more important and more useful than any given bit of learning in chemistry, mathematics or language. Every one is usable by every person who knows it.

Experiment with life, yes, but do so with some degree of caution and research so that tragedy is not a certainty for the future.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, striving to make human needs a necessary part of learning for every child.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Life Lesson: What Makes Life Worth Living

"It is not enough to live; you have to have something to live for."
- Commander Adama, Battlestar Galactica (television program) (2003)

Life is not reflected well in science fiction television programs. Yet they often show excellent examples of human aspirations, foibles and life lessons.

In this case, the life lesson is about having something worth living for. But, what?

Many people fail to find what they want out of life. They die still wondering what they could have done to find it.

The problem is that they had been looking for something that would come to them, something that would enhance their lives, something they could acquire that would make their life complete. That never satisfies the desire to find what life is worth lviing for because we humans can never find enough to satiate our desires. We are, by nature, greedy.

By deduction, what makes life worth living must be outside of us. What makes life worth living is not what we can get, but what we can give.

Being greedy, many people never learn that lesson. The laws of economics say that you can't get more by giving away what you have.

But the laws of economics suck. They have destroyed more lives than wars have. According to economics, the only things worth having are what comes in to us, what we can acquire. Because of our greedy natures, if we style our lives around what comes in to us, we will never be satisfied and feel that our lives have been worth living.

Those people who give the most of themselves to help others know what fulfillment is.That's not just feeding the hungry, healing the sick, giving money to the poor or sending blankets to Kosovo. It's helping anyone who needs help with anything.

People are often free about telling others their problems, whether the others want to hear them or not. Sometimes we can offer to help them. Anyone standing by a vehicle at the side of the road needs help, or at least some company, maybe a sandwich or coffee.

Sometimes helping someone else means nothing more than helping them to cry, to grieve, to let out the emotion that is eating them from the inside. Sometimes all we have to do is to listen.

If you want to know what makes life worth living, help someone. Do it more than once because the first time you may not recognize within you the feeling of having done something good and right. The more often you do it, the more it will seem the natural thing to do.

The laws of economics may be natural, but so are tsunamis and earthquakes. If it really matters to you to understand what makes life wonderful, give of yourself to help others.

Until and unless you have tried it, you won't understand. I don't understand economics, tsunamis or earthquakes. You can teach me once you have learned the lesson I have to teach.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, striving to show you how to make it all worthwhile.
Learn more at http://billallin.com