AOL CEO Tim Armstrong opened his mouth and offended two mothers who worked for him in a botched attempt to rationalize health care cuts.

To his credit, he quickly apologized and reinstated the program.

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie apologized many times for putting the state residents through the George Washington Bridge scandal.

Today, apologizing is becoming a political and public strategy instead of a heartfelt way to say, “I’m sorry”.

Apologies are most meaningful when they have these elements:

1. Make amends first.  Promising to do better, be better or change is not as meaningful as making those changes before you pick the right time to apologize.
2. Fix what you’re sorry for.  Talking about it is empty.
3. Keep your word.  In our modern world, the apology is the end all.  But a real apology is just the beginning.  Do what you say you’re going to do to add real meaning to remorse.
4. Expect nothing from the person you are apologizing to.  The apology is for you.  Just as letting go of anger benefits us more than the people we are angry with, making an apology relieves us from hurt that can damage relationships and self-esteem.

Sorry + why + what you’re going to do about it is the best apology every time.

Being loving or expressing love to others transforms us into compassionate people more able to live life in real time.

A loving attitude tends to eclipse more ego-centered behavior that eventually can wind up coming out as ruminations about things that don’t make us very happy.

Just as important is to love oneself.

The deficit of self-esteem is growing to epidemic proportions.

Proceed carefully.  If you rely on someone else to bolster how you feel about yourself, you can become co-dependent to them.

Work this list today:

1. Forgive yourself. 
2. Make positive statements about you and back them up with evidence. 
3. Look past material things to define who you are.
4. Accept yourself as who you are today (you can always be better tomorrow). 
5. Have the courage to be who you are with everyone.
6. Think of 3 positive ways to describe yourself. 
7. Practice receiving love from others. 
8. Do what you love. 
9. Treat yourself no less than the way you would treat a puppy dog. 

10. Never compare yourself to others. 

11. Always do your best but stop trying to be perfect

Even doing one of these things better can be transformational.

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It’s not your imagination.

We really do live in a world where people are focused on themselves.

In prehistoric days when Dale Carnegie wrote his famous book How To Win Friends and Influence People one of his powerful messages was to talk in terms of the other person’s interests.

Today, you almost don’t have time to interrupt self-absorbed people to practice that very human relations principle because so many folks are talking about themselves incessantly.

On the excellent HBO series Girls Lena Dunham brings us a scene where her friend Marnie played by Allison Williams calls to tell her she got a new cat.  Lena’s character Hannah says “I can’t talk right now” but Marnie goes right on talking about herself without missing a beat.

How do you handle people who suck the energy out of relationships by making it all about them?

1. Keep focused on your own inner emotions at least part of the time.  If you don’t give it all away, you’ll feel less drained.
2. When there is a break in the conversation, jump in with what you want to talk about.  Warning:  like Marnie, they may just go on talking about themselves. 
3. If this person wants something from you, be careful what you promise.  Only do what you can do and want to do.
4. Set a time limit and get out.  When you begin to feel drained, exit the conversation.  You choose the time you will spend listening to someone else go on about themselves.
5. If a person oversteps your boundaries by being focused on him or herself on a regular basis, it may be time to move on.  There are still person-centered people in the world.  Perhaps it’s time to find one.

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“Paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non- judgmentally”.

This gem comes from Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn.

And Eckhart Tolle who wrote “The Power of Now” says, “People look to time in expectation that it will eventually make them happy, but you cannot find true happiness by looking toward the future”.

Perhaps that way so many people with terminal diseases let go and live the time that they have left in a way that they could have never imagined.

Don’t drown in a downpour of your own thoughts.

You don’t need the past to define who you are as a person or the future for feeling fulfilled.

This is empowering for people of all ages.

Planning is forethought.

Obsessive thinking about the future is fear-thought.

Take these 14 words of Dr. Kabat-Zinn and integrate them into daily life and accomplish the previously elusive goal of living and enjoying the present moment.

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Super Bowl champion football coach Pete Carroll did it his way with positive energy and a rah-rah approach to winning.

The “defeated” Denver Broncos coach John Fox was more deliberate but no less competent.

Carroll’s team was a defensive monster. 

Fox’s team an offensive monster.

What a matchup.  But somehow it didn’t turn out that way – at least on the field.

Denver quarterback Peyton Manning bluntly admitted it is tough to forget losing the Super Bowl but he forgot to mention that already won one.

Never forget success – make it an IOU and use it again and again.

Coach Fox should be thinking that he is blessed to be alive after emergency heart surgery just a few months before the big game.

I wrote a book about embracing the advantages of disadvantages because we can’t always win but we can always learn from adversity and win another day in some way.  It doesn’t have to be the same way.

Coach Fox who celebrated his 59^th birthday Super Bowl week had it right when he said, “Setbacks are setups for better things to come”.

Always succeeding is lucky.

Learning from both success and failure is how we make our own good luck.

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There is nothing that works as effectively as what I am going to share with you this morning to improve happiness.

No prescription plan required.

No doctors or psychologists.

When you want to feel better immediately, this is the best approach I have ever seen.

1. Embrace your daily flow of life activities by doing both that which is familiar and comfortable for you and something new and different.  If you make the same breakfast every day, add a new twist.  If you hold your meetings the same way, conduct them standing up – something different.  The “new and different” actually changes the physiology in our brains and promotes happiness.
2. Do things that are meaningful as often as possible.  Meaningful matters.
3. Close the mental file on the past and the future.  Yes, we can visit there but only visit.  When we spend too much time in the past or trying to live in the future beyond planning purposes, we tend to ruminate on things that make us unhappy or even depressed and negative.

Something old.

Something new.

Something that has meaning.

And slam the mental files on anything that takes us out of the beauty of the present moment.

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Guess how long it takes to get used to winning the lottery?

Psychologist’s say the joy lasts only a year at best and long-term can transform that happiness into sadness, loss of friends and even going broke.

Everyday pleasures feel just as good as winning the lottery.  Really.

Loyola researcher Fred Bryant and University of Michigan researcher Joseph Veroff scientifically studied the art of prolonging happiness by savoring all types of good things in life.

1. Celebrate the good moments or as Amit Sood says, do not postpone joy.
2. Slow down and consume good and happy moments the way you lick an ice cream cone or enjoy a latte.
3. Ease up on some of the good things that occur – like eating candy, don’t eat it all at once or you’ll get sick. 
4. Simplify your life.  Too many options can reduce your pleasure.  We like options.  Just not too many if we want to remain happy.
5. Share your happiness the moment it happens.  Sharing is a natural extender of that which is good. 
6. Doing something new boosts happiness because it is in the now. 

Savor pleasure by consuming it as it occurs.

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Many workplaces are toxic, and yet we need a job.

We are intertwined with friends and associates who we might ordinarily not pick out of a lineup to be real friends.

And we can’t choose our own family which means we deal with what we have inherited for better or worse.

So what’s a person to do?

Discovering and articulating the negativity we see and hear around us helps insulate us from being those people.

Saying it to ourselves – “this guy is really depressing, so negative about the future”.

Or, again to ourselves — “what a sad view of life she has”.

Once we get used to articulating the negativity around us, we automatically distance ourselves from the destructive attitudes that bring us down.

Humans become like our environment – we adapt to circumstances as well as prevalent attitudes.

For the rest of today, see if you can make a mental note every time you see or hear a negative situation developing.  And see if it doesn’t make you feel instantly better.

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Two Harvard psychologists, Daniel Gilbert and Matthew Killingsworth, created a smartphone app to get to the bottom of how frequently people’s minds wander.

They then contacted 2,250 adult volunteers at random intervals to ask how they were feeling, what they were thinking about and what they were doing.

They found that their volunteers spent approximately half their time thinking about what was not going on around them instead thinking or even ruminating about the past, the future or things that may never happen at all.

They were happiest when they focused their minds on what they were doing in the moment.  Research backs the advice of many who insist that happiness and fulfillment can only be found in the present moment.  Thinking about other things is a prescription for unhappiness.

This is not to say we cannot plan for the future.  We just can’t live there before it’s time.

Nor is it saying we cannot learn from the past.  Just life today does not exist in the past.

Our brains can be retrained to live in the moment by becoming conscious of even mundane things that we do.  The more we try to reside in the moment, the easier it is to unconsciously live in the now and reap more of the happiness benefits.

There is no pill, no therapy greater than focusing on the here and on.

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No matter how anxious two people are to solve the problem existing between them, there is a greater urge that they almost always give in to.

The need to be right.

Most people can only listen to each other for only so long – and that’s usually not very long at all.  As David Burns says, “One attitude that gets in the way of good communication is the need to solve problems. I often tell troubled couples that they must refuse to solve the problems in their relationship if they hope to experience greater love and closeness”.

Being upset, arguing, bickering is not communicating.  And if anger is not shared openly – and it almost always is not – then game over.

The awesome power of listening is the tool that makes salespeople richer, careers more rewarding, relationships closer and it requires no skill other than keeping our mouths shut for a moment while simultaneously opening our ears.

Resisting a good argument even if you are “right” or if it is absolutely about “the truth” is the direct path to problem solving.

A friend of mine who brokers hundreds of millions of dollars of radio stations used to tell me that the terms of the deals often took a backseat to the dynamics between the dealmakers.   And that even when they wanted to do business together, they couldn’t get out of their own way.

When in doubt listen. 

Overcome the need to be right.

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