Three months? What if someone left you in the box for three months? It’s dark in here. The packing peanuts itch.

Dude, I found a great clothing rack on e-bay. Bookmarked it for ya. Check it out.

Really? You’re gonna watch the entire Godfather trilogy while I just sit here? Don’t you think that’s a little … selfish?

You may have had the best intentions when purchasing your Bowflex, treadmill, exercise bike, or elliptical trainer, but somehow you failed to form the lasting bond needed to get your money’s worth? What went wrong?

Oh ye of little faith …

Really, that’s the answer: little faith. A Brown University study published in the Annals of Behavioral Medicine found that sedentary people who buy home exercise equipment are 73 percent more likely to start working out than those who don’t have equipment … and 12 percent more likely to wind up back on their sofas than their no-equipment counterparts.

The problem seems to be that those who buy the equipment have an unrealistic view of just what that equipment can accomplish. More important than having great tools, the researchers found, is having self-efficacy—the belief that you can achieve your goals. So before investing in more equipment, try investing a little time in your psyche. Ask these questions:

• Am I worth the effort? Your body is your most valuable tangible asset. It houses your spirit, your dreams, your plans, and will help you fulfill—or be the undoing—of every dream you have in life. Are you willing to commit your resources to protecting and preserving your most valuable tangible asset? If so, it doesn’t matter whether you spend money on exercise equipment or just take the time to walk around your neighborhood—you will accomplish your goals. But if you’re not committed to your own well-being, buying exercise equipment won’t magically spark your motivation.

• Am I ready to make the effort? Infomercials for exercise equipment seem to follow the same theme. People are flabby in their before photos, ripped in their after photos, and claim going from one extreme to the other was the easiest, happiest, most carefree time of their lives. To look at the ads, you’d imagine they never broke a sweat. It’s almost as if the mere act of purchasing the machine made them drop 50 pounds by the time it was uncrated. Too bad it doesn’t really work that way. As the quickly passing type at the bottom of the screen explains, the average success story eats a healthy diet, takes workouts seriously, and patiently waits for results. Are you prepared to do the work, no matter how difficult it is?

• Do I believe my efforts can succeed? People have transformed their lives on expensive equipment and with no equipment at all. What all success stories have in common is the genuine belief they can change. Anyone counting on a fad diet or fancy equipment to supply the motivation or do the work will be disappointed. Magic beans and pixie dust are the stuff of fairy tales. To change your life requires positive attitude coupled with sincere effort. If either of those elements is missing, you might as well save your time and money.

Few people juggle more problems at one time than the leader of the free world. After taking over the presidency in the worst possible circumstances—the murder of his predecessor in 1963—Lyndon Baines Johnson was managing an escalating war in Vietnam, anti-war protests at home, civil rights battles in the South, the introduction of Medicare, urban riots, the space race, and crises in the Middle East.

Johnson was known as a boisterous man who commanded a great deal of attention from those in his orbit. His press secretary, Bill Moyers, was his polar opposite in personality. Moyers, who’d go on to become a popular author and PBS host, was a quiet fellow with strong religious convictions. The president often called on him to say grace before meals. On one such occasion, Moyers was so soft-spoken in asking blessings on the food, Johnson interrupted his press secretary’s communion with the Almighty by shouting, “Louder, Bill!” Moyers quickly reminded his boss of the pecking order: “I wasn’t talking to you, Mr. President.”

The next time you start feeling as though the universe revolves around your issues, bring yourself back to earth by remembering these sentiments …

“Help others achieve their dreams and you will achieve yours.”

—Les Brown, motivator

“Who does not in some sort live to others, does not live much to himself.”

—Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, French philosopher and essayist

“The purpose of human life is to serve and show compassion and the will to help others.”

—Albert Schweitzer, medical missionary

“Those who bring sunshine into the lives of others, cannot keep it from themselves.”

—James M. Barrie, British playwright

“The most satisfying thing in life is to have been able to give a large part of oneself to others.”

—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Christian mystic

“Maturity is that time when the mirrors in our mind turn to windows and instead of seeing the reflection of ourselves we see others.”

—Source unknown

“Happiness adds and multiplies, as we divide it with others.”

—A. Nielsen, market researcher

“We ought to think that we are one of the leaves of a tree, and the tree is all humanity. We cannot live without the others, without the tree.”

—Pablo Casals, Spanish cellist

Whether or not you agree with the verdict in the Casey Anthony trial, it’s not easy making life-and-death decisions that will forever be scrutinized and second-guessed by the public. The more infamous the case, the greater the responsibility—and the potential criticism.

As another defense attorney admonished the jury during summation in a long ago show trial, “you are the only bulwark that can resist oppression in a time of public excitement. Judges cannot do it. The fathers of this country put this power in the hands of the people.” If that burden weren’t enough, the attorney went on to assure jurors the accused was “the kind of man who never fails a friend. He was loved by his followers. Open-handed, generous, a man a bookmaker would trust with a ten-thousand-dollar bet.”

No mention of whether he wore a halo.

It doesn’t matter if you’re on a jury, a workplace team, or a PTA committee. The hard part starts when you’re shoved into a room and expected to reach consensus on important issues that could have an impact on lives, careers, projects, or others’ welfare. How do you maintain your own integrity without stomping on everyone else’s right to be heard? Remember this advice:

• Set boundaries. Treat everyone in the group respectfully and insist they treat you respectfully. Rather than responding in kind to belligerence, quietly refuse to interact with people who become abusive. Ignore them and continue the discussion around them. If others follow your lead, rude participants will soon learn to adapt to the majority or risk being excluded from the conversation.

• Nix prejudices. Beware of assuming you can guess people’s opinions based on their age, race, gender, ethnicity, country or region of origin, or any other arbitrary criteria. Try not to make judgments about how people are going to feel until they’ve had time to explain their views. Your prejudgments could be wrong or might have you devising mental counter-arguments when you should be listening to what others have to say.

• Accept differences. Strive to let other participants know their views are welcome and appreciated. Exercise your own good listening skills, and speak up for less bold members of the group when dissenters try to intimidate them into silence. Stress that you can’t reach genuine consensus unless everyone has the opportunity to express opinions.

• Maintain perspective. Expect people to disagree with you—especially when the subject is controversial or the stakes are high. And try not to let their ire get to you. Some people don’t know how to disagree without resorting to “you, you, you.” But no matter how personal their argument sounds, that doesn’t mean it’s really personal. You can’t control how others approach the discussion, but you can control how you react. Stay calm, and keep reminding yourself it’s not a personal attack.

• Be honest. Never go along to get along when making a group decision. Speak your truth, whatever it takes. If your decision is irreversible—for instance, choosing how to budget finite resources or reaching a verdict in a criminal trial—you don’t want to be haunted by knowing you kept silent and went along with something you felt was wrong. Take the time required to reach a decision you can live with.

• Trust yourself. Once your group has made its decision, don’t look back. It’s easy for other people to whoop about what they would have done in your shoes … but they weren’t in your shoes. You did what you believed was right based on the information at your disposal. Second-guessing doesn’t serve any useful purpose. For your own peace of mind, let it go.

The problem with making any decision—particularly when you’re trying to reach a consensus with others—is you may never know if you made a wise choice. Sometimes the wrong thing turns out okay, or the right thing goes awry … or you never know one way or the other. On the positive side, not every decision will keep you up at night. Remember that open-handed, generous fellow his attorney would trust with a ten-thousand-dollar bet? The jury didn’t quite see it that way. They found him guilty of income tax evasion.

His name was Al Capone.

It was a July day in 1975, and Judge Rudolph T. Randa’s municipal courtroom in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, was packed. As the defendant stood before sentencing, the judge asked if he had anything he wanted to say on his own behalf.

Needing to use his hands to speak his piece, the defendant automatically pulled them from his pockets … where he’d been holding up pants that were four sizes too big. His trousers fell to the floor. No underwear. Thus the defendant’s unplanned statement was to moon the crowded courtroom.

The poor man quickly pulled up his pants as the spectators tried to smother their snickers. But with the guard’s admonishment to “keep your hands in your pockets,” he probably found it even more difficult to come up with appropriate words for his circumstances.

A recent study conducted at the University of Birmingham in England found that talking with your hands triggers mental images that helps people solve complex problems involving spatial visualization. In other words, people who use their hands when talking find it easier to put things in mental order. Other studies have found that people tend to view those who talk with their hands as more warm, agreeable, and energetic … and those who don’t as more cold and calculating.

Carol Kinsey Goman, author of The Nonverbal Advantage: Secrets and Science of Body Language at Work says these hand gestures help send positive signals to your audience:

• Steepling. Palms apart, fingers spread and touching lightly tells the audience you’re comfortable, confident, and know your subject well. Goman says steepling is a favorite gesture of CEOs, professors, lawyers, and politicians.

• Clenching. Yes, a clenched fist can indicate anger or intransigence. But it also confirms resoluteness and a firm commitment to the objective. So in the right circumstances, it is a positive gesture.

• Quickening. Sweeping arm movements and quick hand gestures suggest energy and enthusiasm. Just don’t get overly enthusiastic. If you start waving your arms above your shoulders or making excessive, herky-jerky body movements, you run the risk of appearing erratic, unstable, and less credible.

• Calming. If you want to appear composed, and help your audience feel calm and centered, try keeping your arms bent to a 45-degree angle at your waist and maintaining your hand gestures within that horizontal plane. Goman also suggests speakers assume that position between gestures to help keep themselves grounded.

As a child, did you ever read Aesop’s fable of the city mouse and the country mouse? After a visit to his cousin showed him the sparseness of country living, the city mouse reciprocated the invitation, and the country mouse ventured to the city. The country mouse was impressed by the splendid feasts available in the city’s huge garbage dumps … but he didn’t appreciate having to dodge so many cats and other dangers trying to get at them. The moral of the story: “A modest life with peace and quiet is better than a rich one with danger and strife.”

Apparently the Greek writer, who’s believed to have lived sometime in the 3^rd to 5^th century B.C., was wise beyond his time. By using functional brain imaging, researchers from the University of Heidelberg have been able to demonstrate that the brains of city and country dwellers respond differently to social stress. And that probably explains why people reared in cities are more prone to developing mental disorders.

For decades, scientists have known schizophrenia is twice as common among those born and raised in the city–yet genetics accounts for only 20 percent of the risk. According to the study findings recently published in the journal Nature, the German researchers wanted to determine whether the social stresses of city living could be the difference.

Brain overload

The researchers put test subjects to work solving arithmetic problems, then began hurrying and mocking them through headphones and used scans to study how those additional stressors affected their brains. The amygdala—a portion of the brain that processes emotion—was activated only in urban dwellers. And the cingulate cortex—which helps regulate and process negative emotions—responded more forcefully in those with urban histories than in those who grew up in towns or rural areas.

The results were so conclusive the researchers were afraid others would question the findings, so they repeated the study and achieved the same outcome. They plan to expand their studies to determine whether other risk factors, such as support networks or perceived discrimination, have any impact on the way subjects process stress.

So for city dwellers is the moral of the research findings that you should move? Not necessarily. But they definitely suggest you should find opportunities to step out of the rate race and enjoy your simple pleasures.

The best thing that can happen to lesser candidates during an election is for the head of the ticket to have long coattails. When presidents take office by decisive numbers, senators and congressional representatives, state governors and legislators, even local officeholders from the same party can ride those coattails straight into office.

But for those of us just going about our daily routines, hangers-on can be a drag. We think we’ve tossed off the negatives in our lives, but they didn’t fall as far as we’d hoped. They’re right behind us, clinging desperately, and weighing us down as we try to achieve our goals of success, peace, and happiness.

One of the biggest drags on our future is guilt over the past. Take these steps to address the guilts that won’t let go …

1. Take a quick inventory. Many of us live so long with nagging guilts, we forget what we did to cause such remorse in the first place. Start coming to terms with your feelings by writing down the sources of your self-reproach. Grab a sheet of paper and list everything you’ve done that still has you steeping in regret. Once you’ve made the list, put the items in chronological order, listing your approximate age at the time each incident occurred. Then beside each item briefly describe how the situation was resolved. If the situation remains unresolved, leave the space blank.

2. Develop some perspective. Review the list, concentrating first on those things that happened when you were a young child. Think of the children you know now who are near the age you were then. Would you have the same high expectations of them to handle the same situation that you have of your younger self? When we think back on mistakes made long ago, we often view them with the knowledge and experience we have today. But those tools weren’t available to us then. If you wouldn’t berate a child you love today for making the same mistake, how can you berate yourself? Draw a line through everything on your list that happened before you were old enough to make responsible decisions.

3. Examine your resolutions. Now review the remaining items on your list. Circle those items beside which you’ve summarized a resolution. Take a moment to study each resolution, asking these three questions:

•Was the situation resolved to your satisfaction?

•Did you do all you could to resolve the situation? Most of the things we anguish over are behind us. Either they’ve been resolved but we insist on continuing to carry the guilt. Or they can’t be resolved and we refuse to accept reality and let them go. You’ll probably find that your list has few, if any, items you can still address. If you find something to do, then do it … and be done with it. And mark it off your list. Lift the weight of old guilts from your shoulders. When you feel them settling back into place, take out your list and remind yourself these items have been checked off and no longer have a place in your life.

•Can you do anything more to resolve the situation? Now move onto the last items on your list—those that remain unresolved. Repeat the final two questions asked in step 3. Did you do all you could to resolve the situation? Can you do anything more? Leave items on the list only if you can think of more you can do to resolve them.

If your answer to the first question was yes, mark through the item. If your answer to the first question was no, but the answer to your second question was yes, mark through the item. Leave this item on the list only if the situation remains unresolved and if you can think of something more you can do to resolve it.

4. Examine unfinished business. Now move onto the last items on your list—those that remain unresolved. Repeat the final two questions in step 3. Did you do all you could to resolve the situation? Can you do anything more? Leave items on the list only if you can think of more you can do to resolve them.

5. Take the initiative. Most of the things we anguish over are behind us. Either they’ve been resolved but we insist on continuing to carry the guilt. Or they can’t be resolved and we refuse to accept reality and let them go. You’ll probably find that your list has few, if any, items you can still address. If you find something to do, then do it … and be done with it. And mark it off your list. Lift the weight of old guilts from your shoulders. When you feel them settling back into place, take out your list and remind yourself these items have been checked off and no longer have a place in your life.

The Cherry Sisters—19^th-century Iowa farm girls—yearned to visit the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. So in what would later become the tradition of many a B-musical, they chimed: “Let’s put on a show!”

Effie, Addie, Ella, and Jessie came up with the idea of staging a vaudeville act to pay their way to the fair. Their inexperience, corny material, and all-around lack of talent didn’t bother the hometown friends and neighbors who gave them enthusiastic applause when they tried out their act. But road audiences expected entertainment for their two bits. So the Cherry Sisters grew accustomed to dodging rotting vegetables and raw eggs. Addie was even known to patrol the stage with a shotgun to keep audiences from running the girls out of town.

Endless insults

But one night, the audience tried something new: They blew tin horns left over from the previous year’s presidential campaign in hopes of drowning out the Cherrys’ caterwauling. Well, bless their hearts, the sisters took the horns for raucous approval. So imagine their dismay to read in the following day’s Cedar Rapids Gazette: “If some indefinable instinct of modesty could not have warned them that they were acting the part of monkeys, it does seem like the overshoes thrown at them would convey the idea.”

Stunned by the criticism—unexpected as it was for once—the Cherrys did what any self-respecting performers would: They sued for slander. And even after they performed their act for the jury, somehow they won their case. The jury sentenced the editor to marry one of the sisters, but the Cherrys declined … much to his relief.

By 1898, the sister act had dwindled to three with Ella’s retirement. And their promoter had developed the good sense to erect a mesh-screen barrier to protect them from most of the rotting fruits that greeted their labor. But nothing could protect them from the stinging criticism of the press. After a performance in western Iowa, local editor William Hamilton described them as “surpassing the witches in Macbeth in general hideousness.”

Perhaps Hamilton’s nastiness would have gone unnoticed if the Des Moines Leader hadn’t picked up the story. The sisters were beside themselves to read in such a prominent newspaper his view that “the mouths of their rancid features opened like caverns, and sounds like the wailing of damned souls issued therefrom. ”

Once again, the Cherry Sisters sought redress through the courts. They sued the Des Moines Leader for libel. Once again, they performed their act to back up their claim. But this time, the courts were less sympathetic to the pitifully untalented sisters. Their case was dismissed with the judge declaring that a newspaper should have the right to criticize public performers to the point of ridicule. The Cherrys appealed, but in 1901, the Iowa Supreme Court upheld the lower court ruling, saying “If ever there was a case justifying ridicule and sarcasm … it is the one now before us.…” The ruling became the foundation for the First Amendment standard of “fair comment and criticism,” which allows today’s comedians and critics to make public figures the butt of their routines and disdain.

Last laugh

In their decade-long career the Cherry Sisters toured the Midwest and as far as Canada and New York, where they headlined for the great theater impresario Oscar Hammerstein I, turning around his fledgling Olympia Music Hall and his career. “I’ve been putting on the best talent, and it hasn’t gone over,” he said. “I’m going to try the worst.” They packed the house. Hammerstein managed to convince the sisters jealous rivals had hired instigators to pummel the stage with garbage.

The Cherrys finally left the circuit and returned to their Iowa farm in 1903 after Jessie’s death from typhoid fever. And despite all the vicious reviews, rotten cabbages, and derisive laughter that followed their career, the Cherry Sisters retired in just 10 years with a fortune estimated at $200,000 … which today would be nearly $30 million. Not bad for an act the American Weekly said, “began as the four worst professional actresses in the world and ended without improving one iota.”

In much of the world today, people take for granted the privilege to say what they please … which is why the Internet teems with nearly 160 million public blogs. But in the Soviet Union of the 1970s, citizens paid a price for speaking up.

Mstislav Rostropovich was a master cellist, one of the most celebrated musicians of the 20^th century. As such, he and his wife, soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, lived a prosperous life in Moscow, where great artists were treated like royalty. But Rostropovich’s existence was the exception under the Soviets. Increasingly, dissidents were telling the world about the rule. The best known of these dissidents, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, won the Nobel Prize for literature in October 1970, prompting even harsher attacks on his controversial work.

Most people living Rostropovich’s charmed life would have ignored politics to protect themselves. But as Tim Page reported in the Washington Post, the master cellist had different priorities. He risked his favored position by speaking out on behalf of his friend Solzhenitsyn and staging a formal public protest supporting the dissident. The Soviets struck back at what Rostropovich loved most: his music.

Professional engagements dwindled for the cellist and his wife. Their recordings were no longer played on state radio. When Rostropovich was allowed to perform with other musicians, his name was excluded from published reviews. But finally in 1974, he and his wife were granted a two-year visa to tour abroad. They sought asylum in the United States where Rostropovich thrilled Western audiences and eventually fulfilled his dream of becoming a premier conductor leading the National Symphony Orchestra. He didn’t visit Russia again until 1990 when he was invited to perform for Mikhail Gorbachev. He returned to his beloved homeland for good as a dying man in 2007. One of his last visitors was Russian President Vladimir Putin, a gesture of respect usually reserved for national heroes.

Are you willing to risk what you have for a principle or dream?

“No man is worth his salt who is not ready at all times to risk his well-being, to risk his body, to risk his life, in a great cause.”

—Theodore Roosevelt, president of the United States

“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”

—Anais Nin, French novelist

“Great deeds are usually wrought at great risks.”

—Herodotus, Greek historian

“Every man has the right to risk his own life in order to save it.”

—Jean Jacques Rousseau, Swiss philosopher

“He who is not courageous enough to take risks will accomplish nothing in life.”

—Muhammad Ali, boxing champion

“It is part of a good man to do great and noble deeds, though he risk everything.”

—Plutarch, Greek essayist

“That’s the risk you take if you change: that people you’ve been involved with won’t like the new you. But other people who do will come along.”

—Lisa Alther, American author

“Every man must have the right fearlessly to think independently and express his opinion about what he knows, what he has personally thought about and experienced, and not merely to express with slightly different variations the opinion which has been inculcated in him.”

—Mstislav Rostropovich, Russian cellist, conductor, and human rights advocate

In the classic 1944 mystery film Laura, the detective was constantly fidgeting with one of those games where you try to get a bead into a hole. He seemed to do it as much to annoy the suspects as to center himself. I love those games. The only problem is that once you get the bead in place, even the slightest movement sends it rolling off in all directions again.

Hate to admit it, but for the last few months I’ve been a lot like those beads … unable to hold center. I’ll roll aimlessly around the board trying to regroup, find my way back for a day or two, then suddenly get jarred loose and start rolling again.

We can’t always control what happens around us. Storms blow up when we least expect them, and if we’re not centered within ourselves, those events can take us so far off course it seems almost impossible to find the way back. So it’s probably a good idea for me—and anyone else having similar issues—to give some thought to methods of keeping steady no matter what’s happening around us. Here are a few that come to mind …

• Find your anchor. Imagine being lost in the pitch black of your own living room. You’re stumbling and bumbling around, bruising your chins and clutching at air, until you finally grab hold of a sturdy piece of furniture that tells you where you are. Aha, you think, I am here! I am safe!

Your life anchor is like that piece of furniture, the something you can grab in the dark that tells you you’re here and you’re safe. For me, that anchor is my faith. Whatever it is for you, if you’re rolling around aimlessly, chances are you’ve experienced some kind of disconnect. Focus on strengthening those ties.

• Bolster your support. Ever done any flower arranging? You can’t just drop a rose into a large-mouth vase and expect it to stand up straight. You have to provide some support. Perhaps you’ll fill the bottom of the vase with pebbles so you can showcase the rose on its own. Or perhaps you’ll surround the rose with other flowers and greenery for stability. Those pebbles, flowers, and greenery are the people in your life who provide steadying hands when you begin to lose your way.

Unfortunately, if you’re anything like me, when you begin to struggle, you may cut yourself off from the people you need most, figuring you can work it all out on your own. Uh-huh … just like a rose can self-levitate in a vase.

• Steer your course. Sleep deprivation is a chief cause of traffic accidents, and falling asleep at the wheel of life is one way to ensure you wind up off-course. It’s easy to allow ourselves to be swept along by events when we should be taking the wheel, focusing on where we want to go, and making sure we stay on the desired path despite the distractions. It only takes a few seconds of looking away to send the car careening into a ditch. And it’s a lot harder to dig out after a crash than it would have been to maintain focus in the first place.

Recently I was debating someone about how to improve a decades-old process that simply doesn’t work. He believes flawed, inadequate procedures are the best we can do, and considers me naive for thinking otherwise.

“Pollyanna,” he groused.

If he’d used the term appropriately, I’d have been flattered. The expression comes from the classic 1913 children’s novel by Eleanor H. Porter about a girl who manages to find something positive in the most negative circumstances. Thinking you should try to fix a flat tire instead of driving on doesn’t make you a Pollyanna—it means you have common sense. Thinking when your tire goes flat that you’re blessed to have a car makes you a Pollyanna.  

My mother is a Pollyanna; she looks for the good in people, finds the blessings in hard times, and believes tomorrow will be a better day. Being able to find the silver lining behind life’s darkest clouds is a quality I didn’t necessarily inherit but do try to emulate. Here are some other thoughts about looking on the bright side …

“Positive thinking will let you do everything better than negative thinking will.”

—Zig Ziglar, motivational speaker

“The hardest arithmetic to master is that which enables us to count our blessings.”

—Eric Hoffer, American author and philosopher

“The misfortunes hardest to bear are those which never came.”

—James Russell Lowell, poet, critic, and editor

“Reflect upon your present blessings, of which every man has plenty, not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some.”

—Charles Dickens, novelist

“I’ve always believed no matter how many shots I miss, I’m going to make the next one.”

—Isiah Thomas, professional basketball player and coach

“Whatever you believe with feeling becomes your reality.”

—Brian Tracy, businessman and author

“Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.”

—Confucius, Chinese philosopher

“Instead of always harping on a man’s faults, tell him of his virtues. Try to pull him out of his rut of bad habits. Hold him up to his better self, his real self that can dare and do and win out!”

—Eleanor H. Porter, from the novel Pollyanna