PEP or POOP

Personal Empowerment Practices
or
Personally Offensive, Obstructive Practices

Ask someone whether they want more PEP in their life or more POOP. Everyone says they want more PEP, but they often fill their life with POOP. Why is that?

It’s mostly because that’s what they’ve learned. Teachers, employers, parents, and celebrities pretty much shove POOP down our throats. It’s no surprise that’s what we do with our lives.

PEP or POOP is about spotting the often subtle differences between the two types of habit. We also talk about how to move toward PEP so we gain the benefits along with everyone around us.

It’s important to know there are very few hard lines between right and wrong in this podcast. Yes, there is a hard line between honesty and lying, but that’s about the only one. For example, it’s easy to say you should never threaten anyone. Well, yes, negotiating is a better option, but Scared Straight programs work because sometimes people need to be woken up by seeing the threat of real consequences to their actions.

The key is in choosing which are your preferred go-to practices. The key to a beautiful rose garden is consistency, caring, supporting, and encouraging the plants to grow straight and true. But even rose gardens need POOP on occasion (horse manure) to keep them beautiful.

People thrive on honesty, consistency, and encouragement. We all want someone to listen, accept us, and care. But sometimes, when we get a little off course, we might need someone to complain about our behaviour, criticize our choices, or even punish us for doing something wrong.

Perhaps even more important is learning to recognise when we slide over the line from encouraging to nagging. Spotting that change takes a real effort at listening. It’s the same with supporting and rewarding. It’s easy to know when you’re rewarding someone for doing what you told them to do. But what happens when your genuine desire to support someone slides into directing their behaviour because they’re doing what gets them a reward?

Life is nowhere near as easy as driving down a highway. There are no painted lines to show our lane, or even a stone shoulder to get our attention when we’re off track. The gurus say life is not a practice run; you only get one shot at life. Well, they’re right that we only get one shot at living life. But life is all about practicing. It’s great when we get it right straight away, but the whole point of living another day is to practice getting it right. We just have to choose the right things to practice, at the right time, with the right people.