I know how big of a minefield dating can be. You’re trying to stay open to dating, but situation after situation leaves you feeling hopeless about finding the right one. Or anyone. You’ve put in a lot: time, money for online dating, courage – and it’s still not getting you where you want to be.

Joann Cohen, Phoenix’s Genuine Dating Specialist (and the Best in Phoenix, as far as I’m concerned), and yours truly will be teaming up for a special event, “No More Dating Drama,”  this July 13th. We’re going to address all of the questions that keep you stuck in the dregs of dating, and help you change your situation, your dating experience, and your mind.

Online dating may not be enough. Staying hopeful in a hopeless situation may be hard. And knowing what you want can be fuzzy. Come to this special evening, and bring your all questions for Joann and Jason.

See Joann’s site for more information about our “No More Dating Drama” workshop.

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Ah, the sounds and sights of summer. Beach time. Grilling. Good friends and family. I was always looking for an excuse to bring my boombox somewhere when I was growing up, so that I could play my dubbed tape I worked weeks on. I had to wait for just that right moment when I knew the radio would be playing my song. It helped if I could break through the phone line to the station, to request it first.

Times have changed, boomboxes have shrunk to iPhones, and radio requests, well, it’s not as thrilling with streaming music. But the music and the feelings never changed. To honor the symbol of summer – the mix tape – I present to you a list of timeless classics, and new finds, to match any mood you might be experiencing this summer. And it’s just for guys. (And, no, I’m not serenading you).

These songs don’t fit the bill for you? I’ll post this on my blog, so head on over and add your favorites. (This was the best of my iTunes for summer, so it’s a limited stock). Or, check out Tom Moon’s 1,000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die.

Here goes:

Pure Summer Fun:

• “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road” – Lucinda Williams
• “Desert Island” – Magnetic Fields
• “Running on Empty” – Jackson Browne
• “I’d Run Away” – The Jayhawks
• “Honey” – Moby
• “Golden” – My Morning Jacket
• “Deadbeat Summer” – Neon Indian
• “I’m Getting Ready” – Patty Griffin
• “Statesboro Blues” – The Allman Brothers Band
• “My Girls” – Animal Collective
• “California Stars” – Billy Bragg and Wilco

Depressed:

• “Fade to Black” – Metallica
• “Comfortably Numb” – Pink Floyd
• “Sour Times” – Portishead
• “Manic Depression” – The Jimi Hendrix Experience
• “When The Stars Go Blue” – Ryan Adams
• “The Tracks of My Tears” – Smokey Robinson and the Miracles
• “Skinny Love” – Bon Iver

Happy:

• “My Favorite Things” – John Coltrane
• “Peaceful, Easy Feeling” – The Eagles
• “Feeling Alright” – Joe Cocker
• “Perfect Day” – Lou Reed
• “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” – Beach Boys
• “Joy” – Bettye Lavette

Testosterone/Adrenaline Jolt

• “Tom Sawyer” – Rush
• “I Got Stripes” – Johnny Cash
• “Communication Breakdown” – Led Zeppelin
• “Negative Creep” – Nirvana
• “Jesus Built My Hotrod” – Ministry
• “Anarchy in the U.K.” – Sex Pistols
• “Born Under a Bad Sign” – Albert King
• “Lust for Life” – Iggy Pop

Problem Relationship Songs:

• “Human Nature” – Michael Jackson
• “Cure for Pain” – Morphine
• “I’ve Got My Mojo Working” – Muddy Waters
• “Respect” – Otis Redding
• “This is Hell” – Elvis Costello
• “Love Hurts” – Gram Parsons
• “Trouble” – Ray LaMontagne
• “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart” Wilco
• “Evil” – Howlin’ Wolf
• “Jealous Guy” – John Lennon
• “Dyslexic Heart” – Paul Westerberg

Good Relationship Songs:

• “Love Keep Us Together” – Martin Sexton
• “Sweet Caroline” – Neil Diamond
• “Lady” – Fela Kuti
• “You Make Loving Fun” – Fleetwood Mac
• “I Want a Little Sugar in My Bowl” – Nina Simone
• “Love and Happiness” – Al Green
• “I Want You” – Bob Dylan

At Night:

• “Harvest Moon” – Neil Young
• “Pink Moon” – Nick Drake
• “Nightswimming” – R.E.M.
• “House of Cards” – Radiohead
• “Wild Night” – Van Morrison

It’s ubiquitous and it’s stressful. It seizes you and drains you. It leaves you longing for the good old college days, where responsibility was minimal and adult expectations hadn’t set in. We’re talking about time strain. Time, like money, is a finite resource. We only have so much of it, and what we do with it is totally up to us. Even when we think we’re enslaved to it, we’ve still made choices to absolve ourselves of it.

What to do? The crisis of not enough time is one that needs careful attention. As a psychotherapist, I help people take their time back, and uncover the things that keep them enslaved to time and their busy lives.

As Americans, we’ve gotten so much busier. No longer is the 40-hour workweek the standard. It’s more like 45, 55, and 70 hour workweeks for some. It’s become more difficult for many to make ends meet without two people earning a living, trying to provide childcare, and find time for themselves.

In some ways, the recession has allowed us to take a hard look at how we invest ourselves, our time and our money. Many Americans are choosing to spend less time working, and more time investing in the things they value, like their kids, family, travel, etc.

Let’s talk about six things you can do plug the time drain in your life, and to start to reel your schedule back in:

1. Identify what you really value: are your activities and actions aligning with the things you value in life? If not, it may be time to make an action plan to get those things to align (activities/behaviors and values). If you’re unhappy at work, is it reasonable to work less, or to look for something else entirely? What are the blocks to get your values to line up with your activities/behaviors?
2. 

   Booked Solid?

   Get time-organized: this one is a no brainer. If you’re seeping time, and don’t know where it’s going, maybe you can make yourself more accountable. Here’s some tools to help: designer David Seah produces these fine organization tools, where you can start to hold yourself accountable on a daily/weekly/monthly basis. Teux Deux is a sleek, no frills online to-do list. And Google had plenty of products, from online apps, a calendar, and other tools to get you organized. Also, TSheets tracks your time online, like expenditures, so you know how and when your time is being used. And you’ll be surprised how much time you’ve spent on YouTube once you start.

3. Read the previous post on saying “no” to commitments to others, and learn to have more free time and not feel guilty doing it.
4. Prioritize and carve out time for yourself, even if it’s only five or ten minutes a day to do some sitting meditation. Without time for yourself, you’re less likely to be effective to all the other demands of your day. You’re teaching yourself to be able to “input” as well as “output” to others, which is hard for many guys to do.
5. Ask for help! If you can’t handle everything, don’t be so proud that you don’t ask for help. No one cares, except you. Enlist others to help where you need it, and don’t be shy. People are more than happy to help, as long as you don’t take advantage of them.
6. And, make good time for sleep. Sleep is the great equalizer when you get it, and will undermine everything else if you don’t. Get your 6-8 hours of sleep a night (some people need more than others). When you prioritize sleep, as well as yourself (see tip 4), you’re creating a very effective foundation to be your most effective at juggling the myriad things/people/situations that will absorb your time, including work. Do this one above others. Get some good nightly sleep.

Follow these steps, and you’ll be able to experience more feelings of “centeredness” and less feelings of being scattered. You’ll be able to take back your life and time, rather than continue to feel like you’re catching up to it. Good luck, and let me know how it goes. E-mail me directly on the “Contact” page above.

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You’re a busy guy. You’ve got tons of responsibilities: work overload, family duties, chores and to-do lists, time with your wife or girlfriend, time with your kids, working out, having a beer with a buddy… the time commitments can be endless. Where does it end? When you can sit back and breathe, do you ever feel overwhelmed and like you’re burning the candle at both ends?

Stress has many components, and for guys who have a hard time saying “no” to others, it can seem much worse. I know. As a recovering “nice guy”, it was really hard for me in the past to say ‘no’ to others, when they would ask something of me. As I’d take on more and more commitments, I would overwhelm myself, and either generally not be of use to the people asking (by dragging my feet on something), or by generally internalizing a lot of anger at them, and at myself for not getting what I wanted.

If we can learn to say ‘no’, we take the power back that we’ve given others. Having expendable time in your life will be something you create consciously, instead of reactively (and through fear) making commitments to others when you don’t really want to.

I think we can’t say ‘no’ to commitments because we don’t want to let down the other person, because if we do, then they’re mad or disappointed in us, and who wants that? When we give others power over us, to overly praise or reject us, then our fate kind of lies in their hands. If we can learn to get ourselves to the point where it’s o.k. to to say ‘no’, and check it out with the other person if we need to (“I’m afraid if I say ‘no’ to you, I’d disappoint you. Did I?”). If we start seizing back the ‘no’ we mean to communicate, and state it with empathy and not anger, we’ll ultimately get a lot father in our lives.

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Feel like you’re lost and wandering through your life? Envious of those who seem to have a clear route to their own personal success? Many men I speak with feel this way, and blame not knowing what they want, or having unclear goals. Goal setting is difficult when you don’t know what the goal is in the first place. It can be difficult to get somewhere in your life without having a laser focus set on things you want, whether that’s into a good relationship, better muscle tone, or finally buying that home you’ve wanted.

Does this describe you?

1. Feel fuzzy and not sure what you really want
2. Appeal to other’s versions of success, either for you or for themselves
3. Not sure what you get fun or pleasure from
4. Have negative self-messages about success
5. May be afraid of success
6. Just lazy? Or playing a victim?

I think the most important step towards dealing with unclear goals is to identify and understand those road blocks which get in the way of your forward motion. There are others that claim (haphazardly) to just “push through it” and start making goals, and accomplishing them. “No excuses” is the mantra, which doesn’t really tackle the problem at hand, nor honor the stuck place we get into as men.

Here’s some rocks to start turning over to help you deal with unclear goals:

1. How do you prevent yourself from having what you want in your life, whether that’s more variety in your personal life, a different career, or a change in behavior (decreased alcohol use, quit smoking, eat better).
2. What negative patterns from your parents have you picked up? Did you have a parent that limited themselves, and if so, how do you repeat that pattern?
3. What did you do as a child that you loved to do? Are you doing those things, or something similar, today? Why not?
4. If you could put yourself in the right ___________________, what would that look like? What are the barriers to get there (list them out with a brainstorming session)
5. How do you talk to yourself? Positively? Critically? Start paying attention to the language you use with yourself, and see if you get caught in criticizing yourself and stopping yourself from moving forward.
6. Does fear (of success, of failure) play a role in your unclear goals. How does this limit you?

Getting in touch with our goals is, by default, a process of getting in touch with ourselves. If we can learn to tune into ourselves, and listen for what we want and how we talk with ourselves, we develop better awareness to deal with the barriers we have often self-imposed on our forward motion. You may need some professional help, and as someone who specializes in Phoenix therapy, I work with guys to unstick themselves. Call me, or e-mail me, for more information about how to help unstick yourself, and get to work on the goals that are right there for your taking.

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There’s a big difference between being stuck in a rut, and being depressed. The latter is chronic, the former is temporary. We all get stuck in ruts from time to time. We can’t always bring our ‘A’ game to everything we do. Our biorhythms, our lives, our minds: everything is cyclical. One day we’re flying, and another day feeling a little unmotivated and sluggish.

Popular culture professes to have many instant cures for feeling stuck in a rut, and this blog post is not one of them. Let’s talk a little more about what being in a rut might mean:

• You simply don’t want to do whatever it is, say go to work, take care of yourself, stop drinking, etc.
• Some outside entity forces you to change: girlfriend, paying your mortgage, getting to work to pay that mortgage
• We lack the creative “spark” or energy to invest in whatever task or activity we will do – we’re simply not inspired
• There’s a “should” or “must” attached to it; rule number one about humans is that we create an opposite reaction to forces telling us what to do. The energy is there – it’s just pent up and going the opposite direction. If we “have to do something,” it’s more likely we’ll drag our feet, or simply not do it altogether.
• We’re not in touch with what flows, or what’s fun. Our sense of play has diminished, and our sense of obligation overrides what we really want to do.

Here’s some ways to remedy that sense of being stuck in a rut.

• Start communicating with yourself. Ask pertinent questions like, “Why am I wanting to do this? What do I get out of doing it? What would I rather be doing, and could I be doing it that way?”
• Try not to “push” yourself through to the other side, and make yourself unstuck. This tends to create a behavioral pattern over time, which encourages chronic “stuckness” over the long term.
• Take time out, and brainstorm your values. If you don’t know what your values are, take some time to come up with them. Write down values like, “exercise” or “personal time” or “time with my family/wife/girlfriend”. Try create ones like “creative time” or “do-nothing on purpose time”. When you get to the root of what you’re about – your values – and you’re doing activities that align with those personal values, you help yourself de-rut.
• Identify the areas where you’re stuck, such as relationship, work, personal life, money, mind. Create an action plan to work towards solutions to address those specific area. Watch for overwhelming yourself by thinking in a ‘black or white’ mentality, and lumping everything together as a problem. You’ll overload yourself, and stay stuck. Maybe this is what got you into the rut in the first place.

Activating ourselves from the inside is most important, because others – whether they be our wives, girlfriends, bosses, or personal trainers – can only motivate us from the outside so much. Taking ownership for our situation, and making a commitment to ourselves to change is tough, but ultimately much more rewarding.

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