Do You Warm Up Your MIND before work or school, the way you do your body before working out or competing in athletics: stretching Characters�, Actions�, Settings�, and Time frames� scope, depth, intensity, and clarity, that are on your mind?

Barring incapacitating physical debilities, you work out, or you should; probably several ways, if only doing breathing exercises, raising your shoulders up and down, and other simple exercises. That�s part of the beauty of it: changing the routine. But have you ever given two minutes� thought, in all the time you spend doing routines, to whether you can actually work out your MIND the same way, which affects EVERYTHING you do: how well you communicate, relate to people, relate to yourself, manage your life, your business, your job, your family, and how well you actually LEARN in the first place, even how well you innovate your work out, and how well you live when you aren�t working out. You spend all this time exercising your body to improve how you look and feel, BUT � again, how you feel and see is still filtered through your mind, just as sensory perception is, so working your Body without working your Mind is like only working your arms but not your legs, or your front but not your back.

You break down your workout into various specific components, and exercise increasingly specific muscles with a method based on common characteristics, anticipating for instance that more sets with less weight or resistance will achieve certain results, and fewer sets with more weight or resistance will achieve other results. The business you work in does the same thing with different jobs, each of which has various tasks with a multitude of additional details.

Every one of these situations or events likewise has common characteristics. Every book or article about getting your head or act together, like every speaker at every conference for every industry�as different as their advice may be�is explained the same way! One more time: information has a uniform structure, just as our bodies do�and the very atoms of which we are composed�different as they may be in distinct ways. One of the biggest misconceptions fostered by the compartmentalization of knowledge in our educations, is that some information is expository or didactic, some anecdotal or dramatic, some lyrical or poetic. All the speakers at conferences, all the winners of incentive trips, and all the trade magazine articles constantly use a combination of all three, which those people learn to vary the way a chef changes the ingredients of a recipe to suit each customer's tastes. I�ve said it before, and I�ll say it again: anyone can learn how to communicate that way all day long.

Merely telling people to use anecdotes and analogies while making a point is like telling people where the barbells are and expecting them to figure out how to use them, where the menu matrix with several deals is above the Subway restaurant counter and expecting customers to choose what suits them. Our thoughts and feelings are vastly harder to grasp than a barbell or sandwich. Learning how to learn is a whole other discipline than learning math, science, accounting, software, or fitness. Get your head and act together first. The rest falls into place much more readily.

Just as physical fitness improves someone�s resistance to injuries and illness, as well as their resilience from those that occur, mental fitness impoves someone�s resistance to and resilience from stress of all kinds, which only seems to increase as computers increase the speed with which they function and more demands are placed on people in the workplace, and more people have two-family households, on top of which more people are taking care of parents now than children. Nothing enables you to avoid life�s mishaps; you can however, handle and bounce back from them more capably, with less grief, BUT � you need to work at it!

Do You Warm Up Your MIND before work or school, the way you do your body before working out or competing in athletics: stretching Characters�, Actions�, Settings�, and Time frames� scope, depth, intensity, and clarity, that are on your mind?

Barring incapacitating physical debilities, you work out, or you should; probably several ways, if only doing breathing exercises, raising your shoulders up and down, and other simple exercises. That�s part of the beauty of it: changing the routine. But have you ever given two minutes� thought, in all the time you spend doing routines, to whether you can actually work out your MIND the same way, which affects EVERYTHING you do: how well you communicate, relate to people, relate to yourself, manage your life, your business, your job, your family, and how well you actually LEARN in the first place, even how well you innovate your work out, and how well you live when you aren�t working out. You spend all this time exercising your body to improve how you look and feel, BUT � again, how you feel and see is still filtered through your mind, just as sensory perception is, so working your Body without working your Mind is like only working your arms but not your legs, or your front but not your back. You break down your workout into various specific components, and exercise increasingly specific muscles with a method based on common characteristics, anticipating for instance that more sets with less weight or resistance will achieve certain results, and fewer sets with more weight or resistance will achieve other results. The business you work in does the same thing with different jobs, each of which has various tasks with a multitude of additional details. Every one of these situations or events likewise has common characteristics. Every book or article about getting your head or act together, like every speaker at every conference for every industry�as different as their advice may be�is explained the same way! One more time: information has a uniform structure, just as our bodies do�and the very atoms of which we are composed�different as they may be in distinct ways. One of the biggest misconceptions fostered by the compartmentalization of knowledge in our educations, is that some information is expository or didactic, some anecdotal or dramatic, some lyrical or poetic. All the speakers at conferences, all the winners of incentive trips, and all the trade magazine articles constantly use a combination of all three, which those people learn to vary the way a chef changes the ingredients of a recipe to suit each customer's tastes. I�ve said it before, and I�ll say it again: anyone can learn how to communicate that way all day long. Merely telling people to use anecdotes and analogies while making a point is like telling people where the barbells are and expecting them to figure out how to use them, where the menu matrix with several deals is above the Subway restaurant counter and expecting customers to choose what suits them. Our thoughts and feelings are vastly harder to grasp than a barbell or sandwich. Learning how to learn is a whole other discipline than learning math, science, accounting, software, or fitness. Get your head and act together first. The rest falls into place much more readily. Just as physical fitness improves someone�s resistance to injuries and illness, as well as their resilience from those that occur, mental fitness impoves someone�s resistance to and resilience from stress of all kinds, which only seems to increase as computers increase the speed with which they function and more demands are placed on people in the workplace, and more people have two-family households, on top of which more people are taking care of parents now than children. Nothing enables you to avoid life�s mishaps; you can however, handle and bounce back from them more capably, with less grief, BUT � you need to work at it!

Training is the #2 industry in the country, according to Manny London, the Dean of the Business College at Stony Brook University when this was written, but ALL of it is either about what to do�just do it�without a clue about the underlying skills involved, or yet another motivation and attitude spin. Making the most of ourselves each and every day is built into the DNA of every critter on earth. The irony is, it takes far more time and effort circumventing learning the necessary skills to make the most of ourselves, than learning them takes.

For every inaction, there is also an equal but opposite reaction. Like playing a sport or instrument, you get better at it sooner and faster, the more systematically you practice, and it is also self-perpetuating and reinforcing�the process continually improves how well you learn, practice, and use it, along with how well you learn, practice, and do everything else�so you attain accelerated, not mere incremental learning, one separate tidbit at a time, as school and business learning by and large occur, which becomes increasingly prohibitive, the more complex things there are to learn and do�diminishing your opportunities where they are�if you don�t learn how to learn systematically. Even when Roman civilization is compared to Greece�s or Persia�s, or one system or client to another, for example, you aren�t smoothly changing focus

focus on many ways to learn about them, just different things about them in a hodge-podge, unless you have a command of the Uniform Structure of Information to guide you. Almost good enough is increasingly not good enough, the more precarious and fast-paced the economy is. You don't need to know if anyone has done a study of whether people actually spend more time, from avoiding improving their learning and communication skills, and concocting ways to compensate for their absence, than learning them properly would take, if you take into account the time lost doing everything without them, not to mention doing things more than once and those that don�t come to fruition because they weren�t done as well as they would have been. Who knows how many marriages might have been saved, as but one for instance, if they had gotten out of �therapy� and were Getting in Touch with Reality, instead, not to mention the financial debacle that divorce causes and time wasted supporting two households. Whole careers might well have gone a whole other way if only someone knew how to know what to say that would have won the day, time and time again.

Relating what you don't understand to what you already know is as much a function of language skill as solving mathematical problems requires understanding the appropriate formulations for any given situation. An inert mind tends to stay inert; a mind in motion tends to stay in motion. Guess what happens once you get into the swing of it: work, both professional and personal, becomes a game � of golf, or whatever it is that your mind�s��if not your car�s�bumper sticker says you�d rather be doing.

The great Russian short story writer, Isaac Babel wrote in �My First Fee,� �A well-thought-out story doesn�t need to resemble real life. Life itself tries with all its might to resemble a well-crafted story.� The more aware you are of The Whole Story around and inside you, from learning, practicing, and using the Coloring Book, the better you become at communicating them, so the people around and inside you can share them more fully, deeply, vividly, and clearly, and do likewise with you from the stories around and inside them. The purpose of listening to and examining music, reading literature, or viewing art, dance, and architecture, is not, as all too many like to say, to bring something of beauty into your life, but to provide a process that you can emulate in every moment of your life to make it beautiful, so it is a well-crafted movie with music as stirring as Dr. Zhivago�s or Lawrence of Arabia�s.

Much the way every process in nature is interrelated with every other process in nature, the laws of composition are as omnipresent and inviolable as those of science�and as invisible, until we become aware of them. Again, like those of science, the more someone delves into the intricacies of music or its sister arts, and learns about them, the more our every moment can emulate the processes occurring in the stories, paintings, music, and nature we love.

What is rarely noted by sports or artistic commentators, or observed by the less well-tutored audience participants, is the ever-present challenge, which both groups constantly train to attain, to remain relaxed while exerting themselves, so as to prevent tenseness from impeding their progress. Former Indiana University coach, Bobby Knight, suggested as much when commenting about an incident during a televised basketball game, that one of the hardest things for athletes to learn is not doing what they can�t; in other words, exerting themselves where they are no longer relaxed. The greater proficiency they acquire in their endeavor, the more they can exert themselves and still maintain that balance at moments of peak effort. Likewise, in commuicating or learning about any activity, in any venue.

Too few people ever even aspire to a level of performance at anything where that groove is enough of a factor to be noticeable, so they are unaware of its significance in every actvity and venue, from being in a Kindergarten classroom to a corporate board room, or at times their very own kitchen, and wind up uncomfortable in situations throughout their lives, often reacting counter-productively to compensate for being at a loss. The few exceptions where being relaxed is noted in athletics, the performing arts, business, and test taking, for example, I've never heard that dichotomy being discussed in any detail, much less stressed; just the same old advice, �Try to Relax.� Countless people fail to achieve their potential in any of several endeavors that might have led them to others, or spoil personal relationships, merely for want of understanding the necessity of focusing on both exerting and relaxing themselves, and increasing their ability to do each simultaneously. As I will show again and again, you acquire that skill the same way you learned everything else and millions of people work out in gyms every day: breaking it down into its components, focusing on them separately, and putting them back together, over and over.

Formulating information comprehensibly is reassuring, relaxing. Merely knowing you know how to is, as well. Being unable to is stressful and hindering. I often challenged misbehaving students to sit still for a single minute, who scoffed at the idea, then couldn�t. The one time I knew immediately that one of them would pull the trick off, he relaxed instead of clenching still. One in a thousand may sense the concept intuitively; the other 999 can learn it here, among many, many other simple but powerful concepts and techniques, all of which spring from formulating information the way everything you read does, with illustrative anecdotes and analogies putting what you don�t understand in perspective with what you already know. Like most tasks, doing that a certain way makes all the difference, as Hamlet instructs the actors performing the mousetrap scene to catch the King. You can learn to do that better and better, just as you are able to continually learn how to do many, many other things better, if not quite as well as Shakespeare did. No one else has, for all the glorious, fantastic tales told since his. Every magazine is full of articles, in which anecdotes and analogies are used skillfully. I�ll also show you how to make the most of reading each�

Not only does the anecdotal process naturally distance someone from events, making them a third party narrator of them; analogies objectify our subjective experience of those events, transforming them into something other than themselves, with which we can more readily grapple, just as scientists can more readily examine something's properties by creating an apparatus for doing so, and the analogies furthermore enable someone to examine the matter at hand in terms of something else, with which they are more familiar, deflecting from the stressfulness of the situation.

As I begin with students, but referring to their ears since they�re listening, not reading: with one eye follow what I am saying, as you do with everything else; with the other follow how I am saying it. You�ll get better and better at it, just as people of all ages do, coordinating their right and left hands in all kinds of athletics and music tasks, and as with music and athletics, the better you get at that, the better all the information here falls into place. Every good teacher teaches math, science, history, accounting, engineering, medicine, or law, and the rest the same way, with brief anecdotes and analogies illustrating each point, somewhat differently. Come to think of it, so does every musician and athlete do things much the same way, somewhat differently. While teaching a lesson, I'm demonstrating and explaining that process of using illitrative anecdotes and analogies at the same time, breaking it down into its components and putting them back together, the way athletics and music teachers do, and pretty much every other subject is taught.

That process is also evident in everything else you read, perhaps without your having noticed it before because you were unaware of its signficance. Writers and conference speakers are utilizing similar components in different ways all the time, just as athletes and artists of all kinds in every m�dium are. Even when the words or notes are pre-ordained, everyone performs Shakespeare and Beethoven differently. Since that skill is the one Common Bond between every expert in every subject, that is obviously the The Key Skill of All Skills to learn. You will soon see why else that key skill is of monumental importance to every aspect of your life, that there is far more to it than meets the eye, and a-n-y-o-n-e can learn it if they try, just as anyone can learn to play music, sports, dance, cook, and most anything else, and will get better at it faster and more easily, the more systematically they try, which you will also soon see how to do.

Here is the essence of what this most unique of all self-improvement books teaches in intricate detail: people can only transform themselves, as all the other books on the subject tell them to do one way or another, to the degree that they are able to transform what is going on around and inside them, by analogy, into other things like it in the world at large, as all those other books and articles do on every page, often in their very titles like Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, Re-Engineering the Corporation, Chicken Soup for the Soul, and all The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People in Stephen Covey�s Table of Contents, without showing readers the one skill on which all the rest of their advice hinges: how that is done. Such people seem to write and speak brilliantly because they have brilliant ideas, when in reality it�s the opposite: brilliant ideas come to them because the narrative structure, with which they observe, reflect upon, and respond to events is so sound, just as you have to put up a Christmas tree, Menorah, or what have you before you can hang the ornaments or light the candles that make it beautiful and meaningful.

People�s ornaments�their brilliant ideas�likewise remain stuck in their closet, so to speak, because they never properly learned how to use in their daily lives the narrative structure in the books and magazines they studied in school or continue to read only for the content on its surface, so they could get past the next test or meeting, date, or athletic competition. Like playing a sport or musical instrument, what Blanchard, Robbins, Covey, Dyer, and the rest do is to some degree a talent, but largely a skill that anyone, who can read, can learn and master, to accomplish which the book includes exercises and drills like those that athletes and musicians do to improve their strength, speed, stamina, flexibility, timing, and touch putting thoughts and feelings into words. Furthermore, just as athletes and musicians�or ordinary school students in classes of all kinds�continually apply things they already learned to acquire new skills, even without ever being taught how to do that, themselves, The Key Skill of All Skills shows people how to acquire the most basic life comprehension and transformation skills�putting one thing and another together�then putting more and more pieces of the puzzle in their mind together, and using them in ever new ways, the more they know about the process. Old saying: a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. None is even more dangerous. That isn�t just an example of what I�m talking about; it happens to be true.

Even First Graders are amazed�and delighted�by how much they already know, when given a chance to use it, to understand what they don�t. Such examples occur throughout the book. It is AMAZING to think of, but very, very few people are ever shown how to LEARN in that sense at all�recognizing in a heartbeat how what they don�t understand is similar to what they already know, and I�ll say at the outset that I�m dubious of any other approach, as I will also show throughout the book, and leave it for you to decide. In fact, I�m so confident that there isn�t one�other than committing information to memory and clustering it together as much as possible, which becomes increasingly problematic, the more there is to know�I�m challenging all ye readers to find one. See whether they don�t describe their approach My Way, without explaining how they do it, which is like Paul Anka, who wrote the song, �My Way� for Frank Sinatra, knowing that every word of it would ring true to everyone who knew anything about him, neglecting to include the many key ways he did things his way throughout his life. Better yet, the way Sinatra sings the song in an almost ordinary speaking voice, as one can easily imagine he actually does talk, is what makes it sound all the more true. That, too, you will learn how to do here, and more, much more than this, to do it � yoooour waaaaay.

With that said, make no mistake about it: for all that even true geniuses in their own right and countless scholars have pored over Shakespeare and Dante their whole lives, no one�or very few, if you want to include Joyce and Proust, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and a handfull of others in that realm, who will be noted by and by�has managed to come up with their like in all the centuries since they pulled off their stunts. The idea here isn�t to equal anyone else, except � the best you can become. The real difference between the Sinatra impoisonators and the many, many other originals in their own right, is as much a matter of doing it their way, rather than attempting to do it Sinatra�s, as sheer talent, BUT � doing that required learning a whole lotta skills, which we will cover in detail.