Retailers Are Having Trouble Predicting

Retailers and retail analysts are having more than their share of difficulty predicting sales this year, and those difficulties are continuing into the Halloween and Christmas seasons. Halloween sales may be down 15 percent from last year, in part because of flu fears that may keep people home from Halloween parties. Could those same flu fears keep people out of the stores during the Christmas season? If so, Christmas season sales could be down around 10 percent. But the more optimistic assessments, which don’t take flu into account, suggest the Christmas season could be about the same as last year.

One reason for lower sales is that so many stores have closed. Forecasters can only guess how shoppers will react to a Christmas season that has fewer stores than the year before — because it hasn’t happened before. Another problem is that the seasonal adjustments that allow forecasters to make a relatively smooth picture of all the seasons in a year aren’t working so well now. Consumers’ incomes and expectations have changed so much that the meaning of the seasons has changed, and seasons don’t relate to each other in the same way they have in the past.

With the government’s incentive program over, everyone knows auto sales for September and October will be less than we saw in August, but how much less? The fall-off seems likely to be somewhere between 25 and 50 percent, but that is an awfully wide range in an industry that historically has been able to forecast sales within about 3 percent. The pace of dealer closings is the highest I’ve ever seen, with some dealers using the Clunkers program as their final clearance sale, and others forced out as they could not get post-Clunkers financing to maintain their inventory. Fewer dealers would tend to point to lower sales, and so would the collapse in auto leasing. People who lease cars are prompted to turn them in after just 2 to 5 years. But when people buy a car, they may keep it for ten years or longer. So much is changing in the auto business that it’s hard to make accurate predictions. Tomorrow, when auto manufacturers report their sales for this month, we’ll get a better idea of where auto sales are going.

Using Goals to Stay Focused

“How do I stay focused on my goals?” This is a question that often comes up a few weeks after a workshop in time management, manifesting, or law of attraction. For these methods to work, you have to maintain a connection to a goal long enough for it to come about, but in the confusion and distraction of everyday life, people have trouble even remembering their goals.

If you’ve experienced this challenge, there is a reason for it. The strategy you’ve heard, focusing on goals, has it backward. The real benefit comes not from focusing on the goal, but from using goals to stay focused. It’s not so much a question of achieving the specific goals you choose — it’s about taking action and getting somewhere, accomplishing something of value, and usually you will end up doing that when you work toward a goal even if you do not reach the exact goal you had in mind.

Part of the difficulty is that people pick the wrong goals, and too many of them. The goal-setting process of traditional time management training encourages you to set dozens or hundreds of goals. You might select three five-year goals in each of a dozen major areas of your life, then use these long-term goals to develop other goals that have short time frames. You can’t even remember that many goals, and you can lose energy and focus whenever it seems that your various goals are in conflict with each other. Other goals are hard to remember just because they are arbitrary and don’t really mean anything to you. Joe Vitale offers a training package built around the exercise of manifesting a new car. To stay energetic about a arbitrarily selected goal such as this long enough to get through the exercise, you almost have to set aside all your other goals. But arbitrary goals can come from anywhere. In a goal-setting process, if you really don’t know what your goals are, you’ll probably just pick something, and then you have something written down that looks like a goal but that you don’t necessarily care about. It is easier to use goals to maintain your focus if you focus on no more than three to five goals on any given day, and pick goals that have obvious importance.

Another reason it can be hard to focus on goals is that people try the hardest to focus on their most distant goals: “I want to go to the moon,” rather than, “I want a new garage.” In the energy of a workshop setting, the bigger goals can seem more inspiring, but in the bustle of everyday life, it is easier to focus your energy on the more believable everyday kind of goals. If a very distant goal really is important to you, find some angle on it to make it more present today so that you can focus on it more easily.

Finally, it isn’t necessary to have distinctive goals to gain the benefits of focus. Wayne Dyer has said that his goal is to be “better today than I was yesterday.” I often suggest the goal of putting yourself in a stronger position between now and the end of the day. With practice, goals as simple as these can inspire you because you can see them working day after day.

When people have trouble remembering any of their goals or making progress toward them, it’s not a problem of goal-setting. The goals might have come out of a flawed goal-setting process, but even so, some of them have to be well-chosen, just by random chance. If there is a pattern of lack of progress, it is because of a life full of obstacles that form resistance to progress. When people look at this, they often want to focus strictly on mental resistance, but usually habits and situation are more important. When people aren’t sure of their goals and don’t feel like they are making progress, I encourage them to focus on the obstacles that get in the way instead — in other words, take on the goal of removing obstacles. I suggest starting with the most literal obstacles they can find, which for most people means starting with clutter. The book Fear of Nothing lays out an effective process to deal with clutter and go on from there to address the other obstacles in life.

When you remove obstacles, you are removing distractions that can weaken your focus. At the same time, you restore some of the flow to your life, and then it’s easier to select goals you can believe in. These goals, and any action you take around them, add to your focus. With better focus, you take more and better action and get bigger results — and that’s really ultimately what having goals is for.

Your Own Health Care Reform

If it seems like there is a lot of finger-pointing in the health care debate, that is because of the nature of the subject. You have to take on a victim mentality to accept the premise of the debate. The assumption is that how healthy a person can be depends mostly on the actions of others. It is a short step from waiting for others to do something to blaming them for their lack of action.

Yet this is not a particularly empowering approach to life. If you want action on your own health, the simple place to start is with your own action. That’s not to say that you won’t run into problems when you try to improve your health. As Tara Stiles put it, “We have to be present, aware, and involved in our choices to maintain health and educate and inspire those around us to create a healthier society. Our world can be an obstacle course for good health. We have to gather the tools to navigate efficiently so we can live healthy, and enjoyable lives.”

It’s not that we don’t know where to start. Everyone knows something simple they can do for their health that they’re not doing, at least not consistently. Stiles quotes Bill Maher ragging on people for whom a political march was “the first exercise they’ve gotten in years.” It’s funny because it’s true. The best thing to do if you want to be healthy is to get started on what you already know. This works best if you are healthy now — it is easier to avoid illness than to cure it. And in case you’re wondering whether it’s worth the effort, these are just some of the benefits of improving your health:

1. When you’re more healthy, you have more ability to work. You might get more work done, get a better job, get a bigger raise, keep your job when everyone else is laid off.
2. Avoiding illness means less work for everyone who would have had to help you with your illness. This includes everyone from members of your household to the clerks at the insurance company. Less work, of course, could mean you’re spending less money.
3. You can live longer and feel better.
4. If more people are healthy, health care won’t be so expensive, and that will make it easier to get health care reform passed.
5. You’ll have more energy and make a bigger impression on people. That means you’ll be more popular.

Undertake your own health care reform, and you won’t have to spend so much time wondering what the politicians will eventually decide. And as I said, this works better if you don’t wait till you’re sick. It’s not really fair, but it’s true: the healthier you are, the easier it is to take action to stay healthy. At the same time, the sicker you are, the more urgent it is make yourself healthier. Either way, don’t wait. It’s no fun to be waiting for someone else to do something about health care reform. It feels better to take action, to do what you can to create your own health.

The Last G20?

It was a grim G20 meeting in Pittsburgh, as the leaders of 20 influential countries got together for an invitation-only photo opportunity and carefully choreographed discussion. World leaders were careful not to smile as they discussed the unspecified military consequences of Iran’s actions in opening a second uranium processing facility. They were also careful not to go outside, where they would run the risk of being handcuffed and shoveled into police vans along with other innocent bystanders.

The police, for their part, used the event as a rehearsal for the military-style operations they might need if actual civil disorder broke out at some point in the future. There were not many protesters, so police practiced enforcing the unofficial curfew by arresting a group of sports fans, clearing customers off of commercial streets, and lobbing tear gas onto a university commons. (It sounds like the people in Pittsburgh are making this up, but the videos prove this is what actually happened.) The massive police presence, augmented by the military, presented such a danger to the actual summit meeting that any future G20 meetings perhaps ought to be held on a military base or behind the fortified walls of an embassy compound — there is no local color to be had in these meetings anyway.

But I am not so sure there will be any more G20 meetings. The only substantial policy announcement at this G20, concerning tighter rules for bank assets (they couldn’t agree on the part about limiting compensation for bank executives), could just as well have been conducted by carrier pigeon. A few paragraphs describing policies that may or may not be implemented over the next three years is hardly worth the travel time for the British prime minister, let alone the 19 other heads of state who had to make the trip. And while the G20 participants are careful not to let their disagreements ruin their photo-op, stories hint at testy exchanges behind the scenes that called into question not just the structure of the G20, but the whole world order.

If it is this hard to hold a summit meeting this year, how much harder will it be next year, when more things are actually in flux? The next big summit meeting might have to be postponed until after the world’s pressing problems are solved, and by then, it could very well be a different group of countries holding the meeting.

Smoking Causes Heart Attacks

Two new studies, widely reported in the news Monday, highlight the connection between smoking and heart attacks. Researchers used epidemiological data to determine the decline in heart attack rates after smoking bans went into effect. One study found 36 percent fewer heart attacks three years after smoking bans in North America and Europe, with half the the reduction occurring in the first year.

Less than 1 in 4 adults smoke, and both smokers and non-smokers suffer heart attacks, so the size of the smoking ban effect shows that smoking bans reduce heart attack risk among both smokers and non-smokers. Previous studies, however, have shown that the reduction in heart attack risk is found mainly among non-smokers.

Smoking bans typically only affect places of business. They may encourage some smokers to stop smoking completely, but the more immediate effect is to separate tobacco smoke from non-smokers. What these new studies suggest is that cigarette smoking is linked to most heart attacks among smokers and that, prior to the smoking bans, cigarette smoke triggered about half of heart attacks among non-smokers.

The heart attack risk for non-smokers exposed to low levels of tobacco smoke had long been suspected. Being in the same room with tobacco smoke for just a few minutes causes specific changes in blood and blood vessels that are clinically measurable. Most obviously, platelets clump and blood vessels constrict, two conditions that are known to cause heart attacks. People with known heart conditions have been cautioned to avoid smoky areas since the early 1990s. The smoking-ban studies, though, show how pronounced this effect is by showing that tobacco smoke led to heart attack and death in large numbers of non-smokers.

The results of these studies confirm that it is not possible to dismiss cigarette smoke as a vague danger with possible future consequences. Smokers and non-smokers alike have to regard cigarette smoke, wherever they come upon it, as a clear and present danger that has a slight chance of causing immediate death in anyone who is nearby.

One of the components of cigarette smoke that could contribute to heart attack is carbon monoxide, and fruit additives in tobacco create more carbon monoxide than the tobacco itself. The new U.S. ban on fruit-flavored cigarettes took effect Tuesday, and this too can be expected to reduce the number of heart attacks. Policymakers can look for similar rules that can reduce the prevalence of tobacco smoke and its harmful components in order to further reduce the health damage caused by tobacco.