Master/slave Relations: Handbook of Theory and Practice (20 page)

• Do you put off burdensome tasks or do you find that
your "to-do list" keeps growing longer? Are you able
to prioritize your life to maximize growth and achievement?

• Do you make time with your slave to discuss your
career challenges and problems within your biological
family?

• Do you take time out to release stress and free yourself from everyday worries and anxieties?

• Do you have adequate help at home? Are you overtaxing one slave? (Just ask, your slave will tell you.)

Ongoing Improvement

How do you grow, personally? How do you add skills? Do you
expect your slave to grow in this M/s relationship? Will you be
satisfied if your slave has the same skills in five years that he/
she has right now?

• Are you living your life based on a philosophy of ongoing improvement?

• Do you feel that your greatest achievements are still
ahead of you? Do you remain curious about the world
around you?

• Do you have a methodology for living up to the best
that is within you?

• After a period of rejuvenation following a substantial
success, do you challenge yourself to continue to
reach even greater levels of success?

• Do you expect, encourage, and enable ongoing
improvement from those within your family?

Taking Risks

• Are you willing to create new opportunities by taking
risks? In what area are you willing (or unwilling) to
take risks? Financial risks; emotional risks; relationship risks; social risks; workplace risks?

• Are your convictions more important to you than your
need for approval from authority figures?

• When you are going out on a limb, do you trust your
abilities?

• Do you allow enough preparation time when you set
out to create the best opportunity for yourself? Do you
ever prepare a "briefing book" or go through a "trial
run" when preparing to propose a new idea either to your slave, or in a work or social setting? These are
certainly standard business practices (at least in successful businesses), so why not bring them into your
Household?

• Are you aware that it is often riskier not to do anything
than to make a bold move? In the business world, this
is referred to as "lost opportunity risk."

Responsibility

• As Head of Family, do you step out of the way and
enable your Family members to assume a greater
share of responsibility?

• Does your slave strive to take a greater amount of
initiative?

• Do you encourage your Family members to become
independent from your daily direction?

• Do you reward your Family members who take on
greater responsibility? (Personal note: we often dress
in military fetish for dinners. I have begun to award
military ribbons to recognize outstanding service.)

Motivation

• When you are having a very bad day, do you consciously take action and deal with the problem head
on? Clearly, your slave needs to know whether or not
your upset is a Family matter.

• When you find that your slave hasn't followed what
you thought was a clear Directive, do you try to turn
the negative experience into a learning lesson for
further growth? Hint: if you gave your slave a clear
Directive and the slave apparently ignored it, chances are, one of two things just occurred. First, you were
not nearly as clear as you thought you were about
your Directive; second, your Directive may not have
been as good an idea as you thought and your slave
has outthought you on this score and self-corrected.
Tread carefully, lest you create an automaton, rather
than a forward-thinking slave. (No, I didn't miss the
problem of willfulness in the second part of the discussion - and I'm glad you caught it, too. M/s relationships can be tricky.)

Rules of the Mind

• What you expect to happen tends to happen. (This
is a cousin to one of my favorite expressions: You
get what you resist. The common denominator is that
when you dwell on something a great deal - whether
positive or negative - you tend to notice it when it
finally comes to pass. Also, when you expect to one
thing to happen you limit your own ability to consider
and act on creative alternatives.)

• Imagination is more powerful than knowledge; your
body will produce what your mind believes. (In many
cases, you don't notice something until you realize
that the something can possibly exist. That is, until
you hold a concept of something, you may find that
it's right in front of you, but you don't recognize it for
what it is. This phenomenon gave rise to the bumper
sticker you sometimes see: Some things have to be
believed to be seen.)

• Every thought or emotion has a physical reaction.
(This concept is at the root of the observation from
the field of psychology that there is no distinction to a
person between something that is real and something
that is imagined.)

• A belief programmed into the subconscious mind will
remain until it is replaced by another idea; your mind
seeks validation for previous beliefs. (This is another
important concept not only for understanding how you
think, but also for slave training.)

Twelve things to remember:

Marshal Field (founder of the department store chain)

1. The value of time

2. The success of perseverance

3. The pleasure of working

4. The dignity of simplicity

5. The worth of character

6. The power of kindness

7. The influence of example

8. The obligation of duty

9. The wisdom of economy

10. The virtue of patience

11. The improvement of talent

12. The joy of originating

The Dali Lama's Instructions for Life

As said for the new millennium. But, why not take his words
beyond that.

1. Take into account that great love and great achievements involve great risk.

2. When you lose, don't lose the lesson.

3. Follow the three Rs:

• Respect for self

0 Respect for others and

• Responsibility for all your actions.

4. Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.

5. Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.

6. Don't let a little dispute injure a great friendship.

7. When you realize you've made a mistake, take immediate steps to correct it.

8. Spend some time alone every day.

9. Open your arms to change, but don't let go of your
values.

10. Remember that silence is sometimes the best
answer.

11. Live a good, honorable life. Then, when you get older
and think back, you'll be able to enjoy it a second
time.

12.A loving atmosphere in your home is the foundation for
your life.

13. In disagreements with loved ones, deal only with the
current situation. Don't bring up the past.

14. Share your knowledge. It's a way to achieve immortality.

15. Be gentle with the earth.

16.Once a year, go someplace you've never been
before.

17. Remember that the best relationship is one in which
your love for each other exceeds your need for each
other.

18. Judge your success by what you had to give up in
order to get it.

19.Approach love and cooking with reckless abandon.

Reflections on Life

Collected by Robert J. Rubel

• A commitment is doing what you said you would do
long after the feeling you said it in has passed.

• Be bold about ideas, tentative about people.

• You can never solve the problem using the same logic
that created it in the first place. (Einstein)

• Vision without action is a daydream. Action without
vision is a nightmare.

• There is not a right way to do a wrong thing. Knowing
what's right doesn't mean much unless you do what's
right.

• The one important thing I have learned over the years
is the difference between taking one's work seriously
and taking one's self seriously. The first is imperative;
the second is disastrous.

• Tact is the art of making a point without making an
enemy.

• Professionals are people who can do their job when
they don't feel like it. Amateurs are people who can't
do their job when they DO feel like it.

• If you have tried to do something and failed, you are
vastly better off than if you had tried to do nothing and
succeeded.

• The average person has about 10,000 ideas per
day; the problem is that same "average person" had
99.9% of those same ideas the day before. And the
day before, and the day before. Actually, the hidden
problem, here, is with overworked ideas.

• Things don't change, we do; there is always a way if
you're committed.

• In the long run, it's more orderly to convert chaos to
system than to cover chaos with system.

• What you are afraid to do is a clear indicator of the
next thing that you need to do.

Commentary: The last few sub-heads - and their associated bullets - are intended to spark your thinking about
how to configure your Household. I said from the beginning of this book that my Household is somewhat cerebral. But, we find these ideas to be challenging; they
often prompt us to reconsider how we're doing things.

Chapter Summary

Okay, we're coming to the end of the book. In this chapter I've
tackled the task of proposing some approaches to maintaining a
relationship. Largely, I've included bulleted points that cover a
wide range of topics that impinge on the subject of relationships.
Much of what is included in this chapter requires reflection and
introspection; you have to think about yourself and who you
are both as a person, and as a Master. Among other topics, I
touched on communication, goal-setting, and risk-taking. I also
touched on responsibility and motivation within the M/s structure.
Finally, I brought the chapter to a close with the Dali Lama's
Instructions for Life and a collection of aphorisms that I have
collected over the years.

In my experience, it takes a lot of work to ensure that a relationship remains healthy, vibrant, and fulfilling for each partner.
If you've reached this point in the book and decided that this
makes reasonable sense, then here are a few thoughts about
maintaining your relationship in tip-top shape. This chapter contains a brief listing of things that have particularly helped my M/s
relationship.

Know Your Priorities

As Master Jim Glass says: "Decisions in this relationship always
serve the Family's wellbeing." Unlike a Vanilla relationship, a
Leather Master/slave structured relationship is serving a higher
purpose. As Master, it is incumbent upon you to keep that vision
in the forefront of your mind and behavior. You have much more
to do in this kind of relationship than you would have to do in a
husband/wife relationship.

Don't Drift: Plan Your Future

In the same way that a Master/slave relationship is based on
structure, you may - like me - find it extremely helpful to put
more thought and structure into your lives as a couple (or threesome, or more).

As Lewis Carroll said in Alice Wonderland, in "If you have no
destination, any road will take you there."

I'm completely committed to thinking through where I want to
be in five or ten or twenty years, and then focusing my ener gies towards that goal. I've found that to be very successful.
The more clearly I can explain my goals and work through the
necessary steps to attain the goals, the more easily my new life
unfolds before me. There are many planning models you can
use to build a personal/Family plan: pick one and use it. Here
is a very basic (and well-established) model that works well for
individuals or small businesses that don't have a lot of strategic
planning experience:

1. Identify your purpose (mission statement). This is the
statement (or statements) that describe why your Family
exists, i.e., its basic purpose. What are you and your slave
all about? Are you focusing primarily on yourselves and
your relationship, or are you intending to give something
back to the Community? If you intend to give back, what
are you giving back? Time? Service? Money? Wisdom?
The statements will change somewhat over the years.

2. Select the goals your Family must reach to accomplish
its mission. Goals are general statements about what
you need to accomplish to meet your purpose, or mission,
and they address major issues/constraints that you will
face in the process.

3. Identify specific approaches or strategies that must
be implemented to reach each goal. Strategies often
change quite a bit as the Family eventually conducts more
robust strategic planning, particularly by more closely
examining what are called the external and internal
environments of the Family. An external environment
concerns outside forces that have an impact on your
Family. The internal environment concerns itself with how
the two (or three or four...) of you have learned to interact
and work together.