My wife and I have been together for a long time, and we’ve come up with many terms and ideas that we use as part of how we live our lives and raise our family. I’ve mentioned our term “Pillars of Life” before, and I’m just going to present another one here.

Some of these Pillars of Life are profound ideas, strategies about how to live, what values we hold true as a family, and what lessons we want to teach our own children.

Family Values and Mottos.

Some, like today’s article, are much lighter. This one is just a simple term. It’s something Nikki and I can throw around to each other to convey a lot of meaning without actually saying much. “Hey Nikki, I’ll be five minutes late. I’m just going to drive differently… “Deepak Style,”

This means something to my wife.

So I’m going to share this with you. Either throw it away or use it as you will, but it is a little term that has given me a lot of stress relief and helped with decision-making throughout the years.

I had never really been a big fan of Deepak Chopra growing up. I really didn’t know who he was. I had a patient of mine years ago that left me one of his books and said,” I think you should read this, you seem to like to think on some of these deep ideas, and this guy has written close to 100 books on deep ideas. This book has helped me. Maybe it will help you.”

The book itself was interesting. If you have ever read anything about Deepak Chopra, you know what I’m talking about. This guy is a modern-day philosophist and can take any lesson and go very far down the rabbit hole with it. This particular book talked about how the universe’s inner workings and how the universe would give you Clues as to what or what you should not do to continue down a perfect path of life.

Basically, He was saying, if you only know what to look for, you can speak and listen to the language of the universe, which is infinite and will always try to leave you Clues to make your life better. During the course of 4 to 500 pages, Deepak talked about the spirit world, God, and the universe, and basically kind of talked about the metaverse before I had ever heard the term metaverse. Like I’m saying, deep stuff.

I’m not going to give you the replay of the book. What I took out of it, and what my wife, who has the magical ability to condense gigantic ideas into a simple sentence-

seriously… Nikki may have invented memes.

Anyway… what Nikki said was, “If something isn’t working for you and you’ve tried 3 or 4 times, it is time just to do something different.“

Yeah… That.
I mean, it seems obvious when you say it like that, Nikki.

Over the years, she has pointed out a million times in my life where I fought against the grain on absurd things. Things that didn’t work out for me and drove me crazy. Often to the point of being angry and just putting me in a crappy grumpy mood all day. This had to change; our marriage and her sanity couldn’t take me spinning out of control every time the password for Facebook didn’t work for me, a phone number didn’t connect, or I couldn’t find the right bit for a screwdriver I needed for a simple household chore.

Eventually, we coined the term “Deepak Style” to indicate Exactly this idea.

As a family, we use the Deepak style all the time, and it really helps us out. It helped to make our life easy, and it lets me let go of and release any internal stress I had, especially for everyday things that just don’t make a difference.

Why, just today, I used Deepak style at least three different times.

After dropping off the kids this morning, I noticed that my gas tank was only a quarter full. As a quasi-prepper type and the son-in-law of Leonard, this made me a little bit anxious. So, I stopped at the first gas station to fill up. Every single pump was taken or out of order. This is Texas. There are a lot of pumps at each gas station. It’s kind of unreal by itself, but, as I said, this is Texas. There’s a gas station just across the corner. They’re all over the place. I drove to the next gas station and the same thing. This time nearly all the pumps were out of order, with only two working pumps and trucks in front of both of them. As I drove a block away and noticed that the third gas station also seemed maxed out, my brain just spoke to me said, rather subtly, “Deepak style.”

Nikki and I have been using this term for years, as I stated earlier. Deepak Style is just my cue to forget about the gas and continue on. I had a quarter tank. I had 100 miles until E. There would be other gas station times that would get my needs better. There was absolutely no reason to drive around town and look for a gas station because I needed to fill up at that exact minute. Yes, irrational thoughts such as TEOTWAWKI, Armageddon, and spontaneous tsunamis that would require more gas than I currently had, bubbled up in my brain but were perfectly squelched by this more rational, although equally bizarre idea of Deepak Style.

I have no idea if the universe just didn’t want me to get gas at that time. Or if I had filled up, a giant comet would have stormed from outer space and destroyed me where I parked or if the butterfly effect of me getting gas would have caused an earthquake 50 years from now. I have no idea. I also don’t think about it. At all. It’s just time to move on and be done.

Is Cinco de Mayo! Hooray for the Mexican triumph over France years ago. Our office celebrates by having chips, salsa, queso, and a whole kitchen full of Mexican-themed fun.
At lunch, I couldn’t get the salsa lid on the container. I tried three or four times. It wouldn’t work. I just went straight Deepak Style and stopped fighting that fight. A little Saran Wrap over the top, and I’m on with my day.

I had this itch to head to lunch today at a specific time. One thing after another came up in my clinic. Phone calls to clients, X Rays that needed read, business to take care of, and I couldn’t seem to find my keys. As I felt the tension building, not true stress, just a low-grade annoyance, it occurred to me that I’d be better off forgetting about it and moving on. Forget lunch today. I’ll survive. So I “Deepaked it” and wrote this article instead. I feel great about it. The writing and my body. Much better than trying to work this afternoon with a triple queso seafood burrito sitting in my gut like a log.
It works.

It works when you wake up before your alarm, with traffic and when your reservation is lost. It simply allows plan B to go into immediate effect.

Like I said in my last article about being perfect. Perfect is an impossible standard to meet. I think so much of the stress that we feel in our life is that we are comparing what we wanted at that time to what we believe will be perfect or what our plan was for the day.
Deepak Style is just a tool we use to “forget about it” and move on.

Try it out in your life and pay attention to how much this little tool can keep your stress and mindset at an appropriate baseline of “It’s all good brother!”