2023 legislative session a sign of what’s to come

Wh ile this legislative session might be best remembered for the passage of four signi cant gun safety measures, state politics watchers will remember 2023 as the year of warning shots.

With the notable exception of investor-owned utilities, the business community escaped relatively unscathed this session. 2024 could be a very different story. Many of the issues that failed in 2023 will be back – bigger, It’s also a presidential election year, and that’s a whole di erent circus.

e so-called “Fair Work Week” bill set the business community on re at the start of this year’s session, setting its sights on the restaurant industry’s employee scheduling practices. Overwhelm- ing lobbying from chambers and groups like the Colorado Restaurant Association killed the bill in committee.

Measures around labor and employment are always big on the Democrat agenda, so I expect a new and improved version of “Fair Work Week” to come up in 2024. Unions will be back to ght for low-wage service workers, particularly around childcare. Watch for discussions around guaranteed living wage for servers. Watch also for more proposals favoring gig workers, like SB098 that died at the end of session. Uber, Lyft, and other gig-work aggregation platforms are easy targets.

To the relief of the business community, environmentalists largely kept their powder dry in 2023. While Colorado is unlikely to ever be as environmentally progressive as California, it wants to be a national leader on climate issues.

I would be surprised if at least one signi cant emissions reduction bill didn’t cross the nish line in 2024. An aggressive tax on vehicles pow- ered by fossil fuels seems possible.

Gov. Jared Polis is extremely unhappy that his big 2023 initiative on housing a ordability and capacity failed to pass. You can bet he will be spending a lot of time in the last half of the year planning his 2024 strategy, and Jared doesn’t like to lose. Get ready.

While this year’s Senate Bill 213 was a gigantic overreach of state authority, the passage of House Bill 1255 prohibiting local governments from restricting growth is a bellwether. Don’t be surprised if 2024 ends with the state stripping local prohibitions against ADU’s (accessory dwelling units), neutering HOAs, and instituting 10-year mandates on zoning percentages for multi-family housing in the most densely populated areas (including Parker).

Finally, 2023 was a big year for investment in workforce training. You’re likely to see even more dollars aimed at job training programs around tech and manufacturing. at trend is going up, up, up. Look no farther than Apple’s recent investment in the Fort Collins area to see where things are headed. Democrats in other states will be motivating their voters around gun violence, access to women’s health, and civil and voting rights protections. In blue Colorado, Democrats have already made huge gains on these issues. To motivate their voters, they’ll need something else. Business leaders who nd themselves at odds with the current legislature should use the o -season to bulk up.

Sullivan is the President & CEO reached some type of pinnacle or achieved a sought-after goal only to nd ourselves slowly backsliding and reentering our former comfort zone. We reach a certain level of success and then allow ourselves to get comfortable there instead of wondering what we could do if we pressed ourselves a little harder, taking a new or di erent path, and maybe even taking a little risk. It’s like breaking free from one comfort zone only to enter another comfort zone.

If we are on a path of personal or professional growth, we might all do well to have that same mental image top of mind, “Do Not Enter e Comfort Zone.” Whether it’s a physical achievement we are seeking, a business breakthrough, quitting a bad habit, starting a new and positive habit, or maybe setting our sights on breaking the company sales records, once we break free from what has been holding us back, leaving our comfort zone, we need to commit to never going back or settling ever again. Here is something to watch out for, it’s called the neutral zone. It’s that place where we have decided to break free from our comfort zone but haven’t taken any action yet. Something is still holding us back. Maybe we haven’t fully committed to where it is that we want to go. Maybe we have some head trash that’s getting in our way. Whatever it is, it has us stuck in the neutral zone. How do we get unstuck? We take the rst step in the pursuit of our new goals and dreams. We don’t have to go beyond that, we are not going to go from running a 10K to running a marathon, but we are going to take the rst step and maybe run an extra half mile, and then each day slowly build to our ultimate goal.

Taking that rst step does something psychologically that gets us moving in the right direction. For some of us, we get caught up in all the rest of the steps and it paralyzes us to the point where we do not take any step at all. A comfort zone surrounded by a neutral zone creates a do-nothing zone. And as it has been said before, if we aren’t moving forward, we are more than likely moving backward. Zig Ziglar said it this way, “People who never take step one, can never possibly take step two.”

How about you, are there a rst step that you need to take? Is there a personal or professional goal or dream that you have had on your heart for a while? If so, have you asked yourself what is holding you back? As always, I would love to hear your story at gotonorton@ gmail.com, and when we can break free from our comfort zone, leave the neutral zone behind, and commit to never entering that comfort zone again, it really will be a better than good life.

Michael Norton is an author, a personal and professional coach, consultant, trainer, encourager and motivator of individuals and businesses, working with organizations and associations across multiple industries.

BY LUKE ZARZECKI LZARZECKI@COLORADOCOMMUNITYMEDIA.COM

The brain is overrated, according to Kadam Lucy James at the Kadampa Meditation Center.

“Have you ever felt peaceful in your head?” she asked.

She put her hands over her heart and said that’s where the mind is, adding that while the brain has conceptual reality, the mind exists in the heart, where we feel peace, love, joy and wisdom.

“If we can get into our heart, we automatically start to feel more peaceful,” she said.

James is temporarily living in Arvada and teaches meditation at the Kadampa Meditation Center. She started practicing about 41 years ago after she saw a “very peaceful person” in college.

“He was a student meditating on the end of his bed and I asked him what he was doing, because this was back in 1981, and meditation, no one had heard of back then,” she said.

Ever since, she’s been practicing and has taught all around the world, including England, San Francisco, New York City and now Denver. She hopes to one day achieve enlightenment, or in nite happiness and peace.

It takes a lot of hard work, but she said it’s the only thing where the more she does it, the happier she is.

It’s because, with meditation, the mind becomes naturally peaceful. Each person has a natural source of peace and happiness inside them, she said, and instead of seeking it elsewhere — relationships, ful lling jobs or material things — it’s already inside the body waiting to be found. e evidence lies in the random moments of peace and happiness everyone feels. It could be a torrential downpour and the mind is peaceful, settled and calm. e rst step to unlocking that potential and happiness is to breathe.

“What those moments show is that our mind is ne. And then what unsettles the mind is actually all our uncontrolled thinking,” she said.

Coming from the teachings of the Buddha, she compared the mind to a vast ocean. e waves are turbulent while below them is a vast, in nite, calm place. Waves of anxiety and negative emotions distort the brain but below those waves rests an incredible sanity.

“When our mind is settled, when we can let go of our troubled thoughts, and our turbulent thoughts, uncontrolled thoughts, then we naturally feel good. We naturally feel peaceful and we start to get a sense of our potential and who we really are, which is this person who has limitless potential, limitless happiness,” James said.

Focus on the nostrils

Carol O’Dowd, a Trauma and Transition Psychotherapist and Spiritual Counselor assists her clients by meeting them where they are and o ering them acceptance through breathing.

“If you focus on your breath, you cannot simultaneously focus on all your internal dialogue. It cannot be done. e human brain is not wired that way,” O’Dowd said.

It creates a space between the thoughts. e stress and anxiety stored in the body don’t go away, but the practice of noticing the emotions and putting them on pause to breathe helps calm the body down.

Breathing is a function of the body that automatically happens all the time. Focusing on that breath, O’Dowd compared it to a spectrum. What happens when the body stops breathing — death — is one end and the other is when the body pays attention to the breath — peace.

“It can be as simple as just experiencing that ow of air, and in and out of your nostrils. If you can place your attention there, that’s giving yourself a mini vacation,” she said.

O’Dowd encourages her clients to practice treating uncontrolled thoughts like a salesperson trying to sell them. Instead of buying, make them sit in the corner and return to them in 20 minutes after taking time to check in with the body.

It can also let go of stress. Pain, like what the ngers feel after working at a computer all day, can be a physical manifestation of stress. Holding on to that stress can lead to other health conditions.

“It’s not rocket science,” she said.

Escape to reality

James said achieving enlightenment is extremely di cult, and while the teachings she studied laid out di erent steps and pathways, she simpli ed it down to three. e rst is focusing on the breath to relax. e second is identifying delusions.

A delusion can be jealousy, greed, competitiveness or other unpleasant thoughts. Most of the time, those thoughts aren’t controlled by the mind and enter the brain randomly. It’s the root