Saturday, 25 March 2017
Life Lessons From 100-Year-Olds
Being an Achiever | Steve Pavlina
You become an achiever by achieving your goals. If you achieve your goals, you’re an achiever. If you don’t achieve your goals, you’re not an achiever.
This is a simple, binary way to think about achievement. To achieve means to reach, attain, or accomplish. What you choose to reach, attain, or accomplish is up to you.
The difference between an achiever and a non-achiever is largely a matter of attention. Non-achievers give their goals little attention, if they bother to set goals at all. Achievers give their goals sufficient attention so as to reach, attain, or accomplish those goals.
Non-achievers reach, attain, and accomplish something other than their goals. Quite often they will reach, attain, and accomplish someone else’s goals, without consciously making those goals their own.
To be an achiever, you must give your goals sufficient attention to reach, attain, or accomplish them. This means you must withdraw much of your attention from activities that are not directly leading to the accomplishment of your goals.
In a given week, where is your attention going? If you aren’t habitually obsessing over your goals, then what are you obsessing over instead?
What do you normally put ahead of your goals?
Do you manage to watch some TV or movies?
Do you keep up with email, social media, and text messages?
Do you attend to the social obligations that your family, friends, and co-workers expect from you?
What exactly are you reaching, attaining, or accomplishing in a typical week? Are you
making progress on your goals by giving them many hours of attention, or are you putting your attention elsewhere?
Achievers accept that in order to achieve their goals, they must withdraw attention from non-goal activities. Achievers also accept that these competing interests may resist being put on the back burner. The cable company may try to talk you out of canceling. Starbucks may send you a reminder email if you don’t show up for too long. Your mother may nag you about something trivial. Achievers learn to decline these invitations for their attention by default. They keep putting their attention back upon their goals.
You must especially be on guard for new invitations and opportunities that come up while you’re working on your goals. These hidden distractions can easily sidetrack you. If an opportunity aligns solidly with your goals, wonderful… take full advantage of it. But if it seems off-course with respect to your current goals, then stick to your path, and say no to the diversion. Generally speaking, it’s wise to be less opportunistic, so you can be more of a conscious creator. You’ll often make faster progress by creating your own opportunities instead of haphazardly chasing the random opportunities that others bring you.
The Scarcity of Attention
Attention is a limited resource. The ability to consciously direct your attention with good energy and focus is even scarcer than the time you have available each day.
In any given week, there may be many interests competing for your attention: friends, family, co-workers, random strangers, corporations, organizations, government agencies, media, and more. And these days they have many different ways to reach you.
Internally you have some competition as well: your physiological needs, your emotional needs, your cravings, your habitual behaviors, etc. You need to eat, sleep, eliminate waste, bathe, and so on. These activities require some attention too.
Somewhere among those competing interests is another voice seeking your attention. This is your goal-oriented nature, your greater intelligence, your desire to live a life rich in meaning and purpose. This part of you craves achievement, and it won’t be satisfied by anything less. It wants you to set your own goals and to reach, attain, and accomplish them.
How much of your attention are you giving to your achievement-oriented self?
If you starve this part of yourself for attention, it will punish you with low motivation, low self-worth, and a general scarcity of resources. But if you give it the attention it craves, you’ll be rewarded with high energy, drive, passion, abundance, and a sense of purpose and contribution.
Directing Your Attention
Fortunately you have the power to consciously direct your attention. You can let your attention float around aimlessly. You can focus your attention on something other than your goals, such as the goals other people have for you. Or you can focus your attention on your own goals.
To really move your life forward requires a major commitment of attention. If you want to improve your finances, you must put your attention on creating value for people, sharing that value, and intelligently monetizing that value. If you want to positively transform your relationships, then give that part of your life some intense and prolonged attention.
Unfortunately we have the tendency to remove attention from those areas of our lives that aren’t doing so well. In the short term, it’s wise to shift focus when we feel overwhelmed because temporary diversions can help relieve stress. But for deeper transformation to occur, we need to put lots of attention squarely on those areas that scream for improvement.
Setting goals requires focused attention. Planning out the action steps to achieve our goals requires even more attention. Executing those action steps takes more attention still. Achievers make such activities a priority in their lives. Non-achievers don’t.
As you get older, keep raising your standards for what deserves your attention. Keep deleting and declining unnecessary fluff and obligations that might otherwise distract you from your magnificent goals. This will free up more attention to focus on your goals.
Have you noticed that when you put your full attention on a goal and obsess about it, you can really move it forward quickly, and you do eventually achieve it? But when you let your attention become diluted by too many competing interests, then progress on your goal slows to a crawl, and you eventually lose your connection to the goal altogether. Goals require significant and prolonged nurturing until they’re achieved; otherwise they die.
Say No to Almost Everything
The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything. – Warren Buffet
What does it mean to say no to almost everything?
For me this means being able to work full-time on my goals, without letting anything get in the way. It means keeping my schedule free of distracting entanglements. It means that even when I work on goals that seem to be put on my plate by someone else, I must either make those goals my own (and say yes to them), or I must reject them and not give them any attention. If I cannot make a goal my own in some way, it doesn’t deserve my attention.
Even a goal like doing your taxes, you can make your own. You can commit to keeping your finances up to date and in good order. You can choose to pay the tax contribution for whatever reasons appeal to you. But if you can’t make a goal your own, and you try to work on it anyway, then you’re fighting yourself, and your progress will be stunted and inconsistent, which is an enormous waste of precious attention.
Don’t dwell in the land of half-commitments. Put your full attention on your own goals, including goals you’ve made your own. If you have a job, then either make the commitment to do your very best at that job, or vacate the position and let someone else do it better.
Put Your Goals First
A good way to put your goals first is to set high-quality, holistic goals to begin with. Don’t squander your attention on shallow pursuits like making money for its own sake. Set goals that will help you grow, build your skills, create value for others, and do some good in the world. Ask yourself: Does the goal seem meaningful and intelligent when you imagine yourself 20 years past its achievement?
Deliberately put your attention on your goals. When you catch yourself standing in line, dwell upon your goals. Visualize yourself taking the action steps. Make this your default behavior instead of pulling out your phone to attend to something trivial.
Carefully plan out the action steps to achieve your goals. If you received my latest newsletter, you’ll find an extensive how-to article about planning the achievement of your goals.
Clear time to work on your goals, and make this time sacred and inviolable. If you can only clear a small slice out of each week to work on your goals, then consider setting a goal to reach the point where you have the freedom to devote as many hours to your goals as your energy allows. What specific goals would you need to set and achieve to make that a reality?
Imagine being able to devote most of your time every week to working on your most important goals, without anything getting in the way. Many people live this way, and they love it. Why not you?
The Goal of Freedom
One of my past goals was to remove financial scarcity as a potential source of distraction, so I could spend most of my time each week working on my goals, whether they were income-generating or not. I want to center my life around personal growth pursuits and share what I learn as a legacy for others. I devoted a significant amount of attention to that goal over a period of years until it was achieved, and after that I could continue to maintain such a lifestyle with relative ease. I know that some people think it’s unusual to have the freedom to immerse oneself in setting and achieving goals that may have nothing to do with making money or having a job, like traveling around Europe for a month or going vegan or exploring open relationships, but this kind of freedom is important enough to me that I made achieving this goal my top priority for years, sticking with it until it was achieved. It was challenging but definitely worthwhile.
I know many people who’ve achieved similar goals. Generally speaking, they tend to be the happiest people I know. Instead of taking orders from someone else as their daily routine, they put their attention on their goals, desires, and interests. They make it a priority to maintain this freedom. They don’t use a job, kids, or the lack of money as excuses — just the opposite in fact. From these people I commonly hear stories of setbacks recalled with laughter and good cheer, not with fear or regret… like the time a couple of friends had to sleep in a park because they had no money for a place to stay. What non-achievers fear as roadblocks are merely stepping stones (and entertaining future stories!) for achievers.
If lifestyle freedom is important to you, then make that your primary aim. Put the attainment of this goal first in your life. Working to achieve this goal must become more important to you than keeping up with social media, pleasing your parents, watching your favorite TV shows, and other distractions. If anything else is truly getting in the way, then either drop it from your life, or find a way to turn it into an advantage that increases your drive and motivation.
It’s easy for me to tell the difference between people who are committed to achieving lifestyle freedom vs. those who aren’t committed. The ones who are committed are obsessed with the goal; they think of little else. I can’t get them to shut up about it! They’re constantly trying to figure out how to make it a reality. They work hard at it. They stumble and keep right on going. Usually the goal takes longer than they’d like. They often want it to take less than a year. It usually takes 2-5 years to reach the point of financial sustainability. The achievers make it obvious that they’ll get there no matter how long it takes. For them the goal is mandatory, not optional.
The non-achievers talk about the goal as a distant fantasy. It’s a wish, a dream, a possibility… something that would be nice to have if and when the planets align properly. Their action plan consists mainly of reading books about the Law of Attraction and listening to Abraham-Hicks recordings. They treat the goal as a casual desire but not a serious commitment. They disrespect the tremendous force of will that’s required to achieve it. They virtually never get there.
If the goal of lifestyle freedom matters to you, then drop, cut, and burn whatever distracts you from it. Put your attention squarely on that goal, and obsess about it until you achieve it. If you need more time, cancel cable TV, close your social media accounts, and keep your phone powered off during daylight hours. Take breaks as you need them, but keep putting your attention back on this goal. If you do that, it’s a safe bet that you’ll achieve it.
You’ll set yourself on the path to achieving lifestyle freedom when you stop putting other distractions ahead of that commitment.
Source
Friday, 24 March 2017
Everything is always working out for me | Abraham | Esther Hicks
Money and Your Path With a Heart | Steve Pavlina
There’s this idea that if we want to experience more financial abundance, we must identify and rewire our limiting beliefs about money, such as “money doesn’t grow on trees” or “money is the root of all evil.” But the people I know who have lots of money usually didn’t bother to fuss over their beliefs. In fact, current brain research tells us that dwelling on limiting beliefs can be self-defeating since you’re still reinforcing the same neural patterns by thinking about them, thereby making them stronger.
A more effective approach is to largely ignore your so-called limiting beliefs. Put your focus on what you desire first and foremost. The tricky part is figuring out what you actually desire.
I found that the best approach for me, financially speaking, is to follow my path with a heart and to admit that money just isn’t that important to me in the grand scheme of things. So I actually seek to minimize the role of money in my life, making it mostly irrelevant. I create enough financial abundance that I don’t have to devote much mental bandwidth to fussing over money. Money is there when I need it; otherwise I can largely ignore it. This frees up my attention to express my creativity, to explore relationships with people, to travel, to read a lot, and to generally enjoy and experience the aspects of life that matter to me so much more than money ever will.
When I tried to center my life around money, it didn’t make me happy. I found it pretty stressful actually. It set me up for a competitive relationship with others. And I wasn’t very good at making money for the sake of money anyway. I didn’t find myself particularly motivated to do the things that would make me more money. I would procrastinate on seemingly profitable work and spend time learning about personal growth instead, which for much of my life was just a side hobby.
Eventually I saw the folly in investing so much energy into trying to make more money, especially when I wasn’t doing a very good job of it anyway. I realized that I don’t actually want to fuss or stress over money in my life. I don’t really want to make a lot of money. That isn’t a true desire for me. A more genuine desire is that I’d like to live without giving much attention to money. I’d like to live as if everything I desire is free.
Growing up, I was inspired by the characters in the universe of Star Trek: The Next Generation. They didn’t seem to need money. Technically they did have money in their universe, but money was so unimportant that hardly anyone talked about it — except for one race that everyone made fun of. The people in that universe worked because they wanted to work, not because they got paid. Money was irrelevant because they lived in a universe of abundance. They had unlimited food, cozy quarters, quality healthcare, and speedy transportation. Having all their needs met gave them the freedom to focus on other parts of their lives: hobbies like music or painting, recreation, intimate relationships, reading, exploration, and more. They lived in the ultimate personal growth playground.
I was inspired by that idea and asked myself how close I could get to it in the real world. Obviously this reality isn’t the same idealized fictional universe, but I could at least get closer to it if I tried. I realized that one step was to earn a certain threshold level of income in such a way that it wouldn’t require me to do a lot of grunt work to maintain it, and then all my expenses would be covered. That’s what got me interested in passive income.
I’ve been experiencing that reality for many years now, and honestly… I love it.
In order to play the game of life this way, I made decisions that many people would consider foolish. That’s because their priority is to make more money. My priority is to have a life. I’m not interested in getting rich or retiring. I’m already doing what I’d do if I were retired. So I deliberately pass up many opportunities to earn more money, so I can give less attention to money and more attention to personal growth, relationships, and more. I’m very pleased with this trade-off.
I don’t want to waste my life fussing over money. I did that during much of my 20s, and I
think it was a mistake to live that way.
What may surprise you is that I learned to live this way even when I was broke. The key is how you focus your mind. To really enjoy life, focus your mind on what you love most, and bring that into your life now — not later, not when you have more money. Whatever you think money will add to your life, you’re probably wrong about that. Add those elements to your life now. So if you think money will allow you to travel more, start traveling now, even if you’re doing a lot of couchsurfing. Realize that you already have the means to do what you tell yourself you’re going to do when you have the money. You’ve just been programmed by social conditioning to think you need more money, but you don’t. And besides, you aren’t really going to be more motivated to earn extra money if you aren’t already following your path with a heart.
Take time to experience the simple pleasures of life. Put more attention on what you can enjoy and experience right now. That doesn’t actually require money. You can enjoy a long walk for free. Long walks are still one of my favorite pleasures.
When I couldn’t afford to buy books, I would go to the library and check out five or ten personal development books and audio programs and go through them. I very much enjoyed doing that, and it was free. I still do this today, typically averaging about one audiobook per week.
Today I can buy the best organic produce. I don’t have to look at prices when I shop. I like to shop as if everything were free. Whatever the bill is, I know I have plenty of money to cover it.
When I couldn’t afford the best food, I bought the best that I could afford and learned to appreciate it. I tried different foods. I learned to cook. I expressed my desire to have growth experiences through whatever level of abundance I could muster.
That approach was very motivating. It gave me a reason to actually earn some money. My reason for earning money was to help express my desired life path — a path centered around personal growth, exploration, and relationships. The real shift happened when I stopped using a lack of money as an excuse for not pursuing that path. I released the fear of not having enough. I started pursuing this path when I was broke. The money came later.
In my experience, needing money has usually pushed it away. When I don’t adopt a needy relationship to money, I seem to attract plenty of it. It flows to me quite naturally as a result of following my path with a heart. When I’m on this path, I’m feeling good about my life, my self development, my connections to people, and my contribution to the world. That state of being is very attractive. It attracts people, opportunities, business deals, and more. And that state of being doesn’t depend on having any particular level of income.
What if I want to increase my income? Trying to increase it directly seldom works. What works for me is to expand my path with a heart first. Internally I must open my heart to greater challenges or new levels of experience. If those experiences require more money, then the money will flow into my life — but only when I take the first step and get moving.
Quite often when it seems like money is a block to having certain experiences, that’s a false belief. We block ourselves because we aren’t ready. We’ve turned our backs on our light. In truth we are very powerful and creative beings, capable of summoning wonderful experiences into our lives when we’re finally ready to embrace them — and all their rippling consequences.
I used to think that traveling overseas was a really big deal. I turned it into this behemoth of complexity. I definitely used a lack of money as a reason for not traveling more. I also used the excuse of being in a relationship with a woman who didn’t like to travel. But once I realized that those limitations were just excuses and that of course I was a powerful enough being to summon the experience of travel into my life, I simply made it happen. It felt like there was a push to get moving initially, but afterwards it felt more like allowing than pushing.
Once I started traveling more, I began getting a lot more free travel invites. As I shed the belief that I needed money to travel, I found myself being able to enjoy amazing trips while spending very little money. For instance, people would invite me to speak at their events, and they’d pay for my travel expenses and provide a place to stay. I recently received an invite for my fourth free trip to Europe within the past two years, to speak at the Lifestyle Design Convention in Zurich in January 2015. I haven’t been to Switzerland yet, so I’m really looking forward to it.
But of course this wouldn’t be happening if I wasn’t following my path with a heart. Part of that path involved facing and overcoming fears. I used to really dislike public speaking. Now I love it! It’s such a beautiful way to share a positive message and connect with people.
I’ll probably be getting speaking invitations with free travel opportunities for the rest of my life. I love speaking, I love traveling, and I love meeting new people, so this adds a lot of happiness to my life. This unfolded very gracefully by following my path with a heart. I didn’t have to push myself to do work I disliked to earn more money just so I could travel. I made travel a part of my life first, to the extent that I could afford it, and then it expanded, including the expansion of opportunities to fuel it.
You may be assuming that money is the ultimate fuel, the ultimate enabler, the ultimate resource in life. If that were true, then people with lots of money should be so much happier, shouldn’t they? But the data shows that once you get passed about $75-80K per year in income, happiness doesn’t increase with additional income and often decreases.
I have many wealthy friends who earn 10 to 100 times as much as I do. Most of them, however, actually seem less happy than I am. Some of them have told me they’re jealous of my lifestyle. They have empires to manage. They travel 150-200 days per year because they believe they have to. Otherwise they wouldn’t make as much money, and they might have to start laying people off. They often seem worried about potential threats to their revenue streams. Some of them are disturbed by the fact that I’ve uncopyrighted most of my work since they believe that intellectual property is their most valuable asset. But what does their income matter if they aren’t as happy as they could be, if they’re experiencing chronically higher stress levels, if they spend a lot of time worrying, if they wrap their self-esteem into their achievements (which sets them up for an inevitable fall)?
I think that especially in the U.S., we undervalue what actually makes us happy in life. We push ourselves to earn more, but why? If the path to get to that next level of income isn’t fulfilling, and if the money isn’t likely to fulfill you either, then why expend so much energy on an unfulfilling path? Why not put happiness and fulfillment first in our lives — and then see what it does to our incomes?
The approach that worked for me was to surrender the socially conditioned path. I gave up the path that said I have to earn lots of money first, and then I can do whatever I want and be happy. After trying that for many years, I found it foolish and unfulfilling. I actually resigned myself to being broke, figuring it would be worth it to be perpetually broke if I could at least spend a lot of time doing what I found fulfilling and enjoyable. But much to my surprise and delight, that path with a heart turn out to also be the path of abundance. 🙂
Source
Thursday, 23 March 2017
Wednesday, 22 March 2017
The skill of self confidence | Dr. Ivan Joseph | TEDxRyersonU
How to Bypass Resistance | Steve Pavlina
You may have heard this quote from German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer:
All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.Here’s a variation on this idea that we can use for personal growth transitions:
All growth passes through three stages. First, you’ll be ridiculed. Second, your efforts will meet with serious opposition. Third, you’ll be accepted as the new person you’ve become.Have you seen this pattern show up in your life? I’ve run through it many times. Lots of readers have run this pattern. It happens with career transitions, relationships transitions, lifestyle changes, health improvements, and more.
Schopenhauer was a pessimist. In fact, his worldview is called philosophical pessimism.
If we apply Schopenhauer’s model to personal growth, aren’t we being a little pessimistic then? Pessimism isn’t truth. Pessimism is just one of many lenses we can use, and if we go into a growth experience with a pessimistic lens, aren’t we more likely to create a journey that looks like Schopenhauer’s stages?
Are these three stages really necessary? Is the ridicule necessary? Is the violent opposition necessary? Do we really have to go through those first two stages to get to the third stage? Can’t we just skip to the end?
Seduced by Schopenhauer’s Script
Blogging about my personal growth journey since 2004 has given me a lot of feedback. For many years I basically ran Schopenhauer’s script. It was there from day one. What! You’re quitting the computer gaming industry? What the heck is blogging? You’ll never make any money doing that!
After many years of such transitions, the script became all too predictable, and because of its predictability, I got faster at running it. Instead of taking weeks or months to play out, I’d be at stage three within days. Eventually I’d get there within 1-2 days. The criticism and resistance would blow up and then burn out within 24-48 hours. It was Schopenhauer’s script running on Internet time.
Exploring subjective reality gave me a different perspective on this model as well. Were my own expectations creating these stages? If I changed my thoughts, feelings, and beliefs, would it be possible to skip ahead to stage three?
I had to admit that I was indeed expecting opposition when I embarked upon some transitions. I’d prepare myself by raising my psychological shields. I’d pre-load my personal Schopenhauer script. And my expectations would largely come true.
For many years I thought I benefitted from strong personal shielding. I made decisions carefully, weathered the criticism, and plowed ahead. The stormy parts didn’t phase me. I was comfortable with ridicule and opposition.
I even gave myself extra practice by deliberately inviting critical feedback, such as when I made this April Fool’s post inviting people to apply to become my slaves, or this one announcing a fake D/s workshop. The criticism came flying in as expected. Some people even launched new websites specifically devoted to criticizing me, such as StevePavlinaIsTheDevil.com (that one eventually went offline).
To me this was just a form of resistance training. The more criticism came through, the easier it was to handle it. It wasn’t going to phase me.
Did I really want to keep running this pattern for the rest of my life though? Was there any more growth to be squeezed out from stronger shielding?
For many years I figured it was indeed necessary and that I should just accept it as normal… at least normal for me. I’m a public figure. I write about many controversial topics on the Internet. I have some pretty strong opinions. Of course the criticism will keep happening. There’s no way around that.
As the pattern sped up, however, this mindset began looking increasingly ridiculous to me. I wondered to what extent I was creating it through my own expectations. These rapid burns poked holes in my beliefs. I didn’t understand why the criticism would surge and then die so quickly.
Challenging the Script
In 2011 I did a 30-day trial of learning music composition. No one criticized me for that, and that probably doesn’t surprise you. It didn’t surprise me either. But I wondered… Was there a lack of criticism because learning music wasn’t objectionable to my readers? Or was there a lack of criticism because I didn’t expect any criticism for such a trial?
That led to me to ask:
What if I stopped expecting resistance in areas where I’d previously expected it? Would the criticism still happen?And that spawned more questions:
Were people criticizing me because they objectively didn’t like my ideas? Or were they criticizing me because I was broadcasting incongruence, defensiveness, or the expectation of criticism?So I began to experiment.
I started paying attention to my attitude, energy, and expectations as I made new decisions. If I felt defensive in advance, I began working through those feelings privately. I imagined the public criticism that would come, but instead of inviting it, I pre-processed it within myself. I worked on getting to a place of peace with my decisions first.
I didn’t do this with every decision, but when I did apply this, it worked. I could write congruently about topics that previously would have invited plenty of critical feedback, and I wouldn’t receive a single negative piece of feedback. I want to say that this surprised me, but oddly it didn’t surprise me. Somehow it made perfect sense to me.
When I was able to fully accept my decisions, I stopped broadcasting defensiveness, which stopped attracting criticism. Perhaps no one wants to bother criticizing someone whose mind is already at peace, at least not to that person directly.
I realized that people can smell incongruence a mile away, and it’s that incongruence that riles them up and makes them want to set me straight. Otherwise they don’t bother. They might still criticize an idea on their own for whatever reason, but they wouldn’t send such feedback to me directly.
The very presence of armor and shielding makes people want to hack at it with a sword. They really can’t resist. But when there’s no armor and shielding, people don’t even think to grab a sword and take a swing at you. There’s no reason to do so.
An Environment of Acceptance
As I thought about how to bypass the resistance stages, I recalled an effect I’ve seen many times at our workshops. When people spend days surrounded by other growth-oriented people, the deep and immediate acceptance really sinks in. In an environment of such acceptance and encouragement, people realize that it isn’t necessary to explain and defend their decisions. So the shields go down. The defensiveness vanishes. And the mind reaches a new level of congruence and peace.
These kinds of experiences were an important part of my journey as well. When I began leaning into the idea of open relationships, I had doubts about the path and wasn’t congruent with it. When I first started writing about it several years ago, boy was there a lot criticism! But when I would hang out in person with people who’d been living that lifestyle for years, I couldn’t help but notice that they had zero defensiveness about it. For them it was a perfectly normal and sensible way to live. I couldn’t find their shields, even when I tried to play Devil’s advocate with them.
This became a powerful tool for me, one that I like much better than polishing my armor. When I’m considering making a change, I find it really helpful to hang out with people who are on the other side. For me it’s a change. But for them, it’s just their normal everyday lives. When I see how normal it is for them, it helps me imagine the shift as being totally normal for me as well. It gives me a vision of what I’ll be like on the other side.
Starting in the late 90s, I used this approach to transform my once failing computer games business into a successful one. I began hanging out with successful independent software developers, both online and in person. It sounds a little dumb in retrospect to say this, but I was struck by just how comfortable they were with their success. To me at the time, it was a really big deal to earn six or seven figures a year from selling one’s own software. But I couldn’t detect any of this amazement in the people I met. They didn’t feel special to have done it. It was just a normal thing to be doing.
I realized that seeing a transition as special is a form of incongruence. When we project extraordinary qualities onto a change, we push it away. We invite ridicule. We invite opposition. We slow ourselves down. We remain stuck.
It took many more years before I connected the dots between these two ideas and saw how sensible it would be to use an environment of acceptance to bypass resistance.
This is how I skip the first two stages in Schopenhauer’s worldview. But really I still go through three stages. They’re just different stages. The model I use now looks like this:
All growth passes through three stages. First, envision the change as possible. Second, invite support for your change by meeting people who are already living as you desire. Third, realize you’re already one of those people — and that you love it!Suppose you want to transition from a scarcity mindset to an abundant lifestyle using Schopenhauer’s original model. You’ll start by getting ridiculed by other scarcity minded people. Then you’ll deal with lots of obstacles and setbacks. And finally — hopefully — you’ll be spit out the other side. Does that work for personal growth? Not really. You could just as easily stay stuck indefinitely with this approach… unless you build some really strong psychological weaponry and fight your way through.
Or you could take a gentler, more optimistic approach. Realize that other people are already living on the other side of the change you want to make. For those people your desired change is a perfectly normal and natural way to live. There’s nothing to debate. The benefits are self-evident. You can simply go and join them. They’re happy to welcome you. Leave your shields and armor behind.
You can also create this environment of acceptance in your own mind by imagining it as real. Some people are really good at that. I usually get better results by talking to real people though, at least initially. Visualization is helpful after I’ve met people who are already on the other side, so I can better understand the subtleties of the vibe they have.
You can still use Schopenhauer’s approach if you like armor and shields. It’s a little clumsy at times, but it does work. It can even be fun, especially when people go out of their way to swing their swords at you. That’s where the pessimistic model leads. You’ll eventually become a champion pessimist.
But also recognize that there are alternative approaches that can bypass the resistance altogether. Connecting with people on the other side of your desired transition is one of the most effective. Other approaches are possible too, as long as you begin with the idea that you have the power to go straight to the acceptance phase.
We don’t have to follow Schopenhauer’s model of truth either. We can encounter a new truth, welcome it, and accept it smoothly and easily. The challenge is to love the truth more than the untruth.
Which do you love more? The place where you are, or the place where you want to be? If it’s the latter, then stop defending the former.
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