Entitlement

Posted on 19/06/2020 by Boris Clair

A common way that people get stuck, especially in business, is that they feel entitled to success before they’ve invested in really earning it.

Maybe you did well in school. Maybe you’ve been told that you’re smart or creative. Maybe you began with some advantages that made you feel like you’re already ahead of the game.

And then you dive into the real world with your grand goals and dreams, and it knocks you on your ass.

This has happened to me and many other entrepreneurial friends. It’s humbling for sure, but the experience of being knocked down a few times helps you admit that you still have a hell of a lot to learn.

Learning computer programming and getting good at it took me many years. I started when I was 10 years old and didn’t begin working on my first commercial product until I was 22 years old. By that point I knew how to program to some extent in BASIC, PASCAL, FORTRAN, C, C++, Assembly, Lisp, Prolog, and a few other languages. I was very good at math too.

But then I had to learn game programming… and Windows programming. There were lots of animation concepts to learn like back buffers and blitting. Then when I started my own business the following year, I had to learn game design, art, sound effects editing, MIDI, and so much more. I also had to learn new graphics interfaces like WinG and DirectX. Finally I figured I had the skills to succeed, but no…

I still had to learn some accounting, contract law, and negotiation skills, which took a while to wrap my head around. And was that enough? Nope. It was able to land some deals, but most didn’t go well. There was still way more to learn.

I had to learn better people skills and to be more discerning in choosing people to work with. I had to learn to manage a small team and to network with other people in the field. Then there were systems to figure out like customer support and shipping. Finally enough? Still no.

On top of that multi-year journey, there was learning sales and marketing. That was a huge one and really took me outside my comfort zone. For many new entrepreneurs having to learn this part of business can be daunting – and humbling. There’s just so much to learn. And once you finally learn it, your “reward” is to realize that you have even more work to do.

Finally my first business started doing well. It took several years, but eventually I had put enough pieces together to make it work sustainably.

The entitlement aspect slowed me down in the beginning, as it slows down many people. This is the expectation that surely you know enough to succeed already, especially when entering a field that you believe should play to your strengths.

Having a good head on your shoulders may help, but the belief that you should be able to succeed quickly can really get in your way. It may be better to approach new experiences with more patience and humility. Be willing to accept that the journey may be longer than you expect.

Among struggling entrepreneurs I know, I often see the same entitlement patterns that I succumbed to. Some feel that when they’re first starting out, they should have everything figured out and running smoothly within six months to a year. Some may be able to go that fast, but most won’t. I think this attitude makes a lot of people give up when they’re actually making decent progress. They have so much more to learn than they realize.

This entitlement issue can come up repeatedly. Even if you’re been doing okay for a decade, you may hit a road bump and feel like you’re losing ground. This can be frustrating. You may look to all the past efforts you’ve invested and declare that you deserve some smooth seas for a change. Surely you’ve earned it, right?

You may encounter some smooth seas now and then, but realize that the weather can still change. Appreciate the periods of wonderful flow when you have them, but try not to get attached to them.

One solution I like is to think of myself as a perpetual student. I accept that the learning game never ends. There’s always more to figure out. I can never declare that I’m finally done learning and just rest on my past skills and accomplishments. There is no entitlement to more success, regardless of how much I think I know or what I’ve done in the past.

Each day is a fresh one. Each new success must be earned. Each year of life and business brings fresh challenges to face.

This year life has thrown some big challenges at some people I know, while oddly for me it’s been one of the smoothest years ever. That doesn’t give me permission to succumb to a forward-looking sense of entitlement, as tempting as that may be. We live in a world of change.

Even if you’ve been through a lot of rough patches in your past, that still doesn’t mean that you’re entitled to a low-challenge future. You may have even bigger challenges ahead.

You have a relationship with life. Entitlement is a way of saying that you have life all figured out and know just what to expect of it. But life won’t necessarily let you pigeonhole it this way. When you try to box it in by willing it to satisfy your expectations going forward, life has a way of crushing the box.

Instead of trying to boxify life, realize that life still has some juicy mystery to it, and stay alert to the possibility of change and disruption. Change doesn’t have to feel punishing if you learn to welcome it and see it as a gift instead of a curse.

Your Relationship with Failure

Posted on 13/06/2020 by Boris Clair

Here are some quotes from J.K. Rowling about the fear of failure:

Part of the reason there were seven years between having the idea for Philosopher’s Stone and getting it published, was that I kept putting the manuscript away for months at a time, convinced it was rubbish.

Fear of failure is the saddest reason on earth not to do what you were meant to do. I finally found the courage to start submitting my first book to agents and publishers at a time when I felt a conspicuous failure. Only then did I decide that I was going to try this one thing that I always suspected I could do, and, if it didn’t work out, well, I’d faced worse and survived.

Ultimately, wouldn’t you rather be the person who actually finished the project you’re dreaming about, rather than the one who talks about ‘always having wanted to’?

The notion that you might fail can really slow you down. But it’s not the failure itself that’s the problem. The problem is your relationship with failure.

Consider the grand opening of Disneyland, which happened about 65 years ago on July 17, 1955. It was supposed to be a press preview day with limited attendance, and it was a spectacular failure.

Here are some things that happened that day:

Disney was expecting 11,000 guests because they sent out a limited number of invitations, but 28,000 people showed up. Someone sold thousands of counterfeit tickets. Another guy set up a ladder in the back of the park and charged people $5 to sneak in that way – and many did.
The crowds trying to reach Disneyland caused a 7-mile backup on the Santa Ana Freeway. People were stuck in their cars for so long that they had to relieve themselves on the side of the freeway – not sexually, you slut! It was too hot that day.
The temperature topped 100 degrees (38 C), hot enough to melt the fresh asphalt on Main Street into a sticky tar that ensnared women’s high-heeled shoes.
Some paint in the park wasn’t quite dry, and some people were getting paint on their clothes.
Due to the huge crowds, the park’s snack stands and restaurants ran out of food at lunchtime.
Due to a plumbers’ strike, the park wasn’t able to install enough drinking fountains before opening, so people weren’t finding enough access to water. Many accused Disney of doing this deliberately to gouge them for the expense of sodas.
Due to the heat and the crowds, most of the rides broke down at least once, causing more frustrations.
The Mark Twain riverboat was so overloaded with guests that it ran low in the water, and water from the river was sloshing up onto the deck.
The park was full of press, who canned the experience, which was referred to as Black Sunday. Some press predicted the park wouldn’t survive.

Things didn’t immediately improve. Disneyland had more problems in the weeks after the opening, including people smashing up most of the cars on the Autopia ride by driving them too aggressively.

But these many failures didn’t matter that much. Disneyland still did a lot of things right. They eventually fixed the problems, which was like a game of Whack-a-Mole since new problems kept arising. Disneyland was always going to be a work in progress.

Our lives are like this too. Just because you have a spectacular failure doesn’t mean the game is over. You take your licks and get right back to working on your goals. Acknowledge and fix problems one by one. Keep learning and adapting.

Imagine being Walt Disney on Disneyland’s grand opening day. Tons of press are there. The park bears your name. It’s been a 20-year journey to evolve your vision for a theme park into a reality. You’ve struggled endlessly just to get the financing in place, and then there were even more struggles to get the place designed and built. So many people have doubted you, including your brother and business partner Roy. You’ve been preparing for and anticipating this glorious day for a long time. And then some asshole screws up your plans by making thousands of counterfeit tickets, and your people can’t tell the real tickets from the fake ones. Your plans for a wonderful opening start falling apart right before your eyes, and all the attention and the cameras are on you – not to mention all the investors who want to know whether investing in your vision was a good idea.

And what do you do? You shrug it off and get right back to work the next day.

Failures happen. This is part of life. While other people may make a huge deal out of it, is it really that big of a deal? So what if you have a spectacularly bad failure! That isn’t the end. It’s just a learning experience, so learn from it. Life continues the next day.

People may criticize you. You may be embarrassed. Accept the consequences, and then get right back to it and re-engage.

You needn’t retreat and slink away in shame. Be proud that you failed. So many people are too cowardly to even try working on something meaningful. They talk themselves out of pursuing bold ideas before they begin. They treat the prospect of failure as a reason to quit before they start.

Many of Disney’s ideas, including some rides they tried, had to be scrapped and replaced. Each ride was a big project unto itself, so some of those failures ended in the death of a project. But the death of a project doesn’t have to kill the big picture vision.

Take this idea to heart. You can fail a lot with your projects, but your big picture goal can remain intact and achievable. Some ideas and projects along the way will be dead ends, and you’ll have to let them go. So you’ll need different projects and ideas to help you reach your goal. Don’t equate the failure of your projects with the death of your long-term goal.

Don’t pursue your goals as if you know you can’t fail. Of course you can fail! But don’t make such a big deal out of failure. It will happen. You’ll rack up plenty of failures if you do anything interesting in life. Let each failure be a badge of honor. It means you’re making a good effort. A good failure is a powerful learning experience.

My Strengths (According to Reader Feedback)

Posted on 30/05/2020 by Boris Clair

Earlier this week I invited my blog readers and customers to share what they considered to be my strengths, and now I’ll share the results with you.

First, I appreciate the feedback. There were many different answers and perspectives, so I looked for patterns to condense the key ideas into a meaningful list.

The subheadings show the main groupings that I was able to identify. In some cases this was a little tricky while in others it was easy to identify clusters because the words and phrases people used were often very similar.

The bullet lists include some short direct quotes from people’s emails, some slightly modified or condensed quotes (such as to make the grammar consistent or to simplify them), and common words or phrases that people shared. I tried to pick representative samples when possible, but this isn’t an exhaustive list. Some of the samples could be shifted to other lists because they match multiple patterns; I did my best to put them in reasonable spots.

The paragraphs after the bullet lists include some extra personal commentary from me.

Note that nothing on this list is based on strengths that I consider myself to have, and none is based on other forms of feedback. This list is only derived from reader and customer feedback that was specifically sent in response to Monday’s blog post, What Are My Strengths?

Here’s what I ended up with. These aren’t in any particular order.

Open-Mindedness / Growth Mindset / Curiosity

Radical open-mindedness
Openness to new concepts and ideas
Capacity to challenge old beliefs, even when it goes against social pressure or conventional lines of thinking
Growth mindset, applied to multiple areas of life
Giving ideas careful consideration before deciding if they’re right for you
Ability to grow and release beliefs that no longer serve you
Subjective reality
Being a very “unstuck” person (inspirational)
Open to trying new stuff and being vulnerable
Courageous in quitting what doesn’t work for you (diets, relationships, values, etc.)
Willing to try new things and explore new patterns of thought
Inquisitiveness
Curiosity
You have the ability to stay open where most people have been closed off for a very long time
To tip a situation on its side and make a different assessment
Your thirst for knowledge to evaluate and condense all this into powerful thoughts
I love your curiosity and the way you keep exploring new subjects

I was surprised by how many people mentioned open-mindedness as one of my strengths since that isn’t a term I’d usually apply to myself. I definitely see myself as curious though. This feedback helped me see how strongly connected curiosity and open-mindedness are. Obviously our minds have to be open enough to explore unfamiliar territory.

The fact that people would call out open-mindedness as a strength also makes me wonder about the contrast. Does this mean that some of my readers would like to further develop this quality for themselves? This makes me curious about open-mindedness and how to teach or encourage the development of that quality more deliberately. This is probably an area of self-development that I tend to take for granted.

Independence / Freedom / Unshackled by Social Norms

Led by your own reflections
Internal locus of control
Putting yourself out there (seemingly) fearlessly
Being fully yourself, genuine, living life by connecting deeper with yourself and your values
You practice what you preach, and you don’t make lame or cliché statements
Free to explore many different ideas without being tied down to selling a system
Willingness to go against prevailing social norms
Seeing you go against grain helped me see that the reason I was so unhappy was because I was listening to my social conditioning rather than my heart
To constantly reinvent yourself
Nonconformist
Foregoer

This one didn’t surprise me, but again it makes me think about the contrast. I’m well-aware that many readers feel shackled by social and family expectations and want to break free of that. Wednesday’s article on Misaligned Relationships addresses this issue to some extent – it was partly inspired by the early feedback from this exercise.

Internally I don’t tend to think of myself as having these strengths because I’ve lived this way long enough that they just seem normal to me. Instead I frame this as making choices that feel aligned. What other people may perceive outwardly as going against social norms, I perceive as sensitivity to alignment issues. I place more weight on my inner satisfaction with my decisions than I do on other people’s reactions. This has served me well for many years.

I also like to remind myself that people often regret what they didn’t do. They lament how they kept quiet and didn’t express themselves. People regret being too conformist. I’d prefer to avoid racking up regrets, so I take other people’s warnings about this seriously. I don’t seek to be a rebel, but what feels aligned can sometimes be unpopular.

Range / Breadth

Writing about topics others are ignoring
I love the frequent blog posts on all kinds of topics
The different topics that you talk about that cover all sorts of issues
Your willingness to explore ideas on the nature of reality and spirituality without rejecting human needs (money, success, sex, etc)
You have an abundance of experience, and it is interesting to see how you have overcome difficult situations: bankruptcy, divorce, stealing, etc.
It is interesting to see how you manage current events: Covid-19 for example
Prolificness
The huge amount of perspectives you offer, in a generous and non-pushing way

Some would see having too much range as a weakness, so it’s nice that others recognize it as a strength. I also see it as a strength to have a lot of different interests, much like Leonardo da Vinci did. A lot of my best insights come from transplanting ideas from one field to another, such as turning 30-day trials that I learned in the software field into 30-day personal growth challenges.

Range is essential for staying motivated and enthusiastic about my work. If I narrowed my range too much, I’d feel trapped and bored. I like being able to mix up what I learn, explore, and create. It’s good to know that there are people who appreciate that. Many experts recommend “niching down,” and the reason I don’t do that is because it wouldn’t satisfy me on the inside to limit myself so much. I’m curious about more than just one niche, and I don’t think that niching down would create the kind of life I want to live.

From my perspective though, this strength tends to emerge from following what stimulates me while avoiding boredom. But this only works when I balance variety with good self-discipline and consistency. Otherwise I could end up bouncing around from one project to the next and never finishing anything (i.e. shiny object syndrome). That was a real problem for me in the past, and fortunately I recognized that I had to build up my self-discipline to compensate. So note that sometimes you need the balance of two seemingly conflicting strengths to access the benefits of either.

Exploration & Experimentation

Presenting ideas from a perspective of exploration and testing
You encourage people to try things that might be different from what you choose
Willingness to explore and experiment
Reflecting on your own experience and extracting the universal truths and lessons that you can share with others
Connection between exploration and universal truths (grounded in experience)
Willingness to learn and experiment with new challenges
Balancing consistent structure with flexibility, especially when doing 30-day challenges
To thoroughly look at yourself and the world around you, both with your feelings and with your brain, reflect on it, take action, and tell us everything
Living a life that sends a message to us all that anything is possible
The ability to always find a new perspective on things, to not get stuck in a rut
Seeing you do different experiments
Risk taking experience (really important you push boundaries)
Willingness to explore
Exploring the world

This one feels pretty aligned with how I see myself. I do love to explore and experiment. People seem to appreciate that my lessons stem from experience and that I like to test ideas in the real world.

This may seem close to curiosity and open-mindedness, but I list this as a separate item because it’s the sharing of these experiments that provides value for people. Some people find that the explorations I share encourage them to explore more as well, even if they’re doing totally unrelated explorations. It’s good to see that this strength is contagious. The more we explore, the more we influence and encourage others to explore.

Depth & Immersion

Immersive coverage from many angles
Exploring a challenge from so many different angles that it forces a breakthrough for readers
Take a challenge that is common to your readers, and absolutely hammer the problem with endless different tools, perspectives, and actionable ideas
Blog series
Can always go back and review the basics in your blog – habits, discipline, 30-day trials, goal-setting, purpose, productivity, time-management, health, exercise, and diet
Daily nuggets of thought provoking ideas
So many good bits of information and wisdom
Sharing the insider’s perspective
Level of depth you cover in your topics is second to none
You clearly show a vast amount of knowledge and passion for personal development which solidifies your credibility
Your ability to provide fresh insights into well trodden self-help topics
The depth and detail you go into on the issue and lead on to how to tackle the problem
Thorough

Because I often write longer articles, I attract readers who like longer articles. Same goes for the in-depth courses – they attract people who like and appreciate in-depth courses. People who want quick sound bites probably won’t be attracted to my work.

Internally I don’t think of depth and immersion as direct strengths. I see these as side effects that derive from wanting to connect the dots between different ideas. Many of my blog posts are explorations of different angles on a topic to clarify my own thinking.

How can we explore open relationships in an ethically aligned way? Is there a non-sleazy way to do online marketing and have it be effective? What modes of generating income are the best for long-term character sculpting? These are the kinds of questions that my mind likes to explore and resolve. So I would identify my underlying strength here as a drive for real understanding and a dissatisfaction with shallow answers.

Some people said they made specific changes in their own lives that were inspired by what they read in my blog. Going vegan and going jobless were the most common changes mentioned. They liked that I covered certain lifestyle changes from multiple angles with an insider’s perspective.

Some people were actually grateful for making changes that they initially resisted. They noted that it was because I addressed a topic from so many different angles over a long period of time that convinced them to finally try it for themselves.

Challenging People to Change / Teaching People to See Reality Differently

Challenging people to think alternatively
You have an uncanny knack for blogging about issues that I am currently struggling with in a way that gives me a fresh perspective and a new way to think through a problem
Revealing blind spots
How you destroy my world (i.e. old collections of beliefs and attitudes that aren’t working) -> new world of better results
Your ability to get through to people and make them inspired to actually act upon your ideas
Encourage well rounded development (physical, intellectual, spiritual, social, etc.)
Effective at training me to see reality more accurately
The motivation that you inspire to try what you say to do
You continue to be a wonderful example
Your daily blog posts are good reminders to stay on track with my personal goals and values
You consistently give me something to think about/implement in my life, which I love
Giving people a fresh perspective on things in a very simple-to-understand and act-upon way
Sharing your views and experiments allows me to challenge my views
Make us think deeply about all aspects of our existence
Ability to see and communicate new perspectives, new ways of seeing reality
Disruptor
Giving me new perspectives

This one struck me as one of the most interesting items on the list. People actually like and appreciate that I challenge them to think differently. They like that I nudge them to destroy their old worlds, especially if those worlds aren’t giving them the results they want anyway.

Admittedly I didn’t really think of this as a personal strength, but multiple people noted that this is what really provides long-term value for them. Even though they may resist at first, they ultimately like having holes poked in their old models of reality. They like being challenged to raise their standards. They like learning alternative points of view to digest and think about. They like that I don’t play it safe by only writing about topics inside their comfort zones.

I think this strength comes from what I do for myself. I frequently challenge and question my own models, and much of what I write stems from that questioning. This in turn encourages others to ask similar questions.

I love this because it means that by investing in my own growth, I’m providing a good service to others, as long as I continue to share what I learn along the way. This was a big part of my original vision for starting this blog in 2004. I love personal growth and wanted to make it my full-time occupation. I trusted that if I kept learning and sharing that it would provide sufficient value to people. That turned out to be true.

Sometimes I still have to remind myself that this is a key part of my business and lifestyle. I have to keep exploring, experimenting, and questioning because that’s the engine that feeds everything else. Fortunately I’ve always loved doing that, so it doesn’t feel like a burden. I don’t see myself ever losing my deep curiosity about life.

Sincerity / Honesty / Transparency

Honesty
Transparency
Honest and transparent with your readers
Your firm inner strength that knows exactly what you believe and hold dear and is as solid as a rock
You are tremendously honest and direct
Establishing trust with your audience by means of your sincerity of expression
Your ability to gain my trust because of your honest, approachable, and intelligent style
By being honest and transparent, you bring authentic solutions and connections
You tell things as they are and as they seem to you; I have not found hidden agendas to try to get me to buy something

It didn’t surprise me that people mentioned this, but I also see it as more of a side effect rather than a primary strength.

This one is due to sensitivity to how I feel about my life and about the relationships with the people I serve and connect with regularly. I see relationships as a huge part of life, and I want my relationships to be strong, supportive, and growth-oriented. This includes relationships with people, with my work, with myself, and with reality itself.

I find it interesting that no one really named this inner sensitivity as a strength of mine, but it shows up as a key factor in multiple strengths that people experience externally. Perhaps it’s not too much of a stretch to see that being sensitive to your internal states and seeking inner harmony can actually create ripples of value for others. If you seek more alignment on the inside, you may express more of your strengths outwardly.

Sensitivity can be a powerful strength if you honor it as such.

Clear Communication

Writing and speaking
Your clarity of writing
Relaying spiritual or difficult-to-understand concepts in a relatable manner (for a computer-friendly audience)
Being able to take a thought and breaking it down and explaining it very well
Tying real world examples into your writing or courses are extremely helpful
You are concise, and all of your sentences are usually necessary and relevant
Very good at articulating and getting your point across
Even when you make appeals to emotions, you structure your points in ways that both the logical and emotional parts of my mind can agree with
Your ability to bring razor sharp analytical skills to topics that are often dismissed as “woo woo” – and thereby provide your readers with deeper understandings
Your ability to convey complex ideas in a simple and straightforward manner
Your writing skills. the way you can popularize complex ideas with simple examples
Your very clear and easy to follow explanations – I don’t have to read it twice to fathom out what you are saying
You have a way of reducing the fluff of personal development
Helps shorten the learning curve for me
I like how you communicate in clear manner; your writings are easy to follow and enjoyable to read
Articulation

This isn’t too surprising. If people didn’t like my communication style, they wouldn’t stick around. So it makes sense that I attract people who like it.

While I could write in a more flowery style, I actually dislike it when other writers do that in their books and articles. It just makes my brain work harder to extract the meaning. I value directness and plain language in other people’s writing, so I try to practice this myself. To me the purpose of writing is to communicate useful ideas, not to showcase clever writing skills.

I also had some high school teachers that pushed me to eliminate verbal flabbiness when possible. So this strength was largely trained through education and practice. Having a background in computer science and math helps too since clarity is essential in both fields.

Rationality & Practicality

Your ability to think things through
Real world examples
You waste none of the reader’s time, and you get immediately to the pragmatic and practical concerns
Focus on results, real-world problems and challenges
You are grounded and rational
Clear-sighted intelligence
You are always interesting, thought-provoking, and you provide advice that is applicable in the real world
You see reality (as it is and is not) more clearly than I do
Logical, intelligent, and honest viewpoint
You’re able to come up with models of reality that are actionable as well as effective
You do actually offer a potential solution and don’t just leave us thinking, “Well I knew that already, but what do I actually DO about it?”
In your hands, Subjective Reality has a structure and is seen as a kind of practical tool
Well-balanced mix of your well-developed mental and emotional intelligence
Logical

This one also links with a background in math and computer science. Try programming a computer with good intentions and positive thinking. You have to think rationally and logically to get results from coding.

I got into personal development as part of my recovery from self-destructive behavior, so learning to behave more sanely and rationally was a life-saver for me. Consequently, I have a healthy respect for rationality.

While I’ve explored lots of esoteric and woo-woo personal development ideas too, my journey began with an intense need to solve real problems in my life, so this practical grounding has been with me for a long time. I know how valuable an investment in personal development can be because of how beautifully it transformed my life.

I do see value in exploring pure thought experiments, but I still like to link them to real-world results when possible. Otherwise if an idea just hangs there in space and I can’t use it to improve my results in any area of life, I don’t see it as being of much long-term use other than for the entertainment value.

Open-mindedness and exploration help to balance this strength though. Rationality can become a weakness if you overplay it and let it lock you into a linear mode of thinking. I think it’s rational to realize that you always have more to learn, and that means exploring the unknown.

Creativity & Originality

Thinking, visualizing, and communicating outside the box, in fact in a different galaxy
The outside the box ways of communicating
The creativity in the courses I have taken, particularly Stature, communicates concepts in ways that simply don’t seem available elsewhere
I see creativity and a lot of clear thinking in you
Your freshness and originality
You can combine two very different mindsets: analytical and intuitive in a way which is quite symbiotic in nature, and gives rise to solutions that are unique and creative
Innovative thinking

This strength feels like one of contrast to me. If we didn’t have school systems and corporate jobs that pressure us to devalue inner harmony, I doubt that I would seem as creative or original.

While the world’s misalignments may create opportunities, part of me wishes this weren’t the case. I think it would be more pleasing and satisfying to live in a world where most people followed their paths with a heart and stayed sensitive to inner harmony.

In the past I valued being an out of the box thinker and deliberately leaned into that. These days I’d prefer to do away with the box altogether, so no one has to be stuck inside of it.

From my perspective, I’m basically trying to live the life I learned about from watching Star Trek: The Next Generation. Explore the galaxy. Keep learning and growing. Have interesting relationships with people from different planets. And always be aware that there’s an empath on board to keep you honest.

Caring / Empathy / Ethics / Generosity / Heart

A good heart
You come across not only as an expert in the field but also as a friend who cares for others and who genuinely wants to see them improve their lives; not just saying they do. That’s where I get my trust for you from.
Giving a lot away for free, including uncopyrighting
Accessibility – covering relevant issues readers care about, helping people feel they aren’t alone
You’ve transcended the common online business model (AdSense, affiliates, etc.) and have a moral dimension to your work
It’s been inspiring, from a distance, to watch your trust in Life pay off
Your genuine desire to help
You have strong imaginative power which makes you able to empathize more with people
You are friendly and warm in your interactions
The connection that you somehow convey through your writing, so it feels like you are targeting my own personal problem
You seek to cause as little harm as possible
You seek to help and heal through bringing knowledge and encouragement to people
Generosity and your service-orientation; to put out so much free content is a beautiful gift
Being able to offer a lot of quality content on your website without charge
Compassion
Heart of service
Shows that you care about people and surroundings
It is heart warming to see how you genuinely want people to grow and develop themselves

Awwww… I do indeed care about helping people. I think this could also be a quality flowing from sensitivity. I often feel like I pick up on energy, feelings, and intentions from the people I connect with, even at a distance.

When I was younger, I didn’t value such qualities, but now I see them as essential to being in tune with the flow of life. I think caring has a lot to do with listening, not just with our ears but with all parts of ourselves. I feel fortunate that some caring influences came into my life at the right time to help steer me in this direction. Going vegan played a significant part in this as well; that really opened up the heart-brain communication pathways.

Some people who mentioned these items also requested that I do more videos or podcasts, so more of the emotional connection comes through. I can understand that, although I still really like the experience of writing. I feel that writing helps me slow down, so I can go deeper into the exploration of ideas.

I still like video too though, especially live video. What some people may not see is that we do live video coaching calls in Conscious Growth Club 36 times per year. We just recently passed 100 of those calls, so from my perspective I’m already doing a significant amount of video.

Personality / Playfulness / Positivity

Many people have a growth mindset or focus and discipline, but they can’t bring the playful and unique approach to it
Humor
I love how you inject your personality into each post
It gives your posts that personal touch and authenticity which even the most sceptic of readers can respect
As readers we feel invited and brought to your side as individuals who are constantly exploring
To not get dragged down by others or bad energy
To always stay positive and believe that things will be better
To trust yourself and reality
Playfulness

In this area I think it also makes sense that people who dislike my personality or sense of humor wouldn’t stick with reading my blog for long.

I often have mixed reactions when other authors inject their personality into their work. Sometimes I really like it, and sometimes I find it cheesy or annoying if it feels like they’re trying too hard. I aim to strike a balance and not force it, preferring to keep the ideas front and center most of the time.

I also think that expressing some playfulness helps to create a stronger connection over time, and it makes the work more enjoyable too. It’s good to know that it’s possible to attract people who appreciate playfulness.

Focus / Discipline / Determination / Work Ethic / Consistency

I doubt there are many things in your life that don’t serve clear and well-thought-out goals
You aren’t stumbling through life blindly
Goals & character building
Time management
Discipline / self-discipline
Hard-working
Dedication
Determined and disciplined
Consistency
Balancing with open-mindedness: It seems like tightness and rigidity tend to appear in people who have a high level of self-discipline, but it’s quite the opposite with you
Your regular contact; I do like the daily connection

Self-discipline was a hard quality to build, but I did make gradual gains by continuing to invest in it. I feel this is important to balance other qualities that can potentially pull against focus and consistency, like the desire to go out and explore something new.

Self-discipline can also create traps of its own if you overplay it, potentially stifling creativity and spontaneity.

I like to see these different aspects like parts of a song, where each instrument gets its opportunity to shine, and they can all play harmoniously together.

I’m glad I did this little experiment. It gave me some interesting insights and helped me connect the dots between how I think about my strengths and what other people perceive. It’s interesting to realize that outward strengths may come from deeper places that aren’t easy to identify.

This makes me wonder if Leonardo da Vinci would identify the same strengths in himself that other people would credit him for. Did he see his incredible range as a strength? He might have even seen it as a weakness since so many of his works were unfinished when he died. I read the book How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci, which was insightful, but that cannot reveal how he actually thought.

Consider that as you develop your own strengths, other people may credit you for how those strengths affect them, but they may not be able to identify the core strengths that give rise to those outward expressions. You may experience and frame your strengths differently. For instance, no one identified writing from inspiration and choosing topics based on inspiration as a strength of mine, even though that’s a huge deal to me and something I’ve invested in greatly for many years. That strength also stems from sensitivity to signals that carry ideas.

Consequently, if you spot a strength in someone else and then try to emulate if yourself, your results may fall flat if you miss the core strength that gives rise to the outer expression. If anyone wants to get good results emulating some of my strengths, they may get stuck if they don’t invest in increasing their sensitivity to inner and outer signals.

I’m grateful for everyone who chose to respond to these questions, so thank you for that. It was an eye-opening and reflective experience for me, and I hope you got some value from reading this post. I also encourage you to think about how inner qualities that you might not even think about as strengths could actually flow into providing value in ways you may not have considered yet.

Create and Share

Posted on 28/05/2020 by Boris Clair

Many people who want to earn a living from creative work get stuck trying to figure out a business model. Meanwhile they’re not actually doing much creating. They’re waiting for clarity.

Waiting for clarity is a waste of time. So is trying to figure out the perfect transition plan in advance. It’s easier to find clarity when you’re in motion.

I suggest that you start simpler. Focus on getting into the rhythm of creating and sharing. Don’t worry about monetization. Don’t worry about the business model – not if that’s a cause of stuckness for you.

If you’re going to focus on anything, seek to find the people who will appreciate what you can create and share. Appreciation is a sign that value is being received and acknowledged. If there’s no appreciation, such as thank you’s and other forms of acknowledgement coming back to you, chances are that little value is being delivered. Don’t mistakenly assume that this implies you’re not creating value. It’s more likely that you’re not sharing with the right people.

If you create something and share it, and the people you share it with don’t appreciate it, stop sharing with them. Someone else will appreciate it, so share it somewhere else – anywhere else. Even if you bop around randomly trying to find the right people, it’s better than wasting your life sharing with misaligned people who will whine at you or ignore ou.

If you’re sharing on social media, I’d go so far as to drop the people who don’t like what you’re sharing or who go out of their way to criticize you. They’ll only slow you down. Clear them out, and make some room for aligned people to get through.

It’s fine if some people in your audience are neutral, but if they’re dead weight as far as appreciation goes, then don’t invest in trying to please them. Just let ’em go.

Trust that you’ll find your audience. You’ll find your real audience faster by quickly firing the wrong audience members.

Seek to create in tune with appreciation, at least if you want to make your creating and sharing sustainable. Money is a form of appreciation, and if the appreciation is there, it isn’t that hard to turn that into income. But it’s pretty damned hard to do that if there’s little or no appreciation.

You can still work on business models. You can still experiment with income generation along the way. But the fundamental piece to get working early on is creating and sharing. No one can stop you from doing that. You can start on that today.

Once you find people who appreciate your work, you can even co-create your business model with them. That’s how I got started. People who appreciated my work shared ideas and suggestions for how I could monetize it. Some gave me examples of how other people were monetizing work that I might adopt as well. All I had to do was follow that flow, and it was the regular creating and sharing that made it sustainable.

You’ll probably have some objections to doing this. That’s fine. My counter-objection is that creating and sharing, even without much of a plan, works a lot better than vacillating, delaying, second-guessing yourself, and perhaps the most popular lament of all: I don’t know how. So if your objections are keeping you stuck, maybe they don’t amount to a hill of beans. If you create and share regularly and you move towards people who appreciate what you share, you can eventually have lots of hills with lots of beans.

Remember how easy it was to create stuff when you were a kid. Just grab some colored paper, glue, scissors, and make a mess with it. Someone will appreciate it if you show it to enough people. I’ve seen displays in modern art museums that look no better than what a five-year old could create, and there are still people who appreciate it. So get your crusty, whiny, cowardly AF adult brain out of your way, and just create and share stuff. If you don’t know where to start, pretend that you’re five years old, and start anyway.

Exploding Your Mindset Box

Posted on 20/05/2020 by Boris Clair

Some of the biggest traps in self-development are mindset traps, usually because they’re invisible to us. We get ourselves into a mindset box but can’t see the walls.

What if the mindset box you’re in doesn’t contain any solutions to your biggest problems? What if those answers exist only outside the box?

A common symptom of this trap is when you think you’ve tried just about everything and still aren’t getting results in a particular area. This is often true of financial, career, relationship, and health challenges.

What you’ve really done is tried many solutions that are accessible within the same mindset box. None of them have worked for you because the mindset box itself is the problem.

For instance, one mindset box is the self-absorption box that I shared in yesterday’s post. When you’re in this box, you frame your problems self-referentially, as if the whole world revolves around you. While that can be an empowering frame for some types of problems, it’s especially weak for overcoming with financial and relationship challenges. Consequently, you’ll often find self-absorbed people struggling with their finances and relationships. And they’re usually blind to how much the self-absorption mindset is limiting them.

Would you want to be in a relationship with someone who’s highly self-absorbed and has a hard time considering other people’s perspectives? Would you want to do business with such a person? When you look at this mindset box from the outside, its limitations become apparent, but when you’re inside the box, you probably won’t realize that the mindset itself is the problem.

This is a key point to understand. You’re in your own mindset box right now, and it’s limiting you. Moreover, you can’t even see how it’s limiting you. What you can see, however, is your frustrating lack of results in a particular area.

Consider some area of your life that stubbornly refuses to progress towards greater results, no matter how much you work on it. Now ask yourself this: How could your own mindset box could be preventing you from making progress? Ask yourself what other mindsets people use to get results in this area. Consider how someone with a different mindset might approach this problem.

Most importantly, test different behaviors that conflict or disagree with your current mindset. Play with them by taking actions that you’d only take if you adopted an opposing mindset. You don’t have to agree with a mindset to test its behaviors. New behaviors can generate new results for you, even if you still vehemently disagree with the mindset behind that behavior.

Which behaviors have you rejected because they don’t agree with your current mindset box? Try some of those behaviors, and see where they lead. This is how you can start exploring beyond your mindset box.

A key limiting belief to overcome here is that you can only test actions and behaviors that align with your current mindset box. That isn’t true at all. You’re free to test behaviors that conflict with your mindset. Your ability to take action isn’t beholden to obey any particular mindset. Behaviors stem from thoughts, and mindsets stem from thoughts, and those thoughts needn’t agree with each other. Your brain is plenty big enough to hold space for opposing thoughts.

So be deliberately disagreeable with the mindset that’s generating behaviors that aren’t getting results for you. Be disobedient. Be willing to explore in direct violation of that mindset.

For instance, if you have a neediness or a self-absorption mindset, those mindsets are traps that will limit your results. What behaviors would be in conflict with such mindsets? How about volunteering? If you’re needy or self-absorbed, you’re not going to volunteer to help others. Only someone who has a mindset of kindness, generosity, or abundance will volunteer their time and energy to help others, right? So this behavior will clearly irritate your neediness or self-absorption mindset. Perfect! That’s exactly what to you ought to do then.

Your old mindset box will raise plenty of objections about why you can’t do a behavior that conflicts with it. Wonderful! Let it object because you have a much bigger counter-objection. Here’s your counter-objection:

Oh yeah… well you suck at getting results!

Let your old mindset chew on that for a while. Now matter how much it whines at you, face it down with the hard truth it doesn’t want to hear: You’re not getting results, old mindset. You’ve repeatedly let us down.

This approach has turned my life around multiple times. I did the volunteering thing when I was broke and going bankrupt. My old mindset objected vehemently, but my attitude was that the old mindset never worked for me anyway, so what did I have to lose by trying something totally different? My finances turned around that same year, and I haven’t had any problems with scarcity since. That was 21 years ago. The old mindset could never solve that problem for me. But a simple new behavior solved it beautifully.

New behaviors will crack your old mindsets that didn’t work, eventually leading you to new mindsets that align with the new behavior. And now you’re outside of the old box, and now your new mindset will generate still more behaviors, and some of those behaviors will help you get better results. Quite often you won’t figure out the new mindset though till you explore the behaviors that lead you to it.

So it’s not always true that your first behavioral exploration outside your old mindset will create breakthrough results, but by cracking the old mindset, you’ll gain access to even more behaviors. You’ll expand the possibility space by tearing down the old walls. This gives you a much better chance of finding and adopting behaviors that generate better results than your old mindset box ever could.

The benefits of exploring beyond my own mindset boxes have been profound. This is a key reason I do so many personal growth experiments that other people would find questionable. I like to explore behaviors that challenge and push the boundaries my mindset box.

Some of these behavioral experiments include:

Going to Disneyland for 30 days in a row
Eating a low-fat raw diet for 30 days
Going skydiving
Going vegan
Joining Toastmasters and doing speech contests
Doing live events on the Vegas Strip
Water fasting for 40 days
Training for and running a marathon
Traveling through Europe for several weeks without paying for a place to stay
Doing lots of manifestation experiments
Becoming a hugger
Going to a cuddle party
Learning to play guitar
Moving to Las Vegas
Learning card counting for blackjack
Becoming an early riser
Starting a computer games business fresh out of college
Seeing 200+ independent theater productions (and assisting in some)
Shifting from a fenced relationship to an open relationship
Blogging every day for a year (my current one)
Inviting and experiencing threesomes
Joining the Church of Scientology and going to one of their centers for a few months
Going on a 4000-mile road trip
Converting to a smart home with cleaning robots, voice-controlled thermostats, and numerous smart devices from Apple, Amazon, and Google
Traveling many times with a one-way ticket, not knowing when I’d return
Joining an improv troupe for a few months
Doing ayahuasca four nights in a row

Did all of these experiments fit neatly into my mindset at the time I tried them? Heck no!

You try walking into a Scientology center without your mind generating a slew of objections. You try showing up at Disneyland with the expectation that you’re going to spend a full month of your life there. You try pulling out your credit card to reserve a meeting room on the Vegas Strip for a 3-day workshop when you’ve never done one before. Of course your mind is going to object when you step outside its boundaries!

I revel in these kinds of experiments though because they keep destroying the walls of old mindset boxes that no longer serve me. Sometimes even a good mindset that generates pleasing results for a while can feel limiting after a while. Maybe you start feeling bored and listless. That’s a good time to mix things up by violating your current mindset with some objectionable behaviors.

One of my next mindset box violations that I want to attempt this year is to write a novel. I’ve never written a novel before, so of course my mind objects to that idea. I have written millions of words of published content, including my nonfiction book Personal Development for Smart People, but fiction feels like a different beast entirely.

So of course my current mindset objects to this idea. What if I write a novel and it absolutely sucks? What if everyone trashes it as the worst piece of crap they’ve ever read? What if it takes way longer than I expect? What if I can’t get the story to converge on a decent ending? Yada yada yada.

When I see objections like that, to me that’s a damned good reason to take action and try out the new behavior. If my old mindset objects so much, then its walls must be feeling vulnerable. Just making the attempt could lead me to some fresh mindset territory. Regardless of how the novel turns out, the path of exploring fiction will be an expansive one.

Probe the limitations of your current mindset. Look for behaviors that your current mindset says you can’t possibly do. Then explore those behaviors anyway. Smash the walls of your old mindset box, and you’ll surely discover more empowering mindsets and behaviors. And don’t stop. Keep smashing!

The key benefit here is that when you violate a limiting mindset, you gain access to new results. Do you want better results, or would you prefer to continue wallowing in freakish misery?

I don’t have to deal with being broke anymore because I smashed down the walls that caused me to get stuck there. I spent most of my 20s behind those walls, but my 30s and 40s were free of them. Have you smashed the walls of brokeness yet? If not, then your current mindset probably sucks and needs to be smashed. So find a behavior that violates that mindset, and go test it for a month or two.

I don’t have to deal with a lack of affection in my life anymore. I smashed those walls too. So I get to enjoy a super affectionate wife who hugs, kisses, and cuddles me every day. Have you smashed the walls of emotional neediness yet? What behavior would violate the old mindset that isn’t getting the job done? Yup, that one!

If I didn’t explore beyond the mindset boxes that limited me, I’d probably still be dealing with crappy, unwanted results in many areas of life. Now whenever I don’t like my results, I have a method for getting past the “I’ve tried everything and none of it works” nonsense.

The best part is that it’s actually fun to do this kind of smashing, once you get used to it. Sometimes it’s fun just to see other people’s reactions. Sometimes it’s exciting thinking about how different life will be for a while. I really enjoyed the 30 days at Disneyland, for instance. Somehow I never got bored, and that experience pushed me to think bigger. I realized that Walt Disney got that whole monstrosity going by stepping into behaviors that made other people think he was crazy. I don’t think I’d have started Conscious Growth Club if I hadn’t done that Disney experiment.

I challenge you to violate a mindset box that limits you. Commit yourself to a course of action that the old mindset box tells you is out of bounds. If the old mindset isn’t generating the results you want anyway, throw that back in its face when it objects. Don’t blame yourself for the lack of results. Blame your old mindset.

When you do this often enough, you’ll start to trust the process more. I know it’s scary the first few times, but that fear is just one more mindset box to blow up. So many awesome results in life can be found on the other side of fear… the other side of worry… the other side of playing small.

Committing to the Stretch

Posted on 13/05/2020 by Boris Clair

One thing I love about blogging is that by writing about many aspects of personal growth, I improve and deepen my understanding of those aspects. Writing helps me glean fresh insights connect the dots in new ways.

This has been especially true of workshops and courses. Initially such projects felt daunting, but eventually I got the hang of them. Now a big part of my motivation for selecting such projects is the rich personal gains I’ll make in my ability to understand and apply the material.

The next major deep dive I want to create is a course on creative productivity called Amplify. I expect to start working on it this summer. Just knowing that this project is coming me up is making me extra observant of my daily habits and workflows. I’ve made a lot of tweaks and improvements to how I work this year as I seek to better understand how to flow through a variety of creative projects, large and small.

One frame that works especially well is committing to a project before you know how to complete it. It’s extremely limiting to only say yes to projects when you can already see the finish line. Where’s the fun in that? Where’s the growth and challenge?

When you demand that you’re going to have to teach something where you aren’t 100% certain about the outcome, that kind of commitment feels edgier. It keeps you on your toes, feeling awake and alert.

You don’t have to fake it. You don’t have to overextend yourself. You can challenge yourself to make a commitment at the edge of your comfort zone while still feeling confident that you can pull it off.

This kind of confidence goes beyond your belief in your own knowledge and skills. You have to stretch further into trusting reality, expecting that if you take on something bold and worthwhile, reality will back you up.

I’ve noticed that when I set well-aligned goals, reality meets me halfway. The goal has to include some kind of personal stretching though. It can’t be too easy. If reality thinks that I’m copping out and taking it easy, it won’t lend a hand. But if reality sees that I’m offering to stretch into the unknown, it just seems to love that kind of offer.

Sometimes I think that this is a big part of our collective life purpose here. We’re here to explore the unknown, and that requires stretching ourselves beyond the familiar and the comfortable. We have to push into the dark areas of life that we don’t 100% understand.

Life opens the floodgates of support when it detects a real commitment to exploring the unfamiliar and the uncomfortable. When we play it safe, however, life just yawns at us.

People often struggle to achieve easy and accessible goals. What they don’t often realize is that this is why they’re failing. They set their sights so low that life (and other people) mostly ignore them. And no fire burns within them for pursuing life’s low-hanging fruit. Stretch for the upper branches; don’t just hug the trunk.

Consider your biggest upcoming goal. Are you playing it safe by setting a small and easy goal? Are you playing it safe by keeping your options open and not really committing to it 100%? If you’re playing it safe at all, you know it, and life knows it. There’s no hiding. Life won’t reward you for playing small.

What’s the goal that scares you a bit? What’s the goal that stirs up some desire when you think about it, but you also think it could be too much? Where are the edgy goals?

Have you committed to the edginess? What would life say about that? How would you know what life thinks? Well, has it clearly indicated that it accepts your offer? Or does it seem to be ignoring you?

When you make a good offer to life, life responds. It demonstrates that your offer is accepted. When you get no response, make a stronger offer.

Your goals are offers to life. Life will respond well if it likes your offers. If life doesn’t respond, it doesn’t mean that you’re unworthy or that life doesn’t like you. It just means that life declined your offer.

It takes time to discover what types of offers life appreciates from you. So make a lot of offers. Learn what life accepts and what it ignores. The pattern I keep seeing is that life loves stretch offers backed by a clear willingness to commit.

More, Better, Different, Purpose

Posted on 08/05/2020 by Boris Clair

In his book Road to Purpose, Kenneth Behring shared how his life went through four phases.

The first phase was more – more money, more success, more friends, etc.

The second phase was better – a better home, better possessions, better vacations, etc.

The third phase was different – new experiences, new possessions, etc.

And the final phase was purpose – meaning, fulfillment, contribution, and making a difference in other people’s lives.

Behring claimed to have moved through these phases in linear order, but you have more flexible options here. You can shift among these four different types of growth throughout your life. You could be living a very purposeful life and still want to explore more, better, and different, for instance.

If you think about which type of growth most appeals to you now, which of these four would you pick? What feels most important to you? Where do you sense the greatest need or desire?

For me it would depend on when you ask me. This year I’m mainly focused on better. Lately I’ve been investing in creating better habits, developing better systems, and especially making Conscious Growth Club even better. My wife Rachelle has a similar focus. Afterwards we both agree that it would be nice to explore some different, especially when traveling becomes viable again.

When you have a primary desire or focus, do your best to avoid opportunity blindness to the other three modes of growth. Realize that different could lead to better. Purpose could lead to more. And so on.

If you get stuck trying to make progress with your preferred mode of self-development, try broadening your perspective, and consider the other three modes. One of them may hold the key to releasing that stuckness.

Pushing Yourself

Posted on 04/05/2020 by Boris Clair

This morning I went for my usual run, starting before dawn. Lately I’ve been going for 45-50 minutes. This time, however, I was listening to the audiobook Can’t Hurt Me by David Goggins. After hearing the part about his 100-mile run and how he had to push himself to get through it, I felt like I should push myself more as well. So I kept running for an hour, then 75 minutes, and finally decided to stop at 93 minutes.

This was hill running since my neighborhood is very hilly, so almost all the running I do nearby is either uphill or downhill.

Normally after a morning run, I feel pretty good. It gives me a sense of accomplishment early in the day and gets me off to a good start. I see a strong link between focus and productivity and cardio exercise. No matter how much I’ve experimented with other types of exercise, nothing takes the place of cardio in terms of the mental and emotional benefits.

This morning instead of feeling a modest sense of accomplishment, it felt way better to run twice as far as I normally would. I’ve done many 90-minute runs before, but not lately and not this year. It felt so nice to stretch beyond what I’m used to. It wasn’t physically difficult, but I had to nudge myself mentally to go beyond what feels normal to me now. Running for 45 minutes feels pretty routine. Running 90 minutes feels different though, somehow beyond normal. It makes the whole day feel special.

There’s something magical about pushing beyond normal, going outside of the usual zone of comfort. The barrier is usually mental or emotional. Even if it’s a physical challenge, the mind wants to stop before the body needs to.

This got me thinking about other areas of life where I’ve had to stretch myself mentally in order to improve my results. I remember when making an extra $1K seemed like a big deal. Then I eventually reached the point where $1K seemed easy, and I projected those earlier limitations onto $10K. Then I stretched that limit to $50K, and eventually $50K felt easy to earn, like in a week or a month. Now $100K feels easy and seems like a modest amount. And $250K is starting to feel like it’s probably not that hard to earn in one chunk. I just need to be a bit more creative. Earning $500K in a week or so is starting to look like it might be even more fun. It seems within the realm of reach, not inaccessible but a bit more of a stretch to get there.

What I like about financial stretching, as I shared in yesterday’s post on overcoming financial pressure, is that it’s very measurable, and the mind has different associations to different amounts of money. The way you feel about $10K won’t be the same as you feel about $100K or $1M. Some amounts will seem small. Others will seem big. But those judgments have nothing to do with the actual sums; they just expose the limitations and blocks of the mind.

The fun part that leads to breakthroughs starts with deciding to do something financially that’s on the other side of a mental block. Take a clear goal like earning $100K in a week. How does your mind classify that? Is it accessible and doable for you? Is it trivially easy for you? Or is it on the other side of a mental barrier that says it’s inaccessible, out of reach, or unrealistic to even think about?

If you don’t push through your mental barriers and challenge them, they become real for you. Your life becomes boxed in because you don’t push beyond the walls of the box.

To keep progressing in any area of life, we have to stretch the mind first. We have to decide to do something that seems like it’s too much, too far, or too out of reach. The mind will initially resist, but the resistance can be overcome.

Many aspects of my life that feel normal used to feel out of reach. Getting up at 5am daily was one of those. I struggled with that habit for a long time, but the main barrier was mindset. Initially I framed it as something hard to do, something barely accessible for me. But when I just decided to absolutely do it no matter what, the resistance crumbled. Now it’s easy. If the decision is made to get up at 5am daily, it’s a done deal. A long time ago, I broke the part of my mind that said I couldn’t become an early riser by proving it wrong till it finally surrendered.

I used a similar approach to figure out how to make a living without getting a job. The key was to decide not to get one and to figure out some other path. One the decision was made, there was no looking back and no second-guessing. Now I’ve gone almost three decades without a job. And the 2006 article 10 Reasons You Should Never Get a Job has inspired countless other people to discover that they too can do just fine without ever having to get a job (unless they really want one).

I feel like I enter a different zone of being when I push myself. Doing what’s expected and satisfying my own expectations feels good, but it’s nowhere near as satisfying as going beyond my comfort zone and stretching.

What limits are holding you back right now? What would you like to experience or achieve, but your mind tells you that’s out of reach? Prove your mind wrong. Go pursue the goal that’s out of reach. Decide that you’ll find a way.

Here’s a personal challenge for you: Do something within the next 24 hours that breaks one of your mental barriers. Find a way to push yourself, and notice how satisfying that feels.

How to Overcome Financial Pressure

Posted on 03/05/2020 by Boris Clair

We just wrapped up the 2020 launch of Conscious Growth Club, and our next opening will be in April 2021. The launch did very well. We have 87 members enrolled in our next CGC year together. Financially this was our second six-figure launch of the year, the previous one being for the Stature course in January.

I received some feedback from people who really wanted to join CGC this year (some of them waiting months to sign up) but couldn’t do it because of financial challenges, especially related to the virus. Some had been recently laid off. Others have been reporting a business slowdown. Others are uncertain about the economy and want to conserve cash. All of this is totally understandable, and I’d never pressure anyone to join CGC if it would mean overextending themselves financially.

I spent most of my 20s broke and in debt and went through a bankruptcy in 1999. Financial stress was a big issue for me back then. So let me share some insights on how to reframe financial pressure, so it doesn’t keep haunting you and stressing you out for the rest of your days.

Framing Financial Pressure

How do you frame the presence of financial pressure, such as bills or expenses you’re not sure you can cover?

One way is to see such pressure as an annoyance. Maybe it’s something that pushes your buttons emotionally. But if you see it as something that irritates or bothers you, you’ll probably try to avoid dealing with it. Since this framing doesn’t help you resolve the source of the pressure, the pressure just continues.

The annoyance framing often leads to escapism. Many people try to retreat into using the law of attraction to fix their money problems, but that doesn’t usually work when the underlying relationship with financial pressure is rooted in annoyance.

Another option is to escalate it into a threat. Sometimes this will happen as an extension of framing financial pressure as an annoyance. If you avoid dealing with financial problems, they can multiply, and eventually the pressure becomes great enough that some part of your livelihood feels like it’s under threat. Maybe you’re at risk of losing your home, for instance.

Beyond that, you could try surrendering, which can grant some temporary relief emotionally, but by itself this doesn’t resolve the financial pressure either. You may feel a bit better, but you could still lose your home.

There’s also the obligation framing. I think this is mostly the annoyance framing in disguise. You may see financial pressure as a part of life where you just have to suck it up and deal with what arises. It’s not pretty, so just grit your teeth and handle it. But this framing tends to result in punting the problems to the future. You’ll do the minimum necessary to handle the immediate pressure, but it will just keep coming back for another round.

A Framing That Works

A framing that worked very well for me was to see financial pressure as an invitation. I imagine that reality is trying to help me train up my character in a positive way. The existence of financial pressure is an important part of the character training.

Imagine hiring a personal trainer to help you improve your fitness, and then framing your workouts as annoying, threatening, or obligatory. Are these really the best frames to use? How would your trainer feel about that?

It would make more sense to reconnect with the purpose for hiring the trainer and then connect with that purpose-driven frame as the reason for doing your workouts. This would establish a better relationship with your trainer as well, one based on mutual respect.

Do you respect the trainer that is financial pressure? Do you frame its presence as purposeful? Or do you treat it disrespectfully, like it’s some kind of scourge?

Having a strong purpose is a good motivator. Seeing the greater purpose behind a challenge makes the challenge feel more engaging and less stressful.

Be Trainable

When I was in my 20s, I wasn’t very trainable. I was most uncooperative when financial pressure made its presence known. I rejected its offer again and again, repeatedly slamming the door in its face. I kept trying to run from it and find respite. If only I could somehow make enough money, then it would stop chasing me.

Because of my framing, I believed that the solution to my problems was to make more money. But this is like saying that the best way to avoid doing difficult workouts is more fitness. If only you could become fit enough, then you wouldn’t have to workout anymore, and you’d no longer have to deal with that annoying personal trainer. So forget the trainer and just become more fit. Then you can ditch the trainer. Yeah, that makes sense. 😕

That sounds pretty silly when we look at it this way, right? Can you also recognize just equally silly it is to imagine that more money is the solution to financial pressure?

Embracing your financial pressure and respecting its purpose in your life is the solution. Say yes to the training invitation.

Do Your Financial Workouts

Just as I learned to accept and embrace the importance of physical exercise, I learned to embrace the importance of doing financial workouts too.

And just as it’s helpful to find exercise that you’ll like, it’s also helpful to discover the financial workouts you like. You have many options.

A financial workout could mean getting all of your accounting in good order. That’s pretty basic, but if that’s all you do, it will probably get a bit boring. There are people, however, who like this kind of financial workout, including updating their accounts daily. I’m happy to do these kinds of workouts monthly or quarterly though.

The financial workouts I enjoy most include exploring and testing creative and purposeful ways to generate income while serving others and enjoying the process. So they’re compound workouts that hit a lot of muscle groups.

I started small and worked my way into bigger workouts, just like you might do with physical training.

In the mid-1990s, I started learning how to generate income without having a job – badly at first and eventually with some modest degree of competence. I remember launching a computer game in 1999 that sold 50 copies at $10 each in its first month, so $500. The next month it did $1000… and $1500 the month after that. That was an exciting experience. But the real workout was to stretch my creative skills to design and code a game that could generate that result. Then I had to stretch myself to promote it widely.

I didn’t really frame it quite like this at the time, but looking back I realize that I kept giving myself interesting progressive training challenges with respect to money. I kept doing financial workouts of one kind or another. And the more I did that, the more my finances improved.

If you want to survive in business, then of course you have to find ways to generate income. But I think it’s especially helpful to frame these activities as financial workouts.

Doing your financial workouts is an intelligent way to deal with financial pressure. Build up your financial skills, so you can face that pressure from strength. And don’t get complacent.

Slacking Off

Just as we can slack off of exercise, we can also slack off from doing our financial workouts. I fell into that trap too. I could say I was focused on other parts of life, which was true, but I also let myself stagnate in the area of finances for some years. I kept doing token financial workouts (like affiliate deals) that were easy for me, but I wasn’t progressing.

What got me back in the game was to discover financial workouts that looked fun and engaging again. Just trying to make more money doesn’t cut it for me. I find that rather boring.

But if the constraints for a financial workout are just right, then it appeals to me, perhaps even excites me. If the workout looks fun and rewarding, then I’m much more drawn to do it. But if I only see boring workouts being accessible, then I’ll slack off.

And of course where do we find those interesting workouts? We find them outside of our comfort zones. We find them where we don’t dare to look.

Embrace the Training

Training is challenging, whether physical or financial. Don’t expect it to be otherwise if you’re doing it right.

Good training takes us outside of our comfort zones. When we become too comfortable, that’s when we need to mix things up and reintroduce novel forms of challenge.

Daily blogging is a form of training for me. I’ve never blogged every single day for a year, but I’m doing it this year. It’s not always easy, but I like what it’s doing for my character. It’s helping me become more focused, disciplined, and organized. My life and work have much better structure this year than last year.

For my financial workouts, I like doing creative launches. I love to use my creativity, resourcefulness, playfulness, and personal growth experience to create value for people. Then I like to combine that with making honest and ethical offers. This combo is challenging. It stretches me to train in areas that are weaknesses for me, such as advertising. But I like seeing myself continuing to get stronger. This last launch went very smoothly, and I’m seeing the benefits of my skills improving from doing the training – while also spotting more areas where I’d like to train harder.

The money isn’t the reward. That’s like saying that the reward is being able to lift a certain amount of weight. Money is just a number, and the weight is just a hunk of metal. Making more money isn’t the point at all.

The point is to train up your character to grow stronger.

When you use this framing, you won’t have to see financial pressure as your enemy. Allow it to be your friend instead. It’s an invitation to grow stronger.

You have many options for how you train. It matters more that you exercise than what kind of exercise you do, as long as you’re challenged and you’re growing and improving from the training effect.

If, however, you disrespect this invitation, reality isn’t going to reward you for that. The financial pressure will just keep haunting you year after year until you respect and accept its invitation.

Believe it or not, I actually like financial pressure these days. It’s fun. It’s like the invitation to lace up my running shoes and hit the road for a delightful pre-dawn run of a few miles. I used to majorly dislike financial pressure, but since that mindset didn’t work, I opted to befriend the pressure instead. That does work – very well in fact.

Just as there’s such as thing as runner’s high, it’s also fun to experience a high from financial workouts. Having a six-figure week is fun and stimulating. It’s so not about the money though, just as weight training isn’t about the weights. It’s about the experience and the training effect. It’s about being present to the challenge.

Financial pressure is not a demon, so don’t demonize it. If you do that, you’ll just stress yourself out. The trainer isn’t your enemy. Make the trainer of financial pressure your friend instead. Accept the invitation to push yourself. Find the financial workouts that appeal to you, and do them. Keep upping the challenge, so you don’t remain stuck in your comfort zone.

Most importantly, don’t train with the goal of making more money. Train with the goal of strengthening your character. Choose financial workouts that with this in mind, and you’ll make better choices. Otherwise you may try to find shortcuts to circumvent the training, equivalent to lifting heavier weights by using a forklift, which would defeat the purpose.

I chose to develop and launch courses as well as CGC not because these were convenient shortcuts to greater financial abundance but because they’re hard workouts. These projects challenge me deeply. They cause me to spend a lot of time training outside of my comfort zone. And I like the results of that. They’re great workouts for my character.

Making more money isn’t the real progression here. The progression is to transform yourself from a person who tries in vain to stay in your comfort zone into a person who embraces the growth benefits of uncomfortable challenges.

Being Too Quiet

Posted on 25/04/2020 by Boris Clair

When I was younger, I was conditioned to yield to authority. Go to school. Go to church. Obey the parents.

One of the most common commands was: Be quiet. Hush. Pipe down. Silence is a virtue. Children should be seen and not heard.

So I learned to stay quiet – about problems, about desires, about feelings. I developed a rich inner world, but supposedly it wasn’t meant to be shared. My thoughts were to be kept mostly to myself.

On the positive side, that made me more self-reliant. But it also ensured that I didn’t get to experience what I wanted, as the wants and the communication both got suppressed under a blanket of silence.

It took a long time to learn that it was okay to communicate about needs, desires, and feelings. As I got older, I found people encouraging me to open up and share more, such as friends in college. That was difficult to do though. I wasn’t used to it. When people wanted to know more about me, it felt like they were shining a burning spotlight into my soul. I couldn’t go there, so I shared various masks instead. I kept people at a safe distance.

But this left me stuck inside my own thought bubble with no way to break free from it. Because I couldn’t talk about what I felt, needed, and wanted, no one could help me make improvements. Even if people offered support, it was misguided because they didn’t really know what I wanted. They had to guess, and their guesses were wrong.

As I began making a long-term investment in personal development, I read lots of books and listened to many audio programs. I liked it when other people share their stories, goals, ambitions, mistakes, and feelings. Every now and then, I’d come across something that struck me as really honest and authentic. And I silently thought to myself, I could never do that.

What probably helped me shift the most was meeting people who were unconditionally accepting of other people’s wants, needs, and feelings. Around such people I felt like I could open up a little more. I sensed that I could trust them, even though I wasn’t sure why. I just naturally found myself sharing more honestly with them. It would feel off if I wore my masks around them too often. I was surprised when they didn’t judge me for my candor. They actually seemed to like and appreciate hearing the real truth and going deeper than the surface masks. It took a while for me to warm up to that since it was outside of my comfort zone.

There was a long progression with many steps forward and backward, like an awkward dance, but eventually I felt more comfortable sharing more of my inner world with people. I could talk about desires, problems, and feelings openly. I didn’t always feel drawn to do that, but I didn’t feel particularly blocked in doing so either.

And that’s mainly because I got to see the positive shifts in others when I did so. I made more authentic friends this way. But I was also able to experience more of what I wanted.

By saying, “I want to kiss you” instead of keeping silent, I kissed more.

By saying, “I have this frustrating tech problem,” I solved more tech problems.

By saying, “I feel so blah today,” I understood and shifted my feelings more easily, and my default state gradually became happier.

Initially my timing was off though. I was too hesitant to open up when the timing was right because the intensity was too great. But by waiting for the intensity to come down, I was late in expressing myself. I realized how lame I was being when I kept missing opportunities because of that tendency to hesitate.

For a while I got results like these:

Me: I kinda wanted to kiss you last night.

Her: I wish you’d said something. I would have gladly kissed you back.

Me: D’oh!

Me: Last month I had this frustrating tech problem that was a real mess, but I finally got it figured out.

Her: Oh… why didn’t you tell me about that when we last spoke? I had the same problem before, and I could have shown you how to fix it in two seconds.

Me: D’oh!

Me: I was feeling so blah yesterday.

Her: I could tell. I was thinking of offering you a nice head scratching, but it looked like you wanted some space.

Me: D’oh!

Why do we do this to ourselves?

Sharing late is at least better than not sharing. When you see how many opportunities you’re missing due to silence, it’s good motivation to be more courageous and speak up sooner.

Silence can be a virtue, but keeping quiet can be really problematic if you overdo it. How can you tell the difference?

Is the silence peaceful? Does it feel good to remain silent? If so, then enjoy the silience.

Is the silence stress-inducing? Are your thoughts and feelings churning over unresolved issues? If so, then speak up. Get that energy flowing outwardly. Don’t just keep it bottled up inside.

Also be careful not to merely vent sideways. Venting sideways would be doing the equivalent of this:

Me: I wanted to kiss her last night, but I couldn’t bring myself to go there.

Him: I saw the two of you together, and I’m pretty sure she would have liked it if you did.

Me: D’oh!

This is telling the wrong person. When you do this sort of thing, you’re channeling the energy sideways, which isn’t in the direction of resolution. It’s a sneakier form of staying silent. You may think you’re speaking up, but are you?

Sharing needs, desires, and feelings isn’t easy, especially if you were raised to keep quiet about them. It will feel edgy to lean towards opening up, and it will feel uncomfortable to trust that it’s okay to do this. You’ll catch yourself sharing masks repeatedly. And that’s okay. It’s a growth process. It takes time to peel the onion of silence, to find the true voice within, and to overcome expressive scarcity.

WellnessMaster

Get The Latest News on Holistic Wellness

Tag Archives: Abundance