Tag Archives: Creating Reality

Fragile vs Resilient Relationships

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My relationship with Rachelle is very anti-fragile. Even when one or both of us is at our worst or when there’s a lot of turmoil going on around us, there’s little risk to our relationship. We can say or do the stupidest things, and we still stick like glue.

We have plenty of freedom to express different aspects of our personalities, to explore different values, and to make significant career or lifestyle changes, and we can still stick together through it all. It’s hard to find a vulnerable edge of our relationship where one of us might want to cross a hard line for the other person.

This was true of our relationship from the beginning. When I look back on how we first connected, I don’t see a delicate risk that it wouldn’t have worked out if one of us had said or done the wrong thing at the wrong time. It felt like there were more paths where we were going to connect deeply than paths that could deflect that from happening, like we were just meant to be in each other’s lives. I think that if we didn’t connect the way we did, we just would have connected some other way at some other time. Once we got into each other’s spheres, it was only a matter of time before we got into a romantic relationship together.

I have friendships and professional relationships like this too. They were anti-fragile in the beginning and afterwards. They formed with some sense of inevitability, and it would take a huge amount of force to break them afterwards. They aren’t so delicate as to be vulnerable to either person wanting to disconnect regardless of what happens.

I suppose a relationship could have a fragile beginning and become less fragile as it grows, but my experience is that anti-fragile relationships tend to be that way from the get-go.

Resilient Relationship Properties

High compatibility is one property that makes for a resilient relationship. If the compatibility is weaker, it makes for a more vulnerable relationship. A strong alignment of deeply held values that aren’t likely to change can help a relationship stick.

Another factor is the ability to give people the benefit of the doubt. People who lean towards a negative framing of someone’s motives are more likely to have fragile relationships. They’ll find more ways to be disappointed. They’ll assign more negative meanings to events, thereby creating more reasons to leave.

People who appreciate resilient relationships often find another person’s recurring suspicion and distrust tiresome. Such a relationship isn’t such a good long-term investment because it’s probably going to break sooner or later.

Perhaps the most important factor is a capacity for forgiveness. People make mistakes. They step on each other’s toes. They say the wrong things in. the wrong ways at the wrong times.

If you can’t forgive, you won’t likely last long in a rich and meaningful relationship. It’s only a matter of time before the other person screws up in your view, and now you’re bolting because you’ve assigned an unforgivable meaning to that event. What if you could have forgiven the transgression though? Some relationships are worth keeping. Is that issue a valid reason to dump the whole relationship? Could a more forgiving person find good reasons to maintain the relationship?

Rachelle and I both make mistakes, and we’re quick to forgive each other and to give each other the benefit of the doubt. Assigning meaning to events is often ambiguous, and it’s really nice to be in a relationship with someone who defaults to seeing your intentions as being good, caring, intelligent, etc.

It can be good to apologize when you feel you made a mistake, but the capacity to forgive is more important. If you and the other person are good at apologizing, but if even one of you can’t forgive, the relationship won’t endure. You could both be bad at apologizing, however, but if you’re both good at forgiving, your relationship will be more resilient and can endure.

I don’t feel much need for apologies from other people; for me they’re on the “nice to have” list but definitely not essential. Sometimes people apologize to me when I didn’t feel they ever hurt me in the first place. And people have apologized to me years later for events I’d forgotten and imagined transgressions I’d never perceived as such. Has that ever happened to you?

Working on my ability to forgive, by contrast, has been valuable. I used to struggle with that in the past, often holding onto hurt feelings which could slide towards anger, resentment, or the desire for vengeance. Then I read that forgiveness isn’t a gift to the other person – it’s something we do for ourselves. That gave me an important mindset shift. I forgive because it’s good for me, and it’s good for my relationships. These days I see forgiveness as a way of processing stuck energy and moving it through my body and back out into the universe.

Another factor that shows up in my relationships is the ability to trust the person’s ability to grow. This is a failsafe that can preserve many relationships. If a big problem arises, can you trust the other person’s ability to grow and change? Could you also trust your own ability to grow and change? Can you see the potential for this growth and change to make your relationship stronger and more resilient over time?

Since I regularly work with growth-oriented people, I’ve seen some amazing changes in people over the years. I’ve also seen big changes in myself. So I have a deep trust in people’s ability to grow. And in fact, just knowing that someone is growth-oriented helps me trust them more.

Honoring Fragile Relationships

If you invest in a fragile relationship and it breaks, there can be some sadness and grief over that. But if the relationship was indeed lacking in the qualities necessary for long-term resilience, you could say that it would have broken sooner or later. If one final straw incident is what it takes to crack the relationship, it was too fragile to endure.

When a fragile relationship ends, try not to beat yourself up about it. Instead, honor the relationship by acknowledging what you learned from it. It had its time, and now it must move aside to make room for other relationships to come into your life.

Also consider the nature of the fragility that led the relationship to break. Where was the connection lacking resilience? This can help point you towards more resilient relationships.

Fragile relationships may be temporary, but they can still be deeply meaningful. When such a relationship comes to a close, whether or not it’s of your choosing, it’s good to reflect on it and acknowledge what it means to you. What you can appreciate about it?

Investing in Resilience

What does a resilient relationship look like for you?

Here are some qualities I’ve noticed about mine.

One critical quality is laughter. Laughter helps us bond and serves as a pressure release valve. It strengthens the capacity to forgive. It helps us focus on our commonalities instead of our differences. It gets us off our high horses and brings us down to earth. A relationship with a high capacity for laughter is more resilient. When the laughter evaporates, the relationship becomes a lot more fragile.

Another essential quality is play. See the Core of Play article for more details on that. When a relationship loses its core of play, its fragility increases. Play goes hand-in-hand with giving someone the benefit of the doubt. People can make the most ludicrous moves in life sometimes, but if you can frame their actions through the lens of play, you can forgive easily and avoid unnecessary hurt and resentment, if only by recognizing that in any game, people tend to pursue their own self-interests, and there is no need to hold that against them.

A resilient relationship gives people space to learn, grow, and reinvent themselves. If your relationship frames you or the other person into a corner, it will be more fragile. If your framing gives you and your partner some room to roam and explore, there’s less chance of running into a final straw moment that breaks the connection.

A common reason that people reject me and run, even after years of reading my blog, is that they’ve framed me into a corner of their minds. They’ve built a false image of me that doesn’t give me room to actually be myself. So when I inevitability violate their expectations (which were unreasonable to begin with), the relationship cracks on their end. Sometimes they’ll blame me for violating the false image they built, as if I was even aware that I was supposed to follow those rules.

Yet there are readers of my blog who’ve been with me since the first year or two, and nothing I’ve shared since them has caused them to bolt. Their image of me gives me space to be the explorer I am without their having to “ring the bell” and quit on me whenever I get into something new.

Fragility Testing

Some people who have a lot of relationship experience will deliberately test other people to see how resilient or fragile the connection is likely to be. This can occur at any time during a relationship, but it’s especially common at the beginning.

It’s like indirectly asking: What will it take for you to quit on me?

Personally I’m not into this as a deliberate practice because I find that this sort of testing will happen on its own. When I connect with someone new, it will be relatively easy for them to discover a reason to reject me early on. I’m open enough about my life that fragile connections tend to come to light early.

I actually like it, however, when someone does this kind of testing on me. It tells me they’re probing for fragility, and I actually see that as a respectful thing to do. It helps me them figure out whether to invest more in the relationship or if it will hit one of their fragile edges.

Even so, fragility testing won’t identify all of the potential points of fragility. How can it? Could you devise a thorough disclaimer for all the reasons someone may find to reject you and share that upfront? You’d have to identify all possible explorations you haven’t done yet (but might someday), decisions you haven’t faced (but might someday), changes you might experience, etc. So that’s an impossible task, and this means that despite all of your best efforts, you will encounter some fragile relationships, and they may not reveal their fragility right at the beginning.

Beautiful Fragility and Beautiful Resilience

Looking back with the benefit of hindsight, I can see the fragility in my first marriage was there from the beginning. I can see how easy it would have been to knock it off track in the first few weeks or months by making slightly different choices. There were forces pulling us in different directions that we had to overcome. There were near-breakups in the first few years.

Even though we stayed together for 15 years, that fragility was always present, and we had to keep avoiding the fragile edges to preserve the relationship that long… until we were no longer willing to do so because we needed to grow beyond those edges.

In my heart I honor and appreciate that relationship. Despite its fragility, it was a good relationship for us both. We learned and grew a lot together. But there’s also this feeling that breaking up was inevitable. It was just a matter of time. There’s no regret or blame about how we might have done things differently. There’s beauty in fragility.

There’s also beauty in resilience. I love the spaciousness and freedom of resilient relationships. I love the mutual trust. I love the long-term investment potential. I love the flexibility. I love how such relationships stretch and bend yet don’t break. I love feeling deeply accepted as I am.

Human relationships can be fragile or resilient. By accepting this instead of resisting it, it helps me regard my relationship with life as always resilient – by choice.

Life always maintains a resilient relationship with me on its end. It always forgives me. It always invites me to play. It always gives me the benefit of the doubt. It always unconditionally accepts me as I am.

By recognizing that this relationship is always anti-fragile on life’s side, I must acknowledge that any fragility in this relationship isn’t coming from life or from other people. It can only be coming from me.

And that reminds me that fragility is a choice.

We always have the option to tread cautiously around other people to avoid running into any fragile edges. Or we can live more like free spirits and be fully ourselves, smashing those fragile edges to smithereens whenever we encounter them. What’s left when all the fragile edges break? What’s left are powerfully resilient relationships with people and with life – the kind that we couldn’t break even if we tried.

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Ass-Kicking Frames

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Here’s a really simple idea that can be useful for self-motivation.

Sometimes our frames are too flabby, giving us lots of leeway to drop the ball and slack off. In such cases it may be useful to adopt harsher frames, at least temporarily, to demand more from ourselves.

Here are some of these ass-kicking frames to consider:

  • Worrying = dumb
  • Quitting = dishonorable
  • Sleeping past 5am = loser
  • Not asking for the date = spineless
  • Clinging to a partial match = creepy
  • Tolerating Trump supporters = suffering fools

I think such frames are best when linked closely to actions and behaviors, not to more complex results like income. They can be helpful when facing quick do or don’t decisions, like: Get up now, or sleep in late.

Imagine your alarm going off in the morning, and you’re tempted to sleep in. Then an inner voice kicks in and exclaims: Sleeping in is for losers! Get your ass up now!

Or suppose you catch yourself worrying about something you can’t control, and you remind yourself: Worrying is a stupid waste of energy!

While I’m not suggesting that you beat yourself up here, I do think there’s room for using such frames judiciously without risking damage to your self esteem.

Challenging yourself in this way can actually be fun and motivating. I know it’s not for everyone, but for some people it helps. It’s a tool – use it if you like it. Try it if you think it has promise.

You can even connect this practice with memorable movie lines if you like, such as these:

  • On your feet, soldier! – The Terminator
  • Get your ass to Mars! – Total Recall
  • I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I’m all out of bubblegum. – They Live
  • Pain don’t hurt. – Roadhouse
  • I feel the need, the need for speed. – Top Gun
  • I know kung fu. – The Matrix
  • You can’t handle the truth! – A Few Good Men
  • Freedom! – Braveheart
  • I pity the fool. – Rocky III
  • Wake up, time to die. – Blade Runner
  • Game over, man! – Aliens
  • I have had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane! – I hope you can guess this one. 😉

Even if the words of a line don’t quite fit your situation, that isn’t important. The emotion of the frame is what matters. “Get your ass to Mars!” may not fit your context, but if you remember the movie, you may remember the urgency of the line, right before bullets start flying. The emotion of this frame may be more effective than a more rational frame but emotionally flabby frame that makes it easy to slack off or quit on yourself.

There are so many good framing lines just in the movie The Princess Bride:

  • Inconceivable!
  • Death first!
  • I can cope with torture.
  • As you wish.
  • We are men of action. Lies do not become us.
  • Humiliations galore!
  • Have fun storming the castle!
  • It would take a miracle.
  • Life is pain.
  • Get used to disappointment.
  • To the pain!
  • Morons.

If you remember how the characters said these lines, you can summon some fun and engaging emotions that help you get into action. I especially love the “I can cope with torture” framing for facing unpleasant tasks. And I recently use the “Death first” line as a response when someone asked what it would take for me to eat something non-vegan. I wish I could use the “I am not left-handed” line from that movie too, but I actually am left-handed.

Are you kicking your own ass enough? If not, then stop using emotionally flabby frames, and get your ass to Mars!

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Your #1 Priority May Lead You Astray

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While it’s good to set goals and establish priorities, there’s a risk when you become myopically focused on a single outcome.

Single mindedness can be okay for a while if you’re progressing nicely, but if you’ve gotten stuck and the needle isn’t moving, this stuckness can prevent you from making progress in any area of life. And that can really make you feel trapped or stagnant.

Have you ever seen the following issues in yourself or someone else?

  • Still needing to lose weight being used as an excuse not to invest in social life or relationships
  • Long-term troubles with financial scarcity or chronic health problems postponing meaningful lifestyle improvements
  • Misaligned relationships delaying entrepreneurial pursuits
  • Still living with one’s parents being used a reason not to date

Have you ever told yourself that you really, really have to fix one particular area of life before you can properly improve another area of life?

I’ve definitely done that before. I did it when I was broke. I did in my first marriage. I did it when I was feeling out of alignment with my first business. I repeatedly fell into the trap of obsessing over areas of life that were stuck, and somehow that made the stuckness even worse.

Sometimes it’s really hard to make forward progress in your area of greatest stuckness, even when you make that area your #1 priority. Sometimes it just won’t budge no matter how much force and effort you apply.

This can be immensely disheartening and draining. In particular, I found it super draining to keep trying to fix my finances when I was broke. I only fixed this area by shifting my attention to different parts of life that eventually led to good solutions for that stuck area.

I see similar patterns in others who keep trying to force progress in an area that isn’t progressing.

What’s the solution?

Give up… at least for a while. Surrender that stuck area to stagnation. Go invest what little energy you have left in some other area of life that you’ve been neglecting.

You’ll probably be astonished at how quickly you can make progress in a different area of life that isn’t being choked by the same degree of stuckness.

Maybe your finances are terrible right now, but you might make serious progress in your health and fitness at this time. Or switch your focus to having fun for a week or two.

Maybe you’re stuck with health problems, but you could potentially make wonderful improvements in your social life if you give it more attention (at least online at this time). A richer and more aligned social life could actually help you become healthier.

Many people, including me, have found that it’s when we give up and go attend to some other aspect of life, we finally start progressing in our primary area too – often in ways we never would have predicted.

I’m not entirely sure why this is – it just works so damned well though.

We could use the Law of Attraction frame and say that shifting focus elevates your vibe, and that helps get the stuck energy flowing again. We could say it’s due to stress reduction or a confidence boost. We could say it’s due to freeing up mental resources and thereby restoring your problem solving abilities. We could say that there’s a social effect, where more people may notice that you’re not such a Debbie Downer anymore, and now they’re happier to connect with you and bring you aligned opportunities and invitations.

How we explain this isn’t what’s most important here – use whatever frame you like as long as it gets you moving in some other direction. Just try to be open-minded about the possibility for non-linear progress. Realize that there are multiple potential reasons why it may be wise to shift your focus away from your #1 priority for a while.

There’s a good chance you already sense this instinctively. Do you notice a subtle voice nudging you to shift focus away from your stuck area? Do you think there may be a part of you that knows that the path to a solution requires some lateral movement first?

I know it can be hard to rationally explain to other people why you should shift gears. It’s like owing money to a gangster. You can’t justify that the best way to pay them back is for you to take a break from focusing on your finances for a few weeks. You may feel like you’ll lose your kneecaps if you go that route.

Try not to create that type of relationship within yourself though. Realize that breaking away from your #1 priority may be an intelligent and rational choice, even if your inner gangster doesn’t trust that it will work. At some point you have to face the hard truth that you’re not progressing and that continuing down the same path isn’t magically going to start working in the next week or two.

I’ve stumbled upon some of the most amazing advancements on my path of personal growth from lateral exploration. Here are some examples:

  • Volunteering in a nonprofit association helped me learn what I needed to make my first business profitable.
  • Going to Disneyland for 30 days in a row helped spawn the idea for Conscious Growth Club.
  • Attending a Hay House conference (mostly on spiritual topics) helped me change careers from game development to personal development.
  • Blogging about that same conference (but in a different year) led to a book deal and later speaking at that very same conference – twice.
  • Doing my first workshop led to meeting Rachelle, with whom I’ve shared a wonderful 10+ year relationship, including tons of travel adventures.
  • Doing a joint-venture business deal eventually led to an invitation to join the Transformational Leadership Council, which gave me dozens of growth-oriented friends along with more travel adventures.
  • Getting into international speaking led to some wonderful social and romantic experiences.

Getting stuck happens. Staying stuck is a choice.

Sometimes the energy doesn’t want to flow forward. Sometimes it wants to flow sideways. Maybe from a multidimensional perspective, sideways for you is actually forward in the grand scheme of life, the universe, and everything.

Recognize when the energy isn’t flowing in the direction you expect, and go look for where it does want to flow. Stop exhausting yourself with tiresome paddling, and find the current again.

Don’t be stubborn when you get stuck. Get back in tune with the possibility space. Stay humble, and remind yourself that you don’t know everything. Sometimes the fastest route forward is exactly where you don’t expect to find it.

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Imaginary Failure

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Confidence and certainty are often disconnected from accuracy. I’m sure you’ve seen plenty of cases where someone holds a belief that clearly isn’t true.

What you see so clearly in others in harder to see within yourself, however. For that reason it’s wise to identify, question, and test some of your assumptions to see if they’re actually true.

A good place to start is to consider what other people experience routinely that may seem to be difficult or impossible for you. This can help you identify some beliefs about yourself that may not be accurate.

For example, could you earn $100K in a week? For many people that’s no big deal. They could decide to do that for fun and make it happen. If you think it’s impossible for you, is that factually true? Or are you just placing unnecessary limits on yourself?

Could you eat vegan for a month and like it? If you never test it, you might be limiting yourself unnecessarily.

Could you attract an amazing relationship into your life right now? Or have you ruled that out because of the virus situation or some other limiting belief about yourself?

How would you know that you can’t make $100K in a week, love vegan food for a month, and attract an amazing relationship? You obviously would have had to have directly tried all of them – with intention and direct action. And your efforts would have needed to fail repeatedly, not in your mind but in reality.

So how many different ways did you actually try to earn $100K in a week with that as your goal? How many 30-day vegan trials have you done? How many verbal rejections have you racked up regarding your ongoing efforts at inviting an amazing relationship? Can you produce a long record of real failures? Let’s see it then!

And if those endeavors all ran into hard stops, what else did you attempt instead? Are you still running into hard stops, again and again. Or did you make the mistake with replacing them with imaginary soft stops?

Be very careful about placing limits on what’s possible for reality to deliver. It may very well honor your self-imposed limits.

What if you ditched those limits? What if you invited experiences that would violate those limits, just to see what would happen? What if you leaned into actions that directly oppose your old assumptions?

Maybe your assumptions are reasonably correct. If so, you’ll find out soon enough by testing them. Reality will knock you back down. You’ll run into a real obstacle that you can’t pass.

Make sure that this is what you’re actually doing. Let the obstacles you encounter be real ones. Deal with real problems that actually come up. Make reality say a hard no to your requests.

Don’t pre-make these decisions for reality. Don’t create imaginary obstacles and mistake them for real ones.

Fear isn’t a real obstacle. Impostor syndrome isn’t a real obstacle. Harsh criticism from your parents isn’t a real obstacle.

Run into real obstacles, and deal with real problems.

Honestly, when was the last time you ran into a real obstacle, a genuine hard stop from reality? How do you know that reality actually dealt you a hard stop? How do you know that it wasn’t just saying, “Not this way, try again some other way”?

When did you stop facing real failure by replacing it with imaginary failure?

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When Reality Declines Your Offer

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I made some offers to reality this year that it declined. My declined offers included planned trips to Portland, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Milwaukee, Chicago, and Costa Rica. If the original plans held up, Rachelle and I would be embarking on about 30 days of travel starting later this month, including two wonderful multi-day events with different groups of friends, lots of touristy activities, probably an Irish excursion, and our first time at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Additionally I intended to do an all new public workshop in Las Vegas in October, perhaps even a Halloween-overlapping one like we did in 2010. And we’d be doing more ayahuasca ceremonies with friends in the Fall as well.

In January we were set up for a very creative year with lots of fun travel and social experiences, just the level of stimulation we like.

But then reality looked at our beautiful plans and said, “Nope!”

Reality can do that of course. We co-create our lives with reality. We can set goals and make grand plans, but reality always gets a say. It may allow your plans to unfold. It may actively support and enhance your plans with extra cooperation. Or it may decline your plans altogether and throw you for a loop.

Our January trip to Panama happened as planned. It was exciting to see ships going through the Panama Canal for the first time. The bug bites were vicious, but that just adds to the shared memories. Then sometime in February, our awareness of the coronavirus situation grew, and I began to accept that this wasn’t going to be the kind of year I had planned. I realized that my travel plans were done for well before the event organizers officially canceled them, mainly because I dove into the details and saw early enough glimpses of what was happening and where it was heading.

So then we invested in what we had left – mainly on the work side. I finished recording the 65 lessons for the Stature course. We did our annual launch of Conscious Growth Club. And we continued with life without all the travel and socializing. This wasn’t a big deal through the end of April since the first four months of the year were intended to be a creative burst of activity with no planned travel in February, March, or April.

It’s also been many months since I’ve done an in-person meetup, and on top of that, the cozy coffee and juice bar where we used to host those meetups went out of business due to the virus situation.

I decided to invest some of this time in other areas of life, including making many improvements to my habits and systems. I basically doubled my running time each morning. I refined my diet. I lost weight. I completed many business and personal projects. I did more 30-day challenges. But lately I’ve been realizing that I failed to incorporate a good substitute for the missing energy that I connect with travel and social events – the excitement, the sense of adventure, the exploration, the freshness, the fun, the playfulness, etc. I’m spending too much time dwelling in the known and not enough time living in the mystery. Life has become too predictable, and I haven’t been including enough spontaneity.

One thing I love about my relationship with Rachelle is that we often go on spontaneous trips. Sometimes we leave the same day we get the idea, but usually within 24-48 hours. We’re good at making quick travel plans and just going. It’s a fun. part of our lifestyle. When we feel a surge of energy that wants to express itself this way, we like to give it expression. That’s creating some amazing memories. Somehow I don’t regret any of those impulsive trips, quite the opposite.

I realized this week that it’s time to set some fresh intentions to open up this area of flow. That stuck energy still needs to go somewhere, and I don’t feel the right outlet is present in my life right now. Eventually those outlets will come back, but I sense a lot of bottled up energy that needs a fresh approach. I’m just not sure what that will look like yet.

I discussed this with friends on some Zoom calls yesterday, and while there were many ideas floated like perhaps a camping trip, road trip, or rafting trip, none of them felt quite aligned to me. I’m also not interested in doing something that might risk other people’s lives during this time, so while I crave excitement, I’m not going to be reckless about it.

What’s fascinating to me is that just by acknowledging and discussing this problem, I feel that this energy is already starting to flow again, not into a direct solution yet, but it’s flowing into the possibility space in search of aligned ways it can manifest itself.

Just because the old offer was declined doesn’t mean the energy dissipates. It still wants to express itself somehow. Energy likes to move, not to remain stuck. So I like that this pressure build-up is seeing some movement again, like its request is always being answered, even before I’ve put the request into words.

Intention-wise, I might state it like this: I intend to receive aligned opportunities, invitations, and inspirations to safely reignite the spark of adventure in my life; to break away from the overly familiar; and to explore what feels fresh, new, and exciting again – for the highest good of all.

I accept that my old offer for expressing this energy is dead, but the energy behind the old intention remains very much alive, just suppressed. I don’t see an aligned solution yet, so at this point I’ll send this energy outward to seek opportunities, inspirations, and/or invitations that align with it. Then I’ll see what comes through.

The desire isn’t crisp yet in that I don’t know what form it will take, and that’s okay. I know that I can co-create the form with reality. Something will come through – an impulsive idea, a fascinating invitation, etc. I’ll recognize it by the excitement it stirs within me.

This isn’t the kind of problem I can solve purely at a mental level. It’s also not the kind of problem that other people are able to help me solve at that level. I’ve already received plenty of suggestions from friends about this, but none of them resonate on an emotional or energetic level so far. They all feel like “stuck in the head” ideas. It’s still good to unearth and process those ideas to get them out of the way and clear the slate, as if to move the misaligned energy aside. So now I’m holding out for the right energy signature – a solution that arrives with some excitement and which stirs something in me.

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Hills

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Since I live in a very hilly neighborhood, my morning runs are basically hill training. There are many routes I can run, but the main question for choosing a route is when to do the uphill and downhill portions.

If I do the uphill first, it’s harder starting out, but then the second half is a breeze, coasting downhill all the way home – often towards a beautiful sunrise.

If I do the downhill first, the first half hour is so nice and flowing, a lovely way to run on autopilot, but then I turn the corner and have a sweaty uphill climb to return home. During the summer months in Vegas, it’s typically 80-85º F (27-29º C) around 5am.

After many years of running these hills – I’ve lived in this neighborhood since 2007 – I realized that it doesn’t really matter when I do the hills. I could do them first or second, but either way I’ll still do them.

What matters is that I commit to the hills. If I don’t commit to the hills, I won’t run.

If I do the uphill first, this commitment needs to happen when I first start running. That’s a good approach for when I’m feel energetic and ready to face that hill early. I did that this morning, and it felt great to conquer the biggest nearby hill during the first half of my run, note the beautiful sunrise, and float downhill afterwards.

But when I’m not feeling as motivated, and I just want to start out a bit easier to build some momentum, I can do the downhill first. When I face the uphill portion 30 minutes later, I still have to do it to get home. So my next choice is this: I can run uphill while resisting the experience. I can run uphill while surrendering to the experience. Or I can run uphill while embracing the experience.

That’s the nature of an action commitment. Doing or not doing is already decided. You’re going to do it. You’ve committed your body to the task. You will take the action. That part is a done deal. Once I put on my running shoes, tackling some kind of hill is inevitable.

But there’s a second layer of commitment. Have you committed your mind too? If you grudgingly complete a task, I’d say you haven’t really committed your mind, so you’ll probably be fighting yourself internally – all the way up that hill.

Why tackle a hill each day? I could say there are some fitness benefits to running those hills, but I also like what these runs teach me about framing. The challenge reminds me to choose my mental commitment, not just my physical commitment. And this benefits me in other areas of life too.

There are plenty of unpleasant tasks in life, but if we’re going to physically do them anyway – sooner or later – doesn’t it make sense to mentally and emotionally commit to those tasks as well?

You could look upon your tasks with the attitude “yuck!” Or you could look upon them and say “yum!” Finding the yucky framing often happens by default, but it’s not the only framing you have available. Surely you could find a yummy framing if you look for it, and you only need one.

Where do you procrastinate on a task, but you still end up doing it anyway eventually? Maybe it’s doing your taxes. Maybe it’s dealing with a conflict at work. Maybe it’s handling a thorny relationship issue. What’s your hill of inevitability?

You could climb that hill now, or you could postpone and climb it later, but you will climb it eventually. You know it’s just a matter of time. And perhaps it doesn’t even matter that much when you finally do it – just that you eventually get it handled.

You can look up at that hill and hate it. You could look up at the hill and tolerate it. Or you could look up at the hill with some form of gratitude and appreciation. To do the latter takes practice – it’s a different level of commitment.

If you’re going to tackle that hill anyway eventually, why not get your mind right first, and truly commit to the experience, not just with action but also with attitude?

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Goal Traps

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The end of a calendar quarter and the start of a new one is a great time to set fresh goals for the next 90-days.

In Conscious Growth Club we go through a 5-step quarterly planning process each quarter, whereby our members review their recent progress and then set and share their goals for the coming quarter. As part of this process, I host a live Zoom call to review the goals that members have set and to highlight best practices and potential pitfalls. The intention is to help members set goals they’re more likely to achieve.

We just did one of those calls this morning. I find them motivating and inspiring because they unearth a lot of insights into how we set worthwhile goals and make real progress, one quarter at a time. It’s especially rewarding to watch members improving in this area each time they go through the process. Some have made impressive strides in the past year, getting a lot more clarity about what actually inspires them and what doesn’t. We pay a lot of attention to the relationship between goals and actual results, and that’s a big part of what we explore on these calls.

During these calls, I like to point out some best practices as well as traps to avoid. I thought a nice topic for today’s blog post would be to share some of those tricky traps to avoid, which can reduce the effectiveness of goal setting. This is really just scratching the surface because today’s call was 3 hours long, so we really go into a lot of depth in CGC, but I’ll aim to share some of the less obvious yet still important items instead of those you’ve likely encountered elsewhere.

Deferred Decisions

A goal is a decision and a commitment. Setting goals can be uncomfortable because you’re narrowing your options and tightening your focus, and it’s common to try to keep your options open by pretending to commit. A common way to water down your goals is by defining a goal as a decision to be made and thereby not really committing yourself.

A telltale sign that you’re doing this is your goal includes words like define, decide, identify, figure out, determine, research, etc. Your framing is that your goal is really to make a decision instead of to implement a decision. But if you don’t know what result you’re trying to achieve, you haven’t really set a goal yet.

It’s fine to research a decision if you really need to do that first. But is your research in service to an end result, or are you just waffling and delaying because you feel uncomfortable – and calling it research?

If people can set a goal to go to Mars and then do the research along the way, what’s your excuse for needing to do the research before you’ve committed to a result? Your destination can still be reasonably clear even before the research is done. That takes courage, so be courageous, decide, and commit.

I recommend making the decision when you do your goal setting. That’s part of what setting a goal is about. Make your choice then and there. Don’t punt your decision into the future, or you’ll end up doing that every quarter. Declare the results you intend to achieve before the quarter begins.

If you choose wrong, you’ll find out soon enough, and you can choose a different goal if it’s really that bad. Or keep the same goal, and plot a different course to it. But it’s usually better to start making progress towards one clear target that may not be the best choice, and then change course while you’re in motion, than to keep your target definition unclear to begin with.

Head-Based Goals

While it’s good to set goals that are rational and sensible, recognize that motivation is emotional in nature. You don’t actually have to pursue any goals for rational reasons. Logic alone can’t even say that your survival matters. So goals that are too head-based tend to be weak in terms of their motivational effect.

Head-based goals look great on a screen, and that’s usually where they’ll remain till you abandon them.

Goals need an emotional context to be motivating. It really helps if you associate a sense of meaning, purpose, character transformation, or story progression with your goals. Otherwise you’re likely to remain stuck in your head when you think about acting on a goal, running yourself in circles and not really progressing towards a worthwhile result.

Numbers goals are a common issue here, like making a certain amount of money or hitting a particular exercise target. If there’s no emotional context to the numbers, they may be demotivating instead of motivating. Some numbers may feel significant to you – perhaps earning $10K per month feel coolers than earning $8K per month – but often such goals are better defined from the heart side rather than the head side.

You can still hit your financial targets if you come at them from a story-based angle, and doing so will probably be more fun too. Picture Apple explaining what you can do on one of their new devices, putting the numbers in context and sharing why they matter: This speed means you can now edit 4K videos, and isn’t that super duper cool?

Remember the marketing campaign for the original iPod? Do you remember how much storage it had? What I remember is: 1000 songs in your pocket. Isn’t that a better context for the number than saying it has 5GB of storage?

It’s wise to do the same for your own numbers. Otherwise the numbers probably won’t give you a strong enough reason to care.

You can do this for exercise goals too. Running for 60 minutes each morning is nice, but I find it more meaningful to know that I can run a loop around the nearest casino and back home again because it’s a meaningfully bigger loop that I used to run. Or I can run to a particular park and say hi to a half dozen rabbits I’ll usually see there. Running to the rabbit park and back is a more emotional way to define a goal than running for an hour.

If you’re going to bother with numerical goals, make damned well sure to give them an emotionally meaningful context. That will significantly increase your likelihood of success.

Some processes of goal achievement are more heart-aligned than others too. Your destination may feel emotionally inspiring, but if the process to get there is dreadfully dull, you’ll likely have trouble with consistency.

The actual emotion linked to your goal isn’t that important, as long as it’s meaningful for you and gets your heart in the game. Some people love the energy of edgy or risky goals. Others prefer playful goals. And still others like linking their goals to social connections, so pursuing their goals involves deepening their relationships. What matters is that you feel something that stirs you to act. That something is emotional.

Splatter Goals

Usually people don’t do so well with splatter goals, where it looks like a random list created by throwing darts at a dartboard. Such lists might include a health goal, a social goal, a career goal, a financial goal, and a lifestyle goal. But they may not mesh well together or support each other. It looks like someone just picked a random token goal for each area of life.

Instead of trying to splatter your energy in multiple directions, consider a hub and spoke model for goal setting. Have one clear central goal for your quarter (the hub) and a few more related goals that support and enhance that hub goal. This is especially useful when you’re working towards a transition like a career, relationship, or lifestyle change.

Trying to make too many unrelated changes in a quarter will likely dilute your focus. But if you know there’s just one central goal to accomplish, and getting that done is the key result that matters to you, arrange your goals to keep your eyes on that prize. You know that your priority is to keep moving towards that goal each day. If that’s all you get done during the whole quarter, it will likely be a memorable and worthwhile quarter.

Suppose your hub goal is to quit your job and start a new business. Then your spoke goals may include doing setup projects for your new business idea, exercising daily to help burn off stress, wrapping up projects at your job, training your replacement, finding a mentor, etc. That can be a lot to pack into a quarter already, so it’s probably not helpful to pile on other goals like building your dating skills or learning a musical instrument. Just focus on the big transition. When that’s done then consider other goals.

The “Big System” Goal

One final problem I’ll share is when you set a goal to plan and implement your “big system” for radically upgrading some part of your life – usually your workflow, your finances, or your business processes.

People rarely succeed with this approach because it’s too much change all at once. Many won’t even be able to implement their systems for a day, let alone a week, a month, or longer.

While a calendar quarter may seem like a long time, it’s actually pretty short and can blow by faster than you expect. It’s so easy to bite off way too much, especially when it comes to habit changes, and those “big system” goals tend to disguise a lot of smaller changes that will likely take way longer than one more calendar quarter to effectively install.

Instead of trying to transform so many habits at once, pick just 2-3 small habits to change first, maybe even just one. Land a beachhead with a 5-minute or 10-minute change in your day. Do that for at least 30 days first. Once you get it established, and it feels like you don’t need much discipline to maintain the habit, then you can build it out more.

Otherwise if you’re trying to change many parts of your day to fit into some beautifully designed system, you’ll probably find that you never get any sort of implementation to stick. Training yourself to implement that whole system and to be consistent with it will probably take more than a year, so bite off small pieces each quarter, work them into habits, and only add more when you’re able to be strongly consistent with the few pieces you’ve added so far.

Realize that the game of life is long. A year or two isn’t so bad for making a long-term improvement that could serve you well for decades. It’s worth the time to build the foundation one piece at a time.

I hope you found these goal traps insightful. Setting well-formed goals is a skill that takes years of practice to develop proficiency, so please be patient with yourself. Keep practicing this skill one quarter at a time, and study the relationship between the goals you set and the actual results you experience, so you can keep improving year by year.

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Healing Circles

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As the coronavirus has moved into the homes of more people I know, I see a lot of fear energy being stirred up. People are frightened. Some are angry too, especially as they see others not taking the situation seriously or engaging in sociopathic anti-mask behavior.

I contrast this with what I see elsewhere from different groups of friends. They still get scared at first, but the process the fear energy and then frame the event more positively, often as a spiritual or personal challenge.

One positive way of dealing with such challenges is to engage in healing circles. Most are being done online these days. People who care about the person with the illness will hop on a Zoom call and send that person positive healing vibes. They hold the intention for the person to get well. They imagine the illness leaving the person’s body.

Whether you believe that healing vibes are real or not doesn’t actually matter. Look at this from a mental and emotional perspective rather than a spiritual perspective if you prefer. The person’s friends and family are reaching out to express their caring. They may even crack jokes and laugh to help raise the person’s spirits. This is known to be good for the immune system, and people with such support have higher recovery rates. So it’s still worth doing even if there are no actual vibes being transmitted. It’s hard to pick a frame in which a healing circle is a bad idea.

Within the hour Rachelle and I are going to participate in a healing circle call for a long-term friend of ours who’s dealing with stage IV cancer. These calls have been going for weeks, and the person’s doctor said to “keep doing whatever you’re doing because it’s working.” The cancer is apparently shrinking.

A healing circle is a simple add-on practice that doesn’t conflict with other remedies, so you can still do all the conventional treatments too.

If someone you know is dealing with a serious illness, whether coronavirus or something else, consider putting together a healing circle for that person. If it’s a long-term illness, perhaps do it once a week. It doesn’t have to be long – just 10-15 minutes each time could do a world of good.

You don’t even have to call it a healing circle. Use whatever frame you think would fit best within the person’s dominant mental models. You can call it anything from a prayer circle to a play date if you’d like. The label doesn’t matter. It’s just a chance to invite people who care to express their caring.

Imagine if you were the sick one. Would you appreciate having some friends and family hop on a call to focus on your health and well-being and to hold positive intentions with you and for you? Don’t you think that would have a positive effect on your recovery?

Come to think of it… maybe we ought to do more of this when we’re well. Nobody actually has to be sick to engage in an intention circle.

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Your Relationship with Failure

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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.

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Human Privilege

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We’re seeing an explosion of dialog around exploitative systems. People have varying degrees of awareness that they’ve been stuck in systems that affect their lives and the lives of others. Many are withdrawing their consent to participate in such systems going forward. Of course many feel they never consented to begin with. The social contracts are being questioned and uprooted.

I invite you to consider where you’re participating in nonconsensual systems for your benefit.

For instance, do you ever assert the privilege to do as you wish with animals, such as their bodies, their skins, their eggs, or their milk? Do you use any leather or wool products? Do you assert ownership of any animals? Do you claim any as your personal property? If so, you’re participating in nonconsensual systems that dominate other beings for your pleasure. You’re treating animals as human products. Is that what animals really are? Do you care about what their perspective might be? Are you afraid to even think about that?

You can largely opt out of animal abuse systems by choice. You’re not forced to treat the animal world as your personal shopping mall, asserting entitlement to their bodies and lives. Opting out is a viable option. Millions of people have already done it, and more are joining them each day by finally saying: No, this is wrong. I won’t participate anymore.

If you were to make it clear to an animal that you were trying to kill it, and you gave it a chance to opt out, how do you think it would respond? Do you think it would willingly indicate its consent?

Imagine this in Eeyore’s voice: Oh… it looks like you’re trying to kill me… okay, sure… why not? How about you cut my throat? And for good measure, rape my mate, and take her babies and milk too. I exist to serve you.

As pathetic as that sounds, isn’t that the narrative that many people are effectively using? Is that your narrative? Do you really have a better one that isn’t functionally equivalent?

Is your narrative something more religious or spiritual perhaps?

Well, God created animals and then humans, and He gave humans dominance over the animals.

Animals are inhabited by different spirits that willingly incarnate to help human spirits explore and experience this dimension of reality, including eating them with a variety of sauces and dips.

Those are bullshit narratives of course. They grant permission to nonconsensually rape, cage, and kill other species. These are cutesy stories to assuage guilt and to bury the voice of the heart.

What’s your favorite bullshit narrative for the nonconsensual systems you engage with? I encourage you to actually write it up in a sentence or two. Then read it back to yourself. See it for what it is.

Why use these delusional narratives? You could just be honest and say: I’m gonna dominate animals because I can. Fuck ’em for being weak. I really don’t care.

The problem is caring.

A nutty narrative gives you permission not to care. When you drop such a narrative, there’s a real risk that you might start to care. That’s happening with racism now. A lot more people are starting to care. Many are caring more deeply than before. The old narratives are breaking down. People are finally acknowledging that there’s a tremendous amount of systemic unfairness and violence. The crust of denial surrounding their hearts is starting to crack off. And this is leading to more awareness and different choices.

The nasty thing about various aspects of human privilege, whether we’re talking about animal abuse or human abuse, is that the systems do a pretty good job of hiding the pain and suffering from those who benefit from it. That unpleasantness is hidden, denied, or explained away in a comforting manner. Toss is some gaslighting of those who cry foul to tie up that loose end.

What’s the difference between denying racial abuse and denying animal abuse? One group can at least speak up to some extent. The other is more thoroughly dominated due to lack of a voice, other than compassionate humans advocating for them. In both cases systems are used to bury caring.

I suggest that you face the unpleasantness of these systems instead of running from it. Look past the bullshit narratives. This will be ugly to see, and you’ll want to look away at first. But change is possible if you start with truth alignment, and there is a lot more beauty on the other side.

Facing your abuse of people and animals is tough. Inviting these relationships to align with honesty and compassion is beautiful. You don’t have to keep living in denial. There are better and more aligned alternatives.

This isn’t just about the current issue of the day. It’s about the larger context of your relationship with truth. Where have you been leaning on systems that hide the truth from you? Look at social systems, corporate systems, or government systems that you interface with. Where are you using systems to live less consciously instead of facing the truth? What’s burying your sense of caring?

Sometimes we become aware of how we’re interfacing with these systems, and we can do something about it. Many people are doing that with racist systems around the world today. Note that the first steps for many include educating themselves. I just did a quick check on Amazon, and the top four bestselling books right now are all about race – as well as many more further down the list. It’s clear that many people are seeking to align themselves with more truth here. This is great.

Don’t stop with race alone though. Make truth alignment a lifelong pursuit. It will be ugly and messy much of the time. It will uproot your life more than once. But when you discover truths that you can no longer deny, they’ll bring you back in touch with your heart, and that makes change easier. You can opt-out of old systems that aren’t aligned with truth and love, but you must start with a willingness to look at the truth.

Truth is a fundamental growth accelerator. The more truth you can take in, the faster you can grow. This applies to us as individuals and collectively for society.

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