Tag Archives: Emotions

Productivity Starts With Courage

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I recently starting developing a new deep dive course, which I expect to launch later this calendar quarter. It’s called Engage, and my intentions for it are ambitious.

Engage is about optimizing personal productivity and creating a powerfully engaged life. It’s going to be unlike any productivity course or book you’ve ever seen before. This will be our 6th course, and I want it to be our very best one – helping a wide range of people experience major productivity breakthroughs. I’m framing this as our one course to rule them all. I want this to be our #1 flagship course.

These are the big rocks that will form the backbone of Engage. These function as a productivity alignment sequence, which we’ll work through in a mostly linear order.

  1. Courage – invite it
  2. Clarity – feel it
  3. Intensity – claim it
  4. Integration – own it
  5. Harmony – be it

I intend to make this a deeply honest course on productivity. In that regard it’s not going to be sterile or gentle. It’s going to delve deeply into the motivational and emotional side of productivity since that’s where real productivity is born.

I want to show you how to connect the productivity dots from top to bottom – all the way from creating a sense of life purpose down to deciding which specific tasks to do on a Tuesday afternoon.

As I’m exploring the Engage concepts, I’m really liking how simple and direct they can be for making sense of intentions, goals, and projects. There’s a level of honesty that makes engagement problems really clear when using the 5 principles as diagnostic tools.

What’s really interesting is seeing how people avoid the obvious by asking the wrong questions about productivity, such as which apps to use or how to organize everything in Notion. Yet they’re doing uninspired work that doesn’t engage the heart and most likely never will. They really have no chance at being consistently productive till they get their heart engaged. Without strong emotional engagement, they just won’t have access to their best thinking, creativity, and flow.

Instead of fussing over apps, these same people ought to be asking why their emotional and motivational standards have been so low for so long – and what they can do to raise those standards permanently and keep them high for life.

Heart Engagement

When I was going through college in 3 semesters and getting tons done every week, I didn’t have or use any productivity apps. I didn’t have a pocket computer or a phone except for a land line in my room. There was no web or social media. My main productivity tools were a small notebook to record assignments and a pen. I had a paper calendar on my desk, but it always stayed in my room, so I never took it to school with me. That was all I needed to be highly productive and to stay well organized, even with up to 13 classes to juggle each semester and extracurricular activities too.

I can see that I used these core productivity principles very well back then. My heart was fully engaged, and I kept my motivation high (by making high motivation a priority). My goals were crisp, clear, and personally meaningful, and I centered my life around them. I said no to misaligned people and invitations. A strong heartset supported a fully engaged mindset, which enabled me to sustain an intense period of productivity. I ended up exceeding my original goals by earning two degrees instead of one. And the process to get there was rewarding.

I had a similar experience with doing contract game programming work during my last summer and last semester of college. The room where I worked had no phone and no Internet. I had no productivity apps. I used a spiral notebook and a pen to track my to-dos. I mainly just used one piece of software on the computer, Borland C++, to do the actual coding work. Most days that was the only program I opened. I got so much done during that time.

I do use some productivity apps today which I like, especially Things and Bear, but I use them simply. My #1 productivity tools are still very tactile – spiral notebook, pens, index cards, and dry erase boards. The digital tools are nice to have, but I really don’t need them to be very productive because productivity is primarily emotional.

Always Be Exam-Ready

I don’t use Notion, Evernote, Dropbox or other apps that essentially serve as clutter bins. I’m fairly spartan when it comes to collecting and storing information. When I encounter interesting ideas, I do my best to apply and integrate them immediately, so they become a part of my thinking and doing. Otherwise I let them go if they don’t fit.

Note that “integration” is the #4 engagement principle on the list above. How well have you integrated the best ideas you’ve encountered, such that you’re applying them to good effect each day? When good ideas become your natural daily actions, you don’t need reference notes to keep reminding you about what you should be doing.

This mindset aligns with what I discovered in college. I was taking too many classes to have extra time for studying outside of class. So I had to learn and remember what was being taught when it was being taught – during class. I tried not to leave the classroom till I had internalized the lesson. Sometimes that learning extended through the homework as well. I told my mind to learn the material well enough the first time that I felt ready to be tested on it immediately afterwards. That was a powerful and effective intention that prevented me from falling behind.

I love this standard of always being exam-ready. I can’t be dumping ideas into a digital clutter bin for later processing and still feel like I’m exam-ready with those ideas.

I know the concept of building a “second brain” is popular these days. What a delightful sounding label for procrastination? It’s like calling a clogged toilet a second sink.

What’s the point of gathering and sorting info clutter if your first brain isn’t on fire with motivation and focused with intensity? If you optimize your first brain, you won’t need a second brain.

Apps can be nice, but only in service to a fully engaged heart and mind. The best apps won’t fix your underlying issues, and they might just make matters worse by obscuring real problems under extra layers of complexity.

Emotional Intensity vs. App Propensity

It ought to seem obvious that a person with strong heart engagement, sustainably high motivation, clear goals, and intense focus can be super productive without the benefit of any modern productivity apps. Pen and paper are sufficient. Contrast this with someone who gets really into apps but doesn’t have their heart and mind fully engaged, committed, and focused. Which person would you bet on?

In the Engage deep dive, the first principle that we’ll start with is Courage, which is really about heart engagement. Most people don’t even pass this phase successfully, which is the main reason they struggle with productivity and consistency. They tolerate partial matches and mismatches. They ignore and suppress the voice of their heart, which would scream at them if they gave it a real chance to speak.

That’s our starting point. We’re going to crack open this space and invite the heart to get really vocal and honest. For some people this won’t be pretty, but it will be deeply honest.

This will not be a gentle course. Our primary focus won’t be on creating a “safe space” like we did with the Guild course. For this kind of transformation, we need to co-create a powerful growth space. We’re going to cover a lot of rich and interesting mental concepts, but we’re not going to retreat into the mind like most productivity courses do. We’re going to delve into the realm of fear and doubt right from the beginning, and we’re going to invite the heart to reveal the path of courage.

So from the very first principle, this is a journey that invites you to leave your old comfort zone behind. That’s going to take courage. You’ll be invited to form different intentions and to set different goals than you’ve ever set before.

I have zero interest in watching people try to squeeze out more productivity from work they don’t even want to be doing. I want to help people discover what truly lights them up. Help them amplify the voice of their hearts, so they can’t stomach ignoring it any longer.

Engaging with Engage

One thing I love to do when developing courses is to use the principles of the course to help create the course. I’ve done that with all of the previous courses so far, and I’m doing that with Engage too.

I’m working to develop a course that feels courageous and edgy; that offers crisp, clear, and actionable ideas and processes, that’s intense to develop and experience, that integrates its ideas into a coherent and sensible structure, and that maintains a beautiful and elegant internal harmony.

Creating Engage is a big challenge, and I love working it. There’s so much productivity information already in existence, and now I see a path forward to create and share something truly unique, different, and personally meaningful.

Codifying these ideas is already helping me make some productivity upgrades in my own life. That’s what gets me especially excited about the development process – when I’m able to identify and immediately implement upgrades I didn’t recognize before. These upgrades stem from deepening and simplifying my understanding, especially in terms of how different ideas connect with each other. For instance, I’m gaining a much better understanding of how critical courage is and how it fuels clarity, focus, and intensity. Just setting the intention for Engage to be our #1 flagship course creates ripples of extra motivation. Sharing this intention publicly also raises the stakes. But internally this kind of intention really lights me up inside and makes me want to do the best creative work of my life. It makes working on Engage feel even more engaging.

I’m also boosting my understanding of the tail aspects of long-term productivity – integration and harmony. One reason I’ve been vegan for 26 years now (most of my life) is that I fully integrated veganism into my life and harmonized with it. Same goes for doing personal development work for 18+ years and still feeling highly engaged with it. These fit into my life harmoniously, so they aren’t vulnerable to being wedged out, and I don’t need to lean on discipline to maintain them.

Note that self-discipline isn’t one of our Engage principles. Self-discipline is for the people with clogged toilets. Let’s see how long they can hold it.

“Engage!”

Fans of Star Trek: The Next Generation may also recognize that Captain Picard loves to say “Engage” to get the ship moving towards its next destination after laying in a course. The name for the course actually popped into my head spontaneously while I was thinking about it one day, so I didn’t consciously choose it because of that. But I immediately thought of that association afterwards. That made me like it even more. When I think of Picard flicking his wrist and saying “Engage,” as the ship and crew boldly warp off to go explore some new alien world, I see it as a succinct way to grasp what a highly engaged life feels like. It feels like you’re warping off to a bold new adventure that’s sure to keep you on your toes.

Is that you feel about your work, life, relationships, and lifestyle most of the time?

If not, you haven’t even accepted the invitation of Stage 1 yet. Just imagine how much more is possible when you’re regularly flowing through and aligning with all 5 of these principles.

Moreover, when I looked up the dictionary definitions of Engage, I saw just how perfect it was because all of those meanings are relevant to this journey. An engagement can even refer to a battle or conflict, and that’s how many people experience their struggles with procrastination and distraction. They’re trying in vain to win battles with their mind that their heart could help them win with ease.

There’s still much to be worked out before we’re ready to begin the Engage journey together. I think this will be especially rewarding for people who really want to experience something fresh, new, bold, and intelligent. The first place we’ll explore together will be Planet Heartspace, which is sure to seem like an alien world to those who’ve been stranded on Headspace for most of their lives. 😉

Why Wait? Let’s Get Started Now!

How about a tip to get started with the Engage principles right now? I recommend setting and holding these kinds of intentions:

  • I invite courage into my life.
  • Show me the path with a heart in all areas of life.
  • I’m ready to walk the path with a heart.
  • Help me soundly reject and release that which is misaligned with my heart.
  • Show me where and how I can be much, much bolder.
  • Let me begin each day by asking what I can do that’s bold and courageous.
  • Show me how to stretch my courage today.
  • Show me what fear to face next.
  • Let me hear what my heart has to say about the misaligned areas of my life and what it wants me to do instead.
  • I’m ready to live each day in courage and heart-alignment.

So don’t focus on trying to be more productive. If you want to be more productive, start by intending to be more courageous. Courage is the first door to walk through on the path to creating and experiencing a highly engaged life.

Fear, hesitation, worry, anxiety, apathy, confusion, disappointment – this is what you experience when your heart isn’t fully engaged. These are the consequences of turning your back on courage for too long. So flip this around today by intending, inviting, and accepting courage into your life. You aren’t ready to experience real clarity and intensity until you’re willing to embrace the energy of courage.

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What It’s Like Being Me

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I love asking people this question: What is it really like being you?

We can see how people speak and behave on the outside, but what do we know of their interior perspective?

What I love about this question is that it invites real intimacy and empathy. It’s an invitation into trust. I feel honored when someone does their best to answer honestly. It’s fascinating to discover how someone frames and experiences their interior world, at least to the extent they can articulate it.

I thought it would be interesting to answer this question too, if only to see what comes through when I try to answer it.

Centeredness

I love being me and really enjoy my life, which feels rich and rewarding. I feel like I figured out the big rocks and put them in place many years ago. I feel very aligned with the work I get to do and the people I regularly connect with, especially in Conscious Growth Club and the Transformational Leadership Council.

I don’t experience any meaningful doubt about the path I’m on, at least not at the macro level. I like to think carefully about the projects I commit to, but I can’t say that I ever seriously feel like making a significant change in my career path or lifestyle at this point. I’m always interested in upgrades and improvements, but the overall trajectory of my life feels like it’s already perfect for me.

So on the inside, I normally feel very centered and engaged with whatever I’m doing and experiencing. I enjoy a beautiful sense of harmony with my work and life balance. I don’t feel like work and life are separate. It feels more like the work and non-work parts of life are always dancing with each other.

Energy & Enthusiasm

One of the main emotions I experience is enthusiasm.

I love to feel positively stimulated with emotion, not all the time to the maximum, but as nice accents throughout each day. I like to feel amped up and engaged with life.

Partly this is a decision to move away from boredom and dullness. When I feel that the energy of a situation is a bit low for my tastes, I’ll often do something to shift it. For instance, I frequently like to play music and dance around while making meals. I love it when Rachelle does that with me too.

Every day I find something to feel enthusiastic about, usually many times each day. It could be a new business idea, but I’ll also generate enthusiasm for everyday experiences like greeting Rachelle when she gets up, doing a Zoom call, or watching a show together. I’ll even generate excitement about running errands.

My mind has a strong tendency to want to bounce away from boredom and towards feelings of engagement, playfulness, and fun. For me this aspect of my inner reality is solidly implanted.

Raising Vibes

I think this is something I learned from watching movies when I was younger. There are so many movie scenes where a high-energy character walks in, and the whole vibe of the scene changes. Or maybe it’s an unusual character who shifts the vibe of whatever scene they’re in. One example is Bill Murray’s character in Ghostbusters. Another is Val Kilmer’s character in Real Genius. Such characters were basically my heroes when I was younger. You’ve probably seen countless examples of these characters too.

When I interact with people socially, I often think about how I can stimulate them vibrationally… like what I could say or do to help connect them with more enthusiasm for their lives, experiences, and opportunities. Sometimes I feel that my role has been to shake people awake if they’ve been sleeping through life in zombie mode.

I sense that a great key to life is how we manage our energy, which includes thought energy, physical energy, and emotional energy. I think you can include spiritual energy too. I pay serious attention to the flow of energy through myself and through interactions with others. If the energy flow feels off somehow, I do my best to shift it in a more positive and constructive direction.

I think that for much of my life, I’ve felt a strong attraction to certain vibes and a strong repulsion towards others. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten better and better at centering my life around the vibes I like and defending myself from vibes I dislike. I’m attracted to vibes like abundance, playfulness, curiosity, and creativity. I’m repulsed by neediness, close-mindedness, defeatism, and depression.

Thinking Algorithmically

Probably because I learned computer programming when I was a kid, I tend to think of life in terms of interesting problems to be solved and challenges to work through. I live in a world of puzzles to be figured out, and I love chipping away at these. These puzzles could include business challenges, creative challenges, personal challenges, and more.

I don’t worry if problems are solvable. I tend to regard everything as solvable and figureoutable. I generally assume that every problem has multiple solutions, so my mind starts churning on various solution pathways instead of fussing over whether it’s solvable. I’m much more concerned by which pathways seem the most elegant to me. I love to discover shortcuts.

Some problems in my life took me a long time to solve, but I eventually figured them out. It doesn’t bother me if some problems take years or even decades to solve. The time is going to pass anyway, and since I love working on interesting problems and challenges, I enjoy the experience of continuing to chip away at them.

I’m always looking to improve my toolset of problem-solving skills. Tackling interesting problems and challenges helps me improve those tools and upgrade my models of reality.

Belongingness

Imagine receiving thank you messages and expressions of appreciation from people around the world every day of your life. That’s been my reality for the past 18+ years, ever since I started blogging in 2004. That’s probably going to continue for the rest of my life, even if I stopped working.

Recently my book Personal Development for Smart People came out in China, so I’ve been getting a surge in appreciative emails from Chinese readers.

What does this do to my interior perspective? It gives me an unshakeable feeling of belongingness.

When I was younger, I often felt isolated and disconnected, like I was an alien in this world who didn’t belong here. I haven’t felt that way in decades though. Today I feel solidly at home here. I have zero doubt that this is where I belong – on this planet and in this field. I feel like I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.

I feel at home whenever I travel too. Foreign locations don’t feel foreign to me. I’m so used to communicating with people from all over the world that it feels like the whole world is home.

Appreciation

I feel like I’m immersed in a reality that’s filled with experiences, people, and items to appreciate. I can’t seem to help feeling lots of appreciation each day. I appreciate my work. I appreciate my home. I appreciate Rachelle. I appreciate living in Las Vegas. I appreciate this community.

I also appreciate the little things in life. I spent time interacting with various objects and tech each day, and I learned how important it is to fill my life with items that evoke appreciation. This week I’ve been working with a bunch of hand tools to hang acoustic panels, and using them makes me smile sometimes because I carefully selected and purchased tools that I’d appreciate – such as a drill, tape measure, level, etc.

For me practicing appreciation was a huge key in shifting from scarcity to abundance, so this attitude of appreciation is indelibly woven into my mindset. Almost always when I touch something physically, there’s a part of me saying “thank you” internally for the experience. This happens when I put my hands on the steering wheel in my car, when I open up my laptop, when I pick up a knife in the kitchen, etc. I sense that we only have so many experiences in life, and I want even the most mundane ones to be infused with appreciation.

It would also be unusual for me to go through a day without saying thank you to someone for something. I love to express appreciation, and I sense that people could always use more of it. I would love to see more people expressing genuine gratitude for all the wonders we get to experience in this life instead of taking so much for granted.

When I die I want my last words to be: Thank you for this life.

Love

A big part of my interior perspective is that I enjoy being in love every day. I know a lot of people probably see me as a more mental creature due to seeing that side of me from my writing, but internally I feel a lot of love energy flowing through me each day.

I really, really, really enjoy and appreciate my relationship with Rachelle. Every day I get to spend with her is sheer delight.

Our relationship doesn’t feel effortful. It feels like a wonderful gift. I think that’s because we’re so ridiculously compatible. I recognize that what we have is very special, and on the inside that makes me feel very lucky.

I feel doubly fortunate that I get to see sides of Rachelle that she doesn’t often share with others. To people who don’t know her well, she may seem shy or introverted, but with me she shares so much playfulness, fun, love, warmth, and affection.

I’ve never had an issue with loneliness. I love solitary time too and don’t feel any significant resistance towards being alone. But I’ve spent most of my adult life in long-term relationships. I think one reason I’ve attracted partners pretty easily is that I just don’t feel needy in this area. I love being in a relationship, but I also love the experience of being on my own. I feel equally comfortable in both worlds.

I think this has been a key to new growth experiences. Don’t try to invite new experiences by resisting where you are. Try to love and appreciate your present reality as well as what you’d like to invite next. Send appreciation in all directions.

That was also a big part of shifting from scarcity to abundance. I wasted so much energy on the frustration of resisting scarcity when I was in my 20s. When I finally let go and surrendered to it – and actually welcomed it into my life as if I’d always be in scarcity till I died – that’s when the floodgates of abundance opened up. Learning to appreciate scarcity was a powerful lesson.

Freedom & Creativity

I also really enjoy my freedom. I haven’t had a job or a boss in 30+ years, so I’ve been on an independent entrepreneurial path since the early 1990s. It was rough during the first several years, but I eventually figured it out.

I don’t normally think of myself as an entrepreneur or business owner though. Those frames feel a bit too dull and mental to me. On the inside I don’t really fuss about my identity.

I love to create all sorts of things, so most days I’m thinking about what I’m creating. I could label myself as a creator, but that feels a bit off too. I’m not particularly concerned with how I’m labeled by myself or others. I’m much more in tune with whatever I’m engaging with in the moment. In terms of my identity, it feels more like water or wind – very flexible and adapting to wherever it goes.

The term “content creator” turns my stomach a bit, like it’s trying to smoosh something beautifully expansive into a small-minded box. It’s like putting a bird in a cage.

For me creativity and freedom are the Wonder Twins of my life. I see both as being essential for my long-term happiness and fulfillment. These are gifts from reality, but they must be claimed and defended.

Some people would say that they need freedom in order to create. I don’t think like that. It’s too limiting, and it points back to neediness, which is something I always want to bounce away from.

I regard freedom as something I can and must create. Freedom is a choice. But freedom without creativity is unsustainable, boring, and meaningless. I feel that I’ve invested a lot in creating freedom and freeing myself to create. On the inside it feels wonderful to be in a place where I can create, share, and express so much. This includes maintaining the freedom to keep creating without interference.

I don’t just think of creativity as doing creative work like writing articles, making courses, or doing workshops. I think of creativity as being the core essence of conscious living. That includes creating freedom, creating a life I love, and co-creating experiences with the right people.

Curiosity

On the inside I’m incredibly curious. I love to learn, grow, explore, and discover. I’m always finding something interesting to delve into. I love the process of discovering what the interior perspective of an experience is like. I’m very open to new experiences, especially experiences that can upgrade my thinking and understanding of life and reality.

Even when I’m not actively writing about it, I’m often doing some kind of personal growth experiment. Or I’m studying and exploring something new. Frequently I’m exploring multiple overlapping curiosities.

I’m currently doing a new dietary experiment involving testing a different macro balance (carbs, fat, protein). My goal is to aim for a caloric distribution of 70% carbs (or more), 20% fat (or less), and 10% protein (or less). This is similar to the 80/10/10 diet I did in January 2008 but with higher fat. It’s going very well so far.

I also recently researched acoustic panels, and this week I’ve been installing them in my home office. I also have some panels to install in my studio and a few in the living room. This will help to improve the audio quality on some recordings, and it will make my studio look nicer since I can finally remove the old sound blankets. I like the look of the panels too. Rachelle helped me pick the colors, and we spent a lot of time working on this together.

Last month I invested in some plumbing upgrades, hiring a plumber to install a new tankless water heater, water softener, and whole house water filtration system. I also did a plant medicine journey with some friends.

Last year around this time, I was exploring home theater systems and invested in a major upgrade there. That was one of my favorite explorations because it totally transformed the experience of watching movies and shows with Rachelle, especially action movies. That gave me even more to appreciate.

One of my biggest challenges is that I can get too curious and open too many new doors simultaneously. I love saying yes to new experiences and explorations, but I also have to practice saying no a lot to avoid overextending myself.

Order

On the inside, my mind feels very sharp and orderly. I’m usually very adept at focusing and directing my mind to advance the projects that I want to work on.

I have many dozens of projects mapped out with action steps (I currently use the Things app for this). Realistically it may take me years to complete all the projects I’ve already identified. Week by week I keep chipping away at them.

I also maintain a quarterly completion log, whereby I document what I’ve gotten done or experienced each calendar quarter. I’ve been doing this for about 5 years consistently, and it’s really helpful for progress visibility. I can see where I moved projects across the finish line. Sometimes I may feel like I didn’t get as much done as I would have liked, but when I review those quarterly logs, I’m usually impressed with how much I actually finished.

My life is typically a mix of pre-planned work plus spontaneous action. I’ve gotten pretty good at taking action both inspirationally and methodically. I love having the flexibility to choose which tasks and projects I’ll work on each day without prescheduling them. Most days my calendar is blank. But I also keep track of many competing priorities to weave in when the timing is right.

I like keeping my physical environment neat and tidy. When clutter piles up, it’s very temporary. I feel a strong desire to keep moving towards greater order. When items and tasks are in order, it frees my mind to think more clearly, to be more creative, and to take more action. I think one reason that I embrace order is that disorder is very distracting for me.

Optimism

I don’t get depressed. Simply never. My mind stays focused on the positive – on inspiring ideas, engaging people, action steps, interesting projects, creative explorations, etc.

I used to get depressed sometimes when I was younger, but I put a stop to that.

I decided a long time ago that depression is a stupid waste of life and that it was critical to defend against the slime pit of depression, self-doubt, and other downer modes of experience. Otherwise it becomes a trap where one can lose years of precious life. I regard depression as a nasty neural pattern – a mental and emotional virus – so I did what was necessary to ensure that my mind just doesn’t go there anymore. I felt that was one of the early personal development battles where I had to win a decisive victory. So this is a virus to which I’ve built a very strong immunity.

There were lots of pieces to this – cleaning up my diet (zero animal products); regular exercise that I enjoy; dropping misaligned people; committing to meaningful and fulfilling creative work; saying no to partial matches; and creating a life rich in intimacy, warmth, and affection.

I really appreciate my past self for putting so much effort into upgrading his mindset and heartset. That was a real challenge for him, but he did a fabulous job of solving those problems one by one. He gifted me with sustainably constructive thoughts and feelings. That’s a huge gift since I no longer feel like I have to fight with myself internally. My mind and emotions feel very harmonious.

Thoughtfulness

I like to be very thoughtful and deliberate in making decisions, especially important ones. I use many tools and processes to work through decisions methodically. For instance, when designing a new course, I follow a step-by-step design template that I’ve developed over the years. It’s one of the bonuses in the Amplify course.

To really know that I can complete a project, especially a big one, I have to reach a point of strong commitment. When I was younger, I left too many creative projects unfinished because I started them impulsively, and I hadn’t put the right level of thought into them up front. Then I’d struggle partway through with thoughts like, What’s the point of finishing this? Or something else would distract me, and I’d lose focus on the previous project.

Today I’m way better at finishing projects. I look at them carefully and analyze them from different angles, often spending weeks or months in the pre-commitment phase. Some projects don’t converge on commitment, but when I’m able to commit, I’m really good at following through all the way to the end.

What this does for my inner experience is that I have super strong creative trust. I know what it takes to complete a sizable creative project. I know how to get myself to the point of commitment, and I’m able to trust myself to follow through and finish. I also know how to recognize when the alignment isn’t there yet, and I shouldn’t commit myself.

It took time to discover the right process for me such that I could make wise decisions intelligently while also avoiding analysis paralysis. Having a process that converges really helps.

Relationships

Internally I think about almost all aspects of life through the lens of relationships. This includes people, tasks, projects, goals, possessions, food, activities, locations, and more.

Instead of thinking so objectively about different aspects of life, I usually favor subjective thinking. I imagine how different decisions will affect my inner experience. I think more about the dynamic flow of events than about the static nature of situations.

You could say that I think in terms of verbs more than nouns. Where is the energy flowing? How is it changing? How do I want to engage with these energy patterns?

When I’m considering a new creative project, I pay a lot of attention to how I’m going to relate to that project while I’m working on it. I don’t just think about the end goal or result. At least 80% of my thinking is focused on what the journey will be like (probably more like 90%+). I want to make that journey beautiful and engaging.

I’ve invested a lot of thought and energy into creating a beautiful and harmonious relationship with my work and life. This includes how I relate to the people who engage with my work.

What I love about this relationship model of thinking about life is that it helped me get really honest with myself. It encourages me to be more forthright about expressing how I really think and feel. Can I share that I’d love to see Vladimir Putin slowly fed feet-first into a wood chipper, while being given frequent espresso breaks along the way? That’s actually one of my intentions.

Defending Against Misalignments

Some of my energy flows into defensive activities, which is a part of my life that many people don’t see. I have standards for the people I want to engage with, and I’m not interested in lowering them to build a larger but misaligned audience.

That’s one reason I tell Trump supporters to begone. I have no interest in serving racist idiots and assholes. That isn’t political. It’s personal. I find such people utterly loathsome, and I want nothing to do with them. I don’t want to invest my energy in dealing with people who disgust me, so I choose not to deal with them. Moreover, I will continue to staunchly defend this community against them, especially Conscious Growth Club. Such idiocy has no place here.

I have to deal with occasional stalker-types as well, including people who clearly aren’t right in the head. That doesn’t get me down. I just see as it part of the experience of working in this field.

If I wanted to be a mental health professional who regularly engages with such people, I’d have chosen that as my career path. I realized a long time ago that I must carefully defend the path that resonates with me, and that requires being very firm in saying no to people and situations that I’m not willing to deal with. We don’t automatically get what we desire. We get what we’re willing to tolerate.

When people fall out of resonance with me, I prefer to just let them go. If someone violates my trust, I drop them from my life, and I really never let them back in because when I did so in the past, they always gave me cause to regret it. “Fool me once” is enough for me. There are so many interesting people to interact with in this life that it seems foolhardy to bother dealing with misaligned scraps. I now realize just how needy and desperate that is. That said, I very easily forgive people and have no interest in holding grudges, but when I close the door on someone, it’s really closed. From my own perspective, I see this as returning their energy back to the Simulator, where it can be recycled. This keeps my energy from getting stuck where it doesn’t want to be stuck.

I’m committed to flowing my energy where it wants to go and engaging with people who want to explore and engage with me in a mutually supportive way. That takes a certain degree of alignment and compatibility. It’s exquisitely joyful and rewarding to serve people who meet that standard. And it’s disappointing at the very least to attempt this with people who don’t.

Some people and experiences are like the perfect puzzle pieces that interlock with us in just the right ways. Even when our interactions are temporary, that kind of alignment is beautiful to behold. In order to invite more of this, I found it crucial to say a hard and definitive no to the misaligned. Otherwise partial matches and mismatches will block so much beauty, wonder, and delight from flowing through.

High-Trust Relationships & Audience Engagement

Years ago I went through the experience of building up lots of followers on social media and being very active on those services daily. It can feel fun and stimulating having so much attention, especially if you enjoy being in the limelight. I also found those interactions too random and chaotic, and I was glad to delete Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram and tighten up my social focus. Seeing what’s been happening on Twitter these days makes me even more grateful to have dumped it in 2014.

After that I went through a process of focusing more on audience alignment than on audience size. That shrunk my overall audience but also made me feel happier and more in tune with my work. It helped me go much deeper into explorations that inspire me and others – less blogging but more courses, workshops, and of course CGC itself. It’s like we become more courageous, more heart-centered, and more genuine when we’re surrounded by the right people.

I’ve gotten used to having an audience for my work since that’s been my daily reality for decades, all the way back to my computer games business. The people I serve are in my mind each day, and I interact with them every day in some way – through email, the CGC forums, Zoom calls, blogging, videos, in person, etc.

To me this doesn’t feel like a temporary situation. It feels permanent, at least as far as my lifespan is concerned. There are people in my audience in their 30s now who started reading my blog when they were teenagers. I know this because many of them have told me so. I expect that even decades from now, many of the same people who are engaging with my work today will still be engaging with it or with the community around this work.

That really makes me think about how to keep serving the people in this community for the long term. I know that the specific people in this community will fluctuate, but there’s clearly a core base of people that feel a sense of commitment and resonance, so I think we’ll be in each other’s lives for a long time to come.

I love engaging with people on the basis of mutual appreciation. I like having an audience that appreciates me and the work and I do, and I love engaging with people that I appreciate too. This is something I never take for granted. It’s something I always want to keep investing in.

High-trust relationships are very important to me. Trust empowers us to explore so much more together. That’s another reason that certain people have no place in this community. We can’t build high-trust relationships with people who serve as enablers of lying and deceit.

Caring

I think one reason I’ve enduring so long in this field is that I genuinely care about the people in this community. That’s an aspect of my interior perspective that I think a lot of people don’t see. Of all the items I’m sharing here, I’d say that the #1 insight I’d love people to know is that I really do care. I want to see the people in this community thrive and enjoy rich and fulfilling lives. Just writing this part makes me teary-eyed.

I work hard at figuring out how to help people grow and how to keep serving them year after year. For me this is a lifelong investment, and I want to keep getting better at it. Sharing ideas is just one piece to the puzzle. Another piece is having a stable community where people can invest in each other (Conscious Growth Club). And yet another piece is continuing to listen for where the latest needs, desires, and growth opportunities are.

The road ahead is going to bring so many fresh challenges and opportunities. I want to help the people in this community intelligently navigate those experiences. I love the challenge of playing that role and figuring out where I can be of service.

A big part of my motivation comes from the people I serve. I don’t write just to write. I always write for people. I create courses for people. I develop workshops for people. I coach people. And it’s not for people in general but specifically for the people in this community – past, present, and future.

Internally I often feel that it’s other people’s energies and intentions that summon me to do the work I do. Somehow they energetically invite me to help them. So I never feel like I’m writing or creating into an empty void. I always feel like I’m co-creating with the energy that invited me to the dance.

I also see an important connection between caring and defense. In order to feel safe expressing caring and building high-trust relationships, I think it’s critical to defend against the opposite. I don’t trust blindly. I test for trust, and when I see it, I keep investing. But when people abuse my trust, they get the sword and shield.

Support & Cooperation

Internally I feel very creatively supported, and I have a very cooperative relationship with life. Life has given me everything I need to do my best creative work. I wanted to be of service to people, and life said a big yes to that in response.

When I was younger, I tried to do a lot of work under pressure, especially financial pressure and time pressure. There was this sense of always trying to scramble to get enough done to make ends meet. That wasn’t a situation where I could do my best creative work.

Back then my mindset and heartset were more competitive than cooperative. I put too much attention on my individual success and accomplishments, even though that just created more stress and pressure for me. I tried to motivate myself with misaligned forms of motivation. I focused too much on end results, and I leaned too heavily on courage and discipline to try to push through difficulties. I wish I had known back then how much more effective it is to focus on the journey and on cultivating a beautiful relationship with it.

Today my life feels very much the opposite of stressful. It’s fun and engaging, but it’s also peaceful and relaxing when I want it to be. Life feels very spacious, welcoming, and encouraging.

I love that I get to spend so much time exploring the richness of life, relationships, creativity, and fresh possibilities. I feel very in tune with the journey I’m on, and I delight in how it’s unfolding each day.

This isn’t an exhaustive list, but hopefully you found some value in one or more of these insights that may be useful to you in your own life or work.

Happy New Year! 🥳 🎉

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Frequencies of Experience

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I often think of life as a summation of different experiential frequencies, much like different musical instruments can combine to create a song. Some frequencies combine harmoniously while others would sound discordant if you tried to merge them.

What I find most interesting about this model is that it helps me discover when some frequencies are holding me back from having new experiences. I cannot always invite new frequencies into my life when pre-existing frequencies are anchoring me to a different range.

Usually I must detach myself – or at least loosen my grip – from some anchor frequencies, so I can float freely into the range of new experiences. Otherwise I’ll never have the opportunity to experience those new frequencies fully while I’m still shackled to the old ones.

If you try to stuff more and more tracks into a song without removing some old ones, you may end up with noise, not music. When the tracks play together, their frequencies interact, and the more tracks you add, the more complex the balancing act becomes.

In your own life, now and then you’ll need to do some frequency decluttering if you want to progress to new experiences.

Anchor Frequencies

When you want to flow into a new zone of experience, such as by pursuing and achieving an interesting goal, think about the old anchor frequencies that might interfere, and see if you can loosen your grip on them.

Do you have any anchor frequencies that would make you feel some resistance to your new path? Any worries about what other people would think? Any unwillingness to grow beyond your comfort zone? Any old habits you’d rather not release?

Whatever anchor issues you identify, it’s wise to start working on those now, mentally and emotionally. It’s important to start changing your relationship with the old frequencies, so you can create space to harmonize with new frequencies. Many people do a piss-poor job of this, which is why they remain stuck. They may be willing to embrace the new, but they’re not committed to relinquishing the old.

For example, if you’re contemplating a career change, start thinking about how you’ll say goodbye to the old career and how you’d like to frame those memories. Begin to align yourself with the goodbye experience before you leave.

When I moved on from game development and got into personal development in 2004, I framed my 10 years of professional game development as a nice phase of learning and growth but not one that I had to cling to for the rest of my life. I approached the transition like a graduation. This included declaring even unfinished projects over and done with. That wasn’t easy, but I knew I had to let go of the old, so I could fully embrace and explore the new.

This wasn’t a fast process, but before I could really focus on a career change, I had to spend months winding down my relationship with game development work.

Some of those old frequencies faded from my life. I stopped hosting a popular indie game developer forum and handed it off to some friends to keep it going. I stopped working on new games. I stopped doing any new marketing for my games. I let people know that I was closing up shop. I also had to mentally and emotionally let go of a lot of future plans and expectations along the old path.

Any anchor frequencies that might have kept me stuck in the old world had to be surrendered.

Crossover Frequencies

Some frequencies, however, were flexible enough to transition with me. I was able to bring some productivity habits along. I could still do some coding now and then. I brought my creativity, playfulness, community-building skills, entrepreneurial spirit, and explorer’s mindset into the new career.

Those compatible crossover frequencies served me well. They helped me retain some sense of stability while so much else in my life felt new and different. In the same year I started my blog, I also moved to a new city (from L.A. to Las Vegas) and joined Toastmasters to get into speaking. I had a new home, a new social circle, and a new business all in the same year – and a new child the year before.

One crossover frequency that I especially found helpful was growth. This is one of the ultimate crossover frequencies because we can always invest in learning and growth, regardless of how many transitions we go through. So you can also think about anchoring yourself to flexible frequencies – like growth – so you don’t feel so unhinged every time you go through an interesting transition.

Transitioning

When you’re facing a transition in life, see if you can identify some of your anchor frequencies and your crossover frequencies. Which aspects of your life will need to be released? Which can come along for the ride?

If you really look into this carefully, you may find some surprises. You’ll probably recognize some frequencies of experience that you didn’t realize were choices. You may spot areas where you’ve been clingy with anchor frequencies, but you didn’t recognize them as such. And you’ll see where you’ve gotten stuck when trying to transition.

When I wanted to transition from a scarcity experience with money to a more abundant relationship with money, I noticed that I was relating to money in a way that wouldn’t make sense on the abundance side. I had some habitual ways of interfacing with money that were serving as anchor frequencies and keeping me from progressing.

I might describe some of these anchor frequencies as stress and worry. Others involved making money such a high priority – giving so much thought to bills and rent each month. I thought about money pretty much every day. Another issue was focusing so much on my desire for more money. Would I be doing that if I were already in the abundance zone? Nope.

I realized that if I wanted to transition to a more abundant relationship with money, I wasn’t going to relate to it with frequencies like stress, worry, or intense desire. In fact, I realized that many days I wouldn’t even think about money. It would recede more into the background of my life, and it wouldn’t be such a foreground concern. Money would be like a reliable friend, and I’d also have a lot of fun with it – earning it and spending it. I’d have a chill, relaxed, and playful relationship with it. But worry about it, stress over it, or obsess over it? Nah… those were the old anchor frequencies that kept me in scarcity, so I had to let them go.

When I recognized that certain habits of thought and emotion were acting as anchors to scarcity, I realized that I had a choice to make. I had to put a stop to stressing, worrying, and over-thinking about money. I actually worked through the logic of that. Did those old frequencies help? Did they actually create more money? Were they effective? Reliable and consistent? Ha… nope.

These old frequencies sometimes got me to scramble to pull some extra resources together at the last minute, but that was an endless treadmill. There was no way that this way of thinking would lead to greater abundance. It was a foolish approach with no hope of success. Even if I did earn more money, I’d just have more to stress and obsess over, which seemed dreadful.

Once I understood the logic, I asked myself if I wanted to align with my best thinking or if I wanted to keep being illogical and foolish. I made a commitment to stop fretting and worrying about money, and I’ve done a solid job of honoring that commitment ever since. I do slip a little bit now and then, but barely. I’ve gotten really good at pulling my mind away from that old frequency zone and keeping it in the zone of abundance-aligned frequencies.

Abundance-Aligned Frequencies

What are some of the abundance-aligned frequencies then?

One of my favorites is service. Instead of fussing over my own sniveling problems, I think about what I can do that other people would appreciate. In my games business, I shifted my focus to creating experiences for people. That’s still a big part of how I think about my life and business today. I like crafting and delivering interesting experiences that people can appreciate – especially unique experiences they may not encounter elsewhere. I really resonate with the frequency range of investing in growth-oriented people. That connects to even more frequencies that I like, such as caring, mutual support, and co-creation. This range gets me taking a lot of action.

Can I share a simple observation with you? When I see people who are stuck in scarcity, they’re almost always expending way more thought and emotion in dealing with their own personal or family problems than they invest in thinking about serving other people in the world. They anchor their focus inward instead of outward. Is it any wonder that they’re anchoring themselves to scarcity frequencies? So don’t hide. Get out there and engage with the world.

Another favorite is creativity. I love, love, love the frequency zone of creative projects. This feels like a solid home base for me. I’ve created millions of words of published material, and I never get writer’s block. I know that I can always create, and many years of feedback tells me that there are always people who will appreciate these creations. I’ve been a professional creator of some form or another for about 30 years now, and I expect that to continue. Note that this is also a frequency range where lots of action happens.

Also note that actually creating is NOT the same frequency zone as thinking about creating, typing up to-do lists, or otherwise procrastinating on creating. I spend WAY more time writing and publishing than I spend thinking about writing or reading about writing. Some planning is good if it helps you get organized, but is your planning driving projects through to completion? How much of your creative work is getting into people’s hands? Appreciation and abundance are very compatible frequency zones, very often arising together.

Other favorites are exploration, playfulness, and fun. I’m one of the most fun-loving adults that I know, and so is Rachelle. Do you know any other couples who spent 30 days in a row going to Disneyland? We enjoyed every day of that experience. I love being married to a woman who makes me laugh so much, and I love to make her laugh as well. Living with her is immensely entertaining. Even when she’s not trying to be entertaining, she just is.

People who remain stuck in scarcity are so ridiculously tolerant of their old anchor frequencies. They remain clingy with frequencies that clearly aren’t compatible with abundance. Abundance-aligned people have decided not to be so tolerant of those incompatibilities.

Investment & Surrender

One of the most critical self-development concepts to grasp is that where you invest your energy is a choice. You don’t have to remain loyal to old anchor frequencies. You have the option of surrendering those old frequencies and moving into a new range.

To shift your frequencies often requires a real commitment. Don’t even think about trying to half-ass it.

I don’t see any way I could have flowed into such an abundant relationship with life if I was willing to tolerate a relationship with ongoing worry, stress, and obsessive thinking about money.

How do you really surrender the old frequencies that no longer serve you? You reframe them as something that you’ll never want to revisit.

I reframed my old frequencies as stupid, idiotic, dumb, pointless, moronic, foolish, and utterly ineffective. It was illogical through and through to align with those old frequencies. They don’t work. They never worked! Only a great fool would cling to them. Do I want to be a great fool? No, I don’t!

Whenever my mind catches itself backsliding, it generates a huge load of warning signals that prevents it from staying there. It’s like noticing a skull and crossbones on a bottle of poison that you’re about to drink. This makes the whole brain light up with a super strong, “HELL NO!” signal.

I recommend that you do something similar. Stop trying to have a cozy relationship with anchor frequencies that are keeping you stuck. Break up with them instead. And I mean really break up. Dump them for good. Kick them to the curb. Make a “never again” resolution not to engage with them.

Yes, you may slip now and then. Slipping is to be expected, but when you slip, don’t fall. Catch yourself. Remind yourself of your best reframes for the old frequencies. Tell yourself which frequencies you want to engage with instead. Work through the logic of how you’re going to relate to those old ranges henceforth. And then hold yourself to that logic. Remind yourself to honor your best thinking.

Your thoughts and feelings exist in certain frequency ranges. If you want to invite new experiences and results into your life, you almost certainly need to adjust your thoughts and feelings too. While it’s nice to imagine what you’re new reality will be like, it’s even more important to start boxing out your old reality by cordoning off the old anchor frequencies. Remove the old ropes that kept you docked, so you can set sail and float over to new destinations.

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How to Relate to People With Low Truth Alignment

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The first chapter of my book Personal Development for Smart People is called “Truth” because truth alignment is one of the fundamental principles of personal growth. In order to grow intelligently, we must face and accept reality in as many areas of life as we can. This often involves confronting and dealing with unpleasant truths that we’ve been avoiding for some time.

If we don’t get aligned with truth, we slide into falsehoods and denial, which can slow us down tremendously. Have you seen the lack of truth alignment playing out in the world recently? It’s hard not to notice it these days.

When we invite, face, and accept more truth alignment into our lives, we may feel tense, anxious, or resistant at first, but it can lead to a tremendous new flow of energy in a fresh direction when we finally surrender to reality. We so often see this when someone experiences a powerful wake-up call regarding their health, family, relationships, career path, finances, life purpose, etc.

I’ve often found it to be a powerful intention to say: Show me the truth. Show me what I’m not seeing. If the words can be spoken with genuine desire, this can really get some stuck energy flowing again; however, it may not be easy to face and deal with what comes up.

In this article though, I want to address a specific concern that many people have, which is how to deal with other people’s lack of truth alignment.

What do you do when friends, relatives, or co-workers succumb to conspiracy theories and start spewing out falsehoods?

What if someone you know is in deep denial about certain issues but doesn’t seem interested in hearing any honest communication about it?

What about people who wrap falsehoods into their beliefs and still expect to be treated with respect?

The Harmony Approach

A common solution is to try to go for harmony. In principle this is good, but in practice people tend to mistake something else for harmony. It’s like watching someone do a heavy weight training exercise with terrible form, and you know that in the long run, they’re probably going to hurt themselves.

Genuine harmony is an aspect of oneness. Oneness is the combination of truth and love, both of which are fundamental principles that help us move towards growth. For harmony to be real, it must be truth aligned. Without truth alignment you can’t experience harmony. You will get some version of discordance instead.

If you ever find yourself pursuing harmony at the expense of truth, realize that you’re not going to experience harmony. You will experience something else – most likely some form of tolerance rooted in denial. Without some solid truth alignment, you’ll be in the land of pretend, and that isn’t actually going to help you or anyone else grow. At best it will perpetuate stagnation.

The pathway to real harmony is through the truth. This pathway may seem utterly chaotic at first, but the chaos isn’t caused by the truth. The truth just is. The chaos is basically the falsehood and denial doing what they do best – resisting the truth. So let them bitch and moan, and stay aligned with truth anyway. Real harmony lies beyond this point.

Does it really serve our best interests if we try to bury the truth and pretend that everything is okay when we have some serious disagreements? This isn’t truth alignment – it’s confrontation avoidance.

Aligning With the Truth

Getting yourself aligned with truth is a good first step.

If you have a disagreement with someone, can you delve into the facts and details and find out what’s actually going on? For instance, if someone is delving into conspiracy websites, you can look into fact-checking sources and see if those sites are actually truth aligned or not. You can research the background of those sites and see what you discover.

You can also consider what you know about the person who’s succumbing to these falsehoods. Are they lonely? Feeling disconnected? Seeking a new peer group? What are their emotional reasons for going down that path? Is there some secondary gain in it for them? Can you get some sense of what may be driving them?

For instance, one friend started sending me conspiracy articles that apparently discredit COVID vaccines. However, when I looked into the sites he shared, they had ties to the Kremlin, so they’re basically political tools used to cause disruption. Such sites can be very effective at this, but they aren’t trustworthy sources of vaccine info, and some will even post false charts and graphs of fake research info. Of course I shared this with my friend to let him know that he was essentially a pawn being used in this political game. How he processes that info is up to him, but his actions also invite me to update my opinion of him. I regard him as less trustworthy, and I’ll be more suspicious of info he shares with me – not because of his intentions but because of his lack of fact-checking skills and his vulnerability to accepting erroneous info as true.

Now I would agree that we can’t have perfect information, and everything we learn through a screen must be considered suspect. But I also think we can leverage reasoning and some understanding of human nature and basic fact-checking and credibility assessment of sources to at least lean towards better truth alignment. We don’t have to develop clingy fixed beliefs that could be wrong, but we can assess likelihoods and weigh the preponderance of evidence.

I think most of the time, we are too gullible when we ought to be more curious and suspicious. Conspiracy theorists may seem suspicious or jaded, but they’re actually among the most gullible of all since they’ll swallow falsehoods from the most unreliable and discredited sources. IMO such people aren’t nearly suspicious enough. It’s rather silly that they’ll reject mainstream sources and then flock to even less credible outlets for information. Or they’ll switch to unreliable and untrustworthy mainstream sources, such as Fox News, which is laughable in terms of truth alignment but also quite sad in terms of how it affects people and society.

A key area of truth alignment for yourself is accepting when the people in your life are seriously lacking in truth alignment. With so many millions of people claiming to believe in falsehoods that have been abundantly debunked and discredited, it’s likely that you’ve had to deal with such people too.

For instance, who do you know that holds goofy religious beliefs that aren’t actually true? Do you accept the truth that someone you know has been duped into such falsehoods? Or do you still pretend that you’re okay with it, such as by saying, “Well, they’re a good person, but…”? Do you seek a false form of harmony that wants to hide from the truth?

The Emotionality of Truth Alignment

Getting aligned with truth can be surprisingly emotional. You may feel all sorts of intense emotions such as anger, disappointment, betrayal, resentment, frustration, anxiety, and more.

Let yourself feel those feelings. It’s wise to let them flow, so you can process them. Those feelings represent your inner truth. Let it be true that you feel what you feel.

When you see a friend or relative go down the conspiracy rabbit hole, let yourself feel the disappointment and worry.

When you see the U.S. Supreme Court make another ridiculous ruling based on a skewed notion of reality, let yourself feel pissed off about it.

When you see Sergey Lavrov say pretty much anything, let the vomit flow up your esophagus. It’s normal.

Just don’t stop there. Ask your feelings what they’re trying to communicate. The message isn’t just raw emotion. There’s a purposeful invitation behind those feelings. What truths are those feelings inviting you to discover?

I often like to journal about my feelings to ask them what their honest message is. This is a great way to become more truth aligned on the inside. Once I receive and acknowledge the message, the feelings almost always grow milder, or they stop being noticeable after a while.

Driving Towards Resolution

One reason that other people’s lack of truth alignment tugs at our attention is because it’s an invitation to get ourselves back into the flow of growth and change.

When we obsess over some else’s misalignments, we’re using a common delay tactic. Other people will present an endless stream of issues that we can call out as problematic, and it’s fine to do that now and then, but if we overdo it, this can divert our attention away from looking more closely at our own truth alignment issues.

When we see other people as blind, deluded, or misguided, we can get hung up on objections to their words and behaviors without actually resolving our thoughts and feelings about them. It’s fine to go through those phases, but we don’t want to remain stuck there.

If you object to what other people are thinking or saying, don’t stop there. Do your best to accept that they really are doing that, and then take the time to process and decide how you’re going to deal with them. How will their lack of truth alignment affect your relationship going forward? What meaning will you assign to their behaviors? How will you re-classify these people within your internal relationship matrix?

If you resolve your thoughts and feelings about such people to your own satisfaction, your mind can settle down, and you’ll no longer need to obsess about such people. This will free up more energy to pursue your own path of growth, which may involve facing your own difficult truths.

Beware the secondary gain that comes from obsessing over other people’s problems. If this is a way to let yourself off the hook from facing your own issues, it’s best to remove that incentive for using this as a delay tactic. I find that a good way to avoid the secondary gain issues is to give myself full permission to consciously put the brakes on my own growth when I want a break. Let it be perfectly okay to pause or slow down without having to justify the decision. If I can pause whenever I want – guilt-free – I don’t need to obsess over other people’s issues to force myself to go slower.

If you currently have a crushing relationship with someone else’s lack of truth alignment, invite the truth to really sink in. Do your best to fully accept what you see. Then ask: Now that I see this and can no longer deny it, what am I going to do about it? Who do I want to be in this situation?

One way to frame this is to consider that reality is testing you. What must you do to pass the test?

You’ll remain stuck if you don’t pass the test in a way that satisfies you.

Generalizing Your Answers

A good way to figure out how to resolve a situation with someone – at least in your own mind – is to state the issue more generally and then solve the general version of the problem. This won’t rid your social life of problems, but it will enable you to graduate to different classes of problems, so you don’t have to keep dealing with the same types of issues over and over.

For instance, if someone you know is spouting COVID conspiracy nonsense, you could ask yourself questions like these:

  • How would I like to relate to someone who absorbs and reiterates disinformation?
  • How shall I respond when someone speaks falsehoods in my presence?
  • What aspects of my character would I most like to access in such situations?
  • How do I intend to relate to people who present serious truth alignment issues?

I cannot give you these answers, but I can encourage you to ponder these questions intelligently and come up with your own answers. Then your next challenge is to get yourself to act in alignment with your best answers.

When I have time for it and if the relationship seems investment-worthy, I like to challenge and invite people who aren’t truth aligned to question what they think they know. Internally I feel some compassion for how they’ve been led astray, especially due to how much I felt led astray after being spoon-fed years of religious falsehoods.

I’ve noticed that even when I do this in a joking way, many people appreciate the wake-up call – when they’re ready for that kind of experience. I’ve received many cards, letters, emails, and in-person thank-you’s over the years from people who began facing unpleasant truths that they initially didn’t want to face, after they read some articles on my website. When they finally accepted the truth and began acting in alignment with it, they embarked upon some tremendous journeys of growth. A common example was when people realized that their uninspired job was a dead end, and they sought to explore more purposeful and rewarding work. Of course I’ve also received plenty of spiteful messages from people who initially dislike such invitations, but I take that in stride. After all, they chose to come here and read about it, and my article titles are usually straightforward and descriptive.

Do You Want Loyalty or Honesty?

Many people put their relationships ahead of truth. They value loyalty to certain people or groups above other values. I have been such a person as well, and I eventually felt disgusted with that aspect of my personality and worked on changing it. That kind of loyalty almost landed me in prison for a while, so I see it as immensely misguided. I learned some hard lessons that landed me squarely on the side of favoring truth alignment over loyalty to any particular individuals or groups. This has led me down some interesting and rewarding paths.

If you prefer to favor loyalty over truth (which ought to be the tagline for the U.S. Republican party these days), I invite you to carefully consider why you’re doing that. There are books like How to Win Friends and Influence People that will steer you away from truth alignment in order to manifest some extra social gains. If you find this approach appealing, test it for yourself. Personally I find it dreadful because it fills my social circle with partial matches. I very much prefer to get aligned with truth, and then people can love me or hate me on that basis.

What do you want from other people? Do you prefer loyalty or honesty?

If you want people to be loyal to you, even when they have to pretend that they respect you, you may indeed attract that experience. But will that really satisfy you? Do you want your social relationships to be based on secondary gain, full of people who pretend to see you a certain way so they can gain some benefits from you? Blech!

A social circle that values honesty above loyalty may seem more difficult at first, but you’ll get to experience a lot more growth on this path. This probably won’t be a stable circle in the traditional sense though. You’ll likely see people entering and exiting your life in a continuous flow, each person inviting you to see different truths. And even if you spend extended periods alone, that can be a beauty phase as well when you’re exploring deeper truths that matter to you.

There’s something about truth alignment that provides a much deeper level of comfort and security than any amount of loyalty to individuals can offer.

I find that the root of this decision comes down to trusting life. The more I can trust life, the more I can accept the flow of relationships and how they invite me to see and experience different truths. This helps me avoid getting clingy with misaligned relationships.

When someone staunchly opposes truth alignment, I tend to see it as a sign that it’s time to let that relationship fade, so a fresh connection can flow into my life. I’ve been trapped plenty of times when I did the opposite and favored loyalty to an individual or group. Now I realize that it’s totally normal for people to flow towards us or away from us, based on how we’re able to help each other grow in each moment.

Optimism

Despite how wacky and misaligned the world can seem at times, I remain staunchly optimistic. One reason is that I always see open pathways to greater truth alignment. Even when denial and falsehood seem rampant and there are organizations like Fox News spewing out falsehoods that create huge social ramifications, I also know that they have a limited lifespan. Sooner or later people find falsehood and denial deeply unsatisfying. It runs people in circles – or backwards – and doesn’t create a meaningful sense of progress. There’s always the invitation to get off that treadmill and to get back on a path of truth seeking.

So I tend to view such issues, even when they have massive social impacts, as a normal part of the human experience. I’ve circled around in that space quite a lot, and I do see that it has the value of putting the brakes on our growth (even if as I mentioned, we can simply pause consciously whenever we want). The benefit of falsehood is that it can stabilize reality in a more fixed position, so we can spend more time processing certain experiences before we progress to something new.

Depending on how you relate to other people who are mired in denial, you can actually pause your own progress, or you can let them experience what they’re experiencing and then go pursue something different for yourself.

For example, consider the major rollback of abortion rights in the USA. You could frame this as something like: Oh great… this is so backwards. Now we have to re-defend and re-litigate a social right that was already resolved. This is so stupid. Fuck you, SCOTUS!

On the other hand, you could also say: Okay, some people must really want to live in The Handmaid’s Tale universe. They want to control women’s bodies, and indeed even many women are even wanting to co-create that experience. States that ban abortion will predictably see an increase in many social problems in the decades ahead, including crime, since that’s statistically predictable where abortion has been banned elsewhere. If that’s what they desire, I can allow them to have this experience. It’s going to mean there’s a wider gap in the experiences of red versus blue states. It’s going to piss off a lot of people and create harsh consequences for many, including death and poverty, and there will be a lot of activism against this direction too.

Respect

What does it means to respect someone? Can you respect someone who strays far away from truth alignment?

You may find that it’s hard to respect someone when they start spewing out falsehoods. You may feel that respect means to regard someone as intelligent or reasonable, and it’s too much to ask to frame their behavior as intelligent in such cases. You may even think something like: Okay, this person has a defective brain.

A broader version of respect is to allow space for people to have a wide variety of experiences because that’s how we learn and grow, both individually and collectively. I like to see this as a greater form of truth alignment. On one level I may think that someone is being downright idiotic, and on that basis I cannot respect them as intelligent or reasonable. But on another level, I can also see that people are going out and having different experiences and learning and growing from them, and that is something I can respect.

For instance, if someone eats animal products, I can’t respect them as a compassionate or caring person since that wouldn’t make any sense if they’re relating to animals with violence or apathy. So I’m going to go ahead and file them in the “doesn’t care about the well-being of animals” section of my mind. But at the same time, I also recognize and accept that lots of people choose to explore a nonconsensual, entitlement-based relationship with animals’ bodies. They may even treat some animals as beloved pets (still property) while treating other animals as products where cruelty is just part of the business model they support.

I can respect that people are actively exploring this way of relating to animals, along with exploring the consequences of those choices, like much higher rates of lifestyle diseases like heart disease and cancer, harsher climate change impacts, etc. That aspect rings true because we’re all exploring different ways of relating to animals, just as we explore different ways of relating to each other. But I’m not going to succumb to the falsehood that such people actually care about animals’ well-being when their behavior towards animals is riddled with violence and abuse. So there’s no need for anyone in that space to maintain any pretense of caring about animals’ well-being because that’s meaningless if it isn’t backed up by action. But I can still relate to them – and respect them – on the basis that we’re all co-explorers here, each delving into different ways of relating to whatever we encounter.

One benefit of this way of respecting people is that you can also appreciate how they help you clarify what matters to you. Other people help you define what you don’t want to experience personally, and that helps you discover what you do desire. I appreciate that conspiracy theorists have done an excellent job of convincing me that I don’t want to join them in their conspiracies. 😉

I find that an interesting way to relate to people’s lack of truth alignment is to actually reframe it as a greater form of truth alignment that they’re pursuing. They’re seeking truth experientially. Even if I don’t choose to join them in that kind of experience, I can respect them for doing that. The explorer in me can still honor and salute the explorer in them.

I see exploration as one of the main reasons we’re all here. So even if someone is pursuing animal cruelty, misogyny, racism, or some other pursuit that I would vehemently reject exploring for myself, on some level I still appreciate what they’re doing for life. They’re still serving the expansion of what life is capable of. And I accept that life is capable of generating a wide range of experiences that do not personally appeal to me as an individual. That’s a simple truth that I feel it’s best to stay aligned with. If we try to dictate terms to life itself, life will surely overrule us.

This leads to the question: Do you respect what life is doing, in all its many manifestations?

Do you respect life for generating violence, lying, hatred, manipulation, etc? Are you able to give life – and especially humanity – space to explore this?

Can you accept that life is going to keep exploring these aspects with or without your permission?

Can you even accept that life’s explorations will sometimes have consequences for you and other people you know – and that sometimes you may dislike those consequences?

Forgiveness

One way to accept and respect what life is doing is to forgive its transgressions, just as you would hope that life forgives your own transgressions.

I have made plenty of nasty mistakes in life, including some really deplorable errors in judgment, and I appreciate that I wasn’t kicked off the planet. Somehow I’m still here… still breathing… still able to live life and express myself. I don’t take that for granted.

I like that life provides wiggle-room for making mistakes, including mistakes that may even cause consequences and problems for other people.

I too must deal with the consequences of other people’s decisions. I may really dislike some of the decisions made by other people in the world. Some of the choices people have made deeply disgust me. But on another level, I still respect and honor their freedom to make such choices, even when it causes problems for me and for future generations. I see it as a normal part of how life explores this reality.

It’s like playing a video game where someone takes you out with a headshot, and even though you’re dead, another part of you is saying, “Good shot. Well played.”

This doesn’t mean you can’t express what you want to express, including activism. You can still go explore what it’s like to rail against what you dislike. You can still explore what it’s like to inspire changes in the world. But can you accept that other aspects of life get a say as well, and some of those aspects may oppose you?

This can be a hard frame to reach for, especially when you’re in the thick of dealing with the consequences of other people’s choices. In those moments I like to remind myself of how forgiving life was with me when I screwed up. This helps me appreciate that I haven’t been spaced yet. And this in turn helps me choose not to space someone else and to let them remain in the game, even if I think they really deserve to be spaced. At the same time I may be yelling at them, I’m also thanking them for keeping the game interesting and stimulating – and for helping me clarify what kind of character I want to play while I’m here.

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Upgrading the Healing Frame

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One thing that seemed to keep me stuck for quite a while when I was younger was the healing frame, i.e. layering a desired area of improvement with the perspective that I needed to “heal” something within myself.

The healing frame remains a popular way to frame various aspects of self-development, addiction recovery, human relationships, and more. It also carries some major downside baggage though, so it can bey very risky to use it, not just for yourself but for others you interact with.

How the Healing Frame Slows Us Down

With healing physical wounds, the body largely does that for us, so healing basically means waiting or resting or taking it easy, so the body can do the healing part. When we transplant this frame to something mental or emotional, it’s easy for the mind to link up with the association that we’re in waiting mode, which is a pretty passive stance. So in that sense it’s almost a frame of anti-investment, like we’re clinging to the pre-transformation state.

With physical healing we also have a pretty good idea of what the healed state looks like. For many injuries or conditions we can clearly see or feel the difference. The “solved” state is pretty crisp. The wound is closed up. The bone is mended. The sniffles are gone. Our energy is back up again. We’ve stopped coughing. The scans detect no more tumors. The COVID test is negative. So we have some good ways to measure progress when using this frame for physical ailments.

On the mental and emotional side, what does the healed state look like, especially if we feel we’re dealing with some pretty old trauma? I think many people who use the healing frame aren’t really clear about how to state the destination in a way that makes much sense, even to themselves. So it’s very easy for this frame of healing to become an endless quagmire of circular thinking. I think many would agree that they don’t see a clear path to the healed state, and I wonder how many realize that this endlessness is a predictable consequence of using the healing frame. You’ve entered a game world with no actual ending, and the only way to “finish” is to exit the game and stop using that frame.

It’s also pretty easy to use this frame to deflect investments or offers that could be rapidly transformational because the healing frame will likely make you feel skeptical of anything that seems too quick and easy. I think we tend to expect that inner healing must take a long time and that we just need to be patient and go slow. But in the real world, there are plenty of opportunities for inner shifts to come through quickly and effectively, just as some medical problems can be cured with ease today.

We tend not to frame the quick medical procedures as “healing” but rather as something else like a “procedure.” And when you think that inner healing is the answer, you can easily miss opportunities for simpler actions that could speed you along because they don’t align with the healing frame. But if a simple procedure would work even better than your slow-paced healing efforts, why not use it?

The Healing Frame Is Inaccurate

The more I read about neuroscience and how the brain works, the more the healing frame seems outdated. There are many ways for our brains/minds to improve, including ways to recover from major emotional trauma, but a neural network doesn’t really “heal,” unless perhaps you’re dealing with a physical injury to it. So this model doesn’t align so well with the realities of how our brains process experiences.

No matter which direction we bend the healing frame – emotional, mental, spiritual, social, etc – it carries significant drawbacks, except when we limit it to the realm in which it works well, which is physical repair. And if we do apply this frame just in the physical realm, we can even find other useful ways to apply it which can create positive mental and emotional ripples too, such as by leveraging detoxification and physical exercise to improve the health and resilience of our brain cells.

I like and appreciate the healing frame for its usefulness in the physical realm, but outside of that realm, I tend to think of it as pretty messed up and problematic, with a major risk of keeping one trapped for a long time.

Another very real risk of the healing frame is that it can be used manipulatively as well. When someone invites you to heal a relationship or to heal some part of you, take a step back and notice how you might be getting invited into a trap with a risk of giving your power away for someone else’s benefit for a considerable amount of time.

More Effective Frames to Use

Instead of using a healing frame and supposing that same part of my thoughts and feelings are wounded or damaged, which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense neurologically speaking, I find other ways of framing mental and emotional issues much more effective if I actually want to solve problems and release them.

One way to think of such problems is to see the brain as an input-output box. Like any neural network, the brain is trained on experience. For any sort of input, it will generate output. That output could be thoughts, feelings, words, actions, behaviors, etc.

So a “problem” can be defined as a situation where some form of input is creating undesirable output. Once I can admit that my brain isn’t behaving as I’d like, then I can clarify what output I’d like to see instead, giving similar input patterns. So if my brain is doing X, and I don’t want it to do X, then what do I want it to do instead?

This framing helps me step into a frame that gives me a solid grasp on a solution path, instead of trapping me in endless dialog with my inner child. I love talking to my inner child (and many other parts of myself), but for such dialog to be effective, we have to first get on the same page about what we’d like the overall mind to be doing.

Once I know what kind of output I’d like to see, I can leverage the brain’s strengths. It’s very good at learning from experience. That’s real-world external experience, not endless inner probing. So then I need to give my brain some fresh input of various forms to modify its training, such that I retrain its output patterns to get closer to the desired results.

Hence instead of using a healing frame, one significantly more effective frame is to use the frame that you’re retraining, retooling, or refactoring your brain’s outputs. If you want to steer this in a more spiritual direction, call it retraining your consciousness; it works just as well.

Retraining Habits

For instance, if I want to get up at 5am, and my brain is generating “sleep in” thoughts and feelings of tiredness, that’s an input-output mismatch. So then I would need to retrain my brain to generate different thoughts and feelings when the alarm goes off, including the behavior of getting up.

I don’t just want to force my groggy self out of bed when the alarm goes off. I want to awaken feeling well-rested, energized, motivated, and enthusiastic for the coming day. Note that I’m clearly defining the total output package I want to see.

Using this framing leads to much faster results than if I tried to “heal” my relationship with the pre-dawn hours or something like that.

Retraining Anxiety

Suppose I feel anxiety, fear, or some other negative emotion in a situation where I’d rather feel differently. Then I can retrain my brain through different kinds of experiences to create different output there too.

Many years ago I used to feel high anxiety, nervousness, and dread when I’d have to speak in front of an audience, even for days or weeks in advance if I knew it was coming up. My thoughts would dwell upon the pending doom, draining my mental resources. Instead of preparing well in advance, I’d procrastinate, which would just increase the stress levels.

Eventually I thought about the output I wanted, which was to feel relaxed, confident, and excited before speaking and to feel safe, comfortable, playful, trusting, connected, compassionate, and in the flow while speaking. I also wanted to feel well-prepared. And I wanted to feel that the audience and I were on the same side because we’d all benefit from a good outcome. That gave me something to train towards.

Action-wise this involved six years in Toastmasters and a variety of other speaking experiences that retrained my brain to create the desired output. I kept chipping away at the mental and emotional retraining by adding layers of small successes to teach my brain that public speaking could be fun and rewarding. Basically I gave my brain a lot of new experiences to learn from, so it could update its internal connections.

My childhood training in this area was dreadful in that it trained my brain to produce feelings of anxiety and pressure, as well as associations with grades and competition. I can blame my teachers and the school for that because they did a terrible job there, but I was still stuck with the after-effects. As an adult I was able to recognize this deficiency and responsibly retrain my brain to serve me well in this area instead of leaving the poorly trained model in place.

That was a resounding success, and now I love doing public speaking in a variety of forms. Instead of generating fear and dread, my brain now automatically generates very positive feelings when I do public speaking, as well as leading up to it. For instance, I very much enjoyed delivering The Octo Intensive 3-day workshop at the end of October.

While I can of course continue to make improvements, I’m delighted with the part of my neural network that now processes anything related to public speaking. It’s a highly functional part of my brain now, and I cherish what it does for me. Moreover, I appreciate it even more because I know what I had to invest to “train up” this part of my brain to work the way I wanted it to work.

Retraining Mental and Emotional Patterns

Now the retraining process can go in all sorts of different directions, and it can involve many of the same methods you might also apply with a healing frame. But in this case those methods are applied with a much crisper direction in mind. It’s easier to see real progress being made, and there’s a light at the end of the tunnel when you can call the transformation completed, which is basically when you’re getting the output you want to see from your own mind.

What exactly is your standard for measuring progress when you use the healing frame for mental and emotional issues? Do you measure progress by how many therapy sessions you’ve had? By how much you’ve paid for therapy? By how many journaling entries you’ve made? It’s really easy to mistake busywork for progress here. How much time you’ve invested doesn’t matter since that time can easily be wasted on activities that don’t move the needle forward.

If you’re going to use the healing frame, it’s important to clearly define the healed state. How is your brain output different in the healed state? What will you think, feel, and do differently? Are your healing investments clearly shifting your brain’s output patterns towards the healed state? Are you seeing obvious signs of progress in the span of a few weeks?

If I focused on healing my relationship with my inner child to reduce my nervousness with public speaking, I’d still need to get up and speak now and then to assess if those efforts are working. Do I feel less anxiety than before? Can I speak more easily this month than I could last month? If there are no signs of progress, then my healing efforts aren’t worth much. I’m basically just navel gazing and pretending that I’m getting somewhere.

How about healing your money wounds? Is that approach working if you step back and measure the results? Is your income going up? Is your net worth rising? Can you earn the same money you used to earn but in less time, with greater ease, with more fun, etc? Or are you just filling up journals with endless thoughts and feelings? What if you retrained your brain to generate abundance-producing thoughts, feelings, and behaviors? No healing is needed. It’s just money, not a broken bone.

Feed Your Brain the Experiences It Needs to Grow

While there are many ways to make progress towards changing your brain’s outputs, I think the simplest way is to give my brain the input, i.e. the direct experience, it needs to learn what I’d like it to learn.

This is a very flexible frame that helps point me towards actionable solutions.

For instance, when I wanted to retrain my brain to think and feel differently about human touch, I spent time connecting with non-judgmental, compassionate, touch-friendly people, so I could gain plenty of practice. I fed my brain enough positive experiences to shift its output patterns. That helped me transition from an affection-starved life into an affection-abundant one – and with a relationship partner who revels in the joy of touch as well.

When I’m going through a retraining process, I want to focus on positive experiences, meaning that I want experiences that teach my brain what I want it to learn. Consequently, if I want to feel good and safe with touch, I’m not going to practice with people who aren’t at least leaning in that direction themselves, and ideally it’s best if I engage with people who are already where I want to be mentally and emotionally.

I got better faster at public speaking by practicing with people who were way better at it than me – and who were super comfortable with it. Some of the people I trained with, and was trained by, had been speaking for decades. I recall having a 2.5-hour sit down talk with a guy who’d been on stages since he was 3 years old. His parents were skilled comedic performers, so he grew up in that world. Thanks to spending time with people like him, my brain tuned into more effective mindsets for thinking about public speaking. But I still needed to practice plenty, so my brain could really “get it” internally.

If I approached public speaking with a healing frame, I might have wasted years trauma-bonding with people who were just as anxious about it, or worse, and I don’t see how that would have helped much at all. In fact, that approach incurs the huge risk of strengthening the very patterns I want to retrain.

If I want to recover from some kind of trauma, it’s more effective to connect with other people who’ve successfully retrained their trauma responses. I want to learn from other brains that are working the way I want mine to work. It’s not going to be as helpful if I wallow in the trauma pit with people who are in endless healing mode but never healed.

Using this kind of framing has really sped me along through some transformations that might never have happened if I used the healing frame.

Is the Healing Frame Effective for You?

I invite you to question whether the healing frame is really helping you or if it’s actually getting in your way. Are you really wounded or damaged? Are you checking off healing issues as done and cured at a healthy pacing?

I do a lot of coaching, and I don’t normally regard people as wounded, even if they use that frame on themselves. I consider instead that their brains may be outputting patterns that aren’t serving them well. I can still feel compassion for them, knowing how easy it is for ineffective patterns to be trained into us, especially from childhood. There’s no blame or shame in that. But my role isn’t to heal them since I’m not a doctor, and there’s no wound to treat. My role is to invite and encourage them to retrain these patterns, so their brain shifts towards generating the output patterns they’d really like to see.

Like many human beings, I have had to retrain my brain a great deal. I entered my 20s with many messed up mental and emotional patterns which, if left uncorrected, would surely have held me back from accessing and appreciating so much of life’s beauty and deliciousness. I’ve been investing in this kind of retraining for 3 decades now, and it’s still ongoing. And I can tell you that these efforts have been paying off wonderfully. I’m happy. I’m highly motivated. I’m experiencing the best creative flow of my life. I enjoy lovely high-trust relationships. I give and receive hugs, kisses, and cuddles daily. I contribute to the world. My finances are in great shape and keep improving. I have a lifestyle that I appreciate. Nice home. Yadda yadda yadda.

Perhaps my most powerful starting point was in a jail cell back in January 1991. I remember that it was Superbowl Sunday because people were watching the Superbowl from their cells (barely though since it was playing on a small TV a bit far away). I’m glad that even back then, I didn’t use the frame that I needed to heal myself. I started with the frame that I needed to grow, really to grow up. That was a start. I feel lucky that I began by creating a clearer picture of the kind of person I wanted to be, which gave me a standard to move towards.

It was some years later that I discovered and explored the healing frame, and while I’m glad to have explored it a lot because I do love exploring, those were among my slowest and most stagnant years in terms of measurable progress. Relevant to how fast the gains came during other years, it seemed like I was standing still during those times. So using the healing frame was a bit like pushing the pause button on growth, even though I still felt like I was busily occupied with growth-like activities.

Outgrowing “Poor Me”

Another issue with the healing frame is that it doesn’t help unless you perceive yourself as wounded or damaged. What if your life is going well and you feel great? How do you keep healing beyond that? The healing frame is pretty much guaranteed to hit a plateau sooner or later. I don’t want to plateau, and with the retraining frame I don’t have to. Even when life is really good, I can keep reaching for more growth and improvement. I can upgrade endlessly, which I love.

This month I’m doing a 30-day challenge to improve my divergent thinking skills. I’m generating 100+ ideas per day to improve my life and business. Then I assess and figure out how to apply some of the best ones. Divergent thinking is already a strength of mine, so I definitely don’t need to heal it. I’m training my mind to get better at generating even more wildly creative ideas. By the end of the month, I’ll have generated 3000+ ideas. I know most of them won’t be practical, but I can say that after just 2 days of this so far, I’m super optimistic about it. I’ve already implemented some fabulous ideas that were quick to do.

What’s your relationship with the healing frame? Has it done wonders for you and flowed you into a bountiful new phase of life? If so, that’s wonderful, and I applaud you for it. The purpose of this article isn’t to dissuade you from using that framing if it’s truly effective for you. Rather I want to nudge those who find themselves feeling stuck to consider if the healing frame could be a potential reason for that stuckness. The healing frame has some major shortcomings, so my intention here is to caution you about using it. I think it’s highly likely that you’d get better and faster results with a different framing, such as retraining your brain or upgrading your mental and emotional output patterns.

A simple way of thinking about the approach I find more effective here is to ask: What kinds of experiences do I wish I’d had growing up, such that I would have learned much more effective patterns? Getting clear about how I wish life had trained my brain (in contrast to the training I actually received) gives me so much clarity about the solution path.

The overall benefit to having been poorly trained in some key areas is that it was a powerful invitation to learn how to consciously train my brain. If my early mental and emotional training had been much better, I might not have developed this skill set nearly as well. So that helps me appreciate anything traumatic from my past, knowing what an amazing invitation it really was. And this appreciation just compounds when I flow these personal gains into sharing lessons to benefit many other people as well. So even though it was hard going through some of those early experiences, in retrospect I think it was a fair and generous offer from reality, and I can respect and even admire how it set that up. Instead of spending so much of my life resenting or resisting the past, I expect that sense of appreciation will only deepen in the years ahead.

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Timing Your Passion

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When some aspect of life feels forced, and you have to push through with a lot of discipline to make progress, it might mean that the timing is wrong for you. If you feel like putting it off, maybe do exactly that.

Other people may tell you that you need to advance some area of life now, but is that absolutely necessary?

When I was in high school, I loved math and invested lots of extra time in it, so I improved at math more quickly than in other subjects. I got A+’s in my math classes, but that still wasn’t enough for me. I befriended the school’s best math teachers and did extra projects with them. I was eager to learn anything else they could introduce me to, so I learned a lot more than the standard curriculum.

Following my passion helped me become a stand-out student, and that was instrumental in my becoming Captain of our school’s first Academic Decathlon team and President of the Math Club. More opportunities fell into my lap with little resistance as I simply pursued what I enjoyed. I received glowing letters of recommendation for college with phrases like “best student in my career” and “this kid is a heavyweight.”

I didn’t invest extra time and energy in math because I was outcome-focused. I did it because I enjoyed the discovery process. Learning more about math connected with my interest in computer programming, so every bit of extra math I learned gave me an excuse to dabble in more coding experiments. The more math I learned, the more I could do coding-wise. So this was really fueled by the joy of the exploration.

Contrast this with history classes, which I found boring and tedious. I still got A’s in those classes, but I did the minimum to achieve that. Studying history at that time felt forced, effortful, and pointless. I cared more about the grades for those classes than the knowledge. I framed those classes as “nap time” or “snooze fests.” I especially dreaded being assigned history papers to write. I didn’t like reading about dead people and their past problems, and I certainly didn’t care to write about them. Everything I did for this subject felt like a waste of time.

And I was generally right about that. It was a relative waste of time for me to study history at that particular time in my life. It mostly just slowed me down from investing even more in what I genuinely cared about. History was a drag that added friction to my learning experience. I think I would have enjoyed and appreciated the educational experience a lot more without it.

Procrastination vs. Flow

When I got home from school, I usually did my math homework first. If I had long-term assignments in math, I’d typically do them the first day they were assigned, and I’d turn them in early. I never seemed to procrastinate on math.

With history it was the opposite. I put off assignments till the last minute, often having to stay up late to finish them (or to finally start them) the night before they were due. That was stressful, but I couldn’t get myself to even look at those assignments any earlier than necessary. I felt such tremendous resistance towards them.

So what was the point in doing those history assignments with that mindset? In reality it was pretty pointless. I did the assignments to satisfy other people’s expectations and to avoid getting in trouble. My brain quickly forgot whatever I was supposed to be learning, considering it useless info and unworthy of retention or integration. The A’s I got in history classes were hollow accomplishments; they were more like receipts for enduring punishments.

If you dread working on something, how productive are you really? What if instead of forcing yourself to attempt the dreadful path, you flowed your energy towards something that truly inspired you? Note that what inspires you may not even seem like work at all. It will probably seem a lot more like play, which may initially trigger some feelings of guilt, like you’re playing too much and not being productive.

I find it much better to let other people resist my playful approach to productivity, since I can still be productive while they’re being skeptical. It’s much harder to be productive while I’m feeling resistance to the task at hand. So I’ve learned to prioritize my relationship with my work above my relationship with other people’s approval of my approach.

Shifting Passions

Over the decades since high school, I experienced shifts in my passions, as many people do. Subjects I once hated eventually seduced me, including history and public speaking. When I was in high school, I didn’t anticipate that. I didn’t imagine that I’d ever enjoy studying history or giving speeches.

These days I like learning about history, and I do so voluntarily. I read new history books often, and I make a concerted effort to fill in gaps in my knowledge regarding how different parts of the world have been evolving over time. I care about this subject because I have a different context for it today. In high school studying history seemed like a waste of time, and it was. But today I can connect the dots between what I learn about history with my personal development work. I have places to slot this knowledge that I didn’t have before, so the learning experience today is a lot richer.

I also have the freedom to skip the dreadful parts of learning and focus on the parts I enjoy. I don’t have to write pointless papers on subtopics I don’t care about, just so someone else can grade me. Instead I can go for a walk and ponder the ideas in my own way. I can journal about them. Sometimes I will integrate what I learn about history into new articles or course lessons. Whereas studying history was impractical in high school, today I can study it in a much more meaningful way.

Moreover, I can also visit places in person. Last month I stood inside Independence Hall, where the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution were debated and signed. I walked the streets where Ben Franklin and George Washington used to walk. I thought about what it might have been like to live during the 1700s and face the problems and challenges they faced. That gave me a different perspective than I’d ever get from a book. I also gained a different perspective on democracy, and why it’s coming under such strain today.

So I’ve learned that ruling out an area of investment doesn’t rule it out for life. I can circle back to it if and when I’m ready. What may feel like a nagging “should” for many years may feel like a delightful gift further down the road. If I invest at the wrong time, I’m probably just going to waste a lot of energy.

Favoring the Choicest Investments

When I invest in a genuine passion or interest, I can advance more quickly and easily. The experience is more fun and engaging and less stressful. I experience less fatigue, and I have more endurance. My brain absorbs and retains knowledge more readily, eager to connect the dots with my existing knowledge base. I’m happier, I’m more productive, and I feel more satisfied with the flow of my life.

So what’s the point in forcing advancement in a more sluggish and painful way? I don’t see a good reason to do that, except to appease others, so I try to live my life in such a way as to remove (or at least to savagely curtail) such obligations and expectations. I’m fine with committing myself to certain paths, including those that involve significant obligations, and long as I’m choosing what to offer and to whom, so I can ensure that my commitments align with my genuine interests.

Instead of developing a stronger tolerance for feelings of dread and anxiety, I think I’ve become more sensitive to such feelings, and I choose to honor them instead of trying to repress them.

Sometime I wonder how people are able to show up for jobs they dislike day after day. Perhaps they have other outlets for their passions, so it doesn’t feel so bad, just as I had my enjoyment of math to balance my resistance to history classes. Do we really need that kind of balance though?

I’m not saying we need to be perfect, but I think a healthy minimum standard for one’s career path would be to make it at least 50% passion work, so at least half of your time is spent doing activities you like and appreciate. I think that’s a fairly low standard though, so personally I prefer to aim for 90%+ in a typical week. I’d say that this month I’ve been pretty close to 100% so far.

I also know that what seems unappealing or even dreadful at one time in my life may become a lot more interesting at some future point. That which I once dreaded I may come to enjoy. A non-passion can transform into a passion. I’ve seen that happen repeatedly.

Passions too, can eventually burn out, and then fresh invitations arise to take their place. This is one reason I deliberately designed my career path with a huge amount of freedom and flexibility instead of boxing myself into some tiny niche. Some people thought that was a bad idea and said that I should “niche down,” but I’ve noticed that I seem to be a lot happier and more fulfilled than those who offer such unimaginative advice. How many times have I seen someone like that dreading their work after just a couple of years, whereas I still love and enjoy the richness and variety of my work in this field after 17+ years? I credit my past self with recognizing that I would eventually outgrow an overly narrow niche, and I’m glad he was wise enough to see that flexibility was essential for my long-term happiness.

Keeping Passion Fresh

Sometimes the way we do things grows stale, and we need to freshen up the approach to keep it interesting.

My latest project is designing a new online workshop that I’ll deliver on October 29-31, so a little over two weeks from now. I shared back in April that we’d be doing an online workshop on these days, and now I’m going through the design process to create it. This will be our first 100% online workshop, after having done 16 in-person workshops from 2009 to 2016. So that aspect alone helps to freshen up the experience, at least on the delivery side.

However, I’m also approaching the design process in a fresh and inspiring way. I’m using several AI creative tools (based on the GPT-3 language model) to help me design the workshop. The AI isn’t writing content for me. Instead I’m using it to explore the idea space more thoroughly than I otherwise would. I’ve been sharing updates about this in Conscious Growth Club for the past several weeks. I’m really enjoying this because it’s such a unique and modern experience. I like discovering where the AI is weak and where it’s strong, so I can combine its intelligence with my own to create an even better workshop. I’m well into the design process, and I really like how it’s shaping up. I’m also way ahead of schedule, much like I experienced with math classes back in the day.

What’s especially interesting about GPT-3, at least from my perspective, is that it was trained on about 10% of the Internet, including my blog, so it knows a lot about me, my past ideas, and my writing style. Hence I can even invite it to generate extra ideas that it thinks I might conceive of. Since I love to explore new approaches, I’m really enjoying this experience, and I find it super motivating to work on this project each day. I think it’s going to be very beneficial for the attendees as well. It’s a truly unique experience to work with an AI that was partly trained on my own creative work.

Consider how an AI like can look further ahead than humans in a game like Chess or Go (see the AlphaGo documentary on YouTube to learn more about this, which I highly recommend). On the one hand, some people may see this as dehumanizing or threatening, but that’s a weak and disempowering frame to use. A better frame is to realize that humans can collaborate with AI to become better players. They can discover new insights about a domain by using such AI as an exploration tool. For instance, in the game of Go, AlphaGo discovered new strategies and tactics that humans missed, including the most masterful Go players on earth. So this is a beautiful new mode of human-machine collaboration. Something similar happened in the Chess world.

If you’re entirely outcome-focused, then such an AI may seem like a threat, especially if it has the ability to beat you in achieving your desired outcome.

But if you’re more process-oriented, then you can leverage AI to enjoy the learning and discovery process even more. The AI will happily assist you in becoming a better player. I feel fortunate to have access to AI tools that have been trained in domains that interest me. GPT-3 is technically a language model, but as many people are discovering, that’s an oversimplification of its capabilities. I regard it as a fascinating tool for creative exploration within the space of ideas.

Instead of exploring strategies for the game of Go, I’m using AI tools to explore fresh ways to frame, structure, and present ideas for the upcoming workshop. The AI doesn’t help me work faster – in fact, my design process is a lot slower with it, which is why I’m giving myself lots of extra time for this project. But the AI helps me go a lot deeper. So I’m using it to create a better quality experience, and this aligns very nicely with savoring the creative journey.

With the AI’s help, I can generate and consider dozens of permutations of related ideas. I can explore how those ideas link together in many more ways. I can look further around the edges of ideas for related concepts that I might otherwise miss. I can leverage this type of AI to become better at my work. And in all honesty, I’m loving the experience, which I’ve been exploring for about six weeks now.

So I suppose that if you attend the October workshop – and I’ll share more details about that soon – you’ll be attending one of the first-ever personal growth events co-created with human and machine intelligence working together collaboratively. It’s going to be a unique experience, and since the AI has been trained on a vast amount of human knowledge, I think you’ll find it surprisingly human in terms of its depth.

So that’s an example of how I’ve been freshening up my passion. Much as I covered in the Amplify course earlier this year, I find it crucial to keep my creative processes fresh, interesting, and growth-oriented. To me this is inseparable from doing quality work. If I really enjoy the creative journey, the work turns out better, and this yields a better experience for those who partake of it.

Incidentally, if you want to get the details for the upcoming workshop via email, just make sure you’re signed up for my email list, and I’ll surely notify you and let you know how to sign up.

Choosing Enjoyment

Why try to force progress with painful lurching when you could invest in enjoyable and motivated flow instead? You’ll get better results from processes you enjoy instead of trying to use processes you resist. When you catch yourself dreading the tasks on your plate, question why you’re doing them at all. Would you still opt to do them if no one else cared whether you did them or not? Are you doing them to appease others? To avoid trouble? How much longer do you want to live your life that way?

When I work creatively with the AI tools, they never tell me what I should do. They don’t nag me to do something boring or tedious. They voice no expectations of me. They just show up and co-create with me, and they always let me lead, so I can relax and enjoy the flow of exploration and discovery. Why not develop this kind of relationship with life and work overall? If following other people isn’t working for you, you can lead yourself to a happier life. For many people that’s the only approach that works.

A good place to start is to set your intention. Many years ago I decided to do work that I enjoyed. I decided to run my business in a sustainably enjoyable way. A huge part of that included refusing to work with anyone I didn’t like working with. When life offered me the opposite, which it often did, I rejected those offers. I realized that I couldn’t be tempted by them if I wanted to be happy and fulfilled.

Back in high school, if I had felt as free to choose my path as I do now, I would have told my history teachers that I was declining their offer. I would have trusted and honored my feelings a lot more. At least today I can be grateful for how those lessons, among many others, helped me discover a lighter and more playful path forward.

Now please excuse me while I load up some alien intelligence to flow into some fun and lively design work. And stay tuned for more details on the upcoming workshop…

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Creative Courage

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I love the feeling of making a big creative commitment, knowing that I have to lean into trust, rely on my knowledge and skills, and take lots and lots of action to follow through.

It reminds me of when I used to go cliff diving on Catalina Island when I was younger, jumping off a large rock into the ocean and hoping I landed the right way.

Amplify

Once the commitment is fully made, there’s this feeling of being all-in. All doubt is shoved aside since there’s no point in entertaining such thoughts after the decision to go forward is made.

Post-commitment all of my energy flows in the same direction – towards completion. I internally switch off any modes of thinking that might create internal friction. If such thoughts try to surface, they get lasered into oblivion.

I keep a careful watch on my emotions during this time, looking for any emotional drift from solid and sustainable motivation. If I spot any issues, I move to address them immediately. I do what it takes to keep my motivation in the sweet spot for consistent creative flow.

I’m in this mode now. Today I recorded and published the 10th lesson of the Amplify course. It’s a 21-minute lesson, and it took me a good 7 hours to fully design, record, edit, and publish it, including writing a one-page summary of the course and an exercise for the Amplify Workbook. I started shortly after 5am and finished just after noon.

Daily Commitment

This will be part of my daily flow for the next 7 weeks – every day including weekends – till the course is 100% complete.

In addition to creating 60+ audio lessons, I’ll also be hosting 8 live calls for course participants, one per week, starting this Wednesday, March 10. Bringing so many creative people together to connect, share, and inspire each other will surely be a lively adventure.

Many years ago the scope and speed of a project like this would have scared me. Now I love it. It feels edgy, fun, and engaging.

This course isn’t designed in advance. I’m co-creating it with the brave souls who’ve enrolled, one lesson at a time. When I woke up this morning at 5am, I didn’t know what lesson I’d create today. By 6am I was already well immersed in designing it.

I love how this project demands that I stay focused on it for many hours each day. I have to take it one step at a time and keep driving each step forward to completion. There’s at least one new deliverable every day, and it’s not done till it’s published. I can’t just put in what feels like enough time and call it a day. I have to finish and publish, or the creative part of the day isn’t over.

With this kind of rhythm, any misaligned thoughts or feelings are not to be entertained. The mental and emotional drive can only go forward, not backwards or sideways. I find that the commitment itself takes care of that pretty well. My mind knows the daily goal.

It’s very satisfy to work in such an immersive way, to fully commit myself to one of the biggest and deepest creative projects of my life. So much stems from that commitment. By telling my mind that we are absolutely positively moving forward on this, every part of me gets on board.

This is challenging at times, but it feels like I have all the mental and emotional capacity I need. This also requires tremendous trust. I have to trust that the ideas will flow each day. I have to trust that every single day there will be abundant fresh waves of inspiration and that they’ll always be there for me.

I don’t just want to create adequate lessons for this course. I want to create lessons that are interesting, original, insightful, profound, brilliant, unique, and often playful. I want to listen to a lesson after it’s recorded and think: Damn… that was incredible… how did I do that? I want to twist and squeeze every drop of creative essence I have and pour it into this course. I want to record with great emotional energy and expressiveness. And I want to enjoy the experience, day after day. I want to be full of satisfaction and gratitude after publishing each lesson, anticipating how beautiful it will be when people get to listen to it.

Creative Courage

I feel that the key to all of this is creative courage – to finally have the guts to go all-in with a project that I feel ought to be created. This includes choosing a project that’s in my edgy zone. It’s not so easy that I already know how to do it, like plucking a piece of low-hanging fruit off a tree. It seems possible, but it’s going to require that I do my best. A half-hearted effort won’t suffice.

I feel immensely pleased with the first 10 lessons, and the feedback rolling in has been extremely positive, with some people saying they’ve already gotten their money’s worth from the course. I’m really pouring my heart and soul into this, with some lessons making me cry while I design them. This is definitely not just a mental-level experience. It’s a potent journey through creative space, and that can be emotionally intense. It’s like I’m taking all of the emotional energy that flowed through me during nearly 30 years of creative work and infusing it into this course. It’s potent!

I also like that the invitation to join the course requires creative courage to accept. This is not a course for everyone. It’s for people who hear the call to do creative work, and they have the courage to say yes to it. It takes guts to commit yourself to a major deep dive like this, knowing that you’re going to emerge from it a different person – a person who is going to create ripples in the world.

I feel like the real purpose of the Amplify course is to fill people’s hearts and minds with so much creative inspiration and motivation that they experience a major upgrade in their creative courage… and this energy must then flow forth in a powerful fountain of original creative expression.

Do you have the guts to join us?

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Benefits of Eating Raw

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It’s wonderful to be on Day 7 of my year of eating raw. I think I’m past the initial detox phase, and I’m flowing nicely into the beneficial part of this experience. It really has been super easy to reload these habits – not really a challenge, just a different way of experiencing life.

As part of my prep for this year, I reviewed some old blog posts and journal entries from my previous raw foodism times, so I could recall the benefits I documented. Then I compiled them into a big list. I’ll share that here, so you can get an idea of what motivates me to be a raw foodist this year. It’s something I’ve always wanted to re-explore more deeply.

First off, it really is very different from eating cooked vegan. As good as it feels to be vegan and as many benefits as that provides, so much gets significantly amplified when eating raw. The improvements are very noticeable, even after just a week.

Let’s go down the list:

Restful Sleep, Less Sleep, and Dreams

My sleep is deeper and more restful. I normally sleep 30-60 minutes less per night while eating raw, which means more waking hours. I’ll likely have less afternoon drowsiness as well, so I may not take as many afternoon naps. Yesterday I was struck by how alert and awake I feel through the whole afternoon.

I have very rich and vivid dreams each night on a raw diet, which really helps me stay deeply asleep. It often feels like my dreams are 2-3 days long, like complex adventure stories. My dream recall improves significantly too.

Also when I do get tired at the end of the day, sleepiness comes on more gradually, so I can stay up a bit later when I want. When I eat cooked food, the attack of drowsiness tends to come up quickly. On raw foods I can easily dismiss any drowsiness, and it goes away if I engage in any kind of activity. So the initial onset of drowsiness is more like a gentle notification that I can dismiss if I want.

Calm, Clear Mind and Enhanced Intelligence

My mind is so much calmer and clearer. It’s way easier to focus and to make aligned decisions. The mental boost is one of my favorite benefits, and it always kicks in relatively quickly.

I feel like my mind has 30% more RAM for thinking. This could even increase as the year progresses. This will be a great year for making decisions and implementing some new plans. Any kind of high-level thinking or planning work feels so much easier.

That extra mental RAM makes a huge difference. I can hold more complex thoughts and connections in my mind simultaneously, which makes it easier to think about the ways different projects relate to each other. This is wonderful for seeing the big picture of how my life and business are unfolding, and it’s especially good for looking at a large to-do list and immediately seeing the true priorities pop right out.

Consequently, I set different priorities when eating raw. I look at my old priorities and instantly recognize flaws in them, and then I fix them within minutes.

Faster Thinking

My mind feels like it runs faster too, but at the same time it feels less effortful. I observe that I flow through work more quickly and feel less fatigued afterwards.

Life Seems Easier

The extra mental capacity makes projects that previously looked daunting seem lighter and easier. I look at issues that seemed complex before, but on a raw diet they seem like no big deal. I know I can easily do them.

Faster Writing

I can write about 30% faster while eating raw. My mind will think further ahead automatically. After last year’s deep dive into blogging (and the extra training that provided), I could really be a writing and creative powerhouse in 2021 if I wanted to. Instead of more volume though, I want to invest in more depth this year.

I’m especially curious to see how this affects my course development work this year. I think it’s going to make the work feel a lot easier.

Reduced Cravings and Addictions

Cravings for unhealthy foods go down. So do compulsive and addictive behaviors of all types. It’s much easier to avoid distractions. This creates more freedom and discipline to make aligned choices. I’m already feeling increased desire for healthy, living foods, and cooked foods are losing their appeal.

It feels like I have more conscious control over myself and where I direct my thoughts and energy.

More Energy

I feel significantly more energetic in my body and emotions. I enjoy great energy flow when I need it. It’s easy to get more done each day, like 20-30% more action. That adds up.

I don’t have to put off as much to future days. Yesterday I finished all the items on a to-do list I made for the day. I haven’t done that in a while. Usually I have to put off a few tasks till the next day sine I tend to be ambitious about what I try to squeeze into a day. Now it feels like my energy is in better balance with my ambition.

This actually makes me wonder if my sense of what I can get done in a day is calibrated to be accurate when I’m eating raw, so if I eat cooked food, I’ll always fall short of that.

Easier Breathing

My breathing feels easier and deeper, like my lungs are working more efficiently. It’s like I’m breathing in cool, minty air all the time… or maybe the air I’m taking in has somehow become more oxygen-rich.

Happier Emotions

I feel happier when eating raw, often euphoric. That’s a wonderful feeling to experience. I’m more optimistic about life as well. I feel more appreciation and gratitude. This is all effortless – it just happens.

I wonder how many people would permanently cure depression if they just ate a raw diet. I don’t see how I could possibly feel depressed eating this way, even if I tried. This way of eating generates too much positivity juice. It’s nice to know that this is how the human body is supposed to feel when we’re simply breathing.

Joint and Muscle Health

Eating raw and staying caffeine-free greatly improves my joint health. It’s easier to move. My joints and muscles feel looser, and I tend to be more flexible. My body feels more relaxed and flowing, not quite as solid and almost more liquid.

Stronger Nails

My nails grow stronger on raw foods. This takes a while though. Other modes of detoxification also help create stronger nails.

Better Sex

Having sex while eating raw is wonderful, like hearing the full symphony instead of just a few instruments.

Sex feels richer, more pleasurable, and more emotionally connected. Orgasms feel even better. Sex feels a little less physical and bit more spiritual and emotional. The physical aspect is still very nice, but the other aspects get turned up louder by comparison.

I also prefer having sex for much longer while eating raw, savoring the subtleties of the experience. Going for an hour or more feels really pleasurable and connected, especially emotionally. I knew one raw foodist who enjoyed making love for 2-3 hours. It’s a very rich and expressive way of connecting with someone.

The relationship with the person really impacts the experience. I can’t separate myself from her experience because I’m super sensitive to her feelings as well as my own. So mutual love and caring really matters.

Cleaner Body

My body feels cleaner and purer inside – somehow lighter and floatier. Every part feels like it’s running cleaner (heart, lungs, kidneys, liver, etc).

Some sense of heaviness floats away. I feel like my cells have been scrubbed and cleansed, so everything runs better.

Different Gut Bacteria

My gut bacteria will change over time to align with healthy raw foods. This will improve my digestion and overall health and energy. My bowels get cleaner too, like they’ve been scrubbed out. Food feels more energizing.

Better Skin

Eating raw is very good for my skin, on my face and all over my body.

If you’ve ever seen before and after photos of someone who’s been eating raw for 6+ months, the difference is often remarkable. You can see it in the face so clearly. After a while on raw foods, the skin is cleaner and more youthful, often glowing.

The one exception was when I ate only 10% of calories from fat (80/10/10 diet) and got very dry skin on my hands after a few weeks. Including more fat in the diet solved that issue.

Thicker Hair

I used to have thinning hair, but investing in raw foods (and some additional detox methods) thickened it up again. It wouldn’t surprise me if my hair grows thicker still this year.

Weight Loss

Some people lose a dramatic amount of weight when they go raw for a while, like 25+ pounds in a month. I don’t expect anything like that, but as the body releases toxins, it tends to release extra fat as well. I normally get a bit leaner whenever I eat raw.

This year I’m also curious as to what I might learn from eating raw while also maintaining a daily food log. I’ve been food logging everything I eat for almost 8 months now.

Fitness Improvements

I get stronger while eating raw. I have more endurance. I breathe easier during exercise. Exercise feels better too.

If all I do is switch to raw, I can do 5-10 extra push-ups with no extra training. My muscles don’t tire out as quickly, and the push-ups feel easier too.

Last year I really got into hour-long morning runs, and I intend to continue that this year. Since running feels easier and more enjoyable on a raw diet, I may aim to go a bit further or faster as well.

I enjoy going for longer walks too. The extra endurance makes it feel good to walk longer.

Lower Appetite

My appetite will probably go down as digestion becomes more efficient. Eventually I may be inclined to eat less food. This takes a while to kick in though, maybe several months. I’m not sure if this will happen consistently, but I have experienced it in the past.

Once I’ve been raw for a while, I also find it relatively easy to skip meals if I need to. It’s not as important to eat on a regular schedule. My energy still feels good when I drift for a while without eating.

Easier Fasting

It’s easier to fast from a raw base, partly because I won’t have to detox as much. And fasting can be more efficient in its ability to detox me further.

Eyesight Improvement

Many raw foodists report eyesight improvement. I’ve noticed some improvements in terms of visual awareness, like I can take in more of my visual field all at once and feel more aware of what’s going on. I seem to be less mentally myopic.

More Sensitive Taste and Smell

My senses of taste and smell will improve, even within the first 30 days.

Every time I’ve eaten raw for 30+ days, cooked food tastes better afterwards. Cooked food dulls the senses. Raw food restores those senses.

Enjoying Fitness Classes

When it becomes viable to return to in-person fitness classes, I’ll likely enjoy them even more. Doing yoga and other workouts will feel better. I may enjoy challenging myself with some harder workouts since my body will handle them with greater ease. I’ll be able to push myself more and improve my fitness faster. I can handle harder workouts.

Rebuilding a Raw Body

Since we are what we eat, my body will gradually rebuild its muscles, organs, and tissues from raw foods instead of cooked. This can make my body more efficient over time. Apparently a body built from raw ingredients functions better than one built from cooked ingredients.

Since raw foods are way lower in toxins than cooked foods, this means a less toxin-filled body as well. Detoxing from what modern society puts in our bodies is a lifetime effort – this will remain important as long as we have biological bodies. The one thing I wished I’d learned early in my health journey was the critical importance of doing what’s necessary to reduce the level of toxicity in the body. I thought going vegetarian in my early 20s was a huge step when it was barely anything relative to what actually matters most health-wise.

Better Heat Tolerance

My body is way more heat tolerant on raw foods, so the hot summer days in Vegas are nothing to me. Going for a walk in 110-degree weather is delightful. It feels really good to soak up the energy of the hot sun, as if I’ve turned into a plant who thrives on sunlight.

Sauna sessions will feel cooler to me, and my body will sweat more easily to stay cooler.

But I’ll be more sensitive to the cold, so I’ll bundle up more in the colder months. It often drops below freezing in the winter in Vegas. This weekend the low here will be 34F / 1C.

Spicy food is one way to stay warmer. I especially love guacamole with habanero peppers, which are super spicy. I once got some of their juice on my lips by licking a knife I used to chop them. My lips felt like they were on fire, and I had to ice them for an hour. So I’m extra cautious with those peppers now. Jalapeños are a milder substitute.

My normal body temperature will drop a little as well, so I’ll run cooler internally too.

Lower Blood Pressure

My blood pressure is normal even on cooked foods, but my blood pressure will naturally drop a bit further while I’m on raw foods. One time I measured a drop of 14/3 in the first 30 days. It’s still in the normal healthy range but a bit healthier still.

Less Stress

It’s harder to feel stressed or overwhelmed while eating raw. My attitude towards any types of challenges tend to be pretty chill – a feeling of relaxed confidence. I think that’s a byproduct of having energy abundance and a sharp mind backing you up at all times. Life’s problems don’t seem so big; you know you’ll be fine just by using a fraction of your available resources.

Easier to Meditate

I feel more present in the moment on a raw diet. It’s easier to meditate due to better focus and a calmer mind. I’m also less likely to feel drowsy while meditating. But oddly I feel like meditation is less important.

Enjoying Music More

I enjoy listening to music more when I eat raw. Music seems richer and more nuanced. I feel like I’m listening with more of my brain. Even when listening to songs I’ve heard many times before, they feel fresh and revitalized. It’s like the music goes deeper into me and says more to me. This results in increased feelings of appreciation when I hear it.

I often play music while I work. Even though I’m playing the same artists and songs from before, I enjoy their music more.

More Enjoyable Travel

Since my body feels better and I have more energy, I’ll likely enjoy travel experiences more when that becomes viable again. I have to make some adaptations to eat raw on trips, but I expect that it will be worth it, especially if I prepare well for those trips in advance by making some dehydrated foods as fallback snacks.

I haven’t enjoyed eating raw on trips when I went in unprepared, but when I did prepare well, those experiences were great. This aspect also gets easier with more practice. I’m hoping I can do some travel later this year to practice this more.

More Synchronicities & Universal Cooperation

This is a harder one to explain, but it shows up powerfully every time.

Somehow I seem to be more aligned with the flow of life when eating raw. Synchronicities increase markedly. I feel very in tune with the Law of Attraction. My desires manifest with greater ease, flow, wonder, and delight. I feel like the universe is even more on my side than before. My relationship with reality improves. I get a lot of that “I can do no wrong” feeling where so many things just work out swimmingly.

I wrote a ponderous post about this last month with some musings about why this happens.

Super Strong Immune System

Raw foods are terrific for maintaining a strong immune system. I’ve never gotten sick while eating raw. That has only happened when I strayed back to cooked foods – then I’m pretty much guaranteed to get sick right away.

When I’ve been around sick people who are coughing and sneezing while I’m in raw mode, I can almost feel this extra pathway of communication from my body, telling me that I’ve been exposed to something but not to worry – my immune system is on the job and can handle it with ease. I might catch the faintest whiff of a symptom of illness, and then it’s gone.

I’m not going to go out maskless, and I do intend to get immunized for COVID when that becomes available. But I do feel like eating raw provides a significant boost against infections and illness, probably against COVID too, so this may give me a substantial risk reduction for the year.

Intuition and Psychic Abilities

My intuition will be much stronger, and I’ll be more accurate at picking up psychic impressions. I’ll get some helpful insights that could benefit myself and others.

I think this is due to the brain working more efficiently and running cleaner.

Another effect is that I find it easier to trust my intuition because it comes through clearer and stronger. I’m less inclined to doubt it. Consequently, I act in alignment with my intuition more often.

More Attractiveness

People are likely to find me more attractive. I’ll get more invitations of various sorts. While out in person, people will be more likely to start up conversations with me, to make side comments to me, or to be flirtatious.

I’m sharing this based on past experiences. Whenever I’ve eaten raw, I’ve seen an increase in people reaching out to me and wanting to connect in some way. I don’t think this is about looking good visually since it happens in person and online. I think it has to do with some kind of energetic effects.

This has the side effect of making the world seem friendlier, more social, and more engaging. I also don’t feel like I have to push myself as much socially because people reach out to connect with ease.

One of the most beautiful social experiences of my life was attending a raw food festival in Sedona with 3000 other raw food enthusiasts. That was an unforgettable glimpse of how humans are meant to interact and engage with each other. Basically take anything you’ve seen from Trump supporters, and imagine everyone doing the opposite behaviors. It’s heavenly to be surrounded by people smiling and beaming love constantly. Talking to anyone about anything is effortless.

I think a lot of social anxiety would be eliminated if more people ate raw.

Empathy and Alignment Sensitivity

I feel more empathy and compassion towards people. World events stir up more emotion in me.

Consequently, I have to be extra careful about alignment and boundary management. Aspects of my life that I could handle on a cooked food diet become harder to handle on raw foods. I crave more purity, decency, honesty, and caring in connections with people. I crave more depth and soulfulness.

Misalignments feel doubly misaligned and can’t remain unresolved. Yesterday I announced on Facebook that I’ll be closing my accounts there (business and personal). I’ll be off that service by the end of the week. I was already thinking about leaving last month, but when I switched to raw foods, that decision became a no-brainer.

Emotional Amplification

Raw emotions are stronger emotions. Sorrow feels sadder. Anger feels madder. Motivation feels more motivating. Since the body has lots of extra energy, you get more amped up emotional juice too. It’s really hard to find a raw foodist who’s emotionally numb.

This is a mixed blessing. Sometimes it’s the most difficult aspect to handle because it’s really hard to go against your feelings when you eat raw. So if you go this route, you’d better be willing to follow a path with a heart. If you’re on a heartless path when you go raw, you’ll probably end up tearing that path to shreds, which will be a good thing since you’ll soon replace it with something much more aligned.

If you can’t even hear the voice of your heart much, you’ll surely hear it loud and clear after eating raw for a while.

Faster Decisions

I experience less internal friction when making decisions, especially less doubt. There’s a more direct line from idea to action. When I get an idea, instead of holding onto it and mulling it over for a while, I’m more likely to flow into action without really trying.

This means fewer ideas die on the vine. More gets done. I spend less time deciding and more time doing and experiencing.

The Year Ahead

The benefits above are relatively predictable based on what I’ve experienced many times before from eating raw. Most of these kick in noticeably within the first month, while other aspects tend to build up more gradually. Even after just the first week, I’m already observing some of these effects. I feel very different than I did just a week ago – all in a good way.

I’ve never eaten all raw for a full year straight though. Six months was my previous record for continuous raw, although I did eat raw for most of 2008. So I’m super curious about whether some of these effects will amp up even more over time or if I’ll observe any new changes along the way. I’m happy to share any meaningful insights that come up.

Life really takes on a whole different flavor when eating raw. All of these changes add up to a new day-to-day experience.

I have a pretty good baseline of stability in my life and business right now, and I want to see how eating raw perturbs that equilibrium. It’s going to be fun to find out.

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A Growth Heartset

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You may have heard about the difference between a growth mindset and a fixed mindset and how important a growth mindset is for self-development. You may not have considered how important a growth heartset is too.

While a growth mindset is wonderful, it’s not enough. There are plenty of people with growth mindsets who struggle, burn out, and give up. And even when they don’t give up, it’s painful to watch sometimes because they invite struggle, struggle, and more struggle. They keep trying to “earn” happiness and fulfillment, and it keeps eluding them. They may work hard and try hard, but they always look like they desperately need a massage or a vacation… or a vacation full of massages.

What’s going on? Such people may have a growth mindset, but if they lack a growth heartset, they’re very likely to find themselves grinding through year after year of struggle with no end in sight.

A few lists can help clarify this.

A growth mindset includes:

  • opportunity awareness
  • expecting that you’ll keep learning and growing
  • never using “I don’t know how” as an excuse
  • expecting that you’ll gain new skills
  • expecting that you’ll continue to improve your skills and gain new skills
  • expecting to become more capable over time
  • investing in long-term self-development
  • job and career flexibility
  • adaptability to change
  • deliberately challenging yourself
  • setting stretch goals
  • inviting and embracing new experiences
  • willing and able to make new friends and build new relationships
  • maintaining strong personal boundaries (so your boundaries aren’t being violated by. misalignments)
  • learning and bouncing back from failure (resilience)

A fixed mindset includes:

  • opportunity blindness
  • figuring that you’ve already learned most of what you need to know
  • figuring that school is for learning and life after school is for doing
  • identifying with your job or career
  • identifying yourself based on personality attributes
  • identifying yourself based on what you’re good at or not good at and not expecting that to change much over time
  • resisting change
  • expected to earn a pre-determined annual salary (fixed income mindset)
  • feeling stuck with the same social group (fixed social/family mindset)
  • dismissing ideas and opportunities with the “I don’t know how” excuse
  • tolerating boundary violations
  • avoiding failure by not trying

If you’ve been reading my work for a while, it’s very likely that you lean towards a growth mindset. It’s probably obvious why a growth mindset is better for you.

The next two lists, however, can be more polarizing. For some people these will be at least as obvious as the two lists above. For others there may be some surprises that invite self-examination and reassessment, especially the items related to aging.

A growth heartset includes:

  • seeing your biggest fears as invitations to grow and expecting to eventually master what you fear (such as public speaking)
  • expecting to eventually outgrow your major fears, knowing that someday you will no longer feel fear in those situations
  • feeling pleasure and enjoyment from facing fears
  • weaving playfulness, fun, and other positive emotions into your goals
  • shifting away from overly head-based goals that don’t excite you emotionally
  • expecting that your boldest and most courageous years are still ahead of you
  • doing some things just for fun, completely shamelessly
  • expecting to become happier and to have more fun as you age
  • looking forward to your future years with positive anticipation, including your 70s, 80s, and beyond
  • growing in boldness and courage over time
  • expecting to be emotionally stronger and more confident in your later years
  • expecting to set and achieve more ambitious goals as you age
  • taking alignment problems seriously, knowing that you’ll do whatever it takes to solve them
  • being willing to let go of people who aren’t aligned with the direction you want to go and the kind of life you want to have
  • falling more deeply in love with your life with each passing decade
  • expecting your relationships to become more aligned and harmonious
  • expecting to appreciate and enjoy your relationships even more as you age
  • feeling centered, grounded, and at home here (even while alone)
  • speaking your truth and letting your social circle realign as needed
  • feeling inspired and encouraged by people who are further along similar paths (seeing them as allies, not competitors)
  • feeling patient, persistent, hopeful, and determined
  • being willing and able to fully commit yourself to new actions and behaviors, even when you aren’t sure how they’ll turn out
  • investing in a relationship with reality based on deep and abiding trust
  • expecting to trust life even more as you age
  • appreciating vulnerable honesty in yourself and others
  • embracing intelligent risk taking
  • being coachable and willing to ask for help, advice, or coaching
  • wanting and expecting to care even more as you age (about people, animals, life, social issues, etc)
  • deeply enjoying and appreciating your leisure time
  • knowing that your feelings matter tremendously
  • knowing that you can always invite and tune in to the flow of inspiration

A fixed heartset includes:

  • feeling threatened by change
  • avoiding growth experiences that require facing fears
  • expecting that your fears will always be your fears
  • fearing or worrying about aging (dreading getting older)
  • feeling clingy and attached to what you have and not wanting to risk it
  • worrying about financial decline or financial threats
  • complaining about what you don’t want
  • feeling jealous or envious of people who have what you struggle to achieve
  • feeling discouraged, impatient, or frustrated when your goals take longer than you’d like
  • unwillingness to fully commit yourself
  • unwillingness to take emotional risks that could lead to failure or rejection
  • dismissing your feelings as less important than your logical thoughts
  • avoiding commitments that would require a significant emotional risk or emotional investment
  • feeling like you must justify doing “just for fun” activities (such as to your spouse or to colleagues)
  • feeling guilty or unsettled when taking time off
  • setting vague goals like “make more money” or “get healthier” (no real commitment, no emotional investment, also highly ineffective)
  • being too proud, self-sufficient, or timid to seek help, advice, or coaching
  • feeling alienated, disconnected, and alone (and expecting this to continue)
  • feeling that you must hide your true self from the world
  • avoiding actions that could invite criticism
  • staying emotionally aloof or emotionally anxious
  • expecting to retire someday (in terms of reducing your emotional investment in life)
  • never really knowing if you can trust this reality and therefore holding back on your willingness to invest
  • holding back on expressing your feelings
  • surrendering to the “fact” that no one will ever say “I love you” to you and mean it

Which way does your heartset currently lean?

If you know in your mind that you can grow, but your heart isn’t onboard with that, you’ll likely succumb to a lot of struggle and stuck-in-your-headness. You’ll often be pushing against your own emotions instead of enjoying the long-term benefits of strong, positive motivation that helps you flow through life with lightness and fun.

The good news is that you can use that fancy growth mindset of yours to recognize and acknowledge the importance of developing a growth heartset too. You can learn to spot the predictable problems that could throw your life off track, such as fear of aging and lack of commitment, and you can decide to work on improving these aspects. When you begin to grasp the value of emotional alignment, that’s a big step in the right direction.

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How to Handle People Who Easily Become Defensive

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I had a great realization when going through Dr. Julie Helmrich’s Science of Conflict course recently. One idea from that course helped me make sense of an issue that had been popping up now and then in my relationships.

She noted that a key reason that people become defensive during conflict is that their inner critic gets triggered. They’ve already gone through many rounds of internal conversation with this inner critic. So when a problem or issue is raised as if it’s new, it’s really not new. The other person is probably well aware of it. They’ve already beat themselves up for it many times before.

Consequently, when you step into a role that resembles their inner critic, this automatically activates the part of them that must push back against that inner critic. They’re really not in conscious control of this. It just happens. They may even catch themselves doing this, dislike it very much, and still feel powerless to stop it.

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve triggered a person’s defensiveness, and then my response is something like this:

One time, can we just skip past this whole defensiveness thing? It’s such a waste of time and energy. Why don’t we save ourselves a few hours and just skip ahead to solving the actual problem here? You’re not being attacked. I’m not blaming you for anything, so please lower your shields because this isn’t an assault. I just want a solution to this problem, and I could really use your help with that.

Does that ever work? Ha… I wish!

And oh is it so annoying when I just want to get a simple problem solved, and the other person is taking it personally and reacting like a 5-year old caught with their hand in the cookie jar.

Some of these problems could be solved in 5-10 minutes if just a little rational thought and mutual understanding were applied. But if the person’s shields go up, it will take hours, maybe days, if a solution is created at all.

When the person’s shields go up, internally I’m saying to myself:

This is ridiculous. We could be done in a few minutes if s/he would just chill out for long enough to help me solve this. Is a solution really worth this emotional effort? I might as well drop it and find a way to solve this problem on my own… maybe there’s a way to do that. Or I could just ignore the problem for now and try again later.

The Science of Conflict course led me to a different way of framing these situations. Instead of trying to tiptoe around someone’s defensiveness and being annoyed as hell when they began to defend against an imaginary attack, now my attitude is more like Frank Costanza from Seinfeld yelling back:

Oh you want a piece of me?

Trying to avoid the conflict doesn’t work. Oddly it’s better to embrace it. Know there will be a fight, not with the other person but with their inner critic. In a way, I must play the role of the inner critic, so the person can fight back hard against that part of themselves.

If they’re gonna raise their shields no matter what I do, let’s give them good cause to raise them. They expect an attack? Fine… I’ll give them one.

The fight isn’t actually a problem. Just as I was busy thinking that the other person was raising their shields unnecessarily, so was I. I didn’t want to get into an emotional argument, so I pre-shielded myself against that. Their shields were in part a reaction to my own.

It’s very different when you come in with phasers full charged, expecting and even welcoming a fight. Being prepared for a fight is better than wanting to avoid a fight at all costs.

This reminds me of when I trained in martial arts. Practicing self-defense skills with other people made me feel more physically confident and more internally ready for a fight. I’d be walking down the street, almost wanting someone to try to attack me just so I could fight back. I shared this with the other students, and some of them noticed this shift in themselves as well. They also felt that it was less likely for them to get into a fight because they didn’t exude a victim mindset. People are less likely to attack you when your attitude is “I dare you to attack me.”

That may not be quite the attitude that the original course intended, but I do find this framing helpful. If we’re afraid of a fight and would so love to avoid it, we invite the person’s defensiveness to take control and derail the discussion.

The thing is… the other person’s defensiveness never really scared me. I found that aspect of people more annoying than threatening. I found the emotional arguments boring and time-wasting. I felt impatient for faster solutions.

Which is faster though? To ignore someone who keeps trying to bait you into a fight while you’re trying to focus on solving a problem? Or to give your full attention to that annoyance and beat the crap out of it till it surrenders?

Maybe it seems better to avoid a fight. But you could just fight and get it over with. Fight hard. Fight well. Fight honorably. Fight creatively. Fight playfully. Fight till the fighting part is done. Then go into solution mode.

Fights that don’t finish can go on forever. So be willing to fight till the fighting is finished.

I thought that fighting back would be doing people a disservice, but I’m not fighting against them. I’m fighting for a win-win solution.

The other person would like a solution too, and maybe a good pathway to get there is to help them shut down their inner critic, partly by inviting it to spar a few rounds. Then that critic will naturally recede, and we can solve the actual problem.

Martial arts reminds me that fighting can be a lot of fun if you embrace it. It’s especially fun to spar when both people are in the mood for it. There’s something very cleansing about the experience. It moves energy through the body. But if you resist the experience, that energy gets stuck.

This course also pointed out how utterly common it is to activate someone’s defensive response. I always saw this type of conflict as something to be avoided, like I should always do my best to avoid making someone feel defensive. But this only limited my ability to solve problems. Going through that conflict phase is necessary and important.

I can think of some big problems in my past that I punted forward for months or years because I was unwilling to deal with emotional conflict with another person. It was amazing how quickly those got resolved when I finally got sucked into the conflict, which wasn’t necessarily by choice. Getting that stuck energy moving again was such a huge relief.

Like many things in life, when you finally surrender to the inevitable and embrace it, it’s much easier to handle. This attitude of accepting conflict makes it less likely to trigger someone’s defensiveness and less likely to have to invest a lot of time dealing with that defensiveness.

Where in your life are you avoiding conflict because you know it will trigger the other person’s defensiveness? How’s that approach working for you?

Why not try doing the opposite? The path to resolution is through the fire of conflict. The potential for conflict isn’t a threat. It’s an invitation for you to grow stronger. Be a person who will fight for solutions and not settle for non-solutions, and you won’t have to live so much of your life in a cage that’s too small for you.

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