Tag Archives: Emotions

Can You Trust a Life of Fun?

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During my late teens, each time I got caught shoplifting and had to deal with the consequences, my mind would dwell on what I could have done differently. I went over and over different actions I could have taken to avoid the arrest.

This helped me get better at shoplifting. Each arrest or near-arrest made me refine my techniques. I learned to shoplift more valuable items and at lower risk.

I started out stealing candy bars and cassette tapes. Several months later I was stealing video games and small electronics like telephone-answering machines – remember those? Then I progressed to larger items like TVs, cutlery sets, and appliances worth hundreds of dollars.

I could walk into a retail store and walk out with $300 to $700 worth of merchandise. And these weren’t small items. My main limit was how much I could physically carry in my arms.

It may seem hard to believe that someone could walk into a department store and steal a 27″ television – the big, heavy, and boxy kind before the days of flat panel displays. I could barely carry it myself.

I could do this kind of stealing without my heart skipping a beat. It became somewhat routine after a while… till I finally got arrested for felony grand theft and almost went to prison for it. Then I finally realized it was time to straighten myself out.

Before I’d done any shoplifting, I would have thought it impossible to do these bigger thefts at all. You might be wondering that as well. Someone can just walk into a department store, steal a bunch of large items, and walk out with them? Yes, during store hours in plain daylight. I personally did that dozens of times about 30 years ago.

What about anti-theft sensors? Security cameras? Plain clothes security guards?

There are counter-measures for all of those, and most of the ones that worked 30 years ago would still work today.

Every mistake I made back then led me to develop better counter-measures. Setting off a blaring sensor device while trying to steal a Sega Genesis game cartridge encouraged me to learn how to defeat anti-theft sensors. Getting caught by a guard who saw me made me more aware of that risk, and I adapted my methods. Getting caught another time due to being seen on a security camera led to a reevaluation of how to avoid that problem, which led to a whole new method that was exceedingly hard for a camera to catch.

Consequently, although I did get caught and arrested a bunch of times, I never got caught for the same type of mistake twice.

I was also caught more than I was arrested. By developing more sophisticated techniques, I was able to weasel my way out of a capture to avoid an arrest. Any point in the chain could have a weakness, and you just need to turn one weak link to your advantage to break the chain of events that lead to arrest. You can even break the chain after getting arrested; a couple of times I was arrested but not convicted.

I recall that a two-stage shoplifting technique I had developed served me well. I specifically designed it to reduce my risk. In some situations, I could divide the act of shoplifting into one step of preparing to steal and a second step of actually stealing, and those steps could even be done days apart. Once I was caught during the first stage, which didn’t include the actual theft. The guards were certain that I’d stolen something when they grabbed me leaving the store and pulled me into the security office. But they were left confused, embarrassed, and angry when they searched me and came up empty handed because I had no merchandise on me. They knew I’d done something very much akin to shoplifting, but they had no proof. They knew I was lying about it too, and they absolutely didn’t buy my explanations, nor did they take kindly to my feigned anger at them for their “mistake.” But it still worked. Just to be extra safe though, I never went back to that store again. Today that whole chain of stores is out of business.

When I first started on that path, I couldn’t have perceived where I’d end up a year to 18 months later. It was really just a series of small progressions and refinements, motivated by the pain of mistakes and the thrill of doing illegal stuff. Each time I grasped for slightly better methods that reduced risk and increased gains. I also pursued it because it was fun, at least for my teenage brain at the time.

When I think about the progression of little refinements, no single refinement seems like such a big deal. I was really just reacting and adapting to events.

But when I consider how far things went over the course of 12-18 months, I wouldn’t have believed those distant outcomes to be possible when I first started shoplifting. I couldn’t fathom ever reaching that point. It would have seemed like way too much of a stretch and way too scary. No way would I ever take it that far.

And yet I somehow did, one little step at a time, with the biggest improvements happening in response to getting caught.

Here are some key lessons I learned from this progression, which doesn’t have to be applied in an illegal or self-destructive way. You can apply this a lot more positively and productively to your life.

First, this all started with following the fun. There was an inner motivation to stretch and tackle an interesting challenge that seemed fun, even if it was also illegal. Later in life I learned to use this heartset for other worthwhile personal growth pursuits. I looked around for something that seemed fun and emotionally engaging.

Second, anything fun eventually becomes boring if you keep doing it in the same way. So if you follow the fun, that will encourage you to keep escalating in some manner. The path of fun is also the path of escalation. Such paths can be dangerous or beneficial – or both.

Look for a path that eventually escalates into territory that seems impossible for you but also impressive when you think about other people taking it that far. Can you see beyond the edge of possibility space and into the impossibility space if you look further down the road? Imagine where you might end up if you just keep escalating again and again.

Does the impossibility space scare you? If it doesn’t scare you, it’s probably not worth pursuing.

Consider that fear points to future fun that you’re currently incapable of accessing and enjoying. A good progression eventually looks scary. If you look far enough ahead, you’ll see “impossible” actions that you’re convinced you’ll never take.

This points to needing a healthy relationship with fear. It’s important to see fear as an invitation, not as a barrier. Fear means “not yet but eventually.” Fear doesn’t mean “never.” This is a hard thing to wrap our minds around, but we can see the truth of it with our hearts a lot sooner. Your heart will say, “Yup, you could take it that far,” while your mind is still freaking out at the very notion.

See the logic in how to make the impossible eventually possible for you. Just keep following the fun. Keep escalating gradually so it stays fun and doesn’t becoming boring. When a risk becomes a non-risk, find a new risk to replace it. Focus on the risks that are in your fun zone.

You’ll fail and stumble sometimes. When you do, modify your approach to remedy that point of failure, so you’re less likely to fail that way again. Don’t worry about all possible points of failure. Accept that sometimes you’re going to fail, and you’ll have a new learning experience each time.

In the past 30 years since those shoplifting experiences, I’ve gone through much healthier and saner progressions in different areas of life. A lot of what I experience as normal today would have been squarely placed in my impossibility space 30 years ago. My work, my skills, my marriage, my home, my lifestyle, my friends – all would have been deemed impossible for me by my former self. None of this seemed accessible.

This also taught me that if I want to set meaningful long-term goals, it’s good to aim for something that extends into my current impossibility space. If I only reach for what’s possible, I’m probably not aligned with the fun zone. I’m being too safe and not taking enough risk.

It’s possible to check off a lot of smaller goals as part of the progression towards a seemingly impossible one, and this can be a lot more fun and motivating than aiming for the seemingly easier goals directly.

After I lost interest in stealing and getting arrested, I still kept following the fun, but I opted to stick with legal options. Some were still in the direction of that cat-and-mouse game with corporations, not that dissimilar from shoplifting in the emotions I experienced. Learning to count cards at blackjack and playing in the Vegas casinos when I was 21 was one example. It was totally legal, but there was still the chance of getting caught for it. It felt sneaky. There were skills to be learned. And there were ways to escalate the experience to keep it fun and engaging.

By continually following the fun, escalating it, adapting to setbacks, and progressing to something new when the whole chain became boring, uninteresting, or impractical, I eventually started moving in the direction of more positive and socially constructive progressions like writing, speaking, creating courses, and delivering workshops.

I also shifted my character a lot. Shoplifting would be out of character for me now, but I still love experiences that involve a similar emotional journey with risks to embrace and fears to face. This includes learning to make a good living without a job, overcoming fear of public speaking, going vegan, and doing lots of interesting challenges like the daily blogging challenge for this year (only two weeks left to go).

What I find especially fascinating is that even though I started out following the fun by committing crimes, this same heartset eventually turned my life towards meaningful goals, service to others, and a sense of purpose, including the development of a lot more emotional intelligence that includes caring and compassion. While I was doing the shoplifting, there’s no way I’d have considered any of those eventual gains to be within my possibility space. I wouldn’t have wanted them or cared about them either. In fact, I’d have actively shunned them.

Fun and risk seem like reckless or childish frames, right? But imagine where they might lead you over time if you keep dancing with them as I’ve suggested. Eventually a life of non-purpose gets boring. Living in the shell of a weak character gets boring. Being too undisciplined gets boring. Not caring about people gets boring. Watching life pass you by without fully engaging with it gets boring.

It’s possible to have way more fun from contribution than from crime, mainly because of how human relationships are affected. So the approach that got me into those reckless behaviors also got me out of them and onto something better. I kept following the fun. I kept leaning into escalations that kept life interesting and engaging. I kept releasing whatever become boring. I kept aiming towards new impossibility spaces, only later to find myself living inside of them.

Can you trust fun?

Maybe you think about how ludicrous it would be if you just leaned into fun experiences, like playing video games all the time. I played video games a lot 30 year ago, as much as 18 hours in a row, and that was on Nintendo, Super NES, Sega Genesis, GameBoy, or one of those archaic systems with much less sophisticated one-player games, including the kind where you have to restart from level 1 if you run out of lives. Following that type of fun led me to play more and more games and to eventually become a professionally game developer for 10 years, which was a memorable and rewarding part of my life (albeit frustrating till I figured out the business side).

I’ve had a pretty fun life overall, and it’s hard to feel regret even when I think about some of the wild and illegal stuff I did 30 years ago. I feel mostly gratitude and appreciation for those experiences and the lessons learned from them, especially since they shaped who I became.

My main regret is actually that I didn’t trust fun sooner. In many cases where I finally leaned into fun and risk, I wished I’d been able to trust it sooner and not worry so much about where it might lead. Even with the arrests and other setbacks, it’s still a lot better than being bored.

Fun is an invitation, not to do one thing forever, but to engage with life with your heart, not just with your head.

A huge risk that people tend to overlook is the risk of stagnation from being stuck in your head too much. The pursuit of fun, risk, and escalation are fantastic counter-measures.

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Heartstorming

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Heartstorming is brainstorming with the heart (or the emotional part of your brain).

The mental kind of brainstorming is good for generating problem-solving ideas. It’s useful for mapping out the logical space of solutions. Generate lots of ideas, and sift through them to pick the best ones.

That kind of brainstorming, however, is terrible for setting goals and priorities, especially big picture goals for your life.

That’s because you can’t set priorities dispassionately. Goals are emotional in nature. The logical brain doesn’t distinguish between the value of brushing your teeth versus transforming someone’s life. You have to feel your way into priorities.

Evaluating Options

How do you evaluate options on a brainstorming list? You’ll likely evaluate them based on effectiveness, practicality, or impact – or something along those lines.

To evaluate options on a heartstorming list, look for emotional resonance. Look for passion, excitement, playfulness, love, joy, silliness, connection, scariness, etc. Look for ideas that rile you up and make you want to take action. Look for ideas that might scare or embarrass you. Notice which ideas keep drawing your attention, even if they seem a bit ludicrous.

What if none of your ideas are like that? Then you suck at heartstorming. That’s okay. Lots of people suck at this because many of us are taught a different way of thinking that gets in the way of heartstorming. We learn to silence the voice of our hearts. Big mistake… but we can correct that.

Young children tend to be naturally good at heartstorming. Ask a kid what they want for a gift. Then listen to their answers. Are they brainstorming or heartstorming? You’ll probably see mostly heartstorming, including answers that may be impractical or illogical but which clearly have some emotional resonance.

You probably knew how to do heartstorming when you were very young. Did you lose touch with this skill? Have you forgotten (or overlooked) the value of doing this as an adult? How’s that working out for you?

The Value of Heartstorming

I rely on heartstorming more than brainstorming for making decisions about what to do with my life. I imagine what would be fun, fascinating, courageous, a little bit insane, growth-oriented, social, creative, and so on. I look for emotional resonance. Then I pick something that fascinates me, and I push my brain to get with the program. My brain almost always objects initially – it’s stubborn that way – but the heart is very powerful when it leads.

A brainstormed goals list would include things like making a certain amount of money. That’s boring as hell, Mr. Scrooge. It’s logical, but why should the heart care? It probably doesn’t care. So where will the fire come from? Your motivation to act will probably evaporate as soon as you set a goal like that. Your money goal just makes everyone yawn.

A heartstormed goals list will include weird and wild ideas that you’re afraid to share with other people. But some of these goals will excite your heart anyway. And if you describe them to other people, their brains will likely reject those goals, but their hearts may feel some resonance. And if they’re really in tune with their hearts too, they may even encourage you to go for it.

One of my heartstormed goals is to visit every Disney theme park in the world with my wife. We’ve been to all six USA parks, so we have six left: Paris (2), Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Tokyo (2). Is this a logical goal? Nope! It just sounds like fun. So we’ll probably do it (when it’s safe to do so). We’ve been to Paris twice before, so it would be a simple matter to pick that one up, but this goal will also get us to visit Asia finally.

I especially love that I have a wife who enjoys working on heart-based goals and having heart-based experiences together. That’s a special kind of joy when I can share a wild idea with her, and her reaction is basically, “You had me at hello.”

Heartstormed goals that feel emotionally resonate are easier to act on. Motivation is emotional, so if you lean into the emotional aspects, it’s way easier to flow into action.

What’s also great about heartstormed goals is that because action is easier, you can achieve more goals. Additionally, you’ll pick up some head-based goals that come along for the ride; they’re easier to achieve when you use a heart-first approach.

I like to pick fun and interesting projects that also happen to generate income, as opposed to setting income-based goals. I do my best to make the income-generating parts fun too. One day I earned $30K while spending a day at Disneyland with my wife. Doing an online launch while going to Disneyland isn’t a logical goal, but it is fun and motivating. I enjoy the silliness of it. And oddly it’s easier for me to earn money in ways that are silly or unusual.

Brainstormed goals make your brain lazy. Your brain will come up with the most dreadfully dull and predictable ideas that you probably aren’t going to implement anyway.

But if you assign idea generation to your heart, it will fill up your list with wild and crazy ideas, some of which will indeed be stupid, but others will be fun and worthwhile. The best ideas will challenge your brain to stretch creatively. They’ll expand your conception of what’s possible. They’ll wake you up.

Would you rather earn an extra $30K by slaving away at some corporate job for however long that takes? If so, keep generating ideas from your headspace. For the heart, earning an extra $30K is a fun and silly goal – pretty easy when you’re motivated and creative.

Would you rather put your heart in charge of your project choices and demand more from your brain? Why the hell can’t you earn $30K in a day while going in rides at Disneyland? And do this with your best friend and lover that you enjoy spending time with? Create fun memories together, and get paid for the experience. With the heart there’s no compromise. You get enjoyment and results. You get a full, rich, and balanced life.

The logical brain generates embarrassingly crappy priorities – so uncreative, unambitious, and uninspiring.

When you do heartstorming, you’ll probably be laughing and crying along the way. Sometimes you’ll get scared by an idea. You should FEEL something as you generate ideas. The emotion should get stronger as you dive deeper into heartspace.

How to Heartstorm

Give this a try. It’s very easy, but it does take practice.

Open a new page in your journal. Write at the top what kind of list you want to make. Then start typing or writing ideas. But instead of focusing on your brain to generate ideas, put your attention on your heart. Go into your heartspace, and listen from there. Invite your emotions to speak. Tell your logical brain to shut up for a while. Invite your heart to generate ideas.

Pretend you’re four years old again. You can do this. It’s a no-brainer. 😉

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What Is a Spiritual Perspective?

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A spiritual perspective on some area of life asks questions like these:

  • What is my current relationship with this part of life?
  • How would I like my relationship with this part of life to be?

If you remove the physicality from life, what remains is energy. But energy alone is meaningless. What brings meaning to different energy patterns is how you relate to those patterns.

So these questions can pop you up to a spiritual perspective by helping you focus on the relationship you’re experiencing with any aspect of life. The spiritual perspective is the lens that gives you clarity about how you relate to different energy patterns. Everything in life can be seen as an energy pattern.

Another way to frame this is to note that everything you ever think about it is a thought pattern, which is also an energy pattern. Neurons in your brain fire in a certain way when you think any thoughts. And other parts of your brain have relationships with these patterns. So whenever you think a thought, other parts of your brain automatically activate their own neural firing patterns in response.

Hence the big picture “spiritual” perspective is also about how to change or improve the relationships among these different firing patterns. If everything you experience in outer reality is represented by a firing pattern in some part of your brain, then you can consider that all relationships have internal representations in your mind. So you could regard spiritual growth as an effort to change these patterns in some meaningful way. Do you want to make them more harmonious, more orderly, more playful, etc?

I find this perspective immensely useful on a practical level. I use it for making day-to-day decisions frequently. Just getting clear about what kind of relationship I want to have with some aspect of life helps me consider the long-term perspective and the core quality of life issues involved for myself and others.

These questions can also be asked repeatedly to create rewarding growth arcs in different areas of life.

Assessing Your Spiritual Relationships

A simple way to answer these questions is just to list a bunch of descriptive words and phrases that come to mind when you think about a particular part of life.

For instance, when I was growing up, here’s how I would have described my relationship with public speaking:

  • nervousness
  • anxiety
  • procrastination
  • fear
  • worry
  • shaking
  • sweating
  • embarrassment
  • unprepared
  • tedious practice
  • failure
  • too much attention
  • complicated
  • uncontrollable
  • disappointing
  • dread

So from a spiritual perspective, my personal energy and the energy of public speaking aren’t meshing well. Our energies are fighting and resisting each other. The alignment isn’t there.

Note that this relationship exists within my own mind. The relationship itself is a collection of neural firing patterns interacting. And since it exists within my mind, that gives me some power to change it over time. That may not be easy, but I can surely engage with these patterns and nudge them to change over time.

After years of Toastmasters and other speaking experiences, here’s how I’d have described my much improved relationship with public speaking:

  • confident
  • challenging
  • in control
  • structured
  • prepared
  • growth
  • skillful
  • readiness
  • excitement
  • positivity
  • rewarding
  • laughter
  • applause
  • encouraging
  • competitive
  • improving
  • motivating

So that relationship is much improved from where it was earlier. However, I can still see further room for improvement relative to where I really want this relationship to go.

Here’s where I’d say my relationship with public speaking is today:

  • relaxed
  • chill
  • spontaneous
  • connecting
  • playful
  • fun
  • curiosity
  • easy
  • light
  • flowing
  • occasionally silly
  • interactive
  • teasing
  • joking
  • simple
  • natural
  • pleasing
  • listening
  • exploring
  • social
  • present
  • aligned
  • purposeful
  • safe
  • conversation

So this relationship has lightened up a lot. It no longer strikes me as a situation where I need to feel confident or in control. Wanting to feel confident while speaking would be like saying that I need to feel confident while making breakfast. I could try to feel extra confident while making breakfast, but it would be an odd framing to use all the time. It would be like Tom Hanks reveling in his ability to make fire in the movie Castaway.

Clearing Space

Notice how an overly tense or controlling relationship with public speaking can get in the way of creating an aligned relationship with the people in the room. One misaligned relationship can block the full richness of another relationship from coming through. It’s hard to access the fun and playfulness of this connection if a complicated relationship with public speaking is getting in the way.

As I gradually transform misaligned relationships into more aligned ones, I notice that new relationships very often emerge.

It’s much like being in a human relationship with a mismatched partner. While your energy is tied up with that person, it’s hard to see the potential for a more aligned, loving, and joyful relationship to come into your life. Your current relationship can easily block better relationships from coming through.

Breaking up is also a way of transforming a relationship. Enforcing boundaries can help you get some distance from a misaligned relationship, so you can reassess what kind of relationship you want to have in this area.

Earlier this year I got clarity that I really didn’t want to have any personal or professional relationships with Trump supporters. It felt most aligned to kick them out of my space completely, so I adopted a policy of purging them from my life and work. They consistently violate my principles and values, and I realized I’d very much prefer not to have such people in my life at all, at least not at close range. When they’re too close I mostly feel disgust and contempt due to the boundary violations, like I’m being raped by red-hatted idiots. But when I do proper boundary management and keep their energy from violating my space, I feel that this relationship is much improved. I still have no desire to engage with them, but I no longer feel disgust and violation. Instead I notice gentler feelings like compassion and forgiveness starting to emerge.

I also notice, as you might expect, that with this misaligned energy out of the way, there’s a newfound invitation to explore the relationships that this energy was blocking. My connections with high-trust people have growth stronger, and I’ve been investing more in some of those relationships. For instance, I’ve been really enjoying my months-long involvement in the Transformational Leadership Council’s Diversity Committee. We’ve been having hard conversations about inclusiveness and anti-racism, and I’m loving it. It’s inspiring to connect with friends who are genuinely asking how we can do more to make a difference, and they’re investing extra time and energy month after month. I was initially concerned that this kind of group might fizzle out, but I’ve been seeing the opposite. The passion, energy, and honesty have been growing as we’ve continued to invest.

Being angry at Trump supporters is too easy. But getting wrapped up in that energy is mostly a distraction. It hides the calling to invest in something more deeply transformational that could actually move the needle forward.

Honesty

Asking yourself what kind of relationship you want to have with a certain area of life is a call to deeper honesty. This isn’t easy.

One trap is getting caught up in society’s expectations. You may start by wanting what you think you’re supposed to want. Society taught you how some relationship is supposed to be. You may buy into that model, but maybe in the long run it doesn’t really work for you.

I like to see society’s models as stepping stones. They aren’t really where I’m going to end up, but I can still make some progress if I aim for them, at least till I discover something better.

The tricky part is getting clear about what you really want and not getting sucked into society’s partial matches for too long.

The public speaking example shows how I initially aimed for confidence with speaking. Isn’t that the ultimate goal for a public speaker? Get up on a stage and speak with confidence? It’s fine to aim for this as a starter goal, at least until it feels hollow.

Again, it’s like feeling confident making breakfast. Once you see beyond the illusion of fear, it’s not so inspiring to think that you even need to be confident.

So then you pick a better relationship goal. Maybe it’s fun and playfulness. Maybe it’s presence. Maybe it’s creative flow. Maybe it’s inspiring people.

This is especially applicable in business, whether you’re an employee or entrepreneur or you like to just mess around. What’s your ideal relationship with work and business?

Here’s how I’d describe my relationship with my business today:

  • trusting
  • abundant
  • interesting
  • variety
  • growth-oriented
  • waves of work, play, and rest
  • balanced
  • playful
  • expressive
  • flow
  • creative
  • rewarding
  • flexible
  • surprising
  • unique
  • impactful
  • presence
  • enduring
  • openness
  • courage
  • purposeful
  • warm
  • intimate

I just made this list off the top of my head. It’s interesting to me that I didn’t describe my business as organized, productive, profitable, etc. The spiritual lens helps me focus on my personal relationship with it.

This isn’t where I started as an entrepreneur. Initially I cared about success and achievement. Now I think more about the experience of flow.

I also place a high value on flexibility and variety, which are more important to me than routine and structure. I like that I attract readers and customers with expansive and flexible interests who don’t need me to stick with just one niche topic year after year. Each day people communicate with me about different types of challenges and experiences. I like how this keeps the relationship with my readers fresh and growth-oriented. It keeps the door open for surprises and synchronicities.

Courage

Just as it’s difficult to discover the honest truth about the type of relationship you want, it’s also difficult to publicly admit how you feel. But if you can openly share your truth, it is easier to attract and enjoy the kind of relationship you really want. You also won’t have to waste so much time and energy dealing with partial matches.

It takes courage to make your own individual choice here. It takes courage to admit when you’re wrong. It takes courage to stand by your choice when you’re right. And it takes courage to stay with the flow of evolving relationships because they don’t remain static.

Courage helps you find and follow a path with a heart in your relationships with different parts of life. At some point you’ll need to break from society’s expectations, so you can explore the aspects of these relationships that don’t agree with society’s plans.

What’s really happening here is that your brain stores the patterns of society’s plans for you, and you’re also upgrading how you relate to these patterns. Initially you may obey them. Then you may rebel against them. And then you might frame them as stepping stones or intermediate lessons. This latter framing can create more harmony in your thinking.

When you consider the spiritual perspective, realize that it’s all about relationships. How are you relating to each part of life? Where are you experiencing flow and harmony? Where are you enduring resistance and struggle? Let each misaligned relationship point you towards deeper desires.

Be ambitious here. Keep asking for the impossible if it’s what you really want, and you may eventually get it. And you’ll realize that that’s not the end of the road either – the possibility space is vaster still.

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Goals of Being

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Many years ago one of my goals for public speaking was to design and deliver my own three-day workshop on the Las Vegas Strip. I first achieved that goal in 2009. That was a goal of doing.

Another goal I had for public speaking was to develop such strong comfort with public speaking that I could feel fully present in front of an audience, so I could be spontaneous and in the moment and not feel anxiety or nervousness – just enjoyment, fun, playfulness, and connection. I achieved that goal somewhere along the way. I demonstrated it at the three-day 2015 Conscious Heart Workshop, delivered spontaneously with lots of fun, playfulness, and inspiration in the moment – and no nervousness or anxiety. There was no plan or content preparation for that workshop. I facilitated it from the flow of inspiration and audience suggestion moment by moment. That was a goal of being.

At another time I had a goal of writing a book and getting it published. That was achieved in 2008. More doing.

But I also had a goal of writing that book in a way that I could always feel really good about it, and I wouldn’t feel like I’d outgrown it a decade or two later. I wanted to have a timeless relationship with that book and its principles throughout my life. More being. I still feel such a connection to that book, now 12 years after it was published.

The culture that I find myself within gives a lot of weight to doing and not enough to being. Pursuing goals “at all costs” is lauded by many. But we pay a price for this focus – a loss of connection to being.

When you set goals for the New Year (or anytime really), give some attention to the beingness aspects, not just to your activities and results.

Beingness is surprisingly powerful. A lot of doingness takes care of itself if you invest in the right experience of beingness.

Results of Beingness

Here are some examples of goals that I’ve achieved that have enhanced my life greatly, which have more to do with being than doing.

  • I’m in a long-term relationship with a woman who makes me smile when I see her. We laugh together every day. Even after spending so much time together, especially this year, I still look forward to more time with her.
  • My vegan diet forever changed the way I relate to animals. I look upon them with a sense of fellowship and reverence, not as objects to be bought and consumed.
  • I have written millions of words of published content, but for me the more important goal was learning to write from inspiration. I never get writer’s block. That’s due to trust, not because of self-discipline. I don’t have to force anything. I’ve learned how to invite, tune into, and trust the flow. With the right beingness, the doingness is relatively easy. Most of the content I’ve written, including all of my blog articles and YouTube videos, are donated to the public domain, so anyone is free to republish, repurpose, or translate them.
  • I’m happy. I like my life. I look forward to each day. I often feel appreciative and grateful and lucky, not as some kind of deliberate practice but just as an automatic inner response. I’ve made it a priority to live my life in such a way that these feelings naturally arise. I say no to a lot of doing-based projects that would predictably reduce my happiness. I say yes to invitations and activities that will predictably increase my happiness. And I test that predictability now and then to see if my predictions are still accurate.
  • I get up at 5am each morning. This doesn’t require any force. I’m simply in love with the early morning hours. I seem to have a special relationship with that time of day. It’s that relationship that makes it easy to get out of bed – no force or discipline needed.
  • I feel that I have a healthy and positive relationship with money. I enjoy earning it and find it fairly easy to earn plenty of it when I want. I like spending it too. I like saving it. I invested a lot of thought and experimentation into improving my relationship with money – to drive out the fears and worries about it and to replace those fears and worries with play, trust, creativity, appreciation, inspiration, and other positive aspects of beingness. I used to struggle with money during my 20s, and that struggle didn’t occur during my 30s and 40s. This was solved not with more doing but with better being.
  • I have friends who inspire me to be a better person. I find that such people naturally flow into my life and stick around, not from working on my action-based social skills but from deepening my connection to the person I really want to be in each moment. When I express my beingness in the moment, people who are aligned with me seem naturally attracted to me. I also find it beautiful, remarkable, and empowering when someone else really expresses their beingness. It makes me feel in awe of that person. I tend to feel more awe from a person’s beingness rather than from their actions and accomplishments.

I tend to value my gains in beingness more than my gains in doingness. That’s because the right beingness makes the doing part easier and more fun.

Setting Goals of Being

I encourage you to actually set some goals of being. They may look like doing-based goals on the surface, but how you experience them is at least as important as the doing part. So the goal is really about the presence you bring to the experience.

Here are some examples:

  • Deliver a one-hour presentation with zero nervousness or anxiety.
  • Learn to enjoy doing your taxes that you file them at least a few weeks ahead of the due date. Find a way to fully enjoy the process with little or no resistance.
  • Earn $10K in one day, in a playful and inspired way. Form the intention, and then act on the flow of inspiration moment by moment. This seems like it’s about the doing, but it’s really about working through self-limiting beliefs and creating a more playful and inspired relationship with reality. You have to stop the self-censoring and self-doubt and learn to “yes, and” the ideas that flow through. This goals is nearly impossible if your relationship with inspiration is weak. It can be fun do it if that relationship is strong. You might even set such a goal and then find that you’re getting redirected towards an even better or bigger goal.
  • Prepare and eat a meal that’s super healthy, super delicious, and feels delightful to prepare it, eat it, and digest it. This requires that you really listen to how you’re connecting with the food during each step. And then you must be present to how your body is experiencing the food after you’ve eaten it.
  • Become a hugger. Become a person who gives and receives willing hugs, maybe even every day. Create a life rich in consensual touch. Oh, this was an amazing one to achieve, given my starting point. It took years to get there, but it was so worth it.
  • If you start a blog, YouTube channel, podcast, or something similar, define what kind of relationship you want to have with the many loops of creating and publishing new material that you’ll experience. What I’ve found helpful is that the process must be a growth experience for me; otherwise I’ll get bored and resist it. I also have to write for people I care about helping. This is more important than traffic or numbers. I need to love the process of creation. If I don’t love it, it means the beingness is wrong, and I need to approach it differently.
  • Make a really good, new friend. Good luck with turning this into a step-by-step action plan. With the right beingness though, this one is a lot easier. What makes you a good friend? Are you being that kind of person consistently?

So don’t just consider the what aspect of your goals. Pay great attention to the how and the why. Consider what kind of life you’re creating. Look at the inner experience of what it will be like to achieve your goals one way versus another way. There are so many ways to achieve results externally, but many approaches won’t feel very aligned or pleasant on the inside.

When you ignore the beingness aspect of a goal, you’ll likely sabotage the doingness part as well. It’s hard to take action when you’d rather procrastinate. If you’d rather play video games, how can you bring the beingness aspect that you enjoy while gaming into your other goals? What kind of player are you being in those game worlds? Are you being that player in other areas of life?

One sign that I have the beingness right is that I smile warmly when I think about my goals. It makes me happy to think about doing them. I look forward to working on them day by day. I’m not just motivated by the end result. I can savor the journey as well.

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NaNoWriMo Days 16-17

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The morning I hit a nice milestone for my novel-in-progress, getting it just beyond 30K words, so I’m still ahead of schedule for reaching 50K words by November 30th. The daily target of 1667 words continues to work well.

Yesterday I added 2050 words, which I think is the first time I’ve gone over 2K words in a day. I got into the flow of an emotionally juicy scene and didn’t want to stop till I got to the end of it. I got caught up in the characters’ feelings as I channeled their dialogue, and the words flowed as fast as I could type. This was the first time I cried while writing this story. If this novel were made into a movie, I could see people crying while watching that scene too. It could use a lot of editing, but the core of it feels potent and meaningful. It felt very satisfying to write a scene with a lot of raw and nuanced emotion in it. This came from having the characters communicate with more honesty and emotional risk-taking.

Interestingly there’s a Nano badge called “Weepy Writer” that you earn by shedding a tear or two over your novel, so I gave myself credit for earning that one.

When I get into the flow of a scene, I often feel some emotion as I write, although usually not as strong as during yesterday’s writing session. Even though I’m working with fictional characters, their interactions feel increasingly real and genuine to me, and this leads me to discover some emotional truths in their interactions. The situations that the characters face are emotionally similar to real situations that real people often face as well, and this makes me feel extra sympathy for people who experience similar challenges.

Sometimes as I’m writing a dialog between a couple of characters, it feels like I’m doing a deep personal journaling session. When I was writing a scene this morning, I got confused partway through, wondering if I had drifted away from writing dialogue and was actually doing something closer to personal introspection. I paused and read back a little of what I wrote and realized that the scene still made sense either way. That gave me an eery feeling that my writing was happening at the intersection of two different worlds.

I’m finding this writing adventure to be deeper and more growth-oriented than I expected. I figured it would be a growth experience in terms of the skills to learn, the practice, and the daily discipline – that seemed obvious to me before I started. I didn’t expect that writing fiction would lead me into deeper reframes about life, work, and human nature.

I’m glad I took the plunge and gave myself permission to explore this. I use the word “permission” because I previously had some limiting frames about fiction writing. I often looked upon it as being a less worthy pursuit than writing nonfiction, like fiction is just optional play writing but not particularly important or serious. That framing caused me to delay this goal for many years. I regarded the goal of writing a novel as a side excursion into fantasy, like getting lost in an immersive video game for a while.

After just a few weeks, my attitude has shifted a lot. I now see that there’s something precious and worthwhile to be discovered in the world of fiction. I’m feeling more inspired and enthralled by this project as I go along. I think there’s more gold here than I realized, like a different way of connecting with beauty.

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Sensitivity to Lying

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Some people have a high tolerance for lying and falsehood. They can hang out around others who frequently share false information, deliberately or from ignorance, and it doesn’t seem to bother them. Either they don’t notice the falsehoods, or they aren’t much affected when they do notice.

I’m not one of those people. I used to be though. When I was younger I could hang around people who spewed nonsense left and right and be okay with it. That’s basically how I grew up, being taught lots of false religious ideas about how the world worked, only later to realize it was a pack of lies.

But just growing up in that kind of bubble didn’t make me sensitive to lying. If anything I think it made me less sensitive. Somewhere along the way, I developed numbness to lying. I could be in the presence of lying and falsehood, and it didn’t affect me much at all emotionally.

Going vegan, experimenting with raw foods, and doing lots of health-related detox significantly raised the sensitivity levels over time. I’ve written before about the many internal changes that going vegan caused, especially with respect to the heart-brain connection. Many senses and impressions became more sensitive as I made efforts to clean up my body.

I think fasting helped a little too – I’ve done a 17-day and a 40-day water fast – but that was late in the game for me. Fasting probably would have had a bigger impact if I’d done it much earlier, like during my 20s instead of my 40s.

Sensitivity Advantages

There are some nice advantages to this heightened sensitivity. I never get writer’s block because I’m sensitive enough to always tune into an abundant flow of ideas. I’ve published something new to my blog every day this year, and it’s not even difficult. The ideas mostly share themselves, and I take dictation.

I’m also super happy in my relationship with Rachelle. I adore and appreciate her so much. Each day we spend together is just delightful. I can’t help but smile when I see her. It’s wonderful being extra sensitive to feelings of love and gratitude and getting to feel those at full volume. It makes it so much easier to enjoy a beautiful relationship, especially with another sensitive person. Because we’re so sensitive to our feelings and each other, we’re really good at caring for each other.

So I wouldn’t trade this sensitivity for the world. It has added so much beauty to my life. I don’t think it’s the sort of thing you appreciate till you experience it though.

These benefits make me watch my diet and health habits and not let myself stray too far. If I eat a lot of heavier foods for a while – which for me is too many grains and beans (and foods derived from them like tofu) and not enough fruits and veggies – I can feel the sensitivity declining. But at least I know how to get back on track.

Eating more raw foods always brings the sensitivity back up again. Yesterday I had two large green smoothies and some other raw foods. This included bananas, cherries, blueberries, clementines, spinach, kale, mixed greens, celery, and cucumber. I can feel the difference this morning. I feel happier than usual. Writing feels even easier than it normally does. The simpler and cleaner my diet is, even on a day to day basis, the less friction I experience mentally and emotionally.

Sensitivity to Lying

Here’s a potential downside though. I’ve become a lot more sensitive to lying, falsehood, and deceit than I was 30 years ago. Watching, listening to, or reading lies and false statements causes a palpable reaction in my body. I’m not in control of that reaction when it happens, except that I can prevent or disrupt it by sabotaging my body itself, like by eating lots of heavier foods.

Many people joked about drinking lots of alcohol during the election, which is an effective way to suppress emotions for those who are more sensitive. Of course if you overdo it, you may just be swapping some negative reactions for others.

I have a strong negative internal reaction every time I watch Donald Trump speak. The reason is simple. He lies constantly.

I don’t exactly know why my body reacts the way it does, but it does react. I feel emotionally disgusted. Sometimes I feel a bit nauseous. It’s like I just had a spell cast on me that’s about to make me vomit up some slugs.

My body reacts similarly in the presence of Trump supporters when they talk about him. Whether intentional or not, they always resort to sharing lies and falsehoods to justify their support. There’s just such a huge abandonment of truth in that space.

I like being around people who speak the truth, and Trump and his supporters just don’t. At least I’ve never encountered one who does. Trumpism and falsehood always seem to go hand in hand, along with insensitivity to lying.

Interestingly I didn’t have this reaction to seeing Trump speak before he got into politics. Erin and I would sometimes watch The Apprentice when we were together, and while Trump was often a bit of a jerk on that show, it just seemed like ego-based entertainment and posturing. It’s different when the lying is sociopathic and directly harmful.

Trusting Your Inner Senses

At first I did my best to tolerate these feelings. And then I questioned why I should keep doing that. Is that really a wise approach? The feelings weren’t going down. They grew stronger and louder as the consequences of such lying grew even stronger, like lots of people dying unnecessarily.

In addition to being sensitive to my own feelings and senses, I also feel sensitive to other people’s feelings, and those have been especially loud this year. I could feel a lot of stress in the air.

The majority of people that I connect with regularly are also disgusted by Trump and his rampant lying, especially friends who live outside the USA. There are a lot of other sensitive people out there too, and I think many of them are good at broadcasting their feelings without always realizing it.

I opted to start trusting my body more. Otherwise I’m too tempted to disrupt my health to tone down those inner signals, and I don’t like doing that. I trust that this sensitivity exists for a good reason, especially since it produces so many other benefits that I don’t want to sabotage.

When I say that Trump supporters make me nauseous, I’m being literal about that. I recognize that it may sound like an exaggeration to someone who isn’t familiar with this kind of sensitivity due to lack of personal experience. I think many vegans and raw foodists will likely have an easier time recognizing that I’m speaking the truth here if they’ve experienced similar changes in sensitivity from dietary improvements. This effect is described in detail in some books too, such as Raw Emotions by Angela Stokes.

If you know that eating heavier foods and drinking alcohol can dull your senses and emotions, is it such a stretch to consider that eating cleaner can swing you the opposite way? How would you feel after drinking six shots of liquor? Now imagine how you could feel if you could somehow remove six shots worth of disruption from your body, starting from what you think is sober and normal. So many other aspects of life become easier, but then you have to live in a world where a lot more people seem like they’re drunk – mentally foggy, confused about their lives and purpose, and emotionally numb. It’s always tempting to want to return to the fold, but you can’t unsee what you’ve seen.

When you’re very in tune with your emotions and your inner senses, it’s hard to act against them – sometimes a LOT harder. The question then becomes: How much are you willing to trust these signals?

Trusting the Sensitivity

I do feel it was the right choice to honor those feelings, which led me to do some extra social purging during the past few years. That felt better than the alternative of engaging with bullshit again and again.

Last week I joked that I had to pay extra to upgrade my Facebook block list to 2TB. While I can look back and appreciate some of those connections for what they were, I also honor my body’s signal when it’s time to move on.

I don’t regret it. It was the right choice for me.

What I didn’t realize was that I can’t fully honor these sensitive signals while also trying to numb myself to them in some areas. If I put loyalty to friends first, I always lose something of much greater value. I have to honor the truth first and let my social circle align with that. And plenty of people do. I’ve grown closer this year to some good friends who are very sensitive too, and there’s so much more depth and beauty in relationships with sensitive people than with relatively insensitive ones.

So this has never been about politics for me. Nor is it about character either. It’s actually about trust – trusting the sensitivity that can be challenging to hear but keeps bestowing surprising gifts.

Moving on is a big part of personal growth, and it’s often difficult. I notice that when I do this intelligently, it’s a move into greater trust – trust in myself, trust in reality, or trust in the universe.

This kind of trust is hard. It’s so easy to doubt yourself. It’s easy to doubt your inner signals. It’s easy to want to numb yourself. It’s hard to let yourself sense what you’re sensing, feel what you’re feeling, and let that guide you.

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How to Overcome Your Feelings of Neediness

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Why do you feel needy sometimes?

You feel needy because your own brain doesn’t believe you.

Your brain sees what you want. It also sees what you don’t want. And it genuinely expects that you’re going to keep getting what you don’t want. It doesn’t believe that you’re going to get what you want.

Your brain believes that your efforts to get what you want will ultimately provide inadequate. It believes that you’re going to fail.

So you feel needy when this happens. That’s actually a good signal, but you have to interpret – and act on it – correctly.

You can solve the problem of neediness today. You absolutely don’t have to wallow there.

Your brain is just being honest with you. That isn’t a problem per se. It’s just honest feedback, so take it as such. When you feel needy, accept that your brain is telling you that your current plans, behaviors, and actions aren’t going to work. They’re too weak or too misguided to succeed.

Despite this feedback coming from your own brain, don’t take it personally. This doesn’t mean that you’re weak. This doesn’t mean that you aren’t good enough as a human being. But it does mean that your current approach sucks and that you’re going to have to change it.

From Neediness to Abundance

In any area of life where you feel needy, ask yourself this key question:

What would it take to objectively create measurable and observable abundance in this particular area, so it would be really difficult to feel any further neediness?

Also ask:

What would it take to solve the neediness problem for life, permanently?

If you need sales in business, and customers are flooding you with purchases, it’s pretty hard to feel needy for more sales. So one priority in business is to get really good at generating sales consistently, so there’s no longer any neediness in that area.

If you need toilet paper and buy some at Costco, you’re likely to feel pretty secure about having more than enough for a while. When that sort of neediness is no longer present, you can focus on other parts of life.

Show your brain a true solution, and it will very likely stop generating feelings of neediness – if it also believes that you’re really going to implement that solution.

So to overcome neediness, you must show your brain the following:

  1. A practical solution that looks solid and workable, even if it may take a long time
  2. True evidence that you’re seriously committed to actually solving the neediness problem, even if your initial plan doesn’t work

If you could only pick one, the second item is more important than the first. While a plan can be good and convincing, what matters more for overcoming neediness is the personal commitment to create and experience abundance in that area of life. You have to convince your own brain that you’re absolutely going for the gold and that you’ll never give up.

If you convince your brain that you’re going to give up at some point, you can expect to feel pretty damned needy.

Recognize that replacing neediness with abundance is a long-term problem that deserves a thoughtful, long-term solution. Otherwise it will probably still be in your life decade after decade. Whatever neediness you’re dealing with in your 20s will still be haunting you in your 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, and beyond. Problems of neediness usually don’t just go away. You will drag them forward year after year. Your brain knows this, and it’s trying to warn you NOT to do this.

It’s wise to see just how nasty long-term neediness can be, so you’ll frame the stakes as worthy of a long-term commitment to create a real solution, even if it requires a five-year investment or longer.

Solve the Problem for Life

Just reaching the point of making a real decision regarding your level of commitment to REALLY solve the problem for life is transformational. That alone is usually enough to significantly reduce or eliminate the neediness.

Consider this: What really makes you feel needy is that you aren’t committed to doing WHATEVER IT TAKES to create abundance in that particular area.

Your brain knows when you aren’t committed. And it can predict long-term failure and lack when there’s no clear evidence that you’re actually going to do what’s necessary to solve the problem once and for all. So it’s going to generate some negative feelings to communicate that you don’t have a real solution yet.

Your brain is doing you a great service here. It’s trying to grab your attention, so you’ll prioritize solving this problem and prevent a lifetime of regret.

As soon as you truly make a firm and solid commitment to a new course of action that has a decent chance of long-term success, your brain can finally be satisfied that you’ll eventually get there. It can start predicting success, and so it will very likely start generating some positive emotions. You won’t feel neediness anymore. Instead you’ll feel confident, motivated, excited, curious, and other empowering emotions.

Stop disappointing your own brain with your egregious lack of commitment. Your brain isn’t fooled by your half-assed efforts. It can see plain as day that you’re going to fall short.

What About Intentions?

Are mere intentions enough? Ask your brain. It will tell you when it believes that you’re doing enough and when you’re just practicing wishful thinking and deluding yourself.

If your goal is basic enough that just holding some positive intentions will create abundance, you’ll feel great just holding those intentions. Maybe your brain has seen enough evidence that this approach works for you, and it can predict success when you apply it under certain conditions.

But if your brain isn’t convinced, you can hold those cutesy intentions all you want, and much of the time you’ll still feel anxious, worried, and needy because your brain doesn’t believe that the power of intention alone will be enough.

How will you convince the universe to give you what you want if you can’t even convince your own brain?

When your own brain demands more from you, give it more.

Remember that when you feel needy, your brain is saying: I don’t believe you.

Whatever It Takes

So what can you do today, right now, to overcome feelings of neediness and replace them with certainty and confidence?

Do WHATEVER IT TAKES to create the EVIDENCE that you are 100% committed to solving this particular problem for life. Convince your own brain that you’re serious.

One of the greatest transformations I see in my readers who change their lives for the better is when they finally decide to get SERIOUS about solving a problem that’s been plaguing them for a long time.

Some frame it as: no more playing small. It’s like graduating to a new level of maturity.

Instead of resisting the bigger effort required for success, you can accept the invitation.

Say to yourself something like this:

Okay, so my previous efforts have been wholly inadequate. If I keep doing what I’m doing, maybe I’ll get some incremental gains here and there. Maybe I’ll get lucky. But I’ll never get to experience anything close to the level of success I’d really like in this area of life. And if I don’t do something about this right now to change course, I’ll be dealing with this same crap year after year for the rest of my life. It’s just not going to get much better than it already is, and it may even get worse. The only way to succeed is to up my game. I can’t keep playing this the way I’ve been playing it – that is just never going to work.

You can even dialogue with your brain through journaling. Converse with it to see what it actually needs to see from you in order to stop generating feelings of neediness. Listen for the truth, not for the feel-good answer you’re hoping for.

Through practice and observation, you’ll learn what it takes to convince your brain that you’re going to succeed, and you’ll recognize when it doesn’t believe you.

I can tell by how I feel that I’ve convinced my brain that I’m going to write a novel in November (or at least the first 50K words of it). I feel certain and confident that I’ll actually do it. That’s because I’m all-in committed. Other people can see evidence of this too, like my blog posts about this commitment, my NaNoWriMo profile with the book project already created, social media updates about it, recent books I’ve been reading about writing, research I’ve done on story structure, etc. The external evidence may help to convince other people that I’m serious about this, but what really matters internally is that I’ve convinced my own brain that I’m all-in and that I will actually do this. I’ve done enough for my brain to signal loud and clear that it believes me.

Where in your life do you want certainty, confidence, and abundance? Start by convincing your brain that you’re 100% all-in committed to reaching a certain level of abundance and moving beyond scarcity. You can do this in any area of life: money, relationships, professional achievement, creative self-expression, lifestyle, and more.

What will it take for your brain to believe that you’re absolutely going to do enough to succeed?

If you don’t know, then ask your brain what it needs to see in order to be fully convinced. The answers may be simpler than you expect, like: join NaNoWriMo, join the local NaNoWriMo group, buy a half dozen audiobooks on writing and start listening to them, share the commitment publicly, invite others to join in, research story structure, create a novel project in Scrivener, start brainstorming story ideas, etc. Even before doing all of those items, my brain grew convinced when it saw sufficient evidence that I was going to do them and not stop – and that’s before I’ve written a single word of the actual novel.

Beyond Your Comfort Zone

You can’t fool your own brain. It sees right through you. If you feel needy, that’s your brain telling you LOUD and CLEAR that it doesn’t believe you and that it doubts your sincerity. It’s predicting that you’re going to fail because it’s not seeing enough evidence of any real and true commitment. So it’s calling your plans and intentions out as B.S. that won’t work.

That is a call to change – to immediately and powerfully alter course. That can be done in a day. It’s a decision – not a needy one but a strong one that proves to your brain that you’re making a commitment and that you absolutely won’t quit till the job is done.

Convince your brain that you’ll do whatever it takes to succeed. If you haven’t done that yet, then your “whatever it takes” is going to require that you stretch beyond your comfort zone. Don’t confuse “whatever it takes” with “whatever feels comfortable.”

Be willing to do what feels awkward, uncomfortable, and scary. That’s all part of doing whatever it takes.

If awkwardness is enough to stop you, you’ve lost. If discomfort is enough to stop you, you’ve lost. If fear is enough to stop you, you’ve lost.

Your path to abundance may very well take you through awkward, uncomfortable, and scary experiences. Be willing to experience all of that. Surrender to that possibility. Make it clear to your brain that you won’t use those as excuses to quit. Then create some real evidence by deliberately doing something awkward, uncomfortable, or scary. Prove that you’re serious.

Alternatively, you can continue to wallow in neediness – month after month, year after year, decade after decade – until you don’t even cling to false hope anymore, and your neediness is replaced by permanent regret.

Note finally that neediness is actually a positive sign. If you feel needy, it means that your brain still believes you can succeed, but only if you change your approach, raise your commitment, and finally get serious.

Neediness is an invitation; don’t leave it unanswered.

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Why You Should Make a Video in Your Bathrobe

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I love mental and emotional resistance training because it has done so much for me over the years. It’s a fabulous way to think about skill-building when you’re diving into new territory, especially when you feel anxious, uncomfortable, or off balance.

Consider learning how to record and publish videos online, for instance.

So much of this is about how you model the experience in your mind.

A video can be a performance. It can be a conversation. It can be a form of play. It can be a gift. You can frame the experience however you like, but you won’t really feel free to choose your framing until you crush the automatic frames foisted on you by society, like the performance framing.

A simple way to break the automatic frames and discover greater freedom is to notice what you’re resisting about an experience and deliberately do those very things with the intention of losing your fear and resistance.

So don’t fuss over trying to provide value when you begin. Focus instead on shedding your fear, anxiety, and discomfort with the medium. The value will come through more strongly as you do that.

Suppose you want to get comfortable with making online videos. For many people that can feel very awkward and uncomfortable when you first start out.

Even after years of practice, some people still feel awkward and uncomfortable – sometimes even more than when they started. Partly that’s because they didn’t deliberately chase down the resistance. They mostly tiptoed around it, so the resistance remains. Sometimes the resistance even grows as you gain experience.

Consider this type of goal:

Make and publish 50 videos.

That’s an okay goal to gain some experience, but it’s not the same as deliberate practice. You can make hundreds of videos and not practice in the direction of your true resistance. You can still end up trapped into being a bit of a perfectionist, not feeling truly free. You may find that the conditions have to be just right before you’re able to hit the record button. You may procrastinate a lot too.

Consider this way of framing an initial goal instead:

Explore and discover how to make videos anytime, anywhere, under any conditions, on a variety of topics, off the cuff with ease and lightness – without feeling any fear or anxiety.

So the goal isn’t just to gain experience with making videos. The goal is to crush fear, so you become free. Then you can fully express yourself through that medium.

Once you’ve framed your goal in terms of crushing fear and resistance, you can break it down into practical subgoals like these, which immediately suggest action steps you can take:

  • Make a video when you don’t feel like making a video.
  • Make videos in lots of different locations, including some locations that are far from ideal.
  • Make some videos where you feel ugly or unattractive, like when you haven’t showered and your hair doesn’t look right.
  • Make some videos with bad lighting.
  • Make some videos where the audio isn’t as good as it could be.
  • Make some videos while walking with a selfie stick.
  • Make some videos out in public around other people.
  • Make videos in one take, and publish them with no cuts or editing.
  • Make some videos with no pre-set topic or mental script, and speak entirely off the cuff.
  • Make a video in your bathrobe or pajamas.
  • Publish a video that you really wanted to redo because it didn’t turn out well.
  • Make some videos on controversial topics that will surely invite criticism.
  • Share something about yourself in a video that you’ve never shared before and that makes you cringe to share it.
  • Make videos when you’re hungry, tired, sleepy, etc.
  • Make videos when you feel nervous or anxious.
  • Make videos with other people.
  • Make a video when you catch yourself making a justifiable excuse not to make a video.
  • Make videos when you feel like an impostor and have zero value to give.

Whatever makes you feel self-conscious, do exactly that.

Whatever makes you feel like hiding, lean into expressing yourself.

Remember that this is just a training phase. You don’t have to live this way all the time. Just do it while you’re deliberately training through the resistance. You can even split that into multiple phases with breaks in between.

Look for the resistance in yourself, and then resolve to face it. Brainstorm a list like the one above of all the angles that make you cringe a bit. That becomes your to-do list.

It’s not just a matter of checking each item off your list once. Do them once if that’s all you need. Or do them repeatedly. But do them until you realize that it’s not a big deal to do more of them. You can feel that the resistance is either gone now, or at least it’s low enough not to stand in your way anymore.

Maybe you only need to record and publish one video in your PJs to realize that it’s not a big deal to do more videos like that. Or maybe you still feel so self-conscious after the first one that you realize that you have to do more videos like that, maybe the next one in your bathrobe and slippers, to feel comfortable being so casual on video.

You know you need to do more when you feel fear, anxiety, or worry, suggesting that the idea still appears stressful to you. You don’t need to do more when you feel bored over an idea because there is no meaningful stress anymore. What you once feared may eventually feel boring, as it should because the stress was created by a false framing anyway.

Making a video in your PJs isn’t actually stressful – it’s actually a pretty boring goal and a low bar to clear. So once you’ve cleared that bar, and it would seem boring to continue doing more in that direction, turn your attention back towards more fear-busting. Where is the resistance now?

Claw your way out of the pit of fear one step at a time. It’s a gradual process. Keep building on what you’ve done. Keep leaning into the fear wherever you find it.

This is a form of resistance training. When you train up by facing the resistance, you get stronger, and the resistance seems lighter.

Another benefit is that you build up a collection of reference experiences that you can lean on for the rest of your life. You’ll always know that you can make a video in your pajamas. You’ll always know that you can still record and publish when the conditions are far from ideal.

I know that I can make a video in my bathrobe. I can make a video when I haven’t shaved for many days, in my exercise clothes, with salty skin after a sweaty workout. I can make a video when I’m really not sure what to say or if I’m even being coherent enough. I deliberately courted those experiences a few years ago, so I could feel comfortable and be fully myself through that medium. Now it’s been years since I’ve gone more than a few weeks without being recorded on camera somewhere – CGC coaching calls, interviews, YouTube videos, etc. Most weeks I’m recorded on video at least once or twice. So it’s really useful to feel comfortable on camera without being perfectionist about it. Just show up and go.

When you do this in one medium, you can stretch it to others too. One of my best stretch goals was to do a three-day workshop with no plan, no prepared content, and no pre-chosen topic. Just do all three days off the cuff with the flow of inspiration and audience suggestion all the way through. And most importantly, do it with no fear or nervousness – just playfulness, fun, connection, curiosity, etc. It was a beautiful experience, both for myself and the attendees. It helped me reframe public speaking even more than I already had, allowing me to see it as a rich and playful form of co-creation.

What medium of expression would you love to really pwn? (Not a typo, look up pwn if you don’t know the word. It’s in modern dictionaries now.)

Gaining experience alone won’t necessarily get you there. It’s all too easy to keep dodging the scariest parts. Then you might become a control freak who can only express yourself under narrow conditions, and when something throws you off balance, you’re back to fear and anxiety again.

On the other side of your fear is freedom and expansion. You know this. Now you must summon the will to act on that knowing, or you’ll never gain access to those gifts. If you commit to such a process, you can gain access to a new medium of expression that you’ll cherish – and be able to leverage – for the rest of your life. And you can do this repeatedly with a variety of expressive forms. You can be a true multimodal creator then.

When I was younger, I was afraid of many forms of expression that involved speaking off the cuff around other people, other than a small group of close friends. So much opened up when I finally decided that this was no way to live the rest of my life, and I resolved to conquer these fears step by step. You may look far down the road and assume there’s no way that you can reach such distant goals. Don’t worry so much about the distant goals unless they really inspire you. Just focus on the immediate steps you can take right now, like sending me a link to your next YouTube video that you recorded in your bathrobe. 😉

You might figure that you’re doing people a disservice by recording and publishing some material that isn’t your best, but there’s value in that too. You’re encouraging other people not to hesitate so much and wallow in perfectionism. You teach people that it’s okay to just go. You can even weave that lesson into the video. My bathrobe video is about overcoming perfectionism, for instance.

You also never know where your self-expression experiments will lead. During his youth Stephen King submitted a short story to a magazine, and his story was firmly rejected. Years later after King became famous, the guy who’d received that story went up to King and asked him to please autograph the original copy, which the guy had kept all those years as part of a massive collection of Hollywood memorabilia. What may just be a small stepping stone today could have a totally different meaning a decade or two from now.

You’re not the true judge of the value you provide. Other people will receive value in ways you cannot predict. The crappiest video imaginable can still provide plenty of value to people in ways you wouldn’t expect. Let others decide if they’ll watch past the first few seconds. Don’t deprive them of the opportunity to soak up some of your light.

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Raising Your Baseline

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In practicing the slow, shallow breathing approach from The Oxygen Advantage that I shared about during the past two days, I’m grasping that the key to this approach is to define a new baseline for my breathing and then keep synching back to that new baseline whenever I catch myself drifting from it.

The initial temptation is to sync back to my old way of breathing, which can happen automatically when I lose awareness of my breath. Then I might catch myself and practice consciously reducing my breath so I’m not over-breathing.

An aspect of this change that’s easier to catch is when I moderately exert myself for a short burst, like walking up a flight of stairs. My breathing becomes a little heavier afterwards, so I make a conscious effort to bring it back down quickly, ideally within no more than 2-3 breaths.

So it’s like I have a breathing budget, and I’m doing my best not to squander it. My budget for air this week is much lower than it was last week. And next week I’ll try to nudge it even lower.

I realized that a similar strategy also works for adjusting our emotional baselines.

Suppose you often feel depressed, frustrated, angry, anxious, or some other emotion you’d prefer not to feel so much. Pretend that you’ve suddenly been allocated a lower budget for feeling negative emotions, and you have to be careful not to squander it too quickly.

Imagine if life dramatically cut your negative emotion budget by saying: Henceforth you’re only allowed to spend half as much time in negative emotion territory.

How would you obey this mandate?

You need two pieces to succeed here:

  1. Frequent check-ins with yourself to see how you’re doing
  2. A quick recovery strategy to shift from the old behavior to the new one

Whenever you catch yourself experiencing some negative emotion, you must leave that territory and return to a positive or neutral baseline as quickly as possible. Otherwise you’ll squander your negative emotion budget too quickly.

Do you already have such a strategy? Do you know how to quickly shift yourself back to neutral or positive emotional territory? Can you do this within a few breaths?

If you don’t have such a method, then finding one ought to be a key strategic piece for raising your baseline. Being aware of negative emotions isn’t enough – you’ve also got to change them.

To practice reducing my breathing immediately when it’s too rapid, I do the opposite of the unwanted behavior. I deliberately slow down. I can’t breathe slowly and quickly at the same time, so by doing what’s incompatible with rapid breathing, I stop the rapid breathing.

It’s much the same with negative emotion. What’s incompatible with negative emotion? Positive emotion. So if you do something – anything – that makes you feel good within seconds, the negative emotion has to drop off. It can’t hang around while you’re feeling good.

Then the long-term challenge is to habitualize this recovery pattern by always practicing it at every possible opportunity.

I’m doing my best to not let myself over-breathe. Whenever I notice that I’m doing that, I immediately take conscious control of my breathing and slow it down. If I don’t do this, my baseline won’t shift, and I won’t really get to test and experience the results on the other side.

Initially you may have to consciously take control a lot – like dozens of times per day – but if you stay as consistent as you can, you’ll raise your baseline, and the new behavior pattern will become your new default.

Where else could you apply this idea? You could use it for productivity habits, eating habits, early rising, and lots of other areas of life. The key is to develop a rapid strategy for shifting your behavior in a way that’s incompatible with your old baseline. Then apply that shifting behavior every time you catch yourself running the old pattern.

To really create an effective change, the old behavioral baseline must become unacceptable for you. In order to progress to a new baseline, you must eventually regard your old baseline as out of bounds and below standard, even if it still feels normal. This is a simple approach I’ve used repeatedly times for doing personal growth experiments and also for making long-term changes. To embrace the new, there must be some willingness to say: The old behavior is dead to me.

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Relax Into Being

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A few nights ago, I did a 30-minute yoga session before dinner. While lying in Savasana (corpse pose) at the end of it, I reveled in a delightful sense of beingness. This was a good reminder to set aside doingness and to fully relax into just being now and then.

When you relax into being, you experience existence without any need for doing. Breathing in stillness feels effortless and automatic. In this state you can enjoy the feeling of connectedness to life without having to think about it. You can set aside all stress and worry. Sometimes it feels marvelous to be like a puddle on the floor without a care in the world.

Time seems to pause while in the state of beingness. Even though the seconds still pass by, you needn’t attach any meaning to the passage of time.

When I spend time being and then re-engage with doing, the doing feels lighter and easier. I bring some of that puddleness back with me, which makes me feel more relaxed and attention. It’s easier to focus because my mind has been cleared, so it has plenty of capacity. I feel emotionally refreshed as well, so it’s easy to feel motivated.

How often do you just relax into being? Often enough to enjoy a nice balance with doing? Or has too much doing been wearing you down?

If you could use more beingness, try 20-30 minutes of yoga to relax your body, and then let yourself sink into Savasana for as long as you want. Enjoy the experience of being a puddle on the floor, and revel in how good that feels. When you’re ready to return to the world of doing, notice the lightness that comes with you.

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