Tag Archives: Creating Reality

Listening to Your Energy

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I often begin my days by asking: What wants to come through? What energy wants to be expressed?

Then I listen.

Sometimes I listen with my mind or body. Sometimes I listen with my heart. And sometimes it feels like I’m listening with my spirit.

I feel like there’s a collective idea space where thoughts and feelings are always flowing, like radio waves being constantly transmitted. When I tune into that space, I often get ideas for articles. Or I could pull out bigger ideas like for a new course or workshop.

But I don’t have to aim my internal beam-forming antenna in that direction, scanning the cloud of human needs and wants. I can also listen within. I can can scan my own personal energy field and see what wants to come through.

Then different inner voices get my attention to share their desires.

One inner voice would absolutely love to do more in-person workshops. We haven’t done one since 2016, and I was leaning towards doing one in October 2020, but that got nixed with the virus situation. I hear this voice and agree with it. It’s definitely something to look forward to when the timing is right. Zoom is great for the role it plays, and I use it every week, but there’s really no substitute for connecting face to face.

Another inner voice wants to have a more spiritual 2021. That’s the voice encouraging me to eat raw for the whole year since that way of eating makes me feel the most open, sensitive, and synchronized with life. This voice is pleased that I’m on board with the idea, so it waits patiently for me to begin at the start of the year. Meanwhile it seems to be working behind the scenes to prepare me for this shift.

I wonder if there’s some kind of energy linkage between my inner voices and the collective space of ideas. It feels like my internal energies can communicate with this larger field on their own in the background, such as to coordinate events or to arrange synchronicities. When I create certain harmonies with my inner voices, such as by agreeing with them, it feels like I grant them more privileges to take action on my behalf.

This is a mental model I sometimes use, not anything objectively provable, but it does align well with my personal experience. Do you ever feel like some energy-based or thought-based parts of you make arrangements with the rest of reality on your behalf? I’ve seen so many instances of external changes happening shortly after I make meaningful internal decisions, especially decisions that involve saying yes to some under-expressed part of myself.

One example was connecting with Rachelle. We lived 1300 miles away from each other, in different countries. I sometimes feel like our meeting was arranged, like some part of her energy and some part of my energy linked up behind the scenes and recognized our tremendous compatibility. Then they conspired to make us meet in person by removing obstacles and arranging synchronicities. Fortunately we each listened to those internal nudges that spiraled us into a beautiful connection.

I do feel there’s a sort of spiritual permission grant needed to unlock this type of experience. In my case I specifically recall inviting new connections to come into my life while I was still in my first marriage. That was also a time where I was eating a lot of raw foods, which made me extra sensitive to subtle shifts that I might not have noticed if I’d been eating cooked food. So I don’t think this is just a spiritual effect; I think it’s a physical one too.

It feels like the misaligned energies are continuing to move further away and receding into the background. Somehow the louder they scream, the fainter they sound. I feel like this is creating space for more aligned energies to flow through. It’s like how letting go of a partial match creates space for a much better match to flow through. If you’re sensitive to energy flows, you’ll feel this shifting well before you see it, and with experience you’ll trust your inner senses.

With the daily blogging challenge, 2020 was a deep dive into connecting with lots of personal growth ideas. It was also a year of boundary management and lifestyle adjustments. I feel like I had to be extra firm this year in saying “You shall not pass!” to attempted intrusions from stupidity and insanity. I think I did an excellent good job of defending and cleansing my space from such encroachments. It feels like I’ve relegated those energies to their own corral of idiocy, where they’re mostly harmless going forward, other than continuing to annoy those who care to visit. I’m content to steer clear indefinitely; it’s the smell.

Now I feel the energy shifting in a new direction, especially since the election. As I continue to listen within, another part of me says that it wants to have a caring and connected 2021. Whereas 2020 was predominantly a year of ideas, boundaries, and lifestyle adjustments, I sense that 2021 is setting itself up to be a year of people, relationships, friendships, and emotional depth.

This doesn’t feel like a personal need or desire though. I feel pretty content, satisfied, and non-needy in this area of life. It feels like I’m hearing a collective desire from the larger energy field. I can listen to that energy field directly, and the desire for more human connection and intimacy seems loud and chaotic, overflowing with unmet needs. But when I listen internally, I hear a softer and quieter part of me that wants to help with this.

I feel like the energy flow of 2020 was about testing, challenging, clarifying, releasing, and standing firm. It was a tremendous year of truth alignment.

For 2021 I sense a year of stronger love and oneness alignment, but only with very compatible people, not universally with everyone. I can’t say what form this will take, but it feels like different parts of my personal energy field are picking up on this larger signal, and so they’re offering up their own invitations on how to align with this “big energy” in motion.

I do not see 2021 as a year of healing and reconciliation. I sense that 2020 involved a split that was meant to happen, with some people going one way and some going another way. We’ve made some key energetic choices this year. We’ve said a firm yes to some types of invitations and a firm no to others, and we’ve seen other people make different choices. It’s been a polarizing year, hasn’t it?

This year I was challenged to decide whether I was going to be anti-racist or to continue clinging to the feeble non-racist label. I voted for first time ever. I made decisions that caused some people to reject me or to feel rejected by me, while other people sensed and expressed a stronger connection to me than ever (the feeling is mutual). I think it was important and necessary to go through this. It felt like a year of multiple tests, with answers that will determine the future direction of people’s lives and experiences for many years to come. Has it been that kind of year for you?

It feels like the testing part is essentially over, at least in terms of major alignment decisions. Soon it will be time to co-create something new, and now we’re in an incubation phase before that fresh energy really opens up.

I feel like I’ve released and corrected multiple misalignments this year, so I no longer need to carry those misalignments into 2021 and beyond. I don’t feel that this is for reasons of speed but for reasons of depth. It now seems possible to go deeper in certain directions where misaligned energies would create drag and friction, frustrating the most aligned people who aren’t in the mood for friction and just want to explore flow, abundance, and appreciation together. This year the misaligned have had to step aside so that certain high-alignment experiences can be made real for the people who are ready for them.

I think a key question asked of me this year was: Are you willing to put your energy where your intentions are?

And the companion question: Are you willing to withdraw your energy from the friction and drag?

Letting go of the friction and drag is especially difficult when it’s in human form… when someone you know firmly plants their flag in drag territory, and you have to let them have that experience without you. You have to choose forgiveness so you can lighten up your energy and go where you need to go next. Note that forgiveness isn’t the same as reconciliation or compromise (which could keep you stuck in the drag).

So these are some answers that come through when I ask the questions that I shared at the beginning of this post. Does any of this resonate with you?

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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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Is Manifesting a Physical Skill, a Mental Skill, or a Spiritual Skill?

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People often frame their manifesting skills as something spiritual, mental, or a combination of the two. Manifesting is often treated as something akin to prayer. Ask the universe for what you desire, and hopefully you’ll receive it.

But what if manifesting is actually a physical skill in disguise?

Other mental skills, including reading, writing, speaking, and solving math problems, are actually physical skills too. Your physical brain implements these skills on your neural hardware. If your brain is damaged in certain ways, you could lose some of your mental skills.

We often overlook the connection between the mental and the physical except when it becomes really obvious, like after consuming alcohol or when feeling sleep deprived. But the connection is strong and clear. The mental and the physical are inseparably linked.

What about so-called spiritual skills, however, such as manifesting or prayer? If you focus on your desires to manifest what you want, clearly that’s a mental activity too. You have to think about it to do it. You’re engaging your mind in a mental activity, which means you’re also engaging your brain in a physical activity.

Are you following this so far? The mental and physical conneciton seems pretty straightforward up to this point, right? Now here’s where it gets a bit weird.

If manifesting is a spiritual skill and a mental skill, then it’s also a physical skill. This suggests that the health of your brain could affect the results of your manifesting experiments, just as the health of your brain can affect your other skills and the results you can generate with them.

Any mental skills you have can be degraded with drug and alcohol abuse, right? And any mental skills can be upgraded with better health habits, right?

Have you considered that this isn’t just true for skills like writing, solving business problems, and computer coding? Have you considered that it’s also true for any and all spiritual skills, including prayer and manifesting?

Yes, I’m actually suggesting that the health of your brain is inextricably linked to the results you’re able to achieve with any of your so-called spiritual skills. Sure you can still use your skills under suboptimal conditions, just as a drunken writer can still write well sometimes. But in general, a cleaner brain will yield better and more consistent results.

How can you tell? One way is to do health experiments that will significantly affect your brain health. When your brain gets physically healthier, do you notice a difference in your manifesting skills?

I absolutely do notice this when I do certain health experiments, as long as I’m making big enough changes. The improvement in “spiritual” results is very pronounced. Whenever I eat 100% raw for a while, my manifesting skills undergo a major upgrade. Positive synchronicities amp up tremendously, and my desires flow into my life with much less effort. It’s almost a magical experience. Every time I change my diet this way, I’m blown away by this change. I expect to experience physical and mental improvements, but it’s weird when spiritual improvements occur as well.

I also experience a huge increase in intuition. This part makes sense to me because I can say that intuition is a mental skill, so when my physical brain runs cleaner, of course my intuitive insights may improve as well. I can explain this by saying that intuition is a function of the subconscious mind, so when the underlying hardware runs better, the software runs better too, and this leads to more accurate neural computations.

But it’s harder to explain why manifesting skills are so much better when eating raw. Sure I can say that my mind works better because my brain works better. And I can see the surge in results that stays high as long as I keep eating raw. I can notice that those results decline again when I return to eating cooked food. But what’s the connection between my brain and the universe? Why does having a cleaner brain make a difference in reality’s responses to my intentions and desires?

That aspect does puzzle me. I don’t doubt that there’s a connection though because it’s so pronounced. To doubt it would be like having six shots of alcohol in a row and pretending that there’s no effect. You’ll notice the difference plain as day, especially when the shift happens so rapidly.

I’m not the only one who’s noticed similar effects. Other raw foodists have written about this too. It’s a common subject of conversation in person. Many explain it differently though – as something spiritual or soulful.

I find the spiritual explanation unsatisfying. I think there really is a link that runs through the physical. I think it’s probably similar to the application of communication skills.

For instance, if you eat a super clean raw vegan diet, your social life will change. People who’ve never eaten raw may assume one’s social life would get worse, but it actually gets better – usually a lot better. This could be explained by a physical chain of events. You’ll soon look healthier, and people will start to notice. People will find you more attractive. Your thinking will become clearer, calmer, and more focused, so you’ll communicate differently in your writing and speaking, and people may pick up on those differences too. Hence it makes sense that changes in your brain functioning will change what you’re communicating, and this will change the social response that you receive.

My experience is that when I eat raw, people are friendlier and more social around me. Interestingly this effect happens not just in person but also online. I wouldn’t have understood this effect if I hadn’t tested this lifestyle enough times, but it’s pretty pronounced and hard to overlook. I don’t have to try to be more social. It just happens.

I suspect that there’s a similar pathway for communicating with reality itself. Or maybe it’s a pathway of communicating with life, like a form of telepathic signals that we collectively broadcast and receive. Perhaps when we eat cleaner, our internal hardware and software for broadcasting and receiving these signals works better than before. And perhaps there’s an aspect of manifesting that uses these communication channels, and this in turn affects our manifesting results.

When I eat raw, I feel like reality is better at reading my mind. Instead of feeling like I’m pushing intentions out into the universe and hoping for some positive echos, it feels like reality reaches into my mind, pulls out my desires, smiles, and gives me a receipt. Then it brings me what I want rather quickly. I don’t really need to ask. It’s like I’m always automatically broadcasting what I want, and reality is hearing me loud and clear.

Opportunities and invitations flow into my life so synchronistically. My thinking and reality’s responses achieve a level of synchronization that I don’t experience when eating cooked food. I can still achieve an okay level of alignment on a cooked vegan diet, but it’s way, way better on 100% raw foods.

Have you ever considered the link between your manifesting skills and your diet? Have you considered that manifesting is a physical skill too, not just a mental and spiritual skill? Do you realize that your spiritual skills are still running on physical hardware? Have you wondered if cleaning up your diet could yield a significant increase in your ability to manifest your desires?

Have you also pondered that eating cooked food could be negatively affecting your communication pathways with reality? Is it possible that your mental transmissions are getting garbled and that reality isn’t actually receiving your intentions accurately and powerfully? Is it possible that most of the time, reality dismisses your requests as the misaligned ravings of some drunken human who eats a very strange and unnatural diet?

Cooked food affects the body and brain very differently than raw food. For instance, when you eat cooked food, your body generates an immune response with a surge in white blood cells. The body doesn’t response this way when you eat raw foods. If your body must expend extra energy on digestion and waste cleanup, maybe it won’t devote as much energy to transmitting your desires.

What if your life is much harder than it needs to be? What if your eating habits are preventing you from experiencing a level of flow that would make abundance easy and natural?

Are you trying to manifest abundance? What if this could be automatic, just by eating a cleaner diet? What if your natural state of being is to be outstanding at manifesting your desires, and you’ve degraded this flow at the physical level?

And what if your mental and spiritual framing of this skill set has been keeping you stuck? What if manifesting was mostly a natural physical ability all along, and you just had to let it out of its cage, so it could run at full speed?

All of this can be personally tested.

This is one of many factors that’s motivating me to test eating raw for all of 2021. This month I’m reloading those skills, practicing making different raw meals to get back into the flow of eating raw while still permitting cooked food when desired for the next few weeks. I want to do a deeper dive into this aspect of life, especially with respect to what I can glean about reality’s responses. I recently reviewed some of my old blog posts that I wrote during the time when I was eating fully or mostly raw (about 11-12 years ago), and I was struck by how easily I manifested various desires back then.

I think 2021 is going to be a very fun, flowing, and social year.

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Set an Incompatible Goal

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One way to shift your character – and your life – in a new direction is to set a goal that’s incompatible with the limitations of your current character.

In other words, set a goal that you would would never set. Then work diligently to pursue and achieve that goal.

Thinking you can’t do something because it’s out of character for you is still just a thought. You can change your thoughts, but sometimes it’s easier to change your actions and behaviors and let you thoughts play catch-up. Sometimes thoughts of who you are just get in your way and slow you down.

When you try to change yourself at the level of thought first, sometimes that works, but other times it will just lead you into a circular trap of thinking, thinking, and more thinking – and never actually doing, exploring, and experiencing.

Pay special attention to where you have desires that you tend to quickly suppress, especially with respect to ambitious goals and lifestyle experiences.

What experiences are other people having that you secretly envy?

What do you secretly daydream about doing or experiencing, but you could never tell anyone?

Have you ever thought about pulling one of those crazy ideas out of the dream space and setting it as a real goal to accomplish? Other people have already done that.

There’s something transformational about writing down a goal that doesn’t feel like you.

I encourage you to try this: Write down some goals that you would never set as goals. If you have a system for tracking your goals and projects, add those new goals to that systems. Create stub projects for them. Slot them right alongside your other goals. Notice how this feels. Does it seem unreal? A bit edgy perhaps? Realize that you could actually achieve those goals. You could make them real. They don’t have to just haunt you in the idea space.

One example is starting a business. Some people grow up believing that they aren’t cut out to run a business. Having been an entrepreneur myself since 1994 and having met hundreds of other entrepreneurs, I can tell you that a lot of people feel that way. Many still feel that way even after they’ve been entrepreneurs for years. Lots of people don’t think they’re cut out for it, even after doing entrepreneurial activities for 10 or 20 years. So if you have doubts about whether or not you can do this, join the club – you’re way more compatible with this goal than you think.

It’s odd that even after years of doing something regularly, it can still take a while for a person’s self-image to catch up. People think they need to meet some arbitrary standard of achievement before they can claim certain labels. But the labels don’t matter that much anyway. The actions and the results matter a lot more.

Another example would be to have sexual experiences that you feel are beyond you. For some it’s losing their virginity. For others it’s having a threesome or participating in an orgy. For still others it’s having a regular sex partner with whom there’s a strong mutual attraction.

If you’d like to have a lifestyle or sexual experience that you haven’t had yet, it should be on your goals list, written down plain as day. It doesn’t matter if you don’t see yourself as “that kind of person.” Add it to your goals anyway. Take action and use your problem-solving skills to move the goal forward, just like any other.

The notion that anything is beyond you is just a thought pattern. It’s not the actual truth. There are plenty of people who are less intelligent, competent, and attractive than you are who regularly experience what you rule out. You’re probably putting some of them on a pedestal; if you met them in person, you might be far less impressed.

That’s what nudged me to set a lot of stretch goals. I met people who achieved some of my stretch experiences, and I realized that a lot of them aren’t the amazing people I assumed they were. They’re just people.

When I started ruling in those kinds of experiences at least at the level of goals that I could freely set, that made all the difference. That made my mind do a double-take: Wait… we’re actually setting these as goals? Ummm… okay, why the hell not? This could get interesting!

When you set an incompatible goal as a real goal, it pushes your brain to start asking some really good questions that you should be asking, like these:

  • Is this goal really impossible for me?
  • Is this goal really incompatible with who I am? Does it have to be?
  • Why can’t I pursue this now?
  • Could I become the kind of person who could have this experience?
  • If so-and-so can have this experience, why not me?
  • Do I want this? Can I admit that to myself?
  • Why am I so afraid of this goal?
  • Are there people who would regard my resistance and hesitation as silly, unnecessary, or cowardly?
  • Are there people who’d encourage me to go for it if they knew the whole truth about my thoughts and feelings on this?
  • If I could be sure that this reality is a simulation, would I let myself have this experience?

That last one is a nice way to weave in the subjective perspective.

The goals you’ve ruled out will often be the most fun, the most growth-oriented, the most motivating, and the sexiest. They’ll also be the scariest because you’ll have to stretch who you think you are to get there. That’s good. An empowering goal ought to stretch your self-image. It ought to challenge you. It ought to push your buttons.

Take a possibility you’ve been dismissing, and just try setting it as a real goal. Put it on your goals list. Then let yourself feel the resistance and self-doubt. Call it ludicrous if you must. And then say: Yeah, okay, there’s some resistance, hesitation, self-doubt, shame, fear, and so on. But I still kinda want it. It would still be an awesome experience to have. Then let the goal remain on your list. Just keep looking at it when you see your other goals and projects. Just keep leaning into the realization that you could actually do it.

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Will AI Make You an Addict?

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The novel I’m writing is set in the future, tentatively in the year 2047, so it’s roughly one human generation ahead of us. For technology, however, that’s many generations ahead.

Consider that the first iPhone shipped in 2007 (13 years ago). If you got an iPhone 4S when it first came out, that was 9 years ago, and the 5S was 7 years ago.

The iPad is 10.5 years old. The Apple Watch is 5.5 years old.

Look back 27 years to 1993. Back then I was using a 486DX 50mhz computer with a 250MB hard drive. I think it was about $2500 when I bought it. I did some contract programming for a local game developer that year, and I remember using a 486DX 33mhz machine at their office each day. I wrote games for Windows 3.1, and I also heavily used DOS apps (with MS-DOS 6.0), mainly because Windows apps were still pretty slow.

Technically there was an Internet. I think we were using 14.4k modems back then since 28.8K ones didn’t come out till the following year… and 56K a couple years after that.

Web browsing, like with Netscape Navigator, didn’t really start becoming a thing till 1994-95. I build my first website in 1995 for my computer game business. Before the Web started taking off, people often thought of the Internet as geeky college stuff, or it was some kind of paid service like AOL, CompuServe, or Prodigy.

So that was 27 years ago, which seems like ages ago. Now I’m trying to write a novel projected 27 years into the future. That’s difficult, and I’ll surely guess wrong about a lot of things. But it’s a fun thought experiment nonetheless, especially if you love tech as I do.

My current approach is to just journal about the world and let my brain start making connections. As I see some ideas flowing onto the screen, I begin thinking about how they’ll combine. I think about the benefits and drawbacks of these combos. This helps me assemble the world in which my story can take place.

I also have to consider that the pace of change in the next 27 years will be way faster than what happened over the last 27 years. So it might be more like comparing today with 1950s tech.

One trend in particular that seems interesting to explore is AI and personalization.

For instance, I imagine that sometime within the next 27 years, you’ll be able to say most or all of these things to one of your devices, and you’ll be able to expect a good result:

  • Create and play an original episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation with the original cast, just for me. Cast my wife as a guest character.
  • Generate a new sci-fi series that you think I’ll like. Give it 5 seasons, 10-12 episodes per season, and 40-45 minutes per episode. Have it star Brad Pitt, Sandra Bullock, and Tom Hanks at their ages from the year 2000. And include a robot character with Jim Carrey’s voice.
  • Generate and add 10 attractive photos of me to that new dating app I installed.
  • Generate a new open-world fantasy video game similar to Zelda: Breath of the Wild 5. Name the lead character Schmoopie. Include the Three Stooges as quest companions that I meet as I play. Make it take about 200 hours to finish if I do all of the side quests. Make all the food and characters in the game world vegan. Save it to be played on my XBox One XS version X One. Monitor my responses as I play to make sure I’m having fun.
  • Plan a vacation trip for my wife and me to Italy in the spring. Include Rome and Venice. Make it two weeks in duration. Include the major stops you think we’d appreciate, but also give us plenty of time to wander and explore. Keep it under $7K total cost for the trip, but not too much under. Book it and add it to my calendar. Book-end the trip with a self-driving car pickup and drop off at my house. Create a 5-minute preview video of us enjoying the trip, and send it to my wife and me. After the trip, generate a 30-minute highlight video of us on the trip, and add it to our family camera roll.
  • Generate a new 12-song Depeche Mode album in the style of Violator but with shades of Songs of Faith and Devotion – with Alan Wilder as a band member please. Play it during my run tomorrow.

I think we’ll see a big explosion of AI and personalization, especially when it comes to media. I think it’s just a matter of time before AI is smart enough to generate custom experiences. AI can already generate original photos, artwork, and music now. And it can generate movies too with some major limitations. It’s also being used to upscale older videos to 4K resolution or better. It will take time, but I think that AI-generated content will eventually become the primary source of entertainment for most people. I think human-created content will still be around, but AI will improve more rapidly in this area, and the costs are much, much lower. It’s probably just a matter of time before AI surpasses humans at creating TV shows, movies, video games, VR worlds, and more.

I think we’ll see some intermediate steps between now and then, like TV shows or movies where you can change the actors. There may be legal hurdles to that though.

Fortunately the goal of creating a story world isn’t accuracy. I think the goal is to identify interesting sources of conflict. How will the world of the future challenge people?

One big issue I see is the rise of addiction. We’re already seeing AI being used in this way by Facebook. Now imagine if you were able to use AI for your own pleasure, and you give it access to data that it can use for that purpose. Suppose that while you’re watching a movie or playing a game, the AI can monitor your pulse, analyze your face in real-time, and use that data to sense how your biology is responding in each moment. Then it can generate more personalized content for you. It’s an echo chamber for one.

This creates interesting opportunities to though, especially in a capitalist society. We’re also likely to see more AI thrown at the problem of fighting addiction.

I appreciate fictional stories that highlight future problems. They help us map out the possibility space, including dangers to be avoided. A few good examples are 1984, The Terminator, and Gattaca. While fictional and exaggerated, they also point to genuine risks.

Writing a novel that helps to serve as a potential warning appeals to me. The story I’m writing (now past 17K words) is actually pretty dark. Here are some questions I’m currently exploring through the story arc:

  • How might the relationship between AI and addiction unfold?
  • What if people are empowered to use AI in ways that could lead to addictive behaviors?
  • How far will corporations go in using AI to addict their customers to their products and services?
  • Which commands that people might give AI are likely to lead to addictions?
  • What can humans do about AIs that are actively trying to condition addictive patterns?
  • How might AI be used to fight or prevent addictions?
  • Could humanity actually trap itself in an inescapable cage of AI-fueled addiction? If so, what would that cage look like?

While we could get lost in projecting many different technologies forward, for this purpose I favor keeping the world relatively simple and easy to grasp, so readers can be more immersed in the characters, the plot, and the themes rather than having to read endless description about the world.

As I work on this project, I note that the risks I’m identifying are also real. I think people will become increasingly vulnerable to tech-related addictions in the years ahead. Writing this book helps me think about how that may play out and what the potential solutions might be. So there’s an interesting relationship between exploring ahead with a fiction project and helping people prepare for upcoming personal challenges.

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Win Before You Begin

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If you tend to procrastinate on certain projects, one reason could be that you haven’t created a victory in your mind first.

When you think about a project that isn’t advancing very well, consider these questions:

  • Do you have a clear vision of what success for this project looks like?
  • Can you see your desired end result clearly in your mind’s eye, like you’re recalling a vivid memory?
  • Is the path forward relatively clear, from start to finish?
  • Can you visualize the key action steps to bring the project to completion?
  • Have you firmly decided to do the project now (as in this week, this month, or this quarter)?
  • Do you have a reasonably clear understanding of your standards for success (and what results would fall short of those standards)?
  • Are you confident that you can achieve the results you desire and satisfy your standards?

If you must answer no or maybe to any of these questions, it’s fair to say that you haven’t created a victory in your mind yet.

Without the pre-creation of a mental victory, you’re very likely to be plagued by procrastination, delay, excuses, and hesitation.

Create the Mental Victory

How do you create the mental victory? Let me ‘splain…

Kick back in a chair, and put your feet up on a desk or table. Prepare to do some imagining.

Pick a project where you’ve been stuck and that you’d like to unlock, so you can make some real progress on it.

Start a five-minute timer. Knowing that the time is counting down can help you focus, so your mind doesn’t drift to other topics. If you run out of time and want to keep going, feel free to set another timer. Tell yourself that you only need to focus on this for five minutes.

Now engage your mind by thinking about the project. Start at the end. Imagine that it’s over and done with, and you’ve succeeded. Go to that future time and place in your mind. See the final work product. It’s 100% finished. You did it! The project is complete.

Feel how it feels to be finally done. Look at the outcome in your mind’s eye. Appreciate the results. You achieved what you wanted to achieve. You met or exceeded your standards. You satisfied the requirements for victory.

Engage fully with the outcome in your imagination. See it. Touch it. Experience it. If you were watching this as a movie, get clear about what you’re seeing on the movie screen.

Now after visualizing the outcome, stay in the future in your mind, and reflect back upon what you did to get there. You don’t have to review the steps in linear order. Just let your mind pick a step and show it to you.

Imagine yourself doing some of the action steps. Picture those scenes, one by one, in whatever order they come to you. Hop around the timeline as much as you want. See yourself doing some of the final actions shortly before the project is done. See yourself just getting started. See yourself doing some of the middle actions.

Invite your mind to build the story of how you went from present reality to future victory. Let your mind show you the steps you took to get there. Let it show you how it feels to experience the end result.

If you’re not sure about the outcome, this is your chance to play around with different possible outcomes. Compare the stories to see which you like best. It doesn’t take long to do this several times in a row with different results.

If there are obstacles to be overcome to achieve your goal, see yourself facing and overcoming those obstacles. Imagine solving the problems you expect to encounter along the way. Make the path seem real.

The Flow of Action

When you pre-create the victory and you see enough of the story to get there, you’re likely to feel some motivation to act – possibly even while you’re still visualizing. Great… that’s good evidence that your mind now understands what success is supposed to look like. You’ve given your mind a clear goal that it can achieve.

Let yourself flow into action as the inspiration arises. See if you can invest at least 30 minutes in taking action to get started. Start building some momentum.

If you get stuck again, no worries. Just repeat the visualization exercise. Return to the end result in your mind. Re-experience the achievement. Invite your mind to help you visualize some of the key beats to get there. Realize that you can take the steps and solve the problems to reach your desired outcome.

Try this even with projects that you feel you should do but resist doing. If you really don’t feel like doing them, just tell yourself that you’re only going to visualize the end result for a while, and you don’t need to take action right now. See what happens.

You may find that this little mental trick works nicely. Once you get into visualizing the end result, your mind will often wander into thinking about the steps to get there. Let your mind explore some possible stories around that – without feeling obligated to act. You may find that this alone is enough to bypass the resistance.

If you really want to get into this, make two lists of all of your open and pending projects. For your first list, include the projects where you’re satisfied with your progress, and you expect them to be completed successfully if you just keep doing what you’re doing. For your second list, note the projects that don’t satisfy this criteria. Now compare the projects on those two lists. I’ll bet you’ll see that you’ve pre-created a successful outcome in your mind for the projects that are advancing nicely, and you haven’t properly done this for the stuck projects. And now you know how to fix that.

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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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The Point of No Return

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In Act 1 of a story with a 3-act structure, the protagonist often reaches the point of no return. Their old world crumbles, and they stumble forward into a new world, often reactively at first. There is no going back to the old world.

In a novel or movie, there may be multiple progressive points of no return, each creating a deeper level of commitment and increasing the protagonist’s risk as well.

Once Neo takes the red pill in The Matrix, he can’t go back to his old life. The old reality has ended, and now his world is permanently changed.

Once Harry Potter learns that he’s a wizard, his world is never be the same again. He must continue on to Hogwarts. Even when he goes home afterwards, it’s not longer the old status quo.

When it comes to personal transformations, we can make progress faster by deliberately aligning ourselves with certain plot beats that are guaranteed to advance the story. One of those beats is the classic point of no return.

Many people get their stories stuck in Act 1 because they just think about the end goal – if they even have a clear one at all – and they never reach a point of no return that moves their story forward.

When you keep your options open and allow yourself to retain access to your Act 1 world, you remain stuck in Act 1. That’s what Act 1 characters do. They resist the call to adventure, to risk, and to change. They are not committed to change, so real change doesn’t occur.

Are you currently living as an Act 1 character in your story?

Suppose someone wants a more independent lifestyle, but they keep showing up to work at a job they dislike. That’s Act 1. We’re seeing the initial status quo. To advance the story, something must perturb and eventually destroy that status quo. A catalyst is needed.

Are you waiting for a catalyst to magically appear in order to progress your story? Are you waiting for Hagrid or Trinity to show up? Are you waiting for your cell phone to cough up a hologram of Princess Leia? These types of events happen in movies, but in real life you may end up waiting a very long time, perhaps years or even decades.

Are you waiting passively for a catalyst, or are you actively looking for one? Better yet, when you need a catalyst, you can create your own. Why wait?

If you want to advance your story, a good first step is to focus on graduating from Act 1, so you can progress to Act 2. Work on reaching your point of no return. Your old world must die, and you must come to accept the obviousness of that. As long as you still think you can keep your old world humming along safely, you’re still thinking like an Act 1 character, and you aren’t ready for Act 2.

In your personal Act 1, realize that your dead-end job, your dead-end relationship, or your dead-end health habits must come to an end. You cannot keep living in Act 1 unless you want your life story to remain perpetually stuck.

With any powerful personal goal, focus first on raising your commitment level. Make it inevitable that you’ll at least get moving in that direction. A good place to begin is to accept that your old world must collapse. You’re going to have to leave it behind.

In order to do this, you must lean your character towards growth, mystery, and risk. Yes, that will probably seem scary at first. Acts 2 and 3 are way more risky and dangerous than Act 1. Act 1 is cozy and safe – and also boring if it goes on too long.

In a typical 100-minute movie, Act 1 is around 25 minutes – just the first 25%. If you remain stuck in Act 1, you’re leaving most of the value of your life untapped and unlived.

This takes courage of course. What also helps is knowing how awful it will be if you grow old and die while your character is still in Act 1 of your story. If you really want to live, you’ll go through multiple story arcs during your lifetime, and these story arcs can overlap. So sometimes you’ll be in Act 1 of one part of your story while you’re in Act 3 of another.

Do you already have regrets about how much time you’ve spent stuck in Act 1? If so, work on progressing to Act 2 by creating the death of your old world. Engineer your own point of no return, where change becomes inevitable. Demand more courage from yourself. Don’t wait for a catalyst to appear. Reading this can be enough of a catalyst if you want it to be. You’re fully capable of making a real decision to change. That starts with realizing that you’re finally done with Act 1.

One of my personal story arcs that spanned many years was a progression from financial scarcity to abundance. My transition from Act 1 to Act 2 happened in 1999. The decision wasn’t the surface idea to stop being broke financially. It was a decision to stop pretending that financial scarcity could stop me from having a fun, happy, and rewarding life. I resolved to stop stressing over money and to start having way more fun in life. I stopped giving my power away to some number in a computer database. That was the real decision that progressed me to Act 2. It was a decision to change how I related to life and money.

The point of no return is really a decision. It’s when you decide to progress your story, and you also decide that there’s no going back. The dead-end job is done. The dead-end relationship is over. The dead-end health habits are finished. The dead-end relationship with money must die.

Other people will see your outer journey, but these decisions have more to do with your inner journey. You don’t just decide to leave your job for surface reasons. You decide that you’re no longer going to be the timid and needy person who will show up for a job that isn’t right for you. You’re not going to keep being the coward who will continue taking orders from a misguided boss. You’re not going to be the drone who works for a company for misaligned values. It’s time to construct a new identity that fits who you’ve ready to become.

A real decision is harder than action. A real decision progresses you into Act 2 of your story. You’ll know when you’ve made the decision because you’ll feel this deep acceptance – and often even some sorrow – that Act 1 is finally over and done with.

Don’t wait for an external catalyst to get your story moving forward. Invite or create whatever catalyst you need to progress your story. Don’t keep living as an Act 1 character when you’re ready for Act 2.

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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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AI and Character Design

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One thing I have to do ASAP for my novel writing project is to figure out some character and plot ideas. I don’t already have a story in mind, and I haven’t figured out any characters. I haven’t even picked a genre, so I’m really starting from scratch here. I’d love to have at least a basic sketch of what kind of story I’m going to write by November 1st when NaNoWriMo officially starts.

I can lean on past role-playing experience to help with some details of character design, but I also prefer to trust in the flow of inspiration and see where that leads.

One idea that randomly popped into my mind a few days ago was to leverage AI for some character design creative inspiration. I thought it would be cool to generate some random faces with ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com as a creative tool. Since humans are such visual creatives, myself included, why not start with figuring out a character’s appearance first?

While I could start with abstract qualities or other character traits, there’s something about starting with faces that appeals to me. Imagine if you assembled a gallery of pics of all of your main characters. That alone feels like progress.

Yesterday I used that site to generate lots of random faces, and I saved about 100 of them. Some of the images are a bit deformed, but most look very realistic.

Now and then I’ll see a face that makes me curious. Who is this person? What is their backstory? Might this become an interesting character to explore in my novel?

Here are some samples from the collection I saved. I haven’t designed characters based on any of these. Right now I’m just assembling a collection for brainstorming purposes.

When I find an image that captivates me in some small way, I can daydream about the fictional person and see if it leads somewhere enticing. I can invite my mind to suggest details from their backstory.

That woman looks like she works for a tech company.

That guy looks like a little sinister.

That little girl looks wise beyond her years.

This person is probably comfortable on a stage.

Scrivener is popular writing software that I’ve been using for years, especially for designing courses, so I’m using it using it for my novel project as well. I just started that project with the built-in Novel template. In Scrivener it’s easy to add images to character sheets and even to display the cast of characters visually. So when I find an image I want to use for character inspiration, I can drag and drop that image into my novel doc and then design a character around it. I like the idea of being able to display my characters visually. That makes them feel more real to me, like it’s a real group of people inviting me to tell their stories.

With AI-generated images, the output is pretty random, so I may have to generate a lot of images to find ones I like. But it’s easy enough to open five or more browser tabs and just keep refreshing till something interesting comes up.

Since these images aren’t real people, they don’t carry the baggage of previous associations, so I feel free to construct their identities from scratch. If I used pictures of actual actors to remind me of my characters, their pics might bias my writing to align with other roles those actors have already played.

I like that this approach encourages diversity in my character set too. The AI generates images of different ages, races, and genders, including some faces that look androgynous.

These images may also help me consider details that I might have otherwise overlooked, like whether a character wears glasses, has facial hair, or likes baseball caps. I still have to use my imagination to fully design each character, but starting with a photo seems like a nice way to begin. From the face I may figure out the person’s name and a few other traits, and that gets me into their story.

When I would lead friends through role-playing adventures many years ago, I enjoyed designing interesting characters with goals that would conflict with the players’ goals. Some wild and fascinating stories emerged from this collision of goals. I think a similar approach could work for writing a novel. Design a variety of interesting characters who have conflicting goals and interests, let them collide, and see what type of story emerges from that.

I see this AI-based approach as one tool that I can use to the extent I find it helpful, but I don’t have to use it for every character. It’s not a substitute for other design tools and methods, just a supplement. I think it has promise though. Maybe it’s a bit geeky, but it’s getting me into thinking about character design.

This simple idea makes me wonder what other ways I could leverage some AI assistance for extra creative inspiration.

Someday in the future, I imagine making a bowl of popcorn and saying to an AI: Generate a two-hour movie based on my novel, and play it when ready. And then the next day: Now generate the sequel that I haven’t written yet.

You do realize that it’s only a matter of time before that’s a real thing, right?

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