Tag Archives: Emotions

Upgrading the Healing Frame

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

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

How the Healing Frame Slows Us Down

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

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

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

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

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

The Healing Frame Is Inaccurate

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

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

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

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

More Effective Frames to Use

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

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

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

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

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

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

Retraining Habits

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

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

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

Retraining Anxiety

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Retraining Mental and Emotional Patterns

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

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

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

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

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

Feed Your Brain the Experiences It Needs to Grow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is the Healing Frame Effective for You?

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

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

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

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

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

Outgrowing “Poor Me”

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

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

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

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

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

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Timing Your Passion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Procrastination vs. Flow

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

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

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

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

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

Shifting Passions

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

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

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

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

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

Favoring the Choicest Investments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keeping Passion Fresh

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Choosing Enjoyment

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

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

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

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

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

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Creative Courage

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

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

Amplify

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

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

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

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

Daily Commitment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Creative Courage

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

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

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

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

Do you have the guts to join us?

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Benefits of Eating Raw

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

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

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

Let’s go down the list:

Restful Sleep, Less Sleep, and Dreams

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

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

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

Calm, Clear Mind and Enhanced Intelligence

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

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

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

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

Faster Thinking

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

Life Seems Easier

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

Faster Writing

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

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

Reduced Cravings and Addictions

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

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

More Energy

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

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

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

Easier Breathing

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

Happier Emotions

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

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

Joint and Muscle Health

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

Stronger Nails

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

Better Sex

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

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

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

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

Cleaner Body

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

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

Different Gut Bacteria

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

Better Skin

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

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

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

Thicker Hair

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

Weight Loss

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

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

Fitness Improvements

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

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

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

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

Lower Appetite

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

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

Easier Fasting

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

Eyesight Improvement

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

More Sensitive Taste and Smell

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

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

Enjoying Fitness Classes

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

Rebuilding a Raw Body

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

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

Better Heat Tolerance

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

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

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

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

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

Lower Blood Pressure

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

Less Stress

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

Easier to Meditate

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

Enjoying Music More

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

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

More Enjoyable Travel

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

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

More Synchronicities & Universal Cooperation

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

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

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

Super Strong Immune System

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

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

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

Intuition and Psychic Abilities

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

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

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

More Attractiveness

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

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

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

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

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

Empathy and Alignment Sensitivity

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

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

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

Emotional Amplification

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

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

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

Faster Decisions

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

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

The Year Ahead

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

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

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

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

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A Growth Heartset

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

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

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

A few lists can help clarify this.

A growth mindset includes:

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

A fixed mindset includes:

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

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

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

A growth heartset includes:

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

A fixed heartset includes:

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

Which way does your heartset currently lean?

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

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

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How to Handle People Who Easily Become Defensive

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

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

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

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

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

Does that ever work? Ha… I wish!

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

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

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

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

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

Oh you want a piece of me?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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