This article slipped by a lot of people. And today where I keep talking about the small actions that cause and then cement your epigenetic shift, this article is more important than it was a year ago when I first wrote it. Onto the article…
… in Neal Stephenson’s novel ‘Reamde’ he remarks that affluent parts of all cities are similar, but poor parts of cities are miserable in their own way.
What causes success, and what causes failure? Or we could say, what causes affluence, and what perpetuates poverty?
It’s habits. It’s the thing you do (or not do), day in and day out. The things you take care of and the things you don’t.
But if you look, a habit you see are only the tip of the iceberg… maintaining it, keeping it permanently, unchangeably in place.
In my humble opinion, habits are caused and maintained by attitude.
Most of the attitudes we have are unconscious. They don’t seem like ours. They don’t seem like there is anything we can do about them.
The attitude of “it doesn’t matter” 1
One of the attitudes is “it doesn’t matter.” That whether you do something or not, it won’t make a difference. An attitude that belies hopelessness. A kind of fatalistic attitude that it is predetermined that you won’t amount to anything, or that you won’t get better, or doesn’t matter what you do it won’t change anything.
If you have this attitude, then you do some things, most things, in campaigns. You don’t take care of things, like the house, the yard, the repairs, the cleaning, and then you do a lot of them all at once.
Taking care of things regularly, in a timely manner, is a success marker. It won’t make for success by itself, but without it there is no chance for success.
Consistently and persistently. Day in, and day out.
Instead, what you have is a lopsided life. You do a lot of what you like to do, and too little of the boring stuff.
If I can risk to take a bet, you can’t even see why it would matter.
Now, we could have a whole dissertation on why you would have this attitude. About what happened to you as a kid. What attitudes your environment, your racial inheritance, your family culture, imprinted on you. On all the things that lead you to having this attitude.
But in the end, from the point of you of your life, of your success, it won’t matter, will it?
The most important thing is to just see it. Once you saw it, you can’t unsee it!
I listened to a coaching call by my coach yesterday, and I was mortified to find out that I only do one of the four actions regularly that he says all successful coaches do daily. One must do them, all four, daily, if one wants to have a successful coaching business. Wow, horrible. Really? Darn!
You see, I have had this “It doesn’t matter” attitude, and I wasn’t aware of it until just now.
I see that the reason to come to coaching calls, because, left to your own devices, you can only see what you can see, and even if you see it, let’s say while you read an article, getting out of an attitude is not the easiest thing in the world.
Because even if I deal with one symptom of this attitude, i.e. I start to do the four actions every day of the week, learning to do it well, etc. it still feels like a campaign to me.
taking actions won’t change the attitude
You see, taking actions won’t change the attitude. And unless the attitude changes, the actions will return to their default… the principle of the thermometer takes over. 2
But changing attitudes is not like changing your clothes one time… changing attitudes is like a major surgery, like a rebirth, and to be honest with you, I don’t know the first thing about how to start it. 3
So, if you are in a coaching program already, we are probably going to spend a lot of time on attitudes in the future, while I experiment on myself on changing this attitude that inevitably leads to a mediocre level of success, at best, and perpetual failure at worst.
And if you are now just waking up to the idea that attitudes, your attitudes keep you where you are, unhappy, dissatisfied, alone, sick, tired, or poor, you may want to take a beeline to a coaching program to have a chance at changing it.
I don’t know of anyone, I don’t know of any method, that has ever changed attitudes… permanently. 4
Temporary changes, of course, possible, but unless the change is sustained, unless the new attitude is “everything matters, some things more than others, but it is like a fabric, you can’t leave anything out or there is a hole in it” all the work will be wasted on campaigns that will fizzle out, the ultimate cause of the flash in the pan results we see across the board of the worldwide effort to change lives to the better.
I can see that the few things I have been willing to do, consistently, regardless of frequent failures, I have learned to do well and they have produced a serious shift in my vibration, in my attitudes, in my DNA. The rest… oh well, I have quit. I just wasn’t sticking with it.
I can see that the saying: it is darkest before dawn has nothing to do with other things, it is all about learning new skills, building something that is not going to happen anyway, unless someone sticks with it, and is going to disintegrate unless someone sticks with it even after it’s built, like a business, like a relationship that works.
trudging through, patiently, persistently, insistently
One needs to trudge through hopelessness, a sense of uselessness, a sense of wasting time and one’s life, to arrive to a place where it is, like dawn, was long coming.
This is why there is so little success in the world: people give up when the going gets tough, and turn to something that is easy, enjoyable, and doesn’t make a difference.
Like eating, watching sports, talking about politics, listening to gurus, watching youtube videos, and such.
I am talking on the four actions my coach says are necessary for a successful business, and I can see that suddenly, in light of that, I can see a few other daily tasks, that have nothing to do with business, but will come from the same attitude.
Wow, I am already shaking in my booties.
- it is successfully covered up by the attitude “No matter what I do” that I have written about before!
- OK, important update from June 2015: if you take these actions AFTER I pulled your energetic attachments, then taking actions is the missing piece, and it will change you and your attitudes.
- I didn’t know it a year ago. I didn’t even think using energies for that. I still lived in the hypnosis that words can do it… They can’t. Now I am certain of that.
- Same note… after your attachment pulled, you have the ability through small actions consistent with the attitude you intend to foster
Yes and no. Your habits are a sure way to produce mediocrity at best, because there is no rhyme and reason to what you commit to… at this point. These small commitments are not gelling into a coherent whole… and this is what this article wanted to be about… obviously I didn’t express myself clearly enough.
Small regular actions, daily, will take you a lot further than event based actions: getting ready for a performance, or doing a homework.
It is new to me too: except for writing, connecting, reading, and thinking, I pretty much didn’t have anything that was always on my agenda.
No I have making a daily video added, and two other actions I don’t want to go into… but with this a whole new era is opening up for me.
I also see, that housekeeping is much like learning a profession, or building a business, so I am in the process of setting up a schedule for housekeeping tasks… not like a campaign, but as a regular, scheduled task. I can’t believe I am doing this… lol.
In the moments when I have claimed ownership of a situation, like cleaning the bathroom or learning something on the guitar, and I do it for me, because I see it differently, a change occurs. Responsibility arises, but it is not heavy. It leads directly to opportunity. To the place where I can and will do it, and it will be fun, because it becomes a form of self-expression, and not obligation.
Ownership>Responsibility>Opportunity>Action!
You have written, “Responsibility is your access to your personal power, your ability to make things happen.”
Yes, I still have a lot of unfinished projects. My soul correction is “Finish What You Started.” When there is no compelling, time-sensitive reason to do many of them, I do not attend to them, and they do not get done. But I can take ownership…