At any moment you are either growing or you are dying… but how do you go from dying into growing again?
You can plan for survival, and you can plan for growth
The most important difference, from your point of view is this:
When you plan for survival, every setback threatens you with death, or poverty, lack, illness or shame.
When you plan for growth, every setback is a new opportunity to use your skills to now grow from this new level.
The natural tendency is to want to shrink when you feel threatened.
To withdraw, to cut your losses, to run. Every fiber of your being wants to run, to return to the fetal position, to the womb.
In many things, the natural tendency is NOT what works. Even though it makes sense in a way.
Makes sense to make yourself as little as you can. Or alternatively make yourself as big as you can, in the moment… Flex your muscle and make threatening noises. Argue. Justify. Call the other names.
Had the natural tendency always won, there would be no intelligent life on the planet… maybe bacteria, but not more intelligent than that.
All growth, all evolution, all advancement comes from overcoming the natural tendency.
To shrink until it is comfortable again.
To sabotage, lie, pretend… to argue, to justify, to hate.
Comfortable. The opposite of growth. The first step of living life for survival.
Comfortable feels so natural, you don’t even notice it until you almost hit bottom.
Comfortably busy all the time. Comfortably stay up late to binge on Netflix or TV. Comfortably eat away the discomfort.
I am speaking from my personal experience… Businesswise I often go into survival/shrinking mode.
The art is to notice and arrest it first and turn it around next.
I’ll spend some time to map out all the symptoms, triggers, so I can share it with you.
And while I am doing the sober ‘coming to terms with‘ what I have been doing, slowly but surely life-force can recover from under the mountain of good reasons why it was a good idea to shrink.
One of the secrets of turning life around is in these words ‘coming to terms‘.
Everything unacknowledged, everything you are trying to hide, everything shameful, everything you resist amounts to a mountain of stuff, that you have to live underneath, pretending that you are OK.
If you have my Friday podcast, you see that half or more of each call is spent with looking at that mountain of stuff… Unfortunately that is only half of the battle of turning the ship around.
Coming to terms with requires a little distance from that mountain or stuff.
Sober eyes. Emotional distance. Intellectual distance. A detached stance… If you don’t have that you’ll involve yourself, entangle yourself and nothing will get done.
This is the stuff that is suffocating you. Stuff you store away, because you haven’t come to terms with it. Could not face it. Felt too big to handle.
Smart people create that distance, that detachment you need to throw off old, what you don’t need. And if they can’t do it, they hire an organizer or a coach.
For the organizer or a coach all that stuff has no meaning. No personal relevance. To memories that attached to it. So they can throw it away. They won’t stop to read it, they won’t stop to look at pictures, they won’t stop… they are uninvolved, un-entangled, and things clear up fast.
Both in the physical world, and in the emotional-spiritual world starting from nothing is necessary and painful.
Going back to nothing looks and feels like small death. Scary like the monsters hiding under the child’s bed.
I didn’t know I was afraid of that small death until I just wrote about it now.
I use writing to come to terms with stuff… but this topic had never come up.
The best way to come to terms with anything is to be forced to do it.
Moving is a great opportunity to come to terms with the avalanche of stuff you’ve been carrying… physical stuff.
Emotional stuff: coaching seems to be the most effective way to be forced to look at stuff you don’t want to look at.
In that process, if done well, you’ll find who you are really, and come to terms with that too.
There is nothing more liberating than starting from nothing, both on the physical and emotional level.
Being busy, working, is a great excuse. But, of course, no excuse will give you the results you want.
I have done the emotional liberation work… and I have started the physical, the stuff-removal.
My landlord wants to get rid of the house… and I am in his way. So I am using this to force me to get rid of stuff.
I live in a four bedroom apartment, and I don’t even use half of it… my stuff does.
Everything feels like ‘I might need it’ even though the stuff has been gathering dust for years, some even decades.
I am old and I decided that I need to get back to the bare minimum. I decided that this is an opportunity to start from nothing.
To get back to nothing. To have nothing to carry, nothing that is not vitally necessary.
The capacities needed to get this work done are
- Being detached… so you can have an emotional distance from the stuff you want to come to terms with, and expand the limited view of life
- Creating, seeing the system… so you can set up a system to deal with the stuff in both worlds. What is the first thing, and what’s the second… who will be there… where does the discarded stuff go… etc. Schedule… everything that an organizer person would do, so things get done… over time.
- Looking at this as a process… without wanting to skip to the end, without impatience, without quitting… You need this capacity so you can follow the system you set up.The order of things. The frequency of things… Once a day, once a week, one day a month… whatever works for you. Eventually you’ll find, as your life gets unburdened, that you’ll be able to spend more time with it.
I count my process in garbage bags filled.
- Garbage pickup is on Tuesdays. Even if I only remember it the day before, I can at least fill one garbage bag.
I have started with the bulky stuff… 2-3 blankets fill a garbage bag. So it’s been easy, so the resistance is less.
I have noticed a significant increase in my life-force… Now I have more energy. It is getting easier… even though I started with the easiest… lol.
- Life-Force… so you can see the end and will have the energy to see the process through. I also call this capacity desire or ambition… if you don’t have the end result desirable enough, you’ll give up. As you have seen, time and time again. This is the capacity I need to strengthen most, myself… The capacity is open, but not fully.
Someone with enough Life-Force will not resign themselves to a life of survival.
Life force is like the bird’s desire to fly, it is like the baby’s desire to coo. The more Life-Force you have the more life you can carve out for yourself. And the more energy you’ll have available to put in your business, work, marriage, hobby, life… and rest, and fun..
Warning: A new capacity is like a seedling.
When you stop watering it: it dies. This is the secret… So if you want it to stay alive: don’t do it. Commit to nurturing your capacities… So you can grow.
Can you go without adding new capacities? Muscletest says: not likely. So there you have it.
Will new capacities automatically make you grow? No. You have to put yourself into a situation where you have to grow… or else… A self-invented do or die.
I had a course a few years ago where I taught the moves, the concept of detachment… You step back to create the distance. Emotionally and even physically.
It included activating the capacity… because if you take your mind with you, all bets are off.
Detachment, distance is the key
