The Seven Boulders that you need to concquer

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When you decide on a new direction for your life, you suddenly find yourself with obstacles blocking you, even your view of the horizon, let alone your path.

Your reaction to it will be one of two kinds… in my experience.

• One: you’ll want to jump all the way to the end… and most likely you’ll fall flat on your face. I have clients who do that… habitually… never realizing that life is a process, and that there is no jumping in reality. Not mentioning the fact that unless you start where you are… you are playing with your poop.
• Two: you’ll get all confused, depressed, discouraged, directionless… that is MY typical way of dealing with a new ‘future’…

I am in the middle of one of these, so this article is very timely for me. Let’s hope I can get myself unstuck.

Back in 2003 I learned a valuable way of looking at making life meaningful. Looking at living a meaningful life.

The teacher suggested that we pick a horizon, a direction, and then look what’s blocking our way of getting there.

Since then I saw that even seeing the whole horizon is blocked… It is blocked by seven boulders, lined up one behind the other. They are there blocking your view, They are there blocking you from moving towards the horizon. You see only one boulder… I blocks the view of the next one. And the next one will block the one after it.

So, in my coaching practice, when I ask people to set a direction, and they can’t see any, I am inclined to suggest that they choose the direction: living a meaningful live, or a fulfilled life… without specifying what it is. For me, currently, is targeting a ‘crowd’ that is talented, ambitious, and yet not successful… maybe because they need and want coaching? hint… hint…

The goal is to see the first boulder that blocks your view for what it is. To see what is its mechanism to block your movement.

The first boulder, in my experience, is almost always your soul correction, your character flaw, or your weakness

The ‘floor’ of your being.

Once you see the boulder I like to ask: what can you do to eliminate the boulder? You can’t go around it, above it, or under it: because you need to eliminate it.

Without eliminating the boulder, the character flaw, your access to a meaningful life is blocked.

My main character flaw, or put it more precisely, the main character flaw of the Forget Thyself soul correction is arrogance. Fancying oneself superior.

Arrogance always covers up fear. Fear of not being good enough. Fear of having overestimated myself.

How do you use deliberate practice to eliminate the stumbling blocks the soul correction puts in your way?

You can use deliberate practice for a lot of things, especially to become an expert.

But most people are not ‘prospects’ to be trained to be experts. But why?

Some inherent, or seemingly inherent character defect prevents them from even getting into the game of life, fully.

Soul correction is an inherent character defect, an inherent worldview, mindset, that unless it is corrected, results in the person living a substandard life, a life of quiet desperation.

So what would someone like me with doubts about my abilities do. How ould someone like me practice, to get over that hump?

I do not think soul correction can be corrected. But I can manage that character flaw. I can get it out of the way… but not permanently. Come the next project, it will be there in its full glory. So the job is to get good at it, and make sure I notice it fast when it comes back up.

From Kabbalah’s point of view, the purpose of life is to overcome and correct this character defect, so the person can start living a meaningful life.

A meaningful life is not possible without doing something meaningful.

And doing something meaningful requires effort. It requires getting better at it all the time, so there is a sense of accomplishment. And the accomplishment comes with the accompanying pride and pleasure.

So, in my case, a more meaningful life will come from mustering the courage and starting to practice. And get better and trusting not so much myself, but the process.

Trusting that if the process is good, then the results are inevitable.

Wow… I have never seen that before… wow wow wow.

In the next part of this article, I will highlight a few different ways your soul correction may rob you of a chance for a meaningful life.

By the way: weak and sporadic efforts won’t change the character defect, because the character defect is on the level of the genes. The efforts need to be concerted, conscious, ongoing, and deliberate.

Character defect is not wrong. It is only a character defect.

What is deliberate practice?

Deliberate means: done consciously and intentionally.
synonyms: intentional, calculated, conscious, intended, planned, studied, knowing, willful, purposeful, premeditated, pre-planned.

For the practice to be deliberate and successful, there are two additional elements, that without them the practice will not bring the desired result.

• Seeing patterns is one of the additional elements. Being able to see the behavior, it’s elements, it’s triggers as patterns, and the counter measures as patterns you design.

Being able to see and create patterns is an intangible capacity…

…that with enough practice turns on by itself, but when you want to deal with your soul correction character defect, not having the capacity creates a catch 22 situation. I have been able to turn on the capacity successfully for people, and the difference in their behavior, what they see and notice is dramatic. I don’t use this word often: actually this has been the most dramatic of all capacities.

the capacity of being able to create a mental representation

• The second needed capacity you’ll need to cause lasting and seemingly permanent correction of these character defects is the capacity of being able to create a mental representation, a detailed image of the result you seek: a life not hindered by the character defect, the new behavior in the trigger situations. You would need to see what you would do and how you would do it.

This is also a capacity, and I haven’t worked with anyone who has it, and I haven’t turned it on for anyone.

I see it sorely missing. If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll not get there, you’ll not see how far you are from it, you won’t see your errors.

Now, let’s look at some character defects that I can see can be corrected with deliberate practice, and a shift in how you look at them:

One type of character defect is a ‘click-whirr’ automatic behavior when a certain feeling/emotion arises.

It comes up quickly, like a lightning, and the person reacts predictably, for example running away or deer in the headlight paralysis. Or getting upset.

An otherwise glib or talkative person becomes mute, starts crying, becomes stupid.

We could call this a conditioned reflex, like a phobia.

If it is like a phobia, then it needs to be treated like a phobia.

The treatment of phobia is desensitizing.

Gradually, with deliberate practice, the person exposes themselves to the trigger, and gradually can stand and ‘live through’ the trigger without going to their usual reflex behavior, running, crying, leaving, upset, stupid.

While I was researching methods to overcome, one expert said something remarkable:

Panic and Anxiety Are Addictions.

Panic is a powerful manipulator. It uses its force to trick you into doing what it wants so you can make it stronger and stronger, all while thinking you’re doing what is necessary to stop it in its tracks.

The first trick that panic plays is trying to get you to figure out what is causing it. As soon as you have your first panic attack, your mind struggles to figure out what happened. If you can’t come up with a good reason for your anxiety (like an accident, a robbery or something even worse), than your mind will make one up.

Just reading these two paragraphs, I see that the selfish gene is involved in this conditioned reflex…

Luckily we can change. We can change our brain, because it is plastic, and we can change our behavior.

I used to have a knee jerk automatic behavior. The voice in my head said: ‘I can’t.‘

It came up often enough to be undeniable. The feeling was a pressing feeling in the chest, wide, from underarm to underarm.

Surprisingly, just writing the words the whole feeling is there… even though I haven’t felt it now for a long time, maybe decades.

Once I realized that it was an automatic feeling, I countered it with an argument to my feeling. I asked: ‘How would you know?!‘

Because, after all, you don’t know what you can and what you can’t, until you sincerely attempt to do it. And do it long enough to see that you can’t do it.

The argument relieved the feeling enough that I could actually ask a different question:HOW can I do it?

In my case, I made asking that question a habit, until the paralyzing panic reaction stopped coming on altogether. Although, as I have just proved, I can bring it on just by saying ‘I can’t.‘

It’s like the patient who complains that when he hits his hand it hurts… The doctor says: ‘Then don’t hit it.‘ Duh.

I simply became the person who can.

• Considering yourself the judge. The arbiter of the Universe.

Another type of character defect is to interface with the world and with others on the basis of what is wrong with them.

You go around as if it were your assignment to point out, at least in your head, what is wrong with people, what is wrong with life, what is wrong with you.

The hidden purpose of that behavior is that you feel superior in the sea of inferior people. In addition you never have to do anything… You don’t have to be better, improve, learn, respect people, appreciate them for who they are or what they do…

And because you are both the judge and the judged… you’ll not stop judging

and that is all there is to do, stop judging. Without that there will be no improvement, no change, because what would you do if there were nothing to judge?!

Once you treat this as an addiction, a pleasure/pain causing strategy to avoid work… you’ll be on your way to eliminating it.

• Character defect: defensive

For this character defect person everything looks like an attack. On your person. So depending on the person’s constitution, they will attack, or they will justify and explain.

What’s the inner dynamic? Even though they may see that they have shortcomings, they don’t want anyone else to know it or point it out.

They don’t want to have to face their errors in thinking, they don’t want anyone to be more powerful than them. They want to be the peak of creation, even though they are mostly slothful. And they mostly major in minors…

And as a result they spend most of their time with insignificant activities, socializing, helping, etc.

Definitely an addictive behavior, avoiding the effort it would take to change, to do something that is hard.

• Character defect: blaming

Not surprisingly, this is also a strategy to avoid doing any work. This one is the hardest to correct, because the person’s whole life is based on the fact that it is someone or something else’s fault that they are not…. that they didn’t…. that they can’t….

• Character defect: arrogance

  Interestingly this is a trust issue. No one can be trusted to give me the knowledge I need, because people are not trustworthy… This character defect is very forceful: the job is to weaken it.

  In my own practice, I have found that saying: It ain’t necessarily so, opens up malleability, the opposite of rigid or fixed, and the ability to look again. Often that is all it takes to let go of the ‘I know everything‘ attitude. To see what you don’t know, and be able to learn.

• Character defect: self-delusional

  Thinking oneself superior or thinking oneself inferior are both strategies to avoid doing much of anything.

• Character defect: aggressive, self righteous

  This type of person believes that they know, hear and see things accurately, and from that vantage point their behavior is appropriate and justified.

  Once they discover that in fact they don’t see, know, and hear things accurately, they gain a chance to work on this soul correction.

• Character defect: ‘I already know‘

  Stuck in arrogance. But here, arrogance is a tool to avoid going anywhere where you can fail. Avoid working hard. Avoid putting out. The underlying fear is fear of death. This is the most similar in correction to the panic attack I dealt with in detail above.

• Character defect: Entitlement

You are not entitled to anything. You, like everyone else need to earn it. Work towards it. Pay the piper, so to say. And the fact that some people have something that you want, and they seemingly didn’t earn it, doesn’t change the fact: this world is set up to give you what you earn, not what you want.

So, now that you hopefully have found your character defect(s) that you can see may stand in the way of you living a meaningful life, what can you do? What should you do?

1. Find out what is your soul correction. It is a lot like horoscope or numerology: it is calculated from your date of birth.
2. Start observing your behavior, and recognizing the pattern of the character defect
3. If you can’t see the character defect, you may need to have the ‘Patterns‘ capacity activated
4. If you see it, decide if it is worth your while to spend time and energy on correcting the character defect. Decide if a meaningful life is prize enough for you. It may not be.
5. If your decision is to correct it, find a coach who is familiar with deliberate practice, creating a mental representation, and patterns. Start working with them.
6. Alternatively, you can read the book Peak, the new science of expertise (pdf and kindle in my subscribers area) and start working on your own, or with me.
7. I am a coach, but at this point I can’t call myself an expert coach. I consider myself a coach in training. But I can do what no other person on the planet can do: I can turn on the missing capacities for you. Contact me if you want to work with me. If you are already in my coaching programs, I will start incorporating this method and purpose into your program.

In Sunday’s workshop we identified for the participants their first boulder, their first character defect.

The worst thing I have found is this: entitlement makes practice, work, seem unnecessary.

And thus make it the hardest thing you have ever done… cause just knowing about a character defect, unless you practice it nothing will change.

Same thing with activated capacities… unless you practice it and you get so good at it that you can do it in your sleep… nothing will change for you.

So we could say: statistically this is an impossible task, even though some people, like Benjamin Franklin, and thousands of others have done it.

Practice one thing until you become masterful at it.

That is what I have done, and am still doing… There is no other way…

One of the pathways I have found is to commit to a physical activity that requires you to be and do different.

The Drink your Food challenge is a perfect way… You’ll notice that after a week or two, you’ll drop the ball… but if you can pick up the ball… and pick it up every time it drops, you are getting closer and closer to understanding what practicing means.

And that has been the biggest missing for everyone I am in contact with.

The perfect accompaniment to conquering the boulders

Author: Sophie Benshitta Maven

True empath, award winning architect, magazine publisher, transformational and spiritual coach and teacher, self declared Avatar View all posts by Sophie Benshitta Maven