People throw around the words: self-expression, but what is the self? I have never found a person who knows what it means… and if it means what THEY mean.
Most people look how you express yourself not what it is you express…
Meaning: I am letting my hair down… I am loud and obnoxious, I am funny, I am demanding… these are all how expressions.
This article is about “what” not “how”…
What is the Self you express with everything… your life, your job, your relationships, with your music, poetry, and your life.
There are two selves, and the reason life doesn’t work for most of us is because the two selves are not connected in any way.
- Self 1: your genes, your desire to survive and procreate.
- Self 2: your human desire to be higher than just your genes… to live your higher self.
Self in the expression of the higher self, is the evolved self. The self Shakespeare means: To thine own self be true.
The smaller self is all genes, all one’s own self-interest, with maybe some reciprocal altruism: help me and I’ll help you in return… still informed by self-interest.
This smaller self is also very easy to influence, very easy to scare into submission. In later article, the self that is influenced by “The Voices” you hear in your head that tell you to get angry, or tell you to attack are working effectively on this smaller self that thinks everything is as important as everything else… including what the voices say.
The Higher Self only listens to the higher calling… and considers the voices noise… like the wind.
In this article I’ll attempt to define what being true to the Higher Self is… and what the Higher Self really is.
Integrity, ultimate integrity, asks you to be true to your ideals and principles… but more importantly: asks you to be true to your Self.
The separation in that integrity sentence is relevant and important.
You may have high ideals, high principles, but that have does not define who you are, who you are is how you live, who you are is what you do and how you do it.
So the real question is: WHO ARE YOU?
Many people, including some of my students, live as if their words, their speaking, their utterings, as if their thoughts, as if their ideals spoken increased their values in life.
You hear people speak high and act low. Leaders are very visible in that. Teachers. Gurus. They speak high act low.
The only thing those words give them is inauthenticity.
Authenticity is when your words and your beingness and when your words and your actions match.
We live in the age of inauthenticity. You only need to take a look at any social media website and you can’t miss it. You think that putting up a meme, or expressing compassion makes you different than you are… You wish… but that is not how it works.
Being teary eyed about a meme or a quote doesn’t make you, your actions, your life match the value expressed in the quote.
Being different is effort. No cheap solutions like speaking or commenting fool anyone… but yourself.
What am I talking about when I talk about Self-expression then?
The Self you want to express, consistently, over time, is the Self of someone who lives by certain values.
You can get a list of values on the internet, but let’s just talk about a few?
You can design your Self, and train yourself, your attitudes, your behavior, your thinking to be that, over time.
People who are most successful have done just that. No one is born that way! Courage, curiosity, inventiveness, persistence, tireless, big vision are some of the values that are needed for success in any endeavor.
The capacities, the beingness of values comprise their Self, what they do, how they do it, what is their guiding principle in doing life.
You can pretend to uphold all values, but you’ll suffer as a result, because you will be a liar.
I grew up like a wild child. I didn’t see values lived in my environment. I needed to learn each and every value: what they really were, how you could really live them. It was wicked difficult.
I am not alone in not having seen values… but I am unfortunately quite alone in making the many efforts to incorporate values, over time, into my Self.
Even my teacher, Robert Hartman only managed to incorporate a few… during a lifetime of teaching intrinsic values.
In my work’s parlance, intrinsic values, lived, are the spiritual capacities you have.
In the Starting Point Measurements I measure how many spiritual capacities you live by.
The “normal” is 1. One capacity…
The number of spiritual capacities people can have active is 160. The only way to activate a spiritual capacity is to live by it. Words don’t mean a thing.
For a while I experimented with turning spiritual capacities on. But without use, without authenticity, they turned off by themselves.
Authenticity: owning who and what you are, even if what and who you are is not the highest ideal you have, is the key to raising your vibration. Authenticity means, in action: telling the truth about your pretenses. Being authentic about your inauthenticity…
Only when you fully own the imperfect Self you have, that you have a chance for growing. Through confronting your inauthenticity, through winning over it.
Many soul corrections, maybe all, are, in essence, a distorted relationship to the Self… believing yourself either bigger or smaller than the Self is… and that preconceived idea makes it impossible to grow: delusions make you fight windmills thinking they are giants.
In Landmark Education, the whole education is about inventing your Self and then bringing it to your life. Every course, every seminar is about that.
But most people are patient/impatient: wait for a long time to invent themselves, and then think it should happen right away because they spoke. They have their hand out… they want it to happen to them… no work.
Developing a capacity, even after I turn it on, is a long process. Not easy.
And it is quite doubtful that a person can actually speak a capacity into existence. You need to have impeccable integrity, so you can honor your word as your Self.
People who are willing to act consistent with spiritual capacities, values, turn on spiritual capacities for themselves, live them, practice them and that new living becomes a new evolutionary stable strategy, sustainable, the new reality. I have students like that.
One person I know who did this, and it is public knowledge what he did, Brendon Burchard, asked three deep questions of himself in a moment of awakening, and then continued to ask the same questions every day. Did I live? Did I love? Did I matter? But when it becomes just your “brand”, your slogan, the capacities turn off, and your vibration goes down with it.
You need to, authentically, examine your life for how you live. Every day. And every day the answer is “somewhat”… “to X degree”… there is growth built into the questions.
Yesterday I announced a new workshop for communication. It is called Face The Tiger… the courage workshop.
Facing the tiger needs the courage capacity to be opened, and then practices it into an ess… evolutionary stable strategy.
Most of you have enough tigers to confront on daily, but if you don’t have enough, or if you want to start out easy, you’ll start out and follow what Brendon Burchard did. It doesn’t take you to unlimited growth, but it starts the process, and it does require you to bring courage.
Without the practice the capacity will turn off.
Courage is ultimately the willingness to confront something with your eyes open.
Not yelling, not protesting, not fighting it, not resisting, not ignoring, not fretting, not sweet-talking, not positive thinking, not lying… but looking, getting deep, and seeing what there is to see.
That is what needs courage… the seeing. And staying aware, instead of wanting to look away, or wanting to lie, or wanting to die.
The workshop will be two sessions, and it is interactive in a webinar format.
I’ll start with turning on the capacity of courage. And turn it on again when in our interaction I see it missing again.
- Is it for you? I don’t know… If you are scared of it, even to think about it: the answer is yes. It is for you.
- If you think it is a waste of your time and money: yes, it’s for you.
- If you say: I’ve tried that and it didn’t work: then maybe it isn’t for you.
I will do the workshop even if only one person shows up. And record it. And then I’ll sell you the recording…
Get the recorded workshop. I will turn on Courage for you every day for 10 days… a $100 value, because of the personal attention.
