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How do you develop yourself to be able to move forward? To grow?
Many of my coaching students are at a crucial point in their lives where unless something happens, they probably won’t move forward.
Fear, unclarity, self-centeredness, belligerence…
The main attitude is different for each person. Not one person resembles another in what seems to block their path.
A perfect example of the Anna Karenina Principle: a deficiency in any one of a number of factors dooms an endeavor to failure. All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way
All people who move forward are alike. All stuck people are stuck in their own way.
One factor they all share: they have a mentor or a coach. The coach’s brilliance, creativity, insight can make a difference. What is clear is this: unless someone or something helps them through… they will stay on this side of the great divide.
Great responsibility, but I am up for it.
What is the capacity I need to be OK with this responsibility? It is self-trust. Self-trust says: I can deal with it however it goes. I am a match to the twists of life.
That is the capacity, self-trust, that I need to have and use to not throw up my hands, and whimper: I can’t do it… I don’t know what to do! I don’t know how!
But they, the participant, the client needs capacities too. I cannot do it for them.
Don’t be mislead, the biggest barrier to growth is lack of a capacity or two.
But as we have seen, capacities turn on ONLY when they are fully needed.
The oft used example is the bird that steps off the edge of the nest and first falls like a stone, but then finds its wings and pulls out of the fall…
The capacity to fly is there, in the DNA of the bird, dormant, until the bird is put in a situation where it is either fly or die.
So if you are hungry for more capacities, or even for one, you need to put yourself in the situation where without the capacity you fall and kill yourself. Crash and burn. Lose money. Get into big trouble. Or you get lost… go mad, become destitute.
You should KNOW you don’t have the capacity, because you have never used it. Never needed it. Because you have been living in a tiny box where you are safe. Your comfort zone.
Be like the blind person who knows they can’t see.
But I even heard of blind people who pushed, relentlessly to gain sight. Heard of paralyzed people who did the same, and walked again.
What did they have that you don’t?
They had a self. They had a clear sense that they have a say in the matter of their lives. That people are people, circumstances are circumstances, nature is nature, and they are themselves.
That they can do what they can do, (wiggle their toe, stare into darkness…) and by gosh they will do it, because if they don’t do it, the result they are going for will never happen.
Instead of waiting for life, god, other people, healers, doctors, coaches do it for them.
What AL Williams was trying to do in his famous speech is: He tried to encourage you to turn that self on.
‘All you can do is all you can do, and all you can do is enough!’
What he didn’t elaborate on is this: you don’t know where the boundary of what you can do is, until you push the envelope.
- You don’t know how much energy you have, until you collapse of fatigue for the last time… after collapsing and getting up again and again.
You don’t know how far you can go, until you went too far. Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go<. T. S. Eliot
One would suspect that what you need so you can do that, so you’ll do all you can do, so you go beyond, to meet the edge of your ability is courage.
But it would be a mistake. Courage is NOT a capacity. It is many capacities… but the one capacity that is at the root of what we observe and see as courage is self-trust… that makes one able to see themselves (self-image) handling anything that is thrown at them. Pain, humiliation, embarrassment, doing it over, making mistakes, taking wrong turns, hunger, fear, loneliness, and they can see themselves handling it.
Oh, I can be with that… and maybe I can come out of it too… says self-trust.
I have a fully functioning self-trust capacity. And I have even trained myself to make sure I see all the negative possible outcomes, and SEE that I can handle them.
My hunch is that the unwillingness to do mental thought experiments about all the bad stuff that can happen is at the root of people being stuck. A puny TLB… low tolerance to the unpleasant. The scary. The horrifying.
Being able and willing to imagine the frightening scenarios that can happen, and see themselves calm down, and collect themselves, and continue living… which is what means to ‘handle it‘.
- It is not promised that if you fall in a deep well, you can climb out. That is not handling it, that is climbing out.
- It is not promised that if your spouse leaves you, then you can bring them back, or find a new spouse right away.
No, that is not what handling it, aka self-trust means. That is positive thinking…
Self-trust means that you can come back to yourself, and be OK with whatever is happening, or in spite of it.
Coming back to yourself, being OK… means you return to a coherent state, where all your nerve endings fire in harmony, where you are inventive, intelligent, and calm.
It is not an accident that most of my energetic tools teach you, train you, help you to return to coherence.
No matter what takes you out, you can always return to coherence… The faster you do it the more willing you are to push your boundaries.
Self trust is extending this ability to actions you intend to take that can cause trouble, pain, failure, shame… potentially.
Obviously you have to weigh the potential benefits, you have to see that it’s worth to risk the disaster.
That the benefits of achieving what you want to achieve is bigger than the inconvenience of having to return to coherence if something goes wrong.
But the worst enemy is ‘positive thinking’ or rose colored glasses, where you consciously close your eyes to anything you don’t want… Anything you are not mentally prepared for will take you out.
Betrayal, pubic humiliation, shark attack, losing everything…
You need to be willing to play all these scenarios in your head and see that they are not the end of the world, if you are prepared for them.
You will never grow if you can only imagine yourself safe, and happy. So comfortable that even your shirt doesn’t get wrinkled.
And most of humanity can’t let go of positive thinking, of comfort… Can’t and won’t…
So what are you going to do when you notice that you haven’t been willing, haven’t been able to grow even though you said that wanted to? If you never wanted to, never intended to grow… this is not for you!
Your best course of action is to spend a lot of time imagining the worst case scenario, and learn to be with it, and return to coherence while you are seeing it…
You are training your self to do it… It’s a skill!
Your imagination will cause the same physiological and psychological reactions in your body… so you are training your self to return to coherence.
I have imagined worst case scenarios for years, and to one of them I have always closed my eyes in horror and said ‘no’. And often, I gave up my principles and integrity to avoid it.
Homelessness.
The disaster I wasn’t willing to face was becoming homeless. Then I decided to see it, and see it in all its gory glory and see that I am OK. I am still doing it often… it is hard, it takes me long to return to coherence still. But I took care of my health because being homeless and being sick are a bad combination, lol.
You’ll see that there is often an action that you can see, from the vantage point of a disaster, that you should invest in… For many of you, support, supportive relationships will be that. For others: having savings to fall back on. You’ll see what it is for you. Getting a mentor is also a great preparation.
Meet it head on… or avoid it
Depending on your soul correction, you will choose different avoidance tactics and strategies… But no matter what your soul correction, you need to activate the ability to return to coherence when you imagine the thing you are afraid to do… and the worst ways it can go wrong…
Then, your self-image will adjust itself to the self-image of a person who can see themselves doing it, no matter what the results.
And then you’ll do it. And people will say ‘how courageous!‘ but you’ll know. It had nothing to do with courage, and everything to do with developing the capacity to return to coherence fast.
This is the work. And you can do it.
Will you?
PS: My coaching program prepares you to use thought experiments, and see the actions that scare you. Without me pushing you. Because this coaching program coaches you while you are doing the 67 stepshttps://yourvib.me/67. The best idea I have EVER come up with. Why?
because only people who are in action can be coached. Otherwise it is just talking.
John, you are practicing positive thinking, not self-trust.
I’ve seen homeless guys pushing giant carts full of stuff and thought to myself, “That guy’s got more going on for himself than I do.” Will and power and drive and independence. (And freedom and fearlessness and self-determination to boot!)
I practice my self-trust every day when I get on the train. I tell myself that I will not be upset by people with their feet on the the seats, and that I will find the ideal seat for myself, even if I have to change cars.
Did I practice self-trust the other day when I went into a recording studio for the first time? Maybe, but it was at a level of beingness, I knew it was going to be fine.