I don’t want to change you into my vision of you. Rather, I want to motivate you into becoming the person you are capable of becoming.
– Life Mapping (Bill Cohen)
Display and existence. These are two Landmark Education distinctions.
As I am looking at my students, the biggest missing is not intelligence, not diligence, it is these two distinctions.
I am still doing the preparation series for the mapping your life, or lifemapping workshop: I want you to come and do the work, instead of listening to me doing teaching.
Every learning is 5% input, and 95% you doing what you need to do, practicing it, using it, putting it into action.
So this is what these distinction and the article about: the 95%.
Both distinctions, display and existence, are a way to counter your narrow cone of vision.
The lack of the capacity to see the big picture. And keep it in front of you.
OK, here you go:
Display
Display is a visual stand-in for your life. A lot like the skeleton hanging in the doctor’s office… you see the connections, clearly.
On a display you can see the pieces, all together, that pieces you normally neglect, and you are awakened to them usually only when the plate stops spinning, drops and breaks. The noise or the breaking plate is what wakes you up. Late.
Remember: life is like plate-spinning: each area needs energy injection or the whole life is in shambles.
Life is not linear… it is in space and in time. Your linear mind cannot fathom it and cannot keep track of it.
To counter the linear mind, you need a display of it all. In one picture, one glance.
If it were practical, you could be putting the name of the area, or task, or promise you made, on a plate… But it is not very practical.
A good display for your life can be as simple as a map with sticky notes on it.
Main areas, each with
- projects
- context
- commitments
- promises
- people who need to be energized in the area
The four main areas, for most, are wealth, health, love, and happiness… the four pillars of the good life.
Happiness is where growth, spiritual, emotional, happens. It is the root where you create of all the “how” you need in all four areas.
It is a good idea to depict happiness as the trunk or root system of your life-tree, with the three branches of the tree grow out of the tree trunk.
Why? Because you could be very active in wealth, health, and love… for all the wrong reason, with all the wrong “how”. The display reminds you that the how is more important than the what.
Because everyone’s “out of sight/out of mind” having and displaying the whole picture of the whole life is the most important thing you can do for yourself.
Life is compartmentalized without a display, and the plates start falling.
The attention is grabbed by something singular: like a law suit, like the illness of a relative, like a deadline at work, anything dramatic will do that.
- I know people who get all hijacked by election results, by anger, by hurt, by some drama.
- I know people who focus on the daily small tasks and totally forget that life is not about that.
And I know that “the song will remain in you” unless you start having a display of all your life… including getting that song out.
Many pieces. They need to be moved or they do nothing for you.
Moving the pieces is what we call “injecting energy” into them.
Werner who I consider my mentor had his plates on tiny pieces of paper. I have them on tiny pieces of paper on my desk. They have one or two-word reminders of ideas, projects, directions, that unless I see them regularly will get lost.
As I am writing this, I just looked at one. It says “Incompatible wishes”.
What you want that makes it impossible for you to effectively want and work on something else…
You want to remain an excitement junky, a “woohoo, another silver bullet… let me try that” versus all the plates that are barely spinning and dropping all over the place.
And that leads me to the next distinction:
Existence
Existence seems to say the same thing as display, but that is just a seeming.
Existence is very different.
Existence is not a surface thing. Existence of what? you would be intelligent to ask.
Existence of context. Existence of the how. Existence of the why.
It is relatively easy to remember the what. And it is even easier to see a long list of plates to spin, and forget why you wanted to spin them.
The why, the context…
So the plate-spinning becomes drudgery.
The tendency for things that were exciting, and inspiring to become drudgery is amazing.
Marriage. Going to a party. Children. Cooking. The new health regimen you paid me to set up.
Everything.
Your eyes light up because you suddenly saw what you can do to have what you want…
A few minutes later the light is gone… and it is incomprehensible drudgery.
Buyer’s remorse is a lot like that!
In Landmark Education it is said: “the shelf-life of a possibility”…
The amount of time it takes for a possibility to turn into pumpkin…
One of the main reasons I recommend against texting, checking your email, checking facebook, because shelf-life with your how is greatly reduced by new and more interesting, more inspiring input.
I have watched seminar participants sit through three days of incredibly inspiring seminars… and saw them do not a thing that Would come from the seminar.
I have watched successful participants of the same seminar get up in the middle of a session and go to their hotel room, and whip up a whole business from the think they just heard.
This moment’s inspiration de-thrones the inspiration of the previous moment.
Unless one inspiration you can act on stays alive, stays in existence, in front of you, you will live a life of quiet desperation, going from inspiration to inspiration, with no result.
Existence is protecting your “light in your eyes” from something that can de-throne them.
Other people consider it their job to kill it. Especially people close to you.
Or they will pretend that they are on your side, and now demand that you do what you said you’d do: i.e. they turn that shiny possibility into an obligation.
Often you do that for yourself… depending on your soul correction. And then you’ll resent it. And your life is not worth a damn as a result.
The four most difficult soul corrections are “champions” in that.
You need to know yourself.
This is the most important skill that separates the underachiever and the successful person. How long they can keep that shiny eyes in existence.
This is why holidays, trips, or family get-togethers take the wind out of your sail.
Because in those extended stays with people who are not connected in any way, who are not interested in any way, who don’t care about your dream life… kills the light in your eyes.
Christians go to church once a week, and they think that faith can be kept in existence with that tiny energy injection? Hell no.
Energy injection needs to be frequent, and artful.
I know people who can’t keep anything inspiring in existence.
And I know people who can.
I am good at it, personally, and I can maintain (keep my “who” and “why” in existence) with just one 90-minute conversation on Sundays.
I have found a person who can hear what I say, without adding their emotions, their attitude to it… so I get it back, as an echo (energetic echo) back, so I can hear if it is still shiny, or have faded.
When it’s faded, which is nearly every Sunday, I speak and speak and speak… until I have the shiny eyes.
I inject energy into it.
It energizes the whole tree: because what I inject energy into is the context of my whole life. All of it.
Health, wealth, love and happiness… all areas of life.
Energized in one conversation on Sunday… so my already established actions are done in the empowering context. So it repeats the “who I am” in every single area of my life, in every project, every activity.
Who I am is the prototype of the expanding human being…
So when the blizzard stops everyone else, I still walk down to the Community Center to my yoga class, even though chances that it was canceled are high… and lo and behold, even schools are canceled.
Then I walk back to the hill, unfrazzled, unphased, because my happiness is not in some circumstance, not in the hand of other people, or the weather.
I did what I said I would do: go to class, rain or shine. Why? Because if I want to live a long life and be productive and happy, I need to be fit. Class or no class. It was fun. Serious fun. The only person I encountered on the whole “trip” is the snowplow driver… We waved. The unstoppables… lol.
So this leads me to the third distinction:
Integrity.
One of the most important qualification of integrity is this: you need to do what you do in an empowering context.
You may look at your life and see that nearly none of it is done in an empowering context.
What is an empowering context?
If you can’t or won’t turn to what you are doing fully, then the context must be NOT empowering. Work. Talking to people. Your diet. Half of you wants to be somewhere else doing something else.
Although you don’t actually KNOW the context, or SEE the context, you can tell if it is empowering or not by this simple criteria: are you fully engaged in what you are doing? No? The context that is decisive is not empowering.
And here is the most important thing you want to know about doing thins in a not-empowering context: how you do anything is how you do everything.
That how, that context, now carries over to everything in your life.
Even sex. Even fun. Everything.
The bug is planted, and now you can’t enjoy even the thing your mind was suggesting Would be more important.
Now joy has gone out of your life.
You didn’t expect this, did you?
You bring an attitude to the weather, and your sex life suffers.
You bring an attitude to writing your dissertation and your enjoyment of TV shows suffers.
Makes no sense, does it?
The mind denies it. But reality, how you really feel, just observe it, says: oh yeah… I can see that.
The mind justifies. But the mind is not your friend. The mind is even worse than your nay-sayers, your room mates, your colleagues.
The mind insists on everything being separate.
The two things are not connected, even though you perform them both.
The mind is the enemy. Stop listening to it.
It will trash any possibility, any dream, any inspiration.
So don’t put your possibility, your dream, your inspiration in your mind.
Mind is just a small part of the brain…
When possibility, dreams, inspirations are on a display, in a particular way depicted that they keep the possibility in existence, then you can start hoping, reasonably hoping that you can build a life you love.
And that is what you wanted… isn’t it?
If you are in the 67 step coaching, or the Second Phase Activators coaching, the lifemapping workshop is discounted and mandatory.
And for those not in those programs… it won’t be expensive in terms of money. But you can see that you’ll need to give up a lot of what you are doing now…
And no, the workshop is not scheduled yet. And no, I won’t accept early registration. But you can send me an email if you see that you NEED it.
