This is a very important article. If you just read one article, this is it. Without getting this, what I am showing here, you can’t and won’t be able to fulfill your destiny as a human.
To belong to the cool guys, you needed to, at least, pretend, that work, school work, reading, learning, achieving are not important to you.
It is pretending that you don’t care.
The cool guys are losers. In life. But they look good.
Being eager in response to an inner or outer need, is considered uncool.
I guess looking and acting cool ‘proves’ that you are bigger than life… that life cowers to you.
But the whole cool thing, and now your whole life is a game of pretense.
You can be, in reality, at best, a match to life when life is kind. And you can be dead meat, when life decides to do something: flood, earth quake, or ice age.
Evolution depends on the few eager beavers, whose motivation is from the inside. Who are not haphazard, who are thoughtful and organized, who are not jumpy but deliberate.
Many ‘cool guys’, your gurus, who act passionate on stage to whip you into some frenzy so you buy their stuff, the cool guys pretend to be cool while, my guess, they are not very cool about duping you, climbing to the top over your dead bodies.
All desires are unpleasant feelings needing you to fulfill them to go away
Thinking eager thoughts is not the same as being eager, because thinking of doing things is not the same as doing things.
Because eagerness comes from an inner desire (remember, desires are painful) that is as persistent as hunger, or the desire for sex, and can only be satisfied, temporarily, by fulfilling what the eagerness wants: doing something worthwhile.
Awakening the eager, the uncool part of you is one of the most important things you can do for yourself. Allowing that painful desire to be felt.
Awakening, I said, because it is innate. It has been suppressed. Mostly to look cool, and mostly to avoid looking bad. And often because your unwillingness to feel any inner pressure, anything unpleasant.
When it was suppressed? It is personal.
Mine, my eagerness, was not suppressed.
Or better said: I was never interested enough in the public opinion to want to fit in, to be considered cool, so I didn’t suppress my eagerness. F… them and their opinion! A typical ‘Forget Thyself’ response… by the way. That is my soul correction.
And I was never more afraid of doing the wrong thing than eager to do the thing. I allowed my eagerness free range, except when I was in a so-called romantic relationship. Then I played dead. Luckily that wasn’t often and long enough. I hated being dead.
When I look back at my life, I can see that I did risky and risque things. I have a lot of experiences, this side of the tracks, the other side, and on the tracks. The whole range.
Public opinion leaning towards cool people will, probably, never change.
Hillary is uncool. Trump, I guess, is cool.
I am not cool.
And I invite you to at least try it on: you are not totally cool… you have inner desires that are suppressed, barely managed away, and the innate human need to be someone, to reach up and high, is not acted upon, and therefore it is killing you. But you are here…
I am sure there are some people here, reading this, who are sneering and are only here to see you perish… but damn the crocodiles!
The best results I see with those students who found the core human desire and are attempting to make it make them do something.
It is my job to work with you to find the socially acceptable words, so you can have your cake and eat it too. So you can be both cool and eager.
What? Yes.
Meeting others’ expectation is a core need
Meeting others’ expectation is a core need, and you need to satisfy it. And at the same time you need to satisfy the need to be all you can be. The two work at cross purposes, because society, the other, basically wants to keep you down, wants to keep you in the chicken coop. (The chicken coop expression comes from The White Tiger, one of the best books of the past 20 or so years, and is definitely worth your read. It’s the story of this ‘anti-chicken-coop’ desire gaining ground, going full strength and removing our hero from the predicament of a life not worth living. If he can do it in India, you can do it anywhere. The ebook is on the subscribers only site…)
The reason you need to work on wording your core need, because you want to sell them to your family, friends, etc. It is a lot like bringing a girl home: if you want the family to accept your choice in bride, you need to dress her appropriately, and you need to teach her how to speak or the family will kill the marriage before it happens.
You probably married a person who would not be interested in you suddenly being this person who wants to do big things. They want you to stay the same, the guy they married.
Sometimes the ‘context’, the words you and I dream up make them want to join you in a crusade. If the ‘context’ talks to them, they will, at least, allow you to do it.
My mother wasn’t on the side of my father growing and becoming a larger than life figure.
She did everything she could to keep him down. But my father was clever: he got up earlier than everyone, shined everyone’s shoes, made breakfast for everyone, and somehow he bought himself the freedom to be big in the world, as long as he was small at home.
He developed the capacity to hear nothing while he was writing his books and dissertations. You could yell his name, he would not respond.
The need to be someone worked on suppressing the senses, so he could become someone, even in an environment not supportive of that.
In the 67 step coaching you’ll become clear if you have the courage to release the suppressed need, or if you are just going to complain that you can’t.
I have an example, slightly crude.
If you hold your urine long enough, it is hard to release the muscles, the valves to allow the urine to flow. Especially when someone is watching. But it is possible. There may even be pain… but release you can, and if you want to grow, release you must.
The need to grow, the need to be someone is as core a need as the need to pee, or the need to eat.
Painful until released. And then re-generates itself… so it needs to be released, and fulfilled.
A life guided and energized by this need is a life that is joyful. The moment after the release is heavenly.
Just observe the sighs of joy in public bathrooms… lol.
Now, some people can’t find their core motivation. Motivation is another word for need.
My hunch is that you can appease the need by releasing it in another way: dripping it away.
People who like to play computer games may do that. People who like to win arguments do that. People who masturbate do that.
All leave you with a reduction of internal pressure, while the release didn’t accomplish anything close to what it was designed to do.
The same people, I think, do the same thing in the areas of thirst or hunger: sip water all day long, so they don’t have to get thirsty, nibble on snacks all day long, so they don’t have to get hungry. Drink lots of coffee. (I often hear Tai being one of those… he drinks when it gets uncomfortable… this is why his vibration is stuck at 170.)
So what do you need to do if you find that your inner fire is dampened all the time? Dampened by you, of course…
You need to, gradually, learn to feel the tension, the uncomfortable need of sex, hunger, thirst, and the need to be someone.
It IS uncomfortable, no doubt about it.
But only when the need is allowed to get strong enough can it be channeled into useful places.
And then start to build structures, systems, rituals, processes to keep the energy channeled into the useful places.
Because otherwise it is left to your memory, or awareness, or chance.
- If I didn’t have all my energy audios on 24/7, then it would be left to how I feel, whether I have them on or not. Bad idea.
- If I didn’t set up my life such that when I don’t write an article, or don’t answer your 67-step coaching post within a few hours: I get email asking if I am OK. Worried about me.
- If I didn’t set up my life that I only buy what I can eat: I would still be sick and dying.
The few things that still rely on my memory: remembering to do them, are in shambles… Like this morning I noticed that I forgot to turn on the faucet to fill my water container, so I am going to run out of drinking water today.
- I have a note that ‘disappeared’…
- I have the garbage still in the house
- I still haven’t started to do the exercises I’d like to do to release my hip that get stuck from sitting all the time.
And I haven’t even started the process of lightning my load, throwing things away, so I can move.
You see, without systems that can’t fail, you are still stuck…
Let me summarize:
- Words don’t do anything for you, but can do wonders for enrolling others to allow you to become someone.
- What moves you up and forward is inner needs that move you through uncomfortable feelings.
If you release the discomfort of those feelings little by little, you won’t amount to anything. Guaranteed. Drugs, alcohol, can be effective there, just like the ones I mentioned above: nibbling, sipping, computer games, arguments, and masturbation. - If you want to become who you can be you need to nurture the uncomfortable feeling.The more you can take the further you can go.
The four soul corrections, Finish what you start, Sharing the Light, Silent Partner, and Removing Hatred, I called stingy in a previous post, have the least tolerance for unpleasant feelings. It seems that stinginess has something in common with dampening your fire… I don’t understand why and how… but it is not an accident that these are the same soul corrections, the same people.
Stingy, in my world, is the opposite of giving yourself fully. Being available. Fully. For the discomfort, for the pain, for the fear. So you can become all you can become.
Without being called an eager beaver
PS: Eager Beavers are a problem! For other people…
How to Deal with Eager Beavers
5 Instant Solutions to Common Problems
by Claudia Pesce
Independent, autonomous learners are a sight to behold. They show up for their first day of class armed with notebooks, pens, pencils and highlighters in an assortment of colors, as well as the iron will to learn.
They supply answers without being prompted. They complete all of their tasks and homework (and even ask for more!), and they dazzle you with a list of books they’ve read or movies they’ve watched in English…
But we all know that not all students are like that. There are some, by contrast, who must be told exactly what to do – all the time. What happens when we have autonomous and dependent learners in the same classroom? This poses a series of challenges:
How To Deal with Autonomous & Dependent Learners: Problems and Solutions
1 Problem: The eager beaver reads ahead and completes exercises before class
There are students who are so keen on learning that they’ll come to class having read the coursebook and underlined all of the new words (which they have carefully looked up in the dictionary). Some even go as far as completing the exercises and answering the questions!
SOLUTION: While it’s great for students to want to come to class prepared, they should understand that there are things you must do together – in class and as a group. Tell them that you understand that they mean well, and that it’s great that they are so motivated! But if they want something to do at home, you can give them similar exercises or suggest other books/materials they can work with in their free time. If they insist on ‘knowing’ the answers before class, make sure they understand this gives them an unfair advantage over those who don’t prepare.
2 Problem: The eager beaver progresses faster
This is a very common problem to encounter. An autonomous learner is more naturally motivated, does extra work, pays closer attention and will soon enough leave their classmates behind. On the other hand, the dependent learner probably already feels insecure, and the feeling of lagging behind will only make them less motivated. In time, the gap will be even wider.
SOLUTION: The ideal situation would be to detect those students with a natural penchant for language learning and place them in a higher level. If this is not possible, give the fast learner extra work that is suitable to their level, but not specifically related to the class curriculum, perhaps something connected to a hobby they enjoy or books they may be interested in. The dependent learner on the other hand must be engaged and motivated by all means possible. You’ll find great ways to motivate teens, for example, in this article.
3 Problem: The eager beaver engages in bad study habits
Some students use techniques/strategies that, while not altogether bad, are not precisely what you try to promote in class. A good example is when students read a text, underline each new word they come across, look it up in a bilingual dictionary and write down the translation for the word in their own native language. As most ESL teachers encourage students to think in English, bringing long lists of words they have already translated is counterproductive to this effort.
SOLUTION: Teach both autonomous and dependent learners different types of reading techniques and encourage them to use them at home. These techniques include scanning a text for answers, skimming to get the general idea, among others. Train them to focus on figuring out the meaning of the word from the context, but if they feel the need to look something up, encourage the use of an English dictionary.
4 Problem: The eager beaver brings up topics that are irrelevant to the class
Autonomous learners often ask questions about vocabulary or expressions they have come across in TV shows, movies or the Internet. This in itself poses a series of problems. Maybe not all students will be interested in the topic, TV show or subject matter – it may be highly specialized, scientific in nature, or quite simply, completely irrelevant to what you have been doing in class.
SOLUTION: Make sure students understand that you are willing to answer their questions and help them understand something, but there has to be a time and place for consultations that have nothing to do with class. You may set aside a specific moment for these questions, either before or after class, or give them your email. But do not stray too far from your lesson plan to discuss an irrelevant topic, as it may only alienate unmotivated students further.
5 Problem: All of the above involves lots of extra work for the ESL teacher
Finding extra material for either the eager beavers or dependent learners is an added burden to the ESL teachers who have enough on their plate. Most of us have our course planned with an established curriculum and do not anticipate these challenges.
SOLUTION: As in most cases, the best solution is to share the burden. Talk to other ESL teachers, particularly those who teach the same levels, and put together a list of recommended readings, extra-curricular study materials and books you may all suggest students buy for additional practice. This way, when you come across a student who wants or needs the extra work, all you have to do is consult your list and make the necessary recommendations.
