Your being is a paradigm and things show up consistent with your beingness, aka who you are being.
Your being is either a default being or something invented.
A being is always the result of some speaking, inside or outside.
I speak often about turning points in my life. Turning points are points in time where who you are changes… 1
One of them turning points, suddenly I remember, was in 1975. I just left a job where I was unhappy. Nothing new about that: I was happy only a few of the 17 years while I worked as an architect.
I made a decision based on a temporary emotion early that year, and went to a small firm with a good looking boss. I slept with him, and began a descent to a bad place. Really bad…
My descent was predicted by the boy friend whom I left for this guy… He called the predictable a descent to the gutter.
I remember saying in my head: “you are wrong…” but fearing it he may be right at the same time.
Whatever you are afraid of is stronger in terms of giving you a direction. So for many years I marched towards the gutter. Many years. 2
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You see that it has taken me this long, 40+ years, to diagnose what made me descend to hell…
I can see now that the most important thing in getting from here to there is diagnosis.
Diagnosing your being… diagnosing what gives your being in the present… In common parlance why you do the things you do.
Unless you are accurate in diagnosing where you are, who you are being, what you fear, you cannot design a path that reliably takes you where you want to be.
Diagnosing accurately is very hard. And diagnosing needs to happen with some regularity.
Michael Jordan was the champion of diagnosing. He watched the videos of his games right after the game, and diagnosed the points where his being and therefore his actions weren’t effective. And then: he changed his being and changed his actions.
He did that with a real regularity…
I realized today that that is what I have been doing. Diagnosing and making changes.
- In the areas of life where I have someone holding the dirt while I am digging for gold, I am moving. This means: I am doing this diagnosing in a conversation.
- In the areas of life where I have no one to hold the dirt… I am stagnating, or maybe even making wrong turns.
Getting someone to hold the dirt while you are digging is near impossible. People want to fix you, or people want to have the conversation about themselves.
The most important sentence in the book the Hungarian engineer, Margoczi wrote, Feelings, is about love.
It says, and I’ll paraphrase:
Love is when you want for the other what makes them happy… even if that excludes you.
In this article I’ll map it on coaching and mentoring only… I don’t want to be distracted. But just notice that often what you want in life is not what the other wants you to want… and they deny it to you… People’s love is about getting what they want… and they call it love.
This is why I say “there is no such thing as love”… and I’ll show it in the area of coaching, teaching, mentoring.
People who are professional coaches, teachers, mentors, parents, are like a lover who wants what YOU want.
They want to give you what they want to give you, even if it doesn’t help you, or even if it destroys you.
Fact.
Stop deluding yourself.
You want what you want and you hope that someone will give it to you. But only you can give it to yourself. The best someone can do is allow you. Support you. Hold the dirt for you.
I have had two coaches in my life who were willing to have a business relationship with me on my terms.
What I want is a coach or a mentor who will spend 90-99 percent of our time together identifying where I am at, where my issues are coming from, what is blocking my path.
I want them to help me see the situation accurately… I say that is their job.
And then use 1-10 percent of the call to help me look at solutions.
It is not that I lack humility: it is that THEY lack humility.
Each and every mentor, teacher, guru, goes into business wanting to push whatever they want to push… their own agenda. They are not interested in what you want, they are interested only to the degree that it helps them push their solution on you.
But teach a man to fish and you provide them for a lifetime… there seems to be no business in that.
Now, let me look at my clients, my students:
The ones that advance are not looking for me to do their work, they are not looking for answers, or not 100%. They are more interested in doing their own work, and me helping them with clarity.
They are also not looking for me to praise them, to compliment them, or agree with them.
They want to find out, and fast, what is wrong with their thinking about the situation… To gain clarity.
I have noticed that I can predict the quality of the communication by its length.
The longer a call the less open the person is for correction, for feedback, for an interaction. What they want is praise, or agreement.
It is very important to decide what you want from a coach or a teacher.
If what you want from them doesn’t get you closer to what you have the coaching about… then you picked the wrong coach.
Coddling is not the job of a teacher. Being a cheerleader for you is not the job of a teacher. Hire someone for that if that is what you want.
I don’t mind. It’s OK. I want you to have what you want.
But if you continue coaching with me, then consider that I want for you what you said you wanted for yourself. That was a precondition for our coaching relationship: that I can commit to what you want for yourself.
If you lied to me, or if you have changed your mind about what you want, that it’s time to quit: I will just rub you the wrong way.
You have another opportunity today to buy today’s Sunday Rant recording.
There is also a subscription where you save 25% and get the education of a lifetime.
If you are here for your education… that is.
One of the things you get from the calls that you don’t get from my articles, is hearing me. Hearing me how I do things, who I am as I am doing them. So you have a chance to model after me, if you see that being the way I am, doing the way I do, would be useful for you.
I am not a good model for everyone…
Get behind the scenes with the Sunday calls- For example, I am reading a book by Kamal Ravikant whom I reviewed a few months ago. The book, Rebirth: A Fable of Love, Forgiveness, and Following Your Heart is a pilgrimage he took that gave him different ways to be… gave him different ways to at least try on and feel if it fits… all so he can transform his life. The pilgrimage was a possible turning point for him. Do turning points always work? Yes and no… often they are just experiences, only for you soon to return to your default way of being, like Kamal Ravikant did.
Of course the dumb, the gullible, and the pretentious love and celebrate him as a guru… and maybe he is… like all the other Indian gurus, full of crapola.
The idea of reinventing yourself is actually quite popular… but without having a clue about beingness… it is b.s. And without knowing the ‘rules of invented ways , the grammar, the format, it is all just affirmations at best.
Affirmations are worded as a lie… so the mind rejects them.
The moment you invent a being for yourself, the clock starts ticking. Being is always now. You can’t become some being someday… But most of us either don’t know that, or consider ourselves the exception… so you invent some being that you know nothing about… And of course it doesn’t work… It can’t work… It is now cheap words, nothing more.
I have only Landmark Education to bring as an example: all their education is about beingness, none of their results are in the domain of beingness… alas.
- It takes some practice to dig deep enough to find the beingness that gives you your actions.
Here is an example: This student has bought the Water Energizer audio. It seems like a lot of work for mighty little… they can’t feel the effects of the coherence. You can’t feel when you live in your head… you can’t feel it when you are smarter, you can’t feel it when you are dumber, and you manage not peeing too much by not drinking… if possible you don’t want to drink any liquid at all.
To take filtered water from its normal state, from its normal vibration to the magical 653 where it becomes coherent, it takes using the Energizer Audio on the water for 6-7 days.
This same student reads about the small bottles acting as backup power…
They are overjoyed that they can rid themselves of the work of energizing the water. They say: so I only HAVE TO use the audios once a month, and the rest of the time…..
What is the beingness that gives their actions? Economical? Lazy? Untrusting? Dutiful? Stingy? “It’s not worth it?”, “Too much ado about nothing?”, “I have to win every battle!”
Please comment below. I am really curious if you can go deep enough from this little information. OK? Thank you.
hm, interesting.
My feeling of the student above is that they are afraid of actually having to change anything and simply giving empty talk.. they scramble it in order to not have to succeed. So I guess also wanting to look good..?
INTERESTING, TRISH. very interesting.
A guess on the beingness of the above action …
Greed………