In this article we’ll go deep into what’s going on, inside you, that fails you… We’ll look at different schools of thought to do that. Understanding the inner dynamic is the first step towards success.
That, and knowing that every number in your Starting Point Measurements can be changed… Nothing is fixed. Not even your DNA.
If you look at yourself and your behavior, and then compare it with what you say, what you’ve said, there is rarely any similarity between the person who spoke and the person who acts.
It’s quite confusing.
If the mindpower people were correct, if their model were accurate, your actions would come from your thoughts.
But they don’t…
Now, we actually don’t know why that is happening, all we can do is have working models that help us gain some control.
Because a happy person is someone whose words, actions, and thoughts/feelings are pointing in the same direction.
Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.
- If your words and actions don’t match, then you are a liar.
- If your words and thoughts/feelings don’t match they you are inauthentic. Or delusional.
- If your thoughts/feelings and actions don’t match, then you are slavish…
And those three facets rarely match, do they?
But what is going on?
The best model for “culprit” is blaming your mindset.
But mindset is hard to grasp for most people. It is hard to see yourself accurately… Everyone else sees your mindset, but it’s like the sign pinned on your back: everyone is in on the joke but yourself.
Here is an example that is quite complicated: One of my students says: I want you to teach me. Her actions are dutiful or ego based: I am the smarter one. Her thoughts: she is not liking me, I should quit.
She cannot see that she is inauthentic and slavish… while judgmental at the same time. She doesn’t see that she has an agenda to survive, again, a childhood wrong that happened to her.
A lot more examples are in the book Mindset by Carol Dweck, a book I started to read last night. It promises to be a useful and enjoyable book. Her humility is refreshing.
Every person is complicated. When you have three variables and each variable can have several variable, it is complicated. More complicated than high school math…
So, are there models that are easier to grasp?
Yes. Models can show parts of reality, where it is somewhat more simplistic and therefore easier to grasp dynamics.
But each dynamic, still, requires you to be able to grasp reality… as reality is.
If you are uneducated, and your brain isn’t used much, or used for some repetitive task you do well, you will have serious trouble tracking the models… but you can get better.
I am finding that I am getting better doing “brain teasers”, like learning a language on duolingo where whoever wrote the script has a mechanistic knowledge of English only…
I am getting better at adjusting myself to that mechanistic way, and I am also getting better at looking at my mistakes as learning. Not wrong… learning.
The brain is a lot like your body. You can train it, you can use it more fully, if it is willing. They call that brain plasticity, and that is the underlying magic that allows you to change, get smarter, get more observant, understand more, and be able to see more.
But just like with the body, you need to challenge the brain. And it can be uncomfortable, you may feel uncoordinated, clumsy, or dumb… and that is really good.
You can push through: where you are clumsy or dumb are the areas where your potential gain is the biggest.
Now, some of my students are dealing with an issue that goes beyond just having to get smarter: they have a problem making themselves act consistent with their words, or even thoughts.
I am very familiar with this phenomenon.
I notice that unless I have a firm word, my actions will be more often dictated by something I never agreed to, I don’t like, I am puzzled by.
I have a firm word to complete at least two series of assignments in duolingo every day. I am at 70 days, and haven’t missed a day.
On the other hand I have never committed a firm word to do marketing every day, or learn a new software, or get up at 5 am. And therefore some days I do and most days I don’t.
I’d like to do them. It would serve me well. But I don’t.
How I see it (this is a model, a different one!) is this:
The inner and outer aspects of you
I, you, have several components that act at the same time. The body, the Selfish Gene, the mind (the chattering uncoordinated noise machine), the ego or Pride, the Self (if you have one), the Soul that knows what you need to do to become the best version of you, your history, personal and ancestral, including inherited PTSD, the brain that is more like a tool than a component, and your word…
What you will do depends on the hierarchy you negotiate among these components.
- I obviously give high priority to my firm word… Not all speaking.
- I don’t place Pride, and the mind high… even though they “steal the show” occasionally, but not for a long time, thank god.
- I listen to my body and honor its needs…
The people who are having trouble harmonizing the actions, the thoughts and the speaking have a different priority, most likely they never actually decided what to honor highest.
Unless you honor word as the highest, you are likely wasting a lot of your life honoring the aspects of you that are not helpful.
No one is born with the ability to honor their word as themselves. It needs to be learned, it needs to be trusted, it needs to be surrendered to.
Selfhood depends on your ability to honor your word as your Self.
Not your test results, not your IQ, not your looks, not your success rate, not your weight, not your Facebook friends comments on how pretty you are, not your money, not your social status, not your skills, not your religion… All of those are external to you. Circumstance.
You can have the best in all those externals and still be mighty unhappy. Miserable, Wretched.
Unbelievable, isn’t it?
Because if you haven’t decided who you are going to be, there is no chance for the three elements, speaking, actions, and thoughts, to be in harmony.
It will be a hodge podge, accidental, random, capricious, and there is no chance for happiness in that. Not a whit.
Having a strong relationship with your word is not a matter of education. In fact education, comfort, money, work against it.
Having a Self is so rare that most of the books are written about people who do.
I watched Happy Feet yesterday about the penguin who saved the penguins of Antarctica. Cried. What made me cry is that he knew who he was, even when no one else did. And acted consistent with that Self.
I watched part of the first episode of “Anne of Green Gables”. She knows who she is… and causes the people around her to start knowing who they are… (I don’t know if it is going to be good or not…)
My favorite Coen Brothers movie is True Grit… Why? Because the girl in it knows who she is… 1
Knowing your Word doesn’t guarantee happiness unless all your feelings, thoughts, and actions align with it.
And of course there is the problem.
So what could help you with that “alignment?”
Kabbalah calls this force The Opponent. It was mistranslated to Satan in Christianity.
The Opponent is useful in Kabbalah’s model. There is the positive energy of the word, the negative energy of the Opponent, and then there is you… You are there to provide the resistance so Light can be created.
In electricity the electrons go from the positive pole to the negative pole.
If there is little or no resistance, then no light is generated.
The bigger the resistance the more light is created.
When you wish life to go your way, to be smooth, for me to be nice, loving, etc. you are wishing for a dead life without any light.
A life worth living is a life inside which you generate light. Ongoingly.
That light is what we call aliveness, happiness, joy, vibration.
The Opponent won’t quit, it is there by design. The Original Design.
You choose the right words, the right actions, the right thoughts for what you want to accomplish… in spite of all the pull of instant gratification, or ego, or laziness, or difficulty.
And you generate light.
Or you don’t choose: you let those aspects of you run your life, no resistance, no light.
I love this model, the Kabbalah model: it makes it so easy to see that my job is to resist the easy, the automatic, the downhill, and choose the honorable, the high vibration action.
And mostly I do… but not always.
The more I honor my word, the closer relationship I have with it, the more I create structures inside which I can honor my word.
Like saying: I will do at least 10 minutes of marketing every day, and I won’t go to bed unless I did it. Marketing in my business, is getting the word out wider… that is what I call marketing. And email, a post on another site, a video on another site… all qualify.
OK. I said it. You can count on me to do it. You can also feel sure that I will not want to do it. That I will hate it. Like I hate duolingo.
But every time I do it, which is every day, I’ll generate light.
Doing the things you like to do, doing the things that are easy don’t generate light.
Why? There is no resistor… no filament to resist in the light bulb.
- The other interesting thing about that movie, True Grit is how the Marshall, a true slacker, comes to his real Self when what it is about is Life. When the girl gets bitten by a snake… he rides all night to save her life. I am still weeping when I remember, which is often.
That character, the Marshall’s, always reminds me to never give up on people. Never.
