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One of the crucial steps in the 67 steps, is Step #26. It’s about having both belts and suspenders so you always have something to hold up your pants… your life… your health… And your relationships… your livelihood. That step is a step that has been paying me dividends for years now.
Having both a best and a suspender is a distinction…
It began when I first heard it. In 2016.
The 67 steps
The 67 steps is full of principles that can impregnate you, give you seeds that can germinate into something substantial. With you being fertile ground, with you nurturing it till it can grow on its own. It can become ‘mother’ of principles. And for most, it doesn’t…
Only if you listen to it (it is an audio program!) through a one-thing, instead of a collection of good ideas, will it make a difference.
I have had students who did it to increase their attention span. I have had students who wanted to learn business principles… but weren’t in business. By god, I even had a student whose report on each step was longer than the step itself.
Yet, none of those became home to any new ideas. The program didn’t change them, or their lives, or their outlook… They did it like they do everything: without an organizing principle.
In my humble opinion the best way to use the 67 steps is to have one thing… one purpose, and organizing principle to give it context.
If you are an integrated person (if you are not, ‘integrated‘ could be your one thing!) then the principle of ‘the rising tide lifts all boats‘ applies: your one thing makes all areas of your life rise together.
In my case, the one thing was independence. To reclaim my independence, reclaim my power over circumstances, even though circumstances were nasty at the time… won’t go into any detail.
And not surprisingly the circumstances haven’t changed. I have, I’ve changed.
I became a lot healthier, I became a lot happier, while I grew myself to meet life head-on. And while my goal isn’t reached yet (I am at 40% only), the quality of my life has risen beyond my expectations.
As you may be able to see, doing the 67 steps without having someone to talk it over with can be very treacherous. and I can guarantee it won’t produce the kinds of results you are capable of producing. This is why my 67 steps coaching is so essential… It can help you identify the one thing, if you are willing, and it can help you make every principle in the 67 steps lift all of your life, regardless what your one thing is.
I know many people who have listened to all 67 audios, and… nothing changed for them.
Because it is what you do, what you decide and do tiny step after tiny step in your life, that turns it around, not the audio. Not the content of of the audios either.
What you’ll do will depend on your ‘listening’. HOW you listen. What is the context inside which you listen. Your one thing or the lack of it.
Sidenote: listening is a distinction. It says: what is the filter, the content through which you listen. It is going to be part of my upcoming Communication Course…
The principle of belts and suspenders has been a revolutionary concept to me. It says: with services, resources essential to survival, don’t rely on one source only. Bank account, credit card account, spouse but no friends, one grocery store, etc.
Most nightmares are a result of violating this principle.
You may be locked into a relationship where you can be used, abused, taken advantage of… because without the relationship your pants fall… it is a belt, and you don’t also have a suspender.
For me the main thing was my grocery shopping and my back health. I needed to eat, and my back hurt in all sorts of horrible ways. So taking care of them was essential, you’ve got to eat, and you’ve got to be well, right?
At the time I was in pain and I didn’t have a car. I didn’t have the energy to take two buses to get to a grocery store and then climb the 150 steps to get home with the grocery. Same with the chiropractor. So I hired a woman with a car for $30 a week to take me shopping and to the chiropractor…
I was desperate to break that dependency. I wanted to be independent, or be ashamed of myself, be inauthentic in my teaching.
So, what did I do?
I used the tiny step methods, and I listened to a step in the 67 steps program, five-six times a week. The audios are average 45 minutes long.
I did it until the principles in the steps became adjusted instincts, instead of something I can talk about.
But the most important difference was in the area of independence.
Here is how it is today:
1. I don’t need a chiropractor any more. I’ve bought and am using a back stretcher, called True Back. And I use it diligently.
I have joined an exercise class, and have systematically strengthened myself, so I can walk.
- 2. Also I joined my local community center, that provides rides to grocery stores. first I reduced the frequency to once every two weeks. But it was still dependency, so I needed a suspender to that belt. I found a delivery service, instacart.com That and amazon.com have most of what I need… so I now have a suspender and a belt.
I am starting to work on other basic necessities that with a sudden loss I could lose my life or my livelihood. Not just my independence.
The context of belts and suspenders is gentle, and ‘non-emergency’. Not right/wrong based where ‘there is something wrong and it needs to be fixed’. Instead it is enriching. Freeing. It makes it easier to breathe, easier to sleep.
It is giving me a sense of ‘I am a match to life…’ and in some ways, I feel superior to life… although that is, obviously, just a sense, not the truth. No one is superior to life.
But feeling that I can do… anything… is the sweetest feeling I have ever experienced. Really.
Today I woke up with the question:
What would I do if I could not do this business any longer? How would I earn a living?
I have no answer… but it’s a great question. Hey, I need to develop a suspender in addition to my belt.
I have students who are reluctant to develop skills, because they don’t feel that it’s worth it.
But inside this context, belts and suspenders, developing skills, physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, is a no-brainer… And because I don’t have to, I choose to, it can be fun.
Obviously if you have lost your ability to play… them maybe that is the first one-thing that you need to rekindle. Play is the opposite of ‘my life depends on it’, or it is serious.
Without play you cannot grow, because every ‘failure’, every mistake will tell you to stop. And 91% of you are there… just look and you’ll see.
Even more important: it is not urgent. So you can enjoy every little, tiny, insignificant step towards it.
What that is what I like most about this approach is that it’s playful.
Play, playfulness is near impossible in your ‘normal’ scarcity based life.
I’d lived without playfulness for long long decades. I was dutiful, trudging through, getting things done, surviving life.
This has been pretty much the first time in my life where I feel that I am carving out a life for myself that is not survival based. And the belts and suspenders principle is doing it for me…
I get to see new ways, new and fresh areas where I can apply it… effortlessly, joyfully, playfully… Who would have thought that this is possible.
——-
OK, this was the original article edited a bit, but not much. I wrote this article first five years ago. I haven’t had to go to a chiropractor since. And I haven’t been to a grocery store since.
So far so good.
What I haven’t been able to do is teach people to have one thing in mind to organize their lives around.
The one thing operates as an organizing principle… eliminating chaos, stress, and confusion. And the pesky trying hard that is so harmful for your body, and your self-esteem.
So what is suitable to be a ‘one thing’?
The one thing needs to be something that every moment of the day you can ask yourself: is that one thing is guiding me right now? And it either does or it doesn’t. Not good, not bad.
The one thing, until you get good at it, will be something that you are bad at… until you get good at it.
It can be a principle, a distinction, a virtue. It is all inner.
I have had many guiding/organizing principles over the years. I learned this in Landmark Education’s evening seminars.
They said: don’t try to wedge the seminar into your already full life. Instead place your life inside the principle/distinction of the seminar.
Same applies to my programs, my courses, my coaching programs. Especially if you are one who is doing several of them at the same time.
If you don’t have an organizing principle then doing more than one thing in life will make your life fall apart… with lack of integration, like a crumbly biscuit… nothing holds it together.
I first heard this distinction in an Integrity Seminar… It was my tenth seminar… I remembered hearing it before… but hearing it and getting it are two different things.
But finally in 1992 I heard it and got it. It was the year when my father died. It was the year when my mother visited. And it was the year when I got deadly ill. Remind me to share about it…
But I suddenly had an organizing principle: integrity.
I put my life inside integrity. And boy that was like holding up a mirror for me to see my whole life in its gory glory… I hardly had any integrity: I was like a wild horse, chasing mirages.
But it didn’t change my intention… I stuck with it. Everything new you’ll be lousy in it. If you can’t fail, you can never succeed.
An evening seminar series is 3 months long. That was a long enough time for me to learn to see, learn to use the muscles that integrity takes.
It started to change my life. How? I slowly, gradually, became the captain of my ship, the captain of my life.
I stopped taking Landmark Education seminars a few years ago. But the habit of choosing an organizing principle for at least three months hasn’t stopped.
My current organizing principle is discipline. Discipline… as in choosing what I want instead of what I feel like.
I am as lousy at it as I was more than 30 years ago at integrity. But life is not a race… and slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.
I have three months to master it, and if it is not long enough, I’ll double it.
If you were a fly on my wall, you see as I stop and choose many times in a day… Choose what I choose. Sometimes I choose how I feel, and sometimes I choose to do instead what I want.
It is still chunky… giving me tension in the shoulders. Unfamiliar. An effort.
It is a skill. And it is a habit. And it is life-affirming. It puts me in the driver’s seat, not my feelings, my urges, my ever changing moods.
If you every wondered: how do you grow? How do you change your life? And you didn’t have an answer… Or if you thought that the way to change is to do something drastic, please remember the metaphor for your life: the huge ship that needs to be turned around in a tight bay.
The moves, the changes need to be tiny, or the rocks of the bay will break the ship: your life. Your relationships. Your ability to make a living, your health. Tiny tiny moves that imperceptible to the naked eye… but each makes a tiny change.
A hundred times a day, over 100 days… And in the end you notice that your life is turned around…
Whatever it is that you need to turn around can benefit from building a change this way. It’s a skill… You can pick anything, any organizing principle, and you’ll practice two skills: the skill of ‘trimtabbing’, i.e. the consistent tiny change in behavior, in attitude, in mindset… and the organizing principle, like integrity, excellence, discipline, no haste, no constant babbling, no constant busy mind, taking care of yourself, putting yourself first, whatever you need to learn.
It can be ‘don’t jump’. it can be ‘slow is smooth, smooth is fast’. Yes, It can be any virtue.
This is what Benjamin Franklin did, by the way. He rotated 13 virtues, he called necessary virtues. I am good at eight of those, and surprisingly having ‘discipline: choosing what you want instead of what you feel like’ will make me better, maybe even good at the missing five.
I prefer my way… because I find it hard to see how I could have as an organizing principle some of those virtues throughout the day… 24/7
Here are the 13 virtues Ben Franklin used to become as perfect a human as he could…
Temperance, Silence, Order, Resolution, Frugality, Industry, Sincerity, Justice, Moderation, Cleanliness, Tranquility, Chastity and Humility.
My intention being to acquire the habitude of all these virtues, I judg’d it would be well not to distract my attention by attempting the whole at once, but to fix it on one of them at a time; and, when I should be master of that, then to proceed to another, and so on, till I should have gone thro’ the thirteen; and, as the previous acquisition of some might facilitate the acquisition of certain others, I arrang’d them with that view, as they stand above.
To what degree did he succeed? I’ll ask Source through muscletesting: the answer is 30%.
So we are not going for the ideal of 100% either. My ‘discipline’ is at 30%… lagging behind some other important ‘virtues’… So I am committed to raise that without becoming a slave, without making myself wrong, without becoming a robot.
If you join the skill building challenge, you get daily feedback from me, so you can use that as an energy infusion… you’ll need it.
Human nature, increasingly so, is prone to distraction. Prone to want everything now. Prone to be completely undisciplined.
Having someone give you daily energy infusion by hearing your report and giving you adjustments when they are needed is what might be the most powerful trimtab… that will turn your life around… If you take my feedback to heart.
Start building the skill you needPS: One of the first things I am using discipline on is to eliminate stuff that has preservatives in it…
Like the English muffins I like to eat. So I am making my own ‘bread-like’ stuff, biscuits for some mornings, oatmeal, and sorghum porridge on others. It’s not as fast as just taking one muffin out of the bag and toast it… But if I am alive, I want to be healthy… Being sick is worse than being dead. I say. What do you say?
PPS: and to bring some fun and games, play… here are three pictures that made me laugh this morning.
