Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Every learning is becoming. Every action that is aimed at learning but doesn’t lead to becoming… is not learning, it is just a pretense. Treading water. The drift.
But becoming is not easy, and it takes longer than you would expect. OK, longer than I expect. Longer than I have been expecting 🙁
Why? because some of the learning requires you to be right there, ready for that particular learning. You first need to become ready.
One of these learning/becoming steps, (inside my 67 steps coaching program) is mentoring.
Mentoring means spending time learning from people who are 20-30 years ahead of you in your chosen area of becoming.
Why becoming? In the ‘how you do anything is how you do everything’, the how refers to your consciousness.
Unless your consciousness changes, your results won’t change.
Here are some current hows:
- meek,
- inconsistent,
- powerless,
- pretentious,
- forceful,
- hurried,
- thoughtless,
- not complete,
- not thorough,
- ungenerous,
- stingy,
- etc.
You see that doing things with the same consciousness will not produce the kinds of results you want… I hope you see that.
Werner points out in one of his videos that his attitude in ANY conversation is, that he already knows. That is the opposite of humility and teachability.
If you intend to be mentored, if you intend to BECOME someone other than who you are now… with your dominant ‘how’… you need to bring something to mentoring that is new to you.
Humility.
The way to be with mentors is based on humility. Unless you are humble, you’ll pick and choose what you accept and what you reject, what you’ll take and what you will not.
I can track that on my clients with regards to what I say. I can track that on what they see and consider worthy of mentioning in the 67 steps. NOT MUCH!
It’s like swimming against a strong current… swimming upstream
Your results will predictably be between zero and a little bit. But the whole power of the mentoring process will be wasted on you.
Until you become humble, until you become like a sponge, until you listen closely and then go and implement what you heard, you are not in mentorship… And honestly, no mentor would want to spend time with you.
Now, becoming humble is difficult. Becoming humble feels counter-intuitive. Becoming humble feels dangerous.
And unless you are able to do dangerous things, you won’t do it.
What you feel is mis-guiding you 90% of the time. Most of what’s intuitive will actually work against your best interest because what you feel comes from the mind.
People who are willing to risk to actually become humble are happier for it. Respected for it.
This whole thinking is coming from my own experience.
You see, there are levels to everything. And even though I have been reading 2-3-4 books a week, cover to cover, not like Tai, even though I don’t argue with the books, I haven’t much had the experience of being with the 33% above me while reading.
I am talking about Tai’s principle of spending 33% of your time with people who are 20-30 years ahead of you.
Today I spent a lot of time with Werner Erhard. Not personally, mind you. Through audios and videos. But regardless I’ve come away with something I hadn’t known: how you know you are with someone 20-30 years ahead of you is that you can hardly follow them… they are really ahead of you.
You know you are with someone 20-30 years ahead of you is that you can barely follow them
Is it pleasant? No, not really. But unless you do this, unless you work on understanding what is hard to understand, you cannot be growing.
You definitely need humility to stay with it, to trust that you won’t waste your time and that it is taking you someplace you cannot go on your own.
When you declare yourself incompetent, which is how I learned to be humble, you often discover that indeed you are. Incompetent.
But as Aristotle says: the sign of an educated person is to be able to hold two contrary thoughts, or ideas: It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
So being incompetent and barely understanding what someone 20-30 years ahead of you says doesn’t mean you are stupid… in some areas maybe you could teach them… But not inside their expertise.
The second part of the challenge is to go out and implement.
Hardly anyone implements anything faithfully… ever. I learned about the drift today from Werner. The drift where you can claim the results, but you are lying.
I learned about impacting the drift…
I learned that only action impacts the drift. And when you impact the drift, that action also opens you up to being yourself different… this is how you are becoming. Through action. Action is first… becoming is second.
When you are waiting to become someone eager to learn, or become curious, or to feel like doing something, you are putting the cart in front of the horse.
Knowing more, even recognizing more, makes little difference… only actions that come from knowing more, and recognizing more make a difference. Both in the world and in you.
There is an element I am not talking about here, but may be at the root of action: seeing…
There is a fallacy that you can control the results. Reality doesn’t work that way. You can control your actions. Pick actions that may have a chance to impact the results. Pick attitude with which you do the action… that you can control too.
What you can control is the drift.
I work on several key areas of my life, health, the social, money, and fulfillment.
And unless I get better and faster and more courageous in all these areas, the actions I take will be insignificant, slow, or impact-less.
Lastly: what is the drift? The drift is what you see happening when life is left to itself…
Life includes other people… society, your family.
Left alone, without drift-altering actions from you, life goes on in its predictable way.
- You’ll just eat what you have always eaten, even after you find out what is good for you, what is bad for you. what nutrients your diet doesn’t supply, what you need to wash, and what to avoid.
- You’ll behave like you have always behaved… you’ll be all about you, you’ll be all about your comfort, your survival, your entertainment, your self-righteousness.
- Your self-expression will be the expression of the lower self…
and so on, and so forth.
The drift is what we could also call the ‘default’.
Most people’s life is 99.99% drift with occasional episodes of coming up for air. You have moments of brilliance…
You impact your life through impacting the drift. And the drift is strong… and you are weak. Weak in every sense of the word.
In the Starting Point Measurements I measure some of the elements that predict to what degree you are willing and able to impact the drift… i.e. change yourself and change your life. Become someone more deserving so you can deserve a life worth living.
The starting point measurements don’t measure whether you are a good person or a bad person. Both are part of the drift… your goodness, your badness. Your honesty. Your whole behavior. Even what you want. And how you go about getting it.
Part of the drift.
Being someone who can impact the drift is simple, but very hard.
Many people design structures inside which, they hope, they can impact the drift.
Goalsetting is a drift-impacting move… but even if you combine it with affirmations, it can’t impact your drift inside… so it won’t impact the drift.
Taking care of that world inside you, impacting the inside drift is harder than impacting the drift outside.
Everyone can accomplish a goal and not change… remain the same old, same old.
A good coach’s job is to attend to the inside… because changing the outside glitters but is pretty worthless.
The number of rich wretched people is proof of that.
My ‘specialty’ is that I feel when you return to the drift before you realize it.
I am also observing that same thing on myself.
One element of the drift is your ‘ground of being’, your fundamental attitude.
For the past weeks, I have been observing the drift wanting to take over MY ground of being.
The most frequent ground of being in the world is ‘something is wrong here… something with me, something with you, something with it’…
That ground of being is what gives you your actions, your feelings, your overall relationship with life. The sense that there is something wrong and it needs to be fixed. In a hurry.
What you’ll call wrong varies. It depends, a lot, on your soul correction.
By the way, your soul correction is your ‘inner drift’… your inner default relationship to yourself, to others, to life.
Now, what if you have been doing a lot, and yet you are still solidly in the drift? You are not changing, your view of life isn’t changing, you don’t feel better about yourself, your life isn’t moving… or is moving to where it has always moved, and you don’t want it to go there?
I have found that the Bach Profile, me measuring what Bach Energies® dominate your inner drift, is very useful in finding the linchpin Bach Flower Energy that if targeted, can produce a big result because this energy keeps the others also in place
I need to intuit what is the linchpin behavior… and then muscletest if I feel it right.
Example: This is an actual person’s Bach profile:
- if your need for order, cleanliness, (Crab Apple)
- things being just so, done just so, everyone behaving as they ought to, but – of course – they don’t, you get forceful and self-righteous and domineering… (Vine)…
- But there is a profound inauthenticity underneath: you yourself don’t live according to your own rules and standards. (Beech) You become impatient, overwhelmed, and ultimately either dutiful, depressed, or both.
Finding the linchpin in this picture was not easy… it was not obvious what inner behavior, if it were pulled out, would set the rest of the inner behavior back to normal.
I need to be willing to be surprised.
In this particular Bach profile, muscletest says, it is the ‘dutiful, carrying the world on your shoulder attitude’ that holds the whole wretched picture together. That is what keeps you in the drift.
So I advised the person that changing their dutiful attitude to doing things to joyful, or ‘I get to do this’ instead of ‘I have to do this’ will collapse the whole structure of misery, and impact the drift…
If done consistently… it is not an event, or a campaign… like a moment of brilliance, a flash in the pan… We have too many of those. Fireworks and miserable existence.
But knowing that the drift sets in the moment you stop generating your inner attitude, is priceless.
Get your Bach Profile special. Priceless
no. I say it comes from the Selfish Gene… Richard Dawkins wrote a book, the Selfish Gene, and I want people to read that, instead of getting second hand information from me.
Will you say more about intuition and why you think it’s not true 90% percent of the time?