Unless it’s accurate knowledge… i.e. true, tested, from an accurate source.- Unless you know what you learned… unless you know what you know… you didn’t learn anything.
- And unless what you leaned changes your behavior, inside or outside, nothing will change.
All learning is behavior modification, modifying behavior to become more fit to life, to play the game of life better, for yourself and for the human race.
As a coach, unless I modified your behavior, I didn’t do anything.
So how do you modify behavior?
The process starts with an insight. The more energy is in the insight, the more energy you can or are willing to bring to the insight, the easier it will be to make the modification.
- Disgust, hate are strong energies, and can fuel fundamental change. This is my favorite energy source. I hate ugly, I hate inefficiency, and this hate gives me the courage, the incentive, the TLB to face the tiger and make the change that is necessary.
- Desire, love, niceness are weak energies and fizzle out as fast as in a day or two.
- Enthusiasm, dedication, and other positive energies are somewhere in the middle… may last a week.
- Commitment, accountability and planning are probably the most reliable allies if you really want to change some behavior. Especially commitment you base on another strong energy: idea sex!
The most important missing, after having witnessed thousands of fizzled attempt at lasting change, is “existence.” as in “staying in existence”…
Existence of an idea, existence of a conversation… aka shelf-life of an idea…
Existence is a weird invented phenomenon… unless you create it a staying power for what you want to do, the only thing that will exist and keep on existing is the same old, same old. Same people, same triggers, same thoughts, same attitudes. The same miserable life, the same results… The valley of the shadow of death.
What you want to create existence around is the new commitment and the new attitude.
The powerful why and a new trigger will create staying power for your new commitment to cause change, lasting change.
Because positive ideas disappear while you sleep… insights are a dime a dozen. And the beautiful why’s you coupled with them…
By the next day all beautiful plans become chores… Because…
No one wants to be told what to do…
so putting the kind of reminders around, or being reminded by others in a “do this” way is counter productive. 1
I have had a note on my reminder system for about two years to do something… it comes up every day, and I refuse to do it.
On the other hand, I do dozens of things I am reminded with questions, or requests, or some other way that trigger my “I want to do this” reflex and I do it. No resistance.
No reminders, or “do this” reminders, and the project will disappear from view, remaining just a nagging bad feeling in the back or my mind.
OK, what is an insight?
You get a glimpse of some higher truth than what you have been considered the truth.
We could also say: once you have an insight, your job is to make it an upsight… Allow the insight to alter your worldview.
What is an upsight? An insight turned into a behavior modifying, worldview modifying practice.
In an insight you see that reality is not the way you had been seeing it… How it’s different? You saw one way it’s different…
For example, my first insight, 33 years ago, was that things weren’t happening to me, I was an active participant in them, by virtue of what I said about what was happening.
That is an insight that people normally refuse to get, because people like to be victims, and they hate even the idea of them having anything to do with their misery.
But I got lucky… that was my first insight.
My job with that insight was to take that “co-creative” mindset to every memory I had, to every relationship I had, to every happening in my life.
That I always had a part in what was happening by virtue of what I said about it.
I teach this in my Playground program. It’s the most transformative program ever…
The trick is to not have this practice as an event that passes, but a continuous practice… practice it until it becomes like muscle memory, until it truly alters your worldview. I am still practicing it, and have been for 33 years. When I forget about it, life turns into sh*t.
The practice is to pay attention to what you say about things, and learn how to say something different.
NOT like positive thinking. More like getting out of the automatic judgment of things.
The automatic judgment is almost always a systemic judgment. A systemic judgment is a two-pronged judgment: something and its opposite.
Reducing reality to the simplistic, pedestrian, primitive and unintelligent, unseeing children’s drawing summary.
It is good… it is bad… it is right… it is true… it is this and it is that.
And then you are done. Your world is reduced to its manageable format: as simplistic as you are… Two dimensional. No person there. No complexity. No human or not really.
And you judge everything, everyone, including yourself… And what gets lost is the complexity, the beauty, the magnificence, the myriad of facets of everything.
You declared yourself the judge and by gosh you’ll judge.
And unless you learn to look at things differently, from different vantage points, I have nothing to offer you. Not a thing. You’ll remain a thing, a two-pronged switch, and I promise you’ll never find fulfillment, love, passion, compassion, beauty, adventure, or anything that is worth being alive for.
You are a robot, a simplistic robot without a soul, without a spark.
Now, there are several exercises that you can employ to loosen this machine-like behavior…
Don’t kid yourself, this is not a task for little children who cry when they drop their ice cream…
Unless you toughen up, this is not going to work for you, so you might as well resign to remaining a simplistic robot.
Really.
I am not interested in pretending with you that you are going to become a person… pretending is YOUR world… I am interested in real tangible measurable results… and that requires some toughness, diligence, consistency, and some energy.
I use hate as my motive power. I hate mediocrity. I have victimhood. I hate desire to receive for the self alone. I hate apple-polishing. I hate pretense.
Why hate? It works for me. When I choose something inspiring to give me energy, I wake up every morning, and the inspiration is gone… it needs to be re-created. Too much work just to get the energy source to work. 2
But hate is always ready for me…
Today I woke up blah… ready to say: I am done.
I HATE THAT!
But had I thought for myself: I want a life I love… that is as wimpy as it can be… I wanna… baaah… gimme…
Not mentioning the fact that when you have a “positive” energy source, you can go a thousand different ways.
Hate is clear: go away from it.
That is the definition of strait and narrow… outside of that narrow path everything is a no.
They are teaching you hogwash… and that hogwash makes you a wimp.
I am not saying: hate people. Hate ideas. Hate ways. Hate what you don’t want to be like.
I know I am now talking to one out of 100,000… the rest have left the scene. The want nice-nice…
But if you are still here… there is still hope for you. Make the hate burning hot for yourself.
And ask for a practice that addresses that hate.
If you want to become someone who is not judgmental… then have burning hate for judgment, for primitive, for a life of good and evil. Ugh.
By the way, unless you can have tens, hundreds of interpretations of most things that happen, choices you make, you are a simpleton, and you need to start using that brain of yours.
You are intellectually slothful… and the only way to change that is to start becoming diligent… intellectually diligent…
One of my students is using the idea-machine model, and is becoming brilliant in the process, after decades of being dull: intellectually slothful.
He hated being dull…
And believe it or not, he is enjoying the process. And now I actually enjoy talking to him, ask his advice, and we have become a co-creative system in his coaching.
He still needs some nudging, but it’s a process… He still doesn’t do it automatically… he still needs assignments… but with time it will become who he is… a brilliant idea machine.
If you are plodding, then using something like the idea-machine practice will slowly re-activate your slothful brain.
Another sticky point for most people is lack of humility.
We don’t know what humble is… or not really. But a definition I now use in my Starting Point Measurements is as good as any:
Humility is not thinking yourself less, it is thinking of yourself less
If and when everything has a self-referential aspect, if everything seems having something to do with you, then your humility score is low. And when your humility score is low, then you cannot change because you cannot learn.
And you remain worthless… for yourself and for the world.
This is a tendency that needs to be fought with all the energy you can muster, all the energy you can summon. Because it is a total misery maker.
The exercise I gave in the comments section of yesterday’s article is a great little exercise for this… will not eliminate self-centeredness, but at least will start this process.
The worldview underneath is that you are an object in a world of objects, and the world is about you. About your interactions with the other objects and about what you think.
It is a worldview that won’t allow you to be a person…
Everyone says: you are a spiritual being having a human experience.
This is a total b.s.
There is no spiritual being present in the worldview of “I am an object in the world of objects”…
The spiritual is only possible if you become a “conversation”, meaning a product of all the stuff you say, and all the stuff in your backdrop: the statements you have said, accepted, or resisted.
And then look at life, look at events, and consider them a conversation as well.
You are a conversation in a world of conversations.
Then you can start having some power over your life, because conversations can be altered, objects can’t.
I will stop here… because this article is getting too long…
If you have questions, the comments section is for that.
- I just understood why all that fancy software I buy is never used. I bought from inspiration, seeing a glorious future. But by next day INSPIRATION disappeared. Had I looked for what I have a burning hate for, I bet I either would not have bought the software or I would be using it. Hah… that is brilliant. lol.
