Your elbow is close, yet you can’t bite it… another Russian proverb…
Your mind says: I am not enough… it has been saying it for a long time… but nothing has changed.
It is Monday Morning and I am already not enough.
I just read the Monday Morning Memo, and it answered my nagging question: why am I not more successful? And answered it in a way that turned me into a heap of meat: I can’t do what it tells people to do… put sentences the way he says…
I can’t. I’ll never amount to much… maybe it’s time to pack it in.
I am pondering what he teaches, I am pondering my inability, I am pondering how I can live, have the audacity to live, now that I know.
I am pondering, as always, while I play Freecell, a computer card game. A completely impossible setup solves itself… I win the game.
I have a sudden thought: If I could learn to play Freecell this well, maybe I can learn to write the way the Monday Morning Memo says to write…
I muscletest it… The muscletest says: yes. Hm.
Here is the famous alphabet principle: if you say A, and you said B, you may have to say the whole alphabet…
I see it playing out… I said: I am not enough at this… then I said: I could learn it… and now I am seeing the whole enormity of effort it might take to actually learn it.
The pile of money, the interesting work seems like it is on the other side of the ocean… not even visible from where I am standing. Not attainable…
If you recognize yourself, your self-talk, your sentiments, your behavior in mine, then let’s talk.
When you get to talk to me… by the time you get to ask me, you have probably gone through this a thousand times, and every time you said… meh, not worth it. Not worth the effort, not worth the time, not worth it.
- Not worth reading a book that is not fully exciting and entertaining.
- Not worth going through the awkwardness of a conversation to get to mutual understanding.
- Not worth this, and not worth that.
So you did nothing. And not surprisingly you found yourself where you are
- 1. not being enough… not having enough… not knowing enough to do what is now important to you… Like whip out an essay on whatever topic, get married, have friends, find a job that you would enjoy doing, whatever…
- 2. having a habit of saying no to any real effort, anything that takes longer than a few minutes to do.
You’ve become minuteman… minute woman… no real accomplishments, no self-love, no path open for you to grow.
“I am not enough” is magically coupled with the “it’s not worth it”. Tenacity is the opposite… but who has time for that?
The result: no action, and a good reason to feel that you are not enough.
There is a third sneaky partner in this pattern, the one that tells you that you are smart. And yet, when we look at your life, there is no sign of smartness, only signs of procrastination, or no action. Self-involvement, and under-achieving.
My example I share with you in the beginning is real… But I half-lack the second element… the “it isn’t worth it” part, so I am not quite as stuck as you are. But I am still stuck in certain areas… and that “I am not enough” niggles at me more than I’d like it.
That niggling is potentially a good thing.
You see, the way to get from where you are to where you’d like to be is to place yourself, firmly, into the gap. the gap between the “before” and the “after”…
In my case: I can’t write the kind of effective “copy” as the author of the Monday Morning Memo… The Wizard of Ads. But if I could, I would have the kinds of results, the kinds of response my stuff deserves.
The gap
The gap is between what I can do now, and what would produce the off the top response my stuff deserves… One skill that is missing is to write the way the Wizard teaches.
It may take months, years, me practicing daily, and feeling like a dork. But what else am I going to do with my time? Play mine-sweep? Go to Facebook? Pinterest? Celebrate Thanksgiving? lol… ugh.
You see, I have placed myself in the gap… and now the gap can niggle at me. I have set it up… now it became one of the plates I spin: practice writing sentences like the Wizard.
I have one student who doesn’t seem to have this dynamic going very strongly. Even though his soul correction is one of the resistant ones (Sexual Energy), in most of the areas of life he doesn’t resist… except when it comes to eating… There he has this it’s-not-worth-it in spades.
But every other student I have has this dynamic trio: I-am-not-enough plus It’s-not-worth-it plus I-am-smart, and dislodging them seems to be impossible.
They have time for all kinds of indulgences… but not for the work they do with me.
Thanksgiving is one of the indulgences for which they give up the gap, give up self-growth, give up a life they can love and live powerfully.
A 2-3-hour meal where you overeat, till you want to puke, talk to people who you could talk to anytime… but you don’t pick up the phone… and the whole life, the whole plan, the whole gap disappears… And your vibration drops to the level of a slacker, a bum.
And this happens also at Christmas, at Easter… and maybe two-three times more a year.
I weep for you. I weep for the potential you traded for a meal and a get-together.
Question: is this “no holidays” thing for life?
Answer: No. Once you have firmly established the gap and the practice that takes you to the other shore of the ocean, you can pick up the plates and continue…
You WILL drop the plates during the get-togethers, but because it has become a habit to do the practices, you CAN pick up the pieces.
The problem is with people who haven’t gotten to an established habit yet… either because they haven’t decided to put themselves into the gap, or because they are in the beginning, or they are sporadic about the practicing.
I would say that 2-3 months of consistent practicing should do the trick of making the habit stable. But if you look at the holiday schedule in the United States, you rarely have a 2-3 months break between them.
99.99% of your family isn’t up to something, and will have no sympathy, no compassion, no support for you to be up to something. If you hope that they will let you off the hook: keep on hoping.
The one student who managed to establish a habit before he dropped all the plates due to a family get-together, has managed to raise his vibration in seven months, more than a hundred points.
It’s taken a lot of steps, big and small. And a lot of daily practices. And some money… comparatively not much…
Question: How did you learn to play Freecell so well, Sophie?
Answer: If you look, billions of people are doing jobs for years, and don’t get significantly better, faster, more accurate at it. So doing a job from beginning to end doesn’t make you get better.
What makes you getting better is doing parts of it that can be considered a unit. This is how you are trained in sports… or if you aren’t, you don’t get better: you have a lousy coach.
The way to get better at everything is to get better at elements of it, the order of things, the speed of execution, the recognizing patterns, etc. And that is what i did…
I spent a lot of time practicing and getting better at deciding what the first step should be… and the gains were small… not mentioning the fact that it was tedious for me… I like to start things fast, even if I muck it up.
A lot of you get stuck before you start… you want to do more research, or you want to feel like doing the practice.
Others start fast and sloppy, do it for a day, or two, and then fizzle out.
Neither extreme leads to a successful crossing the great divide, the gap. Neither of these buys you a life you can love and live it powerfully.
So what does? Systematic, tireless, thoughtful, and consistent.
This is where the third element will screw you up: you are smart, and smart people don’t have to learn, don’t have to practice… because they are smart.
B.S… The world is full of self-declared smart nobodies… Don’t fall for that b.s.
Question: Do I have to do this with everything I am not good at?
Yes and no. If it is important to get good at something, you’ll know.
It’s almost more important to know that once you get good at something you didn’t feel you could do… your self-image, especially your self-trust shifts. The more self-trust you have, earned self-trust, not delusional!, the more you’ll be inspired to learn to get good at the things you deem important.
And when in doubt, a coach or mentor who can see further and wider than you, can point out what you need to get good at.
