How many balls, ideas, projects can you keep in the air?

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One of the measures in my Starting Point Measurements is how many bits of information, how many balls you can keep in the air at the same time.

Most people can only keep one ball, reliably, in the air. The moment something better, exciting shows up, they drop it… If they start juggling two,they drop both off…

Off course I am not talking about juggling, I am talking about ideas, concepts, distinctions, projects… the kind you hold in your head.

The work we need to do to untangle the tangled wires of our emotions, the 13th, the 14th, and the 15th floor, needs you to be able to see and hold more than one ball in the air.

Even just managing your life to become a successful life, as I suggested, managing it like a business, needs you to juggle quite a few things, and not drop any. If you ARE in business, and it’s not as successful and as interesting as you hoped it was going to be, this is the reason: you drop the balls.

A business, juggling, is like a dance, it has its rhythm, and its music. Not dull, not boring, not hectic either. A dance.

If your life is not like a dance, if untangling the tangled mess your life is, then you need some tools to hold all the wires… so you can see what way they are tangled, what way they are connected, so you can untangle them… and start living like a dance.

Of course you can bring the mindset of dutiful, ‘I have to’, dullness to dance too… and some of you probably will.

So what can you do if your current capacities, if your brain can keep only one ball in the air… one thread, one wire in your cone of vision?

I always brag that I can keep fourteen projects, balls, items alive at the same time live… but Source ‘dares’ to differ: it says: nine. OK, nine.

So what is easy for me, what I can do in my head: you, it seems, cannot do in your head.

But you don’t have to.

You don’t live an ‘out of sight out of mind’ never do well life.

So you CAN solve problems on higher planes than your multiplication table.

As an aside, I am obviously enamored of people, characters who can do the kind of planning that needs all the factors taken into consideration: multiple options, multiple players… the Sherlock Holmes of literature. I am sure the authors of those stories used a mindmap or they wouldn’t be able to write the story.

And then there are the ‘plodding’ characters, like Henry Bosch… who solves his crimes, step by tiny step, always going through the murder book to refresh his memory. The one-ball guy.

I like both kinds of stories… You see one fascinates me for one reason, the other for the meticulousness… linear it may be.

You have been doing neither methods…

The ITCH, the soul correction, the mess you have made of your life is really a lot like a good crime story… it needs you, the investigator, to unravel the crime, so you can prevent it from continuing the way it has been.

There is this three dimensional tool that you can use: called mindmap.

It is a sheet of paper you lay out all the pieces, like a map, where you have all the diverging and convoluted routes to clarity all on one sheet of paper.

I have two different mindmapping software, but for this kind of job recommend pen and paper and maybe even pictures like for a collage.

For example, in this article I mention above business… and that to you it’s boring, tedious, a ‘have-to’.

Linear with a narrow cone of vision, can be very boring. But there are no boring things. There are only things you bring boredom to.

Boredom simply means that there is no empowering, inspiring, interesting context. But context is part of the invisible… if you want to dig out the context from there, you may need a mindmap.

Why? Because it is everywhere. How you do anything is how you do everything. So if you do work lifelessly, then you probably do everything lifelessly… Because the common denominator is you.

If you do work dutifully, you probably do relationships dutifully. And you probably dream, daydream of more interesting activities… not realizing that it is you who is dutiful, and I could put you into the most interesting situation, and you would continue being dutiful.

Everything can serve multiple purposes. A mindmap’s job is to untangle, but at the same time it can serve as a reminder of a unifying purpose, a unifying context, that unless you are reminding yourself, will have the shelf life of a few minutes to a few hours.

One of my complaints about Landmark Education was always that all the successes of participants were ‘flash in the pan’ results.

Why? Because what causes successes are shifted contexts… but they disappear.

You may remember them, but remembering is not the same. An empowering context, remembered, is a nice memory, but has lost its power.

Truth repeated is a lie. Possibility repeated is a have-to.

The art is to keep the truth, keep possibility alive.

And without it existing outside of your mind, outside of your memory, you can be sure it will disappear.

Mindmap is a great device to keep possibility alive. Just like rolling boiled of water stops when you give it heat… but you can put it back on the stove, and it will boil again.

Every time you look at your mindmap the ‘water’ can be brought up to boiling.

I once created a display of my life, a mindmap, where every area and the projects under it, were a grape on a bunch of grapes… and the overall context was: Juicy Life.

And I could move from one grape to the other and attend to all of my life all of the time, not forget about any area.

This time was a time when I got done 10 years worth of growth in just three years. Went from unhappy paid by the hour architect to the owner of a magazine I loved. It built a foundation for the next 11 years. It was beautiful. And i never went to a disempowering context: I stayed inside the juicy life…

I have students who invent a new context every day, every week… but underneath it all they never change, they are dutiful, they have to, they are this and that worthless thing.

The context and that ‘mindmap’ called me to be brave, energetic, tenacious, tireless, inventive, creative, ready to learn new thing, friendly, intimate, truthful, bold… even abundant.

It called me up to be all that, whatever got the work done, whatever accomplished the project I was working on.

Would inventing the context ‘juicy life’ do it for you?

I don’t know. In some way I had been that plodding, dutiful, wake up in the morning because I didn’t die the night before person, like many of students. No pep. No joy. No spirit. No aliveness.

So juicy life meant a whole other world to me, something that I went for with gusto, enthusiasm, because it was like a lush island for the lost at sea.

Would it work for me today? I guess not. I have changed, my life has changed. My lush island is different. It is much less about me and my life.

But I am almost sure your context for now needs to be about you and your life, not about anything bigger than that.

Of course if you set it too small, it won’t do sh*t…

It has to be all encompassing, so every area of life is included. this is one other reasons you need to make a mindmap.

If you lived close to me, we could do it personally: bring colored pencils and pictures, and a cardboard, and do it and have fun. I remember we used to do collaging parties, and it was a lot of fun. Everyone worked on their own, but the energy was shared.

I don’t know if we could do this online. If you have an idea how to do it, please comment below. Sending me an email only means you are too stingy, or you only want to curry favors with me… so please… comment. Thank you.

In the meantime, there is one measure that be very useful as you are contemplating the context for your life. That is your inspirable/inspired measure.

• If your inspirable measure is 10 or less, then don’t even pretend to care about the world…
• If your inspirable is 30, then you need to first attend to your life, and then when it is juicy, or nurturing, or lovely, or abundant, or whatever you want it to be, just please know that it will deteriorate unless you up the ante… raise your sights to fulfill on bigger possibilities that don’t involve you directly.

It is very interesting that most of my students belong to the first group. And three belong to the second.

But for now everyone’s job is to create a life they can love and live powerfully.

It is not an easy task, and there are not many people on the planet who can claim they have that.

It is more of a job of take-away, eliminate what isn’t needed for that, than adding new things to your already crowded life.

People, you, have a tendency to add things… like a housekeeper of ours, some 70 years ago, added sugar to an oversalted dish… ugh… the results are not good.

Of course, adding water to that same dish would have done the trick, or more potatoes, or whatever… it was a soup if I remember correctly.

Same in your life: you can add something that balances out some over-interest, some over-emphasis… like you can add sesame seed oil to dissolve plaque… but it can only deal with so much… If you keep eating ice cream, or cakes, cookies, bread, you’ll still have enough plaque buildup that you’ll be dumb as a doorknob… and weak from not enough blood flow…

Find out where you are at.

Most of you don’t know. There are so many things, and so little attention, awareness, knowledge, truthfulness.

The starting point measurements, no matter what anybody says, lol. gives you an accurate picture of where you are at… and if you add the health measures, you’ll have a complete picture of who it is that is trying to create a life that works, a life they love, and they live it powerfully.

Get your Starting Point Measurements

Author: Sophie Benshitta Maven

True empath, award winning architect, magazine publisher, transformational and spiritual coach and teacher, self declared Avatar View all posts by Sophie Benshitta Maven