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What gives you being/acting in the present is the future you live into.
I learned that sentence in Landmark Education. And until today it was pretty much just a sentence, that I could not explain to any of my students. I will write about this until I GET IT! lol… how is that for authenticity?
This morning I was watching a TED video with Benjamin Hardy. He says somewhere: “Since 2015, my articles have been read between 50 and 100 million times. Nearly 400000 people subscribe to my weekly newsletter.” His vibration is 170, he has 2 spiritual capacities open, his stuff’s truth value is 3%: it is all tree of knowledge. But his stuff resonates with people.
I have to admit, I don’t like Benjamin Hardy. Why? I can’t explain, maybe I am jealous of his following? But this video was an eye-opening for me, and I am going to share with you what I learned.
Proof that if you have the stuff he doesn’t say because he doesn’t know, even a 3% truth value talk, book, etc. can make a major difference for you.
He talks about fat people in the talk… Hm, maybe that is what I don’t like about him? He is talking to the obviously stuck, about obvious problems? Maybe that’s what I don’t like?
Anyway, his first example is about this fat man, who was unsuccessful in everything, work, marriage, health, and had spent 90% of his thoughts thinking about food… until.
Did you notice that every successful talk has a strong ‘until’ in it?
At a motivational seminar he got the idea that he could set his own future, and in it set his future self.
And his future self had normal weight… and confidence.
Next step: he created a 100% commitment to this future self. How? He went and ordered and paid for two custom made suits for the future self who was the same height as him, but 170 pounds lighter. 170 pounds is 78 kilograms, for you on the metric system.
The tailor laughed, but a year and a half later, the dude weighed a healthy 100 kilograms, could wear the suits, and he acted with confidence. He started a business, and was even successful at it.
So let’s reiterate his steps:
- 1. He envisioned a future self who was normal weight.
- 2. He saw that for that he needed to make a 100% commitment to thinking about other things than food, so he committed to a healthy diet with no sugar, and if the story were from today: no carbs.
- 3. He created a point of no return by his investment in the two custom made suits… that cost him all the money he had at the time.
And from that point on, what gave him being in the present is the future he lived into: normal weight, successful, confident, not obsessed with food.
Then Hardy went on to repeat the same process on several other fat people… who came out slim and successful on the other end.
What are the crucial new ideas in this presentation?
Step 1: Envision a future different from the past…
I have students, friends who are really good at step 1: envisioning themselves in the future, successful, confident, happy, what have you.
But they always end up back in the present, and end up worse off that they were before the imaginings, because the comparison hurts… and they spent all that time daydreaming, instead of attending to the present: their jobs, taking out the garbage, reading, or whatever else they could have done.
So these people stop after step 1 and are worse off than they were before.
So step 1 by itself is not only not enough, it is bad for you. Makes you unhappy.
We call this step in project language: formulation.
Step 2: 100% commitment.
Now that is difficult for most people, you, because you have a past that is tattered with abandoned commitments, flakiness, projects, campaigns, and thus failures and disappointments.
The number of people who bought my Water Energizer, the number of people who bought their eating style, or their food list is about ten times higher than the number of people who actually are still doing what they need to do… This is why I insist on people first showing their mettle, before I take them into a ‘real’ coaching program, like the Playground.
We call this step in project language: boxing yourself in. This is still part of the formulation stage of the project.
In the language of motivational talks, we call it ‘throw your hat over the wall‘. That is based in a story of boys who, when being blocked on their path by a tall wall, threw their hats over the wall, so the HAD TO climb over the wall to retrieve the hats… and they did, however impossible it looked, however hard it was.
It is a move that makes you HAVE TO do what you said you’d do, and this is very hard for most people.
Most people I know abhor having to… and resist. Don’t tell me what to do! They yell out loud or in their heads… and don’t do.
So for you, resistant people, we’ll need to look how you can lock yourselves in and love it.
I am not resistant. I have a habit of celebrating the ‘retaining walls’, I could not find a better word. Why? Because without them there are no requirements. No conditions, no guidance.
My guiding principle is: Freedom is recognizing your limitations and loving them.
As an architect my best works were where the building site, or the requirements, the slope, where the conditions were very limiting… because I didn’t have to invent everything, only how to make a building inside those limitations.
My current business became successful, financially, when I gave up on buying stuff that would eliminate limitations… and force myself to create a winning business inside the 1-2-3 framework I have and fully use what I actually have, what I actually already possess. Sounds easy, but it took me years… and the instinct is still to buy stuff that would cause some limitation to disappear. Thankfully Source says no to all these shiny objects.
Same with my health. If I honor and love the restrictions, I can get healthy. If I want to get rid of them, want to do things outside my limitations, I get sicker and sicker.
So my relationship to have-to and need-to is celebration: I get to do what I have to do, I get to do what I need to do. For example: people pay me before I give them what they paid for. And what they paid for is often work… The imbalance is a serious have-to… Now I owe them.
And that could make me dutiful AND resentful… but I don’t. I manage, every time, to turn it into a giving. I am giving you love, I am giving you the life-giving thing I promised… a report, an adjustment, an activation, a session. It is my honor and privilege… not a burden. It makes me grateful for the money you spent with me because I get to do something that is my honor and privilege: contribute to you.
Did this come to me naturally? No, I have to confess. I had to work on my attitude, the attitude 99.99% of humanity has. The ‘have to work for a living…’ ‘I have to do this and that…’ and the ‘I don’t want to.’
The stronger this unwillingness, the more miserable the person is.
Do I necessarily love or even like the actual work I have to do? No, I don’t necessarily like to sit here and mindlessly muscletest the same questions about the same list of foods or supplements. But you didn’t order muscletesting. You ordered health. You ordered well-being. You ordered feeling good. And that excites me, I make that the context… and I am happy to give it to you. I also, occasionally rejoice over the fact that I can do it. ‘Look ma what I can do!’ lol
This is the hardest step for most… I can hear it in your language. You talk ‘no commitment’ language. ‘A little bit’, a turn of language in nearly every sentence. A little bit angry, a little frustrated, a little bit this and a little bit that.
I have been yelling at students when I hear that… and they, of course, they don’t know why I get so bent out of shape… so what? Everyone talks like that!
But as long as you talk like that, ‘100%’, for you, is a four letter word… Because 100% is not a little bit… it is all in, or all out. Cutting away the alternative, dude or dudette… not wishy washy, mish-mash, tish-tush… lol! I wish it were funny, but it isn’t. It’s tragic.
And in the richest time in earth’s history, a monetary commitment needs to be huge to lock you in, not like the hats for those boys in the story, or the two suits for the fat guy.
The question is: what are you willing to give up for this to happen? And if it is not irreplaceable, then you don’t mean business, you are doing your little-bit dance… no 100%.
I have been experimenting with this for the past 30 odd years: when someone promises something, I ask this question: what are you willing to give up for this to happen? And so far no one was willing to bet their car, their whole income… so far I haven’t met anyone who was willing to commit 100%.
In numerology, the numerical expression of this move is 4. The number 4: there is only one way: up.
Each soul correction has something to correct before they can become someone who will commit, and commit 100%. A leap of faith… faith in life, faith that the future can be different from the path. All are in their own hands.
The future can only be different if you are different.
Bummer, eh?
We, you, me, all want the future to be different without having to change. But the person who you are today can only have the same future as your past has been…
In my 35 years experience as a coach, you can only change who you are if what you said about things that happened changes.
This is what we do in the Playground.
Not mindless mantra, positive thinking b.s.
No, we look at nearly everything that happened to us and see them, in the light of day, if there was anything really wrong there.
The art is to refrain from saying the story the same way every time.
We had a mindmapping session on Tuesday. I got a copy of each person’s mindmap, and it struck me as strange, that some students, the stingier ones, had a handful of incidents they’ve never shared.
Incidents are like bugs or monsters. If you can look at them minutely, at the light of day, they lose their ugliness. And that is the point.
As long as you carry those ugly bugs inside, they can’t change. You have to look at them… through different filters, different angles, in different lights.
One of my students wrote to me:
“Thank you for the mindmapping webinar yesterday Sophie. It was fun actually to collaborate like this… I learned a lot from the webinar.
I know I got a little bit offended but I learned some things from that… for example you talked twice about me using processes in my business… The first time I interpreted it in one way and got offended and had excuses… The second time you brought that up again I heard what you really said and took it as teaching and was not offended… that’s like wow. how one can hear things differently… It’s a totally different view when you look at things with the mindmap…”
Yes. the tools we use in the Playground are the tools that make the wrong disappear from your past.
Because without disappearing the wrongs, you cannot become a person who can commit 100% to anything… and if you can’t or won’t, the future will be exactly like the past, because you will be the same.
You are the common denominator in every story of yours… in your past, and in your future… anchoring life solidly to that persona you have invented through all the wrongs.
To help you ease into the technology of the soul… the Playground, I am offering a past Playground’s recordings for sale. And to make it even ‘tastier’ I throw in two other courses, the Happiness, and Skill Finder, if you buy the Playground recordings from 2014 before Friday, tomorrow, midnight.
Go to step 2
