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In my starting point measurements there are a few measures that predict whether you can be trained or not.
I have found that two measures are most telling: the size of one’s ambition and the size of one’s rigidity.
Ambition is an interesting phenomenon:
Ambition needs you to have some kind of vision of a future you are working towards. In my experience, this measure needs to be higher than 10%, and the higher it is, the more likely you’ll do what it takes to be trained.
- Your rigidity is indicative of your insistence to remain the same. Your insistence that you are not to be told what to do.
- And the third is, maybe, not as obvious, but if you don’t have physical energy because you are not well enough, you don’t have energy to grow.The minimum to be trainable, the minimum for me to expect that you’ll do what only you can do to grow, is an average health, which is, at this state is 10%. My health is 70% for a 72 year old. Meaning: I have more energy to do work than a 10% of my own age, and maybe more energy to do work than a 10% of any age, but not someone who has a 20% health number.
It takes energy to grow. A lot of energy. And if you are not well, you don’t have the energy to grow.
So where do you leak the energy? And how? And what is the difference between people who leak most of their energy and the people who use it?
Great question, isn’t it?
The internet if full of winning productivity, habits article, and you may even read some of them. After all you want to be more productive, get more things done, have good habits.
But when it comes to habits, you need to change them, one at a time.
If your Starting Point Measurements says you don’t have the energy to do the work, I promise you have several habits, both in doing and thinking that you need to change to come out on top.
- My ‘star’ student began as a private client, we spoke 2-3 hours ever week. For almost two years. He has been with me for three and a half years now.
His biggest issue was his ambition… he is still prone to fall into the trap that if he can see it in his mind eyes, he is ready, and it will be a piece of cake to accomplish it.
As I said above, ambition is the willingness to do what it takes to get to where you want to get to, to get the job done. Ambition will be the most dominant component if you are able to be trained to become all you can become, or not.
The latest ‘project’ my clients had is to keep The Sight capacity alive.
The Sight is the most important element in becoming astute, and making good decisions. In seeing what is so and what isn’t. In seeing what people intend to do and catch it before you fall victim to their nefarious intentions. Mandatory for being intelligent. Really.
He wrote to me:
Regarding The Sight..I practice looking..both at this (how to make money with his website) and also I’ve started to look at faces….starting with my family and clients I’ve met these past 2 days.
Looking is hard work. It is not natural for most people… they make decisions without looking. Or ask me to look for them… even though I charge for that.
But it is looking that keeps The Sight alive and kicking.
Looking at what? they ask. You think you are looking, but you are not. You are not really looking.
Looking is only looking when there is an intention to see. When there is a question.
- One student keeps her Sight capacity alive by making collages.Making a collage starts with deciding what you want to collage… Her theme has been simply: collaging seeing.She doesn’t quite know what she will find, but she is looking intently. And her collages contain some 20 pictures cut out from magazines. It takes an hour a day, it’s fun, and it is altering who she is for herself… and it keeps The Sight capacity alive.
Another student is looking in my articles for answers to her questions, on how to become someone who grows, someone who doesn’t resists.
Here is her email:
Sophie, I have been reading and re-reading your article ‘why you feel lost..’ and been looking at my life… you say:
‘Too much activity in the mind, you listen from what you know, and you have negative emotions that you resist, suppress, fight, argue with, avoid, run from. You have urges you succumb to. You are in forceful resistance mode.
Because you can’t resist something with all your might and keep what you resist in the same view as the place you are going to. They are mutually exclusive, can’t co-exist in the same view.”
So this morning I stumbled upon something that brought memories of my friendship with that guy and the first thing I did I started resisting my emotions and feelings, fighting them, trying to ‘kill’ the memories.
Then I read your article and you teach not to resist anything. Then I was sitting there and trying to see how that would work. So I changed course and I said ‘hm…what would it be like if I just let that emotion run through, let the memory be there?’
So I let it run through and it did exactly that, ran through and left. I grieved a little and then I was ok. I mean it’s not as easy as it sounds because I felt the resistance. But I am seeing that catching when I resist and being forceful should be my daily thing.
Because I see now, I want to resist emotions and feelings.
I look at them as bad. So I try to suppress emotions, fight them and kill them. Yet now I see that it is being forceful. That it is fighting what I don’t want and while fighting that, I lose the present moment to act.
Like you say we never take responsibility and ownership for our lives. So that means instead of me owning emotions, my feelings and say that ‘hey this is what it is and I own all of it’, they own me. Yet I could take all my feelings and emotions with me. So I see that I’ve been waiting for all of them to go away. So while waiting I miss living life.
‘There is no getting rid of the machine: the machine is part of being human, just like your body is a machine that you can’t get rid of.’
So nothing is wrong with the machine, it’s part of me being me. I will have to internalize that. See it, make it part of me.
‘nothing is missing: you have everything that you need in the here and now.’
OK. So for me I see practicing not to go into the future or the past, but to live here and now. To act and not go into fear. Nothing is missing. So basically then that what I have is enough… what I have, I can use to grow myself…
There are so many pieces Sophie. Sometimes it seems overwhelming… Observing oneself, learning to see what’s missing, making life not about me, creating context, doing exercises you teach….yet it’s incorporating them all like a dance.
Thank you Sophie for your work. It amazes me how patient you are with us.
So you see, she is not just looking to find the butter in the fridge… She is doing serious looking
What are you going to set up to keep YOUR sight capacity alive?
I assert that without some form of seeing a future that you are willing to go to bat for, you are going to continue to shrink.
Want to see your Starting Point Measurements and ask me to say where you leak most of your energy?
I’ll add that tidbit for a limited time for free… until Sunday midnight EST. Normally I would charge another tenner for that.
Get your Starting Point Measurements and my take on where you leak energy… before Sunday midnight
