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If you wake up because you have to. Or wake up because you need to pee. Or wake up because your pet needs you. Most likely you wake up because you didn’t die the night before.
One of the powerful moves you can do to wake yourself up is to cause a breakdown.
One of the reasons people don’t grow is because life is manageable. Even if it is full of low grade annoyance, it’s messy. Or it’s misery, dull, or full of scarcity, discomfort, or empty…
If the ‘bad’ is low grade and steady without undue peaks, people tend to relate to life as business as usual, like the frogs that don’t jump out of the slowly warming water.
So to be awakened, to jump out of that water you need to wake yourself up. Or someone, like a coach should set you up to have a breakdown. A breakdown to jar you awake.
It is better that way than leaving it to Life to do it. Life tends to overdo it…
If you are one of the eight billion, then of course you do leave it to Life… ‘why rock the boat?‘, you say, and you are stupid. You are not at cause, you are not driving your own life.
I am, obviously, confrontational on my coaching calls… but my people are used to it, and they just ignore it like they ignore the weather: they don’t do anything, don’t even consider doing anything different.
So my job is to let my clients hang themselves… dig themselves in a hole… a hole they cannot ignore.
What would be much better is if they could, would, should… lol. Wake themselves up.
Yeah… But for that they would have to have a commitment.
A commitment to anything constructive… not to comfort, and to easy, and to being liked.
In one of my Prison Break classes I taught the ‘breakdown process’ I learned in Landmark Education.
Literally none of the students did anything constructive with it.
Why? Did I teach it wrong?
No. Turns out that to have a breakdown
- 1. you need to have a commitment, and a breakdown in that commitment and
- 2. you need to look at two things at the same time, i.e. hold two things in your brain at the same time, so you can compare them. ‘I committed to this… while I did that. No match.’
If you can’t see two things at the same time, no real thinking is possible.
If you have the memory of one thing and the actual thing: that is NOT two things.
‘Powerful debriefing‘ attempts to bring the two together: the commitment and the actual action to fulfill on it.
So what is a commitment?
The way we have commitment in our common parlance is not useful.
Common parlance calls everything commitment everything that you HAVE TO DO.
A task that other people tell you to do.
But the real commitment is what your inside tells you. When you feel ‘I have to: I can’t do no other‘
Of course if your whole life is given to you by other people… the culture, your workplace, tradition, your family, morality, religion, etc. then you’ll never develop, never feel, never have a chance to develop an inside…
I read the beginning of an article today that talks about how Japanese children are brought up differently than American children. It reminded me of my childhood.
I was very young. Didn’t know numbers yet. I was sent to buy a liter milk. I went. Gave the shop owner the paper money I was given, and got some change and the milk. Turned out I was cheated. Given the wrong change.
Another time I lost the money I was given.
I learned something about the world then… and it’s been useful to me. I learned that I am cause… no matter what.
The two stores I was sent to were several blocks away from where we lived. It’s true, I only had to cross side streets. And I lived in an area of the city that had villas… so it didn’t have much traffic.
I was never coddled… I grew up self-sufficient.
And I grew up growing something like a Self inside.
Commitment needs a Self, a functioning Self.
Commitment is the Self’s expression… while things to do, things you take on to do, or given to do, at best are the expression of the periphery… the public, the not-you.
Here is a little detail that not many know about me:
What I do for a living: Discovering, exploring, experimenting with the human condition is the expression of the Self. My Self.
Producing results consistent with what I see possible is the expression of the periphery. It is ‘outcome dependence‘, the enemy of the Self. And of course the bread and butter of society, of other people, of the culture.
But if you look into your so-called commitments: the ones that have emphasis on an outcome are NOT commitments, even if it is a spiritual outcome. They were given to you.
Ever since I have been following this ‘I can’t do no other‘ commitment, my personal challenge has been this ‘outcome dependence‘. Human Design (a 20% truth value system) calls that not-self. In their system I am a manifesting generator. My not-self is frustration.
Frustration is when you HOPE FOR some result and are hindered or blocked from achieving it.
Focus on accomplishment, held high as a value in our society, is the enemy. Accomplishment is an end result. The scoreboard.
Commitments doesn’t have an end result. That doesn’t mean you won’t have end results: it only means:
The essence of the commitment is the process, not the result.
When the emphasis is on the end result, your attention and your energy are divided. Most of your attention is directed away from what you are doing, and is placed on the scoreboard.
You may be able to get away with that, but you’ll experience no joy. You may experience victory from the result but not joy. Joy comes from being fully engaged in what you are doing.
Whatever that activity is.
Humans don’t even engage fully in sex… they all go for the prize… giving as little attention to the process as they can get away with. Result: No joy, no fulfillment, no intimacy, no cloud nine.
Same with eating.
Same with conversation.
I observe my clients… any assignment, practice I give them: the actual activity is only the means, not the essence of the assignment. And the result they think they need to produce is either produced or not produced. But joy: joy is not produced. Only dutiful servitude.
My own activities are joyful. I am not looking at them done, I am looking at doing… if that makes sense.
Example: I have taken on a hobby: baking breadstuff. The first 10 days the stuff was heavy, and nothing like I’d like to call bread. I still loved doing it, putting my hand in the dough, or the flour, or stretching the dough with my fingers. Delightful. Joy.
When I stretch my body, when I read, when I write an article, when I cook, when I am on a call… I am 100% present, 100% of my energy goes to what I am doing. And unlike my clients, none of me is looking at the ‘I got it done‘ as the prize.
But, unfortunately: YOU DO. And that results in a no joy life.
So although I taught what to do when you have a breakdown… none of my clients ever have a breakdown because they don’t seem to have a commitment to anything.
It seems that the current humanity doesn’t have a developed Self, and therefore cannot have a commitment. Commitment comes from the Self. No Self, no commitment.
And the Self comes from the Spirit… whatever that is. And spirit ignored is spirit dead.
And looking at that, I now see why most programs don’t produce the results promised to more than 1% of the participants.
Because most programs’ promises depend on a commitment from the participants.
This insight also explains the huge gap between successful people and normal people. Those rare successful people have or have had a commitment.
The successful people don’t even know it themselves… I say. If they knew it, they would say it.
Humanity is unaware. All humans. Successful or unsuccessful. More or less. By awareness here I mean self-awareness.
Awareness is a weird beast… It requires two things at the same time:
- ‘noticing’ and it requires the even more rare
- ‘accuracy or astuteness.’ The accurate identifying what you noticed, even if you only saw it in your peripheral vision.
If you feel indigestion, for example, but mistakenly identify it as hunger, you’ll just pile up indigestion on top of indigestion.
So the question is: why humanity is so unaware, and un-astute? That even if they notice something, they mislabel it?
Humans are like an onion… You decided, or told many things and their opposite about yourself and about the world. You accepted some, rejected some, and are ambivalent about the rest.
So when you look at a thing, you don’t see it. You see all the things you were told… and not the thing itself. So chances that it would be seen accurately for what it is are between little and none.
In the upcoming experimental program our goal is to gently identify and remove most of the things you were told and you yourself said… for what they were: opinions. Reactions. 1% truth value. And to disappear them. For good.
All that hogwash is stored on what I call ‘backdrop’. It has all those words… And our job is to wipe it clean, or as clean as we can.
When you succeed with that, your astuteness level, your awareness level with go through the roof…
But this wiping your backdrop clean needs you, the participant to do the wiping. I cannot do it for you. I can create an environment where it’s easier, but that is all I can do.
Guide you.
Let’s wipe your backdrop clear
