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You’ve got to define what’s enough for you. And that is what you should aim for
Until you do that, you are dealing with too much freedom. To much freedom often leads to unclarity, to confusion, or inaction, where fear, ego, delusion rule.
It is smart to define that and it takes smarts to define the dance floor where you can win.
What is winning?
Winning always needs a game.
A game is an agreement where something is more important than something else.
For example in the game of golf the ball in the little metal cup is more important than outside of it.
If no game is set up then no matter what you produce, even if it is big, it is not a win.
So a game needs to be set up. In many areas the game can be called a context. It makes a result, a move equal success or not. Each move can be successful of not. The ultimate outcome of the game is to have more successful moves than not.
- Some people don’t set up games, and they are living a roller coaster life… not a good thing. Not good for your overall experience, for your health, for your relationships.
- Other people set up games where nothing is a win. They live a life of a loser, because they never defined what is winning.
I have set up my life
I have set up my life so I can live, but not too easily. I am the boss, I can do that. My game has financial, spiritual, intellectual, and love components. I need to win in all to have a winning life.
In my long life I’ve had games where although I was winning in some areas, I didn’t win in love… and I was miserable regardless of all the winnings.
- Love is love. Loving the work. Loving the game. Also loving myself. Loving life… Having an echo. Having at least one person who’ll weep when I die.
- Financially my game is to be able to forget about money, while I am able to pay my bills. The only reason to make more is to make sure that I can forget about the money. Forget about the numbers. Have no pressure from money, not from a lack. And also not from too much… from money that has to be spent, or circulated, or invested… ugh.
Many of my students don’t have a good game with money… they are not winning whatever game they set up. When you don’t win in your game with money you have a hard time focusing your attention, you have a hard time to care about anything or anyone else.
Many of my students don’t have a good game in love either. Same issue… it festers in the mind and gets too much attention instead of doing something constructive about it.
Spiritual or intellectual games? None of my students have any measures by which I could see that they have a game there…
Desire
Many (most) teachers teach to want more. To make your desire high enough to cause you to be motivated to do stuff.
In my experience that is not enough energy. Or if and when that energy gets strong, you’ll be all about yourself, and will have a life of hunger and greed. Not a good state.
Also there is a lot of competing desires, desires for mundane, temporal… meaning passing things often trump the main desire.
It is cold outside, cold inside… so the lure of the warm bed often trumps my desire to get up and get stuff done. To get up and make sure I’ll be able to fall asleep at night in a timely manner. So occasionally the warm bed wins, and I start a cycle of not being able to fall asleep at night.
So I use hate a lot more effectively to move me forward.
I hate insomnia. I hate depression. And I hate having nights with a sense that I am a loser. And however I want to control that, if and when I don’t get up when I set up to get up, I start having loser dreams… Like this past two nights.
I also hate to live a life of insignificance, of not making an echo, of not being extraordinary. In some ways, in many ways.
Desire I call propeller energy, hate I call jet engine energy. One pulls, the other pushes. One is weak the other is stronger. The one can fizzle out, but the other is more reliable.
When you have both…
…and you know your game because you set it up so you can win, then you can and will move. Move in life, preferably in all areas.
But what about fear? If fear is part of your jet engine then the strategy to win over fear that hinders you is to shift your attention and fear something more… so you can move.
- Between being squashed by a tree and a lion… I recommend moving towards the lion… and get out of the way of the falling tree.
- Between fear of looking ridiculous and living an insignificant life, I recommend moving towards looking ridiculous… looking ridiculous is a momentary thing… while life is a long long time to be insignificant.
Same with hate. Choose something to hate more. Find the fear in your hate.
Or turn it into a joke. It takes widening your cone of vision so what you fear doesn’t occupy your whole visual/emotional field. So you can see the background and you can manipulate it to bring it into focus.
Here is an example: I have been restless. I react to restlessness with overstuffing myself. With food. But then I have pain. I don’t like pain, but I hate restlessness, the feeling even more. So I eat.
But if I could open up my cone of vision to see myself in bed not being able to sleep, and I really hate that, then maybe I could talk myself out of eating that second or third serving of whatever. So far I haven’t done this… but now that I see what I can do, I probably will. Today… unless I forget.
But this is how life goes.
Life needs you to be a leader… then it requires you to be a manager.
Managing yourself. Peter Drucker, famed management consultant, even wrote a book about it. Here is the audio: https://yourvib.me/managing-yourself
So what does it take to manage yourself to success?
Drucker says that the first step is to take an inventory of your strengths and weaknesses.
Strengths are the things you can do. Weaknesses are the weaknesses that take you out…
We could say, based on my struggles, that one of my weaknesses is that I don’t do well with restlessness… it takes me out.
Every person has a set of weaknesses…
In my experience it is mandatory to handle the weaknesses and develop a strategy to counter them, instead of trying to fix them… even if you consider them wrong. They are… but honestly, they are not going anywhere… and if you waste your energy on trying to fix them, neither will you go anywhere…
The second step is to create a playground, or a playing field, or a dance floor that your strengths allow you to dominate successfully.
And set out to do just that…
It is like war… war to occupy an island of the size of your dance floor. You gain ground, you lose ground, but the battles are not final… neither the wins, nor the losses. The goal is to play on that playground. And win the war, not the battles.
- The enemy is fear.
- The enemy is inconsistency.
- Overconfidence.
- And I could continue listing the names of the enemy soldiers till the cows come home, because they are many.
And this is where management comes in.
My favorite manager, Angelo D’Emilio said: make them fear more facing me with an excuse of why they didn’t do what they said they would do, than any other fear. I rephrased what he said, because I actually don’t remember the words… only the gist of it. ‘Make them fear you more than they fear Sauron/god/their mother‘
Here are some other fear more quotes:
- But if they cannot love you, then make them fear you. Love is better, but fear will do the job.
- The only way to make people be faithful to you is to make them fear you more than they fear their enemies
- There is another great thing: the moment you are willing to look at your fear, and put words around it… the words inexplicably enlarge your cone of vision, and make what you fear less threatening.
Back in the day I did courses in my preparation to becoming a trainer of people. Courses with Landmark Education, courses with Peak Potentials.
The most valuable learning I had was the experience that I have fear, fear doesn’t have me.
I got to that place by doing what I was afraid to do.
Every time I made fear my b.i.t.c.h. I strengthened the muscle that helps me allow myself to have the things that have a tendency to have me.
Fear is not the only thing that seems to have you… Often you don’t even know you are afraid, because all you know is you have an avoidance urge.
- To avoid being wrong you argue.
- To avoid looking bad you pay too much attention to yourself and how you look, how you sound.
- And to avoid domination you dominate or try to.
But underneath it all it is always fear.
All fear is fear of death… You need to make peace with death, with pain, with failure…
How? By adding words.
Words paint a picture that is less scary because they make the focal point: death, smaller in proportion. The world act like adding mustache or curly hair to the picture of a scary boss…
Yesterday, just by adding the words ‘forever is a very long time‘ one of my students snapped out of despair.
Despair is about fear too…
So ultimately fear is the only enemy you have… and getting good at making it your bitch is the skill that without it you probably won’t amount to much.
Fear may be visible, but overcoming fear is entirely invisible.
People consider me fearless… I used to have more fears than I have now… I used to have a lot of fears… but I had more hates than fears… Hating to lose. Hating to be small. Definitely hating to put up with sh!t. So I looked fearless to people who observed me.
The same is true for your heroes… the fear they overcome is in the invisible.
Some people don’t overcome fear, instead they sex, drink, drug. I could add: overeat… Fear has them in their grip… They may even kill themselves.
Now that I am seeing it for what it is, I’ll make overeating my bitch too… I am smiling. I love it.
Because I hate being weak more than I hate being restless… By a lot.
Yeah, be the manager of yourself who is harder to face than the weakness, the failure, the not doing what you said you would do.
We’ll look at money tomorrow…
…through several filters, including this fear… the fear that has you. We’ll also look if you have money or money has you. So likely the distinction we’ll look through is who has whom… having. Having or having to. Having or being wagged by the tail…
Let’s look at money and fearPS: Angelo D’Emilio was my favorite Forum Leader.
Why? Because it took him years longer than for any other Forum/training leader to be allowed to lead.
He was the dunce of the bunch… Why? He was kinesthetic… and did not speak, did not hear from the mind. So the words did not go to his mind, did not come from his mind. He was authentic.
If my definition is accurate, authentic means: there is nothing in the unsaid.
When people speak from the mind, what they are not saying, what is in the unsaid is this: ‘I actually don’t know what I am saying… I am repeating words I heard.’ The torrent of smooth words that come out of one’s mouth either come from knowledge, or from the mind… the storehouse of information… not examined, experienced, used information, just information.
And just so you know, that is the difference, the main difference between the eight billion… they speak from their minds… not from experience. Re-disseminate words and not knowledge. They don’t know if what they are saying is true or not.
Angelo D’Emilio was a 1000.
And I loved him. I still do. I never spoke to him personally… but he is still speaking in my head: What would Angelo say? I can ask myself, and connect to his spirit. I am sure he is not alive. After all I knew him almost 40 years ago. And he was already a mature man. If he is still alive and you can get in touch, tell him that he made a difference.
PPS: Seeing the Big Picture:
I have found that adding words to a picture of fear or concern is almost impossible for most people. But with practice you can get good at it, and experience the magic and power of the Big Picture… where the misery is just a dot… not bigger. It can be activated if you want faster results, but if you don’t practice it, you are wasting the power.
I have found that when you can make your eyes actually look at and see items in your environment, and name the items, the panic, the tight focus disappears.
In my bedroom I now have nightlights… and now I fall asleep faster, and if I wake up in the middle of the night, I go back to sleep faster… because in the dark there is nothing else but what you are afraid of, or concerned with.
