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The secret is SEEING.
Seeing is a metaskill, says the visual artist.
He probably meant a skill that takes you to the next century. Because it is undeniable that as the world changes, the skillset that makes people make a living even now is not enough to make a living in the future…
Meta, the word, means a go-between. Like a bridge. Going between one and another piece… Like the gap between two things.
And maybe I am twisting words, but unless you have that bridge between how it is, and how you envision it, there is no path.
When I look at the people I have trained, I have consulted, I have had conversations with, the most obvious missing skill was this bridge: seeing it, building it, walking it.
To be perfectly honest, I am, myself, am one of those people.
It is MY weakest capacity. You can call it process. Seeing the process, the path, and walking it are meta skills.
But what about seeing the end result?
That is missing as much as seeing the path…
Of course… one could say, but not quite so.
There are ton of programs whose entire purpose is to have you create somewhat of a vision for yourself and your life.
Vision boards are a great example. MindMovies are another.
You ‘create’ that vision, mostly from copying what you see other people seem to enjoy, and you wait.
As if the universe were set up like a takeout kitchen: you place your order and then you wait for the delivery, the short order cooks.
I even participated in a program like that, back in 2007, lead by Pam Ragland.
She actually said the words: place your order and then wait for the delivery.
It doesn’t work that way… her life is an example of that. Just google it.
There are so many issues with this worldview that it would take several articles to flash it out.
- The biggest issue is that there is no ‘meta’.
- The second biggest issue is that whatever people say they want the ‘vision’ to be is stuff.
And getting stuff is like hitting the jackpot… it comes to who you are… so you, yourself, are not built to handle it.
You are like that scrawny kid that is thrown into the Coliseum to entertain the crowds as you are torn to shreds. Throw a ‘Maximus’ in there and the battle is at least balanced…
Maximus is the hero of the movie Gladiator. Russell Crowe had to lose 40 lbs and gain muscle to even LOOK like someone who could fight and win in the arena.
Or one of my clients’ story. Her husband’s business was deeply it debt. She took it over. Her vision was that she would make it thriving. Any steps?
Did the vision have legs?
No. She had bravado, enthusiasm, but no steps.
This was decades ago. She hasn’t realized in the decades in between that she has no meta skills whatsoever. Lots of bravado, lots of enthusiasm, but no steps.
So the state of humanity, through cultivation, I’d say, arrived at a place where people know nothing, have no respect for, can’t design a process.
How did it happen?
First off: it is a capacity. A DNA capacity. According to the book ‘The Life You Were Born To Live‘, it is a soul correction issue. Soul Correction is a numerology based system.
Looking at my clients, whatever is written in the Law of Process is the biggest missing…
So what do we need to actually NEED a meta… i.e. process?
Where humanity is is not an accident.
Ultimately humanity has been trained, painstakingly, to get information from words, and not from their senses, not from reality.
Words can be made up… hundred percent cut off from reality.
And humanity has been fed, for about 200 years, or since the Industrial Revolution.
The Industrial Revolution was the transition to new manufacturing processes in Great Britain, continental Europe, and the United States, that occurred during the period from around 1760 to about 1820–1840. ~ Wikipedia
In the Industrial Revolution machines came between people and production… Not tools… tools are still connecting you to the world… machines don’t.
When in 1977, in my first driving lesson, I connected my foot pressing on the pedal and the car moving, I did an important thing most people never do: I connected my action and my life… in a way.
One of the things people lost with this 200 year old ‘lose touch with reality’ process is the experience and the consciousness, that it is their actions that cause their lives. And no matter how many popular memes tell you that your life is the result of what you do, people live as if it weren’t true.
Here are two of those:
It is not what happens but what you do with it that matters…
And the second:
You create your own reality.
It’s gotten so bad that people actually say: I am/You are entitled to your own truth… Ugh.
So, obviously, unless you wake up from this dream where you have nothing to do with how your life turns out, where you only have to wish for what you want, you have stopped to be human…
I have a number of computers. I am writing this on a Windows 7 computer. It is barely hanging in there. I am forcing it, daily, to do what a computer is supposed to do… to be a match to what Life wants it to do.
It feels to me that there will be a time, probably before my own demise, where I’ll have to throw it to the trash… And weep my good bye.
Humanity is at the same place… with you in it.
Unless you experience and internalize a moment of awakening, like I had in 1977, you are heading to be a throw-away.
You and eight billion others.
When I muscletest how many people actually live knowing that it is them that drive their life… I get the 1000.
So just know: you live in a culture of passengers. Wherever the vehicle goes, you go. And all a passenger can do is protest, cry, campaign, hate, love… all ineffective.
Unless you actually drive what you can drive, your own life, you are a passenger with no power.
Yesterday in the Friday Podcast I gave homework to Bonnie, my partner in that podcast.
I asked her to create, formulate, every day, one or more requests for coaching.
Formulating the request is what trains you to see the world, to see your life, to see your results as a consequence of YOUR actions.
Ultimately, done diligently and skillfully, it can weaken, maybe even remove the 200 year cultivation to turn you into a puppet.
So what is the formula of a request for coaching?
Here you go:
Point A: I have… It is…
Point B: I desire… I want… It would be better… etc. this way. (vision)
The request for coaching presents the gap between how it is (A) and how it could be (B)
The gap can be in any area of life. It can be mindset, it can be behavior, it can be result. Being, doing, having…
The gap needs to be small… So it is not going from A to Z… as the mind movies, the vision boards suggest. No… A to B.
So it’s iterative… i.e. small steps. Tiny steps.
More often than not, the first A to B is going to be about removing unproductive behaviors, unproductive, unhealthy, delusional worldview, giving up or stopping stuff.
This first step can take years, by the way. But just like Russell Crowe had to drop 40 lbs to even LOOK like a Maximus, you’ll have to drop your own forty pounds…
And judging from reports from the making of the movie, Russell Crowe would have had to remove tons of entitlement, tons of hysteria, tons of self-righteousness, tons of impatience, tons of superiority to even RESEMBLE Maximus.
Yeah. Years.
Bonnie and I have been talking every week for about a year and a half… All the calls were 90% about what to drop.
It sounds like she is ready to drive her coaching from now on… by formulating requests for coaching.
But sounding like that may be similar to how Russell Crowe looked like Maximus. So we shall see.
That whole idea of the gap, the word that activated her visual capacity on the call, the idea that she could look at life with lots of gaps between how it is and how it could be, preferably.
For many of you the word ‘gap’ won’t do anything. You need to get there. There is probably a lot more stuff that would need to be removed for you to be able to see, that ‘Oh, it’s a gap!’
If you can see it, if the concept of ‘it’s a gap’ feels like good news, congratulations.
This is how SEEING is a meta skill.
According to muscletest, only three of my readers/clients can see it as that.
Why? I say, and it’s a guess, they have participated with me enough to drop behaviors, or see them as something to drop… even if they haven’t quite removed what is unproductive.
If you ask them, and it’s a guess again, what allowed for that, while others in the same programs did not… I would say that they had a glimmer of a vision. But even a glimmer of a vision is more than no vision… when it comes to starting to consider that your life is going to go where you drive it.
One of these three, for the first time ever, has decided to not participate in the merriments of Christmas with his family.
Your family, like the other crabs in a crab bucket, want you to stay put, and never climb out and start driving your own life.
Holidays, get-togethers, funerals, weddings are the energy exchange places where you are pulled back into the crab bucket.
It’s not your spouse, it is not your partner… it is the gatherings of more than the people you live with.
I would even say: some courses, programs, that you regularly participate in. AA, Landmark Education seminars, anywhere where there seems to be a community.
I started to grow in earnest when I stopped going to Landmark Education seminars… even though those seminars were supposed to cause growth… but not the community. The community of Landmark Education is a crab bucket… sorry to say.
And, to my utter dismay, my workshops were also a crab bucket. That is one of the reasons I have stopped offering workshops.
Growth, it seems, is a lonely task. You have you, you have the gaps, and maybe, if you are serious about it, you have your coach or coaches.
Depending on where you are, your path will be slightly different.
For most people I know, their first job is to expand their ability to see.
The 67 steps is a great vehicle for that… if you know that that is what you are doing. Learning to see. Learning to look outside of you, outside of your mind, to see.
When it will come to seeing the gap, both ends will be based on looking and seeing. Without accurately seeing both ends, both A and B, there is no chance for effective action…
The 67 steps, the way I ask people to do it, the way I monitor that they are doing it, is an excellent vehicle…
Just listening to it won’t do much for you. Forcing yourself to look and see by documenting it is what does the trick. Because without using the looking and seeing faculty, the material goes directly into the mind and becomes worthless Tree of Knowledge.
Start developing your seeing capacityPS: What I haven’t spoken of in this article is accuracy or astuteness.
Accurately see what the gap actually is. Misidentifying the gap leads to false runs…
More in upcoming articles… But for now: looking longer, avoiding ‘cheap closure now’ type of behavior, re-looking in the middle of a step, will eliminate a lot of the mischief caused by misidentifying the gap.
This is where having a skillful coach is most important… by the way.
