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You can have two kinds of attitude in life, and which one you have will decide what kind of life you’ll live.
And no, it is not innate. You are not born with it, you assumed that attitude, for reasons of your own.
The two attitudes are
1. coming from
2. going to
I measure this in the Starting Point Measurements as outcome dependence.
I measure to what degree you hope, expect, effort, work, pretend, lie, cheat so that you get what you want. Security, health, wealth, love, fulfillment, happiness…
You want Life, people, society to give you that you want… And your happiness, fulfillment, etc. depend on what you get.
As an empath I get more than my share of what people give me… unwanted… People give me their emotions, their attitudes.
So here I am sitting feeling someone’s sadness. The attitude is ‘not enough‘. What is not enough I don’t know, but the emotion is weepy. It being Christmas, it may have to do something with the holiday, but I don’t know. I actually get this ‘not enough‘ attitude given to me quite often lately.
Reality, the distinction
A person who has that attitude doesn’t know that reality is meaning-less… i.e. in reality you have what you have. And it is always enough. What isn’t there only exists in YOUR imagination, not in reality. There is nothing that should be there, could be there… What is there is what is reality.
The moment this person would get the distinction ‘reality’ they would stop grieving about what isn’t, and start addressing what is.
They would be in their power: in the driving seat… instead of being a passenger in life who can only complain, cry, grieve.
People draw a blank when they look to see what it would take to drive their lives.
They can’t see that both what you consciously do and what you consciously don’t do will either drive your life or put you in the passenger seat. And doing includes speaking… even speaking inside your head.
Speaking is action for the powerful, and is part of driving your life…
The person whose feelings I feel right now, the ‘not enough‘ is a passenger.
One of the predictable things over Christmas is: people get dehydrated.
Dehydrated through talking too much, through drinking too much coffee, tea, whatever… Or miscalculating how much coherent water they need for their trip visiting friends.
Yesterday I made myself some burned sugar. And I added some almond flour.
I asked myself the question. Am I driving my life, or will I allow my rules to drive my life?
I chose driving. I took some Copper with my burned sugar. And I enjoyed it. It was my holiday treat to myself. It was about one ounce of sugar. And it hit the spot. And I am well.
I have the same relationship to getting up in the morning: I take it always to ‘what or who is driving my life?‘ and then I do what driving would mean.
Until you get clear about what it is like and what it takes to drive your life, you are not coachable, you are not guidable.
You’ll remain spiritually on a 3-year old’s level who, when offered to teach him to tie his shoe laces, he defiantly answers: ‘I already know how to do it!!!‘ while he doesn’t.
It’s always a good idea to ask the question: what is driving my life right now? Frequently.
Is it the need to appease Sophie? lol. Is it your rules? Your self-concern to be blameless? Blameless in everything! It’s not me, it’s my water! It’s not me, it is my fear!
Until you learn and start driving your life, you are unteachable, untrainable, uncoachable, unguidable.
One thing you ‘delegate‘ driving to is your self-concern, protecting your ‘precious I’.
The method I have been successful at is the inversion method.
Instead of fearing being blamed, take it on voluntarily. Say: I am responsible for all of it, whether it is my direct doing or not.
And do what you can to make it work. Your water, your program, your job, your relationship. Your health.
Another way to use inversion is to stand your fancy self-image on its head. If you are trying to prove that you are smart, or that you are always right, or that you can do it… find the effective inverse of that.
In my case the inverse was ‘stupid’. For you it can be ‘I am wrong about everything‘ and look twice before you ‘declare’ like an oracle, as is your habit. It can be ‘I am sure I can’t see what needs done, and I am not sure it’s me who should do it‘ to gain precious seconds where you can reclaim your driving seat, instead of fixing what seems to be the trouble, or doing what seems to be needed to be done.
Obviously, this will slow you down.
Take the steering wheel and the pedals back from the automatic knee-jerk reactions that have been driving your life.
It is always going to be a conscious choice… conscious I said.
Driving your life 24/7 won’t even available on the human being level. Because you cannot put it on autopilot. Just like self-driving cars won’t overtake life… I don’t believe so. And just like self-driving cars, your life driven by your rules, by your family, by your concerns is a killing machine.
I think that identifying what is your automatic, knee jerk attitude and behavior in life is going to be the first step.
And then use the inversion method to create a statement that acts as a reminder to avoid doing the knee jerk, automatic thing… that is driving your life to the ditch.
I teach this in the workshop ‘From inflated self image to humbling’