Podcast: Play in new window | Download
This is the way the cookie crumbles: your life, the quality of your life depends on you.
I’ve read somewhere that people are only curious about something they already know. Not ‘know about’ but actually know. Had experience with.
Knowing about is idle curiosity: useless.
- You don’t know the river until you wade into it.
- You don’t know a person unless you wade in and deal with him.
- And you don’t know a poem until you try to say it out loud.
And this is how it is with this work.
You may read my articles, you may read what others have to say, but it doesn’t, can’t touch you, because you have no experience with it, so it can’t touch you.
And you can’t be curious either: you don’t know it.
My age 1 clients are not curious yet. My age 2 client: neither. Age 3… some aspects, maybe. Very maybe.
Age 5: curious. Can sense that there is something there, and pokes at it. This week he is trying split pea soup… even though he has never had it before. Curious.
How come I have clients who have never waded into the ‘river’?
I guess it is because I accepted incurious underachievers for clients.
Today I ordered pommelo in my grocery delivery. I normally buy grapefruits, but muscletest didn’t like the grapefruit in plastic bag at BJ’s…
I normally get my grapefruits at Aldi, but I need this week something Aldi doesn’t have.
Anyway, the Pommelo is expensive. So I looked on google what the price should be. And also looked what questions people have about Pommelo… and about celery roots, and some other things I can’t find in my usual stores.
The most frequent questions were about pommelo… asking what it tastes like.
That is you… you ask about the ‘river’, and never wade in.
Or some of you put your pinkie in the water and you think you are done.
- My client who for a decade did nothing but play computer games, is now doing serious work. He grew through the Reality Challenge.
- My client who is going for her RN degree in March… she is age 5, emotional/intellectual age.
She EARNED it during the Validation Challenge.
Challenges are the least expensive and most immersive tools.
I challenge you, and you challenge yourself.
If you do challenge yourself. Very few do… ever. Anywhere.
And those who don’t challenge themselves are the sorry but opinionated people who Roosevelt, Teddy, talked about.
He railed against cynics who looked down at men who were trying to make the world a better place. ‘The poorest way to face life is to face it with a sneer,‘ he said. ‘A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticize work which the critic himself never tries to perform, an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with life’s realities—all these are marks, not … of superiority but of weakness.‘
He doesn’t talk about the billions who, in addition, may know about, want to know about, interested about things that can’t be known by looking on. Asking about.
They need to be involved in… The work, the assignment, life.
Not in the mind, mind you! In reality.
In the mind you cannot feel, cannot see, cannot experience reality, so ‘the work’ cannot work on you.
Some of my clients don’t know reality. They only know what THEY said about reality, but that is NOT reality, that is a mish-mash…
If you want to effect reality then you want to, need to separate reality from what you said about it… and then you can effect reality.
If you are ‘working’ on the mish-mash reality (the occurrence, or some others call it the ‘personal reality’), your results will be disappointing.
- Some of my underachiever clients work on their personal reality, and of course, cannot produce anything.
- Others have never seen reality to comment, or interpret… their ‘personal reality’ is entirely all talk, no facts.
- I work on reality by removing my opinion, meaning, interpretation. Always? Almost. 91% of the time.
That is the secret of effectiveness. to work on and in reality. That is the secret of driving your own life. And of feeling good about yourself.
So what are the shoulds a sign of?
They are the sing that you are trying to effect the ‘personal reality’… because no should has anything to do with reality… EVER. In reality everything is… and the chips fall where the chips fall, and the cookie crumbles the way the cookie crumbles.
And every moment there is a new reality to relate to… while your shoulds relate the a past, a past that isn’t any more. Unreality.
When you can see that, not intellectually, but by seeing it, you can raise your intellectual/emotional age.
How high? It also depends on what you actually do… and whether you see passively, or you see a new opening for action.
Landmark Education’s Transformation ‘statement’, when realized for life, creates a ‘one thousand’… a rare specimen.
0% of Landmark Education graduates are able to live by that.
Why? Because it can only be realized by immersion… like the river.
Challenges are immersion tools… But you are too cowardly or too intellectually slothful, or both, to wade in. And yes, I am talking about you.
If you take it as an insult: you just proved my point for me.
And if you take it as a compliment because you are ‘in the challenge’… don’t.
You may still ‘think about’ instead of SEE. So consider that you are in the position to SEE… which doesn’t mean you’ll see.
If it were that easy, millions would be doing it.
PS: the least successful clients
The least successful clients are the ones that have bought into the b.s. the manifestation/attraction teachers spout. Those teachings all work with imagination, thoughts, and not reality… Thoughts don’t do anything with reality… only action does.
Then why is it that when you change your attitude people respond differently to you? Changing your attitude actually changes your actions… and that is what people respond to. Not to the thoughts. Not even to the attitude. But to what you do and how you do it.
Now, is it useful to change your attitude? Hell yeah. Most of what doesn’t work in your life isn’t working because of your attitude.
Changing your attitude, even if it is just a temporary change, is an action. And even if nothing inside changes, your behavior changes.
Three of my clients have tested out a new attitude: being interested.
Nothing inside changed. They weren’t really interested. They were still ‘pompous, judgmental and completely self-absorbed’ as the previous article says they were. And yet life seemed to change with their behavior.
That is what the phrase ‘fake it till you make it’ promotes…
At some point, if you take it all the way, they could have become interested… At some point. But two of the three dropped it… It was too much work.
