The book with the same title was about relationships, whether to stay or to go… But if you really look, the conundrum is applicable to work, applicable to lifestyle, opinion, attitude, diet, course, program, profession. Applicable to nearly everything where you need to make a choice… but instead or choosing you are on the fence.
This choice also includes choosing your worldview. Choosing to remain with the one you have, or look at the world differently.
Both directions, both leaving and staying carry a risk…
…but only one of them carry the promise of something really new. The promise of growth.
Rare are the people who can re-invent themselves without forcing themselves. Forcing themselves by creating circumstances where they have to choose, have to grow.
When I look at my life, I’ve had really many of such instances… Big ones.
I used to call myself the phoenix, the mystical bird that burns to ashes and rises anew from the ashes. Yeah, that used to be me.
It would be nice to be able to say that I was conscious, that I was aware of what I was doing. I wasn’t.
And to tell the truth, most of those choices took me down… to a worse life-circumstance.
- I think my first choice was to abandon the violin for the guitar.
- Then to abandon music for a career in architecture.
- And then to leave a job to start another one where I was even more clueless than in the one I was leaving.
- Then leaving other jobs… each going deeper and deeper to where I was incompetent…
- finally to leave employment altogether.
- Then left Hungary where I had a name, friends, an apartment, a car, a life, to go to a country where I had nothing.
- And then leave that country to go to yet another country where I not only had nothing, where I was not welcome.
So yeah. Becoming who I am today went through many choices to leave… More even than I’ve listed
We could say that it’s a pattern.
Do I regret any of those choices?
Yes and no.
I would have never become who I am, fully, at any of the places I left… so no. I think if the purpose of life is to become more and more fully who you are, then I did the right thing every time.
The other choice would be to become the best at what you are doing, whether it is allowing you the freedom to be you, or not.
I could have become (where I was heading), the best, the most courageous, the most inventive architect in Hungary… used up completely, but unfulfilled because I wanted to speak, I wanted to think, I wanted to ‘dance’ what I wanted to express… instead of building buildings.
Here I am much later in life, and my relationship to buildings is nothing. Not a thing. I don’t care. None of me resonates. Buildings don’t even show up on my radar… My hunch is that I went into architecture because as an empath I was fulfilling on someone else’s desire, not on mine.
These were the decisions in big things…
And this question: too good to leave, too bad to stay comes up even in the small things, the invisible things.
Opinions, attitudes, worldview…
My self-coaching article I do frequently on these pages are the best times I have writing. I love re-living the experience of the lightening incident that pulled me down to the bottom of the river.
Why I love doing that? I don’t know.
What I do know is that every time I come up to the surface of the river, I am fuller in life, there is more of me than was before.
In my coaching, in my teaching I ask people to leave things…
The principle is the Anna Karenina Principle. or what religion calls the strait and narrow. Grow through abandoning. Abandoning what is maybe nice to have, but what anchors you to unhappy, unmotivated, to it’s all-about-you, to being greedy, stingy, and the adjectives of what you are anchored could fill a whole page… so I’ll stop here.
What I didn’t like about Ben Franklin’s approach is that he targeted virtues to embody. Not what to abandon but what to acquire.
The strait and narrow asks you to leave seeming virtues and benefits, ways of being, urges, ideals, standards, moral judgment, so you can become all you can become.
Counter intuitive… and a diametrically different approach to life.
But if it is true that all happy families are alike. Unhappy families are unhappy in their own ways, and, of course it isn’t 100% true, it is only 99% true… then this approach of abandoning what is not necessary is a faster and more reliable way to achieve what you want to achieve in life than acquiring more, better, or different.
Ben Franklin’s way, or most people’s way of amassing whatever they consider good to have a life they want, according to Source, is only 1% effective.
Most courses teach you to acquire. Why? Because creating a course, teaching a course is a commercial endeavor. The main purpose, 91% of the purpose of the course is to generate insatiable hunger in the buyers, so they come back and buy other things. Repeat business.
Even my business is somewhat like that. Many of my most popular products are additive… not subtractive… as the strait and narrow would demand.
Why? Because of you.
Because we live in a commercial world, and the going worldview is that the guy with the most toys wins. It’s a lie… and you swallowed it, hook, line and sinker.
I could sell the same exact things, energies, activation, everything to facilitate the strait and narrow, but for that YOU, my dear, would have to be willing to look what you have to let go of to actually benefit from it.
For example, to benefit from the DNA adjustment, you, at the minimum, would have to OWN that you are not who you present to the world being. That you just want, and want, and want… and maybe give nothing, deserve nothing, earned nothing. Ugh… who would want to go for that that?! You just want the benefits.
Or another example: you would like to become a high achiever, but for that you would have to give up having to have your nose in every pot, pretending that you are superwoman…
All those pretenses are actually killing you and killing your life.
You would have to become ordinary.
And in my observation, that is the least attractive thing anyone can think of. Not a hero? Not important? Not anything special? Nah… not going there!
So if I had someone to ask favors of (I don’t) then I would ask for clients who can choose leaving… leaving a place, leaving an attitude, leaving a mindset.
And, of course, for that someone to have the courage to look, see, and tell the truth.
In a world of courage deficient billions that is a rare person to find.
Can you become that? Certainly. If what you want for yourself is not possible if you stay… stay at the same place, continue having the same attitude and mindset.
One of the first things to abandon is the idea that what worked when you were little will work, and does work in life. The entitlement. Insisting that you know. The little prince or the little princess. Self-importance. Taking yourself too seriously.
The book Too good to leave, too bad to stay was written by this California psychotherapist… Mira Kirshbaum… She has deep insights into people, and it is worth listening to her speak as if she held up a mirror to you, so you can see yourself, maybe for the first time, clearly. Here is her speaking on a podcast…
Here is another opportunity to see the truth and tell the truth. So you can choose…
On June 9th I’ll have a workshop. The same workshop is going to be given as many times as there is still demand for it. It is always the same workshop, but what is different is the issues that come up, or who you are… because unless you change between session, you are really not the ideal person for me to coach: you are not open to change, not open to leave your unproductive opinions. If that is you, I’ll let you know.
I ask you to pay $10 to participate. It enrolls you in as many of these workshop as you wish. I don’t want lookie loos…
The workshop is simple:
- We start with you making two lists. Areas of your life that work. And areas of your life that don’t work well for you.
- Then we’ll pick one of the areas that don’t work well, and look what is there. What you are doing, who you are being, how you are doing things there, and your results.
- In the third step we look what will predictably happen if nothing changes there. In a year, in five years, in ten years.
- The fourth step: we look, given where the current trend would take us, we look what we could do, how we could change how we do things, our attitude, what we bring to that area, to make a difference and arrest the predictable trend.
Some of those will be inspiring. To you. They will be new and exciting. Most… not so much. Most will be attempts to fix what you see as wrong.
- If and when you find something that is inspiring, you can attempt to bring that to your life.
- In the sixth step we’ll see that surprisingly that new way of being is what’s missing in every area of your life… and that makes it even more exciting.
As a gift for just participating, I’ll activate what needs to be activated in your DNA so you can actually be able to be that new way. It is almost always a new capacity.
I sell those every day for $24-$45 a pop.
If you use them, you’ll be able to grow through this seminar series in leaps and bounds… guaranteed.
The What’s missing workshop seriesThe current schedule:
FRI, JUN 9, 2023, 05:00 PM – 08:00 PM EDT
WED, JUN 14, 2023, 12:00 PM – 03:00 PM EDT
SUN, JUN 18, 2023, 05:00 PM – 08:00 PM EDT
SAT, JUN 24, 2023, 07:00 AM – 10:00 AM EDT
You can come to one session, or many… You can cancel your registration of each session. But then you’ll have to pay again to participate in another session.
You can bring or send friends and family to the call, as long as you let them know how to participate. I really appreciate any and all referrals.
