Podcast: Play in new window | Download
I HATE non-fiction. Even in audio, listening to it. I hate being when someone lectures me. It makes my brain stop working.
And no matter what the book or course is teaching, I cannot tune in. Even when it is important to me. Why? I cannot feel that I matter to the speaker. And I need to feel that I matter or I switch off.
Whereas when I read novels, it feels like an honor and a privilege to get an over the shoulder private view of what’s happening. And what is happening, at least in the novels I read, is interesting to me. Because I am interested in people, interested in the world.
But not that interested in what non-fiction writers want to teach. They don’t manage to make me want to read it, even when I know I need what they teach. Or that what they teach would benefit me.
So when I decide to read something non-fiction, I make sure that when I just had enough, after about 10 pages, I put it down and switch to the novel I can read. I have about 500 novels on my Kindle…
I bought a book a few years ago, The One Sentence Persuasion Course – 27 Words to Make the World Do Your Bidding.
It is a short book, supposedly you can get through it in 30 minutes, so that is three segments for me, given my inability to read a non-fiction for longer than 10 minutes.
So I have read two thirds of it yesterday… AGAIN.
Interestingly when I first read it it a few years ago, the message didn’t land.
What does the book teach?
The most important thing the book teaches that if everything remains the same, he can’t help us. If everything continues to be about us, if we are the center of the Universe, then this book won’t help us. Why because to persuade others we need to be INTERESTED in them. We need to be on their side, in their world. or nothing will change.
And that is a big problem for most people: they cannot get out their own way.
An interesting tidbit here: the author, Blair Warren has written another book, The Professional Victim’s Handbook: Stop Working and Start Whining. That title triggered a laughing fit for me. I can’t find a copy of it. I spent hours searching for it.
Why? Because that is almost everyone who comes to my site. A professional victim. They stop working and start whining.
How can I tell?
It’s most clearly visible in the about-me score.
That number is always a snapshot. The most important number is when things don’t go the way you want them to go. What is your number then?
Even if and when that number gets lower, it is just temporary. It will rise again. and you and your self-concern will be in your own way… again.
We humans live our life, we look at life and other people through ourselves. We are always in the way…
I lead a workshop yesterday that was to take a different look at our originating story, our seed level, our incident that we call ‘break in belonging‘.
My intention was to start the conversation on the birth of our Frankenstein monster-like identity, but that is not what happened.
Instead, inside the context of this workshop we suddenly saw a whole new view of that originating incident. A view that explains, that JUSTIFIES how we are, how we have been ever since that incident.
It was staggering.
Now, truth be told, I was doing the looking for all of us. I am not sure if any of my students are capable to get out of their ways, yet, and look truly from the side. To be able to see what happened differently, to see it without bringing in the already always same old same old story.
The other new thing was that this time, given my original intention, we were looking for the decisions, the life-defining decisions we made during and following that incident, given our interpretation of what happened.
Adult as a possibility
That interpretation and that decision has been preventing us from becoming an adult, from accessing our adult capacities.
Most of what the world throws at us, most of what would make us successful, happy, healthy, and fulfilled depend on our use of our adult capacities, instead of what we decided as a really young child.
To have choices, choices that young version of us hadn’t seen. Choices thus we still don’t see. Don’t see because these choices would only exist for us if we looked through the way an adult can see the world.
There is another measure in the Starting Point Measurements. To what degree you use your adult capacities. (19. To what degree you have access to your adult capacities %). Adult capacities, discerning and suck are only available if and when there is nothing wrong. When you manage to transcend ‘wrong’. Whenever you can’t or don’t, you are a 3-year old without ANY adult capacities.
Unfortunately I don’t see many examples, I don’t see many people I could observe who act as adults. And even if you saw one, you would not know what is ‘special’ about them. Because their attitude, their context is in the invisible realm of reality.
A person with high access to their adult capacities is becoming a rare parson. A person who is using their adult capacities, who act as an adult. They are unflappable, productive, and joyful.
Instead of adults we see a bunch of toddlers, kindergartners running about with their nappies full, waiting for someone to change them into a clean diaper…
What Blair Warren wrote in his other book is actual and timely as anything ever written, maybe more. The book: The Professional Victim’s Handbook: Stop Working and Start Whining.
By the way, just because someone writes about something, doesn’t mean, doesn’t even often mean that they practice or can practice what they preach. I think Blair Warren is one of those people. An insight is a dime a dozen…
That first incident
If in that first incident we decided several things. Most importantly we decided what was wrong with us. And we decide what IS the way to fix the injustice we suffered. We wanted to prevent that feeling, that injustice from happening again. We never wanted to feel that way ever again.
Interestingly, the way the human machine works is that the ‘solution’ takes us back to the same exact feeling we tried to avoid in the first place.
The technical term for this mechanism is ‘racket’. On the surface, in the visible part we are fixing… but in the back room we are proving that we were right to feel the way we felt. That we are blameless, and not in any way responsible for what happened.
Interestingly inside that ‘racket’, inside that machine, working towards what we want is not a good idea. Instead complaining and whining is the way to go.
Also blaming, judging, pointing fingers, claiming you can’t is also a yes-yes.
Another ‘good’ behavior is beating yourself up.
But working towards what you want? NO F-ING WAY!
Doing what needs to be done, doing what works so you can feel good about yourself is exactly the opposite of what you decided would work when you were an upset 3-year old.
Blair Warren says that the key to have the world do you bidding is to put your attention on others. Put your attention on people whom you want to do your bidding. On them, instead of keeping it all on yourself.
And if that is so, and I can attest to it, then leaving that ‘solution’ you decided on, the decision of your 3-year old is the most important thing you can learn in life, if you want to be successful and happy.
You can buy the recording of workshop on June 27. Or if that is not helping you, you can ask me to do a workshop where you can be present and you can actually see your decision anew, from a new angle. A new angle, a new view. An angle that will help you to leave it behind, or at least lessen its grip on your life, so you can become all you can become. An adult.
Get the recording of workshop on June 27It started a few people on this path.
If you are a foreigner, like I am, nappies are diapers. and most children are not toilet trained fully by age 3.
