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I had a conversation the other day with my core group. They felt to me rudderless, directionless, low on energy… like a floater.
What’s a floater, you ask? A floater is like stork sh!t… floats in the air and occasionally drops on the ground. Storks are known to poop while in the air… their poop dries out and starts its own rise and fall journey with the air stream… no innate motive power. A floater is like that.
So the crucial question to ask ‘what gives you innate motive power?‘ Because I can tell you, the difference between life as stork sh!t and a person are different like night and day.
But what are the states of no inner motive power… let’s look.
Directionless means that I have no direction determined or found to take effective action towards.
Directionless
Directionless is similar to a state of an army that has no battle to participate in. But that fact doesn’t mean that they don’t have a context:
Context spells out your right to exist.
Without context you are a floater, a waste product that will dissolve into the water without ever experiencing living.
So what does the army do when there is no battle to fight? They keep in shape, they repair equipment, they practice, they learn so that when the fight comes, they are prepared in every way. They are in growth mode: always.
So what does directionless mean to me? It means that until I know which specific direction to move to, I continue my work in discovering what zaps people’s life force, what increases it, I continue to work on myself and increase my energy so when the ‘fight’ comes, I can move fast and steady.
Rudderless
Rudderless means that you don’t know how to direct your vessel.
Your attention span is short. Your ability to move your attention is lacking. Your energy level is low. And the ability to act committedly is missing.
Rudderless means you leak your energy every which way, and you spend your time leaking more, instead of doing the work of building yourself up.
In army analogy, rudderless means that the army has no leadership, has no scheduled workouts, boot camps, classes, equipment maintenance. They are not ready to fight, they are just hanging there… Utter confusion, utter inability leading to heavy losses.
Low on energy, low on life-force
Low on energy means that you may have a good context, you may have a good direction, but you are low on motive power, low on Life Force, and do nothing to increase it. You are a dreamer, you live in your the cave of your mind, in your visualizations, in hope…
Also: You are dehydrated, you eat crap and call it food, you sleep much, or hang out on so-called social media, maybe participate in meaningless discussions on chat sites. You have time for everything, because you don’t have a life.
Floater
Floater means you have no direction, no context, and no energy. You go where the water pushes you.
Most people who visit my site are evenly distributed in these four groups.
- Setting a direction is not something I teach often, but the Soaring Method is an example of that art.
- Setting a context is something I occasionally touch on… The Carrot and Stick series was a good example of that.
- Increasing your energy: I have often focused on increasing your energy: asking you to reclaim your energy from all the leaks ‘modern’ life, the leaks current culture wants you to spring and be a sacrificial lamb.
What are the main signs of being low on energy, or have energy that is misdirected, misused, and useless?
- Self-hate, self-disgust, self-doubt seem to be in every person I see
- Being judgmental, comparing, redirecting self-hate is close second
- Explaining, justifying, rationalizing, finding excuses for not doing anything worthwhile
- Making weak attempts at fixing self or others
- Being dutiful, picking up inspiration from outside sources
- Extorting attention from what would matter by redirecting the attention to what the other person likes to talk about
- Playing the game of ‘I am at least as spiritual, loving, caring, winning, blah blah blah’ as the best of you on Facebook, and other social circles
- Pets, children, grandchildren and other clueless innocents to trade attention to warmth, affection, to feel worthy to be alive
- oh… last but not least: talk talk talk… or type type type… read read read. worthless crap. The sign of delusions and lies… another major leak of energy
Doing anything in earnest? Oh no… that is not part of the signs.
Stop the leaks…
One of the factors, one of the inner dynamics that makes the leaking/floating etc. permanent is your anchor to doom. Your doom is the imaginary consequence of your dominant belief’s therefore.
Another energy I am noticing is entitlement. Your firm belief that you deserve to get everything you ever wanted without putting out, without work, without production. Why? Because you always have. This is the opposite of the doom, but works exactly the same way: there is even an anchor to entitlement…
Here is an example: this little boy wants to go a different way than his parents. They carry heavy bags of groceries, so the keep on going. The little boy remains on the street corner. He starts to cry. A nice lady comes over and comforts him. The mother runs back and carries the little boy home.
He got his way: managed to dominate. He got ‘love’. In fact, he successfully extorted love.
Now he is going to repeat it till the cows come home, never ever be willing to do anything to earn what he wants… he is an extortionist… His doom is getting what he wants… but he never feels good about himself, about anything he gets yet he is bound to this entitled behavior and extorting.
Pulling his ‘anchor to doom’ is futile: he will re-hook it, because it is much easier than working.
What do I predict can happen? What can you expect?
Resistance runs deep, and insights come with time and practice.
The energetic intervention, you can call spiritual surgery are:
- adjusting your Predatory Genes (dramatic!)
- pulling your anchor to doom
- if needed, pulling your anchor to entitlement
But what I do is what I can do… You need to do what YOU can do. What you NEED to do for your life to change.
You need to develop the muscle to actually swim. And not just around the doom, but to actually set a direction, swim, and reach it.
Experience your own motive power, experience your Inner power, and build Inner Authority.
I learned the method back in 1987.
At the time I was an unhappy hourly paid architect, with no hopes that I’d ever be happy. I despised the kind of ‘architecture’ practiced in this country, so I had no ambition to learn and acquire a licence to practice, so I worked in other people’s offices.
I commuted from New Jersey, and I hated every minute of every day. I lived in a one room efficiency apartment. To balance life out I spent all my money on Landmark Education courses, including the course where I learned this method.
The method was simple: you get yourself a notebook where every night you set out what to do next day, priorotize it.
At the beginning of every day you read what you said you would do that day, and do it. At the end of the day you do ‘powerful debriefing‘, also simple: you say: ‘I said I would do X. I did X or I did Y…‘
Powerful debriefing is the most effective way to get you out of the cave. You can only do powerful debriefing in reality, where there is no ‘no’, there is no comparison, only facts. I did this. I did that.
And then you either celebrate or recommit. Recommitting is simple: you reschedule the task for the day when you can do it. If you didn’t do X five times, then you declare it a dud, and remove it from your calendar… but move it in the ‘incomplete cycles’ of your book where all the unfulfilled dreams and projects go.
Once a month you go to that section of your book, and see if any of those incomplete cycles is ready to be reconsidered.
Brilliant system.
Also, in the beginning you set a ‘true north’ for your journey. A North Star. It may change: mine didn’t change much. It was to ‘build a publishing empire’
Somehow, deep inside, I knew I had something to say. I didn’t know what. that got revealed much much later. In fact 20 years later.
But I have been ‘publishing’ ever since… Although it took a few steps.
So in 1988 I quit architecture.
I apprenticed printing, typesetting, learned desktop publishing, applied for a job with a small newspaper locally, sold advertising for them, got promoted to lay out the magazine for the newspaper, delivered the paper for them, wrote ‘dining reviews’ for them. In November of 1988, a year and a month after I did the course, I started my own little magazine where I could say what I had to say…
Then in 1989 I started another magazine that was wildly successful and used a lot of my training in architecture to do it well… That magazine had an 11 year long successful run.
I got deadly ill… so I switched to online… and ran that same publication online for another 15 or so years.
And today I have this site… you can safely say: it is still publishing. I have my mobile app… and you can say: that is also publishing.
Publishing empire? Nah… even though I have some kindle books too, and I could have as many as I want… if I had the time and help…
But this all started with that course, that book, and that practice of setting what I was going to do next day, confirm it the same day, powerfully debriefing at the end of the day.
Rinse and repeat.
I didn’t go anywhere without my book… I still have it.
Incidentally, I don’t use it any more, because I am now using computer systems, but maybe I should.
How many things were there on my ‘agenda’ on any given day? Maximum three, minimum three.
Two small ones to gain energy from, and one bigger one, that I needed much energy for.
I never left any of them to the end of the day… I call leaving stuff to the end of the day procrastination.
So there you have it.
I went from an unhappy floater to a self-directed PERSON.
Happiness wasn’t instantaneous… For that I had to adjust my predatory genes. For that I had to pull my anchor to doom.
Without those I could not move away from being a ‘victim’ and all the nasty stuff victims do: dominate, make others wrong, make others look bad, gossip, lie, bad stuff.
The evil inclinations aka payoffs of the human machine, the racket.
The average time to alter your energy level sufficiently to be considered ready to ‘go to battle’ is six month consistent work on building up the muscle, but you should see a lift in your mood and attitude even after a few days.
Your inclination will be to declare yourself good and done… This is why most courses and trainings don’t work: that is a stupid declaration.
The default mode will set in, in everything, almost instantly, and you’ll become that floater again.
What would be an app that can serve somewhat like that book of mine? Trello seems to be the best alternative. It has calendar, task cards, lists? and it is both on the desktop and on the mobile. I am not using it, but maybe I should.
Can you do it? Yes. Will you do it? It’s really up to you. If you don’t have enough attention, if you don’t have enough energy to do this program, then probably nothing can help you…
While you are building up to getting your energy level up to par, one of your daily tasks could be to set up and maintain your water energizing system.
If your cells are dehydrated, i.e. if you don’t drink coherent water consistently, you are both stupid, literally, and weak willed. Will power needs a lot of inner energy. Physical energy.
To create a permanent change for your life, if you are either rudderless, directionless, low on energy, or a floater, you will need to get your predatory genes adjusted, you anchor to doom pulled, and your evil inclination transformed…
Only after those will this process I learned back in 1987 become useful.
Another method, a moment to moment method I learned from two Russian dudes can get you unstuck when it seems you can’t do it alone:
The method puts you into the ‘soaring state’. Gurus do that on their sessions. Fire breathing is a method I know. But the Soaring Method lasts beyond the minutes or hours of a session, and used diligently can become a lifestyle.
And for those of you who live in your head, only caring about yourself, about how you look, about winning. Those of you who habitually have a high about-me score, or lack of humility, the ‘renaming on the fly’ method, part of the Soaring Method, can be a life-saver. It takes you out of your head, out of your self-concern, out of your dominant belief or dominant desire, so life can lose its predictability.
You keep life at bay by your self-concern, dominant belief and dominant desire… and it is not pretty… stuck is stuck.
Go to step 2
If you look up extortionist on google, it says: racketeer is a synonym… So an extortionist’s racket is a complaint… not being able to extort enough. Ugh.
Given that for about 70 years I didn’t have any predatory genes, most extortionists see me as easy prey. I am no longer willing to be easy prey. Now I have, hallelujah, three predatory genes.
OK, if life is not as good as you want it, and you are willing to invest in a life you can love, go and start your journey.
