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Most of us live because we didn’t die the night before.
Even I have mornings like that… about 10 percent.
We live a life of quiet desperation… meaning: we live in the daily hubbub of pedestrian life, never getting anywhere, pushed around, hopeless and in despair that it is ever going to get better.
Most people come to my site, or seek out any self-improvement, spiritual, or manifestation program for this simple reason: they can see that in the pedestrian hubbub they will not find what they seek: peace of mind, a sense of purpose, a rhyme and reason to their life.
And without rhyme and reason you cannot be happy.
None of those courses help, unless you first lift yourself from the muck of pedestrian living, where everything is an obstacle… really.
I am offering a workshop (at the end of this article) that does that. Lift you from the muck… to a place where suddenly everything makes sense.
Bringing rhyme and reason to your life, to your activities is an important topic, maybe the most important for you, so please makes sure you read it until it makes sense. This article is stream of consciousness one… I apologize for that. It makes wild turns… but where it leads is where you want to go. So please read it, and come to the workshop, if you can.
Planning is practice
If you live from the mind, in the mind, you know little, and you recognize even less. And you don’t recognize the things you need… because you don’t know them. Don’t already know them.
When you live from consciousness, you are lead to strange activities where you may be given what you need in an unexpected environment, and in an unexpected form. You don’t expect them, and yet there they are… You can’t see why you would encounter those…
…but consciousness recognizes them.
I was reading a book as is my daily habit. I was reading a novella on my kindle…
One sentence struck me. Arrested me. Hit me in the chest. ‘Planning is practice…’
This is an extraordinary way of living… as opposed to the winging it, getting killed, mauled, or crushed in the process, you have been practicing…
Planning is practice… instead of hoping that when you get to the step, then you’ll know what to do and how to do it… you use your brain to practice it before you get there.
Wanted an extraordinary way to live? Plan for what you want… and practice…
To be successful in life you need to employ an extraordinary principle… this is one I now favor: planning as a practice.
I like it. I am adopting it.
Wow, I am excited.
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When you watch people like I do, you’ll notice that planning is not cool. People follow the current memes: just begin it. Take bold audacious action… Don’t look, just do!
Some do, some plan to begin it… but none of them do the work that needs to be done, ahead of time.
They want their enthusiasm to carry them to the peak…
…but enthusiasm is fickle… Passion is fickle.
you need energy to maintain it. It counts on getting energy from success… the scoreboard. Both enthusiasm and passion are outcome dependent. Unless the outcome is positive and FAST they both fizzle out. They fizzle out when things slow down.
So people in general don’t do anything much, and definitely don’t do anything long enough to make a difference. Mastery? forget about it.
And all this no accomplishment is because planning is not cool?
It is more that people don’t know, because they were never taught how to plan. But plan what? Plan for what?
I am definitely not an expert at planning. I am one of those ‘jump in and start swimming’ kind of gal… to my own detriment. My so-so results are because of that.
I have never planned for eventualities. I have never planned for setbacks. For failures. For detours. And yet… I can see how that would be useful.
I am going to share here some of the things I know to be useful and most people will never teach you.
Planning has five stages… I’ll deal here with the first stage… but all stages are equally important.
The most important element of any project, maybe any action, maybe even any area of life is the context.
Context is the why? Why do you want to do it? What is the purpose? What is the outcome that unless you set it up ahead of time, will never happen?
In Landmark Education they call it possibility. When you call it that… you immediately start looking at it different.
When I first asked ‘why’ you looked at what you wanted to fix, what you wanted to get, but not a high minded, high vibration question: what is the possibility?
Yet, what you want needs a lot of energy, energy level maintained… Energy to fuel your actions. But wanting is emotional, and as anything emotional, it is changing, and often dies without ever blossoming.
Possibility, when crafted well, can have a much longer life, because possibility is not all about you. Possibility can be shared with others. If it is really a possibility then they, the listeners, will feel they will win if you accomplish what you set out to accomplish. The possibility.
Because possibility is not personal. When it’s available, it is available to all.
So the listener will feed back energy to you.
Context, possibility need to be ‘crafted well’.
I said ‘crafted’ well’. Yes, one of the purposes of the context, one of the purposes of the possibility is to set out, define the strait and narrow, so you are not all over the place. So you know when you are on, and you know when you are off.
Vague contexts, like ‘making a living’, or ‘having fulfillment’ are too wide…
Context needs to be crafted. Designed like a machine, to do the job of what you want it to do…
Without a well-designed context even the most amazing work becomes chore, burden, and that is not what you wanted, is it?
The context you craft needs to be reliable, self-perpetuating, repeatable, and not something that will fail to empower you over time.
The reason people don’t like the grind because they never invented a context that includes it.
I do a lot of work that is grind. The grind makes my back hurt, my eyes hurt, my heart hurt. Yes. And yet, it is never a chore, because the context is decisive, and the context I have invented works like a charm… it never lets me down.
Much like cooking is a chore, but if you cook for someone you love, it is not a chore: you cook as an expression of your love for them.
And if anything, cooking is a grind.
Victor Frankl invented a context, he called it meaning, that allowed him to live through concentration camp for years, people dying around him. Living through pain, hardship, starving, cruelty, with no promise for a life after… And not only live through, but live through it without inner bruises, like most who survived. Survived with trauma. Survived with hate. He invented for himself the context: ‘living with dignity, no matter the circumstances’
And dignity, the context, the strait and narrow, is magical: as you hold your head high, with straight spine, giving no room for self pity, hatred, blame, whining, or complaining. It is what it is.
Dignity allows you to absorb what comes at you. cushions you and your precious I, your soft body, your bruised ego. Your moral self-righteousness.
Many of you could benefit from taking on this context
living live with dignity
for your life… you know who you are. The self-righteous, the judgmental, the blamer, the complainer, the quitter, the procrastinator. The liar.
- The context decides where you get your light from. With well crafted context, you get the light from inside. You glow.
- With the default or poorly crafted context you are like a planet: when the sun shines on you, you light up… but the sun shines only when the sun shines.
When people smile at you, you are happy. When people frown at you, or admonish you, you shrink and whimper.
We call this outcome dependence…
Some contexts are too wide… Others are too prosaic.
A good context is inspiring. A good context is poetry. When you say it, everyone hears that god is in your words.
When I ask people why they want to join my coaching program, they say they want to grow. No god in the words. No poetry.
So the test of any context is: why would that be important and for whom?
If a context is personal and exclusive, i.e. it is about you, then there is no god in the words, and people won’t get excited.
Living with dignity, not matter the circumstances, is one of the most inspiring set of words I have ever heard. It makes me want it for myself. I feel my spine straighten, I stand taller, my eyes set higher. I want to weep.
When you say: I want to grow… It does nothing for me. And guess what:
if it does nothing for me, then it does nothing for you.
It is a statement that generates no echo.
Echo is a phenomenon in which your energy comes back to you doubled, tripled.
But if the energy you send out is whining… the echo sends it back doubled, tripled, etc. Fixing? the echo doubles, triples the wrong.
You are like a wet blanket in life, and no one wants to be with you. Not even you…
Ordinary language calls it negativity. Negativity is not in the words you speak, it is in the context in which you live…
Most people who complain about negativity, don’t know that they are getting back what they are sending out.
As I said, context is the very first step in creating a plan for anything, including your life, a project, an event. And context is a piece of art, crafted. Carefully and mindfully.
A companion piece to this article is how to plan so your vision for yourself and for your life becomes more real…
But no matter what, you need to start with the vision. Your Pleasure Island… It’s not a place. It is a context. It is a possibility. And unless you know where you are going, you’ll never get there.
What’s missing, ultimately, is a context
