Changing your future: what is the challenge on the seed level? (originally published in 2011)
In the last article I have set up the issue: you need to know where you are and you need to decide where you are heading if you want a future by design.
To actually get there, you need to design your path, you need to have the skills and the knowledge and the decision making ability and willingness.
But that is just the surface: you need to change your undertow, the underworld, the root of your world, on the seed level.
If I told you that your life, your projects are like a tree. They are designed to bear a certain fruit… and what that fruit is comes from the seed level. And the seed level tells the seed what type of roots to develop…. But
You see, most people, in self improvement, spend all their time trying to work on the fruit level, trying to hang a different fruit on the tree, wish, pray for a different type of fruit, repeat affirmations, etc. make mind movies, but that does not change the results because it doesn’t change the seed level.
What do you need to do to change the results?
If I limited you to an orchard: what would you do? You would do either of two things:
1. plant a different tree from a different stock
2. infuse a different stock into the roots you already have, but just barely above root level.
What does this mean outside of an orchard? In real life… your life…
The first case, when you need to plant a tree, comes from having envisioned a tree that is unsuited for your purposes. This was my mistake for most of my life. I did not have the courage to plant the tree that I really wanted because I was afraid that if I failed at the ‘real’ tree, my life, my hopes, my ambitions would be crushed.
Until I got that I had only one life, and that I prefer to fail at something I love than succeed at something I don’t give a hoot about.
So I planted a different seed, and my life has been a celebration of life: I have never been happier.
The second case is a little trickier, and this is what the unstuck program is really about: when you have the right aim, but you have the wrong path…
Here is how you know: you have meant to harvest apples, but what you have grown are crab apples. Close, but not what you wanted.
What went wrong? Along the way you have a hidden principle, a hidden agenda, a hidden belief, a hidden rule, that was not compatible with apples…
Let me give you an actual example from one of my clients:
The client teaches students to put their knowledge on the internet and create a business from that. When we examined his results, what we saw was that he worked like a maniac to create heros out of ‘pedestrians’… meaning people with little talent, little capacity to think, little capacity to do the work, and very little willingness to actually do what it takes, beyond following instructions. I started to question that he had any purpose of harvesting apples.
Apples don’t grow on a barely nurtured, barely fed ‘tree’, but crab apples do.
I dug with him and suspected that there was something he succeeded in: and this is what we found: his principle in business (and in life) was that his duty was to carry the lesser talent, the one with no initiative, the slacker, the stupid, pretending that this could ever succeed.
This principle came from his childhood, and we used my technology for getting unstuck to change it.
Now, what will change? Will these same students bear apples for him in the future? I doubt it. But he can pick more capable, more ambitious students in the next round and start harvesting apples.
You see, you can’t grow an apple tree from crab apple seeds… the seed level is the most important thing. It tells you your future…
Crab apples or apples… you need to choose.
