I have been ‘harping’ on this principle with my students: hear the principle first, and then hear the rest…
Imagine that you are Cinderella… on the night of the big ball.
If I asked you (Cinderella) to separate the wheat from the chaff… what would you do first? If you are like me, you first find out what is the difference… in looks, in weight, and then start separating them accordingly.
I even used to use this capacity (oops, forgot to say, it’s a capacity!) to hire or not hire someone to work with me. I would ask someone to separate a pile of things by their category…
For you Everything is the same as everything else … except not always
Universally missing capacity… I found out. The underlying capacity can be said with these words: be able to tell the forest for the trees.
If you can’t… or can’t yet… then you are probably not making as much money as other talents of yours, other skills of yours would almost guarantee you would. Why? Because the world is full of needs to see the difference between the forest and the trees.
If you cannot see it, then you are an employee who needs to be shown everything, in the area of your work. But even if you know it at work, the capacity is not open, so you cannot see it elsewhere.
Here is a sample question: what is a magazine? what is a catalog?
what is the difference? (the organizing principle is needed here… that is the task. Please send me an email or post below… If you don’t want people to know that you are not as intelligent as you hoped you were… comment anonymously.)
OK, back to harping… What did I do? I asked most students to quote the principle before they write anything else.
In the 67 steps coaching program each student has a coaching area, where they can have a private back and forth conversation with me in writing.
Cost: $10 a week, $520 for a year. For comparison, I’ve paid $500 a month $125 a week for MY coaching… also in writing.
A standard post is like this:
- number and title of the step
- what did you get out of this step? And what is, or could be your takeaway?
- what actions do you see for yourself from this step?
- So I added a part: what is the principle… the organizing principle, the enduring truth by which you can look at life and see where you are at, where your mindset is, where your map of reality is missing reality.
It’s hard to catch the principle, because Tai talks a lot and talks fast.
It took me till the third or fourth round to be able to catch them reliably fast and then listen through the principle.
Listening to a step in the 67 steps is like life…
it is coming at you without waiting, without giving you time, giving you advance notice, so you can see the context.
It is also like a shower, if you allow it to be like a shower. It gets you wet. But if you consider it something to understand, something to learn, something to use for anything other than to get wet: it won’t get you wet.
But context is decisive… and thus you live a life of struggle or a life of resignation…
And because context is decisive, and because you have a default context largely determined by your soul correction, your life is a struggle, and you keep on reacting the same way, the same self-harming, self-defeating way as you have been.
Students listen through a default context:
- is this true? is this guy smarter than me? is he telling me I am wrong?
- Another default context: I don’t trust you… I know better… You are full of X
- Yet another: nice. nice…. so what?
- or… I better learn this or I am doomed…
- or… This is too much, I won’t remember…
You see that when you are listening through any of the default contexts, you’ll miss most everything, because the default context is about you…
The starting point measurement, I have added, in response to the principle: humility is not thinking less of yourself, but thinking of yourself less… is a number, 1-100: how much you live in the default context: everything is about me.
The more time you spend in a day thinking of yourself, i.e. taking things personally, the less you can learn. And the less you’ll be able to think through principles… ie. the less you are going to move to a principle driven life, a life worth living.
I measure this in the Starting Point Measurements, to what degree you look at the world through yourself, your self-interest, your self-protection, your self-importance.
Here is what one of my students said:
Thank you Sophie I am so intrigued that we are not talking about my feelings and yet my world feels like it is expanding despite my best efforts to prevent it!
This unexpected result is the consequence of thinking through principles, instead of your feelings, your thoughts, of yourself.
Here is an example: one of the steps, step 23. In this step you are a pilot in training, flying your plane (your life) in a storm, and your job is to land your plane on the airstrip (the great wall) in spite of the storm with gusty winds.
The principle is: ‘Make your plane go where you want it to go’
Simple, and OMG new to most everyone: what? MAKE it go?!
We, humans live our lives hoping that circumstances will favor us and our plans.
We even have sayings:
- The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry
- man plans, god laughs
So humans are already resigned before they start… They don’t even go for it, let alone ‘make their plane go where they want it to go’
They don’t even bother to name the airstrip because they are so resigned.
And then, out of the blue, some student does the unexpected… and names the airstrip or some aspect of it.
It’s often simple: she writes
Thanks Sophie
You know those times when you tell me I am doing good work are very meaningful to me. I appreciate you saying them and thank you.
She was making sure to land her plane on the landing strip… she asked me to respond to her in a particular way… It worked and she has accelerated her progress…
Why didn’t I think of that? Because the way of communicating she asked of me doesn’t come naturally to me. That is why.
Now, it is true that there have been students who complained that I wasn’t nice, or asked me to be nice, but that is not an airstrip, it is a continent…
She specified what worked and she asked me to do more of that… I can do that, I said to myself, and have been.
The student who asked me to be nice has dropped out… It never occurred to her that her approach was unhelpful for her to land her plane…
Make your plane land on the landing strip is a principle… for life. You can live your whole life successfully out of this one principle.
I have another student who wrote seven stories (the skill finder workshop stories from What Color is Your Parachute) and all his stories are examples where he is making his plane land on the landing strip
… unconscious competence… but unconscious nevertheless.
The rest of his life: not at all or not consistently…
His stories are victory marches… really. His work life… more the Valley of the Shadow of Death.
Unless you live your life out of a principle… all of your life, you are living in quiet resignation…
My job is to change that with you, for you.
Now, can you land your plane on an airstrip without experimentation? Not really.
Humans learn best from mistakes. But the mistakes don’t have to be yours. You can learn from other people’s mistakes, that is what reading is for, and you can learn from thought experiments, if you can use thought experiments like a flight simulator.
Not everybody can, but I think everybody can learn it to one degree or another.
If you are busy, this is what is missing. Busy people are busy learning from their own mistakes. They don’t take time out to look, and see.
If that is you… hell, you know now why you are neither happy nor successful.
By the way: this is the first of the five metaskills: Seeing
It is also The Sight capacity… that I can turn on for people, but unless you use it it turns off in 72 hours.
