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Let’s say you would like to be a winner… Create yourself as a winner…
What do you need to chuck, discard, leave behind, toss if you really want to create yourself?
I am going to write a full article, maybe even a book: a collection of articles, because what is in memes, what is in articles is off the mark… very low truth value… useless.
But in this article I’ll talk about one or two aspects of creating yourself… Even so, this article is very long… maybe too long.
First I’d like to poke into a mindset where your worldview says:
I can only help people who are less than me, who are less smart than me, know less than me.
And alternatively:
I can only learn from people who are smarter than me, who have higher vibration, whose truth value is higher than mine.
I have been getting a ton of healers, coaches, teachers come and ask for, mostly for their eating style and their health measurements, occasionally also for their starting point measurements.
Occasionally I get scared… and when I do, I refund their purchase. I did one of those today. I am afraid of being duped… why I am afraid? My 3-year old incident, being gullible has cost me a lot of grief.
I wrote an email and told her: I am refunding your purchase… The response to my refunding their purchase always seems to justify my action: the person I refuse almost always turns out to be a nasty person who thinks they are entitled because… whatever the heck they believe.
But my job is to protect myself, my sanity, my space, my business… and therefore I need to ‘curate’ who I want to do business with.
Much like I learned from a Frank Kern talk… Unless I would like to spend an hour with you while we are having lunch, together, I won’t like to work with you. An hour? Yeah, feels like a lifetime with someone I can’t stand.
At first blush I don’t want to spend time with anyone: I am an introvert, best at being on my own. But that is not completely true: I actually am curious if there is anything to be curious about. Most people are so boring, it is not even funny. But not all… and the ones ‘not boring’, the ones not too shallow are the people I would be willing to have lunch with.
So this is my relationship to ‘curating’ clientele… Would I be willing to have lunch with you?
What is the biggest reason I wouldn’t? The biggest is if you want to use me, deceive me. Everyone can be a sucker for flattery, and when you flatter me, my antennae is way up and is listening. Is there an agenda there where I’ll hold the potty?
I caught one of those flatterers on my Office Hours. I let it go, but when the dude noticed that I didn’t take the flattery, he asked about it. Then I had an opportunity to distinguish between a compliment without an agenda, a validation that is not about you, and a compliment that wants you to react, to say teary eyed: thank you so much! add weepy voice, lol…
In the Validation Challenge people had to go through all the moves they knew, before they would do anything that wouldn’t be all about them. About them being the Validator… Look at me: if I validate you then I am better than you.
It reminds me of an exercise I was in, the last to complete it back in 1991. It was in a hunting lodge in Georgia.
The assignment was to instruct a fire log (wood for foreigners sake) to stand up.
You look at the firewood and tell it to stand up. Huh? Yeah… I thought so. lol
So I knew ‘reality’, and I was sure that firewood wouldn’t stand up… so I was hesitant and felt foolish and pretentious to even try. But it was a class that cost me close to 10 grands, so I went for it.
And I was begging. I was cajoling it, I was sweet talking it, I was whispering to it, I was threatening it… but, the firewood didn’t move.
The whole class finished, about a hundred people, and everyone, including the two teachers stood around me, and the pressure was unbearable. Everyone wanted to go to eat… and I was holding them back.
All eyes were on me. Some hated me, some were pitying me. I said: Firewood stand up… And they all clapped and I was done.
Did I accomplish what the teachers meant? I felt I didn’t… But they let me pass and we all went to eat…
They wanted me to pass and I never learned how to say what you say when you want the Universe to comply. Or another person.
I attempted to teach people on my office hours about validation… how to be authentic, how to have it not be about you. How to not place yourself above the other, but speak from humility and admiration or wonder.
I don’t think it can be taught… Meaning: hearing the words won’t do it for you.
Why would you want to learn to speak with that much power from that authentic place?
Many reasons, but one stood out on the call: if you yourself don’t believe in your own power to create, then you can’t create your own reality at will, and the world will not respond to you in kind.
What do I mean?
Between 1991 and 2003 I diligently practiced what I failed at in 1991, that kind of speaking that makes even firewood move.
It could be said that the only advantage I have over others: I consider failure the best thing to ever happen to me: Failure shows me where I need work.
So in 2003, I was yet again in a Landmark Education program. Part of that program was to lead introductions to the Landmark Education Forum, and move people (firewood!) to register into it.
Not very different from the exercise in 1991. The difference was: you registered people not one-on-one, but in a group. A different dynamic, yet the same.
To cause a group to register, you need a team to support you. Without a team you cannot really move a whole room full of people and make them sign on the bottom line, you need a team.
So I was on my way to train a team of support people in Ithaca NY… a community that considers themselves above all others… very conceited. And I am ordinary, and I was, in their eyes, not a suitable representation of their community in front of their people…
I was facing a losing battle: not my favorite kind of battle.
So what did I do? I invented that I am already a winner, that I don’t have to win this battle to be a winner. That I don’t have to win this battle to MAKE me a winner.
I don’t need the firewood to stand up for me to be a winner… See the connection?
Back in 1991 I had no facility TO consider myself a winner: I was this little scared immigrant girl.
I started participating in Landmark Education’s programs because the slogan, at that time, was: creating a world that works for everyone with no one left out. And I was the ‘left out’ people and I hoped that I was, that I could be included. Hoped.
And that came through in that firewood exercise: no confidence. Not a shred.
But in those 12 years, between 1991 and 2003 I practiced the most important thing a person can practice: my power to create myself.
So in 2003, facing that training session that was predictably humiliating, I invented myself ‘outcome independent‘, i.e. a winner regardless of my results. Regardless of the results.
And something funny happened. Suddenly the world said: hell yeah. You are a winner!
The first thing that happened is: I noticed that my car, a 10 year old Nissan Maxima had a sign on its window: four door sports car. In my little immigrant world that already demonstrated that I was a winner. Only winners drive sports cars.
And then, suddenly, the traffic started to move after being stuck for almost an hour on the highway. The Universe also got that I was a winner.
And then the people in Ithaca listened and learned… They were like putty in my hands… They listened as if… as if they knew that I knew what I was talking about. Not like before.
Yeah…
Now, many years later, I look back and that 2003 incident has been a dramatic turning point for me.
I now had the POWER OF MY WORD… I could create MYSELF, at will… and as a coach, I can also create some ripples in my clients, ripples that if they resonate, they allow them, they help them to create themselves.
The secret, for both of us, is to be outcome independent AND to have integrity.
If you remember, the secret sauce in integrity is what no one considers: to do the things you do inside an empowering context.
Why is that the secret sauce? Because you create the context with your words… with the power of your words. It becomes a daily practice if you consider it important to have power… instead of being a forceful, cajoling, manipulating little creep, or alternatively a hoping little thing, like I was in 1991.
The Validation Challenge is an excellent training ground… if and when, and only if and when, you consider it a training in the power of your word.
- To create the context,
- to create the attitude,
- and to create yourself.
These are the ONLY things you have the power to create. What belongs to you.
Of course shysters say things you can create the world, you can create money, you can create what you want with your words, but for that you need to be god, and although you are made of god substance, you are not a god.
Your power is for creating your self…
…If and when you are Outcome independent. When you have no agenda,
One newish client was arguing about this on the call. His words gave away his ‘attitude’. He is a wanty… That is a word for people who want… want… they really really want… The word is like needy… the ‘I need, I need, I need’ needy people.
He wants to create himself because he wants… An agenda. Not for power, not for creation, but as a means to get something.
Whenever you have ‘I want to’, I need to, I have to, I should in your sentence, inside or outside, you are outcome dependent… and powerless. You can only force, cajole, or manipulate… not create.
Of course the world is all about wanting, needing, etc. So even when you can create yourself, you have to do it over and over again .
I create myself a hundred times a day. I create myself independent of everything, unflappable, someone who cannot be frazzled.
So that my readers, my clients, politics, the weather, the cold floor, the lack of sleep, my weight, my misbehaving computers, my own mistakes, my restrictive diet… all the circumstances will leave me untouched.
That is the true meaning of independence.
The other day I forgot that probably there was no garbage collection… so I went down and brought my garbage back… and I wasn’t upset with myself. So what? I made a mistake. No biggie. I can deal with it.
Yeah…
I have found that you cannot reach any of that power unless first you can start seeing ‘reality’ as malleable.
Malleable? What that really means: not fixed. Not one way. Where from where you look makes a difference.
Obviously, the whole eight billion people strong humanity fights for the world to be seen as fixed, and that no one attains to their personal power.
And your fixed mindset, your rigidity can keep you stuck in just one view.
But if you practice it long enough, if you hate being the way you have been being, then you’ll succeed… eventually.
It took me 12 years…
This is exactly what we are doing in the ‘From Intention to Self’ where the goal is to create a Self… To live as a human being… a cause, not an effect.
Learn to create yourself
