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As usual, I am going to take the scenic route… I hope you’ll walk it with me, and get the enormous power of responsibility in causing yourself to have a life you can love.
Let’s start with looking at the word: Mentality
The word mentality is a lot similar to attitude, but while attitude is emotional, mentality is like a narrative, a whole story about how life should be, how people should be, how it was pre-ordained, who you are supposed to be, how you are supposed to be… blah blah blah.
By the way, narrative is the story you tell yourself, the explanation of life, your actions, of how you feel and why. It can change over time.
If you are one of my students, it is the right circle… while the left circle, what happened, can remain unchanged, every person has a different narrative, explanation, comment, story, meaning about it.
The fastest and best way to polarize people is to create a seductive narrative about the world, and put it on loudspeaker. It has to be us vs. them… sweet as chocolate and just as bad for you, waistline and everything.
But you cannot escape narrative: it is built into the human condition, it is how homo sapiens makes (non)sense of life.
Some narratives as borrowed, some made up unconsciously to avoid feeling guilty. Rare is the person who designs their narrative to make them and life more valuable, more meaningful, to matter more.
In my work, whether I have used the word before or not, we take charge of the narrative by taking charge of ourselves.
Take charge of the narrative by taking charge of yourself.
What’s that second part? Yeah, most people are not in charge of themselves, they are like slaves, or automatons, not in charge of much of anything, even when they are forceful, or domineering, or point fingers at everyone.
There is no trace of responsibility, and thus there is no trace of power.
Responsibility is one of those words that everyone interprets according to their ‘mentality’, the narrative they consider the truth, they consider reality… and only mighty few treat it, use it, honor it as the key to the kingdom, key to power, personal power, power over any and all aspects of yourself.
Words that are ‘built’ the same way in Hungarian and English, are suspect to actually have a meaning close to what after deconstructing they would mean.
In both languages responsibility is about answering… answering to what? Being called to account?
If you can be called to account then you had something to do with it… with what happened, with what’s happening, with what is going to happen.
And that is the meaning of the word: responsibility: the ability to see that you had something to do with it, and therefore you have some power.
Not all the power, but power over what belongs to you.
You cannot claim power over what doesn’t belong to you: the weather, the economy, the behavior of politicians, human evilness, or what other people do or say.
You have no power over that. You might have the power to protest, to complain, to grieve, or try to force people to do something different… but that is not real power… that is powerlessness.
Instead you can look at what you have control over:
- your response,
- your attitude,
- your mentality,
- what you do,
- what you say in your head,
- what you say out loud.
That is pretty much it.
I am sure most people miss responsibility in watching certain people doing, because most of responsibility and what they are ‘doing’ is in the invisible, and what isn’t is so subtle, you can’t see that it took responsibility: owning your power, to do.
I often make requests of my coaches. Requests that other people would not dare to make. I make those requests respectfully, and then allow the coaches to deal with my request. I am also afraid, because my requests are not always reasonable. I am afraid because my ‘doom’ is being thrown out, and if the coach is reactive, that will be the end of our relationship, it has happened. But I am willing to take that risk.
Why? Because I am willing to own my power and steer my coaching to the direction where it is worth my time and money. And moreover… …
it is my job, i.e. responsibility, to take care of myself, not theirs.
After all I didn’t hire a wet nurse to coach me…
If I were married and had an insecure a-hole for a husband. I would take responsibility for having married him, and for managing our relationship such that he would get what’s in it for him in what I do… His WIIFM.
I would get really really really good at having a mission and purpose for him, so he can see in everything I do that it is in his best interest.
Mission and purpose for him? WTF? right?
You have a hard time to create a mission and purpose for yourself, let alone for your spouse.
But it is in your power! As a spouse, as a human, you can see what is important to them, and talk to that!
Expecting people to take responsibility for their part is like praying for rain.
People will do what they will do. People mostly only see what is pointed out to them with the appropriate narrative. But it is YOUR responsibility to create that for them, so they can be well, and so you can have a great life.
Oh, and it is not an event…
…it is a continuously strengthened and attended to activity: and it is your job.
I keep on returning to this 2,400 year old three lines by Hillel: If I am not for me: who is for me? If I am only for myself: who am I? If not now, when?
My office in Jerusalem, Israel was on Hillel Street. Of all the wisdom of all the sages, these three lines have made the most difference for me.
These three lines is what responsibility is: the source of tremendous power.
Responsibility is a distinction. In essence a word, a vocabulary word, that when used as most people use it, it means burden, or guilt. But the definition and the distinction are not the same.
Definition approaches a thing differently than distinction does, and therefore it is imprecise. Just like most science is… like ignoring side effects, or ignoring entire generations in the vaccine testing, or including every death that happened that wasn’t caused by the virus in case the virus was also present.
Imprecise. Misleading. Disempowering… i.e. rendering you powerless.
What is disempowering, disempowerment?
When you lose confidence, you lose your sense of power, because someone or something is holding you as inferior, not to be trusted, a sheep.
I am interested in handing over all the power to you. What you will do with it is up to you: that is out of MY power. I hope you’ll do good, for yourself and for humanity.
One of the ways I do that by teaching you to distinguish… At the moment all of humanity’s astuteness level is 0.7%. Yes, you read it right, less than 1%.
Learning, truly learning to distinguish one distinction just to a puny 20% level, your astuteness level can rise to 1%. Why not more? Astuteness level behaves like a logarithmic scale: the graph looks like a hocky stick…
When you distinguish another distinction, also to the 20% level, your astuteness level rises to 2%.
At ten distinctions, the curve suddenly jumps: your astuteness level is now 30%.
And these are innocent sounding dictionary words: responsibility, narrative, meaning, story, reality… really not very highfalutin sophisticated words.
School’s job, in an ideal world, would be to teach distinctions so the students can navigate the world well.
Distinctions are like the tools in the handiman’s tool box. You can only do so much without tools, and with tools you can do almost anything.
To put together my stretching chair a month or two ago, I needed a specialized tool… with it the job I had tried to do with ordinary tools took me many hours to see that I need a specialized tool, with that tool it took me a whole two seconds…
And such is life.
- No tools, lots of struggle.
- Some tools: less struggle.
- Many tools: a life of no struggle.
At the moment I am running three big courses: 1. Freedom 2. The Soaring Method 3. The Integrity Workshop.
Combined they cost 170 dollar a month. They are, all three, foundational knowledge courses.
The Freedom Course, for those who continue it, will turn into the More Money Course.
I have decided early on that I am not willing to teach the More Money Course to people with no foundation. It is like trying to teach kindergartners advanced physics. They will play with the equipment and blow up the lab… lol.
There are three weeks remaining before the More Money Course starts. It will have as many students as a handful… but if you want to be in it, you need to have completed, at the minimum, the Freedom Course that is now in its fourth month. that means that the class recordings are about 30 hours.
If you think you can handle it, if you have done Landmark Education courses, then please email me and I’ll give you a payment link.
If you are not ready, not interested, to you I recommend my weekly paid podcast on distinctions. I talk to Bonnie, a student and a fellow Hungarian weekly on Fridays.
At this point the sessions are about an hour long. Why so long? For the same reason President Lincoln said: I would have written a shorter letter, but I didn’t have time…
I am learning to outline the ‘show’ and eventually it will be shorter… just long enough for you to get the distinction.
Bonnie is a beginner in this arena, so she is the perfect person for me to teach so you can learn from what i say.
Give yourself a belated Mother’s day gift, whether you are a mother or a father or neither. It will pay you dividends way beyond the price you pay. You can celebrate all the holidays in April… Israel’s Independence Day is my choice… but you may be a Jew hater… choose what you like.
Get the new Distinctions podcastNot surprisingly, also over the years, after struggling to teach people to rise above their environment and the going mentality, I have seen more and more of the distinctions myself. So I can teach them deeper and wider.
The truth value of most things out there is low, because the speaker/writer/teacher has few or no distinctions to mention. so they can only teach you what they thing, and the truth value of that is very low, given how little they can tell the difference between their ass and their elbow.
Don’t be mistaken: distinguishing is a serious mental, intellectual activity. If you are not up for that, don’t bother buying my podcast, please.
