Become all you can become by raising yourself higher on the Tree of Life

Taking you from smart to intelligent…

OK, my intention is to teach you to become intelligent… Lots of people will teach you stuff that is going to help you to regurgitate stuff, look good and smart to others, but is otherwise useless… for life.

So I am really only interested in making you intelligent. And so that you know: intelligence is 70% physical, and only 30% mental. You don’t learn it through mental means: you learn it through being in intimate touch with your physical self, and I am not talking about muscles, and athleticity, I am talking about everything physical, including all the senses, hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting and touching.

OK, after this preamble, we can start… Continue reading “Taking you from smart to intelligent…”

What do you value? Value enough to do something for it?

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We live in a fix-it age. Whatever you don’t like, whatever feels bad, whatever doesn’t work well… we attempt to fix it. We don’t value anything enough to look for a real solution.

We seem to live like the butterfly… only touching everything it its flight and then it dies. Surface living.

Never and no one looks long enough to see what is the root cause of any trouble, we, like the butterfly, only look at what is readily visible…

One of the things my readers SEEM TO want to fix is a meaningless life. Maybe their life is too busy, maybe it is not busy enough, maybe they only have time to do what they must do, and on their days off they lounge and bemoan their life.

But all in all: their life is not theirs, and it feels meaningless. Empty of meaning, empty of importance, empty of essence, joy and adventure.

And it probably is!

So they try this and they try that, they do one of my classes… but…

Continue reading “What do you value? Value enough to do something for it?”

How to become whole and complete? Like good soup…

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Tai Lopez uses an analogy that really talks to me. He says that we need to be like a soup. Our knowledge, our lives needs to be like good soup.

What does it mean to be a good soup?

You can’t make a good soup with just a few ingredients. You need a lot of ingredients to make a soup that you don’t have to make edible by crumbling crackers into it, or bread.

Some poor man’s soups, onion soup, garlic soup, ‘rue’soup in Hungary, are so uninteresting that you can’t eat it without putting bread in them. The versions with poached egg, cheese melted on top, etc. are the restaurant versions of the same soups… but the soup itself is a poor man’s soup. Poor as in not having much to give. Continue reading “How to become whole and complete? Like good soup…”

Stone Soup: the fairy tale. Case studies galore

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Capacities, distinctions, intelligence, and success in life: there is a strong correlation. The Stone Soup fairy tale is an excellent teaching story.

Let’s start with debunking the current worldview, that intelligence is inborn. We are all born tabula raza… a blank slate.

Your intelligence depends on the number of large chunks, neural connections permanently formed in your brain firing together automatically. Those chunks are created in learning. Not learning about… no, actual learning a skill to unconscious competence. Driving a vehicle is unconscious competence for most. Reading and comprehending? not so much. Continue reading “Stone Soup: the fairy tale. Case studies galore”

Reality? Collective hunch at best… at the very best

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One person who I often trust sent me an email with a link to a video. Must watch, he said.

I watched, so far, an hour and 20 minutes… I rarely can tolerate anything longer.

Then I read the comments… and was (was I really?) surprised, appalled, and then confused by the comments.

The video was a lecture of an MD-scientist who was talking about what interests most of us most: what the F… is really happening?!

Reality. Reality is happening and we have no idea what it is… we see something, other people see something else… what is real, what is made up? Continue reading “Reality? Collective hunch at best… at the very best”

Resistance to new: fear. Fear of the unknown. How to win?

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Part of being a good coach is to experience the scary stuff the client is experiencing or will experience on their journey… so I can have compassion, and maybe some tools to ease their bad experience and help them through some obstacle.

I am in the middle of exactly that… and I am quaking in my boots…

I was never a fan of new things… I am not an excitement junkie… not me… sorry. And now that I am old, it is even less tempting… and yet, it takes me less deliberation nowadays than it used to, to ‘jump’.

Jumping off the diving board is a very good analogy… but even getting into the pool or the lake. You don’t know if you can survive.

In fact, all fear is fear of death… The interesting thing about me: death itself doesn’t scare me as much as the path to it, the pain, the horror, the experience.

OK… even just writing those few words… Continue reading “Resistance to new: fear. Fear of the unknown. How to win?”

Right to end your life… do you have ANY rights?

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Is your physical activity enough to make a difference in the quality of life, in your health, in your longevity?

This has been my question for quite some time.

If you have this question, you, like myself, have some barriers… time, laziness, weakness, or pain… as it is in my case.

I am 73 years old and I have been frail and weak and have struggled with that all my life. Activities that needed me to be on my feet were not liking me… Continue reading “Right to end your life… do you have ANY rights?”

On coaching: what it is, what it isn’t… It’s a bridge

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Good coaching is a bridge… Bad coaching is not.

We all have some area where we don’t already have a bridge, a path, to where we want to be

What bridge? What is a bridge?

The bridge is what happens between an idea and its fulfillment, materialization. What happens between a problem and its solution.

Most bridges are connectors between words and actions. Or future words and the process that will make it work. Or teaching and what we actually make of it.

Or maybe our words and the feelings we want to feel, mostly about ourselves…

Words and feelings. Words and doing. Doing and something built in reality. Different ‘modalities’. Continue reading “On coaching: what it is, what it isn’t… It’s a bridge”

Do you have enough? Energy, knowledge, attention, love?

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How do you set the price of your product or program? Or help. Or work. That was the question yesterday in my coaching program.

I know you are probably not a product creator, or a coach. But yet you do have a product or a program… if you work for a salary, if you have friends, a spouse, children.

No matter where you are in life, no matter what you do, money comes to you from other people… or love… or support.

The question here is: what are they paying for? What are they reciprocating?

Depending on your about-me score, you’ll have a different answer… Continue reading “Do you have enough? Energy, knowledge, attention, love?”

Big audacious actions or tiny steps?

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Back in the fall of 1987 I was in a camp in mountainous Kingston NY. I was participating in a highly physical course, called the 6-day course, challenging both your body and your fear and what you should do with it. It also added the method of tiny steps that is the secret I want to share in this article.

One of the challenges was to cross a valley on a cable stretched, just with your arm’s strength… (Of course I don’t know what it is called, so the pictures are all about zip-lines… oops… what are they called, do you know?)

The first half of the climb was easy… your weight created a slope in the cable… the second part was wicked… you had to, hand over hand, pull your weight over.

It was a lot like mountain climbing: you put one foot in front of the other, and you don’t quit. Small feats take you there. Continue reading “Big audacious actions or tiny steps?”