I’m leaning into an inspired idea that I’ve been wanting to explore for a while now, which is to have deep and interesting conversations with various friends, record them, and share them – especially friends who are very into personal growth or who are doing empowering transformational work in the world.
There are two parts to my intention. The first part is to give people more insight into real conversations that growth-oriented people are having about life, the universe, and everything. Instead of doing formal interviews, I want these to be more like one-on-one conversations over coffee – relaxed and improvisational but also interesting. The idea is a little bit similar to Jerry Seinfeld’s Comedian in Cars Getting Coffee – but without the cars or the cynicism.
The second part of my intention is more personal. I want to spend more time connecting with friends and colleagues through fun and stimulating conversation about ideas we care about.
How often do we tell ourselves that we should make a better effort to keep in touch with friends? There’s social media, but that tends to be pretty shallow most of the time.
I really appreciate and respect the friends that I have, and I feel lucky to know many of the people I do, but the vast majority aren’t local to me. We may see each other at retreats or conferences or when speaking at events together, but I think it would be lovely to carve out more time to talk one-on-one about what we’re passionate about. I want to invest more in deepening these relationships, and sit-down conversations are great for that.
While I could do this on my own in private, I think there’s a nice opportunity to invite more people into the experience and create more positive ripples from this too. Lots of my friends are already used to communicating publicly since many are authors, speakers, trainers, coaches, etc. So they’d be fine with recording and sharing our conversations. We know there’s a good chance that some people would find our conversations uplifting, inspiring, and encouraging.
I intend these to be longer conversations, like 1-2 hours in duration (preferably closer to 2 hours). Hence the recordings would be more appealing to people who love depth, especially people who want to open themselves to new insights and reframes.
Fortunately a number of friends like this idea too and said they’d be happy to do it. I currently have a list of about 20 people who’ve tentatively said yes to this so far, including some from the personal growth field that you’ve probably heard of. I could invite more, but this short list will be plenty to get this idea rolling.
This idea started in Conscious Growth Club last year when we did such a call with a member, which was recorded and shared within the group. Initially I was thinking that we could do these with CGC members as well as with some outside guests, and then we’d archive the recordings as an extra member benefit. So it started as a pretty casual idea.
The offer I’ve been making to my friends is that we’ll have a Zoom video call together, and we’ll invite members of Conscious Growth Club to watch the call live. CGC members can comment and ask questions too. We’ll record the call, and at a minimum we’ll share the recording with CGC members in our private portal. But if the guest and I agree to do so, we can also share this call beyond CGC, like on our blogs and YouTube channels.
The reason I want to do it like this is so that people can feel more comfortable just being themselves on these calls, not feeling like they’re in interview mode. We can just go with the flow and see what happens. If the guest doesn’t feel good about publishing the call afterwards (or if for some reason I don’t feel good about it), then we can limit the recording to CGC members only and keep it fairly private. But if we both like the result and feel that it would have value for other people, then great, we can each share it more widely if we want. We don’t have to make this decision till after we finish the call.
While I find it hard to envision a scenario where I’d object to sharing the call publicly – I’m not particularly concerned about embarrassing myself now and then – I want to make it easier for more people to say yes to these invites. Some people in this field are more into their branding, especially those with larger teams supporting them. I want to invite them into playful and spontaneous conversations, so there’s a risk that someone might say something in the moment that they’d rather not publish too widely. I don’t think this is likely to be a major issue, but I just want to take that risk off the table, so they can feel more in-the-moment while we have our conversation.
This morning I had one of these conversations with author, speaker, fellow Transformational Leadership Council member, and long-time friend Martin Rutte. We had a lively chat for about 100 minutes, including talking at length about Martin’s Project Heaven on Earth, which is about how to create a better world for all of humanity.
Martin and I both very much enjoyed the experience, and we agreed to share this one publicly. The feedback from CGC members who were on the call with us was very positive too. I’ll be sharing the recording of this call on my blog and YouTube within the next few days. We also recorded the live chat logs from CGC members, but the chat logs are only going to be shared inside CGC, not publicly.
Presently this is an evolving idea, so I’m just leaning into it. I’d love to do more of these calls this year. I don’t intend to turn this into a full-blown podcast, and I don’t intend to do these on a set schedule. I want to keep this casual for now and see how it goes. It feels nicely aligned so far.
I also wanted to share the basic idea in this blog post, so you’ll understand what these videos are when they start turning up. Then I can link back to this post, so people can see the explanation of the original idea.
A big thanks to my wife Rachelle for helping out with these calls! ❤️
Last night Rachelle and I attended our first class from the kink-related meetup group that we joined after going through the orientation on Monday. The topic of littles and age play wasn’t something that either of us are into, but we thought we’d go anyway to see what the meetup was like. We also got some synchronicities related to attending, which I often take as a hint from reality that it’s wise to accept the invitation.
I also like leaning into learning and social experiences that are very different from what I’ve previously explored. Even if I’m not particularly interested in something, I still like to expand my horizons and take in fresh input now and then. This helps me learn more about human nature, and it keeps my knowledge and understanding from becoming stale or brittle.
I don’t tend to be converted to new points of view when I deliberately learn about something that doesn’t appeal to me, at least not in terms of being directly persuaded to like something that I didn’t like before. The effect is similar to when people hang out with those of the opposite political persuasion. You’re unlikely to be converted, and you’ll probably just emerge more certain about your prior views, but you may develop a keener sense of what matters to you and why. So there can still be a character sculpting effect, but it probably won’t pull you in the opposite direction.
I didn’t know much about littles and age play before the meetup. I’d heard the terms before, but that’s about it. These topics were shoved in the bin of my brain called “kinky stuff I’m not into, but some people are.” After attending last night’s class, which included two hours of slides, storytelling, and insightful sharing from someone with extensive direct experience – albeit playfully and casually – I know way more about this than I ever did before. I emerged even more certain that it’s just not something I’m into.
One reason I wanted to go to this meetup was sheer curiosity. I didn’t understand how it could be a turn-on for someone to be into this particular fetish and not have it feel immensely creepy. No matter how I frame it, it’s a total turnoff for me. I get an “ewww” feeling just thinking about it. Before I went to the meetup, I wondered why anyone would be into this, let alone offer a class on it. Apparently there are a lot of people who enjoy this though, and many have found a way to integrate this into their lifestyles with other like-minded people.
I do respect that this is a kink practiced by consenting adults, and I support people having the freedom to explore together if it’s agreeable for all involved. But it also made me wonder why this is even a part of my reality, especially when I view it through the subjective lens. Why would my simulation even give rise to something like this? Is it a glitch, or is there some deeper value or meaning in it?
There is some overlap between this fetish and other aspects of kink that do appeal to me, namely the power exchange of D/s play. So this did help me think about D/s with a fresh perspective, giving me a bit more clarity about the edges and boundaries of what I like. But I didn’t find that particularly profound, and it wasn’t the main insight I gained last night.
What I found most interesting was when the speaker shared his reasons for being into this, not just as occasional play but as a committed lifestyle and identity. He noted the joys of letting go of responsibility and letting someone else care for him. It was clear that he gains a lot from the experience, especially in terms of feeling deep emotional connection and intimacy. I was genuinely impressed by how lucidly he expressed this, which helped me to understand his point of view. I found his depth of sharing about the emotional benefits way more insightful than anything he shared about specific practices. I also found this part more relatable. I couldn’t connect with the practices, but I could connect with the benefits he described.
Because my work is about personal growth, and since personal growth is also personal, I don’t do a very good job of letting go of work. So much of what I do can be considered growth-related in some way or another. Even when I’m traveling or on vacation, I have a tendency to frame and treat such trips as growth experiences. I’m always challenging myself to grow, grow, and grow some more.
When I try to have a pure play experience, some part of me still conspires to treat it as a growth experience. Personal growth is just such a dominant lens in my life, probably because it’s a lens that I feel saved my life when I was younger, and so I’ve been very loyal to it for decades.
And I still love this lens. I don’t expect to ever abandon it. But I also see that it’s useful to lower this lens now and then. Sometimes I wear this lens so much that I can mistake it for my eyes.
I can have pure play experiences, but I relegate these to the back burner much of the time. This part of life so often gets cut when I get busy. And I still feel a need to justify play much of the time, giving it a work-related purpose such as recharging my batteries to be more productive. There often has to be a growth-oriented “adult” reason to justify play, which means the meaning of play is always tethered to the meaning of work.
Play can be framed as an activity that gets balanced with work and other activities, or it can be integrated into one’s self-image, such that it becomes a normal and natural expression of oneself.
Play is one form of non-work, but I could also think of non-work as meeting and fulfilling deeper needs. I’m very good at meeting some of those needs, like enjoying an abundance of human touch. But this class invited me to think about other aspects of non-work more deeply, such as friendship and in-person socializing. Do those outlets have to be growth-oriented in order to be very satisfying?
I’m grateful for last night’s meetup. It was an unusual invitation from reality, one that I could have rejected for surface reasons. This encourages me to loosen up and be more flexible in learning about other kinks, fetishes, and other practices that I already know I’m not into. There may be higher level insights to be gained by seeking understanding and trying to find common ground. Instead of that “ewww” feeling when I think about this topic now, I feel that some compassion has stepped in to take its place, perhaps because I can now link it to a real human being. I still have no desire to explore it personally, but I feel that I’ve gained something by understanding a little better why other people do. I know… bad pun. 😉
This evening Rachelle and I attended an orientation meeting for a local kink-related meetup group. It’s a very active group that does frequent educational workshops as well as social meetups. I’ve known about them for years and was curious, but I never went to one of their meetups, mainly because there was a (relatively minor) prerequisite that seemed just annoying enough to dissuade me from going and keep the idea perpetually on the back burner.
In order to attend any meetings from this group, they require that everyone has to attend a 90-minute orientation meeting in person before they can attend anything else. If you don’t attend the orientation, they won’t even give you the address for their events.
Sitting through a 90-minute orientation sounded pretty dry to me, and it was about a 40-minute round trip drive to the location, so I always put it off. I figured it would most likely go over some basic aspects of kink that I was already familiar with and that it would be boring to sit through it. My only motivation for enduring it would be to get access to the hopefully more interesting meetings of the group.
Sometimes these orientation meetings would be offered when I was traveling, or they’d be many weeks away when I checked, or I’d just forget about the group for several months. Sometimes I’d add the orientation meeting to my calendar just in case I felt like going when it came up, but then I always talked myself out of it.
I could at least see the topics and descriptions of their meetings without having to go through orientation. There’s a relatively small subset of kink that interests me, which I’ve blogged about in the past, but this group has way more variety than my narrow range of interests. I might be interested in maybe 5-10% of what they cover.
This year (and really starting this month), I decided to lean towards more expansion of my in-person social life, so last week I decided to check again when the next orientation meeting for this group was coming up. I saw that it was only a few days away, which turned out to be this evening. Finally the stars aligned, and this time I decided to actually go. Rachelle agreed to come along and check it out as well. I’d say we were both a bit skeptical about what it would be like, but we did our best to go in with as much open-mindedness as we could muster.
I was pleasantly surprised. The orientation wasn’t about orienting to basic etiquette related to a kink-based lifestyle that I’d heard many times before. It was actually about the specific standards of the group and their internal code of conduct.
This is a very active group with hundreds of members, and they’re very protective about the culture inside and creating psychological safety for those involved. So the orientation mainly focused on clarifying and setting expectations for what it’s like. It was largely a rundown of what’s considered acceptable versus unacceptable behavior inside the group. All of the standards made sense when viewed through the lens of psychological safety.
For example, we could share about the group itself, what topics it covers, and the personal aspects of our experiences because that isn’t going to threaten anyone’s psychological safety. But we absolutely cannot “out” anyone who’s involved because that could cause significant problems for people, such as a job loss or being harshly rejected by family.
What I found especially interesting is how the group has tiers of access. The group is free, so these aren’t financial tiers but rather trust tiers. The most basic level of access is granted after completing the orientation, so Rachelle and I have now progressed to that level. At the end of the orientation, we were given the address for the meetups and can freely attend whichever ones interest us. The next level is granted after attending three meetups.
I rather liked learning that the group has a code of conduct meant to prevent problems, create psychological safety, and minimize drama. It seems clear that they’re seeking members who will align with the group, and they want to catch misalignments early and then restrict or limit access based on the severity of the misalignment. They have rules in place to prevent, catch, and handle threats to the psychological safety of the members.
I’ve been public about this part of my life for at least a decade, so the social consequences and judgments aren’t an issue for me like they might be for some people. I don’t need as much protection or as many rules to feel psychologically safe. I’ve had time to get used to feeling safe and supported even when sharing rather personal aspects of my life publicly.
However, I still benefit when the people around me feel psychologically safe. If they feel safe, they’re more willing to open up, share, and connect, and that means less work for me socially. So even if I don’t think I need as much psychological safety for myself, I really like this standard when I see it because I benefit from easier social flow.
I’ve also seen how a lack of psychological safety can negatively impact groups if they don’t create enough of it.
In a mastermind group I was involved in a while back, there wasn’t a very high standard of psychological safety. Members teased each other a lot. New members weren’t onboarded particularly well. The social expectations of the group were fuzzy. During the meetings many members were on their phones, laptops, and tablets constantly, not even giving the current speaker their full attention. Various misalignments, some of which might have seemed minor on their own, added to a feeling that something was off with the group. The feeling of connection was weaker than it could have been. It felt like investing in this group would be a lot more work socially than in other groups with higher social standards.
With a different online group that I got involved in this year, the psychological safety is very high, and it shows. There was more clarification about the standards and expectations, and members were screened for alignment before they could join. I’ve been impressed with the level of intimacy and sharing in this group.
Psychological safety isn’t a crisp and clear standard. It’s subjective of course. We could say that it’s whatever people feel it is. It’s also a spectrum, not a binary switch between safe and unsafe. But there are still ways to create it more consistently, such as by identifying what people would perceive as a threat and then seeking to prevent or remove those threats.
It’s also possible to take this standard too far. This happens when people feel stunted in being able to express what they’d really like to say, out of concern that they may (even accidentally) make someone else feel unsafe or violate some rule they perceive as overly strict.
I think that a relatively healthy standard is to allow for some errors on both sides. This means that some of the more sensitive people will feel uncomfortable; they’ll feel that it’s a bit too much of a stretch to open up, share, and trust. For instance, some people may still not feel that they can trust the kink group even with the rules and expectations defined pretty well. They may be so concerned about the risk of accidentally being outed that they won’t join or show up.
And on the other extreme, some people won’t feel good about being in the group because they’ll find the rules too stifling. They’ll find the rules too oppressive, and they won’t like being burdened with following the rules, especially if they don’t require as much to feel safe.
I think it’s a healthy sign when people are opting out of a group or declining to participate at both of these extremes. This indicates that the group’s center of mass is probably being satisfied well enough.
Consider the alternative of trying to eliminate dissatisfaction with the standards on one side or the other. You’ll end up chasing after fewer and fewer people as you move further from the center, which can cause some dissatisfaction in the center as well. More people will start feeling the rules are either too tight or too loose for them.
This balancing act is one that I keep working on in Conscious Growth Club. We have a nice culture of sharing and trust that I want to preserve and improve on the inside. But to get this right and satisfy the majority of members, I expect to see some resistance at both extremes. Some people will leave because they feel the rules and culture are too tight and too protective. And some will leave because they feel the rules are too loose and not protective enough. That’s to be expected. What I aim to preserve is the core of the group who feel the rules are pretty well aligned to give them sufficient psychological safety to connect, share, trust, and to derive solid benefits from participating. If we chase the extremes to create more satisfaction at the edges, the bigger risk is losing the center of mass.
While I don’t know what the kink group is like on the inside – time will tell – I appreciate that they’ve put a lot of thought into creating psychological safety. Even if they don’t calibrate perfectly well for my tastes, just making the effort to address psychological safety tends to do a lot of good, creating stronger social flow inside. It’s not something that will ever be perfect, but an imperfect implementation is generally way better than none at all.
Once when I was going through customs at the airport in Winnipeg, Canada to visit Rachelle, I got pulled aside for extra questioning. The suspicious young agent somehow convinced himself that I was on an errand of ill intent and interrogated me about my reasons for visiting. He went through the files on my laptop, searching for evidence of illegal activity. He read through the recent text messages on my cell phone. Much to his chagrin, I wasn’t actually crossing the border to destroy Canadian society, so he came up empty handed and grudgingly waved me through, although for good measure he gave me a bonus lecture about the risks of doing anything illegal while visiting Canada.
I felt mostly creeped out afterwards, as if I someone had just vomited fear into my personal energy matrix. It took me several hours to slough off those feelings. Fortunately hanging out with Rachelle and the other nice people of Winnipeg was all it took to bring me back up again.
At the time I blamed that event on the overzealous agent, but if I look back on it now, I can interpret the whole experience as a reflection – and perhaps an amplification – of my own thoughts and beliefs at the time.
Even before I got to that agent, I approached the customs area with a suspicious vibe. I didn’t trust the agents, so when I was asked about the reasons for my visit, I gave a vague answer – “tourism” – which of course made the guy suspicious that I was hiding something. Who travels from Las Vegas to Winnipeg for tourism?
If I’d been a tad less suspicious and a bit more open with the agents, I probably wouldn’t have been subjected to the extra grilling.
I’ve seen similar patterns echoed back to me through blogging as well. When I’d write about a topic while feeling guarded about getting a negative reaction, my posts would attract plenty of criticism and judgmental responses. But when I fully owned what I was writing about, and I felt unattached to how people would react, there usually weren’t any negative responses to speak of.
I’m reminded of an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation where the ship is being shaken by energy waves of increasing magnitude, and the waves are getting so strong that they’re about to tear the ship apart. But it turned out that the ship’s own shields were causing these violent waves. The waves were proportionate reflections of the shield energy. Once the shields were dropped, the waves stopped, and the ship was no longer in danger.
One important zone of clarity is your relationship with reality. Reality will often reflect back to you what you put out, even when you’re unaware of this relationship. I think it would be an exaggeration to say that this happens with a magical degree of perfect balance, but the effect is there nonetheless.
Occasional missteps aren’t usually such a big deal, but if you see recurring patterns in what reality seems to be reflecting back to you, consider that you may actually be creating these effects more powerfully than you previously realized.
When you identify a recurring result in your life that you don’t feel aligned with, pause now and then to ask yourself, How am I creating this? Don’t ask this question with an attitude of blame but rather with an attitude of curiosity. Consider the possibility that your own thoughts or actions are causing or contributing to these outcomes.
Suppose, for instance, that you keep encountering a significant lack of social support in your life. Maybe everyone around you seems indifferent to your goals, and no one seems to lift a finger to help you. You may believe that you’re taking positive actions such as behaving gregariously and generously with other people. You may believe that you’re a good person, that you have worthy goals, and that you deserve some help. But if you privately feel distrustful of people, if you’re pretending to care about helping others but you don’t really care that much, or if your thoughts are otherwise out of alignment with the outcome you seek, then you can expect that people will subtly pick up on your true intentions, and they may respond with some resistance in return.
You’ll likely find it easier to spot these waves of reflection in other people. Perhaps someone tells you about a persistent problem they’re having, and it’s abundantly obvious to you how this person is creating that very problem. You may think to yourself, Well… duh! Of course that’s what you’re going to experience. Meanwhile the person remains completely oblivious to the causal links between thoughts, actions, and results.
You may also know that if you share your honest impressions with the person, they’ll probably be surprised, insulted, or defensive. They’re unlikely to see what you’re seeing. They’re too close to the situation to see it through the lens of self-created reflections coming back to them. So you may offer up a polite response instead.
I think it’s wise to assume that you’re also blind to many of your own self-created reflections. What you’re experiencing from life is in many ways just basic feedback regarding what you’re putting out.
Now the mistake people make here is to attempt to alter the reflections by doing even more of what caused them in the first place.
As I dealt with the overzealous border agent, I became increasingly annoyed with him. I asked if he could speed up the process, suggesting that I had more important things to do (like hang out with friends). I made facial expressions and shifted my body language to overtly communicate my irritation with his behavior. I did even more of what invited these reflections in the first place. Did this help my situation? Of course not. It simply motivated the agent to hold me up longer as he searched in vain for evidence of increasingly far-fetched breeches of Canadian law.
Have you ever done something similar by doubling down on an approach that clearly isn’t working?
When life threatens you with a financial problem, do you tighten up and go even deeper into the scarcity mindset that gave rise to this problem in the first place? Or do you use the challenge as an invitation to shift into abundance mode, such as by being more generous than usual?
When you’re stressed at work, do you procrastinate even more, thereby amplifying the stress? Or do you turn towards relaxation and find a way to play your way through the work instead?
If you go deeper into the thoughts, feelings, and energy patterns that give rise to your problems, you’ll attract more and bigger versions of those same problems. You’ll be like the character in that Star Trek episode who keeps calling “more shields, more shields, more shields” till the ship is about to be torn apart, never realizing that the shields are causing the problem.
Which persistent problems in your life might you actually be creating? Is it possible that you’re creating financial scarcity by acting like a financially scarce person would? Is it possible you’re creating social disconnection? Is it possible you’re creating the health status of your body? Again I’m not suggesting 100% perfect causality here, but can you entertain the possibility that your own thoughts and behaviors may be contributing to your results?
You may not learn the real truth until you deliberately shift your patterns of thought and behavior and give yourself the opportunity to see different patterns being reflected back. That’s when it will finally dawn on you that you’ve been playing a major role in creating your experiences all along. It’s when you break the old patterns and try something incongruent with your previous mindset that you can finally see the causal links that were previously hidden to you.
I suggest that you start small here. Test this idea when it doesn’t feel super critical. When you’re experiencing scarcity, try donating a small amount of money online to a cause you like. When you’re bored at work, play one of your favorite songs, shake out your body, and take a dance break for a few minutes. When you’re feeling angry, try sending someone a thank you note. If you don’t like the outcomes you’ve been experiencing, try setting a radically different cause in motion, and see how it affects your results.
Turn towards the patterns that feel more loving and more powerful to you, even if you can only manage this for a short time. When you disrupt your previous patterns, you’ll also raise your awareness of the old reflections you’ve been serving up unconsciously. And this will help you step into a zone of power that lets you change those patterns – and improve your results too.
There are multiple zones of clarity. Let’s consider them.
First, there’s clarity with yourself – clarity about who you are, what you are, and about your skills and capabilities. This zone of clarity could be called self knowledge, self awareness, and self understanding.
Second, there’s clarity about this reality – about the world, the universe, and life in general. What is this place you find yourself in? What is its nature? What’s possible here? How does it work? What are its laws and rules?
And third, there’s clarity about your relationship with this reality. How do you connect with this world of existence? Can you trust it? Are you safe here? Do you need to protect yourself from threats, risks, or dangers? Which parts of this reality can you control or influence? And which would seem to be outside your control?
Those are the three big types of clarity:
clarity about yourself
clarity about this reality
clarity about the relationship between you and this reality
Think of this like a human relationship such as a friendship, a romantic relationship, or a marriage. We can say there are three types of clarity in such situations. There’s clarity about who you are. There’s clarity about who your partner is. And there’s clarity about how you relate to each other. A lack of clarity in any one of those areas could inject confusion and uncertainty into the relationship. If you’re unclear about yourself, if your partner is unclear in their identity, or if you’re unclear about how you and your partner are connecting with each other, then any or all of those issues could lead to fuzziness and uncertainty about the relationship.
If we go another step further here, we can see that there are even more layers to the clarity puzzle. First, we have your understanding of your identity, of your partner’s identity, and of the connection between you and your partner. But additionally we also have your partner’s understanding of these three roles as well. So we have how your partner perceives you, your partner’s self-perception, and how your partner perceives your relationship connection.
And then we could go even more layers deep, like how you think your partner sees you, your mental model of your partner’s self-perception, and how you think your partner sees your relationship connection. And if we wanted to, we could keep considering more and more layers: I think that my partner thinks that I think that she’s… and so on.
Therein lies the challenge of clarity. Here we’re only considering a relationship between two people who may claim to know each other to some degree. Now add the entire physical universe and all of the people within it to this puzzle, and also note that all of these entities are in flux and never remain static, and the potential for confusion just grows astronomically huge.
So what hope do we possibly have to resolve the clarity puzzle for ourselves as individuals? It is such a hopeless challenge as it may seem?
Well, yes – it is as hopeless as it may seem. If we look at this challenge from a certain perspective, we have to admit that we can’t possibly know all there is to know about ourselves, about the universe, and about our relationship with the universe – and keep all of that information 100% current and accurate 100% of the time. It’s a truly impossible task. There’s just no way we can hope to achieve clarity this way.
The shortcoming to this approach is that we can never hope to achieve clarity through information. We’ll simply get lost in infinite possibilities with such an approach. We won’t be able to predict how circumstances will unfold with sufficient accuracy. We’ll be frequently surprised – surprised by other people, by the world at large, and even by our own behaviors. A sense of consistency will always elude us with this approach.
So let’s just admit the truth of this. An information-based approach to clarity is doomed to failure. It will never work for us. Does this mean our efforts are doomed to failure though? Not necessarily. It just means that we have to approach clarity from a different angle. We can’t rely solely on gathering information.
When you catch yourself needing to do more research, reading, and information acquisition to gain clarity about a major life decision, beware the bottomless pit. Information alone won’t answer your most important questions, although it may help you research and buy a good toaster.
So what’s the alternative? I recommend focusing on the relationship between you and your reality because improving that relationship also improves your clarity about yourself and about reality. The challenge is that improving this relationship is akin to deciding to trust reality more. The more you trust reality, the more your relationship with reality improves, and the more clarity you gain across the board.
This trust factor is up to you. It’s within your control to trust more, to trust the same, or to trust less. So in that sense, clarity is really a decision to be made. It’s the decision to commit to creating a deeper level of trust with reality.
This makes sense when you look at the other side of clarity. Suppose you do gain tremendous clarity. Then what? Now the expectation is that you’ll take action in alignment with that clarity. This requires trust as well.
So I encourage you to frame your clarity challenges not as challenges of figuring out the right information but rather as trust challenges. How much are you willing to trust? If you want more clarity, especially with the expectation that you’ll act in alignment with greater clarity, then work on trust.
A good way to begin is just to say aloud to reality when you’re alone, “I want to trust you more. Help me do that.” This works with people too. 🙂
Obviously you’ve been through a lot of character sculpting already. You started as a baby, and you’ve grown into the person you are today. But much of that sculpting process was done to you, such as by your family upbringing, the culture you were raised in, and the education you received. Up to a certain point, you were sculpted by the world.
How well did the world do its job?
How do you feel about your character’s values, behaviors, habits, identity, lifestyle, and overall place in the world? How pleased are you with your internal state of being? How delighted are you with the results that are currently flowing into your life?
Do you feel like the world did a good job? Did it complete the task of fully sculpting your character, such that now you have a wonderful role to play for the rest of your life?
Some people might indeed feel the world did a great job on them. Others, myself included, would find these statements laughable, depending on when in our lives we ask them.
In my early years the world tried to sculpt me into a reverent, obedient Catholic. Nice try, world. Nice try.
Rebellion Phase
Of course I didn’t like where that was headed, so I rebelled against that fate and opted to take charge of my own path without the nuns and priests.
Actually I wish I had thought of it as sculpting my character, but I wasn’t that self-aware at the time. So it was mostly a phase of chaotic rebellion. That led to my getting arrested 4 times in 18 months… and almost going to prison for a year or two.
Eventually that situation scared me straight, and I abandoned the temporary dream of becoming a criminal mastermind. But I was still left hanging by the world. What now?
Personal Growth Phase
Eventually I stumbled upon personal growth, starting with a late night informercial to buy a memory improvement course. That seemed better than doing things that would get me arrested, albeit a bit tame relative to my previous lifestyle. The memory course was just okay, but it got me started on the long road of personal growth that I’ve been traveling ever since.
In the beginning I gobbled up random books and audio programs – whatever looked interesting to me. This material gradually taught me to think more consciously and deliberately about my life. In the beginning I consumed lots of material on goal setting, time management, and values. This led me to eventually set a really big goal for myself: graduate from college with two degrees in only three semesters. I succeeded and even won an award for being the top computer science student in my graduating class. That was a potent taste of what personal development could do for me. It was also my second attempt at university, my first run resulting in expulsion. Such a stark contrast in my results was enough to convince me that I should stick with personal growth work for many more years.
I was still being sculpted by the world in a way, but at least I had some say in how I was being sculpted. I could choose which books to read and which courses to buy. But I was still subjected to the values the authors injected into their work. Some of that was really good, and I liked being influenced and stretched, but I cringed whenever I heard someone utter the word God in their programs. I was an atheist at the time and wanted nothing more to do with religion.
This phase lasted for many years. I went through 1000+ books on various aspects of personal growth – relationships, health, business, spirituality, productivity, success, meditation, lifestyle, and more. I started going to workshops too. I hired a few different coaches.
The positive influence of this material definitely had an effect. I took a lot more growth-oriented action. I trained in martial arts for a few years. I got into distance running and ran the L.A. Marathon. I went vegan. I wrote an award-winning computer game. I bought and moved into a home that cost more than $1 million. I overcame my fear of public speaking. I started traveling. I got married (twice) and had kids (twice, but just with wife #1).
Conscious Character Sculpting
Being influenced by positive sources was really empowering, but I also felt that I could do better by engineering my own growth experiences. I sensed that there was yet another level I could progress to.
One method I used again and again was to do 30-day challenges. I did my first one in 1992, which was to go vegetarian for 30 days. It stuck and I never went back, even though I wasn’t intending to do it permanently. I used the same approach to go vegan 3.5 years later.
I’ve done so many of these challenges now that I lose track of them. I’ve probably done 6 or 7 of them in the past year alone. Even the more mundane ones, like learning chess for 30 days, added some delightful nuances to my character. Sometimes I do bigger challenges too, like my current challenge to blog every single day of 2020. Since I started on December 24 (why wait?), this is day 14. I still have 360 days to go after I publish this. It’s a leap year. 🙂
Long ago this type of challenge would have seemed unachievable. Now two weeks into it, I’m still enthusiastic about it. I know how good this will be for sculpting my character in the direction I want to go this year.
I saw the connection between the knowledge and experience I gained each year and the long-term effect on my character. Knowledge changed me. Experience changed me too.
Year after year of investing in personal growth had sculpted me into a different person. My past self who wasn’t yet into personal growth wouldn’t recognize me as I am today. He might even find me intimidating. I’d just hug him though, even though he’d probably cringe. Even though our scars are basically identical, he hadn’t yet repaired the damage related to being touched by humans.
I can still remember how I used to be in other decades of my life, so in that sense I’m the same person I was before. But I’ve added and shifted so much through gains in knowledge and experience that my dominant thoughts and feelings can be strikingly different each decade. I seem to become increasingly relaxed and confident in who I am as I get older. I find it easier and more effortless to express myself without worrying about being judged or criticized. Making money is easy and fun. And I get to enjoy a cool lifestyle. Later this month I’m going to visit the Panama Canal for the first time, and I’m heading back to Europe again this summer. I used to have a character that thought it must be a huge deal to leave the country, so he never did so. He’s really going to love his first trip to Paris.
Appreciating the World’s Role
I used to resent what my Catholic upbringing did to my character. Much of my early personal growth work involved repairing the damage. It’s so nice to live by my own well-formed sense of ethics instead of having some vapid nonsense like the Ten Commandments stuck in my head.
Today I feel differently about the world’s role in early character training – grateful actually. The religious “truths” I was taught early in life just seemed so ludicrous and nonsensical once I grew half a brain that it was a no-brainer (or half-brainer?) to reject that sooner or later.
The world handed me such a terribly misaligned character that clearly wasn’t going to work for me long-term. Self-pity wasn’t going to help. And doing heart-racing stuff that got me arrested, while often fun, clearly wasn’t sustainable unless I wanted to sculpt myself into a character who only wears orange pajamas.
The world gave me little choice but to try to fix the crappy ass NPC preset that it served up. But if not for that, I don’t think I’d have learned some of the most powerful self-development methods that are such an integral part of my life today. Life put me in a position where I had to put tons of work into my character if I wanted to have any chance at long-term happiness.
This kind of work is very difficult at times. It’s especially difficult to admit the truth that we aren’t as happy with our current characters as we’d like to be. So many of us pretend to be okay to fit in socially when we clearly aren’t inside. I have thousands of emails from people as evidence of that.
It’s hard to say yes to character sculpting work. It usually involves a lot of crying. But it does work, and it is worth it. And in the long run, it’s way, way better than denial.
I feel lucky that my starting point didn’t give me much room for denial. I felt like I slammed hard into the truth about myself shortly before I was even an adult. I think this road is more difficult for people who have the option of pretending that all is well with them. It’s harder for many other people to get started on this path because they aren’t ready to admit just how misaligned their characters have become. So they continue living those lives of quiet desperation, if only to remind the rest of us not to end up like that.
Fortunately a lot of us are ready and willing to admit that our characters need work. The challenge for us is figuring out how to do it effectively, so that we create clear signs of progress inside and out.
While my character sculpting journey began with damage repair mode, that’s no longer true today (and hasn’t been true for many years). Now I just want to take a character I really like and continue sculpting it into one that I really, really like. And when I get there, I’ll work on creating a character that I really, really, really like. It’s definitely possible to like who you’ve become yet still want to keep growing. When I go through some intense growth for a while, I often like to settle in for a bit, but eventually the promise of more growth always seduces me back into the game.
Conscious Character Sculpting
These days I really love the character I get to play each day. I like myself because I worked hard to turn my character into someone I’d like.
This requires figuring out what kind of character you’d like (not always easy) and then doing the work to actually become that character (pretty much never easy).
I’m happy that I developed my character into a creative entrepreneur who hasn’t been anyone’s employee since 1992. Would you enjoy playing a character who never needs to deal with job interviews, commuting, corporate politics, and bad coffee? I’m literally writing this article dressed like Arthur Dent.
I’m happy that I see money as something fun and flowing and playful, not as something to fret over.
I’m happy that I’m married to a woman who’s smart, funny, and yummy. She’s my best friend too. I love snuggle-sleeping with her every night. And I like working with her each day as well.
I’m happy I have a lifestyle that I like. I get to create and publish a lot, which I enjoy. I get to work with very growth-oriented people every day in Conscious Growth Club. I get to travel a nice amount. And I get to keep doing lots of stretchy personal growth experiments.
And I’m not stopping – ever! I know that my character will always be a work in progress, and it’s fun and rewarding to progress (once you learn how to get yourself to actually change). It’s also fun to keep dreaming up new ways I can train him and teach my character new tricks, like when I got him to go 40 days without food in 2017… or when I had him go to Disneyland for 30 days in a row in 2016. This year I’ve put him on a major training program for amping up his creative output, so he’ll create and publish more this year than any year before.
If you have to live with your character for the rest of your life, wouldn’t it be nice if the experience keeps getting better and better?
Let Me Help You Sculpt Your Character
If you wake up each day with a character you love to play, kudos to you, especially if you didn’t start out that way. We should compare notes.
If, however, your character needs work, then you have two options. Figure it out on your own like I did, which will take decades.
or…
Leverage my decades of acquiring knowledge and experience, including years of coaching people, and join us for the new character sculpting deep dive that we just launched at the beginning of this year. It’s called Stature, and its ultimate purpose is to help you sculpt your character into one that you love playing each day – taking it one day at a time with bite-sized lessons and exercises.
Character sculpting is truly a lifelong process, but if you learn these tools early enough in life, they’re going to save you so many years of false starts and dead ends. I know I can shave years off your learning curve here if you’ll let me.
More than 100 people have already joined in the first few days (135 last time I checked). You can see the current count at the top of the Stature page. How many do we have now? You can be our +1.
During the launch week, we’re offering Stature at a 70% discount from the long-term price, so this discount is only good for about 2 more days: Tuesday and Wednesday this week. It expires at midnight Pacific time at the end of Wednesday, January 8.
So far I’ve published the first 7 audio lessons, and we have full transcripts published for the first 4 of those. We’re co-creating this course together throughout January and February, during which time we’ll build the course to at least 42 lessons (probably more).
Here’s a screenshot of the lessons in our member portal, so you can see what we have so far. You can stream or download any lesson from your favorite device (the portal is mobile friendly). There’s also a workbook to accompany the lessons and bunch of other bonuses and supplementary material being created for this.
If you’re ready to dive in with 135+ other people and do some major character sculpting work to create not just an amazing 2020 but a happy and empowering life, you’d be wise to join us for the Stature course. You get to keep it for life and do the course as many times as you desire. My website is a long-term fixture in the personal growth community (operating continuously since 2004), so we have that stable longevity factor going for us.
Hopefully you have a character who’s empowered enough to say yes to this, but if you’re still on the fence, my tip is to go with your first gut instinct.
A recent study reported in the Washington Post today claimed that people make better decisions when they go with their first gut instinct instead of second-guessing themselves. I also asked growth-oriented friends on social media if they make better decisions from gut instinct or second-guessing analysis, and it was abundantly clear that gut instinct was the winner by far – many had regrets about second-guessing themselves and missing opportunities. So if your gut instinct is to join us, then join us.
I also trust my gut instinct, which told me that creating this course was one of the best projects I could do in my lifetime. I’m building a timeless course that will serve people for decades to come. This is just the beginning. I hope your character will join us in this special experience. The energy from the first group of people going through a course is just such a delight to behold.
We’re only 7 lessons in, and many people have told me they’ve cried a good bit already. Come share some tears with us if you’re brave enough. It’s part of the rebirthing process as we say goodbye to our old selves.
Seriously, please do join. Stature will do you a world of good.
What if you think you need to maintain an old situation that you’re only tolerating for the secondary gains, and you don’t feel you can afford to quit immediately and lose those gains while you seek a better situation?
For instance, what if you don’t think you can afford to quit your job and have no income coming in while you search for something better?
Or what if you don’t feel you could leave a so-so relationship while you look for a more aligned partner?
It will probably slow you down if you remain stuck in those situations, but it doesn’t have to derail your progress completely.
When you’re not aligned with a situation, life may eventually eject you from it, or you’ll sabotage the experience enough that other people eventually kick you out, such as by laying you off or by breaking up with you. Tolerating negative circumstances is an unstable situation. One way or another, it will eventually come to an end. The real question is when.
If you prefer to creep up on clarity at a snail’s pace, then tolerating a negative situation is certainly one way to do it. It will slow you down, usually by a lot. But you can still do it if you feel it’s what you need to experience.
Now if you’re not ready to move on from a tolerable situation with secondary gains, but you still want to progress towards greater clarity then here’s a key question to ask yourself (and to keep asking again and again): Which is more important to me right now – the secondary gains I’m getting (like the income, the companionship, etc) or increasing my alignment with something else?
Now if your honest answer is that the secondary gains are indeed the most important to you right now, and if you’re unwilling to risk them, then in a sense we could say you already have pretty good clarity, right? You’re clear that those gains are what’s most important to you. And so you can feel congruent continuing to do what it takes to maintain them.
In fact, if you suspect that’s the right approach for you right now, I encourage you to make that choice. Try it on for size. See how it feels. Go a few weeks living with that mindset. Know that you’ve chosen those secondary gains for now. Tell yourself that this is what you want or need to experience at this point in time. See if you can continue to feel good about that decision.
If you can feel good about that decision, then your negative internal reaction to your circumstances will begin to lift. You’ll progress from tolerance to acceptance and surrender, and you’ll stop resisting what you don’t want. You’ll actually begin to appreciate your situation for the worthwhile value it provides. You’ll appreciate your paycheck more. You’ll appreciate your relationship partner more. And through this surrender, your sense of clarity will improve.
If, on the other hand, your best efforts to accept your secondary gains don’t stand the test of time, and you still find yourself feeling ambivalent about the decision – meaning that you keep waffling back and forth on it – then this suggests that deep down, something else is actually more important to you than the secondary gains you’re trying so hard to defend. It suggests that you’re headed for a transition.
This is another invitation to acceptance and surrender. In this case, can you surrender to the transition that’s coming up for you? Can you accept that you’re currently in an unstable situation and that one way or another, you’ll soon be moving on?
If you can surrender to the inevitability of your transition, you’ll also experience an increase in clarity. It will help you get past the doubt of staying where you are, and this will swing the pendulum the other way. You’ll feel increasingly dissatisfied with your current situation, and you’ll be less willing to keep tolerating it.
Either way, swing the pendulum. That’s the key to overcoming ambivalence. If you swing it one way, and it doesn’t lead to greater clarity, then swing it even harder the other way. Lean one way, and if that doesn’t work out, then lean even more the other way. And keep increasing the amplitude of your swings till you break free on one side or the other.
Either you’ll come to love your current situation, and you’ll fully surrender to it and release any significant resistance to staying. Or you’ll find your current situation so intolerable that you’re finally ready to move on and transition.
You can swing the pendulum even while you continue to experience the secondary gains.
If you don’t swing the pendulum, or if you’re not willing to do so because you perceive it could risk your secondary gains by increasing the chances of a transition, then there’s another layer of acceptance and surrender that you can work on. And that is to accept that you’re effectively sentencing yourself to an ongoing lack of clarity. You’re degrading your hope of experiencing more clarity than you have right now.
You have the option to do that. You can keep yourself stuck in ambivalence and confusion if you so choose.
But if you do want greater clarity, then it’s wise to accept that you cannot continue to tolerate what you don’t actually like. And moreover, you cannot continue to tolerate ambivalence either. And the reason is simple. Tolerance and ambivalence don’t create clarity; they just perpetuate confusion.
Imagine being in a relationship with a partner you don’t trust. Would you be able to have good clarity in such a relationship?
If you don’t trust your partner, you won’t be able to trust that they’ll do what’s mutually beneficial for your relationship. This will make it harder to invest in your relationship. You’ll feel inclined to hold something back. You’ll feel a need to protect yourself against the risk of dishonesty, betrayal, harsh judgment, and so on.
But the odd truth here is that if you knew for certain that you couldn’t trust your partner, you could still experience a strong level of clarity. You wouldn’t bother investing in a trust-based relationship with such a person. You’d focus on self-preservation instead. If you knew that your partner was going to lie, cheat, and perhaps act abusively, and you grew to expect such behaviors and to tolerate them, you could still feel reasonably clear about the relationship and where you stood within it. You’d be savvy enough to learn to control and manipulate your partner instead of trusting them. There are indeed relationships like this, and they’re often fairly stable over many years, so our model of clarity must account for this.
A low-trust relationship can still be a fairly predictable one, and hence it can have relatively high clarity. Suppose, for instance, that you got into a relationship with someone for the secondary gains, such as access to a wealthy lifestyle, and you could freely admit that to yourself (even if you hid that intention from others). And suppose your partner abuses drugs regularly. If you’re honest with yourself about your reasons for being in such a relationship, and if you feel willing and able to deal with the highs and lows because you really want those secondary gains, you could actually surrender to the truth of your situation and thereby feel pretty clear about your path within the scope of that relationship.
You wouldn’t delude yourself into thinking that you have a fairy tale romance. You might put on a good show for other people, but you’d know and accept the truth of your situation. You wouldn’t be so naive as to be fooled by your partner’s frequent lying. When you felt it was important to know the truth in areas where you suspected lying, you’d conduct your own independent investigation rather than accepting your partner’s word. You’d take steps to protect yourself from potential abuse, and you’d accept it as a cost of doing business, so to speak. In a way, you’d actually trust your partner – as in trusting them to behave like a drug abuser or a scoundrel. You trust that you couldn’t trust them.
As long as you stayed aligned with the truth of your situation and didn’t pretend that it was something other than it was, you could still feel pretty clear about your journey together and where you were headed. Maintaining a cynical view of your relationship would actually serve your sense of clarity.
On the other end of the spectrum, what if you did trust your partner? This can lead to strong clarity as well. You’d make different predictions about your partner’s expectations based on trust. You could expect your partner to be honest with you. You could expect some degree of loyalty to your relationship. You could expect to be treated fairly. Your partner’s past patterns of behavior would give you good cause to form these expectations.
In either type of relationship, you could feel psychologically safe – but only if you don’t succumb to self-delusion. In the low-trust relationship, you’ll need to develop self-preservation skills in order to feel psychologically safe. In the high-trust relationship, you could achieve psychological safety through feelings of love and caring.
At these extremes we can have good clarity, but what about the gray area in the middle?
You can still achieve decent clarity when you’re not at the extremes, as long as you seek to align your expectations with reality. What muddies your sense of clarity is when you cross the streams. Try to blend a high-trust relationship with lots of suspicion. Or try to combine a low-trust relationship with an unrealistic presumption of honesty. That’s going to pollute your sense of clarity because your expectations will be out of alignment with reality.
Expect human beings to behave like human beings, which means that sometimes they’ll behave like heroes and sometimes like villains. It’s reasonable to expect that in the world of humans, you’ll encounter some dishonesty, cheating, cruelty, and other human foibles. Humans have been practicing such behavior for millennia. To assume that your life will somehow be devoid of such issues isn’t likely to match up with reality. Life isn’t all rainbows and unicorns, but nor is it all zombies and pirates.
Within this expectation comes a deep level of forgiveness, not just of other people but of yourself. When you accept that other human beings will sometimes behave chaotically, it helps you accept this about yourself.
I share this as someone who has walked in the world of villains and in the world of heroes, and I’ll tell you that villains have their heroic moments, and heroes have their villainous moments. We are all – at our core – infested with human chaos. And this is part of the beauty and magic of life.
To deny the presence of this chaos is to reduce your sense of clarity. It makes no sense to deny what you’ve seen and experienced so often and can reasonably expect to be part of your reality in the future. But if you can accept the chaos and even learn to love it and to play with it, especially in your human relationships, you can stroll through the world of humans while maintaining a strong feeling of centeredness and psychological safety, even as the world throws you for a loop now and then. You may not be able to predict the events of each day, and you’ll often be surprised, but you can predict that if you embrace and accept the chaos, you’ll be in for a fun ride.
I listened to Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up audiobook this week. I know it’s a super popular book, but this is the first time I’ve checked it out. I liked it!
It also strikes me that the way she relates to possessions would be an interesting way to handle trust wounds as well, as both can be resolved through a decluttering process. The problem with both areas that creates stuckness is that such a process isn’t usually done thoroughly enough to fully fix the recurring problem (recurring clutter or recurring trust wounds).
Not doing a truly thorough, one-time tidying process is the main reason for recurring clutter, according to the book. We could say that a similar oversight also leads to recurring trust clutter.
What is trust clutter? It’s the presence of triggers (usually people) in your life that trigger trust issues for you. These could be people who’ve violated your trust in the past, and every time you think about them, those old wounds pop up again. Perhaps you keep such people around out of loyalty. Note that this is how people often accumulate lots of physical clutter as well – out of loyalty.
Marie Kondo’s standard for tidying is that you should only keep possessions that spark joy. That’s a high standard, and many people won’t be willing to meet it, but imagine what your life would be like if all of your possessions did meet that standard. You’d be surrounded by possessions that trigger only happiness. As as she notes in her book, this really does raise the long-term happiness level of people’s lives. If you eliminate the unhappiness triggers, you naturally get to experience more happiness.
I live in a home with lots of possessions that I like, but I’m nowhere near the spark joy standard across the board. This has been making me question some possessions: If an item doesn’t spark joy, what does it spark instead?
I’m discovering that possessions that don’t spark joy have other associations, many of them mixed. Some possessions trigger memories. Some trigger associations to people, especially gifts or hand-me-downs. Most of these triggers are on the positive side, but some aren’t. If I went through the process of evaluating and releasing the misaligned items, I do think it would improve my overall happiness. If you take away the negative triggers and the mixed ones, then there are only happy triggers left.
What I find interesting is that I actually apply this standard much better in my social life. When people violate my trust, I have a habit of releasing them and moving on. I remove them from my social circle, and I tend not to look back. In the past I’d give people second and third chances, and they pretty much always made me regret it sooner or later. While I wouldn’t say that all of the people in my social circle spark joy, I do believe that most of them do, and the ones that don’t are sparking mostly neutrality or weaker forms of positivity, but not negativity, problems, or trust violations. Consequently, my social circle is full of people I trust.
How many people are in my social circle today that I don’t trust? It feels like I have to wrack my brain to think of even one. I think it’s zero by definition. For me to consider someone part of my social circle, I have to trust them, so if I don’t trust them, they aren’t part of my social circle.
As Marie Kondo notes, once you do a really thorough tidying of your physical space, which mostly involves discarding items, and you push through until the job is truly done, it permanently raises your standards, and you’re unlikely to relapse. Can you imagine tidying up so well that you never relapse back to cluttered conditions? Life becomes so nice on the other side that any clutter that pops up really grabs your attention and makes you want to fix it immediately.
That’s how I tend to feel about my social life. Since my norm is to have trusting relationships and since my life has been like this for years, when something nasty does happen, it stands out like a truly glaring issue that must immediately be addressed. I just don’t tolerate social nastiness in my sphere. That’s probably why my Facebook block list has 100+ people on it. Cross the line once, and I’m very likely to conclude that we’re incompatible, so I’ll release you permanently. I respond to trust clutter like Marie Kondo deals with physical clutter.
This might sound a bit harsh, just as Marie Kondo’s tidying style may seem extreme. But I can see the logic in what she proposes because of my own experiences in my social life. There really is some life-changing magic to tidying up, not incrementally but in the form of a deep, one-time purging of the misaligned. As she notes in her book, this typically takes about 6 months for possessions if you’re going to do it right. Doing it once in your life is enough because that will raise your standards permanently.
If you have trouble maintaining an aligned social circle, consider doing a deep and thorough social tidying – so thorough that you only have to do it once in your life, and then you’ll never want to relapse. Ask if each person in your life sparks joy for you. If not, why are you wasting your life maintaining a relationship with them? If they spark joy + some crap, they go in the discard pile.
You might think you’ll have no friends left if you maintain this standard, just as people might feel like they won’t have any possessions left. But if you really have to downsize that much, it means that most or all of your friends or possessions are misaligned, and so starting fresh will be a good thing.
You don’t have to declutter harshly. You needn’t discard items by throwing them into the fire while bellowing, “Die, foul chatzki!” Marie Kondo recommends thanking and appreciating items as you release them. Consider using a similar approach when releasing relationships. You’re not tossing people into the Fire Swamp. You’re thanking and releasing them while appreciating the role they’ve played. You’re graduating to more aligned experiences.
If you cling to misaligned relationships, you hold yourself back (tremendously!) from graduating to more aligned relationships and social connections. That’s your choice, but I wouldn’t recommend staying stuck due to misplaced loyalty for too long. Be loyal to your path of growth, and you’re likely to see your relationships get better and better. Similarly, be loyal to your overall relationship with your home and to awakening and stimulating your best energy patterns. Loyalty to misaligned possessions and loyalty to misaligned people isn’t real loyalty – it’s really just resistance to growth and change. This life doesn’t reward settling into your comfort zone; it will make your comfort zone increasingly uncomfortable till you get back on a path of growth. If you’re stubborn about it, then your intention isn’t to remain in your comfort zone to the death – it’s to remain there to the pain! And good luck with that.
What do you think of someone when you walk into their cluttered home, full of stuff they clearly don’t appreciate? What would you think of them if their home had few possessions, but you could tell they liked and appreciated what they owned? Now apply this on a social level. What do people think when they see you tolerating people who trigger you? What would they think if you had a much sparser social life, but you fully appreciated everyone in it?
Even if you have to take your social circle to zero to reach this standard, then do as Marie Kondo does and start by appreciating your possessions. Develop the relationship with your stuff that you’d like to have with people. Misalignments are infectious, and so are alignments.
You could also extend this to customers and clients if you have a business… or to co-workers if you have a job. If the people in your life don’t spark joy for you, why not release them? Donate them to another business. If you do this enough, it will raise your standards for business and life. I do this pretty well, and so I get to connect with customers that I really like each day… even to the extent that I married one last year. And it’s a very happy, fun, and mutually enjoyable marriage because we both spark joy for each other.
Tidying up your social circle like this might sound crazy, especially if your life is full of misaligned people that you feel you must tolerate. But if that’s your justification, realize that you sound just like those people in cluttered homes justifying why they must keep every possession that makes them feel less than happy. Doing a thorough social cleanup would be incredibly freeing, even if it means you have to switch jobs or companies and even if it means you have to redefine “family” as something different from your relatives.
Just as no one is forcing you to live in a cluttered home, no one is forcing you to tolerate a misaligned social circle. You’re free to choose to clean house whenever you’re ready.
If you have trust clutter repeatedly popping up in your life, what’s the real cause of these recurring trust problems? Perhaps the true cause is that you’ve never done a throughout social tidying, so you don’t get the life-changing magic till you do.
Thanks a bunch, Marie Kondo. I thoroughly enjoyed and appreciated your book. 🙂
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