Tag Archives: Values

My Strengths (According to Reader Feedback)

Posted on by

Earlier this week I invited my blog readers and customers to share what they considered to be my strengths, and now I’ll share the results with you.

First, I appreciate the feedback. There were many different answers and perspectives, so I looked for patterns to condense the key ideas into a meaningful list.

The subheadings show the main groupings that I was able to identify. In some cases this was a little tricky while in others it was easy to identify clusters because the words and phrases people used were often very similar.

The bullet lists include some short direct quotes from people’s emails, some slightly modified or condensed quotes (such as to make the grammar consistent or to simplify them), and common words or phrases that people shared. I tried to pick representative samples when possible, but this isn’t an exhaustive list. Some of the samples could be shifted to other lists because they match multiple patterns; I did my best to put them in reasonable spots.

The paragraphs after the bullet lists include some extra personal commentary from me.

Note that nothing on this list is based on strengths that I consider myself to have, and none is based on other forms of feedback. This list is only derived from reader and customer feedback that was specifically sent in response to Monday’s blog post, What Are My Strengths?

Here’s what I ended up with. These aren’t in any particular order.

Open-Mindedness / Growth Mindset / Curiosity

  • Radical open-mindedness
  • Openness to new concepts and ideas
  • Capacity to challenge old beliefs, even when it goes against social pressure or conventional lines of thinking
  • Growth mindset, applied to multiple areas of life
  • Giving ideas careful consideration before deciding if they’re right for you
  • Ability to grow and release beliefs that no longer serve you
  • Subjective reality
  • Being a very “unstuck” person (inspirational)
  • Open to trying new stuff and being vulnerable
  • Courageous in quitting what doesn’t work for you (diets, relationships, values, etc.)
  • Willing to try new things and explore new patterns of thought
  • Inquisitiveness
  • Curiosity
  • You have the ability to stay open where most people have been closed off for a very long time
  • To tip a situation on its side and make a different assessment
  • Your thirst for knowledge to evaluate and condense all this into powerful thoughts
  • I love your curiosity and the way you keep exploring new subjects

I was surprised by how many people mentioned open-mindedness as one of my strengths since that isn’t a term I’d usually apply to myself. I definitely see myself as curious though. This feedback helped me see how strongly connected curiosity and open-mindedness are. Obviously our minds have to be open enough to explore unfamiliar territory.

The fact that people would call out open-mindedness as a strength also makes me wonder about the contrast. Does this mean that some of my readers would like to further develop this quality for themselves? This makes me curious about open-mindedness and how to teach or encourage the development of that quality more deliberately. This is probably an area of self-development that I tend to take for granted.

Independence / Freedom / Unshackled by Social Norms

  • Led by your own reflections
  • Internal locus of control
  • Putting yourself out there (seemingly) fearlessly
  • Being fully yourself, genuine, living life by connecting deeper with yourself and your values
  • You practice what you preach, and you don’t make lame or cliché statements
  • Free to explore many different ideas without being tied down to selling a system
  • Willingness to go against prevailing social norms
  • Seeing you go against grain helped me see that the reason I was so unhappy was because I was listening to my social conditioning rather than my heart
  • To constantly reinvent yourself
  • Nonconformist
  • Foregoer

This one didn’t surprise me, but again it makes me think about the contrast. I’m well-aware that many readers feel shackled by social and family expectations and want to break free of that. Wednesday’s article on Misaligned Relationships addresses this issue to some extent – it was partly inspired by the early feedback from this exercise.

Internally I don’t tend to think of myself as having these strengths because I’ve lived this way long enough that they just seem normal to me. Instead I frame this as making choices that feel aligned. What other people may perceive outwardly as going against social norms, I perceive as sensitivity to alignment issues. I place more weight on my inner satisfaction with my decisions than I do on other people’s reactions. This has served me well for many years.

I also like to remind myself that people often regret what they didn’t do. They lament how they kept quiet and didn’t express themselves. People regret being too conformist. I’d prefer to avoid racking up regrets, so I take other people’s warnings about this seriously. I don’t seek to be a rebel, but what feels aligned can sometimes be unpopular.

Range / Breadth

  • Writing about topics others are ignoring
  • I love the frequent blog posts on all kinds of topics
  • The different topics that you talk about that cover all sorts of issues
  • Your willingness to explore ideas on the nature of reality and spirituality without rejecting human needs (money, success, sex, etc)
  • You have an abundance of experience, and it is interesting to see how you have overcome difficult situations: bankruptcy, divorce, stealing, etc.
  • It is interesting to see how you manage current events: Covid-19 for example
  • Prolificness
  • The huge amount of perspectives you offer, in a generous and non-pushing way

Some would see having too much range as a weakness, so it’s nice that others recognize it as a strength. I also see it as a strength to have a lot of different interests, much like Leonardo da Vinci did. A lot of my best insights come from transplanting ideas from one field to another, such as turning 30-day trials that I learned in the software field into 30-day personal growth challenges.

Range is essential for staying motivated and enthusiastic about my work. If I narrowed my range too much, I’d feel trapped and bored. I like being able to mix up what I learn, explore, and create. It’s good to know that there are people who appreciate that. Many experts recommend “niching down,” and the reason I don’t do that is because it wouldn’t satisfy me on the inside to limit myself so much. I’m curious about more than just one niche, and I don’t think that niching down would create the kind of life I want to live.

From my perspective though, this strength tends to emerge from following what stimulates me while avoiding boredom. But this only works when I balance variety with good self-discipline and consistency. Otherwise I could end up bouncing around from one project to the next and never finishing anything (i.e. shiny object syndrome). That was a real problem for me in the past, and fortunately I recognized that I had to build up my self-discipline to compensate. So note that sometimes you need the balance of two seemingly conflicting strengths to access the benefits of either.

Exploration & Experimentation

  • Presenting ideas from a perspective of exploration and testing
  • You encourage people to try things that might be different from what you choose
  • Willingness to explore and experiment
  • Reflecting on your own experience and extracting the universal truths and lessons that you can share with others
  • Connection between exploration and universal truths (grounded in experience)
  • Willingness to learn and experiment with new challenges
  • Balancing consistent structure with flexibility, especially when doing 30-day challenges
  • To thoroughly look at yourself and the world around you, both with your feelings and with your brain, reflect on it, take action, and tell us everything
  • Living a life that sends a message to us all that anything is possible
  • The ability to always find a new perspective on things, to not get stuck in a rut
  • Seeing you do different experiments
  • Risk taking experience (really important you push boundaries)
  • Willingness to explore
  • Exploring the world

This one feels pretty aligned with how I see myself. I do love to explore and experiment. People seem to appreciate that my lessons stem from experience and that I like to test ideas in the real world.

This may seem close to curiosity and open-mindedness, but I list this as a separate item because it’s the sharing of these experiments that provides value for people. Some people find that the explorations I share encourage them to explore more as well, even if they’re doing totally unrelated explorations. It’s good to see that this strength is contagious. The more we explore, the more we influence and encourage others to explore.

Depth & Immersion

  • Immersive coverage from many angles
  • Exploring a challenge from so many different angles that it forces a breakthrough for readers
  • Take a challenge that is common to your readers, and absolutely hammer the problem with endless different tools, perspectives, and actionable ideas
  • Blog series
  • Can always go back and review the basics in your blog – habits, discipline, 30-day trials, goal-setting, purpose, productivity, time-management, health, exercise, and diet
  • Daily nuggets of thought provoking ideas
  • So many good bits of information and wisdom
  • Sharing the insider’s perspective
  • Level of depth you cover in your topics is second to none
  • You clearly show a vast amount of knowledge and passion for personal development which solidifies your credibility
  • Your ability to provide fresh insights into well trodden self-help topics
  • The depth and detail you go into on the issue and lead on to how to tackle the problem
  • Thorough

Because I often write longer articles, I attract readers who like longer articles. Same goes for the in-depth courses – they attract people who like and appreciate in-depth courses. People who want quick sound bites probably won’t be attracted to my work.

Internally I don’t think of depth and immersion as direct strengths. I see these as side effects that derive from wanting to connect the dots between different ideas. Many of my blog posts are explorations of different angles on a topic to clarify my own thinking.

How can we explore open relationships in an ethically aligned way? Is there a non-sleazy way to do online marketing and have it be effective? What modes of generating income are the best for long-term character sculpting? These are the kinds of questions that my mind likes to explore and resolve. So I would identify my underlying strength here as a drive for real understanding and a dissatisfaction with shallow answers.

Some people said they made specific changes in their own lives that were inspired by what they read in my blog. Going vegan and going jobless were the most common changes mentioned. They liked that I covered certain lifestyle changes from multiple angles with an insider’s perspective.

Some people were actually grateful for making changes that they initially resisted. They noted that it was because I addressed a topic from so many different angles over a long period of time that convinced them to finally try it for themselves.

Challenging People to Change / Teaching People to See Reality Differently

  • Challenging people to think alternatively
  • You have an uncanny knack for blogging about issues that I am currently struggling with in a way that gives me a fresh perspective and a new way to think through a problem
  • Revealing blind spots
  • How you destroy my world (i.e. old collections of beliefs and attitudes that aren’t working) -> new world of better results
  • Your ability to get through to people and make them inspired to actually act upon your ideas
  • Encourage well rounded development (physical, intellectual, spiritual, social, etc.)
  • Effective at training me to see reality more accurately
  • The motivation that you inspire to try what you say to do
  • You continue to be a wonderful example
  • Your daily blog posts are good reminders to stay on track with my personal goals and values
  • You consistently give me something to think about/implement in my life, which I love
  • Giving people a fresh perspective on things in a very simple-to-understand and act-upon way
  • Sharing your views and experiments allows me to challenge my views
  • Make us think deeply about all aspects of our existence
  • Ability to see and communicate new perspectives, new ways of seeing reality
  • Disruptor
  • Giving me new perspectives

This one struck me as one of the most interesting items on the list. People actually like and appreciate that I challenge them to think differently. They like that I nudge them to destroy their old worlds, especially if those worlds aren’t giving them the results they want anyway.

Admittedly I didn’t really think of this as a personal strength, but multiple people noted that this is what really provides long-term value for them. Even though they may resist at first, they ultimately like having holes poked in their old models of reality. They like being challenged to raise their standards. They like learning alternative points of view to digest and think about. They like that I don’t play it safe by only writing about topics inside their comfort zones.

I think this strength comes from what I do for myself. I frequently challenge and question my own models, and much of what I write stems from that questioning. This in turn encourages others to ask similar questions.

I love this because it means that by investing in my own growth, I’m providing a good service to others, as long as I continue to share what I learn along the way. This was a big part of my original vision for starting this blog in 2004. I love personal growth and wanted to make it my full-time occupation. I trusted that if I kept learning and sharing that it would provide sufficient value to people. That turned out to be true.

Sometimes I still have to remind myself that this is a key part of my business and lifestyle. I have to keep exploring, experimenting, and questioning because that’s the engine that feeds everything else. Fortunately I’ve always loved doing that, so it doesn’t feel like a burden. I don’t see myself ever losing my deep curiosity about life.

Sincerity / Honesty / Transparency

  • Honesty
  • Transparency
  • Honest and transparent with your readers
  • Your firm inner strength that knows exactly what you believe and hold dear and is as solid as a rock
  • You are tremendously honest and direct
  • Establishing trust with your audience by means of your sincerity of expression
  • Your ability to gain my trust because of your honest, approachable, and intelligent style
  • By being honest and transparent, you bring authentic solutions and connections
  • You tell things as they are and as they seem to you; I have not found hidden agendas to try to get me to buy something

It didn’t surprise me that people mentioned this, but I also see it as more of a side effect rather than a primary strength.

This one is due to sensitivity to how I feel about my life and about the relationships with the people I serve and connect with regularly. I see relationships as a huge part of life, and I want my relationships to be strong, supportive, and growth-oriented. This includes relationships with people, with my work, with myself, and with reality itself.

I find it interesting that no one really named this inner sensitivity as a strength of mine, but it shows up as a key factor in multiple strengths that people experience externally. Perhaps it’s not too much of a stretch to see that being sensitive to your internal states and seeking inner harmony can actually create ripples of value for others. If you seek more alignment on the inside, you may express more of your strengths outwardly.

Sensitivity can be a powerful strength if you honor it as such.

Clear Communication

  • Writing and speaking
  • Your clarity of writing
  • Relaying spiritual or difficult-to-understand concepts in a relatable manner (for a computer-friendly audience)
  • Being able to take a thought and breaking it down and explaining it very well
  • Tying real world examples into your writing or courses are extremely helpful
  • You are concise, and all of your sentences are usually necessary and relevant
  • Very good at articulating and getting your point across
  • Even when you make appeals to emotions, you structure your points in ways that both the logical and emotional parts of my mind can agree with
  • Your ability to bring razor sharp analytical skills to topics that are often dismissed as “woo woo” – and thereby provide your readers with deeper understandings
  • Your ability to convey complex ideas in a simple and straightforward manner
  • Your writing skills. the way you can popularize complex ideas with simple examples
  • Your very clear and easy to follow explanations – I don’t have to read it twice to fathom out what you are saying
  • You have a way of reducing the fluff of personal development
  • Helps shorten the learning curve for me
  • I like how you communicate in clear manner; your writings are easy to follow and enjoyable to read
  • Articulation

This isn’t too surprising. If people didn’t like my communication style, they wouldn’t stick around. So it makes sense that I attract people who like it.

While I could write in a more flowery style, I actually dislike it when other writers do that in their books and articles. It just makes my brain work harder to extract the meaning. I value directness and plain language in other people’s writing, so I try to practice this myself. To me the purpose of writing is to communicate useful ideas, not to showcase clever writing skills.

I also had some high school teachers that pushed me to eliminate verbal flabbiness when possible. So this strength was largely trained through education and practice. Having a background in computer science and math helps too since clarity is essential in both fields.

Rationality & Practicality

  • Your ability to think things through
  • Real world examples
  • You waste none of the reader’s time, and you get immediately to the pragmatic and practical concerns
  • Focus on results, real-world problems and challenges
  • You are grounded and rational
  • Clear-sighted intelligence
  • You are always interesting, thought-provoking, and you provide advice that is applicable in the real world
  • You see reality (as it is and is not) more clearly than I do
  • Logical, intelligent, and honest viewpoint
  • You’re able to come up with models of reality that are actionable as well as effective
  • You do actually offer a potential solution and don’t just leave us thinking, “Well I knew that already, but what do I actually DO about it?”
  • In your hands, Subjective Reality has a structure and is seen as a kind of practical tool
  • Well-balanced mix of your well-developed mental and emotional intelligence
  • Logical

This one also links with a background in math and computer science. Try programming a computer with good intentions and positive thinking. You have to think rationally and logically to get results from coding.

I got into personal development as part of my recovery from self-destructive behavior, so learning to behave more sanely and rationally was a life-saver for me. Consequently, I have a healthy respect for rationality.

While I’ve explored lots of esoteric and woo-woo personal development ideas too, my journey began with an intense need to solve real problems in my life, so this practical grounding has been with me for a long time. I know how valuable an investment in personal development can be because of how beautifully it transformed my life.

I do see value in exploring pure thought experiments, but I still like to link them to real-world results when possible. Otherwise if an idea just hangs there in space and I can’t use it to improve my results in any area of life, I don’t see it as being of much long-term use other than for the entertainment value.

Open-mindedness and exploration help to balance this strength though. Rationality can become a weakness if you overplay it and let it lock you into a linear mode of thinking. I think it’s rational to realize that you always have more to learn, and that means exploring the unknown.

Creativity & Originality

  • Thinking, visualizing, and communicating outside the box, in fact in a different galaxy
  • The outside the box ways of communicating
  • The creativity in the courses I have taken, particularly Stature, communicates concepts in ways that simply don’t seem available elsewhere
  • I see creativity and a lot of clear thinking in you
  • Your freshness and originality
  • You can combine two very different mindsets: analytical and intuitive in a way which is quite symbiotic in nature, and gives rise to solutions that are unique and creative
  • Innovative thinking

This strength feels like one of contrast to me. If we didn’t have school systems and corporate jobs that pressure us to devalue inner harmony, I doubt that I would seem as creative or original.

While the world’s misalignments may create opportunities, part of me wishes this weren’t the case. I think it would be more pleasing and satisfying to live in a world where most people followed their paths with a heart and stayed sensitive to inner harmony.

In the past I valued being an out of the box thinker and deliberately leaned into that. These days I’d prefer to do away with the box altogether, so no one has to be stuck inside of it.

From my perspective, I’m basically trying to live the life I learned about from watching Star Trek: The Next Generation. Explore the galaxy. Keep learning and growing. Have interesting relationships with people from different planets. And always be aware that there’s an empath on board to keep you honest.

Caring / Empathy / Ethics / Generosity / Heart

  • A good heart
  • You come across not only as an expert in the field but also as a friend who cares for others and who genuinely wants to see them improve their lives; not just saying they do. That’s where I get my trust for you from.
  • Giving a lot away for free, including uncopyrighting
  • Accessibility – covering relevant issues readers care about, helping people feel they aren’t alone
  • You’ve transcended the common online business model (AdSense, affiliates, etc.) and have a moral dimension to your work
  • It’s been inspiring, from a distance, to watch your trust in Life pay off
  • Your genuine desire to help
  • You have strong imaginative power which makes you able to empathize more with people
  • You are friendly and warm in your interactions
  • The connection that you somehow convey through your writing, so it feels like you are targeting my own personal problem
  • You seek to cause as little harm as possible
  • You seek to help and heal through bringing knowledge and encouragement to people
  • Generosity and your service-orientation; to put out so much free content is a beautiful gift
  • Being able to offer a lot of quality content on your website without charge
  • Compassion
  • Heart of service
  • Shows that you care about people and surroundings
  • It is heart warming to see how you genuinely want people to grow and develop themselves

Awwww… I do indeed care about helping people. I think this could also be a quality flowing from sensitivity. I often feel like I pick up on energy, feelings, and intentions from the people I connect with, even at a distance.

When I was younger, I didn’t value such qualities, but now I see them as essential to being in tune with the flow of life. I think caring has a lot to do with listening, not just with our ears but with all parts of ourselves. I feel fortunate that some caring influences came into my life at the right time to help steer me in this direction. Going vegan played a significant part in this as well; that really opened up the heart-brain communication pathways.

Some people who mentioned these items also requested that I do more videos or podcasts, so more of the emotional connection comes through. I can understand that, although I still really like the experience of writing. I feel that writing helps me slow down, so I can go deeper into the exploration of ideas.

I still like video too though, especially live video. What some people may not see is that we do live video coaching calls in Conscious Growth Club 36 times per year. We just recently passed 100 of those calls, so from my perspective I’m already doing a significant amount of video.

Personality / Playfulness / Positivity

  • Many people have a growth mindset or focus and discipline, but they can’t bring the playful and unique approach to it
  • Humor
  • I love how you inject your personality into each post
  • It gives your posts that personal touch and authenticity which even the most sceptic of readers can respect
  • As readers we feel invited and brought to your side as individuals who are constantly exploring
  • To not get dragged down by others or bad energy
  • To always stay positive and believe that things will be better
  • To trust yourself and reality
  • Playfulness

In this area I think it also makes sense that people who dislike my personality or sense of humor wouldn’t stick with reading my blog for long.

I often have mixed reactions when other authors inject their personality into their work. Sometimes I really like it, and sometimes I find it cheesy or annoying if it feels like they’re trying too hard. I aim to strike a balance and not force it, preferring to keep the ideas front and center most of the time.

I also think that expressing some playfulness helps to create a stronger connection over time, and it makes the work more enjoyable too. It’s good to know that it’s possible to attract people who appreciate playfulness.

Focus / Discipline / Determination / Work Ethic / Consistency

  • I doubt there are many things in your life that don’t serve clear and well-thought-out goals
  • You aren’t stumbling through life blindly
  • Goals & character building
  • Time management
  • Discipline / self-discipline
  • Hard-working
  • Dedication
  • Determined and disciplined
  • Consistency
  • Balancing with open-mindedness: It seems like tightness and rigidity tend to appear in people who have a high level of self-discipline, but it’s quite the opposite with you
  • Your regular contact; I do like the daily connection

Self-discipline was a hard quality to build, but I did make gradual gains by continuing to invest in it. I feel this is important to balance other qualities that can potentially pull against focus and consistency, like the desire to go out and explore something new.

Self-discipline can also create traps of its own if you overplay it, potentially stifling creativity and spontaneity.

I like to see these different aspects like parts of a song, where each instrument gets its opportunity to shine, and they can all play harmoniously together.

I’m glad I did this little experiment. It gave me some interesting insights and helped me connect the dots between how I think about my strengths and what other people perceive. It’s interesting to realize that outward strengths may come from deeper places that aren’t easy to identify.

This makes me wonder if Leonardo da Vinci would identify the same strengths in himself that other people would credit him for. Did he see his incredible range as a strength? He might have even seen it as a weakness since so many of his works were unfinished when he died. I read the book How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci, which was insightful, but that cannot reveal how he actually thought.

Consider that as you develop your own strengths, other people may credit you for how those strengths affect them, but they may not be able to identify the core strengths that give rise to those outward expressions. You may experience and frame your strengths differently. For instance, no one identified writing from inspiration and choosing topics based on inspiration as a strength of mine, even though that’s a huge deal to me and something I’ve invested in greatly for many years. That strength also stems from sensitivity to signals that carry ideas.

Consequently, if you spot a strength in someone else and then try to emulate if yourself, your results may fall flat if you miss the core strength that gives rise to the outer expression. If anyone wants to get good results emulating some of my strengths, they may get stuck if they don’t invest in increasing their sensitivity to inner and outer signals.

I’m grateful for everyone who chose to respond to these questions, so thank you for that. It was an eye-opening and reflective experience for me, and I hope you got some value from reading this post. I also encourage you to think about how inner qualities that you might not even think about as strengths could actually flow into providing value in ways you may not have considered yet.

Share Button

Misaligned Relationships, Rejection, Guilt, and Betrayal

Posted on by

One of my readers recently asked: How do you stay connected to loved ones who aren’t on a journey of curiosity and growth?

I’ll frame this more generally by addressing these question too:

  • How do you maintain relationships with incompatible people who expect you to stay connected?
  • How do you manage shifting relationships while on a journey of growth?
  • How do you deal with feelings of guilt arising from letting go of incompatible people?

To answer the first question, my answer is pretty simple. I really don’t.

If they reach out to me, I’ll be civil with them, but I don’t see the point of investing in such relationships. I’ve tried to invest in such relationships in the past and concluded that this wasn’t going to work. The compatible isn’t there. The mutual support isn’t there. The flow of energy isn’t there. So why continue to invest?

Sometimes people don’t like what I’m into. Or they see my pursuits as threatening. Or they try to talk me out of new explorations. If it becomes clear that I don’t have their support for being who I am and living the life I want to live, it’s equally clear that I shouldn’t continue to invest in such connections.

That was disappointing at first. My initial response was to play it cool and be aloof, even though I still valued such relationships on some level. But that wasn’t sustainable. It leads to clinginess and neediness and a host of other problems as well. It’s harder to feel good emotionally and stay motivated and disciplined when you lower your social standards.

In the long run, I concluded that it was perfectly fine for me to want and need strong, compatible connections with other people. I just had to find the right people. I had to let go, let go, let go, of connections that were unfulfilling and dissatisfying.

There really are a lot of intelligent, heart-aligned, growth-oriented people in the world. But you may not see this abundance if you get clingy with mismatches.

The more I leaned away from misaligned connections and surrendered to the fact that they would never become what I really wanted them to be, the more I allowed myself to mourn the disappointment. I accepted the feeling of loss. I let hope die in those cases – because it was false hope.

I leaned into trusting my feelings and intuition, which told me that compatibility really matters.

In my 20s I had some limited experiences being around growth-oriented people, and it was refreshing. I felt like my spirit was being fed by a nurturing energy source that it sorely needed. Those were peak experiences, but I so wanted them to become everyday, normal experiences. At the time I didn’t even see how that was possible though.

Fast forward to today, and I connect with growth-oriented people every day as a normal part of life. I’m married to such a person too. But because I didn’t start with this, I can still relate to what it’s like to think of this as too good to be true.

Where are all the non-growth connections now? They’re pretty much dead because I haven’t invested in them for so long. I don’t feel any energy flowing through them. There are relatives that I haven’t seen, talked to, or emailed in many years, even decades, for instance. I let those connections fade.

I realize that in some cultures this would be seen as crazy, cruel, or anti-social, or a betrayal of family values. But I’m actually very pro-social. I like people. I just want to invest in relationships where the compatibility is high, the mutual support is strong, and the flow of energy feels intuitively right. The results are better for all involved.

Compassionate Rejection

When I think about incompatible relationships that I let go of over the years, I don’t feel much resentment or disappointment. I tend to feel more gratitude towards them than anything else. I see those relationships as valuable learning experiences. They helped me better understand what matters to me in life. They helped me clarify my values. They helped me define my social boundaries. So I find it difficult to feel much negativity towards them. I mostly feel appreciation when I think about them, if I feel anything at all.

I think that’s because I really like my life today. I like the people in my life. They’re interesting, creative, weird, fun, and deep.

I think many of us are a little too resistant to rejection. Sometimes rejections are done more harshly than necessary, but the general practice remains important. To reject means to dismiss or refuse. It means to say no. Some rejection is necessary to sculpt our characters. We must say no to the misaligned, so we can invite and embrace what does feel aligned. Otherwise we become blurry, ill-defined blobs instead of self-realized human beings.

I sometimes think of my social life as a journey. This involves movement and travel. I see relationships as fluid and flexible. They come and go. Some people move further away while others move closer. Some relationships will be short-lived. Others will endure longer.

In the long run, everyone grows. Some grow more consciously and deliberately, while others grow reactively in response to changing events and circumstances. The coronavirus situation is a growth experience for all of us. Some have woven this change into their journeys consciously. Others are mostly reacting to what arises. But we will all grow from this one way or another.

I have friends that are not super growth-oriented, definitely more reactive than proactive, and we get along okay most of the time. But I don’t usually invest much in such relationships. I prefer connecting with people who are on conscious journeys. It’s fine if they’re not clear about where they’re heading, as long as they embrace the overall idea of investing in learning and growth.

But the stubborn stick-in-the-mud types who have fixed mindsets? Where are they in my life today? Most days they just aren’t part of my reality. I have to stretch to even identify them. I don’t see them in person. I don’t see them on Zoom calls. I don’t see them in my email inbox. At best I might overhear a conversation out in public that strikes me as very limiting or ignorant, but then it fades away as I move past it.

I think I don’t attract such people into my life because I don’t invest energy in thinking about them most of the time. And if I do think about them, I mostly feel that gentle flow of appreciation, but it’s really just a trickle of energy. I don’t have spikey feelings in this area most of the time.

Social Norms

I also feel that investing in incompatible relationships is irrational. I don’t see the logic in pouring my energy into a connection that isn’t working, even if the other person wants to and even if social norms tell me I’m supposed to. My life has gotten better by rejecting social norms that didn’t work for me, so I tend not to give them much weight. The social norms I grew up with were full of irrational baggage that I discarded, like going to church every Sunday. Some social norms can have positive effects, such as by making communication easier and fostering good teamwork, but you always have to be cautious of them when it comes to expectations that push against rationality.

Being loyal to social mismatches is just more baggage to release. It doesn’t matter if they’re relatives or long-term friends. A mismatch is a mismatch.

I don’t think I could have a good life by elevating loyalty to social norms above my own mind, heart, and intuition. I trust my own thinking, my own feelings, and my own path with a heart way more than what society tells me or what relatives expect of me. My relatives can live their lives how they see fit, but I won’t invest in relationships that don’t feel aligned to me.

Guilt

When people conclude that I’m incompatible with them and want to move away from me, I let them go. I prefer not to chase after them and get whiny about it. I trust them to make their own decisions, and if they aren’t feeling the connection, who am I to question them about that?

Since I hold myself to this standard, I don’t feel guilty if someone else reacts negatively to my moving on. They can process those feelings how they see fit. I may feel some compassion for how their frames may be making a transition difficult for them, but I’m not going to wallow in their self-pity if they go that route. Otherwise I’d open myself up to emotional manipulation.

Other people don’t get to use their feelings to manipulate me. I will let them wallow in the pit of despair for as long as they want, but I won’t join them there.

I frame this as an issue of maintaining rational social investment standards, maintaining rational boundaries, and trusting my mind, heart, and intuition. I don’t give power to social norms. I don’t give power to other people’s reactions. And I don’t succumb to guilt because I’m doing what I feel is best.

I could feel guilty if I felt I violated my standards, especially in a way that caused someone harm. I can’t feel guilty for violating someone else’s standards – especially standards that I disagree with.

So if someone else holds that standard that I must behave in a way that feels misaligned to me in order for them to feel okay, that’s on them. They can expect that I will violate their standards to follow my path with a heart.

This happens, even with people I don’t know well. When I got into exploring open relationships, about 11 years ago, some of my blog readers felt betrayed. Some felt betrayed when Erin and I broke up. This year some felt betrayed when I shared my feelings about Trump. Some even felt betrayed when I stopped having Google Adsense ads on my site in 2008, calling me crazy for abandoning the business model they sought to emulate.

Do you think I felt guilty about any of this? Of course not. That’s because I was exploring and expressing what feels aligned to me. I could feel guilty if I violate my own standards, especially if I cause harm to someone else by doing so. But I can’t feel guilty if I honor my standards, even if someone else feels that I violated their expectations.

Betrayal

Now watch this: After trying out Instagram for a while, I’ve mostly stopped using it because I find it boring, stupid, and pointless. It’s just a dreadful match for me. Let’s see which avid IGers feel betrayed now…

For those who love Instagram, I’m happy for them. They should be free to post all the cat pics and yoga poses they want, with a proper handstand pic being the ultimate lifetime achievement. I love writing though, and IG is pure shit for that. It’s not a good platform for me at all. Does anyone really need to feel betrayed by my making a choice that’s right for me? Of course not, but some will anyway.

People are going to feel betrayed repeatedly if you live consciously and make your own choices. They’ll expect things of you that are unreasonable and irrational. They’ll have emotional reactions based on your decisions. I suggest that you let them. It’s not a problem per se unless you make it a problem. Just accept it as a normal part of life.

Do NOT under any circumstances let someone dig their emotional hooks into you and manipulate you emotionally. That will hold you back tremendously. In fact, this is one of the most problematic issues that many of my readers struggle with. They fall into the trap of turning against their own inner guidance and let someone else control them through emotional manipulation. Beware this trap – it’s nasty. It can suck years of your life away if you’re not careful.

Let people process their reactive feelings, even if they make a big, wild stink about how difficult it will be for them. Don’t frame their reactive feelings as your doing some kind of harm to them. Their own irrational frames and expectations are causing these reactions. Give them the gift of allowing them to process their reactions. With luck it will lead to their upgrading their frames and accepting your freedom to make aligned choices for you.

Self-Harm Threats

What if someone really goes over the top with their emotional manipulation, such as by threatening to hurt or kill themselves because you don’t play by their rules? If someone did that to me, I’d probably get really pissed at them. I might cuss them out for even suggesting that. I wouldn’t change my course though. If they hurt or kill themselves, that’s on them. I still don’t see myself feeling guilty about it, although I’d probably be very disappointed in their irrational behavior if they went that far. But in the end, I would let them go.

This has actually happen to me personally, and it has happened to people I know. Someone I knew once threatened to kill himself because I took a course of action he strongly disagreed with and which negatively affected him. He owned a gun, so I took it seriously. This was years before I started blogging by the way. I didn’t back down though. I felt disgusted by the very notion that someone would do that, but I saw it as his choice. I knew I was making the right decision, and that is how it turned out in the end. He recovered, and I think it was better for him all around too. The relationship wasn’t working for either of us, and we had to move on from it. The fact that he threatened suicide actually just made me more certain that moving on was the right choice.

If this sort of thing were to happen again today, I’d frame it as a test from reality. I’d frame it as a character sculpting challenge too. I’d take the threat seriously, even if I didn’t believe that the person would go through with it. But I would still refuse to be emotionally manipulated, even if it meant someone else reactively taking their own life.

My ex-wife Erin had to endure an even more serious test when her abusive boyfriend not only threatened to kill her but also her whole family if she ever left him. And she still ended up leaving. Many years later that guy shot himself dead with a shotgun in a standoff with police, who were actually just coming to his house to do a suicide check because he made an offhand comment about potentially harming himself to a coworker, who called it in.

You can frame such situations however you see fit, and depending on the severity of the threat, I wouldn’t fault you for backing down if the stakes seem too big to handle. But most situations that my readers deal with are a lot milder, and they blow them up into big hurdles. So if you’re dealing with less than a mass murder threat, perhaps take a hard look at how you’re handling this situation. Are you behaving rationally? Are you really listening to yourself? What will it do to your character to let someone else emotionally manipulate you for years and years?

Guilt also heals. Even if you do feel guilty, you’ll probably get past it eventually. How long do you think the guilt will really last? How long will the emotional manipulation last if you don’t move on?

If you betray someone’s expectations of you, you can let them have their reaction and not feel guilty about it. This may take some practice and some rational framing upgrades, but you can do it.

But don’t betray your own inner guidance. Don’t betray your own rational intelligence. Don’t betray your path with a heart. If you aren’t feeling guilty about self-betrayal, maybe you should listen to your feelings more closely.

Share Button

What Are My Strengths?

Posted on by

During some recent morning runs, I’ve been listening to a series of Michael Michalowicz books: The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur, Profit First, Clockwork, and Fix This Next. He also wrote The Pumpkin Plan – one of my all-time favorite business books.

In the Toilet Paper Entrepreneur book, there are some questions about identifying your strengths and leveraging them in business. I think I know mine pretty well by now, but this stirred up my curiosity about how my blog readers and customers see my strengths and which particular strengths are most relevant for them. I also got to wondering how I could better use my strengths to make a difference for people.

So I thought I’d use today’s blog post to ask a few simple questions directly and invite you to reply via my contact form.

From your perspective…

  • What are my strengths?
  • Which strengths of mine are most important to you (in terms of serving you well)?
  • How do you feel I could (or wish I would) use my strengths to serve you better?

These questions are intended for people who’ve been engaging with my work long enough to form opinions about this.

That’s it! I’ll personally read every response and reflect on what I learn from this. It would be great if I this spawns some actionable ideas too.

Share Button

Managing Your Echo Chamber

Posted on by

Is it a good idea to suffer fools?

Perhaps you think of it as tolerance, mercy, or compassion. But is it really?

When you hold a low opinion of someone, is it better to keep them in your life and do your best to be tolerant and forgiving? Or should you simply dismiss such people from your life and move on?

Perhaps you’re concerned that you’re life will become too much like an echo chamber, filled only with people who share similar opinions and lacking in diversity.

Over the years I’ve tested different approaches to this, and presently I find that it’s best not to suffer fools. Once my opinion of someone drops below a certain threshold (which can be admittedly arbitrary, although Trump supporters qualify en masse), I find it most productive to disengage when possible.

I note that such a relationship will virtually never recover once it passes a certain point of no return. While I can think of the person compassionately from a distance, up close I’m most likely to feel some disgust or annoyance. So it doesn’t seem rational to cling to such a relationship, which can be unnecessarily distracting.

Letting go frees up trapped energy, which can be put to better use elsewhere. When I surrender a misaligned connection back to the simulation, and I let it dissolve, I usually feel a sense of relief and peace – and optimism about what new energies can flow in to replace the old.

Does this create an echo chamber effect? Absolutely, and I submit that this is a good outcome. When you dismiss the irritating and irrational from your life, your echo chamber can become richer in rational, sensible, and intelligent people.

Would you rather experience rational echos or irrational ones? Would you rather fill your life with thoughtful echos or ignorant ones? Would you rather be influenced by purposeful echos or distracting ones?

Consider that you’re always inside some kind of echo chamber. Your social world is just a tiny fragment of the larger world of possibility. Some echo chambers are more harmonious and interesting while others can be frustrating or distracting.

Have you ever thought about consciously creating a more desirable echo chamber than the one you’re experiencing now?

I don’t want my echo chamber to constrict me, but I do want it to stretch, challenge, and support me. I want it to be rational and purposeful. I want it to be well-aligned with my core values. I want it to be rich in honest and honorable people who care and who seek to contribute. I want it to be full of curious, growth-oriented learners who trust life.

I don’t want my echo chamber to be invaded by angry, irrational, suspicious, or violent people. I don’t want it to be occupied by the clueless and confused. I don’t want religious zealots or conspiracy theorists moving in. And Trump supporters? I’d rather give myself a paper cut and pour lemon juice on it.

A good echo chamber creates harmonious yet growth-inducing echos. It reflects back your desires and aspirations. It challenges you to stretch and grow. And it allows sufficient room for diversity and options.

A good echo chamber helps you advance.

A bad echo chamber keeps you stuck, wallowing in misalignments that don’t help you progress.

You’re always in an echo chamber, so take charge of it. Purge it of obvious misalignments first. Then deliberately invite what you want. Close some doors. Open others.

Market and promote the open doors. Post guards at the closed ones.

A poorly managed echo chamber will continue to be infiltrated by further misalignments. Chaos will invite more chaos. But a well-managed echo chamber can continue to attract aligned people while repelling the misaligned.

There are many creative types inside my echo chamber, including writers, artists, musicians, designers, programmers, course creators, filmmakers, performers, entrepreneurs, etc. There are many fellow vegans within, although it’s not exclusive to vegans. My echo chamber is also LGBTQ-friendly and open relationship friendly, so such people are welcome inside.

I love my echo chamber because it’s empowering and encouraging. It does a good job of echoing growth challenges, inspired ideas, and stimulating invitations. I feel happy and fulfilled within it. It’s a chamber rich in action and activity. And it’s far from static, always shifting and changing.

Now and then something grody sneaks in through the doors of social media (which can be more porous than I’d like), but that’s manageable as long as I promptly disinfect.

As long as I keep the echo chamber relatively clean, it works wonderful. It doesn’t have to be perfect, just harmonious enough to play beautiful music.

Yesterday I did an interview for a friend’s podcast, and we talked for more than four hours, which has to be the longest interview I’ve ever done. We covered many fascinating subjects from character sculpting to polyphasic sleep to open relationships. I also love and appreciate that he was supportive of my intention to write a novel this year – he’s written three – and he shared some insights into what it was like to create fiction. My life is rich in this kind of mutual support, and I think it’s largely because the echo chamber is aligned with this flow of support.

Raise the standards for your echo chamber. Drop the disharmonious and misaligned, so you can invite more of the aligned. Then instead of fussing over the misaligned, you get to deal with the benefits – and the challenges – of aligned support.

I think one reason people wallow in grody echo chambers is that it’s easier in a way. Harmonious echo chambers aren’t just peace and oneness. They’ll challenge you to grow in ways that a misaligned echo chamber never will. Life doesn’t really get easier when you have abundant support. It gets harder. It’s like training with heavier weights. Sometimes it feels easier though because you’ve grown stronger and can handle more responsibility.

Is it mean or harsh to dismiss those who irritate or annoy you? I can understand that mindset and used to feel that way myself. But I actually see this as doing a service to others.

If someone wants to explore conspiracy theories or some outdated religion or engage in behaviors I consider foolish, why stop them? They’re welcome to explore that. They’ll be better served by engaging in such explorations with an aligned echo chamber that fully supports them. I don’t belong in such echo chambers, so it makes sense to excuse myself.

If you’re dismissing someone from your reality, you’re really purifying their echo chamber of the impurity that is you. If you stick with them, you’re being obnoxiously clingy, even if they purportedly want you to stay. Give them a clean break to explore what they need to explore without your serving as social drag for them.

When I went down certain paths, others walled off their own echo chambers from me, so I wouldn’t be a “bad influence.” Good for them I say. I think it’s good for them to have a purer experience if that’s what they want. If and when they’re ready to move on to something different, they can open up again and start inviting fresh influences. But there’s a lot of value in pure experiences without social drag slowing you down.

What happens when you broadcast your goals within your echo chamber? Do you get echos of support or some other kinds of echos? If you’re not getting echos of support, I’d say you’re mismanaging your echo chamber, and you need to disinfect it.

When I shared recently that I wanted to write a novel, I received only support for the idea. No one suggested that I shouldn’t do it. Some people shared ideas for themes or topics. Some said they looked forward to reading it. This goal feels aligned to me, and my echo chamber reflects that. This helps me go faster. It makes it easier to actually write the book.

But if I shared a goal that was really misaligned for me, my echo chamber would catch and reflect that misalignment. People would indeed try to talk me out of it. That’s good too. You don’t want an echo chamber filled with unconditional yeses.

Managing your echo chamber is a lifelong endeavor. You can be sloppy with it, but you’ll pay a price for doing so. Rational management of your echo chamber provides many benefits, including faster progress towards your goals and desired experiences in life.

Share Button

Self-Accountability

Posted on by

Using an accountability buddy to help you consistently stick with a habit or work on a goal is fine as a temporary measure to get yourself into the flow of action, but it’s also a crutch.

Ultimately you want to be accountable to yourself first and foremost, not to a buddy, team, company, organization, app, or external entity.

That may sound counter-intuitive, especially if you’re accustomed to external accountability.

External factors can increase your sense of accountability because you don’t want to let other people down. You want to do your part to pitch in. That’s understandable.

But externals don’t last. At some point you’ll move on from the school, team, company, boss, parents, or situation that provides your accountability. Then what? Find another external group to hold you accountable? Accountable to what? Their goals or yours?

Being accountable to others often adds extra busywork too. You may need to do extra paperwork or reports to prove your efforts to someone else. Bosses do performance evaluation. Teachers dole out assignments and tests. Concerned parents check up on you. When you’re accountable to yourself, you can track your own data when you find that beneficial, but you needn’t bother with extra reporting to convince others of your standards.

In the long run, I think you’ll find the payoff better if you invest most deeply in self-accountability. You always have yourself, so your inner accountability buddy is with you 24/7 for life.

I like holding myself accountable to my future self. I know that I’ll be my future self someday, so my loyalty is to him. I want to build him up with good habits that enhance his life. I want to complete projects he can look back upon and feel proud of. I feel grateful that my past self put me in a strong position because of his many efforts, and I know my future self will feel the same about my efforts today.

Can you still hold yourself accountable for doing your personal “shoulds” when no one is looking? When no one would know or care, can you still push yourself? Can you go the extra mile when you’re the only one to hold yourself accountable?

It’s fine to add the benefits of external accountability on top of personal accountability. Working with a strong team can be super motivating. But be wary of substituting external accountability for internal accountability. Don’t lean so much on the externals that you let your inner fire atrophy.

If the team goes away, if you lose your job, if the external accountability drops off, do you still maintain strong discipline? Or does the structure of your life fall apart when it’s just you alone and no one is watching?

I struggled with this for a long time in the past, leaning too much on externals for accountability. When strict structures went away, my life crumbled from lack of discipline. I was accountable to no one, not even myself. I got in enough trouble that the courts intervened to hold me accountable, sentencing me to dozens of hours of community service. I ultimately concluded that was no way to live and began the struggle of trying to hold myself to a higher personal standard.

That was not an easy path by any means, but I do feel it’s been stronger than relying on externals to push me. It feels better to push myself because then it’s a choice, and I can be sure to push myself in purposeful ways that makes sense to me. My orders to myself are meaningful, carefully chosen, and aligned with my values. I don’t have to deal with ill-considered commands from elsewhere.

Personal accountability also enabled me to stretch into areas where no one else was directing me to go. I didn’t go vegetarian and then vegan because of external pressures. I chose it and committed. I didn’t do so many personal growth experiments because of external accountability, even when I blogged about them. I can still do private 30-day challenges and feel just as accountable, even when there’s no public eye watching me.

No accountability buddy got me out of bed at 4:30 this morning. No one pushed me to run for an hour, then do yoga. No one is telling me to get my work done today. No one will achieve my goals for me.

Again, it’s okay to lean on external accountability to get yourself into motion sometimes, but don’t let your personal accountability languish from lack of investment. Personal accountability is more reliable and consistent than external accountability, but it takes more practice to build.

Even when you’re doing something service-oriented, the internal accountability can come from the effect it has on your character. Fall in love with the inner rewards of being a kind, generous, and compassionate character. Do you want to embody such a character? If so, then hold yourself accountable to behaving in alignment with that character. Look into a mirror, and see what the guy in the glass has to say.

Do you want to spend your whole life being driven by carrots and sticks from other people? Or do you want to empower yourself to build a strong, self-accountable character who can do your should-dos without whining, complaining, or external rewards and punishments?

Share Button

Your Work Attitude

Posted on by

This is one of my favorite quotes from Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet (in the passage on work):

Work is love made visible.

And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.

For if you bake bread with indifference, you bake a bitter bread that feeds but half man’s hunger.

And if you grudge the crushing of the grapes, your grudge distils a poison in the wine.

And if you sing though as angels, and love not the singing, you muffle man’s ears to the voices of the day and the voices of the night.

Consider that the attitude and energy you bring to your work can enhance or poison your output and the ripples you’re creating.

Sometimes it’s easy to discount this for our own work, so flip it around and look at it from the other side.

Do you care about the attitude and energy other people invest in their work? Does that make any difference to you?

Would you prefer to buy products and services from people who enjoy and appreciate their work, who care about what they’re creating, who find the work purposeful and fulfilling, and who want customers to have good experiences?

Or is it all the same to you if people grudgingly show up to jobs they hate, working under poor conditions with bosses who are mean to them, feeling stressed and anxious while creating products and providing services they really don’t care about, so you can have that added value in your life?

If you see these two scenarios as meaningfully different when you’re on the customer side, how can you not see them as meaningfully different when you’re on the creator side?

Do you believe that your attitude affects (or infects) your impact?

Share Button

Daily Reminders

Posted on by

I normally review my quarterly goals each morning, which is a good habit for staying focused on them throughout the quarter. One new habit I’ve started is to also review a daily reminders list. This is a list of good practices that I want to refresh in my mind each morning, so I can remember to practice them.

The reminders list is good for habits that are difficult to anchor to just one time of day. This can include mindsets, frames, values, and practices that I may want to embody throughout the day. The list is very flexible though, so I can also use it to remind myself of positive habits and their benefits.

My reminders list is pretty long – too long actually – so I want to cull it down to make it more succinct. I started by making an exhaustive list. I can strip away the less important items that really don’t need a daily reminder. I think it’s good to get the list down to a page or less, so it can be reviewed more quickly.

Here are some ideas for what you could include on a daily reminders list:

  • Your favorite morning routine
  • Your favorite evening routine
  • Your favorite weekend activities
  • Reminders about how to use your personal time purposefully
  • Your key areas of focus: health, relationships, business, etc.
  • Your favorite habits that benefit you
  • New habits in progress
  • The current book you’re reading
  • The last time you changed your contact lenses (for 30-day kind)
  • Favorite activities that aren’t daily
  • Your favorite exercises or workouts and when to do them
  • Your best diet advice to yourself: dos and don’ts
  • The healthiest foods you want to eat more frequently
  • How much caffeine is best for you (or none at all)
  • Trigger foods you want to avoid
  • Personal blind spots to watch out for
  • Risks you need to stay on top of
  • A reminder to look for opportunities each day
  • A reminder to practice gratitude
  • A reminder to type shorter emails
  • A reminder to sometimes practice silence
  • A reminder to be compassionate towards your future self when making decisions
  • Your best practices for unwinding at the end of a workday as you transition back to personal time
  • A list of some trips and vacations you want to take
  • A list of your top 10 friends that you want to connect with more often
  • Some of your long-term dreams
  • A few reminders of your favorite memories
  • Your best practices for relaxing when you’re stressed
  • Your best practices for amping up the stimulation when you’re bored
  • A reminder to take breaks during your workday
  • Some favorite songs that make you feel good
  • Your favorite music to listen to while working (I love anything by Jessita Reyes)
  • Your best productivity practices
  • Your favorite productivity apps to use
  • Areas of focus that you want to pay more attention to
  • A reminder to cut back on behaviors that aren’t serving you (and what to do instead)

One reason my list is so big is that many of my daily reminders don’t need to be daily. It contains many sublists. Some of these could be bumped to a weekly or monthly reminder list instead. I do find that a long list is still better than none at all, even if I just take a couple of minutes to skim through it. But the risk of having too many items is that it could clutter my mind instead of helping me focus on the essentials.

One great use of a daily reminder is to warn yourself about blind spots in your thinking. This can help you remain watchful of known weaknesses and traps you’ve fallen into before. So if you have a tendency to overspend on items you don’t need, you could include a daily remind to be frugal and watch out for unnecessary expenses. However you tend to unbalance your life, you can remind yourself to pay attention to the areas where you tend to under-invest, especially while feeling overly busy.

Daily reminders are especially good for changing long-term health habits. You could have daily reminders for some of these good practices if you’re looking to improve your eating habits, for instance:

  • Take pics of all meals and snacks; review at end of week.
  • Eat slowly and mindfully to 80% full; save leftovers.
  • Wait 20 min after eating before considering eating more.
  • Favor foods with low caloric density, low fat intake, lots of veggies; measure quantities for denser foods.
  • Favor raw foods, whole foods, low-fat foods, nutritarian, variety of colors.
  • Reduce or eliminate refined sugars.

Your list doesn’t have to be beautiful, so even a hastily created one that you scribble out in a few minutes could be better than none. The key is to establish the habit of reviewing it daily. I like to review mine each morning while sipping a green smoothie.

For some items it’s fine to just include the what. For others you may want to briefly mention the why as well, so you can link the behavior to the purpose behind it. Reminding yourself of the purpose behind your best practices can help you with consistency.

What are some essentials to include on your list? Where do you lose sight of your best practices? Where do you tend to slip after a while? Where are you struggling to be more consistent? Daily reminders can help with all of these.

Daily reminders also create a sense of accountability. If you’re slacking off on some of your best practices, these reminders will alert that you’re falling short. It doesn’t feel good to be reminded of this, and the daily reminders keep that unpleasant realization right in your face. If you try to justify your sliding, your own purposeful reminders will hold you accountable and encourage you to raise your standards. You’ll have to face the music each time you review your list.

This practice is good for prevention too. It’s harder to slack off on a good habit when you keep reminding yourself of its benefits each day, such as by reminding yourself that exercise boosts your mood, clarity, mental endurance, depth of concentration, creativity, and immunity.

I encourage you to test this habit for yourself. It’s easy to get started. Just make a list. Then you can ask one of your devices to remind you to review it each day. Or you could place a physical copy of your list somewhere conspicuous, like taped to your bathroom mirror, so you’ll automatically see it each day.

Share Button

Personal Desires

Posted on by

As a follow-up to yesterday’s post on facing personal weaknesses, one step I took to deal with such weaknesses many years ago was to brainstorm a list of qualities I wanted to experience instead of those weaknesses.

Here’s what I came up with back then:

  1. Confidence – holding a strong belief in my own self worth and my abilities
  2. Courage – the willingness to face any fear and conquer it
  3. Passion – love and zest for my life and my work
  4. Gratitude – feeling grateful that I have so many gifts and blessings
  5. Worthiness – feeling that I am a worthy person and that I deserve all my success because I’ve earned it
  6. Generosity – feeling that I always want to give more than I expect to receive
  7. Victory – feeling that I am the best in my field, because I’m willing to give more than anyone else
  8. Intelligence – making smart decisions and benefiting tremendously from the results
  9. Enthusiasm – doing my work with vigor, energy, and passion
  10. Leadership – devoting my life to evolving the planet
  11. Persistence – sticking to a task until it is complete by holding the vision of the goal in mind
  12. Humility – knowing that I must continue to make myself worthy of my success
  13. Growth – becoming a more evolved person
  14. Contribution – changing the world for the better in a significant way
  15. Being the best – consistently outperforming my competition
  16. Patience – being willing to delay gratification for bigger future rewards
  17. Wealth – feeling totally rich, being a financial wizard
  18. Drive – pursuing my goals with energy no matter what
  19. Ambition – visualizing the future as I want it to be
  20. Achievement – achieving my goals one after the other in rapid succession
  21. Success – reaching my goals successfully
  22. Speed – working quickly to accomplish tasks faster than expected
  23. Integrity – being honest with myself, keeping every promise I make
  24. Vitality – experiencing abundant energy to achieve everything I want
  25. Honesty – simplifying my life by always telling the truth
  26. Sacrifice – being willing to do without something in the present in order to achieve a better future
  27. Honor – keeping my word to myself and others
  28. Communication – being able to communicate easily with others, especially on the phone
  29. Spirituality – maintaining a connection to my higher self
  30. Order – being well organized and efficient
  31. Creativity – finding creative solutions to problems
  32. Uniqueness – following a different path from others and expressing my individuality
  33. Management – being good at managing my life and the work of others
  34. Self Esteem – feeling good about myself
  35. Health – living in a state of physical well-being, vitality, and energy
  36. Action-orientation – jumping onto opportunity and acting quickly to take advantage of it
  37. Commitment – finishing tasks that I start
  38. Concentration – being able to work for long periods of time in a state of concentrated effort
  39. Focus – keeping all my attention on the task at hand
  40. Flow – enjoying a state of peace and serenity as I work
  41. Peace – a feeling of oneness with the world and my spiritual self
  42. Faith – belief that everything that happens will turn out for the best and that I am led by a higher source
  43. Abundance – having more than enough for the rest of my life, having quick access to anything I want
  44. Mental toughness – sticking to my goals no matter what obstacles there are
  45. Open-mindedness – a willingness to be open to new opportunities and solutions
  46. Flexibility – the ability to change my approach whenever my current actions aren’t delivering the results
  47. Resourcefulness – using all the resources at my disposal and stretching to accomplish my goals
  48. Power – feeling strong, vital, and in control of my life and my destiny
  49. Responsibility – taking charge of my lot in life, knowing that I am fully responsible for my own situation
  50. Happiness – enjoying my life and maintaining a positive mental outlook
  51. Adventure – living life to the fullest
  52. Mastery – feeling that I am a master of my own destiny
  53. Wonder – feeling a sense of awe
  54. Appreciation – feeling happy for what I have and taking time to stop and enjoy it
  55. Discipline – sticking to my current tasks and goals even when progress is difficult
  56. Curiosity – asking questions to increase my knowledge and identify areas where I want new distinctions
  57. Vision – knowing exactly what I want in life
  58. Clarity – keeping a crystal-clear vision of what I want
  59. Persuasiveness – being able to influence others and persuade them to take actions that will benefit us both
  60. Service – serving the planet by utilizing my greatest talents
  61. Wisdom – making decisions wisely with consideration of their consequences
  62. Strength – having a strong character that others can quickly recognize and relate to
  63. Aggression – a go-getter in active pursuit of my goals
  64. Expert – being a master in my field of interest
  65. Efficiency – working quickly on my highest payoff tasks
  66. Take immediate action – seize opportunity as soon as I find it
  67. Investing – spend less money than I earn, invest the difference, and reinvest the returns
  68. Money is a score – seeing money as my score and working to reach higher and higher scores
  69. Planning – focusing on what I can control and creating plans to make it a reality
  70. Leverage – being able to use things without needing to understand them completely
  71. Seeing success on the other side of frustration – knowing that when frustrated, success is coming soon
  72. Determination – strong commitment to follow through on a plan in order to achieve the goal
  73. Time management – using my time wisely on my highest payoff tasks
  74. Sleeping four hours a night – and awakening with my body fully restored
  75. Love – growing closer to my wife every day
  76. Compassion – caring for other people deeply
  77. Cleanliness – keeping a clean environment, cleaning up on a regular basis
  78. Purity – living a moral, goal-oriented life that is consistent with my highest values
  79. Listening – being able to relate to others effectively by really listening deeply to them
  80. Sensuality – taking time for slow, physical pleasure
  81. Intimacy – a feeling of closeness and knowledge of another’s true self
  82. Warmth – a feeling of connection with others and feeling love towards them
  83. Humor – laughing at the world
  84. Playfulness – maintaining a child-like quality and being able to enjoy the simple things
  85. Loyalty – feeling a strong connection to those who share my path
  86. Stimulating – able to stimulate an open emotional response in others by touching them deeply

I made this list when I was in my 20s. While many of these items still resonate with me today, I estimate that about a third of them don’t, especially the ones related to victory, aggression, competition, and entitlement.

In reviewing this list today, I recognize some strong desire for more control over life, stemming from neediness and frustration. There’s a need to prove myself and to feel worthy. This list shows me why I felt stuck so often in my 20s. These values actually slowed me down.

I often see similar values expressed by people today who are just as stuck and frustrated as I was in my 20s.

Creating such a list was a good place to start though. It helped me take a conscious look at the contents of my desires. Even though my list had some problems, it gave me hope that I could keep making improvements. In the years after I brainstormed this list, I made many changes to my life – new city, new business, new relationship, and new lifestyle.

This lengthy list showed me some genuine desires that I wanted to keep working on, and it also revealed some socially conditioned desires that were actually getting in my way and slowing me down.

Looking back, I feel that I made the fastest progress not so much by focusing on what I wanted but by releasing problematic desires that slowed me down. For instance, I advanced more easily – and faster – through cooperation than competition.

The list above looks overly yang to me now. It’s represents a version of me who believed that more power and aggression was the solution to scarcity in most areas of life, which was actually counter-productive. I made smoother progress when I learned to be kinder and more patient with myself.

Nevertheless, I can still see myself in most of the items on this list. It’s gratifying to recognize that the person I am today can still feel connected to values that I cared about in my 20s. It’s nice to reflect on how much progress I’ve made in aligning with and expressing these values. My 20-something self would likely be surprised by some of the experiences I’ve had.

What’s missing from this list is trust. Today I have a really deep trust in reality. It’s one of my most important values. Unearthing that importance of trust really changed the balance and flow of my life. I lean into this trust when I write, speak, connect with people, and do creative projects. I lacked this trust in my 20s, and I can see how much that lack of trust held me back. I think that’s why my values were so aggressive back then. Since I didn’t trust life, my approach was to control as many aspects of life as I could.

Back then, I thought that the solution to many of my problems was to push harder. But I got much better results when I learned to trust more deeply, especially trusting myself and trusting reality.

Perhaps the most important shift I made since then was to repair that relationship with reality. First I worked through the logic of trust, which helped me see that I couldn’t expect to have a good life without it. Then as that mindset took hold over a period of many years, I invested in building unshakable trust in reality.

Eventually I condensed those years of realizations and experiments into a 60-day deep dive to share with others, which became the Submersion course. It’s great to see how transformational that’s been for others as well. I don’t think we can really understand trust unless we actively test and experiment with it, which is why the course includes 60 days worth of simple experiments to do – and lots and lots of reframes to remove blocks and limiting beliefs.

I encourage you to make a similar list to see what comes out of you. What do you value? What do you care about? What qualities do you wish to develop? Even if you do nothing else with your list, you may appreciate reviewing it a decade or two later to see how much you’ve grown. And such a list will also contain seeds of your future. If you really care about certain values, you’ll probably find ways to express them.

Share Button

Facing Personal Weaknesses

Posted on by

Years before I started blogging about personal development, I would often feel frustrated with my character. I struggled for many years trying to get myself to do what I felt I should be doing.

One thing I did back then (which I recently found in some old files), was to create a list of what I perceived to be my personal weaknesses.

This is what I came up with at the time:

  • lack of self-discipline
  • procrastination
  • avoiding difficult or tedious work
  • poor scheduling habits
  • excessive socializing
  • poor time management
  • poor task prioritization (working on the most important task to completion)
  • lack of single-handling (sticking with a task until it is 100% complete)
  • lack of integrity
  • lack of courage (avoiding actions that cause fear or unease)
  • lack of initiative (not taking advantage of new opportunities immediately)
  • lack of clarity
    • fuzzy or uncertain goals
    • lack of a plan for achieving goals
    • lack of a clear deadline for goals
    • lack of specialization (need to master a particular field)
    • lack of directed attention to a single most important goal
    • lack of exactitude in defining my desired outcome
    • unclear thinking (trying to find a short cut to success)
  • poor emotional context to work
    • feeling uninspired
    • lack of clear rewards for completing each task
    • lack of purpose
    • lack of passion for work
    • lack of certainty
    • lack of creative freedom in the work itself (feeling trapped)
    • not feeling that I am the best at anything important
    • lack of desire
    • not enjoying the process
  • poor conditioning
    • no improvement / continuous growth plan
    • no reinforcement of short-term and long-term goals
    • no directed meditation habits
    • poor mind-body connection
    • lack of habitude (conditioning positive new habits until they become automatic)
  • lack of orderly routine
    • poor fundamental work habits
    • unclear rules
    • irregular meals
    • no clear rewards (when to see movies, socialize, take time off, take vacations, etc)
    • not knowing when to pay attention to work, finances, household duties, etc.
    • starting work too late in the day
    • lack of clear routine for physical exercise
  • poor mental endurance
  • lack of focus and concentration
    • being easily distracted
    • mental tiredness
    • no immersion in the task
  • poor financial situation
  • lack of direct income-generating activities
  • lack of money
  • small circle of influence
    • lack of competitive spirit (no competitive goals)
    • lack of peer support
    • lack of mastermind group
    • lack of new friends
  • poor distinction
    • not properly expressing my own creativity and uniqueness through my work
    • not leveraging my greatest strengths

This wasn’t a pleasant task as I recall. I had a lot of grievances about myself, and facing them collectively was daunting. There were so many interwoven problems to unravel.

In reviewing this list today, it actually makes me smile a bit while also feeling some compassion for my past self. My life is way more focused, disciplined, happy, abundant, and fulfilling today than it was back then.

This makes me wonder about the key leverage points that created major shifts along the way. And while there may have been a few, the long path forward wasn’t really about major shifts doing the heavy lifting. Results came gradually from a long-term commitment to personal growth. So the most important factors would include persistence, tenacity, resilience, and determination.

This required a long time perspective. The benefit of making a big list of character flaws was that it compelled me to face and surrender to the obvious truth: I wasn’t going to fix them all in a year no matter how hard I worked. This was going to take a lot of work and a long time to unravel over many years and probably decades. And that turned out to be accurate.

When I made that list, I was already dedicated to personal growth. I knew it wasn’t going to be easy to work on my character. I also felt that if I just kept investing year after year, I’d continue to see some gains, just as I had in years past.

About a decade before I made that list, my problems were even worse. So having to deal with the many issues on that list was actually an improvement from where I started.

If there was a single key leverage point, it was the commitment to keep investing in personal growth for life – to keep learning, exploring, experimenting, seeking improvement, and to never give up no matter what.

When there was a significant advancement in a relatively short period of time though, the cause was usually social. I typically made the biggest gains when I invested in a more growth-oriented social circle. That also helped me get out of my head by seeing that my problems weren’t unique. Lots of people struggle with similar issues, and struggling together was easier – and often more fun and rewarding – than struggling alone.

Share Button

All 65 Stature Lessons Complete

Posted on by

Yesterday I finished creating and publishing all of the lessons for the co-creative Stature character sculpting deep dive.

The full course is 16 hours and 20 minutes of audio, with the average lesson being 15 minutes. I wanted to keep the lessons for this course very focused and tight.

There’s also a 138-page workbook to accompany the audio lessons, including a one-page summary for each lesson and exercises to apply each lesson. That’s complete as well.

Additionally we have full text transcripts published for most of the lessons now, and the remainder will be done within the next several days.

And next up there are several more bonuses to create for the course as well, so we’ll add those as soon as they’re ready.

Here’s the full list of published audio lessons:

Module 1: Awareness

  1. Introduction
  2. The Airing of Grievances
  3. The Airing of Commendations
  4. Who Do You Think You Are?
  5. Impossible Invitations
  6. Summoning Your Power
  7. Avoiding Your Power
  8. To the Pain
  9. To the Love
  10. Backstory
  11. Personal Trainers
  12. Self Sculpting
  13. Your Origin Story

Module 2: Harmony

  1. Choosing Harmony
  2. Ridiculous Ridicule
  3. Stepwise Character Growth
  4. Aligned Income
  5. Expressive Alignment
  6. Expressive Commitment
  7. Family
  8. Making Progress
  9. Sweet Surrender
  10. Character Care
  11. Immortality

Module 3: Desire

  1. Opinionated You
  2. Pointers to Desire
  3. The Child Inside
  4. Wanting
  5. Inner Demons
  6. Chorus
  7. Pretending to Care
  8. Spontaneity
  9. Decision Rituals
  10. You Are So Lovable

Module 4: Courage

  1. The Voice of the Heart
  2. Trust
  3. Dancing with Fear
  4. Edginess
  5. Directness
  6. Adaptability
  7. Don’t Get Stuck
  8. Opening the Heart
  9. Courage Training
  10. Defending Your Character

Module 5: Will

  1. Responsibility
  2. The Source of Power
  3. Investment
  4. Balance
  5. Fame
  6. Reputation
  7. Dreaming Sideways
  8. Character in Crisis
  9. Wireframing
  10. Defining Your Core
  11. Fire

Module 6: Voice

  1. Memories
  2. Sculpting the World
  3. Embodiment
  4. Mortality
  5. Experiences
  6. Authority
  7. Self-control
  8. Developing Discipline
  9. Releasing
  10. Journey’s End

While I could say that this was a 3-1/2 month project since I’ve been designing and recording lessons for it since December, it was actually a multi-year project since I’ve been engaging with these ideas and developing this course in some fashion for a few years.

Originally this was going to be conceived as a course on clarity, then it evolved into one on goal setting. But I realized that in order to do those topics justice, we have to get to know ourselves very deeply. In order to set aligned and intelligent goals, we have to know who we are and what matters to us. In order to have clarity about anything else in life, we must create sufficient clarity about ourselves.

Without this depth of self-understanding, it’s very difficult to set meaningful goals and work towards them consistently. If you’ve ever set a goal and then lost sight of it within a few weeks or months, then you’re already familiar with that experience.

To do such deep work into personal awareness, we need ample courage too, so that’s a major part of the course with a whole module being dedicated to it. Sometimes the most courageous acts involve looking deeply into the parts of ourselves that most disturb us.

I’m delighted that many of the lessons were co-creatively inspired by feedback and suggestions from course participants who signed up during the first quarter of the year. Some people provided some really great seeds of ideas that were developed into full lessons or parts of lessons. For instance, I recall that lesson 2.2 on Ridiculous Ridicule (i.e. your inner critic), lesson 3.5 on Inner Demons, lesson 5.5 on Fame, and lesson 6.9 on Releasing were all created because of suggestions received.

I’m absolutely delighted with how this course turned out. It’s been a tremendous amount of work and a huge focus of my life for so long. I’ve been publishing each lesson as soon as it’s ready, so new lessons have been getting added every week since we started in early January. Hundreds of people signed up for Stature in January and have been going through it. Some are going slowly, still on Module 2 or 3. Others are close to finishing Module 6.

I feel pretty happy now that the long journey of creating the core lessons for this course is complete. I have this nice warm feeling in my heart this morning. Even though many of us are in some form of lockdown right now, I feel a strong sense of connection with the people who’ve been going through the course, like we’ve been communicating energetically from a distance. I also feel that what we’ve co-created together is really beautiful and magnificent.

Creating this course is easily one of the top five projects of my life, largely due to the decades of experience it took to create it. It feels amazing to share this unique creative contribution with people.

It’s been transformational for me to engage with these ideas so deeply for so long. I feel that I’ve emerged from this process a different person, especially in terms of my ability to focus well and maintain good self-control. Developing this course refactored my previous ways of connecting the dots among ideas, so now I mentally and emotionally link ideas together in ways that feel fresh and exciting. It felt like going through a gradual rejuvenation process, and some aspects of life feel easier as a result.

While the world is undergoing major shifts right now, I feel grounded and safe in the midst of the chaos. Somehow this course gave me a deep sense of inner peace. That may also be because I’ve improved many of my habits and reworked my entire daily routine along the way.

It’s especially satisfying to know that since this is a timeless course, people can be benefitting from it for decades to come.

A huge thanks to my wife Rachelle as well for helping with the course creation, including compiling and editing the lesson transcripts, many discussions of ideas, and abundant cuddle breaks to recharge along the way. ❤️

Share Button