Hi Sophie,
This step is about ‘Annihilating the Amygdala, and MPFC Mastery’. This one is sooo interesting.
He starts this out first by explaining that when he started these 67 steps, he hadn’t completed this last one yet, to illustrate a principle that the founder of Linkedin said – that if you’re not a little embarrassed of your first product, you waited too long to launch the business.
That’s something I’ve never heard before… meaning not to be completely unprepared to where people get really angry, but, as I see it, not waiting until everything is perfect to get started… starting where you are.
Another principle here is that people don’t demand perfection from your business, unless you’re in the airline business. Hmm, something I’ve never considered before…
I would have thought something needs to be ‘perfect and complete’ before launching or getting started… which I see is what I’ve done in my own life… waiting, to get some great breakthrough that makes everything clear or some new mindset that makes me do things differently, or for the perfect opportunity to appear out of nowhere, or to wait till I’m ‘ready’ before getting started with the very actions that would cause those results.
But perfect and complete never comes, in business or in life…
what there is to do is to start doing. I’ve never even taken a moment to consider that, or to consider what perfect and complete would even look like if it did exist.
But even seeing this and writing about what I see is more of the same, more of what doesn’t work… talking about it seems to mean I see it as something I ‘should fix’.
How can I make this different?
How would this look if I actually saw it and then changed something?
How would it look in a scenario that actually works?
I’m thinking I would start right here where I am and just start narrating… just doing it everywhere, practicing being an observer… until I start to really look from the sideview, and really start to see what is, not what I thought is, not what I said or perceived something is, not from my mind.
I would look again at each instance, each altercation, each discussion, each hectic moment, even if it’s after the fact to begin with, to see what voices were in play, or what the voices were telling me I ‘should’ do.
Instead of what I have been doing, which is accumulating more and more, reading more, taking more notes, ‘logging it in’ to come back and do later, once I’m enlightened.
I don’t already know how to do it, nor should I, because it’s new to me, so I can start where I am and keep practicing.
As I spend some time looking at that, my attention span… my ability to hold it in my attention as I start doing other things and practice seeing it as an observer… that seems to be the biggest issue I’m finding.
So the action I should take, it seems, is to work on my attention, to enable me to do this ONE THING more effectively. And to notice the ‘noise’ that takes my attention away, and the voices that tell me what a loser I am when I do lose focus… to notice that’s what they are. They are so insidious, they seem to really want me to believe I ‘can’t’ do it… my job is to say ‘yes, I’ve heard this before, I know you want me to believe it… but I’m going to work on this anyway. Do your thing and I’ll do mine’.
I think I went down a rabbit hole there… going back to business, he mentions an interesting benchmark – that if about 5% of your customers DON’T complain or make nasty comments, you’re a nobody. Meaning you want some ‘hate mail’ or ‘nastygrams’, as some people call it… not legitimate complaints, but the nasty nit-picky ones.
Hmmm, I guess I can see that… if you’re a completely ineffective nobody, nobody would even bother to complain – you probably wouldn’t stir up any emotions or feelings at all. Just like in relationships – if we didn’t care on some level, we would be indifferent in relationships… there wouldn’t be the stirred up anger, jealousy, love, hate, or whatever strong feelings stir up… we don’t get those for people we find insignificant.
There’s a great principle here about fear… that if we are not careful… if we don’t control our fear, what will happen is we will start ‘caving’ to the chatter and the expectations and get foolishly pulled in different directions… as I see this, we completely unknowingly give up our control and responsibility to the fear, and let it drive us… cause us to ‘react’ rather than deliberate and choose our actions. I hadn’t considered these fear based.
I think not just from expectations or judgments from others, like in the Aesop’s fable he references about the father and son with a donkey, where the son caves to social pressure and puts his dad on the donkey, then his dad caves and puts the son up there with him, then they both cave and get off and walk, and then they carry the donkey, and fall into the river, all based on what they hear from passers-by…
the principle here is that you cannot please all of the people all of the time. But I think a lot of the ‘chatter’ comes from my own voices and expectations, at least equal if not more… from expecting myself to know or be able to do something, or from being unwilling to ‘take it’ when I discover something I didn’t know about myself…
unwilling to take the hard stuff that we learn about ourselves, I think this is fear based as well… fear of facing that I’m not ‘good and positive and okay’ like I thought I was. fear of exploring the ugliness. fear of seeing that I don’t measure up. fear of disappointing you or not being liked. fear of finding out I still ‘don’t get it’… fear of giving up the persona we built for ourselves and lied to ourselves about for a lifetime, I think.
We cave to others’ expectations of us, and to our own expectations of ourselves, our delusional state, as he put it in the last step… None of that is accurate, which is bad enough, but what is worse in my perspective is that it puts up a ‘firewall’ of resistance, to where my focus turns to how hideous I am and not to the work at hand of learning to ‘see’, really see what is.
It’s a bitter pill to swallow after a lifetime of trying to convince ourselves that we’re ‘good’, or ‘right’, or how we ‘should be’… but I see from this that failing to control that fear is paralyzing… I have been blind to this, to the fear, and to seeing that these reactions come from voices that are not me, and that I have been scrambling to follow them, giving away my responsibility and letting them sink me into self-concern.
Going on to his next point, are we actually being torn down by the whisper of someone 20k years ago? I’ve never heard anything like this before… He says that all of us are… that the amygdala in the brain refers back to our ancestry, where if they moved they might not have food and water or be attacked, and could starve to death or be killed.
Or it might even refer back to what our parents and grandparents always thought or said. Am I making decisions because of what my mom or someone in my family says, or from someone way back in the day not wanting to step outside or they might freeze to death or be killed?
That is completely outside of anything I’ve ever conceived of…
he says here that that’s where the urge or feeling comes from, where we ‘seize up’ and refuse to do anything ‘outside of the box’. Very interesting.
He states that the Amygdala has gone haywire, because realistically nobody is in danger of starving to death in the modern world… that it’s working with information that is inaccurate.
Wouldn’t the amygdala log in that information as well, that the danger is no longer there? It’s interesting to think about. Or is it information just from what I said about my original incident when I was 3, and being unwilling to see that it was stupid, and not accurate?
That I could see as well, since we spend our lives proving that to be correct even though it isn’t…
I’m going down another rabbit hole here, this is just so new… his point is that our brains are the same as our ancestors’, and we must annihilate the amygdala. That our brains don’t know we’re not in fear of starving to death any longer. Or maybe my brain doesn’t know that what I said at 3 or 5 isn’t true, that my perceptions and ‘right/wrong’ concepts are not accurate, and it’s just been ‘married’ to what I said about that all those years ago to where my entire worldview is based on it.
I can see that as well.
He states that ‘Fear of Annihilation’ is a real syndrome. Hmm. Does fear sometimes dominate my decisions? YES, absolutely yes, most of them (maybe all of them?). Considering that ‘Should I attend this or this’, or ‘buy this or that’… that any of even these kinds of decisions are fear-based, then I would say it’s a lot more than I was aware of.
I would say it’s a principle that being afraid to make a bad decision is fear based… of course, because we are ‘afraid’.
What am I afraid of?
Why am I so afraid?
What is the worst-case scenario?
I’m seeing now that it’s all of these ‘voices’, that say that I should be afraid, that I don’t measure up, that if I take no action I’m off the hook and can protect my pretend image, the list goes on and on.
But, interestingly, he points out that people DON’T fear living a crappy life… they don’t fear wasting multiple years. I think that’s also a principle.
I never consciously considered that I might be wasting years, because I was convinced the years were ‘happening to me’. I might be all over the place here, but there is so much to see here, so much to consider… so much that comes full circle with so many workshops and calls with you.
His principle here is that years ago, all of these fears were legitimate, because you couldn’t survive if you were ostracized by the tribe. But the ones we invented at 3 or 5 or whenever, these aren’t legitimate, were never accurate.
This reminds me of that Seneca quote, a principle, that we don’t mind at all giving away our time, but yet we hate giving away money. But it seems we don’t even see that we’re giving away our time, because we don’t see that it’s in our own control, that it’s our own responsibility not to.
The next part is maybe the biggest principle of all of these steps… that seeing clearly is the greatest gift we can give ourselves.
Meaning seeing what is, seeing outside of our little box, outside of our filters, seeing even somewhat closer to what is reality, is the greatest gift we can give ourselves. That would enable us to fear the things we SHOULD fear… the REAL fears, such as wasting the years of our lives that we can never get back… such as completely giving away our power, and thereby giving away any potential we have to ‘be all we can be, do all we can do’.
The real fear that we can live an entire lifetime by letting life happen to us, and not ever driving it, not ever living it powerfully, not ever even knowing we could have loved it.
Wow-facing that squarely, that is real fear. That fear has haunted me, but I don’t want to feel haunted any more… haunted feels powerless. It is up to me to start driving.
He goes on to look at the inverse… that what should NOT haunt us, is
what other people think of us.
What celebrities are doing.
Whether or not we’re being scammed. He makes another good point – that every single study shows that McDonald’s is bad for health, but nobody is protesting McDonald’s, nobody worries that it’s a scam.
Or knowing Sam Walton could be life-changing, but most people don’t even know who that is while they know all about the Kardashians.
As I see it, people are up in arms about letting a guy who dresses like a girl compete with women, while the country and the world are descending into turmoil so much bigger than that.
It’s a good principle that the ultimate scam is what we’re NOT afraid of in the world right now.
It’s pretty genius, how they bombard everyone with gossip shows and magazines and present knowing the ‘dirt’ on celebrities or having just enough lies about a political subject as being ‘in the know’, and keep people arguing and offended about more nit-picky issues.
But I hadn’t considered that even the fear of starting a business and having it not work out isn’t a ‘real’ fear – he mentions that this could be one of the best things ever to happen to us.
Funny that I never considered that when I actually experienced it – my failed business was the experience and education of a lifetime and I have never regretted it, however I’ve had a fear of going through that again – once felt like enough.
He mentions that anyone new in business should plan on the first couple of businesses not working out… or the first couple of books, or whatever it is, and it’s a good principle to know this going in … that the ‘first one is for the trash’. Hmmm.
That makes perfect sense in terms of this work that we do on ourselves… it’s completely new, like a foreign language in many ways, and yet I’ve taken every one-off failed attempt as a ‘crash and burn’, that ‘I totally suck, I should try something different, that didn’t work for me, maybe this next thing will do it’ kind of knee-jerk reaction.
Having lots of jumbled thoughts, but not actually thinking purposefully.
I guess I started out with the ‘billion dollar idea’, as he puts it, rather than just curing the deficit and getting to ‘zero’ as a starting point.
The principle here is to start out with the smaller goal… maybe a small side job in business, or practicing ONE THING until I get good at it in this work.
This applies in every area of life, one change at a time through practice, through doing. Certainly true in learning to ride a unicycle-there is no shortcut. I would say another principle here would be to be willing to give it time, and be willing to be uncomfortable, and willing to ‘have’ the fear, but not let the fear control the decisions.
This next part is about MPFC, or Median Prefrontal Cortex, also a part of the brain, which can annihilate fears. Fear annihilation is called ‘Exposure Therapy’… that is new to me as well.
He refers here to the Amish horse training method, as an example. I had horses many years ago, and we did this with them… we called it ‘drown-proofing’, referencing how lifeguards get people beyond their fear of water by putting their heads under water for longer and longer periods of time, teaching them to hold their breath, until they’re no longer afraid of drowning.
Every horse seems to inherit a fear of loud noises, which can literally drive a horse to its own death, where if they just stay steady they’ll be fine.
The Amish take a young horse to near a freeway and keep him there to get him used to the sound of traffic. The principle here is that exposure therapy actually rewires the brain. There’s another principle here, that the brain needs to be in shape before the body can be, and the simplest way is using the MPFC part of the brain.
Another principle is that we cannot completely get rid of our fears, but our brains do have the ability to annihilate fear. The brain goes first to the amygdala, which starts with a memory, and if there was a bad experience, we automatically never want to do it again. Then it goes to the MPFC – the way to annihilate fears.
With exposure therapy, it will look for a newer memory, where something better happened. If there’s a newer memory of an experience of that same thing going well, it annihilates that first fear.
The principle here is that the ONLY way each of us can overcome a crippling thing, is to face the fears, and do the Amish Training Method… expose ourselves to our greatest fears. Wow, so timely…
I only just started with this… as I’m understanding it, it’s about getting familiar with the ‘voices’, the ones that tell us all of the things that cause us to fear taking action. Learning to notice them, recognize them, recognize the ones that are ‘memes’ that we have lived by, the rules and restrictions they make up for us, and as we notice them and distinguish that they are not us, not ours, they are voices, their control over our lives dissipates. I’m seeing them as ‘the people with the puppets’ from the Plato’s cave allegory, which seems to help me separate myself from them and see them as ‘not me’, but always right there.
He gives a process for this:
1- Take time to sit back for a thinking session, to think through some fears. Not to meditate… to contemplate.
I’m thinking about this though, I’ve found that often my own thinking is ‘noise’, and gets me further into self-concern and is not useful.
There’s a part in one of the videos where you mention that the only place meditation is useful is to see where the mind wanders and what it wanders to, to help distinguish the voices, and I do find this to be helpful in seeing what the ‘chatter’ tends to be.
But in looking at contemplating, or as he puts it, ‘doing the math’… what is the thing we should fear most? He makes an interesting point regarding business, that most businesses fail to cash flow, but it’s usually NOT their biggest fear to run out of money.
Meaning the thing that should be the biggest fear for starting a business, usually isn’t. I think there’s a principle there, because this seems to apply to every area.
People fall in love and fear falling out of love, rather than the more real issues such as having different goals or having ‘give and take’ or differing philosophies on raising kids, the big things that make people not want to be around each other over time, regardless of how much they might love each other.
In health, I find that so many people seem to fear potatoes far more than they fear artificial sweeteners or diet sodas or the chemicals that can really mess with their system… they’re much more afraid of the number of carbohydrates on the label than if there’s any actual food in what they eat.
With money, most people don’t fear not having 6 months of savings in a bank account, which would be the thing that keeps people out of trouble if a worst case scenario happens.
His principle here is to be petrified about the REAL things, not the things the world worries about.
He moves on to another principle here… that we need a margin of safety.
He refers to a quote from Benjamin Graham – that if you could sum up the greatest investment advice, it’s that you better have a margin of safety in your life. It could be cash, expertise, immune system, etc. in other areas, but it MUST be brain power. Hmm…
what would brain power look like? I’m seeing it as developing the ability to focus attention… focus it on what is mine to control, not scattered on a bunch of insignificant things… the ability to ‘clear the fog’ and consciously decide what to put it on, and the ability to HOLD it there.
2- Be afraid of AGING… not about looking old, but about losing drive as we age. Fear losing the hormones that will drive us, losing ambition. Again something I’ve never thought about. In considering that most people have their drive drop off after a certain age… sometimes even by age 45, as I look at that I can clearly see that my husband’s drives and ambitions are MUCH less than when I met him 20 years ago, and yet not as much so as many other men and women his age that I meet…
I do see that people in general tend to ‘wind down’ in that area.
He gives an example in the area of giving back to society, also a principle… even if you are the most selfish person, you must have a degree of altruism, or in general, the world will ‘fight back’ and take from you. I’ve heard something like this before, but I’m wondering if I’ve experienced this without knowing it. He suggests to try an experiment with charity… the principle is that one of the best ways to overcome financial fears, is to give an unusual amount to a charity. Hmm… that giving a bunch of money to a charity can perpetuate fear annihilation… because nobody ever goes broke from giving to a charity.
Interesting. Is it spiritual? Is it correlation vs. causation? He gives the example of Bill Gates, the billionaire who gives the most money away of all… although I have questioned the ways in which he gets a lot of those billions, which has been what I’ve read, not what I know… but I’m off the subject there… his point is that the money comes back to him.
Perhaps it gets you out of scarcity mode and forces you to make money, that does make sense as I think about it. Perhaps the brain would take that as ‘owning’ your fear of scarcity. I would think depending upon how you give. If I gave a bunch, terrified that I shouldn’t be, would it have the same effect?
Or if I ‘owned’ my fears, considering that they cause my feelings of scarcity, that the voices that are telling me I shouldn’t are not from me… and then choose to give rather than letting the fear control me and my actions, that could make the scarcity disappear and allow for the abundance.
Or if I gave to experience what I receive, the good feelings that come from giving, while the charity also benefits, in the spirit of receiving for the sake of sharing, or in the spirit of a win-win where both benefit, certainly that could open up the possibility of dissipating the scarcity and allowing for abundance.
He raises another interesting point to consider in looking at some scientists who measured peoples’ economic responses to making money. the question was, if a person started to make a million dollars a day or an hour, would they work the same amount? They found that about half of people would work for a while, save it up, and retire… about half would build a fear that they have to constantly work, or they will stop making money, or a fear that everything they do that isn’t work now COSTS them money.
Both of those responses are fear based. Hmm. As I look at those I do see that both are scarcity based. The principle here is that giving to charity can re-wire our brains, ‘drown-proof’ us from that fear. So interesting.
There’s another principle here, that one way to eliminate fears about money is to give some away to a good cause. But, importantly, not to brag about it, or even tell people about it… that can have the opposite effect.
I would think this would work the same in having a fear of ‘not having time’, or ‘my time is not my own’… what if I contributed time to charity… gave some away to a good cause, just like money? Something that I plan to experiment with.
He goes on to talk about using the method with introverts, people who hate calling attention to themselves… to try things like publicly yelling out things around them… exposure therapy.
I love the story about his stepdad whipping out a harmonica in a store and playing it, where he’s a teenager and thinks he’ll die of embarrassment… the principle he tells Tai is that ‘someday you’ll realize, nobody cares about you or what you’re doing, and you will WISH people would pay attention to you.’
So true, like that Alex Hormozi quote about fearing what others think about you, where the short answer is that they DON’T… that has helped me, considering that. That is a principle – don’t fear what people think about you.. they don’t. Don’t fear ‘stuff’… Have REAL fears, about REAL things.
I think calling attention to the various multiple ‘shoulds’ I have been listing really shows a lot of the insignificant areas where I have had fears… a lot of the voices and ‘noise’ I have allowed to control what I do, control my days, almost robotically, like a zombie.
I really had no idea, especially how so much of what I thought was contemplating was actually more noise… thoughts, not thinking. I could see it in many of my emails to you, and in my inability to articulate verbally things I thought I knew.
He mentions here, which I think is a principle, that the biggest tragedy is that most people spend 88% of their lives doing things they don’t want to do. Wow. He references a book called ‘Flow’, where what scientists call ‘flow’ would be if all of us operated opposite of that, where only 12% of our lives were spent doing what we didn’t like, and 88% with what we did like, and we were doing exactly what we were meant to be doing… that would be a time of optimal creativity.
I would guess that 98% of us would say to that, ‘what is it that I’m meant to be doing’?
He suggests that if the government gave a 10 million dollar reward to solve a big problem, someone would be creative and find the solution… wow… certainly all of us would try, harder than we’ve ever tried to solve anything, and it could be anyone who found it – any age, any education.
There’s a principle here, that the problem is that we are not CREATIVE enough. That’s interesting… you have said that what makes creators different is that they see REALITY. They have the ability to see what doesn’t work, and instead of talking about trying to fix it, they are curious to see how it would look working. They don’t compare, they create a whole new scenario.
As a person who typically just talks about what needs ‘fixed’, that stuck out in my mind, but I see that I need to ‘marry’ that with other principles and ratchet it in for it to be useful in my daily life. In that light, ‘we are not creative enough’ is an understatement… we don’t tend to see reality in the first place.
He gives a principle here, that we will never run out of money, but we will run out of creativity if we are not careful… if we don’t rewire the brain. Or as I see it, if we don’t rewire the brain to cut out the chatter and start to see reality… the greatest gift we can give ourselves.
He has another principle here, that running out of money is not a legitimate fear… but running out of time IS. Another is that time is one thing we can never get back… running out of it is the ultimate fear.
I have known people who have lost enormous amounts of money… most have made it back and then some, sometimes a few times over. It was interesting hearing about Donald Trump losing boatloads of money when he stopped focusing on business and started focusing on supermodels. He mastered his fear using logic, looking at the cause, which was turning his attention away from the business that got him so far upside down, and ended up richer than before.
That’s interesting… what we focus on is what flourishes, good or bad… I think that’s a principle as well… and another is that everyone wants the good life, but not everyone is tough enough to conquer that fear.
Another principle here is that we MUST be tough… we must master the amygdala. He gives an interesting example from a study, that people who commit suicide over a half million or million dollars are people who lack emotional stability.
There’s an interesting principle here – that men who are stable, and ‘tough,’ is what gives a man status, much more than just having a lot of money. That is so true, I never thought about that… Nobody admires someone who merely inherits a boatload of money… but everyone admires someone who is really tough and overcomes.
In considering what kind of person we would want to invest in, I would say it’s a principle that we would probably choose to invest in the guy who is tough, conquers fears, and is READY, not a silver spoon kid with no training.
A great principle is ‘aspire to be the tough one, not the weak-willed one’.
Also a principle that a fear of not wanting any scars is a fear that is not logical. The world in general is so weak-willed, we’re a generation now of arguing via text so that we don’t have to have face-to-face confrontation, or completely falling apart if the person we wanted doesn’t get elected, and interestingly enough not much ever changes no matter who gets elected.
It’s another good principle that there is nothing to fear, but yet we are all afraid of ghosts. Another really important one is that happiness doesn’t come from where we think it comes from…
what makes people happy is CONTRAST.
So true, appreciating the satisfaction of hard work or making it through a really tough trial is such a different happiness than buying a fancy car or house… I’ve known so many wealthy people who become overweight and unhappy, wondering why they got everything they wanted and are still not happy, so they eat more and more, and buy more and more, and become more and more frustrated that the happiness doesn’t just ‘come’.
He references a book – The Upside Of Your Downside… that says that depression is a good thing sometimes, if we are ‘rightfully’ depressed.
I think it’s a principle that our brains are pretty tough, and the world rewards tough people now more than ever in history.
Also a principle that no matter what generation we’re in, we could be the greatest one if we would toughen up. Wow… in more ways than one. What kind of lives could we lead if we ‘toughened up’? I’m seeing that my entire life would have been different, I’ve made so many decisions based on fear.
I’m also seeing that my participation in this work would have been completely different thus far… that the biggest reason I’ve been my own worst enemy is that I couldn’t ‘toughen up’ and buckle down and accept that I am where I am and it’s nowhere that I thought I was, or WHO I thought I was. And became too wrapped up in how wrong I am and how much I should be different to see the bigger picture… someone truly maddening to coach.
I have cringed and avoided the hard work and babbled incessantly because it was uncomfortable, and I couldn’t take it. WOW.
The principle here is that we must have that tough mindset.
As I see it, we must be willing to take it, all of it… and be willing to see reality no matter how ugly it is, and not keep wishing it to be any different than what it is, just get to the ‘doing’.
Alex Hormozi said something so true about this, also a principle – that desire is a contract we have with ourselves to be unhappy until we get what we want. So interesting, so true… desire creates a deficit… I never saw it that way. The fun should be in the DOING, the experimenting… not because of where we want to be.
There’s another principle here in that everything we hear about business caters to us being turned into a ‘sucker’… I think it’s not just in business, which is why I think it’s a principle… like the 4-hour work week, or the ‘9-day Diet’, or any of the millions of get rich or skinny or find your soulmate quick schemes.
Another great principle is that the human machine is happy when BUILDING. As you mentioned once, I was happiest in my life when I was really in the thick of it in business, when I had skin in the game. It’s so true… it was like a real life chess match.
He gives the example of kids with their toys… Legos, Tinker Toys, Erector sets, those were always by far my favorites… you could never do anything fun with a Barbie.
The principle is that happiness, real happiness, comes from ACCOMPLISHMENT, accomplishing through doing. People say not to tie happiness to accomplishment, but it’s just not true… I would say don’t tie happiness to ‘stuff’.
Another principle would be that we should want is FLOW. Even more than financial independence. Or, even more than wanting to ‘get somewhere’, which indicates that there’s a finish line where you’re done.
He mentions that the Amish live very happily, and a principle that they live by is ‘it’s not what you make, but what you KEEP.’
Another principle is the ‘HARD’ is what makes it GREAT… that will build memory happiness. Wow, looking at everything that could entail… how it would feel to do the hard work to attain living a life I love, and living it powerfully… how it would feel to truly ‘make Sophie proud’, to where there was a big victory and satisfaction in seeing results that were produced, rather than feeling like one huge disappointment after another…
to be a real producer… how it would look to see things as they are, and see where I can be generous, give the other person a ‘win’, to truly get to unconsciously seeing opportunities to receive for the sake of sharing, rather than just to ‘get’ for myself… The picture of that so amazing and pure satisfaction, and yet I have no idea – it’s the ‘billionaire’ idea, and I can only start where I am and stop assigning expectations to where I ‘should be’.
But what I see here is that a life in general looks much more interesting when I look at these things as a lifelong process… rather than ‘I can never get there’ and making that a big traumatic event. it looks like there’s always something to work on, always something to aspire to… not in a ‘deficit’ way of desiring to have it, but in a way of doing something every day to work towards perfecting one thing to mastery, and then another, and then another… life would never get boring, never be truly aimless.
I just watched a great movie, ‘the World’s Fastest Indian, based on a true story, where a guy asks the main guy why on earth he’d be going for a world record at his age, and he answers that ‘I guess the fun is in the DOING’… which it clearly was because he did it 9 more years in a row, traveling from New Zealand to the U.S. with a bad heart. What a great example of conquering fears, of purely enjoying the ‘doing’.
He gives another principle here, to ‘be careful what you wish for – you might get it, and regret it’. Meaning, build the fence SLOWLY. Step by Step. Slow is smooth and smooth is fast, even if all it means is that I have one dollar more today than yesterday.
Like that Bruce Lee quote that is so good, about not fearing the man who knows 10,000 kicks, but the man who has done ONE kick 10,000 times…
or going to bed each night having taken at least one more step towards a goal.
Or manage to really see from the sidelines just one more time today than yesterday.
Manage to notice the voices a little more each day.
He gives another principle here… to build great stories, the best stories… like you have Sophie, to where you can use them to teach.
Or make a bunch of money and give it away… he tells an amazing story about Keanu Reeves making $80 million on the Matrix, and giving it all to the people in the movie because he didn’t want to become materialistic. Whaat? I never heard that… that does make a great story, especially in that he ended up with a net worth of 300 million.
There’s a reason for that, which is a principle… to get what you want, you have to deserve what you want. He certainly had no scarcity mindset in doing that, which left all the room in the world for abundance.
Wow, so many amazing principles in this one step… MPFC mastery… creativity… toughness. Not wanting to have it too easy. Developing the mindset of partnering, win-win, not ‘me me me’ .
In my case, stepping up and being willing to embrace the ugliness that I see and have seen in myself through these steps, and trusting you that we are all the same, all somewhere on this same scale, and being willing to accept what is, start where I am, and give it time… FUNDAMENTALS.
Not trying to ‘get somewhere’, or be obsessed with being where I ‘shouldn’t be’… that those ideas come from voices that are not on my side… the ‘people with the puppets’. One of the greatest principles in these steps is that to get what we want, we must DESERVE what we want. That applies everywhere, in every aspect, of every area of life.
What a journey this has been to do these steps… I didn’t manage to connect the dots on much, but there is so much I do look at differently since starting these, so much I consider differently, so much I have found that I don’t know that I thought I knew, so much more that I question and aspire to be ‘pro-accuracy’, as he put it.
I think the two biggest things I’ve gotten are first that it’s a process… even with these 67 steps, these are a process…
I believe I’ll never be ‘finished’ going through these again and again, to see what I didn’t see before. I look forward to starting again with the first one, and getting used to being a work in progress, in a process to do all I can do and build new habits and ENJOY the DOING, enjoy poking a hole here and there and seeing something different through it.
With what I have learned about myself, I am now not surprised that I’ve been too entrenched in my mind to get all I could get out of these. Not preferable of course, but it is what it is, and that was the cost.
The second huge thing that these steps have truly shed a bright light on, I think the biggest thing of all, is my own role in how I have lived my life, how I gave up my power and responsibility, why I have been a ‘beach ball in the waves’… why I am where I am, how I caused it and it didn’t just ‘happen’ this way, how it’s my responsibility to make the rest of life different and learn how to live life powerfully and love it… Which is a gold mine in itself.
It only makes sense that I’ll be going through these steps again and again, to see what I didn’t see before. But with the intention of SEEING, clearly, more of what is…
…which I had forgotten is the direct opposite of ‘black and white’, right/wrong thinking… I think I fell even further into that when I started to see what I could be doing and wasn’t doing, and then focusing on how ‘wrong’ it is to be how I am, rather than remembering that life itself is ‘the grandest experiment’ and enjoying the process.
I started this program having no idea where it would take me, but with your coaching through it it’s been priceless… even if it’s just a kickoff point, even if I didn’t manage to make a lot of it ‘stick’, there’s no question in my mind that it’s been priceless. I intend to enjoy this work moving forward, to enjoy this process that is the Grandest Experiment. Thank you so very much Sophie.
-Jodie