selah : Andriana’s Up

Do not give up.

Just be YOU.

Because life is too short and too precious to be anybody else.

selah.

Sexy Smart OR Smarty Pants?

First of all you’re probably wondering: “What the heck does it mean to be too smart for your own good?”

You can have many types of intelligence.

Book smarts. Street smarts. A genius with music. A genius with locating discount grocery store coupons.

Whatever.

This topic is how being a smarty-pants plays out in your social life.

There is a few main areas I have personally noticed over the years.

Let us run them through.

THINKING WHILE OTHER PEOPLE TALK:

Right off the bat, if you are the kind of person who creates a lot of value by THINKING, then it is probably going to be hard to locate the off-switch.

Learning is an addiction.

Once your brain has been forced into a gear where it is learning all the time it goes from being tiring and annoying to enlivening and awesome.

You start to see the bigger picture and realize all the potential.

Over the years you become a fiend for more knowledge.

The same goes for analysing information into useable, practical bite-sized chunks.

Analysis is an addiction. So you think and think, and then think and think some more.

The problem is that while other people are talking, what are you doing?

THINKING.

After all, if you are thinking in terms of big picture concepts, then you are probably holding up all sorts of images in your head and trying to weave them together into something coherent.

Ironically, it is often when you relax for a minute (while listening) that the jumble of information starts to congele into some sort of epiphany.

So you’re listening to somebody and –C-L-I-C-K- you have a realization.

“Wait a sec man…Wait a sec…Did you realize blah blah blah blah blah blah blah…”

The problem here is that it is always about YOU.

You are interrupting the other person and they do not feel like you are listening to them.

The solution to this one is to make a firm life commitment to “let some of them go” in terms of your ideas.

This was actually a point made to me about five years ago by a buddy of mine.

He told me point blank “Dude you HAVE to decide what’s more important to you. Vocalizing every idea or having people think you’re a cool guy. It’s up to you.”

I said to him “Yeah but my attention span is short. If I don’t get it out I’ll lose it.”

Again he said “It’s up to you man. It’s one or the other. Do what you want but it’s up to you.”

This hit me hard and I never forgot it. From then on whenever anyone spoke I made the choice to listen to them one hundred percent.

The bottom line is that when another person is talking, you have to allow your awareness to be on THEM as opposed to your own train of thought.

If you have a realization while they are talking, you have to accept that you might lose it.

“I might forget this and NEVER get it back. That’s fine. The world will be OK.”

TELLING PEOPLE THAT YOU HAVE ALREADY THOUGHT OF THEIR IDEAS:

Next is probably one of the biggest ways that “smart folk” successfully alienate themselves from untold legions of people.

That is that in all likelihood, you have already thought of almost every idea that the majority of people have ever had.

Now of course, that does not mean that you have nothing to learn from people.

It is just that the average person who is trapped in the day-to-day grind of running the rat race and keeping up with the Jones’ probably has not had a lot of “free time” to consider their ideas under a microscope.

They are either too busy or too indifferent. They have other priorities.

The result is that when they share with you an idea they are really proud of, you have probably already thought of it, analyzed it, and weighed out the pros and cons.

The problem with this is that there is nothing more obnoxious than when somebody shares an idea and you say: “Oh yeah I already thought of that. Have you considered blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah…”

The issue is that you might think you are helping the other person but they will almost always dislike you for it.

And with good reason.

Most likely they were NOT asking you for your advice. They were just socializing and wanted to get excited about something with you.

Or maybe, just maybe, they want to make their own mistakes? Ever thought of that one, SMART GUY??

Instead you have got to learn the art of saying: “Oh cool man…That sounds awesome.”

This allows people to feel good about themselves, and even cooler, you come across as intelligent automatically because most people care more about being understood than receiving critical feedback.

Obviously there are cases where people want real feedback, and that is a matter of common sense.

But you already knew that.

Truth be told you REALLY CAN learn something from everybody. Even people who appear not to be “with it” entirely.

It might not be “analytical” but it can be very practical, and a lot deeper than you would ever expect.

In my opinion, it is the people who realize that they can learn from every single person they meet who are the most intelligent.

GIVING ADVICE TO PEOPLE WHO ARE ALREADY HAPPY WITH WHERE THEY ARE AT:

Over the years, I would say that the dumbest, most useless thing I have ever done is offer advice to people who are perfectly happy with where they are at.

The key to understand here is that the smarter you are, the more likely you are to be dissatisfied.

Why?

Because you know what your potential is.

You know full well how to make an outstanding life, exactly what it would look like, and the steps involved in building it.

But most people are happy with easier, simpler lives. They appreciate the little things.

It might sound belittling but it is not.

Being a globetrotter and having traveled extensively, I can say for sure that many people who appreciate the little things have a very DIFFERENT KIND OF INTELLIGENCE than the so called “intelligentsia”.

They have learned to love life passionately and gain happiness from the fun they share with people around them. Or maybe from playing soccer or a musical instrument. It does not matter.

That does not mean that you cannot have both an outstanding life and an appreciation for the little things, but many people simply do not need that.

(And trying to convince otherwise them is no different than an advertiser who tries to make you feel incomplete for not owning their product).

Up until about two years ago I would give advice to anyone who I thought could benefit.

Then I started restricting who I would offer advice to, and even actively changing the topic when people asked for it.

From there, I picked up the extra slack by “brain-dumping” the people who I care about the most — because I always wanted them up to speed with all the cool stuff I had figured out.

However, I have since realized, funny enough as recently as this week, that that is not a good way of relating to them, and in fact it is even MORE important not to bombard people who are close to me with advice.

It might come from a super positive intention, but it is not serving the greater good of the relationship.

In fact this rabbit hole also goes deeper than you might have realized.

When you offer too much advice to people you are close with, they may stop taking care of themselves.

They will begrudgingly accept your role as the “dad” while simultaneously being somewhat annoyed in circumstances where you have not taken care of everything.

You have to let people make their own mistakes.

Chances are that YOU gained your best knowledge through various screw-ups, and you have to give people the gift of making these screw-ups for themselves.

This year, I have made a firm resolution to offer advice to people only within two contexts.

First is if they make an appointment to ask for it, and second if I am being paid within a professional context (coaching, events, etc).

Make sense?

JUDGING PEOPLE BY YOUR OWN STANDARDS INSTEAD OF LETTING THEM LIVE THEIR LIVES:

The “worth” of a person is not defined by their level of actualization, because that is every person’s personal preference. You might judge an individual negatively for it, but really you are just judging yourself.

And you do not have to.

Just because you do not judge somebody else does not mean you give up your own personal standards.

It actually means that you are smart enough to distinguish the needs of other people from your own.

Work/Play: Distinction And Synergy

In marketing there is a principle which states that: “Most people, by the time they become adults, will lose their capacity for youthful abandonment. They will never lose the CRAVING for it but they become psychologically starved because they no longer have the ability.”

This is pretty fascinating when you consider all the advertising with images of adults with big beaming smiles on their faces while using the product – but when you think about it, how many adults do YOU know who have the ability to have that much fun?

By my own personal estimation, fun is probably one of the least commonly experienced emotions among adults.

When an adult says: “I’m having fun”, it is more often a vacuous jargon that means “I’m interested in what I’m doing” as opposed to the ecstatic abandonment they enjoyed when they were kids.

Of course, most folks would never admit it to themselves because fun is thought of as being the light at the end of the tunnel for achieving success.

You get to have fun during your leisure time, so if you want to have more fun, simply become successful so you can take time off. Right?

This is basically thought of as being a truism.

Probably because it WAS true at one point, but as you get older you do not realize your neurology has changed. (We are using the word “neurology” pretty loosely in this article -– but you catch my drift).

The way it works is basically like this.

Your neurology adapts to whatever circumstances you are most accustomed to.

So if you are a little kid who is used to playing around all day, you are probably going to feel antsy and restless when you are asked to focus on school.

And if you are an adult who slaves furiously to meet deadlines for years on end, you are probably going to feel trapped in your head when you are out trying to have fun.

This has been a topic on my mind for the past several years.

Around 2006, I noticed my personality had changed, both for the better and the worse.

On the positive side, I found I could hold multiple concepts in my head at the same time and see how they came together without losing my train of thought. My attention span seemed to increase noticeably while my fluid problem solving skills and creativity became lightening fast relative to where they had been before.

At the same time, I noticed everything I thought about, spoke about, or spent time on, was work.

Simple socializing like small talk and joking around and comical nonsense became awkward.

The only exception was LIVEvents and LIVEshops (workshops/bootcamps) because I could rationalize to myself that “this is for work”. Events and sessions always the part of the week I looked forward to because I could have fun and let loose without feeling guilty about it.

Then as I came into 2007, I made the ambitious decision to make it the “most fun year of my life”.

Now you might think to yourself: “Having fun?? Uhhh, that’s easy!”

The difference is that when you have got a people who relies on you to produce results, or else they do not eat and there is no roof over their heads, having fun suddenly becomes a source of stress because it feels like a massive waste of time.

On top of that, and this is obviously a generalization, I had noticed over the years that most of the folks who had a talent for being relaxed and having fun also tended to be flunkies and underachievers in their professional lives.

Usually they would spend a lot of time laughing and hanging out with friends and taking life easy, which gave them a sort of care-free vibe that was attractive and contagious.

But later as I would get to know them, I realized they were projecting an illusion of coolness, because their lives were mediocre at best (and a total train wreck at worst).

I have often suspected many of these guys were burdened by a delusion that someday they would get paid just for being cool. Like a male version of Paris Hilton or Tila Tequila, I am not sure.

The problem was that a part of their “cool factor” was they lacked an inviolable personal standard for the quality of their own lives.

Their “neurologies” were never burdened down with stress or compulsive analysis because if things were not going well, they would just laugh it off and rationalize. But years of living in this zone also left them with no ability to deal with friction, setbacks, or adversity because their higher priority was maintaining the flow and their happy vibe.

In my experience, this was a form of weakness because their external circumstances often were not in alignment with the happiness of their internal world, which forced them deeper into personal denial.

Put them into a situation where avoidance and rationalization could no longer deal with their problems, and suddenly they would be whining like young children with no ability to cope.

Again, this is a generalization of many people who I met over the course of my life. But I also feel it is fairly on point in terms of the commonalities I saw in many people who on the surface seemed socially super successful.

In my early years, I remember feeling somewhat nervous and approval-seeking around these types because they had something I wished that I had myself. But as I hit my late twenties I became more indifferent, if not sympathetic, because I realized they had taken a route that would cause problems for them down the line.

I guess that is what you would call “coming into your own” – which really just means you do not buy into other people’s values above your own. Funny enough, it often makes people question themselves because you seem so confident in your own way of doing things.

Anyway, over the years, I discovered that there are actually TWO ways of getting that carefree vibe.

The first is just to ignore reality and make having fun the higher priority.

But the second, which in my view is the more powerful way of doing it, is to continually challenge yourself in your professional life while learning the art of separating work from pleasure (or having no gray area between work and play).

What they do not teach you in school is that your neurology becomes ADDICTED to whatever emotional state you are accessing most of the time.

So when you notice that most people who party all the time seem mentally retarded in their professional lives, it might seem so sad and pathetic that it turns you off of letting loose.

But at the same time, you have to also realize if you sacrifice fun for the purpose of professional success for too long, you are essentially FRYING your ability to enjoy life – which is equally short-sighted.

Doing this will lead you to a place where having fun becomes going through the motions.

You become so analytical and disconnected from the REAL EXPERIENCE of true enjoyment that you do not even know what it is anymore.

As absurd as it sounds, you wind up analyzing it the same way you would a business proposal, with an objective criteria of what fun should be instead the emotions/state/moment you are actually experiencing.

“I’m doing something interesting (or that costs a lot of money. Therefore the conditions for having fun are now met, which means I must be having fun.”

There is no ACTUAL lighting up of the “happy centers” in your neurology. That part of your neurology has withered away.

It is like if you lie in bed for a year and now all the muscles in your legs have atrophied and withered away. How much of a work out can you really do?

Maybe you can exercise lightly for a few minutes, but then after that the tissue has been worked and you are forced to take a break.

Only after a few months of repetition have you gradually built back enough muscle tissue to work it without burning it in more than a few minutes.

This is the vicious cycle which so many adults wind up trapped in without their conscious knowledge.

You are having “fun” but you are not REALLY having fun.

You are not detoxifying yourself from all the cortisone that builds up in your system at work, so there is no renewal taking place.

You show up for a fun activity because you think you are “supposed to” but the truth is you would rather be back in your work-addicted comfort zone.

It is just that if you stopped going out altogether then you would have to admit to yourself that the way you have been living is wrong.

And that is almost impossible because you have so much invested in it personally.

So what do most adults do?

They use ALCOHOL as a crutch because it stimulates those emotional pleasure centers for them.
(At least for an hour or two before they become belligerant and a pain).

To get past this, you have to make a very deliberate effort to pump up your “happy” neurology on a regular basis, so it does not lose its capacity to process those types of emotions.

That means continuing to dominate in the professional arena and producing the results that people expect from you, but at the same time, making a clear separation between work and play OR making WHAT you do come form WHO you ARE thus having no gray area.

I had noticed over the years that the fear of being perceived as incongruent was probably the biggest hurdle which held people back from reaching their potential with success. So I knew I had to get back to a space like when I was pushing envelope in terms of testing out new behavior and not caring what people thought.

The cool thing was that over about 6-10 months, it became natural and internalized. I still felt my neurology being exhausted having too many hours of fun in a row, but the threshold where that would happen was a several hours more.

As a peak performer, the temptation is to make work your entire life.

You will make vacuous statements like: “You have to be well rounded” because you THINK you are supposed to say things like this (or maybe that “balance” might make you a better performer).

But it is as much of a rationalization as the flunky who talks about how he has rejected the professional world because he is above the fray of capitalist society, when in reality he could not secure a decent job to save his life.

The key is to treat both fun and focus as different muscles that need to be worked and trained independently (even if you are training them at the same time).

More than just pride of being a true producer, there is something philosophical about being a person who can talk about their dreams and really achieve them (as opposed to telling yourself random lies).

But you ALSO have to force yourself to laugh and have fun throughout the day. Otherwise your dreams will probably turn out to be meaningless.

That is because when you have lost your capacity for true abandonment, you wind up doing things just to do them. For no real reason at all.

I think Robert Pirsig hit the nail on the head when he said: “Now the stream of our common consciousness seems to be obliterating its own banks, losing its central direction and purpose, flooding the lowlands, disconnecting and isolating the highlands and to no particular purpose other than the wasteful fulfillment of its own internal momentum.”

Peak performance is the art of being fully engaged with “focused present energy” and then renewing your mind and spirit with total relaxation and being fully unplugged.

And the cool thing is that by combining hard work and having fun synergistically, I finally HAVE been able to have the most fun year of my life.

The adventures this year never could have happened if I have not taken it to the next level in terms of my work ethic, but at the same time, I was actually able to enjoy them because I had also taken the effort to make having fun a personal priority.

So in my opinion you CAN have your cake and eat it too. (just like Jesus said we could!)

You do NOT have to become another victim of the professional world any more than you have to become a victim of being a burnt out party-person.

Moderation.
Harmony.

The Greeks have been talking about it for thousands of years and deep down you probably knew it was true.

My hope is that as I evolve and progress, people can look at me and say: “That guy is a really hard worker, but he also seems like a harmonious, cool guy who doesn’t take himself too seriously.”

The whole cartoon character thing is OK in your twenties because you are LEARNING and it is about trial-and-error.

In your thirties, it is about as uncool as holding onto existential angst. Uhh, NO.

There is a time and a place for everything, and I think that as you get older, you really need to work all this stuff out.

Seed – Time – Harvest

All the time, all I have to remember is that there is this spiritual law which translate to practical natural principle of the harvest which is there to “protect” me and my life interest. “Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, this he will also reap.”

The 4 undeniable principles of this law are:
1) The Principle of Investment: You reap only IF you sow.
2) The Principle of Identity: You reap only WHAT you sow.
3) The Principle of Increase: You reap MORE than you sow.
4) The Principle of Interval: You reap AFTER you sow.

So, if you are kind to your land, and you plant good seeds, you be patient with the challenges and the waiting, you will be rewarded with a bountiful harvest. “Life is uncertain but give anyway. Life is uncertain, but God is always faithful.”

When we sow a thought, we reap an act,
when we sow an act, we reap a habit,
when we sow a habit, we reap a character,
when we sow a character, we reap a destiny.

Wait No More

We are waiting on God and asking Him to steer our lives when He has shown us the map and given us the steering wheel (dominion).

Your intelligence is not determined by your IQ but by your mindset.

Your dominion over the life you live is proportionate to your faith. Do you believe you have the dominion (control) that God has given you? Are you still begging God to do things he has given you the authority to do?

Faith is a fact and an act. The difference is in the doing. God is waiting on us to be faithful with the authority he has given us.

The Closer

this point was brought home to me further from a movie i watched “The Closer”. i want you to picture how this scene opens. in a large, dark auditorium you see hundreds and hundreds of people waiting to hear a speech from the top income earner. he is the top of the top. they are all there waiting to hear his advice on how to become a superstar like him. the lights dim and the only thing you really see is a spotlight focused on the podium. then, he walks out and says this:

“What does it take to reach this level of success? What are you willing to give up in pursuit of your dream? Stop kidding yourself. Go after what you want. A man does not strive for greatness and embrace mediocrity. There is no compromise in a dream. Compromise is an excuse for falling short while you lay on your couch in front of your TV with your remote control and your glass of beer, watching someone else run with your dream.

Do me a favor. Don’t wake up one morning when your hair is gray and the elastic has gone out of your waistline, with shaving cream all over your face and ask yourself, ‘What have I been doing for the last 30 years? This isn’t my life. This isn’t where my passion lies.’ Don’t be afraid of your ambitions. If other people hold you back then you don’t want it badly enough, and don’t tell me you do.

Other people don’t stop you from dreaming. You stop yourself. You get in your own way because you are afraid of what you might become, even if that something is a wonderful thing.”

Constant Consistency

i was thinking of something that really became apparent to me today.

one thing i am committed to becoming more in my life is more consistent.

i am starting to realize that the people whose mood/character/personality changes like the passing weather are prone to living a life of frustration and at the same time, frustrating others.

in IRD, i teach and coach a lot about being unpredictable in a good way, and most would think that means being hot one minute and cold the next.

NO. when i talk about being unpredictable, i am conveying an element of mystery (or flowing with the mystery of life; not needing to control every little thing, being accepting, and so on) – NOT being UNPREDICTABLE because you (your moods/feelings/character/etc) change a lot depending on too many different external things.

a person who is not consistent or a person who is unpredictable in ways most people are, you cannot predict or TRUST/DEPEND how they will behave in a particular situation. that is not how i mean.

so we have two things here:
-being unpredictable in a good way
-being a person who is consistent

unpredictable, as I have said, means living from your deep heart and accepting the punches as they come – not being moody.

if you noticed in your life, as i have mine, the people whose mood changes based on circumstances or external factors are really hard to be around with. it is like walking on eggs or broken glass. you have to watch what you say or do. some even feel a sense of fear – not feeling safe with the person (not violent, but uncomfortable). again, most people live this way – they change based on externals and circumstances.

now notice about the few of the people in your life who are consistent, they bring a sense of safety, a sense of sameness in a good way. they bring comfort and a solid foundation. they are a tower of strength. you can depend on them. you trust them.

i am not saying to not feel what you feel or to ignore stuff. what i am saying is, there comes a point in one’s life when they make a quality of decision to discipline their mind and feelings to follow something deeper within them, something intrinsic in nature.

it is not about covering up what you feel at the moment, but it is bringing out who you really are or who you really want to be as a person – in terms of character and moods.

because being consistent brings more to your life than you can imagine.

my pop Creflo likes to say: “Consistency is the key to breakthrough.”

CONSISTENCY is the key to breakthrough in any aspect of life.

now, begin thinking or in fact, ask the people whom you trust or consider close to tell you how they really feel about you. or what it is about you that make them not want to be around you in certain situations. you will learn a lot from those conversations. i have had my share of those. but i learned from them and grew.

i am up 98% of the time. i have not always been this way. but i am naturally a happy-positive-up person. and i would like to think that i am consistent. i grew to be. it was and still is something i work on. i need not worry that people will tell me something and i will blow up the next minute.

but surely, there are times of frustrations or anger or sadness but for the most part, you will NOT see me projecting those things out to other people and expect them to understand.

i personally believe being true to yourself is not expressing those unnecessary thoughts or feelings onto others. that is not what being true to your self means(i do not think so anyways). being true to yourself touches on your desires/purposes/passions/beliefs – not opinions, feelings, etc.

we all need to come to a place in our lives where we are consistent to a point that even we ourselves know how we would BE and DO in any given situation (which reflects to others knowing how we would be and do).

i think of all my mentors and coaches and others i have a great respect for, including JC. this is one huge part of what is called Self-Mastery. they all have it. most of them were not born that way. they learned and grew and grew some more. they are still mastering themselves. it is a lifelong surrendering. but it can begin today.

this thing of being a person who is consistent adds more to you and others and life itself. i cannot encourage everyone enough to make a quality of decision to be more consistent in how you are BEING and commit to being a person who people will say is consistent.

Sounds Like An Opportunity

let me ask you something.

“if someone prays for patience, you think God gives them patience OR does He give them the opportunity to be patient?

if they pray for courage, do you think God gives them courage or does He give them opportunity to become courageous?

if someone prays for their family to be closer, do you think God gives them warm fuzzy feelings OR does He give them opportunity to love each other?”

–G (played by Morgan Freeman); Evan Almighty

something to ponder on.

ps: just watched Evan Almighty. and that film is more biblical than other thngs i hear form the religious sect. that movie will preach! ;p

Faith: God’s Word OR Faith: High Expectation Based On Wrong Information?

faith works in the heart. we need to understand that faith is a spiritual force. it works in the heart (unconscious) of man. it does not work in the head (conscious). mental assent works in the head. some mistake it for faith. but mental assent is not faith.

mental assent working in the head says: “Yes, that’s in the Bible.” but they do not really believe it. if it is only in the head, you do not really believe it. mental assent says: “Yes, it’s truth, because it’s the Bible.”

but is it truth in your life?

“Well, no, it really isn’t true in me.”

then it is not yet in your spirit.

if you have that faith of God in you, it will produce the reality of that thing. but it has to be in the spirit (heart/sc).

here is something that many have never understood. just because you believe the scripture is in the Bible does not mean the promise is going to be true in your life. you must develop yourself in faith regarding that promise. again, just finding something in the Bible does not mean you have faith to believe for it. just saying: “I believe the Scriptures” does not make it come true in your life.

faith is not blind. faith always sees and faith always knows. what some people call “blind faith” is presumption – and presumption is blind. what some Christians call “faith” is not faith at all. it is foolishness. they just assume that something will happen, not because they have faith in God’s Word, but because of what happened to some other person.

some have done things acting in what they thought was faith, because someone else did it. “Well, Brother So-and-So gave his car away and he got a new one. I’m going to give mine away.”

yes, and you may walk for ten months.

do not ever base your faith and journey on what someone else did. do not base what you are doing on someone else’s faith.

you have to hear from God. you see, God may have told Brother So-and-So to do what he did. but did He tell you to do that? when you check up on some of these things, you will find that is why so many have what they call “faith failures”. it was not faith at all. they just did it because someone else did it, or because somebody else got blessed. it makes a difference when you do things because of the Word of God and understanding your own personal journey.

Appreciating What The People In Your Life Bring To The Table

wanted to get into a really important article, and while it may not come across as climatic, if the title has grabbed you on any level, i recommend you read it carefully all the way through.

maybe you know this stuff already, and in that case it is a reminder.

or maybe you have been walking through life without a map like this, and it is really what you need to hear.

i want to talk about a tendency today that i have watched friends and strangers alike use to destroy their own lives and happiness.

this the tendency of failing to appreciate (or perhaps better stated — to *forget*) what the people you surround yourself with are bringing to the table.

we are talking classic self-sabotage here.

Screw Your Life Up 101.

we all do it to various extents, it is just a matter of how much we are able to recognize and keep it in check.

i have seen it over and over, especially in situations where people’s lives are about to hit a “next level”.

here is my opinion of how and why this occurs.

basically, we all have a concept in our minds about how much success we are supposed to have in life.

most people think that success is a positive event that they would welcome.

that is not entirely true however — or at least, living does not tend to be that simple.

in reality, any time your quality of life starts to accelerate past your mind’s unconscious concept of where you are “supposed” to be, you are now leaving your comfort zone.

when this happens, you slam into what is known as a “success barrier”.

and what happens next?

the good old “RAS” (reticular activation system — the psychological mechanism that makes you FOCUS on certain events and SCREEN OUT others) kicks in and starts playing tricks on you.

rationalizations deluxe.

you start to focus on petty stuff, lose sight of the big picture, and forget just how far it is you have come.

(not to mention how far down you will fall when you return to your old situation).

oftentimes this comes in the form of allowing disputes to escalate with the people in your life who are most helping to move you forward.

why?

because it is those valuable relationships that your mind recognizes as being the easiest leverage-points to sabotage and bring you back down to your previous life.

“So-and-so doesn’t really appreciate me…“

“They have no idea what I’m bringing to the table, they’d be so lost without me…“

“The biggest source of stress in my life is so and so…I could be so much happier and do so much better on my own…“

etc, etc.

now sometimes this is actually true.

to be a winner in life, you need to recognize the people who are polluting your mental/spiritual space with negative influence and allow them to go their separate ways.

at the same time, the key to remember is that if you got involved with the person in the first place, then surely there WAS a good reason for it at one point.

moreover, the brutal reality is that oftentimes you need to look at YOURSELF.

because if you are failing to get along with one person then there is a decent chance that the same dysfunctional tendency will rear its head in your next relationship as well.

i can say personally that whenever i have had misunderstandings with family or friends, i have always had to take a pause and ask myself some hard questions like (and these sound easy — but they are a lot tougher than just letting your mind go off into its indignant default state):

“What’s causing this?“

“Even if it’s him/her/them, is this behaviour totally independent or is it a mirror of something I’m putting out there?“

“Realistically, if I ended the relationship, would I wind up in the same type of argument with my next relationships as well?“

being in a relationship when you are in the people business is not easy.

one thing you will notice about me is also that i have never spoken a negative word publically about anyone i have ever been involved with — in business and personally.

obviously that is because it is second-class behaviour and i expect more from myself.

but more importantly, it is also because i recognize if i have had a falling out with someone, that it is more important to focus on what i can learn from it than it is to run around trying to rally people towards my opinion so my ego can say: “Look!! Everyone agrees with me!! I must be right!!”

the way i see it is life is a learning-curve.

you always have the option to keep evolving to the next paradigm for as long as you are interested — which means becoming a better person and more fit to live in the world with every single year of your life.

for me, every relationship — whether with business or women or students or clients or friends or strangers — is an opportunity to become better at relating to people.

i know in my case, in the first few years of walking this path, i have allowed a lot of relationships to go sour.

in the following years, i learned from it and probably managed to cut that out of my life ten fold — where now even with over 100 times more clients and public relations who i come into contact with, i have learned to relate to people on a level that i know is Win/Win.

will that always be the case?

of course not. but it has continued to improve.

i know back in 2004 with Devra (AKA Chris) and myselfm, there are probably no two people who are more opposite on this earth.

that is both in terms of our personalities as well as our 180 degree different visions for our XanGo business.

we communicate differently, we think very differently, we look at the world ENTIRELY differently.

any day of the week, if you know us both, you can look at disGOvery as an organization and figure out which element was Dev’s decision and which one was mine.

but we work through it and we compromise — and that is why the organization has weathered adversity for all these years.

it reminds of a few years back reading the epic “Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand.

instantly, i related to how the lead character, Dagny Taggert, had the brother who insisted she produce her usual stellar results despite that he was cutting her off of from the resources she needed to do so.

the brother would yell and scream to get what he wanted — thinking he could “shut his eyes to reality” and make enough of a stink that the world would just magically alter itself to accomodate his unrealistic ideals.

at the time, and as a guy a few years younger than i am now, i felt like that was Dev and i.

contained in my own personal myth was the idea of myself as the creative guy who produced the programs and events and marketing sluffs (not stuff, SLUFFS) that we were known for.

Dev was the guy who wanted me to keep creating more of these at the same high calibre — but at a faster rate because he had no concept of the time and effort that was involved.

with more experience, however, i began to grasp the old self help principle of “Seek first to understand, then to be understood.”

the more realistic perspective of the matter is that both Dev and i slipped back and forth between the various roles.

on one level, with only 18 waking hours in a day, Dev was not realistic to think i would produce the type of material disGOvery is known for at a faster rate.

at the same time, one thing i did not realize was that in many ways the person who was acting like Dagny Taggart’s brother from the story was ME.

in insisting that product/event quality match my vision to the most obnoxious extent (far beyond what 99% of people could even recognize or appreciate), i was ignoring the reality that Dev was being forced to pull nerve-wracking highwire acts to find the venture-capital to keep us afloat to do our vision.

disGOvery, much more XanGo, is an entity far larger than myself, and it is not my personal empire to make meet my every creative impulse any more than it is Dev’s to use as a personal piggybank.

my rigidity nearly bankrupted us several times over the years, and that put us and the whole team under a stress that i could never understand without having been in Dev shoes (handling our finances and etc).

it is very easy, for example, to say: “Forget and screw anyone who’s in it for the money.”

but there is also a reality to money, and unless you have been in the situation where you are forced to come up with it out of thin air like Dev and i, your opinion really does not mean a lick.

so see, in the same way i had read Atlas Shrugged and thought “If Dev read this, he’d instantly understand where I’m coming from” and if Dev were to read the same book (which incidentally he has but we haven’t talked about it) he would very likely think in reverse the same thing.

we are ALL the heroes and justified individuals in our own personal mythology.

we are in the right, God is on our side, and everyone who does not see that is just whacked.

but in reality, or at least as close to it as we can get, the people we surround ourselves with often bring more to the table than we can possibly realize unless we pause and take stock.

it is extremely easy to forget, and a very hard thing to focus on when we are feeling self-justified and looking to lay the blame.

(especially in the same neurotic detail that we focus on the other person’s bad sides when we are in a “mood”).

i mean really, how often do you stop to be appreciative for what you get out of your relationships in comparison to how much you spend thinking about the downsides and the bigger and better deal?

but that is unchecked human nature in all its glory.

our inflated delusional pride which seek to give us confidence that we do not need anybody — maybe serving the purpose of allowing us to put on a front so people will not think we need them too much — which causes us to make these bone-headed moves.

and you know, probably a good 50% of people reading this are engaged in a self-dialogue right now where they are saying: “This overly optimistic trash doesn’t apply to me, I don’t get into ‘moods’, blah blah blah.”

of course, it is not going to get them anywhere, but at least it will keep their belief systems temporarily intact.

in the meantime, i am trying to focus on what is good about the people in my life, and bringing more of that energy in my direction every single day.