Whenever a personal development guru talks about passion, enthusiasm, or even happiness, there is usually a clear directive that if you aren’t feeling these emotions, you can build them consciously with effort and practice–just like you can build a muscle. By training one’s emotions in this way, you can have more of the desired emotional experience.

Along with this, there is also usually the understanding that bigger is better–that more passion, more enthusiasm, more confidence, and more happiness is always, in every context, better than the alternative.

I call this idea “emotional bodybuilding.” Like physical bodybuilding, the conscious inflation of one’s emotions without limit or regard for other factors tends to lead to strong negative side-effects, leading us farther and farther away from the freedom and connection we are seeking by doing so.

The History of Bodybuilding and the Inflation of Self

Physical bodybuilding emerged out of the 1900’s physical culture movement, and rapidly became about maximizing muscle size at any cost. Physical Culture was the name for the modern exercise movement. Physical culture was the first real modern exercise that wasn’t explicitly for sporting purposes, emerging out of industrial society where for the first time, people did not have to use their bodies much for either finding or growing food.

Exercises like pushups, pullups, isometrics, and various calisthenics were sold in mail-order courses before the postal service made shipping of exercise equipment feasible, and before the modern gym was created. Most courses were aimed at young men, had chapters on sunlight, morality, and modest but holistic living, and advocated for a variety of movements as well as running and playing several sports. (For fascinating examples of such mail-order courses, check out the great website Sandow & the Golden Age of Iron Men.) Strongmen of the 1900’s competed in carnivals and at fairs, showing off their hand-balancing skills and amazing full-body strength feats, bending railroad spikes and tearing phone books in half with their bare hands.

Most early 20th century strongmen would be considered puny by today’s NFL standards, and tiny, soft dwarfs by modern bodybuilding standards. Here is a comparison–Charles Atlas in the 1920’s on the left (the ideal physique of the strongman of the age) vs. Ronnie Coleman of the late 20th century on the right. But very few bodybuilders or NFL linemen could actually pull off the feats of strength of the strongmen either, which often included a combination of strength, agility, and endurance, as well as a little stage magic, utilizing trickery and good leverage.

Later, lightweight exercise equipment was developed: chest expanders built of steel and other strange devices. Towards the late 20th century, weights became wide-spread enough to create a subculture of bodybuilders and weightlifters, popularized in movies like Pumping Iron with Arnold Schwarzenegger. In the 1970’s when Pumping Iron came out, jogging and aerobics were the most popular forms of exercise, and the ideal man was a thin, tight-pants wearing rocker. In the movie, there is a scene where all these enormous bodybuilders are eating breakfast at a restaurant, ordering whole steaks and a dozen eggs each, and the people around them have these shocked and confused looks on their faces. Bodybuilders were clearly seen as freaks of nature at the time. Nowadays, while few men aspire to be as enormous as Ronnie Coleman, every men’s magazine has on the cover a man with larger, more defined muscles than Charles Atlas, with clearly defined and hairless washboard abdominals–a physique greatly influenced by bodybuilding workout methods and bodybuilding’s influence on culture.

Bodybuilding, originating from the wholistic physical cultural movement, has come to specialize in muscular size, maximizing just one variable in an ecology of health and fitness. The reason why every athlete doesn’t look like Ronnie Coleman is because enormous muscular size is actually quite useless for most human activities. Bodybuilding is the equivalent of driving a monster truck to the grocery store–it’s far too much power and size for the task, and obviously there to maximize attention through maximizing size.

The reason I went into so much detail about the history of bodybuilding is because of the prevalence of the emotional bodybuilding metaphor in personal development. Bodybuilding should rightly be viewed as a cancerous growth that once represented health but has degraded so far into drug use, narcissism, and excess that now is it commonplace for bodybuilders to have heart failure on stage due to the extreme dieting pre-competition. Metaphors of building muscular size without due respect to other factors of wholistic health and fitness will fall prey to similar errors of imbalance.

Specifically, maximizing muscular size is a direct example of inflating the self. We tend to identify with our bodies, so the larger and stronger our bodies, the larger and stronger are our selves. By cultivating this ego (self) inflation, we hope to gain some kind of liberation, some existential freedom…but this quest actually sends us in the opposite direction, alienating us even more from others by increasing our difference, our freakiness, our separation.

A Movement Towards Wholeness

Many modern fitness experts on the cutting edge like Scott Sonnon, Pavel “Kettlebell” Tsatsouline, John Peterson, Matt Furey, and others are bringing back (or coming up with new) wholistic understandings of health, putting muscle back into it’s place within the system of balanced human functioning. Often this is done by reconnecting with the roots of the Physical Culture movement.

Similarly, a reconnection with wholeness is needed in personal development. Emotional bodybuilding–whether done through repetitive affirmations, intense visualization (the main technique in Think and Grow Rich and The Secret), “power moves” (violent, personalized body movements from Tony Robbins to shock your physiology into a fight/flight response Robbins calls “passion”), or simply “pumping yourself up”–is a way of cultivating ego inflation.

Cultivating ego inflation is another way of saying:

• training yourself to be more self-centered
• consciously working on increasing your egocentric orientation
• purposely choosing to be more selfish (not in the Ayn Rand sense, but in the common usage)
• alienating one’s self from others on purpose

Most people engaged in cultivating ego inflation do not understand that this is what they are doing. Almost everyone values being selfless, kind, and generous to some extent–especially people interested in personal development–but the very emotional bodybuilding methods of personal development work counter to these values. For example, many people claim to be both into Tony Robbins and Eckhart Tolle, which is completely contradictory when you understand that Robbins provides effective methods for inflating the ego and Tolle for dissolving it!

Cultivating ego inflation should be contrasted with developing a healthy and accurate self-concept. This is like putting muscular size back into it’s place within the ecosystem of health and fitness. Contrary to what some spiritual teachers say, I think ego (or the sense of self) is not necessarily a problem when it is at it’s proper size and functioning appropriately. Spiritual realization ideally leads to this kind of mature self-concept, as when the sense of self is seen to not have absolute permanence, one can lighten up and just be one’s ordinary, flawed self. (The best book I’ve ever seen by far on practical self-concept change is Steve Andreas’ Transforming Your Self. Some NLP background is helpful, but some beginners find it accessible.)

By contrast, most affirmations and visualizations are specifically instructed to be created such that they are false and contradict present reality! For example, if you are not feeling confident, instead of asking whether you could use more skills in some area, you are instructed to affirm again and again, “I am totally confident!” This could range from saying it in a confident tone of voice, to literally screaming this phrase again and again, depending on the level of emotional bodybuilding the personal development guru advocates.

Much better would be to affirm, “I can learn what I need to learn to be competent” or something similar, which creates the opportunity to do something, rather than just be or feel something contrary to the facts, thus amplifying inner conflict.

Emotional bodybuilding, or cultivating ego inflation, leads to similar kinds of excess and imbalance as physical bodybuilding. When we pump ourselves up, we can find a kind of false power in overpowering others. We find that we can sell anything to anyone…until they come down from their contact high. It also becomes taxing to maintain this inflation–just as more and more protein and steroids and HGH are needed to keep those enormously inflated muscles from catabolizing, we find we need more and more achievement, fame, power, coffee, and even adrenaline to keep our enormous personas inflated to the maximum.

It is a tremendous gift when inflation fails us–when we develop chronic fatigue, when our business fails, when our partner divorces us–and our bubble is popped. Like a balloon let loose, we fizzle and spurt until landing unceremoniously on the ground, humbled, ordinary again. From this place of humility, we can find wholeness again in ordinary strength, authentic emotions, and even find the right times and places for acts of conscious willpower. Life becomes much easier when we stop expending so much time, effort, and energy on inflating our bodies and emotions. We find that we can relate to all beings’ pain as well as joy. We realize health, happiness, joy and peace are our true nature, and that there is nothing we need to do or achieve in order to experience these states in an ongoing way. Ordinary moments become magical (not just the intense breakthroughs), as we mindfully enjoy each breath, each sight, each sound. Letting go of the desire for anything to be other than it is, we find that we have a natural desire to act out of compassion, and this action can flow more effortlessly than we thought possible….

Coaches, therapists, and healers are activists for better living. We are the ones who will change the system based on a level of consciousness that is harming us all to a system that can truly represent the abundance of the universe.

But many of us are blind to collective problems because of our focus on individual responsibility. We also tend to buy into a naive view of business and marketing as unquestionably good when wrestling with the ethics of getting clients, and tend to present ourselves as 100% optimistic in order to keep up a facade of what a coach “should” be (with some notable exceptions).

The Problem of Meaninglessness

Our friendships are fairly meaningless in our society. We don’t really need any particular person for anything, so we generally become friends by sharing entertainment, by consuming together. Rarely do we create anything together–a meal, a song, a game–because someone else more talented and creative and specialized has already created something far better for our consumption. Rarely do we engage in meaningful conversation, except perhaps to comment on the news–the work of a specialist. It’s more efficient to consume someone else’s creation than to create our own. And increasingly, rarely do we break down in front of someone or lean on someone else for emotional needs–unless the person is a paid specialist.

Indeed, to deal with the sense of meaninglessness in our lives, many of us hire a Life Coach. Life Coaches are meaning-making specialists. We know how to reframe problems as opportunities, how to figure out your life purpose in 20 minutes, how to create a values hierarchy and set SMART goals–all of which leads to a more meaningful individual life.

Some of us even become Life Coaches to deal with a feeling of meaninglessness, finding that having meaningful conversations with others about purpose and passion fills a hole in our soul and is deeply nourishing. Or at least, this was a primary motivation for me.

The Outsourcing of Meaningful Conversation

Every time we purchase a created product, GDP goes up. Every time we make a song or paint a picture that is not for sale but just “art for art’s sake,” nothing whatsoever is added to GDP. GDP or Gross Domestic Product, is a measure of all the “goods” and “services” exchanged–or at least that’s what it is supposed to be. If something is given freely or created for it’s own sake, it doesn’t “count” and can’t be accounted for. Therefore, freely given things are not only bad for the economy–which must forever grow exponentially in order for interest-bearing currency to function–but also freely given things do not fit into the definitions of what is “good” or a “service”!

Similarly, every time we get “coached” by a friend or family member or even by our minister, GDP does not go up. This represents an untapped market for the economy, an area in which things could be made more efficient if performed by a specialist. This outsourcing of meaningful conversation robs our friendships, intimate relationships, and religious institutions of what little depth was left. We seek out coaches because of our sense of meaninglessness, but one very unfortunate side-effect is that our ordinary relationships become even more irrelevant as we no longer share as much of our direct human messiness with our friends and family.

Imagine this scenario: If I have a major life crisis on my hands, do I seek out my wife, my best friend, or my Life Coach to talk to first? My coach is the obvious choice, as he is well-trained and will listen to me without interrupting, providing just the right balance of reflection and challenge. Sure, I’ll share the details afterwords with my friends and family, but it’s just too messy to have a breakdown in front of them, and plus I don’t really trust them with this stuff, so I’ll do my process first and then share the sanitized version. That will be better for my personal brand too, as I will present an image of having it all together.

Of course, nobody would ever admit to that kind of reasoning. But just wait a few years. The economic pressure is enormous to outsource that which is inefficient–whether meaningful conversation or childcare–to a paid specialist.

Alienation causes the need for a Life Coach, which then adds to the alienation because we aren’t sharing our deepest challenges in a human and messy way with those people whom we are wanting to be closest.

Let’s dive a bit deeper…

Finding Meaning through Coaching

Coaching and therapy has largely arisen in response to the meaninglessness that people feel in our culture. People go to a coach because they have lost a sense of mission and purpose, a purpose that used to be a given before the modern age. It used to be that you were born into a profession, that a man knew how a man was supposed to behave, and that your place in the universe was clear. But those roles were confining, stultifying, and kept our hearts from truly singing. Life Coaches and therapists help clients to further break down any identification with socially-given roles so that they can individuate and follow their own bliss.

This bliss-following is wonderfully romantic, however when done independently of all others (it is after all my bliss not our bliss), the hero’s journey contributes even more to the feelings of emptiness, alienation, separateness, etc. of the modern condition. Only by sharing common values, goals, dreams, hopes, fears, and challenges do these feelings of alienation get alleviated.

Since the coaching context is individual-focused and not community or family focused, the sense of separation naturally increases as a result. One thing family therapists warn about is working with one partner in an intimate relationship and not the other can inadvertently break up a perfectly fine relationship due to the fact that one person now has more resources and sees the other as totally neurotic. Coaches rarely understand or acknowledge this view, as the paradigm of Life Coaching is highly individualistic. In fact, some personal development authors (I’m thinking of Steve Pavlina here) go as far as to state that if family and friends don’t align with your goals anymore, dump ‘em.

Dumping intimate relationships is a great recipe for feeling alone in a meaningless universe. Someone who feels alone in a meaningless universe is a great potential coaching client! Are you starting to see the vicious cycle here, or is it just me?

The Liquidation of Social and Spiritual Capital

When we used to have a problem in our lives, we would share it with friends, family, or our faith community (e.g. our minister). But now that God is dead (thank Nietzsche for pointing out that we killed him), few of us participate in church communities or find them of much relevance. Many of us find that we no longer live in the same town as our families and old friends, so we don’t feel the same kind of closeness (and some conversations just don’t feel right having over the phone). While these trends do not equally affect everyone, they are fairly pervasive, and everywhere increasing due to enormous economic pressures. Remember: if something is freely available, it does not contribute to GDP. Therefore, to increase economic growth, find something available for free, take it away from people, and charge them for it.

Unfortunately, Life Coaching and therapy of all kinds increases this trend. By turning healing into a specialized profession that one must have a degree or certification in, therapeutic conversation is being outsourced from our conversations with friends and family and confined to the narrow domain of coaching calls and therapy offices.

It used to be that everyone was a healer to some extent. In the Kalahari, the illiterate Bushmen gather to dance, sing, shake, and quake whenever they feel like it. Some Bushmen are more powerful in n/om than others, but everyone is understood to be swimming in n/om–the healing spirit of the universe–and everyone knows how to access this for self-healing.

It’s very important to note that no Life Coach wants to make our culture more alienating or take away any individual’s healing power! This is not certainly not the intention of any Life Coach I know–quite the opposite. Most coaches are engaged in coaching conversations with friends and family and even strangers for free and out of the generosity and enthusiasm of their hearts. Most coaches would work for free if they could because coaching itself is intrinsically rewarding, like creating art. It is not a personal issue–it is part of a much larger cultural and economic trend.

All coaches and therapists are attempting to help people to find more meaning and more creativity in their lives, thus working against alienation. But by creating a specialized profession (which our economy demands in order to survive), we are simultaneously fueling alienation by removing therapeutic conversation from our everyday relationships, sucking whatever emotion and depth is left from our friendships and families right out of them.

Why cry with your wife when she might get defensive? Your therapist will be unconditionally supportive and give helpful advice. And once you’ve cried with your therapist or got the support you need from your (relatively anonymous) coach, you won’t need to cry anyway. It’s less messy this way.

Furthermore, by pursuing our own individualistic goals, we contribute to the very problem that has created the sense of meaninglessness in the first place, which is a feeling of separation or disconnection. Our common values have disintegrated, and the anxiety of separation, instability, and meaninglessness is a natural response to this wound. No amount of personal goal achievement will ever make up for a lack of collective coherence.

By saving our intimate relationships from the messiness of life by outsourcing our problems to the coaching relationship, we further sanitize our interactions with our families, friends, lovers, partners, and co-workers. By becoming more integrated, more creative people, we become people who never struggle openly, who never publicly break down and cry, and who never need the support of friends and family because we’ve got it covered on Tuesdays at 1pm. Our personal brands are spotless charactatures, projections of our idealized selves.

Again, this is much more efficient than the old way. As any trained coach will be quick to tell you (including me), your friends are not trained listeners, nor are they 100% focused on you when you are talking, nor do they know a host of powerful techniques to help you make the changes you want. Therefore the healing benefits of a coaching or therapy session are much greater than simply a conversation with your friend, who’s continually interjecting his own experience and bad advice.

So What Can We Do About This? The Million Dollar Question

Honestly, I think that the convergence of crises we are facing which includes the alienation and meaninglessness of modernity are in need of a miracle. I believe that in our lifetimes–specifically in the next 4 to 35 years–either total collapse or radical evolution will occur, and that the best we can do is to surrender through despair to find a deeper hope for a world waiting to be born. I don’t know exactly what role each of us will play in this grand drama that is unfolding, but I do believe that if you listen deeply enough, your heart knows and can lead you there.

Here is an initial brainstorm on the subject to spark your imagination:

Create art with others. Play like you mean it. Participate in the creation of actual communities, not pay-by-the-month clubs controlled by you. Set a reasonable income goal and give pro bono sessions weekly. Structure your coaching or therapy to be more about facilitating self-help, so that the client goes home and does stuff, especially stuff that involves the sharing of vulnerability with intimate partners and friends. Inquire deeply into your motivations for personal development. Year-long coaching contracts are disempowering. Learn NLP and help people fast so that they get back to relating for free with people they will build authentic relationships with instead of renting-a-friend. Give up the addiction to achievement. Participate in activist movements. Instead of opening every conversation with your elevator pitch, open some with political news or literature that inspires you or something else non-commercial and could be a source of collective values. Learn about alternative currencies and accept payment for coaching sessions with them. Stop defending big business and corporate marketing and learn to differentiate small, locally owned business marketing from the 99% of marketing that is ruining our planet. Pray. Feel your own despair and transform it with surrender and compassion. Hope the apocalypse is kind to us….

Feel free to add your ideas for solutions in the comments.

Thanks,
~Duff

Think and Grow Rich was published by Napoleon Hill in 1937. The publisher’s preface of my Ballantine Books edition starts off by calling this book “one of the most influential books of all time in pointing the way to personal achievement–to financial independence and to riches of the spirit beyond measurement in money.”

Many personal development authors explicitly mention Think and Grow Rich as a profound inspiration for their work, including Tony Robbins. In fact, when you step back from the field of personal development (especially after immersing one’s self in the field for years), the vast number of books, tapes, gurus, and websites all start to look similar, based on principles from Think and Grow Rich and other early works in the field of personal development.

I myself have already read Think and Grow Rich three times, and each time found it incredibly valuable. But that was when I was fully immersed in the personal development reality tunnel. Things have changed, to say the least….

After 7 or 8 years immersing myself in personal development literature (especially the Tony Robbins school), and even becoming a Life Coach, I burnt out on the overachievement and began looking for a better way. I’m still in the process of discovering this way, but I’m starting to get a sense of it.

I now have a sense of the fundamental assumptions and limitations of the field of personal development. Every field has it’s fundamental premises that go unquestioned, like “every individual seeks his own rational self-interest” for classical economics. It’s time however for me to use my training as a philosopher to make these assumptions and limitations explicit for all the world to examine critically.

New authors in the field of personal development keep rehashing the same old stuff. The personal development blogosphere is full of trite sayings, the same 1000 or so famous quotations, and restatements of premises developed in the 1930’s. There are a few of us on the edge, however, challenging the status quo and looking for a radically new paradigm. Among us rebels and freethinkers we are beginning to feel that it’s time for personal development to develop itself. I hope you’ll join me in my part of the emerging paradigm.

Over the coming days and weeks, I will be re-reading Think and Grow Rich cover to cover, and doing a critical analysis chapter by chapter here at PrecisionChange.com. I will then conclude with a summary of my critique, with directions for further investigation, and suggestions as to new premises for recreating the field of personal development (or creating an entirely new field from its ashes). If this experiment proves useful, I may go on to do the same for other foundational books in the field.

This kind of investigation is not for the feint at heart. It will probably not “win friends and influence people.” But I’ve always felt a burning desire to ask the kinds of questions that others fear to ask. If you too share my curiosity, if you’ve ever felt that something is amiss with personal development, then I invite you to join me in this inquiry. Heck–pick up a copy of Think and Grow Rich for yourself and dialogue with me in the comments here if you’d like. I could use the dialectic, even if we ultimately agree to disagree.

With that, here are my thoughts on The Preface and A Word from the Author.

Deconstructing the Publisher’s Preface

the philosophies and formulas which lead to success are made available to all who greatly desire to make money and to attain the rich spiritual satisfactions that achievement brings.

Perhaps the publisher is not a Christian and has therefore not heard 1 Timothy 6:10 which states, “For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.”

But I’m a philosopher and a magician, and so I examine ideas based on their logic and my direct experience–not solely because the book is said to be holy by a particular group. Notice however that “spiritual satisfactions” and worldly achievement are equated. This is contrary to nearly all classic spiritual texts, which tend to pit the spiritual life against the worldly.

Think and Grow Rich, and indeed all personal development literature, posits that one can “have it all”–enlightenment, personal wealth, health, happiness, great sex, and a fulfilling career. Is this true? Can one have it all? Or are there fundamental compromises one must make? Is the love of money the root of all, most, or even some evil? Does power corrupt? Or is power a “neutral” force that one has choice as to whether to use for good or ill?

If having-it-all (pursuing both worldly achievement and spiritual enlightenment) is possible without leading to corruption/evil/sorrow, then the good life is radically different than what the religious and philosophical traditions have stated. The good life is not necessarily then a life of virtue (Aristotle/modern happiness research), nor a life of renunciation or selfless service (Christianity), nor a life of taming and investigating the mind to reach states and stages of liberation (Buddhism/Yoga), nor a life dedicated to some divine force or godhead, but a life of personal worldly achievement and personal financial wealth.

If having-it-all is not possible without leading to corruption/evil/sorrow, then this having-it-all position is radically incorrect, a complete reversal of the teachings of all spiritual and religious traditions. If this is the case, then we should denounce this view as a corruption of the teachings of all the great religious and historical figures throughout history (including those individuals often quoted by contemporary personal development authors and speakers!).

In either case, it is of critical importance that we sort this matter out!

And of course, perhaps there is a middle view, that some amount of money and worldly achievement is a part of the good life, or some relationship to the world is the “right” relationship. Everyone must relate to the world, but what is the right relationship?

The riches within your grasp cannot always be measured in money. There are great riches in lasting friendships, harmonious family relationships, sympathy and understanding between business associates, and inner harmony which brings peace of mind measurable only in spiritual values.”

Again we have the premonitions of the having-it-all philosophy of personal development. The ultimate aim of life in this view is to not only have wealth, but to also have the intangible “riches” in relationships and inner peace. Every personal development book I’ve read since has echoed this having-it-all philosophy–not one has questioned it, advocated for moderate personal wealth or voluntary poverty, spoke strongly of compromise, or hinted at potentially corrupting effects of personal power.

Again, just to contrast views (not to choose one yet), a standard idea from religious traditions and cultural critics is that the only things of real value and importance are the relationships and inner peace, that money is merely a means to an end. To take this “money is means only” position seriously is to live in an entirely different way than to live by the “having-it-all” view.

Whenever I bring up this contrast in views, I often get a response like “well of course money is just a means to an end, but since many people want it, why not help people get what they want and then guide them towards what’s really valuable (aka the relationships and inner peace)?” Pragmatics are a different conversation than what is true, and also important to discuss. But first it is important to examine what is of ultimate value. If money or power or worldly achievement is the ultimate end of our philosophy of the good life, that is radically different than proposing that only satisfying relationships and inner peace are the ultimate ends of a good life, which then leaves open the question as to whether money and power and worldly achievement are good means to those ends.

In Think and Grow Rich–the foundational text for most personal development literature–the message is clear: you can have it all, and it’s a good thing to have it all. The ultimate aim of life is seen as having both personal wealth (which is implied as having more than most others) and satisfying relationships and inner peace. The philosophy of Think and Grow Rich is clearly not claiming that money and worldly achievement are mere means to getting satisfying relationships and inner peace. In the view of Think and Grow Rich, and indeed all of the personal development literature, money, power, and worldly success are seen as ends-in-themselves.

This position is clearly opposed to all philosophical positions that attempt to maximize or optimize collective happiness. Any philosophy that advocates for personal wealth as an end-in-itself implies that the aim of life is to have more money than most other people. Since it is theoretically impossible for everyone to have more money than most other people (i.e. only a small minority can be wealthy if wealth is defined as individual and comparative), then this philosophy of life must necessarily fail for most who adopt it in a given culture. In a competitive game, there are winners and losers. If the aim of the game is to win, many people will lose.

Personally, I’ve always been interested in having a philosophy of life that can include all other people’s happiness as important. Therefore, any philosophy that necessarily pits people against each other in a competitive game in order to reach the ultimate goal fails my criteria for a philosophy that everyone can adopt and at least theoretically reach the ultimate aim. Competitive games may be fun in other contexts, but when we are discussing ultimate aims, they necessarily exclude at least half if not more than half of people from achieving the aim of life.

Deconstructing A Word From the Author

In every chapter of this book, mention has been made of the money-making secret which has made fortunes for hundreds of exceedingly wealthy men whom I have carefully analyzed over a long period of years.

Did someone say The Secret? Yes, it is the same secret–what you focus on expands, or rather, when you focus your entire being on getting something, you are much more likely to get it.

Hill mentions that Andrew Carnegie gave him this secret, and even calls it a magic formula. This is significant for reasons we will get into later. To give you a preview, I contend that the techniques in Think and Grow Rich are indeed techniques of Magic, have Magical results, and actually come directly from the Western esoteric tradition of Magic, albeit misunderstood in their application to personal achievement instead of consciousness transformation. I also contend that the entire field of personal development can be seen as a branch of the Western esoteric tradition of Magic. Indeed, at least one esoteric writer in 1928 called some of the foundations of personal development “black magic”:

Though the demonism of the Middle Ages seems to have disappeared, there is abundant evidence that in many forms of modern thought–especially the so-called “prosperity” psychology, “will-power-building” metaphysics, and systems of “high-pressure” salesmanship–black magic has merely passed through a metamorphosis, and although its name be changed its nature remains the same.
~ Manly P. Hall, The Secret Teachings of All Ages

The “word from the author” is filled with what would now be called “testimonials” for the secret magic formula for riches that the author will reveal throughout the book. This tradition continues in the first few pages of a personal development book (or on the back of a dust jacket for hardcover) and in long-form sales letters online.

Hill then goes on to say that this secret “cannot be given away, it cannot be purchased for money” and “serves equally well all who are ready for it.” I cannot help but think of the parallels of those monks and yogis who speak of enlightenment. Indeed, Hill is proposing enlightenment through material, worldly success, something I have written about before in discussing personal development as religion.

its [this book's] purpose [is] to convey a great universal truth through which all who are ready may learn what to do and how to do it!

Again, reference to “a great universal truth” makes me want to categorize this book as a work of religion, the religion of personal development. And not only that, but a book of yoga or magic–practical techniques for realizing the ultimate truths in one’s life (indeed, the main technique is a meditation, as we will see later). In this case once again, the ultimate aims to be realized are personal wealth, fame, happiness, harmonious relationships, health, and inner peace–having it all.

Next time, I’ll deconstruct chapter one. I’d love to hear your reactions and thoughts in the comments below.

~Duff

My advice to you is not to undertake the spiritual path. It is too difficult, too long, and it is too demanding. What I would suggest, if you haven’t already begun, is to go to the door, ask for your money back, and go home now. This is not a picnic. It is really going to ask everything of you and you should understand that from the beginning. So it is best not to begin. However, if you do begin, it is best to finish.
— Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

My advice to you is to only undertake the spiritual path—the path of transformation, the path of questioning everything and creating a better world—if you absolutely must, if life would be utterly meaningless if you didn’t. If your ignorance is bliss, by all means stay ignorant. What you don’t know may still kill you, and you will still suffer in your ignorance. But unless you absolutely must awaken, then you probably won’t survive the horrors and dangers of the awakened life. Seriously.

Following Your Bliss Can Kill You

Ask anyone who has been following their bliss for years if it’s been smooth sailing the whole time. If they are on the path and they are honest, they will have to admit that a great deal of it has been hell. To the extent that they deeply question the nature of reality and society, there will probably be greater hell and more difficulty with smooth integration of their insights into their daily lives, friendships, community, and career.

All who follow their bliss, who attempt to do something great, fail miserably at times. Many feel like they are going crazy, and some actually do have some “crazy” experiences. Some persist and eventually succeed, and these folks are written about in history books or start major world religions (if they are famous men). Most either fail utterly and die, or succeed and are completely unknown and unappreciated, often even to their families. If you must pursue the path, then this will not matter as much (although it will still hurt like hell), because you could not imagine living any other way. You still might die trying, but keep in mind that this is a real possibility, that many have indeed died trying, that very few have succeeded in transforming themselves or the world in any significant way.

Spirituality Has Nasty Side Effects

How is meditation marketed to potential customers? What are the “benefits” in the sales letters and glossy brochures for books and retreat centers? Usually peace, bliss, a calm mind, and/or ultimate relief from suffering are listed. Never once have I seen a list of common side effects.

As a rule, when marketing something, it’s best to speak of what’s good about the product and gloss over any bad sides as long as you aren’t obligated by law to talk about them (if you are, put them in really small type and obtuse language as to dissuade anyone from actually reading it).

If one were honest, the brochures and books would have to list acute psychosis, debilitating depression, disorienting body sensations, terrifying nightmares and other sleep disturbances, and extreme physical pain as potential, relatively common side-effects of intensive meditative practice. (See this article on Spiritual Emergencies for more on this. All of these categories of spiritual emergency have been experienced by me or someone I know. If you read these categories of psychospiritual crisis and think “Cool!”, then you are probably already on the path.)

Again, if you don’t have to meditate 10-15 hours a day for weeks on end in silence in order to feel like life is worth living, if you don’t have to experience unity with God every day in order to feel normal, it’s probably not worth the risk. If you don’t absolutely have to know the truth of your own existence and of ultimate reality, then don’t go looking for it. You probably won’t like much of what you find along the way. It certainly won’t live up to the “love and light” hype.

If You’re on the Path, Have Faith and Keep Going

On the other hand, if you are already on the path, the wound has already been opened. Once you take the red pill that opens your eyes to the truth, there is no turning back.

Morpheus is more honest than most teachers of psychospiritual development. He says, “Remember—all I’m offering is the truth, nothing more.”

If you’ve taken the red pill (which nobody can do for you), just do your best to stay on your hero’s journey, whatever that may be. Seek out the company of other Peaceful Warriors, alchemists, magicians, and monks, but stay true to your own heart.

If you do choose the path of transformation—or even if you are thrown upon it kicking and screaming—best of luck to you. Keep the faith, and know that in your times of deepest pain and suffering that you are not alone, that others have suffered before you, are suffering now, and will suffer in the future, and that many have survived and gone beyond the suffering. The path is always a noble one.

I figure the best way for us all to get through these tough times is to help each other, so I’m kicking it off by offering my help to you or someone you know.

For more info, read the updated coaching page here (it’s much funnier than it used to be): http://precisionchange.com/coaching

Sorry for the interruption. We’ll resume with out-from-left-field philosophical cultural critique of personal development again shortly.

I think of a religion as a set of answers to the great philosophical questions of life. “What is the meaning of life?” “Who am I?” “Where did the universe come from?” etc. Personal development provides clear answers to these questions. It also posits a superhuman controlling power: YOU.

A scientific religion…

Science initially explained away the need for gods of the rain and plants, etc. and then later explained away even the need for a clockmaker god. The power of science produced tremendous technology–from dramatically increased lifespan to travel to the moon. Science definitively answers the question “where did the universe come from?” with The Big Bang. All is matter. The universe is a bunch of stuff randomly bumping into other stuff that somehow combines into genes. These genes compete to spread themselves and evolve through random mutation to create humans. There is no purpose to it. There is no meaning in matter. Or as Nietzsche put it, “God is dead”–and we killed him with science.

Enter existentialism.

From Wikipedia: “In existentialism, the individual’s starting point is characterized by what has been called “the existential attitude,” or a sense of disorientation and confusion in the face of an apparently meaningless or absurd world.”

Most personal development books start out with a chapter on the rags to riches fairy tale of the author. A man is in the depths of despair, his life meaningless, spent mostly trying to avoid the anxiety of boredom. (I say “man” because most personal dev authors are men. Perhaps women more naturally intuit that our purpose lies in relating?)

The key moment in the turning point of the once down-and-out, overweight and depressed man is when he realizes his personal power to create his own life and reality. He realizes this as the meaning of life. This is the religious conversion event in the life of the personal development prophet, the moment when the man dies and the uberman, the god-man, is born. He now knows the answer to the big three questions of life:

Where did the universe come from?
The Universe came from an exploding ball of matter and light. It is without absolute meaning.

What is the meaning of life?
Life is ultimately meaningless. You must create your own meaning through constant and never-ending improvement in the pursuit of your goals, aligned with your personally chosen mission.

Who am I?
I am a god of my own reality with unlimited power to shape my personal destiny how I choose.

Reborn a god.

The angst of responsibility for creating meaning transforms into the exhilaration of freedom as the prophet of personality finds ultimate meaning in the pursuit of his personal goals. Developing personal power, he becomes as a god–infinitely capable of creating anything he wants. His supernatural charisma wins over others to his mighty cause as he converts the weary and aimless with the “good news” of personal achievement.

The prophet begins to run into limits to his “Unlimited Power” as doubts creep in both internally and from others that perhaps he is not a god, after all. His techniques lead to some results, but often not as great as promised. Even when a devotee experiences personal achievement, the meaninglessness remains. Since the alternative is a meaningless world of matter and selfish genes, or denying science in a fundamentalist regression, the prophet redoubles his efforts in sustaining the illusion of infinite ability to create and control his world in order to maintain a sense of meaningfulness.

Addicted to achievement.

The prophet encourages those who feel despair on the path to push themselves harder to achieve more. The Kingdom of your Own Personal Heaven is Near! The devotee–following his guru’s instructions for personal liberation from suffering and entry into his personally constructed Heaven–adamantly pursues his own personal goals in service of his own personal purpose statement. He cultivates desire for his goals, praying daily to become his own god-man, to awaken his giant within. He believes in and worships his Personal Power–for what other power could there be in this world of mere matter?

The devotee pursues superhuman powers in order to stave off the lurking anxiety–the alienation from nature, from others, and from disowned parts of himself. The more meaninglessness he feels in his goals of worldly achievement and isolated success, the more he throws himself into their pursuit. For the alternative is despair, the despair he experiences whenever the boost of “motivation” deflates from the last tape, book, or seminar; the despair he experiences immediately after achieving a goal, which he quickly escapes by setting a new one, maintaining his illusion of personal godhood in his Sisyphus-like pursuit of the impossible.

Out of control.

The Giant Within he seeks is his own personal godhood. It is the uberman, the superhuman YOU that is promised as the ultimate liberation from this world through the infinite power to create it as you wish. God is dead, but the idea of the ultimate has simply been turned into the ultimate inflation of ego. It is a religion born of science, of our tremendous ability to control the wild of nature.

But just as we are experiencing global environmental crises that we cannot control, we find that we cannot control our inner nature without severe side effects as well. The more control we exact over the biological environment, the more we contribute to the problems that could destroy civilization. Similarly, the more control we exact over our own lives, the farther we travel from the true happiness of just being.

A call to evolution.

It’s time we smashed the false idols of the religion of personal development. We are not gods, we are humans. We do not have–nor we will ever have–unlimited power nor unlimited potential. We suffer, we die, we are not in control.

But let us not stop with the false idols of personal development–let us smash the false idols of “objective” science as well. Science did not stop with Newton. Modern physics admits irreducible uncertainty as fundamental to our understanding of the universe. No theory of mathematics can include itself, which implies that the Universe can not be absolutely ac-counted for in numbers, and therefore neither in science. The observer affects the observed, therefore objectivity is a myth. Particles are entangled across “time” and “space.” We are completely and totally interconnected and not separate from the Universe as passive observers at all. Separation was a myth all along–just as the ancient religions all said.

Perhaps there is meaning in the universe, after all. Perhaps it does not depend on there being a spooky otherworldly absent father to make it meaningful, nor does it require denying the scientific method and it’s conclusions, nor does it require being personally powerful.

Perhaps the existence of the universe is itself magic. Perhaps the fact that you are reading these squiggly lines and experiencing something is mysterious. Perhaps evolution itself is sacred.

Perhaps that which is infinitely powerful and important was right in front of your eyes the whole time.

Advertising and marketing are very powerful cultural influences. New understandings of human psychology are continually being applied by salesmen, copywriters, and marketers everywhere. Unfortunately, this is true of my favorite field, NLP and Hypnosis, which originally studied great therapists in order to help people be happy and sane. Usually this application of psychology to marketing is seen as good or neutral: “people need to buy stuff to meet their needs, we’re just making it easy for them to know what will serve their needs.”

Yet we all feel like advertisers are lying to us. The slogans, promises, and taglines of large corporate entities lack any meaning or authenticity whatsoever. We are used to products not working as advertised, or even not looking like what’s on the box.

The products we buy from such advertisements don’t really seem to serve our needs. The GDP goes up every time a parent gets too busy to care for their children and has to hire a nanny. Does the nanny serve our need? Kinda, but we’d really rather be with our kids and not have to work so much. We clearcut forests to make subdivisions. Does this serve our need for housing? Sorta, but now we feel even more alienated from nature and have to pay for what was free by going to “exotic” locations where life still freely roams.

My own field of therapy and coaching is in many ways an outsourcing of friendship, family, community, and religion. We are too busy working so that we can make enough money to buy stuff from marketers. So we liquidate our social capital, hire back our friendships, and call this progress.

Self-Motivation: Should We Cultivate Desire?

Just as marketing amplifies our desires for products that don’t exactly meet our deepest needs, self-motivation usually amplifies our desire for goals that don’t exactly meet our deepest needs.

Many self-development bloggers and authors recapitulate Napoleon Hill’s maxim that intense desires lead to intense results. They they advocate for the cultivation of intensity of desire in conjunction with a positive vision of the future. But is this a good idea?

Desire is a signal that a need is being unfulfilled. Desire tends to naturally intensify if you have been ignoring the signal or incorrectly meeting the need.

When you are somewhat hungry, you simply eat and the desire is satisfied. If you feel deathly hungry because you forgot to eat both breakfast and lunch and it’s now 8pm, that’s because you’ve been ignoring your body’s need for nourishment.

Should you cultivate an intense, burning desire for food? Should you visualize a large juicy steak and repeat “I now draw to me HUGE quantities of delicious food in massive abundance!” I don’t know anyone doing this, yet many people are doing something parallel with regards to their financial goals, their career goals, their fitness goals, or (for young men in particular) their dating goals. Why are we attempting to over-meet our needs through such “motivation”?

When Enough is Enough

Marketers are known for manufacturing “needs” that don’t really meet our needs. Does anyone need high-fructose corn syrup fizzy water? Soft drinks are an enormously popular manufactured “need.” But manufactured needs don’t meet our true needs. In this case, drinking soda does not meet the body’s needs for nourishment or hydration, so the need remains unfulfilled and the hunger and thirst gets stronger, so we drink more, etc.

Marketers also associate things like sex, power, fame, and happiness to products that do not in any way meet our needs for sexual expression, self-efficacy, acknowledgment, or meaningfulness. We get confused by the clever advertisements and associate beer to sexiness at an unconscious level, even though drinking alcohol is a direct cause of such unsexy things as developing a beer gut, vomiting, fatal car accidents, sleeping with strangers, addiction, and abuse.

By linking soft drinks to fun and beer to sexiness, we attempt to meet our needs by consuming something that will never do so. This drives us to try harder. We drink even more soda and beer, to have even more fun, sexy times. It doesn’t work, so we try harder. Pretty soon we have diabetes and a failing liver, sitting in front of the television watching reality TV and we wonder “what happened?”

Similarly, we attempt to “motivate” ourselves to be high-achievers, to make a lot of money, start a business, train for a marathon, etc. by pumping ourselves up and associating unrelated emotions to these goals. Making a lot of money we think will get us love, or appreciation, or the ability to help people. Starting a business we think will get us fun, creative work. Running a marathon we think will keep us fit, and make us feel special. But when we make the money, we feel empty. When we start the business, we feel overwhelmed and out of our element. When we train for the marathon, our joints hurt and we feel tired all the time.

We think that we are naturally lazy, but in fact we are pushing ourselves to do things that are not truly meeting our needs. We push even harder, only to cause even more problems. It’s time to stop pushing and start listening.

The story of the rich, successful, yet unhappy man is so common as to be an archetype. No amount of wealth, power, fame, and “being the best” will ever meet our unmet needs for connection, love, appreciation, oneness, peace, and joy, for these are states of being, not doing. The good news is that these states are much closer than you think and don’t require achieving any of that stuff to experience in an ongoing way.

In Boulder there is a coffeeshop that sells a white chocolate and peppermint tea drink called the “Peace of Mind.” I love the irony of going in and purchasing “a large peace of mind–to go.” Peace of mind cannot be purchased and no one can give it to you, but yet you can experience it for free at any time.

Why do we think we need motivation? If we are actually meeting real needs, then the simple and direct meeting of those needs makes us naturally feel good and satisfied. We think we need to be motivated because we have inner objections which we vilify. Our right hand fights against our left. When we end the inner conflict by accepting all parts of our self, we naturally meet our needs and feel peace of mind more and more in an ongoing way.

Motivation is for Losers

In the battle against the self, no matter who wins, you lose! By pumping yourself up artificially with enthusiasm, inspiration, or passion, you are fighting and dominating other, more soft and sensitive parts of yourself that object to your empty quest for achievement. This “motivation” creates an inner war, assuring that you will lose. You cannot achieve happiness, joy, peace, love, or oneness–these states of being are your true nature when you listen to your true needs and simply meet them.

This artificial amplification of desire is like forcing an inhale. In fact, the word “inspiration” comes from the same root as “respiration,” and means both “to breathe in air” and “to be moved by the Spirit.” As most creative people know, while you can set up conditions for the Muse to inspire you, you cannot force it. (See my previous article “Where Does Inspiration Come From?” for a longer treatment of this topic.)

Let’s Do Something!

Here’s an exercise for you to start putting these principles into practice.

Let’s say you desire to start a successful business. You normally amplify your desire by visualizing extreme success daily, picturing your luxury megayacht, your Porshe, people lavishing you with praise, etc. Even if you get all of these things however, you will not be satisfying the underlying needs and may still feel empty. Why not fulfill your needs directly instead of wasting all that energy on “success”?

You can begin to learn what those needs are by first acknowledging the desires you have. Say “part of me really wants to own a luxury megayacht in the British Virgin Islands.” Welcome this part and know that it has some deeply positive purpose for wanting this for you.

Then take a deep breath, relax, close your eyes, and go inside. Notice where this part of you lives: do you feel it in a particular place in your body, or see yourself in your yacht off to your left side, or hear someone saying “nice yacht!” in your right ear?

Ask this part of you “what do you want?” and wait for a response. If it says “success”, ask this part “if you have success, fully and completely, what do you want through having success that’s even more important?”

You can continue this questioning until you uncover the deeper needs this part wants for you by “motivating” you to go for the yacht. If you continue to go further, you’ll find at the core of what it is wanting, there is a state of being like peace, oneness, OKness, love, or joy.

See the book Core Transformation for a much more precise and detailed process for doing exactly this.

You can also hire me for a Core Transformation Coaching session to begin unmotivating yourself and instead welcoming and fulfilling your true needs. I’m currently taking clients on a sliding scale basis from $30-75 for a 90-minute session. Most of my clients have said something to the effect of “this is the most powerful psychological work I’ve ever done.” If you are interested in this kind of deep transformation, please email or call me: andrewmcduffee [at] gmail [dot] com -or- 303-520-8658. My goal is to train clients to be able to do this process by themselves so they can find wholeness without dependence on a professional helper.

Many of us seek inspiration in inspiring quotes, motivational audio programs, passionate self-development books, and enthusiastic “breakthrough” weekend workshops. The very basis of the massive field of personal development could be seen as helping people find this inspiration, this passion, this purpose, in every aspect of life, and in an ongoing way. The gurus of personal development usually claim to have found inspiration nirvana–having once been in your shoes–and they alone can show you the path to wealth, health, and happiness.

Those who aren’t consumers of motivational materials often ask why people read book after book and attend seminar after seminar? Does the stuff not work? I myself spent thousands of dollars on personal development books, audio, video, and seminars. Often I’d buy books and only read the first few pages before buying another. Meanwhile I was in severe debt from college loans and credit cards, and could not find meaningful, inspiring work. I hoped that I could be like the stories in the beginning of each of those books: broke, lonely loser with meaningless life becomes mega-success, gets the babes, and obtains omnipotence…in 30 days.

I thought I was alone in my feeling the shame that came along with this pattern, but later I found that this is a typical picture of many consumers of personal development products. “The last product was good, but the effects faded. But THIS one will finally save me…” While I’ve stopped the irresponsible spending, the debt, career challenges, and desire for ongoing inspiration remain.

Why are we so desperately seeking inspiration? Could it be that we have lost it?

God is Dead

The dominant scientific worldview posits that the Universe was created from a random explosion and everything is just bits of meaningless matter bouncing around, selfish genes mutating and fighting for survival in a competitive deadly game, and rational actors maximizing their rational self-interest in a resource scarce economy. This belief system is so deeply entrenched, it is hard to imagine an alternative explanation of the universe ever existed or could exist.

There is no room in this explanation for God, spirit, or any subjective experience whatsoever. Until the cognitive turn in psychology, behaviorism denied that mind was more than a mere “epiphenomenon,” and current neuroscience is confident that someday, all subjective phenomena will be ultimately reducible to firing neurons and moving chemicals. This means that things like soul, spirit, beauty, and meaning don’t have any place in our modern understanding of things.

Nietzsche declared “God is dead” to describe this philosophical turn. We killed God as an explanation of the Universe and replaced Him with mere meaningless matter. In it’s place, the German philosopher anticipated the personal development movement by creating the idea of the ubermench (Uberman or Superman). Everyone is now their own personal superhero, beyond Good and Evil, pursuing their own happiness apart from everyone else and the religious institutions that used to collectively bind us together.

Some have decided to retreat from modern science and instead explain the universe in terms of a literal interpretation of a holy book, thus isolating themselves from and pitting themselves against the modern world. Others attend lifeless church services, where God is now an absent ethereal nothingness, totally irrelevant to daily life and not found anywhere in the physical world nor in subjective experience.

Enter personal development.

We intuit that our lives are meaningless, that our religions can’t answer the big questions, and we desperately seek something to fill the hole in our soul. Our jobs are tedious, our marriages loveless, our successes empty. We have no real community anymore, our families live in other towns, and our endless online “friends” never quite live up to the real thing despite the promises of our hyper-connected age. We constantly worry about survival, attempting to regain the feelings of safety and nourishment of nursing at our mother’s breast with the warm, sweet milk of a Starbucks. The caffeine drives us on to push, push, push harder to make sure that we stand out and therefore can survive as the winners in a zero-sum game.

We seek to become Ubermen and Uberwomen. Some of us succeed in developing super powers of personal achievement and excellence in our quests to attain liberation through accumulating personal wealth (for the benefit of others, we tell ourselves). Others of us fail and drop out completely, but there is nowhere to go, so we end up competing to be the most spiritual, the most environmentally friendly, the most 100% raw, conscious, limber, polyamorous, enlightened triathlete in all of Colorado, no, the world!

We accumulate online “friends,” blog subscribers, and Twitter followers like an addict, because indeed we are addicted, as we cannot truly get our needs met for connection, love, trust, touch, and affection in our culture of alienation, separateness, and meaninglessness. Or we connect intensely in dramatic weekend workshops, hugging and high-fiving, crying and laughing, sharing our deepest wounds with total strangers, promising to “stay in touch” only to feel so alone again when we return home.

The Geek word for soul is “psyche” as in psychology or psychotherapy. But there is no room for soul in a world of matter. Is it any wonder that there is an epidemic of new “diseases” such as ADHD, depression, OCD, autism, bipolar illness, etc.? Our souls are sick.

Pharmaceutical companies explain that all our unhappiness is due to “lack of drugs” since we are just brains in bodies. So we take Paxil, Prozac, Ibuprophen–anything to not feel the constant anxiety, the chronic pain of our soulless society. We feed amphetamines (Ritalin) to our kids who refuse to cooperate with the program of soul-sucking schooling so that they too can be well-prepared for a meaningless career of empty achievement. The sensitive among us develop chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, or autoimmune disorders, a metaphor for the self-destruction our lives consist of in a civilization of runaway growth that is toxic to itself.

The Origins of Inspiration

The word “inspiration” comes from the same root as “respiration.” To inspire has a number of definitions related to breathing, creativity, influence, aliveness, and religious experience. From the etymology of the words inspire and inspiration, we see that inspire could mean “to bring in spirit” or “to bring in breath,” as breath and spirit come from the same word.

“Enthusiasm” similarly comes from the Greek enthousiasmos which means a range of things from “to be inspired by a god,” “to be filled with the Spirit,” and “to be possessed.” Secular psychology calls this “flow” or “creativity.” Christians call it “to be filled with the Holy Spirit.” The word “enthusiasm” has a fascinating history in the Christian church, from initially being a good thing when someone experienced the shaking, quaking, and shouting of joy and aliveness. Later “enthusiasm” was used pejoratively, meaning religious fanaticism, irrational craziness.

We have forgotten what joy looks like. Watch some kids playing–they make nonsense words, sing spontaneous songs, dance wildly, draw freely, laugh and scream and cry easily. By the time they are teenagers, we’ve sucked most of the soul out of them. Now they fall asleep in class, have no idea what they want to be when they grow up, and begin feeling the alienation and anxiety of modern meaninglessness. If an adult continues to express joy, playfulness, and creativity like a child, we either lock him up and give him “antipsychotics” or call him a creative genius.

Breath, aliveness, and spirit

Inspiration is the natural and automatic drawing in of spirited experience, just as inhalation is the natural drawing in of breath. You cannot force inspiration any more than you can force an inhale. Just as inhalation happens naturally as long as you don’t try to control it, inspiration also happens naturally and is just as near and easily available.

We all know that if you want to feel happy, you can simply smile and you’ll start to feel happy. But many of us also intuit that this is a rather superficial kind of happiness, and it would be a pretty depressing life if this was the only way you had to feel happy. This kind of physiological control is the basis of Tony Robbins’ “state management” which he adopted from the field of NLP. State management is another form of control, as if we need to do something to be inspired. I use Robbins as an example because his main shtick is “living with passion,” and because of this, he exemplifies the motivation industry’s approach to inspiration.

Robbins’ “passion” is equivalent to inspiration. He recommends discovering which you love to bring out this inspiration naturally, but also advocates forcing a “peak state” of passion through violent physical movements (”power moves”), breathing, shouting “YES!”, etc.

I was a Robbins devotee for several years and found that this method does indeed “work,” but not without severe short-term and especially long-term consequences. It is self-reinforcing and addictive in that once you pump adrenaline and serotonin through your body through forced inspiration, you temporarily feel good, but then you need continual maintenance to continue to feel good.

This is the very structure of the motivation industry–get you hyped, crash, get hyped again, etc. Hence why motivation is as popular as Starbucks.

“People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing - that’s why we recommend it daily.” ~ Zig Ziglar

Forced inspiration is more like caffeine than mental hygiene. It pumps you up for a time, then you crash. Natural inspiration is not like bathing either–it’s more like breathing! There is nothing you have to do except get out of the way and relax and your breath comes in naturally.

Forced inspiration doesn’t last because you aren’t addressing deeper needs that the pain of unhappiness is pointing towards. Meeting needs feels good, but usually not in a big, dramatic, forced way. Artificial inspiration has about as much aliveness in it as a Twinkie. Natural inspiration comes easily and automatically when you stop trying to control it and just allow it to come.

Robbins criticizes affirmations as not being effective by demonstrating what he sees people doing by saying “I’m happy, I’m happy, I’m happy” with a scowl on his face and an angry tone of voice. He encourages you to instead change your physiology so that what you say appears congruent. Usually he does this by shouting affirmations (what he calls “incantations”) with an angry intensity in his voice and a face like a warrior prepared to kill you if you get in the way of his goals. But being a better actor doesn’t mean one is congruent, it just means you are more skilled at forcefully dominating the parts of yourself that object to this superficial happiness.

Buddha said it first: life is suffering. But Buddhism is not a pessimistic philosophy. Accept suffering and you are free. Let go of forcing and controlling and you’ll breathe in spirit.

“What’s full of itself is not full of spirit” says psychotherapist and shaman Bradford Keeney. This is certainly the case with Mr. Robbins of the Anthony Robbins Companies, as well as James Arthur Ray of James Ray International and other motivation gurus who have penetrated their “personal brands” into the souls of inspiration seekers everywhere.

But not to pick on Mr. Robbins, he’s just made explicit what we do to ourselves all the time. “Put on a happy face,” “push yourself to succeed,” “you’ve got to put in 10,000 hours to master something.” All these and more are ways of forcing inspiration, as if we thought that since breathing in keeps us alive, if only we could breathe twice as much air in and never let it go! That way we’d always feel alive and healthy.

Wild, Mysterious Inspiration

Inspiration comes from the same place that dreams come from. It is a place beyond understanding, knowing, and controlling.

Inspiration is born of naturalness, of being, of attunement to spirit. When you stop controlling and start listening, inspiration naturally arises.

Inspiration is also wild, mysterious, and unknowable. Inspiration is the stuff of pure creativity. It cannot be measured, predicted, or controlled.

Our scientific paradigm rests on the assumption that everything real can be measured and explained with numbers, logic, and words, and that nothing “essential” is left out. But what is left out is of utmost importance to living an inspired, meaningful life.

Do not seek to force inspiration. Do not repress any part of your nature either. Appreciate everything. Seek to see the sacredness and beauty in all things, in all moments, in all feelings and experiences. Follow your bliss. Feel your pain. Sing the blues. Find hope not in blind faith but in the desperation that comes from fully feeling the weight of the world and the enormity of the crises we are facing.

Be wild. Stop making sense and start making nonsense. Allow your breath to come in as your life and the world again becomes soulful, inspired, full of mystery and beauty, awe and wonder. Allow your breath to go out as you let go of everything and die to each moment, so that the next moment may be fresh, entirely new and alive.

Tell me, what in nature grows constantly and never-endingly without regard for its relationships with others?

Trees reach a certain height and stop, and eventually die. All animals grow for a time, mature, reproduce, and die.

Here are some things that grow endlessly: cancer cells, suburbs, landfills, the yeast that creates vodka as a waste product which eventually kills itself. Our capitalist global economy requires endless growth just to survive. We can see how well that is doing….

Growth is an important part of any animal’s development. In particular, it’s a very important part of adolescence. Most human beings have a great untapped potential, but nearly so great as advertised by personal development literature. The reason we have a great untapped potential in many cases is because the structure of our civilization keeps it untapped. In school we are trained to keep our creativity and genius to ourselves, to sit down and shut up and behave. We have to engage in conscious growth just to reach an acceptable adulthood!

At some point however, growth outgrows itself. Then what? What comes after personal development?

The big fat problem is that you cannot ultimately control any of these things.

The recession is teaching many people who thought they were in control of their financial destiny that in fact, their personal finances have a whole lot to do with the creation of obscure financial instruments that they knew nothing about, and had no say in creating.

If you think you can control your mind, you’ve never meditated. Try sitting for 60 seconds without thinking of anything at all. How’d it go? Even positive thinking is an ongoing battle against negativity, within and without.

Emotions are often compared to the ocean. Trying to control the ocean will get you killed. You can sail on the ocean, you can surf on the ocean, but it is foolish to try and control the ocean.

Our ultimate destiny is death, and we can’t control that (at least yet–bio-nanotech may change things). And even worse, there isn’t even a solid, permanent sense of “I” to be found in any of our thoughts, feelings, sensations, beliefs, or even our body, as all these things are constantly changing.

So how should we approach this idea of control?

There is a clue in the idea of sailing or surfing. While we cannot ultimately control anything that is important to us, we can learn to surf the waves of life. We can be smart enough to not sail into a raging storm. We can practice flowing with the ups and downs, using the wind and waves to guide us where we want to go. And that can be a whole lot of fun!

In Buddhism, a metaphor is often given of “entering the stream.” Once we’ve jumped into a stream, just flow with it! We don’t have ultimate control of where our life is headed, but we can somewhat steer and avoid major rocks as we flow towards the ocean. Sometimes there are dangerous rapids, sometimes slow, stagnant pools.

Swimming upstream is attempting to be in control. That’s a serious waste of energy. Not steering, surfing, or sailing and just letting the waves push you around is stupid. Tony Robbins and other personal development gurus can only help you to surf, not to control the ocean. “Spiritual” teachers more directly teach you how to stop swimming upstream and learn to flow. Both are important.

You are not in ultimate control of your life, but you can learn to sail through life with more ease and enjoyment.

Thinking positive is wonderful, but often just plays on the surface, repressing deeper feelings and needs. Willpower–forcing yourself to do things–can be helpful too, but still doesn’t deal with the deepest cause of the problem.

While I’m certainly not immune to the winter/recession/holiday blues, I am grateful to have come across a powerful technique for deep transformation, something that turns blues into peace, joy, and happiness–the true spirit of this season.

That something is a powerful process called Core Transformation. This technique begins with welcoming a feeling or behavior you want to change, then completely transforming the feeling by a step-by-step process of accepting and penetrating inquiry. This can be used for lots of things, from depression to procrastination to finding your purpose and more.

This is not an intellectual reframe, and it goes WAY beyond most personal development and therapy that I’ve experienced. Using this technique, you find at the core of anything you didn’t like is an experience of something profound and wonderful, and deeply healing.

Whether you learn Core Transformation or not, please please please, use these challenging times as a vehicle for inner transformation instead of succumbing to unpleasant feelings or unwanted behaviors.

There are 3 good ways you can learn Core Transformation for yourself and feel much better fast:

1. Get a copy of the book Core Transformation. You’ll need to read the whole thing, and practice, practice, practice–looking at the book alone won’t help! However, this is the cheapest option. You can get a “near new” copy (sent back by distributors for minor “shelf wear”) for $7.50 from Real People Press (disclaimer: I work for them, but don’t get any commissions). You can get a copy here.
2. Buy the Core Transformation DVD seminar. This is a recording of the live seminar, and also includes Aligning Perceptual Positions, another very powerful technique of finding inner alignment. Very high quality stuff, and reasonably priced at $185 plus shipping. Get yours here. You could also attend a live seminar, but I’m not aware of any coming up soon.
3. Get 1-on-1 Core-Transformation-Winter-Blues-Busting-Coaching with me. I’ve got space available for 10 new clients, and would love to introduce more people to this powerful technique. All the marketers say not to discount your fees, but I’m going to do it anyway for December. Sign up for 4 powerful 90-minute sessions of Core Transformation and pay by December 15th for only $349. In January, the price for 4 sessions goes up $101 dollars to $450, and only have 10 sessions available for clients given my other projects, so please email me or call me now to sign up: duff [at] precisionchange.com or 303-520-8658.

Whatever you do, please take care of yourself and those you love. Count your blessings. Get lots of sleep and healthy food. And have some fun too, while you’re at it!

Happy Holidays,
~Duff

If the content of this video makes no sense to you, don’t worry, it doesn’t make sense to me either. The language is hypnotic, artfully vague–i.e. devoid of content–yet obviously very expressive and passionate, carrying a sense of urgency and intensity. It’s an energized, shamanic rant to stir you up, and obviously geared towards those with a New Age worldview (who else would go see a trance channel for advice on living).

Esther is co-author with her husband Jerry of a series of popular books on “manifestation”–Ask and It Is Given, The Law of Attraction, etc. that teach you how to get what you want (manifest) while being “in the flow.”

The similarity to Tony Robbins–with a New Age twist–is striking:

Apparently the Hicks’ teach a method of positive thinking called “pivoting,” where you switch out what you see in the world that upsets you (e.g. someone’s disapproving glance) for something you’d rather see or experience (e.g. the same person smiling). In it’s less shallow versions, this ends up being another form of positive thinking, focusing on the positive when everything around you is bleak.

Personal development has developed advanced methods for doing similar things that used to just be called “positive thinking.” Tony Robbins’ version he calls “state management”–the ability to change your feelings or moods in any moment by changing your body (physiology: breathing, movements, posture, etc.), internal images, or internal dialogue. This is a particularly powerful way of taking control of your inner experience. However, it is not without it’s side effects.

Is Happiness a Feeling?

Hedonism is the view that life is basically about feeling good. Most people who have not reflected too much on what life is about basically live according to this view–which means you probably do. Personal development literature usually does not question it, except for some rare authors who emphasize the development of virtue as the good life.

There are subtle forms of hedonism that postulate that the ultimate pleasures come from service to others and contemplation of philosophy and art, but most hedonists (i.e. most humans) want physical pleasure, creature comforts, endless full-body orgasms, and positive emotions galore more than anything.

If you basically think pleasure is what life’s about, you have a couple main options for maximizing happiness. One is to control your environment to be maximally pleasurable–obtain big lounge chairs, delicious foods, wine, women, some fancy cars, a big plasma TV, some drugs, and royally enjoy yourself. Most Americans are attempting to live some version of this goal.

For those lower on the socio-economic ladder or who see themselves as more “spiritual,” one can learn how to endogenously generate chemicals of pleasure through techniques like state management, or even subtle spiritual pleasures of bliss from intense concentration. The advantage is that these are generally free and don’t run out when the money does. They also can seem “spiritual” in that one can renounce worldly pleasures for the pleasures inside, and often one enters a kind of flow state when playing around with self-generated feelings.

Personal development tends to be a blend of the two, learning how to be worldly successful so that you can have all the things that bring physical pleasure and the pleasure of social dominance, while simultaneously learning how to amp up your internal feelings so that you can go about this quest in a state of mania with delusions of grandeur. It’s the American dream run amok.

Why I Learned Positive Thinking, and Why I Unlearned It

I studied Philosophy in college, was a member of several activist organizations, and generally thought the world was screwed up in numerous ways and needed to change bigtime. After I graduated, I found the only job I could get was working for a credit card processing company, working on the phone at the Helpdesk, in a cubicle where they pumped in white noise that gave me a massive headache.

One day I got sick with something like mono and I lied in bed for 3 weeks. My unconscious had decided that I was not going to work anymore for my corporate overlords, but I had no idea what to do. I was depressed and lost, with no hope for a positive future, and no idea how the hell to integrate my intuition that the real world was a terrible place to live with actually making enough money to support myself as an adult.

A friend loaned me some tapes from Tony Robbins, and I listened to the whole Personal Power II series–which is supposed to take 30 days–in 21 days. By the time I was done, I was so excited about my future and how successful I was going to be, I was pissing adrenaline.

I began practicing a similar moment-to-moment practice like pivoting that I learned from Tony Robbins called “state management,” a sophisticated form of positive thinking.

Basically the idea is that you can change your state/moods/thinking in any moment if you don’t like the current one. Kinda like changing the channel. The technique is easy enough: change your physiology (body), your internal images, or what you are saying to yourself.

I got really, really good at this. It was useful at the time, and in difficult circumstances, I still use it today.

I found two problems though, in working with this as a way of life. Two things that really screwed me over for a while, which is why I’m writing this blog post in the first place–so you can learn from my dumb-ass mistakes.

1. In my quest to live a life of ecstasy (not unlike Ms. Hicks or Mr. Robbins in the above videos, I was capable of such charismatic displays, mostly through dance), I developed intense mood swings, from the highest of high peaks, to moderately low burnout (not full-on depression, because I had used cognitive-behavioral methods to transform my inner dialogue pretty fully).

I learned to run my neurology so well that I came up against the limits of my body’s ability to keep up. Eventually this cultivation of hypomania lead to adrenal fatigue where I was too tired to get out of bed 2 or more days a week, which I hoped would be on the weekend so I wouldn’t miss work, but I wasn’t always so lucky.

It’s taken about 4 years to recover from living this way, with lots of help from my herbalist, eating well, and generally living less intensely. I’m still exploring the extent to which I can experience intense moods without depleting my adrenals.

2. Because I was so good at changing my state, I developed intense psychological shadow elements. I became very, very good at repressing or denying aspects of myself or my life that I didn’t want to look at.

There’s a well-known technique in hypnosis where you create anaesthesia–especially useful for getting dental work without drugs–called hypnotic pain control. This is a useful technique, but if you use it to ignore the message the pain is giving you, the problem can get a whole lot worse.

I similarly was able to create a kind of emotional anaesthesia, ignoring the messages that some of the discomfort or difficult emotions were telling me. After a while, this incongruence or lack of inner ecology made the techniques I was using less and less effective, leading to total breakdown–the techniques I had been using to get happy no longer worked, and simultaneously I had a lot more problems in my life as a result of not listening to the alarms that had been going off in the form of negative emotions.

Core Transformation, with it’s focus on listening to every part for it’s deeper positive purposes, has been deeply healing for me because of that. Surprisingly, I’ve found Core Transformation to also help quickly change my state–not by swishing out a different feeling or image, but by going into the core of the existing feeling to it’s source, the Self in Jungian psychology.

The Cultivation of Delusion

When anyone first hears of positive thinking, they immediately think it’s cheesy and stupid. There is wisdom in this intuition.

Pivoting, positive thinking, and state management function by changing your focus from what you see to what you imagine. This can be helpful, especially in emergency situations or severe mental imbalance where thinking positively can determine the difference between life and death. It can also be a natural functioning of our ability to choose what we want and to make plans for the accomplishment of our outcomes. This ability is largely only present in human beings, and is responsible both for our outstanding technological success as well as our outstanding ability to destroy our life-sustaining environments.

In contrast to pivoting and positive thinking, Buddhism and other eastern philosophies would consider these practices as the cultivation of delusion or ignorance. There is a kind of freedom in being able to create one’s own delusion (”I create my own reality”)–but it’s a freedom that comes at the expense of truth. I found that when I practiced state management that the price was ultimately too high to bear, and I became addicted to the chemicals spinning in my neurology that I endogenously generated, eventually hitting “rock bottom” as they talk of in 12-step groups. I never got into drugs as a kid, both because I was afraid of the dangers and because I simply couldn’t afford them! But I learned how to get my highs for free.

Perhaps these methods will work out better for you. Some people seem to like drugs, and don’t have any apparent problems coping with the highs and lows of regular drinking, smoking, or what have you. Similarly, some people seem to be cool with denying reality and are more comfortable and functional with their delusions. If that’s you, then continue to ignore what I write about, and go read some other personal development blog!

If on the other hand, if you see signs that perhaps your positive thinking, pivoting, or state management is having side-effects that are more significant that the cure, I’d recommend checking out Core Transformation, mindfulness meditation, or some other approach that cultivates wisdom through accepting things fully, and finding that in doing so, they also change.

Duff is a transpersonal development life coach specializing currently in the Core Transformation process–an extremely effective method of rapid change with few to no side-effects. To get a 1/2 price Core Transformation session (only $50 for 90 minutes! Only good until Nov 31st) email duff@precisionchange.com or call him at 303-520-8658.

I had tended to react with anger towards what I viewed as “his inauthenticity and greed,” including the long-form sales letters that he writes to sell his popular products, the outrageous fees he charges for his “mastermind group,” and his “double your dating” course that I read long ago which I was now seeing as a superficial approach to relating with the opposite sex. Within an hour, I no longer had this reactivity towards him. I might not want to hang out with him, but we are both just people, and being a hater isn’t helping anybody, and it’s not creating something beautiful.

To my surprise, today I discovered that my reactivity towards another guy (i.e. “jerkbag”)–UK magician and hypnotist-entertainer Darren Brown–was also gone. I just watched a few Darren Brown videos on YouTube, which in the past would have set me off with indignant anger and digust. Tonight I had no reaction except curiosity (quite frankly, he is a master hypnotist with great language patterns), some enjoyment of his entertaining style, and also some criticism (without any intense feelings) of some of his acts where he picks on people or shows people how he can manipulate them (in one video, he steals a man’s wallet by using a confusion technique and then simply asking him to hand it over, which he does). The cool thing is that my reaction to Mr. Brown changed without any willpower, affirmations, visualizations, or any conscious attention whatsoever.

If you are curious how I went from hatred to indifference in about an hour, and how you too can actually let go of anger–perhaps with a loved one, or the “other” presidential candidate–then read on…

The Jerkbag I Hated Was Just My Projection…

I decided to work with a feeling of reactivity towards internet marketer Eben Pagan a few nights ago. I did this both because I was curious about what would happen, and because I’ve found some blocks in my own ability to market myself effectively and build a thriving private coaching practice. I’m also in favor of less anger and more kindness in the world, and I want to “be the change” I want to see in the world. Plus, I don’t know the guy. Everything that I think I know about him is just an idea I have about him (which by the way, is also often the case with people we think we know really well!). Being angry at him certainly isn’t going to change him, since I can’t even have a conversation with him. Meanwhile, I’m the one feeling crappy. Even if he is a jerk, he’s the one who should feel bad about it, not me!

I did the Core Transformation process with these feelings 2 or 3 nights ago, first watching a video of Eben presenting his new personal productivity product that someone had emailed me about. I first worked with the part of me that hated him, thought he was inauthentic, etc. In Jungian psychotherapy, this is classically called shadow projection, but knowing that intellectually did not change the emotions I felt. To paraphrase Connirae Andreas (the creator of Core Transformation), if you start with mental concepts then you will transform your mental concepts. But if you want to transform your experience…then begin with your experience!

How I Did It…But First, A Warning

I should start off by saying that you probably won’t learn the Core Transformation process from just reading this blog and trying some things from it. Get the book, or the DVD home training set, or attend a seminar, or get a private phone or video coaching session from me first.

If you try something after reading this blog and it doesn’t work, that’s like trying to bake a cake from a conversation overheard at a coffeeshop. It isn’t because the recipe “doesn’t work”! There are many subtleties to this technique, many of which are covered in the book, others of which are covered in an NLP practitioner or master practitioner training, others which are pure art and cannot be taught. In any case, the technique is the most powerful thing I’ve ever come across for both brief and deep yet lasting personal transformation.

With that caveat…

In the Core Transformation process, you start by identifying how you experience an unwanted feeling, behavior or response. In this case, I heard my inner dialogue saying “what a jerk,” “he seems phony and sleazy,” and even “God I hate him.” I checked to see where the inner voice seemed to be coming from (a way to more precisely notice your experience) and it was coming from my chin and throat. I was also breathing shallowly, with a wrinkled brow, and feeling frustration and disgust.

After identifying specifically how you experience the thing you are wanting to change, you treat it as if it’s an unconscious part of you, because you obviously didn’t consciously choose to have this response. The reason for saying it’s “as if” is because this method does not make claims about ultimate reality (”ontology” in philosophy)–it’s a practical method for personal transformation, not metaphysics or theology. If only more new-agey people understood this and stopped talking about quantum physics and healing…but I digress (another part for me to work on?).

Next, you welcome this part–instead of what we normally and habitually do, which is repress it, deny it, make it wrong or bad, feel shame for having it, etc. (all my favorites). By welcoming it, we assume that it has some positive intention for doing what it does.

Have you ever noticed how if you assume someone has a negative intention, you quickly end up in a fight? Try this with your boyfriend or girlfriend sometime. When they do something nice for you say, “Why don’t you love me!” That never fails.

Similarly, assuming someone has a positive intention is a key element in nearly all conflict negotiation strategies, and an important strategy for being in an intimate relationship!

Then you ask this part “what do you want?” and listen for experiential responses: inner dialogue, feelings, and inner images that appear in your bodymind. Yes, I said bodymind. Despite what our educations would have us believe, your mind and body are a complete system, a continuous field of subjective experience. If you don’t believe me, try not eating for a couple days, then eat a giant cheeseburger and notice if your mind and emotions are at all different than normal.

At this point, you record the outcome your part is wanting, thank it for letting you know, then ask it to step into an experience of already having this outcome, just in imagination, but really getting into the experience. Instead of waiting for experiences you want to “just happen,” you just imagine them now. How’s that for instant gratification? I mean, why wait?

Then you ask “if you have that, what do you want through having that that’s even more important?” You generally get 3-7 outcomes before getting to a state that doesn’t depend on others (like love or respect), doesn’t depend on doing or achieving anything (like success), but is more a state of being, like OKness, oneness, peace, aliveness, or even more “spiritual” experiences. This is not an intellectual understanding–this whole process is experiential, so within about 10-30 minutes, you have already gone from some unpleasant state to a state that might be far beyond what you’d normally call pleasant, with no weird beliefs to adopt–just a pragmatic stance towards assuming a part, and that the part has positive reasons for what it’s doing. It’s looking for the good in things and loving yourself in a precise recipe that works with reliable effectiveness (I’ve done it nearly 100 times).

After this, you ask “how does already having [core state] as a starting point make things different?” and then “how does already having [core state] transform [outcome]?” for each of the outcomes this part had. This tends to flip everything on it’s head. Our parts tend to think we need to do something to feel good, but we can feel good first and then what we do often changes to be much, much easier and more effective.

He’s Not a Jerk, I’m Just Better Than Him…

After I had worked with the angry part, I found a proud part. I imagined myself meeting Eben and shaking hands with him, but questioning his way of being subtly by being the “wise one,” giving cryptic teachings in order to “show him the errors of his ways.” At first I thought I was done with this process, but soon I felt pride bubbling up, a big smile on my face, and seeing an image of Eben as “beneath me.” While this was better than being angry, it still wasn’t as good as I knew I could experience.

So I worked similarly with the pride, experiencing it, welcoming it, asking what it wanted, getting to a core state, going back up the outcome chain. And today, I found I was also no longer reactive to Darren Brown and his wacky stunts. I’m not going to follow in his footsteps or learn how to trick people into giving me their wallets, but I’m also not going to freak about him, or rather my idea of him.

A Recipe for Transformation

We all have people in our lives that occasionally, or even frequently piss us off, frustrate us, make us mad, or even that we hate. So far I’ve worked with several of my own parts that hated or were frustrated by others, and several clients experiencing anger or hatred towards ex-partners, people who “screwed” them in business, etc. All have found significant relief from the grip of hatred in 60-90 minutes with this process. I had one client who was normally very kind, but in this case was afraid they would lose control and hurt another person due to their anger. Within 60 minutes, this was no longer an issue…although they still planned to tell the other how they had hurt them.

I urge you to work with this process or some other to transform your hatred, if not into love, than at least into indifference or assertiveness. Your life will be better for it, and the world will be a slightly more kind place to live.

We all “know” that we should be kind to others, but repressing our anger just makes us more shallow, inauthentic people. Expressing our anger is often dangerous, especially if it has reached the levels of hatred or rage. Telling yourself or others to just let it go rarely works. What I love about Core Transformation is the precision and reliability of the process–it has worked nearly every time I’ve done it with myself (except 2 or 3 times when I couldn’t concentrate enough to lead myself through it), and every time I’ve done it with clients so far.

For more information about how to get a Core Transformation coaching session, email duff [at] precisionchange.com or call him at 303-520-8658.

In these essays, I will be philosophically deconstructing the assumptions that the field of personal development is built upon in order to reconstruct the field in a new, more inclusive and healthier way. Your comments are highly encouraged!

We’ve already covered the problems with assuming “personhood” in personal development. Now we turn our attention towards the idea of “development” and the unexamined assumptions behind it.

The unexamined life is not worth living. ~Socrates

In personal development literature, it is usually assumed that the goal is continuous, linear (or even exponential) improvement in all areas of life: financial, relational, mental, physical, emotional, spiritual, career, etc. At first glance, this seems like a good thing, all else being equal. But is this possible, or even desired? What is the role of improving one’s self in the good life and in the promotion of human happiness? Can life be modeled accurately by a straight, upward pointing line?

Home and Self: Never Done, Never Good Enough

One significant problem with the quest for self-improvement is that it is never done, which can fuel one’s sense of never being good enough. Personal development tends to become a way of life, one that is ultimately dissatisfying because there is no rest, and no “done.” You can never check off personal development as complete, and there’s always somebody more developed than you in one or more areas. In addition, you are not fully in control of your life, your body, or even your mind, emotions, and actions. Unless the transhumanists are right, we will all ultimately die, and even before we die, our bodies, minds, and often bank accounts (due to hospitalization in the last few months of life) will diminish and degrade very significantly.

You can never get enough of what you don’t really need. ~ Eric Hoffer

Ever noticed how Americans are engaged in endless home improvement? Once the bathroom gets remodeled, it’s on to the kitchen, then the garage, then the spare bedroom, then the living room, etc. Most suburban homes are under more continuous construction than most websites! Suburban Moms and Dads work all week at their jobs so that they can work all weekend on their bathrooms, basements, lawns, and gardens. The huge number of design shows on television only fuel this obsession with housing perfection, which of course is never achieved, and therefore never brings satisfaction or happiness. The evidence from happiness research would suggest that spending that time and money with one’s family instead of on one’s home would be a much better investment in one’s personal happiness and life satisfaction, as well as the happiness of those one cares most about!

The home design industry changes “what is hot” nearly as fast as the fashion industry, in large part to fuel consumer dissatisfaction in order to drive revenues. When do we just live in our homes and relax with nothing to do, feeling satisfied and complete? Imagine a home design show that came in to someone’s home and said “hmmm…looks good enough to me–I wouldn’t change a thing.”

In dream analysis, a dream about a house is often seen as a metaphor for the self. It’s interesting that Americans (and many westerners) are obsessed with endless home improvement as much as we are obsessed with endless self-improvement. We find ourselves unable to rest in our homes or in our selves, constantly seeking something better, often in competition with the neighbors, or with idealized media images.

Greater economic development over the past 100+ years has lead to no increase in reported happiness or life satisfaction. In 50 years, a similar thing might be said about personal development. If we are always looking towards the ever-receding horizon, if we are thinking about the neighbor’s greener grass, if we are comparing our bank accounts, bodies, and babies with media images of success, we are cultivating dissatisfaction as a way of life.

I’ve never seen a television home improvement show, nor have I ever read a personal development book, which laid out criteria for when the improvement was done. By that I mean not just the individual project, but improvement generally. When is your home or your self “good enough”? It is well known from the research in positive psychology that “maximizing” leads to dissatisfaction and “satisficing” (being satisfied with good enough) leads to satisfaction and happiness (see Barry Schwartz’s excellent book The Paradox of Choice).

Personal development books in particular often explicitly state that self-improvement is never done, as if dissatisfaction and perfectionism were virtues. Tony Robbins speaks of “constant and never-ending improvement” as something to cultivate. Many authors repeat the slogan “if you’re not growing, you’re dying”–which of course is only partly true, because we are all dying from the moment we are born, regardless if we are consciously pursuing our own growth or not! The question is do we want to live with happiness and satisfaction, or pursuing a goal that by definition cannot be satisfied?

Linear vs. Non-Linear Models of Human Life and Development

As I mentioned earlier, life as seen from personal development seems to be that of a straight line pointing upward, a model of linear progress. Affirmations like “every day in every way my life is getting better and better” are good examples of this. However, this is not the only possible way to model a human life.

Many ancient religions saw life as either a circle from birth to death, or an arc from birth, peaking at middle age, and falling downward to death. This kind of modeling tends to give one an appreciation and acceptance for things outside of one’s control, like the decay of the body (which I’m already beginning to feel at 29), loss of memory and hearing in late life, etc. It also gives a sense that there are naturally-suited times for having children and a family, for pursuing career goals, and for pursuing spirituality and philosophy. Seeing life all-at-once in this way puts things in perspective. For example, it is normal for someone to seek career development in their 20s, 30s, and 40s, peaking often times in mid 40s, and changing significantly after that to a more senior role, or simply declining in importance in one’s life.

Life seen as an arc from birth, upward to middle age, and downward to death gives a very different and much more realistic perspective than life seen as an upward line of continuous improvement and progress. Westerners usually don’t see life in terms of a cycle however, with the results that we ignore the old and the wisdom many possess, and we tend to over-extend certain phases of life (especially youth). In particular, we push our bodies beyond their limits with the types of physical exercise we take on, we push ourselves to constantly make more money (even amongst the ultra-wealthy) even after our careers have peaked, we artificially maintain our youthful looks with plastic surgery, etc. When we model our lives linearly, we miss that phases of life come naturally to a close, and we resist against this instead of letting go and moving on.

Life can also be seen as a sine wave, going up and down in somewhat regular cycles. I’ve found this to be much more accurate of a description of any sort of path of growth, including the spiritual path. One goal of spiritual development is to accept life’s ups and downs with equal appreciation.

Development vs. Maturity

Personal Development is something that tends to be pursued consciously, with explicit, written, time-bounded goals and plans. But much of our “development” happens naturally, as a result of going through the life-cycle and our responses to the challenges that come into our lives unexpectedly. This type of development could be called maturation, with the result being maturity.

Maturity is not something that needs to be consciously planned out in advance. Maturity emerges from one’s response to challenging life circumstances, like having a child, getting laid off, or contracting cancer. Much of what people are seeking through personal development can happen through maturation, through courageously responding to the challenges that come one’s way without seeking them out. In this way, a lot less needs to be on your to-do list.

Engaging in relationships with others–family, intimate relationship, community, parenting–leads to enormous personal development. Parenting in particular is an incredible opportunity for development in many different areas. Living in a cooperative house or co-housing community is another incredible opportunity for development and maturation, in addition to being much more environmentally sustainable. Learning about the world’s biggest problems and attempting to solve them with others leads to incredible personal development and maturity, but does not explicitly involve developing one’s own abilities, career, or bank account.

Many of my coaching clients suffer from having too many goals. They often come to me complaining that they can’t get themselves to do what they want to do. In other words, part of them wants to go for all these goals, and part of them usually wants to just chill out and enjoy life more! By understanding that much “development” happens fairly naturally and automatically, we can free up energy to accept and enjoy life more, having fewer things to do, feeling better about the things we do actually accomplish, and flowing with the inevitable twists and turns of life.

A friend of mine recently joked that if life is about developing one’s self, then death would be the highest stage of development. The linear model of life leads to this absurd conclusion, while seeing life as non-linear can help us to accept the natural course of things, which is much more likely to lead to the happiness and satisfaction that we are ultimately seeking. In addition, trusting that life will provide you with many opportunities for development through maturation, you can let go of many of your goals and focus on the things that actually improve our lives: our connections with others, our own wholeness, and appreciation of the great mystery of life and the universe.

Personal Development has many assumptions. One is that there is such a think as a “person” to develop.

Now this seems fairly obvious, right? Obviously you have your own body, your own emotions, your own mind, perhaps even your own house, car, bank account, cell phone, email address, etc. How could anyone doubt they are an autonomous individual person?

To some extent, you are in fact an autonomous individual–but not nearly to the degree that you might think. There are many ways in which the assumption of personhood is actually quite weak, and may even be false.

Breathing, Eating, and Thinking are Happening

In personal development, it is assumed that there is such thing as a person, and this is obvious and fundamental. Three short examples will illustrate my point that in fact, this is not the case, and that interconnections between systems are fundamental, without which the concept of an individual person would not even make sense.

Breathing

Every few seconds, you take a breath in, and let a breath out. Is this air “you”? Most people would say that it is not. Yet if for some reason you could not breathe for even just a few minutes, you would likely die. So in a sense, the air in your lungs and around your body is both you and not you.

This air is generally composed of an optimum amount of various gases, most notably carbon dioxide and oxygen. The countless plants and animals on the earth help balance and regulate the air in an optimum ratio in a huge self-regulating system. Without this system, you would not be able to breathe. If this system got too far off-balance, life would not be possible.

Most planets do not have a ratio that could sustain life. Earth oxygen levels used to be 21% of total volume in prehistoric times, but due to the burning of fossil fuels (to power civilization), it is now dips to around 19% in many areas, and 12-17% over major cities–a less than optimal level for human health. At oxygen levels of 6-7%, life can no longer be sustained.

Is the oxygen being released from a plant in your office “you”? It supports the larger balance of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere, and you bring a portion of that air into you every few seconds, without which you could not exist. Certainly it is in some way a part of you, and you a part of it. Yet we don’t normally think in these terms.

Eating

Every few hours, you eat (unless you are sleeping, or reading this blog from a country undergoing severe drought and famine). Is food on your plate “you”? Again, most people would say that it is not. Yet if you do not eat within about 30 days, you will die of starvation. Is the digesting food in your stomach “you”? Hard to say. Certainly after it has been turned into tissue or burned for energy it is more “you-like,” but yet you could lose your arm and still be “you,” right? (An aside: How much of your body could you lose and still be “you”? How much of your brain could you lose and still be “you”?)

Where does your food come from? Most likely, animals and plants that are cultivated for consumption by human beings. Almost nobody grows their own food or raises their own chickens, etc. nowadays, so your very personal eating habits depend largely on the production of food by others. If you ate an egg for breakfast, was it “you” when it was laid by the hen? How about before the hen was born? Was there some future “you” in a fertilized chicken’s egg a year ago? If that’s too wacky for you to stomach (pardon the pun), then at what point did that egg become part of this thing called “you”?

Are the people who grow your food you? Certainly not. Yet you would not survive without them, and the mechanisms of production that they utilize to bring food to your table several times a day.

Thinking

Sit for about 30 seconds and try to just notice your breath without thinking. Unless you are a well-practiced meditator, you probably had between 5 and 100 thoughts just then. Where did those thoughts come from? Are those thoughts “you”?

If you practice meditation for a while, say on a silent retreat for 10 days, you begin to really notice how these thoughts come by themselves. After a few days, your internal dialogue, your inner cinema, and the inner feelings and sensations you experience begin to take on a quality of “not-me,” due to the disturbing fact that they keep happening whether you want them to or not!

But what about the thoughts you think when writing a book, or brainstorming a project? I remember the first time I thought I had come up with an absolutely brilliant original idea in Philosophy back in college. Then I found out that Plato had written the same thought nearly 2500 years before. Was the thought original to me? Unlikely. More likely is that I picked it up unconsciously from the culture around me. Ever had a boss or a spouse do this with your brilliant idea?

The same principle is displayed in the acknowledgments section of the beginning of any good non-fiction book. Most authors realize that the book “they” have written was in reality written by a huge team working with them, and that many of “their” ideas were built from the ideas of their mentors, other authors, and great thinkers throughout history. Also, in many eras new discoveries are made at nearly the same time by academics and inventors working independently (e.g. the discovery of calculus by Newton and Liebniz).

Are your original ideas “you”? Hardly. Original ideas also seem to arise spontaneously from mental activity, even when sitting in meditation. Ideas come from the same mystery as dreams, and should be treated as such.

I could go on with more examples, but three is enough for my point in this post.

Why Personhood is a Problem

Personal Development (as well as classical economics) is built on the idea of “personhood,” that there are such things as persons who are basically autonomous individuals. This is an assumption that leads to several kinds of problems.

1. The assumption of personhood in personal development presupposes that happiness is something that an individual finds for themselves, via rational deliberation, goal-setting, and planning.

This is largely not true for human beings for several reasons. First, we are social-political animals. Happiness studies have also shown that having a number of very close personal ties to friends, family, and community are a much greater indicator of reported happiness than individual success, fame, or money. Even individual enlightenment tends to lead one to the intuition that I cannot be enlightened unless all beings are enlightened, because I and all are not separate.

Similarly, human beings don’t do a good job of knowing what really makes them happy, nor actually following through on our plans. Hence why there are jobs for people like me in Life Coaching! Many people choose goals for themselves such as losing weight, which are both unlikely to optimize their happiness, and they are unlikely to actually follow through on the plans to achieving.

Personally, I’ve found that my best goal-setting occurs when it feels like my goals are emerging from something beyond me, whether I call that “intuition” or “spirit” or whatever else. The rational mind does a great job later at planning how to achieve those goals, but does not work well at all at deciding on which goals to pursue. Looking back, I’ve often found that pursuing these goals was much more fulfilling than other, more “rational” goals. I’ve also found that many things not on my goal list tend to be the most happiness producing, often developing close personal relationships, going through natural life transitions, or living through a crisis.

2. The largest problems facing our world today are problems of interconnected systems: global economic depression, ecological disaster, famine, terrorism, overpopulation, etc. According to Erwin Laszlo in The Chaos Point, we may only have until late 2012 to early 2013 to avert global systems collapse by influencing every human system towards greater holism.

Many of these global problems can be seen as problems of individual systems attempting to dominate other systems (or a part trying to be the whole), rather than working in conjunction or harmony. Cancer cells are the ultimate out-of-control individual autonomy model at the cellular level: they continue to grow themselves without any regard for their environment. Cancer cells are very good at personal development at the expense of others and their environment, ultimately to their own detriment.

An individual pursuing their single-minded personal goals can make the world’s problems worse by emphasizing personal wealth accumulation, fame (even if simply within a niche), and individual success without regard to the interconnectedness of their actions in the larger environment. When personhood is assumed and interconnectedness is minimized, this danger is more likely.

Beyond Personal Development

What are the alternatives? Can we capture the enthusiastic spirit of personal development with all it’s beneficial aspects without the problems of assuming personhood and it’s hyper-individualistic tendencies?

Transpersonal Development

I propose the solution could be called “transpersonal development.” Transpersonal refers to that which transcends and includes the personal. Transpersonal development includes developing in ways that meet one’s individual needs, but also go beyond to serve the needs of others and the systems that supports all beings on the planet, as well as connecting into something “spiritual” that transcends the individual self sense. Core Transformation is one excellent technique for transpersonal development that can be used to find goals that are truly in alignment with one’s needs, as well as solving typical psychotherapeutic problems. Insight meditation (also known as Vipassana or simply “mindfulness” practice) is also a critical practice for transpersonal development.

Transpersonal development includes developing one’s self in such a way as to find healthy individuation and the meeting of one’s needs, but not in excess. For example, transpersonal development sees excessive personal wealth accumulation as “financial obesity” which benefits no one, for beyond meeting basic needs, more personal wealth accumulation does not benefit the wealthy person in terms of real happiness, and limits the flow of financial resources from meeting the needs of others.

Core Transformation is a particularly useful technique for learning to meet one’s needs without excess, for through this process, you discover and experience what you are most deeply wanting, and then from that core state experience begin to act in the world, as an already whole and connected being. This is why I’m changing my personal coaching to be based on this one technique–it changes everything!

There is already a field of transpersonal psychotherapy which attempts to integrate healthy psychological functioning with the direct experience of the spiritual. Transpersonal development is like the do-it-yourself version, not requiring a transpersonal psychotherapist or coach to facilitate (except for emergencies and knotty problems), just as personal development often is a do-it-yourself version of counseling, therapy, or coaching.

Transpersonal development is not simply personal transcendence (surrender of the part to the whole), but it simultaneously does not ignore the whole system in which the individual is embedded. Transpersonal development is founded on the principle of ecology, awareness of the long-term impacts of the actions of one part of a system on the interactions between parts and the health of the systems in which they are embedded, whether economic, biologic, socio-political, relational, etc. In many ways, simple ethics already take this into account. The mortgage crisis would not have come about had ecology and simple long-term thinking been respected.

Transpersonal development also does not engage in dangerous or excessive practices of personal growth that could lead to psychosis, suicide, self-aggression that gets projected outwards (like “personal power”), the cultivation of mania, etc., because these lack ecology, having potential negative side-effects both for the individual and the environment. Instead, transpersonal development starts from wholeness and acceptance of things as they are, and every step of a transpersonal development process is love and acceptance. Yet transpersonal development must be as effective if not more effective at getting results, otherwise it is a step backward in psychospiritual technology.

What do you think? Do you still think “you” exist and should be the focus of your conscious development? Or do you think that both you and the larger systems you are embedded in should be considered in all “personal” development?

A few months ago, my friend Ryan had to move on to other projects. Ryan and I, along with several other friends, had started a podcast business a year prior that was going to change the world–not the first organization I had been a part of with such high ideals.

The business tanked, having no real revenue model and an investor who didn’t care about our world-changing ethos. In the same week as the business failing, I experienced a very serious family crisis. I spent the summer on unemployment, hoping to build up a podcast audience and a private life coaching practice while nursing my adrenals back to health after all that craziness.

After hearing that Ryan could not continue the podcast, that was just too much for me to simply continue with business as usual. It was time to stop and think. What the hell is going on? Where I am headed? What is my purpose? What is the role of personal development in my purpose?

In times of change, I tend to ponder. I’ve always been a bit of a philosopher, for better or worse.

Psychospiritual Development and The Ecology of Mind

Even with the creation of the Precision Change show, I’ve been pondering the role of personal development in what philosophers call “the good life.” I’ve especially been wrestling with concerns about “ecology” or the side-effects of approaches to personal development.

I’ve also been struggling with how the hell personal development–which aims to change things to how we want them to be–integrates with the spiritual notion of “accepting everything as it is” without changing it. From the personal development perspective, spirituality seems useless and passive. From the spiritual perspective, personal development seems ego and greed driven and empty, ultimately unsatisfying.

First, a little background…

Years ago, I was a superfan of Tony Robbins. I listened to his Personal Power II tapes over and over, and even attended the Unleash the Power Within seminar and walked barefoot over hot coals. But not only that, I fully intended to be “the next Tony Robbins.” I lived the Tony Robbins “unleash the cocaine within” 1980’s lifestyle, jacked up to 11, giving “1000%” with everything I did. In particular, I unleashed a charismatic side I never knew I had, growing up as I did with extreme social anxiety. I pushed myself to develop in every area of life simultaneously. I had huge lists of Big Hairy Audacious Goals. My future was so compelling I could hardly wait to take action every morning to make it real…except when I was coming down from one of the self-induced highs. I pushed myself constantly to do and become “more than anyone could ever possibly expect.”

Living this way culminated in a spectacular crash. The physical effects were that my adrenals were maxed out. A local health practitioner here in Boulder says that the adrenal glands are like a credit card–as long as you pay off the balance each month, you’re fine. To live as the next Tony Robbins, I had maxed out my adrenal credit limit, and the late fees were steep. One or two days a week, I could barely get out of bed. I hoped that those days would fall on a weekend so that I could work during the week, but I was not always so lucky. My finances were also maxed out, and and are still just beginning to recover. Instead of paying back debt, I spent whatever money I had on personal development products because not unlike many who’ve swallowed the personal development pill, I was convinced that very soon I was going to strike it rich.

My health has become much better, mostly by pulling my energy way back, taking on fewer projects, and living within my energetic means. I’ve learned how to take the time to rest. I also underwent an extensive program to heal a life-long problem with my digestive system through a local herbalist. But unlike the fairy-tale stories of self-help books, I have not now bounced back to attain super-success. On the contrary, I am more satisfied than ever with my lack of worldly success, with my ordinary humanness, with my imperfections and weaknesses.

A few months ago I joined a men’s group. The members of this group are some of the most conscious, intelligent, and successful men I know. Yet the group was oriented towards certain techniques that aggressively break you down to show you stuff about yourself you didn’t realize was there. This was a style of group therapy pioneered in the 1950’s Encounter Groups, and is unfortunately still quite popular. My intuition was that this is a dangerous practice, but I could offer no evidence, nor alternative techniques that were equally if not more effective. None of the members of the group seemed to understand my objection to this work, and they encouraged me to bring my concerns to the group, but the format for processing objections was within the frame of aggressive confrontation. It was extremely painful for me to leave, and I felt like perhaps I was a bit nuts to do so.

But then someone close to me went to an intensive all-weekend-long personal development seminar and ended up in the hospital. That was the nail in the coffin for me. In addition to inducing mania and adrenal fatigue, personal development absolutely can be dangerous! And nobody is talking about this. Even highly conscious and intelligent people don’t can’t see it. I felt like I was a bit crazy! I desperately wanted to have an alternative, to help these amazing men–and everyone involved in personal development–to be able to get the results they are wanting, without unnecessary risk and potential harm. I knew that there has to be a better way–I just didn’t know what that way was yet.

Ask and Ye Shall Receive

Meanwhile, synchronicity hit. I got bored being unemployed, and even though I didn’t know what I wanted to do next, I went looking for work. I hoped that the Precision Change podcast would launch my coaching practice, but it didn’t work out that way, and I was running out of time.

During my weekly job search, I went on Craig’s List and one of the first ads was a job with two of my all-time favorite authors in personal development, who happen to be local. I got the job, as well as another job working with a local non-profit. The non-profit job ended up not working out. Why not? Well, one reason is that they do intense personal development seminars, the type that could send you to the hospital. It wasn’t a good fit–to say the least–given my search for a better way, and the recent events.

Working for two heroes of mine, I decided to dig deeper into the personal development and therapy books they have written. I’d remembered their books being wise and considered, but at the time I had been more interested in excitement than wisdom.

One book in particular, by Connirae Andreas, I had already started to read and was on my bookshelf. It is called Core Transformation. I picked it up, and found exactly what I had been looking for, all this time.

Turning Personal Development on It’s Head

Core Transformation is the exact opposite of pretty much every personal development technique I’ve ever done. There are no affirmations. You do not attempt to think positively, reframe anything, change your state, visualize what you want, drudge up old childhood shit, face your fears, understand the origin of your problems intellectually, pump yourself up, set goals, or anything else. Neither do you simply try to accept yourself as you are without changing anything, focus on your breath, notice sensations without reacting, or let thoughts go.

Everyone knows intellectually that money, success, fame, and even good health, getting the relationship you want, and having a great job won’t necessarily make you happy. But we all constantly act under this delusion anyway! At first I couldn’t believe it–and still find it magical after practicing this technique nearly 70 times–but Core Transformation actually is helping me to live from the understanding that these things won’t make me happy…and how to be happy as a starting point instead.

In Core Transformation, you find wholeness and change through the very things you hate most about yourself, other people, and the world. And it doesn’t hurt. It is sometimes categorized as “brief therapy,” yet the results are deep and long-lasting. The only part of the process that feels bad at all is connecting with your experience of the problem, which you generally already feel when you are trying to change something. After that, it feels deeply loving and healing, because in a sense, it is the missing recipe for the deep, healing self-love that everyone talks about and says you should do, but doesn’t show you how.

The most amazing thing to me is that within 5 to 15 minutes, I can consistently go from totally stuck in reaction, anxiety, sadness, anger, and other unpleasant experiences to experiencing a Core State like Oneness, OKness, Love, Being, or connection to something greater than myself. I’ve tried for years to “manage my state” and “think positive” and I’m really good at those things now–but they’ve often felt like I’m repressing something, or splitting off part of myself. When thinking positively, I usually feel less whole, and like I have to “pump myself up” to get something done. But what goes up, must come down….

What Doesn’t Kill You, Might Maim You For Life!

I’ve read numerous times that our difficulties are the source of healing and goodness, that “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” I’ve reframed myself into thinking this way. But it hasn’t always felt true for me. There are many times that what hasn’t killed me has scarred me and made me weaker.

I didn’t have a recipe for how to go from stress to strength. I didn’t have the how of wholeness. Personal development blogs and books are full of great advice on what’s wrong and what you should do, but very few have a clear enough procedure for how to do it. “You should love yourself.” But how specifically do I do that!

Life was clever enough to connect me with exactly what I was needing most, and for that, I am incredibly grateful. I think it’s hilarious that I already had the book Core Transformation sitting on my bookshelf. I had picked it up to read a few months before, but I stopped before I had really practiced it. I guess there is a proper time for everything!

How All This Impacts the Precision Change Podcast

So what does this have to do with the Precision Change show? Well, honestly, I’m just not interested in most approaches to personal development anymore. I see most as useless, dangerous, have negative side-effects, or just lack the elegance and far-reaching benefits of Core Transformation. As my herbalist said, you shouldn’t have to heal from your healing. I’ve spent too many years healing from my personal development, and I’ve seen first hand what some of the dangers of overly intense techniques and seminars can do to people. Nobody should ever have to suffer needlessly in their quest to grow, change, and become a better person.

Core Transformation is the only technique I’ve found so far (and I’ve surveyed hundreds if not thousands) that gives such quick and powerful results without excessive pain or negative side-effects. I’ve done it about 60 times personally in the past 3 months, and it’s been incredibly helpful in about 95% of my personal trials. The 5% of times in which it didn’t seem to work I was generally in a very unresourceful state and couldn’t concentrate enough to do the process. And on a deep level, it’s changing my habitual relationship to my experience from that of reaction and repression to that of love and understanding!

So I’ve decided to focus my energies (which are usually scattered in sampling many different personal development techniques) on the thing I’m feeling is both most effective and most important. I’ve changed my personal development to be entirely focused on practicing Core Transformation, and I’m transitioning my coaching practice to be similarly focused.

You’ve Read This Far? You Deserve A Reward!

Would you enjoy receiving reasonably priced, incredibly effective personal transformation? I thought so. Which is why I have decided to run a special 1/2 off deal, and keep my regular price affordable as well.

I’ve already run 5 people through the process, all experienced their Core State or states, and all reported that it was very helpful in changing the problem they came in with. That’s 100% success in one session–a much higher rate with much faster results than my typical coaching sessions for which clients have happily paid $75 an hour.

From what I’ve experienced personally so far, Core Transformation appears to be far more effective in making rapid and permanent changes than anything I’ve been doing with standard coaching models and techniques. My clients deserve the very best and most effective methods of making change, with the fewest risks. I believe Core Transformation is one of the best methods available today for doing just that.

Because no beliefs in anything religious or spiritual are required to follow the simple steps, it works even if you don’t believe in any of that stuff or don’t think the technique will work. Connirae wasn’t even interested in anything “spiritual” when she discovered this way of working with people–she was just trying to develop a much more effective technique of solving human problems!

This technique is very widely applicable: from career challenges, to relationship problems, to personal habits, goals, feelings, “blocks,” etc. It is effective with just about any unwanted feeling, behavior, or response, or even with making things you like about yourself more full and rich, and goals accomplished more smoothly and easily. It also eliminates goals that are motivated by an intention like “if only I can achieve X, then I’ll be happy…”–but you probably don’t have any of those.

If you are interested in trying out this work, please email me at duff [at] precisionchange [dot] com or give me a call: 303-520-8658.

I ask that we do in-person or video coaching only, so go buy yourself a $30 USB video camera, download Skype, and make sure you are on a fast internet connection. I need to be able to see your non-verbal responses, so video or in-person is required. Also, this process takes time, so we will need not just 1 but 2 full hours to give you the experience of transformation that will most benefit you. I’ve squeezed some sessions into 90 minutes, but I wasn’t able to complete all the steps to really deepen the state and make the change full and lasting.

How Much for Core Coaching?

I’m wanting to make this new Core Transformation Coaching affordable, especially given the financial crisis most of us are experiencing. I generally charge $75 for one hour of less-effective conventional coaching (and many less-skilled coaches charge $150 for a 30 minute phone call!). I’m pricing the 2 hour sessions at $100, and for the next month (until October 31st, 2008), I’m offering a special 1/2 price deal for your first session: two full hours of powerful, potentially life-changing work for just $50!

(By the way, if you don’t want coaching, you could always read the book, or learn Core Transformation from this wonderful DVD set.)

I used to do a first session free, but I’m thinking many people will only need one session of Core Transformation to powerfully move forward in an area of life they are currently feeling blocked. However, if you absolutely need coaching but cannot afford even $50, write to me or give me a call, tell me your story, and I’ll consider giving a further discount or a free session.

My goal in our session(s) will be to teach you how to do the technique for yourself. I find that the conventional coaching model, with all it’s talk of empowerment, puts the accountability for change on the coaching relationship and in that way increases dependence on having a coach. While that works out great for the coach, it’s not the best I as a coach can do for my clients. By empowering you to help yourself, we can focus in our sessions on the things you cannot do for yourself.

While I’m sorry for those of you who loved Precision Change, I’m excited to be practicing and facilitating this powerful process. I hope you’ll join me in transforming your life!

Yours,
~Duff

p.s. Once again, if you want to experience the transformational power of Core Transformation–which is nothing like most techniques of personal development–then email me or give me a call today! Also, feel free to write to me any other thoughts you have about the show being canceled, about your experience with personal development, or any other feedback to what I’ve shared with you in this “confession.” I’d love to hear from you: duff [at] precisionchange [dot] com.

At one point, becoming “the next Tony Robbins” was actually my goal, a goal I now feel embarrassed to admit I once had. Especially since I saw recently that James Arthur Ray had beat me to it:

From 3:57-4:07 James tells a joke that is exactly the same as joke I’ve heard Tony Robbins tell. Of course, Tony is no stranger to plagiarism either–a good 75% of what he does comes directly from NLP, which he reworked and renamed NAC to avoid a lawsuit.

After extensive research, I’ve discovered the top 7 “success strategies” for becoming a personal development cult leader:

1. Bigger is better. If you want massive success as a pop icon of personal development, you must think and act in larger-than-life terms. It helps if you are over 6′6″ tall and weigh over 240 lbs (solid muscle of course). Speak loudly and quickly. Take up a LOT of space–that way, there will be no room for people to think or object. Dress either in fine suits, or like a rock star–your choice. Your seminars should be at least 2000 people, even if you have to pay people to attend at first, although some have had success with smaller groups (especially therapy process groups). 50ft jumbotrons, stadium music, lights and lasers are all a nice touch. Here’s a good example of your future lifestyle from Tony Robbins’ Unleash the Power Within (warning: the volume is loud and distorted):

2. Use the word “unlimited” as much as possible. People hate the inherent limits of the conditioned world. Instead of providing a way of overcoming suffering by accepting the world as it is, simply deny that limits exist by creating a fantasy world of words. For example: “unlimited power,” “your unlimited potential,” “the unlimited market potential,” “unlimited wealth,” etc. Everyone knows all markets are limited by definition, potential is limited by all sorts of factors, and only a megalomaniac would want unlimited power or wealth. To overcome this minor objection, induce a state of mania with a large group (see above) while appealing to people’s greed. This should eliminate deviance and insure compliance. You’ll be amazed at how suggestible and gullible people are!

3. Model your inner circle after other successful cults. Why recreate the wheel when so many have already succeeded at creating devoted followers, sleeping with hundreds of beautiful women, getting people to work for free, etc. So much research has already been done on cults and cult formation. Offer the “opportunity” to work for you for free, and then cull members of this volunteer workforce to join your inner circle of devotees. This handy training video says it all, really:

4. Offer free or cheap initial seminars to hook victims. All great personal development gurus make sure that the initial seminar is free or reasonably priced. This is a great bait-and-switch, and also makes people feel like they owe you something. Use the altered state you have elicited in your audience to deliver a long, multiple hour, extremely aggressive pitch right at the emotional peak of your workshop. Don’t forget to use all of your advanced understanding of human psychology, sales, and manipulation!

Make sure to charge at least $5,000-10,000 for this “advanced” training to create extreme perceived value–equivalent or greater than a college education in 5 days–even though the advanced training is basically the intro repackaged. Encourage participants who don’t have the money to put it on a credit card or post-date a check, using the magical manifestation powers thinking they’ve learned in the seminar to somehow find a way to make the money by the time the check clears. Distract from the fact that many will issue chargebacks or bounce checks when they realize they were being manipulated–have your trained collections team (or what we like to call “financial coaches”) work with such resistance later.

Answer objections about the outlandish prices in advance by framing resistance to impulsively buying as “limiting beliefs” that will cause financial failure throughout their lives if they can’t “break through” them now, ignoring the fact that many previous participants in the advanced courses declared bankruptcy due to this “success strategy” and the high costs of the workshops. If necessary, plant people in the audience to run to the sales tables to create social proof. That should get you a good 2/3rds of people signing up, and even after chargebacks and bounced checks you’ll still net a pretty profit.

5. Publicly thank people, but don’t cite anything. Thank authors that you’ve ripped material from publicly and with tears in your eyes. This will end up sounding like you have referenced where your ideas came from (most of which are not original, after all, since the only thing you are an expert in is your own PR). Yet since you haven’t actually referenced any idea in particular, you’ll still sound like you made up all this stuff on your own. What better way to come off as a nice and incredibly brilliant guy when you are actually a narcissistic megalomaniac! By the way, don’t get a degree in any psychological field, so you won’t have any pesky colleagues or overseeing boards. In order to pull that off though, you must…

6. Polish your image, not your content. You could focus on better techniques for helping people and relieving their suffering, but how would that help you become a rock star and get all the ladies! Don’t be silly. Work on what’s most important: your image. Get your teeth whitened and capped. Get on Oprah. Surround yourself with celebrities at every opportunity (even get them as clients). Sue the crap out of all detractors. Superficiality breeds success. If you want people to treat you like a god, you must look like one!

7. Start a Multi-Level Marketing scheme. Multi-level marketing is great…if you’re at the top of the pyramid! By starting an MLM, you can leverage the hype from your CDs and seminars towards making you money. MLM’s don’t actually provide any real chance of anyone making money, but you won’t need to worry about that, for you can twist your teachings by spinning structural inequities as being the fault of individuals who aren’t “going for it 1000%,” have a “negative attitude,” or have a bad “money blueprint”…which means they are in need of more seminars!

There you have it–the 7 Secrets of Success for developing your superpowered personal development cult…er mastermind group.

Have any additional tips? Please add them in the comments.

The questions I never hear asked however in personal development are “who doesn’t need more personal power? When does someone have too much personal power? How much do we want? What is the optimum amount, and what happens when we have too much?”

From my personal experience watching people in personal development communities and developing personal power myself, too much personal power can definitely be a bad thing. Let’s take an example.

Imagine a weak, shy young man who has terrible luck with women and who decides he wants to become more confident with the ladies. He does all sorts of inner work to get in touch with his emotions and communicate more authentically, all of which is really good stuff. But since he’s framed his life around the development of personal power, he now sees all social interactions in terms of hierarchies, and aims to be top dog (alpha) in all situations. While he’s not exactly a macho jerk due to his innate sensitivity and his new slick communication skills and emotional authenticity, he’s still a bit of an asshole in a strange way. For instance, nobody else can get a word in when he walks in the door due to his overwhelming personal power and charisma. He can’t be missed, as he now dresses in stylish and even flashy ways. He tells extremely interesting stories, talks loudly, and takes up a lot of space.

Sound far fetched? Sound like “it could never happen to me?” Well, yes, it can happen to you. It happened to me for a while, and I’ve seen it directly happen to others I know personally and peripherally. It’s a strange experience, going from a sense of such deep unworthiness and shyness to suddenly (and very naturally) dominating conversation, holding listeners enraptured with every word, beaming confidence and taking up space.

When one is afraid of taking up space, often the injunction from personal development literature (and popular men’s work and “seduction community” stuff) is to confidently take up space, even with your body language (hold your legs apart when you sit, speak loudly and quickly, etc.). But this frames social interaction in terms of a zero-sum game (if I win, you lose or vice versa). If there is only so much social-emotional space to occupy and I’m now taking up more than my fair share, it leaves less room for others.

When you see social interaction as a non-zero-sum game (we can both win), then personal power becomes far less important, and in fact having a lot of it can overwhelm or overpower someone else who is say wanting to contemplate an idea slowly and carefully.

When I was first developing and working on getting enough personal power, I held certain people up as role models: Tony Robbins, breakdancers, even rap artists. But now I see things a bit differently. The Tony Robbins of the Personal Power tapes sounds to me like a self-absorbed narcissist (I don’t know him personally though, and it was the 80’s). Breakdancers sometimes appear overly confident, as if picking a fight so they can show off. Rap artists seem sex and power obsessed (how many women and cars does one man need?).

Everyone has a need for personal power, just as everyone has a need for food. But just as our need for food is not infinite, and taking in too much can be harmful, too much personal power could be problematic for an individual, or at the very least for the people around that individual.

What do you think? Is there a limit to how much personal power is appropriate for a given person in a given context? Add your thoughts in the comments.

Recently my friend and partner on this project Ryan Oelke had to make some tough decisions about what he could be involved in, and unfortunately Precision Change didn’t make the cut. As we all know, especially us productivity geeks, there is always more to do than we could ever possibly do, and sometimes we have to make these kinds of decisions.

Precision Change is definitely going to continue as a show. It’s too fun for me, and I’ve been getting too much positive feedback to stop now. It would help me if more listeners became coaching clients so that I don’t have to get other jobs, but hey, all good things come to those who wait, right?

In the mean time, I’m looking for someone to help produce the show. In fact, I will give you the official title of Executive Producer for your resume. In a year when we are the #1 podcast in iTunes for the Health/Self-Help category, perhaps that will help you to make your first million.

In particular, I’m looking for help in two ways to continue the show:

1. Production/Audio Engineering. I need someone to do the audio editing (or I guess I could learn too, but it’s more fun with a team). It’s not that complicated, just simple edits in Garage Band or ProTools if you have it, mostly for “umms” and “ahhs” and 2-5 edits for content, plus arranging the PowerUp segment and initial voiceover. Probably a grand total of 1-2 hours per episode if you already have audio engineering skills.
2. Someone to keep Duff on track. As a creative type, I have a tendency to forget when things need to get done, when we need to search for more guests, etc. Ryan was great at reminding me about these details in a non-violent manner, even when I was getting them done at 1 in the morning.

If you are interested in either or both roles, please email duff [at] precisionchange [dot] com. The pay is low ($0), but if there is something you’d like to promote that is relevant to the show, I’d love to do it. It’s also a great resume builder, and I’m totally open to creative ideas of what to do with the show.

Also, if we come up with any ingenious ways of making cash from the show and this website (I have a couple ideas), I’d happily share the revenue in a way that is fair.

Are you shy? Do you lack self-confidence, motivation, and a belief in yourself?

If so, I feel your pain. I was a seriously shy kid who was afraid of basically everything, but especially other people. But through persistent effort and little acts of courage, I have significantly overcome the shyness of my youth and even unleashed a fair bit of charisma. If I can go from a painfully shy kid to a podcast host, you certainly can become more self-confident and create more of the life you desire.

Listen in as I, Duff McDuffee, talk with John Wesley, founder of popular personal development blog PickTheBrain.com and another formerly shy guy, about getting started with personal development.

In this conversation, you will learn…

• What book John Wesley recommends for getting started in developing yourself.
• The key reframe for getting over shyness and social anxiety.
• How little acts of courage add up to build a solid belief in yourself and your abilities.
• How to save two birds with one bird sanctuary through the use of “multiple positives.”
• Why the 9-5 office worker may become a thing of the past, and how this benefits your career goals.
• Why you need a compelling vision for your future if you are lacking self-confidence and motivation.

Listen to the end for a tip from the very insightful Charles Gilkey of ProductiveFlourishing.com.

If you like this episode, please share the love by Digging it, giving it a thumbs up on StumbleUpon, or bookmark it on del.icio.us. Thanks!

Also, subscribe free to get updates automatically by email, iTunes, or RSS (what is RSS?).

Stuff we talked about:

- PickTheBrain.com, the classy self-development blog founded by this week’s guest
- Steve Pavlina’s blog, the blog that launched a thousand blogs
- The Magic of Thinking Big, an excellent book for newbies to self-development, a classic
- Overcoming shyness article, a popular post from PickTheBrain
- Multiple positives article, a great concept and solid post
- The 9-5 office worker as a thing of the past? I think so too, in fact it already is for me!
- The Four Hour Workweek, Tim Ferris’ controversial book, filled with strange ideas that might forever turn you into an anti-9to5′er
- WordPress, the wonderful free and open-source blog software that this blog and many others are powered by

John Wesley

Duff McDuffee

What David perhaps doesn’t realize is that being isn’t the same as inactivity (or not-doing). Rather it is the connection with a fundamental, and formless aspect, of reality. That connection can happen during relative inactivity or during the most intense activity. The sages of all of the world’s wisdom tradition have recognized this. In the Taoist tradition we see references to the phrase “effortless effort”, in the Christian tradition we see a deep concern with the integration of contemplation and action, and in the Buddhist tradition we see the activity of the Bodhisattva, who does not forsake the world for some sort of pure being, but rather commits to helping all beings realize that same being. In short, there is absolutely no contradiction between being and doing, and many people throughout the millennia have recognized this.

But let’s not be too hard on David Allen. Being isn’t his main focus, and for what he has done in the world of doing, he has helped a tremendous number of people. Some of those people (like me) have even used his system to deepen their connection with and recognition of being. Thanks David!

That being said, if David, or any other productivity nuts are reading this, I want you to know that just as there are some great methodologies to help us do, like his GTD system, there are also many great methodologies for being. Indeed, just as David suggestions systematic instructions for how to become more organized, effective, and attentive to our life’s activity, there are many systematic instructions for helping one come to find deep levels of being, of stillness, and peace, in the very midst of doing!

Meditation techniques like Vipassana, Zen, Centering Prayer, Raja Yoga (not just the physical poses but the whole system of yoga), Vedanta, Sufi meditation, etc. are all methodologies for revealing the deepest truths about who we are. This truth is not opposed to the world (as many spiritual seekers often believe) but is rather something that deeply transcends the world, while also being intimately connected with it. It is both immanent and transcendent.

When one begins to awaken to their true being, their engagement with the world can emerge from a place of much greater stillness, peace, and clarity. Certain confusions can drop away, and we are free to engage our lives with a greater sense of freedom. This can be a tremendous compliment for mastering productivity, and as far as I can tell, one without the other can actually be a great disservice to our highest potential as human beings.

Are you confusing upgrading your computer with upgrading your life?

Maybe not, but are you really asking the tough questions of life, or are you finding yourself installing another FireFox plugin, hoping it will somehow ease that sense of angst and anxiety you are feeling about your life? Isn’t it time you sunk a little deeper and got real with yourself?

This week I (Duff) talk with Clay Collins, writer at TheGrowingLife.com, about truly hacking your life by asking the tough questions and living creatively.

This is part 2 of 2. Check out part 1 here.

In this second part of the conversation, we talk about…

• Why computer hacks probably shouldn’t be considered “life” hacks…and what should.
• Why “if there’s a path, it’s not your path,” and how to find yours!
• How no Firefox add-on is going to help you ask the tough questions of what life’s about.
• Why there’s no “there” there in doing things that are “going to lead to somewhere.”
• Why you should never affirm “everything I touch turns to gold” or risk ending up like King Midas!
• The many forms of lifestyle design, and why only a custom design will do.
• Why if you are truly lifehacking, you might appear flaky for a while, but eventually you will work out the bugs.

Listen in to the end for a tip from Charles Gilkey of productiveflourishing.com, a professor of Philosophy and a smart, insightful guy with whom I had the pleasure of chatting recently. I recommend you check out his blog.

If you like this episode, please share the love by Digging it, giving it a thumbs up on StumbleUpon, or bookmark it on del.icio.us. Thanks!

Stuff we talked about:

- The Growing Life, Clay’s kickass blog
- The Life Hack Misnomer, an article on Clay’s blog that goes more in depth into the “lifehack” language, and where it goes wrong
- Philosopher’s Notes, Brian Johnson’s cool personal development book summary service (PDF’s and MP3 audio). Tell Brian that Duff sent you.
- The Cult of Abundance, Goal Autoimmune Disorder, & Abundance 2.0, a killer blog post from Clay, complete with videos from YouTube.
- Vagabonding, a book and a lifestyle for living and traveling on the cheap.
- The Future of Success, an audiobook I recently listened to. Robert Reich is a freakin’ genius. I need to read more Economics.

Clay Collins

Duff McDuffee

Are you truly thinking for yourself, about what makes you come alive, or are you blindly following the advice of personal development experts?

Listen in as host Duff McDuffee talks with with Clay Collins, blogger at TheGrowingLife.com, about how to truly find your own way in life.

Listen in to the end for a tip to live your life from the inside-out from Charles Gilkey of productiveflourishing.com, a wonderfully philosophical blog on productivity and personal development I recommend you check out.

In this first part of the conversation, you will learn…

• Why becoming an early riser might be bad for your health and your success!
• How sleep deprivation could be harming your cognitive performance without you knowing it.
• Why R-directed creative thinking might become more important than L-directed linear thinking in the near future.
• Why you shouldn’t ask what you can do for the world, but instead what makes you come alive.
• What you should do if you’re feeling out of control, bored, and stuck (hint: it’s not get organized!).
• What’s lacking about most talk on the web about productivity.
• Why you may want to think about your values in words other than “productivity.”

If you like this episode, please share the love by Digging it, giving it a thumbs up on StumbleUpon, or bookmark it on del.icio.us. Thanks!

This is part 1 of 2. Subscribe free to get next week’s update delivered by email, iTunes, or RSS.

Resources:

- The Disruptive Thinker Transport
- The Growing Life
- Why getting up early might be harmful
- A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future
- Five Ways Productivity Can Turn You Into a Real Nutjob

Clay Collins

Duff McDuffee

What are you here to do? If you don’t know, it might be because you’re weighed down by details of life and work.

Listen in as host Duff McDuffee and Executive Producer Ryan Oelke talk with David Allen, author of Getting Things Done, about mastering the mundane to allow your spirit to soar.

In this final part of the conversation, you will learn…

• Why “if you go to the beach to get a tan and you don’t get a tan, you’re unproductive.”
• What the advantages of working from the bottom-up are instead of starting with visioning and working down.
• Why if you are here on the planet to do something, and you aren’t doing it, you are going to feel strange.
• Some highlights from David’s next book, due in December of 2008, on the deeper principles behind the principles of GTD.
• How to accept current reality, so it doesn’t own you.
• What about GTD changes and what stays the same when applied in a group or relationship.

Also, David answers a question from Dustin Wax of Lifehack.org about what David still has to learn.

If you like this episode, please Digg it, give it a thumbs up on StumbleUpon, or bookmark it on del.icio.us. Thanks!

This is part 3 of 3. Listen to part 1 and part 2 from the previous two weeks for more great conversation with David Allen.

Resources:

- Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity
- Ready for Anything: 52 Productivity Principles for Work and Life
- Making it All Work: Winning at the Game of Work and the Business of Life
- David Allen Company

David Allen

Duff McDuffee

Ryan Oelke

One of my favorite books on personal productivity is David Allen’s Getting Things Done. The subtitle is “The Art of Stress-Free Productivity” and lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the “stress-free” part.

Much of the productivity material on the web focuses on hacks, tips, and tricks to increase productivity at work–learning keyboard shortcuts, installing new organizing software, keeping a time log, reducing distractions, etc. This is all fine information, but if we implement these techniques of becoming more productive and are just as stressed, we have failed at the most important thing: becoming stress-free, happy people.

Productivity’s Diminishing Returns

If we make more money but still worry constantly about money, we have not attained financial freedom. Similarly, if we become much more efficient, organized, and productive but are equally if not more stressed, we have not achieved productive freedom. While it might be helpful to be more productive or make more money, the #1 priority must be to cultivate a stress-free state in the midst of “doing.”

The evidence from happiness studies concludes that making more money up to a modest point contributes to happiness. Once they can study it, I believe we will similarly find a kind of diminishing returns on increased productivity relative to happiness. Being more organized and productive doesn’t necessarily make your work stress-free, as a boss can give you more to do, or you can take on more personal projects. But most importantly however, increased productivity doesn’t necessarily change your relationship to your mind, and to doing itself, and therefore doesn’t necessarily make you happier.

Befriending Your Mind is The Key to Stress-Free

It has occurred to me that the reason GTD gives a sense of peace and ease (stress-free productivity) when it does is because by completely “getting everything out of your head” you are completely acknowledging and appreciating that part of yourself that reminds you to do things. Also, by creating trust in your system, you are cultivating self-leadership, a kind of trust in yourself that you will acknowledge and take in information from all the parts of yourself, and then manage that information and act upon it skillfully.

It’s common knowledge amongst GTD practitioners that getting most things out of your head doesn’t give you that profound feeling of relief. Neither does mostly trusting your system, or mostly reviewing everything, or clearing nearly all of your emails from your inbox. Only 100% gives that stress-free feeling.

Why 100%? Is it because David Allen wants us all to be perfectionists? No–it’s because only by completely accepting something 100% do we get an “unconditional” feeling, like love, flow, peace, OKness, etc. Do you really think you can feel inner peace if you only accept most of reality as it is? Have you ever experienced being in the zone when you were only mostly focusing on the task at hand? I don’t think so.

Alternative Ways to Befriend the Mind

There are also many other ways of befriending your mind that lead to less stress. Mindfulness meditation is one way as in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction or Vipassana meditation. Both are ways of training the mind, kind of like training a puppy to sit and not poop on the rug. If you beat the pooch, you will get bit. If however you are patient and persistent and loving, you will have a new furry best friend.

You could appreciate this part directly by assuming it has a positive purpose for you, and then seeking to find out what it is. Maybe it just wants you to remember the milk and be successful in work, but just doesn’t know the best way to make that happen for you. There is a technique that emerged from NLP called Core Transformation that I’ve been studying and working with lately that has you directly appreciate a part, and seek it’s positive purpose in a very powerful way.

You could also appreciate the part by seeing and hearing it differently, what is called in NLP changing the submodalities. If you imagine what this part is like, perhaps it looks and sounds like a nagging parent. What if instead it were a sexy secretary telling you what to do? Or simply a neutral computer algorithm?

Or you could appreciate the part by asking yourself “what if you didn’t have this part?” What if you had a brain disorder that made it so that you didn’t have a voice inside reminding you of things to do? How would you know what to do at all? You would be completely absent-minded and wouldn’t be able to remember any details. You wouldn’t even remember to check your lists! You’d also lack creative thoughts about what you want to do and creative solutions for problems.

The key no matter what the technique seems to be a real appreciation for the field of information that your mind is giving you.

Self-Leadership is Protection Against Perfectionism in GTD

People new to GTD often take David Allen’s advice and do a complete “core dump” or “mindsweep” and really get everything out of their head, or really clear their email inbox to 0. They feel a profound sense of relief and even inner peace with their work, perhaps for the first time ever. This inner peace can be seen as a result of fully acknowledging and accepting the part of the mind that reminds you of what you are committed to or might want to do. It’s in some ways a state of unconditional love!

Where people go wrong next though is letting this part dominate their lives. They become productivity robots, productivity perfectionists (and believe me, I’ve been there!), and overachievers–constantly looking for more things to do and faster ways to do them. In many ways our entire modern economy is being lead by these parts of ourselves.

But unconditional acceptance of a part does not mean that this part runs your life! Look–if you unconditionally love your children, it doesn’t mean they get to make decisions about whether or not they get to play with matches, or eat nothing but candy. You love your kids, you listen to their requests, but you also set reasonable limits and make intelligent decisions that keep everyone safe.

Be the Master of Your Own Mind

The part of you that reminds you of your commitments and things you might want to do is a better servant than master. You can gain the benefits of 100% acknowledging and appreciating the job this part of your mind plays without letting it take the reigns of your life. You do that by capturing everything, but then make a decision about what you are going to do and not do based on all the input from your whole mind, including from other intuitive feelings, hunches, or even conflicting interests.

When you let perfectionist productivity rule, it’s as if you’re letting the legal department make decisions for the entire company. Instead, let the legal department do what it does best (making sure you don’t get screwed) but have the CEO make the decisions about what you are and aren’t going to do with full input from all relevant parties.

The key is to stress-free productivity is to completely accept this part of yourself and take in the information it provides you without letting it run your life. It is a poor leader of your internal family system, and is not even very good at deciding or prioritizing or letting you know at the right times or the right contexts, as David Allen so insightfully points out.

When you are working, does time disappear? It may be hard to imagine. But it is possible to get everything off your mind so that you can be more here, right now. GTD provides a systematic practice for doing just that.

On this episode, host Duff McDuffee and Executive Producer Ryan Oelke talk with David Allen, author of Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity about handling mechanical things mechanically, so that you can free your focus for creative work.

In this conversation, you will learn…

• What to ask yourself if your someday/maybe list gets out of control.
• Why your lists are totally your responsibility and totally in your control.
• The importance of flexibility and appropriate fit in your application of GTD.
• How potential meaning overload (and not “information overload”) is the cause of a great deal of stress.
• What Bit Literacy and the digital age mean for Getting Things Done.
• Why David Allen wirelessly emails his wife when sitting right next to her.
• What we are really seeking from “simplicity” and how to achieve it.

Also in this interview, David answers questions from Mark Hurst (author of Bit Literacy) and Leo Babauta (blogger at ZenHabits.net).

If you like this episode, please Digg it, give it a thumbs up on StumbleUpon, or bookmark it on del.icio.us. Thanks!

This is part 2 of 3. Listen to next week’s episode for part 3, and last week’s for part 1.

Resources:

- Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity
- Ready for Anything: 52 Productivity Principles for Work and Life
- Making it All Work: Winning at the Game of Work and the Business of Life
- David Allen Company

David Allen

Duff McDuffee

Ryan Oelke

I recently read one of those books that changes your life. Unfortunately I think it’s out of print, but it’s called The Energy Break: Recharge Your Life with Autokinetics by Bradford Keeney. I found a used copy at a bookstore, and there appear to be copies on Amazon as well.

I’ve been Twittering a lot about autokinetics lately and I figured it was time to write a post about it, as I think it fills in a HUGE missing piece of personal productivity for me. Autokinetics is the first technique I’ve ever seen to explicitly help you access an energized, creative flow state in 10 minutes or less. It’s also a perfect counterpoint to systems like GTD because it involves no “work” whatsoever, and actually cultivates an effortless, purposeless state of mind and body where creativity flows like a fountain, and doing and being merge into easeful activity. In Clay Collins‘ language, it is the ultimate “anti-hack.”

Since it’s a fairly new topic for me (and the blogosphere), in this article I’ll be covering the background, and in a subsequent article I’ll cover exactly how to practice it.

Who is Bradford Keeney?

Keeney was a prominent family therapist who at the peak of his career realized that for all of his cleverness (and he is an incredibly clever psychotherapist) and knowledge of family systems, he could not fix the problems in his own family. So he had a spiritual crisis and found himself looking for something deeper. For him that meant studying the indigenous spiritual traditions around the world by participating in their ceremonies and practices. And what he found was that in many cultures throughout the world, not only are there traditions of relaxing and concentrating in meditative absorption, there are also traditions of energizing and arousing in ecstatic movement and expression.

Now I want to make it clear–you don’t have to believe in any weird stuff or study with any tribal shaman to make use of autokinetics any more than you have to become a Hindu and fly to India to learn to relax and concentrate. Mindfulness-based stress reduction is a completely secular technique that works no matter what your religion or lack thereof. The same is true of what Keeney calls “autokinetics”–it is a completely secular and rational technique that can be experienced directly by anyone, regardless of belief or lack of belief.

What is “Autokinetics”?

Autokinetics is short for automatic kinetics, which is “the practice of making automatic or spontaneous body movements that bring forth life energy.” It’s practiced in one or two 10-minute sessions, sitting on a chair or bench (or standing if you prefer), and has 3 phases that move progressively more into a kind of energized flow state. But the best part is because the movements are to be made in a way that feels automatic, the technique involves no “work” per say, unlike meditation which can become to feel like a chore and still requires disciplined attention.

It sounds simple, even dumb, but so does running (put one foot in front of the other for multiple miles) or meditation (sit and do nothing but notice your breath). The key is to have the movements feel automatic, even though you are making them. Try it right now! While you are reading this, allow your body to move how it wants without conscious effort. The goals is to have it feel like the movements are moving you, rather than you are moving your body.

With this simple practice you are cultivating “effortless effort.” Could that perhaps be useful in your work life? To feel like work just pours out of you naturally and easily? Hmmm….

Friday Night Dance Therapy

Club pic from fabbio.

How do I know autokinetics works? Well, I’ve actually been practicing it for years without knowing it. Growing up I had intense, debilitating social anxiety. I never dated until age 18 (not even one date!). I felt awkward and shy nearly always. I was afraid of everything–banana peel strings, dogs, other people’s bathrooms, you name it. I was a total perfectionist, procrastinator, and generally high-strung dude.

I wanted desperately to be comfortable in social situations. The situation that scared me the most was dancing, so I counter-phobically went out dancing 3 or 4 nights a week, alone, in order to challenge myself…for about 5 years!

At first I found it excruciatingly difficult to make any movements that felt coordinated and spontaneous for many, many evenings. Every movement of my body felt awkward, planned, and just plain stupid. A voice inside berated me for my awkwardness and idiocy–why was I out doing this to myself? Eventually I broke through again and again to a spontaneous experience of flow and joy, which chipped away at my social anxiety, silenced my inner critic, and gave me an experience of social ease–even charisma–that I never imagined possible.

Today I enjoy dancing more than just about anything. I am now regularly complimented for being a great dancer and I have experienced wonderful and profound flow states from dance. I am just now learning how to apply this principle of flow and ease to my work life. But I always thought I’d discovered something new and strange that no one else would understand, so I usually keep this profound experience of growth to myself. Little did I know I had been practicing autokinetics, the practice of making automatic or spontaneous body movements that bring forth life energy.

What is “Life Energy” and How Do We Get More of It?

Reiki Cat from anomalous4.

Now what exactly is life energy? Am I getting all woo-woo on you? Put away the crystals and incense. Life energy is simply what it sounds like–feeling energized and alive, beaming with happiness and joy…naturally, i.e. without the Starbucks. It’s what you feel when watching a great movie, when you’re in love, when watching a sunset or crossing the finish line of a marathon. Life energy is inspiration, creativity, and joy. It’s what I felt when dancing after getting over the years of shyness and just moving and shaking and having fun.

If you have kids, you know that they can’t stop jiggling, shaking, talking, and generally bouncing off the walls with energy–and this torrent of energy only stops when they are sleeping. But somewhere in junior high or high school we have this constant agitation suppressed by well-meaning teachers and what happens? We fall asleep.

When we get out of school and get a job, we similarly have trouble staying awake and alert sitting at desks 8-12 hours a day. So we reach for the coffee–an artificial stimulant of life energy–in order to have the energy to do that which just doesn’t seem to naturally energize us. We are drowsy and stressed most of the day. But on the weekend when we engage in a creative project, play sports, watch a powerful movie, or make love, we feel that surge of energy throughout our bodies and feel alive again for the moment.

Keeney’s claim is that a major reason why we are tired most of the time is not because we aren’t resting enough (how draining to the body is it really to sit all day?) but because we aren’t regularly accessing this life energy, this passion, this intuitive flow of creativity that inspires us and literally moves us.

Our bodies are not machines needing to be refueled. We are fine instruments needing to be regularly re-tuned. By practicing automatic or spontaneous body movements we cultivate an energized flow state. We can re-tune ourselves to this ease and flow, and it can begin to permeate our life and our work.

Are you busy? Of course you are! But are you calm and focused while doing things? Do you even think this is possible?

On this episode, host Duff McDuffee and Executive Producer Ryan Oelke talk with David Allen, author of Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity about learning the martial art of knowledge work.

We ask David some questions that many people have about the GTD methodology, including covering common problems people have with implementing it. If you are familiar with the basics of GTD, you may find this interview especially helpful in answering some of your burning questions.

In this conversation, you will learn…

• Why you can only feel good about what you’re not doing when you know what it is.
• Why simply listing every commitment you have will help you if you tend to overcommit to things.
• How to get started, or get back on the GTD wagon if you’ve fallen off.
• Why it’s so important to build the extended mind, outside of your head.
• Why priority lists are fine, as long as you are willing to rewrite them every 5 minutes!
• Why David does his weekly review sometimes 1 or 2 times every day.
• What kinds of mental flexibility are required for mastering the martial art of work and life.
• Whether starting with GTD by doing it all at once or gradually is better for you.
• Why the biggest challenge of GTD is getting over the good feelings that come from doing it.

If you like this episode, please Digg it, give it a thumbs up on StumbleUpon, or bookmark it on del.icio.us. Thanks!

This is part 1 of 3. After you’re done with this one, listen to part 2, and part 3.

And thanks to Clay Collins of The Growing Life: Alternative Productivity, Anti-Hacks for Living for the PowerUp tip of the week.

Resources:

- Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity
- Ready for Anything: 52 Productivity Principles for Work and Life
- Making it All Work: Winning at the Game of Work and the Business of Life
- David Allen Company

David Allen

Duff McDuffee

Ryan Oelke

By getting more things done, we believe we will make more money, have more time, and therefore have more happiness. But what are you going to do with that money and time?

We all know intuitively that more money won’t make us happy. Those who consult others on money have clients with money problems making $30,000 a year and $800,000 a year. Happiness studies have shown no correlation between increased life satisfaction and making more than about $36,000 a year.

We also know intuitively that more time won’t make us happy, either. I remember being so excited when school got out, only to be totally bored the next day, and for the rest of the summer. Many people find that they can’t relax–or even stop checking work email–when they are on vacation. And try relaxing on vacation when you have kids!

Don’t get me wrong–excess time and money are great. But what exactly are you going to do with that time and money?

Many people when they fantasize about what they’d rather be doing instead of their crappy job think of hanging out on some tropical island. I’ve met several wealthy people who’ve sold a business and then done this. It’s great for about a week, maybe 4, but then what? After a while you get restless, and want to do something–maybe not toil away at an office, but certainly contribute to the world, or create something unique, or help others in some way.

I say, why wait?

Do what you are most wanting to do, now. Do what you are here to do.

Don’t put your life’s purpose on your someday/maybe list.

Productivity is the measure of outputs per unit of input, i.e. efficiency. The value hidden in “productivity” is frugality, and frugality does not mean being a tightwad but “sucking the marrow out of life.” Personal productivity is about living fully–not someday/maybe, but RIGHT NOW.

A lot has also been written about simplicity. As David Allen talks about on an upcoming episode of Precision Change, simplicity is about being deeply present in the moment, getting into the zone, so that the only thing that matters is this very moment.

And this very moment is all that we ever have, right?

In the coming weeks, I’ll be writing and talking more about productivity, simplicity, and some specific methods for cultivating this flow state, this presence, this zone right in the midst of your work…so you won’t have to work ever harder to achieve something you can have right now.

Do you think you are “doing just fine” with your clutter? You might not be considering what it really costs you in terms of the energy it is sapping from what you really want to be doing.

This week we continue our talk with Erin Doland of Unclutterer.com and RealSimple.com about the costs and benefits of clearing the clutter.

In this conversation, you will learn…

• Which books to definitely get rid of first, and which to hold on to.
• Two sexy ebook readers worth considering.
• Why you might find it important to not have a job that makes you want to poke your eye out with a hot metal pipe.
• How being aware of the cost of clutter and procrastination can help you to live the life you desire.
• How uncluttering and mindfulness of the Earth’s limited resources are interconnected.
• What uncluttering is all about—living the life you want, doing more of what is most important to you.

If you like this episode, please Digg it, give it a thumbs up on StumbleUpon, or bookmark it on del.icio.us. Thanks!

Listen to last week’s episode for part 1.

Resources:

- Unclutterer.com
- Amazon Kindle
- Sony PRS-500 eBook reader

Erin Doland

Duff McDuffee

I just read a short book called The Underachiever’s Manifesto: The Guide to Accomplishing Little and Feeling Great by Ray Bennett, M.D. It’s appropriately very short–you can read it in 30 minutes, after which you feel you accomplished something…something very small.

While nearly everyone has the potential to improve their lives, often times our idealistic standards keep us from doing anything, or even make us more unhappy than not having them. Because the neighbor is a raw foods evangelist claiming “cooked food is poison,” we don’t even bother eating a serving of vegetables at dinner, reasoning “it’s too much work to be healthy.” Yet we feel like crap–not because of the food we’re eating, but because of the thought that we should be eating better! If we’d simply lower our standards to the bare minimum to meet our real needs, we’d find it’s incredibly easy to improve our lives in substantial ways.

Here are 3 ways to lower your standards for greater happiness and real achievement (I’d write more, but that’s enough for now):

• Exercise 20 minutes a day, max. Go for a walk, do some pushups and bodyweight squats, and stretch comfortably. Don’t let yourself do more! Do you really need to be more fit than this? Get fit over a year or more’s time, not in a 12-week blitz.
• Get Rich Slowly.
• Find work you love by working less. Do something you enjoy in the extra time you’d be putting in at the office. Find at least 10-30 minutes a day to have fun or do something creative. By developing your passions, you’re less likely to burn out, and more likely to learn something fun that you could also get paid for.
• Less courage, more consistency. I often recommend to clients that they do something each day that is at a level 2-3 of courage out of 10, and avoid doing things that require an 8-10 of courage whenever possible. Reserve your adrenal glands for life and death emergencies!

Ha, I gave you 4 points. That’s a tip called underpromise, overdeliver. It’s easier to go the extra mile when you only promised you’d run one mile than if you promised a marathon. This is something I’m really working on personally.

The things that I’ve made the most significant progress on in my life have often been areas in which I set minimum standards and worked on them over long periods of time. For instance, when I had social anxiety, I would attempt to make eye contact and smile with a couple people a day until that felt comfortable. Sometimes I got too wound up and tried to make huge leaps in progress, but I inevitably crashed.

What can you achieve less at today?

p.s. I thought about putting a photo in this post, but it doesn’t really need one. Plus, I put a lot of work into the Precision Change podcast, which is where more of my strengths and interests lie anyway.

Duff here. I just installed a shiny new comment system, thanks to the great folks at Intense Debate, because I’m really wanting to stir up dialogue around these topics. Nobody has the final answer here, including our expert interviewees. (Of course, please keep the dialogue constructive and respectful.)

Also, please give us your feedback on our podcast episodes and articles. I invite you to think of this podcast as your podcast–what author, blogger, or even unknown (who should be more well-known) would you like to hear an interview with? What two authors would you like to hear debate or dialogue together? (Personally I’d love to hear Tony Robbins and Eckhart Tolle debate about the role of achievement in a life well-lived.) What would really help you make a change in your life, or be really entertaining?

Thank you for reading and listening!

How do we get rid of clutter and live a simpler, organized, more conscious life?

This week we talk with Erin Doland of Unclutterer.com and RealSimple.com about cutting the crap to make room for more of what you love.

In this conversation, you will learn…

• How clutter doesn’t always start out as clutter.
• Why if you are in a constant state of disorganization now, you absolutely can change.
• What exactly to start on to begin uncluttering your life.
• Why getting a storage unit is almost always a bad idea.
• The machine that will finally give you a paperless office.
• A simple way to clear out kitchen clutter.
• Why uncluttering is really just about finding what makes you happy and what really matters to you.

If you like this episode, please Digg it, give it a thumbs up on StumbleUpon, bookmark it on del.icio.us, and email it to someone who might benefit. Thanks for spreading the word about Precision Change!

Listen in next week for part 2.

Resources:

- Unclutterer.com
- Fujitsu ScanSnap on Unclutterer
- Freedom Filer on Unclutterer

Erin Doland

Duff McDuffee

Do you have 1000’s of emails sitting in your inbox right now, many unread, all nagging at you to do something about them? Have you declared email bankruptcy, hoping that “if it’s important, they’ll write back?” This sucks, eh? But you’re not alone. And more importantly…

Come to the free Email Mastery seminar, part of the Precision Change seminar series. I’ll be hosting with fellow life coach and entrepreneur Ryan Oelke. We will hold your hands through processing your inbox to 0, perhaps for the first time!

Join us at The Cup (on 16th and Pearl in Boulder) on Wednesday May 14th at 5:30pm and achieve inbox emptiness in under an hour. Bring a laptop, as this is a hands-on workshop.

In this seminar, you will learn…

• How to get your inbox to 0, even if it’s never been there before!
• Why software won’t solve the problem, and what will.
• How to write emails so you get fewer of them.
• Why none of your emails need be longer than 5 sentences.
• What the 3 types of emails are, and what to do with each.
• How to sort through your emails with lightning speed.
• Why you don’t need to “do” an email to get it out of the inbox.

Take responsibility for your relationship to the digital world now by attending this 60-minute free workshop. And email this to friends who might benefit!

This free seminar is limited to 12 people. Please RSVP to Duff to reserve your spot: duff [at] precisionchange [dot] com.

Have a productive day!

Chances are you haven’t had a single course in the most important subject in your life: love. Why not make it a study and realize the power of opening up?

In part 2 of this discussion with Brian Johnson of PhilosophersNotes.com (summaries of personal development books “for the busy self-actualizer”) Duff and Brian chat about some of the surprising findings of the relationship gurus:

• The 5:1 ratio, and why it is critical to having a successful relationship.
• How the vocabulary of selfishness is correlated to increased heart attacks!
• How your actions in difficult conversations determine what you are really committed to.

If you like this episode, please Digg it, give it a thumbs up on StumbleUpon, bookmark it on del.icio.us, and/or email it to someone who might benefit. Thanks for spreading the word about Precision Change!

Resources:

- Philosopher’s Notes
- Think Arete
- Love by Leo Buscaglia
- Gay and Katie Hendricks

Brian Johnson

Duff McDuffee

Photo credit: El Garza

Succeeding regularly is comfortable. I regularly succeed at making myself breakfast. But I’m 28 and of average to high intelligence, so I don’t put a check on my goal chart for cooking myself some eggs. I’m grateful for my ability to feed myself, but if I don’t have some goals I could and probably will fail at, then I’m not really living up to my potential.

I do not like to repeat successes. I like to go on to other things.
~ Walt Disney

Many people have no real goals, i.e. goals that matter deeply to them that they are actually working towards, goals that there is a good chance they could fail at–and that to succeed at them they’d need to seriously grow. It’s a shame, because unless you have goals like this, you are not really living or feeling the aliveness that comes from “living the dream.” And yes, the dream is like an always receding horizon, but the quest is still worth it.

A Brief History of My Successful Failures

I’ve been a part of several failed startups. How cool is that? I really went for it, tried to do something new and exciting and even world-changing, and it didn’t work. From these experiences I’ve learned a ton about…

• how to make ideals real
• when and how to get practical without losing vision
• how to work well with others
• why sometimes you do everything right and shit happens anyway, and all you can do is let it go and bounce back
• how to stay positive even after your ideals get shattered, your heroes sometimes act like assholes, and businesses you poured your heart into fall apart in 48 hours

(There’s the obligatory personal development blog bulleted list.)

But even having experienced the pain of business failure, I don’t understand how anyone could work a soul-sucking corporate job. Personally I think the 40 hour workweek is archaic, let alone the 50, 60, or 70 hour workweek. Of course, what do I want to do with my free time? Study, practice, create, dialogue with friends, write, and work on personal projects like this one.

Success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.
~ Winston Churchill

I’ve quit many jobs, risking failure and poverty, because I simply would not do the mind-numbing work that was being asked of me. Have I achieved success? Success by who’s criteria? I value my mind, my free-time, and the possibility for creating something unique and meaningful more than a steady and well-paid job, so by that criteria I am totally successful. For someone raising a family, or desiring to impress the neighbors by the size of their television, they will have a somewhat different criteria for achieving success. But no matter the criteria, if you are not failing often, you have become stale or your vision is too small.

On the personal front, I’ve had many failed relationships. My current relationship is overall quite beautiful and wonderful, but that in many ways is because I risked–and experienced–a great deal of failure. I grew up with intense social anxiety, so bad that until junior high I regularly peed myself in class because I was too shy to ask to use the bathroom. I had a crush on one girl from 3rd grade to 8th, and never once talked to her (although she was on my softball team for several years).

I never asked a girl out until college, where the first woman I kissed I ended up in a 2 1/2 year relationship with. I was a co-dependent, depressed pushover through most of the relationship, and when it ended, she took all my friends and I had to find new ones! Luckily I kept playing a bigger game, kept risking failure, and doing so with an open heart. I kept courageously going for what I wanted (failing even at that) and many years later, after many heartbreaks, I have a wonderful woman in my life. And at least every month there are challenges in our wonderful relationship! This is what happens when you are growing.

Risk Failure, One Day at a Time

I love talking to people who are smarter than me, which is one of the joys of hosting the Precision Change podcast. Today I interviewed David Allen, author of Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. It was wonderful talking to him, in part because I suck at doing things. Really! I hate todo lists. I’m basically lazy–passionate, but lazy. I’d much prefer to sit around and think about things, or read something interesting, or just relax outside in the beautiful Boulder sun than to get something done. My friend Theo joked recently that I should write a book called GTOYP: Getting Things Off Your Plate.

Enthusiasm is one of the most powerful engines of success. When you do a thing, do it with all your might. Put your whole soul into it. Stamp it with your own personality. Be active, be energetic, be enthusiastic and faithful, and you will accomplish your object. Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

But yet I love David Allen’s GTD system, because it gives me the tools to manage a weakness (doing) utilizing a strength (thinking). And David Allen himself is a creative philosopher type, like me, who created this system in order to help himself to stay organized and get things done.

When I first thought of emailing his company to get him for the podcast, I felt anxious. What if he thinks we are small potatoes and laughs? Am I worthy of his time? But I felt the fear and did it anyway. What are you putting off because you are afraid you might fail? If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing poorly at first.

The biggest lesson I’ve learned from all of my failures is that when you are really trying to do something important, when you are really trying to change the world, you are probably going to fail hard and often. If you try new and audacious things, at times you are regularly going to look like an idiot and a flake. If you take the creative and unique path you were born to live, your family may disown you. If you think outside the box, people will think you’re crazy, and try to stuff you back into their box. But for those who want to live fully, doing anything less than fully expressing your unique gifts just won’t cut it.

“I have learned this at least by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”
~ Henry David Theoreau

Of course, failing too often, or purposely taking on extreme challenges can be dangerous and counter-productive. I have my fair share of personal experience here too. Don’t be stupid about the challenges you take on, but do regularly challenge yourself so that you continue to grow and express your unique gifts.

What can you risk failing at today?

The transformation try-out however is a slightly different concept, that Duff McDuffee, Ryan Oelke, and myself came up with. It’s different in that we want to constantly evolve the try-out process itself, and because we’ve added these key distinctions and suggestions when performing the 30 day try-out:

1. Keep in mind that changing a habit is often very hard work, and while the benefits are often enormous, doing so can often be massively destabilizing. Often times if you push the edge too far in transformational work, you can end up with a break down of multiple systems, instead of the breakthrough you are looking for. Because human beings are a system of many different tendencies, belief systems, habits, and so on, one major shift to an element of the system can have unforeseen impact on the system-at-large.
2. Know which habit to try and change, at what time, and in what order. Perhaps in order to make other bigger changes you need to start with the simplest one’s of all. For example, say you want to start your own business, but you are in extremely poor health and barely have the energy to maintain your current lifestyle. The 1st thing you may want to change is your energy levels, and to do something related to your health, so that you can have the energy to commit to other larger changes and goals.
3. Clear parameters and the appropriate tracking are invaluable. In order to follow through with a transformation try-out you first have to be very clear about the parameters of the change, and then need to have a reliable way to track your progress. It could be as easy as creating a small calendar on an index card and checking off each day that you perform the new action you are trying to do (or avoid a harmful action). Or it might be more elaborate, require more detailed metrics, happen over a digital medium, or have a collaborative component.
4. While you are participating in a transformation try-out it is also a good idea to keep some sort of record of the process. Keeping a journal with observations about the process, or blogging if you’d like, can help with sticking to it and also learning from the process.
5. Tell people what you are doing, and find others who can understand and support your decision. The more you talk about it, thinking about it, and reference it the easier the try-out will be.

Keep your eyes peeled for transformation try-outs from me and my friends, as we share our successes and failures, and hopefully the larger lessons that we learn along the way. We’ll be posting many of these in a blog format, and hopefully will continue to evolve the “transformation try-out” process itself.

Are you dreaming big enough? And are you backing up your dreams with consistent, daily action?

How do we cut through our limiting beliefs to free our vision while also recognizing and accepting our real limitations?

On this episode, Duff talks with Brian Johnson of PhilosophersNotes.com, a service that provides useful summaries of personal development books “for the busy self-actualizer.”

In this high-energy conversation with two personal development geeks, you will learn…

• How to integrate the magical and the mundane in your hero’s journey.
• Why if there’s a clear path for your life, it’s not your path!
• Why “feeling the fear and doing it anyway” is all important for developing the fearlessness of a spiritual warrior.
• Why it’s important to “love the plateau” in your self-development.
• How to have a truly successful life, one day at a time, by cultivating this simple (but not easy!) daily habit.
• Why you should never check email first thing in the morning if you want to have a great day.
• Why doubts and fears never completely go away if you are living at your edge…no matter how many personal development books or blogs you’ve read.

If you like this episode, please Digg it, give it a thumbs up on StumbleUpon, bookmark it on del.icio.us, and email it to someone who might benefit. Thanks for spreading the word about Precision Change!

Listen in next week for part 2 of this dialogue with Brian Johnson.

Resources:

- Gaia Community
- Think Arete
- Philosophers Notes
- Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway
- Mastery
- Getting Things Done
- The Science of Getting Rich
- The Secret
- Dan Millman’s blog
- Joseph Cambell’s “The Power of Myth”
- The Man Who Tapped the Secrets of the Universe
- The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (audio)
- The 4-Hour Workweek

Brian Johnson

Duff McDuffee

Are you a personal finance n00b?

Never fear. There are some simple steps you can take towards getting out of debt that worked for J.D. Roth, personal finance blogger at Get Rich Slowly, and that will work for you too.

On this episode you will learn…

• Why tracking every penny you spend is a fundamental habit for money mastery
• How to get yourself to save $1000 in an emergency fund
• How to cut monthly expenses while having more fun
• Where to cut back your expenses in a way that will work for you
• How J.D. gambled his IRA on a stock and lost, and what you can learn from his mistake
• A simple strategy for long-term investing

If you like this episode, please Digg it, give it a thumbs up on StumbleUpon, bookmark it on del.icio.us, and email it to someone who might benefit. Thanks for spreading the word!

Resources:

- Get Rich Slowly

J.D. Roth

Duff McDuffee

Do you feel like you are never going to pay off all your debts? Are your finances a constant source of stress in your life?

Learn more about how to pay off your debts and have more control in your life as J.D. Roth, personal finance blogger at Get Rich Slowly, tells us about:

• How to get rich slowly by spending less and earning more.
• How to increase your net worth.
• How to pay off your debts with the “debt snowball method.”
• How striving for perfection can be dangerous.
• How debt repayment is about psychology and not math.
• How mastering other parts of your life can parallel mastering your personal finances.

If you like this episode, please Digg it, give it a thumbs up on StumbleUpon, bookmark it on del.icio.us, and email it to someone who might benefit. Thanks for spreading the word!

Resources:

- Get Rich Slowly

J.D. Roth

Duff McDuffee

Are you overwhelmed by information? Do you have 1000’s of emails sitting in your inbox right now, many unread, all nagging at you to do something about them? Have you declared email bankruptcy, hoping that “if it’s important, they’ll write back?”

You are just minutes away from a permanent and responsible solution…and it has nothing to do with getting a Blackberry or the latest upgrade of Microsoft Outlook.

According to Mark Hurst, author of Bit Literacy: Productivity in the Age of Information and E-mail Overload, the digital age has created both new opportunities and new problems with these things he calls “bits.”

In this interview, listen to Mark teach you…

• How to “let the bits go” in a world of infinite bits, and why this is vitally important to your productivity.
• How the inbox was not designed to be a filing system and an address book and a to-do list and a calendar.
• How to get your email inbox and to-do list to zero—today and every day—even with exponentially increasing incoming messages.
• How to procrastinate more effectively by deferring things into the future as far as possible.
• Why you need a simple to-do list, and how to get it to 0 so you experience the feeling of being done.
• How mastering bits gives you time to actually do your work, and enjoy your life more when you’re not working.
• Why you may have failed with David Allen’s complex Getting Things Done method, and what to do instead.
• The power of bit levers, and why you are typing far more than you need to if you aren’t using one.

Take responsibility for your relationship to the digital world by listening to this interview now. After you do, go achieve inbox emptiness and then come back and comment about it below! We’d love to hear how it works for you.

If you like this episode, please Digg it, give it a thumbs up on StumbleUpon, bookmark it on del.icio.us, and email it to someone who might benefit. Thanks for spreading the word!

Additional Resources:

- Mark’s online to-do program GooToDo
- Bit Literacy: Productivity in the Age of Information and E-mail Overload
- Getting Things Done
- ActiveWords (bit lever for Windows)
- TypeIt4Me (bit lever for Mac)
- TextExpander (bit lever for Mac)
- Mark Hurst’s Customer and User Experience company Good Experience
- The Interview with Gina Trapani

Mark Hurst

Duff McDuffee

You’re not crazy. Trust me.

We all have voices inside of us speaking their minds about our life - our projects, hopes, dreams, problems, and challenges. The good news is that having voices is not a bad thing. In fact, it’s through giving them a microphone front-and-center, one at a time, and hearing them fully that we succeed in life. Unfortunately, we often spend our time rushing through our days, ignoring them, and worse yet, letting one voice overshadow all other voices, giving us a very narrow perspective on life.

Ok, so you might have some doubts about all this, wondering just what a voice is. Think of a voice in the same way that you say things like, “A part of me feels/thinks this____, and a part of me feels/thinks that.” As an example, a part of you might want to get your financial debt under control, another part says it’s way to hard, and another part say to hell with it, live for today! Now, we haven’t quite got to the voices yet, only things the voices are saying.

Who or what is behind these statements?

Using the example again, a voice behind the first statement could be your Planner voice - the part of you that is always focused on long-term success and well-being, and with any issue in life, this Planner will take that side and present its case. Sometimes, you’ll value its perspective and other times you won’t, but if you don’t acknowledge it, there’s a good chance it will eat at you consciously or unconsciously. The important point here is to understand that we all have voices that take certain positions relative to any issue we’re dealing with.

So, what happens when you don’t listen to your voices?

Someone suggested this to me recently about a problem I was wrestling with, “It’s like you have a board room filled with people yelling at each other, and no one’s getting heard.” I thought this was a perfect metaphor for the experience of having lots of voices (parts of ourselves) speaking, but not hearing them out individually. Hard to run a company that way, and equally hard to be the CEO of our lives. As a result, one of two things (usually) happen when we don’t listen to our voices:

1. You remain frozen, indecisive, and unable to take action.
2. You take action, but are not fully committed, doubting yourself.

You can only make strong decisions in your life when you have fully heard yourself out, when you’re not fighting yourself, when you have expressed everything on your mind and have come to terms with it all. This doesn’t mean that, after listening to your voices, they just go away, only that you are not held back by them. You might still worry about your debt, but if you have gone through this process, and feel that you’ve thought it through, you feel much more at ease about it all.

In the end, the only way you’ll know what I’m talking about is to actually give it a try, so let’s go over the process.

Let the Voices be Heard!

The first step to listening to your voices and integrating their perspectives is to give them the time to speak. The first time you try this, set aside at least an hour. Make sure you won’t be disturbed. If quietness helps you to reflect, make sure you have it. If music gets your juices flowing, kick on some tunes that help you relax. Now, the actual process can be done in a more extroverted or introverted way, depending on your personal preference. One way involves, speaking out loud and using a couple of chairs that you’ll move back and forth from. The other method, my personal choice, simply involves paper and pen - in other words, bust out a journal. Either way, the essential process is the same, so go with what feels most comfortable.

The second step is to bring up a problem or challenge you’ve recently been struggling with. It could be an opportunity you’re considering taking, like a new job, or dealing with a thorny problem, like debt. It’s important that you have the issue clearly in your mind before you start. Once you have it, begin speaking or writing whatever comes to mind. After a few minutes, take a step back and ask yourself, what voices are speaking here? Often, it might be only one voice, having spoke it’s mind fully. Sometimes, it’ll be a whole bunch, but try to differentiate the different perspectives your voices are bringing to the table.

Next, once you have a few voices identified, you’ll want to have them “speak” alternately, one at a time. If you’re using the chair method, you should get up and move chairs for each voice, speaking from a distinct and different voice when you move to a new chair. Two chairs is fine, even if you have five voices, just make sure you clearly distinguish them, but the more chairs the better. If you’re journaling, write as though you’re composing a play, writing each character and their lines.

An important thing to remember is to fully embody each voice as a distinct and separate voice. It’s easy to start combining voices and get confused. Keep in mind that there is no “set list” of voices, so be creative and name as many voices as you have and feel the need to distinctively identify. Of course, there are certainly some common voices that everyone seems to have - the protector, the parent, the child… - but we also all have our own unique voices that emerge in our lives.

Each time you do this, it will start very naturally and organically. There is no rigid, predictable method. Over time you will be aware of all of your most common voices that could have something to say about the issue at hand, but you won’t be able to necessarily predict any or all of them.

Each time you do this process will be like picking up a bread crumb trail, or like a bloodhound catching a scent - at first you have to find the trail (identify the issue), then follow each crumb (listen to all your voices) and more bread crumbs you follow, the closer you get to a realization/understanding, much like a bloodhound hones in on its target. There is also no predictable time it takes for this. Sometimes the process might take five minutes, other times it might take a handful of hour long sessions. The goal with this is to arrive at a point when you feel that you have expressed all the sides of an issue you’re internally taking, and can take action with confidence and a clear conscience.

This is the pilot episode of Precision Change, a weekly podcast about technologies of transformation—from personal productivity to personal power, lifehacks to life mastery, GTD to NLP, and other acronyms you’ve never heard of.

Next week will be the first real episode, so subscribe now so you won’t miss anything.

Why “precision change”? Well, a lot of self-help books and audio are pretty cheesy. We’re wanting to give you the strategies and information that work, now with 1000% less hype!

On this show we’ll be talking with prominent personal development authors, speakers, and bloggers about how to thrive in the digital age, live your life with purpose, improve the quality of your relationships, get and stay healthy, optimize your personal finances, and other ways to obsess about your personal development.

Every week we’ll bring you with free tips and tricks for inspiring your personal development in playful, courageous, and integrated ways…with a geeky edge, because frankly, we’re geeks, and the geeks shall inherit the earth, right? I mean, look at Bill Gates.

Subscribe to our iTunes feed for this show on the left side of this page to get the latest episodes automatically.

Give us your feedback by adding your comments to the episode pages by clicking on the title of the show. We’d love to hear from you!

Enjoy the show!

Duff McDuffee

photo credit: http://flickr.com/photos/pingnews/

In Part 1 I described the difference between victimhood and full responsibility, and how one can move toward full responsibility. In this post I wanted to push the envelope a little, and describe territory that I believe most self-development literature is unaware of (or even worse confuses with victimhood). This is the living understanding of integrated responsibility or what one could call cosmic responsibility.

The Synthesis of Opposites: Living in Complete Accord with the Universe

Integrated responsibility is the bringing together of the key insights from the previous two stages of responsibility. From victimhood we see the key insight that the world is a complex and sometimes uncontrollable force. From full responsibility we see that we (or the other) have a much larger part to play then we once thought, and that intention and surrender are deeply powerful forces with regards to causality.

The difference in integrated responsibility is that we don’t conceive of our “personhood” in the same way as we did prior (where the sense of a solid separate self was maintained as part of the equation). We also begin to see the deeply systemic nature of causality, and the limits of full responsibility.

Going Beyond the Self

For either victimhood or full responsibility to be maintained we have to think that there is a “self” that is at the receiving end of causality. That self is often experienced and understood as radically separate from the rest of causality (though becoming less so in full responsibility). When one begins to see through this sense of self, as ultimately existing, then the focus on self, and indeed on our always getting what we want starts to diminish radically. At this point one switches away from self-actualization, which characterizes most of the self-development literature, and moves toward self-transcendence, which tends to involve contemplation and introspection.

Systemic Thinking is Key

Another thing that can bring about the awareness of integrated responsibility is a kind of systemic thinking, in which one begins to see how systems operate, where their leverage points are and what the limitations in systemic change are. A great example of this type of thinking can be seen in “systems theory” with such thinkers as Gregory Bateson, Fritjof Capra, Ken Wilber, and Peter Senge. Our personal influence on changing things is seen in the light of larger systemic dynamics that are at play.

To get a better sense of how this might play out, think about the weather system. You may want it to rain, may do a rain dance, etc. but how much does your personal intention play in the larger confluence of wind, air pressure, humidity and competing weather patterns. Probably not that much!

Another thing I’ll mention about integrated responsibility is that one begins to have the flexibility to notice how and why their personal intentions have the results (or lack of results) that they do. One begins to appreciate the strong power of habits and forces in the universe, and develops a certain level of surrender to them. They also become more able to leverage these systems in amazing ways and can become phenomenal masters at shifting whole systems. In many ways these are the alchemists, magicians, and agents of change!

Here are some tips for how, if you are already operating from a perspective of full-responsibility, to move toward integrated responsibility:

Tips for Becoming an Agent of Change:

• Have a regular contemplative practice – Contemplative practices, from any of the wisdom traditions, provide insight into a deeper, wider perspective that is broader then your “self”. This naturally leads to integrated responsibility.
• Study thinkers who think systemically – Studying the great philosophers, thinkers, and theorists who have put forth material in a systemic way is a sure way to be challenged to think this way, and start moving into a sense of integrated responsibility. I mentioned a few earlier in the post, but there are many.
• Think about things from multiple angles – Challenge yourself to see the things that happen in your life from multiple viewpoints. For example, I recently heard that my wife and I were receiving (along with many other people in the U.S.) a rebate check for $1,200. I can view that as simply chance, can see that because we have been on top of our taxes we are receiving it, can view it as a the universe doing me a favor, can see it as a larger governmental response to the current recession, etc. There are so many ways to consider the things that happen in our lives, and by doing so we become disillusioned with any simple answers or perspectives.

When we open fully to the larger context in which life is happening, that isn’t solely reducible to my experience or my desires, then a greater level of surrender & happiness can result. The happiness isn’t one borne from getting what we want, but rather from seeing how things really are.

photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/brunkfordbraun/

Much of personal development work has to do with our relationship to the world and ourselves. New challenges and opportunities are constantly arising, both internally and externally, and how we are conditioned to relate to them will largely determine the degree of peace and happiness we experience in this life.

What I’ve observed is that there appears to be three main ways that individuals can relate to the world, and that is either as victims, with full responsibility, or with integrated responsibility. The other thing I’ve observed is that this is largely a developmental process, where we move through these levels and at each new level there is a greater experience of freedom, flexibility, and happiness. In this series I’ll take you through a guided tour of each of these levels and also give you specific tips on how you move from one level to the next.

The Victim: Everybody has Got it Out for Me!

Victimhood is the predominant mode of being that we must initially fight to overcome. The world is so complex and crazy, especially when we’re younger and we’re still trying to figure things out. It’s no wonder that the first relationship one might have to that world is one of feeling victimized by it. It can feel at times that things are happening to us, that our completely outside of our control. And with that lack of control comes a phenomenal amount of fear, resentment, and anguish.

Oddly enough, sometimes the victim’s stance is take credit for something when it works out but then to feel deflated and depressed when it doesn’t. In this way they bounce between excitement and fear, being completely at the whim of outcomes. Also, they don’t really see there part in the “struggle of life”, or rather don’t see how their own beliefs and habits end up shaping their experience of life, and their participation in it. They are caught in a battle—with themselves and the conditions of their life—and it’s a Chinese knot that gets tighter with each new pull.

Full Responsibility: If It’s to Be It’s Up To…

At some point, one may realize that they are experiencing a tremendous amount of pain being the victim to conditions outside of them. If they realize this and then are exposed to the possibility that some other alternative exists, i.e. full responsibility, then there is a chance that if they have the courage to do so, they can begin to shift their relationship to life. The shift must be radical though.

Full responsibility is a movement toward beginning to think and act in the world, as if, you (or some other) are %100 responsible for what occurs in the world. Everything outside is seen as a reflection of this power, which can either be your individual power or the power of some Other (i.e. God). One’s mantra becomes, “If it’s to be it’s up to me” (or it’s up to God), and thereby begin to identify and work with the heart of the causality in the universe.

This radical movement begins to sever the victimized mentality that came before, and one now feels empowered to act in the world in whatever way they choose. This empowerment often brings with it a heightened sense of confidence and unshakeableness. No matter what happens, I can choose to relate to the situation in a fully mobile way. In this way we can begin to unwind and change the personal habits that no longer serve us, and we see that it is within our capability.

The other thing that full responsibility does, is to allow us to see the world not as a force that acts against us, but that one that works for our greatest good, either through our individual action or faith. One could argue that putting your faith in an Other (especially fully) is actually an extreme case of victimhood, but in reality it’s the opposite. When one looks for instance at the vow that Mother Theresa made—perhaps the most fully devoted woman of our times—to “Not refuse Him anything, under pain of death”. To truly fulfill this vow, and to put one’s faith in an Other fully, one has to exercise an extreme amount of self-reflection and is acting out of the same kind of responsibility that one who is seeing themselves as the source of all things is. In either case we’re dealing with some sort of ultimate power (whether it’s localized internally or externally) and that remains radically different from the stance of the victim.

Here are some tips for how, if you are operating from the role of victim, to move toward full responsibility:

Tips for Becoming Fully Responsible:

• Take the perspective that you are responsible for everything that happens - In every situation imagine what it would be like if you were ultimately responsible for everything. How does that change the situation, and the way you choose to respond in it. If for instance your partner and you get into a fight, you can ask yourself, how was I responsible for this fight? Instead of immediately blaming them, or becoming a victim, look at the ways in which you acted that helped to cause the situation. Then from there instead of perpetuating the fight, you can take responsibility for it.
• Take the perspective that a benevolent Other is responsible for everything - If you come from a background of faith, and feel a strong resonance with it’s teachings, try seeing everything that occurs in the world, including your own bad habits, as being in the hands of a benevolent being. Consider that everything that happens is for your, and others, greater welfare. Your practice then becomes to surrender fully to everything that arises, seeing that it is all an act of benevolence, even if you don’t know why, and you seek only to act in ways that in accord with this benevolence.
• Speak a language of responsibility - Notice when you say things like, “I have to…” and begin thinking, and speaking in terms of getting to do things. Also, notice how often you speak in terms of “you or they did this” and begin also speaking in terms of “I”. Instead of “She made me feel this way” one could instead say, “I choose to feel this way.” These shifts in language have a tremendous impact on our experience.
• Hang out with fully responsible people - Spend time with others who are already seeing the world this way. Find friends, mentors, and teachers who exude this degree of responsibility, and find out what makes them tick. Emulate the best parts of them, and step into greater freedom.
• Take new risks! - We’re always dealing with new challenges and opportunities, but part of what we did when were a victim was to try and isolate ourselves from those things, because they were seen not as opportunities but as threats. Now we can more fully engage with things we might not have otherwise tried, such as a new job, travel, a new skill, etc. Personal development becomes possible at this point, so give yourself to it fully!

The next post deals with yet another level of responsibility, one I’m calling integrated responsibility, and also gives tips for how to achieve it.

photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/d_vdm/533344086/

Last year I finally did it. I got myself to exercise nearly every day. And instead of being a chore, it was a wonderful thing I looked forward to!

How did I pull this off?

Well, I wasn’t born loving exercise. I’m a skinny intellectual who in the past would have loved to download his mind into the matrix rather than care for and feed “human body 1.0.”

The previous five years I unsuccessfully started and stopped various exercise programs, usually pushing myself really hard the first few weeks, achieving some results, but then burning out quickly. But last year I successfully practiced yoga daily, only missing a few days and easily picking up the routine again without guilt or shame.

Two weeks ago, I decided to up the ante by joining a gym. I’m starting to get in decent “yoga shape,” but my strength and cardio is lacking, and I’m wanting more energy and overall fitness. I used the same principles as when I took up yoga, and I have barely even noticed that two weeks have passed–except for some sleepiness the first few days and some mild soreness. I’m already feeling more energy and vitality at work, and in *ahem* partner yoga.

If you don’t already exercise regularly, it’s probably because when you think about exercising, you experience aversion, otherwise known as fear of pain. But exercise doesn’t have to be painful, and nowadays I look forward eagerly to going to the gym…even though I’m still not in that great of shape!

So what is my secret formula for mastering exercise motivation? How do I get myself to go to the gym 5+ days a week, and even do yoga at night some days?

Well, I didn’t learn how to cause myself pain and tolerate it. What I learned is a way to love exercising, by following these simple principles:

• Exercise daily. I find this to have several advantages. First, it feels good to move my body daily! I work at a desk, so this is really my only opportunity to get my lungs, heart, and muscles working. Second, by committing to exercising daily, I don’t push myself too hard on any given day, because I know if I do, I’ll be sorry tomorrow! This reduces soreness, fatigue, and injury, which in turn makes exercise less painful and more fun! Third, daily exercise gives you more frequent direct feedback on your physical condition. In my experience, this encourages the development of a gentler relationship to my physical experience instead of trying to push my body into submission and “shape up.”
• Make minimum commitments. I used to set extremely high goals for myself, like “do 100 pushups.” Now I set minimum commitments, like “show up to the gym 5 days per week and do whatever I want once I get there.” With my yoga practice, my minimum commitment was 20 minutes every day. Since my yoga sessions always end with savasana (relaxing on your back), sometimes that meant 10 minutes of stretching and a 10 minute nap! But setting a minimum commitment works well for me, because while some days I feel tired and lazy, just as often I am excited about doing more or exploring a new exercise. By setting minimum commitments instead of lofty goals, I develop both integrity (because I’m doing what I committed to doing) and enthusiasm (because I leave myself extra energy to go above and beyond). The reason I used to set high goals is that I thought I was naturally lazy; I never thought minimum commitments would work. But instead I quit my brutal regimes when I got too sore and tired from them, and I easily stay on my new programs because they are so fun!
• Create a menu of options. Along with my lofty goals, I used to set very precise and strict routines for working out. But I’m not an elite athlete, and I don’t care to be! I’m not motivated by beating other people at sports, or anything else for that matter. I simply want vitality, health, fitness, and energy to do the things I really care about. So instead, I now have a menu of options available for me every time I exercise. The menu only includes things that are good for me (in that they lead towards my outcomes) and fun (otherwise why do it?). One of my options on my menu is sitting in the sauna. If I’m especially tired and lazy today, I’ll usually do the elliptical machine for 10 minutes and then sit in the sauna for 10 minutes. This beats the exercise I’d get at home sitting on the couch with the Macbook!
• Start with a check-in. Before beginning my exercise, I quickly jot down a few words about my physical and emotional condition in a little journal. Just taking a minute to do this provides a context for how hard I can realistically expect myself to work. For example, if I’m feeling frustrated about something in my life, I can usually push myself really hard on the elliptical machine! But if I’m exhausted and stressed, I’ll go easier, just to “work hard when it’s hard to work.” I also jot down the exercises I do, both to monitor my practice over time and to remember what I did yesterday when I’m feeling exhausted today.
• End with rest. Happiness studies have shown that we generally remember experiences by their peaks and their endings. In particular, if something is painful but trails off slowly, we tend to remember it as less painful. People who got colonoscopies where the tube was left in there for a few minutes at the end were more likely to return for future procedures, even though the total time for this uncomfortable process was longer. Applying this to your workouts, if you end with relaxation, either in savasana (lying on your back for a few minutes) or sitting in the sauna or hot tub, your whole memory of exercising will be that of feeling wonderful–even though it may be 5 or 10 minutes longer! This will make it more likely that you will continue with the program, and even begin looking forward to it. Make sure to really let go and relax during this time. How often do you take even 5 minutes to enjoy life and relax deeply, with nothing to do and nowhere to go?
• Go with others. I decided to join the gym in part to support my girlfriend, but then I realized she was supporting me! Everything is easier when done together. As social mammals, we are often more likely to do something for someone else than for ourselves.

If you are not currently consistently exercising, you are missing out on the health and vitality that you are meant to enjoy. Please try this strategy out, starting today, and let me know how it works for you by leaving a comment below.

If you have a different strategy that works for you, please share that in the comments as well.

photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tasteful_tn/

I was speaking with a friend this morning, who is a committed martial artist and a meditation practitioner. She was sharing a recent event in which she was sparing with a beginning student and she found herself laughing every time either of them made a mistake. She apologized for laughing, as she noticed that the guy she was sparing with was getting more and more frustrated with each mistake. Wondering why she would laugh at something like that, we reflected together on the process of mastery and how with any skill or discipline there is a move toward greater and great lightness, acceptance, and humor. I mean come on, if you do something all the time, and have for years and years, you better damn well be able to have fun while doing it! But I think what she was really getting at is a heightened sense of acceptance that comes with mastery, in which having seen so many mistakes, fuck ups, and less-than-perfect scenarios we start to soften up to the inevitability of the dark with the light, and in the end we may even begin to see the inseparability of these polarities.

That isn’t to say that mastery is simply a move towards greater and greater acceptance, because there is also a movement toward greater and greater subtlety. In my friend’s case she can now see when someone’s stance is off because their right foot is pointing a hair to the wrong direction. An even more developed martial artist would probably be able to distinguish even more in-depth subtleties.

Meditation Mastery

With regards to meditation practice, which is my primary area of interest, this movement towards greater subtlety and deepening of acceptance and lightness are both means by which I’ve come to understand the progress of practice. The acceptance and lightness have mostly to do with the movements of my mind, and the relationship that meditation has uncovered to it. There are many times where I find myself having ridiculous thoughts, or going through patterns of craving & irritation, but instead of getting mad at myself I often just have to laugh. Oh, here is craving again, or here is irritation again. Mental states come and go, can’t ultimately define me, and will never be able to fully capture the fullness of reality. In that sense there is little need to push them away, or take them all that seriously. In a sense the mind is part of a larger cosmic joke.

With regards to subtlety all of the myriad states of heightened consciousness that one can experience (of light and bliss, deep calm, formless experience, or even of radical emptiness) are traversed during the course of meditation. They become more easily accessible and meditation actually becomes enjoyable at a certain point (not all the time, mind you). One also becomes aware of more and more in their experience, and is able to make finer and finer distinctions about mental and physical states. There is also a speeding up and expanding that happens with awareness, in which more and more sense objects can be seen with greater rapidity and in a broader perspective. This fluctuates, but is definitely a development related to intensive meditation practice.

The process of mastery, of moving from the gross to the more subtle, and moving from the stuck to the fluid is a brilliant process. That the lessons learned with one type of mastery can also apply to some many other domains is also quite fascinating. So next time you’re sparing with a master, and they start laughing at you, keep in mind that they’re just enjoying the process.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/

Welcome to Precision Change, a new blog about technologies of transformation, from personal productivity to personal power, mastery to meditation, self-development to self-transcendence.

Unlike other blog sites that recycle tired old aphorisms and over-generalizations, we will focus on precise, practical ways to bring about change using the richest and deepest models available, backed by real experience. We will wrestle with complex issues while keeping it simple.

Think of it as personal development 201.

We’re new, so subscribe to the feed now and have the latest articles served piping hot to your feed reader or email inbox so you won’t miss anything.

And pardon our mess while we finish designing the site.

Why precision?

Many people (including the authors) often find self-help literature distasteful due to exaggerated claims and over-generalizations. Claims of “unlimited power” or “it works every time” feel exciting, yet disingenuous, and ultimately create distrust when the techniques don’t in fact produce unlimited power or work every time.

What does work? Personally I’ve found that precision is a major key to success in effective change. Enthusiasm ultimately wanes, but a focus on specific strategies that work in specific contexts can be extremely powerful. And yes, you can change nearly everything in your life. Your innate potential is tremendous (but not unlimited).

Who’s behind this?

Precision Change was dreamed up by life coach and podcast producer Duff McDuffee after getting prodded by friend and fellow fruit Vincent Horn to (finally) start his own blog site.

Quickly the idea morphed into a group blog with Vince and Ryan Oelke (also a fruit), mostly because I’ve never been able to keep up a consistent blog schedule alone.

Ok, Ryan and Vince are also both excellent bloggers and good friends, having started the popular blog and podcast Buddhist Geeks, which evolved into the podcast network Falling Fruit TV where we now all work. I love my job–without these two Buddhist geeks, I’d be out on the street begging for life coaching clients.

I hope you enjoy our writing and audio. Please join the dialogue by commenting on our posts, subscribing to our feed, and if you like our stuff, submitting our posts to Digg.com, del.icio.us, and StumbleUpon.

Thanks!