Sometimes I overhear people say things like “I’ll be happy when ” and I feel like shouting at them. But why? Doesn’t that sound like a good sentiment, focusing on things that bring happiness? After all, it’s good to have a dream and hope for the future, something that a person can look forward to. Right?

Well, not exactly. This is actually one of the most toxic things you can say to yourself. So don’t do it.

We tend to spend most of our time in the states of mind that we practice most often. If we operate deliberately in a state of curiosity, after a while we will tend to spontaneously revert to a state of curiosity. Same thing for a state of gratitude, happiness, or excitement. And unfortunately, this is also true of a state of resentment, pessimism, or anger. The mind states that we practice consciously are the mind states that we tend to slip into unconsciously.

But what actually creates these states of mind? One of the strongest and most enduring influences on our typical mind-state is the language that we use in our inner monologue, and the questions we typically ask about ourselves and the world around us.

Because of the powerful influence of our language on our inner state, it’s important to understand what an seemingly innocent phrase like “I’ll be happy when …” has on our typical state of mind.

First, the sentence contains an important presupposition encoded inside it. That’s a complicated way of saying that it is based on assuming something – namely, that I’m not currently happy, and possibly even unable to be currently happy. Why? Because I don’t have that thing – whatever it is – that I’ve decided is a necessary condition for my happiness. If I were already happy, why would I say something like this? Why would I need to point to something in the future that will bring me happiness?

Next, a person who repeatedly uses language like “I’ll be happy when …” is going to train herself to exist in a state of mind of expectation and future orientation. While not an immediately toxic emotion like anger or resentment, this is nevertheless an unhealthy mind-state to abide in for too long. A person misses the beauty and excitement of the present moment when he is seduced by dreams of the future.

Finally, this kind of phrasing is often oriented toward something external, some condition outside the mind and thoughts of the person speaking or thinking the “I’ll be happy when …” phrase. Unfortunately, the condition is almost never under the immediate control of the speaker / thinker – instead, it is often dependent on the behavior of another person or organization, or on some kind of “luck”. Because of this, the speaker has given the power over his own happiness away to an external force.

What kind of language can a person use instead of this? There are three main things to change in order to turn this sentence into something worth saying to yourself.

First, drop the assumption that you’re not currently happy – or relaxed, or experiencing inner peace, or whatever mind-state you want to experience. Is it possible that the only thing standing in the way of you having that state of mind that you want, is the expectation you need something outside yourself to have it?

This could lead to a phrase like “I will allow myself to feel happy”.

Next, change the tense of the verb. Why orient yourself toward the future when you might be able to experience the mind-state you want right now?

This leads to a phrase like “I allow myself to feel happy”.

Finally, it’s useful to emphasize that all our inner states of mind ultimately depend not on the external circumstances of our lives but on the thoughts we think. Focusing on the unconditional nature of our inner experience helps us decouple it from forces outside our own minds, and reclaim power over our own experience of life.

At last, this leads us to a phrase like “I allow myself to feel happy and thankful, now and always, regardless of the circumstances of my life and my situation”.

Some people may react negatively to a sentence like that – “what is this New Age bullshit? Of course, I’m going to get upset if something bad happens in my life”. If you have a reaction like this, do your best to say this phrase to yourself again, without judgment, as best you can. Observe how the reaction changes and transforms.

Allow yourself to explore the possibility that your inner state might not have to depend on your life circumstances. What would it mean for you if you understood, fully and completely, that “I’ll be happy when” is just a lie, a fake story that people tell themselves? What would it mean for you if you understood that “I’ll be happy when…”, is actually the only thing standing in the way of anyone being happy right now?

You can even introduce things that you don’t like about yourself into these kind of sentences – “Even though I {am a fat lazy pig, get angry, am a wimp, have dark moods, etc.}, I deeply and completely accept myself.” [1] Just because you have circumstances in your life situation that you would like to change does not mean that you can’t experience positive states of being, right now. Because you can.

This is the power of what we say to ourselves – the language we use in our inner monologue has the ability to transform our mood, our habitual states of mind, and our overall experience of life. Why not try this out? After all, what do you have to lose but some unpleasant emotions – emotions that you would probably rather not experience anyway?

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[1] This example is from Andreas, S. Help with Negative Self-talk, Volume I, Real People Press: Boulder, CO 2009.

Christmas is considered a big deal in many places around the world, even without its religious content. Whether it’s Christians celebrating the Sun of God, or Jews enjoying Chinese food, movie premieres, and easy parking, there is a lot of great stuff going on. In Japan, I am told, Christmas is celebrated with Kentucky Fried Chicken. In Sweden, families gather to watch violent old Donald Duck cartoons.

Personally, I have always experienced Christmas as the quietest and stillest day of the year (almost nothing’s open) – a celebration of family and connection with loved ones. But the contemporary anchor point of the day, despite its roots in pagan solstice festivals, is still this man Jesus from 2000 years ago, the mysterious prophet about whom little was known until he started preaching in his early 30s.

Based on the stories from that time period, it seems as though he was a serious spiritual ninja, a shamanic master who tapped into the fifth neurological circuit (in Leary’s eight circuit terminology) in order to heal, commune with spirits, persuade the skeptics and haters of his magical powers, and so forth. Whether or not he was literally the Sun of God, it’s clear that he was a pretty serious Buddha-level Jedi Master of the spiritual and magical arts. And for that reason, his example and his life story is pretty significant, whether or not you identify yourself as a Christian.

When I hear a person ask that famous question, “what would Jesus do?” (abbreviated famously as “WWJD?”), I suspect the answer is something like “go to rabbinical school”. After all, he was a spiritually inclined Jew in Roman-occupied Judaea. It’s not as though he could advance in Roman society, and the religious path was a good way for a young man of modest means to make his mark on the world. Except that in his maverick style, he operated outside the usual traditions and lines of teaching and rolled his own way. Metaphorically and literally. In the essay The Power Tactics of Jesus Christ by Jay Haley, we see a different picture, not the gentle Prince of Piece, but a spiritual gangster who wrote his own rules, devised his own laws, and had harsh words and promised penalties for those who crossed him. A true mafioso of Galilee, an original gangster of godliness.

So what does this mean? What else can we learn from the example of this magical dude whose example inspires, infuriates, and confuses people two millennia later?

Well, for one thing, the example of his life illustrates the necessity of enlightenment. Those of us who have a pre-existing spiritual practice are aware of this already. Self-realization erases fear, craving, aversion, and puts us into a different way of being. Among other spiritual masters who crossed this gap, Jesus must certainly have experienced enlightenment, dropped all these petty and worldly concerns, and began walking his own path. A path which eventually was trodden by billions of others over the years. This is perhaps the most important lesson from his life. It’s a similar lesson that we glean from other spiritual masters over the years – the Buddha and other nameless ones whose stories were not carried forward to the present day.

I have a couple of meditations and conversations with Jesus that I will share with you.

The first one is pretty basic. I just imagine myself hanging out with Jesus sitting on a purple beach (not sure why the sand is that color) talking about a variety things. This Jesus seems like a pretty cool adviser. Sort of like that idealized, perfect, non-judgmental, best friend who is always willing to help.

The second one is a bit more intense. Some Christians seem to appear fixated on the gruesome details of Jesus’s demise. His blood is viewed as the literal and metaphorical vehicle by which the sins of believers are “washed away”.

Since we humans have water-based physical bodies, we naturally feel affinity toward the cleansing power of liquid water – a deep connection to our mother ocean, among other lesser bodies of water. This thread of thought naturally led me to the visualization of an infinite ocean of the Blood of Christ. And from there, to the notion of a massive tsunami, a mile high, propagating, at three times the speed of sound, toward a person’s body standing on the beach awaiting the impact of the wave.

One can imagine the sensation of being hit by a hypersonic liquid wave of Christ’s blood – pure redemption in action, at least according to the Christian view. A person’s body would be absorbed completely in this shockwave of forgiveness and redemption, merged completely and totally with this tsunami of peace and healing, and experiencing an infinite sense of release and letting go, consciousness drifting, dropping and falling through an infinite and empty and quiet space now and forever. This is a physical analogy for the personal experience of enlightenment – the absolute obliteration of pre-existing worldview, mindset, and consciousness, to be replaced with an abiding experience of oneness with Being, Reality, and All That Is.

Of course, a variation of this visualization can be practiced by replacing “Blood of Christ” with “מים חיים” (mayyim chaim), “pure ocean water”, “fresh water”, “chakra cleansing spiritual energy”, or similar concepts that resonate for you based on your own traditions and beliefs. There’s no need to practice with a spiritual idea that weirds you out.

So yeah, if it wasn’t obvious, Merry Christmas to everyone who celebrates it. And enjoy your quiet day off if you don’t.

I recently saw a photograph that kind of blew my mind. It was a photograph of Planet Earth from six billion kilometers away (nearly 4 billion miles), taken by the Voyager spacecraft. Launched over 30 years ago to explore the outer planets of our solar system, Voyager is still the farthest and fastest moving man-made object ever. As of 2011, it’s already about 18 billion kilometers away from us, and still moving over 60,000 kilometers per hour.

The photo is known as the Pale Blue Dot because that’s how our world appears from six billion kilometers away. It’s so far away that the radio signals took almost six hours to reach us. Can you find it on the picture?

Everything we know or have experienced in the physical world is located there, floating in the great emptiness of the space that surrounds us. Everyone you have ever loved, hated, or ignored. Every meal you have ever eaten, every glass of water, every iPod, iPad, used ink cartridge, junked car, every house you’ve ever lived in, is still on the pale blue dot. Where else could you find it?

All the material that makes up the planet, and everything on it – all the heavier elements that make up our bodies, the food we eat, the cars we drive, the buildings we live and work in, all of the natural world and the built world – all of this material was forged in the cores of long-dead stars. When the stars died and collapsed and threw their contents across the vastness of space, some of this material condensed around the sun and formed planets, including our own. Moby wasn’t just talking in metaphor when he titled his song We Are All Made Of Stars. He was literally correct.

All the atoms of our bodies are billions of years old, formed from the corpses of dead stars that exploded and threw their contents across the vast, still emptiness of space.

Sometimes we get so caught up in the closeness of our troubles and day to day worries – we take so many different things personally, even when they are not intended that way. But none of these things mattered four billion years ago, when the sun was born, and none of them are going to matter four billion years from now.

What things can you let go of worrying about right now? What can you stop taking personally? What can you stop taking too seriously?

When you expand your perspective to the size scale and time scale of the entire universe, a lot of things recede in importance. Only the big picture remains.

Here’s a fun question to ponder: How can I best make my presence a blessing for others?

What I mean by this is simple and subtle.

It’s not about changing the physical environment around you – your Presence is the same whether you’re in the middle of an empty field, a shabby ghetto apartment, or the Presidential Suite at the Four Seasons. Because your true self is non-physical, it doesn’t depend on anything physical in order to influence those around you to enjoy a better subjective experience of life..

It doesn’t depend on your words or your actions. Your Presence is the same whether you are speaking or silent, still or moving, awake or asleep.

It doesn’t depend on your physical body. No touch or physical interaction is needed. Being in the presence of a person whose mind is still and pure is calming and nourishing for others, at a very profound and non-physical level.

But how can a person most effectively do this for others?

The simplest and most direct is to still the mind and create an abiding inner peace within yourself. Relating to the world from a way of being that is peaceful and still, you will naturally radiate this kind of energy into the world around you.

By recognizing your True Self as the observer of the thought-stream, and not the thought-stream itself, you enter a place of stillness.

Thoughts are often like an unpredictable, raging river. When a person is swimming in a torrent, struggling to keep his head above water, he may not recognize that he’s not the river, he’s just in the river.

But when he chooses to swim to the riverbank, climb out, and recognize that he is separate from the river, then he can become a rescuer of others. He can spend his time throwing ropes to others and helping pull them over to the riverbank as well.

Your stillness and presence – your True Self – are gifts that you can give to everyone around you.

[The setting is EARLY 2011, at Terminal E, International Arrivals, at Logan International Airport, Boston]

JACK: “Yeah, I never check baggage.”

Frequent traveling is one of the best gateway drugs for a minimalist lifestyle.

When I have traveled “heavy” in the past, I’ve always been amazed at how few things I actually used out of the things that I supposedly “couldn’t live without”. (I’m especially embarrassed at the pile of junk I dragged to Australia, most of which I left at my cousin’s house – completely unused – while I bounced around the country and learned to drive on the left hand side of the road.)

Every time, I would promise myself that I’d learned my lesson, that I wouldn’t pack as much next time. Eventually I actually learned. Iterated application of the 80/20 rule eventually locked in on what was essential and what was useless. Now I see people checking giant stacks of luggage at airports and quote the philosopher Ludacris to myself: “What in the world is in that BAG, what you got in that BAG?”

Overpacking is just a neurosis, an insurance policy. You can’t control everything about your trip so you overcontrol what you can – your stuff. When you release the neurosis, you release your attachment to your stuff. You release your attachment to the false idea that your stuff can save you from uncertainty. The only thing that saves you from uncertainty is accepting it.

Then the idea of packing more lightly starts feeding back into non-traveling life. That’s when you start to become a full-time minimalist.

Actually, minimalism as an idea is something that has been in my life as long as I can remember. (Also see: simplicity, frugality)

I always loved the architectures of Tadao Ando and Louis Kahn. I like modern furniture. I don’t like clutter or unnecessarily ornate details. Living in rooms that are mostly empty is better for the mind. It creates space in which to move and think.

[In fact, "creating space" is a good metaphor for what I do for my clients in coaching.

This can't happen when a person is living in their head among the detritus of a self left behind years ago.]

The summer after I graduated from high school, my drive to ‘minimalize’ was inspired by an Outward Bound canoe trip. It blew my mind: ten people could paddle five canoes, carrying food, shelter, and everything else they needed. It was a completely autonomous, self-contained team.

For months afterward, I dreamed of living as a full-time minimalist nomad, carrying a tent, a camping stove, and everything else I needed, but nothing more than necessary, traveling from one place to another.

I didn’t actually do this. Instead, I returned home and went to university. But the idea didn’t quite go away.

Minimalist Dreams

For some situations, it’s nice to have a clear goal in mind. This is one of them.

My ideal lifestyle is what I call “prosperous homeless” – no fixed address; traveling lightly enough to fit all my possessions in carry-on luggage; having the financial means to travel permanently, and stay in a hotel, B+B, or apartment every night (or week, month, or year) if I were so inclined.

I am not “there” yet, but I am making gradual progress. At the end of 2009, I downsized from my own 1 bedroom apartment to one room in a 4 bedroom place. That meant placing a lot of excess furniture in basement storage.

A few months later, while I was on a Vipassana meditation course, flooding destroyed all but one of the items I had in storage in the basement. That was a welcome sign from the universe – I was being supported by natural forces in my quest to become a true minimalist! That rain disposed of lots of things that I never used, never needed, but hadn’t yet shown the focus, courage, and balls to actually throw it away.

That experience further drove the point home: ownership of “stuff” isn’t particularly interesting or special – it’s access and usage of physical things that matters.

Over a period of several years, as my weight grew from 175 to 220 pounds (aka “The Time I Got Fat”), I moved a weight bench and a set of dumbbells through several different residences. For some reason, owning that stuff didn’t save me – it wasn’t a magical amulet that could chase away the demons of an unhealthy diet and too much drinking. I didn’t return my physical body to the proper shape for me until I started doing yoga and CrossFit-style workouts, and eating a vegan diet.

What do you want your stuff to do for you?

Owning “stuff” doesn’t matter – it’s what you do that counts. And you can “do” just as easily with something rented or borrowed as you can with something that’s yours. Often you can “do” without.

Think about it this way.

As a minimalist, you don’t want to “own” a car – you want to move the body from A to B in a comfortable and timely fashion.

You don’t want to “own” a book – you want to be able to read the 50,000 words of content written by Author X, at the time, place, and medium (paper, bits) of your convenience.

You don’t want a Gerhard Richter on “your” wall – heck, as a true minimalist, you don’t even buy in to the illusion of a wall that’s permanently “yours” – you want access to a gallery where you can enjoy the art of Richter and other great artists.

The idea of releasing material objects from your life is intimately connected with the idea of emotional release.

Quite often we use the metaphor of “holding on” to suggest emotional strength – life’s challenges as flood waters or hurricane, holding on as being strong in the face of external forces. But a person can also express incredible emotional strength through releasing – in recognizing when holding on is no longer working effectively.

The more we can release physically, the less we tell ourselves that we “can’t live without”, the more empowered we are to craft lives of genuine freedom and creativity.

Once in a while, when you have an object that you think you can’t live without, hold it for a moment and ask yourself “could I let this go?”, “will I?”, and “when?”

Thirty two thousand days from today, you will already have let it go, whether you planned to or not. Why not release your hold on it now and focus on what’s most important?

I just changed the tagline of my web site. It now reads “Life is a game. I will coach you to win it.”

This tagline is more aligned with the specific focus of my professional action – which is life coaching – and aligned with the goal of the person who hires a coach.

What’s that goal? A simple analogy will explain it. A basketball coach coaches players to win at the game of basketball. A hockey coach coaches players to win at the game of hockey.

So by analogy, a life coach coaches players to win at the game of life. People who hire coaches are interested in winning. Therefore, my number one objective, in my role as a life coach, is to make sure my client wins.

However, the game of life is magnitudes more complex than any sport. Because of this, winning at life is something hard to define. It differs from person to person. For one person, it might involve becoming a multi-hundred-millionaire and leading a company of thousands of people. For another person it might be retiring early and living in a tropical paradise. For another it might demand that they raise a large family. For still another it might involve exploring the farthest reaches of body and mind to reach spiritual enlightenment.

The important thing is that winning is defined in a way that makes sense to the individual. Without a defined endpoint, or at least a guiding star on the horizon, our internal goal seeking mechanism will send us wandering around in circles, confused.

However, following a guiding star that isn’t truly aligned with our own deepest values will confuse us even more. What happens in that situation? We have a goal (it’s good to have goals!), we’re going after it (gotta be a go getta!), we’re making progress (winning!). So why do we feel so demotivated. Why does every victory feel hollow? We’re successful – this is supposed to feel good!

Understanding what really motivates and inspires us is a good start to figuring out what winning the game of life means for us – and us alone. No one else can decide this for us. Many, many people spend abundant energy and effort acting out other peoples’ life scripts, according to other peoples’ values, and then wondering why they don’t feel fulfilled. Operating according to the value system of others is a great recipe for feeling confused at best, and depressed and burnt out at worst.

A tiger is a tiger and a goat is a goat. Each one is perfectly what it is, but to demand that a tiger act as a goat or vice-versa is to demand that it operate against its nature. Same thing with humans and their values.

Animals in a state of nature have some pretty simple rules for “winning” – get enough food, reproduce, don’t get killed or maimed by other animals or forces of nature. On the other hand, winning at the game of life doesn’t mean the same thing for all humans. Our bigger brains, complex societies, and advanced technologies mean that we “domesticated primates” have a lot more options than your average feral critter to create and define what we mean by “winning”.

So what does this mean for a life coach? How do we coach players in a game that’s this complex? How do we coach someone who may not yet have created or defined the game that they are playing, even though they are already in the thick of things, getting slammed back and forth on the playing field?

One of the key differences is that a life coach works with the client to understand and define the game. A coach of a well-defined game such as football doesn’t have to work with his players to create the rules of the game – they are already codified by external authorities. All he needs to do is create strategies and tactics that empower the players on the field to score more points than the other team. Simple, but not easy.

On the other hand, as far as we know, the only unbreakable rules in the game of life are the laws of physics. Practically everything else is up for negotiation.

As such, the process of coaching needs to start with learning what the client’s deepest values are. Without knowing this, how are we to know what their definition of winning looks, sounds, and feels like?

Coaches use a range of different techniques to elicit clients’ values, and thus to assist those clients in defining what “winning” means for them.

Some of these methods are highly structured, and create a list of values in order of priority. Others are less structured and capture and identify values that emerge through the process of the coaching conversation. Both approaches have their uses.

In my coaching practice, I like to learn clients’ values through an intuitive and unstructured approach that I call the SOUL method. It consists of four basic pillars.

Shut Up – I am most effective as a coach when I allow the voice of the “monkey mind” inside to become quiet and still. This stillness is encouraged by various foundational mental and spiritual practices, including meditation, yoga, and NLP. These psycho-spiritual disciplines assist me to quiet my mind over a longer time scale (i.e. weeks, months and years) and thus make me a better coach the more I practice them.

Open Up – I create within myself an intention to be open to the client and accept them exactly as they are. Within the coaching conversation, I work to establish a space of infinite and unconditional acceptance, reducing judgment to zero. This includes thought and spoken judgment from me, as the coach, as well as self-judgment or self-criticism by the client.

Understand – I aim to understand the client exactly as they wish to be understood. I refrain from applying my own value system or beliefs, I quiet my own ego, and I honor the client from the standpoint of their own highest self-concept, and their own model of the world.

Listen – Having built the foundation and created the space for me to be truly present for the client, I can now listen effectively. Obviously, I listen to their choice of words and phrases, but I also listen for feelings, emotional tones, and, most importantly, for the core, underlying values the client expresses through their speech.

Winning is something that each individual defines for themselves, based on their own highest values. In coaching someone to win at the game of life, at their game of life, I need to ensure that I am working in alignment with the values that are most important to them.

One week ago, I went to Portland, OR to attend a conference with the modest title of World Domination Summit. The conference was great and I definitely experienced a couple of transformative “aha!” moments that I will describe a little bit later in this post.

First and foremost, WDS was a great opportunity to reconnect in person with some West Coast friends that I don’t get to see very often, including Crystal Silver, Mike Schumacher, Jeff “Yooper” Smith, Thea Lawson, Erica Douglass and Lance Vallis. It was wonderful to connect with old friends and make new ones.

(Photo Credit: Armosa Studios)

When I originally signed up, I didn’t have a clear purpose in mind aside from “meet people, see what happens” but my intuition suggested that I’d experience something interesting. I have found in the past that the meetings that I attend with a “see what happens” agenda are often the most fruitful. My intuition always works when I trust it.

The conference itself was deliberately and artfully vague about its specific purpose. In the program, the unifying question was How do we live a remarkable life in a conventional world?. The details of this goal were left up to the imagination. Most of the people attending consisted of artists, entrepreneurs, writers, lifestyle designers, coaches, travelers – simply put, lots of creative and imaginative people who were hard to pin down in a specific way.

Obviously, the title refers to capturing the imagination of the world through creativity and generating excitement, rather than the old-school methods of conquering through war, political intrigue, and diplomacy. (The only military equipment I saw in Portland was the Navy ships that arrived a few days later for Fleet Week!)

The prevailing attitude at WDS was one of connecting with others, encouraging them on their path, and embracing difference and uniqueness. Everyone seemed to recognize the beauty that emerges from different ways of being and acting, in taking risks, and in pursuing those things in one’s own heart that don’t have to make sense to the rest of the world. Everywhere at the conference, I encountered an abundance of creative people – sometimes that creativity was expressed in their attitude and outlook, sometimes in their actual profession. (By creative professions, I mean artists and writers… but why can’t a person be creative as a CFO, or as a database admin, if that’s what they love?)

The effort put forth by the organizers, volunteers, and speakers was impressive. “Blue shirts” (volunteers) were everywhere, making sure the event was running well. The Portland Art Museum made a great venue, and the city itself was a great place for organized and impromptu meetings after the official program was over.

“Your imperfections make you likeable and endearing”

Instead of doing a speed review of the overall experience (that’s a future post) I’d like to distinguish one of the most powerful and personally significant parts of my WDS journey.

It happened in the Mondo Beyondo session presented by Jen Lemen and Andrea Scher. In addition to delivering a great inspirational message through the coaching session they ran, Jen and Andrea did a beautiful, irrational, and extreme thing that caught the attention and imagination of the entire group. The two of them had personally handwritten 500 affirmation notes and stuck them under each of the chairs in the auditorium. (This is exactly the kind of dramatic, extreme gesture that I love!)

My own card read “your imperfections make you likeable and endearing”. The relevance and impact of this message was eerie – in the few days leading up to WDS, I had just been speaking with close friends about some concerns and doubts that I had about how I was presenting myself online. It’s also the exact sort of thing that someone with perfectionist tendencies like mine, someone who graduated in the top 5 in “one of the most selective and advanced engineering programs offered in the world” specifically does not want to hear. That’s probably one of the reasons why it was so powerful for me.

In particular, there are a couple of topics that I’d shied away from discussing on my blog in the past. Blind spots, of a sort.

One of them feels really stupid to write out but it felt real to me a couple of weeks ago. I identify myself in my “About Me” section as “Dr. Jack Bennett” which is totally legitimate – I have completed a PhD from a real university. It was a fun experience and a lot of work.

However, I avoided mentioning the specifics of my degree on this site until now, specifically that my PhD is in Electrical and Computer Engineering. I had a fear that this subject might be judged by others as too technical and not sufficiently “life coach”-y.

In the recent past, I was telling myself a bunch of stories about how people wouldn’t want to work with a life coach who has the wrong kind of degree. That is, the “wrong kind of Ivy-league doctoral degree”. Boo hoo, cry me a river, right? This what we in the coaching world call a “high quality problem”. And yet it’s often our own blind spots and limiting beliefs that are hardest to see. (Incidentally, this is one of the reasons why all professional coaches are encouraged to have a coach themselves.)

Yes, it’s total bullshit, of course, but these kind of stories start to seem real when they take up residence in our own heads for long enough. That’s one of the biggest reasons why telling trusted others the stories that hold you back is so powerful. Your friends can reveal to you exactly how much bullshit you’re creating for yourself. (Hint: imagine a Pacific Ocean of fetid, stinking, liquified bullshit. That’s the kind of scale that we’re operating on when we go digging through the darker reaches of our own heads. Pack a hazmat suit.)

Fortunately, when others reflect back to you how silly you’re being by living into a false story that you’re telling yourself, it’s a lot easier to stop telling it, and to stop giving your power away. And your days start to pass a little more easily, without all that bullshit.

A life coach with advanced degrees in electrical and computer engineering – that’s a little unusual, right? There’s probably something interesting there. And until recently I was suppressing this uniqueness, trying to be like the average of everyone else, some sort of bland yoga-Zen-vegan-hybrid of Eckhart Tolle, Tony Robbins, Dr. Phil, Oprah, and Wayne Dyer. I was turning down the volume on what made me different, interesting, and yes, a little bit strange as well. Well, screw that.

I like to think that my past writings are intelligent and insightful, but I think they could use a little bit more soul too. So I am looking forward to the fun of including a bit more personality and authenticity into my writing (and profanity too – although I probably already swear far too often).

The other topic is a little bit more personal, but still not something that I avoid telling other people in real life. So why not mention it here?

It’s a pretty simple story – I was in a long-term relationship, we were married for 2.5 years and then divorced. (Wow, intense dark secret, huh? I’ll bet you’ve never met anyone who was in that situation before!) Until now, I avoided mentioning this here for a variety of “reasons”.

• I didn’t want to appear imperfect (limiting belief – “Helping others with their interpersonal relationships is an important part of being a coach. How can I do that authentically if I got divorced myself?”)
• I didn’t want to be disliked by others. As individuals, people are mostly pleasant and kind, but the internet as a whole sometimes delivers spikes of viciousness and stupidity.
• I didn’t want to be judged by others for “leaving” rather than “being left”, or for the reasons that I chose to leave that relationship. Victimhood is a comfortable pose to take and is usually guaranteed some sympathy; conversely, embracing your own power and creating uncomfortable change is often a target for criticism.

Given time I could probably come up with a bunch of other reasons but they all boil down to the same thing – I wanted to look good and avoid looking bad. This desire is not uniquely mine, of course. A lot of human energy is spent (i.e. wasted) by people attempting to impress others, or at least to avoid looking stupid in front of them.

Everyone I talked to at WDS – including several professional coaches – said that going through the personal experience of marriage and divorce would make a person a better coach, not worse. After all, people said, some real world ups and downs give a bit more authenticity to a person’s story. Granted, this is not an average audience, or a scientifically-valid sample, but it felt like a real vote of confidence – I told people I had just met about these things, and everyone was supportive. In other words, according to my conversational survey, my limiting belief was well and truly bullshit.

Perfection – or the appearance of perfection – intimidates and distances. We bond closely with each other through our fears, doubts, and perceived or actual “major, life-changing fuck-ups”. Holding our pain close to the vest and concealing these so-called “failures” gives them far more power than they deserve. Sharing them with others and thereby seeing them through other peoples’ eyes helps us to release and transcend them. As the old proverb goes, “what I resist, persists” – so stop resisting and release instead!

So what next?

In the follow-up email messages in the few days after the conference, head organizer Chris Guillebeau asked the attendees to ask themselves the simple question:

One year from now, what will be different?

It’s an important question. In the “post workshop high”, people can get caught up in the excitement and make dramatic plans that don’t see the light of day because “normal life” ramps up and they don’t follow through.

Thomas Edison is often quoted as saying that “genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration”. If that’s true, then the time ratio of a three day conference to the rest of the year is just about perfect. And I am very much looking forward to seeing what I and the other attendees are able to accomplish in the days, weeks, and months ahead.

Time to go do the work now…

Over human history, people have created many, many different metaphors for what life is. Different metaphors lead to different conclusions.

Life is a stage performance

When you were born, your body was probably given a name and legal identity to distinguish it from the other bodies. This is the name of the character that you’re playing in the stage play called “Your Life”. There’s no script for this play – it’s improvised by you and all the actors around you, moment to moment.

Some people play their characters straight, and take everything seriously and literally. Others treat the play as a comedy and take nothing seriously. Most people operate somewhere in between, shifting back and forth between comedy, drama, tragedy, and other genres.

Everyone wears a costume most of the time. Some of the characters judge other characters based on the costumes they wear. Changing the costume changes the way that other characters respond to the character that you’re playing – sometimes dramatically.

People wear masks, both metaphorical and literal. Sometimes they confuse the character they play with who they really are. Some people play the same role regardless of which part of the stage they happen to be on at the moment – work, home, golf course, bar, ghetto street corner, luxury hotel, aircraft seat. Others change the character they play to fit the context of the people and the stuff that surrounds them that time.

Some actors play for the audience, trying to be the hero, wanting others to like their character. Others play for themselves, based on internal motivations and drives.

Life is a game

We are all players in the Human Game. Your game piece is your physical body. The most fundamental rules of the game are the laws of physics, from which the behavior of material things is understood at different scales of time and space. Many less precise but equally useful “rules of thumb” have emerged from the observed behavior of living and non-living things. Other imprecise rules emerge from human organizations, societies, economies and so forth. There may also be non-physical, spiritual laws to which our game pieces are subject but they are either less exact or less well understood.

No one knows how long their game piece will last before it’s worn out. A person can play the game in a near-infinite number of ways before the game is over for their physical body. Treat others as allies or adversaries. Try to accumulate as much physical stuff or promises of physical stuff (i.e. money) as they can. Learn and explore as much as they can. Do as little as possible and avoid anything that looks like work or a challenge. Lots of people will attempt to tell you how to play the game. You can play the game of treating them seriously or play the game of ignoring them. It’s up to you.

The basic rules on this game board are the laws of physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics. The derived rules pretty much correspond to whatever you persuade the other players in the game to let you get away with. Beyond that, there are no rules – you play the game however you choose. There are no rules, just consequences.

Life is a test

Everything you do in life is a test, adding up the ultimate test which is life itself. If you pass the test then it means that you’re worthy and you can go on to harder and harder tests. If you don’t pass an important test then it means something very significant about your identity and value as a person. It means you have been judged and found wanting. Be very careful about this.

It’s very important that you do well when others test you or when you test yourself. For some, getting credentialed is the most important thing they can do – the more letters after a name means more value as a person. For some, getting the right numbers on the bank statement, the scale, the measuring tape, the spec sheet of their car, residence, or spouse, is what matters. For others, it’s more abstract – living in alignment with their chosen personal values, for example.

The specific nature of the test isn’t important – what’s important is that you recognize that you are being tested and judged and measured from the moment you emerge from the womb. For that matter, you were probably tested extensively even before you were born. Choose your tests well and pass the big test of life as well as you can.

Life is a war

The world is full of other people who are opposed to you getting what you want. In order to triumph in the war of life, you have to be prepared to fight for what’s yours – your home, your family, your money, your stuff. People are going to try to take what’s yours, and to make sure they don’t, you’ll have to hit them first and hit them hard. Sometimes this is a metaphorical war, as in politics, the workplace, or the condo board. Other times the metaphor becomes literal in the case of street gangs, police officers, armies, guerrilla fighters, or terrorists.

We are all soldiers and warriors for some kind of cause. We’re all putting our lives on the line for something, fighting for something. Even the most apathetic person, through his action or inaction, is fighting for something specific (though he may not know it, and might not care if he did know). But this is not for you – in the war of life, you should fight for something meaningful, something that really matters.

In a war, you have allies and you have enemies. Choose your allies well and they will cover your back when you’re putting lead on target. Choose the wrong allies and they will crumple under fire and be useless to your war effort. Choose your enemies well – a David and Goliath fight may be impressive, but don’t martyr yourself in a heroic but pointless gesture.

Pick your strategy and your tactics carefully. Maintain situational awareness at all times, and know your enemy’s mind better than he knows himself. Hit the enemy hardest in his weakest points, invade his decision cycle, and induce chaos, uncertainty, and fear in his thought process. A disorganized and terrified enemy is ineffective and unable to fight, easily scattered, overwhelmed, and then destroyed completely. Move your forces silently and quickly, and be elusive, mysterious, and invisible like angry ghosts. Create your army to be as intangible as smoke, as concentrated as the tip a spear, and as deadly as the stroke of an axe.

And in the war of life, always remember the dictum of the master warrior Sun Tzu – the peak of skill is to subdue the enemy without fighting a single battle.

Life is a party

Everyone’s experienced pleasure and pain at times. During your time attending the party of life, it’s important to seek out the former and avoid the latter. As a great man once said: “There is no right or wrong. There is only fun and boring.” Since life is a party, seek out fun and avoid boring. This can apply to people, situations, cities, actual, literal parties, or anything else. Seek out fun and avoid boring. What else is there?

Because you’re looking for the epicenter of the party that is life, there’s one rule and that is how the party you’re at makes you feel. Thrilled and excited is good. Apathetic and bored is bad. Don’t feel bad to leave one party and go to another if you get bored.

Some activities are better than others for giving you that rush of fun and pleasure that makes life worthwhile. When you structure your life situation so as to have more skydiving, race car driving, and yes, partying itself, and less financial accounting, quiet contemplation, or being alone in nature, then you are truly living your life as though it’s one big party.

All pleasure, no pain. All fun, no boredom. Life is good. Party on.

Life is a dream

Have you ever had that feeling, where you’re not sure if you’re awake, or still dreaming? Guess what? You are still dreaming. None of this is real.

Your experience of life here is just a dream – a dream taking place inside your own mind, a dream that you can observe due to your consciousness, a dream made up of thought.

A dream mind observing itself dreaming. How can this be real? Your real self is formless, beyond this world, and impervious to being changed or harmed by anything from this illusory world.

Your happiness, security, well-being, inner peace – all of these things don’t come from this dream world. They come from your true self. Anything that happens in this dream can’t possibly touch who you really are because who you really are is formless, not of this illusory world of form.

When you really get this, at a deep level, your experience of life will transcend your wildest dreams.

Life is…

None of what I have told you is true. None of it is real. These are just stories. Maybe some of them resonated with, inspired, or offended you. That doesn’t matter.

The only thing that should matter to you is the answer to the question “what is life?” that you create and speak for yourself.

So what is it?

Imagine the effect it might have on your experience of life to continuously acknowledge everything and everyone present to your attention with these nine words – “I thank you, I love you, I forgive you”.

I call this process “real-time practice” – real-time thanking, real-time loving (what the Buddhists call “mettā”), and real-time forgiving.

Whether you thank a specific person, object, or situation, or else thank the universe[1] for creating it, the basic ideas and implications of the process are similar.

To make this exercise more concrete, consider these specific examples – your spouse / significant other or the absence of same, the part of your body that you believe looks the worst, God, your favorite food, your mother and father, your left eye, the sky, your business card, tigers. If you don’t like these examples, it’s OK – life will provide you with others.

I thank you

This phrase is for the happenings that you have judged to be good. You can give thanks in advance for the things that you want to happen. You can give thanks in the present for things that you like. And, looking back, you can give thanks for situations that went the way that you wanted them to go.

I love you

This phrase represents the transmission of unconditional loving-kindness (mettā), to all people, things, or situations. A person doesn’t love because they hope it will earn them something or get them something. Some people often label that process “love”, but when it’s conditional, it’s more of a transaction, not genuine love. This phrase acknowledges and honors reality, exactly as it is.

I forgive you

This phrase is for the things that you have judged as “bad”. Recognition of the potential limitation of your own powers of judgment and acknowledgment that the things that you deem “bad” might yet bear fruit in unexpected ways. And even if they don’t, recognizing the truth of reality, as the absolute. Forgiving God – forgiving reality – for not living up to your expectations and demands, is a powerful spiritual practice.

“I thank you, I love you, I forgive you”. Chained together, these three phrases provide a simple and yet profound statement of celebration of reality exactly as it is, now.

Crossing over

A interesting and powerfully transformative experience can emerge from what I call the “crossovers”.

For example, when you thank the universe for getting a result that you don’t really like, or forgive the universe for giving you what you want, you may feel a bit uneasy or resistant. (“Why would I want to give thanks for something I didn’t want?”) Unpredictable and possibly uncomfortable feelings are likely to arise when you stretch your mind and your thinking in different and seemingly contradictory ways. When these feelings emerge, sit with them and understand what they are trying to teach you.

It can also feel like a release to acknowledge that you don’t necessarily believe what you think – the situation that you judged to be “bad”, you can nevertheless thank, because you recognize it may turn out to be “good” in an unexpected way in the future. Or, it may not, and you can thank it anyway because it is a part of reality – and reality always wins any argument.

Even though you perform these practices in real time, you may encounter situations where you truly resist the practice. The words may feel insincere or hollow at times. Perhaps you really, really don’t want to thank the universe for something that you don’t think is good. Perhaps it feels silly to forgive the universe for permitting you to reach one of your most important goals. This is not a problem – recite the words anyway, and observe the thoughts, pictures, sounds, and sensations that emerge in response.

Resistance is part of the process. Don’t try to force your way past it. Instead of resisting resistance, and setting up a vicious circle, just observe the way you resist thanking, or loving, or forgiving. If you can’t accept the process itself, at least accept your resistance to the process. And if you can’t accept that, accept your resistance to the resistance. Eventually you will discover a level at which acceptance and peace prevail – at this level, you can thank, love, and forgive as normal. For some situations it may take time to thank, love and forgive – for others it will feel natural immediately.

Hold these nine words constantly in mind – “I thank you, I love you, I forgive you” – especially when you experience emotional extremes or stresses. In doing this, you will remain aligned with the reality of things as they are. You will keep your mind clear of confusion and distortion and illuminate your experience of life with the clear light of truth.

[1] You may also prefer to use “God”, or “Source”, or whatever other name works for you.

Video from my recent talk at MIT. I discuss the Three Principles of Sydney Banks.

The Three Principles are a philosophy of life that can help people to enjoy a happier and more fulfilling experience of life – right away.