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Time To Come Alive

After reading The Tools by Barry Michels & Phil Stutz, I decided that I liked the idea of having tools to access in your mental tool shed that helped me move through the day. I am still practicing Bring It On, Active Love and Jeopardy. And I looked for more tools, which I found in their newer book, Coming Alive.

What makes these tools great, like the last ones, is the ease of implementation. Instantaneously, you can change your state by following simple steps. As the saying goes, it is simple and not easy. The hardest part of using these tools is remembering to use them. Each requires you to pause before responding or taking action. And that takes practice.

The tools in this book focus on becoming the best version of ourselves by tapping into our innate wisdom:

The belief that an invisible animating energy underlies our existence is
thousands of years old. Unlike our modern, mechanical notion of energy, which we understand via mathematics, this is a living energy that we feel inside us. In Eastern religions, this energy, or Life Force, is known variously as prana (in Indian philosophy and medicine), lung (in
Tibetan Buddhism), and chi (in Chinese philosophy and medicine). In the Old Testament, it was called ruach, the breath of God, which gave mankind not only life, but the spirit to evolve. (pg 11, Coming Alive)

By experiencing this energy deeply, we can come to see the Life Force around us expressed in Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. They are the true forces that make life meaningful:

To put it simply, Truth reveals your path, Beauty inspires you to walk it, and Goodness enables you to spread virtue along the way. It is on this path that you gain the greatest reward: you know who you are and why you are here. Your soul finds its true place in the universe. (pg 230, Coming Alive)

Come Alive!

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Four Agreements on Three Questions

Don José Ruiz of The Four Agreements fame has written a newer book to create clarity on you as a powerful, humble human, The Three Questions. I loved the story that illustrated the his points. They say that stories help us remember and that is true of the story to remember the three questions.

Simple stories invite us to reflect on our own lives. One way or another, they represent everyone’s story. If a story is good, it has the power to inspire questions and encourage us to look for answers. If a story is very good, it can get under our skin and dare to see the truth. It can open new doors of perception. These stories leave us a choice: to be challenged by the truth or to close the door and continue walking a familiar path. (pg 7)

The three questions are

Who Am I?
What is real?
What is love?

Like The Four Agreements, Ruiz is able to speak to simple rules to help us live as humans better. As a question “who am I?” is probably one that everyone asks at very points in their lives. As I am asking know.

As we move from one stage of live to another, as my children become their own persons, our answers evolve. This book is one that you can pick up at any time when you need clarity because not only do we ask “who am I,” we ask “what is real” and “what is love.” If we, each, to ask these simple three questions, we can change the world one person at a time.

Things are the way they are in the world not because they are right or wrong. Naturally, there are things we can all do better for the sake of our personal happiness. We can free ourselves of our own tyrannies and give ourselves the sense of safety we’ve been longing for. Because we are free doesn’t mean other “countries” will be free. It doesn’t mean that other leaders will be aware or responsible. The choice for transformation belongs to every individual. We can guide ourselves toward personal independence, but should not coerce anyone else to follow us. Our journey back to authenticity is ours alone and mustn’t be used as an excuse to pressure family members or dear friends.

At any time, we can walk up and see the totality of what we are. We can see life as it is and accept everything we see. We can show how truth walks and talks in the world without attempting to govern others. We can offer our presence–not our rules–to demonstrate the best of what a human can be. (pg 196)

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Where Did I Leave It? Finding My Great Work

Michael Bungay Stanier has been in my inbox for years now. As an insecure coach, I am compelled to learn from the best. He is one of those. His napkin-sized book, Find Your Great Work, gives me an idea, which is its mission.

I am particularly partial to the maps 4 – 6: Choices. The book is a quick look at 12 exercises that help you find work that matters. After discovering your great work–work that lights you up, you have a better chance of feeling engaged, empowered & in the flow–all the buzz works for finding the meaning in your work. Map 4 takes you through the challenge of creating space, in your life, to do your great work. There is a whirlwind around all of us that pulls us in a dozen different directions. You need to “get clear on what you’re willing to give up and what you’re not by deciding what’s negotiable and what isn’t.” (pg 64)

The map has you define everything that is going on in your life as non-negotiable, feels non-negotiable–but maybe not, and negotiable. One key to this exercise is knowing that we have a choice for just about everything. We might not exercise it. Don’t like your boss? You have a choice whether you stay in your job or not. Staying might be non-negotiable, or it might feel like it is, and it isn’t. Running through these hard choices can help us understand why we are where we are, if we want to change, accepting what we can’t and changing what we can.

Once you have your list, you will need to consider:

  • “What has become clear? What are you seeing as more important than you realized? Less important?
  • Are you giving due time and space to the things you say are non-negotiable? Are they the first things you book in and hold as you allocate your time and energy?
  • What do the non-negotiable items bring you? And at what cost? What are you holding on to here?
  • If you had to move 3 items from ‘non-negotiable’ to ‘feels like non-negotiable’ what would they be? How does that free things up?
  • Knowing now what’s really important, what can you start to say No to?” (pg 68)

This is one of the exercises in the book which punches way above its weight class because

Even though we might find ourselves in situations we wouldn’t pick.

Even though we carry with us all the uncertainty and history of who we are and where we come from.

Things only get interesting when you take full responsibility for the choices you make.

Finding Your Great Work, Michael Bungay Stanier, page 16
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Life Can Be Perfect, If You Are Not A Perfectionist

For the past three or four years, things have been going pretty well at our house.  We pay our bills to afford small luxuries like weekends away and dinners out, and still have something in the bank at the end of the year.  So far as life is concerned, I have felt fairly well content.  But there is another side to me which every now and then gets restless.  It says:  “What good are you anyway?  Is this all there is work, sleep, shuffling from year to year?”

Of course, we contribute in small ways–a twenty in the church plate, ten to Red Cross–dribbling out money hoping to satisfy our need to be worthwhile, to create a perfectly happy life.  But there isn’t much satisfaction in it.  For one thing, it’s too diffused and, for another, I’m never really sure in my own mind, if this is the right thing.  I am not sure I have time to find out.

A couple of years ago, I said: “I’d like to discover my perfect place in the world where I can be my best and contribute more than anywhere else.”

It was a rather thrilling idea and I went at it in the same spirit in which I investigate all my big purchases.   Without bothering you with a long story, I believe I have found it.

Not everyone can benefit from this.  Not everyone reading this will want to take the action needed to find their perfect place.  That’s okay.

For everyone else, let me give you a little background.

Sitting in a playground, a young child shines with un-self-conscious gaiety.  She falls to her knees from a missed step and a shadow passes.  She jumps up, brushes off her hands and begins again to shine.  She sits despondent, staring at the swing that she wants to play with, but it is still occupied.  Again she gets up distracted and joyful with a new adventure.

We turn the hands of time.  She is grown and then enters the age of rational responsible living.  It seems that our times present new obstacles to her happiness–and yours.

Until recent times, we were deaf and dumb to the trials of others, but now they moans and complaints are audible through television, radio, YouTube, and Twitter.  The millions are now saying what moody poets have always said:

“The flower that smiles today
Tomorrow dies.
All that we wish to stay
Tempts and then flies.
What is the world’s delight?
Lightning that mocks the night
Brief even as bright.”

The worker-bees of today, who are much better off than the same class of worker from centuries ago, still say what Shelley said in 1819.

“The seed ye sow, another reaps
The wealth ye find, another keeps
The robes ye weave, another wears
The arms ye forge, another bears.

The poets are by no means the only offenders.  The journalists, politicians, even talk show hosts, take their turn.  News deals daily with the lives of the vicious, the wretched and the dissolute; and with the most unjust and disastrous conditions of modern society.  The camera’s eye is filled with a popularized opinion that highlights an immoral universe, indifferent to right and wrong.

This is a melancholy notion that really makes people miserable and only illustrates our morbid curiosity with the sudden collapse of civilizations.

Still.

A flower blooms.  A baby laughs.  A child hugs a grandmother.  These moments pass quickly; are stored in our memories and rise up for us to remember our bliss.  In spite of many old and some new discouragements, we are still seeking those perfect moments that add up to a perfect life.

What are the means and sources of this perfect life, with the storms of the present surrounding us?

The thought that we need to take hold fast of, throughout our pursuit of a perfect life is that the best way to secure future perfection is to create perfect moments today and string them together.  To secure any desirable capacity for perfection in the future, near or remote, cultivate it today.