This was the final assignment from the group coaching course I participated in from September 2018 to March 2019. It expressed an emergence of a deeper understanding, of a new way of being and getting things done. Not one based on struggle, deadlines and forcing outcomes but one that could be best summed up as making progress in spite of personal doubt, angst and overthinking, by tapping into the ever-present creative genius that exists within all of us ~ Scott
“If you learn it right, you’ll do it right the rest of your life, If you learn it wrong, you’ll do it wrong, and you’ll spend the rest of your life trying to do it right” ~ Steve Prazenka as quoted by David H. Hackworth in ‘About Face – The Odyssey of An American Warrior’
It seems I’ve spent much of my adult life questing. Not the grab a Hobbit or two, pack your lunch and something to drink while you go and slay some orcs and dragons while picking up a few trinkets along the way sort of questing. But the one where you try and find out the secrets of the Universe so you can have what your heart desires sort of questing.
All this personal searching was played out against a backdrop of managing large-ish IT technical projects that help other people get what they want.
I failed so many times on my personal quests (I did alright on the projects), that looking back its only now apparent the reasons I stumbled and what the lessons were.
I’d tried using the same methodologies that I’d learned for implementing large impersonal projects on my own goals, without too much success.
And that’s the key. Project Management methodology is impersonal. While there is always a part of the project dedicated to ‘Change Management’, its only lip service. More designed to quiet the detractors and get them used to the fact that ‘things are changing, whether they like it or not’.
What most business change projects miss is that to change culture, you need to change collective thinking in order to change the behaviour. Most businesses only focus on process, thinking that will get them where they want. But that’s the slowest path to change. If you change thinking the result of changed behaviour will take care of itself because it will be internally motivated i.e. the people will do it for themselves.
It’s not so easy when it your ‘own self’ that is protesting the change. When you’re the one trying to push forward with a change, even when it’s for your own good.
It wasn’t until I started to see through some of the personal conditioning that had kept me going around in circles that I started to make progress.
The less time I spent bound to my own ego, arguing with and losing to that little voice in my own head, that things slowly started to change. The less I engaged in those arguments, the more things started to shift.
Like a large oil tanker changing course, I had so much mental momentum invested in doing things in a certain way, that it took a long time for me to change direction.
This, I hope serves as a distillation of lessons I have learned along the way, and by sharing you might find something of use to you in your journey.
Rule 1 – The Outcome of Any Given Goal is Not Up to Me
You have no say on how things turn out.
It sounds surprising, especially for someone who has spent the better part of his professional life making outcomes happen to a plan, but there is a limit to what you can make happen.
In the projects I managed I would make things happen by sheer force of personality. It seemed I had boundless energy, and would either do it myself, or ensure others were focused enough to know they needed to complete their tasks so that the outcome would not be compromised. Some call it stand-over tactics, I just did what I thought was right at the time.
It wasn’t exactly Project Management ‘by the numbers’, but it did get results.
So if that were true that Project Management is how business gets what they want, why can’t the same work for us mere mortals?
I realised somewhere along the way that I had very little to say whether my plan worked out or not. And the more often I tried to predict outcomes, the more I realised that predicting outcomes wasn’t my job.
In fact, I’ve realised I’ve got about as much chance of predicting how something will turn out as I have predicting the winning lottery numbers (I’ve tried, as they say, you have in it to be in to win it!)
This means I can throw everything at a goal, intention, energy, desire, and despite that, I’m not guaranteed that things will turn out the way I want.
And that’s not a bad thing!
It doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t set goals, or I have things that I would like to aim for.
What it does mean is that I had to learn a new way. A new way to create, a new way to relate to myself and the world around me. And most of all I had to unlearn years of conditioning, of thinking I had to come up with the answers and be the authority on making it all happen in just the way I wanted to so that I could extract some sense of success, security, power, or whatever particular motivation I thought a goal would give me.
The big lesson for me here has been the less time I spent dwelling in my ego, and the less time I spend trying to control life and its outcomes. And the more time I spend connected to what lies before that, and the more time I allow myself to play in the Unknown, the less likely am to be looking out into the world to find stuff to try and make myself feel better.
Rule 2 – The Universe Wants You to Have What You Want
And that is why we may humbly ask our Divine Lover for whatever we want. For our natural and innate desire is for God – and Gods desire is for us ~ Julian of Norwich
Despite Rule 1, from where I sit it seems the Universe wants you to have what you want.
That may seem strange when most religious teaching would have us believe that the Universe or God is a grey bearded guy in the sky that passes judgement on us and decides whether we’ll burn in the pits of hell for eternity or be graced with everlasting peace in heaven.
I’m not a religious scholar and don’t have a particularly religious upbringing and think the last time I saw the inside of a church was 15 years ago at my Grandmother’s funeral.
I’m not talking about the God of fear and judgement; the one man uses to control his fellow man. My experience has always been a God of love, an all-knowing God that wants me to learn and experience life, God in the purest sense.
And that’s why God wants us to have what we want. Because in the process creating, and the joy of having, we get to experience God. And that’s what the Devine wants most of all for us.
This is the God of ‘the zone’ or ‘creative flow’, the one where we find the right answers at the right time, and know what we need to do to move forward in the moment.
Based on that it’s easy then I hear you say. No wonder books like ‘The Secret’, were best sellers, they’re essentially telling us we just need to focus really hard on what we want, and our hearts desire will come true. Job done, next.
Not so fast. There is a little more to it than that.
You don’t get to experience God when you’re trying to feed your ego. Your small self. Power trips, chasing the feeling, delaying gratification until after you’ve got the ‘thing’, are all signs you’re feeding your ego.
No, God, the Universe, Source, Devine Essence call it what you may, is far grander than anything your small self could ever imagine and wants you to experience it in all its glory.
This is not a call to worship, but a call to create. You experience God in the joy of creating and the joy of having. Having what you have created in your union with the Devine.
And why is there so much struggle? Why is it that we fall short? If it’s ordained by all that is, why do we not click our fingers and have our hearts desire?
Simple. We don’t allow it. Call it conditioning, guilt, Thought, mindset. We don’t let ourselves experience the Divine. Our small mind (ego) doesn’t think we are worthy and with that we block our ability to experience the joy of creating, let alone the joy of having.
Put simply, God wants you to get because that’s how you experience God, no conditions, no guilt, no shame.
Rule 3 – Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places
What is love? What is it to be loved? What is it to feel love? Why do humans search for love?
What is love when it comes to the self? Self-love? Self-acceptance?
Why is so much money spent on worshipping love?
What is this love thing? Can you hold it in your hand, look at it from different angles, hold it, shape it? Can you give it away?
Can you even describe it?
Love and self-acceptance have always been issues for me. If I was to rate myself now, I’m at a scale of ‘high tolerance’ for spending time with myself, which is far better than a few years ago where it was rated as ‘I would prefer not to be in the same room’.
From what I’ve seen the biggest shift has been in dispelling a misunderstanding of who I am and how I relate to that.
I used to invest a lot of energy in setting goals. The idea was simple. Get the object of the goal and my happiness quotient would increase based on what I thought the goal represented, or how much that was tied to my wellness index.
Big muscles and ripped body were high up there because they would lead to; Self-confidence which would lead to lots of girls. Its funny, health didn’t seem to come into the picture anywhere.
The next one was a high paying job coupled with income from investments. The job was to feed the income so at some point I could quit the job that I wasn’t enjoying, because then I could be free to do what I wanted.
It seemed quite circular logic. Why didn’t I just put all that energy into figuring out how to get paid for doing something I liked?
Most of the goals I set were tied to status. How to increase it, so I could be considered more important, more desirable and more respected? In short, how could I pump up the ego?
I’ve been told the biggest fear of the ego is death or obliteration, but what if its next biggest fear is rejection and isolation? Of the ego being by itself and having no one in the world ‘out there’ to connect with. Having no mirror, nothing to reflect it its own self-importance, its own existence?
I’m guessing this is the reason traditionally prisoners were, and still are, put in isolation as punishment. What better way to torture someone to their very core than to isolate them from all contact. To send the ego insane with insecure feelings.
It seems quite bizarre to point it out now as it’s so obvious to me but love and acceptance cannot be found in the world of things. It’s not found in goals, in houses, in money, in status, and surprisingly while it may be present in relationships, it’s not found there either.
Love and self-acceptance go hand in hand. They are what is present when ego isn’t. They are a constant. Underneath the habitual noise and chatter of the monkey mind, lies a depth of feeling unlike anything in this world. And that’s because it’s not of this world. You are the stuff that love is made of, you just need to get out of your own way to find it.
Rule 0 – It’s Just a Game and You’re Perfect
I was reading a blog I subscribe to recently and it reminded of a point that I’d almost forgotten. While feelings are real, the thoughts that create them aren’t. They’re just a transitory mirage played out on the movie screen of my own consciousness.
I remember where I was and what I was doing when I first saw this for myself. I was trapped in a mental whirlwind of my own making. Feeling very self-righteous that what I was feeling was 100% true, and that the object of my scorn, another human was obviously wrong.
I was driving along and remember very clearly the voice in my head justifying, “but my feelings are real”, and without pause, that was followed by another, softer much gentler voice replying, “but the thoughts that created them are not”. In that moment I popped. All judgement and justification drained from me.
In that moment I saw the contrast between the small mind and the big mind. The small mind of judgement, of needing to be right, of feeling wounded and maligned. And then there is the Universal Mind gently steering the ship back on track, no judgement, inviting me to rest in its bosom to return to peace, return to knowing.
Did you know that before Thought, before all the programming that unconsciously runs our day-to-day lives, you’re perfect, whole and infinitely creative?
Do you know that you’re not broken and don’t need fixing?
Did you know you’re the creator?
Do you know you have the whole creative potential of the Universe at your fingertips?
Did you now there is a space, underneath the noise of your habitual thinking that hat you can tap into, it’s available 24 x 7, 365 days of the year, including leap years, that will guide your creative endeavours more than you could imagine.
Writers call it the muse, athletes call it the zone, computer programmers call it flow. A space of infinite creativity and performance. A place where things get done and miracles happen.
Not only that, when you turn away from your personal mind and allow yourself to sink into that space it will take care of you, heal you and provide a greater insight into the nature of being and humanity than you could ever hope to learn from a book.
I once heard the mystic Sydney Banks say on a recording, “we’re all swimming in a pool of God”.
And rather than being a God of judgement and fear, I think you’ll find this one is more than willing to show you how to live your best life.
What does all this prove? We play this game of like it’s a life or death matter. We must win at all costs. I must get to the top of the heap; beat the other guy and don’t worry about the carnage we sow.
Let’s face it, we are not getting out of this game alive. You might as well take yourself and life a bit less seriously.
We treat ourselves and others like an afterthought. We dream that we’ll create a successful life then take the time to care. Perhaps we’ve got it the wrong way around and instead we should try caring for ourselves and nurturing those around us.
But there’s nothing special in this approach. We might not get noticed, there is a good chance we won’t gain any special status, and there is no guarantee of wealth.
When I was growing up I used to read a lot of books about men in combat. There was a common saying, combat is 99% boredom and 1% sheer terror.
Well, life is 99% ordinary, and 1% magical, but it is from the ordinary that the magic is created.
As I finish up, I want to leave you with three things to consider;
- Leave perfection to God.
- Live your life, give it a go, don’t worry if you’re not good at something, that may come with practice, or not. Who you are is already perfect, so you have no need to prove it.
- God (the Universe) wants is to have what we want, because in the act of creating and the act of having we get to experience God
- Dream big, find the space within, visit it often, it will teach you, heal you and guide you, and most of all, will show you love.
- And what God most wants for us is to experience fullness of the Divine Love, and surrender from the smallness of our personal minds, our ego, into Grace.
- Find as many opportunities as you can to experience the ordinary. You’re special because you’re made it this far in life, not because of anything you have or do, your value is intrinsic, there is no need to try and create what already is.
