Go beyond selling

If you want to be successful and sell, make the “design so engaging and compelling that people simply have to share it,” is what Ravi Sawhney, the founder and CEO of RKS says in his Fast Company blog post. He goes on to say,

When you’ve done this, you just haven’t sold one product. When you successfully let the Hero’s Journey be your guide, each sale, each heroic evangelist you create, will generate many more sales and build brand loyalty. It will turn your company into something far more than a company that creates products or services. It will be a company that creates empowerment. When you move people in this way, you bond them to your brand. And that bond? It’s priceless.

Take risks – express your passion

We all want to do more than shop, we want to be heroes. We want to be the person who solves the problem no one else solves. We want to be the person who shares that new thing.

We think of ourselves as modern man, yet we have the same wiring of our ancestors. We’re motivated by pain or pleasure. We want to avoid pain through solving a problem or experience joy through receiving pleasure. The person who does this for others is the hero. The experience goes from being a personal experience to being a communal experience. Our actions serve more than ourselves – they serve our community.

Understand what moves people – understand the Hero’s Journey

Both the Whole Adventure described in this site as well as Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey describe the hero’s path that Ravi Sawhney refers to in his post. If you want to move people to action, evoke their innate desire to travel this journey even in a minor way. By evoking and supporting their hero you’re moving your cause forward. Your product or service becomes the excuse for others to receive the rewards of being a hero.

How have you sold using the Hero’s Journey with a product or service? What did it feel like?

Further Reading:

1. How to Speed Deep Change
2. What is the Whole Revolution?
3. Want a Powerful Life? Use Your Hidden Resources – Part 1

Image via Wikipedia

Why can existing be so hard? Why does it feel like you are fighting the inertia of the entire universe to have the life you want?

I doubt you are using your innate capacity to fully live. In previous posts, I’ve written about the Whole Adventure or Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey as being an unconscious movement to evolve.

If the Whole Adventure is your evolutional process and the river you travel to your new self – what is the power that will propel your down the river? Beyond the desire for this journey, you have the means to facilitate the needed change. If you are to take this journey, and you are – you need help traveling it. Help comes in three forms as you change and grow. Knowing how to use these instinctual processes will greatly improve your journey.

The Trinity – three ways to achieve graceful and powerful change:

• Therapy to healing
• Being to doing
• Magic to miracles

Over the years these three aspects of development consistently show up in those who have a rich life. I suspect these people instinctually tapped into their deep power. You can do it intentionally by understanding what these three assets are and how to utilize them.

Therapy to healing

These aspects are not necessarily stages, but if they were, this would be the first for some. Here, the limitations that prevent life and movement are removed. This is particularly true if  the stress or trauma occurred during childhood and we were unable to experience and release it so the event becomes lodged in our body/mind. Our world tells us that either what occurred didn’t occur or we can’t speak about it in an honest way – so we distort our worldview and ourselves to fit the world that exists. Over time, we grow to consciously and unconsciously accept this new worldview.

Therapy, as a change agent, becomes the catalyst for this change. Be it psychotherapy or body therapy, or even shamanic work when the stress is released and understood for what it was, you are free to begin to experience life fully. Life stops being about survival. You stop being at the effect of stress and trauma, for example you move beyond the Drama Triangle which I wrote about in previous posts.

Therapy is the part of the trinity that deals with fixing. It removes the limiting past, beliefs, pain,

tension and toxins. It gets the crap out of you and your life. Therapy sets up your body/mind to do what it wants to do – heal. Healing can’t occur in a state of survival. Stress, even if it is from the past, is a form of survival. To the extent you have stress in you; you are limiting your mind and body to heal.

Examples of therapies

Therapy can also include holistic therapies such as acupuncture, herbology or homeopathy. Standard allopathic medicine doesn’t foster healing, but it is great at dealing with emergencies. Support groups when focused not on a problem, but towards sponsoring change, can get you out of your past. So can trainings that not only teach a new way of being, but also activate your deeper instincts for change.

As Americans, we like to fix things including ourselves. This is great until it becomes a distraction or obsession. My warning here is don’t use these processes to develop a better coping mechanism. I see people learn a better way to be, but they still aren’t being themselves. They may overtly be functioning better. They could be getting in less trouble. They aren’t happier.

It’s not why

Believing you need to understand the why to heal is a misnomer. True understanding comes from the wisdom of experience, not from someone else telling you to be different. In other words, be less concerned about why and more focused on the how of change.

Agents of change

Your body and its cycles have its own agents of change. For women, puberty and menopause are two examples of how all parts of a woman are forced to change as she passes through her rites of passage into another stage of life.

All these agents of change will produce chaos. Releasing, completing and healing will shake up the past; it is their purpose. The fixing nature of therapy brings you back to a neutral place, a place more available for the second element being to doing which I will discuss in the next post.

What are your agents of change that you use to move your life forward?

Further Reading:

1. Want a Powerful Life? Use Your Hidden Resources – Part 2
2. Want a Powerful Life? Use Your Hidden Resources – Part 3
3. A Crisis Is a Terrible Thing to Waste

Change requires determination, sometimes like that of a competitive endurance athlete. An article in National Geographic Adventure on how to get through adversity, tells the story of how Rosie Stancer attempted to be the first woman to travel solo to the North Pole. She didn’t achieve her goal, but she did survive—minus two toes while vowing to reattempt.

The article quotes Andrew Lane, Ph.D., a sports psychologist, who suggests concentrating on each movement. He goes on to say, “Relaxing your shoulders can help stop a cycle of vicious thoughts.” Breathing and being in the moment no matter how difficult it might be will reduce your stress and increase your performance. A stressed body never performs as well over time. The survival response as the stress response will get us out of harm’s way, but we aren’t meant to sustain that level of sympathetic nervous system output. Over time, our performance decreases if only because we become exhausted.

Another sports psychologist, David Coppel, Ph.D., speaks about how some athletes disassociate from their bodies to get through the event. Disassociation is a backup to being present; when you can’t handle something you check out. The problem is that you often don’t check back in. It’s true, you feel less pain but you will also feel less pleasure. Not being present is a set-up to injuries and getting lost.

Stress, in a sporting event or life, can teach you to check out. The problem is you can get so good at it that you don’t even know you aren’t present. Then one day you may wake up wondering how you got to where you are. Twenty-five years ago, I had a pediatric neurologist see me for Rolfing. About halfway through the ten sessions, he told me, “I am not who I wanted to be. I am someone else’s image of a life.” He gave up medicine to discover who he was and what he wanted from life. That took an act of bravery to come back into his body and his life.

The process of change can be difficult. Often the most difficult aspect is getting present. Once you are in your body, and feeling what is occurring in the moment, change occurs. For many, the first three stages of the Whole Adventure are just about getting present. Re-associating and relaxing into whatever is happening can make your event more intense. It will keep you on your path ultimately increasing the chance of success.

Further Reading:

1. How to Use Pain to Change
2. What Makes Women Happy?
3. How to Cheat Change – Use Your Body

Are you wasting your crisis? Paul Romer, a Stanford Economist, first asked this question. Now I’m asking you.

I remember working on a crisis hotline while in college long ago, training others to leverage callers’ crisis into changing their lives. There’s nothing better than a crisis to get someone’s attention. A crisis wakes you up. It forces you to feel, it forces you to look at things that you haven’t seen before the crisis.

What a crisis do for you

A crisis can:

• Show you that the past is no longer working
• Create a request for change
• Assist in breaking down old patterns
• Go beyond denial, escaping and projecting
• Create a portal – an opening for change
• Provide a request or an opportunity to learn
• Provide an invitation to a new place or experience
• Bring a death of the old and isn’t working
• Prompt the beginning of a new adventure – Campbell’s Call to Action
• Require something new from you
• Set up you for releasing old stress or trauma and a chance to heal

How to make the most of a crisis

After you deny it and then fight it – what do you do? You surrender – not necessarily to the situation, but to the experience. You allow yourself to slow down and shift out of the stress response of fight or flight to a place of mindfulness. I know this doesn’t seem like what you want to do; it is as if you’re asking to be hit harder.

By surrendering, you do first feel more discomfort. You feel what you were avoiding. For an instant, the tiger that was chasing you does catch you. The next instant you realize you’re still alive and maybe you will live. Now that not all your resources are oriented to surviving, you can start to use your more creative resources to fully evaluate the problem and perhaps transform it.

Given that you are not panicking and you see that there might be hope, you can start to leverage the crisis. You can use it as way to shift your life, learn a deep lesson or heal an old pattern. Once you know you will live, you can expand your scope of awareness and action to go beyond problem solving.

Ask yourself, what is the pattern? How is this crisis a repeat for you? Where has a similar crisis occurred in your life? In most cases, we tend to repeat a crisis until we learn what it is attempting to teach us. The players might be different – but often the theme will be similar. You might know someone who continues to end up in abusive relationships. His or her players change, but the theme of the drama stays the same.

If you can’t come up with your theme, ask your friends. Their perspective will be less biased. Once you get the pattern, step back. Look at it as if you’re looking at another’s pattern. Don’t analyze it yet, just feel it. By letting it sink in, you won’t be avoiding it anymore. This is what you were running from. Let your emotions catch up to you and feel what they have to tell you. It might be scary, but that’s okay. Keep breathing; these feelings will release.

As you’re feeling the full experience, let the images, sensations and memories surface before you release them. After much of the charge is released, expand your awareness by asking yourself what you’re learning. Buried in the drama and details is the lesson, the healing. It is possible you won’t get this awareness until after your crisis has ended; I’ve had the understanding come months later.

How to Use the Whole Adventure

This site is set up around what we’re calling the Whole Adventure, what Joseph Campbell called the Hero’s Journey. It is a process of unwinding down to a place of deep decision, the Catalyst stage. This is often the stage where a crisis intensifies – it is here you’re forced to decide. Are you going to keep doing it the old way or are you going to find a new way?

For some it is their dark night of the soul. That place where you are alone. You are in a void – not who you where and not who you can be. Your old behaviors will not serve you. Your mind will not serve you. You are brought to a place where there are only two doors – the door you entered in from and the new door with the unknown behind it.

The entire process of the Whole Adventure is about traveling this journey. Click on any of the five stages at the top of the page to learn more about the process.

Where to get help

Now that you have a frame of understanding to contextualize your experience, you can fully benefit from help. Friends can be a source of support with the caveat that if they have not gone through a similar situation, they might also be frightened. The more a friend has experienced his or her crisis or dark nights, the more likely he or she will be able to support you in a deep way. Friends always want to help. The question is, are they placating you or are they supporting the needed change? You will know. Simply put, don’t go to your bar for help quitting drinking.

Doing research on what is occurring can help. Often it will get your energy moving, and you’ll feel less stuck and at the effect of the crisis. The challenge here is not to over analyze the situation. Approach the research from the perspective of looking for an out-of-the-box solution.

Review the above list of the benefits of a crisis as a way to stay focused. Like all of us, you’ll want to escape, deny and project. Notice when that occurs; then come back and focus on accepting the present.

If you’re suffering the effects of a crisis, you might as well get the most from it. Use the crisis as a turning point for change. In holistic medicine and psychotherapy, this type of crisis is often called a healing crisis. It is where the body/mind detoxes or releases the past to create more space for the future. If allowed, the instability of the upheaval can evolve to a huge shift. Don’t waste the opportunity to deeply change your life.

Please tell us your experience in using a crisis as a change agent.

Photo by:  dipfan

Further Reading:

1. What is the Whole Revolution?
2. How to Speed Deep Change
3. Why Change Doesn’t Last?

How to Make the Powerful Easy

You have an instinctual ability to transform your life. Buried in your unconscious-Carl Jung would call it your Collective Unconscious-you have an urge to grow. With this urge comes a deep skill set analogous to your instinctual capacity to survive. When you get out of your way, or out of your head, you allow these skills to show up.

How do you go with this flow? You surrender. I know this statement makes a part of you scream No! However, you don’t need to trust me, but you do need to trust yourself. When you learn a new skill, we’ll say skiing, you keep raising the bar to raise your skill level. You practice and then you try steeper runs to the point where fear becomes excitement. When you’re learning to change, you may first tell your mind, “thank you for sharing, but I’m not going do what you suggest.” But as you keep stretching your comfort level, you begin to experience how your innate skill of balance takes over on the skies.

Now that you’re open to your ancestral skills showing up, let’s talk about them. Joseph Campbell, the fellow who made myths famous, also wrote about what he termed the Hero’s Journey. In his book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, he outlines 13 stages of the journey of the hero. Being a researcher, he was brilliant and precise in his analysis of the process a person travels to create deep change. Campbell freely admits that these 13 stages are not always in the same order or even always present. His 13 stages are too unwieldy to use in creating change, but they’re great at analyzing it.

After working with thousands of clients, many groups and through my personal travels, I’ve observed five stages of change. These stages of the Whole Adventure are easy to orient to as you travel this adventure of deep change and creation demands simplicity and focus. These five natural stages will take you from one experience to the next while keeping you oriented to experiencing the full potential of your journey.

The Five Stages of the Whole Adventure

These are the same stages listed under the header of this blog.

1. Imagine Allow your dream to lead you
2. Commit Begin the adventure, start your revolution
3. Catalyze Create with help from the WR and its members
4. Integrate Integrate your creation into your success
5. Share Apply your wisdom to changing your world

Through the posts of this blog, we will explore each stage and the entire Whole Adventure. Start experimenting with these stages. Start on small projects. Teach yourself what this instinctual process means for you. There is no one way to do it. The more you use this buried skill set, the better you will be at using it. It does work. It will make change deeper, quicker and easier. I’m a lazy fellow and I use this process to get out of work.

Photo by: Joseph Campbell Foundation

Further Reading:

1. What is the Whole Revolution?
2. Deep Healing, Deep Transformation
3. Why Change Doesn’t Last?

Living a Passionate Life

Passion is the fire that gets you moving. Without passion, all you do is get things done. You can achieve, but you need to ask yourself: Was the process fun? Did I end up where I wanted to end up? Did I grow or learn?

My vision of creation is that passion, our enthusiasm for what we are doing, is the core of our creation. If you not getting joy from doing something or will be in the future-why do it?

Passion anchors us back to our emotions. Passion shows up when we are open and expressive. Not limited by our shadows (our limiting beliefs), these open emotions are the set-up for passion. Experiencing and expressing your emotion of fear as you keep moving forward allows the fear to evolve into excitement.

Accepting and releasing the limiting emotions and shadows of the past permit you to express. Only though expression will there be room for passion to show up. Controlled emotions means controlled passion. Healing can be an inner journey; the expression of your passion to create is an outward journey.

Having a dream, vision, mission and goals are important, but without passion, there is no fuel to drive them. Without passion, you are just going through the motions. You may succeed, but will you create? Will you inspire? Will you change the planet?

Given that passion is at the core of creating-how do we support each other in tapping into our passions? I propose that you first need to ask yourself where your passion lies. What increases it? Where is the edge you are afraid to cross? How do you activate your passion? In the local men’s group we created, we are always asking what do you feel? Here we focus more on the question-what do you want.

If you are serious about creating, I encourage you to find a partner to support and be supported by as you travel this journey. Ask the above questions of your partner.

My experience with most achievement groups or processes is that they are strong on techniques. They tend to be weak on the emotions and passions fueling the creation. Start dreaming into your passions and your feelings about them. As you support each other in accomplishing your tasks, stay focused on the passion. Listen for it in your partner’s speaking. Is she or he just going through the motions? Where is the passion?

Support his or her passion with your enthusiasm. Let each of your passions spark the other. It’s true, what we focus on is what we create. I will always take more passion-will you? Let us know what your feelings are around passion.

Photo: by WisDoc

Further Reading:

1. Passion – Your Fuel for Success

What fuels your success? Is it a desire for money, possessions or fame? Do you hear a voice in your head telling you to get to work? We all have carrots and sticks propelling us forward. Sticks aren’t fun nor do they work well as we tend to resist them. And, the carrots-when we get them-often don’t taste as sweet as we hoped.

There are numerous ways to motivate you to be more successful. Therein lies the problem. Motivation demands effort and often produces results that are less than expected. However, an easier and quicker way exists which is also more fun and the results more fulfilling. You achieve the personal development  and the goals you want simultaneously.

Release what doesn’t work

Those voices, the shoulds and shouldn’ts that speak to you, are distracting. If you’re like me, these voices are more like nagging flies. Get rid of them.

How?…by not resisting. I’m not suggesting that you follow their advice but that you listen to what they really want. What emotions are behind them? These voices are much like a nagging child. When a child gets what he or she truly needs, the nagging ceases. Slow down and listen for the feelings and needs as you would to a child you love.

There are many techniques to facilitate letting go and I will address them in future posts. For now, breathe, feel the feeling and listen for what is behind the nagging. When you accept what you are resisting, the nagging will end thereby ending the distractions and energy drains.

The more you release the limiting spell of your voices and your beliefs that tell you the right way to achieve, the more room you have to do it your natural way. All the actions and beliefs about what and how you should proceed limit your choices. Let them go. In the beginning, it may not be comfortable to not have your old limiting friends but you’ll grow to enjoy the freedom from the silence.

This is the healing phase. Removing the blocks always creates space for the magic to show up. It isn’t much different than pulling the weeds from your garden so your vegetables can grow.

Spark your passion

Now the fun begins. Now that you have a little space to feel-what excites you? If nothing comes up, that’s okay as that is frequently the case. Here are some questions that can spark you:

Finding it

• What do you dream about having? Think about what you’re afraid to tell others.
• What is your vision? This is the big goal you have for yourself. It’s frequently the one you hesitate to share. This is more than a dream; it is the context in which your dream will show up for you.
  What do you envy in others? Go beyond the material items, what qualities do these people have that you want.
• What do you read, watch on TV, research and speak to others about? What is it about this interest of yours that makes it interesting? For example, although you may spend time around hardware stores, it doesn’t mean you want to own a hardware store or be a contractor. What does the store represent as a metaphor?
• Triangulate your observations. Use several of these and other questions to create several directions of inquiry. Where do all of them meet?
• Ask your family and friends. They often know more about how you express than you do. Ask them what excites you.

Sparking it

• Experiment. Play with the components of what you find. Give yourself the chance to investigate your passion.
• Find others who are into it. Hang with them. Being with them will give you energy if it’s your thing.
• Risk it. It’s like falling in love. When you are infatuated, you are expressive. Express yourself. If it is the thing, you will be getting energy from sharing.
• Create. Take what you learn and make something with it. Maybe it’s a plan, a model or a scaled-down version.

Risk it

• Let go. Someone might not like your idea or your creation. Step back from the personal identification and listen as if he or she is helping you improve what you love.
• Know the fear. There’ll be fear when stepping out beyond your norm. Fear wants to freeze you and stop you from achieving your goal. Feel the fear as you keep moving forward. This goes against most of what we’ve learned and because of that, a lot of power is available to you when you turn your fear into excitement and passion.
• Share it. Artists know how hard it is to share their work. It’s a part of them, sharing it exposes their creation. The line between fear and excitement is thin. The fear can quickly transform into excitement.
• Express yourself. With the fear and passion in hand, go for it, be the little kid that is so excited he or she can’t shut up.

Transforming fear into passion is no different from going from knowing that you can’t ride a bike because it’s too hard and scary-to having a blast. We repress a huge amount of passion that could fuel our success by allowing our fear to rule. Shift from denying and fighting the fear to accepting it, releasing it and then using it to keep you in the game.

Seek out experiences and people that support this shift to passion. Model what others do when they allow their emotions be their ally. Young kids are innately innocent in their passion. They will tend to focus less on what might happen to them and more on what they want. Let the passion fill you, it can. Stop trying to mitigate the fears. Go for increasing the passion. Dream into what you want.

The big picture

This process follows the Whole Adventure and its five stages. For those of you who like to make connections, you’ll see patterns developing in these posts. Start with what you want-imagine. Keep going-commit. As it gets intense, get the help you need to find the core of your passion-catalyze. Once you taste it, allow the new experience of you to be empowered by this newly found passion-integrate. Enhance and reinforce this gift by giving it away-share.

We need more passionate adventurers to share their enthusiasm with the rest of us. Passion begets passion. Passion makes us whole; it fuels change and creation.

What is your denied passion? What do you want to create? Share it. The act of speaking it can be a breakthrough. I want to know.

Photo:Two coffees… by Tonyç’s

Further Reading:

1. Passion, the Fuel for Our Creation
2. Follow the Energy
3. How to Use Pain to Change

This post is from a colleague of mine in the men’s work and personal development trainings. Dmitri Bilgere writes a simple, yet powerful way to transform our screw-ups into breakthroughs.

Can you relate to this? On a beautiful winter day, my wife Fawn and I put our skis in the car and drove to a nearby frozen lake to ski. The sun was shining, the air was crisp and cold, our clothes were keeping us warm, and we couldn’t wait to get out on that snowy ice and ski.
But as we were unloading the skis, Fawn said, “Oh no! I’ve forgotten my ski boots!” This wasn’t the first time she’d forgotten them. In fact, it was a remarkably common occurrence. We’d go skiing, she’d forget her boots, and we (or she) would drive home to get them. Then, the next time, she’d forget her boots again, unless I reminded her to bring them.
No matter the inconvenience, she didn’t seem to learn. I don’t tell you this to single out my wife — far from it. We all have areas in our lives where we consistently DON’T learn from experience. We mess up, it causes us pain, and we SHOULD learn. But we don’t. My wife does it, I do it… and so do you.

There’s a cost to not learning
This isn’t some trivial topic. You may continually not learn to pack your ski
boots — or you may not learn in an area that’s much more important. For instance…

- If you don’t learn from the experience of overeating, you can become overweight.
- If you don’t learn from the experience of bad relationships, you are likely to have more bad relationships.
- If you don’t learn from the experience of skipping exercise, you are likely to get unhealthy.
- If you don’t learn from the experience of bouncing checks, or not filing your taxes on time, you are likely to have major financial problems.

To put it mildly, not learning from experience can cause BIG problems. In fact, the most upsetting problems you have may result from your not learning from experience. I hope I’ve convinced you that finding a way of handling the areas in which you don’t learn is worth a little effort. It can make a huge difference in your life.

How most people handle not learning
When people don’t learn from experience, they tend to take on one of more of these strategies to “fix themselves” so they finally learn. As you read this list, ask yourself: which ones you tend to use?

- Punishing yourself, criticizing yourself, and beating yourself up.
- Suffering the consequences. (This is the “it’s the only way he/she will learn” approach.)
- Trying harder to be different next time.
- Thinking harder to figure out why this is happening over and over.
- Trying to stop “sabotaging yourself.”

These approaches all add pain… but if you’ve been having trouble learning from
experience, I can guarantee you one thing: You’re already experiencing plenty of pain. Pain to make you change hasn’t worked. And it WON’T work in the future. You need something different than trying harder and “kicking yourself when you are down.”

What does work
Despite your best efforts to punish yourself into learning, this remains true: -It’s hard to learn while you are hurting. And when you are in pain, learning happens best after compassion. I often put it this way: -First comes the love, THEN comes the lesson.
But most of us try to do it the other way around… We reserve compassion for ourselves for AFTER we finally get it right… If we ever do.
Here’s what my friend and mentor Jim Keeley told me about learning and compassion:

Think about a little child,” he said. “If you tell a child not to do something, and they do it anyway and get hurt, simply telling them ‘I told you so’ doesn’t work. First you have to bring the love and compassion to the pain they are suffering from that experience. You need to bring the ‘Aww, you got hurt,’ energy. It’s only after you give compassion, that you can teach a lesson about behavior.

In my two decades of working as a personal-growth facilitator and coach, I’ve
seen the truth of that over and over. It’s only after a people find compassion for themselves — even when they’ve screwed up — that they are able to heal the hurt in their hearts, and really learn. That’s the shift you want when you are repeatedly not learning from experience.

So how do you do it?
Here’s a simple process for finding your compassion (an example follows, below):

1) Visualize yourself having not learned, again, and acknowledge that you are hurting.
2) Notice what you have unconsciously decided must be true about yourself or your life because you didn’t learn, again. (Hint: This will be negative.)
3) Open your heart in compassion to how difficult it is to live believing that negative thing. Let that compassion flow to the image of you that you are holding. Step aside from your judgments, and let your compassion flow to this part of yourself.
4) Feel the love and compassion, and see what (if anything) changes.

In Fawn’s case, here’s how it went:

1) She saw herself having once again forgotten her ski boots. She imagined seeing herself in front of her, and opened to the truth that she was hurting.
2) She saw that she had unconsciously decided that this repeated mistake meant that she was “just a screw up.” She saw how believing that was really hurting her.
3) She opened to her compassion for herself, and for how hard it was for her to go through life believing that she was “just a screw up.” She let herself step away from her self-judgments, and reach out with her heart to really bring love to that part of herself she was imagining before her.
4) As she felt that love, she started to relax. A part of her that she’d turned her back on started to feel like it belonged, and that it was okay. As that started to sink in, she began to see that her thinking she was “just a screw-up” had made it too painful to even think about her ski boots — causing her to forget them even more often, and making the whole situation worse.

Her pain lessened, and yes — the next time we went skiing she REMEMBERED her ski boots. As you can see, compassion is a real key to opening your ability to learn and grow from your life experiences. Find your compassion for the part of you that is suffering, and your life experiences can teach you, rather than keep you stuck.

Dmitri is one of the original four founding Shadow Work facilitators along with other leading men trainings, a trainer, a personal coach, and author of “Beyond the Blame Game“. To get his newsletter and to get a free mini-course from him, please visit http://www.dbweb.org/free-resources.html.

Photo: Wikipedia

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Does it give or take energy?

What is your payout? Are you getting a return on your investment? Are you putting more energy into a task or relationship than you are getting out?

If you’re like me, you’ve had situations that drained you. You know, the ones that you don’t look forward to. The ones that you come away from with less energy than when you started, these are the ones that are sucking your vital energy. These situations may be a small interaction with one client or they can be your career.

How do you get your energy back?

First, you get sober to what is happening. Where are your biggest leaks? Get honest. It might not be that car that is a problem; it might be your work. When the economy was good it was easy to replace draining energy with a new toy. Now that you might not have the distractions, what do you do?

Create a list of the things in your life that are taking your energy. The following list will help direct you to the areas of your life where you might be losing energy.

1. Body
2. Emotions
3. Mental
4. Spiritual/religious
5. Career/education
6. Relationships/sexual/family
7. Community
8. Space/home/work
9. Money
10. Fun/hobbies/sports

What are your top three drains?

It might be easier not start with the most challenging item. You can start with an easier one to ramp up to the one that will give you the most energy. In many cases, you will be saying no to get your energy back.

The power of no

No can be the most difficult word to say. When I say no, I often risk losing a relationship. If you feel that fear, ask yourself, Am I getting my needs meant? Be honest, and then ask yourself who is the source of the problem. Is it the other person? Is it you? Or, are both parties responsible? To the extent you are the problem, start communicating your feelings and wants. To the extent it is someone else, communicate your feelings and wants. If the situation changes with communication – great, if it doesn’t change, you can then decide if you want to continue with it.

Saying no creates boundaries. Unfortunately, we are not taught or encouraged to do this as kids. There aren’t many healthy models out there on how to keep your personal and physical space safe and clean.

Be prepared to have people object to your requests. Often the ones who object the most are the ones who are sucking the most energy. While this sounds mean, a shift can occur when you allow yourself to possibly be perceived as mean. Even the bluntest person can find standing their ground for what they feel and want to be difficult.

Follow the pleasure energy

What gives you energy beyond the act of doing it? Marcus Buckingham speaks about championing strengths. Why give energy to what you don’t like or are not good at? Invest in what you enjoy and makes you happy. While this sounds obvious, we all become numb when we dream about what we want while not working towards it. What passion do you have that you aren’t pursuing?

Just the pursuit for your dream can give you energy. Remember the feeling you had as a kid of wanting a toy so much that you worked until you got it? When we work for what we want, the work is more fun and goes quickly. I suspect you may notice that sometimes the bigger payout wasn’t the reward, but what was experienced or learned while doing the work.

If you are not enjoying what you are doing, or if it is not immediately giving you energy, will it produce the thing that will? Think of it this way, In 30 years when you wake up from your task, will you be glad you started? Many years ago, a client who was a pediatric neurologist, announced during a session he was done with being a doc. He quickly left medicine because he realized it wasn’t his dream. Going to work every day was slowing killing him. Is something slowing killing you?

Photo:  via Wikipedia

Further Reading:

1. Passion – Your Fuel for Success

And why would you want to join?

The Whole Revolution is what is happening to the United States and the planet. It is the change emerging from deep within each of us. It is an instinctual desire to be whole-to be complete as a man or a woman. As our old institutions go through metamorphosis, our external support falls away. For example, the current economic crisis not only erodes our faith in these institutions, the crisis also evokes out of us what we often don’t experience in good times.

We start to ask questions of our lives and ourselves. These questions don’t produce quick answers. It is the intent of this site to support you in your exploration and manifestation of what you need to be whole. As we travel what we term the Whole Adventure, we begin to experience an innate sense of peace from within. This serenity is not passive; it wants to create. Out of knowing from a felt sense who we are and what we want, creation is much easier and more enjoyable.

Empowerment

As we wake up from the trance we were in, we first feel despair and anger for what we allowed. How could I have allowed this to happen? What was I thinking?

Use that grief and anger to propel you into doing what you always wanted to do or be. One great thing about times like these is that there is less to lose from changing. In fact, change might be the only thing that will save you.

If you are changing out of necessity or desire let it be easy and efficient. This is where we can help. Our five stages of change (the Whole Adventure) are what women and men have used for thousands of years. Deep within each of us is an instinctual skill to transform who we are. Most of us never use or develop this skill. Yet with some guidance and support, you can draw out your inherent skill of change.

How do you know what you are talking about?

Believe me, I’m no genius; I stumbled onto to this secret of change. I grew up with Asperger’s Syndrome and dyslexia. Throughout my childhood, I failed at most things but I made a commitment to heal when I graduated from college. With that commitment, I started my Whole Adventure. Now, 33 years later, I’ve healed these two problems to a point where they are much more of an asset than a burden. In the process of doing this, I’ve helped thousands of clients and students travel their own Whole Adventure.

I began to observe in others and myself that when deep change occurred, a common phenomenon transpired. The journey begins with a vision of what the traveler wants. Then he or she commits with action. This action brings new adventures and new help. Because it is new, it can be scary. Eventually the person reaches the center of his or her spiral down into their being. Here, he or she lets go of what is not part of his or her being -what is not working. For a moment, the person might feel alone. Once the person reorients himself or herself, the journey back begins as a process of integration and reinforcement. Once back, it seems he or she is inevitably called to help others with his or her new gift.

I was a slow learner; I had to go through this adventure a few times before I began to see the pattern. Once I saw it in myself, I quickly saw it in my clients. As is so often the case, I then realized that another person had discovered what I thought was unique. Joseph

Campbell laid out his Hero’s Journey in his book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Campbell uses mythology and history to explain what a hero goes through to solve an unsolvable problem.

Join the Whole Revolution

We are in this together. The change the planet requires must come from each of us-we all know that. The Whole Revolution is how we make this change deep and sustainable. And, I hope, with grace and ease.

Use us. Ask us how we can assist you in your Whole Adventure. Apply what you learn here on a micro and macro basis, on a daily and life level. Plug in the techniques and knowledge you acquire from the site to aid you in getting the most from your change. We are constantly studying, learning, practicing and teaching the Whole Adventure. We will continue to share what we learn; we ask you share what you learn.

Further Reading:

1. How to Speed Deep Change
2. Sell More – Be a Hero
3. Join the Revolution